Guild Wars 2

Deniara Devious.3948:

Anybody knows where one can view the stream? I was on a work trip for few days, so I missed it.

While it is great that WvWvW finally gets attention and the live stream is a superbly good idea, the summary on this thread sounds like a nightmare come true.

Keeping the BL maps as small, but practically eliminating the lake + adding more objectives around where the lake should be is a really bad idea:
- the side with bigger numbers will have a superior advantage
- offering the leading side map wide boosts is the bad idea (read below)

We already have called Power of Mists and I consider it has an educational example of failed game design. The winning side shouldn’t have any bonuses, which make the winning even easier. Luckily the stat bonuses are rather small, thus it is not entirely game-breaking. But now adding a similar system on top of it could easily create a snowballing effect. The winning side gets even more morale, encouragement to utterly trash and steam roll the outnumbered side. The side with much less players seems the challenge as Mount Impossible and goes back to pve. Combination Power of Mists, the new proposed system and Applied Fortitude + Guard Leech WXP traits could be devastating for small scale and solo roaming (one side / player having enormous stat boosts compared to no/almost no boosts).

In the current system matches are generally decided already within the first few days from reset, now the proposed system might make this even worse.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Power_of_the_Mists

(In a well designed system this should be the opposite and probably completely random e.g. the more your server is behind in points, it has a better likelyhood to gain some minor buff points e.g. +4% to healing power or health. Thus giving a better chance for a comeback and higher likelihood of really even matchups).

Here are question for the devs:

1. Where can we have large scale underwater combat if / when the lake gets more or less eliminated?
The lake provided a different combat experience (variety is good!) and siege free environment (a lot of players really hate the abundant siege wars, but Arenanet doesn’t seem to listen to them). The current pond in Eternal Battlegrounds is pitifully small and few very players reside there. The Raid on the Capricorn map in pvp is very small and the underwater is very small part of that map. So where is the underwater combat?!

2. Any plans to give players ability reset WXP traits?
(this could be a good money / badge / karma sink)

3. Any plans to tone down overpowered WXP traits?
( +250 to vitality, added power + condition damage, +25% damage buffs, 1.5x radius—> 2.25 times area etc. are obviously way too good to be true)

4. Any plans to balance the professions for WvWvW?
(Now it is obvious that some professions are much more frequent than others and also requested by good commanders, who might tell that that profession XXX is not needed)

1.Nobody wants underwater combat. The majority loathes it. capricon is that way > > >.

2.Hope so.

3.If the do then they should remove consumables+ sigil stacking on pve mobs.

4. lol, no. They haven’t broken the stealth mechanics after numerous hundreds upon hundreds of complaints which lead to people quitting. Why do you think they should do so now? They have to lose money and then they will pressured to do something.

The key points I’m getting…

• GvG needs to return in its own format with leader boards. Needs to not be server specific. May need the completion of the new LFG tool first in order to work.
• WvW needs a reward after winning match ups. Shifts focus onto winning.
• Orb mechanic can then give points boost rather than stat boost.

Maybe gem rewards for winning? Small amounts like 25 for winning 17 for 2nd and 8 for 3rd?

Eligibility would need to be establish. Maybe off the daily system?

i think there could be 2 simple changes to fix all this:

- put direct access from outside WvW to the EB jumping puzzle instead of the entrances through the keeps.
- make some terrain changes there so there is a suitable arena to duke it out – including spectators standing nearby like at windmill, this is part of the great gvg feeling.

/yawn, not real changes

Castaliea.3156:

AndrewSX.3794:

Castaliea.3156:

WvW isn’t intented to be PvP. It’s meant to be WvW.

Which is where afterall the 2 positions are different.

WvW is PvP with some sieging, control and whatnot attached

- or

Sieging, controlling, managing and whatnot with PvP attached

?

You missed the point.

Naw i think you or Anet(I think you worded to say that Anet intends it to be non PvP) is over complicating the meaning of PvP which is player vs players. So if players are vs players in any form it’s PvP. You can name it something different to make it a special type of PvP but it’s and always will be PvP unless we start fighting nothing but non player controlled enemies.

KarlusDavius.1024:

Maybe gem rewards for winning? Small amounts like 25 for winning 17 for 2nd and 8 for 3rd?

Eligibility would need to be establish. Maybe off the daily system?

Gem rewards is, in my opinion, not a very good idea. As they are now, they make a decent barometer for how the economy’s going, and amounts like 25gems is trivially small.

