Guild Wars 2

Since EoTM isn’t connected to anything, I think it’s a good opportunity for ANet to be a bit more experimental. They can make changes to see how players react before rolling things out to WvW (or not.)

Here’s an idea to make EoTM a fun place to fight, all the time.

Fair matches, all the time
Drop the colour system. Instead, when players enter an EoTM map, they are assigned to the team with the least players on that map. Parties can enter together and stay together. EoTM should prioritise fair matches over community.

If a player dies, they can only respawn in the same map and team if the sides are relatively balanced. Otherwise they respawn in a different map, assigned to the smallest team. (This keeps the sides balanced when players leave.)

Only kills grant rewards
Drop all rewards except for player kills. No other activity in EoTM grants any rewards of any kind. The end of karma trains.
To prevent abuse, it takes 30s to waypoint, and characters will exist in the world for 30s after a player quits or disconnects. So players can’t quit or waypoint to deny you the kill.
Once you make rewards more difficult to exploit/train, that means you can increase the amount of rewards given. Eg. Every X player kills give a Champion Loot Bag. Player kills grant lots of XP, and Karma, etc.
So with balanced sides and zergs cheerfully crashing into each other like a meat grinder, it could mean that my idea for EoTM could be just as rewarding as the current karma trains.

Make holding and defending rewarding and meaningful
Remove PPT for holding objectives. However, holding objectives has an important incentive – For every objective that your team currently holds, the rewards per kill are increased.
For example, if you hold 1 keep, then every 20 kills results in a Champion loot bag. But if you hold 2 keeps, then every 15 kills results in a Champion loot bag, etc.

-

Anyways, even though this is a simple ruleset, I think it would bring out the best in RvR gameplay. Combat is the priority, but map objectives and other mechanics are important to reward and support the combat.

Whilst it’s not likely that ANet would implement such a change, I’d be interested to hear how people predict gameplay would be like in such a game mode.

I like.

I like Karma Train too… Dailies are completed fast…. :-)

EOTM would be empty in days if you implement that

30 second respawn time? That alone would get a lot of people to stop playing eotm.

Look the problem is that nobody would play EoTM if you remove the rewards and/or make it supereasy to def. I almost exclusivly play WvW nowadays and even I only go to EoTM for the rewards. I use it to level alts or get badges/karma. Seriouly they should call it badgetrain not karmatrain, the amount of badges you get in EoTM for killing guards is insane.

I guess i didn’t make it clear – due to the scaling rewards per kill based on objectives held, we can absolutely make this mode very rewarding. In fact, since rewards are given on player kills and can’t be exploited quite as easily, we can make this mode potentially even more rewarding than eotm currently.

Since the maps would be auto balancing, and matches end quite soon, you have reduced chances of situations where one side has the whole map and traps the other sides in their base.

As another nice idea, killing the team that currently has the most held objectives can award bonus awards, to incentivise ganging up on the winning team.

Rieselle.5079:

As another nice idea, killing the team that currently has the most held objectives can award bonus awards, to incentivise ganging up on the winning team.

Oh man, I’d let my enemies cap everything then just hunt them into an early retirement.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Rieselle.5079:

As another nice idea, killing the team that currently has the most held objectives can award bonus awards, to incentivise ganging up on the winning team.

Oh man, I’d let my enemies cap everything then just hunt them into an early retirement.

Even though there’s a bonus for killing the leading team, your rewards are scaled by how many objectives your team holds. So i guess the optimal strategy for 2nd place is to hold 49% of all objectives and then hunt the winning team

Depending on the size of the bonus vs. the scaling from objectives, it should still be more lucrative to hold most / all of the objectives, as long as your opponents don’t just give up and refuse to play on that map.

Personally… I love EotM. I hate the players in EotM. I’ll first cover why I like it because I like it for many more reasons than I hate the players.

It’s a beautiful map for one. It’s a nice change from the redundant EB and BLs. I enjoy the different areas and the middle of the map and the aetherblades and all that mess. I enjoy the different champs and their uniqueness as to why you might want to cap them.

