Guild Wars 2

So Hugh previewed more details about Bloodlust in the Borderlands, the orb replacement mechanic, in a live stream recently.

A brief summary from what I recall. The lake in the middle of the borderlands map has mostly been filled in and new objectives have been added.

The capture points:

• There are four new capture points placed on the corners of the lake and one at the north of the ruins (five points total, of equal worth).
• Southern point is Temple of Lost Prayers and it’s located at the northern tip of the existing ruins.
• South West point is Battle’s Hollow. It’s has an arena type layout with two tunnel entrances.
• North West point is Bauer’s Estate. It’s a fairly open space and it’s connected to the Battle’s Hollow by pillars you can jump from for faster travel between the two (compared to if you run along the ground/swim).
• North East point is Orchard Overlook and you can blink/shadow step from the cap point to the cannon which allows unique play from the other points. Multiple pathways to the cannon location emphasises terrain combat (this is the case for all the points form what I can see).
• South East point is Carver’s Ascent and it’s a high location. Lots of open edges to knock people off. Emphasises stability and knock-backs, there is also some kind of tunnel underneath.
• Each point is slightly different in its terrain and different strategies can be used for each, such as fighting at elevations (use stability and knock-backs), using blink skills to traverse up terrain quickly, wide open points versus more crowded points.
• To capture a point you have to stand inside the square (similair to PvP or capping a tower) with no enemies inside of it.
• Multiple players will not capture faster.
• Once captured, the capture status will decay slowly over time if no-one is inside of it.
• Point status shows up on the map with the colour of the server that controls it (white if neutral) in addition to a light above the point which is visible from normal view.
• Enemy players can neutralise by standing in an unprotected point, neutralising is faster than capturing.
• Capturing or neutralising the points will not provide you with normal event credit or WvW experience. The only intended reward is the actual buff (I may have misunderstood this).
• Each capture point has a cannon (the same as tower/keep cannons that benefits from masteries) that can be built with 10 supply.
• You may also build additional siege inside and around the capture points, although it’s not intended to be able to treb a keep from any of these points.

The buff:

• To obtain the bloodlust on the borderlands buff you need to capture at least three different ruins on that map. Once you hold at least three at the same time you need to hold them for two minutes to obtain the buff which is given to every player on your server across all WvW maps.
• To lose the buff an enemy server has to obtain it. They have to cap at least three ruins and hold them for two minutes, neutralising alone won’t do it.
• The buff gives your server one point for every stomp made while under it. It also gives +50 to power, precision, toughness, vitality, healing power and condition damage.
• The buff stacks so you can hold three borderland buffs and get three points per stomp. Only one player can get stomp credit. Killing without stomping won’t provide points.
• Some system is in place to prevent trolls from allowing enemy servers to stomp them repeatedly for points.

Miscellaneous:

• The quaggan and the krait have been removed completely. There are random yellow (only hostile if provoked) NPCs that roam the area. I noticed a red ooze among other things so this will help complete daily kill variety in WvW.
• There are two new sentries in the new area.

Ram Mastery:

• Tier 1 gives the player Iron Hide. This is a 50% damage reduction buff.
• Tier 2 gives Flame Blast (ram skill two) the ability to apply structural vulnerability. This increases damage taken by 1% per stack.
• Tier 3 reduces ram skill recharges.
• Tier 4 causes knock-back to people behind the gate disrupting repairs.
• Tier 5 gives a support skill which applies Iron Hide to nearby allies.

Another Livestream will be out next Friday. I can’t remember if he mentioned the release date for any of this stuff although I think ram mastery is in the next patch.

Here is the video of the stream: http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/b/457403128
(The fat kitty at the start was the best part!)

Votf should be happy about the Ram Mastery.

Best part of this is prolly the ram mastery actually

I actually think it’s an interesting mechanic and I look forward to seeing how it plays out. The one area of the game I’m always amazed by inventiveness of the players is in WvW. The environments look great (especially the Orchard) and the complexity of the terrain will be very interesting to play in compared to the open field nature of most maps. I don’t look forward to increasing the power level of mesmers and thieves though. Blink and shadow step skills are going to be too powerful here.

I do have a few concerns though.

If interacting with one of the five capture points (either neutralising or capturing) doesn’t reward WvW exp, normal exp, karma or gold, doesn’t this punish players who prioritise helping out their server by capturing the points instead of joining the karma train?

