Guild Wars 2

Could we get some sort of clarification if the white crosses really are to be removed or if the devs really listen to their players response about it. Reason i am asking, there is a lot of tensions and discussions about this everywere and people are angry and sometimes even toxic about it in chats, so over all i think it would be a good move to let us know how this have turned out so we can move on.

Leaa.2943:

Could we get some sort of clarification if the white crosses really are to be removed or if the devs really listen to their players response about it. Reason i am asking, there is a lot of tensions and discussions about this everywere and people are angry and sometimes even toxic about it in chats, so over all i think it would be a good move to let us know how this have turned out so we can move on.

This was posted in “Adapt A Dev: A Wasted Last Chance?”:

Mark Katzbach.9084:

We understand and have seen the feedback regarding the proposed white swords change and the team is discussing that feedback.

It looks like a lot of people have already highlighted what I wanted to mention, but I’ll bring up a couple of points in regards to the white swords being removed. I spent 1.5 years in a t1 server and I’ve spent the last 5-6 months in a t3/4 server. One of the biggest differences that I’ve noticed (and this is a tier issue, not a server issue) is the scouting capability and number of willing scouts, as well as communication. There is a huge gap, and as you move down the tiers these concerns get more apparent. Even with good coverage and a solid scouting network I recall responding to only ‘white swords’ just in the nick of time, and that was at a t1 level. I don’t see lower tiers being able to communicate effectively and respond to important needs quick enough if white swords are removed. I realize that we want to try and promote better communication and more scouting, but I don’t think this will promote people to do it – just as well it might discourage cross-map raiding for guild groups or ‘response teams’.

Thank you for acknowledging our concerns,

Removing the white swords is probably the dumbest idea I have ever heard.

I’ll just put this here again because everyone’s too busy losing their marbles over some white swords that don’t ACTUALLY matter because population and coverage determine WvW scores in the end.

Syndictive discussed this concept with our developer briefly, but I hope this was brought to the table:

Removing the ability to hard-rez fully-dead players while in combat, or putting a timer on WHEN you can rez fully-dead players. (IE, 2:00 after they die)

This thought arises from the issue that if my guild (a skill group) is fighting 20v50, we manage to kill a lot of players on our first pass, say 10. The next players push up into us, and make us kite back from the dead-state players. The players in the back of this massive group then rez the fully-dead players nullifying our work. This makes fights against double our numbers nearly impossible – they become simple attrition battles no matter our organization or skill level. This change would empower skill groups and outnumbered servers during open-field and in-keep fighting without completely destroying numbers advantage.

This change I suggested, in addition to your new PPK system, could easily break down social barriers that exist in WvW currently between the fights/GvG guilds and the PPT focused players. The rift could essentially be non-existent if the kills are a substantial part of the score as well. The only worry that I have is that now PPT-focused groups and players will only run away from skill groups, because they would be afraid to hurt the server score.

Just wanted to make sure that wasn’t getting lost in the flood of super casual non-daily PvX players dominating this thread which is about actual developer response to issues in WvW.

Also, wanted to thank Hamm (Tyler) for his time with us, we left him in the guild and told him he can raid with us whenever he’d like. He’s an awesome dude, you guys should be proud to have him on your team.

Hi John,

thanks for listening to and considering our feedback and worries.
I think the suggested approach — experimenting and changing things now and then — is great for all of us. Some may feel like we’d be downgraded to being test dummies, but this is what we need right now: Collaboration between the designers, devs and us players, to find out which ideas only sound good on paper, what needs some fine-tuning and which things are worth keeping after all to make WvW a fun experience for most (if not all) players involved.
In my opinion you should set up the experimental changes for several weeks (especially regarding PpK, overall scoring, maybe new maps or map mechanics, etc) to let us players adjust.

(Just to name an example: During the first weeks many players were mad about the bloodlust buff changes and the added ruins — Today they provide great areas for small scale fights and give roamers even more things to contribute to the overall match (at least on Kodash). After all the ruins were a good change, which, today, most players accept or even use.)

There will be some nay-sayers, ofc… But let me say that I think those experiments will be fruitful and are welcomed by most of the WvW population. Please make sure to announce the experiments to all WvW players, but you may want to not name the ones you implement directly, so we don’t approach the stuff from a focus-tester’s view but experience them as we’d do if the game was released just then.

John Corpening.9847:

There was quite a lot of discussion around the proposal of removing white swords from objectives in WvW. We understand there are concerns about how this change might work in practice or how player behavior may change as a result of it. We felt like the best way to understand fully the impact, and give players a chance to see for themselves how it directly changes the WvW experience is to let people try it and see what they think.

I believe both of these changes will be pretty awful for most servers for pretty obvious reasons, but I also think experimentation and testing the theory is a good thing so I think this is a decent way to proceed. I also hope that you’ll consider future experiments like this with other suggestions that many other people have made (some that I like and some that I don’t) that should be feasible to implement as an experiment such as the elimination of rallying and eliminating the rezzing the fully dead.

maeggle.6021:

(Just to name an example: During the first weeks many players were mad about the bloodlust buff changes and the added ruins — Today they provide great areas for small scale fights and give roamers even more things to contribute to the overall match (at least on Kodash). After all the ruins were a good change, which, today, most players accept or even use.)

I’d still rather have the quaggan and krait lake back but the ruins have not been as bad in practice as I thought they would be because the players largely ignore them at the level my server is at (each server normally holds their own, making it a wash). The same thing could certainly happen with the PPK, too, if most people don’t change their behavior because of it.

