Guild Wars 2

I love the borderland maps, EB is all jam packed close together and it lends more to hiding behind arrow carts with everybody spamming 2 on their siege engines.

borderlands is where the open field combat comes into its own, you can truly push backwards and forwards across the field more and it has an impact.

I generally see EB as a place for the disorganised chaos (which is still awesomely fun) of WvW between more random players and borderlands as the place where tactics and coordination can truly be implemented and inferior forces can win against larger numbers.

I think its all right to remove the orbs, i mean. Flying players getting the orb??? Why do we need a bugged mechanic, it didnt really made all tht difference. If you think BL have no attractive now just think of them as free points, i mean i really Dont know how many points can a BL net, but lets asume is close to 100, are you going to let them go just because there are no orbs?
Everything will balance out at some point, so Dont worry. Until they get fixed bye bye orbs, welcome running players.

I don’t know why they put the orbs inside keeps they should have just had an alter near each spawn so you have to go dangerously close to get it back but its not physically protected by Walls and gates.

I’m not sorry to see the orbs go. They amounted to little more than a hacker magnet and ‘win more’ item, as far as I’m concerned.

As for borderland maps, you’d have to be a fool to leave them undermanned in favor of sitting in the EB queue. EB counts for less than 40% of the total points possible. If your server is interested in winning, they’ll need a strong borderlands presence.

Personally, I prefer the Borderland maps to EB’s.

I never joined EB, because borderlands where always full of fun without any queue

I enjoy the borderlands more than EB and so do many other players and its not due to orbs. The removal of orbs is the best thing that could have happened to WvW aside from removing server transfers. Orbs have made extremely unbalanced and lopsided matches week after week, discouraging servers with fewer players from even attempting to play WvW.

Removing orbs will do a couple very positive things..

1. Stop a mass amount of flames and QQ during server battles about being hacked
2. Stop the snowball effect of the winning team from just holding 3 points
3. Focus players on the real objective of WvW which is the scoreboard

The borderlands aren’t going to become less important and frankly I think they will become more important. Instead of trying to hold the orbs you are going to focus on maximizing your points in the borderlands because every close fight I’ve been a part of in WvW is ALWAYS decided on the borderlands.

I dont think thats the case – I stay in my home BL and command there almost every day. I stay where people know me and enjoy the BL’s more than EB.

Better removed then let those cheaters continue to cheat.
People play WvW to fight for wins, not for some orbs.

If your server want to win, you need to be good at all 3 maps or you aint going to win it.<3 anet for this decision.

15% more health and 150 to all stats.

There were some Necro’s and Warriors in my guild running with over 30,000 HP and over 3000 armor.

It was stupid beyond belief and it needed to go away.

remove orbs +1 its for the better,we can now focus just on capturing objectives

Why not just have harsher punishment for those who hack the orbs? Would be really easy to detect, especially with the community on guard almost 24/7.

You hack the orb, perma ban, plain and simple. You can still work on different mechanics, and making the orb more secure on the side.

But I really feel you’re shooting yourself in the foot here. Unless you come up with an alternative within the month, WvW is really going to lose it’s appeal. The only reason for taking tower and keeps was for orbs, which in turn also was for points, which lead to realm pride. Now the main focus is just going to be farming points, which is going to get boring.

I’m still going to WvW, don’t get me wrong, I just hope the popularity doesn’t diminish.

I do not think I can possibly disagree with the op more
The borderlands are much faster pace and you basically stated why in ou post and then went on to say the opposite
The borderlands are smaller, more compact, and alot easier to get from any spot on the map with relative ease and quickness
And I do not think I ever heard EB being labelled as for noobs.
and your “big name” guilds go to borderlands because it is harder to defend points and you can much easier get attacked on 2 sides simultaneously
Not saying EB isnt fun or anything, but if you watch eb map on several server you would know that map has the most consistancy to it. I can’t tell you how many times I have looked at that map to see 1/3,1/3,1/3 with only a supply camp and maybe the keep changing hands

I personally have played more on my borderland than EB. Why? Because it is the pride of my server. Securing your own border with or without the orb is a testament that your server actually cares for its reputation. The few times I joined the battles in EB, I felt good about the fact that my team was keeping our borderlands clean and steadily gaining points as we advanced and took over EB. Even without the orbs I will be battling to keep enemies out of my homeland.

