Guild Wars 2

Anet said last year that the players would drive the direction of WvW, but frankly we don’t have the tools or perspective to do so properly. And the WvW polls stopped awhile ago.

I too think that Anet needs to decide on a direction for WvW, and let the playerbase know what that direction will be.

I’m a commander. Sometimes we run guild only. Sometimes we let people willing to hop on TS into the squad. I will rarely let people not in TS into the squad because my days as a pugmanding/textmander were over years ago.

Commanders should and do have the right to run their squads any way they like, and if you want to run with a given commander it is on you to meet their criteria for entry.

You are not self-entitled to a spot in a squad just because you bought the game. Or are on the same map as a commander with a half full squad.

But here is some good news for you, with rare exception, every WvW guild left in the game is recruiting players. You want a spot in a squad? Join one or more guilds and earn that spot.

Staff isn’t used in PVE, nor in PVP, so this change was one of the few clearly aimed at WvW. The question is why? No one thinks it is too strong, hammer or GS are arguably better.

Of all the nerfs to make to weapons used heavily in WvW you pick guardian staff? I too would really like to know the reasoning behind the decision.

And no, the changes to light fields, and a bit of cooldown reduction on some of the other skills do not make up for it.

Majority of players I see in WvW are in a guild. The ones without a tag usually just aren’t repping at the time. Off-hours is going to be significantly different in that regard compared to NA primetime.

So long as there is no barrier of entry or criteria to join a server you cannot create a competitive environment in WvW. People will flock to winning servers, and leave losing servers. It has happened since the start of the game.

Trying to tie competition to server identity is structurally impossible, unless you want to fundamentally redesign WvW.

Personally I believe that the majority of WvW players have more loyalty to their guilds than their servers, so I would encourage Anet to look at redesigning WvW around the concept of guilds rather than servers. You could create something more dynamic, player-determined, and competitive. But it would have to be a fundamental redesign, none of this incremental bit by bit stuff we’ve been getting.

Most people aren’t going to see the disadvantages of 1u1d until its been in place for a couple weeks. Judging it after its decided one week of matches is not exactly a good sample size.

Xernth, do you know of any FC guilds that have moved to YB? We have had several guilds move to FC because YB is full, and more recently to IOJ because YB is still full. But I am not aware of any native FC guilds that have decided to move off FC to YB. DINO, MAKI for example are still on FC.

I’ve been playing WvW since release of the game, and been involved with server leadership since the first or second month of the game on at least six different servers. And we’re nearly five years since that time. There is not the leadership, or community support, or player base to support 24 thriving NA WvW communities. To be honest, I don’t think there is even enough to support 12.

WvW is pretty boring without people fighting with you, and against you, and grouping those people so they can find each others more easily(ie server links) is needed.

Been watching this thread with interest as a supporter of server linkings(even while they admittedly have some negative effects and are not a long term solution for WvW), and I have to wonder who actually is against server linkings? Because I talk to a lot of guild leaders, and a lot of server leader and admin types, and I don’t hear them complaining.

If there really is a majority of players against server linkings where are those community leaders, those guild leaders who oppose linkings? It is what, three or four very active posters here who claim to speak for a majority, but I have yet to see even one major server community figure speak out against linkings.

For the next wvw event week I think it would be interesting if every character in wvw had one life. You die in wvw on that character and you’re locked out of WvW for the rest of the week on that toon.

It would make for an interesting week.

It would be nice to have another tourny. And frankly the reasoning that we see a dip in WvW players after each tourny is bogus logic. If we were to hold to that logic we should not have another season of living story or PVP because after each one we see a noticeable dip in players in those events.

This is not to say they’re aren’t massive structural problems with WvW seasons, there are. We know who would win, servers would buy guilds, etc. That said, if you run seasons at set intervals you’d see surges in WvW participation during those seasons.

Linkings revitalized WvW. Now with a surge of people playing WvW due to pips, linkings are less significant, but that population surge is not going to last long.

Linkings were always a band-aid stopgap measure however. We can’t go back to having multiple tiers with almost no one playing in them. It is bad for the game mode, despite what a vocal minority of roamer types say.

What is needed is a new system, a revamp of WvW that is designed to maintain population balance and promote even numbers. Is the current system bad? Yeah. Would going back to no server links be better? No.

We need a new way to handle population.

Choc Pudding did more to shape NA WvW than Mal or Indo, and hardly anyone knows who he was.

