Guild Wars 2

Gaile Gray.6029:

Buy Some Apples.6390:

Gaile Gray.6029:

I’m going to sticky this thread, with John’s consent, because we feel it contains valuable information that forum members may wish to read.

Eh?!

The first post has information directly from John Corpening. Am I misunderstanding your question?

I think it was a question based on this quote from first post “As work on Heart of Thorns wraps up, we’ll be treating resolving the remaining core areas in WvW as our #1 live development feature priority for the game to ensure we deliver on making World vs. World not just the great experience it is today – but the incredible experience we know it can be.”

Not to mention rewards, the “missing patch notes” on Node nerfs… Etc…

idk, let’s just list some of the thread titles on the first page of the WvW Discussions forum:

HoT actively drives people away from WvW
New borderlands gotta go before WvW is dead
A plea to the devs- Get rid of auto upgrades
How many quit playing WvW since new maps?
WvW Bug List
Q:Daily Master of Ruin
How to fix wvw in 3 easy steps
Not a single sign of any devs..
Is WvW Really Dead? [Merged]
Anet hates the 2 things I love…

and that’s just from the first page, there have been dozens upon dozens of threads where WvW players have continued to raise their concerns for WvW, even more so now with the release of HoT and the barren Desert BLs (Barren i.e. there’s hardly anyone on them! Gotta laugh at the ironically named new maps )

Instead you sticky a 3 month old thread, which states you will prioritise WvW after the release of HoT, yet you have continued to ignore the forums and not issued any bug fixes for some of the issues we have pointed out.
Not forgetting that then you release this blog, https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-road-ahead-for-2015/, without a single mention of WvW!!!

WvW is at it’s worse ever! And if you do not communicate with us properly, well, as we’ve been saying for 3 years, it’s gonna die, more players will just leave again.

Even our one and only FSP is complaining (when are you gonna announce the 2nd one again?)

I dont think it is that you are misunderstanding our questions, it’s that we know that there is a certain higher up who thinks WvW is PvE and is preventing you from talking about anything.

Because apparently it’s important for us to read this (as if it answers any of our questions), I’ll be fairly abrupt about my questions regarding John’s post:

Firstly:

As work on Heart of Thorns wraps up, we’ll be treating resolving the remaining core areas in WvW as our #1 live development feature priority for the game to ensure we deliver on making World vs. World not just the great experience it is today – but the incredible experience we know it can be.

When are we to determine that work on HoT has wrapped up so the team can work on WvW? Has that begun? Is the ‘work on HoT’ the entirety of the expansion and now you guys have moved on to WvW work? Is the HoT work over when raids are released? If raids are the thing that’s still worked on, are we saying WvW work will begin when the first wing of the raid is released? Are we saying it will begin when the final wing of the raid is released? Could I be entirely wrong in assuming that more work is to be done (eg: does Anet consider the ‘remaining core areas of WvW’ already addressed)?

Secondly:

As this effort ramps up you will be hearing more from us about the work in progress.

The fact that we haven’t heard anything dramatically concerns us. This small sentence means we’ll be hearing something. We have heard little to nothing. Deduction leads us to the assumption that there are no works in progress. I know (hope) that you guys have something in store, but the lack of any information and this quotation leads me to believe that there is nothing immediately in store. Therefore, we have no works in progress which are far enough along that we’ll see them before sometime in late 2016.

Thirdly:

An example of this work in progress is the recent change to how world populations are determined. Going forward worlds will be marked as full or not based on actual World vs. World participation rather than accounting for every player in the game.

This is just flat out flawed. Either the formula for calculating WvW participation needs numbers readjusted or it takes into account EotM attendance. Yak’s Bend is currently rated as “Very High” instead of Full despite being the highest rated wvw server on NA. Is the formula measuring a weekly attendance thing? Is it registering people zoning into WvW instead of time spent in WvW? Did my quick trip to the borderland to craft something count as my presence in WvW for that day/week? World balance is tricky, but if it’s not addressed again, things will go south. Guilds can no longer recruit from off their server and (I know from experience) are told that the best course of action to take is to transfer to a lower tier (please ask one of the 0 devs who plays wvw what their experience is outside of NA prime on a lower tiered server) or to try again when servers open up (not going to happen if the measurements are flawed). I’m guessing something was tweaked because now only 6 servers on EU are full instead of 12, and only 5 on NA, but I’m thinking it still needs addressing.

Please don’t take our reactions as meaning that we hate you or anything. Take everything said on the forums with a grain of salt, but when we get quotes like this:

We are eager to see the strategic play that develops from the Desert Borderlands with its new mechanics, unique objectives, astounding beauty and layout that both supports team fights in some areas while breaking up blobs in other areas.

