Guild Wars 2

MarMaster.6241:

Volkon played for a bit on a server that didn’t have 100% coverage, he left to go back to JQ.
He didn’t like the coverage holes.
You can see his perspective from that set of moves.

It wasn’t the coverage… even JQ has coverage holes. It was the fact that aside from FIRE no one there had a clue on how to win.

Each subsequent stack of the bloodlust buff should be smaller. Ex.

Minor Bloodlust: +45 stat increase (total)
Major Bloodlust: +75 stat increase (total)
Superior Bloodlust: +90 stat increase (total)

This would make the main benefit of have all 3 stacks denying the buff to your opponents while still giving your team a slight stat increase.

Also, the main problem with the buff now is the unbalanced match-ups. If match ups were more balanced (in terms of coverage) then I think the bloodlust buff wouldn’t have the issues with snowballing that it potentially has now.

I have played this game a ridiculous amount of hours, most of which has been in WvW. I think the borderland map changes are fantastic. I play on BG (have been there since launch) and in a relatively even match-up, the stat bonuses are no big deal. This may turn into a long thread, and I hope my appreciation for these changes are not lost in the discussion. There are bugs that need to be fixed, and hopefully they won’t take a year to get to. These changes add so much more dynamicism to the game and break up zerg tactics well.

My only concern is the imbalance between the bay side and the 2 western nodes and the hills side and the 2 eastern nodes. It’s still too early for us to determine this yet, but considering that each server has the same issue on their respective map, this may not be a big deal.

VOLKON.1290:

insanemaniac.2456:

VOLKON.1290:

Does anyone else realize that we’re only taking about a perfect damage increase potential of only a couple percent here? Far less than a single weapon hit and easily mitigated through normal means? It’s less than it was going from exotic to ascended items.

1 orb for me instead of 1 orb against me is the difference between me soloing an unupgraded camp without even using my heal and me not only needing my heal, but also my supply crate.

thats HUGE. and its only the effect of 1 orb. 3 is plain ridiculous.

Hmm… I’m going to have to play with the math. I’m sensing large levels of exaggeration here.

i was taking camps for about an hour last night. i circled AR bl 3x while seeing 2 enemy players (2 engis, 1 uplvl who tried once to kill me while taking a camp… while i had 3 orb buff, 1 who was more interested in being a bunker in the middle of nowhere and didnt follow me at all after we unsatisfactorily drew in a waste of 2 mins) and 1 friendly who did the last 2 camps with me. 1 enemy was trailing me 3 camps behind, just recapping… until i started buying caravan guards and he could no longer solo. 5 minutes later or so, 2-3 AR started capping again but never tried to cut me off.

at the beginning, i had 3 orbs. it dwindled down to -2 orbs vs AR, ending at -1 orb.

i have maxed both guard lines and have 4 offensive and 3 defensive wvw infusions.

i am not exaggerating. i solo camps a lot. and the orb mechanic has introduced a bad inconsistency, not to mention the fact that 2 days ago i would have been cut off somewhere around after hitting 3-6 camps by 2-5 AR (but thats prolly due to shiny newness i hope).

Why do NPCs get the buff too? That seems like adding insult to injury.

As a solo player, hitting a supply camp with no upgrades was a 9 out of 10 times success rate. I tried 2 last night when they had the +150 and got my butt handed to me.

Anyone else have a similar experience?

Kincaidia.3192:

Why do NPCs get the buff too? That seems like adding insult to injury.

As a solo player, hitting a supply camp with no upgrades was a 9 out of 10 times success rate. I tried 2 last night when they had the +150 and got my butt handed to me.

Anyone else have a similar experience?

yes, but fortunately my match hasnt yet snowballed into boring and our buffs still flip around. 3 orb camps are about as hard now with full guard lines as they were pre-orb with no guard lines.

DevonCarver.5370:

Fuzzion.2504:

Regarding the changes

In the positive

1. Roaming has become way more fun
2. Adding stat bonus as a reward is a good step forward
3. Added incentive to WvWvW
4. Use of heights as strategy was factored in during the map design
5. Greatly increased the need for everyone on that particular map to work in unison
6. Surprise tactics by rushing on said occupied point creates anticipatory jitters
7. Some use of water combat is still in-play
8. Felt like I was playing in an entirely new map. It was a good feeling for the stalemate feeling we had in the BL.

