Guild Wars 2

Why would you nerf any form of condi clear? There isn’t even close to enough condi clear in this game. Even with two condi clears on heal it’s an uphill battle trying to fight a condi class that can out DPS you with 3k armor.

Entenkommando.5208:

Diru.4531:

Penalty examples:

• Most deaths

Goodbye necros.

Just posted that deaths shouldn’t be a major penalty/bonus. Necro cleave can win games. However, if you run necro without a support class then it’s up to you to earn your +3.

Artaz.3819:

Another option is to allow soft reset of MMR again and again (after 10 matches). Even if the rewards are postponed/reward chests are reset as well, it makes sense since strings of poorly made teams/bad-connection-players is inevitable.

This would still give certain players more chances to be placed higher than they should be. I think it just needs a rework to include individual performance. Slightly more accurate placing plus faster progress for skilled players is really all that’s needed.

Rodzynald.5897:

As for penalties, no deaths and most deaths shouldn’t be taken under consideration. Because of that we would welcome bunker meta of sorts once again or too many professions that have a lot of escape on demand mechanics (also people might run away from a fight just so that they don’t get killed.)

The individual penalties/bonuses shouldn’t be enough to take focus off winning the game. Something like +3 for least deaths, +5 for most top stats. Penalties would be the opposite in the higher tiers. It should double the progress for consistently good players.

*Edited the original post as least deaths makes more sense.

Give an MMR point for playing a match. This will get rid of the players who placed well but aren’t actively participating in the season. The number one spot in NA right now has played 11 matches total. This is easy to implement. Just add the total amount of played ranked matches to a players current MMR rating and start giving an extra point per match.

Reward individual player performance. In Platinum and Gold tiers have a point penalty for underperforming. In Silver and Bronze tiers have no penalties, but point bonuses for performing well.

Penalty examples:

• Most deaths
• No top stats in a match

Reward examples:

• Least deaths
• Multiple top stats in a match

Team based MMR only makes sense when the teams are evenly matched. The chances of this happening decreases significantly in lower divisions, yet the punishment for losing a match remains the same. There needs to be at least some incentive to keep playing your best when your teammates aren’t doing well.

I’ve been running a similar build in T1 for a couple of weeks. It works pretty well but there are two things that ruin it, especially in large fights.

Rocket Charge leaps 3 times. When each leap actually goes forwards it’s a great, but there’s a high chance that the second/third leap will go left, right or even backwards. In a big fight anything but forward is usually a death sentence.

Unreliable/awkward stability. I use Toss Elixir B for stab. Having a cast time is a pain, having to target it is a pain and I feel like the caster might not be given priority for the effect (haven’t tested that).

It’s still a really fun build for medium scale fights or mid-line. But the lack of leap/stab control in a large scale fight makes the class pretty unreliable.

If Rocket Charge always went forward or towards the target and Toss Elixir B was improved (IE. 5 stacks or stability to self for 5 seconds, non-targeted, insta-cast and stun break) then the build would be solid.

I don’t think anet realizes this but the regular veteran WvW commanders are the ones that kept this game mode alive for so long. When anet gives them a new map that’s harder to defend, harder to find fights and contains a central PVE event that causes the entire map to lag, this is the outcome.

You probably just encountered a disorganized group hoping to ktrain an empty map.

If the game is fun the community will find a way to make it work.

I expect we’ll reuse the server TS in the beginning. Some alliances will get their own, while others may share the cost between multiple alliances.

Administering could eventually be made easier by the anet devs:

• Give us a place to enter our Teamspeak identity Unique ID.
• Add an API call that takes the Unique ID as a parameter and returns what alliances the user attached to the Unique ID is a member of.
• User joins alliance TS and is assigned a temporary group.
• TS server has a cron job that integrates channel permissions with anet’s alliance member API.

The integration would probably work like this:

• Cron job uses TS ServerQuery to list all clients in the temporary group
• Get the Unique ID for each client
• Query the anet alliance member API by the client Unique ID
• Get back a list of alliances the user is a member of
• Check if any channel names match the alliance names
• Update client permissions and remove from temporary group

Tzozef.9841:

But what do you think prevents Anet from making this decision, I mean, why not?

Because people assume that bringing back the old map is something that can be done easily and without issue. Judging by the amount of bugs that slip through testing with each major update it’s safe to say no change is an easy one.

