Guild Wars 2

Now this post may just be fueled by the classic reaction to moving the cheese, but I’m dreading this BL going live. Granted, it’s very pretty, but I’m foreseeing problems regarding both its design and mechanics.

The biggest issue I’m noticing is that the map is that its almost entirely on one type of incline or another, i.e. there is almost not flat ground. While this makes the environment varied, GW2 has a long history of having problems with the interaction between player abilities and vertically changing terrain. For example, I’m predicting that the BL is going to be plagued AOE effects behaving incorrectly due to the fields or players being on different horizontal planes. Hammer stuns will be hit or miss, any arcing projectile will have collision issues when fighting uphill, and combo fields effective range will reduced to single points.

From a design perspective, the terrain itself will present problems. The BL is full of choke points and has very little in the way of open areas. This fact will be a detriment to the map, reducing large fights to siege standoffs. I personally play WvW for mobile engagements with as little siege involvement as possible, but I’m predicting many fights will be similar to a stalemate in inner Hills in the current BL. This sort of gameplay is static and frankly not very fun.

Lastly, there’s also the issue of amount of PVE in this map. As I mentioned before, I play WvW to fight in large groups, not to kill NPCs. Any NPC monsters will just end up clogging up fights, either outright impeding performance or acting as a rally-bot for either side.

I can’t offer many solutions that don’t involve significant redesign or reworking of systems. The BL is fundamentally flawed.

I came to post this exact thing.

I wanted to love it because it’s beautiful; but then I played it.

1) Awful terrain for any skill that uses movement (Warrior Hammer F1)
2) Skills that arc are useless in 50% or more of the map (Engi nades with grenadier)
3) Entirely too many chokes and nowhere near enough flat surface area for Guild on Guild fights. The open spaces are all filled with red mobs or debris that will mess up the flow of combat and provide rally bot access to otherwise defeated players.
4) It’s too big and the pathing isn’t conducive for roamers or large scale fights.
5) It takes way to long to get anywhere quickly. Narrow beams? Seriously?

If you want to replace EotM, you did a good job.. but this isn’t a Borderlands map.

If the designer was going for a PvE environment that was karma train friendly, they nailed it. As far as something for people who only play WvW; we didn’t want more PvE, we wanted more fights with less siege…

Complaining is the last thing I wanted to do, really. I want to love the new map.

I just can’t. It’s not a map for WvW players. It’s a map that makes PvE players feel like WvW players.

- Sauer

^^^^^^^^^^

I was really looking forward to trying out the new map and after 3 hours of play I can’t think of a single moment where I had a lot of fun. The night was filled with long periods of running in circles trying to find my way to the nearest supply camp or tower and a few moments where an enemy zerg jumped out from behind a corner and wiped us.

Too much running, the map should have been made smaller then Alpine not larger.
Too many NPCS, theres really no reason for them to be there.
Random pve buffs are not necessary. Can we just get straight up fair fights? we don’t need random 10% damage buffs.
Too many cliffs. I spent way too much time tonight wondering if this jump will kill me.
I could not find supply. Period. Whether it was a camp to flip or supplies to build siege at Fire Keep inner.

I was able to participate in the skysplitter event. I thought this event was geared towards roamers? I was with an organized group of about 20 ( a larger zerg compared to what I’m used to in FC) and we tried for the event but got swamped by 2 enemy zergs both outnumbering us at least 2 to 1. This event will just benefit the server with the most players. That’s the last thing we need in WvW atm.

This new map may work great for T1 servers but it will be a ghost town in low population servers

The designers of this map did an amazing job with visuals. The map is very pretty and interesting. However I think it is way too large and complicated.

The new map pretty much took everything I dislike about WvW and magnified it. At this point its probably way too late to fix problems with the actual map. I felt like I spent 3 hours getting lost in drytop.

TLDR: Too much distraction from murder.

OP & Dash. What you wrote were exactly my thoughts as I watched the stream today.

Dash.8027:

I came to post this exact thing.

I wanted to love it because it’s beautiful; but then I played it.

