Guild Wars 2

I just returned to the game at the start of the season, and I’ve enjoyed it.

Another season absolutely requires better matchups.
~would a fourth division help? A fifth?
~play every other team an equal number of times ( as closely as can be managed )
Rewards/Achievements are good, but need tweaking
~jumping puzzles in WvW always mystified me. (I probably won’t get the meta cause I can’t be kitten d to do these things when I could be battling it out)
~where’s the reward for defending stuff?
Transfers need handling way better.
~lockout of wvw for x amount of time?
~different transfer prices based on server rank?

It’s funny ( in a sad kind of way ) how many of the problems were the same at release ( I was on HoD then ) , however I do think leagues are a positive step overall.

six hour queue.
finally get into borderland.
outnumbered buff.
friends are still in queue.

Not much else need be said. If you’re looking to make sure the season 1 is a success, you can start by making sure there isn’t a mechanic (or “bug”) in place arbitrarily limiting the number of players on one side.

Lol of course all the people that lost are going to say that this season was kittenty.

Gilgamesh.7364:

Lol of course all the people that lost are going to say that this season was kittenty.

It’s not the fact that they lost, it’s the fact that they had 0 chances of winning (or even improving upon their rank) no matter how hard they pulled together and fought due to awfully unbalanced matchups. The entire outcome of Season 1 was determined on the first day which makes the idea of a competitive season pointless.

Julie Yann.5379:

Gilgamesh.7364:

Lol of course all the people that lost are going to say that this season was kittenty.

It’s not the fact that they lost, it’s the fact that they had 0 chances of winning (or even improving upon their rank) no matter how hard they pulled together and fought due to awfully unbalanced matchups. The entire outcome of Season 1 was determined on the first day which makes the idea of a competitive season pointless.

This right here. There were a few upsets luckily (EB and YB forcing SBI into 3rd), but overall the season was pointless. Those with low coverage in Silver had no chance of winning, those with medium coverage had no chance of getting higher than 4th. Really no point in how they were set up.

Part of the fault is in the achievements.

There’s no “Take or defend X” there’s only “take x”. So people often let enemies get the locations so they can capture them back.

There’s no “get bloodlust for your world”, only “get ruins”. So people got ruins and promptly abandoned them.

There’s no “score for you world”, so people ignored the score timer as just captured whenever.

Just “break walls or gates” not “Be among those who broke walls of gates on a location that got captured”.

Just “repair” not “repair structures that got defended”.

Just “take mercenary camps” not “take or destroy mercenary camps”.

The achievements must be designed to encourage victory. To give points to those who do things that directly help with victory. Instead, they can be perfectly done while letting your world lose.

RyuDragnier.9476:

Julie Yann.5379:

Gilgamesh.7364:

Lol of course all the people that lost are going to say that this season was kittenty.

It’s not the fact that they lost, it’s the fact that they had 0 chances of winning (or even improving upon their rank) no matter how hard they pulled together and fought due to awfully unbalanced matchups. The entire outcome of Season 1 was determined on the first day which makes the idea of a competitive season pointless.

This right here. There were a few upsets luckily (EB and YB forcing SBI into 3rd), but overall the season was pointless. Those with low coverage in Silver had no chance of winning, those with medium coverage had no chance of getting higher than 4th. Really no point in how they were set up.

In a perfect world, all the servers would have the same amount of people logging into WvWvW on every single server… But this simply is never going to happen.

Sucks that those at the bottom of their tiers never stood a chance, but there’s nothing that can be done about it.

Vimtor.5483:

And here’s the bottomline: “The Season 1 is a failure overall”. Do you agree?

Yes.

The league/matchmaking system was/is extremely flawed. I can only hope that next time they’ll increase the leagues to 4 and use the data from this season to better match the servers in season 2.

Server: Riverside [DE]
season failed because of bad matchups. my server can only compete on weekends, rest of the week no chance in gold league. its a problem if your server is too good for silver league, but too bad for gold league

I think Seasons were a complete success. I like the way A-Net did things and I hope they don’t change that much for Season 2!!!

Overall, yes, but the amount of QQ generated by the SBI/YB/EBay matchup was worth all the unbalanced, awful, nightcapping, supply cheating, hacking, poor sportsmanship BS.

I would say that pairing FA and SBI with any silver league server was a pretty huge disappointment.

