Guild Wars 2

I think there’s rather a lot of ex-WvW players who feel like it doesn’t exist anymore.

Hopefully this announcement comes sooner rather than later, and contains something a bit more substantial than how much work is going into it. If players are optimistic about the direction of the game for a change, there may be more activity in WvW again.

People used to complain about nightcapping more back in the days when more people were under the illusion that points determined anything other than who you get to play next week.

The solution of scaling point contribution based on how many players the other servers can field at that hour (on average, to reduce the potential for exploitation) seems reasonable to me, but it’s only something we’re likely to see in the reboot. I suspect that who gets how many points for what is one of the easiest things to adjust, so perhaps they might be inclined to discuss that with the community?

(Maybe?)

I don’t really see anyone competent use them in WvW either. There’s usually some better trait that you can pick if you just stop running off cliffs.

Just to make sure Brian has something to talk about…

What happened to make lip-syncing possible again? How much work is it to animate?

The old pet animations are often a little basic compared to the new creatures, pets included, in HoT. If you’re making a new pet, what do you have to keep in mind for gameplay considerations, and what do you like to do to give it character?

Speaking of giving things character, how do you work with traditional animation techniques to do that in this game? Anything you’ve developed that we might not see much elsewhere?

What technology might we see next in creature (and character) animation – and is there anything you’d like to do if the game was able to support it?

Day-long conditions make transferring hilarious.

It’s going to take a bit of extra work to deal with the poses. But it’d be worth it.

Mostly happy with changes to balance – at least the ones I’m familiar with.

Alacrity change should have come with some tweaks to trait duration – chronomancer only pays off if you invest heavily into it. WvW condi mesmer might be getting confusion a bit too fast off Mistrust. But it’s a tradeoff between the always useful clone spam trait and the sometimes useful and more decisive punishment of stacking.

Not convinced about Ranger shout changes, particularly losing the last option to move a pet independently. If F3 and pet combat mode had some more options that could make up for it. Defensive trait buffs are nice to have though.

Sic ‘Em as is requires you to anticipate the use of stealth, or just prevent it when it’d be inconvenient. I prefer the proactive requirement to a reactive skill personally.

My issue is mainly with Guard – what they’ve done is just two flavours of Protect Me where probably one would suffice. Additionally, the option to actually guard an area has disappeared, which would be OK if a replacement had been added to the pet utility bar where it should have been from the beginning.

What Guard should do is cause your pet to follow an allied target, grant protection to them, and taunt anything that attacks them – i.e. very similar to what Protect Me now does.

Protect Me was an inferior version of SoS that didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but could have been reworked to be a Ranger equivalent to Shelter – i.e. while the pet is alive, enemies without stability cannot approach.

Seems you could fit the entire remaining NA population in two tiers now. I’m curious how low it will go.

Finally some leverage to charge the server for my services.

(Needed another reason not to do this?)

The hair disappears, but I think the eye problem is actually clipping – the Magus Shroud mesh is in front of the eyeballs, but behind everything else.

With the tighter meshes it seems there’s a need for a few different versions so that charr can have armour skins that don’t float on some body types or clip through others.

In my server, and doubtless many others, the players who were trying to upgrade stuff were broke and either bored or outmanned. Now, they don’t have to waste their time, and the karma trainers who flip the borderland have to PvD a bit harder.

Requiring players to kick off the upgrades is going to do one of two things, depending on server population and time of day: one or two players will run around the map every 30 minutes flipping switches, thus contributing nothing to fights – not that solo players ever provided useful competition to karma trains anyway – or the karma trains will be taking paper stuff because no-one was online to upgrade them, or more likely no-one cared.

Waypoints will fix travel time and that’s about it. The previous borderlands were actually more homogeneous precisely because anyone could waypoint any keep. In the desert BL, you get one third that’s easily reached and two thirds that aren’t; which third differs depending on the map. Each borderland still gets more focus from the defending team, when they’re available.

atheria.2837:

I want to add something to the mix here.

Some of game skills use f4 skills, yes?

Ok, under your left palm on most badly made keyboards is the ALT key.

Many times lately I have palmed over the ALT key while using my f4 skill and VIOLA, game over.

Anet is the issue, their logic about keyboard layout and use is abysmal

If they want people not to seemingly purposefully abuse alt-f4, they should change it immediately to a combination NOT in the rotation of a skill use.

ALT-F4 should never have been used to “end the game” in the first place._*

Best thing I’ve read all day.

Turns out the Alt-F4 command comes from the truncation of mainframe keyboards for use with personal computers. Didn’t have an F16 key anymore, so the Alt key was used for higher functions, and thus the command to close an application became Alt-F4. I suppose that means this combination has been used for around 40 years.

