Guild Wars 2

This sounds very promising and solves a lot of underlying “problems” in WvW by giving people a reason to tag up, a reason to win skirmishes while still being motivated to play when outnumbered, adding new WvW skins, and implementing a system that gives high rank in WvW a purpose.
I am looking forward to it. Thank you Arenanet.

If there are more wvw people spending gems, then there may be more ressources to improve wvw as well. It would be a win-win situation. You can always convert gold or badges to gems to buy a commandertag as well. I personally think more styles of commandertags should be fairly easy and cost-efficient to implement (you just need a new icon and have a variable that tells you if a person has that tag unlocked or not) and could be a thing that people want, to stick out more if they are commanding. And it actually could be something that non-wvw-players would buy as well.

Sarrs.4831:

Skirmishes should grant Ascended Memories of Battle.
You should be able to spend Ascended Memories of Battle on the T2 Triumphant gear..

Yea, that is a good idea, if it is a new currency that certainly would give a new long-term motivation to get all the pieces over time for the veterans.

gitflap.9031:

Fewer Ascended rings and an earring now and then.

I agree, I did some fractals just to get the salvage kits for ascended rings to get rid of the ones I had 5 times in the bank.

If you get killed by opponents this is 2-3 points for their server, but if you capture stuff like sentries or camps, your server gets a few points as well. On the great scale of things one person doesn’t really have a impact on score that is big enough to change the outcome but you are certainly more likely to help your server than hurting it by doing your dailies.

@ProDecius.2609 people can have a different opinion than you for different reasons than trolling. You have several options against condi builds. Try running more condi clear, bursting your opponents with powerdamage, cc them in the right moments, some classes like necros can even specialize in giving the conditions back to the opponent (the last mesmer that got all his confusion back twice wasn’t too happy).

I agree. Condition duration is only a problem, if it cannot be cleansed, that’s why it is so dangerous on classes, that can cc-lock you. So decreasing the time on condi cleanses was actually a good way to counter the condition duration problem. Condition duration isn’t really balanced between the condis though, because the short conditions like burning are far more likely to apply all their damage before they can get cleared than ones that are 10-20 seconds. I hope they adapted the damage of burning to compensate for that fact.
But yea, I think it is GOOD that there isn’t one way that is always better in WvW now. Why are people complaining about that, it is far less boring.

I would be open for it to have been multiple hits on siege/structures or killing a guard. But would this change really have any impact on the difficulty to tap in a way that makes it more rare to appear? Probably not.
I am fine with it, but be aware that this change wouldn’t change anything in the game.

WvW players already spend gems on transfers and skins, and I am sure that there are many players here that just don’t want to pay additional money for the game and that is fine. But until now afaik there have been no gemstore items with the WvW community in mind. Are there things we WvW players would spend gems or real money for that isn’t available in the game right now?

Suggestions:
—> auto-upgrading my guild to all wvw-upgrades, guild emblem and anthem to have the buffs on camps/towers without having the struggle to build up a hall alone or with few guys or joining pve guilds for it.
—> maybe permanent tactivators (that would allow a guild to use a specific tactivator upgrade once a day without having to scribe it), having a piece of siege dropped on you, smashed by a whirling omega-golem, having all the condition-tick-symbols still ticking above your dead body, having a warrior nod
—> maybe wvw-related finishers like being ran over by a zerg of different races, having a zerg jump on your dead body, trampled and sat on by a packdolyak, having a ghostzerg of women trying to revive and reanimate you, eaten by the giant grub…
—> Inventory cleaner: Small creature that sits in your inventory and snatches all minor runes, trash items that you get. Can be upgraded and then set to collect major runes as well. Is an inventory cleaner. Properties: a) could sell the items and give you the gold automatically, b) could have a small chance to give you a wiggly chest with minor non-trash rewards for every item it snatches. It should be possible to put him in shared inventory slot.
—> additional commandertags (for example a king-crown, prince- or princess-crown instead of a dorito, maybe a sword for fighting, a telescope/eye/lens for scouts, a special tag for people that want to gank etc.).

Probably more controversial:
—> skins for siege: catas that throw quaggans instead of stones, fireballs, asuras, cats (custom, funny/silly/cool siege), giant white bunnies instead of omega golems.
—> custom purely cosmetic changes in builds that you claim, to adapt it more to your guild. But I fear those skin-changes would be too hard to fit to every objective you claim and still work, are prone to bugs and are probably one-time-buys, thus less lucrative, but who knows.
entities: like spawning a horde of friendly (yellow or white) quaggans in or around structures, some annoying bard that sings, changing skins of guards to all asuras, all norns, all ghosts or pirates or wearing pink, wearing horsehead-helms etc.
changing skins on dolyaks in camps that you capture to cows, dragons, giganteous bunnies
skins on structures: door or walls look differently (for example pink door, christmas themed etc).

And opinions or ideas?