Lina.9640:

Overall, yes, but the amount of QQ generated by the SBI/YB/EBay matchup was worth all the unbalanced, awful, nightcapping, supply cheating, hacking, poor sportsmanship BS.

Hehehe. Agreed.

Lina.9640:

Overall, yes, but the amount of QQ generated by the SBI/YB/EBay matchup was worth all the unbalanced, awful, nightcapping, supply cheating, hacking, poor sportsmanship BS.

I wonder how high on the list of “biggest WvW upsets” it would rank

As a person from a “mid-ranked” Bronze server, I’d say the following (for NA servers):

The concept itself is workable, but needs some fine-tuning. For example, I had originally questioned the first-stated idea of 2 Leagues of 12 servers per (3 of 8 was shot down due to math errors on my end, but I had also suggested 4 of 6 servers per League).

At this rate, it could work a lot better if:

• 4 Leagues, 6 servers apiece. This would at least somewhat smooth over the population issues in most cases.
• FREEZE transfers, starting 1-2 weeks prior to a Season, and ending after the same amount of time post-season.
• Modify the Achievements to account for all aspects of WvW: offense/defense, solo/small group as opposed to full-scale zerg.
• If you’re going to add things like Toxic critters, why not work that in, as a warfare objective. Note, the points from such a thing don’t need to be obscene, just a bit of icing on the cake.
• You should also alter the Season length to account for possible matchups overall.
  I’m sure a lot of servers kept running into 1 or 2 opponents, and almost never running into others. An example from my League was the much-wanted SF/ET/FC grudge-rematch.

Overall, I (as someone who admittedly didn’t WvW as much) would give this first season a"C" average. There are issues, still, but I don’t believe that they are impossible to surmount.

Advent.6193:

• FREEZE transfers, starting 1-2 weeks prior to a Season, and ending after the same amount of time post-season.

Punish players who just want to transfer servers? It’d be good enough to just not offer a transfer discount… 800 gems only just to pile up on blackgate? Redonculous.[/quote]

MithranArkanere.8957:

Part of the fault is in the achievements.

There’s no “Take or defend X” there’s only “take x”. So people often let enemies get the locations so they can capture them back.

There’s no “get bloodlust for your world”, only “get ruins”. So people got ruins and promptly abandoned them.

There’s no “score for you world”, so people ignored the score timer as just captured whenever.

Just “break walls or gates” not “Be among those who broke walls of gates on a location that got captured”.

Just “repair” not “repair structures that got defended”.

Just “take mercenary camps” not “take or destroy mercenary camps”.

The achievements must be designed to encourage victory. To give points to those who do things that directly help with victory. Instead, they can be perfectly done while letting your world lose.

As much as I loved season1, there is always room for improvement… This post was an excellent post, oh and btw my server didn’t “win”.

Cottontail.8526:

Advent.6193:

• FREEZE transfers, starting 1-2 weeks prior to a Season, and ending after the same amount of time post-season.

Punish players who just want to transfer servers? It’d be good enough to just not offer a transfer discount… 800 gems only just to pile up on blackgate? Redonculous.

No, I think he means making it so that you can transfer servers, but you won’t be able to enter WvW for that server, probably lock you into your old server’s WvW. Meaning a WvW lock, but all other aspects of transferring (such as having that as the server you start on) will be available.

Cottontail.8526:

Advent.6193:

• FREEZE transfers, starting 1-2 weeks prior to a Season, and ending after the same amount of time post-season.

Punish players who just want to transfer servers? It’d be good enough to just not offer a transfer discount… 800 gems only just to pile up on blackgate? Redonculous.

I figured a 1-2 week dropoff would at least help to lessen stacking. Fact is, nothing will actually stop server bandwagoning, without either:

• Making the cost of transfers so astronomically high that most players’ll stick to their own servers. This is an undesired option, and would shaft folks something fierce.

or

• Scaling any and all points/awards proportional to a server’s WvW population relative to the population of their enemies. That would be more complex, and probably a mass annoyance for any coders involved, but at least could account for Small Server “X” getting farmed and spawncamped by Large Server “Y” for “Z” period of time, and still soldiering on regardless.

Note that I don’t claim to have all the answers, merely suggestions that might (or might not) help out.