The loss of the white swords will be harder to ignore. If it promotes active scouting, upgrading, and refreshing, I would be pleasantly surprised and think that would be a good thing but I think that outcome will be undermined by the lack of reward offered by scouting and defensive play by the game. It’s also going to rob roamers of the useful psychological weapon of knocking on the gates of keeps to draw swords to keep the enemy wondering if they’re really under attack.

Sounds like the WvsW would be different each time (not as hardcore as fractal instabilities). This might help the servers I guess, but I would like to say that wvsw maps need specific and personalized rules. Not same rules for everyone.

Example: Reds got 10 players in the map and blue got 50 players. Then reds should be able to track down the blue players on the map (by game system, or maybe 10.000 unit range. Same as EotM tracking torrets, the ones that you buy in the observatory). That way a small group can havoc a big group just because they’re outnumbered. When the numbers are back to normal, that system would stop working.

I think the english word is handicap.

John,

Appreciate the approach and the experimentation. There will be some good results..and some bad ones..but the efforts and “real life trials” are sorely needed.

Keep it up and lets see what happens. Hope you enjoyed your time on our server…come play with us anytime.

John Corpening.9847:

Hello All,

There was quite a lot of discussion around the proposal of removing white swords from objectives in WvW. We understand there are concerns about how this change might work in practice or how player behavior may change as a result of it. We felt like the best way to understand fully the impact, and give players a chance to see for themselves how it directly changes the WvW experience is to let people try it and see what they think.

We have decided to run a special multi-week event in WvW where we’ll be changing some of the “rules” of WvW for a limited time. This event will feature two major rule changes while it is running: we are planning to remove white swords from objectives, and add points per kill in WvW to the over-all score for the duration of this event. We are currently targeting December for this event but will keep you posted when we have dates nailed down for certain. If this type of event is successful, we may look to do more events like this in the future where for short periods of time the rules of WvW are changed to different rules, scoring and scenarios to help both keep the game fresh, as well as to change up the experience and try new fun things for WvW.

We look forward to your feedback once the event begins, both on the temporary event only changes, as well as the concept of these special events in WvW.

Thanks,
John

sweet, keep solos here i come

Sergie.7865:

John,

Appreciate the approach and the experimentation. There will be some good results..and some bad ones..but the efforts and “real life trials” are sorely needed.

Keep it up and lets see what happens. Hope you enjoyed your time on our server…come play with us anytime.

Truth. Test out more. Change the rules on a monthly basis, if needed. Just add an in-game mail that is sent to players each time they enter WvW or set up a bulletin board where they can read the current weeks or months rules.

Pavel.8531:

style.6173:

No white swords is a horrible idea. I don’t understand why you’d want to dumb down the game.

Wait, wait. You call that “dumbing down the game”? Sorry but no, this will do exactly the opposite thing. However – I dare any dev to try scouting a tower for an extended period of time, then say “well it was cool, I had fun”. This is just not gameplay. And they want to force it to people if they want to be able to defend any structures. Genuises. Freaking genuises. Hey, let me go all sarcastic on them:

“We know scouting is a chore – annoying, boring, not fun and expensive and there are barely any people with their right mind that would scout. That is why, we will FORCE people to scout. If they don’t want to put that hard effort, which will make them wish they were doing homework or watching paint dry, well duuuuuh, their server better join the karma train. This is a real war, serious business, and in real wars you do sentry duties, which aren’t fun. kitten fun!”

Huh? How can you argue that this change is anything other than dumbing down the game.

Commander: We need people to just sit in towers because we can’t read the map anymore
Players: Oh yay! Just what I wanted to do. Just sit in a tower and not play and be bored. So exciting.

The game is being dumbed down.

maeggle.6021:

Hi John,

thanks for listening to and considering our feedback and worries.
I think the suggested approach — experimenting and changing things now and then — is great for all of us. Some may feel like we’d be downgraded to being test dummies, but this is what we need right now: Collaboration between the designers, devs and us players, to find out which ideas only sound good on paper, what needs some fine-tuning and which things are worth keeping after all to make WvW a fun experience for most (if not all) players involved.
In my opinion you should set up the experimental changes for several weeks (especially regarding PpK, overall scoring, maybe new maps or map mechanics, etc) to let us players adjust.

(Just to name an example: During the first weeks many players were mad about the bloodlust buff changes and the added ruins — Today they provide great areas for small scale fights and give roamers even more things to contribute to the overall match (at least on Kodash). After all the ruins were a good change, which, today, most players accept or even use.)

There will be some nay-sayers, ofc… But let me say that I think those experiments will be fruitful and are welcomed by most of the WvW population. Please make sure to announce the experiments to all WvW players, but you may want to not name the ones you implement directly, so we don’t approach the stuff from a focus-tester’s view but experience them as we’d do if the game was released just then.

New score approach = good idea
No white swords = bad idea

I already gave you the results of the test. Mark my words and come back later and tell me how right I was

Ok, putting my two cents in. The PPK sounds good at first, but the simple fact is the server usually on top every week will still be the server on top. It encourages more “Blobing”. after all, the more you have, the more you can kill.
And add to this that now those “blobs” can run through and cap everything without you knowing they are even there until they’ve already taken your keep or garrison.
These add absolutely nothing to WvW, and takes what little Guild or zerg fighting there is left away. Its already tough enough holding onto a Keep against a 80 man Blob with Warning from White swords, now it will be impossible.
John, you think you are helping, but this is already ruining a badly managed WvW. The idea is to encourage a more balanced matchups. You can only do this by penalizing those that can queue maps. Do something that will encourage Guild Fighting After all this is “Guild Wars” not “Blob Wars”
Simply put, if you can’t figure a way to get people to move from the top servers to the lower servers, or design something to encourage guild fighting, any changes you make are worthless.
Penalties and rewards. People WILL NOT scout or watch a Keep, much less a Tower for long period of time, and expecting 15 plus people to do it is crazy. Even the top tier already have trouble doing this.

