Guild Wars 2

This probably should be posted on the sor forums, but since it seems sor doesn’t want to care about their server pride at the moment I’m just going to spill it here.

There’s been a problem brewing on sor for some time, it just hadn’t reared it’s ugly head before the season started but it’s something I noticed as the weeks went by, a certain attitude from sor guilds and and sor commanders. Last week “for the fights” mantra I kept hearing really made me disappointed in sor as well. Look, every player and guild has the right to play the game however they want, I’ve been a part of guilds like that, but there is a time and place for these things.

We all have had an entire year to go around to just “for the fights!” and not worry about the scoreboard, the moment we started the season that should have been put aside until certain things happened. When we’re far ahead or behind in score with no chance of the score flipping towards the end of the week, hey forget the siege and go for the fights, no one would have a problem with that.

The first three days of a match up when we’re all fighting to take the lead put your efforts before yourselves and do something for your server, get the points from ppt or grab the orb buff and get to stomp. If you can’t find it in yourself to help your server win a match up in a season then please get off the top 3 servers where everyone went to get the top competition. You can find fights just as well fighting on the other side and arrange your gvg’s as well if that’s your thing.

It’s sad that sor is not motivated by the season, servers like maguuma and sos fought and stayed in gold league while others may have tanked, even though they have no chance to compete in it. I’m glad they’re making a wvw overflow map, a lot of guilds are going to fit right in there, no points for the server, plenty for yourselves, and nothing but fights.

Sor is self destructing because of the guilds, some of them are unwilling to play with others, they pull good players from the server into their guild and then play among themselves. I’ve heard commanders sound disgusted they have too many pugs with them, some will do things to shake them off, some commanders are unwilling to work with pugs at all, which I think is very important to maintaining numbers on your side.

If you are not out there leading whether we’re winning or losing with the pugs they will give up wandering around aimlessly getting slaughtered. But I suppose that’s what you want right? well 12:30pm on a saturday outmanned on a bl, the pugs have already given up and the ap hunters are gone so who’s left to fill the space?

Now you guilds have what you wanted, an open queue and a ton of bg to fight, but the price? There is hurt pride and broken morale all in the name of just looking for fights to fill your bags up, and it’s only week 3 of 7 where we were expected to compete for first, instead what’s left of the season is talk of waiting to 2v1 with jq on bg on week 7, so I guess we should just get the karma train running for 4 weeks huh.

I know commanding the pug zerg can be trying on the nerves, but if you want better players you need to train and lead them, all I ever hear is blame being set on them for anything that goes wrong. Even the week before the season I mentioned in chat that commanders should be out and leading, and yet I got back the “it’s training week for guilds” that attitude was bound to bite us back.

Then I constantly hear well bg has two times our numbers, of course they do they use their pugs, you fight with your minimum numbers and claim to have better skill but unless the lag and skill lag goes away completely, or you have more skillful players than the other side then it means nothing, numbers will crush you and be available at more places than you can be at once. Your pugs will also not get better if you keep throwing them to the wolves, ridicule them, and blame them for everything.

We still have a number of excellent guilds and commanders around, I appreciate the work they do to coordinate us and creating the fun that can be had from wvw. I don’t need to name other guilds or commanders this was in regards to, if you read this and are offended then really ask yourself if it’s true, do you care enough to help the server or not, if you’re not offended then I’ll say keep on fighting please, the people that follow appreciate it, Rally up Rall.

For a game that’s suppose to be driven by armor appeal, they certainly don’t do a good enough job with it. There are of course a couple sets that look cool in the game, but the majority of them don’t, especially male light armor. I looked at every one of the male light armors they sell on the black lion trading and none are appealing at all.
Don’t even get me started on one sided shoulder pieces.

Or weapons… about the only special weapon that looks good usually is a two handed greatsword and that’s probably due to it’s size, I wish staves and two handed hammers were bigger. Real shame when I look at a game like WoW and think they have better looking stuff.

If they had put any thought into wvw for the expansion and guild hall upgrades they could have implemented a few different things. War room upgrades should have had their own separate set of materials that dropped from wvw, they kitten well know the war room is for wvw only so why did they force wvw players to grind in pve?

Why put our precious +5 at guild level 37? Why put such a heavy cost on scribing wvw schematics? What a joke, no one is going to use tactivators for years until the cost comes down. It’s like the kitten wvw achievements all over again, and even that took them 3 years to fix. We didn’t buy the expansion to start over on the upgrades we already had kitten .

They could have implemented reward tracks that helped provide those materials, I mean even spvp has a reward track that provides silverwaste shovels. They could have had other materials for purchase for wvw badges giving them another use, they only have one in the hall right now. They could have made the materials drop from sentries and camp npcs, hell even put them on the keep lords, it would promote ktraining, but at least players would be on the new borderlands at this point.

The problem with this game and it’s developers is not everything is implemented fairly across the board. How many years did wvw players have to wait for them to finally make badge gear salvageable? The auto loot feature gets handed out to pve while wvw gets the cold shoulder again.

Spvp got revamped with reward tracks so their players don’t need to step out of pvp, they get tournaments with real cash prizes now. They even get a kitten buff every month that shows up every player everywhere promoting spvp for that time, while also reminding wvw players they’re still standing in the corner looking at the blank wall for being the red haired step child. Really that hard to provide the same buff for wvw once a month and give it the same promotion? seriously?

Squads finally got upgraded, but that’s only because of raids, otherwise it would still be in a useless state.

It’s obvious their focus right now is on raids, and what piece of the pie it can pull from the 5 million players that left WoW in the last year. Their greed in constantly looking for new players and not being fair to their veterans is what’s killing this game mode.

