Guild Wars 2

source:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Adopt-a-Dev-for-the-WvW-Fall-Tournament/page/6#post4493275

How disasterous is this going to be?

My guess: Every matchup T4 and below become 100% PvD in the BLs outside of a 6 hour block (around primetime). In other words, EotM, but without the OP rewards.

Discuss.

As people have already said in the Adopt-a-Dev thread, it’ll be a disaster. I don’t think you’ll find anyone who thinks otherwise.

Please, don’t implement it.

1) Discourages the importance of zerg mobility and map awareness.
2) Benefits servers who can afford scouts in towers/keeps, which is usually the largest server.
3) Increases the benefits of having waypoints, which translate into helping the strongest server and hurting the weakest server.
4) Discourages responsive play and fighting enemy players. Way too easy for zergs to go around PvDooring things undetected.
5) Makes defending much more difficult and makes karma training that much easier.*

*Note: the fix to siege disablers isn’t to make defending against larger servers impossible altogether. The current “fix” is like tearing down your entire house because some curtains aren’t fitted properly. Adjust siege disablers accordingly, but don’t take away white swords.

Not well thought out at all. As I mentioned in the other thread there are times in the wee hours when we can field only a handful of players. Someone will have to stay in each tower and at least 2 in each keep in order to be able to stop an attack and that does not leave anyone for camps. As there will be no white swords 2 people can open up an upgraded keep by setting a cata in an out of the way spot forcing a defender to continually monitor all walls and gates for damage. May as well kiss upgrading anything goodbye as there is no way in hell I am going to spend my silver to upgrade if there is no chance to defend it.

So that’s all you took out of it?

What about:
- the bad large battle fights where one steamrolls the other group by following the commander pressing 1?
- the 90% keep/tower takes are done without any or much resistance(defenders) being done within 3 minutes.
- the boring keep takes if there are defenders with tons of arrow carts and the only option is to wait till the walls are downed by long range siege
- the groups capping everything at weird hours without any resistance
-etc…

???

Might aswell remove structures together with the white swords so attackers dont have any resistance to face. I wonder where they picked this idea up, definitly NOT in the lower tiers. But most changes they made so far are all in the Ktrain’s favor so wouldnt surprise me if they push this idea through.

So a change that will force groups to split up and have scouts checking out towers and keeps in order to make sure that they can be defended?

Isn’t that basically what people have been demanding since release? A way to stop the zerg form just going from place to place and take stuff unopposed?

I for one think this will be a good change. Serious WvW guilds already have people scouting towers and keep so won’t really be that much of a difference.

Seems like anet wants WvW to be a mindless karma train like EotM is. What next, no visible contested timers, lower wall and gate health, defenders debuff.

What a fudging stupid idea. Yet another change to completely destroy lower tier servers.

Oh, I don’t know. I played on Underworld for quite some time, even after many of the guilds left.

And while true that the same guild might not be able to have one person per tower/keep having one player (doesn’t have to be a guildie) standing in there or at least walking between them shouldn’t really be that hard for any server with some sort of organization.

It’s easy, if they remove white swords then they have to award players who scout and defend; oh wait……

Well as underworld have never defended their own borderland in the 2yrs ive been playing makes it even more apparent you just have no idea what you are talking about..and that now poor UW have so little to play with you think they and others at the same wvw pop lvl can afford scouts it will just make it more zerg as there will be no point trying to defend just freecap it back after for the loot..KarmaTrain for the mindless, well done indeed, will save me some money as i do scout n defend mostly tho GG

Worst idea since the first AC Range/Dmg increase patch.What are you guys trying to do with wvw ? Cus to me you only have gold league in mind where theres full maps on every bl + eb and people know how to scout.I know how bad scouting can be on my server,and this will wreck so much havoc it might be one of those changes pushing people further away.I can safely say that keeps will be ninjad without people noticing whats going on untill theyre inside….Honestly dont…just don’t.Youre destroying a core mechanism of WvW.

lordkrall.7241:

Oh, I don’t know. I played on Underworld for quite some time, even after many of the guilds left.

And while true that the same guild might not be able to have one person per tower/keep having one player (doesn’t have to be a guildie) standing in there or at least walking between them shouldn’t really be that hard for any server with some sort of organization.

