Guild Wars 2

I agree AND disagree
I do agree on the part that many recent jumping puzzles are more random/trial-and-error based than they are logic based.
The idea of a jumping puzzle is that it should be clearable if you use logic (next to your jumping skills) but the recent ones don’t challenge your thinking ability, just your patience.

#5. The news channel

We need to talk about WvW. We need to know what is going on in our server, in our match up and in other servers. We need to know about the drama in other servers, which server is imploding, which server is getting bandwagoned. Which server is doing great and which one is doing poorly and why. We need to know what is going on in WvW.

It’s like having an election where no one is allowed to talk about it. It doesn’t make sense.

We all know that the match up forum got closed because it was full of hate post, insults and uncivilized conversations. I don’t think that reopening it would be any different sadly. But the point still stand that WvW needs to be talked about. Players have the right to be informed about what is happening.

My suggestion is to create a news channel just like we watch on our TV. Basically, appoint a bunch of journalists, aka willing players, that will gather the interesting news and present it to the rest of the player base in a format that is not “toxic”. These journalists would be allowed to post as much as they want about what’s going on in WvW.

Yes, I know, it’s a strange suggestion. I don’t even know if it would work. But I firmly believe that WvW needs to be talked about for it to be healthy. So, if you have a better suggestion please step up.

Conclusion

I expressed a view that I have rarely seen in this game or on this forum. I figure that most of you must be scratching your head right now wondering what the hell I’m talking about and that’s fine.

It’s hard to define WvW and define what it needs because everyone plays it differently. To do so, you need to take many steps back and try to look at the global picture.

I see WvW as a political campaign because at the end of the day the server with the most players and most coverage will practically always win. So, the path to victory is basically to convince more players than your opponents to play for you. I find it pretty similar to what politicians do during elections.

Tell me, how do you see WvW?

So many people want to “fix” WvW. But if you don’t know what WvW is, how can you fix it?

At the macro level, WvW is a political campaign.

Every week your goal is to convince as many players as possible to come “vote” for your server by showing up in WvW. The server with the most “vote” win.

Often, you will see players complain that WvW is not fair that other server has too many players. Indeed, it’s not fair but deal with it. If you can’t convince players to show up for your server, it simply means that you failed at WvW. Sorry to point it… The good news is that it doesn’t mean you don’t have fun even if you lose!

The political campaign is currently broken

Sadly, the political campaign doesn’t work at the moment and hence WvW suffer a lot. It has lost its soul.

Below, I will explain why it’s currently broken and how we can fix it.

#1 You need to have an identity

This is the most crucial point ever. How can you convince someone to play for you, when you don’t have an identity. Who will he be fighting for? The alliance of server A, B and C that will be destroyed in a few weeks? No one has an identity anymore since server link. Not the host that need their links to perform and even less the linked servers that even lost their name.

Sure, something needed to be done about empty low tier server but server link was not the right solution. Since I experienced it myself, a server with low population is not a problem as the game is still fun even if you only have 30 players total instead of 200. The problem is when you ask those 30 players to cover as much objectives as 200 players can. You can’t stretch 30 players on four big WvW maps and hope it doesn’t feel empty.

A better solution than server link would have been to change the number of map depending on the population in each tier. For example, tier 1 have four maps they can play in while the bottom tier only has one map they can play in. You can see going up in tier as a reward since you get access to more map. Another solution would have been simple server merge.

#2. Server transfer is normal, even desired

This will be my most controversial point but bear with me.

The “game” in WvW is literally about convincing as many players as possible to fight for your server. To “win”, you must play it like a politician trying to get votes. Would it makes sense if every voters that wanted to changed their votes to you would have to pay hundred of dollars to be able to change their vote.

Changing your mind and wanting something else is normal, as is server transfer. Just accept it. Trying to put too much barrier on server transfer will only hurt WvW as you can’t play its main “game”, which is convincing players to come play for you, if they can’t transfer to you easily. Sure, transfer should not be totally free but the cost should be more symbolic.

#3. Randomness is not good

Would it make sense to you if during an election you were told to come vote for the candidate of your choice, but then, at the end of the election we would discard all the votes and just roll a dice to determine the winner?

