Guild Wars 2

New PvP Video:
Awakening

I personally don’t love either map.

The basic design of Alpine was pretty linear, simple, and open. Meaning, for the most part you were able to travel from North & South or East & West with basically nothing except another player getting in your way.

The design of the Desert map brought in new “barricades” that hinder players from moving, mostly, North and South. You must break through them, and as a solo-roamer or small group, this takes a while. Otherwise you’re basically forced through sentry points that will mark you. However, it is moving East and West on this map that is vastly different than Alpine. Again, in Alpine you had nothing really to bar your movement, but in the Desert there are massive vertical cliffs (especially on the east side) that you must navigate. It may not look far, but these areas add in a lot of S-turns, on top of “possibly” needing to go through a barricade again, or around it, depending on your heading. These narrow passes could add flavor to some fights, and are used as “choke-points” but most groups simply avoid them and will pass through the open Oasis before returning to the more rigorous terrain and an objective.

There was a fine-line I think where verticality was acceptable. If we rated Alpine and its relatively level sloping hills as a 1, then the Desert could be a 3. So, more or less something between the two would be acceptable as terrain-“flavor.” Anything that doesn’t double or triple the time it takes to go across a map could potentially be alright.

Then there is all the additional PvE-nonsense added in. We shouldn’t even go there but essentially a group of 5 players (or less) could do a meta event just like in PvE and open up all the enemy tower/keep gates and start walking in as they please 5-10 minutes later. Basically WvW players tend to lose money (at least commanders and other dedicated people) buying and placing siege in these locations to fight other large groups. There really is no great income source in WvW. Then here is this meta-event that shoots the gates wide open and those handful of people walk in and break everything and cap the tower before you realize where they are.

WvW players don’t want to run around maps completing meta-events and letting the PvE-content fight the war. They don’t want one-sided buffs (No Fall Damage for instance). They don’t even want to scrap over said meta-event because 2 sides always lose (if it happens at all) and then poof; gimmicks.

They want a level playing field on the map 100% of the time where player skill is the main, sometimes only, factor that determines an even-numbered fight. (Obviously not all fights are closely numbered) You want stealth? Here is your mesmer, engineer, and your thief; not a mini-asuran sandstorm creation even if it is cool. I think a lot f us would agree the ideas are cool, the map looks cool, but it has too much gimmick and too many roadblocks.

Screencapped Matches:
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Not sure why so many folks are complaining about every other match being a blow-out. About 70% of my games were within the 150-200pt range or less. Which to me seems almost no different than a few years ago anyway. There’s always going to be a middle-ground in skill-level in competitive gameplay. Here, that is Ruby. In League that is Platinum, and there are many other games with that similarity across several genre.

If you’re playing a DPS/Damage based character (Which let’s be honest the majority of us are) you should be consistently aiming to do a few things:
1: Dealing around 400k+ Condition Damage per game
or
1: Dealing around 600k+ Raw Damage per game
2: Minimum kills should likely be 8+ on either set (My record is 27 currently)
http://i1053.photobucket.com/albums/s464/BrandedAlphaWolf/Necro%20Record_zpslrovwi87.jpg
3: If you are not meeting those thresholds consistently you need to contribute to the team in other ways (Heal People/Stomp/Back-cap points)

If you’re not able to do at least 1 of these things even in a difficult game, you’re just as much at fault as your teammates are for the loss. Not Georgette the bad elementalist, not that Revenants grandmother, and not the system. Take responsibility for your gameplay, learn multiple classes or at least know multiple builds for your class that you can swap on the fly. 2 Engineers + Elemental on the enemy team? = Good luck getting great condition damage out this game if they’re remotely competent.

The system was changed. You’re “last season” complaints aren’t very useful when the game had a lot of players carried into diamond that couldn’t hold their own, and then truly some of the better folks trapped in the real Ruby-heck that due to 50% win/loss in Season1 when it paired you against equal skilled players residing in any tier.

