Guild Wars 2

It’s my understanding that the only thing your server matters for is WvW. Can you not guest on any other server for DEs, dungeons and what not to play with your friends?

For the friends you’ve already made, once guesting is implemented, this will be fine. But there’s much to be said for ‘bumping into people’ and ‘making friends’. The servers that don’t have a ‘strong Oceanic presence’ may have as few as 2 people in the same map area as me. If I wanted a solo trek through an empty-looking wilderness punctuated by towns, I’d play Oblivion. I don’t want that, so I play on the same server as major OC guilds; it means that I get to play an MMO, instead of a solo game with 200ms latency.

I’m an Australian on Yak’s Bend.

Last week, Blackgate beat the kitten out of us with their superior presence.
This week, Maguuma is fighting more effectively than us (during Australian hours) and we’re coming second.

I continue to assert that once the rankings have had time to put equivalent servers up against each other, a fair and challenging competition will be had by all. (IE, I support nightcapping, even though I’m not winning because there are people out there who nightcap better than I do.)

If we had a way to give the orb back after it was hacked, we would use it. If the GMs had a way to give the orb back after it gets hacked, I assume they would use it. Changes and improvements to the code are in the works.

In the meantime, you can throw your hands in the air, or you can keep fighting. We got hacked against last week towards the beginning of the match, and a lot of people threw their hands in the air. I’m disappointed by the reaction to the hacking as much as I’m disappointed by the hacking when it happens.

Please don’t give up – I had much more fun last week with a 2:1:1 score ratio (we came third) than the week before, where it was 10:1:1 and we were the 10.

Hix.8925:

lollie.5816:

Hix.8925:

Also think it’s funny that the same people arguing that NA servers should just recruit more Oceanics also say that Oceanics can’t be put in their own 3 server group cause there aren’t enough Oceanic players to spread around 3 servers.

You realise you also have nightshift workers and etc to bolster up the “NA nightcrew”? Half if not more of Oceanics would likely play on the NA servers voluntarily, just to be around more people. That would leave a three server group pretty much dead (really doubt we’d have three full servers, there’d not be enough for decent sized DEs also across 3 servers).

Well lets do the math here. Half the Oceanics could not fill 3 servers, according to you. Lets assume that half the Oceanics could fill 3 servers. Then that means all the Oceanics could fill 6 servers.

That’s still not enough Oceanics for the “go recruit” option to be a real solution.

It is a real solution, because the matchups will change. Give ANet one or two more weeks, and the servers with Oceanic crews will be facing servers with Oceanic crews. You might not be in the top bracket anymore, but you’ll be facing off against a server with a similar set of capabilities.

Interestingly enough, a massive score advantage is a disincetive to do WvW. The PVE bonuses max out, and when that happens, there’s an incentive to PVE instead.

I WISH that the server with the best nightcrew was guaranteed a win. For all our success nightcapping, we still lose matches.

There’s more than 1-2 servers with oceanic presence. Hopefully, we’ll skill up enough to be able to compete in NA prime time, not just in the other hours.

There’s widespread disappointment within Yak’s Bend that someone from our server did indeed use hacking to grab an orb. Requests for people to send relevant records to ANet went out for some time afterwards.

There is no such thing as a ‘hacking server’ or a ‘not hacking server’, but we do make an effort to keep our house clean.

If you refuse to compete because a player on the other team committed a foul, that’s your decision, but the reality is that it happens, and either you get over it or you don’t.

Client-side hit detection? Wow, I can see the complaints about ‘unhittable’ and ‘never miss’ hacks in Planetside now.

EVE lag is far worse than GW2 lag. In EVE, the player QQ has often gone like this:

“After getting 10 frames a minute for 3 minutes, I saw a loading screen, and woke up in a station.”

Frankly, hacking seems to impact morale much more strongly than the direct impact on the outcomes. It does impact outcomes, but the far greater impact is when the cheated-against team throws its hands in the air and says “OMG, I can’t play against hackers.”

The players eventually load, but it is ridiculous to run around in WvW with peril-sensitive sunglasses on – the times when I most need to know that there are enemies about, I can’t see any of them!

With voice comms on, I don’t usually have much of an excuse for smashing myself into those zergs, but displaying the nameplates seems like a useful thing to do while loading the models for everybody’s custom armor.

bradadad, you’re right – to win at WvW, you have to win the meta-game. I make most of my contributions to the Yak’s Bend WvW effort by writing forum posts. I like the fact that the meta-game is an important part of WvW.

