Guild Wars 2

Variety is nice, but all things considered, I’ll be glad to see the DBLs back when they come. The problems of WvW ran significantly deeper pre-HoT than just needing a new map. In that respect, I’m sure that the die-hard ABL supporters will try to paint the next few weeks of WvW as a resounding success whilst pushing key features and changes (world-linking, rewards, stability, etc.) to one side as factors in that. However, realistically, DBL may need changes, but it is the more interesting and engaging map of the two to play on when it’s populated. Many good fights were had on the ABLs over the years, but that wasn’t the majority of the time. Much more common were guilds and commanders who were happy to swap between the maps looking for things they could easily PvD, made all the easier by things being quite so close together. I’d say that possibly one of the few significant benefits the community might see from the return of ABL is people getting adjusted to the idea of defensive siege again.

That said, rather than solving any question or issue, I think, more kitten ingly, this thread more just goes to show why a very significant number of players are put off of using the official forum and putting their opinions forward. It genuinely deserves its reputation as being toxic.

Seeing as the thrust seems to be to make them more accessible and you can only get a limited number of tokens in a season anyway, could even offer ascended armour/weapon boxes/trinkets (unique skins a la raids would be nice, but I think a lot of people would be happy having another option on getting ascended gear).

Speaking as someone who owns HoT, I’d be more than happy if it was left in as a “feature”. I think it’s actually a nice way for core/f2p players to be able to try it out.

I’m looking forward to seeing a balance pass on some of the tactics. Most of the timers did need an increase.

I am also bemused that anyone thought that tactics wouldn’t make an appearance on ABL.

Unless there are any oddities, it should be 19 April – 13 weeks after the Winter update.

For all of the complaining about “is that it?”, please do try to realise that this is earlier than they’d normally be talking about the update. Primarily, this is a heads-up on one change that’s going to remove something – FotM achieves, giving people notice that they need to complete them before then if they want them – and another that will have a big effect on how much something costs/the economy, Scribing.

The mention of WvW likely only made it in there as part of giving people notice on what had been decided, as the last official word on it was that they were going to take feedback and then make a decision.

This is not /notes.

One final thing to note as well. For those who are wondering whether this means that the Desert BL will be completely scrapped or not, I think you can very safely imply from them updating the Desert BL in this coming update and seeking feedback on those changes, that the Desert BL is still very much a part of their plans and will likely be worked on as something that can be improved that can be rotated with the Alpine BL, after the latter returns. Which, frankly makes sense.

I’m just going to give a relatively brief personal take on the current state of feedback in the community and how the community is communicated to.

Feedback

Well, this

But, really. It’s getting rare to see a red post on this forum that isn’t followed up by some kind of vitriol. I understand that some people feel particularly invested in the game for one reason or another. I understand that it’s easy to get frustrated if you feel left in the dark about something you paid money for. Hell, I can definitely understand that some folks genuinely care about the state of the game but aren’t that good at expressing that and themselves well – this is the internet, social awkwardness abounds.

Look, I get it. But the problem is that yelling doesn’t solve anything. You’re dealing with real human beings with real feelings, not robots. They don’t all run around with suits of armour and hearts of ice. Every time one of these staff members experiences criticism with no constructive element or outright personal attacks, that’s another instance of them being conditioned to deliberately avoid interacting with the community which hurts us all in the long run. I genuinely feel sorry for people like Gaile who actually have to deal with this kind of behaviour as part of their job – and we don’t even see messages sent or most of the stuff that gets infracted.

I suppose the best analogy I could give is to ask how you would feel if someone called you up at your work and told you that you were terrible at your job? Would that make you feel motivated about your job? Would that make you inclined to want to talk to people outside of the firm when you don’t have to?

I understand that it’s often difficult to do it if we’re kept in the dark about some things, but keeping criticism constructive really does go a long way. We only shoot ourselves in the foot as a community if we act in a way that discourages open communication with members of staff. And yes, I’ll even go as far as saying that that extends to some complaints about where we’re communicated to. If this were an ideal world where we knew everything about every aspect of the game and how it was progressing, I’d say that there’s a time and a place for a discussion on whether the channels of communication are being used appropriately, but at the moment, I think it’s safe to say that the community is looking for more communication more than it cares about where that communication takes place.

tl;dr: Being rude has been a contributory factor to the decline in communication and continuing in this fashion isn’t helping anything.

Communication

Well, here’s the other side of the coin. It’s not as if I could say that the standard of communication is bad per se, but it definitely feels like it’s lacking. Okay, we moved to a quarterly release format so it’s easy to feel like things are much farther away. Yes, we even had that giant AMA just the other week. I even have to give a fair bit of praise for an initiative like the Known Issue Tracker . Even so, I don’t feel that we, as players, really know that much about what’s going on and the surprise announcement of new legendaries going on hold really reinforces that.

Okay, for the past two months, we knew exactly what to expect to come out thanks to the State of the Game update in January. I would assume that a couple of weeks in advance of the next quarterly update on 19 April(?), we’ll receive a similar update outlining everything to expect in the three months following that. Yes, that’s nice. But right now, as it stands, I couldn’t tell you a single precise thing that I’m absolutely sure is going to be shipped in a majorly quarterly update that’s less than a month away. Given that we know from the AMA that there are even some pretty interesting minor tweaks and changes coming at some point, that’s crazy. This is especially compounded when you consider that there are longer-term projects like WvW where we have had literally no idea how far down the development process they were.

