Everyone has to spec traits, that’s how it works. My point was that you can spec yours to do some pretty awesome damage whilst still having a chance to survive (e.g. you clones and phantasms will still be DPSing when you are taking some defensive action).
You have a trade off of damage vs survivability, but it is not as harsh as that on many classes. Those classes may have to take more defensive traits, then increase their DPS with runes.
I know this is the mesmer forum, so I am concious of not wanting to troll, but really the mesmer has been one of the few classes that has been at the top since launch. I agree that having parity on movement speed should be somewhere in the future, but I’d very much like to see balance of actual performance put before things like that.
Necros are the same. Go far enough back and they were horrible in tPvP.
However, history has nothing to do with a desire for balance. Warriors are currently OP. It is not about whether they turn a bad player into good. It is about whether a fight between two equally skilled players gets decided by class and spec instead of player performance on the day.
The majority of PvPers (i.e. the ones the game should be based around) are ok at PvP but not amazing. Too many of them are currently playing warriors because it is easy to be successful with a warrior.
I play an engi. More or less have done since launch. I’ve tried most builds and know very well how to use the skills of an engi. I’m not amazing at PvP, but I am ok. I can kill bad hambows. But against a hambow who is decently spec’d and knows the basics of what to use when, I struggle hard. Against a hambow (or many other specs of war) who has the same amount of experience on warrior that I do on engi, I stand almost no chance of winning.
My direct damage is mitigated heavily. My condition damage is cleansed or slides off, my KBs and stuns bounce off the high-uptime on stability. Whereas every few secs the warrior can stun or CC me in some way. Even using all my blinds, dodges and escapes, all I do is prolong the fight. Eventually I start running out of ways to avoid the CC, and all the while my health is dropping way faster than his.
Some classes get swiftness or speed naturally but are not so great on damage, so have to try to squeeze some extra out of runes.
Mesmer gets high damage naturally and has to squeeze some swiftness out of runes. Where is the imbalance?
Hambow warriors can apply a aoe stun+damage every 7.5 secs
It’s beyond belief that the same Anet that sees no problem with that thinks a single target immob every 10 secs needs nerfing.
Anet are really not interested in balance. They have a few classes they want everyone to play in tPvP (war, mes, necro, guardian) and other classes will be configured to make sure they don’t get in the way of that.
Night capping, like WvW population imbalances would be solved by a dynamic border pop cap (i.e. you can only have the same number of people in the border zones as the next highest pop +x%).
But of course this has been suggested many times and is not the solution, because it would mean people wanting to go into empty border zones at night and cap all the towers without opposition would HAVE TO QUEUE TOO LONG.
I noticed that some people who get ragey in PvP wait until after the match then whisper you their opinion/insults/rage and immediately put you on block. They then unblock you and whisper you some more.
I suggest you put a cooldown on block/unblock so people can’t spam this. It would also give them some time to have a think about how they are behaving.
Well I am not at all sure I would agree that might stacking is the only way to play an engineer.
You can get quite the same or better damage stacking a number and frequency of conditions. Each condition doesn’t have to be max damage if you have many more conditions than you would otherwise.
Similarly, most condition builds have extra defensive bombs/grenades and against many groups (vs 1 on 1) they can be amazing timed right. Blinds, knockbacks, stuns.
I always felt when running HGH that I was missing some of the diversity of what an engineer could do (and you are if you go from 20 skills to under 10).
Both work, but I would dare say that the total damage of a good condition build will out do a pure damage build 8 of 10 times assuming there is enough time for the conditions to build. Power builds apply more damage over a shorter condensed timeframe.
Yes, I agree it lacks diversity, but as it stands, the extra options are not worth as much to me as the extra damage.
You still get the blinds etc, from condition kits if you do hgh/nades or hgh/bombs.
I find builds like that one are not worthwhile in PvP. Your damage output is not high enough to burst anyone down, and once you get focused, you have no escapes or resilience.
A decent thief will be better able to apply damage and also better able to escape and survive. The same could be said for several classes, in fact.
I don’t like playing builds where I think we compare badly to others in the same role.
SD specs can be viable, depending on what the rest of your team are doing. You really need to be able to sit at long range pushing the damage into a 2-3 man fight. Unfortunately, you rarely get that option, because as soon as a decent opponent realises you are doing it that will focus you and at that point your damage is not enough to save you.
I think bombsaway about covered it, but I would like to add something to one point:
1) Not really designed for condition damage
At this point in time, I feel like the main advantage of an engineer is being able to take full advantage of Might. I know that sounds like a small thing, but I’ve tried many, many builds for PvP and they all expose a flaw that engineers mostly agree on – there is nothing we excel at. DPS builds out-damage us, bunker builds out-last us. Even hybrid builds out-perform us mostly (at least the viable ones do).
