Guild Wars 2

Lorelei.3918:

Then you got guys like DoctorFaust who see nothing wrong with needing over 400 hours to level and gear a character to a point where that character can be considered competitive.

It’s an RPG. That’s what you do. You want fairness and balance? Play SPvP.

As for being competitive, I jumped into WvW at level 12. At 50, I was killing level 80 characters. Not all the time, mind you, but I was able to do it from time to time with a combination of picking my fights carefully, paying attention to the situation, and analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of their build based on what gear and buffs they had.

There’s more to this game than mere total stat points and player skill – there’s also the rock-paper-scissors-esque elements of different builds.

SF here to, uhh, “represent,” I guess? And also to say how glad I am for the good fights this week. HoD is really sticking it to us, and while I’d prefer to win, I’m glad we have someone to sharpen our blade against before we even raise the possibility of moving to Silver League. After all, if every match was a roflstomp, that would get real boring on the quick-a-like.

And boy-howdy, do we have a lot of sharpening to do! Thankfully, I’m a good sport; otherwise, I might start, like, raging out or something.

I do have a question, though, and pardon my noobishness for asking. What is it with people getting upset when the other team jumps on their corpses or emotes a laugh? I understand that it’s a taunt, a display of dominance on the part of the victors, but I don’t understand why anyone gets upset about it. Moreover, I don’t understand why anyone is ever around to see it – when I die, if the opposing team has time to emote on or around my corpse, it means that the fight is well and truly over – at which point I am probably waypointing back to spawn. If I’m waiting on reinforcements (and those reinforcements have a snowball’s chance of reviving me), then any time spent pseudo-tea-bagging my corpse is just time spent vainly gloating until certain doom arrives. What part of this is worth getting upset over, and why?

Please note, I don’t want any “bads will be bads” explanations here – I’m not trying to poke at an open wound, I’m just seriously confused as to how this is even a thing at all. Can someone who actually gets upset at this please explain to me what it is that’s upsetting about it?

Looking forward to the fights to come! And I can’t wait for Round Two with HoD next week – if we win, then we’ll almost certainly tie for first; if HoD wins, then they well and truly deserve their position as undisputed champions. Cheers!

OK, yes, Guard Leech and Applied Fortitude give 450 stat points, no argument there. It also takes 115 WvW ranks to get either of those, which at an average rate of one rank per hour means 230 hours to achieve that bonus. But keep in mind that a Superior Sigil of Your Face gives you up to 25 stacks of +10 to your face, for 250 stat points. As for exotic armor (and trinkets and gems), let’s add it up:
Hat gives 32, 32, 45, for a total of 109.
Shoulders give 24, 24, 34, for a total of 82.
Shirt gives 72, 72, 101, for a total of 245.
Gloves give 24, 24, 34, for a total of 82.
Pants give 48, 48, 67, for a total of 163.
Shoes give 24, 24, 34, for a total of 82.
Straight armor subtotal: 1,063. So much for those bonuses giving “not much less than the stats provided by an entire set of exotic armor,” as you claimed in the OP.

A full set of Soldier runes (because I’m looking at my build) gives 215 stat points.
A Superior Sigil of Whatever gives 250 to whatever.
Necklace gives 64, 64, 90, for a total of 218.
Two rings each give 48, 48, 67, for a total of 326.
Two earrings each give 40, 40, 56, for a total of 272.
A rare backpiece (because again, my build) gives 14, 14, 20, for a total of 48.
Gems in each of those six items give 15, 15, 25, for a total of 330.
Accessory/socket subtotal: 1,659 (or 1409, if you don’t have full Whatever stacks).

Grand Total: 2,722 stat points on armor, to which 450 stat points gives a 17% bonus. That’s substantial, no doubt, but by no means game-breaking. There’s still another thing we’re missing, though, and that’s baseline stats.

For this, I’m going to forego theory and just add up what my actual stat totals are. Here is the build I am using, for reference. You’ll notice that I have some items that eschew flat traits for percentage-based things (namely, zerk weapons and a beryl jewel in the back slot, plus a rune of fire in the sword), and I also use ascended celestial trinkets (which provide roughly 10% more total stats, at the cost of spreading them out everywhere, while ascended items themselves are roughly 10% better than exotics). As a brief note on this build’s rationale, it’s not meant for 1v1; it’s meant to make a group better around me, hence the healing shouts and multiple condition clears (as it stands, my 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9 abilities all remove conditions in an area). Instead of fighting the odd guy 1v1, I roll with a small group and keep them quick & clean, specializing in extraction from dangerous situations and big sustain in long fights. I’m basically a bard in heavy armor.

Anyway, these are my actual stat totals before any guard leech or applied fortitude come into the mix:
Power: 1,663
Precision: 1,443
Toughness: 1,720
Vitality: 1,770
Condition Damage: 429
Healing Power: 416
Grand Total of All Stats: 7,441.
Adding 450 to that makes it 7,891, but it’s only a 6% improvement. Still substantial, but even less possibly game-breaking.

Let’s take a new player to WvW who jumps in at level one with no stat gear. Using fuzzy math because I’m reaching the end of my patience (and the bottom of my drink), we can subtract the 2,722 stat points from the 7,441 total to yield a rough 4,719 stat points out of the box. The geared level 80 player is 63% “more character” than the noob, not to mention the added flexibility of filled skill slots and player experience at operating the character. Most of my characters took me roughly 200 hours to level to 80 (my warrior, that build I linked, only took 170-something). So it takes, let’s just say, 200 hours just so you can equip the gear for a 63% improvement, and that’s assuming you can afford to buy it all the second you hit 80, and another 200 hours to get that additional 10% (450 is 10% of the “out of the box” 4,719 stat points), which at that point is only a 6% increase over what you’ve already gotten by gearing yourself.

