Guild Wars 2

Remove? I play 90% percent of playtime in there as commander. I love it! In two years i played it litterly thousands of hours mainly as commander. The badges and karma is useless i stacked loads of it and no idea where to spend it on. If your really lucky maybe 3 exotics a week. And really i play huge amounts of time.

Before hot i played in a guild group in normal wvw to. It has some appeal. But eotm is much better for me. On my server currently the wvw maps are completly empty and thus not at all playable. Also ‘real wvw players’ think an superior + normal flameram does more damage then three normal flamerams. This way of playing results in a much slower gameplay. Eotm has a great pace more action and regular massive fights.

There could be a lot more fights if things where balanced though. This week for example red about 80, blue about 20 and green an average 40 man. Blue was roflstomped of eotm most of last weekend making it almost unplayable for my side aswell (green). At this point its best to play avoidence. Because loosing a fight will make your zerg schrink about 10 man at the time. Due frustration about unbalance. With fair teams ill ocasionally fight and with slightly being outnumbered defensive ambushing.

Removing this mode will result in players lime me quitting the game. I lime guildzerg in borders aswell but atm finding more then 3 people on even a map like ebg doesnt happen more then once a week maybe month

Consider EotM have nothing what so ever to do with wvw then no the suggestion is absurd and tbh if they prefer EotM from WvW by all means stay there. Having upscaled karma trains that are not able to move outside of a keep or tower if there are no com on the map and only know how to autoattack and scream cheat when being rolled over moving to wvw would be a disaster for wvw.

EotM obviously is filling a purpose for the players that enjoy doing it, so let them have that purpose. It might not be what it was intended to be but it was super easy to see that it would go that way. I mean it was not long ago were you could get 22 badges for capping a worm, whilst you got 1-2 for capping SM the biggest thin in wvw to cap.
It change like half a year back or so, but my point is when EotM came out they made it so that the pve part in that area gave you more then the wvw part.
Ofc there will be a pve train there, it is in every other aspect of the game were such thing can be added

I said yes and here’s why.

When I first started out in WvW I was immediately at a disadvantage because not only was I new, but my gear was under par compared to most players, with the addition of not having the guard stack advantage.

Its very disheartening getting face rolled all the time and some either wait till they have the gear to enter WvW or just go ahead and end up getting frustrated and quit.

I say we need those players now. Almost every toon I have is in full ascended gear minus a few trinkets. If anyone should complain its me because I just got on par with the vets, but looking at the wvw landscape it is clear to see that it is in trouble. For the love of the sport WvW needs to become more player friendly to the new or returning players, and we don’t need them drawn away to Pve in order to get geared.

I love WvW and I believe this is the way to go to breath life back into it.

Also I started with GW1 and it was never about the gear…it was how you played your build aka buildwars.

gw1 gearing (stats being linked to character, not gear) was one of the “things i liked about gw1”, but never got to gw2:(

I’m usually not one to jump in on nerf threads but I have to agree, that invisible fence is literally and figuratively broken.

Sviel.7493:

Why can’t we consider things with some semblance of objectivity? Why all the drama?

We will see soon enough how good the Alpine maps really were. And yes, I expect lots of moaning and whining when people understand they are not that good. And then they start another campaign about some feature removed 3 years that could magically fix EVERYTHING.

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.

Haha, awesome.

You trolled us though.

(love it)

Tyler Bearce.3427:

It would be easy enough to move all the camp guards closer to the center, so you’d always have to fight all of them to flip a camp. But to be clear, you guys are arguing that you want to do ‘more PvE’, which seems to go against the forum’s current agenda of ‘less PvE.’

Well he’s got us there.

I hope this better illustrates the roamer vs zerger situation; kitten fight resetting crows:

He still has a point though. When people talk about disliking pve in WvW, it often is really vague, so it’s nice people are differentiating between vital game mechanics and what is basically noise. For example, everything in the middle, oasis event or not, does absolutely nothing to add to anything.

