Guild Wars 2

The change to saturday was mildly annoying but I could deal with that. The change from prime time to the middle of the day is just awful. I’m not going to tell my daughter that our saturdays are now shot because I’m playing a video game.

Unpopular opinion: It’s 2-3 hours of the week; I’m actually fine with it. If my guild doesn’t rally, I’ll follow along with a different guild and then rally as normal in the evening. Carry on as normal.

The change to the WvW reset time has come has a surprise to most of us, and some welcome it while others don’t. In situations like these, I try to list the pros and the cons so that I can objectively see both sides of the issue. This change definitely has some wide reaching impact, so I’m going to separate the impact as best as I can for objectivity. As such, some of the pros and cons may conflict, since I will be attempting to look at the change from the perspectives of different communities. First, the unknowns:



Unknowns

• The reset time changing to Saturday could drastically affect the way matches are determined, leading to more variety in match-ups.
• The new maps may have a drastic effect on how PPT is accumulated, changing the WvW scene even more.
• Friday could become worthless for PPT and fights since the scores of some Tiers are already decided by the last day in the week. Even having +690 PPT may not mean you can come back from a loss.

Pros

Fight based Guilds

• PPT matters less, since most matches are already decided this late in the week. This could lead to more fights for fights sake.
• It’s possible most pugs will have left WvW at this point, further solidifying a fights oriented nature of Friday.
• GvG’s and other events have more time to be setup, and this could be a great day to do them on.
• Queue times are reduced on Friday.
• Saturday will reset all structures, meaning you don’t need to attempt to take a tier 3 keep because the other server had good coverage overnight.

Objective based Guilds

• Friday gives you a last minute chance to push to victory if you are in a close match-up.
• Saturday gives you a fresh start on all structures and PPT.
• If you have a lot of coverage in your guild, you are better able to determine your PPT throughout the week, since the weekend won’t have as much impact.

Cons

General

• Scheduling changes lead to scheduling issues at times.
• Friday may lose it’s impact for players if the week has been a blowout in score, leading to less population in WvW overall.

Fight based Guilds

• The work you do, towards kills or towards PPT, gets reset on Saturday, effectively making one of your days of progress lose it’s importance.
• It’s possible Friday may be given up to karma trains, reducing the amount of fights given overall.
• If Friday loses it’s importance, that only gives one strong night on the weekend, as Sunday generally means people work the next day, thus reducing play time.

Objective based Guilds

• Friday becomes a waste of time, since most matches are decided earlier in the week.
• Saturday reset means you have less time to make an impact on the score before the week starts.
• Coverage will become more important for PPT, meaning small guilds will have less of an impact overall.

My proposal:

From what I can see of how this change will impact WvW, it is accomplishing some good things, and some bad. It does appear that WvW needs a change to give the players more power to impact matches, either through fights or through capturing objectives, and although this change would accomplish that, I believe it might negatively impact players more than expected.

To counter this, I would propose the reset date is instead changed to Wednesday or Thursday night (backing up the time 24 or 48 hours from where it currently is). This change would have some positive benefits compared to Friday and Saturday:

1. Reset Night itself will not be overpopulated with players, causing high queue times, due to the middle of the work week.
2. The weekend would be centered throughout the week, giving that majority of players plenty of time to have an impact on that week’s score.
3. Friday would no longer force all players to join at the same time, reducing queues overall and spreading players out between the different maps. This will decrease load on the servers, as well as increase the amount of playable time on the weekend.
4. Friday would no longer be a hard reset on all objectives. Players that can participate in WvW on the weekend would come in to see towers and keeps upgraded, people defending structures, experience fights around upgraded structures.
5. For Fight based Guilds or solo WvW players (roamers), you would know your match-up ahead of time, and if you needed to schedule fights, or setup a “Fight Club” you could do so well in advance and possibly on a weekend, thus increasing the accessibility and the community overall.

However, there may still be some negatives here:

1. Tuesday is the day most patches drop. This only leaves one day (about 30 hours) for bug fixes to be implemented before a Wednesday reset
2. It only allows one day of testing (about 30 hours) for players when balance changes are released.
3. It shifts the end of the week a bit closer to Sunday, meaning players that may not have the weekend off may play during less desirable times in order to have an impact on the scoring.

Not sure if everyone caught this but there is a new currency called Memories of Battle, “a new tradeable material, Memories of Battle, that only comes from playing World vs. World” for WvW players. It was mentioned in the recent Legendary Weapon blog post.

