Guild Wars 2

When people say prime time, they don’t mean the peak hours of their servers. They mean the time where both servers are competing at full capacity. In a matchup with Russian or East-European servers primetime will end earlier, and in weekends primetime will last longer. The only thing people are asking for is that point gain when servers are actually competing is properly rewarded.

I really like the WvW gameplay and I don’t think the gameplay needs to be altered at all. What does need to be addressed is that fact that when you have a fair and tense battle filled with large scale sieges and defenses, you will only get a fraction of the point lead you are able to get when the opponents are logging out due to the fact that they are Russian and living in a different timezone. As it is, Russian players are being punished for their timezone. I’m not Russian, but I would love my matches with them to be focused on the times we are actually competing actively and are having a great match.

Making sure that the scoring interval goes up when there’s many people competing will work wonders in solving the timezone issues.

Thats a nice idea! But I think that scaling the intervals at which points are being gained would be a bit better. That way a castle is always the same amount of points, but when there’s enemies to fight, you will be getting points every 12 minutes instead of every 14.

This way objectives still hold the same value to everyone, but the timezone problems would be resolved.

That’s a cool idea Phildo! The reason why I suggested adjusting scoring intervals instead of adjusting point values is that you would be able to keep the value of objectives consistent. So your server’s point gain of +230 wont suddenly drop when players leave. Instead, you’ll be getting points every 14 minutes instead of every 12 minutes.

etsmith.9025:

Actually We cant agree. At some point you are going to be matched to a server where YOU are in prime time, however to another server its offpeak. Are you gonna be happy with your efforts counting half as much? during your prime, you will be gaining points at a disadvantage while the other team will gain full points during their prime
does this sound like a reasonable tradeoff?

If you’d read the second to last paragraph of the 1st post you’ll find that I agree with you on the timezone problems.

With primetime I meant a time where both servers are competing at their full capacity. So primetime will not always start at exactly 20:30 and weekend will have a longer primetime.

Also, try to look at it this way: you will get a higher reward when there is enemy players who are trying to stop you. So holding 2 keeps and 2 towers when there is an enemy force of 100 soldiers trying to stop you will give better gains then holding those points versus an empty server.

That thread started about moderation and is all over the place. This thread is about the score rewards during different timezones. Hopefully we can all agree on the fact that night capping is fair, but that some adjustments to the scoring system can improve the competitiveness of the server ranking.

Bump for relevance.

The issue is not that night-capping is unfair. Night-capping as a tactic is completely fair, and I have not heard many people cliam otherwise. As I explained earlier, one of the issues is that the scoring system puts some timezones at a disadvantage because of their geographical location. ArenaNet seems intent on building a caring community that competes for a high ranking. So I hope they will look at a system that represents the best server as accurately as possible. It’s possible to remove (some) of the influence of the geographical location of the players without altering any of the skill-level.

Making the score intervals dependant on the amount of players in the servers is a very simple but elegant sollution. This means that for example Stonemist always gives the same amount of points. But when there are 1000 players playing a WvW matchup, they would see the score count go up every 5 minutes instead of every 15.

Ah, thanks for clearing that up.

l’ll be staying away from getting world completion then. It’s an extremely obvious giveaway for our clone mechanic.

A few days ago I encountered an enemy commander in WvW. When clicking on his portrait I could see a star. During the short combat (the commander was running away), I noticed that the clone did not have have this star, thus making the commander icon kind of flawed for the mesmer class.

Can anybody confirm this?

I don’t see how gold is relevant to this discussion as it would not be affected. And as I said, you would relatively be gaining more points per player as point scaling wouldn’t happen linearly. Regardless, this topic is not about point scaling but about the competitive problems WvW runs in to.

the flaw is with the matchmaking system, not with the WvW rules or the people on the servers. If your server is really good during peak hours, and really bad during off peak hours, then your server should probably be ranked somewhere in the middle. If your server is pretty good during peak hours and dominates during off peak hours, your server should probably be a top 10 server.

As I’ve said before, server populations have different timezones. The server ranking is not a bandage to fix the system, its supposed to represent the best servers. Under the current rules Russian servers have a huge disadvantage. If you disable half the units of a SC2 player and let him play on the ladder, then yeah, eventually the matchmaking would give him winnable matches, but that would kind of be beside the point…

You can not have fair cross timezone matches unless you focus on the times they are actually actively playing against each other.

Orbs are fun!

Unfortunately they don’t see much play due to the fact that they are locked away behind 2 reinforced walls. Having a few orb resets a day would be fun.

