Guild Wars 2

Darklight.5487:

Honestly guys, which part of the sentence “We do not want another EOTM map (in case u dev and pr guys dont know what eotm is, it is the overflow map called t”he edge of the mists" map) did u not understand?
Honestly tell me which part of this sentence u do not understand and ill change that part so u do understand it.

It was clear to me many months ago that the ArenaNet developers did not get WvW and that the new WvW maps they were promising were going to be EotM-like gimmick maps. I pretty much gave up on the game when I realized it was only headed away from what I enjoy. I came back to see where things were going in case I was wrong because I did once enjoy the game a great deal. Looks like I wasn’t wrong.

My solution to the Sneak Attack experiment? I tried it and saw how awful it was for my low population server and defensive play, and took a month off of GW2. If you don’t care about defense, I’m sure sneak caps against empty towers and keeps are great fun but they are horrible for the person who spent 3 hours trying to get a tower or keep upgraded and sieged up, only to watch it flip while their back is turned.

Seriously, if reliable and fast capping of empty towers is so much fun and what everyone really wants (judging by EotM, it may be), the solution seems pretty simple to me. ANet should build a PvE map that uses WvW mechanics but everyone is on the same side, so towers will never be defended by anything but a handful of NPCs that can quickly and reliably be defeated.

Population imbalance problem? Solved. Everyone is on the same side. Frustrated defensive players tired of spending their afternoon upgrading a site only to have it flip in a couple of minutes to a zerg or when caught off guard? Gone. There won’t be any defensive play. Players getting bored because the karma train has stalled on some defenders. Won’t happen. No more risk of unexpected death to a well operated siege weapon or defenders showing up to defend.

Nice, safe, and predictable without enemy players showing up to gum up the works and it can be perfectly balanced just like the rest of PvE.

Missy.6803:

PvE Megaserver….meet WvW Megaserver in alliances.

I know several players who stopped playing GW2 because of the megaservers. The map caps are set high enough that every map feels crowded now, which I don’t consider a good thing, and they broke the community on lower population servers. I no longer see the same familiar faces, which I also don’t consider a good thing. Doing that to WvW, where I stay on a low-population server because of the community, would probably kill the game for me. No, I don’t play for massive battles against faceless opponents. I play for the scrappy fights against unpredictable odds against small and moderate sized groups of players.

morrolan.9608:

No its not, Dawdler has it right about ESO. The ESO design is clearly superior.

I plan on giving ESO another chance (I played it in beta) when the subscription fees end, but I thought the combat in Beta seemed a lot more static and boring than GW2. I have higher hopes for Camelot Unchained and dumped some money into funding that. GW2 WvW has some great elements and it could be better, but each time they announce a change, it just seems to move further away from what I really want, rather than closer. Maybe I’m just not the demographic they are trying to attract. Also looking forward to Black Desert, which seems to be heading to North America and Europe. But we’re probably talking about 2016 or later for those challenges to become real.

shadowpass.4236:

We have all of these threads about how ranger is OP, and no counters. But the real question is…

Why do rangers never complain about rangers? =]

As someone who played a Longbow Ranger in WvW before the changes and who had opponents specifically target me assuming I was the weakest link and easiest kill, I’m too busy enjoying being able to win to complain about anything.

Hexalot.8194:

It’s not going Free to play. It’s going Buy to play (similar to GW2).

Yes, I know (I was thinking “buy to play” and typed “free to play”). I liked the Beta enough that I’m fine with that. I don’t want a recurring cost.

Coldtart.4785:

Making defending involve fighting players instead of sitting around waiting to fight with siege against siege would be a more rewarding defence experience.

Which was how the white swords generally worked in my experience, because they let players show up to fight when a location was under attack, but they’re experimenting with removing them, too.

Respawn.6802:

Whatever they do it will now have to compete with another AvAvA game.
TESO is dropping the subscription requirement mid March so if what they are offering for world PvP is more attractive to a large group of players (and I do understand its overall system isn’t appealing to just as many) WvW might take a noticable hit.

I tried the TESO beta and didn’t stick with it because of the subscription. I’ll be taking another look when it goes free to play.

Osu.6307:

Thanks a lot, anet, for giving us the opposite of what we have been asking for.

That seems to be the pattern.

Players: “Low populations servers are suffering. Defending is unrewarding. We don’t want a karma train and gimmick maps like EotM. Server communities matter to us.”

ANet: “Right. We need to make high population even more powerful, make it harder to defend, give WvW maps even more gimmicky than EotM, and destroy the server communities.”

It’s like information passes though some sort of bizarro reverse translation before it reaches them.

Is it really that difficult to implement a Report Hacking/Abuse button that would sent a report to whatever GMs are online at the moment as a sort of “head’s up” to tell them where to look for potential problems? I don’t expect them to catch every instance, but some of these go on for a long time with a lot of people seeing them and complaining about the.

