Guild Wars 2

DaVinci.8073:

Not sure if it’s been mentioned, but :
Make /t chat server wide (all bl’s can read this chat)
/m chat for the bl you’re on, onviously

+1 Here, there should be some form of chat across BLs

Exactly. I have a laundry list of changes I want to see in WvW, but at this time we need immediate action. These 2 things will give players a small glimmer of hope.

Please bring back Alpine maps. There is just too much PvE aspect to the desert borderlands and they are way too big. Too many cliffs, too much for a WvW map. Clearly population in the borderlands maps have dropped significantly through out every server since HoT release. Just bring back the Alpine maps as they were please.

Also get rid of all the PvE extra crap they added in.

Mike O Brien.4613:

We’re all reading it and referring to it in team discussions.

It’s been great having these “Top 5” lists active in the forums and engaging player interests, even better to see active participation from developers. Of course, I still think some of these issues should be addressed in game, directly to the playerbase, rather than on the forums. If you can advertise the ESL leagues in the game you can advertise your attempts to get player feedback about specific, pressing game issues there too.

Keep up the good work.

Yes please………….

Did MO’B just say that skill balance and maps will now be a higher priority than population balance and rewards? I guess I will be hanging out in sPvP for a long while. :P

Please bring back the alpine borderland maps.If you do anything do that first,the new maps ruined it for alot of people.Secondly, address the population issues.Then sort out the class imbalances etc.If you do all those things Wvw will be fun again.

1. Stability needs to be FIXED or REVERTED back to the old system. So just a balance in skills here. #1 by far.
2. Rewards, sPvP has FAR greater rewards and loot.
3. Maps, maybe a rotation?
4. Server Pop, maybe it’s time for NA/EU to combine servers, so we can play with each other… Like in GW1. (I miss playing with my EU friends from GW1…)
5. Remove the just Airship/Frost gen/Banners. That stuff fits more in PvE then WvW.
*6. Auto-loot. Maybe?
*7. Show the ALL the rings for LB 5 on Guards. Many times I’ve ran into a invisible ring and yelled in VoIP cuz I couldn’t see that crud.

Greetings, Mo!

As much as I appreciate the idea and theory of the new Desert Borderlands, I feel it would be in the best interest to the overall health of WvW to reestablish the Alpine Borderland map again.

Thank you very much for your post—responsive and concise information like this is truly appreciated!

I think there is a somewhat skewed sample of responses here. I wonder what the responses to the question of “what do you want first, stability or rewards? Population balance or skill balance? Oh, and here’s how long you’ll have to wait for the other one…” would be…

Bring back alpine bl (unchanged by the Hot gimmicks and auto upgrade crap)

Revert stability change.

Reward tracks and update WvW armor/weapon vendors

Auto loot

Balance the professions.

Once these are done you can start looking into server balance, there isn’t any point in trying to work on that until you fix the changes that ruined WvW for so many people (and don’t even think about going to some crappy eotm system! )

Bring back the Alpine Borderline map as it was. No HoT verticality added into it, no incresing the size of it or watever. We just want the old Alpine Borlderland map back.

I personally know a lot of people who will not play the new Borderland map and just sit in the Eternal battlegrounds. I think you’ll find that once the Alpine map is back the population may start to return and the poulation issues will begin to balance themselves out over time again.

Apline Maps returning is a yes from me.

as for balance, i personally would like to see the servers work it out. I do think that the imbalance in game was fixable by the community, and it would be nice to see the community work together for everyones best interest. There will always be bad apples, but i refuse to believe the majority of the community are bad apples. So part of this big april goal, should be shared by the community working together to balance servers.

a game is only as good as it’s community. let’s upgrade that thought :p

Puck.9612:

Bring back alpine bl (unchanged by the Hot gimmicks and auto upgrade crap)

They removed auto upgrades awhile ago tho

I would put rewards at the bottom of the list to be honest and bump up population balancing and scoring. Then bring back alpine borderlands and rework the desert one (AND ADD A MAP ROTATION SYSTEM!) and then test the reworked version on open betas and work on feedback from there.

