Guild Wars 2

Anubis.9346:

We left for Archeage because we were tired of the content of WvW. So boring after 2 years…

I tried Archeage in beta because of my concerns over the direction that GW2 is going and because the sandbox elements were appealing to me. Spent less than a day on it when I got frustrated by the gathering and other activities being gated by “labor points” that build up over time, so I could find plenty of resource nodes that I couldn’t harvest because I didn’t have the points I needed to harvest them. More frustrating than anything I’ve ever experienced on GW2, and I say that as someone who has long played a longbow ranger in WvW on a bottom-ranked server.

Proposal Overview

Allow some sort of affinity group identity for players or guilds in addition to simply guild identity so that different guilds can be grouped together into alliances on megaservers based on common interests without necessarily representing a single common guild. The goal is to provide a mechanism through which players can undo some of the problems they perceive with megaservers and to help ANet sort players by common interest into them.

Goal of Proposal

To allow smaller guild to maintain an independent identity while being able play with other smaller or larger guilds. To make it easier for guilds to group by play style affinity or any other reason without necessarily having to represent the same guild.

Players grouped by server identity before megaservers (so there was, for example, and “unofficial role-playing server”) but now players get mixed on megaservers with people and guilds who are often essentially strangers and who might not share the same play style. So players interested in role-playing could join a “Roleplayer” affinity group that would try to put them into megaservers with other role-players. One could create a server identity group to restore some of the server identity that was lost and perhaps such a grouping could be a default. Basically, give the players a way to sort themselves out by interest in a way that doesn’t involve joining a single guild and representing it because there are various reasons why people might not want to do that.

Then give the players a sort of affinity chat option, where they could send messages to members of their affinity groups or perhaps just an individually specified (like a whisper) group. So, if I wanted to whisper to other Eredon Terrace players and was part of an Eredon Terrace affinity group, I could chat just to those players on the map. Role-players could likewise communicate exclusively with other role-players, and so on.

In the future, this could be used as a way of letting WvW players group together independent of server identity, too.

Proposal Functionality

The game would start with a set of affinity groups by default. For example, each server could have an affinity group (that only players from that server could then choose to drop or maybe have to add to get it) and there would be affinity groups for Role-Players, WvWers, PvPers, Beginners, Low-Population, Medium-Population, High-Population, and whatever else seems appropriate. A guild or individual players (it could work either way) can then choose affinity groups that will have a large impact on what megaservers they are sorted on to beyond party membership. The Population affinities would let a player communicate whether they want to play on a crowded megaserver, a sparsely populated megaserver, or something in between to support different playstyles rather than packed megaservers as a default.

You could then allow guilds, with influence points, build their own affinity groups that either other players or guilds could join or that perhaps they maintain control of and have to invite people into. Overall, this would allow guild alliances without requiring the loss of individual guild identity. This could, at some point, be used as a mechanism to allow very large guilds to purchase their own megaserver instances, perhaps temporary, if not permanent, and allow other guilds to enter them through invitation to an affinity group.

Finally, through default affinity groups, ANet could use this to get some sense of how the players see themselves and their play and what they get out of the game. Basically, it could be used as a sort of player poll.

Associated Risks

There will still be challenges sorting players into megaservers, especially if they have conflicting affinities already split across multiple servers. Megaservers will still fill up isolating some players from others with the same affinity. Players choosing low-population megaservers will require ANet to have more megaservers available. Players may find selecting affinities daunting or confusing so they’ll need sensible defaults.

Asacledhae.2650:

Even a 10 year old would’ve found the game in it’s original state very easy to understand.

I know it’s against the terms of service (which I think prohibit you from even showing the screen to anyone under 13 while you play), but I know someone who has played Guild Wars 2 with his 5 year-old daughter, and he joked about how she’d finish the personal stories while sucking her thumb. Not buying that it’s too hard to learn. What does gating add to the game other than frustration?

ADDED: And after watching that video, I’m not sure I would have continued to play Guild Wars 2 if I had to jump through all of those hoops to do things with my character. It was annoying enough waiting to get the elite skill slot. Whoever decided that players want to have basic character functionality (like the ability to fight underwater or use all of their downed skills when they are downed) denied to them and that would make the game better is on some really powerful mind-altering substances.

(More than any other reason, the reason why I gave up trying to like the Archeage beta, even though the sandbox elements appealed to me, was that they gated gathering and other things you could do in the game with point. Labor points. Really? People like that and think it’s good game design?)

Svarty.8019:

At 18 minutes he PROMISES a new map!

While he doesn’t promise a new map, the fact that he talks at some detail about the timeframes and issues involved in creating a new map suggests that, at the very least, it’s being discussed in detail internally, and from his tone, I got the impression that they’ll be releasing one at some point but he’s not at liberty to talk about it. I simply hope it’s not as busy and gimmicky as the EotM map.

Nihilus.3015:

All their testers were over the age 40

I’m well into my 40s and GW2 is the first MMO I’ve ever played (unless you want to count text MUDs in the 1980s). Also not a big fan of computer RPGs or twitch games. Civilization or Sim City is the type of game I’d normally play.

One if the things that sucked me in is that I could do a lot quickly and the game gated me very little. The game didn’t keep telling me, “No, you cant do that yet.”. In fact, the most gated aspect of the game for me, personal stories and dungeons, are what I’ve spent the least time in. Don’t like artificial gates. I’m fine with the game telling me I’ve gone too far or bitten off too much by killing my character, instead.

In some ways, that’s good for ANet because I spent a few hours playing the Archeage beta to see if it was any better (the sandbox elements appeal to me) and the reason I gave up on it wasn’t the disconnects or the more boring combat (made worse by the weapon abilities being gated so I could only do 2-3 attacks for quite a while) but because gathering and other things were gated by labor points which refreshed fairly slowly. How noisy it was trying to “help” me also was very annoying. If GW2 had been more like that when I started, there was a good chance I would have given up on it, too.

This grindy, gatey, cloyingly helpful style of play may be just what people are looking for in Asia or maybe you have marketing research that says it’s just what you need to reach an untapped audience in NA or Europe, but it does nothing for me but make the game worse.

Redphoenix.9560:

1. After seeing the map and clicking a waypoint…kinda hard with those commanders blocking the view on minimap.

Click (or right-click) on the commander tag icon and Join Squad. All other icons should disappear from the map and you’ll just see the one.

Redphoenix.9560:

1. A good chat with friends and guildies about incoming Archeage. (what won me is, guildhalls off the bat, unlike some politician promises)

What lost me, beyond the disconnects that required a full client restart that took minutes during the beta and combat far clunkier than GW2, was that you need to spend Labor Points to gather and open drops and they take several minutes before you get more so you gather, gather, wait, wait, wait… Yeah, the guild halls and ships are appealing, but Labor Points? Ugh.

locoman.1974:

Also, any tips I could use would be appreciated.

Possibly more important than your class is that you play an 80th level character rather than an uplevel and you have high-end (exotic or ascended) gear that boosts your Vitality and/or Toughness so you can survive some hard hits and conditions unless you are really good at avoiding getting hit (like Soldiers/PVT armor). The Karma vendor at Arah and the Badges of Honor vendor in WvW both sell exotic PVT armor, though you might want something that boosts condition damage (like Dire/CVT), instead, if you pick a class that relies on that. As a warning, it’s impossible to extract a rune set or sigil from armor or weapons bought with Karma or Badges of Honor with a salvage kit (you need a very pricey upgrade extractor from the gem store), so if you get exotic armor that way, be careful what you put into it if you ever plan on changing it because you’ll basically have to buy the upgrade again unless that’s changed.

gobax.6185:

That is why they are making changes. Anets goal is that each class have the same burst/tank/mobile potential as other classes. They felt rangers lack burst compared to other classes so they are changing it.

From the Ranger CDI thread (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Collaborative-Development-Ranger-Profession/page/16#post3691980):

“The Ranger isn’t expected to do burst damage. By sustained, we mean that the Ranger should excel at surviving (resilient) through burst while still doing enough damage over time to take the opponent down.”

Yeah, I can build a tanky Ranger and I do so little damage so slowly that it’s impossible for me to take any opponent down that can heal faster (or run away to heal) than I can do damage.

gobax.6185:

Classes in gw2 are mostly preference. Each class can be mobile / tanky / bursty. Only currently anet is still balancing them so you might see others are lacking compared to others.

I’ll be quite happy if that’s what they do.

gobax.6185:

Seriously. Read before buying. During the release they already said this.

I did. The Profession description for Ranger on their web site tells me:

“Rangers rely on a keen eye, a steady hand, and the power of nature itself. Unparalleled archers, rangers are capable of bringing down foes from a distance with their bows. With traps, nature spirits, and a stable of loyal pets at their command, rangers can adapt to any situation.”

When the reality of the game doesn’t match the description of the game provided by ANet, you can’t really fault people for not getting what the game promised.

That said, I’ll ask again, what’s the point of classes in GW2? Is it really style only? If that’s the case, then shouldn’t other classes get Stealth and shouldn’t other classes be able to wield a hammer with lots of CC like Warriors and Guardians?

gobax.6185:

It will defeat the purpose of getting rid of the trinity of this game.

Not really. The warriors do a lot of things well. That doesn’t mean that they have to do everything well. If every class should be able to do everything equally well, why not let every class run that fast or do the same damage and CC as a warrior? Why have classes at all?

gobax.6185:

Anet’s selling point is the abolishment of the trinity meaning all classes can play how they want to play.

Really? Then why did ANet tell all the people in the Ranger CDI thread who wanted burst power builds to be viable that that’s not how they intended the class to be played? Why do I have people telling me to build condi-trap Rangers or a longbow Warrior if I want to be effective in WvW when I want to play a longbow Ranger? Because you really can’t play all classes any way you want.

gobax.6185:

Now you guys want to isolate warriors as the heavy armor wearing tanky class? Try to think once in a while guys.

What are classes for in GW2?

gobax.6185:

It will defeat the purpose of getting rid of the trinity of this game.

