Guild Wars 2

Hello,

I am unable to verify with certainty that this is a ‘bug’, but feel it has escalated in severity to the point where it needs to be mentioned on this forum…

Since last Monday, we have noted a consistent drop in our WvW population, even though we show queues on all 4 maps. By the end of the week, we were noticing the same problem plaguing our opponents.

Without tools to show who is truly ‘in map’, we cannot verify this, but …

At one point, we had lost the entire map and were being kept holed up in our citadel by enemy Zerg. All exits were cut off. We took a census and found 20 players inside the Citadel. Yet there was, at that time, a queue to get into our Bordlerlands.

This would imply one of two things…

1) There were over 100 independent players roaming around outside the enemy zerg, yet the enemy couldn’t locate them, and the missing 100 didn’t bother to attack or capture anything

-or-

2) There is something going on that was introduced on or about last Monday near the same time as the culling fix that is causing WvW maps to register as ‘full’ even though only a fraction of the players are being allowed in.

Currently, on our Borderlands map, there is a queue that (from informal survey) is averaging over an hour, but the population in our borderlands is extremely sparse (20-30 we can account for, total) and has been dropping all night.

In other threads, other servers have mentioned the same problem.

It seems highly likely that whatever is managing the number of connections to the WvW maps (and quite possibly the tools ANet uses to check the map populations and finds nothing amiss) are not accurately reflecting the number of players actively in-map and playing. Perhaps connection ‘slots’ are not being released. Perhaps it is something else. But it becoming very hard to ignore and seems to be growing worse over time.

There is a Tarnished Coast thread in the WvW forum that has been discussing this problem for several days. There are also remarks of others that have seen similar behavior in other WvW ‘queue’ threads, as well, documenting what many servers seem to be experiencing as best we can. At this point, the evidence we players can present, lacking tools, is entirely circumstantial, but it is extensive, growing, and feels like it should get some attention … something definitely feels very wrong in the disparity between queue times on the outside and shrinking pops on the inside of WvW.

Because this seems to be an issue impacting many, I have created this thread in the ‘Bugs’ forum in hopes that it shall be noticed and investigated.

Thank you!

I guess I am trying to frame the discussion of ‘What do we want the upside of picking a warrior to be?’ rather than ‘Why would you ever play a warrior when you can play a thief?’

Though both are definitely problems to address, I think we need to answer the first before we can answer the second.

If not survivability, then what should our ‘moment to shine’ be?

While I agree that thieves currently feel OP (at least in comparison to other primary melee classes), the point of this thread is to figure out why/how Warriors are UP in PvP, and how to fix it, rather than getting into a nerf/no-nerf discussion about Thieves.

I’m OK with Thieves having higher burst damage and mobility than warriors, but their numerous stealth options really do make them far more survivable in PvP. Survivability isn’t just about HP bars, it can also be a function of how hard you are to hit consistently, and how often you can even be targeted. As it stands, a reasonably-well-played thief is far more survivable than a reasonably well-played warrior, and because thieves have greater mobility, greater damage, greater breadth of utility, the idea that they ALSO have greater survivability than a warrior makes a warrior feel like they have no role in combat at all that can’t be better served by a thief.

Nerfing thieves won’t fix warrior underpoweredness. What we need is a buff to warrior’s toughness/survivability to allow them to survive for longer not only against thief bursts, but all those high-damage situations that the developers seem to want us to be able to last in, but that we currently cannot.

I should ammend the above to state that I am fine with warrior behavior/balance in PvE. I seem to be about as tough as I need to be to fulfill the role of ‘primary damage absorber’ on my teams. But players are much smarter than AI enemies, so most of that warrior toughness evaporates in PvP, and you become the ‘person who buys the casters two extra seconds by always dying first’ role, and that does get old.

I play a fair amount of World vs. World, and the lack of any viable escape is the major problem I have with warriors. We cannot stealth, flash away, pop a clone, or have any viable options to ‘reset’ the fight, as the OP stated. As a warrior, once you engage, you are committed until you die, or the other person dies. And it will usually be you, because the other person DOES have viable escapes.

So if they start losing, they use one, and it’s a ‘do-over’. If you start losing? You lose.

I just don’t know what our role in combat is supposed to be. We can be 20% tougher, but are expected to hang around in situations where you take 60% more damage. I find that unless I want to be a burden to my teammates in team fights, I have to pull out a rifle and snipe from the back, otherwise, in melee I get stacked with tons of conditions, have no escape, get killed, and become a burden to revive. Our single-target damage is good, but rarely lands because we are forced into very predictable patterns due to lack of options, and any moderately-skilled player can see us coming and easily counter.

Our survivability in actual fights (not on paper) ends up being low. Our damage is acceptable but easily countered/negated. Our utility in sieges seems to be limited to running supply. We cannot effectively duel due to lack of escapes.

If your team needs damage, call an elementalist (or a thief). If you need survivability, call a mesmer (or a thief). If you need buffs, call a guardian. If you need the enemy debuffed, call a necro. If you need a lot of utility abilities, call any caster (or a thief). If you need none of the above, you’re probably safe to carry a warrior along in your group, so long as things do not get too intense.

Someone remind me why I’m here?

Frvwfr.4307:

It’s not a bug. It is their spawn. It prevents you from spawncamping them like you are doing in that screenshot.

