Guild Wars 2

I’ve enjoyed my time in WvW (on losing server FA). There are issues (culling, xfers, some balance stuff, orbs etc)…but those will likely be addressed in time. Frankly the biggest issue is prolly the playerbase…..people are too focused on server scores and easy victories, and instant gratification…“OMG! we’re down 15k 1 day in, give up and xfer”….though I suppose that is to be expected in an MMO these days.

IMO Anet needs to….

1) Communicate with the WvW community – acknowledge some issues and lay out some timelines/direction.

2) Curb xfers – getting a functional ranking system and more “even” population matchups (and thus scores) I think will alleviate a lot of the angst in the playerbase

3) Fix/improve rendering issues

4) Everything else….

There are problems and yet it remains great fun. Many fixes and changes will come over the next few months and the basic premise is epic and pretty well executed.

This thread is all about throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Iconoclast.1506:

There are problems and yet it remains great fun. Many fixes and changes will come over the next few months and the basic premise is epic and pretty well executed.

This thread is all about throwing out the baby with the bath water.

People keep saying that but wants in this content patch? Paid turnies for tPvP… ya, thats what they think will keep this game afloat. Gonna be a sad day when there is 4 or 5 turnies running, maybe 10 or so hot joins, and a dead wvw world.

It is funny that people say dont like it leave and L2P – look at tor and where that got them.
The fact the population has plummeted like a rock and most of the people I know have left because if these types of issues. That means there are issues!

Parts of WvW are fun but they dont outshine the failures. The underlying mechanics suck right now and need an overhaul.
2.5 weeks after launch people were asking for an expansion because things were not good. WvW was to be endgame but its not. Anet chose to put $ into spvp and neglect everything else and it shows – go thru orr or WvW issues here.
Start small stop transfers – that alone would go a long way to server stability and community.They just dont care or else something this small would have been done.

My hope is the message makes it to the decision makers to turn things around.
PS they arent coming back once they leave.

Kiado.9362
What a kitteny time to be a developer for a video game. You build such an amazing creation of computing and code and all the crap that goes along with it, but no one is every happy. I won’t say their aren’t problems, but there has hardly been time to completely fix them, and fix them right. You want instant gratification and instant results from an extremely complicated system. Either have the patience to enjoy what a wonder you are walking around in, or move on to another one. You have the right to kitten as a paying customer, but to call it a total failure is ludicrous. I play nearly every night and enjoy it, despite the issues. Maybe the problem is everyone is so uptight and needs kitten now now now that nothing will ever satisfy you.

It seems to be a very easy time to be a video game developer, back in the days before the internet was common to every home, developers actually had to release a product of a certain level, rather than the ridiculous bug fests most release these days, who rely on patches to cover for the half finished products they decide to release.

You know in other industries, there would be public inquiries if products were released in the state many games are.

But anyway, yes WvW is fun much of the time (at least for me) and yes some issues take time to fine tune, others however just seem incredibly badly judged such as giving the world that is already on top an even bigger advantage through orbs, then at same time giving a useless outmanned bonus, or putting a feeble 24 hour limit on transfers.

You also have to take into account this is on top of a lot of other issues, zillions of bugs with certain classes, “fixes” that then cause a different bug, endless broken DE, poorly thought through reward systems, bots that never get removed, etc and to top it off a very slow response to these bugs, they clearly do no thave enough people working on them, that there are a slew of bugs for something as basic as the class skills / mechanics this long after release is just poor and the general state of the game makes a mockery of the “when it’s ready” slogan.

Must admit I didn’t read the full OP because with so much hyperbole in the thread title and the first few sentences it’s hard to take anything that follows seriously.
But to reply to the first few sentences, I’m still having tons of fun so for me the goal that you start out with to describe is still met.

I imagine a lot of us can play contentedly until some of the problems are fixed. Downed state, orb bonuses encouraging snowballing, PvDoor, invisible enemies, yada yada yada. What needs to end immediately is all the disgusting server transfers. It does far more to ruin match ups than any of the technical or design problems. A few more weeks like this past week, with the game ruined for the majority of the player base by large scale transferring, and I can’t see WvW surviving in any sort of a healthy state.

server transfers have made the bottom 9 servers competative.

Keep in mind kaineng wasnt winning their matchup till today, so no one transfered to kaineng because they were ‘winning’.

People that care about competative matchups are transfering into the bottom teirs where there are competative matchups, and they arnt primarily picking the winning server in the group, they are jumping on the second and third server in the matchup.

I can practically guarentee you that ferg has gotten less people from transfers than kaineng or even DR.

I urge the fair minded players to transfer to a bottom teir server, pick a server that is losing its matchup and make a difference!

You make me laugh. Not because your right, because your not, but because some folks always want to point the finger at the developers for everything thats wrong.