The reward tracks made WvW a lot more rewarding and I would say that we get enough reward for playing atm. But it stings a bit that I get most of my rewards from the reward tracks. This is good for scouts, because they don’t miss out on a lot of rewards as long as their activity is up, but it is a bit sad for active players. So I would like to propose two ideas on how to improve balancing of rewards in WvW. I would be fine with it, if reward tracks had to be slightly slower/less rewarding to compensate for the new loot.

Loot for killing:
- heavy loot bags lost a chunk of their value because their content isn’t adapted to HoT. Beating a WvW player can be a lot harder than beating a pve champion though. So I would propose to make “rare loot bags”. This new bag type has a chance to drop from non-free-to-play-players in WvW. The bags have a higher chance to drop from enemies with higher WvW rank, if they have been alive for long, if you fought them for longer, from HoT classes and if you contributed more to their death (through damage, condi damage or healing/booning people that did the fatal damage). With this system you should be more likely to drop the new bags if you 1:1 someone with 100% of the damage in a long fight, than if you run over someone with a zerg and only did 5% of the damage on a guy that died.
Loot tables of the new bags could include superior siege, LS3 content like the new salvaging items that drop leather, ore or cloth, HoT materials like a chance to drop evergreen slivers, flax fibers, orbs and very rarely maguuma lilys, amalgamated gemstones, mother-of-pearl etc. It would be nice if it would include the items needed for wvw-upgrades for scribes or stuff you need to craft ascended armor/weapons.

Loot from rankups:
- Make rankup-chests more valuable if you have a higher rank. Atm it is a bad thing to have a higher rank in WvW as your opponents will focus you, there is no upside to this. Furthermore a rankup in wvw is worth maybe 30 silver in total, imho a underwhelming reward for the time it takes, especially when compared to reward tracks.
I would like to see more rewarding rankup chests for high-level WvW players. This could be done by just increasing the chance for rare/exotic/ascended rewards on rankup depending on your rank. Additionally they could add a loot bag to the rankup that differs depending on your rank and has a chance to drop ascended materials at higher levels.
It could also be done with making achievement chests for reaching specific steps in WvW rank (for example additional reward track boosters and potions; siege and ascended materials every 100 ranks or every new title and increase rewards depending on rank; for example a free commander tag at rank 1000, etc) but I think it is too late for that and implementing it right now would lead to some players getting 30+ achievement chests right away.

Ascended
Before the implementation of the marks needed to get ascended armor in pvp and fractals I would also have liked a way to get ascended armor/weapons in WvW. Now we need crafting anyway and it is not a lot cheaper to get it through other sources anymore, so it doesn’t matter much anymore to me.

What do you think about the rewards in WvW? And what rewards would you like to see changed and how?

@ProDecius I do agree with you that epidemic is still a skills that in groupfights can be inbalanced, as it transfers not only the conditions you applied as a necro, but all the conditions currently on the target (up to 25 stacks per condition).
Rarely seen it used with confusion-mesmer though, as it requires a lot of teamwork to pull that off. Confusion has been in the game for a long time and it was always possible to get 25 stacks of confusion on yourself before. It should do around 4000 points of damage on skilluse btw. So yes, it hurts, but confusion alone does not kill you instantly.

I would say marauder versus carrion isn’t a fair fight: Marauder should win with equal skill, as it has more skillpoints. Marauder versus trailblazer should be a fair fight with equal skill, but it depends on the class you are playing as well, as some classes have advantages and disadvantages against other classes. Same as in pvp you have to avoid fighting some classes if you struggle with them.
What exactly are you saying? That you haven’t enough condi-clear on your guard against condi-builds? Then how about adding more condition clear, don’t know if there is a class with more condition clear options than guardians.

while it would be nice to see them investing as much in wvw, I doubt that people would really like it. Also while I do like EBG, it is good to have something different as well. If we had 4 ebgs, 3 of them would still be empty. I think the best arenanet can do is replace one of the alpine maps with another map of similar size that has new mechanics. I personally would love to see a map where we could glide and maybe even fight in the air (flying zergs fighting each other would be so cool), but since fighting in the air would require so many changes it isn’t realistic. I don’t think we need even more map currencies and stuff like that. Gold is fine to buy ascended.

playing this game mode that is not PvE is contributing to my ascended gearing.

I agree with you but would argue that playing WvW already contributes to my ascended gearing by giving me gold and items I can convert to gold. Gold is the best currency, because you can get it in every gamemode and they HAVE to balance it well already.

I doubt they will invest a lot of resources into wvw after the feedback on the maps after HoT and they don’t have to. If they make a new class or new elite-stuff for the other classes this will affect wvw as well. I think they will make the same thing as last time and give players with the expansion a significant advantage over people that don’t have it (a thing I don’t like, but I understand that the expansion has to sell for this game to survive).

I think it is possible to get a new borderland to replace one of the alpine ones. With the DBL the home BLs are already different, so it really doesn’t matter if they try to replace one of the alpine ones as well from a balancing perspective.
It could actually be fun, for example if flying and flight combat would be one of the mechanics on the new map. Just imagine two zergs flying through air-minefields, clashing and raining killed players from the sky, heavily under fire by new siege from the ground that can hit flying targets. But it would require a lot of work and thick skin to even attempt to implement stuff like that.