I lost my record kills game (Yes it is an unranked – irrelevant to this point). That goes to show you no matter how hard someone is grinding your face into the dirt you can still win. But you won’t win wasting 5-seconds every time you respawn or are running somewhere to yell at your teammates or complain. You’re not focused on the match, and you’re not pro-actively accomplishing much of anything at that point (Not counting strategic things like “Hey let’s hold these two points”). We all know what I mean, especially if you’re in “ruby”-hell as you note. You’re going to have bad teams, and if not you’re certainly gonna have a good player that has a bad game; and you need to carry them or pick them up so they play until the end. Not type useless things in the spawn (Rubies are becoming notorious for this ragequit nonsense “I can’t win, it’s _____’s fault”)

There are minor faults in every competitive system. But if you can’t roll off-meta builds to counter a teams composition and still be successful, then you probably belong where you are.

The SoF are recruiting any and all players. We have members transferring from the Maguuma server to Darkhaven at this time. There are ranks defined fore PvE, PvP, & WvW players and we are looking to fill these positions with members as well as leaders for Darkhaven as some of ours are lingering behind in order to continue running the former guild to maintain our use of Guild Missions via Guesting back to Maguuma for a time.

If you’re a skilled player in any area and think you could contribute as well as promote a friendly atmosphere let us know in game for the fastest response.
If you’re a new player come along anyways! Helping you learn and enjoy the game gives some of us old players something to do with our time rather than just grind dungeons away.

We operate with ventrilo voice chat currently.
There is a facebook group you may join.
There is also a website, currently under maintenence due to this transfer which I’ll repost for you later.

See you in game folks

Tyler Bearce.3427:

It would be easy enough to move all the camp guards closer to the center, so you’d always have to fight all of them to flip a camp. But to be clear, you guys are arguing that you want to do ‘more PvE’, which seems to go against the forum’s current agenda of ‘less PvE.’

Fair Enough, yet at the same time it is a mistake. Rather than argue with your population, fix it. Also no, “less pve” in general on these forums relates to Dredge/Hylek/Ogres, random NPC mobs, and especially the events in the Desert BL. Lets remember that meta-event ya’ll disabled recently.

There is PvE that hinders the game-type, and there is PvE that can also add some life to it. In this case a camp needs to be defended, by something, so the average roamer can’t flip a camp solo. 3-5 People may be a decent goal; however misplaced and inactive NPC defenders might as well not exist and the player’s post was not talking referring to the general PvE issues in WvW; simply the placement of these NPCs that yes, you did overlook and no it wasn’t a big deal overall.

If you could kill the Lords in Legacy of the Foefire without aggro-ing the other 4 defending NPC’s you would quickly resolve that issue. (PvE)
And that would have nothing to do with “Hey should we have PPT in PvP?” (Do we need more PvE because we had to fix something? No)

Are these people asking for more PvE events/map effects/bonuses as you note (Yes this is the general issue at hand not NPCs at camps)? No; this is a single engagement, and moving the NPC’s or extending aggro-range still makes, a single engagement it’s just slightly more difficult.

Make sure the next Expansion is more than 40% done when it ships. If it ships like Heart of Thorns it better cost us 40% of what that 1st expansion did.

If there is any reconciling players for their $$$ on HoT, drop the Trading Post “Outfit” people and put them on more Living World content instead. Thereby you keep working on Legendary weapons and make good on at least one more promise. The old “armor sets” on the Trade Post were much more valiable to myself at least because you could mix+match the pieces to existing armor in the game and that provided more diversity.

That WvW team you have needs to save that 3rd of your game. If it comes out rough again just toss WvW out the window cause all the veterans will be gone. Should probably make surveys alongside the WvW content as much as possible to proceed safely and with some self-assurance. Include players from start to finish, don’t throw out a beta and waste your own time trying to make it shiny and new with no time left to change anything major if players dislike something again.

Currently the system resets the symbol beside your name in game when new seasons begin. This I’m sure was to provide incentive for players to return and play again the next season and keep people coming back. It also however abruptly devalues a player’s work in a prior season.

Maybe someone didn’t get time to play for a few months that was a Diamond, play a few games and stop in Emerald for this reason a few seasons down the line. Now that decent player is considered “scrub-tier” for all intents and purposes and his/her badge does not reflect skill level or past efforts; just their availability to play in a particular season.

