Guild Wars 2

Jereme.1840:

On another note, What is with all the rangers? You do realize they offer little to no support in WvW. Any other class outshines Ranger in WvW hands down. So so many rangers makes me *cry*

I’m wvw rank 98 on my Ranger and I play it *gasp* because I have more fun playing on a ranger than on the other classes. To me, if I’m choosing my character based on the meta of the month, I’m no longer playing the game for the fun and that’s the whole point.

ptitminou.6489:

Top 3 is HoD, FC and SF. In that order unless the SF transfers make it HoD, SF & FC.
When ET faces a non top 3 team, they will get the +5.
Like in weeks 3 and 5.

So far the match-up, as well as the other 2, is going down as I predicted for week 3. Way too early to call anything, but ET is 32,000 points behind GoM and 5,000 behind Kain. It is only Monday, so ET could still easily pull ahead of Kain, but that GoM lead is starting to look like a very long shot to come back from.

nightwing.2179:

In my eyes, these are some major changes! I especially like the elementalist preview.

When these are released, will we have our traits reset or do we have to buy another manual to re-trait?

It only costs like 3 silver to reset traits at 80. I do it every couple of weeks.

Mercabre.7123:

I don’t think the points accurately display of the rank or skill of the server. I know this week HoD has put the hurt on ET and as a result DR has more points overall and yet ET is a stronger server than DR.

You’re probably right, but the fact remains that ET is only getting 1 point this week and only got one point last week. Last week, DR got to go against AR, which got them 3 points and DR is getting 3 more points for Silver finish this week. Those 2 weeks are the difference between the 15 and 11 point totals in my spreadsheet.

Mercabre.7123:

Kalorian.1935:

Here is my prediction for how the rankings will shake out, along with the week by week, match by match analysis of how I got there. It’s a tough call on who will take 1st between DH and FC this week so I basically assumed FC wins this one and DH wins the next time the two meet. I’m on Darkhaven, so I was trying to stay objective.

http://i881.photobucket.com/albums/ac12/Bandit439/NABronze.png

ET will end up being ranked higher than Kain (personal opinion after three weeks of fighting Kain and then ET just before and during leagues). ET seems to have a larger playerbase and coordination.

This is entirely possible. DH hasn’t gone up against Kain yet since they dropped so I was looking at a lot of data and no personal experience.

To those saying, I thought xyz would have been higher or is better than my chart predicts, remember you have to look at it in the context of each weekly match. ET goes up against FC in week 4, SF in week 6 and both SF and DH in week 7 and I think the odds are against beating any of those servers. If it is true that ET can easily beat Kain, then that changes the predictions a lot because they meet them twice. If ET can beat the GoM I am seeing this week, that changes everything. DH has gone against both GoM and ET in the last 3 weeks and I think GoM’s coverage will win out over ETs.

I agree GoM has come a long way. I did some Bronze league analysis earlier and went through all 7 weeks match by match and added up the points. I put DH and FC at 3rd and 4th (anyone’s guess as to which order really) and GoM at a very respectable 5th. Here is a link to what I did.

http://i881.photobucket.com/albums/ac12/Bandit439/NABronze.png

zaragoz.6351:

All in all I just thought I would say this has been a kitten close match, good job to everyone who’s stayed up and been involved. Oh and GO FC!!! I’m at work, but for those of you at home don’t stop trying!

Ditto, but go DH instead of Go FC.

titanlectro.5029:

Kalorian.1935:

DH is trying to win this thing. You win by getting more points than the other guy. If we can get those points from GoM more readily than from FC, then so be it. That’s just the nature of a 3 way match-up and I don’t think GoM should view it as being picked on or unfairly focused. On Wednesday night we were 10k points behind GoM and 8k behind FC. Taking and holding the GoM borderland ensured us 2nd place and gave us our current shot at 1st. It’s hard to argue it was the wrong call for our Commanders to make.

I’m saying it was the wrong call for FC to make. A strong GoM would have given them a chance. Now DH is just going to camp GoM BL and win first. FC should have helped us, not double teamed us.