Sure it is annoying, but I agree that it doesn’t matter if the tapper dies or not, he has enough time to get from his spawn to the enemy keep again after being killed for tapping.
Additionally we already have emergency waypoints that counter the problem very well.

I think it is actually good that we are able to contest waypoints, it doesn’t cost a lot of time to have to run from spawn and otherwise having t3 keeps is just way too overpowered if there is no way to counter the waypoint.
About the suggestions that make it harder to contest a waypoint: this would mean that the defenders have less time to react, if there is a real attack as well, making defending a lot harder. So for example the attackers could freely take down all siege on outer without being detected before the defenders noticing the attack. If I scout I only notice the attack because of the “contesting” event.

the crafting token takes out a big chunk of the cost of crafting the ascended gear

not really. I did the math for armor and you save on average 5 gold per piece of ascended if you get it through pvp/fractals from crafting it outright atm. Some pieces are actually more expensive to get through pvp than crafting them outright. Since 500 badges are worth 5 gold and armorpieces would most likely need more than that, it is unlikely that adding a vendor to wvw would actually reduce prices for ascended gear over crafting in any relevant way.

I agree that it is silly to have other gamemodes have options we don’t have in wvw, but the patch that added the tokens made getting ascended in other gamemodes not worth it. So for this to be worth it, they would first have to reduce the number of tokens needed per armorpiece in all gamemodes to give the special currency a value as well.

I think it is a good thing that conditions are now viable in wvw in roaming and sometimes zerg-context. It gives more variability after HoT and the rise of Metabattle reduced build-diversity by a lot. I think every class has now several similarly good options to play the game and that is great! Tempests are still good as frontline healers or backline siege-clearers in zergs btw.
I agree that it would be nice if some standard-roaming builds would be toned down a little, but that may just me playing some classes more than others. As a necro for example I will die against a lockdown druid that immob/stuns/dazes while applying conditions due to lack of fast stability-options in a very boring way, other classes die because their condi removal isn’t as good.
But it’s a lot better to deal with since the last patch that buffed our condi-clear options/reduced cooldown, but you have to run them in your builds. I think at the end of the day some classes are just better against specific classes, while being vulnerable against other classes, that’s fine for me.

I agree that atm the content doesn’t really have to be nerfed, as the maps have enough population. Some hero points with champions aren’t easy to complete solo, but people help out if you ask in mapchat or after the meta (I completed VB, AB and TD on the weekend without problem). And there is only one (mushroom in TD) that maybe isn’t possible to complete with 1 teammate. But LS3-maps show, that the content will be probably better scaleable in the future also for solo-players.

Breakbars: I also think it would have been nice to have learned this new mechanic through story before it was implemented in the world. Now I know how it works and what skills have a big or small effect on the breakbars, but it really isn’t “easy” to understand. You have to check the internet to find out what skills you have do how much to breakbars.

I am not sure what the next expansion will bring. If it is the same as HoT, then we can expect that all classes get more powerful through the expansion and this would make future nerfing of HoT-maps unnecessary.

@Obtena you can find my suggestions in the first post on this page. If Arenanet made collections for the game that are obsolete because of the prices, then the work Arenanet made for this parts of the game is for nothing. For me that would be reason enough to make that small changes to make the content worth it. I think the binding of the precursor prices to the materials (with a vendor where you can exchange the pres for ascended materials with a slight luck factor) would ensure, that the cost for the precursors would stay parallel to crafting cost in the future and not move off further.

@SlippyCheeze When the precursor collections were implemented, they were all slightly cheaper than buying the precursor outright, and afaik that was also posted in the forums back then by devs. But since there was no binding to the ascended materials that are needed and with dropping demand crafting is now in some cases vastly more expensive than buying outright.
Of course it is also good if there are “alternative ways” but why do you think it wouldn’t be good if those ways both were from an economic standpoint equivalent or at least comparable? To have an alternative way is worth nothing if it has in no way an advantage over the other way. And I think that is a bit sad in a game where you can actually control the cost of each and every way.
Same thing for ascended armor: if there is one way to get it that is clearly better than any other way, then this devaluates all the other ways of getting it. That may be a reason why the devs changed the acquisition of ascended armor in pvp.

But I can see that I seem to be one of the only guys that thinks it would be nice to have several comparable ways of getting precursors instead of just a one-click-buy from tp. That’s fine, if I am the only one that seems to want to change it, then it surely isn’t worth it for arenanet to actually make the change Thanks for the feedback guys.

In my opinion it is a reason to intervene if one way of getting a precursor is vastly more expensive than another. If you craft the Lover right now, this will cost you 938 gold, buying it on tp is 480 gold. If you craft the energizer, it costs you 485 gold, it costs 168 gold on tp. Sure prices fluctuate, but not that much and average prices went down a lot and that is normal due to no new demand (as people don’t ever need more than one precursor in the system right now) . And the prices will go down even more, because the people that want the precursor already have it and will never need a second one, while precursors are still created every day due to drops, So in my opinion it really makes sense to bind precursor prices, so people that want to craft it don’t get a disadvantage by doing so.

