Guild Wars 2

The polls are you doing are an interesting idea, but I’ve been completely unimpressed with them.

For instance, the notion of server linking good or server linking bad was unanswerable for me for the simple fact that I don’t know what the other options are. There are all kinds of ways to “fix” population imbalances, and you’ve tried exactly two of them. Making a poll based on two methods that are both hated hardly seems like a useful poll to me. There should be more options.

Today’s poll, about the borderlands, was also lacking for me. The notion of rotating borderlands on a three month basis seems like a bad idea to me. Two alpine/one desert or two desert/one alpine also seems like a bad idea to me. There are other options, better options in my opinion.

But, I can’t just sit here and complain, that isn’t useful. I should put forward proposals!

Server population is a hard problem. One option I think should be explored would be letting guilds match themselves for battlegrounds. I imagine that faction NPCs could be placed in the game, and guilds leaders could sign their guilds up for a faction. The game could balance the populations out based on sign ups. For guilds that are more hard core there could be private matches where the sponsoring guilds select which guilds are allowed into the battle. There are lots of little details to work out, such as how to handle guildless people, and how to handle people in multiple guilds that end up opposing each other, but I think this is doable.

The borderland problems are far more vast in my mind. Back in tier 8, last place in tier 8 I should add, I was still quite happy. Matching servers, not matching servers, it really makes no difference to me, fighting intelligent humans is fun, and fighting dumb ais is not. But the problems with maps are huge, and every time I’m on a map it hurts me that the maps are bad. I’ll only cover a few of the biggest problems.

My biggest hatred of the borderlands is that they all face the same direction. Both the alpine and the desert borderlands are oriented with the homeland base in the north, and portals for the invaders in the southern corners, and it makes no sense. No sense at all. The EB map has red in the north, so the red map should have the citadel in the south. Likewise the green citadel should be oriented towards the green spawn on EB, and the blue citadel towards the blue spawn on EB. Even if the maps are the same, they suddenly become different, and that would be awesome.

Another problem is, with the new addition of the desert maps, this notion of rotation. Keeping one BL for three months is way too long. Putting two of one and one of the other seems just as wrong. But it gives me an idea: The Swampland.

Deserts are hot, and hot is red, so the desert borderland should be the red borderland. Mountains are cold, and cold is blue, so the alpine borderland should be blue borderland. And then there green. Swamps are pretty green. Make a swamp borderland. Make parts of the swamp borderland the nightmare that is the Mossman (traps everywhere). Make the rest of it a somewhat safer swamp. And that’s the green borderland.

Something needs to be done to fix SMC. SMC is really just a keep. It has two layers to peel open before you get to the juicy lord in the middle. That’s silly. SMC needs more. At least three walls to get through, and I think there should be four. And not rings. If people want to run circles in SMC they should be breaking down walls and doors that break SMC up into quarters as well.

Siege needs some serious help. Splash damage is kittened. Putting a catapult in a tunnel beneath a wall and shooting it into the wall of the tunnel to break the wall up on the surface is dumb. Putting a catapult under a bridge and shooting it into the wall to break a nearby wall on the surface is dumb. Shooting a catapult past the corner of a wall and breaking a wall behind the corner is dumb. Eliminate splash damage. The catapult either hits the wall, or it misses. The same with trebs. Splash damage needs to go.

Fixing ACs would help a lot too. Let us pan out more to get a good view of where we can shoot it or change how it shoots. I have having to twist my camera around looking for a corner I can just barely see with that doesn’t have a UI element blocking my firing in it just sucks. Panning out more would fix that, since I could see that I was shooting at. Or locking it in to a first person view from the AC standpoint and select pointing and power to lob them. A pipe dream would be to let cover provide cover from ACs, but that would be a lot of computation, so I can understand why that might never happen.

The hit range on rams is stupid. A ram set up to ram the outer gate of a keep shouldn’t hit the inner too. It certainly shouldn’t hit both inner and outer at the same time.

Siege should be repairable, and you appear to have a poll coming up for that which is good. But destroying siege should have a chance to render supply, because that would be realistic and useful.

Fully upgraded objectives should probably self repair as yaks come in solely because they self repair as the upgrade. There are 80 yaks to get from reinforced to fortified, and I think every 80 yaks after that should automatically auto-repair everything. Or each yak past full supply while fortified should be divided up amongst all the damage and repaired. I imagine this would be unpopular though.

