Guild Wars 2

Recently, I see a ton of thread complaining about the new map, how they don’t like the design and what not. But, for me, it seems nearly everyone is missing the bigger picture.

Is the home borderland concept a bad idea from the start?

Problem #1 : Having a home borderland in a game mode that strives to get 24/7 action is just counter productive.

The whole point of the home borderland is to lock down your map, meaning that you control everything on it, upgrade everything and siege everything. Might still sounds good at this point, but when you realize that what this promote is a gameplay where every server is sitting on their fully capped map thinking : “Is someone coming to attack us soon? It’s been 1 hour since the last attack…” you get how bad the idea is. The end result of controlling 100% of the map is to kill the activity on that map. WvW needs more constant actions not map lock down.

Problem #2 : The population of lower tiers just cannot fill 4 maps.

It’s just the reality since the game launched and will likely not change. Then, why do we have a map that require 3 copies of itself in a same match up? This is a problem that should have never existed. If a tier only have the population to make 2 maps active, they should only have 2 maps. This would solve a big part of your constant problems with server population and complaints about empty map.

HoT would have been a perfect opportunity to change that system and design a new map that like EBG is symmetrical, to allow you to adjust the number of maps according to the population in the tier. But NO… I just don’t get it. Why would anyone willingly shoot itself in the foot?

Random BlahBlah

There are many other points I would like to discuss about home bl but for the sake of brevity I won’t expand on them. Still, let me ask you another question. Does it make sense to you that a map (home bl) who doesn’t even come close to the level of activity of another map (ebg) count for more in the match up score? You get more points holding your home borderland than by holding your corner of Eternal Battleground, still every single day or time of the day, I see way more players in my corner of EBG than in my home bl. Go figure…

Ok so i waited till Halloween was over to come back in here. This is what i got as a experience.

I tried once to run around alone and this was awful. The map is great looking as is actually really fun to explore but im getting caught by people i cant even attack due to angles and them being on a higher ledge them me. There shooting down at me freely and im getting obstructed.

When me and 4 other guild members jumped in there it was alot more fun. We are on the Crystal Desert server though and it became a problem no matter what map we were on. Everytime something is taken you are notified. I dont like this, we are a 5 man group trying to sneak towers and camps. We took 1 camp and literally less then 1 minute later we were met by 20 or so SBI.

We tried again later and was able to take a tower, the champion was alone which felt a little empty. Also the 2nd we took it a 8 man group came do it immediately. We are a smaller population server and it feels like crap. The map might as well put blinking targets on the map of where we are.

Im still seeing veteran creature and ruin dailies. Anet added synthesizers in place of the fact no nodes were anywhere. My friends and I who have been doing WvW since the start of this game are at the point of not doing dailies since we wont move servers. We want action but not one forcing us to go 5 vs 15 all the time.

The auto upgrades are bad, it makes it so people dont care about protecting them at all. When we would upgrade a camp we would watch it and watch the closest tower and hold that too. You would get small groups of 3-5 holding areas of a map. You dont feel the need to watch it anymore.

So i end with even though i love the fighting/ how pretty the map is/ and i do disagree with some of the people with the map size. I would say the map doesnt feel WvW. Something is missing from a personal stand point. Also there is something missing from the middle of the map, that event doesnt do anything for anybody.

The expansion brought a great story, new pve maps, great pve add ons and bos fights. They are amazing. PvP got the new specs which are great and create alot more builds. Many people are actually trying to force the new specs as meta even though alot of the old builds work and its gonna create awesome tournaments and hopefully leagues for the future.

This expansion brought nothing to the table for WvW, its a beautiful map. It doesnt work though and the WvW populations are shot. We have 3-5 people in my guild who cant switch to crystal desert because the Popualtion is too high. Yet we cant hold 1 keep on our own borderland on a reset night. When you talked transfer spots and rune of air/fire/earth temples. I pictured someone else entirely. I saw in my head amazing beautiful temples that once upgraded i would want to protect. And by having it gave unique abilities and we got elemental huts that truly dont give anything to holding them. Seeing towers look like rock wall huts and when they are totally upgraded and they still look like rock mud huts. im looking at it like oh well.

