Guild Wars 2

I can’t just walk into PvE and get all the achievements and mastery points without a grind. Why would you expect to walk into WvW and get equal achievements to us players that have kept the game mode alive over the years. Judging by the queues last night every PvE player and his dog jumped in expecting to get quick bonuses. Well sorry it doesn’t work that way. WvW players have put in years to get their world rank, so no, forget shortcuts just so that those that haven’t can get their rewards without the hard work.

I want to know if somebody had been on the whiskey before combining the 3 largest French servers. Both ourselves (Gandara & Underworld) and Riverside are killing them at a 2:1 ratio yet there are always more. (K/D 3 French Servers 0.6, Gandara & Underworld 1.3 and Riverside 1.2) Somebody explain to me how the server doing all the dying is the one way out in front, would love to know the population figures over the duration of the match-up.

Getting this also. Really having a negative effect in WvW, I don’t have time to open each bag when searching for disablers or siege when I’m in the middle of a fight, my bags need to be open and able to see all of my items instantly.

Why must stability be fixed? Why? The WvW community needs to learn to fight differently. Instead of all pushing in one huge mass, spread out and push, Push with different sub squads from different angles, both ways lessen the CC as it has to be more widely spread. Perhaps the days of Empower – Veil – Leap In – Wells Down – Drop the Bomb have gone.

You wouldn’t see a modern army in trench warfare because they have moved on. It’s all about fast mobile units in the real world. So why shouldn’t WvW adapt?

Every single class has multiple ways to escape CC and stun, if you choose not to carry a stun breaker or two, more fool you, adapt your build and stop running the so called “meta”.

Yes some HoT skill/class combinations are overpowered, but Anet will eventually balance that. But it all boils down to learning to adapt in both tactics and build. Use your brains rather than being a follower of the meta automaton.

You are never going to “fix” off peak capping, just make the scoring representative of the number of people on each server to avoid huge discrepancies of holding towers and keeps unopposed for many hours. Capturing and holding a keep against equal numbers is an achievement. Capturing against a couple of guards and a door, then holding all night against nobody is not an achievement and the scoring system should reflect this with fewer points.

We are playing a server in our current match-up that runs from fights unless it is assured it has the numbers to win and is rarely seen during the peak game play hours. Yet they put out a big off peak crew and are dominating the other 2 servers based on nothing but the this off peak scoring. End result a score discrepancy that cannot be addressed and most of our players deciding to take the rest of the week off. Finding a solution to this is the “fix” for night capping.

DanielHarvey.7320:

You guys realize that they are changing it in the beggining of January to be not auto but based on the number of dolyaks making it into the structure? This is changing, it’s not for much more than a week or two at most left.

Auto upgrade is not being disabled the dollies still run automatically, it’s just the timed upgrade being disabled. What we need is somebody to launch each tier of upgrade manually, that is stopping auto upgrade.

Very few roamers are going to sit up all night killing dollies and flipping camps to prevent their border turning to a T3 home away from home for the server with the biggest night crew. So just removing the timer will NOT stop the madness of waking up to a fully upgraded enemy occupation of your borderland.

If an enemy wants a T3 tower / keep on your border, make them work for it, not just get given it due to higher off peak numbers.

Shadowresli.3782:

MoonT.6845:

Conner.4702:

People please stop as if anet did something fanstastic here. WvW got trown a tiny bone after years of neglect and most of you are jumping with joy as if it is the best thing ever.

These changes while some are needed and some are dubious are not going to change WvW at all for the most part.

We are trying to gauge the changes proposed and offer suggestions for the improvement of the game Conner not fan-boy. Please add something or give feedback if you can to help ANet and thus ourselves as a WvW community.

moon, you must be new …
a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away there was a thing called CDI. over months wvw players made suggestions and gave feedback. lock at what we got. Befor the HoT release, there was betatesting of the new WvW maps, with some dedicated WvW Guilds. most of there feedback showed, that there will be problems with the new maps. Did Anet listen? Most of us are way past giving feedback.
im with conner here, there was nothing released, so why all the merrits? this thread is a testament to how badly anet threaths the wvw community and how desperate we’ve become, that we are 8 pages of joyous over tablescraps.

