Many people in WvW devote countless hours and hundreds of gold to the cause.. whether it be with upgrades or siege weapons.. And they do it without the expectation of being reimbursed. Half the time they don’t even get recognized for their work. These are the people (a small portion of the population) who are the driving force in winning a match. More often than not they are commanders.
When those players see you trying to sell siege weapons instead of donating them to commanders or putting them down yourself, they’re going to call you out on it. They’ll accuse you of taking up a spot in WvW to do jumping puzzles and “make gold” instead of contributing to the war effort. And there’s nothing you can do to stop that.
Realm Avenger (250k kills) is one of the easiest WvW achievements to get. And that’s only if you play a class/build with significant AoE DPS potential and reside in a tier with consistently large zerg vs. zerg battles. Most “Hardcore” WvW players are still in the vicinity of 8k~25k kills. And what about oceanic/asian players who are stuck in tiers where they have very few people to fight? NEVER going to see that achievement.
Yakslapper requires that you destroy ONE MILLION caravans. Someone did the math, and even if you played WvW 24 hours a day and killed every yak in existence.. it would still take years to achieve.
The upgrades slow DB’s zerg a little bit.. enough to limit our point gain overnight. Especially if the other servers provide ANY sort of resistance.
Losing your upgrades is part of WvW. If you want to enjoy those upgrades, get them going early in the day so that you can actually benefit from them during NA primetime. And feel free to focus all of your attacks on Dragonbrand to offset our nighttime presence.. we’re used to it.
Asking A-net to do something about night-capping is simply beating a dead horse. They’ve already said that WvW is a 24-hour game, and the scoring/capping system is working as intended. If you want to continue competing in tier 4 or above, get used to it.. or get a night crew.
Good to hear from you, Mike. I remember running around the Battlegrounds with your little Afro-Asura in beta.
If you’re still answering questions, here’s a couple:
Are there any plans to make support builds more viable in WvW? As things stand, the classes/builds that get the most kills/loot/badges are those that spec into DPS and AoE. What about the guy who focuses on supporting his group in the backfield? I feel that the WvW dynamic could be a lot different if people weren’t so obsessed with farming badges and hitting as many enemies as possible.
Second Question:
Would it be possible to make fortification upgrades a group effort? For instance, players could talk to the quartermaster of a keep/tower and donate a small amount of silver to the cause. Once enough silver is in the pool, anyone could activate the upgrade using that resource.
Remember those two weeks when our nighttime crew went to vacation? Dropping tier=doing ok?
When did that ever happen? lol.
They supposedly took a break during the end of our tier 4 match two weeks ago, but that’s the last I heard of it. We actually GAINED points that week IIRC, but still dropped a tier.
In any case.. our NA crew during this match maintained an average income very close to that of EB and YB. If our Asian/Oceanic crew didn’t exist, would we have lost? Probably. But it would have still been a good match, and we would still be competitive in this tier.
Glancing at the current score evolution, we’ll likely be in this same matchup for a good 4 to 8 weeks. The only server that has the potential to shake things up is Kaineng.
I think it’s important that siege doesn’t stay around indefinitely. Not allowing it to depsawn in some fashion would make it all the more easier for an enemy spy to place a siege-lock on your maps. Also, sometimes siege is placed incorrectly and just needs to be gotten rid-of.
I can’t come up with a good solution to this problem.. but lengthening the despawn timer would probably be good. Refreshing siege is just another one of those things that makes WvW feel monotonous.
It’s the responsibility of each server community to police their players and promote legitimate WvW tactics. The real problematic exploits right now have nothing to do with player culling… there are other bugs that completely cheapen the WvW experience. You never know when a keep was taken by a hidden mesmer or an exploiting mesmer, because they could have been hiding in a false wall or they could have jumped through the gate. Without catching them in the act you’ll never know.
People who are exploiting in this fashion will never listen to reason. If they get kicked from their guild and condemned by their server, they’ll just switch to another server and repeat the same thing again. What’s important is that we encourage honest players to keep playing legitimately, because every day they inch closer to the “If they’re doing it we should do it too” mentality.
Can someone post a link to Dev Post that said using false walls that Dev builit into a keep is considered a exploit if hide in them. Searched and could not find one. Or is this just case of a player calling something he doesn’t like a exploit? Like player who accused a server of exploiting because they “built” rams in water gate of Bay keep. (You know where ledge is at.)