Some servers don’t have the numbers to fill two maps let alone field a competitive force across all four maps. Isn’t this mechanic going to dramatically favour servers with larger numbers? It looks like this mechanic won’t be as exciting in lower tiers with less players and spotty coverage. Have you considered how this change could favour high population servers and further reinforce the idea that you need to transfer to a higher ranked server to experience WvW fully?

I really think you should be able to neutralize it. Making it this way just means that the server with more people will have it all the time, because if you only have 20 people on the map you won’t be able to cap it but you will be able to take a couple points and hurt the bigger server.

No roaming group(s) is going to be able to take 3 of the 5 for 2 minutes and recap the buff from a server that has 70 people. Bad implementation.

EDIT: all of this stuff is in the next patch, sept 17th

EDIT2: static siege with ability to build MORE siege.. good luck roaming groups.

Was it made clear if the points-on-stomp are actually for a stand-still-and-interact stomp, or just killing a downed player?

Ragnar.4257:

Was it made clear if the points-on-stomp are actually for a stand-still-and-interact stomp, or just killing a downed player?

I believe he did make that distinction. He wasn’t pedantic with his wording, but he was specific about saying stomp as opposed to auto-attack. You only get the point/s if you stomp them.

Shiren.9532:

Ragnar.4257:

Was it made clear if the points-on-stomp are actually for a stand-still-and-interact stomp, or just killing a downed player?

I believe he did make that distinction. He wasn’t pedantic with his wording, but he was specific about saying stomp as opposed to auto-attack. You only get the point/s if you stomp them.

Well, that doesn’t surprise me, although I’d hoped it might not be the case.

95% of the kills in WvW are not stomps, which means this won’t change anything. Which is a shame, because it was the one part of bloodlust that I was excited about.

Inability to neutralize buffs without taking them. They’re trying so hard to get us to not play.

The point value of a stomp is equal to 1/5th of holding a supply camp at the 15 minute mark. That’s a pretty big deal. If you can stomp more than 5 people every 15 minutes you’ve done more for your score than holding that supply camp at that time.

Big zergs wiping each other won’t make much a difference with this one – most of their kills are from AoE and auto-attacks, but smaller groups roaming and fighting over supply camps or trying to ninja camps (or even roamers) will matter a lot more. The people fighting for control of the ruins will probably get a fair few points from this alone.

Towers and keeps would be almost pointless if it affected every kill instead of only stomps. I actually think the added dynamic of to stomp or not to stomp is a good one. It also adds another dimension to playing for score (something I personally don’t care about but it’s good to see more diversity in it).

I feel if they take out the stat buff (replace with wxp gain or something) but keep the stomp giving points, it would be really good. Now I feel it gives too much advantage to the winning side since it would be kitten difficult to neutralize their hold on bloodlust.

What happened to it being easy for the opposing server to remove the buff?? This looks like it’ll be kitten near impossible to neutralize it.

The stomp mechanic is bad news.
This will mean that people will be competing for kills, something this game has so far avoided with good reason.

It’s going to adversely affect the spirit of camaraderie, which has been one of the nicest features of the game. I’d hate to see this go the way WoW ended up with people trading insults in chat and on the forums.

Nice. Now armies can cluster in the middle of the map and cause skill lag in the borderlands, the only limited refuge from the game-breaking problem that hasn’t been fixed in more than a year.

make the stronger teams even stronger with blood lust, looks like Anet really learns from its mistakes..

Contiguous.1345:

The stomp mechanic is bad news.
This will mean that people will be competing for kills, something this game has so far avoided with good reason.

It’s going to adversely affect the spirit of camaraderie, which has been one of the nicest features of the game. I’d hate to see this go the way WoW ended up with people trading insults in chat and on the forums.

One poster above mentioned that a stomp was worth 1/5 of a supply camp. That actually sounds very significant. I wonder if this is enough to give people reason to Alt-F4 right before the stomp. The answer is probably “yes.”

A supply camp will give you 5 points if you hold it at the time the score is calculated (every 15 minutes). With one bloodlust buff a stomp will give you one point. With two buffs you get two points per stomp and with three buffs you get three points. Controlling all three buffs will probably be unlikely for most servers (unlike orbs you can’t hide the buff away in a fully upgraded keep filled with supply and siege, they are fairly vulnerable and out in the open requiring defence of at least three points) but if you do, a stomp will be worth three points which is a lot.

