Guild Wars 2

There’s 2 problems with jumping puzzles:

1. Some of them are needed for map completion
2. The achievement for doing them doesn’t mean anything because most of the people do them with mesmer portals

No reason at all to remove them from the game though since many people still enjoy them

Marmatt I commend you in taking on this task. And I do agree that population/coverage imbalance is one of the main issues of WvW.

You may now see the difficulty in addressing this issue, just look at this thread. For every person A who suggests something; there is Group B who agrees and Group C who disagrees, sometimes vehomently. Much of page 2 is a few people discussing back and forth about a suggestion and disagreeing about it.

Let’s look at your initial thoughts about ideas for dealing with this issue.
_Popular ideas-

A) Population reductions
B) Server Merging
C) A reward system (similar to the PvP reward track) based on the duration of a player’s stay on a single server.
D) Battle Groups (mentioned in the first link)
E) Better rewards for doing WvW_

• A) and B) and D) Some people think yes lets do this. Others loathe the idea.
• C) I think most people would accept this idea but it depends on how it is implemenetd of course. If it draws in PvE achievemnt hunters that don’t actually do WvW except kill NPC’s and Karma train then people hate it.
• E) I think just about everyone agrees that it would be nice to have better WvW rewards. Again though, it can’t be rewards for capping a point or killing NPC’s like EToM or WvW may turn into one big Karma train where everyone avoids fights and I think just about everyone agrees that would be terrible.

I think this disagreement among players is the reason Anet has not done anything about the issue. No matter what they do, a permanent change to try to address this issue is going to upset people.

Notice the word “permanent” in my statement above. And I think this is an important point that needs to be brought to Anet. What if they made “non-permanent” changes for a period of time – like the PPK and no white swords sneak attack test?

Change something for a month. It would add variety to WvW. But even if you dislike the change, its only temporary. I think even the players who didn’t like the sound of PPK and no white swords weren’t up in arms about the temporary test. How would the players feel about that?

But it couldn’t be 6 months between the tests. Make it every month, or with a week or two in between of “regular” WvW.

I don’t know what changes are technically possible to do like this but I think anything they can do to spice up WvW and attempt to mitigate population imbalance would be good.

TLDR; I think temporary changes similar to the PPK and white sword sneak attack are the way to go. I would suggest a proposal to Anet to do frequent temporary changes to attempt to mitigate the population/coverage imbalance issue. Have tests that last a month and if it turns out to be a terrible idea then its gone in a month. But if it turns out to be great – it could be perhaps added permanently.

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

If you have permanents jst running by is a waste of your actual buy… anything you harvest is a return on your harvesting tool…

Well the seconds you will spend on harvesting the mostly worthless node is seconds away from doing something more productive. Apparently many people think harvesting the cacti just isn’t worth the time.

Please realize this is the first report, and many more are to come from this one. I will be reviewing past reports in order to update them in the future in order to add certain concerns, or idea’s that the community feels needs to be added.

Next Weeks Topic: Siege Trolling
Please feel free to give feedback on this report, and ideas for next weeks topic.

Cheers!

Issue: Unbalanced WvW matchup
Thread links:
(1) https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Solution-to-fix-the-population-imbalance *
(2) https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Completely-Unbalanced-WvW-matchups/first
(3) https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/WvW-balance-limited-resources
(4) https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Clever-solution-for-imbalance-wvw
(5) https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/please-put-auto-balance-into-EOTM (for future reports)
(6) https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Community-Standards-Mass-Server-Transfers/first#post4790876
I linked these threads due to the amount of “constructive criticism” present. Below you will see quotes from different users that I’ve found to be the most enlightening on the subject of balance when matching up servers in WvW.

• Nativity.3057 “….Shift the idea of GW2 endgame from fractals to WvW Let’s be completely honest, GW2 lacks “endgame” unlike other MMOs (cough WoW). The game’s name has “war” in it, why not focus on that aspect? While making WvW endgame might result in server stacking (players wanting endgame equips quicker by joining servers that are winning WvW battles), actions can be taken to prevent this. One would be to prohibit server transfers to same tier servers. Another idea would be to handicap the server that is in first place (and stays in the same tier). If the server stays in first with the handicap (handicaps will increase with each win), the rewards for winning increases as well.”
• Smooth Penguin.5294 “They can’t combine servers, because in the event that there’s a mass influx of new WvW players, the combined servers won’t have space to hold them all. The best option at the moment is to keep the servers as they are, and just try to give more incentive for PvE players to WvW more often.”
• Rimmy.9217 “Dropping map population caps to sixty or even forty would probably nudge that along, even if the map caps were only temporary. If player population is a fluid (which it’s not), then rather than the hydraulic despotism of hoarding it all in one place it should be left to to spread out. A large group of people have more fun in a wide seven-meter deep pool than in a single-lane pool that’s thirty meters deep. And more matchups without population imbalances means more fun for more people – fun in a game, if you can believe it. It will also mean that players new to WvW will find an active scene regardless of which server they’re on. It will also lead to more matchup variability, which is definitely a good thing. And finally, it’ll mean that being in the top three means more than “we out-blobbed the other servers”. There will have to be a hint of skill in there too.”