Not really. The warriors do a lot of things well. That doesn’t mean that they have to do everything well. If every class should be able to do everything equally well, why not let every class run that fast or do the same damage and CC as a warrior? Why have classes at all?

gobax.6185:

Anet’s selling point is the abolishment of the trinity meaning all classes can play how they want to play.

Really? Then why did ANet tell all the people in the Ranger CDI thread who wanted burst power builds to be viable that that’s not how they intended the class to be played? Why do I have people telling me to build condi-trap Rangers or a longbow Warrior if I want to be effective in WvW when I want to play a longbow Ranger? Because you really can’t play all classes any way you want, except maybe Warrior, which seem to do everything pretty well.

gobax.6185:

Now you guys want to isolate warriors as the heavy armor wearing tanky class? Try to think once in a while guys.

What are classes for in GW2?

Serophous.9085:

Oh! And you need to spend that labor you only get while online to open loot bags. Yes, in order to get some coin, you have to spend a resource needed to do the whole farming and build house and profession stuff…on a bag….

That, alone, was reason enough for me to give up on it. The disconnects (which led to a lengthy client restart) didn’t help, either. That combat system was clunky but I might have learned to tolerate it, but not being able to harvest resources or open bags because I didn’t have enough “labor points” and having to wait minutes for more? Ugh. Horrible mechanic, especially for a game where harvesting a building is such a big selling point.

The friend who did the most to get me into GW2 has stopped playing since they transformed town clothes, something he spent money on and had a lot of fun with. Has over 10,000 achievement points and hasn’t played in months.

My complaint about the wardrobe system is that I now have no easy way of getting upgrades out of karma and bade of honor armor without buying an extractor, which simply isn’t worth it because I’d need six of them per armor set.

EnemyCrusher.7324:

I’ve noticed a lot of warriors using greatswords purely for the movement abilities. This happens mostly in WvW, but I’ve also seen it in sPvP.

Okay, so what’s the problem? The players who (ab)use these abilities have the option of ejecting themselves from a fight, with almost certainty that their enemies will not be able to catch them.

The Warrior should be one of the slowest classes in the came (mitigated with a few closers and CC abilities that they can use to keep people in combat with them), not one of the fastest. Heavy armor does not imply The Flash.

MoonT.6845:

ANet need to find a better way to reward people that don’t jump on the karma train and want to play this game with some level of tactics and sanity. Siege refresh is just another way to drain gold and ensure the zerg mentality remains.

ANet could give players a reward (karma, if not silver) for using any siege weapon with less than 30 minutes left on the timer (not counting rams and golems used primarily for offense). It doesn’t have to be a big reward, but a reward would help encourage players to do it.

Filovirus.6258:

Oh and your “debuff” that should makes it “better” by lowering the AoE “resistance” just breaks the game, because despite what you pretend, the AoE cap, the way it works and the way it’s countered IS one of the major element of balance in WvW, and was/is taken into account by Anet.

No, really it’s not. It’s a technical implementation limitation. Devon Carter has already explained why the AoE cap is there:

DevonCarver.5370:

Just wanted to hop in and mention, again, that the AoE cap on player skills is a technical limitation. Were we to increase that, skill lag would get considerably worse.

But given that you also think defense is OP, maybe your problem is that you haven’t figured out how to dodge out of the red circles yet?

Filovirus.6258:

So putting your “debuff” in just breaks balance even more…. Yeah, like we need it.

No, it simply eliminates the extra advantage tight clustering gives to players in the form of partial AoE immunity. There is another solution to avoiding AoE damage. Spread out a bit, stay out of the red circles, or bring along enough healing to survive the damage.

Players naturally want to spread out and not have their characters overlap, whether we are talking about standing at the bank in Lion’s Arch or doing WvW. Commanders have to artificially tell the players, often repeatedly, to stay tightly on the tag. It’s unnatural behavior for a variety of reasons.

Filovirus.6258:

AoE cap, the reason it’s there, why it won’t go away, the way it’s used in all parts of the game (including PvE events) and so on, have been discussed, devs knows about it and are fine with it, they even consider it a valid tactic (they posted in multiple threads about it back at that time), so why the Hell do you want to put in something that requires changing this system afterall for a modicum of balance ??? (it won’t happen once again, ever, so there is no point to discuss it).

Devon is pretty clear why there is an AoE cap in the quote above. If you’ve got any developer quotes that say it was an intentional design choice to make zerg-balls even more powerful and effective and the optimal way to play, I’d be happy to look at them. It won’t go away because it’s a technical limitation, not because ANet is trying to encourage zerg-ball play.

Also Devon Carver from https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/devon-carver-on-the-future-of-world-vs-world/ (emphasis mine):

Everyone who plays WvW has encountered the zerg, either as a member or as a victim. The zerg is an important part of the game, but it shouldn’t be the best strategy for victory.

An important distinction should be made between large, organized groups of players making strategic strikes and mindless groups of players running around in a mob. The former are deadly and effective. The latter can be deadly at times but tend to be sorely lacking in strategy. Our goal is to continue to encourage organized large groups while giving small, tactical groups the necessary tools to put a dent into larger mobs of less-skilled players. We think that it can be fun to run around in a zerg — but we also think that the game should be about tactical acumen and skill more than sheer numbers.

In order to achieve that, we will continue to make tweaks to the scoring system to properly reward smart play and to make it possible for a server to prevail over superior numbers with superior tactics. We will also continue to make changes to siege weapons and introduce new siege weaponry to throw the balance in favor of well-organized groups while retaining the joy of jumping right into things for more casual WvW players.

See also this from a GW2 player:

teg.1340:

This is not about zerging vs. small groups. Its more about positioning. Currently a zerg runs around in one huge blob, because the game favors this playstyle due to the aoe cap. The more people stand in one place the less likely it is to get hit by an enemy.

A “crowded penalty” would just penalize blobbing, not zerging in general. You have to position your zerg correctly by spreading out in combat instead of blobbing to abuse the aoe cap to your favor.

In games like DAOC there was no AOE cap so blobbing like in GW2 was deadly. It was a common newbie mistake to stand all in one place because a single group could rush in and wipe your zerg in a short time.

Zergs also existed in DAOC although blobbing was dangerous. Instead you had to spread out at the start of battle. Positioning was actually an integral part of the game whereas in GW2 you just stick to your commander while spamming #1.

Filovirus.6258:

Oh and your “debuff” that should makes it “better” by lowering the AoE “resistance” just breaks the game, because despite what you pretend, the AoE cap, the way it works and the way it’s countered IS one of the major element of balance in WvW, and was/is taken into account by Anet.

No, really it’s not. It’s a technical implementation limitation. Devon Carter has already explained why the AoE cap is there:

DevonCarver.5370:

Just wanted to hop in and mention, again, that the AoE cap on player skills is a technical limitation. Were we to increase that, skill lag would get considerably worse.

But given that you also think defense is OP, maybe your problem is that you haven’t figured out how to dodge out of the red circles yet?

Filovirus.6258:

So putting your “debuff” in just breaks balance even more…. Yeah, like we need it.

No, it simply eliminates the extra advantage tight clustering gives to players in the form of partial AoE immunity. There is another solution to avoiding AoE damage. Spread out a bit, stay out of the red circles, or bring along enough healing to survive the damage.

Players naturally want to spread out and not have their characters overlap, whether we are talking about standing at the bank in Lion’s Arch or doing WvW. Commanders have to artificially tell the players, often repeatedly, to stay tightly on the tag. It’s unnatural behavior for a variety of reasons.

Filovirus.6258:

AoE cap, the reason it’s there, why it won’t go away, the way it’s used in all parts of the game (including PvE events) and so on, have been discussed, devs knows about it and are fine with it, they even consider it a valid tactic (they posted in multiple threads about it back at that time), so why the Hell do you want to put in something that requires changing this system afterall for a modicum of balance ??? (it won’t happen once again, ever, so there is no point to discuss it).

Devon is pretty clear why there is an AoE cap in the quote above. If you’ve got any developer quotes that say it was an intentional design choice to make zerg-balls even more powerful and effective and the optimal way to play, I’d be happy to look at them. It won’t go away because it’s a technical limitation, not because ANet is trying to encourage zerg-ball play.

Filovirus.6258:

Berk : we must not have the same definition of “short”. You write, everytime 500/1000 words to answer when 2 lines are enough, only adding pompous terms and phrasing to make yourself look “bright”, it’s sad to have such an inflated ego and chip on your shoulder…

And if you spend less time whining about the length of my replies and the big words I used and stopped playing junior psychologist, both of our replies would be shorter.

Filovirus.6258:

Despite pretending the opposite, ALL your propositions tends to try to remove options (or make them unviable) and to try to control and balance an environement, that as long it’s a 3 way, CANNOT be balanced.

What you want is a controlled environement, and that means xvx “arenas” also known as Battlegrounds, not WvW.

And repeating an assertion over and over again doesn’t make it true.

I am not trying to remove options. I am trying to make other options viable. If zerging is the clearly most optimal and rewarding style of play in WvW and anything less than that would make it unviable, then isn’t every other option already unviable? On top of that, you say that defense is overpowered. So what’s left? What are these options you think players have?

I agree that WvW cannot be balanced without something drastic like randomly assigning players to teams as they entered the game (like the megaservers). I hate the megaservers in PvE and would hate that even more in WvW. If I wanted a the controlled PvP environment you imagine I want, I would play PvP. I find the idea so unappealing that I’ve never even tried it. If you actually made the case that my proposal would make a zerg an unviable form of play or impose arena-style play on WvW, I might actually agree with you that it’s a bad one. Again, repeating an assertion over and over again doesn’t make it true, nor does it explain why you believe it’s true.

Filovirus.6258:

I really don’t see how you people (you are exactly like Dayra) can pretend to “love” WvW and willing to make it “better” when all your proposals are removing what makes it WvW…..

And what, exactly, do you think makes it WvW? What do you love so much about the existing game that you fear will be lost if it’s changed?

Filovirus.6258:

The worst part is that you truly seems to be convinced that it’s great ideas for WvW instead of them only being ways of transforming WvW into yet another Battleground/Arena system.

