Guild Wars 2

Automatic upgrades in WvW were terrible. I think everyone playing agreed on that one. And with the release of the latest update I was pretty hopeful for all of the new changes, including the changes tying upgrades to the number of Yaks through the door. Sadly, ANet seems to be interested in extremes, rather than fully thought out changes.

With the patch release on the 26th many of my guild mates and I were looking forward to seeing all of the changes. PPK is great, no rezzing the dead while in combat, and finally an end to the auto upgrades. Unfortunately, the upgrades have now swung too far in the other direction.

I’m a numbers guy by nature, and after the patch launch I went out to an enemy BL to see the changes myself. We hit SE Camp, S Camp, and SE Tower to get yaks rolling into the tower. And I timed the yaks from each camp to the tower.

Yaks coming from SE Camp took 2 minutes and 20 seconds each. Yaks from South Camp took 3 minutes and 20 seconds each. The goal to get to secured is 20 Yaks. Reinforced is another 40 Yaks.

Running the numbers you find that SE Camp will supply a little over 12 Yaks in 30 minutes time. South Camp will supply 9 Yaks in the same time frame. In total, 21 Yaks in the door in 30 minutes. That’s if all things are perfect, no Yak killers show, and nobody flips your camps. To get to reinforced you’re looking at almost another hour and change. So, to have those harder doors and walls plan on about 1 and a half hours.

The results are pretty visible. So many objectives are now paper, and will remain paper.

ANet has now created new “challenging content”. And by challenging I mean the content takes longer. In the recent updates you’ll find that capture and hold missions have had their time adjusted to 1 hour to get your objective to tier 1. Those missions were 30 minutes, and it seems with the mission adjustment they’re acknowledging it takes a long time to get there. I’m pretty sure most of our remaining guild members who are still desperately trying to hang on to this game mode won’t have the patience for 1 hour long WvW guild missions….

I have to say, I’m feeling like Goldilocks here. First it was too fast, now it’s too slow. Will we ever be presented with just right? I’m not sure I can hang in to see.

Faux Taux.9834:

Automatic upgrades in WvW were terrible. I think everyone playing agreed on that one. And with the release of the latest update I was pretty hopeful for all of the new changes, including the changes tying upgrades to the number of Yaks through the door. Sadly, ANet seems to be interested in extremes, rather than fully thought out changes.

With the patch release on the 26th many of my guild mates and I were looking forward to seeing all of the changes. PPK is great, no rezzing the dead while in combat, and finally an end to the auto upgrades. Unfortunately, the upgrades have now swung too far in the other direction.

I’m a numbers guy by nature, and after the patch launch I went out to an enemy BL to see the changes myself. We hit SE Camp, S Camp, and SE Tower to get yaks rolling into the tower. And I timed the yaks from each camp to the tower.

Yaks coming from SE Camp took 2 minutes and 20 seconds each. Yaks from South Camp took 3 minutes and 20 seconds each. The goal to get to secured is 20 Yaks. Reinforced is another 40 Yaks.

Running the numbers you find that SE Camp will supply a little over 12 Yaks in 30 minutes time. South Camp will supply 9 Yaks in the same time frame. In total, 21 Yaks in the door in 30 minutes. That’s if all things are perfect, no Yak killers show, and nobody flips your camps. To get to reinforced you’re looking at almost another hour and change. So, to have those harder doors and walls plan on about 1 and a half hours.

The results are pretty visible. So many objectives are now paper, and will remain paper.

ANet has now created new “challenging content”. And by challenging I mean the content takes longer. In the recent updates you’ll find that capture and hold missions have had their time adjusted to 1 hour to get your objective to tier 1. Those missions were 30 minutes, and it seems with the mission adjustment they’re acknowledging it takes a long time to get there. I’m pretty sure most of our remaining guild members who are still desperately trying to hang on to this game mode won’t have the patience for 1 hour long WvW guild missions….

I have to say, I’m feeling like Goldilocks here. First it was too fast, now it’s too slow. Will we ever be presented with just right? I’m not sure I can hang in to see.