The gift of battle isn’t needed for precursor-crafting so has nothing to do with precursor prices.

Jitsuryoku.9038:

The whole reason they went for grandmaster marks was to avoid giving players easy ascended (without crafting). With this change you either need crafting ,raids or luck to get ascended items. That’s why I don’t agree with “make grandmaster marks sellable”.

Yea, you may be right. I thought they added the ascended armor in pvp and fractals to give players an alternative to crafting in the first place though. And I think to have this alternative is a good thing. Non-pve players often see crafting as tedious, annoying or confusing and if you don’t level up your crafting with a guide, then you may lose a ton of gold by doing so. Did anyone ever have fun while using a guide in a multiplayer game? I can live with it, if they force people to craft for ascended items, but I don’t think it is the best way.

I agree that the “nerf” was extreme.

Last season I got 8 pieces of ascended armor (I only bought the 150 shard ones) for less than 100 games, so 15 hours of total playtime. That was crazy imbalanced and if you assume an average of 67 gold to craft one ascended armor piece, then you got rewarded with 36 gold worth of ascended shards per hour in pvp.

This season you will get 2 pieces of ascended armor for 100 games, so 15 hours of playtime. Since the grandmaster marks you need this season, cost around 60 gold of materials to make (if you have crafting already maxed) per “150”-ascended piece, you save maybe 5 gold per piece to crafting ascended armor outright. So you get 0.7 gold worth of ascended shards per hour in pvp if you don’t do repeats. And why should you repeat, because then it is 0.35 gold worth of ascended shards per hour. So it was nerved by 98%.

—> While I understand that it wasn’t in any way balanced last season, the gold you save by buying armor in pvp and fractals is no longer worth it from a financial standpoint.
—> crafting with the grandmaster marks is in some cases more expensive than making the armor outright, so you use additional currency and get no discount at all. I checked on gw2efficiency.com.

My suggestions would be:
- get a statistical expert to analyze your game mechanics before adding stuff that is out of balance or nerfing them so much.
- reduce the cost for grandmaster marks by 33% or the amouth of grandmaster marks per armor piece by 1 to make sure the additional currency is actually worth it.
- make grandmaster marks sellable, so there is actually a (more expensive) way to get ascended armor without having to level crafting.

I agree, I think it is good, that they reacted so fast and addressed a least a part of the epi-problem in wvw and they didn’t wait for another balance patch in half a year. That you could just stack conditions on siege and then kill everyone when they came near the siege was completely insane.

The problem may not be solved for downed players and champions, that still can be used to stack conditions on them for epi-bombing zergs but I think it is a good change. Btw I am playing necro most of the time in wvw, but the epi-bombs were completely out of balance and dominated the fights. Now it will be less crucial at least, it is still highly unbalanced compared to other skills in a condi-zerg, because it allows you to multiply not only your conditions but the conditions all of your teammates apply, but at least now it needs more skill to pull it off.

Gold is the fairest currency, because you can transform almost every currency in the game to gold as well. So if you save enough badges, just sell badges of tribute, if you have enough proofs of heroics, sell superior siege, or just make the reward tracks and dailies until you do have enough gold to buy it. It is really not THAT expensive for any player that plays the game a lot.

Doam.8305:

Current pres will drop farther as time goes on the issue is we don’t have a set of new legendaries. No PVE/WVW legendary backpack or armor either so people will have stockpiles of mats. If HoT delivered on legendary weapon and armor sets then mats would have more value than they do now do to increased demand.

Yea, because the pre prices continue to drop it would be nice to have systems in place, that stabilize them. What does it matter, if it is an old pre in the recipe or 200 lodestones?
Mat prices aren’t dropping as fast, if they were, then crafting a pre would be cheaper than buying them on tp. Mat prices are still relatively high, but I agree that new legendary stuff does help, and I am hoping to see more weapon skins and armor in the future. It’s a different topic though.

I agree that it would be good if I wouldn’t care about the price of precursors and just crafting them anyway, but if buying from trading post is about half the price compared to crafting, then I cannot bring myself to craft it, it is against my inner “kitten economicus” and I fear I am not alone in this. And I think it is sad that this content in the game is “shut down” by the price of precursors on tp, because it is fun doing it. That’s why I think arenanet should make some changes to stabilize the price long-term.

@Lite Ning Strike: it is true that legendaries are just a skin and ascended is really good enough. But another factor is, that if you actually were to be so lucky to drop a precursor right now, the price wouldn’t show how extremely lucky you were by dropping it. And this problem will increase, precursor prices will just drop further. And if you don’t want to craft it, the only thing you can do is make it to money right now. So I think it would be nice to be able to “trade” it for ascended crafting materials instead.

@Astralporing you may be right, but it is worth a try. Implementing them in future recipies for example would help, while still being a part of new systems they will continue to support (we will surely see new legendaries in the future).

