Guild Wars 2

Here is my suggestion for fixing WvW.

First and Foremost. My thanks go to Arenanet for fixing the culling issue. I am into networking, OS Design, Game Programming and Music. It is not an easy thing to accomplish and its quite expensive, specially rewriting the code.

My worries deal with the long term system itself of WvW, along with players who have multiple characters.

Certain questions are raised with an example being

“What will happen when new players play GW2 a year from now and they enter WvW to find they have to compete with players who have a System-Advantage over them from earned abilities. Those who spent 2000 – 4000 hours to cap all the first tier abilities and how about 2000 – 3000 more hours capping second tier abilities?”

The answer is a complete disadvantage, so below is my suggestion:

You know how each character class has a trait system? Where we have 70 points?

Why don’t we have a 70 – 80 point WvW trait system as well? One independent from Character Classes?

The way it works is that we enter World vs World and we customize a character outright for WvW performance.

The trait lines name examples can be:

Offensive, Defensive, Economy, Logistics, Command, Siege (This can also be in offensive or defensive traits too), but you get the idea.

So basically, We enter WvW and we have:
Character Class Traits (What we have now)

AND

WvW Trait line (Abilities functioning in WvW)

The reason I came up with this is because each character class has 75 trait skills (12 * 5 and 3 * 5 as the minor traits)

This would be really cool because it would allow for each player, regardless their experience base to actually customize any character for WvW and combine with character trait skills.

It would make this WvW more interesting, more independent and unique. It will prevent the problem of players getting systematic advantages over new players in the long term as I would hate to see how new players five years from now will get into WvW with players having 10000 hours worth of playtime or more and many tiers capped….on one or multiple characters…

I would love to enter WvW and tell my team

“Ok, since we are countering larger groups, I will take Defense 30, Command 10, Siege 20 and Economy 10….

…and then later say "Oh the situation has changed, I’ll take “Offense 30, Command 30, Economy 10”

Rather than say “Oh! yeah…I can bring a necro to do condition damage, but I can’t because my elementalist has 200 points and I want to get 100 more for Supply +5”

This trait system might be cool for small groups and zergs to be on more equal footing with one another, because what the current system is doing is hurting small groups because small groups go and capture camps, survive for a long time and then the 40 – 50 man zergs out there in a sea of red hunt those groups down because they will get more WXP from killing 7 – 8 players than killing 5 zergs.

It just feels like small groups are like cattle in a farm that everyone allows to live to fatten them up, so that then they could be scooped up by large zergs.

I just feel that if I have to spend 4000+ hours capping stuff that I will have to leave to another game because as the current system stands, there is more grind than any other game I have played and the developers speak of more abilities in the future.

This hurts the new guilds too…
Imagine I make a 20 man guild in the future and run together for 200 supply. A 20 man guild with a +5 supply buff and +5 camp buff is going to carry 400 supply, which is something I can’t compete with unless each member gets 300 points.

It no longer becomes about competitive skill as much as the combined WvW skills attained vs players who do not have the same skill (or any skills)….

Well. I am sorry for the long, drawn out post….but Its just my feelings to this system. I thought about the trait lines because it could be really cool and finally allow players to freely play alts and not have to worry about throwing their lives away (Yes, 4000 hours is a VERY LONG TIME in teenage to young adult years…very important time to learn and grow. It is more time than one spends in classroom time obtaining a Bachelor’s Degree)

Setsunayaki.4907:

Here is my suggestion for fixing WvW.

First and Foremost. My thanks go to Arenanet for fixing the culling issue. I am into networking, OS Design, Game Programming and Music. It is not an easy thing to accomplish and its quite expensive, specially rewriting the code.

My worries deal with the long term system itself of WvW, along with players who have multiple characters.

Certain questions are raised with an example being

“What will happen when new players play GW2 a year from now and they enter WvW to find they have to compete with players who have a System-Advantage over them from earned abilities. Those who spent 2000 – 4000 hours to cap all the first tier abilities and how about 2000 – 3000 more hours capping second tier abilities?”

The answer is a complete disadvantage, so below is my suggestion:

You know how each character class has a trait system? Where we have 70 points?

Why don’t we have a 70 – 80 point WvW trait system as well? One independent from Character Classes?

The way it works is that we enter World vs World and we customize a character outright for WvW performance.

The trait lines name examples can be:

Offensive, Defensive, Economy, Logistics, Command, Siege (This can also be in offensive or defensive traits too), but you get the idea.

So basically, We enter WvW and we have:
Character Class Traits (What we have now)

AND

WvW Trait line (Abilities functioning in WvW)

The reason I came up with this is because each character class has 75 trait skills (12 * 5 and 3 * 5 as the minor traits)

This would be really cool because it would allow for each player, regardless their experience base to actually customize any character for WvW and combine with character trait skills.

