Guild Wars 2

This is kind of a rant, but I also want to hear what other players have to say about it.

Some things I think that break WvW:

1. Laying on the ground/spying
2. Hiding mesmers in keeps after you lose them / portal bombing
3. People in general being in keeps after you take it from them
4. Keeps are impossible to defend unless you have your entire zerg there or many strategically placed arrow carts
5. Too many AoE skills can line the walls making keeps impossible to defend without a large group or a ton of siege.
6. Gold-buying (see: have no idea what they’re doing, only commander because they are rich) commanders who tag up and fragment groups being run by competent commanders
7. Boosted WvW rank exp, making upgraded and OP siege a common thing.

Laying on the ground after you’re dead and spying:

Shouldn’t even be possible. Fade the screen to black/blur after so many seconds/minutes to disable this. An argument can be made that they are actually screwing their team over because they’re just laying there dead, but, in this game, one person missing from a zerg of 30-40 (even 20) players, does not make any difference whatsoever.

Hiding mesmers/people in keeps in general/portal bombing:

There should be a mechanic that teleports you out of the keep if you lose it to someone else. Think of stonemist. After you waste a ton of supply and siege to take it (see: earning it), and then once you take it the entire enemy zerg is still within the walls, they can just slaughter you and wait for righteous indig. to go away and flip it again. Portal bombing as a strategy to get your zerg behind an enemy zerg is totally fine and actually clever. Also, moving golems with this is fine as it doesn’t violate game mechanics at all. However, having a mesmer hide in a keep and then portalling their friends in (especially at bay/hills) to inner wall or even INSIDE inner wall is pretty much unacceptable and needs to be made impossible. It should be that if certain conditions aren’t met, you can’t proceed (If an outer wall/door hasn’t been taken down, the inner is invulnerable. likewise if an inner door/wall hasn’t been taken down, the lord is invulnerable.) It just doesn’t make sense why people should be able to bypass an entire layer of protection by using one skill. It’s BS and isn’t fair.

Keeps being impossible to defend/AoE skills on wall/skills not requiring LoS and destroying siege:
Unless you have a ton of arrow carts or a large group to defend a tower/keep, kiss it goodbye. With staff necro marks, staff ele meteor shower, lb ranger arrow volley or whatever it is called, it is impossible to stand on a wall and defend a tower/keep without getting dropped in seconds. you could say: oh, place siege. except this isn’t even possible anymore because almost all places that siege can be placed it can be AoEd down. Dawns tower is a good example of this. The only place you can put siege and not have it killed is on the ramp going up to supply. even that i’m not sure is a safe place. Anywhere else and eles with scepter can just use dragons tooth without even having LoS and kill it.

inexperienced/gold-buying commanders ruining groups:
there are commanders who simply bought gems convert to gold and bought a commander tag without spending hours and hours in game earning that gold. the commander tag being reliant on an item that can be spawned (gold) was a bad design choice from the beginning. it should have been based on wvw experience (kills, plots taken, etc) + badges. this is too late to fix and is really not even worth complaining about anymore.

boosted wvw exp:
should have never been boosted. i am totally fine with them giving exp for a wider range of activities but the fact they doubled exp from taking keeps and stuff is totally lame. people are so impatient that they complained that gaining wvw rank was too slow (um, it should be. it grants access to powerful abilities), and so they buffed it. now, the majority of players have AC range, cannons that remove boons, wider radius shots, and so on. only players who play wvw a lot should be rewarded with these things and not just everyone.

well, that’s pretty much it. i realize it is a lot and i tried to split it up into smaller sections.

The only bad thing I see is #6. The rest come off as tactical gameplay. Sieging up your towers, hiding a mesmer, “spying” is a way to be useful while you’re waiting for a wp to open up or if you’re predicting a fairely fast rez soon. WvW abilities allow you todesign your character more, if you like soloing camps you can get one of the guard abilties up, if you’re a guardian and have no range, why not take out your anger and get your ac skills up.

Just my opinion.

