Guild Wars 2

Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion and entirely subjective. I have invested only about 6 hours in total in WvW, a lot less than many others. I won’t claim I have grasped all the fine nuances and meta-game that decide matches.

Then again, this is not what this thread is about.

This is about how WvW feels a lot less “dramatic”, “epic” or “meaningful” than I pictured it. This is coming from playing various MMOs in the past, DAoC, WoW, WAR, SWTOR etc. Now of those aforementioned games, only WAR and DAoC had a meaningful open PvP aspect, which is what I’m basing my evaluation on.

Like many others I was quite excited when hearing about Guild Wars 2 WvW. It seemed to be the first modern MMO to really commit to the large scale open PvP style. I liked that as it awoke memories of large scale, hour long sieges etc.

Better yet, GW2 had all the ingredients to make this type of game-play even better. We have a resource system, working siege weapons and fairly intuitive mechanics. In theory, it sounds perfect. And objectively it’s hard to nail down what’s wrong.

I’ll begin by saying that over my time of WvW, I felt more like playing an RPG version of Battlefield 3 than I did playing a open PvP game. In general, everything was very fast-paced. Over the course of an hour, we layed siege to 3 bases, lost them again, took 5 resource hubs…lost them again etc. Taking these bases felt more like capping a flag in BF3 (and it was almost as fast), than it did conquering a fortress.

Essentially, due to the rapid exchange, everything felt rather meaningless. This applied to minor things like Dolyaks as well. If I took the time to kill one, I could see the next one walking up the hill just in time. Whether I killed it or not, ended up feeling rather inconsequential.

The “synchronized” maps add to the artificial flair, again making it more akin to a shooter map than a real Battlefield.

Then there’s the other issue with the lack of choke points. Allowing 50+ players on each side to freely roam the map might sound good, but every video-game map designers understands the need for choke points. Without them, battles have a random nature and people spend more time roaming around than in the heat of battle.

Lastly there’s the disconnect between what’s happening on my current map and the rest of the worlds. I don’t actually feel like I’m part of the same battle (because I’m not). Instead of feeling like a gigantic battlefield it feels like 4 different shooter maps which share a score.

My memories of DAoC and WAR are a little fuzzy, but somehow RvR there felt more meaningful overall.

PS: After having written this I realize some of these complaints also carry over into PvE (“speed” of the game, aka. mobs respawn, events resetting, lack of “meaningful” contribution etc.)

I just felt like sharing this and was wondering if other people felt the same.

What server are you on and what level are you? Taking that long to kill a dolyak, I think you’re abit low lvl. Also really depends what time you play, teams you’re against and server you’re on

Your simply not on at the rigth times. Most servers have time slots when their crews come on and take over the maps. Try changing you play time to a better hour for WvW and Im sure youll have a blast.

Daoc had a community, something which gw2 distinctly lacks. You run around every night and see maybe a couple of people you know and that’s it. Everyone is just doing their own thing and the maps make it so nobody has to talk to each other.

Samfisher.7942:

What server are you on and what level are you? Taking that long to kill a dolyak, I think you’re abit low lvl. Also really depends what time you play, teams you’re against and server you’re on

It takes me about 15 seconds to kill a Dolyak…and yes, I’m level 80. But is it really that important? Is that all you took from my post?

Sure, a lot depends on player dynamics, time of play etc. But really I doubt any of that would really change my perception. My “complaints” don’t really have much to say on players, but rather how the maps and WvW in general was designed.

I mean, all the design decision make sense and as I said, all the ingredients are there. And yet it feels a lot less meaningful than I expected.

I spend perhaps 90% of my time in WvW, and I’ve had many epic experiences. They usually involve holding objectives against huge odds, particularly creative captures, reinforcements arriving in the nick of time, open field fights where everyone is synced together etc. etc. Pretty standard stuff really.

I guess we just have different definitions of what constitutes “epic”.

