Guild Wars 2

Siliconhobbit.4361:

Colin,
One thing that I wanted to ask you about, which was not detailed above or alluded to in regards to future content changes and updates, is the Commander Badge.

Can we expect to see an overhaul of this item any time soon or at least some tweaks to make it a bit more worth the 100 gold price tag?

I for one would like to see this badge become account wide rather then bound to a single character. While I greatly enjoy playing my Elementalist in WvW (the one character I have with the Commander Badge) I find myself NOT playing WvW with my Guardian for the sole reason that I do NOT have a badge on that character.

I love WvW but it is much harder to coordinate battlefield tactics with my guild and keep everyone together while playing on my Guardian simply because I have no badge on him. And before anyone tells me…a 2nd badge is simply not something I can afford…any time soon…or even possibly ever. The badge I have on my Elementalist was given to me by my guild for Commanding via player donations.

Some changes/additions to the badge I would like to see is some more map useable icons as well as a more semi-permanent drawing option.

Being able to see ALL members of the squad on the map as a colored dot, no matter their distance from me would also be something desirable.

In addition to those suggestions, I think all commanders could benefit from the ability to ‘lock’ and ‘unlock’ the squad itself, giving us the ability invite and remove players from the squad if necessary.

Anyways, thank you again for the update. It is much appreciated.

No changes on commander tag anytime soon, see Mike’s reply https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Willing-to-share-WvW-details/1192287

Aww, I was expecting to see the WvW update this month as promised a few months ago. One more month to wait. O well

/wait patiently

Thankies for letting us know that the WvW update has been postponed, Anet.

Maxou.8930:

“We’ll fix the queue issue during the upcoming days”. That would have been a useful annoucement.
Not a huge page for “huumm won”t be February but March instead for you to have nice items in WvW"…

You’re loosing players and support of the community here Colin. Maybe it’s time to realise that …

Maybe this is their way to fix it? Everyone quits: no queues, no culling. Problem solved!

Maxou.8930:

“We’ll fix the queue issue during the upcoming days”. That would have been a useful annoucement.
Not a huge page for “huumm won”t be February but March instead for you to have nice items in WvW"…

You’re loosing players and support of the community here Colin. Maybe it’s time to realise that …

They are not losing players but if that’s what you want to believe go ahead losing the communities support lol this post was to inform the community about changes in patch so you wouldn’t surprised.

Yep. Like a quite a few other people I know, I’m an older player with a demanding job.

I don’t have time to grind, so I certainly don’t want to see PvE grind introduced to WvW.

When can I play, I have maybe a 3-4hr window between work, family and sleep.

GW2’s original promise of grind-free casual WvW fights was tailor-made for me and I’ve had a great time with it despite all the flaws, at least until the latest patch.

Right now though, about half of that 3-4hr window is spent trying to get in to WvW.

For me and for many players like me, the present state of the queues is therefore completely unacceptable. I was hoping for some indication that Anet recognise that queues are broken since the last patch and that they were treating a fix as urgent.

No such indication above though, just an update which has slipped again and which is full of stuff that sounds like it’s introducing more PvE and/or grind to make WvW less fun for people who are actually interested in WvW, in order to attract PvE’rs perhaps.

I do appreciate the effort to communicate here, but I’d appreciate much more some evidence that Anet are actually listening to and responding to the feedback from committed WvW players.

Esoteric.5490:

So we get promised, yes, PROMISED huge updates for WvW in February, then they decide that the patch “needs more testing”, but, in all of this, those, blessed PvE updates are still going through. Honestly, ANet, you have got to be kittening kidding me. I played Guild Wars 1 for 4 years after it launched. If it wasn’t for players like me, this game WOULD NOT EXIST. And how do you repay my customer loyalty? You spit on me by making me play a game for 6 months because of the promise of this unknown carrot on a stick, praying every day that you wouldn’t screw us over with badges not being able to buy ascended gear and that when you created these “titles” all of the game time I put in playing WvW wouldn’t be left for naught. Little known fact, most of us that play WvW DO NOT PLAY OTHER PORTIONS OF THE GAME. We got to level 80 and geared our characters and then we never left, but you decide that the only aspect of this game that we want to play is somehow less important than some carebear PvE player’s content because they totally haven’t gotten multiple holiday events, an event with an absurd drop rate of precursors, and a PERMANENT dungeon. Oh, I forgot, we got jack-o-lantern flame rams and Trebs that launched snowballs, A+ development work on WvW right there, champs.

