Guild Wars 2

While most of us agree that the Desert Borderlands (DBL) are visually stunning, almost all of us can agree that they are extremely boring to play in. The following are just a few of my thoughts on why that is and what could be done to change it

1. Why were the Alpine borderlands seen as fun?

This would come down to several factors, but the main reason is that the terrain allowed for you to re-enter fights extremely quickly due to not having any environmental obstacles. Moreover, the fights were centred around 4 main areas and 4 more minor areas being – between Bay and Garrison, between Hills and Garrison, South of Bay, South East Tower being the more major points of conflict, with the more minor ones being the 4 side camps. This is just from my experience in WvW since early 2013

If we look at the locations of most of the conflicts, you could see that they all occurred in mostly flat terrain with very few environmental hazards or choke points. We can probably safely assume that this is what would lead to more fights in either open field or contentions for objectives. I’d disagree though, that having flat open terrain is the main reason why the fights were in those locations. I would assert that instead, it is the location of the major objectives in the map that funnelled players towards these objectives, allowing for an easier time for players to find other players to fight or interact with.

The locations of the camps easily lead to either a tower or a keep. Holding a keep on an enemy borderland allowed you to more easily attack their garrison, which made it worth something. Especially if you were able to upgrade it to having a waypoint, which allowed you to control more than your 1/3 of the map. This made it important for zergs to pressure the side keeps, for roamers/havoc parties to snipe/contest camps and for the server as a whole to maintain defense on their borderland. This play style became the norm for many WvW players, even spawning the term “home borderland defenders”.

The only downside to this was the snowball effect when you have a server that can significantly outnumber the others in their matchup, which is more of a problem with the scoring system than with the design of the map (especially since it’s actually worse now). Another downside to the Alpine borderlands was in its overall design. While not a necessarily a bad thing in particular, over 2/3 of the map hardly ever saw action or rarely used at all. In particular, north of the north towers and south of the south towers saw little to no interaction outside of the 2 camps. That’s a huge chunk of the map that was never used. In fact, you’d find that the Alpine borderlands are actually larger than the Desert borderlands – just that the Desert borderlands is much better with objective placement.

2. Why are people avoiding the Desert Borderlands?

Well, there are many reasons, but the main reason I think is the fact that it actively funnels people away from each other. The pathing and environmental obstacles don’t allow for 2 enemies (either roamers or zergs) to easily encounter each other due to all the twists and turns on the map. You could be right next to each other, hidden by a single wall, and you wouldn’t know it. This makes the map seem extremely empty and desolate, which then forces players onto a map that doesn’t have this issue – Eternal Battlegrounds.

Of course, the shrine effects, keep effects and the oasis event all adds onto this as well, as they are rather bad at funnelling players into a “hot zone” like what the alpine borderlands did, and instead spreads players out around the map away from each other. The oasis event in particular forces groups to spread out, meaning that if your group is the one trying to complete it, you’re extra vulnerable to being ambushed by a group that has no interest in completing the event, but simply wanting to kill you.

This all leads to a vicious cycle whereby there are less and less players on the borderlands because they can’t find enemies to fight, then people coming on find less friends to fight enemies with, resulting in even fewer players on the map.

My opinion is that the terrain needs to be changed in a big way. Remove a lot of the cliffs, gorges, ravines and valleys and allow an easier path from your waypoint to where the action should be (around the major entrances of the keeps) and instead replace the Oasis with those kinds of terrain for roamers to play hide and seek in with the Oasis objectives – making it a roaming/havoc only objective. Tone down a lot of the environmental hazards and obstructions to where it would slow down a large zerg to give enough time for defenders to call for backup, but not to the point where groups are de-motivated to try at all. Both the side keeps need their effects removed as well, since all it does is make it harder to take for the outnumbered side – were it to be defended.

Defense sorely needed a boost, but it got too much of a boost. WvW stays interesting when you have delicate balance between the attacking and defending forces – not when defenders can split your zerg before you even got to your objective. The new borderlands went overkill with the aims in splitting up zergs and buffing defense on keeps and towers, which kills action even faster than before when attacking was too easy.