Yes 10 years in the GW world and 3 in WvW clearly I’m new, don’t assume, instead stop being negative and living in the past and help ANet to shape the future of the mode.

Conner.4702:

People please stop as if anet did something fanstastic here. WvW got trown a tiny bone after years of neglect and most of you are jumping with joy as if it is the best thing ever.

These changes while some are needed and some are dubious are not going to change WvW at all for the most part.

We are trying to gauge the changes proposed and offer suggestions for the improvement of the game Conner not fan-boy. Please add something or give feedback if you can to help ANet and thus ourselves as a WvW community.

(An afterthought)

Ditch the oasis event, dispose of the dinosaurs and flatten the area to essentially make an open battlefield with access points to the fire and air keeps still at the sides. The oasis event is from what I can gather universally disliked and seen as a chore rather than an enjoyable event. Creating a flatter area where large scale combat can take place would encourage groups that wish to fight to play the borderlands more, and waypoints in the 3 major keeps would give players that have been killed a way back to a battle which currently takes way too long to run. Consider this a reinforcement type of action. Intelligent servers would contest or capture the keep waypoints to make servers reinforcements take longer to arrive, giving a mix of combat and strategy.

Dolyak killing will have a whole new fanbase.

My fear however is that a blob can still k-train a border and if you have no defenders it will still upgrade to T3 by morning. 1 person can now mitigate this somewhat by taking the camps to prevent upgrades, but I would like to have seen a system whereby each upgrade tier still had to be physically started by a player. K-Train blobs are too lazy to take down siege these days, let alone come back and launch the upgrades, so no effort after a capture should mean no upgrades taking place.

Also I see nowhere in these changes that anything is being done to reduce the huge points discrepancy that can occur when a server with high out of normal hours coverage, can hold towers or keeps for many hours in the other servers downtime. Yes give them a point contribution, but not as much as when the other servers actually have players around to defend it. After all capturing / defending a tower against an enemy group is harder than attacking / defending against a single player or indeed nobody. Base the points the towers provide on a ratio of total players available on the servers. This way if a server chooses to focus on EB with many people and ignore it’s owner border, then tough you deserve everything that you get for not being organised or just poor strategy. But if you genuinely have no players around to defend, then the score ratio being lower would keep scores within reason.

This way you do not devalue the off peak players who should be allowed to play when they wish, or the contribution of the vast majority of standard hours players, whose contribution is currently made irrelevant by the huge off peak hours points discrepancy, which once gained is very unlikely to be redressed over the course of the match-up.

I think Jocksy a few changes would help redress the balance in off peak hours.

Firstly as mentioned in another thread, make each tier of auto upgrade have to be manually triggered. The reasoning behind this is that karma train blobs can hardly be bothered to clear siege any more, let alone constantly running back to trigger upgrades on the towers and keeps they have taken. Make it such that if they want it to fortify they have to put some effort in.

Secondly, small groups trying to recap generally cannot carry enough supply to get into keeps and towers before guards respawn and destroy the partially built siege you are trying to place, the distance you need to run is just too far. So a quicker method of obtaining supply via way of tunnels, or moving a golem by a similar method would help. I’m sure the devs could devise some mechanic that allows a small party enough supply to try to retake a keep.

Finally, scale the boss fights for smaller groups to give them a chance to defeat a keep boss in a reasonable amount of time before the karma train comes running back from whatever map it is currently flipping, it’s a simple mechanic that already exists in the game. It’s hard enough to get into a keep, let alone then be faced by a super buffed boss, just give the smaller defensive groups a chance to recapture. Alternatively, apply a buff to small groups attempting to retake a border, it could run similar to the outnumbered buff, but calculate when it applies based on the populations of all 4 maps at the time, so that it is countering the large blobs, but turns off if the numbers are fairly even. We used to have Siegerazer and his mate to help with the northern towers, now nothing.

We just need something that gives the small group a chance to regain their towers and keeps against the blobs as that is what HoT has taken away. If this doesn’t happen we are going to continually see match ups where one server will dominate purely based on off peak scoring. Points scored during the majorities playing hours have no meaning whatsoever when compared with the 6-8 hours a day a server with a strong off peak presence can dominate all 4 maps, if defenders have no chance of recapping.