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

Today i ran out of gold, siege and the will to spend one more dime on WvW.
unfortunately this means no more keeps or towers held during prime time and a starting tick of 0 each evening.

Try asking in map chat for donations. A few times, after running through a few gold and earning nothing, I’ve asked someone else to run an expensive upgrade (to a keep or SMC) because I was out of gold and I got several gold from other players via mail in response. If other people appreciate your work, they might help you pay for it.

That said, I’ve suggested an upgrade completion rebate. Give players half the gold they spent to start an upgrade back if their upgrade completes, providing incentive to make sure it does.

Swamurabi.7890:

Everyone’s been using the white swords as a crutch to aid in defense. In order to counter the white sword defense you either had to drop enough siege to quickly knock down a wall/door before white swords popped, send a “tagger” to pop white swords on the other side of the map, have a “blocking” group to prevent defenders from getting in the keep. All of these required having a much larger attacking force than defenders.

That’s a feature, not a bug. The game rewards coordination and planning, as it should and it should require more attackers than defenders to defeat a defended objective.

Swamurabi.7890:

There was no way to ninja a keep as a small team because the white swords and the fact that you had to go through two walls/gates meant that you’d get attacked before you could even get to the second wall/gate. So even if you had equal but small numbers on a map you were severely handicapped by the white sword mechanic.

Is that the type of balance you want?

Absolutely. A small group shouldn’t be able to ninja a keep and they should have to be careful and maybe a bit lucky to get a tower. Why do you think a small group should be able to ninja a keep?

It should be possible to flag movement that should be impossible. In other words, calculate the maximum distance that a certain class can cover optimally using every enhancement, skill, and rune the player is using and compare that with how far the character actually moves and then flag it if it seems impossible. Reset the check if they use a portal or waypoint. Flag any character found under a map or flying over a map. Flag any character that moves through or up a wall. If other players are seeing it, these movements must be getting reported to the central server. This doesn’t even have to be done in real time while it’s happening. Log the movements and then churn through them later.

TexZero.7910:

Ballista’s dont damage walls. A for Effort though.

So, just to confirm it still works, I went over to the FC borderlands and capped a camp, and built myself a ballista in the catapult spot on Briar tower (under the lord’s room) and got damage for all three attacks and drew swords on the tower. It’s not a lot of damage (under 1000 on the 1 and 2 and under 4000 on the 3 with a normal ballista and full mastery), but with enough time, you can take a wall down with it. In the past, I’ve done it to an outer wall on the blue keep in EBG from Langor. Without white swords, there will be all sorts of interesting stand-off locations where you can build a ballista to whittle a wall down. You can take gates down with ballista fire, too, which is useful if the front of the gate gets too hot for rams and the gate is already damaged.

MrWubzy.3587:

-I cry every time I see the image of Eir holding a dead Snaff ([img]http://40.media.tumblr.com/2ad710983b921b73bd7cd43052c7103a/tumblr_n6p28kj1JD1s6c8gro1_500.jpg[/img]

Everyone knows that a party in Guild Wars 2 can only have 5 people in it. If Zojja came along with Snaff, Logan wouldn’t have been able to join the party, anyway, because it was full, so he might as well have stayed behind with the Queen, otherwise someone would have had to kick Zojja from the party and then she’d be endlessly pouting about that, instead.

(My confession is that I kinda like Logan.)

One of the worst mistakes a game can make is to take things away from the players that they enjoy and this game has been doing a lot of that (SAB, casual outfits, server identity in PvE, interesting starter quests, traits at low levels, transformation crystals allowing the movement of upgrades, etc.).

TexZero.7910:

Ballista’s dont damage walls. A for Effort though.

Unless they’ve changed something and the Wiki is wrong, sure they do. See:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Fire_Reinforced_Shot

Jeknar.6184:

I belive the complaint is about how the AoEs from below can cover the whole wall, making people on ground safer than people on top of it which make no sense.

The walls also get in the way of attackers firing down (so they have to jump up on the edge where they can be pulled down) and I particularly like the crenellations next to mortars on some keeps that offer no real protection to the mortar but block it’s field of fire. Maybe they were all designed by the Mad King to make them impossible to defend and easy to capture. Can’t make things too hard to take or the karma train so will get bored and do something else. People have a loot-per-hour quota expectation to meet and there is no loot in defense or a long drawn out fight.

Johje Holan.4607:

1. Identify the zerg.

• Someone needs to search out the zerg
• When found, the player needs to trail the zerg and stick to it like glue
• This way, there will be no surprise attacks

2. Scouts for the southern camps.

• Instead of sitting in all towers and keeps, scouts will need to patrol the three southern camps of their BL to spot invaders as soon as they enter the map.
• These scouts should have more fun than just sitting in towers. They can fight anyone who enters the BL, they can take the camps.
• These scouts will alert the zerg trailer if the zerg ports into the BL.

