Guild Wars 2

When I finally started playing WvW it was on Desert, there were sometimes fewer, sometimes more people around, but it was possible to form groups, go around, and sack all them towers and keeps, you know, do WvW siege stuff. From what I had read about WvW earlier, it was supposedly about that.

Later we (Vabbi) got mushed together with Desolation, and we had an immense amount of fun with somewhat more organised runs, both on Eternal Battlefields and Desert.

Then came the return of Alpine, and this somehow stopped very soon after that.

All of a sudden the groups started telling others not to follow them because it was a closed guild raid. Enemy zergs became also such, trying to find the other guild to have some massive GvG fights. Not much actual WvW is happening. For a short while there were queues on all maps… now there is only a queue on EB (typically a massive one, like 60 people), and GvG swarms on otherwise unfilled Borderlands.

Others not participating in this usually just go there to have their daily fix. You find an otherworld person standing next to a camp, wave at them, point at a guard, they nod yes, you bow and poke at your five guards for daily, maybe take the camp so they can retake it 5 minutes later.

There’s a charming fun in this… but at the same time this isn’t what I liked in WvW in the admittedly short time of that game mode. (And here’s the explanation: when I started I knew basically no friend’s home world, chose Vabbi because it was the least full — as such, I never ended up WvW-ing because I don’t know anyone from Vabbi).

Some really vocal people here seem to hate Desert for various reasons:

• because it’s too much of a PvE map (but how? other than daily I never wanted to kill a single animal because it’s simply not the point — and to be quite honest, you can kill Environment creatures on Alpine and EB as well, so don’t tell me Desert is PvE),
• they hate it because there’s no action on it (my experience seems to be the contrary, but I do see that currently we have more population — I would at least partially chalk that up to HoT being very hot at the time, and not so much anymore),
• and even blame the lack of action on the size of it (Alpine is narrower, but not really much smaller, the size feel of Desert comes from the north start point not being in Rampart)…

but I miss the Desert times, if not for the map, but because actual WvW happened on it. I have 15 supply in my pocket and haven’t had an opportunity to use any of it in a month, because WvW doesn’t happen now.

Some vocal people in-game tell me that if I’m not in WvW for the PvP I should go back to PvE. I say if I wanted to PvP I’d go PvP. But I get it, this is Epic Size PvP. I understand that people like that. I understand that people want to poke each other in massive 50 people flocks. I’m not much into it and in fact I’m horrible at PvP, but I understand. What I don’t understand is why people don’t want to play WvW anymore though.

What changed?

What made the WvW aspect of WvW unappealing? Is it maybe that Alpine is not actually so fit for that? Is it just that the Alpine loving population that came back after it was “finally” added back to the game, is not into WvW at all? What can be done to make people want to play siege WvW again? Am I alone in missing that aspect of the game?

Hi, WSR player here. We fought your server for months before all the desert maps came and heart of thorns, back when we were both in T9.

It wasn’t always like this, when we were both in T9 you’d be spending the supply all the time building stuff, capping objectives etc. This is because if you didn’t, we’ll probably no-one else would.

We are now with Ring of Fire and it’s not like you describe, we have fights, we get blobbed and we defend stuff, smartly spending supply. I guess you just had the worse luck in being paired with a really full server

First of all, there are open tags in debbi, just dont follow the yellow tags.
Maybe you should consider joining the community Guild (DC) and a wvw Guild.

Marko.2906:

First of all, there are open tags in debbi, just dont follow the yellow tags.
Maybe you should consider joining the community Guild (DC) and a wvw Guild.

Thanks, haven’t seen the yellow tags lately (to avoid them). We’ll see about the guild thing.

WvW used to be full of Closed and Open tags, mostly queues everywhere, especially in T1 or so, so you had a choice. You usually find a tag at night, but there’s little resistance by that time of day.

It seems as though the hype, since the ABL/rewards/links have died down, when there were queues everywhere aswell (and no one to lead).

It sounds like what you enjoyed was the karma train, and you assume just because there isn’t a tag on every map there is no activity. Go out and try to cap stuff and see how quickly you find activity. Of course it looks dead if you are just sitting in spawn holding on to your 15 supply.
Pro tip, you can buy your own siege and build it, you don’t need a tag to do it

It really kills me that you are actually running into enemy players and not picking a fight…. .

