September 8-10 stress test - my feedback!

September 8-10 stress test - my feedback!

in WvW Desert Borderlands Stress Test

Posted by: Menaka.5092

Menaka.5092

First things first: thank you for inviting me again!
It was fun and we made a lot of SCIENCE!

Before my full report, there’s a big premise to be made: these “stress tests” could really use more bodies. During my experience I’ve rarely seen more than 10-15 players on each side and we never had a proper 3-way fight. In these conditions is hard for players to “weight” the fights that are possibly designed for more players.

For example, today we ended up in Earth Keep lord room with 5 players, and between the lord, the guards and some defenders, there was no chance for us to capture the objective.

I’m not sure what happened… many people who I spoke to said that either them or their friends didn’t receive the invitation E-Mail and had to check on the website, but I’m pretty sure there was a lot less people online during this test than during the previous test. And this time only one borderland was open!

Now let’s see my notes…

Oasis event

I’m gonna post a video for all the people that were screaming “OH NOES PVE EVENT”, because it’s not a PVE event. It has been a PVP massacre and I enjoyed every minute of it

I’m a bit concerned with the effectiveness of the event, tho. The first time, when I reached a fully upgraded gate after the event, it was at around 95% so I thought winning the event would do about 5% damage to a fully upgraded gate, but then the second time the gate was down to around 50%. I’m confused. Maybe the first time got repaired. Maybe the second time was already damaged. I don’t know…

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Posted by: Menaka.5092

Menaka.5092

Autonomous defenses for towers and keeps

I know that “guard duty” is boring and nobody wants to do something boring in a game, but the amount of “automatic defense” (some may say “PVE”) in WvW is getting out of hand.

In my opinion, defensive siege used by players should be able to slow down attackers (not wipe them like it currently happens with superior ACs) until reinforcements arrive, but automatic defenses (guards and autocannons) should be a minor nuisance: if an objective is NOT defended by players, it should fall easily to an enemy group. The guards marking enemy groups moving around the map and the huge amount of HP on gates and walls should provide enough reaction time for players to go and defend the objective.

Guild autocannons must go. Or be heavily nerfed. Gates are already the easiest position to defend with cannons, arrowcarts, oil (and, sadly, trebs behind the gates). Adding those autocannons to the mix is a terrible idea. I’ve seen groups of 5 to 10 experienced wvw players struggle and being pushed back by autocannons and guards inside enemy keeps. That is not acceptable.

With the current map design I think many of the fights will end up being inside towers and keeps. Fighting (players vs players) in the middle of arrowcart fire is already nearly impossible and I was already concerned with the amount of space all the keeps and towers have for deploying defensive siege, but during this stress test I rarely have seen somebody build an AC:

  • guards are easily hitting for 5k and have insanely strong CC
  • guild-upgraded cannons can only be destroyed by siege, so they are available to players and can drop tons of damage and CC
  • guild autocannons were hitting for 3-3.5k with a knockdown on top: I got nearly stunlocked to death more than once

if you think that organized groups will look forward to fighting in that hell against other organized groups, you are terribly mistaken.

So what will this game become? Siege Wars 2? Trebuchets hitting from max range for hours to drop the walls of upgraded keeps? Counter trebs? Counter-counter trebs?

This game has an amazing combat system, please don’t waste it by forcing the large scale PvP to be all about hour-long sieges!

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Posted by: Menaka.5092

Menaka.5092

Guild banners, Charr carrs, Lava hounds

In general, I would like for these strong transformations (excluding the Charr car) to be available only inside the radius of the objective they are generated from. It felt “wrong” to fight a Lava hound at south camp. If it were possible I would:

  • for banners, teleport the banner back to the Tactivator if it’s brought outside the objective area
  • for lava hounds, remove the effect from the player leaving the fire keep area (and maybe reset the cooldown inside the keep)
  • the charr car is an attack vehicle (siege damage!) so it’s fine for it to leave the objective area

The turtle banner felt decently balanced (except for the bugs, see below). The damage is quite low but it’s ok. It’s a defensive weapon.

The centaur banner felt a bit disappointing: not much damage, altho the utility from the skill 4 is nice. The skill 5 is basically a mix of Tornado and Plague, but you can’t heal during it’s duration and if I remember correctly you don’t get any bonus HP.

I didn’t get to personally test the Dragon banner, but as a victim of the skills, the damage felt a bit on the OP side.

