Guild Wars 2

I’m guild leader of RED. I have been bouncing around servers, atm I am on Sorrows Furnace, linked to FA.

My impression echoes previous posters who say Jq, BG, SoS, FA have strong presence in ocx atm. If you want to win all the fights, the top dogs atm are LATE and KnF on which ever servers they are on, but for a good community I think FA has a strong set up with multiple small groups active at once, as opposed to Omni blob tag/server mentality.

This is actually a good idea, the biggest problem with WvW is the lack of quality commanders tagging up. The old ones getting bored, and new ones rarely pop up and try more than a few times.

Ohhhhhhhh you mean how it was before there was a claiming queue, where people could troll it? Your suggestion is bad, because the current system allows it both ways. If it’s like you say the the guilds in queue don’t ‘want’ to claim, then ‘Whoever clicks first wins and get the claim’.

Lul this guy isn’t even talking about ppt, he means ktrain eotm commanders.

It would be easier and equally as effective to simply remove Epidemic from the game. Let’s also remove skill bars all together, it’s a balancing nightmare !

BG player pretending to not be a BG player complaining when he transfer his alt account to BG for easy wins and is faced with a challenge.

There are many ways to manage condis, and a good epi isn’t even that easy to land. Let’s QQ about every meta change until we can only do direct auto-attack damage without crits !

Bringing in new players to face this mess will not leave a good lasting impression, but on the other hand of course we need the fodder to fill out the ranks. It doesn’t solve the issue of commander imbalance either, which is why BG is still going to rock any combination of low tier servers no matter how ‘evenly’ or ‘overly’ balanced the rest of the population is.

Many good issues raised by experienced players who are addressing the topic, especially the players who are commanders and guild leaders with a much clearer reality of WvW and a higher awareness of what a server needs to survive.

There is an imbalance in skill, leadership and timezone coverage in this game right now. A four tier system at this stage of the game be can’t sustained with the above three factors. Discussing a destack of healthy servers to put the balance in the hands of anet is a disaster waiting to happen.

The simplest solution moving forward is to look seriously at leadership and timezone coverage and figure out how many servers worth of leadership and coverage can exist in a healthy way? It’s not healthy to have 1 commander carrying long hour gaps, it creates a huge vulnerability to a server. Extreme example: DK from YB can cause YB to be in T1 when he plays or T4 when he doesn’t. I suspect 2 tiers is where we are right now.

Add new map where siege can’t be placed, fewer objectives to hide behind and smaller map for more focused action. Instead, there can be pre-placed trebs like in pvp that you have to use to break into objectives, forcing fights at specific locations.

TC was ready for the possibility of no link, we played hard last week. In the end YB failed to tank hard enough in kitten drop out of t1, but make no mistake YBs performance last two weeks was a pure show and for some reason anet rewarded it. The worst part about it is that YB is perhaps one of the least entertaining servers you could play against. No one wants YB in a T1/T2 rotation.

JQ certainly tanked last week, but even so does that mean they didn’t deserve a link? They are a trash server that needs all the help they can get.

How did anet decide that Maguuma, the #1 server, deserved a link? The only thing more obscene would be to give BG a link.

The only possible explanation is that anet wants kitten be locked into Mag/BG/YB to reduce the rotation. It’s a multi-pronged stroke of genius. On the one hand you keep BG in check with a pair that’s strong enough to dominate them in fights and ppt, on the other hand you force BG to destack by pairing them up against YB because let’s face it, no one wants to play against such a poor competitor.

The only fault in this genius strategy is that there isn’t a T1 glicko wall to support that set up, anet must soon be getting ready to announce glicko adjustments for BG/Mag/YB to force a wall.

A lot of what is being attributed here to hacks really is lag. Next thing you’ll say the dolyaks are hacking when you see them teleport sometimes.

Anet is already doing this for NA servers.

JQ will likely get a link this time next week, unless anet changes their NA link rules. Any question of why JQ doesn’t currently have a link stems from ignorance:

- Links are done for everyone at the same time every 2 months.
- Links are based on the servers performance at the time of the relink. If your server is doing really well at that time, you can expect to get either a weaker link, or no link. Specifically, anet has said they won’t link t1 in NA for now— and what did JQ do last links? They pushed themselves into T1.
- If you start doing poorly immediately after your relink, too bad. YB and DB sunk far worse than JQ without a link. Anet cannot predict the breakdown of servers.
- If your server starts doing amazingly after your relink, grats and too bad for everyone else. Bandwagons win, look at Mag and previously DB, and previously BG.