Good post. Luckily at this point it’s just a matter of tweaking numbers (the number of yaks required). That’s easy. The change to make it so that yaks are no longer optional for upgrades was the big one. I’ll give Anet kudos for that. I think the underlying system for upgrading objectives is in a perfect spot right now, just gotta tweak the yak numbers until it feels right time-wise.

and PLEEEAASEEE give us something to do to activate the extensions .. for .. Karma points maybe .. ? Or something else ? No ? I`d love to get keeps back to feelin more .. personal .. as if i have done something to earn extensions in it -except convoing .. Dolys

Sry english isn`t my main language .. i´ve tried my best.. ^^

Well the guild upgrade won’t necessarily be more than the 30 minutes for towers, but with castles it might be a while.. If the guild works as a group, and escort the dollys while someone sits the objective, you can speed up the dollies with the med kit stam pots or with the guard and mesmer’s speed skills. And if you are a dedicated wvw group, there should be a speedy dolly upgrade for the camps, I think?

While I agree, left to their own, the time is very big for paper towers and keeps. But it also would encourage people to watch over keeps and towers so that when dollies come closer they can jump out and go and speed the yaks towards the door. (not to mention newer players can be assigned to this task for their lifetime yak assisting achievement)

While I understand that these are /not/ the solutions you would prefer, it is at least bronze lining in the bag over our heads.

EDIT: did some math after I posted and rectified my comment for clarity

The problem is, nothing should upgrade at all without players. Does not matter if things upgrade slowly now, they will still upgrade automatically over time. And that should never happen.

Upgrades should only happen from player interaction. Lets say each dolly carries more supplies and it takes less of them to upgrade objectives BUT dollies will not unload supplies without players. Once they reach destination tower/keep, they will stand by the supply depot and wait for players to interact with them and order “Unload Supply”. Only then will dolly return to the camp and start to bring next batch.

So an hour and a half to get reinforced? That sounds about right. Don’t forget thats reinforcing doors and walls. Back in the day i remember it would take hills or bay at least 4 – 5 hours to get fortified with a wp.

Yeah, people should look over the keep and tower…. But what the point to defend something ? What the point to have T3 ?
Do you earn more PPT ? Do you we reward with some WP ?
Nop…. T0 and T3 are the same useless thing… Then there is no interest to defend something…

Sich.7103:

Yeah, people should look over the keep and tower…. But what the point to defend something ? What the point to have T3 ?
Do you earn more PPT ? Do you we reward with some WP ?
Nop…. T0 and T3 are the same useless thing… Then there is no interest to defend something…

point of defending is to get the upgrades which make it harder for others to take which means you keep your ppt pretty stable by holding those objectives. t0 is easier to take than a t3.. its cool if you don’t want to defend and just let the other servers take away your upgrades and ppt. i’m sure those that want to k-train would pat you on the back for not defending. reason why we lost some people that used to defend is because too many people say defending is pointless now so they don’t even react to map call outs. also why wouldn’t you go defend something? don’t fights usually happen if defenders can hold off long enough for others to come help? this whole pointless to defend stuff is getting old fast and there is EoTM for those that do not like to defend stuff. too many people stuck in k-train mode and its been happening for a long time now. even before all the changes we got.

+1
20 yaks? You can barely get in 10 in T1.

I think its perfectly fine the way it is. Im running past things that are fortified, reinforced and paper; the way it should be. Previously everything was almost always fortified which was stupid.

Allisondellue.4683:

Well the guild upgrade won’t necessarily be more than the 30 minutes for towers, but with castles it might be a while.. If the guild works as a group, and escort the dollys while someone sits the objective, you can speed up the dollies with the med kit stam pots or with the guard and mesmer’s speed skills. And if you are a dedicated wvw group, there should be a speedy dolly upgrade for the camps, I think?

Just a small comment – in order to put speedy dolly upgrade you need to claim them camp. So if your aim is to claim and reinforce the tower/keep you can’t claim a camp.

And you have to keep it claimed for at least 30 minutes, because only then you can put level 2 upgrades, (which the speedy dolyaks are). And they don’t activate immediately but some minutes after you put upgrade.

