Guild Wars 2

First of all, let me tell you, that I am by no means a veteran wvw-player (300 wvw level or something) so I don’t know how much merit my following statements have. Anyhow, a lot of my friends are very passionate about WvW and have tried to get me into it a few times. Unfortunately however, although I have tried to get into it a few times now, the mode seems to disagree with me on a very fundamental level.

Personally (although I know that a lot of players prefer this style) I dont like the whole blob/zerging aspect of it. I, as a player, like to feel the impact I have in a fight or on the map. Unfortunately, in a mass of >40 players, there is no way to tell how good a single player performs so there is that. In terms of roaming, which I would prefer …well roaming is dead. The impact you have on the matchup when running as a small group is just insignificant on a overall scale.

To the point now:
What would like to have, is more of a system/map design that is closer to the sPvP one.
A LOT (and I mean A LOT) of equally important objectives all across the map, one big zerg can’t possibly contest all at once. This would – essentially – force players to group up in much smaller groups (of lets say 5-10 people max) to cover all important areas of the map.

This would do two things at the same time:
Firstly, it would break the whole blob vs blob aspect of the mode, allowing single players (or small groups at least) to have significantly higher impact on the overall match outcome.
Secondly, it would spread out the entire map population. Cause, as it is right now, whole areas of the map, except where the zerg is fighting, are completely abandoned. I basically spend more time running around in wvw than actually combating other players (which is completely unenjoyable imo).

Now, I don’t know about map balance or even map design for such a mode, but personally I’d play the kitten out of such a mode. Obviously UNGUARDED objectives should be able to be easily (!) taken by small groups, so there is no need for a zerg at all.

Anyhow, those are my opinions about WvW. Let me remind everybody, that this is supposed to be a DISCUSSION thread, where everybody can state what they would like WvW to be. This might be a good way for the community to express what they expect from WvW on a FUNDAMENTAL level (rewards, builds and whatnot can be an issue as well….but here I’d like to talk about more basic matters).

It is so easy to increase WvW population that ANet not doing it just hints they are not interested in it:

1. Much better drops from killing enemy players;
2. 4 weeks WvW tournaments every 4 months with awesome rewards;
3. WvW unique armor/weapons skins.

Thanks.

While YOU prefer a small scale aspect to WvW, that is not what the game mode was designed for.

sPvP is for small scale fights.

WvW is for large scale fights. So if you want WvW to be about fifteen 5v5 encounters instead of one 75v75 megabattle, you should either play on DBL or play sPvP.

Swamurabi.7890:

While YOU prefer a small scale aspect to WvW, that is not what the game mode was designed for.

sPvP is for small scale fights.

WvW is for large scale fights. So if you want WvW to be about fifteen 5v5 encounters instead of one 75v75 megabattle, you should either play on DBL or play sPvP.

You are exactly right. I have stated many times, that those ideas would specifically appeal to me and might not be for everyone. I never intended for my opinion to be the “be all and end all”.

All I wanted, was to setup a platform, where people could talk about what would make THEM play the game mode.

Swamurabi.7890:

While YOU prefer a small scale aspect to WvW, that is not what the game mode was designed for.

sPvP is for small scale fights.

WvW is for large scale fights. So if you want WvW to be about fifteen 5v5 encounters instead of one 75v75 megabattle, you should either play on DBL or play sPvP.

I strongly disagree.

It’s evident from the map design and siege mechanics that this game mode wasn’t designed for 1v1. It’s also evident from the server architecture and performance issues that this game mode wasn’t designed for 75v75.

The best gameplay, at least if structures are involved, tends to occur at 5v5 all the way up to two-way 50v50s or three-way 30v30s. 75v75 is simply ludicrous.

Just from a game mechanics POV, I think that WvW should reward the server most, when it is able to do “strategic tasks” on the map & group play over individual skill and zerg vs. zerg.

