Guild Wars 2

Reacting to buffs and debuffs on a target is huge whether you’re doing PVE or PVP, this is a good part of GW2 gameplay but there’s a major problem. It’s really hard to see quickly which buffs/debuffs are active on yourself or a target – the icons are all the same color/size and don’t appear in any sort of consistent order. I find this problem especially huge in PVP/WVW when trying to determine if a target has stability so I don’t waste CC.

Solutions:

1) Let players assign custom colors to specific buff/debuff icons.

2) Have the icons appear in a consistent order (eg if player has stability it will always be first icon on the left).

3) Allow players to set specific buff or debuff icons to a larger size, rather then changing the size of the entire UI or all icons.

These are pretty small tweaks, but IMO it would be a huge QOL improvement in all gameplay modes.

Boonsharing in general makes wvw a boring one-dimensional mess. There’s no fun/skill involved at all in boonshare group vs boonshare group, and given how many ways there are to apply various boons + how fast they can be shared boon strip as it exists now doesn’t solve the problem.

I’ve told friends this is why I’m taking a break from GW2, being able to stack + share buffs for such long durations especially hard CC immunity + resistance (covers soft cc), quickness and protection. I got alot of disbelieving responses to this one, and describing what was going on with boon share….the whole situation just feels so ridiculous.

Boons really need a lower hard cap in duration, and/or boon share powers should be disabled in WVW altogether. PVE would probably benefit from this too, having such constant uptime on so many boons really makes it incredibly difficult to design interesting encounters without piling on one-shot mechanics.

WVW rewards are way better then they used to be, if you’re running with a good guild/commander then you’ll need to empty your loot bags multiple times during the night. The balance isn’t ideal, but player skill definitely has a way bigger role in how much wvw loot you get vs most forms of PVE – unless players screw up drastically the PVE map metas in particular are really easy compared to wvw.

Inicidentally, the bloodstone fen reward track is really good, best source I found for getting large amounts of blood rubies. IMO increasing WVW rewards by lowering the amount of fine/masterwork loot in favor of rares would be a great idea.

One thing WVW rewards really need is to be tied more closely into actually taking defended objectives and fighting other players. Objective rewards should scale based upon how many attackers/defenders there are and how long the fight is, killing players with siege damage should be less rewarding on both a personal and server score level then fighting them head on.

I don’t have any interest whatsoever in EOTM, way less strategy then WVW and no real sense of investment/accomplishment. It isn’t necessarily the idea of having three large “sides” that is a problem – Elderscrolls Online only had 3 factions and I spent a ton of time in Cyrodil which is their WVW equivalent. In ESO, players could choose what “instance” of Cyrodil they joined subject to queue limits so it was reasonably easy to play with allied guilds or login to the Cyrodil instance where all the most competitive guilds played. EOTM has no long term map persistence and groups/players can’t control whether they end up on a map with lots of good fights…..or a map with a bunch of ktrain groups that do nothing but run away and hide behind siege.

IMO if Anet isn’t going to do server merges then the linking system needs a major revamp. Main thing that needs to change is guest servers being able to have their own score over time, and more recognition of their accomplishments such as names over objectives. There should be a fixed set of criteria for promoting guest servers to host servers based on their performance/individual server score.

Even if this is done, removing the old lower tier servers and creating new ones might be a necessary step – hopefully let players start on new server with new history.

Let players vote on whether to flat out merge low pop WVW servers into others. I think this is something alot of players want, but the option was taken off the table due to Anet paying too much attention to a few vocal players on the forums.

Too much seige in WVW is already a problem, especially in upgraded objectives. The last thing WVW needs is anything that makes seige harder to destroy. IMO repair hammers would excessively favor objective defenders and make taking upgraded objectives even more annoying/boring then it is already. Objective defenders already have strong tools vs attacking siege – siege disablers and the poison cow rounds that cover a big AOE and steal supply from attackers. The only real option attackers have is focusing fire on and directly destroying defending siege, this option becomes way less viable if defenders can use repair hammers.

Focus in WVW needs to be put back on players fighting players, not attacking players vs defenders hiding in a keep and spamming “1” on siege engines.

I think what WVW needs is way more advertising to players outside of GW2 like trailers, interviews and such. Realm vs realm pvp has it’s own sizable, dedicated following of PVPers but the implementation in most games is really poor (worse then what GW2 has) along with a way larger grind to become competitive.