While I agree, left to their own, the time is very big for paper towers and keeps. But it also would encourage people to watch over keeps and towers so that when dollies come closer they can jump out and go and speed the yaks towards the door. (not to mention newer players can be assigned to this task for their lifetime yak assisting achievement)

Pardon me, but I think you are highly optimistic if you believe assigning the “exciting” task of dolyak defense to newer players would achieve anything except maybe them leaving to do something else.

While I understand that these are /not/ the solutions you would prefer, it is at least bronze lining in the bag over our heads.

EDIT: did some math after I posted and rectified my comment for clarity

There needs to be some adjustment on the number of dolyaks needed, and the reward for guild missions.

I suggested in another thread that as some PvE players claimed to make 8 gold an hour farming this is an ideal amount to give for guild missions with an hour time limit.

The longer I play the more I realize upgrades aren’t a good idea. Everything should be a T3 and nothing ever repairs even between flips. Someone mentioned this a while ago and the more I play the more I realize this would be a much better system.

What would be nice is a different number depending if it’s your own structure (EB keep / Hometeam BL) or an enemies’. Right now bootstrapping your home corner with 5-15 people – quite a common number in bronze league – takes more than an evening. When you’re spread out, an enemy group of 5-10 people can wreak sufficient havoc to force everyone to defend the keep, while camps go lost to roamers. Effectively, the numbers are much higher than the 1.5 hours for T2 / 3.5 hours for T3.

Straegen.2938:

The longer I play the more I realize upgrades aren’t a good idea. Everything should be a T3 and nothing ever repairs even between flips. Someone mentioned this a while ago and the more I play the more I realize this would be a much better system.

I think they should do an event like this as it could be fun but could become another k-train event. Only thing I can see happening is more people will say it is pointless to defend. Some are saying it now with auto upgrades.

Honestly, I like the current numbers.

It means that camps matter a lot more, and are things people want to defend and attack for reasons other than a supply dump. Those “paper objectives” are paper because people are still attempting to play an all-assault meta in stead of a strategic meta.

By spreading the upgrades out this way, it creates an imperative for defense, but not the boring kind of defense where you twiddle your thumbs behind a wall for an hour. In stead, you have to defend your assets to get the upgrades by patrolling the whole area of your objective and its feeder camps, which pulls you in to the field to fight enemies trying to disrupt your supply in the field. Overall it results in more fights, in more places, and ensures that more fights actually matter than the ones directl on top of an objective.

Even sentries become a lot more important in this system as having that intelligence on enemy movements can be crucial to protecting those supply lines, and telling you where you need to defend.

It gives real tactical utility and meaning to yak patrol as well, as having someone running yak guard duty and swifting them significantly speeds up upgrades, and upgrading the camps themselves for more yaks or slotted yak upgrades does as well.

This serves to seriously break up zergs, as even a small havok group can completely shut out a tower or keep upgrade without too much trouble just by back capping camps.

People hate this because they’re used to a WvW in which strategy simply wasn’t a thing, and decisions revolved around flipping camps in stead of holding them, because the yaks were secondary, and easily outdone in a few minutes by a large group of players running supply.

Literally all of WvW boiled down to “which objective do we send the zerg to to flip the fastest?”

If you’re still playing that game, you’re getting paper objectives taken from you and doing nothing but playing catch up by retaking what you’re losing over and over. If your enemy is doing the same then it’s the same boring endless flipping of objectives that people hated before. Of course it isn’t fun. You’re missing the entire point of the changes and complaining about the result of your own poor tactical decisions.

But, overall, this set of changes got rid of “auto defense” and “auto upgrades” without turning the whole thing in to ‘camp an objective’ in stead making the system more about “patrol this map quadrant”

My only real qualm is the laser even in the new BLs, which runs directly counter to this “strategy and defense actually matters” rework by letting people completely ignore your preparatings as long as they have a bigger zerg at the laser

That event is cool, but its reward is ridiculous, and undermines everything Anet is trying to accomplish by making WvW more tactically sound and interesting. it needs to be changed to a less potent effect.

PopeUrban.2578:

My only real qualm is the laser even in the new BLs, which runs directly counter to this “strategy and defense actually matters” rework by letting people completely ignore your preparatings as long as they have a bigger zerg at the laser

^This

Also while it might be too slow maybe we just have to adapt. And the result of upgrades being worth much more might be a good thing in the long run.