Guild Wars: Shrines in Arenas
So apparently ArenaNet added Hero Battles maps to the Arenas rotation. It only says Team Arenas in the update, but apparently they added them to Random Arenas too. Not sure whether that's intentional or just a bug.
I'm curious as to how this plays out. Of course, I expect a lot of bitching right now no matter whether it's good or bad. Maybe I'll manage to get a few free minutes and check into the arenas this weekend. Oh, just in case you didn't notice the front page news, it's a bonus points weekend in the arenas too.
Update: according to Izzy, adding the HB maps to Random Arenas was intentional. It was the change log that had the mistake.
I'm curious as to how this plays out. Of course, I expect a lot of bitching right now no matter whether it's good or bad. Maybe I'll manage to get a few free minutes and check into the arenas this weekend. Oh, just in case you didn't notice the front page news, it's a bonus points weekend in the arenas too.
Update: according to Izzy, adding the HB maps to Random Arenas was intentional. It was the change log that had the mistake.
Labels: gaming, guild wars, hero battles maps, random arena, team arena
posted by Clamatius | Friday, November 02, 2007
3 Comments:
It's...interesting is what it is. Inveterate waffler that I am, I'm of two minds on the issue.
The first mind says that if you're going to be rotating formats within the Arenas anyways it'd be nice to get some actual diversity int there so you're doing something more than killing people with a different fancy background. More variety in terms of formats, then, is objectively a good thing.
The other mind says that even for good shooters there are only a few good maps. Ones that stand heads and shoulders above the rest and that everyone wants to play on - there's no way of telling which those are with the Arenas since there's no feedback option but I can think of at least a few that I'd love to drop from the rotation, if I could. And that the Arenas would be better off to stop just piling on the different maps, making it harder for someone to get familiar with them, pick a standard ruleset, and go with it. A little bit of variety is fine but if you want it to be a viable format then it's best to forget about adding things like killcounts and point capture and concentrate on making the deathmatches as good as they can be.
Yep. Unlike a lot of the peanut gallery on Guru et al, I'm not going to comment on whether this is a good or bad change till I've actually played it.
Clearly TA and RA are pretty different environments, so the answer may be different between them.
I do think at least one fixed-bar format like the CB would be good for noobs, so I don't have to tell people "well, you can't really play the PvP till you unlock a bunch of crap" - at least then they can jump in and start getting pwned till they figure out what's happening.
It may be that the right game type for that is annihilation for simplicity's sake, and then the "RA" now is shrine-based.
However, the combination of a capping format and shadowstepping still seems problematic to me. In GvG you have a flag to carry around and thus can't really abuse teleporting to its full potential. But in these small shrine maps, the mobility afforded by Shadow Arts is going to be a real issue.
Dirty, filthy sins
The root problem there, of course, is that Shadow Stepping is just problematic in general and probably should never have seen the light of day. But, good luck getting it out of the game now. I read in the wiki that Izzy's contemplating having Shadow Stepping cause exhaustion, at least in HvH. Which is better than disabling it entirely but, still.
Yep. Unlike a lot of the peanut gallery on Guru et al, I'm not going to comment on whether this is a good or bad change till I've actually played it.
Yeah, I haven't played it either and I'm not likely to any time soon so I'm also holding off on any scathing judgement (Beyond, you know "getting capping all over my deathmatches"). I can imagine the frozen-in-amber crowd and the gladiator dweebs are howling at the moon tonight, though. So glad I don't run a swamp anymore at times like this...
I think, though, on the face of it that it works better in TA than in RA. There, it acts as a curveball. Like the different maps in the HA it makes it hard to have a build that encompasses all of them. Makes it harder to get a huge run going where you stomp everyone in sight and gives all those other teams out there a better chance of beating you. Not sure it would actually work but, again, swinginess in the newbie grounds is a good thing.
In the RA, though, I expect it to be a mess. It's tough enough just to get people to bring rezsigs. And now you're expecting them to fight their way through three different rulesets all of which require different strategies? I don't get it. It works much better with formats like CB because then, at least, you know everyone's going to be running the bare minimum required and no one's going to be a liability (Paragon notwithstanding). But in a format where everyone gets to pack their own bars with crap?
I do think at least one fixed-bar format like the CB would be good for noobs
You'll get no argument from me. One of the really nice things about the CB that hasn't been mentioned yet, I don't think, is how it didn't matter what campaigns you had, you could use your skills anyway. I didn't have GW:EN at the time and I could still use Falling Lotus, for one, as if I actually had it (Granted, I think I'd already unlocked it but, still...). So, not only do newbs not only have to worry about unlocking things, they don't worry about having to unlock things from a particular campaign.
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