Guild Wars 2

Well, in my opinion the relatively fair implementation would be to grant extra pips for players that were on any map for over 2.5 minutes under outmanned buff.

The way it could be implemented would be to implement separate “outmanned” counter, which increases every second of outmanned buff. In the end – if you reached value of 150 you get the buff – even if you switch map for example to defend a keep in emergecy (if you still have the T3 participation).

That way – if you were for on map for 3 minutes with outmanned and just lost the buff before “tick” you still get the bonus. If you switched and akitten at spawn 2 minutes before the tick – you get no bonus.

Well, for once I think that the devs did a right thing here. And not because current system rewards “old” dedicated WvW players (Which is not bad – becayse those felt beeing left out for years)

The current system promotes dedcation of players. It will filter out those that do not care and that just thought they will grab some cheasy-easy rewards “achies” or eq fast.

I remember the times of “WvW” tournaments, where WvW was also flooded with people, that just wanted the “achies” and who in majority left the WvW afterwards. Creating a deep resentment in WvW for “PvE” players.

In this system everything tells you “long term commitment”.

Well, full set is impossible but one piece is easily doable with old tickets. I have spend some of my old (I think about 50%) tickets before but still had 600 left on the day of patch.

You might also look on the live matchup status here (And depending on your location server check appropriate continent – since the previous posting relates to NA i will link for EU):

http://mos.millenium.org/eu

There when you look on the kill/death ratios you might notice that there is something more to the serwers quality than the rank.
For example the third matchup ( Piken Square +Whiteside Ridge vs Augury Rock +Vizunah Square vs
Seafarer’s Rest +Blacktide) is in this case quite interesting. You have rank 3 against rank 10 against rank 11 , but apparently the current score does not reflect the ranking exactly …

In any case – if you intend to run with organized groups and fight – you might check the servers with K/D ratios high. Most likely there is a base of experienced players and experienced commanders and you will have a better opportunity to learn and have fun.

When choosing you could also consider that in current situation, the highly stacked servers will have large queues.

And obviously, if you already started the game, you might checkout playing on YOUR server ?

Well, you can check this page

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Structure_upgrade

Also if anyone is interested sometimes before HoT someone made time calculations for keeps here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Average-Time-to-Build-a-Waypoint/5332741

Jim Hunter.6821:

Sviel.7493:

Wait, what tactic was removed from the game?

Draining supply to make a keep vulnerable is certainly viable

But draining supply to prevent upgrades isn’t….

On the other hand – even with full supply the keep will now will not upgrade if no dolly gets inside.

With old system if the keep had supplies these would serve as “upgrade buffer” of several dollies (depending on reserves – even up to 10 ).

Previously I also did a fair share of objective upgrading. Compared to current situation – the things I didn’t like was personal gold cost and the intended or unintended supply trolling.

The things I did like was the possible optimization of upgrades – you could go for walls + gates in first order while building siege with camp suppy. In that case tou had a practically a T2 objective lightning fast compared to now (As the “personnel” upgrades are pretty meaningless towards the structure defense). Also after all was already upgraded you had much larger buffer of supply inside.

Also – the upgrade time for inner towers now is so tragic. Before – the one worker was able to burn down through the supply of a single (upgraded for double supply) dolyak before next one came. Effectively burning 70 supply per dolyak run. Walls + door = 600 supply – that was only 9 upgraded dolyaks. Now 30 (or 60 without double supply guild claim).

As a defender, I personally would not mind going to old system – without the personal gold cost. Preferrably with customized order of upgrades for the guild claiming objective to avoid trolling. Well – as attacker – maybe not that much since things got upgraded walls and doors ultra-fast compared to now.

If I recall when the bloodstone fen was introduced one of my guildies used “Teleport to Friend” to access it. But that only means he was able to skip on the related living story, as of course that chapter was free for anyone who logged in.
It still might work to access the map, since as far as I can tell only the story chapter is locked.

People complained about desert BL maps beeing too large, and taking too much time to get from one spot to the other.
And originally as I remember the WP in both Fire and Air keep was unavailable for the “home” server? (Though can’t recall if it was design or just a bug)

Well, it sort of already is in, though you need eagle eye to spot the difference. The last time it was discussed in this thread, and so far the response was “I’ll pass on the feedback to the team.”

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Separate-sub-squad-color/first#post5940701

Well, how about that bug ?

For quite a long time the mandatory map completion required also all WvW maps.
Now that was a real pain even for WvW players – as sometimes you just had to wait for several weeks to get to that particular garrison (because either you missed the time it was capped, or your server was too outmatched) .

Now – it’s not that tragic thing really. Even without extra boosts it’s about 9 hours real time, just need to login during the prime time and join zerg for a few days. Or grind it out during weekend. Not the ideal solution but compared to the effort needed for crafting precursor or gathering all the mats, it’s nothing.

