Guild Wars 2

The other day I saw a post made by an experienced WvW commander, which kinda encouraged me to make this one of my own. I see that ANet is working towards fixing and making WvW better, in a slow pace, but still doing much more than they ever did in the past years, and thats really nice! Thanks ANet for that. So during this time of work being done, I figured would be nice to suggest a couple things that could be taken into account while working towards these new changes.
I won’t mention some obvious things that people already said before, just for the sake of not ranting or repeating things over and over again, such as alpine > desert bl’s etc. I have always been in WvW guilds, 6k+ hours of WvW played, zerging, blobing, roaming, small ops, havoc, bloodlust, commanding, scouting, hardcore ppting and currently focusing on fighting. I do not express the opinions of my current guild, neither do I speak for them. But I’m sure that many other veteran WvWers share these same concerns.

• SIEGE
  I believe that defensive siege is the most annoying factor that makes fighting guilds and players to deslike fights around structures and the PPT game. The siege abuse makes fights completely unfair and/or unsustainable. Its obvious that defensive siege is part of environment that WvW comprehends, but a balance needs to be addressed towards it. How about using the “outnumbered” buff for it? Make the buff to be structure based, instead of map based, taking into account the number of players involved on the attacking/defending event. If the attackers outnumber the defenders by 1.5+:1 ratio, the defenders are able to use siege. That would prevent the siege abuse that ruins so many fights so often. Other than that, couple other suggestions could be taken into consideration, such as reducing the dmg done to players, increasing the dmg done to enemy siege; reduce the siege cap on structures; reduce the condition dmg/duration done by siege. Of course these are just suggestions, since I don’t have knowledge about programming, and i’m not sure how possible/viable these changes would be to code. Thats up to you guys from ANet to tell me.

• Annoyance vs Challenge
  I really hope I am not jumping into silly conclusions here, but I believe that WvWers play WvW to fight and compete against another players, not the environment. WvW is a PvP game mode. When you start bringing too many elements from the environment into fights, you are taking away the purpose of Player vs Player, and making it less fun. I believe that what we WvWers consider challenging, is fighting skilled or bigger groups, not champion bosses full of mechanics and hp; not fighting in a surrounding that constantly applies cc’s on your group; not having to deal with navigating issues; not having to be worried if a meta event (that pretty much no one cares to do unless to get rid of the huge lag for the entire map) is about to start. We do understand the dev team took time to work and design champions and areas with proper mechanics, but honestly, thats not why we play WvW. Even if those mechanics meant a challenge to the players, thats really not the type of challenge we are there for, so it turns into just annoyance. There are plenty of challenge environment and content in PvE Raids, if we choose to have WvW game mode as our main source of fun in Gw2, means we do not care about challenging annoying environment. Again, what is challenging for us, is the quality of the fight, the quality of our enemies, thats the type of challenge we want. Which kinda leads to next point…

• Builds
  In such standardized situations, with many players from different classes involved, where group/builds synergy matters a lot and can make the diference between winning or losing a fight, I personally believe (I hope more of us agree) that the more you add RNG and passive factors to it, the less you are relying on individual/group skill, and it takes the purpose of trying to win a fight. I do understand that classes balance needs to take all three game modes into consideration, and its impossible to make everyone happy.

I believe I dont need to mention rewards, small groups issues on the huge new maps, small guilds issues towards claiming objectives, etc because would just sound as a broken record and many of other experienced players gave good suggestions to fix those issues.

If you took time to read this, thank you for your patience.
If you have other suggestions, feel free to add them in a constructive way
Most of us WvWers are drained, tired, exhausted, burnt out from enduring with so many issues for so long, and we still manage somehow to be around and get some fun from the game mode we love. ANet seems to be finally working on it, so this is our chance to make ourselves to be heard and to give good feedback. I apologize for the long post.

About the new lords: I think they’re meant to mess with attackers when there are actually people defending, so that the attackers can win only if they’re well organized. So, they shouldn’t be annoying and jumping arround unless there’s an actual player defense.

For me, the fun is also about supporting your server with solo actions. Running supplies, scouting, flipping camps, sentries, ticking siege. But it’s just fun if you feel there’re people to support and that there are overt results of your efforts.

Gigiobalt.7625:

• SIEGE

Outnumbered buff based on objective instead of whole map could perhaps work. In very simplistic way you could draw circle around the keep lord and count attackers/defenders in the circle. There are of course smaller problems with it, like exact numbers when it activates (1 attacker? 10 attackers? 50 attackers) or how long it stays on (or defending groups start to stay behind the walls to make sure buff goes on, siege is activated and then everyone rushes in to save the keep) and so on.

Gigiobalt.7625:

• Annoyance vs Challenge

I guess you are mostly annoyed about desert BL maps. I am not sure what would be perfect map design for most players, make it too simple and bland and you end up players complaining about how boring and simple it is. I also think desert maps could be fun place to fight if there was ever any enemies to fight.

