Guild Wars 2

Malcheor.7645:

My Sweet Lily.1952:

I currently have Mad Memoires parts I-III but I can’t seem to get any more of these :/
(got them all this morning)

How did you go about getting the first three?

Thinking about it, I doubt these have anything to do with it—I think their presence is a bug. Candy-powered matter meters don’t work and these books don’t show up in the forge. At best they’re unrelated to this.

That being said, if you look up on the wiki where those first three NPCs are supposed to be, they show up there from time to time. I’m not sure what the trigger is anymore, but lurking and watching will get them to turn up.

Amurond.4590:

froacus.6892:

Amurond.4590:

froacus.6892:

just waited a bit.

That doesn’t seem to work… do you need to have done something else first?

I honestly don’t know. I did not.

I was just aimlessly exploring and stumbled upon Sampson. Then I followed him to the end of his path and he was available to talk

Have you completed the two Halloween instances? Maybe that’s why he doesn’t do anything, I haven’t done the second one yet since it has been disabled.

I don’t think you have to have done anything previously—or if you do, you don’t have to have done it this year. I saw the mysterious fog and spoke to him having done no other Halloween-related things this year.

The mysterious fog was only visible for a few seconds, and Samson seems to disappear after a minute or so as well, so you might have to be very on-the-ball about this.

I would like to see the devs earn the community’s good will by blocking or banning the siege trolls we’ve had for months or years before attempting to develop some kind of gameplay mechanic. The number of players doing this action are extremely small: I only know of about three people on my server who do this as a dedicated action, and I’m on a T1 server. How long would it actually take to investigate and ban players with months-long evidence listings? Why should we implement any mechanic when players have been recording play, screenshotting, and submitting evidence for months with no results?

We do not need changes to WvW play. We need the GMs to actually investigate. Ban everyone players have been reporting for months and come back a few months after that if there’s still a problem. I suspect there will not be.

If mass reporting worked, we wouldn’t have a problem with siege trolls in WvW. These people have been mass-reported many times and have never been blocked or banned. Believe me, the WvW crowd would be the first to know if mass reporting worked as rumors say it does.

I would think he was coming in a later patch except he sent it to me in this patch. It’s not like ANet is afraid of springing that sort of thing on us.

So I got a letter from Trahearne after doing a few Living Story steps this patch. He said he was going to be in the Grove and he wanted to talk to me before the summit, but I couldn’t find him. Is he around there somewhere? Where is he?

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I’m trying to think of an instance that uses a portal. Usually, it’s prompt that come up in the center of the screen. Can you give some examples? Unless the ‘instance’ used a new map….I guess. Were there portals in the Tower of Nightmares? That might have been the case, I can’t remember.

Many dungeons have portals. Generally you don’t notice them because you have no reason to turn around backwards when you’ve just spawned in.

I don’t think ANet considered any consequence of Megaservers whatsoever beyond “well low-population servers will get more players!!!!!”

• Server communities are getting wrecked. All talk about seeing players from your world/guild… just talk. Doesn’t happen. Just like overflows, megaservers are created by the time you zoned into the map and nothing else matters.
• No way to communicate with players about events that won’t be on the same map. If I wanted to do a world event, I used to be able to go to Lion’s Arch (or Gendarran Fields in the past few weeks) and ask people if they wanted to do it with me, and we could all zone into the map and do the event. If something interesting was happening in WvW during off hours, I could pop into the hub map and get people to come into WvW with me. This is now impossible.
• World bosses other than Tequatl and Wurm are now pointless. You can literally afk while autoattacking, take little to no damage, and be done in less than thirty seconds for almost every world boss.
• Anyone without a high-end PC is screwed because there are constantly stupid numbers of players on the map if anything’s happening.
• All waypoints that can be contested show as contested, forcing either double waypoint fees or frustratingly long walks between areas. You can’t know whether a dungeon is going to be open or not until you reach the map.
• If you’re trying to avoid a player that you’ve been in conflict with, it is now impossible, because servers are meaningless and you could be zoned into a map with that player at any time regardless of server, no matter what time of day.