If you think for a second that you have not made WvW second fiddle to PvE content, you are dead wrong and no politically correct statements you make about your “progress” is going to show otherwise.The rest of this game has gotten thousands of hours and repeated patches of work put into it, but WvW has only had you REMOVE entire objectives like orbs from our maps and now you have pushed the WvW updates back, EXCLUSIVELY. Also, it is astonishing that you just now decided to hire more “staff” to your WvW team. Did it take you 6 months post release to figure out that you have yet to release one solid, meaningful addition to WvW and to realize that you need more bodies working on what is supposed to be your ENDGAME? And to think that WvW had 3 whole developers compared to the dozens, no doubt, that you had working on all of that great PvE content. Explain to me, what is the point of even playing in a Borderland? What dynamic PvP happens there when you have no objective to fight for on 3 carbon copy maps?

If you detect a hint of rage or anger in my post then you are kitten right. I play GW2 for the WvW and the WvW alone. I, nor 90% of WvW players give a flying kitten about what PvE content you are adding because our favorite game type, that we love despite your dysfunction, is barely playable.

I pray that you are reading this and take my words to heart, because if you erase the 4.5k badges I’ve made by trumping them with a new WvW currency, decide that my achievements and the 20k kills I’ve gotten in WvW don’t count towards these new titles retroactively, or make it apparent that you are not even going to put in 25% of the effort into WvW that you put into PvE, then you will see players leave this cesspool in literal DROVES.

No need to toss my input, you’ve basically said much of what I had to say. Its absolutely crazy how many times WvW gets put to the side for other “more important” things, while a large portion of their player base gets ignored. Those quaggan backpacks sure do look cool though!

I’ve got to the stage where I just log on to complete the daily for the laurel, then it’s either queue for the one BL that has any players in it or log off and play something else with my valuable time.

Numbers on the maps seem to be lower and lower – wasn’t it supposed to be 500v500v500 when it first came out? Now it seems we are down to 60v60v60 judging by entering a ‘full’ BL last night.

Devs need to recruit some real players on to their team that is steering wvw and get a full size test server to test changes using real players – there are loads of players that will happily test any crazy idea you might have and give you honest feedback of what they think about any new reward system , etc.

February pushed back to March pushed back from December pushed back to June 2013 – it’s quite clear wvw has not been allocated the resources it needs and now they will be struggling to get anything ready even for March other than cosmetic changes and a new reward system (that can be plastered over the existing one, no great amount of coding required).

Thanks for the update, if Anet fix the queues this month at least that’s one of the main problems sorted (fingers crossed)

Can i just get like blue/green/red figures like placeholders i dont give 2 kittens about what weapon they have or fancy armor combo. I dont care if its norn or asura. I am just tired of thinking, " o it’s just three of them" as another 60 render after i am dead. It is not only a tactical nightmare but it makes me feel like an idiot. Ques are understandable it’s gonna happen. However it is some bs to have nothing in February, we were promised an update give us something. We are dying here. I love this game but your promises are starting to drive even the diehard fans to the edge. I promised my guild over and over things are getting better…I tell my members that are getting tired of the game, “don’t worry guys big update coming soon.” again u make me look like an idiot and makes you guys look incompetent. So please stop messing with your players or ESO will get a nice influx of GW2 diehards. Please just listen to us and at least respond to your community…..

SupercalifragilistaFAIL

I say go ahead and release the patch at its intended date. Let’s be real, almost everything you guys have added since release has been borderline broken and seems to be poorly thought out with what seems to be minimal testing….so just release the patch and let us test it for you as usual. Why make us wait until March to tell you everything that is wrong with the patch?

Thanks for the update Colin. If you need or want additional testers I’d love to volunteer.

Will we get anything for how much we’ve played already? All I do is play WvW and I have 50 silver to show for that.

Those updates and info ok but what about PVE update and precursor scavenger hunt ?

ColinJohanson.2394:

I wanted to quickly give an update on where we stand with upcoming releases for WvW to help give a sense of where we’re at, and set expectations for the coming months. We’re in the midst of finalizing our February release, which I know had been discussed as a potentially large month for WvW additions.

Okay, wait a second, I’m a bit confused . You’re finalizing the February patch. The Feb update was WvW centric, but all WvW content has been moved to March.
So what will we see in the Feb update then if the WvW stuff was moved?

