Guild Wars 2

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/devon-carver-on-the-future-of-world-vs-world/

I think the most important thing about this post is that they know which problems there are in WvW. I like the idea of adding some weekly rules to stirr things up

A possible idea maybe: every player turns into a quaggun and has one skill called FOO, does 2000 dmg to yourself

discuss

I like everything I read, but at the end of the day, it’s all about the implementation. Still, I’m pleased to see that Anet is at least aware of some of the issues and are working on ways to address them.

nothing significant to see in the blog post actually, more like a series of hollow soundbites " we want to improve the game, we will like to add more things in the future.."

very hard for me to get hype up when you don’t give us any ’ specific’ features or contents are going to add.

I like the thoughts floating around in those “ideas” to improve the game. Making guilds and smaller skilled groups more powerful than an unskilled zerg sounds great. Look out for the skilled zerg though, lol.

What’s lacking from that message is server improvement. How can you talk about the future of WvW without talking about skill lag or lag in general? C’mon Devon. What is being done to address this?

Quite frankly, the more I hear, the more alarm bells sound off in my head.

The current track record of the WvW team is abysmal.

Let me address some of the points discussed in the future plans:

Siege

“we don’t think that “MOAR arrow carts!” should be the answer to every situation. " Are you kidding me. How can you put this statement out with a straight face. This was an issue literally created by the WvW team. All of a sudden one day, ACs get changed without notice and people and siege start exploding. Even with a nerf on seige damage, the range and FoV issues still haven’t been dealt with even when addressed as needing to be after multiple patches. Simply put, what’s being said here is that your’e telling us that we can expect the people that created the problem and have failed to fix it to eventually fix it… yeah, that’s gonna inspire confidence.

Variety

Your attempts at “variety” have only caused more issues. The new match ups have created situations with blow outs and servers pretty much not showing up/having fun that haven’t been seen since the first weeks of the game. Given the wonderful way this was implemented with the last minute take back, last minute push, and last minute bug storm, I’m absolutely terrified at what attempts to create new rules and address “nightcapping” will do.

Zergs

Tactics over sheer numbers? Almost everything done has only served to encourage zerging. Take a well fortified keep with ACs for example. How to deal with this? Outside of an unexpected rush, the answer is a zerg. I’ve seen keeps so bunkered up that commanders are left with no practical choice but to range keep doors down via “man modeing.”

i like how he talked about new maps

I agree that the best bit of this is that they’re absolutely aware of the problems. And are working on them. I’m excited to see what they come up with

For those cynics saying they made all the problems in the first place… well, they also made the whole WvW experience that we all love so much too :p Let’s see where this goes…

Overall I’m quite happy with what I read. If this wasn’t the guy that brought us those overpowered AC’s, I might be a little more optimistic. I think they have now identified all the ‘problems’ but I do not have enough faith left to believe that they have the right vision to address these problems. (Please prove me wrong)

hplee.2839:

nothing significant to see in the blog post actually, more like a series of hollow soundbites " we want to improve the game, we will like to add more things in the future.."

That was exactly my impression. Where are the things we’ve already been promised, such as the rest of the Ascended Back Piece and Accessories, purchased with Badges of Honor?

I can already imagine people thinking they will be able to run over a 60men+ zerg while they are 15 and they’ll come moaning here about what Devon said.

zergs: wxp needs to be divided among those taking the objective, not just the same static # no matter how many people are involved. same with killing a player. (e.g. a towe could be worth 3000wxp. if 10 people take the tower, they all get 300wxp. if 20 people take it, they each get 150wxp, etc.)

guilds: it would be really REALLY helpful to be able to see what guild has claimed an objective. guild tag on the guards/lord and a tooltip/guild emblem/tag on the world map would both be good. also guilds should get some alert in guild chat when their keep/tower is under attack.

He thinks organised groups like siege and actual fighting is for casuals? Well, that sure explains a lot too…

Hyung.6140:

For those cynics saying they made all the problems in the first place… well, they also made the whole WvW experience that we all love so much too :p Let’s see where this goes…

No… they didn’t… the WvW team changed dramatically this past spring. At least get your facts straight.

