Guild Wars 2

can somebody explain in theory how HoT ruined WvW?

In theory, you could go and play WvW to form your own opinion instead of seeking the forced view of other people thats already been regurgitated over and over again in 100+ thread should you choose to read the forum.

New shinies.

/15charr

HoT Released and these points maybe happened:

new WvW maps get released with HoT which only a few like in terms of WvW the look is great. Now the most WvW Players ar in EBG and EOTM

with HoT new masteries came and now everybody is farming EXP or Mastery points and you only can do it in PvE, so none is in WvW who want the masteries.

Raid comes with HoT so some WvW players want to do Raids too and now spend more time in PvE and less in WvW to get gear and stuff.

With HoT the new Stronghold Mode comes in and some WvW players want to test it too and so there are less playeres in WvW.

Auto Upgrade and new Guild System make some WvW players angry cause the lose there Guild Progression they made over the years and for a small Guild it is getting harder.

There maybe other point but these are common.

Its a chain reaction.

1.) Hot needs a lot PvE and resoures (e.G. guild halls) to “Grind”. People are more in PvE till geting what they want.
2.) The new maps have to be learnd. People have a hard time to find their way at start.
3.) New maps have PvE gimiks which is not what most WvW players want.
4.) WvW is about strategic play, siege battles and support. So its about suplies , towers for strategic positions in taking keeps … The new map seem not to support this well.
5.) Autoupgrade is disliked. It takes off a player goal. Also it results im more upgraded stuff, making it more dificult for small groups.
6.) As result BL population decreases. Players don´t find groups or enemies to battle so they move to a map they know well and where more play—> EB.
Spiral started, lower population drives away more players. Players returning from PvE after some time might not be enough to stop it. They come and find a deserted desert, go EB or get totaly frustrated and the hole stays for the next reurning …

WvW burns down. And Cristmas is a deadly gate, where people might move on to other games if ther is nothing holding them back before.
I think anet wanted to release HOT to hype before christmas to hold players but for WvW this is going to fail hard.
And WvW is the end content for a huge numer of GW2 players.

Read up on the many threads regarding this i would say.

There are many problems with WVW that you need to understand from before HOT, which have been made worse by HOT.

Main issues of WVW since the game started and never addressed:

1. Low population servers / tiers – with release of desert borderlands this has been made worse because the map has a much larger overall surface area even if its “border to border” size is close to the old one. it has far too many labirinth like features and is too vertical. All of these lead to players on all sides having a much harder time to find some action. it is now pretty bad on the high servers, and horrible / unplayable on the low servers.

2. Population imbalance – this has been made worse by HOT because A-Net raised map caps. So a group of 30-40 that was previously being outnumbered by 2 groups of 60 (hence 40 vs 120 on resets), is now outnumbered by 2 groups of 80 (40 vs. 160 on resets). This has gotten so bad that people just give up and leave even on prime time reset nigths, its a lucky day if the reset prime lasts more then 2-3 hours now, usually it doesn’t.

3. Nightcapping – made worse by the 2 things noted above, few defenders unable to follow / cut off the map blobs cause map design, map blobs even more imbalanced due to increased map caps.

4. PVE grind for guild upgrades – completely destroyed, made pointless, small guilds and personal guilds. These guilds will never be able to use the tactivators, ever in the current HOT system. period. Quite a few people have left because all the effort they put into such guilds has been basically wiped out.

5. Roaming took a hit because of larger map with more spots to hide. Players just can’t reasonably find other players to play with or against.

6. New BL map limited asymetric warfare, making it much harder for smaller size groups to deal with map blobs.

7. The laser PVE event is just too unbalanced and too big in all aspects. Its effects are far too powerful and on top of that it is broken and still causing many people to lag out completely and get disconnected or causing game to crash. This makes it so that entire groups / guilds leave the map when the event starts because map becomes unplayable for too many players.

8. We needed improved map over the old BL, mainly improved travel times, especially to bay and hills from defenders spawn so that objectives would be easier to defend, this map is opposite. It takes far too long to get to objectives you need to defend from spawn due to the vertical and labirinth aspects of the map, knowing the map does not help anything because you’re still just as stuck and still have to get over these obstacles and still unable to get to objectives in time.

Other major factor of note:

Map was supposed to be designed to break up blobs. It is NOT doing that. Not working as intended in this regard and on top of that as mentioned above, map blobs are now larger due to increased map caps. I do not see how they can accomplish this without some sort of a direct blob debuff or adjusted boss scaling to the point that a blob almost can not kill a boss at all but a group of half map que or less can.

these are the major issues, some of which are new ones, others have simply been made worse instead of being improved and made better, overall the issues are large and hard enough to simply continuously make players just give up and leave WVW game mode, which in turn makes things even worse.

Hope this explains some stuff, but, as said before, best thing for you is to hop onto your servers TS at prime time reset and see all this for yourself.

• Big PvE releases had a negative impact on WvW population.
• Guild Hall upgrades are expensive, making many WvW upgrades as good as unobtainable.
• WvW upgrades are also 50 times more expensive than what they should be and can only be used once.
• Reset night was changed from Friday to Saturday. This might have had a huge impact on its own.

If they made the new WvW upgrades (improvements/tactics/claiming) much cheaper and easier to get, then maybe it can revive WvW.

@Tongku

You basically laid bare what is causing WvW to implode atm.

Very Good observations & analysis in my opinion.

+1 Vote from me.

Short answer:

Auto upgrade system, which doesn’t require human interaction. This often leads to match ups where one server totally dominates because of off-time capturing. I play on Desolation, EU #1 server. We are completely dominating our match up, as we did the previous weeks as well.

Old Alpine BL map got replaced with overdesigned Desert BL map, which few players like and most hate it. Too much gimmicks and pve in it, too slow and complex to traverse with way too massive keeps. Much less fighting vs other human players, in fact you can play on BLs for long time without seeing any other human players. The central oasis event makes the entire map lag very badly and the mega laser is way too overpowered.

Capturing objectives is now slower due most objectives being fully upgraded and having more defenses and more powerful NPCs and lords. Things feel like slow motion compared to old & hectic WvWvW. And of course we got load of new bugs e.g. projectiles going through walls.

WvWvW guild upgrades were made ridiculously expensive, requiring guilds to grind crazy amount of pve. The WvWVW rewards are as bad as before.

Moving reset night to Saturday to was bad idea, at least for the EU servers.

I would pay $$$ to get the old WvWvW back. I mean revert all the changes and get the original maps back (without the ruins, the lake had so many fun fights).

Tongku.5326:

5. Roaming took a hit because of larger map with more spots to hide. Players just can’t reasonably find other players to play with or against.

Good post but added to this the roamers who took care of upgrades and whatnot now have less incentive to play due to the auto upgrade system. I think the auto upgrades have led to less players sticking around to defend.