Guild Wars 2

As it exists at this moment, WvW makes me want to uninstall this game from my computer and never look at it again. I don’t care if you all call QQ, I feel like ranting, so if you don’t enjoy a good rant then just stop reading right now. Otherwise, carry on.

THE reason I bought this game (well, after Charr looking cool) was WvW. The fact that we were finally getting another DAOC/Warhammer had me squealing like a Japanese school girls with excitement. Now, I’m not a ‘hardcore’ PvPer in any sense of the word- to the contrary, I’m what the neckbeards like to sneeringly call a casual player.

Nonetheless, I love the concept of WvW. I love the sieges, the keeps, the guilds- all of it. But the way ANet currently has WvW is completely ridiculous.

There’s a lot of problems in WvW right now, and I’m not gonna go through them in any particular order. Before I do though I want to give ANet credit for fixing ONE problem at least when they put a 24 hours freeze on transfers- thank you ANet for stopping the cross-server spying, cheating, abuse by large guilds, and other such problems related to the free transfers.

Now then.

First off, something needs to be done about the night capping. While to some degree I recognize this will always happen, it has to be curtailed at least somewhat. After the new rounds were set up the other day, servers began duking it out, and servers that had previously been roflstomped all week suddenly found themselves near the top of the list.

And then cameth the night, and everybody logged back on to find their server nonexistant on the pie chart. To anybody who has the remotest sense of fairness, this is ridiculous. Now, I don’t want to hear some bull about realism- in REAL life if an army attacked its enemy at night the opposing army WOULD wake up at some point, possibly with some ground loss- but most definitely not the entire battleground.

I’m not sure what the best solution to this is, but the only one I can think of off the top of my head is putting regional restrictions (i.e. Oceanic and French Canadians cant go night cap in the U.S. and Europe, respectively). If NOTHING else is fixed, then at least this.

Second on my rant list, orbs are ridiculously overpowered. I understand their point, and I believe they should be in-game; but in their current form they turn a roflstomping into a full-on steamroll.

It is impossible- barring a AMAZINGLY skilled PvP killed transferring in or a massive influx of players- to defeat a server that owns all of the orbs in the map. You want proof? Go fight in a server that doesn’t own them. You’ll be demoralized very quickly, I assure you.

The fix here should be pretty simple- either nerf the orb’s buffs, or actually make the my-team-is-outnumbered-buff actually USEFUL or something.

Third, espionage is limited to a small cadre of elite guilds. Now, hear me out here- one of the major problems going on right now is that the major guilds are coordinating outside of the game into alliances that totally rig matches (again, as proof transfer to a server that is losing). My problem isn’t with this- I think that espionage is and should be a consideration in any war, and frankly ANet will never be able to get rid of it.

My problem is that the rest of us (ungrouped or without a guild) are completely in the dark to these things. My suggestions? Open cross-server chat, so that EVERYONE can talk to the enemy.

The advantage to doing this should be obvious- pugs or guilds without cross-server communication can readily and easily call for a cease-fire between teams (for example , last night Ferguson’s Crossing and Anvil Rock should have quit bashing eachother and just steamrolled Shiverpeak together).

My basic point here is this- while espionage can be (and sometimes is) a problem, you’re NEVER going to get rid of it- the best way to handle it is to remove its benefits solely from the hands of the large organized guilds.

While this definitely isn’t a complete list, and is a bit TL;DR, it’s what I felt like ranting about. So deal with it. Frankly, if you take the time to read (probably not read) this and then take the time to make a counter-rant comment, I’m probably just going to either A) Ignore you or Laugh. I’m not talking about a disagreement here, I just mean trolling.

Oh, and have a nice day!

P.S. On the off chance that someone at ANet actually reads this…please do SOMETHING for god’s sake…

Well said sir.
I totaly agree with you

Hazal Birunae.6082:

I’m not sure what the best solution to this is, but the only one I can think of off the top of my head is putting regional restrictions (i.e. Oceanic and French Canadians cant go night cap in the U.S. and Europe, respectively). If NOTHING else is fixed, then at least this.

Second on my rant list, orbs are ridiculously overpowered. I understand their point, and I believe they should be in-game; but in their current form they turn a roflstomping into a full-on steamroll.