Surely, you would wonder why you even bothered to vote at all since it doesn’t really matter.

Well, that’s exactly the problem we have right now in WvW. At the end of each match up we roll a dice to determine who win the match up and get the chance to move up a tier. It’s ridiculous…

Initially, this randomness was introduced to help with match up staleness and glicko hell, but it was not the right solution. If there was a problem with glicko, you should have fixed glicko instead of introducing a new problem.

#4. Get rid of glicko

It doesn’t work. Glicko is not a good ranking system for WvW. The ratings change too slowly for the change in population. It also creates all sorts of other problems like big gap between tier that you can’t overcome. Don’t try to adapt it either, just drop it.

Designing a good ranking system for WvW is not hard and there is even a multitude of possibilities. Here are three rules that will help you design a good ranking system :

• Rule 1 : If a server completely dominates the other servers in its tier, it should move up.
• Rule 2 : If a server is completely destroyed by the other servers in its tier, it should move down
• Rule 3 : If a tier is competitive, no server should move UNLESS there is a great imbalance in the thier right above or below this one. (see first 2 rules)

The exact details of this ranking system don’t really matter but if you follow theses three rules it will be good enough.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

“Normal MMO content”? What exactly is that?

That’s content that includes, and only includes, content that a particular player enjoys. Nothing they do not, personally, enjoy. =P

The jumping puzzles are fine.

Sure they’ve slightly gone up in length/complexity but that’s not a bad thing. It’s just not your thing.

Dawdler.8521:

Chinchilla.1785:

The benefit of daily reset is to reduce snowballing caused by coverage, and having another chance for a different match up for shorter increments. That’d be about it.

And how exactly does it reduce snowballing caused by coverage? The server with the nightcrew will literally win every matchup if it’s a daily reset. Is that a reduction in snowballing caused by coverage?

If this system was so great, EoTM would dominate WvW. It doesnt. Because short matchups become totally meaningless and even during those 4h, coverage and the dominating server snowballing points is still everything.

Snowballing in this context is the T3 structures that were “night capped” that get carried over into “prime time.” If we assume the current reset time was for every day this would be less of an issue. So, the NA/EU prime time doesn’t have to deal with flipping their home borderland’s T3 Garrison or spawn keep in ebg all because of lapses in coverage.

It doesn’t solve coverage. You will never solve coverage unless your game’s session is equivalent to the average player’s session (probably 30 minutes-2 hours max). Longer play sessions lead to player burnout if you don’t believe tournaments were an indicator of that. Of course, tournaments had an illusion of meaningful rewards so people pushed themselves over to only quit forever.

EoTM’s biggest issue is the map. Idk how many actively play it, nor do we know how many actively play ‘normal WvW.’ So let’s not try to state it as proof of anything in regards to activity, yes?

There looks like there’s a alot of confusion what roaming is. And take the negativity with a grain of salt lolz peeps take this way to seriously. Anyways here’s my way too indepth explanation.

Theres 2 types havocing and roaming

Well first off roaming is small very small 1-4 peeps usually lightly or unorganized, usually just friends looking for fights, can they be effective? Well ya a few ways

1st they can back cap objectives,

2nd they can frustrate maps, I’ve personally had a ebg zerg come after me and my one friend since we were on a roll and capping and killing everything, lots of hate pms there. Which is great cause it can take the pressure off of the main tags in other maps

3 going for the sniping/gank when their tag is attacking an objective, think of ambushing the enemy to prevent reinforcements, if you show you are decent enough tags will occasionally ask you to do your thing and help out

Finally roaming is hella fun, I’ve made some good friends on enemy servers just cause we enjoyed the fight. Spent many a day just milling about chating and dueling. A bit more rare these days cause everyone’s getting more and more toxic as Anet’s been weak with the updates, (for cats sakes it’s been a year since they promised an overhaul and passing things out in phases)

Now on the down side has roaming got wayyy harder well yes, back in the day due to the less boons and restriction of stats, very limited non cc aoe and less reset buttons 2-3 good full zero players could wipe zergs

Since the condi change and elite specs it’s kitten near impossible to lazer a decent tag who’s in to as all the members have perma everything which means you cant cc, or do enough damage, not to mention whenever you down someone mercy guards and ect can install red them. it can still happen but it’s hard and thus roaming has been nerfed.