All the people that are saying they are happy the orbs are gone because the buff was too unbalanced. THAT is why they were worth fighting for. The points round robin of taking keeps is FAR outweighed by “night capping” imbalances, so even if you were off-prime and another server had a massive zerg, you would still want to at least protect the orb even if you lost everything else. Honestly there was no way you were going to protect everything else anyway so the score would end up lopsided like we’ve seen over and over again across multiple tiers.

The orbs were something worthwhile to fight over. I agree their loss will make the borderlands less critical in the grand scheme of things unless you are in a well balanced match-up with prime/off prime population equality.

And for those of you saying, just wait until they come back. How long have we been waiting for other ‘fixes’? I don’t expect them back anytime soon given A-nets track record thus far when it comes to WvW.

“Without the orbs, Borderlands are just going to be seen as the annoying maps you have to put up with when Eternal Battlegrounds is full.”

That’s already how I view the borderlands, and it’s only day 1 of no orbs.
I just don’t bother with the BLs anymore. In fact, no one does. Every BL is its respective servers colour, no one can be bothered to go there and take anything. Everyine’s been piling into the EB since the change and the EB queues get insane (right after it was implemented the queue was FIVE HOURS! We’re a medium populated server.
A 5 hour queue has never happened before, not to mention it was the middle of the night/early morning.
_

Unfair unbalance < People less spread out.

Let’s hope they bring orbs back, but as something that is not exploitable, usbject to hacks and does not alienate players.

@TheRamosOnline – please continue not bothering with the borderlands. My server will continue to rack up huge points there while your team waits in queue for EB.

Fantastic change, AN! Thank you so much.

Why not just switch the out manned and orb bonuses? So outmanned servers have the potential to fight back whilst outnumbered and the orb gives the entire holding server bonuses to magic find, experience and gold. After all, what your fighting for is basically pve bonuses anyway.

I realise the hacking will still need to be addressed for all the gold sellers not to take advantage, but it’ll keep the objective and give smaller servers a chance when paired with larger more active ones.

LHound.8964:

Spetrix.3859:

Dee Jay, I’ll quote from earlier to demonstrate why this change bothers me

In addition, think of the loss of this experience: taking the orb from the altar and running it back to your garrison, all in the meanwhile trying to defend the enemy from killing your orb carrier and resetting it/ stealing it. It’s one of my favorite moments in WvW when an orb is on the move and it just goes crazy trying to secure it. By removing the orbs of power, we will no longer have this experience available to us. I highly urge Anet to fix the altar problem and put them back in (maybe modified)

And then a hacker “harry potters” it away! Very fun indeed!

This is the issue. They cannot handle the hacks at all. Such simple ones that many games have combated in the past. Z Axis flying, no clipping (really? no clipping??), speed hacks, etc… These should have been handled in beta.

Bumble.6940:

Why not just switch the out manned and orb bonuses? So outmanned servers have the potential to fight back whilst outnumbered and the orb gives the entire holding server bonuses to magic find, experience and gold. After all, what your fighting for is basically pve bonuses anyway.

I realise the hacking will still need to be addressed for all the gold sellers not to take advantage, but it’ll keep the objective and give smaller servers a chance when paired with larger more active ones.

Hackable orbs + magic find + bots = bad ide.

Until orbs are fixed and not hackable to the large degree they are….then removal is the only logical thing. Gives them time to fix and implement gvem safely with sensible benefit.

Yea they also said that the Dolyak events were going to be “worked on” and instead they have just been removed for over a month…I don’t understand why they just couldnt swap the undermanned buff and the orb bonus? The orb event was one of the funnest things left to do in WvW.

Also 30% magic find for bots and hacks aren’t game breaking if I only have 10% chance to get something with 30% MF I have another 3% chance, its not the end all be all. And why the hell is it our fault and why are we being punished because they can’t handle bots?

