Guild Wars 2

Radian.2478:

So sad that PvD’ers every one in a while experience a little bit of resistance…

In my opinion, it should be time consuming and quite difficult to take a defended tower. That’s why people build fortifications. I think this would all be much less of a problem if PvDoor against paper towers yielded almost no rewards while taking hours to fight your way into a well-defended T3 keep had rewards commensurate with the amount of time and effort it took to take the site.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

So you have absolutely nothing to back up your assertion that many servers are dead?

It depends on how you want to defined “dead”, but population has definitely been a reason for people to transfer off of lower-tiered servers. You’ll notice that various servers keep rising up to the 15-18 rank level in NA and then fall back down toward the bottom again. The reason for that is that they get some good guilds from a higher tier that transfer in and greatly improve the server’s performance, up to a point. But then they hit a wall and it becomes harder to move up in the rankings, sometimes because of numbers and sometimes because of coverage, so the guilds transfer off for greener pastures, sometimes taking additional people with them. I’ve seen it happen on ET a few times and it’s happened on other servers, too.

You’ll also find people talking about fair-weathers playing and not playing. A server can go from being fairly lively to pretty dead for a week if the match-up is highly imbalanced because people stop playing when the odds get too bad. Again, not fun being someone else’s piñata. Nobody wants to be a mob for someone else to farm.

Note that I like the fact that WvW has different levels of play, from often-queued zergzilla servers to sparsely populated servers where two people and a catapult can cap a tower. The problem is handicapping play so that one or two of the servers in the matchup don’t wind up getting farmed by a much more highly populated server.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

which servers are those, specifically?

The bottom 3-4 NA servers are all pretty sparsely populated but Kaineng seems particularly dead. I play on ET so have been playing against them and the only reason why our scores are close this week is because GoMs been smacking both of us around pretty well. And that’s after ET lost a few of it’s largest and most active WvW guilds to higher tiered servers.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

and have you played on them, to have such insight as to how dead they are?

I would argue that the bottom tier play is actually fairly interesting so long as all the servers involved have low WvW populations and that’s why I haven’t abandoned ET. I actually like the scrappy fights that pull in various small groups where everyone makes a difference. The problem is that any significant population imbalance makes it fairly easy for the higher population server to take most, if not all, of the map. It’s fun being an underdog. Not so much fun being a piñata.

EotM doesn’t help the lower tiered servers because it sucks people out of the main WvW maps because we don’t have a queue problem that needed solving. It solves a problem we didn’t have by creating a problem we didn’t have. And, if anything, EotM softened one of the two liabilities with higher-tiered servers that might have caused people to transfer to a lower-tiered server — queues. The limited time Living Story events also suck people out of WvW, which hurts low-population servers more than high-population servers. And Bloodlust only makes the problem worse because it makes it that much harder for an outnumbered server to fight opponents with boosted attributes.

I find it difficult to understand why ANet has such a difficult time grasping the concept of handicapping competitive events, especially since that’s exactly what they do when they upscale and downscale characters in PvE and scale the difficulty of encounters based on the number of participants in an event in PvE.

What they’ve done in WvW is not unlike balancing all the PvE events so that only the highest population servers fielding a zerg can complete them and, worse, make the events even harder if you have fewer people. If you want to reward the winners, do it with gold, skins, and other things that don’t make it even harder for a lower-population server to win.

There is a reason why competitive sporting and gaming handicap the better player and give advantages to the weaker players instead of the other way around. There is a reason why the bottom-ranked sports teams get the first draft picks for the next season and the best team gets the last pick. This is not that difficult of a concept to grasp yet every change I’ve seen to WvW suggests that ANet actually doesn’t get it.

ET is again a fairly low WvW population server at the moment so there are quite a few fairly small groups running around. But perhaps more importantly for what you are probably looking for (other small groups to fight), I’ve been running into a lot of opponent groups in the 3-10 person range on the servers we’ve been up against (including Kain) and have actually thought, from time this would have been great for PAXA. As with when you were playing before, you probably want to settle on a server that’s low-tier or maybe middle tier.

King Amadaeus.8619:

IE groups telling the random pug casuals to “get away you are giving us the debuff”, which goes against the casual non-combative nature of this game.

The solution is a small penalty for every additional person over a small number such that no individual person pushes the penalty over a cliff and each additional person only has a minor impact. Given large groups pop orange swords, they have the capability to count how many people are in group.

The main penalty I’d like to see applied to zergs is a movement penalty. My suggestion was to reduce movement by 0.5% for every person over 5 such that kitten person zerg would be moving 25% slower than a 5 man team they came across. The penalty could be higher.

This would have two useful effects.

1) It would make it easier for small groups to get out of the way of a zerg and otherwise operate on it’s edges. It would be harder for a zerg to overrun a careful small group with a movement penalty.

2) It would slow down the ability of a large zerg to move across a map quickly capturing camps, towers, and keeps and provide an incentive to use lighter forces for capturing.

Another option is to have a % chance of missing based on the same formula such that people in kitten person zerg have a 25% chance of any attack missing. Since these penalties start at a half-percent (a 1 in 200 chance) and only increase another half-percent a person (a 1 in 200 chance per person), the addition or subtraction of a single person into a group should not cause so big of a change that there would be complaints.

What both of these suggestions do is add in real world problems caused by large numbers of people clustering tightly together to fight that are avoideused in Guild Wars 2 because there are no collisions, shots blocked by others in the way, or friendly fire and I don’t expect those things to be implemented. Other people getting in the way should make it harder to attack and reduce movement rates. And both of these work without touching the AoE mechanics, which are also part of the problem, because it sounds like ANet is currently unable to lift the AoE restrictions and we are stuck with them.

2) The predictability of it all. When a zerg attacks an undefended target or a much smaller group of opponents, the result is predictable. To me, it’s boring being on the zerg side and just as boring from the target side. The outcome is inevitable. On the winning side, it’s like riding the champion train in Queensdale — run up, attack for a few seconds, get a reward, rinse, repeat. On the losing side, well, it’s not much fun being a piñata, which is why low population servers have trouble holding on to WvW players and guilds. Even when you have a more even match, there are certain optimal ways to do things that make it all very repetitive. Beyond the zerg-limiting suggestions in the first part, I think ANet needs to work harder to create more diversity in viable styles of play in WvW. They need to figure out a way to make ranged play more viable so that Rangers and Engineers don’t wind up at the top of everyone’s “Worst Class for WvW” list.

In many ways, WvW is a game of rock-scissors. Rock bests scissors. Rock beats scissors. Rock beats scissors. So eventually most players play rocks because rocks always win and scissors always lose. ANet needs to figure out how to turn WvW into something more like paper-rock-scissors, where there is no one optimal choice for every situation but where paper defeats rock, rock defeats scissors, and scissors defeats paper so that if everyone starts playing rock, you can play paper and beat them.