Now for the more effective havoc. Well havocing is 5-10 super organized guilds, think mini fight guilds, who aggressively hit objectives either ppting, fighting, or zergbusting. They can be super effective, laying waste and building off each others builds, and generally can do whatever “roamers” or on the other hand what zergs do just way more efficiently. Although sometimes you get the baddies who organize and just gank solo roamers

Now to roaming guild and havoc guild can be one in the same, for example my guild is usually very loose and disorganized, on rare occasions when my guild leader is on and my guild decides to actually play a Comp, we can do some pretty crazy fights, and I’d say last year we were in our prime and even took on a few fight guilds, now due to the absence of certain key players we’re now very loose roamers with varying degrees of skill. Some are good some are well leave much to be desired.

Anyways I hope this helps

EremiteAngel.9765:

I think WvW would be fine as long as we can spread out the active and skilled guilds evenly across different servers so that there will always be competitive fights around.

Unfortunately, the playerbase is actively trying to do the exact opposite. And short of dissolving all the servers and reshuffling everyone more evenly, linking is the best Anet can really do.

Svarty.8019:

FlOwMaKeRs.8623:

XenesisII.1540:

Just wondering what type of big changes are you expecting?

What do you think?

EVERYTHING THE COMMUNITY HAS SUGGESTED SINCE BETA.

In fairness, they did a lot of changes to desert and some of those came from the forum.

iirc, most of the things added to WvW since launch were things players wanted (or thought they wanted), and that includes the DBL itself.

FlOwMaKeRs.8623:

XenesisII.1540:

Just wondering what type of big changes are you expecting?

What do you think?

EVERYTHING THE COMMUNITY HAS SUGGESTED SINCE BETA.

I DON’T KNOW HOW ABOUT SUGGESTING SOMETHING YOURSELF!

P.S WHY ARE WE SHOUTING IN TEXT!

P.P.S IF YOU IMPLEMENT EVERYTHING SINCE BETA THE GAME WOULD BE A TERRIBLE MISHMASH OF A MODE BECAUSE CRAZY PEOPLE ALSO POST IDEAS IN HERE!

Having played FF, I wonder why they can’t just let us level every job on a single character.

The first game had a secondary profession system where you could pick up pretty much anything from another profession and meld it with your primary.

The least they could do for the second game is to let us learn and switch professions, as long as you have to level all of them from level 1 that’s not much different from having alts, with all the things that are already shared between an account’s characters.

The only issue is that character slots would suddenly less attractive, so they would probably have to sell the option on the gem store.

An hour into reset, YB had 4 maps queued and a total of 95 waiting in Queue. BG had 4 maps queued as well. Meanwhile, we had 3 maps queued and our worlds locked, as usual.

This nanny state they created is a horrible design for what’s supposed to be a competitive mode.

Seasniffer.1763:

We’re doing poorly because BG recruited quite a bit and FC is a THICC link and the YB population is finally coming out to play. Showing the weaknesses with the link system. JQ experienced this a few weeks ago when we were paired with SoR and AR. The link system is a terrible system and needs to be reworked ASAP.

What other system would fix that? Anet can’t account for sleeping populations in any system, we all don’t know when they would return, if they return. Can’t really complain about BG recruit when it’s stated in this thread JQ just recruited 300 players a few weeks ago (an exaggerated amount I’m sure, but still). We could complain for them to lower the population threshold yet again.

Most times players will come out to play if there’s commanders around. We see this with DK or Cloudfly when they take a break, their followers take a break of sorts too, if servers want keep up momentum, gotta get more commanders out there.

Lastly there’s ups and downs with populations and participation, don’t know why people expect servers to maintain full service and high level of play all the time, just relax not like JQ is falling to tier 4, twelve hours after a reset.

Lastly, lastly… matchup thread.

i only gank daily people if they attack me or take my tower >:(!

They do scale, it’s just that low level events are scaled for low level players. A zerg of 80s in a level 80 zone is already doing over 4x their individual damage, hence the broken scaling in general, and it only gets worse at lower levels. The problem is, who do they balance for? Zerkers doing 2x the damage with another 4x on top of that from group buffs? That’s why scaling will always be broken, since there’s a huge gap in power.