That’s if we only utilise our power builds or our condition builds. However, if you use a might stacking build, you can trait for survivability (to some extent) and let the damage bonuses from might provide a very good DPS.
If you accept all of the above, then one big advantage of the pistol is that it is hybrid damage. Rifle has mostly direct damage components, whereas pistol has both DD and condi, and as such has a much better DPS increase from stacked might.
I agree that our trait bonuses are hard to make work. I really can’t see crit damage builds working too well in PvP. It can do in WvW where you have access to more +crit damage and therefore no need to rely on trait bonuses.
In PvP, effective use of precision seems to be more about getting bleed and burn procs than getting large extra direct damage. Don’t forget, a crit is 150% of a normal hit, with no +crit dam at all. Adding 30% from traits is not a huge difference proportionally.
I like your build. It’s probably up there with other decent bunker builds I have seen and tried. However, engineer as bunker at the moment has some real challenges.
I would imagine you will be able to outlast most necros, thieves, and rangers and probably exclude them from the node.
Bunker Guardians you will likely stalemate on. Neither of you will hurt the other and your knockback will be countered by his blocks and stability.
Warriors will be a challenge. You’ll likely survive if you are lucky, but it will be hard work. Their CC is stupid and of course they have no worries about health with the definitely-does-not-need-nerfing-warriors-“are-in-a-good-place-right-now”-healing-signet. You will not be able to exclude them enough to cap a node due to their high stability uptime and it is possible they will have you running around so much you’ll concede it to them.
Mesmers and elementalists are your real problem. On the right build, either one of them can kill you with very little chance you will stop them. Eles have an attack chain that applies so much damage so quickly, you die before you can react. Only good eles with the right build can do it – I reckon I meet about 1 ele in 20 who can do this.
Mesmers can keep you dazed for 2-3 seconds and in that time take your health from max to zero. They can’t do it every time, because it depends on damage from their illusions, but they do it often, and I meet about 1 in 3 mesmers now doing this attack chain.
A few weeks ago, I would have said you are mad for not including Automated Response in your build. However, despite not seeing anything in the patch notes to suggest it is worse, it feels to me like it is way less effective than it used to be.
Also, having only one stun break and no immobilise escape (rocket boots) would make me feel vulnerable on a bunker spec, but you can’t have everything, I suppose.
Just out of interest, does the super speed from kit refinement act as a stun break? The one on slick shoes toolbelt does.
To be frank, after playing a bunker engi for most of my time in game since launch, I no longer find them viable enough.
(edited by Cribbage.2056)
A lot of people have knocked the idea that it is the new heal that is the reason for all the MMs, but the only other suggestion is that condition build is no longer viable.
To my mind condi necro was one of those easymode builds, like several warrior builds – a simple way to let your spec play for you, so you don’t have to. If it has been nerfed, a lot of the ppl on it are going to switch to the next easymode build. Maybe that’s MM, but if so, it must be a sight more powerful than just “viable.”
BTW, I assumed the guy who spoke about the new heal being good for MMs with siphon meant that the on-attacked tick goes well with the ticks from your pets attacking. Given that the MM necro has the option of using his pets to eat conditions, as well as plague signet and offhand dagger allowing him to offload them, I doubt CC is a must-have option.
Did the last patch cause this?
Is this “build diversity” – 4/5 necros being full MM?
I have never seen a build where I would rather have Elixir H than either healing kit or healing turret, and yours are no exception.
I found a big difference when playing SD build is to take utils whose toolbelts take targets. SD on an untargetted TB will go straight out in front of you. A lot of the time this hits, but it misses enough to lower your overall DPS.
In general, it’s worth thinking for SD builds:
1) Max Tools to get lower TB CDs
2) Consider going precision, since your max tools gives you 30% crit dam anyway
3) Use your rifle as your main weapon, augmented with SD from TB spamming. Kits only as defensive for this build.
4) Personally, I like rifle turret (for very low CD on TB), Rocket Boots (great defensive skill, also very low CD TB, which is targetted) and Toolkit (low CD TB, not targetted unfortunately, but does give access to a great block and cripple)
5) If you’re going beserker, your traits and utils are your only source of survivability, so choose them with care. Even if you were 3 shotting people (which you won’t be), you still need escapes and cleanses for multiple opponent situations.
On the subject of how well the Commander feature works:
1) I like it a lot. I recall playing DAoC and running frontier groups with 50-100 ppl. You had some nice facilities like being able to organise people into battlegroups and each group having its own chat. However, the commander system in GW2 is better.
2) I don’t think squads work too well, as people often don’t join a commander. I’d like to see commanders having unrestricted /team or /map chat
3) It would be good if there was a /command channel so that commanders on a given map could coordinate using it. Enabling multiple commanders would help erode the “one big zerg” tactic that make the game a little bit less exciting than it could be.
