Guild Wars 2

I am still missing 10+ points I earned since HoT launch because this has not been addressed, or even acknowledged. I am not completely roadblocked on all my Tyria masteries because of this, since all my XP bars are filled, and the points that i have earned, that I need to unlock Pact Commander IV, are not being awarded.

It’s been a month. I’m over this. Done. I’ll check back after the new year and see if you all managed to ever actually wake up and fix this.

Joshua Diaz.6402:

Just as a heads up, the Mastery Points for Personal Story are awarded on a per-chapter basis. So once you complete Chapter 1 and earn the Achievement for it, you’ve earned the Mastery Point for Chapter 1. This includes each different starting storyline: I believe the right names are: Graduation Day, For The Legion!, Crime and Punishment, Rising to the Challenge, and Waking from the Nightmare. Similarly, whichever Order you join, there’s just one Mastery Point there.
Hopefully this helps clarify the total number of Mastery Points you should be expecting from your previous accomplishments in Tyria. That said, the different stories really are fantastic, and should definitely be experienced, but for your own pleasure, and not for Mastery Points. If any of you still think you are missing MPs from Achievements you’ve completed, let us know via the in-game Bug Report tool and we’ll try to identify if there’s a bigger issue happening.

This response indicates to me that you do not fully understand that there is a bigger issue happening. I have bug reported it in game, no response. I posted in a thread on here, no response. I have seen at least five or six other threads with multiple responses on here saying people are having the same issue. But, you have not yet actually responded to and acknowledged this problem in a single one of those threads or bug reports.

The problem is this: If you completed the races and orders personal story steps before the launch of HoT, then you will have points awarded — 3 for each race’s complete story, and 5 total for the completed story for all three orders. But if you complete those same story steps today, then you will not get the points, even though the completed step shows up with a mastery point icon.

I don’t think you all actually understand that this means that there are 20 out of 22 possible mastery points in the personal story that currently cannot be earned.

I think you should take a look at the wiki, and take a look at the Hero section of the achievements window in-game on a character that has all story segments completed, and actually count up the points that are shown as supposed to be awarded.

According to all the information we have been given by you, there are supposed to be 3 points for fully completing a racial story (a total of 15 points from playing all races through) and 5 points from doing all the steps of all three orders, up until just before the final two chapters.

Again, look at this page:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Hero_

This is where I am getting this information from. There are fully 20 points that cannot be earned from the personal story that are indicated as being awarded from all those race stories, starting with “Crime and Punishment” straight on through the order stories all the way to “This Far, No Further.”

Also, I have confirmed with multiple guild mates that people who did these exact same steps before HoT launched did get points awarded for them by the retroactive one-time points catch up thing you did. But anyone who completes these steps after HoT launched is not getting the points. The achievements display with a mastery point icon in-game after they’re completed. We just don’t get the actual points.

And again, as I stated, this has been bug reported multiple times, and there are multiple threads with dozens of people complaining about the same issue. There is a thread right now on the first page of the bug reports forum about it. Search in there and you will find at least half a dozen others on the same topic with multiple reports.

And yet your comment that I quoted here seems to be saying that you all are not even aware that there is a problem. Which may explain why this issue still has not been fixed, or even acknowledged at all, more than a month after this system launched.

I have tried the 64-bit client and overall it installs easily and works fine. However, I have a strange graphical issue with it that makes it unusable.

The issue is that there is a strange shimmering effect; like a visible refresh flicker or something, that affects all text in the in-game UI. It’s very distracting and visible on all of the text elements in-game.

This is with Windows 10, latest Nvidia drivers, i5-4690K / GTX 980. I play with all in-game settings and control panel settings set to max or near max quality.

The client performs very well; I didn’t have any particular issues with the 32-bit version, but the 64-bit works just fine too. The only problem is this strange shimmering makes it so I can’t play with the 64-bit one, though I would love to.

With everything exactly the same, if I exit and go back in with the 32-bit client, no text shimmer, so for now I’m sticking with that one.

Personal story steps that are completed are not awarding the mastery points that they are supposed to according to the Hero section of the achievements window.

This affects at least the racial stories and the orders. I confirmed it by completing at least four story steps in the last several days that show a mastery point icon when I view the completed item in the achievements window, but I have not received any new points.

I went through all the story steps that show a mastery point icon just now, and I should have at least 10 points just from those alone. I only have six total, plus one that I got a few days ago from Teq. The six were from story steps that I finished before HoT launched, so I know that these are story steps that are supposed to award points.

I also have talked to guildies in game that did the racial and order stories before HoT, and they got points retroactively awarded. But it appears that those same story line steps in the racial and order stories that are done after the launch day one-time retroactive rewards are not giving points.

I submitted a bug report about this in-game and have posted about it a couple times on reddit. Others have chimed in saying that they’re also not getting points they should, but I have not seen any ANet comment on it anywhere, even to acknowledge that it’s an issue.

Well, compared to how sPvP works in other MMOs, they did just about everything they could right the first time around. So obviously the only way they could go when changing it is to make it worse.

Forget dealing with the hard balance problems and nuking Skyhammer from orbit. Just give us something nobody asked for, that adds nothing good, and that negates what was the single best aspect of an entire game mode.

Unlocks in sPvP are flat out stupid.

Here are a couple other incentives I thought of, but did not mention before, that would make holding objectives “attractive.”

A modest but useful stacking buff for all guild members active in WvW.

This should only apply while in WvW (not EOTM or PVE) based on the cumulative “weight” of structures you are maintaining claims on. This ought to be something unlike, e.g., the guard stacks. I’m not quite sure what. It should be something desirable, but not a straight power boost. It also should be big enough at the cap to be attractive, but not a game changer.

Maybe something like a nice bonus to WXP and badge gains. Or maybe some sort of reduced supply cost for building guild versions of siege or something. Maybe something else clever I can’t think of at the moment. These are buffs you would really like to have, but that don’t give rise to any roflstompage griping and balance issues.

Significantly reduced time and cost to build upgrades on the structure.

This could be a scaling de-buff to build times based on how many guild claims have been laid on the structure. The more paid up claims are present, the more build time (and maybe supply cost) are reduced, up to some sort of reasonable cap. It should still be “worth it” to have quite a few active claims though (i.e., a small buff that can get up to a lot of stacks, maybe 1% each stack for a total of something like -20% or -33% cost and time).

This makes some imaginary sense since it’s kind of logical that pledging support for a structure would involve leaving some of your peons around to work on fixing the place up, and the more hand on the job the shorter it should go.

Cumulative active structure guild bonuses

My idea was definitely that guild bonuses should not stack. So five guild claims when all have +5 supply just equals +5 supply. But I think each separate buff that at least one claiming guild has at any given time should apply. So if one guild with +5 supply and another with the HP buff each stake a claim, then both bonuses should apply as long as both guilds maintain those claims (and, as you mentioned, as long as the buffs are active and running in the normal guild “build” pane).

The meaning of “defending.”

I guess the hard thing about defending and escorting as a concept is that, if you’re doing it right, a lot of the time you’re actually doing . . . nothing. Or at least, you’re doing a lot of things that don’t show up in “easy” stats like kill counts and objective caps.

You might scout, guard, keep an eye out, etc. You also might stand around looking many and mean. Or you might have big fights. You also might go attack something all the way across the map to draw attention away from what you want to hang onto.

I agree it should be worked out so that it’s not just a rush to claim Stonemist all the time. In fact I really like the idea of active supply management figuring into a big part of it, and I think that holding one camp with 100% supply deliveries should outscore standing around Stonemist by a good margin, even though both are meaningful. (But taking one camp and leaving all the Yaks to die should score much lower than holding any keep or tower.)