If Anet going to remove the white swords, can you remove the white knighting?

Offair.2563:

lordkrall.7241:

Oh, I don’t know. I played on Underworld for quite some time, even after many of the guilds left.

And while true that the same guild might not be able to have one person per tower/keep having one player (doesn’t have to be a guildie) standing in there or at least walking between them shouldn’t really be that hard for any server with some sort of organization.

If Anet going to remove the white swords, can you remove the white knighting?

That would be almost too good to be true.

lordkrall.7241:

A way to stop the zerg form just going from place to place and take stuff unopposed?

How does removing white swords do this?

Removing white swords actually does the opposite. It makes it easier for the zerg to go from place to place and take stuff unopposed. Because the tower/keep is going to be gone before anyone even realizes it is being attacked.

If they were really interested in stopping the zerg from going place to place and taking stuff unopposed, they would make it easier for the Losing/Lower Populated server to know that their stuff is being attacked. They should do this:

• The Winning/Highest Pop server pops swords on Losing/Lower Pop servers assets immediately.

• The Losing/Lower Pop server has the current delay when attacking the Winning/Higher Pop server.

• In a severe blowout, the Losing/Lower Pop server does not pop white swords at all when attacking.

• Remove white swords for taps. It takes a siege attack on a wall/gate or a certain amount of damage from players to pop white swords.

Anet would have to set the criteria that define Winning/High Pop and Losing/Low Pop. It could be based on total score, current PPT or population across all maps. Probably best if it were a combination of total score and current PPT.

It’s offical now we know Anet dont care about WvW at all with this idea, who in their right mind thought this idea was remotly good.

What we will see down the road is paper towers and keeps due to people dont want to waste karma and silver to upgrade and build sieges.

And please don’t say you have to scout, yeah right so much fun standing in a tower for hours on end without getting rewarded for it while the rest getting lootbags,wxp and karma.

Most dumb idea in the gaming history of all times.

The biggest problem in WvW bar none is the lack of knowledge. You don’t know where your enemies are and you don’t know where your own team is going, save for those tagging along with commander. The only ways we can know what’s going on is to look for white and orange swords. Leaving scout to key locations to type their findings on team chat is clunky alternative.

My suggestion:
Change the structure of vision so that you see on the map everything that any player on your team sees. So if a scout sees a zerg moving on the canyon, everyone’s map would show the players as the scout sees them (red dots). If the scout tags along with the enemy zerg, the team would have longer vision of the zerg’s movements.

I think this suggestion would significantly move the focus towards player vs. player fights away from player vs. door fights. It would also intrinsically reward any work that scouts are doing and give incentive to break away from blob to have larger map coverage and control.

Being mainly a roamer (alone or with 2/3 people max usually in enemy BL) I do like the advantage I would get, but I don’t like helping big blobs killing my keeps easily on the other side.

If I understand correctly, white sword are an effect of “defend xxxx” event (the one with the 3 minutes timer)

How about use event scaling as a way to delay the sword?

Example
1 attacker -> event will never trigger, no sword, could be a way to reduce troll tags. People able to solo towers or keep are rewarded with some extra stealth.
2 -5 attackers -> event (or just swords) will trigger in 1 minute
6-10 -> 30 seconds
11-20 -> 15 seconds
Up tp 30 -> 10 seconds
More than 30 -> 5 seconds

This will also be an incentive for people to form small groups instead of constantly blobbing.

Zenith.6403:

My suggestion:
Change the structure of vision so that you see on the map everything that any player on your team sees. So if a scout sees a zerg moving on the canyon, everyone’s map would show the players as the scout sees them (red dots). If the scout tags along with the enemy zerg, the team would have longer vision of the zerg’s movements.

It should be somehow related to an interaction with the enemy to avoid trolls from exploiting it, but why not?

So does this change mean that anything with a waypoint won’t go contested unless there’s orange swords? Can anyone confirm?

In my opinion this is a complete mistake, there is absolutely no positive side to this. As people have already touched the other aspects I am just gonna say that this is not only negative for objective oriented gameplay: It would also gravely affect groups looking for fights/roamers. White Swords means there are people in this map. If I am roaming, I look for sentries and camps flipping. Seeing white swords on a camp is my beacon of light!

