Guild Wars 2

Atherakhia.4086:

Miles ahead of the Ranger CDI. Congrats.

While we didn’t get a huge amount of ANet feedback and not everyone got what they wanted, I think the last big patch contained a lot of evidence that they did read that thread and addresses some of the issues raised in it fairly well, specifically by eliminating the need for Signet of the Beastmaster and making longbow power builds viable in WvW.

Zaxares.5419:

Is 30+ players really considered too few??

Given that they seem to have set the cap at 100 or more and seem to like world boss events where the world boss melts in a minute or two, perhaps 30+ really is too few for ANet.

Jeknar.6184:

Go play a bit on AR and you’ll see your server is nowhere close of being dead.

Even AR isn’t completely dead. They managed to do a decent job of taking quite a bit yesterday and had some fairly large numbers on for a while.

Filovirus.6258:

Oh and most players on low tiers servers are ok with transfering, merging and such, it’s just they don’t want to pay for moving, and/or (most reason) they don’t want to leave without their friends there.

And you know this for certain because? And you can speak with authority for both the NA and EU servers, all 18 servers in bronze leagues?

Filovirus.6258:

Despite a handful of players pretending they would leave the game if they were merger, the vast majority of players would have no problem with it.

I am not pretending to know what I want. I know what I want and you don’t. It’s the height of arrogance to tell someone else that you know what they want better than they do. You don’t.

Filovirus.6258:

Remove the last 6 servers and offer the players on it a free transfer to any other server but the top 6, and leave them a few weeks beforehand to organize their move, and nearly none will stop, they’ll go to other servers with the people they like (or avoid the people they dislike) and you’ll see in the end most servers players will split up without a second of remorse, leaving behind their so-salled “community” filled with drama and rivalry.

If everyone really wants what you want, then why not simply offer everyone free transfers to any non-gold server and let the players decide what they want to do instead of forcing them to do it?

“People don’t know what they really want but I do.” “People are clinging to bad habits that hold them back from true happiness so they need to be forced to give them up.” “People choose the wrong things if you let them choose on their own, so those in charge should make the hard choice for them.” “People just need to be forced to accept change for the better and then everyone will be happy.” “They think they’ll hate the changes but they’ll learn to enjoy the new order of things over time.”

I doubt you’ll like to be on the receiving end of those arguments.

vincecontix.1264:

Far from god mode but they easy mode.

Try dodging or reflection or, heck, even kiting around and obstruction. Players that run in a straight line are an easy kill. Players that know how to move sideways and dodge, not so easy. It also helps if you are class that spews minions and clones. Stop being a predictable and easy to kill opponent.

vincecontix.1264:

At this point its easier dealing with multiple bad zerker thief’s than it is bad ranger.

So what, exactly, makes them “bad” if they are effective at killing you?

And before you tell me that they all use the same attacks over and over again, the vast majority of hammer warriors I’m attacked by all seem to use the same attack routine every time, too.

nekretaal.6485:

Just hide the score / hide the tick timer.

Right now the score tells losing servers that the intubation is hopeless and things snowball.

Unless you can also hide the map, you aren’t going to be able to hide how things are going for a server. When I want to know how things are going for my server, the first thing I look at is a live map of WvW, which I can even do outside of the game. My server’s home BL is mostly the enemy’s color and we have very little on EBG, it’s pretty clear that things are going badly.

Sreoom.3690:

Ask any BG player….they are always out numbered and win only by superior organization and outstanding play.

From what I’ve seen, everyone always seems to think that they are outnumbered and I think that’s because it’s easy, when looking at the enemy’s tags, to count all the pets, minions, and clones as enemies so that in a fairly even battle, both sides can think that they were outnumbered by the other side.

Arghore.8340:

1. The inability to claim a supply camp with a small group (say 3 people) with all different guilds. Not being able to claim this camp for a +5 buff severely hinders doing an impromptu havocgroup (for some reason people do not like to just stand around for 2.5min twiddling their thumbs). The same thing applies in regards to doing a guerrilla action during outnumbered periods…

Yes. Sometimes this even happens when it’s just a friend and me and he forgot to change his guild representation to our common guild. While I’d be fine with it being removed entirely for camps, I think they could simply reduce the delay to 1 minute instead of 3 and it wouldn’t be so bad.

Arghore.8340:

2. The fact that once claimed, one can not ‘un claim’ a structure, and with buffs running out after a certain amount of time, I found that more then often a structure is claimed by a guild, buffs have run out, and there is nobody of said guild around to claim something else. This severely hinders a good defence especially during off hours.

This, too. Put messages into guild chat that the buff is running out in WvW 15 minutes before it does and then when it does. Once it runs out, another guild should be able to take over the claim.

I also think there should be a way to simply unclaim something you’ve claimed without having to go claim a camp or something to move it. That would be less of an issue if you could over-claim when no buffs are running, but it would still be nice to reliquish a claim on purpose.

Finally, I’d like an “OK/Cancel” dialog to pop up when you make a claim if that claim is going to move the claim from some other objective. Something like, “Claiming Greenbriar will remove the guild claim on Cliffside. OK/Cancel”. One of the reasons why I use small personal guilds in WvW is so that I can move claims around without having to worry about accientally moving a claim that someone else in a larger guild made that I wasn’t aware of. I don’t want to accidentally pull a claim off of a keep to get a +5 supply buff on a camp, for example, or to take a +5 claim away from someone else who is using it to build siege weapons in a tower or keep.

You can see the claiming guild’s name using a live map web site such as this but I agree it should also be available in the game itself. Having the guild claimer dialog tell you is one good way to do it. Another way to do it would be to make the banner clickable and show the name and abbreviation for the claiming guild.

Absconditus.6804:

I tend to see a plethora of the same people on the maps I travel to, because you know, the system actually works like that. It will pool your server together as much as it can, your friends, your guildies, other players you’ve been playing with a lot.

Maybe it works for you. It doesn’t work for me. I don’t belong to a large guild and guild seems to matter a lot. If my friends are representing a different guild, I don’t wind up in the same map with them and there was one case where we couldn’t get on the same map even when we were in the same party, despite both of us trying to leave and come back to the map.

I play primarily on laptops. They have decent capabilities (one is a high-end gaming laptop) but I don’t see anywhere near the framerate you are seeing, even on low. I didn’t have to play on low settings before the megaservers. I’m also predominantly a WvW player but I want to see the character models of the people I’m fighting. I play on a low-tier server so until they give us the megaserver treatment in WvW, it’s still rarely a problem there. I have dialed my settings down a bit, but I’m not happy about it.

And if you didn’t find The Frozen Maw challenging with 3 people or soloing the old Taquatl challenging, then you are really a far better player than I am and I play with a lot of people who aren’t that good. If you did find that challenging, well you can’t get that challenge anymore because there will be a zerg there waiting to speed kill it.

It’s fair enough that you have some anger toward players that abuse other players for interrupting their train. I’m not one of them, nor are my friends who have stopped playing (it was their praise who brought me in to GW2) because they hate what the way the megaservers changed the way the world boss events play and feel. Nor are the casuals that I’ve helped that I’ve seen having trouble getting credit for the Frozen Maw events. In fact, most players would probably consider me a casual, too, especially if they’ve seen me in a dungeon.

Absconditus.6804:

I never have trouble tagging enemies, and I play a freaking Mesmer. I don’t perhaps tag every enemy, but I never have problems tagging into an event. Why should I expect to tag everything anyways? I have never had problems getting the “Gold” reward for completing an event unless I reached it late, I participate easily, achieving that and getting any associated reward chest from it. I get my bonus chest(s) without any real effort needed at every larger world event I go to. I’ve never had a problem tagging Champions to get a bag (if they drop one, not every Champion in the game does after all).

I’m not expecting to tag everything, but there are pre-events at the Frozen Maw and elsewhere where everything dies before it is even done rendering because there are people waiting to kill it. If you know where to stand, you can usually hit one or two before they die to at least get a bronze or silver for it, but if you are new to the event, I can easily imagine it whizzing by in a flash before the person even realizes what’s happening. I frequently don’t get gold on at least half of the Maw pre-events, despite knowing where all the mob are going to appear and I’ve recently played with a new player who had trouble getting any credit for any of it with a lower-level character. You may not have any problem. Other people do.