Jim Hunter.6821:

It sounds like what you enjoyed was the karma train, and you assume just because there isn’t a tag on every map there is no activity. Go out and try to cap stuff and see how quickly you find activity. Of course it looks dead if you are just sitting in spawn holding on to your 15 supply.
Pro tip, you can buy your own siege and build it, you don’t need a tag to do it

You assume something I don’t do. I have in fact run around, and recently mostly seen the jumble of people and onlookers, and some random runners who weren’t the onlooker kind and we ended up fighting (and knowing my PvP skills, I ended up dying).

But that’s it. No cap blobs. Might just be my luck.

Jim Hunter.6821:

It really kills me that you are actually running into enemy players and not picking a fight…. .

In these cases they aren’t picking a fight either.

And since I’m a crappy PvPer, I avoid one on ones to begin with because I simply know I stand exactly zero chance. There’s a reason I don’t go to PvP arena, and this is it. Blob vs. blob? Sure, fine game, I can help out and even get XP and loot out of it, and some good adrenaline rush sometimes!

What time you play WvWvW usually?

Prime time has been generally bad for Desolation already for ages. Defending sucks as too many prime time commanders just want “good fights” and some even insist “let’s not build any siege”, even when the enemy has double the numbers e.g. 60 vs 30 and of course then objectives are lost. If you enjoy to play defense with tons of siege, I recommend the German servers. I have never played on them, but it is obvious that they are much more efficient when it comes to defense and usage of siege.

I was today commanding 2.5 hours at EBG, roughly 9 to 12 morning (only short I went back to home border as I was called there for help). No elitism. I didn’t kick anybody out of my squad. We had about 10 in squad and about 5 randoms (not in squad, but following nevertheless). It was mostly pvd, but after poking enemy enough, they finally came for fights, which nicely continued for an hour.

Speaking of Alpine vs Desert BL:
- the time to travel from earth keep inner to fire keep inner is significantly higher than time to travel from Garrison inner to Bay inner. Most WvWvWers hate to spent lots of time traveling (e.g. after death) than actual fighting, it also makes it difficult to move your troops or mobile scouts in time to stop enemy from capturing objective
- towers serve no purpose on DBL
- DBL has too many environmental hazards (wind to blow you, tons of places to fall to your death) and additional gimmick mechanism (fire blasting turrets, shrines).
- towers and keeps have very varied levels of difficulty to solo, where as in Alpine all the keep lords are exactly the same and all tower lords & guards are the same. I would argue that earth keep is much easier to solo capture than air keep.

I never want to see Desert Borderland back again in WvWvW and I am sure having it for 3 months would kill this game. I wish it would be remade into a pve map. The Alpine borderland also needs changes. The NW (Skritt) and NE (centaur) areas are underused. The ruins of power are just a copy & pasted ugly spvp conquest map. Please bring back the lake + center island (but make the center island a bit bigger with an objective to capture and hold ).

Alpine brought the guilds back. That’s what’s changed.

Learn to work with them and you’ll have a blast. They always always want scouts.

That does indeed sound like a karma train. If that’s how you want to play, join a casual community guild, buy a commander tag and carry on the tradition of open raids instead of waiting for someone to provide it for you. People play for different reasons and Apline BL brought back some of those who prefer that their units be comprised of guildmates or at least people who are on the same page.

I’m not sure if op is talking about karma train or not. I hate k-trains and leave when that’s what’s happening. When I hear WvW siege stuff I think fighting over a defended objective. As in a mideval siege of a castle. As in an epic fight at Bay. Or Gari, hills, NET, etc.

If that type of siege warfare is what the op is talking about then I’m with them. I miss it too.

That type of siege warfare depends on good sized fairly even populations of pugs and/or guilds on a map wide basis that are willing to engage in strategy as well as direct combat large scale PvP.

When the populations shrink so that its hard to find people or the people are doing a private raid, then that leads to pugs not engaging in WvW, which leads to further population loss and you get what the op is describing. WvW takes a combination of guilds and pugs.

Another important point is leadership. You’ve got to have a commander or guild that will lead the pugs. Without leadership of that type you aren’t going to have the type of organization necessary to carry out sustained siege warfare.

The op talks about enjoying WvW but being bad at PvP. I can relate. I loved WvW in the beginning. But I’m bad at actual PvP – the small scale or duel type. And I will never be good but I’m ok with that. So I’m not going to go take camps to try to encourage 1v1’s. Besides being incredibly boring soloing camps or trying to take a tower by myself (talk about PvE!), running supply back and forth , I don’t really want to attract duelers.

So to end this ramble, and to answer the op’s question, what happened has to do with population, leadership, guild participation and preference, and lastly I would say “a point to it all”. People get bored without a purpose. Which is one reason I hope Anet hurries up with the skirmishes. A 2-hour skirmish will give a purpose to get in there and do siege warfare. And I’m looking forward to it.

