Guild Wars 2

Kaladarm, I think I actually remember you (or someone in a very similar position) asking in the Borderlands map what WvW was like on Underworld. Fair broke my heart trying to help explain it.
There were a few hours, a few glorious hours, last week when we were actually second in our match up. Didn’t last, obviously.
It is kinda depressing. There’s rarely much point trying to upgrade something cos you know you’re never going to be able to hang on to it and you know that, sooner or later, when the other servers get done with whatever they’re doing and send their main force over, you’re going to get stomped into a smear of meat paste on the ground.
I think at this point we just play for the fight, for the few times when there are enough of us on to actually mount a decent defence and have a proper epic battle, like the ones that used to be fairly commonplace.
Ah well, not a lot we can do about it. Maybe next season it might occur to someone to put an upper limit on the number of people who can transfer to a single server.
Or the rest of us bail on Underworld and leave no one there at all. That might make someone pay attention.
Shout out to all the other Underworlders who’ve stuck around through thin and thinner (confession: not logged on at all in the last few days – I can only take so much getting beaten up day after day before I need a break).

Come to Underworld!
Never a queue to be seen!*

*Disclaimer: there are no people either and you’ll spend most of your time getting turned into a smear of meat paste on the floor.

I can take it no longer, I must know!
Why, why in the name of all that’s good and right in this world is the upgrade order on towers and keeps walls and then doors?
Why does the most vulnerable, much smaller part of the defences come second, cost much more and take far longer to complete?
What manner of madness would make the defenders of a mighty fort spend all the time and effort building their walls of stone yet leave their inexplicably expensive to upgrade doors made of paper?
It defies all logic and common sense!

Sorry, I needed to get that off my chest.
Of course, changing it would make no difference at all to my server – I play on Underworld so the idea of defending something is but a distant dream, a story from the long-ago time that is only spoken about in hushed whispers – but changing it so that doors upgrade before walls would do wonders for my peace of mind.

A little bit of story, just in case you missed it (I know I was the only one on my overflow server who was there) if you followed Magnus rather than chasing after events, after the fight with the champion in the fort he went up on to the walls of the fort where he met Ellen Kiel on that jetty that extends out over the harbour.
He tried to persuade her to stay and save the fort, but he was injured and she convinced him that the fort was lost, then the two of them along with a bunch of defenders all flew away on the airship.
(screenshots show the airship sailing off – I’m afraid I didn’t screenshot their conversation)

How do you feel about the defensibility of keeps and towers?
I’m particularly thinking about the problems for defenders standing on walls and the speed with which a large group can burn through a door without needing to put any siege down. I can only speak for the battles I’ve been in on my realm (Underworld EU, which is admittedly one of the lower pop WvW realms) but besieging a keep is something that happens very infrequently nowadays. More often the strategy is to rapidly blitz through the doors and kill the Lord as quickly as possible. At most, 3 or 4 rams are used.
How does this more offensive, hit-and-run style of game, where keeps and towers are routinely flipped back and forth within minutes, match up to your original design philosophies for WvW?
One minor suggestion I would like to make is to change the order of upgrades so that doors are reinforced before walls – it seems to make little sense that we reinforce the more vulnerable part last.

Here’s my crazy, never going to implemented in a million years idea:
Change the day/night cycle so that it matches up with the local time. So in the EU, have night time start at, say, 11 pm CEST and it stays night through to 6 am or something. Or maybe have the “night” start at varying times – sometimes it’s in the middle of the night, sometimes it’s at primetime. I dunno, I’m making this up as I go.
Anyway, next change “night” so that it’s properly dark, so that you need to use a torch to see anything, and the towers and keeps are distant, glowing islands of light in a sea of darkness.
Finally, at “night” make the monsters come out. Rather than 3 lame wolves that everyone ignores, have a pack of 20 that roam around at random, or some other hungry creatures on random paths around the maps. And have them scale depending on the size of the groups they encounter, to try and stop a big zerg rolling over the top of them.
Make the night time dangerous. Sure, your group might be able to take down a tower or a keep without much resistance, but to get there you’re going to have to take a few risks.