You bunch of ingrates.
They wanted to give you mobile cannons and you didn’t want it.
They wanted to give you repair hammers and you didn’t want it.
They gave you scoring changes all you do is argue over numbers 3 2 1 2 1 1 5 4 3 100 99 98.
They proposed more worlds to dying wvw and you said no.
Then people wanted mercenary worlds which is the same but you can’t agree on it because identity crisis.
Anet proposes 1 dbl 2 alp, you say no, vote says yes, anet checks on scrapping dbl, you say no, anet checks for 1 dbl 2 alp again, you say yes.
Then cry about veterans not playing for 2 years didn’t get a fair vote, you need bunch of ranks and a bunch of wvw hours to vote, you cry the vote was rigged cause pve players care about a wvw map.
Then you cry about the empty red borderland when the other two borderlands are also empty, while ebg is over queued every night.
You cry for population balance, they lower the threshold to keep bigger worlds from getting bigger, you cry about it to players from 20+ dead servers, we’re gonna die if we don’t open up!
They gave you golem week and you cried about a minor golem buff exploit.
They gave you some new commander tag colors and you cry about every other color not available.
They gave you reward tracks and you complain about not getting a legendary backpack.
They put gift of battle in the track and you complain about not getting a years notice before so you can buy it with free badges.
They took away crafting stations and you cry about not being able to skip a loading screen.
They gave you you a “big giant sized” guild hall with a “small dinky” arena to do your gvg’s and you cry about it.
They reorganized the wvw upgrades into your guild halls and you complain about the minor cost of spending months in pve.
They gave you fun to use banners and you complain about it being op.
They gave you extra upgrades to scout for you and all you do is complain about small groups.
Big fancy airships to make the big castle in the middle of ebg feel more epic you cry about it killing you every 15 mins.
They put a big fat cannon in the middle of dbl to promote fights every 3 hours, you cry about lag so they take it away, and then you cry about it being empty and no bloodlust.
They gave you new elite specs to freshen up classes after 3 years of getting old and boring, and you cry about imbalance pfft like that didn’t exist before.
They gave you boons to counter the increased damage but you complained no one was dying, so they fixed it after months and months and months of hard testing, and then you complain about dying to conditions.
They made conditions good so you don’t feel limp in zerg fights and now you complain about spreading it.

Pfft.

Next Step: Relink
Timeline: Next Friday

I’ve run into one thing that annoys me greatly about the desert borderland, hopefully some others share this annoyance.

Running into the random plant, or small stone, or stone chip on a stairway or ramp, or tree root or even bigger stairs should not make you stop.

No other map have I encountered in GW2 where the random little things make you stop in your tracks and you need to go around them. I think these things should be made to walk through or walk over. Anyone remembers the little stone clip that sticks out in north tunnel of dredge tunnel in ebg? it’s like that but 10x more present in the desert map.

Almost nowhere does that exist on the alpine maps, whereas on the desert bl it’s an everyday occurrence for me. I know Anet wanted to make an interesting and detailed map, but I think they may have gone overboard and took away the smoothness of a wvw map.

I’ve lost count the amount of times I’m in a fight and get hung up on a random plant, having these random none passable objects breaks momentum in a fight. Environmental factors should play a part in fights, walls, posts, gates, bridges, stairs, not a random plant on the ground that you can barely see because it’s a half desert.

So please Anet I would ask that you go in and give the map a good cleaning, there are plants you have that are passable, please use those more if you need to. I’ve attached some screens to show examples. Thank you.

Just finished it, not worth it, they’ve destroyed another place to have some fun. When are the Anet devs going to wake up and understand that it’s “ok” to give decent rewards. They took out all the chest, have to kill the 6 bosses before getting 1 chest, which gave me 3 greens, gg not going back in there.

Would love it if they offered something like this, bonus leveling for playing in the game mode I love. But wvw is always last in consideration for stuff like this. I think they view badges as badly as they view karma now, too easy to get, and a starter currency that they don’t want to add much to anymore. Look at how many currencies they’ve added to the game since the beginning to avoid using karma.

Yes please do, it would be funny.

I played in T1/2 from the beginning up to a year ago, so I know what queues do and it sucks trying to fit your guild in. Again this was the first night for the change, there’s any number of factors for the high population at reset. If in fact the queues hold up on T1 servers for some time and it’s unbearable I’m sure they could go back to unlinking T8 with T1, and maybe link T8 with the T4 servers if that looks more suitable.

But they won’t know exactly what the situation is until it’s been given some time to show them, growing pains. I’m not saying don’t express your concern, but let’s not overreact and flood the forums with 20 different qq threads about the queues everyday.

Well said.
I wouldn’t have a problem doing the achievements for the item, but is it worth all the grinding you need to do for it? nope not to me. I understand players out there who have physical limitations and problems with stuff like jumping puzzles, I never liked the linking of jump puzzles to anything other than achievements points, keep it in that role and don’t force to me to do them. Never mind that the jump function in this game never works properly well for me and maybe others.

I don’t like where these type of items are going, putting them in the legendary tier with heavy ties to the economy, prompting players to find gold one way or another. But nothing can do about that.

Just a shame for a great holiday where it’s suppose to be about fun, cheer, and joy, we have to grumble and mumble our way to a reward, or not bother at all.

Stealth in this game is probably one of the worse ever implemented into a mmo, they built a class to function entirely around it. It’s not like, well you use it to get around, or just for your opener, or just for getting way, nope, it’s built to be spammable from start to finish in a fight on top of which it’s even on hard hitting skills like cloak and dagger, why the hell is stealth used as an attack?

It’s never going to be “fixed” because they built thieves entirely around it, you tweak it too much and you’ll probably break that class, for other classes like ranger/druid, mesmer, engineers it’s optional to their play.

Players don’t like EBG over Alpine’s because it’s more complex.

EBG has more structures, they’re closer, it’s easy to get around like alpines, it’s got a lot of areas to have open fights or chokes for positional fights, and none of them felt stupid like when you get stuck on a plant on the ground(other than that step in north dredge), it’s got it’s central structure that constantly attracts fights from 3 sides. Both maps provide a much smoother experience in meeting your enemies, moving around, fighting, and counter play. That’s why players prefer it.

When you put in stuff to interrupt that experience like spacing out structures, high cliffs and tight passages, areas filled with obstacles, and then have to put in gimmicks to counter it, thus making the experience of meeting enemies, moving around, fighting and counter play much less enjoyable and annoying, obviously players will hate it more than love it.

Obviously with structures closer it’s harder for havoc teams to operate in EBG with faster response times and why it’s easier for “blobs” to exist there, and why smaller groups mostly sit in borderlands. Desert was built to try and break up the big groups, congratulations, it worked, can’t come in here to complain about less players when that was the purpose of the map, especially when the expansion also screwed over those small groups.

There’s a certain annoyance to desert borderland that probably won’t ever go away, even it’s theme alone can be an annoyance to players. No different than tangled depths, a lot of players hated that map even after the changes.

atheria.2837:

Willkilliam.5012:

Eotm has been there for quite awhile and it was a basically a beta test for new things to implement in WvW but now it just sits there and count toward servers populations. If you go in to Eotm all you see is K-trains and that doesn’t sound like beta test to me. SO why not get rid of it?

Wait, WHAT?

WvW and EoTM populations are connected STILL?

No wonder the populations are counted WRONGLY.

Anet, you are more abusive than any other MMO past or present.

If true, the game can be fixed to a huge degree by making sure one mode can’t affect the other.

How very evil! Stack EOTM, your server gets a bonus that others can not hope to fight at all?

The next MMO that doesn’t abuse players is going to make a lot of money and gain a lot of players from this game immediately.

