Guild Wars 2

I’ll preface this by saying I consider the PPT system to be fundamentally broken. I made suggestions similar to these sometime in 2013/14, but have since come to believe that a model of simple objective control doesn’t reflect what WvW is about. However, I do welcome changes from A.net, and I do think these changes have the capacity to improve the current scoring. With that said, some constructive criticism:

Upgraded Objectives Score Higher

• Each tier of objective upgrade increases the amount of score per tick
• The goal is to incentivize defending your upgraded objectives and assaulting opposing upgraded objectives

The goal here is noble, but the effect contradicts the prior stated goal of reducing the need for 24 hour coverage. One of the effects of servers with strong night and morning presences is turning all of their opponents’ structures wooden. This is a double whammy with lower PPT values for wooden structures, as retaking those structures then occupies further time, during which the higher-coverage servers continue to get max-value income from their own fortified structures.

Reduced the Score Tick Timer from 15 minutes to 5 minutes
&
Points for Capture

• Capturing an objective awards immediate score.
• If the objective is upgraded it is worth additional score.

I am extremely wary of this change. We saw 5-minute ticks and instant-cap score in EotM. Although EotM is not directly comparable, as you do not upgrade structures, and players have no attachment to overall placement, I do believe this gives undue advantage in winning the match-up to the eventual approach commanders in EotM adopted, which was to be the fastest flippers on the map. When a server chose to defend its holdings against another server in EotM, it was to the benefit of the third server, who would then gain greatly from capping as much as possible during that battle. I firmly believe WvW is a mode that is about encouraging large-scale battles between groups of players, over optimising objective-flipping.

Points for Kill

• The amount of score earned from PPK will be increased, so that it contributes more to the overall score.
• As a rough number, PPK may increase to 3-5 points, rather than 1, with diminishing returns on killing players who have been alive for less than 5 minutes.

Improving PPK does fall in line with my vision of WvW. I am not entirely sure about the diminishing returns system. Players are no less of an obstacle to capturing an objective if they’ve spawned recently. At the same time, I recognise that under the new system, it may be tempting for commanders to keep their force inside an enemy keep, ‘farming’ defenders for PPK. It’s hard to judge the outcome of this without knowing the exact numbers you intend to assign many of the new systems, but I think this will improve the average WvW experience.

• Warscore for Caravan Kills, Caravan Delivery and Sentry Capture should increase by at a similar rate as PPK.

Caravan Delivery giving points is questionable. You are rewarding people for the absence of enemies a lot of the time here (this is a general problem with PPT, and the source of my dislike for the system). However, given that a server essentially gains ‘double’ from killing a caravan (they both gain points and deny their opponents points), it may not be a big deal.

I’m not sure if this requires a trait to function or happens naturally, but Revenant Hammer auto-attack has no collision detection. I watched a group of 3 Revenants (part of a bigger zerg) methodically remove every AC and mortar that weren’t in line of sight over the gate they were sieging, before focus-firing any defender on that wall so that they couldn’t drop AoE or disablers.

Line of Sight breaking skills like Dragon’s Tooth, Life Transfer, and of course the wonderful offensive Arrow Cart were bad enough for defenders to begin with, but this is absurd. It’s an auto-attack for crying out loud.

Same issue; bought all three essences yesterday, today the tabs are locked again.

This is specific to a single character. Other characters on my account with map completion in these zones log in and correctly receive their rewards (blue box above the mini-map, mail from the Tyrian Explorers).

All of these characters had 100% completion of the individual maps beforehand. However, only the character who is not receiving map rewards had 100% WORLD map completion.

1. Towers were described as blocking important paths between areas. Does that mean they’re blocking the only path into an area, or are they blocking the shortest path to an area?

2. EotM was, way back when, described as a sort of testing area for new mechanics for WvW. How did it influence the design of this Borderland, and are we going to see any of its mechanics in mainstream WvW (e.g. Sentry Turrets)?

I’ve been doing t5 runs of Dry Top for the past couple of days. During this time, I’ve noticed some consistent cases of various events not spawning at times that they “should”.

In particular, these are:

Guard the Shamans healing the Zephyrites (nr Crash Site #2)
Defend the Skritt from Mordrem to make a Vine Bridge (south of Oasis)
Kill the Inquest Krewe Leader (in Uplands)
Defend the Shaman (in Oasis)

While there’s a fair amount of leeway in getting to t5, having events not spawn like this can make things very difficult.

