Guild Wars 2

BillFreist.1527:

Over the past several months we’ve had a small team working on ways to relieve some of the load from the game server while there are large concentrations of players. Most of the work thus far has gone pretty much unnoticed from the player’s perspective, but there have been pretty large steps made towards the issue. This continues to be a large and high priority issue for us so we can continue to make improvements to make this a thing of the past.

You need a “large” team. There needs to be noticeable improvements every patch.

This is not a troll post and I appreciate that it’s being looked into, but I’m going to tell you this one simple fact: Skill lag makes the game unplayable, players abandon unplayable games. It is a testament to how much player interest there is in WvW and the large scale PvP concept that players have stuck with Guild Wars 2 in spite of this skill lag for as long as they have. What I hear all the time in Teamspeak from the WvWers is that this game is “it” right now, there are no other serious choices for WvW. All anyone has to do really is introduce a game featuring the WvW concept without the skill lag and poof, there goes your entire WvW population which incidentally is the group who spends the most money on this game.

Again I’m not trolling, I’m just underlining the fact that first and foremost you need to fix the skill lag problem which has been around since launch a year ago or you will lose all of your WvW players to other games. It needs to be noticeable improvement every patch, it needs to be a “large” team working on this. You need this more than you need new PvE content.

Jeydra.4386:

Jubelum.3472:

Jeydra.4386:

If one day I buy a commander tag of my own, I’ll probably become one of the most defensive commanders ever … after taking SM, I’d immediately lay down 10 ACs and Ballistas, covering both inner gates, running supply from Overlook, Pang and Speldan to do it.

Well if you did that then you’d be acting like an SoR commander, and servers like SoS would troll you and say you can only win by blobbing.

Screw what servers like SoS think to hell and back. Do whatever wins the game.

As one of the most defensive commanders on SBI, I can tell you it is not as easy as it sounds. We’ve had completely sieged towers fall to the sheer number of SOR’s forces. They will push in, wipe your eleventy billion pieces of siege, then proceed to eat you for breakfast.
It can be fun to hold/farm them as long as possible, but yah…

Last week during the TC / SoS / DB matchup, there was a brief period when SoS held SM. There was again no siege in SM at all, but for whatever reason, although there were active TC and DB zergs on the map and trebs had punched wholes in SM outer wall, neither attempted to take SM immediately. I placed some siege down in the Lord room, asked on map chat for people to help build them, and ran supply from Umber. I completed two runs before SM came under assault, but by then we had something like 6 ACs and 4 Ballistae in the Lord room, and the commander decided it was worth trying to defend SM.

So we turtled in the Lord room while TC broke down the inner gates. We waited, waited, waited some more, and then suddenly both DB and TC rush in at the same time. With the siege placed we might have been able to fight off one server, but not both at the same time. Afterwards our commander decided it was time to go to bed, and the map depopulated until we were outmanned.

But at least we tried … and that’s the whole point, no?

There’s obviously a little more to it than just sieging a lord’s room, in most defenses you are undermanned as almost no one ever assaults you with equal or inferior numbers. The real math of a solid defense is done with the individual defenders and the coordination of their commanders. If you have 30 uplevels defending against 50, you’re going to lose, if you have 30 well geared/specced seasoned WVWers in voice comm with their experienced and knowledgeable commander, your odds significantly improve. After awhile of being on a server it becomes clear which kind of WvWers are most prominent, this is why guilds move to different servers most of the time.

Naztharius.7639:

kuora.5402:

Wick.1280:

After fighting a few SoR…. I’m not impressed

I’ll have to say the same for every single SBI and SoS so far.

lol I wouldn’t be talking. 2v7 against SoR and we take out 2! haha gj. Thanks to all the SoR roamers in SoS bl that fed me and my buddy bags I’ll come back tomorrow to claim more!

See?! See SBI! Your comrades are winning great victories against SoR in WvW, we are weak and inferior to you, please come out to WvW, more of you, yes, please come out to WvW with us

eksn.7264:

Hey you VIG guys killed me when I was a quaggan with a kite, not cool bro.

Sorry but there’s a long history of bad blood between VIGs and Quaggans and the kite is a symbolic Quaggan gesture for hostile intentions

Really SoS and SBI, please form some sort of double team, I think a lot of our main WvW guilds are taking a breather this week, you could come out and fight what’s in the borderlands right now and score some real victories, please please PLEASE don’t avoid WvW this week because you think it’s futile, there’s lots of fun to be had, I’ve seen a lot of Rallians levelling new toons in the BLs, it’s mostly karma training which isn’t very organized, this would be a good time for you guys to really show up in full force and put up your best fights. I implore you! Pleeeease! with sugar on top, and and and cherries! just um, pwease pway wif us?