Come on ANet, simple changes that don’t devalue anybodies time in the game. At the moment you are devaluing the players from small servers that play off peak and can no longer contribute in any meaningful way to their server.

I think very few people are enjoying the match-ups now Reddie. When I observed the score discrepancies on Sunday morning it showed the new maps and features had made a huge 25,000 point approx point difference in favour of the servers with an off peak blob. And now 2 nights later we are seeing leads of 60,000 – 90,000 on all of the EU gold league match-ups. Small groups defending a border have been made irrelevant. Just look at the graphs, once keeps are taken then generally will not flip back until the following morning or lunchtime when the server gets numbers again.

At least on the old borderlands we had a chance to take our stuff back, but this is a joke, so everybody just logs off and leaves the blobs to it now, either returning when the server gets numbers, or not at all. There is no incentive to defend a desert borderland outside of peak hours any more and the longer this discrepancy exists, the more the less populated servers will have players leave.

Anets figures for WvW population are laughable, if all 11 top EU servers were full then we wouldn’t be seeing the ridiculous score differences we are seeing now. Just look back at the weeks prior to HoT and the score differences between servers and then at the differences after HoT. Unless some servers got miraculously good and others incredibly bad in the space of a day, then HoT has definitely had a massive effect on WvW.

I honestly feel the badly thought out changes in terms of auto upgrade and map size have torn the soul out of this game mode I love.

This ties in well with a post I made earlier today https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Off-Peak-Hours-Scoring-has-it-increased that is basically about the balance of WvW being totally shot now. I really hope ANet take a long hard look at this and realise they have just taken a situation that was already unbalanced and magnified the problem.

Does this make sense, yes. Will ANet listen, No.

I wish it was that simple Dawdler, EB is just a quarter of the points total. The majority of points are statistically scored on the borders off peak, and when players do wake up or get in from work / school to recapture stuff I is all T3 due to auto upgrade. The current environment seems to be an off peak heaven, cap, move on and wait for everything to fortify and be virtually impossible for small groups to retake.

The ability to score points outside of a servers peak hours has always been imbalanced, with 1 decent group able to karma train an entire set of maps. The only thing that kept this in check was that a small, dedicated 3 or 4 man group willing or able to play during the night or early morning period (For the majority) was always able to wait out a blob then take a borderland back whilst the enemy blob was off Karma training something else. So the blob always gets ahead but the few could at least reduce the damage being done whilst the bulk of the server population slept / worked.

However since the introduction of the new borderlands / features of WvW with keeps in particular being harder to take the problem has been compounded as a blob can still keep taking, but the small crews can no longer take them back before getting run over by an enemy train coming back to a border to defend.
I for one as a defensive minded player wanted structures that were more defensible and didn’t just melt, but the balance is just not right at the moment.

There has always been a lot of talk about not devaluing the contribution of players that can’t play during standard hours for the time-zone in which the server is situated, but at the moment the points being scored during the non standard hours are devaluing everything that the bulk of the population of the servers do.

It is one thing to want to value everybody equally, but another thing totally for the majority of a servers population having no say in the outcome of a match. Just look at the gold tier of EU since reset about 11 hours ago. Every one of those servers is classified as full in the WvW population. Yet in every match-up one server (of the equal numbered servers) has a 20,000 – 25,000 point lead.

Looking at silver and bronze leagues, other than 1 exception the results are a lot closer, most likely because servers in that bracket cannot field a blob that would take the whole maps as quickly as in gold league match ups based purely on the server population.

I don’t believe that I am imagining this issue has become worst since the HoT release, I think this is a genuine trend developing. What are your thoughts on this? And please remember I am not devaluing people playing outside of standard hours, it’s about the greater impact they can now have.

Everybody is different and for many of us it is not just about the fights. some of us actually like the strategy part of WvW which brainless karma training destroys. Why does every map have to be 3 huge blobs and a scattering of roamers? Can’t people use their brains on occasion and split into multiple groups. Then we get smaller scale fights all over the map instead of a lag fest. Save the huge blob fights for a gari/keep take down and the occasional open field fights. A huge battle should be a highlight, not every other fight. The more the new maps can break up the blob mentality, the better I feel.

Do they ever ask WvW players or test these changes in live environments? Way to go ANet you have created the new meta, catas up against walls for which all interior siege is now useless.