Also, as a commander in EotM, I enjoy the lack of TS use. In EB and the BLs everyone is on TS because they’re all on the same server. In EotM you can’t do that because you’re all from different servers. This calls for a little more strategy and tactical use of terrain and structure as you can’t just call out “Stack and push” and charge headlong into another zerg that is doing the same thing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to look around for a choke point or high ground or a control point in our possession to set up siege and defense against an incoming larger zerg. It sets apart the good commanders from the great commanders in my opinion. If you can be an effective pugmander in EotM I will hold great respect for you. You have to be more active in team chat and it is a great thing, not to mention the feeling when you’re outnumbered and whoop the other zerg.

I DON’T like the fact that players in EotM are constantly saying things like “THIS IS EOTM THIS IS KTRAIN YARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH”. They get genuinely angry at people and it’s a great way to turn away first-timers. I understand that people come to EotM to level up toons and, as a commander, I understand people want karma and champ bags and I do my best to give it to them. But when people constantly yell at other people who are defending or they call the commander bad because he/she turns to defend the keep really quick… it’s annoying and kind of childish.

The other day I was defending FR keep with a handful of defenders and OG was going up mid gate. Our cmd was on the other end of the map so I didn’t expect him to come help and I didn’t ask for it. What happened was the cmd wp-ed back, so since he was in our area I figured I’d point out that we were defending… The cmd ran his zerg right by OG which was committed to mid-gate. He could have easily trapped them and wiped them but no and his reasoning was “We can take it back later for karma”. What ticked the defenders off the most was that he was literally right there to wipe OG, he wasn’t on the other end of the map.

It’s mentalities like that that make me and other people who enjoy just doing their thing not like EotM as much as we might. As I said, I have nothing against ktrains and champ bag farming but recently, now that people notice what colors are good for what, ktrains are harder and harder to keep going. OG knows they’ll always outnumber FR and BL so it’s not uncommon for them to bag farm. BL knows their keep is easily capturable due to WS right next to it so they don’t bother and try to take other things. FR is usually outnumbered and tries to ktrain only to be either wiped by OG or end up having to take their keep back and fail due to the three defenders of the keep. As FR I only care about defending keep, as BL I only care about capping things, and as OG I don’t really care because our numbers are great enough to take anything. People are starting to realize what each team is good for and ktrains are starting to die out.

As far as relation to the OP goes… I like the way it is set up now I just wish the mentalities of the players in EotM would be a little more open-minded and wouldn’t mind a little change up every now and then. It is a game after all and the objective is to have fun. People’s idea of fun differs and, while yours might be constantly grinding from one champ to the next monotonously, another person’s might be occasionally breaking the monotonous action to engage another zerg in a pretty intense battle of non-ts using strategy and tactics.

Maybe if they made two EotMs… one for all levels and one for lvl 80s only… where the all lvl EotM is where you would go to Ktrain only and the lvl 80 is where you would go to run WvW with other server players and have fun. But no matter… people are entitled to their opinions and, even though it wasn’t originally designed as a ktrain only map, EotM will become what the people make of it.

One problem that could quickly derail this reward system is if one or more sides are just hopelessly outnumbered by the third. Since rewards are kill-based, and the outnumbered sides just can’t get any kills, they’d be quickly turfed out of their areas and then just spawn-camped. Players quickly get discouraged and leave, and the map becomes a ghost town.

It would be a fun little change up to just starve the map of supplies. Make generators the only resource + elements on the map if all 3 if the orb things are built around it, remove supplies from keeps/towers/spawns, increase required supplies to rebuild bridges. Would make for some fun battles in mid.

X Factor.2641:

….

+1

This week in EU was a quite good Week to fights in EotM. OG had number as it was green, and FR had mostly equal number as they had SFR.

X Factor.2641:

snip

The problem with eotm is that even if you take it seriously it’s still just eotm. It’s still that map with the absurdly unbalanced keeps, meat grinder choke points that hand wins to the first group to claim them and narrow bridges that make skyhammer look fair.

Don’t forget why it became a karma train map. All the ppt guilds and all the fighting guilds wanted nothing to do with it when it first came out.