I’m also saying that as a game mechanic, “stomp the little guys for the easy points” is horrible. The three way battle was supposed to promote ganging up on the person in first. Of course this is not how it goes, but that won’t stop me from hating it.

My comment wasn’t directed to you specifically, but generally to the 4 or 5 GoM posts deriding DH for taking over their borderland. I’m also not sure I would characterize GoM as a “little guy” in this match-up, though that was certainly true in the past when we’ve seen you on DH. Remember, you guys were ahead of DH in this match-up from Saturday night until the wee hours of Thursday morning.

DH is trying to win this thing. You win by getting more points than the other guy. If we can get those points from GoM more readily than from FC, then so be it. That’s just the nature of a 3 way match-up and I don’t think GoM should view it as being picked on or unfairly focused. On Wednesday night we were 10k points behind GoM and 8k behind FC. Taking and holding the GoM borderland ensured us 2nd place and gave us our current shot at 1st. It’s hard to argue it was the wrong call for our Commanders to make.

Sean.8274:

So, what happens if there is a tie? Lets assume SF and HoD are very closely matched. So much so that SF beats HoD once, and HoD beats SF once. This would result in a final predicted score of 33 for each. Do both servers get 1st place?

Good question and I don’t think it has been addressed by the Devs at all. My guess would be that they’d award gold level awards to both servers, silver to none and bronze to the 3rd place. Alternatively, they could break the tie by adding up the cumulative points from all 7 weeks and seeing who had the highest total.

Here is my prediction for how the rankings will shake out, along with the week by week, match by match analysis of how I got there. It’s a tough call on who will take 1st between DH and FC this week so I basically assumed FC wins this one and DH wins the next time the two meet. I’m on Darkhaven, so I was trying to stay objective.

http://i881.photobucket.com/albums/ac12/Bandit439/NABronze.png

I think tonight will tell us a lot about who will come in which position this week. It’s going to come down largely to hit gets hit the hardest by the Living Story release I think. We usually lose a lot of people to Living Story on DH, but maybe some will stick around for the WvW Meta achieves.

1)Scoring/Coverage Imbalance
2)Zerging
3)Reward/Lack of meaningful gold acquisition

Byega.4215:

WvWers don’t care about achievement points, we just want to play the feature we love.

In all fairness, some WvW players have been complaining vocally about lack of realistic achievements for many months. I see threads about it every week.

On the topic of achievement appropriateness, I think the merc camps will be the worst since you have to go out of your way to do this as they aren’t something we normally give any thought to in WvW. I know the EB zergs sometimes do them if they are passing through. The Yaks kill achieve I think is fine. Often when you hit a camp, you get to kill 1 or 2 yaks in the process. Doing the camp capture achievement will get you more than halfway to completion on this.

The one I worry about the most is the 5 castle captures. I play WvW nearly exclusively, but I don’t enjoy EB. I’m going to have to spend a ton of time in EB to get this one. Even worse, some of the smallest pop servers like AR and GoM almost never hold SM. I’d hate to see a situation where whole servers miss out on this achievement.

The other one that seems crazy to me is the 50 world ranks. I play 2-3 hours of WvW most nights but I play home border defense and only get 1 or 2 ranks a night. I can’t see casual WvW players ever getting this unless they exclusively do EB zerging, which is definitely not what WvW needs more of.

I can’t compare it to last year because I wasn’t here last year. I mostly play WvW but I took last night to do some of the Halloween stuff. The instanced story intro seemed pretty good. I went to LA and did the jumping thing to get in the cauldron to do the costume brawl and that was fun.

Then I went out into the 3 Krytan zones to look for the doors. I found one, opened it and nothing happened so I clicked on it, thinking that was what I was supposed to do. I got sent to the Mad Realm and my only option was to go back to LA. Once I did that, I waypointed back to Kryta to keep looking for doors. I ran around for like 15 minutes and had about 5 of them disappear on me before I could reach them. I did manage to reach 3 or 4 of them and 2 of those dropped a trick or treat bag and the others, like the first one I encountered, seemed to do nothing. I don’t understand this content at all. Not fun.