I echo the need for armored vehicles in the game now, too much anti-infantry siege to be walking around by foot.

Even if it only took them a few days to develop it, they don’t release patches that quickly for a reason.

This kind of topic only adds to anets confusion on a direction for wvw. Many threads complaining that we have cannons, now this thread complaining we didn’t get them sooner.

I don’t believe it was a manual lock or bug, just the same old heavy handed algorithm that’kitten many servers in the past. JQ is always the first to complain about some action done to their server. Please JQ, you crushed many servers since the start and now you get to taste the other end.

We know the population balancer is observing ‘activity’ over a wide window (probably 1 or 2 months).

What counts as activity? Those guilds and players that show up once a week for reset/weekends are also being counted. They aren’t there for you the rest of the week, but they are showing up to ensure your server gets locked. Over stacked timezones that can’t win mega points because of skirmishes is also another hinderance.

It’s a world of bandwagons and bandwagoners. But it’s also practical, few servers could truly claim they aren’t on 11:55 or worse on the doomsday clock.

Guilds are always queuing up to go to BG, the first day they open they’ll have a feast that will fill them for many more moons on full status. Meanwhile, the peasant servers will be begging for leftovers with both hands open.

I hope Anet is paying attention to Yaks Bends ‘performance’ this week. They are tanking so they can secure a relink. Don’t reward their behaviour ty.

Organised 2v1’s are very fun and should be encouraged, the fights happen at your doorstep instead of having to chase them down.

Skirmishes are a step in the right direction. Conceptually it’s good to have competitive timezones worth as much as non-competitive ones (ie, winning during NA prime by a slim margin is worth as much as steam-rolling during SEA with 500+ppt).

The problem always exists of timezone balance — there are more ‘off-hour’ timezones than ‘prime’ timezones, but that’s an issue that should probably be solved with better balance considerations rather than score tweaks.

Others have posted good suggestions on the scoring tweaks (eg, 2-1-1). This would add meaningful strategy and cross-server teamwork.

Another suggestion is to add ‘alerts’, eg you can have random (pre-announced) timeslots that are worth bonus points. That way players on each server can rally up and fight for those bonus points if they want to catch up or keep a lead. To make it less of a ppt-grind, you can make the bonuses objective based rather than ppt-based, eg: whoever is in control of SMC at the end of the timeslot wins the bonus points.

There are too many variables to account for to be adding new features without understanding the problems of the old ones. At this point it’s pure whack-a-mole.

The issue needs to be looked at on a player skill/competency level. Simply having enough numbers isn’t balancing out WvW as anticipated. We can shift populations around, merge servers, lock servers, force transfers, etc etc, but it’s not helping because not every player is equal.

The most valuable players are skilled/fun commanders that can generate a following and play regularly for reasonable hours. Most of the quality commanders are either on a strong home server or are moving as part of an alliance on each relink. Either way, there isn’t a balancing of commanders happening that is allowing for 4 tiers worth of servers to exist. This issue is compounded when you consider the different timezones — some timezones simply don’t have enough commanders across all the servers as a rule.

How to solve this problem? Can we incentivise commanders to balance? No — commanders are like any other players, they want to play with other commanders for their own peace and sake of mind, no one wants to carry a server. The only workable solution is to reduce the number of host servers.

Dat #pptstress

Don’t worry, have fun.

Balthazzarr.1349:

Ultra Hades.4691:

Darkness.9732:

Ranger discrimination goes on since day 1.

It’ s not the person who plays ranger fault.

The fault lies in who didn’ t make ranger decent and viable in 4 years.

You got it backwards, the class itself is fine, but it’s the players who play it that bring it down. Rangers encourage poor discipline and selfish gameplay habbits that aren’t welcome in any serious group. It’s easier to replace all rangers for other classes than explain to a group of selfish rangers why one particularly good ranger is allowed to be on a ranger and that the group would benefit from more of another class. Usually the good players will switch classes upon request anyway.