There are also tons of choke points (I know, I play an area control Guardian who specializes in them). They tend to be at the mouths of supply camps, the doors of keeps, bridges across islands on the way to keeps or camps etc. etc.

And GW2 WvW is it own game. It really should be described as semi-persistent, half-way between a battleground and a virtual world. Personally I prefer this, as it is (once they get the imbalances worked out), better for the casual player. But this is different strokes for different folks.

I get exactly what the op is talking about. Between 4 different maps that have nothing to do with each other and queuing to get in, it doesent feel like a persistent world, its an instance, its spvp on a week long timer. youre not on a side, I mean I know you are like wee Im red today but It just doesent feel like theres any realm loyalty or soemthing.

Also the self sufficiency that everyone has leads to less grouping socializing etc. I dont say two words ever. Why bother I can just do my own thing. This whole concept of the non trinity style of game leads to people not needing other people as much.

This varies incredible in server choice.
Some servers provide good leadership less zerglings and epic oponents.
Some servers provide the total oposite, bad leadership massive number of lemmings and zerglings and weak oponents or totaly unbeateble oponents.

Your vieuw of 6 hours WvW is likely very biased as you have seen nothing yet in WvW then a few attempts of towers / keeps.

Ive been holding Stonemist versus 2 others servers for 5 hours both cramping up in our Lord room and pushing them back out the 2nd walls.

I find the GW2 community better then any other mmo, except Eve’s community who seems to be extremely helpfull.

But GW2 is like WoW / Warhammer / Aion / SWTOR / or any other fantasy mmo and thus you get their garbage with it, but also their good and polite players and guilds.

So far i realy like it.

Also the reward for WvW for me is the action the attack and defend and repel enemy’s.
To each his own offcourse, it cant make all people happy

Well i didnt read the post sorry. But some fight are really boring but some figts are really epic like you feeling in a real historical war with those siege weapons firing and lol golems

You just need some dedicated ppl for that epic siege…

Dee Jay.2460:

I’ll begin by saying that over my time of WvW, I felt more like playing an RPG version of Battlefield 3 than I did playing a open PvP game. In general, everything was very fast-paced. Over the course of an hour, we layed siege to 3 bases, lost them again, took 5 resource hubs…lost them again etc. Taking these bases felt more like capping a flag in BF3 (and it was almost as fast), than it did conquering a fortress.

Essentially, due to the rapid exchange, everything felt rather meaningless. This applied to minor things like Dolyaks as well. If I took the time to kill one, I could see the next one walking up the hill just in time. Whether I killed it or not, ended up feeling rather inconsequential.

[…]

Lastly there’s the disconnect between what’s happening on my current map and the rest of the worlds. I don’t actually feel like I’m part of the same battle (because I’m not). Instead of feeling like a gigantic battlefield it feels like 4 different shooter maps which share a score.

If you’re taking multiple towers/keeps and losing them within the the space of an hour (not to mention the camps), then it sounds like no one on your side bothers to defend anything. That’s not a map problem, its a player and coordination problem. My server is JQ, which might mean that our players and opponents are better in general, but I find that capturing a tower takes 15-45 minutes on a good day, more on a bad one; and capturing a keep tends to take an hour minimum.

In situations like this, things like Dolyaks become extremely important. An upgraded camp will bring 140 supply per trip to a keep, which is a massive amount of gate repairs or several siege weapons. Killing them while attacking the keep or even taking the camps thus becomes an important part of the strategy, and the reverse applies when defending. If you find Dolyaks irrelevant, it sounds like your opponents don’t defend well or don’t bother.

For your second point, I’m fairly sure the entire point of the orbs is to encourage cross-map coordination. Can’t make a dent trying to take SM? Get out to the borderlands and capture some of the orbs, so things are more in your favor. People seem to sorely underestimate the value of orbs; they’d often rather zerg the nearest tower than coordinate to go secure a keep with an orb. And that’s a big problem, because orbs are tremendously powerful; +5% to all stats on all maps is a massive advantage.