I nominate this for the wvw mistaken freak out post of the year.

The arguments on why it should be done have already been discussed to death, hence why they announced they were working on it. They chose to put eotm and the tournament as top priorities, eotm probably because of the china release, and the tournament to help keep people interested in wvw during the Elder scrolls release period.

Account wxp should have been top priority because it is something every single wvw player wants, which the same cannot be said for either of the other two. Until they make the change I do feel like I’m stuck playing my highest ranked character, and wasted time on the others.

You only get credit if they are holding a siege blueprint at the time of death unfortunately.

DeWolfe.2174:

Sure, let’s just give the Dev’s a chance because they can fix it, right? Because they said there going to do X,Y, and Z to it right? Oh wait, they didn’t say they’d fix it further. Even if you finally convinced them changes were needed, how many months or years will go by with us being stuck with it as is? It took 6 months for them to acknowledge that it even needed anything. Voting on something with hoped of future “maybe’s” is a bad concept.

Six months ago we didn’t have the current team in charge of wvw from the looks of it. Ever since they made the changes when Colin left the current wvw team HAS been doing a lot of work for wvw including the maps. So yes I think it’s fair to give the current team a chance to continue fixing and streamlining the desert bl especially since they’re also taking our input on it.

It’s not my type of map but I do realize there are others who like or even love it, the same for alpine there are those that love it and those that don’t. The love/hate ratio might not be the same for both, but they both deserve to be around for both sets of players that love them. The fact that the kittens who can’t get over that and can’t live with a 2/1 compromise is why we’re wasting weeks of polls on the maps.

There’s obvious flaws with the desert borderland when you compare it to alpine because of the design, but that doesn’t mean it’s completely hopeless to play on. I’m sure the devs can make it better, and that process would go a lot faster if we helped with it instead of sitting here crying about it every day.

The cost is still too unreasonable. Besides of which as you go lower in tiers there’s more dead times and therefore easier for your claimed structure to flip at any time, so who’s going to spend all that gold on something that probably won’t last past your prime time.

Players will obviously defend what they sunk time and gold into, that’s why upgraded T3 waypointed keeps got defended, something Anet forgot to take into account when they made the new maps and messing with the waypoints.

The material requirements for wvw schematics need to be lowered, by a lot.

Stealth design is broken, always has been broken, always will be broken in this game.

Some other games put cc under diminishing returns so that you’re not continually taken out of control of your character while you go from 100 to 0. Anet only like to apply diminishing returns to loot, think you can figure out where their priorities are with the game.

Half the problem here is we have those threads that Gaile mentioned on a weekly basis, and players really need to stop with them. The my server is dying, why is my server locked, when are we getting unlocked, we need new tournament, why does our one server have to face 6 servers!, delete this map for this other map, look who ran away, look who tanked, look who bought out guilds.

All it would take is some research and frankly some common sense for these people to figure out stuff, instead of coming in here every week asking the same ridiculous thing over and over and get the same answers over and over, to the point where it turned into a running joke.

Now to the other part of Anet’s communications, they feel they are doing enough on that end, there’s nothing we can do to change that. I will point out something though, a year ago we got two devs in here who posted on quite a lot of issues, and it promoted quite a lot of positive discussions. One of them got shipped off to living story without a word, the other has cut back on posts in the last few months. A lot of us feel like things have just gone back to the way it was before the expansion.

The forums are here for us to discuss problems with the game, hopefully in a productive manner. Positive communication can only be maintained by having both sides involved, you cannot expect players to come in here to pure their hearts out on issues, hear nothing back and expect them to stay positive about the entire situation when they see their game mode continue to die in front of them for 4 years.

Finally, yes WvW is dying, when you take 24 servers and fold them into 12 to get the same population you had a year before, that’s dying. Deny that and hide your head in the sand if you want, but that’s not going to help fix anything, just lose more players.

Qugi.2653:

Colin say if you argue about PVP esport hurt game and you should have shame.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3v24hg/the_reduced_visual_noise_changes_have_to_stop_gw2/cxk2o2z

If you don’t like it more power to you, don’t watch, but it’s absolutely helping our marketing folks make Gw2 a bigger game which I’d hope we’re all excited about. If you want to see the game fail I’m not sure what you’re doing here, but rooting against programs like pro league is basically rooting against Gw2 growing. When folks come here and rip on stuff like PvP, you’re basically hurting the games ability to grow – and personally I would say shame on you, if you truly love the game, be constructive and give awesome feedback and suggestions: but don’t knock it just cause it’s not PvE.

So if love GW2 must like PvP esport. If not you want GW2 fail and should have shame for that.

SHAME!
/throws rotten tomato
SHAME!
/thows a pointy carrot
SHAME!
/thows a cabbage with a rock hidden in it
SHAME!

Shame on you ANet for spouting cleaning up visual clutter then add in a highly visible icon to players names, shame on your marketing team for placing unremovable announcements to the information area of the UI, stuff I click to close and wish I could remove much like participation medal info because I don’t need useless information staring at me the entire play session. Finally shame on you Colin for ripping on people for ripping on pvp which you think hurts the games growth, when your development teams ignores WvW for years, how’s that for hurting a games growth?

Shame indeed.

Willkilliam.5012:

WvW you may like it you may not but who cares if you do or not. This post is merely to bring attention to the situation under going a “neglected” portion of the player base. WvW to me is the main reason I play GW2, the combat system is nice and fun and it emodies the Games name “Guild Wars” a place were Guild actually fight. So what about WvW? Well this game is going into its fifth year soon (congrats Anet), and PVE content has dramatically expanded in so many ways that made the game much more fun.

WvW on the other hand has been left in the Dust. Yes there was a new map (Desert Borderland which is everyone’s least favorite) Yes we get the benefits of the new Elite Specs, but that is it(yes bug patches and tweaks to the Shrines but nothing Major) Where is the new content? If you ever play any competitive game then you know how important it is for there to be something new in the mix to shake up the player bases skills and knowledge.

The only thing for WvW we have to learn is that we cant break certain walls anymore in the game because “PHYSICS” and new Build Metas (Separation of WvW Meta should be different from PVE). Don’t bring up PvP because pvp is a failed mess(its fun but its not good enough for esports Sorry.) For my main and Final point. What is the WvW player base doing right now, we are currently holding on too whatever morality we have left to play (There is a good number of Guild that don’t play the PVE content which is ok).