Arkard.3970:

No… they didn’t… the WvW team changed dramatically this past spring. At least get your facts straight.

I’m not sure you meant to come across as sharply as that?

I’m aware the leadership of the team changed and a few people moved around, but my point was more that everyone is blaming “Anet” for breaking WvW while not giving “Anet” credit for creating WvW in the first place.

Nothing more than that

Hope you have a good day and that your world vs world experiences are all fantastic forever.

It was an encouraging blogpost particularly the mention that they are aware that the tangible rewards need work.

I was hopeful for the last patch but it only improved WXP, they need to improve the ways to earn regular XP, gold, karma and badges not only for support but also when players are fighting.

An autoloot function where we don’t have to pick up those annoying bags and can concentrate on the fighting would be a great start.

LOVE IT.

Sometimes it just takes a developer to say, “Yes we know there are some flaws, we are looking to adjust them” to put everything to rest.

Going to be interesting. Don’t really participate in mindless zergs because time can be better spent somewhere else.

Anyway I found this part funny. Even the devs poke a bit of fun at thieves.

Everyone has likely seen a commander laying out battle plans and then subsequently seen that one thief mucking up those plans.

mcarswell.3768:

zergs: wxp needs to be divided among those taking the objective, not just the same static # no matter how many people are involved. same with killing a player. (e.g. a towe could be worth 3000wxp. if 10 people take the tower, they all get 300wxp. if 20 people take it, they each get 150wxp, etc.)

I’ve seen this idea crop up from time to time. Please let it die.

Any system which promotes exclusion will promote nothing good in WvW. This kind of thing will result in groups from the same server sniping at each other because they were “leeching their WXP”. Map chat will have groups claiming objectives as “their take” and people will lose their marbles when some random militia group comes along thinking they’re helping.

It’s the same danger with trying to design systems that reward small group play. Do it wrong and all you end up with are small tight groups, closed off to the server, running silent because they’re on TS or similar. Casual players can’t break in and leave WvW and the whole thing spirals down.

WvW must be inclusive by design to succeed. You should always, always be happy to see another few people show up because it makes your life better / easier.

nglcpyro.4906:

Going to be interesting. Don’t really participate in mindless zergs because time can be better spent somewhere else.

Anyway I found this part funny. Even the devs poke a bit of fun at thieves.

Everyone has likely seen a commander laying out battle plans and then subsequently seen that one thief mucking up those plans.

I found it funny too. If a commander is losing to one thief, then the commander is really bad.

Well, we are all getting what we wanted here. For a long time, players pleaded with ANET to put more of a focus on WvW. We wanted new maps. Instead of more maps, ANET decided to turn this into a more PvE like experience. Sad.

I still think everyone should have a piece of siege automatically strapped to their head when they enter ACvAC. That’s the direction that we are going.

style.6173:

nglcpyro.4906:

Going to be interesting. Don’t really participate in mindless zergs because time can be better spent somewhere else.

Anyway I found this part funny. Even the devs poke a bit of fun at thieves.

Everyone has likely seen a commander laying out battle plans and then subsequently seen that one thief mucking up those plans.

I found it funny too. If a commander is losing to one thief, then the commander is really bad.

I think he meant it as the plans being ruined because they were scouted by a scout thief as Devon then goes on to talk about specific roles in WvW. He explicitly mentions scouts.

Just give us a FLEXIBLE grouping system we can set up the way we need. Right now you only have the tools to 5 man it or zerg. Let us form any size squads with some control over numbers and configuration. Commander and Squad needs a private option for guild squads or alliance members.

Ahmrill.7512:

Just give us a FLEXIBLE grouping system we can set up the way we need. Right now you only have the tools to 5 man it or zerg. Let us form any size squads with some control over numbers and configuration. Commander and Squad needs a private option for guild squads or alliance members.

