Guild Wars 2

Anet didn’t prevent server transfers before and during the season so that allowed for a lot of bandwagoners. I’d say yes it’s a disappointment.

well I learned a lot and enjoy the game more because of what I learned. Dunno if I should feel guilty about that. I wish I was better at jumping puzzles, since those are required for the money reward for the season, but it has been fun anyway.

I feel indifferent to the achievements:

1. It has got more players in which is double-edged due to queues.
2. It gives loot and good AP which are nice
3. The achievements aren’t done well as there are no defensive achievements for objectives or dolyaks. Nor are there any related siege building and objective upgrade achievements.

Season 1 bought an end to the extreme match ups (e.g. T1 facing T6 servers) which made it more interesting; double teaming was more prevalent than it would be in normal scenarios, which was surely an experience (which I can’t say much against having just played Battle of Fan Castle on Dynasty Warriors). Either way the battles were more interesting for me as it was competitive so I liked the league over the old match-ups.

The thing that’s really got me confused though is the fact it’s a league, yet there were 7 weeks. Ignoring Gold NA, add one more week and schedule it so that each server plays each other server in their division twice and we have a league. Take 2 weeks off and NA Gold faces each server twice. Yet we have 7 weeks, and for some reason still had some servers face each other 3 times. Granted I noticed it more as I’m in a server that’s facing BOTH 1st & 2nd three times, two of which are together. To me this randomness suggests luck of the draw, or in other words a cup. It’s more confusing because I noticed the first 4 weeks had every server having faced everyone else once, so it’s clear that even with the 7 week schedule we could have faced other servers once or twice only.

Looking forwards I hope that no matter how many servers “play dead”, a TRUE league is emplaced such that the top 2 from one division gets promoted and bottom two get relegated (within limits of course); and there is a fair tie breaker (i.e. 1st-2nd-3rd place results has: 1-1-1 > 0-3-0) for the next season. I also hope that there will be an 8 week schedule with each server facing each other twice at least in the vast majority of servers.

In summary, I’ve liked the addition of the league as match ups seem more logical; so in that respect SUCCESS. However it can be vastly improved in various ways with defensive achievements needing more focus or any and an 8 week schedule being introduced for starters.

PS. For the love of god get rid of the toxic alliance, especially in EB. In fact, anywhere not remotely close to the tower (hallucinations in Orr my *).

Fail because of

1. Movement of players to servers expected to win, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
2. Dropping of Nightmare tower content in halfway when the League was supposed to be entirely unaffected until the season ends.
3. Ridiculous requirements for the League achievements – you’re encouraging people to run circles capping ruins which might do nothing for the world if the world already owns Bloodlust, and run circles around the map killing random sentries for the lulz. Sentry, Ruin and Camp requirements should have been reduced, Tower, Keep, Player kill requirements should have been increased. SMC shouldn’t have been a requirement because certain small worlds simply cannot take SMC, let alone 5 times.

Locking players to worlds for the duration of the League, announcing matchups only at the start of the League after the server-lock, keeping new content the hell out of WvW and setting achievements which would have been earned in the course of normal WvW would have fixed these issues and turned it into a success.

It is a good start when you realize WvW = PvE.

Do not think it was something else or try to make it so and you are all good. You got to realize if there’s supply in tower anyone can use it however they seem fit. It is not your supply or your guilds supply or whatever. It’s just like.. PvE resource node.

It could use some gameplay balance (character vs character or group vs group) for sure but everything else no one should care too much.

gidorah.4960:

— but fixing population imbalance.

I am sure Devon would be happy to fix population imbalance for us. But how would they do it without upsetting whole lot of people.

They can not start merging servers or moving people around from server to server as they please after all. The only thing they can do is work on the matchmaking to get more evenly populated matches but even if they re-seed the matchmaking to that effect some time after it will start to rear its head again because the matchmaking algorithm can not adapt on its own when there are population shifts.

Yes I’d say it was a disappointment. We constantly got boring matchups instead of fun matchups with the normal usualy matchup system before.

Only think that would make up for this are hopefully the rewards where the lowest ranked servers also get some nice rewards for fighting. If they make too big differences in reward and reward the high coverage servers then no doubt a lot of people will leave the game – fighting for your server at low ranked server and fighting more than others at a high coverage server where some people might only play minimum to get achievements and then some big reward… that should not happen.

Season 1 made me quit WvW after about 3 weeks. If they do another season in a similar fashion I doubt I will come back until the new zone is in the game.

Anet have made to many mistakes in this game it is a wonder it is still playable.

Separate regional servers, free transfers lasting for a lot longer than they should have, glory hunters and now WvW season with achievements.