When obstacles and NPCs present you a bigger threat than other actual players, I think that’s a problem, because then it really is dependent on your ability to fight AI. Not very interesting. On the other hand stuff like guards and walls set a minimum threshold to be able to capture something. NPCs are just speedbumps and it’s the players that need to be able to stop attackers. When you have keep lords that can stall people for a ridiculous amount of time, then it just feels like the place defends itself and you might as well just go somewhere else.

As for the camps, themselves, meh, whatever. I don’t really think it matters. Dumb AI is dumb AI. Camps are never going to be threats to any group greater than a solo player and nor should they, considering people regularly solo/duo towers and keeps already.

FogLeg.9354:

Nobody is arguing if WvW is dying or not. But none of us knows the actual cause, we can all guess but we could be all wrong.

I have argued against this already several times. The empty DBL is not the cause for less players, there would be less players no matter what kind of map is used. Empty BL maps just show us the reducing WvW population.

If match has enough WvW players for only 1 map, they all go to EB no matter if BL maps are good or bad. So the BL maps itself does not affect how many players play WvW. Players can say they don’t like the map design or how objectives are placed or what color the sand is. But none of this would matter if there would be enemies to fight, you simply would have no time to notice any of that, you would be busy fighting. You never go to WvW because you “like” the map.

The cause WvW is not interesting or fun, and players leave the game, is not map design and it can not be fixed by changing BL maps. The time and effort Anet is spending to replace the maps back, is all completely wasted.

This.

The maps are not going to be silver bullets. And what some of us are saying is don’t steal from Peter to pay Paul. There are two sides here, one saying give us less options and force people into a way and the other saying give us more options and let us choose. Leave it with 4 maps, but make it 4 different maps not 2 maps, 1 having three exact copies.

Either way I would still expect more player decline. That is natural in games. Its up to ANet to agree and either roll up some servers or determine another way to mix the current populations together. No company likes to close servers but it happens over time. If you wait too long you further bleed population.

DeceiverX.8361:

PvE/sPvP players shouldn’t feel compelled to play WvW for optimal loot/ascended items just as we shouldn’t be compelled to play their format.

The gear won’t matter to SPvP players so that is a non issue. But I disagree that PvE players shouldn’t be compelled to come to WvW. It’s been the other way around for 4 years and that is one of the reasons (one of many) that WvW is suffering.

WvW was already in rough shape due to stagnation but then Anet removed guard stacks, nerfed things like condi duration food, and then added armor with better stats (including condi duration) that you could only get in PvE. They also made it so you need to go to PvE to get mats for GH upgrades. They were basically forcing you out of WvW in order to play at a competitive level.

If you give PvE players a reason to come to WvW and spend some time there, some of them might end up enjoying it and sticking around.

@Sarrs. Agreed (In my first post I misunderstood what you were trying to say so I remade this)

Its pretty easy to learn DBL. Theres multiple routes to each location so your movements aren’t as predictable for the enemy to guess. But theres multiple places scouts can go to check those routes giving scouts something to do.

Remember how when you were going to nw camp and EVERY SINGLE PERSON ON THE ENEMY TEAM knew how to funnel you into a kill box (victory worm) or where to go to head you off? (south entrance of the camp or the switchback to the east.) It really didn’t take much effort to figure it out. And since the entire area was one massive field up to that point you could have one guy sitting* on the wall of bay and hed have a hand free to press the push to talk to say “Oh there going NW camp”.

Anyone that says alpine was great for scouting has probably never scouted it before. It was EASY to scout. It was by NO means fun. Spending 45 minutes of your 2 hour gaming session on a wall HOPING the place your “Scouting” gets hit wasn’t hit wasn’t entertaining and certainly wasn’t PvP. Theres a reason most people started watching movies. Becuase you didn’t even have to pay attention to notice the giant ball of red names out in the middle of the open.

(Alpine was great for scouting my human female meta behind)

Hule.8794:

Ansau.7326:

Wut? Alpine is the perfect map for karma train. A map you can flip in 12-15 min without any issue.

But that was possible only because gates could be max reinforced.
Make gates on Alpine to go Fortified too and its much harder.
Btw you can flip DBL in 20 minutes.

