Guild Wars 2

LetoII.3782:

Hammer being a ranged weapon leaves me scratching my head… Just as a little side to the specifics.

I should rename my revenant “Thor”. Hope its not taken.

Adula.3698:

Dragon Banners hitting every player for 10k dps. Airstrikes hitting for 10k. Turtle banners giving full stab for half a minute. Centaur Banners CCing and Immobing. Guards auto defending and gates auto defending. What’s up with all this PvE crap? WvW Players have been complaining about Anet adding more PVE to WvW since THE GAME STARTED. Is Anet ever going to nerf or remove this stuff? Maybe triple the cost.. it’s just so hard to play offense when these cooldowns are like 15 min or passive. These NEED to be nerfed in damage, increased in price, or have their cooldowns super bumped.

I would avoid raising the price as a solution. P2W might start creeping into WvW.

Thanks for the prices Crucifier and Sadrien.

How much does a Dragon banner cost? If anyone knows the price for 1 banner, and the approximate price of the guild grind to be able to craft one. Is this P2W?

tym.3791:

I honestly don’t blame ANET this time. How long did everyone scream they wanted new maps??? So they finally give in, give new maps, now everyone is hollering we want the old back.
…

First, I never requested new maps. I guess the people who wanted “new maps” should have requested “new and improved maps”. I would have thought the “improved” part was implied, but I was wrong.

Before WvW is attractive to PvE players we need to understand what PvE players want. I will base the following on my observations of the behavior of PvE players that I have seen during my time farming PvE for resources to play WvW (the only part of GW2 that I enjoyed). PvE players want the most gold per hour. They typically blob up to accomplish this if possible. The SilverWastes chest farm train is one recent example. The champ chest train is another, this train moves to the most lucrative farm map as ANet nerfs and buffs various aspects of the game. Then there is the world boss train, this also includes a large group of players that simply sit out most of the event and only tag the boss at the end. I have seen and participated in all of these in my quest to afford ascended equipment for my WvW characters. EOTM is also lucrative I have heard, although I really never farmed it.

There are other reasons people play PvE, like role playing, collections, vanity skins, etc. I will leave these aside since the loot per hour and blob behavior must be solved to get most of the PvE crowd into WvW (in my opinion of course). And right here is the unsolvable problem. The typical behavior of PvE players is incompatible with the changes introduced by HoT and the desires of many forum posters for buffed defenses, roaming, and small scale fights. They will try to blob around the maps for the best gold/hour and quickly find that WvW is no where near as lucrative as other activities.

I will close with some information I read on another thread recently. One poster said that the highest return they knew of was an activity that could give you 90s every 90 seconds. By my calculations that is 36 gold/hour. So if we want the PvE blob to come to WvW just increase the loot to maybe 40 or 50 gold/hour and watch the PvE trains blob all maps. Problem solved, right?

Jski.6180:

Dawdler.8521:

Oh the irony, considering Alpha can only hurt doors, compared to Omega that can hurt walls as well.

Honestly, I cant think of any other 3 year old game that suddenly went back to being an alpha version. Will we see GW2 re-release soon? Another beta?!

I think there been games in alpha for 5 years + now so GW2 dose it a lot better then most.
Any way how are ppl just now finding this out HoT and the new wvw effects have been in the game for some time now.

Probably because the guilds had not unlocked the upgrades until recently. Last Sunday was the first time I saw the defensive siege damage reduction and the chill effect. Maybe on T5 we just couldn’t unlock things as fast as on higher tiers.

Daddar.5971:

Hahahaha YES! Here’s a fix for the population issues. The upper 3 tiers get Desert BL maps (you know, because they require real skill and all that). The tiers from 4 down get Alpine BL maps. THAT is how they can get people to transfer down.

You are a genius!

Humphrey Bear.2698:

No one plays Desert Borderlands and no one cares about it so why is it so hard to give back Alpine Borderlands for now before everyone eventually quits ? And then perhaps tweak Alpine Borderlands by like replacing ruins with something else . If it’s not hard bringing back events like Winstersday then why would Alpine Borderlands be an issue bringing back ?