People “take one for the team” now and just stand scout duty because they know it needs to be done, and everyone takes a turn. But it’s really hard to quantify stuff like, for instance, spending a ton of time sieging up a place nicely, so that what would otherwise be a successful attack turns into a slaughter at the gate.

That was the idea behind an ongoing cost and measuring “success” at defense by how long your can simply hold onto something without it being flipped. You might have done all sorts of things in the meantime that made that happen. All of them mean something, but not all of them are really metric-able.

I get the general loathing for PPT, but if used for the “right” purposes, and if getting it “costs” the right things, it can be a really simple and fairly direct bottom line proxy for doing a whole lot of other things that we know we want people to do, but can never actually give them direct incentives to do.

I think the passive score has a place, as long as it requires active effort (farming influence to pay for it, running supply, keeping an objective by whatever means) in order to get it. So it has to cost more than just capping and hoping nobody comes around behind you.

And if WvW Influence is the main resource used to hold claims, you have to do a lot of all that other stuff like killing and capping in order to “buy” your passive points. So the incentives flow both ways.

Sungak Alkandenes.1369:

For example, what guild in that format would end up on the banners? The best solution is “no one – just the color.” If you’re that interested, go prod the API or talk to the Guild Claimer.

It would not be practical to have the guild emblems displayed on the big banner as they are now. But maybe they could rework it to display smaller images of the decals for all pledged guilds on it.

The suggestion also was that anyone can see who is supporting a facility by talking to the Quartermaster and looking at the Pledge tab, which is where you already go to claim an objective.

Not sure where the spouting about “sandboxes” and “elitism” comes from. We already have guild claims now; they’re just pointless and have various annoying features, like not letting a guild with better bonuses place a claim if another guild with less or no bonuses already has claimed. This suggestion just takes that system and expands it to let more than one guild “claim” an objective instead of only one.

If you don’t care about the leaderboards, then don’t pay attention to them. And if you want to spend all day happy capping random stuff, you can do that to your heart’s content, at the same time knowing that you’re annoying all those “elitist” guilds whose claims you’re erasing over and over.

Just don’t be surprised if before long they show up to fight you for it.

And ANet just got done making a whole new special playground for those who just want to karma train 24×7. What they have not done at all since launch is anything for who have suggested that maybe the “war” in a game called “Guild Wars” should offer something more in the way of reasons for guilds to . . . go to war.

DevonCarver.5370:

I think if you examine more closely what you just said, you can see the problem. The progress was being given to anyone standing around near the dolyak when it ended its path. That is hardly accurately tracking who helped it out. Without a good way to know who actually helped, we can’t provide adequate rewards.

To reward “defense,” give guilds a reason to hold objectives, not just cap them.

Here is how you reward defending without just giving points away. The trick is to reward guilds instead of individual players. You could do this and at the same time deepen support for guild involvement in WvW.

This will give people a reason to hold and defend, without the free-riding problem that you have from “standing around” awards for “defense” or “escort” missions.

Let more than one guild claim (i.e., “Pledge Support”) to each objective.

Change this to allow up to N guilds to place claims on each structure. Pick an N that won’t destroy your back end, but make it big enough that guilds will be limited in placing claims only by lack of resources, not lack of things to claim.

Change the interface from the guild decal banners we have now to a tab on the Quartermaster window that shows a list of all guilds who have “pledged” the current structure. Change the structure bonuses to be the union of those given by all guilds who have pledged.

When an objective gets flipped, all claims are wiped until it is retaken and claims re-pledged.

Add a cost to hold a claim (“pledge”) on each structure.

Bigger structures cost more to pledge. The cost is deducted from guild resources each tick. This should be influence and maybe a bit of silver. You might need a new “WvW Influence” that can only be farmed in WvW (when guild members participate in caps and kills).

A small guild should be able to log in for a few hours, run some ops, and have enough to keep a pledge on, say, one supply camp overnight while they are logged out. Bigger guilds that want to hold more and bigger structures will have to have more people on or work longer to keep their pledges funded 24×7.

Unfunded pledges drop off at the first tick when the full payment can’t be made from guild resources / bank.

Because there would be a cost to each claim, there needs to be some sort of new privilege (e.g., “Warmaster”) that a guild member would need to have assigned in order to be able to place a guild claim on any objective.

Make a guild leaderboard for each server showing the PPT earned for the match.

Each tick that a guild holds a pledge on an objective, add the PPT for that objective to the guild’s leaderboard score. More objectives held longer = more support for the war effort = higher standing.

Pay added “bounty” points as a bonus for each Yak that reaches its destination to each guild that has pledged the camp it started from.

This gives people a reason to escort Yaks without letting players farm by just standing around. To some extent guilds might free-ride on each other, but if a Yak doesn’t make it then nobody gets the bonus, so every guild also has an incentive to keep supply covered any time their members are on, to avoid missing bonus points.

This also encourages “active” play and gives smaller guilds that focus on supply a chance to outdo larger ones that just hold big structures. If you pledge a single supply camp and make sure every Yak that leaves gets where it’s going safely, you should get more in base PPT + bonus than a guild that just pledges a (more costly) tower or keep, but doesn’t put any effort into guarding the supply chain.

DevonCarver.5370

Do you think that the amount of travel that you have to put in makes the maps feel better? Does it feel like there is a consequence for dying and that you can whittle down an opposing force?.

TL;DR: No. It just makes the map feel more annoying. No. The winning force faces zero consequences and the losing force goes back to spawn. There is no such thing as “whittling down” when the winners just rez everyone and keep going. You win the fight right here or you go back to start, that is all.

It’s been said before in other places, but, honestly, if you want to know what people really want and would respond to in terms of “feel” for WvW . . . just get yourselves a couple beta keys and try out AvA in TESO. That is what WvW could and should have been. That is what people want from it today. They want a fight that looks and feels and scales like an actual medieval WAR, only embedded in a larger game that doesn’t suck kitten in every possible way (i.e., this one).

The weird thing about the EOTM and WvW modes is that you now have: (1) one game mode that is a huge single map with no waypoints, that is actually confusing as hell to run around on foot (not to mention has pathways that could be destroyed when you get to them); and (2) another game mode with three tiny maps where every structure is a stone’s throw from every other . . . that also has waypoints everywhere and in every corner that everyone can use all the time.

It’s a bizzare mash up of design choices in both cases, and both sides come off like a ketchup popsicle.

We know that EOTM is the goof off karma training playground; so really it’s just annoying that you make people foot zerg for ten minutes to get into the action every time they enter or die. If you were doing these two game modes today, from zero, the obvious choice would be to put EOTM on the “old” maps and WvW on the “new” one (minus the rope bridges and other gimmicks).

The first thing you need to decide is what fighting in WvW is “supposed” to feel like. It probably shouldn’t feel like either EOTM or what WvW is now, for a start.

If you want it to feel epic and like a “war” and where there is a “front line” and “supply lines” and all that, then you need to think about a re-work and merge of the three maps (filling in the spaces between them to make one huge landmass), with a real lattice structure, redistributed and spaced out objectives, some real sub-objectives, more variation in terrain, and a whole re-think of the scale of the structures themselves, and the way siege works with and against them.

And if you want stuff like travel times and supply lines to matter, then you’re going to have to, at some point, just bite the bullet and take rezzing out, full stop. If nobody has it then everyone gets “whittled down” as they take losses, and how far you are from resupply and reinforcements means something for everyone.

In place of rezzing, put in mobile, tactically deployed spawn points (“hospital tents” “regimental depots” “forward bases” . . . whatever) that you have to bring with you, put down in a covert but strategically close spot, then defend throughout the battle to keep up your ability to resupply and reinforce.