I cannot say what predicts these not spawning; we have had runs where every event spawns correctly at its time, and we’ve had runs where some of those above events have not spawned at random times (there is no consistent time when an event above does not spawn).

OK, so I do EotM commanding now and again. My style has always been to find enemy zergs and bust them when they’re trying to take our stuff.

For my own zerg’s part, this is generally met by a few negative responses (people asking why we aren’t just flipping towers), but they in turn are addressed by other members of the group who are happy to have fights. So the will to fight enemy players is definitely there for some players; it’s just in the hands of the commander.

In terms of WXP, wiping a zerg of 60 will give you a decent WXP return as long as you space it out. I tend to alternate between wiping the two colours, and also tend to alternate between a wipe, and taking an objective.

Most of the time, enemy zergs do not expect you to attack them at all, and can be caught totally unaware while attacking towers or keep gates. Unlike normal WvW, fights in EotM are very much over in one push; getting the jump on an enemy zerg almost always guarantees that you will win.

So with this in mind, EotM is actually fairly ripe for commanders who want to fight the enemy groups. You get a huge number of loot bags from doing this, as well as good WXP, but obviously less karma than just flipping objectives. Commanders who cut their teeth in normal WvW should find it very easy to track enemy groups, as most zergs in EotM do not bother to hide swords or the like.

So yeah, while EotM is currently karma-farm prime, once other commanders realise how good the pickings are for farming zergs, I would imagine you’ll start to see a lot more of this style of play.

lordkrall.7241:

Do you actually get the chests though? Or is it just a visual bug?

You do actually get the chests.

Devon, is it okay for those of us affected by this bug to play WvW and receive chests?

Or should we stay away from WvW until it’s fixed?

Knox.3748:

People abusing from the code is called exploit. Deal with it

In order to not “abuse” the bug, you have to actually not play WvW.

That’s kind of stupid.

Minfast.5489:

Try playing on one of the other servers outside of primetime where you have zone blobs on every map. You guys have a bigger night presence than Vizu who we faced last week.

We have zoneblobs, you have zoneblobs, everyone has zoneblobs when there’s just PUGs on the map.

Get over it. If you’d ever commanded, you’d know it’s inevitable.

And no, our night presence doesn’t even begin to compare to Viz’s coverage.

iPsychO.5043:

- We experience near perma outmanned buffs on borderlands, let alone the tremendous lagfest against their always full-size blobs in EVERY map.

Haha.

On Piken Square Borderland last night, from 6 till 10, we had:

15 TUP
20 WvW
15 EP
15 DiVa

And maybe 5-10 pugs.

They were all running separately, as often happens on Gandara. Meanwhile, FSP had a full map group, and Piken had a group of 40 and a second group of 20 from SWD.

We had to explain to many of those who had transferred to our server, on TS, that this is how Gandaran guilds like to play; with lots of smaller guild groups.

Map blobbing is inevitable when it’s just pugs and when all borderlands are queued, but insulting the server (and it’s worth noting that nobody who was on Gandara before the transfers is responsible for the influx of players we got) is just silly.

Unfortunately, they can’t fix it.

I had mine switch from Tonn onto Apatia for the Defending Fort Trinity and final step, way back when the game released (despite never doing Personal Story with anyone else). Liberating Apatia is still there on my character, taunting me.

The current price on lower tier materials, those such as linen, being pretty much scratching-at-the-wall levels of insane, I would like to suggest that A.net adds recipes to the Mystic Forge to demote materials.

For example, 50 t5 cloth + 1 t4 cloth + 5 t4 dust + 1 philo stone = 60-120 t4 cloth (numbers are purely for the example).

This would go a long way to allowing players without much interest in either playing in lower level zones, or spending vast quantities of money on common-quality crafting materials, reasonable access to these materials and recipes that use them (consider the cost of simply levelling Tailoring to 400, let alone 500, at the current prices).

The drawback is that this will also hit the prices of other materials such as gold ore etc. that do not have similar market demand, and make them worth less, but this seems like it’s an acceptable price to pay.