With this change in mind, scouting would become having people sit in every objective and check every door and wall all day long? That is cancerous.

Yeah this is not a good idea.

Actually it would be great if they did quite the opposite – make scouting easier. Like implement stationary sentry turrets in towers/keeps as a part of upgrade or guild buffs for example.

lordkrall.7241:

So a change that will force groups to split up and have scouts checking out towers and keeps in order to make sure that they can be defended?

Isn’t that basically what people have been demanding since release? A way to stop the zerg form just going from place to place and take stuff unopposed?

I for one think this will be a good change. Serious WvW guilds already have people scouting towers and keep so won’t really be that much of a difference.

Given enough time and patience I can solo a keep. It takes a lot of time but if no one is around it can be done. Take away white swords and I can take your garri and not have any issues. Give me 4 more people and this can be done easily. Off hours I could cap keeps that are full upgraded all the time.

If you think that this will make it harder for zergs then you haven’t thought this through. I can have the outer walls down without a defender knowing any better, and call in the zerg. Boom, t3 tower/keep taken. Stopping the zerg? Nah.

Some serious wvw guilds. Very few in lower tier servers (not t1/2) and even less in off horus. Any server with an advantage in off hours would steamroll even more.

Bad idea. Do not want.

lordkrall.7241:

Oh, I don’t know. I played on Underworld for quite some time, even after many of the guilds left.

And while true that the same guild might not be able to have one person per tower/keep having one player (doesn’t have to be a guildie) standing in there or at least walking between them shouldn’t really be that hard for any server with some sort of organization.

Have “fun” doing that when for 18h a day you don’t have enough players to have one in each tower/keep (not even talking about camps) unless the ennemy owns more than half of them on Bronze servers…
UW being what it is i even doubt you’ll be able to field that 2h a day while maintaining a decent strike force on 2+ maps….

And have even more “fun” finding people that want to :
- forfeit all sort of rewards forever (you don’t get ANYTHING scouting, not karma, wxp, xp, items, badges, NOTHING)
- spend their time running around a keep/tower and spending gold/badges and such sieging/upgrading (there is already at most 4/5 insane people like that on RoS that enjoy doing that, it’s barely enough to upgrade/siege keeps in home bl and EB, rest is “optionnal” and far less sieged, and it’s IF the night/day are relatively calm and things aren’t flipped too often, so on UW let me laugh at that idea…)
- still not able to do anything to stop any capping anyway with the speed it is being done at

Removing those markers is incredibly bad. No idea how any Dev could pick up that idea, unless they are the ones (aka the vast majority) who went on the mindlessly blobbing servers that don’t want fights, but want to ktrain without the ennemy having a single chance to fight back….

Swords, white and orange, needs to be retuned, there needs to be a varying delay depending on the number of assaulters, objectives shouldn’t be taggable by 1/2 people just killing a guard or two at most (more often than not, just dropping 2/3 aa on the gate), but removing them is utterly stupid and proves once again, that devs have no clue about their own game, and what people predicted about the “Adopt a Dev” program (that it would be an uttermost failure with 90% of the devs only sticking to T1/3, and picking the winning blobbing servers in those tiers too…) was spot on.

It’s sad.

And honestly, still don’t get why one of the great things of EotM (the vision/detection sentries) weren’t implemented in one form or another (a new line of upgrades for all towers/keeps with various ranges and duration maybe ? or make it a “buff” to be bought for 1h like siege for like 20/30 supplies in a tower or keep) in WvW.

It would make things far better.

Filovirus.6258:

lordkrall.7241:

Oh, I don’t know. I played on Underworld for quite some time, even after many of the guilds left.

And while true that the same guild might not be able to have one person per tower/keep having one player (doesn’t have to be a guildie) standing in there or at least walking between them shouldn’t really be that hard for any server with some sort of organization.

Have “fun” doing that when for 18h a day you don’t have enough players to have one in each tower/keep (not even talking about camps) unless the ennemy owns more than half of them on Bronze servers…
UW being what it is i even doubt you’ll be able to field that 2h a day while maintaining a decent strike force on 2+ maps….