Conversely, because the hospital tent becomes the number one high priority target in a battle between even numbers, coming OUT of the walls to hunt down and destroy them forces the enemy to meet you in the field rather than just standing on the walls and lobbing rotting cows at you all day.

I could go on, but really the ultimate TL;DR here is that if you keep asking the wrong questions when seeking direction, you’re going to keep winding up in the wrong place.

I know that “big changes” are a hard sell and would take time. But people don’t want timid, pointless gimmicks. They want you to see and admit that WvW is a really great game mode, with a lot of potential, that in its current form just falls quite short of what it could and should be. They want to see you articulate a compelling vision of what it could and should be, that is interesting on an epic scale. And they want to know that you are moving down the road toward that vision, however long that may take (even if it’s going to be a while, they want to still see that the light is there at the end of the tunnel and it’s not just more tunnel).

Kind of a slap to the 9th place worlds in EU. The “worst” you can do in NA is 225, but the last place in EU is only 200. There is no apparent reason why NA FAIL > EU FAIL. But that’s what the rewards are saying.

geist.3980:

some of that we just have to suffer thru but as for low pop, I refused to accept it, I spent the gems and I moved to tier one and I regret nothing. sure I miss my friends on the lower tiers, but its not all giant zergs here. there are a lot of roamers and havoc groups making a difference at all hours of the day. the wait time isn’t bad either, theres always a borderland open. BG and JQ are max servers now from the transfers, TC will be soon too. join the wvw player base and move up.

This. If you want to play WvW and have it not suck on a regular basis, you have three choices. Pick one and get there today.

Baels.3469:

The response to this CDI seems underwhelming compared to not only previous WvW CDI’s, but also other currently active CDI’s.

Compared with the Fractals CDI and the sPvP leagues one, I’d have to agree. Reading back through this thread, it comes off as a lot of really enthusiastic, lengthy, and thoughtful posts by players, met with basically “Cool story, bro” in response.

There were some datamined elements from recent patches that suggest a new skill line is coming to WvW that would let you “send enemy players back to their spawn” on death. I kind of wonder why, rather than doing that, they don’t just remove the downed and rally system entirely from WvW.

The “back to spawn” thing is just going to become a must-have skill anyway, and putting it in that way only means there is a gap between the haves and have nots while people get it skilled up; which is just going to be super annoying until everyone eventually has it.

If they think this is a desirable thing to have at all, they just ought to make it the default (only) behavior and be done with it.

Hule.8794:

Heezdedjim you forgot about Ress tents. You can build ress tent anywhere and it is not afficted by contesting the keep. But tents are really easy to burn down. Do proper placement is needed.

They do exist. They’re sort of like a mini forward base or like one of the vehicles that include a spawn point in games like PS2.

It’s a consumeable you have to buy and have with you, and it only allows 20 players to respawn at one before it goes away. They can be useful for bringing troops back to an ongoing battle a little quicker, if deployed near the front line and not burned down right away. I never saw one actually used in beta, but with some established and more coordinated groups in game, they could be of some value.

I’m not sure if one can be put inside the keep wall or if they can only go outside keeps. If they can go inside the walls, then (assuming enough people bring them), they could help to get defending forces safely inside quicker.

sssshh.

If you call them “merges” it will never happen. Go post in the thread where we’re talking about “alliances” if you want to get some traction.

Contiguous.1345:

Heezdedjim.8902:

They really ought to just make it so that you can just grab a set of green gear and go straight into RvR from level 1, and pretend the whole rest of the game doesn’t even exist.

Ahhhh! – that would be my dream-MMO of course

I am baffled as to why they don’t do this. The AvA zone is by far the largest in the game and at the center of the map, and they did a lot of things right with the RvR — as well as or better than the scarce competition anyway. So it’s arguably “an RvR game,” because, let’s face it, that seems to be the only part they put any actual effort into, and it’s a geographically dominant element of the game world.

You would think they would want to push people into the best part of the game as early and as easily as possible, and definitely not to slow down and annoy the hell out of those who come to the game solely for the RvR. Instead they seem to stick it off in the corner like it’s an “afterthought,” when in fact it seems to be the only part of the game they gave any real thought to.

matjazmuhic.1649:

Death should be punished, that’s why you don’t see reenactments of Lerooooooy Jeeeenkins in ESO. You don’t want to die. And about map being to big. It’s not. You can teleport on your keeps that are not under attack. And as I see it they’re just the right amount of distance apart from each other that if you die you can still quickly run back and try to help save your keep.

The other cool thing is (if I understand it correctly) that if someone takes over a keep in the middle thus making some other keep not connected to any of your other keeps you can’t just teleport to it. Making this kind of tactic rewardable but it has higher risks also.

The map uses a lattice structure, so objectives have to be taken “in order,” rolling up the links and working back toward the other side’s home corner. So you can’t just randomly sneak in and cap one thing off on the other side of the map. This eliminates the rampant karma training and establishes a “front” between the three sides where all the action will focus at any given time.

You can teleport to any keep that is not under attack; BUT, as soon as an objective is attacked, the waypoint is shut down both in AND out. You cannot just randomly bring up the map and teleport away from anywhere in the zone. This is a pretty big difference from waypoints in WvW.

Instead, you have to go inside a keep to the waypoint console, and then you can teleport from there to anywhere else that is not contested. But once an attack starts, you can’t just meep out to somewhere else. So you either have to stand and die, or run away the old fashioned way.

And when you die, you’re forced to respawn at an uncontested point, since rezzing takes forever and requires the rezzer to burn a token which costs currency and effort to collect; so there is no “rallying” downed, and people will not be rezzing random zerglings (they might not even rezz guildies or teammates depending on whether they have tokens). You also have a limited time to spectate from death, since you’ll be force respawned after 10 minutes.

The distances are short enough that people can teleport into a keep that is behind the lines and run up, and taking down a wall takes long enough that you do have time to make the run, if people react when the attack starts. Also, you know what objective will be next in line after one that is contested falls, so it’s not like attacks are much of a surprise (maybe it’s a 50/50 chance which one they’ll go after next, but the options are always limited to a handful of places they could push next).

Contiguous.1345:

As for the PvE being a fail – as far as I’m concerned, that’s a given anyway. PvE is for grinding, that’s all. NPCs are just automatons that repeat the same actions and dialogue over and over. Once you’ve played through the PvE content the first time, any repetition is just pointless. For me, PvP competition is the only reason to play MMOs and it’s the only one I need.

As to no arrow carts — yes, it’s true. Basically players fight players and siege fights siege. Some of the siege says it does damage to “foes,” like the catapults that shoot gravel. But I never saw any evidence of mass numbers of players being damaged more than trivially (if at all) by any siege. All the siege I saw was shooting at walls or other siege, not spamming AOE death on players.

There is burning oil, but your rams have a little roof that looks like it might protect the operator (not sure how well it works).

If players can get to the siege, then they can burn it, but that means you have to go outside and fight your way to it, or get inside and overrun it in order to destroy. So it’s a contest to see if attackers can get the wall down and overrun the place before defenders can kill or burn the field siege (i.e., it works how you would imagine a huge fight over a big kitten stone fort working in some semblance of the real world).

And you’re right, PvE always is boring the second time around. The problem with TESO is it’s boring the first time around as well. I have never had a problem, on that first run-through, just picking up a brand new character and running around the theme park at least one time.

With this game though, it was seriously almost unbearable even to get to level 10, and all I wanted to do was just see the RvR. There is literally no way I could see myself ever leveling outside of RvR in this game. Ever. It was so bad that I have a hard time thinking about doing it again to get back to RvR with a live character.