Since a few months prices for precursors for vanilla legendaries have dropped, causing them to be more expensive to craft than to buy from trading post. This is because most people that want their legendary, already have it and so there isn’t enough demand for the precursors. It would be nice, if people actually had a reason to craft them, instead of buying them, as this content otherwise will not be used.

two ideas of how to stabilize the prices:
- increase demand: use precursors of vanilla weapons in recipes of future HoT-legendaries, if there is a new greatsword legendary, for example it could use dawn in the recipe.
- bind precursor prices to prices of ascended crafting materials: make a new vendor/item, that exchanges precursors for ascended crafting materials (deldrimor steel ingots, spiritwood planks..), make it a little random (so sometimes you may get more crafting materials back then what it cost you from crafting) and adapt it so you get on average the same amouth of crafting materials back as when you craft it. This would stabilize the price on the low end.

what do you guys think?

Blades is talking about the trait that burns when you block attacks (amplified wrath). Interesting tactic, will have to try that.
Btw. not all classes have blocks. Necros have no blocks or invulns.

@Fluffball your description is quite good, it is like 50 autoattacks but from 1 guy to 5 players. That’s why it is OP in the current implementation and this by a margin that is so huge that nobody should even question a nerf that wants a fair game. Sure, maybe some people don’t care about a fair game, but then why would they take part in topics about balancing.

@Expandas while a possible blocking surely also is a good idea and may work in small scale zerg-fights there is no way to see the tell in 30+ zerg scenarios. Also it feels like Raids if you are playing on a though character and one missed dodge will just kill you outright, even if it was just one guy “one-shotting” you and 4 other guys, and then the next ones in 13 seconds. I think we are way past the point, where a tell would solve the problem of the damage capability of epidemic.

A very interesting solution to make tactivators a mastery track! I like the idea.

The other idea I really liked is the mapchat-message with the name when someone pulls a tactivator. While it doesn’t solve the problem itself, it helps if we can identify the people that pull the tactivators. Longterm this helps guilds to know what servers and or commanders work together with spies that pull tactivators.

While I find myself a bit baffled over the remark about the devs looking at conditions stacking on “wvw doors”, I will hope that they actually look at the problem in game now. Because if you play the game in zergs, then they would know that there isn’t much a zerg can do to “counterplay” epidemic other than avoiding things the enemy is able to stack conditions on. You can’t react because you are down in 2 ticks in many cases.

After seeing it and playing it myself for a long time, I think it should be adapted. Similarly to what the mesmer boonshare meta did before the change, this skill pretty much breaks the zergfights.
- 13 seconds cooldown when traited is absolutely crazy, it means 5 target 25 bleeds, poisons, burns, etc. every 13 seconds. Would you not nerf this if it was a skill on a weapon that would directly apply that? I don’t think there is a question here really.
- I think it would be best to limit maximum number of conditionstacks per condition. One should keep the necromancer in mind with this though and the condition-types he does (so maybe allow 20 bleeds, 10 poisons, 3 torments, 3 burns and 3 confusions?). It would still be potent.
- Make epidemic on siege only transfer conditions to other siege and epidemic on a castle lord npc only work on other npcs. This way raids would not be broken too much. The problem here is that it is very easy for a zerg to stack a high number of conditions on siege or lords and it is extremely easy to drop whole zergs with epi if they run there.
- Not sure about downed players. It also seems too easy to stack conditions on downed players with high vitality and kill people that try to revive with epidemic. I think it may be okay if downed players can be cleared of conditions by the zerg. Not sure that is possible atm (I was told conditions on downed players cannot be cleared, but have never tested it myself).

Please be careful not to break conditions in general by implementing massive condition clear “because” of the epidemic skill. It sounds in the dev-message like this was implemented to counteract epidemic and if it was, then a) it misses the target because epi is too fast to counteract and b) hurts other condition builds that may not have been broken.

Eyae.6843:

We shouldn’t be allowed to epi siege https://gfycat.com/GreenWindingGraysquirrel

Thanks for sharing, good point. Same things happens on npcs and downed players, so it really would be the smartest change to limit epi the same way that boonsharing was limited with number of stacks/duration or let it transfer only a few conditions.

The condition meta is ok, it is good that conditions are present in zergfights as well and there isn’t only one way to play the game. But I agree that this condition bomb is too much to be balanced.

Epidemic of course is too good in a zerg-scenario. I personally would nerf it so that it only transfers 2-3 of the conditions to the other targets. Since necros only have poison and bleed as damaging conditions this wouldn’t hurt solo necros or small group-necros at all.
But even now there are still a lot of ways to counter conditions that imho make condition-zergs not as good as other setups. So maybe it is good to keep the problem in the game to give condition-zergs a chance

Well, from a statistical standpoint it was clear that the new rating-system wouldn’t work. Even with the victory-point-system we still need to address the “newly created” problems by it.
The new system with 2-1-1 victory points makes it even worse. In a few hours Jade Quarry cannot be beaten anymore, just shortly afterwards Fort Aspenwood will be the winner as well. Leaving more than 3 days in the matchup with no possible way to catch up. This is boring.