Let me explain:
>> sPvP has its focus on tactical movement on the (relatively small) map. WvW should be about gaining key locations for a benefit in attacking or defending the next position.
>> Roaming should not be about waiting in stealth (like Ghost Thief did for so many months) and kill people running by a choke points. Roaming should be playing the supply game, knowing enemy movements and taking structures that are undefended because of negligence.
>> Guilds should have a bigger impact on active fighting, not just claiming a structure.

How could that be accomplished? (expansion pack 2 changes?)
>> Guild teams and squads should get an option to challenge the enemy, e.g. by making the squad visible on the map, so that large groups can meet up to fight. If you participate in that challenge fight (both sides agree to fight each other), the reward for killing enemy players should go up significantly, both for server scoring and individual loot from bags.
>> Guild missions should be overhauled, so that they lose the min. requirement of 3 people. A guild team spreading out to suddenly flip camps or take sentries will shake up map awareness a lot. Also do it encourage more players to join WvW for individual rewards from guild missions.
>> Supply needs to be more important again for structures. The auto-upgrading has taken away a lot of choices for the players on how to upgrade (e.g. “rushing” for a WP in favour of weaker defenses)
>> Players and guilds need to be rewarded for using tactics and improvements in structures, because those can provide a lot of individual nuances to e.g. a tower or camp. Perhaps the rewards could be small boosts to the WvW reward track or a chance to get a decoration token for GH
>> Allow participation in WvW to contribute to GH decorations, e.g. by adding a reward token that lets you turn siege blueprints into decorations in GH.
>> As defending is not very rewarding at the moment, perhaps a successful defense event could recharge the gathering nodes at the structure. A tower that has a cloth and leather node could be worth defending for individual people.
>> The home garrison should get an NPC, that can trigger a different (active) server tasks for the map each hour on a random rotation. If you can qualify for that task, you get a buff like “outnumbered”, which increases your MF%, gives you faster reward track gain etc. Server tasks could be: Hold bloodlust / shrines for 15min; capture a keep / tower. “Active” tasks would only be available if you do not already qualify for that reward (e.g. if you already have bloodlust, that would no be available.

You might find my ideas not the best, but you should get the idea of where I want WvW to be in the future:
More and active player choices that reward you for active participation in different tasks.
Thanks for reading the T3 wall of text.

I like your thinking Gorani.
Map awareness and decision-making concerning movement should be a huge part in this game mode…and not just from 1 commander who everybody else just blindly follows. The mode is designed to drive community-effort to gain victory, where everybody needs to constantly be of use wherever they can and not just running after a tag, doing whatever and whenever the commander tells them to.

Reacting fast and correctly on a large Borderland also would make classes that are currently merely laughed at due to their lack of large-scale combat impact more relevant again.

The thing with “meta-events” also sounds rather interesting. Something like SM only being attackable during these events and granting a specific buff to the server or maybe even just some static points. There are many possibilities to setup such events.

I play WvW for a constrant stream of objectives where I fight for one outcome against other factions that want a different outcome. The ultimate standard by which our actions are judged is that outcome—not pure combat.

Done well, this allows groups of varying sizes to fight each other in a meaningful way. A cooperative faction of players can all work towards the same goal in very different ways and all make meaningful contributions. Communication, strategy and tactics have a bigger impact than any single warrior, but being highly proficient in combat is a strength that can be leveraged into victory.

If you didn’t play before HoT you missed out on those groups. There use to be a lot more roamers, and havoc groups 5-10 running around that could make an impact to maps and scoring (I use to run in a guild like that). HoT and it’s additions broke a lot of that and these days the roamers have either turned to a couple annoying classes using annoying or broken specs, or they’ve just grown into those havoc sized pin sniping gank groups. The havoc players either left or merged with bigger groups, because it’s more effective and safer to run in bigger groups these days for everything because of boon sharing and condition bombs.

You can put in a lot more objectives but they have to have a purpose or people won’t bother much, like the shrines or bloodlust.

