Guild Wars 2

ET was a T1/T2 server that had an achilles heel of no Oceanic coverage, and they got smacked down every time they went to T1 due to that weakness. Other servers that came into T1 and T2 also got smacked around once they had their coverage weakness exposed. In a 3 way match up like this, the player community has to organize itself to fill the gaps. What you are seeing with the server realignments is that guilds that were on T1 to T3 servers did indeed move to several servers, I believe as far down as T4 or T5, in order to find server coverage gaps they could help to fill. I think the end goal is to have the top 10 NA servers as competitive as possible, but that is going to take some time as people move around to where they are needed.

No one server is super stacked, but several new servers now have complete coverage and are competitive at all times of day.

If you want to win WwW in this game you have to be organized at the server level with guilds and groups that also wish to be organized at a server level. If your server has its coverage gaps filled 24/7, then all that means is that you can compete around the clock. When you are then matched up with other servers with 24/7 coverage, you get competitive matches that are constant slug fests.

What we’re seeing right now is the rebalancing of all the servers, and it is going to take another 2 to 3 weeks to get all the readjusted servers in their natural tiers. Yes, blowouts stink but we’re stuck with the system we have. I personally don’t think matches should last longer than 72 hours, and that these week long matches are way too long.

Have fun everyone!

NA Raking Prediction Site: http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA

Based on the projected rankings model, we should place solid T2 on Friday. If we do that and score well in the next match up, we’ve got a good shot at T1 in under 2 weeks.

http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA

LotD transferred over to Blackgate after the Friday reset. We’re having fun, and we were looking for a server with coordinated coverage. Having been on ET where the server didn’t have any oceanic coverage meant that all of our NA primetime work would just to go waste each week we advanced to Tier 1 matchups. Blackgate seems to have good coverage during oceanic times, and we’ll do what we can to help out the NA coverage times.

Yes we need PST and EU timezone guilds. We can get into T1 with what we have, but we can’t stay there due to not having PST/EU timezone organized guilds to hold the fort down while EST/CST players sleep and work. In EST/CST prime time for NA we’re doing fine, but to stay in T1 we need our off peak hour gap closed.

Drop us a line at www.lotd.org and ask for Sanjo if your guild is interested in helping with the PST/EU timezone presence.

ET needs off peak hour guilds in order to stay competitive 24/7, and during NA primetime EST/CST there are queues for WwW. So we need some PST and some EU guilds to close that gap, or we’ll just keep bouncing between T1 and T2.

ET is looking for good Euro time zone guilds to work with if yer interested. Hop by www.lotd.org, and PM Sanjo if ya want.

2009 AGDC Panel Discussion: http://www.lotd.org/showthread.php?t=26464

We told a wide audience of developers and community managers about the dream MMO, and mine was this….

DAOC 2.0 with the following:

No Trials of Atlantis grinding
With DAOC New Frontiers RVR system
WoW’s solo friendly leveling
Warhammer’s Public Quests done right
Warhammer’s Guild Leveling system with better rewards
AOC’s Guild City Building concept (not in GW2)
COV’s sidekick system
PVP Arena’s with multi-server queuing
Detailed PVP stats (Not in GW2 WwW or SPVP atm)
—-by player
—-by guild
—-achievement recognition
PVP progression systems for items
PVE systems with 5-10 main raid content
Titles and trophies that provided passive bonuses
Gear that has durability and wears out

Ok, Arenanet needs some props because they got a lot of our list right!!!

Quick Siege History

In early DAOC the Keeps and Relics changed hands too frequently, and were unrewarding. I’ll call that the vanilla siege environment because its a straight up zerg the keep down as fast and often as you can to flip territory situtation, and generally not associated with many individual player or guild rewards. It is very similar to what people are saying about WwW now, and why past siege based games went to the Window of Opportunity (WOO) system. WOO’s have their own issues such as 2 AM sieges, and just prove that no siege mechanic is perfect. If sieges are too easy then stuff changes hands all the time, if they are too hard then people get bored, and if they happen in off peak hours most people can’t participate.

DAOC (pre New Frontiers especially), Shadowbane, Age of Conan, Warhammer, and AION all tried the vanilla and WOO siege formates for mass PVP, and essentially they all failed due to what I listed above (in addition to waiting to long to fix broken mechanics or exploits!)

What Can GW2 WwW Do Over The Long Haul??

1.
You need individual and guild level pvp metrics so people can stand out. DAOC had individual and guild realm point rankings. You could match up who you were fighting on the other side (to some extent) by reviewing those, and GW2 could do it too because people are comparing the servers that get matched against one another.

2.
You need to reward players for actually killing other players instead of flipping keeps and sitting behind arrow carts/trebs from miles away. Warhammer’s zone control strat that required player kills for Victory Points was a good mechanic, and some formula for player kills should be going into the WwW overall point total.

3.
Protecting supply lines is strategical and should also be factored into the overall WwW point total.

4.
Reduce point totals for keeps, towers, castles, and resource camps, and add in point generators from the other things I mentioned.

5.
Seven day matches are too long, and I think 3 day matches should be ideal.

Right now it appears to revolve around keeps, towers, castles, and resource camps instead of the whole combat picture, and since there are no individual or guild rankings for WwW then the whole server gets labeled as good or bad.

WwW History

Honestly there hasn’t been a good 3 faction PVP game in a long time, and most players are used to 2 faction PVP. In 3 faction PVP it really is a big King of the Hill match, and it is up to the PLAYERS to politic and strategize to decide who comes out on top of every 3 server match up. In the end the result is winning, and less about who works with who or not.

What is beyond the control of the players though is the fact that WwW generates points with ways that cannot be solved if the point system only revolves around capturing keeps, towers, castles, and resource camps. Actual combat, protecting supply lines, and other “active” things have to be put into the overall point spread, or you just end up with people sitting in keeps all the time while night capping in off peak hours to win the 3 server match.

LotD will fight either way, but I do feel that WwW needs major mechanical changes for long term viability as a PVP option for this game.