Yes, I don’t think there’s a player at this point who’s unfamiliar with the idea that you don’t want to start trumpeting about things that aren’t 100% done with a confirmed launch date because things can change. I can especially appreciate that timetables have probably been thrown around – and in some cases thrown out of the window – thanks to a variety of factors post-HoT. I mean, even on a basic level, you’ve got an expansion to think about, the lack of a permanent Game Director and a number of staff have gone over to Amazon. Particularly in terms of the latter, new staff don’t suddenly fall out of the sky – I’m sure a number of players are familiar with quite how many open vacancies you have at the moment – and new hires do take time to get up to speed.

Even considering all of this, simply having a State of the Game message to rely on each quarter to tell us what’s going on isn’t really sufficient. If we could expect a regular AMA once a quarter right in between SotGs, I’d say that’s a great step, but it feels like the one at the start of this month was very impromptu and not something we can expect as a regular feature. Honestly, I’d even be slightly happier to see something like the Releases pages being updated with teaser information much earlier as it becomes clear what’s almost certainly going to make it into the game at that point. I realise a lot of it can be in a state of flux in the run-up, but I’m also sure that there’s probably things that even at this point are basically “guaranteed” to make it in and, honestly, it’s fine if it winds up that it won’t make it in at the quarterly update but will reach the game somewhere within that quarter, just as long as that actually gets communicated. It’s okay to miss deadlines by a bit if it’s communicated that that’s going to happen.

In that respect, it would also be nice to have an idea of the development priorities at the moment. It felt from what Mo’s been saying that there is a new focus on working to finish the things that are actually close to completion – in some cases splitting them off from larger-scope projects to do so – and actually having more to show sooner for your work. What the exact details of any of those things are and what’s really being focussed on? Who knows. I appreciate that it’s difficult to say in some respects because it seems that a lot of the development is predicated on fairly small teams (maybe half a dozen to a dozen people) all working on different content and naturally advancing at different speeds. What that can mean though is that some teams wind up having a lot to show regularly (e.g. the raid team), whereas it feels like complete radio silence for others (e.g. Living Story team). To put that example into perspective, had it not been for the AMA, we likely would not have known at this point that we probably can’t expect the next Living Story to start before July.

The best thing I could probably suggest to remedy that is considering something along the lines of developer blogs. For any team that’s working more long-term on something that isn’t going to hit release in the next update, maybe it’s worth considering having them give a quick update every couple of months on what they’re working on, how it’s going and a rough time-frame of when it might go live. That doesn’t have to give details that are still under consideration or be lengthy with really pretty pictures and everything. I’m sure that most players would be happy with a short plain text update of a couple of paragraphs just to let them know that that is something big that’s being worked on and that there is an an end date that might (or might not) be hit. That sort of thing can even be used to get regular feedback on proposed ideas – say you were working on a new PvP map and wanted to get opinions on a couple of ideas that had been had for mechanics on it rather than go through the full development process and find that they’re not at all well-received during testing. Feedback doesn’t have to be sought on everything, but it could be a useful option.

In closing, I do also want to just say that I understand that it can feel frustrating if someone is being very negative towards you, but for every person doing that, I’m sure there are a whole lot more people who appreciate the time taken to interact with the community and explain things/update us with what’s going on.

tl;dr: Additional regular communication, particularly on longer-term projects, would be amazing. It may be worth considering:

• Updating Release pages further in advance with changes that are coming in/around the following seasonal update.
• Having a regular AMA, perhaps halfway between each State of the Game.
• Relaxing the policy of not talking about content that’s not ready to ship in favour of saying something along the lines of “x is being worked on, hopefully to ship in y quarter” and just updating if that drastically changes.
• Short updates every couple of months from teams that would otherwise seem MIA.

I do feel like this is a good move overall. It does feel a lot like there’s a lot of stuff “in the pipeline” or that’s still “hush-hush”, but very little that’s actually ready to ship any time soon. I think it’s a move that could pay dividends in getting more content out over the next 6-12 months that would reach more players. I’d chalk it up as an especial victory if LS3 ended up getting pushed out earlier or some high-demand aspects of content were worked on by those people (e.g. I know it’s getting to be a trite example by this point, but SAB). I’m conscious that six people won’t result in instant content, but, spread between certain other teams, could result in schedules being pushed up which I think would be healthy for the game and well-received by the community.

That said, I’m also conscious that we did get told that we would have new legendaries post-HoT. As such, question: is this likely to be an effectively permanent halt or is it the case that in an ideal world we’d still see the full 16 shipped by the time the next expansion comes out?

Edit: Also I’m seeing a lot of queries along the lines of “we have new gliders/BL weapon skins every few weeks, why can’t people be pulled from that?”. It might be oversimplistic to say, but the overhead for gliders/BL skins is primarily on art – there’s very little serious developer work involved on those compared to anything else. They could probably ship shiny looking things that are skin-only all day without actually taking away from serious design and programming. They’re basically two completely different things.

The patch had nothing to do with the change in reset times and connection errors are not unusual right as a patch happens. It’s honestly unhelpful and unpleasant to act like that under the circumstances.

Clemy.8290:

Regrettably, what should have been an easy change with a huge positive impact will be heavily detracted from by the fact that much of the feedback about it being too late has been completely missed.

It is difficult to comprehend why, after managing for over 2 years, it is now impossible to have the reset on Friday, 1 hour after reset, as it used to be. The given explanation of there ‘maybe’ being a patch then makes little sense to be honest. There have been so few patches on a Friday that the impact would be negligible.