I get the bonus chest but I have gotten the actual champion box once from the Frozen Maw since the megaservers started, the day I wound up on a half-empty megaserver that wasn’t packed. I’m rarely in a party, so that’s part of the problem, but why should I have to be? A new player that I recently played with had trouble getting anything from the events with a lower level character. When was the last time you played The Frozen Maw or the Shadow Behemoth, events that happen in starter areas, with a 13th level character that’s not optimized, like a new player might? What kind of experience do you think beginners have?

Absconditus.6804:

The problem here isn’t necessarily that the events are done quickly, is it, it’s seemingly more so that you can’t tag every little thing, and as such, the horror, you have a little bit less chance at loot from trash mobs. There’s also still a need to avoid incoming damage, regardless if you’re 30 or 100 players at an event. At easier ones, this is trivial, but it is regardless of how many players are there.

Nice try with the straw man. I don’t care about the loot from the trash mobs. Some events seem to have done away with most of that, anyway. The problem is exactly what I said it is. The event is done too quickly.

Mobs die before they are fully rendered. The boss gets pinned by a zerg and goes down in minutes. And, no, I don’t have to avoid incoming damage. I never had to with an 80th level character at the Shadow Behemoth, but at the Frozen Maw, I’ve found that I can park my thief right next to the shamen in the zerg and never dodge or fire off a heal and not go down. That was not something I could do with 5 or 10 or even 30 people. I can with the commander-led zergs, though. If you’ve played the Frozen Maw with three people, you must have seen the shaman actually walk around and follow people when there isn’t a zerg pinning him.

Absconditus.6804:

There’s a large number of events I run by that has nobody doing them, so I do them, I get to do a load of events on my own or with a few other players around, it’s just not the very few specific “farming”-events that players seem to love and choo-choo around the map in circles to do.

Absolutely, but that’s the problem with the megaservers. The concentrate the zerg on those farming events. And when that doesn’t happen, the results can still be pretty silly. See farming for resource nodes in Malchor’s Leap and the karka killing trains on Southsun Cove for examples of more spread out mobs of players.

Vayne.8563:

As time goes on, server pride will be replaced by guild pride. It’s going in that direction and has been for some time.

My primary guild has 2 active players in it. I have another one where I’m really the only member. Honestly, I like it that way because if I want to guild claim something in WvW or run or fire off a buff, I don’t have to worry about other people approving or not.

With guilds come hierarchies and I’m not really all that interested in joining someone else’s army, having another job, or taking on mandatory obligations to do things with the group. I know some people seem to enjoy the structure and focus but I really don’t.

Server groups me with other people without a hierarchy. I consider that a good thing.

Vayne.8563:

Guilds are just like what you describe…my guild is still a group of people I see all the time.

I hang out with people from several guilds, depending on the day and what I want to do. There are some WvW guilds that I hang out with in WvW but sometimes I hang out with other guilds or roam on my own or with random people. Sometimes I hang out with friends in TeamSpeak who might all be representing different guilds.

I’ve never been one to join structured groups because I never really found them appealing. Didn’t belong to clubs as a kid. Didn’t belong to a fraternity in college and belonged to a few clubs only casually. Don’t belong to any clubs or organizations now. Not a huge fan of structured fun or friendships. I know other people enjoy that, and that’s great. Not what everyone is looking for. Not what I’m looking for.

And note that I’ve been invited to join several guilds and did join a few, so this is not a complaint that I can’t find a guild to join or that none will take me. It’s about making something important that I don’t want to have to care about and doesn’t match how I want to play the game.

funassistant.6589:

Day 836273563 of the Ranger plague.

Replace “Ranger” with “Warrior” and “entangling roots” and “bear” with “hammer” and that’s a pretty good approximation of the frustration that I had playing a longbow power Ranger build in WvW before the patch, before it was good. And for the record, I only use a bear pet underwater (polar bear).

Could they reduce the number of NA servers by 3 or 6 without messing it up too badly? Probably. But who are they going to merge? How are they going to merge them? And is it actually going to solve the problem? There are some low-tier servers that I would probably be OK with merging with, but I’m not sure everyone would be happy about it, nor would it necessarily solve either servers problems if it doesn’t fix the coverage problem.

There are other low-tier merges where the cultures wouldn’t fit well together at all, leading to a dysfunctional server or an exodus of people, thus erasing any benefits of a merger. But if they were to melt the lower-tier servers into much higher-tier servers, the effect would be to destroy the lower-tier community and change their style of play significantly, which they might not want.

As for the game being designed for 30+ people on each map, that’s the point (orange swords) where I see the WvW mechanics and play experience going down-hill. It becomes difficult to identify and target individual opponents. Frame rates drop unless you’ve got top-end hardware and/or dial the graphics settings way down to make the game look worse. Mechanical quirks like the AoE caps and overlapping boons start to give people near immunity to stand under attacks if they do it right and skill lag can start to kick in, where players try to use their skills but can’t because the server is overwhelmed.

And it’s not wasting anything if the players doing it are enjoying it. What’s a waste are my friends who, after investing years playing GW2 and raving about how fantastic the game is no longer playing the game because they hate the experience thanks to megaservers. So, how does merging the servers improve anyone’s game if they break communities and destroy an experience that players enjoy so they stop playing GW2 entirely? People play GW2 for fun. It’s a recreational activity, not a job they are paid to do. When it stops being fun, people will stop playing.

A sure-fire way to reduce the player base is to narrow the play style options to cater to a single preference, taking the things away from a lot of people that make the game worth playing for them. It’s like a bakery finding out that it’s most popular cake is an 8-serving chocolate cake and then declaring, “All we are going to sell from now on are 8-serving chocolate cakes. Want a smaller or bigger cake or a different flavor or some other baked good? Go talk to someone else.”

Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean that other people are only “pretending” to like it. What you seem to fail to grasp is that WvW isn’t about what only one player likes best. It isn’t about just one thing. Not open field fights. Not GvG. Not PvDoor. Not zergs. Not roamers. Not thieves ganking people. It’s about different things to different people.

There are players who want to eliminate siege weapons, upgrades, and even objectives entirely because they don’t care about that stuff. It’s not why they play. There are other players who want to improve siege weapons, make upgrades more important, and to add objectives because that’s what they do like about WvW and it’s why they play. For some players, it’s all about the zergs and they want all the servers merged so it’s zergs for everyone all day long Other players hate zergs and transfer into the lower tiers to get away from them. There are players who like the mercenary camps and players who hate them. There are players who like long prolonged sieges and players who have no patience for them.

There is no one right universal reason to play WvW, and if anything is going to ruin WvW and drain people out of it, it’s going to be heavy-handed changes that try to force everyone into a single style of play in the mistaken belief that everyone plays WvW for the same reason and finds the same thing fun.

No, you can’t comprehend why other people enjoy elements of WvW that you hate and find awful any more than I’m ever going to comprehend why my wife likes broccoli and hates spinach while I love spinach and hate broccoli. It’s a matter of aesthetic preference. It’s what people enjoy. It’s not a moral issue and there is no one right or wrong answer.

I don’t understand why players enjoy ganking people from stealth as thieves. I don’t understand why people like the loot trains. I don’t understand why people like battles so massive that the game mechanics and client start working badly and everything becomes a chaotic mess. It doesn’t matter. They do. And it would be silly for me to ask ANet to destroy what they enjoy about the game just because I don’t find it fun and assume they must only be pretending to find it fun and don’t know what’s best for them.

I don’t look down on PvE players or casual players. To a large degree, I was one and am one. And I found the mindless zerging experiences of the champion trains, EotM, the Living Story, and now many of the world bosses awful. But for all the talk I hear about wanting fights and challenges, everyone except the few guilds deliberately looking for open field fights seems to go for the easiest targets so they can win. It’s why the #1 and #2 server inevitably gang up on #3. It’s why people do sneak attacks on towers and keeps and use superior rams, catapults, and omega golems by the half-dozen.

Yes, I’ve seen a fight-oriented guild crack open a tower but not complete the capture to lure enemies in to fight (to the annoyance of people playing for PPT) and, yes, I’ve camped in open supply camps to see how long it takes the enemy to send in a zerg to flush me out, but I don’t see a lot of people hoping to encounter an even force on the other side most of the time.