In my opinion the best solution would be to have PvE and WvW and PvP version of the legendaries. With separate crafting precursor collections. But that’s not going to happen.

Balthazzarr.1349:

If the OP is correct then somebody explain to me why I don’t get skill lag or other lag? Not even in blob situations. I run mid to high graphic settings, nothing low and run GW2 on an ASUS RoG laptop. My internet speed is 60mbps.

If the lag is the fault of ANet then why am I not getting it?

Define “Blob situations” – people have different meaning for this. Maybe you just have not met the typical “skill lag” (a 50vs50vs50 SM fight is pretty good chance for that, while 70vs70 is not – for some reason need 3 parties for true skill lag)

Seriously ? You want to force everyone to play EOTM during the week and WvW only for weekends ?

Dusty Moon.4382:

Dawdler.8521:

Dusty Moon.4382:

No – big zergs mean more information coming through your connection. Your PC might not be able to handle all the data coming though.

This still has nothing to do with skill lag unless you are using a 56k modem from the moon or something (and DX9 or your CPU has nothing to do with it either btw).

The server skill queue get clogged by client requests and take longer to send out responses, hence your skill activation lags. Nothing more to it.

It does make a difference. If you think it doesn’t you are kidding yourself.

Turn down your graphics also. That really lowers lag. The more information that comes in, the more lag you get.

People like to blame the servers but it is also 50% their machine.

When the skill lag is mentioned we are not talking about FPS drops or anything like it.

In general when server “skill lag” appears – you are able to move, and most of the time your #1 skill works. But when you try to use other skills – including healing it refuses to activate. The chat works normally as you can tell by people around starting to complain about skills not working.

In the difference to normal lag when you check FPS and ping they are at normal values. Clearly when you have 50ms ping and are still recording at 60fps the issue is on server side.

Dawdler.8521:

Yuffi.2430:

Locking tactivators to a specific guild is great while players of that guild are on the map and present at that location, but literally useless otherwise.

Tactivators is a guild thing. Literally, they come from an upgraded and expensive guild hall. Why should tactivators by default be open to pugs?

Again, simple solution:
- Tactivators default to guild only on claim
- Guild can still open it to public manually
- if no guild member with tactivator access has been active on the map for say 1 hour, it flip open to public automatically.

As to locking the public activation – can’t say for others but I’m never doing this mainly for 2 reasons:

You cannot guarantee that in time of need your guild will have members on the map(Some structures are owned for couple of days so unless you are member of some large/community guild with 24h coverage it’s just not possible)

Even if you have people on map you cannot guarantee that in time of need your guild members will be there in time to flip it.

The only better option than 2-1-1 would be 1-1-1, and be done with the scoring. It would give even closer scoring !

Well would surely be funny to run guard spamming staff #1 without the cap limit.

Originally the flax fibers were not a problem, the resonating slivers were. When they changed scribing and resonating slivers the price of flax went up like 10 times (from a bit more than 1 silver to 10 silver)

But I agree that the WvW reward tracks should have more WvW oriented rewards. And I agree that having Flax fibers in EVERY WvW tactic/upgrade is bad, especiall in such high number. Not to mention that because of the flax numbers the low level upgrades like hardened gates cost 50% more than upgrades like emergency WP.

As a scribe I wouldn’t mind even having WvW reward tracks for some specific decoration elements.

After all the raids/fractals have specific decorations (Those trophies from raids, solid stuff fragments, and holo norns from fractals) (A scale model of SM castle ? Or flat model of WvW – maybe even map reflecting the current BL state ?)

Balthazzarr.1349:

I could be wrong.. but I honestly believe that the “beginning of the end” for WvW was the introduction of the Megaserver in PvE. Once we were unable to pop out to the cities and put out the call for help in WvW for our own server the crippling began.

My feeling exactly. The Megaserver destroyed the natural bond that existed between players of the same server. There was always a steady inflow of new people.
Currently even trying to recruit new players for WvW guild is hard as hell outside WvW, and the “newbies” come to WvW even less frequently.

And while the new people might have fun in PvE megaserver maps, they might get a nasty surprize when they login the WvW and find out they are on a poor server.

The 2-1-1 system is really really wrong. In any competition second and third place show be reward differently.

Some people think that this will encourage the 2 lesser servers to team up, and for anyone paying attention to WvW in past years it is obvious it will not happen.

After all the 2 servers with lower points ALWAYS had option of double-teaming the leader – but it rarely happened. If it did – mostly because they had some sort of gurdge against it. The 2-1-1 changes nothing.

With 2-1-1 there is no reward for second place, and no “punishment” for third place. In many skirmishes one of the 3 servers falls behind enough that it’s not possible to catch up to leader.
Why would you care for helping current runner up to be winner ?