You should add bushes like LoL has, or turn off the name tags when you lack line of sight to the player. Hiding behind something should work. In real life people don’t have giant glowing letters stretching out six feet to either side of their head that always appear.

RI should mean something. When I started, RI just meant use condi damage to kill it anyway. In EotM RI means stay away it’s going to kill you. In regular WVW RI means just clear the guards then AFK while the lord beats on you and kill it when the RI is up. If a camp/keep/tower/castle has RI, give all the NPCs RI. And make the NPCs tougher like in EotM. And give those nodes permanent RI so they can’t be farmed until you take the objective!

Make Obsidian Sanctum useful again. I don’t know how, but it’s stupid now, and it used to be a big part of WvW.

I could probably go on for days, but it’s late, and I should sleep.

There should be option to keep Alphine until Desert borderland is fixed to playable state. But I am fine with 2 alphines too, cause I can just ignore Desert, if i don’t want to play on it.

schlake.2718:

Today’s poll, about the borderlands, was also lacking for me. The notion of rotating borderlands on a three month basis seems like a bad idea to me. Two alpine/one desert or two desert/one alpine also seems like a bad idea to me. There are other options, better options in my opinion.

There probably are better options, however, as was said by the devs either here or on reddit. Majority of their dev time is now tied up by the decisions made by the first two polls. Before majority of the voted scoring changes are done they will not look at solutions to these or other problems that would require a lot of dev time.

So, these polls are things they can do with comparatively little time investment in the interim and potentially have significant impact on WvW regardless. They are basically giving us the opportunity to shake things up and change the status quo of WvW if we as a collective so choose. But for them majority of their time is spent on things we already decided upon.

Although you do have some good proposals can we PLEASE not make WvW any more automated than it has already become. The radars, the upgrades, the everything that made WvW strategic to take higher tier items is gone. Scouting is useless if you have a radar on each tower. Also how do you expect roamers and small guilds to sneak towers away while the enemy blob is defending smc? There are just too many automated and pve elements in a strategic game mode for any group ranging from 5-50. Yes, anet solved the issue of overpowered keep tactivators and cloaking waters but that doesn’t solve the smaller guilds and groups from being able to sneak a t2 or t3 anything from and enemy if they aren’t properly scouting when everything has these ridiculous upgrades.

I would like to point out that since release we are getting more input and feedback on WvW than ever before. That doesn’t mean everyone is going to be happy with it and it doesn’t mean ANet is actually going to do anything with it either.

I am not saying you should stop with the forum feedback but keep in mind there are many players with many different motivations and they all aren’t going to sync up. As for more options, I think development/design time is limited and to involve user input early on is actually fairly difficult since designing several potential systems is costly. I think they are just looking to expand on what they have and get relevant feedback on what we might like in that limited scope.

SgtOVERKILL.4701:

Although you do have some good proposals can we PLEASE not make WvW any more automated than it has already become. The radars, the upgrades, the everything that made WvW strategic to take higher tier items is gone. Scouting is useless if you have a radar on each tower. Also how do you expect roamers and small guilds to sneak towers away while the enemy blob is defending smc? There are just too many automated and pve elements in a strategic game mode for any group ranging from 5-50. Yes, anet solved the issue of overpowered keep tactivators and cloaking waters but that doesn’t solve the smaller guilds and groups from being able to sneak a t2 or t3 anything from and enemy if they aren’t properly scouting when everything has these ridiculous upgrades.

You’re right about the disappointement caused by automation of all this, even if I’m not sure it should be called PvE. Yet, you’re forgetting most players just want to have fights against other players, and don’t care much about upgrading, roaming, scouting and so on.
Even if I perfectly agree with the fact players should actually do it by themselves, making things automatic is a way to push things towards the strategic facet of WvW. For exemple, I once have been in a border map and, with some help, we took the spawn camp, helped taking the spawn tower, escorted 20 dolyaks to have them go T1, prevented the camp from being taken by ennemies 3 times and eventually lost everything because 2 comms were busy playing blob vs blob in a place where our server wasn’t holding a single thing : one of those fantastic guild fights.

So, in that kind of case, I must say I’m happy some things are in automatic mode.

OP, I disagree, the polls are a great way for ANet to see where the community is at.

Hopefully there will be a Desert BL acceptance poll before the end of this quarter.