EDIT: RyuDragnier’s idea could also work. Thing is, is it (with current code) possible to pull off? It’d at least manage to deal with the server-stacking biz, if you could lock WvW status, but not punish a person’s choices for pure PvE.

I was away for most of it, been back the last 2 weeks, but honestly it feels exactly the same as WvW did before.

I am really not sure what having seasons and leagues changed.

Gilgamesh.7364:

RyuDragnier.9476:

Julie Yann.5379:

Gilgamesh.7364:

Lol of course all the people that lost are going to say that this season was kittenty.

It’s not the fact that they lost, it’s the fact that they had 0 chances of winning (or even improving upon their rank) no matter how hard they pulled together and fought due to awfully unbalanced matchups. The entire outcome of Season 1 was determined on the first day which makes the idea of a competitive season pointless.

This right here. There were a few upsets luckily (EB and YB forcing SBI into 3rd), but overall the season was pointless. Those with low coverage in Silver had no chance of winning, those with medium coverage had no chance of getting higher than 4th. Really no point in how they were set up.

In a perfect world, all the servers would have the same amount of people logging into WvWvW on every single server… But this simply is never going to happen.

Sucks that those at the bottom of their tiers never stood a chance, but there’s nothing that can be done about it.

In a perfect world a game designer would not be so reluctant to give the players exactly how the que and population works. Right now it’s bugged and therefore allows high population servers to have more players on a map than lower, while the lower has people in que. It’s insane how protective they are on how these numbers per map work.

Not the best place to do a poll like that, people on the forums tend to whine about everything.

If you really want an objective post, go into WvW itself, ask around during many times of day and night and get statistics from there, not from the forums where you can even find people that play the game 1 hour per 2 days, complaining that they can’t keep up with 2000+ rank players.

My 2 cents though, are that Season 1 was awesome. Beautiful, competitive, intense and it can even get more and more awesome. If there’s one thing that I have high expectations of, in this game, it’s WvW.

I’d have to agree.

It’s no catastrophic failure or anything, just… meh. Achievements were also a chore, especially for the servers getting dominated. And they get lower rewards to boot, go figure.

Advent.6193:

Cottontail.8526:

Advent.6193:

• FREEZE transfers, starting 1-2 weeks prior to a Season, and ending after the same amount of time post-season.

Punish players who just want to transfer servers? It’d be good enough to just not offer a transfer discount… 800 gems only just to pile up on blackgate? Redonculous.

I figured a 1-2 week dropoff would at least help to lessen stacking. Fact is, nothing will actually stop server bandwagoning, without either:

• Making the cost of transfers so astronomically high that most players’ll stick to their own servers. This is an undesired option, and would shaft folks something fierce.

or

• Scaling any and all points/awards proportional to a server’s WvW population relative to the population of their enemies. That would be more complex, and probably a mass annoyance for any coders involved, but at least could account for Small Server “X” getting farmed and spawncamped by Large Server “Y” for “Z” period of time, and still soldiering on regardless.

Note that I don’t claim to have all the answers, merely suggestions that might (or might not) help out.

EDIT: RyuDragnier’s idea could also work. Thing is, is it (with current code) possible to pull off? It’d at least manage to deal with the server-stacking biz, if you could lock WvW status, but not punish a person’s choices for pure PvE.

You can guest for PvE content.

I’d be all for freezing WvW upon xfer for X amount of time. Would definitely go a long way in preventing sabotage/cheating, and would be a deterrent I think to heavily stack projected winning servers.

Outmanned also needs work, as does breakout. I like the idea someone had about the bloodlust adjustment per placement in the match(can’t remember the thread.) Would also be nice to see those that are outmanned get harder hitting NPCs and also be able to receive more NPCs on upgraded structures. Also think breakout needs to have guards/npcs. Could balance the structure NPC with breakout to match the opposing team map #s and have them fade as people on the outmanned team join the map.

While the idea of having league play sounds good in theory, it was poorly executed in this case and based on rankings that for many servers was no longer accurate.

I definitely vote no for season 2 without some serious changes to the way matching/ranking and xfers are handled.

Hi, OP. I just wanted to inform you that, while your sentiment is understandable, from psychological standpoint your question is rigged and thus the whole poll is useless for any reasonable consideration.

