Guild Wars 2

1. New player experience. Welcome to WvW system.
2. Clean up siege locations.
3. Guild Upgrades
4. Air keep turrets in lords room, Fire keep bridge choke, Airship, Chilling Fog and other gimmicks
5. remove wxp from eotm.

thats a nice copy list, now I will elaborate.

1. Teaching new players the mysterious ways of wvw is something Ive put a lot of time into. I wish there was a mechanic, as impractical as it might be, a system to connect new players with a guide. the new player testing out wvw for the first time wont know how important team speak is or how to get connected. they need help with builds and short hand terminology. I think that new players get overwhelmed and dont want to come back, especially since theres no actual reason to besides enjoying pvp.

2. my best example of what i mean by clean up siege locations is the air keep. breaking the outer wall can only be safely accomplished by trebs in the south east camp. breaking the inner wall can be done mostly safe by cats in pocket next to the south inner gate or by cats doing splash dmg below the north inner gate. Its very hard to stop this because theres no counter treb to the camp and you cant place ACs on the cliffs above these walls.

there should always be a back and forth with siege. The old AC rules were great for this. Yes ppl complained their mounds of tower siege would get cleared by ACs outside the wall, but was that rly so bad? Consider that it worked both ways, if your defenders spotted the attacking ACs quickly they could destroy them, or if the attackers were quick enough they cleared out the siege, broke in and were killed in a fight or took the tower.

fire keep inner has the high ramp where the defenders can build tons of untouchable siege. theres no good places for them to push out for a fight either so they just sit up there puking AC fire until the walls break.

to summarize; if the defenders prepared well the objective should be difficult to clear and capture but always possible. if the defenders did not prepare they shouldnt be able to build one AC at an untouchable position and thwart a zerg.

3. most every guild just wanted the +5 supply buff.

4. when you break into smc and the defenders activate air ship, its pretty much over. run fast or die. theres rly no actual pvp involved, we come to wvw to fight other players and anything that prevents that is bad. same with the choke point leading to the fire lord, no one can cross it, there should be 3 bridges at least. the lords room air turrets constantly CC players and they have no chance of giving a fair fight.

5. (I had to make five for the list) they dont deserve wxp

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

Thanks Mike. This is definitely a step in the right direction, and I agree with the ordering of priorities as well. It’s very refreshing to see the better communication and listening to player needs on your guys’ part. I truly hope you can follow through with it as well, as I really love WvW and miss how great it used to be.

Also, big +1 to bringing back the Alpine borderlands maps. While I applaud the efforts on creating the new maps, they definitely need some major revision, at the very least, to be as conducive to fights (i.e. the part of WvW that’s truly fun) as the old borderlands.

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

That’s a first post ever of direct communication with the WvW community. Could be far too late now, but it’s a real step in saving what still can be saved. Place a sticky post, keep up updated daily (or close to daily, not weekly) “Read here: This is what we are currently doing to save WvW”

Won’t be easy, but even small changes WILL have huge impact, if they are the right changes. Move WvW back to competitive community based fun, SKILL based game – not as progressively was changed into a mindless siege vs players, RNG and out of player control environment. Those better mastering their GW2 class and work better with their team, should always prevail, and that be reflected in the realm score. Those who are not good enough yet will have something to look forward: to improve.

Make it matter being good, playing well, winning battles – and not sitting on siege and capturing empty buildings for ticks – and WvW will be reborn again, albeit with a new generation of players, despite upcoming RvR titles: because GW2 will always produce new players and there’s no better place to learn mastering the class fighting system than in the WvW. There’s sPvP too, but WvW allows far more varied roles for newbies, without the sPvP specific pressure. It’s your true endgame for competitive players – if the WvW community completely dies, GW2 won’t be whole ever again.

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 would like to see both Alpine Borderlands, AND Desert. But Desert, if you will keep the vertically, needs to be smaller horizontal. As you’ve removed the Oasis event, may we suggest just removing the oasis, and kinda push the rest together toward the middle. Leave some empty land in the middle for good dueling/open fights, but just making the map 20-30% shorter east/west and north/south would make a difference.

+1 for reverting the Desert Borderlands back to the old borderlands. Arenanet has good designers and artists, but what that map is NOT good for is large scale pvp. The assets and designs would be great for a pve raid, so I don’t think the work would all go to waste.

1. Make WvW Rewards more appealing to the whole player base.

2. I love the new Desert Borderlands a lot more than the Alpine as they are more complex but I do think travel times between objectives are just a tad higher than they should be, a ‘small fix’ for this would be nice. And please fill up with something the huge gap left in the center of the map now that Oasis Event is gone.

3. Make a player’s server visible in PvE and make the Power of the Mists Clearly Visible and Significant. Many WvW players don’t even know this exists, let alone PvX players. Also consider adding Magic Find % or substituting it for one of the others as I think this would be a very attractive bonus to fight over.

4. Deepen the game mode for WvW veterans, I miss that feeling of progression as I maxed out the moment HoT came out.

5. WvW Marketing, people have always come and gone but lately it feels like no new people is coming into this game mode.

To sum up, I love the mechanics of WvW and I really like the new map, I just feel the only thing that’s missing in WvW is more players.

Rednar.4690:

1. Make WvW Rewards more appealing to the whole player base.

2. I love the new Desert Borderlands a lot more than the Alpine as they are more complex but I do think travel times between objectives are just a tad higher than they should be, a ‘small fix’ for this would be nice. And please fill up with something the huge gap left in the center of the map now that Oasis Event is gone.

Agreed, from same server.

I know the higher tier, more populated servers love the old borderlands (and I understand that) but at the lower end the new borderlands actually make for some fun guerrilla warfare.

They just need to be 20 to 30% smaller.

Who am I?

Engineer main, Blackgate, experience in WvW as literally every class except Ranger/Thief. Rank 630. I’m no “ON MAN RANK 12321 PRO”, but I’d like to think I understand WvW.

Change how walled places get “tapped”.

It makes no real sense to have a system which is largely false positives and promotes griefing moreso than any other real playstyle. If a keep/tower/walled place is saying “I’m under attack, look at my swords!”, it should actually be under some kind of attack. A single ranger running full nomads hitting the gate once before running away, once every three minutes, for twelve hours, every day, is not an attack, it’s not creating fun engagement for defending players, it’s not anything but an annoyance. It doesn’t promote any real kind of stimulating gameplay and makes no logical sense. Yes, I’m looking at you CAPS, you’re annoying.

For a keep to be sending a distress signal (white swords) and locking its waypoint, it should be suffering something actually meaningful. Walls/gate taking meaningful damage from PvD/siege, and the lord being under attack. Everything else is largely irrelevant when it comes to what should be considered as meaningful to a walled position on the map.

Stability shouldn’t promote x=x+1

Seems like this is something already on the table, but having stability be in the advantage of whoever can bring more guardians, and thus, has a larger blob than their opponent, is not exactly great. Old stab may have been a kind of dull mess of “keep the buff up! rotations!”, but at least it worked for smaller forces. If you want to break blobs, be wary of stacking buffs/debuffs, because that quickly enters the area of “well if I can just have their buff amount plus one, I have a better chance at winning!”. x=x+1 is not good for balance.

