Guild Wars 2

STIHL.2489:

Hyper Cutter.9376:

Swagger.1459:

I mean, if we go that route, let’s start killing off fractals so you raid more. I’m sure that’s great incentive right?

Anet’s literally way ahead of you, they already gutted dungeons to drive players into fractals and raids.

LOL, Yah, in light of what Anet already did, I gotta agree it was a bad move to use the analogy he did.

And it was a bad decision. They acknowledged it and are reverting it…

All my other points that were not quoted stand. You’re not getting anything back or making pvp better as a whole by tinkering with eotm.

And the analogy was directed toward you because you do fractals casually and don’t want to see them messed with, but you have issues with raids. So yeah, we could easily turn that “cut stuff out to make what I like better” mentality around on other game modes and see how other players like it.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

In all seriousness though, thanks for bringing this up. I’d been meaning to fix this for a while, but it fell off my radar in light of higher priority issues.

Good news: This is now fixed.
Bad news?: This is fixed in the build where we disable Desert BL and bring back Alpine BL

• DBL Camps: Reduced the number of base guards from 4 to 3.
• DBL Camps: Base guards are now a combination of both Scout and Guard NPCs.
• DBL Camps: Guards have been moved inside the capture circle.

All I’m seeing here is good news for the most part. Though still, tactivators. :s

Thanks for your involvement, on this, though. While I understand the “kitten ed if you do, kitten ed if you don’t” mentality or general potential frustration, it’s honestly great to have that exposed to people posting. Exposing logically the difficulty of development intents or contradictory requests gives people some insight on why things are as they are and in the end gets people to back off from criticism.

Throwing humor in the mix is also great so long as (as demonstrated) the issues do get recognized as they are.

I pugmanded for years…Lead a wvw guild…lead a gvg guild. I say that I love pugs and I hate pugs. Commanding I will thank scouts, and despite having large groups in TS I’ll throw a few words in say chat if I see the future. It does go both ways. I wont ever apologize for not typemanding to the pugs though. The game has changed. Once upon a time pugmanding was typemanding and that was pretty common. Then guilds and groups started using comms all the time. Then guilds became the hard centers of pug zergs and the age of the typemander has mostly come to an end. As a commander from day one we simply had to keep pace, stay sharp and relevant lest we lose the ability to be effective at what makes a lot of fun. So…its really been an evolution and in most cases that is being in TS and being a well-oiled machine. Most good commanders will modify their style based on what the situation calls for. If I have 20 ppl in TS and there is another tag on map who is pugmanding he’s going to be minding the map and Ill primarily be fighting. The reverse also happens. Commanders should be able to switch as needed. Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer willing to typemand or pugmand these days. The benefit of having a trained guild is obvious but you can’t run them 24/7. Pugmanding you can do 24/7 and as a result I would say its the pug tags and the loveable pugs that follow them that make up the real back-bone of a server. A guild’s contribution only lasts as long as the raid but pugs contribute 24/7.

So why is the non-guilded pugmander dieing out on a lot of servers? Mostly I have found that pugs would rather follow organized guild groups than a pugmander. So you can imagine how a pugmander might feel betrayed.

So who’s to blame for the state of pugs? Their image as unloyal, untrustworthy, and unskilled? That’s all rather complicated I think and as ArchonWing pointed out there are plenty of ways to look at it.

Guild commanders will always sacrifice pugs for their guildies. Pugs will sacrifice the zerg for bags and Pugmanders will sacrifice whats needed to succeed.

To wade into this argument the damage to players doesn’t need a (heavy) nerf. The damage to siege DOES. As mentioned by others we have bali’s for that.

It would be interesting though perhaps ill-thought to give balis a damage reduction to siege.
Perhaps a little damage boost to gates, so we have another (read: viable) option for DBL siege attacks.

Durzlla.6295:

So I was just wondering why you, actual WvWers, like the Alpine Borderlands so much more than the Desert Borderland.

No one wants the Alpine back really. They got stale, but what people really want is:

• Swift Direct, Easy Travel, which the Alpine provided and the Deseret did not.