It would help if you’d present an argument rather than just asserting things. If you have a case to make, cut the whining and drama and make it.

Explain why you believe zerging is such a fragile mode of play that any penalty, no matter how small, will make it unviable. And assuming zerging actually were made unviable by this or any other proposal, how do you think that would automatically tranform WvW into a battle arena game? Do you really think everyone would be lost if they couldn’t zerg?

Filovirus.6258:

Oh and your part about “realism” explaining that you are totally right to expect the level of “realism” that suits you but that expecting more (that doesn’t suits you anymore) is irrealistic and trying to pigeon hole people, priceless.

So, you accuse me of being “exactly like Dayra” and spend half your replies telling me what kind of person you think I am, and then you accuse me of trying to pigeonhole people? And then, for good measure, you follow up with:

Filovirus.6258:

Let me guess, you are working in marketing or a politician in RL ? xD

You’ve got enough projection going on there to open up a multiplex.

pdavis.8031:

I got what you are saying, but i have to agree with filovirus. Its basically hindering how WvW works, and what makes it fun.

What makes the existing zerg mechanic, especially getting everyone to pile on a single point, fun and desirable? Beyond the balance issues, I simply find it tactically, strategically, visually, and from a sheer gameplay perspective uninteresting.

pdavis.8031:

Adding movement restrictions only just slows it down, a bit, only to be quickly overrun and destroyed by a small harrying force. Which strongly discourages a large group, and takes away the need for having a large amount of people.

And how would the small harrying force be able to destroy a larger force? If all it takes is for a small force to catch a larger force to destroy it, then the game is already badly broken. The goal of my proposal is not to erase the advantage of large groups but to lessen it. I’m not looking to balance an army of 50 against an equally skilled army of 20. I’m looking to give a lone player or small group of players the ability to escape rather than getting mowed down by a force that will flatten them in seconds.

The idea of the movement was to make it more difficult for the large group to inevitably overrun most single players or small groups that they can easily wipe out, in part because a good zerg is constantly boosting the speed of it’s head by 33%. WIth a cap of 25% for the movement debuff, most zergs would still be moving at or above base moment due to sigils, runes, buffs, and so on. And that would be with 50 people in the zerg.

Note that this is not my most pressing problem with WvW and I’m pretty happy with siege weapons as a counter so long as they don’t nerf siege weapons, but you don’t need to spend much time on this message board to get the sense that a lot of people don’t like various aspects of how zerging or blobbing work.

pdavis.8031:

I suppose the only way to realisticly implement my idea would be to have collision detection. Where You would be able to put your heavies on the front lines, and the enemy wouldn’t just be able to run past them to the lights and mediums in the middle. Or what ever formation the squad leader/commander wanted. It wouldn’t remove the benefits of being in a large group, amd wouldnt discourage being in a large group with slower speeds, debuffs and what not.

As I’ve said in other threads, I’m really not a big fan of buffs and debuffs as a way to fix problems. I suggested this as a possible way to lessen the benefit of more people to compensate for the advantages one gets from having more people. It’s not as if a zerg simply gets linearly more powerful with each additional person (e.g., 10 times the people are 10 times more powerful) but they get even more powerful through increased immunity to AoE attacks (which have a cap), the ability to retreat among allies, and shared buffs. If there wasn’t an AoE cap or there were collisions, there would be trade-offs rather than more always being better, and it is trade-offs that make tactical and strategic decisions interesting. But AoE has already said they won’t increase the AoE cap for technical reasons and they won’t implement collisions because of all the problems that would cause.

Reborn.2934:

Is any player that thinks that the timers on sieges , special on superior sieges and guild sieges ( that cost a lot gold and game time and nobody can waste them for griefing ) are correct and logical ?

For the most part, yes, though it’s helps when there is siege you don’t want that’s taking up real estate where you’d rather put something else. My suggesting is to create a version of the metabolic primer, which makes food last for 12 hours, for siege weapons. If you deploy (or maybe complete) a siege weapon while the siege primer is active (one shot or within a time limit), the siege weapon won’t expire for 12 hours (unless it’s destroyed). Way to keep some critical siege weapons from expiring. Way for ANet to get some money from WvW players through the gem store.

pdavis.8031:

Lets try to keep calm. The way I see it is, while there could be some balancing issues that need to be fixed, doing any kind of major change to the way combat in large groups is done would: A. Be extremely difficult to implement B. Would actually hinder more than help and C. Probably isnt worthwhile in the end.

My specific proposal was not a major change to the way combat in large groups is done and was designed to use information and processes already apparently present in the game engine based on what I observe in combat and from information presented in WvW. Whether it would hinder more than help or wouldn’t be worthwhile is a legitimate discussion to have, but it would help if it were done with details rather than the vague FUD that any change is bound to make things worse.

It’s pretty clear that a lot of people are unhappy with the artificially good advantages the game provides for the players clustering tightly together (note that I do not consider getting AoE boons an artificial advantage — that flow naturally from the way those effects work in the game). That is why you see endless messages on these message boards from people begging for the AoE caps to be lifted or collisions to be turned on in the game system, both of which would create a natural disincentive for tight clustering. So I don’t think its fair to argue that there is no problem and everyone is perfectly happy with things the way they are. A lot of people aren’t.

Personally, it’s not a major concern for me because I think there are ways to work around it (specifically siege weapons with a higher AoE cap) and I actually enjoy interplay between siege weapons and counter siege weapons, placements, the logistics of supplies, getting them built, and so on.

pdavis.8031:

Now if there was a way, that wouldn’t be game breaking/take away from the basic mechanics as is, what would it look like? Would it even be enjoyable or possible? (Not from a dev stand point but rather a hypothetical) thoughts?

That’s what I thought I was proposing. Small penalties (0.25% to 0.5% per person and capped off between 10% and 25%) for each additional person in a cluster, specifically in the form of a movement penalty or a chance of missing on attacks. The goal being to diminish but not eliminate the advantage of increased numbers to compensate for the artificially good benefits of tight clustering due to AoE caps and lack of collisions, obstructions, and friendly fire in the engine.

Filovirus.6258:

Oh and just for lulz , something that i don’t hide, contrary to what you think i want, i’ve been on the RECEIVING END of “blobs”, outnumbering groups and such for over a year, and worse than anything else, we are always between “rock and a hard place”.

I don’t enjoy winning an mu on Sunday even when 30% top of the people play, nor that i enjoy being 100k behind on sunday when pretty much 80% of the regular WvW players pulled out double/triple shifts to TRY to hold on……

On our servers zergs/blobs seldom happens due to basic “ennimity” between the main guilds.

And contrary to what you seem to think I want, despite being at the absolute bottom of the rankings for much of the time I’ve been playing WvW, Eredon Terrace can field some impressive numbers during primetime on the weekends, especially compared to some of our opponents. For the first few hours after reset last night, we were well ahead in points, taking keeps on enemy borderlands and denying one of our opponents their keep in the Eternal Battlegrounds. We had multiple teams operating on maps attacking multiple objectives, too. Our guilds all work together pretty well and coordinate through TeamSpeak. I’ve also run with guilds from higher tiers who came down to play on Eredon Terrace who were highly coordinated, calling out for specific fields and combos, paths to move along, and so on, so I do understand why you are making a distinction between a blob and a zerg.

Some of the most amazing fights I’ve seen in WvW has been when large forces from another map arriving while their opponent is already in the lord’s room of a keep (someone else in one of our keeps or our forces in someone else’s keep — both ways) and fighting for control of the keep with holes in the wall and very little siege weaponry involved, sometimes long enough that people run back from waypoints to keep fighting, so long as the battle remains small enough that serious skill lag doesn’t kick in.

Filovirus.6258:

On top of that we are (or should i say we have been for 18+ months…) at the bottom of the ranking, maintaining ourselves around 21/22 ranks, always losing guilds to higher up servers when needed, always being either the stompers or the stomped……

Filovirus.6258:

But (and i’m sure about it, because i asked a lot of people about it) no one would accept your ideas.

And what idea is that? Adding micro-penalties for each player in a group to diminish the benefits of additional people? Or that you imagine I want to implement 10v10 arena fighting?

You’ve raised at least one legitimate objection to part of my actual proposal, which is that even with micro-modifiers, it could still reach a tipping point where players notice and ask other players to leave. Thinking it through, I even came up with specific ways that could happen and posted them. It may very well have serious problems that I’ve though of and, as I’ve also acknowledged, I don’t think buffs and penalties are the idea way to balance things in WvW and would actually prefer to avoid such mechanics. But determining the flaws and merits of a proposal require addressing the actual proposal and not a straw man that nobody is proposing.

You’ve also thrown out a lot unsupported objections (e.g., the entire game engine would have to be rewritten to implement micro-penalties like I described), and that’s not very useful, either. If an ANet developer tells me that they’d have to rewrite their game engine to implement my proposal, I’d accept it, just as I accept it when they tell me that they can’t increase the AoE cap. Are you an ANet developer?

Filovirus.6258:

The day they come into motion all those people that are still there due to guilds/friendships/relations would leave in a couple weeks because what you propose is battlegrounds/large arenas.

How do you jump from my proposal for micro-penalties for proximity and arguing that siege is not overpowered and is fine just the way it is to my proposing battlegrounds or a large arena? Not what I’m look for. At. All.

Filovirus.6258:

If it’s what we wanted we would be spending h24 in 10v10 arenas. Not fighting with unbalance in WvW, exploiting it, enjoying it, being kittened over more often than not….

And if you spent more time reading what I was actually saying rather than speculating about my agenda, motives, and so on, you might realize that even I don’t agree with the straw man positions you imagine me holding. I have no interest in a 10v10 arena, either. So maybe you can tell me why you think micro-penalties for proximity will inevitably lead to 10v10 arenas, I might agree that my idea is a bad one.

Filovirus.6258:

PPS : 20 posts everytime i (or anyone else) write something because ON PURPOSE you refuse to trim what you quote should have made me realize you are just a “holier than thou, seen it all, bending reality to your needs” type.