When the topic of false walls first appeared, it was in reference to certain cliffs within the Bay Keep which you can jump into and hide your character. No, I don’t have a link for you.. but A-net recognized it as an exploit.
This is just common sense though. Obviously a piece of terrain would never be designed so that your character can phase through it, unless it was a fun jumping puzzle feature or something. The areas in Stonemist where you can do this are undoubtedly a bug in the game that needs to be fixed. And utilizing a bug to your own advantage is exploiting, plain and simple.
The devs did not “build them into the keep”. The devs and QA testers made an oversight when checking player-object collision in these areas. It’s not an intentional feature by any stretch of the imagination. And it would boggle my mind to see anyone support such a feature.. we already take hours out of our day to sweep for legitimate mesmers.
YB, I like fighting you a lot, but you have way too many thieves that don’t do anything but run around and abuse culling.
Every time we’ve gone up against EB I’ve been impressed by their solo/group roamers. The average skill of an EB player is certainly one of the highest amongst NA servers.
But I have to agree that the thief groups are a bit ridiculous. They would still be great PvPers without abusing player culling… right now it’s just crazy.
I realize that En Rohbi is talking about YB, but EB seems to have even more thieves. ;p
You can spend hours looking for all the mesmer spots in SM and still not get them all.
While that may be true (and extremely annoying in itself), I don’t like hearing that someone was standing inside of a “false wall” which you can walk into and completely hide yourself (or in this case, with your name tag sticking out). Other WvW forts have areas like this as well.. and all of them are considered exploits.
There really aren’t that many legitimate places in SM where you won’t be spotted by a concerted sweeping effort.
It’s not necessary to insult YB over this issue, because all of our servers have exploiters.. or people who don’t realize they are exploiting. But I want to be sure that everyone is paying attention to what their Mesmers are doing.
At around 8:55pm PST Yak’s Bend took SM from us with a hidden mesmer (or two).
Normally I would commend them for this.. but let me tell you, we had at least 10 people sweeping SM for the entire time that we owned it. I received reports of a mesmer inside once.. who was glitched inside a “false wall”. When he was spotted, he moved somewhere else and we never found him again.
I’d like to believe this was a legitimate ninja of SM, but I guess we’ll never really know. In any case, I hope you guys are policing the methods used by your mesmers.
A-net isn’t going to hold Commanders to a higher standard, but the community on your server needs to. Nobody should be following or listening to someone who would go on a tirade like that. It’s just a game after all.
I can empathize with fellow Commanders who shoulder a lot of responsibility in WvW and then get blamed for everything that goes wrong.. and I don’t agree with the content of this thread, as it’s basically calling out a specific commander under the guise of asking a legitimate question. But obviously there’s no excuse for the behavior in this screenshot.
You can report people for verbal abuse, so that would be a good idea whenever you see this happen. It will take more than one report for the proper action to be taken.
Dragonbrand was already competitive in tier 4 a couple weeks ago, but we also received some transfers prior to this match that will help our NA time slot considerably.
From what Habib says, it sounds like the removal of player culling could (potentially) cause our clients to send requests to the server to load enemies that are literally outside of our view distance. And this could be a major problem for everyone unless the engine is tweaked appropriately. Similarly, we don’t know how powerful machines will actually perform in a large-scale Stonemist Castle siege. There’s already a serious (network?) lag issue for everyone in those battles.
For the brief time that I played Final Fantasy 14, I noticed that even while staring a wall.. player models were rendering all around me and causing a significant FPS drop. The same thing could happen in GW2 if player culling is removed without making tweaks in other areas.
Repair costs are a drop in the bucket compared to how much I spend on superior siege weapons and keep/tower upgrades. On an average day of WvW as a commander, I’ll spend 5~10 gold out of my own pocket. Sometimes I can get people to mail donations, which is great.. but that doesn’t always happen.
If the costs were shared equally among players it would be a non-issue. But as things stand we have 10% of the population covering 90% of the costs, which gets a bit ridiculous.
Back to the original point.. repairing is more of an annoyance than an actual cost. But isn’t WvW a large enough gold-sink as is?
I still haven’t seen a satisfactory answer to why this is even a problem or why culling is in the game at ALL. Tons of other games have huge numbers of players on the screen at once with no problems whatsoever. Seems to me there must be another reason, like Anet wanting to save on bandwidth or something.
