This is one of my biggest pet peeves. The insistence that WvW is for casuals and SPvP is for the hardcore. I feel it is exactly the opposite. SPvP takes no dedication or commitment unless you are doing tournaments, and even then WvW takes way more investment than SPvP. More strategy, gold, gear, and people.
I feel it is disrespectful to the players to insist that WvW be designed around the casual, instead of the people who live it and dedicate themselves to it.
I never took what ANet originally said about WvW as “it’s for casuals”. It’s meant to be more casual PvP as in not structured…like structured PvP. You don’t have set teams, classes aren’t 100% balanced and you can’t control every aspect of the game.
That, however, doesn’t make it “casual” it just makes it not structured.
I’m not sure I consider ether one as hardcore or casual.
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A group of hardcore players can succeed at both and casual players can be effective in both. Just because wvw benefits from having an organized force doesn’t mean John Q can’t zone in, ask “where’s the fight?”, and be effective by joining that organized force.
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Well.. provided John isn’t going to run around solo and get mad when a mob finds him. Or chase runners to far. Or run into a twenty guys alone, die, then scream “WHY DIDN’T YOU FOLLOW ME!?” Oh John.. why do you have to be Rambo?
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I guess my point is this. Being casual doesn’t mean being stupid.
WvW is casual in the sense that you can always just log in and start playing (queues notwithstanding). Even though it’s a huge money sink and you can definitely “go pro”, the fact that you don’t have to form teams or follow a schedule makes it casual.
The hardcore servers are dominating the top tiers of WvW right now, how exactly is that catering to casuals? The difference between the two has been illustrated by the posters above me. Plus, if you’re bad, it’s much easier to be carried by a zerg of 30 -40 than it is to be carried by 5-8 other players…
< JADE QUARRY >
Zabroshan – 80 Guardian / Sorroe – 80 Mesmer Hands Off My Octopus
It’s casual in that it’s always running and enemies are anonymous, but it’s non-casual in that being level 80 with top gear makes a difference (as well as running with a group using voice chat).
It’s sort of like the DAoC frontier. There’s mobs, dynamic events, skill points, gathering nodes, roving gank groups, castles and keeps. It’s pretty much got it all.
I think they meant casual as in anyone can jump in and contribute in some small way without any lack of skill of their part (if there is any) causing a big problem.
Casual players are usually (but not always) lesser skilled and don’t usually want to go into a limited numbers battle (5v5 or 10v10) where their lack of skill would be a huge detriment and/or easily noticed. No one likes looking bad or feeling like they let their team down.
I’m not sure I consider ether one as hardcore or casual.
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A group of hardcore players can succeed at both and casual players can be effective in both. Just because wvw benefits from having an organized force doesn’t mean John Q can’t zone in, ask “where’s the fight?”, and be effective by joining that organized force.
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Well.. provided John isn’t going to run around solo and get mad when a mob finds him. Or chase runners to far. Or run into a twenty guys alone, die, then scream “WHY DIDN’T YOU FOLLOW ME!?” Oh John.. why do you have to be Rambo?
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I guess my point is this. Being casual doesn’t mean being stupid.
+1
Casuals can definitely make a mark in WvW, but there has to be a realization that WvW needs teams to work together, I know no guild group that will turn down anyone else joining in on their operation (as long as they don’t do a “John”)
I think the issue stems from the fact that you can’t just jump in as a casual go where you want in WvW, especially with the guild groups and zerg. Might I suggest next WvW you jump into send a /m asking if any groups have a spot for a dependable warrior. And watch the invites come in. Even better, jump on their voice comms and get the full WvW experience without the need to be hardcore
The two are on such different scales, but I really don’t consider one or the other “casual” or “hardcore.” You can be useful and effective in either, so long as you try to and understand what each requires.
I do agree though, WvsW at the highest tier requires a great deal of time, dedication, and gold to be competitive. sPvP at the highest tier (tournment against equally skilled players) requires all of that except gold. I would argue that sPvP requires more individual skill, whereas WvsW requires good leadership above all. Not to say that people that focus on WvsW aren’t skilled or that it doesn’t require skill, just with that many people all working together it is less about how good of a player you are alone and more about how well you listen to orders as well as how good the leader/s is/are.
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I guess my point is this. Being casual doesn’t mean being stupid.