Are we talking mechanical skill? That would be some of the ESL players who dabble in WvW from time to time. Are we talking impact on WvW? That would be the shadowy figures who bankroll guilds and people moving.

I support the general idea of breaking up zergs, especially map blob size ones. But your proposed solutions are a mixed bag at best.

“1. Remove Downed mechanics and Ressurect without skill use from WvW.”

Makes the ability of a blob to kill people easier.

“2. Remove “Max targets” from all skills, and introduce a diminishing return effect to avoid 10 meteor 1hitting everything (diminish return might not be needed).”

Lag will go up due to more calculations, condis will be even worse. Zergs will be even stronger in that they can focus damage even more, no more 5-man cap protecting the smaller force, even if you get diminishing returns in.

“3. Lower the time which Slowdown last when no in/out dmg is done to 1sec before norm speed”

Again, making the zergs able to kill things quicker and more effectively.

“4. Remove out of combat healing from WvW.”

Promotes zerging since a zerg can heal quicker where as the out of combat people clouding around will need more time to heal.

“5. Lowering the effectiveness/powerspiking of combo fields.”

None of the better fighting guilds/groups rely too heavily on blasting fields terribly often any more, far more of their boons and what not come from composition and various traits, especially revs, guards, mesmers. Change to zergs would be minimal.

“6. Allowing everyone to Flag up as “raid parties”, just give them another colour icon. (also consider removing commander bonus or make them map wide=highest bonus apply)”

Can’t you just already tag up as a five man party and do that?

“7. Bruiser builds vs. everything else rebalancing according to TTK principle’s. (might want to read the TTK part of the p1, first post. I think every gamer should know TTK base concept/idea as it is good for our understanding of balance and design reasoning).”

Gear sets that allow you to be extremely tanky while still retaining high damage output need to go. Particularly trailblazers. I should not be able to dive into a zerg on my full trailblazers necro and have enemies explode around me.

Take away account wide gold find, and magic find by an extension of that logic. It discriminates against new players. Nodes in home instances? Also a no no. Unfair.

I agree that the idea of battlegroups is the way to go to improve WvW. The current server/tier system is contributing hugely to guilds and players quitting or playing WvW less.

But, the proposed outline in the OP would make me and my guild play less. An EotM style system in normal WvW? Pass. The devil is in the details.

For battlegroups to work and improve WvW it has to make people care about the result of match-ups, it has to add some competition. It has to make people want to log into WvW and feel that their contribution matters to the outcome. And a big part of this is investing people in their “team” or community.

Since the reddit leaks last year talking about battlegroups there has been a fair amount of discussion that battlegroups would destroy server communities. But the truth is(and I say this having been involved in a number of different NA servers in a leadership position) server communities are already dead, or at least a shadow of what they were two or three years ago.

Properly implemented battlegroups could and would have to revitalize the community aspect of WvW, if constructed carefully.

Tier stratification and stale match-ups.

Or

Weird blow out matches.

Both are bad, but I’ll take never knowing who I’m going to fight week to week, its more interesting.

When I play pvp and one team has a numbers advantage the match is rarely fun, even on the winning side. 4 v. 5 is just not fun.

With the current way servers work, and the way population is distributed almost every wvw match-up is significantly unbalanced.

So get rid of servers as they are currently designed, they don’t promote good even fights, or reward effort, or are even particularly fun.

Create a new server system, one that is more responsive to population shifts, yet still retains the sense of community our current servers have.

As WvW population drops holes in coverage and population imbalance grow creating more lopsided matches.

And until Anet takes a more proactive stance on balancing population it is only going to get worse.

Using terrain, keep/tower advantages, distractions, or other situational advantages it is possible to beat larger groups.

But given two equally organized groups and even terrain it is nearly impossible, even if the smaller group has a higher quality of player. The smaller group might push, and might get a few kills, but it will have to fall back in the face of pressure, and the larger group will often just res their dead.

The videos and examples people counter with are when they’re fighting unorganized forces, or distracted forces, or all to often they just miscount the number of enemy they are fighting.

I GvG almost every week. But the player base of guilds on the NA servers who actively GvG right now is under 200 players. Anet shouldn’t cater to such a tiny minority. We need more people in WvW, playing it however they want, rather than a more segregated smaller population.

Yes ballistas should be able to shoot down balloons. But make the balloon regenerate after say 10-15 minutes.

