Guild Wars 2

1. Population imbalances (PvD, nightcapping, etc)
2. Constant siege buffs without any defense buffs (aka wtf wxp traits)
3. Discouragement of alts (aka wtf wxp traits aka wtf ascended)

= humor

Swamurabi.7890:

That’s not what he said. He said that players from higher population servers would want to move to lower population servers on their own. Which I’m sure he has the metrics to show how FALSE that is.

Devon has said that we should suck it up many and many a time. He’s just continuing Anet’s suck it up stance that goes back all the way to the first month or two of play.

Fastest thing to do would be to let players queue up for the EB jumping puzzle straight from the WvW interface. Maybe make the ground in some spots flatter to help it out. Remove the bloodlust buff from that map and you have a really nice stopgap solution without having to wait for a lot of interface/map guys.

The hardest 1v1s I’ve ever had were in GvGs. People out on the fringes, like staff eles, get into all sorts of trouble with thieves or d/d eles or whatever while still having to cast their aoe on the group and dodge the hammers.

Beating up random enemy zergs though? They’re bad enough that I can go full glass and not have troubles. Fighting bad players is boring. Fighting bad players in sPvP? Even more boring.

Anet needs to get players from PvE, so that means the largest amount of potential players are outside of T1. Catering only to T1 is the fastest way to get WvW killed.

GuardianOMS.8067:

This is not a trinity game, I don’t see why you should get more or some reward for support. Tag the enemies, move on.

Sometimes you guys kill everyone before my ice spike can even hit the ground.

Doesn’t matter what the benefits are if they keep putting in more and more siege mastery lines. You’re always one queue zerg away from having hours of boring work going down the drain. It really wasn’t always like this. Makes me sad.

Yeah, but have you ever held out in a tower knowing that you’d die just to hold it one more tick? It wasn’t a big deal as far as points. More a point of pride. With the current system, any sort of last ditch efforts just put your server further behind. Whether it matters or not, it still puts a pretty kitten feeling on what used to be interesting gameplay.

JudgeD.5673:

One can also argue that having the right WvW rank/skills and killing 5 NPCs is also OP vs someone who doesn’t have the same buff, but I’ve yet to hear any complaint about this.

Then you haven’t been listening.

Rackhir Tanelorn.9123:

Are you aware that the whole “GvG Movement” grew out of the fact that Matches are horribly imbalanced and that coverage trumps skill every time?

Ding ding ding! Fighting 1:4 over and over and over gets boring. It was nice to do some 1:1 fights every now and again.

The stomp points really need more attention. Once people adjust to the points involved in losing fights while they don’t have bloodlust, the game is going to get really passive. Wait. The game is already really passive. I mean it’s going to get even more passive.

I feel as the weeks go by, we’ll learn that nothing was actually improved by this update. Anet really needs to put a new group in charge of WvW development. Preferably with some people that play the game on T2 and lower servers. Wait. I mean preferably with people that play the game at all.

Jiiub.7135:

yea.. freaking sucks.. we are NOT having fun Selan, NONE AT ALL…

I bet you can’t wait for the league where the rank 12 server gets to test its mettle and show you what it’s made of!

Defending has been dead for months. Anet has been buffing siege and incentivizing karma trains, so don’t defend. Just wait for the queue zerg to move on and then take it back. Welcome to the game as developed under Devon Carver!

You’re supposed to attack things.

Juan Ignacio.8903:

nerfing aoe solves zerging

By making sure smaller zergs can’t stand up to larger zergs and there ends up only being one zerg?

This might be another tier disconnect. Most match-ups don’t have the numbers to fight over the buffs and defend structures at the same time (frequently don’t even have the numbers to defend structures), and the winners are usually decided as soon on reset when you see the server names pop up on the scoreboard purely due to coverage. Now if I go into an outmanned borderland to toy with enemy zergs, my server is going to be punished? They did a good thing when they took away repair costs when the outmanned buff is up. Made you feel better about messing around on enemy borderlands. This does the exact opposite.