No one asked for this. No one wanted this. No one is fooled by the PRspeak. Megaservers are trash. Get them out of the game.

JJBigs.8456:

open field ramz!

I’ve actually seen an open field ram kill players before.

It was a Thursday.

You only need to hit the door once or twice. There will be a delay of up to 30 seconds before the keep contests in reaction to what you’re doing, but don’t worry about that; as long as you hit it, you’re fine.

If you’re having survival problems, wear PVT armor and make sure you have condition cleanses and stun breaks in your skill bar. Also, consider what gate you’re approaching from: many keeps have doors that are less guarded than others. If you’re going straight for the most convenient entrance, you’re more likely to get in trouble.

Quite honestly, I enjoy the map-hopping wide-roaming playstyle our server adopts during off-peak hours. It feels much more strategic than zergballing all over the place.

The scoring system is what’s broken. Fix that. Don’t try to “fix” something a large subset of players like.

runeblade.7514:

Alcyone.8695:

Forgive me if this is rude, but what exactly is the point of insisting that a proposal be tied to a particular game mode in a profession balance thread? Any substantial change to the profession will affect everything, and we’ve already been told repeatedly that ArenaNet does not want to split skills between the three game modes. Most posts here already read PvX because their players correctly understand this; I saw at least one saying “PvP if I have to choose” which is in the same spirit. There may be minor balance tweaks proposed that would involve small splits between sPvP and PvE/WvW mechanics, but those would affect all game types as well.

There’s no good reason to use game mode in this thread. It just takes up space. Leave it out.

Some people want to balance their suggestion over PvE. Some people want to balance over PvP.

For example, someone might say return Hunter shot as before, which is that it gives 5 stacks of vulnerability. Why? Because it is a buff to PvE. Stealth is not that great in PvE, but strong in PvP.

That would either affect all game modes directly, if the skill was changed in both game modes, or indirectly, by causing a split in the skill’s function where there was not one before. Either way the change will not be exclusive to a single game mode.

digiowl.9620:

I am really surprised that ANet have not programmed overflows so that it will attempt to put party and guild members on the same server if at all possible.

It would likely cause a bit more load time tho, but it would be worth it in my opinion.

Overflows do attempt to place party members on the same overflow. If your party doesn’t get into the same overflow (sometimes happens due to overflows being filled at an extremely rapid pace), you can right-click on a player’s portrait and click “Join in [Whatever Location]” to join their overflow.

As far as guilds go, things are less than ideal and I suspect there is no detection, but you can “taxi” people in this way by adding people to your party, having them join you, and clearing out your party to bring over more people.

Many event rewards are available to you on the trading post: ones that were available before by random drop. They are expensive and unreachable for most casual players but casual players that were able to log on for the event would be highly unlikely to get them anyway. Others are relatively cheap because they dropped in mass numbers. You could always get dragon coffers or trick or treat bags.

Most of the items that you can’t get in any way are achievement rewards that represent not just logging on during that time period, but also committing hours of your time to complete the achievements. I’m potentially willing to let go of the time-exclusivity (though honestly, I like having a unique record of “I was there for that!”) but not in any way willing to just let a player have something for gems or buy it off the TP with gold. If I had to work for it, so should you.

PattyCakeChamp.5268:

Alcyone.8695:

Paying for convenience is exactly the kind of thing we should have as a gem store item. Buying the pass only gets you services you can get elsewhere in the game for free (in an area that isn’t even well designed compared to free areas like Rata Sum). You don’t have to have it to be successful in the game.