• They don’t want a map full of Gimmicks. WvW for most intents is more a War Zone not a Theme Park. There does not need to be any distractions there to keep us entertained. Thus the Alpine was simple and direct, the Desert is not.

• Distinct Wall Lines for the Buildings. The Alpine map made it easy to know exactly where the walls where, and the layout could be seen from the Mini-Map. The Desert has this convoluted set up where it’s not all walls, and you can’t see the distinct outline from the Mini-Map.

So it’s not that anyone wants the Alpine back, it’s that the Desert fails to preform so badly they would rather go back to the Alpine then continue to deal with the Desert.

Truth is, I would rather they fix the Desert, and learn how to do it right, so they can make more maps.

What Anet could do is move all mastery points to communes. This way players can complete all masteries without much effort.

In place of the mastery points that they removed from things, they can add a token specific to that activity, avhievement, or whatever. These tokens are used for another collection to gain access to craft HoT legendary weapons.

they quit, once Trump, err Tequatl puts up that wall, you have at least 10 people quit because things didn’t go according to plan.

pvprs don’t quit, that last 3 guys fighting tequatl at the 1 minute count without even a slightest chance to win, are pvp material.

lil devils x.6071:

“The WvW team’s current top priority is fixing population imbalance. It’s a really hard technical problem. It has taken us a long time to ship a solution, so it’s been a long time since we’ve shipped significant updates, and of course that hurts.” ~ Mike-OBrien-ArenaNet[

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/48zlyd/im_mike_obrien_here_with_gw2_dev_team_ama/

At a high level we plan to address core WvW issues such as population imbalance, scoring issues, and rewards. Of those, the first updates you’ll see will be related to population balance and rewards. ~Anet-TylerB

So there we have it. Game over. They. Just. Do. Not. Get. It. Here, lets shovel some rotten food with sugar all over it and wonder why no one is eating it.

They sat on their hands watching everyone leave.. they jump up again to do the wrong thing at the wrong time and can’t put the nails in the coffin fast enough. Then they are going to pat themselves on the back afterwards " we did everything we could" Nonsense when the one thing they had to do to fix it they refused to do. The end.

WHY is this such a bad answer? Sadly, they are not listening..
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Adding-rewards-b4-Alpine-will-fail/first#post6021249

Population imbalance will resolve itself when they fix the other issues with the game ( including too many servers). Hello Anet, everyone is sitting in queue for EBG because of the DBL boycott, not population imbalance. There are many options to resolve it that are better than their idea of a godawful alliance system. WvW players do not play WvW for rewards, they play it for challenging, strategic Fun PvP ( which they are not receiving currently).

Most WvW players spend $$ to play WvW, they should just be an incentive to do more instead. Pouring sugar on a rotten plate of food is not going to fix it. What they are choosing to do here is kill it faster.

Considering Obrien is now calling the shots for the game and is the one who thinks WvW players <3 PvE, I don’t think I can stand to stick around any longer to watch this painfully dwindle away a slow excruciating death, it has been nauseating enough to watch as it is.

First bolded quote…

No, population imbalance will not resolve itself now. Didn’t work before either.

Closing servers is not an option, they are not going to shut down and meld servers on the 95%, just to appease the 5%.

Anet is looking to fill up servers and from those it fills the wvw pool with players.

In rvr you have to have sides closer to equal, so alliances or megaserver stuff needs to be in place to make this happen.

Addressing population issues and lack of rewards players faced since launch are both good starts. The rest of the issues will be fixed.

Your second bolded quote…

That’s not true for the majority in every pvp oriented game I’ve ever played. Pvpers want both good fights and good rewards to brag about. You are in the minority on this one.

Go take out plundering from EVE and “king of the hill” from ESO and whatever they are doing for CU… and you tell me how many players will play…

Rocketmist.5436:

As we all know the last wvw lead, Devon Carter, left anet. This left a void in wvw leadership within anet. Instead of hiring someone else, they simply added the wvw leadership role on John Corpening. John Corpening is very much a pvp focused leader at the moment. Going through the last 3 months of his twitter shows 0 posts about wvw and tons about pvp.