In the negative

1. Roaming has become harder for duos or singles
2. Stat Bonus is too much. 25 would be better than 50.
3. Increased Lag reported by all players
4. falling off the map into unintended areas ,i.e. map glitch
5. 3 out of 5 cap points should be increased to 4 out of 5 to balance reward and sacrifice

Overall, I think the WvWvW team are heading in the right direction.

-Fuzz

Fuzz, thanks for the feedback. A couple of responses:
1) The lag is an issue we are aware of and a result of a bug we will fix as soon as possible.
2) Please report any and all places you can fall out of the map or get stuck. We will continue to address those as we can.
3) The buff is something we will continue to think about. There are alternative frameworks for the buff that I think we will at least look into.
4) For now, we will stay with 3/5 because it makes it easier to capture and harder to hold. If it turns out that this doesn’t function the way we intend it to, we will re-evaluate it accordingly.
5) Roaming in the middle is absolutely more difficult, however, travelling the edges of the map shouldn’t have become any more difficult. At least that’s how it played for me yesterday.

Again, thanks for the input, and for playing.

Are you kidding me? Why do you write only in Posts with good feedback? Do you read the other 100 Threads how bad the new WvW stuff is?? 80 % of your WvW Players don’t like that stat boost. Why stat boost? Such an silly idea. I mean, why not loot boost or boost which reduced damage of siege? Or stat boost for Servers as inferiority buff. I can’t understand you. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the work you (Arena Net) did, but in the last three patches you go into the wrong way! Why do you do nothing about the 727493920 Threads oh whinning and the bad review ypu get. Or the good ideas there are?? I don’t understand it. So many good ideas, and then choose stat boost? Lol.
It’s a shame what happened to this great game in the last time. Why can’t you make a new Map without new dumb ideas like stat boost? Hope you get my point, and the point of the other 2748493 threads about this patch. Remove this buff and do something against the lags. Then, all will be happy.
Thanks.

2 things which need to be removed:

Buff. Lag.

Lag is self explanatory, if you haven’t stacked survival stats and used to rely on your own personal skills, you now have no chance to live with the skill delay.

Stats buff is a really bad idea.

Not only from the receiving end of it. Yes, it gives players an advantage over their opponents for free. And yes the server has to gain the buffs, but the majority of players receiving the buff probably had nothing to do with attaining it.

Why is this bad? Apart from the obvious free and unfair advantage over the other servers, it holds no real value to the buff bearer.

There is a lot of player satisfaction from working hard to perfect your characters build and gear, working towards this and achieving your end build is a real achievement.

There is value in this, because it has been hard work to develop your character. A free 150 buff to all stats completely devalues the work you have put into your character.

Can’t you just turn it into 150% MF? Or a point system and the winner at the end of the season wins a skin? Or something like that?

These changes certainly changed the dynamics of WvW which is good, since it was getting a little static. I’m curious to see how the Bloodlust buff plays out.

But I too agree the stat bonuses weren’t necessary.

As others have said: I do not think the buff is the root of the problem. It’s the massive population imbalance between the servers. Actually the buff is a nice idea IF all servers were (nearly) equally balanced.

However, as we all know this is not the case. In fact things are getting worse and worse. Players and guilds are transfering to high-pop servers. Because, frankly, it is currently the only way to get experience WvW in a balanced way.

We often ask: what can we do to fix this? I fear the answer is: we cannot. It’s too late. If there had been population caps right from the beginning the population would have spread out. But such a system without any caps WILL result in population balances in the long run, even accelerating the wider the gap becomes. It is an inherent problem.

GW2 is by far not the first game suffering from this kind of problem. Ignoring this problem and believing that things will work out by themselves is kinda … well … especially if you dare to look beyond one’s own nose.

Now that we have this situation the only solution IMHO would be to split the servers into dedicated WvW and PvE servers and disable WvW on the PvE servers. Super radical, for sure, but the only option to keep WvW “balanced”. Also it would give a clear message to the player: Wanna WvW? Go here.

I really feel Devon should have retracted that comment with an apology to the community. It just comes across as arrogant and out of touch.

That being said, this recent update really goes to show how important a test server really is.

DevonCarver.5370:

Fuzzion.2504:

Regarding the changes

In the positive

1. Roaming has become way more fun
2. Adding stat bonus as a reward is a good step forward
3. Added incentive to WvWvW
4. Use of heights as strategy was factored in during the map design
5. Greatly increased the need for everyone on that particular map to work in unison
6. Surprise tactics by rushing on said occupied point creates anticipatory jitters
7. Some use of water combat is still in-play
8. Felt like I was playing in an entirely new map. It was a good feeling for the stalemate feeling we had in the BL.