-Popular ideas-
A) Population reductions
B) Server Merging
C) A reward system (similar to the PvP reward track) based on the duration of a player’s stay on a single server.
D) Battle Groups (mentioned in the first link)
E) Better rewards for doing WvW

Based on the communities responses approximately: (posts on subject)
57.73% suggested for better rewards (101)
15.24% suggested server merging (26)
12.08% suggested population reductions (17)
10.32% suggested battle groups (18)
4.63% other (8)

Based on the statistics above, it can be postulated that earning better rewards in WvW seems to be the general consensus for getting new players to join WvW. Having new, and improved rewards will help bring PvE players into WvW to help establish WvW as a form of end-game content. This could eliminate some issues of barren servers, with this influx of new players. Merging servers could be put into place after the revamp of rewards in order to help servers who still need help “refreshing” their WvW populous. Population cap reduction, however, has been vigorously stated by the community as a form of containment for the unbalanced match-ups. An opposing argument has been made, although, stating that creating a lower population cap in the WvW maps could lead to extremely high queue times in higher server tiers. This brings up the point of differentiating map caps, based on that server’s population. I digress, the main points that have been made have been to either “revamp” existing rewards to pull PvE players back into WvW, or to merge servers in order to collect the few players in the barren servers in order to allow for more balanced gameplay in the lower tiers.

Not everyone is in favor of just putting wvw rewards on par with pve/pvp the main reason being that many do not want wvw to become eotm. Basically turned into a karma/champ/exp farm, many in the wvw community despise eotm and the pve’ers that go there because of their lazy entitled attitude and aversion to fighting in a pvp map in favor of unobstructed farming.

Giving Incentive to players to go into wvw is not easy, and being a former guild leader I can tell you some people just will not step foot outside the citadel and see a borderland as something to quickly map for world completion or to use the bank/guild vendor/la asura gate. The problem here is, as we have seen in the past with AP during seasons rewards and pve players going into wvw can cause a lot of friction with WvW guilds, yes the maps are open to everyone but this is not something that should be ignored or pretend it does not happen. The other problem is, that many who just go to wvw for rewards is that they finish and leave, they didnt stay to help with anything, they didnt stay to learn tactics, or learn about siege etc. This is easily seen with dailies.

What I think would be a good idea as has been proposed numerous times is a wvw reward track where anything that rewards wxp would progress the track, but the rewards should not be similar to pvp/pve rewards, it should be specific to wvw. It could reward superior siege, ascended materials, badges of honor, maybe champ bags and tomes of knowledge and maybe a few unique skins at the END of the track to deter farming.

Or how about you put your money where your mouth is and applied when Anet was actually accepting them rather than blowing hot air now after the fact?

People should be applauding Marmatt for putting his hand up to deal with this nest of vipers

Oh boy! You mean I get to pay more of my gold to experience my horrible RNG luck?! FUN TIMES! Yeah…fun…times…

Spooksie.4930:

O.O

Wow? Those kinds of shenanigans are that pervasive?

I guess that answers my question on whether or not the mode is worth playing.

Servers have been buying guilds for a while, the end game is 9 servers full of players and 15 barren wastelands full of people screaming “SERVER PRIDE”.

HoT may slow or hasten the process.

Yes, this is normal currently. Servers pay for guilds to come over, pay for people to sit in towers, give people legenedaries as bonuses if they bring their whole guild.. yup. Currently that is how this works, and yes it would be great if we could solve the imbalances issues so this would not be considered the " norm".

Hopefully eventually they will solve this problem one day. ( looks back over at my rants on this subject…) More Player skill less pay to win please.

@Synosius.9876:
I don’t think the idea is too complicated. But maybe I didn’t explain it well enough.

The part about the rewards is actually nothing the player has to worry about. The bigger and better the thing you capture or defend, the better the reward. That’s quite easy to understand I think.

The other part is supply. Let’s not hang up on details. Those need testing and balancing anyway. But the main idea is, that fortifications slowly decay. The goal is, that the better populated server, which holds most likely more structures, also needs more supply to keep the structures in tact. Supply may be “broing” (I see that differently), but I believe it would be a good way to keep a balance. I have not been a commander myself though. But teaching ppl that supply has more function than building siege (what is the function 99% of the time, when I run with a zerg) would be a necessity in my proposal.