I came into GW2 WVW from Elderscrolls Online when I got sick of how messed up Cyrodil was. The only reason I found out that WVW was still a thing in this game was talking to friends who were already involved.

I’m really against trying to pull PVE players into WVW by hanging carrots like map completion or resources in front of them, this ends up with a bunch of players in WVW that don’t really want to be there. I don’t think there’s many players who will be pulled into WVW by being killed on the way to some PVE objective unless they were into open map PVP to begin with.

Depraved Ambience.7942:

ArchonWing.9480:

LFG Auric Basin AFKers and flax nodes. We see that lots of people are doing the meta but we don’t care if they fail or not because death to elitism. Will tag for Hero Point train once we see Octovine decreases in health.

The difference is you don’t see people who lose at Octovine taking to the forums and raging that a handful of people AFK made all the difference and caused them to lose and they should be kicked and the nodes should be removed.

HOT Meta events can’t be compared to WVW at any level. You’re playing against a predictable AI event that has alot of room for error/afk players in map now that the strategies are known. On top of that, there’s multiple instances of the HOT maps running, too many players for one map due to hero point farmers/node harvesters/afkers just go find another one.

WVW is competition against human players, many of which take the play mode very seriously. There’s also a very limited number of open slots on any given map, also within the overall matchup. Those “few” players afking at crafting benches can make a difference and it’s also incredibly aggravating and frustrating for the players who actually WANT to play WVW that are sitting in queue.

IMO anything that reduces the amount of afkers and players who aren’t on a WVW map for the purpose of playing WVW is a good thing.

The whole concept of players having to play multiple game modes to craft legendary items is flawed from the start. There should be specific paths available in each mode to obtain the needed components, I don’t like the idea of going for map completion anymore then PVE players like going into WVW.

mtpelion.4562:

Lyp Sao.1375:

anet removing good things
will this help the game??

This will help WvW but will hurt all the PvE players who used WvW for quick crafting so we could return to PvE in the same place we left it.

Exactly……WVW is for WVW players, not a “quick crafting” stop for PVE players.

I like the idea of removing crafting stations but keeping the bank in WVW, anything that discourages players from idling in the starter areas and/or coming into WVW just to do something completely unrelated is a good thing.

I"d really like to see what would happen if the winning T4 combination server that has T2 population was moved up to T2 for a couple of weeks. IMO it would be a pretty decent test of how viable a group of linked servers is competitively vs older servers with a more established player/commander core.

Re-evaluating links every 8 weeks looks good for now, I think this interval can be increased after a few rounds as the details of the linking system are solidly worked out. What’s IMO more important for NA is looking more at population levels + time zones when linking servers, not all servers need to be linked especially T1/T2.

In the longer run, a post from the dev team giving more details about server linking plans would be great. Things like how does a guest server move up to being a host server, what steps are planned to give guest servers more of an identity on the map/showing their name on claims ect.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

The results turned out more mixed than we think will be good for the future health of the game. For that reason we are going to run a “Remove Desert Borderlands?” poll first and then run a variation of this poll again. The updated poll will be reworded for clarification due to large amounts of feedback that many of the ‘No’ votes were cast with a misunderstanding of what they meant.

I think requiring 75% majority to act is way too high especially when the two options favoring mixed borderlands came in at 70%. 60% seems like a more reasonable threshold to act upon. And like others have said, polls shouldn’t be the prime decision maker for wvw design, it’s a tool and one that isn’t overly suited to complex topics. IMO written feedback is just as important as polls probably more because it can give insight into why players want something, and way deeper detail on what they are concerned about.

Looks like guest servers are going to be around for the long term, but right now these servers have no control over their own destiny in terms of who they end up being matched up with, or when they can become host servers themselves. IMO to become sustainable in the long term, guest servers need acknowledgement in their own right and goals to build towards.

There should be a scoring system focused on individual servers that governs when they make the switch to being host servers, and ideally factors into what tier they are matched up with. Not exactly sure what metrics would work, don’t think glicko would be usable unless the contribution each server in a pairing makes to the overall total can be determined. Possibly a combination of KDR/captures credited to an individual server?

I think shorter term server identity measures could help (such as pairings having a combined server name). Individual server scoring is definitely more work but worth the value in terms of giving guest servers reason to stick together and develop over the long run. IMO either these servers need to be given more identity + concrete ways to control their future or they should be merged. The current limbo guest servers are in isn’t sustainable and doesn’t seem fair to players on those servers.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

We are looking at ways to improve transfer experience. It’s a complicated problem.