And then you see the reality of the situation: few players on the borderlands. Towers and keeps upgrading without any human presence at all. I was at the streamed beta test thing with Heurix, Chemso and that other guy. It was a lot of fun because the map was populated and everything was new. As the novelty of it all wears off, it becomes less fun, which is understandable, but show me a borderlands map that for more than 3 hours a week is anywhere near as exciting as it was when you guys forced everyone onto a borderland. The fact that EB is still an option means people will go there and not explore other maps. That, coupled with the fact that certain aspects introduced into wvw and the surrounding experience (like the necessity of pve to upgrade one’s guild) have led to people not prioritizing wvw like they used to.

Making this thread sticky now is even worse than staying quiet.
Your WvW population is generally disappointed and now we see “look at this stuff we promised you that you still have seen nothing about, we told you not even about future plans and a basic timeline. Well, don’t fret! Here farm PvE to upgrade your guild so you get your boni back and farm that expensive new profession that will make this great promised new mechanics avialable for the broad public in late 2016” ^^

Starfall.6425:

Making this thread sticky now is even worse than staying quiet.
Your WvW population is generally disappointed and now we see “look at this stuff we promised you that you still have seen nothing about, we told you not even about future plans and a basic timeline. Well, don’t fret! Here farm PvE to upgrade your guild so you get your boni back and farm that expensive new profession that will make this great promised new mechanics avialable for the broad public in late 2016” ^^

That’s a little overdramatic… Regardless of whether these changes come to light, this thread does help to answer a fair bit of questions people have been asking repeatedly lately. Not to mention, this thread hardly ever stayed off the front page for long since it’s first posting.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Buy Some Apples.6390:

Gaile Gray.6029:

I’m going to sticky this thread, with John’s consent, because we feel it contains valuable information that forum members may wish to read.

Eh?!

The first post has information directly from John Corpening. Am I misunderstanding your question?

What´s the point in making a post 3 months old sticky ? There is no new information and to be honest WvW has much much greater problems than server population right now.

So i hope the fact thar Mr. Corpening is not coming himself to the forums talking to his crappy customers means that he is busy fixing stuff.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I’m going to sticky this thread, with John’s consent, because we feel it contains valuable information that forum members may wish to read.

Thank you very much Gaile, I think it’s important that you did this because a lot of us felt that what John had stated wasn’t actually true after Colin’s recent interview on MMORPG.com.

Let’s remember Mike O’Brien’s statement

We’ve set a clear policy in the past year: we don’t talk speculatively about future development. We don’t want to string you along.

Colin reiterates this in the interview:

we still have work to do to address core fundamental issues like population balance, rewards, scoring, night capping, etc. As always we don’t discuss features in development until they are far enough along to share meaningful details, so for now we’ll just say WvW is the final big game system on our radar

Despite being unable to talk about things in development for fear of stringing us along, I think some of us (I know I am guilty of this) expected a little more communication when John said

As this effort ramps up you will be hearing more from us about the work in progress.

Anyway, that’s a recap of where we are.

Melanion.4892:

This is just flat out flawed. Either the formula for calculating WvW participation needs numbers readjusted or it takes into account EotM attendance. Yak’s Bend is currently rated as “Very High” instead of Full despite being the highest rated wvw server on NA. Is the formula measuring a weekly attendance thing? Is it registering people zoning into WvW instead of time spent in WvW? Did my quick trip to the borderland to craft something count as my presence in WvW for that day/week? World balance is tricky, but if it’s not addressed again, things will go south. Guilds can no longer recruit from off their server and (I know from experience) are told that the best course of action to take is to transfer to a lower tier (please ask one of the 0 devs who plays wvw what their experience is outside of NA prime on a lower tiered server) or to try again when servers open up (not going to happen if the measurements are flawed). I’m guessing something was tweaked because now only 6 servers on EU are full instead of 12, and only 5 on NA, but I’m thinking it still needs addressing.

Whoa, #mindblown , …that thought never occurred to me. EotM shows up as part of the “WvW” map area of the game. Therefore, I believe EotM participation — does — count toward a server’s population, if it is? We don’t know how it’s calculated. If it does count then this is wrong. This is something that shouldn’t be counted towards a server’s WvW population. I can also see some ways how server population count could be abused by the (few) type of people that log into a competing server, grab their golems from spawn, and run them out to their friends so they can be destroyed. Anyways, I digress.

TL,DR — EotM should NOT count towards a server’s WvW population!

Gaile Gray.6029:

Buy Some Apples.6390:

Gaile Gray.6029:

I’m going to sticky this thread, with John’s consent, because we feel it contains valuable information that forum members may wish to read.

