The problem with the stability discourse, as well as many other discussions regarding WvW lately, is that it is obscured by the misconceptions of stupid people. People who are completely unable to either look at the very simple mechanics behind the change and tally up the numbers or look into the context of how the stability change is the driving fault behind the “population imbalance” and general discouragement of content-enablers (like commanders, roamers, scouts etc). I have no better description for people who refuses to argue the points at hand or harp on about incontextual or peripheral issues.
There never was a “permastab” norm before the change. That is the misconception of stupid people who never understood how rips worked and simply wanted their spammable go-to buttons to be the end-all solution to some elitist guild, all-melee, permastab strawman. The changes to stability, making it part of a tit-for-tat cooldown trade, is in direct correlation to superiority of control effects, given how the game has more control effects on shorter cooldowns. It is an imbalance. That is the simple math.
By the same premise, it is in direct correlation to larger groups outperforming smaller groups [with fewer cooldowns to burn] (making transfering to higher populated servers more appealing) and pickup zone-blobs outperforming well-composed diverse groups (that tend to provide said pickup groups with commanders or other forms of leaders and content-enablers). They do not have sufficient counters to cover all the control or the uptime to match the reapplication of control effects. They simply run out of cooldowns.
That used to work well, with more control than counters but higher applied covers that had to be ripped from their players to impose control upon them. The current balance makes pinballing the norm and that is what makes range-to-range combat the norm. We had rips to boons, boons to conditions and conditions to cleanses rather than the breakbar-spam nonsense promoted in PvE now to create a simplistic version of that mechanical context. Tangent: Even in PvE it would probably had been more fun with bosses that corrupted boons to cleanse and reapply or stole boons to rip, steal or corrupt back.
All of this has created a transfer circus where players transfer to win, overpopulating already highly populated servers, followers transfering to find leaders, draining lower populated servers to the point where players have to transfer to even find players to fight and to participate in the basic premise of game mode – to have open world fights – and a dependence of more players upon fewer players, where old established commanders are expected to guide more, less experienced players. That is a terrible environment to command in, causing burn-out, limited tactics at one’s disposal and a general disinterest in the game mode, from the decreasing amount of players that an increasing amount of players depend upon. That’s the context.
Stability is at the heart of everything, from the personal enjoyment of getting to control your own character to the melee-range balance, finding fun friends to follow and exciting frenemies to fight. A game (mode) where restricted movement is the norm is simply garbage and completely counter-intuitively wasteful to the fantastic movement- and combat engine this game promises underneath the WvW scrapheap. That’s why many of us are so passionate about it too, because the WvW mode has so much potential in GW2. It stands to be the open-world market leader. The same can not be said for good stories, raids or esports, with cross-genre competition where our MMO is but a small contender.
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