Guild Wars 2

played for a couple weeks at launch then quit, thinking of coming back.

how is WvW now compared to launch? and how long are the queue times now?

Worse. It’s worse by a wide degree.

The League was a terribly executed idea, implemented before the inherent problems with populations and steamrolling and zerg tactics were addressed. I used to adore WvW, and I haven’t enjoyed a second of it since the league started.

Don’t bother.

Much better, they have added quite a bit of stuff and changed the borderland maps.

Stuff changed include progression, masteries (gain progression points and spend to do more damage with siege and so on), reward chests, changed match-up system.

One of the things that made me not care for pvp/wvw is that there is no worthy rewards other than aesthetics. Is it still like this?

No WvW exclusive rewards.

At all

despair.1385:

One of the things that made me not care for pvp/wvw is that there is no worthy rewards other than aesthetics. Is it still like this?

Yes.
The game is after all built around cosmetic rewards rather than more powerful rewards.

despair.1385:

One of the things that made me not care for pvp/wvw is that there is no worthy rewards other than aesthetics. Is it still like this?

Absolutely no WvW specific rewards. You get a chest for ranking up your wvw rank(wannabe WvW character progression system that is an epic fail), and bonus chests for your server performance, though the loot is crap.
Some nice changes like a small redesign to BL maps which is decent for solo roamers, removal of culling.
Massive skill lag in large fights, long queues on the high pop servers, people realised that coverage wins matches, not skill, WvW meta mentality is running in zergs pressing 1 and spamming AoE. Small scale fights are dominated by zergs and are far in between. Alt unfriendliness and a substantial power creep with ascended gear and wvw mastery buffs which affects newer players.
A fraction of WvW people started organising their own PvP in form of guild vs guild fights, an action actively discouraged by devs for some reason(theyactively promote running in 70 men blobs facerolling everything and building arrowcarts in the middle of a fight but the sad part is they have a substantial community support since taking an undefended tower with 70 men is top level PvP lol…)

It really depends what you like to do, if you enjoy really large fights that are predetermined by numbers and who lags less, it is a decent WvW experience, if you like small scale fights you shouldn’t bother with gw2 at all, wait for wildstar RvR, ESO RvR, camelot unchained..
The new leagues system depends heavily on which league your server is in, but most of the match winners are predetermined before they actually begin.

Of course, at launch, one server sometimes took all three orbs the first night and held them the entire week…there was culling so zergs over 20 players didn’t show up on peoples’ screens until after the fight was over…thieves took an extra 2-3 seconds to appear after coming out of stealth…

But people forget those things and will tell you it’s worse now.

It’s still as bad. Que times vary based on your server.

it’s not as bad, it’s worse – they are forcing pve in the most aggressive way possible – they make you grind for the best stats in pvp equipment. you will either grind in gold to buy it – grind in crafting to get your character to level 500 and grind in materials to make it. In some cases you can’t even buy it so you are forced to grind anyways. And even if you don’t care for getting the best stats – they added spores to wvw anyways. ….spvp is the equivalent of the food fights in la – so there is no real strategic pvp anymore without being forced into pve one way or another – that’s if you want to save your doylaks from this spore horror.

exactly opposite of what they advertised. talk about a loss of trust.

Its gotten worse. Much worse. J/K, everyone is quitting so the queues, on servers that are in bronze, are inexistant, also in part thanks to everyone bandwaggoning on gold tier servers. Jokes on them when they sit in queue 6h+ per night.

It’s much better then at launch. Culling removal in itself is a massive step forward. However, since you are only interested in gear grind that is still the same as it was at launch. In other words, no, the rewards are still aesthetics and will remain so as that is one of the core concepts of GW2.
Altho, you could technically “grind” for ascended gear… Tho I’m not sure if that should be considered grinding.

Whether it’s worse or better depends on how jaundiced you feel about the negative changes.

Some improvements have been made – the lake was removed and replaced by more interesting topology, culling was removed. That’s about it on the positive side.

Most of the remaining changes have apparently been made with the intention of attracting PvE players. Extra rewards for grind activities and grind-based extra skills added.
It seems to have succeeded. Now we can’t play unless we queue for hours and when we do get in, the standard of gameplay has gone down the pan.

It’s pretty action packed, at least on my server (JQ).

I’m on my third book as I read queueing up, and by the looks of next week i’ll be able to finish off the books I have on pre-order that are about to be released.

Hey mate.
I was in a similar position to you. I played from pre launch to about 2 weeks into launch.

First off, there is a greater feel of progression in WvW with the World EXP and WvW ranks.
I think the best part is that things are more organised. I don’t know about your experience but at launch zergs weren’t as organised, servers didn’t have teamspeaks to follow etc. Yes, Guilds would have Teamspeaks but the ins and outs of WvW were not yet to be known.

I personally prefer it.

Worse… PVE inside WvW, This league is totally horrible, basically the league was made to raise some money for ANET with the server transfers, all the problems we had was not addressed.

- PVE inside WvW
- League is useless, made the WvW worse then ever.
- No decent rewards.
- No alt friendly, you need to grind so many levels if you want to play with 2-3 toons.
- Skill lag since day 1, never got addressed.

Srsly, take your money elsewhere.

Same or Worse. They have 4 maps, with 3 the same. Shows the lazyness and /care about wvw in general..

First you could get into WvWvW because their was no que or a little.. but nowadays its like impossible to get in. I heared something like PVE scrubs got into WvW for archievemets. Next to that read above poster..