But as the idea of Svarty.8019 shows, there are other ideas to balance. Balancing through a limited resource, which is spread thinner the more people try to use it and the more fortifications you actually have, would be imho a good way to decrease the gap between servers with different numbers of players.

I was thinking a bit more about WvW balance. Being on FSP I don’t have the feeling that fights are massively unbalanced… well at times it is but over all it seems fine there to me. However, I see often threads about unbalanced matches due to player population imbalance. So I was thinking:

Limit supply
What if we let balance follow a limited resource. This resource would be supply. Rethinking how supply is… well supplied might help. Supply would only come from camps (as it is now), but it would be generated much slower. Dollies would transport supply generated in camp. I mean really generated supply. Not just spawn with supply, but spawn and then carry 35 of the previous (for example) 100 supply. Leaving the camp with only 65 left. This is meant to slow down supply production and make supply production vulnerable to roamers. Empty camps wouldn’t be able to transport any supply and either the dolly waits for 35 supply in camp or just walk with the supply that is there (not sure here). This may make roaming play more effective for the over all match outcome and would make dolly defending necessary, if you don’t wanna lose that 35 supply for your server to a singly roamer. On the other hand upgrading supply camps would work without the use of supply (to avoid supply usage conflicts). Tower upgrades still would need supply.

Decay
Another thing that could be introduced is decay. Decay of player armor as well as decay of fortifications. Armor decay would result (after having received a certain number of hits – maybe tracked with a stacking decay icon) in gradual loss of player armor points (marginal, but it would accumulate). A player can then repair the armor by spending his supply with a button next to it on top of the screen or by returning to the spawn.
Fortification decay would in a very slow rate lower wall and gate HP and needs a repair “upgrade”. Players can also manually put supply in the wall/gate to repair it. NPCs also would use up supply (role play wise for food and medicine) and constantly lower supply reserves. More NPCs would lower supply reserves quicker. Siege would also suffer from decay. Siege would have no refresh timer any more, but would also decay and be in need of repair.
The outnumbered buff would prevent player armor decay.

New reward system
I would also tie rewards to supply stealing/destroying/defending as well as upgrade level. This means, capturing/defending a low tier fortification with no supply would give only a marginal reward in terms of karma, money and drop quality/quantity. A fully supplied (at beginning of defending/attacking event, which only ends 5? min after attack actually ended), fully upgraded fortification on the other hand would offer much better rewards for attackers and defenders. Killing dollies with supply would give a reward tied to the amount of supply (players wouldn’t see how much supply a hostile dolly carries). Player kill rewards would not be tied to how much supply they carry for it doesn’t destroy or steal the supply.

Aim of that system
This proposal follows the idea that with more soldiers in a war and better, bigger fortifications the need for supply rises. This would lower a bit the number advantage of a better populated server. Farming an empty server on the other hand with fortifications in a bad condition gives less reward than capturing high tier fortifications and may be a way to answer the population imbalances on low tier servers. I have no dreams of this system fixing everything. But I believe it could lower the gap between certain unbalanced matches. What do you guys think?

Anyone else feel like

- there is no siege counter to omega (unlike every other siege)
- render nearly every defense siege useless
- is a slap in the face to any defender
- it’s a pay to win solution

Only requirements to use them is to outnumber your opponents and spend 10s of golds to build them. Then let the karma train begin!

I have been on both side. I have massively used omegas to take fortified keeps and I have lost tons of fortified keeps to omegas.

But really, the biggest problem with them is :

It’s not fun to play with omegas in their current state.

It’s not fun to attack a keep with them because, if you can win the zerg fight than you will cap the keep. It’s guaranteed. You know you outnumber your opponents, you build your omegas and you take the keep. No challenge at all.

The reverse is not fun either. Defending against a big horde that use smart ballista, ram, arrow cart and catapult placement to take down your walls, gates or sieges is fun. Defending against a blob that bring omegas is super boring. Throw siege disabler, attack from top of wall, suicide on it, try to build arrow carts. No matter what you try it’s usually useless the gate will go down and your only option is to have a nice meat grinder ready inside.

Omegas also heavily favored the winning server that field the biggest blobs.

Playing with or against omegas is just not fun.

Svarty.8019:

It’s not my perspective, I’m not fussed what happens. I am just reporting what’s been posted in the Guardian forum since the dawn of the game.

