Guild Wars 2

Straegen.2938:

. As I have said before the score IS NOT THE PROBLEM. It is a symptom of the problem. Trying to “fix” the scoring is like putting a bandaid on a gushing wound.

I think the score also creates the problem by encouraging stacking for rewards and because people don’t like to loose in points, either. To encourage distribution of players to produce good roughly even fights, the game has to reward the behavior rather than telling stacked servers with superior coverage that they are the winners and doing things right via points & rewards.

Aeolus.3615:

probably they count teh EOTM karma train as wvw population

That may very well be the case, but it suggests a serious disconnect between the perception by WvW players that the population is declining and ANet saying that the population is stable.

Chaba.5410:

It’s not just that. Players are leaving the game.

The Gamescom 2014 interview with Devon Carver has Devon saying that the WvW population is stable, so apparently ANet isn’t seeing big changes in the number of people playing WvW.

Theftwind.8976:

The glicko system works………to a point.

The problem is that I think most people care about whether they win matches or not, not whether their server ranking goes up or down. They need a handicap system that allows a server punching above it’s weight to win the weekly match-up, not come in third but improve their rank. Do that, and the incentive to stack no the server with the most people and best coverage will be greatly reduced.

Svarty.8019:

This:
http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/09/02/flameseeker-chronicles-whats-next-for-guild-wars-2/

Funny thing though, I expect barely any significant changes to my favourite game-type (WvW). Even if Anet implement the mother of all expansions.

Actually, after clicking through to and listening to the interview with Devon linked to in that article, I’m a bit more optimistic about where WvW is going. He doesn’t actually promise much, because he can’t, but he spends a lot of time talking about the many issues involved with things like creating a new WvW maps or dealing with the coverage problem that, through the details he mentions, strongly suggests they’re doing work on them and we might see some of those things down the line. The one discouraging comment was that they intend all the maps to feel “full” and I think that’s a problem. I don’t really want every map and event in PvE resembling a 3 server zerg fight for Stonemist Castle, lag and all.

agenciq.8043:

This would be tricky as WvW rank doesn’t determinate if the person is fit to command the same as achievement points have nothing to do with player skill.

True, but there is no reliable way to determine if a person is fit to command in the game. Beyond the fact that there is a certain amount of subjectivity as to what makes a person a good commander, any system implemented to rate or rank commanders based on skill could be gamed or manipulated. Given that, achievement points and WvW rank at least suggest the player has spent a lot of time in that game mode and has some familiarity with it.

One thing I forgot as an example of a change making things worse is that when they changed the transformation system, they made it impossible to get runes from karma or badge of honor armor without an expensive extractor that usually makes it more economical to just buy the runes again, instead, since you need six of them to recover a rune set. We should be able to salvage and destroy karma or badge of armor, even if doing so yields only the materials and runes (which shouldn’t destabilize the game economy) and not globs of ectoplasm or or dark matter. Buying and using karma or badge of honor armor should not make runes impossible to recover conventionally.

All of these examples of things getting worse, not better, when they are changed create the impression that the game is getting worse, not better. And it’s a serious problem when things are taken away from players that they already had and relied on as part of an “improvement”. Taking things away from players that they like really annoys them, especially if you tell them that it’s an improvement.

Svarty.8019:

Funny thing though, I expect barely any significant changes to my favourite game-type (WvW). Even if Anet implement the mother of all expansions.

My guess is part of the problem is that WvW doesn’t earn ANet a lot of money in the gem store because it’s pretty self-contained. So it might help to suggest ways ANet could make money, or at least break even, improving the WvW experience.

In my reply above, I suggested using a Kickstarter for another WvW map set. They could offer gems or other benefits (an exclusive WvW patron armor skin) as rewards in order to encourage participation in the Kickstarter. A new map set would make the game feel fresh and would likely draw players who left out of boredom back into the game. It could even be used as an incentive for people to transfer down to the lower-tier servers by introducing the new map set to the bottom tier first, then the bottom two the next week, and so on until each tier gets to play the new maps, and then rotate them once everyone has seen them with the old maps.

The Metabolic Primer is an example of an item that’s useful for WvW players, but I can think of others, including versions of superior siege weapons (in particular, arrow carts, ballistas, and trebuchets) that don’t expire for 12 hours (so they don’t have to be continually refreshed), traps that done expire for 12 hours, some sort of instant supply camp drop (like the bonfire) that let’s players get more supplies in the field until it’s deleted, and so on.

WvW

• Servers win because of population and coverage and, as a result, people stack on servers, which only makes their population higher and coverage better, making the problem even worse. This will persist as long as the score doesn’t take population and coverage differences into account and so long as the winner (determined by population and coverage) gets the best rewards.