If you want unbiased approach to the topic you can try with “Poll: Rate your Season 1 experience on a scale of 1 to 5” or “Poll: Did you find Season 1 entertaining or disappointing”

No. It’s not a failure. It’s flawed.

/vote

No, but it was a grind.

It brough the bad out of most servers. Honorable servers formed perma alliances to get a higher placement in leagues, brough more griefers, hackers, spies, and so on.

I want the classic WvW match up system back.

Natronix.9827:

It brough the bad out of most servers. Honorable servers formed perma alliances to get a higher placement in leagues, brough more griefers, hackers, spies, and so on.

I want the classic WvW match up system back.

Agreed, this is exactly the reason I have for not wanting to have a season 2. It got really ugly IMHO.

It gave us nothing but bad matchups and pve karma train players.

did nothing but promote bad game play and queues. quality of fights dropped dramatically.

Sad part is, they dont care. Expect it to get rammed down our throats again, players are not part of the process in this game.

It’s the worst non-sense I’ve ever seen in a game:

A competition where matches are only decided by 2:1 or by PvD, and the real fights do not matter et al.

Here just another illustration of the capabilities of the league-winner (2nd in this case, 48h of fighting are worth less than 4h PvD, great competition)

PS: may sound a bit less constructive, but as all my constructive proposals (at least 3 different ones, none denied 24h availability of WvW) were ignored, it’s time for pure critic. The constructive ones can be looked up in my post-history as soon as the problem is acknowledged as a problem.

I am totally unsatisfied with season 1 and stuff which came with it, but to be honest I have expected this to happen. Anet either doesn’t have single clue about competitive gaming or they simply don’t care. Allowing transfer before league start to make more server stacking and making it buy2win, screwing server’s WvW players with achievement hunters or the pure fact of making competitive something which is supposed to be imbalanced (as they said themselves) makes me wonder whether they care about they game as they have proclaimed so many times before game launched or they care only about copies sold and money.
“There is something rotten in the company of Arenanet.”

My dissapointment are the rewards.
People went after them and left Underworld and there is a lot of toxicity thanks to that.
We lost more than 10 WvW guilds that went for the better server with bigger chances to win. So in the end for us it was a really terrible season and its all due the rewards that weren’t thought through and nobody thought of the impact on community.
In other words ANet kinda ruined many players experience thanks to that. I know that my server was probably the most deserted but there were others that suffered from this behavior.

Flat rewards would help that and indicate that you were there to witness WvW S1, not like trophies and all that for people to start rat race.

I liked it, yeah some changes like get PvE out would help, maybe 4-5 team leagues, stop transfers early. I can’t speak for the rest of Mag but I wanted Gold even though we stood zero chance of winning. The game for me and many in our guild boils down to PvP, not wall slamming or blobbing for karma you basically become no more than ambient killers.
We had great fights and a lot of fun. We didn’t have to bounce around for fights they were everywhere though at times they started as 10v10 and ended up 10v1,000,000,000
I came into this with no expectations but getting fights and I got them not sure why anyone would care about rewards, or actually want to dominate so the other servers stop playing.

Not a failure.

There is room for improvement, though.

The achievements should be chosen so that you are not seduced to do meaningless or even server-damaging things (like ramming without mastery while masters stand beside you).

The matchups should be better balanced. There are several ideas flowing around. For example someone proposed to stop the point counter during late night and early morning, so that big servers with a good night team might have a great start when the points are counting again but not the huge lead which a good night coverage brings. All these ideas may not be ideal per se but I am sure the developers at ArenaNet canmake something great out of them.

Not a failure.
Not all server can be equally wvw oriented. With season we had same issues as before, but now there’s a reward, people is greedy, so a lot of people complains or move into another server.

More fun.
Less fair.

I think that sums it up for me. It was fun to have more emphasis on WvW and something to strive for. It was so insanely unfair. Waiting to get in while on the underpopulated server? Really? I get that you don’t want people on the overpopulated server unable to play.

There needs to be a mechanic that helps balance the competition. I suggested that mechanic whereby a server that has over 1.5 or 2x pts (depending on time of day) could not get into the enemy’s zone. They could still fight over EB and their zone. Make them play defense.

No matter what they devise next, it will always be a failure.

There is a too serious imbalance between servers, and nothing they can do will fix it.

The league system would work better if there was a hundred servers to compete between. With so few servers, the imbalance is too heavy even between servers close to one an other in the rankings.