Do you consider structured PvP maps interesting enough or also having too much annoyance?

Gigiobalt.7625:

• Builds

I am not sure what you mean by that comment. The class balance? Skill balance? Asking to create separate skills for large scale GvG fights? WvW-specific builds?

I too am curious about you mean by “builds”. if this a suggestion we go the PvP route and limit sigils/runes/foods and the like than 100 percent NO.

People should be allowed to use any build they want in WvW. The sheer volume of diverse builds in WvW are part of what keeps me going there. Arguing it a matter of skill and synergy is just arguing for the formulaic which is not my idea of fun. Play your way is important. Guilds are already free to dictate the types of builds and classes used in a fight and those Guilds I would avoid like the plague.

If it specific skills seen as OP then that a different story entirely.

Regarding OP:

Re: Siege: Defensive siege or counter siege are valid tactics. Those that don’t like the use of siege in defensive environments simply don’t like siege fights. Well some people do. And those that do it well can annoy the crap out of an attacker which discourages the attack … which is the point if you are defending. Make the attacker go away. Just because you want to have a melee fight doesn’t mean that no one else should be allow to use siege.

Re: Annoyance vs challenge: Having environment elements allows players to have tactics. WvW is a mixture of PvE and PvP. And yes the clever use of environment can change the direction of the battle. Terrain and Environment add a little complexity to the conflict. This is a good thing. I don’t think reducing WvW to an oversize Obsidian Sanctum map is going to make the game more interesting for most. And while these environmental challenges are not why you are there, others may enjoy using the environment to help them win a fight. It seems that some want a fight that is strictly decided by builds and group comp. But even then people are manipulating the environment through their choice of gear. Really if you want a truly fair skill based fight without any environment, everyone should have the same build and group comp, then and only then, will the more skillful warrior be known. Maybe this sounds like a silly slippery slope argument but all you are really arguing here is your preference as to where Anet should draw the line on environment impact. There is no problem with employing terrain, structures or even NPC in a fight strategy. That allows for more creative gameplay.

Re: Builds: I’m not sure what you are getting at here. But it really sounds like you are hoping for a fair fight in WvW. You will never get one. I mean, where do you want to draw the line? The RNG rewards those that spend more time playing the game and farming. Skill rewards those that spend more time engaged in fighting. Which is more important? I don’t know if that is for you to decide. Anet is happy so long as people are spending time playing the game so either works for them. The determining factor in both RNG and skill is time spent playing the game. IF you really want a fair fight, then fight should be balance by total hours spent playing the game by both groups of combatants. Which is silly. The smaller scale of sPvP allows this level of control via managing groups size, pairing, gear control, skill level (via glicko) and so one. But ultimately, a group operating with teamspeak still has a huge advantage to pugs. And short of not letting groups join as groups there is no way to correct for this. I doubt anyone wants pure sPvP pug play.

Regarding the siege and defences, i think they need to reduce the amount of siege and defences you can put up in a certain area or limit it, you are right that when you face certain servers the amount of defences and or- siege used by them is more than just excessive. sometimes i wonder where they get the supplies from to build it all.

Builds reflect the individual players freedom they are different when following a zerg or when you run in a smaller group or solo, this difference, diverseness shouldn’t be lost. Even when it means that the builds need to be checked for them to be not to OP.

As opposed to pvp which is structured warfare, team vs team, WvW is open warfare.

In open warfare the battles fought are set by the conditions you encounter, setting the battlefield conditions yourself besides choosing the location of your battlefield are impossible. whereas your location starts from a fixed point you might be fighting in the open, under siegefire etc etc.

In real warfare battles you do not get to set the conditions besides your battlefield aswell and fights are not only won by actual fighting they are also won by capturing, securing and defending key-points on the map, in WvW these are camps, towers, keeps, sentries and monuments atm :-)

Open warfare shows or is an attempt to allow the players to experience all forms of warfare: big battles (blobs, zergs) medium battles (Tactical, strategic squads, havoc, ambushes), small battles (defending an objective, fighting against enemies by yourself), escorting (protecting suplies going to the keeps, towers, camps) and scouting.

If you wish to change or limit WvW you would be taking away this diverseness in my opinion, not trying to start a row here.

The environment as in annoying i agree to a certain extent, Arena-net should get rid of the local wildlife for one, and give the quests if there are any a logical USE or remove them.

For me the real problem isn’t the maps, although i would be amazed by a real map-rotation, i don’t mind players wanting to bring back alpine at all, i just don’t want it on evry borderland, evry single week for another 2 years like the first period the map was on because then it becomes a drag to play. that’s not making the game better.

The Main problem is the reward-system and players rank-farming in EOTM instead of coming to play WvW with the guilds on their respective servers, real love for WvW might not be shown back by them from the start but real rewards can be a good motivation for players to play the game as its meant to be played.