Guild Wars 2

A friend and I were discussing the WvW changes and how GvG/Raiding is discouraged by Anet and there is actually a pattern, relating to PvE content as well as WvW.

The PvE Pattern:

Dungeon Speedrunning, players found ways to complete level 80 content within the fastest time possible, not mainly for records as fastest times, but gold runs per day.
Essentially this progressed into players learning to solo dungeons and sell the paths off.
This resutled in Citadel of Flame being nerfed for rewards, and now overall rewards nerfed so hard it’s pointless doing dungeons unless you want tokens, and even these have been lowered to 40 per run. (Sometimes dungeons were exploited, but Anet could have easily banned or fixed the exploits)

Queensdale Champ train: Self Explanatory, Players found an effective way of farming champs and exp, also looked good to players joining the game. Simply another method of earning gold which is now so scarce?

Silverwastes Farm: Another innovative way thought up by players and mastered by Aki who led the best Chest Farm raids but apparently got banned, then made less effective by changing what shovels are needed for.

How does this relate to WvW?

Redguard, every vet of WvW knows the name, Redguard essentially were one of the first for organized raiding in WvW, essentially the start of one of the most fun options within the gamemode World vs World.

It started a hardcore game mode within the game mode, voice comms, organized team compositions, builds synergizing with each other and individual and teamplay playstyles encouraged to be able to go head on with other organized raid guilds, in GvG/WvW Raiding along with outnumbered fights and more. Not neccesarily focusing on capturing and defending objectives but mass pvp on the way World vs World was advertised.

Guilds like TA, dF, LaG, Agg, vE etc, pushing the boundaries of raiding, a year on and are part of the GvG scene where the audience exceeds that of the PvP tournament arena net host which is supposedly classes as “esports”.

The Changes which ruin and demote all of these points above me:
Stability Change, a push to remove melee players being able to have a good chance of sustain in fights, outnumbered and GvG alike.
The P word (Pirate Ship) A meta promoted in which it essentially becomes AoE Wars 2 in fights, promoting backline fighting without an intensity of a higher requirement of skill to play.
Scaling of Lords: Is this PvE? You have an awesome fight between 3 servers and come out victorious in the castle then to find the lord is still up and the entire enemy zerg can run back at least 2 times between you being able to kill the lord.
Autoupgrades: Where players interaction was high with responsibility needed and a motivation to help your server thrown away due to everything being easier to defend without much effort, and harder to assault because something you backdoored and captured behind the enemies back is almost fully upgraded from nothing in 2 hours.

Essentially within WvW, player adaption and introduction of new gameplay within GW2 is not appreciated and from my point of view it looks like anyhting Arenanet themselves didn’t put into the game they do not want.

GW2 was also advertised as a game where there shouldn’t be a limit to being able to play the game how you like, an open world adapting and changing all the time, although when a player adapts it is pushed away and they try to change it.

Essentially the question I am asking is, if Anet don’t implement it themselves, do they not want it in the game?

sPvP: It is the smallest audience and playerbase within the game, over 20 servers including US, EU and CH ones with WvW in yet PvP is promoted moreso than PvE and WvW.

P.S it was a harder job to slowly ruin WvW like it is being doen, than it was to improve or maintain it.

xXBAKESXx.6731:

Scaling of Lords: Is this PvE? You have an awesome fight between 3 servers and come out victorious in the castle then to find the lord is still up and the entire enemy zerg can run back at least 2 times between you being able to kill the lord.

This point is confusing. Are you trying to cap or are you trying to have awesome fights by allowing the other servers to have time to run back?

Chaba.5410:

xXBAKESXx.6731:

Scaling of Lords: Is this PvE? You have an awesome fight between 3 servers and come out victorious in the castle then to find the lord is still up and the entire enemy zerg can run back at least 2 times between you being able to kill the lord.

This point is confusing. Are you trying to cap or are you trying to have awesome fights by allowing the other servers to have time to run back?

Sorry for the misundeerstanding, it’s meant as in, you beat off 2 servers, but spend too long trying to take down the lord to acctually capturer the castle, feeling, frustration can be huge.. especially if SM is fully upgraded :/ it isn’t designed to promote longer fights I don’t think, but just slow downthe process of everything, even worse when you’re recapping a border with your zerg because it takes 1hour or so to do it with a 5 man group as it’s usually t3 everywhere, honestly some lords take 1-2 minutes to kill :/ which i personally feel is too long, just make them tankier and don’t scale, it’s WvW not PvE it slows down the game mode

Unsupported? That’s probably too nice of a word.