Give Frontline reasons to not be Guardians

Guardians are end-all right now, as per always, for frontline. Have at least two per frontline party or die. And that’s largely because they not only have a good amount of tools at their disposal, but also because they’re the only reliable source of group stab for frontline in the game. Stab is too important to not be placing first and foremost, and Guard is the end-all answer since no other class can provide it as reliably as them. Warriors exist because of banners being too important to not have at least a couple of, to revive pins, but even with an ability which is now five times more powerful than killing an enemy to revive allied downs, and with reviving dead people being effectively removed, they’re still secondary to Guards because of the stab difference. Give Warriors/Revs/Scrappers some kind of party stab that’s worth something. Like, you could swap the Engineer’s toolbelt stab to a party buff rather than a ground AoE, mess with the cd/uptime to compare to Guard, and that would be solid on it’s own right without even needing to add an ability or be doing something so drastic that it could destroy other modes.

Give Backline some way to manage projectile reflects or whatever

Necros, GS Mesmers, and Eles all have one thing in common. None of them are completely shut down by projectile reflects. This would be harder to mess with in other classes without affecting other modes, but it would be really nice to be able to play Engineer backline without being completely removed from relevance (in comparison to current core backline) by a reflect or two. In WvW specifically, in theory you could make Engineer Grenades immune, to force an Engineer to close in to deal reliable damage, using Mortar for long range harass in comparison (diverse choices! strategy!), but changes like that could mean bad things for PvP and the like, so, idk.

Babygates

Either make them very telegraphed and visible 100% of the time rather than the effect being culled in favor of other abilities, or nerf them into the ground. They are far too disruptive for how invisible they are in large engagements right now, especially with how important it is to have the camera zoomed out in order to see the bigger picture of a battle.

Mike O Brien.4613:

1. Stability & skill balance
2. Fix or revert DBL
3. Rewards
4. Population balance
5. Scoring

1. Stability & skill balance
Yes – Although I’d love this to be a work in progress and having someone monitoring and adjusting everything in wvw if necessary – class balance, zerg balance, siege balance, structure balance. I’m fine if not everything is perfect as long as I know it is indeed a work in progress – changes to wvw are mostly better if they’re gradually, I think.

2. Fix or revert DBL
I’m fine with both – I think the easiest fix for DBL is to open the WPs for the server who’s BL it is – we really don’t have enough people to be on all maps.

3. Rewards
Personally I don’t care too much about rewards but it would be great if there was something that would make people new to wvw want to try it – currently there’s EotM and most probably won’t go farther.

4. Population balance and 5. Scoring
That one is tricky. I’d actually like scoring balance to be before population balance. On EU nearly every server manages to get a blob together during prime time (I’ve been from bronze to gold – it looks pretty much the same everywhere from 8 pm to midnight) – all 4 EU servers I’ve been on had a community (the NA servers as well but it’s been a while, can’t really say how they are now) – merging servers or guild alliances would destroy that as half of us are in very small or personal or no guilds – and we’re pretty much the heart of it all – roamers who don’t need a commander to do things.
ETA²: I’d like to see a buff to smaller servers before everything that hasn’t got a certain size is being merged – buffs can be: Scoring, class/skill/stability balance. To me this is really important as people would be more motivated to fight on if their efforts weren’t fruitless just because they’re fewer people.

The most important thing to me is class (and skill) balance though. And keeping my server.

Phew nervous I hope I’ve said everything that’s on my mind as now I’ve got to be silent forever..

ETA: I don’t want to keep the lowest servers from merging though – I don’t know them and maybe they want a merge.

1. Bring back the Alpine BLs. It wouldn’t be a magic “reset” button that would bring us back to when people actually played WvW, but it would be evidence that Anet is listening and is willing to make changes suggested by the WvW community. That would go a long way in restoring my faith in Anet.

2. Get rid of the gimmicks and PvE events. Siege is one thing, guards and lords are one thing, but these banners/auto-upgrades/magical unicorns that poo victory over the other worlds is simply not fun, and not wanted in a PvP setting. This is WvW, not WvE. I’m not asking for a straight PvP/team deathmatch mode, but fighting ability and skill should trump completion of PvE events.

3. Balance professions. Separating WvW stats from PvE would be really, really nice for both modes. Short of that, small, consistent balance changes instead of drastic, quarterly patches that change all of the meta builds would be welcome.

4. Rewards. Killing another player should yield better loot rates than what trash mobs drop. Even killing trash mobs in WvW should yield better loot rates than killing trash mobs in PvE land.

5. Communication. I know the devs are much better about this (at least for now), but some sort okittennowledgement by anyone who works at Anet is much better than what we’ve been getting. The level of communication and consideration from Anet towards WvW players gives me the feeling of abandonment, much like when an early-access game on Steam is abandoned.

Honorable mentions:

Don’t do anything huge like DBLs or auto-upgrades anymore, at least not all at once, and definitely be prepared to revert the changes if they’re not well-received. I just don’t recognize the WvW I fell in love with anymore.

Not all the changes made since then were bad, but reverting WvW back to pre-HoT/DBL times would rekindle my interest in this game. Better yet would be pre-stability change.

Rawrakai.2908:

dear god whatever you do, DO NOT revert back to the alpine borderlands. Everyone here that thinks this will solve the problem with WvW is wearing rose-tinted glasses and simply think reverting everything to it’s original state will make the game type fun again. Removing content from a game that is already slow to add new stuff is the LAST thing your playerbase wants. That’s right it’s still new content. I bet the majority of the informed playerbase has not even stepped foot into the borderlands due to the waves of complaints.

I used to WvW on blackgate back during the “glory days” and had a blast. I’m primarily a hard-pve/pvp kind of player and it really pulled me into a new aspect of the game that felt very refreshing. I stopped long before the HoT just because it became monotonous and unrewarding after having a couple of great fights.

If we revert back to the alpine borderlands we will not see a resurgence in WvW play. There will be a short period of time where everyone will get out the WvW itch they’ve been having and after no more than 1 or 2 weeks everything will be as dead as it was before HoT.

I love the new maps, they are some of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in this game and it would be a nail in the coffin of me ever returning to WvW if the alpine borderlands were reverted.

OBVIOUSLY something needs to change with the current desert borderlands and quite frankly I don’t care what direction they take that will get people to load back into these maps. My personal anecdote to the conflict would just to increase rewards like they did in PvP and players will come flowing. Some commodity that is currently difficult to get (Such as transmutation charges for PvP) make abundant from WvW rewards. Problem Solved.

The issue is I think players only want ALPINE as a temporary quick fix because they are refusing to play WvW all together until it is reverted WHILE they make a new map from the ground up that is specifically designed for nonstop, challenging, strategic PvP action the entire time you are on it. The new map has to be better than you find elsewhere, not " settled for". Beautiful =\= Great PvP map. It has to be a great pvp map instead, as many guilds ( In mass) will only come back to this game if they do so. Keeping the DBL in the game at all at this point means players leave game and do not come back. Ever. The end.

This is not a " Nostalgia" issue, players ( in mass) refuse to play the game at all as long as the DBL’s are in it because they receive better gameplay on other games than you do here currently due to them being here. The DBL’s are not competing with what Gw2 has to offer, they are competing with what every game on the market has to offer. If you pour sugar on rotten food ( rewards on DBL) players will still not eat it/ play it and you just make them / uninstall instead. I DO know what it will take to bring them back, as I have been talking to them. They have me a spot reserved to go with them…
“settling for” them “fixing the map” = more players leave and the ones that already left never come back.