The three factions idea can only work if WvW gets a lot more maps.

I have one, but I’m a bit lost on why you should use it during a raid.

I think a lot of current players are, actually, but it’s an imagining I had, before GW2 went into beta, about what WvW might be like.

I supposed that WvW would be a battle for an echo of Tyria in the Mists. So, wondering what the world map of the Guild Wars might look like before the searing and cataclysm ruined the party, I poked around in Photoshop for a bit, figuring out where all the towns and cities might be…

…and with that done, I wonder how they got to fight at all with the Shiverpeaks in the way. Perhaps that’s why the game launched with WvW maps that didn’t echo past events like PvP’s Battle of Kyhlo did.

Getting 10x the points would be fine by me, but I don’t see it changing anything. Ten of those points gets you just as much nothing as one point does.

Considering that the development time is going to approach the 2-year mark before we see anything, I’d have to assume they’re pretty near starting from scratch.

Which would be good, but at this point they should have said a little more about plans for the game mode. Right now we know there’s an overhaul to address the problems with PPT, but they’ve said absolutely nothing about how they’re doing that – which, considering the backlash against so many past updates to WvW, seems like a really bad move.

Learning that it’ll be the end of the year before we finally see what’s going on has unsurprisingly led to scores of people saying “bugger this, I’m out”.

Raawk.7584:

Cynz.9437:

Raawk.7584:

Cynz.9437:

Oh there would be such huge issue like with guild halls. If you have players from eu and na in your guild and for example NA player in in guild hall, then EU players get insta booted out of instance if they try to enter same guild hall. They would have to change how instances work for it~

I could see the issue in pve but finding players in tyria has never been a pronlem. I was thinking it should be implemented for pvp only.

LoL you really don’t understand do you? PvP match is nothing else but an instance. They would have to change how instances work, even if just for pvp.

It’s a more viable solution than crying about it.

Not really… GW1 did have such a system where it’d put players from everywhere onto NA or EU servers during their respective timezones. So when one server block had problems, everyone got to enjoy them. And playing on EU servers from the OCX/SEA region wasn’t fun… at 600 ms ping it was pretty near unplayable, and was a major reason why I didn’t play PvP during EU primetime.

Even worse, because the EU playerbase was a lot bigger than OCX/SEA late in the game (and it’s the same in GW2) I couldn’t play during my primetime. So… I couldn’t play PvP at all unless I was home from work early for some reason.

Do you want subscriptions to get access to all content on NA/EU? Well, good for you. I’d rather not.

I remember some of those. Don’t remember more. But I’ve rarely seen any of them since 2012.

“Server pride” died within months of launch because it was a one-way relationship.

Crystal Desert and hopefully a bit of northern Elona. Would like to see more open maps – and the tighter canyons of Vabbi might make good gliding spots. It’d be a crime to fight Kralkatorrik without Palawa Joko getting a say.

The Hall of Heroes rediscovered for PvP or WvW – along with Fissure of Woe and Underworld, perhaps as raids, and perhaps something else.

A cycle of weekly missions for the Order of Whispers, Vigil and Durmand Priory, plus racial side-quests to bring some of those early NPCs to life.

Another book of dance moves, another set of racial armour, charr front feet leaving footprints, and a /hug emote.

I skipped GWG as soon as they moved to Curse and required a new account for a whole lot of rubbish I didn’t want. Not entirely surprised to learn they’d been storing passwords in plain text. (That’s why you don’t use your account ID or password on third-party sites…)

Once you’ve actually played it for a bit, you figure the routes out and it’s quicker to traverse.

As for trebbing one objective from another, stopping that was evidently one of the goals of the redesign. There were just too many places where you could break down a wall without even having to defend your siege.

I don’t know if it’s possible to scale based on how much damage a player did. Plus other players don’t tend to stand in AoE if they can help it.

What I don’t want to see is people being rewarded more for karma training than fighting actual players. It doesn’t make sense to reward them for PvP when they’re actually playing PvE.

Credit towards a PvP track for any player that would normally drop a loot bag is certainly going to reward zerglings more than anything else, so perhaps scaling based on the number of nearby allies and enemies is something to look at.

I’m all in favour of this – so long as it only progresses for player kills.

Kaiser.9873:

Junkpile.7439:

Before people wanted much bigger map so players can’t run back in fight after death.

This is seriously one the few things I HAVEN’T seen people ask for.

Haven’t been here long then. Back in the early days there was a bit of consternation regarding never-ending zerg fights where you couldn’t really repulse an attack without a decisive numbers advantage. The problem is, the current maps are made for a population far higher than what we’ve got left.

