Guild Wars 2

Hello forumusers and hopefully mods/devs,

With the recent and upcoming wvw patches you’ve received a lot of criticism. In this post i want to try and work out what Arenanet’s intentions were and how this worked out. This post contains a lot of speculation from my side, and i hope some people will share their thoughts about what i wrote here.

Starting off with the new bloodlust buff, in my opinion arenanet made a change to the borderland maps, simply because they received a lot of complaints about arenanet not caring about wvw. The underlying thoughts to create the bloodlust points and buffs are probably designed in the hope to create more organised smaller groups that would split of the zerg and thereby spreading the people, decreasing lagg and making wvw more strategic.
Then there’s the leagues, which are probably designed to give every server more of a loyality boost and more competitive/rewarding fights.

This, in my opinion, is a combination that ruined wvw for a lot of people, and is very poorly chosen. First of all; the bloodlust will have an opposite effect. High wvw-populated servers will have the extra numbers to spread and possess all of the points (and therefore the buffs), making the server that already had the larger numbers even stronger since they will get the extra stats from the buff… I personally can not see any other outcome from this bloodlust buff than the strong servers having an advantage…
Bringing in this patch, nearly at the same moment as organising the leagues, will cause a ton of people to transfer to a higher (wvw-)populated server cause they want to join the winning team. Combining this with the simple way of server transferring, could be lethal to wvw as it is.

My question is simple, do people think im right here? and how do people think wvw can be improved? I personally think the recent patches were there to out something out there in the hope to keep the wvw population happy, which did not work out.

My suggestions;
- Start listening to forum users, even the ones that seem like a complete whiners (me?)
- People have been asking for GvG’s a long time, this current buff even ‘destroyed’ GvG’s. I personally don’t care for GvG’s, but if so many people want it, why introduce a buff that will destroy it??
- Make servertransfers near enough impossible… A lot of people switch servers to be on the winning team, completely unbalancing servers. At the begin of the game we ‘had to pick our server wisely’… Why? 2 hours of farming and i can switch.
- Fix the buff on the last patch… It’s so obvious it didn’t turn out to be what it should be… Give some other bonusses like increased wxp or whatever, but not such a powerfull extra stat.
- Make WvW more rewarding, i think this is something that Anet adressed a bit by making the Vets/champions in WvW drop the new ascended items and champion boxes, but there’s still a low reward level compared to pve.
- As part of a more rewarding WvW, new achievements would be really welcome and probably easy to implement.
- Give us a prewarning when a patch hits, instead of kicking us out of WvW instantly… tell us 15-30 minutes beforehand instead.

- And last, but not least, get some fresh thoughts in your WvW team. WvW has such a high potential and it’s probably THE endgame of GuildWars2. Don’t let it go to waste and get some more brains in, cause (no offense) the current team does not think everything through like they should imo.

I hope some people could offer their thoughts on this post and tell me what their suggestions are. Let’s try to make this a constructive feedback post, rather then a bunch of whining.

If you ask me, what WvW mostly needs is a lot of different QOL changes.

Imagine you’re assaulting the Hills keep with an enemy waypoint in there. You breached outer and inner, but the enemies are holding the chokepoint. Every +-3 minutes, when the “repel the enemy attackers” event (for the defenders) hits 0 all their dead players and reinforcements from other maps can mass waypoint in there. And unless there’s an attacker that keeps hitting a closed gate, the waypoint will even stay open.

The Tutorial for WvW is missing any notion at all about the Bloodlust buff. The information is also presented in the wrong way – the stuff the voice tells is much less important than what the small popups show, but most people focus on listening instead. And choosing the menu options for advanced questions? There’s a placeholder saying the NPC needs to wait for “the battle plans to arrive”. It also doesn’t explain anything about the different maps, the unconquerable spawn points and other things a beginner should know.

Adding a ‘Private’ option for the Commander Tag would also allow guild groups to use the targeting system for what it was actually designed for instead of it being a ‘ghetto commander tag’. It will encourage more groups to run individually instead of all zerging up.

Having some more achievements for WvW would be a welcome change as well. If WvW players want to get the achievement chests at any decent rate, they are forced to do PvE / living story for it. +-5-7 points from the daily just doesn’t cut it compared to how much you get in PvE. It doesn’t even have to be all the way up there, but an increase would definitely make me happy. I think this also falls under the ‘more rewarding’ header. (I don’t want WvW to be the MOST rewarding at all. I just want to make it more viable to leave PvE completely.)