Good idea on the maps. Also roll back as many of the other changes as possible. Then fix the WvW issues that existed before HoT.

Jski.6180:

Alloy.2839:

In war there is no second place winner, and militaries around the world will pay huge premiums for small advantages. True, in WvW we do have second and third place winners, or losers depending on your point of view. So the advantages of elites can be construed as P2W, or as Straegen calls it Pay4SubstantiallyStrongerBuilds. However since ANet gives away the base game, and needs to pay its bills and employees, I have no problem with this. Just buy the expansion and run that build yourself. Or wait for the elites to be nerfed, they will eventually be. I own HoT and have elites unlocked on all my characters. Even so I still play my necro as a necro.

That is the WORST ideal i have head when it comes to war. Often there not first places in wars. NO one get out of a war unharmed or uncharged and no one comply wins at them. Only history books make it out that way becuse its way to hard to tell something complex as “wining” a war in just a few pages or even in words.

Are you saying that you doubt the sanity, the efficacy, or the reality of my reference? I was only referring to the reality of that doctrine. The efficacy or sanity points would be a political discussion, and I have had enough of those to avoid them.

Jayne.9251:

Was back before summer I believe.

And my 79 pages is just to get 15 pages of up voted posts. A gal’s gotta have goals, although the percentages are grim.

You could try for “Ultimate Dominator”.
“Yak Slapper” was more challenging but they nerfed it.

Happy Holidays

As far as comparing the size of the Desert BL and the Alpine BL consider the following treb ranges. NW and NE tower could hit garri outer and vice versa. NW tower could hit NW camp. NE tower could hit NE camp. Treb on the hill by NE camp could hit Hills and vice versa. Bay outer could hit SW tower and SW camp and vice versa. Hills outer could hit SE tower (maybe the SE camp too, I never tried that one). Before they added some rocks, a treb on the SW cliff of garri could hit bay. If anyone knows if any structure on DBL can hit another structure you can post it. Note that I am not discussing the merits of this, it is only a way to compare the size of the BLs.

Jayne.9251:

Alloy.2839:

Remove PvE population from world full status calculations. This never made much sense.

Hate to break it to you, but they did this months ago.

Have you been away or not playing?

Well I have to admit that before HoT I did spend most of my GW2 time playing WvW rather than on the forums. So I hadn’t really kept up with these things. I do admire your 79 pages of forum posts (compared to my 5) and would expect that you are better informed than I am.

Anyway, I mentioned the server population calculation issue because it affected me personally. The WvW guild of which I was a member based their decision to transfer a few months ago on server cap issues. I won’t go into details. So when did they change the server cap calculation?

KayCee.4653:

2 free transfers? Nah… Whats to stop someone from making repeated free accounts to do multiple servers WvW?

I just say make server transfers free permanently and leave it like it is… If a lot move to T1 and T2 servers, then block them with a paying amount for transfers to those servers. 1800 gems is nice, but seriously, have that as a block for very high pops, but any other level of pop for WvW, make it purely free.

Advantage of doing this, would be to allow commanders from lower pop servers like T8 servers, to see how larger fights are done and coordinated among multiple blob groups/zergs. The thing to remember too is that it helps all players gain experience and find a place they might would settle down and call their home server. I don’t know of many that have stayed on the same server since day 1 without testing 1 server at least. Free transfers would allow this and maybe make some get server loyalty too, to stay on that server for years to come.

Nothing stops people from doing that now as far as I know. Also, unless the economic restrictions on free accounts have changed there is a problem moving resources for gearing your new characters. So if you enjoy playing up levels with no ascended gear be my guest. Besides isn’t leveling a new character to 80 a real pain on a new account? No scrolls of whatever to level up quick.

I seriously considered suggesting unlimited free transfers. It is just that I don’t think they are going to fix WvW in its current form. We will get alliances and since there will (hopefully) be no charge to switch guilds the end result is the same.