Realistically, new/inexperienced players are not going to buy it because it’s a significant cash investment for a game they’re not committed to. Very new players are entirely unaffected by the current situation because the game doesn’t even lead you to Lion’s Arch in any capacity until you’re about level 25. Long-time/experienced players are the ones who will buy it, if they do, and they know other crafting areas exist in the game. Any economic advantage gained from not having to waypoint to another city to craft (and you had to waypoint to your chosen city to craft before anyway, and no one whined about the pavilion…) is offset by the fact that you would gain way more by converting the gems to gold than you would make over the duration by crafting items.

“Manufacturing consumer pain and peddling the solution” is exactly how every business operates. A basic principle of advertising is to create a need in the mind of the consumer, then show your product and how it fulfills that need. I have no idea why you think this is shady when most Westernized countries depend on this effect for their survival.

Let’s follow this up with touching on the watch work pick. Those people who complained because it was an infinite +1 and made theirs obsolete? I honestly feel they are the scrub consumer every company loves to take advantage of. Now realistically, it feels to me more aimed at those who were on the fence already about buying it, and this is an extra incentive to finally get one. Let’s face it, some scrubs getting sprockets will never harm the economy in significant fashion. I bought an infinite pick, and until the Super mining pick of extra orichalcum comes out, I’m just fine.

I’m honestly a little worred about the watchwork pick because it offers an actual advantage. But this pass definitely doesn’t.

Paying for convenience is exactly the kind of thing we should have as a gem store item. Buying the pass only gets you services you can get elsewhere in the game for free (in an area that isn’t even well designed compared to free areas like Rata Sum). You don’t have to have it to be successful in the game.

Realistically, new/inexperienced players are not going to buy it because it’s a significant cash investment for a game they’re not committed to. Very new players are entirely unaffected by the current situation because the game doesn’t even lead you to Lion’s Arch in any capacity until you’re about level 25. Long-time/experienced players are the ones who will buy it, if they do, and they know other crafting areas exist in the game. Any economic advantage gained from not having to waypoint to another city to craft (and you had to waypoint to your chosen city to craft before anyway, and no one whined about the pavilion…) is offset by the fact that you would gain way more by converting the gems to gold than you would make over the duration by crafting items.

“Manufacturing consumer pain and peddling the solution” is exactly how every business operates. A basic principle of advertising is to create a need in the mind of the consumer, then show your product and how it fulfills that need. I have no idea why you think this is shady when most Westernized countries depend on this effect for their survival.

Forgive me if this is rude, but what exactly is the point of insisting that a proposal be tied to a particular game mode in a profession balance thread? Any substantial change to the profession will affect everything, and we’ve already been told repeatedly that ArenaNet does not want to split skills between the three game modes. Most posts here already read PvX because their players correctly understand this; I saw at least one saying “PvP if I have to choose” which is in the same spirit. There may be minor balance tweaks proposed that would involve small splits between sPvP and PvE/WvW mechanics, but those would affect all game types as well.

There’s no good reason to use game mode in this thread. It just takes up space. Leave it out.

This is all from the perspective of a WvW player. Important points are bolded.

WvW players are fine with PvE stuff being in WvW… as long as it doesn’t disrupt gameplay. For example: the DO NOT TOUCH thumpers? Totally fine. In fact, a lot of players were actually pretty amused by them. One night when the map was quiet, our guild actually had a competition to see who could die the fastest by repeatedly touching one of them. On the other hand: the giant plants placed in the middle of the mercenary camps? (In the middle of the season, no less?) No one liked that because it was disruptive to the actual matches going on.

WvW players enjoy it when PvE players come in to play WvW with them, though a few vocal players get extremely frustrated with newbies—most of us do understand that there’s going to be turnover and we need fresh blood coming in to survive as a game mode. But WvW players don’t like PvE players coming in to WvW to do PvE things. Any initiative that encourages entering the map but ignoring the match in favor of doing something else is going to make a lot of people very angry.

