Guild Wars 2

Why is WvW dead anyway?
I want to hear opinions of WvW pro players 24/7

I’m not a fan of WvW back then , but with the new layout of the map Im gonna try it after I finished my HoT stuff.

ANet has pretty much ignored all concerns associated with the format since release, done many things that people actively didn’t want and requested against, defeated the purpose of playing in a small guild entirely in WvW, and pretty much designed maps that are awful to play in and consumables locked behind huge paywalls for guilds which trivialize combat with the release of HoT.

Not to mention the absurdity that is the state of class “balance” (more like imbalance) right now leading to unfun and unskilled gameplay.

If you weren’t a fan of WvW back then you certainly won’t be a fan of it now. Bad RvR game mechanics aside there is a broken combat system consisting of p2w Guild Banners, insane damage output from the new class and very little to no stability even though the new class specializations were given tons of CC’s. So if you play any frontline class you better reroll to Ele, Dragonhunter, or Rev ideally.

Now if you want to see for yourself how the new Borderlands are you’ll have to transfer to tier 1 to be able to play on them and not completely bore yourself to death. Otherwise you can stay on whatever tier you’re in and play on EBG during NA timezone or Borderlands on reset for a few hours potentially.

Usually every major zerg engagement is decided purely by numbers and whoever has a better Dragon banner or Turtle banner. If you aren’t a fan of zerging then you can try to solo roam in which you’ll probably get chased down by 2-5 people trying to murder you for solo roaming since you’re easy prey, or if you’re lucky you can maybe get good duels along the sides of SMC. If you don’t like to solo roam you can get a group together and spawncamp the kitten out of another server until you get bored or they send a zerg after you. That last part is probably subjective though. that’s just my guess what roaming groups do when they aren’t groupfighting or picking off zerglings.

Welcome back, WvW is now on life support. The above 2 replies pretty much summarizes everything.

RIP WvW in the present state.

Because the devs are clueless about RvR. They are pve players.

They are PvE players who read metrics that said WvW players spend a lot of time in PvE. So we must LOVE pve right? Clueless twits, we PvE’d because we had to. But now with all the guild hall changes and other PvE crap required, it is too much. And all the other moronic changes to WvW didn’t help either. So most of the WvW players told ANET to stick it where… you know.

PvE should be an option, it shouldn’t be forced on us. The devs can’t see that though.

-Balance is nonexistant

-New Map is a broken mess, confusing and difficult to navigate for many.

-Anet isn’t interested or doesnt seem competent enough to fix bugs, glitches, exploits. Most of the time when they actually attempt a fix it either doesnt work and/or breaks something else.

-Tons of gimmicks added in HoT, unbalanced and abused, see banner garbage.

-Endless barriers regarding guildhalls that require a ton of grinding in pve to unlock buffs/features your guild already had pre HoT. Level 37 just to unlock +5 gg.

-Anet depends on metrics more then actual feedback, interaction, and involvement in wvw for content and feature development.

-Reset night moved to Saturday night (if NA) effectively making friday night meaningless, and splitting gaming time in half for many on the weekends.

Theres actually more, it sucks when devs dont understand their own gamemode and dont bother communicating with the people who actually care about it.

WvW is dying because:

1. New map – many different issues that have been stated over and over for the past 6 months (yes all the way back into beta), not going to restate them just going to say it’s not as good as the alpine map.

2. Guildhalls – partly killed small guilds because of the upgrade costs, all guild upgrades have been ripped out of vanilla and placed back into HoT guildhalls with massive upgrade cost. Guild arenas have partly pulled guilds out of wvw.

3. Guild catas – a staple to small groups had it’s cost doubled, which effectively killed small group havocing.

4. Scribing – that came with guildhalls, massive cost and mats, need it to create schematics for all the upgrades to claimable structures, except auras which you also have to upgrade in the guildhall war room. +5 not until guild level 37.

5. Banners – the ultimate pay off for upgrading your hall and scribing, the new dragon and turtle banners are now throwing imbalance into fights.

6. Class balance – op specs have changed the balance of fights, pirate ship meta.

7. Bugs – numerous wall bugs, invulnerable walls, shoot through walls, too much hitpoint walls, heck even graphical wall bugs, I sure did enjoy having that oil pot on the 3rd floor of smc. Fixes have been slow coming…

8. Auto upgrades – mostly killed the reason for scouts to check on structures regularly, at least that’s being changed a bit in killing the definite timer to upgrade, now scouts and roamers will sorta be needed again for dolyak runs.