1. ok maybe
2. NO. If mesmer is smart enough to hide on good spot and ppl that took that keep are stupid enough not to do proper mesmer sweep it is their problem.
3. more lootbags what is your problem ?
4. NO if you properly siege every keep, it is so hard to take, that it can take forever to capture one. For example Hills so hard to take!!!
5. NO as i said well placed siege is key to succes. If you are one of those ppl that place arrow cart on place where it can be really easily AoEd(like middle of a wall) than you are right, YOU cannot defend that keep. But others probably can.
6. Yep that is a problem, but by what you said about only experienced ppl getting commander tag would mean that even “experienced” WvW players that have lot of WvW kills and stuff will be able to get commander tag just because they are zerging 24/7? not a good option
7. let ppl get their ranks and be happy for them

1. yeah, so auto release after a short period of time (say a few mins maybe)
2. nah, it is fine
4&5. the camera hack makes this a little trickier. I do wish things would not flip so quickly though. for example, rams take more then 1 to operate (or gain power as more then 1 operate). but for this to work, maps need to be larger, or more of them, or speed needs to drop. too easy to move between points, so zergs can respond too quickly.

My big thing is that wvwvw is kinda meh. downed state is just a PITA. maps too small. coverage is everything…so much fun to work for hours to get things only to take a break and come back and now the EU prime time starts and server x gets 80+ on each map.
I remember having hour+ long sieges in DAoC, working to take towers, having to run supply into keeps. now these keeps can drop so fast. tactics seem to be only summon the zerg or put as many ACs as you can and hope someone doesnt exploit the camera and find ways to hit them.

would be cool if you had to secure your BL before you could put troops in the field in EB….oh well….back to manning my AC.

Spicyhash.7605:

Laying on the ground after you’re dead and spying:

Shouldn’t even be possible. Fade the screen to black/blur after so many seconds/minutes to disable this. An argument can be made that they are actually screwing their team over because they’re just laying there dead, but, in this game, one person missing from a zerg of 30-40 (even 20) players, does not make any difference whatsoever.

People have been posting on these forums about this since last September. Honestly, with the Downed mechanic and the way zergs can rez and even “insta-rez” people with Warbanners, there should be at least SOME penalty for dying. I don’t mean a 15-minutes timeout or whatever, but I think that when you die you should be automatically teleported to your original spawn point (Citadel, etc) after 15 seconds or so, not able to simply choose from any of the waypoints your server currently owns. I know this is only a minor inconvenience, since you could then waypoint anywhere you want once you’re up, but it would solve the “Corpse Spy” problems, and a minor inconvenience is more of a penalty than we have in WvW now, since the only problem we have with dying is that you might get a repair bill of 1 silver or so.

Spicyhash.7605:

inexperienced/gold-buying commanders ruining groups:
there are commanders who simply bought gems convert to gold and bought a commander tag without spending hours and hours in game earning that gold. the commander tag being reliant on an item that can be spawned (gold) was a bad design choice from the beginning. it should have been based on wvw experience (kills, plots taken, etc) + badges. this is too late to fix and is really not even worth complaining about anymore.

This is a problem that most of us saw coming back in beta, having the Gold be the only barrier to getting a Commander Icon. A lot of people thought that the “100 Gold Commander” idea would be a temporary thing at the beginning of the game, to allow large, organized guilds to pool their money together quickly to buy 1 Command Icon for the leader of their group (my guild, for instance, had 1 Icon less than a week after release.) But once the Trading Post finally started working, it became clear to most people that it was only a matter of time before everyone in the game would have nearly 100 gold at some point during their time in GW2, which is the situation we’re in now. On some servers it would be pretty easy to fill the entire que for a map with nothing but Commanders. And yes, many of them are quite bad, and some of them are PvE’ers who bought the Icon FIRST, then decided to check out WvW (this is still unusual on my server, though.)

The barrier for getting an Icon really should be something other than pure gold, but it does need to be something that allows a guild to pool their resources together to elect their own Commander. It seems like a very complicated issue to get right, and as we’ve seen, a very easy one to get wrong.

I feel like WvW is broken.

Title fixed.

It is not hard to defend any keep against a force larger than yours. Defending gives you a great advantage (as it should) and you hardly even need siege for that. With siege it is way too easy though.

Spicyhash.7605:

Think of stonemist. After you waste a ton of supply and siege to take it (see: earning it), and then once you take it the entire enemy zerg is still within the walls, they can just slaughter you and wait for righteous indig. to go away and flip it again.

I wouldn’t call leaving enemies alive inside "earning it". Especially if they defeat you and flip it back. You clearly didn’t earn it then.

Additionally, if a server’s got a large enough force to take SMC or a keep or even a tower and leaves an opening for a mesmer to bring folks through, then you didn’t really earn the objective, imo.

Also to the AoE comment (5) -- if the folks on the ground are giving you a lot of AoE, why are you not giving it back to them? Your forces should still be able to get siege up in useful places, and hitting people from on the wall should be easier. Maybe you’ve been outnumbered.