P.S they probably should take a look at ESO and what they’ve done with their systems. Like their port system to structures and how capturing small objectives play a bigger role in that, like if you capture the 3 smaller objectives around a keep you lock out the ports to that building, taking an objective in the middle of their port system breaks the line of ports. An example for gw2 you could use the lattice system of ports (port from structures not from anywhere the only port from anywhere should be citadel) it would go from citadel -> garrison -> nwt -> nwc -> bay -> swc -> swt -> enemy spawn, if nwt was taken it breaks the ports to bay, which makes nwt much more valuable to hold, the same for the camp. Naturally it’s a lot easier to take the camp to disrupt the flow and now your roamers and small groups become more important in recapturing and keeping that point safe. This would work well on desert borderlands.

You could even use this on the ppt flow, you would only earn ppt from structures if they were connected to your garrison, making the mid points more important for roamers and small groups to maintain.

ESO also handles structures differently, all walls and doors are basically already t3 upgrades always, when a wall goes down you have to repair it even after a capture it doesn’t repair automatically, so supply would become much more important.

Little things like that they need to check other rvr games out there and see what worked, and what could maybe work for a gw2 version of it.

BikeIsGone.8675:

Swamurabi.7890:

While YOU prefer a small scale aspect to WvW, that is not what the game mode was designed for.

sPvP is for small scale fights.

WvW is for large scale fights. So if you want WvW to be about fifteen 5v5 encounters instead of one 75v75 megabattle, you should either play on DBL or play sPvP.

You are exactly right. I have stated many times, that those ideas would specifically appeal to me and might not be for everyone. I never intended for my opinion to be the “be all and end all”.

All I wanted, was to setup a platform, where people could talk about what would make THEM play the game mode.

What do people need to play WvW……a reason to play.

My first reason to play was map completion.

That reason no longer exists. The Gift of Battle reason doesn’t keep players in WvW long enough to get to like WvW. WvW map completion could take months.

My second reason to play was to find a good commander/guild to follow.

It used to be that you could find a tag on every map. Sometimes there were more than one tag and there were calls for one or the other to tag down. I eventually found a guild and played for a few years. When the commander quit the game the guild collapsed. So I’m back to looking for a good commander/guild to follow. Unfortunately, because of linking and the current state of WvW, sometimes there isn’t a tag on a map, even EBG. Last night in NA T1 I went to EBG and there was a tag, after they got wiped twice they either quit or went to another map. Our side was quickly outmanned. I see this more and more, no tags and outmanned on multiple maps. Even if you do see a tag because of linking they might not be on your server or might not even be on your server’s teamspeak.

If I know what to look for in WvW and can’t find it how do you expect someone new to WvW to find it?

Swamurabi.7890:

What do people need to play WvW……a reason to play.

My first reason to play was map completion.

That reason no longer exists. The Gift of Battle reason doesn’t keep players in WvW long enough to get to like WvW. WvW map completion could take months.

My second reason to play was to find a good commander/guild to follow.

It used to be that you could find a tag on every map. Sometimes there were more than one tag and there were calls for one or the other to tag down. I eventually found a guild and played for a few years. When the commander quit the game the guild collapsed. So I’m back to looking for a good commander/guild to follow. Unfortunately, because of linking and the current state of WvW, sometimes there isn’t a tag on a map, even EBG. Last night in NA T1 I went to EBG and there was a tag, after they got wiped twice they either quit or went to another map. Our side was quickly outmanned. I see this more and more, no tags and outmanned on multiple maps. Even if you do see a tag because of linking they might not be on your server or might not even be on your server’s teamspeak.

If I know what to look for in WvW and can’t find it how do you expect someone new to WvW to find it?