I know Guild that have disbanded because they don’t find it fun to do the same thing in the same ways 4 years straight. I have seen players leave and Guilds leave to other Games that offer a similar experience (ESO, has a system like WvW that is very fun btw). Soon enough the player base will die out in WvW. What can be done to help? Talk with us more, we want to hear from the WvW team often (yes there is a negative view against Devs but its with reason)

But if we get feedback and more communication from the team showing us a reason to stay thats all we need. But as of right now we have nothing to look forward too and most of us won’t wait in hopes the next expansion will bring something new.
TL -DR, Anet talk to WvW player base more before we leave

Wall of text are hard to read dude.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

WvW is a 3 team gamemode, rather than a 2 team gamemode, is so that worlds could team up and try to take down the dominate world.

This isn’t something we incentivized very much before 2,1,1 but having 2v1s in WvW was intended behavior and when it works correctly can lead to more balanced matches.

Yup… too bad more players don’t see it that way.

OriOri.8724:

I still don’t think that 2, 1, 1 was here long enough to see how it truly affected the gameplay. It was here for 3 weeks, during which the whole time people were whining because WvW players, despite continuously asking for changes, hate any change to the mode somehow.

We had 3, 2, 1 since september last year. ANet, you guys gave that ~4 months before deciding to change it, yet you gave 2, 1, 1 less than 1. How can you draw good comparisons from that?

Not to mention it was done during the holidays and wintersday which would pull players out of wvw. So some players came in here freaking out how 211 made populations drop during that time, or how a 2v1 on the bigger server is somehow worse than 2v1 on the weaker servers.

I think it should get more time for players to figure out how to work with the system, but there’s obviously players in here that only care to dominate and don’t give a kitten about balance to the system.

People need to stop freaking out about scoring changes, it’s temporary, they can be changed, they’re testing out what works. If you can’t accept them testing stuff then don’t come in here asking for changes.

But yeah whatever, keep on trucking BG.

Well we all know of the biggest problem with wvw these days is population and coverage, and the season highlighted it much more than ever. If you have greater coverage in a match you most likely will win, and win by the time the weekend is over.

We have all looked for solutions on how to balance populations, like offering transfers to lower server reduced cost or for free, that may work to some degree if players are willing to move down to get away from the queue of the stacked servers.
May even try to reduce capacity in the maps, which again will force players in those queued maps to spread out especially the guilds, and may even work on reducing the zerg ball, but I love those big open field fights, as long as it’s near equal numbers, plus we don’t need maps to feel empty.
Limiting points gain in none primetime/overnight but that restricts other players during their normal playtimes, the game runs 24/7 and it’s not fair to limit those players who are not in your primetime zone their right to play.

Either way I don’t think population problems will ever go away and I think we need to look at wvw competitive balance in a different angle.

The current game.
Team A, usually has the best coverage, gains the bloodlust buff more often than not, gains the bonus points for stomps which helps sway the match more into their favor, usually accumulates enough points by monday to run away with the match.
Team B and C, anywhere from close to equal cover to don’t even belong in that tier, Team C is usually getting double teamed for their bases because they are an easy target, when really Team B and C should be beating on A.

Arenanet introduced a very interesting mechanic in earning score points from stomping people while under bloodlust, so why don’t we expand on that.

Example Proposal.
Team A earns 1x points from bloodlust as normal, they would earn no bonus points from outmanned buff.
Team B earns 2x points from bloodlust buff, they would earn 2x bonus on structures and also earn score points from siege kills while under outmanned buff.
Team C earns 3x points from bloodlust buff, they would earn 3x bonus on structures and also earn score points from siege kills while under outmanned buff.

The bonus amount will need to be tweaked obviously, and teams will have their bonus points gain change according to their current rank in the matchup. If teams are within 10k points of each other then the bonuses should be turned off. If Team A is 5k ahead of Team B and Team C is 15k behind Team B, then only Team C is earning the bonus. The two conditions are random enough that the two lower teams will not completely keep up with the top team.

The conditions should be helping the lower teams rather than only buffing up the top team. The top team should be rewarded as Arenanet explained in their reasoning for the bloodlust buff back when it was the orbs, but their coverage is already the reward for them which allows them to win matches easier, as well as in this scenario of points collecting they have the ability to deny/limit their enemies access to the bloodlust buff much more than the other two teams.

So what’s the point of keeping teams so close in points you may ask, might as well not have a points score. Well the reverse is also true since the start, what’s the point of scoring when the top coverage team is always running away with matchups. The point is to keep the matchup close enough so that all sides continue to compete through the week, but you still have to work at keep it close. Many times a server will just give up on bothering about ppt when they know who’s going to win the matchup from the moment the match starts.

END: The short story – 2nd 3rd place earn more points while under bloodlust and outmanned to help stay competitive. Instead of just outright rewarding the bonus to the top team, use the buffs to help the lower teams, the top team still gets rewarded with coverage and the option to deny their foes points.

WvW will never be comparable to sports competitions because of population imbalances, so change the points system not the population.

If you don’t like the time slice scoring and prefer another method then don’t vote for it, vote for one of the other points options. Get your guild and server mates to vote now or forever hold your peace.

1. Modify objective scoring to be relative to upgrade level
(Medium time frame)
-T3 upgraded structures will have a higher PPT.

2. Rebalance scoring for actions that are not included in Points-Per-Tick
(Small time frame)
-Increased points for PPK and killing yaks and sentries.

3. Implement scoring for objective capture
(Small time frame)
-Points for object captures, more points for a higher tier structure.

4. Adjust scoring to be relative to current activity and population
(Large time frame)
-The skirmish time slice scoring and possibly the controversial action level change.

5. Provide features that increase a team’s ability to recover from large point disparities
(Medium time frame)
-Last Stand catch up mechanic.

6. Change WvW Tick timer to 5 Minutes
(Small time frame)
-More ticks, more points.

7. No preference
-You like chocolate frosted vanilla cake with colored sprinkles.

P.S Am I the only one who has a hard time noticing new sticky links on top of the forums? Maybe new red links should start with a sticky and then later placed up there after it’s been a few days, I’m sure it would get enough bumps to stay up. I just tend to ignore that small top part for some reason lol.

Typically red=dead.

Generally I will not interfere with a 1v1 fight if it’s in the middle of nowhere, if they both stopped to fight there then that means they both wanted to fight. I’ll sometimes wait around to see if the ally dies, and then I’ll jump in with fears and res them, if they wanted help they just need to say it on TS.

Its funny though those 1v1 guys want an even fight and will cuss you out because you interfered, but then they will turn around and prey on people who clearly do not want to engage in a 1v1 fight, because guess what more than half the people you will run into in wvw are not specced for roaming but for groups.

To the duelers, respect is a two way street, if you don’t want people jumping into your fights then don’t jump on people who clearly do not want to engage you.

We got any mind readers in the house? If you’re going to ask for a redesign you should present a design or at least point out the problems that need to be fixed. What exactly needs to be redone? There’s a jumping puzzle area and arena area.