Not sure if working as intended:

  • The Charr car stun removes the full defiant bar from dinosaurs in the Oasis (and I guess from players with the defiant buff)

Bugs:

  • Banners don’t have shared cooldowns, if you drop the banner and someone else picks it up you can use the same skill multiple times in a row (particularly bad on turtle banner 3 skill)
  • The centaur banner doesn’t have a buff icon displaying the remaining duration
  • The turtle banner skill 4 (the wall that gives resistance) allows you to go through multiple times and stack about 30s resistance (maybe if you find a fix for this, fix Temporal Curtain as well!)
  • It is way too easy with the Charr car to gain distance, exit combat and refill your HP

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Posted by: Menaka.5092

Menaka.5092

Overhauled Guild Claiming

The objective upgrades UI allows you to see in game the status of every objective, including which guild claimed it and which upgrades are available and even the cooldown on them. This is important strategical information readily available for commanders. Very nice!

I didn’t find an easy way to check which objective my current guild has claimed: it was pretty confusing and time-consuming to click on every objective to see which one had the guild upgrades available.

About the UI: it took me a while to understand that you needed to double-click the upgrade to apply it to the currently selected slot. And another thing: you can overwrite previously selected upgrades – including upgrades that are ready to use – without being asked for confirmation.

Not sure if working as intended: if the guild that claimed the objective didn’t select any upgrade for a specific slot, anyone can pick one.

Bug: for some reason, I got the guild buffs (magic find, stats, etc) near an enemy keep.

Players being marked on map

In general, I liked this feature. I’m pretty sure players that are concerned with the defense will love it, but it was really buggy, I was “marked” most of the time, sometimes even marked inside the lordroom of our own keep!

Having the players marked after flipping a keep is a good thing, but for example it happened to us that we managed to breach outer fire keep, we got inside, some of our group got killed but my friends and I managed to hide and stealth, ready to provide a portal after the enemy repaired the gate and went back to other objectives.

Other random bugs

  • Mesmer GS clones refused to attack NPCs (keep lords in particular)
  • Some cannons still fail to hit the gate (south west tower for sure, maybe others)
  • There’s one spot on north-east of fire keep where you get lava damage even if you are on earth

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Posted by: Menaka.5092

Menaka.5092

That was a proper wall of text! If you read till here, you rock!

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Posted by: BrickFurious.7169

BrickFurious.7169

Adding my feedback here to try and not create too much clutter (plus I agree with a lot of Menaka’s feedback).

What I liked

- The map. It’s amazing. Caters a lot to roamers and havoc groups, it’s a beautiful map, and I think it’s very cleverly organized. Also I love the verticality. You will get a lot of grief about it early on, don’t let it dissuade you. The map definitely has a learning curve but it felt a lot less maze-like by the end of the test. I got to the point where I felt comfortable throwing up a tag and leading people around; still not quite sure about all the good siege spots, but that’ll come. It looks like a lot of thought went into creating many places from which to place catapults and trebuchets, kudos on that.

- In general, automatic upgrades (one complaint below). Such a good quality of life change.

- Most of the guild upgrades and the UI changes. Being able to click on an objective from anywhere on a map and claim it, choose guild upgrades, see its upgrades timers? Awesome, great job on this. Most of the guild upgrades felt super useful too and not overpowered; the chilling fog felt tuned just right, the charr car was fun and useful without being too useful, the emergency waypoints are awesome, the banners are a great idea though the numbers could use a bit of tweaking (as well as fixing the bugs Menaka mentioned), the watchtower upgrade is great.

- The oasis event. So fun, and not PvE AT ALL. It was a big free-for-all with the minor objective of collecting the orbs. Such a great thing to have every 3 hours. The amount of damage to enemy keeps by the skysplitter felt just right too, especially considering it only hits the gates.

What I felt could use some adjusting

- Auto-turrets. Gonna completely agree with Menaka here that this needs to be fixed/nerfed. They were way too powerful, both in terms of damage and CC, especially when combined with the guild upgrade to cannons/oil/mortars, the killboxes, the increased health on fortified gates, and the beefier guards.

- The guards. I had guard defense/offense maxed the whole time, they still took a little too long to spike down. I thought their damage was actually fine, but the fact that most of them also taunted/stunned on a short cooldown with little or no visual warning was supremely annoying. The amount of CC I was subjected to by NPCs in general was just nuts, and when guards had the 50% damage reduction guild upgrade turned on it was a nightmare.