Y’all remember spawn trebs on Alpine? That map was exploitable! Bring back Alpine, but only as one of four playable maps!

1. Revert all HoT changes impacting WvW.
(Bring back Alpine is far less work than it would take to make DBL a good map)
(Desert Map is as inhospitable as a real Desert! Aversion level is high)
(Desert Map is a place I wouldn’t even want to own, let alone fight over.)
(It’s better to break some Scribing and Guild buffs than lay waste to a game mode)
(This also includes resetting reset time to previous time)

2. Free Transfer’s for 1 month
(Let us balance the mode for ourselves. We can do it better and have no one to blame but ourselves.)

3. Auto Loot
(Allow Pact Mastery to work in WvW, not spend time building a new Auto loot)

4. Balance CC’s and Stability
(Adding Stab stacks or reverting is meaningless if you don’t tone down the volume’s of CC’s available)

5. Gliding
(It’s becoming second nature to Glide. Not having the capacity feels broken)
(If there’s any place where gliding is breaking the map, simply place an inverted updraft to act as a down draft. Make it grey and add some electricity to it even.)

Additional changes are:
6. fix whatever happened to the speed buff from Traveler and Speed Runes.
7. Add a Reward Track / Shiny’s
8. Dev Hunt Day! (Get your tushes on a map and play with us!!!)
9. 48 hour Tournaments
10. Mist War Buffs! (Turn it on!)
11. add a Green Commander Tag
12. Better visibility of skills. For exmaple, enemy Wall of Reflection should be entirely red. Aka Turkey Pens should be visible.

I can keep going on how Worlds need there own place to call home. How Worlds need better in game communication tools.

Please do not bring back the Alpine map.

Everyone has intensely rose-colored glasses on about how super-sweet they were. It’s like short attention span theater up in here.

Spawn trebs and all manner of other exploits that were absolutely rampant on alpine.

Everyone I played with, including me, found the maps boring and repetitive. ANet did tip the scales WAYYYYYY too far in favor of defense (including chokes) on desert BL. But everyone seems to have forgotten the complaints about the alpine map the desert BL answers pretty well. I’m not going to bother to go over them because it’s been beat to death the past 6 months.

Just fix what you have. The desert BL has a TON of potential but the chokes, the insanely strong defense, these things need to be reworked. We don’t need a “ground up rework.”

This topic drives me insane.

1. Please merge servers. Anything else you do is pointless and foolishness. Please don’t act like Anet/GW2 is above server merges, it’s disappointing that you’ve let the situation devolve as much as you have and still refuse to implement the most obvious solution, used in many other games (eg, planetside 2).

Ask anyone in the top 3 tiers to compare their experience now to this time last year. Those who still actively play can feel the game dying, there isn’t nearly as much action. It’s too expensive to transfer, and very disruptive to any guilds core.

A few years ago I would have said 3 tiers were appropriate, now I’d say 2 tiers are appropriate. Tick tock, waste time implementing minor issues or other things and you’ll have to merge the servers down to 1 tier.

2. Take another page from Planetside 2, instead of having 4 maps open 24/7 to disperse the already low population, close 2 of the maps on a short (couple of hour) rotation and force players to engage each other.

robotempire.2451:

Please do not bring back the Alpine map.

Everyone has intensely rose-colored glasses on about how super-sweet they were. It’s like short attention span theater up in here.

Spawn trebs and all manner of other exploits that were absolutely rampant on alpine.

Everyone I played with, including me, found the maps boring and repetitive. ANet did tip the scales WAYYYYYY too far in favor of defense (including chokes) on desert BL. But everyone seems to have forgotten the complaints about the alpine map the desert BL answers pretty well. I’m not going to bother to go over them because it’s been beat to death the past 6 months.

Just fix what you have. The desert BL has a TON of potential but the chokes, the insanely strong defense, these things need to be reworked. We don’t need a “ground up rework.”

This topic drives me insane.

I dont think anyone thinks they are that great, I think you misunderstand. The ONLY way players that left and to stop those about to leave is to bring them back temporarily while they design a new map that is designed from the ground up to keep players engaged in nonstop PvP action the entire time they are on them . It breaks down like this atm:

( Just to be clear we are talking about thousands of players currently)

• Bring back alpine Pre Hot NOW= players come back and agree to wait for them to do other changes.
• Do not bring back ALpine = Guilds waiting for an answer leave for good, and those beckoning them to come with them on other games already NEVER. COME. BACK. the end.

That is the decision being made here. No rosy tinted lens, players are angry the results of beta were ignored and they went ahead anyway. You are asking them to let the guilds leave the game for good. Players do not want them to keep playing on Alpine forever, they just do not consider the game playable at all due to the DBL, and returning Alpine is a show of good faith.

‘veteran’ solo/duo roamer QOL changes and perspective (not in any particular order)

1) Add Desert BLs to tournament/seasonal rotation (instead of vice versa/wvw ‘seasons’ should be seasonal instead of annual)

2) Rework wvw ability/rank (ranking up is currently r1-r9999 – make this progression less linear/ability line desperately needs to be expanded upon and include auto loot)

3) Reward track/new achievements to add incentive (obtain a/c bound exotic lvl 80 gear and a/c bound lvl 80 food through reward tracks as you earn WXP)

4) Tower/Keep siege + NPCs (remove 50% damage reduction buff from cannons and veteran npcs as this only punishes direct damage power builds and small man play. cannons+mortar+oil vulnerable to damaging conditions? reduce damage done to players by cannons – cannons should be mostly effective as counter to enemy siege, it currently rewards bad sportsmanship in small scale and outnumbered fights which has largely contributed to the lack of roamers in wvw. Dredge Turrets in EBG respawn too quickly)

5) WvW currencies/vendor update (badges of honor and proofs of heroic need more sinks. tournament tickets have been redundant for too long. skins + more stat combinations + a/c bound lvl 80 food + ascended trinkets should be accessible via wvw vendors with these currencies)

Since both dbl and alpine will be work, just give us alpine until you have time to work on the other, no rotation necessary, most people are just saying that to be civil

reward tracks for legendary wvw armor

remove banners

1) CCs are overwhelming, tone it down or grant other classes with party stability skills since stability skill stacks comes right off as soon as u know it.

2) Revert home BLs to Alpine BL. (Convert EBG similar to Deserted BL with SMC replacing Oasis in the middle, Maybe..)

3) More rewards as it makes WvW a much more rewarding game mode to play again. More and better loot drops. Every rank up, milestones, achievements grant rewards. Examples of rewards are transmutational charges, gold, sieges, more tokens & etc. We do fashion wars too, we need those charges.

4) Merge low/medium servers to maximize timezone coverage and capabilities. Close dead server as servers are now based on from WvW, Maybe as a last resort because every server has a story/lore behind it which i love to read and appreciate the writers input. Bring back WvW season & free transfer whenever seasons is coming instead.

5) Remove “Upgrades”. Eg. siege hardened gates, Banner (Dragon, Centaur, Turtle), chilling fog & etc etc, you get what i mean.. but keeping the buffs that we get from claiming. Keeps WP to revert back to how it was before whenever the timer goes off cooldown, players are still able to WP in within that split seconds period.

6) Nerf the shield generator or remove it. As it does makes it harder to capture the objective.