• Hacking is a problem in WvW because it allows players to walk through walls, see what they shouldn’t be able to see, destroy what they shouldn’t be able to destroy, and survive damage they shouldn’t be able to survive. You can’t have a fair fight against hackers. And because the policing of hacking is so uneven and some of the hacks are so subtle, that it makes players wonder whether everything strange they see is a hack or exploit (such as the enemy team that seems impossible to catch because they can always skip just far enough away to get away from attacks at the last moment).

• Class balance is a problem in WvW with a few classes widely being seen as dominant. It’s not uncommon to see certain strong classes reliably win in 2 or 3 v 1 battles against good players playing weaker classes (see also hacking, above), which is a problem in a player vs. player setting if you want a diverse class mix in the game.

• WvW is endlessly played on the same maps that most experienced players know nearly every nuance of. Players have been asking for new maps for a while now and if you added new maps, you’d see players return to WvW, even from other games, just to play and learn those new maps.

• Fixes Needed – The game needs some sort of score handicapping so that less populated and covered servers are more competitive (I know it won’t be easy to do right so that it can’t be gamed by the players, but it needs to be done). Stop rewarding the “winners” with better loot during competitions until “winning” means more than numbers and coverage to stop encouraging stacking on the all-too-predictable league winners or, alternately, reward players for playing for the underdog to encourage the players to spread out. Do a better job policing hacking (e.g., flag characters that are in locations they can’t legitimately be in) and give players a way to report suspected hacking for further investigation. Continue working on class balancing taking WvW into account. Add new maps to the WvW game (if monetization is a problem, start a Kickstarter campaign to pay for it).

What I’d Like To See Added to GW2

• More sandbox features such as guild halls and housing.

PvE

• Several event bosses were buffed to make them tougher and give them time limits, but I don’t think it actually improved the quality of the encounters. Maybe I’m a minority, but I don’t think standing around a champion a doing DPS and healing for 10-15 minutes while the boss repeats the same attacks and animations is all that interesting. It was often more interesting watching the Shadow Behemoth go down before the repeated their sequence the second time than watching it go on for 3 or 4 after the timer was added. Longer and more isn’t always more fun.

• The disparity of drop rates for certain materials (specifically cloth) and the use of even lower level materials in ascended gear has made the costs of some of those materials prohibitively high, especially for a starting character trying to work their way through a craft that requires those materials at lower levels. I’d hate to be a starting character trying to craft cloth armor today and you’ll notice that one of the biggest concerns about tuning armor drops to match the class getting the drop is that it will make it harder for medium and heavy armor classes to get cloth drops.

• I personally don’t like the Living Story grind (it feels very much like a grind to me) and I’ve largely given up on them, yet it seems to be consuming a large amount of resources for GW2 development. At the very least, I think the GW2 developers need to figure out how to make the player’s characters central to the story rather than having them follow a bunch of NPCs around for their story. That’s the main complaint about Trahearne in the personal stories, and it’s a problem in the Living Stories, too. If you have tabletop role-playing writers on your team, ask them what a GMPC is and stop doing that.

• Guild Wars 2 is a beautiful game and a lot of the Living Story events have been trashing the map and making it ugly. Lion’s Arch was a fun city to roam around but now it’s an ugly ruin. Kessex HIlls was a beautiful map that now is covered with garbage from the Living Story. Basically, the map is getting uglier and I’d hate to be a new player that only knows the ruined Lion’s Arch and not the beautiful and fun city that was destroyed.

• The person most responsible for getting me in to GW2, who has several screens worth of different characters, who spent plenty of money in the Gem Store, and who has more than 10,000 achievement points hasn’t played Guild Wars 2 in months, and one of his main reasons is the gutting of town clothes so they can’t be customized and mixed and matched. That was an important feature for him and role-players and taking it away didn’t make the game any better. It only made it worse for a lot of people, and I will never spend another dollar in the Gem Store buying any out-of-combat skin because of it, either.

• Fixed Needed – Longer isn’t necessarily better. Adjust cloth drops, in particular, so prices don’t become prohibitive, especially on low-level materials for starting players. Don’t make the whole game revolve around the living story. When you do tell stories, make the player’s characters more central to it. Stop trashing the map or move the main dragon story forward and clean up some of the desolate maps going the other way. Restore town clothing and customization for people who want to role-play outside of combat.

To start with a positive note, I think the upcoming changes suggest ANet is seriously listening to the complaints of the players and making changes based on specific points players have made, including the changes to the Ranger (some of which reflect specific points raised in the Ranger CDI thread, including one that I think is very important), nerfing the Warrior a bit, and the multi-colored and account-bound commander tags for WvW. This is the first time in a while where I’ve felt like the game is going in the right direction and I’ve been spending some money in the Gem Store again as a result of it. Unfortunately, it still feels like one small step forward after two giant steps backward and I still have serious concerns about the long-term direction GW2 is going in and I’m more unhappy than happy.