So that’s my ridiculous notion to change things up a bit. Utterly absurd, I know, but I’d rather something fun like this than trying to limit when and where people can play, or some convoluted points system.

I agree with the OP and l also like his suggestions.
Anything that can reduce the effectiveness of huge zergs and enable lower pop servers to actually hold on to a keep or a tower should be encouraged – we rarely, if ever, manage to successfully upgrade a keep. Been weeks and weeks since I last saw a waypoint.
For clarity’s sake, I should point out that any zerg over 20 would be considered big on my server (Underworld) as that’s often our total population on our home borderlands.
Suggesting people transfer off such servers is very unhelpful as that only makes it worse, locking us into a downward spiral until the server is completely empty.
Maybe that wouldn’t be a bad thing – a completely deserted realm with no points at all might bring it home that something needs to change.
At least it’s Christmas this week, means I can spend my time doing something else besides getting steamrollered by Fort Ranik

TChalla.7146:

Well this is rather disheartening to read.

I’m new to the game, and my interest in getting into WvW is pretty high. I would certainly prefer playing a more defensive role. However, after what I’m seeing here, I now fear that playing defense isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Pity.

Don’t be too disheartened. I know my posts may come across as negative but it’s only because when WvW is at it’s best it’s freaking awesome and I’d like it to be that way a bit more often!
I should point out that the problems I’m experiencing are because Underworld is currently rock bottom in terms of WvW.
If you’re on a more populous realm and I promise you’ll have a much more positive experience.
And hopefully at some point in the not too distant future, with some of the good suggestions from these forums and a little TLC from ArenaNet, it won’t matter as much which realm you end up on, you’ll still have a good time.

The problem is a combination of low population and the difficulty of defending keeps and towers. No one’s suggesting recreating month long sieges, that would be ridiculous, but it’s equally ridiculous to have a castle flipping back and forth in a matter of minutes. It renders as trivial the act of taking what is supposed to be a heavily fortified castle.
It’s a subjective thing but I would prefer something a little more involving than playing swappsies with a keep every 5 minutes.
And personally, I find there’s little fun to be found when you’re being constantly steamrollered and even less when you’re the one doing the steamrolling (that did happen with Underworld, back in the long ago time).

Population imbalance is a fact of life in this game, it’s always going to be, I’m just trying to think of ways to make the advantage of having more people less pronounced.
As it stand now it’s become a feedback loop – everyone knows that a low pop realm is going to struggle, they don’t want to keep getting their backsides kicked so they give up or transfer away, further reducing the population of the low pop realm. It’s self-perpetuating.
Look at the EU matchups at the moment, the vast majority have a single realm that’s dominating the others. Incidentally, you may notice that Underworld has the lowest score of anyone. The fights are very uneven – close fought, epic battles are increasingly rare.
Give low pop realms some way to better defend what they’ve captured and there’ll be less ROFL-stomping and more epic battles, which is how WvW ought to be.

That’s kind of my point – keeps and towers are fine if you can upgrade them fully, and you’ve got arrow carts all over the place and the people to use them, but if you don’t have the people to defend it while it’s upgrading and to make sure that the supply keeps coming in then it never reaches that point.
It gets flipped long before the upgrades are complete which is why no one bothers ordering them any more – they know they’re just wasting their money. This is what I discovered last night when I decided to actually make an effort to fortify what we’d gained – I set upgrades going on 3 keeps and 2 towers. All of them bar one was lost before the upgrades were finished. The one with the upgraded walls was lost not long afterwards. I think the reinforced walls on the garrison slowed down the attackers by 3 or 4 minutes at most. Just about long enough for the 2 of us who were there to set up a couple of arrow carts which did precisely naff all to stop the attackers.
The upgrades take too long and it’s too hard for a low pop realm to maintain the supply levels needed, let alone blanket the place with defensive siege.
And, as mower says, there’s little you can do from the walls besides decorate them with your corpse. Had I been able to go up on to the walls without instantly dying or getting pulled off the top by a necro/thief/mesmer then perhaps I could have done something about the three catapults that were parked all of three feet from the wall they were pounding.