With that in mind…

Nimrod.9240:

“Sociopolitical Diversification: … Map and/or Server Wide Meta events unlocked through player, team and guild progression (Leading to individual, group and server rewards)”
If a WvW server reaches a certain goal(points?), it will unlock things in PvE, like a dungeon given access to certain skins, gear, better droprate. Maybe some free gems, given the goal in WvW is hard to get. Now if the dungeon gets cleared for a certain amount of runs, it will unlock things in WvW, faster dolyaks, sturdier walls/gates, WXP boost, better drops from rank chests and so on.
This could tie the different gamemodes closer together, like leading to PvE and WvW guilds working together.

This would not be welcomed by WvW players as written. Asking for a points goal encourages stacking on one server so that players on that server get a reward, and stacking leads to imbalanced matches. Goals other than point goals, however, are also not going to be well-liked because they would encourage ignoring the overall matchup in favor of doing something that may or may not be helpful. And believe it or not, I don’t think that WvW players would like getting bonuses as a server from PvE players either. If a server’s PvE was not particularly strong or active and another server in the same matchup had a very active PvE crew, it would create an imbalance in the match. WvW players ideally want wins to represent skill. (This is part of why WvW players tend to resent Ascended gear.)

Guild Halls would be welcomed by WvW players as a place to hang out outside of WvW. (It would be super cool to be able to unlock portals to each WvW map in your Guild Hall!) Player housing would also be a cool way to spend downtime. Cosmetic rewards for guild/player housing exclusive to a game type are fine, but there should be ways to unlock any functional rewards in each game type. Functional rewards are things like portals, mining nodes, storage, or whatever devs think would be cool that does something.

The Grail Quest sounds very cool, but it does make me a little nervous. If a task for a player involves multiple game modes, it should never encourage ignoring the objectives in a PvP match. That should be true for both sPvP and WvW. Additionally, sPvP should remain a place where all skills, traits, and weapons for each class are available from the start.

WvW players are likely to be resistant to having to leave their favored game mode in order to unlock skills, traits, and weapons. However, if the devs think that having ways to unlock these things within WvW would be even a little disruptive to the match, then it would be far better to send people out of WvW to do things in PvE. Remember that a small disruption to the match is a big deal when multiplied by thousands of players.

Taking off my WvW hat and putting my PvE hat on, I’m very happy with the proposal as it stands.

• Are the Asura really that much smarter than the other races, or is it just a matter of valuing intellect more and emphasizing that direction as they grow up?
• How long before the game started did the events of Edge of Destiny take place?
• Why are a bunch of Sons of Svanir allowed to live more or less in peace in Hoelbrak?
• Where does the grawl tribe that didn’t trust the Consortium plan to make its permanent home, since they refused to go to Southsun?
• Do Sylvari appear to age over time, or do they always look the same as the day they awakened? Are there signs that the Sylvari will one day die of old age, or are they probably immortal unless killed?
• How did the weird alliance between bandits and centaurs come about?
• How did that Marriner plaque get all the way into Orr?

Notes:

• Some WvW players do enjoy crafting, it’s just that with queues the way they are at peak hours, they aren’t going to craft because there are no crafting stations outside of their home borderland. If the choice is to craft a thing and wait for half an hour or more to play with their friends again, or not craft it, you can imagine what they’re going to choose.
• Is there any good reason that celestial exotics should be time-gated anymore now that ascended armor and weapons are in the game? Turn that gate off.
• The special exotics that world bosses have (ie, Final Rest on Shadow Behemoth) should have a nontrivial chance of dropping as account-bound ascended instead. Or just be switched to always drop as ascended.