New maps – to big, to messy, to many levels, to much PvE, less enemies, terrible terrain.

Old maps – perfect size, 1-2 levels, easy to roam, not so much PvE, enemies everywhere, and I loved the grass,water,mountain terrain without dust, desert and other kitten that is in the new maps.

So. Much. Text.

To me, its really simple. Lets ignore the awfull timer based autoupgrade system here and just focus on the WvW gameplay of desert border. The reason we click the button to join a border.

With no “ultimate upgrade” to an entire secured border – waypoints in all keeps, with garri being #1 priority – players have no sense of purpose. Why do I need to defend garrison? Simple answer; you dont. Its just another keep. Its just PPT. Hills, bay, same thing. The most defining features of a border, its keeps… Useless. All useless.

I can nitpick a dozen other things that is wrong, but it doesnt matter. When the heart is broken, nothing can fix it.

Dawdler.8521:

So. Much. Text.

To me, its really simple. Lets ignore the awfull timer based autoupgrade system here and just focus on the WvW gameplay of desert border. The reason we click the button to join a border.

With no “ultimate upgrade” to an entire secured border – waypoints in all keeps, with garri being #1 priority – players have no sense of purpose. Why do I need to defend garrison? Simple answer; you dont. Its just another keep. Its just PPT. Hills, bay, same thing. The most defining features of a border, its keeps… Useless. All useless.

I can nitpick a dozen other things that is wrong, but it doesnt matter. When the heart is broken, nothing can fix it.

tl;dr Desert Borderlands has bad map design where you could have 2 map blobs right next to each other and neither would know it beyond lag. Makes the map feel empty, which makes people bored of the map, which leads to a vicious cycle.

English major \o/

Agree.

There is a huge wall between the center and air keep. This means that, if you don’t own it, one needs to approach it from either the north or south.

The map, in general is designed to be run in a circle with only a few spokes to the middle. There needs to be more points of entry to the center so that we can more easily get from point a to b, no matter where those points are.

Since they nerfed the heck out of barricades, the northern towers play no importance at all, except for 10 PPT.

The keeps are a bit too large. Each one has 3 outer gates and a ton of breakable walls. This means that there is far too much real estate to place defensive siege for outer. Also, by the time a scout actually finds where the attackers are, and the rest of the defenders arrive, outer is usually breached or about to. This means that inner is the only thing to spend time defending.

The northern keep can have treb placements to defend outer and inner gates. N and S gates at fire keep can not have defensive trebs. I haven’t spent too much time in air yet.

Turrets need to go. First off, we want to fight people, not the environment. Second, they are hugely unbalanced. The fire turrets are a minor annoyance, screw with our cleanses, and just prevent us from waypointing if need be. The air turrets actually kill people if knocked to their death. That’s a pretty big discrepancy. Get rid of em.

The oasis event needs to go. It’s just all around dumb. And I don’t mean for the pve aspect. Yes, there’s a lot of people who hate it for that, but I’m talking strategy and game mechanics.

First off, it’s overpowered. So much so, it’s one of the reasons people don’t care about defending anything. Second, it usually just favors whoever has the larger force. Third, it’s not a comeback system, it’s a defensive event. Here’s what I mean. If a loosing server happens to win the event, great! Now they can enter enemy stuff more easily. However, the same holds true for the winnng server. Sure, their stuff is borken, but now the second place servers stuff is broken too, so they can rush that and keep the 2nd place server down even more. That, or just repair their own stuff and let the 3rd place server take the 2nd place server’s stuff. Either way, whether they win the oasis event, or loose it, the first place server wins.

Oh, and spending the next 20 minutes repairing the gates, and the walls next to the gates, is really fun.

Bring back points per stomp and the ruins. There’s no reason you can’t have both ruins and shrines. It is one of the only things that leveled the playing field between a terrible blob server and a skilled fighting force.

