Guild Wars 2

“This is a non-issue. If they are repairing the walls and you have siege up they are just wasting supplies as the wall will just go right back down.”

As much as I don’t really care whether the walls insta-repair or not, the OP does have a point. We’ve reguarly stood by a wall when a zerg is coming in, let 1/4 of them funnel through the wall gap, wait for the Treb shots to hit the ground, then repaired it back to 0.1%, the wall goes back up instantly and 3/4 of the forces are stuck on the outside. We wipe the 1/4 that are already in the keep and finish them off before the next Treb shot hits bringing the wall down again. The morale that the attacking force loses is huge. Walking into a keep to see so many dead bodies is demoralising.

With that said, I agree that siege equipment doesn’t take long to drop a wall, especially when it’s siege up the top of Garrison that is usually hard to take down, even with Ballistas at the bottom of the cliff. When Trebs are in those sorts of positions I think it’s more than fair to be able to insta-repair the wall because those Trebs effectively make the wall defenses you spent so much on upgrading pretty much useless.

Ascii.9726:

This type of system would somewhat balance the point gain and not make the lead uncatchable, whilst still promoting as many people to log on as possible to night cap (more on, higher the value)

Whilst I appreciate the fact that you’re one of the first people to actually put some thought into a solution rather than continually complaining, I have a few points that I believe you haven’t taken into account.

a) Your setup basically says that if a server has a strong NA population that dominates other servers and builds up quite a significant lead then they should be the clear winner. The reason this doesn’t work is because your server also has an Oceanic/Asian playerbase, and let’s say my server has a very strong Oceanic/Asian base and we dominate, there’s really no way that we can catch up because we’re being crippled by being rewarded with lower scores until the NA prime time kicks in again, at which point we’ll be dominated again and fall further behind. In my opinion if we dominate a timezone due to skill then we should be rewarded the same amount of points that you are being rewarded for dominating.

b) That brings up the point you made of it all being based around population that is online at the time. I understand that the NA prime time ‘fills’ out the 4 Wv3 maps better than the Oceanic/Asian prime time, but what you have to realise is that the fights at a keep or a tower are still the same in size because we’re just concentrated into a smaller area than you are. So again, crippling our timezone because we don’t have the population to fill out the other maps doesn’t mean that we’re doing any less of a good job than you are. We’re still facing the same size attacking force on the same map because each individual Wv3 map is queued separately than the others.

Like I said, I appreciate your ideas, but it still points towards one thing, which is that the NA prime time is more important than the rest of the world, and this is a global game and not just a NA game, irrelevant of where the actual servers are hosted.

Redtah.3016:

If all playtimes are supposed to be equal in value then why is it that one of the Region primetimes is completely pointless? Currently US primetime is completely dwarfed in value because all other region primetimes are immediately after it. Take everything during US primetime? Go to sleep, now lose it all to Euro/Oceanic Primetime and allow them to hold it for 6-8 hours before US primetime.

Without directing my post towards a specific area of the world, I fail to realise how the ‘peak’ time players cannot see that they’re being completely selfish. The Oceanic & Asian communities paid for the game as well, expecting that the WvWvW would be open 24/7 so that we could enjoy it as much as everyone else. You seem to think that your servers are being rolled during your off-peak because you don’t have numbers. Have you thought for a second that maybe your off-peak players are just really bad?

In addition to that, take the above poster I’ve quoted… he says “Take everything during US primetime? Go to sleep, now lose it all to Euro/Oceanic Primetime”… ok, so you’re taking everything during your prime time? Flip the situation around for a second. YOU, or the NA prime time, is taking EVERYTHING during OUR off-peak timezone. I’m pretty certain that what you’re doing is EXACTLY what you’re accusing the Oceanic & Euro communities of doing. You take everything during the US timezone, we take everything during the Oceanic timezone. The same. It’s pretty easy to understand.

To counteract these problems we’ve been recruiting NA guilds like crazy so develop a strong NA timezone so that we can eventually move up into Tier-1. You should be doing the same instead of expecting that your timezone becomes ‘special’ compared to the rest of them.

There’s always the option of transferring servers yourself to help an Oceanic server.