Improving horizontal progression:

• Skin locker as with sPvP. (One of the reasons that no one is using all these cool backpieces we’ve been getting from the living story is that the next time a cool backpiece comes along, you have to use an expensive stat splitter (which wasn’t even an option until recently) or just lose the skin forever. They’re unlocked by completing achievements, why aren’t the skins sitting there with the achievement-point skins like the Zenith set ready for us to use?)
• Ability to save a few trait builds at retrait: the problem there isn’t the money sink (you could probably even raise the price a little and no one would complain), it’s that it’s a pain to swap between the same builds over and over.
• Ascended gear should not unlock only one stat set for a particular weapon or armor piece if it’s going to be time-gated and heavily expensive. One of the nice things about exotics was that it was cheap enough that if I wanted to try out some stupid gimmick build, I could afford it. Perhaps initially your ascended gear has one statline and then you have to do quests and craft/mystic forge your way to different statlines which you can then swap from, and the advantage of legendaries is that you’re completely unlocked from the outset?
• More traits, with tradeoffs.
• Cosmetic skill progression: if I want all the “smoke” in my necromancer’s skills to be bubblegum pink, why not? (This could be turned off for enemy players in sPvP and WvW so they could read your skills properly, like how you can set them to have team colors rather than specially colored gear.)
• Not all WPs are unlocked for alts when you world complete, but a few key WPs should be: the ones next to each dungeon entrance.

Note that these are odds based on the current glicko rating, and that means they’re basically odds for next week only. Everyone’s ratings will shift, and those odds will be recalculated. We’re not locked into these odds forever.

In this thread, WvW players beg for a PvE-related thing.

Nike.2631:

Soren.9316:

Alcyone.8695:

No to a special WXP line for commanding. New commanders are already at a large disadvantage in terms of a lack of player support in the field and it would not help them to have a restricted set of tools as compared to other commanders; we want to make it easier for them, not harder.

100% agreeed. We shouldn’t be trying to do anything that will limit/handicap a new commander. It’s hard enough when you pop the icon and have evryone flock to you. If you don’t have all the tools how can you be expected to lead properly? May as well give the new leaders a fair chance at getting things right the first time. Everyone has to start somewhere right?

“Starting somewhere” can and should be at the bottom.

The thing is right now commanders are nearly toothless. They get a map marker and some intel on allies (supply carried). We have the possibility of giving people Tools with actual mechanical value and bite, but to do so there would have to be appropriate costs. Right now commander tags are one of the closest brushes the game has with Pay2Win. Instead of having a time play in WvW or skill displayed to make it on stage to even attempt being a commander its “Do you have gold/did you buy gems?”

This ‘all or nothing’ attitude is fine for what we have now (because ‘all’ is virtually ‘nothing’…) but if we start to add things like group buffs, increased survivability in friendly zergs, reduced costs for upgrading siege equipment, and other things that actually set a commander apart for building and directing squads, we benefit from some sort of progression scheme, and progression fueled by something other than Gold.

Everything we have now can stay purchased with the 100g commander book. The possibilities open up from there for those commanders willing to invest in more.

I don’t think a commander should be able to buff groups or find survivability increased just by spending some points, and I think that a reduced costs for upgrading towers buff would be more appropriate in some other traitline.

No to a special WXP line for commanding. New commanders are already at a large disadvantage in terms of a lack of player support in the field and it would not help them to have a restricted set of tools as compared to other commanders; we want to make it easier for them, not harder. An exception to this would be spending a bulk amount of WXP to unlock the ability to use your tag within WVW, and then having the full featureset available to you as a one-time “purchase”.

Having each icon on the map be a different color and/or shape and waiting on any other significant change to the commander system would be awesome in my book.

A clever player can already find the enemy commander by looking for players with the buff icon, and commanders already tend to be focused down in high-level play. With that in mind, some kind of skill allowing players to find enemy commanders would make a difficult situation even harder. I’m inclined to say it would be a bad idea unless greatly limited in scope in some way.

I think some (not all) of the problems with server population imbalances could be solved by encouraging the two losing teams to team up and work together rather than attempting to artificially shift server populations or restrict the number of players that could log in.