I agree with the whole post, but this is the point I agree with the most. Casual tends to be thrown around as an insult. Casual does not mean you’re a bad player. You can’t accomplish much in either sPvP or WvsW alone, and being casual doesn’t mean aren’t able to contribute to your team in either.
i fail to see how its casual, at all, with people losing massive amounts of silver on repairs if they are on a bad server trying to fight the good fight, and the massive amounts of gold competetive guilds are paying to dominate with keep upgrades
if anything anet is trying to cover up the huge amounts of hardcore players that are paying to win by using gems to fund their keep upgrades, cause they sure arent geting that money from farming because they are in wvw everyday siting in their keeps that have hundreds of cannons and reinforced walls
I don’t think “accessible to casuals” and “hardcore players will excel” are mutually exclusive concepts. Of course the most organized and resource-rich groups are going to do better at WvW. Any attempt to stop this from happening will utterly ruin the game. That doesn’t mean casuals can’t hop in and enjoy. Zergs have their place, if nothing else than to distract enemy attention from the folks on the map who are applying a bit more strategy to their WvW time. WvW manages to both provide a good time to those who just want to log in and romp, and a for those who want to join the foreign legion. If you’re really serious about winning and competing, there’s a good chance you’ll take steps to excel, like join a guild, or read about the game in your off-time, or just play more. When that happens, you start drifting more and more toward the label “hardcore.” If that never happens and you still had a good time, well then, the casual crowd has been catered to.
It’s no different from sPvP, except in that WvW plays out with everyone running around together, and the sPvPers get secluded little matches that keep the 8v8 casuals and the 5v5 hardcores separate.
The possibility of physical and mental collapse is now very real.
No sympathy for the Devil, keep that in mind.
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
I would argue that sPvP requires more individual skill, whereas WvsW requires good leadership above all.
Being a retired war veteran I fully support this position. In the chaos of WvW, just as it is in reality, it helps to have a trustworthy and calm voice directing traffic for the folks not sure of what to do. I know in WvW I’m definitely in the “what am I supposed to be doing” group.
Being that we’re all total strangers, however, WvW requires a player with not only game knowledge but true leadership ability (no matter what age or background they’re from). It’s always effective when a calm player is giving directions in plain language with motivation after failures, and less so when it’s a passive-aggressive player getting angrier with each setback.
I’m a pretty casual player (play 2-3 hours a day at most) and I think WvW works well for casual players. I can log onto my 45 guardian tonight, jump into WvW and run around for a couple of hours having fun with my guild.
As far as money goes. I made 40 silver last night from WvW (we were on a roll), and also picked up 1 golem, 1 trebuchet, and 1 ram from loot drops and an arrow cart and balista from one of the puzzles so I’m pretty well equipped for tonight’s fight.
Why make sense, when it’s so much more fun to make nonsense?
WvWvW will always be for casuals. Any game that allows advantages in any form in a pvp scenario is for casuals. PvP is about 1 thing. Skill VS Skill best wins. Till that happens WvWvW is for casuals/hanging out with your friends nothing else.
WvWvW will always be for casuals. Any game that allows advantages in any form in a pvp scenario is for casuals. PvP is about 1 thing. Skill VS Skill best wins. Till that happens WvWvW is for casuals/hanging out with your friends nothing else.
I disagree and consider this statement narrow minded and guided by lack of experience in the field.
The problem with playing W3 in a casual way is that intensity of the experience is dictated by the most hardcore participants in your current matchup. I logged on with my static group of 4 rl friends to play around on W3 the other afternoon, and we controlled literally nothing. So we figured “Sweet! We can probably snag a couple little objectives!” and went to attack a supply camp. As we were fighting the main guard, ten or twelve players roll in and mudstomp us, then /dance at our corpses. Repeat this same scenario at another camp, and we were quite done with W3, and I don’t know if two of my friends could be talked into trying it again. And on top of the base frustration of failure and the embarrassment felt for the childish behavior on the part of whoever those people were, you get hit with a repair bill.
Until there is a way to dileneate the root cause of the problem, whether it be in the matchmaking system, incentive scheme, or game mechanics, that’s just going to be the way it is in some places.
WvWvW will always be for casuals. Any game that allows advantages in any form in a pvp scenario is for casuals. PvP is about 1 thing. Skill VS Skill best wins. Till that happens WvWvW is for casuals/hanging out with your friends nothing else.
I disagree and consider this statement narrow minded and guided by lack of experience in the field.
There is no skill to top servers in WvWvW currently. Best “Graveyard crew” wins. Games are fair during the day pretty decent match ups and ruined at night. Not to mention the game mode allows 80vs 1-79 which is no different then SWTOR before the max level bracket was released. So ya WvWvW is just killing low levels outgearing most people and zerging with superior numbers and if your losing don’t worry you can cap the whole map at 3am. Long way to go before WvWvW can be taken seriously and be truly competitive.