John Corpening.9847:

Hello All,

There was quite a lot of discussion around the proposal of removing white swords from objectives in WvW. We understand there are concerns about how this change might work in practice or how player behavior may change as a result of it. We felt like the best way to understand fully the impact, and give players a chance to see for themselves how it directly changes the WvW experience is to let people try it and see what they think.

We have decided to run a special multi-week event in WvW where we’ll be changing some of the “rules” of WvW for a limited time. This event will feature two major rule changes while it is running: we are planning to remove white swords from objectives, and add points per kill in WvW to the over-all score for the duration of this event. We are currently targeting December for this event but will keep you posted when we have dates nailed down for certain. If this type of event is successful, we may look to do more events like this in the future where for short periods of time the rules of WvW are changed to different rules, scoring and scenarios to help both keep the game fresh, as well as to change up the experience and try new fun things for WvW.

We look forward to your feedback once the event begins, both on the temporary event only changes, as well as the concept of these special events in WvW.

Thanks,
John

Yes!
This is what I want!
Both for testing and as a recurring thing to keep WvW interesting!
You might even design a known pool of rules and make a system that randomizes it for each week.

Well done!

But be aware that the context being an experimental period of time might affect the results too. Just like tournament season 2 wasn’t a good representation of what WvW is during the rest of the year.

If you really want to test this, design a map where people can test it freely. Allow the current matchups to be matched up in the special map, and allow feedback after one or two weeks.
The score on these maps wouldn’t affect the regular matchup (like EOTM), and it would allow you to try future ideas. Maybe run Tests there for a 4 week period. This way, you will get much more useful information, be able to modify things on the fly, and come up with a much better product.

John Corpening.9847:

Hello All,

There was quite a lot of discussion around the proposal of removing white swords from objectives in WvW. We understand there are concerns about how this change might work in practice or how player behavior may change as a result of it. We felt like the best way to understand fully the impact, and give players a chance to see for themselves how it directly changes the WvW experience is to let people try it and see what they think.

We have decided to run a special multi-week event in WvW where we’ll be changing some of the “rules” of WvW for a limited time. This event will feature two major rule changes while it is running: we are planning to remove white swords from objectives, and add points per kill in WvW to the over-all score for the duration of this event. We are currently targeting December for this event but will keep you posted when we have dates nailed down for certain. If this type of event is successful, we may look to do more events like this in the future where for short periods of time the rules of WvW are changed to different rules, scoring and scenarios to help both keep the game fresh, as well as to change up the experience and try new fun things for WvW.

We look forward to your feedback once the event begins, both on the temporary event only changes, as well as the concept of these special events in WvW.

Thanks,
John

I still think this is a god awful idea, even on large servers people don’t want to stand around ticking siege, losing out on fun fights, losing out on wxp, losing out on loot. It’s a thankless job, and very boring.

White swords mean you only need sentries on keeps/garrisons.

No white swords mean you will basically need sentries on every tower you want to keep. Anything Tier 3 you’ll have to have a sentry on.

Where do you find that many people who want to just stand around ticking siege for an hour or so at a time?

In fact I see an extremely negative thing coming from this change.

Literally watch duty rosters.

Because servers won’t be able to find enough people for sentry duty and the few that do volunteer will be sentry for extended hours which is just stupid, they will resort to guilds having sentry duty rosters. They will draft you to watch a tower or garrison on a schedule, and unless you have a good excuse like work or something, you might just find yourself kicked from your guild for failing to show up for scheduled sentry duty.

Is that what you want from Guild Wars 2? World of Warcraft raid guild mentality where you’re expected to be there on raid schedule or get kicked?

Sergie.7865:

John,

Appreciate the approach and the experimentation. There will be some good results..and some bad ones..but the efforts and “real life trials” are sorely needed.

Keep it up and lets see what happens. Hope you enjoyed your time on our server…come play with us anytime.

I do agree that trying new rules will be the best course. We can discuss forever, but testing on the ground it’s way better, provide it will not be a soft way to introduce new rules.

May I suggest another round of adopt a dev for this trial weeks?

Any chance on rally mechanic to be changed? With PPK rally off a death will become a huge factor.

The biggest problem arising form this ‘adopt a dev’ is that they totally failed to see wvw from the average player’s viewpoint.
Smaller servers were ignored.
people without guilds or in tiny guilds were ignored.
scouts were ignored.

So they now come back with a totally screwed up viewpoint of what wvw is really like outside a tournament for the vast majority of players and will base decisions off of that false information.

Instead of ‘adopt a dev’ they should try ‘have a dev on each server for a week’, where they spend the first week guarding a tower or camp, second week roaming, third week looking for a guild that plays wvw in the bottom servers, etc and they must only play other classes, not GWEN. maybe then they might get a realistic viewpoint.