Eh?!

The first post has information directly from John Corpening. Am I misunderstanding your question?

Well Gail, so far it’s just more lip service. The problem with John’s statement of purpose is the disconnect between the WvW community and John’s (Anet’s) vision of WvW. The new borderlands very explicitly demonstrate not only the vast disconnect of Anet’s vision for WvW and what the players want, but also the way every new “improvement” is going to come, as a fully developed system that is well beyond the point of making any changes. We are stuck with the new borderlands map, yet another “vision” not shared by the people who actually play WvW. Much earlier collaboration with us would have allowed YOU to eliminate many of the gimmicks on that map that hamper the kind of gameplay WE want. And while his statement is “nice”, clearly he is also in charge of Fractals, and their big “update” to fix your vision there won’t even come till December, and that is only a rewards fix and a minor fix to toughness scaling… WvW has always gotten some amount of lip service, until we see real iterative changes I for one am not impressed.

Gaile Gray.6029:

The stickying of this thread was only a convenience measure for forum members suggested by forum members. It’s really that simple.

But dont you see how even this post is making things worse?

By the community, for the community.
For 3 years the WvW community has suggested many things, many ways to improve WvW. We’ve even had devs reply saying how great some of the ideas are.
Yet we’ve still had nothing from them regarding these!

In GW1 you were very active taking to all, you could be found in game especially during events and you talk actively ingame as well.
In GW2, I’ve not seen you once, and as with all devs and mods, you try to stay away from the WvW forums, and anything you do say seems as if it isnt you who has written it, or you are being forced to follow very strict censorship orders.

The simple fact is that the WvW community is leaving the game again.
The simple fact is that those who are remaining are screaming for help in the WvW forums!
The simple fact is that the WvW community continue to give their advice and ideas
The simple fact is that the devs continue to ignore us
It is this that is really that simple!

I also see you have quietly removed the sticky for the new WvW Forum Specialist. Why is that? I mean talk about throwing yourself into the fire!

Svarty.8019:

Despite being unable to talk about things in development for fear of stringing us along, I think some of us (I know I am guilty of this) expected a little more communication

And by trying to not string us along, they’ve strung us along for 3 whole years with a whole lot of “we cannot talk about it”, events which none of us asked for but they claim we did, and after 3 years of saying we dont want PvE in WvW, they finally give us a new WvW map which has so much PvE it’s like they listened to us and then did the opposite! And now look at the borderlands, they are all empty!

The forum specialist thread wasn’t exactly a very productive thread, and as is wouldn’t have been incredibly welcoming to anyone that was going to join.

That being said, I’m just going to assume things are very busy, because unlike some I think all 3 game modes are broken in some aspect or another but there are certain issues such as dailies that I do not feel should be taking so long.

Fellfoot.8156:

TL,DR — EotM should NOT count towards a server’s WvW population!

It isn’t. The Dev that posted about the change to the population calculation answered this, multiple times iirc.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I thought it might help to let you know that stickying this thread was a suggestion from a couple of players. I asked John, and he and I thought there was still content of value in his older post, so that’s why it was stickied.

We do understand you have questions and concerns. The stickying of this thread was only a convenience measure for forum members suggested by forum members. It’s really that simple.

Where should we voice these concerns aside from in threads where you post when the only red posts we see are in other forums and in this thread?

I mean, thinking from the perspective of a forum/communications coordinator, I would think that even a little “devs have read this” notification or a “anet has considered this” or even just a “Anet is not, in fact, a company of one person pretending to be many people”

joneirikb.7506:

Fellfoot.8156:

TL,DR — EotM should NOT count towards a server’s WvW population!

It isn’t. The Dev that posted about the change to the population calculation answered this, multiple times iirc.

Thanks, I had no idea.

Why do I have to PVE to get certain armor sets?

Why do I have to PVE to get certain sigils runes and ascended trinkets?

Why do WvW guilds have to PVE to upgrade their guild halls?

Why do I have to PVE to get Legendary armor?

Why can’t I buy these things with the millions of karma, Thousands of rank up points and thousands badges I have?

Big changes are needed and fast. We don’t wanna PVE anymore.

Arena net MUST stop forcing players to play certain game type they just dont want to. It doesn’t matter how well you make PvE and Raids. Hardcore WvW players will always JUST want to play WvW.
Can we FINALLY start making WvW playable again?

At this rate, without communication from your side (arenanet), you will start loosing players very fast and possibly a whole game type. Because PvE players simply wont play WvW with these lackluster rewards.

Guild wars 2 just isn’t a WvW game anymore. Sad.