The new change keeping WvW open while a new patch is about to land is a great improvement. THAT is the stuff I want to see, and many others with me.

Ah yes, that indeed brings up some points i had thought about too, but did not mention in my post. As part of a more rewarding WvW, new achievements would be really welcome and probably easy to implement. After playing a ton of WvW i still only have a few tiers in most of the achievements, and as pointed out before, the amount of total doly’s killed the past year would only be enough to reward 23 people with the yakslapper title. Why not make a lot more tiers, and think of new achievements?

Second point that i had thought about aswell is the patch notification… Why the hell does everyone get kicked out of WvW in 10 sec after the message ‘a new patch will be available soon’ appears… Why not at least tell us 15-30 minutes beforehand? Few weeks ago we were at the inner of a servers main keep in EB when we got kicked out… Unfair and unrewarding.

I added this to my main post aswell.

More tiers would help, but also some more unique ones. “Capture a [camp/tower/keep/SMC] without being damaged”, “Kill x players by using siege weapons”, “Destroy x pieces of enemy siege weapons”, “Knock X enemies off siege they are manning”, “Destroy enemy siege with a cannon, mortar or burning oil”, and so forth. There’s a lot of options there completely unexplored.

-server alliances would help with the leagues it would also make the leagues unique. alliances are formed according to players and coverage on each server. so if it was like sor/tc/fa matchup…tc needs help(t2 server/t3 server) and fa needs a loot of help(jq or db). sor would not get an alliance.

-improve the loot please! all im getting atm is whites and blues with a couple of greens. im losing so much gold with all the siege i have to buy and all the upgrades and repairs.
also could we get some t6 mats and t6 nodes on these lvl80maps? and please not in the jp only?
could we get help with the ascended crafting…maybe buy stuff with badges instead of laurels.

-more use for badges

-support the guilds: we need gvg areas. also how about guilds are allowed to build watch towers or something on the map to protect the keeps or just something that makes every active guild in wvw matter.guildhalls?even trap areas constructed by guilds.

-the runins are lke a spvp playground which is nice during downtimes and i had some fun fights, but it feels disconnected from the rest of wvw. the terrain tough would be great around keeps. make gates harder to reach. the carver cap point near lake feels way more like a tower than actual lake…..making terrain more difficult, breaks up zergs. zergs have to pass choke points, so the defenders can actually givem a hard time even if outnumbered.

-after over a year: can we finally kick offline party members?!!!!!!!!

-class balance:its not fun being stunlocked to detach or perma interrupted without being able to react. its not fun being 2 shot by a glass class(with a +150 buff). its not fun being forced to be support or go roaming(mesmer/ranger).its not fun being ganked by perma invis guy. its not fun being conditionbombed to death in 3 seconds. AND ITS NOT FUN TO BE BALANCED AROUND SPVP!
please make one big balance patch for wvw only and please based on a gvg situation and not a 1v1 situation. some classes are stuck atm: mesmers:portal/veil/support, rangers….ermmm no role(maybe thief detector after october patch), thief: ganker, camps, roaming, killing dolys, tagging gates…in a zerg….melt to death(also stuck because of spvp 1v1)

-fix exploits. some people are still able to portal inside the inner bay gate.ac range behind the gate area.

-make walls a little safer as zergs can nuke everything on the walls and make an omega golemrush for example pretty hard to defend.

also one thing that has always bothered me…why on earth is the lord in smc standing at the bottom and not on the top level?o.0 it would make smc way harder to take if he was on top.

selan.8354:

also one thing that has always bothered me…why on earth is the lord in smc standing at the bottom and not on the top level?o.0 it would make smc way harder to take if he was on top.

He used to be at the top, but could be killed with a treb there. So they moved him down. That’s also when SMC became 35 instead of 50 ppt.

TCDJ.5378:

selan.8354:

also one thing that has always bothered me…why on earth is the lord in smc standing at the bottom and not on the top level?o.0 it would make smc way harder to take if he was on top.

He used to be at the top, but could be killed with a treb there. So they moved him down. That’s also when SMC became 35 instead of 50 ppt.

oh i didnt know. how about the second floor then?

selan.8354:

oh i didnt know. how about the second floor then?

Because of their code. You could use arrowcarts from the bottom to hit the lord up on the grating system. Maybe to much work to fix the error so they just moved him down.