What makes you assume that the enemy will attack as a zerg without swords? Two people can take a tower pretty quickly if not interrupted. Not a zerg. Two. (15 supplies each and a guild cat or, heck, a ballista. I’ve taken a keep’s wall down with a ballista and some persistence.)

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

As I join the fight to support my team mate, I immediately get assaulted by the bulk of the laughing ET forces who was so far simply trebbing our only tower from our fully upgraded keep (that server has received MASSIVE transfers after the tournament it is just ridiculous now)…

It was already bad that ET was just so overblobbed and taking pleasure in having zero competition whatsoever, but when my “team mate” yelled at me that it was a duel, I snapped!

A lot of people on ET really aren’t all that happy that we have little competition and they are looking to move up in ranking, which is why they are taking and holding so many points. ET did gain people. SoR lost people. We’re moving up and you are moving down, so hopefully you won’t have to deal with this from ET too much longer. SoR should be able to have more fun against AR and Kain, even if you lose a few more guilds.

Skriven.3074:

Put sanctum of rall and anvil rock together to form sanctum of anvil rock. Put ferguson’s crossing and kaineng together for kaineng’s crossing and sorrow’s furnace with eredon terrance for eredon’s furnace. Make it 6 / 6 / 9 for gold, silver, bronze.

Two problems with that. First, several of those servers are not going to complement each other’s weaknesses. But more importantly, without getting specific, those servers have been rivals and don’t necessarily want to be merged with each other.

I believe a new set of maps would bring a lot of people back to WvW in GW2, at least for a few weeks, to try it out and learn how they are different and work.

style.6173:

What? Name one person who plays GW2 and their most fun moment is to just sit in a tower. That makes zero sense.

Some people do love to defend, and that is different than just randomly sitting in a tower. They enjoy the strategy of trying to defend when someone is attacking.

As someone who does a lot of defensive play and scouting, I agree with this. Defensive play can be fun (though not rewarding — it usually costs me gold to play that way) if I can roam around and manage a few objectives (a couple of towers, a camp, and a keep), constantly moving between them and maybe running some dolyaks, and it can be fun when the enemy attacks and tests whatever defenses have been put in place. But just sitting in a tower waiting is not fun and I rely on the white swords to know if I need to run back to an objective I’m not currently sitting in to see what’s going on.

The only tower that’s somewhat entertaining to camp in is Quentin Lake, because one can build a ballista (and use the mortar, if there is one) near the lord’s room that overlooks the hylek camp and use it to (A) get the hyleks on your team, (B) neutralize the hyleks if another team has them, and © take out enemy players either trying to get the hylek or neutralize them. With ballista mastery and/or a superior ballista, it’s not hard to do enough damage, even if there is nobody down there and the hylek are quick healing, to kill the hylek or krait and you can get rewards for the kills and events. It’s sort of like fishing off the back of the tower. I wish more towers had something like that to do while camping them.

Wanze.8410:

What rules changes would you like to see tested for a match up and why?

1. Eliminate rallying off of kills in WvW. To eliminate the liability of uplevels and beginners.
2. Eliminate reviving someone who is fully dead in WvW while in combat. To reduce the advantage of zerging and improve the ability of zerg-busters to zerg-bust.
3. Assuming we get white swords back, have white swords pop with no delay if the defender is outnumbered. Could be point based, instead (any server more than N% behind the top server), to avoid gaming it with numbers. To give outnumbered defenders or losing servers a better chance to defend.
4. Give a defense event and reward for players who damage creatures or players who do damage to a dolyak (no points for just walking the dolyak — you have to fight). To reward the walking of dolyaks to make sure supplies get through.
5. Give players a rebate for the gold they spend on an upgrade equal to half the cost of the upgrade if the upgrade successfully completes. To give players a vested interest in making sure the upgrades they start are completed.
6. Give some sort of reward to players who refresh arrow carts, ballistas, trebuchets, and catapults inside of an objective with 15 or less minutes left on their timer. To encourage the refreshing of defensive siege weapons so they don’t expire.
7. Dial the orange sword limit back down to 5-10 combatants. To make it easier for those looking for a fight to find them. Not sure this is a good idea, but I’d like to see it in practice.
8. Add diminishing returns to the scoring system to reduce the point gap between competitors. This would require no new extensive code if it’s based solely on existing score and/or points-per-tick. See, for example, my proposal in the scoring discussion as one way to do it. To reduce the runaway score problem and keep the scores withing a more competitive distance of each other throughout the match-up.