9. Friday night reset night – killed “the” night to do wvw, moved it a day forward to Saturday, which killed a day of meaningful wvw for everyone. Reset still gets it’s fights on, just doesn’t seem to last as long as friday resets use to.

10. Last but not least, new wvw format in whatever form, is not expected for maybe 6+ months from now, after being worked on for over a year already, after we’ve been strung along in this old dying format for 3 years already.

My issue is Elites…

1. Fully specced Elite vs 30 points into Elite: Not fun for either side.
2. The cost of them is ridiculous compared to the current drop rate of badges.

One extra: Reset night being changed, as an Aussie that’s my Sunday morning now for WvW reset, so I get one day, for limited hours before I head to work Monday.

Anet appears fairly determined to tell us how we should play, without regard for how we actually play. Lots of very bad decisions as I remember:
1. EtoM map cue “solution”
2. Free transfers disaster
3. Tournament stacking
4. Zero kittens given about population and match-ups issues
5. Stability changes unbalanced
6. No tweaking of stab changes bringing on the Pirate ship meta
7. New elite specs -game breaking exacerbated by #5
8. EotM version 2.0 now with dinosaurs, I mean the new BLs (EBG now always cued blobfest)
9. Moved reset to Saturday night

On the plus side(all minor tweaks, nothing significant):
1. Siege labeled and footprint better
2. Squad UI
3. maybe a few other things I can’t remember off-hand
4. PPK, Yak requirement for structure upgrade, 1 kill = 1 rally, guild catapult supply reduced (coming on the 26th… literally IMO the LEAST they could possibly do)

Why you should be concerned:
1. WvW Major Overhaul…. coming sometime this year, unlikely before the summer. One can’t look at the massive failure of EtoM(of course it was actually a success for PvE players, quite a success) for the WvW community and not see that blindness manifest even worse in the new BLs. If it’s true that the WMO has been in development for over a year, then the same mindset that created the BLs is also at work on that. You can be certain that by the time we hear anything, the basic structure will be set in stone. For this reason, I am personally, very nervous about the WMO. It’s bad enough that we have at minimum 6 months before it drops given how quickly WvW is deteriorating, but the evidence points to it being yet another knife in the coffin, not the resurrection of WvW….

I want to play WvW. It is really the part of the game I most enjoy. But I like the Fractal weapons so I have to farm daily Fractals. I also like to try the new set runes from the new HoT maps so I have to farm the new HoT PvE map currency. I also want a Legendary so I have to… I burn out in PvE and I’m taking a break until late this year.

Oh yeah, I forgot about Guild rip-off grind-o-matic-gold sink Halls. that too….

While the new borderlands are very pretty to look at in some areas (but not others), and have unique towers and tower lords, the main thing people don’t like about them is the maze-like feel and constricting passages, or “choke points”, as well as a complete lack of open space for any type of large scale fighting. Well, I take that back. There IS a large open space, but it’s on top of what used to be knows as “Bay”, now known as Undercroft, or “Fire Keep”, but there’s almost no reason to go there unless you want to take the shrine located there, and it’s not really flat enough for a good fight. In Alpine BL, we had lots and lots of nice flat land to fight in. Even the south towers had a lot of nice flat area in front of them where many battles would be fought, with enemies coming from their spawn point to attack the tower, or on their way to hit Hills or Bay. None of those types of places exist in the new BL’s.

However, my server has been fluctuating between tier 4 and 5, and we see a LOT of action in the desert borderlands. Groups of 5-10 have been trying with mixed success to take the Air and Fire keeps (old Hills and Bay), and because of the sheer size of those keeps, they are sometimes difficult to defend. Larger groups have better chance of success, of course, but if you and 2 others manage to take the Air or Fire keeps while a few are defending it, it’s quite a battle. If more defenders show up, of course, you’ll get stomped. And not all of this action is in “prime time”, which is nice.