I suspect most of the time servers will only hold one maybe two buffs at a time so the point advantage will be negligible because they are all getting it. It’s only going to matter when a server can reliable obtain and hold multiple buffs, which opens up opportunities for a server without the buff to attack places that aren’t being defended. It’s going to be a lot harder to protect three ruins than it will be to protect an orb behind keep walls, and if you are protecting the ruins it means your forces can’t all stack in defence of a tower or keep.

It’s not out yet but it looks a lot better than the old orb mechanic (it’s easier to get the buff than it is to get an orb) and it might create really interesting priorities for servers resulting in different strategies being used.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Contiguous.1345:

The stomp mechanic is bad news.
This will mean that people will be competing for kills, something this game has so far avoided with good reason.

It’s going to adversely affect the spirit of camaraderie, which has been one of the nicest features of the game. I’d hate to see this go the way WoW ended up with people trading insults in chat and on the forums.

One poster above mentioned that a stomp was worth 1/5 of a supply camp. That actually sounds very significant. I wonder if this is enough to give people reason to Alt-F4 right before the stomp. The answer is probably “yes.”

Have some faith with developers. There is already a system to award player when their opponent disconnects midfight. It will surely be extended to cover the stomp reward as well.

Korgov.7645:

Have some faith with developers. There is already a system to award player when their opponent disconnects midfight. It will surely be extended to cover the stomp reward as well.

?? O_o :> :> <<<< >>>> :<

This is going to help the servers with the biggest night team too. You can go to bed with each server holding a buff on their own borderland to keep it pretty even.

You then get up and the server that has a strong night team will have their morning zerg running around with all three buffs up gaining a tremendous amount of points from kills just increasing their score even further.

Korgov.7645:

Have some faith with developers.

You haven’t been here very long, have you?

I’m not sure but the server with the biggest team of players is now even harder to fight against?

aspirine.6852:

I’m not sure but the server with the biggest team of players is now even harder to fight against?

Correct.

Nooooooo!

Every WvW player on the most populated server gets +4 Might, +7% crit and +150 Toughness, Vitality and Healing. All this when they introduce big rewards for being on the winning server.

How is that supposed to make WvW more enjoyable? More interesting? More satisfying?

But wait, didn’t this prove to be a bad idea last time?
Haven’t we been saying for months that this is a bad idea?
Hasn’t that message been the most consistent and possible the most posted ever since ANet announced they were replacing the orb mechanic?

The incentives that encourage zerging are bad enough. But to increase the incentives for blobbing at the server level is, at the very best, incredibly naive.

What WvW needs is the direct opposite of what’s happening here. For WvW to be interesting, Anet need to encourage participation on underdog servers; to reward between servers (not imbalance).

Lord Kuru.3685:

Contiguous.1345:

The stomp mechanic is bad news.
This will mean that people will be competing for kills, something this game has so far avoided with good reason.

It’s going to adversely affect the spirit of camaraderie, which has been one of the nicest features of the game. I’d hate to see this go the way WoW ended up with people trading insults in chat and on the forums.

One poster above mentioned that a stomp was worth 1/5 of a supply camp. That actually sounds very significant. I wonder if this is enough to give people reason to Alt-F4 right before the stomp. The answer is probably “yes.”

No, but I’m expecting to run into a lot of stomp hacks where you are unable to stomp them when downed and the only option is to keep hitting them till their hp drops to 0.

Wow arena net this is kind of fail… why make the stronger team even stronger?

Why even provide a stat buff… havent you learned from your mistakes? This is so wrong…

Looks like it could be interesting. Can’t wait to see how hackers, exploiters, griefers and the like will find ways to break this!

Does anet think the average player cares about the overall score? The whole stomp thing seems stupid.

If you roam with a small group, nearly all of your kills are stomps.

arKRazor.8654:

If you roam with a small group, nearly all of your kills are stomps.

And? Does adding a point to the score make it more fun?

Hmm, the PVE Dev team get all the talented creative PVE Devs, the PVP Dev team get all the guys that understand PVP and creating balance and the WvWvW Dev
team get err umm……….

This wont just destroy GvG but the entire WvW as well. People thinking that they added stuff for small groups are being naive.

You have to keep these points for 2 solid minutes, more then enough time for any zerg to move to your location, chances are the zerg will be roaming somewhere in the middle anyways because you can secure and protect the points, and also move to one of the 3 keeps with relative ease.

And for those saying that you can cap there towers/keeps while they are grabbing the points, good luck trying to get into a keep within a minute with a roaming zerg while you got 5 people next to you.