There was more than just only fortified walls and doors.
- You could take down both outside and inside with the same catas.
- Travelling between camps was a bit shorter and between keeps much more than DBL.
- Lords with joke health pool.
- Sentries didn’t spot you.
- Structures were much smaller and simpler = less time spent between outside walls and lord.

I don’t believe that everything is black or white. in my opinion removing some tactics will actually harm wvw (or atleast the outnumbered side) while others will only improve our wvw experience. Many ppl tend to think that all tactics are ewul … but some actually help as a last resort vs servers with double ur numbers, while others are kind of useless.

Some examples:

Minor supply drop (gives 100 supply): I think this one is the most versatile tactic, u need to play smart to use it efficiently. Lets face it, it wont save you against a blob if u only have a few ppl inside ur keep. But…if u are against, lets say; 6 enemies that place siege outside a tower you solely defend, you can use those 100 supps to place a bali or an ac in such a position that will kill the enemy siege b4 they breach into ur tower. They will eventually cap the tower if they insist but u may force them to resupply 2 times till they do and choose diff spots for their siege… so I believe that one supports outnumbered servers and rewards smart play.

Emergency WP (Creates an uncontestable wp for 1min): This one is an example of a bad tactic. The team that uses this will be able to restart the fight instantly and for 1min to have every1 that is dying coming back. Discarding any fear/consequences of death so usually it supports the side that has more people that play badly. In theory it may help an outnumbered server by keep porting back, but in reality…I’ve seen it mostly abused by the strongest side (that plays poorly) to reset the fight 2-3 times(it becomes tiring). The reason why it is mostly abused by the strongest side is because if they outnumber u it takes near the reactivation time to kill every1 so… by the time you have killed them all they can reactivate it (20mins cd). It needs to either be removed or nerfed…

Chilling fog (chill for 1min): Sounds…impressive, but…it never changed the outcome of a fight for me… I don’t think it is that good.

Dune roller (summons a charr motorcycle that grants high mobility): Utterly useless but… extremely fun to use. I don’t know why would any1 want that removed?

Invulnerable Fortifications (walls and doors become immune to all sorts of damage for 1min): Useful to give you enough time to call buddies to help you defend. can be used effectively by both the outnumbered and the strong side. I don’t think removing it will help or damage wvw.

Armored Dolyaks (Dolies gain increased health/toughness) : Useless in general like most of the camp upgrades. Camps flip so easily and fast that they are only a waste of resources.

Cloaking waters & Airship defense: Completely broken. Those tactics only help the already stronger/winning side I believe they should finaly remove them both. The side that controls sm for that long to enable those is already strong enough for a fair fight and doesn’t need boosts. Not to mention that those are super expensive to craft, so its easier for the server with the most wvw guilds/ppl to use them, which makes them even more unfair. AD though is sooo impressive that I will miss its visual effects if they choose to remove it

That’s just my opinion ofc but… After countless times of using them, I think that most of the tactics don’t have such a great impact to the balance of wvw. With the exception of some (that need to be nerfed or removed) most tactics are only giving diversity to wvw or are just useless.

Don’t judge poorly every tactic cause some are overpowered. Anet needs to fix those, not to remove everything that is HOT related.

PS: Don’t forget the countless guilds that will start whining after having all their already-payed upgrades removed without compensation.

Jana.6831:

I play the game, I have friends on a lot of servers, I play against other servers and since I’m EU it’s always different servers. To pretend that wvw isn’t dying is naive.
Of course you won’t see all of this when you’re playing EotM with its megaserver.
Wvw has got more problems than the DBLs – it has been neglected for too long and HoT was the breaking point.
If we all love EotM or the DBLs that much we’d play them – we don’t: only halfway populated map I’ve seen in the past 6 months from T6 to T1 was EB.

Nobody is arguing if WvW is dying or not. But none of us knows the actual cause, we can all guess but we could be all wrong.

I have argued against this already several times. The empty DBL is not the cause for less players, there would be less players no matter what kind of map is used. Empty BL maps just show us the reducing WvW population.