Broadly, I’m concerned about the game taking design direction from the Asian market and incorporating changes from the Chinese version of GW2 into the NA and European version. I don’t think the tastes of the two markets always match very well and few people seem happy with most of the changes being brought over from the Chinese version of GW2.

Beyond that, I have some specific areas of concern about the direction the game is going in several areas that I think represent trends in the wrong direction:

Megaservers

• Destroyed existing server communities and turned every zone into (too) high population play. This is the problem that caused me to take a month off from playing the game. I came from a low-population server where a handful of poeple would try to do the Frozen Maw or (the old) Taquatl. I’d see familiar faces and guilds at the champion events and the Frozen Maw actually plays better with fewer people (more on champion events below) because the Svanir Shaman actually moves out into the ice a bit. Now, every event is a mob scene with lag, reduced FPS, and is basically an excercise in applying DPS until the boss dies. Worse, I no longer see familiar character or guild names at events, just a random blob of strangers. Yes, there were problems with the low population servers (many events almost never got done) but this has lurched too far in the other direction. If I wanted massive high-population server player, I would have transferred.

• The above also creates problems for role-players who need to wind up in the same instances with each other. Forcing players to join guilds or party together to wind up in the same instance is not really a substitute for the high-level server identity that’s been lost.

• Not being grouped with people from your server in PvE has badly hurt the ability of WvW players to recruit from the PvE players in the game or to call out for help in PvE because the players from their server may be distributed across several megaservers and there is no way to chat with only the players on a person’s server.

• Fixes Needed: Reduce the population cap on Megaservers so there aren’t as many people in them and only squeeze in more if they share a party. Mix only a fixed number of servers (or only one for the high-population servers) and restore guesting, if necessary, to restore some sense of server community on the Megaservers. Give players a server-only chat option so they can map chat (or even broadcast chat) to the other players on their server only for WvW recruiting and (until they are changed) guild recruiting. Assign megaservers based on the guilds a player belongs to and not simply the guild that they represent, so that players can set up affinity guilds that they don’t always have to always represent to be grouped together (e.g., a role-players guild, an Eredon Terrace guild, etc.).

Xaragon.3520:

could someone point me towards what to do at the end game, i have pretty have just pvp’ed my entire time and i have no idea what I’m doing in pve.

You can try WvW, which is open PvP.

ShroomOneUp.6913:

If i want a polar bear i want a freakin snow white bear and not some street sludge color.

Real polar bears are often not snow white, and my guess is that they are using a real bear model for that color.

http://www.dna2life.com/sites/default/files/polar%20bear%20with%20cubs_0.jpg

That said, the real fix is to ask ANet to allow rangers to apply dies to their pets and make them whatever color they want. Then you can spend 34 gold in the trading post getting the Celestial dye so you can have a bright white bear.

Zaxares.5419:

I’ve NEVER seen anyone kill that Grub. >.>

I have. I was in a zerg that did it, but it’s easier when you control the blue keep and can hit it with siege weapons from inside. You can do it with a fairly small group with siege weapons hitting it, too.

echo.2053:

In theory that seems reasonable but in reality that would be incredibly complex. For example factoring population loss/gain from outside factors such as school and holiday breaks, you may/may not have experience this on et but fairweathers who come out to karma train during the easy times and are gone during the hard.

I know it’s not easy to do right, but I think it’s necessary to make WvW anything other than “stack to win”. It’s also complicated by the fact that people will try to game the system for an advantage by manipulating their player population. I think that can be controlled through looking at various averages as well as the points, which do often indirectly reflect coverage and population.

In the past, for example, I’ve recommended calculating WvW populations as a the greater of either the current population or the last hour’s average population. Another way to do it would be the greatest population in the last hour. Looking at short-term population windows like that would automatically factor in the fairweathers. The idea is that a server should not get an instant advantage for abandoning WvW and should not get an instant advantage for surging on to a map.

But it may be necessary to look at turnouts from previous weeks to make sure that a server doesn’t deliberately sandbag and sit out a particularly difficult challenge or part of the day in order to rob their competitor of points while they have a numbers advantage. This is where fairweathers naturally resemble attempts at sandbagging to manipulate the score, and the answer there may be to limit the role the effects of handicapping so they don’t erase the advantages of a higher population but simply reduce the score advantage so that gaps in scores remain more competitive.

Finally, the handicapping could depend on score differential so that a server that’s ahead or trailing only a little in score gets no benefit from having a lower population while a server that’s trailing by quite a bit does. The goal there would be to keep scores differences within a competitive range to keep matches from being decided by Saturday or Sunday.