Our current preferred solution, which we’ll likely poll players on, is as follows:

• If you think of the periods between world links being changed as seasons, then we’d lock all transfers for the first half of the season, and allow normal transferring in the second half.
• So assuming we continue to update world links once every 3 months, the first 6 weeks would be locked for all worlds and the second set of 6 weeks would allow normal transfering (costs scaling based on population size.) Then we’d relink worlds and lock transfers for another 6 weeks.

Thanks for the response, this seems like a reasonable compromise solution for a complicated problem. As for the problem of newbies not being able to create on the server they want and paying to transfer later….I’ve had a couple of friends end up in this situation, they ended up transferring when the server unlocked. I don’t think this problem is unique to the proposed system though, newbies being unable to join friends in WVW due to population locks has always being around. Think this solution is way better then players having no idea when a server might be open again, and I doubt the majority of newbies have specific wvw server preferences.

IMO a good deal of the server stacking issue is related to scoring problems and “night capping” – upcoming improvements here should significantly reduce the need to stack EU/OCX timezones as well as the impact from doing so.

YB’s main problem is not related to “being outnumbered” or “enemy blobs”. What I’ve seen in WVW personally especially the last couple of months is YB groups that lose fights very quickly when they have equal or greater numbers. Also large (30+) YB groups that run the moment they see enemy forces bigger then a roaming group. Lastly, the huge dependency on seige….dont’ think this is true of “all YB” but a significant percentage.

This isn’t a problem that Anet population balancing can fix, it’s a gameplay issue that individual guilds need to work on. Not trying to dig at YB in particular, I’m tired of seeing losses being blamed “we’re outblobbed” in situations where that isn’t the main issue.

Dagger.2035:

I didn’t know I was on a dead server playing the game with a bunch of non-competitive “band wagoners”.

People play WvW for a variety of reasons. I personally like being on a server where I can solo roam, havoc, or join up with a zerg anytime I choose. It’s a place where individual player skill matters. If I had to deal with the population levels on Blackgate I probably wouldn’t enjoy playing WvW.

I’m not sure what the best long term solution is for population balance. Server stacking is a problem and we also don’t want to have empty servers. I’m glad that ArenaNet is trying to address these issues. I feel like its too early to start complaining about server locking. The lock isn’t permanent and can be changed.

This isn’t about “blackgate”…..if I was serious about roaming, I would definitely transfer to a tier 3 or 4 server. But I want an actual, established server in those tiers, not some “guest” server with fewer guilds, less organization and fewer commanders that could just as easily be linked with a T1 server next quarter. What I’m strongly against is the idea of ALL tier 1-4 servers/“host servers” being set to “full”, not the locking of individual servers.

That’s the thing with the current situation, it’s not really good on either side. Host servers get their recruit stream cut off, which has really bad negative effects over time I already mentioned. Guest servers have no real stability whatsoever thanks to link changes, and players who transfer in/join a guest server as thier only option are denied the organization/coverage/general guild variety benefits that players on the host servers have.

There’s no incentive for players to improve the organization/community on guest servers – they aren’t gaining rank through their own actions, and their tier can change arbitrarily based on “balancing needs”. Empty servers are a bad thing….but the solution is using linking to test potential merges then making them permanent. Not cutting off the player supply to half the servers and putting the other half into a constantly unstable limbo state.

SkyShroud.2865:

u shld do ur homework before asking for something like this, ur reason is rather personal than a logical one.

I do have logical reasons for making this post. I’m not against population locking individual servers, but universally locking every sever above T5 is a really bad idea. There aren’t enough WVW players to maintain 24 servers…..cannibalizing healthy competitive servers to prop up dead ones is penalizing players for doing well.

I don’t think it’s trolling to say that existing WVW players who want a change and newbies shouldn’t be forced onto the lowest tier servers. What I keep reading on the forum from players in T5-8 is that they enjoy having a very small community and aren’t focused on getting larger. So why leave those servers as the only open ones? If smaller guest servers decide to get organized and grow….and end up drawing players from host servers that way, great.