Is there not one guy in the entire WvW office who thought that this would be a bad idea, not just for the mostly ignored GvG, but for the entire WvW that will only result to more blobbing and zerging after this patch?

Have fun facing off against a stacked, 150+ buffed zerg

^this.

Adding more objectives isn’t wrong per se. Actually, that would in fact help to spread out zergs.

The problem is the size of the map. BL’s are already too clumped, especially the 3 keeps (just think about Garri that is able to treb outer Bay wall), which are also the main points of the BL.

Adding more objectives in a already too small map and do not enlarge it will just make it worse. A zerg can go in the middle and steamroll any small scale groups within 2 min from any point of the map. Add to this that zergs will always be around the 3 keeps…

You can’t add all that stuff with current BL’s size. But devs said already that there are technical limits and maps are as large as possible already. Lowering the cap of pop per side would work, but also destroy entire communities and worsen the issue of queques (inbefore “Transfer away from stacked servers” – halving the cap pop woul make q’s appear almost everywhere – and you don’t really think that only top 6 servers has q’s right?).

If on top of that we consider that the buff is stat based, and outmanned is still useless-based…it’s a very bad thing for overall wvw imo.

Things to do/could be done:
-enlarge maps (as said, impossible)

-halve the cap pop per side of the maps BUT double the number of maps.
Aka every server have 2 BLs, but they hold 75 players instead of 150. Overall numbers of players do not change, but more maps will make zergs spread out much more (less ppl on single map)

-swap outmanned and bloodlust bonuses.
Outmanned will give you 50, 100 or 150 at all stats depening how hard are you outnumbered. bloodlust will now have 6 buffs (remember that there are 6 BL’s): +Exp, +Karma, +MF, +GoldFind, +WXP, armor don’t get damaged. you get all of them if you hold all 6 x3 shrines, only exp/karma/mf if you hold 3, and so on.
(Ofc can be adapted to work with 3 BL’s only, but this should really be done regardless of any change to number of maps.)

WvW Bloodlust buff shouldnt give direct stat boost to players, giving +50/100/150 boost to all stats makes it even harder to get back from losing position. Also this boost makes it hard to organize even GvG matches (having higher stats gives an advantage to team that has it).
In exchange i would suggest to add some kind of boost to siege damage (5% per orb maybe?), reduced damage from siege, damage increase to guards/lords, WExp boost or gold/magic find boost. With this it wouldnt give any advantage in player vs player fights, while giving little advantage for players trying to take objectives like keeps/towers/camps.

This is the opposite of what WvW needs at the moment.

The most glaring problem with WvW is about half the worlds have low participation while the structure of the game rewards population.

This new change simply rewards the world with the largest population and which can keep all of their map slots filled, 24/7.

People who think this sounds like a good idea have never played, week after week against worlds 6 or more tiers above them, or played on a world that cannot keep it’s map slots full.

Where is the dialog? We get these faceless procalmations. We don’t even know who is responsible for this decision. Is it one person, two, a committee?

Games that have test servers populated with players, not devs or paid testers, avoid this kind of top down Dilbert style management stupid design changes.

This is one of the worst design decisions I have seen in a long time.

I get the impression that who ever is making the decisions about WvW, has never ever spent any time trying to play on world in the lower half of the tier ladder when they are matched with a world 6 or more tiers higher.

Blix.8021:

arKRazor.8654:

If you roam with a small group, nearly all of your kills are stomps.

And? Does adding a point to the score make it more fun?

Can’t imagine it would.

I love this idea, with the new mechanic wvw is not about everyone join map zerg anymore.

If map zerg go cap points = no tower or keep harm.
If map zerg go cap tower = roamers can de-cap points.

KumaTazZ.8054:

I love this idea, with the new mechanic wvw is not about everyone join map zerg anymore.

If map zerg go cap points = no tower or keep harm.
If map zerg go cap tower = roamers can de-cap points.

The map changes are good, what people are kitten ed about is the unnecessary stat buff, that will guaranteed provide a snowball effect like we had when the orbs were around.

Zenguy.6421:

Nooooooo!

Every WvW player on the most populated server gets +4 Might, +7% crit and +150 Toughness, Vitality and Healing. All this when they introduce big rewards for being on the winning server.

How is that supposed to make WvW more enjoyable? More interesting? More satisfying?

But wait, didn’t this prove to be a bad idea last time?
Haven’t we been saying for months that this is a bad idea?
Hasn’t that message been the most consistent and possible the most posted ever since ANet announced they were replacing the orb mechanic?