• Few thoughs, can we trade in badges of honor for the new currency?
• Will the new currency replace badges of honor or will they still be obtainable?
• Will the merchants in WvW change to use the new currency?
• Will there be new merchants for the new currency?
• Is this currency just for legendary crafting?
• Will this currency be obtainable from EotM or just WvW?
• How will it be earned? Similar to Badges of Honor or only form events/reward chests/kills?

Maybe this currency will become valuable and will help to make WvW a bit more rewarding to play, but not to much that people come to farm for gold. Also this could help to bring in some WvW ‘unique’ skins that are bought with said currency, I know ArenaNet doesn’t want to force players into WvW but since this is tradeable they can sill get them.

WvW has always been a server community game mode with its point system. It isn’t about an individual. It isn’t about a guild. It isn’t about a time zone. It’s about the entire server. If your server is lacking presence in one of the time zones, your position is going to suffer.

ANet shouldn’t do anything about this, because anything they do would be unfair to the off-hours players. Instead of waiting for ANet to make a change, do something yourself:

1. Actively recruit in other timezones. Create forum posts that your server is looking for guilds in whatever zones you’re lacking in. Work to patch the hole in your presence if you care about your server’s rank that much.

2. Leave your server and join one at the tier you want to be in. You have control over your personal enjoyment. Take control, or take responsibility that the choice you are making is going to be frustrating at times. That isn’t ANet’s fault. The system has been the same for 3 years, so you know what you’re getting into.

3. Enjoy the fights you find in your prime time and stop worrying about overall rank. Servers are constantly in flux, with guilds leaving, joining, leaving again. And if rank really matters that much to you, join a high rank server so you can feel like you’re of high rank. Whatever you need to do to enjoy yourself.

Population and coverage have always been two key factors in server placement. Why is only coverage the frustrating one that needs to be “fixed”? It’s like saying your lower population is better than another server’s in prime time, so based on how many players you have logged into WvW, your PPT should be multiplied by a factor of the difference from the other servers.

WvW doesn’t mollycoddle an individual’s sense of worth. It’s an open and fair system to the entire server community, and I don’t think there’s any reason to change it.

And I thought the spoiler was wvw is ALWAYS closed because it is night somewhere 24/7……

Dawdler.8521:

I was comparing the effort to cap a defended keep compared to nightcapping empty keep. You said it was worth the same, I say not really. And you had to single out siege to respond to, lol.

I am sure he knew what you meant. I think they were using sarcasm to point out the effort your making to allow your bias to cause you to avoid having an actual discussion.

Your attempting to use backhanded comments at every turn. Why wouldn’t you compare night capping a defended tower to prime time taking an undefended tower. Is using 60 players worth of supply to slap down 8 rams and take a tower that is completely undefended, some special feat?

As a player who plays all hours of the day, I can tell you I take more towers and keeps, unchallenged, when I am pinned up and running a guild raid or as map pin, then I do I 5 AM pinned up with 6 players on me.

As a general rule, if it is way “off peak” time, when there are 10 players running around trying to cap a map, there are at least 5 trying to stop them. I have had just as much prime time unevenness with 25 players on one whole server and three maps queued on another.

You continue to argue from a point of dishonesty by repeatedly presenting no actual discussion, and using extreme hyperbole in scenarios as your arguments.

Dawdler.8521:

You also seem to be intent on calling PPT equalization based on population a punishment. How is the servers being punished? All of them will score lower PPT at that point in time. The reduction is an equal percentage drop for the 3 sides. And the nightcap crew know perfectly well wtf they are doing, capping easy undefended keeps just to exploit PPT when no one is around.

Well actually, your using the term “equalization” wrong. Your also making a fair amount of assumptions that are generally wrong in relation to map populations.

How is the server being punished? I wouldn’t say your bad idea to change the scoring system punishes a server, it just directly punishes players for not playing at what ever time you deem as deserving of a lesser score value per keep. Who cares if the score is “equally scaled” down for each server? Anyone who plays during the times that score is scaled down.

If we scale down your paycheck, are you happy with that as long as we scale down every one else, yet the people who work different hours then you continue to get paid more? I wouldn’t be happy with that. Unfortunately, you seem to think players worth and efforts are of different value for something as arbitrary as the time of day it is where you are at?

You keep bringing up some hyperbole about having no resistance during off peak hours. I always see as much resistance from my foe in off peak hours as I do during peak hours.