Off topic Speaking of new rules for WvW being swapped in and out, can one of those rules be that if more than 5 players are within a 10 yard radius of each other a lightning bolt strikes down and blasts all players within a 20 yard radius. Bouncing them away from the point of strike and ignoring Stability. I think this would be hilarious to watch for a week.

Also, i think some of the fractal instabilities would be amazing to change in and out on a weekly basis. Off Topic

Devildoc.6721:

I still think this is a god awful idea, even on large servers people don’t want to stand around ticking siege, losing out on fun fights, losing out on wxp, losing out on loot. It’s a thankless job, and very boring.

White swords mean you only need sentries on keeps/garrisons.

No white swords mean you will basically need sentries on every tower you want to keep. Anything Tier 3 you’ll have to have a sentry on.

Where do you find that many people who want to just stand around ticking siege for an hour or so at a time?

In fact I see an extremely negative thing coming from this change.

Literally watch duty rosters.

Because servers won’t be able to find enough people for sentry duty and the few that do volunteer will be sentry for extended hours which is just stupid, they will resort to guilds having sentry duty rosters. They will draft you to watch a tower or garrison on a schedule, and unless you have a good excuse like work or something, you might just find yourself kicked from your guild for failing to show up for scheduled sentry duty.

Is that what you want from Guild Wars 2? World of Warcraft raid guild mentality where you’re expected to be there on raid schedule or get kicked?

I agree a lot with this. Scouting is the most non-rewarding job in this game – yes we can use word job, because that’s how it feels when doing it “when noone else wants to”. Even if enemy attack the tower and you get on siege, tag them all and your zerg wipe all the enemies (most positive scenario) you don’t get as much rewards/fun as if you were running around the map with the zerg or roaming in my opinion. No wonder so many servers play only in the evenings when guilds have raids and give up on trying to win, because there are no ppl willing to do these – and if there are, those few won’t manage to do it 24/7, that’s how WvW rolls.

Now, about white swords as you say, where will the scouts come from? Servers have lot of problems with these, unless you are stacked to the roof like the most populated WvW servers in the game atm. Keeps like garri/bay/hills/EB keep/SM need multiple scouts also. If it’s golem rushed and no white swords = I understand it as no attacker timer as well, then if the attack is not spotted right away, it will reach inner gates in a matter of seconds… This turns WvW more into EoTM where ppl gave up on defending and simply run around trying to get exp/karma/lootbags.

The real problem is “How to promote players to join the less populated WvW servers?”, having white swords or PPK is smaller issue than the population imbalances in the end. Maybe WvW just needs diffferent structure overall; most people mentality is like this – why struggle if you can get the same with less efforts, why fight against the odds versus stacked server if there will come time of day/night when you just don’t have the coverage and loose it, easier to join the winning server, isn’kitten

John Corpening.9847:

Hello All,

There was quite a lot of discussion around the proposal of removing white swords from objectives in WvW. We understand there are concerns about how this change might work in practice or how player behavior may change as a result of it. We felt like the best way to understand fully the impact, and give players a chance to see for themselves how it directly changes the WvW experience is to let people try it and see what they think.

We have decided to run a special multi-week event in WvW where we’ll be changing some of the “rules” of WvW for a limited time. This event will feature two major rule changes while it is running: we are planning to remove white swords from objectives, and add points per kill in WvW to the over-all score for the duration of this event. We are currently targeting December for this event but will keep you posted when we have dates nailed down for certain. If this type of event is successful, we may look to do more events like this in the future where for short periods of time the rules of WvW are changed to different rules, scoring and scenarios to help both keep the game fresh, as well as to change up the experience and try new fun things for WvW.

We look forward to your feedback once the event begins, both on the temporary event only changes, as well as the concept of these special events in WvW.

Thanks,
John

Totally awesome idea to test it and make WvW more fresh for some time.

John Corpening.9847:

Hello All,

There was quite a lot of discussion around the proposal of removing white swords from objectives in WvW. We understand there are concerns about how this change might work in practice or how player behavior may change as a result of it. We felt like the best way to understand fully the impact, and give players a chance to see for themselves how it directly changes the WvW experience is to let people try it and see what they think.

We have decided to run a special multi-week event in WvW where we’ll be changing some of the “rules” of WvW for a limited time. This event will feature two major rule changes while it is running: we are planning to remove white swords from objectives, and add points per kill in WvW to the over-all score for the duration of this event. We are currently targeting December for this event but will keep you posted when we have dates nailed down for certain. If this type of event is successful, we may look to do more events like this in the future where for short periods of time the rules of WvW are changed to different rules, scoring and scenarios to help both keep the game fresh, as well as to change up the experience and try new fun things for WvW.

We look forward to your feedback once the event begins, both on the temporary event only changes, as well as the concept of these special events in WvW.

Thanks,
John

Once again you ignore the player base and make changes, because YOU think they are good changes, making changes like this is only going to bleed more players from wvw whether temporary or not. There has not been a so called update worth anything since launch to keep players playing all you have done is drive more players away from the game.

So adopt-a-dev is you took some newbies devs that never went to www, and you listen to their feedback ? Is this serious ? Are you really proud ?

Enable bodyblock in the WvsW map for 2 weeks. What do you think? Might remove the entire adventage of being in a big zerg.

Devildoc.6721:

Is that what you want from Guild Wars 2? World of Warcraft raid guild mentality where you’re expected to be there on raid schedule or get kicked?

The Hardcore wannabe WvW guilds are already like this… Don’t show up on raiding time with the specific build and profession and you get the boot.