Whether or not that answer is satisfactory is another matter.. because too much emphasis is being directed toward client-side resource/bandwidth issues when the problem is almost entirely server-side. The specifications of player PCs are important when discussing the ramifications of reducing player culling.. but it has little relevance until they actually come up with a way to do that.
Server-side player culling is the same for everyone, regardless of their PC specs. However, as Habib stated, after that information has been sent to the client it still has to be rendered. This is the point where having a stronger rig allows you to load player models faster. As far as client-side bandwidth usage goes.. it’s a complete non-factor unless you’re on dial up or something.
I’ve known for a long time that being in a party increases drop rates in PvE (because the damage threshold on a target is cumulative as long as you’ve hit them once), but it never really occurred to me that this applies in WvW as well. Makes sense though.
It’s a shame that A-net can’t get the party system working properly in WvW. Being unable to kick offline players is such a hassle.
There’s not much value in pointing out exploiters on the forum – especially in a match like this. Hopefully if we continue to send reports to A-net they’ll do something about it.
To the guilds who transferred to DB: Please continue to uphold the semi-casual, fun atmosphere that we’ve been fostering here for quite some time. As others have already said, we don’t care about winning.. but hopefully an improved NA presence will help move us up the tiers to a level where our oceanic crew has stiff competition. I’m sure they would enjoy that.
To DB…. if you want to have fun with WvW this match, try not to camp the enemy spawn please. Let them get a foothold.
Servers don’t die. New leaders will rise-up in due time and you will once again find exciting WvW matches. A similar thing happened to Dragonbrand a couple months ago and many people lost hope, but we’ve since bounced back from that.
My understanding and opinion is the Oceanic guilds brought Dragonband back up. Without the Hardcore Asian guilds “TFV, TWIN, NNK” I doubt very much that Dragonbrand would of bounced back up from death as easily as it did.
Darkhaven will not be able to bounce back so easily as DB did. Oceanic time zones are the hardest to fill NA is the easiest.
Can’t really argue with that.. without our asian/oceanic contingent we would have fell all the way to tier 7 or 8. The fact is that we had lost over 1000 active NA WvW players to one mass SoS server transfer.
There was a severe loss of morale at that point in time, so our NA turnouts were terrible and I imagine a lot of our night crew wasn’t interested either. Our daytime squad has since grown more populous and competitive. The fact that we DO have a night crew is one of the main things that drives people to transfer here.
That said, there aren’t many servers below tier 3 that actually have a measurable oceanic/asian population, which means that Darkhaven is in the same position as many other worlds at this level.
Agreed that it’s best to transfer between matches, or when we aren’t actually matched against one-another. In any case, DB welcomes you aboard. A few things to keep in mind though:
- At the moment DB does not have a unified community website.
- We have a huge PvE contingent, similar to DH. Getting people to defend instead of joining the “karma train” is difficult.. but they’re learning.
- We have an unlimited seat mumble server, but not everyone uses it. A lot of our coordination and communication happens through in-game chat and relies on commanders that are willing to work with each-other in that medium.
To Darkhaven:
Servers don’t die. New leaders will rise-up in due time and you will once again find exciting WvW matches. A similar thing happened to Dragonbrand a couple months ago and many people lost hope, but we’ve since bounced back from that.
I really am having trouble empathising with someone who doesn’t recognize that an overnight crew easy-moding four maps isn’t a problem, while competition is fairly even thru-out the rest of the day.
Night-capping is not a problem in itself. It only means we have a higher population, more coverage, and really don’t belong in tier 5 – as evidenced by our performance in tier 4 last week.
I’m not going to argue that the WvW ranking is flawed in many ways, but that has nothing to do with DB or our Oceanic coverage. Hate the system all you want.. don’t hate on the other servers and derail a thread that’s meant for enjoyable discussion. Go make a new thread or something. YOU may be frustrated with the match, but other people still want to have fun with it.
Be glad the daytime fighting is still awesome. At least you aren’t in one of the matches (such as tier eight) where people are being stomped into the ground.
If you have enough Karma you can also collect exotic armor from the cathedrals in Orr. Mixing and matching will get you a nice set of vitality/toughness/power/healing.
My “tank” build is focused around condition resistance/removal.. which in my mind is crucial in a lot of scenarios. My favorite food (by far) are Bowls of Orrian Truffle and Meat Stew. The extra endurance fill rate is amazing for WvW and dungeons.