The people in the 3-rd one will tell you they don’t play for PPT but for fights, and anyway we will get the same points as server 2 (It’s funny though that when you lead in skirmish so many of those people sound really happy about winning those 2 points)

In fact this might have rather opposite effect. Let’s imagine you have 3 servers. One is leading in overall points but in current skirmish it’s 3-rd. One is runner up in overall points, and is also second in the current skirmish.
Obviously curreny skirmish leader is 3 overall.
As overall leader if you do nothing – then you still win in total score, as the difference between you and the runner up remains the same.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Valfaros.6908:

I mean the amount of decorations in a localised area yes.

@Randulf
Well I’m pretty sure WvW with 180 players fighting each other will require a higher spec than placing 30 objects on each other. If this is not the case than there certainly is something wrong with how they do things at ANET….
+Even if that would be the case why don’t just add on option for players with minimum spec to only show a certain amount of decorations.

My PC doesn’t slow down noticeably when a zerg is fighting. However, it takes about 10 seconds for my guild hall’s marvelous decorations to finish appearing. Every time I head for the GMO nodes in Lost Precipice, I run smack into the repair anvil, which hasn’t yet shown up on my screen.

Maybe ANet should offer guilds a gem shop upgrade to allow more decorations, with appropriate warnings that folks running potatoes (who can otherwise play the rest of the game) might crash, stall, or otherwise be unable to enjoy such halls.

As fas as I was able to tell the loading speed of objects does not necessarily correspond to the speed of the setup. When I updated my PC – while the FPS has jumped from 13-19 to 90-120 the speed of “loading” decorations or map elements has not visibly changed. For some reason the GH decorations seem to appear/load AFTER you enter the instance.

This hints that these decorations use some different handling to the generic map contents. Probably someone did really poor/cheap design job there (“Just make it seem to work at first glance and we will fix it later” approach).

The “Halls” in both possible cases are just HUGE EMPTY cavern maps. To fill that space we have multitude of mostly tiny decorations (all the chairs/baloons/tables). The single chair in a cavern sized room looks stupid, but try to put down few tables and few chairs and you hit the limit.

Lets say for pure theory – x people with area attacks vs y people with area attacks.
To make things simpler let’s assume x=y (same numbers)
So with 5 effect cap we need to make x*5 calculations for damage done by side A and x*5 calculations done by side B.
So 2*5*x = 10*x calculations.
Without area cap – that’s x*x for side A and x*x for side B
that’s 2*x^2

Soo, numbers for 50v50 (max squad size)

(2*x^2) / (2*5*x)

5000 / 500

That’s basically 10 times more computing power needed

But let’s say it’s a 3-way SM-fight – similar rules apply:

50v50v50

3*(x^3) / (3*5*X )

375000 / 750

That’s basically 500 times more computing power needed.

First of all – in this type of product, you can’t expect the “plot” to have any deeper meaning. Most likely you event don’t have single author like in case of a book, but rather a multitude of people. Some perhaps only perhaps writing a single “chapter”.

Basically, the “story” part of HoT is quite poor. I mean the quality of the story as a whole, is one of the worst
excuses for a story based in a fantasy world.

I can’t say the original story line from GW2 was that great – mostly on a level of rather under-average cheap fantasy book. But that’s sort of normal – usually the “stories” in the computer games/MMOS are just like that.
The characters in most race part of story are rather one dimensional and uninspiring. (Most – because I personally found that someone somehow managed to give more dimension to Eir’s character – and that’s one of the reasons she was the one to get killed off)
So , as i said the original story was rather average – but still – compared to HoT story it was a marvellous masterpiece. HoT story – feels like something that was forced because it just had to be there.
Like person(s) responsible for it did as some sort of punishment, and therefore they went as quick as possible to get it over with and basic recipe is “Just write anything to make people go from point A to point B”.

Therefore :
ad1) Do not expect any response or follow up. I would not have been surprised if people involved in HoT story haven’t had a clue about previous stories. Besides it wasn’t necessary in story-line based on “go from A to B”. You just had to reach that boss in the end.
ad2) Like I mentioned – I believe somehow Eir was a character that seemed to have some realistic personality. You need to have some writing talent and experience to “write” that character.
You can easily see that writing a story involving a character that while obviously a strong hero, but also plagued with guilt, probably rather charismatic as a “leader” of DE to writing a story involving a character, that well is rather impulsive simpleton and not much besides.
So it’s easier to sacrifice a character you are unable to maintain. Also it creates “drama” .
ad3) Cheap drama. “look at me i’m soo original, I’m killing of characters !”

Dante.1508:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Scarcity makes people purchase, even if it’s artificial scarcity.