It’s like all the best bits of EVE, without the devs actively condoning various forms of cheating.

We will probably see larger-scale sPVP activities in a future release, which will hopefully satisfy the people disappointed by unfairness in WvW. (This speculation is based on the assumption that ANet’s GW2 strategy will echo the GW1 strategy.)

Very impressive fight put up by Emhry Bay in the Yak’s Bend Borderlands at the kickoff, btw. You’ve earned your early lead.

NoizeMaker.8367:

The hell with commanders and give us raid groups.

That’s what a commander skillbook gives you, is the ability to command a ‘squad’.

No, it’s like saying, if you want a fair game, go play the game that regulates team sizes and resets the map after every short match. It’s saying “If you want a fair fight, fight in the arena where fairness is enforced.” I get that SPVP doesn’t feature seige engines and gates and keeps and orbs, but the reality is that GW2 provides for a fair fight if what you want is a fair fight – you can do that in SPVP. For those of us who enjoy warfare (with all it’s added complexities, including a 24×7 schedule) instead of duelling, there’s WvW.

I belong to a guild with 1000 members playing this game, and I spend a LOT of my time trying to persuade people to play in WvW, to cooperate with each other and to get as much of an advantage as we can within the rules.

Unlike other players, our hardcore WvW players will go out there and have fun when we’re losing. We’ve staged a comeback in Oceanic time after being nightcapped by Euros, and we’ve done it against full-strength Oceanic teams. (We missed out on 2nd place by 100 points or so at the end of the week.)

I get that you want to the game to be the way that you want it to be. I get that NA players were happier when the efforts of Oceanic players were irrelevant (which they were before the weekly matches started).

Give the rankings another 2 or 3 matches to sort themselves out. The nightcappers will concentrate on the servers that satisfy them, the servers who don’t have nightcappers will go down in rank, and eventually, every server will be matched up against another server of equivalent power. Some servers will be balanced because they’re on at the same time and fighting during that time. Other servers will be balanced because they’ll nightcap each other during the week. That’s OK.

GW2 provides you with the opportunity to be on a winning server if that’s your priority. You can be on a server with short queues if that’s your priority. You can have nightcappers on your side or not. You don’t get to pick and choose, and have all those variables exactly the way you want them, but if you’re a serious WvW strategist, you’ll be accustomed to making difficult trade-offs.

Corew.8932:

BlueOrange.5740:

Region locking will make things worse, not better. Nightcapping crews will consist of students, shift workers and the unemployed. There will be less people to recruit into nightcapping crews overall, giving a more powerful advantage to a smaller number of servers.

That’s possible to deal with, borderlands capping out at night because of cross region players.. that’s a bit too harsh.

Applying the logic of the people complaining about nightcapping, then won’t all of the shiftworkers and students join the same server, making it impossible to deal with?

Do what Blackgate did to defeat us – promote your server to Oceanic and Euro guilds. WvW is full-spectrum warfare. If you want a fair fight in PVP, go to PVP, not WvW.

If the Goon Squad have any connection to EVE’s Goonfleet, then they’re not out to make friends.

As for your invitation, Jamaz, I’m looking forward to fighting against Emhry Bay’s Oceanic players, and if your side will be offering easy points by not offering a defence, then I will aim to take those points.

Defend yourselves, 24 hours a day, for a week.

Region locking will make things worse, not better. Nightcapping crews will consist of students, shift workers and the unemployed. There will be less people to recruit into nightcapping crews overall, giving a more powerful advantage to a smaller number of servers.

This week’s match appears to be far more even than last week’s match, which was an improvement on the week before. The reality is that as server populations stabilise, we will see more reliable rankings, which will give more even matches.

As a Yak’s Bend player, we have strong populations in NA and in Oceania, and we nightcapped our way to a massive victory against our first weekly opponents. We got promoted into the next bracket, and found that Blackgate were fighting us hard whenever we were on, and they were able to nightcap us as well, with their population of Euros!

This week, we’re in with Emhry Bay, who have been promoted twice in two weeks. It’s not just due to their nightcapping success, they’ve been smart, well-organized, and skilful. (I’m sure the nightcaps help, they helped us.)