What do you propose that the large Oceanic playerbase does exactly if we can’t play World vs World, it’s not like Anet are going to give us our own servers. This current round for us (IOJ) is against SOS (also with a large Oceanic playerbase) and FA and the match has been really good so far.

Orbs are overpowered and need to be balanced, absolutley agree with you on that point. In addition they need to do something about the oumanned buff as it simple does not serve a useful purpose at the moment.

@Jakula Again, that was just a solution off the top of my head. Another possibility is the game adding more NPC guards in accordance to the population balance, so that even if a night team does show up they’ll have to work for their reward.

Hazal Birunae.6082:

@Jakula Again, that was just a solution off the top of my head. Another possibility is the game adding more NPC guards in accordance to the population balance, so that even if a night team does show up they’ll have to work for their reward.

I actually really like that suggestion. Scaling the number of guards with the population. I also suggested in another thred the possiblity of changing Outmanned which included additional health to guards and fortifications when there is a massive score/population difference.

That idea is plausable and would seem to fit well if implimented correctly.

NPC are a terrible mechanism to balance players. They are very ineffective at anything that isn’t scripted. Attempting to balance WvW also goes against a lot of the original concept.

My suggestion would simply be that the score counter counts a lot slower at night.

So while you might get 100% of your score during the day, you only get 50% (or less) at night. You could also say capping takes twice as long, although I doubt it would change much.

Maybe even expand it as follows:

100% score between 9AM and 5PM
150% score between 5PM and 1AM
50% score between 1 AM and 9 AM

That way everyone gets to enjoy WvW, it just counts for more during the peak hours.

@Dee Jay Perhaps a combination of more powerful NPC’s and score scaling would work, Dee Jay. Point is, ANet needs to get a move on about this stuff.

i agree with some points but its not impossible to get the orbs back if one server has them all.
im on riverside and we are currently against vizunah and far shiverpeaks. far shiverpeaks owned all 3 orbs, but now we have 2, so its possible but they are too strong, i agree. and night capping is some serious issue.

Only one I agree with is nerfing Orbs. Even then not much.

Region locking or XP scaling is just a way tokitten off part of your playerbase or treat them as second class citizens for no reason other than the fact that someone else couldn’t be bothered to show up.

NPC scaling might work, though it obviously has issues. Same with buffing Outmanned.

I agree that orbs should be nerfed big time. Orbs make it so it snowballs the match and no one can recover.

Suggestions on Orbs:

1. Make orbs respawn back every hour or so.
2. Servers don’t start with an orb, but it becomes a strategic item to get. Just like Baron Nashor in league of legends. Make it harder to get, put it on the middle of the map guarded by a small fort, a champion npc and a few veteran mobs. I suggest adding the Orr faction to this since it’s part of the Guild Wars 2 Universe, no?
3. Orbs aren’t kept in keeps but in towers.
4. Change the orbs stats to 3%. +20 to all stats so if they stack, it’s only 9% hp boost and +60 to all stats. And you don’t get it very long.
5. Change the outmanned buff for christ sakes. “Hurrr durr you guys suck here’s a boost to karma and exp :P”

I don’t know, just dishing out ideas here to help balance WvW.

1. Night issues.

I dont agree at all. As someone else said it is unfair to treat the people who play during certain hours as second class. People have different hours, different lives. When they get to play they shoudlnt feel like the effort they are putting forth means less just because of when they can login. That just isn’t fair. I understand you don’t like logging in to drastically lost ground…but maybe they should just encourage more worldwide involvement on single servers or something. Or like a Dev said in another post, overtime the servers with good night populations will rise up and ultimately face others with good night populations, since it is so important.

2. Orb

Totally agree.I’m one of the people who thinks the orb and out manned buff should just be swapped. The winning team shouldnt gain more strength, making it easier to win. That is just backwards.

3. Espionage

Complicated issue. I haven’t really formed am opinion in it yet. My gut though tels me that anet sets the rules, as gamemaster. If they deem server transfers to spy as espionage…then it is allowed and fair game.

night-capping: working as intended. if you get demoralized by the fact that your server is losing, either a: set up and organize 24-7 alliance, or b: do like I did, and set yourself some more achievable goals.

orbs: orbs were actually slightly buffed form their ordinal incarnation. so it is unlikely theat there will be major nerfs anytime soon.