I’m sure it makes for fun in match-ups with somewhat fair coverage numbers, but it seems like a problem people aren’t catching onto yet for the rest. The game is about to go into seven weeks of beyond imbalanced match-ups, so I think we really need to consider this. Think about how annoyed T1 servers have gotten recently when they drop down to T2 and have nothing to do? Seven weeks of that against servers that are discouraged to confront them. It will not be fun.

I’m starting to think that the T1 servers need to be in a league all by themselves and have rule tweaks that apply to them alone.

In my experience, it’s always been harder to keep random zerg assortments from stomping in order to keep on fighting. The amount of times I’ve heard commanders try to get their front line to keep on moving and just let the people behind them finish people off is immense. It’s always been the smaller groups that focus more on winning a fight and just dps the downed enemies so they can’t self-res. I mean seriously .. is it good players that you see trying to stomp a thief three times in a row? That’s some pub kitten right there.

I’d really like to see decent arguments for how points for stomps encourages open field. If the other server has three buffs, what incentive does your server have to fight them? It seems like a drastic incentive to avoid combat.

Delta Blues.8507:

I once worked with my brother in a small butcher shop. From time to time old ladies would come in and complain about how they had been served the last time (sometimes they were right and sometimes they weren’t) and I would get mad about their behaviour.
Then, after I told my brother this he told me “remember that a customer that comes back complaining is still supporting you and is giving you a chance to improve yourself. The ones you really have to worry about are the ones that don’t say anything and just never come back”

Yeah, that gets said in the restaurant industry a lot as well. The other thing about it is that the ones that say nothing, leave and don’t come back are usually telling everyone they know about how bad they thought it was. It tends to lose you a lot more than just one customer. That’s part of why I found it ridiculous that Devon Carver said that he’d pay attention to the forums if there were continuously dropping population numbers. Once your population is continuously dropping, it’s pretty much game over. That’s not unhappy players. That’s players leaving and not coming back.

The match-ups will be forever stupid. Anet’s refusal to address issues months and months ago have assured that. What they need now is mechanics to alleviate that. This mechanic just makes it worse. Incredibly worse.

Tom Gore.4035:

WvW just got another layer of strategy added. Learn, adapt, overcome.

You are as ignorant of the realities of most match-ups as Devon Carver seems to be.

I really don’t think the points per stomp is getting as much attention as it should be. You know how we used to throw our bodies into circles to delay captures until help arrived? I’m not sure the math supports that anymores. So you’re down on buffs, probably fighting a larger force, fighting a buffed force, and are losing your structures. The scoring rules now suggest that you not even try to defend.

Anet, in every mode, try to discourage actual fighting. They really don’t get it.

Proper capitalization and punctuation is a kindness to the reader.

I think it’s unfair to put any of the problems with WvW on NCsoft. Anet worked really hard to make this as big of a mess as it is. Give them some credit.

The uplevels aren’t just at a higher disadvantage. Now they’re feeding points. Devon Carver has stated that they don’t want a bonus on unmanned so people harass people off a borderland, but now PPT focused servers have the motivation to harass poor players out of the game when they’re not holding the orb buffs.

Chopps.5047:

How is it more complex again? I’m stuck at the premise of your argument. It seems to me that train v train is a simplified version of open field combat which is itself just a subset of wvw. Am I mistaken? You’re saying train v trainers are good at open field combat? I’ll give you that for sure.

It’s quite a bit less simplified if only for the reason that the guys you are fighting are actually good at the game. Beating up on randoms gets old. As for the rest of WvW, there’s absolutely nothing hard about that other than trying not to fall asleep from the mind numbing boredom.

AC buffs gutting competition? What are you taling about? ACs are awesome.

Devon Carver

Holding a tower against all odds with some smart siege placement and a bit of luck may be one of the most fun things I’ve ever done in a video game.

Thrumdi.9216:

I know when we play servers like Maguuma, though they put on less PPT, their GvG’s are among the best in the game. If the problems had been corrected early, there would have been quality like that on most servers. It’s probably too late now to save low tier WvW.

Screw PPT and screw holding towers. Let’s fight.

Jski.6180:

Foresight would of been to lead the AC as they where even with ppl complaining about them and just keep pushing forward with other wvw level ability to counter the AC. Foresight is something a player cant have only the game makers. That means they can have foresight because they simply know more then you do about what they are doing to the game things you CANT know.