Coldtart.4785:

X Factor.2641:

snip

The problem with eotm is that even if you take it seriously it’s still just eotm. It’s still that map with the absurdly unbalanced keeps, meat grinder choke points that hand wins to the first group to claim them and narrow bridges that make skyhammer look fair.

Don’t forget why it became a karma train map. All the ppt guilds and all the fighting guilds wanted nothing to do with it when it first came out.

They found their tactics for WvW-maps and turned out to inflexible to find new tactics for EotM. Ok their choice

But I don’t really see that a “my tactic doesn’t work there” make a map tacticless. It only shows the inflexibility of the tactic-owner.

It’s quite irrelevant that the different sides are balanced if you play for fights and not for points. But I find it very interesting that they are different and require different tactics.

Red would be my favored side to play, if it wouldn’t be that horrible outmanned most of he time.

No, they found that eotm only supports braindead people who need the map to hold their hand when trying to play strategically.

Randomly assigning players to balance match up would be a good start.

Making the only drops come from players would make it an instant ghost town.

30 seconds delay, people would log off.

More loot for OP team…this means the dominant team would reap all the rewards, as the weaker team now has no incentive to recap anything (no rewards), so the large guild would wipe everything on the map, the weaker side would relog, and you’re left with a map that has one colour.

Coldtart.4785:

No, they found that eotm only supports braindead people who need the map to hold their hand when trying to play strategically.

Hm. I prefer to play with people, that do not produce such statements.
That of course gives EotM a big advantage over WvW.

Explain to me how it takes any strategic ability to defend Thunder Hollow or Overgrown Fane.

People in EotM so far don’t have the patience for serious attacks against defended keeps.
And it’s hard to motivate this, as long as there is other stuff to take.

I never tried, but probably you can treb the east gate of the inner Overgrown keep from the top-platform of the observatory. Would be really hard to counter, if possible.

A serious battle against a defended inner keep of blue would probably go via the middle gate. the first gate you can pass, the second you can treb/cata without fearing the mortars, as soon as you oppend the 2nd you have access to the roof of the buildings surrounding the inner keep on west and south, which give you a position to clear the wall defenses. It could be a very cool fight if ever done.

On the WvW maps every siege spot is now known since ages, on EotM only a very small percentage of all the possibilities has been explored. (only the ram-spots are well explored and even the scorpion spots aren’t all explored so far. )

Dayra.7405:

People in EotM so far don’t have the patience for serious attacks against defended keeps.
And it’s hard to motivate this, as long as there is other stuff to take.

I never tried, but probably you can treb the east gate of the inner Overgrown keep from the top-platform of the observatory. Would be really hard to counter, if possible.

A serious battle against a defended inner keep of blue would probably go via the middle gate. the first gate you can pass, the second you can treb/cata without fearing the mortars, as soon as you oppend the 2nd you have access to the roof of the buildings surrounding the inner keep on west and south, which give you a position to clear the wall defenses. It could be a very cool fight if ever done.

On the WvW maps every siege spot is now known since ages, on EotM only a very small percentage of all the possibilities has been explored. (only the ram-spots are well explored and even the scorpion spots aren’t all explored so far. )

I rarely see offensive trebs in EotM. It’s either catas or rams.

On the defensive side, I do see use of cannons and especially oil used more. It amazes me everytime I see a zerg approach a gate and they don’t even look to see if the cannon or oil are built and they drop rams anyway. Spire and Perch have oil that’s well placed for a defender. The oil in the middle gates for FR are also well placed. Every other oil is too exposed. The oil on the altar side inner gate of OG is even difficult to get to as a defender. You have to stand on the top of the wall ledge just to use it.

they are explored but most eotm players just hate all this annyoing and boring siege stuff
thats why most dont play wvw

On an unrelated topic, I like EOTM. I like commanding in it, I like that it’s almost always active, I like that it feels more care free, I like that there are often entertaining conversations happening in /map. I don’t think EOTM needs a change and I’ve asserted this before. I’ve spent a lot more time in regular WvW than EOTM, my recent time spent in Edge has just been because I’ve been enjoying myself there more than I thought I would. I’ll probably never understand why so many people hate it or demand it’s changed. The only thing I can think of is that people play regular WvW (Borderlands and EBG) because they want loot and not because they want to have fun. But because EOTM gives more loot/badges they demand it’s changed. -Shrug- Shoot me, I enjoy EOTM and don’t think it needs to be changed.. The only thing I’d change if I could is the occasional toxicity but that happens everywhere anyway.

