Guild Wars 2

Puck.9612:

Kylden Ar.3724:

Puck.9612:

…… You realize having towers that threatened the keeps made people gasp, shock fight for the towers right?

No, it made people take camps to cut off supply. Which was at least some extra fights.

If they rotate in ABL without moving the towers, all it will do is ensure that those towers ALWAYS have a sabotaged depot in them.

Are you saying people didn’t fight over the towers? Because I have about 4 years of experience that says otherwise.
I agree people also fought over the camps, that’s partly because of the better upgrade system that made supply more valuable and partly because of how connected each objective on the alpine map was.
SW camp was especially great for forcing people to hop off their siege and come fight since you could use it to attack bay.

Oh no, they fought over towers, but at least where I played, we always choked off supply first so they could not easily do treb to attack keep and arrow carts to defend the tower. Simple tactics.

I’ve always been in Kaineng, however, and our smaller numbers meant you had to do that before throwing your blob at a tower or all you did was feed them bags. In higher pop servers, that may have been different in ABLs.

But really, logically, while it might be fun for a game, it makes no sense that the towers can treb keep and vice versa. Course, the fact that any of us can survive a hit from a treb is also silly.

Meh. Still needs more remodeling.

Ultimately though, as long as they provide a large enough space to fight and enough people on the map doing their thing, I’ll be okay. TBH, I wouldn’t even mind a queue if it led to something good. I’m honestly a very simple person when it comes to gaming needs.

Kylden Ar.3724:

Oh no, they fought over towers, but at least where I played, we always choked off supply first so they could not easily do treb to attack keep and arrow carts to defend the tower. Simple tactics.

I’ve always been in Kaineng, however, and our smaller numbers meant you had to do that before throwing your blob at a tower or all you did was feed them bags. In higher pop servers, that may have been different in ABLs.

But really, logically, while it might be fun for a game, it makes no sense that the towers can treb keep and vice versa. Course, the fact that any of us can survive a hit from a treb is also silly.

That’s all the sense it needs to make. It was fun and promoted fights. A threat to the keep made the tower important and the camp important. To protect the one you were fighting over all 3. The dbl doesn’t have this and that’s why it fails as a WvW map.

I had adjusted to the DBL, but the latest changes are gold for the most part… particularly the WP correction, hallelujah! I think I would be bored with the old Alpines, yeah.

My remaining gripe is with the “marked” function recently introduced. No one should be marked as an enemy, just not right. It is up to the conquering party to sweep a keep when flipped.

If marked is retained at the sentry points, the radius should be reduced from current size. It is not hard to see where the enemy is going without marking them.

Recap, yes, I am pleased overall, but remove marked.

I am really excited for the return of the alpine maps. I do not enjoy DBL at all.

Alpine is an extremely dumbed down version of DBL, and I hope it never comes back.

I only play on it when EBG has a 300 man queue, or when I need a cheap WP to LA. When Alpine comes back, we’ll have some good times on the BLs.

i never disliked dbd. it was just a unnecessary. now for those who were begging for alpine yeah the navigation was easier you could safe treb some objectives but they weren’t great. they had plenty unused space.

Had someone join our squad tonight (reset) who had never been in the DBL’s. Long time WvWer, but only came to the DBL because of the EBG que. He said when were done he had a great time and wished he’d tried them sooner. Go figure.

I still hate DBL. Maybe it can be fixed but the map needs to be shrunk… Still see DBL part of the EOTM rotation instead.

They stopped being stupid and made the Waypoints work the way they should have to begin with. That alone makes the map 10x more playable than before. I appreciate the fact and like it a bit that they opened up areas of the map more. I dislike that they created a ton of handholding for the pve components….to die to lava or falling damage or any pve stuff here is pretty much 100% completely ur own mistake give how easy anet has made it to avoid it now. Haystacks are great, if u kno where they are, they add alot of strategy to everything. Same with how the map has been opened up so much….you don’t run into giant dead ends now, there’s always a way around obstacles which is great. You know I just have so much fun getting chased by a large mob across 1-2 kilometeres of desert, bringing them all to a cliff ledge and using fear me when they get close enough and seeing them all fall off to their deaths…classic!
The shrines are also great now as well. They do just enough to help those who own them without breaking anything. Plus that 40% movement speed is great, a great thing for the home bl no doubt when they succeed in pushing back the enemy and need help getting back to the front lines (especially when fire and air haven’t fortified).

