Guild Wars 2

For the next 3 weeks, 12 guilds will be representing their respective servers and compete for the title of being the top GvG guild in NA Tier 2!
 

The format is a round robin tournament where each match between two guilds of 15 members and 5 subs lasts 7 rounds. For every round a guild wins, they get 2 points. For every round a guild loses, they get 1 point. If a guild wins the match, they get a 3 point bonus. The guilds with the highest number of points in each server by the end of the round robin stage move on to finals! From there, the top guild from each server will fight to represent their server and and have their guild be titled champions of the T2 GvG Invitational!
 

Of course, what is a tournament without a prize? The prize pool for this tournament is valued at 4000g, comprising of both gold as well as useful WvW sigils, runes, and mass consumables.
 

You can catch all the action at http://www.twitch.tv/gw2gvg with key matches casted by some of the GvG scene’s most experienced veterans!
 

Your casters are:

• Drigan
• Equinox
• Feârless Faov
• Syndictive Fallen
• Kyle the Savage
• Georgy
• Kyotie
• Whitehelm

And here are the guilds participating and your server representatives!

From Sea of Sorrows:
Aeterna [Ae]
Bad Guys Anonymous [BGA]
Gun Squad [GS]
The Ninth Legion [IX]

From Yak’s Bend:
Monsters Înc [Boo]
Dawn of Dimentia [DUI]
Feârless [Hymn]
Night Legion [UL]

From Fort Aspenwood:
Adventurethyme [BMO]
Bomb On me [BOMB]
The Guild Unknown [II]
The Fluttering Horde [TFH]

Matches begin tonight at 10pm EDT/ 7pm PDT/2am UTC

Frankly the meta in WvW has for the most part been dictated by the meta in 15v15/20v20. The guilds GvGing bring whatever meta shifts they found in GvGs to WvW which guilds that don’t GvG/pugmanders/pugs pick up on by facing them.

The food being used, the hammer guard meta, to the big bomb meta, to pirate ship. These were all things developed by GvG guilds.

Well OS is queued for all three servers in T2 tonight. 9 guilds are having a fight night; that’s 180 people.

Pretty much, but the fact that they reopened it means they must have read through some of it. So that’s a plus.

Thanks for the re-open, hopefully can start brainstorming on possible solutions again. Frankly I’ll be happy if they changed up the central area in EotM to be similar to the arena in Obsidian Sanctum. I think that would go a long way for a of players.

He said it’s complicated because GvG has baggage. Honestly I feel the fact that this thread hasn’t been locked yet to be a sign that Anet’s position may be gradually changing.

Also got rangers, engies, riffle warriors, evis warriors. Depends on what the meta is, but people can always experiment at the expense of being less efficient.

It’s like generalizing that PvP is just cele d/d eles, medi guards, shout warriors, cele engies. GvG by necessity needs to be more structured in terms of comp because everyone needs to try to keep boon uptime.

Anyway, I think we’re wandering into the realm of opinions and a severe case of “you like what I don’t like, and you shouldn’t” (and vice versa).

Frankly I think it comes down to a lot of people not being exposed to the playstyle. I get the impression that a lot of hardcore PvPers dislike wvw because their only experience with it is either roaming, or joining a zerg.

While roaming can be a satisfying experience, I’m sure zerging is sort of devoid of any real strategy or complexity. Nor does it have any real organization.

GvG/fighting imo is the bridge between PvP and WvW much like how WvW is supposed to be the bridge between PvE and PvP.

SobeSoul.6910:

Oh, Chem’s channel got 800 viewers once. So has a pve stream. Yawn.

This has probably been the most dead the GvG scene has gotten, and it still hit 800 viewers, all the while when at the same time G4GW2 EU was running with 500 viewers.

Lest we forget Agg vs TA had 4.3k viewers when that happened last year.

If people knew that GvGs were going on more often, then yes they would probably watch.

SobeSoul.6910:

Who cares what their reasoning is behind leaving? If I’m a developer, there’s no chance I’m designing a game mode for a wishy washy crowd.