I appreciate the work you guys have done on WVW lately, I"m on black gate and it’s been way more fun past month or two then it ever was before (I came back just before HOT came out). But I am very concerned for the long term health of existing WVW communities (servers like BG that naturally rank in the top 4 tiers) because you’re only allowing transfers to T5-8 worlds.

What really makes gw2 special for me compared to other RVR games I’ve played like Elderscrolls Online is the existence of organized server communities with several good guilds, server teamspeak and commander coverage outside of guild raid times. Communities like Black Gate need new recruits to stay healthy as players take breaks from the game, burn out ect. I’ve seen first hand what happens when a good guild breaks down because there’s no supply of new players…..it really sucks and makes your entire playing experience unpleasant to see a group slowly dying to circumstances outside their control.

It’s really frustrating you’re strangling the strong WVW communities to support a bunch of dead servers that have been on life support for eons now. Transferring to servers that are full of non-competitive players and “band wagoners” who want to play alongside winning servers isn’t viable IMO for any serious WVW player. I never had a problem with Anet locking high tier servers that got really full compared to others, but now you’ve gone and locked out transfers to literally every real WVW server.

WVW is the reason I stick with GW2, the reason I spend gems on bank space/bags/ crafting. But I’m not going to stay with a game mode where my options are limited to a) organized servers that are going to die a slow death from lack of new players or b) dead low tier servers that you guys are forcing players onto. I’m really disappointed how much you’re disregarding the play experience of serious WVW players who want to play with a strong guild vs other strong guilds.

Please reconsider locking the real kitten servers that actually earned the rank. Those are the servers that can give a really good WVW experience – and the places where transferring players/guilds is actually viable. It’s the organized servers that make GW2 stick out vs other games, killing off those servers will severely hurt the mode in the long run no matter what other changes/improvements you make. And keep in mind, lot of the serious players are actually in playing the game not spending all their time trying to counter ideas on the forums.

TLDR;

I have no problem with locking individual high population servers. But locking ALL servers above T5 is IMO a serious problem, it’s penalizing servers for doing well at wvw by cutting off their flow of recruits regardless of the situation each individual server is in. Anet is IMO cannibilizing the entire community of healthy wvw servers to feed a bunch of servers that died.

Being able to hide player ranks in WVW would be awesome, along with having abbreviated server names. IMO rank + full server name is way too much unnecessary visual clutter especially during zerg battles, makes it hard to see far more important things like player animations and red circles on the ground.

Wouldn’t mind seeing rank info removed altogether, I don’t see much benefit in showing for allies or enemies + a big downside in terms of visual clutter.

This ridiculous top 12 servers being marked full needs to end ASAP. For a player who wants competitive/serious wvw I don’t think any of the open servers are worth transferring to – we’re talking about the servers that took pride in being “small” and “casual” to the point of being dead. Adding in a bunch of bandwagon players who want to be linked with a given t1/t2 server doesn’t really improve those servers at all.

Anet, if you want people to “destack” T1 servers in particular they need viable destinations to transfer to aka t2-t4 servers that actually earned their place in the rankings. Stop trying to funnel players into 12 servers that have being on life support for eons now, merge them into a single lower tier to give the players who want more casual play somewhere to go.

(This isn’t hating on the t5-8 servers, I keep reading on the forums how most of them want to be on lower ranked very small server communities….and aren’t fond of all the transfers coming in. What I’m really trying to get across is that throwing a bunch of transfers at existing server communities that don’t want to change into competitive t4+ servers is waste of time for all involved)

Tyler, I really appreciate the community engagement but I can’t help but feel you guys are out of touch with why and how alot of players do WVW in the first place (especially in the more organized and competitively focused guilds). It’s awesome being part of an organized guild on an organized server where commanders actually work together on TS. Why on earth would a player who enjoys an organized environment want to join a new server that then gets linked to far more “casual” lower tier servers? If the incentive is sufficient you might get a bunch of PUG transfers to a new server, but a bunch of PUGs+lower tier server doesn’t = server that can compete in higher tiers (lack of commmanders, infrastructure, organization ect).

Removing the old t6-8 servers THEN adding say 3 new ones and giving players free transfer to those servers with incentives makes sense and I think has a solid chance of the new servers being viable compared to existing servers. I don’t see the point of creating new servers, luring players to them, then linking them to existing low tier dead servers to act as “life support”.

lil devils x.6071:

Most important factors for appealing server is a server and community willing to work as a server to accomplish common goals in both willingness to cooperate and the financial burdens of the costs of running in WvW, coverage outside of NA prime time and capability of the players on that server to be able to at least hold their own.