If people know that luxury item X will be in the store forever and ever then they’ll frequently put off purchasing. There’s no rush because it will always be there. Since something better may come along they figure they might as well wait. If people know that item X is going to leave then it pushes them to decide to get it now as they’ll won’t be able to get it later.

That is so stupid… Terrible business sense.

They have lost so much money from me because i don’t have it when they decide its time to dump out items i like, so they miss out…

Take the Bandit Sniper Costume, i’d love to have purchased it, but they tack on a heap of useless items to pad out the price, so they lose 700 gems worth of money because i refuse to pay 2000 gems, Sorry no deal…

Another instance the “Exclusive” Wizard Hat i’d love to buy but they wont add to their Cash shop so no money from me…

Whatever Business Anet thinks its running they are losing a crap load more due to it.

Actually – you can buy the gems when you have money and spend them later. I usually do that, and I suppose many others might. Then I only spend those when they throw something that I find it’s worth spending gems on.

True – they may be loosing your money but maybe overall they make more out of other people. It’s not like this sort of marketing tactic is anything new.

How do you feel overall about reward tracks?

I think it’s cool. It might be something to draw some more of the new players to WvW.

What are your thoughts on the rate at which you gain participation?

I believe it’s ok. Maybe a single-player effort could be a bit boosted (like taking a camp by 1-2 roamers should give a lot more to them than to 50person zerg). Though I imagine it will not be easy to implement.

How do you feel about the rate you earn reward track points?

I believe it’s fine.

Overall, what are your impressions about the types of reward tracks we have?
So far so good. For the moment I’m satisfied.

Are there any other reward tracks you would really like to see?

Well, personally as a scribe I would like to see some reward tracks that could give some WvW furniture ingredients or maybe specific recepies. (Like golems/trebs/etc or maybe something like miniature maps/keeps/towers etc)

Vavume.8065:

Torady.3907:

why cant we get a pve chest at the end like wvw and pvp

This ^ with a mystic coin in it.

The funny thing about WvW – the rewards you are talking are for the WXP levels.

But you also get normal EXP. Which currently once you reach 80 is redirected into a black hole of uselessness (like /dev/null) as it neither counts for HoT masteries not Tyria masteries.

It appears that a lot of stull they changed with HoT was left partially undeveloped with the “Well deal with that later” approach. Unfortunately it’s months and still many release-time issues have not been addressed (The “EXP” thing WvW players noticed right away on HoT release day).

Manasa Devi.7958:

Blame the game. Taxiing, which is required for plenty of people to have a chance at winning the meta, sets your participation level to 0%. Doing a full circuit is pretty much required to get participation level up to a level where rewards are worthwhile.

It is true that the game mechanics have huge impact on the player behavior and encourage certain type of play. Currently it promotes a skritt “want my shinies” mentality. The “meta” maps with per instance participation level – you are not encouraged to participate in events/maps that have low chances for the meta final.

The megaserver has really negative impact on populace mentality – before you had some more of a feeling of belonging to specific “server society” – which people behave differently.
That’s simple human thing – once you start to consider people you play with as “us” you behave differently – it’s practically build in.

In other aspects – I have noticed that for Shatterer – now we have like 50-60 people camping the WP while like 1-5 are doing the PRE. Before I recall we had 20-30 people at main event, and 10-15 were going for the pre. That’s 50% drop to 2-10%.

Menaka.5092:

babazhook.6805:

The argument is valid. If a given number of players could defend against a given number of attackers using siege before in a castle or keep and can no longer do that due to mechanics changes then it nothing to do with population or doing it wrong.

An outnumbered group should never be able to defend forever against an overwhelming force.
Defending requires fighting, not arrowcarts. If you don’t have the people to fight the attackers, you lose the objective, it’s as simple as that. This is a Player vs Player mode, not Siege vs Player.

We have pure PvP game mode and it’s NOT WvW.
There is a reason (or there was one once) of having fortifications. And I mean something else besides having stuff to K-train all day round.
The whole point of fortifications is to give some edge and allow outnumbered to hold off attackers. Heck that was and is the point of creating fortifications in real life. It’s all point of having some balance.

That balance was shifted towards attacker on new BL. What makes me really really angry is not that it shifted, but that it shifted by bad design. By design “Oh i like it I think it looks cool”. Design that gives attackers sweet safe spots practically under your wall. That places siege in useless position.

For example the cannons on keep gates. The only more useless position would be for it to be on the ground outside of the gate.

Spurnshadow.3678:

I don’t think you guys intended the .05 second thing to affect different players. But in WvW, where you have massive battles, and lots of players throwing their skills around, you are bound to get hit by CoR multiple times. And that’s just a pug blob. A co-ordinated group will time their attacks properly to maximize damage. This change eliminates that. No one will play a rev in WvW if their big attack is completely negated because someone else happened to do the same attack at the same time. Better to just play any other class in the game where this doesn’t happen.