A major part of what makes tactics interesting in the real world is the concept of Combined Arms, which is coordinating a mix of dissimilar assets into a fighting force so that they cover for each other’s weaknesses. An effective fighting force in a well-balanced WvW should require unique abilities of all classes rather than the abilities of simply 5 classes. An as much as that’s about making what some classes do more effective in large scale battles (e.g., ranged attacks despite the AoE limits, which aren’t going away anytime soon), it’s also about limiting classes so they are not one man armies that can move quickly AND heal quickly AND do lots of damage AND apply lots of CC AND have no weaknesses. While any weaknesses are a problem in one-on-one PvP, giving every rock it’s paper as a weakness is key if you want to have real tactics in WvW that give every class something to do and require players to do more than push a few buttons to win. Every class should have something that they can’t do [well] to give them incentive to travel with someone else of a different class and build.

Please note that this doesn’t mean replicating the WoW “trinity” here. Looking further back to games like Dungeons & Dragons or wargames such as Warhammer are a better source of inspiration here. See this article writing in the context of encouraging tactics in tabletop role-playing games:

http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/columns/elements01nov02.html

I think my problems with zerging fall into two categories, with the first being a bigger problem for me.

1) Zerging is bad simulation. By that, I mean that what’s effective and what’s ineffective bear little resemblance to what one would expect in the real world. In some cases, it make sense in the context of the magic in the setting (AoE boons have limited range so you need to be near the person using them to get the benefit, which handicaps dispersed groups or ranged combatants). In other cases, it’s a side effect of quirks and limits in the game, most notably (and you’ll find plenty of messages complaining about this, but it’s unlikely to change) the Area of Effect (AoE) attack limits (5 targets), which removes the normal disincentive for clustering tightly together in real combat. Essentially, rather than AoEs being a threat to a tightly clustered zerg, they actually become less effective against tightly clustered zergs because the odds of the same target being hit more than once go down. And in the real world, people clustered together get in each other’s ways, block shots, take friendly fire, and compete for resources, none of which happens in Guild Wars 2.

As a constructive suggestion, I think it would be useful to provide some penalties to clustering to offset the benefits that are often simply a side-effect of quirks of the game implementation and correspond to some of the problems such a strategy would cause in the real world. The most obvious would be a movement penalty, so that a 50 man zerg will have trouble catching a small group of defenders that turn to run. In the real world, large groups generally do move more slowly than small ones for reasons abstracted away by the Guild Wars 2 implementation (e.g., collisions, friendly fire, and avoiding them).

Other options might include increased cool-down times on skills (to simulate the larger draw on the ambient magic a large group would cause), damage reduction or a percentage chance to miss (to simulate the interference a tight cluster would cause in lieu of implementing collisions or friendly fire), or reduced effectiveness on boons and heals (to simulate the diffusion of magic across a much larger group) to offset the reduced effectiveness of AoE attacks. Phase them in slowly in small increments (perhaps with every new person) as the size of the zerg builds (to prevent a penalty cliff that cause the group to blame someone for tipping them over the edge).

For example, maybe each person over 5 reduces movement by a half percent so that a fivty-five person zerg would be moving 25% slower, or even a full percent so they move at half-speed.

Julie Yann.5379:

I don’t mind if they don’t have a buffs on towers if they are taking the time to upgrade and siege it properly and are going to camp it. They only things the should really have buffs are keeps.

I agree with this. I don’t mind guild claiming without a buff on a tower if the claimed upgrades and camps it for a while. What bugs me are people who claim and leave with no buffs. Camps, on the other hand, shouldn’t be claimed without a supply buff.

Asmodeius.2751:

I would suggest ANET to implement some sort of strategy into the map and de-fragment objectives, so that using small 3-5 men diversion groups would be viable.

In a way, this supports your point, but this sort of play is already viable and done on the lower tiered servers. I frequently solo camps and have taken a tower with one other person. Sure, the experience is uneven because of coverage and sizable zergs do happen, but if you like solo and small team play where even one person can make a big difference by scouting, defending, harassing, or soloing objectives, consider a transfer to one of the servers at the bottom like Eredon Terrace.(or Kaining, Devona’s Rest, Sorrow’s Furnace, Northern Shiverpeaks, Darkhaven, Anvil Rock, or the EU equivalent). Further, skill matters a great deal in the bottom tiers because there is a lot of solo and small team skirmishing and plenty of encounters where the odds are imbalanced but not impossible. This is why I really don’t want to see ANet merge the servers into uniform high population play. I like low population play, for the most part, and rarely have to deal with lag or queues, either.

Dawdler.8521:

As a tradeoff to defenders being able to properly defend, attackers should be able to properly besiege and starve defenders. Loosing 3000 HP every 5 second inside a keep that has no supplies and is contested sounds fair.

The starving mechanic in Guild Wars 2 is to keep destroying the defenders’ walls and siege, forcing them to use supplies in response, while keeping supplies and defenders out. Works quite well. I’m sorry if it doesn’t happen in seconds, but I have little sympathy for a zerg that can’t stay on task for 10 to 15 minutes to take a site that took hours and quite a bit of gold for defenders to upgrade and siege up. If you want indefensible sites guarded by ineffective NPCs that can be taken in seconds, PvE is simply full of that stuff and it’s a lot more varied and interesting. I play WvW precisely because I’m not looking for a fast, predictable, and easy rinse and repeat experience.

Bhodi Le.6251:

As a player who has been in WvW since beta I have come to the conclusion that it is all but impossible to defend. Think about it, the defenders inside a structure (keep, tower, garri) should have the advantage. The have the high ground, they have the walls, gates etc… but they are actually at a disadvantage. If you are on siege on a wall, in a location where you can actually hit an enemy, then you are AOE’d by a 30 man zerg.

It’s bad enough that one can get attacked anywhere on a wall but it’s even worse than that. The walls actually get in the defenders’s way and help the attacker. Cannons have blind spots. Mortars are put behind crenellations and structures that block their fire. The walls usually have a lip that helpfully prevents attackers from pulling defenders off of the wall, but it also blocks outgoing ranged attacks, including AoE attacks down forcing defenders to jump up on the wall… where attackers can pull them off. Only a madman would build fortifications that do more to help the attackers than the defenders.

Want to make WvW more interesting? (And, yes, I know this would be a nightmare to balance well.) Make all the locations flat-topped boxes and let players place the built-in siege, add crenellations and lips to the walls, put in a moat, ditch, or spikes to keep pesky Dragontooth Elementalists away from the wall, add siege weapon platforms to the insides of walls to build siege weapons on further in, add small siege weapon towers to allow ballistas and other weapons to fire down without being on the edge, and so on instead of forcing players to defend a stupidly built location that they can’t fix. Let players actually build up the sites they defend.