I don’t know about you, but I actually do recall quite a few Friday updates after reset over the years and a number of complaints – particularly from servers that could experience lengthy queues on reset nights – about them. This really isn’t a situation where everyone can win.

Definitely happy to see Friday resets again though. Should be good fun out there tonight.

Couple of things, really.
1) Commander tags are actually a very useful thing in PvE. Due to their widespread use in PvE, they just won’t raise the badge price to anything that can’t be acquired fairly easily. If anyone was then thinking about saying “well, they should split that up and make PvE and WvW commanders separate”, don’t. I seriously do not think that that would be a worthwhile use of their time (because we all know that that won’t be simple) when they are trying to work on some major WvW improvements right now.

2) Yes, they started out at 100g. And at the time, that was a hell of a lot of gold. Times changed as did the value of gold. I remember it taking me months to get to the Golden title (200g) after launch. As it stands, how long would it take someone seriously farming to make 100g? Depending on drops, a couple of days maybe? They’re supposed to be rarer than “oh, that’s not that much gold, I’ll just get one for funsies”. Indeed, as one person picked up on earlier, if a couple of hundred gold seems like a lot to you, you probably won’t get far as a commander. I don’t regularly command, but I even still carry around about 100g’s worth of siege on me in WvW.

Seeing as they were primarily introduced as an alternative way to earn HPs for your characters to get their elite specs, the idea is that you should be progressing on that character in order to get that specialisation. I realise it’s something that a lot of people miss/complain about, but it’s a lot like asking why you can’t just repeat HPs in PvE on one character to give you points for all of your characters.

Airship really just needs a cooldown increase (maybe 30-40 minutes). Having 15 minutes downtime isn’t really an awful lot in the context of a fight over a T3 SMC. I’ve seen SMC fights that took over an hour before. As an overall feature it’s not actually that bad. I mean, not only do you have to get into a position where you can make it, but at current prices, each one costs 17.33g and takes 16 hours to build. All it really needs is a transition from “oh, someone’s inside the outer, let’s pull it” to “well, we really ought to save that in case we’re actually in trouble”.

In terms of the items on the table:

1) Stability: unpopular an idea as it may be, I don’t think reverting to duration stability would be a positive change. The entire thing ends up favouring larger groups who can afford two Guardians per party and when you then consider other things HoT brought us like much higher Protection uptime and much greater aoe heals, we would wind up in a situation where we have zergballs worse than the ones that inspired the stability change in the first place. I mean, let’s not forget that that was a huge inspiration for the change to begin with. I remember pre-HoT ~20v20 zerg engagements where it’d be a full minute before you had someone go down. I can’t see how that wouldn’t be even worse now. That said, HoT has also brought us many more hard cc’s – some more troubling than others – and stability hasn’t kept pace with that. I think the best thing I could constructively suggest is something along the lines of doubling the stability you currently receive from skills in WvW and/or looking at how skills that are currently personal stability skills could potentially be expanded into aoe stability skills. The latter may also go a way towards helping with class diversity issues.

2) Maps: I actually personally rank this as a lower concern than rewards and other ways to interest players in WvW. DBL seems to have been designed with the idea that large groups will be running around there and it really is difficult to give a full and frank account of it when it is often sitting pretty empty.

That said, the impression given before HoT was for DBL and ABL to rotate somehow and variety is generally a good thing. So, assuming that the ideal long-term goal would be to have both in the mix, I’d say that looking to bring back ABL and looking to deal with the shortcomings of DBL are both good ideas. Given that the precise fixes with DBL are slightly more of a nebulous concept at this point, I would lean towards doing the work to bring ABL back up to standard and able to be used and then spend time working on DBL (also, that way if any expansive changes to DBL are made, you could throw in a weekend event or something for players to be able to try it out and give feedback). Realistically, in any situation like this, it’s best to work on the project where we know exactly what needs to be done before it gets started.

In terms of how DBL could be improved when it came around to doing that, obviously there can be a more lengthy discussion at the time, but I don’t think it needs to be quite as drastic as it necessarily seems. Yes. it does feel a bit too big. But are there not solutions that may be somewhat difficult in themselves, but would be significantly less work than a full redesign? To my mind, you could insert significantly more jump pads to give more paths/avoid certain chokes, introduce gliding to help with the verticality the other way and even look at something like giving everyone on the map a base +20% move speed buff (so with Swiftness, you’d be looking about a +50% move speed rate). I think particularly a base move speed buff would help make the map feel a lot smaller than it is as you’d be able to get around much quicker.

Yes, some amount of terrain redesign on top of that might be prudent if people don’t feel there’s enough free space in some places for zerg v zerg combat, but I don’t think it necessarily takes a full redesign and trying to squeeze it into a smaller space to accommodate that.

On a related note, but still somewhat of a tangent, I’d also look at the balance of DBL’s NPCs. I agree that the keep lords should be tough, but it used to be the case on ABL that it was difficult but possible for a player to solo the tower lords. Generally they are still possible, although much more difficult, but I’d say that the lord on SWT just isn’t realistic, particularly between the damage it does and the amount of daze it puts out. It’s difficult as a solo roamer to justify the time of ninja catapulting a tower if there’s no chance of beating the lord inside.

3) Rewards/incentives: as I say, I rank this as a higher priority than the maps. I dislike using terms such as “we all feel” or “everyone knows”, because actually, unlike a lot of players who have expressed their opinions here, I appreciate that what I’m saying is just my own opinion and though some players might agree with the broad thrusts, I’m sure there are a lot of disagreements on our precise visions for changes and the game in general. However, in this instance, I feel justified in saying that everyone knows that you don’t go into WvW if you are looking for in-game rewards for the time you are spending there. Yes, you can have an amazing amount of camaraderie and server spirit displayed, but you’d probably make more money off of the current liquid rewards from dungeons. It is incredibly difficult to encourage players into a game-type – which often requires having completely different gear sets – when they don’t feel like they’re getting anything for their time.