There is no skill to top servers in WvWvW currently. Best “Graveyard crew” wins. Games are fair during the day pretty decent match ups and ruined at night. Not to mention the game mode allows 80vs 1-79 which is no different then SWTOR before the max level bracket was released. So ya WvWvW is just killing low levels outgearing most people and zerging with superior numbers and if your losing don’t worry you can cap the whole map at 3am. Long way to go before WvWvW can be taken seriously and be truly competitive.
I am sorry your experience has been a negative one, however posting a video of one persons experience does not validate labeling an entire demographic as casual.
And in addition to that, labeling an entire server as a zerg – doesn’t quite fit either. There are plenty of smaller teams/guilds/groups that take WvW very seriously, and prefer not to move in a herd.
If an unfortunate “low level” gets caught into it, that is not the fault of the people participating in WvW. It is a decision that person made to come to an arena that he/she may not have been ready for.
I’m sure the 30 or so people I saw either AFK or herding Yaks last night while all the supply depots were over run would consider WvW hardcore fun. could be wrong though.
[RE] Isendale – Tarnished Coast
“Did you see that? Tell me you saw that!”
This is one of my biggest pet peeves. The insistence that WvW is for casuals and SPvP is for the hardcore. I feel it is exactly the opposite. SPvP takes no dedication or commitment unless you are doing tournaments, and even then WvW takes way more investment than SPvP. More strategy, gold, gear, and people.
I feel it is disrespectful to the players to insist that WvW be designed around the casual, instead of the people who live it and dedicate themselves to it.
I agree with you. I think a lot of people see WvW as accessible to the masses (all it takes is a click and a wish you beat the queue monster to join), and thus think it must be “casual” since anyone can participate. I think we all know this line of thinking is wrong.
The problem is, to the person with the pet peeve is… Arenanet feels the same way Spvp is for the hardcore and WvW for the casuals., i think they have done everything they could to make it so.. no kill spam, no player names, and very little person information on who you’re fighting.. I think there isn’t even skin changes right?
If you are an sPvP-er and you go into WvW you will see a palpable level-of-skill difference between the people you fight in sPvP and the people you fight in WvW.
I hope I’m not being a major elitist here, but in reality to be good at PvP it requires a certain amount of practice. A lot of people in WvW probably mouseclick their hotkeys and backpedal rather than sidestrafe or simply autoattack all day long.
The problem is, to the person with the pet peeve is… Arenanet feels the same way Spvp is for the hardcore and WvW for the casuals., i think they have done everything they could to make it so.. no kill spam, no player names, and very little person information on who you’re fighting.. I think there isn’t even skin changes right?
It’s carebear central out there in WvW
And see it’s exactly the opposite in reality.
Spvp is far more casual as it takes no real effort to get into it. You just queue up, you’re given a spec, and gear, no cost other than time, no investment in your character.
You don’t have to level, spend time gathering resources, or gold. Yet Arenanet considers spvp to be “hardcore” pvp and designed wvw around being casual friendly?
Just because something is said, doesn’t make it true. You can go into WvW and end up penniless, and naked. How is that casual?
The problem is, to the person with the pet peeve is… Arenanet feels the same way Spvp is for the hardcore and WvW for the casuals., i think they have done everything they could to make it so.. no kill spam, no player names, and very little person information on who you’re fighting.. I think there isn’t even skin changes right?
It’s carebear central out there in WvW
And see it’s exactly the opposite in reality.
Spvp is far more casual as it takes no real effort to get into it. You just queue up, you’re given a spec, and gear, no cost other than time, no investment in your character.
You don’t have to level, spend time gathering resources, or gold. Yet Arenanet considers spvp to be “hardcore” pvp and designed wvw around being casual friendly?
Just because something is said, doesn’t make it true. You can go into WvW and end up penniless, and naked. How is that casual?
We both know that, we are both on ET and we both know what we want and what we expect. Unfortunately it’s up to Arena net to fix, but i doubt it will happen.
It is neither meant for either. The entire game was built around both casual and hardcore players. If you are casual, sure, jump into WvW. Have fun for a couple hours, you can do that. You can make it hardcore, where you farm the jumping puzzles daily to get siege for bigger battles. But you don’t have to. That is the beauty of this game. Everything in this game has content for both Casual and Hardcore gamers. I’m in between myself. I find myself having a blast on WvW just playing for a couple hours. Sure, some people have invested a TON of time and effort into WvW. That is fine too.