4) For a similar reason, I suggest commanders on the same map could have different coloured icons (first commander blue, second green, etc.). This would allow servers to develop more complex tactics like blue commander is siege offence, green is defence, red is ruins, etc.
On the subject of who can be commanders:
1) WvW command should be based on WvW experience. You should get commander title when you hit a certain WvW level. If you still want people to buy it, then just unlock something that can be bought at that rank. This would indirectly serve your idea that being in a big guild should count for something, as big guild membership enables faster WvW leveling in a couple of ways.
2) PvE and WvW command should ideally be separated. Ability to command PvE does not necessarily make you suitable for WvW command and vice versa. Create a “WvW Command” and a “PvE Command” feature, and each can only be activated in the relevant environment.
I agree that creating a level playing field should be number 1 priority, as it gives much more fun for all players.
The problem is that Anet do not have the courage to tell players on high WvW pop servers “You have to move.” They are casting around for some alternative fix, and because they cannot find one (because one probably does not exist), they will be paralysed with indecision.
I’m expecting this to bite them on the bum in the future. If WvW continues the way it is, it will become a much more niche passtime, and will contribute to general attrition of playerbase. They should take the bull by the horns and fix it now, even if that means they have to temporarily annoy people on high pop WvW servers.
Will we keep the current glory we have now?
Yes, but glory will be retired in the future. We will give warning before that happens.
What on earth do you expect people to spend it on?
For example, I am rank 40 and have 150 000 glory. I have most of the skins for my rank and could easily forge the ones I don’t have if I wanted.
It was my intention to get to a higher rank then use the glory on chests to get cultural armours. However, I have no chance of getting high enough rank before you remove glory.
So … you tell me what I can spend it on? Because if you can’t, then you should be letting us convert glory to gold.
Think about this – on day 1 of your new system, people who have NEVER PVP’d in their lives will be able to use their massive stacks of gold to get skins and I will have nothing, because to date PvP has been generating tons of glory and zero gold. Is that what you want – to favour PvEers over PvPers? I thought GW2 was intended to serve PvPers equally, but maybe those days are behind us.
Updated Reward System
With gear unification we will also introduce a system that allows players to set goals for rewards in PvP and work towards them. We are not ready to discuss this system in detail yet, as it is still being developed, but more information will come as we get closer to being able to release this system.Once this new system is in place, glory will be retired as a currency, and gold will be the standard currency across the game. All existing glory vendors will be removed at this time. We will give advance warning when this is coming so you can spend all of your existing glory before that happens.
That’s the part you should keep in mind.
The bit you have highlighted is too vague to have much bearing on discussion.
On the one hand we’re being given concrete specific information about what will be taken away (glory and ranks), but the information about what will be added is just a vague reference to “a system.”
You can’t expect people to comment on how they feel about this when they only have half the proposition. For all we know, your plans are at such an early stage that between now and releasing them you might be forced to radically revise them and be unable to deliver anything at all to meaningfully counterbalance the absence of ranks.
If you genuinely want community engagement on this (or any) topic, you will need to share your ideas. Otherwise it just feels like your sharing the negative just so people can get used to the idea and you have no real intention of acting upon feedback.
We see this all the time. You go through the motions of sharing and listening, but every single post from a dev you see amounts to a rebuttal of the user input or some vague “yeah, we should think about that.”
Lowering map cap or initiating/promoting any sort of server transfer isn’t the best answer. In my opinion, mass server transfers will lighten the load a little bit on the server, but they are merely bringing over the problems (plus other issues) to another server. But that’s my personal opinion, I’ve never had a good experience with mass server transfers.
Plus, I can see why many people would be very hesitant to transfer from let’s say JQ to let’s say Kaineng (I mean no disrespect). I personally wouldn’t want to go from rolling over people to being rolled over (I don’t have personal experience from being either JQ or Kaineng so please correct me if I’m wrong here).
What I think might be a plausible solution is to force the top 3 server with the highest wvw population/longest queue to break into two teams. Call it a breaking up of a monopoly if you will. After all, silver and bronze leagues have 9 servers each, while gold only has 6. Wouldn’t creating 3 more servers/teams make it a perfect 9 in each league?
For argument’s sake, let’s use BG, JQ and TC as the 3 we will breaking up. Force people from these 3 servers to choose between BG1 or BG2 the next league reset. Or even better, maybe give it a cool name (perhaps a choice between Jade Quarry or Jaded Queue). I think people will more likely be more open to joining a brand new team rather than joining one that has been losing consistently. Plus you are not bringing problems or creating new ones in an existing community.
I may be way off on this but I am imagining some of these top servers to have populations that are way more massive than other servers. This will probably only work if wvw population on these servers are at least 1.5 times the ones on other servers.