In the negative

1. Roaming has become harder for duos or singles
2. Stat Bonus is too much. 25 would be better than 50.
3. Increased Lag reported by all players
4. falling off the map into unintended areas ,i.e. map glitch
5. 3 out of 5 cap points should be increased to 4 out of 5 to balance reward and sacrifice

Overall, I think the WvWvW team are heading in the right direction.

-Fuzz

Fuzz, thanks for the feedback. A couple of responses:
1) The lag is an issue we are aware of and a result of a bug we will fix as soon as possible.
2) Please report any and all places you can fall out of the map or get stuck. We will continue to address those as we can.
3) The buff is something we will continue to think about. There are alternative frameworks for the buff that I think we will at least look into.
4) For now, we will stay with 3/5 because it makes it easier to capture and harder to hold. If it turns out that this doesn’t function the way we intend it to, we will re-evaluate it accordingly.
5) Roaming in the middle is absolutely more difficult, however, travelling the edges of the map shouldn’t have become any more difficult. At least that’s how it played for me yesterday.

Again, thanks for the input, and for playing.

Thank you for your reply.

-Fuzz

Did they remove Doiid’s post ?
There were a lot of good questions in it.

Samhayn.2385:

honestly what could anet say to you that would make you happy? Sorry we will roll back this requested (yeah people asked for something like this) change that took months to complete because people raged on the forums? If they caved to every whiner after every patch we would be still playing the day one release version of this game.

If it seriously took them months of full-time work to put out this update they need to hire more than 2 dudes to do WvW stuff. If they lent a Living World team to the WvW team we’d probably have an entirely new map, not a remodelled section in the middle.

I’m from Picken Square server. We’re currently ranked nr.3 server, but until last week we were on steady 6th place and allot of people don’t exactly know how we suddenly jumped 3 positions but w/e.
We are playing against Vizunah Square which finished more then 2/3rds of their matchups as nr.1 server and Augury Rock which is placed 9th…

So, as far as the proposed leagues go, in our case we have a full spread.. Statistically the best server in the world, a server in the middle of the league and a server at the very bottom… One would assume that from all the doomsday prophecies that are floating on the forums Vizunah would keep all 3 buffs almost all of the time with Piken Square nabbing an orb every now and then, but the reality of the situation is that as soon as people started logging in (~9AM GMT) the orbs constantly changed hands… I’ve kept a close eye on the orbs situation and so far I’ve yet to see anyone get more then 2 orbs.. In fact, for the last hour or two it is Augury Rock that holds 2 orbs…

@all angry people: Could you please help me understand what am I missing ?

I don’t like the new capture points so far.

1)All people want to do is rotate through the points and gank each other, mostly because:

2) The Bloodlust mechanic is not clear. I play with quite a few WvW veterans, and most of them misunderstood how the Bloodlust mechanic worked (they thought you had to keep three of the points capped at all times to retain the buff). This could be made clearer.

3) I think the terrain could have been better utilized to grant access to the capture points from the water trenches and subterranean paths, rather than always having to be above-ground when approaching the points. The closest thing to this is the coliseum point, which has two access points from the surrounding water, but even there, the player is completely above ground approaching the point. This would go a long way toward allowing ambushes and more effective hiding and escape routes.

4) The water trenches are aggravating, as they make movement more tedious than it needs to be. If you are moving directly from one capture point to another, you are probably trying to move across the trenches. However, the trenches are just wide enough that they cannot be jumped from level terrain, even with a dodge-jump.

Some minor stuff, but they’re things that might be possible to improve.

MandJ.8965:

DevonCarver.5370:

Fuzzion.2504:

Regarding the changes

In the positive

1. Roaming has become way more fun
2. Adding stat bonus as a reward is a good step forward
3. Added incentive to WvWvW
4. Use of heights as strategy was factored in during the map design
5. Greatly increased the need for everyone on that particular map to work in unison
6. Surprise tactics by rushing on said occupied point creates anticipatory jitters
7. Some use of water combat is still in-play
8. Felt like I was playing in an entirely new map. It was a good feeling for the stalemate feeling we had in the BL.