If you purchase the Digital Deluxe Edition/Upgrade after Glory has been retired, what will become of the Chalice of Glory (gives you 5k Glory on use)?

I’m disappointed that the ability to earn the current Rank finishers will be taken away, even if we get to keep the ones we’ve earnt thus far. I play all aspects of the game – PvE, PvP and WvW – and so generally don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to one particular side of things, but was enjoying gradually working my way towards these finishers.

I hope A.net will reconsider totally removing the ability to get these finishers.

Sorry you feel that way Ricardo, we’ve had nothing but good fights from FSP.

Nev.5316:

You still haven’t proven anything. Can you prove that such a meeting took place? Anyone can claim anything in this thread doesn’t make anything facts til it has been proven.

Ah, the Ostrich method.

Occam’s razor, kid. Look it up.

Nev.5316:

PS: I’m sure a intelligent man like you can provide proof to backup you’re statements regarding tanking.

This seems to be confusing you, so I’ll elaborate: tanking doesn’t mean every single person on a server decides to tank.

As already has been posted, the server meetings for Deso suggested that they drop out of Gold League to avoid having to face Vizunah during Season One (something I’ve already said I can totally understand; nobody wants to face that server, just as I imagine Underworld and Fort Ranik have no particular wish to face Gandara or Desolation).

A co-ordinated ‘effort’ by major WvW guilds to take it easy during the pre-Season will lower your rating, while a co-ordinated effort by major WvW guilds to play as hard as possible will raise it.

hholls.3278:

@Bethryn Firstly think you’ll find the people who stayed on Deso through the last year have tremendous balls!! Fighting week in week out, outmanned with often no chance of winning and still sticking together due to some fantasic remaining guilds and commanders.

The balls part is directed at those like SlapMeSilly who are mocking Gandara and others for losing to Desolation (read his post for context).

I have nothing but respect for the decent Desolation players who are in it for the fights, and aren’t about to take pot shots at us.

Nev, if you’re going to try and insult my IQ, it’s best not to do it in a post full of run-on sentences, where you can’t even spell “you’re” correctly.

hholls.3278:

Just trying to work out where we are….last match up Gandara were only in the fights ( alledgedly)….earlier this week when leading they were very interested in ppt… until they started falling behind and now its only the fights again!!! Hey I suppose when they’re ticking 400 points overnight against Underworld it’s ok !!!

No, it’s incredibly boring for us.

Abolish PPT, it’s awful and encourages flipping paper towers every time there’s 5 minutes on the clock.
Get rid of the 9-wide leagues, they’re clearly too wide and some match-ups are just totally predictable. Absolutely get rid of the League boundaries for Gold/Silver/Bronze etc., as we’ve already seen it encourages servers to tank downwards so they can talk down to people on other servers when they beat them (telling us to grow some balls when you clearly didn’t have the pair necessary to stay in Gold League in the first place; very impressive).

Make it so players want to defend towers, make it so that the system rewards the fights that matter, not people backcapping, or whichever server can find the other server(s) in the match-up with no coverage and hold all their keeps overnight.

Then maybe we can talk about having actual prizes for first place.

If you’re curious, you can see I felt exactly the same way about the Seasons back in the first match-up thread. The Desolation victory this week hasn’t made me bitter any more than the stupidity of allowing these sort of match-ups did at the beginning.

What’s more pathetic is the children being smug about Gandara (and indeed many of Silver League) being totally unimpressed with having to fight a server that shouldn’t really be matched with them, based on the strength shown during the leagues.

But hey, if you want to be that way about it, maybe you should convince your server to tank to Bronze for Season Two. You can really show them who’s boss.

Thank you indeed!

gjop.8612:

And I’ll say this again, I’ve known people on server’s lower then the top of the silver league and you do exactly the same thing to them that people are complaining to Deso about.

I agree, and my personal opinion is that no server should be facing any server further than 3 places either side of them.

MagnusLL.8473:

Funny thing about all the conspiracy theorists on deso tanking on purpose is how they promptly ignore all the facts

Talking of ignoring all the facts.

Go back and read the posts from your own guys who attended the server meetings. Read about why DVG left. Of course you won’t, because you’re in denial, but hey!

I’m not even saying I blame Desolation for not wanting to be in the same League as Vizunah; nobody really wants to be there.