There are a couple of things in your post I don’t really understand.
Firstly, I notice you and other people refer to “lowering the map cap.” Is this a reference to the idea where you only let people into the map if the second highest population is within x% of your server’s border population (people sometimes refer to this as "dynamic population cap)? Or some other idea?
Secondly, assuming the tiering system is eventually refined to the point where is successfully splits servers by skill, why would anyone be able to roll over anyone else when populations are roughly equal?
At the moment, you will get steamrolled if either (a) the enemy server are much better than you or (b) the enemy server outnumber you. Tiering should prevent (a) and dynamic population limits would prevent (b).
You could confidently move to any lower pop server within your tier without worrying about getting steamrolled.
Note, I realise tiering is currently less than perfect. I also realise that there may be certain server who maintain a reputation for elite play that puts them head and shoulders above everyone else. However, at least dynamic pop caps will ensure those servers cannot become too populated without experience longer and longer queues. This hopefully will spread a fair number of the elite guilds to other servers within the tier.
…………..Engineers. Really I am sad they intend to buff engi healing which is almost impossible to counter and so skilless and lame. Let us think about the lamo engi bunker builds:
1, Healing turret gives alot of healing for a short CD
2, The cast time on healing turret is too short not allowing any pros to counter play it
3, Multiple engis can blast into each others water fields and ruin everyones day
4, Engis just have to spec into a passive/no skill trait and then they cant be killed by condis
5, Engis has so many lame knock backs, blinds and other bs.
6, Bunker engi is just a no-skill spam build. It isnt fun to play against at all. At least a bunker guardian you can actually hit and kill eventually.These are the facts as far as I see them.
Please don’t nerf warrior dps, necro dps, and other damage and leave this engi heal the same or improve it. It is just lame.
Discuss.
Engineers have very little by way of stability, which makes them vulnerable to CC.
I agree we do have strong heals. Healing turret and medkit are both very strong in their own ways, and with automated response make engineers very hard to kill. It’s not no skill though – you have to juggle and time skill use, and have to pay close attention to position. Unlike guardian, you can’t just plant yourself in the centre of a node and refuse to move. You also have to use your own CC to buy cast time against people who can interrupt you.
The idea we’re operating under:
If you want AOE CC, bring a hammer. If you want burst or DPS, bring an axe or a greatsword.
I think the DPS of hammer is only one part of the problem, and not necessarily the most significant part. In a team game, AOE CC is a fight winner if you can chain it or even if it has too much uptime without being able to chain it.
Even ignoring the AOE, if a warrior can chain CC and interrupts on a single target with virtually no let up, that opponent has no come back at all. Certainly while the warrior has a passive heal as strong as healing signet they will have absolutely no chance to put out enough damage to worry the warrior. Reducing the DPS does not stop the warrior winning in that scenario, it just means it takes longer.
Are you saying that offered the following 3 options:
1) Play fair (i.e. fun) WvW with a very long queue on the server you are on now
2) Free transfer for you whole guild, including influence to a low population server, where you would also get fair (i.e. fun) WvW due to dynamic pop cap
3) Stop playing
You would choose option 3?
Your question is not really “why should people on a high pop server be penalised?” It is “why should people on a high pop server be given the motive and means to move?” and the answer is BECAUSE WE NEED BALANCED SERVERS.
Only people who stubbornly believe the game should be fixed for them, without them needing to contribute, will defend the right to stay on a server with a population that puts other servers at a disadvantage.
I am personally on a server that is outnumbered 95% of the time.
I still don’t think it is a good idea to punish people for playing on a server with high WvW population.The thing is, no matter what they do to try and balance the servers there will always be someone that is punished, and I simply don’t think that is the way to go.
Also some guilds actually care about the server they are on, and won’t transfer even if they would get special treatment and so on.
What should be done is trying to get more people into WvW, not trying to force people to transfer off their server.
People keep saying “you shouldn’t punish people for being on high population servers.” But why not? Consider:
1) Our goal is balanced populations. That leads to lowest queue lengths FOR EVERYONE. Surely there should be some negative attached to people who stand in the way of that goal?
2) At the moment people on high population servers are ALREADY EXPERIENCING LONG QUEUES. However, this is balanced by the fact they have a better experience of WvW once they gain entry. A dynamic cap would ensure a better experience for everyone, meaning they now have just the incentive to move and gain shorter queues.
3) At the moment, people are punished for being on lower population servers. And the only possible way to address this is to move to a higher pop server, MAKING THE PROBLEM WORSE. If we are going to punish anyone, we should at least allow them to fix it in a way that doesn’t make the problem worse. That’s just good sense.
You refuse to see the gigantic negatives of a system like that.