Removing the server population caps and eliminating the transfer charges produces an interesting solution. Now the only limit left is the map population cap, and this is, at least partially, driven by the server hardware computing power (lag). Now servers can stack until the map queues themselves force the players to de-stack. Given the realities in tier 1 I would expect them to complain loudly. Alliances may achieve at least half of this naturally.

Swagger.1459:

Ok so what’s your plan to fill up every borderland and EB map across all servers more consistently?

That’s 32 maps in total
…

There is almost certainly no way to fill 32 maps at this time. I am not sure if there ever was, even 6 months after launch. However I will not accept your false dichotomy between filling 32 maps and megaservers. I will, out of concern for the seriousness of the issues currently facing WvW, provide a list of issues that I believe need to be addressed no matter what the future brings. They are currently worded as changes to WvW as we know it, with Alliances some of them are moot.

> Some of the changes introduced in HoT had a negative effect on WvW. This needs to be corrected.
> Remove PvE population from world full status calculations. This never made much sense.
> Adjust server caps based on player statistics and map capacities.
> Fix the existing bugs, hacks, and exploits.
> Reduce server transfer costs drastically.
> Give 2 free server transfers to each player so populations can adjust. Let servers stop participating in WvW if that is what happens. But no forced transfers under any circumstances. Repeat this whenever WvW populations change significantly.
> The server capacity changes combined with increased player mobility and the map capacities are intended to allow the free movement of players to fix some of the imbalance problems. I hope that player choice is sufficient since coercive solutions have their own problems.
> Let some of the PvE masteries be usable in WvW, auto loot pickup and legendary weapons mastery experience in particular.
> Get a group of experienced WvW players to interact with the developers, and listen to them.
> Send a personal email where possible, not in-game message, to WvW players notifying them of the changes, some of them might come back.

Honestly, trying to fix the bad effects of HoT by adding megaservers alone makes about as much sense as taking cough syrup for a broken leg, all the while denying you have a broken leg.

I have nothing against EOTM, I just don’t think we need 2 of them.

I highly doubt we will get megaservers. We will probably get Alliances and a lot of my suggestions are inherent in that solution. For example, free transfers now become freedom to change guilds, PvE population is not a part of guild cap calculations, etc. A few issues from HoT will carry over however. The DBL maps are badly designed for WvW, the buffs to defense went too far, the mega laser and Saturday reset just appeared. I mean really, what percentage of our WvW population asked for Saturday reset or a mega laser?

I will continue to play WvW at my current reduced level until then and pass judgment on alliances when I see how they are implemented.

I think it is overly dramatic, not to say untrue, that auto upgrades are killing WvW, but I will admit that running long distances up and down hills, through fog and lava, and attacking undefended T3 structures for PPT (so we don’t lose server ranking you know) on an empty map is not any fun at all. Even the climatic PvE boss fight at the end for a champ bag just doesn’t fulfill me somehow. Defending these T3 structures is just as boring, but not as rewarding since you don’t even get the champ bag. The mere presence of even a few defenders is sufficient to convince an attacking force several times their number to just go elsewhere. Maybe I should be content just harvesting the nodes.

Megaservers are a recipe for EOTM, and we already have that. Maybe EOTM could use a new map, like the DBL one.

In war there is no second place winner, and militaries around the world will pay huge premiums for small advantages. True, in WvW we do have second and third place winners, or losers depending on your point of view. So the advantages of elites can be construed as P2W, or as Straegen calls it Pay4SubstantiallyStrongerBuilds. However since ANet gives away the base game, and needs to pay its bills and employees, I have no problem with this. Just buy the expansion and run that build yourself. Or wait for the elites to be nerfed, they will eventually be. I own HoT and have elites unlocked on all my characters. Even so I still play my necro as a necro.

DresdenAllblack.1249:

The lord SHOULD tilt the battle towards defense.

The lord has always tilted the battle to defense. The problem is that now the lord DOMINATES the defense.

Bring back the Alpine maps. I never had a problem with them. But if ANet decides to change the maps, at least make sure that the majority of players agree that they are improvements.