Waypoints must be brought back. I’ve said this before, and predicted it in beta. The current maps encourage zerging for many reasons. One of the biggest is the time it takes to get from the southern towers to a keep, especially the North. Considering the north keep has the advantage of a waypoint, it heavily favors them for defending. This means you need to bring all your forces with you, to be sure to overwhelm, have as much supply as possible to blitz the gates and have offensive siege if need be, and to have people res if some die. The same holds true if you’re defending the side keeps. If you get close to wiped, it’s over. Without a waypoint, it’s just too long of a run back, and there’s no way to get into the lords room without getting stuck in a choke that the attackers are at. They should be part of the T3 upgrade. The same is true for the towers. There’s no reason why these structures should have a waypoint right away, except to facilitate travel. But the other reason for this is that it will give people something of value to fight for.

Along those lines, and this is not ubiquitous with the new map, but with HoT, auto upgrades have to go. Keep the good: the set upgrade path and supply not being tied to upgrading. Get rid of the bad: make upgrades dependent on yaks. No yaks = no upgrades. This gives an importance to camps and yaks, as well as something to work towards regarding the keeps and towers.

Without a sense of ownership, there is less motivation to fight over it.

Auto-upgrades promotes zergs. I don’t want to bother explaining this. It’s been explained in countless threads.

Guild halls promote zergs. Again, doesn’t need an explanation

Building a maze-like map does not break up zergs. Having multiple objectives that have importance and relative ease of access does and giving more power to small groups does. That way, zergs have to make a choice; either they can stay a blob and take one thing at a time, but loose in points because they are not split up to defend other objectives. This is the balance that the old boarderlands, and EB succeeded at.

I also just want to re-iterate, the new maps are beautiful. It’s obvious that there has been a ton of attention to detail over every inch of the maps. Not just ascetically, but game design wise. I don’t want you developers to forget that, even though many of us are giving you a lot of criticism, and much of it negative, that we don’t appreciate the work that did go into this map.

I personally love the distinctions between the zones. I love that the scouts have little huts or lean-tos or whatever. I love that the camps have barns or are spawned out of thin air by Asuran technology. I love that each tower and keep is different.

I only hope that you will take much of the rational, and sensible criticism to heart and make the changes that are needed to keep WvW alive, otherwise, there will be few players left to enjoy this hard work.

Don’t get me wrong, I can see that a lot of time and effort has gone into these maps, and they are like next generation maps very beautiful to “look” at. But unfortunately it goes against everything that people wanted .

We complained about PvE content in WvW – you give us more.

We ask for scouts/defenders/upgraders to have a better reward mechanic – you scrap them roles and made them virtually non existent.

We asked do not end up making WvW like EoTM – They couldn’t be any more similar.

We asked for another map in addition to the ones we had – I feel like I have taken my car in for a spray job and they decided to scrap it and turn it into a 40ft kittening yacht, yeh looks great but I can’t swim and don’t live near the ocean.

People love to fight players, that is why the majority of them play WvW, these maps have taken that away, sounds weird but true. Fights are not easily accessible, people don’t want to run across a map for ages to get to where the fight is and if they die, will they bother going back? probably not, takes too long.

Alpine maps were near perfect, everywhere was very easily accessible, even if u had to run from citadel with no waypoints on map. Auto upgrading? why? We have no purpose to defend now, the tactics of building and holding a waypoint in enemy hills/bay/Garri are long forgotten which was also an achievement.

What’s with all these silly mechanics like air pads etc? I ain’t interested in doing these silly jumping puzzles to get to my guild etc. I go to WvW to fight, all these canyons and cliffs and different level’s, the saying is very true “less is more”.

I spent 3hours in my home BL last night and although everything was flipping constantly, I seen 2 enemies whole night. This is not what i want out of WvW, I want to have 3 way fights exiting on the edge fights, easy to access again if die or d/c. I want something that we can fight for like enemy blob about to reset our way point we spent so long trying to upgrade.