1) Awful terrain for any skill that uses movement (Warrior Hammer F1)
2) Skills that arc are useless in 50% or more of the map (Engi nades with grenadier)
3) Entirely too many chokes and nowhere near enough flat surface area for Guild on Guild fights. The open spaces are all filled with red mobs or debris that will mess up the flow of combat and provide rally bot access to otherwise defeated players.
4) It’s too big and the pathing isn’t conducive for roamers or large scale fights.
5) It takes way to long to get anywhere quickly. Narrow beams? Seriously?

If you want to replace EotM, you did a good job.. but this isn’t a Borderlands map.

If the designer was going for a PvE environment that was karma train friendly, they nailed it. As far as something for people who only play WvW; we didn’t want more PvE, we wanted more fights with less siege…

Complaining is the last thing I wanted to do, really. I want to love the new map.

I just can’t. It’s not a map for WvW players. It’s a map that makes PvE players feel like WvW players.

- Sauer

Pretty map, future dead gamemode is pretty much the interpretation most of us seem to have.Thieves especially get jacked with points 1 & 2. You pretty much nailed every point I and the group I was with had.

I agree with all of you but for a different reason: population

I’m in Underworld (tier9 EU) and we’re suffering from a BIG lack of wvw players. And I think I can say the same for one of our adversaries Fissure of Woe as well.

I am 200% sure that if we get 3 of those new maps instead of the 3 regular BLs it will successively kill WvW here. We simply won’t have enough people to just play those maps normally.

Pretty much agree with the POV in this thread, too many chokes especially north. And to the previous poster yes I agree it will kill off WvW in the lower tiers.

I wrote a long thread touching on some of the same topics. One thing I’d like to re-inforce are my concerns regarding the terrain and aoe and los mechanics. There have been tons of bugs in the past regarding this. I have not been able to have an active enough map, yet to notice anything though. Also, will balista spread shot be able to go up or down now?

I gotta say I loved the maps. They’re straight up gorgeous, interesting, fun to explore and run around on. I loved everything I saw.

But.. that only tickled the pve-er in me. Nothing about this map strikes me as WvW. The keep designs are SO so so beautiful but I know 100% it will turn into “Turtle Wars 2” with arrow cart placements on high points where you have to run through a main pit of death, and up narrow stairs that are choke points. If you aren’t knocked down to your death, you’re dead before you can even get to them. It’ll basically turn into 5 guys with arrow carts annihilating any size of zerg that tries to take a keep or tower. That’s great if your idea of wvw is “I’m going to sit in the keep for 5 hours and press 3 buttons! (t1)” and not “I want great large scale fights!” (it would be cool to use gliders to offset how VERTICAL the map is but that’d create a lot of work just to make sure no one to effectively glide straight into a keep)

My original thought was the map would be great for roamers at least but.. not anymore. You either get killed by a pve mod (I wiped a group of 5 by myself by stealthing off veterans and having the mobs kill them), or you have to scour this huge/complicated map just to find a fight so it’ll round up to 1 fight every 30 minutes.

You could definitely replace EotM with the map, this map is so great and synergizes well with what eotm is known for. But this is not a replacement for serious wvw. This will kill serious wvw in any tier that isn’t T1 and T2 and put a 100+ queue on EB.

But like I said, look-wise the map is amazing and beautiful—the people who worked on it worked hard and did a fantastic job. The designs of the new mobs are lovely, and walking into the west keep straight up took my breath away. It’s got me REALLY excited for the new maps in HoT (pve yeahyeahyeah)—however the functionality of this map as an “exciting, fast paced fight map” is 0/100, and has a 85% chance of “everyone’s turtling everywhere and I’ve seen 100g worth of ac in the past 2 hours”

Oh also new siege—the shield generators are a cool idea but their max range on the 1 skill should be decreased. that 3,750 range outplays ballistas and could make flipping a keep nearly impossible.

Map has lot of open space. I don’t get it why people are saying that there is not enough open space. All towers seem to have open space next to them. Air keep area seems to be the place with lot of narrow passageways though, but even there are ways to approach that are open.

I think the problem is that the “hardcore” WvW crowd does not want the same things from WvW that ANet does. If you look at most of the complaints they boil down to two things -> Too much PvE and an emphasis on siege warfare with this map.