If this WAS your intention, shame on you. But if your intention was to eliminate the double hit from standing on top of two different zones of CoR thrown by one guy, then you need to come up with a different solution ASAP.

Rip Rev in WvW.

That is a a change in the right direction ! Really. I’m just waiting till they make similar changes to all damaging skills. Like you cannot be hit by more than 1 hammer, killshot, Well, pull, etc.

Seriously – the current system is not that terrible. The main issue is that they just pulled a more or less random number added 0 and decided that is the desired number of dolyaks. The EB towers seriously suffer in new system.
Maybe the solution would be to keep a timer – as a sort of wind-up clock. And each dolly could make the upgrade timer “tick” for couple of minutes.

In the original one I really hated that a single troll or clueless new person could screw you up.
Like one time in our EB keep was running a wall upgrade with enough supply to finish. And then just when enemy zerg came someone bought merchants, effectively screwing us up.
And it’s not like there were many really viable tactics of upgrading stuff to make it count as tactic.

What I did like was that if you had supply inside – your stuff could get upgraded even during siege. It made defense and offense a lot more interesting when the objective was close to finish some upgrade.

Allisondellue.4683:

Well the guild upgrade won’t necessarily be more than the 30 minutes for towers, but with castles it might be a while.. If the guild works as a group, and escort the dollys while someone sits the objective, you can speed up the dollies with the med kit stam pots or with the guard and mesmer’s speed skills. And if you are a dedicated wvw group, there should be a speedy dolly upgrade for the camps, I think?

Just a small comment – in order to put speedy dolly upgrade you need to claim them camp. So if your aim is to claim and reinforce the tower/keep you can’t claim a camp.

And you have to keep it claimed for at least 30 minutes, because only then you can put level 2 upgrades, (which the speedy dolyaks are). And they don’t activate immediately but some minutes after you put upgrade.

While I agree, left to their own, the time is very big for paper towers and keeps. But it also would encourage people to watch over keeps and towers so that when dollies come closer they can jump out and go and speed the yaks towards the door. (not to mention newer players can be assigned to this task for their lifetime yak assisting achievement)

Pardon me, but I think you are highly optimistic if you believe assigning the “exciting” task of dolyak defense to newer players would achieve anything except maybe them leaving to do something else.

While I understand that these are /not/ the solutions you would prefer, it is at least bronze lining in the bag over our heads.

EDIT: did some math after I posted and rectified my comment for clarity

Similar problems – can’t login to characters on HoT maps. For a while even guild hall

Personally I have made the 400 level mainly in mind of the crafting of WvW upgrades, not for decorations. I checked my resources before starting and the estimations and decided It’s feasible. Seeing the outrageous costs I was well aware the costs might be balanced to lower in the future – but I still decided to do it. I will not feel bad if the cost will be 1/2 , 1/3 or even 1/5 of what it costed me.

I wouldn’t mind the scribing costs being lowered. After all you level up in order to use the profession. I don’t think the cost of scribe leveling will be drastically reduced. After all the in the “cheap” guide you will craft a lot of WvW upgrades.

Please note that decorations at the current moment still have astronomical costs. And on the way I crafted a few decorations but the results were extremely disappointing.
I don’t mind SOME decorations – like the mechanical orchestra being costly. But for most cases after making the stuff the reaction instead of “Wow cool !” is “wft ? THATS IT ?”. And it goes both for the low level ones and for the 400-level ones.

Trying to make guild decorations – if you have not read the story on this forum
A-Scribe-s-Lament-aka-The-Optimist-Love-Story

So while I personally I will not mind the price nerf. I understand some people – possibly even whole guilds will feel really really cheated. Still the costs for furniture making must be reduced.

Someone mentioned the ANET introduced this in order to encourage mat/gold hoarders to spend them. Personally – I don’t believe so.
Let’s seriously think what is their primary goal as a company. It’s not to make people happy, or to make world peace. It’s to make money .
They are aware that many players will feel the need to push for 400 level scribe achievement. And many will feel enough frustration to spend the real life money – to get gems and to get gold needed for mats. I’m pretty sure the that generated some considerable income.

It’s still far far away from the BS that many of the F2P market of games for android/Iphones are doing. Still people are ready do burn thousands of dollars/euros on these.

• Describe a typical hour for you in the Alpine Borderlands in the past. For example, What size of group were you running in? What kind of tasks did you run? What activities did you do?

Depends – Home or Enemy.

• On Home either solo roaming/scouting – upgrading and siegeing up stuff if necessery. Or defending objectives as part of larger groups.
• On enemy – most often part of invading groups – various sizes. Small guild runs big zergs – depends what was available.