If they were to buff the lower levels, they’re going to nerf you by further reducing your stats while downscaled.

I second this motion.

This, and the change of daily events from region wide daily events to single map daily events is the reason why I stopped doing this daily unless it’s on a high level map. Packing everyone and their dog on a single map causes friction and arguments as events end almost as soon as they begin and while people are still running to reach them.

My vote

1) change daily events back to region wide to spread out people so everyone isn’t on the same map and events aren’t being swamped by hordes of people trying to do them.
2) better scaling so that event mobs aren’t being instantly killed at spawn by people standing at spawn points and spamming aoe.

xikira.3264:

Resistance is important for the health of wvw. If anything needs to be nerfed it is conditions over all. Resistance is one of the few things that semi help fight the condition cancer.

2 sides to every argument. I’d also argue that the current condition meta is a result of zergs running super tanky, forcing power setups into redundancy. It is the only counter to it. If you nerf condi, then nothing will stop tank/sustain meta.

Sylent.3165:

We all know necro/reaper and ranger overall always seem to be rated the best at soloing but truth be told I’ve played enough of each of those classes.

I kinda tried a condition daredevil which seemed really strong but couldn’t solo champions I could on my necro.

So I’m looking for a new solo class to tackle hot maps and events with ease

So other then necro and ranger who do you think wins with the best soloing capabilities with what kind of build?

Warrior, with adrenal healing, is reportedly extremely good at soloing things. My own experience is that this is a little true, but also, it’s a very different way to handle it than on necro or ranger.

So, I think that’s probably what you are after. I’d point to metabattle PvP and WvW builds as the way to get started: they focus on “not dying” stats and utilities, unlike the glass cannon PvE builds.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Auto-deposit would be convenient, but bad for the game.

Spirit shards are automatically deposited into inventory after dropping from mobs and as a result, barely anyone realizes that they drop at all..

And yet they still drop? And you still get them. Not sure how that’s bad. It’s one of those features that would clearly be an option for people, I personally don’t bother to check what materials I get from salvaged/bags so it would be another lazy man’s feature.

We’re going to go ahead and close this thread, as match-up threads are not permitted on the forums.

djemben.6924:

The concept makes absolutely no sense. Why not just not give us that gold in the first place? By not giving it to us, and not taking it away, it’s two less things to worry about.

So, this is more or less MMO economics 101, but … if we went with your theory, and didn’t have anything that removed gold from the economy, you have one of two things happen:

Thing one, players can “create” gold out of thin air. When they kill a goblin, it drops newly minted gold, which the player then has. The can spend it, or save it, but ultimately the amount of gold floating around increases, right?

So, by changing the amount of gold that drops changes the slope of the line of the amount of money in the economy, but with nothing to consume it, the amount just moves around and around. That line keeps going up and up as time passes — inflation.

Thing two, players can’t create gold, just move it around. So, if a critter is gonna have some sort of reward, it’s gotta come from somewhere. Once the very first players have looted the dungeon, where is the reward for the next person to come from?

So, that’s why it can’t work. Unless money goes out somewhere — a money sink — you end up with inflation running rampant. Over time the cost of everything necessarily goes up, because everyone has more gold, blah blah. It kinda sucks. (Also, this is why in WoW the price of everything is in gold, and copper and silver coins are just noise — inflation made them worthless.)

In GW2 there are a bunch of them, including vendors, waypoints, consumable boosts, etc. They eat money so that the economy doesn’t constantly keep getting more and more flooded with money, which just raises the cost of everything.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I think the point of the “sheer excess of CC on some enemies” is that there are other ways to deal with CC. If I get stunlocked nowadays, I consider that my fault, not the game’s — it means I wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings and that I let myself get into an area where I could be CC’d to death.

Indeed, I can’t really see how this is a problem. In PvE, most of the stuff is telegraphed, and I can remember being CC’d in LS3, but I’ve never been stuck. The grand majority of pve enemies do not attack that fast as in to chain it. Also, the centaur stampeders? The ones that move in a set pattern? Really? What about not faceplanting into them?