And have even more “fun” finding people that want to :
- forfeit all sort of rewards forever (you don’t get ANYTHING scouting, not karma, wxp, xp, items, badges, NOTHING)
- spend their time running around a keep/tower and spending gold/badges and such sieging/upgrading (there is already at most 4/5 insane people like that on RoS that enjoy doing that, it’s barely enough to upgrade/siege keeps in home bl and EB, rest is “optionnal” and far less sieged, and it’s IF the night/day are relatively calm and things aren’t flipped too often, so on UW let me laugh at that idea…)
- still not able to do anything to stop any capping anyway with the speed it is being done at

Removing those markers is incredibly bad. No idea how any Dev could pick up that idea, unless they are the ones (aka the vast majority) who went on the mindlessly blobbing servers that don’t want fights, but want to ktrain without the ennemy having a single chance to fight back….

Swords, white and orange, needs to be retuned, there needs to be a varying delay depending on the number of assaulters, objectives shouldn’t be taggable by 1/2 people just killing a guard or two at most (more often than not, just dropping 2/3 aa on the gate), but removing them is utterly stupid and proves once again, that devs have no clue about their own game, and what people predicted about the “Adopt a Dev” program (that it would be an uttermost failure with 90% of the devs only sticking to T1/3, and picking the winning blobbing servers in those tiers too…) was spot on.

It’s sad.

And honestly, still don’t get why one of the great things of EotM (the vision/detection sentries) weren’t implemented in one form or another (a new line of upgrades for all towers/keeps with various ranges and duration maybe ? or make it a “buff” to be bought for 1h like siege for like 20/30 supplies in a tower or keep) in WvW.

It would make things far better.

My assumption on adopt a dev is they all joined the blob guilds who started to whine about being killed after a try on tier3 keep as it had white swords on this. Remove these and it will become eotm 2.0 – hell even worse. Esp for the lower populated worlds.

Edit: This will also open up more room for griefers and trolls if they got tired of their useless siege building. “30ppl on inner bay” – stuff like that.

I’ll bet a lot of people see that this will be bad for “less populated servers,” and don’t care. But the fact is even in T4, there are significant amounts of time where there not enough people to even place one in each tower and camp.

This idea is from the adopt-a-dev; what we see is the result of all those devs bandwagoning into T1.

Think about how big SM castle is and then think about how long it takes for someone with catapult mastery and a guild catapult to take down a wall. Now if 4 people did that from opposite sides of the castle, no white swords will be raised and any defender in the castle may find one or two but without the swords and a contested timer he may never find the other two.

There needs to be some form of swords on the map. It would be cool if a scout could trigger the swords or something like that.

I just can’t….Why would…I don’t…..

The stupid is so strong with this decision.

I agree, removing white swords would be bad. Knowing there is something going on promotes fights, while removing swords just seems to promote standing around watching for an enemy.

I could see delaying white swords for smaller groups as a good change, but removing them is a bad idea IMO.

I really hope they don’t take those swords away cause its going to start problems. As someone who plays in Anvil Rock (24th in NA) we barely have enough players to keep stuff on both EB and BL during prime and now you want to remove swords? For low tier population servers, these swords are essentially one of the two ways we have to keep track of where our enemy is going. Nobody wants to stand at a camp and watch over it, what fun is that. I can see this system working for gold tier but really this is going to screw up lower tiers.

Nope, no suggestions, no begging. We should just STOP banging our heads against this wall. I mean who are these guys listening to? Really? No white swords? Whose friggin bright idea was this? Literally, who verbalized it, or put it down on paper. I want their name. I want them FIRED. Immediately! STOP COMING UP WITH HORRIBLE THINGS TO DO TO WvW!

[quote=4494813;They should do this:

• The Winning/Highest Pop server pops swords on Losing/Lower Pop servers assets immediately.

• The Losing/Lower Pop server has the current delay when attacking the Winning/Higher Pop server.

• In a severe blowout, the Losing/Lower Pop server does not pop white swords at all when attacking.

• Remove white swords for taps. It takes a siege attack on a wall/gate or a certain amount of damage from players to pop white swords.