Maybe, if you move away from their spawn, they won’t be invicible?

No, it’s not their spawn. Their spawn is well down the other end of the path that ends at this bluff, a good distance away. They run FROM their spawn to get to this bluff, jump down into the play area, but maintain their invulnerability if they stay at one or two spots with bad invuln area geometry. The people in that screenshot are not spawn camping, as the spawn is up the bluff, down a tunnel and down a hill, hundreds of yards away from the point of that screenshot.

Kezekiah, that is incorrect. It is NOT their spawn. It is the invulnerability trigger erroneously extending BEYOND their spawn area in one or two places that is the problem and the exploit.

Invulnerability at the top of the bluff is fine. Only one team can access that area, so only one team gets invulnerability there. But to have locations where only one team gets invulnerability in the SHARED gamespace (i.e. at the bottom of the bluffs) is clearly not working as intended, and requires a fix.

No, if they’d planned for this to happen, they wouldn’t have had the spawn invulnerability area stop right along the top of the bluff, except for one or two tiny unexceptional hidden spots that inexplicably extend to the bottom.

What happened is some environmental artist drew the spline for the trigger volume for the invulnerability area a bit too wide. Or some terrain artist came through later and tweaked the bluff without adjusting the trigger shape along with it. It happens. But it’s such an egregious exploit as it stands, that they really need to address and fix it, otherwise it breaks the play balance of every borderlands map more in favor of the attackers than what was clearly intended.

This is indeed a bug, as spawn area invulnerability should not be able to be reacquired after entering a WvW contested area. Once you jump down the one-way bluffs on the side paths, you are in contested space, and should not be able to reacquire invulnerability until you return to your spawn area, either by death or running back via the main gate. What is happening is that people are exploiting the fact that invulnerability can be reacquired in one or two spots where the invulnerability zone geometry stretched down into the contested area. This means they can enter, leave, and re-enter at will. It also allows them to damage and kill camp defenders while being unable to be hurt themselves, unless the camp defenders leave. Then they’re free to go out and recapture, and if the defenders try to counterattack, they just run back to their invulnerability zone.

This leads to exceedingly dull play for the defenders, and probably not very interesting play for the attackers, either. I suppose it could be argued that dull, uncompetitive play fostered by tiny, undemarcated safe spots was ArenaNet’s design goal, but I doubt it. It is clear the design intent was to have attackers taking the side paths to the camp be unable to return to safety the way they came, and this exploit breaks that.

The invulnerability needs to stop before they jump down into contested space, or else this very irksome exploit will continue forever.

Also agree. We are currently defending our borderlands from two groups that just sit in the invulnerability zones until we leave, then run out and take the camp. If we try to counter, they just run back to their invulnerability spot. They can kill us, we can’t touch them. So, we either have to permanently post numerous people to sit just out of range to keep them from forever capturing our southern camps, OR we have to resign ourselves to never having those camps (and thus the towers they supply). It’s very broken gameplay, sadly, and needs to be fixed soon as I am seeing it more and more.

Hello, Red-names!
Is there any update on this? It seems the problem is well-defined and fairly widespread, and it has at least three of my characters unable to progress on story missions (since I want to do them with a friend) for several days now. I know things can take a while to fix, but a ray of hope that it is being looked into would be nice to have!

Edit/Addition to Above:

In neither case are either of us in overflow zones.
We have checked our servers and verified we are both in Tarnished Coast. Home server, base map for both of us, no overflow.

I noticed this problem a great deal in the first week of play, then it abated. I thought it was fixed. But in the last 72 hours, it has returned with a vengeance….

Playing Tarnished Coast server, Gendarran Fields Zone
Two separate instances of two pairs of different characters on different storylines behaves identically as follows:
Two player are partied in a group, both in-zone.
Upon entering zone, we are unable to see each others’ portaits in party UI unless in close proximity to one another.
When mission owner enters story mission, other player is not given prompt to enter. Other player also has no ‘Join In’ option to join mission-owning player.
Reboots, leaving zone and returning, quitting and reforming party, forming party in separate zones/same zones/whatever and many different combination of the above give no joy … still unable to join one another in story missions, effectively blocking progress for us as we have been storying with these pairs of characters together since launch.

I also, have this issue. It appeared in the first week or so of the game, then disappeared, and I thought it was fixed, but now it is back. My friend and I can no longer advance in our storylines. It appears to be some sort of syncrhonization issue … if I move away from her, our pictures go black in the party window. Only when near each other can we see one another. Then, when she enters a mission, I get no option to join her. This makes cooperative playing of story missions impossible. Hopefully this gets fixed soon, because being unable to play cooperatively in an MMO is just unacceptable.

My apologies, but this appears to be working as designed. I mis-read how the benefit was applied. Carry on!

I have purchased shield mastery, looking forward to the 20% reduction in shield skill recharge time it promises, but have found it grants no such bonus. My two shield skills recharged at 30 and 24 seconds before the trait skill was purchased, and therefore seem like they should recharge at 24 and 19.2 seconds, respectively, after the skill purchase. However, the recharge times are unchanged, verified both by the in-game displayed skill recharge time UI and independent timing with a watch.

Is the skill, in fact, not working in this respect, or is the skill description text wrong? (in which case the toughness bonus w/ shield alone doesn’t make it a very appealing skill to take) – Thank You! -Sasha