Well, just come off an evening in the Underworld borderlands.
We actually had control of the map at one point, but then lost everything in about 20 minutes. 2 supply camps are ours at the time of writing.
I’d managed to get the walls reinforced and the doors were two thirds done when, at about 23.30 UK time, a zerg of 20 to 30 people came up and pounded the wall to dust, followed by the inner gate. There were, I think, 2 of us trying to defend. Shout out to whoever that charr was, didn’t catch his name. Think he had a pink warhammer.
Epic it was not (the fight, not the hammer – that was actually quite cool).
Something needs to be done to help defenders because it’s becoming farcical.
Of course we should lose, we’re horribly outnumbered, but it just shouldn’t be that easy to defeat someone who’s occupying an apparently fortified position.
I mean, think about it – we call it “flipping a keep”. Flipping it, like a huge castle is as inconsequential as a coin.
I see our garrison just got flipped back to us. Yay. Those upgrades I bought were a waste of money though, guess that’s why no one else ever bothers buying them any more.
I must go to bed now, I can hear the world’s smallest violin playing me a lullaby.

It isn’t that our server doesn’t defend enough, or that it doesn’t want to, it’s that it can’t.
We don’t have the people, there’s no way we can pull together the supply for upgrades, even if we could hold the keep/tower long enough for them to complete.
That’s partly why I want to make them easier to defend, and also make it so that players could deposit supply.
Also, a siege is supposed to be a lengthy thing. I find it hard to believe that when ArenaNet first thought up WvW they envisaged the “sieges” lasting only a couple of minutes. That’s not an epic battle, that’s an afterthought.

And people transferring off only makes the problem worse, I don’t want to do that. I picked that server (granted it was only because I thought the name Underworld was cool) and I’d rather stay and try to make it better. The alternative is a server that is almost entirely abandoned, though it seems we may not be far off that now.

As I type this, Underworld has 1 keep (our home garrison) and 3 towers – that’s on all borderlands and the eternal battleground.

I really like some of the ideas here, especially the carrying supplies one.

Shout out for Underworld! Fighting tooth and nail to hang on to a single keep like we did with the Garrison last night!

I think the problem is two-fold.
Firstly, our lack of numbers in WvW. As epic as last night’s defence of the Garrison was I think it was pretty much the entire population of our Borderlands in the keep lord’s room. There’s no one to spare to try and keep supply lines running so we’re perpetually supply starved, which means that we rarely get the chance to upgrade. I don’t remember the last time that I saw one our borderland keeps with a waypoint in it.
The second closely related issue is the effectiveness of outnumbering your opponents. Not only can you win most encounters, you can spare people to defend, to run supply, to flip camps. The advantage magnifies, making the map progressively more imbalanced.

The thing is, there’s always going to be a population imbalance somewhere, whether on Underworld or another server. You can’t make people transfer to even things out and trying to use incentives to get people to move is like trying to herd cats.
A better solution would be to do something to negate the effects of the imbalance. Ideas might be (and I’m plucking these out of thin air so they’re not going to be that well thought out) allowing players to carry supply that can be put towards the upgrades – if I can take supply from a keep’s stores then why can’t I deposit some? Let’s be honest, no one likes escorting dolyaks and they’re far too easy to kill anyway.
Improve the defensiveness of keeps (I started a thread on this yesterday in this very forum)
Introduce some mechanism to increase the speed or decrease the supply cost of upgrades for low pop servers. Obviously there’d need to be something in place to stop everyone on your server zoning out while an upgrade is applied then zoning back in when it’s done.