Hypothetically speaking; they bring the old map back which brings with it some old bugs fixed in recent patches, as well as introducing a few new ones. Then they have to update the old maps with the new WvW features, introducing even more problems. Then they go through their testing phase. Then they organize a maintenance window for the stressful job of pushing this all to production and likely reconfiguring the system that manages their WvW VM instances. If they’re unlucky this results in a few ongoing issues for their infrastructure team to fix. Then they get to look forward to all the complaints and bug reports for problems missed during the testing phase.

It’s a massive undertaking that just flushes all the work done to get the new desert BL live down the drain. It’s not going to happen.

Yeah, I’m pretty much done. I really don’t feel much thought was put towards the competitive level of play we’ve become accustomed to over the last few years, or what factors affect the active WvW playerbase. I’m probably in the minority though. I only play WvW, have two paid accounts for it and just buy gems when I need gold. I didn’t buy HoT because everything seemed PVE gated.

Just cap the amount of wvw rewards an account can receive to some (PVE equivalent) amount over a 3 hour period. After reaching the cap only allow a 10% chance to receive the full reward. After 3 hours the cycle starts again. Is it truly that hard?

Dawdler.8521:

Predictable to the point of teleport, after that who knows.

You’ve got the sentry proximity mechanic or scouts at this point, but the idea would be to block this move in advance by defending the northern camps or middle.

I completely agree that the Alpine map was much easier to control. That’s why I’m hoping there’s some feasible improvements we can suggest for the new map as I doubt its going anywhere soon.

robotempire.2451:

The larger force would be able to just take the keeps. If they do decide to do the event then they’ve just cut down on ramming time. Who cares if it’s biased toward them?

Because like you say, the larger force already has an advantage. With tunnels a smaller force could delay enemy movement until reinforcements arrive, and the reinforcements may have a chance to reach contested objectives quicker via the tunnels. Obviously if there are no reinforcements then the smaller force is boned, but at least their roamers can move around the map easier and find fights at camps.

Dawdler.8521:

These tunnels would bring forces behind the enemy lines … Your tunnel would just make the zergs further avoid each other instead of making them clash.

Thanks for the feedback! There are multiple counters to your first point. Defend the northern camps, defend middle until the camps are under control, have roamers contest the southern camps.

As for zergs avoiding each other, I disagree. I think zergs would tend to use the tunnels making their movements more predictable. I also think that camps would become hotspots for roamers and havoc groups due to their increased strategic value.

Remove the laser event and replace it with a worm champion like in EoTM. Defeating the champion allows access to four tunnels in the middle map area. The tunnels exit near the NE,SE,NW,SW camps. Each camp also has to be owned for its respective tunnel to work, but the worm can be owned by any side. The worm should CC enemies in the middle area to give owning it some strategic value.

Example scenario:

• Blue borderlands
• Blue owns the worm champion
• Green owns SE camp
• Green roamers take tunnel SE camp > middle
• Green roamers head on foot to NW camp
• Green main force rally at SE camp
• Green roamers take NW camp
• Green main force take tunnel SE camp > middle > NW camp
• Green main force head on foot to NW tower

The laser event is biased towards the larger force and needs to go. The new map is too large for a single force to control. Roamers and havoc should become a vital part of WvW strategy. Small scale fights at camps should be encouraged. The solution is based almost entirely on existing game mechanics.

Thoughts?

It feels like anet attempted to deal with the population imbalance by making the map more “fun” to draw in new players. Here’s the problem with that:

The reason there was a lot of action in the old maps was because coverage was scheduled. Coverage was scheduled because it was possible to control each map (sometimes by a single commander and group). Consistent map control gave you an edge in the matchup which made all the effort worthwhile. That’s impossible right now. So much more coverage and effort is required to do what was done before, and we have to feel happy about doing that on a PVE styled, strategic mess of a map. I just don’t see it happening. The new map sure is pretty though.

Some of what (I think) the organized WvWers were hoping for:

• A new map that allowed for strategic control similar to the old one.
• Incentives and game mechanics for scouts, siege refreshers, tower defenders and havoc groups.
• Incentives for taking/defending objectives that scaled intelligently. (Outnumbered/excessive siege use penalties/2v1/time held)
• Server-wide incentives for winning a weekly match.
• A server-wide “call to arms” game mechanic.
• A solution for population imbalance.
• A solution for server lag during large fights.