Rieselle.5079:

Since EoTM isn’t connected to anything, I think it’s a good opportunity for ANet to be a bit more experimental. They can make changes to see how players react before rolling things out to WvW (or not.)

Here’s an idea to make EoTM a fun place to fight, all the time.

Fair matches, all the time
Drop the colour system. Instead, when players enter an EoTM map, they are assigned to the team with the least players on that map. Parties can enter together and stay together. EoTM should prioritise fair matches over community.

If a player dies, they can only respawn in the same map and team if the sides are relatively balanced. Otherwise they respawn in a different map, assigned to the smallest team. (This keeps the sides balanced when players leave.)

Only kills grant rewards
Drop all rewards except for player kills. No other activity in EoTM grants any rewards of any kind. The end of karma trains.
To prevent abuse, it takes 30s to waypoint, and characters will exist in the world for 30s after a player quits or disconnects. So players can’t quit or waypoint to deny you the kill.

Make holding and defending rewarding and meaningful
Remove PPT for holding objectives. However, holding objectives has an important incentive – For every objective that your team currently holds, the rewards per kill are increased.
For example, if you hold 1 keep, then every 20 kills results in a Champion loot bag. But if you hold 2 keeps, then every 15 kills results in a Champion loot bag, etc.

-

Anyways, even though this is a simple ruleset, I think it would bring out the best in RvR gameplay. Combat is the priority, but map objectives and other mechanics are important to reward and support the combat.

Whilst it’s not likely that ANet would implement such a change, I’d be interested to hear how people predict gameplay would be like in such a game mode.

TLDR : I don’t like EotM, and i want it changed to what i like, despite thousands of players being there all day long.

So i came with a ridiculous idea (already posted half a dozen times already, and put to rest faster than a dead horse) that kills EotM in 1 week top.

The day you make the rewards not worth it (just putting them on WvW inexistant level is enough you know), EotM is gone.

The day you FORCE people to fight and nothing else, EotM is GONE. Specially since this map is actually the worst possible place for fights on the long term.

It was “fun” for a couple of weeks at release because people were discovering the map, it was new, and the community hadn’t rooted out all the trolling chokepoints, insane unbalance, bugs, advantages and “ins and outs” of the map.

It’s not the case anymore. Fighting in there resume in : who get to the chokepoints/edges the first with more AoE Fear/Kb or siege wins. Who holds the right objectives (cough Blue Keep cough), win.

Even players pretending they want EotM to be “real” WvW and “good fights” would be gone in a week.

Stop already with the dumb ideas for EotM/WvW, it’s being tiresome. You don’t like it, don’t play it instead of trying to make it something totally different.

On top of that EotM is fullfilling a REALLY USEFUL purpose right now, amongst other things keeping a lot of upscaled out of WvW and it’s a good thing.
Keeping most of the Ktrain people out of WvW too. And it’s a good thing.

Allowing the community to get a taste of WvW and the basics without being overwhelmed and a liability in WvW too (no it’s not the same than WvW, but if you are trying to understand the game, you get a lot of “basics”, like supply management, Righteous Indignation, damage of siege on defended objectives, what chokepoints/edges can do for and against you, advantage of terrain, and a few other things).

There is no need to change it by the amount of people playing there you know.

I really don’t get why there is so much people that want to kill EotM and the farm/income from there… are you all so “happy” WvW COST money if you do it right (by spending money on siege and upgrades, wich most of the “pro” players wanting “fights” NEVER do not surprisingly) that you want Anet to make everyone else the same instead of asking to get the same level of income than EotM ?

On top of that, there is quite some good things from EotM that could be implemented into WvW (their level of power for Tower/Keep Lords is one, Detection Sentries too, for exemple) and Anet should really use it like they said they would, as a testing ground for new things.