Its a MAD MAX world with a MAD MAX plot without mad max.

The map doesn’t have to be full for people to enjoy themselves. A ton of roamers and skirmishers preferred the alpine bl’s because they could get into fights without a map queue sized blob interrupting them.

It also gave us a way of breaking up the omni blob that certain servers liked using. If they had everyone Voltron’ed up together to hit our EB keep a handful of us could go hit one of their bl wp’s and force them to break off or lose a keep.

These types of tactics no longer work because of the new wp/upgrade mechanics, and map design. That’s why you are seeing complaints.

If people stop thinking of their whole Home BL as “theirs,” and instead consider a part of each map to be “theirs,” then people might enjoy the BL’s more in the current environment. Less running, less complex travel, and faster reinforcements are some of the benefits of splitting up.

By splitting up your perceived territory across all the borderlands:

• You have a waypoint available in each of your territories.
• You have a short, non-barricaded route from spawn to a keep, tower, and camp in each territory.
• When waypoints are unavailable, Invaders have an advantage when running to defend their spawn-side Keep compared to people running from Citadel.
• The barricade system can drastically slow down Defenders trying to run from citadel to defend the side keeps.

The waypoints we are accustomed to having went to other maps… maybe we are supposed to as well.

@misterdevious.648, well, people don’t get , they hardly split, reason blob is the most common way to win,makes rewards faster, since blob can take towers in 1 minute (not talking about actual BL)or a bit more and then blob up several parties that are taking more time to to capture other “objectives” due map being simple and very straightforward(less tactical, more easy to win due number difference).

I want the old map’s back, my roaming is gone.

@Gudradain

+1 from me, no surprise there, been advocating this for about a year now Also can you please change your post from a question to a normal post so I can give it a +1 ?

@misterdevious

Good points, I’ve been wanting to see people play more like they do on EBG with each their corners instead of dominating the map myself, you put it into better words than I have.

Gudradain.3892:

HoT would have been a perfect opportunity to change that system and design a new map that like EBG is symmetrical, to allow you to adjust the number of maps according to the population in the tier. But NO… I just don’t get it. Why would anyone willingly shoot itself in the foot?

This is a good point, they should have created the desert BL as a tri pointed map like EB, and then redone the alpine BL as a similar map. Then had 3 maps per game. BG is probably the only server that would fill all 3 maps in NA at least, so its not like they need 3 home BLs.

misterdevious.6482:

If people stop thinking of their whole Home BL as “theirs,” and instead consider a part of each map to be “theirs,” then people might enjoy the BL’s more in the current environment. Less running, less complex travel, and faster reinforcements are some of the benefits of splitting up.

This is why having tri pointed maps is arguably better than what we’ve currently got.

Gudradain.3892:

Might still sounds good at this point, but when you realize that what this promote is a gameplay where every server is sitting on their fully capped map thinking : “Is someone coming to attack us soon? It’s been 1 hour since the last attack…” you get how bad the idea is. The end result of controlling 100% of the map is to kill the activity on that map. WvW needs more constant actions not map lock down.

This is an interesting question. I seen EBG played this same way too though, where a commander spends all their time working to control 100% of their third of EBG and almost never venturing out to make some play on the third of another server.

The concept is good. The home border is part of server pride, something that bring battles. You wanted to hold garrison, bay and hills on your home border as they where considered “yours”, while enemy borders where considered hostile territory even if you had them capped. Pretty basic psychology at work here.

The passive PPT tick from safe/uncontested keeps that snowball server points at low population times has always been a problem and there have been many, many different ideas on how to solve that.

In this case though, I dont really see an issue. Yes, the points from a home border is more than the points from your corner of EB. That’s sort of the point. The home border is supposed to be the rough average where all servers are equal, while EB is the battlefield where taking SM is supposed to make the difference. That said I really wouldnt mind if border PPT was reduced.