I fully quote the person I’m replying to so that it’s clear what I’m replying to, so I stay on track, and so I don’t misrepresent what they are saying, which you have endlessly done in your replies to me. I’m honestly fascinated that people feel having their words quoted back and them and specifically replied to is somehow maliciously hostile. I’d actually prefer you’d put my quotes above your claims about what you think I’m saying and believe because it would make the disconnect pretty obvious.

You are also apparently taking this way more personally than you should be. If I was maliciously trying torment you and win at all costs and was truly “holier than thou”, I wouldn’t have (twice now) posted arguments backing your point against me (pointing out that I advocated avoiding using buffs and debuffs to balance the game in another thread and pointing out specific tipping points in a movement penalty that might be noticeable to a group once they are reached). This is a discussion about a game that neither of us has any control over. The only danger my suggestions pose to being implemented is if ANet thinks they are a good idea.

If you’ve got a good point to make about why my proposal is bad for the game, make it. Spend less time railing against extreme positions I’m not advocating and typing in all caps. Stop taking this personally. It isn’t personal. If you feel I’m threatening your favorite part of the game, then explain why you like it and why you think it’s threatened without the hyperbole and pop psychology.

Filovirus.6258:

(4th ed of DD didn’t go down in flames AT ALL for scrapping out “realism” but for making it a basic mmo ruleset… with all the “realism” you pretend you want……….)

I think you are the first person I’ve ever seen claim to find “realism” in the 4th Edition rule set.

Filovirus.6258:

You are hypocrit as Hell, you are pretending to “like” a game… but want to change EVERY SINGLE THING about it and make it something that no one wants AND is present in 2 dozens games out there if needed.

I really don’t get it. You want something else that requires changing pretty much everything about GW2 to make it a (bad) copy of game xyz… why not move to game xyz ?

Straw man arguments rarely make sense because they reflect opinions nobody actually holds. For example, I don’t actually want to change “EVERY SINGLE THING” in GW2 (repeating it over and over again and typing it in all caps isn’t going to make that any more true) nor would my proposal require changing pretty much everything about GW2 to make it happen (as I pointed out, it would use information and mechanisms already clearly present in the game, so unless you know more about the game engine than I do, there is no reason to believe it’s hard to implement), nor am I trying to make GW2 more like some imaginary game that you keep alluding to but can never actually name as an alternative (GW2 is the only MMO I’ve ever played — unless you want to count text MUDs in the 1980s).

Since you’ve complained about the lenght of my replies, I’ve cut a lot out of this one, not because I can’t reply or agree but because it’s probably worthless to just about everyone who might be reading this, is repetitious, or doesn’t really go anywhere useful.

Filovirus.6258:

Since you and your fellow friends wil NEVER accept that, there is no point in discussing the rest of “realism” because all you want is “realism” when it suits you… and totally stupid irealistic things when it suits YOU.

Yes, people will desire different amounts of realism and that can vary from person to person and game to game. I doubt anyone would want the addition of bathroom breaks to GW2 like they have in The Sims, or require characters to sleep to avoid fatigue modifiers, or to add encumbrance modifiers as loot bags fill up. And I would guess the vast majority of GW2 players are quite happy that death is fairly meaningless in the game, nevermind WvW. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t expect some internal consistency or for things to make some sort of internal sense. At some point, things reach a level of absurdity or farce.

People wonder why, in a game where death is normally just a mildly inconvenient speedbump, characters permanently die during personal stories, because it’s highly inconsistent with the reality of the setting presented elsewhere in the game. I wonder why anyone would build a fortification or wall that not only offers little or no benefit to the defenders but actually hinders the defenders on the wall more than the attackers below them in many cases. See the quote from Tolkien I posted earlier.

Filovirus.6258:

Honestly i would LOVE to see your "ideas " put into motion but not the “one way we bully you all day long with no risk” version but the “we have 10 times more to lose than you, meaning that 2 kills for 300 on our side is worth it”.

I’ve argued in another thread that I think that reward should be proportional to effort so if you spend two hours sieging a keep to remove some tenacious defenders, you should get a larger reward for the effort than if you PvDoor your way to victory in an undefended keep in a few minutes. I’m not looking to punish or destroy zergs and I have no problem with a well-played zerg being well rewarded for their skill, coordination, and effort.

Is that really your problem with defensive siege weapons? You feel “bullied” by defenders firing siege weapons at you from behind a wall? The solution to tenacious defenders is to build counter-siege to destroy it. Just about any defensive siege weapon can be destroyed by well-placed counter-siege. As I said, a few weeks ago, we were up against a group that had the discipline to scrape every piece of well-placed (back from the wall and even in the courtyard) siege off of an empty Ogrewatch tower before drawing swords on it using ballistas, elementalists, and other siege weapons to destroy it so defenders couldn’t use it against them. It was frustrating as the defender who had built some of it but I was impressed by the coordination and thought their capture was well deserved. I’ve seen ACs built in the gully in the middle of Quentin Lake used to scrape all the siege out of the inside by attackers. That was a good idea, too, and that’s the way I think attackers should deal with defensive siege weapons. Work to destroy it. Don’t expect things to be easy by default.

On the flip side, the reason why I’ve driven off 15-20 with 2 people and a couple of siege weapons or even a dozen by myself is that they are groups looking for quick and easy captures with no resistance. They want PvDoor or a capture taking 5 minutes or less. If there is resistance, they leave, and I think that’s a good thing. If a single person in an arrow cart can “bully” your team away from a capture, then you aren’t looking for a challenge. The game already has an easy mode WvW karma train in EotM. I want to see captures be challenging in WvW.

Filovirus.6258:

It is NOT what you want but stop trying to remove an option from players and try to get a new option implemented ?

Filovirus.6258:

Removing things will only lead to the death of the game, adding things might drag in new players.

What have I advocated removing? I have not advocated taking anything out of the game.

gennyt.3428:

A nicely compensated punching bag is still a punching bag, vanity item(s) and a handful of gems most likely won’t make people stick around through getting blobbed down or dealing dead zones during their play time.

They were two different incentives. The vanity items are because saying “thanks” can mean a great deal to someone who is already willing to put up with being a punching bag and can help prevent them from reaching a tipping point where they give up. It says the effort is appreciated.

The goal of the gems is to get enough people to try transferring down in order to equalize the server populations so there are fewer punching bags and just about everyone in the lower tiers could use at least a few more people. If they don’t stick around, then they pay ANet more in gems than they got for coming down to go back up again.

gennyt.3428:

It is supposed to be entertainment after all. What happens when opponent servers get these transfers as well? Unless the perks are attached to server rating(hello manipulation!), the already dominant server will probably be the more attractive.

Sure, and I already mentioned putting a much lower cap on how many people can transfer per week based on rank to provide additional incentive to transfer as far down as the person is willing to go.

gennyt.3428:

And I seriously doubt Anet would give gems for transferring down, when they can get people to shell out real money to transfer up and I also doubt they’d spend resources making unique items that won’t end up in the gem shop instead.

ANet gives 400 gems for getting 10,000 achievement points and it’s currently worth about 36 gold, so it’s not a huge reward and you’d need to pay ANet more to move back up. The incentive for ANet is that it will help fix a player distribution problem that’s hurting part of the game play without forcibly merging or redistributing people.

Filovirus.6258:

But once again, what you want isn’t WvW so i really don’t see why you are trying to kill/destroy WvW to get what you want.

Given the comments here and in the game, it’s apparently what quite a few people want similar things out of WvW. What, exactly, do you think is the essence of WvW? Quick and easy captures of undefended towers and keeps? The game has a map dedicated to that and plenty of WvW players hate it.

Filovirus.6258:

What you want is something else that can live besides WvW without problem, ask for that (or move to one of the multiple games that already have it) and leave WvW alone ?

You are the one who is complaining that the existing siege weapons and defenses are over-powered, not me. Are you sure you aren’t the one who is unhappy with WvW the way it is and should move over to the map where the the zerg caps something every five minutes or less? And that’s what this all really comes down to is that you don’t want changes to the zergs because you like the way they work and I don’t want changes to defense because I like the way it works. And it’s as silly for you to tell me what I want and should do as it is for me to tell you what you want and should do.

Filovirus.6258:

Oh and you might want to realize you aren’t the only one above 15 that played tabletop rpgs and discussed to Hell and back “realism” in those games/books/etc.

Then stop acting as if you don’t know what “realism” means in a fantasy setting context.

Filovirus.6258:

Actually you might take your own advice and read on the subject and accept the throng of advices/people recognizing that “realism” isn’t something you want in those settings, they behave like stories :

I have, and I watched Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition predictably go down in flames because it tossed “realism” (i.e., simulation of the game world as a real place) out the window in favor of abstract game quality after drinking the story gaming Kool Aid. There is a reason why genre fiction yields parodies and it’s because story elements that aren’t plausible and believable quickly become laughably funny, especially with repetition. Why did “red shirts” die in Star Trek? For the story purpose of showing the situation is dangerous without killing a named character. After it happens a dozen times, it becomes a cliche and fodder for movies like Galaxy Quest. That’s where story without concern for realism leads.

Let me quote the key paragraph of Tolkein’s On Fairy Stories:

JRRTolkien

Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker’s art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called “willing suspension of disbelief.” But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed.

—

Filovirus.6258:

you want them somehow anchored into reality/realism, but what makes them good is the part of imagination to go away from the mundane world… because if the mundane world was what people wanted, there is wars every day all over, there is dozens of military simulations readily available, books describing FACTS and not made up stories/fantastic stories.

There is plenty of Guild Wars 2 that is anchored in reality and realism and the game would be unplayable without it. The game gives players familiar weapons that work in familiar ways because it allows players to know what to do using their real world assumptions. You don’t shoot arrows from your swords or swing our bow to cleave enemies in two. You don’t make cloth armor out of iron or turn omnomberries into jewelry or or fire burning rocks from dolyaks in WvW, and if the game worked that way in the name of fantasy and escapism, it would drive people nuts.