One of the problems with keeps and towers is the limited and weak guards. You can upgrade them to lvl82 plus add an extra guard. The issue here is that some people can easily solo for example 4 of these guards together. Much more guards, up to lvl85 maybe? Silver guards in between. option for upgrading armour and weapons. Just like you could in DAoC. Guards there wasnt just a slight anoyance.

Night capping to me isn’t a big deal, because soon as it is daytime they will get taken back and you get exp, point, karma, etc for doing it anyways. Adding more guards is almost useless pointless beyond stopping very small groups from easy caps.

Spying is lame, and your idea may be good, only other way is to limit all toons to the one server you pick and that is it. So one server must have ALL your toons. So you want to transfer you don’t transfer one toon, you transfer all of them. Then some lamer would have to own two game accounts and log out of one into another to spy, discouraging it even more.

The orb : What could be done is have the orb increase drops, drop quality, increase exp, karma, instead of stat boosts causing more imbalance.

@ Everyone-saying-my-suggestions-for-night-capping-is-unfair, the only other solution I see is servers with night teams slowly going up the rankings. While to some degree this has happened, the abuse of the free transfers made it difficult. Now that the unlimited free transfers are gone, though, it might be a good idea to reinstate the one-day or two-day matches so that the correct tiers can be put together.

@ kelman, while stuff may get recapped on some servers during the day, on a lot of servers nothing is recapped, as people are demoralized by their lack of presence on the pie chart.

Glad to see there weren’t alot of trolling responses.

Hazal, you wouldn’t want to reinstate the short matches because those favor recapping multiple times. Night teams play a larger roll in holding your ground, which is more important with longer ,atces where you need to keep your points coming in at a nice steady rate in order to maintain your lead.

I know its hard to say, but give out a couple more weeks/matches and then see how things have turned out.

squiggit.2357:

Region locking or XP scaling is just a way tokitten off part of your playerbase or treat them as second class citizens for no reason other than the fact that someone else couldn’t be bothered to show up.

It’s a video game, not war. The very vast majority can’t afford to wake up in the middle of the night to defend a virtual keep when they have a family and a job. Only the minority of “no life” can afford to do that, ruining the game for the majority.

I would simply shut down W3 between (e.g.) Midnight and 8am. You can still run around, fight each other, but you can’t take forts anymore. But that’s drastic, I’m sure a more gentle solution can be found.

Night capping stinks, there’s no other way to put it, but limiting sieges to certain times is not the answer. Region locking is also bad. They should have made the servers international so that everyone has a huge overnight crew. Of course, there’s the lag issues, but if Oceanic players can deal with it then perhaps it’s a non factor.

Servers aren’t region-locked. I’m central European, I play on Ehmry Bay – a US server.

cough*modelculling*cough

While these are all valid issues there is something else that straight out kills fun of PvP – server lag.

In case there is a lot of people fighting at the same time enemies don’t all load and you only can guess where they are at and AoE. This kills strategy as you cannot determine how big the enemy force is. I guess the issue is with the amount of data the server has to send about enemy players in the vicinity and it has to be reduced.

Another one is ability lag. This issually happens in very huge zergy battles and is more prevalent in Ethernal Battlegrounds. Not all skills are affected equally. However PvPing when you have to press heal 20 times until server recognizes that sucks.

Not sure if other servers have the same issue, this is happening on Vabbi (EU).

CoffeeElemental.4698:

Another one is ability lag. This issually happens in very huge zergy battles and is more prevalent in Ethernal Battlegrounds. Not all skills are affected equally. However PvPing when you have to press 20 times until server recognizes that your action sucks.

Not sure if other servers have the same issue, this is happening on Vabbi (EU).

