Guild Wars 2

My over all experience has been positive. The vocal minority seem to have had a negative experience, I find it difficult to understand why. People’s complaints seem limited to the map’s size influencing travel time, poor PC performance, networking issues, and the suitability of the map for smaller groups and individual roaming players.
50% of these complaints are irrelevant to the application of the map into WvW.

In my opinion the map itself seems to provide good play opportunities for a wide range of group sizes. Groups of 5-10, all the way to 60+ should be able to find interesting fights, as well as objective based gameplay like the defense and offense of various points. Smaller groups will be able to havoc objectives more safely, without fear of being waypoint zerged by 60 players as often.
Flipping camps, sentries, controlling shrines, defending caravans these objectives are suitable for small groups. The terrain of the map provides good opportunities for scouting without discovery. Some creativity, and tactical thought may be required. But it won’t kill anyone to have to use their brain a bit.

The new NPCs in keeps and around the map in general are a welcome change. Though they feel a little PVE-ish, the mini ‘raid’ style keep boss fights are a nice change from rollin’ and stompin’ keep lords in current WvW. World vs. World seems intended to function as a hybrid of PVE and PVP, so I don’t see that they’re not working as intended, or a detriment to the format in any way.

As for the event objectives scattered around the map, I’m unable to form any real conclusion at this time. It will take a few weeks, or maybe a couple of months after the map is released before they become comfortably incorporated into any sort of defense/offense gameplay. Despite this, I can see a lot of interesting decisions arising from the large cannon. The gate damage mechanic should provide a good solution to the stagnation that could form as a product of the increased defensibility of the objectives. This kind of opportunistic gameplay mechanic is very welcome.

I have some concerns regarding the size of the map (mainly due to the fact that I am comfortable with the considerably flatter current borderland). However, I think that given enough time this will be beneficial, as the reduced waypoint availability, and increased travel time should force organized servers to place scouts more efficiently, as well as provide some emergent gameplay for smaller groups, roaming single parties, and individual players. There are also plenty of open places for larger scale zerg fights, and the narrow chokes provide a good balance, so that smaller groups can put up a resistance to bigger zergs.

TL;DR: It seems like there will be some great opportunities to ‘play the map’ on release. Hopefully, larger and more consistent populations will highlight the real strengths and weaknesses of the map. The new border is a welcome change from the current map, providing more opportunities for smaller group and individual gameplay that doesn’t involve simply flipping camps. Scouting should now involve more actual play, and less standing in towers for 3 hours.

The size of the map is a little blown out of proportion to me. The layout is generally the same as Alpine’s but there is much more going on which makes it appear to be much bigger than it actually is.

The map isn’t a complete fail by any means and those saying it will kill WvW are mostly overreacting. There is however a lot of work to be done. If this is going to replace all the Alpine BL’s like they said it would, it needs to appeal to the masses of hardcore WvW players that enjoy fighting and occasionally taking/fighting in/fighting for/defending structures. It also has to appeal to roamers and small group play as you mentioned as well. It needs to keep those kinds of people important but not break a server if they don’t have scouts or groups on the map to help locate enemies. That job is kind of null by the fact that now you can see people walking around the map with ease making it harder to sneakily take towers or even keeps.