There are still problems with the waypoints that no one likes. Example- in your OWN BORDERLAND you cannot use the waypoints in old Hills or Bay locations, meaning you have to run from the very top of the map (where the Orb used to be) or Rampart, which is the old Garrison, provided it’s not contested. And because of the maze-like feel, the run back is never a straight line, like we were used to in Alpine. If you take Air or Fire keeps on an opponent’s borderland, you get the waypoint right away.

Then there’s the Oasis event in the middle of the map that happens every few hours. If an enemy completes the event on your map, a big laser hits all the gates on opponent held keeps and towers and damages them a certain percentage based on the level of upgrade at the time. Non upgraded gates will get blown wide open, whereas reinforced gates get damaged to 75% health. In non-prime time, if the Oasis event gets done multiple times, you may visit your home borderland to find fully upgraded towers with gates having 90% damage. Many people will claim that this event causes lag (lots of threads about it), but I’m a firm believer that it’s the stability change and population increase (as explained in some older posts that you can google) that causes the lag at the Oasis event.

Then there’s the whole scribe thing. Remember when you used to claim a camp for +5? Not only is that behind the HoT paywall, it’s also behind a scribe grind that is insanely expensive, unless you have an entire guild dedicated to helping your guild’s scribe reach that level. And woe to you if you have one scribe your guild helps reach level 400 scribe and then that person falls in love with another game and is sick of waiting for Anet to fix everything they broke and then LEAVES this game, completely uninstalling. Bye-bye scribe! Now your guild has to level up another scribe, and that’s not cheap. It happened to my main WvW guild.

TL;DR- Anet messed up.

Sinbold.8723:

TL;DR- Anet messed up.

RIP WvW…………..

Here’s a pet peeve that hasn’t been listed, it’s a freaking Desert! Life doesn’t flourish in a Desert. It’s instinctual to avoid such an inhospitable environment. So why the Dev’s thought players would want to spend hundreds to thousands of hours in there, building and defending, boggles the mind.

For the most part, players are looking for greener pastures.

DeWolfe.2174:

Here’s a pet peeve that hasn’t been listed, it’s a freaking Desert! Life doesn’t flourish in a Desert. It’s instinctual to avoid such an inhospitable environment. So why the Dev’s thought players would want to spend hundreds to thousands of hours in there, building and defending, boggles the mind.

For the most part, players are looking for greener pastures.

^THIS

Who the kitten thought that this i a good idea should be fired asap.

North part of the new BL’s look nice, but thats only a third (probably less) of the map with exactly two towers, one camp and the furthest away from spawn if it is not your home borderland. Oh and you will still only see desert if you are attacking each of these towers from the front, because the green scenery opens up BEHIND these towers. kitten anet seriously.

Yeah but there is that beautiful Oasis in the middle. – yeah right, where you can do that frkn pve event which lags the kitten out of the map if there are more than 10 people on it. kitten anet seriously.

DeWolfe.2174:

Here’s a pet peeve that hasn’t been listed, it’s a freaking Desert! Life doesn’t flourish in a Desert. It’s instinctual to avoid such an inhospitable environment. So why the Dev’s thought players would want to spend hundreds to thousands of hours in there, building and defending, boggles the mind.

Just like most of human history in real life… give me a tropical oasis any day!

Yea a lot wvwer are going thought the stages of grief. I have already accepted that this problem will not be fix anytime soon. I was hopeful that why I started to play WvW again before HoT. Now is just a few threads here and their about the same things that have been discussed for years.

because this is anet listening to the wvw community

Pretend WvW is Apollo 13 and Anet is Houston.

Houston never answered back.

For me…new map + new class imbalance = no fun.

Which is baffling, as they really thought EoTM was such a great concept and ran with it. Despite NO ONE going there outside of k-trains.

You all realize that anet devs read this right? its not like they need to respond to everyone

Me and most of my guild members just got bored of playing the same mode over and over and over and over again for almost 3 years. I honestly doubt bringing the old bl will attract players/vets to play wvw again.

I also partially blame gvg elitist and their “GTFO this is our raid/fight”. Rather than promoting wvw to the newcomers, elitist often scare away ppl with their smug behavior. It’s not rare to hear guilds saying the server is doomed if they leave the server, making more and more ppl less inclined to step into wvw.

For a moment, I miss the matchups before gvg exist. It was just pure madness and fun. TCvFAvDB matchups were some of the best moment I have in gw2

caveman.5840:

because this is anet listening to the wvw community

You’ve missed that fact that the dev’s have been very biased to the T1 servers (since pre mega servers even).