DemonCow.5328:

What about when we have a 20 v 20 fight overnight? Our fight was no less even than yours, and it wasn’t any easier to win it. It certainly is more difficult to capture objectives with 20 people than with 100 people just zerging everything.

You can easily make sure that point scaling stays high when the fight is equal, so your idea that 20v20 would not be rewarded is incorrect. And even if the reward would be a bit lower, shouldn’t 300 people fighting score more points then 40 people fighting?

DemonCow.5328:

If you want the primetime WvW to count more, how about having to pay a fee to play during those peak times? Or everyone who plays off-peak hours gets a 50% refund on their game since the WvW stuff they do won’t matter, but you still have to pay full price? I am willing to bet that you don’t really like either one of those ideas….

First of all, I am not talking about restricting access during peak hours. I’m talking about that fact that even if you are doing well during peak hours, you’ll get maybe a 50/100 point lead over the other servers. At night you can cap more points with more ease and thus have a higher gain then when there are actually enemies to fight.

Playing off peak will still matter immensely. But at the moment it simply matters way more then fighting during peak hours, which is the imbalance that should be fixed.

DemonCow.5328:

Maybe we could just give the matchmaking system some time to work itself out…. There really was no way for the servers that capture everything overnight to be taken into account in the 24 hour test matches. I think this was an oversight by Anet.

As I said, this will still not solve any of the problems. First of all the payoff of night capping will still be higher then the payoff for tense fighting between full servers. Second of all, the servers are supposed to be ranked, and being the best should be meaningful. As it is, a Russian server has a severe disadvantage because of the way points are distributed. Even if they dominate the enemy, they will lose out during the night because of the 3 hour time zone difference.

Mog.1589:

The real solution is to restrict the servers by region. I do not see any other way to balance it correctly.

Problem is, even a small timezone difference such as Russia vs. Europe will have problems.

If you decide to leave, the other 2 servers will be able to get a massive point score on that map as they will both have people playing.

I really enjoy WvW, though I play GW2 mostly casually, so I have no stake in the whole “my server is the best” debate. I’m mostly speaking from my experience with running several large competitive tournaments.

Putting servers that nightcap vs each other will not solve the problem. The issue with night capping is not that it’s unfair, night capping is completely fair and game under the current WvW implementation. The problem is that giving night cap scores the same reward as 100v100 man prime time fights is undesirable from a competitive standpoint. The obvious solution is to scale down point gain during off hours, which will solve most problems but will not not make night capping obsolete as a tactic.

The gains of playing versus a nearly empty server during off time are much higher then the gains of playing versus a full server on prime time, which is obviously not ideal. If all servers have their max players out, it really is a challenge to capture multiple points, especially with 3 servers competing. So mostly you’ll be fighting for a 50/100 point lead. And getting more then that is really awesome. But playing at night versus an empty server has even better gains then that. And since you will retain what you capture, you will keep earning points for the rest of the night.

From a competitive standpoint nightcapping will still be worth it if it only gave 20% of the points it gives now. A competitive player will go for any advantage he can get, and playing versus a nearly empty server is a guarantee for an advantage.

As it is, Oceania vs US and Russia vs UK servers will have troubles with fair matchups versus eachother. A Russian server simply can not stay up as late as the European/UK servers, simply due to their time-zone differences. Now, they can wake up a few hours earlier, but that advantage will only last for those few hours. The advantage that the UK server has over the Russians will run for the same amount of time and all trough the night that follows, totaling an insane score advantage that the Russians will have a hard time catching up to even if they dominate when the fights are equal. So competing fairly will be really troublesome for a Russian server (I’m not Russian, just using them as an example).

Making the score intervals dependent upon the amount of players in the server will not make any of the current tactics obsolete, but will more fairly reward an advantage gained when the actual enemy is there to compete and solve potential unfairness due to timezones.

tl;dr: the tactic is fine, its rewards are problematic

Just wanted to say that playing with Nvidia’s 3D Vision glasses works amazing for GW2. The beta had a few problems with the depth placement of the cursor and skill bar, but in the final build it works amazingly well. The crosshair changes to the depth of what you are pointing at, which means the whole interface works very smooth. Walking around in some of the major cities is simply amazing with all the visuals and eye-candy.

It is very taxing on your system though, so keep in mind you really need a good setup to run things smoothly.