Remember the GvG ladder in GW1? That worked well because you had hundreds of guilds to compete against, so there was almost always a guild close to your own strength to fight against. That kind of balance does not exists in GW2 WvW.

Blanche Neige.7241:

There is a too serious imbalance between servers, and nothing they can do will fix it.

First of all, the league increased imbalanced, as
- a lot of people transferred to the servers that were expected to win.
- some servers lost some matches before the league to fall down into a league they could dominate.

Second, the imbalance is mainly caused by: only a few server have a 24/7 coverage.
While the could easily compete e.g. on “weekend only” or “8h per day” matches, they do not have the timezone coverage to compete 24/7.

Should there ever be a competition again,
1) it should not be announced before it started (but, hm, ANet like the money they earn by transfer, so this is prbably not happening) to avoid transfers.
2) it should be on smaller timeframes, such that quality has a relevance compared to coverage.

Do we already have official responses? I think it is about time an ArenaNet official calms down the players and says “We never again will make leagues in GW2” – otherwise a lot of players might leave…

<- Still doesn’t understand why pure wvw servers arn’t introduced..

It should be easy ( As a professional programmer “^^” i will tell you how)
choose and select server thingy,press crtl +c.. move pointer to free server thingy..
press ctrl +v, name it WVW server 1 repeat for a couple of times..
Then go to the split server between US /europe and click turn off..

There i solved it!

This poll shows the authors bias with a loaded question and title that would deter people who would disagree from speaking and don’t feel like its representative to the game population as a whole that don’t even come to the forums, especially when you have a “neutral” count for people that found some fault, but did not voice agreement that season 1 was as a failure. Its either they said it was a failure or they didn’t, how they evaluated and expressed their thoughts on improvement is irrelevant. Despite the clear bias of the poll, I will answer anyway.

First I will define what is my definition of failure in reference to "“The Season 1 is a failure overall”. Do you agree? ". To me failure means it did not meet its intended objective and it is my belief that seasons were created for three reasons, to increase competitive spirit and to draw more people into WvW, and to provide better matches.

“The Season 1 is a failure overall”. Do you agree? " I Absolutely Disagree.

Seasons accomplished all these things.

On my server (Yaks Bend) and in my guild [XHSA] season 1 has sparked massive interest in players that would not or have not considered WvW before. It really showed on our server, we had increased coverage, more participation, and generally more of a will to win it for our server.

Seasons have added a whole new level of kind of a competitiveness spirit. More people are yelling “harray for our side” and are motivated to fight to win either it be for rewards or spirit. It has also added a level of strategy that focuses outside the present week there alliances can be brokered to the mutual benefit of both parties. It usually nothing personal, its just good business and their will be servers that will have the odds pitted against them to fight or become victims of circumstance.

The match-ups can be a little imperfect, they will always be, but as a yaks bender I felt like we had more closer match ups than what we had most of the last year. We had less “its over by the Saturday night” blow outs. Now while I feel that my view is limited to my server, it defiantly helped Yaks Bend find better matches as we did not go out of our way to manipulate ourselves into another league.

Most of the things being pointed out are problems with the nature of WvW before seasons, but seasons themselves can use some polish.

WvW is unbalanced, servers have uneven population, skill levels, and coverage times. This will always be the case as servers are like a business and people will flock to the servers that serve their interests best. Crutches that players have asked for such as “night guard” or buffing the stats of out numbered servers isn’t what I would call “balance”. WvW is meant to be more like a war not a sport, and all is fair in love and war. Numbers are most important, and strategy is also key. If your server does not have these things you deserve to fail, not be propped up by the game so you can compete against servers that actually work to accomplish these things without having to do any of the work yourself.

That being said the way accomplishments are structured could use some work. Never should using supply be part of achievement, this encourages wastefulness. Also some of the capturing sentries, killing dolyaks, farming ruins, and merc camps I feel need to be reduced, and more focus on defending towers, keeps, and camps for accomplishments. Accomplishments should be focused on the main activities a server should be coordinating to do to win, not some pve style “lets grind out 50 ruins by running laps” kinds of tasks.