I know nobody is asking ArenaNet to make all servers like T1/T2 servers, but the problem is that when they complained their servers didn’t have enough people to open temples or do Taquatl, they weren’t necessarily asking ArenaNet for a T1/T2 experience, but we’re stuck with megazergs on megaservers, anyway, because that’s how ArenaNet interpreted the problem and solution.

The example of the megaservers give me no confidence that we’ll get a subtle and modest solution to the population problems that doesn’t end in top-tier like play, especially because most of the developers seem to play at those tiers. Too few people? Megazergs for everyone! They’ve already done it in PvE and EotM.

I don’ t know about the EU, but ET has quite a few core players who have been there from the beginning. I didn’t start WvW at the beginning, but I’ve never played on another server. And that seems to be true of other low-ranked NA servers, too. We do have some people who transferred off, tried different servers and tiers, and then came back because they had more fun on ET and with the people on ET, even though their fun isn’t perfect (which is why they looked elsewhere).

But it doesn’t really matter if people have played on a single server for “server community”. What matters is that they enjoy playing with the people they are playing with now and don’t want to lose that.

I actually do enjoy playing on nearly empty maps, as part of my WvW experience. If it’s my home borderland or corner of EBG that’s “empty”, then it’s time to take care of housekeeping and get upgrades done and siege built because it’s not going to last forever. If it’s someone else’s map that’s empty, then I see what I can take before they start sending people after me to get rid of me, and if they only have a few people on, it’s an opportunity to play cat and mouse. I don’t know how empty the EU servers get on the bottom, but I’ve never hit a point on the NA servers where I didn’t see opponents for hours. If no enemies is the problem I want to solve, going to an enemy BL to flip things will solve it for me.

Do I want only a few people on 7×24? Of course not. But it never lasts 7×24. I get a wide variety of play across the day from maybe one other person on the map with me to events that can queue a map, and I like the variety.

The problem I see isn’t a lack of people where a few people play cat and mouse with each other or 1-2 people flip the camps and maybe a few towers but with populations that bome imbalanced enough that one side can unstoppably zerg around a nearly empty map flipping everything, including keeps with waypoints perhaps on both of it’s opponents because they’ve got a guild playing in OCS or SEA or Europe. That’s a coverage problem, not a population problem, per se. I’ve seen orange-sword level forces from all the servers we fight at some point during the day. The problem is if a server has nobody on at the same time.

Because the off-hour populations are smaller, they still won’t balance until you’ve compressed everyone to an old-style T1 experience, all queues all the time so that the queues balance the populations. That’s the only mechanism in the game that enforces population balance. It doesn’t take long (at most an hour or two) for everything a server owns to be flipped if they’ve got a dead spot in their coverage while an opponent doesn’t.

A simple summary of the problem I have with the megaservers:

I traded a familiar community of people who would struggle together to complete interesting events with maybe too few people for a faceless zerg led by a commander that can’t lose where I have to hope I do enough damage to creatures that die before they are finished rendering and to a boss I can sometimes barely see to get credit for the event.

Not. An. Improvement.

Umrae.5124:

2. Real clothes
We have caps, glasses, puff hats, top hats etc. Why not vests, shirts, jeans, pants, skirts etc? Town clothing as armor? No one uses the tonics of the sets, why not making it normal armors?

This. If there is a problem with needing to recognize armor type and class, then either revert to default skins in PvP and WvW or include a bit of leather or metal on the medium and heavy versions of the skin to provide a clue. But for clothing to be useful and worth buying, it needs to be something you can dye and mix and match. The tonics are silly.

Asmodeus.5782:

Yeaah, we’re talking about the precious few events that have been designed to pose a modicum of challenge for an 80 lvl player and provide appropriate rewards for the said challenge. The rewards are still there somewhere, the challenge remaining is to tag things in time and to have a good enough PC to support the lightshow.

I no longer get the champion loot chest out of the Frozen Maw because I think having to party with random people just to get it is absurd, so I don’t and do without it. Again, I can only imagine what a beginning player with a low level character gets out of it. Even before the megaservers, I saw friends having trouble getting credit for the event with low-level characters. The Shadow Behemoth works a bit better in that regard.

Asmodeus.5782:

Absconditus, for me the problem is that now you do not fight the monsters. You fight other players in a race to touch and tag the monster before it dies. Instead of utilizing your character’s skills to be efficient in combat, you use them to be efficient in farming. As stated above, with those populations mobs evaporate as soon as they lose their ‘invincible’ status. Maybe the megaserver was a good idea, but its implementation is such a kittenty work, its sad. Much too high map caps, completely bugged orrian statues, destruction of the server communities (why do we need this kitten in towns, again?).

This. One of the primary design goals of Guild Wars 2 was supposed to be that no player should ever be unhappy to see another player showing up to help them out. That’s why resource nodes are shared and not gathered competitively. That’s why loot is shared and doesn’t go to whoever lands the killing blow. The megaservers have turned PvE in Guild Wars 2 into a game where I wish most of the other players would go away and not be there. I know people who loved the game who have stopped playing because of it. I’m sure some people feel differently, but for a lot of people, the megaservers turned something fun into something that’s not fun. At the very least, they need to lower the population caps on most of the maps.

Vayne.8563:

Mostly if you’re doing popular and meta events this is true. I don’t limit myself to those and there are plenty of times I’m doing an event alone or with just a few people.

There are 1500 events in this game (more actually) and I’m willing to bet that 1400 of them are not crowded.

None of them were crowded on my server before the megaservers. So why is having 100 (of the most rewarding) events taken off the table for me to play because of the poor quality of the events when the are mobbed an improvement over what I had before?

And what kind of experience is a new player in Guild Wars 2, who creates a Norn supposed to have if he wanders into The Frozen Maw with his 13th or 14th level character and can’t even get credit for any of the pre-events because all of the creatures die before they are fully rendered and what kind of experience will they get out of the final encounter where they can’t even see the shaman because he’s surrounded by a zerg and the whole event is probably displaying at a few frames per second for them? This is fun or good for GW2 because, why, exactly?

Absconditus.6804:

I’ve seen complaints of all sorts about the new Megaserver hindering the ability to do x, y and z.

It’s no different than the complaints of all sorts that empty servers hindered people’s ability to do x, y, and z. That was simply laziness, too. Figure out when the big events were done or go guest to a server that did them. There were web sites that would tell you which servers had temples open, for example.

Ultimately, it’s a matter of personal preference, like whether one prefers to live on a farm, live in the suburbs, or live in a city. If you like the megaservers, that’s great. Other people don’t. So much so that the person who got me interested in playing GW2 because he spoke so highly of the game, played daily, and has over 10,000 achievement points, and has something like two dozen character slots filled, hasn’t played in 2 and a half months. It wasn’t because he was lazy or couldn’t do it dailies. It’s because it replaced an experience he enjoyed with one he didn’t.

Yes, it’s nice that I can reliably hop into a map that can do Taquatl (as long as I show up 20 minutes early) and I get some fine loot in the process. But it stinks that I can have trouble getting bronze in some of the Frozen Maw pre-events because everything goes down so quickly and that I have to endure the final battle at 1-2 frames per second while the shaman melts before the zerg without doing much of anything (which isn’t how it works with only a handful of people doing the event). What’s the entertainment value of that supposed to be?

Absconditus.6804:

some people in this world baffles me, they disgust me.

And some people in this world who confuse their personal preferences in a game that’s played for amusement for moral superiority over others amuse me.

Absconditus.6804:

Let’s make Guild Wars 2 seem dead again? What exactly is the benefit here?

It was preferable to having creatures die before they are even fully rendered because there is a zerg at every event. Would simply lowering the megaserver population cap help? Yes. But if my choice is between 5 people doing The Frozen Maw or 100 people doing The Frozen Maw, I’ll choose 5. It was a much better play experience. Recently I wound up on a megaserver map with about 30 people on it and it was a good experience. I wish I knew how to replicate that experience deliberately.

Absconditus.6804:

I have never had trouble getting the Temples done since the Megaserver implementation. I have never had trouble getting the World Events done. The only one that does not get done, which would very unlikely change, is Triple Trouble. So what is the tragedy here?

The events that I could once count on starting are now almost always partially or wholly done and the big events are done by such large mobs of people that it can sometimes be hard to tag anything before it does, especially if you are not familiar enough with the event to know where things are going to spawn? (I’d hate to be a starting player wandering in to The Frozen Maw with a 13th level character and trying to do the pre-events because I doubt they’d get any credit for them.) An event that’s already completed or that I have trouble getting credit for because it zips by some quickly is a pretty crummy play experience and not a lot of fun.