Anet please bring back the Alpine maps so we can bring our players back too. Who ever designed the Alpine maps thumbs up, this desert map seems like it was left in the hands of a PvE player who casually steps foot in WvW.

The new map tries to split the megablobs but no reason to split up. Now they just cant find each other. There should be multiple pvp events at the same time where you need to split up to win

My opinion is that the terrain needs to be changed in a big way. Remove a lot of the cliffs, gorges, ravines and valleys and allow an easier path

The terrain has complexity to reduce zerg mentality. People need to learn the map and they will “find” players to fight, or play sPvP for more action packed fights. The WvW game mode is a bit slower paced.

Defense sorely needed a boost, but it got too much of a boost.

Defense is still not buffed enough, attacking is much easier and rewarding than defending. Proxy catapults and omega golems are still very effective.

Arena.Net if you read this, all people that want the old bl maps back are just nostalgic. All the points that have been brought are invalid especially the one about the flat terrain. If you want flat terrain then I would suggest on top of undercroft there’s a huge plain desert area or in the oasis.

Bring back wp on side keep, give us a reason to hold the tower… Actually when you control the north tower this don’t even block the north camp dolly to rampart…. Before when you hold the north tower the dolly to garri will be killed in front of the tower…
And from those tower you can treb garri… Now what the point about those tower except the PPT ? Nothing, really nothing…

Before holding the side keep will help you to earn the WP… And then go faster to defend the south. Before when scout where standing in our keep, to build those WP, or to defend those WP they run to the south camp to upgrade the keep. This give fight for the roamers.
Now except PPT, what is the advantage to hold side keep ? None… Really none…

Before you had to control at least briar to protect bay, or lake to have eyes on ennemy move. Now this is useless… Yeah you can deny the auto WP at T0…. But once ennemy take the tower back they have the WP…

Before you try to hold the south camp, because dolly where going to the tower AND to the keep…. But now the dolly from south camp don’t go to side keep…

Holding the south east and south west camp was usefull to upgrade the keep. Now the dolly are bugged, you can eventually escort the dolly for UC, with a lot of heal he can go through…

It’s all those issue who remove the fight… You can add the auto upgrade who remove the need or the “ownership”. If ennemy attack, don’t loose too much time to run back when you die… Just regroup and take something else… We go later to take the stuff back… We don’t have WP on the side keep, tower are useless, rampart have WP at T0… And all those thing have exactly the same PPT at T0 or T3…

It’s all the core of the map and the game mechanic who have broken WvW…

Now yeah you can have some fun fight at prime time, but outside that it’s boring like hell… I was used to play for hours outside prime time… Now I don’t play at all…. I just join sometimes at prime to make some fight with the blue tag but nothing more…

They need to remove the WPs completely. If you were playing on your borderland then you could have upgraded bay and hills to WP and it was really hard for the enemies to reset the map when you could just teleport really quickly using the WPs.

Waypoints need to be removed completely and there won’t be any complaining from people about rampart T0.

Catalin.5341:

They need to remove the WPs completely. If you were playing on your borderland then you could have upgraded bay and hills to WP and it was really hard for the enemies to reset the map when you could just teleport really quickly using the WPs.

Waypoints need to be removed completely and there won’t be any complaining from people about rampart T0.

Yes, remove them completely, because running through all that beautiful scenery for 5 minutes is what wvw is all about?

I thought wvw was about, well, world vs world, where epic battles were fought over objectives and planning and tactics were involved.

Catalin.5341:

They need to remove the WPs completely. If you were playing on your borderland then you could have upgraded bay and hills to WP and it was really hard for the enemies to reset the map when you could just teleport really quickly using the WPs.

Waypoints need to be removed completely and there won’t be any complaining from people about rampart T0.

