Guild Wars 2

I for one am glad this is being done, namely for the reason of a dominating team can keep it’s domination by simply having the orbs, or at least giving them an unneeded edge in a fight that’s generally already one sided.

I posted this reply in another forum, but I think that it should be said here too.

An easy fix to this is that every server starts with their own orb, and the other teams can only capture the orb, but not receive benefits from that orb. This way no server could ever have more than 1 orb. This would still allow for a bonus but not a huge bonus; however, allow the other servers to recapture the orb and continue to be able to move it around too. I like the idea of having a orb bonus, I do believe that the orbs will keep the borderlands important to the overall WvW system. This idea would also reduce the impact of hackers/scum to the WvW gameplay system.

Good! Even though we’ve owned the orb, I am sick of the cheaters hacking them.

Please put orbs back into the game with zero bonuses attached to them.

Make them purely honor objectives.

Keep the orb buff symbol but give no coded benefit other than the symbol itself.

That way people can fight over the orbs and have the pride of owning them.

dirtyklingon – I checked 3 videos on that link you posted and what you were saying is a complete lie (no surprise to me). At no point were you fighting 3 orbs vs 0 orbs. In 2 videos your team had an orb (how many I don’t know, the icon was there) and in 3rd video you didn’t have the orb but neither did enemy you were fighting.

You mentioned fighting under outmanned buff and didn’t mention the fact that in actual battles your group was heavily outnumbering enemy players, and in few cases numbers were equal (at which point I notice huge amount of enemy players being under lvl80).

I did not notice any actual tactics in these videos other than standard zerging. There was certainly no cooperation visible to me from party or guild members.

In short, just a waste of my time proving to myself what I knew before even watching these videos.

What I would do is turn the orbs into a two edged sword:

- Give them a point value, and a fairly high one; perhaps something in the 50-70 zone.

- At the same time, give the server that is holding the orb a penalty (or give the other two servers a bonus, it adds up to the same thing).

The intent would be to force any server that wants to win to get the orbs, but at the same time make it easier for the other servers to attack whoever holds the orb.

Apart from the usual ways to give a debuff to the server that has the orb, or to give a buff to whoever doesn’t have it, another idea for making life hard to the server that holds the orb would be to make the orbs into something a NPC faction wants back; whoever has the orb has to deal with increasing NPC attacks on his holdings in that borderland, attacks that the other servers should be able to exploit to their advantage. It could also affect the EB; for example. if a server gets a second orb it would have to deal with mild NPC attacks in EB, which would increase in intensity if the server holds all three orbs.

The game needs the orbs in some form. It feels stale without them.

Relentliss.2170:

The game needs the orbs in some form. It feels stale without them.

I agree, the orbs need to be there in some form. Since they were removed, I’ve spent maybe 20 minutes total in the border lands, as those zones feel less important without the orbs. Eternal Battlegrounds is the only zone with a solid objective now.

I always felt like the outmanned buff and orb buffs were some clown’s coding mistake anyways, and were intended to be swapped. If your team is ahead, and you have all 3 orbs…you don’t need a huge stat buff to help you keep winning. The orb buff should have always been a non-combat buff…like say, oh I dunno, increased loot/karma/magic find?

And if the population distribution is dire enough to give you the outmanned buff, your stats should be increased proportionate to the population difference. Like if you are outmanned 2:1, you get a 15% increase to everything. If you’re 3:2 = 10%, 4:3 = 5%, etc. Similar to the “catch up” feature in racing games, where the losing player gets a slight speed boost to keep the race competitive.

good riddance, the flaw of orbs was pointed out from the get-go.

Mmm, although I love orbs being out of play, it would’ve been cool if you just switched the buffs it gives. As someone else said, the orbs could have just increased Magic Find and Gold dropped by enemies.

Just chiming in to say I applaud ANet finally doing something about the orbs. I agree with EasymodeX when he said this probably won’t change who wins the match in most cases, as they won for other reasons like better coverage or more numbers in general. Still, there’s no reason to make the strong stronger. WvW isn’t a MOBA where deadlock needs to be avoided.

so 2k hp and 7% more in a random stat is being overpower? are u guys serious? :facepalm:

orbs are fine, the only problem is that they can be exploitable by wall/flying/speed/wathever hack

possible solution? keep the orb as a static object and put the bonus (lowered if QQ is too much as i can see in this reply..) on the keep itself (like garrison) , with 1 more tier of upgrade/harder to take..

For me this was a balance issue which got fixed

However it goes to show ANET listens to the community then go and do thier own thing

Swapping the outmanned buff with the Orbs buff was a brilliant idea from the community. What did ANET do? They just took it away completely. (Theres been so many kittented community ideas, but that one was actually really good)

If the orbs lowered repair/siege/upgrade costs by 5% each as well – that would be amazing

Not really that impressed. However getting rid of the extra 150power from a 3orbed backstab thief stacking might (Which is able to achieve far more than 50% crit damage) in an already dominating server was needed

WvW need some love.

What happened to Habib anyway?

I almost thought that they were gonna remove it for real.. until I realized that post was 10 months ago.

Habib Loew.6239:

~Snip~ As implemented, orbs tend to strengthen teams who are already winning and make it even more difficult for underdog teams to fight back.

I still don’t have a vote whether I feel this way, but from what I’ve heard from people, is certainly what he stated above.

The winning servers seem satisfied though. I won’t jump to conclusions however. This might need to settle down to get an accurate reflection on whether not this is beneficial to WvW.

Haha, nice find. Now that they are an “e-sport” they needed to try and force more people out of WvW into sPvP. Funny, but I still don’t like capturing points.

But hey, if you want a balanced PvP game that can only be found in sPvP.

Moka.9641:

I almost thought that they were gonna remove it for real.. until I realized that post was 10 months ago.

I was all excited, til I saw november

I want habib back, he seemed like a cool guy.

Le Rooster.8715:

I want habib back, he seemed like a cool guy.

Habib knew what was right.

What happened to Habib? He seemed to be the only Anet employee with a brain. I want him back.

Habib Loew.6239:

After a careful reevaluation of orbs of power we have decided to remove them from WvW in an upcoming build. As implemented, orbs tend to strengthen teams who are already winning and make it even more difficult for underdog teams to fight back. In addition, the current implementation seems to be irresistible to hackers/cheaters and will require significant modification to prevent cheaters from having an unfortunately large impact on the state of any given WvW game. Under the circumstances we believe that removing orbs completely is a better choice than attempting an in-place redesign/re-implementation as it will immediately put a stop to all orb hacking. It is likely that orbs, or some orb-like mechanic, will return at some point in the future, but only after we are confident that they will not exhibit the sorts of issues that we see with orbs today.

Why did the impact on underdogs get mentioned ahead of the other problems with the orbs?
Was that just random? Or is there a reason why that issue was first on the list?