In the negative

1. Roaming has become harder for duos or singles
2. Stat Bonus is too much. 25 would be better than 50.
3. Increased Lag reported by all players
4. falling off the map into unintended areas ,i.e. map glitch
5. 3 out of 5 cap points should be increased to 4 out of 5 to balance reward and sacrifice

Overall, I think the WvWvW team are heading in the right direction.

-Fuzz

Fuzz, thanks for the feedback. A couple of responses:
1) The lag is an issue we are aware of and a result of a bug we will fix as soon as possible.
2) Please report any and all places you can fall out of the map or get stuck. We will continue to address those as we can.
3) The buff is something we will continue to think about. There are alternative frameworks for the buff that I think we will at least look into.
4) For now, we will stay with 3/5 because it makes it easier to capture and harder to hold. If it turns out that this doesn’t function the way we intend it to, we will re-evaluate it accordingly.
5) Roaming in the middle is absolutely more difficult, however, travelling the edges of the map shouldn’t have become any more difficult. At least that’s how it played for me yesterday.

Again, thanks for the input, and for playing.

Are you kidding me? Why do you write only in Posts with good feedback? Do you read the other 100 Threads how bad the new WvW stuff is?? 80 % of your WvW Players don’t like that stat boost. Why stat boost? Such an silly idea. I mean, why not loot boost or boost which reduced damage of siege? Or stat boost for Servers as inferiority buff. I can’t understand you. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the work you (Arena Net) did, but in the last three patches you go into the wrong way! Why do you do nothing about the 727493920 Threads oh whinning and the bad review ypu get. Or the good ideas there are?? I don’t understand it. So many good ideas, and then choose stat boost? Lol.
It’s a shame what happened to this great game in the last time. Why can’t you make a new Map without new dumb ideas like stat boost? Hope you get my point, and the point of the other 2748493 threads about this patch. Remove this buff and do something against the lags. Then, all will be happy.
Thanks.

+1 to this. It is quite annoying that the one developer assigned to serve the WvW community cherry picks out posts instead of addressing the real issues.

ArenaNet obviously does not understand what they have created in WvW and therefore they continue to make changes that make little sense to the community.

I really hope they bring back the quaggans and remove this new BL bullkitten.

Kincaidia.3192:

Why do NPCs get the buff too? That seems like adding insult to injury.

As a solo player, hitting a supply camp with no upgrades was a 9 out of 10 times success rate. I tried 2 last night when they had the +150 and got my butt handed to me.

Anyone else have a similar experience?

Well, now instead of just taking camps you also have the ability to take the ruins (they are quite easy to take on your own) which is quite good since taking camp after camp after camp does feel quite repetitive after a few hours.

If you have issue with buffed camps simply take the buff on the map in order to buff yourself and unbuff (a bit at least) the camp.

DevonCarver.5370:

Fuzz, thanks for the feedback. A couple of responses:
1) The lag is an issue we are aware of and a result of a bug we will fix as soon as possible.
2) Please report any and all places you can fall out of the map or get stuck. We will continue to address those as we can.
3) The buff is something we will continue to think about. There are alternative frameworks for the buff that I think we will at least look into.
4) For now, we will stay with 3/5 because it makes it easier to capture and harder to hold. If it turns out that this doesn’t function the way we intend it to, we will re-evaluate it accordingly.
5) Roaming in the middle is absolutely more difficult, however, travelling the edges of the map shouldn’t have become any more difficult. At least that’s how it played for me yesterday.

Again, thanks for the input, and for playing.

Dear devon,

I got some questions and comments for you:

1) What kind of bug may this be? A ’’bug’’ as in terrain causing lags? How exactly do you want to fix this ’’bug’’?

2) When and how did you change your minds about buffing the strongest server? Especially when you said yourself it (the orbs in this case) needed lots of work and would not be added again to the game untill you found a good solution .

3) The roaming part was not based on terrain or objectives being harder to roam, but due the extreme statt increase it becomes either really boring and easy by facerolling with +150 stats, or really hard/boring. Especially when fully tank classes get another 150 to everything making them more tanky and able to do more damage.