The whole system is broken, a good design wouldn’t alienate thousands of people simply because they can’t field a good WvW population.

Pretty much everything the OP said is valid, except that’s only because of the huge zergs.

Fix the zergs and you fix almost everything that’s wrong with WvW.

Epic large maps on mist fow or uw where castles, keeps towers control resources camps and bonus for pve world.

1) Is a tactic.
2) ^ " _ "
3) ^ " _ "
4) Not trying to be disrespectful but…no kitten? What you want people to all grab bows and shoot at each other then retreat and auto heal back over and over?
5) What you want siege to endlessly kill those outside? Course there is tons of AoE banging you…
6) I agree with this one, imo WvW commander hat should be bought with badges + X amount of people approval based on server population.
7) So? Ranks go up slow or fast? What difference does it make? Siege is the soul of WvW is what makes WvW unique from other MMOs open world pvp. We could always remove that and make this game die!

Lyonell.1753:

1) Is a tactic.
2) ^ " _ "
3) ^ " _ "
4) Not trying to be disrespectful but…no kitten? What you want people to all grab bows and shoot at each other then retreat and auto heal back over and over?
5) What you want siege to endlessly kill those outside? Course there is tons of AoE banging you…
6) I agree with this one, imo WvW commander hat should be bought with badges + X amount of people approval based on server population.
7) So? Ranks go up slow or fast? What difference does it make? Siege is the soul of WvW is what makes WvW unique from other MMOs open world pvp. We could always remove that and make this game die!

Going to quote the entire post since it’s exactly what I was going to say. :-)

1. It doesn’t really bother me if they lie there.

2. This is a lame tactic. I’ve been saying this forever and I’m a Mes. Portals should not work through intact walls.

3. I disagree with this one. The fight after the capture is often as fun as the fight before.

4. I have discovered that someone’s opininon on the ease of attacking vs. defending (not to mention AC’s) is tier dependent. Those in higher tiers have an easier time of defending because they have bodies and organization for scouting, sentrying, siege refreshing. They can have 12 AC’s at a gate and keep them refreshed for a long time. In lower pop servers we can’t do that. And in lower tiers defending is harder than capturing. (I am on SBI and have now gotten to witness from DB the kitten unleased by AC’s and everything else by a well defended keep. That simply doesn’t happen in the previous lower tiers that I have experienced.) Imo the real problem is superior siege – it never should have been put in there.

5. I agree but the problem is not that attackers from below can aoe the walls (they should be able to). But the real problem is that as a defender on the walls you are supposed to have a height advantage but don’t because of a THREE INCH ledge around the wall that you cannot aim over. Seriously, wtf is up with that? You have to jump on top of the ledge in order to fight.

@ #3 – I don’t really have an issue with this, but if ANet wanted to fix this, just temporarily add a number of extra patrols and give ALL of them R.I. That’ll clear the place out really fast.

I agree with the spying thing. Why should a dead person be able to sit there and see everything else you are doing? Everything else can be pretty much summed up in one word – ZERG. That is the big problem.

I play on JQ and it is just so depressing when we work so hard to fully upgrade one of our keeps, and then SoR does one of their timed late-night 80-man zerg pushes and it’s like, what can you possibly do to not allow them to just roll over everything on the map and turn everything back to paper? All it takes is for one server to get everybody together on one map at one time of day to completely trash the entire map.

It can be even worse when they bring along their 10 alpha seige golems they’ve been hording. Golem rushes are something I just really hate because even if you are completely on top of your scouting, if they show up with 5 or more golems, your fully upgraded keep is going to fall so quickly your server will never have a chance to respond. I wouldn’t mind if golems were just taken out of the game.

I concur with many of the things the OP has mentioned already, especially 1-3. 2 & 3 would be nipped in the bag if they just ported people out of the structures once they were taken over. You don’t want to be ported out, jump the kitten out then if you feel it’ll be taken over. For #1, same thing, when they are dead, either fade the screen black or port them back to the closest WP.

What they could do is just add another trap or revealing trap if you will, once that (once activated) removes all stealth in the keep for say 1 min.

One thing you didn’t mention OP that I think should get the boot more than anything else.. Downed state. Fine for PvE but it’s a waste of time in WvW. This works out for both pro and anti-zergs alike as it drastically speeds up play. The only ones who should be against it are those don’t know how to stay alive.

There would be so many problems fixed over night if they got rid of downed state in WvW