In this respect, I would add my voice to the calls for WvW reward tracks, very similar to the PvP ones. I would hesitate to give exact numbers on how much WXP-equivalent should equal how far along in the track, particularly as I’m sure that ANet have sufficient analytic data to determine a number for 1 reward track point/x time and extrapolate that to the average gain in WvW and come up with a good rate. But I think that reward tracks along those lines with a similar amount of time and effort invested into them would definitely be a good way to go and would allow for WvW to be better included in some reward-types, perhaps particularly when talking about then being able to get Mystic Clovers and other mats/tokens that you might need for a legendary weapon, which would further allow people to feel that they can really work towards something through their time in WvW. Yes, exclusives like its own legendary backpiece and armour set would be nice, but I think even a barebones system with a variety of basic tracks that could be built on later would be a good start that would give a lot of players a strong reason to stay in WvW.

It would also be nice to see some more events/a WvW tournament. I know I’m not the only person sitting on some claim tickets and wanting to get more of those items. Long-term, it’d be nice to even see it on a fixed cycle much like the PvP seasons so we have some certainty in how long it’ll take us to work towards the rewards we want.

4) & 5) Population & Scoring: both of these come a very, very distant way behind in terms of priorities. Without WvW as a whole having a fairly healthy population with players actively wanting to get in and feeling like they’re getting appropriately rewarded for the time they’re putting in, I don’t think it’s possible to make a good decision on either of these two issues – particularly when you consider that changes made in terms of population, and therefore perhaps servers, could end up practically irreversible.

I don’t have a Reddit account, but I think it would’ve been an awful mess to try and do something like that with this forum. I could actually read and follow discussions and trains of thought, which is something that would have been impossible here. By my count, there were around about 226 “red posts” on that thread, mostly in the space of just a couple of hours. I can’t think of a realistic way it would’ve worked here. It would’ve been a gigantic mess that no-one would have been able to follow.

Don’t get me wrong – I think there has been a good case made for better engagement on this forum and I don’t think anyone’s going to argue that better forum software wouldn’t go amiss. But under the current circumstances, I’m very glad they chose Reddit for this.

sanctuary.1068:

A good player doesnt die to a dh to begin with. People who die to a dragonhunters are just bad. If you can carry a team with dh it means the opposite team suck rly bad.

Uh. Okay. On the basis of last season, it seems like you’ve got some bad news for a couple of ESL players then.

Burtnik.5218:

Well i guess thats happens. My 3 games today, i give up for now srsly

Being at the high end of where players have gotten to is always rough. I very much found that when I hit Sapp/Ruby very early last season, particularly with pro players running around.

sanctuary.1068:

Thats interesting because according to some people (elitists) that never happens. Apparantly they say “if youre good enough” you can carry your team members however bad they are.

Depends on the situation really. In some respects, being on a class that can hold down a point well (e.g. Tempest) or one that can carry your team to victory in a group fight (e.g. DH) can and will make the difference between a win and a loss in a game. Similarly, game awareness can have the same result – holding down a point when there’s likely to be a respawn heading straight there or paying attention to the timers for communes/animals.

There is, however, no cure for a team that can’t, say, win a 4v2 or consistently fights off point letting it be decapped.

Speaking as someone who made Leg last season but is far from a top-tier PvPer, my experience so far is that is has been a bit of a steamroll. I’ve yet to lose a game and despite only yoloqing, some matches have been a complete faceroll (5m22s on Temple, 5m26s on Foefire).

That said, I’m still finishing up getting through Emerald and it looks like the most dedicated players are starting to hit Ruby at this point.

I’d say overall that the best strategy is to play normally and you should find that you’ll eventually settle into part of a division which is appropriate for your skill level (mostly averaging 50% win rates).

velmeister.4187:

Here are a couple gems if you wanna investigate for your research. I have many more like these but, I have no time to edit names out and reformat. Since ya’ll hand out bans for n number of reasons and censor Alfred Hitchkitten’s( <<— see what I did there) name, I don’t want to post w/ other people’s names and get screwed.

I am actively declining to join insta-queue pops now. They are kittening death traps like these.

While you are watching can you push a ruleset that will completely remove the possibility of ambers and emeralds getting into diamond late ruby matches? Honestly, I find diamond matches to be extremely boring and amber and emeralds at least add some fun with fights instead of “bunk bunk bunk”. But, for sake of my poor innocent ever vanishing hard-earned soloQd pips, please stop this experimental nonsense for a few days.

Or at least protect Solo Q’rs who are not cheating their way up that Oily ladder.

EDIT: Whatever ruleset you used the day you rolled out changes hoping to eradicate Amber shopping, it seemed to be working that night. I got into stable matches that night with people who were at similar skill levels. But, from very next day, everything went haywire.

Actually, those aren’t bad at all. The lower division players were teamed up with a Diamond player, so they were matched up as Diamond players. That’s actually working as intended and is a good thing.

Something is currently broken with matchmaking. Like actually broken, not just “wahwahbroken”. Normally you should only match up with people at most 30 points away from you, whereas we’re currently seeing basically any ole person thrown into any match.