And when events are done regularly and predictably, there is nothing really special about completing them. Completing The Frozen Maw with a dozen people was challenging and fun. With 80 people? Not so much. When something is routine, it stops being special. That’s a big part of why the champion trains never interested me very much.

Absconditus.6804:

What is the horrific thing to the Megaserver system?

I used to recognize familiar people and guilds when I did events before the megaservers. Now I don’t recognize anyone. I’ve even had trouble getting on the same map with someone I was in a party with. And that’s not even going into the trouble it causes in WvW when it comes to recruiting or asking for help from PvE.

Absconditus.6804:

Prior to it, I would run around on alts leveling up, not seeing a single person for hours. I’d say the system is doing what it set out to do.

There were times when I enjoyed relatives solitude. It made wilderness and remote areas feel like wilderness and remote areas, not urban environments full of people. Yes, it’s legitimate to argue that there really were too few people on some maps and some servers, but they’ve traded one extreme for another that’s even worse. It’s like assuming that just because farmers sometimes get lonely and can’t find anyone to help them that everyone should be forcibly relocated to a high-density city.

If they dialed back the population caps to a smaller number and did a better job of grouping people together so you’d see the same familiar faces somewhat reliably, the megaservers might be more palatable to me. But whatever problems I had with not being able to get events done (which I could solve by guesting if it was really important to me) were far less annoying than not being able to get away from commander tags and zergs everywhere I look. I see more commanders leading zergs in PvE now than I see in WvW.

Filovirus.6258:

People keep pretending they are on the lowest servers because they “like” the WvW there… except there isn’t one.

Please stop telling me what I think. You don’t know me and you don’t speak for me.

I play on what was the bottom-ranked NA server for a long time and I’ve never logged in and had nothing to do. Can it be empty at times? Yes. And we can also queue maps and throw orange swords at times. You complain that the bottom is dead and the bottom also zergs, so which is the problem? I like that range of experiences, including the nearly empty maps and the occasional queued map. I like the people I play with and the way they play, for the most part. I really do enjoy playing on my server.

I’ve tried EotM and know how to get there. I found the experience awful. I can afford to transfer anywhere I want to. I’ve been asked to transfer to higher-tier servers by the leader of a guild I belong to (they asked again today), who would probably pay for me to transfer if that was the only sticking point, and I again declined because I like playing on Eredon Terrace. I have fun. Really I do. The whole experience. Even when we were stuck at the bottom of the rankings and coming in 3rd every week.

Similarly, I liked PvE on Eredon Terrace before the megaservers, when a handful of people might try to do events like The Frozen Maw, even though some events were rarely or never done because we didn’t have enough people. I enjoyed running through Malchor’s Leap in near solitude, occasionally running across one or two other players. The megaservers ruined that experience, and I’m not alone in thinking that way. Two of my friends who played daily and have over 10,000 achievement points have pretty much stopped playing Guild Wars 2, to a large degree because of what the megaservers have done to the PvE experience for them.

I also think I have a petty good idea of what play is like higher up, not only because we get transfers from higher up and I’ve talked to people who have played on higher-up servers, including T1, but also because I can see it by looking at the live maps of various match-ups and because we have risen a bit in the ranks in the past and occasionally wind up playing a higher-tier server.

Would I mind playing a few tiers higher with a population a bit larger than what we have now? Probably not. But I’m concerned about what forcing two communities together would do to those communities, especially if they are rivals who don’t like each other very much.

But after the megaservers, I’m concerned that ArenaNet could really screw things up by merging everyone toward either a serverless megaserver or EotM-type experience and/or merging everyone toward a T1-type population under the assumption that everyone wants a T1 experience. Why would I want to give up what I already enjoy to take a risk of destroying the experience so badly that I’d probably stop playing?

If ArenaNet merges servers, I think they need to do their best to preserve the server communities and should merge small servers together rather than small servers with large servers. And they should probably send people in to play on the servers they are going to merge for a few weeks to determine which servers hate each other and which ones might be a good fit together rather than arbitrarily pairing them up. And they need to preserver lower tier play as distinct from higher tier play and not assume that everyone wants a T1 experience. I don’t. If they force me into a T1 experience or break my server’s community, then I’m probably done with Guild Wars 2 just like my friends are. And we’re all people who spent money on the game beyond the initial purchase.

Maybe things are different in the EU servers. And, yes, there are times when the match-ups can get so imbalanced that they are depressing to play, but those inbalance problems seem to happen up and down the tiers, not just at the bottom.

I do not want to see the low-tier servers merged into something like megaservers. If I wanted T1 play, I’d transfer to a T1 server. Please no.

KDXX.9520:

8. Stealth trap, worthless, remove it. I think I’ve only ever seen it used once, ever.

I’ve used quite a few of these. They are good for tenacious thieves that won’t go away, work pretty well in supply camps that get targeted by thieves, and can be used to find and remove thieves that hide in objectives after they’ve been flipped. The behavior of thieves, once they realize that they can’t stealth for 30 seconds, is usually pretty hilarious, too, because that’s often all they seem to know how to do.

I’d be happy if they just undid the megaservers. It might bring back some friends who haven’t played in a while because of them and it would help servers recruit and communicate for WvW and help role-players stick together, too. Since they can do them on a map-by-map basis, they could pick a few maps to keep them for so that the really big event like Taquatl get enough people. The starting area maps and cities should not be megaserver at all.

Vanthian.9267:

Don’t worry, it is just a bunch of Charr. They have no souls anyway. Just keep on whipping them.

I never played Guild Wars, but there have been times where I’ve wanted to fight for the Separatists and Ascalonian ghosts against the Charr.

But for real troubling moral issues, there are always the Asura, who want to commit genocide against the Skritt.

aRestless.6213:

On the other hand: Last week, I was up all night trying to upgrade our own bay to the waypoint. We were two people, and had big problems, just because one really good 1v1 guy constantly flipped back the adjacent camps and killed the dolyaks on their way.

While a good player with a good build can make it very hard to get dolyaks through, my two suggestions for you are:

1) Remember that any speed or heal ability that you can apply to another player also can work on dolyaks. If they are being hit, drop a water field on them and blast it. Speed them up so they deliver faster. You can not only significantly increase the speed at which upgrades happen by speeding dolyaks (which some classes can do almost constantly) but I’ve pushed dolyaks into towers while they were under attack by healing them and giving them regeneration so they didn’t die.

2) Invest in ballista mastery. They are pretty good for defending camps, especially once you get the spread shot. A superior ballista with full mastery can down a lot of characters in one shot with spread shot and discourage others from pretty far out with the increased range and damage to the normal shots. As an added bonus, ballista blueprints and superior ballista blueprints are usually relatively cheap.

Harper.4173:

Because of zergs and megaflows.

I’m not a great player looking for super-hard content, but even I find the zergs on every map absurd. It used to be fun starting out events like the Frozen Maw with maybe 5 people and getting maybe a dozen by the end. At that level, the Shaman actually follows players out onto the ice and you need to think about where you are and what you are doing a bit. Now? Just snuggle up right next to him in the zerg to keep him pinned and apply damage. I know at least two people with more than 10,000 achievement points who have either stopped playing or barely play anymore because of what the megaservers did to the world boss events. Maybe it was always like that on the stacked servers, but it wasn’t like that on the lower population servers, but now there is no choice. It’s zerg or nothing (though I did get lucky enough, a couple of weeks ago, to wind up in a Frozen Maw event with only 20-30 people in it and it was much better). And it’s sad seeing the map tell me it wants to kick me within 5 minutes of the event ending because everyone has left.

https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/169813/Keep-calm-and-carry-on-scan.jpg

Snowreap.5174:

now shift back to today. maybe the day when GW2 only has enough NA players for 23 servers is today? I know this isn’t technically true because people on T1 servers could choose to play on AR, but it may be effectively true because why would anyone on a T1 server want to?

“why would they want to?” is the key question. if AR can come up with an answer I think we’d be on our way to a solution. this isn’t an answer that can come from the GW2 devs, because the why is mostly based on the community on that particular server.