The ranking system gets worse and worse as time goes on, because potential evolution is not scaling at the same rate as cumulative rating. The way things are going you’re doomed to face BG and SoR for many more weeks.
The system is meant to create “even” matches.. but without a complete blowout, servers rarely move up or down the ladder.
DB isn’t strong, DB has a night zerg, that’s it. That’s all it ever is. Maybe they’re night zerg is strong, but otherwise, you’re fairly average.
Also, other things that make you appear stronger, is DH losing large guilds, DH tired of waking up in the morning and not having our fully upgraded keep because of a Night Zerg.
So we don’t need posts blowing smoke up our kittens and saying ‘nice fights’ and ‘lets have fun’ when everyone knows every morning the wvw will be starting out with anything but fun.
What’s funny about your statement is that DB gained the potential point lead yesterday BEFORE our nighttime crew started logging in. And a majority of people who painted the map green were actually NA players staying up late.
When I log-in later today all of the upgrades that I spent 5~10 gold for will be gone.. assuming that you guys continue to put up a decent fight as you did in weeks passed. WvW is a massive gold sink for everyone, but this thread isn’t for whining about mechanics that are NEVER going to change. How’s about posting something to improve your server morale instead?
I was on until almost 2am, DB did NOT have that point lead by then. Again, more historical revisionism.
Potential point lead, bud. To be more specific, potential point income (ie: +250)
We had that lead well before 9pm PST, and maintained it for at least a while (I logged off shortly afterward). As far as cumulative points go, we were ahead of DH at that point.
DB isn’t strong, DB has a night zerg, that’s it. That’s all it ever is. Maybe they’re night zerg is strong, but otherwise, you’re fairly average.
Also, other things that make you appear stronger, is DH losing large guilds, DH tired of waking up in the morning and not having our fully upgraded keep because of a Night Zerg.
So we don’t need posts blowing smoke up our kittens and saying ‘nice fights’ and ‘lets have fun’ when everyone knows every morning the wvw will be starting out with anything but fun.
What’s funny about your statement is that DB gained the potential point lead yesterday BEFORE our nighttime crew started logging in. And a majority of people who painted the map green were actually NA players staying up late.
When I log-in later today all of the upgrades that I spent 5~10 gold for will be gone.. assuming that you guys continue to put up a decent fight as you did in weeks passed. WvW is a massive gold sink for everyone, but this thread isn’t for whining about mechanics that are NEVER going to change. How’s about posting something to improve your server morale instead?
The requirements for current titles need to be reduced, and there should be more than one title for each achievement line. For example.. there should be a title for 10k kills, 50k kills and 100k kills.
There also needs to be a new achievement that tracks healing.. something to make support builds feel a little more worthwhile in WvW.
I’d just like to point out to BP and DH that after last week’s demoralizing setback, I hear that many of our asians are taking a few days off. What does that mean for you? Work hard and you might find that some of your keeps still have waypoints when you wake up.
… no promises.
~ Kovu
I believe they decided to take a break towards the end of the match, rather than afterward. That’s part of the reason why our score dropped off during the last couple of days. Honestly, if anyone needs a little break.. now’s a good time. We’ll need everyone well-rested if we intend to win our next match in tier 4.
Dragonbrand’s NA crew is getting stronger each day, so if BP and DH don’t double-team us consistently then this match is already decided. You guys almost beat us once before! Don’t even think about giving up.
Epic 3-way battle over Stonemist this evening.. BP was still hanging on when I left, but it will take a miracle for them to push DB and DH completely out at this point.
Both classes can fill similar roles on the battlefield, and both can use a hammer..
Guardians tend to have more survivability with various forms of damage mitigation (aegis, protection) and healing power. Warriors tend to have more overall damage output, especially in the ranged category (scepter guardian is okay.. not great). Both classes are capable of orienting themselves for group support with shouts, banners, bubbles, etc.
Why not play both? It takes no time at all to level a character to 80.
Forgetting about current design flaws with WvW, Dragonbrand is having a ton of exciting matches lately. I like where we’re at in the rankings.. lots of great servers to learn from and force us to step up our game. There have also been some recent transfers that had a noticeable, positive effect on our overall performance.
Being outmanned in NA primetime is actually rather enjoyable now that we’re accustomed to consolidating our forces and working together. We’re able to maintain control over DB borderland and our section of EB a majority of the time.