This is diminishing returns (based on time invested) for endgame content that literally everyone has access to. I’m going to call this balanced and working as intended. Cheers!

You accurately articulate how the statistic would work, and that is precisely why it is in no way a measure of any kind of skill. Remember, each server is treated as a black box: no matter what’s going on inside, all that’s being measured is overall points divided by total player hours logged – and the only new information we’re getting is that “total player hours logged” bit. Your argument about player contribution is exactly why we need to keep this “black box” mentality firmly in mind.

If anything, a low overall P3H would be a sign that something like that “mass of feeding zerkerlings” stuff is going on. The only way it’s misleading is if people try to erroneously assign extra meaning to it.

These are certainly interesting ideas, but I think they might be band-aids on the underlying issues: that the match-ups aren’t balanced in the first place. While this is a source of frustration for many players, it’s not a “problem” per se so much as it is an inherent factor of the game. Furthermore, I think any attempt on ANet’s part to implement your proposed solutions would result in further gaming of the system.

From the start, I believe that ANet wanted SPvP to be their E-sport baby, while WvW was only ever meant to be a fun little thing on the side. WvW has gotten more and more attention over the past year and change, with balance tweaks and features like masteries leading up to the map overhauls to incorporate the SPvP-esque bloodlust ruins, and the upcoming entirely new maps of the Edges of the Mists. But this still built on top of a system that is, at its foundation, not designed to be fair or balanced in the greater scheme – that’s what SPvP is for, and the problems that come with such a rigorously controlled environment are the price you pay for fairness and balance. There is a true dichotomy here – WvW’s susceptibility to such runaway conditions is a direct result of the uncontrolled environment which, for me, makes it more fun and interesting than SPvP. While I still have my complaints about how those runaway conditions sometimes play out, I largely accept them as better than the alternative (which is why I’m not much for SPvP, even though I still occasionally dip my toe in).

The point of all this is that the point structure, as it stands, is simple and obvious. What the points mean is simple and obvious. How you go about getting those points is where the depth comes in, where there’s room for subtlety in strategy: in player actions. I think this is more or less as it should be. Adding subtlety to a simple and obvious scoring system sometimes adds interesting depth – I actually think your bit on upgrades making an objective more valuable is a good suggestion, in fact, as it encourages “capture and hold” gameplay and devalues the karma train and its attendant Ouroboros effect – but most of the other stuff strikes me as unnecessary complication.

The reason it’s unnecessary complication, rather than further interesting depth, is twofold. In the first place, it’s because it attempts to balance the fundamentally unbalanced: the adjustments based on population would be a back-end Band-Aid on a front-end “problem,” as mentioned above. It’s unnecessary because it goes directly against the design of the game mode. In the second place, such adjustments would certainly (almost necessarily) lead to further gaming of the system by players: the homeopathic amplifying of score with diminishing player presence would encourage servers to field as few players as necessary/possible. While no player could kick another player from a map or report them for any actionable offense (…yet…), there could be “soft enforcement” vis a vis guild kicks and other social retaliation in an effort to keep only the best players on the map. This wouldn’t even be the result of people trying to be mean, it would simply emerge from guild leaders trying to do what’s best for the server (we all know where roads paved with good intentions lead), and it would further divide the WvW community. Additionally, the matter of how often player counts were tabulated would also be gamed, creating a weird pressure for players to duck out right before headcounts in order to maximize server score.

Making upgrades add to an objective’s value is a really good idea, though – I like it a lot!

More like to see if we’re really being out-played or just overpowered by mere numbers. The statistic already exists, it’s not a made-up thing: there is a total amount of points obtained by a server (which is currently visible), and there is a total number of player hours logged in the WvW game mode (not currently visible to players, dunno if devs track this). I just want to put the numbers next to each other and compare them, to see if anything can be learned from it – despite your nay-saying, this is still an open question.

APM is useless during those times when players are just making boxes and selecting units with no further purpose as a nerve-calming exercise during the odd few seconds of downtime, which they do all the time. Knowing when a number is useful to look at and when it’s not is another factor entirely, so harping on my throwaway “if only to say” comment doesn’t really advance the discussion or argue against the usefulness of the statistic. Thanks for trying, though!

At any rate, I never said anything about player skill in my entire post – you changed the subject by bringing that up. My question is specifically about numbers – to wit, how many points are accrued and how many player-hours were logged in their accrual. Please tell me where you got any notion of skill out of that, because I’m just not seeing it. I’m not talking about player skill in a fight or commander skill at commanding or any other kind of skill at all, just server-wide results and time spent in the game. This essentially treats all servers as black boxes with no attempt to explain what’s going on inside (so no “skill” is involved at any step). Assessing player skill, I think we’d both agree, would require much more analysis and would probably be better suited to the more controlled environment of SPvP.

So I’m on Sorrow’s Furnace, and after a very exciting weekend of back-&-forth with Henge of Denravi, HoD is finally starting to pull steadily ahead and establish a commanding lead on us. OK. I can see when we’re beat, and I can admit defeat like a good sport. Hats off to them, because even though I’m still going to try my darndest, I don’t think we’re coming back from this.