@John,
When you say your going to test adding PPK, does that mean along side PPT? Or replacing PPT for a limited time?

Because if the reason for this test is because of how PPT currently is, wouldn’t it be best to test this new scenario without PPT and just PPK or something similar to give true results?

Twinny.9304:

@John,
When you say your going to test adding PPK, does that mean along side PPT? Or replacing PPT for a limited time?

Because if the reason for this test is because of how PPT currently is, wouldn’t it be best to test this new scenario without PPT and just PPK or something similar to give true results?

They never said they will/want to remove ppt, just that they want to add ppk. It wouldn’t make sense to test ppk without the ppt if they do not intent to remove it.

insanemaniac.2456:

sweet, keep solos here i come

Yes, and if you’ve got a nice hidden cat spot, you can take your time bringing the walls down, too, because the enemy isn’t going to get any warning no matter how long it takes.

Baldrick.8967:

The biggest problem arising form this ‘adopt a dev’ is that they totally failed to see wvw from the average player’s viewpoint.
Smaller servers were ignored.
people without guilds or in tiny guilds were ignored.
scouts were ignored.

So they now come back with a totally screwed up viewpoint of what wvw is really like outside a tournament for the vast majority of players and will base decisions off of that false information.

I don’t think that’s entirely true. There are people who think the apex of play is organized guild play on stacked servers focused on the repeated capturing of objectives. It’s what they enjoy. They would think small server play is awful, guildless play is awful, and solo roaming or scouting is awful, so even if you forced them to do it, their “fix” would be oriented around making those aspects of the game go away because they don’t like them.

I think that may ultimately be the problem, that there is simply nobody among the development staff that has the preferences or play style for which this would be a problem. They just don’t understand or care about it.

Often, when you make a game more X, you also wind up making it less Y. When everyone making the decisions think that X is good and Y is worthless or even bad, then deciding to make the game more X seems like a no-brainer decision, even though it alienates everyone who likes Y or doesn’t want more X. I’m sure there are people who love what the megaservers have done to the game, but I know people who loved Guild Wars 2 who have stopped playing the game because of what the megaservers did to parts of the game they enjoyed the most and kept them playing every day.

Of course you can optimize any game to do one thing very well at the expense of all other things, which will make the game a must-play experience for players who want that one thing but worthless to everyone else. That limits the customer base. That’s fine if the limited group is big enough to pay the bills but not so fine if they aren’t.

John Corpening.9847:

We have decided to run a special multi-week event in WvW where we’ll be changing some of the “rules” of WvW for a limited time.

This is the greatest news I’ve heard from you guys recently. Especially great is the amount of detail you are giving – despite not knowing the exact dates, and knowing that it could get moved from the target dates, and so on – admitting that it’s in progress and giving specific information for us to digest is exactly what we have been encouraging you to try.

I fervently hope that you see great feedback from this. Additionally, I hope that this will encourage you to seek feedback in a similar fashion in other aspects of the game. It seems like the freakouts have been a vicious circle: don’t tell info, tell info, freakout occurs, omg we can’t tell info or there will be freakout, don’t tell info…. I’m pretty sure you guys are scared to even tell us stuff at this point, but please remember that if we find out about it ahead of time, we have time to prepare, debate about it, get things changed if needed BEFORE you roll it out and have to waste your time rolling it back or adjusting it.

I’m also reminding you of the suggestion that has been rolling around about reusing the survey system from beta. Inserting an X% chance of triggering the survey when performing action Z, where action Z is something that you have previously received feedback about – this could be a great way to get fresh, relevant feedback about the specific aspects of the game that are having trouble. “What did you just complete? Did it work the way you expected? [yes/no/sort of] What part of it went wrong? How could it be improved?” It is particularly a great idea for this (trigger upon tick reset or upon event completion in wvw), but it is able to be applied to any other aspect of the game that you’re paying attention to.

Thanks for trusting us enough to give us this detailed info, John, and I really hope that we can continue this pattern in the future.

My frustration just met its maximum with this, so let me get this straight…

So even despite the FACT that the negative connotations associated with both of these “improvements” far outweigh any potential benefit to the non-blob, non-karma train community, you’re going to go through with it? Even with all the feedback and good, sound, legitimate reasons not to do it, you are doing it anyway?

Makes me wonder if this program had any devs spend time on servers other than T1 (inb4 that’s not how it works). These are the second and third worst ideas I’ve seen for WvW to date.

You’re very prone to announcing changes to the game, specifically WvW, and “taking in feedback for future considerations…” The issue with that is that you almost always follow through on your own promotions regardless of the negative connotations associated with them, despite very good and solid points against why they wouldn’t be good/work, and simply go, “Lol, well we should balance it a little better next patch.” It honestly makes me wonder if they even bother with trying to keep WvW alive since this game has become more PvE centric since Season 2.

You seriously just said, “Well, we’re going to do it regardless, just to see if you still say it’s a bad idea.”

It. Is. A. Bad. Idea.

Some times you have good ideas for WvW and poor execution – case and point, siege disablers were a neat idea, but the execution was absolute garbage- , but this time it’s just a bad idea and the execution is going to be disastrous by association. There’s no two ways about it.

First off, removing the white swords is a terrible idea and in no way helps WvW defenders, scouts or otherwise, regardless of new potential rewards or reward system. Not all scouts, servers, or guilds operate the same in WvW so you’re already balancing off of something that’s inconsistent at best. WvW is designed to be balanced off of a larger scale, and organization from that is already difficult since not all servers have 24/7 coverage. You’re essentially taking that away and making it more like PvP where one person or a few people can change the entire outcome of a match up if they just happen to stumble over an objective at the right moment. You’re also pushing WvW into a very blob-happy, karma train with this “points per kill” ridiculousness.