• Compare your experience described above with a typical hour spent in Eternal Battlegrounds, if you went there at all. Does your style of play change between the 2 maps?

Well sometimes similar – scouting and upgrading, but EB had always different play style, because all 3 forces have about equal chances due to placing of objectives and spawns.
Either in big group focused on capping /defending, or in guild group looking for fights.

• Compare your experiences described above with an hour spent in the new borderlands.

Either it’s dead – so there is nothing to do and I move/queue for eb, or defending against enemy blob, in which case you need to blob up yourself in order to steamroll the blob.

• Describe the nature of combat in the borderlands in the past. How have the new borderlands impacted this paradigm for you? What style or build changes might it cause? For example, knocking people off cliffs or into lava might play a more important role.

The nature of open-field combat has not changed. Knocking to cliffs/lava practically does not play any role in 90% of fights.
The only role the environment plays are navigation problems. What changed is the amount of running needed around in case one side was defeated. The builds were affected by the condi changes and new elites.

The siege warfare lost a lot of tactical play in my opinion. Before you had to carefully choose your attack spot, so that your siege would not be easily destroyed. It required some experience and planning. You could not ignore towers when going for keep – or else one treb could devastate your rams/catas and drain your supply.

• In your experience, compare the time it takes take a structure or objective here, then it did in the past.

If you have enough people and supply, it’s a lot easier/faster to take new keeps. They are in bad places for defense.

The siege like the cannons is placed so badly It’s absolutely unbelievable.
A narrow platform, extended outside of the keep fortification. A cannon operator is extremely vulnerable, as he can be bombed from left/right and below, practically by ANY ranged weapon, and pulled down by number of abilities.
In real life you would be afraid to go there because a strong wind could pull you off.

• How is the loot and wxp for you compared to in the past? Will it be able to sustain whatever you are doing? Did it take a hit, or was it improved? If you are planning to unlock an elite specialization, do you think you were helped or hurt in these regards? Do you think you could pursue any other in-game goals just by playing WvW?

Well it did take a hit. But so have everything else that is not connected with HoT new metas. That is not an isue because WvW was never for the loot/wxp.
Unlocking elite is cake in HoT PvE maps. A couple of hours running HP’s. With HP train onging it’s maybe doable within 1 hour.
On the other hand unlocking elites purely in WvW is by comparison extremely long ~80 wvw levels.

• How will the map change impact the long sessions (multiple hours) you spend in WvW?

Well the effect will be that I will spend more time in EB, less time hopping border/EB.
Unless of course there is EB queue.

• In 100 words or less, describe how the new BLs could be improved.

• Remove the oasis event
• Redesign the keeps and surrounding areas to make some strategic sense. It would not hurt to have more objectives/ like towers/outposts. The placement not based on arbitral symetric but based on whenever it makes some sense.
• More types of “towers”/walled objectives ?

• In 100 words or less, describe how the borderlands work to a new WvW player.

• I think they are too confusing. There should be some more clear paths for people to reach the few nearby objectives. A new person will most likely have huge problem reaching the tag that is not in spawn areas. They seem like designed with gliding in mind at some point, but without gliding. They are harder to navigate than 3/4 of new maps.
• Home border should have a more “safe” feeling. The spawn area probably could be larger and placed more centrally.

• In 100 words or less, describe how the borderlands work to a veteran WvW player that is new to the maps.

• Similar they don’t work well. They might work better for a roamer, especially that some camps are designed in a way that you can avoid guards and just kill overseer and cap it. Most of the champs in all objectives are soloable (Not all easy not by everyone but still new champs are to easy)
• People looking for fight will have problem due to navigation issues.

• Which map am I most likely to find you currently, if you’re on Gw2?

Well if the guild is raiding that on that BL. Most likely EB if no queue. Or farming the new maps for flax and other stuff needed for upgrades.

Yes. I wand the old maps back.

But not because I particularly miss them, but because they were designed with WvW in mind. These ones are obviously designed by people clueless about siege strategy (or any multiple way conflict strategy I think) and obviously quite ignorant about WvW in general.

Why ?

In alpine BL the fortification made tactical sense – for example the inner towers – both of them were placed so that any enemy trying to attack garrison from back, HAD to run by them. No only that, the siege placed inside was able to reach up to outer keep walls. Each fortification had a view to the next one.

This had purposes – any enemy wanting to siege the garrison with catas or other siege, would have to mind that defenders in tower could build and use counter-siege to destroy theirs. Scouts stationed in towers could spot and report the enemy movements.
True – if tower was captured, it could be used to attack outer walls of the keep. But only outer ones, and could be attacked from keep as well – which from risk/benefit ratio of map defense made sense.
The people in the HOME border had clear advantage to enemy invades – as I believe it should be ! After all if you would plan your home defense you would design it to give yourself an edge.