7) Scribing/Guild upgrades. why is this tied down to PvE so much. Implement WvW tokens as a currency that can be exchange with vendors to purchase mats required for guild upgrades.

8) point no.4 maybe of last resort to address population but when the rest of the implementation is reverted or improved, that alone would entice players to return and newer players to join in in WvW thus populate servers once again.

Stab changed back and alpine bl plz! DBL maps look good but arnt very much fun, if you want fights you gotta go EBG all the time and that causes Ques.

1. WvW population balance
2. WvW exclusive rewards
3. Class balance
4. Remove auto upgrades
5. Siege limit (harder to obtain and build)

Also… imagine… WvW Raid map… 100v100v100 + big boss in the middle that takes hours to kill. Endless fun. Add a daily respawn timer and you’re golden. The team that does the most damage gets the reward, ascended box, skins, gold, something like that.

If you want to put PVE in WvW so bad as you’ve shown us so far, than do this. Fighting + PVE = $$ for Anet.

Trying to be concise, I would say that the top five issues facing WvW right now are as follows, and in order of their importance.

1. Make the WvW community feel engaged with and listened to. You’re starting out well, but there are three years of neglect to undo and it will take a lot of effort and a lot of time. Sorting the signal from the noise on these forums is going to be difficult, and you might want to do more rounds of commander interviews, but when the WvW population takes it as a given that ANet doesn’t care about them and finds a sort of bitter amusement in the Skyhammer event completely breaking the entire map four months after the release of HoT, something is very very wrong.

2. Make the PvP combat fun. This is mainly what the complaints about stability are about. Around a year and a half ago, the combat was free flowing and aggressive with an emphasis on frontline and pushes. People enjoyed that style and want it back. The current meta of oversized backlines bombing each other at 1200 range, while the frontline has trouble pushing because of snares, stability, and choke points is not one that people enjoy. We don’t necessarily need old stability back, but any balance or map changes should be dedicated to bringing back this style of play in WvW.

3. Do something, whether it be server mergers or an alliances rework, to address population and tier issues. Many WvW tiers are completely stale, with movement in or out of the tier being extremely rare, and repetitive matchups.

In the same vein, there is little action outside of the top couple tiers. Any player should be able to play WvW and have an action packed and fun experience, not wander around a deserted wasteland used only for daily achievements.

4. Bring the rewards in line with the costs. Until the advent of PvE raiding, WvW was the only game mode where players regularly needed to farm for more expensive sets of gear, sigils, and runes, while constantly using the most expensive consumables. All this while being by far the least rewarding game mode.

You could argue that PvE raiding now requires a similar investment, but the rewards are much more in line with the costs there, including regular drops of ascended gear to help with equipping characters and the potential for rare and expensive drops.

In HoT, WvW players need to venture outside of their game mode to farm the gear that they need to be effective since it’s not available to them inside the game mode at any price. Additionally, the new WvW upgrade system is a massive transfer of wealth from WvW players to PvE players. Scribing and the associated costs are borne far more heavily by WvW players than anyone else, with the main source of most scribing related materials being PvE; and high end WvW upgrades costing upwards of 10 or 15 gold each. Also insanely expensive guild siege, both in terms of gold and build times.

5. Adjust the maps and general flow of the game. I appreciate what ANet was trying to do with the new map, make it difficult to traverse to increase response times and offer a large number of attack points to empower smaller groups and split up the blobs that are far too common in the higher tiers.

However, when combined with other changes (tier 3 gates, the current fighting meta, commander attrition), defense and large groups were empowered more than offense and small groups, leading to the worst of both worlds, defense and large groups on a map that is not fun for them to fight on.

Evening out and opening up the desert map would offer many more open areas and fewer choke points to fight in, while lowering wall and gate HP can compensate for the reduced response times. It will take effort, but DBL can be made into a enjoyable map.

lil devils x.6071:

I dont think anyone thinks they are that great, I think you misunderstand. The ONLY way players that left and to stop those about to leave is to bring them back temporarily while they design a new map that is designed from the ground up to keep players engaged in nonstop PvP action the entire time they are on them . It breaks down like this atm:

( Just to be clear we are talking about thousands of players currently)

• Bring back alpine Pre Hot NOW= players come back and agree to wait for them to do other changes.
• Do not bring back ALpine = Guilds waiting for an answer leave for good, and those beckoning them to come with them on other games already NEVER. COME. BACK. the end.

That is the decision being made here. No rosy tinted lens, players are angry the results of beta were ignored and they went ahead anyway. You are asking them to let the guilds leave the game for good. Players do not want them to keep playing on Alpine forever, they just do not consider the game playable at all due to the DBL, and returning Alpine is a show of good faith.

I don’t want players who consider desert BL to be unplayable to come back because I don’t think people who think like that are very good players.

I play a bunch of other games but I still make time for WvW because there is no other game that does RvR combat right now at the scale GW2 does. I don’t think people leaving to go play other games is a big deal. Good, go, have fun doing something else.

I also don’t think a “give me back my ball!”-style temper tantrum about the Alpine maps should be something the devs give two kittens about.

In terms of the fixing/reverting the DBL map, I would say that do bring back the Alpine BL and while that is up work on fixing the DBL.
It would actually be great to have both maps and have a rotation. If it is possible can both not be implemented and have them rotate quarterly that way both sides are happy.
The DBL definitely needs fixes especially with the size but I would like to see both maps Alpine and a fixed DBL and actually have them rotate.

robotempire.2451:

lil devils x.6071:

I dont think anyone thinks they are that great, I think you misunderstand. The ONLY way players that left and to stop those about to leave is to bring them back temporarily while they design a new map that is designed from the ground up to keep players engaged in nonstop PvP action the entire time they are on them . It breaks down like this atm:

( Just to be clear we are talking about thousands of players currently)

• Bring back alpine Pre Hot NOW= players come back and agree to wait for them to do other changes.
• Do not bring back ALpine = Guilds waiting for an answer leave for good, and those beckoning them to come with them on other games already NEVER. COME. BACK. the end.

That is the decision being made here. No rosy tinted lens, players are angry the results of beta were ignored and they went ahead anyway. You are asking them to let the guilds leave the game for good. Players do not want them to keep playing on Alpine forever, they just do not consider the game playable at all due to the DBL, and returning Alpine is a show of good faith.

I don’t want players who consider desert BL to be unplayable to come back because I don’t think people who think like that are very good players.

I play a bunch of other games but I still make time for WvW because there is no other game that does RvR combat right now at the scale GW2 does. I don’t think people leaving to go play other games is a big deal. Good, go, have fun doing something else.

I also don’t think a “give me back my ball!”-style temper tantrum about the Alpine maps should be something the devs give two kittens about.

The tempers were in the beta testing, they released maps that were evacuated during beta. Players thought there would be no way they would implement them anyhow.. and yet they did. It isn’t a few guilds leaving, it is hundreds of guilds, thousands of players.

In terms of the items on the table:

1) Stability: unpopular an idea as it may be, I don’t think reverting to duration stability would be a positive change. The entire thing ends up favouring larger groups who can afford two Guardians per party and when you then consider other things HoT brought us like much higher Protection uptime and much greater aoe heals, we would wind up in a situation where we have zergballs worse than the ones that inspired the stability change in the first place. I mean, let’s not forget that that was a huge inspiration for the change to begin with. I remember pre-HoT ~20v20 zerg engagements where it’d be a full minute before you had someone go down. I can’t see how that wouldn’t be even worse now. That said, HoT has also brought us many more hard cc’s – some more troubling than others – and stability hasn’t kept pace with that. I think the best thing I could constructively suggest is something along the lines of doubling the stability you currently receive from skills in WvW and/or looking at how skills that are currently personal stability skills could potentially be expanded into aoe stability skills. The latter may also go a way towards helping with class diversity issues.