You do have some valid points:
- server transfers: should remain free, but restrict you from doing wvwvw for at least a week, i’d recommend a month myself though.
- outmanned: implement a max “outmanned” population of 10 so that at the most you’re up against no more than 20 folks more than your team. you cant compensate for 20 folks, youre fail at WvWvW and should stick to PvE.

Off hour capping/upgrading. Why do you want the devs to change the game for you? There are tons of folks that play the off hours so they should get hosed because YOU dont like it? How about you do some research, find a server that has a strong team on “your” off hours, join it. A lot of folks figured out if they play on EU servers and their US based, then their server has a very strong prime time and off hour teams in WvWvW. Or you can recruit EU guilds/players to come to US servers…vice versa. Either way, there are lots of ways to improve “off hour” gameplay instead of jacking over those that cant play during “your” prime time.

Simple really…it’s a game. It’s not perfect, never will be as you cant please everyone all the time. Here’s a tip for you though: How about YOU adapt to the game and not try to get the game to adapt to YOU!

Dred

I really like the game, been playing for two months and I really like the pve and enjoyed the bit of spvp that I’ve played but I’m not going to blindly support WvW for no reason.

It has issues, big issues, so I’m not going to pretend that it’s awesome and fun. I honestly haven’t even been able to play a game of WvW because I can’t get out of the spawn, so I don’t know what a fun WvW match is at all.

WvWvW and all PvP content is all about fighting other players. If the night capping, being out numbered or being behind in points makes you not want to do WvWvW then you are not they type of person who like to do PvP anyways. So please stop spamming the forums about how this game is broken. You probably would complain and not participate in any form of PvP no matter how much “fix” the problems.

Solution simple.

Force a queue to prevent one side from being mass flooded. Not only would that help counter general outmanned, but it also solves the cross timezone problem.

US just cannot get past the EU queue at EU nighttime, since the other worlds are too empty. Bam.

Add some small buffer, since small differences in numbers are totally fine.

ALL PROBLEMS GONE!

It would also:

Give an incentive to transfer to less populated servers to get more involved into WvWvW rather than being stuck in Queue at all times because you joined the stomping server with the highest cross timezone population.

Discourages transfers to highly populated cross timezone servers for pure WvWvW since you would have high Queue times always.

→ Combined: It would even things out.

That was easy.

I’ve mostly enjoyed WvW, winning or losing.

Seems like loot drops more now — maybe I’m just playing differently — that helps pay the repair bill, taking some of the sting out of dying. I do hate the current state of waypoints though — I’d like to see some cool updates to that system, and an easy way to spot the zerg on the map, because, well, I think it’s fun to run with the zerg.

The free, easy, quick transfers is more harmful than helpful to the WvW.

Not only does it encourage bandwagoneers to jump TO successful realms, or AWAY from unsuccessful ones (instead of working to improve their realms’ lot)- it also is disruptive to building character of a realm.

People that talk about “teamwork” etc don’t seem to get it. When players are in n out depending on this week’s success/matchup, you get absolutely no consistency. You don’t know most of the players (they just showed up) or the ones you did know are now gone. Time, effort, goodwill etc invested in your ‘realm’ are wasted.

At this point, I cannot fathom why the transfers thing isn’t simply adjusted to be a 1-week sit out from WvW. That’s a quick, dirty fix that still lets players get to another realm if they want. Following this, ANET needs to make the system a paid-transfer with the same 1-week sit out from WvW.

It’s such a ridiculously easy correction, that I’m worried it hasn’t been done. That doesn’t cause me to think ANET cares much about the glaring problems with WvW atm. This is the easiest, simplest correction to one of the colossal problems, and they’re doing nothing. What about the REAL problems/difficulties such as invisible players, hackers, or design adjustments? If they won’t/can’t handle an easy, simple fix…..

I’m bumping this thread after looking at the scores for the top 5-6 brackets last week.

Every. Single. One. was a 400k+ points blow out.

There are no good close fights in wuvwuv. Period. Your system has failed.

All these server transfers must be ended or it’s going to be an endless cycle of massively imbalanced matchups.

But that’s not enough. They also need to do something about nightcapping. It’s completely saps the will to fight hard all primetime, spending gold to buy upgrades and put down siege..then in the night the enemy server with the best nightcapping crew (which is TC this go around) simply walks around and retakes everything with no opposition.

So the next day all the money you spent is gone, your upgrades are gone, all the progress you made is gone, the enemy has ALL the orbs, and all their stuff is upgraded to the max and they have arrow carts everywhere.

The first time that happens, it seems to spell the end of the match, pretty much. People realize it’s pointless and they refuse to throw hard earned money down the whole. This seems to hold true across all servers, in all tiers, since the game’s release. I’ve only seen 5-6 exceptions, one of which happened on FA when we beat out SOS. They had all oceanic players we had all NA players. They’d cap everything when we went to bed, we’d cap everything when they went to bed. The score was close but the good fights were not there at all. We won only because some dedicated guilds got up early in the morning the last couple days and recapped some stuff earlier than we would normally have been able to.