SamTheGuardian.2938:

[snip]

Two things, both somewhat interrelated to each other.
1) Every game you mentioned there has PvP as its sole purpose. PvP is only one aspect of GW2 and, as much as I know everyone goes on about “lulz, will never be an eSport”, it’s more something that came up as a marketing idea rather than them going “we want to be a serious eSport game”. Particularly, at the point where you still have a strong B2P element if you want to seriously PvP (HoT basically being mandatory), GW2 cannot and should not be viewed in the same way as serious, mainstream F2P eSport games.

2) More pertinently, GW2’s PvP doesn’t even nearly have the same population as those games. Realistically, if there was the population there to support it, this would already have been announced as coming. My primary thrust in saying that separating the queues out is exactly the same reason why this hasn’t happened yet. If we’ve already got players often waiting 5-10 minutes (and well-documented instances of some players waiting well over an hour), increasing the queue times isn’t going to encourage people to play PvP in GW2, and will lead to decreasing participation.

This is why I suggest that the best way of handling this is to look at increasing the incidence of parties playing against each other (whilst not making it exclusive) – it actually has the knock-on effect of lowering their queue times as well, encouraging more people to queue up and queue up as a team, lessening the impact on players who are solo queueing in the first place.

On another note, I’m going to be a dissenting viewpoint. I do not see Solo/Team Queue separation as a priority – or even necessarily sensible. Yes, I think we’ve all been there now where we’ve been stomped majorly in a match and it’s transpired that it was five people solo queued on one side against a full premade team on the other. I don’t see that as a problem with how people queue up so much as it’s potentially a problem with the matchmaking system.

Generally, what I’ve noticed, is that the system will try to pair up similar numbers of partied people on each team – if one team has a duo, the other team more often than not will have a duo or maybe a trio. Unfortunately, there aren’t always the right groups of certain numbers sitting around queued ready to be matched up in even matches. And, when it comes down to it, 5-man teams do need people to play against, just like everyone else. Hence, I’m assuming, at a certain point, the system says “screw it” and throws together whatever it can find in the ranges it’s been given to work with.

Rather than the potential pit-falls of splitting the queues, not to mention raising the overall queue times, I think the best way of dealing with this would be to have 4-man and 5-man parties treated slightly differently when it comes to matchmaking, ergo, in the new system, if there’s another 4-man or 5-man group also queued, but who would be slightly out of the division range, they’re paired together in a match anyway.

In that respect, I don’t think this is a problem that should be looked at from the perspective of “sometimes I get matched up against premades, the system is completely broken, split the queue types”, but instead from the idea that, largely in my experience, the system works very hard to match up similar sized numbers of partied people and that should be tweaked to give that slightly more importance over other matchmaking concerns when you’re talking about full or nearly full parties. I think we can safely justify this as, generally, parties of four people or more are going to be set up with complementary classes and builds and will often be using VOIP coordination, which represents a greater advantage than simply being a decent individual player in a similar division.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Another note: We’re making some changes to allow high division players to get matches faster to help combat the long queue times.

I’d say that this is probably the biggest thing that I’m concerned about in moving towards a more division-based matchmaking system. When I was playing very early on in the season, I managed to advance to Sapphire very quickly while most people hadn’t played as much and were still in Amber/Emerald. At the point where I was no longer seemingly getting matched up with Emerald 1 players, my queue times skyrocketed, making the entire experience really dull. The rare matches I was seeing were often against teams made up of ESL players, who I was not on the same level as, skill-wise. It made the early season very frustrating waiting for players around my own skill level to work their way up to a similar division ranking.

You cannot attune backpieces. The only item of equipment you can attune are rings.

One of the events necessary for completion of the precursor collection Kamohoali’i Kotaki III: Carcharias, Defeat Captain Cork and Chompers, appears to be bugged. When in the correct location on the map, the event shows up in the UI in the top-right as normal, however neither Champion Captain Cork nor Chompers seem to have spawned.

I main Guardian and I do not believe for a single second that they need a health buff. Yes, builds and the meta is in a very odd place right now thanks to HoT, but have you seriously already forgotten the sustain/bunker builds you used to see pre-HoT from Guardians that were really difficult for a variety of classes to kill?

We do need a balance patch, but we don’t need something that major being changed.

If you’re up against a team which has a higher MMR than you (i.e. they’re expected to win by a margin), you can earn points if you lose but the game is relatively close (how close obviously being dependent on the respective MMR).

It’s obviously more common when you’re up against a full premade as a group of solo players, but it’s far from rare in such situations to at least not lose a point when it’s a close match.

Morwath.9817:

Ghedoriah.4290:

Morwath.9817:

Yawz.7841:

The queuing system is literally broken. In turn, this effects everyone because they are “forced” to take a lower MMR just to get a game, which does lower their team’s MMR. Maybe some pro’s are exploiting this, but I would like to believe most are doing it simply to play ranked pvp.

Thieves are people too, they need to eat, so they steal. Logic.

It was slightly inelegantly put, but essentially because half of what goes into deciding your match-up is your division, if you’re in a high division, you can be sitting there for at least fifteen minutes to get a game. Partying with someone in a lower division might be considered slightly unethical, but it essentially gets you a game faster whilst, in theory, keeping you against similarly skilled players (as if the division part of matchmaking is circumvented, it should be mostly based on your actual MMR).

Slightly? It’s not that people duo que, we’ve seen serval screenshots with 4x Diamond and random Amber/Emerald in one premade to trick entire MM, so Diamond premade could do some moar pugstomping in lower tiers.