However, it seems like they’re able to field more players than us. Like, loads more. Also, they have some pretty good scouts who are presumably reporting on our troop movements and numbers from the objectives they control. Interestingly, the latter could create an illusion of the former; if so, then they’re just plain out-playing us. But I want to dig deeper: anyone can say, “They outnumber us!” I want to know what’s true.

I would really like to know how many WvW player hours have been logged this week for both HoD and SF. Total points divided by logged player hours in the WvW game mode would yield a “points per player-hour” (P/PH? PpPH? P3H? Let’s go with P3H), and that would be a pretty solid metric for a server’s relative player efficiency during that week. There would clearly be fudge factors, such as players only logging in for map completion or jumping puzzles or crafting or what-have-you, but I don’t care about any of that. Just take the server’s total points that week, divide it by the total player-hours spent on the WvW maps, and bam: that’s the figure I’m interested in knowing.

I obviously can’t do this by myself, though, so I guess I’m just putting the question out to the devs: is this something we could maybe get? I think it would be a useful statistic for servers to have, if only to say, “Oh, jeez, we totally got trounced this week – but that’s OK, because even though Server X got twice our points, they used four times the player-hours to do it. They won, but we know for a fact that we did more with our inferior numbers.” The game already tracks total hours logged on each individual character and each account as a whole, so I think it would be a (relatively) simple matter to track this (if it isn’t tracked invisibly already). I don’t think it would be game-breaking or overly intrusive, as it would be impersonal, anonymized vis-a-vis aggregation, and only applicable to that particular week’s matchup (as other weeks would have different point totals, different servers, and different amounts of total player hours logged). Plus, it would be kind of like the way StarCraft logs Actions-Per-Minute: a metric that doesn’t tell you the whole story by itself but helps to put other data in perspective.

Anyway, that’s my idea. Other players’ thoughts? To the devs, is this something we might maybe some day get, or is it just plain not on the menu for some reason or other? Or is it something we can already see and my Google skill is just failing me?

I am a doctor, and 100% of doctors surveyed endorse this message. It was a small survey (n=1), but we got wonderfully consistent data.

(Note: I am not a doctor. Still, all of the fake doctors surveyed endorse this message.)

FirstBlood hit the nail on the head: the main advantage of the thief is the ability to disengage. So no, you can’t “beat” a competent thief of any build, because you can’t force a thief to fight you. The thief will always be able to run away.

So what? This doesn’t prove anything. As has been mentioned, sword/warhorn warriors also have a ton of disengage. Mesmers can use a little deception to get out of any fight. Guardians also have abilities that can keep them alive until they’re able to reach safer ground. Any class is able to spec for disengagement, meaning that any competent player will be unbeatable for the simple reason that you can’t force them to fight you. It just so happens that thieves are able to achieve this with a wide variety of builds, whereas other professions only have unbeatable disengagement available within a narrow set of specializations.

The answer is not that thieves are broken, or dominant, or any of that nonsense. The answer is that you’re looking too narrowly at 1v1 fights. As a rule, 1v1 builds tend to be selfish and don’t work well in groups (unless that group is a mindless zergball, in which case you’re not truly a group, you’re just a bunch of 1v1 fights that happen to be very close to each other). If you focus on 1v1 fights, then you’re missing the point of WvW entirely, which is not to fight other players but to capture and hold territory. Objectives can be soloed, but that requires an incompetent enemy (except for camps and flags). Group composition, strategically choosing one’s battles, and seeing the big picture are how you win WvW, not 1v1. If you’re going to focus on 1v1 balance, you may as well say thieves are “cheap” or have no “honor” – it’s scrub thinking. The game is bigger than you, and you are refusing to expand your mind to accommodate it.

So if that thief is stalking you and preventing you from taking any objective, harrassing you and just generally being a pain – don’t complain. Realize what the thief is doing – and that your best move is to go do something else productive instead of continuing to put yourself in a bad situation. Don’t be a Sphex.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digger_wasp#Uses_in_philosophy

I, for one, prefer volatile match-ups to stale ones.

Yes, that means that you will sometimes suffer a crushing defeat. Sometimes you’ll suffer crushing defeats many weeks in a row. But with stale match-ups (i.e. “the old way”), servers settled into fixed tiers and there was a top dog and the loser. In those match-ups, being in the permanent loser spot with the same opponents was way worse than randomly getting a streak of losses due to bad luck.

And if losing really makes the game not fun for you, then you’re just a bad sport. Good players know how to turn losses into learning experiences and become better players for it. After all, in a zero-sum game like this, someone is going to lose. Sometimes that will be you. When it’s your turn in the barrel, you sac up and see what you can learn from the situation.

Huh. Interesting.

I guess this is going to be a minority opinion, but I actually like the Bloodlust areas. Krait Lake was boring, the weather buff was too unpredictable to be useful and too small to do anything, and there was nowhere to hide (it was a flat-out sprint to get anywhere, you couldn’t avoid telegraphing your movements, and the central island was the only feature that allowed you to break Line of Sight).

Now there’s a consistent buff from a topographically interesting area that provides a small (i.e. not game-breaking) but non-zero benefit to everyone on your side in WvW. It’s something that roamers can work on which benefits the whole server in a concrete way, and it’s great for losing a tail or turning the tables. Plus the cannons at the top of each area make “capture and hold” that much more viable.

Then again, I also don’t have any problems with SPvP. I don’t do it much (only when WvW has too big a spread to be interesting for the rest of the week), but I like it for testing builds and fast-paced small-scale action. So… I guess I just see things from a totally different perspective than you folks.

Envy, I’m in the process of pursuing my Master’s degree in order to become a librarian. I believe in being organized. It doesn’t matter how much space I have, I will organize the things I put in that space.