Are you complaining that there’s not enough pugmanders? Or are you complaining about other people’s guilds finding their own enjoyment? I don’t understand the problems here. All of the issues you listed can be solved by putting up a commander tag yourself.

I wish I ran a wvw guild.

“Kill them all Spartacus”

Deniara Devious.3948:

What time you play WvWvW usually?

I have time only in the evenings, so yeah, prime time.
I’m not willing to spend money on moving to another server as it’s primarily blind luck what I end finding there.

Deniara Devious.3948:

Speaking of Alpine vs Desert BL:
- the time to travel from earth keep inner to fire keep inner is significantly higher than time to travel from Garrison inner to Bay inner. Most WvWvWers hate to spent lots of time traveling (e.g. after death) than actual fighting, it also makes it difficult to move your troops or mobile scouts in time to stop enemy from capturing objective

That is because the map is wider. That’s pretty much the only size issue I see with DBL, that due to the Oasis it’s wider than ABL. On the other hand, ABL citadel is pretty much unnavigable southwards (or takes quite a bit of exploration to find the sweet spots on the ledges which I haven’t yet) which is why I never touch home BL these days, because it takes a huge detour to get anywhere from there.

Desert had the barricades removed in the end (which were super annoying) and it made things a lot easier. I’m all for improvement and making people’s lives easier

Deniara Devious.3948:

- towers serve no purpose on DBL

I’m curious what purpose they serve on ABL that they don’t on DBL, because I didn’t notice much of a difference so far.

Deniara Devious.3948:

- DBL has too many environmental hazards (wind to blow you, tons of places to fall to your death) and additional gimmick mechanism (fire blasting turrets, shrines).

Falling to death is given in many places in ABL as well (for the most part, north), but I’ll admit it’s fewer than on DBL.

Shrines feel similar to the Ruins to me and are mostly just extra fluff in a different presentation, and to me both count as don’t-really-care additions that can be taken when one has the time for them and get a buff going…

I might be in the minority here but I liked that somewhat different approaches were needed to take the different towers (tbh, not that different), and the keeps (much more so) — required some organisation and effort. It was a challenge for the groups. the Fire Keep was on my hate list of things to do, but definitely not in the sense of “I really wish nobody had ever come up with this and nobody should have to play this fortress again”. More like “well, this is hard and the Keep Lord is a jerk, but at least this doesn’t fail as often as new Shatty”. I find EB and ABL somewhat bland in this regard (though I guess the Stonemist Keep lord is still quite fun to beat up).

Deniara Devious.3948:

- towers and keeps have very varied levels of difficulty to solo, where as in Alpine all the keep lords are exactly the same and all tower lords & guards are the same. I would argue that earth keep is much easier to solo capture than air keep.

I consider that a plus (and eh, towers and keeps are typical group effort stuff anyway)
(but wait, soloing Rampart, you mean? That does sound pretty cool, I’d have loved to see that!)

Deniara Devious.3948:

I never want to see Desert Borderland back again in WvWvW and I am sure having it for 3 months would kill this game. I wish it would be remade into a pve map. The Alpine borderland also needs changes. The NW (Skritt) and NE (centaur) areas are underused. The ruins of power are just a copy & pasted ugly spvp conquest map. Please bring back the lake + center island (but make the center island a bit bigger with an objective to capture and hold ).

And that’s why I voted 1+2 or 2+1 or whichever. Keeping just one map for 3 months grinds the gears of the players, having one BL different means you still get to choose to never see one of them ever again (and colour rotations can fix that you get to start from any and all corner of each, eventually).

There’s a room for improvement everywhere. Of all the topics where people spoke up about Desert, nobody praised the Oasis (I think it’s pretty cool, but I haven’t seen anyone go for it in my short experience), maybe it could go and that’d solve a bunch of size problems for example.

(Edit: exorcised a kitten)

Johje Holan.4607:

…

Thank you, exactly this. Siege, taking objectives, avoiding solo combat (and yes, I get enough of that in PvE or (if I played that) PvP, depending on the enemy).

Nothing to do with the “karma train” (I’m new enough never to have knowingly encountered one that advertised itself as such), I have karma to my ears anyway.

As for towers being more strategic. Try trebing Garrison from Northern towers, or Bay from briar. Also Garrison can treb Northern towers, Hills can treb Lake.
In addition to that, you can treb Bay from Vale(including inner wall), Northeast tower from NE camp, Hills from NE camp, Hills from Lake(was never used much). All of which are pretty protected locations with source of supply nearby.
Garrison is realy hard to capture from south, since you can have ACs on unhitable locations, but capturing a tower and building a treb, magicly makes defenders abandon outer defenses or come out to play.