I wish they would just make the walls less of a hindrance for defenders. Why do crenellations on walls do more to block defenders and their siege equipment than attackers? Why do I have to jump up on the edge of a wall, where I can get pulled off, to shoot down? Why do I die repairing the back of a gate that hasn’t been breached yet? Why is it nearly impossible to place siege weapons anywhere near the wall that can’t be readily destroyed with hand weapon attacks? Seems like the walls are often more about decoration than serious defensive structures. Even the murder slots in keep gates are there mostly for decoration.

As annoying as I find them, I’m fine with permanent-stealth being a thief’s thing. I don’t have the patience to play it or fight them most of the time but I can normally simply escape them and if they are really good or annoying, anti-stealth traps and calling in more people are ways to deal with them. I’d use Sic ‘Em more if it lasted longer, but I’m OK with the annoyance as a style of play for those who enjoy it.

That said, I don’t think thieves should be able to stake downed players while in stealth. This makes them impossible to interrupt and means that going down with a thief in the battle is almost a guaranteed stake. Let them keep doing damage to get the kill from stealth or become visible and vulnerable like everyone else. The becomes even more of an issue when staking is worth points with the Bloodlust mechanics.

Likes:

1) Defensive play. I enjoy the mechanics and pace of supply management, running dolyaks, doing upgrades, and sieging up a site to ready it for an attack.

2) Variety of play style options. One can camp, build, roam, disrupt, duel, or zerg as desired. I’ll often drift between styles depending on my mood.

3) The unpredictability of fighting other players rather than carefully balanced NPCs in set encounters. This has really taught me to play my character better than PvE ever did.

Dislikes:

1) Defensive play is thinly rewarded and impeded by defensive structures and other mechanics. Figure out how to reward dolyak escorting, building useful siege weapons, upgrades (some karma or WXP in exchange for the gold for completed upgrades?), and other defensive activity. Shouldn’t be as rewarding as taking objectives but shouldn’t offer no reward. Figure out how to make defensive structures that are not more of an impediment to defenders than attackers. Shouldn’t be as hard to place siege that can’t be hit by regular attacks and shouldn’t need to risk being pulled off a wall to attack from the wall. Only an idiot would design a fortification like that. Your towers, keeps, and castles have crenellations and murder slits but they are defensively useless and only block outgoing siege. Would also be nice if siege weapons inside of friendly structures expired more slowly (probably more important in the lower tiers).

2) Staking downed players from stealth, which makes it a free kill that’s impossible to interrupt. Of all the thief stealth abilities that are annoying, I’d be happiest if ANet got rid of this. I’m fine with a thief being a pest and escaping. Not so fine with them being an unstoppable killing machine.

3) Overpowered warriors. They can outrun anyone or out flee anyone, take more damage than anyone, deal more damage than anyone, immobilize their targets so they can’t move. In WvW I’m not seeing much of a downside or vulnerability. But the biggest problem is that they are simply not fun to fight. They all seem to be played the same way. Needs a rework. Plenty of detailed complaints in the forums if you need ideas.

Hexin.5603:

1- 5 SMC captures

The only warnging I’d give with this one is that I’ve been standing in the capture circle while SMC was taken and not gotten credit for this (I’ve completed the achievement other ways). We haven’t been flipping SMC all that much, but if I’d gotten credit for when we did and I was there, I would have gotten this achievement but still don’t have it.

Solstice.1097:

For a simpler change the rewards need to be tied to directly helpful actions and not just standing inside.

You can’t really guarantee that the enemy will attack if you stay in a site, which is a big part of what makes defense boring, and that’s another area where I think NPCs can help. Have small bands of NPCs periodically harass the objective guards and give defense rewards for killing them, either with personal weapons or siege weapons. One of my favorite objectives to sit on and defend is Quentin Lake. Why? Because I can build a ballista facing the Hylek and use it to help us get the Hylek on our side, defeat the Hylek when they aren’t on our side, and pick off enemies who enter the Hylek to take or kill them (a surprising number of which die before they realize a ballista is hitting them). And the ballista can do damage fast enough (with mastery or a superior ballista) to kill the Hylek and Krait without having anyone down among them fighting when they fast heal. In short, playing with the Hylek camp gives me something to do while the enemy isn’t attacking the tower and trying to take it. Give the players something to actively do around all of the objectives that can be used to determine that they aren’t just a bot gathering rewards for sitting on a site. I know people in WvW want to face other players and not NPCs, but I think facing challenging NPCs is preferable to PvDoor and sitting around doing nothing.

Solstice.1097:

I will point out that I put griefing last on the list in the OP because I realize its a very difficult fix. Some basic limitations could be put in place to at least limit it. I.E. no more than 5 blueprints per player in an objective.

I support your suggestions overall and the sorts of improvements that you are suggesting in general. It’s just that one particular one that I think is the wrong approach out of an otherwise good list, and I’m explaining why. Limiting blueprint drops per player per objective is more workable, but could still punish a low population server where there might be only one or two people who stay behind to siege up a captured objective. I’ve dropped and build more than 5 siege weapons pretty much solo in an objective myself (e.g., Veloka — 3 trebs, 3 ACs, 2 ballistas, Quentin Lake — 3 ACs, 1 treb, 1 ballista, 1 cat), but I could probably live with that limit if I had to and ask someone to drop blueprints for me if I exceeded it. There would still be the question of how to count open field siege. If there was no limit to open field siege, a griefer could just build it outside the walls.

My question is, how many of the serious griefers are long-term characters that would evade limits placed on new characters or new transfers? I haven’t seen much griefing on Eredon Terrace other than golem destruction, but I don’t dispute that it’s a serious problem and I’m curious what sorts of patterns they follow.

Solstice.1097:

The other points however I feel could make a much bigger quality of life impact with very little change to in-game mechanics.

I think the rest of your points are pretty sound and would very much like them to reward defense, since I often play defensively and lose gold or roughly break even playing WvW as a result. As I said in my first reply, at the very least, your points cover the most commonly complained about parts of WvW pretty well.

Solstice.1097:

anything that makes griefing more difficult or more expensive is still a step in the right direction, right?

A key part of my point is that limits can be abused by griefers to prevent the building of legitimate siege by filling up the quota, in which case, it might make their job easier and the cure might be at least as bad as the disease. In general, fixes that prevent everyone from doing something should be a last resort. Eliminating town clothes from WvW stopped an abuse but also hurt players from using them for benign fun reasons, for example.

abiyde.5064:

Large quantities of non-superior siege are a sign of griefing. Have a very low siege cap for un-upgraded siege but let superiors be placed in greater numbers/concentrations and you can still legitimately place siege where needed and reduce griefing.

Never underestimate the ability of a determined player to evade any limit with an exception, and this would still leave the problem that building non-superior siege in useless locations would prevent the legitimate placement of non-superior siege in useful locations. I honestly don’t think that the 9 silver per Superior Ballista blueprints or even 17-18 silver for Superior AC or Flame Ram blueprints would deter a griefer willing to spend $30-$50 for a throwaway account.