EotM is the last tolerable place to level in this game for a lot of players. That said, I am all for trying something new which is easy to say since I have done all the leveling I need to do.

Oh and stop trying to punish players for playing together already. :/

Your system basically kills any sort of guild play above 5 people (wich would make “organized” EotM an even worse nightmare than the totally unbalanced sides and population problem and fact that the map is terrible for that even worse) and is punishing guilds and people wanting to play together, yeah. :/

(and don’t talk to me about “matching” people like on MegaServers, i spend more people seeing tags of people i fight/fought months ago regularily in WvW than people from my own server in there….).

My view on this map,

I find EotM a fun map to play with an interesting design and mechanics to make fights more fun and fast paced than in regular W³.
But, from my point of view, alot of this potential goes unused or unwanted by many of its players because:

- even with megaserver tech, some sides often outnumber the others demotivating players (mostly those who are there for rewards).

- players go there to lvl up and/or just want the karma,w/exp,champ bags. They don’t mind PvP (and lootbags) when they (and the lvl 80’s) cleary outnumber and steamroll the opposition – if resistance comes up with wipes they complain about PvP in… a PvP map, blame the commander or something else.

- Commander job is often asked for and can be stressful both for them and their followers because of a conflict of interests (pro PvP and pro PvE or a mix of both) driving them.

I hope with the next feature pack, the new player experience will attract more players to level up through PvE (although for me it was never an issue after several toons).
I believe there are some genuine players who want to get into the PvP side of W³ in EotM but given the numbers of uplevels vs geared 80’s this situation can have odd results or the experience be changed by others driving motives to play there.

I’m not much of a PvE farmer (sometimes have small bursts of farming mood) and also go to EotM for the rewards but not exclusively for them. I wouldn’t mind if the rewards get toned down simply to promote PvP first and foremost.
On the other hand, while players are “farming” Eotm for the rewards they aren’t doing so in PvE maps which may be seen as a positive for those who enjoy train free maps (even if megaserver tech nulifies that)…

.

Regarding the OP,

I guess Megaserver tech in EotM could be tweaked to function better in distributing players on each side per instance.

The idea of player kill bonuses making into more of a deathmatch map sounds good given the nature of EotM’s “Hotjoin” but i wouldn’t remove cap points rewards, if anything, they could be tweaked down to accommodate the new player kill rewards.

But, a problem i see with this is uplevel players and geared 80’s, casual solo and organized guild runs affecting the whole experience which currently can already be seen .

i agree with most of what Xfactor said. But I will add that people would be more inclined to fight if the advantage of overwhelming numbers is removed.

Whats the point of charging headlong into a zerg when green outnumbers you by at least 4 to 1 every single time? The first few times may be fun, but when they start to specifically hunt you down over and over again, it gets old real fast.

I live almost exclusively in either Wvw or EoTM. But lately EoTM is just OG rolling over everything with extreme number advantage, and even I am getting burnt out of this (cant do much when your outnumber by that much)…

I like EotM the way it is, but wish they’d make the overflows better and keep the numbers of each team close to each other..

I would like to see balancing in eotm, its long overdue. Anyone who spends any length of time in there can see that its a problem, unless of course your the dominant team, and then they will be the ones demanding that there should be no balancing whatsoever (funny how that works).
I would also like a Ferrari, my bank account overflowing and a 100 foot Yacht, but iv more chance of having those than having some TLC in eotm—or indeed wvw!

It will not take very much longer and also the dominant team has a problem as well: no opponent and nothing to capture.

Should SFR dominate the 3rd season as I expect it, it will be green 4 weeks in a row and no one will go to EotM for blue and red anymore.

Dayra.7405:

It will not take very much longer and also the dominant team has a problem as well: no opponent and nothing to capture.

Should SFR dominate the 3rd season as I expect it, it will be green 4 weeks in a row and no one will go to EotM for blue and red anymore.

and the problem is?
sfr dont “outnumber” his enemys so what?

You think eotm is unbalanced cause sfr players take it more serious than others?
Cause SFR players go in with lvl 80 chars and not uplvled rallybots?