My hat is off to the alliances that got themselves organised. There’s a reason why they’re dominating the server ladder, and having 24/7 coverage is one of the main reasons for that. I hope that my server can continue to build to that.

Yes, this is another ‘night capping’ thread.

I think that it’s completely unfair that North American guilds are able to cap our points back at night while we’re asleep or while we’re at work. Our Oceanic & Asian guilds work extremely hard during the PEAK hours (5pm – 1am AEST GMT+10:00) to cap as many keeps and towers as we can, we build up a nice lead and then we come back the next day only to find that we’re back down the bottom again because the LATE-NIGHT players (US/EU) have capped them all due to our guilds not being online.

Some people have put forward some great ideas that may help.

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Dee Jay.2460:
Scale the score system according to peak play time.
Peak hours (5PM to 1AM) – 150% the standard score
Late Night (1AM to 9 AM) – 50% the standard score
Day time (9AM to 5PM) – 100% the standard score
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motku.2354:
Reward players who fight during the peak hours; when maps and queues are full. And make the teams that have a solid late night group still gain something for it; just not as much.
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silvermember.8941
Acknowledge that people have to sleep and stop punishing players on the only servers they can play on with decent latency. The implementation would be as follows: 12 am -12 pm accept these as off peak and 12 pm to 12 am as primetime for all NA based servers (all times are GMT+10:00). During this time, if the outmanned buffed is on longer than 15 minutes per map all points will start degrading to a maximum of 250 points (all maps combine), this means even if you hold everything you can only get 250 max. This could even be made to work 24/7 on servers that have larger WvW players, but for my purpose i propose the 12 hours version. ADDED: I just realized that since they are 3 servers it might be a problem. So instead of relying buff maybe make it so that points are worth 50% of their value from off peak.
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I think that the above guys bring up some really good points that will help the Oceanic community to stop having to put in ridiculous hours in-game only to be overrun when we’re sleeping & working. We shouldn’t be punished for this.

For the North American players, we’re sorry, but this is how it has to be

Cheers.

DeeJay,

I think you need to calm down and have a sleep. You’ll wake up much clearer.

1: You should recruit from more timezones
2: You should join a guild/alliance, especially in a game called Guild Wars 2
3: You should learn to adapt to other languages, we have portugese speaking guilds on our Teamspeak that aren’t in our alliance or guild, they’re here for organisation
4: It is fun for other people, do not assume that because it’s not fun for you that everyone is having a boring time
5: If you’re going to post about an issue, you should post possible solutions. Nobody likes a whiner that doesn’t know what he wants
6: You should recruit from more timezones

There are heaps of teething problems with WvWvW at the moment. The NA servers are stuck with FOUR servers that are currently in another league (HoD/SBI/ET/JQ). Since we started, every second day we’d come up against the loser of the top 3 of those sides and they’d absolutely demolish us. We’d drop down a tier, win that tier by quite a lot and go back up against one of the top FOUR sides again. You know what? Big deal. Bad luck.

It’s not Arenanet’s fault that four servers got themselves organised while the rest sat around doing nothing and hoped that people would magically join their unorganised server. They put in the hard yards and now it’s paying off. We’re now putting in the effort, which is a lot harder now than pre-release, to bring our server back into being able to be competitive with one of those top four sides. It won’t happen overnight but we’ll eventually get there and it gives us an awesome goal to work towards.

There’s really no other word to describe your post but ‘selfish’. I could go and make the exact same post and call it by the same name, but from an Oceanic point of view.

GW2 is a global game, not just a US game. Just because the servers are hosted in NA it doesn’t mean that you suddenly receive all rights to push the rest of the world out of having a bit of fun as well.

We currently have issues of Isle of Janthir, which have been improving quite rapidly, where the Oceanic timezone on our server does quite well each day, with far less players than the other servers have online in WvW, and then we come back the next evening only to find we’ve lost everything we fed all our cash into upgrading, etc.

It’s extremely frustrating, but it hasn’t made us have a cry about it or ask for the game to be changed, it’s made us go out and try to recruit US timezone players as well as EU timezone players to keep our points at a decent level during our low periods. Arenanet has clearly said that there is a certain level of responsibility from the players to organise the servers themselves as they cannot force people to play on specific servers.

You should really think about things from the other side before you decide to whine away.