That and this is in no way going to be able to stop certain servers from just hunkering down in a few towers, with well placed siege, and begin farming anything that comes near it with extreme prejudice. You’re very much reducing the overall need for open-field combat which is something some servers pride themselves on, and more specifically, some guilds and players have spent the last two years developing the skill to perform at their best while in open field combat.

If you plan on doing this, you should really be smarter about it: reducing the range on who can see the white swords (likely scouts or scouts in nearby towers) would be a much better idea than simply getting rid of them. Since improving commander functionality has been on the table for a long time, having certain types of commander tags or tag “upgrades” that can see swords, but others can’t, is a decent idea. Do you see how both of these are already better than “No White Swords”?

Now…Say you proceed with this nonsense, since you already had your mind made up even though you wanted our input; you need to have a better relay/alarm system that someone (namely the scout whom SHOULD be rewarded for so doing already) can trigger to inform their troops of the enemy presence, other than just saying something like, “lol enemy blob at tower” in map chat. I think this relay would work very well with other potential improvements for Commander (tags) Functionality. Instead of changing the entire mode of gameplay, perhaps you could just reward the people that do actually scout for doing their job and not screw over the rest of WvW (again.)

I mean…even extending the WP timer on Garrison, Hills, Bay, Keeps, and Stonemist would be better so that enemy forces who are defeated can’t just wait for the timer to expire so they can res-rush the team that successfully beat them once already.

Outright getting rid of the swords, the ONLY consistant thing we have available so we know when to respond, is a bad idea that cannot possibly be executed in any positive manner. It’s been the only thing that’s allowed low pop servers to respond when necessary, and its balance is that you have to use tactics in order to gain an objective since you know there’s a potential response from the enemy on its way. If this is a ploy to get rid of “blobbing” it will immediately backfire, as soon enough all of WvW will become a Karma Train.

This is a mistake, and it is a very costly one at that.

/end

Any response from Anet that has “We understand…blah blah blah blah blah.”

You don’t. No you don’t. Don’t say you do when it’s evident that you aren’t even taking feedback in for consideration. You introduced a another stupid idea and are still going through with it even when the majority said it’s kittened. You’re just doing it because it’s your idea and you want it to work. It isn’t as simple as that!

STOP changing things that DON’T need to be changed. FOCUS on FIXING things that need the attention first.

The people that play WvW the way it’s really supposed to be played have been telling you it’s a bad idea, and you’re not even listening! You’re catering to these scrubs that want another aspect of the game to be just as easy as farming a copper ore node! You’re encouraging the type of dishonorable gameplay servers use to exploit against servers with lower populations and/or less coverage than them. Last I checked, it didn’t matter if there were white swords on an objective for some servers because they already lack coverage enough to do anything about it, and the servers that do experience having a fully upgraded keep overrun and taken by three people. There are time zone gaps to consider, for one, and making it easier for really small teams to take something as supposedly difficult to attain, like Garrison, is nonsense!

You haven’t even effectively balanced server rotations and match up changes, or actually stuck with a tournament style through to the end that CORRECTLY matches servers based on their performance…yet you’re going to implement some crap ideas that have no foundation to benefit servers that can’t run roaming map blobs!

No white swords is already going to equate to less engagement, which means less fighting, which means less player versus player interactions. This means Points Per Kill is not going to be as effective as you want, and I’m well aware of what your thought process is in regards to how it will positively impact WvW…except what YOU think is not the reality of how things will turn out. What you want, what you’re biased towards, is rarely how things turn out after the fact.

Wtf is the point of WvW if you’re going to leave it to chance that two enemy forces might fight, if one gets lucky enough to catch the other before they just Waypoint out and sneak another objective? PPT is already the focal point and you’re just looking to one another for solidarity, when you should be actually taking into consideration some of the good ideas players have had to improve WvW.

And your recovery is to introduce a points per kill system that can be very easily exploited, again, by the same servers that already have a very dishonorable style of gameplay? Are you aware of how ridiculous this sounds or are you so enamored with the sound of your own voice that you can’t actually listen to reason? We already have the Bloodlust system in effect, and that makes roamers useful when they get an enemy kills. How is it not easier to reward people for the things they already do instead of trying to completely change the way WvW is going to be played?

I must congratulate you and your crew. You’re quite possibly some of the best trolls on the internet, and most of you are doing it unintentionally. If this is secretly about, “Well it’s free to play after you buy it.” Bring on the subscriptions so we can get down to making this better.

WE don’t want to try it, is the point. YOU want us to try it because YOU had discussions, and YOU understand YOUR concerns. YOU ask US to help with decisions and then YOU don’t even fully understand the impact of how badly this is going to effect the already declining population of WvWers that aren’t in Tier 1.

John Corpening.9847:

Hello All,

There was quite a lot of discussion around the proposal of removing white swords from objectives in WvW. We understand there are concerns about how this change might work in practice or how player behavior may change as a result of it. We felt like the best way to understand fully the impact, and give players a chance to see for themselves how it directly changes the WvW experience is to let people try it and see what they think.