The simple fact is a castle or tower should give the defenders a significant advantage over any attackers below them. This is not reflected in game as the immovable siege is useless within 2 seconds of an attack beginning, and enemy siege can be placed in ridiculous positions but still clear your own siege whether well placed or not.

The top of almost every real castle a crenelation to allow the defender to attack the enemies below whilst still having a degree of defensive cover. They have arrow slits and murder holes to rain death down on the attackers, whilst very well defended.

Non of this is reflected in the game mechanics, so every time a blob comes knocking the defenders with fewer numbers will typically lose. Taking a garrison or major keep should be a monumental achievement, not a quick 2 minute task by a blob that is karma training a whole map.

WvW can be a very unrewarding place for those of us that enjoy scouting and defending, very little reward for hours of work which can be wiped out in seconds by every huge blob that turns up at the gates, whilst the masses run around gathering vast quantities of loot-bags and rewards on the K-Train.

Give me a castle that works like a castle ArenaNet, if a few defenders could hold or at least seriously slow down an enemy then more people would scout and defend, especially if our efforts were rewarded in loot. You get loot for taking a tower, why not for a successful outnumbered defence?

A workable defence would even help smaller servers that are outnumbered constantly in periods when the majority of the servers population are sleeping and prevent the huge discrepancy in scores that happens overnight. Just look at the statistics, the bigger servers score more points in the periods where the majority of the players in the time zone are asleep.

If I was sleeping in a castle and it was suddenly attacked, I’d wake up and defend it. Clearly we can’t in the real world send alarm calls to the servers population all night, so giving defences that actually function as defences and provide a significant advantage is the better answer.

Amen to that, worst event anet have done. Just pointless hour after hour of flipping wooden towers. Probably an idea that was thought up after 1 too many beers.

Not a snowballs chance in hell I’m going to buy the expansion at this rate. 95% of my game is now spent in WvW and I just don’t see any improvement, despite the lag being continually reported. I have a 152Mb connection with 10Mb upstream, fastest you can get in the UK at the moment. i7 processor and 12Gb of ram. Latest geforce drivers and a card easily capable of running this game maxed out on multiple monitors if I wished, yet as soon as the 3 servers get together nothing works. Fight for SM and the Keeps and Gari’s are a pure lottery of spam 1 as nothing else will work.

The most disappointing thing however is the minimal response from ANet, the PR department have struck out on this one big time.

To anybody complaining about this, log off, just log off or…

1) It’s funny as heck so get a sense of humour.
2) Other people are probably more annoyed by your ridiculous complaints than the joke.
3) Stop being so overly sensitive

Good on you Anet, was in WvW when this kicked in last night, you had a lot of people laughing hard in our Teamspeak.

I totally agree with Lillith on the difficulty of these Daily awards. As a person with premature rheumatoid arthritis I find the bells impossible to achieve as I can’t move my fingers fast enough. Jumping puzzles I can do given time, but this jumping puzzle is timed, making it impossible for me. So two of the dailies are out of my reach.

There are mice and keyboards that allow bindings of actions for those of us with some form of disability, but unfortunately Arena Net won’t let us program them either if it performs more than 1 action per key press, such as turn right and jump, so we are screwed whatever way we look at it.

Boring & predictable. You knew which Euro server was going to win before the season started. What’s the point in playing such an unevenly matched tournament against the same enemy week after week after week. The not play any server more than once turned out to be a myth. Anet continues to bury it’s head in the sand regarding server coverage issues.

What was to enjoy?

Absolute joke the no repeat match-ups has turned out to be. Same old story, always pitted against the largest server, lose 7-10k points every time you go to bed due to their superior coverage. Lose the desire to play.

ANet your wonderful 3rd season CHANGED NOTHING! Congratulations on a crappy job.

If all we have to look forward to after next week is the same 2 or 3 teams week in week out, then WvW and ANet can kiss my butt goodbye.

Stats don’t lie Ansau

Something has to change. Season 3 EU is already a forgone conclusion due to the NA players on EU servers situation. It doesn’t matter if you pull out all the resources you have for 20 hours per day in this game, your server eventually hits a dead spot where the majority of the population have to sleep.

When another server can field 150+ players at 3 in the morning, and turn 5000 point deficit into a 5000 point lead in those dead hours and the time you are rebuilding your wooden kingdom it truly does feel as if these tournaments are a waste of time and effort.