It would make much more sense if confusion stacked in duration kind of like burning (the base damage would be increased). At the moment it doesn’t last long enough for PvE and can be 100% avoided in PvP. Adding the duration mechanic will solve some of the problems in PvE and strengthen the control aspect of confusion in PvP, an enemy can choose not to use skills, but will be losing an increasing amount of time if he does.

I don’t understand why people are trying to make a straw man argument in a feedback forum. The point of the OP is very clear. Phantasm skills do not go well with the class mechanic. That is not comparable to power builds not going well with condition builds. Comments like “I really start to loathe the mesmer community” are really unwarranted. ArenaNet is more then capable of assessing the feedback correctly, there’s no need to attack the OP on his apparent skill.

Empirically speaking, I never really had much trouble keeping 3 phantasms up.

gurugeorge.9857:

There’s so much nonsense being spoken about the Shatter mechanic. It seems to be coming from people who want to play “lazy” with the Mesmer and keep up Phantasms for DPS.

Wouldn’t people who are lazy want to keep things the way they are? They would be able to do plenty of damage and have plenty of utility using their phantasms.

I’m afraid you’re making a straw man argument which doesn’t make much sense. Most people want to decrease the phantasm DPS and make it more compatible with other mechanics. If you disagree that is fine, but posting how good you are and how bad everyone else is does not add anything to this forum meant for feedback.

EasymodeX.4062:

Timing with clones doesn’t take much, if any, skill tbh. Half the timing equation is centered on phantasm uptime management.

Clone timing is only slightly more interesting if you are using a Shatter heavy build, which is not really the current discussion.

Timing might not have been the correct way of phrasing it. What I meant was that to decide what shatter you use, when you shatter and when you expend your clones is already a decent “choice” mechanic.

EasymodeX.4062:

That aside, as you say, maintaining 3 phantasms in any fight that matters is actually hard to the point that it’s infeasible and unlikely to actually have 3 phantasms up. Because we’re not even talking about a mega AOE wipe of your phantasms. We’re talking about an add looking crosswise or cleaving a random phantasm instantly, or the boss taking a potshot and instantly erasing the phantasm.

Which begs the question why everyone is pretending that they are shattering their 3 phantasms that they never actually have.

Just a few minutes ago you were arguing that people who are putting up 3 phantasms should be shattering and re-summoning them instead of keeping them up. Now you are arguing that they shouldn’t even try because it’s not possible? If you have trouble understanding the point of the OP or some other poster please say so. This thread is about illustrating some problems with mesmer mechanics, not about winning a yes/no debate where you have to refute every sentence someone types.

EasymodeX.4062:

People that are still on the learning curve have a hard time getting a good feel for how they actually want to manage the phantasm uptime. There are many nuances with clone replacement and phantasm attack resets … the volume and nature of threads on this forum about the topic are a pretty obvious indicator that players are still learning.

Shrug.

Isn’t the entire point that shattering is usually detrimental to you phantasm uptime?

EasymodeX.4062:

long post

Illusions die, their enemies die, so getting 3 phantasms up is tricky. If a boss whipes all your phantasms you want to have them back up asap and not wait because you’ve just shattered them. That’s all my point was.

Are people saying shatter is never useful? No. Are people saying everyone who uses shatter is bad? No. The only point being made is that the shatter and phantasms mechanics conflict with each other. Something you cannot deny. So the question is how much they conflict and if changes would bring improvement. Seeing as the clone/shatter mechanics already bring a great deal of “choice” in terms of timing your shatters (something you’ve correctly said takes a lot of skill), I don’t see why adding a phantasm mechanic on top of that is feasible. In fact it takes a bit away from the shatter mechanic we like.

Here’s a random idea:
Phantasms do not count to shatters or the 3-illusion limit. This allows for buffing the shatters and nerfing the phantasms. Phantasms will be illusions that haunt the enemy with utility and light damage as they were designed to be. You can only have 1 phantasm up from each type.

Mesmer is amazing and definitely not underpowered.

To be fair, I have hardly seen people who claimed it was underpowered, only people who pointed out a problem with a skill or mechanic.

How is having a skill that can instantly daze an opponent even while knocked down or channeling another skill considered a waste? Let alone comparable to a skill that relies on you already having a clone aimed at the specific enemy and having that clone reach that enemy in the exact time to interrupt?

Shatters are simply not efficient when you have phantasms out. Shattering will mean I have to waste time resummoning the phantasms and switching weapons. That is time better spend on utility and weapon skills. You are also ignoring the fact that phantasms die. When they die I want to resummon them. If they didnt die I want to stack them. Shattering doesnt come into play as it is not only unnecessary, but counter-productive.