You can 1 man it to 4 you can do it with 6 or 7 or 8 (being a zerg is stander 25+ and they talk on a lot of what is not really a zerg when that group is being mindful of there moments). I think its your own hang ups about numbers. If you try to fight 2 ppl when solo you SHOULD lose this hold true for any number differences. This dose not make the 2 ppl a zerg though now if they each play on there own then yes 2 ppl becomes a zerg.

apparently they were focusing on the “new features” until now.

who knew…..

Being aware of the problems and understanding them are very different things.

It’s really very easy… a simple change can do wonders. Allowing commanders to “hide” the pin and STILL retain all the functions of a squad opens an entire new dynamic.

Instead of having just 5 man groups or giant zergs running around, you now can make forces of all sizes. You could actually keep a squad under the 25 person limit to try and prevent orange swords. You would have more multiple size forces spread all over the map. Guilds and alliances can actually have squads for private events now.

I understand that arenanet wanted to have commanders as public only to make it more accessible for the casual WvW player. Implementing private/public squads should not take away from this. Every game I’ve played with this type of large scale PvP, there was almost always a public squad/warband/battlegroup running as well as private forces.

A flexible in-game grouping system for more than 5 people is needed, allowing private squads would solve this. Give us the tools for guilds and players to use, but let them form it the way that works best for them.

I’m sad to see they are still completely ignoring the problem of lower population servers. No word on doing anything at all to balance populations, like providing some real incentives for players or guilds to transfer and STAY on a server (reward loyalty?) even when they don’t win every week.

From the article:
“…to make it much more difficult to keep your territory without actively guarding it.”

Are you kitten kidding me? You are going to make it EASIER for nightcappers to PvDoor a whole map when no opponents are on? Why the heck would you do that? Shouldn’t you be encouraging players to actually fight other players? If you do this, it makes upgrading objectives and playing defense even more pointless…how can you get people to dump money into walls and doors when everything is going to get wiped away every night? And again…with no incentive for guilds to move and improve coverage on servers that are sorely lacking, ArenaNet is ignoring one of the largest issues and actually making it worse with many of these changes.

I love WvW, and I’m sticking with my server…but it really seems like every new decision is based around the high-pop servers and their enjoyment, and every update just makes it harder for lower-pop servers to compete.

With that said, I love the new randomized matchups. I think it’s a great thing for many reasons. Turn-out on our server has been better, and fresh opponents make each reset exciting. Hopefully we’ll be able to exceed expectations and show we didn’t deserve the T8 hole we were in for so long.

I will wait for the patch notes to go live before saying anything. It is not like ANet never ever said something and it turned out to be different from what was promised.

Imo, the one thing that is missing in WvW among everything else is your lasting impact on the battlefield. Currently, I don’t feel I am important at all, just another guy running a zerg or following one. Everything in WvW is so kitten casual – everything resets way too easily and there are no real losses for your team other than some points on the scorechart missing.

WvW feels so generic, because you play that kitten chart, not the opponents. If there were objectives and goals that rewarded realms for specific actions and a series of actions instead of simply holding objectives then the game would be so much better. Everytime I log off from any WvW session I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished anything. Ok, I got x badges and y karma and killed another 100 players. However there is nothing to be proud of at the end.

I know that I am repeating stuff over and over again, but think campaign gameplay. Imagine if you’d need to take a series of objectives in order to lay siege on a final structure. If you manage to take that structure your realm is rewarded with x points and the enemy is driven off of that section of the map. I think you get the idea. WvW needs global objectives that are more important than periodic and unpersonal ticks to some score. Such objectives would also help to rally players behind an objective and give them some direction without the need of commanders.

WvW will not improve significantly as long as the current gameplay exists.

Great news! Sounds like they’ve been listening to players and are making changes to things that could be improved.

Also, what I get out of this is that WvW is an evolving world, it will never be “finished”. And if you think about it that makes perfect sense. And that is the best thing about this article, they’re willing to put the time and effort into it to create lasting fun for all of us.