Thrilling come from behind win , right? Not really. The entire FA/SOS matchup was boring as hell we hardly ever saw each other.

FA has a very good NA primetime crew – and almost no off hours coverage at all. If Arena.net doesn’t want such servers to just collapse and die, they need to fix their wuvwuv scoring system. We do very well in primetime, being competitive against everyone we’ve faced. Then we wake up the next day and everything we worked so hard for is gone. And then people stop showing up. This is arena.net’s fault, not the players fault. People work towards progress. If you are going to take away all the progress they make every time they log off, they are going to stop showing up.

24/7 coverage should not be a requirement to compete in wuvwuv. It should be skill based, not warm bodies in front of keyboards based. If you can’t beat a server in their primetime, you shouldn’t be able to beat them, period. There are only a certain number of people around who can play in the off hours time zone. Certainly not enough for all servers to have such a presence. So does that mean wuvwuv is just pointless on these other servers and they’ll be at the mercy of whichever sever they are bracketed against who does have some people who can run around nightcapping stuff? Apparently. So should we just give up on our server and leave? That doesn’t sound very fun. I like the community here and don’t feel like betraying them by leaving. Just resign ourselves to never winning wuvwuv? That also doesn’t sound very fun. Beg for oceanic guilds to tear up their roots and leave the servers they are on and come here? That’s horrible for the game. Every time mass transfers like that happen it throws all the rankings in chaos and leads to weeks of unfun matchups like that.
Right now servers move up in the tiers by getting more people. They should move up in the tiers by getting more skilled. The whole system is broken from top to bottom.

Points earned during primetime in the face of stiff enemy opposition should be worth about 10x as much as points earned when everyone is asleep. Why not scale points earned to current server population?

Is this how we envision the end game of wuvwuv playing out? All the NA guilds transferring en masse to whichever server happens to have good oceanic presence, and destroying the matchups for their previous server and their new server, in a never ending cycle of kitteny wuvwuv matchups that drive hundreds of players from the game? Because that is what is happening. And it will continue to happen until arena.net does something about nightcapping.

Your balancing system for wuvwuv can’t revolve around people transferring en masse from server to server, chasing whichever guilds are viewed as currently winning. That destroys server community’s, throws matches into completely lopsided stompiness, and plays havoc with queue times.

I would pretty much agree with this.

I had a blast doing WvW during the 1 day fights. I realize that’s because they were 1 day only and no side every got a huge lead – and if they did, it really didn’t matter.

During the week-long fights – so far only 1 has been close (I’m in Yak’s Bend and we had that one week where 1st and 3rd were separated by like 8k points at the end – that fight was amazing!).

We’ve had weeks where WE are always like 600-50-45, and weeks where we were either the 50 or the 45. Neither of those are fun – though being the 600 allows people to do the PvE content of WvW (100% completion and jumping puzzles).

If I look at the scoreboard, and one team is routinely over 450, unless that team is mine and I have a character who I want to get some 100% WvW completion – I simply don’t go to WvW.

Server transfers and culling are easily the big huge problems in WvW. Server transfers probably the worst, as it makes the rankings system laughable (see SoR and YB last week vs the week prior), but culling makes the actual playing of WvW incredibly unfun.

Something does need to be done with scoring so that the scores don’t snowball out of hand (and lead to losing servers having no morale and simply not trying after Sat or Sun). I have no idea about numbers, but I’d do something like:

Alter the update value of the score at each update based loosely on active participation.

The goal would be to allow servers without a night presence to not leave relatively close and wake up the next day overwhelmed (and then largely stop trying).

For example, if a server is at 600-50-45 on the update, and the 600 server has twice as many online players as the other 2 combined (say all 4 zones full while each other server only has enough on to fill one zone), either lower that 600 to 300 (or something similar) or raise the 50 and 45 to 200 and 180 (or something similar).

Balance it such that it’s NEVER a winning strategy for a losing server to empty their WvW zones, but do something to alleviate the sure-thing losses due to people not being there.

Right now when I see the outmanned buff show up my first thought is “How does that remotely help me?”

But anyways, transfers and culling are still the main issue, but low morale is surely up there, too. Most of us that play WvW want to have fun, and I think most agree that a week of not even remotely close WvW isn’t fun, no matter which side you’re on.

Right now WvW is, generally, not even remotely close.