And now with the lack of linking arenanet doesn’t correct for the imbalances in population, generating very stale matchups. Why exactly was this done?

I personally really don’t understand why arenanet changes things that have no possibility to solving the problems there are in wvw like
- the imbalance through matchmaking (what is Fort Aspenwood doing in tier4 exactly?),
- the primetime/offtime-problems,
- the no-way-of-catching-up problems,
- the having-no-tournament-problem,
- the having-no-wvw-communitymanager-problem.

A statistical expert (you know, the guy responsible for balancing) can tell you exactly what works and what doesn’t BEFORE you try it (and about the 2-1-1 you will find enough posts here in the forums telling you the problems before it was implemented). But hey ok, let’s just flip random switches that are easy to implement and then not read all the feedback on the forums because it is too negative, leading to flipping the next random switches without considering the consequences or what the problems are..

But to be honest, maybe they really don’t have the resources to construct and implement systems that work and are changing things they know aren’t going to work just so we have the illusion they are still working on wvw Are we wvw-players really that few? Or do we not buy enough gems with real money? I really would like to know.

Where did you read that Gw2 still has 7 Million players? I doubt that number is accurate. Maybe if you include all the players that have bought the game but stopped playing plus the chinese market (I think it was about 2 million sold copies, but a lot lower number of active players).

There are 4 matchups in NA and 5 in Europe. So 8100 players could play at any given time. If we assume that in average a quarter of the spots are filled, then 2050 players would play at any given time. If the average player plays for 1 hour this would bring the total to 50’000 players a day and maybe 200’000 unique players a week. I am not sure if that is a lot or not, but if you would sum up the total hours in wvw and compare it to the total hours in dungeons, fractals, pvp, etc. then I would assume that wvw is more “active” than other gametypes, because I would assume the average player plays it for a lot longer than the other gamemodes. But that is a lot of guessing without any numbers

People don’t need a reason to defend tier3 stuff, they are already very overpowered because of waypoint, upgrades and being harder/slower to take. Commanders are already defending them for that reason.
If they wanted to encourage people to attack tier3 stuff: increase the points for capturing tier3 stuff is enough.

Now your server just needs a big blob at times when the enemy has nobody. So you can blob over the opponent, papering all their stuff, crippling their ppt for many skirmishes. Not only did the skirmishing not solve the nightcapping problem, this change just made it worse. Furthermore it increases the gap between the servers even more. I really don’t think they have thought this through.

And if you start out in a skirmish with only paper stuff and your opponent has tier3 keeps, then you might as well just give up the skirmish, as there is no way to take defended tier 3 keeps in time to actually win the skirmishes even if you hold your bl and eb third (a lot harder if they are paper).

I think it is good that capturing higher tier objectives awards more points. They are harder to take and it makes sense to award more points for this.

I think it is very bad that holding higher tier objectives award more points. It is easier to hold if they are high level. It will lead to servers with a lot of high tier objectives having a serious advantage in the skirmish. Not only do they have the pleasure to have objectives that are very hard to take, they will also tick higher even if they don’t capture anything else. If you start the skirmish with only paper stuff, you are screwed even if you hold your own against the other servers.

On twitter 30 minutes ago:
“The ongoing connection issues are due to a DDOS attack. We apologize for the inconvenience and the team is working towards a solution. ~MJK”

So arenanet has no info about when the attacks hit, how long it will take and unfortunately may have little options to avoid them.

Arenanet: change your population calculation if you still calculate population just by “players”. You are overstacking servers.

a) If I was you I would calculate for every single player in the game the average “participation” point gain (without “roof”) in average per week for last 3 weeks.
Then add together this value for all the players on a server they are currently on and compare those values with the population values in how good they are in predicting the results of a matchup. I would expect this past “activity” on a server to be a good predictor of future results. If the activity goes higher than a limit the server would close. Transfers of very active players (thus having a high activity) on a stacked server, would lead to a server reaching the limit faster.
Maybe you need to adjust it so you substract/add a percentage of the result for the “fairweather effect”, because winning servers will have temporary higher activity in players and participation gain, losing servers will always have a lower one and maybe you need to have an impact of data that is older than 3 weeks to avoid servers not playing before new linkings etc.
b) run similar prediction models for the average playtime in wvw per player per server to see if it is a better predictor than participation and close servers that have too many manhours in wvw.

Not sure if you should communicate the system that you use by the way. People will try to play it if you do.

I do understand that in theory it is better to have a ton of smaller servers to make it easier to create balanced matchups.
I don’t think this idea would have been likely to change the balance though, because we already know that people want to be on the winning server and most of them don’t want to play on empty servers and do not enjoy being a small link. So why would people voluntarily change to small new servers that get linked with a ton of different servers all the time if they don’t do it right now already? We have a ton of small servers already that could use guilds from BG

I think the balance is ok if the right servers are in their correct tier. The matchmaking system (and the proposed 1up/1down rule as well) is still likely to put servers in wrong tiers though, creating blowout matches. So links STILL aren’t the problem that inbalances matchups, the matchmaking system is. But as long as Arenanet only proposes solution for the matchmaking system that very obviously would make the inbalance worse instead of fixing the problems with it, it is not going to be solved. :/

I am not a PvE player. You can already buy trinkets in wvw with badges as well btw. I also disagree on your opinion about PvP or dungeons not “needing” that rewards. Of course if you implement something for one gamemode, then you have to give similar ways for other gamemodes.
I know that Raids allow you to “buy” ascended armor, but imho this content and high level fractals really aren’t comparable to WvW in difficulty to get the currency you need to exchange against ascended items. So if the same thing were to be implemented in WvW you have to account for the difficulty by making it something that is really hard to reach or create new hard to get currencies.