Even with my current 8- & 10-slot bags, I normally have about 2/3 of that space empty when I’ve cashed my trash, so the problem isn’t a lack of space. The problem (which I’ve solved by organizing my stuff) is that I don’t want to have to look for stuff when I need it, I want to know where it is. So there’s a place for everything, and everything goes in its place. That way, when I need an arrow cart blueprint, I know I just have to “press I, scroll down, second from the left and double-click.” My vendor trash all goes in the top two bags so that I never accidentally vendor the stuff I want to deposit in my bank or sell on the trading post. And bags with gathering tools and non-depositable collectibles like badges, karma jugs, boosts, and other rewards you get periodically (and might want to save up because you don’t know which character will need them later), get hidden so I don’t have to look at them until I go back to the bank or need to equip a new gathering tool.

As a result of this system, whenever I die, it takes me less than ten seconds to repair my stuff and cash my trash (while most people I’ve seen take a minute or two), letting me get back to the action that much faster (i.e. “playing the fun part of the game”). I’d say that what you call your “opinion” is really more your “playstyle” (with respect to inventory management), and I just have a different one. As in, I don’t disagree with you – nothing you said was false or bad in any way at all, and yeah, the second option is pretty nichey now that you mention it – I just do things differently in a way that’s not compatible with the way you do things. Because I do things differently than you. So while you may think I’m a slightly-OCD neat freak, I do get a tangible benefit out of it (front-loading my thinking in exchange for free time on the back end); I, on the other hand, think you’re a slob who wastes time sifting through inchoate piles instead of minimizing boring vendor times, though you also receive a tangible benefit from your system (the freedom to not give a skritt about organizing your stuff).

TL;DR version: Thx 4 +1, +1’d back, ur right on #2.

cheshirefox.7026:

please, remove stonemist castle from WvW
it serves no purpose
it’s just an easter egg for the higher population server

I’d like to generalize this argument to illustrate its flaw:

please, remove points and the concept of victory from games
they serve no purpose
they’re just an easter egg for the people who were already winning anyway

Stonemist doesn’t serve a purpose external to WvW because, when you’re trying to win at WvW, Stonemist is the purpose. It is the single most valuable piece of real estate, it provides an excellent platform from which to siege other objectives, and it facilitates troop movements if you can keep the waypoint uncontested. You may as well tell people defending a position not to defend themselves, because it makes it harder for you to conquer the position they’re trying to defend.

To turn it around, if the devs do go and remove Stonemist, then the very same line of reasoning could also be used to persuade them to remove all keeps – after all, they don’t serve any purpose, except as a bonus to those who are able to hold them (the bonus being WvW points, a defensible position, and a waypoint – just like Stonemist). Once keeps are gone, ANet may as well remove towers as well, because they serve even less of a purpose (they only provide points and a position, no waypoint). And with no towers, keeps, or castle, supply camps become utterly pointless as well: they’re hardly a defensible position, as they have no walls, and only provide points to whoever is able to hold them. And now that we’ve removed all capture points, what we’re left with is a huge open-world deathmatch with no point aside from bloody-minded murder.

Supply camps exist to provide supply to other capture points. Those capture points exist to fortify your server’s position and serve as launching points for assaults against their capture points. Stonemist is The Big Kahuna – the one point in a three-way war which, if you can hold it, will secure your victory against the other servers so long as you can also protect your borderlands and your corner of EB equally as well as they can. So of course Stonemist is an “easter egg,” i.e. a prize for whatever server is winning WvW. You probably think this comes down to population, so let’s just call this “to-may-to/to-mah-to” and agree that we mean the same thing even though we say it different, because I don’t feel like getting into the intricacies of geographical/time-zone coverage and coordination vs. raw population.

What you’re ultimately saying is that you don’t like the WvW game mode and you want a deathmatch instead. You may find SPvP more rewarding – even though it still has the same “capture and hold” gameplay, you can choose to ignore that and simply fight other players for the thrill of battle. I’ve seen plenty of people do it while I’m sitting on a point and securing victory for my team.

I really like the “Deposit All Collectibles” option. It’s convenient and awesome.

I really don’t like the “Compact” option. It messes up my organization (minis in my invisible bags, blueprints at the bottom, different weapons in the middle… you get the idea).

These two are right friggin’ next to each other on the inventory Options drop-down! Many times, I have attempted to deposit all my collectibles, only to jam all my stuff as far up as it will go.

I propose an easy fix. Well, two fixes, either one of which would work, but they could both be implemented and I think they’d be easy to do.

Option 1: Implement a “Deposit All Collectibles” hotkey in the Control Options, perhaps under Miscellaneous or User Interface, and let us bind it wherever we want. I’d probably do Alt-I, because I’d want it to be easy to remember but difficult to do on accident – I’m altering my inventory!

Option 2: Add a setting under General Options, perhaps under User Interface, to disable the “Compact” option. That way, people like me who literally never want to compact our inventory can simply take the option away. There could maybe be a drop-down selection to enable it, disable it, or ask for confirmation (“Do you really want to compact your inventory?”) for those who want to do it sometimes but not accidentally.

I know it’s a minor thing, but I think this could be implemented with less than one half of one staffing-hour, if the person really knew the UI code. I mean, I don’t know how you guys organize everything, maybe the inventory code and the other options code is just all over the place, but it seems like it would be a really easy thing to do that would save a lot of headaches from a simple (and very close!) mis-click. I mean, the text is small on the screen and the buttons are right on top of each other, so it’s easy for us to mess it up.