1. People will then AFK to not lose their spot due to long queues, this once again fuels imbalance. That is not fun. OR the opposing side leaves a map to prevent the other side from fielding enough to retake things, not fun. Leaving a map also punishes the other server by making people wait even longer for a queue. Losing the match? Stop queuing and at least frustrate your opponents!
2. You’re guild will still be subject to the dynamic caps and half your guild might be locked out for most of the night, that is not fun. Not to mention that some people like playing WvW with lots of other people on the map, so low pop maps aren’t fun for them.
3. Considering long queues you won’t be able to play and having guildies locked out due to low pop cap, neither of which is fun, this isn’t a far out option.
Placing dynamic population caps just opens the game up for more exploiting/cheap tactics. This ultimately punishes more players and that’s generally not a good thing for a game to do. If the dynamic cap route is even remotely being considered then WvW might as well just be scrapped and a new AV style 40v40v40 battleground created.
Unlike the current situation, those issues are largely easy to address.
1) Log people out after a reasonable period for AFKing. Plenty of games do this effectively. It’s a proven way to deal with afk.
2) The point about having a self-correcting system (dynamic caps, plus facilitated transfers to lower pop servers), is that over time the populations even out. I’m not sure if people really understand this, but with evenly distributed server populations, queue times will be much, much shorter. If your server is facing a server with roughly the same activity in WvW, there is no reason why your guild members would be locked out for any length of time.
3) The only people who have long queues will be people on over-populated servers. These are the people who (a) are causing the problems and (b) have the power to fix the problems (by moving server). All it takes is for Anet to give some guilds a free transfer (along with their influence) and the problem completely goes away. For everyone. For ever. No more long queues for anyone. No more massive out-numbering for anyone. Who wouldn’t want that?
Because the intention is for population to balance itself.
A dynamic cap is the only way for there to be truly balanced matchups. But ANet has already vetoed this idea, so I don’t know what the point of bringing it up over and over is.
But it won’t balance itself.
It will simply make people stop playing.
It is most likely impossible to get every single server to have around the same amount of WvW-players, and as such a dynamic cap will always hurt at least one side.
Are you saying that offered the following 3 options:
1) Play fair (i.e. fun) WvW with a very long queue on the server you are on now
2) Free transfer for you whole guild, including influence to a low population server, where you would also get fair (i.e. fun) WvW due to dynamic pop cap
3) Stop playing
You would choose option 3?
Your question is not really “why should people on a high pop server be penalised?” It is “why should people on a high pop server be given the motive and means to move?” and the answer is BECAUSE WE NEED BALANCED SERVERS.
Only people who stubbornly believe the game should be fixed for them, without them needing to contribute, will defend the right to stay on a server with a population that puts other servers at a disadvantage.
the past few match ups have been detrimental for crystal desert. we get put up against servers with massive populations which leaves our server feeling helpless leading to many people giving up all together. 15 minutes after the reset today, our entire borderlands was lost. we have no chance what so ever when up against large population servers.
all im asking for is for matchups to be based off of population rather than wins.
or even merge some servers, its just getting annoying getting stomped by huge servers who have 2 or 3 zergs in every zone
Hmm, 15 minutes after reset, I doubt it was completely lost. You guys sure did have a huge zerg on BP BL for a few hours after reset. You guys were keeping us on our toes in that BL.
I’m sorry that you will lose to us, but hopefully you and BP can have a good fight for 2nd.
Would you not enjoy a good fight for 1st? Or is an easy win preferable? I am genuinely interested to know which you would prefer.
Collaborative development; world population – have a read.
Nothing I have seen from Anet in that thread gives any hope. The players have a lot of good suggestions, many of which echo each other, but Anet’s input can pretty much be summed up as “We don’t want to force people off high population servers, so are looking for game mechanics that will nullify population advantages.”
In my view that’s an absolute dead-end approach and will mean we have to endure ridiculous match-ups for some months to come (until they have tried and failed enough unrealistic fixes to actually shift players off of high pop servers).
Will Anet be sorting population issues in time for season 2?
So far in Bronze tier we have had every single rotation – without exception – dominated by a single, high population server.
That means 2/3 of the servers have had an absolutely awful experience of season 1 so far, and WvW is rapidly becoming a no-go place for large numbers of people.
I realise that there is no chance this will be addressed in time to save season 1. Speedy responses to issues is not the Anet way. I am wondering if there is any hope at all that population imbalances will be addressed for Season 2?
I am pretty sure that if season 2 is going to be a repeat of season 1 population issues, the number of people bothering to show up is going to drop through the floor. It’s already very low.
A simple concept that goes a really long way
Borderland structures can only give PPT to the native team to that BL. You cap stuff in enemy BL to deny enemy points, but you do not gain them for yourself.