The too much PvE is totally justified, I am not sure why ANet wants to fill these maps with so many mobs when the focus should be on large scale pvp.

That leads to the second point where I totally disagree with the “hardcore” crowd. At this point its fairly obvious that they want zergball fights and ANet is letting them have those fights within their Guild Halls now. WvW is for siege warfare NOT for zergball open ground fights.

ANet needs to bite the bullet and compress the current servers down to a much smaller number according to their current WvW active population. This removes the population problem and will let people play the map the way ANet intends at least. Now if people don’t like the siege based gameplay they can go and zerg pvp in Obsidian Sanctum or in Guild Halls but should stop dragging that stuff into WvW proper.

sendaf.8375:

Too much running, the map should have been made smaller then Alpine not larger.

If the map is smaller then a single blob can run quickly to defend any objective, so it’ll be blob vs blob all day long.

Also I’m not even certain the map has much more travel time than the Alpine borderlands, people just haven’t figured out the fastest ways to get from each objective to every other objective. Also the keeps and towers are bigger and take up more map space, so from outer gate to outer gate the travel time may be similar to the current borderlands.

It’s a nice mix of vert tht needs smoothing but the fact that a low participant boarder land can actually still be viable is huge. I love it!

displacedTitan.6897:

That leads to the second point where I totally disagree with the “hardcore” crowd. At this point its fairly obvious that they want zergball fights and ANet is letting them have those fights within their Guild Halls now. WvW is for siege warfare NOT for zergball open ground fights.

Only.. Large scale fights was one of the main bullet points of wvw. You might as well be telling roamers “Oh, you want to roam and kill people?? Go to pvp!!!” I understand your point for 80 vs 80 vs 80 fights but a 20vs20/25? not a “zergball.” The problem with no/minimal -flat- land is that a lot of skills don’t mesh well with inclines. (hammer f1 on warrior is the BIGGEST—you could f1 an enemy on some stairs and be a millimeter away from them and it still won’t hit) Fix the skill issues with inclines, boom no problem with hill-y surfaces. Siege warfare is apart of wvw, but SO is actual group fights—you got to balance it, no make it a complete turtle fest faceroll 3 buttons on an arrow cart on a cliff where no one can hit you all day. That’s not fun.

I will say the maps make it a lot easier for smaller groups (1-3 for example) to defend a keep so it’ll help out low pop servers a /little/ but it also means they can’t really take anything either.

If anet wants to keep the mobs there they could just remove the ability to rally off them—it’d still be annoying to get hardhitting mobs on you but at least the people you down wont rally.

on a side note I finally got to experience the no fall damage east keep buff and 100% I’m on board I love it (though it’ll suck when I’m fighting someone with it and they can just hop off a bridge to get away lmao—but it’s w/e, hope it stays so I can witness a large group eagle diving ofkitteniant cliff into the valley below onto another enemy group)

—also I’m sure the “it’s so big!! too complicated to get around!!” will die down with mini map cleanups and people actually learning the fastest routes etc (I think I read a dev say they were going to put little portal/elevator indicators on the mini map so that’s a+)

I predict two months after it’s released if no changes are made 90% of the time there will be no q for any BL and only EB will have huge q’s.

Small roaming groups can’t cap the towers. Throw in some defenders and it becomes impossible. After a while people will stop even trying.

Pretty much agree with all complaint points. Was really bad. Sure not knowing the map is part the problem but when you see orange swords somewhere it takes way too long to react and find a route to get there and see what was going on (ie get in on the action if there enemy left when that fight over etc). Nothing for the open field guilds really due to the terrain and cheesy pve aspects.

All I can hope is that they will put a weekly map rotation on from the start. Give this map 2 weeks on hot release then go straight into rotation mode with alpine map. I can put up with this map every other week because then you can work around that (guild raids more often during alpine week, reduce number raids during HoT map week and just karma trainfest if can be bothered) .. if however there 6months of this map I think that there will be a lot of unhappy players, though i suppose the EotM karma trains will fill in the gaps so anet wont care too much :s