Also, I don’t think having participation and victory tied together is a good idea. That will encourage stronger blowouts. Have rewards at the end of the week in two ‘chests’;

Chest 1’s the server score-based chest. Give it maybe the same contents as a Solid Ocean end chest and a FotM reward chest put together, with roughly the same contents; Ascended gear, crafting mats, a few currencies and a few pieces of loot. You get a small chest for coming third, a medium chest for coming second, and a large chest for coming first, but the rewards aren’t really anything that you couldn’t have gotten elsewhere. Encourage people to drop in for maybe an hour a week and they get enough credit for it; something to get people’s feet wet.

Chest 2’s the personal contribution chest. Have a big chart detailing everything that the player got involved in, and give some really meaty rewards which scale directly with personal contribution, including things like fancy models which can’t be gotten any other way, high chances of an Ascended piece or two, good chances for Superior siege, etc.

Optionally, a third chest for taking and holding a location for your guild, which grants guild commendations, guild rewards, etc. Claiming an objective just so you can give it +5 supply and that being the lot of it seems silly to me.

Asudementio.8526:

A list of added content:
-5 objectives in the borderlands lake, 3 of them give an orb buff if held together.

I really see no real substantial updates to WvW. I don’t see people spending their time trying to hold 3 of 5 objectives(esp. on low pop servers) SIMPLY to have some buff that in itself probably won’t be very substantial. It being similar to the importance of running yaks for upgrading towers/keeps and most players do not find escorting yaks fun at all…

I’m disappointed that there aren’t any new maps for WvW, to give more variety and strategy to the WvW player-base.

I think ANet have to pull their heads out of the sand and realize there are plenty of people who exclusively play WvW, have no real interest in PvE (and even SPvP) content. Just as there are role-players and die-hard PvE players out there that have no real interest in WvW. Yet Anet cater predominantly to the PvE crowd with all this living story content. Yet Anet cater as well to sPvP, arenas and the like.

Rankings are nice and all, but I still feel WvW is getting the shaft and from observation it seems they’re killing the WvW player-base slowly.

Emmet.2943:

Castaliea.3156:

AndrewSX.3794:

Castaliea.3156:

WvW isn’t intented to be PvP. It’s meant to be WvW.

Which is where afterall the 2 positions are different.

WvW is PvP with some sieging, control and whatnot attached

- or

Sieging, controlling, managing and whatnot with PvP attached

?

You missed the point.

Naw i think you or Anet(I think you worded to say that Anet intends it to be non PvP) is over complicating the meaning of PvP which is player vs players. So if players are vs players in any form it’s PvP. You can name it something different to make it a special type of PvP but it’s and always will be PvP unless we start fighting nothing but non player controlled enemies.

No. I’m not. What I think people are oversimplifying is WvW. The post before did a good job of pointing how different’y people view it but that’s the very problem. People get so caught up in the proper way to view or define it they split it up into categories instead of looking at it as a whole. I use to look at WvW as “PvP on a massive scale” but that doesn’t do WvW justice.

To use the examples above;
Siege=PvP=Controlling=Managing=WvW
not
Siege+PvP+Controlling+Managing=WvW

It’s a fine difference but a major one. WvW is not made up of all of these things. WvW is all of these things.

Personally, I think people have a really hard time coming to terms with is how Siege is PvP and PvP is Siege. We all have predefined notions of what these things are and view them as such different entities they could never be the same when in fact, they are.

WvW is all those things, but the real issue is the balance between the parts.

Controlling as point scoring mechanic, thus victory mechanic, means “who have most coverage wins”.

Siege is a core feature of wvw, and it’s ok, but there’s a difference in having it playing a role on the scene and the current Siege War.

And managing atm is just “where should my zoneblob go?”, not the “let’s split up and hit 3 places at same time”.

All in all, current situation is favouring Siege, Controlling and Managin over the plain PvP.

Some see it just as “It’s WvW that’s how should be played”, some as “I want to smash people bare hands in excting fights, how the hell this laggy blobbing 24/7 running from fights building ACs everywhere is a pvp game mode?”.

That’s it. And so far Anet is going to the route of favouring/changing WvW around the former.

AndrewSX.3794:

Some see it just as “It’s WvW that’s how should be played”, some as “I want to smash people bare hands in excting fights, how the hell this laggy blobbing 24/7 running from fights building ACs everywhere is a pvp game mode?”.
.

This is where I think it gets confusing. They’re both right.