2) Maps: I actually personally rank this as a lower concern than rewards and other ways to interest players in WvW. DBL seems to have been designed with the idea that large groups will be running around there and it really is difficult to give a full and frank account of it when it is often sitting pretty empty.

That said, the impression given before HoT was for DBL and ABL to rotate somehow and variety is generally a good thing. So, assuming that the ideal long-term goal would be to have both in the mix, I’d say that looking to bring back ABL and looking to deal with the shortcomings of DBL are both good ideas. Given that the precise fixes with DBL are slightly more of a nebulous concept at this point, I would lean towards doing the work to bring ABL back up to standard and able to be used and then spend time working on DBL (also, that way if any expansive changes to DBL are made, you could throw in a weekend event or something for players to be able to try it out and give feedback). Realistically, in any situation like this, it’s best to work on the project where we know exactly what needs to be done before it gets started.

In terms of how DBL could be improved when it came around to doing that, obviously there can be a more lengthy discussion at the time, but I don’t think it needs to be quite as drastic as it necessarily seems. Yes. it does feel a bit too big. But are there not solutions that may be somewhat difficult in themselves, but would be significantly less work than a full redesign? To my mind, you could insert significantly more jump pads to give more paths/avoid certain chokes, introduce gliding to help with the verticality the other way and even look at something like giving everyone on the map a base +20% move speed buff (so with Swiftness, you’d be looking about a +50% move speed rate). I think particularly a base move speed buff would help make the map feel a lot smaller than it is as you’d be able to get around much quicker.

Yes, some amount of terrain redesign on top of that might be prudent if people don’t feel there’s enough free space in some places for zerg v zerg combat, but I don’t think it necessarily takes a full redesign and trying to squeeze it into a smaller space to accommodate that.

On a related note, but still somewhat of a tangent, I’d also look at the balance of DBL’s NPCs. I agree that the keep lords should be tough, but it used to be the case on ABL that it was difficult but possible for a player to solo the tower lords. Generally they are still possible, although much more difficult, but I’d say that the lord on SWT just isn’t realistic, particularly between the damage it does and the amount of daze it puts out. It’s difficult as a solo roamer to justify the time of ninja catapulting a tower if there’s no chance of beating the lord inside.

3) Rewards/incentives: as I say, I rank this as a higher priority than the maps. I dislike using terms such as “we all feel” or “everyone knows”, because actually, unlike a lot of players who have expressed their opinions here, I appreciate that what I’m saying is just my own opinion and though some players might agree with the broad thrusts, I’m sure there are a lot of disagreements on our precise visions for changes and the game in general. However, in this instance, I feel justified in saying that everyone knows that you don’t go into WvW if you are looking for in-game rewards for the time you are spending there. Yes, you can have an amazing amount of camaraderie and server spirit displayed, but you’d probably make more money off of the current liquid rewards from dungeons. It is incredibly difficult to encourage players into a game-type – which often requires having completely different gear sets – when they don’t feel like they’re getting anything for their time.

In this respect, I would add my voice to the calls for WvW reward tracks, very similar to the PvP ones. I would hesitate to give exact numbers on how much WXP-equivalent should equal how far along in the track, particularly as I’m sure that ANet have sufficient analytic data to determine a number for 1 reward track point/x time and extrapolate that to the average gain in WvW and come up with a good rate. But I think that reward tracks along those lines with a similar amount of time and effort invested into them would definitely be a good way to go and would allow for WvW to be better included in some reward-types, perhaps particularly when talking about then being able to get Mystic Clovers and other mats/tokens that you might need for a legendary weapon, which would further allow people to feel that they can really work towards something through their time in WvW. Yes, exclusives like its own legendary backpiece and armour set would be nice, but I think even a barebones system with a variety of basic tracks that could be built on later would be a good start that would give a lot of players a strong reason to stay in WvW.

It would also be nice to see some more events/a WvW tournament. I know I’m not the only person sitting on some claim tickets and wanting to get more of those items. Long-term, it’d be nice to even see it on a fixed cycle much like the PvP seasons so we have some certainty in how long it’ll take us to work towards the rewards we want.

4) & 5) Population & Scoring: both of these come a very, very distant way behind in terms of priorities. Without WvW as a whole having a fairly healthy population with players actively wanting to get in and feeling like they’re getting appropriately rewarded for the time they’re putting in, I don’t think it’s possible to make a good decision on either of these two issues – particularly when you consider that changes made in terms of population, and therefore perhaps servers, could end up practically irreversible.

robotempire.2451:

I don’t want players who consider desert BL to be unplayable to come back because I don’t think people who think like that are very good players.

I also don’t think a “give me back my ball!”-style temper tantrum about the Alpine maps should be something the devs give two kittens about.

That’s your opinion.

The Desert Borderland – as it is now – it’s avoided by most players for many reasons. I’m one of those sometimes playing on it, but every second is a pain that I’m willing to endure for the sake of my realm. I hate every second of my life while being there. Can that map fixed? Yes, with a lot of work, and time that we don’t have. There has to be action NOW, even if it’s too late already.

Some players like DB? Yes, likely. Some like EoTM too. More divide there. How to decide then? Voting maybe, in-game. Considering player numbers, we could have 2x EB maps and nothing else, until the other maps are ready. Then EB, Alpine and a redesigned-Desert or a replacer in future, since verticality can’t be just fixed, chokes and mazes are the central theme of that map.

It’s really disheartening to me to see “Fix or revert DBL” as an item on the list. I like the desert borderlands SO much more than the old alpine ones. If Alpine and Desert were in a rotation, like was originally proposed, that would be fine, but if the Desert was just scrapped and the Alpine was brought back, I really don’t see myself being excited to log in.

There are no new tactics to discover in the Alpine maps; no surprises, nothing left to figure out. They’ve been done.

Clearly, in this thread, mine is a minority opinion. I would not even have known this thread existed if I hadn’t seen a link on my guild’s website. I’m sure a lot of people here will just say “fine, we don’t need you, don’t log in”. If an actual majority of all WvW players prefer the Alpine map, then I guess that’s how you should go. But I would hope that you (the devs) consider the fact that people who even know about this thread, let alone post on it, are only a fraction of your players.

(To be clear, before anyone else in this thread gets their knickers in a twist, I am not saying your voice doesn’t count. It totally does, and should. I’m just saying there are a lot of voices that aren’t here, and that those players matter too.)

i agree, and that’s why i think there should be different grades of pvp.

I personally would like older bl’s back, not so much because i don’t like the new ones, but because i saw the strategies and tactics many people developed on the old ones – especially in the lower tier servers. It was a powerful way to score points on servers larger than ours.

so it was not just a graphic removed, but a whole strategy of quickly jumping around from bl to bl to keep the enemy off guard. It was a smaller map which a smaller sized server can move around and catch up on points quickly. a whole way of competing vs larger servers was taken from us.