If they are going to redo OS, first thing they should think about is making it open to green/blue/red sides than servers like eotm. So people can go there to fight and not be restricted by tiers.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Namer.9750:

I believe that a lot of these threads and posts are an outburst against what the majority see as an utter neglect of the game mode. Whether this statement is objectively true or not doesn’t matter, perceptions do.

I understand. I do appreciate that while we know we’re working on things, and know what we’re working on, the players do not. Our policy is not to give a future-looking accounting of works in progress but to analzye, gather input from players (through a variety of means including frequent reading of the forums), develop, and release.

Most players have been around long enough, or know the company well enough, to understand how we work, but it’s undoubtedly true that the desire for more info can drive people to posting unwisely. Nobody likes to have their post removed, and we all benefit from a better forum climate. So I’m hoping a few comments in aid of “prudent posting practices” will not go amiss.

Here lies the biggest problem that anet keeps skirting around the issue of developer participation, anet always states the excuse of talking about future content, when there are many issues and topics that players would appreciate a word on. Stuff like bugs, balance, or even mechanics. Tyler Bearse seemed to be on track with that in his limited time with us, even got the long standing issue of building siege in citadel area fixed. Spvp forums seems to have more of that than the wvw section.

Future content news is not the only developer input we ask for. I can understand not talking about future content, but not saying little to nothing at all for long periods of time on everything.

Sure it’s good if you’re a melee and all you need to do is ball up and run around a train with perma protection and every boon on them. Not good for balance though, not when you have to load up a ton of boon corruption, which doesn’t even work when multiple boons get reapplied much faster and getting it spammed from skills, traits, runes.

Combat has gone to kitten ever since they decided to make it more about boons and conditions. I prefer the old days when all you had to worry about is stacking might and everything else had to be used at key times.

The dumb down boon meta. You get a boon! and you get a boon! and you get a boon! and you get a boon! everyone gets a boon!

62 bleed
25 vulnerability
39 poison
24 confusion
8 burning
2 torment
1 immobilize
1 blind
1 chill
1 cripple
1 fear
1 weakness

Now obviously the problem here is there wasn’t enough burn stacks, and now Anet has addressed that with some buffs to burning for Engineers. Also Necromancers need a buff to apply more torment because 2 stacks was really weak.

All joking aside.. this also shows how dumb it was to take the 25 stack cap off of players. Once again their solution to conditions is to place yet another bandaid solution instead of taking a good look at the boon vs conditions war, which needs to be toned down in the core and not applying bandaids to try and keep it in control.

But hey you know what, players have been asking for aoes changed from 5 to 10 targets to help punish large groups, and epi spam sorta does that, although it sucks when the bigger zerg is running with more epimancers.

I read it all since you managed to put your wall of text into paragraphs.

But I don’t think you quite understand why the enemy no longer wants to fight you, and it’s not the structures and upgrades that’s the problem. When you constantly go at your enemy with more numbers it will get to a point when they will just sit it out and wait for you to get bored. They will sit on their siege and wait for you to either get bored and move on, or whittle your numbers down enough to attack you with greater numbers. It’s always a numbers game.

T1 had a balance for years, when it was BG/JQ/TC, but after the T1 break and movement between YB TC JQ, then the links happened and BG woke up and apparently are stacked like it was year one, it’s clear T1 isn’t balanced anymore. I don’t think there’s a single server that wants to face BG anymore. The reality is BG needs to shed some weight and get itself closer in balance with the servers around it.

I’ve leveled to 80.. an elementalist, ranger, necromancer, warrior, another necromancer, and just recently a guardian and that was hard to push. I’ve gotten an engineer to 54, mesmer to like 34, another guardian to like 35.

At this point I’m sick and tired of leveling, most of us cheat and just do tradeskills, or use the books to get to 20 and then extra levels, or do wvw upleveled anyways. I don’t need to go through 80 levels again to learn a class, the first 80 levels was essentially used to learn the game. I only need my class at 80 so I can gear up and play in wvw properly. Some of you forget you can already be level 80 in spvp from day one of the class so already skipping the supposed 80 levels to learn the class.

I would welcome an instant level 80 gem, make it available after getting 2 or 3 characters at 80 if you need to. Right now I have no motivation to level anything else just too boring and painful.

This is so simple.

Everything that was announced with the expansion is a promise that has been paid for and needs to be delivered, that includes legendary weapons and living story 3. Those are things that should be delivered before the next expansion. You can argue all you want about they didn’t say it would all be delivered at release, oh it would be months to years after because they didn’t give a timeline. It doesn’t matter, one way or another they need to deliver everything for that expansion before bringing the next one.

Everything else are extras to the game that Anet chooses to develop with revenue from gem store sales, they can choose what to create, can remain quiet about, can refuse to make promises on, can cancel it at any time, like for example super adventure box. I have no problems with this, this is how they operated for the 3 years before the expansion.

What if this happened to the last raid wing, or living story 3, would all players finally be angry and stand up about this? There are two routes that Anet could have gone with this, postpone/cancel a feature or buckle down and get it done. They have a large number of their staff not working on current content, they are obviously making future content the priority.

After YEARS of not telling us what’s coming out, telling us it’s company policy to not say anything because stuff can be cancelled at any time, they come out and announce a bunch of stuff for the expansion 10 months ahead. Wouldn’t it be safe to assume at this point that hey it’s stuff they are committed to fully producing to the end and not canceling once again in mid production? Now they’re even getting paid to get away with this stuff.

Mo obviously knew about the timing of legendary weapons and sab, he’s the guy in charge, I’m sure he reviewed both for a while and this isn’t an instant decision. He knew sab was in the pipeline and placing the news of legendary weapons delay a week before was a good way to minimize the damage it would cause. If they planned on releasing the legendaries before the next expansion, why bother telling us about delaying/canceling them right now?

Alright, we had this option when we were voting for this or the scoring changes. Some of the stuff they suggested were interesting like the cross map chat, others like the sparkle trail… not so much.

So I think it’s about a good time to make a thread and give Anet our suggestions for this section, which may be the next thing they work on if voted in on the next priority vote. Or who knows it’s something they’re working on the side while they wait on scoring programming.

WvW Quality of Life Improvements as suggested by Anet.

• Add an option for reduced nameplate clutter. – yes!
• Add cross-map team chat. – yes!
• Add objective-summary tool tips. – meh
• Add a display effect for Righteous Indignation on map markers. – yes!
• Add floating indicators when gaining points toward war score. – meh
• Add a WXP-gain sparkle trail. – meh
• Add a territory-control map overlay. -meh

Others I’d like to see.