At the end of the day, what I’m talking about is for things to internally make some sort of sense. Defensive walls that don’t defend and actually hinder defenders more than attackers don’t make sense. Defensive structures that offer no significant advantage to defenders doesn’t make sense. Who would build such things? Madmen? Having everyone stack on a single point to protect themselves from AoE is incredibly counter-intuitive because it’s the byproduct of an arbitrary game mechanic. Watch new players and pick-up players in WvW and they spread out because that’s what seems natural to everyone who isn’t focused on the mechanical quirks of the game. And when fantasy movies are made full of stupid nonsensical elements like that, they wind up being mocked mercilessly in Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Filovirus.6258:

“Realism” is what you don’t want in a Fantastic setting, coherence and logic (as in : if it works that way in one mode/part of the system, it should work the same in another) with invention and ideas is what you want.

Coherence and logic is “realism” in a fantasy setting. From Merriam Webster, realism is “the quality of being very much like real life : the quality of seeming to be real”. See also Tolkien above.

Filovirus.6258:

Defense is indeed op in GW2 ONCE you have sieged up a keep you need minimal people to defend it.

Defense is powerful if you siege up and upgrade a keep, what what’s over powered about it? From what I’ve seen’ a determined enemy zerg that’s smart about how they attack, persistent in trying again when they fail, and builds the siege necessary to break the keep can eventually get in if they have more people.

Filovirus.6258:

The reason why things flip so often is that there is basically NOBODY to upgrade/siege up/yak run/defend objectives, because everyone is so busy ktraining/getting kills/getting “good fights” while expecting “someone” to do the thankless job, costing time and money, and not earning anything at all (no karma, no badges, no xp, no wxp, no gold, no items), but expecting it to be done nonetheless….

I’m one of those people who does the thankless job, including spending an entire day refreshing siege weapons only to watch them expire if I leave for more than an hour. The work that goes into it is exactly why I want it to be rewarding. If I spend my day running dolyaks, running upgrades, and carefully constructing siege weapons to cover all the standard attack angles, then I should be able to repel a much larger force that’s not willing to put in the effort and persistence to counter my effort and persistence to take the tower or keep away from me. And if they put in the effort and persistence to siege the keep, wear the supplies down, and destroy the siege inside, then they’ve earned taking it. I don’t operate under the assumption that an attacking force is entitled to successful and easy captures. In fact, it’s my assumption that it’s my job to deny them successful and easy captures.

The reason why a couple of arrow carts and a treb are enough to drive many zergs (or blobs, if you prefer) away is that they are looking for easy targets and run away if they hit too much resistance. But I’ve seen enemies quietly build ballistas and trebuchets and use elementalists to carefully scrape a tower clean of well placed siege weapons without throwing swords and they have my admiration for being so disciplined to do so.

Filovirus.6258:

The day you have a server with a 20/30 man guild with the financial means and human means to siege up/upgrade/defend keeps and towers all week long that one won’t fall until you have 1/2 zone wide blobs going attrition on it for a LOOOOOOOOONNGG time with far bigger numbers.

And I think that’s exactly how it should be. They are called siege weapons, not drop and win weapons. Sieges can take time. If you want a karma train with easy caps, I’ve seen a great one running on EotM.

Filovirus.6258:

Oh and i “love” your “real world” comparison when you take :
- periods where siege items were nearly inexistant
- places where said siege couldn’t be deployed

There were other examples from other periods, including the Siege of Eger in 1552 where a couple of thousand defenders with 6 large cannons and a dozen smaller cannons held off a force of 35 to 40 thousand with 16 large siege cannons and 150 smaller pieces of artillery. Yes, real world castles are built where it’s hard to deploy siege, and that’s true for some of them in GW2, too. The whole point of castles and walls is to give the defenders an advantage. Can you find examples of quick surrenders and fortresses and keeps going down quickly? Of course you can, in part because real people come up with terms and surrender, something that has no meaning in a game where you can’t really die. And, yes, the superior force wins in a few days or weeks, not a few minutes. If you spend two hours on a keep and maintain a numerical advantage over your enemy in GW2, you should be able to take their keep. Can it be hard? Yes. I consider that a good thing, a feature not a bug.

Steinpilz.5078:

In short: you repeat the same things over and over again.

While it’s repeating content, I’ve found it interesting to revisit encounters I once thought were tough as a low-level character with a level 80 character with exotic and ascended gear and see what I can do solo. A lot of those encounters play very differently.

By the way, Filovirus, it would be perfectly valid for you to quote back at me what I’ve been saying in another thread about not really liking character buffs and debuffs and that and preferring handicapping to deal with points, information, and rewards, instead as a counter-argument to my penalties suggestion. I really do believe what I’m saying over there.

And for whatever it’s worth, there are two potential tipping points for the movement penalty. One is the point at which a character buffed with +33% movement drops below +25% movement and a zerg can’t keep up with an unbuffed lone character with Traveler or Speed runes or Sigil giving them speed. The second (and maybe third) is the point where the zerg’s buffed speeds (either +25% or +33%) is reduced below 0 such that the zerg can’t keep up with a single unbuffed and unaccelerated opponent. A zerg can notice crossing those tipping point. Personally, I prefer the missing penalty (percentage chance of missing with an attack) with a cap to keep it from getting too high (say 10%-25%) as a sort of flip side to the AoE protection (getting missed by AoEs because of the cap) that clustering provides.

Feaduin.7603:

The current “blob” is actually a battle formation. While it does not look like the nice neat Napoleonic lines or pike squares from late medieval combat, like those formations the “blob” evolved because it represents the simplest means of gaining the greatest effect from the mechanics and weapons systems available. A few reasons people blob are because of the prevalence of PBAOE support skills, offensive AE cap, the importance of blasting combo fields, and the difficulty of focusing a target while he is in among his allies. Given the mechanics of GW2 combat, a line, echelon or square would actually be less efficient in combat than the “blob.” Big picture tactical maneuvers such as flanking, portal bombs, and holding a choke point already happen when multiple organized guild groups coordinate on TS.

I understand all of that, and I think the AoE support skills are a perfectly legitimate in game “realistic” reason for everyone to cluster together. In fact, that’s exactly what I talk about when I see a commander in map chat or TeamSpeak complaining that their group isn’t sticking together and starts dying. I tell them that as counter-intuitive as it feels, you are actually safer sticking closely together because it allows you to share the heals and boons that the players around you are throwing out and it actually protects you from AoE attacks. It’s also why I rely heavily on pre-sieging towers and keeps for defense, because most siege weapons have higher AoE caps.

All of that said, the reason the blob is so effective is also a side-effect of what GW2 does not implement or limits, which is my point. Normally an enemy throwing a Molotov kittentail or grenade would be a reason to disperse because the real world doesn’t have AoE limits. Guild Wars 2 does, largely for practical performance reasons, and it makes clustering together counter intuitively a good way to protect yourself from an AoE attack rather than making you more vulnerable to them, which is what happens in the real world. And by not calculating collisions, obstructions, and friendly fire from the other players in the cluster, again largely for pragmatic or performance reasons rather than improved realism, additional natural penalties for clustering together don’t exist.

So what you get is a strategy that looks and feels silly to a lot of people, which is why people continually ask for the AoE cap to be lifted, collisions turned on, and so on and why new players have to be told, “No, no, you need to stick on that commander like a stamp on an envelope because you are actually safer in the middle of sustained AoE fire and ranged attacks if you are standing in a group than you are trying to dodge out and stay away from it.”

Yes, it’s a game and the tactics have evolved around how the game rules work, but they don’t simulate anything that makes sense from a simulation perspective. By default, people expect things to be “realistic”. If you drop something, it falls. If you throw something, it sails through the air in an an arc. And if you throw a Molotov kittentail at a ball of 20 people, you expect 20 people will catch on fire, not only 5.

Filovirus.6258:

ANY sort of detriment for playing together is bad in a game, people should finally start getting it after 20+ years, but no, those kind of ideas keep popping up in various game forums, with the same (bad) reasoning behind it (that is more often than not : “i don’t like it so it shouldn’t happen”).

I’ve been playing simulation games since before they were on computers at all and abstractions are a common way of simulating real-world effects in games. War games and some tabletop role-playing games have penalties for firing around friends or into melee combat to simulate accidental collisions, they have cover and obstruction penalties to simulate things getting in the way of attacks, they have movement penalties for stacked units, they have zones of control and attacks of opportunity and all sorts of mechanics to simulate the complexity of people moving around each other and trying to land attacks in the chaos of combat. These hobbies are older than many of the people working on GW2 or the 20 years you are talking about and it’s amazing how much of it’s been ignored or forgotten by people who never played or studied tabletop simulation games and are simply emulating copies of copies of copies of a dim memory of Dungeons and Dragons by way of Ultima and Wizardry.

WvW in GW2 already has detriments to playing together. You’ve mentioned them. Add unorganized and undisciplined players to a zerg and you get a blob. They are “rally bait” who help the enemy when they die. In addition, commanders get upset when players don’t follow them and don’t follow orders. An inexperienced player running a single upgrade that eats supplies can doom their team to losing a tower or keep. A single inexperienced player shooting a keep gate before the siege is up can throw swords early and doom an attack. I’ve seen players get yelled at for all of these things, and that’s not even going into the complaints that crop up when population caps are hit and players queue up so that players doing the “wrong thing” are taking a valuable play slot from a player that would do the “right thing”. Do I need to go on? It ain’t all hugs and kisses in WvW right now. And when many players complain about the same things for 20 years, it suggest that maybe, just maybe, those things are real problems that bother people.

Filovirus.6258:

I don’t know, if you want more “realism”, there is a lot of military/warfare simulation games/tools out there, go play one ?

It’s a Medieval Fantastic GAME, not “Warfare Simulation 2”… :/

See below. [*]

Filovirus.6258:

Oh and amongst drawbacks of zergs/blobs (less in zergs) :
- you can’t really chose who comes or not nor the profs they play
- it’s not optimized groups/composition
- you don’t control the level of gear
- you can’t maintain the same level of discipline/coordination (specially since it’s pretty much impossible, outside of a fery few numbers of guilds in ALL GW2 to have everyone on TS)

What you are essentially saying is that a zerg is an elitist blob that excludes the “wrong” people from playing, and that’s why I find your indignation that “ANY sort of detriment for playing together is bad in a game” so funny when you turn around and point out the problems that already exist in the game when less organized players want to play together in a big group.