On the plus side, this will change over time as people learn more about WvW. Just this morning, with me a few other guys coordinating through /team, we took three camps, two towers and two keeps on borderlands where we started with a single camp, capturing an orb in the process. The whole thing met my definition of awesome with ease, but the epic part was when we grabbed the orb and grouped up to run it back to our main keep.

On reaching the north wall of the keep we’d just taken (green) and stepping outside, a HUGE zerg of blue players came around the bend straight for us. We barely retreated in time, took a different route, and though our orb carrier died at one heart-stopping moment, another player grabbed it in time and we ran him to the keep. Those moments, or the moments when a siege weapon I build takes down a door, or when we finally rush in and capture a keep after an hour of heavy back-and-forth – those are the things I play WvW for.

I just finished my first WvWvW experience with a large, organized group of people in a voice chat, with a good commander (vVv repping), and I can tell you that I used to agree with what you said.

However, after playing with a large group with great coordination, especially against another large group with good coordination, the game seemed much less random and much more strategic. Sieges were laid, equipment was placed, shots were called, and scouts were designated. We took fire from artillery from high ground, and feinted to a supply camp to regroup and setup a trebuchet. We rushed in to defend a tower, and organized random PUGs into small side objectives.

It was great fun, and it changed my view on WvWvW. Find a good guild, and run with it. Hang around WvWvW servers for a while, and see which guilds you see around and ask for an invite.

Dee Jay.2460:

My memories of DAoC and WAR are a little fuzzy, but somehow RvR there felt more meaningful overall.

Mines from War are as fresh as they can be. ;-)

It’s a very different concept.
In War you have, how should I say, an evolution in th RvR.
Pairing’s open after City Push.
Lock a zone and move on the the next zone or defend the next zone (3 zones to fight and defend at the same time till one pairing locks)
Lock Pairing
Lock 2nd Pairing and go to IC/Altdorf
Pairing’s open after 1 hour and start over again

GW2 is different as it’s a point based system over a certain period of time. Here you don’t have that lock and move to the next step system but a continue fight for objectives, ressources and so on that are going to help you to take those bigger objectives and this on 4 maps.

Give it some time, and a couple of sessions and see how it works out. Fights can be fun and there’s, as mentioned by others, often a lot of strategy involved.

I’ll begin by saying that over my time of WvW, I felt more like playing an RPG version of Battlefield 3 than I did playing a open PvP game. In general, everything was very fast-paced. Over the course of an hour, we layed siege to 3 bases, lost them again, took 5 resource hubs…lost them again etc. Taking these bases felt more like capping a flag in BF3 (and it was almost as fast), than it did conquering a fortress.

Well put. Taking a keep does not feel like an accomplishment because you know it’ll be lost within an hour or two (or a few minutes…) if your realm setup is even close to balanced. So you end up just running around capping circles (which can get recapped immediately afterwards).

It feels pointless and cheap.

Taking a keep should be a big deal, it should reward the players in a big way and defending a keep should be incredibly attractive for the player to do. I personally feel this is not the case currently.

Skirmishes and smaller battles should take place at all the other points of interest like supply camps and towers, but keeps should actually require a big effort and make a massive TANGIBLE difference when taken.

as my esteemed rival sam fisher on “that other server” has stated, its possible you are running around a bit low level, but also taking keeps back and forth like that, suggests you guys are not upgrading keeps or placing alot of siege.

it gets alot longer and alot more intense when you are trying to defend or attack a t3 tower

if your server wants to be successful, you must invest in your keeps, not just takem and run off

as long as you dont have cheesers setting up trebs in invul locations, its alotta fun

Lonewolf.5869:

I have 4 warnings by admin for me complaining about this game being doll, boring, meaningless… no sense of reward etc.

therefore Ill stick to “No comment” -____-

i got an infraction for typing “congrats / charr” when congratulating ioj for taking our orb….lol i feel you man

Zzulu.5489:

I’ll begin by saying that over my time of WvW, I felt more like playing an RPG version of Battlefield 3 than I did playing a open PvP game. In general, everything was very fast-paced. Over the course of an hour, we layed siege to 3 bases, lost them again, took 5 resource hubs…lost them again etc. Taking these bases felt more like capping a flag in BF3 (and it was almost as fast), than it did conquering a fortress.