What a stupid idea. Right now ppl don’t even bother to run to a fight in the south of their home BL. You think they will bother more if they have to run LONGER than now? Ppl go to EBG because they can get to the action way faster than in the BL.
You can create potential for good fights when you give stuff a value. With removing the waypoints and the t0 waypoints Anet killed the potential for good fights.
Why should i stop taking this tower to defend something with no strategical value?
Things need to be important. For atackers and defenders. Right now not even garrison (or how ever that keep is called now) is important.

People that cant be bothered to run shouldnt be bothered to log in!

gagi.4012:

People that cant be bothered to run shouldnt be bothered to log in!

People who don’t bother logging in also don’t bother buying gems, eventually finding other games to play.

Your idiotic suggestions in these threads would only serve to shorten the lifespan of this game. People who take the time to write these walls-o’-text do so because they care about the game and want to keep playing it. If you on the other hand want the game mode to die off completely, then by all means keep promoting your toxic b.s.

People that cant be bothered to run shouldnt be bothered to log in!

I agree. The wvw game mode involves more tactical fights where you wait your enemy to do something or you do guerilla warfare, etc.
If people want fast action packed non-stop combat, then there’s spvp.

then we are not allowed to do KT on the map, we are not allowed to search for fights… Roamer don’t play anymore because you need at least 5 people to do something.
Scout don’t play anymore because they have nothing to do and will not loose time to defend useless structures with no one tactical advantage…
Who will remain on the map ? You and your 2 friends ?

So this megalaser event is the exact opposite of an anti-blob mechanics and lol to top it off you have to run from the outer-most edge of the map to defend an entire border yeah sure..

I would of liked to see the Alpine map increased in size by 25% with the East and West stretched apart a bit and maybe update the visuals a bit to make it less bland otherwise the map was perfect.

I don’t understand why they decided to start from scratch on a map that just screams PvE with PvP inside of it when all we want is 99% PvP with the 1% PvE.

Bring back old borderlands, you guys are ridiculous for ever releasing this garbage. Who is running WvW over there?

msalakka.4653:

gagi.4012:

People that cant be bothered to run shouldnt be bothered to log in!

People who don’t bother logging in also don’t bother buying gems, eventually finding other games to play.

Your idiotic suggestions in these threads would only serve to shorten the lifespan of this game. People who take the time to write these walls-o’-text do so because they care about the game and want to keep playing it. If you on the other hand want the game mode to die off completely, then by all means keep promoting your toxic b.s.

WvW is not for them or you, in WvW u need to make a effort to make fun and epic situations. You can’t get them by not doing anything.
I suggest Strongholds then there is lot of action there and all u need to do is start the game and walk out of spawn.

1) We have a triple whammy hitting our small groups:

• proliferation of t3 gates,
• the removal of supply-cheap catapults (i.e. guild catapults which used to cost 25 supply) AND
• no more +5 supply at camps

2) Then we have CLAIMING which has been delayed due to The Great Paywall of Guild Halls. This will make it very unlikely that small guilds ever get to claim anything – it’s big guilds or go home in WvW.

At the time of writing, I’ve yet to see an active Tactivator, weeks after the release of the game and despite guilds rushing to upgrade their halls in order to have access to them.

3) I think there are problems with the automatic upgrades – perhaps these should happen more slowly. I suspect that my opinion on this would change if there were more people on the maps.

4) The mobs in the Skysplitter event annoy me greatly because despite being about average to take down they have a long charge, knockdowns and are tricksy to fight because WvW players are traditionally in tanky PVT gear. I think this event needs looking at by the QA people – I know it’s meant to be just a thing to make people get into an open field fight, but on it’s own and without enemies it’s not fun enough.

In summary, it’s NOT a problem with the maps. In my opinion the maps are fine.

Zioba.6182:

Why should i stop taking this tower to defend something with no strategical value?

^So much this.
This paired with the new mechanics that discourage roaming is why the new map promotes k-training.

