Guild Wars 2

Yep I can confirm that all altars on Deso and SR keeps have been broken by this nefarious individual. Altar breaking has been out since release and 1 month later it’s still an issue. Matchups at the moment are a farse and no before you even say it, I’m not stating this to justify Desolation’s score. We would probably be losing even with orbs but then again who is to say. Arena Net are you reading this ? Do you intend to do something about the hacks (preferably during this lifetime) ? If not, we might as well bail now.

Orbs were a good idea on paper, terrible idea in practice. It works assuming that the matchup is balanced in terms of manpower but that is almost never the case in WvW. In fact it’s designed not to be balanced. Combine this with hacks running rampart and you’ve got a recipe for long-term failure. Orbs should never have provided such powerful bonuses in the first place. In fact those kinds of bonuses should have been granted to the outmanned buff, which has been stated about 1 trillion times already. TLDR: Bad design across the board balancing wise, amateurish programming mistakes (hacks, invisible zergs etc) with too much security sensitive data running through the client, a deafening silence from A.Net when called out on these issues. Not a good way to keep people invested in the game.

Reading the drama stories about the hacker guy, his brother, his guild ban, his pet cat and whatnot just made me cringe. I’m still undecided on whether I should just /popcorn or /facepalm to the entire situation. It is really astounding how easy it is to manipulate the scores on a matchup through the orb advantage (and make no mistake 3 orbs is a significant advantage) just because you can or felt like it at the time. As for the noclip mesmer on DB tonight destroying siege while “swimming” underground, because Kodash tried repeatedly to siege the keep and failed (good battles though) again /facepalm. I don’t understand why people resort to such practices. What do they get out of it ? Is it satisfaction ? Is it really rewarding or satisfying to achieve a goal by breaking the rules, rather than earning it ?

As for waiting for Arena Net to take action on these issues, the sound of the crickets is deafening.

MagnusLL.8473:

While I agree with the general feeling, remember there’s only so many players willing to to WvW.
If the servers drops and fails to attract enough of those players, it’s over for good.

Just to give you an idea, right now you can enter SR borderland with zero queue and the outmanned buff. This at Saturday prime time.

Unfortunately, if Desolation players would (generally speaking) rather PvE than PvP, then there’s really not much anyone can do about it. It’s just something that can happen. When it comes to PvP and more specifically W3, there will always be “server hoppers” that join the “winning” side, since it’s quite clear that A.Net does not realize that the current system benefits no one but rather makes matters worse for the servers that are unable to sustain a healthy W3 population, 24/7, since they themselves made it so that this is virtually a requirement to even have a chance to compete for victory.

On the other hand, guilds that left their initial servers due to long queues will start, once more, to experience the same issue, as random people rally around them. It’s not rocket science. Server transfers in any MMO in the…universe have associated costs, may or may not be always available to all servers, in many cases have cooldowns (aka you cannot server hop at your leisure) etc. There are good reasons as to why these restrictions are in place. It prevents population instability and especially when you have a feature such as W3 where active pvp population matters, you cannot simply make a decision considering transfers and not take population balance into consideration. The community is NOT going to sort this out on its own. It has never happened anywhere before and quite frankly it’s not the responsibility of the players to balance out a fundamentally flawed system. We are being told that transfers is a temporary measure until the guesting system is properly introduced. Why has the game even launched without this system might I ask ? I could go on and on but I’d be simply rehashing things that have already been discussed and beaten to death in other threads and forums, plus I’d be derailing the thread even further :p

On a more relevant note, I know for a fact that SR border was struggling due to an absence of a capable commander and/or guilds to take charge and organize the defense/offense. We have discussed this and have a few ideas. For the time being we feel that we’d rather have a strong presense on one maybe 2 maps, than spread our already limited resources to all maps and not being able to reinforce and keep whatever we are capping.

Imho, as stated before losing ranks for Deso can only be a GOOD thing in the long run. Only the people that actually want to pvp will do so, the zerg mentality will wear off and new guilds will learn to cooperate and operate a lot like the IRON/Apex/BoA/SHC/LoR alliance who do NOT leave keeps uprotected or unupgraded and actually fight back. If people only want to pvdoor and steamrolling 10vs30 with absolutely 0 challenge and risk, then they need to learn that Desolation is not for them. There are plenty of “winning” servers to join. Our queues have already gone down, at the very least for the non-deso border are almost instant now.