Why would they want to? So they could play against an awesome server like Eredon Terrace, of course.

xusa.4021:

You clearly don’t understand the situation. Our problem isn’t that we have low pop, the problem is that we don’t have any pop at all.

ET has been there, done that. Yes, it can get frustrating but as Darius suggested on the gw2wvw.net forums, stop worrying about the points, stop trying to win and stop trying to play on all of the maps. Pick a few objectives that you want to try to hold and bunker them down and learn how to defend them well. Keep your community friendly, cooperative, and fun to play with and set up events to draw people into WvW. Advertise the positives of T8 because it’s not really as dead as many people make it out to be. If you are playing against servers with decent coverage around the clock, that means guilds looking for fights that transfer to you will be able to find them.

Those are all things ET has done and it’s paid off at least twice now. Late last year and earlier this year, we rose as high as 20th and then lost some guilds. Now we’re seeing some success and larger numbers again. Maybe it will last. Maybe it won’t. We’re going to do our best to enjoy the ride either way. No matter how bad things have gotten on ET, there is always a core group of people who do what they can and keep a positive attitude about it, and that goes a long way.

To that I would add that you should learn to defend better with less. Try to anticipate where the enemy is going. Have some siege weapons ready to fight back with in the places you want to hold, even if that means running supplies from a camp on a different map. I’ve driven off fairly large groups (in the 15-20 range) with 1-2 people with some well placed siege weapons that covered the most common attack sites but were hard to counter. Make sure your server has a voice communication system and try to get as many as you can. And when that fails, roam and see what you can take, even if it’s just flipping a camp or two solo. Killing dolyaks are worth points, too, and a lone player can do that, too.

xusa.4021:

I don’t know if there’s any ET here, but they are generally worse, and I say that based in the fact that I myself suck and still get to spike some of them. We’ve won lots of battles against them being low on numbers even outnumbered by far.

ET has long said pretty much the same thing. I think everyone over estimates how big the other side is and underestimates their own side because they see all the minions, pets, and clones as opponents and don’t always see everyone fighting on their own side. You may very well have spiked me. I run a support build that’s pretty good at supporting an attack, running dolyaks, and flipping camps but not so hot at dueling. Even then, I manage to kill others in duels sometimes, but that doesn’t mean their whole server is awful. That said, AR did put up some good fights against us but based on what I saw, you may need to adapt your strategy and tactics to the population you have, not the population you had, and you could learn to place and use siege weapons better.

xusa.4021:

This ain’t a simple matter of “you’ll win next round”. We’ve been losing for 2 consecutive rounds because they simply have players in every map and take everything while there’s no one defending. People in AR don’t play WvW, and when they do, they see how pointless it is to do it alone and leave.

As others have said, ET has experienced that for months. When I first started playing WvW on ET, we were lucky if we could hold a tower on the Eternal Battlegrounds for one tick, flipping a camp was a major accomplishment, and we could get spawn camped for hours. It’s been up and down but mostly up since then.

Stop trying to cover every map. Pick what you can cover. Upgrade it. Siege it up and keep it refreshed. Manually run and speed up dolyaks to get upgrades and siege weapons done. Don’t worry about the points. Don’t worry if you lose your tower or keep even though you’ve defended i.t Play to do your best, and encourage that attitude when people show up in WvW.

Jerus.4350:

1) I see your point, but as you said, look at the timed events, and the flow towards that type of content. You simply can’t make content that’s challenging and still allow people ot kitten around and do whatever they want, they’re conflicting ideas.

Absolutely. But I think the game needs a bit of both if they want to attract a larger pool of players and I think a lot of things can be both at the same time. I’m pretty awful at dungeons so I only do dungeons and fractals with friends who don’t expect perfection. We eventually make it through them, but nowhere near as fast as speed runners who know what they are doing can. Rather than make the content so challenging that it’s impossible for more casual or mediocre players, they should make the content so that it rewards excellent play with bonuses for quick and/or flawless completion. WvW already has roles that are challenging and require skilled play and perhaps they should be better rewarded, but if we want to allow beginners and casual players to play alongside hardcore WvW players, the score has to be something both can contribute to.

Jerus.4350:

So yeah, the last bastion of this mentality that you say defines GW2 is in the open world where it’s not made to be challenging but just allow you to get through it, the pinnacle of that probably being like Jormag but something like Teq… “get the hell out of the turret area and get back to the zerg if you aren’t int he defense team!”

The problem is that they needed to implement the megaservers to make a lot of those events viable for a lot of servers that didn’t have the people or the hardcore players to do them. The smaller the player base that can complete the content and have fun playing the game, the fewer people will be playing GW2. I don’t think “smaller player base” is a winning business model for GW2.

Jerus.4350:

2) Again, kill one and you’ve not hurt anything, get 2 and you’ve gained points for your world. Live and die by the sword.

Various mechanics make that fairly difficult when one is outnumbered, especially if all other things are equal — condition stacking, AoE caps, down state, rallying, escape moves, invisibility, and so on all make it very challenging to get kills in before going down. Yes, I know highly trained and coordinated players, often playing the most powerful builds in the game, can pull it off, but what percentage of WvW players are they what’s in it for anyone else?

Jerus.4350:

3) At this point I’m kinda done with the discussion obviously there seems to be many that hate the idea, so I’m not going to push it, I jsut figured I’d make one last post in the spirit of discussion

By all means advocate for the sort of game you want to play. That’s what everyone else is doing and that’s how we can anticipate pit-falls. If these proposals are going to suck the enjoyment out of WvW for you, I would expect you to complain and fight against them.

Jerus.4350:

5) Honestly the handicap is the best option I’ve heard so far, but it still rubs me the wrong way, reward people for poor play…

If you look at the diminishing returns proposal I made in the first page, it doesn’t really reward people for poor play or not showing up. It doesn’t really care why a server is ahead or behind (coverage, points, skill, etc.). What it does is make it more difficult for the servers that are ahead to gain points as quickly as they increase the point spread in order to keep the spread more competitive for comebacks. Basically, the bigger the lead that you open up, the harder it becomes to increase that lead, but it never becomes impossible.

Jerus.4350:

And with that, what happens when say Hibergate happens after the season(which it likely will as the people who are pulling overtime will stop)? Will they roll into season4 with bonus points?!?

I’m not sure that any handicapping system can look outside of the current match-up because a lot can change from week to week, as you point out. I don’t think the solution is going to be easy, which is why I’ve been posting considerations that should be kept in mind for any changes to the scoring. Whatever they come up with, they need to make sure it provides the incentives they want, doesn’t provide incentives they don’t want, and doesn’t fall apart if players game the system or don’t play it exactly as anticipated.

Bertrand.3057:

I don’t think the game experience should change*, just how the points are counted. The great thing about reset once a week is that your game only gets interrupted once a week. Timeslicing addresses the off-peak issue without changing the rules for only a specific group of players.

That’s one way to do it, but then it doesn’t address one of the key complaints of defensive players, especially in the lower tiers, which is that they can spend a day upgrading a map only to see their work undone overnight because they have poor overnight coverage. A lack of WvW players doesn’t have to last long to see a whole map of fully upgraded towers and keeps flip. It still puts a lower-tier server with poor coverage during part of the day in a repetitive cycle where they need to retake and upgrade everything again every day after their dead period.

Jerus.4350:

4) Incentive for running a larger force? You’d still be able to brute force objectives and still run over less skilled groups. While a highly skilled smaller group would likely be able to pick off chunks and not be at a loss if they’re less than highly skilled they’ll be a good target to run over. Again, that’s what IMO makes this idea great, it rewards skill over size, but size still helps if you can utilize it correctly.

Sure, but it could look like what I’ve seen in EotM, which is two zergs circling the map to flip empty objectives while largely avoiding direct contact with each other because defending or combat is too slow and messy. I do see the appeal of rewarding skill over size, but I would do it through karma, gold, and drops rather than points. That way, if you lose and die because you are casual or are still learning how to play your character in WvW, it enriches the guy who killed you but doesn’t make you a liability to your own server. That’s the key problem and, yes, it’s already a problem with rallying and spiking under bloodlust.

Jerus.4350:

5) I’m not very convinced with score handicapping. The predictions would be tough to nail down, and in all honesty the entire idea rubs me the wrong way. It’s pretty much the opposite of what scoring is, giving points to teams for being weaker… yeah I don’t know.