I looked at anet’s glassdoor reviews and everyone is complaining that they are understaffed also. So at the end of the day, they simply don’t have enough people working at the company to really fix any of the issues. They didn’t even hire a wvw replacement for the one that left. Pvp and wvw are two huge completely different gamemodes, it seems pretty crazy to give one guy the keys to both.

From a company perspective they are simply cutting costs to the extreme by not even replacing people that leave.

Hows it goin man ? I do still enjoy runing with you guys once in a while, though I just don’t play as often as I used to for same reasons as most of us on these forums.

I gotta tell you though, you are incorrect in this case, or at least largely partially incorrect.

This guy was largely responsible for a lot of what is happening now. Remember, prior to his “departure” from WVW he spent his time exclusively on T1 and saw everything through rosy glasses, I have no doubt he even pushed for EOTM as it is now to placate the T1 who at that time was screaming and complaining about queue times. His statements on these and reddit forums seemed to me very detached from reality.

Screwed the rest of us by further dividing the playerbase which was already thining out at the bottom tiers and instead of jumping on the population issues when they were in their respective infancy.

I have also read through his various reddit statements etc., and I have no doubt (especially taking into account the snail pace of a-nets work), that he was largely partially responsible for many of the bad ideas which are currently implimented and in the game as the work on them has begun when he was still there, he even said so somewhere on reddit.

The glassdoor statements are vastly outdated and more applicable to production and release of HOT expansion when you look at the dates, not the current situation.

My assumption is that they have even less people now then they did before, I base this on the official NCSoft released statement about A-Net going full “upkeep” and “sustain / maintenance” mode rather then producing large new content. Not sure where the confirmed 2nd expansion fits into all this. But at this rate, I would not be surprised if the final stages of this WVW overhaul will be included in that 2nd expansion requiring another $50 to use a year or so from now.

Thus to me, his prescence and history seem rather detrimental, and something to want to be rid of rather then have.

PPK is wonderful. WvW veterans like myself are terribly bored of PPT because it’s unrewarding and not exciting. Fights are something new every time they happen because there are always different people, builds, guilds and geography involved.

The new players have far more things catering to their needs than the veterans and WvW almost strictly consists of people who love the game mode so dearly that they’re still hanging on to it. If you’re a new player, you’re in our territory which means either fight and have fun or get hunted while you attempt to ktrain until you rage quit.

Spawn camping is frustrating with that much I’ll agree but there are plenty of ways to counter it. Like not running straight in to their arms is a good start. Otherwise, roamers have always been a thing and now they have more of a purpose. I just wish as a solo roamer that being solo was more viable but I can’t complain with the abundance of fights. At least I don’t have to look for action anymore.

The only problem I have with PPK is that afaik, it doesnt take into account outnumbered. With the buff, you shouldnt give any PPK. Would be even better if outnumbered was better localized to the area of the map you are in.

All of them. Don’t pug raids. Do them with friendly people you know.

This change is working as intented IMO. It require some tactic change (a few players purposly getting out of combat to revive in the situation described in OP) but this is not a bad thing. Even if 12 people roflstomp 20 simply because they are better or a focused guild vs pugs both groups can work the revival rules to their advantage.

Overall I’d say its one of the best changes Anet have made in years.

Keep in mind that getting into combat after you start reviving does not stop the revive. Heavy support builds that can take a beating or get shielded/reflected/covered by buddies can still do danger close revives.

It’s not too hard to do on ele. You can do it much cleaner than my examples – but just los/pull to you, cc+aoe blind of necessary, then aoe dps

https://youtu.be/BO5WDPpoI8I camps and shrines

vesica tempestas.1563:

Vayne.8563:

maddoctor.2738:

Astralporing.1957:

So, in the end, one or both of those groups will be unhappy and there’s no way around that.

The point still stands. Even if they add something that casuals want behind hardcore content, how is that making the game (as a whole) not casual friendly?

Well, it depends. Adding a specific single thing doesn’t. But that’s not where it ends. There will be more raid wings and more rewards.

If I go to an amusement park, and I don’t like roller coasters, but I do like shows, then I want enough shows to make it worth my admission to the park, or I’m going to feel ripped off. Not everyone wants roller coasters.