Solstice.1097:

then i think a max of 5 would suffice. red as an example could have 3 for SMC, 1 for ogrewatch and veloka, and 1 that can hit anz.

To be honest, I think 3-4 facing Ogrewatch and Veloka are more important, and that may be because I play on a low-tier Bronze server that often fights outnumbered. My larger point is that players can legitimately want to build more than your limit, even if you can’t personally imagine it being necessary, which undermines your claim that there is no legitimate reason to build more than you personally imagine is enough. And as I also mentioned, your limit also creates the problem of griefers building siege in useless locations up to the limit in order to prevent useful seige from being build where it’s needed. Yes, it may be frustrating to see 15 trebs in the lord’s room but it would be even more frustrating to see 5 built in a corner where they can’t hit anything and not being able to build another treb where you really need it. You need to make sure you cure isn’t as bad or worse than the disease you are trying to cure.

I don’t think the griefing problem will be solved with overall build limits like this. I think it will be solved with limiting who can build (making it so that new players to a server can’t drop blueprints — the source of several types of griefing — or start upgrades — another major way to waste supplies. Even if you were to make the limits account-based (e.g., each account can drop 5 blueprints per site), I can imagine situations where that would thwart defensive players legitimately building siege for defense.

Out of curiosity, have you ever had trouble building siege that you wanted to build because of the existing placement limits? I have (several times at Jerrifers, in particular, but also elsewhere), and it’s quite frustrating not being able to build what you want where you want because the game prevents it.

Blackhat.4016:

1. Check the amount of players every minute for each server (15 per tick)

I think the rolling average period needs to be longer than 15 minutes and should probably be in the 30 to 60 minute range. I also think the effective population count should be the greater of either the rolling average or the current population. The idea is that a server should not be able to get a benefit by either quickly dropping it’s population or by quickly increasing it. A longer rolling average period would reduce the benefit of quickly dropping in population and using the greater of the average or current population would eliminate the benefit of quickly increasing in population.

I’ve actually found the Stonemist Castle achievement the hardest to get, first because I’m often not with our Eternal Battlegrounds force when it takes it but also because I’ve been standing in the circle when we took it and not gotten credit for it. I’d have the achievement already if I’d gotten credit for every capture I’d been involved in.

Solstice.1097:

5. Limit Griefing – […] Place a limit of trebuchets, catapults, and rams inside an objective to max 3 or 4 of each (I’ve never seen 5+ rams, catas, or trebs inside a friendly objective when the player was not purposely griefing).

One thing I forgot to add is that I disagree with this part. I’ve often seen 6 or more trebs in the Red Keep on the Eternal Battlegrounds and all of them were justified and placed deliberately by players on my server (generally 3 in the lower keep aimed toward SM and/or Anz and 3 in the upper keep aimed toward Ogrewatch and Langor. And that’s not counting the possibility for a door treb or two. I’ve seen similar set-ups in the other keeps in the Eternal Battlegrounds, too, particularly in the Green Keep (to cover the four outlying towers) but also sometimes the Blue Keep (aimed at Langor and Bravost as well as the doors), and there are towers where I’d put 5 or more trebs given the time to build them (specifically Langor, which may need to broadside and counter-treb the red keep to take it back, and Jerrifers, where there might be two back by the lord’s room and another three on the far side to cover the Green Keep, Golanta, and Klovan). I can also imagine a griefer using such limits to build 3-4 badly placed trebs that are useless to prevent defenders from building the trebs they do need to properly siege up the site. So I’m not a fan of this limit. My preferred fix is to prevent new players from dropping blueprints or starting upgrades until they’ve been playing for at least a week and, during leagues, until league play has ended.

I suppose I should also point out that sometimes deliberate siege placement by one player can look like griefing to another player. For example, I’ve build flame rams in the middle of supply camps like Pangloss because the number 2 attack can be useful when being jumped by a small team to push them back (it does direct damage, 3 seconds of burning, and 3 seconds of fear).

Solstice.1097:

NPC could possibly help but it’s more of a crutch than small group strategy.

It’s absolutely a crutch, but I think it’s the least disruptive of all of the solutions I’ve seen or could think of and outnumbered servers who are losing heavily in points need some sort of crutch.

Adjusting points doesn’t change the fact that getting stomped, spawn camped, and holding nothing on a map isn’t much fun for a greatly outnumbered server. Adjusting stats creates problems for players who want to test their skills against other players and consider things like the Bloodlust bonuses imbalancing. It also makes it difficult for players to kitten how effective their character might be in any fight, since the strength of their character and opponents will vary quite a bit.

I know the NPCs will help because I use it already with caravan guards, camp NPCs, and the mercenaries to help me hold and take camps while outnumbered.

Solstice.1097:

I think if defense were made more important and the scoring system did a better job of encouraging attacking the leader it would go a very long way with very little, if any, changes to actual game mechanics.

I think that rewarding defense would help, but it wouldn’t solve the problem that once the population on server drops low enough, there simply aren’t enough people available to cover every location that they’ve upgraded while their numbers were higher, meaning that even a handful of opponents can flip a fully upgraded site.

One other suggestion I’ve made is to give an underdog server (outnumbered or down by a significant number of points) instant warnings about attacks instead of delaying the swords for 30 seconds, but given how fast superior rams with mastery and golems can melt gates, even with an instant warning, the battle could be over by the time a defender runs to the tower and gets on the siege weapons inside. Having the NPCs start the defense when the enemy shows up could go a long way toward giving the defenders the time they need to get inside and help out.

Eloquence.5207:

Whenever I try to do the “small group” things like roaming, escorting yaks, and defending camps, I ended up getting trolled by thieves and/or warriors.

For the warriors, upgrade the camps and get caravan guards for the dolyaks. Adding a few NPCs in to the fight can tilt things in your favor. For camps, I also recommend building some siege weapons — ballistas in particular since they have no minimum range — in among the NPCs for protection. If you spend the points on ballasta mastery, they can do quite a bit of damage and I’ve downed opponents in one shot at close range with them using the spread shot.

The answer for thieves is to invest in some anti-stealth traps. Makes them a sitting duck for 30 seconds and if they stick around, you’ll kill them and if you’ve got siege in a camp, you’ll kill them. Very effective in confined camps with limited access like Pangloss, Danelon, and Rogue’s Quarry because you can almost guarantee they’ll trigger them but they can work in an open field, too, if you know a thief is lurking around. It’s actually kinda entertaining watching thieves do their routine until they figure out that their stealth isn’t working.

Also, you might want to try luring them into the water when roaming. ANet got rid of a lot of the deep water on the Borderlands maps but there is still enough of it to fight in and there is some deep water on the Eternal Battlegrounds map, too. Rangers and Mesmers, for example, are very effective and hard to kill underwater and Warriors and Thieves aren’t nearly as impressive underwater as they are on land.