I’d like to see the first one tested without the second one. Only the 4th suggestion should be in any way difficult to implement.

lorndarken.3702:

if your enemies dolyak was a hotdog , would you eat it ? I KNOW I WOULD !

Doesn’t everyone kill dolyaks for slabs of red meat for cooking? (A slab of red meat is a fairly common drop in dolyak kills.)

style.6173:

Organized guilds still won’t want other people with them.

Sure, but rallying changes it from an annoyance to a liability.

MomentofWeakness.1246:

Precisely, instead of working on things in WvW we aren’t asking for they could focus on using community ideas that they like that are actually requested in mass.

I’m guessing that part of the attraction of removing the white swords for the developers is that it’s a very easy change to code, Probably just a matter of commenting out a few lines of code or setting the delay really high.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

one of the core tenets of the devs is “you should always be happy when another player comes to help”.

Then why don’t they remove rallying off of dead players in WvW, because that’s the biggest reason why organized groups don’t want inexperienced players or uplevels traveling with them and operate without a tag? And why are they talking about adding points-per-kill, which will make inexperienced players and uplevels a liability to their server?

GreyWraith.8394:

I disagree; reading that post was something of a relief. They aren’t going to issue a permanent change and completely ignore us – they are trying a multi-week test to see how it works. That’s … reasonable. I still don’t think it will work well, but at least they are willing to do a temporary test first.

While I’ve expressed similar sentiments, the question remains open as to how, exactly, they are going to kitten whether the test was a success or failure and how they’ll determine whether to keep the change or revert it back. How are they going to tell if it’s a success or failure? Are they going to poll? Are the people who don’t like it going to have to boycott WvW to express their displeasure? Are they going to look at scores? By what criteria is a change a failure or success?

Luvpie.8350:

No white swords will lead to karma trains… anyone that tells you different either doesn’t play wvw exclusively or trying to kill your game faster then you.

Or likes karma trains and PvDoor, thinks that’s the apex of WvW play, and wants to encourage more of it. Plenty of people seek to get a kick out of it in EotM.

Personally, I’m starting to think they could solve the whole problem of population imbalances and giving the inevitable losers a fighting chance or a reason to show up and play by creating a PvE map full of WvW objectives defended by (slightly — don’t want to make things too hard for the karma train) tougher NPCs that everyone can endlessly defeat while all playing on the same winning side.

Rodrigo.1486:

Why don’t we just embrace the imbalance

It would be easier to embrace the imbalance if the game didn’t keep rewarding the imbalance by giving advantages and better rewards to the winner. “You get to show up and die so the other team can slay you like NPCs and get more loot bags and rewards than you do,” isn’t exactly a pitch that’s going to get most people to turn up every week.

Achey.3612:

seriously…. our wvw is dead now. AND IM GONNA CONTRIBUTE TO THAT because i don’t wanna be in a dead wvw server. so, wherever i go, i cant wait for me and my 4 buddies to be welcomed into a new home!

When I started on Eredon Terrace, we were lucky if we could hold a single tower in EBG for 5 minutes through the spawn camping. There is always plenty to do, even at the bottom, especially if you’ve got 4 other people running with you. Stop worrying about the points and just do your best.

Dawdler.8521:

I wont even start comparing the 80 man raids, full collision detection, single instance world where you dont even notice zone loading and amazing naval combat in Archeage, I’ll simply sum it up as below:

What ever merits Archeage’s engine and mechanics may have (and I didn’t think the combat was nearly as interesting), I found time-gated labor points, that you can pay a monthly fee to improve but not eliminate, a show stopper and the weekend I planned to spend learning it to see if I could like it lasted only a few hours before I was back on GW2. GW2 has already added some time-gated crafting limits and those are bad enough.

grifflyman.8102:

Tier 1 – Hire Caravan Guard: Currently has no importance, it’s irrelevant and provides nothing to the game. When a caravan is destroyed the guards immediately de-spawn, so they don’t really offer any protection. It would be interesting to see the guards provide a passive speed boost to yaks, or perhaps a defense bonus to them while the guards remain active.

Not true. This upgrade can be critically important on the Eternal Battlegrounds if the dolyaks have no human guards, since the dolyaks can be killed by multiple creatures that they encounter on their way to their destination. If I know nobody is going to be walking dolyaks, I’ll sometimes run this upgrade first on Eternal Battleground to make sure that they get through (a doubled dolyak that doesn’t get through provides 0 supplies).

grifflyman.8102:

Tier 2 – Hire Additional Guards: Added guards is helpful, I would love to see the final upgrade offer a radius alert, alarming players on the map if a group over 5+ people begin to attack it. This would provide relevant task for havoc groups, and help break up the current blobs that plague WvW.