Ultimately PPT and PPK are just means to influence player behavior within WvW.

PPT has led to k-trains and the associated anti-fun anti-fights mentality.

PPK has led to blobbing(even more) and avoidance of fights you cannot win, which has also led to an anti-fun, anti-fights mentality.

The mechanics of WvW need to be designed to promote the behavior we the player base think are fun.

Repurpose the outnumbered buff for instance. When you have it on, it means purely that you are outnumbered on the map. Maybe you have 9 players, and the enemy have 10 players. But the change would be that only the side with the fewer numbers would get PPK from kills, or perhaps even by extension have it count towards server KDR.

This would promote behavior of looking for fights where you are outnumbered, instead of avoiding any fight where you are outnumbered.

All the arguments for getting rid of DBL can just as easily be used to justify getting rid of Alpine BL as well.

Much less active than EBG? Check. Much more PVD? Check. Much more running around to get anywhere? Check.

We should clearly get rid of all the BLs, get rid of EotM, and just have EBG by this argument. Which would just be silly. We need maps that are different, even maps that are less popular. Nothing would be more boring than having four identical maps to play on.

YB had a queue of three on YB bl for a few minutes last night. No queue on EBG or any other map. On DB bl YB had the outnumbered buff flickering on and off for the first few hours of reset.

Clearly even numbers.

I like the 1.0 concept more than the 2.0.

But if you’re going to have large bodies of water Anet would have to balance underwater combat, and give revs some water skills.

Last night YB had a queue on SBI bl, and a queue on YB bl, both queues were single digit.

SBI at one point had double digit queues on all maps, including a 37 man queue on one of the BLs.

I cannot speak to HODs queues.

Traditionally the full servers in NA have always been the top servers on NA, with only a rare passing exception here and there. Since their population status is linked to hours played in wvw, as guilds flee the dead staleness of T1, those servers might open up, as the bandwagon servers in the lower tiers close.

But as witnessed by TC currently, it is supremely hard to go down tiers sometimes now.

It also occurs to me that we have seen a downturn in activity in NA T1 in recent months, T1 is often the least active tier in NA by kills/deaths(presumably also ranks). We could reach a point under the new algorithm where servers are far more likely to be locked below T1 then within T1 itself.

Yes thank you McKenna.

The playerbase is going to be split on whether or not these are the proper metrics to use. But I think this is the sort of communication Anet should have with the WvW community. And I think the entire community would like to see more of it.

So a big thank you.

To the WvW community, I think there are a number of weaknesses to using the metrics mentioned as many of you have already noted. But what are better metrics to use?

We don’t actually know that it is based on how many hours a player plays in wvw. Anet has never given specifics on how they measure population.

Does a player on NA servers playing for 2 hours during NA primetime count the same as a player on NA servers playing 2 hours during SEA time? They shouldn’t.

Does a player playing wvw for one hour a week, count the same as a player playing ten hours a week? We don’t know. Anet has never articulated those metrics.

Obviously due to the lack of transparency in regards to how Anet calculates population metrics and server population status any answer we give here is speculative at best.

But we shouldn’t get overly concerned about any particular server. What we need to urge is that Anet promote greater transparency when its comes to population metrics. I think it is a thankless and silly job for a Dev(s) to manage WvW populations when they aren’t as knowledgeable as the player base on the subject.

If server linking is the best we can hope for population balance, give the players those population metrics, than formulate some sort of polling system where the players vote on and determine the linkings the week before servers get re-linked.

Looking at things from purely a game design perspective, what is needed is a scoring system that is responsive to population changes and does not lock servers into tiers where they cannot compete. Thus allowing match-ups to be fluid and be the most competitive and reasonably matched possible. Fun for everyone.

All the tinkering with skirmish scoring, PPK and the other little bits and pieces over the last six or eight months has had a cumulative effect of obscuring that simple purpose. Worse however is that it has made things worse structurally. If you are on a server that is listed as full, or with bad link partners, or stuck in a tier you should not be in, it is very difficult through player agency to change anything or get out of that position(other than just giving up and transferring servers of course).

Create a better system to allow players to control the fate and destiny of their servers and communities. Don’t worry about making the score look closer, no one cares about the score.

EotM was created as a waiting room for people in queue to real WvW. Population is down in WvW and the waiting room is not needed anymore. It actually drains WvW population, and makes WvW worse off.

So it is time to get rid of it.