Next I tried out the Lunatic Inquisition and played 2 or 3 rounds of that. I thought it was a fun game mode and will probably play it a couple more times before it goes away.

Last I did the Labyrinth. I ran around by myself for a bit just killing things (never saw a door or a boss) and then the zerg found me so I fell in with them. We killed three bosses, but I only got one of the achievements, curiously. I spent most of the time helping rez people during the boss fights. At the end of the night I had like 75 candy corn so I went to the holiday vendor to see what he sold and saw that it takes 1,000 to make one of the candy corn cobs and that the only things he sold require 15 and 20 of those cobs. This is the point where I pretty much wrote off ever going back to the Labyrinth. I get, at most, 3 hours a day to play after my kids are in bed and even if I did this every night for all 3 of those hours, there is no way I’d ever be able to afford anything.

I look forward to trying the clock tower tonight. I recently started seeking out jumping puzzles and have been enjoying them a lot so I think I will enjoy this.

This is a really good question that I’ve been wondering about as well. If you are near the top of your league it seems you only stand to lose ground not gain it. I think this will be especially bad in Silver where there is a 500 point rating spread between the predicted number 7 server (SBI) and the predicted number 15 server (NSP).

Just look at this week’s match-up of YBvSFvET. YB currently has 316k points to ET’s 66k and ET is still predicted to gain rating in this match-up. Those servers are only about 400 rating apart from one another.

The patch notes say “The WvW rank-up bonus chest now provides greater item rewards.”. I read that to mean only the 1-3 bonus chests you get based on server performance each week were made better. I don’t think they promised standard rank up chests would be better.

Vergil Huragok.3967:

And the yak finishers are temporary until the next season as well, I imagine much of the other rewards are pretty much standardized

Also, I’ve seen the finisher described as a “stack of yak finishers” which makes me believe it is a limited number of time-limited consumables similar to how the cow finisher you could buy from the gem store used to work.

skullmount.1758:

I do kinda wish they’d talk about the rewards more for the season thing. It might help people decide whether or not to move to a different server.

Hopefully this will be part of the patch notes for tomorrow’s release since it’s the last update before the league starts.

They won’t be able to tell you WHO you will be facing until this week’s match-ups are over. The leagues are to be based on standings at the start of the league. It’s not at all clear at this point which U.S. servers will make it into 5th and 6th spots in the gold league, which also impacts which servers end up in Silver league. It’s more firm in bronze, but there is still a chance of some flip flopping in positions 15 – 17.

purduealliss.7145:

Poor little Darkhaven. They were afraid we were going to take there camp. So they built 3 AC’s, 2 Ballista’s, and put a stealth trap on both sides. There was just us 3 thieves. Keep being fabulous DH! ;D

How dare they utilize stealth traps to counter your ridiculous, normally uncounterable class mechanic? Was it tiresome for you to have to fight for more than 4 seconds at a time?

Hey FC, thanks for the hospitality during my 40 minute stay in Bluevale. Next time you send 4 people to dislodge one ranger, make sure 3 of them aren’t attacking the NPCs. SF finally ran me off to supply their siege of your Bay.

Better than 10 pages of posts by and replies to that one guy from last week.

Narsil.6579:

Kalorian.1935:

Narsil.6579:

Kalorian.1935:

Narsil.6579:

It is speculation and sort of conspiracy thing going on, about higher tier servers throwing their matches to get to lower leagues to take the winnings, idk if it is true lol ,but this is why Anet should have thought this crap through, instead of 3 , they should have made 4 of 6 , or 6 of 4, i know it makes more winners, but it makes closer matches and better outcomes. At this rate if a high server does throw itself on purpose to go to the lower leagues and dominate, then we still screwed!

Speaking of not thinking things through, how were you envisioning the 6 leagues of 4 working? Does one server just completely sit out from WvW each week?

During the leagues every server will face every server it will be in a 1v1 basis, meaning every server gets to go against every other server atleast once.