Its a player made problem and no side/color outnumber his enemys at start – its more like the side with most “leechers” will be farmed cause they die in seconds and than the first people leave. And with leechers i mean this uplvled people.

There are even alot people who go in eotm on every reset and cap only the first few freecaps until first fights start – than they leave and do other things

this are the problems in eotm – the “leechers” – they are the reason why it feels unbalanced

not the players who take it serious

Romek.4201:

and the problem is?

I made a prediction, we will know in 5 weeks, if it was correct. And should it be correct we will see how many people will have a problem with it.

The prediction is based on the observation that more and more WVW/EotM player overstack on SFR, such that in the meantime SFR provides more than 50% of it’s EotM-team of 9 servers. That leads to nice fights between green and SFRs color, when SFR is not green, but it is a waste of time to enter EotM when SFR is green. I personally will not enter EotM, whenever SFR is green. If many people see it like me and SFR will be green 4 weeks in a row, no one will be left in EotM.

wow

sorry when say it like this but your post is “stupid”

but anyway – elona not green this week so its the normal “doom and gloom” from dayra

i bet this week we will see 2-3 threads from you with “how to balance eotm” “merge servers” and stuff like this

see? did a prediction too ….

Romek.4201:

but anyway – elona not green this week so its the normal “doom and gloom” from dayra

i bet this week we will see 2-3 threads from you with “how to balance eotm” “merge servers” and stuff like this

SFR is not green, we will see how many such threads will be made, but definitely not by me, while I am on the handicapped side.

I already know that a lot of people that run out of arguments switch to “affront by imputation of bad attitude”.

Therefore I time my proposals better:

• I proposed random assignment to EotM team last week, when we were green.
• I proposed “coverage nerf” when we were good in coverage and not when we were hit by better coverage of others.
• …

In any case, I knew that it is likely that everyone is sometimes on the benefited side (which is often boring) and sometimes on the handicapped side (which is sometimes challenging, but much to often only frustrating). My conclusion is: It’s best to improve equality and competitiveness by reducing both benefits and handicaps.

PS: Nice to hear from you after you left our guild at Elona, Romek. How is it at SFR? Your expectations meet? Is is worth 1800 gems?

I believe in one of ArenaNet’s interviews they stated that one of the reasons why they created Edge of the Mists was to test new ideas that may be moved over to WvW in the future. So I think it’s fair to say that if they do indeed use it for this purpose, changes in EotM may make their way over to WvW.

Coldtart.4785:

Explain to me how it takes any strategic ability to defend Thunder Hollow or Overgrown Fane.

The keeps are easily starved off supply. It will take a while to take them but it still is way faster than taking a fully upgraded, sieged and defended regular wvw keep.
Its just the impatience of the karma train and the inability of its commanders to make a proper siege that makes them so easily defendable.

I would actually love to see EB being substituted by EotM in the regular match ups for a couple of weeks, to see how the map is played when the focus is either on ppt or fights rather than pvd.

The lack of waypoints is a concern, i would say, so i would suggest to make waypoints upgradeable in the 3 towers.

It’s just as easy to remove supply from the attackers by destroying bridges and placing supply traps on chokes. The upper levels in OG keep allow for the mother of all unreachable siege that can not only destroy any siege the attackers place but also use traited trebs to prevent the generator from being used by the attackers to resupply.

Even if you manage to get through all that you then have to deal with acs firing on the lord’s room from above, which you have to get across a choke point overlooking the bottomless pit to reach. The lord also takes a long time to kill, can be bannered and can polymorph attackers.

Even if you get by all of that the defenders can simply camp the top floor by placing acs and ballis on the long rope bridge and simply recap it 5 minutes later.

Tom.8029:

I believe in one of ArenaNet’s interviews they stated that one of the reasons why they created Edge of the Mists was to test new ideas that may be moved over to WvW in the future. So I think it’s fair to say that if they do indeed use it for this purpose, changes in EotM may make their way over to WvW.

Yes, the point of this thread is to express the desire that ANet actually experiment with and play around with EoTM in order to find new mechanics that are better and less exploitable.