Jeydra.4386:

If one day I buy a commander tag of my own, I’ll probably become one of the most defensive commanders ever … after taking SM, I’d immediately lay down 10 ACs and Ballistas, covering both inner gates, running supply from Overlook, Pang and Speldan to do it.

Well if you did that then you’d be acting like an SoR commander, and servers like SoS would troll you and say you can only win by blobbing.

And here we are 5 months later and still no Valkyrie or Vitality focused ascended items, finishing what they start seems to be a real low priority for Anet. I don’t see a point in doing any of the fractal missions or spending anything on ascended rings/trinkets until they finish adding all of the stat combos. Also, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t add the simple baseline stats first and then add all the weird ones like precision/toughness/healing/condition or power/precision/18vitality/crit, or even better, why we can’t just socket our own gems in them.

Brutus.5732:

sostronk.8167:

Yes GG SOR. Smashed us this week.

But in about 9 hours karma train night will be kicking off. I am aware you will be very attached to those waypoints in BGBL, as would I, but please don’t go all “JQ” on us over them. (lol)

It seems BG is so desperate for ppt (to get ahead of JQ for #2) that they are trying to farm uplevels karma training.

Way to represent your server after we took our foot off your throats.

My feelings exactly, guess you guys want to stop the whole “it’s friday everyone relax and pre-reset karma train” thing and just go back to earlier in the week where SoR served you your hearts on a paper plate. I swear every time I think I’ve seen BG at their lowest, they prove that they’re always willing to take that next step down. Oh well, I suppose a little temper tantrum is acceptable since it’s some sign of life out of BG this week.

Le Rooster.8715:

SoR aren’t making themselves friends for when the leagues come and when the leagues it is a time to rely on your friends especially when the good ol SoR vsBG bash comes, that third server will be the decider.

Honestly regarding SoS’s oceanics not pulling their weight in man power it’s a combination of 2 things
1. we have to beat on t3 structures whereas SoR smashes down t1 structures.
2. nobody cares about ppt in SoS as much as you all do, once ppt matters then we might actually start playing for it.

All this talk about beating a t3 server as the no.1 t1 server is seriously silly and stupid. especially when it’s coming from ex-SoS’ers you guys left the server great now go away and never return. Even last night we ticked 300+ ppt occasionally during oceanic time.

Sea of Sorrows is not a pvX server we’re a hardcore server which has one of the least fairweather populations out of any server, we come out no matter what the score is and we still kick kitten .

No and we’re not interested in making ourselves any friends, and in tier 1 against BG and JQ we are quite often double teamed, and I don’t mean just we’re fighting off BG at Bay while defending from JQ at Hills, I mean BG and JQ commanders are in comms with each other and coordinating their 60+ man zergs in our garrison against what SoR can cobble together at 5 in the morning because they both hate us so much.

But you know what, that is exactly how we like it, because in those situations we still beat them and there is no sweeter victory than feeding those double teaming jack holes their humble pie.

Hexin.5603:

This thread is boring. But last night had some great fights with the 3 zergs or guilds from SoR … out front our spawn. You guys know who you were, but wanted to shout out to you guys for the fun. It really was the most enjoyable practice and battles I got all week. i think you guys got that we were trying to practice and you guys broke into 3 evenly matched groups. It was fun, even when you guys strategically positioned yourselves.

Special thanks to the exs guys for there leadership and lessons too. We had alot of takeaways from it and wanted to send my thanks. Can’t remember i think it was SoS bl for an hour or so at 9pm ish?

~ X [REx]

Yeah that was a lot of fun, so much more enjoyable than the usual PvDoor or PPT race that you get in WvW most nights.

So I logged in earlier and received an email from the dev team with a free WXP booster which was a nice surprise I guess, the only problem is I don’t WvW with the character I logged in with, this booster is soulbound on acquire and this email isn’t visible to any other character I log in with.

I appreciate the gesture, but all this did was show me how out of touch with your game you people really are. I don’t play this alt in WvW because of the way WXP is awarded to the character and not the account, so I’m basically forced into playing the 1 character I want to develop and never an alt, yes I’m already aware this will suck the life out of the game for me pretty quick.

I guess I really need to be careful about which character I log in with these days, don’t want to even log the alts in if there’s going to be these random “gifts” which really need to go to my main character and not my alts which they irrevocably get soulbound to.

Well if you’re looking for proof of a double team, here’s the first photo. It shows the Borderlands at 12AM PST a couple nights ago as it was 2 nights in a row. Notice the even distribution of EB and SoR BLs while JQ and BG have all their keeps and towers in their own BL.