The incentives that encourage zerging are bad enough. But to increase the incentives for blobbing at the server level is, at the very best, incredibly naive.

What WvW needs is the direct opposite of what’s happening here. For WvW to be interesting, Anet need to encourage participation on underdog servers; to reward between servers (not imbalance).

+1. This is exactly what I didnt want. It makes the strongest server stronger which makes no sense at all.

Maybe this has been suggested before, but they NEED to make the buff something that you can claim, either at spawn or at the capture point, until/if ever they make a GvG dedicated game mode. It wouldn’t take anything away from the mechanic, and it would save GvGs. If the buff goes in as stated currently, I don’t see how GvG could continue to exist at all.

rfdarko.4639:

Maybe this has been suggested before, but they NEED to make the buff something that you can claim, either at spawn or at the capture point, until/if ever they make a GvG dedicated game mode. It wouldn’t take anything away from the mechanic, and it would save GvGs. If the buff goes in as stated currently, I don’t see how GvG could continue to exist at all.

The point is, they want GvG dead, so dont bother bringing that up, every time GvG is mentioned they will kill a kitten and make all witnesses disapear

The whole point we are trying to make is that they implemented stat bonusses to the side with most coverage before and it was very very bad (I myself quit WvW because of this during that time untill 3-4 months ago)
It will make the winning side stronger, and the points wont work like they hope they will, not on lower tier servers where population and coverage is an issue,
These servers will get rolled over even harder, even more with the people migrating to winning servers with the upcoming leagues

Well-designed games try to make the matches more interesting all the way to the end. And most people agree that even matches are the most interesting.

Adding yet another mechanism which adds power to that server which has better coverage is a bad idea:

1. We already have Power of the Mists

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Power_of_the_Mists

Which can provide up to 10% bonuses to health and healing power, etc.
The more points your server has the bigger the power of the mists bonus. This feature should have never been in the game. Now to add yet another similar mechanism on top of this just adds more power to the winning side, snowballing all the benefits for them and making come backs or wins for the outnumbered side a mission impossible.

In general it is also easier to get WXP on a highly populated WvWvW server following the karma train (zerging). Guard leech and applied fortitude WXP traits already give stat bonuses and my hunch is that players on a fully stacked server are more likely to have high enough WXP ranks to have those bonuses.

2. We need game mechanisms to make come backs easier for the losing side

Instead of giving flat map wide stat bonuses, these 5 new capture locations should give a variable random bonus. The lower your current score is the better chance to get a better bonus. Thus the bonus benefit has inverse relation with your current score. The highest score holder has lower chances to get really good bonuses. Similar system has been used successfully in MarioKart for ages. E.g. in Nintendo 64 MarioKario 64, the player on the lead usually just gets a single banana or green shell, while the last players are likely to get something really good like: lighting strike, golden mushroom, star which gives invulnerability or 3 heat-seeking red shells.

Example of bonuses (varying from low power to high):
+10% crafting EXP bonus
+10% karma bonus
+10% EXP bonus
+10% luck bonus
+10% WXP bonus
+50 vitality bonus
+50 to power and condition damage

The server with the least point is more likely to get better bonuses from above.

3. Giving 3 points per stomp is a bad idea

That is 3 times more than capturing a sentry. This will encourage even more players to run ganking builds e.g. have a team of 3 thieves. Traited steal from 1500 range. Burst down the victim very quickly and then stealth stomp it. I don’t see how this would be fun or fruitful to the game except for those 3 thieves laughing their kitten off if they have psychopathic personality disorder.

Already the rewards are skewed towards attacking e.g. keep reward 3-5 dragonites for those who slay the keep lord. This urges all the players to go high dps and just rush the lord. If one or few attacking players would stay elsewhere to stall the defenders, they get no rewards. The WXP points are also rewarding selfish play. You get much more WXP by just flipping objectives, instead of defending. The incentives to upgrade keeps, siege them etc. are really low if you are against a server who can capture everything in ease while you are at sleep / work (aka night capping problem, which is still not solved, in fact the new changes would just underline it).

Questions for the developers:

- Imagine that you are playing on a horribly outnumbered server and being spawn camped. You might not even have 10 players to start the Siegerazer/Siegecrusher NPC commander event and it won’t stop the larger enemy groups from stomping you near your own gates. What should you do?

- Are you really planning to remove the outnumbered buff? This sounds like a bad idea. I agree it needs to be reworked, but for above mentioned reasons the outnumbered side really needs more incentives to play. Game should be more fun for all, not just for the winner.