I doubt they’ll be able to stop one server having a numerical advantage over the others, but they might be able to at least level the playing field a bit.

Edit: just after I posted that I noticed that we’ve actually got all 3 keeps on our borderlands – it’s a Christmas miracle!
It won’t last and we’re still miles behind but let’s enjoy these few special moments.
Edit 2: it lasted about 30 seconds

Johje Holan.4607:

Yep everything you mentioned is an issue. I like all your suggestions too. Unfortunately, Anet does not.

Although I did not know about the scaling of the NPC’s in EOTM, maybe they’re testing it there.

I might be wrong about that. I was watching Wooden Potatoes’ preview video of the Kodan region of Edge of the Mists and I’m sure he said the door guards were tougher. I know he said the keep lords scale in there but I can’t remember if he said the same about the guards.
I hope there is something like that but it’ll need more to balance these fights are.
It does show that they’re at least looking at solutions, albeit slowly, so I’m optimistic that eventually it’ll get fixed.
It’s the wall problems that annoy me more than anything else, they make it far harder to defend than it should be.

This may have been discussed before. If so you have my apologies.

What I want in WvW are close matches. I don’t mind losing if it was a good fight, if there were epic battles along the way, but at the minute those aren’t happening (at least on my server – Underworld EU for the disappointing level of mediocrity!).
Right now it’s “oh look, a mass of red names stretching across the screen are stampeding towards the three of us in this keep” – SPLAT.
It’s dispiriting to know that no matter what you do, or how well you play, you’ll have about the same effect as a butterfly has on an oncoming freight train. And having been on the other side in the past, it didn’t feel that much fun being the freight train either.

Obviously a heavily populated realm is always going to have an advantage, and will probably always win, but there should be some way to at least make a fight of it.
One of the biggest issues, as I see it, is that it’s almost impossible to hold on to anything, specifically keeps. A gate, even a reinforced one, melts if a 30-person zerg rocks up to it.
The NPC defenders are, at best, a bump in the road, barely noticed.
The geography of some gates, such as the south gate of Bay, mean that any AC you set up has to be below the walls and behind the gate, meaning the operator is essentially firing blind.
Any defensive siege or defending players on the walls are vaporised in moments. In fact, being on the walls is actually a liability, it concentrates you into a small space and makes it far easier for the attackers’ AOE to hit you, whereas they can spread out on the ground below the walls.
These are supposed to be heavily fortified keeps, hard to attack and easy to defend, but the actual fortifications work against the defenders. The walls are supposed to provide protection and give the defenders the high ground, but all they really do is make you easier to hit because you have to stand in a clump on the edge to try and target the guys attacking the gate.
I propose the following:
That gates are made sturdier, and that the effectiveness of spells and character abilities against them is reduced. Also that AOE and Mesmer clones should be prevented from hitting anyone on the other side of the gate.
NPC defenders should scale up according to the size of the attacking zerg and just be generally a lot more effective (I thought I heard this was happening in the Edge of the Mists map. If so, please bring it over to the main maps!)
Walls should actually confer some level of protection on the defenders, to give them more of a chance to defend.

Obviously there are potential problems – this doesn’t make it any easier for a low-pop server to take a keep in the first place, for example – but I think it would help balance things out, at least a little.
Maybe (probably?) this is all pie in the sky stuff and you can poke holes in it until it falls apart, but there are other good suggestions in the forums right now and something needs to change, that much seems certain – of the nine matches currently on the EU side, only two could be considered even slightly close. Most of them have one server clearly dominating the other two after less than 24 hours of the week have passed. There’s little fun to be had in that.

My friend is also suffering from huge lag and disconnects despite having an otherwise stable and fast connection.
We were standing next to each other in the Grove, on the Underworld server, last night. My connection was fine, no lag or anything, he was complaining of a seven second delay between hitting a key and something happening