But i LOVE having to cast my heal 30 times until it actually works… >_>

I quit WvW because of (in order of dissatisfaction):

Orb buff’s existence
Lack of region lock (night capping) imbalance
Queue times & queues not working
Invisible players in combat
Lack of anti-cheat; hackers placing siege & stealing orbs

Remember for nightcapping. Region locks dont solve anything, it might only make it worse. A group of graveshift people could easily wipe a non region locked server. Remember society works 24/7.

this player has no idea what hes talking about

I go to sleep at 3-4 am. “This player” is right – society does work 24/7, in any part of the world.

the game is for the whole world to play, I’m NA based server but I’m 12hrs ahead of EST, how would you know its already night time when to me US players night is my day and my day are your nights, and whose time frame shall I follow. its absurd if I can’t play WvW at my convenient time and I want to do something as well for my server,

OP – your frustrations are understood and shared by many. however, the ranking and matchmaking system is already producing better games than it has in the past (in general, tho maybe not in every instance this go).

wvw is not meant as a balanced format. although, personally i have to agree that having zero chance to get anything accomplished with one’s servermates due to a heavy numbers disadvantage just flat out sucks kittylitter. when it’s like this, sure, it’s something to rage about. in a case like that, there isn’t much to accomplish as far as “playing” wvw.

but if not… we may as well enjoy it for what it is and use the difficulties to become better at this as a server. it’s pretty possible to out think an orb buff lol…

just 2c. the scoreboard means about nyerk but frame of reference anyway with imbalance being the rule rather than the exception.

@ Daish Oh good, the first troll!

WvW is 24/7. It has always been advertised as such. All this stuff about “night capping” just means all you are really worried about is you. I am NA and usually play midnight to 8AM my time because that is the only time on Stormbluff that the ques are short enough that I actually get to play. By your logic my play time is not as important as yours. And, my achievements and success shouldn’t count as much as yours.

I hope they don’t do anything about it. It is a 24/7 game. Everyone’s contribution for a server should count just as much as anyone else’s. WvW isn’t about you.

The only problem I tend to see is the existence of lazy players in the world. Those who are completely unwilling to organize and fight with the team at all. They’re either off stealing supply from a tower and running from another player, or they’re dancing at the asura gates, or they’re messing around with some sheep for three hours, or they’re pretending to be Swifty and trying to solo some dudes in their supply camp, when their help could be better used defending a nearby keep. I think most of them have map/teamchat turned off entirely, because they’re just entirely unresponsive.
A disorganized server is a dead server. And these people are making queues happen for people that are actually willing to try fighting. Hell, I see some people fighting naked because all their stuff is broken, but at least they’re trying.
It’s all very discouraging.

As to the OP I had hoped to see the real issues with WvW.

1) The current rendering is broke and has been broke since BWE1. Anet KNOWS it is broke and has many screens shots from players showing invisible enemies. Most of the time you don’t know if you are going against 4-5 players or 50 until your dead and count them as they walk over you.

2) Current exploits that allow players to speed cap orbs and keep them in glitched keeps where they can’t be retaken.

3) Being able to build siege in areas that keeps anyone from being able to counter them, ie. spawn zones.

4) Making the out numbered boon actually mean something. Since it’s inception it really hasn’t made any difference at all. Especially compared to the boons from orbs.

5) Giving WvW a back seat to the rest of the game. The specific issue here was that Anet decided it was more important to reduce the number of servers after BWE2 and thus increase the server pops to almost 40K. Even while they knew that they couldn’t increase the pop cap (666 per server for the 4 maps) for WvW because of the rendering issue above. All this did was create horrendous ques. Now they are trying to back track to “fix” that by adding more servers and asking people to transfer to them. Which is a NO GO for those of us that spent months trying to get our whole guild in one place so that we could play together. All it has meant is that a lot of people who enjoyed playing WvW in the betas quit playing till Anet really fixes the issue they created. They could have at least stopped the transfers to high pop servers to alleviate the issue some what but so far they have been unwilling to do even that???

There is probably a whole laundry list of other “glitches”. But those are the real issues with WvW right now.

kelman.9451:

Spying is lame, and your idea may be good, only other way is to limit all toons to the one server you pick and that is it. So one server must have ALL your toons. So you want to transfer you don’t transfer one toon, you transfer all of them. Then some lamer would have to own two game accounts and log out of one into another to spy, discouraging it even more.

When you “transfer”, you change your home server for your whole account, not just one character.

fractalKinesis.8569:

or they’re pretending to be Swifty and trying to solo some dudes in their supply camp

sheep

don’t tell me you were one of the guys hangin out over there in that camp in EB when my team was being stupid as hell

hey. what else is a lowbie thief to do alone? maybe sit in spawn and make molotov kittentails out of bottled farts….