Spartan, I’m guessing you haven’t been exposed to the situation everyone’s living since Guild Wars 2 has been released.
First few month : WvW rocks, everyone joins pretty much easily, fine days.
End of the year : Anet annoucement. We’ll patch WvW soon so that it keeps up with nice content as the rest of the game has. Meanwhile orbs are removed for whatever balance reason. Ok fine.
Beginning 2013 : Anet annoucement : the patch will appear in February and will be awesome.
January 2013 : PvE lolpatch, creates huge queues in WvW and pretends to be fixing / bring solutions against culling (which isn’t). And by the way, MiB style Anet reponse, the queues never hapened.
End of January 2013 : oh by the way patch postponed to March but hey guys, we’re working soooo hard.

So Yes Spartan, it gets people frustated … even more players spending 5 evenings a night in WvW prime times. Deal with it.

FrouFrou.4958:

Maybe this is their way to fix it? Everyone quits: no queues, no culling. Problem solved!

Was about to post something like this too

I think that a a great majority of WvW players are really disappointed by this annoucement and will stop the game in fews days/weeks if nothing is do quickly to reduce the queues. Arena has to realize this major concern.

Great to know the staff is increasing and that new stuff (with more testing and polishing) is comming to the game.

To all the haters… Take a chill-pill, go do some sPvP or PvE if you are so mad with WvW, the game has a lot to offer… Make an alt or w/e

If you dont like any of it, take a break untill march or july, there is nothing wrong with it, its not like we pay a monthly-fee.

I have to admit this is also the first time I hear the February patch was a POTENTIALLY large month for WvW update.

I knew this would happen. Shame i cant get any satisfaction from it. But what else to play ? So few open world pvp. And TESO is so far away :-(

Well it is disappointing, but i can survive for a month.

Jesus.

This is bad.

And this is why I think Arena Net are going about WvW the wrong way. They see a bunch of casual players who are in it for the monthly, some karma trains, and say to themselves; "we retain quite a lot of players in WvW, we don’t need to prioritize any immediate changes to address all the complaints on the forums.

What they fail to realize is that healthy WvW can never be driven by these casuals. WvW needs crazy people who spend 100g for nothing more than the ability to rally his peers, who sit at less than 1g because they spent it all on siege and upgrades, who woul guard Dolyaks for 2h simply because no one else will. It is THESE people who are complaining on the forums, who are leaving the game etc. It might not show in your statistics Arena Net, but without these players WvW will meet a terrible end. When the dedicated players leave, siege won’t be bought, structures won’t be upgraded, and this will mean that WvW turns into a place where you go beat on some doors should you need some quick XP and karma.

I know it might hurt to hear this given the design philosophy of the game, but catering to your hard core WvW’ers, IS more important than catering to your casuals.

Communication much appreciated thank you.

lOKI.8152:

And TESO is so far away :-(

I’m sorry of this, but seems like TESO will be like GW2: separate open-PvP maps with player limits…
But, I hope, they will use their brain to not decrease that limits to the ZERO in comparsion with whole server population…

I’d say I was disappointed but in order for me to be disappointed I’d have to be able to get past the kitten que and actually play dubvdub…..

This is not good, not good at all.

SilverWF.4789 so what you want, unbalanced fights? are we “silly” or what?

They just need to increase peek per server to equal, and the new map is going to help them, but just unlimited, is just like throwing a rock in to the face to Balance.

Also communication much appreciated, tho I hope something roles for Feb.

Alur.7510:

SilverWF.4789 so what you want, unbalanced fights? are we “silly” or what?

They just need to increase peek per server to equal, and the new map is going to help them, but just unlimited, is just like throwing a rock in to the face to Balance.

Also communication much appreciated, tho I hope something roles for Feb.

More Numbers != Unbalance. Not if the game is well designed to handle zergs.

The current maps in wvw, are way to small for handling more people.

Thanks for pushing back updates instead of dropping half kittened patches on us.
Maybe this way you could squeeze fixes for the more glaring shortcomings of WvW in… but the March update better be good then! …no pressure. ^^
Looking forward to the February update to see what is left of the “expansion worth of content” though.

Forget all this, if you can just fix the queue and make possible to play WvW it would be a brand new game.

Reminder: currently impossible to play WvW or organize guild events so all your updates are useless if we can’t play WvW.