Anyway, that’s it. Thanks for listening!

Handin.4032:

DevonCarver.5370:

The NA matchups won’t be available until the reset.

In the future will we have a bit more of a heads up, especially as to what color the server will be? I know on TC the guild leaders like to get together and decide what guilds are going on what maps so that not all the guilds go on the same map, and the color of the map decides if they’re bay side, hills side, etc.

Handin, there’s an easy workaround for you. Ooh, two easy workarounds, actually! Both will assume you’ve got your EB & BL groups planned, as it doesn’t matter what color you are – EB & your BL will always be EB & your BL. As for the other two BLs, there are two options to coordinate without knowing who is what color:

1. Have a team go “left” and a team go “right” from your BL. If you’re in the middle, it’s nice & obvious what’s left & what’s right; just imagine wrapping the edges of the map together, so that if you end up in the green position (at far left), red (middle) is right of you and blue (far right) is left of you.
2. Have a “top” & “bottom” team – your top team goes after the higher (green or blue) borderlands, and your bottom team goes after the lower (blue or red) borderlands. This one’s probably less confusing… but I thought of #1 first, so I decided to put it in anyway.

On another note entirely, I also want to thank the devs for introducing this element of randomness into the matchups. I am perfectly comfortable getting wtfpwned every now & again; losing hard is just a part of the game sometimes. The proper response to a roflstomp is not to get demoralized & quit, but to take stock of the situation and adapt. I’m not saying such adaptation will result in victory, I’m saying it will result in learning (so long as you’re paying attention). Adversity is often the greatest teacher.

AndrewSX.3794:

Where are al those ppl who said “Screw balanced matches, we want variety!” now.

(not pointed at you rof guys.)

Right here, buddy! I, for one, am very glad to see more volatility in the matchups.

I feel your pain, Ring of Fire folks. I’m from Sorrow’s Furnace, we were in the North American tier 8 (the very bottom) for months. Now, a big part of it was that we lost hard for a while, and our rating dropped like a rock. But then we got our act together, and we started stomping the other tier 8 servers.

And kept stomping them week after week after week after week…

The problem was that there was a substantial gap between us and tier 7, and at the time, tier 7 was clustered pretty close together. The servers kept changing positions, they were so close; and that stopped them from falling within striking distance of us. And so we were stuck in tier 8, because the way the Glicko ratings work, to increase our rating we not only had to beat the other servers in our tier, we had to beat them by more than we did the previous week.

So yeah, you’re gonna have a boring week. Cheer up, though – at least it’s only one week for you.

There’s still a reason to run from fights if you’re not taking repair damage when you die. A few reasons, actually:

1. Dying to another team gives them loot & WXP, which helps make their characters more effective (with gear & perks). So running from the fight denies them that reward.
2. Dying gets you out of that part of the map until you run back from the nearest waypoint. So running from the fight can save you downtime.
3. Running from a losing battle to get to a more defensible position is almost always a tactically sound maneuver. So running from the fight can help you turn a bad situation around.

Now, yes, there are certainly situations where it is tactically advisable to stand your ground in the face of certain death. On more than one occasion, I’ve jumped into a farm ring alone against 5+ guys just to delay the capture until my 12 teammates can get there, dying horribly in the process but ultimately saving the camp (and thus preventing the need to wait 5 min for RI to go away). My argument isn’t that you should always run, my argument is that money shouldn’t be the deciding factor in whether you decide to stand or fly – the deciding factor should be, “Will standing accomplish something, even if I/we die?”

I don’t find repair costs to be all that onerous, myself. Granted, I’m only in rares (with the odd exotic weapon or ascended trinket, but I don’t think those take damage), so I don’t know if it gets more expensive with better gear. But I only pay a silver and change, which I can make up pretty quick. Most nights in WvW, I turn a profit (if a small one) while still tossing out the odd upgrade and buying siege prints pretty regularly. Then again, I don’t always charge into every fight without taking stock of the situation…

To everyone who says it’s “all about numbers,” I advise you to check out the YouTube channel of RaggokOozo. Here’s his latest video, uploaded today and a perfect counterexample to “numbers are all that matters” thinking:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djeVYpFIqos

In it, he and his team (5-7 players total) take on superior numbers and use coordination & tactics to win the fight. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, then just skip to 8:50 when the music changes, and watch them take on 20-30 people. They don’t take the farm, but they don’t fold either – and I defy any one of you to say it wouldn’t be a pleasure to be on the smaller side of that fight.

Here’s another video of them cutting off reinforcements to Stonemist by keeping them (mostly) locked up in their garrison. It’s about 10 vs. 40:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sfs-dTf1iGU

Notice how they take tactically sound positions, pick their fights, and coordinate with each other. This is what “learn to play” means: these guys know how to play, and while they’re far from invincible, they really kick some serious kittens. Oh, and they’re tier 7, which makes me glad that WvW is getting shuffled up a bit, because we just moved up to tier 6 and I look forward to playing against them some more.

Lots of good conversation on the matter of how to fight a thief – not knocking it, I actually have an 80 thief myself just so I could learn what makes ‘em tick, and I still learn new things every time I dive into the forums. One thing I haven’t seen anyone bring up, though, is the matter of how to defend unwalled objectives from thieves (i.e. flags, yaks, & camps). It might seem a minor quibble, but hear me out.

Suppose I’m trying to babysit a yak to a tower or a keep that desperately needs to resupply after barely fending off an assault. Doors/walls just put back up, supply almost empty after building defensive siege, everyone scattered to find out where that zerg-ball’s rollin’ up to next. Nobody wants to babysit yaks. Nobody but me.

