Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing GW2 for about 3 weeks. I wandered into WvW about 2 weeks ago for the first time and have dabbled in it since. Here are my initial impressions, which obviously won’t mean much to most of the experienced players, but maybe Arenanet will want to know how this feature comes across to new players (at least, some of them).

1. The concept is amazing. One of the problems with most games I’ve played before is that no matter how much PvE content they have, you get bored pretty quickly. That leaves PvP, but straight PvP just isn’t for many players, including myself — I don’t have the twitch skills or the time required to get really good at it. WvW is a nice balance between the two and looks long-term to be a lot of fun.

2. WvW is very newbie-unfriendly. I don’t mean that the people are unfriendly, I mean that the feature itself is both highly confusing and heavily tilted against new players in terms of what they can reasonably accomplish and how much fun it is for them to accomplish it. To some extent it’s just the way of things that new players have to get down the learning curve, and I get that, but WvW is far worse than PvE in this regard. I’ve basically had to curtail my involvement until I get more gear and more experience.

3. The server matchups are odd. Maybe it just seems that way because I’m in TC which I understand is a “Tier 1.5” server and doesn’t match up well against others, but it seems like each time I log in we’re not doing so hot. You can’t win ‘em all and I have no problem being an underdog.. I love the fighting spirit of the folks I’ve seen on my server when I’ve gone into WvW. But it must be discouraging to see one’s team so far behind, which I think then discourages people from going into WvW, making things worse.

As I write this one of the three servers in our current assignment has 85% of the assets, and it’s largely due to just having greater numbers. Why not limit the number of players in WvW from each server to avoid the lop-sided population problem?

4. The swarm/zerging thing is silly. In real wars numbers do matter and offensives do often take the form of large armies attacking small ones to wipe them out.. but defense also matters. Seems to me that stronger rewards for holding assets and stronger penalties for taking them and then immediately losing them would discourage this behavior. There should also be more things that individuals or small groups can do that doesn’t require a huge glob of people.

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Overall I think WvW is a great feature that just needs some adjustment. It gives me something to look forward to later in my GW2 “career”.

In this summary of your first three weeks in WvW, you have summarized 75%+ of the posts in this forum from the past 1+ year.

Agreed – good, intelligent post. Welcome to GW2!

Cyvil.1605:

In this summary of your first three weeks in WvW, you have summarized 75%+ of the posts in this forum from the past 1+ year.

Kinda sad how true that is.

TC is a great WvW server, but lacks coverage across all time zones except NA to compete with tier 1 servers.

Glad you’re enjoying WvW. The learning curve isn’t very steep (just jump into your server’s VOIP program such as teamspeak, ventrilo or mumble and follow the commander’s orders), but the amount of time and gold required to get the necessary gear might be off-putting to new WvW players.

I agree with this post as well. However, I’ve seen people say in the past that there should be some kind of system to level out lop sided matches and the problems lies in this;
It can’t really be fixed.
People can come and go as they wish from WvW. If one server suddenly has a bunch of people log off that means they’ll be outnumbered. That can’t be resolved in any way other than by kicking people out of WvW from the remaining servers. Which would obviously be unfair. So it’s really not about fixing, it’s about keeping people interested in WvW and promoting it. I like to think of The Mists (WvW) as war and our servers as our country’s. We’re fighting for our homes and if we don’t recruit and promote the war effort we’ll lose valuable people and resources. So just make sure to remind people if you see them talking about it that they should get their butts in WvW and help us out. They’re not required to, but if they have pride in their server it would do them some good to join in.

Thanks for the replies and kind words. I’m sure many of these problems can’t be easily solved, but some things would help. For example, no, you don’t want to boot out people if people from the other servers leave, but you could make it so that no new people can enter on a server that already has twice as many people as the others. There are other ideas.

I think if I’m going to have any chance of enjoying WvW I need to make a character tailored towards independent play. I’m just not sure what that should be given my lack of experience and skill. I was thinking maybe a thief for the stealthing ability but I’ve heard they are getting nerfed so I don’t know.