I’m fine with improving this upgrade, but it’s also not worthless. The last two upgrades can make a camp much more difficult for a lone opponent to solo.

grifflyman.8102:

Tier 1 – Hire Merchants/Hire Outfitter: Offers very little, is there some kind of unique item they could offer? Maybe hiring them allows the guards and NPC’s to be better equipped? I don’t feel like guards offer any difficulty and most often they are ignored. Good examples are the archers placed along the walls, they don’t do much.

Tier 2 – Hire Siegemaster: The siege master sounds cool, but he does nothing. It would be amazing if he placed free siege, similar to what siegerazor does once you purchase him. Keep in mind the Seigemaster is only available for towers, an asset I think it very easy to lose before it’s fully upgraded. Free siege placement might provide extra incentive to actually defend a lowly upgraded tower and would provide small squads something to do. An interesting thing to notice is the icon for siegemaster/services is an Asura working on a siege golem, as if repairing it. Maybe golems could regenerate health very slowly if they are stationed next to one? This would allow towers to play a larger role, damaged golems would be kept inside towers instead of at spawn or inside keeps.

These two are usually pretty useless on towers, especially once siege weapons became sold in the Trading Post. It would help if they provided an armor repairer as part of these upgrades. Siege repair workers (that repair all siege in a tower, including the built-in cannons, oil, and mortars could be interesting as a T-3 upgrade, where it might be tolerable for them to automatically consume supplies.

I’m less enthused about the idea of automatic siege placement because it’s likely that it would be placed in vulnerable locations where it could be easily hit by attackers instead of the tricky hard-to-hit spots that a person would pick.

grifflyman.8102:

Tier 3 – Hire Patrol: A patrol us used to scout an area and report on any enemy activity or to secure a perimeter. Patrols should put X on the map if they encounter a group of players larger than 15 attacking a keep or tower. Again this allows small groups to have purpose, allowing smaller guilds and havocs to play an important role in WvW. Clearing patrols before assaulting a keep would be an important tactic, and if they were taken out by a small group it would prevent the main force from being spotted within the area of the keep.

Again, the existing Hire Patrol can be pretty useful on Eternal Battlegrounds for the same reason Caravan Guards are. They can help keep dolyaks without guards from dying to creatures. This is particularly true at Veloka, Ogrewatch, Quentin Lake, and Langor.

It would be nice if the patrol marked a tower or keep as under attack as soon as they were attacked, but it sounds like they are determined to remove the white swords to make defending even harder. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they decided to remove the upgrades, too, because they just slow down the attacking zerg and the goal of WvW (as seen in EotM) seems to be moving all towards now slowing down the attackers and letting the game be a capture train.

Vayne.8563:

I think Guild Wars 2’s success (at least compared to most MMOs released) is that it didn’t try to copy the WoW formula and tried to create a different kind of experience, which the core game still is.

I think that’s true, however as a person new to MMOs who was recruited by a player attracted to Guild Wars 2 because it was different but who has stopped playing, my concern is that Guild Wars 2 is moving away from what made it different and good toward what hardcore WvW players expect. Why are the new events all about massive zergs, DPS, and time limits? Why are the megaserver caps set so high? What kind of experience is a new player in the Wayfarer Foothills who wanders in to the Frozen Maw with a 15th level character going to have? Will they be able to see what’s going on in the center of the zerg or even do enough damage to get credit for the event?

The reason I didn’t spend more time with ESO, after spending weekend playing it during the late beta, was the monthly fee. The combat experience was worse but there were some things I liked about ESO better, but I wasn’t going to obligate myself to play by paying a monthly fee. The reason I gave up on Archeage, which also had a worse combat experience but I liked some of the sandbox elements, was the Labor Points. I didn’t like being time gated to harvest and craft, but Guild Wars 2 has been adding time gating. If you need to artificially time gate what the players do in the game, that suggests something more deeply is wrong with the design of the game.

The friend who got me into Guild Wars 2, who bought a computer just to play it, who played daily, who has something like two-dozen character slots, who spent plenty in the gem store, and who accumulated over 10,000 achievement points hasn’t played in (just checked) exactly 3 months now. He didn’t leave Guild Wars 2 for another game like a locust. He just stopped playing because they broke Guild Wars 2 for him with their changes. He would pay in the early morning and no longer saw the same people every day doing things with him because the megaservers destroyed that community (more on that in a moment). He bought casual outfits for many of his characters that he color coded, which were also ruined for him. He basically recruited for the game and had recently gotten a casual player into the game to play with him, but she largely stopped playing when he did.

A second friend took longer but he’s also largely stopped playing for the same reason. They just don’t have fun with the zerged world boss events, champions, and maps in general.

The megaservers also destroyed the server community for WvW. One can no longer recruit players or ask for WvW help in map chat from their server in PvE. The megaservers also hurt the server community for role-players, who now have to guild together or even party together if they want to wind up on the same maps with each other.