There is a very sad reality is that when you purchase GW2 you are prompted to select a home world server and essentially roll the dice on how enjoyable your WvW experience will be. If were fortunate to pick a server with an active WvW community (I’m referring mostly to earlier in the game when people were still actually in WvW) then you would you have a chance to experience those intense, epic and awesome moments that only large scale wvw has to offer.

IMO, the real issue with Anet abandoning WvW and now has it in a state that is so awful its uncertain if they will be able to breath any new life into the game mode (not just bring back vet player; any players would do at this point) has to do with money. It’s a longer story, but as a player with alts and who has transferred multiple times the server population was exaggeratedly high (every server in the game was either high, very high or full) and seemed to have a pretty wonky script/alorithm to determine populations at all. It’s hard not to think Anet was being pretty slimy here as the only thing that was monitized in WvW was players paying to transfer servers. It’s quite likely that the highest wvw revenue was made during seasons as players paid to stack servers and then again as players repeatedly transferred to higher tiers during the last year+ in search of tiers with active wvw populations.

Hands down there is no component of the game that the dev’s are further out of touch with their player base than in WvW.

Let’s take a quick look at the Anet track record:
- Pay for the game, find out what wvw is, then pay again to transfer to a server where you can play the wvw gamemode in a game you already purchased
- EotM addressed certain aspects players at the time were asking for, but has been left untouched/unpolished and operates almost entirely on large scale map collusion for players to k-train and level alts.
-Changes to stability, zero attention given extremely unfun mechanics/skills (venomshare+wells) and since HoT rev hammer spam – even though in almost all accounts the culprit mechanics were used neither in pvp or pve
- The first of what was supposed to be several ‘tests’ and fun events in WvW – the golem rush. The event was bugged giving players massive damage buffs out of golems – it wasn’t acknowledged, wasn’t fixed and left as-is for the duration, and no ‘fun test events’ have been run since
- The new border land maps without a doubt put a massive effort into the art and aesthetic but completely overlooked the strategic elements (some egs: you can’t capture and then threaten another objective, savagely biased map design and mechanics for defense (tower turtling and siege humping), almost completely removed the supply attrition element of counter play, etc etc etc)
- New wvw buffs are only available to large guilds that do a lot of NOT wvw play and can afford to craft incredibly strong buffs in wvw.

Anyway, for those that missed it Anet did an adopt a dev thing back in the fall of 2014. Here’s the video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Bd0UWUr6l0 as an after the fact sort of hype video.

Some bonus trivia from a longtime player:
You’ll see Hugh Norfolk in the video there and he did run with [Cern] and streamed some of his play. Any guesses on what he ran for organized guild fighting?

Jovani.9207:

You all realize that anet devs DON’T read this right? its not like they to respond to anyone

Fixed that for ya…

All of above ..and also useless title ranks

Dvantaman.3617:

Why is WvW dead anyway?
I want to hear opinions of WvW pro players 24/7

I’m not a fan of WvW back then , but with the new layout of the map Im gonna try it after I finished my HoT stuff.

Take the new BLs, yeah … not good too large and most WvW players want to run in guild groups or in large zergs, WvW in new BLs isn’t really good for that. They made the BLs look all pretty and all, but made them friendlier for smaller groups.

They got rid of stability in the old sense, made it a boon and boons get stripped so easily that most frontliners are dead the first or second push even in a well coordinated group.

They made it so that people don’t have to upgrade anything, I take all your camps and your towers, keeps and castle will still upgrade to T3… What the…

They got rid of the tournament of the past, so that upon getting Silver something rank, you lose any sort of reward to playing WvW. You have unlocked everything mastery siege wise… so why play?

Getting +5 use to be guild thing that anyone could get, now you have to PvE like crazy to get to level 37 on guild hall to get +5 unlocked.

Oh and speaking of Guild halls, you have to get someone to train for scribing that is rather expensive, then farm Flax seed fibers and resonating silvers, and so forth for banners and various things like harden gates, harden guards, harden siege, SMC bombardment… etc. Keep Presence too to get +10… Its no wonder some consider WvW more P2-consider-win than it use to be. Its not P2W, but its closest GW2 has ever been to the concept in my opinion.