I’d wait. I got WvW world completion done pretty quickly on Eredon Terrace when it was at the bottom of the regular rankings and even managed to get some Borderlands map completions done while other servers were assigned the map. At the time, the biggest challenge was getting Stonemist Castle because, at the time, it seemed like we’d never take it. If you already have that, everything else is just a matter of time.

Mighty Assasin.3816:

Zergs are encoruaged by this game, it might be different if :
1. the AOE cap was increased/removed.
2. Downed state removed.
3. Rally has a small player cap. (2 player max)
4. An adjustment to supply

There is yet another issue that encourages stacking. Boons and heals are generally ranged based and the best way to get these things from allies is to cluster close to each other so that when boons and heals are triggered, you get the benefit. This is one of the main problems that Rangers face in WvW. If a longbow ranger stands back to use their longbow from a distance, they don’t get the boons or healing being provided by the main cluster of players for each other.

To fix that, ANet would need to change the way boons and possibly heals are ranged and allocated, making them effective over a longer distance, perhaps only to party members or squad members or something like that.

One way ANet should be able to increase the AoE limit without melting their servers is to make more AoEs work like Barrage and do their damage in pulses over time, perhaps making sure different opponents get hit on various pulses. The way Barrage currently works is that it does 12 hits on 5 targets at 0.6 second intervals and picks a new target if one target dies. Suppose barrage did 12 hits on 5 targets at 0.6 second intervals in “A” and “B” sets (each not including a target in the other) each doing twice as much damage. The first set of 5 nearest targets becomes that “A” set and takes the first set of hits. The next set of 5 skips the first 5 and becomes the “B” set and takes the second set of hits 0.6 second later (if there aren’t 5, then those hits are lost). Then back to the “A” set in 0.6 seconds. Then to the “B” set. And so on until it’s run its course. That would allow barrage to hit twice as many targets without significantly more computation per pulse except for the calculation of the next five nearest targets on the “B” pulse. Increase to 15 maximum targets with a “C” set. I believe other AoEs work in a similar way (Meteor Shower?).

Sirendor.1394:

No. Don’t merge servers. We don’t want blobs. Most people here are on Vabbi because they like small scale, they left their original servers for it. People who didn’t like it transferred to other places.

I’m on Eredon Terrace in NA and I feel pretty much the same way. I’d like some more players and some more around-the-clock coverage, but I’m really not looking for the sort of play people talk about on the top-tiered servers and like the small town feel at the bottom. The problem isn’t the small scale play but being matched against much larger servers and if ANet could resolve the match-up problem, it would actually be a good thing to support various scales of play for the people who want them.

Straegen.2938:

WvW is an open field game with scoring nodes.

If that’s the intent, then they should turn the whole map into a bunch of capture circles like the ruins. That people expect fortifications to be defensible is not unreasonable. If that’s not the intent, then ANet should present them as capture points, not fortifications that you can upgrade.

It’s kinda like putting bows in the game and then having the characters swing them at each other like melee weapons instead of shooting arrows. Yes, ANet could do that, but then they shouldn’t be surprised by the endless complaints by players who would like their bows to shoot arrows instead of having to use them to bludgeon their opponents in melee. And they shouldnt’ e surprised if all those players jump to a new MMO if it offers them bows that shoot arrows rather than being absurd melee weapons.

The solution seems to be pretty simple. Don’t allow new characters for one week or the duration of league play (since they let players know who their server will be playing for several weeks) to drop plans, start upgrades, or control golems. That seems to cover the vast majority of serious problems. Let them spend supplies on repairs, to build siege that other players have dropped, or to man other siege weapons because, even though there are cases where that can be abused, those are viable things a new player could need and want to do. If they still have a serious problem after that, they could adjust the restrictions from there.

hihey.1075:

Ehm… wut? If you are accusing me of being a pvd lover you picked the wrong user.
Thing is, when you roam at 3 AM and you find no one anywhere, with the exception of a 30+ppl karma train, you are inclined to group up with some other roamers and try something different rather than the occasional sentry or camp.

So you are not a PvDoor lover, but want it kept a viable option for you because you like it more than the alternatives? Maybe the solution isn’t to protect PvDoor as a viable mode to play but to fix the larger problem that’s making it the best option available to you?

hihey.1075:

Anyway, it is not you who decide what people can do and what people cannot do to have fun.

Nor is it you, so please get off that high horse before you get a nosebleed. ANet decides. And, if you haven’t noticed, they change what players can and can’t do with almost every update, at times eliminating the viability of character builds and modes of play to change the way the game is played. They do so based on what the majority of players find fun and not fun and what they think makes for the best game for everyone. Here, you are defending a mode of play you claim you don’t actually like which is a mode of play that makes the game miserable for a lot of other players.

hihey.1075:

If people fight for PvD, let them. I have nothing against it, since I couldn’t care less about points. Sometimes I even follow the night karma train just because I like making fun of other people in TS. Sometimes I troll the guys in Teamchat and throw 20+ ballista blueprints in front of a gate. This is WvW.

The question is not what WvW is, but what it should be. If people really love PvDoor, then admit it and defend it’s value to the game, but even you don’t seem willing to do that. The entire PvE portion of the game provides a better PvE experience than PvDoor, so what’s the value of PvDoor?

And, sure, ANet can craft the rules of WvW to make it a wonderland for trolls and griefers, but I somehow doubt that’s going to be a viable long-term business model for them and seems to run counter to the design philosophy of the rest of the game which, if you also haven’t noticed, is designed to limit trolls and griefers. “Our game is full of players who like to annoy other players and make the game harder to play,” really doesn’t make for great ad copy.

Fastbucks.5073:

The issue I face is that when I get home, login, there are hours of queues to get into the borderlands or EB where fighting takes place.

I’m on Eredon Terrace, currently at the bottom of the Bronze League, and I finished my Season 1 achievements a few weeks ago. Basically, your population that causes those queues is the population that put your server at the top of the WvW rankings. So you’ve got a choice. You can continue to play on a dominant server and endure queues that might mean you don’t get to play, or you can transfer to a lower tiered server where your server may be the loser but you’ll almost always have the opportunity to play. Currently, that’s apparently ANet’s only strategy to equalize server populations, but also apparently there are people who would rather sit in a queue and not play than play on a lower tier server.

On Eredon Terrace, the only time I see queues is on reset night and, then, only on one map. That’s likely true of all of the servers near the bottom of the rankings. I can play WvW whenever I want and usually on whatever map I want.

Azlaphe.5178:

I love to roam actually Take like a 10 to 15 man zerg as well and roam from place to place. or smaller. If you know of a good guild that that is willing ot help me out and or interesting let me know. I have skype if anyone wants to talk iwht me as well

Eredon Terrace has float teams that do that. Of course a lot of our main zergs are also in that size range (10-20). One of the reasons why I really don’t want ANet to forcibly merge servers or equalize the populations is that I actually like the small town feel of the servers at the bottom, where a small group or even individual can make a difference.