That points to another direction the game is moving that doesn’t interest me — organized guild play. I’m not interested in joining a club or taking on a second job and recent threads suggest a move toward making guilds more important. I know there are people who want and enjoy that, but moving the game in that direction moves the game away from casual players not interested in that.

The Living Story has also turned into a grind for me such that I’ve stopped doing it. And I’m not eager to do many of the holiday events for the same reason. All of this suggests to me that the game is catering to the locusts, the players who want to grind, the players who want to be fed more limited time content, and the players who want bigger, zergier battles.

Maybe I’m the minority and maybe ArenaNet can afford to alienate me and my friends from the game so we stop playing, but if I leave, it won’t be because I’m looking for the latest new thing and will be because Guild Wars 2 has left me behind and isn’t interested in supporting the same sort of pay that they once did support and that I enjoyed. And in the case of my friends, they didn’t leave to play another game. They just stopped playing Guild Wars 2 from having played it daily.

Beldin.5498:

In the end you just said what we all now, that a lot of MMO player are just like locusts .. they consume content and go to the “next big thing”. Be it ESO or WS or AA or Black Desert, or Generic Asia Grinder 4711 .. or even some single player games .. or whatever.

Guild Wars 2 is the first MMO I played (not counting text MUDs in the 1980s). I have map completion on one character and enjoyed and still enjoy some PvE play, but I now spend most of my time in WvW. I play a lot but I’m not a great player and I’m not a hardcore player and do dungeons and a lot of other content casually.

What led me to try ESO and Archeage wasn’t that I’m a locust looking for the “next big thing” full of content to consume. What made me try those games is that Guild Wars 2 seems to be moving in a direction away from what I enjoy about the game, not simply through neglect of the elements I like but also changing them for the worst or eliminating them.

I enjoyed seeing the same people from my server every day in world events. I enjoyed trying to do The Frozen Maw with only a 5-10 people. I enjoyed roaming Malchor’s Leap or Southsun Cove, only occasionally running into a friend or another farmer, so they felt like an empty frontier. And I enjoyed the event chains at Orr leading to the temples being open only being done occasionally so that completing those events or finding a temple open felt special, not routine. Yes, it was annoying that my server couldn’t really do Taquatl or some of the later Living Story events and I needed to guest or join a special guild if I wanted to complete them, but I was fine with that.

The megaservers took that away from me by giving me zergs everywhere and it seems pretty clear to me that the direction the game is moving is toward more, more, more events with commander tags and zergs and anyone without top-end hardware playing at 1-2 frames per second. That’s a move away from what I enjoyed, since the original Taquatl (before it was changed) was an event I did regularly, sometimes with only a few people and the early Living Story elements were not something that required a zerg to complete.

That suggests ArenaNet’s direction is toward bigger zergier events that require massive DPS to complete. Yes, it’s great getting the Taquatl loot and the Karka Queen loot but I see those events largely as grindy chores that I show up for an push one to collect a reward, not challenging events that I enjoy doing with a few random people I might run into every day. I’m sure there are people who enjoy the zergs, but it’s not my personal idea of fun. I’m concerned about the forced merger of servers in WvW for the same reason. I don’t want to be forced into zerg play there, either.

Baldrick.8967:

The biggest problem arising form this ‘adopt a dev’ is that they totally failed to see wvw from the average player’s viewpoint.
Smaller servers were ignored.
people without guilds or in tiny guilds were ignored.
scouts were ignored.

So they now come back with a totally screwed up viewpoint of what wvw is really like outside a tournament for the vast majority of players and will base decisions off of that false information.

I don’t think that’s entirely true. There are people who think the apex of play is organized guild play on stacked servers focused on the repeated capturing of objectives. It’s what they enjoy. They would think small server play is awful, guildless play is awful, and solo roaming or scouting is awful, so even if you forced them to do it, their “fix” would be oriented around making those aspects of the game go away because they don’t like them.

I think that may ultimately be the problem, that there is simply nobody among the development staff that has the preferences or play style for which this would be a problem. They just don’t understand or care about it.

Often, when you make a game more X, you also wind up making it less Y. When everyone making the decisions think that X is good and Y is worthless or even bad, then deciding to make the game more X seems like a no-brainer decision, even though it alienates everyone who likes Y or doesn’t want more X. I’m sure there are people who love what the megaservers have done to the game, but I know people who loved Guild Wars 2 who have stopped playing the game because of what the megaservers did to parts of the game they enjoyed the most and kept them playing every day.