Working as intended, unfortunately. There’s nothing to stop a guild from existing on multiple servers.. or sporting a new tag specifically to spy on opponents without being recognized.
Move to server(s) that need your help to be competitive in their tier.. don’t try to throw WvW out of whack again for no reason. The people on your theoretical server don’t want months of imbalanced matches just to be “number one.”
DB doesn’t have one specific “peak time” as a lot of servers do. Our NA primetime population is just a large as the oceanic contingent, but we have a lot stronger resistance to deal with during the day.
Don’t discount your own night/morning crew, either. The only reason DB hasn’t completely ran away with this match is the fact that you DO have people defending and slowing us down significantly.
Some classes are more suited to leading in smaller group scenarios.. and smaller groups have less need for a commander icon (in my opinion). From that you could argue that a Guardian is more suited to commanding than a Thief.. but obviously it’s not that simple.
It’s important to keep in mind that WvW requires many, many leaders. But it does NOT require many, many commanders. In order to shepherd players properly you can’t have 8 different blue icons running around the map, even though you may need 8 distinct groups of varying sizes to perform the necessary tasks.
One or two posts from one person is not hijacking a thread. Don’t blow things out of proportion.
To clarify, I’m talking about the pages and pages of accusations and discussions about cheating.. Much of which has already been deleted or locked by moderators. This isn’t about one or two posts, and it applies to future threads as well.
DB seemed to give up entirely too easily this morning. They’d hit something, get pushed, then go to another BL. No seige, no adjusted plans, no hitting from a different door, just map back. Thanks for the late Christmas present, I guess.
I expect this match to come right down to the wire.. gonna be a lot of people burning the midnight oil. It’s a shame that one of us will be swapping places with Ehmry Bay again next week.
We’re well on our way to getting this thread locked (again). This board isn’t here to complain about exploiters, though there are some of us who would willingly accept private messages with the information necessary to track these people down and get them banned.
There is a small minority of people who will try to judge entire servers based on the actions of a few cheaters and trolls. Don’t let them hijack this thread by continuing to fuel a pointless discussion. It doesn’t matter which server you’re on.. just stop it.
Back ON TOPIC:
I’m surprised Dragonbrand hasn’t managed to maintain a stronger point lead with the advantage we have in the early morning hours. Maguuma and Yak’s Bend aren’t going to let us win so easily.
Being a Commander is often a thankless task.. the same holds true for those who spend their time leading WvW but can’t afford commander status.
It’s already been said, but I’d like to re-emphasize the fact that Commanders gain nothing extra from taking on that responsibility. We don’t get more rewards from sieges.. we don’t get any fancy armor or titles. All we have is that little blue icon, and the expectation that we ourselves will place most of the siege weapons and buy a majority of upgrades.. Because that’s what it takes to be successful in the massive gold-sink that is WvW.
The only commanders that deserve to be put-down are those that effect server morale by insulting others. You can have personal preferences for commanders based on their level of success, but never forget that all of them are trying their hardest to help others enjoy the WvW experience.
After playing a Guardian Commander for so long I would have to say that bunker builds are often advantageous to leading WvW. Charging an enemy group and taking them by surprise (while taking advantage of player culling) is fairly important.. and PuG players are far more likely to jump into the fray when they see their commander in the midst of it. If the commander hangs back, a lot of other people will too.. and then you end up with a prolonged battle where you should have rolled right over your opponent.
Survivability helps me get behind enemy lines to attack entrenched siege positions, hold choke points where necessary, get better vantage points, stay on siege weapons for much longer, etc. Two extra shots with that ballista can make a big difference.
There’s nothing wrong with a Ranger commander.. you just have to play a bit differently from classes which have front-line survivability. And you need to rely on in-game chat a little bit more
Prior to our match last week I don’t recall any legitimate accusations of cheating/exploiting. Because these exploits have been allowed to exist for so long, more and more people are beginning to utilize them (with basically no repercussions at all). This is true on all servers, unfortunately.
As has been mentioned, the vast majority of players on Dragonbrand are strongly against any form of cheating. This is especially true for those of us who have been here since launch. Those who DO purposely exploit likely transferred some time recently and have no pride in the server they’re playing on. They just want to troll.
Hope everyone had a good Christmas! Been a great match so far.. let’s finish the week out strong.