- The lords: The earth keep lord actually felt great to me; you can avoid his shockwave by jumping over it, the rock walls he throws up are awesome and fit the theme of the keep well, and his damage is high but not too high. I actually managed to solo him near the end of the test. The fire keep lord also felt ok I think, though I only fought her once. When the fire turrets are turned on at the keep it was definitely more challenging, but if you were good about avoiding the red circles it was ok and felt rewarding.

The air keep lord though…where do I begin. I think the biggest problem is when the air turrets were turned on in the lord room. I don’t know if they’re always turned on, but they were whenever we fought the lord. And it was ridiculous. Like, a group of 6 of us almost got wiped with no defenders ridiculous. The range on them is crazy. We had to huddle into the small circle at the center of the room to avoid them because they reached so far. Which allowed the lord to just do his teleport attack and nearly kill us all. I think nerfing the range on those air turrets would go a long way toward making that encounter more enjoyable. Which brings me to…

- The air turrets in general. There needs to be some kind of warning before they go off, like they glow white or something a second before they blow. In the fire keep you have red circles to warn you. In the earth keep the whole point of the rock walls is that they are surprising, and they don’t do any damage so it’s fine. But the air turrets can be lethal and they have no warning of when they’ll fire. It was insanely annoying fighting around them. They should totally make things harder for attackers, but not so randomly hard.

- Yak-less upgrading. I posted this in another thread too. I love the automatic upgrades. But the mechanic where the timer keeps ticking down, and a successful yak escort just reduces the timer, felt very unrewarding to me, and seemed to diminish the importance of yaks (as well as all the yak guild upgrades and the invulnerable yaks tactic). I think a better system would be to make upgrades have two requirements: The timer, plus a certain amount of successful yaks (and remove the way that yaks reduce the timer). This makes yaks much more important and make them similar in function to how they work in WvW currently. Example: the first upgrade of a keep requires at least 20 minutes, as well as 8 yaks to successfully reach it. The next upgrade requires at least 40 minutes, as well as 16 yaks. Etc.

- You could see what guild upgrades had been slotted in the guild upgrade UI for enemy objectives. I think it’s fine that we can see the regular upgrade status, and obviously you can just walk up to a keep to see if it has the only-siege-damages-doors/cannons upgrades. But being able to know what tactics they had slotted and the cooldowns on them felt a bit overpowered, I feel like they should be able to surprise enemies with that information.

- The dragon banner might need to be toned down a bit. One guardian with it fought a group of 8 of us and nearly managed to kill us all while being super tanky.

That’s it for now, if I think of more feedback I’ll edit it in. Thanks for inviting me to the test, I hope you guys get a lot of useful information out of it.

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Posted by: Dawntree.7246

Dawntree.7246

I do agree that auto turrets and gate turrets are too strong.

Air turrets are way too annoying, they need some kind of teller before going off. I was knocked down 3 times in a row on the bridge leading to Air Keep main gate.

Yes, you can go flip the shrines, but still it’s annoying as it is now.

Emanuel Dawntree – Nord Guardian of [TasH] – 9×80
Whiteside Ridge

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Posted by: Menaka.5092

Menaka.5092

The map. It’s amazing. Caters a lot to roamers and havoc groups, it’s a beautiful map, and I think it’s very cleverly organized. Also I love the verticality. You will get a lot of grief about it early on, don’t let it dissuade you. The map definitely has a learning curve but it felt a lot less maze-like by the end of the test.

Yeah, being on the second stress test myself, the map made a lot more sense and I could find my way around a bit easier. But it’ll take time to learn the best paths between two points, keeping in considerations the shortcuts that you may or may not use (holding keeps, etc).

The lords: The earth keep lord actually felt great to me; you can avoid his shockwave by jumping over it, the rock walls he throws up are awesome and fit the theme of the keep well, and his damage is high but not too high. I actually managed to solo him near the end of the test.

Thank you for mentioning the rock walls!
BUG: during the Earth keep fight, one of my friends got stuck inside one of the rock walls and when the wall went below the floor, it brought my friend with it (stuck in the wall and then inside the floor!)