Alpine won’t have any of these things. I still have no idea why people wanted it back to begin with…Half the map was boring. I miss the snowy half of the map, and the open large keeps are kinda missed…they weren’t very interesting though after an hour of playing in them but I miss that 1 hour.

I mean desert bl doesn’t have any underwater stuff in it…..that’s awesome is it not? Should we not praise it for that? (has 2 little side areas u can go underwater but no reasons to fight there). ebg has underwater combat areas and most of us hate that…..alpine has GIANT OCEANS and nobody is gonna miss the underwater combat that came with that giant waste of map space.

If they make further changes I would suggest: They make the wyverns in the NE corner worth something…whether it be better loot and/or count toward the vet creature daily. I mean they are really fun and cool miniboss fights….I don’t understand why they are completely devoid of reward though. Make them a merc camp! Get the wyverns and it opens a wp in the middle of the map for a minute or so every 30 minutes or something….so its not op or overwhelming but at the same time its important enough that invading bl might want to skip ahead and send someon1 to cap it for themselves.

I mean the Desert map is also great cause it doens’t really have a linear fashion to which people take stuff. If ur playing it on reset night you know just how many options you have alot of options….you can place urself in the middle of the map basically and just go whatever direciton you want and attack whatever keep you want from whatever direction you want. I mean the next step towards making this work would be removing the ability to spy on enemy locations using the friends list…that shoulda been removed a long time ago.

Tyeme.6589:

Had someone join our squad tonight (reset) who had never been in the DBL’s. Long time WvWer, but only came to the DBL because of the EBG que. He said when were done he had a great time and wished he’d tried them sooner. Go figure.

What, people on the internet dismissing something out of hand without ever trying it because, “It’s different and it sucks!”, never. They would never do that.

The fights I had this last week in DBL were some of the best ever, even when Kaineng had a good population and we had the WvW season with ABL.

Cerby.1069:

Alpine won’t have any of these things. I still have no idea why people wanted it back to begin with…Half the map was boring. I miss the snowy half of the map, and the open large keeps are kinda missed…they weren’t very interesting though after an hour of playing in them but I miss that 1 hour.

I mean desert bl doesn’t have any underwater stuff in it…..that’s awesome is it not? Should we not praise it for that? (has 2 little side areas u can go underwater but no reasons to fight there). ebg has underwater combat areas and most of us hate that…..alpine has GIANT OCEANS and nobody is gonna miss the underwater combat that came with that giant waste of map space.

[snip]…

I mean the Desert map is also great cause it doens’t really have a linear fashion to which people take stuff. If ur playing it on reset night you know just how many options you have alot of options….you can place urself in the middle of the map basically and just go whatever direciton you want and attack whatever keep you want from whatever direction you want. I mean the next step towards making this work would be removing the ability to spy on enemy locations using the friends list…that shoulda been removed a long time ago.

This, so much this. DBL puts people on a lot more even footing. Some classes are just plain better in the water (Ranger, Mesmer, Necro) while some just get hosed (Thief in particular loses a LOT of their maneuverability in the water, which is a death sentence for a roaming class).

The old ruins/bloodlust mechanic is boring as crap. I’d rather fight over lava than water (looking at you Bay). Old hills has about as many fall to your death spots as Air Keep, but no faster ways up for defenders.

I got a feeling that ABL will come back with changes that are going to make these people pinning for the old maps and old fights mad, because they are not going to come back the same way, they already said they need to change them to fit the new mechanics. And then these people are still going to whine.

Absolutely, hate it with a passion. I’m on BG and EBG has a 33 man queue right now and no queue on any other BLs. It says all, doesn’kitten

The overall feel of the DBLs is annoying and discouraging. They are not just different, they are simple BAD.

And yet last night my EBG had an 80 man wait, and each BL was 30-40.

Your anecdotal evidence is anecdotal, as is mine. The only people that can really see the numbers is ANet. If anything the fairly even scores for all matchups last week is also a good sign that people are playing ALL the maps.

Kylden Ar.3724:

Your anecdotal evidence is anecdotal, as is mine.