It’s a bit of a logical fallacy to assume that someone in a lower tier is automatically less skilled. That’s also not exactly how your MMR calculation as a team works. In all seriousness, I’m not going to touch the issue of ESL teams, but there just aren’t enough players in Ruby/Diamond to keep the queue times down at the moment.

Morwath.9817:

Yawz.7841:

The queuing system is literally broken. In turn, this effects everyone because they are “forced” to take a lower MMR just to get a game, which does lower their team’s MMR. Maybe some pro’s are exploiting this, but I would like to believe most are doing it simply to play ranked pvp.

Thieves are people too, they need to eat, so they steal. Logic.

It was slightly inelegantly put, but essentially because half of what goes into deciding your match-up is your division, if you’re in a high division, you can be sitting there for at least fifteen minutes to get a game. Partying with someone in a lower division might be considered slightly unethical, but it essentially gets you a game faster whilst, in theory, keeping you against similarly skilled players (as if the division part of matchmaking is circumvented, it should be mostly based on your actual MMR).

Scheduled builds are every two weeks on a Tuesday. Even if this fix is coming this week, it wouldn’t have been part of a scheduled build, so it could have been any day of the week.

ReaperJr.5967:

Miaze.8631:

People are already legendary, if you’re good enough you will get there.

Unfortunately I do not have the time nor team to farm solo q-ers as a premade and also I’m not part of team pz and mist initiative so I can’t dodge queues or trade wins.

That was unfortunately just a fairly obvious troll. You can check how many players are in Legendary and the individual leaderboard for it in the PvP tab in-game.

JVJD.4912:

I dont think even high end players or the 24/7 glued to GW2 will reach legendary
They will just keep winning and losing among themselves lol

Won one oh cool here’s 1 pip, oh you lost okay i will take away 4 pip now
This will just cycle

The thought’s there, but practically they will make it. I saw someone on the second day (four days ago now) who was in Ruby and saw someone last night who was in Diamond. As for how many regular players will make it, who knows, probably not many. And unless there is a massive upward filtering like ANet are predicting, I can’t see it being possible in yoloq.

If you hadn’t played ranked on your alt account before when it was available, chances are it had an arbitrarily low starting value for MMR, which would make sense for completely new players. Hence, in going into matches, you’re expected to be terrible and lose every match by 500-10. Going and actually winning instead is giving you a huge number of points every match.

It’ll even out eventually when your MMR finally settles to where it should be.

The lack of SoloQ is designed to promote premades and give solos a chance.

I don’t know if anyone has been paying attention during their games, but ANet’s matchmaking system has a very noticeable bias towards trying to match up opponents of the same party sizes. So if you have a duo on one side, it will try very hard to put a duo on the other side or something very similar (e.g. trio on one side, two duos on the other). For the vast majority of games I’ve played and cared to take note (most), this has been the case. I think it’s actually the best system you’re going to get, given the game and the playerbase involved. Unfortunately, the system can only match the people that are queueing up, so if you don’t have two suitable 5-man premades queued, you can’t match them, so that premade has to fight another group, which is where it seems a number of the criticisms are coming from.

That said, as is the recurring problem with the nature of complaints in PvP, some of those don’t strike me as justified. Take earlier, for example, I was queued with two guildmates under one of our guild groups. Upon winning a game, we received an amount of abuse from a member of the other team that could be summarised as “why am I playing an organised guild group?”. Now, in this instance, we weren’t on voice comms, we had two solo’s with us and the other team was two duo’s and a solo and in terms of the three of us going in together, we don’t actually normally play together at all anyway. In terms of the two sides, there were no significant differences in terms of cohesive groups/organisation. Not to put it too bluntly, but we won because, as a five, we were the better side. However, according to that individual, they lost solely because they’d been unfairly matched up against a guild group.

In terms of MMR/Pips:
I think it would be more realistic to switch to 3 pips per tier and, for Ruby, to make it so that you can’t lose more than, say, 3 tiers, so even if you do have a really bad run, there’s still a buffer (on that basis, the worst you’d lose is 9 games of progression, rather than up to 29 at the moment). That said, I’d still keep Diamond roughly the same – if Legendary is to have any meaning, it shouldn’t be easy to make it there. Overall though, that would allow people to more freely even out up to Diamond.

I’d also recommend loosening the Division restriction on matchmaking. There was a nice suggestion in another thread to have a checkbox for players to accept facing players from higher tiers for the potential of higher rewards or lower tier players but with reduced rewards if that’s the case as a method to reduce queue times and allow more flexibility in matchmaking.

Balance:
I’ll be honest, I was only 50-50 as to whether the intention was to have a full balance patch before this iteration of the PvP season. At the point where one did not emerge prior to the ESL season starting, it was basically certain that that was not going to happen and I’m not sure why, after that had started, anyone was surprised that a balance patch did not happen before the season started. As it stands, I am still behind and expect roughly quarterly balance patches prior to new seasons (both ESL and for the rest of us mere plebs as they seem to be trying to synchronise them).

Yasha.5963:

Luclinraider.2317:

Let me start by saying I don’t think DH is OP.

This is where you got it wrong.

Might be slightly biased seeing as it is my main, but there are more classes that give DH a run for its money than don’t in terms of skilled play. DH is just a very simple class with a low skill threshold (think something like the traditional Hambow). Unfortunately, to be blunt, there’s also a very low skill threshold in seeing a DH and thinking that you should run up to it in a straight line to the exact spot where it’s standing to attack it.