If match has enough WvW players for only 1 map, they all go to EB no matter if BL maps are good or bad. So the BL maps itself does not affect how many players play WvW. Players can say they don’t like the map design or how objectives are placed or what color the sand is. But none of this would matter if there would be enemies to fight, you simply would have no time to notice any of that, you would be busy fighting. You never go to WvW because you “like” the map.

The cause WvW is not interesting or fun, and players leave the game, is not map design and it can not be fixed by changing BL maps. The time and effort Anet is spending to replace the maps back, is all completely wasted.

There’s a lot of hate towards people who run tryhard builds in groups like parties of five PU condi mesmers/tank tempests who strictly just attack individual players running back to another objective, but do not flip anything themselves.

Yesterday, for example, an enemy server had a guild group of eight PU condi mesmers camping between our home keep and a camp they captured, ganking any player or small group (less than 4) running towards the camp. They laid no siege elsewhere for towers, and had many of their third’s towers captured and not defended.

You’d drop out of the keep, head to the camp, and take 60 stacks of confusion and infinite CC locking. Stunbreaking or even using a condi cleanse would kill you.

Brought five or six people to fight them, and they just ran away and hid in stealth. Friendlies dispersed after taking the camp.

Five minutes later, they’re back to the same thing. This went on for several hours.

They’re not playing for objectives/PPT to justify a gank.
They’re not actually looking for fights or small group skirmishes.
They’re not actually interested in a fair fight or a fun one.

It’s those types of “roamers” who I have absolutely no respect for.

The reasons a zerg chases roamers or roaming groups span far and wide and are specific to events or feelings known only by the squirrel or group of squirrels.

For instance, when I’m zerging it, I’ll engage in a chasing episode from time to time, but it usually has nothing to do with what that particular roamer has done. It’s usually bitterness held over from an earlier mob episode involving their zerg and me or a small group of us sometimes hours/days/weeks or perhaps years earlier. The roamer in question at the time of course has no knowledge of this earlier episode, and then labels the entire server abunch of 1 spamming zerglings. It’s a vicious cycle really.

The thing is though, if you don’t participate in every facet of the game (roaming, zerging, small havoc, outnumbered server vs overpopulated server etc etc etc.) And if you’re a roamer on the largest server and don’t appreciate the efforts put in by those on the smallest server or are not in the trenches everyday or dont break away from your group/individual playstyle to explore the different facets, you can’t really understand that the others are chasing you because they’ve most likely been chased by you and yours many times previously.

Run over the roamers, gank the backline, run from the zerg if you must and relish the hate whispers when it takes 20 of them to catch you, make fun of trolls on the the opposing server or your own server, run food, don’t run food, play however you want whenever you want! It’s all part of the game and none of us are or have been any better than our competition 100% of the time though out the entirety of this game mode.

rotsono.9176:

I dont mind the roamers that do smallscale fights with other roamers or some that fight 1vs1 somewhere.
The most hate goes to the roamers that are kinda annoying and run behind the zerg and try to gank people that stand to far away.
That roamers are mostly first target and getting chased down cuz they are god kitten annoying.

Those roamers are trying to teach you to stay on tag. You should be thanking them.

baylock.1703:

I have noticed more and more that zergs chase me across half of a map whenever I’m roaming I have raven gotten few offensive whispers from enemy that I’m playing wvw wrong …… what has happened?

Honestly sounds like you are doing it right lol. Take it as a compliment :p

I worked for a game company that did a merge of six servers to two, and added a new server for people looking for a fresh start. They all had massive (expected) spikes in activity per server initially. After six months, populations on each server were the same as they were before the merge. And this was a game in which transferring wasn’t allowed and the community voted for who to get paired with (there was no inter-server conflict, either, so this was strictly just a population boost). Two years later, they merged the new and the old again, because the population across all three never improved.

Merging servers fixes only symptoms of the greater problem. I know people want improved numbers, but merges typically don’t do anything except help the immediate future, and often make the extended future worse. There’s no reason to merge until after these problems get fixed, however, because the populations are still almost guaranteed to die down as a result.

Bandini.6185:

Dawdler.8521:

Bandini.6185:

I really doubt servers merge could be done on a beta test, so I think they have planned something else for April update regarding population.

