Guild Wars 2

ANet, you’re probably already aware of this, but you’re about to hit a critical point in time where you either have to fix WvWvW or risk a significant portion of your community leaving. Every day these forums remind me more of the Diablo 3 forums, and it was depressing for me to watch a game I wanted to do so well die such a poor death because of a development team that didn’t pay attention and listen to the community quickly enough. WvWvW is close to being a fantastic experience, but your players can’t keep slogging through the glaring holes in your design for much longer.

I implore you all to offer us more transparency. You have created an experience in WvWvW that I haven’t been able to enjoy since playing DAoC, and I have been yearning to rediscover that for a long time. If you will actually open a conversation with us and make it clear what your plans are to patch the problems in the WvWvW experience, we can definitely weather the storm. However, giving us a vague post that “Something is coming” is not sufficient; a generalized AMA in reddit is not sufficient; a month old post on night capping is not sufficient. Without an open channel of communication dedicated to the WvWvW community, I give WvWvW about 2 more months before it becomes a ghost land. You must help us prevent this, so please answer the following questions:

• What are your plans and time frames to rectify the current server imbalance issues? In specific, how do you plan to combat transfers to a winning server? How do you plan to combat time-zone disparities between server populations and the group tendency for players to cluster based on their timezone, i.e. Sea of Sorrows and their Oceanic coverage? More importantly, when do you plan to implement these changes?

• Do you have any plans to modify the current scoring system? If so, what are you considering? Are these considerations attempts to mitigate the problems caused by population disparities?

• Do you have any plans to change Orb bonuses or the outmanned buff? If so, what are you considering?

• Why is the commander icon based on gold? One of the biggest problems in our community are “Credit Card Commanders” that bought the pretty icon, don’t join our voice comms, and then mislead the zerg. Do you have any plans to change these requirements?

• We appreciate your discussion of culling during reddit’s AMA, and we understand how hard nasty O(n^2) problems like that can be to solve, but we need more information on what you are doing to combat this. What solutions are you toying with right now? What kind of time frames do you have for implementing these solutions?

• Why are bugged enemy guards appearing in East Keep and Garrison, and why did they become more prevalent after a recent patch to the point that they are smashing the altar and siege in East Keep? Why does it take more than one patch to fix this?

• Why does map activity only show up for my active map? Why can I not access the BL maps without being in WvW?

• Why is there no information on WvW score mechanics? People are still trying to figure out how points-per-tick are calculated and what extra bonuses count toward score. It’s hard to command a game of chess when you don’t even know all the rules of the game.

• What are you doing about botters in WvW zones? Many of us understand that you do 1-month banwaves on malicious activity. This is not sufficient in WvW where these players actively steal slots from others on the server. Seeing the same botters in the lake every day actively demoralizes players.

• Why are we not getting advanced notices of patches in WvW? This sort of variance can throw a WvW game or cause many gold of freshly built golems to vanish. Why are you unable to refund gold for players after this occurs as well?

• Once everything stabilizes and we move to two-week matches, do you intend to take a more active approach to game moderation or will you continue to be L’aissez Faire. i.e., will you be returning hacked orbs or will we continue to have to deal with this until it’s patched?

• What is the timeframe for resolving the numerous bugs related to keep lords and orb behavior, i.e. orbs becoming untakeable, orbs disappearing, zones failing to go contested after the champion lord dies?

Please reach out to us and give us concrete answers to these questions.

My fellow players, if this post resonates with you and you want more information as well, please reply expressing your support. If you feel that I’ve overlooked any concerns here, please add them and I will edit them into this post.

I agree with this,. Please Anet, don’t forget about us.

I’d just like to add the rendering issues to that list, while it’s not as bad as it once was, it continues to effect gameplay.

Good post.

For me the glaring issues are:

1. unrestricted server transfers are causing ongoing weekly imbalances
2. the reason for being in wvw should be more focussed

What I mean in 2. is currently you get people in wvw for a myriad of different reasons, some of which are counterproductive (winning wvw, levelling, getting monthly kills, getting badges, getting exploration, crafting, doing jumping puzzles, getting karma , mining etc.) This needs to be more focussed, the primary reason people should be in wvw is to help their server win the current match and anet needs to put in measures that help this focus. As a quick example; the jumping puzzles should be separate instances with their own player limit/queues that do not count towards the actual map player limits.

WvW is a ghost town at this very moment in the lower tier servers. Damage has been done already by the free transfers. Only solution i can think of is changing the WvWvW from server vs server to assigned cross-server-groups vs each other. This would take months, if not years, so the only solution for players that like to WvW and found themselves on the losing servers that are getting spawn camped daily: Transfer.

There is also the problem of rampant hacking and botting, but even that pales compared to population issues in WvW.

Metalripper.5406:

I agree with this,. Please Anet, don’t forget about us.

I’d just like to add the rendering issues to that list, while it’s not as bad as it once was, it continues to effect gameplay.

I completely agree. I initially omitted this because they actually did mention that they are rigorously working on this during their AMA on reddit. However, I think we deserve more details so I’ve added it to the list.

Actually, they tried to fix culling issue (they had post this) before fix everything else (although no ETA when it will be fix).

its a good post but lets leave the technical aspects and known exploits at the door and focus the attention on the overall game mechanics of WvW and the issues relating to mismatching (server transfers, scoring system that is biased to off peak times, commander improvements etc)

I would like to offer my support for this topic and these questions. Especcially the Server transfer and commander issues.