And this running pirate ship meta stuff, and group compositions being such a key factor in some fights, its a pain.

So yeah, I only glossed over some things that I, a player that does very little PvE, but loads of WvW have beefs about. In the end, though, WvW is still around, people still do it, but people are also waiting to see what changes are likely going to happen, but as it is, there loads of bugs in WvW that have never been addressed, and loads more of features and fixes that have been requested.

TL;DR
Basically mentioned the reasons why which mostly amount to auto-upgrades, banners, scribing guild upgrades for WvW, group compositions mattering and how easily boons and things are stripped on pushes cause of how many x of this class are running. WvW still exists and people still do it on even T8 server, yet the coverage on anything short of T1 is less and less it seems these days. And people are waiting to see what ANet is going to do about the population balancing.

Sinbold.8723:

While the new borderlands are very pretty to look at in some areas (but not others), and have unique towers and tower lords, the main thing people don’t like about them is the maze-like feel and constricting passages, or “choke points”, as well as a complete lack of open space for any type of large scale fighting. Well, I take that back. There IS a large open space, but it’s on top of what used to be knows as “Bay”, now known as Undercroft, or “Fire Keep”, but there’s almost no reason to go there unless you want to take the shrine located there, and it’s not really flat enough for a good fight. In Alpine BL, we had lots and lots of nice flat land to fight in. Even the south towers had a lot of nice flat area in front of them where many battles would be fought, with enemies coming from their spawn point to attack the tower, or on their way to hit Hills or Bay. None of those types of places exist in the new BL’s.

However, my server has been fluctuating between tier 4 and 5, and we see a LOT of action in the desert borderlands. Groups of 5-10 have been trying with mixed success to take the Air and Fire keeps (old Hills and Bay), and because of the sheer size of those keeps, they are sometimes difficult to defend. Larger groups have better chance of success, of course, but if you and 2 others manage to take the Air or Fire keeps while a few are defending it, it’s quite a battle. If more defenders show up, of course, you’ll get stomped. And not all of this action is in “prime time”, which is nice.

There are still problems with the waypoints that no one likes. Example- in your OWN BORDERLAND you cannot use the waypoints in old Hills or Bay locations, meaning you have to run from the very top of the map (where the Orb used to be) or Rampart, which is the old Garrison, provided it’s not contested. And because of the maze-like feel, the run back is never a straight line, like we were used to in Alpine. If you take Air or Fire keeps on an opponent’s borderland, you get the waypoint right away.

Then there’s the Oasis event in the middle of the map that happens every few hours. If an enemy completes the event on your map, a big laser hits all the gates on opponent held keeps and towers and damages them a certain percentage based on the level of upgrade at the time. Non upgraded gates will get blown wide open, whereas reinforced gates get damaged to 75% health. In non-prime time, if the Oasis event gets done multiple times, you may visit your home borderland to find fully upgraded towers with gates having 90% damage. Many people will claim that this event causes lag (lots of threads about it), but I’m a firm believer that it’s the stability change and population increase (as explained in some older posts that you can google) that causes the lag at the Oasis event.

Then there’s the whole scribe thing. Remember when you used to claim a camp for +5? Not only is that behind the HoT paywall, it’s also behind a scribe grind that is insanely expensive, unless you have an entire guild dedicated to helping your guild’s scribe reach that level. And woe to you if you have one scribe your guild helps reach level 400 scribe and then that person falls in love with another game and is sick of waiting for Anet to fix everything they broke and then LEAVES this game, completely uninstalling. Bye-bye scribe! Now your guild has to level up another scribe, and that’s not cheap. It happened to my main WvW guild.

TL;DR- Anet messed up.

I think you’re probably the most right here. It’s mostly the navigational problems of the BLs and the silliness with guild upgrades to unlock previous functionality (why the hell) and scribing. (in fact scribing recipes themselves aren’t too bad, but levelling them and unlocking them is)

I must say though, the new BL being not flat enough sounds like bogus. There being too many chokepoints can be part of a reason, but like you said, that in fact enhanced small group play. (not that they have many perks left) and WvW has been stuck in blob vs blob for so long that it’s too weird to change that. However, ease of movement between objectives (not at) should be improved on the BL maps.