I get where you are coming from. By now it’s pretty much apparent that the WvW population has reached a pretty steep low. That being said however, the main issue tied to this seems to be, that most players just don’t seem to enjoy the overall concept of the mode. Luring players into mode with rewards, might be an incentive for people to actually give WvW a shot, but it doesn’t really provide a reason to consistently play it…or making you want your server to do well. How to solve this? I have no freaking idea. The idea of providing better rewards isn’t really going to help with player’s dedication (or rather: lack of) towards the mode imo. So, and again in MY opinion, there needs to be fundamental changes to the overall mode design.

Like, lets say you enjoy the large-scale fighting aspect of the game….What would you do to make this aspect more enjoyable? Obviously you would need a big population to support large scale fighting. Would – as previously mentioned – timed (like every 2 hours or so), deathmatch-like meta events help? Where your server has time to get ready for the upcoming event and since there is a timer on it, people would have it easier to organize.

Large scale fights are cool and all, but there’s no way to make the game mode hinge on their outcome. If large-scale is the be-all, end-all, then the server with the most people online wins. Conversely, if organized groups are powerful enough to account for numbers, then casual players have no place and may actually be detrimental to a group.

Part of the reason objectives exist is to avoid those pitfalls. If you can’t match someone in manpower, you can use other tools to still accomplish your objectives.

Of course, there are problems with the way that’s going right now. Notably, it’s more effective to run away and PvD than it is to contest your enemies unless you have overwhelming numbers. Some players just want fights, of course, but there’s not enough of them to sustain a population—especially since the types of fights they want vary wildly in size.

For me WvW is about small to medium size encounters (squads of 5-20 people). I believe that the objectives are where the engagements should be occurring. Most of the best fighting i have done was defending objectives being assaulted by superior forces, and this was in the days i ran with PYRO pre-maguuma collapse. Yes i do think some on both offense and defense will be on siege, its part of the game, however i do not agree with being able to have 5 rams on a gate, 6 catas on a wall, or 10 ACs raining down death on the aggressors.

Since i play in a guild who likes to Havoc on active maps, its not normally an issue to find both. I disagree that HoT killed havoc group. What HoT did do was require havoc groups to at least improve their fighting as the power creep allowed a small party of skilled roamers to really dish out a lot of damage, or simply outsustain you until more help arrived. That imo isn’t a negative drawback in a pvp enabled game mode.

Prior to HoT, many havoc groups were pure PvEers essentially, even if they spent most of their time in WvW, the PvP side of it was lost to them. Even CTH back then was more adept to fast tower caps under the enemy noses, when it failed the strategy was to die fast to regroup and hit somewhere else. The builds ran were to move fast and instant kill lord, but were completely useless to roaming and zerg fighting. This thankfully had to change, because that 5-10 second delay of killing a lord (scaling + breakbar) can often mean more defenders.

How would i fix things to promote my ideal of wvw? I posted about it plenty on these forums
1. Diminish rewards (and ppk points) on killing the SAME people over and over. You already do this with wxp rewards.
2. Remove Kill/death statistics from API. There is a lot of abuse over this scoring metric, theres a reason you dont show this in spvp, please apply the same methodology here.
3. Remove Fortified Walls, or change them to 125% of Reinforced
4. Rework Siege use in wvw.
a. Arrowcarts, Rams, shield Generators: have locked placement areas (equip it and you see blue outlines where you can build)
b. Catapults, ballistas, Trebs: Freedom of placement, but an increased range to cap limit.

Imo you should be limited to 4 rams hitting a game, and 4 catas hitting a wall. If want it to drop faster, you build trebs further out. Trebs should be limited to 2 within 1200 of eachother. ACs should have their build spots roughly 2400 units apart on walls. Shield generators build spots should only be behind walls and gates, and limited to objective owner.

Sure this seems like an overemphasis on siege, and that “wont fix the game mode” but it atleast can fix 2 issues. Blobs PvDooring will be delayed more, to go faster becomes very inefficient supply wise, and they cant use shield generators to abuse their numbers against defenders. Out numbered Defenders can delay the blob, but they will lose if no one comes to help fast. Defenders can still use ballistas, but they always have a tradeoff with positioning.