Every server gets to see every server at least once, but it is still 1v1v1 format.

Well in any case 3 of 8 is still unmatched, since 3*2 is 6 + 2, so 2 servers get to go against each other while other 6 get a 3 way format? see the logic fail there?

3 leagues of 8 , 3*8 = 24

It’s going to be 3 leagues, but the Gold league is the top 6 servers and Silver and Bronze are 9 servers each. That was the only way they could do 3 leagues to keep multiples of 3 for even matchups.

Narsil.6579:

Kalorian.1935:

Narsil.6579:

It is speculation and sort of conspiracy thing going on, about higher tier servers throwing their matches to get to lower leagues to take the winnings, idk if it is true lol ,but this is why Anet should have thought this crap through, instead of 3 , they should have made 4 of 6 , or 6 of 4, i know it makes more winners, but it makes closer matches and better outcomes. At this rate if a high server does throw itself on purpose to go to the lower leagues and dominate, then we still screwed!

Speaking of not thinking things through, how were you envisioning the 6 leagues of 4 working? Does one server just completely sit out from WvW each week?

During the leagues every server will face every server it will be in a 1v1 basis, meaning every server gets to go against every other server atleast once.

Every server gets to see every server at least once, but it is still 1v1v1 format.

Narsil.6579:

It is speculation and sort of conspiracy thing going on, about higher tier servers throwing their matches to get to lower leagues to take the winnings, idk if it is true lol ,but this is why Anet should have thought this crap through, instead of 3 , they should have made 4 of 6 , or 6 of 4, i know it makes more winners, but it makes closer matches and better outcomes. At this rate if a high server does throw itself on purpose to go to the lower leagues and dominate, then we still screwed!

Speaking of not thinking things through, how were you envisioning the 6 leagues of 4 working? Does one server just completely sit out from WvW each week?

Chris.3290:

Don’t laugh about the EU/NA merge, I’ve been thinking about it and I’m starting to believe that it may happen on some level (maybe a post-season between the top 3 of both zone?)
Think about it, they have been adamant about the 2 leagues about the beginning. They are adamant about the effects of bloodlust.

What could their big announcement be, that they need to have it translated perfectly before they can let the news out?

There are only three possibilities that come to mind:

1. Interleague play at some level. Whether it’s just the league winners or gold league winners or???

2. Changes to the bloodlust. Either a change in the amount of bonus stats, in the places needed to capture, or even a cooldown before it can change hands.

3. An announcement containing all the information on the leagues, including scoring, how matches are decided, rewards, etc. (most likely.)

Devon’s post specifically said changes to the NA leagues were in the works. I don’t think he would have called out NA specifically if what they are doing involves EU.

Qualamala Lumpa.9832:

melodyca.8921:

Horrible demoralizing matchup. Will be glad when the week is over with. It sucks being outnumbered. The matches are fun when they are EVEN

And GOM…how come its never acknowledged we are in a serious slump???

Just wait until leagues! All the servers 20 – 24 are going to have a blast facing rank 12 – 15! Kudos to Anet

There may be hope for you guys on AR and GoM. There is supposed to be an announcement about changes to the North American league and season plan coming sometime before the end of this week.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/US-Leagues-4-instead-of-2-Please/page/3#post2900179

Ostricheggs.3742:

Just pointing out the truth. Telling anvil rock you got zerged down is like telling a starving african child that there’s nothing to eat in your pantry.

We all know DH outmans you, but the way you tell it makes it sound like you have 10 guys in WvW. Last night I got run over by a 20+ man group from AR and we on DH had the outmanned buff in our own borderland for a while. Thunder Panda posted a screenshot of the group I’m talking about on the previous page. The night before that I saw a similar sized group while roaming in the AR borderland and either Saturday or Sunday night I was chased by a 20+ person group in the GoM borderland. I haven’t been in EB all week so I’m not sure what it is like there but things don’t feel wildly lopsided in the borderlands when I’m on in the evenings.