GvG being unwatchable is not an opinion. It is a fact. There’s no camera that can cover the entire thing or single out intricate play. If you showed it to someone outside of the GW2 player base, they wouldn’t be able to distinguish much from it.

Why sink resources into a mode that you couldn’t promote on Twitch or where ever? It would be silly.

You gvg guys can scream for the mode you all want, but you need to take a healthy and honest look at why the chances of it happening is less than 2% in the next few years.

In all honesty, conquest isn’t that pleasurable of a viewing experience either, especially since there are multiple skirmishes happening at the same time, it’s nearly impossible to capture every play unless it’s a teamfight going on at a point or something, and that’s pretty rare as people would rotate out to try to decap the obviously uncontested points. And then additionally, non GW2 players will probably have a hard time following normal PvP anyway. Hell I bet if you get a PvE main to spectate a PvP match they won’t understand either.

That not withstanding, with first person view, it’s now possible to get an overhead view in the Obsidian Sanctum of a GvG, similar to how camera works for traditional sports like hockey, football, soccer, basketball. You cover the entire play area and can see the movements of both guilds’ melee trains, backlines, and gank skirmishes.

I think a lot criticism stems from the misconception that something like this has to be easily spectated (not going to argue whether it is or not, just that people for some reason are under the assumption that it has to be) or that you need to have a matchmaking system. It’s not a mode that lends itself to being spectator friendly with a complex algorithm to matchmake and determine leaderboards (hell Anet’s still trying to figure out normal matchmaking and leaderboards for PvP), neither does it have to. It’s about being a worthwhile thing to have because people have fun doing it.

WvW is 100% impossible to spectate, because in addition to the points you brought up regarding 15v15/20v20, you still have capture points spread across 4 maps. Yet WvW exists.

And I think the reasoning behind leaving is important to consider. People want to play the game, but can’t because there’s no support for how they play. It’s a chicken and egg scenario.

I don’t think it’s as simple as saying guilds leave and that’s why Anet shouldn’t put in dev time. There’s a lot of things that go into the reason guilds leave that’s not just clearcut “because the game isn’t interesting”. The pool of guilds to fight right now is restricted to guilds not on your server, and guilds who are in your tier. Those severely limit possible opponents. EotM is currently a suboptimal battle ground as there are a ton of environmental hazards such as canons that can easily disrupt the middle of a fight.

Jaxom.7310:

seems like lots of posts from a handful of guilds. kind of an echo chamber effect.

more ways to play is better, so can’t argue that. would think it’d be easier to slice n dice an arena for RA style matches than 20 v 20. have to wonder if theres enough 20+ sized guilds that want this kind of content to support it. or would it be the same 5-10 guilds fighting each other.

maybe devs can take obsidian sanctum arena area (never been there so don’t know its size) but cut taht up into a proper pvp arena that people can do this 20v20 stuff.

The GvG community is pretty large, but different groups of guilds are isolated by the different tiers they find themselves in. There are 10 or so active GvG/Fight guilds in T2 NA alone (that’s 200-300 players!). T1 has it’s own scene. As does T3 and T4. I do believe there was also a bottom feeders GvG tournament going on in T8 as well.

So currently yes, there should be enough, but I think there will have to be a lot of brainstorming to do in order to be able to come up with an idea that really sticks and won’t get bland.

Current GvGs supplement WvW (or the other way around depending on perspective) but I don’t think standalone TDM GvGs is something with long legs considering how short rounds actually are.

On the other hand, developing a mode would probably shed light on the scene and community a lot and may get new comers to enter the fray, which would definitely be welcomed. The issue right now is that the scene is fairly underground and spread mainly by word of mouth. To break it open for everyone to witness would definitely be a great boon.

The thing about MMOs is that it should feel massive in terms of player interaction. 5v5 has its place, but MMOs have always created communities of players (that are larger than 5 people) but GW2 doesn’t have anything strictly supporting large scale content for large communities (PvE, or PvP). You have loose nudges in that direction through Group Events like Mega bosses, Teq, TT Wurm, WvW, and Guild Missions, but nothing really structured with a system in place.