More worlds doesn’t make that better.. that makes that worse. Merging worlds according to timezone coverage would help, but it still does not change the quality of the communities in regards to assisting with financial impacts on guilds for runs or cooperation of the guilds to respond accordingly as needed.

This guy really gets it, this sort of co-ordinated WVW community is what really draws me to GW2. I don’t see any point to being on a server that’s just a bunch of random players linked to different bunches of other random players every quarter. The only way I’d personally be interested in transferring to a completely new world would be as part of an organized guild alliance (and we could be sure all guilds could make it).

EDIT: I also think the population of serious organized WVW players is under-represented on the forums because mostly we’re busy playing the game.

I voted “yes” ONLY because I see world linking as a good way to test possible server merges. I really dislike the current implementation of world linking, especially in the case of T8 linking to T1 servers I don’t think it’s doing anyone any favors. Those lower tier servers needed to be merged a long time ago…..not get linked to some higher tier server and possibly inherit a bunch of “bandwagon” players.

I can understand the highest tiers getting transfer locked depending on their activity levels, but locking the top 12 servers? IMO you’re screwing over the servers who did things “right” to try and prop up a bunch of dead servers/tiers that should have been merged eons ago. Also hard to get people back into GW2 with news of other changes, or new people into the game when the only wvw servers they can go to are dead/low activity merger candidates.

The WVW population has definitely gone up, but I think that’s due to Alpine Borderlands+ reward tracks and stability changes NOT server linking. As a tool, server linking has great potential for testing merges….but the current implementation is a serious problem.

Suggestion: For next round of linking leave tier 1-4 alone, link tier 5-8 servers into one tier based upon activity levels/timezone coverage. Then let it run for a while and have a poll for players on those affected servers only regarding whether they want to make the links permanent as a merge, or tweak it.

If the devs want WVW population to spread out more evenly from T1 in particular, players/guilds need viable servers to transfer to. Why would anyone who wants a good long term wvw experience transfer to a “guest” server that could end up being linked to a completely random server when pairings are changed again? Or worse still linking ends and players are stuck on “dead” servers.

The current system of locked host servers/open guest servers only benefits players who are thinking short term and want to jump on the “bandwagon” of whatever guest server is linked to the winner of a given tier. It doesn’t work for players and guilds who want a stable WvW experience and it’s also bad for existing servers where guilds can’t recruit new players.

Situation is even worse for new player to GW2 itself, they get to join a “guest” server that’s an unstable mass of random people (and with said instability, good luck finding anyone who can teach them how WVW works on a given tier in terms of builds/groups and the like).

Prolonging the combination of linked servers and “full” host servers is creating a poor WVW experience for alot of players that is just going to get worse as time goes on. IMO merge the lower 4ish tiers into T5 and let those players get on with building stable wvw communities. Server populations being batted around like ping pong balls for the sake of “balance” isn’t good for anyone. If I wanted “mindless mass of random people” vs “mindless mass of random people” I would play EOTM or world of warcraft battlegrounds.

EDIT: I appreciate the attention devs are giving to fixing the “dead server” situation and wvw improvements in general, I"m just not sure the devs understand how important steady/organized servers are in terms of making wvw fun to play and different from the other MMOs out there with similar game modes to wvw.

T1 IMO shows that server population isn’t the only factor that matters. Yak’s Bend in particular I keep seeing zergs die repeatedly to equal or lesser numbers of BG players. Those extra lootbags are also points on weekly score. BG also managed to keep T1 and often get 2nd place when the server was definitely outnumbered.

Server organization and overall style/community counts for a great deal in terms of ranking and this isn’t something Anet can fix.

Really enjoying Alpine BL, being having way more fights then I ever saw on Desert BL and also more roaming groups despite the number of large groups on T1. On player death/group wipe it’s also way easier to get back into the fight again, or to find enemies in the first place.

I did spend alot of time on the Desert BL after HOT came out, the map definitely has it’s good points. The last “map pass” definitely improved navigation, think the map could still use more improvements here. Removing the smaller obstacles like the random tree roots sticking out of the ground would help as well.

When DBL is rotated back in, I would suggest setting each borderland map to either Alpine or Desert randomly, with max of two identical borderlands.