The air keep lord though…where do I begin. I think the biggest problem is when the air turrets were turned on in the lord room. I don’t know if they’re always turned on, but they were whenever we fought the lord. And it was ridiculous. Like, a group of 6 of us almost got wiped with no defenders

We tested a strategy for that lord: sitting outside the circle on the south side and hitting it only with ranged stuff. The lord was “stuck” inside the circle and couldn’t damage us.
Not sure if “clever use of game mechanics” or a bug.

The air turrets in general. There needs to be some kind of warning before they go off

They could start lighting up a fraction of a second before going off, yeah.

Yak-less upgrading. I posted this in another thread too. I love the automatic upgrades. But the mechanic where the timer keeps ticking down, and a successful yak escort just reduces the timer, felt very unrewarding to me, and seemed to diminish the importance of yaks (as well as all the yak guild upgrades and the invulnerable yaks tactic)

I somewhat agree, I think it’s a bit unfair that even if you completely starve a keep for supplies, it will upgrade anyway. But we’ll see with the changes on upgrade time!

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Posted by: Menaka.5092

Menaka.5092

Another bug I noticed with Lava hounds and Charr car is that the player inside had to be stomped twice after they died, I’m gonna post a clip Soon™.

Edit: posted the charr car double stomp bug video: https://youtu.be/Z9TQNVMyFiU

(edited by Menaka.5092)

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Posted by: Menaka.5092

Menaka.5092

I’m sorry for adding again, but I’m going over my recordings and screenshot and noticed a few more things:

Charr carr

  • Smoke Screen: the field in the tooltip is “Dark”, but should be “Smoke”. If I remember correctly, we tested it with a thief blast and it gave us Stealth, so probably the tooltip is wrong
  • Pounce: the blast finisher on this skill didn’t seem to work on the Smoke Screen, or on any other field
  • Incendiary Rocket Barrage: this skill seems to be a triple fire field (for a very limited amount of time)

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Posted by: Bettik.4982

Bettik.4982

these “stress tests” could really use more bodies. During my experience I’ve rarely seen more than 10-15 players on each side and we never had a proper 3-way fight. In these conditions is hard for players to “weight” the fights that are possibly designed for more players.

Agreed. I appreciate the purpose of these tests, and was very glad to be able to participate, but there’s going to be a huge difference when hundreds of people, server PuGs and guilds, are let loose on these maps for a sustained period of time…

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Posted by: ZedforZee.1284

ZedforZee.1284

First of all, thank you for the invitation, It was a pleasure to see the new borderland.

I agree with the previous posts, and I have only two notes.

1. It has seemed to me that the shrine NPCs were too weak. With a condition mesmer I’ve easily flipped a shrine in just a minute, I’m sure a zerker-like character would be way more quicker than me. Is this a design decision – I mean every shrine should need human defenders too, to stop a flipping attempt?

2. I’ve felt lost myself in the Fire Keep. I saw my party members on the mini-map just where I stand, but because of the multi-layer terrain design I went in circle, and it took for ages to me to reach them. Maybe it’s not a design error, rather the keep was a terra incognita for me, but at that moment I would pay for a tourist guide or a multi-layer map – like the one that we have on the racial capitals right now.

Overall I’m all excited to play on the finished version.

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Posted by: Pink Ninja Man.4375

Pink Ninja Man.4375

Everyone is complaining that the automatic defenses are to strong for smaller attacking forces, then they want banners to not be taken out of objectives. xD The banners are designed for offense and defense, take a turtle banner to attack a tower that is upgraded and it will get easier.

Also, if the claimed guild doesn’t put upgrades it others are allowed to slot upgrades, this is by design.

Twitch – PinkNinjaMan [/\///\/_//\]
Main Class – Ranger [Bezerker/Trapper Hybrid]
Main Mode – WvW [Gate of Madness]

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Posted by: Menaka.5092

Menaka.5092

I’ve felt lost myself in the Fire Keep. I saw my party members on the mini-map just where I stand, but because of the multi-layer terrain design I went in circle, and it took for ages to me to reach them. Maybe it’s not a design error, rather the keep was a terra incognita for me, but at that moment I would pay for a tourist guide or a multi-layer map – like the one that we have on the racial capitals right now.

I posted a video with a few hints about navigating the west side of the map

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Posted by: Menaka.5092

Menaka.5092

Also posted a video about the Dune Roller (aka “Charr Carr”) enjoy!