Notsoperky.2348:

I feel the removal of guard buffs was a bad idea. As an excuse they offer ‘barrier to entry’ and then turn around and say ‘go make 400 levels for your elite’.

Yeah that change and the reasoning was pretty silly. It only hurt low health pool, non-bunker players. A new wvw player is going to die in 1-5 seconds to a regular wvw player stacks or not.

John Corpening.9847:

Hello All,

There are a couple of reasons for the change to reset time. One is for the overall quality of the game. The last few years we have been careful to not disrupt the WvW reset time but this has at times made it difficult for our team to address issues during reset day. This change will give our team an extra day of the week that they can use to respond to issues that may occur with WvW or any other area of the game if it is necessary. In the early days we wanted reset to be during a weekday to ensure we had people available to monitor the game at reset time, but at this point we have seen the ongoing stability of World vs. World and resetting on a weekday is no longer necessary.

Another reason is the emergent gameplay that has come from reset. It has become one of the most exciting times for WvW and we would really love for more players to have the opportunity to experience it. We have many more players logging in on Saturday than on Friday which means with this change many more people will be available to experience the rush of claiming objectives for their world during reset.

However, given the concerns posted here we will be moving the Saturday reset to earlier in the day to give most players the majority of the day to enjoy the start of the new match. Immediately after launch the new time will be 11am PDT / 2pm EDT (6 pm UTC) for NA and 11am BST / 12 pm CEST (10 am UTC) for EU. Keep in mind that the following week with the end of Daylight Savings Time / Summer Time the reset times will be pushed even earlier to 10am PST/ 1pm EST and 10am GMT / 11am CET.

Thank you for your feedback. We realize that no time we pick is going to work for everyone but this change is going to benefit even more players overall while at the same time giving us a little more breathing room to improve the quality of the game during the week.

Thanks,
John

The only problem I experience is during large scale fights. It can range from a few seconds of skill lag (flashing skill icon) to being completely unable to even queue a skill (skill icon activates and stops flashing immediately without going on cool down). I’m usually in team speak with 40 other people all experiencing the same issue.

That’s the only issue I’d like to see addressed. Generally I have a 250-300ms ping from Brisbane, Australia. Gameplay is smooth, enjoyable and I have no rubberbanding.

I used to get a lot of rubberbanding issues with my last ISP due to packet loss. They did everything to blame my equipment, guild wars and their wholesaler. In the end, switching to a provider with a better managed core network, adequate backhaul and good international peering/routes fixed all of my issues. I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of peoples gameplay issues are due to the rising network contention ratio of local ISPs.

I think providing a simple way for everyone to test and rate their connection themselves would be a good start. Providing useful details regarding packet loss, latency information and maybe even a user based grading of local ISPs. An offical page to view the health of arenanet services would also be nice.

There’s no way you guys are putting a dent in Amazon’s CDN. The test build probably isn’t available yet and you’re all just downloading a small 404 response a gazillion times.

:3

They’re letting people stream the “stress test”? That’s pretty brave considering all the skill and waypoint lag I’ve seen in T1.

Hopefully this guy can get to the bottom of it for us: https://youtu.be/oUFc9iqYXE4

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Keep in mind you may not even be using Focus for much longer once Chronomancer drops, the Shield offers a lot of possibilities and kind of overlaps roles with the Focus.

I run rune of the pack with the focus partly for the mobility. I do have a few ideas to keep the build viable but it just seems like a waste putting those traits together. I’ll just have to give it a try.

I see your point. Does swapping “Warden’s Feedback” with the new minor trait “Inspiring Distortion” make more sense?

Anyway, I hope there’s something they can do. I don’t see many mesmers raid much anymore so a change like this is pretty disappointing.

Yeah, it makes no sense to me. Warden’s Feedback is only worthwhile against large groups, but if you want to do any damage against a large group you have to use Protected Phantasms…

Hurting mesmer raid builds is a pretty bad idea. I rarely see any mesmers during ocx/sea raids anymore.

Running both of these traits was a solid build in large scale fights. You have to choose Protected Phantasms because Phantasms melt in almost any kind of aoe. Dropping Warden’s Feedback removes a great counter to ranged focus. It’s a real shame as it was the only Mesmer build I’ve played that actually felt useful in large fights.

If I had to offer a solution:

Swap the master trait “Protected Phantasms” or “Warden’s Feedback” with the minor trait “Inspiring Distortion”

John Corpening.9847:

Hello Again,

I wanted to give you an update on some more changes that are coming out as part of the feedback we got during the Adopt-A-Dev program.