No matter what tier you pick, there are going to be blow-outs because that’s the nature of how the WvW match-ups work right now. Where the tiers seem to differ is in what the routine and normal play looks like because a server with 60 players on a map plays differently than a server with 5.

Azlaphe.5178:

lol well I do want a challenge but I dont want to be in a predicament leaving me saying now what. And i dont want to get steam rolled hard. Though geting stream rolled here and there isnt bad either honestly

The problem is that WvW doesn’t scale gradually. There is a fairly narrow range where there is an even challenge but any substantial number advantage either way produces a blow-out. So at almost any tier, you’ll get decent match-ups where at least two of the servers are competitive and even decent times during almost any match-up where differences in coverage patterns make various servers compatible, but if you aren’t on a reliably dominant server that’s always winning, that means you are going to be on one of the servers that they wind up dominating when put up against them and steamrollering is going to happen for at least some of the match-up.

The one nice thing about the lower tiers is that there is rarely 100% map coverage from any server, which means that there is almost always an opportunity for a small team to do something on one of the map. I’ve also seen some pretty epic successful defenses against impossible odds (e.g., the two other servers fighting us in the lord’s room of a keep) because one thing you’ll find at the bottom is that there aren’t a lot of mindless pick-up players looking to follow a zerg for points, so what’s left are fairly die-hard WvW players who are actually pretty good and can hit a zerging opponent pretty hard. Quite a few players who have transferred around comment that they think the individual skill level at the lower tiers is better than in the upper tiers.

Azlaphe.5178:

So my question to yall what is a lower League Server i can transfer to that still has a good community and a decent population but isnt owning everything. if that makes sense i would like to know and if u know of a guild on that server that is willing to let me in. I liek wvw alot and i do pve but mostly liek to wvw my only problem is that We just dominating so much it has become not fun anymore.-.-. Many thanks for advice

Any of the Bronze League NA servers except the the top few (3 or so ) would probably give you what you are looking for. Just bear in mind that you may find yourself on a server that’s being dominated. Most of the time, there is still plenty to do and you can have a lot of fun with it if you aren’t going to worry about losing in points, but it can still be disheartening to have an huge enemy zerg show up on your borderlands or corner of the Eternal Battlegrounds and take whatever they want without being able to do anything about it and it can be disheartening to lose everything every night because your server doesn’t have overnight coverage. If you can live with that, then you can still have a lot of fun on the lower-tier Bronze servers because defending against huge numbers provides a lot of opportunity for kills and loot and having all of your stuff taken away provides a lot of opportunity to take stuff back.

I know Eredon Terracce would be happy to have more help because one of the other nice things about low-tier servers is that everyone matters. We have a variety of guilds and players with different play styles ranging from looking for 1v1 and small group open field fights, taking objectives (sometimes specializing on different maps), and even defending against servers that outnumber us and succeeding more often than our numbers suggest we should. One person can make a difference down here.

(I think you’re looking at higher tiers, but wanted to add this for others in the same boat or in case your mind isn’t set yet.)

ARAGON.8759:

I am unsure what the game designers can do about this,but I do wish to alertthe staff of Gw2 of this issue.When gameplay is no longer fun, thats when players leave.

What I find difficult to understand is that ANet seems to have a pretty good understanding of scaling a challenge and handicapping a fight in PvE where they not only adjust the level of characters to make the challenge appropriately hard but even have the ability to dynamically scale encounters on the fly so they become more difficult as more players show up to an event. You need to present more players with a harder challenge. There are many ways that this can be done in WvW ranging from adjusting abilities akin to up-leveling and down-leveling and doing things like adjusting cooldown or even simply boosting Health/Hit Points for an outnumbered opponent to increasing the number and strength of NPCs (should be easy enough, since they do this in PvE already) and the adjusting the efffectiness of fortifications and siege weapons. So long as piling on the players increases effectiveness linearly or even better (and given how conditions and CC work in GW2, probably better than linearly, especially now that immobilizes stack) with no downside (AoE caps help guarantee that), the only winning strategy will be to stack into a single glob and unless there is a huge skill disparity, the largest glob is going to win.

Yes, all of those fixes come at a price. While combat happens between armies, it occurs as individual fights that can be 1-on-1 and adjusting combat abilities will make those individual fights imbalanced and hard to predict. People play WvW to fight other players, not NPCs, and so on. Of all the adjustments, I think scaling the NPCs would be the least disruptive since it (A) will have minimal benefit on office and many benefit defense, (B) can leverage code ANet already has for PvE, and © PvDoor or taking out a camp or tower with 1 to 2 defenders is already essentially a PvE experience, and (D) having NPCs drop in effectiveness or even disappear at more defenders show up should be far less annoying to defending players than adjusting their combat effectiveness on the fly.

There is also the challenge of determining when a server is outnumbered and what sort of bonus it should get that can’t be easily abused by a clever server, given how freely players can move into and out of WvW, between maps in WvW, and around maps inside of WvW but using rolling averages and points (as a way to determine how well a server is doing in their battles) and having the upward adjustments for being disadvantaged happen slowly (so a server can’t abandon a map or WvW to get an instant bonus) and downward adjustments for being advantaged happen quickly (so a server surging onto a map quickly loses it’s advantages), this should be manageable.

I think this is a good summary of the most complained-about problems in WvW. My own preference for fixing WvW population imbalances is to add or buff the NPCs for the outnumbered server. I’d rather fight alongside other players but if they aren’t on, I’d rather fight alongside NPCs than fight alone while badly outnumbered.

I can win while slightly outnumbered while fighting among friendly NPCs in a camp, tower, keep, or while escorting a dolyak. One could win against a greater imbalance with more NPC held, without making any individual character unfairly strong.

And, yes, know players don’t want PvE in their WvW, but that’s what they already have with PvDoor against a badly outnumbered server and perhaps instead of it being laughably easy, it should be a bit more challenging? It’s not as if ANet doesn’t already have the code for NPCs to fight, for NPCs to fire siege weapons, and for NPCs to scale to the immediate challenge because they do all of these things in PvE.

hihey.1075:

Working as intended. I’ve done things like this before (but used only 2 alphas and it was a T2 keep, and we were 4 people, 3 of us were mesmers lol) and it’s incredibly funny.
I can say that the pleasure YOU had in upgrading all that stuff was way less than the pleasure those 5 guys had when taking those keeps.

You are aware that the game has this whole other huge map full of easy-to-take targets defended by a variety of NPCs called PvE, right? If you find beating up NPC guards a blast, you should find endless entertainment there. They even release new Living Story content there every 2 weeks to keep things fresh. You can even follow endless champion-farming loot trains around several maps in PvE, an experience not unlike doing PvDoor against an outnumbered opponent except that the encounters have a little more variety and may actually be a bit more challenging to defeat with 3-4 players.

hmsgoddess.3869:

We are still looking for a new home. And it has been made public on our server now, which has pushed us to look harder and try to speed up the process. As such, I will be scouting with my main account now.