The problem is that there is not enough objectives to warrant splitting up that blob, or for smaller teams to engage in. This coming update gives more non-walled objectives for smaller groups to fight over while the larger blobs can tackle the larger objectives of the map. This also shrinks said blob. Another huge problem is that there is no tactical counter to this blob. I think this is the common problem people have and rightfully so. It doesn’t matter how well you play because a 50 man blob is always going to beat a 10 man blob. What if that 10 man blob had tools to tactically use against that mindless blob?

If you would be so kind as to read this post I made a long time ago;
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Real-tools-for-the-WvW-player/first#post2219173

A short quote for you here though;
“…Discourage zergs and then encourage smaller groups. This is not done with buffs or debuffs but through the use of tools enabling smaller groups to counter and destroy zergs with teamwork while at the same time encouraging smaller groups by giving more ways to effectively use supply and make a difference throughout the map.”

With this coming update we’re getting more ways to encourage smaller groups and to a lesser extent use supply. I believe they’re headed in the right direction with this. They’re not done but I do believe they are making progress. It may not be as fast as I want it to be but if they keep up with this I feel they’ll reach a good final product. I do have to admit I’m not a fan of some of these Mastery lines they’ve grown so fond of. They do not in any way advocate player roles.

Lastly, there is another group. There are those people that despise siege and don’t want to see any of it anywhere but at the same time want to blob and not deal with overwhelming numbers. Well I’m sorry but this is not in any way WvW.

The only issue: every single update in this year encouraged blobbing over splitting up. Placing new cap points is a start but if the size of map doesn’t grow (and it will not) that might actually worsen the issue, cause map gets more cluttered with a higher density of cap points, thus players.

I am guessing you guys noticed the quaggans were also gone?

Until Anet has competition in regards to WvW, they’ll do exactly what they want, when they want (they know if you want 3 factions, this is it pretty much).

While I don’t have high expectations for TESO, it will be sure to draw folks away, and if Camelot Unleashed turns out well, they’ll lose even more. Sadly, those two are a long way out.

Competition is good for the players, and right now, Anet has none.

Well, regarding the whole ‘Zerg’ mentality. There are Zergs that are just a collection of random people with limited coordination trying to overpower opponents with numbers, and then there are coordinated guilds out there that utilize game mechanics as provided by Anet to achieve a highly coordinated organized force with strategic mentality and objectives. I favor greatly the later.

Regardless, Anet created the game and mechanics to support grouping. Combinations and finishers. Such mechanics give clear advantage to those that use them properly. They won’t get rid of Zerg balls or highly coordinated guilds(especially) unless they change the mechanics of their game and remove such advantages caused by Combinations/finshers(etc..).

There are plenty of WvW guilds out there that play this game for the strategy and coordination of it(the use of combo fields/finishers etc), especially open-field battles. If you take that away, you’ll see a lot of guilds leave this game. If that’s what Anet wants to do, fine, but to me they’re killing their own WvW game if they take that approach.

Yamato Shinobi.4378:

Well, regarding the whole ‘Zerg’ mentality. There are Zergs that are just a collection of random people with limited coordination trying to overpower opponents with numbers, and then there are coordinated guilds out there that utilize game mechanics as provided by Anet to achieve a highly coordinated organized force with strategic mentality and objectives. I favor greatly the later.

Regardless, Anet created the game and mechanics to support grouping. Combinations and finishers. Such mechanics give clear advantage to those that use them properly. They won’t get rid of Zerg balls or highly coordinated guilds(especially) unless they change the mechanics of their game and remove such advantages caused by Combinations/finshers(etc..).

There are plenty of WvW guilds out there that play this game for the strategy and coordination of it(the use of combo fields/finishers etc), especially open-field battles. If you take that away, you’ll see a lot of guilds leave this game. If that’s what Anet wants to do, fine, but to me they’re killing their own WvW game if they take that approach.

The interesting thing is though, that while Anet created combos to encourage grouping, they did not intend them to be use as they are now by organized guilds.

If you go back to the videos of Johansen explaining the combo system, he said what he wanted to avoid was everyone stopping before or during a battle to get buffed in turn by the buff classes. The idea for combos was buffs would arise naturally during combat.

But with everything else in GW2 design, this starts to break down once you get large numbers of people.

What in facts happens now with combos? People stop before or during a battle while the buffers (field providers + blast finishers) do their thing and buff everyone in turn. Exactly the thing the system was designed to avoid. (Same with the anti-Trinity mechanics that large guild groups can bypass, but that is another story).