Fallen, are players even allowed to make a thread in the CDI forums? Or are you planning on creating your CDI thread somewhere else?

KcB.6890:

Fallen.4317:

Note that ArenaNet, being a business, will only be interested in ideas that will be able to be monetized and will be cost effective. This does not demonize them, they didn’t create Guild Wars 2 just for funsies. Keep this in mind during our productive discussion.

I’m kind of confused at what people mean by able to be monetized. How are PvE, sPvP, or WvW monetized individually? The whole game is monetized by sales of the game and by gemshop purchases that are mostly cosmetics that work equally in PvE, sPvP, or WvW. Arena.net needs to make a game that people want to play in order to monetize it. Simple as that.

PvE is now monetized through living story (not the case at launch). It’s also probably the most populated game mode.
PvP is monetized through custom arenas.
WvW is monetized through server transfers.

Everything else is cosmetic. And of course everything could be paid for in gold.

But you’re right Anet needs to develop something that a lot of people will play for them to think it’s worth developing. Otherwise, they need to put in additional micro transactions to make up for the losses.

While the fights/gvg community is fairly large, is it large enough for anet to just be willing to make a mode for? Or will there have to be some compromise where we as players need to fund it continuously.

gjop.8612:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/GvG-community-ignored-again-why/first#post4780149

I can’t find the original quote the dev was referencing but this question has been answered already.

The difference here is that they haven’t shut down this thread yet. They even let it go for at least 3 pages. I think there’s merit in discussing what may and may not work. We already acknowledge the fact that a 4th mode to maintain and split the player base is probably out of the question, but that doesn’t mean that a compromise can’t be made.

Rabidd.9458:

Now that I had time to think on it a bit, try to address some points in the CDI Fallen&co.

1) How would the leaderboards work? If a MMR system was created that resembles the current PvP system, people could be sitting in queue for up to an hour before finding a match. Would it be easier to simply match you against a team that holds the closest leaderboard rank to your own guild? And then the team with the higher rank be forced to fight in the home turf of the lower ranked team?

2) Would the existing WvW system need to be changed? If another raid system was created, would this mean fewer people would play WvW? And if so, how much of a bad thing is this anyway? Currently it’s all about coverage. In the lower tiers you spend all evening/night trying to take over your own keeps etc only to wake up in the morning and see they’ve all been taken over by the people playing late into the night or early morning.

3) Rewards. Or are they unnecessary? Could make it a system where the leaderboards reset every couple months and the only thing you’re playing for is prestige. Or they can add some account-bound skins that cannot be traded so people don’t mess up the economy of the game that a new reward system can make happen.

4) There is a limit of 5 guilds that each person has in the game. How would you prevent a single person from joining different guilds and trying to stack them all at the top of the leaderboards to harvest the most rewards? Make a person locked in by the week (ie if you raid with a guild in a single week then you’re stuck being able to raid ONLY with that guild for that week) or would this not be enough since you could probably power house a guild into the top 10 within a week or two and then start playing as another guild to get that one to the top as well so you could just flip-flop between the two every other week and keep them both high for double the rewards. Could lock people in the same guild for the entirety of the leaderboard season but many guilds die within a week or two due to inactivity/friction, and I could see this happening even more in such a competitive environment.

Will add more below if I think of more, time to get back to work

I think a good thing to note, that was sort of touched upon before was that maybe it shouldn’t be a queue system, and that rewards aren’t necessarily important.

Queuing naturally doesn’t work for something so large scale, but a system to organize raids better I think would be welcome.

Tyldor.9078:

I’d also like to touch the fairweather part that has became a huge thing in the GvG scene. Alot of guilds will not challenge a bigger/established guild to GvG because ‘’they know they will lose’‘. There’s a ton of guild leaders out there claiming they want to reach the top tier, yet they avoid fighting more experienced/skilled guilds. This blows my mind. Just go out there, fight whoever you can, learn from your losses and work on them.