Is there any chance of looking at the cost vs. reward for WvW. Right now the only reason for me to play it is fun. And I do find it fun. However, if you calculate repairing armor costs and upgrading stuff costs vs rewards you get for playing wvw. I’ve found little reward. The bags are hard to see/pick up when you are in a moving battle and rarely have much in them. Dungeons are much more reward for the time invested.

WvW is one of the biggest Gold-Sinks in this game, i doubt anyone who is really playing it will make any + out of it. @ katz.

@Anet
Letting a Team of Developers testing their own stuff is wasted Time. They can use this time Fixing things instead.
Make 1/3 Test-Server and let the Playerbase test it.

greetz

Thanks for looking forward to the update.

As for the queue issues… If you are on a tier 1 or tier 2 server, queues should be expected. Coverage is the reason your server is in those tiers. If you’d like to organize guild events, go to a mid tier server.

style.6173:

Thanks for looking forward to the update.

As for the queue issues… If you are on a tier 1 or tier 2 server, queues should be expected. Coverage is the reason your server is in those tiers. If you’d like to organize guild events, go to a mid tier server.

It isn’t necessarily the queues that are causing the problems. It’s the fact your server A has 30 people in the match, server B has 45, and Server C has 60 and all servers have a queue. If the cap is 60 (or whatever it is), why are server A and B not allowed more people in? Why do they have queues when they are clearly under the cap? It’s kittened up! All we get on the whole issue is silence from ANet. Likely because they have no clue what they kittened up last patch when this all started happening.

Extremely disappointed with ANet… This tied with culling, reset and queue silence has made me sign up for ESO.

Guess the quaggan backpack really was the expansion worth of content.

Seren.6850:

Guess the quaggan backpack really was the expansion worth of content.

Maybe we were supposed to open the backpack to get the expansion content out of it?

Gankfest.4965:

The problem isn’t that the update has been pushed back to March, just that there isn’t any useful updates to fix the core problems like lag, culling, and fps/cpu optimizations. Hopefully ESO gets it right…

What a disappointment…

Beta testers have said Elder scrolls online (ESO) is not bad. A little like DAoC(Dark age of camelot). GW2 took some artists from Mythic that helped in DAoC and GW2 was meant to be the DAoC killer which now seems not so likely if they dont focus on WvW. This will mean the crowd looking for WvWvW or RvRvR type of pvp will be forced to shift to ESO.

So this gives Anet about 1 year to get their act on WvW or lose a huge number of players to ESO

I cannot say that I’m not massively disappointed. I know a lot of other people I play with will be as well.

I think WvW is going to be deserted for some weeks now that people know they have nothing imminent to look forward to, on top of multiple upcoming weeks of wildly mismatched servers ‘fighting’ (more like one server flailing about on desperate defense of one objective at a time while the other gets bored playing ‘Player Versus Door’ and falling asleep while zerging down various NPCs with no resistance) each other.

Welp, it was fun while it sort of lasted.

Fuzzion about sums it up. But id go a bit further and say they got until the beta test of ESO, if they fail by that point, people gonna be playing the beta test and not caring at all about GW2.

Tammuz.7361:

Fuzzion about sums it up. But id go a bit further and say they got until the beta test of ESO, if they fail by that point, people gonna be playing the beta test and not caring at all about GW2.

These last couple weeks have turned quite a few people off of the game and I know quite a few others are on the breaking point of walking away. This news isn’t going to help at all.

Burl.9567:

Tammuz.7361:

Fuzzion about sums it up. But id go a bit further and say they got until the beta test of ESO, if they fail by that point, people gonna be playing the beta test and not caring at all about GW2.

These last couple weeks have turned quite a few people off of the game and I know quite a few others are on the breaking point of walking away. This news isn’t going to help at all.

And they will all come back once the patch hits. This happens in every MMO I’ve played.

new Content <- everyone’s pounding away
3-6 months later <- everyone’s getting burned out and stops logging in.
new Content <- repeat.

Also, I’m not sure why people are saying culling is worse. It’s much better than it was before.

much better? how is much better when suddenly 3 feet from me, suddenly a zerg is appearing huh? explain me how is it much better?

ComeAndSee.

And they will all come back once the patch hits. This happens in every MMO I’ve played.

new Content <- everyone’s pounding away
3-6 months later <- everyone’s getting burned out and stops logging in.
new Content <- repeat.

Also, I’m not sure why people are saying culling is worse. It’s much better than it was before.