Siege disablers are getting their radius reduced from 450 units to 300 units. The skill recharge on siege disablers are going up from 5 seconds to 45 seconds and the duration that siege is disabled is going down from 45 seconds to 35 seconds.

The first change will make it harder for siege disablers to take out siege that is sufficiently spread out. The second two will guarantee a window that attackers can use siege if there is only one person disabling siege at an objective.

These changes are going out with next week’s build. Thanks again for all of your feedback!

John

Disabling seige is really starting to make fights incredibly boring. I dont think that change will help much at all. The siege trick just needs to delay the attack and provide counterattack advantage, right?

How about:

• Increase the cooldown of all siege attacks by 100%.
• Decrease siege range by 15-20%
• Increase incoming damage to siege by 25%
• Drain 20-50% supply from a siege build site
• 1 minute duration?
• 5 supply cost?
• 50% chance of success?

If that’s not enough advantage for defenders then they deserve to lose the structure.

I’d just like to address server transfers one last time since it’s the only mechanism players have to help balance WvW themselves at this point.

Transfer costs are currently determined by world population, which no longer makes sense due to the introduction of mega-servers. They also do nothing to promote server balance.

Base transfer costs on the current WvW ranking of the server being transferred to. Provide an incentive by significantly reducing the transfer cost if a player is moving to a lower ranked server. I would also consider preventing transfers to the top 2 or 3 ranked servers.

I think it’s great that this discussion is happening and that we’ve steered towards an Alliance Vs Alliance system, but what do people in my situation do in the meantime? I play during the OCX time zone on Maguuma (god bless) where there are typically less than 5 people playing. What does anet suggest I do? Will a WvW support pack help me?

If anet are truly committed to fixing this problem and if we are heading towards an Alliance based system, then why not just allow free transfers to servers with poor wvw coverage? Work out what servers need help and in what time zone and make a plea to the community. A few extra incentives wouldn’t hurt either.

I’m sure this has been suggested before, but here’s my take on it.

A 2-4 sided map with overflow instances and no world limitations. No PPT. You simply earn better loot from taking and defending locations. As for what side people would spawn on, I think every match should be randomized. If it was a 4 sided map, each match would randomly choose 6 NA servers to be part of each side.

The map would contain multiple siege-able locations containing boss/survival battles. A main castle battle for example:

You siege your way to the inner sanctum. After beating the first boss you receive reward level 1. All walls and doors can be repaired or reinforced (extra cost) via an NPC that spawns. After a few minutes, mobs start appearing and try to destroy outer walls, doors, defensive siege and kill the repair NPC (who cannot be revived). If you tried to rush the boss and left a lot of mobs in the courtyard, this could be quite difficult to counter. After about 15-20 minutes another more difficult boss spawns. Defeating this boss grants you reward level 2. Walls and doors can be repaired again providing the NPC is still alive. A final wave of mobs including a mini-boss spawn to try and destroy walls, doors and siege again. The final and strongest boss appears that you must defeat for the final reward. No more mobs will spawn until you’ve left the castle/tower, which has basically reset to level 1. You’re doing all of this while defending against other groups trying to get in and steal the higher level rewards you’ve unlocked.

What do you guys think? Would it just turn into another EoTM? Would the extra coordination required to take and defend locations promote smaller more ogranized groups?

Dayra.7405:

Boris Losdindawoods.3098:

~ ~ As someone else said, this also looks cool, but seems like it would be complicated for Anet to implement. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHcO6Xo8eJ8&feature=youtu.be

Guesting isn’t a solution, it’s the opposite, it cements population imbalances. People over-stack even more, knowing they can freely guest somewhere else at will, when they aren’t needed at the “home-front”.

Paired server guesting is not meant to be a solution for overpopulation. The only solution needed for overpopulation is a little more incentive to change servers. I would have thought constantly queued maps would be enough, but apparently not. What paired server guesting is meant to fix is underpopulation and coverage, as well as adding some much needed variety to WvW. Guesting has the potential to “kickstart” a server’s own WvW population which would soon get the server rankings moving again.

Like quite a few others, I also suggested an Alliance Vs Alliance system. The reason I’m pushing for the above is because it has a good chance of fixing a lot of WvW issues while only taking a small fraction of the time it would to implement a completely new system.