I would argue the opposite. At this point, given our incredible amount of hours in this game, we know far more about it than they do.

Hey, I got an idea. How about we have eight leagues and then move servers up and down based on their results of their games? Okay, so we have three servers so you’d have all potential match-ups in one week. Yeah, this idea might work.

Entropy.4732:

Totally agree with this. First place is rarely an option. It’s all about who gets second place, which ultimately boils down to which sever the winning server decides to pick on more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingmaker_scenario

Well look what happens when your server has to face one just four or so ranks above yours. A lot of previously core WvW players take most of the week off along with all the previous fairweathers. Even leagues of six would hurt communities of everything but T1. Promise servers that half the time they’re gonna see servers six or more ranks away from them. Seriously? How in any respect is that healthy for this game.

The thing Anet doesn’t seem to realize is that for a reasonable amount of people, once they stop playing, they’re not coming back. Once they see their precious population stats go continuously downward, it’s most likely already too late.

This is no secret. Maguuma learned way back when fighting WM’s Kaineng that all you need to do is step sideways and the melee train goes right past you. Granted, War Machine was a bad joke, but it still works against the better hammer blobs. Don’t stand in front of them and they have nothing to do.

I don’t think there’s anyone other than Devon that has said leagues are a good idea.

BBMouse.6510:

No one knows what this league is till we try. What’s there to lose?

Near all of the players.

Anet has said in the past that it is wholly up to the players to solve that issue. Supposedly everyone would evenly settle into the different servers in the interest of good match-ups.

Look at any T1 response to lowering the pop cap on a borderland to know that’s not gonna happen. Look at the lack of any oceanic servers and the understandable desire for off hours guilds to not be alone on their servers.

Given that population imbalances are never going away, let’s get back to calling the patch bad.

The orb used to reset all the time. It’s not like you had to assault a keep to take it. You just weren’t going to keep it against a bigger server, so what Habib said about making the rich get richer still stands. Besides, the hacking excuse seemed more like a way to save face while removing something integral to their design that the player base hated.

I’m not sure people are really remembering how many anti-orb threads there were. It was fun to fight over things. It was not fun to fight buffed groups. So the pickle is trying to give people who no longer give a kitten about PPT, because when most people realized that PPT is merely a measurement of population they decided to not care about it over quitting the game, something important enough to actually fight over while not having it be something that exacerbates the coverage problem. I’m not sure what that thing could be, but this isn’t it.

That’s super boring.

Shemsu.8721:

Obsidian Sanctum…

Single color fully fortified EBG.

I’d like to remind everyone that with the new league system, pretty much every week will have a population stacked and PPT obsessed server from T1 or T2 against a server from T3 or lower. There’s no way the massively outnumbered server is going to be able to convince enough fairweathers and karma trainers to come in and fight +150 blobs. Hence you won’t have any pressure on T1/T2 structures and they will be able to focus most of their manpower on keeping you from capping 3 of those points at once.

TL;DR We’ve had stat buffs before. They weren’t good for WvW, and the leagues are going to make it even worse.

MiLkZz.4789:

/signed

Again, I’ll give it 1 month. If nothing gets fixed, I will look for a new game. Well already looking actually.

We never asked for a buff, it is a stupid idea. This favours the server with the most players, because they can miss the most to hold the points. And you killed GvG in the process. Way to go to dissapoint your most hardcore (14hours+/day) players.

As I said before, Gw2 is a gem. But Anet just can’t identify it.

If you give it a month, Devon will point to the numbers and say that participation is fine and use it as an excuse to go even further with his bizarre vision for WvW. When the orbs go in, just stop playing. Vote with your feet and all that. It might also help for WvW players opposing GvGs to see how empty their game is without most of the hardcore WvW guilds.

If we want them to fix any of this, we’re going to have to immediately stop playing until they do. No exceptions.

Vena.8436:

Except at release, the buff was hidden inside a T3 keep behind a zerg.

You can’t compare completely different scenarios so easily.

It doesn’t matter where they are really. It was still waking up to more players with +150 stats that turned WvW into a complete ghost town from time to time.