From what I’m reading here and what I’ve also read in other topics, the main problem is an original misunderstanding about WvW is or should be.

I totally relate to your experience. I’m not so good at PvP, even if I can enjoy a fight that’d feel different of a 25s stunlock+spike and run away if that didn’t work. I like people who play.
I don’t like being in a blob and just running, trying to hit something before it’s destroyed and get some loot and XP.
I like to spend some time to take a camp and a tower, and escort dolyaks to upgrade the tower. I like to use cannons, AC and mortars to give the oh-so-naive blob in front of the door a hint that’s a bad idea to come too close.
I liked to rush to fire keep shrines to switch the fire turrets back on, or swith the wind blowers back on near air keep too, and give the oh-so-naive blob trying to take it a hard time.
I laugh at the pack of players of my own server who naively thought they could take on T3 Bay without even holding the camp and the tower.

Yet, if you read carefully what’s written all around by some ppl, you can see that :

• Ppl enjoying taking, holding and upgrading objectives are more or less considered as PvE players that shouldn’t be in WvW
• Ppl using siege weapons to defend their towers/keeps against blobs (it’s always against blobs…) are called “siege huggers”
• Fire turrets or wind blowers are called “gimmicks” and broadly despised because of the movement impairing they cause.

But, truly, if you think about it… Those things are just plain, and totally normal in a game mode that involves sieges and strategy. Logical devices.

The reason why they’re not liked is because they give blobs (mostly) a hard time, and don’t make taking an objective a casual after-work leisure trip. The reason why they’re not liked is ppl just want to take the highway to “the place where something happens” and do not consider ambushing or shortcuts as viable enjoyable ways of playing, nor do they accept some places to be hazardous for sole defense purposes. The reason why you don’t see what you enjoy is ppl mostly think about attacking objectives. Siege weapons are liked to open doors and walls ; never to defend them (siege huggers).

The reason why WvW doesn’t taste like a tactics and strategy game mode, focused on objectives taking, holding, ugrading is ppl mostly don’t care the slightest about all this. Lots of ppl just want “epic fights” or “large scale PvP”… For actually no other purpose than just fights. If you think in only “epic fights” or “large scale PvP”, then you don’t need objectives for more than excuses for fights. Then you won’t like siege weapons because they’re indeed unbalanced (their purpose is to allow outnumbered ppl to hold a place). Then you won’t like DBL because it has movement impairing places, and it requires you to think to remember the paths.

And this naturally leads to the 2 main things more or less everybody sees : blobs running around, full of “casual after-work players” that just want to gain loot, and not think too much about what’s going on, just out of boredom. And you see guild fighting other guilds, because this can be a reason to fight when everything else feels tasteless.

This is the original sin of WvW. Some ppl consider it’s a game mode that it’s not, and that doesn’t (yet should) exist in GW2. And some of those very same ppl are actually killing it in a “If I don’t enjoy it, then nobody should” behaviour.

Ralesk.3215:

I’m curious what purpose they serve on ABL that they don’t on DBL, because I didn’t notice much of a difference so far.

If you cant tell the difference then you fail to see one the most important reasons WvW works as a gamemode, if not the most. WvW at its core isnt fighting – thats just a sideeffect of capturing objectives. But in order to feed this desire to capture objectives, keeping the gears of war turning – and thus get fights – they need to be under constant threat.

EB design do that to near perfection with towers very close to keeps.
Alpine design do that about as good with towers a bit further away.
Desert design dont do that at all with towers far beyond treb range.

And that is why it fails at WvW no matter what else is changed. Yes, the improvement did alot to make it more enjoyable, but its still broken.

On Desert, we basicly have 3 keeps that are perfectly safe on their own when held. You can ignore the towers. You dont need them. They dont matter. For home, the northern towers are the worst offenders because they are totally useless as scouting positions or borderland defense. This makes it boring because those gears of war I talked about… they never start turning. Everything grinds to a halt on Desert. Small scale, large scale, it doesnt matter, the effect is the same.

The way the cannon worked sort of made up for this but the thought was silly. Gather stuff to win only favor two sides – the one with a full zoneblob or the ones that dont have any enemies. Not to mention it was stupid kittened that it fired at all enemy gates. Had it just been against say garri it would have made some sense.