I really urge the developers to have a State of the Game (similar to spvp/tpvp SotG) on a monthly basis with representatives of the WvWvW player community. More two-way communication, actual discussion, not just dictating stuff stubbornly is good.

Jalad Lantana.3027:

This is the opposite of what WvW needs at the moment.

The most glaring problem with WvW is about half the worlds have low participation while the structure of the game rewards population.

This new change simply rewards the world with the largest population and which can keep all of their map slots filled, 24/7.

People who think this sounds like a good idea have never played, week after week against worlds 6 or more tiers above them, or played on a world that cannot keep it’s map slots full.

Where is the dialog? We get these faceless procalmations. We don’t even know who is responsible for this decision. Is it one person, two, a committee?

Games that have test servers populated with players, not devs or paid testers, avoid this kind of top down Dilbert style management stupid design changes.

This is one of the worst design decisions I have seen in a long time.

I get the impression that who ever is making the decisions about WvW, has never ever spent any time trying to play on world in the lower half of the tier ladder when they are matched with a world 6 or more tiers higher.

There aren’t many fights like that between servers anymore.

I’m open to the idea. It seems pretty easy to neutralize (havin people hold it is probably gonna be as hard as having people sit in a tower/keep waitin for things). Gives small persons somethin else to do and the stomp thing might put more emphasis on small persons fights too.

Anet,

Everything sounds great about these changes except well of course as any person that plays wvw knows is the stat increase bonuses. Why? Why? Why do you think this is needed? Do you want to further create disadvantages for the lower pop servers and give advantages to those with higher pop? How did you justify that implementing these stat bonuses were in anyway good for wvw? Please name one reason you could have fathomed to think the stat increase would be a good thing. Do you not learn from your mistakes? Is that not why the orbs were taken out in the first place?
Again everything about this sounds really nice and a welcome change but i implore you to rethink the stat increase bonuses and replace them with bonuses such as increased wxp, xp, gold, karma, and magicfind. That along with the stomp bonus should be more than enough incentive to fight for these points. Giving a server with a huge population bonus the chance to have +150 to stats is just plain dumb, game breaking and will destroy balance that you supposedly have tried hard to create. It is hard enough to fight against a higher population server as it stands right now. If you do not see how this will have such a negative effect on wvw I am at a lost for words.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE reconsider this small part of what seems to be a wonderful change to the borderlands map.

Most truly yours,
Paxus

Anet let me spell this out for you by giving an example. Reset night. Our server (Riverside) gets matched up against Gandara and Desolation. We (assigned to the green border by the community) land on Gandara’s home border.

The following guilds (and the occasional random player) make up the WvW players of that night:

- Riverside: Second Law, PAIN
- Desolation: Forsaken Gamers
- Gandara: Yakslappers, Insert Coin, Cantankerous

The presence of these guilds made for a great WvW night. These are all well-known guilds with a strong WvW presence. This is your WvW playerbase, your costumers. Most of these guilds are actually listed on gw2gvg.com.

Like the buff to (your beloved) Arrow-Carts the orb mechanic (up to +150 points to every stat) makes fights unbalanced and a possibility to measure strength between impossible.

Do not get me wrong I think the capture points are a good idea, but why not let them count towards the points per tick (PPT)?

Answering questions on the stream like ‘where did the krait go?’ instead of legitimate questions brought up by the core of the WvW community is ignorance on a whole new level.

I do not like the insertion of these new points where the lake currently it… its like CLUTTERVILLE…. If you insist on adding these capture points why not EXPAND the map a little to accomodate this rather than what you are doing? Secondly, the cap system for these new points is pretty much the sPvp style play inserted into WVW….which to be honest makes me question how well this will be received by a lot of the players.

I am on TC…so we will as a server survive this fiasco most likely…however the lower population servers will be driven to their knees as their wvw player base either leaves the server or else they just toss in the towel on wvw all together.

As far as the stomp buff, that is something a lot of people have already reflected on and personally I will have a wait and see attitude regarding that aspect… But the cluttering of the BL maps with essentially a sPvp map dropped into the center of a wvw map is a Trainwreck…..

Not too keen on buffs, especially stomp buffs. We already have so many buffs (applied fortitude, guard leech, sigils) that promote running from fight if odds look even slightly bad. I guess it is PTV thief time then.

It looks like all those points can be safely trebbed from a nearby keep or tower