Well put. Taking a keep does not feel like an accomplishment because you know it’ll be lost within an hour or two (or a few minutes…) if your realm setup is even close to balanced. So you end up just running around capping circles (which can get recapped immediately afterwards).

It feels pointless and cheap.

Taking a keep should be a big deal, it should reward the players in a big way and defending a keep should be incredibly attractive for the player to do. I personally feel this is not the case currently.

Skirmishes and smaller battles should take place at all the other points of interest like supply camps and towers, but keeps should actually require a big effort and make a massive TANGIBLE difference when taken.

Taking keep reward has been nerfed because people keep trading keeps in every server(like one server took stonemist and ran out to wait for another server to take it and run out). Nowdays all they care is about fastest way to benefit(geting karma/xp) even it could ruin fun for others.

I have played both DAoC and WAR. WAR was crap. Face it, it was crappy pve with crappy RVR thrown in. DAoC on the other hand… but I think you are looking back on it with rose colored glasses. Emain loop? MG camping? Crau being rented out by the hibs cuz it changed hands so much? 300 person relic raid with everyone looking at the ground cuz the came couldnt handle all the people in one area. Ram on ram action. Kiting a relic guard clear across your frontier to your zone in because it was unkillable outside of a 200 person zerg.

Look, i LOVED DAoC, played it for 6 straight years before it got stale. WAR, meh. Right now GW2 WvW is more like early day RvR. Lots of sub 50’s running around in a zerg (no battlegroups back then) doing the emain loop and camping the MGs. What we are mostly seeing is a mindless zerg filled with sub 80’s running from tower to tower beating the snot out of each other and maybe having some fun. Most of the stuff you might remember from DAoC probably didnt happen until well after launch, more around the time of SI release. Also, if you are an old school DAoC player, it was the FIRST game to give you that massive zerg on zerg in an MMO so it was new and fresh.

if you play on the dominating servers its fun, but if you play on the reeaped servers it aint

OP: It sounds like you want the WvW to be a bit more “realistic” or “plausible” seeming, and less “game-like.”

You make comments like wanting asymmetrical maps, for the different maps to link together into an overall objective, for sieges to feel like they last a long time, etc.

That’s good in its own way, but GW2 doesn’t look like it’s trying for that. Instead, it’s aiming for exactly what you describe – An RPG Battlefield 3 minus vehicles.

It’s a shame that’s not to your tastes, but you have to admit it’s a perfectly valid and popular design choice. They wanted something a bit more game/esport-like rather than something simulation-like.
(Personally, I tend to prefer simulation-like myself as well, but I can see most competitive players prefer symmetrical maps, fast objectives, etc.)

Rieselle.5079:

OP: It sounds like you want the WvW to be a bit more “realistic” or “plausible” seeming, and less “game-like.”

You make comments like wanting asymmetrical maps, for the different maps to link together into an overall objective, for sieges to feel like they last a long time, etc.

That’s good in its own way, but GW2 doesn’t look like it’s trying for that. Instead, it’s aiming for exactly what you describe – An RPG Battlefield 3 minus vehicles.

It’s a shame that’s not to your tastes, but you have to admit it’s a perfectly valid and popular design choice. They wanted something a bit more game/esport-like rather than something simulation-like.
(Personally, I tend to prefer simulation-like myself as well, but I can see most competitive players prefer symmetrical maps, fast objectives, etc.)

Even after adding another 10 hours to my playtime, I still feel very much the same way about RvR.