Anet would have to set the criteria that define Winning/High Pop and Losing/Low Pop. It could be based on total score, current PPT or population across all maps. Probably best if it were a combination of total score and current PPT.[/quote]

This is the best suggestion.

Having no white swords at all is a bad idea as not even the tier 1 servers can afford to scout all their keeps and towers 24h7. Scouting can get lonely and boring and it offers close to no rewards.

Deniara Devious.3948:

Scouting can get lonely and boring and it offers close to no rewards.

Close, it offers ABSOLUTELY NO rewards at all!

No reward = why bother.

It’s ok for t1 servers, they have enough people who can rotate with another player every 15 mins or so.
But for bronze server, it is never going to happen!

Why hang around doing nothing for hours getting no reward when you can be with your group killing, having fun, capping towers, getting xp, getting karma, getting rewards!

Sorry Anet but you designed WvW this way, removing white swords without compensation isnt gonna fix it!

That they think this would be a positive change just shows how out of touch Anet is with the current state of the game. It’s pretty sad.

At least scouts before had a decent chance to encounter action when moving to white swords. Now they’ll be either sitting in towers doing absolutely nothing the whole time. Even if it were rewarding, it’s not “gameplay.” Who’s gonna want to do this.

And again… many posters focussing on bronze servers being hurt by this. Not so. Borderlands defended by fewer than 10 people are the norm outside of primetime all the way up to mid-silver servers (maybe even higher).

Really there should be more sources of player detection, not less. The easier it is for players to find each other, the more fights there are. I’ve seen the obs sentry turrets used for that purpose in eotm before, but being eotm the resulting ‘fights’ were fights in name only.

I see a pattern here. Anet announces a really dumb feature. Players rage. Anet retracts plans and offers scraps. Players rejoice that Anet listens and thinks the scraps are a banquet. All is well until staleness becomes apparent again. Less people play. Rinse and repeat.

Implementing this would be bad. The only way I see this work, is that the leading server, has the same properties as current wvw (everything that’kitten, shows white swords to enemies). But nr 2 and nr 3 in ppt scoring, get a buff. ‘Call to arm’: your server is getting behind! Your enemie is getting reckless, and they won’t see contested structures anymore’. This means nr 2+3 can ninja a tower without contesting it, but Server 1 Cannot contest enemy structure without causing white swords. That’s the only way to balance wvw, and to make ‘being behind’ usefull. This also will make bandwagoning, being thought twice about. Since being close in score is much more exciting and can actually sometime in the match switch lead, wich means even more exciting times with the different ‘call to arms’ buff, on different servers.

This is a good thing! Instead of letting WvW lay on artificial life support they finally just pulled the plug!

KDXX.9520:

Nope, no suggestions, no begging. We should just STOP banging our heads against this wall. I mean who are these guys listening to? Really? No white swords? Whose friggin bright idea was this? Literally, who verbalized it, or put it down on paper. I want their name. I want them FIRED. Immediately! STOP COMING UP WITH HORRIBLE THINGS TO DO TO WvW!

Would like to know their names too bringing this idea up. Probably some mental disabled ones.

So do we get a CDI on this or will it be just a they do it and see what happens? Sounds like the latter so far.

I admit I am on the fence. It would favor the larger side, it would give more importance on the havoc groups job role and scouts, it still wouldn’t reward scouts since they would still have one of the more boring jobs of looking and potentially finding nothing, it might potentially break off some of the zerg (unless PPK becomes a higher value in points then it would do the opposite and mass people) and so fourth…

The question we would need a Dev to list out is what’s the end goal of removing the white swords, then people might also be able to offer other alternatives.

As a single quick example I run havoc at times, if the goal was to give my havoc more of a chance to take an objective against a larger force then tie the swords into something that I can attack and remove to blind the tower from reporting the swords. Maybe once all the forward guards are killed then the swords don’t spawn until a guard is back. That way I have to adjust my tactics to clear guards and then I can assault. The slight difference makes a difference though in keeping a balance.

In any change you have to make sure that attacking and defending have counter balances else you favor the assaulter only who in most cases outside of the havoc have the edge already and you would widen that edge. ‘Wait we just lost both southern towers and all the camps at the same minute time stamp! This is lost everyone jump maps home map is lost and we will just retake it.’ Sound familiar?