I’m not angry that you double team us, I’m flattered that you double team us, I’m disappointed that you lie about it and act like it’s not coordinated.

pot.6805:

So basically you are saying, its okay when SoR does it, bad when JQ and BG does it. Glad we could clear that up.

Good, glad you understand the concept of 2nd and 3rd place working together against 1st place. For a minute there I was beginning to wonder if you really believed 1st and 2nd place working against 3rd place was how it was suppose to work.

Thought I was losing my kitten mind.

pot.6805:

Jubelum.3472:

BG and JQ both attacking us in our borderland is one thing, BG’s border being completely green and JQ’s border being completely red while both have huge zergs in SoR borderland working together to take our last keep is clearly two guys licking each other’s kitten.

Yeah because SoR has never done such a thing!

If you’re the top server and you’re wining every week in points because of your Oceanic and SEA coverage you should expect the other two servers to organize and double team you. Being the top server and organizing a double team with another late night zerg server to attack the server with lowest numbers in that time slot is just WEAK. I mean how can you not see that? Do you even understand the totality of how cheeseball that is?

…ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU FAIL!

BG and JQ both attacking us in our borderland is one thing, BG’s border being completely green and JQ’s border being completely red while both have huge zergs in SoR borderland working together to take our last keep is clearly two guys licking each other’s kitten.

Mr Whodey.6591:

Its funny cuz while we were wiping you 40 or so times, I was thinking about how SoR was gonna spin it to make themselves feel good.

You wiped us 40 times? Seems to me that if you wiped us even once with 200 people you would have taken the garrison. I recall you killing a few of us, with 200 people you should have gotten some kills, I mean, 1000 monkeys with typewriters and what not, but you never wiped us out because you never took the garrison. Taking the garrison was your entire goal and you certainly had the resources to, pooling from two servers who were obviously cooperating with each other and in constant communication. It’s not a conspiracy theory to notice 1 server’s force guarding one objective another server’s force guarding the other and neither attacking each other.

You wanted the garrison, you FAILed, you are a FAILure.

Mr Whodey.6591:

You won that? you got farmed for 3 hours because we wanted your bags not because we wanted your Garri, but whatever makes you feel better about it.

Oh of course that’s why you were there, the bags! So explain to me this, if you were there for the bags, how come (BG) didn’t leave the capture circle and with 100 people weren’t able to stop 3 hours of lord bannering. I mean if you’re there to farm bags clearly the 1 guy running in to banner the lord wouldn’t be that hard to take down, no? Also, if you were there to farm bags, why didn’t JQ or BG attack each other? Clearly one was there to farm bags and the other was quite squishy so it seems that if bags were your goal one mega zerg killing the other mega zerg would be conducive to this outcome, yes?

It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but your server coordinated a double team with another server, and in spite of the huge skill lag this caused, you failed, horribly miserably failed, and in the end you were farmed. Just swallow bra, just swallow…

Yeah how about that, we have a 35 PPT, we have ATM (JQ) and MERC (BG) running their 100 man zergs to cooperatively hit our Garrison, we hold them off for 3 hours in the lord room before wiping both zergs. This is what I mean, our PPT in Oceanic and SEA DOESN’T MATTER, the fact that we’ll fight your clear and obvious double teams and win the one fight you’ll actually stick around for is what makes SOR the server it is.

What’s sad is you guys trolling or preening as if you win some big victory because you megazerg the BLs with 4 times our numbers and get points. Points do not matter, and in the face of such crushing defeats in the actual FIGHTING it’s amazing you bother posting anything here at all.

We took your best double team and shoved it down your throat, whatcha got now, punk?

Yes your 80 man blobs at 5AM in the morning chasing PPT and running from fights with IRON don’t matter.

Pure and simple: this is a NA server group, anything that happens outside of NA prime time doesn’t matter. If you are in this tier because of your Oceanic or SEA presence exclusively, you don’t really deserve to be here.

I only mention this because during NA prime time I see BG running from a lot of fights against equal or inferior odds, and owe a great deal of their PPT to clear and obvious support from a 2nd server.

Looking at last night’s borderland around 12AM PST and seeing how evenly divided everything was between BG and JQ while they were both attacking SoR I realized that this double team is actually very cute, kinda like a romantic love story, not Romeo and Juliette perhaps but definitely Brokeback Mountain.

You can’t really balance a game around morale, besides even if the points are hidden people are going to know what’s up when they log in and see all 4 borderlands are 1 color. My idea is to create a handicapping system that works around the various population peaks of servers and allows lower populated servers to stay competitive with higher population servers. It would also give an incentive for large guilds to transfer to lower populated servers where the queues are short without sacrificing their competitiveness.