Maybe Sentries shouldn’t ping enemies on the radar unless they upgrade.

schlake.2718:

The polls are you doing are an interesting idea, but I’ve been completely unimpressed with them.

For instance, the notion of server linking good or server linking bad was unanswerable for me for the simple fact that I don’t know what the other options are. There are all kinds of ways to “fix” population imbalances, and you’ve tried exactly two of them. Making a poll based on two methods that are both hated hardly seems like a useful poll to me. There should be more options.

Today’s poll, about the borderlands, was also lacking for me. The notion of rotating borderlands on a three month basis seems like a bad idea to me. Two alpine/one desert or two desert/one alpine also seems like a bad idea to me. There are other options, better options in my opinion.

But, I can’t just sit here and complain, that isn’t useful. I should put forward proposals!

Server population is a hard problem. One option I think should be explored would be letting guilds match themselves for battlegrounds. I imagine that faction NPCs could be placed in the game, and guilds leaders could sign their guilds up for a faction. The game could balance the populations out based on sign ups. For guilds that are more hard core there could be private matches where the sponsoring guilds select which guilds are allowed into the battle. There are lots of little details to work out, such as how to handle guildless people, and how to handle people in multiple guilds that end up opposing each other, but I think this is doable.

The borderland problems are far more vast in my mind. Back in tier 8, last place in tier 8 I should add, I was still quite happy. Matching servers, not matching servers, it really makes no difference to me, fighting intelligent humans is fun, and fighting dumb ais is not. But the problems with maps are huge, and every time I’m on a map it hurts me that the maps are bad. I’ll only cover a few of the biggest problems.

My biggest hatred of the borderlands is that they all face the same direction. Both the alpine and the desert borderlands are oriented with the homeland base in the north, and portals for the invaders in the southern corners, and it makes no sense. No sense at all. The EB map has red in the north, so the red map should have the citadel in the south. Likewise the green citadel should be oriented towards the green spawn on EB, and the blue citadel towards the blue spawn on EB. Even if the maps are the same, they suddenly become different, and that would be awesome.

Another problem is, with the new addition of the desert maps, this notion of rotation. Keeping one BL for three months is way too long. Putting two of one and one of the other seems just as wrong. But it gives me an idea: The Swampland.

Deserts are hot, and hot is red, so the desert borderland should be the red borderland. Mountains are cold, and cold is blue, so the alpine borderland should be blue borderland. And then there green. Swamps are pretty green. Make a swamp borderland. Make parts of the swamp borderland the nightmare that is the Mossman (traps everywhere). Make the rest of it a somewhat safer swamp. And that’s the green borderland.

Something needs to be done to fix SMC. SMC is really just a keep. It has two layers to peel open before you get to the juicy lord in the middle. That’s silly. SMC needs more. At least three walls to get through, and I think there should be four. And not rings. If people want to run circles in SMC they should be breaking down walls and doors that break SMC up into quarters as well.

Siege needs some serious help. Splash damage is kittened. Putting a catapult in a tunnel beneath a wall and shooting it into the wall of the tunnel to break the wall up on the surface is dumb. Putting a catapult under a bridge and shooting it into the wall to break a nearby wall on the surface is dumb. Shooting a catapult past the corner of a wall and breaking a wall behind the corner is dumb. Eliminate splash damage. The catapult either hits the wall, or it misses. The same with trebs. Splash damage needs to go.

Fixing ACs would help a lot too. Let us pan out more to get a good view of where we can shoot it or change how it shoots. I have having to twist my camera around looking for a corner I can just barely see with that doesn’t have a UI element blocking my firing in it just sucks. Panning out more would fix that, since I could see that I was shooting at. Or locking it in to a first person view from the AC standpoint and select pointing and power to lob them. A pipe dream would be to let cover provide cover from ACs, but that would be a lot of computation, so I can understand why that might never happen.

The hit range on rams is stupid. A ram set up to ram the outer gate of a keep shouldn’t hit the inner too. It certainly shouldn’t hit both inner and outer at the same time.

Siege should be repairable, and you appear to have a poll coming up for that which is good. But destroying siege should have a chance to render supply, because that would be realistic and useful.

Fully upgraded objectives should probably self repair as yaks come in solely because they self repair as the upgrade. There are 80 yaks to get from reinforced to fortified, and I think every 80 yaks after that should automatically auto-repair everything. Or each yak past full supply while fortified should be divided up amongst all the damage and repaired. I imagine this would be unpopular though.

