Showing Posts For Creo.8750:
Not here to start a flame war…
I watched through some videos and they are fun to watch, thanks. That said, I can’t help but notice that the fights look quite messy and not very organized, at least to an untrained eye. I know from experience in other games that sometimes what looks like a mess from the outside is actually a well-orchestrated performance on the inside (but other times, a mess is just a mess), so…
Can you guys point me out to some resources (possibly threads on this forum?) which discuss strategical and tactical components of these battles? Things like group compositions, maneuvers and the likes. How deep is this thing?
Thanks.
First we have to determine what Anet’s stance on zerging vs roaming is. It is entirely possible that Anet is content with the current situation where most people zerg.
As Daendur says, having 70 happy players (who zerg) is better than having 5 happy players (who roam), so, if the numbers really look as 70 vs 5, that’s a big reason for Anet to not do anything. This does ignore long-term perspectives (not sure zerg gameplay can keep a player interested for long), but long-term perspectives are always so difficult to reason about, so…
Solo roaming playstyle generally dictates that they are doing it for the challenge. I don’t know anyone roaming solo who’s doing it for the XP/Coin returns… If they just want the XP/Coin then surely it doesn’t matter how they achieve it and joining a zerg to take a tower would be no problem?
That’s some interesting logic.
Roamers would love to have more XP/coin that zergs get, but roamers don’t like zerging due to how brainless and boring it is, hence they roam and spend a lot of their time running around desperately trying to find fights despite not getting too many tangible rewards beyond just sometimes having fights that they can enjoy.
You might say “whatever, roamers do their thing without rewards now, so they will continue to do it in the future, no need to change anything”, but, realistically, the skew in the reward structure towards zerging can’t not make roamers eventually go extinct. The skew guarantees that new players who want to zerg are going to stay with the game in general and in WvW in particular much more frequently than new players who want to roam, so…
What you’re swaying towards is the issue that lies with reducing rewards for zerging and increasing those for solo.
It might seem nice in theory but that’s what leads to players becoming elitest, unco-operative, selfish and greedy.
You want greater rewards for doing something by yourself that others like to do together. Over time that sort of mentality destroys a playerbase.
I don’t buy that.
Why so many players don’t like zergs? Because zerging takes very little brain, that’s why. It dumbs down the game. And not only does zerging dumb down the game for those who zerg, it also dumbs down the game for those who don’t zerg and don’t want to zerg. That’s a key point.
I don’t see how wanting to play with some brain can be “the sort of mentality that destroys a playerbase”, as you are saying.
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Actually that’s why most people bought the game in the first time. Most of the playerbase now is complaining about the game not being as it was advertised. Now it seems like anet is going to screw out WvW (which is already unbalanced as kitten) implementing
-ascended items
-rank/stat buffs
-orb buffsThe manifesto clearly stated that gear wouldn’t make a difference and would be fairly easy to obtain. That players would have the same access to the same stats and that vertical progression belonged to “other MMOS”
Now any decent PvP oriented player doesn’t want any advantage nor disadvantage but simply fair challenge. That’s why most pvpers came here in the first place and that’s the same reason why big guilds / multigaming clans left it after 2months. Now it’s time to make an improvement and fix all this, because soon enought will be too late.
But if they’re trying to fix all this with buffs/ranks/stat rewards and vertical progression well I don’t think is gonna keep the serious pvpers in.
+10000
Exactly.
I am a prime example of this — a player who have recently left another MMO attracted by the promises of GW2. What exact promises attracted me? Two things:
(a) WvW — massive PvP with objectives, and
(b) no gear grinds — “you do some PvP, you get gear, you use it forever, noone is going to have better gear”.
Much to my chagrin, both promises appear to have serious problems — WvW suffers from zergs (yes, some people roam, but the majority zergs and so roamers spend most of their time trying to find fights), and in the “no gear grinds” department we have ascended gear.
No good.
As someone who has very recently left another MMO aiming to land in GW2 almost solely because of WvW and the promise of there being no gear resets —
NO, I do NOT want addition of gear with increased stats, no matter how small the increases are!
Please do NOT let GW2 devolve into never-ending chases of better and better gear, of the kind we have in other MMOs. Please do NOT kill one of the prime factors that makes GW2 so attractive compared to others.
So if not stat-buffs, what do you suggest should be the orb buffs? Because e.g. coin and karma bonuses doesn’t make it a strategically valuable target.
I don’t understand this. If stat-buffs are bad (noone wants them, which surely is an alarm), then they are bad and shouldn’t be implemented. If that means there’s nothing useful to put on orbs, then don’t do orbs. /shrug
How about skills like this: you put a poison onto a player, and that poison ticks each second, doing stacking damage and spreading to 5 nearby players. This would still obey the AOE target cap that is there, because otherwise the servers wouldn’t be able to deal with the amount of computations (see posts from devs), yet it would allow small groups of players to decimate zergs effectively (because, given proper numeric balance, 5 people would be able to kill half of the 50-man zerg, because zerg can’t easily spread away), no?