I have what I think is a simple solution:
1-Instead of resetting the badge per-season; leave the highest attained badge visible in PvE/Lobbies.
2-Inside matches display their current season’s badge symbol (Like on the end game results currently)
3-On top of this place a simple numeric value in the bottom right corner of each badge in PvE and maybe even in the PvP games that designates how many seasons a player obtained that particular skill-tier in PvP.[/list]

The numeric value should incentivise the hardcore players to keep returning instead of just quiting after 1 season and keeping whatever badge it was. It should also alleviate the stress of grinding thru PvP every single season just to get the same reward again, or less if you’ve finished the The Ascension.

I’ve made Legendary this season, can probably do so again. I’m guessing my win rate was around 85%+. Could I do it again next season? Most likely, but I’m finishing up the Ascension already so why obtain the exact same badge by my name? At least we’ll know the truly dedicated PvP’rs that rise to the top every season this way.

I’m sure several people have noticed (those working on their halls and supporting their guilds anyway) that there is an abundance of household items in the game. This includes a few kinds of wall as well.

The only issue with building a personal home/community in your guild hall is the massive cost on a handful of players of course, and the simple fact that there is no actual roofing. Sure you can use snow piles and a few other odd objects that stand out like a sore-thumb in a golden cave or desert cliff. A door-like opening in a wall would be great too if there isn’t one. See arches, may have missed it but not seeing one at the moment.

Even with the tedious placement options when decorating people could still find ways to stack the pieces where they needed to. Why not put a roof segment or two in? Need a measurement? 1×1wall segment or 2×1 segment should be good enough for the breadth of the roof’s base. Anything from thatch, vines, twigs, stone, gilded stone, and adobe would be fine. And there you have it, an actual complete house just by adding a dedicated roof. I think a lot of us just wish 5% of a guilds roster wouldn’t be paying for ALL the homes in that guild hall lol, but it could be a thing.

If it were easier to make these types of objects in the game, GW2 could technically say it has personal housing. Still can, but very few guilds overall are large enough to support this as most players don’t pitch in their fair share and leech. Hey, I found a new marketing tool inside Guild Halls, what do ya know.

But while we’re at it, if your guild is large enough, and your chosen enslaved scribe has enough decorations for you; go find a flat spot and build yourself a hut to post here.

Also, why not add a chest for personal banking to put in the house. Can already go to the scribe anyway; just something to add some incentive for going back to your decorated plot, among other things that could be added.

1-Add a small Weekly Reward System for X-amount of Participation
This could easily work off the same system as the old tournaments or you could do something new. Essentially you could have a repeatable weekly achievement system (Like Dungeon Master). Did you capture 5 Keeps this week?~Here’s 5 gold. Did you capture Stonemist 3x this week?~Here’s 5 gold. This is very generic but the time involved in either activity easily warrants a few gold at the end of the week. Especially compared to Fractal farming in a mere hour, PvE event chain maps, and a host of past income sources like dungeons. The rewards for playing WvW in this game have always been meager, even after tournaments compared to all other game-types. This should help bring in more players to the game type and would please some old veterans account $$$ for all it costs to defend locations to expand those small % bonuses the thankless PvE players get for our work.

2-Add in Kill Tally Leaderboards for Guilds on each Server per week
This guild killed 4000 players this week guild2 killed 2480 players this week. It could just be a top 5 per server counting only specific guild-repping players. This would spark more competition at all tiers.

3-Add a Guild Name Change Contract to the Trade Post for like 5000+gems
You’re going to ask why… Well, World vs World guilds occasionally merge together in order to increase group numbers. In the past this meant making a 3rd guild with a new name that both agreed on quite often. Guild Halls complicate that now, but with a contract you could rename the more ‘complete’ guild’s Hall saving hassle and promoting more cooperation on a server again. Not to mention an old guild just wanting to rename itself when 90% of the roster is completely different people.

4-Unique Guild Hall Decoration/Bonus
Make it something cool that you can spend those excess WvW-Skillpoints on. Maybe even add small 5% buffs for just your guild if people put in 5000 rank points. You know, those things we can’t do anything with after maxing the WvW skill tree.

5-Remove the large amount of PvE gimmicks around each map
Oh that guy rallied off a lizard, great… If it isn’t event based (I don’t love those either), then just make it a white creature.