Sure is, but this trend is very common. The sentiment towards the garbage maps has not changed. Most still avoiding it. Other changes have surely been welcome changes but the community is still waiting for the promised return of Alpine Borderlands. We don’t need this garbage DBL crap.

The “trend” is meaningless. WvW was only changed just over a week ago and since then numbers have returned. Alpine borders would have been almost, if not quite, as empty since HoT, because the population had plummeted and with reduced numbers people filled EB (or often didn’t even manage that) to get fights.

The original state of the DBls was a contributor to the population drop, but was not the majority of the problem – no rewards, bad meta (e.g stability), WvWers forced to PvE for elite specialisations, mastery (OK, not essential if you are pure WvW) and Guild Hall upgrades, together were a bigger problem.

But that’s not to say the DBls did not have problems. Just they were launched when the game was in a perilous state anyway. And when there was no one there, no body bothered learning the overly complex routes adding to the confusion and frustration when they did go.

So anything before last week is meaningless. You need to try the DBls now to judge them and on our server, as clearly on many others, the last week has been great. People are now learning the improved maps and they will work well in rotation with the ABls.

Of course there are still things we can point to that we would like to improve, but that will always be true of the whole game.

Jong.5937:

So anything before last week is meaningless. You need to try the DBls now to judge them and on our server, as clearly on many others, the last week has been great.

Already have, they still suck.

Puck.9612:

Jong.5937:

So anything before last week is meaningless. You need to try the DBls now to judge them and on our server, as clearly on many others, the last week has been great.

Already have, they still suck.

That’s fine. I could argue that past experience might be stopping you being open-minded but you are free to disagree.

However, you will see some have also got very very bored of the ABls. People difer. Many would disagree with both opinions. So, best to stop trying to pick one over the other and go for rotation…. as planned.

I still hate it.
They removed the ridiculous event in the center of the map and made a few tweaks.
Yes, it s better now, but the biggest problems haven’t been touched:

1. The tactical significance of the capping points (northern towers + southern towers are useless for anything else but themselves.

2. Keeps are unneccesarily wide, when they should be rather long. This shows to me, that the people working on bay and hills knew what they were doing and why. On the desert BL noone knew. Pure style over substance. Those are STILL PVE structures!
I could say the same for Garrison 2.0 (lets call it that), but hey, since it s the most prestious structure (or should be if anyone seriously cared) i could live with it.

3. Still too much gimmicky BS, on BAD spots on the map. Again no significance to those (stealth, lava/falling damage immunity,verticality,….), because of that. Therefore the camps feel even more far away than they are.

4. Because of 2. and the spawn point (far north), and gimmicky BS (jumppads, verticality galore) the map feels too big.

I guess i had more reasons to hate it when i started writing this, but i can’t remember.
And please stop telling wvw players to be open minded, especially when you re just a zerger. I was open minded. I tried it, liked the looks, played it and eventually asked myself why there are invaders on a pve map.

To me the Desert BL is for wvw what Skyhammer is for PVP – a joke. It took them years to change it, not after trying to force it on us a couple of times before. Although players were clear about it (what’s the deal with you?).

PS: Don’t ever bring back the center event!

As a roamer and a person who runs with a guild 4 days a week during NA primetime, I can say that Desert BL is better than what it was, yet it is not as good as what Alpine BL offered.

-For roaming : The map is better than what it used to be. Before it was boring enough to drive me out and my roamers friend out of the game (those barricades and the zig-zag all around). Now that barricades are gone and the maps got new ways to travel around, it is better. Still, I think the map is way too big and you need that 40% move speed bonus from a shrine in order to navigate without feeling like you are in a walking simulator (now it feels like we are are at least in a running simulator, which is still better, yet not perfect). Alpine was simply better. It was fast and action packed for roamers (it was our paradise).