This is the same situation. It’s not just raids. It’s raids and a lot of other stuff that some casuals feel locked out of, and it’s a percentage of the expansion.

So raids is advertised as the next big thing, and you’re not doing that, and maybe the new zones are too hard and you’re not doing those, or you don’t have enough time for the metas, so you’re not doing that, and then maybe you can’t spend the time to grind out legendaries, and suddenly, you’re in an amusement park full of roller coasters looking for the ocassional show.

The problem is, you paid the same admission price as the people who love roller coasters, but a percentage of the content isn’t yours anymore. So you get fewer and fewer of the rewards.

But now add to this, the entire amusepark existed before and it was 90% shows, so you want and spent your money when they opened an extension to that park and suddenly it’s 90% roller coasters. That’s the real problem.

You think it’s not a problem because you like roller coasters. You think there are still a couple of shows. But people who bought the expansion paid the same price you did and the offering percentage has changed drastically.

That’s what all the complaining is about. It’s about the fact that people who could do most things before, are now locked out of most things. Small guilds can’t access guild halls without bankrupting themselves. People can’t farm legendaries, because the price of everything has gone up, but the quick dungeons they ran don’t give gold anymore. Not as much anyway.

You can say I like all this stuff so what? But it doesn’t solve the problem and for some people, possibly a lot of people, there is a problem. Because essentially the product has escalated too suddenly and it’s leaving too many people behind.

That’s my take on it.

your analogies are incorrect, your amusement park started off as 98% ‘casual’ rides and perhaps 2% ‘hardcore’ cutting edge in the shape of high end fractals, then Anet added a new rollercoaster in the shape of raids and 99% other stuff. its still the same shape of data with the vast majority of content being casual. We know Hot is casual friendly because the vast majority can happily play it solo in glass gear (while also offering a step up from the overpowered tyia, which is still there)

Variety is good and there’s nothing to fear from new content appearing that is specialised .

as for ‘Small guilds can’t access guild halls without bankrupting themselves. this is entitlement nonsense, Guild halls are designed for guilds not small parties (why would you design it for small parties?) however, as with the rest of Anet strategies, if small parties want to form mini guilds they can, but obviously its balanced for larger groups of people, that’s common sense.

But my analogy isn’t incorrect, because Anet changed the product suddenly. If I were playing as a casual player only, and found the HoT zones not fun or too challenging then there really is very little for me in the expansion even though I have to pay the same price as a harder core player to get the expansion.

I once took a writing course with the SFWA, and one of the first things they teach you is that the moment you start writing a book, you’re creating unwritten contract with your reader. You’re defining the genre and tone up front and if you should change that later in the book, you risk losing a percent of your readers. The greater the change, the more likely it is you’ll lose readers to the change. So before you make that change you have to sell the change to the reader.

I don’t feel this change was sold to casual players. It’s not gradual. It’s sudden, and there’s a lot of it. It’s the same for games. If I’m playing a game and you sell kitten expansion which includes stuff for everyone but me, and you expect me to muddle on with the same stuff unchanged for another couple of years before another expansion comes out…well, I’m not sure why anyone would think that would go over well.

And small guilds didn’t just end up with having a very expensive guild hall but they lost functionality that they previously farmed to have access to. Dismissing a legitmate claim like that as entitlement would be like saying you paid to have access to electricity in your house but now you can’t have it, because they’ve changed how electricity works. You used to have electricity and now you don’t. That’s a very legit complaint.

Making you farm the old system to unlock something and then making you farm again for it, and making it much more expensive is very much not entitlement.

I love the idea of these and the price seems more than acceptable overall (frankly, if I were running GW2, I can’t imagine releasing these for this price — a single account-bound gemstore purchase stuck in one of these and it’s already losing them money? Madness, but good for me!)