Reasons that this does not happen already, in no particular order:

• There is no obvious way to communicate with players on another team in order to coordinate battle strategies. You can’t even find out the username of the enemy commander in order to send a PM unless you have friends (or less generously, spies) on the enemy server). Even then, you won’t know anything about that person: are they trustworthy? Are they skilled at command, or is this the first time they’ve popped their tag? You have no way of knowing.
• There is no way to merge two servers’ forces together. “Friendly fire” will destroy your allies. Any player on either of the allied server that either doesn’t read map/team chat or isn’t in that server’s VOIP won’t know not to kill them, and of course they can easily choose to ignore your directions if they do know because “red is dead.” You can’t build siege equipment and then allow your allies to use it. You can’t give them boons. This requires any alliance to be complicated, rather than just allowing for the obvious strategy of “let’s both just march on their keep together.”
• When one server holds most of the towers on the map, it is likely that the towers they hold will be upgraded, while the towers they don’t hold will be at base level. This means that the losing servers will have a much easier time destroying each other than attempting long, complex sieges the game doesn’t readily support against the first-place server. Both the fully-upgraded tower and the “paper” tower are worth the same in terms of scoring. There is no immediate incentive to attempt an alliance.
• Of course, there’s the general mistrust that two enemy teams will have for each other—but that isn’t something we can change or would want to.

Some potential solutions, some of which have been elsewhere in thread:

• Allow commanders a method of finding out the names of commanders on other servers so that they can talk to each other. Note that obviously this shouldn’t give away the enemy players’ positions, just their names. Trolling is one potential drawback to this.
• Create a mechanism within the game that temporarily merges the two losing servers’ forces such that they are real allies, with green names, sharing of siege equipment and boons, and a united map/team chat.
• Give a point bonus to the capturing team of a structure based on the number of upgrades it’s undergone and the amount of siege inside (we know that the game keeps track of the latter already because you can hit a cap for a particular structure). This would encourage attacks on upgraded towers and therefore give more incentive for alliances.

Having said all of this, I want to emphasize that this won’t fix everything. In particular, for a lot of players, the draw to WvW is the large-scale zerg vs. zerg combat, and when one server has 90 players and their opponent has 60, those battles will always be a matter of numbers rather than skill. Players that want their large-scale combat to be fair will not be satisfied with anything less than equal numbers, and I can’t blame them.

Given the real-world Olympics are coming next year in early February, perhaps we could help rebuild the Quaggan Games (instead of some kind of Valentine’s Day thing…)

lakdav.3694:

What happens with all that power? Necromantic power, might we add!

It’s why necromancers are so OP now. All that power from the dead Zhaitan has flowed into every necromancer in the game.

While there are some Asura, as individuals, who would be interested in world domination, their culture makes it unlikely that they’d go to war as a large, united front.

Mainstream Asura society places its highest value on the pursuit of knowledge. The people that they hold in highest esteem are the smartest and the cleverest. It doesn’t matter to what purpose you have devoted your intellectual pursuits, it matters that you do something new and interesting. So power is only useful in that it allows access to better research supplies, expands fieldwork opportunities, and the like. (This is why the Inquest are tolerated where the other major races ostracize their “bad factions.” They’re smart and produce research results. They’re considered bad because they go too far, not because their goals are wrong; whether the Inquest’s highest priority is actually research or power is an open question.)

Not all Asura are like this, of course. We see merchants, especially in Lion’s Arch. We see police officers, and soldiers. They have the Arcane Council, which many Asura deeply fear being appointed to because then they won’t have time to do their own research projects! But as a whole, their culture doesn’t have any reason to rule the world. They feel their superiority is self-evident and have no compulsion to prove it, and ruling the world would force them to be management rather than scientists.

I know the PPT has got to be demoralizing, but I think as a whole the WvW playerbase on SoS is better than the group we have on TC. I learned to be wary of you guys very quickly on reset night. I think it would take very little additional NA coverage for you to start kittening top tier servers to the ground.