I seriously feel like WvW is the redheaded step child of this game even tho its what attracted a lot of people to it. I mean all the updates we have gotten have just been them stripping content from us instead of giving us more. The biggest things we got to do was launch pumpkins and shoot toilet paper and that was it. Id like to see something come to WvW soon *cough*cough*November15th*cough*cough* or I could see a lot MORE people stop playing what is becoming a stagnant game type.

I understand the need to remove the orbs and I in fact support the effort and applaud A-Net for taking measures to protect the community against the issues these orbs cost. I am unfortunately very disappointed overall because this leaves me feeling that A-Net has just taken from WvW repeatedly, without giving anything back.

They removed the incentive to escort Dolyaks, which wouldn’t be necessary except there is incentive to take / defend other objects. This has trivialized the importance of Dolyaks and made it where only those of us who are truly focused on trying to win are helping our poor Dolyaks out. Lower level characters just about never will assist with escorting a Dolyak…. period ….

Now orbs are gone – which had created many of great epic battles on my server. Taking and defending keeps is now far less important and can easily be ignored / left alone.

The point is, while they have done some great games for a lot of the game, I fear they are failing to provide that same level of service to WvW. When the solution is “Well, we can’t fix it sooooo we’ll just remove it”, you have failed.

I disagree with the OP, Borderlands are fun. Have fun meeting your opponents on even footing.

Can we stop making new threads on this topic? kitten lot of clutter

The pure inbalance of Orbs was really quite bad. The orbs were also the main complain among people who were complaining of hackers. Hackers would fly in and steal orbs. It wasn’t much of a fight for orbs anyway. Plus the WvW battles were to control points, not the OP orbs. If people begin to not go into borderlands anymore, then I will gladly take my guild into there and cap everything.

Until Orbs are balanced and until the fly hackers are dealt with, I will gladly accept no orbs any day.

Plus I have a feeling people are mad because now their servers who always control the orbs, don’t have that insane stat buff any more. Now the fight is always even among players and now people are realizing that they weren’t skill at the game at all.

“hacked orbs are better than zero orbs for everyone.”

EPIC facepalm…
EPIC!

+1 ANet for the temp removal.

I will be running my group in BL’s all the time. Don’t even like EB.

Oh, and please don’t bring back the buffs when you DO bring them back. Make the buffs PvE (Karma, Gold, Exp, whatever)

Make the outmanned buff what the orbs were.

" Make the outmanned buff what the orbs were. "

No..Non..Neit,

ANET I hope you never do this. I supect you wont as it is along a similar vein as ppl complaining of night capping.. IF your server can’t must a force to fight then you deserve to lose not be buffed up.

I imagine orbs will be back right after they get to dealing with that “temporary removal of dolyak escort rewards while we figure out a solution.” =P

There will still be enough people playing WvW to fill all the BL’s + EB. Nothing to worry about here.

Orbs were too overpowered to the winning teams, it created too much of a score difference and made WvW USELESS for the last 4 days of the week. I think the removal of the orbs will create more of a challenge to the winning team. I noticed a huge difference yesterday from the orb removal. My server went from 100% world to about 75% in a matter of hours.

1- Removal of the orb buffs is a good thing
2- Borderlands are way more fun than EB
3- Outmanned buff should eliminate the 5 player limit for AOE

There should be way more emphasis on defending keeps full time with zergs so that small organized groups can wander around the maps. Zerging around a map should be punished.

An easy fix to this is that every server starts with their own orb, and the other teams can only capture the orb, but not receive benefits from that orb. This way no server could ever have more than 1 orb. This would still allow for a bonus but not a huge bonus; however, allow the other servers to recapture the orb and continue to be able to move it around too. I like the idea of having a orb bonus, I do believe that the orbs will keep the borderlands important to the overall WvW system.

The score still gives server wide buffs. Points are important regardless of what the doomsdayers say. WvW will be fine without the orbs.

Are people really QQing about not being able to exploit orbs? Really? Really?

Serious WvW servers will play BLs regardless. This just prevents exploiting. If your whole server gives up on BLs because they are boring, you don’t deserve to win your matchup.