I actually do prefer the current borderland to the old, since it’s got more potential. But it’s not the only piece of the clockwork that needed fixing before the whole mechanism can work again. We’ve got a place that can be defended, but still no reason to actually do so.

And yet I’m pretty sure Gaile said it’s viable afterwards a very short time ago.

Edit: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Updates-about-Wintersday/first

Conversely, I saw the population of starter areas – and everything else outside LA – increase dramatically following the megaserver conversion. They were dead before, even more so than today.

I guess it depends what server you were on at the time.

Calling it “always prime-time” doesn’t change the fact that there aren’t that many people in off-hours. This system would improve off-hours blowouts, but won’t change the population. If you want to do that you’ll need to reduce the number of servers in off-hours.

Best way to get good feedback is just talking to individuals. Forums are a mixed bag, and the WvW forums are at the worse end of it. You see some good posts but it doesn’t pay to read the replies (such as this one).

And yet primetime, when apparently your contribution doesn’t count, is when it’s the most fun to play. Despite the minimal scoreboard impact, or because of it?

Let’s be honest, no-one’s cared about the scoreboard for years.

If each piece worked the same way as the weapon skins, I’d go for it. Assuming I liked the skin, of course.

…not be amused.

The old BL was an even bigger karma train than the current one. Bringing it back unfixed would just make things worse.

Gaile Gray.6029:

• Objectives upgrades will no longer be automatic based on time.
• Supply cost for all catapults are being reduced by ten supply.
• Points per kill will be turned on and kept on.
• The number of players who can rally off a single kill has been reduced from five to one.

All changes seem good to me – would like to suggest PPK be relatively high against the normal score tick, but for the moment the score tick doesn’t mean too much anyhow.

The catapult supply cost would not have been such a problem if the +5 supply guild upgrade were more reasonable to obtain – I’m somewhat concerned that you’ll need to revoke this once more guilds have access to it. But the difference of 10 supply isn’t going to break the game, so I’m not going to object to it.

Player rally/revive changes would be welcomed; keep in mind that dead can always waypoint back so it’s not as if they’re stuck there.

If they can put together skin sets at this rate, perhaps some new cultural armour sets might be nice. Might take a while longer too, but that’d help in scraping together the BL tickets for all those weapons I meant to get.

I haven’t been a fan of many new charr hairstyles either, but I do like these additions enough to actually use them. Hopefully there’ll be some new faces in future that similarly impress.

I actually greatly prefer the new borderlands – the problems with it are systemic to WvW, not just that particular map.

It is much larger, but it also tends to funnel players through certain places, particularly if they don’t control local keeps or towers. That and shrines combine to territory actually meaning something, which is a major improvement over the old BL. That also makes it much easier to intercept groups flipping camps, towers or keeps, even if they don’t want to see any non-PvE action in their WvW today.

It’s also a lot easier to defend keeps and towers than it ever was, it’s just that nobody bothers doing it. But the only reason anyone bothered doing it in the first place was that some poor idiot had wasted their gold on upgrading Garrison. I don’t see the current version as worse, I see it as a declaration that the emperor has no clothes.

If the systemic problems with WvW are fixed so that it’s worth spending time in, I suspect the desert BL is actually going to be a really good venue. But when the population of WvW is so small in almost every tier, you go to EB unless you want to karma train.

Jim Hunter.6821:

You just described why it sucks for roaming.
No one is there upgrading the bl since it’s on auto pilot, and since upgrades require no effort and the towers/keeps are completely disconnected, no one cares to defend.

This means the only way you’ll find a fight is if you just happen to run into each other.

The problem I used to see on the old BLs was that the only people there were the ones upgrading, and they were generally not good fighters. Bad fights are better than no fights, but the changes have just made a major problem in WvW more obvious – defending is a fool’s errand.

The other thing I’ve been seeing is that building up your guild hall is far more rewarding than defending things in WvW because you actually get to keep the fruits of your labour longer than a week, or until someone nightcaps it.

Maybe a better solution would be looking toward guild halls for inspiration. Cut down on the grind a bit though.

Personally I’ve found it’s the opposite way around. Two of the guilds I’m in have guild halls – one is reasonably large, with around 30-50 active members at primetime, and the other is fairly small, with 5-7. The smaller one is not building the guild hall as quickly, but the players all have a lot more involvement because everyone’s contribution matters, and therefore everyone has a better idea of what goes into upgrading the guild hall.

The other thing I’m seeing is that the real time gate is what the mine can produce, once the upgrades are progressing a little more. That’s made it possible for the smaller guild to avoid falling too far behind.

I think “loved” is a bit optimistic.