Like seeing WvW changes but am a little leary of quick changes unless the Adopt-A-Dev program were on all tiers and on both sides of the fights during the review. Either way appreciate their time in game and will say, Good hunting!

Just don’t remove it, anet. White swords are essential for finding fights, alarming people, giving you targets on the map.
By removing, you would force people to stay in their own part of the map, keeping them from fighting because of missing overview and most of all: You still don’t change anything about scouting and defending being unpopular and unrewarding as kitten.
Or just going ot for fights .. and everything will fall because no one is doing that unrewarding job. Which happens often.

I can already see future being like “Oopsi, keep is gone. Oh, tower is gone. Oh, everything is gone … lets go for karma/bags/whatever because we have nothing to hold anymore.”
I have NO CLUE how you got on that trip, really. Just don’t do this.

I believe this is the right direction, with a tweak. Only remove white swords for whoever is leading the scores at any one time. Done.

This incentivises the other two teams to attack the strongest side as was suggested a very long time ago.

Svarty.8019:

I believe this is the right direction, with a tweak. Only remove white swords for whoever is leading the scores at any one time. Done.

This incentivises the other two teams to attack the strongest side as was suggested a very long time ago.

Not really.
It just make said server being forced to play defensively, avoid fights, and never get out of objectives to keep their lead, hence burning out people out of boredom and killing WvW some more.

Encouraging people to avoid fights by hiding possibility of those, should NEVER happen in WvW.
You wand MORE ways of detecting/following ennemy players to confront them, not ways for them to go undetected, PvD some objective before defense can come, and then leave without a fight.

Filovirus.6258:

Svarty.8019:

I believe this is the right direction, with a tweak. Only remove white swords for whoever is leading the scores at any one time. Done.

This incentivises the other two teams to attack the strongest side as was suggested a very long time ago.

Not really.
It just make said server being forced to play defensively, avoid fights, and never get out of objectives to keep their lead, hence burning out people out of boredom and killing WvW some more.

Encouraging people to avoid fights by hiding possibility of those, should NEVER happen in WvW.
You wand MORE ways of detecting/following ennemy players to confront them, not ways for them to go undetected, PvD some objective before defense can come, and then leave without a fight.

Why not just show their dots on the map, then, if this is your vision of WvW?

It’s not mine.

I thought the goal was to fix WvW and to get more people into it. This change will make WvW even more frustrating. It’s amazing how ANet is pandering to high population servers.
If my memory doesn’t fail me white swords popped in the past instantly , then it was delayed by 30 seconds or so . We got the orange swords which popped for groups larger than 5 which was then changed to 25. All those changed were made after complains came from high pop servers.
Now the white swords are going to be removed completely. Every of those changes made it more difficult for lower population server. Never have I seen an idea so counter productive and nor have I seen the “ANet” tag during adopt a dev.
Then we have another forum thread about server imbalance this change is going to make it worse. At some point people are going to burn out and leave all together.

It sure is hard to stay positive. Seems like WvW is going to turn into EoM 2.0

What they need to do is remove the need for scouting at all. Yes I just said that. Players should not have to physically scout. It is BS that people who play a video game for enjoyment should have to spend hours and hours sitting at a defensive structure waiting to see if enemy come. If you disagree with me, I’m calling you a masochist. Scouting structures should be automated in some way, whether it be by upgrades to structures or some other sorts.

The removal of white swords is a striking change. It may either decrease or increase participation in WvW.

Compared to the whole bucket of “not a lot” that has been done for 2 years, change, even poorly thought out change, does have a percentage chance of helping.

This change would be right up there with allowing Siege to be sold on the TP and Golem mastery.

Removing white sword will give havoc groups a better chance at taking objectives. If the rewards for defending are not improved as well it will only make servers focus more on pvd or offensive instead of defense. Not every server has enough players to defend.

Their should be a scout post listing increase wxp for the scouts around the objective( x yds away from the cap). Limit it to a handful of scout based on the objective and make the scouting post a buff which you talk to the keep lord to get. A 15m timer which the keep lord can only hand out to x amount of player.