Mike O Brien.4613:

We’re not currently working on scoring and that has to be a longer-term project.

Um, was this not even part of the overhaul that was in the works for over a year now?

TorquedSoul.8097:

Did MO’B just say that skill balance and maps will now be a higher priority than population balance and rewards? I guess I will be hanging out in sPvP for a long while. :P

Honestly skill balance isn’t going to require a lot of work as I’m sure they will not make changes to upset spvp. New map is obviously a problem, old map just needs the new rules implemented, it doesn’t need a complete overhaul. Two things that they can probably get done soon and out the door.

Please bring back the Alpine borderlands.

I know what I say will upset some people but here are my thoughts.

I would hate to see the work put into the dbl go to waste as they are truly beautiful maps. I’ve had some of my best fights on them and they aren’t bad to navigate once you learn.

What I would say though is perhaps change it so that holding towers gives some strategic advantage. Like in the old bls you could treb garrison from the north towers etc. If not moving the towers maybe introduce a buff of sorts for holding them that makes capping keeps easier/ harder (if you’re the holder of the keep.) This would force people to strategically think about taking a tower to assist with the siege of a keep.

Either way, I vote for keeping the new bls as they offer more variety, they just need some tweaking. The Alpine bls are rather bland in design and I don’t think they should replace the new things for the sake of nostalgia. Ebg is also bland by comparison since hot and I believe it needs tweaking or a remodel. Actually make smc a castle and not a glorified keep used as a supply dump. But that’s less important.

Mike O Brien.4613:

We’re investigating whether to fix or revert DBL. They’re both a lot of work. These next couple days will be your last chance to give feedback before we make a decision, so speak now or forever hold your peace.

The desert borderland is aesthetically pleasing and aesthetically more interesting than the alpine map. That’s about all it has. DBL has:

1. too many unavoidable choke points/movement restricting areas (alpine and EB have these too, but not nearly as many as DBL)
2. too many places to fall and die
3. towers that are meaningless (you can’t use trebs to hit any other structures from any of the DBL towers)
4. towers and keeps that are way too large.

Please revert stability and swap out the desert BL permanently (could be great a repurposed PvE map, silverwastes 2.0?)

Here are mine in order of importance.

1. Rewards. – It is just so unrewarding out here. When I lead a small team from my guild, I lose gold on the night. It is a shame to have make gold playing other things to fund a WvW night. A reward track like PvP would be a good start. Work on a WvW specific backpiece would be very nice. Just adding in some coin for captures would be a quick fix in the right direction. Anything here.

2. Alpine BL – Yeah, Alpine was a lot better. Ideally, we could mix in Desert sometimes, but if I could only have one it would be Alpine, not even close.

3. WvW Currencies – Let us do something else with it. (new stats, etc) And this soulbound proof of heroics thing. Make them more useful and put them in our wallet (account bound).

4. Masteries – Let’s allow our PvE Masteries (autoloot, swiftness in starting camp) to help out here or give us new WvW quality of life masteries.

5. Scoring / Population balance – Yes, this is a huge issue. We know this will take some time, but put together a plan and lets discuss it publicly.

Bring alpine back so people can continue wvw and stop saying that wvw is dead , others i actually dont care i m having fun anyway . But u can bring alpine back some to (if not take much effort ) improve ur desert bls , but after this time u must ask community first before ur movements to continue improve game , u know some of people playing this game since beta they prob know all the things this game needs

Archeia.8905:

Puck.9612:

Bring back alpine bl (unchanged by the Hot gimmicks and auto upgrade crap)

They removed auto upgrades awhile ago tho

No they didn’t, they just made upgrades dependent on yaks getting in. Everything still automatically upgrades on its own.

I can be considered a vet WvW player and I must say that I don’t care at all for direct rewards. Tokens that can be used to buy someting or likewise. Im in it for the server vs server feature.

1. Bring back our Alpine borderlands.
Not much to be said here. We just want it back. Period.

2. WvW season.
Continue with the WvW seasons. Don’t give us some bogus events like golem rush events. Give us something like a fun NHL-type of season where every server meets eachother and give all players a gold, silver and bronze reward.