It would make this WvW more interesting, more independent and unique. It will prevent the problem of players getting systematic advantages over new players in the long term as I would hate to see how new players five years from now will get into WvW with players having 10000 hours worth of playtime or more and many tiers capped….on one or multiple characters…

I would love to enter WvW and tell my team

“Ok, since we are countering larger groups, I will take Defense 30, Command 10, Siege 20 and Economy 10….

…and then later say "Oh the situation has changed, I’ll take “Offense 30, Command 30, Economy 10”

Rather than say “Oh! yeah…I can bring a necro to do condition damage, but I can’t because my elementalist has 200 points and I want to get 100 more for Supply +5”

This trait system might be cool for small groups and zergs to be on more equal footing with one another, because what the current system is doing is hurting small groups because small groups go and capture camps, survive for a long time and then the 40 – 50 man zergs out there in a sea of red hunt those groups down because they will get more WXP from killing 7 – 8 players than killing 5 zergs.

It just feels like small groups are like cattle in a farm that everyone allows to live to fatten them up, so that then they could be scooped up by large zergs.

I just feel that if I have to spend 4000+ hours capping stuff that I will have to leave to another game because as the current system stands, there is more grind than any other game I have played and the developers speak of more abilities in the future.

This hurts the new guilds too…
Imagine I make a 20 man guild in the future and run together for 200 supply. A 20 man guild with a +5 supply buff and +5 camp buff is going to carry 400 supply, which is something I can’t compete with unless each member gets 300 points.

It no longer becomes about competitive skill as much as the combined WvW skills attained vs players who do not have the same skill (or any skills)….

Well. I am sorry for the long, drawn out post….but Its just my feelings to this system. I thought about the trait lines because it could be really cool and finally allow players to freely play alts and not have to worry about throwing their lives away (Yes, 4000 hours is a VERY LONG TIME in teenage to young adult years…very important time to learn and grow. It is more time than one spends in classroom time obtaining a Bachelor’s Degree)

You know it took the better part of 5 years to develop and test the trait system we have now for all the professions and races we have now since you’re in “game programming” care to take a questimate on how much more time it would take to develope these wvwvw traits? Years!

Five years for all profession skills along with the 600 trait skills. Not to mention developing the characters, races, world and everything else.

How long did it take them to make the WvW skills we have now? I do not think it was a long time. Also, the trait system I suggested need not be 75 skills. It could be a lot smaller. One can have 30 point and distribute them among less number of lines or skills.

I know it does not take years.
It takes time, not years.

My personal experience below:

Three person team programming a shooter mod without new meshes being created of twenty multi-functioning weapons. This took me four to seven days to write and a week to test with friends. Then two weeks for bug testing after initial release.

Five person team writing 28 passive passive skills and 31 active skills to an old MMO that only exists now in private servers (official ones down worldwide), took less than a month to write and implement, around two – four weeks for testing and tweaking.

….and to bring the idea home.

It did not take “Years” for arenanet to implement the WvW Abilities and Patch. nor months to test them. :P After them creating Guild Wars 1 and doing what is needed to make Guild Wars 2, the creation of an add-on which only exists for WvW itself is more of a kitty-project from experience.

However, what does kill my time in Game Programming is actually making maps for games and writing music to games. A simple map, testing them for BSP errors and other bugs, along with dealing with Concept Design, Geometric Design, Texturing, Rendering, Rebuilding….then dealing with all the Event Triggers and Planning…That alone takes months for a very good, detailed map to be made, and then even more time to test it.

just to get back at where this started:
1. if people will play alot, eventually the siege dmg will remain the same, people will deal 5% more dmg, and get 5% less dmg, no problem in there, and its not like this will increase the amount of damage you deal to players.
2. zergs hunting small groups? for real?
3. if you play WvW just for the WvW xp, please leave WvW and go get your PvE achievements. the ranks are nice and fun to have, compare to others etc, but when I command I dont chase of the enemy blobs just for the world xp, I dont cap stonemist for the world xp, nor the karma, I do it for the server, and most of all, for fun.

the wvw ranking system didnt add much more… everyone following a zerg spamming 1 can get the final rank eventually…

You sound like an old college classmate of mine! While it may not take a ton of time to program for a small team of devs, it would take forever to get through the pipeline. This idea isn’t something that would be placed very high up with all of the other problems and implementations that they want to fix and put in the game. I.E. there are better things the devs can be doing with their programming time. Gotta think about the design time this would take too…
Not to mention the test times that this would need for balancing reasons. It would take much more time than just programming a new WvW trait system.
Maybe you should apply to ANet and pitch your ideas as a developer… just don’t give away your ideas before you’re hired.

Setsunayaki.4907:

Here is my suggestion for fixing WvW.

First and Foremost. My thanks go to Arenanet for fixing the culling issue. I am into networking, OS Design, Game Programming and Music. It is not an easy thing to accomplish and its quite expensive, specially rewriting the code.

My worries deal with the long term system itself of WvW, along with players who have multiple characters.