-For group fights : Desert borderland is better because it is slightly faster to navigate with the new paths. Yet, even with the map queued for all 3 servers, the time it takes between each fights is a lot longer than what it was on Alpine BL. You simply run more on this map. Alpine BL was fast and action packed. What you see is what you can get on Alpine BL. If you saw a group ahead, you could simply run up to them and engage in a bloody battle instead of going left to take the path that leads up higher to finally reach nothingness since they are long gone by then…)

As for the art style, I still prefer Alpine BL since I am Canadian and I simply prefer the mix of green grass mixed with pure white snow and flowing water <3

As a closure, I would simply add that big brawls in the lord room are now really rare on Desert BL in comparison to Alpine BL since enemies rarely get to lord if there is a couple defenders who mastered the art of building up siege… Those keeps are more like bunkers where a couple Gandalfs mount up their siege and yell ‘’You shall not pass’‘. Back then we had big brawls in the lord room on many occasion during a single night and those moments were the best on any given server. If you lost the keep by the end of the brawl that sometime lasted hours, you would not even mind since you had so much fun in that. If you won, you would simply rejoice and the whole server would cheer up from pushing off the enemies after that bloody battle where a couple hundreds of players on each server died. At the end of those fights, the whole server would usually call out ’’[Insert server name] Pride!’’ in team/map chat. Good times that was.

Kylden Ar.3724:

The towers being out of range means you have to gasp, shock take the field and have FIGHTS to get siege on a keep and take it, like it should be.

Trebs only get past the outer wall, so attackers still need to fight through defenders on inner.

The difference is what it took out of each side. Defenders don’t need to wipe the attacking force to save an objective, they just need to destroy all of their siege, so if they can’t just shred catapults with arrow carts and door-treb rams, they only thing they have to do is blind-rush it and dump all of their AoE on it. If they wipe in the process, oh well, still won! Nevermind that shield generators and high-elevation mortars make it much harder to treb the earth keep than the alpine garrison.

The bottom line used to be that if a team just hugged wall siege and couldn’t win fights, they would eventually lose the objective. Now that’s much less true, between the retreat-or-wipe tactivators, shield generators blocking long range siege, golems not being able to strip wall siege, hardened cannons, increased supply costs, and wall-of-health CC-spamming boss arenas.

Taking a keep now means taking it while the other team is asleep.

Someone said alpine lovers will hate going back. That’s bs, I haven’t heard one single person say they want to keep DBL on HoD server. No lie.

the map is still too big…running from point A to point B takes too long
if the map running time is shortened to the same as the old map, then we can start talking

As a guy who just started playing this Borderland map, I have no idea why it’s hated. I am curious, because I’m enjoying it. I’d prefer if they rotated the two every once and awhile. It seems like a pretty detailed and interesting map, I’d hate to see it wasted.

OneEightHundred.5689:

Taking a keep now means taking it while the other team is asleep.

It’s ok not to like a map. If one thing is clear from this thread its that opinions differ. But I’m sorry, this is just wrong. If that’s the case you are doing it wrong. We have had great fights for all 3 keeps in prime time and either side of it, with 60 and 10 and point inbetween and won them. Sometimes it’s taken a long time, just like in old Bay and Hills, but it can be done. The strategies are just different, which is why rotation ( sorry to repeat it) is good. It’s just, unlike on ABl, we haven’t worked out every conceivable tactic and counter-tactic, which should be a good thing!

Kythan Myr.4719:

As a guy who just started playing this Borderland map, I have no idea why it’s hated. I am curious, because I’m enjoying it. I’d prefer if they rotated the two every once and awhile. It seems like a pretty detailed and interesting map, I’d hate to see it wasted.

“Goes back to putting ice on my hand after jumping around the fire keep just to defend it all night” YEA.. What’s not to like? If I wanted to play Super Mario, I would play Super Mario..

They need to make the keeps manageable to get about without having to jump everywhere and would be nice if they could be easily scouted with just 1 scout, as the other keeps can be thus not tying up more players. Over complicating things just has players spending more time doing tedious nonsense than spending it engaging in nonstop, challenging, strategic, fun, PvP action instead. If they went back to the keep type/style from EBG and Alpine, it would help a bit. Think about the map like this, The Map is the artists canvas, not the focus. The PvP combat action is what is supposed to be interesting and the focus, not the map. Players are supposed to be engaged in nonstop PvP action and that is still far from the case with the DBLs.

An ideal large scale PVP map would have simple objectives close together with direct fast routes so players are fighting over objectives at every turn. The more time a player spends in the action the better. Players should be in the action the entire time they are on the map, not running to get to it. Even the objectives themselves have to encourage combat rather than give too many escape routes to avoid it. Even in the keeps it has too many ways to avoid fights and you are spending your time chasing them all over the place instead. It looks like they helped with the routes to the objectives but really need to work on the objectives themselves as well to make them more enjoyable for combat.