(Added later:)
Or maybe even this: you set up a trap, and if at some moment there are more than 10 people in the vicinity of the trap, the trap explodes doing so much damage that the 5 players it hits are at 5% health (or maybe killing them outright)? A true zerg-buster, of the sorts = don’t run in big groups. What do you think?
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If I was a new player reading the garbage that I see here I would be put off WvW in a second. Almost all of it is hate post and sarcasm, in addition to flat out attacks at the development team.
I am a new player.
I bought this game because of WvW and WvW alone. (As I said elsewhere, other games do PVE better, frankly, and this goes for many other things, but WvW is a unique selling point of GW2 that noone else has.)
I did read these forums and, while there is some sarcasm and bitterness, I can’t help but notice that the vast majority of the posts on WvW were and are completely constructive and had and continue to have many great suggestions (some of which even look like they’d be easy to implement for the team, as in, the poster took the time to think how she could save the devs their time and tried to find that golden egg which would get 80% of the result with 20% of the effort).
So, there. I respectfully disagree that those criticizing WvW have to be more mature and that lack of maturedness is a great problem here. That’s not what I see at all.
This is a very good thread. The devs need to see it.
I don’t know about others, but I came into this game for WvW. Other games do PVE better, quite frankly, but WvW is a quite unique selling point that noone else has at the moment.
BUT.
Right now, WvW is mostly “zerg or die” in that you can roam, yes, but there is so much zerging going on that most of your time is going to be spent running around (away from a zerg or just looking for a fight) and not fighting. This isn’t fun. And zerging is even less fun, because it’s pretty brainless, so, yes, there are problems.
Turn WvW from mostly zergs into mostly roaming to let the unique selling point of GW2 that is WvW really shine!
Maybe just asking the devs will work?
Devon, two questions:
1. Why are you bringing the orbs back? What do you want them to do? Do you want them to promote zergs over roamers or do you want them to be neutral to that?
2. What is your view on zergs vs roamers in general? You probably want to support both types of gameplay, that’s understandable, but it looks like if you just let these types of gameplay sort themselves out, zergs tend to win in that zergs become the default mode practiced by the majority because roamers have to jump through too many hoops just to find their gameplay. Do you agree with this? If you do, do you have any plans to support roamers and make roaming look more competitive to just zerging it than how it currently is?
Thanks a lot.
Thanks a lot for the replies, folks. Thanks a lot for the stream and video, koroshi. After all the good responses, I thought I owe it to the community to dig more into this and publish the results of my analysis.
I have watched through more videos, streams, and stream recordings (including all of yours, koroshi, good stuff), fast-forwarding with a step of 1 minute and keeping notes, plus have roamed a bit more on a low-level. This accounted for about 30 hours of gameplay, both on low-tier and high-tier servers.
The sum total of this is:
Zergs happen everywhere (that’s just a trivia at this point), and the majority of people participate in zergs, regardless of the server. Roaming with a small team (3-5) is going to get you some fights, although you will spend a significant proportion of time looking for these fights and another significant proportion of time running away from zergs.
According to my notes, your time is going to be split something like that: 40% running away from zergs, 40% running looking around for fights, 20% fighting (about half of that is fighting PVE mobs or chasing someone trying to get away from you, so some mix of fighting and running, really). Again, that’s from analyzing about 30 hours of roamed WvW gameplay from stream recordings and otherwise.
Whether or not that’s enough fighting is up to personal taste. In my case, I really, really hope Anet does something to make zergs much less attractive and roaming much more attractive, because, as it stands now, WvW in zerg mode is skilless, brainless and boring and WvW in non-zerg mode is hard to enjoy for all but the most loyal players who are willing to spend the majority of their time jumping through hoops just so they can get several good fights per evening.
Cheers.
Thanks a lot for the responses.
What I took from your answers is: yes, there are zergs, but one can play “around” them, and being on a lower tier server helps. If I got that right, everyone agrees on that and it is just that some say that with zergs being so predominant, if you want to play around them, you spend so much time trying to avoid them and looking for a more or less fair fight, that it is not worth playing like that, the actual fights will just be too rare — and others shrug and say that on small servers (which are zerged less) and with some teammates (which expands the range of fights you can call ‘fair’), it works fine, the ratio of time spent fighting / time spent running around looking for fights improves to acceptable levels.
OK.
This has been helpful. The movie from nyckolag has been very inspiring too, thanks a lot for that. It wasn’t a straight up capture from a stream with no delays like others asked, so I guess it doesn’t clear it up on the ratio of fighting / running front, but it did show the kind of non-zerg combat I am after, so at least I know it does happen sometime!