I’d personally prefer to see the Desert Borderlands fixed rather than see the return of the Alpine Borderlands. We’ve been running around in Alpine for years and it gets really boring after so long. It would be fine if it was temporary but permanently? I’d really like to see the Desert one fixed ASAP.

The Desert Borderlands looks amazing and is a breathe of fresh air. It just requires some big fixes in regards to strategy, tactics, location of camps and towers etc. The towers are also too big so it makes it hard to defend them and they’re too far away in no-man’s land. Honestly one of the biggest issues with Desert BDL is that there’s not enough population to cover it and that’s an additional way this map could be fixed. But yeah, I’m personally bored of Alpine, please don’t bring it back permanently or temporarily but for another year or more.

Throwing in my vote for going back to the old Alpine BLs.

With regard to stability I think:

1) It should go back to the old way where instead of stacks it was just an on/off thing, and CC doesn’t strip it.

2) I think it should be unstrippable by boon rips, or at least make it so the boon rips randomly strip things rather than prioritizing stability (as my understanding the Necro boon rips do).

Really stability is the only way large groups can collide with each other and have a meaningful battle, without that you just end up with this ranged vs ranged battle that nobody finds fun.

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

Mo

1.- I think that stability stacking is better than an unstoppable blob smashing 1 but I agree that stability skills should last longer and have 1.33X or even 1.5 more stacks per skill. Cooldowns also should be revised. in order to avoid permabuff.

Skill balance should focus on avoiding one hit killing and condition burst damage, it is not fair to step a trap and die.

I also think that just like skills have limited targets, players should be receive a maximum amount of hits per second this will also prevent instant-death.

Create a maximun boon duration per skill to avoid prebuffing. No boon should be stacked longer than 1 minute, and others like stability or resistance not longer than 20 seconds.

2.- Clearly fix: I think old bls with new stuff (Autoupgrades, tier0 keeps with WP, etc) would be a massive failure, reworking new BL following many players criterium making easier to walk around the map, making it flatter removing unnecessary obstacles and giving north towers relevance again.

3.- Give more purposes for badges, so people don´t need to farm hours in pve to craft ascended gear. I think it could be possible to acquire account bounded Elonian Leather and other ascended materials by a nice amount of badges or reaching new levels.

I don´t want WvW becoming chest farming or boring farm maps where people dodge battles, just want WvW to be a sustainable game itself.

4.- It is the hardest thing in my opinion, this is a personal choice from each player I´d merge some of the less populated servers and leave 18 servers in EU. Letting this population join other server with same flag.

5.- i think the most unfair thing about actual scoring system is that empty borderlanes gives victories in MU, I´d rework it so losing a huge amount of points in a timezone don´t be critical to MU.

Just like a Tennis players earns points, games, sets and win match this could be worked same way:

Keep game mode 24/7
Split MU in 3 hours “sets” a set is won by getting highest score of their respective tics.

Each server earns 3, 2 and 1 point for set it doesn´t matter if they have scored 7k or 1k. This way ticking 600 all night won´t ruin MU because another server can catch de gap during rest of the day.

I think it is not fair to give other time zones less repercussion as it has been suggested.

Thanks in advance for listening us.

My top 5 prios..

1. Pop-balance – Skill balance, stab changes or rewards. None of these are fun without any1 to play with.)

2. Fix/revert DBLs – They just feel too big, most of the wvw population and queuetimes are now centered around Eternal Battleground.

3. Rewards – I believe some sort of reward for doing what we WvW:ers LOVE would be nice. NOTE: I dont know if player kill-reward or NPC kill-reard would be best.

4. Skill balance – Not the highest prio right now. In the bigger picture things are working out decently. Some skills are very strong in certain situations, but nothing that needs a rush.

5.* Scoring* – When everything else works fine.

1. Skill Balance – At the moment, I think only Guardians, Necro, Ele, Rev ,and Druid are relevant in WvW with the other classes being too situational.

2. DBL – I’m all for the “Wow” factors of the new Desert maps but they absolutely have to be changed thoroughly to encourage fights THROUGHOUT the map rather than just the narrow lanes between keeps. However, I think it’s going to be extremely hard for the devs to cater to everything that the WvW community is asking for in the BLs. I imagine it will be a very back-and-forth patch-after-patch cycle if Anet decides to edit the Desert BLs. Maybe Anet will change some cliffs to be smaller, make keeps smaller, and put something else in the oasis event. I can guarantee that the first several changes will not be enough. I’m of the opinion that it would be so much better if the Alpine BLs come back with whatever small new additions Anet thinks will liven up the old BLs.

It’s important to note that the above 2 points absolutely have to keep the “fight-oriented” spirits of WvW

3. Rewards – I think the best way to implement a reward system in WvW would be to have something like PvP reward tracks with a WvW-exclusive legendary backpiece. I’d love it if the reward track gave some mats essential for Ascended crafting. Essentially, I don’t want to leave WvW in order to play WvW. Currently, I absolutely hate going into PvE to grind ingredients, gold, etc. to fund my WvW builds. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with PvE; it’s just that I do not enjoy fighting NPC mobs over and over. I know Anet has said in the past, “no one just plays one game mode”, but believe me, there are tons of people like me who only leave WvW to do PvE dailies and grind gold/mats.

4. Population balance – I think this can only be solved by implementing all of the other points I have listed above as well as the dreaded megaserver/server-merging. I think, at this point, any server below Tier 4 has an unsustainably low population. Given that the WvW population as a whole has plummeted in the past year or so, I think there are too many servers. Who knows, if Anet completely nails this WvW overhaul, we might need more servers in the future, but I do not see this happening before the second coming of christ. I think Pop. balance is the most sensitive out of all of the issues because of server loyalty and the chance that friends may be separated. I suggest free server transfers for a few months and possibly delete Tier 8 servers (maybe even Tier 7 too) and allow those players to join any other Medium Pop. servers.

5. Fight-oriented design – Anet has obviously come off as being against this design in WvW, especially GvG/fight guilds. I think Anet should seriously rethink this direction of developing WvW. I truly thought Turtle/centaur/dragon banners were going to be a homerun until I saw what they did. They should absolutely be used to encourage fights by being a direct counter to siege. Turtle banner should have a skill that makes all/some nearby enemies immune to siege damage for a short period of time (solving the hated open-field siege situations). Dragon banners should be able to kill siege extremely fast and be able to kill arrow carts in unreachable spots – something that Ele’s Dragon’s Tooth did in the past. Please remove the unnecessary upgrades in SMC that frustrates everyone who plays WvW for the fights: Chilling fog, Airship, and Stealth fountain to be exact. I know a dev already struck down this idea but please please please reconsider the Private tag idea. There are players in WvW who like to take their runs very seriously and want to improve teamplay rather than running a massive train all over Ebg.

I think this is only my second or third time that I’ve posted on the GW2 forum. I’m posting only because I get the feeling that the devs are finally taking WvW development seriously for the first time in over a year and I want this greatest game mode in gaming history to bounce back.

I don’t want the old bl’s back they are utterly boring. My guess is within a month of reverting the same people will be back here crying about how wvw never gets anything new. Shrink the size of dbl, make it easier to get around on and most people will be fine with it.

i can assure you that no matter what happens, some will complain. You have to consider that because of this unbalanced system, many servers adapted in different ways. To some servers the old bl’s were a tactical advantage. But i can also appreciate to a larger server that can fill the new borderlands easily, it’s a fun new addition.

this isn’t a one size fits all scenario.

migellito.7301:

I’m just saying there are a lot of voices that aren’t here, and that those players matter too.