All of these will likely have problems and it will likely require some mix of strategies to get things right, and it may have to be adjusted over time. But the current system also has some serious problems and the incentives if provides distort the game from what players claim to want and what I think ANet intends.

echo.2053:

As much as we may hate coverage gaps handicapping based on that would penalize the servers and possibly make it far worse. For example suppose a server is the strongest during ocx time but weakest during the rest of the time, It wouldn’t remotely be fair to handicap them which in many times is the only time they can catch up.

In terms of “fairness”, I don’t think winning (and getting the material benefits for winning) is “fair” if the win comes from PvDoor while the other server is asleep. That’s like winning a sporting event because the other team has no players on the field while your team is racking up points. The goal of handicapping is to mitigate the distorting advantages of stacking which reward servers for fielding players while the enemy has nobody else on and for fielding numbers that the other server can’t match. None of that fits the ideal that many profess to want, which is PvP fights won through strategy, tactics, and good gameplay. And the only way I can see to stop encouraging stacking and PvDoor is to take the advantage of doing it away.

If only one server has OCX players, then they contribute to the score through PvDoor. If that didn’t contribute much to the score, then the solution would be for the OCX players to spread out over several servers so they fight each other instead of NPCs for empty camps, towers, and keeps. And that’s the whole point of handicapping, to encourage the players to spread out so they are battling each other for objective instead of stacking on single servers during a particular time period for easy wins against grossly outnumbered enemies or NPCs.

I keep hearing people say that they don’t want more PvE in their WvW but that’s exactly what PvDoor is and that’s exactly what happens overnight in the OCX for many servers. The reason a small group of OCX players can change the color of an entire enemy borderland or EBG is because they have little or no opposition. If that’s really not what people want, then we need to encourage people to spread out and reward them for it instead of rewarding them for PvDoor and easy wins against greatly outnumbered opponents. Or maybe it’s all talk and the WvW players really do want easy victories and to avoid serious PvP action as much as possible. That would certainly explain the fairweathers and the people I see zerging around EotM attacking empty objectives.

One way to limit commander tag bloat is to turn them off after a few minutes if the commander does not have anyone (or maybe even more than one, if troll teams are a problem) in their squad. Yes, a commander could keep popping it back on, but it wouldn’t stay on if there weren’t people actually joining their squad to follow them.

Another way to limit commander tag bloat would be to limit the number of commander tags shown on a map to 5 determined by WvW rank in WvW and by achievement points in PvE. Or a softer version would be that once there are 5 commander tags up on a map, the only way you can turn on another is if you have a higher WvW rank or more achievement points, so that no commander tag that’s already one will be turned off. The number doesn’t have to necessarily be 5 and it may need to be a different number in WvW (where more than a few commanders on a map can cause problems) and PvE (where there are events that can justify 5 or more commanders on a map).

It’s not useless. It let’s low-population servers know when an enemy zerg has arrived on the map and what kind of attacks to prepare for.

echo.2053:

No doubt some communities are more pleasant than others, but pride doesn’t really exist. Your fooling yourself if you think thats true, come in third for weeks in a row and youll see people transfer off,

That people transfer off a server that comes in third for weeks in a row does not preclude server pride really existing among those who don’t. Eredon Terrace has spent a lot of time coming in third and being at the absolute bottom of the rankings in NA. While we’ve certainly lost people to transfers who were unhappy with that, we have a very solid core of players who have a great deal of server pride, including not only people who have stuck with the server through thick and thin but people who have transferred off and then came back to ET because they missed playing with the people there.

echo.2053:

In its current state theres nothing that they can do, they can’t restrict play hours or force people onto other servers.

There are other things they could do such as adjusting handicapping the score based on population playing at the time (using a rolling average population that responds instantly to increases in population and slowly to decreases and factors in previous week participation numbers to reduce the ability of servers to manipulate their populations for scoring), which would both make lower population servers more competitive in terms of points and provide incentive for the more powerful servers to attack each other rather than gang up on the weakest server (which happens now).

While Glicko is used in competitive environments for ranking, there are other ranking and handicap systems that adjust points to allow weaker competitors to win match-ups, including point spreads. What they need is a handicapping or scoring system that allows a weaker server that punches above it’s weight in participants (not necessarily past performance, which is what Glicko takes into account) to actually win the match-up in points, not simply tell that they did better or worse than expected, even if they won or lost the match-up.

Until they provide a way for less populated or less well covered servers to win actual matches with points, the server with the most population and best coverage is going to win, and the way to assure winning is going to be to transfer to the server with the most population and best coverage because that’s who is predictably going to win. Make winning about more than population and coverage through handicapping of the match-up score and then they’ll solve the problem.