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Posted by: BassHunteR.7246

BassHunteR.7246

This feels 1000% more like a new EOTM map than a new wvwvw map.
And dont you dare saying it is the same thing.. it isn’t.
It feels like ANET is removing wvw from game and replacing it by EOTM 1.0 and now EOTM 2.0
sad

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Posted by: nacario.9417

nacario.9417

This feels 1000% more like a new EOTM map than a new wvwvw map.
And dont you dare saying it is the same thing.. it isn’t.
It feels like ANET is removing wvw from game and replacing it by EOTM 1.0 and now EOTM 2.0
sad

Whats sad is despite your best efforts, none of your words can be considered as any feedback as theres no info in it other than hurt feelings.

Power Ranger PvP
I used to be a power ranger, now not sure anymore

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Posted by: Menaka.5092

Menaka.5092

This feels 1000% more like a new EOTM map than a new wvwvw map.
And dont you dare saying it is the same thing.. it isn’t.
It feels like ANET is removing wvw from game and replacing it by EOTM 1.0 and now EOTM 2.0
sad

EOTM hasn’t replaced WvW. Nobody but upscaled and karma farmers play there (and the occasional guild farming free bags).

In EOTM there’s no incentive in defending at all. Keeps are always upgraded as soon as you flip them. Green side is disproportionately advantaged and theres maybe 2 or 3 spots in the whole, huge map, where you can have a decent fight…

The desert borderland has nothing of that.

The only thing that is similar is that it takes time to go from one side to the other of the map. And that’s a good thing because it means you can’t cover the whole map with one single blob of 60-80 people, you need to split up your forces, you need people defending or attacking secondary objectives (camps, dolyaks, shrines) that are even farther out of the way.

And on top of that, every few hours you’ll need to be able to win the Oasis event while keeping an eye on all the other objectives and that requires a lot of coordination and even PvP skill. And after the event you need groups ready to be able to repair the damage done if you lost or ready to cap the objectives damaged by the cannon if you won.

That said, I’m somewhat curious to know in what you think this map is similar to EOTM.

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Posted by: BassHunteR.7246

BassHunteR.7246

- huge map. This would be something positive if the servers could handle more players on a single BL. Right now if i am not mistaken only 80 per server may joon one Bl at a time.. that is 240 players. On a map like that you are going to completely eliminate big fights. And in not prime server time ppl gonna have hard time finding enemies so they will basically PVD just like it is done on EOTM.. you cap it all and don’t even see the enemy.
Right now server performance is so bad that the only thing that CAN’T happen on WvWvW is exactly that: 3 worlds fighting each other. If a single guild from each server decides to hit SMC/GARRI or any keep at the same time with 25-35 players each (not even a map blob. Just a guild + some pugs that randomly follow) everyone knows that this fight is going to be terrible for everyone. Most commanders avoid it. Skill lag is so hard that it’s not a matter of organization to win. It’s more about luck on skills goong out and enemies skills getting stuck on the lag fest.
Now add that same situation to a map with even more processing required.. elemental keeps with lords full of cc.. oasis hitting whole map.. and there you gonna have hard time fighting even 1world v 1world while the other is backflipping stuff..
- Mobs and events all over the place. Most areas where a decent fight could happen, they placed bunch of veteran mobs or struggle points or anything that can and will ruin the fight.
- keep lords and guards full of cc and making it ao that havoks are almost unable to flip stuff. There are several reports of 1 keep lord + 1 guard being able to wipe 5-10 man group because of auto siege dmg and to much cc. So again, more pve n less wvw. On current bls havocks help a lot to control the map and flip stuff that are not being scouted properly. On new map 2-5 players group is jist pointless.
-oasis event: if you are having a great fight and that freaking event starts you gotta automatically bail of the fight and run to that just to try and avoid anyone from taking it, because if they do.. the freaking cannon gonna kitten up all the work your server has done in the past hours. If you win every fight for 4 straight hours and cap stuff and than for a brief moment your forces go to bio or something and you lose the event..yay cannon gonna kitten you up…
- struggle points / ledges and things that break fights. Keeps has underground area… big ledges.. towers make enenies forced into struggle points and those situation that if you get pushed off = dead n no rally. Just like EOTM filled with ledges and bridges where you cant really fight cause any push back or fear = dead.
So yeah.. has nothing to do with EOTM.
Clearly.