3. The battle of the red rings
Much of the joy of WvW is gone nowadays. And it’s not because of the desert borders. It’s too much cc’s. Go back to the drawing table and redesign some of the cc skills to be less effective in wvw, so we can have those fun and active fights again. Fun and engaging melee fights without being chilled, slowed, bled and burned to death before even reaching the enemy frontline.

4. Population balance
This, but without making WvW a copy of EotM.

Mike O Brien.4613:

Hi all,

This is a great thread. It’s constructive. We’re all reading it and referring to it in team discussions.

As we said in the AMA, our top internal priorities have been population balance and rewards. From this thread, your top five priorities are, in order:
1. Stability & skill balance
2. Fix or revert DBL
3. Rewards
4. Population balance
5. Scoring

Yes, we will take the feedback and make stability, general skill balance, and fixing/reverting DBL our top priorities. We’re not currently working on scoring and that has to be a longer-term project.

Karl is working specifically on WvW-focused skill balance. He’s looking for the wins for WvW that don’t screw the rest of the game.

We’re investigating whether to fix or revert DBL. They’re both a lot of work. These next couple days will be your last chance to give feedback before we make a decision, so speak now or forever hold your peace.

I want to reiterate that everything we work on either ships in April or starts beta-testing on Live servers in April. We’re locking down dev work for the April release soon — next up is localization, QA, integration and regression testing — but we’ll extend the deadline for WvW skill balance.

There is one thing that doesn’t need to get wrapped up into the April release: Friday night resets. That doesn’t require a Live build. We’ll do it.

Mo

I vote for Mike!

Make WvW great again!

Must say – I really like your communication quality.

Anet, please. PLEASE get rid of the desert borderlands. You can’t fix them without removing the oasis event, making them much smaller and much less vertical so you may as well just scrap them. The alpine borderlands were superior in every way imaginable. Honestly, I think that the lack of people on the new borderlands attests for how people feel about them. Sure, there may be some that enjoy them but the vast majority would rather they were gone, as can be seen from the forums and reddit.

I really appreciate the hard work you guys put into the new bl’s, but theyre just not good enough at the moment. They can be, but they need to be smaller, less hight difference, less chokes, less gimmicks, and so on. I thInk reverting the old bl’s back will be less work then trying to fix these bl’s.
I vote old bl’s back

I’ll chime in by repeating what a lot of others have been saying already.

1. Bring back the alpine BL. Its a personal choice, but it was a lot more fun than the desert BL.
2. Population balance. The fun factor gets diminished when you’re vastly outnumbered for hours on end every single day (whenever it is you play).
4. Rewards. It would be nice to have a pvp style reward progression of some sort.
5. Let the auto loot master work in wvw.

The return of the old Alpine Borderland must be only a temporary solution. The map has issues that you tried to solve with DBL. The issues will come back with the old Alpine BL. The Alpine BL needs an overhaul too.

1. Population Balance
2. Overhauled Borderlands (Alpine and Desert)
3. Skill Balance
4. Rewards
5. higher importance and incentives to hold structures

Puck.9612:

Bring back alpine bl (unchanged by the Hot gimmicks and auto upgrade crap)

Revert stability change.

Reward tracks and update WvW armor/weapon vendors

Auto loot

This.

And please do NOT try to solve the issue of night capping by changing how the system works during the night. The issue is gonna solve itself once the population balances out. WvW is a 24/7 gamemode, do not change that.

volpenvieh.3201:

Puck.9612:

Bring back alpine bl (unchanged by the Hot gimmicks and auto upgrade crap)

Revert stability change.

Reward tracks and update WvW armor/weapon vendors

Auto loot

This.

And please do NOT try to solve the issue of night capping by changing how the system works during the night. The issue is gonna solve itself once the population balances out. WvW is a 24/7 gamemode, do not change that.

Scoring based on the number of enemies you face is actually alot more fair for a game though. It may be a gamemode based on war, doesn’t mean having every element in there is fun and works in a videogame.