The fact we finally got a source of reasonable achievement points was great, but this has attracted the AP junkies to WvW taking up valuable spots. Some probably got into WvW but others were so obvious it was laughable. I remember the first week of the season, you would have the main zerg attacking and then behind then all huddled together were the AP leechers.

There is pretty much nothing Anet can do about the imbalances between tiers now people will just have to live with it and low tier servers try to recruit some guilds from high tiers to them. But even there you have problems deciding. Back when SoS was top server, they clearly had better coverage than the 2nd place server, yet SoS were still trying to recruit more and more people! Why would the #1 server at the time need more people?!

So this season allowed people to have fresh new matched each week, but the imbalances are still there even between the bottom two tiers.

I think what Anet could try is to categorize the servers, make some WvW servers, other PvE/PvP/RP; but then that brings in the issues of when a player may want to do something else other than what the server mainly is.

So I dont think anyone will be happy whatever Anet try to do, because the mess is just so way out of hand already that it’s probably better to leave it as it is.

Xillllix.3485:

GvG is what Guild Wars 2 need.

This.

After all the game is called Guild Wars..not Server Wars.

It’s a disappointment for me.

We now have the worst part of PvE (kill X this, collect X that, go X times there) in PvP. Instead of promoting PvP Season 1 promoted farming. Farming to gain WXP to stay competitive, farming to get ascended materials to stay competitive, farming for the sake of farming.

The game should be called Zerg Wars 2.

I’ve been easing off the game myself at this point, which is ironic because I just got my ascended weapon. The game itself, is insanely fun, the art is great and visually rich. The rules are atrocious and feel very punishing as opposed to challenging. From this I’m guessing some of the developers / programmers are probably getting tormented with us and are really not to blame for the chaos in the game, else you would see it in the quality. I’m pretty sure there is 1 person or a small clique making the rules this ‘painful’ at this point. No developer in their right mind would make such amazing battle grounds – then encourage inbalanced fights, or unfair logistics… that just doesn’t make sense. That would be like picasso making a beautiful painting then tormenting people who want to see it. I’m sure developers are suffering also because they are taking slack for something that isn’t their call.

The season has had the unexpected effect of shaking up a lot of servers. A lot got transfers and a lot lost people.
This season seems to have been ultimately harmful to long-time/hardcore players’ morale.
There is going to be an uncomfortable meeting where the devs will have to talk about the huge drop in participation following the season.

Read the thread, a bunch of good points imo are said:

- New WvW achievements doesn’t encourage organized teamwork and defense. (Sentries? Merc camps? Taking over SM 5 times?)
- Server transfers is double edged. We have people ditching top servers to get less queue/more challenge, and have people ditching low pop severs to “win?” instead of getting stomped all the time. There seem to be as many as the former as the latter group so it can’t really be a negative.
-Inherent problems with WvW – it mostly usually comes down to how big each server is. Which usually result to just terrible matchups where servers can repeatedly get stomped or roll over others. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a simple solution to this, so I suppose we’re just whining without offering constructive criticism.

Adding freaking PVE achievements into WvW was a pupping failure as result of this activity National servers get advantage over multinational servers.

How about for Season WvW play your guild must have i dunno 1 000 000 000 kills in total / 100 000 WvW ranks in total or w/e so that your players get inside in priority.

YES FAILURE

Yes, for me it’s a failure.

This season is killing my server. We were always between 10th and 7th before the season (EU). We had the choice to fail on purpose and go in Silver league, or fight “normally” and stay in Gold. We decided to play “fair” and to go in Gold.
And we had terrible match up : we met several time the 1st, 2nd and 3rd server of the pre-season. We were hoping for a “fair” match between the 9th, 8th and 7th…. but no.

So we have been fighting for weeks against server with more time coverage. Our “defensive” guilds have now left our server, because they were upset… We lost 3 guilds in the last 2 weeks. Did they go on SFR or Vs because we were too bad ? Nope, on bronze…

Meanwhile, our former opponents (10th, 11th..)who failed on purpose in order to be in Silver have really easy Mu, and are too powerful for the other ones.

There is a “gap” in every league : the 6 first servers of gold have more population and time coverage than the 3 last one, and the 4 first servers of Silver are stronger than the other one.

We need league made with 6 servers, not 9 (impossible with 27 servers I know..) …. or change the scoring system.

As an experiment, there is no “fail”.
Preparation
It was announced that the top servers would receive better rewards than the lower placed servers – encouraging people to stack up on already full servers.

Method
Servers were divided into huge chunks with some servers who were not populated over night being constantly matched up with the top three teams in their league. The matchups were not fair, or fun, much of the time.