It’s not just that it’s boring and tedious and slow as hell. It’s so bad that it crosses some weird sort of line and feels insulting that the company actually thinks you are so mindless that you would pay them money to play it. I not only do not care one little bit about any character in the story; I actively despise them and wish every single one would just die in a fire already. It’s really that bad.

If the game goes B2P (once it’s on fire sale for $30) or F2P, and if you can get through ten levels without wanting to just poke your eyes out with a fork, then the RvR is definitely worth a look. It’s hard to tell how it will work out once it’s all there, and like I said, I fear it may be wasted since the game will struggle to ever have a decent overall population. But some good things are in there.

They really ought to just make it so that you can just grab a set of green gear and go straight into RvR from level 1, and pretend the whole rest of the game doesn’t even exist.

Terravos.4059:

But when i’ve zerged in ESO’s beta, I’m talking 120+ people fighting, I’ve gotten zero lag and i’ve not had a single FPS drop.

This was without question due to the servers and network not being under more than a trivial load in previous test weekends. During the current (2/28/14) beta weekend, AvA was unplayable anywhere in Cyrodiil because of the insane, hellacious server-side lag on everything.

Unlike the previous beta weekends, this weekend was an actual stress test where they tried to load the NA megaserver up to live levels for performance monitoring. The PvE game worked ok, with just a bit of lag here and there. The AvA back end fell flat on its kitten .

Even doing the noob quests at the Cyrodiil spawns, where nobody and nothing was anywhere near, the NPC dialogs were lagging by 10-15 seconds. In battles it was so bad that basic attacks wouldn’t even fire, and there were points where everything just froze and it was nothing but a bunch of statues with birds chirping for 30 seconds or more. Insane rubberbanding, skills firing 30-60 seconds after you activated, etc.

And there were, at the most, no more people on screen than I have ever seen in WvW in GW2. One “big” battle I might have been able to see 50-60 people total at a time; there were certainly less than 100 anywhere within draw distance in any direction.

They might get it working ok by launch; or at least no worse than any other game that has done RvR. But there is nothing revolutionary here when it comes to lag, and compared with these early reports from when there was no real load on the back end, you’re going to be sorely disappointed if you think it will be like that on live.

Also, the PvE side of the game is by far the worst I have ever seen in any MMO.

The NPC dialog reads like Mad Libs of the worst Tolkien fanfic writing you could imagine. And everywhere you go, every NPC in the kitten world has some mindless “arrow in the knee” catch phrase that they blurt out over and over and over.

And I’ll just go ahead and spoil every single quest in the game right now for you: Get the east X. Get the West X. Take them to the North Y. Kill A. That is it. Literally everything you do in the game from start to finish will follow that same exact pattern.

As far as I can tell, everyone ignores the quests and goes to grind the “dungeons” scattered around the map, because it’s a far less annoying and faster means of leveling up, and it’s also the only way to get gear at low levels, because everything is insanely overpriced.

That might sound like fun . . . until you realize that every dungeon is a stupidly small, empty, boring circle track with like three rooms, and a door at the “end” that just ports you back to the start. So you spend hours on end running in circles through the same three rooms and three hallways, killing the same spawns over and over and over, till you outlevel them, then move on to the next one.

Even by this “efficient” method, leveling is slow as molasses at the early levels, and I only barely managed to even get to level 10 in order to try the AvA.

And so far as it goes, I will say that Cyrodiil looks really nice. The maps are big, and objectives are spread out over what feels like a lot more epic scale.

The siege also feels like siege, and is far more interesting to use. For one thing, you can zoom the camera out far enough to actually see what the hell you’re shooting at; and the targeting interface for all the types is a very simple “arc” with an “X” at the end showing you the exact path and landing point.

The structures are huge with lots of vantage points, and, as far as I can tell, you can defend them in a way that real structures would be defended (i.e., no magical wall-climbing / gate ignoring AOE and no stupid geometry tricks needed to place “unkillable” siege). So you can stand on top of a thirty foot wall and have — surprise — an actual tactical advantage over someone on the ground.

The textures and landscapes also are beautiful, and the siege engines and everything are very huge and cool looking.

Overall, it looks like the AvA has a lot of potential. But I think it may be sadly wasted in a game that is just going to be an amazingly huge fail on the PvE side. About 90% of the lifetime revenue from this game is going to come from Skyrim owners who preorder it sight unseen. After that wave of dumb money is gone, it’s going to crash and burn in fantastic style.

It might keep all those people who are just waiting for Camelot Unchained to get released busy for a while. But I kinda doubt that’s enough to keep the game afloat all on its own.

As to leaderboards, I agree with what others already have suggested that there just aren’t any “good” ways to do them for PvE. The player skill cap, by definition, is low enough that almost anyone can reach it before long, and your efficiency beyond that just depends on repetition and the gear grind. Everyone is going to wind up at “the top” of any PvE leaderboard sooner or later.

Leaderboards based on anything like clear time also will have serious negative effects, because any time you put a number in a game, two things happen: (1) people will focus on gaming that number to the exclusion of all else; and (2) demands for a minimum score on that number will become a routine screener for groups.

This will delight a small number of people. But we have enough problems already with the speedrun / zerker meta and group finder postings with truly idiotic screens like +65 AR for explorable mode regular dungeons. Imagine what will happen when “TOP 100 SPEEDRANK ONLY” becomes commonplace.

The better way to go with this would be just putting in some “torture mode” or “feat of strength” style achievements, like clearing an instance in less than an absurdly low time, doing a series of them within a low overall time with the same group and no deaths, doing a whole sequence of very different ones with no skill or gear changes in the party, and under a very low elapsed time, etc.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Savoy.6824:

Why are none of the devs discussing the over abundance of ascended rings. There have been several proposals around these but not any comments by the devs on those proposals. Are they not helpful?

Just because we don’t reply doesn’t mean that we aren’t discussion or reading the proposals and discussions being put forward in the thread. It would be a huge evolution for us as CDI members if we could just get over this ‘Assumed’ barrier.

Maybe you could talk to the web team about putting a couple of Dev Hand buttons into the forum interface just for ANet staff to use, in CDI threads particularly.

For the first button, any ANet staff could click on a little checkmark just to signify “read it” or “noted,” without expressing any view up or down on the post.

For the second button, if something from the post is good enough to make it onto The List of your takeaways from the CDI thread, then you could click a shiny green “ANet +1” for that post to let us know that you saw it and it raised your interest.

On a side note: Canyons good. Bridges bad.

Again, if you like cheese tactics and playing bumper cars with zergs, EOTM offers plenty of that. Bridges (fixed and destructible) are features that should stay in EOTM where they belong.

DevonCarver.5370:

For the purposes of the question, think in terms of building a new map from scratch, rather than retrofitting the current maps.

On the subject of building new maps from scratch, and following on from your suggestions about more strategic control points:

You may want to explicitly think about, and ask for input on, the idea of any brand new map using a lattice type structure instead of open objectives like the old maps have. I’m not saying which approach is “better,” but there are consequences to both open and more structured map dynamics.

Lattice structures also force an attacker to think more strategically about making coordinated attacks on several points to put a main objective in contention and make it cap-able; plan the “shortest route” to the “most valuable” medium and long-term objectives, and so on.

And once you have lattice attributes in place, they give you a hook for putting in really neat features like letting commanders actually assign “missions” to cap specific objectives, that people can accept and complete . . . leading to further missions that unlock based on what the cap gives access to, etc.

And because of the more strategic planning involved to move the map, lattices tend to discourage random training and just flipping stuff all day for teh lulz. Given that EOTM now lets folks who like that game mode go hog wild with it, anything that dials back the tendency for aimless karma training in WvW would be appropriate and I think welcomed by many.