To get pedantic about your point: I don’t see why eles shouldn’t have greatsword, except that you don’t have axes or bows as regular weapons and you do have elemental ones. With guardians, they DO have spirit greatsword, hammer and shield and regular ones of the same types. But like I said, I’m not bothered about what happens, I can’t change anybody’s minds anyway.

Because the FGS gets so stale and I like the look of a GS on my ele
Conjures make the Ele unique, so Ele wouldn’t be able to get any new weapons anyways unless it’s a conjure or a real “magic-ish” weapon like scepter, dagger, focus or staff. :P

It also doesn’t matter, since Anet probably already have finished their designs and ideas.

Junkpile.7439:

You can go train in jumping puzzles so you know how to jump in expansion.

I know how to jump.. the issue is when I call for people to come save hills on our BL, and they said they would rather be set on fire than go to that map you see there is a problem with the map itself.. If people quit the game over a map, and refuse to play on it there is a problem with the map.
People play wvw to fight other players, not play Mario. We can play Mario all we want in obsidian sanctum already.

Altie.4571:

I’m just going to implore the devs right now…

PLEASE don’t make the map similar to EotM in terrain. I don’t want to think about “falling to my death” on every kitten turn, I want a map geared to fight.

Take a page from WoW’s Alterrac Valley map, create natural chokehold points to promote fighting…. don’t don’t DON’T make it a vertical map!

Way too late. They’ve already emphasized, as the main features of the map, the verticality and the environmental traps for knocking people off cliffs. There’s no way they’d make such drastic changes at this point.

I think this will sum things up nicely.

…………………………….Bye!

Can I haz your stuff? ups I mean bye.

Good balance change, goodbye EZ mode ele.

BYE bb’s

Foghladha.2506:

Gaiscioch [GSCH] and several others are still playing our hearts out on Sanctum of Rall, however we’re not playing all the time every day. We have scheduled events when we go out into WvW. The rest of the time we’re doing our own thing whether its pve or wvw or spvp. When we’re out the field doesn’t look like that. Last night for example we were ticking at the high 200’s with Hella Vanka, X P O W E R, Cara, and I running tags together manning all warzones at the same time. We had waypoints in all 3 SOR keeps by the time we signed out.

But that’s just it. On Sanctum of Rall eventually the party stops and people go to bed or do other things. We don’t have coverage every day and it should not be expected of a Tier 3 server let alone a Tier 7 or 8. Sanctum of Rall is a very casual WvW styled approach where scheduled events get our largest turnouts. If you want hard core fighting SOR is not the place to be. Those of us who remain here and call it home are happy where we are and are having fun doing what we can when we can. We don’t expect to be the best, we only want to come out and have fun when we can.

So many people are so high strung about this it makes me scratch my head. It’s a GAME, it’s supposed to be FUN. If you’re not having fun change the way you’re playing or who you’re playing with. People just need to relax and get back to having fun.

Thing is that for some people fun is in the competition that wvw has the potential to bring. So when you say people need to have fun after two paragraphs about how apathetic SoR is regarding wvw it’s hard to imagine it being a fun place EXCEPT when your map blob is running. Otherwise everyone is just getting rolled over.

the first rule of WvW:

Coverage wins WvW.

Voidrunner.5093:

Im sure Anet will do something about it

hahahahahaha

oh, you

Its been a long standing joke that they do have a dev team for wvw… Except it’s only one person and usually they last about six months before disappearing from the forums.

I’m starting to think that there is no WvW dev team. Look at everything that has launched for 2014. What has really been launched? A new PvE map (although that work was really done in 2013) and another mastery skill.

It seems as if ANET has decided to focus on other areas.

Does anet just want me to suck it up, and wait?
Does anet want me to switch servers?
Does anet want me to quit playing?

What the hell are you guys doing? Are you going to fix wvw or not?
These unbalanced matchups have to stop! Can I at least get a dev to tell me I have a reason to believe that wvw will be fun again? That this game will be fun…

I have been playing gw for 10 years, and this is the first time I have felt this level of hopelessness. There have been periods where I got burnt out, but this is not burn out, this is terrible game play. I mean I hated factions, but at least I could play other content to keep me busy while I waited for nightfall to come out. All of the content in this so call open world is too boring to repeat, there is no reward in repeating it.

I joined a wvw specific guild, and for a month we had open field battles and I was re-invigorated into the game. But then the unbalanced matchups started occurring EVERY SINGLE WEEK! and the wvw guild fell apart, and eventually disbanded.
I am not having fun anymore.

Gaile Gray, I have some nostalgia from hearing your name, I equate you to gw1 and the fun times I had at your going away party/event. Please tell me I have a reason to keep playing this game. CD should not be matched up with HOD and BP