Of course you can optimize any game to do one thing very well at the expense of all other things, which will make the game a must-play experience for players who want that one thing but worthless to everyone else. That limits the customer base. That’s fine if the limited group is big enough to pay the bills but not so fine if they aren’t.

insanemaniac.2456:

sweet, keep solos here i come

Yes, and if you’ve got a nice hidden cat spot, you can take your time bringing the walls down, too, because the enemy isn’t going to get any warning no matter how long it takes.

Virtuoso.9460:

It was definitely CD doing this. As It happened tonight on DBBL everyone on the map could see the treb on the hill exactly where the screenshots within this post have shown.

All siege weapons keep track of who built it, which is why you can kick someone else off of a trebuchet you’ve built. Is it really that difficult for ArenaNet to send someone into the map to take a look and figure who is doing it? Is the game really that opaque to the people who built and run it?

Jeknar.6184:

Scryeless.1924:

Removal of white swords isn’t an issue for any Tier. Even in the lower tiers if you see that something is contested, how often is anyone actually able to make it to the node before it flips? The color still changes so you know it isn’t under your control and that you need to reclaim it. That’s the important part. If the colors were removed and no one had a clue which team owned what then we might have a small problem.

The only objectives I’m not able to reach in time after I see white swords are the southern towers of home borderland (if there is no WP) and camps (which sometimes flip without swords)… And by reach it in time, I mean have enough time to toss a disabler and use the siege inside the tower to protect it.

I play on the same server and agree. We arrive in time to save objectives from white sword all the time because our opponents are normally not a zerg of 30+ dropping 5 rams or catapults so there is often time to get in and defend, especially when it’s a keep but also often the towers if they are close enough to an open waypoint. It’s easy to jump in and save a tower from a small party or a camp from being soloed after seeing white swords and, on the flip side, I’ve gotten jumped plenty of times while soloing camps if I don’t get it done quickly enough. If there is a 30+ zerg on the map, we can usually tell that because of the Outnumbered buff. And even if we choose to ignore the white swords at a camp or tower we know isn’t upgraded or sieged up, it gives us more time to get to the next logical objective and make sure there are siege weapons waiting, which you won’t get if your first sign of trouble is the tower changing color, when your opponent may already be starting to move toward the next objective.

This is a change oriented toward offensive play, hobbling defense, and making it easier to capture objectives without resistance, as if the game needed any more of that.

Pinkamena Diane Pie.8054:

Removing the AOE cap wont solve the problem, though it never should have been added in the first place either.

The problem is the zerg nature of WvW, everything you do can be better done with more numbers, and so people run 50+ blobs, even 80+ on some servers!

Part of why zergs are so powerful is because of the AoE cap. If every AoE attack on the heart of a zerg damaged everyone in the zerg instead of only 5 of them, AoE attacks would cut down any tightly clustered zerg and they’d have to spread out to survive, thus reducing the benefit of AoE boons.

The other thing making zerg viable is the lack of collisions. If the people in a zerg to in each other’s way for movement and attacks, again, they’d have to spread out.

maeggle.6021:

(Just to name an example: During the first weeks many players were mad about the bloodlust buff changes and the added ruins — Today they provide great areas for small scale fights and give roamers even more things to contribute to the overall match (at least on Kodash). After all the ruins were a good change, which, today, most players accept or even use.)

I’d still rather have the quaggan and krait lake back but the ruins have not been as bad in practice as I thought they would be because the players largely ignore them at the level my server is at (each server normally holds their own, making it a wash). The same thing could certainly happen with the PPK, too, if most people don’t change their behavior because of it.

The loss of the white swords will be harder to ignore. If it promotes active scouting, upgrading, and refreshing, I would be pleasantly surprised and think that would be a good thing but I think that outcome will be undermined by the lack of reward offered by scouting and defensive play by the game. It’s also going to rob roamers of the useful psychological weapon of knocking on the gates of keeps to draw swords to keep the enemy wondering if they’re really under attack.

John Corpening.9847:

There was quite a lot of discussion around the proposal of removing white swords from objectives in WvW. We understand there are concerns about how this change might work in practice or how player behavior may change as a result of it. We felt like the best way to understand fully the impact, and give players a chance to see for themselves how it directly changes the WvW experience is to let people try it and see what they think.

I believe both of these changes will be pretty awful for most servers for pretty obvious reasons, but I also think experimentation and testing the theory is a good thing so I think this is a decent way to proceed. I also hope that you’ll consider future experiments like this with other suggestions that many other people have made (some that I like and some that I don’t) that should be feasible to implement as an experiment such as the elimination of rallying and eliminating the rezzing the fully dead.

Artaz.3819:

Actually leave the map as is and put a long straight tunnel (with kneedeep water in it) along the same path under the tower. It is useful for positioning both offensively and defensively (especially with a zerg).

Another way they could have dealt with it was to put walls at either end of the gully and a set of stairs out of it at the far end so there would still be a choke point at the bridge and a pit to stumble into but not a place wander in to from the outside.