You have to grab three of these buffs for two minutes each to reset them. Against a mobile karma train that doesn’t want you to have the buff, that’s just as hard as ninjaing a keep. You have to remember that there are servers besides your own. With this league system, every single match-up is going to have a huge population imbalance. Implementing that with a mechanic that even further helps the server in the coverage lead is a really, really bad thing.

cubed.2853:

I like it. New content, new mechanic. Supporting small scale skirmish. That’s exactly what I missed a little bit. I’m so happy to get something like that.
Dear wvw team, please dont forget, the happy people mostly dont write something, because they are happy! I’m an exception :-)

You’re an exception because you don’t seem to understand how karma trains work and don’t seem to remember when we had stat buffs before.

Bleed.7052:

Guys, stop whining, i know i’m going to get rocks thrown at me, but i’m just trying to be honest.First of all, even though we’ve seen previews of the buff system, we have never tested it ourselves, dont kitten on something you have never had the occasion to try, i highly doubt that servers will go for the 3 buffs, or maybe just the first week, secondly, wvw was never about fair fights, what about the upleveled people ? What about people who can afford high cost/effective food ? What about level 300+ people with power/cond dmg/vitality buffs from Wxp ranks ? What about people that can afford ascended thingies and some peoples staying on a mix of rare/exos ? What about the gold cost on omega’s making it much easier to stack/do golem ops on server’s with some rich people in ? Seriously guys, if you want balance, go to sPvp, if you’re whining for the GvG, GvG is quite bad for the wvw community point wise, so it’s against WvW rules anyway, even though i enjoy it and many people do, if it’s for the GvG, wait for a GvG mode, we will eventually get it, the game is evolving at a fast pace, so yeah trust me, we’ll get it. Anyway, i hope i made my point, dont hate on me for just saying what is WvW, wvw is war, if you can get victory, you have to, by any means. Good luck and have fun everyone.

We have tried stat buffs before. Weren’t you here on release? It was absolutely awful and the first change for good Anet did for WvW was removing it. The server with the night crew would get all three buffs. Then their day crew had all three buffs on top of their already larger numbers and could keep all three buffs. Throw in fairweathers in each direction, which we will have more of when they’re matching up server #1 against server #12, and this will be a mess. This is not something new. This is something that clears WvW of players.

Shiren.9532:

But can they do that while defending their towers and keeps on the map? If you are aggressively going after the ruins it means you aren’t defending a tower or keep.

Of course they can. They have more people. It’s just another thing that helps the larger zerg.

Inability to neutralize buffs without taking them. They’re trying so hard to get us to not play.

Anet, tell us how you really feel.

I’ve taken the hint. See you guys in the next game to come around.

Aberrant.6749:

Remember that day… that one BEAUTIFUL day when no siege other than golems worked? Dear god. That was by far the most fun I’ve had in WvW in a LONG time. Sure there were gates and stuff we had to crack open, but once we did there were players… fighting… players. ZOMG AMAZING!

Best WvW day ever. No joke. Full stop.

I think that day and the degrading game experience as more siege masteries are added shows exactly how far in the wrong direction Anet has wandered. I’m not sure who they think is going to enjoy what they’re doing, but I doubt the people who will are going to spend as much time, effort, and money as the more dedicated guilds that are being bored to the point where inaction and simply messing around is more entertaining than genuine participation.

I’d really like to focus attention back to arrow cart screen stretching or zoom hacking. If Anet can’t fix that, defending is near impossible for anyone not willing to do such a thing in return. Sitting inside with lesser numbers and some siege? Watching all your interior siege get wrecked by a hard to reach arrow cart outside the walls? Might as well just walk away and let them have it. This one thing has done more to wreck the will to defend than anything else in the game.

A zerg that massively outnumbers you, as karma trains tend to do, can afford to match your numbers and back cap you while they continue to mow your towers over with their further improving siege weapon trait lines.

This unfortunately can’t address any of the problems the game currently has.

insanemaniac.2456:

i sure hope theyve been testing it with the amounts of people typically seen in live server battles.

i dont think they have.

and i think all of us should assume the update is subject to change until its released.

I think they’ve shown themselves to be a bit too stubborn for both of those things. Father knows best.