This instantly makes the game more defensive-minded, forcing offensive pushes to be more strategic, which moves more towards rewarding coordination and skill and a little bit away from sheer numbers.
Strategies will quickly adapt. I imagine towers being much more sieged up, and therefore trebuchets and other longer, more drawn out sieges, resulting in more fighting and less of a musical chairs back-capping game.
See the thing is if server A caps all of server B’s borderlands, that sets server B back, but it does not give server A a point advantage over server C, so if server C sees that happening and goes after server A, forcing A to pull back off B, etc, you can quickly see how it would quickly become a more thought-out macro-strategic game.
Hmmm….interesting idea.
Can we discuss this?
Let’s say server A is the most populated one. So he goes to B and spends time taking B’s BL. He also has to protect EB and his own BL. B is not making points in his BL, and instead it goes to EB and try to stop A there. Since EB is the only place where the battle for points is. The one who domains EB, domains the game.
Now, what would be the balance between EB and a BL? Will a server with his entire BL producing points be enough to fight a server controlling EB?
Well after some thought I think EB could operate the same way, with SMC being the only structure that can give PPT to any server that owns it. Therefore whoever holds SMC becomes the target of the other 2 servers, and encouraging the 2v1 that was initially expected to happen in WvW naturally.
This is the best idea I’ve seen, as the concept in and of itself functions for every tier, it really stresses defense over offense, and it encourages more tactical usage of Borderland maps within the scope of all of WvW.
It also reduces the raw number of points available, which I think is better for the game, since having a 60k deficit breaks morale a lot more than something like 20k. If Server A has terrible coverage, as long as they can maintain their BL, they won’t fall as far behind, and can then try to rally to make up the smaller point gap.
It will seem like a lot less of a good idea once you see a single highly populated server hold it unbroken for days against two low pop servers. Those servers will in your proposed system have no way at all to score points and no meaningful objectives to head for.
And if by some chance the two smaller ones overpower the high pop server, as soon as one of them caps SMC, the fight becomes them vs high pop + the remaining low pop. So they get to hold SMC for all of 5 minutes.
At least as things stand, smaller groups can dodge about taking minor locations.
Zero impact in my opinion. The ppl would transfer on the last day and no problem. But what is the point to punish someone after a transfer? in theory, transfer to a lower server is not anything bad. I think is better to try to encourage ppl to make transfer to less populated servers.
The point is not necessarily to punish people, but more to add an increased cost to transferring. If you are switching worlds to be a spy or because you are bandwagoning, it makes a difference if you can’t play WvW after doing so for some period of time. It may not be worth doing, I was just curious what people thought.
Transfer cost should discourage people from moving low>>>high (WvW pop) and encourage people to move high>>>low.
With that in mind, you could profile transfer scenarios as follows:
Critically High pop to any lower pop … Free
Any non-critical pop to a lower pop … 400 gems
Any non-critical pop to a higher pop … 1600 gems (or maybe even more)
Critically Low pop to any higher pop … Not permitted
This would encourage migration trends in a direction that would help the game.
However, for people on high population servers, this merely facilitates the move. You ALSO need a reason for them to want to move in the first place. The obvious sensible one seems to be zone queues. Put rules into the game to make populations equal (within tolerances), which will push up queue times on higher servers.
This would lead to a system where:
1) Players on low population servers get good WvW and low queues, and have no reason to make a game-damaging move to a higher population server
2) Players on high pop servers get good WvW but have high queues, giving them an incentive to make a game-improving move to a lower pop server. Transfer prices facilitate this move.
Everyone gets good WvW and the only people penalised in any way are also given the option of free or cheap transfers to fix their issue.
What could be fairer?
It’’s over a week since Halloween and we are still getting trick or treat bags as PvP rewards.
These things have absolutely no relevance to PvP. You are giving rewards that can’t even be opened in the mists.
Halloween is one night of the year, but apparently in Tyria it lasts a month. Great way to make something that could be special and interesting into something tedious and frustrating.
This is still broken and will prevent me completing the whole of season 1.
3 weeks since it was reported and no one from Anet can be bothered to spend 10 seconds acknowledging it. Very poor customer service.
Firstly, several posts have called for reduced map caps in WvW. The problem that would create is that we’d be allowing even fewer people to play in a given period of time if we were to do that. So I wonder if there is another way to accomplish the same goal, while not disenfranchising people who would now be unable to get into the maps? It’s a hard problem because the more populated servers face long queues while the less populated ones face empty maps. From my perspective there aren’t a ton of good options, which is why discussing this problem is pretty important.
This only true while you have massive imbalances in the WvW populations on servers. If you had more even populations, NOONE would have a long queue.
The goal should be to incentivise the player base to move towards balanced populations. Creating a system where they queue for a long time unless they move to a more suitable server would be a very good way of doing that.