It could, because its really nothing more complicated than rerouting server X WvW to server Y WvW for a week or two.

I was not speaking on the technical, but human, point of view. Merging servers would mean merging people and communities.

Does say T7-9 honestly have such sizable communities that they would cry out in horror over being absorbed into T4-6?

Look its real simple:
- Announce officially and far ahead of time that tier X will be removed. Lets say 2-4 weeks.
- Specify that server Y will be automaticly transfered to server Z at that point, giving any possible community leaders a chance to sit down together and organize things.
- After the merge, all transfered players have a grace period where they get one free transfer to a server of choice within the tiers that was initialy available for all servers.

If this simple idea of concentrating the communities really isnt agreeable, the WvW server and competetive system need to be remade from scratch because it wont hold in the long run. Eventually servers will thin out and die. Players will leave the game. Players that higher tiers could have used, but that Anet in their glorious wisdom decided to hide behind a transfer paywall.

At some point, WvW will only be able to sustain a single tier anyway, leaving us with the inevitable WvW megaserver even if Anet doesnt even program it, lol.

FogLeg.9354:

DeceiverX.8361:

Merged servers is frankly be the worst possible way to handle the WvW population issue as it only solves symptoms and not the actual underlying problems.

It does not have to be “merge”, could be some other way, but number of servers HAS to be reduced dramatically. And I am in one of the dead servers, which I always love and will never transfer away, but it’s still dead. Sure there are other stuff that needs to be fixed too, but the last servers were dying even before HoT.

You need to ask yourself why the server is dead, however. For about a year after release every map had a queue 24/7 on almost all tiers. Can we really expect the same exact number of players to be interested across all servers as they are now, despite dramatic format changes/pace changes and guilds potentially being overshadowed by other foreign guilds?

I’m not saying that any kind of population mingling is a bad idea, no. Frankly, I’ve supported complex developments of smart systems for dynamically resolving population and scoring imbalances between weeks and have suggested means of doing so several times, but this also maintained the integrity of each individual server.

Simply merging the servers will just cause a very short-term boost in population but historically in every competitive game which has done this, it has resulted in repetitions of history and ultimately net player losses across the board.

It’s a simple solution which few games have done successfully overall, and is potentially more disastrous for the health of the game and format than doing nothing.

This idea makes me pretty nervous, but it may be good nonetheless. I’d tie it to overall score, though not PPT—that way, people don’t rush out of the game mode as soon as they get a high tick. Also, having it take effect only after the end of the match (for the following week) would make it less volatile.

The biggest flaw that I can see is that the people working for the reward are going to be in WvW too much to actually benefit from it.

Encouraging people to farm one gamemode, so they can get more from farming another gamemode…ehhhh I’d rather not. But I do understand your point.

The solution to the wvw problems is not to remove an aspect that is clearly popular among players but to make core wvw more appealing. Complaining that eotm is too popular and therefor ruining your version of wvw is short sighted and just silly. Right now if all they did was remove eotm, people would still have the same complaints about the current state of wvw. Throwing more players into the mix might make lower tier servers more active but people will still complain about BLs. Tactics will remain the same. Nothing changes except that there are some queues on servers that didnt have them before. A band aid fix that would probably not go over well with a large portion of the community. Forcing players in doesnt make the gametype better. Fix the gametype, make it rewarding and the players will show up.

How would they secretely “fix” population issues? Murder people in their sleep?

Because I seriously doubt someone would go “hm, why am I on Sea of Sorrows today when I was on Yaks Bend yesterday? Well, guess its just a visual bug that happen to everyone, np”.

100% all that HoT stuff: runes, sigils, stat combos, food.

Make it account bound if that helps, I really don’t care so long as I don’t have to play PvE for hours on end just to enjoy something in WvW.

Warcry.1596:

Where was it even announced that one was happening at all? I missed that

Yea, I keep hearing this but nobody has said it’s been confirmed which leads me to believe it’s just speculation.

Merged servers is frankly be the worst possible way to handle the WvW population issue as it only solves symptoms and not the actual underlying problems.