Certain questions are raised with an example being

“What will happen when new players play GW2 a year from now and they enter WvW to find they have to compete with players who have a System-Advantage over them from earned abilities. Those who spent 2000 – 4000 hours to cap all the first tier abilities and how about 2000 – 3000 more hours capping second tier abilities?”

The answer is a complete disadvantage, so below is my suggestion:

You know how each character class has a trait system? Where we have 70 points?

Why don’t we have a 70 – 80 point WvW trait system as well? One independent from Character Classes?

The way it works is that we enter World vs World and we customize a character outright for WvW performance.

The trait lines name examples can be:

Offensive, Defensive, Economy, Logistics, Command, Siege (This can also be in offensive or defensive traits too), but you get the idea.

So basically, We enter WvW and we have:
Character Class Traits (What we have now)

AND

WvW Trait line (Abilities functioning in WvW)

The reason I came up with this is because each character class has 75 trait skills (12 * 5 and 3 * 5 as the minor traits)

This would be really cool because it would allow for each player, regardless their experience base to actually customize any character for WvW and combine with character trait skills.

It would make this WvW more interesting, more independent and unique. It will prevent the problem of players getting systematic advantages over new players in the long term as I would hate to see how new players five years from now will get into WvW with players having 10000 hours worth of playtime or more and many tiers capped….on one or multiple characters…

I would love to enter WvW and tell my team

“Ok, since we are countering larger groups, I will take Defense 30, Command 10, Siege 20 and Economy 10….

…and then later say "Oh the situation has changed, I’ll take “Offense 30, Command 30, Economy 10”

Rather than say “Oh! yeah…I can bring a necro to do condition damage, but I can’t because my elementalist has 200 points and I want to get 100 more for Supply +5”

This trait system might be cool for small groups and zergs to be on more equal footing with one another, because what the current system is doing is hurting small groups because small groups go and capture camps, survive for a long time and then the 40 – 50 man zergs out there in a sea of red hunt those groups down because they will get more WXP from killing 7 – 8 players than killing 5 zergs.

It just feels like small groups are like cattle in a farm that everyone allows to live to fatten them up, so that then they could be scooped up by large zergs.

I just feel that if I have to spend 4000+ hours capping stuff that I will have to leave to another game because as the current system stands, there is more grind than any other game I have played and the developers speak of more abilities in the future.

This hurts the new guilds too…
Imagine I make a 20 man guild in the future and run together for 200 supply. A 20 man guild with a +5 supply buff and +5 camp buff is going to carry 400 supply, which is something I can’t compete with unless each member gets 300 points.

It no longer becomes about competitive skill as much as the combined WvW skills attained vs players who do not have the same skill (or any skills)….

Well. I am sorry for the long, drawn out post….but Its just my feelings to this system. I thought about the trait lines because it could be really cool and finally allow players to freely play alts and not have to worry about throwing their lives away (Yes, 4000 hours is a VERY LONG TIME in teenage to young adult years…very important time to learn and grow. It is more time than one spends in classroom time obtaining a Bachelor’s Degree)

If it takes more lines of code than the lines of text in your post it isn’t going to happen.

Economy trait xDDDDD
Thanks

The trait system in Warhammer Online is similar…

You get x trait points and per rank you get an additional one.
It won’t make you super strong but will allow increasing a certain line a bit or combining traits that couldn’t be combined before.

That would be great and wouldn’t affect balance too much.
But it’s not gonna happen.

It did not take the developers 5+ years to develop wvw. If it did then they done a REALLY bad job because WvWvW lacks in content so bad. I agree there should be a trait system but you know arena net they would rather create pve content and forget us pvp’ers which also make up a large amount of the playerbase. They can make new pve crap every month but they can’t create 1 new map for wvw or a trait system?

hey excellent idea ,.actually a trait tree for WvW doesn’t have to be so extravagant , just enough so when you choose a certain path , it makes us unique , defenders , offense ,, ,would seem impossible to manage to be able to gain credit for all who participate , a lot like to stay back an place siege and wait for defending keeps and towers , while massive zergs go cap stuff,. so theyres no incentive, but just the will to want to win and use actual strategy , . and gain nothing from it,. so all in all its just a midless zerg like everything else in the game,. dragons always die , etc WvW players want an need remedys now asap , to keep our hopes and competitive spirits high, and drop the price of transfers in half and close the top 6 servers for tansfers , let other servers grow and advance,.

The current WXP abilities aren’t that pronounced that they sway the tide of battle.

I’ve yet to use my rank points, feeling the current abilities are sub-par and I am taking a wait-and-see approach.

Also, for people who’ve invested hundreds of hours in WvW, they’ve earned those abilities.

In its current state, it’s far from unbalanced to new players. Just look at the upscale mechanism, it gives player a boost to help bridge the gap, but fully geared and traited players will always have the advantage in a equal skilled battle. By your logic, we should send them a full exo-gear set as soon as they enter WvW.