For whatever it’s worth, your talk of playing defensively in another recruitment thread sounded great and would have made me consider your server if I were in the market for a switch. We have some fairly dedicated defensive players and I’ve seen some spectacular saves on Eredon Terrace, carried out by commanders bringing in the cavalry from another map, even with the enemy already in the lord’s room. I do hope you’ll look at Eredon Terrace (and also some of the other servers not at the top of the Bronze League). We have a lot of fun and some spectacular fights even if the points don’t make it look that way.

The goal is to make the WXP spending differentiate characters. I think they could achieve the same goal without the current punitive system by giving all of a player’s characters the full amount of WXP to spend on abilities and perhaps reduce the overall amount of WXP so that no one character can have it all and players are encouraged to allocate different builds to different characters, especially since WXP can’t be readily reallocated.

Zylonite.5913:

Someone who spends 10-20 minutes trebbing a tower’s wall deserves more than 60 WXP when the zerg that run in the lord room get XP and Karma and Coins. and WXP.

As a defensive player, I agree with your points but…

You can get some of the loot while manning a treb while a tower is captured. When the wall goes down, turn your treb to the Lord’s Room and fire a cow and then boulders into it. If you can hit and damage the Champion Defender, you’ll get loot when the zerg finally kills him. I’ve gotten quite a few loot bags manning a treb that way.

WarLord.8430:

The server is outnumbered because no one wants to open their eyes and see how good ET could be with numbers, its ok overtime WvW guilds will come to us again, hope to meet you on the ET teamspeak server.

Just because we are outnumbered, it doesn’t mean that we don’t win battles or even hold a lot of stuff when we do have decent participation. Attached is a map screenshot from earlier this week where we were at +380 points in a match-up we are currently losing. Yes, we take a beating during the off-hours but do fairly well during prime time so long as enough people show up.

Also earlier in the week, we were badly outnumbered on Eternal Battlegrounds and FC broke through the water gate at our Keep. I jumped on our float channel in Teamspeak and told them what was going on and the cavalry arrived in time to save the Keep, not only from one opponent breaking into the inner keep but the second opponent showing up, too, fighting them both off. If I’d had to hop maps to find them and communicate the situation via map chat, the Keep probably would have been lost.

I’m not in IoM but IoM is a big part of our coordinated efforts on TeamSpeak, have very good commanders, and they played an important role in our rise in the rankings up from the bottom before the leagues started.

bokunocarrie.7215:

dat +375 ppt was lookin’ hella nice

Peaked higher than that (and I think it was even higher than this screen shot). Note that’s without SM, too.

I think that Eredon Terrace is worth a look because we’re a pretty good match for everything you say you want and don’t want. We have room for more commanders, work to defend our borderlands and are active on emeny borderlands (even when outnumbered), appreciate scouting and communication in map chat and TeamSpeak, have an active TeamSpeak sever open to guilds and WvWers grouped into a variety of channels, and cooperate and have commanders that will respond to requests for help, even when they are commanding while drinking (yes, we already have some commanders who do that quite well). We also have players who will stand and defend and fight, even when the odds are heavily stacked against them.

We are Bronze League and what that means is no queues except on reset night, and they are usually short (5-15 minutes) and on one map only. Mild lag generally only happens during really large battles for keeps or Stonemist Castle. We tend to face other smaller servers, which leaves lots of room for roaming, camp capturing, yak slapping, sentry taking, and one-on-one and small group fights without being zerged. We also have some duelists and small group and GvG fighters, as do several of the other servers we frequently face off againt, and they generally have a “Fight Night” once per week on one of the maps and informal fighting going on throughout the matchup. An active group of 12-15 could have a big impact on our success, even during NA primetime, even doing their own thing. I’ve been doing solo roaming during the last two match-ups and have had a fair amount of one-on-one fights and some solo camp captures without getting zerged.

The bottom line, and I’ve said this in a few recruiting threads already, is that everyone on ET can make a difference and can get listened to, even without a tag. I encourage you to read the most recent ET recruitment message, which should be on the first or second page of the recruitment forum, which includes a before an after message from someone who transferred to ET. We also have people who left ET for higher-tiered play and came back, both for the variety of type of play we get in our tier range and because of the community on ET.

We do have a coverage problem during parts of the day, when we tend to lose a lot of things, but our coverage during NA primetime and over the weekends has generally been pretty good, and even when we are outnumbered, we tend to hold on to some things through it all, take things back, and do some strikes into enemy territory. I find our PvE coverage OK and do quite a bit of PvE, but a lot of the harder event chains are only done rarely, but you could guest to other servers to solve that problem if you find it too sparse. There is the occasional melt-down over map chat or TeamSpeak when we do particularly badly out of frustration but they are rare, not meant personally, and we bounce back from them quickly. The norm is for everyone to be cordial, if not helpful. For the most part, everyone cooperates and works together and I’ve seen more than one tower or keep saved by the cavalry arriving from another map, responding to a call for help.

How well would our small group of 15 fit into the WvW scene?

I think you’d fit very well, be greatly appreciated, and could make a huge difference. We have all different styles of play and they are all appreciated.

Do you think your server would support our crazy events? What kind of WvW events do you already have?

We generally have at least one “Fight Night” per matchup and recently had a Ladies Night organized by some women on ET to encourage women to play WvW and command (they are planning on doing that once per month). I don’t think anyone would have a problem with crazy events or drunk commanding so long as you are helping out and not dragging us down. ET cares about results, not whether you sing Shakira in TeamSpeak (yeah, we’ve had that) or command drunk (yeah, we’ve had that, too).

If you could change 1 thing about your server, what would it be?

I wish we had better and more consistant coverage, especially outside of NA primetime. We lose a lot of stuff overnight and through the day but do a good job taking and holding stuff during our primetime when we have coverage and can lead in points per tick during our primetime. If you seriously are worried about points, we’re usually not the winning server and there will be some disapointment, though we went up a lot in rankings before the Leagues (we were at the bottom) and are working on building up (you could certainly be an important part of that). If you want good fights at all levels (ranging from 1v1 and small group fights to zerging with some pugs) and a great community, especially during NA primetime, we’ve got plenty of that. Even when we’re outnumbered and losing in points, we’re doing things and not giving up. Like I said, everyone on ET can make a difference.

Shademehr.1397:

I’m even MORE surprised by our lack of forces. Where is everyone this week?

Yes, we seem to have had a big drop-off in players since the start of the season and the few weeks before it started. I’m curious what happened to everyone, too. It’s been a while since there were so few people on both our Borderlands and the Eternal Battleground maps.