Sure, you frustrate them temporarily, but they will have the power to improve their situation themselves, which mitigates that frustration a lot.
Your idea that you have to live with massive population imbalances but can through some game mechanics make it not count in fights in unrealistic. It’s been tried in other MMOs and it never works.
For example, what if we restricted or completely eliminated transfers during a season? I think it has some positives, but it might be overly damaging to people who aren’t intending to bandwagon, but legitimately want to change servers.
This is a great example of what I am talking about above. You COULD create a simple game mechanic where people get free transfers to servers who need them. Instead, you are wrestling with a really destructive idea of server transfer freezes in an attempt to work around the real problem.
You need to stop being afraid of long queues. As long as you tell the players how they can avoid them, and give them free transfers to help make it happen, it will help solve the problem.
Identifying with a server is no different from identifying with any other team. Most people develop some strong feelings, but some people have no feeling at all about it. Neither is right or wrong, it is just human nature.
Here, I’ll break your idea:
EVERYONE GET OUT OF THIS BL – [DFND] HAS 20 PEOPLE IN AND WILL LOCK IT DOWN. GET OUT SO THE OTHERS GET STUCK IN QUEUE!On every organized server, that is exactly how it would work. As long as there is PPT, you cannot have balanced matches. However, sPvP does have that balance you look for, why not join it?
a) I think you’ll find most people’s desire to actually play is greater than their desire to win. Not many would care enough about winning to actually leave the border. Probably it would happen, but I can’t see it being frequent enough to hurt the game.
b) With population limiting rules there is a question do you limit it per border or for the whole of the borderlands. I suspect the latter would work a lot better.
c) There is also a question of how low the minimum population should be before the capping kicks in. I personally think it should be low enough that minimum vs unpopulated border would struggle to take a tower. That would help a lot to prevent night capping. In my opinion 20 is way too high.
Any chance the devs can add this to Reported Bugs, please? Since it is a bug and it has been reported.
I’m slowly coming around to the opinion that it’s less a server population issue and more a timezone coverage issue.
I’m on Maguuma. While we got 2nd the first week, we’re most likely going to lose every other week this season. Which is fine. I don’t really care where we place, I just care that WvW is fun when I play. Last night in EBG was a blast. We had enough people, could hang onto our (upgraded) section of the map, and even took stonemist a couple times. To do this we had basically no presence in any borderland. Some karma trains I think, but we weren’t holding anything.
When I got up this morning, we owned 2 camps. total. If this week follows last week’s pattern, we’re never going to be able to hold anything for a decent length of time again. We’re behind because other servers are camping in our keeps and fortifying them. So while Sunday play is fun, the rest of the week is kind of a loss.
If there were something that could be done to negate or lessen the advantage gained by overnight caps, I think that would go a long way toward evening things out. Maybe a daily reset of ownership for all areas before primetime? So the maps revert to the initial layout they have when the week started, but daily instead of weekly (without the score resetting daily.)
Even if my supposition about coverage isn’t correct, I think this would make things more interesting for the servers who are doing the blowing out, as they’d have things to capture at least once a day.
Preventing unequal border zone populations would also address timezone coverage.
If you have a rule that queues people when their server has x% (let’s say 15%) more people than the second highest population in the borders, then overnight people will not be able to form large enough groups to take a lot of keeps etc.
You need a basic population minimum before the rule starts kicking in, but if you set it at, say 3 people, then you’d stop groups going in an taking keeps in zones with no opposition.
I’ve had 2 fights recently where my opponent was stacking confusion on me, and I couldn’t work out how.
The first was with a thief, and he put 8 stacks on me in a couple of seconds. I cleared them and he immediately put 9 more stacks on me.
The second was a hammer warrior and he put 8 stacks on me very quickly (seemed more or less instant).
I don’t see this happen in PvP so I am assuming it is a food or a PvE rune/sigil. I am also assuming it is broken. Can someone confirm to me that it is a bug and show me Anet’s response, please?
This is still not fixed. I reported it in game via support, and no response. It is also not on the known issues list.
Does Anet even read its own support forum? This is weeks old and is starting to feel like they are ignoring it completely.
Yes, although rocket boots is an amazing WvW skill, it does occasionally leave you rooted at the end. Try initiating a kit swap or something just as you come into land. That usually ensures you don’t get rooted.
I dunno if this has been mentioned, I’m not reading all 13 pages, but I think that, instead of a server merge, there’s a WvW merge. Take the 9 lowest ranked WvW servers, and combine them, like this 1, 4, 9; 2, 5, 8; 3, 6, 7. And then those 3 groups fight each other. The grouping never changes, except perhaps to adjust for population. This would boost WvW populations, without affecting PvE, and would give them a fighting chance against other, higher level servers.