Reset time is generally a major event in WvW – everyone jumps on because it’s reset, so server populations are highest. There’s no more to it than that – it’s not because at 6pm Pacific on Friday there’s suddenly a huge number of people coming on to play that couldn’t have been there an hour ago.

Put that in Wednesday and there’s still going to be a rush, just at an inconvenient time. Saturday is easier for most people to make, but also happens to make the queues longer; however, I’m not seeing all maps queued at reset, and my server is not far off the full mark.

ScribeTheMad.7614:

Or buff the defense event up a bit and give it the same reward chance?

I’ll go with that. This isn’t the only event in that track affected – Gates of Arah also doesn’t have a defence chest, but there are a lot more spawns for loot bags on defense. Thankfully there’s also Rotbeard himself for that particular item.

Synosius.9876:

a while back the devs said they would nvr interfere with wvw like standing in capture rings and now youve gone and snitched on him!

theyll probably make him go program quaggan dancing as punishment now.

I’ll just put this here to refresh your memory.

Michael Henninger.7451:

Just a heads up in case you see the character GM Proheals doing any of the following:

*appearing/disappearing
*teleporting
*running really fast
*not dying
*moving players – very unlikely but I know if I don’t include it….
*changing teams (friendly to enemy at will)

You should not see me doing any of the following:

*fighting back / fighting npc characters
*standing in unclaimed land
*reviving players
*using siege and supply

Here’s my toon:
!http://i.imgur.com/TTVHVaB.jpg!

Questions?

Mordayn.6198:

It’s all good though, shortly thereafter we went to their home BL and ninja’d their WP’d WK with 9 people and I think they rage quit because their population dropped to almost nothing and everything was pretty much an easy take from there. Can’t mess with that Mag Swag.

Odds are they went to bed – it’s only the Korean and Singaporean players who are able to flip waypointed stuff. They’re far more interested in flipping your keeps than defending theirs.

Because of those reasons, it’d be worse. The madness was constrained by the three leagues then; it wouldn’t be if that extended between all eight tiers. And the population imbalance is a lot worse now, which is why the tiers have become locked in the first place.

Here’s what would have happened had such a system been in place this reset:

Tier 1: JQ, BG, TC. Nothing unusual here, and should be a reasonably even match.
Tier 2: YB, SoS, Mag. Blowout. SoS has difficulty competing with T1 coverage; Maguuma isn’t even close.
Tier 3: FA, SBI, DB. Possibly close; FA is weaker than it once was and DB is looking stronger.
Tier 4: CD, NSP, DH. Blowout. CD is going to have everything on the map waypointed overnight, every night.
Tier 5: HoD, SoR, SF. Probably another blowout. Not sure how much HoD’s population has changed since I last saw them but the other two are minnows for sure.
Tier 6: EB, BP, IoJ. Can’t say for sure, but because you have the 13th and 21st ranked servers, 225 points apart in the same match, likely another blowout.
Tier 7: AR, GoM, FC. FC may not fare too well but this looks like one of the closer ones.
Tier 8: Kaineng, DR, ET. T8 is always a blowout regardless.

And then the next week, the matches are likely to be identical to those two weeks before. Personally, I’d rather keep the existing stagnation unless the populations level out, because particularly at the top, population differences between tiers are too vast to make any inter-tier match worth playing.

We had winner up, loser down in one of the tournament seasons (2, I think). It caused blowout matches every week of the tournament. Put that in WvW and you will kill off what’s left of it.

And that’s why the function gyro should be extended to harvest gathering nodes and throw toilet paper rolls.

(Hey, they’re important parts of my play style.)

More seriously (apart from the gathering node bit which is super serious) the function gyro should be a candidate for further AI control of a sort, such as operating siege equipment, interactions with NPCs, holding cap circles, collecting environmental weapons, and so on. Anything that lets the scrapper perform menial tasks in addition to their combat role, where permitted by gameplay mechanics.

falcedge.1847:

In the end I simply always have to push myself to play, why should I play a game which forces me to go through mental gymnastics to keep giving it more chances? I hope you guys can help me – this is a sincere plea to ask If I got it all wrong, did I miss something? am I playing wrong? should I just amputate the leg and move on? please notice me sempai’s this might be my last leg!

I think you are missing something – the build system in GW1 was just as cookie-cutter in the end. Despite all the diversity that was possible, there were a handful of builds that were head and shoulders above the pack… and an inexhaustible number that were useless.
And the end-game content, like GW2, consisted of repeating old content for loot or achievements. Outside of PvP, what you could do in GW1 was pretty much the same thing. The difference is in the enjoyment.

So I’d suggest you look at it from a different angle: What did you do in GW1? What made it enjoyable? And where does GW2 fall short in making it enjoyable?

Better to throw the whole system out and make a persistent world.