And before anyone from FC or AR interprets this as simply whining about numbers, I think both have really stepped up their game since the last time we played them and FC’s coordination, beyond just their numbers, has been pretty impressive. You aren’t giving us a lot of opportunities to relax and are making us work for the points we have. We’ve improved our coordination, too, which is why we were rising in the ranks before the Leagues started, but we need to get our numbers back up.

Shiverpeaks. I still enjoy running around in Wayfarer Foothills with my level 80s. Kryta has become a more distant second now that they’ve trashed Kessex Hills and made it even more dismal than the Harathi Hinterlands.

I think much of the champion train and dungeon problem would be solved if ANet didn’t make trains and a few dungeons paths clearly the best way to earn loot fast. If they didn’t nerf routine mob killing and the rewards for other activities and didn’t provide no reward for defending in WvW, more players might spend their time doing things other than running champion trains and a few dungeon paths. Why shouldn’t an hour spent killing risen in Orr or sharks on Southsun Cove be about as profitable as riding a champion train for an hour or speed running dungeon paths for an hour? If they were all about equal, then people would actually choose the one they enjoy the most — choosing the way they play instead of ANet choosing it for them.

doublebb.6574:

Some people clearly need to learn the difference between “tactics” and “exploits”. The bay water gate “tactic” is an EXPLOIT, plain and simple. I highly doubt Anet intended to allow players to be rezzed through solid matter. If so, why would they even put up doors and walls?

While that could be a valid argument for why you shouldn’t be allowed to res through a door, it’s not a valid argument for why doing a res through the Bay water gate should be prohibited. That’s not a solid wall or door. It’s a porous grate that one could see through and, from a role-playing simulation perspective, easily reach through to touch the dead character on the other side. If you aren’t supposed to be about to res through the Bay water gate, why does it still have holes in it that a another character can see through and would be able to reach through?

doublebb.6574:

These are clearly supposed to be the ways that everyone is supposed to invade a tower or keep. If you are able to successfully hide a LIVING mesmer, by all means that mesmer deserves to port his allies in and punish the defenders for not checking carefully. There is no defending your claim. I also highly doubt that EVERYONE uses it considering how many people are saying that it’s a wrong thing to do. And even if most people did, it doesn’t change that it is an exploit.

And if a mesmer dies in a tower or keep and doesn’t respawn and a perma-stealth thief hiding inside the same the tower or keep gets to them to res them, do they deserve the easy attack? Is it fair if it happens within 15 minutes? Is it fair if it happens after 2 hours?

I’m a defense-oriented player. I often lose money in WvW because I spend my time upgrading sites and even walking dolyaks to speed them up. I understand the frustration this causes to defense-oriented players. But there are also players who get their kicks out of using annoying tricks to get an advantage against their opponent. In many ways, I see this as another example of play like perma-stealth thieves. It annoys a lot of people and the forums of filled with complaints about it and requests to change it but it’s a form of play that part of the community enjoys and ANet is unlikely to eliminate it. Given how easy it would be to change it, yet after a year of complaints, ANet hasn’t changed it, suggest that it’s possible ANet doesn’t want to change it. That the Bay water gates used to be breakable but now aren’t suggests that ANet knows how to fix a real “exploit” like this when they want to.

RedStar.4218:

This is as much a tactic as the one used to get into QL without destroying the gate or wall.

Did ANet fix the exploits used to get into QL and Jerrifers without destroying the gate yet? Did they change the way the water gates at Bay worked to fix an exploit? Why does ANet fix one problem but not another? One answer is that one problem is easier to fix than the other. Another possible answer, though, is that it’s working as intended and ANet likes it that way.

RedStar.4218:

After 15 minutes you are using a cheat to get by the afk timer.

For the record, I’d be fine with enforcing a 15 minute forced ejection from the WvW map, reset only by someone doing a res on the character, if they don’t respawn at a waypoint. I think it’s a fine short-term strategy to keep defenders on their toes but something that’s seriously not fun for a defender who spends hours watching a corpse to make sure it stays dead. I agree you shouldn’t be able to reset the counter yourself by playing with the UI. 15 minutes seems like a good compromise to me.

titanlectro.5029:

They are there because they used to be destructible, like the water gate in Green Keep in EB.

They disabled the destructible nature of the gate because it was too easy for people to exploit through the gate. Turns out they are still easy to exploit.

I did not know that. Seems like an odd way to resolve the problem.

titanlectro.5029:

People are fooling themselves that this is not an exploit. But continue to rationalize it all you want…

It depends on what you mean by “exploit”. I think people are fooling themselves if they think that this is the sort of “exploit” that ANet is going to ban people for if they are reported doing it. I do not think this meets the standard for what’s prohibited by the Terms of Service agreement.

Jeknar.6184:

This “ress-through-gate” thing, been already exploited for ages and I find it silly that it still around when many other exploits like the wall climbing have been fixed already… They could simply put another stupid gate behind that one and the problem would be solved. And no, I don’t belive that such a broken mechanic is “working as intented”.

I think the first part of this does not support the conclusion. They fixed an old exploit at the Bay water gate by changing how it worked and made the gratings indestructible and I agree that the “res-through-gate” thing would be even more trivially easy for them to fix, simply by adding another cover to the other side of the tunnel. So if this is an exploit that’s simple to fix and they don’t want it to be there, why haven’t they fixed it yet?

Jeknar.6184:

Not-So-Off-Topic: Also, bay is a so stupid keep to take… You can treb bay from the valley camp, from briar tower, from garrison, from quarry camp, from the bloodlust ruins, from SMC, from Lion’s Arch, even from bay itself… This keep need some serious changes. There towers way harder to get compared to bay (like Jerrifer’s or Veloka).

Defending, in general, is broken. There is something seriously wrong when the walls and gates of a tower, keep, or castle do more to get in the way of defenders than attackers, which is sometimes the case, too. The biggest problem is that walls and gates do not cast a shadow that prevents effects from happening through and across them and being able to affect people on the other side of a gate is just another symptom of a much bigger problem. And to be honest, I think that plenty of other problems caused by this are far more serious problems for the game than this is, including being able to Dragon Tooth and wide displays to destroy siege weapons deep inside of towers and keeps. Of course defenders also “exploit” this problem by firing their siege weapons, including trebs, at the backs of solid doors to harm the attackers on the other side.

titanlectro.5029:

We can add AKD and ApeX to the bay exploiting list… Yes, I got screenshots of you rezing through the gate.

I know you guys are convinced that this is an exploit, but I think it’s pretty clear that Bay was designed with those gates precisely to allow what people are doing. Why else would those portals be there and not act like walls? What other purpose do they serve? I think they are working as intended, frustrating as that may be to those who take Bay, just as perma-stealth thieves and Mesmer portaling in general are working as intended. I recommend not killing the Mesmer by the underwater portal or by doors and, yes, there are ways to do that.