All this needs is some time to settle – the 24-hour servers and the 12-hour servers and the 8-hour servers will line up in their brackets and fair fights will ensue. For me, it’s fantastic to be against servers who will put up a fight in my timezone.

As a Yak’s player, thanks Onkarunseen for reporting this with the GMs and giving us a timely reminder that we also have a house to keep in order. Thanks also to Deified and Boose for acting to keep our house in order.

In WvW, after my squad kept wiping the enemy players, they came up with a new plan, and charged straight past everybody else to kill me.

If I’m dangerous enough that they will go straight past my team-mates to take me out, I’m not underpowered.

I’ve been playing elementalist for a few weeks, and still don’t know how to play it as well as I want to be able to play it. This is the right class for me.

If you want something easy to play – here’s a tip: Don’t go for the class that switches rapidly between 4 different skill bars.

I like elves.
Leaf-hair.
English accents!
So very pretty.

For the Chris Rock fans: “Did you toss her salad? Didya?”

I hadn’t noticed the same-sex relationships before this thread. Probably because they were a lot less tacky than the Mass Effect gay relationships. All I saw was relationships.

A top hat, you say? Auction it to my corp?

Or perhaps I can interest you in this Caldari Navy Raven? Ignore the tritanium icon in the corner, that’s a glitch.

There are features of EVE that I’m glad are absent in GW2

I would, howver, pay 400 gems for a trading window that had moving averages, donchian channel, and traded volumes in it. (Traded volumes is key, and not available from gw2spidy.) Basically, the trading stats that EVE taught me to love, that most people don’t want.

I’d also really like the buy order and sell order depth displayed when I’m selling, having to go to the ‘buy’ window to check the depth before selling something is annoying.

There are a number of people posting in this thread who have expressed variants of the theory “If the Guild Wars 2 economy were more like the EVE Online economy, then things would sell for more than the cost of the components.” As a highly-experienced EVE player who used to spend a LOT of time working in the EVE economy, and made a LOT of isk (in a slow day, I’d only turn over 2 billion), I can assure you that this is not the case. The complexity of the EVE economy does not remove this phenomenon, it just hides it.

For 3 months, my corporation made a 5% profit on buying battleships (that had been constructed by players), recycling them into minerals, and selling those minerals. We increased that to a 15% profit when a mining company that was branching out into manufacturing asked us for a long-term contract to buy battleships from them at fixed prices. Eventually, we took pity on them and bought the minerals from them instead, meaning that they could save money on manufacturing costs, and we could save money on recycling costs. Everybody won (except the NPCs).

When you consider that a battleship in EVE costs you the minerals + mineral wastage factor + blueprint costs + labor costs + assembly line time + skillbook costs +skill training time, that’s a lot of effort to go to – they were using probably 120,000,000 isk of resources to make something that we would buy for 95,000,000 isk, recycle (incurring recycling fees +recycling mineral wastage) and then sell the minerals for 100,000,000 isk.

The complexity of EVE and the inefficiencies built into the market do not mean that players are guaranteed to sell above their costs, but it does mean that other players will take advantage of that behaviour and make it less visible. (When we bought the battleships and made 15%, we did it using off-market trading mechanisms.)

If Guild Wars 2 allowed green wood dowels to be salvaged, it would probably be a very profitable business. But even in an economy where manufacturing has significant time and capital costs (like EVE), game players will sell below cost, because they are deriving satisfaction from making something. In Guild Wars 2, where manufacturing is near-instant, has no cost aside from the materials, and awards XP, the price of the components will always be higher than the cost of the manufactured goods. I don’t see that as a problem. It’s weird, but it’s OK.

(There are things you can make in EVE and sell at profitable margins. But as soon as you tell anybody what they are, the margins evaporate.)

Yak’s is a largely oceanic server. In the 24 hour matches, our oceanic players would come on when the americans were sleeping, cap some stuff, and get pretty much nothing for it, because the points accumulate over time, and our efforts would only make a difference for the last 1/4 of the round or so.

However, in the 7-day format, we can roll you while you sleep and actually see a benefit from it (and it seems that a lot of you joined us as a result). The 24-hour accumulation format discriminated against us. Now it doesn’t.

We’re disorganized and messy, but we are high-pop, and we don’t sleep

You might want to do a server transfer, look for a server that has High population at the time that you play most.

There are talents that allow people to teleport. Could that have been what it was?