We have decided to run a special multi-week event in WvW where we’ll be changing some of the “rules” of WvW for a limited time. This event will feature two major rule changes while it is running: we are planning to remove white swords from objectives, and add points per kill in WvW to the over-all score for the duration of this event. We are currently targeting December for this event but will keep you posted when we have dates nailed down for certain. If this type of event is successful, we may look to do more events like this in the future where for short periods of time the rules of WvW are changed to different rules, scoring and scenarios to help both keep the game fresh, as well as to change up the experience and try new fun things for WvW.

We look forward to your feedback once the event begins, both on the temporary event only changes, as well as the concept of these special events in WvW.

Thanks,
John

So instead of actually listening you gave vague PR speech, and decided to ignore your community and go ahead with what you thought was best.

Why are you even doing this ? You guys already labeled EoTM your hotbed for fresh WvW experiences and trying “new” things. Guess that went out the window already.

It really feels like you guys don’t have a dedicated WvW team at this time and are just out to throw spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks. Did you not learn anything from the Siege disabler fiasco ? We told you it would be broken and abused. We are telling you again no white swords will be broken and abused. It will cripple anything not T1 play where people don’t have 8 people camping in every tower.

As a WvW regular and someone who visits these forums weekly to criticize the problems I have to say I have no problem with these ideas.

Let’s all take a deep breath.

The last month alone we have seen more hands on discussion with WvW than we have in the last year, this is a good thing.

If you’re as hardcore as I am you should remember a very long time ago the mention of the WvW rule-set possibly changing certain weeks. This would allow different strategies and offer a new challenge to current strategies.

I’m really surprised at how many angry posts I’m reading. You need to understand that a magic wand can’t be used. The problem needs to be fixed and they are making an attempt to finally, all be it slowly, fix it.

grifflyman.8102:

As a WvW regular and someone who visits these forums weekly to criticize the problems I have to say I have no problem with these ideas.

Let’s all take a deep breath.

The last month alone we have seen more hands on discussion with WvW than we have in the last year, this is a good thing.

If you’re as hardcore as I am you should remember a very long time ago the mention of the WvW rule-set possibly changing certain weeks. This would allow different strategies and offer a new challenge to current strategies.

I’m really surprised at how many angry posts I’m reading. You need to understand that a magic wand can’t be used. The problem needs to be fixed and they are making an attempt to finally, all be it slowly, fix it.

Just throwing stupid ideas into this does not make for better game play. These changes are not in any way to helpful to wvw players. I already don’t play the game as much as I used to because of the things they call updates have all been a farce imo.

Here’s what I read from you…

grifflyman.8102:

“Some bragging at being hardcore WvWer. blah blah blah. Try-hard voice of reason whose is the only opinion that matters, regardless of not offering a solution.”

The problem needs to be fixed and they are making an attempt to finally, all be it slowly, fix it.

They’re not even on the right path to fixing the real issues. They’re not even in the same general direction. Creating more problems and ignoring the current ones that need to be fixed is not in the interest of the established plurality who genuinely want WvW to be competitive in a sense other than gaining points through conquest. This has been addressed many, many times since the game’s release, and their attempts to resolve issues has always been to misdirect players with some mechanic that only runs in a circle like the other before it.

The solution is not to keep throwing different things at us in hopes we’ll ignore the current standing issues, or to hope we ignore them by becoming frustrated with something else. They blatantly disregarded, in public may I add, every single type of complaint and legitimate reason not to go through with this and said, “Lol. Too bad, you have to play the way we want you too.” This merits people to be negatively opinionated towards them to any degree they desire.

John Corpening.9847:

Hello All,
We look forward to your feedback once the event begins, both on the temporary event only changes, as well as the concept of these special events in WvW.

Thanks,
John

You got a lot of feedback here. No need to test anything. You are making the game worse for the defenders, period. And better for the awesome “skill” groups that probably do nothing defense wise and just open field, and the havokers of course. Might not be important to “skill” groups that white swords are removed and that hard rezzing is a more important issue than an issue that concerns the few that do defend, but it’s important to the defenders and the servers with few scouts.

But then again I don’t expect to be on during your testing of this stupid change.

They need to implement some of the things from EOTM into WvW, as they originally planned, such as the sentries, especially if white swords are going to go away.

John,

Thank you for ensuring the death of WvW. We look forward to seeing the remaining WvW developer moved to his/her new position designing back-pieces.

It’s this kind of brave forward thinking that makes updates like the September one possible. Keep up the good work ignoring anything remotely relevant to WvW play.

Last night our small group wished for the changes to white swords to be already implemented. It was hilarious that, whenever we were done pecking a gate or wall down, a whole map-jumping zerg rolled in to defend their stuff. It was noticable that, most of the time, there was a group of similar size nearby, throwing siege disablers onto us and holding us off.
So far, so good, but this didn’t lead to the PvP interactions we hoped for. Without white swords, there would’ve been either no player alarming the map-jumpers (would’ve been equally boring) or the defenders had to be more aggressive to shake us off as soon as someone noticed the attack on the structure.

Without compensation and addition of some meaningful mechanics, just removing the white swords will be – as already stated many times – a bad change for defenders. If we get other means of scouting and reporting, on the other hand, it will be a whole new situation (possibly even a good change to promote splitting up).

Some random ideas that we came up with (some of which were already suggested elsewhere):

• make sentries and guards a real thing. If they are attacked make that visible to the whole map and / or to the nearest fortified structure
• allow us to place sentry turrets like on EotM (but avoid spamming them)
• or add sentry turrets to fortified structures, which we can build (similar to cannons) without an upgrade for supplies worth of 2 to five players
• allow players to set team-wide markers or notifications on the map, so that roamers and roaming groups can help to report enemy movement and sieges (“siege marker trick” for 5 supplies, maybe?)