With that said, the map(with some tweaks here and there) isn’t terrible, and it would be a waste of resources to not use it. So re-purpose it as a third BL map, meaning we get four unique maps in every match-up to play on.

Every few months players/guilds get randomly assigned to newly created “tourny” servers that are Anet balanced. Transfers during the tourny are locked. These servers play a tourny for a month, winning server gets some bragging rights and rewards. Then everyone gets returned to their normal server for the off-season for a couple months.

I’ve been a WvW commander since the game started. I played in each tourny. I have a friends list filled with guild leaders and other commanders.

The idea that the tournys burned people out and made them quit WvW is true to some extent. But honestly the humdrum lack of tournys has made far more commanders and guilds lose interest in WvW and quit playing. Name a commander who quit because of a tourny, I’ll name two who quit because of boredom.

I’m also a PVP player, you know what happens during the off-season? No one plays and match quality is terrible. You know what happens when a season starts? More people play, and play seriously.

WvW needs tournys. Something to motivate people to play WvW again. Population levels are dropping every week because it is incredibly stale and Anet seems to not support the game-mode to nearly the degree that it supports any other game-mode.

I love PPK much more than PPT but it does promote unhealthy game behavior, namely blobbing up and killing anything smaller than yourself, and running from anything bigger than you. And this isn’t one server or guild doing it, its all servers, and most guilds. As well they should, that is what the gamemode rewards.

But instead of making PPK worth more points, you should design PPK to promote good behavior, and diversity in gameplay.

To that end PPK should scale based on the situation. Some examples, if you have the outnumbered buff on your map, any kill you get is worth say 30 points. The point value of a kill would show up on your boon bar, and that number would change based on proximity to other players.

You’re a roamer, when you get a kill with only four allied players within 4000 range you get 15 points.

You’re a “fighting” guild, when you get a kill with only 20 allied players within 4000 range you get 10 points.

You’re a pugmander when you get a kill with only 30 allied players within 4000 range you get 5 points.

You’re a blobber, when you get a kill with 30 or more allied players within 4000 range you get 0 points.

I voted for DB bl, I play on DB bl almost every night.

Variety is good.

Epidemic is very powerful right now, but considering all the sustain/tank/defensive foods/traits/abilities in game it is badly needed so that at least someone eventually goes down.

When individual duels, or group fights both small and large can last upwards of five minutes I really don’t think nerfing one of the few strong offensive tools left in the game will help anything.

And note, I don’t play necro nor have any investment in the class beyond liking more diversity in WvW.

If you want to scout probably a thief, good mobility and the ability to engage or disengage fights at will. If you want to take stuff, probably camps, perhaps something like a Nike warrior, ability to outrun almost anything that you can’t fight.

The desert BL is in most matches slightly less played on than the Alpine BLs. But all the BLs are much, much less played than EBG in every match-up consistently.

So really just get rid of everything except EBG.

I am all for reevaluating how population is tracked/measured in WvW. Because clearly the idea that a triple linked server can somehow compare with Blackgate right now is just silliness.

So I propose that whatever population metrics you have for WvW be made public, at least in some limited fashion. This would allow us to see what you see, and maybe give you some fresh analysis on it. And it might also allow us to help you design some improved metrics to better measure population and activity levels.

A couple points.

First, guilds aren’t looking for space to expand, they’re looking for PEOPLE to recruit. There is a reason that most of the surviving large WvW guilds are in the upper tiers, because that is the only place they can replenish numbers and maintain themselves. WvW guilds die on lesser populated servers. You’re not going to get WvW guilds to move of their free will unless you can guarantee them a population to recruit from. These new empty servers would be the death knell to an already dwindling supply of WvW guilds.

Second, reading between the lines and looking at Tyler’s post, and remembering the leaked notes on Reddit before world linking went in, the conclusion is pretty obvious.

This is an oblique way to bring Battlegroups into the game. You might still call these 50% smaller servers “servers”, but they’d in practice just be a couple guilds(maybe approaching that 1000 man cap that Battlegroups were rumored to have) and would essentially be Battlegroups.

Now, I am all for Battlegroups, anything to make WvW more alive and less stale. But if the Reddit leaks were accurate Battlegroups were going to go in with a couple other features. Battlegroups(or small servers if we want to call them that) would be able to shake up their rosters every 8-12 weeks without costing gold or gems(Very crucial to creating new match-ups and recruiting new players). And more importantly the existing server structure would disappear and be replaced.