There are two ways competitive sports and games keep competitions interesting and somewhat balanced. They either carefully control the competitors in number and skill through fixed team sizes, leagues, weight classes, and so on so that the competitors are roughly equal in number, ability, and skill or they handicap the points or scoring so that the player with more skill or ability has to work harder to win. That’s not simply to make the game fair and the outcome unpredictable but because blow-outs are generally not interesting to any competitor involved, nor to any spectators. Yes, there are people who like repetitive and predictable activities in MMOs, which is why GW2 has karma trains and loot trains in PvE and in EotM. But is that really the direction people want for WvW?

WvW is never going to be as carefully balanced as a football league without it turning into something that looks very much like the PvP part of the game. That leaves handicapping as the alternative to allow underdogs to compete. It’s no different than point spreads in sports gambling, having a better chess player remove pieces before playing, a father letting his son start running early before the father starts running in a race, or handicapping in golf. This stuff is all over the place for a reason, and it’s not giving a player points for being bad. It’s acknowledging that the player isn’t as good and giving them points so that they can still be a challenge for better players to beat and still get something out of showing up to compete.

Jerus.4350:

1) Those may be potentially toxic places, but first, that’s literally the entire game, I mean hell even RPing in Divinities Reach has you getting trolled and griefed from what I’ve seen (I don’t RP but I’ve seen more than enough complaints to know it happens). We’re talking about the internet, people are not always very nice. It’s unfortunate but welcome to the real world.

Not in my experience. I saw very little trolling and griefing in PvE before the time-limited events and megaservers on my server, and see very little of it in WvW because when you’re on the bottom ranked server, just getting some participation is welcomed. Sure, people can get nasty regardless of how the game is designed and pick on people who have no impact on their game, but l when success and failure hinge on certain people playing the game a certain way or not participating at all, that makes certain players a legitimate liability. The design of the game is making their participation a bad thing, not simply the quirky tastes of a particular player. No, MMOs don’t have to care about that at all, but one of the distinguishing features of GW2 (and the reason why loot and resource nodes are shared rather than competitively distributed to whoever gets the kill or gets to the node first) is to avoid that sort of dynamic wherever possible.

Jerus.4350:

2) There are some people who will go to any lengths but again, it wouldn’t be as big of a deal as spiking, as the only option to avoid that death and it may not even work, is alt + f4, which means you have to start the game back up and get back into queue for one measly point? naw, I just can’t see it being a problem, maybe a handful of cases just like there are now (it already happens without points associated to the kill). So yes there is the potential for it to happen, but realistically I doubt it’d be an issue worth being concerned about.

The way to avoid death is to run at the site of a larger force in the open or to hug a tower full of siege and, if a bigger force shows up, jump inside. And if it looks like they’re going to get in, waypoint out or jump out the back before they break in. But a “What the heck, let me see how many I can kill before they take me down,” approach of always fighting or even roaming around solo or as a pair to take the risk of flipping some camps before getting stomped could easily be a net detriment to your server. People who care about PPT are going to care whether you die or not to a degree that they currently don’t.

Jerus.4350:

3) cool we can actually agree on that, and I hope I don’t come off as being just rude, just having a good conversation figured I’d mention that as this point isn’t something I need to elaborate on , I know I may come off as an unforgiving elitist, but hey I enjoy a game that sets a bar that requires me to put a little work in, lets me reach it and then rewards me for doing so. If that requirement of “getting good” is removed, it’s not all that interesting to me. but back on point!

People have different tastes and everyone should fight for what they want the game to look like. I get that skill and even coordinating numbers should be rewarded. You’ll notice that with my diminishing returns proposal where the score increases are reduced for the servers that are ahead, it can never stop the server that’s ahead from earning more points if they take and control more stuff and it doesn’t stop larger numbers and greater skill from leading to victory. It simply slows the point increase as the gap grows so that a server that’s behind can catch up if they have a good part of the day, too.

The extreme end of balancing would be to make sure that every server always winds up with the same number of points per tick, no matter how many people play, no matter how good or bad they are, and no matter how many battles they win or lose. Basically, everyone gets a trophy, even if they don’t show up or win any combats. I don’t think anyone wants to get anywhere near that extreme. But I do think we want mediocre players showing up and participating, not only to provide loot bags for the good players but so they can stick around long enough to get better at WvW. Making mediocre players a liability to their own server works against that. The game already has a fair-weather effect to some degree where players stop playing WvW if their server is getting stomped to badly but show up in force if they’re doing the stomping.

One thing missing from a lot of the time slice suggestions is what would happen during the transition to the things on the map from the previous time slice? Would you inherit whatever siege weapons and upgrades were done in the previous time slice by your server? Would all upgrades and siege reset? Would they be restored to whatever state they were in at the end of the last time the time slice was active?

nirvana.8245:

If even a small percentage of the suggestions in this thread and the previous thread go ahead and be implemented, you might as well just delete WvW now and keep EoTM. The discussions in these threads are pushing towards killing WvW and that is what will happen. To quote something said on Teamspeak recently from a well known commander from a well known guild, “I have no intention of being involved in this discussion thread. If Anet want to kill the game mode than that’s on them.” Tread lightly. That’s my only suggestion.

As someone who despises the megaservers, knows people who stopped playing because of them, and who said that I might stop playing WvW entirely if they merged the servers to force a T1 experience on everyone, I think it’s quite possible for the cure to be worse than the problem it was designed to fix, so this is a legitimate concern and your advice to tread lightly is good advice. That said, details and specifics would be useful here.

Which suggestions, in particular, do you think would be detrimental to WvW and why? What are you concerned will be changed or lost? Or from the flip side, what do you think is working well and shouldn’t be tampered with?

Jerus.4350:

1) I disagree, maybe that’s a stated intent but it sure isn’t held true in ANY other aspect of the game. PVE open world, things scale, if someone doesn’t hold their weight they’re a drain on the system. In Dungeons, they’re a drain, in fractals, a drain, in PVP a drain, in WvW rallybot, it simply isn’t true.

And if you add in the event farmers who purposely fail events to farm them, you’ve named every single one of the most toxic and abusive parts of Guild Wars 2 where players behave abusively toward each other and the forums contain plenty of complaints about it. While I doubt it could be entirely eliminated in the more structured parts of the game that are limited to very small groups (dungeons, fractals, and PvP) I think that hardly reflects well on the game or meets the goals that ANet says that they have for the game and I don’t think Guild Wars 2 needs more abuse and hostility between players than it already has.

Jerus.4350:

2) I guess you could argue that but I guess it’s more of a lack of confidence, I’m no great amazing player but I’m confident I can do well and I rather live and die by the sword than sit around with my thumb in my bum

People have said that they already see some of this behavior among PPT-oriented players in the top tier. While I agree with you that it’s more fun to live and die by the sword, the problem is that risky choices and losses will be an invitation for abuse from other players who are point-oriented. because every time you die by the sword, you are giving the enemy server points. The most toxic parts of the game are when winning leads to other people telling you how to play the game or to leave because they don’t like how you are playing or how well you play. Maybe you are so good at winning fights that you’ll never personally experience that sort of abuse, but everyone can’t be above average.

Jerus.4350:

3) That’s a decent point, but I guess you could put the same timer as there is on loot bags to prevent the abuse from really being an issue.

Something could probably be done about this one, but it would need to be considered.

Jerus.4350:

Second point, and in response to the other post in reply. My experience recently is that there are guilds, multiple ones, that will sit and farm larger groups, sure they eventually lose the battle of attrition but they literally hang outside a waypoint and farm off people racking up bags and getting kills. if you are a well organized quality force then the idea of getting at least 1:1 ratio of your kills to your teams deaths is no problem. These people are getting easily 5:1 if not more. I’ve seen these groups sit and farm for hours. Maybe I’m being a bit too optimistic, but to me that’s where I’m coming from, seeing these quality guilds and playing with them seeing what is possible I don’t see it as being bad. A quality small force should be able to gain points off a larger force as the larger forces aren’t going to be as organized, if they go to try and one push they’ll dodge and avoid it, running away not losing points. Again, maybe I’m optimistic in that sense but that’s the perspective I’m coming from.

You also need to consider this from the other side. What incentive would any commander have to run with an unorganized large force if they are simply going to provide points to an opposing server? Why risk an engagement with a quality guild in an open field if it’s only going to give the other side more points? For someone to win engagements, someone else needs to lose them.