You should add bushes like LoL has, or turn off the name tags when you lack line of sight to the player. Hiding behind something should work. In real life people don’t have giant glowing letters stretching out six feet to either side of their head that always appear.

RI should mean something. When I started, RI just meant use condi damage to kill it anyway. In EotM RI means stay away it’s going to kill you. In regular WVW RI means just clear the guards then AFK while the lord beats on you and kill it when the RI is up. If a camp/keep/tower/castle has RI, give all the NPCs RI. And make the NPCs tougher like in EotM. And give those nodes permanent RI so they can’t be farmed until you take the objective!

Make Obsidian Sanctum useful again. I don’t know how, but it’s stupid now, and it used to be a big part of WvW.

I could probably go on for days, but it’s late, and I should sleep.

Keep in mind, that if there are too many choices, then there will be no possible way to reach 75%. In fact, thats what things look like at the time I write this on the BL poll because it has 4 choices.

And what happens when nothing reaches 75% ? They are supposed to work on nothing and do nothing ? The polls need to be unfortunately simplified as much as possible or the bar needs to be brought down, way down, from the 75%.

Because of this, voting in such polls is quite a lot like voting in the US presidential elections, you are not voting for good or bad or what you like or dislike, but for the lesser or at times far lesser of the 2 evils.

Which one would you prefer ?

Heh, you could make a poll about that !

Tongku.5326:

Keep in mind, that if there are too many choices, then there will be no possible way to reach 75%. In fact, thats what things look like at the time I write this on the BL poll because it has 4 choices.

While I agree with your sentiment there, we are not at that point yet, because…

There are actually 3 choices… the 4th choice doesn’t count, as in when they look at the percentage 100% is constructed from the three remaining options (Yes 1, Yes 2 and No).

The 7.5 percent or whatever the fourth “show results” option is right now equals to the same as not voting at all, because those votes will be thrown out before the final tally. They did this for the previous poll too.

The fact that this option exists at all is kind of silly because the result page can be accessed without voting. Although it does give some insight onto how big portion of the voters are indifferent.

schlake.2718:

Making a poll based on two methods that are both hated hardly seems like a useful poll to me.

You might hate the polls……but that doesn’t mean that everyone does. I know a lot of people in game that actually like the linking and are excited about the possibility of having 2 different border lands at the same time.

Teon.5168:

I know a lot of people in game that actually like the linking and are excited about the possibility of having 2 different border lands at the same time.

I have to second this, I remember talking about DBL and Alpine in guild chat the day of the patch that rotated out DBL. The general vibe from that chat was that while Alpine does lot of things fine, it is also a bland, as in less atmospheric, map by comparison and smaller as well. In particular I recall someone who started playing with HoT wondering if Alpine borderlands would be too small.

At the end of the day, it comes down to what you are used to, but in general I can’t say that at least based on that chat in our guild DBL is as universally disliked as most people here portray it to be.

Teon.5168:

schlake.2718:

Making a poll based on two methods that are both hated hardly seems like a useful poll to me.

You might hate the polls……but that doesn’t mean that everyone does. I know a lot of people in game that actually like the linking and are excited about the possibility of having 2 different border lands at the same time.

Liking linking and wanting more than one borderland is no excuse for doing it poorly based on inadequate testing and meaningless polls.

I am happy we are consulted with at least. I would hate to see the polls removed.

Swedemon.4670:

OP, I disagree, the polls are a great way for ANet to see where the community is at.

Hopefully there will be a Desert BL acceptance poll before the end of this quarter.

They could be, but at the moment they feel more like a slow-motion version of Twitch Plays Game Designer, but with less focus.

Some elements of the WvW game have enormous mass appeal (i.e. server stacking and blobbing) despite their tendency to create boring matches. Other elements are mode-defining, but greatly derided (like playing defense and using siege).

If you have 30 players assaulting a tower gate and 10 defenders using siege, communication, positioning, and supply traps against them, then you could poll those 40 players on whether siege is too strong/just right/too weak. I’d expect a result that 75% (the 30 assaulters) wish siege would be weaker. But that doesn’t make such a poll meaningful (unless you are prepared to forcibly move 10 of the attackers to the defender’s side).