A simple way for Anet to “fix” this would be to add a player controlled supertreb/cannon/mortar in every tower and keep as a special map mechanic. It should reach outer of the closest keep/tower (for north towers, both keeps). But its not gonna happen. Still gonna vote a resounding NO if the option to delete it comes. Cant risk anything else after the resounding failure of the poll where people couldnt compromise.

The people who did care about such things left, because putting effort into the WvW metagame has been fruitless for nearly 4 years.

So it’s not that surprising that a lot of the remaining players prefer either karma training or smashing other players with as little impediment as possible. Neither of those two has really gone away, but they too have faded due to bandwagoning and build power creep.

Dawdler.8521:

If you cant tell the difference then you fail to see one the most important reasons WvW works as a gamemode, if not the most. WvW at its core isnt fighting – thats just a sideeffect of capturing objectives. But in order to feed this desire to capture objectives, keeping the gears of war turning – and thus get fights – they need to be under constant threat.

EB design do that to near perfection with towers very close to keeps.
Alpine design do that about as good with towers a bit further away.
Desert design dont do that at all with towers far beyond treb range.

I guess the reason why I don’t see it is because people just don’t do these anymore. See also ThomasC’s reply just above you.

But thank you, that explains a lot about Desert. And I’ve seen trebuchets deployed in the others, but not so much used. I guess there’s a reason why Vabbi is in the bottommost tier and whatnot :P

ThomasC.1056:

From what I’m reading here and what I’ve also read in other topics, the main problem is an original misunderstanding about WvW is or should be.

I totally relate to your experience. I’m not so good at PvP, even if I can enjoy a fight that’d feel different of a 25s stunlock+spike and run away if that didn’t work. I like people who play.
I don’t like being in a blob and just running, trying to hit something before it’s destroyed and get some loot and XP.
I like to spend some time to take a camp and a tower, and escort dolyaks to upgrade the tower. I like to use cannons, AC and mortars to give the oh-so-naive blob in front of it that’s a bad idea to come to close.
I liked to rush to fire keep shrines to switch the fire turrets back on, or swith the wind blowers back on near air keep too, and give the oh-so-naive blob trying to take it a hard time.
I laugh at he pack of players of my own server who naively thought they could take on T3 Bay without even holding the camp and the tower.

Yet, if you read carefully what’s written all around by some ppl, you can see that :

• Ppl enjoying taking, holding and upgrading objectives are more or less considered as PvE players that shouldn’t be in WvW
• Ppl using siege weapons to defend their towers/keeps against blobs (it’s always against blobs…) are called “siege huggers”
• Fire turrets or wind blowers are called “gimmicks” and broadly despised because of the movement impairing they cause.

But, truly, if you think about it… Those things are just plain, and totally normal in a game mode that involves sieges and strategy.

The reason why they’re not liked is because they give blobs (mostly) a hard time, and don’t make taking an objective a casual after-work leisure trip. The reason why they’re not liked is ppl just want to take the highway to “the place where omething happens” and do not consider ambushing or shortcuts as viable enjoyable ways of playing, nor do they accept some places to be hazardous for sole defense purposes. The reason why you don’t see what you enjoy is ppl mostly think about attacking objectives. Siege weapons are liked to open doors and walls ; never to defend them (siege huggers).

The reason why WvW doesn’t taste like a tactics and strategy game mode, focused on objectives taking, holding, ugrading is ppl mostly don’t care the slightest about all this. Lots of ppl just want “epic fights” or “large scale PvP”… For actually no other purpose than just fights. If you think in only “epic fights” or “large scale PvP”, then you don’t need objectives for more than excuses for fights. Then you won’t like siege weapons because they’re indeed unbalanced (their purpose is to allow outnumbered ppl to hold a place). Then you won’t like DBL because it has movement impairing places, and it requires you to think to remember the paths.

And this naturally leads to the 2 main things more or less everybody sees : blobs running around, full of “casual after-work players” that just want to gain loot, and not think too much about what’s going on, just out of boredom. And you see guild fighting other guilds, because this can be a reason to fight when everything else feels tasteless.

This is the original sin of WvW. Some ppl consider it’s a game mode that it’s not, and that doesn’t (yet should) exist in GW2. And some of those very same ppl are actually killing it in a “If I don’t enjoy it, then nobody should” behaviour.

^This, so …much…THIS ^

+1’d

Although, I do like Alpine more. Maybe because that’s where I started and have fond memories.

Daemonne.5018:

Although, I do like Alpine more. Maybe because that’s where I started and have fond memories.

You know, maybe that’s really the reason why I’m biased the other way :D