Drops aren’t the only way to get ascended armor and weapons for players in WvW. There is a thing called crafting and a market, where you are able to buy everything you would need for making your armor and weapons. It isn’t difficult, it just isn’t cheap (around 70 gold per ascended), so you have to play a while and sell stuff to get it. With the reward tracks it is no problem to save up that kind of money.
You guys have to keep in mind that the crafting has to make sense as well. If you can get everything somewhere else than with crafting it yourself, then why would anyone level their crafting to 500 at all?
Furthermore if such a thing is implemented for wvw, then it has to be implemented for other gamemodes as well. Fractals, pvp, dungeons…

I could live with reducing the “rng” and including boxes or at least materials you might need for ascended armors and weapons to be traded for heroics (they cannot use badges, as there are people with 50’000+ of those because of EotM-farming). But then they should be as hard to get or harder to get as the drops are today while at the same time reducing the random drop rate. So I think it would have to be at least 1000-2000 proofs of heroic per ascended piece to be balanced with the worth of heroics compared to crafting it. If I was you, I would just save up the money and craft it.

I like the general idea, but I don’t think I would use it apart maybe from reset night, because it is not where the action is.
- When guilds are gathering, usually people already go capturing camps, defending objectives etc, so it is faster and better for your server if your guild does meet on a bl than in a separated lobby where you might run into a queue as soon as you try to join the bl you want to go to.
- We already have all the stuff we need like merchants etc in the spawn. To have them two times is redundant, to have loading screen to reach them wouldn’t be fun.

If they would implement a wvw-lobby:
- It should be a fast load, because otherwise people would just go directly to wvw
- PvE players should have a reason to go there, new members should be “pushed” to go there with lvl 80. Maybe make a big chest there where you see the result of last weeks matchup that gives you some minor rewards once a week and a minor boost depending on last weeks position (for example celebration boost). Gathering would be too boring, you can do that on every other map as well.
- It would be nice if the lobby was decorated with the guild banners of the guilds that currently hold your keeps or had the most kills/caps etc. in last hours for bragging rights.

What might be a lot easier to implement and is all I personally need: just make an option that allows you to activate “teamchat” when not on wvw-maps.

Hmm, well in the last 2 months I dropped around 5-6 ascended chests from WvW reward track and rankups and probably the same number of ascended rings. Isn’t that enough?

I don’t consider crafting “pve”. I am a WvW player but I can still craft with the material I get in WvW. And it is easy to craft ascended weapons already. I also don’t think getting ascended armor and weapons should be too easy/for free, because otherwise you have nothing to strive for. Every new player will be full exotic in a matter of minutes/hours after reaching level 80, they are incredibly easy to get, your elite specs can be reached in less than an hour as well, so they need something you are still able to reach that actually takes a little more time.

I would be all for unique skins and things like that, you know, cosmetic additions, but I don’t think making it even easier to get ascended stuff would be the right move for our long-term-motivation..

I understand that it is frustrating for all the people that got used to empty servers and enjoyed that gameplay. But the fact that those servers were mostly empty lately also shut out a lot of players that are now free to enjoy the game. So while I understand that this is a problem of dedicated wvw-players, I would like you to understand that linking solved problems the majority of people were unhappy about. The whole reason why your servers were empty in the first place and you could roam freely is because people didn’t enjoy the gamemode with empty maps and no tags enough to play wvw.

“Wait and see”-mentality: I thought about it and I think smaller communites should focus on solutions; what can be done to solve the problems and what can they do themselves:

- Make a server-guild that includes all the players on your server that are still active in wvw. So you will know who is on and where they are and you can group up regardless of guild. Everything you do with that group will be “your” accomplisment, in this groups your major link will only be “pugs” and know it.
- If you don’t like to be tossed around and want permanent merge, you can transfer this guild to a bigger host server and stay there. You can also move to EU as NA or NA as EU to create more small scale battles instead of fighting zergs. This way the ones that still want to stay on their server will not be forced to merge. Merging would hurt the balancing the linking accomplishes right now and it would force people to change servers, something you can do now voluntarily if you want to anyway.
- If you guys want a merge of all small servers: this is also something you can do right now too, you can discuss with other small scale communities and transfer to one small server, forcing Arenanet to make this a host server in next linking if it surpasses the population of CD, HoD or NSP.
- You can consistently fight for your ideas, but it would be better to find a easy and realistic solution with other affected people and servers. Arenanet will not get rid of the linking and go back to empty tiers. But maybe they will implement a small roaming-tier where 3 new servers will fight with a lot smaller population-limit on the maps, if enough people want it and they are willing to pay for it (so expansion-material; or spending gems for transfer) and this “solutions” is getting consistently pushed. But you will have to be fast and consistent with your ideas to stand a chance, because I am sure the content of the next expansion will be fixed very soon or is fixed already.