WvW is all about the large scale, epic fights. It’s not sPvP or small groups. Plenty of other games have those mechanics – it’s the large scale fights that makes GW2 stand out. New maps on a periodic basis would be great but at the very least get rid of Desert BL and update/tweak Alpine.

Give WvW some exclusive, end-game gear to steer more players to it. Make it based on PPK and not an afk track so you have to actively participate in order to get it.

I was able to enjoy it for 4 years as a staff ele doing ok dmg then major balance shifts due to raids now i am only able to heal bot as an ele…

So other game times messed up my wvw expectations comply.

Expectations?
After 5 years of nothing, someone in this sub-forum still have expectations for wvw?
You guys must be very fresh in wvw/wvw forum.

My expectation will be that wvw going downhill further next expansion. I’m sure Anet won’t let me down on this.

Offair.2563:

My expectation will be that wvw going downhill further next expansion. I’m sure Anet won’t let me down on this.

i dont know, since they could not balance pvp to be decent in esl and atrack players, they prefered to drop it, i fear that is what will happen to WvW.

All they can do is increase rewards for players to cap stuff faster and more freebies that can be farmed on the reward tracks.
That and increase more power creep and spam class cababilities within the next expansion.

Gorani.7205:

Just from a game mechanics POV, I think that WvW should reward the server most, when it is able to do “strategic tasks” on the map & group play over individual skill and zerg vs. zerg.

Let me explain:
>> sPvP has its focus on tactical movement on the (relatively small) map. WvW should be about gaining key locations for a benefit in attacking or defending the next position.
>> Roaming should not be about waiting in stealth (like Ghost Thief did for so many months) and kill people running by a choke points. Roaming should be playing the supply game, knowing enemy movements and taking structures that are undefended because of negligence.
>> Guilds should have a bigger impact on active fighting, not just claiming a structure.

Things used to be like that in the beginning, but these days there is simply no need to care anymore.
We used to have roamers constantly capping camps and killing dollys. And on the other hand we had groups defending said targets.
But this part of the warfare is only needed and useful if you are going to commit to a long lasting siege fight (which imo used to be one of the best ascpects of wvw). What do people do these days? If you can’t take a structure on the 2nd or 3rd attempt you just give up. Nobody these days commits to a 5-6hrs supply and siege fight just to take down a garrison when they can ktrain all around the map.
This aspect had also been entirely eliminated for some time with the release of HoT and the implementation of auto-upgrades until they went back to the dolly system.
Also supplies play a lot smaller role, because a) people can carry a lot more supplies (15 used to be the max, not 25) and you can just have things like supply drops or even simple border hopping which simply didn’t work with full maps back then. You had no supplies to drop like 6-7 sup rams on every single gate.

Guilds used to work together a lot more. I for example played on Seafarer’s rest back then which was famous for it’s many guilds. It was a common sight to have 2-3 guilds@20-30 guys per border so of course they had to work together, coordinating many small attacks, forming one big attack, baiting and flanking the enemy and so on.
But unfortunately over time balance turned out to favor bigger groups more and more. You could more easily rally, you had the aoe spread over more targets and most importantly you had better ways to distribute stability after it’s change.

People just stopped caring after some time. They eventually realised that there is no point dedicating hours upon hours to getting some virtual points which is why, from my limited experience at least, players started to focus either on ktraining or active search for combats, with the latter being much rarer.
This also had to do with the effects of nightcap. If you actually still cared about points you’d barely make any while just trying to take enemy keeps for hours upon hours. And should you manage to do it you may hold it for 1-2 hours only to go to bed and find the entire border t3 the next morning again.

Something like nightcap and the sheer advantage of blobs are core problems that have been known for years now. There is no point in merging servers to fight your dwindling population if you don’t fix what actually drives people away from the game…otherwise you will keep merging and merging until you are left with not more than one matchup.