I want to thank the SR people for their responses. As has been stated, we are not bashing the entire server but the person/people responsible for this. Truth be told however, even with screenshots and a name and a possible perma ban, the damage is already done. Losing the orb that people fought hard for about an hour to acquire (actually the ONLY orb Desolation managed to snatch and defend), after facing both Kodash’s and SR’s teams in some awesome fights, in the way it was done, demoralized and dissapointed people to the point of simply leaving the zone. As a result, we lost our towers and keep after making a last (outmanned) stand in the Bay (I was inside when Kodash sieged it, with little resistance).

I was on that map as well when the orb all of a sudden disappeared from a fortified keep and magically appeared on Seafarer’s Rest keep. My best guess is the person doing it used a noclip hack and/or a speed hack.

While I’m not one to hold an entire server accountable for the actions of a few (or one) individuals, in all honesty these kinds of hacks are only hurting whatever integrity is still left in WvWvW (if any). We currently have speed hacks, gravity hacks, fly hacks, camera hacks, noclip and I could go on and on but you get the idea. The fact that GW2 is one of the few if not the only MMO that has been plagued by so many hacks simultaneously (available literally at a mouse click on your favorite search engine) in the last few years is mind boggling.

If this trend continues, expect people to leave in droves. This needs to be addressed…yesterday.

QTRKOBRA.1827:

Anybody have an idea about it?

There are currently ongoing discussions both ingame and outside, about alliances and coordination, involving at least 1-2 major guilds and a few minor ones. As Thorny graciously pointed out, I don’t think it’s a good idea to provide more details about this on a public forum. Speak to the leaders directly.

That being said, the last week’s matchup went bad again and we basically all know the reasons. Arborstone went berzerk capping stuff @ 3am+ when the reset occured and at that time we did not have the numbers to stop them or even slow them down. When we did, it was already too late for 2 reasons :

1) They had a huge point and tally advantage and we could not maintain our numbers, while AS had crews around the clock, 24/7, that would at worst case match our own, best case they would completely overwhelm us.

2) People seeing the weekend score, never bothered to queue for W3.

Basically the reasons why anyone loses on W3, at the moment.

As usual, AR was probably happy to settle for 2nd place and while I do not believe in conspiracy theories or…Canadians :p, I have personally witnessed cases (mostly in the borders, not EB) where both realms were deliberately focusing on Desolation, when there were better and more reasonable tactical choices. This is not a flame, however. Good for them, bad for us. Such is life. We get over it and move on.

Of course, there are a few more minor reasons we lost, that have to do with coordination, like people not reporting attacks and keep/tower statuses, people with tunnel vision, people making the same mistakes over and over again (misplaced siege, getting supplies from anything but camps etc), mindless zerging with no real plan, afking @ spawn while waiting for guild/whatever when we desperately need people defending, guild commanders not willing to work with others, commanders that are empty icons etc. If we want to have any hope of maintaining our rank, much less progressing to the upper tier, we need to overcome these issues. Don’t get me wrong, this is not intended to assign blame (we have enough of that on map and team chat and it needs to STOP NOW, cause it’s not helping anyone) but rather have people think long and hard on what exactly they hope to accomplish by queing for W3. If it’s just badge farming, then we deserve what we get. If it’s something else, we need to do better. We can do better tbh, as illustrated by our relative successes on AR and AS map, when we decided (for once in the week) to mount a counterattack on Wednesday (with Genesis on AS, IRON, LoR and many others on AR).

Anyone that has played WvWvW enough and is worth his/her salt can tell you with absolutely certainty that, as it stands right now, the team with the biggest nightcapping crew is the team that is going to, eventually, win the weekly matchup, more often than not, having a huge score advantage over the 2nd. There are no if’s and but’s here and it doesn’t require rocket science to figure it out. I know it, you know, everyone that has taken the time and put in the effort knows it.

That being said, I’m one of the few people that has played alongside IRON (not I’m not part of that guild) on AR borderlands this week and that’s pretty much the only map where Desolation has had some mild success sieging it up and trying to defend AH, even against overwhelming odds (I’m talking about 5 vs 1 best case scenario here), mainly due to the fact that we seem to have more players on that map willing to duke it out even on 4-6am in the morning.

The thing is, there just can’t be victory against those odds, anyway you twist it, save for more capable people queing for the other maps, which is something that is simply not going to happen, when the initial weekend gain has managed to demoralize a good portion of those people. While I personally agree with Bloodsteel and Thorny as to the fact that at the end of the day, all that matters is you enjoying the very nature of WvW (and care less about the score), I can’t ignore the fact that a lot of players do not see it that way and need some kind of motivation, other than fighting for the sake of fighting, in order to get involved in an uphill battle. Maybe they need to change their mindset about it, since it is quite clear that A.Net isn’t really going to do anything about it, then again I can’t really blame them for opting out, since no one really enjoys dying over X vs 1 skirmishes.