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Posted by: Menaka.5092

Menaka.5092

huge map. This would be something positive if the servers could handle more players on a single BL. Right now if i am not mistaken only 80 per server may joon one Bl at a time.. that is 240 players. On a map like that you are going to completely eliminate big fights.

if by “big fights” you mean 80v80 people that spam 1 because you can’t do anything else because of the lag… well, I certainly hope that this map will help eliminate big fights

And in not prime server time ppl gonna have hard time finding enemies so they will basically PVD just like it is done on EOTM.. you cap it all and don’t even see the enemy.

off-peak hours are already like that
with the difference that in the new borderland you have upgrades on towers that will scout the enemy for you, and the sentries will scout the enemies for you as well…

Right now server performance is so bad that the only thing that CAN’T happen on WvWvW is exactly that: 3 worlds fighting each other.

I play WvW every day and with 25-35 people per side there is no lag in my experience. With bigger numbers (say 60 per side) the lag starts to get bad and with the full zone blobs clashing the lag is real.

But that’s not a map problem, it’s a general problem of networked games and one that is hard to solve.

Now add that same situation to a map with even more processing required.. elemental keeps with lords full of cc.. oasis hitting whole map.. and there you gonna have hard time fighting even 1world v 1world while the other is backflipping stuff..

This is pure speculation.
Also, at the beginning of your post you said that there won’t be big fights because the map is big and people will spread out…

Mobs and events all over the place. Most areas where a decent fight could happen, they placed bunch of veteran mobs or struggle points or anything that can and will ruin the fight.

I can’t recognize the spot by your description… there’s quite a few zones where you can have good open field fights, notably all the south zone (between south camp and south-west and south-east towers), some zones around the northern towers, and some spots in the Oasis

keep lords and guards full of cc and making it ao that havoks are almost unable to flip stuff

on this, I completely agree, and I stated it in my posts: too much “pve”, too much automatic defenses: if an objective is undefended it should be easy to flip it even with a 10 man group, IMHO

oasis event: if you are having a great fight and that freaking event starts you gotta automatically bail of the fight and run to that just to try and avoid anyone from taking it

well, that’s a strategic decision… if you keep fighting, your enemy either disengages to go to the Oasis (and you can flip the objective it was defending, for example) or they stay and fight, so their side will have less people at the Oasis event

it adds depth to the game, and having multiple groups running around is not like you are the only one that can take care of the Oasis…

If you win every fight for 4 straight hours and cap stuff and than for a brief moment your forces go to bio or something and you lose the event..yay cannon gonna kitten you up…

Again, this is pure speculation: we don’t know the final numbers on how much damage the cannon will do to enemy objectives… you make it sound like the cannon will automatically flip objectives and that’s clearly false.

- struggle points / ledges and things that break fights. Keeps has underground area… big ledges.. towers make enenies forced into struggle points and those situation that if you get pushed off = dead n no rally. Just like EOTM filled with ledges and bridges where you cant really fight cause any push back or fear = dead.

Choke points have been a fundametal part of defensive design for… literally centuries. And the game already offers tools to deal with those.

About the ledges, I can think of some spots in Air and Fire keep that you can fall from and die, but none of them seems like a good spot to fight on, to me. If you can be more specific maybe it would help the designers fix that… claiming that this map is “EOTM 2.0” isn’t really helping anyone…