ExtraCosmic.9082:

The maximum account MF is +300%, I believe. However, I don’t know how the occasional boosts from achievement points stack with the bonus from luck, and whether the AP bonuses are wasted after reaching 300% or if they stack separately.

Before the change to account-based MF, I ran MF gear and during the Southsun Cove event where you could get a +200% boost, with my gear, other boosters, and food, I could push my MF over 400%. It also seems to affect material drops as well as equipment. You can squeeze over 100% out of the amulet infusion (20%), food(30%), and a Magic Find booster (50%) and there are other boosts, including the 100% birthday booster.

Alchemist.3692:

Does investing in; or pursuing increasing your magic find actually impact your drops? I’ve heard of some people having over 200% magic find, and my question is has anyone tested this? or noticed whether or not magic find has increased the rate of collecting more rare items?

In my experience, it makes a difference. I ran Magic Find gear before the change to account-wide Magic Find and currently have a Magic Find over 100% and I don’t see that many common items and quote a few rares and quite a few exotics. I’ve gotten two ascended drops in WvW recently. Sadly, no precursor yet. Note that there are Magic Find boosters, Magic Find food, and Magic Find guild boosters so you can probably temporarily push your Magic Find over 100% for an hour, which should be your target, to test it out yourself. At 100%, your bonus won’t ever get lost in rounding or dropping fractions.

Pegur.3849:

My suggestion is that wvw ranks should be considered as achievements and you should have an option to select “<Your current wvw rank>” from Hero -> Achievement drop box so that the players on your side would see your rank too.

With the PvE megaservers making it hard to recruit in game for WvW, it would be nice if it also displayed your server on PvE maps, too, something like:

Eredon Terrace Bronze Squire

carlvinmadarang.4130:

Im a Zerker DPS Guardian and just got full ascended gear. I have 40 laurels and all my gear has empty infusion slots. I was looking at the laurel vender and saw they have pretty lame upgrades like +4 vit/power/etc. Are those the best things to slot? If I infuse all the items, do I get a bonus Agony Res slot or does that Defensive slot turn into the AR slot? Or can I have both?

You need to build infusions that give you AR if you want that. You can also use Laurels and Badges of Honor to buy infusions that give you bonuses against guards in WvW. See:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Infusion

carlvinmadarang.4130:

Also, is the +20 MF laurel upgrade best for amulet?

That depends on our priorities. That’s what I run, but you really want to get your MF over 100 if you can to see a real difference in drops.

biggietoot.6945:

The second major flaw is that people want to feel important in a battle. The reason wvw is so lackluster is because you currently just run around facerolling a few champions until finally you run into an enemy zerg and either you steamroll them or they steamroll you. In wvw you are not a skillful player. You are a number in a zerg there to do nothing more than boost overall dps. Its hard for people to take pride in their servers accomplishments in wvw when the deciding factor of who wins is who has the most players.

That’s not the experience at the bottom and it’s one of the main reasons I’m not eager to transfer to a higher tier or to have ANet merge the servers in WvW. There are all sorts of instances where it’s a handful of players against a handful of players and even the zerg clashes are rarely so huge that individuals don’t make much of a difference or the lag makes skilled play impossible (lots of zergs at that tier are in the 20-30 range rather than the 50+ range). There is also quite a bit of skilled play with individual players and party teams looking for open field fights, at least during prime time and on the weekends. The problem at the bottom is that the population mix can get very uneven (sometimes we wind up playing servers than can field a 50+ zerg or two or three zergs at once) and there are off-hour times when there are few people to fight and it’s largely a PvDoor experience when whole maps at T3 towers and keeps get flipped. But during prime time, the play can be pretty good.

Hannelore.8153:

And you know what? Its been happening since I joined the game. Yet despite clear evidence since day one that the servers cannot handle so many players in one place, they continue to add more and more and more zerg content.

Eredon Terrace was fairly sparsely populated before the megaservers, in both PvE and WvW. While I’m not recommending things be as empty as they were for Eredon Terrace (where events were rarely done and events like Tequatl required guested help from other servers), I can’t remember ever seeing much lag (usually only low frame rates) in PvE and only see lag in WvW during really large battles for keeps and SMC during prime time. Heck, it wasn’t uncommon to see five people at the start of the last phase of the Frozen Maw and only two to three times that when it was done during off hours. You’d probably be amazed at how much the Shaman moves around when he’s not pinned down with constant melee combat. He moves way out on to the ice and goes after people, but you won’t see that when he’s in the middle of a zerg.