Remove scaling lords and PvE “challenges”. Given fairly even attack and defense, the lord really tilts the balance in favor of defense. The extreme example is the fire keep, would it even be possible to take the keep if an equal number of defenders were on the platform with the lord? Maybe if you built siege but otherwise I think not. Area fear on a platform surround by lava and a lord that alone is a match for 75 percent of your whole team. That whole lord’s room should just be moved to PvE where it belongs.

One simple way to help the WvW loot situation would be to allow the PvE auto loot pickup to function in WvW. In open field zerg fights I often have the choice to try to pick up bags, or concentrate on the fight and keeping out of the red circles. Also, several times I have chosen to stay on my AC as our keep or tower was being overrun. The result was my body surrounded by bags, which sometime continue to drop after I have WPed. Once, the enemies that killed me actually bowed, and that meant more to me than all the bags. Moments like that are the reason I play WvW. Digital shinies compared to that? Give me a break.

Dayra.7405:

…
But if you like to keep the max 695, you can also say T1 nothing, T2 half today, T2 as today.

This would do absolutely nothing to fix the situation Dawdler points out. It would just make the numbers smaller.

As someone who plays WvW almost exclusively, I thought dragonite was a rare commodity. A 3 hour guild raid would get me maybe 75 dragonite on an average day. Then one day, after discovering the wonders of the SilverWaste chest train, I got 1500 dragonite in a couple hours. So I went there a lot, knowing that anything this good would be nerfed sooner or later.

Thanks for the info, I was wondering about these relatively invulnerable enemies I had been seeing. Hopefully they are OP in PvP also, that way they might be fixed in the near future.

In my opinion, the reduction in WvW population following the release of HoT was caused by one thing. That is obviously the changes introduced by HoT. The reduction in the BL population, being more drastic than the one in EBG, is because the new BLs got the full dose, while EBG only got the new mechanics and guild grind. Attempting to counteract the effects of HoT by changing other aspects of WvW, rather than reversing the HoT changes themselves, makes little sense to me. Of course WvW had issues before HoT, and they need to be addressed. But depending on these fixes to counteract both the original issues and the HoT changes seems improbable.

So we divide the world into 4 zones of 6 hours each. When we log on we go to the appropriate server from out 4 server list. When the 6 hour window expires we auto transfer to the next server on our list (because if people could stay on a server there would be problems). This much is defined to some degree.

However the following issues are puzzling to me and I will just throw out some thoughts since I am having trouble defining all the possiblities. On the new server the state of the structures, camps, events, etc would be where they were 18 hours ago (since the servers didn’t run) and most probably not be the same as the server we just left? Or maybe the servers just reset? Our map location on the new server might need to be the same as the end of the last interval or we could end up in an enemy keep for example. Maybe we just map in to spawn, but on which map? This has the potential of an episode of “The Twilight Zone”. One minute I am defending my EBG keep, the next I am in a borderland trying to find the door to the Air keep. If I miss a day or 2, what happens when the server switches? What if we were in a battle in the lords room and the server switches? Will we continue where we left off, or will the server with the closest WP just take it before the other side gets there? If the server state resets during off time this starts to resemble EOTM, just with 6 hour matches. What if all the members of my guild don’t have the same server list? What about server tier? One minute I am in tier 1 and the next I am in tier 6? What about TS servers (which tend to be server specific), if the TS population doesn’t move together you have enemies in your TS server. I am not being critical, I am just wondering how the details of this system would work.

Play WvW rather than reading the forums.

Thanks for the links Fellfoot. Nice to see the Alpine BL again and also to know the players in the videos.

If we were looking for real fights before HoT it was (any WvW map) > EOTM. Now in tier 5 it is EBG > EOTM > DBL. We have even taken our guild WvW raid to EOTM out of DBL boredom. TS, WvW meta builds, team composition, stack-empower-portal bomb, was a real surprise to the EOTM blobs. But it was enjoyable to at least have enemies. We even wiped a couple times since they outnumbered us 4 to 1.

