Nothing realty changed in wvw ppl are just working out the best ways to play it and its very hard to get into wvw and do well with out knowing a lot of tricks. In some ways wvw has become very hardcore type of game play. This is how a lot of games work out in the long run.
I agree that you have to know a certain amount of tricks in order to be effective, but other than that I politely disagree with your statement that WvW has become very hardcore. In reality, it’s become completely the opposite precisely because of these tricks, as every single one of them encourages non-hardcore game-play.
- Numbers > Skill: with no AOE cap and easy rezzing through down-states, all that really matters are numbers. That’s why people constantly run in massive blobs. As a small organised group you can still do decent against larger groups, provided that they’re disorganised PUGs. Once the bigger group has even a modicum of organisation, as a smaller group you can harrass them, and that’s about it.
- 2 Keys > 10 Keys: in a zerg, everyone has a particular role to play and when lag goes through the roof, most people let auto-attack do the work or press a few buttons at most. However, as a small group or solo roamer, you actually get forced to learn your class and your opponents as you can’t hide as a faceless number in the zerg.
- PVE > PVP: everything in this game encourages PVE, rather than PVP. Which is obviously ironic for a PVP game. There’s no decent rewards for defending and a heavily defended T3 tower that gets taken after an hour long battle gives similar rewards to a T1 one that gets steam-rolled in a few minutes. That’s why people actively avoid the fight and PVE karma-train.
- Coverage > Strategy: there is no need for strategy when the outcome is already decided by who has the most numbers and who has the best coverage. PPT has become a side-game that only a few people care for, realm-pride has gone out of the window. The only strategy left is to find the path of least resistance and karma-train that.
- Offense > Defense: with no clear rewards for defending, less and less people care about upgrading things, placing/refreshing siege and generally defending objectives. Yesterday, one of our commanders abandoned EB for an empty BL without even trying to defend our T3 keep. The mind boggles. What are left with is active keep-trading for karma.
In short, GW2 encourages zergs and PVE. As a casual you can log on for an hour, hobble along with the zerg, take some objectives, get some loot/mat/gold and in general feel good about yourself. There’s nothing hardcore about that. In fact, I’d go as far as arguing that GW2 WvW is the least hardcore competitive realm-vs-realm I’ve done in any MMO.
Now, one could argue that in prime-time it’s hardcore when organised guilds slug it out against each other, even then I’d disagree. None of these guilds have the exact same numbers, plus there’s a lot of add-ins. More often than not, the outcome is decided by this.
Obviously, in organised GvG events, it’s somewhat more hardcore as skills/numbers are pretty much equal, whilst numbers are exactly equal. However, even then it’s hardly hardcore. All guilds pretty much run the same setups/strategy (i.e. hammer-trains) and there’s relatively little skill involved in that: pump might and boons, run in, pop stability, lay down a veil, end up in a big cluster-kitten with two balls of players running over each other whilst AOE CC and damage does the work. Grossly simplified, but that’s the gist of it. There’s very little targetting, very little assisting… once everybody has gotten accustomed to their role and sticks close to the commander, you’ll do fine enough.
And I personally believe this is exactly why WvW has taken such a drop. Game-play is one-sided (i.e. offense, but really avoiding fights and karma train), there’s no strategy left in the game with fewer and fewer people defending, numbers and coverage decide the outcome of a match-up, and for real hardcore players (i.e. solo roamers, small hit-squads and organised guilds) there’s little left.