ArenaNet needs to explain the new ranking system better – I think there would be less outrage if people understood the exact set of changes involved. Essentially: even losing can be rewarding rank-wise under the new system, if you do better than the computer predicted, and you can win and still drop in rank if you are complacent. Tiers are less relevant than individual rankings and score gaps in the new system, and in the event where one server gets a huge load of transfers their rank will adjust rapidly, rather than having them spend months cannibalizing the scores of the other two teams in the tier and punching them into the floor before they can slowly fight up to the top where they now belong. This is one benefit to the lowest ranked servers in particular, as we’ve seen more than once how hard it is to break out of the lowest tier no matter how well you do. There will be reduced incentive for massive guilds to transfer to low ranking servers just because they want to spend a few months beating other servers to the ground (and I’m sure we all have suspicions about that)—it simply won’t be possible to the same extent that it was before.

That being said, matchups are going to be pretty awful at first, as the system has to more or less “get to know” every server from scratch. I’m pretty sure EU matchups are worse than they ought to be due to the false start ending up counted in their data and whipping their scores around. ANet really should have removed that data from their calculations.

If I was ANet, at least for the first new matchup and perhaps for a few weeks afterward, I would fudge the numbers and feed the resulting scores into the algorithm, hand-designing matchups that would be possible under the new system but only change things up enough to be interesting and not suspicious. That would give things time to settle a little before throwing things out for realsies.

TeamBattleAxe.3901:

Dumb Woob.9415:

Wemil.7052:

yeh yeh really funny if a t3 goes against t7.

the t7 is gonna rage quit and WvW lose more ppls VERY GOOD IDEA!

(leave the game not just WvW)

Ah but this would be a mistake. A server at a vast rating disadvantage (to use your example, a 10 Seed versus a 20 Seed, it makes little sense to use tiers now that there is match-to-match mobility) can come out ahead in rating even if it scores less than 0.5 of the points against the higher rated server. That is, there is also pressure on the 10 Seeded server to dominate the match; if the 20 Seeded server is able to put up enough of a struggle (gaining valuable experience against a better team, as well) it might be able to move up a spot—19th Seed. This is the motor behind rank mobility with the newer system.

This guy gets it.

Lower seeded servers could still gain rating even while getting blown out. The math would then re-adjust the following week with higher probability of finding accurate matches in the newly-adjusted rating spread.

Essentially, this should fix glicko’s tendency to only absorb rating points from within your own tier and lead to much more volatility in the positions.

In practice, most players quit playing a particular match for the week when it becomes evident they have no hope of winning. Despite the good points of this system, rankings will remain inaccurate as losing servers fail to field players. Fighting your way up is all well and good in concept, but most players have no comprehension of how rankings work right now, and morale will be low when every fight is a roflstomp.

In the long term, this may be a good change. Right now, it’s going to suck for everyone who likes a fair fight.

Draygo.9473:

use this week to explore new siege placements, gear up, and save siege for next week when you will probably not face them again.

Field some new commanders – it takes a lot of the pressure off if you know you’re not going to win anyway and so it’s safe to fail. Try out that new tactic that you’ve always wanted to mess with but haven’t dared. Level your alts for free – if you’re constantly outmanned, there won’t be any gear repair fees! Farm the grub or the tree spirit in EB just because. Take it as a vacation.

Everything is broken. Treat it like a snow day. Have meet and greets and singalongs with the other servers.

Az z.2746:

I hope this trainwreck extends to the NA reset, it sounds like fun.

The more buggy this sounds, the more excited I get.

Malifect.2310:

also, everyone is gonna try it on the first day…cmon

I think that has a lot to do with it. Every time a major change happens in WvW, there’s tons more turnout at first. Then those people quit caring because it’s not the weekend anymore.

I’d say /kneel is probably the closest to a /surrender you can get.

Nobody new to WvW knows how squads work. Your proposal takes even more work and would be even less intuitive for new players.

Massive zergs will still exist. Warband leaders will form a party so they can see each other, creating a single unit out of several, and do the same thing they do now only with more interface stupidity. Someone will be designated leader and will still say “regroup at spawn” and everyone will regroup at spawn. Preventing players from forming basic parties in WvW would be absolutely stupid, but there’s no other way to prevent this. Won’t happen.