• Commander tag more visible over nameplates in game, sometimes it gets lost in the nameplates especially if the player is asuran, which sometimes leads to having to place a target reticle on them, which defeats the purpose of the commander tag.
• Squad only commander tags, visible on the map to only those in the squad.
• Showing proper linked world names for player name tags, for example for Darkhaven and Ehmry, instead of only showing Darkhaven tags, it would show both to allies and enemies.
• Changing the color of the current target arrow to another color and and perhaps shape or size (I know, not a wvw only issue). At times it’s fairly easy to lose your targeting when you target downed players who also have the small red down arrows on them.
• Abbreviated guild names under their icons on the flags for any claimed areas.
• Update Outnumbered buff to perhaps provide a minor bloodlust stat boost.
• Npc guards and lords updated to wear Triumphant armor, and Mistforged hero weapons.
• Power of the mist rewards showed as a buff with server name and percentages, to players of that world in wvw and pve. (That’s if the rewards stay with the skirmish score changes). Perhaps if pve players see the buffs they get from wvw they may want to help in wvw more.
• For an example when you hover the mouse over the buff:
  Blackgate WvW bonuses for Pve.
  Artisan: 20% increased chance of crafting critical success.
  Gatherer: 20% chance of additional gathering node uses
  Defender: 10% increased defense against monsters.
  Energetic: 10% endurance regeneration bonus.
  Medic: 10% increased healing effectiveness
  Robust: 10% increased maximum health
  Scavenger: 10% bonus coin per kill.
  Wisdom: 10% bonus experience per kill.

Couple others added.

• Display percentages for the health of walls/gates you target.
• Going along with the RI displays on the map, maybe also display the amount of supply currently at a structure.
• Reward tracks, allow one track to be marked as default, which the system will revert to when the current track is completed, or repeat the track that was just completed instead of randomly choosing another.

If anyone has anything to add, please do, and let’s keep this thread constructive, thanks!

I’m starting to think Anet should probably just go back into silent mode, since we can’t even appreciate the effort they’re making in trying to communication with us lately, we begged and pleaded for years to be heard and now people just want to nitpick and break down everything they present to us.

These polls aren’t viable!, we have more pve players voting on stuff they don’t care about! sacrilegious!, we don’t have the hardcore players who quit two years ago voting! outrageous!, a rank 10 that gained a level this week gets to vote? wickedness!, well you worded it wrong it should be the other way so we get the majority of votes!, that guy has 20 accounts he spammed the votes the wrong way! lawlessness!,

Wait I thought this was a majority poll?, wait this wasn’t a majority poll? hold on I need my glasses, you didn’t explain this poll enough!, you explained the answers too much so people got confused!, you put too many yes answers so people got confused and didn’t vote no!, you need a year and 1000 ranks of experience to vote! the more ranks you get the more bonus votes you get veteran of the mist eotm’er!, they should hire a real professional survey company cause everything is random!

They have enough information on what to work on for the next year anyways.

It was just a bad decision overall to gate elite specs, do it for masteries on pve content, that’s absolutely fine, many other games have done that, it’s called reputation grinds.

Elite specs are already gated behind $50, having to be level 80, and having to learn every other vanilla trait and skills, really no need to gate it beyond that.

I think you would find that most players would have been happily enjoying your game (no matter the form pve wvw spvp), if they were given the chance to enjoy their chosen class sooner rather than later.

They really need to start treating WvW like they treat playing Spvp.

Hey guys, let’s relax a little bit on qq for queues, it’s the first night of the world links. Let’s give the system a week to see where it goes, it was normal for reset nights and even tournament time to have queues on 4 maps back earlier in the game life.

Will that keep up for saturday and sunday?
What will the queues look like on the weekdays?

There could be a combination of factors here for the increased population tonight other than the link.
Maybe a lot of people are excited and playing on reset when they don’t normally play.
Maybe we got returning players coming in and playing on reset when they don’t usually play.
Maybe players stayed up to 10est to play because it’s reset time when they usually start at 8est and be done by 10est or 11est, so lets see what happens on saturday and sunday.
We don’t know these things as yet.

One thing is for sure, many servers needed players because most times it was 3 empty maps and a queued up ebg map. I know being in queue sucks, that’s kinda why they created eotm, play there while waiting on the queue, but give the system a week to see what happens, we can’t judge it on the first couple hours.

Happy bag hunting.

P.S Thank you Anet for the work you’ve been putting into WvW lately, please keep it up!

PyrateSilly.4710:

Really? I play pretty much every day for several hours at a time and I see massive numbers of players still playing in PvE and WvW.

Ahhh take a moment if you will, relax, and close your eyes. Now imagine the sky being a beautiful sky blue, with the fluffy clouds being fluffy white like marshmallows, and passing by in great numbers, and the sun shining like a sun shines.

Then you look down into wvw and see what it was four years ago with twenty plus full status servers, with almost all servers complaining about people not being able to get into maps and long queues.

Now jump ahead three years before the game life changing expansion is delivered and many of those servers have lost a great amount of players, with only three of them able to carry full status tags.

Nonchalantly skip ahead six months after the expansion was delivered, and the population dropped so much that they had to fold over half the servers down to twelve servers, to bring the population back to what it was just before the expansion was delivered.

Massive amount of players? sure of course nothing would look dead much if you play in the prime time of your server where zergs are abound everywhere. Sure as hell isn’t at the levels it was at even from when they did the links.

Also, pve zones has megaservers of course it’s going to look full all the time, that was the point of it.

Lacuda.8543:

They made the Obsidian Sanctum Arena explicitly for duelers. Come on guys, the EBG queue is through the roof on most servers right now. It really is becoming a matter of griefing if one of the reasons the queue is so high is because of the mass amount of players detrimentally dueling in mid-map locations.

We run all our zergs with a kill on sight rule of thumb for duelers. If you guys wanna do it, go to OS. That, or go to the wonderfully unused Oasis sections of the BL maps. Nobody, not even zergs go there.

lol thought they made OS Arena for gvg’s? not explicitly for duelers.

Anyways wvw is a pvp mode, all types of pvp players run in there, solo, duo, groups, zergs, duelers, gankers, gvg’ers, ppt’ers, defenders, etc. Players play what they want, when they want, wherever they want, however they want, and you have no right telling anyone else otherwise.

mmorpg.com

Heart of Thorns, the first expansion to Guild Wars 2, divided players with its many changes. But one thing’s for sure, it’s one of the most complete expansions to an MMORPG in years.

Every facet of the game was touched, polished, tweaked, or overhauled. More shockingly, most of the changes were for the better!

ArenaNet says that Heart of Thorns is all about laying the groundwork for what’s to become of their MMO sequel.