You might be right that the Battlefield feeling is popular, but I’m not sold that this is what the designers were setting out for. I do believe they were very much inspired by RvR in DAoC and aimed to recapture that feeling. I also recall them coming out and saying just that.

And yes, I’ve played “coordinated” on TS/Vent and all that, nothing of which fundamentally changes the experience.

The reason why I believe ANet was not really aiming for this “fast-pace RvR” is because of what players have to invest in order to achieve anything.

-Very limited respawn points meaning dead players are out of combat for a while.
-Player Gold invested into upgrades and weapons. (If you’re investing significant portions of your earning into something, you want it to be a meaningful and lasting investment.)
-Coordination required to build siege equipment.
-Team-play for long distance bombardment.
-Supply system and supply lines.
-etc.

All this implies that they were aiming for a “slower pace” type of WvW.

But then we have:
-medium sized maps
-littered with objectives, often less than 1 minute apart.
-point capture in a matter of seconds (something like 10-15 seconds).
-easily zergable NPCs etc.

and all that results in a faster pace.

I believe things would be a lot more strategic if the 4 maps were combined into one, and meaningful objectives were fewer and father between. I mean currently there’s over 50 objectives to fight over across the 4 different maps. No wonder there’s so much give and take.

I can not disagree more. You obviously haven’t attacked a well defended, and upgraded keep before, have you?

You forgot to mention which server you were on, which would help quite a bit as well. On SBI, we were defending Stonemist for over 3 hours. They were inside the castle. There’s been constant battles I’ve seen that last over 8 hours just to take hold of a choke point. Play against more organization.

Eternal Battlegrounds is epically awesome. Do this.

At first it felt exactly as you described, aimless wandering followed by some zergs to take a keep.

Now that I am involved in a guild and on a server where people care and are not just out doing jump puzzles its an AWESOME time. I am sitting at work counting down the hours until reset…. going to be amazing tonight!

People are expecting too much from WvW with the game only being weeks old, it will take sometime for servers to establish wvw guilds and server pride. once the server transfers are done and the server matches are balanced you should start to see the good stuff.

DAOC RvR didnt get real good until 4 months after the game launched. but even after 10 years its still epic. alltho Warhammer failed to alot of people its PVP got alot better but that was months after launch. it just takes time for fixes and balance.

I can agree to what OP said, keeps arent as special as it should be. Taking a keep nowadays is just a “oh cool” moment for me. because it happened too often. there should be indestructible built-in siege weapon on the keeps wall or something that will be npc controlled to make it harder. So taking a keep should require more resources (more treb/catapult needed to attack keeps) and not just 2 or 3 rams per gate lol

I know exactly what you are talking about OP. I kinda feel the same way.
I hope it will improve over time, because right now, I don’t feel much inclination towards WvW.

[EDIT]
I also feel that WvW would benefit greatly from a slower pace. I know what you mean about the players investing into siege equipment, that in the end didn’t feel like it was worth the money/tokens.

So players end up not investing in the expensive stuff – because that is a very risky investment.

You run around every night and see maybe a couple of people you know and that’s it. Everyone is just doing their own thing and the maps make it so nobody has to talk to each other.

I disagree. It does depend on how much you play though. I often see the same people, and people recognize me. People talk a lot too in chats, it’s never quiet. Of course this depends on server.

Once ArenaNet stops server transfers I think we’ll see the communities really stabilize.

I’m also unsure how anyone can expect community from servers that aren’t even 1 month live. Really? DAOC nor any other game had community in that short time. There is also a pretty huge competitive WvW community, you can gauge it by reading the WvW forums and Guru WvW forums. Lots of rivalry between servers.

it would be interesting to give some kind of story focus to the WvW, so that servers battle it out for some ideology, instead of sporting server logos like a baseball match.

to me it would be about the RPG put into it. that cold make it glorious, and i would jump on the server that ideology is more akin to mine.