4) Since ‘’leaked information’‘, aka a link to a post you made, is forbidden to post on forum, I wont post the link here. But I’m quite sure you know what I’m talking about:
***The main question would be: What kind of users actually comment on the forum? Elite players or casuals? I’m quite sure most of the people can answer that question themselves.
Now the problem is that casual players mostly don’t really bother doing work to create a ‘’better game’‘. Simply because they don’t know most of the problems or don’t really bother them cause they do exactly what this game is all about at the moment (sadly): ’’zerging’’.
Basicly in every content of the game, zerging is the way to go.
But that’s not really what point I’m trying to make here. You describe the people who give critism/feedback as a ’’minority’’ and you basicly say you don’t care about them as long as you don’t see drops in people playing. And yes, of course we are a minority. In every game, it’s always a minority reporting problems.
Just a recent example: When Rome total war 2 was released, CA also said only 2% of all people reported problems, while probably everyone had in their minds there was a lot wrong with the game.
Same goes for GW2 at the moment. Only a minority want to adress the problems to actually improve the game, while at least 40% (And I’m quite sure it’s much more) of the actual player base knows there are things wrong with the game.

Doiid

The ruins and the buff were a good idea to address zerg balling. It breaks up the terrain and gives incentive to break into smaller groups. It also works as something besides a fort to trade. One serve has more PPT and defends while another has stronger players from the stat boost, giving them more potential to take a PPT lead, but then also forfiet the buff by not defending it.

It does not address the problem of coverage being far more important than anything else. It just makes that problem worse. But it was already pretty bad. However, complaining that a change doesn’t fix something it wasn’t intended to fix is a bit silly.

Where’s the incentive to try against the odds in WvW when you know you can’t win due to coverage? I can go do PvE to make money or sPvP if I want an even competition.

actually, as nice as the new areas are for zerg breaking and smaller scale tactics, the maps are too small in size with the points much too close together to support the current number of players from each side allowed onto them. Not to mention that lower WvW map population caps would actually solve a ton of other issues, lag and forcing super stacks to break-up or face large queues being foremost amongst them. Being outmanned in off peak hours would be less detrimental if it was by 20 instead of 40.

For people jonesing for huge epic zerg lagtastic battles, they could keep EBs cap higher but the borderlands really need to be adjusted downwards for the new center caps to work effectively. The zerg can still run amok thru the center and defend at bay, hills and gari when needed without breaking apart. It is obvious they can’t make the maps bigger so lets have less people in there to ball up so we can see better small scale action.

Of course it is to late if Leagues are coming next month. I think those ought to be delayed a month while this stuff settles down as any gold medal in the middle of a meta shift isn’t really going to mean all that much.

Torasan.6029:

no stat bonus IS NOT A GOOD IDEA… haven’t you been reading the other 9000+ posts in this forum.

we want fair fights not unfair fights. that means NO STAT BONUSES whatsoever in wvw!

Why would you go to WvW for fair fights? You say that but you play an arena which favours:

• Coverage. The server with the most players playing during the most times will win.
• Levelling. Quite often roamers will be fighting sub-80 players. It’s part of their goals to pick on and kill low weaker players, even in groups. The majority of WvW players are not roamers. The majority of people I see killed in roaming videos (usually in groups) are not roamers. WvW is the PvP map you can bring your friend who doesn’t normally play PvP but suddenly can because they can have success with enough allies.
• Gear grind. Ascended gives you a distinct advantage, even exotics will. It can be quite expensive to acquire exotic level gear for a certain build (a lot of PvE rangers will never acquire gear sets that work well in WvW because they don’t cross over well to PvE, PTV is a bad gear set for a lot of dungeon warriors/guardians because it makes content harder by causing you to hit for far less).
• A reliance on imbalanced food buffs. When balancing the classes for competitive combat no consideration is made for food buffs. The condition/stun duration reduction foods would be crazy broken in sPvP. If a player can’t afford to maintain food buffs all the time they are at a disadvantage.
• Characters built for different roles. A roaming thief is almost certainly going to win against a zerging staff ele simply because of what they are built for. The ele would be far more useful in big group fights, but the thief is 100% built for roaming combat. In no way is that a fair fight. Also consider that WvW uses the same builds as PvE so quite a large number of players will never retrait when going to WvW. What’s best for WvW is almost never best for PvE.
• Lots of fights (prior to this update) revolved around defending or attacking a tower or keep. This usually gives one side an advantage over the other.

Face it, people don’t go to WvW for fair fights. That’s what sPvP is for. There is almost nothing about WvW that is fair and that was always the case before bloodlust.

The 150 stats issue will be , without a shadow of a doubt, be reduced.

Anet prefers to start either low or high. Note that i do not use the the word “very”.

I will say playing my DnD ele has now forced me to go even more bunker with the new stat builds. Warrs are insane when they get all 3 buffs.