What a load of horse kitten.

(this is based off my server, Isle of Janthir, and our opponents to date)

We’ve defending Towers & Keeps against five times our numers time and time again. The number of times that a large force actually goes around to the side of the keep to AOE is rare. It’s usually a scattered group of players that are quite easily dealt with. AOE rarely hits the side of a keep because it’s all concentrated on the front. There is never enough AOE from the ground to the walls of the keep on the sides that you can’t actually stand on the wall and get off a Ranger or Elementalist AOE to the ground. A simple “Root” ability followed by a ground-based AOE is enough to take someone down to half-health and have them running for their life, and not usually returning because they know if they die around the side their chances of being revived are quite slim.

a) Multiple Arrow carts can fire insanely faster than a group of players AOE’s can, so it doesn’t necessarily matter if it’s a zerg or not. Could it be improved so that numbers don’t mean as much as they do? Yes.

b) We do guild drops off the edge time and time again. I’m not sure whether you’re running with a PUG or random players but a well coordinated guild group can EASILY kill and halt a large group of players down the side of a Keep or Tower.

c) I never get “Obstructed” when firing down because I’m launching an AOE then moving back, not constantly auto-attacking the players which is when “Obstructed” usually kicks in.

d) You only need to push them back once or twice and they’ll stop coming. Zergs don’t sit at the side of keeps, they sit at the FRONT of keeps. If they surrounded the entire Keep or Tower then your point would be valid, but it’s never like it in any siege I’m a part of

e) It’s not about some Towers or Keeps, it’s about where you place the Arrow Cart. We probably placed 50 Arrow Carts before we realised the best places to put them. There’s only a handful of Towers & Keeps on each Borderlands map and then those maps are repeated another two times, so learning where stuff works best is quite easy given a bit of patience.

The problem that people have when placing arrow carts is that they build them WHEN the force arrives. Unless you’ve got a guild group standing on top of you, waiting for you to put down the building site, then the other team will see the giant concrete block being built and focus fire it. You should either have the arrow carts built prior to any force arriving or you should ensure that as soon as you build it you have 3-4 others building it so that it’s built in less than 5 seconds and doesn’t actually get seen by a lot of the attackers. Once it’s built half the time you can’t even see an arrow cart from the ground so you need to rely on looking for the players with the little ‘cog’ icon to show they’re on a piece of siege.

All of the above is based off my experience on Isle of Janthir… it may be completely different in Tier-1 with HoD/SBI/ET/JQ, but we’ve reguarly been in the Tier-2 bracket and don’t see a lot of what you’re referring to.

A decent siege defense won’t be AOE’d down because you’ll have:

a) The siege weapons firing on the people trying to AOE your arrow cart
b) A group of people that are tasked with protecting the area outside the walls to stop the AOE
c) Your own AOE’s raining down on those on the ground who are trying to AOE your siege equipment
d) Guardians and other classes putting up projectile reflects to stop your siege being damaged
e) Your siege equipment in an area where only the edge of the AOE radius hits your siege, rarely hitting it

There are a heap of different ways to stop your siege from being hit. You really need to experiment with locations for siege and you’re bound to lose it time and time again until you either find somewhere great or you start to be more efficient with how you protect it. Can you honestly imagine how impossible it would be to attack a Keep/Tower if people couldn’t take down your siege inside or on the walls!

The one thing I noticed about ET is that they had defense up. We tried to cap a few supply camps at one point and ET had defenders within a stone throw, Ballistas up, etc. You wouldn’t get people from IOJ doing that because it’s boring, but in the end it was enough to make us wipe 5+ times and move to another borderland.

I’m on the fence regarding the orbs. They sit as a point of power. You strive to get them because they give you an advantage. That’s war I guess. You don’t take places that aren’t really going to help you in any way. At the same time I see people’s opinion on why giving someone who is already winning a 15% advantage over everyone else is a bad idea. That should however make you want to get those orbs back more, which creates conflict, more PvP, etc. I dunno, that’s a tough one.

Shinzou.1534:

IoJ should never been in this matchup. We were #8 on the latest rankings, why would we be paired with #4 and #5?