TLDR : More fighting (if that is your thing), less whining. Deso isn’t the most coordinated realm in the…universe but we are getting better at it and the potential for improvement definitely exists. Choosing the “easy way out”, by transfering to the winning side, isn’t always going to be an option and on top of this, I personally feel that it takes away a lot from the sense of achievement such a (hollow) victory brings to the table.

miya.5160:

The problem with not disclosing what the Diminishing Returns system actually does is that we can’t tell you if it is working properly or not. The less you tell us, the less we can give you feedback about whether or not the patch was successfully implemented.

You have reasons for not telling us everything, but, of the two I can think of, neither will yield as positive results as you telling us honestly what you intend to change.

The first possible reason is that you don’t want people to find ways to exploit the system by working around it. While it’s admirable that you think this will work, people WILL figure out your system. For example, when I couldn’t figure out why I was getting such low rewards, I created a topic to pool information to find out if others were having the same experience. Even if you don’t want us to do that here, we will do it on some other forum.

And people who like to exploit systems regularly are extremely smart and resourceful. The only way you can prevent your game from being exploited is by making smart fixes. Putting a handkerchief over our eyes only works temporarily.

The second reason is that you don’t want us to know when patches fail, because you get a lot of negative attention for it. True. The community is extremely fickle, hard-to-please, and seemingly unforgiving at times. BUT, if we don’t know what you truly intended to do, we’ll assume that all the problems you have patching are intended changes. When that happens, the backlash you will get on forums will be even worse.

When the Diminishing Returns patch was broken and gave me 2 silver on my second run, I didn’t mind, because I read on the forums that it was an unintended bug.

Complete transparency is impossible, but honest communication where both sides have all the information and can come to informed decisions, opinions, and resolutions is not. It’s something that should be worked towards.

Don’t worry. We still love you. Sort of. I mean… these patches are kind of killing us, man. Ho ho.

This is right on the money. People are getting hit by DR all over the place and we sadly cannot help A.Net to figure out why, because we are in the dark on how the system is supposed to function in the first place. It is absolutely ridiculous that players have to suffer DR because some groups might or might not find exploits, enabling them to speed clear specific paths. Because of these imaginary groups, EVERYONE is being punished. Here’s an idea. Right now I’d say that it’s crystal clear A.Net does not intend us to run a dungeon path more than once (at least in a way that makes sense to a logical human being and does not involve intentional AFK in order to “reset” the DR system). Allow us to run it once, then implement a lockout period. Problem solved. Players will be able to run their 3 different paths, get their 60 tokens per path and either call it a day or switch dungeons if they really want to go on. This also discourages farming specific paths and at the same time encourages hardcore “dungeoneers” to experience more of your dungeon content. Win-win situation.

2 mesmers and a thief is a recipe for success for this guy, especially if backed up by exotic berserker gear/dps oriented specs. My original question still stands. Mr Hrouda you mentioned that QA groups were able to defeat this boss with different class makeups. Care to englighten us on the success of non-mesmer, non-thief groups and their specs and tactics ?

Robert Hrouda.1327:

SuperPringles.4321:

Got him to 25%, same walrusing thing. Seriously, otter Anet. If you want us to run all paths, don’t make them so whaleing hard. Penguin this.

Of course, it may be that there is a mechanic that we are missing, but we also tried every-sealing-thing like LoSing, burning crystals at the last phase, et cetera. That is bullkitten.

The only possible way I can see is to permanently put poison on the boss, but Anet has also stated that you don’t need a particular class makeup to complete a dungeon. So what the dolphin is this bullshrimp then?!

5/5 would read again.

When people started posting about him, I looked into his skills and found he does need a few updates to certain things that weren’t working properly or displaying properly. Those will be in next week.
Our QA group, Alphas, and even groups on Live are able to defeat this boss, and I’ve seen those groups have vastly different class makeup.

He’s hard, but not impossible. Explorable dungeons were billed as being hard. Some things are unfairly difficult though, and we are actively trying to balance these things. Bringing them to our attention always helps with speeding that up

Please explain to us with a straight face how easy (or even possible) he is without poison and possibly without time warp, in comparison to the opposite. I’m dead serious here. On top of that, could you please explain the purpose of the crystals ? Did you intend people to DPS them down, because if that is the case I can tell you with absolute certainty that most if not all groups able to defeat this boss, ignore the crystals entirely (which implies ignoring a crucial mechanic of the fight, by brute forcing) and simply stack an enormous amount of DPS, preferably with perma poison and/or time warp.