Jerus.4350:

As far as the last point, I’ve seen suggestions that screw over off time players, is that right? maybe /shrug it’d be more fair to the overall player base i think but really if I were an offtime player, screw that. I’ve seen suggestions that are FAR FAR more exploitable than player kills. I’ve seen suggestions that could just potentially screw your play time. So to me other than points for kills none of the ideas sound acceptable to me overall.

Part of the reason why I made the suggestion to make the score handicapping based on score differential alone was that it would address a big part of the problem (runaway scores and the inability of underdog servers to catch up) without directly impacting a particular time of playing or having to worry about how many players are involved in WvW at a particular time.

And note, that even basing score on player kills can hurt particular play times. If a server with a strong OCX or SEA player base goes up against a server with only a handful of players during those time periods, there won’t be many players on for them to earn points off of by killing them.

Jerus.4350:

So doing well in fights shouldn’t be rewarded because you should be able to freely kamakazee into things?

You do get rewarded. If I kamikaze you, you’ll get loot bags from killing me. Isn’t that enough? I don’t have a problem with you being rewarded for killing me. I have a problem with my server being punished for me dying, even when no objective is involved or lost.

Why shouldn’t it affect is the score? Three main reasons.

1) One of the primary design objectives of Guild Wars 2 is supposed to be that you should always appreciate another player joining in and you players should never be motivated to tell other players to leave and not participate. Making players who die quickly because of lack of experience, skill, level, or focus on points violates that.

2) People keep claiming that they want fights and want to fight humans, not NPCs in WvW. Having death give points to the enemy gives players a reason not to engage in fights, which runs counter to the idea that you should be looking to get into fights.

3) As someone else pointed out, it’s fairly easy to manipulate with second accounts or spies letting themselves be killed to rack up points.

Jerus.4350:

Ohh well, I thought that was a solid idea without any real down sides, it rewarded good play, scaled to actually reward more skilled yet smaller groups. Just seemed a solid plan.

If the fights were 1:1 or always between balanced groups, then it might make a lot of sense and would probably work fine. The problem is that a lot of fights aren’t balanced. Tonight ET went on to AR’s borderland and flipped a bunch of stuff. To their credit, AR players showed up to fight us, even though they were unlikely to stop us. And I’ve been on the flip side of that equation, since ET is the bottom-ranked server in NA right now. But if the enemy server gets points for everyone they kill, there would be no reason to stick around and fight. The best thing you could do for the points is run away and slip out the back and let them PvDoor the objective, instead. I don’t see much fun in that for either side.

Jerus.4350:

If that’s a no go, then I’m back to thinking there’s no real good solution that doesn’t screw someone over enough to not do it.

Any solution is going to change something and that’s bound to annoy someone. But the reason I put together that list of considerations that I posted earlier in the thread is that each suggestion needs to be considered in terms of the play it will motivate and how it will work in practice with players trying to game the system. I could be wrong, but I don’t think we want to encourage players to run away unless they are pretty sure they can win, and that’s what several people suspect would happen based on behavior they’ve seen among PPT players. Personally, I would never think of jumping off a cliff to avoid being staked, but that apparently does happen with the hardcore PPT players, too.

Jerus.4350:

@Berk, I’m a little confused. Why would someone jump off the cliff? If they are in combat the kill is still awarded, if they aren’t in combat they could just waypoint out. I guess you could jump to avoid a stomp, but that’s already there and has nothing to do with the kill points.

Right now, you get points if you spike an opponent but not if they jump to their death, so that’s why players are already doing it. It would work a little differently if the points were awarded simply for a kill and be a bit harder to evade, but I think the current behavior suggests the extremes players might go to in order to deny an opponent points for a kill. As other players commented, it may simply mean running into a tower or keep whenever outnumbered. It could also increase the use of open-field siege weapons to gain a kill advantage. While I don’t personally have a problem with open-field siege, I know a lot of players seem to dislike it intensely.

More broadly, people in my server will often throw themselves into an enemy regardless of how outnumbered they are just for the fight. To me, it seems like a problem to punish people for that sort of thing by rewarding their opponents with points.

As a disclaimer, I’m not a big fan of the Bloodlust bonuses, either.

Taggund.8936:

However, I have thought of changing PPT to level of upgrades as an alternative to promote upgrading and defending more.

I made a similar suggestion earlier in the thread, though your variation has some interesting extra twists, and plenty of other people have suggested the same in the forums. In general, the idea appeals to me because it adds another dimension to play decisions and the I think it might encourage people to attack the hardest targets rather than easier targets and engage in prolonged attacks. That said, it could make imbalanced matches even worse.

Having spent a lot of time at the bottom of the rankings, there are times of the day when a persistent opponent with a large numbers advantage can take just about anything they want if they are willing to invest the time in doing so, and this would provide a lot of incentive for a dominant server to go around and flip everything the weakest server has to reduce the point value. Right now, a lot of enemies (in the lower tiers, anyway) can be driven off by some defensive fire because they aren’t willing to spend a half-hour, hour, or even longer to flip a tower or keep when they can move on to many other easier targets, instead. This would give them more incentive to invest that time and there will be little a seriously outnumbered server will be able to do to prevent it from happening.

TeamBattleAxe.3901:

Here’s a proposal I pieced together from several ideas posted by forum users:
(exactly one year ago! o_O)

http://youtu.be/qHcO6Xo8eJ8

Finally watched this (it would be helpful to just put the text into this thread). I have some concerns about it (specifically about PPT-oriented guilds from top-ranked servers coming down to “rescue” low-tier servers and clashing with the culture there because they play differently and making the lower tiers more zergy) but it seems like a better idea that forced merges and abstract match-ups to me. Not sure queues are the problem today that they were when the video was made, though.

With respect to splitting the match-up into time slices, one of my main interests in doing so is to prevent upgrades that I’ve spend a day managing from being flipped while I’m not playing. If the switch in time periods does not preserve the status of upgrades until the next time the time the same time slice comes back up and instead lets the next time slice play with whatever upgrades the previous time slice was able to hold or complete, I’m not that interested in that mechanism.

To the suggestion that upgrades be eliminated, I actually enjoy defensive play, upgrading towers and keeps, and even managing and running dolyaks. Eliminating upgrades would take something out of the game that some people actually enjoy.

What’s frustrating isn’t doing the work to complete upgrades or even losing a defended and upgraded tower to a tenacious opponent that does the work to take it. What’s frustrating is having it flipped by a PvDoor crew overnight while it’s not even defended because my server doesn’t have enough people on. Freezing the upgrades overnight and then restoring them the next day would help reduce that frustration, though depending on how the time slices are made, it might not solve the problem at all because it doesn’t take long for things to be flipped when nobody is on. If the time slice straddles any dead period for a server, you can kiss the upgrades goodbye.

Cleaning up and adding to my list of considerations posted earlier in the thread (updates in italics):

1. Population-based adjustments must react quickly to upward population shifts but slowly to downward population shifts to reduce the benefit of quickly abandoning a map or WvW or rapidly surging into a map on WvW. In the past, I’ve recommended calculating a server’s WvW strength as a 1 hour rolling average (average population for the last hour) or current population, whichever is greater across all of WvW.
2. Population-based adjustments must never make it more beneficial to for players to leave WvW and let opponents rampage less impeded instead of staying in WvW and fighting to slow them down. This likely means a handicap that provides a partial benefit to the weaker opponent but does not entirely erase the disadvantage. This likely also means retaining some benefit to PvDoor so that an abandoned map remains beneficial to control.
3. Population-based adjustments must be gradual rather than having sharp tipping points, so that the presence or absence of one player never makes a huge difference and changes the game significantly.
4. Scoring should not be based on trading an objective back and forth because it will make score differences very difficult to move. The sentry flags are largely worthless to the score because each server gets a point when they flip it so more scoring like this is probably a bad idea.
5. Any scoring adjustments should not discourage players from entering fights or risking dying to an opponent. Dying while fighting shouldn’t be a liability to a server.

If T1 PPT-oriented players are already willing to jump off of a cliff to avoid giving opponents points from kills, which some have reported, that suggests that kill-based scoring is a bad idea. That last point is also why rallying (just rallying, not the whole downed mechanic) should be eliminated from WvW. It makes inexperienced players and uplevels a liability rather than an asset..