Good point about the Tactivators. I still haven’t seen one in use either. So, is the biggest failure for HoT and WvW the Guild Hall? It just might be. No guilds were “grandfathered” in with things that were already unlocked (small guild killer). The potentially FUN things they added to the game mode are taking a long time to get to (tactivators?) and basic needs (claiming and auras). The cost and grind of the Guild Hall could be redone. Waiting months to finally find out that, hey, what the kitten this fill in the blank new WvW thing is too expensive to use or not worth the time and effort, etc. Blah blah… Have we even gotten to the place where people have used and formed an opinion on all the unlocks/upgraded yet?

TL,DR. Guild Hall grind is contributing to players giving up or getting bored.

Svarty.8019:

1) We have a triple whammy hitting our small groups:

• proliferation of t3 gates,
• the removal of supply-cheap catapults (i.e. guild catapults which used to cost 25 supply) AND
• no more +5 supply at camps

2) Then we have CLAIMING which has been delayed due to The Great Paywall of Guild Halls. This will make it very unlikely that small guilds ever get to claim anything – it’s big guilds or go home in WvW.

At the time of writing, I’ve yet to see an active Tactivator, weeks after the release of the game and despite guilds rushing to upgrade their halls in order to have access to them.

3) I think there are problems with the automatic upgrades – perhaps these should happen more slowly. I suspect that my opinion on this would change if there were more people on the maps.

4) The mobs in the Skysplitter event annoy me greatly because despite being about average to take down they have a long charge, knockdowns and are tricksy to fight because WvW players are traditionally in tanky PVT gear. I think this event needs looking at by the QA people – I know it’s meant to be just a thing to make people get into an open field fight, but on it’s own and without enemies it’s not fun enough.

In summary, it’s NOT a problem with the maps. In my opinion the maps are fine.

I think you ordered them very nicely, as these issues aren’t just merely an annoyance, it really does block people from actually playing via paywalls, a broken guild claiming system making things requiring pve, overly fast upgrades making taking structures more tedious, and other annoyances like guild catas. The maps have problems too but it wouldn’t be as bad with everything else compounding to it.

Svarty.8019:

In summary, it’s NOT a problem with the maps. In my opinion the maps are fine.

IMHO its all of what you wrote plus the maps. Reverence documented whats wrong with the map design and the same points have been made in other threads.

IMO the new desert maps are made for new HoT mechanics and much higher populations but they made it so there isn’t any real reason to spread out. So if you raise the player cap it will just mean larger zergs. I have a feeling that when creating the map the designer was using gliding, which would totally make the map have a different feel, and then someone said “nope, can’t do that in WvW or Pvp” but left the map the way it was.

Like I said I another thread, they need to move the southern tower WPs back to the keeps and make them tier 3 upgrades. Having waypoints that close to the invading WPs means they don’t mean jack to the invaders and if the home team has the WPs already then there is no reason for them to be porting down there. Its like a design mistake that got through on accident. Like the guy in charge of placing them didn’t realize it was something that goes in the large keeps and nobody corrected him. I would also make it so the upgrades were manual with a gold cost. All 3 of these would help to make things strategic again and not just there for EOTM K train style flipping. You would have more soloist running around starting upgrades and roamers and havoc teams taking the towers and camps for the strategic values, even if its still a pain in the butt to take keeps. All while making keeps have a lot of strategic value for holding them again.

I also agree that something needs to be done with the guild system. That is a huge change that disrupted many WvW guilds and pushed many players into quitting. Telling people to go big guild or go home makes a lot of people choose to go home. Which is bad for everyone.

morrolan.9608:

Svarty.8019:

In summary, it’s NOT a problem with the maps. In my opinion the maps are fine.

IMHO its all of what you wrote plus the maps. Reverence documented whats wrong with the map design and the same points have been made in other threads.

I agree, I have mentioned things that can be done to help the current desert map but, even though I thinks its a beautiful map, it really needs a complete overhaul. It is just to big for current populations and increasing the cap just means larger zergs which I do not think anyone wants. There is lots of other things wrong also and yes Reverence does a great job of documenting them. Hopefully they not just listen but actually hear what we are saying.