It’s just pretty annoying for Silver League to have to deal with that as a result. Ultimately, it’s A.net’s fault.

So is Axe still here? I want to see his/her follow-up to “dat logic”. Because, oh what a surprise, a weak weekend followed by a steady creep up during the week from Gold League levels of coverage.

Anyway, good individual fights from many Desolation (and of course FSP).

As far as I’m concerned, this has just proved Leagues are a total failure though. The winner of Gold League for EU has always been known, and the winner of Silver and Bronze Leagues henceforth are pretty much going to be whichever Gold or Silver league servers, respectively, tank into the League below.

As for the Deso members of this thread talking about whining, well, we all know you’re 14. Congratulations on that time you were put back a year in school and did the best in class on the exams, but the only person who’s impressed by that is your mother. Make sure you tank harder than RS, AR or Kodash in the intermediate period, or you’re not going to have such an easy Season Two.

It’ll be interesting to see how both we (Gandara) and Desolation do against Riverside, Kodash etc during the season break (although I doubt anyone will play as hard as they have during the season, so it won’t be a true test).

The morning coverage from Deso is definitely good enough to keep them in low Gold at least, and if we can keep up with them, we might well belong there too.

Though of course, unranked weeks are likely going to be used to firstly recuperate, and secondly, stay in a league where you don’t have to fight bloody Vizunah.

axe.5621:

Wait a second shouldn’t we be stomping all servers in silver league without any problems if we belong to gold league? Whats going on? Why Gandara’s resistance such good against gold league server? Maybe Gandara is worth gold league after all? Or this is just result of duoble teaming? Why Deso is having problems with Gandara? You must admit one:
a) you are double teaming very well thats why Deso is struggling;
b) Deso is not so strong after all and wasn’t tanking to get to silver league;

What is your choice?

Option c) You’ve won every single Silver match you’ve played by a significant margin, possibly indicating that in fact, you are stomping all servers in Silver.

axe.5621:

And again? Like someone already said here. We’re losing to a silver server, yet we belong in gold? Dat logic.

You’re “losing” by 200 points, having made thousands in the last day.

Not to mention look at our previous match-up: your weekend was weak, but you made it up in the week with night and morning coverage.

http://mos.millenium.org/servers/view/15/114

“Dat logic”

axe.5621:

On FSP BL for 10 hours now FSP and Gandara are trying to take bay fom Deso (one from south, other from north). There wasn’t a single fight or flip between FSP and Gandara in FSP BL. How do you call this?

It might have something more to do with the bad reputation your server has garnered by tanking into Silver than any organised treaty between the two servers.

Bubbles.1047:

We’re losing to a silver server, yet we belong in gold? O Logic, Logic! Wherefore art thou Logic?

You’ll come first this match-up.

Your morning strength alone is enough to keep you in mid-Gold. Then we have the issue that FSP is a very sleepy server, so night-points will almost certainly go to you as well, since you tend to have around 20 people more than us during the night.

It was just the same in the first week; you had a weak weekend, followed by strong night and morning presences. It’ll be almost the same next week, except AM isn’t so sleepy, so it’ll be more about the morning presence.

Some good open fights when it wasn’t horribly lagging.

Now take care not to trash the other match-ups too hard Deso, or your rating might put you back in gold. ;P

Ajaxx.3157:

Lmfao @ the screenshot with covered up weapon and utility skills…. Lmfao.

(I think he might be using an axe though!)

When we fought you in Week 36, there was still a small group of IRON doing roaming play on BLs.

Haven’t seen anything like that this week, most I’ve seen is 1 or 2 tags in the middle of a zerg.

Sad, because they were a fun group to fight against. Battles actually lasting longer than the first push.

If only the fights had been any good.

Only interesting fights were with EXG and GoD. IRON seems mostly dead.

1) Alt-friendliness, especially wrt WXP system.

2) Emphasis and reward for defence and on taking defended rather than undefended objectives.

3) Review of the PPT system.

Respect to the UW players who kept showing up despite the match-up.

As for Deso, well, you’re a night-capping, blobbing, and now tanking server with some of the most disrespectful people I’ve met in-game. May your server suffer the same fate as Blacktide.

http://mos.millenium.org/servers/view/15/

Look at the score evolution. All the occasions when Deso takes the lead start after midnight, and tend to end at around 10am.