The lower towers – the “enemy” ones – had more aggressive purposes – both as a foothold on enemy territory and a first point from which a siege war could be initiated. In both cases you could not ignore the towers for their strategic value. If you did – even if you heavily outblobbed the defenders your efforts could be wasted. The design had brain, and more reason than “I think this will look cool so go ahead”. The placement of things in BL had purpose.

In new BL the upper towers serve no purpose. You can have them or not – their only purpose in match is providing points. Both defenders and attackers can safely ignore them. As invader the only tactic you need is to blob up, and go karma-blob stuff one after another, in whatever order you want.

The new central Keep placement and design is terrible. It practically can be siege bombed from anywhere around.
It’s extremely vulnerable to trebs – those can be placed on the many surrounding hills in such a way that they are hidden by the terrain which makes counter-siege extremely hard.

The current WvW design team apparently have not bothered with trying to understand the original design, they seems to not understand the game mode. They have not bothered with feedbacks from HoT beta’s, they believe they know better than people that within last years spend thousands of hours in this mode.
It’s pretty reasonable that they will not be able to fix the current maps. Both cost/time wise and resource wise. Do they even have the original WvWvW architects ? So that is the reason that my vote would be to have old BL back.

Yeah, this one took me quite some time to get. So if anyone still has some doubts, it does pop but drop chances per each adventure chest are probably less than <5%.

Actually funny thing is I had missing 3 collection pieces – The one dropping from Ulgoth, the one from meta completion chests in Auric Basin and the adventure one.

An yesterday – I just got 3 of them in one evening – starting with Adventurous Melody, then Modniir Battle Hymn from Ulgoth, and then by some ultra luck I logged in to Auric Basin map, AFTER the meta event was done successfully – and the chamber with chests was open and found the golden tuning fork.
(And honestly didn’t even know it was even possible to jump in map instance that completed the event without taking any part in the events)

Melona.9217:

Zedd.3140:

… in Verdant Brink, and lost all of my map progress.

You had one job Anet.

ONE JOB.

There is a good reason here. If you can keep your participation instead swapping different maaps, it will be unfair, cause you didn’t help THIS maap.
If you could keep this participation, just go to empty maap -> get 40~60 % of participation by doing events (maap is empty, so all events are available for you -> then switch maap).

But doing events in empty map is much harder than in populated one ? Really do try this for yourself sometime and compare how quickly you can get that participation by doing events alone, and when there is always a group of people.
There are no restriction on how many people can do a single event and you can do them both fast and easy.

And you did help THIS map. Just not in the particular instance. What’s the difference between people that did an event in some other corner of the instance that you are one, that you didn’t even see from the people that did the event in other instance .

I don’t see anything fair with punishing a player that suddenly finds himself in an empty map. And you don’t loose anything yourself. If he had participation he wasn’t apparently just leeching it AFK.
So why do you think it’s fair to take away from people that had bad luck, when you neither loose anything, and your only achievement is that you had luck joining a good instance.

Especially since it’s the GAME that prompts you to change the map.

I have a really nasty suspicion, that the person on support that handled your request, just trolled you a bit when telling you to post this on forums.
Because I’m afraid all you can get here is a lot people laughing at you and maybe just few felling sorry for you. But I really really doubt you will get any dev response or actuall help.

Kiza.5630:

Hubal.8571:

There should be checks and safeguards against over-allocating of memory resources.

They are reaching limits of 32bit architecture. Pick up a random C source code on the internet and see if there are checks for malloc return values. Also, in many situations you can’t do anything else anyway than just let it crash. Memory exhausted = game over. It might not even be in their code, but some library the game uses. The only real solution is to forget about 32bit. It’s not that 64bit is new.

Or find a way to drastically reduce the memory usage. But I’m not sure such a huge change will make sense. All it does is cost developer resources. But they should probably push the new client instead of calling it beta for too long.

But the OP didn’t answer yet, so we don’t even know if it’s an oom problem.

Hubal.8571:

Imagine a company released a car, that has this malfunction causing the engine to explode sometimes, if it goes over 4000 rpm and/or 140 km/h.

Well, the client crashes and burns for sure, but I think comparing the outcome with an exploding car is a bit too much.

Well, extreme example was to make a point. In both cases you know the workarounds, you know the consequences of not applying them.

Regarding the malloc – that is a bit besides the point, as checking the malloc return is not really the solution. It’s not how you control resources. At the moment it returns null it’s quite too late to do anything smart except throwing exception. (And basically this is what usually at some level leads to client-side crash window, instead of system-side crash message)

But if you are a programmer please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_dynamic_memory_allocation
If you do please check the “Common errors” section, specifically the one titled “Not checking for allocation failures”.