I would hazard the guess that one of two things occurs as far as MMR movement goes:
1) It’s fairly slow – because, unless I’m mistaken, the MMR is based solely on win/loss, not the size of it, it shifts very slowly
2) It doesn’t update instantly – it can take some time/games to see any actual changes based on the wins/losses you’ve had

In either event, it means that you tend towards streaks – varying between groups of games that you win easily and groups of games against extremely stiff opposition. Part of the problem however is the relatively small playerbase, particularly when you factor in Divisions and that it seems that you won’t get matched up with people too far away from your divisional position, even if your MMR is actually on par (although with that said, you can seemingly get around that cut-off by duoing with a friend in a lower Division). It’s not immediately clear which Division you’re in, but if you’ve hit a decent Sapphire tier, I’d guess that that’s actually a sizable chunk of the problem you’re experiencing as whilst it seems you won’t see opposition much higher/lower than your tier, if there aren’t enough opponents within a reasonable range of your MMR, you’re just going to get matched up with what’s there. Up to and including, players that are significantly more skilled and full premades.

Probably the best thing I could say in mitigation at this point in time is that from the comments posted towards the end of the week, it does seem like this problem is being actively monitored and they will look to come up with some solutions. We may well not see any changes before the end of this (fairly short) season though.

Toeofdoom.6152:

Ran into a game with an esl player recently but apparently it is possible to lose, yet not lose any pips – it was around 200/500 (I don’t get the impression they were trying extremely hard based on the talking and standing still during combat)

I tend to find that above a certain score, you’ll generally maintain the status quo against them.

And in fairness to them, they are people too who are probably just as bored with the opposition as we all are.

I get the feeling that the season length was designed to tie into the ESL schedule (hence the part of that which is having guilds able to vie for spots), but seven or eight weeks really is too short for meaningful progression by all except the most hardcore of players.

Ashron Valhalla.8369:

Premade shoudn’t’ win pip for a 500-<100 vs soloQer.

If it were designed and enforced thusly, it would be very simple – premades would allow people to get so far, then smash them. It wouldn’t avoid the original problem of a skill mismatch.

I suck at PvP in the sense that I’m entirely one-dimensional – the only class I play to a proficient standard and feel comfortable with is Guardian/DH (by virtue of that having been my main in all other game modes since release), running a very simplistic build (albeit non-meta). Even then, my mechanical skill isn’t the best – I can’t count the number of times I’ve missed a Longbow #3 on a basically stationary target – and having been used to playing a very tanky class, I’m still screwing up a lot of basics now that I’m a squishy, e.g. positioning.

Pretty much the only thing that’s played in my favour is that when I hit a losing streak, I’m not great at giving up early or breaking them. So when I wind up trying rather hard, but failing miserably for maybe ten games before giving it a rest, generally when I come back, it’s been tough not to go on a winning streak of almost as many because of the havoc I’ve unintentionally wreaked upon my own MMR.

In terms of the general topic, I suppose it’s probably worth mentioning that things will just get tougher once you start to work through Sapphire. I think once I hit Sapphire 3, I noticed my queue times go up significantly and I’d be seeing much fewer people from Emerald in my games. There aren’t an awful lot of people in Sapphire/Ruby right now and, even outside of pro teams, the standard of competition is really high.

Also, in defence of ANet’s matchmaking system, I’ve consistently noticed that it will try very hard to put similar amounts of partied people against each other in matches – so if you have a duo on one side, it’ll try to put a duo on the other side. This has been the case for, I’d say, easily 90%+ of the matches I’ve paid attention to it. Unfortunately though, the system can only work with the people queued up to it and as a result, you are going to get odd matches here and there that seem mismatched.

Sins.4782:

Ranked matchmaking seems to take your league division into account, but I’m not sure if it takes the tier your on or how many pips you have into calculations.

I have a strong suspicion that it does. When I hit Sapphire 3, the number of games I’d be getting had a dramatic drop-off, suggesting that I was no longer getting queued with Emerald 1.

I’m Ruby and I basically entirely yoloq’d my way to Sapphire 4. The only reason I didn’t do that into Ruby was because some guildmates asked me if I wanted to play.

I know it’s a somewhat tiresome refrain to hear, but I’m really not that good, so if I can do it, a huge proportion of the community can do it.

As much as it’s something you work towards anyway, what amazes me is people who think that ascended armour makes/made a difference. On a zerker set, you’re getting maybe a “massive” 52 extra stat points, plus another 60 armour. If you seriously go into a group and nod in satisfaction that everyone must be using ascended armour because everything is going much more smoothly than other groups, then you need to get real. Individual skill and knowing your optimal rotations is hugely more important. There are a whole list of considerations, starting with using good foods, sigils, runes, etc. that can individually matter several times more than whether someone’s using ascended or exotic armour.

That said, in the condi stakes, you do see a noticeable power creep between Sinister and Viper. For a full armour set (using ascended as the example), you’re talking about:

Sinister
Primary 1: 439
Secondary 1: 315
Secondary 2: 315

Total: 1069

Viper
Primary 1: 376
Primary 2: 376
Secondary 1: 207
Secondary 2: 207

Total: 1166

On a pure stat-for-stat basis, you’re actually holding your group back significantly more by running Sinister rather than Viper than you would be running exotic armour rather than ascended (obviously even with the condi duration cap figured in).

For Mordremoth Usurper, it does no damage to wolves that are on top of you. Kite them away a bit, run back and kill them before they get back to you. Not sure if it’s intended behaviour, but I’m guessing it’s either something silly like a los issue or part of the AI that ends up making any Modrem mob invulnerable to damage when they’re standing on it (much like the controllers are until they move/you knock them off).