So for me, this is new, and I wonder how much time the ANet developers spent on low-population servers like Eredon Terrace in both PvE and WvW because they seem intent on making the whole game play like at high-population T1 server game. If I had wanted a high-population T1 experience, I would have paid for a transfer or guested to a high population server in PvE. The only time I ever used guesting was during the more recent Living Event stories because they were scaled in a way that low population servers had almost zero chance of completing them, especially with tight time limits requiring tremendous DPS that didn’t scale down very much.

Vayne.8563:

There are changes coming in the next feature patch addressing performance in large groups.

As others have pointed, out, it’s not just a matter of the lag but the fact that things die before you can even see them — and the events are so huge and chaotic, you can’t really see or appreciate what any individual character is doing.

When there were a dozen or less doing the Frozen Maw, I could see what everyone was doing and the Shaman moved around quite a bit because he wasn’t constantly pinned or in melee combat. I can’t even make out individual names or guild tags in the middle of a zerg constantly blasting damage. And in the pre-events, it can be challenging for lower level characters to tag or do enough damage to things to get credit for events, especially if you’ve never done the event before, which is a problem in starting areas like Wayfarer Foothills for new players (where the Maw takes place).

On a broader look-and-feel level, I’m fine with Lion’s Arch or any of the other cities feeling like a bustling metropolis full of players. It’s not really how I want, say, Malchor’s Leap or Lornar’s Pass to feel unless it’s for a special event like the attack on Lion’s Arch.

Doing the Frozen Maw earlier today, the map and event were so heavily populated that I saw lag worse than I’ve ever seen in WvW and when you’ve got that many people throwing damage, it can also be very difficult to hit anything before it dies if you don’t know exactly where to stand and what to target for the pre-events (knew where to be and what to target at got Silver and Bronze for a couple of the pre-events). I come from a low-population server where plenty events were rarely attempted or completed before the megaservers because there were too few people but I think things have gone way too far in the other direction, from my perspective.

I would very much like to see ANet dial down the population cap for individual megaserver instances. I thought it was much more enjoyable trying to do the Frozen Maw with 5 people because that’s all that were there than with a 50+ player zerg. Not saying I want to go back to doing it with 5, but I’m not enjoying the lag and quality of play with 50+ at all. Something in between, maybe?

Tarkus.4109:

Adding more PvE to WvW is never a good thing. So no, its a bad idea.

I understand this sentiment and I’d agree with it if the challenges were more balaced, but the alternative to PvE in WvW often isn’t PvP but often sadly unchallenging and predictable PvE (taking empty towers and camps defended by largely ineffectual NPCs — that is, “PvDoor”). As such, proving a buff to the defending or adding more defending NPCs isn’t so much adding more PvE to WvW as it is making the PvE in WvW more challenging than a momentary speed bump.

Steve Whitley.8359:

you guys on et just need to pony up for transfer fees. they’re not going to merge servers…

I can afford the transfer fees, I have no interest in transferring (I’ve been asked by departing players to join them), and I don’t want ANet to merge servers. And given everything I see and hear on the server, I doubt many players on ET want ANet to merge servers on them. So please stop attributing the opinions of a few players to the whole server.

Steve Whitley.8359:

then there’s ET who just can’t get get it together 4 hours after reset for some reason that none of the rest of us will ever understand…

Four hours after reset is when (a) the NA Eastern Time people who do more than play GW2 all weekend start going to bed (which ET seems to have a lot of, judging by what I see in map chat and hear in TeamSpeak), (b) the NA Pacific Time people are in the middle of their prime (which other servers have a lot of), and ( c) the other servers start hitting ET simultaneously with zergs instead of hitting each other and fighting over Eternal Battlegrounds because the reward system rewards hitting the weakest opponent rather than the strongest opponent. Personally, last night I had as much fun dealing with the tag-team invasion of our home BL a few hours after reset as I had romping all over FCs BL with our zerg earlier in the night.

Filovirus.6258:

I don’t see how Anet can justify PUNISHING players for not bandwagooning the server(s) most likely to join.

They are focused on the idea of rewarding winners but seem to be missing the point that winning in WvW is based on numbers more than skill. There is a reason why playground kickball games have captains pick one player at a time and professional sports have players drafts instead of letting all the players pick the team that they want to play on. If you let every player pick their own team and they all picked what they thought would be the winning team, it would quickly destroy the sport. Since it would be difficult to take that choice away from players (who will want to play with their friends), they need to give the players other incentives to give playing for less competitive servers a try rather than offer nothing but lesser rewards for doing so.

Indie.4129:

Don’t punish stats, too many people will cry so anet would never consider it. IMO something as simple as:

- the Zerg after x number of people within a given radius shows up on a map allowing you enemies to view your movement.
- Or a speed debuff, but that goes back to stat changing.

I think letting the enemy see movement is a good idea. I’ve suggested that outnumbered or servers far behind in points should have no delay before swords are popped. Simply giving underdog servers more information can help them deal with the disadvantages of being outnumbered.