Result
The predicted servers won. Players became apathetic towards the scores and objectives and became more interested in zerging around trying to batter nightcapping enemies.
Conclusion
Some servers have more people than others and at wildly varying times of the day or night. The devs should make a topic to discuss it with the community or something…

they succeeded in kitten ing off a lot of people and ruining a bunch of server communities

Svarty.8019:

As an experiment, there is no “fail”.
Preparation
It was announced that the top servers would receive better rewards than the lower placed servers – encouraging people to stack up on already full servers.

Method
Servers were divided into huge chunks with some servers who were not populated over night being constantly matched up with the top three teams in their league. The matchups were not fair, or fun, much of the time.

Result
The predicted servers won. Players became apathetic towards the scores and objectives and became more interested in zerging around trying to batter nightcapping enemies.
Conclusion
Some servers have more people than others and at wildly varying times of the day or night. The devs should make a topic to discuss it with the community or something…

Says it all.

*votes for complete failure*

I vote fail.

Maybe if the increased the rewards, you would see some ppl from PVE change into WvWers.

jalmari.3906:

It is a good start when you realize WvW = PvE.

Do not think it was something else or try to make it so and you are all good. You got to realize if there’s supply in tower anyone can use it however they seem fit. It is not your supply or your guilds supply or whatever. It’s just like.. PvE resource node.

It could use some gameplay balance (character vs character or group vs group) for sure but everything else no one should care too much.

I don’t know what your statements have to do with the topic but I’m gonna rant at you anyway. Your right it’s not my supply or my guilds supply – it’s my servers supply. If it’s going to hurt my server to take it and use it on a wall (that’s almost upgraded to boot) then guess what – that would make me a <insert something unsavory>. That was a big part of the problem with the season achievments.

The only thing that bugs me is the server numbers imbalance. I don’t know if its good for any server.

When people get stomped they either transfer to a top server causing even a greater imbalance or they stop playing WvW as much. Either way its a lose/lose situation.

Right now SoS seems evenly matched with Maguuma, and both of us are completely outnumbered by SoR, JQ, TC and BG.

I enjoyed it before this league setup because at least we had weeks where we weren’t a punching bag for the top 4 and had some interesting fights where our numbers were more evenly matched.

IMO a nice idea, badly implemented. Where in the universe would you find a ‘league’ where 1 team are able to field 2, 3, 4 times the number of players than the opposition?

Hey dominant server, have 3 stacks of bloodlust 90% of the time to give you a boost.

Hey, losers, you are outmanned, have a boost to your magic find and xp, it will really help you and balance things out.

Season 1? Wrong on so many levels.

Agreed to the OP

Agreed if only because i found myself going out of my way to complete some dumb achievements for a good while. DPSing gates when other people with mastery are better at it, doing JPs for no other reason than having them done, tagging every camp/tower/keep in sight not to miss out when/if it flips. Not even talking about the ruins circling cap trains… Fancy scouting/defending/upgrading for a change of pace? Sure, and in addition to less lootbags/xp/karma you can add no meta achievement too. Yawn.

Apart from the stupid achievement filter deciding whether you contributed enough or not and increasing queues exponentially for the first 2/3 weeks, i fail to see what the league/season system has brought to the table.

Well FA got pretty bloated with transfers, though the queues are lessening a bit now they are easily 2-3 times as bad as they were pre-league. Karma training is now the norm not something that happens on thursday-night or friday before reset. So while their milkshake has brought a lot of people to the wvw(Which I am sure will have Anet labeling it a success. If more participation was the goal then it indeed worked.) I would say it was an inferior product to what we had before. Not a lot of reason to fight the queues not with so many other games in my library. I like playing games not waiting for queues.

I don’t think the season is a failure at all, I’m glad to see more people coming out to play and the achievements make wvw more rewarding.

I think there are plenty of things that could be improved though. A couple of things come to mind:

1. server imbalances
2. relative lack of achievements that incentivise defense and support play.

I think for Season Two they need to make a few changes:
1. Lock server transfers for a week or two prior to the start.
2. TAKE THE DARN ACHIEVEMENTS OUT OF IT (caps intended). All the PVE’ers flooding the maps with no clue what they were doign. I think that really hurt the WvW match ups with the extremely long queues in the first 4.5 weeks, then the lack of normal WvW’ers weeks 4.5 – today.

edited the second point

If my expectations of season 1 was to have 7 weeks of blowouts and getting facerolled by BG and JQ while a bunch of PvErs work against the server because achieves is what is important to them then no it is not a disappointment.

Like everything Anet has done with the game, the idea and intentions are good but the execution is downright (insert censored word here).