How rewards and server transfers should be handled and are working fine. Most people don’t realize when a season starts you are locked into the rewards for server you were on when the season started. If you transfer mid-season, you will be allowed to play WvW in that server but you will get your old servers rewards. This is how it should be. I am also under the impression all servers get a meta chest. The rewards are based on placing with 1-3 getting unique rewards. It needs to stay like this, but I would also go as far as to increase the rewards based on how many consecutive seasons you spent in the same server. This would cut down on band wagons and encourage people to stay in the server they are in. As for population, I would give free transfer to people on low population servers so people can move to a more competitive server. Or you should start linking servers WvW worlds together that servers that don’t have the population to compete have more numbers.

In short, I think season 1 set out what it needed to do, pull more players into WvW and add a competitive spirit. It could defiantly be improved. It shouldn’t be ended just because people don’t think it perfect, because it will never be perfect. It is truly better than what we had.

I’ll refrain from typing a wall of text, because no one likes that.

Season 1 was not a failure, but it could use some polish:
1) The amount of rounds in the season is plain odd. Most leagues have 9 servers, which means you face all servers once in 4 rounds (8 opponents, 2 opponents/round). Having 7 rounds means some servers will get it easier than others (some will face the top servers twice, others won’t). 8 rounds would be a better number.

2) The achievements are poorly thought out. It forces people to do stuff they wouldn’t normally do (because they don’t enjoy it?), and it leaves out other jobs that need doing, so players doing those go “unrewarded”. There should be a better way to measure involvement in WvW, for example WXP gained each week, or events completed each week, …

The overall imbalance of WvW is an issue of the format, and has little to do with season or no season. Plenty of “fixes” have been proposed, some bad, some good. Ultimately it’s up to the devs to decide if they’re going to do something with that feedback.

Vote: On the fence.

Season 1 was a success in that it got people who probably never played WvWvW interested in it. this is a good thing if more people have found the fun that WvWvW can be, and maybe they will stay and play more, get better and overall improve the performance of their server.

Season 1 was a failure in that it got people who were not interested in WvWvW into playing there. This is a bad thing because we ended up with uplevels all over the place on peak hours, wasting supply on repair walls when it was tactically unfeasible to do so, and generally not caring what they were doing as long as they get their chest and title.

Vote: Leagues = Success

I was very concerned going into leagues, but I was very quickly proven wrong – they turned out very well for our server community, and I am actually quite sad to see this all over. I also have to thank Anet for being willing to split it into three leagues. Bronze league was awesomely fun because of it!

If there was one thing I’d change going into the next season, it’d be to make sure all the match-ups within a season are unique. There are enough options that I don’t see a reason to have the same three servers in a match-up more than once per season.

I look forward to the next season!

I didn’t even bother logging in. Failure.

Geniekid.2645:

No, not a failure.

Most of the problems people have mentioned in this thread are WvW problems, not seasonal league tournament problems. Just the fact that you have all these angry people who suddenly care about their WvW status when they didn’t give a kitten before is a huge success.

You do realize this is a WvW discussion right? Of course they are WvW problems. server imbalances are huge. DB would be lucky to be a viable bronze league at this point. It just means a ton of infighting and no chance to actually play in WvW because servers with greater activity i.e. FA just spawn camp and zerg roll over everything lower end servers try to mount. It’s not fun if it’s not even competitive.

The only new WvW content released in that time was the achievement list and some lonely arena for GvG.

The matchup were ok I guess.

Vimtor.5483:

And here’s the bottomline: “The Season 1 is a failure overall”. Do you agree?

Yes, I believe season 1 was a failure. The same problems that plagued WvW before season 1 were present during season 1, and they look to still be there next week when the season ends.

Absolute disappointment. Im taking a very long break from wvw because of it. They shouldnt have showed the schedule of matchups and should have stopped transfers during.

Let’s be honest. WvWvW was not balanced before, is not balanced now. This is why it si 1vs1vs1 map and not 1vs1.
Season 1 didn’t make it more unbalanced, simply a lot of people who are in a server that can’t win now complain because there’s probably a reward for winners.

Season 1 was nice. But could be improved.
Achievement filled maps (and queue) with a lot of pve grinder.
Also, please delete those JP in wvw or move to another istance. There’s not point on filling the queue with people that will not fight for their server, expecially now.
2vs1 if fun because gives weak servers the chance to fight. Anet should find a way to avoid the exploit of that, because bigger servers can buy help from smaller to secure their supremacy.