And… one would have to assume that the percentage of people for and against would scale proportionately.

How easily people forget what wvw was like prior to the release of HOT. Numbers were steadily declining back then due to complete player burn out and to few new players joining WvW. While its a shame new maps didnt pull numbers back in, we shouldn’t live in the delusion that people were happy. They werent. My point is a simple revert to maps that people were already leaving will not fix your problems. Honestly the first big departure from WvW occurred after the first season. Whether it was just due to massive match manipulations, or people running in WvW for unhealthy amounts of time, that is when the first departure happened. Normally that would rebound with new blood influx however when Eotm arrived new players largely went there and stayed. Whether it was due to numerous people in WvW telling new players to go there rather than teach them or just the draw of better rewards i cant say. Probably both.

This is my perspective from a now T7 server that used to be T2 back during the last WvW season.

1. Timezone balance – Currently in my T7 server, its quite common to join WvW only to find the entire map has been capped (including BL) and is fortified. A few players might get together and try retake a keep or a few towers and camps. If they havn’t been immediately rolled by a zerg 2-4 times their size, the points they take are simply flipped 10-30 mins later. You feel like you achieved nothing for the overall game. These days, when i decide to play WvW, if i see the map like that and there’s not many in my WvW guild online, i don’t bother joining WvW.

There’s currently no incentive to stay and defend rather than capture other points. Even though you’re not really able to contribute to the overall game score by capping points (as they will be flipped back again shortly anyway), its something to do and you at least get some decent wxp and loot. Even if you decide to defend, its hard and often merely ends up delaying the attackers a little bit. You ultimately fail and seems like a waste of time. It would be better to let them cap quickly, so you can then flip it back asap, as well as get loot and wxp. Furthermore, there’s no real reward for defending. Even if you stay and defend, managing to hold off against impossible odds, there’s practically no reward compared to attacking. Maybe, if you fail to defend, you could be rewarded for how long you held out, (non-linearly) scaled by the number of attackers. If you successfully defend, you get the same reward as if you captured the objective.

Attacking is also way too easy. Sieging a tower should be hard, let alone a keep. I think defending players should get a buff if there are less than 5 at the objective. This would allow 2-3 players defending to put up a good fight against 10 attacking players. Part of making siege harder, could also involve increasing the cost of siege. This would prevent players from spamming it.

2. Stability – There’s not much more i can add here that the thread hasn’t already addressed. The only thing i would like is a bit more of a visual hint/aid to display when a player has gone invulnerable or has stability. I currently find it really hard to track the boons/conditions as they shift in the bar when they are added or removed. It also means i need to take my eyes off the fight and what i’m doing. I feel like boons need to be on a different row. Or certain boons need to always appear in the same place.

3. Rewards – I covered a bit of this in (1), but a simple answer is reward tracks. Defending needs more reward, as well as skirmishing. Scouting needs a form of reward, but this might be hard to implement.

4. DBL maps – I dont actually think the new DBL maps are all that bad. There’s is some issues with them, but overall they are decent maps. Perhaps they can be put on a random rotation, so each BL gets a different map. However, given that many people like the old BL maps better, and you would need to fix them anyway (to add them into a rotation), it might be better to just update the old BL maps to HoT.

5. Scoring – I think scoring, while an issue, has no major impact on the enjoyability or fun of WvW. The things that make WvW less enjoyable or break the game mode, need to be addressed first. Though if they introduce WvW seasons again, this would need to be fixed.

1. Alpine, Alpine, Alpine. They were constructed well, and would work better for the lower numbers of people we currently have playing. It might even bring back some who have left! I think Desert was great in concept, but we don’t have the population to sustain it. Even in T1. There are too many chokes, too many height differences, too many massive defensive opportunities, too many… just… ugh. Alpine would also give us opportunities to fight open field, and made life far easier for roamers. Do keep PPK on, though.

2. The amount of CCs that exist in WvW right now is off the chain. If stab could have its own WvW split, so it didn’t mess with raids or whatever, that’d be great.

3. Reward tracks would be great. They don’t need to grant dungeon tokens, if you wanted to keep those pvp-specific, but just… something. Anything. Maybe wvw finishers, tonics, minis, backpieces, etc. We also need to see a return of the mist weapons that tourneys rewarded. Maybe tie a collection to them, to give folks something to work on.

4. Population still needs to be addressed. We need people together who want to play, and not a few people on a few servers shouting into the abyss. Ditch transfer fees, reset glicko, and let the tiers adjust themselves

Nightshade.2570:

How easily people forget what wvw was like prior to the release of HOT. Numbers were steadily declining back then due to complete player burn out and to few new players joining WvW. While its a shame new maps didnt pull numbers back in, we shouldn’t live in the delusion that people were happy. They werent. My point is a simple revert to maps that people were already leaving will not fix your problems. Honestly the first big departure from WvW occurred after the first season. Whether it was just due to massive match manipulations, or people running in WvW for unhealthy amounts of time, that is when the first departure happened. Normally that would rebound with new blood influx however when Eotm arrived new players largely went there and stayed. Whether it was due to numerous people in WvW telling new players to go there rather than teach them or just the draw of better rewards i cant say. Probably both.

I dont think anyone has forgotten. I am not aware of anyone who wants to stay with the Alpine maps forever, they just want them back while they fix the other problems and test the other maps in beta and do not release them until the players actually like them this time, not force players to be stuck with the DBLs while they work on it like they did last time, as many consider them unplayable all together and if not resolved in April, they are not waiting for them any longer and have lost all faith they will ever get going in the right direction.

New players went to EoTM to level and leave for the most part, not stay. Most of the players left WvW prior due to siege humping, lack of PPK being more valuable than PPT, and class balance issues.

Peazomanco.7259:

4.- It is the hardest thing in my opinion, this is a personal choice from each player I´d merge some of the less populated servers and leave 18 servers in EU. Letting this population join other server with same flag.

This is us (rank 17) against rank 21:
If we were merged half of us wouldn’t be able to play as we’d stuck in a queue.
(Also we’re speaking different languages)

ETA: Didn’t really get your last sentence in the first read through. Then thought that this might actually work, then had a look at the ranks and servers – that would lead to another imbalance: We could merge the french servers and there’s enough lower EU servers to be merged with higher EU servers, only one lower German server and no Spanish server – I don’t know if you get my point: Some servers would get a pretty big influx of players and they’re not that weak already.

in gw1 scoring was everything, it made gvg an esport – the competitive players left because all of the esport gw1 created, didn’t come to gw2. so yeah, wvw can be fun with no score, but that does nothing for bringing the competitive players back who want their name in lights. – to say people shouldn’t want their name in lights is to say people shouldn’t like esports. some people don’t like esports, i’m not into esports myself – but i like playing competitively on a casual level. so score is sorta kinda meaningful to me in a being able to talk about it in lions arch way lol – not an “OMG, forbes needs to cover my greatness” way. Pro esport guilds want recognition, by rolling stone if possible lol

DeWolfe.2174:

migellito.7301:

I’m just saying there are a lot of voices that aren’t here, and that those players matter too.

And… one would have to assume that the percentage of people for and against would scale proportionately.