We really do know how you guys feel. Go to http://mos.millenium.org/servers/history/46 and look at 3 of our 5 last weeks before this (37, 36 and 33). This time last week we were down nearly 70k points to CD due to their superior numbers, which is about the same margin AR is down in score compared to DH right now. The situation really is the fault of the broken matchmaking system and the leagues are only going to make it worse. You’re going to match-up against IoJ and Yak’s at least once each in that seven week period and they both have a lot more people than DH. You’ll also have to see DH again, plus Kain which last we saw them had more people than our current numbers. It’s a big mess and it is nobody’s fault but ANet’s.

Same. I click Travel, it goes to loading screen and 5 seconds later it tells me I’ve been placed in overflow. It’s like an infinite loop of being placed back in overflow (not sure if it is a different overflow each time or the same).

Here is my take. No server has inherently better players than another. Every server has a range of players spanning from really new or unskilled to the guys who spent hours perfecting their build and know it inside and out. For those saying DH is the zergiest/worst server they’ve ever seen, I have to chuckle because it is the same thing people on DH were saying about CD the two weeks in a row we faced them before this match-up. CD in turn told DH to quit whining because this was nothing compared to how bad they got zergged by TC the week before. I think if we’re all honest with ourselves, what we are really kitten ed about is facing a server who has way more people on than ours does.

Regarding roaming, small group, zerg mix….it seems to me every server has a relative handful of people who enjoy roaming and small group play and everyone else sort of just heads to the nearest commander tag, which, given enough people, becomes a zerg. I think most people who aren’t in organized WvW guilds just do it because they aren’t sure what else to do or what they can do by themselves.

I think we all need to face the fact that WvW is just kind of broken due to server participation imbalance and because it encourages the zerg style play because a) new/casual players don’t know what else to do and b) the reward structure is all about capturing as many things as you can as fast as you can. There’s no sense beating one another up on the forums when the real problem is over at Arena Net HQ.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see but I’m doubting the rewards for this league are going to be great enough that droves of people are going to throw down approximately 70ish gold for a transfer. Or even less likely, 140ish gold or approximately the retail price of the game itself for a transfer there and then back to the original server. I’m sure there will be some, but I bet it isn’t going to be the mass exodus some are predicting here on the forums.

I love the addition of some reasonably attainable achievement points to wvw via this league meta. I think it is also great that rewards will be tied to completion of it, rather than everyone on the server getting the reward as the Masively article implied. I’m hoping these achievements will be along the line of capture 100 sentry points, slay 150 enemy dolyaks, capture 50 supply camps, capture 25 towers, etc. Achievements like that will be easy for regular wvw players to get and not so overwhelming that newcomer PVE player won’t have a shot at them over the course of 7 weeks.

One thing I’m still interested in is how the scoring will work. Will it work similar to the rating system where say the number 13 U.S. server has to beat the number 24 U.S. server by something like 200k points just to break even? Or will it be something more like a victrory in each weekly match-up awards 3 points, second place 2 and third 1 and the server with the most points at the end of 7 weeks wins?

One thing I don’t love about the League concept is it means more weeks spent playing servers with wildly different server populations, even more so than now. I personally have the most fun when playing servers with similar populations. When we go up against servers with double or even triple the number of people we have, it’s completely demoralizing and I don’t even want to log in because it’s just a fight to try to hold onto a single keep and a couple towers. Similarly, when we face low-pop servers, it’s boring. This system insures No 24 is going to have to face No 13, 14, 15, etc. at least once each in this 7 week period and that match-up would never occur today.

So much speculation in this thread. Wait to hear how the match-ups, scoring and rewards are going to work before getting too worked up.

Here’s the part of the Massively article I found most curious:
“However, there will be smaller rewards doled out along the way, and even if you don’t participate in WvW, you could be on the receiving end of some goodies if your server does well.”

If everyone on the server is going to get some rewards based on WvW performance, can I get in on some of the Living Story loot bags while in WvW?

Ok DH, thanks to the way this wonky rating system works we probably need to win by about 100k just to break even this week…