I finally need to chime in on this! The game in its design is actually excellent. The Developers have designed a theory that will work. Where the problem lives, is in the players and our ability to transfer servers for free. This and this alone is killing not only WvWvW, but also killing the game for many servers right now. The free transfers to other servers needs to stop. Players need to pick an server and stick to it. … NC Soft/Arena Net, here is what is needed. Do what WOW has done. Allow one free transfer for the next 30 days, to let everyone have a chance to get where they are going to live and then stop all free transfers. Make it so once transferred in the last free 30 day transfer period, that we are not allowed to transfer again for 90 days. Then if people want to transfer servers at that time, make it so it cost us $25.00 of actual money per transfer per Character.

This will force everyone to stop server hopping and learn to work with the server they finally pick. Again, if it is really important to them to transfer at that point it still gives them a way, but it will cost us. This will do the following;

- Settle the servers down, so that all servers will balance their populations
- Create a fair balance in the WvWvW environment where pvp will once again actually exist
- It will actually put in place what was socially designed to allow each servers population to actually learn to work together
- It will create a tier of WvWvW rankings that will do what was designed. To have each server matched up fairly and eliminate the WvWvW domination exploits that are currently happening

NC Soft/Arena Net, make sure that the winners of each tier are rewarded equally to allow the reward balance to happen throughout the servers, so that playing in the top three servers no longer means anything. Set it up so that the winners of each WvWvW server grouping are rewarded the same. Then pit the winners of each server to go on to play in the next grouping of servers they are balanced to play with in accordance with each game out come 1st place, 2nd place and 3rd place.

Change the one week WvWvW event to 3 days. Award all servers for participating, but make a definite difference in the rewards for 1st place, 2nd pace and 3rd place.

Make it know in the server rankings we all see who each WvWvW top winners are from each grouping, by listing all servers in accordance with the 3 day events server groupings outcome, 1st, 2nd and 3rd positioning.

Then make up the next WvWvW groupings by pitting each winner placement rankings against each other accordingly;

- 1st place winners against 1st place winners
- 2nd place winners against 2nd place winners
- 3rd place winners against 3rd place winners

Pit them against each other for the next go around.

This will finally put some order into this issue, fix the pvp exploits and balance the game. This will finally settle everyone down and put our populations back on track to have once again a good fair game experience that actually make players have to work a little. Making this game easy is not what players need. Most players get board when things become too easy, thus the server problems we are now all currently experiencing.

NC soft/Arena Net, please correct this and correct this quickly or this game will die. People throughout the game are already exodusing back to games they use to play because of this problem. Many have already gone back to WOW, Rift, EVE, Conan, Console games etc. The gauntlet is now thrown down. Be a leader and lead this since this is all in your control !!! Do not hesitate in correcting this or what happened to SWTOR will happen here. Once you lose players, they start prepping for the next latest and greatest. You truly have the saving grace of being free to play so many will come back from time to time. But it will never be the same as it can be in the beginning where you still have a chance to have everyone who is still with us stay playing and real back those who left.

My hope is that this does not fall on deaf ears. Thank you

Vorpal you can contunie repeating your own statements, and you would still be wrong.

If FA does´nt have good timezone coverage, dont blame Arenanet for your failure as a server. Do something about it.

And to answer the op, if you can´t beat your enemy when outmanned, dont blame the game, blame yourself. It´s easy to beat 4-5 times your numbers aslong as you have a guild with a bit of coordination. Here´s a hint for you. It´s called guildwars – maybe get in a guild?

The previous week we ( BG ) were up against IoJ and SBI, and even though we lost, it was the best WvW we ( my guild ) had experienced so far in WvW. If you only think winning is fun, you should´nt be playing a pvp mmo.
This week we´re up against ET and HoD, and I admit it´s borring as hell. Even more borring that fighting TC and FA last week. Atleast TC put up a fight there, and tried their best. However this allows for us to get some new tactics tried out, getting people geared and letting the people that are into pve do a bit of that, without having to take them out into wvw as soon as they log on.

The orbs is a great idea ! It adds a whole new dimension to the strategies, and taking it away would´nt solve anything.

The bottom three tiers have competitive match-ups this week. The other tiers don’t.

Did you look at the same data I did? 2/3 matches had their top 2 within a 60k point differential, which is pretty close. The second to last tier was about 140k point differential between 1st and 2nd place, that’s a blowout.

Reviewing NS/DH/EB, EB was over 100k behind 2nd place. So that matchup was only competitive between 2/3 servers. If the system was really working, you wouldn’t see one (or more) server being so far behind.

To me one of the biggest problems is the 3 servers.

In theory, it sounds great. The two weak servers will gang up on the strong one and it will balance out.

In practice. The 1st place server stomps the 2nd and 3rd. The 2nd place server getting stomped by the 1st attacks the 3rd place server as well since they can’t dent the 1st. End result 3rd place server logs out for the week.

The concept of having the two weaker join up is a good one. It’s just implemented poorly. To make it work the two weaker teams need to be marked as allies and not be able to attack each other. The specifics of when the two weaker teams become allies would need to worked out but the current system doesn’t work at all.