My preference is a speed debuff because that’s what would actually happen if the game dealt with collisions between characters getting in each other’s way. Reduce the speed by 1% for every 2 people over 5 within a 1200 radius of each other with a maximum of around -25%. This would allow a zerg to bunch together for defense or a slow attack and a well coordinated zerg could mitigate it while moving by splitting up between their departure and destination for long runs.

Zietlogik.6208:

Scouts, yak runners and defenders have nothing to do.

Not entirely true.

While running dolyaks, there are often monsters to kill along the way, especially on Eternal Battlegrounds. Not ideal, but it’s something to do and get some rewards for.

Better, though, is Quentin Lake on the Eternal Battlegrounds. I have ballista mastery and build a superior ballista on the platform by the lord’s room facing the Hylek camp. From there, I can use the ballista to take the Hylek camp, clear the Hylek camp, harass any enemies trying t do either of those things, or help people on my own server take the camp. But I can do enough damage to to the Krait and Hylek down below (even though they are fast-healing if nobody is down there fighting them) to kill them from the tower. So perhaps one idea is to put NPC events outside of towers that players inside can use for target practice and to get some rewards while sitting around and defending. Yes, I know people want PvP fights and not PvE in WvW, but unless ANet starts randomly teleporting enemies outside for me to use for target practice, NPCs at least give players something to do.

Mayama.1854:

You need to change exactly one thing to keep perma resetting thieves in check (and PU mesmers). Add dimishing return to stealth in WvW. Problem solved.

I would be pretty happy if they simply eliminated the ability to stake people in WvW while stealthed. Doing a stake should reveal the character doing that. Other than that, even though I have no interest in playing a thief and find them annoying to fight, I’m pretty fine with them.

Nor.2057:

Since theres been much debate about the upcoming Feature Pack update and its announcements ive been wondering which are the Top 3 Features that you wish be added to this?

1. New WvW maps. Preferably multiple sets so they can change from week to week and at least one with some larger expanses of water for underwater combat.

2. Some restoration of server identity though the megaservers through some sort of “world chat” channel that can only be seen by players that share your world. It’s difficult to do in-game recruitment and communication for WvW on the PvE maps without it.

3. Less populated megaserver maps or the option to be sent to less populated megaserver maps. I’m not asking for empty maps and some crowded maps are fine (e.g., Lion’s Arch) but I’d rather not see commander tags and zergs everywhere I go. Zerg play is not everyone’s ideal.

3. The ability to salvage karma and WvW badge armor to recover runes. I don’t care if it doesn’t yield globs of ectoplasm or dark matter. I want to be able to get the runes out without buying a way-too-expensive extractor.

sscripko.5387:

If they merge two servers together, the smaller server will be the guest until they dissolve into the larger server’s organization and guilds.

Correct. Which is why if they were to merge, the last thing I’d want to see is ET get combined with a T1 server. There is also the point that I’m not really interested in T1 play. The taste I’m getting from the megaservers was bad enough that I stopped playing for a month. If I wanted T1 play, I could transfer myself.

Want to bring people [back] into WvW? New maps. Want to encourage people to transfer down? Implement the new maps on low-tier servers first.

Happyangrycatfish.1725:

ET rarely gets big groups going when it does. Mostly 10-15 groups on reset night we always compete that seems pretty much it. We do good when we have groups though. We just need some more people on at off times.

We had a group larger than that last night and I counted over 20 in the TeamSpeak channel for the commander. Yes, we lost quite a bit of real estate (points) through the night once FC showed up in numbers, especially when we were being tag-teamed by an SoR group holding our Bay with siege and an FC group taking Hills and trying for Garrison with golems on the other side, but we had some great saves (defeating an enemy in the lord’s room) and great fights in the 20-30 vs 20-30 range. Not PvDoor or capping empty camps. Not a couple vs. a few. Not greatly mismatched numbers and fights that are over in seconds. Not just for a few fleeting minutes but several fights all over the map (Hills, Bay, Garrison, Lake tower, etc.) and prolonged battles for the lord’s room. Good stuff.

I know I’m talking about NA primetime and that there are plenty of times during the day where that’s not true, and I can find them frustrating too, but we get good participation on more than just reset nights and we’ll have to see how things go once the summer is over.

Snorcha.7586:

Server pride means nothing if you have no enemies to fight.

It’s still not that hard to find enemies to fight if that’s what I’m looking for. Start taking enemy supply camps or towers and theyll show up. I can solo camps. I also enjoy the non-fighting aspects of WvW such as running supplies and upgrades and setting up siege weapons. As hard as it may be for people to believe, it’s far better off now then when I first played WvW, when ET could barely take, nevermind hold, a single tower or supply camp in the Eternal Battlegrounds. Right now I’m looking at over 20 people in our TeamSpeak Float Team channel and we’ve got 6 keeps.