Yeah but then you’d still have the problem of having the same matchups week after week, which is also killing WvW for a lot of people.

The PPT system is broken in it’s current form because most players feel it does not accurately reflect the matchup. For example, in prime time the fights are even and server A gets ahead because they’re more organized and utilize effective strategies. Then in the wee hours of the morning when server A is asleep or working server B rolls in their huge oceanic zerg to capture everything in WvW and hold it for several hours. Server A wakes up to find their 5K point lead is now a 20K point trail.

To address this, my idea is to slow or hasten the PPT based on a borderland’s active population. Let’s say server A has 40 people, server B has 20 people and server C has 30 people in the current borderland. Since server A has the most people their point tick will be slowed down by a factor proportional to their advantage over the other servers. Server B might see their ppt hasten whereas server C wouldn’t really notice a change at all. Now if server A came along at 3AM with an 80 man zerg into a BL that no one was defending and proceeded to capture every tower, their PPT in that BL would begin to slow tremendously. It wouldn’t completely stop, they would receive points for holding everything in that BL but their PPT would potentially slow to one tick every hour. This would allow servers who at 3AM may only be able to field enough players for 1 BL to compete with those servers who at 3AM may be able to field enough players for 3 BLs.

In my opinion WVW is in dire need of such a change, most people are getting tired of the same matchups week after week, victory in WvW has almost nothing to do with how coordinated or effective your server is in prime time and everything to do with what size oceanic zerg you can field between 3AM and 8AM server time. I get that this game has to be accessible to people in different time zones and this would allow such a thing to make sense without completely destroying the matchup for everyone else.

“Say goodbye to the Quaggans”

I understand this to mean the rumors are true about the removal of underwater combat in WvW, what frustrates me is that underwater combat isn’t the problem, the downed state is the problem, and it’s especially a problem underwater. The downed abilities are not equal or balanced for their respective classes, they force people in WvW into one kind of fight: the zerg and they usually don’t accomplish anything other than 5 more seconds to troll someone who’s just beaten you. Would really have given me hope for this game if the dev had said “say goodbye to the downed state” instead.

I really must congratulate the BG conquerors for fielding such a mighty force and storming through the borderlands with such unbridled fury, skillfully evading your opponents in the open and crushing them when the odds clearly favored you, we could not stop you at the keeps, we could not stop you at the towers we could not stop you at the camps and in the end the PPT was yours!

Oh crap, just realized I wrote all that in English…

I agree it’s a stupid mechanic, the whole downed state is a poor mechanic and should be removed in WvW. The problem is that in any zerg on zerg fight there’s that 1 person either uplevelled, poorly specced or geared who goes down and when they die they potentially rally the entire enemy zerg. It puts too much of the onus on one person and creates a strain amongst players, especially new ones who should be encouraged to WvW not punished mercilessly for their failures once they try to. I can see the downed state mechanic being a fun way to troll people in sPvP but it makes no sense in WvW and pushes everyone into a cookie cutter bunker spec where they have to run in the largest zerg possible in order to win. It rules out the possibility of surviving a 1v2+ even if you’re correctly specced and geared because once you’ve killed someone you have to kill them again and that’s a pain in the kitten for anyone who doesn’t have “ways around” the downed state interrupt skill like a thief or mesmer.

Hey Arenanet,

Reading over what is planned for this event I’m troubled by the direction you seem to be taking this game, so here’s my suggestion: adding new dungeons is a good step, enhancing the existing dungeons would be an even better one. There is a lot of room for improvement in the existing dungeons.

There should be an element of surprise and adventure in a dungeon, and since yours are instanced it’s possible to change them up a bit. Imagine if every time some group did them there was a variation of the creatures they encountered. For example in one run through there’s a hallway and a chamber where nothing really happened, but in the next time, boom ambushed by an undead legion, a time after that, there’s a boss from another run (maybe even another dungeon) who has returned for revenge against your little band and has finally caught up with you and now there’s going to be a reckoning. It’s something I’m sure you could devote a few people to simply dropping in content to existing dungeons, making them change, making them interesting without making them extraordinarily challenging and painful to complete.

Remember in GW1 Factions where you were doing a mission and all of a sudden you came to a part where your team met up with a whole other team to stand off against a swarm of enemies? THAT was great gameplay, that was a surprise the first time through, imagine if something like that occurred every once in awhile in a dungeon in GW2. There is a huge list of random elements you could add to dungeons to make them more interesting, this would make them less grindy which would be it’s own reward and contribute to the longevity of the game.