FAILURE.

Worse matchups than before, busted server communities, smaller servers getting absolutely destroyed every time, increased gold : gem ratio, disorganized units, pre-announced matchups, servers/guilds intentionally throwing matches, longer queue times on higher-tier servers, and even class imbalances vs zergs. I could go on and on.

The #1 servers and the high-end of the low servers saw almost no changes, however the middle tiers and those in the low-high and very bottom got absolutely destroyed by the season update. I’d much rather fight the same server week after week if the fights are good than get stomped by a different server or stomp another server week after week just because we’re forced into playing other servers.

I have no problem with losing, however unfair matchups have totally killed this format for me – and WvW is almost the entire reason why I joined this game. Stomping/being stomped are not fun; there’s no challenge in either, for it’s either easymode kills or an impossible obstacle that no matter how well-organized and skilled your side may be, having less coverage and fewer numbers makes the task just not feasible.

I feel like I’m going to miss it.

Vimtor.5483:

“The Season 1 is a failure overall”. Do you agree?*

IMO yes, server stacking and ridiculous amounts of achievement hunting drained the fun of contest for me, ideally skill lag, hacking and various other bugs would have been fixed before WvW was ready for season #1.

Bet the reward is terrible too.

Eh, the only thing wrong with having ‘Seasons’ in WvW is that it seems to highlight competition in a game mode that is really dominated by which server spends more time online.

Yes, there have been a lot of steps made to make population imbalance matter less, but with a huge map that is open 24/7, there’s no getting around the simple fact that the server with more people online more often will dominate.

There are some good fights that go on during the day, but the game is still full of so many people that have so little idea of what they are doing or how it contributes to the server’s overall performance that judging a server based on performance is really ridiculous.

The achievement grind probably influenced the outcome of some matchups, especially during the first two weeks. It could have been benefical if at least the achievements hadn’t appeared so grindy.

fail. remove pve from wvw

Yes, it was putting a Band-Aid over a bullet wound. They thru in some achievements and the promise of an end-of-the-season chest into WvW. Basically, a distraction attempt from the real problem with WvW – population imbalance regarding the matchup system.

And for a lot of people, it has been very disappointing as they were roflstomped weekly and found out they can’t get their achievements done. So no chest prize for these 3rd world server folks.

So, yeah, I’m disappointed.

I was quite pleased with Seasons 1. It was a bit disappointing that SoR gave up (even though they had the potential AND the coverage to fight BG and JQ). Now their server is going to die, which is unfortunate. It was also disappointing that JQ chose to not show up, despite their equal coverage, we could have had some really great fights.

The fact that they added the ability for us to control boon sharing and combo fields was a HUGE step for WvW. Also the MASSIVE reduction to “skill lag” was fantastic, and has made WvW infinitely more enjoyable.

In hindsight:
-Matches need to not be RNG, JQ had a pretty easy time through leagues, facing t2 servers more than SoR and BG.
-It’s painfully obvious when playing T2 servers that we need to do something to split pve and wvw servers up so that wvw population can be regulated better.
-NO LIVING STORY IN WVW, especially not during leagues. These toxic things are stupid.
-I still think dolyaks should be able to be upgraded to have more defenses, HP, and armor. It’s silly how easy it is to kill 1 dolyak, even when it’s defended and you’re outnumbered by the defenders.
-better rewards (Still have yet to see the rewards, but I am not expecting much judging from the past, I could be surprised though!)

Seasons is a good idea, however there is room for significant improvement, primarily just in the case of imbalances:

1. Imbalances – Currently players are responsible for balancing the worlds, which means they will never really be balanced. Anet can create something closer to balance by intelligently placing players into teams for each matchup or season. i.e. 1 week before the start of the season, players all first identify which guild they wish to represent in WvW, then the guild leader registers the guild for that season, then after the end of the registration period, each player and guild is assessed based on their past WvW experience (achievements), their typical logon hours, etc. Based on this information, Anet can then spread the guilds out into teams such that the higher ranking guilds aren’t all placed onto the same teams, plus matching up different times zones such that there shouldn’t be any 1 time zone that is overly dominated by 1 team due to the lack of coverage. Any player/guild that did not register for the season would just enter into a separate ‘casual’ WvW matchup unrelated to the season, while the rest enter and represent the team they were assigned to and would not be able to change guilds or teams until after the end of the season. No new players would be allowed into the WvW season matchup after the start of the season.
2. Zerging – No matter what, it’s a natural progression for players to team up, with more encouragement for more rather than less. Why send 5 men to take an objective when 50 can do it much easier and faster? The game was designed for zerging. Not that I’m recommending it, but if you want to making zerging harder, make it so friendly players can collide with other friendies. That would become so frustrating after awhile that there would still be large groups, but they would be spread out more just to avoid bumping into each other.
3. Achievements – I see nothing wrong with achievements. Sure, there were a bunch of PvErs that came in just to do the achievements, but then that is one way to actually recruit more players into WvW. Problem is, most WvWrs didn’t necessarily take it as a good thing and instead helped make the PvErs feel so unwelcome that they may have intentionally began to grief or simply not help the team. Contrary to popular belief, we were all PvErs at some point in our gaming life, whether it was in this game or some other game. It’s important to try to get more players involved in PvP/WvW so as to make your team that much stronger and to keep both alive and active. That being said, a guild/player ranking system and placement into teams as I am suggesting, would go along way to alleviating any issues with players just going in for achievements. How? Because these players are not likely to have high WvW ranks based on their past WvW experience, then they too would be evenly spread between teams such that each team would have nearly equal ‘hindrances’ of those achievement hunters.