DevonCarver.5370:

I’m curious what you all think about choke points as strategic ideas. I don’t think we’d ever want a map that was just a bunch of canyons, this isn’t Sparta or Thermopylae, but having areas that make it harder for large groups to get through if they are well-defended creates gameplay. Think of a tower that guards the only pass through a canyon, rather than bridges everywhere. Is that something that, in moderation, could provide for more varied and strategic gameplay?

Beyond their ability to treb other nearby structures, the structures in the current maps are of very little strategic value for controlling actual map geography and movement through it. So something along these lines would be a great addition and would give a lot more perceived value to holding these designated strategic control points.

I see three things that would be needed to make some more strategically located choke point control structures a “good” addition:

• (1) Be Somewhere Important. Unless the structure is capped, it must be able to directly and easily exert significant control over any movement through an unavoidable choke point. And the choke has to lead to somewhere that the enemy will need to go (i.e., not just to the structure itself). There might be a long way around, but it should be long enough that capping the control point structure will still seem like the better option, if you think there is any way you can do it.

• (2) Have Control Siege That Can Actually Control a Choke Point. This means that the structure needs to allow placement of all siege types (siege and counter-siege) with clear and easy, overlapping fields of fire directly onto the choke. In other words, the siege needs to be able to fire and not be fired upon. That means high bluffs that can’t be reached by AOE spam, etc. The new structure and built-in siege features on the EOTM maps make it clear that you understand there is a problem with siege placement on many of the old structures. Those lessons should be applied to the new structures so that siege is usable directly for the intended defensive and control purpose, without stupid siege tricks like throwing onto some off-the-wall geometry feature that leaves you with no clear line of sight to use it.

• (3) Have a Designated Weak Point. Because the structure can’t be impenetrable, it needs to have one entry point of obvious use for capping it that is NOT within the field of fire of the control siege. So if attackers can push through to this point, then they should be afforded complete defilade from siege placed in the designated immune control siege areas, and will only have to contend with defenders at the door, using appropriately placed siege on or around the door to fight at that point as usual.

Even at the designated weak point, however, the local siege placement should, again, apply the lessons of EOTM so that it can be put in sensible places and used as intended, without being subject to instant death from magical wall-climing AOE spam and other cheese tactics. If you put it in plain view and Golems can shoot directly on it, then it deserves to die. Otherwise, if you put it where it “should” work and be shielded from direct ground fire, then it should work and be shielded from direct ground fire.

Cactus.2710:

The problem is that ANet has built so much visual clutter into the combat that I simply don’t think they could handle a three-realm scenario. GW2’s “server” capacity is already a misnomer since ANet leases server capacity in bulk from Akamai for NA (not sure who they use for EU). The concept of “server” is purely artificial so indeed ANet should in theory be able to aggregate players as you propose, but I don’t think their game engine can handle the breadth of abilities and effects that they’ve built into the game and handle large numbers of players at the same time.

I believe you are correct that the current back end could not handle substantially more players on a WvW map instance than we see now in T1 battlegrounds (where skill lag does become a real problem regularly).

All of the proposals for rebalancing population by alliances or factions or whatever assume that at the same time we also would have the EOTM-style overflows ported over to the traditional WvW maps as well.

That would be required both to keep queue times manageable at prime time, and to allow larger total populations to be active in the war than what the system can handle in one battlegrounds instance.

The assumption also is that the system would attempt to keep populations within each instance balanced fairly closely between the three sides, and just create and destroy instances as needed to fill as many balanced maps as it could.

The excess from any one side would have to be queued if they could not get in without unbalancing the numbers in an instance (which would of course encourage them to swap to an “outnumbered” side to avoid the queues).

Zepher.7803:

I have to ask the Moderators to get this thread back on track. 3 pages of multiple posts that don’t have anything to do with the CDI Topic is killing it.

Devon pointed up the idea of server alliances as interesting, said he thinks it could do some good, and asked for more specific comments about it as a possible solution. He also specifically asked if the idea of “server pride,” or lack of it, is linked to “underperformance” of certain worlds in WvW.

The last several pages contain a good number of posts responding directly to the (collaboratively) revised topic of the thread, and to Devon’s questions.

The current stacking+coverage meta and long standing population balance problems are serious issues, that people have been asking for some work on for a long time. And people care a lot about notions like pride, identity, and community. So they write a lot about these things when asked why they matter, and how to address them.

“Cash-like” rewards we can buy shiny things with are nice, but I think that the truly competitive players, and even those less competitive, would more appreciate unique titles and finishers for the top three leaderboard spots of each season (team and solo), as well as common unique finishers for those who rank in broad gold/silver/bronze bands at the end as well.

People who are competitive and “hardcore” really like having these sort of “feat of strength” rewards that show you were there back when and you did some big hard thing, and you earned something that will be a unique record of what you did forever.

Giving unique rewards for each tier and the top three spots lets everyone get some lasting recognition linked to their performance. And these would be things you can compete for anew each season; either to move up and get the harder to win titles, or just to keep placing at the same level to show your dedication.

And for those that aren’t that competitive, a title and finisher that is unique to the season, but awarded to everyone who completes a relatively simple 10-part meta achievement would offer a nice “I was there” token that they could get, which still means a little something to those that made the effort to get it.

Midius.6501:

The problem with alliances etc. is, that they have to be static to build up a Community. But whenever you have a static system the ppl will always join the winning Team, you got the same problem then before.

It is a problem. But with a large enough scale two things happen: (1) the numbers are large enough that stacking becomes harder to pull off, especially if only a small group cares about it; and (2) as long as you have “enough” people on all sides to fill at least one map equally to the top, queues and overflows will discourage stacking any side to any noticeable degree.

The way you counter stacking is enforcing strict numbers balance in each map instance, which means no side can ever get excessive numbers onto a map, no matter how many are sitting in the queues. Those people on the stacked side then get sick of sitting around and change sides so they can play the game instead of waiting all day.

With a working active map balancing system, players will tend early on to seek the side that has the lowest queue times in their preferred time slot, and whatever side that is will become their home. Any attempts to stack any side beyond rough equality will be defeated, because new people just wind up sitting in queues all the time.

Ragnar.4257:

I’ve seen merging servers mentioned a few times. Is this actually workable? Maybe it’s different in NA, but in EU even lower tier T4-7 servers are capable of regularly having queues during primetime, and some higher tier T1-3 servers have no queues in primetime. The difference is really in the off-peak times. Would merging lower ranked servers not simply result in massive primetime queues?

That’s what overflows are for. The idea would be to bring in EOTM-style overflows (but NOT the red-green-blue random server groups) at the same time as any new server alliances, to avoid any excessive queues during prime-time.

DevonCarver.5370:

I’d be curious to know if the folks who argue against and world pride feel that way because of being on underperforming worlds or not.

Reading through your comments again, I felt like this needs a response, not to your question, but how you posed it. You might have meant this innocently, but read in the most obvious way, it sounds like you’re saying that you think what we’re talking about is somehow rescuing “underperforming” worlds that aren’t enjoying WvW because they just aren’t very good at it.

It’s important for people to understand, and I think for ANet to acknowledge, that these worlds you’re talking about are not “underperforming”; they are abandoned. And players abandoned them because your game is broken when it comes to maintaining population balance in WvW across all of the current shards.

Active WvW players are on the whole the most dedicated players you have across all servers, those on the “underperforming” worlds who are still doing it most of all. Those people are grossly overperforming when it comes to playing the game, and doing so despite what is a pretty serious and long neglected problem at this point.

What we’re talking about is fixing at a game mechanics level the problem that players have been doing their best to address on their own by just leaving the majority of servers where WvW is broken, and moving to the handful (3-6) where it can be made to work by sheer force of numbers.