I’m not very experienced in WvW but I’ve noticed that people tend to run in zerks circling the map with only rare fights against other zerks. I would like to see more defensive play styles couraged by the game mode mechanics and rewards.

I also very much like the idea of reward tracks! And WvW exclusive legendary back item!

Yes, please bring back the Alpine Borderland map.

My take on Desert Borderlands, is that it’s a very beautiful map, and it would be sad to see it go if it comes to that.

But in my opinion, I think it would be for the better. The map is beautiful, but as said, it’s far too large, and it feels more troublesome to take yourself around, because it is so very vertical.

The problem is that it only encourages large group players, aka zergs, and barely anything for solo roamers, or smaller groups to take towers, because again, it’s large, and the towers requires quite a lot to break in and take them. The towers also holds no strategic waypoint for them to be truly considered to be held, except for ticking points.

I don’t truly know what needs to be done to ‘save’ Desert Borderlands. The main complaint about it, is that it feels too large, and it’s too vertical to get yourself anywhere meaningful before it’s too late.

1. Old borderlands in rotation with desert borderlands .

2.Old stab before change patch would stop this mentality of pirateship

3. Remove Bronze tier and just merge them with Silver/Gold servers that way population will increase and all those pve/pvp/pvx small scale roamers will be able to play in more interesting way than metting 1 person in 5hours .

4. REMOVE WAYPOINTS FROM NOT UPGRADED KEEPS keeps have to have waypoint at (highest upgrade ) .That way atleast it will be worth flipping and taking 1-3h taking it .And having that nice feeling that you have waypoint and enemy don’t or other way around.
5.Rewards well its up to your team what you want to add but in Pass 2years I spent over 5k gold for commanding and siege . So I would say they have to be reasonable .

6.Other than that supplys are not used at anything so maybe implement them on keepe additional upgrades such as Emergency waypoints /banners and stuff like that.

7. Reduce damage or remove totally Banners from WvW if makes strong blobs even stronger and crushing smaller groups even faster.

I’d like to add my voice to this – please revert the DBL and return to ABL.

Your environment artists & designers have done an incredible job as always, but the map is just not suited for WvW. It feels too complex – like i’m in Tangled Depths, when I really just want to be moving quickly between engagements and objectives.

I used to be a daily WvW player in the Borderlands, but now only spend time in EB once a week or so. I’m one of 2 players out of our little 15 player WvW guild that still logs in. The others have simply left and it makes me sad.

1. Remove airship, all of the new banners, frost and basically any of the new WvW upgrades except +5/10 supply (or at least make it where you can only use them when VASTLY outnumbered, but still should probably be removed). Please sort this
2. Better rewards
3. Go back to the old Stab
4. Bring back alpine and tweak desert BL to make it somewhat decent, then rotate. Start working on another map and add to rotation.
5. Limit defensive siege, by a lot.

Why cant you bring back Alpine maps AND adjust DB, make it smaller lose some of the Pve mechanics, which I assume is a much larger project..

.. then have them in rotation? that is after all what was implied in the run up to Hot?

other than that which is my Top priority:

2. Better rewards – ways also to get items from other game areas .
3. 24 hour matches arnt sustainable unless you have a presence from a different time zone which most servers don’t – reduce night time points or something else.
4. More creative ways to match up so we arnt always matched against the same servers.
5. Gliding – seriously – keep Desert BL it IS beautiful but see the above changes brought in then introduce gliding – F2P already are penalised in Tyria, no need to do it here.

I want to add some thoughts contrary to some of the stuff posted in this thread regarding the Desert Borderlands.

As a commander who’s been in T1/T2 that has led a consistent group and pugmanded on both maps, a lot of people we work with have adjusted to and favor the Desert Borderlands more than Alpine. The variety of fights that we get are much more diverse and we enjoy that more than just face-slamming on a flat plain over and over again.

However, there are some things that I would like to see addressed in the Desert Borderlands map:

Give more meaning to the towers and likely reposition them. For example, on Alpine the northern towers on the map gave a foothold to an enemy’s garrison (you can treb garri from the northern towers) and also provided watch over the routes between the paths towards garrison. South West tower on Apline also allowed you to attack Bay.

