Guild Wars 2

A few questions which I think the community would love to hear ANET’s views on and I suspect ANET might value the communities views on. Again, I understand if there is no official ANET position, but can individual employees give their personal thoughts?

1) Do you believe the updates you provided WvW worked as intended?
2) What do you think was the best received?
3) What missed?
4) Why?
5) How would you change the approach?

My answers:

1) Somewhat. The Seasons did add quite a bit of purpose to WvW even if the implementation had challenges (as anything that involves predicting how thousands of gamers will act can). Ranks became an effective reward system without unbalancing other aspects of the game. EOTM largely missed.

2) WvW ranks really worked well. They were not OP and they really anchored a number of key people and commanders creating server leadership (at least on my server). The one exception may be guard stacks given everyone seems focused on getting that ability first. Seasons worked better than not. There was passion around WvW even if a bit of frustration. Overall, it was a win but whether it remains such going forward will depend on removing some of the frustration (after all the Seasons are no longer really new now).

3) EOTM (and if talking about PvP) Skyhammer missed. EOTM was designed to be about WvW conflict mechanics and it became more an extension of PvE than really PvP/WvW. Skyhammer was just about the most clever map I have seen in a MMO but became quickly exploitable. Other things are relatively minor such as guard stacks.

4) ANET seems to have extremely good creativity and frankly the execution of new content really works much better (on whole) than most games. What is missing seems to be an understanding of the player and how they will actually use content (or abuse it). Likewise, the focus on BIG changes in WvW/PvP while focusing on minor (and more frequent) content in PvE (Living Story) gives the impression to gamers (right or wrong) that PvE is more “top of mind”.

5) First, it would be great to have a test server to see exactly how players might exploit or use content. Secondly, having a series of balance improvements (focus on a class at a time or some manageable chunk) with each LS patch would create a perception of balanced effort.

After nearly two years we have seen minimal features added to WvW. In the last six months we have seen even less. To make matters worse they really haven’t fixed or added much in the quality of life department.

• EotM – Nice for PvE’rs but wasn’t really a WvW upgrade

• Account bound WvW levels – Was a nice to have but should have shipped that way originally.

• Culling – Nice fix but certainly no feature

• Added ruins – Boring even for roamers

• Seasons – ughhh. Still buggy and bases on the same borked coverage/population mechanics of regular WvW.

• WvW levels – Probably the single best addition they have made but that isn’t necessarily a compliment.

• Lots of balancing most of it poor as condi classes now dominate small fights and GWEN is a slight upgrade of Hammer Train. They have weakened an already under-performing Ranger class, nuked several builds (D/D ele must have stolen developers candy) and gutted an entire build design (anyone seen a good zerker build lately?).

I remain impressed with the game GW2 launched with but after nearly two years seems not much has changed in WvW. Most of the fundamental issues are still here.

Anyway the short version is that the “State of WvW” is pretty much the same state it was in at release.