Chaba.5410:

You wrote that efforts by non-peak players would be worth lesser of a point value compared to peak players. To move to a state of being “lesser” implies moving from a state of equality between the two sets of players. To say otherwise is both irrational and illogical.

You do a fine job of both making a statement, and disproving it, in one post. Not sure where your trying to go with this, For one it is a fact that altering the score to scale to a lower max value is very much in fact, “lesser” value. Your comments do not reflect how math works.

This is a constructive feedback post on the issue of Incentives in WvW. I know that WvW is a difficult subject to address when it comes to adding the appropriate amount of reward for it. Giving out rewards for simple things like defense can be tricky in the fact that you can just walk through a keep and be counted in the defense of it.

The Reward Track idea has been proposed before by others and myself in the past, but I would like to go into detail with how it could work:

To Balance, these reward tracks you can:
A. Remove any monetary rewards for completing an event in wvw and give Karma and XP only.
B. Make the progression of these reward tracks slower then PvP since you can constantly attempt some of the items for them, so that it equals out to the amount of time it takes to complete a series of PvP tracks. I realize there are other rewards in WvW unlike in PvP where your only reward is the track your on. However, to balance that it would make sense to complete a reward track to take more time and have less rewards then PvP.
C. Or instead of B, Make it a week long track and Set it so you pick one track per week that resets at reset.
D. Remove the *reset chests for first, second and third place winners and introduce this instead.
E. OR Reward tracks could even be progressive as your rank increases.

Types of reward tracks you could have:

Seasonal: This reward track is only available during WvW seasons and involves things like PPK, Boss kills in keeps and towers, Doing the event in the middle of the map. They could have a specialized armor or reward of that sort for them

Holiday A reward track that gives out the same holiday rewards currently in PvP and PVE.

Defense reward track: This could always be available and involve, using defense mechanisms at camps and towers, escorting and defending yaks, Using a piece of siege when a tower or keep is under attack (this could be a certain number of times not every time you do it like, five times to be adjusted as needed). Defending a lord. (can not be gained on enemy borderlands, just EB and your own borderland)

Offense reward track: Hitting gates or walls with golems or rams, using the new shield generators, Doing the event in the center of the map.Taking enemy camps, Killing enemy dolyaks ect… (can not be gained on your own borderlands?)

Event reward track Events that the team develops could be made to incentivize players to participate by offering special reward tracks for either specific or time alotment of gameplay.

An Exceptional reward track: Covers all these aspects takes twice as long as the others and involves an exceptional weapon skin or items needed for legendary creation.

This puts the rewards in the hands of the player, as well as allows you to pop an event with a special reward track making events more likeable. This is also a chance to normalize rewards, across, wvw, pve, and pvp.

Iavra.8510:

In equal fights, this is fine and works, but when fighting against a bigger group this makes it harder for the small group to win.

Anyone trying to hard ress is removing themselves from the fight for the duration of the ress, mitigating their own numbers advantage while also making themselves an incredibly easy target.

It’s not the down state that is the problem, it’s the rally mechanics. Having all those players rally off of one kill and rallying off of mobs.

At least the mob rallies will be curtailed in HoT, being limited to veterans or higher.

Greek.4396:

Being frustrated in the direction Guardian is heading, Im taking all my ascended gear from my Guard and putting it on my Rev.

Please do. Because that kind of movement in the playerbase is easily tracked by the metrics and the best ammunition imaginable at the Balance Team meeting that Revenant is over-incentivized and that Guard finally needs to be looked at without the “its in a good place” noose around it’s neck. Because a couple of the guard’s less used utility lines really need to have that kind of attention.

Most of the out of WvW achievements, even hardest ones take less than a year of grinding. Open world – Slayer is annoying on giants only (1 long achievement which, if necessary you can grind out in a month). Bioluminescence is a week or two. Weapon Master is not overly long, just mind numbingly boring if you decide to grind it out. Dungeons – dungeon master is a matter of a week. The new one that requires every piece of gear from every dungeon is the only one that takes time. Yes there are a few categories which are annoying altogether (rare collections), but most achievement categories have one or two long ones, and the rest are doable in a few days.

Let’s be honest, any reasonable achievement system will award the achievements to the people way before they spend 2-3 years playing that game mode.

After reading thru all these comments it seems that everyone overlooks the main reason LOS was enforced on ACs and that was because of payers taking advantage of the new camara system and using AC to hit every inch inside a Tower. Unfortunately that fix also screwed ACs defensive value. A fix for the camara system should have been made instead, after all, OP eles can still meteor spots where they should not be able to if they had LOS on their skills. Rangers also can barrage beyond LOS it seems. So if the camara system cant be adjusted to prevent this LOS should be applied to all player skills also.