Didn’t read the OP, TLDR But since orbs have been removed WvW is way more balanced and fun!

This really isn’t a thread about orbs.

It’s a thread about how the borderland maps are less popular than Eternal Battlegrounds. The long supply routes, the northern towers only being fed from 1 supply camp, the vertical nature of the map, the water — lots of factors lead to these maps just not being considered to be as “fun” as Eternal Battlegrounds.

The only thing that kept so many people going there was the fact that orbs were seen as OP so everyone wanted to make sure their server had some. We went to borderlands despite the fact that Eternal was more generally fun.

Without orbs, I’m afraid borderlands will just lead to more people quitting. They won’t be able to get into the “fun one” because of the queues and they’ll quickly tire of the 3 identical auxiliary maps.

i’d rather have this than the hackfest that was going on.

I dont think removing the orbs will significantly impact populations in the borderlands. Truth be told sucessful orb battles have always been quite rare. More often than not an orb capture after the match settled was either a long multi hour grind or a mad dash burn the gates down before defenders can arrive nitecap style (or the friendly neiborhood hacker doing it)

I do feel that WvW will be looseing something important without the orbs but it shouldnt impact the majority of folks all that much. I would have been much happeir if they’d swaped the outmaned and orb buffs. A bit of bonus stats and damage is probably needed for the vastly outnumbered side who probably is not able to hold orbs in the first place where as 25% XP/karma/MF per orb does not exactly make an already dominante realm snowball. Holding all the orbs may be a nice bonus but far from being worthwhile targets for hackers if they dont provide combat boosts.

Then agian I also prefered DAOC’s approach to relics, the more you held the more bonuses your realm got but your realms defenses got weaker taking a supreme effort to hold onto all 6

No one said orbs are gone forever, just going to be worked on.

They said that about Dolyak rewards too.

What the OP said was very insightful. Eternal Battlegrounds was my favorite map prior to the removal of the orbs. Now that there are no more orbs for people to defend/attack, all the Waypoint Dance Teams and Young Bloggers of America have decided to invade EB and stink up the place to the point where I don’t even like being in there anymore.

The chat is constantly scrolling from some brat on a Monster Energy Drink high. Naysayers saying “OMG NOT SM AGAIN OMG!!!” You broke the game, ArenaNet. I hope you do something to fix this soon.

I hate to mention that game, but WoW had a good idea going with those vehicles you could drive (forgot the names) that had turrets on the roof. When you decide to create another Orb style mechanic, how about making it so that moving it involves more than one person? Require that it be mounted like a WoW tank (whatever you call em.)

Orbs should have a scaling effect on the PVE component of WvW , the bonuses. Make the Orbs give bonuses to Influence, Karma and Gold gain in PVE, but no effect in WvW, then the PVE guilds would fight over them while the WvW guilds would be doing their stuff.

Slamz.5376:

The main reason the Borderlands got what action they did is because of the Orbs. Big-name guilds usually went straight there and fought for orbs. “Eternal Battlegrounds is for noobs” was the catchphrase. People tolerated the slower pace and fewer options of borderlands because it was so critical to capture and hold the orbs.

Funny. I always saw it the other way around. Borderlands were for noobs who wanted to be lemmings and follow one huge zerg around…pounding at a tower for 30 minutes without going anywhere. In my experience Eternal has more strategy and better players. I hate Borderlands and love Eternal if nothing else for the reason that siege matters more.

I’m of the opinion that the only people who actually are upset the orbs are disabled are the ones who haven’t figured out how to play without the orb bonuses.

I am curious about people’s thoughts on this now that we have had a bit of time playing these new matchups without orbs. Personally, I have not seen a drop off with the numbers on the Tarnished Coast boarderland. We had pretty typical numbers for the time that I play. HoD only had a few people but that isn’t to surprising. CD was giving us a hard time for awhile, taking camps and making us defend a couple of keeps and such. They seemed to all disappear all of a sudden, and that allowed us to take the rest of our map.

There just didn’t seem to be a lack of people or fighting all of a sudden without the orbs.