After some thinking, I decided that if the key question is whether or not the ratio of fighting / running works for me, maybe an experiment will help. I rolled a character on GH (#15 on EU — while we are on that, thanks a lot for all the invites, US folks, I am not in your region, unfortunately), leveled a bit and spent some time running on WvW maps as a green arrow. I didn’t care if I’d be stomped on, I was just running around trying to look for small battles or small groups of enemies which I’d try to take on as a geared level 80.
The results so far have not been very encouraging: in two hours I spent running switching between different maps, I only saw 2 small groups of enemies and 1 battle (3v5). I had to run from zergs, both ours and enemy’s, 8 times (I kept notes). I did saw about 20 people, both ours and enemy’s, running solo, but they ran in the direction of a zerg, so I guess they weren’t roamers.
I will keep looking, but, just in case, could someone set my expectations straight on that? Suppose I am roaming, small server, solo = no team. How many 1v1 / 1v2-4 fights would be reasonable to expect to get, on average? One in an hour? Three? Enough to fight 75% of the time? I know the answer is “every day is different”, but what’s it like on average? How many fights are you getting?
Thanks again. I have to say, whatever the state of WvW might be, these forums are great.
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I am a new player about to migrate from another MMO. I’ve been looking at GW2 for some time now, tried playing for a couple hours here and there, things looked fine.
But.
My main interest is WWW and, being a curious pup, I watched quite a number of streams (over the last few weeks, so not just the current holiday) to see what it looks like. In 90% of the cases all I saw was zergs – a big ball of people rolling from one location to another killing what little resistance they met with no visible strategy. Sometimes one big ball collided with another big ball, making for some chaos, but again – no visible strategy.
I know how zergs work in other MMOs (pretty mindless) so this is a huge turn off. My questions are:
Was I unlucky or is WWW for the most part really just a zerg? Can you have an interesting game playing WWW solo (I am not against small parties, but let’s keep it simple and insist on solo)?
Thanks.
A pair of simple questions from a new player:
1. How much time, in hours of playtime, does it normally take to level to 80?
Preventing the obligatory “don’t rush it, take your time, enjoy the game” response: I am not going to rush anything, just wondering about how long it normally takes to level a new char without extra help. I also appreciate that there are different leveling options which may vary in leveling efficiency considerably: just assume that I would be doing a bit of everything, in solo mode, from events to instances to WvWvW (assume half losses and half wins if that matters).
2. How much time, in hours of playtime, or in days if that’s more relevant (eg, if we are talking about something that can only be done once a day), does it normally take to gear up for WvWvW?
Again, I am not going to rush anything, I am just wondering what should I expect by playing normally.
Thanks a lot!
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A simple question:
Is it possible to level strictly via WvWvW? Did anyone do it? What were the biggest drawbacks?
I suspect leveling via PvE would be faster, but unless leveling via WvWvW is like 5x slower, I don’t care much. :-)
I am a new player. I am very intrigued with the concept of large scale PVP that is WvWvW. I did quite a bit of searching and reading about WvWvW on these forums and although doing that answered most of my questions, I still have several important questions left unanswered. I’d appreciate it if someone helped me figure them out.
Here goes:
1. It is my understanding that the battles continue 24/7. With cappable objectives on the map, does it not mean that a realm whose peak activity hours de-facto occur slightly later than on other realms has a significant advantage? I appreciate that since all realms are created equal, save for the language filter, their peak activity hours are expected to be relatively the same, but, first, perhaps even small variations (an hour?) matter, and, second, there should undoubtedly be pressure for anyone interested in winning to pre-condition a win by logging in at the right hour. What is the deal here? Are logging hours important or not?
2. I am in the EU and somehow I rolled on Vabbi, the lowest realm of them all in terms of rankings. That was a hilarious random choice. :-) I never had any problems playing on the side of the underdog, that’s not the issue, but only as long as I can still play meaningfully. So, my question is, what is it like to be playing on the realm that always loses (let’s say this won’t change for the next 6 months)? Can you still make a meaningful contribution to the battle? Like, in those 3000:1000:100 scores, are those 100 points the result of meaningful play from the side of the underdog or are they merely random points which every side is bound to get no matter how hard it fails? If I was on any other realm, I wouldn’t be concerned about the rankings at all, every third realm is on the losing side every week anyway, but since I appear to be on the absolute lowest realm, I am wondering.
Apart from the above two, I also thought I’d ask which profession you’d recommend as easiest to learn for WvWvW. From previous MMO experience, I enjoy all styles of play, melee / ranged, tanky / squishy, and I figure I will level more than one character anyway, so this really is the case of what you think is easiest to learn and thus suitable choice for the first character.
Thanks a lot!