The towers on the DBLs only really provide PPT and no tactical advantage at all.

The solution to this is to shrink the oasis and shift the towers closer inward. Make some objectives in the way of others so a foothold can be achieved.

Another suggestion: diminish or remove the Oasis event. At least in T2 when we had Oasis events whenever an Oasis event was about to begin, most opposing forces dogpile onto the map to break open or weaken most objectives on a map. The event favors who has the most forces to split up and take cores, and it also is a highly laggy event. Since it has been disabled, WvW has been more enjoyable and more focused.

If you are bringing Alpine back at some point (and it has been mentioned it will be a lot of work to bring it back), make sure to revamp it and fix some of the problems that map had. For example, there are invulnerable trebuchet spots at the home citadel that can easily attack NE and NW towers. Before HoT’s release on Alpine, we saw these invlun spots being heavily abused, preventing any counter play to prevent the enemy from taking their tower back.

I’m personally fine with a possible rotation of the maps, but I don’t want to see Desert Borderlands going away as it provides a lot more tactics and fight variety. It just needs tweaks.

Thank you for addressing the WvW community and keep the communication channels open.

Mike O Brien.4613:

snip We’ll do it.

Mo

Thanks for taking the time to get back to us, Mike. It does really help when developers keep communication ongoing, especially regarding a game mode that is the sole reason many customers play the game (hence the ‘passion’).

Mike O Brien.4613:

Hi all,

This is a great thread. It’s constructive. We’re all reading it and referring to it in team discussions.

As we said in the AMA, our top internal priorities have been population balance and rewards. From this thread, your top five priorities are, in order:
1. Stability & skill balance
2. Fix or revert DBL
3. Rewards
4. Population balance
5. Scoring

Yes, we will take the feedback and make stability, general skill balance, and fixing/reverting DBL our top priorities. We’re not currently working on scoring and that has to be a longer-term project.

Karl is working specifically on WvW-focused skill balance. He’s looking for the wins for WvW that don’t screw the rest of the game.

We’re investigating whether to fix or revert DBL. They’re both a lot of work. These next couple days will be your last chance to give feedback before we make a decision, so speak now or forever hold your peace.

I want to reiterate that everything we work on either ships in April or starts beta-testing on Live servers in April. We’re locking down dev work for the April release soon — next up is localization, QA, integration and regression testing — but we’ll extend the deadline for WvW skill balance.

There is one thing that doesn’t need to get wrapped up into the April release: Friday night resets. That doesn’t require a Live build. We’ll do it.

Mo

Mo,

This is a much needed reply thankyou for it.

One key pointer to this all is the problematic shield generator.

Alpine Borderlands are better than the Desert in its current state. My suggestion would be a significant nerf or removal of the shield generators while you swap back in the Alpine maps. While those are running fix the Desert ones and have a weekly Borderland rotation for variety and strategy switch up.

This is good and I applaud you for the step in the right direction right off the bat.

I have to thank the developers for coming out into the open like this. These sort of forum posts are exactly the type of steps Arenanet needs to take in order to gain the trust and heart of the WvW community.

As a guild leader of a small havoc guild on Dragonbrand, the top five priorities for me would be:

1. Stability Overhaul – explore incremental duration stacking, with hard CCs trimming one stack/duration
2. Tactivator Balance – knockback from SMC airship, cloaking waters stealth duration, channeled casts to use levers, cooldowns on tier 3 tactivators
3. Siege Equipment Balance – knockback from shield generator auto-attack, arrow cart AoE size and damage overhaul, supply requirements for arrow carts and ballistae (increase and decrease, respectively)
4. Bugfixes – marked debuff on keeps not appearing for correct team, range limit on dragon banner skill #3, presence of the keep not appearing when passing through certain portals, druid exploit bypassing air keep walls, sentry marked debuff being applied despite stealth
5. Matchup Variety – direct means: rework glicko system; indirect means: transfer costs, RI duration, scoring interval, PPK interaction with outmanned

I believe issues such as population balance (gold vs bronze server pop) and “nightcapping” (primarily directed at eu/ocx/sea players) will resolve themselves if an effective and engaging framework for WvW is reintroduced. A quick, albeit disruptive, option for these two topics would be to reduce the number of matchup tiers to five ala PvP divisions (amber through diamond) in order to condense the player base.