And unfortunately now they simply cannot abandon 32-bit version for the sake of business itself. Basically you cannot change the requirements after you sell your product. The HoT expansion should have been made 64-bit mandatory – now it’s kinda stuck – and as I said fixing the situation will not be easy – time and money is needed (or as you said “development resources”).

Provided of course the the memory is the problem.

The fact is that the game should never simply crash due to memory limits. If you fit game requirements, you are able to run it, then you should not experience crashes.
There should be checks and safeguards against over-allocating of memory resources.
I mean the 64-bit client is still beta, so the game SHOULD be stable with 4G of memory.
So it’s perfectly OK to complain when it’s not.

That said – fixing the situation will not be easy, so meanwhile all you can do is try all the possible work-around.
Joining a squad in DS is a good thing even for the sake of better coordination. Other stuff can help to minimize crash risks too.

Imagine a company released a car, that has this malfunction causing the engine to explode sometimes, if it goes over 4000 rpm and/or 140 km/h. So far there is no fix for this problem. They obviously should make one. But will you drive it over 4000 rpm or at 150 km/h and explode with it because “Why should you? Why should you have to lower the speed of the car to remedy this glaring issue?”.

Well, to be honest that would not really surprise me. I would estimate that active WvW population is a lot less than 33% of whole GW2 population. (Probably even less, after megaserver changes, and I would not be surprised PvP has even less population).

I’m on 2 guilds, one WvW focused and one that’s not. In the guild that’s not WvW focused, I’m practically only one out of maybe 20 active members that appears on WvW.

Also they pretty made sure that you have to PvE a lot – at least until you get all the upgrades back (You know, mostly the ones that we already had like claiming/+5 and so on – but that is a story for other thread), get the elite spec up (Yeah you can do that in WvW – but seriously that is weeks compared to doing 3-4 hours of PvE HP run).

I would happily accept that as a fact, and event more happily come to terms that WvW does not get a lot of updates – provided we are not screwed up with the ones we get.

You can actually only check and note the ip for the instance.
/ip
You can try leaving and coming back few times. It might take a few minutes but you have high chances to switch to better map (But remember to leave party/squad – otherwise you get pulled).
Once I entered 4 different instances within 2 minutes.

Jayne.9251:

How about: Removed entirely.

Yup, that seems the best remedy in my mind too.

Some response would be nice. We have same issue, stuck on level 29.

I’m really really tired of getting into empty maps in HoT. There is something really really wrong in the megaserver.
Just today I entered a dead-empty map. Nothing new in HoT i suppose, so when the server asked me to move to more populated map – I took it.
Only to be placed in another DEAD EMPTY MAP. I still have the buff for moving maps active when the server is again asking me to move.

The statement about “true WvW players” was practically tantamount to hanging a “kick me” sign on your own back.

Though in most points I have to agree with many points I don’t see a true WvW player as one not caring about matchup. After all, for me after the megaserver was introduced, the only real community besides the guild is your WvW server. I do care how does “my” server does. After all I have spend thousands of hours there. That does not necessarily means winning a match is a priority. That means you come and try to kick their backside even if they outblob you.

I also want to really see new people join and have fun in WvW community. I don’t like changes that discourage the new players.

Also I get really annoyed at people that believe themselves elite, and look down upon others. Mainly because I was playing WvW almost from the beginning of GW2 and remember some guys that now are the arrogant “elite” when they still were WvW noobs.

Heh guys, remember how long is took them to fix a thing like daily for ruins in WvW.
Do not get your hopes up for a quick fix.

Can’t wield the new spec weapons on both characters (guardian and thief) that had enough hero points for activation.
Got weapons got achievement, can’t use the weapon. Both cases I made sure to be in PvE maps, still.

People seem to forget that the dodge besides the clear “evade an attack” is a fast change of position.
In some situations you can’t walk out of “red circle” fast enough but you can dodge fast enough (especially if you need to go other direction than forward !), though I believe that getting out of circle should always count as success.

When fighting a melee opponent on ranged, a dodge can be used to remain out of range. So in this case trait like “Gain vigor upon successfully evading an attack” may well work for sword / dagger in main hand, and is a lot less useful for pistol users.
Another issue is of course whenever really people should be given an “extra dodge” advantage at all.

Though trait that removes 1 second from steal CD upon successful dodge – and only while wielding sword or spear (and really really why those ?!?) is kinda a bad joke.

I suppose for high level fractals the agony resistance might make real difference. For me, since I never liked/played fractals much I put on the WvW ones.
Not for the +stat which is basically useless, but rather for the bonus against guards/lords. It makes noticeable difference for example when soloing camp.
But that’s exactly it – it’s enough of a difference to notice – if you equip like 5 of them.