We weren’t 8th. I’m sure it’s been said about 50 times already. We were 6th, we got destroyed by Jade Quarry, we dropped to 8th. We then destroyed Gates of Madness and Dragonbrand and would have gone back into 5th, after Blackgate and Sea of Sorrows got beaten by Eredon Terrace.

We’re matched up in the right tier based off recent matches.

The current morale in WvW is extremely low. I play on Isle of Janthir and we’ve continued to W3 even though we’re being stomped. Even in our prime hours we’re coming up against Philippino and Malaysian guilds that just bring too much numbers to the field. They’re not overly great players but there are always enough numbers and quick response to stop us in our tracks.

This whole scenario of bad matchups is not really Arenanets fault. It just happens to be that there are four very organised servers, very populated servers, that are in another league, and I tip my hat to them. It happens in FPS brackets all the time, except that you usually don’t have to deal with it for a week, and I think that’s where the crying is all coming from.

Our server morale was quite high last week and it’s at an all time low this week. Next week I bet that we’ll be up against Tier-3 sides and we’ll do quite well and this will all quieten down for 7 days until we pop back up against Eredon/Jade/Stormbluff again. We’re trying to organise things with our own server forums but to be honest people just aren’t interested in coming onto them. We run one of the only alliances on IOJ, it’s only four guilds in size, but we hold our own quite well. If people organised themselves a bit better, got some more alliances going and started trying to recruit some US/EU players to our server we would be in a better position.

This is really unfortunate for Arenanet and I hope they’re looking into ways to fix this because the MMO public generally couldn’t organise their way out of a wet paper bag and will just sit back crying until they are all dried out and leave GW2 behind.

This needs both the MMO community AND Arenanet to get onto this ASAP.

(this post is in regards to IoJ vs SoS vs ET)

I don’t think inefficient matchmaking is to blame here. There are FOUR servers that are in a different league than the next ‘block’ of servers. The current setup of WvWvW, meaning THREE servers, is awesome. I’m tired of two-faction games, and no-one is creating FFA-PvP games these days.

So what we’re left with here is ONE server that is always going to drop down into the tier-2 bracket against, at the moment, Isle of Janthir, Gates of Madness, Maguuma, Dragonbrand, Fort Aspenwood, Blackgate. None of the these servers really have a chance against Jade Quarry, Eredon Terrace, Henge of Denravi or Stormbluff Isle. They’re too organised, have too many players, great alliances, and 24/7 coverage.

Whose job is it to fix this? I don’t know. Maybe ours, maybe Arenanet’s. Either way it has to change because once we realised we (IoJ) were up against one of the top-4 sides our morale just dropped through the floor. At the 24-hour mark people were exhausted from banging their heads against the wall over and over again.

In no way am I saying that the top-4 servers should be nerfed or that we should receive some sort of buff in order to make us more competitive, and I’m reguarly trying to recruit US/EU servers to our server to bring us up in the rankings as we usually do quite decent in the Oceanic timezone, but there’s a definate problem at the moment and unfortunately I’m not naive enough to realise that if it’s not fixed within the next fortnight the game will suddenly see a drop in active players immediately (timeframe judged off the fact that we receive a spanking this week, drop to Tier-3 next week, hopefully win the T3 bracket, move back into the T2 bracket and go up against one of the top-4 servers again).

Can anyone confirm what the actual population limit is per map, and whether it’s locked to say 500/500/500 per team, or whether you can stack 1400/50/50? I’d love to know if one server got to 500 players on a map if they got capped but the server still allowed the other servers the ability to get up to 500 players, which I think is the fair way to do it. I might add that I believe in your home map it should be 40%/30%/30%, just to make it a touch easier to defend against two servers at once.

Arenanet did say that they were adding in PvE elements to W3 delibrately so that others could get more of that world-PvP feel. However, with the fact that there are queues, and often long ones, I think they need to look into some sort of alternate solution.

It’s like the guy the other day complaining in chat about being ganked while ‘just trying to get their exploration achievements, and to stop killing him’. I see GW2 as some pretty serious PvP and people are pretty competitive with the whole server vs server setup that they’ve put in place. I mean there are huge alliances, specific official server forums, etc.

This is one of those things you’ll never really stop unless you remove the reason for people actually wanting to PvE in W3, such as the experience being higher, etc.