IMO server linking needs to be ended and replaced with a permanent merge of the bottom 3-4 tiers into a single tier – shifting bodies around and denying growth to guilds on “full” host servers doesn’t really help anyone.

Too much emphasis is being placed on balancing “population” and making it the primary measure of whether one server is competitive with another server, especially after scoring based on timezone is balanced out. When populations between two servers are even vaguely equal, the percentage of players that run in organized builds + play on teamspeak becomes a HUGE determining factor in who wins. Groups on teamspeak following an experienced commander are going to win vs similar numbers of PUGs 90% of the time. Throwing a bunch of newbies into a lower tier server doesn’t make them competitive vs organized t1/t2 servers.

Arenanet can balance scoring to fix timezone stacking problems, and merge low tier servers to balance population but they don’t have control over most of the factors that make a server “competitive” rank wise. The vast majority of these factors like teamspeak usage, commander experience and group builds are factors that individual guilds and server communities need to deal with. Tier 1 and 2 servers get there and stay there by a concerted effort over time to organize and improve their play, not just by “stacking population”.

I’m really against this idea, it sounds cool in theory but in practice I think it would end up being like EOTM with ktrains running and large blobs of random players. I’m also not seeing how one set of interconnected wvw maps is going to solve population balance or scoring issues, you’d be trading “servers” for guild alliances at this point.

As for adding in more PVE, I don’t think that’s a good idea – players go into WvW for PVP. There’s also the issue of builds….players use completely different builds for PVE and PVP. Having to switch builds to take on some epic raid style monster, then getting wiped when you get jumped by gankers because you’re on a PVE build isn’t fun.

Don’t bring back Desert Borderlands, that map still needs alot of work to make it easier to navigate – and it needs to be shrunk down a fair bit. It’s way too hard to find enemy players, or your own commander again if you end up respawning – compared to alpine borderlands, the Desert Borderlands seem more focused on running and solving navigation puzzles then fighting.

The last round of improvements on DBL definitely helped with navigation, but it’s still really difficult to navigate compared to EB or alpine. IMO don’t rotate the map in until it’s undergone more rounds of fixing.

The extra population in WvW is great….but what’s really needed is flat out server merges. A great deal of what makes a strong wvw server function is “out of game” stuff like having a strong roster of commanders who support one another, server community/training and properly setup VOIP communications. Swapping server pairings every few months makes for chaos in terms of co-ordination and VOIP communications, something that is made worse by marking the higher rank host worlds as “full”.

Anet….the focus on WvW is great but I think you guys really need to “stop” trying to force players to spread out across too many servers, or trying to force guilds who want to avoid stagnation onto less organized/serious servers so they can grow. What really makes WvW fun vs games like planetside 2, or Cyrodil in Elderscrolls Online is finding a server/tier that fits your playing style best and joining an organized community.

If I wanted to play with random/shifting disorganized blobs then I’d queue up for EOTM. I really think devs need to show more respect for the WvW communities and organization that players have built up on the existing servers, especially the most active ones and stop trying to force players and guilds to “spread out” onto servers that don’t fit their playing style.

Not overlooking the communities on lower tier servers either – I think merging lower tier servers with other lower tier servers based upon things like timezone activity is a way better option then trying to “link” them to T1 servers that have a completely different playing style. The current “linking” setup may look good/balanced on paper but it’s not respecting player/guild playing style preferences at all.

TLDR;

WvW servers and tiers vary considerably in terms of organization and playing style. Guilds and players shouldn’t be put in a situation where they are “dumped” into a radically different tier by server linking, or for larger host numbers end up stagnant because they can’t recruit. It’s even worse when the server pairings change arbitrarily, merges should be done once combining servers that are closer in tier/playing style.

It’s great to see more focus on WvW but IMO Anet needs to stop with the half-measures and flat out merge servers. What really makes a wvw server work is things like good comms setup, and a roster of commanders with good timezone/daily coverage that are used to working together. These “out of game” things are hard enough to maintain with fixed servers, it’s crazy when a big chunk of your forces change every few months.

Likewise, IMO it’s completely nonsensical trying to force guilds on the larger host servers to either transfer to the lower population servers or stagnate/not grow. Dedicated WvW players/guilds want to play with other proficient guilds/players – not be forced to transfer to a less competitive server and try to salvage together a decent wvw presence.