Along comes a thief, peppering the yak with shots. Yak don’t fight back, but that’s OK – I do, and that’s exactly what I’m here for. Except the thief doesn’t engage me – so my guardian’s retaliation, my mesmer’s chaos armor, my engineer’s healing, all my defensive abilities are rendered useless (except AoE projectile reflection [feedback, shield of absorption, smoke screen, etc.], but those abilities have 30-40 second cooldowns). Well, my engineer’s healing is actually useful, it’s AoE so I can heal the yak. But even still, it won’t keep up with the DPS of a thief, and I know for sure that the thief is going to evade out of my AoEs and circle around to attack from whatever direction I happen not to be facing. I put ’em up just the same and do my best, but still, the yak is inexorably killed along the road.

And yeah, while some kind of lockdown would certainly do the trick, it requires actually getting hold of the sucker, and the point of thieves is to be slippery: while I’m out of stealth, I still have disabling shot, infiltrator’s arrow, infiltrator’s strike, shadow strike, withdraw, roll for initiative, shadow step/return, smoke screen, and dodge rolling to get in & out of combat without taking damage. Obviously I can’t use them all at once, but there are so many options to evade attacks that don’t even use stealth.

If I’m on my guardian, I can chain blinds & blocks for a while – but if I don’t kill anyone in all that time, I’m getting the living kittens kicked outta me as soon as my guard’s down. My mesmer & engineer have decent buffer tanks, between their various boons & heals, but they can only last for so long until I’m stuck between rotations. Thieves and thieves alone can pop in & out of combat indefinitely, picking an objective off right from under my feet, while I have no way to force an engagement without relying on luck (such as nailing them with a lucky AoE, or waiting for them to screw up – there’s nothing I can do to force the issue).

And if my mesmer goes down, I just have to wait for the stealth stomp, because my 1, 2, & 3 abilities all require targets. But really, that’s just the icing on the cake.

Point being, I can’t stop a thief from shooting a yak out from under me, even if I’m a thief. Same goes for a flag, and a supply camp is just a joke. Sure, I can hang out in the middle of the NPCs to not die; but as soon as I walk away, that camp’s getting solo’ed. I’d like to be able to do something proactive, instead of simply hoping the thief 1) gets bored, and 2) doesn’t come back after I reckon the coast is clear. My problem is not that thieves can only be effectively engaged on their terms – that’s how they’re designed, and that’s fine. My problem is that thieves can engage what I’m trying to protect without engaging me. And yeah, as in the original post, traps are useless here because I can’t possibly trap a whole camp or a whole yak route or even a whole flag’s perimeter – again, I have to rely on luck if I want that trap to pay off (and the cost just isn’t worth the risk).

So, because of all of that, stealth needs a counter.

One silver per thirty minutes? For ten bots? Are you kidding?

In the first place, I can make more money than that in PvE. The first radiant heart quests you can complete take about 15 minutes and get you almost half a silver – and it only goes up from there. When you add in drops and gathering, it goes up even more.

In the second place, botting is already abuse. You’re basically saying that “people who are already abusing the game will be able to abuse the game.” Which, I mean, friggin’ duh. XD

I hate botters, don’t get me wrong. And I especially hate the idea of botting in WvW. But this is far from a unique threat; you may as well say that PvE needs quicktime events to confirm actions, otherwise botters could program their bots to mindlessly run around farming.

EDIT: I see now that there are mobs that spawn along supply routes, and they give WXP for killing them. This fully addresses my concerns – it’s something to do for those on defense that gives a small reward. Thanks, ANet!

Zosk.5609:

Your premise that what is most effective to put points on a largely meaningless scoreboard should be the most rewarded is silly.
…
(Also, I’d argue given the current state of the game… killing players is much more effective than killing yaks. Supplying keeps rarely stops people from taking them. Your definition of effectiveness of actions seems particularly shortsighted or literal. Just because something doesn’t directly score a point doesn’t mean it’s not effectively scoring points?)

Except that I didn’t say that “most effective” should be “most rewarded.” That would indeed be silly, because often the most effective thing is to communicate with your teammates in mapchat (there’s no way to reward that without encouraging spam). But this is not at all what I said. In fact, I even said in my latest reply that the fun and exciting stuff should be encouraged by making it more rewarding than the boring stuff. Once again, my problem is that certain effective actions get zero reward. So if even a small reward were implemented, we’d both be happy, to take you at your word: defenders get something instead of nothing, and defenders still aren’t the most rewarded.

That way, hurrah, no ghost town – the main force is still out doing the fun and exciting things, and getting the bulk of the reward for it; and the few defenders staying to keep an eye on things are getting something (not a lot, just something) instead of absolutely nothing.

Also, you’re apparently deliberately ignoring the part where I said, “Here, ‘rewarding’ means ‘gets you stuff’ (coin, karma, XP, and/or loot); ‘effective’ means ‘wins the game’ (points, and points alone).” Killing players in itself does not earn you points; you can kill players all day and all night, but if you have no land, you don’t earn points when that timer ticks over, and you lose. Stopping an enemy supply caravan will actually put points on the board immediately. While killing players is very often necessary to earn points, the fact remains that no amount of player-killing will earn points. You are confusing the fact that player-killing often happens alongside some point-earning action, with the idea that it is the point-earning action – the entire point of this post was to disentangle those notions, which is why I defined effective as “point-earning actions” (because points, and points alone, determine rank and advancement at the end of the day – kills and deaths are not tabulated in any way at all).