If a server holes up in a tower defending it they surrender all the surrounding territory to the attacker. All the attacker has to do is setup trebuchets. If they have a counter treb in the tower you build two trebs on opposite sides of the tower. One counter treb can’t defend against that.
The attacking force has the advantage of being able to resupply while keeping the defending force inside the tower. You don’t send everyone to get supply. Keep it to 5 people max per run and prepare the treb spots to counter rushes against them, positioning the main force to respond to either treb.

Anyway now that ANET did this they need to make tops of walls safer by implementing collision detection for AOE hits. Any AOE cast against the side of the wall should never damage someone on top of the wall. Projectiles at targets on top are fine.

I love these “can I get into T1” threads!

First of all it shows how broken Anet allowed the servers to become, getting players to stack into the top 3-4 servers.

And the typical excuse of “I want to play with my friend”, is yet again hilarious! You dont see such tantrums on other games, yet here it’s like they think it’s their right to get into T1, like there isnt another tier available. :P

Anet waited too long to lock servers this way, and by still charging gems for transfers after PvE gets megaservers, it’s just another slap in the face for WvW players.

But although I laugh at them I am getting tired of seeing them. A mod really need to make a stick saying Full servers are full for a reason, select another server!

Don’t be a baby.

That’s really the biggest thing. Your attitude effects everything. There will be times when people don’t want to follow you, because either youre bad or they dont know you or theyre roamers. There will be times you lose / wipe. There will be times you cant be effective because you are outnumbered, or because people didnt listen.

The minute you start complaining, you don’t deserve to wear the tag. A commander has zero business complaining because his negativity effects everyone. Be up-beat, positive, win, lose, die, respawn. Tag up when you want, tag down when you want, dont worry too much about finding a replacement because when you get good, no one will want to tag up after you, and staying tagged up when you’d rather not be will just burn you out.

Agree on max bagspace.

If you aren’t talking on the server’s official TS, you aren’t commanding anything, you are just some pug with his pve-commander tag on.

I am in a large T1 guild and most of my experience differs from yours. I get asked for my mortar water. My pin, when I am not pinned, loves my low cool down EG Fumigate that converts condition to boons. They love my ability to stomp with elixir S.

Maybe you need to educate others about what you can do to aid them. We set an entire mid line group to support the front line and protect the backline.

By the way, why do you assume T8 is full of scrubs? How long were you on a T8 server to make that claim?

Sure, the profession can use some work and benefiting changes, but making your post is such a combative and accusatory manner doesn’t help your case.

Besides, I solo camps faster then any of those other professions, which is benifitial as all get out, and I find dispatching those thieves that try to gank back liners or random trying to get somewhere to be very good at making everyone happy.

I find the engineer to be ideal for roaming thieves and mesmers that give others trouble. I wish I got a title for being such a good destroyer of stealth spammers.

So I know this has been suggested numerous times, but the only way to get change is to stick with it and constantly ask for change.

For those who don’t know, WvW has many dedicated players. Although Anet may not believe it, there are many who pretty much only wvw. Sure some people will do a dungeon or some spvp in the downtime, but there are many who play wvw for 90% of their game time, and some who literally never leave.

The reason I am saying this is that for players like this, and myself, it gets expensive. Buying food, siege, armor, etc. over and over and for others gets really really expensive. And wvw is the only gamemode in the game atm where you will actually lose gold over time as you play it. Heck, just playing dungeon runner for an hour will give you more gold/loot than a weekends worth of wvw.

So because of this, I want to ask for reward tracks. There are a ton of posts about this thoughout this forums history, but lets get this idea back out front now that devs seem to be actually posting on the WvW forum.

The rewards don’t need to be great, but even just getting armor/weapon boxes like spvp or siege or mats for food or any number of things would be great.
I can see a reward track for food mats, one for siege, one for armor, and one for just general champ bags. Make each tier for x amount of captures or kills or upgrading an objective or for every point of supply spent, just anything. I know there is room for exploits so it can be tough to balance, but just about any rewards for the devotion many of us give to this game would be awesome.

Heck just let me trade my badges of honor for real loot and I will be happy. Please Anet, give us something to help counteract the cost of wvw.
Thanks!

Acrisor.8097:

Coming up next, without a GW2 tattoo on right hand accounts will be limited.