Filovirus.6258:

For tactical tools, just a “Chain of Command” system with subcommanders would help already.
Same with a commanders shared chat. Same with the ability for commanders to draw on the map in a way visible to all commanders.
Ability for commanders to put discernable markers on the map that all other commanders can see, or visible for all the map if needed (to coordinate strikes/attacks on multiple fronts).

[*] I’m sure there is some other game out there that does those things better than Guild Wars 2 so maybe you should go play those games instead. You might like them better. And I can’t understand why you’d expect a formal chain of command system in Guild Wars 2. _It’s a Medieval Fantastic GAME, not “Warfare Simulation 2”… :/, after all, right?

(Note, I think you are perfectly entitled to suggest changes of the game to make it better from your perspective. Please extend the same courtesy to me.)

Filovirus.6258:

Tags with visibility limited to your guild, or a custom list of people, or people in your squad (people not in your squad don’t see it) while not hiding all other commander tags.
And so on, and so on.

In other words, you want to make it easier for people to exclude other people from playing with them. Why? Because having random people show up and help can already be a huge detriment in WvW play and already causes friction.

Filovirus.6258:

On top of that, in Real World, if you have 2 guys maning a turret/canon in a keep, and you have 50 people at the gate, i guarantee you they won’t defend the keep for long nor keep all the attackers in no time.

Really? See Harlech Castle. During the Welsh rebellion of 1294, thirty-seven men successfully defended Harlech Castle against the entire Welsh army. In 1403, a garrison of 28 armed with “just three shields, eight helmets, six lances, ten pairs of gloves, and four guns” held out under siege for more than a year, killing 300 attackers. Of course castles in the real world aren’t designed by idiots who put their siege weapons in vulnerable locations where they are easily destroyed by an enemy using hand weapons and don’t have walls that do more to get in the way of defenders than attackers, but that’s a complaint about GW2 WvW for another day and discussion thread.

You pretend you want “Real World” likeliness, but the reality you describe is far more “let’s give defenders an even easier time, like it’s not op as Hell already”.

So towers and keeps rarely flip in WvW because defense is so overpowered? I’m not sure what game you are playing, but that’s not the one I’m playing, nor is it the game I hear is being played at T1, either, where apparently the southern homeland keeps get flipped quite often (only one of the lower six homeland keeps I just clicked on has been held for more than an hour). In the real world, tower and keeps are overpowered and do give an incredible advantage to the defenders. It’s why people spent a tremendous amount of time and resources in a subsistence society that could barely generate a 10% surplus building towers, keeps, and castles. Walls are there to keep the bad guys out. They weren’t build for decoration and tourism.

Going back to your distinction between blogs and zergs, yes, showing up and throwing down a few rams without destroying the oil or cannons or building any other siege weapons can result in the failure of an attack. That’s not an organized or disciplined attack. In my experience, a determined and intelligent attacker who outnumbers the defenders will eventually take an objective by destroying the siege weapons in the objective and starving it of supplies (performing a siege). That it may not happen karma-train fast enough for the attackers is a feature, not a bug, in my opinion. There are plenty of maps that offer push 1 to win karma trains.

Filovirus.6258:

Because let’s face it, outside of attrition with vastly superior numbers and control of the map (supply camps first) or facing unsieged/unupgraded/defenseless structures, you have a far easier time defending than attacking.

And it should be easier to defend than attack. That’s the point of the walls, or at least it is in the real world. In WvW, they seem designed by people oblivious to the realities of combat in the GW2 setting, but I again digress.

Filovirus.6258:

And your “small debuff” WILL have a turning point however you implement it. And players being players, it’ll be calculated, and exploited, and at that time it’ll be abused and create yet another layer of toxicity in WvW.

How will their be a turning point? What will it be? At which half or quarter of a percentage does anyone notice, nevermind determine a player becomes unwelcome? And remember that any zerg that shows up to face them or huddles in a tower is going to face the same penalty structure for tightly clustering together.

Filovirus.6258:

The problems ALREADY existing will be amplified 100000 times or more, because any person considered a “rally bot”/useless for now, will be even more so when you’ll need to run an exact optimized number to be the most effective, and getting above it would be detrimental, specially with subperforming players….

Disperse and the movement penalty disappears. All the organized and disciplined zerg needs to do is split into two or three smaller groups and the debuff goes away, and any pursuing enemy that sticks together to pursue them will have their own debuff to deal with.

Filovirus.6258:

It’s not the same at all.
One is organized, disciplined, and FAR beyond the “hit 1” description you like so much, the other isn’t.

And you are shifting goalposts, as well, by complaining that implementing something might possibly punish players for wanting to just join in and help out is horrible and will destroy the game when you know, just as well as I do, that the “organized, disciplined” zerg must reject players, classes, builds, and uplevels and demand participation in things like voice servers in order to remain organized and disciplined.

Filovirus.6258:

And what you want is basically : “let’s have zergs/blobs but not zergs/blobs so i can stay near them but not in the middle and still get the buffs/heals”….

No, that’s not what I’m saying. In fact, I said the buffs having limited range makes sense. What I said was that the game includes benefits (some artificial, such as the AoE cap) to clustering in a tight ball but artificially removes what would be the liability of doing so if the game were to take collisions, obstructions, or (and I am not advocating this) friendly fire into account. This is why you find people on these message boards endlessly asking ANet to remove the AoE cap and/or add collisions to WvW because they know doing so would naturally resolve the issues.

Filovirus.6258:

And having things more akin to “real world” might be a good idea (i would LOVVVVVVVVVVVEEE to see the explanation for teleporting, invulnerability, and other things like that :p) but pretty much all of your ideas won’t happen. EVER. for a very simple reason :

Please don’t be a pedant. I’ve been discussing what “realism” means in a fantasy game in the context of tabletop role-playing games before there were MMOs and when the Internet was still the ARPANet. so I’m more than able to explain what “realism” means in a “fantasy” setting if you really need me to. I recommend starting with Tokien’s On Fairy Stories

Filovirus.6258:

your ideas require a total rework/replacement of the GW2 engine, meaning redoing totally the game, WvW/PvP and Pve.

While that’s true of lifting the AoE cap or adding collisions, I highly doubt that’s true of the micro-penalties I described. The game already calculates the number of combatants within a certain proximity to display orange swords on the map. If the engine can count how many people are within a certain proximity of each other to display orange swords on the map and can already apply the sorts of penalties I described as part of combat, the engine has the capacity to determine how large a force in close proximity to one another is in order to apply micro-penalties. In fact, that’s the whole point of using an abstraction of the penalties rather than actually implementing unlimited AoE attacks, collisions, obstructions, and so on. And that’ also how many tabletop wargames and role-playing games deal with such abstractions (e.g., shooting into melee combat or around friends).

Filovirus.6258:

It’s not a question of good or bad, it won’t happen. Anet won’t change the whole backbone engine of how AoE and things like that works, nor collision, nor proximity, nor will they had specific mechanisms of that level JUST for WvW (because if they do in PvE they basically killed the whole “end game” of PvE and Events).

What makes you think that anything I suggested would require major changes to their system engine? Since neither of us works for ANet, we are both speculating, but as I’ve pointed out, there is evidence in the game that every subsystem that’s needed to implement my suggestion already exists in the current game engine.

Straegen.2938:

Only server winning is defined that way. Individual victory can be achieved any number of ways. Winning to many is defined as being successful in ones endeavor.

The problem with WvW is that one can be successful in their endeavors (e.g., getting dolyaks to sites and upgrading them) and even successful in terms of points while one is playing, yet the game will tell you that you are not winning or are a loser through rewards and points. I lose gold when I spend my day doing defensive housekeeping in WvW while the players out fighting in the field are getting gold, equipment drops, karma, and so on. Yes, I may feel like a winner when I get the dolyaks into a tower to complete the door upgrade and I might even get a gold medal on my screen when I get a dolyak in to it’s final destination, but the game makes me spend money to run upgrades and gives me no loot for successfully running dolyaks, so the game is telling me I’m a loser. And yes, I may feel like a winner when my server controls SMC and we are earning more points per tick than the other servers, but the total score showing us 20,000 points behind tells a different story, that we are the losers. That disconnect is a problem.

SonOfJacob.7396:

Brilliant – thank you for putting this in terms I understand. It makes sense to handicap points – aka alter the scoring methods, which is probably a LOT simpler to code too. if I understand this right, fights will always be imbalanced – which is kind of how it has to work – it’s entirely dependent on the players, not the system. But the scoring should match based on how important certain goals are.

Yes, I think the fights should be imbalanced if the numbers and/or build quality and/or skill levels are imbalanced and I don’t think the game should try to fix that or really can in any useful or satisfactory way. My preference is that points should be handicapped based on some measure of effort, which I think would solve the population imbalance and coverage issues naturally if done right.

SonOfJacob.7396:

Tell me this: should taking a keep be jacked up in points and individual stomps be reduced? I just want to be sure I’m following the CONCEPT, not necessarily the details.

I’m going to answer conceptually, too, so don’t assume the ideas I’m tossing out are necessarily finished or ready to go.

Using consideration of effort as a guide, I don’t think it takes a lot of effort for a zerg to stomp a lone roamer that has the misfortune to stumble into their path. I’ve seen a single player hold off 3-5 attackers so I would say that up to maybe a 5:1, a stomp requires some effort and should be rewarded by points. But a zerg rolling over a lone player or small party requires no effort to stomp, so I wouldn’t given any points for that.

Taking a tower or keep where both sides are throwing orange swords requires effort and the winner of that encounter should get some significant rewards for fighting off a formidable enemy because such victories require a lot of effort. Even a handful of defenders with siege can put up some decent resistance, so a victorious attacker should get some reward for their effort and the defenders should get a greater reward if they can fend off a larger attacking force.