Consider their attempts to devalue certain content. Dungeons have gone beyond unsupported, by nerfing the rewards which was one of the main incentives, they have practically cut the content off and damaged it to promote something else— in this case fractals and raids. It is not unlike companies slowly cutting off support for aging or unwanted products. This is actually somewhat natural, but on the other hand it doesn’t really make for a good relationship.

Another place we see something devalued is underwater combat. It was just too hard to deal with, so underwater content was removed, and there isn’t any new underwater content. Now, sure it kind of sucked anyways, but besides the point.

So anyone that’s reading this is probably going to know what I’m getting at. Is World vs World also being devalued and being phased out, still being there, but other things are prioritized over it?

Well, it’s probably not as bad off as the aforementioned example but let’s look at some possible factors:

• Megaservers were a huge blow to WvW communities because it hardly ever mattered for anything non-WvW anymore. No more trips to LA to rally folks. Note that requests to have the cities free from megaservers were not just from World vs World players but also a number of other groups that wanted to maintain communities for whatever reason. They were all promptly ignored.

• Gamebreaking bugs seem to have very low priority for World vs World. Now, granted, the game has bugs everywhere that haven’t been fixed for ages, but anything for WvW is exponential.

• Anet still refuses to balance modes separately, with PvP balance being the main thing while there are some adjustments made to PvE (ferocity, for example or new stats from PvE). Anything just for WvW? Nope! Whenever PvE or PvP balance takes a dump, it always lands on World vs World. Even if you like say, the stability changes, do you think it took World vs World into account?

• Other factors cause World vs World to be effectively the toilet for PvE. For example, ascended gear, elite specializations, guild upgrades, and such were clearly optimized for PvE rates of material acquisition, which of course doesn’t work at all. All of these changes affect WvW. Basically, World vs World is still stuck in 2 years ago for a lot of its system.

To be fair enough, there have been some steps to maintain World vs World….

• Some new content and changes. In particular, a new map, and some new mechanics. Yea, I know many people don’t like them, but I wanted to be fair.

• Some alternate methods to gain PvE things in World vs World. The notaries, despite being imperfect, are a good start.

• Some ways of putting WvW in the economy, such as memories of battle, synthesizers.

Unfortunately, even these good things tend to be affected by the above problems. The Desert maps seem to have taken HoT mindset to building them, but without the things that made the HoT maps interesting to begin with. The things involving material gains are really the only thing that speaks in the current development mindset, and seem to be the most solid, but also displays what I think is a misunderstanding of what progression means. Ultimately, these things don’t do much to really bring in new players that aren’t just passing by to collect what they need and leave.

That being said, it seems there have been some attempts to improve World vs World but they have had limited or even negative effects because of either various misunderstandings or they may have their hands tied. In the end, WvW fills a niche that remains hard to replace despite all of this, and it might have just been too successful for its own good. So, it might have been entirely possible that they never planned for this at all. After all, this was meant to be a bridge to Esports PvP.

It could be a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it.

The main point is, does Anet not want gameplay modes in the game they didn’t directly implement themselves?

ArchonWing.9480:

In the end, WvW fills a niche that remains hard to replace despite all of this, and it might have just been too successful for its own good. So, it might have been entirely possible that they never planned for this at all. After all, this was meant to be a bridge to Esports PvP.

Very unfortunate.

xXBAKESXx.6731:

The main point is, does Anet not want gameplay modes in the game they didn’t directly implement themselves?

I point back to Violgate. Where an Anet employee stood in the middle of a GvG fight at the south windmill, popped his Anet tag, and told everyone that they were “Violating his game mode”. So yes. They very much have a control freak issue going on, and what makes it worse is that they have a very limited understanding of, well, the entirety of WvW. They don’t understand the tactics. They don’t understand the strategies. They don’t understand the community. They don’t understand the players. They don’t understand the needs o the game mode. As a result, they’re simply unable to make good changes, because they just plain don’t know what would and would be a good change. Even though the bulk of the regular WvW players can produce a giant list that we all pretty much universally agree on. Sure, there’s some issues where we don’t all agree, but we’re all on the same page for a LOT of the key concepts.