The HUGE problem I have: The bulk discount. I’m a small-time, occasional purchaser. This isn’t going to change. I have only so much real-life money and only so much time to play. If these were 700 gems each, flat rate, I’d end up buying all 5 of them eventually, one at a time. But here’s the thing, and you can call me stubborn or bitter if you want: I am not going to buy ANY of these if I know I’m getting screwed and being charged more for them than the guy next door to me is, just because he’s got a better job and can reasonably buy all five of them at once. And yeah, I could save up my gem allowances for a while if I really wanted to; but frankly, spending two or three months sitting outside the shop with my nose pressed up against the glass going “I wish I could buy FunThing, but I have to save all my money for SeriousThing” is something I get enough of in real life. If the GW2 marketing department wants to start making me feel like a bitter second-class citizen in-game as well, I have no reason to stick around.

CONSTRUCTIVE FEEDBACK:

Thank you ANet for adding this particular item(s) into the game.

• Although it’s a minor start with only 5 mere slots currently, I have higher hopes this number can and will be increased as most players do carry around important universal items such as food, siege blueprints, gathering tools, TP/merchant Express(s), portal scrolls etc. My proposal is around 15-20 slots for this to be achieved at a sound level.

• 700 Gems for ONE of these slots is quite demanding; I think 500/600 Gems may have been more reasonable. On the other hand, buying the bundle of 5 for 2,800 Gems is very reasonable as you buy 4 and get 1 free; that is fine. For what this item does, it is indeed useful so I understand the overall initial pricing for this item(s).

• Shared Inventory Slot(s) should be able to be moved around like normal bag slots, not just at the very top of the inventory.

I hope for more innovative & QoL features such as this particular item to be implemented into the game.

EDIT: Agreed with others in this thread regarding all the permanent contracts... yikes.. they have definitely sky-rocketed and this is disappointing, however, if anyone is after a “merch” to merely sell junk when their bags are full… the Tarrktun Personal Delivery Portal still exists… for a pretty hefty price either way…

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Tarrktun_Personal_Delivery_Portal

I have a bit of carpal tunnel syndrome or arthritis in my wrists (not sure which) so that I have to be careful how much repetitive use I get with video games.

One of the things I noticed with GW2 is the addition of Consume All for Essence of Luck items.

This simple QOL addition was much appreciated. My wrists thank you!

However I’d like to see this menu choice availability become more widely available, in particular with all the items that start out with tiny bits that have to be agglomerated into larger bits – tiny snowflakes, Mordrem and Evergreen slivers etc.

Going through stacks of hundreds of these to refine them is actually physically painful to me.

A little thought about the ergonomics of these design decisions would make this game more playable for people with issues like mine.

Okay it’s not a treadmill, I agree with that, but I don’t like stat sets being locked behind a form of content that most players of the game will never do. It’s not like locking a skin, or a mini. You’re locking a play option.

I’m okay with lots of stuff other people complain about. I’m not okay with this.

The banners are ridiculous. They have no place in WvW. So many gimmicks so little map in the new borderlands. The new borderlands were clearly never play tested in any real way. One would think Anet would have learned SOMETHING after the disaster that is EtoM, but no, clearly they didn’t Thank you Mike O’Brien.

It’s a shame they went this direction with Ascended rings, amulets and accessories when they would fit Lv 500 Jeweller perfectly.

Tspatula.9086:

zhonnika.1784:

I don’t wish to derail this thread, but since I was addressed specifically, I’m not actually a wvw forum specialist, and haven’t been since early October. They just haven’t fixed my forum title yet

To keep this on topic, I say HELL NO to manual upgrades in any form. Too much abuse, too many people who don’t understand upgrade order, too many ways that it can and has gone wrong. Auto upgrades are fine with the change. I do not wish to go back to the days of someone starting fortify before anything else because they clicked wrong or just wanted to keep you from having anything else. Sorry, no.

Manual upgrading for the camps, keeps, and towers would not be able to be abused. It would be a simple change that would require a player to manually activate available upgrades, rather than having them automatically activate when available as they are now. They would be the same upgrades that happen now, only the structure would sit at the “upgrades ready to activate” state until a player essentially pushes the button.

That sounds like pointless busywork.

There’s nothing wrong with the upgrades autmatically queing as long as the enemy can actively disrupt the yaks. The problem with the atuo upgrades wasn’t that they upgraded when nobody was watching. it was that they made yaks pointless.

Requiring someone to go to the objective and click a button adds nothing to the game, unless you’re under the assumption that the enemy is going to bother camping the objective to wait for that one guy that’s going to run over and click it when they should be focusing on disrupting yaks.