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Posted by: BassHunteR.7246

BassHunteR.7246

- a 35 × 35 is already a medium fight.
But add a 3rd guild from the 3rd server.. lets say all 3 servers face each other with 30 man on each..
That is not a map blob or anything.. thats jist 1 guild from each server..
If that happens we all know that this is going to be a terrible fight cause of server performance…
You said for yourself ( those fights where ppl spam 1).. they do that because the skill lag is already considered a “feature” of the game and spamming 1 makes your auto attack to go off.. of you try to use any other skill, you are goong to get stuck in skill lag.. so ppl just spam 1 cause at least that works evebtually faster than waiting for skills to go off..
Deny it as hard as you want.. pretend it is not like that but deep down you know it, i know it, Anet knows it and every wvw players know that things are like this: 90 + players fighting in same place = terrible server performance..
Now lets compare this to lineage2 ( a 11 years old game) from ncsoft. Servers could and still can handle 500 players fighting in the same castle with no problem..
So there is no speculatoon here.. it is a fact. Gw2 server performance is terrible if it cant handle 90 players fighting.
- you said i am speculating when i say there will be lag in big fights on the new map…well i am not.
Its common sense. You have a clean map with barely any automatic event or defenses or any of those stuff and the lag is there on every big fight.
Now if you have the exact same situation and add even more proccessing to the server.. you really think it is going to be any better? LoL
The only thing that would fox this would be:
Increasing server performance to a level where it can handle these events.. but instead.. they didn’t increase anything rather than the proccessing requirements for their server.. it is going to be worst…
- you say that on off hours the situation is already bad.. well sorry for your server but it isnt like that for everyone.. it is going to be on this huge map since only 80 players are allowed to go in but today it isn’t..
And about sentries and towers scouting for you.. ok that is nice.. but they could just add those to the regular BL’s.. that feature dont need to be tied to the new map and booom: a 10x better map was just created.. just by adding 1 feature..
- when i mentioned cannon will kitten your previous work if you lose the event i didn’t mean that it will automatically flip everything back.. but if you have barely any idea of the time and effort needed to fix all the walls that the cannon hitted.. you know that at least 30% will be gone by the time you get to them to fix it… its an npc that hits several locations at once and 2 servers can get several advantages from it while the one defending gets stroke by both in multiple locations.. the decision is :what are we giving up in order to save others.
- you mentioned 2 areas in a huge map considered goos for big fights…
So basically whenever we encounter enemy in other terrible areas you expect aides to pm each other and say" hey there.. plz stop hitting.. lets slowly move everyone to the southern area of the map.. i think that is a good sppt for us to fight.. and when we get there we fight.."
Sorry but that does not happen.. at leadt out of gvg scene..
You fight enemies where you see thembor you drag the fight somewhere IF there is a best location nearby.. a huge map with 2-4 locations is jist a fail concept…
For me and lots of other wvw players a wvw map doeant really need to be beautifull.. filled with events or shiny npcs or glitter..
Wvw map is like a paper that is blank. You write the stories that goes on there with fights and with the fun moments on TS that you had during those fights..
You even heard something like:
“Remember that day when we had a fight on that shiny keep.. wow the designs on those walls man..they were awesome. Did you notice the npc armor and weapon design?? Dang those were nice too.”
If you hear those.. trust me.. you are a PVE player.
Nothing against that.. but this was supposed to be a map focused on wvw community.
Add the glitter on the 4 new pve maps that are comming..
Wvw players commonly hear something like:
“Remeber that dayvwhen we were fighting server X and we stomped them even outnumbered?”
" remember that 45 minutes long fight we had inside Y server garri? Dang i got so many bags that i had to clear inv twice."
Those are the things we look for.. PLAYER FIGHTING PLAYERS.. not players fighting npcs or beaultifull locations..
Sure that a fancy design is nice and to improve the locations is cool but..
If you ask wvw players:
What you prefer? A better looking map with automatic events and automatic siege weapons used by npc OR a better server that can handle any fight at all and increase BL capacity to 100 for each server and know that there will not be skill lag. But in case you choose second scene the map will not be as fancy as the ones from scene A or will even be the same known maps from today..
I am sure wvw community would prefer better server than better design…

September 8-10 stress test - my feedback!

in WvW Desert Borderlands Stress Test

Posted by: Menaka.5092

Menaka.5092

lets say all 3 servers face each other with 30 man on each..
That is not a map blob or anything.. thats jist 1 guild from each server..
If that happens we all know that this is going to be a terrible fight cause of server performance…

in my experience, it’s not like that, with those kind of numbers
but I acknowledge that if you have more than that, there will be some skill lag and if you have many more it’ll become unplayable

what I’m saying is that it’s not related to the map, it’s related to how networked games work

- you said i am speculating when i say there will be lag in big fights on the new map…well i am not. […] Now if you have the exact same situation and add even more proccessing to the server.. you really think it is going to be any better?

I think you don’t know what “speculating” means. “Conjectural consideration of a matter”. You have no proof that the new map will lag more than the current one in a similar fight situation, you are making an educated guess, but that’s pure speculation, as I said

- you say that on off hours the situation is already bad.. well sorry for your server but it isnt like that for everyone.. it is going to be on this huge map since only 80 players are allowed to go in but today it isn’t..