I consider myself a casual player. I will say that after 15 years of gaming, I am no beginner. I have been involved in pvp since EQ and spent 5 years in a top 10 guild in DAoC (Halo).
That said, it is the queue times that make ANY form of pvp in GW2 not friendly to the casual player. I am in a very organized, very focused guild on a top tier server. All of our planning is tossed out the window when maybe 10-15 out of the 30 plus who were logged in are able to get into WvW and have some fun.
If you are an sPvP-er and you go into WvW you will see a palpable level-of-skill difference between the people you fight in sPvP and the people you fight in WvW.
I hope I’m not being a major elitist here, but in reality to be good at PvP it requires a certain amount of practice. A lot of people in WvW probably mouseclick their hotkeys and backpedal rather than sidestrafe or simply autoattack all day long.
WvW is not really about 1v1 skills. Of course they matter, but in a 20 vs 20 battle its not so important to understand what skill thief #8 just fired off. In fact, in most cases you couldn’t if you tried.
sPVP is indeed more about individual skill. WvW success is more about tactics and strategy, communication, coordination. At a group and map level even much far beyond a 5 man sPVP team.
For example, I’d rather have an average player doing something productive in WvW, being a team player, than a top 1v1 player off doing his own thing trying to gank people, which is something that really adds next to nothing to your team’s success.
well if this game ever goes do esports stuff it will 100% not be based on WvW. that being said sPvP right now is also pretty much random people since there is no rating or matchmaking system, so I wouldnt argue too hard that sPvP is for the hardcore pvpers.
what I think is that if you are good at tourneys you can probably bring your spec into a WvW game and contribute well. if you’re good at WvW it wont translate to winning tourneys to the same extent.
what I think is that if you are good at tourneys you can probably bring your spec into a WvW game and contribute well.
Ideally, I think you need entirely different specs for sPVP and WvW. The latter its far more helpful to have a spec that helps your team or for dealing with large numbers of enemies. Or for example a speed buff, because you are running so much more in WvW, it makes much more sense than perhaps an ability that helps you in single combat more. Though if your adept you might try and switch on the fly and hope not to get surprised.
WvWvW will always be for casuals. Any game that allows advantages in any form in a pvp scenario is for casuals. PvP is about 1 thing. Skill VS Skill best wins. Till that happens WvWvW is for casuals/hanging out with your friends nothing else.
Narrow view from a player grown up on FPS
I know alot of players that would say that DaoC style of PvP takes alot more skill, planning AND coordination
i fail to see how its casual, at all, with people losing massive amounts of silver on repairs if they are on a bad server trying to fight the good fight, and the massive amounts of gold competetive guilds are paying to dominate with keep upgrades
if anything anet is trying to cover up the huge amounts of hardcore players that are paying to win by using gems to fund their keep upgrades, cause they sure arent geting that money from farming because they are in wvw everyday siting in their keeps that have hundreds of cannons and reinforced walls
Did u forget not all Guild members are in wvwvw?? Every guild has their fair share of pve players.. So that’s where the gold come from..
Mjdeathless – Necromancer
Kopiousiudai – Thief
Canadian Pizza – Warrior
WvWvW isnt for casuals….thats why some servers lose because people dont know were to go and just fumble around and get owned all the time. seeing that you cannot see were people are at. i would advise against casuals going to WvWvW…
WvWvW isnt for casuals….thats why some servers lose because people dont know were to go and just fumble around and get owned all the time. seeing that you cannot see were people are at. i would advise against casuals going to WvWvW…
But arenanet has gone through great lengths to make WvW as casual friendly as possible. And by casual I don’t believe they meant time, I believe Anet meant skill.
WvW is supposed to have been designed in a manner that allows anyone to jump in and participate.
Well they could have done that, while keeping the competitiveness in WvW. I believe that it’s time to admit that WvW is not casual friendly at all, and admit that the investment required into WvW is above and beyond what a casual player can expect.
All future design decisions should keep this mind. Regardless of the intent (or marketing) WvW is not for casuals. It is extremely punishing to someone that does not know what they are doing, and the design decisions surrounding this (come on really, “invader”) have not added to the quality of wvw.
Please make all future decisions, for what’s good of the people that are actually in WvW, not for the people that aren’t.
LMFO, I love how fanboys try to change the words of their lords (Anet developers) to fit their mood.
WvW ISFOR CASUALS, it means they will always accomidate for the casual player and never the hardcore, the whole game is for casual the pve the pvp everything.
as matter of facts if you play game “hardcore” hours on hours a day you will find nothing to do and find it so boring that you will have to cut it down ALOT by playing something else… why? becaus its a casual game.