The Goat.1940:

it’s far too easy to defend towers and keeps as it is; with that said the current rewards for defending are justified any additional rewards would create more of a turtle and add to an already boring siege on towers/keeps. really sitting around defending ppl on trebs… just I case the turtle decides to come out and play is terribly boring. to further that would kill the game even more.

I don’t know what your idea of a good strategy is, but mine involves the idea that when you take an objective, you should hold it. The very point of siege weaponry is so that a smaller number of players can take on a larger number without it; if both groups have siege, then it comes down to supply, and look at what a well-stocked keep or tower is going to have piled up in its depot. Yes, the whole idea of having a giant building bristling with weapons is that it’s easy to hold. You build defensive fortifications with exactly this end in mind.

It sounds to me like “boring” for you just means “requires planning.” Yeah, if there were small teams of three to five keeping an eye on every objective and flash-building siege when enemies were spotted, that would mean you’d have to plan a siege rather carefully instead of charging in like an idiot. I also like how you can replace “ppl on trebs” with “towers & keeps,” and “turtle” with “zerg,” and your argument basically says that you don’t like WvW – if what you want is to fight players in “honest combat,” I think they already have a game mode for that. WvW is for tactical, strategic play – and when a good strategy works out, then yeah, everything goes according to plan and it can be boring. Against a wily opponent, however, you have to continuously adapt to changing conditions. If all you have to do to take a keep is cluster around trebs in case the group inside comes out, then boy-howdy, those are some lousy defenders and I feel sorry for you. On our server, at least, when things aren’t working out, we try to figure out what could turn the situation around and then do that thing instead of sitting around waiting to die.

Thanks for that information, deviller. Yeah, if the reward for protecting was the same as for killing, and people were then only protecting and never killing, I could see how that would get real stale real fast. I was unaware of this history, as I only really got into WvW after I had a pair of level 80 characters, and only started getting “serious” about it after our server moved up a tier.

In that case, I think ANet just swung the pendulum a little too far in the other direction. I don’t think the boring stuff should be equally as rewarding as the exciting stuff – exciting gameplay should be encouraged. I just think that effective play should be at least somewhat rewarding, even when it’s not exciting (and, in fact, because it’s not exciting – otherwise, why else do the boring things that help the gears run smooth?). Just to reiterate, the core of my complaint is that the housekeeping work of maintaining your own backfield gets absolutely nothing. If that were changed with even a small reward, then Problem: Solved, as far as I’m concerned.

I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the abuse you mentioned. Could you clarify?

EDIT: OK, after thinking about it for two minutes, I’m assuming that a million guys would babysit one dolyak and this wasn’t what ANet intended. (If I’m wrong on that, please correct me.) An easy fix would be to divide the reward among the number of participants, which makes a real-world kind of sense, as the caravan is only worth so much and so protecting it is only worth so much, so each of the protectors gets their share and that’s all. I know ANet’s all about encouraging cooperation instead of competition, so how about three (or five? Whichever) people can get the full reward; additional rewards get divvied up among all participants. So the formula would be something like ((Reward X)*(# players [ceiling 3]))/(# players [total]). So if you see a caravan with three players and no enemies in sight, it’s probably best to find another ’yak.

A second form of abuse could be skipping from caravan to caravan, speed-buffing the ‘yak for credit and then running off. A little trickier, but again, the fix is easy: only allow each player to have one escort quest at a time. Each new participation would erase the old one; so if I go from caravan to caravan, I don’t get anything (or lessen the others’ pay, if the first fix is implemented too), because I keep over-writing the last escort with the new one. That way, if I’m just passing through tossing speed buffs (which, admittedly, does help in a small way), I’m not racking up loads of points unearned.

Again, I’m not sure if this is the abuse you referred to, but those seem the two simplest ways to abuse the mechanic, and the easiest ways to prevent such abuse.

Contrast this with the most rewarding strategy possible. To maximize player rewards, map objectives would be taken and then lost as soon as possible so that additional rewards could be accrued by re-taking the objectives again; lather, rinse, repeat. This would take the form of player mobs zerg-rushing every objective, then immediately abandoning it to pursue whatever the enemy zerg had just taken in the meantime. This was dubbed “the Ouroboros effect” in some blog column (which I can’t find at the moment, probably because there’s a book by the same name), named after the mythical snake that eats its own tail. There would be no strategy, no defending of any objective, and victory come Friday would be a matter of chance – but players’ rewards would be higher than on any other tier.

When the most effective strategy is so diametrically opposed to the most rewarding strategy, something is awry. The Ouroboros effect is encouraged by the reward structure, and effective gameplay is all but explicitly discouraged by the very same mechanic. Now, nothing’s perfect, and these can’t be brought into perfect balance (largely because different people have different ideas of what “perfect” is). But I think a couple simple changes to the reward structure could go a long way toward encouraging more effective gameplay, without disrupting the WvW flow. So here are my suggestions.

1. Add a reward for protecting supply caravans, even when they’re not attacked. This could be divided by the number of participants, or limited to a small number of players (say, three). It’s just highly discouraging to babysit ‘yak after ’yak from Hell to breakfast, see that gold medal pop up with “Event Succeeded,” and get nothing for it. I believe it’s literally the only event in the game that provides zero reward to the player for accomplishing it. It doesn’t even need to be a big reward; I’d just like it to be more than absolutely nothing. I can motivate lazy workers, pick scrap materials up off the ground, and solve math problems in PvE for a reward – all without entering combat. I see no reason why this principle couldn’t carry over to WvW. Yes, it’s most exciting to be where the action is, but a few warm bodies are needed where the action isn’t, on the off-chance that it comes there. When the action doesn’t come, and the housekeeping team gets nothing for staying behind and doing their job, it adds insult to the proverbial injury.