PvDoor, on the other hand, requires very little effort unless there are very few people doing it. Soloing a supply camp requires effort. 2-3 people capping an empty tower requires some effort. Those activities should be worth something. A zerg capping an empty paper tower before swords are even thrown? No real effort there and not worth much, in my opinion.

At least that’s the concept. Rewards should follow effort. Hard should be worth a lot. Easy should’t be worth much at all. But you need to make sure that the smaller force can’t game the system by deliberately not challenging attackers to make their attacks easy (that’s what makes this hard to do right), so rather than look at individual encounters, population levels across all the WvW maps, as a measure of the potential challenge an opponent represents were the two sides to clash directly.

At the most basic level, that means counting the players on all of the WvW maps and scaling the points based on the population. The population needs to be some sort of rolling average over time to mitigate the effects of large groups entering and/or leaving WvW. The problem there is that WvW players can hide outside of WvW to suppress the points of a stronger enemy, so a system that couldn’t be easily gamed might have to count all the players in GW2 that have recently played WvW to capture all of the people who might pop into WvW at any moment or might be hiding out to manipulate the score (which would als count fairweathers not deliberately sandbagging and with no intention of showing up that week). Even with that, people could still just log off to hide. Basically, the hard challenge here it to prevent anyone from getting an advantage by deliberately not showing up. There needs to be a reason why it’s always better to go into WvW and fight instead of letting the enemy forces roll over a map without opposition.

gennyt.3428:

Berk.8561:

Isn’t that what’s enticing people to stack on what they anticipate to be the winning server in each league?

So make, transferring to poorly performing worlds have equal or better rewards than actually “winning” the tournament? As I said, what practical perks would move players into an environment where they know they’ll be blobbed to kingdom come for heaven knows how long?

I think it’s a serious answer. How do they entice teachers and police officers to work in rough neighborhoods that are less desirable and more thankless to work in than nice areas where they are appreciated? They pay them more. It’s how incentives work and they’ll never work on everyone. There are two possible goals behind such compensation.

First, some nice compensation could make being a punching bag for larger servers more palatable and less thankless for those who do it (I say this as someone who plays on a bottom-ranked server). It doesn’t have to be the same reward as the winners of a tournament get nor even necessarily the same. In fact, it might be better if it were different and unique — something like an “Underdog of the Mists” title or a special Outnumbered Defender skin set would be cool. That wouldn’t solve the imbalance problem (because stacking on an underdog server to get a reward would make it not the underdog) but it would make sticking with an underdog server more rewarding.

Second, the goal of the compensation could be to get people to disperse and spread about to the less populated servers to unstack the players. Since server identity now means very little in PvE and will mean even less when guilds become global, server identity really only has meaning for WvW. So change the cost of transfers, in gems, to reflect an incentive system something like this (I know my example is crude and would need to be refined). Move up one league? Pay 800 gems. Move up two leagues? Pay 1600 gems. Move down one league? Get 200 gems. Move down two leagues? Get 400 gems (The actual system would need to be more sophisticated to avoid stacking on the top server in a league).

Limit the reward to the first 10-20 per week that transfer to a server to avoid swamping the bottom tier servers with hoards, to avoid everyone stacking on a single server, and to avoid a crude gem train where a mob quickly rides a bottom tier server to the top as the top servers tank and then jumps back to the bottom to earn gems, though this happening slowly and naturally wouldn’t be a bad thing. Maybe the severs at the top of a tier have a 10 person cap while those at the bottom have a 20 person cap. Also limit transfers to one compensated transfer per month (though you’d still have to pay to move up) to avoid exploits.

Of course let people know if the won’t be compensated for moving down if the cap is reached and let them still transfer without compensation if they want. Thus a 25 person guild moving down might only see 20 or even less of their members get gems for moving down and could work that out internally or move over several weeks.

So, yes, pay the players to disperse in WvW if that’s what people really want to see happen.

Straegen.2938:

Even less people in WvW… really bad idea. Far better to remove the conditions that having uplevels around a poor choice, namely rallying. Eliminate rally from player downed and uplevels would be welcome.

I agree. I like the downed stare as a condition a player can get themselves out go it can be helped out of by another player but rallying means that dying not only hurts you but helps you enemy by getting downed players up. It should not be that difficult to remove just rallying from WvW.

Straegen.2938:

Another bad idea. I would be a roaming god if they did this. Simply log in when out manned and proceed to stomp the crap out of every enemy I see. I could 4+v1 effectively in this system and be nigh unkillable.

The challenge to any handicapping is preventing it from being gamed. I’m not a big fan of special buffs in WvW (including food, Bloodlust, Guard Killer, Defense Against Guards, etc.) so I think it’s an awful way to handicap the game. I’d rather fights be about builds and skill less than stat boosts and maintaining stacks. I do think WvW needs handicapping but it needs to be revolve around the points, rewards, information (e.g., eliminating the delay before swords appear), and/or NPC strength and not the combat abilities of the players.

toudy.1057:

i’m using sigil of fire only to burst my aoe damage :S

You can effectively get AoE with the piercing arrows if you line your targets up. Does the Sigil of Force increase your damage before or after the critical modifier? If it’s before, it would add over 10% to your critical hits.

For whatever it’s worth, I have Fire & Force Sigils in my longbow, but I’m considering Accuracy, instead. Fire helps with getting the Condition Applier daily.

toudy.1057:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fNAQNAT8XjMq0qavKGsQ0ag9AZdgGFYeZkzqZP5VHaF-TBCBABQt/QN6Gk4iAMlyPYVCCwTAgI1few8HpAGVXF-e

what u guys think about it?

My only questions are:

Have you considered using a Superior Sigil of Force (+5% damage) instead of Fire on the weapons?

Have you looked at ascended Knights trinkets to improve your Toughness instead of Condition Damage?

toudy.1057:

Hey all, hello, i’m recently up to level 80 in my Ranger, and LOVE use Longbow, what i want to know is, have any build to make my Ranger reach 100% Critical Chance? Is good?

I use Longbow/Sword&Horn in WvW and also in PvE (Horn for Call of the Wild to give Fury, Might, & Speed to others and to blast finish my own a Healing Spring) and have had some success with Torch in WvW. Need to try Greatsword one of these days. My focus us Power and survivability for WvW so my Critical chance is pretty low.

Using the gw2skills.net build editor and looking at a build with all ascended Assassins and Knight’s gear, Precision infusions where possible, a Superior Sigil of Accuracy, Superior Runes of the Ranger, and maxing out the Skirmishing trait line, it looks like doing that’d would give an 87% Critical chance and around 200% Critical Damage but the build sacrifices Vitality, Toughness, and Condition Damage to get that. Don’t think that’s a good trade off for WvW, though it could work well in dungeons and PvE. I think that’s about the max without food, but as others have said, it may be too high if you expect buffs in play.

A problem with Rangers is that in the Ranger CDI discussion thread, ArenaNet said that the design goal for the Ranger was for them to do slow and steady damage rather than burst damage, so the class fights against power and Berzerker builds looking for high damage and currently works well with condition builds. I have a lot of fun playing a Power Longbow Ranger in WvW but I know it’s a sub-optimal build that works better as support than in evenly matched skirmishes with other classes. It’s also not optimal (and often unwelcome) for dungeons. Works just fine in the rest of PvE though.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I have a Guildie that only plays on the weekends (Friday and Saturday nights), and he rarely finishes the Monthly, as he runs out of time. I don’t think changing the requirements for the Monthly would be a good idea.

Recommend a few nights in WvW running with a commander. It can yield a ton of events, veteran kills, champion kills, and WvW player kills and salvage the stuff you get for the salvage achievement. I can usually finish my monthlies in 4 days.

Zaxares.5419:

We need something like the ground reward chests in EotM for defending, with perhaps increasing tiers of rewards the longer you have control of the structure. (And likewise, to incentivize attackers, the better the tier of structure you capture, and the longer the enemy has held it, the better your rewards when you finally do capture it.)

One of the things that I think would greatly improve WvW play in terms of challenge would be to give much better rewards for fighting other players than NPCs and a door, and for attacking the first and second-place servers rather than the third-pace server. The karma train on EotM illustrates that the game’s current incentives reward flipping sites with as little resistance as possible. I find myself wondering if there might be a market for WvW objectives and equipment (siege weapons) on a PvE map so that the players can run a site-flipping train against NPCs without any danger of running into an ornery human opponent that fights back.

gennyt.3428:

How can you entice people to move to a losing side? Loot handicaps?

Isn’t that what’s enticing people to stack on what they anticipate to be the winning server in each league?

pdavis.8031:

Im not against zerg/large groups, but there seems to be a strong distaste for them in general. I am just thinking of ways to favor both large group and small group tactics in such a way that each can play how they play, but have a bit more structure, instead of a grand chaotic melee.

I’m not entirely against zergs, either, and I don’t expect small parties to be able to wipe much larger forces, either. What I’d like to see could probably be best described as diminishing returns for adding more people to a zerg so that the impact of differences in numbers isn’t quite as large as it currently is.

Filovirus.6258:

The day players are punished for playing together is the day WvW die, and at most you’ll have what you pretend you want : 1/5 full condi thieves/mesmers/random condi warrior/engi runing around killing people that don’t run those builds or running from fights.

If there are benefits but no penalties for being a huge zerg ball, then that’s what’s going to dominate. And if your zerg ball gets busted because it contains weak links, then those weak links are going to be told to get lost, and that already happens. But if the penalty for each additional player is small and the benefit for adding another player generally outweighs the penalty, then what’s the punishment for playing together? Doesn’t that only happen if the penalty for adding another player outweighs the benefit? In fact, it’s theoretically possible to balance the benefits and penalties such that an additional player neither adds nor subtracts anything from the effectiveness of a group. Were that the case, how would that discourage or punish players from playing together if their presence didn’t provide a net disadvantage?