Stacking + coverage >>> all else in the current state of WvW, and there is no dynamic map balancing system or other mechanic to counter that. But if all maps are full on all sides all the time (or if things are as close to that as players can make them), then it forces a rough sort of balance, or at least as close as we can get.

Given that the total number of players in WvW across the game is not that large, this is a work around that only works on a handful of worlds, and is no aid to the other 20+ that, at this point, have nobody left to even try it. So people who like WvW just move to where it works, and leave where it doesn’t.

Matipzieu KyA.9613:

(E) Many players have suggested that game-wide communities can be established. But how much community is there on sPvP or EoTM? This is one of my biggest concerns about removing the “world” from World v. World. We have a simple test case: in sPvP, you have short-duration set matches composed of players that will overwhelmingly never see each other again. This allows players to get into the game and play it very quickly and easy—great!

EOTM and sPvP actively obstruct communities by forcing constant, random churn between “sides.” That’s why EOTM-style random server mash ups won’t work.

There are, however, two counter-examples that prove why, although some stable frame of reference is needed, the current “servers” or “worlds” that we happen to have today are not integral either to building or keeping the communities we have. In fact it’s clear that the setup we have today is actively destroying communities, not keeping them alive or helping them thrive.

Look at single-shard or server-less games

First, look at any single-server (server-less) game that has strong communities. EvE is the most obvious example, where all communities are player formed, and range in scale from small 5-man corps up to 5,000-man mega corps, corp alliances with 10s of 1,000s, and “coalitions” formed from loose, constantly shifting informal cooperation between alliances (coalitions are purely a creature of player behavior, because the game has no features at all to make any in-game tangible connections between alliances). EvE is arguably the most community-driven game in existence today, and not a server in sight.

There are other server-less games as well where players have no problems forming and maintaining strong communities. TSW and STO never had servers or shards or anything like that to segregate players. TESO, when it comes out also will be a singe-shard game. “Single-shard universe” is even a buzzword and a selling point today, and it’s because it obliterates the obstacles to community that come from any architecture that segregates and separates players.

Servers in fact have, when poorly managed, been more often the instrument of death and destruction of communities in games that rely on them. The disastrous crash and burn of SWTOR in the first year was due in very large part to Bioware refusing to wake up and confront the utter collapse of the population, which left players stranded on graveyard servers for months on end until they finally did forced merges down to just three NA servers from what had been dozens.

A similar toxic mechanic has taken hold here in the narrow world of WvW, where almost the entire active population of WvW players has wound up on just three servers. In the absence of any action by ANet to address the population balancing problems, players have addressed it themselves by just reducing the number of worlds where WvW actually happens to a minimum, ensuring that all those worlds have a high and reasonably balanced population.

If people want to play WvW with any reasonable semblance of balance, they have no choice. They have to stack, because it’s what works. The alternative is clinging to graveyard servers with empty maps, hoping maybe someday things will change and people will come back. But even if they do, the communities that were ripped apart by the exodus will be long gone, forgotten even by many who were a part of them.

What if we had only three servers instead of twenty-four to start with?

Second, just imagine for a minute that ANet made some sort of revolutionary change to their back end load balancing code that allowed them to host eight times as many players on a server as they can support today. So ANet decides to merge servers from twenty-four NA shards down to just three.

Would our communities fall apart overnight because now they’re on servers with three or five or eight times the population? No. Your guilds and friends and groups of friends would go right on doing what they do every day now, with the same people they do those things with today. You would just see some more new faces around for a while (until you get to know them). You might even make some new friends.

Server alliances would basically be that; making a few bigger cities out of what are now a lot of mostly small, isolated, and in many cases deserted neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods would still exist. They just would be part of something bigger and better as well, and they would have a chance at least to thrive and grow, rather than being left to wither and die.

I only ever see the ruins held when there is a daily point for them. Then you can watch as one person after another caps them in turn for a random color, and then runs away and never comes back. I reckon this makes for some easy kills for roamers on unwary zerglings just trying to get the dailies. But other than that, it seems they’re ignored.

Kind of a vague premise here, but weak in what way? Are you dying all the time, or finding that you can’t kill anything? And are you zerging or roaming solo or with small groups?

If you’re dying in zergs all the time, the problem is likely as much tactics and positioning as any build or gear issue. If you’re running through stacked AC circles, getting isolated and focused 5v1, not staying stacked on the commander when pushing to get the benefit of AOE cap damage reduction and blast healing+AOE cleansing, then you’re going to die no matter what.

If you’re running into people solo and can’t kill any of them, then you may be running a build made for zerging that has no burst damage and not enough control+escape to dictate the terms of the fight. You also may just be behind the stats curve; lots of roamers are going to have fully optimized builds, full guard stacks at all times, and a lot of experience killing people 1v1 with their setup in WvW.

There also are a lot more cheese builds in WvW compared with sPvP, since the PvP nerfs to stuff like stealth spam have not been ported over.

As was said already, alliances are a means to balancing population when you are going to have ongoing three-sided battles. They should allow as consistent a context as possible so that people within each alliance can form stable communities.

Servers are a bad sorting mechanic for population balancing, as there can be no doubt at this point. Server alliances would be a good bit less bad if done on a large enough scale to dilute any attempts at stacking. Player chosen factions would be a better mechanic, but we’re probably not going to get that.

Regardless of all that, the central focus of all these ideas like “pride” and “loyalty” and “identity” always ought to be — really must be — groups that players form on their own, and that means guilds not “servers” or even “server alliances” or any other form of arbitrary, game-imposed bins that people are sorted into for the purpose of simply making the game work in a reasonable way.

Where your guild chooses to “live” in terms of server or alliance or faction or whatever has some meaning, because it determines what other guilds you ally with and who you see in the game on “your side” every day. Those things are important, and that community of people around you should be stable and familiar.

But the underlying focus of loyalty and pride and identity ought to always be on the guilds themselves, not the larger bins that are created for the main purpose of just making fights reasonably fair.

And that means that the thing we really need, which we do not have in any form, is guild leaderboards within each faction or alliance that make visible and tangible the contribution of each guild to the war effort.

I posted about this at some length above, and I won’t repeat what I said before. But part of what’s happening here is that because what guilds do is completely meaningless and invisible in WvW, we don’t even know what we’re missing. So we grasp at things like “server pride” to fill a hole that would not need to be filled if we had visible recognition of each guild’s team efforts that we could base our “pride” and “loyalty” and “identity” on when it comes to WvW.

Server Alliances would be a great start and would directly address the serious, community-wrecking, toxic dynamics that the current server-based meta creates. They would solve some real problems and would be a step in the right direction. And they could be put in place without destroying the existing communities we do have. Our “neighborhoods” would get a little bigger; but that just means we have more neighbors. They can still be familiar and valuable to us.

The next step would be leaderboards within each alliance to give us a real outlet and focus for building actual pride and identity by showing us how much the groups that really mean something to us, and that we each have a direct impact on, contribute to our community.

Once we get that, then what is done in WvW actually will have some lasting meaning beyond just farming and training, and it will be meaning that endures above and beyond “wins” and “losses” and who came in “1st” or “2nd” last week, in wars on which, in the end, any one player can have, at most, a vanishingly small impact.

clint.5681:

Whoever mentioned alliances is a smart man and we should discuss how that would work more.

Should the alliances be the merger of lower tier servers together say SF+FC+ET into one super server of sexyness?

or should it be a lower tier + middle tier+ plus upper tier server?

I see what you did there.