2. Add a reward for protecting map objectives, even when they’re not attacked. Whenever I’m near a tower, keep, or camp, goals pop up in the upper-right corner, telling me to defend the workers upgrading a tower or defend this building for my world. That goal never completes – if enemies attack, a new goal (“Repel the enemy attackers”) pops up instead. But when the walls are upgrading and our main force is out taking other objectives, it’s effective to have a warm body in the tower to keep an eye on the place, providing intel in the event of an enemy attack so that enough people can show up before the door’s busted down. Again, this doesn’t need to be a big reward – nowhere near what you’d get for repelling enemies – but if any reward at all were provided, it would encourage the guarding of objectives instead of their mere endless flipping. You could call it “Protect the front lines,” and you only get credit if there’s an adjacent enemy objective (waypoints would count, so if you have your whole borderlands, only the southernmost camps & towers would have this available – but that’s exactly where you need coverage in that situation, isn’t it?). This would also encourage the holding of camps behind enemy lines, for instance taking and holding the supply camp north of a borderlands keep to help starve it off.

OK, I said a couple, and that’s two. And this is getting long, but there was a lot of ground to cover. To summarize, my complaint is that the current reward structure actively discourages various effective actions by providing zero reward for them; small rewards would help alleviate this problem.

I searched the forums for a while to make sure this hadn’t been addressed before. Malin covered it briefly here, in point 6:

6: Make it worth defending: Right now we defend for pride, and to keep the upgrades we have. But, a lot of people are not interested in defense, because that is boring and gives them nothing. It is awesome fighting to take a defended keep and I wish everybody to have that experience of true carnage and war, so make it worth it for the brave ones in there.

While this touches on what I have in mind, it’s three sentences among many different points. I wanted to go a little deeper into the structure of the game, the incentives provided, and the difference between “rewarding” and “effective” gameplay. Here, “rewarding” means “gets you stuff” (coin, karma, XP, and/or loot); “effective” means “wins the game” (points, and points alone).

Ideally, effective gameplay is also rewarding – playing effectively should earn rewards. Sometimes ineffective gameplay should also be rewarded – less so than effective gameplay (usually), and often to keep players interested in the game even if they’re not always winning. However, when ineffective gameplay is rewarded and effective gameplay is not rewarded, this almost always creates a perverse incentive. Players pursue the reward instead of pursuing effective strategy, resulting in a hot mess.

Lots of things in WvW are both effective and rewarding, such as taking map objectives from the enemy, driving off enemy players from your map objectives, and killing enemy supply caravans. These activities contribute to one’s score both directly and indirectly (as points accrued for oneself are denied to the enemy, and slapping ‘yaks makes it easier to take the enemy’s land).

However, some ineffective activities are also rewarding. The prime example is killing enemy players. “Now wait a second, doctor,” you may be saying, “how on Earth did you decide that killing enemy players is ineffective?” Simple: killing enemy players, by itself, does not earn points for your world. Now, killing enemy players is often required in order to do something genuinely effective – such as killing the two folks babysitting that ‘yak in order to kill the ’yak. But this is the important point: killing the players doesn’t earn your world points, killing the ’yak is what earns the points. Likewise, if you take an enemy’s tower, that tower is worth the same amount of points for your world whether it’s defended or not, and whether any hypothetical defenders flee or fight. Player kills, in and of themselves, are rewarding for the player but absolutely ineffective in terms of advancing up the WvW ladder.

This is not problematic in itself. As mentioned above, sometimes ineffective gameplay ought to be rewarded to maintain player interest. This is a prime example of that, too.

What’s problematic is that there are also effective actions which are not rewarded. I don’t mean “rewarded little” – I mean not rewarded at all. Actions like protecting supply caravans that happen not to be attacked (you get a gold medal, but no reward as in coin/karma/XP), and defending map objectives that happen not to be attacked.

Put it all together, and we can contrast the most effective strategy with the most rewarding strategy. The most effective strategy possible, that which maximizes world points, would be to take and hold every objective on every map: any world that managed to do this would clearly win the week, as they’d nab every possible point. However, aside from the initial rewards for capturing the objectives, there would be no rewards for doing so (outside of the mere killing of enemy players who tried, unsuccessfully for the sake of argument, to take the objectives).

(continued)

Alcyone.8695:

…It is always worth it to kill a dolyak…

Thank you, doctor. We’re all aware of this, but you just changed the subject. The question is not whether it’s worth it, but how much it’s worth.

Of course it’s always worth it to kill a dolyak, no matter what situation you’re in. But if three people get more for killing a ‘yak than one person does, then it would make sense for groups of three to form up to slap some ’yaks. They’d have strength in numbers and be able to know that they’re getting more points for their server than they would if they were all running solo.

You also presented a false dichotomy in your third point – we’re not trying to decide between “solo ’yaks” and “don’t kill ’yaks at all,” we’re trying to decide between “solo ’yaks” and “zerg ’yaks.” If a single dolyak can actually be worth up to ten points (or even three – tripling any source of points can be significant), then it makes sense to get as many points out of it as we can.

I am also confused by the evasive response. OK, so you don’t have the numbers at home. That’s cool. Could you please then answer the question from work? We’re OK with “it’s a secret,” but as it stands, it sounds like we got left on hold and forgotten about.