Thank goodness it doesn’t have its “probe”.

Paulie.6215:

…
OR remove all unusable XP from WvW. At least this would keep the yawnfest ktrains from forming.

Are you talking about “yawnfest ktrains” in WvW or EOTM? In EOTM they are the norm, I haven’t seen anything like that in WvW on the servers/tiers I have played in.

Pensadora.9478:

@Alloy – I find it difficult to see that this would cause people to leave WvW any more than the queues currently for EB do now, or have in the past.

OK, and I agree it would not cause as many people to leave as the map/mechanic changes introduced by HoT. But, I still see it as a negative change. I will not belabor the point since we would be discussing a proposed change to a hypothetical situation in which TZ imbalances do not exist. Given that the TZ imbalance has been with us since launch, and that we don’t know what changes will be required to actually fix the imbalance, perhaps we can resume this discussion when we can discuss reality rather than speculation.

I wish my WvW EXP applied to core Tyria masteries. I really need the “loot vacuum cleaner” mastery. It would help me farm for materials for my WvW guild upgrades that I do in PvE because it is much more efficient. I wish to minimize the amount of time I spend in PvE since for me it is just a chore I do so I can play WvW.

Pensadora.9478:

@ Alloy – No Phyrrhic victory if my force is locked from returning from your BL as this movement, depending on how many forces were committed to it, creates a risk that something on EB of mine could be taken, or that your forces could threaten our garrison during that time. Considering this, I would want to leave forces on my BL and in EB, to counter any attempt on those objectives – destacking my blob to do that.

The same might be true on the other side. Perhaps leave part of your force on EB to protect and defend, or to pressure an objective there, while another part of your force moves to your BL to defend your garrison.

The movement gating creates the need to have people in multiple places at one time to counter any movements by other forces, or to take advantage of their movement and their inability to return at a click of a waypoint. The opposing forces will need to do the same thing – have people in multiple places to defend and to take advantage. As a result, at least in theory, servers begin to spread their groups around, encouraging smaller sized teams to form up and to spread out. The fights become more reasonably-sized.

What is the issue meant to be distinguished by ‘lower tiers’? Remember, the issue of population imbalance was a given that was assumed to be resolved.

You misunderstood me, the Pyrrhic victory refers to breaking up the blob by making people leave WvW.

According to Wikipedia, Glicko was invented for games like chess and go. I have also seen references to it in relation to sports. In chess a players skill does not change drastically over a short time. The same would be true for sports where individual or team strength is basically stable over the course of a tournament or season, barring injuries. However using Glicko for WvW does not account for the rapid server strength changes caused by guild migration. I imagine most of us have seen servers gaining or losing strength quickly and then being trapped in either too low or too high a tier. Secondary effects, like leaching Glicko from a rapidly falling server cause addition distortion in the tiers. I would suggest having some group of knowledgeable and impartial people review the Glicko calculations and adjust the matchups where server strength has changed dramatically. A impersonal formula would of course be better, if someone could develop one that could deal with the current realities.

OP, your suggestions would provide more incentive for populations to remain in EBG on most of the lower tiers. Why would a guild raid switch to their home BL to take back (PvD) their garrison and risk losing their EBG holdings because they were stuck in the BL for 15 minutes? In my opinion, the HoT attempts to “break up the blob” have only resulted in players leaving WvW. True this breaks up the blob, but it is a Pyrrhric victory.

Nothing more needs to be done to “make defense feasible”. HoT already shifted the balance way too far in favor of defense.

The last day before the new maps, we (HoD) walked a golem or two to Hills on our BL. We took the keep and then jumped off the bridge to our deaths. It was like a funeral procession and I didn’t realize at the time how prophetic it was. If anyone can link the video I would really appreciate it.

Dawdler.8521:

Binkydink.2697:

Well that solution cant work because the boss is scaled to a 40 man group and you try to assign 10 people to kill it while the other 30 deal with pvp. So people who want to do pvp must do pve so they don’t die in pvp. They should be able to ignore the keep lord and fight the bads but they cant ignore him because he’s too strong to ignore.