Granted there will always be paths that are slightly more attractive in terms of difficulty but at the moment, there are prime examples of imbalance between paths that need to be looked at, for instance the effigy in CoF, compared to the other paths etc.

If they want people to be doing all 3 routes, they need to make all 3 routes as equally as interesting/fun, which is not the case, as it stands with many dungeons. Given the choice and considering equal rewards, people will usually opt for the path of least resistance. There is no rocket science involved in this conclusion. Incentive (not always in the form of a reward) is always more attractive than punishment.

It’s a huge mess. We had the same experience running a couple of runs (different paths) in CoE. 1st run everything was fine, 2nd run some party players found themselves with less tokens than the rest. We did NOT speed clear or at least consider our time as speed-clearing (runs were a little above an hour each) and none of us had entered any other explorable mode dungeon that day.

On top of this, I just like to tune in with all the other people considering the DR rewards. Can we have some reasoning (that actually makes sense) behind why exactly is the system punishing efficiency in dungeons. What is so wrong about people wanting to run the same explorable modes ? Aside the obvious fact (that it’s their time), if you really want to encourage people to complete more paths, you should consider offering incentives for it (more/special rewards or interesting mechanics), instead of punishment, punishment and more punishment. We are not idiots. We understand that you are trying hard to battle farming and botting in any form. The thing is, legitimate players are usually caught inbetween. Nothing good will come out of the current system, other than actually discouraging people from running your content, in the long run.

In all honesty, the most serious problem with dungeons at the moment is the fact that there is absolutely zero learning curve. I think we can all agree that the mechanics used in dungeons are somewhat different than the normal mechanics of leveling PvE and in some cases slightly different from those of DE’s. The issue here is, the game makes no effort whatsoever, to communicate those mechanics to the players. What you get instead is a mail @ level 30, inviting you to AC, one of the mildly difficult dungeons (why not pick CM as the starter dungeon is beyond me), in comparison to the rest and most players choosing to step foot in there, at the appropriate level, equiped with greens/blues and leveling specs, soon realize that they were completely unprepared for it. It’s basically like throwing a person into shark infested waters and demanding that he makes it to shore. Don’t even get me started on combo fields, finishers and their proper usage. Even today there are tons of 80’s running around, being almost completely ignorant of combos and how they can be used to optimize gameplay on encounters. To be perfectly honest, I can’t really blame them that much.

Even in a specific dungeon, difficulty is usually all over the place. For example you can have Boss 1 being mildly difficult, Boss 2 being nearly impossible and Boss 3 & 4 being so mind numbingly easy that you are left scratching your head.

The mechanics themselves aren’t really anything to write home about. If you’ve played MMO’s before and got into the endgame, you’ve probably seen it all. 9 out of 10 you will be required to dodge/block/los/immune red circles/telegraphed attacks (assuming that you can properly notice them, through the gazillion particle effects), control/kill adds, kite adds/boss/trash/whatever and try to put a dent into HP sponges. Luckily there are a few encounters that are genuinely interesting and stand out from all this mess, problem is you can probably count them on one hand.

My point from all of the above is simple. Providing incentives for players to actually experience the content, instead of punishing them is a given, assuming of course that your intention is to maintain a healthy player base for this particular activity. There is not even a discussion here. That’s game design 1on1. Tuning your content for appropriate levels, gear, getting rid of serious bugs (NPC’s or events bugging out for no apparent reason, requiring an instance reset) and creating a difficulty curve is another pretty simple “lesson”. It really isn’t rocket science. If all you provide is a grind of otherwise unattactive content to the masses, for basically vanity stuff (skins), then don’t get surprised when very few people opt for it, or those that do choose the path of least resistance. It’s simply human nature to do so.

GW2 dungeons, both story and exploration modes, give me the impression that have been designed to be artificially tedious, grindy and prolonged (I’m not going to use the word ‘hard’ here) in order to mask the lack of an interesting and attractive PvE endgame. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve completed all story modes and most of the explorable paths but the question remains, is it worth doing them all over again just for the challenge or “fun” if you’d prefer plus the chance to, at some point, complete a vanity skin set ? In my very humble opinion, no, at least not at the moment.