I’m sure we’ve all heard these come out of engis/rangers mouths, especially when you ask them to either run a different build or class:
- “I am the best ranger in the game!”
- “I’ll beat you 1v1”
- “I run this really tight build that is the best at ____”
- “I have more experience than ____”
- “My wvw rank is higher than ____”

Second time I’ve heard that I am selfish… Please enlighten me.. what is it that’s selfish about a person playing a Ranger? Just curious… at this point I have no interest in joining any zerg with my Ranger so you can go into relax mode now… but I really still want to know what you mean by selfish..

I don’t know you, just speaking in general. In general people running in a team in a team game aren’t all running their favourite individual setups that will get them the most lootbags, they are running what the team will benefit from as a whole.

Then you’ll get a bunch of players who don’t get it and think that they are contributing more than they could be if they were taking the advice of the groups they try to leech off.

Some builds and classes just don’t scale as well as others, so while the people who don’t get it think they are helping, they can be giving the group over-confidence and disappointment in real engages.

Darkness.9732:

Ranger discrimination goes on since day 1.

It’ s not the person who plays ranger fault.

The fault lies in who didn’ t make ranger decent and viable in 4 years.

You got it backwards, the class itself is fine, but it’s the players who play it that bring it down. Rangers encourage poor discipline and selfish gameplay habbits that aren’t welcome in any serious group. It’s easier to replace all rangers for other classes than explain to a group of selfish rangers why one particularly good ranger is allowed to be on a ranger and that the group would benefit from more of another class. Usually the good players will switch classes upon request anyway.

I’m sure we’ve all heard these come out of engis/rangers mouths, especially when you ask them to either run a different build or class:
- “I am the best ranger in the game!”
- “I’ll beat you 1v1”
- “I run this really tight build that is the best at ____”
- “I have more experience than ____”
- “My wvw rank is higher than ____”

Too funny to read BG players complain about the links, after a long period of face-rolling T1 with their link. Be humbled.

Let me apply the BS argument that the ignorant faction here is using:
15.9 % of players voted for 2 month rotation
84.1% DID NOT VOTE FOR IT.

It’s very simple, anet got it wrong.

That’s a bad-taste decision. 39% of people are not happy with the current pairings and want to see an end to paired-server stacking ASAP. 1 month pairings will either prevent paired-server stacking or dry up the coffers of the guilty parties, both are acceptable outcomes.

briggah.7910:

Ultra Hades.4691:

What is with all these low skill PvE players trying to bring PvE into WvW. Find some friends, get some skill, go out off your siege and fight your attackers.

sounds like you never defended anything.. defenders are becoming rare and usually its a few people defending against a larger force, buying time, till more show up to help if any even come. i’d like to see you jump out of a tower against a group 2 to 3 times your size.

I do that regularly, because most of the time there is no help coming, you got to try something different.

What is with all these low skill PvE players trying to bring PvE into WvW. Find some friends, get some skill, go out off your siege and fight your attackers.

These siege huggers should be happier, not angry. Now your ACs will be able to farm people who try to PvD thinking the 50% damage reduction is easy mode. The hardened t3 gate is best bait for AC heroes.

Come to TC and play OCX, pls show us how to do it.

What are you even talking about, I am saying the max gate and walls should be is T2/reinforced.

BG has the most dominant force in the game, this change doesn’t screw them over, it would make them even more dominant and make the matchup less stale.

I see I have offended people with this suggestion, but please don’t worry, you’ll still be able to hug siege like always.

You would still have T3 walls/doors on your third, although it would give the invading servers a stronger foothold on foreign maps, encouraging cross-map gameplay and strategy rather than home-bl bunkering.

I don’t know how anyone could say increased activity would be a negative thing to the game mode. Skilled groups would easily counter ktrains and either way a t2 keep with a lot of defensive siege is not that easy to take when defended.

Right now T3 keeps only flip when there is a low in defender population, that’s not tactics or strategy, that’s just dull.

Right now I think there is too much emphasis on defense and flipping T1/T2 upgraded things, to the point that guilds just won’t go on the offensive on a borderland if it has T3 upgrades in their third during a prime time.

Between the defensive siege advantage, which already makes it very difficult to take an objective, the large amount of extra time it takes to break a t3 wall or door, and the broken speedy-yak resupply times feeding keeps, it just makes WvW very stale right now.

It’s a lot more fun for all balanced servers when you can go and break into their keep and fight them for it, or when they do the same to you. Or if you are outnumbered and sneaky, you can quickly hit a keep to try to ninja it.