So many threads complaining about so called ‘night capping’ and all pose the same solutions;

Regional restrictions and lesser points. Both totally ignorant and stupid. Why shouldnt people form other parts of the world play on NA servers, some people, like me, may have friends here. America ISNT the center of the world, get over yourselves. As for the point being lessened, dont see why anyone’s contribution should be lessened because YOUR asleep. Selfish and ignorant is all those suggestions are.

Night capping, as YOU call it, is NOT night capping at all.. its a population issue. Depending on the hours, depends on the population available. So instead of focusing your ignorance upon kicking ppl OFF NA servers or making their contribution worthless, I.E thinking your better than them, why not focus on what can be done against high populated servers?

This problem is NOT regional, its all the time. even at peek times there are some highly populated servers Vs low pop’d servers, and there are some suggestions that could be implemented. Such as, making towers / keeps more resilient against higher population attacks. Guards being stronger and such. The outmaned buff ‘could’ be tweeked to give those at a disadvantage more chance. These kind of things are more beneficial to everyone ALL the time, instead of just nerfing people because they happen to live where YOU dont.

Then again.. W3 isnt supposed to be 100% balanced, if you want that do SPvP, W3 is supposed to be fluid and unpredictable. Having said that, I can see how some ppl get angry and disheartened when facing 50 people against their 3 or 4.

So PLEASE Stop crying ‘night capping’, stop making rediculious suggestions to restrict people or nerf their contribution because they dont live where you do or cant get game access when you do, it makes you look foolish and ignorant. Make ACTUAL suggestions that could benefit everyone, everywhere at all times.

The orbs are powerful yes, gives them some benefit for fighting over. Nerf them too much and it isnt worth having them. Not seeing a massive advantage to having them as yet however. Perhaps, what your seeing is a high pop’d server holding the orbs against your low pop’d server and what your seeing as ‘orb power’ is again, probably just pop power. Just a suggestion.

Again, on the flip side of the coin, Warhammer online had a similar issue with orbs and yes, ill agree, the side with the most people, generally tend to be the ones holding all the aces. Difficult to balance but then again, holding all the cards should give some benefit.

Also – how did kittentail get kittened? LOL

Sorry for second post but I’d like to add something about ‘stopping free server transfers’.

I agree with Comments made about ANet reducing the number of servers in Beta, that was a bad idea, now many servers are highly populated. However, I dont think they should close server transfers just yet and the simple reason is MAC users.

A few of my friends have just bought the MAC version and it took them a couple of days before they could transfer to our guild’s server. So they created characters on another server and waited till space was available to transfer. Closing the free transfers now would of meant they not only paid for the game but also had to pay to be on the same server as their friends. Not cool. Spare a smidge of thought for our MAC using friends

Having said that ANet ARE making roads to slowly reduce server transfers, by making them only once every 24 hours so once they have given enough time for MAC users to get to where they want to be, expect the server transfers to start costing money.

Admittedly this does screw up W3 atm but ANet always said there was going to be sometime before the W3 wars were settled. In say 6 months time, I’m sure the situation will be different, if not sooner. Think if this as testing time, time to polish your fighting skills for when the real fight begins.

Then leave. This game obviously isn’t for you. You want a game that revolves around you. Too bad.

Me and my group lost any interest for www (we had a lot of fun in RvR WHO). WWW here is unrewarding as I feel it. Karma and money better to get in PvE. Badges? You can’t buy items what you want – for example items for crit+precision+power. Play for fun? It seems i can’t get enough of fun when I feel that I don’t get decent rewards from my activity. So I log in game today and realised that I don’t know what to do, nothing in game excite me for doing it :\ I don’t complain, just want to share some of my thoughts.
p.s. Sorry for bad English.

Columba.9730:

Then leave. This game obviously isn’t for you. You want a game that revolves around you. Too bad.

Yeah, he should just leave, because WWW works perfectly in every aspect right?

You are hilarous with such an elitist comment. Elitists have a few things in common in general:

- They have way too much time to play games
- They prefer winning over a fair fight
- They play to get geared, not to have fun
- They think they should be listened more than anyone else by devs, because they are elitists
- They usually dislike game changes, because they have learned to adapt to (IE exploit) the broken mechanics

I have something to say to you, you might not have realized:
“You are the minority, not the majority !”

Columba.9730:

Then leave. This game obviously isn’t for you. You want a game that revolves around you. Too bad.