The best solution from the standpoint of stability and population balancing would be giving each Alliance an equal cross section of servers from all tiers, from top to bottom. So in NA it should be three Alliances, with eight servers in each, ranging from (EDIT: Seriously, Mr. Kitten Filter?) Tee-One to Tee-Eight.

Once set up though, any server alliance groups should be fixed and stable, because people are going to build up their webs of trust and deploy shared resources at an Alliance level, and changing those associations would be really disruptive.

DevonCarver.5370:

From my perspective, the discussion around changes to the matchup length are interesting. I originally proposed 8 hour matches, but someone else suggested a version that I think would be really interesting which is basically that the weekend is one matchup and the weekdays are another. I’d be curious to hear what people think about that.

Weekday vs. Weekend matches . . . could be very neat. There is great intuitive appeal in this, given that the population dynamics are very different from weekday to weekend. You would need to be pretty thoughtful about the exact start and stop times for the “weekend” though to avoid unintended consequences with the various time zones.

I think “weekend” players would love to have a chance to get a “win” during the days they play without wondering whether they may just fight hard and get ahead, then see it all lost over the five days they don’t play.

DevonCarver.5370:

Probably the most contentious issue has been the talk of getting rid of world’s and replacing the system with just the three colors. I think there is some merit to the idea, although I believe the worlds have a lot of value. I’d be curious to know if the folks who argue against and world pride feel that way because of being on underperforming worlds or not.

I think it’s safe to say that the overwhelming sentiment is that nobody wants random Red v. Blue, and everyone wants a “place” to call their own, and a stable community to feel a part of. I believe that it’s absolutely true that a sense of community is key; but I also believe it’s plainly false that “worlds” are the only or best anchor for that.

I’ve also been on underperforming and overperforming worlds, and from either point of view, the current meta is just bad for everyone, at all levels. That’s why everyone should want to see it fixed no matter what tier they’re in now. And I believe that most or all active WvW players at every level do want to see a Big Change in this respect, and one that would change things for everyone.

DevonCarver.5370:

I also wonder if there isn’t some work that could be done to restore that world pride without completely overhauling the WvW system. Someone mentioned alliances, which I think would work fairly well. If the less populous worlds were grouped together, does that seem like something that could reinvigorate them?

If you think this is something that could happen, I would say anything at all that can be done down this road would be a step in the right direction.

Of all the things that plausibly could be done, server alliances appear to be the most doable thing that offers a real chance of rolling back the current stacking + coverage meta, without destroying existing communities.

I still believe the most benefit would come from rolling servers into alliances across all the tiers, with each alliance anchored by a T1 server and including a cross-section of others from all lower tiers.

However, you could start by rolling up everyone in T2-8 or T3-8 into three Alliance super-groups. That in itself could be enough to bring some real energy back to those worlds once they’re in this new super tier, and it might even draw some nontrivial numbers out of T1 if it works well. Also, the lowest tiers are in such bad shape now that almost nothing could make them worse, so the risk of a bad outcome is less.

If that works out well, then you can think about how to incorporate the T1-2 worlds into the alliances, if it seems like it would be a further improvement (the extent of migration from T1/2 into the new T2-8 or T3-8 super tier would be a reliable signal for whether further consolidation would be a good move).

There is, however, one BIG risk in leaving the T1/2 worlds out of the alliances, and that is what happens if another one pulls an SoR in the meantime and implodes. If that happens, they would have no airbag of lower tiers to catch them, and the results of being stuck in a high tier while the server falls to bits would be pretty awful.

If you only roll up the lower tiers, that also would effectively put a “glass ceiling” in place and prevent any of those worlds from ever moving up into T1/2 or whatever are left at the top, which would be unfortunate.

Those last two things seem to further suggest that alliances really ought to be a top to bottom thing and should roll up all of the tiers, to minimize or avoid unintended consequences from any future shifts of population.

DevonCarver.5370:

Interesting, I hadn’t considered using the 3 of 5 system there. Do you think that would really force groups to fight it out or would people just turtle up to prevent capture?

Some sort of segmented system seems like it would be tempting enough that people would always think, “We can just take one corner; that’ll be easy. And at least it will stop them trebbing our towers non-stop while we go do other things.” Then they get sucked into the meat grinder and can’t disengage without losing their corner; or someone thinks, “Well that was easy, maybe we can take one more . . . ?”

DevonCarver.5370:

Would it make Stonemist feel too difficult to capture if the assaulting team had to capture and hold 3 capture points? Here are some of the problems I see with it.

Maybe SM could be divided into three lower zones that could be capped (and fought over) individually, and the fourth zone (upper floors) could only be accessed if you hold all three lower ones. Basically the lower level could be three separate towers glued together by common walls and gates between.

This might lead to an ongoing battle raging between sides that hold only one or two of the three segments, and only occasionally someone could gain control of all of it and thus the strategic advantage of using the higher floors to build commanding siege.

It would be hard to capture the whole thing, but also hard to hold the whole thing, since someone could make a hard push to take just one segment away, and thereby deny use of the upper levels to anyone.

I does have the advantage of inviting a focused, continuous war for control over the single biggest strategic asset on the map. It also would mitigate the large PPT bonus that comes from holding what is otherwise kind of an unremarkable and not hard to flip control point now.

EDIT: Alternatively, maybe holding any one lower zone would open up a portal from that zone to the upper floors, so if each side held one corner of SM, the upper floors would become a total no-mans-land, where nobody could build siege without it being instantly overrun, and big raging battles could ensue.

King Amadaeus.8619:

Actually the biggest reason for “stacking” (beyond buffs) is to mitigate AoE dmg by manipulating the AoE cap.

It is a flaw in the design of this game, ANET can’t (Read: says they can’t) change it due to technical limitations on their end.

Wasn’t there a time when there was no AOE cap? What was happening back then that made them add it?

Terravos.4059:

As for the Comparison between WvW and AvA in ESO..

There is no contest, ESO AvA is far far superior.

Not only does it run way way better….(Zero lag…and I mean that..Zero..I have never seen an MMO to date have the performance that ESO has in PvP)

It doesn’t have crappy gimmicks like GW2, There is no Down System, If you want to Res someone, You have to walk up to them, and cast a Res Spell, that takes like 10 seconds almost to cast…If someone interrupts you, You have to start over with the cast.

It also doesn’t have an AOE Cap, Countless times in beta I’ve seen 8 People absolutely Blow the Hell out of Large Groups of Players trying to Zerg something…

If you bunch up in ESO, you will die… Like you’re suppose to.

The Map is also vastly superior to GW2 as well…I mean its not even close… Not only its it bigger then all the Borderlands,EB,EOTM combined…It actually pushes you not to zerg objectives…

You get more for killing someone Solo, Then you do for taking an Undefended Keep..

There is no contest..It is the better PvP Game.

This sums up perfectly why ESO AvA will pwn GW2 WvW in every way, when it comes to mechanics and gameplay.

Add to that they are making an (apparently pretty successful) design effort to head off the eternal population balancing / stacking issues with instanced maps and forced balance within instances. This alone will have an enormous impact on making AvA not suck the way WvW does.

The big question is whether ESO can draw and sustain a strong population given that they have hobbled themselves with an asinine pricing model and the PvE is horrendously bad. If the game succeeds despite Bethesda’s every effort to strangle it in the crib, then it will be the go-to for players that want to do nothing but AvA all day.

If it fails generally, AvA won’t matter because it will be a ghost town. Which, let’s face it, has happened often enough to games that did this mode well in the past.

One thing is sure, the game will go either F2P or B2P within 90 days of launch. At that point we’ll see whether it actually can compete with GW2.

Either way, great AvA alone will not be enough to maintain a large enough paying playerbase to sustain it. The game has to succeed generally with the carebear masses to be viable, and it’s not at all clear that it has any chance of that.