IF the percentages scaled proportionally then the list the dev’s have now would be accurate…which I think there list is extremely accurate so hopefully they stick to it

1. Bring back Alpine BL, desert bl’s are godawful

2. Rewards

3. More Tournaments, why even care to win atm?

4. Better scoring system

5. No stupid gimmicks, keep it simple stupid

Well, here’s some more spittle in the sea:

1. Stability: I’ve written on the subject of the stability change numerous times and I don’t want to be repeating myself. The short version is: Yes, correcting Stability as a high priority is a good thing. I can come up with a few fixes, but the simplest solution, as far as I can tell (no coder, here), would be an icd on stack loss. That said, there is still way more hard cc and more aoe in the game than there was before. This would not return fights to the fashion of days of yore, but it would allow some nuanced melee engagement, which is exceedingly rare past a certain size threshold right now, and which ideally would discourage excessive clustering.

2. Borderlands: Prior posts suggested that the Alpine maps were being adjusted to mesh with HoT changes, which I must assume refers to automatic waypoints (not a good idea) and inability to use multiple keep waypoints on a map (not a good idea). These changes reflected a shift in the theory of the Borderland. Previously, the BL was designed to give the owning server an advantage, which makes sense, inasmuch as it is your “home.” The current design seems to encourage each BL being split relatively evenly, like EBG. If waypoints are limited on the Alpine map, it will play “bigger” than before, like the DBL, as everyone will be running from spawn or one (frequently contested) keep.

I do not want to see the DBL thrown away. As much as I prefer the Alpine map, I also appreciate variety. However, as many have noted, the scope, complex floorplans, and other factors seem to suggest that the DBL was designed with a very high population in mind. It could be tweaked, both to be slightly shrunken, and to address some of the issues of verticality — there are too many places (especially within structures) to fall to one’s death, which constrains movement about the map and in fights. It “feels” narrower as a map, despite the size.

I would very much be in favor of seeing Alpine and Desert in a rotation. Hell, if ever we arrive at gigantic, overpopulated WvW megaservers, we could do seven maps at once. Ideally, though, and in the short term, let’s have them swapping weekly as soon as we can (don’t know if you have to pull the DBL from service in order to work on it or if you can do that in the lab).

3. Skill Balance and Bug Fixes: Truth be told, there are not too many skills (right now) that are out of line in WvW, but those that are could definitely use some attention. Fortunately, some of them see little use in instanced PvE or sPvP, so it ought not to be a difficult fix.

4. Environmental Stuff: Banners, airstrikes, daze lasers, crazy bosses, frost fields, cripple fields — it’s all too much. If a minute amount of this had been implemented, it might have been accepted (like, say, the little stealth valley), but it’s become overwhelming. The principal conflict in this mode must be PvP; the structures, regular NPCs, and land provide all the environment we need.

In this same vein can be addressed guild access to upgrades. The Scribing wall is odious.

I don’t have a #5. Population balance is a thorny issue. It doesn’t matter to me from a scoring perspective — you don’t win anything, and in fact the whole glicko/tier/dynamic matchup thing has a boatload of flaws and exists primarily to promote population movement (the only upside is that rare chance of facing a fresh opponent) — and that could probably be addressed with one of the scaling PPT plans people have proposed. I understand that folks have different — and clashing — perspectives here, and the matter does need to be addressed eventually, but that is something that can wait.

Who needs rewards?

None of this will bring back all the lost players; nor will it resurrect the game mode as we once knew it. We can better accept that such things must pass and that we must acclimate to changes if we see that this progress matches the vision of WvW that served it in its finest moments.

Jana.6831:

Peazomanco.7259:

4.- It is the hardest thing in my opinion, this is a personal choice from each player I´d merge some of the less populated servers and leave 18 servers in EU. Letting this population join other server with same flag.

This is us (rank 17) against rank 21:
If we were merged half of us wouldn’t be able to play as we’d stuck in a queue.
(Also we’re speaking different languages)

That is why I think a forced server merger isn’t going to solve the issue and they need maps that scale to population instead determined by all 3 servers in the match. start with one map in play, then as every server in the match hits 15 in queue they pop a new map every time the population increases. AS the population decreases those extra maps disappear within the hour. No server would be able to run up the score more than an hour with population imbalanced.

Would prevent server stacking as the one stacked server would be the only one in queue and never get to play as long as it stayed that way.

EDIT: In regards to your other post, they need to make it so members of your guild of specific ranks can organize parties for the commanders so they do not have to.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Want-the-old-maps-back-182-Signs/first

These players need to be included in the count, since many of these players are not going to come back here and repeat themselves again and are just waiting for it to happen.

1) Stability and skill balance – old stability was to OP and curent stability is too weak with all those CC’s flying everywhere, but what most people dont take in notice is that game is currently in a state that even if stability would be reverted to non stacking, melee trains like they were would not be possible anymore. Other classes are now too much powerfull for it to happen again. Back then, guards and warrior were the bosses because of survavibility and damage, now even tank wont survive more than 2 direct hits.
Reverting immediatelly stability to old system and working on skill balance in next weeks/months is the best way to keep people in WvW. People will still be interested, long time warriors and guardians could still play melee, small groups will have chance again against unorganised wvw blob which is just throwing CC around(and this is exactly why smaller organised groups have little,almost no chance, against unorganised blobs)
2) Alpine vs DBL – while common words against Alpine are that this map is old and boring, it really had much more group oriented fights where groups could fight. DBL with its narrow roads and canyons is not the best place for group fights, and yes massive battles means group fights not 1vs1.
Thinking about Alpine and DBL, Alpine would need some buffs.

• First it would need fortification of gates.
• Second it would need NPCs to get more health, specially dolyaks and lord guards(not lord). Gates and walls could use a buff to base health too, about EOTM health of base gate.
• Third, waypoints needs to change. All three keep waypoints on BL should be open only for home team. This is easy thinking, home team is the defender on this map and that means that home team is basicaly always 1vs2. Giving defenders a bit of chance to actually defend is a good thing and will make bay/hills much more strategic value for both teams.
  3) Rewards – you should probably reinvent those tournament tickets but this time just give them for winning a matchup. And drop some random stuff with even ascended quality to the vendor. Ascended helm for 400 tickets while you will get 100 ticket for winning a week? Yay finally some rewards for pure WvW players so they dont need to farm pve to get ascended or spend a lot of IRL money. It will still take some time in the week to do requirements for getting the reward, it will take time to get full set but it will be at least worth it. (legendary weapon for 1000 or 1500 tickets? so you either save tickets for legendary or get ascended?)
  4 and 5) population balance – for start keep PPK and PPT, with reverting stability and Alpine, keep it at least 1 month until things settles, in 2 weeks after the change get info how much is from PPT and how much from PPK and tune them so it will be about 50-50 between PPK and PPT.
  This will also help against nightcapping, while nightcapping still will be a thing, it wont matter as much as before.
  And even one week of failed nightcapping will then have a great inpact for the overall score if the other team is winning the rest of the week.

important is that if you want to change things, you need to change them fast, a lot of people quit the game, including me, because of not having fun in wvw anymore. If you want to be a roamer, EB is still the best place, if you want to be a small group organised player then you are sad as with stability and neccessary complex dbl its no longer fun, if you want to be blob fighter then you just dont care if its dbl or alpine and stability old or new. You just stand there and spam all skills.

My idea:
lets have
1 Eternal
2 Alpine
1 Desert Borderland