The comparatively weak night crews of Gandara and UW can’t keep up. The only exception was yesterday afternoon, but this may well have something to do with the release.

Noticed this while looking through Achievements today. Anybody else’s seem this messed up?

I ask because I very rarely go out and kill a lot of enemies in PvE, and only gotten 1 piece in 20 minutes of farming, I’d much rather just get them from playing WvW, which I do far more.

sirsquishy.8531:

the DB is the easy part, its the UI, the UI sizing, and graphics (Icons are Not that easy to make when it needs to pass Q/A). Then its about the items added to the purchase field, on the vendor you create to hold items.

These are all things they have a process for, as we’ve seen them doing it previously, and if doing so takes more than a couple of hours (barring making the icon for the token), they really need to get a better systems engineer. Populating an NPC with items for purchase should not be a difficult task for your staff.

sirsquishy.8531:

new items? Skin creation, sizing for each race. Item Balancing (which stat weights do they put on them, do we have these stats on another vendor already)….so yea, you really have no clue.

Nobody said anything about new items, and new items are completely irrelevant to a token system. You’re grasping at straws.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Bethryn.4087:

Expanding the wallet would be extremely simple.

Didn’t know you worked at ArenaNet to be so sure of this.

A lot of things in programming that seem simple… not necessarily are.

It’s a database.

You’re adding a field.

It really is not that difficult.

Expanding the wallet would be extremely simple.

And why would the number of token systems matter at all? They’re not hard to keep track of.

Having beaten Tequatl, and gotten, well, ~1g worth of yellows out of it, I feel that Tequatl – and any open-world super-raid bosses in the future – ought to have a token system attached. 1 token per kill, 10 tokens for a weapon, maybe 25 for a mini. Weapons and minis still drop randomly for lucky players.

Honestly, this system works so nicely for Dungeons, it seems bizarre that A.net doesn’t want to use it elsewhere, especially now that they’ve gotten the Wallet included in the game.

Killing Tequatl is awesome, but the current loot, for most people, isn’t.

Lake was already a tower that was difficult to hold because of how easily it could be trebbed from a fairly safe spot on the edge of Hills.

But now there’s another huge height-advantage area in Carver’s Ascent. I thought a week or so ago, the developers stated that they didn’t want any of these new areas to create significant new trebuchet spots, but this pretty much goes directly against that.

Like you guys, I’ve been having a look at ways to get through that Gatekeeper, and so far, no luck. There are a couple of other spots we could check again.

The cave that you bomb open before the first polar bear is still weirdly empty, even if there isn’t anything visible in the sealed off area behind it.

Shortly after the first polar bear, when you’re going around the outside of the rocks, if you keep your camera flat, you can see there’s a ‘window’ beneath the jumpable areas. I don’t think this is reachable through any obvious methods though.

When you first encounter the Q*bert puzzle, there’s a small alcove below and to the left. If you look up inside, you can see there’s an area you could potentially drop down from.

And of course there’s that kitten ed Gatekeeper, which feels like it’s the last place.

Beyond that, I guess we know that any bombable wall is going to lead to a passage, as we’ve completed the secret areas section. The yellow bauble that requires a dodge-jump (near the end, above the final frozen bridge) does set a worrying precedent though; there are some areas that would involve dodge-jumping to reach that are going to be very hard to test exhaustively.

If we were to get to the other side of that Gatekeeper, I think it seems more likely that we’d be dropping to it than climbing, given what you can see inside, but it’s hard to say. There certainly isn’t any obvious way to get above it and come back down (I’ve tried dodge-jumping at the top of the sloped face in the backtracking route that starts opposite the gatekeeper; maybe someone better at it can see if they can get higher there?)

Have to say, I was proud to be part of the group that blunted the 3am golem rush on Langor this morning. I think we got 3-4 Omegas and a few Alphas killed in that attack, thanks to people standing their ground and fighting nicely on the stairs against a much larger enemy force (oh, and two Sup ACs, of course).

Expecting players to log in absolutely every day for several hours’ worth of GvG is probably a bit much expectation on a guild’s part.

Just in general, I’d like to see more stylised titles like those of GW1.

The WvW ones, with the exception of Yakslapper, are pretty mediocre in this sense too.