For all these 0/0/30/10/30 Hambow Warrior setups, what are the standard skills, traits, and gear?

phys.7689:

I will say though, devons idea has a lot of merit, like i said i would break it into days, and have 3 rounds per day.

If you consider an idea with no apparent benefits, that nobody asked for, which does nothing to solve any core, underlying problems to have “merit,” then I guess so.

You also can substitute any of a dozen words in place of “server” into the things you’re saying and get to the exact same place. Again, this is amply proven by the successful games that do have strong communities, and do not have “servers.”

Community is crucial to the game, and not just in WvW. “Servers” are not crucial to a sense of community; they never have been and never will be. They are, if anything, obstacles to a sense of community, and, as recent experience shows, often the very instruments of its demise.

clint.5681:

Couldnt you combine 3 servers each into like a “super server” (alliance) that would help solve population problems if you combined them smartly (No combining all T1 into one server). Say ET + DB+ JQ or AR+YB+TC ( I just threw some random servers in, idk their current strengths, i left the game in December.)

This is a reasonably good idea, even with the issues it would create. It might not be the best possible solution. But of the things that plausibly could be done, it might be the least worst thing that could make a real dent in the current meta.

Given that the total population of active WvW players seems to be quite small, I would go even further and combine all of NA into three permanent alliances, each with an equal share of the current servers from each tier. So each one would have a single T1 server, and equal numbers of servers from the other tiers down the line, for a total of 8 servers in each Alliance.

Stacking would still be “possible,” but with eight servers all ganged together it would become a whole lot harder to pull off and a whole lot easier to counter. It also would be a lot harder for a small group to keep up the effort when the ultimate results would depend on what happens on the other seven servers in the alliance.

Of the things that might be done, this seems like it could be one of the less difficult ones to implement, because they already have the back end in place to queue players from multiple servers into global overflow maps, which is what happens in EOTM.

The work would be setting up fixed server groups that would take the place of the on-the-fly R-G-B groups in EOTM, but mechanically from that point it works the same as EOTM does already. They also would have to implement the EOTM queueing and overflow scheme for the old WvW maps, which is work, but at least it means only adapting work they already have done.

EU would be a bit of an issue with the languages, but it might be less worse than what we have now.

I play on an NA server but often am on during oceanic hours, and even us ignorant ‘mericans do fairly well following a couple excellent Chinese commanders who speak zero English. They have chat macros for “Ctrl-T + stay on pin” “stack = power” and “push = veil”; and that’s actually about all they ever need to say.

Deniara Devious.3948:

Merging all servers to colors might function sort of okay in NA, but here in EU it won’t work well, because we have so many different languages. I am glad that Arenanet developers understand that server pride (but also guild pride) are important aspects of this game.

“Server pride” is only a thing because servers are what we have. Other games with single-server universes have just as strong — if anything far stronger — communities. But they’re formed around other anchors like factions or player-made alliances, not an arbitrary set of load-balancing bins (which, after all, only serve to divide, not unite players).

“Servers” are not an integral or even a helpful feature for developing communities. Some sort of stable anchor for identity that will let players form lasting groups is. There could be other mechanics like global factions that would allow that, and that also would decouple the community anchoring elements from the underlying WvW population balancing elements.

As others have pointed out — and SoR’s recent failscade proves — given a choice between “server pride” and just bolting to a server with higher population and better coverage, to avoid the pointy end of the stacking + coverage meta, it is abundantly clear which thing is actually most important to most active WvW players.

It is certainly true that randomly tossing players on the fly into Red v. Blue bins does and would obstruct attempts to maintain stable communities in WvW. It is certainly false that “servers” and “server pride” are the only, the best, or even a very good alternative.

There are approaches that would preserve the ability to build stable communities and also allow ANet to address head on the elephant in the room, which everyone knows is the stacking + coverage meta. Those approaches should get serious thought and real consideration.

This is an idea to counter the stacking and coverage meta with a relatively simple change to the math behind PPT.

The idea is, apply diminishing returns to PPT, such that the first few objectives taken add a large (same as current) increment to PPT, but each additional objective adds a smaller and smaller increment as more are taken and held by one side.

This would do two things: (1) push the point at which a match becomes a certain loss farther out toward the bitter end; and (2) allow a side that is behind in PPT to catch up quicker, without being buried overnight in a PPT hole that they never can dig out of during their peak hours.

Overall, the goal would be to balance the math out so that today’s 695 tick is never possible. With DR, the new math would mean that a side that holds the entire map would get, say, a 250-300 tick, and another side could come online and get back up to say a 200 tick just by taking back it’s own corner of EB.

This could be matched by a new “Overextended” debuff that would kick in on the side with the highest numbers on a map, any time another side gets “Outnumbered.” The effect would be a strong and scaling debuff to PPT, to the point where if one side was on a map all alone, PPT would basically grind to a halt for that Overextended side, on that map, until the population balance recovers to the point that nobody has Outnumbered there any more.

These two things could help to negate the strategy of winning through stacking and coverage alone, and make it a lot harder for a side to just dominate, without winning fights consistently throughout the match. It would also require each side to scrap to maintain much narrower leads than we tend to see servers winning by today, which would allow reversals to still happen right up into the final day or two.

With stacking + coverage no longer the dominant strategies for winning, people also would go back to thinking about where they should transfer based on more desirable criteria like where queue times are shorter (i.e., populations lower), or what the actual community is like, instead of who is paying the most to stack.

DevonCarver.5370:

I’d say there is a pretty strong sentiment against the idea of collapsing all of WvW into 3 colors, rather than the current world set up. Which I agree with. I think world pride and association is an important part of the way that WvW works currently.

DevonCarver.5370:

I’m curious what you all think of that? Does it retain the feeling of victory in WvW right now and solve problems or does it just introduce more issues without solving any core concerns?

I agree with the first part, and it’s an obvious and reasonable feeling.

But I don’t see how just shortening up the matches does anything to address the toxic, community-wrecking stacking + coverage meta that people have been asking for a solution to for so long.

My response is: What do you think about the idea of implementing global factions to replace servers as the anchors for that sense of identity and “home,” so that we could have those great communities, but build them around an association that isn’t subject to the intractable meta problems we have as a result of server-based match ups?

That would allow you guys to pull in the one greatest feature of EOTM — dynamic map balancing — without losing the core features of old school WvW (long term strategic game play and a sense of a fixed, familiar community and loyalty).

There are some . . . interesting . . . behaviors in the overflow and queueing mechanics. I’ve seen it happen more than once where I go into an overflow and everyone was from one side; zero from the others. It’s funny for about two and a half minutes. Then the whole map is red and everyone is standing around like . . . w t f . . .?

UltraHiDef.4809:

So many responses from Devon Carver, I can’t even count ’em anymore. Keep the good communication with your players, ANet!

It’s unrealistic to expect he would respond in turn to suggestions, and that was not the stated plan anyway. They’re “collecting” input now, and responses will come in a consolidated posting or Ready Up review once they have discussed and digested.

SkyFallsInThunder.8257:

I found that staying on the pin makes you stay alive longer simply because that’s where the heals, stability and AoE condition removals are dropped.

This.

SkyFallsInThunder.8257:

Besides, staying alive should not be your main concern in zerg fighting, there will always be casualties and random damage spikes. What matters a lot is making the zerg as easy to wield for the commander as possible, which means stacking on pin.

Actually staying alive should be your first concern, because if it’s not, then you will become just another rallybot. (Protip: If you look around the zerg and don’t know who the rallybot is . . . it’s you.)

Especially when you’re starting out and may not be a major contributor to team wins, you need to make sure first and foremost that you also are not a major contributor to team losses.