Why would a commander pay for his title? IMO it should be a vote system of some sort. 1 commander per guild, voted for and only visible in WvWvW. Blasted Creditcard Commanders…

While this thread wasn’t exactly comprehensive it did allude to many things:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Small-update/page/3#post498433

The issue I have with this thread is that you’re expecting specific answers for specific things. As Matt’s update indicates they can’t tell you exactly what’s happening. While it’s frustrating I understand their sentiment, the community can be very unforgiving. Once you state specific dates or future changes the community is almost viral in the way it responds to things you may want to change later. And for every one person that agrees with your idea’s there’s someone else that disagree. In some ways it’s safer to keep a small distance.

Having said that don’t be surprised if they touch on the points you’ve made, but they would be saying something to the effect of ’We’re looking into it’ which won’t mean anything.

While I’m confident that ArenaNet is working on many, if not all the issues you’ve raised. Indeed you’ve raised some legitimate points, it doesn’t understand the nature on Online communities.

I love this game, and intend on being here for quite a while, but WvWvW is the enggame content for me and a lot of other folks. Currently, it is broken. Here are my suggested fixes:

1. Allow server transfers, but when a player xfers, they are ineligible to wvw for the current match and the next if it is within 3 days.

2. If a server owns no points on a map, they are allowed to build siege in their spawn area.

3. Owning orbs gives defensive bonuses (or the current outmanned buff) while not owning the orb in your borderland gives you offensive bonuses.

4. Point accumulation scales inversely with relative population.

Anyway, SOMETHING needs to be done soon!

Vytality, HOPE, Fort Aspenwood

For some reason, MMOs endure player criticisms that are far harsher than any other type of game. The community rage can affect the development process negatively, i.e. implementing changes based on knee jerk reactions of frustrated players. Quick fixes can cause more problems than were there originally.

If they say they’re working on it, they are working on it. It takes time to find the right solution. Harassing them to try to evoke a faster response is not a good idea.

Best case scenario; they ignore you because they know taking their time to properly run fixes through their paces is the right way to do things.

Worst case scenario; they implement fixes based on forum raging and that can create more problems than it solves (see TORtanic).

It took years to create this game, fixes this important won’t happen in a couple of weeks.

The community of GW2 act as if game devs should hold their hand at all times…

Kam.8109:

If they say they’re working on it, they are working on it. It takes time to find the right solution. Harassing them to try to evoke a faster response is not a good idea.

I haven’t heard a “We’re working on it” to any but about 2 of those questions. I’ve also seen games quickly empty out because the dev team didn’t respond quickly enough to the community (Diablo 3). Not all of these are huge, complex issues. I really don’t think there’s an excuse for bugged guards to be breaking an altar in a keep for more than 24 hours.

The thing that interests me most on this post isn’t the stuff they are working on.

your top 4 points are what I think Arena Net need to comment on very soon.

"

• What are your plans and time frames to rectify the current server imbalance issues? In specific, how do you plan to combat transfers to a winning server? How do you plan to combat time-zone disparities between server populations and the group tendency for players to cluster based on their timezone, i.e. Sea of Sorrows and their Oceanic coverage? More importantly, when do you plan to implement these changes?
• Do you have any plans to modify the current scoring system? If so, what are you considering? Are these considerations attempts to mitigate the problems caused by population disparities?
• Do you have any plans to change Orb bonuses or the outmanned buff? If so, what are you considering?
• Why is the commander icon based on gold? One of the biggest problems in our community are “Credit Card Commanders” that bought the pretty icon, don’t join our voice comms, and then mislead the zerg. Do you have any plans to change these requirements?"

zastari.1730:

Kam.8109:

If they say they’re working on it, they are working on it. It takes time to find the right solution. Harassing them to try to evoke a faster response is not a good idea.

I haven’t heard a “We’re working on it” to any but about 2 of those questions. I’ve also seen games quickly empty out because the dev team didn’t respond quickly enough to the community (Diablo 3). Not all of these are huge, complex issues. I really don’t think there’s an excuse for bugged guards to be breaking an altar in a keep for more than 24 hours.

Except they have addressed issues…

And they regularly patch their game. Games are buggy near the start. This isn’t a new thing with MMOs. Seriously, all these threads are just QQbutthurt.

zastari.1730:

I haven’t heard a “We’re working on it” to any but about 2 of those questions. I’ve also seen games quickly empty out because the dev team didn’t respond quickly enough to the community (Diablo 3). Not all of these are huge, complex issues. I really don’t think there’s an excuse for bugged guards to be breaking an altar in a keep for more than 24 hours.

D3 “emptied out” because it was largely devoid of substance. You beat the game and it was only a matter of time until you got tired of grinding. That’s all they offered and that’s why the game failed. It’s not a matter of the devs not responding quickly enough, its that they made a wafer thin game that severely lacked things to do. Comparing such a game to GW2 is comparing apples and oranges.

It would be nice if a developer could just read something on the forums, snap their fingers and fix the issue. But that’s not how it works. Worthwhile fixes take time. And as previously stated, ANET knows it’s a bad idea to go around blabbing about fixes that aren’t finalized yet.

What the issue needs, is the exact thing this generation of gamers completely and totally lack: patience.

While it would be nice to get an update on these issues I don’t feel the game is under any huge threat atm. It’s early days yet. Yes wvw attendance has dwindled significantly since the first 2 or 3 weeks but I’m not sure that it has anything to do with the mechanics or issues highlighted above. Looked more like the fotm players left.

Regarding Kam’s patience comment: I’m pretty sure zastari has it in spades, he’s just worried about the ones that don’t.

I don’t think the OP’s request is asking too much. Bonus points to them for being thought out and polite.

My life is not spent on these forums, but as far as I can see, the last substansive update on the state of WvW from a ANET member was about 27 days ago.