The linking is actually better than the merge, because every two month there is a normalization of the wvw population that makes the opponents equally strong and gives them an opportunity to have better balanced fights in all tiers.

People will always change servers if they want to, some because they want to play with friends or in new guilds, some because they want to play in different tier. We cannot change that. But the linking helps with keeping the servers balanced. A merge wouldn’t do that, since it cannot be changed again.

I enjoy WvW a lot more since linking and started playing again after being away for half a year because of them and the old BLs. Maps are a lot more populated now, more tags running around, more new people finding their way to the gamemode. Before the linking many players on small servers never got into WvW, just because their server never had a tag. The last couple of months have been a ton of fun for me (I enjoy both small group and large scale WvW).

Of course that isn’t the case for everybody and I am sorry for the people of very small servers that actually wanted to have a low population density. It is true that with the linking this problem cannot really be solved for the very small servers. What you can do with your group, is to change from EU to NA or NA to EU, so you will play at times where a lot less people are on.
Another idea that came up a while ago was to make a roaming tier with 3 new servers (servers that new players typicly should be discouraged to chose) that are independent of the current system and have a much lower limit of players on the maps. But since it is a minority that wants low population maps, I think Arenanet would only implement that, a) if there are enough players that are interested in this and b) if they are willing to finance the development costs of that.
Both ideas don’t let you keep your server identity unfortunately..

The “high” mark doesn’t adequately show the wvw population on the server, like others have said here, DB hybernated for a long time now and the players just didn’t play. That’s why they are considered tier 4 now and thus get the same amouth of links as the other tier 4 servers.
But yes, they have a large SEA-time crew including those guilds. HoD has a huge EU crew instead (especially when you play into EU-time), crushing everything for weeks now. Should we get no link because of that?
But of course it is possible that DB wakes up and we will lose, but imho it is still a fair and good fight, even if we lose. We will have good fights.

@Nightingale
a) Maguuma alone has not been rank 2, they have been rank 2 together with the link BP against unlinked servers JQ and BG. You don’t know how much of it was dependent on the link, Arenanet does.
b) Glicko-ranking isn’t the same as activity in wvw and it is actually a good thing that Arenanet is able to make linkings balanced for coverage/activity of the population (so “absolute” values) instead of a relative point-system that is very dependent on who you fight, who you are linked with etc.

But just look at the results on millenium and then tell me again what servers you would consider “tier1”-enough to be unlinked and we can evaluate if this would make matches more balanced or not.

@Lapiy I understand that it is hard and it is hard for other servers as well to find a way to work together with the linked servers. I think CD just needs a while until they have implemented the new manpower into their main zergs and guildgroups, people know what commanders to follow etc. This is easier for HoD and DB, because they have a larger base and smaller links. People already know about TS and discord and all that. But they also don’t have a lot of possibilty to improve on what they have now.
HoDs links were around 1 out of 7 guys in the main zerg during EU. So you have a lot of manpower compared to HoD if you have 1 out of 4 and as soon as people are used to you guys it will be a lot better and you may make it really hard for HoD to compete with you.

@Dewolfe The linkings say, that according to Arenanet BG, TC and JQ are tier 1, it’s just the matchmaking-system that didn’t put them there. Arenanet has to make the linkings manually to make sure, the matches are competitive even if a t2 server goes to t1. If they don’t do that, blowout-linkings would be the result and I think the results in NA show that it works very well atm. Looks a lot more balanced than before linkings were implemented.

Dawdler.8521:

No AoE should ever go through objects

That would mean that rams cannot launch opponents reparing the gate, wells, marks, traps wouldn’t hit through the gate, ACs, cannons, trebs and catas couldn’t hit you from the other side of the gate. This clearly wasn’t the intention of Arenanet here, they wanted some AoE to hit through the gate, just not through the wall, thus making those two structures different in fighting scenarios.

I am unsure about this issue, if it is a bug or not. I personally like the different ways attacks work (so for example this attack won’t hit if there is a crack in the ground between you and the attacker), but you guys are right: if it is a bug, it should be fixed. If it is not, it would be nice to have someone tell us it is intentional.

I think what the community wants is shown in this topic: everyone wants different things to be addressed and some people have a hard time understanding that their opinion may be a minority or a bad idea in the context of the whole game (and I admit, I am struggling with that as well myself sometimes).

I think what all WvW guys want is to be taken seriously. I think the WvW community would be happier if Arenanet had someone on this forums to talk, publish their positions, react on good ideas etc. if possible someone from inside the WvW scene. It is easier to understand why something isn’t changed if we know “why” or that they are working on it etc. It wouldn’t change the game itself, but it would change our perception of it.