Then again, I pass through entire zergs in WvW on toons with bad stability uptime, so this kind of thing seems to be a L2p issue to me.

I guess it’s probably an issue in PvP where multiple foes have their strict attention on you.

I imagine most people’s problems in the thread will be solved if they pick up some kind of movement boost (25+%) or whatever because they will be able to better move out of bad spots and thus not get CC’d in the first place. I also imagine they’re not using food that would make some fights much easier.

Trouble with the current stub lock is that it’s low risk and high reward. I wish cc was not as spammable but more strategic in nature.

I couldn’t get into GW1 and the combat was boring. GW2 is better in every way.

.. Guild Wars 1 has awful, tedious combat.

The active combat of GW2 is amazing, and makes all other MMOs feel sluggish.

Ashantara.8731:

While many of the responses have valid points of criticizing the OP, I have to agree that the OP was right on spot when they wrote:

jihm.2315:

the reason people play gw2 instead of 1 is because gw1 is ancient and is not getting updates

Obviously there are people who prefer to play GW1 even now. There are definitely people who would spend more time in GW1 than GW2. But it’s a bold claim to state that’s the only reason people play GW2 — I don’t see any evidence of that in the least.

I suppose it also depends what you mean by “ancient and not getting updates” and what you mean by “play.” If GW1 got the half-dozen devs they’d need to finish the GW Beyond storyline (parallel story to The War in Kryta and The Winds of Change), I’d play it, and never go back. I’m curious about the story and where it might have gone, but… that’s about it.

But… I still wouldn’t go back to GW1 if all that changed is the graphics. It’s a coop game and I prefer the massively-online aspects of GW2. The combat system is (for me) horribly dated in concept, so that would have to change. Movement would have to be 3D, not 2D, and they’d have to let us move while using skills (other than shouts).

In short, if I preferred the sort of game that is GW1, I’d still be playing it, updates or not. I far prefer GW2.

So no, the OP doesn’t speak for everyone and, without evidence, I don’t buy the claim that the OP even speaks for the majority of players, when they say that people prefer GW1 over GW2, except for the updates.

Why? Among the things GW2 did right that most other MMOs did horribly wrong was the combat. Just watching animations and doing little else isn’t fun by any measure of the word.

This is a real thread…?

The only things that can be extrapolated from GW1 is having actual balance when it comes to skills, and AI. Dodge, and a real jump are a good thing here. Too bad there are no on-jump traits (you know…to replace the on-fall ones nobody takes).

A lot of GW2 mechanics compressed GW1 skills (e.g. Confusion condition for most of what Mesmers did in GW1…). The general idea increased the complexity of individual skills within GW2, that I suspect in an effort to narrow the potential metas ANET would have to balance out in the future (in theory).

However, the added complexity meant the AI in GW2 greatly suffered. No longer did AI have access to the same abilities players did. All that we fight in PvE are auto-attack damage sponges and scripted events (your bosses). I actually miss AI that properly used a CC to interrupt me… Fuqing Cry of Frustration NPCs.

The only notable AI that half-way cares about their existence are the trainers in Spvp lobby.

jihm.2315:

make 2 versions of the game or something , one as it is now and one with tab targeting that copies GW1 combat.
GW1 had one of the best (maybe the best combat) in mmo history along with Lineage 2 (games that you could play for hours) yet they decided to make GW2 different.

simplicity wins over complexity because mmos are not action games,
action games and those new mmos that wanna be action games are designed to spend players resources and energy and stresses you out while it had to be a relaxing yet challanging at times experience.

thats mmo games today simple things become complicated with skill point spam and everything even worst in newer games like black desert but GW2 also falls in that category.

just remove the dodge and copy GW1 combat instead of just focusing on making new expansions and let people pick which version of they wanna play.

dont even anyone say anything about your skills , skilled players where a thing before action combat plagued the games

You know… there is also people who never liked GW1 because of the boring gameplay it had. People that happily joined GW2 when they saw the amazing active combat it has.
I’m being quite subjective, I know. But I am SO glad to have at least 1 MMO (GW2) that is not a boring static heir of wow or lineage.

Keep transferring so we only have one server left in the game with multitudes of people complaining that they have nobody to fight.