One doesn’t need to even look very far to find evidence that supports this. Look for the thread Fozzik made. The overwhelming majority of the posts were in favor of what he spelled out, almost universally. Look at the thread Yuffi made, where we even did open group brainstorming to come up with a working layout for the map. And to go even further, look at the new squad system. This exact system was proposed years ago, and then again in the CDI. It was overwhelming, universal support for the system. It was not something that would take a year or two to develop, but…. it was a year or two before it was implemented. Why? Now, sure, some may try to spin things and say “oh, they had to make sure it worked right and it’s very complicated and you wouldn’t understand all the technical details and blah blah blah” but that’s complete BS. It’s counting on the lack of knowledge for those excuses to fly. There’s nothing legitimate backing it up.

Actions speak louder than words. When you want to know the truth, you don’t look at what someone says, you look at their actions and establish a behavioral pattern. Everyone has a behavioral pattern, whether they realize it or not, and the pattern always shows the truth of the person/entity in question. What their motivations are, what they general knowledge level is, what they care about, what they prioritize, what they want. And Anet’s behavioral pattern is very distinct at this point. So what do they want? What is their goal? What is their motivation? Well….. they want money, first and foremost. But that has far more to do with NCSoft than Anet themselves. NCSoft has been doing quite a lot to position itself next to EA when it comes to raw, blind, greed. Quality and happy customers mean nothing to NCSoft, just money. NA and EU are just testing beds for them to get their hands on the massive amount of money they can make in Asia. That’s already come to fruition in GW2. However, Anet’s motivation is something much different. See, if you look at the Glasstree reports from employees and former employees, they spell it out in no uncertain terms. Anet cares solely about an ego measuring contest with Blizzard. That’s it, that’s all. Nothing more. So they do everything they can so they can point at their game and say “look at the game we made, look at the systems we created, look at the innovations we made. Look at how great we are.” Anything that speaks counter to that is either ignored entirely, or they attempt to discredit it. Any player suggested changes are handled in one of two ways. Either the “Ignore and Discredit” method, or they wait and wait and wait, and then finally implement it with a line about “how much they care about their customers and really listen to the feedback”. Which is clearly pure PR spin. They couldn’t care less about their customers, and this section of the forum is a testament to how well they actually listen. See, suggestion on improvement implies that they’re not perfect, and they don’t want to accept that. They want their egos to be puffed up. Look at the threads they did respond to. One was blatantly titled with that purpose in mind. They were told something they did was “Great” and they responded to it. And just that. All of the complaints, all of the suggestions for how to fix things, all of the suggestions for how to improve things over the years are subject to the “Ignore and Discredit” treatment, unless there’s overwhelming support, then it’s gotten the “wait and take credit for it” treatment. Because at the end of the day, the highest quality game possible isn’t what’s important to them. They’ve consistently proven that over the years. Money and ego inflation are.

So yeah, they do actively squash good ideas that aren’t theirs, because they can’t claim credit for them, and that doesn’t help them in their Ego War with Blizzard. Even when it’s to the detriment of their product. And I honestly wouldn’t be surprised at all if some of the biggest white knights on these forums are just alt accounts from people in their PR department. Shills aren’t exactly a hidden, or even uncommon, practice with all major companies. It would be extremely naive to think it’s not going on here too.

xXBAKESXx.6731:

Guilds like TA, dF, LaG, Agg, vE etc, pushing the boundaries of raiding, a year on and are part of the GvG scene where the audience exceeds that of the PvP tournament arena net host which is supposedly classes as “esports”.

Can fanbois stop trotting out this nonsense, most GvG matches streamed got feeble audiences, and even the largest audience got far less than the largest PvP audience (Pax 15k), just because their “e-sport” audiences are pathetic compared to an actual “e-sport” doesn’t alter that “GvG” audiences were even more pathetic, and both of them were less than individual non-offical streamers get in other games.

zinkz.7045:

xXBAKESXx.6731:

Guilds like TA, dF, LaG, Agg, vE etc, pushing the boundaries of raiding, a year on and are part of the GvG scene where the audience exceeds that of the PvP tournament arena net host which is supposedly classes as “esports”.

Can fanbois stop trotting out this nonsense, most GvG matches streamed got feeble audiences, and even the largest audience got far less than the largest PvP audience (Pax 15k), just because their “e-sport” audiences are pathetic compared to an actual “e-sport” doesn’t alter that “GvG” audiences were even more pathetic, and both of them were less than individual non-offical streamers get in other games.

Was more of an example as it’s well known names GvG/WvW far exceeded the PvP competitive scene. It still would if Anet didn’t try to shut down organized fighting in WvW.

Promote PvP.
Slowly change WvW in a way it pushes down any players and guilds playstyles.