So many good guilds who have retired or are about to retire because ’’it’s boring, not enough competition, decease of the crown’’ type of thing. But is there really anyone putting their shoulders under this scene and trying to help lesser guilds? Something you should ask yourself. ( This is a quite loaded subject as I can also understand the players in the good guilds, I’ve kinda been there myself a little bit aswell ).

I think this sort of pinpoints the reasons in which the scene has sort of died on multiple occasions, which is the fact that you have maybe 2 or 3 guilds that are hyper competitive with eachother, but are miles ahead of the next 4 best guilds on the “ladder”. So much so to the point where you can learn very little GvGing them because they just absolutely crush so hard.

I think it’s worthwhile to explore the fact that there needs to be a better dissemination of knowledge. I’m of the opinion that the basics of fighting is very simple (which leads to the conclusion that fighting is mindless) but that there are many nuances that veteran and casual WvW players alike don’t understand.

On the other hand, I also don’t think that it’s necessarily the responsibility of top tier guilds to take it upon themselves to help the guilds that are significantly behind. Logistically it doesn’t work to have these guilds go searching for guilds that want help. I think it comes down to less established guilds to seek out help from the better guilds.

My raid driver frequently points out that people won’t remember what you were, but what you are. If the less established guilds truly desire to get better, and take it upon themselves to find material and seek out help, when they finally reach a point where they become competitive with their peers, or even surpass them, no one will remember the learning period that guild went through, just the fact that now they’re good. But it all comes down to how resolved they are at wanting to get better. A lot of guilds sort of half kitten their way into the scene, and give up before they make a serious name for themselves.

I used to think the top guilds were untouchable, but now I think anyone can be beat as long as you put in the effort to improve as a group.

It’s sort of a chicken and egg problem, but I think the first step to solving it is to have a comprehensive collection of important and CORRECT information regarding how to fight.

Anyway +1. There’s definitely a good argument for the existence of the fight scene, whether it be open field raiding, or GvGs. Official support can definitely be argued on both sides, but I think the scene should definitely exist as it adds a new layer of complexity to the combat system not seen anywhere else in the game.

1. How does the WvW team balance defender’s advantage, in the sense that defender’s have an elevation advantage as well as locations where siege can be placed within structures but are not counterable due to line of sight. While it’s generally understood that you shouldn’t make it easy to assault something, there comes a particular point where the time and money investment to try to take down an objective is not worth the benefit. (T3 garrison, fully sieged, waypointed, that when capped will just be upgraded again 3 hours later unless constant pressure is applied throughout the week)

2. As EotM was an inspiration for the new maps, and as devs have said that they decided to keep the things they liked about the map, I’m curious as to what were the mechanics and map layout that the devs decided should be ported over, and what should be dropped?

3. What do the devs think of the relationship between guild groups who focus on fighting and guild groups who focus on focussing on PPT and capping/holding structures? There seems to be some enmity between these two groups of players that sort of divides players of a game mode that is reliant on cooperation. What are possible solutions?

4. How does Anet view the different “flavours” of different servers? For example some servers have incredibly high WvW populations, but low PvE or PvP populations and therefore appear as very high and can continuously receive transfers, while some servers have high PvE and PvP populations and appear as Full, but the WvW population suffers for it as they can’t compete in coverage.

5. Are there any plans to change the ranking system that determines matchups? NA T1 servers have sort of locked themselves in the T1 position due to the fact that there is no longer any glicko to gain from eachother, and the next closest server (FA) is barely able to gain more glicko over the other two servers in T2.

Similarly, in WvW where constant amounts of CC are stacked on eachother while fighting, such as lines of warding, rings of warding, earthshaker, static fields, etc. Would passing through multiple of the same skill knockdown the stability stacks immediately? E.g. two lines of warding stacked right over eachother, would you lose 2 stacks?

I was just checking out my home instance and I noticed that none of the vendors were on the minimap. I decided to try to find them, and I did, but they can’t be interacted with. Is this a new bug?