When are you going to change the autoupgrade system? You will wait until all of us left the game?

And the terribad Desert borders!!!

Maybe you can read here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Constructive-Feedback-Desert-Borderlands/page/3#post5777400

Gaile Gray.6029:

I’m going to sticky this thread, with John’s consent, because we feel it contains valuable information that forum members may wish to read.

I’d say it mostly contains valuable information that the Devs should read (counts for the whole forum actually).
Specifically the ones that make the decisions, because it is very clear there is a disconnect between players and dev designers when it comes to WvW.

The only people leaving are those that grinded the old-borders to death and never cared about varying fights, tactics and sieging in the first place. EU has understood what the new borders are good for and uses them more and more by the week. Those maps are, except the event-lag, awesome and are uncomparable to the old borders. Most of your problens NA are homemade and we don’t want to suffer under your inability to play something new, learn something new and especially recognise that all the devs did was destroy your precious Karma-Train on the borders and spread server-coverage to silver league.
Keep up with thr changes Arena you are doing the right thing. Cut back on some of the PvE content and power of Lords, Nerf some Builds fix the remaining minor laggs and we will have a great map that most gw2 players will like after a short period (some might take a few weeks more since they switched to eotm to farm ranks).

TingleTangleBob.6027:

The only people leaving are those that grinded the old-borders to death and never cared about varying fights, tactics and sieging in the first place. EU has understood what the new borders are good for and uses them more and more by the week. Those maps are, except the event-lag, awesome and are uncomparable to the old borders. Most of your problens NA are homemade and we don’t want to suffer under your inability to play something new, learn something new and especially recognise that all the devs did was destroy your precious Karma-Train on the borders and spread server-coverage to silver league.
Keep up with thr changes Arena you are doing the right thing. Cut back on some of the PvE content and power of Lords, Nerf some Builds fix the remaining minor laggs and we will have a great map that most gw2 players will like after a short period (some might take a few weeks more since they switched to eotm to farm ranks).

First of all, I hope you don’t think that you speak for all of EU, and I certainly hope that Anet doesn’t think you do either. I’m not sure what server you’re on, but my server (Piken Square) has not seen the same things you have, at least not from my perspective. As far as grinding the old maps, my experience had been that EB was more of a grind and blob fest than the old maps, with much less variation and tactics regarding fights, and I lead open raids as well as guild raids for months on both the borders and EB. The only karma training I really ever did on the old maps was at night time when there were very few people online or when we were fighting servers that had very little population.

As of now, it is very difficult for us to get anyone into the borders other than guild raids (because EB always has a large queue [30+]) and most of the guild raids I’ve been in since HoT have essentially been us running around the border for a while, whispering other guilds to try and get them to fight us in the arena because we have nothing to do. There was one guild raid I had in the border that I enjoyed immensely, because for the entire raid we were sat in one spot fighting multiple rounds against a guild, meaning that we didn’t actually have to move across the border at all.

I don’t see people playing in the new borders very much, certainly not compared to the old maps. I started playing WvW a little over a year ago, and I remember when we had queues on every single map, all the time, but now I think I’ve only seen a queue on a border other than EB twice in the last month. Maybe its not the same on other servers, but outside of prime time, we used to be able to get open raids together on any map, now its next to impossible to do it anywhere but EB. The other day, I tagged up on our home borderland in an effort to move away from camping EB, (we already had an open tag on EB at the time), and I sat in spawn for about 5 minutes, staring at the 3 afk players already there. I spammed in map chat, I jumped to the other 2 borderlands and spammed in map chat there, and I wrote a message on our server’s forums. After about 20 minutes I had one person who I think might have been trying to join my ‘raid’ although they also might have accidentally moved in the same direction that I had. Now this of course could just mean that my server is dead, but if that’s the case, why has the majority of my server’s WvW population left?

I’m not going to say we haven’t had more people start going into the borderlands than we had a month ago, because we absolutely have, but its not a comparison I think I should make, because a month ago, we had maybe 5 people playing WvW, and everyone else doing PvE. I’m not saying the new borderlands are the worst thing to happen to WvW ever, although I’m not saying they aren’t, but I want to make sure that this post (the one I have quoted) is portrayed as the opinion that it is, not as fact. Just as my post is of course opinion as well. NA are not the only ones having problems with the new map, and I certainly don’t think they are unable to learn something new, especially when learning something new in this context is how to run around for an hour without seeing literally a single player and then your EB queue pops and you go karma train/blob fight.

TL;DR NA are not the only ones dissatisfied with the new maps/the current situation of WvW in general.

Uau…so much love and effort wasted while trying to convince ANet to fix WvW…