Purr Kitten.8731:

But then again I don’t expect to be on during your testing of this stupid change.

Me either, sir. Me either.

I for one will not even log into WvW until I’m sure the implementation of this B.S. idea is done and over with. There is zero need to introduce new changes to WvW without first changing the things that require it first. Their sense of prioritizing things has always been a huge flaw.

John Corpening.9847:

Hello All,

There was quite a lot of discussion around the proposal of removing white swords from objectives in WvW. We understand there are concerns about how this change might work in practice or how player behavior may change as a result of it. We felt like the best way to understand fully the impact, and give players a chance to see for themselves how it directly changes the WvW experience is to let people try it and see what they think.

We have decided to run a special multi-week event in WvW where we’ll be changing some of the “rules” of WvW for a limited time. This event will feature two major rule changes while it is running: we are planning to remove white swords from objectives, and add points per kill in WvW to the over-all score for the duration of this event. We are currently targeting December for this event but will keep you posted when we have dates nailed down for certain. If this type of event is successful, we may look to do more events like this in the future where for short periods of time the rules of WvW are changed to different rules, scoring and scenarios to help both keep the game fresh, as well as to change up the experience and try new fun things for WvW.

We look forward to your feedback once the event begins, both on the temporary event only changes, as well as the concept of these special events in WvW.

Thanks,
John

Best decision ever. Thank you so much for giving things a try! I’m delighted that you are taking this approach.

John Corpening.9847:

Hello All,

There was quite a lot of discussion around the proposal of removing white swords from objectives in WvW. We understand there are concerns about how this change might work in practice or how player behavior may change as a result of it. We felt like the best way to understand fully the impact, and give players a chance to see for themselves how it directly changes the WvW experience is to let people try it and see what they think.

{… snip…}

We look forward to your feedback once the event begins, both on the temporary event only changes, as well as the concept of these special events in WvW.

How do you plan to measure this feedback? Because I can tell you right now as much as I support mixing things up, and trying things out, some design choices are just so bad as to not warrant such a test. The people here have illustrated why fairly clearly – scouting is boring, low-pop servers can’t do it, etc. How this isn’t obvious is incomprehensible to me.

I love the idea of lengthening the sword-appearance-time for outmanned or “behind score” servers on some threshold (it’s already on a list of tweaks I’m putting together to propose to help balance WvW through incentivizing players to do things that are good for game, the enjoyment of it, and server balance), but complete removal of that indicator is just plain stupid unless it’s coupled with some sort of compensatory system change. (E.g., Making sieges take A LOT longer so as to be detectable without swords, guards lighting some highly visible signal flare or some other alert mechanism, rewards for actually scouting, etc….)

How will you measure success or failure of this change? Do I cast my vote on the forums after? In-game poll? By sitting out those two weeks in protest? Because I can tell you this will fail as a stand-alone change, but I have limited confidence (given that you think this is a good idea to try in the first place without some of the types of corresponding adjustments to mitigate the obvious damage) that you will measure this effectively…. I’m not trolling here – I love this game and want it to succeed and it pains me to hear about this idea.

John Corpening.9847:

Hello All,

There was quite a lot of discussion around the proposal of removing white swords from objectives in WvW. We understand there are concerns about how this change might work in practice or how player behavior may change as a result of it. We felt like the best way to understand fully the impact, and give players a chance to see for themselves how it directly changes the WvW experience is to let people try it and see what they think.

We have decided to run a special multi-week event in WvW where we’ll be changing some of the “rules” of WvW for a limited time. This event will feature two major rule changes while it is running: we are planning to remove white swords from objectives, and add points per kill in WvW to the over-all score for the duration of this event. We are currently targeting December for this event but will keep you posted when we have dates nailed down for certain. If this type of event is successful, we may look to do more events like this in the future where for short periods of time the rules of WvW are changed to different rules, scoring and scenarios to help both keep the game fresh, as well as to change up the experience and try new fun things for WvW.

We look forward to your feedback once the event begins, both on the temporary event only changes, as well as the concept of these special events in WvW.

Thanks,
John

This sounds great! A few weeks evaluation will be fun and a real change of pace. I personally don’t see either no swords or ppk as game breaking, if either was going be permanent I wouldn’t be happy, but a few weeks to see what it is like sounds pretty fun!

I have one question and one question only. Why you not using Edge of the mists to try any new ideas, drastic ideas, game changing ideas ? You have a great testing enviroment and you are not using it…
This new idea is of course good and i’m up to see changes that will refresh wvwvw system, but on EotM you can experiment with radical changes without worries that this change could break wvwvw.

I don’t understand the benefit you think the game will get from removing white swords?

Games are supposed to be fun right? Sentrying is the most boring job in the game mode, you should be giving us stuff such as new upgrades or guild buffs that reduce the need for a sentry, not making it more necessary than ever.

Can you please make it so players cannot rally off of random animal mobs? I’m tired of 1v3ing people, downing them all, then having all three of them rally just because they tapped a mosquito that just so happened to die. They then rally with half health and proceed to kill me. This doesn’t promote any sort of skillful play at all.

Also, can you please make it so players cannot rez the completely dead while in combat? There’s been way too many times where my small group fights a much larger group and their numbers mean they just rez the dead without a problem. How does this promote skillful play? The smaller groups suffer.