There would not be any more communication through map chat than there is now, for the same reasons we don’t have much now: it’s very hard to talk in map chat while doing anything else requiring your keyboard, like firing off skills, and everyone will still all be in the same few places, making it not all that useful anyway. You won’t promote more communication in map chat. You will promote more voice chat, perhaps, but since GW2 does not have built-in voice chat, it will be yet another barrier to newbie players.

There is nowhere on the interface that you could put 19 other players’ HP bars that would not either be useless (over their heads) or obstructive (on the side of the screen). Even a 20 vs. 20 fight would go so rapidly as to make this information useless anyway.

New players to WvW need commanders on the field just as they are with a visible icon from anywhere, because otherwise there is no indication of what they should be doing at all. Players who just logged into WvW would not be able to see any “warbands” on the screen and would have no idea what was going on or where to go either. Map and team chat would be clogged with “what’s going on” “where should I be going” “what warband do I need to be in” “who do I party up with” so much so that it would be near impossible to use them for strategic communication.

tl;dr: No. Please no.

Squad chat doesn’t support the size of the average zerg and a lot of players have no idea how to join a squad, or even that squads exist, because the mechanic is not exactly obvious. If squad chat is supposed to be a viable replacement for /s these two issues need to be addressed first.

I’ve fought under two or three commanders that could slice through zergs twice our size like a slap chop, as long as players grouped up with them closely and paid attention. A smaller and smarter group will win, as long as there isn’t a massive size disparity. This is as it should be.

I think making squad mechanics more obvious could help a lot. I didn’t realize until a few weeks ago that joining squads meant you only saw one commander on the map (the one whose squad you’ve joined, of course) even if there are several using their tag, and I’ve been playing WvW on and off since launch. If most players knew to choose a commander and track them through the clutter, it would allow for more commanders to be fielded and make smaller groups more viable. You could also make different commanders have differently colored icons so you could tell at a glance who was where rather than spending a lot of time trying to interpret the minimap. It wouldn’t completely resolve the “who do I follow” problem with small groups—there will always be people who just spawned into the map and don’t know the battle situation, and new players who have no idea how WvW works at all—but it would help.

I’m not really sure why you’re all so excited about learning about the exact numbers for what is on a grand scale a paltry quantity of points.

1) It is always worth it to kill a dolyak even if it is worth no points whatsoever for the sake of blocking supply to the enemy team, so there’s no reason not to do it.
2) A solo player is less likely to be sighted than several players, especially when they are classes with stealth but also simply on the basis of being a smaller target.
3) It’s better to have someone going out solo and killing dolyaks than to have a bunch of people not going because they’re alone and it’s not worth the same number of points.

I don’t get it… wouldn’t you feel MORE left out if a one-time event dropped a cosmetic skin that you could NEVER get again instead of something that, however difficult, you could get in the game normally? I mean, you can trade in karka shells for the accessory, you can buy a twenty-slot bag on the trading post or craft one for yourself if you have the funding, you have a chance (even if it’s smaller than the odds of finding a shiny pokemon) to get a precursor off every mob in the game or you can save all your gold to buy them… Even if you missed out, it’s an attainable goal. A unique item that you can never get again? Now that would make me feel left out… not only would I not get to do the event, I’d also miss out on a really cool item I’ll never have a shot at again.

So if someone didn’t want to follow someone’s spoiler guide, they can’t complete the event? Yeah. I’m not impressed.

You should do something to make up for this, maybe have an NPC give the players the items that they weren’t able to get during phase 1 because you guys kittened up if you honestly think it’s too much kittening work to . It’s not the players’ fault that they weren’t able to complete your buggy event and proceed with the quest chain without following your poorly-publicized twitter feed and spoiling the events of the weekend. It’s yours.