I remember how common this response was in SWTOR at about this time in the games release.

Alot of people did just that.

@Mara – tend to disagree a wee bit

No W3 doesnt work perfectly, some tweeks are needed but as far as regional lock outs and points deductions, yes that is a selfish attitude and I think that was what Columba was trying to point out. I’m assuming Columba is just as fed up as many of us are at these threads going up about night capping and the frankly…. stupid solutions as the rest of us.

However telling ppl to leave is not a great idea either as Zin pointed out, mind you, even with it’s faults i do believe GW2 a better game than SWTOR.

The ONLY twix that is needed in game, and this is mostly WvW issue, are invisible enemies.

1. You will NEVER get rid of spies, and big guilds/alliances are needed for WvW, otherwise there’s chaos and pathetic tries to do anything, and you server is rotflstomped.
2. Orbs are imho fine. Maybe few tweaks would be nice, but are not realy necessary
3. Nightcapping will always happen. Even if Anet will get rid of “French Canadians” etc, there will be always people/guilds that will play during nightime capping everything aroud. What will you say then? Forbig playing WvW during night time? meh…

And Yes, i play FOR FUN, that’s why i dont really care about nightcapping. More annoying are people running mindlessly around or knocking to the SM doors 24/7 using their heads.

I would suggest that WvW should be 80th lvl only… but nobody will agree with me and Anet will never do it, cause they want to make every content available on almost every level.

^ good post!

Except the lvl 80 – I see your reasoning but we all joined this game mostly for the W3 and i still believe lowbies have their role too.. cannon fodder mostly but even so a small group of lowbies can take out supply dollys, sentrys and even non upgraded supply camps fairly well. That is the only thing i disagree with you on tho, even tho i do see your point of view

Mist of Pandaria is on Tuesday OP if you are interested. That game revolves around you

My top issues in WvW are ability activation delay in large fights and invisible enemies (characters not appearing at all until fully loaded which takes a while).

As for night capping, scoring needs to be adjusted to take into account how many players are actually in the zone playing. More people playing and fighting (on all 3 sides) should = faster point accumulation.

Oceanic and Euro players have every right to play and have their actions shift the balance of WvW, but right now their influence in that regard is out of proportion to their population. Restricting playtimes or regions isn’t the answer; make the scoring metric reflect the level of activity that is taking place.

Also, Orbs have an unbalancing effect, change their bonuses to be non-combat-enhancing, thanks.

Coffee.6394:

fractalKinesis.8569:

or they’re pretending to be Swifty and trying to solo some dudes in their supply camp

sheep

don’t tell me you were one of the guys hangin out over there in that camp in EB when my team was being stupid as hell

hey. what else is a lowbie thief to do alone? maybe sit in spawn and make molotov kittentails out of bottled farts….

Not sure where that all came from, but I never just sit in a camp somewhere… unless I’m guarding it.

The majority of complaints and solutions I’ve seen so far have been self centered. It’s like “Do whatever you can to benefit me, and punish everyone else”. It’s madness!
As an Australian that loves to play World vs World, I think it is fantastic the way it is, it has it’s ups and downs but overall it’s amazing. If you have a little patience, it can be very rewarding and entertaining. Be it assaults, defending, patrolling, surprise attacks and diversions, it’s a very fun experience and the possibilities of how things happen against another server vs another is endless.

My server struggles during US times and it’s normally always last, sometimes with crushing defeats. But during Australian peak time the tide begins to turn in our favour and we have aim to make up the lost points and catch up. Sometimes we win fast enough to gain a good lead, other times we come back but it’s a case of too little too late. Our current week of WvWvW is very tight between all 3 servers, it’s had brilliant battles and it’s more closely matched over the 24 hour day, I can’t wait to see what will unfold over the coming days between us.

If a US based server is having trouble against well organize Oceanic servers. I suggest 2 solutions:

1: Your server players better during your peak times and the interlapping period so that your lead is unassailable.
2: You organize yourselves and defend better when you face the Oceanic wave. Delaying them is worth double, for every point you hold on to, they will also lose.

If you play during the Graveyard shift and it’s a case of 50 vs 400, I suggest go queue up for Eternal Battlegrounds, that is the hardest fought and tightest of all the battlegrounds, it is the hardest to both gain and lose ground in and the servers often cancel each other out.