Or you just take the daze mantra so you can keep all of your DPS up and actually have a daze that is instant.

Same goes for the mind wrack, after putting up 3 phantasms I can just focus on dmg and combo fields by using weapons and utility skills. There’s no real reason to be trading in my existing phantasms for effects that are hardly better then things I already have.

The reason why I don’t shatter my warlock and recast a new one is that I’d rather have 2 warlocks up.

gurugeorge.9857:

/facepalm

The charging is a mechanic. If you don’t like keeping an eye on your bar to ensure you have mantras ready, then don’t use mantras. Mantras are for people who LIKE micro-management and multi-tasking. I know multi-tasking is so 90s, but please kids, let us at least have something that we have to be alert about managing.

You make an excellent point, good sir! I would also like to thank you for informing me of the whereabouts of your hand and forehead, I hope they are both well. As for your argument, please allow me to retort:

The charging and management aspect will stay during and inbetween combat. Combat is the part of the game designated for the execution of your superior skills and micromanagement. What will change is the need to charge the mantra after you zone or log in, something that does not cost a lot of skill but is in fact a bit bothersome.

EasymodeX.4062:

Except you can resummon the phantasms again immediately because the cooldown on most of them is pretty low. So you “reset” your damage output for all of ~1.5 seconds. Oh no! Given that default phantasm attack cooldowns are 6 seconds, and that fresh phantasms attack immediately, you’re not losing any phantasm damage output at all. In fact, you’re gaining output. In addition to the shatter.

People are not talking about the situations that shatter builds encounter, where you have maybe 1 phantasm and 2 clones. In that situation shattering is obviously useful> But when you have 3 phantasms up you don’t really want to be shattering them, especially when you have multiple versions of the same phantasm or a weapon swap cooldown.

EasymodeX.4062:

Are you sure phantasms are supposed to be a source of consistent damage?

I don’t care what they are supposed to be, but as long as they do insane damage and you can stack 3 of them, I’m gonna be using them.

Because really, when I have a warden denying and reflecting all damage of a champion while doing really good damage, while my 2 warlocks are spiking the enemy like crazy, why would I ever shatter all 3 of them for a daze that doesn’t stack?

Clones and phantasms should not be on the same limit because they are incomparable. Phantasms should be summons that haunt your targets with utility and a bit of damage. Clones should be the main mechanic of the mesmer that you can cast and shatter in various ways.

It doesn’t really matter how phantasms are separated from the same 3-limit as clones. Whether you can only have 1 type of each phantasm at a time, or 1 type of each on a enemy or even a separate limit of 3.

First of all let me start off by saying that mantras have a lot of potential. You can actually cast them while casting/channeling another skill, or for example while rezzing people. The required pre-cast makes things kind of cumbersome though, requiring you to cast it after logging in, zoning, death, combat and so on. So here is a simple suggestion based on already existing gameplay mechanics:

At the moment mantras work as follows:

Charge Mantra of X -> Mantra of X

What would make the mantras a lot easier to use:

Mantra of X -> Recharge Mantra of X

If “Recharge manta” is not cast for 60/120 seconds or so, the skill will recharge by itself, in a similar fashion to how the portal skill works.

The skill will still work the same during and in between combat, but it won’t require the same micromanagement outside of combat. This will make it a lot easier to have on people’s skill bars.

Weapon traits are not needed to be successful. You can also get some toughness and vitality from your gear so that you are free to pick the more offensive traitlines.

I think the warden is able to move when he is not attacking, and that his attack makes him immobile. The attack takes quite long though, so especially with phantasmal haste he won’t move much.

Despite the legitimate criticisms, I kind of like the warden, he brings a lot of utility and can shut down enemies quite nicely. The other phantasms are just a source of damage, which makes the entire class feel kinda weird and unfocused.

The problem is that a listing fee and expiration fee encourage undercutting the lowest price even further. Selling high or matching will give you a tiny bit more money while you risk not selling the the item and having to pay a listing fee again. While undercutting only costs you 1 copper compared to matching the lowest seller and has no risks at all.

Here’s a random thought: Allow for 1 free price drop per item. This will keep the listing fee intact, and because of that listing high will still cost more money. However people will be encouraged to come up with a clever price as they won’t lose the entire listing fee when it doesn’t sell. Instead they will be made aware of a fluctuation in the price of an item and will be given an opportunity to react to that.