A tunnel is what they’ll probably need to do if they want to perform a similar fix to Mendon’s, since the dolyak path leads under the tower that way (or they’d have to reroute it down the stairs) and it would be a serious obstruction to travel between the Keep and Mendon’s to put rock there.

My guess is that it was changed because ACs could be used to hit everywhere in that tower. A week ago, someone was killing the Worker (and Quartemaster) inside QL while we held it, which I thought was a clever way to stop upgrades from running. But basically nothing in that tower was safe.

Tspatula.9086:

WOW! Backpedal much? Did you have one, no maybe two devs on a low tier server? You understand? The reality is that WE are finally starting to UNDERSTAND, the “dev team” is pretty much clueless about WvW, which is rather obvious to those of us who actually do it. But hey, thanks for more of the same, with a little “dev participation” thrown in to spice things up.

One developer did join Eredon Terrace, which was at the bottom of the rankings at the time, and did participate with the guild he joined. Another played on Darkhaven, which is also in Bronze. At least part of the problem is that the developers were adopted by guilds to go to guild stuff, which generally involves larger scale activity, even on low-tier servers, oriented toward attacking and not wandering the map alone or as part of a small group, refreshing siege, running upgrades, and so on.

I think there might be an even broader and impossible to solve issue here, which is that opinions about what’s good or bad and fun or awful in WvW varies considerably from person to person. Every developer could be paid to play on the bottom tier for a month, but they might never understand what a low-tier player finds appealing about playing on their server. If they think the goal of WvW is massive battles with so many people that it strains the playability of the game and that activity should be heavily guild oriented (which is what some of the recent events and megaservers suggest), then they might never understand what an independent roamer finds appealing about low tier play and low population map. At that point, they can either listen to what those players say and try not to ruin the game for them or they can decide that they can afford to lose those players and not worry about them and their concerns.

Flyphish.6398:

Vastly more people WvW on the top 3 tiers, why disrupt more people when you can roll the dead server players into the more active tiers. Minimal disruption and we get fewer threads about how dead it is down in T8.

There are plenty of threads full of whining from the top two tiers, too. I don’t know what the bottom looks like in the EU or during every part of the day, but I wouldn’t consider my server dead nor the servers we are playing. The point is, why disrupt anyone by destroying the level of play they enjoy? Is the point to drive people out of WvW and have fewer Guild Wars 2 players? Because that is what it will do.

Flyphish.6398:

If you like low population, stay…it’s really simple.

That’s all a lot of people want, but we can’t do that if ArenaNet deletes our server or forcibly merges us with other servers, can we?

Reverence.6915:

I see a lot of posts from low tier servers saying they don’t want to deal with large battles in higher tiers. From my experience visiting several servers over EU and NA, it’s only when you get to tier 4 that you get even medium sized battles frequently. That means that merging the bottom few servers will only bolster WvW participation as more people in WvW only makes more people want to participate. Those who want to roam alone are in the minority by a large percent.

The real problem with low tier servers though, is the “fair weather” problem. Many servers (ET included prior to transfers – my experience on ET for a week a few months back showed me a large population of 50+ on EBG every night but no one working together) have a LOT of players that simply don’t show up if the matchup isn’t in their favour. This makes unbalanced matchups even more lopsided and simply snowballs from there.

What’s a “medium sized battle”?

So the people who want to roam alone are a minority, yet ET has a large population that doesn’t concentrate into a large force because… they want to roam alone or in small groups. What people seem to keep missing from is that the people who want small server play, even if they are a minority, aren’t going to magically learn to like high-tier play, especially the ones who transferred down to get away from it. They’ll likely just stop playing WvW entirely.

As for fairweathers, I think that problem exists top to bottom and mergers aren’t going to make it go away because it’s fairly obvious that many people are going to prefer winning and being rewarded to losing and not being rewarded. “Would you rather have a cupcake or a slap in the face? I don’t know why nobody ever stands in the ‘slap in the face’ line.”

The one thing that makes players show up for a slap in the face is community and that’s the thing that any forced mergers is going to destroy, just like the megaservers destroyed community in PvE.

Yelloweyedemon.2860:

I play on silver league EU server, and we have roamers even on extreme times (far too late or early), let alone a zerg. There’s enough roaming AND zerg action pretty much anytime. It might stop at some point after 6 AM for a couple of hours, then repeat.

So no I don’t know what you’re talking about. I imagine on “gold” league there would be many people 24/7 on map. I don’t play on bronze so can’t really comment on there.

I’m talking about Bronze, where maps often have 5 or fewer people on them outside of primetime (and sometimes even during primetime if the server is trying to concentrate a zerg on another map). Note that I’m not complaining about the low population, which can work OK with the white swords as-is.