And as always with poor design in all avenues of life, it is the average person who misses out. Buffs on demand are only available to organized guilds whose commanders assign classes, and can call for fields and combos. With this system, PUGs just can’t do it, even though it is supposed to be a casual game.

Luna.9640:

Basically those 5 new cap points are like 5 new supply camps for thieves and people who love small scale skirmishes around the map tho can’t say clearly what will be the impact and magnitude of this wvw buff for holding them.

The Brotherhood is looking forward this new stuff. If well implemented it can be a new world of oportunities for roaming and ninja-ing guilds as us.

Best,

Haltair, one of the Twelve Shadows

Thrumdi.9216:

And as always with poor design in all avenues of life, it is the average person who misses out. Buffs on demand are only available to organized guilds whose commanders assign classes, and can call for fields and combos. With this system, PUGs just can’t do it, even though it is supposed to be a casual game.

Just recently my server has had some notable success getting PUG groups onto TS where the Commander (usually a guild commander on a break) has been able to use the proper tactics with a full zerg to great effect.

Of course, we still had a lot of loose people running about making a bit of a mess but on the whole the buffing, stacking and coordinated veiling went quite well.

Thrumdi.9216:

If you go back to the videos of Johansen explaining the combo system, he said what he wanted to avoid was everyone stopping before or during a battle to get buffed in turn by the buff classes. The idea for combos was buffs would arise naturally during combat.

That sounds like PvE talk to me. It makes sense for casual PvE content for the system to work in such a way.

Though, we’re talking WvW, which is a different form of game-play. If the developers didn’t intend for groups of people to use the combo/buff system as it is now in the game for WvW, then they should have created different rules for WvW. But they didn’t, they left them in. This is a sign to the user-base that the system was intended at the start and using such mechanics of the game was acceptable.

Thrumdi.9216:

But with everything else in GW2 design, this starts to break down once you get large numbers of people.

What in facts happens now with combos? People stop before or during a battle while the buffers (field providers + blast finishers) do their thing and buff everyone in turn. Exactly the thing the system was designed to avoid. (Same with the anti-Trinity mechanics that large guild groups can bypass, but that is another story).

I’m not sure what WvW game you’re playing, or what tier you’re in, but many coordinated guilds/groups in WvW can buff on the fly without stopping for most buffs. Sure, sometimes we stack and stop for might, but that’s usually for timing and strategic purposes while our scouts kitten the field situation before we move to commit.

Thrumdi.9216:

And as always with poor design in all avenues of life, it is the average person who misses out. Buffs on demand are only available to organized guilds whose commanders assign classes, and can call for fields and combos. With this system, PUGs just can’t do it, even though it is supposed to be a casual game.

[/quote]

So, if the ‘average’ person wants such an experience, join a guild, join the server’s public Teamspeak server, get a commander’s tag and coordinate it themselves. The tools are there.

There is an advantage in joining a well coordinated WvW guild. This holds true for every other game out there. If you’re in a guild, you have advantages such as shared knowledge, resources, more grouping options and overcoming certain difficult content, etc etc. You have large PvE guilds in this game that help members achieve much of the PvE content quickly. So why is it a bad thing that there are WvW focused guilds? I mean, the game’s name is GUILD Wars 2…

There are PUG Groups/Zergs that can achieve some success in coordination using the server’s Teamspeak Public Server. I’ve seen it done many of times. Granted, it’s usually not as good as a WvW focused dedicated guild.

Darlgon.9273:

I am guessing you guys noticed the quaggans were also gone?

Maybe the Quaggans found a good hiding spot…. perhaps where they left a FUNCTIONING group UI for WvW. Maybe the quaggans will actually be able to form a group properly and be able to kick offline quaggans and invite normally.

I wish I could run with my guild and use a functioning group UI in WvW to manage our group… lucky quaggans.

Ahmrill.7512:

Darlgon.9273:

I am guessing you guys noticed the quaggans were also gone?

Maybe the Quaggans found a good hiding spot…. perhaps where they left a FUNCTIONING group UI for WvW. Maybe the quaggans will actually be able to form a group properly and be able to kick offline quaggans and invite normally.

I wish I could run with my guild and use a functioning group UI in WvW to manage our group… lucky quaggans.

Hey, what do you think about a functional group UI? Could we use something like that?

Surely it wouldn’t break their ongoing plans for WvW to create a few neutral zones around the map that aren’t effected by whatever buff the new orb of power thingy gives.

New mastery, new mastery and more mastery is all i see here… poor update for wvw as always, not surprising or disappointing, just the regularity.