Creating these small servers without these other features would not be ideal at all.

Don’t be afraid to shake things up. WvW needs a shake up.

What WvW needs is a purpose.

What many of us have wished for from the beginning is that WvW be a serious competitive game-mode(with all the balance related things people have already listed).

Right now playing WvW does not matter, playing WvW skillfully does not matter. Winning the week does not matter. Winning outnumbered fights, or PPTing better than anyone else does not matter.

Now imagine if WvW had the structural framework to give a purpose to doing WvW. Skirmishes were a baby step in that direction, but have lacked any sort of follow up at all.

Make winning matter, make playing well matter. Give people a reason to be in WvW and give them a reason to improve their play.

As far as the history of NA servers, the reason NA looks different than EU is not primarily the fault of the NA players.

First, most SEA and OCX players play in NA not EU. This has led to coverage wars which EU has not experienced at the same level. NA could easily have nine relatively well matched servers during NA primetime if SEA and OCX players were not around. But early in the game, the first few months after release, the competitive WvW players came to understand that coverage was important, and that started the chain of bandwagon servers we have seen, as well as the tier stratification.

Second, EU has language based servers which have helped maintain more stable server populations, whereas that has not existed for NA. Transfer where ever you want, you’ll still speak the same language on NA.

As to tanking. Yeah YB is doing it, I suspect JQ is going to try it. And I’m sure it has been discussed among the various bigwigs on TC.

I don’t really think it will help anyone, but it is the way the game is set up at the moment sadly.

Gliding would be enabled and leylines would channelize much of the flying traffic.

A three sided map with each server having a main keep on top of a very tall mountain, various towers would be on the sides of the mountain descending down into the valley. In the deep valley between the three mountains would be a variety of minor objectives that have no walls and are often underground, but when held can undermine various towers(literally destroying the walls underneath various towers or opening tunnels into objectives).

The map would be designed to funnel the bulk of players down into this sprawling valley, and reward splitting up into smaller groups. Various ledges on the mountains, or tunnels in the valley would collapse if too many players are in them at the same time. Ballistas would be re-purposed as anti-gliding weapons, when they hit an enemy flier they would immediately place a debuff on said player so he cannot glide for a set period of time(hence causing gliders to fall to their deaths).

Travel time due to gliding and leylines would be extremely quick, but due to air-snipers, avalanches, collapsing tunnels, flash floods, and other player controlled terrain features you would need to pick your travel routes with care.

Additionally scoring on this map would still in part be PPT/PPK, but a major aspect of it would be resources that you gather/loot/mine on the valley floor that you then have to transport back to your keep on foot with a big glowing symbol over your head announcing your position to enemy players on the map.

Thank you for being so transparent and honest about these manual adjustments Mckenna.

I’m still troubled about whether or not manual adjustments are a good or bad thing for WvW.

But I am thankful you are telling us exactly what you are doing and why.

Been watching this discussion with interest.

First, the battlegroup idea. To what degree it was developed and the specifics of how it would work are unclear, and if it had gone Live the finished product would almost certainly have been different than what Mal’s sources told him.

But it is clear that World Linking is only a band-aid solution to WvW. A short term fix for larger systemic problems that need to be addressed to revitalize WvW.

I have been a WvW commander since the first month of the game(and am still active). The game-mode is incredibly stale, players and guilds are quitting, disbanding, or branching into other game-modes to maintain interest in GW2.

So to McKenna and the other members of the WvW team, pick a direction for WvW and go with it. It might be wrong, it might be right. It might work, it might not. But right now WvW is just sliding into oblivion.

If you have to do away with servers in the process, do it. If you have to fundamental change how scoring works, do that. If you need to revamp mechanics and maps, do that.

But don’t rely on the players to direct your attention. We’re a diverse and argumentative group that will never agree on anything, and if you leave things to us WvW will never change in any meaningful way.

Make an orb that a player can hold. It is visible to both friendly and enemy players. When in a supply camp for five minutes it receives 1/6 of a charge. Once you charge it in all six supply camps you can take it to an enemy keep or tower, and it will destroy all siege, all tactics, and blow open the gate(s) of said structure.

Of course if at any point the orb carrier is downed or killed, the orb resets and loses all charge.

Question, will the +150 extra glicko continue to be given to YB after the end of this current week’s match-up? Because that would put YB squarely in the middle of T1 if current scoring trends continue.