HoT showed very obviously that the WvW devs have no connection whatsoever to the WvW community which, as long as this is the case, makes WvW bound to fail in the long run no matter what they try to do.

Diku.2546:

Diversity is totally possible…

Large scale zerg & small scale sPvP play-style can naturally co-exist in a diverse WvW ecosystem.

It’s a very simple solution to fix WvW.

We just need to re-purpose existing game mechanics…imho.

(…)

If means change Anet wont do it, or hardly do it, they will just change a few vallues on some parts of the game to hide a bit the problem.

To be fair, Nightcapping is far less of an issue than it used to be. It’s still a problem and likely always will be, but it’s been improved.

As for blobs…when players stop complaining about the things that break blobs up, maybe we’ll make more headway on that. Right now, any change that allows defenders to even slow down an attack is decried as pro-PvD and anti-fights. If blobs can’t be slowed, there’s no point in splitting up.

Sviel.7493:

To be fair, Nightcapping is far less of an issue than it used to be. It’s still a problem and likely always will be, but it’s been improved.

As for blobs…when players stop complaining about the things that break blobs up, maybe we’ll make more headway on that. Right now, any change that allows defenders to even slow down an attack is decried as pro-PvD and anti-fights. If blobs can’t be slowed, there’s no point in splitting up.

You don’t necessarily have to be able to slow down blobs to somehow force more spread out fights. As I have said previously, id like to see, that small groups just have more impact. If a handful of players were able to take objectives comfortably on their own on MULTIPLE places on the map, the response time for big zergs would just be too long. Its like for conquest-sPvP: running from point to point as a full grp of 5, may be a way to consistently win fights, but it will still lose you the game when the enemy team decides to just contest the other objectives at the same time.

The situation you’re describing is just K-Train station. The blob shows up and you can’t do anything about it, so you go hit a bunch of other things they aren’t defending atm. Everybody caps everything comfortably.

That sounds more contentious than I want, but I’m not sure how to fix it so…I love you?

I also want to ask what you define as comfortably. I’m currently comfortable taking any objective in the game with 2 people. For things like upgraded keeps, I’ll shout out in team chat and usually get 5-10 people. If I’m alone, I comfortably cut supply lines and deal substantial damage to walls. What, specifically, do you feel needs to be improved about small-group gameplay?

For once, I feel like supply-costs for siege are far too high. If you run arround as ~3players you can drop pretty much 1 siege weapon. Then, with that 1 siege it takes ages to break down a gate (left alone a wall), all the while you hope it doesn’t get destroyed, because you dont have the resources to build another.

Blobs on the other hand don’t have that problem. They deploy 3-4 sieges at once and take the Door/Wall down in a matter of seconds, while the other 36 players just stand there and watch, essentially doing nothing if the objective is unguarded.

What I want, when I say that small groups should be able to have higher impact, is, that it shouldn’t take THAT much longer for small groups to take unguarded objectives than it does for a zerg.

If you lower supply costs for siege, zergs will still take unguarded structures faster than small groups. The small group may have more siege but the zerg also has more siege. The only way to normalize the speed would be to restrict the amount of placed siege and ensure that groups of all sizes could hit the cap. That seems like a terrible idea to me.

Isn’t there some other way to impact the game besides quickly capping unguarded structures?

as long as it takes about the same time for both zergs and roamer alike to take objectives, I dont have a problem with that. Basically you get the same value (score wise) from it but one side commits far more players to it, thus being at a disadvantage everywhere else on the map.

An example:

Imagine one 30-man zerg on one side and six 5-man groups on the other playing for 10 objectives. Depending on how far spread out those objectives are, the side with the smaller squad would have a significant advantage in terms of map control if it takes about the same amount of time to capture objectives as it does for the zerg. All they essentially have to watch out for is to avoid the zerg.

The 6 5-man groups will win that scenario even if the zerg caps objectives 5x faster than them. In other words, that already exists in-game. There’s no need to hard punish people for groupings of more than 5 when there are already advantages to running small.