'Fraid I don't know Izzy personally, but from what I've heard secondhand, he seems more in line with the "all skills should be fun and playable, particularly if you have to put several otherwise terrible skills on your bar for minimal synergy" philosophy than "skills that reward good players should be better than mindlessly mashing for maximum effect". Once again, secondhand conjecture, but from what I know, he was largely responsible for the massive buff to Channeling that sent the metagame into the hell we all know as Ritspike.
About the resources, as far as I know, very little is being dedicated to balance updates and such. Reconnects came from someone at the office working on them in his spare (over?) time. Without anywhere near the playerbase WoW has, and certainly no monthly fee, Arena.net has had to make choices about what they're going to do, and PvP often gets left on the back burner. Not that I can blame them; the majority of their audience somehow came out on the role-playing side.
I'd almost blame this on them being TOO successful. The game was so idealistic at the beginning that it attracted not only the target audience (Time>skill, Balanced and tactical PvP, etc.), but also masses of people looking to play a "grind-free, fee-free MMO". I could be wrong, but I think that's influenced their marketing and development decisions since then.
And perhaps it's just my personal growth or cynicism or whatever, but at the beginning (beta and shortly after), I always got the impression that they cared, that they were trying to fix things, but now it feels more like they just trying to get that next chapter out there as fast as possible to avoid going into the red. **
As for the downward spiral PvP is going through, you get a lot of the same phenomena in M:tG. In the earlier days, no one really knew anything about balance. Time progressed, they started learning a little (game was pretty good just before Factions), expansions created synergies which horribly broke the game. And this is the stage GW is in right now. Magic fixed it by first making several expansions which were so incredibly underpowered that they did nothing. Hoping GW excludes that bit. Then they started grabbing ex pros for their R&D teams, which helped drastically. But I don't know if Guild Wars will survive that long as the potentially PvP beauty we know it can be.
But despite the mass-migration of Magic players to other things (right around Saga, when it was broke the worst), there was still a healthy competitive crowd. And in Guild Wars, it is dying. You get garbage guilds farming the ladder with overpowered skill-less builds. **And the players have a ton of ideas to revitalize things, but either Izzy is simply not given the programming resources, or he doesn't think they'll work.
I'm stopping now, or I won't be able to, and this has gone on long enough.
If anyone does manage to get Fury up and running, reports would be good.
Edit: But don't violate any NDAs.
--me
About the resources, as far as I know, very little is being dedicated to balance updates and such. Reconnects came from someone at the office working on them in his spare (over?) time. Without anywhere near the playerbase WoW has, and certainly no monthly fee, Arena.net has had to make choices about what they're going to do, and PvP often gets left on the back burner. Not that I can blame them; the majority of their audience somehow came out on the role-playing side.
I'd almost blame this on them being TOO successful. The game was so idealistic at the beginning that it attracted not only the target audience (Time>skill, Balanced and tactical PvP, etc.), but also masses of people looking to play a "grind-free, fee-free MMO". I could be wrong, but I think that's influenced their marketing and development decisions since then.
And perhaps it's just my personal growth or cynicism or whatever, but at the beginning (beta and shortly after), I always got the impression that they cared, that they were trying to fix things, but now it feels more like they just trying to get that next chapter out there as fast as possible to avoid going into the red. **
As for the downward spiral PvP is going through, you get a lot of the same phenomena in M:tG. In the earlier days, no one really knew anything about balance. Time progressed, they started learning a little (game was pretty good just before Factions), expansions created synergies which horribly broke the game. And this is the stage GW is in right now. Magic fixed it by first making several expansions which were so incredibly underpowered that they did nothing. Hoping GW excludes that bit. Then they started grabbing ex pros for their R&D teams, which helped drastically. But I don't know if Guild Wars will survive that long as the potentially PvP beauty we know it can be.
But despite the mass-migration of Magic players to other things (right around Saga, when it was broke the worst), there was still a healthy competitive crowd. And in Guild Wars, it is dying. You get garbage guilds farming the ladder with overpowered skill-less builds. **And the players have a ton of ideas to revitalize things, but either Izzy is simply not given the programming resources, or he doesn't think they'll work.
I'm stopping now, or I won't be able to, and this has gone on long enough.
If anyone does manage to get Fury up and running, reports would be good.
Edit: But don't violate any NDAs.
--me