T4 days say that they give a Bladed box, but I’ve never seen one (and I’ve done more than a few T4 days now at 200%).

T4 nights really aren’t that hard to organise – you just want the entire map spread out amongst the camps with no more than five people per camp. If they spread out that way, you’ll push into T2 very easily and you automatically have a good spread of people to beat each of the canopy bosses.

Just to add on to the subject of the dungeon gold nerf, I think that rewards have to be practically looked at on a gold/hour basis. There is a reason why certain paths are completely overlooked by the majority of the community and that is because they just aren’t particularly rewarding for the time and effort involved. Using GW2Efficiency figures, I think we could say that, yes, maybe paths like CoF1, SE1 and AC need their rewards rebalancing slightly downwards, as getting almost 10g/hour just on the gold reward of the dungeon is possibly a bit high. But in comparison, there are paths that have always felt neglected and not particularly worthwhile – HotW2 and 3 and CoF3 spring to mind and even arguably paths that have a notionally high reward like Arah4. I think the best way of approaching it would be to look at the analytics of how long the average party takes to complete any given path, decide roughly how much they should be making per hour by running dungeons and assigning a gold value to each path on that basis.

I do feel that in doing this, it’s tempting to skew your view towards the people who run the paths the fastest – the people who know every trick and can get through a path in half the time a pug group would. Slashing gold rewards because of those people is a bad and lazy thing to do though. Instead of punishing the majority of players who play dungeons to have some fun and make a bit of money, surely it would make far more sense to fix some of problems that make it possible for people to make a mockery of the idea of hard, but rewarding dungeons? Let’s take a major example here – Arah. Would it not make more sense to fix the parts where people are still able to skip entire sections (not talking about running past mobs) or even, gods forbid, making it so that you can’t wall and reflect Lupi? Ideally, we should be talking about how we can fix the existing exploits and shortcuts to make it so that all players have a tough, demanding challenge that has a good reward for their time at the end of it. Instead, if I’m teaching a group an Arah path, I expect to set aside up to two hours for that. If I’m with a pug group that’s not necessarily that good, I expect to take up to 45-60 minutes on a path like P1. If I’m with a really good group, it probably wouldn’t be unreasonable for me to cut that closer to 30 minutes. But it sounds like this is all being judged on the groups that are running through in a fraction of the time using every trick in the book (and then are sometimes selling the path on top), rather than understanding that the rewards already aren’t always that great for the average player.

It’s not that I have an overall objection to the idea of moving away from dungeons but realistically, I think the existing dungeons present a good alternative to newer PvE content and will continue going forward as something different to do. A big part of that is because other options haven’t really been presented. Fractals was introduced in 2012 and since then, four of the five additional levels that went in were cut and pasted from the Living Story. Is it appreciated how boring it would have been if the only instanced group PvE content that gave half-decent rewards for three years were those 14 levels? Even with raids coming in, it sounds very much like they’re going to get released at the pace of one wing every few months. That’s not really what I’d call a replacement, especially on weekly rewards.

Frankly, I got pretty bored of WvW because it was the same thing over and over again and I’d even be making a loss in terms of gold (factoring in buying upgrades). It doesn’t sound like this is really going to make group PvE content much better than that. As it stands, if there wasn’t a gold reward attached to dungeons, I’d only play PvP if I wanted dungeon tokens – takes longer, but I’d actually have more fun and feel like I’m actually getting something out of my time. Or, gods forbid, I’d just go play another game.

I think the key thing I’d say about this is that, okay, this event has not really worked out and the rewards are a bit of a mess. It would however be really good if we could get some kind of confirmation as to whether or not the Mordrem Blooms are just for this event or if we’ll see them come back around again in a future event. That would make a huge difference between being able to casually enjoy some of the events over the course of the weekend or potentially just ignoring it because the grind to get some of the rewards is excessive.

If you’re not really sure on what gear you’re going to settle on but you do EotM a lot, I’d probably suggest getting mostly zerker ascended trinkets, then having a couple of different armour/weapon stat sets. You’ll likely have the badges for them which makes it relatively cheap to have multiple exo armour sets (whereas it’s only really rings if you do FotM a lot that are in plentiful supply as far as ascended gear goes), so you can have a full zerker set for PvE, PVT armour and weapons for WvW, etc.. Of course, the obvious caveat is that seeing as you can’t salvage WvW gear, don’t put any really expensive runes/sigils in any of it unless you’re sure you want to stick with that stat set.

As much as I appreciate almost everything that’s been done with Guardian lately and bugs getting fixed, I’ve got to say that this probably one of the very few bugs that I actually didn’t want to see fixed.

Why? Well, “Hold the line!” isn’t bad as far as shouts go. It’s punchy and well-voiced. But what it replaced on Asuran characters makes me kinda sad. Now, for most races, I can understand it’s no big fish as far as I’ve heard/I can see. But Asura had some of the best filler quotes that would pop up when using it. I mean, seriously, with the voicing, some of these were diamond:

“Don’t just stand there, dodge!”
“These supplies should help; Help me take over the world!”
“I claim this victory in the name of me!”
“The difference between stupid and genius, is the same as the difference between you and I!”

And, my personal favourite:

“Compared to me, most Asura have the intelligence of a carrot.”

I know it was infrequent, but I am seriously going to miss having my character come out with those lines. If I didn’t realise it would be an amount of effort to do, I’d even ask if it’d be possible to have them as random alternatives to the normal shouts on a rare chance.