Wait what?

Someones been smoking too much of something something, or they’re counting a little something something between their fingers right now. Cause they certainly didn’t play every facet that was squeezed(economy), sandpapered(spvp), twerked(guilds), or mutilated(wvw), most of the changes were for the worse!

PS. the FFXIV expansion was cheaper in price.

DeWolfe.2174:

Xenesis.6389:

ImperialWL.7138:

Who gives a kitten when most of the people who vote are pve kittens who play WvW once a week?

That the new excuse going around these days for polls that don’t go your way? more pve players vote on the polls than the wvw players?

lol

How about how poorly and biased the poll’s have been worded? Do another poll Anet with something as concise as “Should we permanently remove the Dessert Borderlands: Yes or No?” With “YES” being first as every logical minded person would think and say it. It’s literally called a “yes–no question” for a reason!

This poll was doomed from the start with poor wording, poor staging, and from a “new” majority now being 75%. How many voting are even WvW players? How about a “Reward Track” for each poll where you have to earn the right to vote on a WvW issue? The more times you complete the reward track, the more your vote counts? That right there will take care of non WvW players and those with multiple accounts voting.

Oh the other excuse people are blindly voting the wrong way cause you think it’s not worded properly. It’s fine, there are more people who are willing to give the map a chance than those that want it removed permanently, stop crying about it and move on.

You know nothing John Snow.

Don’t care about the complaints.

1. You can access your bank through the guild register npc, there’s a pull down menu to switch to it.
2. You can access your bank at the upgraded keeps.
3. Rata Sum is the best city to do crafting, with the bank and trading post in the middle of it all. I only ever go to LA for the mystic forge.
4. Better prepare yourself before going into wvw, if you’re running low on foods and oils craft them in your downtime so it doesn’t affect your play time? Or now you can buy them off the provisioner.

Having said that, kinda late on these changes, use to see a ton of people in the crafting area in the early days, not so much these days, I suppose it’ll help a lil on reset night, maybe.

Maybe they should allow Ruby/Diamond/Legendary players to start at Emerald Division at the start of the next season, that way it would give new players into Amber some breathing room to advance and not be totally crushed at the beginning of the season.

It would also be a nice extra perk to those players. Mind you those players will make it out of Amber pretty fast in any case.

Small guilds have been screwed with the expansion, it shouldn’t matter that a guild is made up of friends of 3 peoples or are mass recruiters making sure they have 500 members on board. But they built the new system based on guilds with large numbers, it wasn’t enough they have time gated materials they also had to introduce a large amount of materials to supply all the upgrades.

Yes it is highly unfair that a small guild of 5 people is expected to donate the same amount of materials as one with 500 members, I understand why that has to be the same(or guilds will just drop to small numbers), but time gated upgrades alone could have dealt with keeping that even.

What bothers me is that last week guilds that had almost everything unlocked have to restart the process with only a few things grandfathered in. WvW guilds have especially been hindered with their abilities to claim and upgrade structures, guild level 37 and a bunch of upgrades in between before they can get +5, are you kidding me?

Also once upon a time a few expansions ago, WoW had guild levels as well, also had problems with large guilds taking over and mass recruiting to level the guild faster, those guilds tend to lose their personal feel after a short time, cliques form and they fall apart, they eventually got rid of that system.

Guilds shouldn’t be about who can grab the most members to upgrade stuff, I shouldn’t have to be part of a mass mob to enjoy guild perks. There are a lot of smaller family and friends type guilds out there and you’re killing them Anet. The expected time to fully upgrade a guildhall is what 10 months? based on what 500 members? how much more is it going to take a group of 5 to get their hall fullly upgraded?

Again, time gated upgrades like what they are doing with aetherium is fine, the expected amount of donations is not.

Balthazzarr.1349:

I believe that HoT in itself didn’t hurt WvW. What really hurt WvW was bringing something as big as HoT in while at the same time completely changing WvW with new borderlands that were almost impossible to navigate.

Bottom line to me is that linking seriously damaged WvW more than it helped. Do I have an answer? No I don’t know what the answer would be. So I figured out how to live with what has been done and have some fun again because frankly I still really like this game and the people I know in it

You can believe that if you want, but the desert bl was only part of the problem, the expansion brought a lot more changes that affected wvw badly in the past year and half. We’ve had alpines back for almost a year and wvw is still in terrible condition.

• Guild upgrades moved from base accounts to HoT accounts, upgrades for the wvw part of the grindhall, players were then forced to pve to reacquire those upgrades, of course the bigger the guild the easier that was to do, but it was also time gated with resources. Let’s not forget the expense of scribing. Guild level 37 was required to regain our most important upgrade in the +5 supply aura, who the kitten cares about magic find aura?

• New guild upgrades that broke certain parts of wvw, watchtower, smc airships, smc stealth water, banners, shield generators.

• Guild catapults nerfed in supply cost, this was a staple to havoc groups, but it also allowed zergs to get through walls much faster.

• Elite specs which forced players to upgrade for because they were in every case better than vanilla specs.

• Introduced new broken specs, stat combinations, and runes into the game.

• Trait changes of june 23rd 2015 which were the first step into the revamping of classes and combat for the expansion.

• Stability change which broke melee front lines and turned the game into pirate ship meta for 6 months.

• Combat change to focus more on conditions and boons, which at first produced boon sharing meta for more than 6 months, now still condition heavy with epidemic bombs.

• Desert borderland which was left in for far too long before fixes were made, and alpines returned. Rotation of the maps should have been their first thought when bringing another map into the game, not shoving it down everyone’s throat until players left.

While linking has it’s own set of problems, the alternatives were bleaker.

• Servers left to rot on their own, which they would have, and be in the same state as they are today. I was on Ehmry bay a mid tier server when HoT landed, the expectation for most on that server were there would be a lot of returning players, it didn’t happen. Instead for the next few months activity in the forums and TS went down before links even happened. Once links happened it was pretty much the last call for a few guilds who decided to move up in tiers, the glicko wall was also a problem at the time.

• Merge, which would have instantly deleted half the servers. And frankly with all the movement guilds have made in the past year would have put servers back to square one of being unbalanced in population. Maybe even in worse shape than today, at least we can rotate servers every 2 months to try and fix the damage players are currently doing.

• Battlegroups which would have probably taken 6+ months to implement and possibly destroy every single server and it’s community, depending on how it was implemented.

Identity is one of those QoL things they should have worked on early on, to help those link servers keep some pride and purpose. But at the time I believed links were suppose to be a temporarily solution that they could implement quickly and not months down the road, now it seems like it will be the permanent solution.