What do you mean should? You can ignore the SM lord perfectly fine if you dont want to cap the place. …

Thanks for the Pro Tip Dawdler. For the past 3 years in WvW I had mistakenly assumed that the correct action after breaking through the castle gates was to kill the lord, get the loot, and capture the place. But if I am not going to capture, why would I spend money on siege to break in? The only way to cap without siege is PvD. But people complain about PvD, it is all so confusing.

Although not a game, removing the start menu from Windows 8.0 caused issues for many users. Microsoft responded by releasing 8.1 with a better but still incomplete start menu. Then they skipped Windows 9 and offered a free upgrade to Windows 10, which has a start menu again. My experience with Windows 8 is much like my experience with the HoT WvW changes. When I upgraded from XP to Windows 8.0 I tried to like it, but no luck. I now use Widows 7 64bit Pro.

Many would like a WoW type open world PvP experience, but without the subscription. Makes sense, but the owPvP experience doesn’t appeal to everyone, myself included. However, in the megaserver system, it might be possible to create an instanced server that allows owPvP. Not with a lot of high end features, but basic PvP for everyone on that server. People could then guest over and be in the company of others that shared their enjoyment of owPvP. In this system there is little possibility that PvE players would meet with the insults and harassment that sometimes exist in owPvP. Any unwanted fight requests outside of the owPvP server could be treated as harassment and the appropriate action taken. Lobbying Anet for something like this seems more likely to succeed than attempting to force it into PvE, or to replace WvW with owPvP.

As a WvW player, the changes introduced by HoT already caused me to reduce my play time to about 30 percent of what it was previously. I will wait to see how alliances are implemented before deciding to quit altogether, but given the recent changes I am not optimistic. It also seems to me Anet could achieve many of the effects of alliances by simply removing server full status and making server transfers free.

I would like to see an event where an elder dragon spawns, decimates your enemies, and wrecks their stuff. The “Dragon’s Wrath” event would trigger if a server didn’t control any structures on their home BL and had 4 or less players remaining. The dragon is not taking sides, it is simply angry at karma training, night capping, and population imbalances. A victory chest containing ley line sparks and flax would be mailed to the last 25 players to have seen action on the BL.

This reminded me of the original WvW achievement numbers for some reason. If I kill 1 yak every 2 minutes, 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, it will only take me X years to get Yak Slapper.

Jayne.9251:

You can’t use any of the mastery stuff in wvw.

You mean the new legendary weapons won’t be allowed in WvW? I can go along with needing to obtain ingredients for a legendary weapon in all aspects of the game, but why not allow WvW players to generate EXP for that mastery in WvW?

Badges drop from player kills, so go kill some enemy players. I am not sure if they drop from tower/keep lords because as a WvW player, badges are not a scarce currency. Just kill some lords too and see if they drop.

I have 10 alts and belong to 3 guilds, 2 personal bank guilds and 1 real guild with about 500 members. I cannot get guild chat (with the real guild of course) to work, either send or receive. I tried both of the guild channel selections, the 2 for my bank guilds didn’t need testing. My guild mates names show in gold so I know I am representing the guild I am trying to communicate with. Guild chat worked prior to the HoT release, which I own.

Thanks for the advice. I got to the account login screen via https://account.arena.net/ and used the add code button. Worked fine and didn’t ask for a new password.

I understand you get 1 account rollback (under exactly what circumstances isn’t clear to me). You might be able to rollback your account to before the guild was lost. Contact support maybe they can help.

How did you create the new account (rather than upgrading)? I have my HoT key but it wants me to change my password during the registration process. I don’t want to create a second account by accident either.

Enrif.7359:

It’s interesting to see how vigilant some are againt unrestricitng some things for people who have proofed not to be Goldsellers/Trolls by achieving lvl 70/80.

Unfortunately, being lvl 70+ does not prove you are not a gold seller. Gold sellers get gold by botting, bots level as a result of gold farming. A gold seller could easily level free accounts and get access to map chat for advertising.