I’m going to say YES it was a disappointment. Mainly due to the fact that it caused so much bandwagoning that it killed a ton of server communities. I would have rather everyone who does the meta gets the reward chest, then 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, get a slightly better reward IN ADDITION TO the meta chest. I don’t like the idea that the meta achievement chest scales based on the servers performance. “The reason my server did so poorly in our league is because all our major guilds kittened out and went to the easy servers”

It was a disappointment. Brought out the worst in people. Siege trolls, spies, buying of guilds, flocking to the winning server, hackers. It killed so many servers.

Season 1: an overall failure? Well, I can’t say it’s been a success, or even a great experience, so I have to toss a yes vote.

Personally, the biggest reason I feel S1 deserves an “F” is that the red carpet was rolled out before the stage was ready. Queues were already a significant issue. A big season launch without an overflow map in place was an incredibly bad decision and resulted in damaged and frequently non-existent experiences for thousands of players.

Yeah. Season 1 is horrible.

Servers died and the end result was one, maybe one and a half good match so far. Ironically, it was the same match we were playing during ladder every week. Whodathunk?

Krypto.2069:

Yes, it was putting a Band-Aid over a bullet wound. They thru in some achievements and the promise of an end-of-the-season chest into WvW. Basically, a distraction attempt from the real problem with WvW – population imbalance regarding the matchup system.

And for a lot of people, it has been very disappointing as they were roflstomped weekly and found out they can’t get their achievements done. So no chest prize for these 3rd world server folks.

So, yeah, I’m disappointed.

My server got ROFL Stomped every week (Eredon Terrace) and yet look I’m now a Veteran of the Mists. Don’t blame the server or the rules, blame yourself for not playing well enough.

CattivoUomo.7198:

3. Achievements – I see nothing wrong with achievements. Sure, there were a bunch of PvErs that came in just to do the achievements, but then that is one way to actually recruit more players into WvW. Problem is, most WvWrs didn’t necessarily take it as a good thing and instead helped make the PvErs feel so unwelcome that they may have intentionally began to grief or simply not help the team. Contrary to popular belief, we were all PvErs at some point in our gaming life, whether it was in this game or some other game.

It’s this WvW Elitism that really ticks me off. Glad to see someone else call it out.

I guess people need to open their reward chests to make up their minds.

Disappointing… no because most of the players here predicted exactly how it would go and it went exactly as people expected it would. There were zero upsets as to who would make top 3 in each tier. Some servers swapped places but that isn’t really an upset.

Disappointed… yes because it went just as everyone expected. Numbers ruled the day and blowouts were common in Gold/Silver. If there is another league I am headed to bronze where the matches looked pretty close and probably a lot more fun.

Season 1 had been great. A much needed improvement imo.

When 1 server in each match up is 150,000+ Points ahead of the other 2 servers in that match up, the WvWvW season is a complete Failure.

There is no challenge, no chance of winning (unless you are on a server that can Queue a BL and knock out the competition with outnumbered), then you have the worst of the worst players that are using Movement Hacks to get into fully upgraded Garrisons, Bay’s, and Hills to port their 30+ Zerg in to cap in less then 1min.

You have players that want to ‘duel’ in WvW, and when you kill them (Hey, they are Red, it means they are Dead), you get nasty messages from the players involved, even if you ‘follow’ their rules and not attack those dueling, they end up in a camp and kill your Guild Claimer…

The WvWvW season is complete BS right now, and it just needs to end. Once and For all.

No more Seasons, no more WvWvW competition. Until Anet figures a better way to handle and Police WvW.

we need a way to vote kick players that are see cheating/hacking in the VERY LEAST from WvW.