Suggestion:
Remove T3 wall/gate upgrades from keeps that aren’t in your third. Eg, on BGBL, BG can get T3 walls/gates on their garrison, but not hills or bay. SMC should also not get T3 walls/gates.

Having more uses for them is one thing, but removing them is something else. New players or players looking to level new classes can now play WvW exclusively and level up very quickly, unlike previously where they would have to do mind-numbing amounts of PvP or EOTM for the same result.

Don’t remove tomes, this saves us from having uplevels in WvW !

It’s this kind of over-reaction that lead anet to making the wrong decisions for WvW…

@ JQ guilds burning out, share those ocx guilds with TC

Teon.5168:

Ultra Hades.4691:

.

Don’t be hesitant to overstack the low tiers. They don’t have the organisation or skill to fight on even terms, give them a chance and give the stronger servers a challenge.

Gotta love that fine grade school logic.

Yea, because we all know that the lower tiers suck at everything. Why else would they be in a lower tier?

Do you actually even have ANY experience playing on a lower tier to base that ridiculous comment on?

Maybe ask our TC mates in wvw about how bad a wvw players we are from Kaineng.

/eyeroll

I don’t need to hear talk, I’d love to face the challenge instead.

Giving us a chance to move with free transfers is a good idea, but opening a new server is bad. Few guilds want to transfer to a server with no prospect of recruitment, and a server with only wvw guilds in it is definitely not going to give recruitment opportunity.

Don’t be hesitant to overstack the low tiers. They don’t have the organisation or skill to fight on even terms, give them a chance and give the stronger servers a challenge.

Edit: Apparently kittens are not allow to be shy.

I really appreciate that Tyler has shown an understanding of the situation going on IN the actual game, not just looking at numbers and statistics.

I have issues with your solutions to stop bandwagoning however. Firstly, raising the price of transfers won’t stop bandwagoning, look at how many people bandwagoned to high and very high servers.

Trying to stop bandwagoning is a problematic issue to begin with. Bandwagoning is a healthy aspect of the game that shakes things up, both as a server the receiving bandwagon assistance and as a server fighting a bandwagon, there is fun to be had.

My biggest problem with what you’ve posted is the server population method and reasoning (which has been in place for a while now, and has already taken a large toll on FULL servers). You can’t keep cutting off the supply of recruits to a server with the method you are using. Let me explain it with a simpler example, the reference frame of a guild:

To have a healthy guild, you need to constantly recruit. It’s not just about growing, it’s about maintaining your guild population. People go inactive, stop playing, die in RL, etc. Eg, just recently I kicked 250 people off my roster (many who were once core to the guild) because they were now inactive. In the wider sense, that’s 250 people on my server missing.

Imagine if my server told me I can’t recruit anymore. It wouldn’t take long for my guild to drop down to very low activity levels, but the problem grows more and more for each active person lost. Eg: Imagine I field 40 people, one person lost isn’t a big deal, 39 people will still have a lot of fun together. But as time passes I’m down to 20 active people, it’s now a big deal for every person lost because that great fun we had together is disappearing. Then we’re down to 10 or 5 people facing against guilds that are continually recruiting and getting fatter. At that point it’s time for a new game. The problem can be seen to be worse when you factor multiple timezones.

This example is exactly like what have been doing to healthy servers. Servers need recruits (especially guilds, but individuals too) like guilds need players. If you cut off the supply, the healthy servers will quickly start to struggle. The first time the new population lock was introduced, it left servers full for FAR too long ! Get real, by the time things opened up again most healthy servers were struggling and suddenly dropping to high status, skipping very high. There was talk about every T1 server collapsing at one point or another (including the now over-compensated BG), and some T2 servers DID collapse !

My suggestions:
1) The FULL status lock needs to be more fair and realistic, it has to factor in the HEALTH of the server, not just population spikes. How healthy is it for a server to have a lot of people on the weekend (facing against a lot of people) but be low during weekdays while still facing against a lot of people? For the majority of the play time, there is little fun to be had.
2) With the first point fixed, only then should your remove the T1 server pairings. T1 still needs to be able to come off of FULL status and recruit, don’t make this mistake again.
3) When you adjust the server pairings, look very carefully at how organised and healthy the host servers are. In my opinion, only tier one to tier three are healthy enough to be host servers. Pairing servers to those T4 servers is only hurting the game health. If you collapse T4 then T1 can probably get a paired server for balance.