John Corpening.9847:

You guys beat me to it. After last week’s positive discussion on siege trolls I wanted to bring up the topic of population imbalance and ideas that you have on it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHcO6Xo8eJ8&feature=youtu.be

Pair servers together based on ranking and allow for WvW guesting between the paired servers. Simple. The only thing the video doesn’t cover is that servers rarely need, or want that much help, so something like a 20-30 limit on WvW guests would probably do. One thing I really like about the idea is that it allows for small groups to play with or against new players more often, which is something I feel WvW could really benefit from.

Rize Jodo.1276:

The main reason I posted in this thread was to share a very old suggestion for creating more equal matchups that would be easy to implement. See the video here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHcO6Xo8eJ8&feature=youtu.be

Thanks for posting that. It’s a really good idea. Breaking tiers into groups of 6 with sister servers allowing for WvW guesting. Pretty sad that I haven’t seen more people pushing for it. It beats my idea hands down on simplicity alone.

DemonCow.5328:

This would leave out any small guilds or force them to run on very empty maps. I think this would kill off the fun left in wvw.

There shouldn’t be any empty maps since there would only be a certain amount of match-ups per week. A small WvW guild could join any side of any one of those matches. You would have much more choice. Also, the whole idea behind the suggestion is to have higher level coordination by not limiting guilds that are great at WvW to only playing in these broken tiers.

Werat.7063:

Okay, the way i understand it you want spvp with a threeway, right? At the moment in spvp you can already invest in your own private maps where you got a limit of 20 players. That should be enough for any gvg on 90% of the cases.

I menton this because i find this kind of argumentation on your side very anti-social. In wvw in the past working together with everyone on the map seemed to be the way to go.
Some time now wvw has deteriorated very much in that area e.g. multiple guilds blocking maps during primetime to gvg but dont help the remaining few that actually play the map.
When my guildies are on we run maybe a 5er group because i am in a small group. When the map is played and we cooparte with other people/guilds on the map its fun to we deff or attack or divert, we get our fights and need no special game setting for this

So please with what you have in mind take it to extend spvp and not abuse wvw. My own server seems to have lost a lot of good people in the “play together scene” because of selfish guilds that force their gvg game mode onto others including tellling people lies so they leave the map and the guild can get its people in when there is a queue.

Nope. I like the WvW maps and the playstyle. I just wish it was better ogranized, less blobby and that WvW focused guilds could challenge any other guilds in the game. What I’m proposing would lead to guilds forming alliances, proposing interesting match-ups and then working together with all of the smaller groups that decided to join their match to assist. I don’t see anything “very anti-social” about it. As for the “selfish guilds”, don’t you think that’s due to overpopulation and only having a single match to play in? At least there would be more matches for them to join or the option to pay for their own. If this system was in place and all the matches still got queued, well that’s a different problem entirely.

Thanks for taking the time to reply guys.

I’m sure this has all been brought up before, but having “worlds” as part of the match-up equation just doesn’t work. Each world’s WvW presence and timezone coverage differs too much to guarantee a good match. To make things worse, the rankings rarely change and you’re stuck fighting the same people for months.

We have an amazing combat system that works well in large scale fights. We have some extremely organized guilds and a skilled player base, yet we have a matching system that basically prevents most of them from ever fighting with or against each other. It’s tragic. Here’s another way I think it could work, and one I hope would not be a nightmare to implement.

A three-way versus just like it is now and on the current maps, but with each side being an alliance of up to 3 guilds with no world limitations. Match-ups could be suggested by anyone, agreed to by the leaders of the guilds involved and then voted on by everyone. The highest rated N matches getting locked in and scheduled.

What about pugs and roamers? The guilds in these match-ups aren’t always going to be there in force. They just need priority placement if the map gets queued. When there’s space available in the map, anyone should be able to pick (and be bound to for the match duration) an alliance to assist in the match.

As for points, it would be nice if they could be tied to the guilds and based on raid success and presence. If that veers to far from the existing code base then it could just be tied to the alliance. I’d much rather have good fights than a meaningful leader board.

How could this change also benefit ArenaNet?

• Paid match-ups that don’t require votes.
• Have match prize pools that players can contribute to.
• Buy more votes to promote unpaid match-ups.
• For pugs/roamers, allow only one free assist in a match per week and require a small fee to change.

Just an idea after playing WvW for a while. What do you guys think? Would it work? Would it just cause more problems?