I don’t think that’s true. Even WoW is seeing reduced numbers of players after expansion. SWToR lost a huge amount that never came back.

A few think culling is better, most think it’s worse according to an informal poll here.

Esoteric.5490:

So we get promised, yes, PROMISED huge updates for WvW in February, then they decide that the patch “needs more testing”, but, in all of this, those, blessed PvE updates are still going through. Honestly, ANet, you have got to be kittening kidding me. I played Guild Wars 1 for 4 years after it launched. If it wasn’t for players like me, this game WOULD NOT EXIST. And how do you repay my customer loyalty? You spit on me by making me play a game for 6 months because of the promise of this unknown carrot on a stick, praying every day that you wouldn’t screw us over with badges not being able to buy ascended gear and that when you created these “titles” all of the game time I put in playing WvW wouldn’t be left for naught. Little known fact, most of us that play WvW DO NOT PLAY OTHER PORTIONS OF THE GAME. We got to level 80 and geared our characters and then we never left, but you decide that the only aspect of this game that we want to play is somehow less important than some carebear PvE player’s content because they totally haven’t gotten multiple holiday events, an event with an absurd drop rate of precursors, and a PERMANENT dungeon. Oh, I forgot, we got jack-o-lantern flame rams and Trebs that launched snowballs, A+ development work on WvW right there, champs.

If you think for a second that you have not made WvW second fiddle to PvE content, you are dead wrong and no politically correct statements you make about your “progress” is going to show otherwise.The rest of this game has gotten thousands of hours and repeated patches of work put into it, but WvW has only had you REMOVE entire objectives like orbs from our maps and now you have pushed the WvW updates back, EXCLUSIVELY. Also, it is astonishing that you just now decided to hire more “staff” to your WvW team. Did it take you 6 months post release to figure out that you have yet to release one solid, meaningful addition to WvW and to realize that you need more bodies working on what is supposed to be your ENDGAME? And to think that WvW had 3 whole developers compared to the dozens, no doubt, that you had working on all of that great PvE content. Explain to me, what is the point of even playing in a Borderland? What dynamic PvP happens there when you have no objective to fight for on 3 carbon copy maps?

If you detect a hint of rage or anger in my post then you are kitten right. I play GW2 for the WvW and the WvW alone. I, nor 90% of WvW players give a flying kitten about what PvE content you are adding because our favorite game type, that we love despite your dysfunction, is barely playable.

I pray that you are reading this and take my words to heart, because if you erase the 4.5k badges I’ve made by trumping them with a new WvW currency, decide that my achievements and the 20k kills I’ve gotten in WvW don’t count towards these new titles retroactively, or make it apparent that you are not even going to put in 25% of the effort into WvW that you put into PvE, then you will see players leave this cesspool in literal DROVES.

I can already tell you rewards won’t be retroactive, kinda obvious on that one

ColinJohanson.2394:

- Continual work to re-build the way our game loads models and compresses data, to allow for more visible characters/names in WvW in the long run as we build towards removing as much culling as possible from the game.

I asked for this some time ago, glad to see it’s going to be done guys

This should really help with culling problems while they’re completly solved, I love this.

Lokheit.7943:

ColinJohanson.2394:

- Continual work to re-build the way our game loads models and compresses data, to allow for more visible characters/names in WvW in the long run as we build towards removing as much culling as possible from the game.

I asked for this some time ago, glad to see it’s going to be done guys

This should really help with culling problems while they’re completly solved, I love this.

Except a month ago they told us they were working on removing culling completely. Now it is “as much culling as possible” which means nothing.

I am so disappointed by this I am cancelling my subscription.

But seriously, I’d rather have the patch be mostly bug free and working well when it comes out than getting a buggy patch right now. With that said, WvW is getting a little stale after so long so I may take a break until the update actually hits.

By the way, in the next patch can you introduce an item to stack stacks of consumables? My various stacks of badges is crowding my bank and I would love a way to convert one stack of Badges of Honor into one Large Badge of Honor and the other way around. That way I could keep all stacks of my badges in one slot instead of having to spread them out into 8.

ColinJohanson.2394:

- Continual work to re-build the way our game loads models and compresses data, to allow for more visible characters/names in WvW in the long run as we build towards removing as much culling as possible from the game.

Translation: in near feature some server will be able to have only 10 players per map, while others can send all 166. Queue fixes all our problems. © – Anet’s way of doing things.