4) If you want to really make meaningful progress towards population balance, you need to introduce a server and player timezone month-long activity metre and locks based on time. Players who are active in some time period looking to transfer to a server that is active in that same time period should have to pay more or simply not be able to transfer (because full server in that time period). Players active in a time period looking to transfer to a server with a low activity in that period should be rewarded.

I will mention one last point that I don’t think I’ve seen mentioned before. Even if you get the population balanced, that still isn’t enough. Because commanders also need to be balanced between servers and more needs to be done to encourage new commanders and to encourage retired commanders to return (eg, big rewards for commanders of some kind). My server in theory has the players in OCX and SEA, but in reality the lack of commanders and the reliability of players available aren’t in balance.

Consider HoT. Many thought (perhaps naively) that HoT would usher in a revival to the WvW population. In reality we didn’t see that, but why?

When HoT landed, the top servers were all full status. The only servers available were servers with much lower activity and organisation. I, and many others, feel that WvW isn’t fun if there isn’t a commander running a group. The proof is simple, when a commander detags, how many of the following will stay online in wvw? Usually the population drop is immediate if there is no follow-up commander of similar entertainment calibre.

It’s an MMO after all, we are looking to play with other people. I am a guild leader and commander too, but I only find entertainment outside of my guild raids when running with other tags.

So what happened when HoT dropped and we had new players forced to play on low tier servers? We had individuals with no guilds logging in perhaps once or twice, trying to figure out where they are and what they should do. They might walk to a camp and find something resembling PvE there, but 90% of the day they wouldn’t see any activity. It looks like a really dead PvE map— why should they bother ?

That’s a disaster to the health of the game mode. If there is ever a return to such dead state servers, then it should be 100% opt-in. New players should never be able to select that as a starting server, that dead ‘roaming’ server should cost as much to transfer to as a ‘very high’ server and only then we’ll see if these players who complain about this revitalisation of the game mode (world linking) will put their money where their mouth is.

1. Please merge servers. Anything else you do is pointless and foolishness. Please don’t act like Anet/GW2 is above server merges, it’s disappointing that you’ve let the situation devolve as much as you have and still refuse to implement the most obvious solution, used in many other games (eg, planetside 2).

Ask anyone in the top 3 tiers to compare their experience now to this time last year. Those who still actively play can feel the game dying, there isn’t nearly as much action. It’s too expensive to transfer, and very disruptive to any guilds core.

A few years ago I would have said 3 tiers were appropriate, now I’d say 2 tiers are appropriate. Tick tock, waste time implementing minor issues or other things and you’ll have to merge the servers down to 1 tier.

2. Take another page from Planetside 2, instead of having 4 maps open 24/7 to disperse the already low population, close 2 of the maps on a short (couple of hour) rotation and force players to engage each other.

As an Aussie who experiences all the types of lag in every game, I feel like I have insights.

The disconnect issue is local to users, especially if the local game falls out of sync with the server action (eg you are in comms with leader who’s making calls you don’t see for x seconds).

Becoming stuck in place or having delays going through portals is probably local to user.

Frame rate lag is not the issue.

Skill lag is real, it affects everyone at the same time regardless of PC or connection. Some skills get soft locked, some skills go through fine, sometimes nothing works. The issue is very noticeable in a full three way on an objective like the garrison.

On such fights the in-game timers such as contested time become completely incorrect. Dolyaks will display in the incorrect location and sometimes you’ll see the day / night flip instantaneously.

If you want to experience it, T1 NA will be more than happy to demonstrate all night long it if it will help solve the issue.

Actually I found out in some leaked patch notes that as well as foods and oils/stones, there will be moisturisers, body-cleansers, war paint, colas and battle snacks.

Right now there are two types of people playing GW2:

1) People enjoying the mindless grinds being offered in the form of stacked WvW servers, or living story/dragon events.

2) Those who have yet to quit or transfer to a stacked WvW server.

The devs already recognize that they have driven off hoards of #2, and that they were too hard to squeeze money out of, so they are focusing on pandering to the needs of #1.

To be fair even TC is not showing up as much as could be expected. I hope it’s just because of the crown pavillion/farm :x

Nice work on that omega rush !