TLDR version: There’s too many WvW servers, stop trying to “force” guilds off well organized servers into less competitive ones with minimal WvW population. Instead do permanent merges so the server communities have time to grow/work together rather then going through a major upset every few months when pairings change.

What makes WVW enjoyable is strong organized server communities fighting one another, if I wanted to be thrown in with random people then I’d be spending my time on EOTM.

Chase.2798:

Tldr: i think wvw populations need to be fixed and closing all servers but t8 would be a good way to spread out population.

There’s too many servers in the first place, trying to “force” the population to spread out will only cause players/guilds to abandon WvW. There’s a very limited number of players who are capable of running guilds/commanding groups/setting up server infrastructure like forums, TS and guild alliances. Forcing those players and organized guilds to spread out at random does nothing but make the overall WvW experience worse.

IMO arenanet needs to focus WAY less on balancing the “number” of players on WvW servers and start focusing on retaining organized WvW guilds and improving quality of life for them. Opening/closing servers suddenly based on some arbitrary “population” number makes life really difficult for WvW guilds small or large. Another big thing would be having an MOTD or popup for WvW that directs players to the server forum so they can get on teamspeak and have access to a list of organized WvW guilds.

TLDR: What needs to happen in WvW is merging of low population servers. Guilds and players should be able to choose the server environment they want, and join an organized/established WvW server community if they choose to do so. Dumping a bunch of random players and guilds onto a low population server isn’t going to help ESPECIALLY if they want to be elsewhere.

Spreading the number of capable commanders/guild leaders too thinly across servers is an even bigger problem for the health of WvW then spreading raw population out.

Edit: I’m not trying to imply that the lower tier/smaller servers are devoid of talented players or leaders. More that the organizers and commanders in particular are nowhere near numerous enough to support 24 NA WvW servers, and that trying to forcibly spread them amongst the server tiers isn’t a good thing.

Reducing the hero point requirement for elite spec to 250 was a good move. This goes a long way towards allowing players to unlock their elite specialization while still having choice in terms of playing style. The 400 hero point cost for elite spec IMO required way too much focus on platforming and finding areas that would be difficult to navigate to even with a video guide.

Putting in more hero points then are strictly “needed” in an area to unlock core class stuff like elite specializations doesn’t make the game overly easy or “casual”. What this really does is let players continue to progress and master their class while sticking more within their preferred playing style (combat or exploration/platforming).

No way does gw2 need the “holy trinity” one of the big reasons i play this game is because it isnt stuck with tank/dps/healer pidgeonholing. As for metacritic reviews imo people are blowing some minor issues with a good expansion way out of preportion.

Elite specializations are horizontal progression so by definition they wont fit everyone’s build. The ones in HOT look good overall, hero point cost could be lower but that really isnt a huge problem. This and masteries are VASTLY better then grinding a bunch of levels and all new gear. Both seem like meaningful character progression without having to grind like crazy to be competitive again

Overall its an 8 so far, the area design, content and features are fun. Could really use different icon color for Hot hero points indicating which ones need new masteries to get. Total mastery points to unlock elite spec could be lower say 250-300ish.

Lastly, more of the events need to scale for solo players, I have no problem with some grouping required events but given size of the area finding players to do smaller events with like retaking rally points is difficult. Aside from this really liking day/night and how dynamic the map is.

Doesnt feel like a “zerg” is needed generally. No issues navigating the map solo, 80 warrior with soldier gear, definitely nowhere near getting one shot.

Just started on HOT content myself, it does seem tougher then Tyria but still reasonable for solo players. Glad I"m running gear with toughness/vitality on it though – I think people still running a bunch of berzerker gear is a problem and/or not adjusting your build for survivability.

Personally I’m tired of MMOs where most of the content is incredibly easy and the rest is more about grinding gear/xp then any sort of real difficulty. Likewise, I don’t think that HOT content should be considered “leveling” content difficulty wise.

There’s definitely too many WvW servers, and I think trying to spread the population out so thin via server locks just hurts the overall WvW game as a whole. Merging say T 7-8 into teir 5-6 would help the population situation a great deal.

IMO population balance should only be a concern within blocks/tiers of 3-6 servers. Players and guilds that want to play on well organized servers with good timezone coverage should be allowed to do so, trying to force these players onto less organized servers doesn’t do anyone any good. Ultimately I think players/guilds will gravitate towards others with similar playing style and the focus should be on balancing population within those broader groups, not trying to balance across the board.