This hand of mine is burning red …

Risingashes.8694:

I’ve seen a few people on reddit who claim to have achieved T4 or T5 of some of the achievements. I find this unlikely due to hypothetical times involved, but if it’s true I think you shouldn’t reduce the maximum number needed for each achievement below what people have already reached.

Reducing below current levels is very disrespectful and unnessesary as it’s clearly achievable at whatever level someone has already achieved.

I hope you guys learnt your lesson from the Fractured debacle, reducing players progress without even a slither of recognition isn’t the way to restructure a system.

Back when you guys capped the salvaging achievement, you left in the repeat counter. As someone who had over 10k AP taken away, that small mark of respect and consideration was amazing for me.

I don’t think scaling the new achievement requirements based on the level of outlying grinder players is a particularly good idea, particularly for something like Yakslapper which requires no talent whatsoever beyond the ability to waste a colossal amount of your time. 2500 yaks is still quite a large number for reasonable players.

Reward tracks for participation. More or less based off what you participated in.

And yes lets hope those PVEers come! Cause we all started somewhere!

You can’t have it both ways:
Theres no one to WvW with, our timezones are empty

We dont want those PVEers they don’t know what they are doing

I have such simple words here.

Train the ones that care. Get them to stay, give consistent! Good! rewards. They will then come, stay, and not just pop in and out for events.

WvW should create a line of weapon skins or gear based on WvW rank. Gold, Platinum, Diamond, and Mithril are great rank titles but I’d like to have a shot at a Legendary maybe. An exclusive backpiece or weapon skin or unique piece of armor that can only be acquired in WvW and only available based on your rank.

PVP has the progression of stomps. Dragon being the top. So why not set us hardcore WvWers up with something people can’t buy or make anywhere else?

Jayne.9251:

I’d recommend going to www.gw2wvw.net and just reading the forum match threads to get an idea of server, um, personality.

What you see in those threads, trolls aside, is pretty much what you’ll see in map chat.

That site is probably the last one i would recommend people to look up for server communities. Nothing but cowpoo all over the place.

this EoTM bashing really needs to stop. If you never go there because its too ‘kitten’, then you shouldn’t be qualified to say what EoTM is or isn’t.

for the record, I play both. And quite frankly, I get into more fights in EoTM than i do in WvW, on average. And EoTM is populated at any hour, at least for my server (BG). Do people ktrain there? Sure they do. But i see the exact same thing in WvW, where the 80% of the blob moves to an unguarded keep to flip anyway. Or hides siege in an semi exploitable spot to stealth cap….or has the mesmer stealth port to get easy captures to avoid fights. Isn’t that ktraining just under a different guise?

Yes, some fights in Eotm are lopsided due to uplevels. But not all. And usually these lopsided fights are caused by the so-called ‘zerg busters’ guild groups that have to boost their ego in EoTM by farming uplevels and such.

And again, I play both. I roam in both. I zerg in both. I look for fights. I flip keeps/supply/etc. Depends on the commander on the types of fights you get in either place. Both do the ktrain, only many of the WvW folks try to hide that fact for some reason.

The only differences I have witnessed between EoTM and WvW, the score doesnt count in Eotm and elistist folks in WvW scream and yell at folks for being <80 level.

briggah.7910:

msalakka.4653:

It’s not a change of perception. Anet thinks EotM is WvW. So it makes sense to provide them a rationalized reason as to why doing this makes sense and is a good idea for them, while really, we just want the freeloaders to not kitten up our WvW more than it already is.

Anet knows the difference. They even stated that EoTM will not be counted towards WvW population because it is not the same WvW experience.

Then Anet should also know that not being able to properly work with a team in wvw being able to use team chat, whisper commanders, donate siege to the server commanders and work with the tag is also not providing the same wvw experience and takes up a place on the map that could be better used by someone who can properly participate in the match in progress. It is a burden to the server, not a benefit to have players who are unable to properly work with their server on their server maps taking up space that could be used by someone who can.

EoTM is the future of wvw. It is their testing grounds for wvw and until they put something else in there to test, that is what we can expect to see. WvW players hating it is beside the point of what it actually is supposed to be.

Won’t work at all except for one exception.

Population differences between servers (even those adjacent in ratings) are so wide that you’ll just have servers bouncing from steamrolling into first place one week and getting smashed to bits the following week. Meanwhile, the number two server stays number two every single week.

The one exception is when one server implodes or gets bandwagoned. This’ll move them into proper position faster. But is that worth unbalancing every matchup every week?