Typical tick for EU vs NA supported EU server, effort required to hold that first night was ridiculous, 2nd night people had to sleep, and ANet say it’s acceptable, well enjoy losing the playerbase ANet, that’s all I can say.

How ridiculous saying it is overpowered. I managed a fair few kills in WvW last night but still got killed myself. I respec’d damage went down a little was more survivable. Why on earth call for a build to be nerfed that has been underpowered for so long that many times I couldn’t even get a party in WvW because of the distain other classes show the ranger.

I do no more damage than a thief that can down you in a matter of seconds yet I don’t see the thief getting nerfed or the a limit putting on the warrior damage because he can down me quickly.

It’s new, people will adapt their defence against it, but I for one appreciate the fact that I can now bring my ranger to the table without everybody shouting noob, because I want to play my favourite class.

I couldn’t give a hoot what some people say about your day is someone’s night, sticking their heads in the sand and pretending this isn’t an issue, in Europe with a 2-3 hour time difference we get people who play late and others who play early. But despite this there is always a dead spot where the vast majority of Europeans are asleep.

We all know night capping is a problem where Spanish and French speaking NA server users join EU servers to dominate the empty maps night after night. Just take a look at the SFR statistics for hourly tick, all day generally even matchup (until people just give up and quit when they can’t be bothered to recap everything morning after morning), as by 3:30am most nights they tick 550 plus. Dedicated language servers in NA would put a stop to this too, how much fun can it be for them to cap empty maps night after night anyway?

Another solution, if they want the game to score 24/7 they should have 24/7 server populations, ie no NA, EU, China, just global. That way all servers should have cover at all times.

Practical implications, WvW is a lag fest anyway at times and this would only make it worse. So position servers in geographic locations that would be able to handle this better. i.e. Not all stuffed in a vast Texas data centre.

There are solutions to this problem that Anet like to see it as a feature. The ultimate remedy will be people getting fed up and dropping WvW participation entirely.

Something a little drastic I know but what about taking the decision away from the players somewhat? Reallocate guilds to random servers in even number distribution. Then at the end of each tournament do the NFL draft thing. Servers that performed the lowest get the top guilds draft of new players and higher servers the least. Repeat each tournament and we get a pretty level playing field.

I agree with the OP siege refresh is ridiculous, why on earth should siege just disappear after a set time, must be some serious bloody woodworm in these keeps and towers. It’s hard enough trying to defend a tower when a 60 man blob turns up, you hit all your defences to run through the crowd on the gate, get inside and lo and behold all the siege you placed earlier in the day is gone and you’re left slinging stones from the tower walls with 0% chance of holding.

I naturally like to play tower defence, zerging for me is boring, I’d much rather pit my wits to keep an enemy at bay. However I’m now at the stage where I no longer scout because it just costs me money and I earn next to none back. I throw 10 bits of siege up in a tower, probably spend 2g on that, another couple of gold upgrading and then head off for tea. Come back an hour or 2 later and because the person you left scouting didn’t do a job I now have to spend more on resiegeing, if the tower has been taken.

ANet need to find a better way to reward people that don’t jump on the karma train and want to play this game with some level of tactics and sanity. Siege refresh is just another way to drain gold and ensure the zerg mentality remains.

GW2 is very healthy, just because WvW has taken a hit don’t assume the Pve, Spvp and roleplaying crowds don’t flock to this game in huge numbers. WvW isn’t dead either, yes there may be fewer players off peak, but prime time still has queues. But it is in decline.

I believe WvW is losing numbers due to imbalance. Every week it’s the same after reset, some good hard fights for the first 5-6 hours, then normal people go to bed and the nightcap routine kicks in. Same old story, wake up after the following morning see that your server tick is at a dribble and think I really can’t be bothered now. Or servers where you are totally outnumbered the majority of the time have the same effect, once you fall behind there is no way back without the numbers and people give up.

WvW is a procession, you look at the 3 teams on reset night and pretty well know the result the following Friday night before you start, If ANet could find a way to iron out the huge advantages and disadvantages that different servers suffer it might turn into a contest again. Until then WvW will lose numbers with people becoming disillusioned with the predictability.