Filovirus.6258:

All your ideas don’t PROMOTE smaller scale play that is mostly unbearable right now, or uneffective, it JUST PUNISH bigger scale play (and once again, zerg!=mindless blob), wich is a bad and toxic and suicidal behaviour/change specially so late into the life of a game.

OK, I’ll bite. How would you promote smaller scale play? By gutting AoE attacks and siege weapons? What kinds of tools do you think players need to coordinate beyond a TeamSpeak/Mumble server and a tag? What, exactly, is the benefit of large scale play and how can it be anything but mindless once the skill lag kicks in and activating skills does nothing other than making the skill number blink?

Filovirus.6258:

Blob busting isn’t really hard to do, there is guilds specialized into that, and it happens everyday, both in EotM and regular WvW.

So is zerg play not about mindless blobs or are blobs easy to bust? Or are you arguing that zergs that aren’t mindless are easy to bust and it happens all the time? I spent a little bit of time on EotM to level a character and, frankly, if that’s the future of WvW play, I want no part of it.

Filovirus.6258:

If you don’t like zerg vs zerg or blob vs blob, stop stacking everyone of the same time zones in the same servers ? Maybe you’ll actually have people playing smallscale at various times instead of big scale fights/zergs/blobs 4/6h a day, PvD the rest of the time ?

I play on Eredon Terrace, a low population server at the bottom of the rankings, and I’m actually pretty happy with the gameplay at that level, though I wish the coverage were a bit more even, and have no interest in transferring (I’ve declined invitations to do so by people who left). My main problems with zergs is that they are artificially too effective because the quirks of the way things are implemented in Guild Wars 2 gives added incentive for being tightly clustered (AoE caps) and eliminates all of the real world penalties for doing so (collisions, obstructions, and friendly fire) that would act as a natural incentive to engage in other tactics.

Filovirus.6258:

Stop trying to think “nerf”/punish all day long, and find ways to encourage splitting up teams into smaller more organized groups (guess what, quite some people want that but that won’t happen till : 1) siege and AoE damage gets nerfed HARD because the main reason for zerging is AoE cap “protection” 2) players have tools to coordinate/play tactical).

My suggestions are not primarily about nerfing or punishing large groups so much as they are about mitigating the unrealistic side-effects of quirks of the game engine that produce bizarrely artificial optimal strategies. Having spent years looking at tabletop role-playing systems and computer games, the road to sanity lies in understanding the incentives and penalties that influence real world decisions and make sure they are accounted for in the game simulation, otherwise you wind up with a stack of distortions so deep that it makes no sense outside of the distorted environment of the game system.

Your suggestion to nerf siege and AoE damage even more is a great example of that. In the real world, AoE damage and heavy weapons are one of the primary disincentives for bunching together in a tight group, but it’s artificially distorted in GW2 through the artificially low AoE cap. So your “fix” is to distort it even further by nerfing the AoE damage so that it’s even less effective, such that it would be essentially worthless. You are really suggesting they remove AoE damage from the game to “fix” a problem that more powerful AoE damage would normally solve in the real world.

You are also ignoring perhaps even a more signficant reason why the zerg ball is an optimal strategy, which is that the AoE buffs in the game have limited range and if you aren’t in the zerg ball, you won’t get the splash AoE heals and buffs. The problem I have standing apart from the zerg isn’t that I get hit by AoE (which is already weak enough that I can generally survive it) but that I don’t get the heals and buffs being fired off at the center of the zerg ball. When I do PvE events like The Frozen Maw, I can often stand right up against the champion throwing out a great deal of damage simply because the constantly fired off heals and buffs being applied by the center of the melee zerg fighting the champion. This is a perfectly logical benefit of clustering.

So there are lots of benefits to being in the zerg ball, many of which make perfect sense, but there are none of the penalties that one would see in the real world if they behaved like that. There is are reasons why soldiers don’t wander around in a group hug that go beyond the risk of being blown up by a single AoE attack. People who stand right on top of each other get in each other’s way. They take hits from friendly fire, block attacks, and get in the way of each other’s movements.

All of the penalties I suggested reflect real world penalties for bunching up into a tight ball without having to implement the costly (and, in the case of friendly fire, undesirable) systems that would naturally produce these problems as a matter of simulation. Large armies move more slowly than small reconnaissance squads for a reason. Soldiers spread out a bit, unless they are engaged in something like a shield wall, phalanx, or pike square formation, so they don’t get in each other’s way (and they have to be highly trained to execute those formations properly). From what I’ve seen, that’s the way a lot of WvW players actually do play when not being ordered into a zerg ball by a commander because it makes natural sense to them to spread out a bit. You could argue that the game reality of limited AoEs on heals and buffs naturally provides an incentive to group together tightly, and I’d agree with that, but it doesn’t mean there shouldn’t also be any penalties for doing so.

This is also why you will see people in the WvW forum endlessly ask for the AoE limits to be lifted, for collisions to be added, and so on. It’s because they know these are things that prevent one from seeing zerg balls in the real world. My suggestions are based on the knowledge that it’s mechanically impossible for ANet to lift the AoE caps right now (they’ve said so many times) and that implementing collisions would create problems beyond any performance issues it might create, so my solution is to simulate the penalties that those more complicated and realistic mechanics would create abstractly with penalties that might be mechanically feasible to implement without grinding the game to a halt.

Filovirus.6258:

Annnd that would ends up EXACTLY like the event scalling “gaming” that is plaguing Tequatl and others, like LS or seaosonal events (like the Crown Pavillong bosses/Blitz) with players determining the best equilibre between numbers and debuff and you’ll end up with “medium sized” groups getting free kills of people with more numbers, better gear, better players JUST because of the debuff and their ability to be organized JUST around that numbers instead of depending on pugs and such, and players being insulted/bullied into getting the kitten out (like all ideas that puts a debuff on numbers).

I hate to break it to you, but players already get insulted and bullied with zerg play. I’ve seen commanders complain about players who aren’t following them around and following their orders to optimize the size and effectiveness of their zerg. I’ve seen commanders get upset by players who don’t stay tightly bundled on their tag or can’t survive a punishing push through an enemy zerg. I see people complain about players playing the wrong classes in zergs because they aren’t optimized for the melee zerg ball. I see players called “rally bait” because they are playing sub-optimal characters, the wrong class, or an upleveled character. And I’ve seen plenty of complaints on these message boards about the wrong people playing for the wrong reasons taking up valuable spots on T1 servers when there are queues by preventing the mainline zerg players from getting on to a map. It’s not like it’s all hugs and kisses for anyone who shows up and does their thing in WvW right now. The existing bias toward zerg balls creates incentive to optimize toward that style of play at the expense of all others.

Filovirus.6258:

That CAN’T happen, unless there is a drastic change in Anet’s politics (wich would basically kill WvW btw) punishing people for helping out/playing together won’t happen (and shouldn’t).

My specific proposal was for a very small penalty for each player above 1 so that there is never a notch point at which things become significantly worse by another player or two helping out. Are you going to reject a second person traveling with you over a half or quarter percent penalty? How about a 6th person helping out your 5 person party adding a half or quarter percent penalty? Does that small penalty really outweigh the benefit of another person doing and soaking up damage and firing off other skills to help the group? At what point does that happen?

McWolfy.5924:

Character collision what we need

They could simulate the liabilities of collisions, without actually implementing collisions, by giving densely-packed characters an increased chance of missing (a nice counter to the decreased chance of being hit), a penalty to movement, decreased damage, and/or a chance to hit friends. This is how tabletop role-playing games sometimes abstract out crowded conditions such as firing into melee combat.

ANet is concerned that this will make players unwelcome in groups because they may trigger a modifier, and the solution there is to make the modifier very small and added for for every character in a tight group, up to a maximum cap, so that the modifier is largely unnoticeable in small groups but becomes fairly substantial in large groups. For example, if movement were reduced by 0.5% for every character, a party of 5 might see a 2% reduction in movement speed while a squad of 30 would see about a 15% reduction in movement speed. A 50 person zerg might see about a 25% reduction in movement and it might cap off around that. Or it might be a 0.25% chance of missing per character so that a 5 person party has a 1% chance of missing while a 50 person zerg has about a 12% chance of missing. Or maybe it should also be a 0.5% chance per person, too.

The last suggestion does a pretty good job of being the flip side to the protection that the AoE limits provide to being hit for characters in a tight cluster. And those suggestions shouldn’t be incredibly resource intensive to program in like, say, increasing the AoE limits would be. They’re already calculating large group proximity of some sort to determine when to throw orange swords on the map.

Very very few people are going to complain about another couple of people joining their group for a 1% penalty or less because they’ll provide more benefit overall through the additional combat abilities they add.

Johje Holan.4607:

Aw well, it doesn’t matter anyway, Devon has said they’re not changing WvW. So I won’t bother to write any more.

I’ve been pretty pessimistic about the direction the game is going, but that’s not the impression I got from the interview with Devon. The impression I got was that he was following the company policy of not promising anything that’s not nearly ready, but he talked in great detail about some of the problems of WvW and some of the changes people want (new maps) that strongly suggested they’ve been working on those things internally and we may see them someday.

lept.4692:

The fact that WvWers have to PvE to get decent rewards goes to show how lousy the rewards in WvW are. It is the least rewarding game mode, even compared to PvP. While it’s true most of us don’t WvW for the loot, excluding bags of course, it doesn’t excuse how poorly our time is rewarded relative to the other modes.

I get decent loot when I go on the offense with our attacking force. I lose gold in WvW when I play defensively. It would be nice to get rewards for things like upgrades you’ve started completing (a sort of rebate for at least some of the gold spent starting the upgrade), siege weapons you’ve thrown the blueprints for being used to kill an attacker, improved rewards for successfully defending against an attack that throws orange swords or where the (tower, keep, or castle) lord has been downed, and escorting dolyaks, of course (which could be measured by spending a least a quarter of the transit time near the dolyak, by defeating creatures or other players near the dolyak or that have attacked it, or healing or speed boosting the dolyak). On the flip side, maybe attackers should get better rewards if they successfully complete an attack where their opponents threw orange swords or where the lord was revived or bannered at least once during the battle.