If enough yak runs ahve already made it through for the objective to upgrade, the enemy has already failed. Making someone click a button doesn’t magically create fights. It just makes it easier to PvDoor, and creates less tanky objectives during off hours, during times they should be tankier to discourage easy night capping and encourage defense even at off hours.

I think one major reason why WvW is so empty is that the rewards are weak. Here’s a suggestion to fix it. Make the rewards dependent upon meaningful player participation. Rewards are dispensed every 1/2 hour on a percentage participation basis (similar to map metas in HoT). Rewards range from 0-200%. Here’s an example reward structure:

5% for: building a piece of siege equipment, destroying a piece of siege equipment, using siege to breach a wall, rezzing a player, killing a player (tagging, including w/ siege), killing a guard or mercenary (tagging, including w/ siege), capping a sentry point or temple, spending 15 supply to repair a wall or gate, defending a camp against invaders, escorting a dolyak, capturing an undefended tower.

15% for: Defending a structure under active attack for 2 minutes, killing a dolyak, defending a Dolyak under enemy attack, finishing a downed player, capturing a camp, capturing an undefended keep.

30% for: Capturing a player-defended tower.

60% for: Capturing a player-defended keep.

Whether a structure is ‘player-defended’ is simple: If enemy players are inside the structure at any point during the attack, then it counts. This resets if the attack is stopped for 1 minute or more and then resumed.

This is the basic idea. These values are off the top of my head, and would probably need to be changed. I know it favors offense over defense, but turtling is boring and counterproductive.

How about a popup saying:

“Too few players remaining on this map” as is done with the megaserver?

Why not have this box come up on low population servers, allowing free transfer to a higher population server? This would allow a RNG to slowly eliminate, say, the bottom 9 servers in NA.

This would be free, but the choice when the box would come up and the choice of the new server would not be up to the player, so gems would still be needed to get a guild to move as a unit.

I think players are more on to community or guild loyalty than server loyalty at this point. Too many servers have already been destroyed by players moving away, and sometimes multiple guilds will move together to another server because they like playing with each other. Just like what we saw when some T1 guilds moved to YB to ride them to T1.

Megaserver tech definitely hurt recruitment and defense call outs for wvw, which is why they should have left LA as a server based city and not put every single zone on megaserver.

The eotm system could work, it’s just a matter of whether or Anet wants to put the work into making it work properly. What they need to provide is something else to rally behind instead of server identities made by the players. Besides guilds, players need a bigger purpose to rally behind, the other games that do this actually make it a war with distinct sides, which GW2 just makes it a war with servers.

I’ll use examples that they could use, world of warcraft alliance and horde sides. Both sides are distinct, they have lore to back it up, and there are players who are fiercely loyal to either side. Warhammer online, also 2 distinct sides that players were fiercely loyal to. Remember Dark age of camelot? the game that wvw was insipred by, same concept with 3 sides. Same thing another game called Planetside features, 3 distinct sides in lore to fight behind.

What Anet needs to do is create 3 new alliances, let’s just use this as a quick example say Durmand Priory, Order of Whispers, and the Vigil. There’s a lot of lore in game to back it up, there’s distinction between all 3 sides that players can support and rally behind, the rewards for them could also be unique as well.

Let’s take it further and use the Gods as sides instead:
6 gods that players are matched to from their character creation, Balthazar Dwayna Grenth Kormir Lyssa Melandru. (Option to change one time upon implementation).
So basically 6 separate pools of players (instead of 24-27 servers).
3 sides of 2 gods alliances, so 2 gods randomly matched into alliances every week.
You want to transfer? pay 1800 gems to transfer and get a prayer book back piece as a blessing to your new god, lol.
Offer new wvw season rewards with art/fashion that match the sides you’re playing for, such as the lyssa balthazar and dwayna outfits.

What we don’t need is 3 faceless sides, green blue red to fight for, or the stupidity of putting all the green ranked servers (usually the top server of the tier) player pools together. Nor do we need player made mercenary alliances filled with 3 guilds and 300 players to fill maps for a week.