The new borderlands. Addition of ridiculous and OP banners, airship strikes, chilling fog and other broken mechanics. Not addressing the normal population decrease that games this old have. The constant addition of pve elements in wvw. The horrible lag in the pve event in BL.

Dvantaman.3617:

Why is WvW dead anyway?
I want to hear opinions of WvW pro players 24/7

I’m not a fan of WvW back then , but with the new layout of the map Im gonna try it after I finished my HoT stuff.

Anet killed WvW with new maps. Try it and you probably won’t log in to play but to get that daily chest like me.

Friday night resets moved to saturday killed it.

WvW died with the release of HoT.

The sad thing is that they will use the current state of wvw to justify the future incoming deathblow to wvw in the way we played it until now.

I highly doubt they came to the conclusion that the changes that came with HoT was a big failure. They look at the current state of wvw and EotM and implement changes from there. They are too stuck with the mindset of trying to do something unexpecting.

And instead of solving a series of problems with both class balances, maps and mechanics we will see questionable solutions.

BlueBoy.1236:

Me and most of my guild members just got bored of playing the same mode over and over and over and over again for almost 3 years. I honestly doubt bringing the old bl will attract players/vets to play wvw again.

I also partially blame gvg elitist and their “GTFO this is our raid/fight”. Rather than promoting wvw to the newcomers, elitist often scare away ppl with their smug behavior. It’s not rare to hear guilds saying the server is doomed if they leave the server, making more and more ppl less inclined to step into wvw.

For a moment, I miss the matchups before gvg exist. It was just pure madness and fun. TCvFAvDB matchups were some of the best moment I have in gw2

Aside from my gripes with how WvW development is handled that’s another reason I stopped going there. Every bit of action I’d come across I would be told to get on Teamspeak or find someplace else. I don’t mind being on there sometimes but unless it’s a really important fight I don’t want to listen to people get super serious and talk at double speed saying everything three times as if that helps. It’s not an open world pvp area, I accept that, but there’s not much to do anymore if you just want to jump in and wander around.

kash.9213:

BlueBoy.1236:

Me and most of my guild members just got bored of playing the same mode over and over and over and over again for almost 3 years. I honestly doubt bringing the old bl will attract players/vets to play wvw again.

I also partially blame gvg elitist and their “GTFO this is our raid/fight”. Rather than promoting wvw to the newcomers, elitist often scare away ppl with their smug behavior. It’s not rare to hear guilds saying the server is doomed if they leave the server, making more and more ppl less inclined to step into wvw.

For a moment, I miss the matchups before gvg exist. It was just pure madness and fun. TCvFAvDB matchups were some of the best moment I have in gw2

Aside from my gripes with how WvW development is handled that’s another reason I stopped going there. Every bit of action I’d come across I would be told to get on Teamspeak or find someplace else. I don’t mind being on there sometimes but unless it’s a really important fight I don’t want to listen to people get super serious and talk at double speed saying everything three times as if that helps. It’s not an open world pvp area, I accept that, but there’s not much to do anymore if you just want to jump in and wander around.

While people are certainly free to play the game in whatever way they want. No matter if its pve, spvp or wvw, the problem is pugs that dont follow the commander, dies and rally ppl. So you actually end up doing worse with additional ppl not on TS, than if they weren’t there to help at all. Thats why guilds doing closed raids shout to ppl not to follow them. It’s not that they can’t stand you being around, you actually do more harm than good.

Magnuzone.8395:

While people are certainly free to play the game in whatever way they want. No matter if its pve, spvp or wvw, the problem is pugs that dont follow the commander, dies and rally ppl. So you actually end up doing worse with additional ppl not on TS, than if they weren’t there to help at all. Thats why guilds doing closed raids shout to ppl not to follow them. It’s not that they can’t stand you being around, you actually do more harm than good.

Ya I’m aware of that, said as much in my post, whatever.

Magnuzone.8395:

While people are certainly free to play the game in whatever way they want. No matter if its pve, spvp or wvw, the problem is pugs that dont follow the commander, dies and rally ppl. So you actually end up doing worse with additional ppl not on TS, than if they weren’t there to help at all. Thats why guilds doing closed raids shout to ppl not to follow them. It’s not that they can’t stand you being around, you actually do more harm than good.

I covered that aspect of it in my post, whatever.