1. Bring back old stability
2. Bring back Alpine maps
3. Class balance after stabs changes to make sure both ranged and melee are relevant
4. Structured brainstorming with us on how to fix offhours population imbalance or minimize its effect?

For me, those four alone would get me back in the game. Honestly, the first two would do it, since I prefer playing melee.

Enought people have expressed for me about some other subjects, but something that hasn’t been addressed enough are the ridiculous guild upgrades for WvW. Not only the +5 that HoT guilds lost and have to work super hard in PvE to get it again, but things like Chilling Fog, Iron Hide for NPCs and SMC Airstrike are ridiculously overpowered and can be abused by anyone.

This needs to change. I’d doubt that you guys would just remove it after people already spending time and effort to acquire it, but it can’t stay the way that it is right now. My suggestion: make Iron Hide for NPCs, Chilling Fog and SMC Airstrike only be available if the server has the outmanned buff. Because right now, full map zergs hiding inside a fully sieged up T3 SMC can abuse these guild upgrades and make impossible to take it.

And also banners. They still need to be tonned down.

I’m not to bring back Alpine maps as top priority as WvW was at death’s door on it ever before HoT on my server.

Anyway :

1. Population balance (maybe a queue if there are more than X% of player difference.)
2. Give Interest to play WvW. (A title, new skin, a server bonus, whatever.)
3. You have 4 map on the hand, put the 4 for each MU : Desert, Alpine, Eternal, EoM. (Then we will see which of these are the more entertraining AFTER population imbalance fix.)
4. Make it impossible to fight the same more than 2 consecutive weeks.
5. Don’t turn WvW only for big squad/guilds (like with hall upgrade.).

1. Stability & skill balance: Bring back Stability and roll back the cc creep in WvW. There was much more group synergy in the past.

2. Fix or revert DBL: Please revert it until you can fix the new BL – it’s too big, too complicated to get around in and too vertical. I think we all appreciate the vision of it, but it’s not working.

3. Rewards: Could we not make them comparable to PvP? The tracks could be tied to our WXP tracks and maybe 5 WXP levels gets us to the rewards?

4. Population balance: I hate to say it but you need to rework the server system. Nobody wants to see their server close, but it may be the only solution. No matter what you do, there will be grumbling and whining – but we will all just deal with it.

5. Scoring: Points per kill was an excellent start.

From my perspective the Desert Borderlands are fine. But they heavily suffer from the low population currently. WvW population took a big hit with HoT, and I think the vast majority of the players who initally took a break from WvW did that because out of a sudden there was something to do in PvE again. Then the weekly reset changed on top of all that and what little common ground those WvW groups and guilds had was gone – and many WvW groups dissolved.

And then there’s learning a new map. As someone who almost exclusively played (Alpine) Borderlands, the passage ways on EBG are still confusing for me. And in a similar fashion, the Desert Borderlands aren’t overly confusing, they’re just unfamiliar. But naturally, the dedicated WvW folks (who didn’t leave for PvE) disliked the map at first (as you’d dislike anything that confuses you), identified that as the reason for the low population and built up their prejudice towards the map, instead of properly learning to play and maybe happen to like it.

So in my opinion, most people didn’t even give the Desert Borderlands a chance.

From my personal standpoint, reverting the map will not bring me back into WvW again. It might even put me off even more, because I’d see that as a step backwards. What WvW is lacking for me is purpose. To be motivated, I need goals, be it personal rewards I can work towards or server-wide goals, in the form of tournaments or seasons. An ever repeating weekly cycle, that may or may not change a placement on a meaningless leaderboard does not motivate me.

I would prefer implementing all 4 WvW maps into the matchup. Let the players play where they want. The new DBL are fine once people take the time and effort to learn them, and I, personally, like it.

Having all four maps active would be a great solution!!