John Corpening.9847:

Here is a high level summary (not a proposal) of what is currently being discussed:

• Some sort of point scaling based on population or prime time hours

Please note that I also suggested point increase scaling based on the disparities in scores to create diminishing returns when the score gap widens, or is that part of the “Consider adjusting score based on placement” mentioned below?

John Corpening.9847:

• Break the day into scoring periods. The match is decided on the scoring periods not PPT.

Two things to keep in mind here. First is that the weekends and holidays can the populations in various time periods unpredictable and uneven. An NA player might be able to play until 6AM on a Friday night or Saturday night or starting in the morning on a Saturday or Sunday but not keep that up all week. And even the time zones within region can mean that primetime varies significantly based on how much of an NA server’s population, for example, is in the Eastern vs. Pacific time zones and whether the server has a lot of student or adults with jobs.

Eredon Terrace, for example, sometimes seems to fade out around midnight to 1AM Eastern time just as other servers with more Western US players are just getting started. So an 8 hour time slice that runs 4PM to Midnight EST might help Eredon Terrace while an 8 hour time slice that runs 8PM to 4AM might be horrible for us against NA servers with a strong Western US contingent.

John Corpening.9847:

• Consider score for taking objectives either in conjunction with or in place of PPT

This might be useful in addition to the existing scoring system, but I think it would awful as replacement. The sentry flags are generally pretty pointless in WvW because one server takes them and then another server takes them and they each get a point, so it’s generally a wash. If a server only gets points for taking a tower, and then another server takes the tower back and gets the same number of points, it’s going to be difficult for any server to get ahead. Yes, there are ways to squeeze a net gain of points out of it with three servers, but most towers and keeps tend to get swapped back and forth between the same two servers.

• Boost the outnumbered buff (in a number of ways)

It might also be useful to have some sort of Outscored buff that kicks in when a server is, say, 10,000 points behind or more and ends when the gap is closed to 8,000 points, or something like that, to encourage more player participation when a server is losing. Sort of a counter-fairweather buff to attract people looking for loot. Perhaps something along the lines of the +200% Magic Find buff from the Southsun Cove event, or a large experience buff. Either might draw people in from EotM.

John Corpening.9847:

• Create special objectives/achievements that occur when you are behind that give you a special reward for completing them

One way to do this might be to improve what the mercenary camps provide in EBG (so they send more and also send forces to the adjacent towers for that server), perhaps even with a Siegerazer-class champion and insta-siege if the server is far enough behind. So, for example, if I take the Ogres while I’m red and my server is far behind, I’d not only get the normal Ogre band headed toward Umberglade and Pangloss but also additional bands of Ogres sent to Ogrewatch, Veloka, Durios, and Bravost, perhaps with a Siegerazer-class champion among them. If my server owns the tower, they’d set up shop by the gate as additional guards (like the old Quaggan bands on the borderlands). If my server doesn’t own the tower, they’ll create siegerazer-like capture circles near the gate. Mercenaries should then also be added back to the borderlands to serve a similar purpose. This could either be done with the Skritt and Centaurs in the upper corners or something could be put back into the ruins to replace the Quaggan and create some more action there.

This would basically be extending an existing and well-tested mechanic to have a further reach. It might not do much for high-tier servers where the dominant server could make sure they keep the mercenaries, but this could make a difference in the lower tiers.

John Corpening.9847:

These are all very much related and solutions are not just in one area but I’d like to keep this discussion focused on scoring. Also, if there is another aspect to scoring that we should consider that I’m missing please feel free to bring it up as we kick off this discussion.

While it won’t help the score disparity problem (and might make it worse), I think it might be nice if the points of an objective were based on how upgraded it was, and this could be a part of encouraging other servers to do the hard thing or two weaker servers to gang up on the stronger server in order to reduce the points the top server is scoring. Other’s have made similar suggestions, too, and in the past, I’ve suggested:

• Camp – 1 point + 1 point per upgrade (1-5 points)
• Tower – 3 points + 1 point per upgrade (3-15 points)
• Keep – 6 points + 2 points per upgrade (6-30 points)
• Castle – 9 points + 3 points per upgrade (9-45 points)

Basically, this might provide encouragement not only to run and complete upgrades but for servers to attack the upgraded servers of their opponents rather than simply flipping the same not upgraded objectives over and over again.

John Corpening.9847:

• 24 hour coverage
  • How do we make play time in off hours valuable without blowing out the score?

The most obvious solution here is to handicap the score based on how many people are playing with a basement so that it’s always worth something, even if the enemy doesn’t show up (see my previous post about the form handicapping points should take). In other words, implement a handicap system that reduces the benefit of a higher population but does not entirely erase it.

John Corpening.9847:

• Snowballing
  • How do we give worlds a fighting chance throughout the duration of the match?

Another way to handle the score problem, independent of the population, is to based the changes in score on the current score disparity rather than population at all. This would help avoid the problem of sandbagging, penalizing certain time periods, and counting participation. Basically, make the scoring non-linear and make the points worth less toward the score the further ahead a server gets.

For example, divide the PPT earned by each server by the points between the server and the bottom server divided by 10,000 before adding it to the total score (these are probably not the exact right numbers, but I’m offering it as an illustration because the math is easy). So if Server 1 has 12,000 points, server 2 has 7,000 points, and server 3 has 2,000 points, the PPT for the Server 1 would be divided by 10, the PPT for Server 2 would be divided by 5, and the PPT for Server 3 would be divided by 1. So if server 1 holds 500 PPT of objectives, it would only add 50 points to its score during that tick. If Server 2 holds 150 PPT of objectives, it would add 30 points to its score. If Server 3 holds 45 PPT of objectives, it would add 45 points to its score

If the bottom server starts to reduce the gap, then the top servers will get to keep more of their points added to their score because it will be divided by less. The goal here is to prevent runaway score gaps and keep the match-up competitive because under the existing system, it’s easy to reach a point where the top server can’t be caught. The downside is that a server that shows up strong late in the week could catch up and pass servers that fought strongly earlier in the week. It will also not eliminate the benefit of night-capping, but it will reduce the effectiveness if the night-cap changes who is ahead. The benefit of this approach is that it requires no accounting of who is playing when or where.

John Corpening.9847:

• Stagnation
  • How do I feel continuously challenged when my world is ahead?
  • How does my world break the hold that other worlds have on me when I’m behind?

A problem I think WvW has, in general, is that it’s simply easier to attack the weakest target (an undefended tower, the third-place server) than the strongest target that will put up the best fight. As such, there should be benefits to making the hard choices instead of the easy choices. The suggestion to make points-per-kill a bigger factor is one way to do that. Another way would be to make upgraded towers or defended towers (which could be determined by siege weapon or player damage to the attackers from the other server) worth more points or rewards than undefended and not upgraded towers, perhaps by way of bonus capture points. The lower-scoring servers could also get bonus points for attacking up at servers with a higher score rather than attacking down, or maybe attacking down would lessen the rewards or score.

As for breaking the hold of the top server, see my suggestion to limit the point gap, above, or try to stop the gap from getting so large in the first place. See my suggestion for limiting the gap above.

From the other thread, concerning point handicapping as a solution:

If it’s beneficial for an overpowered server to sandbag and leave WvW, players will do that as a tactic to deny their opponent points, and that could create exactly the sort of hostility that ANet wants to avoid — players abusing other players for playing WvW when doing so might help the enemy’s score.

To be viable, any population-based handicapping:

1. Must react quickly to upward population shifts but slowly to downward population shifts to reduce the benefit of quickly abandoning a map or WvW or rapidly surging into a map on WvW. In the past, I’ve recommended calculating a server’s WvW strength as a 1 hour rolling average (average population for the last hour) or current population, whichever is greater across all of WvW.
2. Must never make it more beneficial to for players to leave WvW and let opponents rampage less impeded instead of staying in WvW and fighting to slow them down. This likely means a handicap that provides a partial benefit to the weaker opponent but does not entirely erase the disadvantage. This likely also means retaining some benefit to PvDoor so that an abandoned map remains beneficial to control.
3. Must be gradual rather than having sharp tipping points, so that the presence or absence of one player never makes a huge difference and changes the game significantly.
4. Will likely need to include incentives to make the players on the underdog server(s) show up and play even when they are outnumbered and have trouble winning.