You said, I quote:

And in not prime server time ppl gonna have hard time finding enemies so they will basically PVD just like it is done on EOTM.. you cap it all and don’t even see the enemy.

So… which one is it? Either off peak hours have enough people and with the help of sentries and towers can easily scout the whole map or they don’t. You are contradicting yourself.

when i mentioned cannon will kitten your previous work if you lose the event i didn’t mean that it will automatically flip everything back.. but if you have barely any idea of the time and effort needed to fix all the walls that the cannon hitted..

I can barely follow here…

  • the Oasis cannon DOESN’T hit walls, only the gates
  • we don’t know yet how much will be the damage to each gate
  • keeps have 5 gates, towers only 1
  • if you have such an overwhelming superiority that you hold every objective on the borderland, you’ll need to repair 19 gates in total if you lose the event (but if you can already hold all the objectives I don’t see how you gonna lose the event)
  • remember that you don’t use supplies for upgrades anymore, so you have all the supplies readily available to spend on repair

So basically whenever we encounter enemy in other terrible areas you expect aides to pm each other and say" hey there.. plz stop hitting.. lets slowly move everyone to the southern area of the map.. i think that is a good sppt for us to fight.. and when we get there we fight.."
Sorry but that does not happen.. at leadt out of gvg scene..

WvW guilds already get in touch to organize open field fights (not GvGs, only open field), so nothing will change there…
for the other fights, I can’t predict the future, but from the map layout I think they will happen mostly inside the outer ring of the keeps and inside the towers. Time will tell.

You fight enemies where you see thembor you drag the fight somewhere IF there is a best location nearby.. a huge map with 2-4 locations is jist a fail concept…

those I mentioned are “optimal” locations, I didn’t say you cannot fight in the rest of the map… you did.

Wvw map is like a paper that is blank. You write the stories that goes on there with fights and with the fun moments on TS that you had during those fights.. […] Those are the things we look for.. PLAYER FIGHTING PLAYERS.. not players fighting npcs or beaultifull locations.. […] Sure that a fancy design is nice and to improve the locations is cool but.. If you ask wvw players: What you prefer? A better looking map with automatic events and automatic siege weapons used by npc OR a better server that can handle any fight at all and increase BL capacity to 100 for each server and know that there will not be skill lag. But in case you choose second scene the map will not be as fancy as the ones from scene A or will even be the same known maps from today..
I am sure wvw community would prefer better server than better design…

You seem really confused. If you clicked any of the videos I posted you would have seen that on my Youtube channel there’s dozens of videos of WvW fights. I played more than 6.5k hours and most of them in WvW, so I’m not exactly “a PVE player”, nor a “arrowcart hugger”. I love WvW and I love fighting other players and I think it’s pretty obvious from what I’ve posted after the previous stress test and after this one.

Sure I would love less skill lag. And I think WvW could use increased numbers in the new borderlands, but not in the current one since that would only increase the blobbing and make non-pirateship fighting impossible. But guess what? That’s a different set of problems, handled by different teams: map design vs network/server programming.

I think this map has been designed making good use of lessons learned from the Alpine BL and EOTM:

  • the Alpine borderland is easy to navigate, has a limited amount of objectives that are pretty clustered to each other so blobbing is extremely efficient, having everyone on the map in one single big group is often enough to defend everything
  • on the other side, EOTM is too hard to navigate, the uneven terrain makes it impossible to fight in most places and the “fall to your death” mechanic is way too punishing, especially considering how long it takes to go back to the fight
  • EOTM has secondary objectives with powerful effects (worm, scorpions, etc)
  • the Alpine borderland has huge chunks of the map without a wvw-related purpose (centaur and skritt camps, jumping puzzle)
  • the Alpine borderland tower and keep lords are not up to the task even if there is defenders on the premises (that doesn’t mean that I think stronger lords are the best solution, I’m just saying that the current ones are as useful as a training dummy)
  • EOTM bosses are stronger, too bad nobody is there to defend…
  • EOTM showed that sentries reporting the location of enemy groups are good, but a bit too good to allow players to place them freely on the whole map
  • the cost of upgrades on Alpine BL discouraged upgrading, especially on lower tier servers, while the “permaupgrades” in EOTM trivialized the act of defending even more (“who cares if we lose it? we gonna cap it back soon”)
  • some active defenses were often useless because destroyed before use (cannons and oil)

… and, I’m sure, many more.