Am I not understanding something?

Whenever I Observe matches now all I ever see is the same 8 man team scheme, on both sides, and everyone uses the same builds copy and pasted from PvX.

What ever happened to diversity? You have so many skills in the game and instead of people going out and being original everyone just copies the same stuff. Its just weird for me because Guild Wars is a game with an assload of skills and combination's to choose from.

At least it wasn't so bad a couple months ago when I observed matches. Now when I actually see someone not running the PvX builds its like whoah! I bet they get criticized for that too :S

Lots of less than creative people in here !

yup pvp has alot of set bars, buildwars ftl

Eaiser to play something that was on obs and works consistently than to try and be creative and make your own build.

When everyone uses a build, it probably means that it is the most effective for it's selected purpose. In PvP where there is any skill involved, people use a build because they think it will work, not 'cus PvX said so.

Assuming that you are watching GvG, I think it is fairly safe to say that top tier GvG'rs are not PvX scrubs, and do know what they are doing. If you are watching HA, meh.

Random skill selectors for your skill set done as you map in.... boy would that add a twist

Creativity is often used as an excuse for being stupid

It's on PvX because top GvG's (or HA's?) are running it.

I lol'd a bit. People in GvG run that Me/N Corrupt barbs build now, and a few months ago everyone was runnning Dual MB Ele splits. We're just as retarded when it comes to creativity as HAers.

i noticed the same thing the other day. i was decided to watch some guild battles because i havent observed any in a long time, watched like 3 games and all 6 teams had the same build. it was pretty boring.

You're probably watching Euros, and Euros never switch builds.

This isn't even sarcasm, it's actually quite true.

That euro build isn't even on PvX.

from this alone i can tell you don't pvp.

many skills in gw yes, most of which are 100% useless, few of which offer the best compression and synergy. if you wanna go and cry wiki wiki wiki go ahead, but until you win with a team with 8 bars full of bad skills those cries will mean nothing.

its called the meta not pvxwiki u can run something different e.g a searing flames ele over a sh in HA but your heading for failure
________
Marriage Advice Dicussion

GvG would get a real jolt if it was like the card game where the game limited you to certain skills after you entered. That would be hilarious. Lets say they give each side 3-5 minutes to get ready. Meta be damned.

I wouldn't say it's a case of people taking their builds from the wiki, but more a case these days of the wiki listing what teams are running. For most of the current meta builds, you'll see that they've been tagged as such.

As gifted said, the builds run by the "in the know guilds" are used for a reason. no-one is gonna run a fail build just to be creative. RA AB are great for trotting out the quirky builds.

If you create an efficient and effective build through process of elimination then serious kudos to you.

Otherwise youll see the same EFFECTIVE builds used and abused until there is a counter to it. The youll see that one used ad-nauseum.


Cronk

Everybody running the same builds does tend to allow the cream to rise to the top.

If your team is better than the other team, who's running the same builds, you should win!

The only variable in the equation is "how good you are" vs "how good they are"...

If you allow randomness into the equation, like a limited selection of random skills, then it's no longer "us vs them". In the short term, it becomes "our skills" vs "their skills," which may not be popular. It may be fun, in select formats, but not popular...

In the long term, however, with a large number of samples (matches), I do believe that it would be an even better gauge of who is a superior player. If you can adapt and consistently win with junk skills, would you not be the better player? (I'm just not convinced that you'd ever get that far, though, since I don't think that people would put up with it for long... It's too frustrating to lose because of a poor skill bar.)

I think that the randomness issue is also why there is an effort to remove heroes from PvP. For victory, there's a lessened focus on the skill of the player(s), since the quality of the heroes skill bars has an impact. I see this as the reason they want to move toward fixed henchie skill bars.

Welcome to Guild Wars. GvG stopped being creative when;

a) ANet stopped caring, and more importantly,
b) [rawr] started winning. You all know it's true. Once [rawr] started winning, guilds either ran their build, or specced against it.

All of the corners of buildmaking have been explored in Guild Wars. The only thing left to do is choose the best one, and play it.