Dungeon rewards can be tricky, there’s a number of different ways to earn the same level of gear with the same stats including crafting. The fact that I can earn for free a suit of armor in lieu of buying it from a crafter seems counter to a player driven economy. Maybe the dungeons could award armor and weapon “skins” with some inherent effect to be applied to crafted or Karma armor and weapons. So for example if I completed Arah and bought the armor skins and applied them to my Karma armor I would achieve +10 damage to undead simply for having that armor skin applied. This wouldn’t affect WvW but if I really liked running through Arah I’d have an advantage. Also if you wanted to make a harder dungeon in the future or add new content the skin’s inherent PvE bonus could increase in power as much as you liked without effecting WvW. This concept could be applied to existing gem store armor skins, something like magic find or increased stats while in certain areas of the game.

Beyond any of this is of course fixing the technical issues which exist in the current state of the game with regards to the dungeons. For example last night while doing crucible of eternity one of our group members went linkdead because her video card went out. We replaced her with another guildie who couldn’t enter our instance of the dungeon, we had him drop group, log out, rejoin, re-enter the dungeon, nothing worked. It became clear after awhile that we would all have to basically restart the dungeon from scratch after a series of logoffs and logins in an attempt to correct our bugged group. This is while I was trying to convince my brother who was in our group to start playing again by showing him some of the PvE content he may be missing out on. What a laugh, I doubt I’ll get him to play this game again, which is kind of a bummer since we usually only play online games that we both enjoy.

Anyways these are just my suggestions to a game I strongly believed in from the start, having played GW1 from the days of early beta. Your addition of WvW to the guild wars concept was a dream come true having really enjoyed the old Dark Age of Camelot as long as I did. Remember that DAoC lost it’s way when it started down the gear grind path, I hope you do not make the same mistake.

Sanctum,

We are a distinct server, no other server is named for what we are named for, there is an honor and dignity assigned to each of us who make this our permanent home, a burden beyond what any other server carries on it’s shoulders. This is fight we will probably not win, this is a fight which will show us our many weaknesses, this is a fight which will test us, divide us and I believe ultimately unite us. It is a fight and not a gift in any manner beyond that. I know this is tough, I hear it as I’m sure you do in your guildies, people looking to do other things, people looking to stop fighting, people looking to quit, all I’ve got to say to you is, suck it up and drive on, hua.

Nothing you guys are complaining about hasn’t happened to us at some point in the past including this week, there are ways to overcome border gate spawn camping, it just takes a little bit of leadership. I know you have it in you I’ve seen people on your side doing it, they just weren’t supported by anyone else. Those server transfer guilds you’re so fond of mentioning haven’t really been out this week either, I’m a regular in WvW and it’s been a real slow week for us. The entirety of Yak’s and GoM simply gave up from the get-go, there is no one to blame for that but yourselves.

All this QQ about server transfers, zergs, spawn camping is really neither here nor there. SoR is winning this match for the simple reason that Yak’s and GoM gave up. That’s it, period. You could have mobilized and kept pushing even at a point disadvantage during the week, setting up a huge push towards the end which may have evened the score, but you chose not to. At the very beginning of the match Yak’s pulled a huge lead which SoR had to fight to win back, you could have fought us back, but you chose not to.

From what I’ve seen this whole week, SoR’s main WvW guilds and their leaders have taken a nice vacation, the queues for getting into borderlands has been pretty non-existent, there’s been nothing to do out there and no one to fight. SoR has been weak in the field, mostly full of PvE’rs looking to get their map completions, armchair generals pretending to be commanders while fighting the grub in EB. Even though we held the map I would categorize our WvW presence as merely a police force since we pulled ahead. With a little server leadership and some dignity there was ample opportunity for Yak’s and GoM to rise up and retake everything against a complacent opponent, you simply chose not to.

So about 100 runs of AC explorable to get an exotic set which you can’t use until 60 and won’t use at 80… makes sense…

I don’t really understand the point of having large PvE mobs in WvW zones, it’s distracting to the players who are there to PvP and participate in WvW. Objectives are won or lost based on player participation and if for some reason a large group of people are otherwise detained by some random PvE boss like the grub or arbor spirit then the whole idea of WvW objective player cooperation breaks down. Just now for example, our server lost stonemist because a whole bunch of people were fighting the grub, I think they did this intentionally to grief the people who were trying to WvW and hold stonemist. Anyways, these PvE events are not a benefit to the server’s WvW participation, the people who for whatever reason join WvW to do these PvE events are holding up spots for people who want to WvW. That seems entirely unfair and counter to the goals set by the devs who designed WvW to bring players who enjoy PvP together to achieve a common goal.