The problem with a solution like this is that it gradually goes out of whack over time, requiring you to do it again and again.
As soon as it becomes obvious which worlds are better at WvW, people start moving to them. They need some incentive not to do that. In my view, queue lengths should form that incentive. If you move to a world with high WvW pop you should know that you’re going to be queuing longer to get into the border.
Success for the game on population looks like this:
1) Border zones have equal populations
2) Queues to enter worlds are short
Achieving (1) – Equal border pops
This can simply be built into the queueing logic. You can only enter if your world does not have x% more than the second highest population in that zone.
Achieving (2) – Short queues
This requires two steps from Anet
- Publish the average queue length for each world
- Allow free world transfers from Long queue to short queue worlds
Over time the border populations will stabilise and all queues will shorten.
World population can ONLY be addressed in a systematic way like this. If you have systemic flaws like we currently do (e.g. there is more incentive to move to a high border pop world than a low pop one), there are no other side-rules or efforts that will fix it.
One of my problems with this patch is that currently the only way I have managed to stay viable in TPvP is with a high survivability build. In fact, the only way I could compete with a hammer/mace warrior at all was to tailor my build completely towards doing so.
This patch supposedly creating build diversity makes minor DPS improvements, which will still leave DPS as not viable, whilst giving minor nerfs to my survivability, making a barely viable build even harder to play with.
If you want build diversity you need to address the fundamental problem that a DPS engineer will always lose out to a true DPS class.
It’s not punishing. Having decent enemies to fight would be considered a plus for most people.
If you don’t want longer queues, Anet can work out free transfers to better worlds. End result is low queues and good WvW. How is that punishment for anyone?
If a the border population of a world greatly outnumbers that of the others, here are the downsides:
1) The larger pop world has very few challenging (i.e. fun) fights
2) The larger pop world spends a lot of time without people to fight at all
3) The lower pop world feels frustrated and helpless
4) The lower pop world starts losing people from the border making it worse
5) The lower pop world cannot achieve even basic in-game goals
6) There is no meaningful way you can contribute to fixing this situation as an individual. If you switch realms to avoid it, you make matters worse overall.
The fix that has been suggested before is to implement the following rule:
When trying to join a border zone, if your world outnumbers the second highest border population by more than 15% (or some other proportion, to be decided), you will join the queue.
Downsides of this:
1) Larger pop world ends up with longer queues.
2) As an individual, your only real fix for this is to move worlds.
Surely the downsides of this are a lot less severe than those of the current situation? Particularly since Anet could easily facilitate the moving of worlds from high WvW pop to low WvW pop.
The main aim for rewards should be to encourage good play, and I can see how Anet are thinking with the reward changes.
In my mind, there are 3 possibly approaches to this, in the following order of preference:
1) The best method would be to give rewards for individual effort, but ensure that the rewards are linked only to actions of real value and cannot be exploited for farming. This would mean:
- killing should only be rewards when it is near a node or other area of significance.
- defending nodes should give rewards in a more intelligent way. Fighting 2 ppl to a standstill 1v2 for 5 mins currently ensures you score nothing!
- All rewards (killing, node capping, etc) should have diminishing returns to prevent farming
2) Give a reward simply for the win, as per Anet’s new approach. The downside to this is that the gap between elitist and beginner grows, which is bad for the long term of the sport. It also means that the impact of people being AFK or just plain bad at the game is much more severe in hot joins.
3) Give simplistic rewards for killing/capping and a small reward for winning as per the current system. Unfortunately this both encourages farming while not really rewarding good play. However, it does ensure that people contributing nothing get nothing without necessarily dragging the whole team down with them.
I hate patches like this. The whole player base knows what needs to be done, but Anet in their arrogance do a load of random other stuff and ignore the real issues.
It went like this with thief at launch. Months of people complaining and spoiled matches. Finally Anet nerfed them and it solved the problem. Same thing now with healing signet on warriors. Why do we have to live with this for months, just because Anet are too arrogant to take advice from the people actually playing the game.
Currently, warriors can play 100% aggressively without any worry for defence at all. There are no other classes who can do that. The rest of us have to either be aggressive and fragile or defensive and reduced killing capability. Warriors get the best of both.
(edited by Cribbage.2056)
So everyone will be dodging a whole lot less. Who benefits from that the most? Warriors.
And no addressing of the healing signet issue, yet again.
Is Anet just trying to save face or something by pretending their “warriors are in a good place” comment was not just a load of rubbish.
It’s really interesting to see the priorities Anet has. A nerf to engineers, dishonestly reported at some nonsense about encouraging build diversity, but and indirect buff to warriors. If they really wanted build diversity they’d not be happy with the fact 95% of warriors use healing signet.
(edited by Cribbage.2056)