At the end of the day, it’s up to players to keep in touch and keep community going. At this point a lot of players have left the game or turned to their guilds as their community for the game.

Mike O Brien.4613:

We have a team of six developers working on that, who could work on it for years to come.

So, after shipping Chuka and Champawat, I’ve asked that we indefinitely suspend work on new legendary weapons.

Oh god I’m crying and dying from laughter!

You sold an expansion with new legendary weapons being one of it’s features and now release 4 and put the rest on the back burner.

Seems like you need to put the next expansion on the back burner until you deliver everything on your plate, the rest of the current expansion and the wvw update.

I hope this finally opens people’s eyes as to how this company operates, why do people still have faith and belief in this company. They pushed so hard to get people to prebuy the expansion with as little information as possible, and now they can’t even delivery on everything that was suppose to come with it. The guild halls were such a blunder in grinding they’re even taking the time after it’s release to try and fix that.

If the work for the precursors was too much, maybe should have just made one repeatable epic type of quest to obtain any of them, instead of a unique quest for each one.

P.S Think about this, this isn’t any different than if say they said the recent raid wing is the last one for now, the 5 man team will suspend work on the last wing and go work on the living story instead. How well do you think that would go over?

To me wvw is indeed endgame content, just as spvp is endgame for arena pvp players, dungeons and fractals was and now raids are endgame for pve players, while wvw was for everyone. Endgame content is basically something that is repeatable and ultimately the area of the game you will spend most of your time after you’re done leveling.

Wvw obviously used daoc rvr as a template, and infused with elements from grand strategy games, capture, gather resources, upgrade, defend your areas, earn points for victory at the end of the campaign week, the political side was taken cared of by the players. With the points and glicko system they built it to basically run wvw matchups on it’s own.

Everything else though I don’t think anet had any fore thought would happen, the evolution of going from a points game, to creation of zergs/blobs fighting, to players just wanting to fight because of how good the combat system was, to forming guilds just for fights and gvg’s. Unfortunately anet never evolved with the changes. Wvw also came with it’s own problems from day one such as coverage times, which in the beginning they told players wvw is a 24/7 area, it isn’t fair, so suck it up.

All the while that happened Anet somewhat ignored wvw, part because they were busy trying to keep their pve living story dream going, part because they weren’t looking to change the systems they designed for wvw. Some work was done obviously in giving us eotm, wvw masteries, ruins, 3 tournaments, desert borderland, before they really started giving it some attention this year. A lot of missteps happened during that time, including opening free transfers to servers for a tournament.

So is there any point to wvw anymore? after 3 years I think many of us have come to the end of the line. Points mean nothing, the grand strategy part of the game is meaningless, population and coverage imbalances still exist, glicko means nothing but a border to keep servers in their own areas, thank you trump for the t4 wall, we’re only out there to find something interesting usually that ends up being just fights.

But even combat is a mess these days thanks to the new direction they decided to go with boons and conditions. Players are getting tired of what wvw was originally designed for, there’s little to no pride and glory left to fight for. No leaderboards, no possible way to make fair tournaments or seasons in current wvw to leave your mark on the world.

With all the movement of guilds and players, and now with links taking away server identities, sometimes I feel like I’m in the walking dead, all the red names are zombies looking to kill me, I only got my friends and guild as my fam to back me up, everyone else on my side today could be my enemy tomorrow looking to kill me to take my bag.

After 3 years and experiencing everything wvw has to offer, most of my guild gone to other games, my friends scattered on servers, down to looking for some interesting fights, if not then log out and rewatch videos of fights of yesteryear.

No reason to take wvw seriously anymore, just spend the time having the most fun you can while there’s population around for you to do so.

Tiny Doom.4380:

Is it dying? No.

Are there fewer people playing WvW than there used to be? I would definitely say so from my experience, and in all four tiers too, but I don’t play NA Prime so can’t speak for that.

Is WvW lacking direction at the moment? It seems so.

Is it still fun? It is for me although it varies match to match.

I don’t know how people can say this with a straight face. Obviously it’s dying, it’s obvious it has way less players than even 6 months ago, nevermind what it was before hot or at release. They’ve had to fold the servers in half with links to get it back to pre hot level, and even now it feels like it could use another fold.

Please stop trying to hide that fact, call it like it is.

People come in here to complain because the current format will not sustain itself, and there’s barely anything to get new players into the game mode. While some of you might see a lot of qq and salt, a lot of changes that made it into the game were born from these forums.

A loud minority may be in here, but at least there’s someone to say something, than the other silent half that just packed their bags and left never to come back to the game.

Palador.2170:

Sometime this spring we’re due for another of their announcements on it. It’ll be the usual “We’ll change. We’ll talk more about our problems and our plans. We’ll open up. We’ll be honest. We’re a team, devs and players.” with a bit of “It’ll be different this time. We’ve changed, we know we have. We won’t backslide again. You can trust us! We love you, players!”

Within a month, it’ll be back to what it was before. And a month is being generous to them.

Pfft we don’t need to wait until spring. Let me save some time.

A year ago in a galaxy far far away

I know some are concerned about whether ArenaNet is communicating with you and listening and responding to your feedback. As you saw with yesterday’s announcement, we do. All of us at ArenaNet play the game with you, chat with you and read your forum posts, on Reddit, and work on the, gem store, things that we think will most delight and entertain you.

We’ve set a clear policy in the past year: we don’t talk speculatively about future development. We don’t want to string you along. Creating fun grinds is an uncertain business: sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t; sometimes we go back to the drawing board over and over before we get something right. If we make optimistic promises and then can’t deliver on them, everyone suffers. So when we attend a trade show or give an interview, we’re there to talk about what we’re getting ready to ship, not to speculate on what we might ship someday.

Don’t read that as meaning that we don’t want to talk with you about the longer-term roadmap. The intention of the CDI threads is to talk with you about the roadmap. We want to talk design philosophy with you and hear how you want to see the game evolve. When those discussions trigger development, we’ll work internally until we have something we’re proud of before we’ll announce it.

A lot of the questions I’ve seen posted this week are as simple as this: does ArenaNet have an agenda to never do something? That’s almost never the case, and if it is the case you deserve to know and we’ll make sure we get more clear. In general the simple truth is this: when we’re not currently working on something, it’s because we’re working on something else instead that we think is more important for the game and community.

Our developers post on these forums Reddit on a voluntary basis, and in addition to developers, we have a community team who can clarify and be the bridge between players and developers. They’re ready to engage you on these topics. And I know it’s hard for the community team to engage players across all the forums and sites where these questions are being discussed, so I’m going to support the team in consolidating and focusing as necessary, to Reddit, so that we can be clear to the community where you can go to get a response.

See you in-game,
Mikey OB