Added: Saw two saves with the enemy in the lord’s room tonight and we were fighting both FC and SoR on our home BL. Lot’s of enemies to fight, at least during prime time, and plenty of organization, too. Yes, I know there are dead times but that doesn’t mean the server or tier is always dead.

Reverence.6915:

With the correct organisation, if all you’re after is PPT, smart backcapping can easily maintain your PPT. With fights, at the bottom tiers, there’s no decent fight guilds at all, so if you get your peeps into teamspeak, you can easily wreck zergs 3x your size provided they aren’t hugging siege.

You can’t really maintain PPT with two or fewer players on a map when the enemy is operating multiple teams taking things. They can take and hold stuff faster than you can back-cap it and it doesn’t take much (a defender or two or a some random enemy roamers interfering) to stop the 2 people on the map from retaking a tower or keep.

When ET has reasonable numbers playing, we can and do wreck zergs and I’ve seen quite a few zergs driven out of the lord’s room of keeps and towers by several of our commanders arriving from another map just in time. We can and do take Stonemist Castle and defended enemy towers and keeps. All of that is far better than it was when I first started playing WvW on ET, when we were lucky to take a single tower for a few moments on the Eternal Battleground and it looked like I’d never get map completion in WvW.

Under a certain number of players, though, and you won’t find a tag or, if you do, there will be only a few people following it. TeamSpeak becomes empty because there simply aren’t that many people on. Even then, organization isn’t always lacking. I’ve coordinated defenses and even recaptures in map chat without a tag (I finally bought one because of the changes — haven’t used it yet). There are a few organizational things I’d like to see improved on ET and there are things we could do better, but we do pretty well when we have the numbers to properly support a commander.

As for the dedicated fighting guilds, it’s been my experience that most of the bigger ones want to fight other big guilds, which they don’t reliably find in the bottom tiers, and most of the smaller ones are perpetually unhappy and wind up repeatedly switching servers looking for an ideal that they’re unlikely to find (balanced small-group open-field battles). I honestly think we’re better served by players being loyal to the server than a guild and the larger WvW guilds that ET currently has are long-term players very unlikely to take their guild and leave. Not saying I wouldn’t welcome a guild transfer but there is a lot of skepticism on ET about new players and guilds from the top tiers because we’ve seen more than a few show up and leave with people from ET.

One of the biggest problems is the whole megaserver implementation. It’s made it almost impossible to recruit in game in PvE because there is no way to direct map chat messages to only ET people.

Shademehr.1397:

I’m not sure that I’ve even seen any ET players actually condoning it. The most amicable post that I’ve seen has been from me and my closing comment was basically that I wouldn’t spend too much time kicking and screaming about it. But that’s not to say I still wouldn’t do SOME kicking and screaming.

I’m an ET player who is not a fan of a forced server merge. If I wanted to transfer (and I have been asked), I would.

To be honest, things were worse when I started WvW than they are now. The first week I really played, we were lucky if we could take one tower in the Eternal Battleground and hold it for 15 minutes and often had a zerg spawn camping us. I remember being amazed the first time I actually got in to Stonemist Castle. Now it’s not uncommon for us to hold our corner and even take SMC.

Do I wish ET had more players and didn’t lose some of those we lost? Sure. But I’m not interested in being dropped off at someone else’s house like an unwanted orphan. If ET has organization problems (and I’m not convinced it really does — I think that’s largely a side effect of the numbers problem since many of the organization problems seem to magically vanish once we get quite a few people on) it’s that different players have different priorities and they can clash. There is a “rugged individualism” streak on the server which can sometimes make coordination an exercise in herding cats because that’s the type of person who will stick it out through horrible odds.

But on the flip side, I’ve seen the server come together wonderfully (I’ve seen more than a few zergs stopped in the lord’s room), there are times when we lead in points and take a defended Stonemist Castle or enemy keep, and few people are going to hassle you for playing the wrong class or way because, for the most part (so long as you avoid server-screwing moves like starting Fortify on a keep with no supplies or supply feed) we’re happy to have people playing. And I’ve seen very little drama personally and like the people I play with on ET. Not interested having that wrecked through a forced merge.

Biggusbiggus.5789:

Only a Mesmer in WvW says “kitten yeah, water combat!”
Where is everybody? Why won’t someone come and fight me? Why are the krait lakes gone? No pearls, either?

I run a Ranger and like underwater combat, too, and miss the lake full of Krait and Quaggans. I still have some of the pearls. One of my two ascended weapons is a spear gun. Mesmers are the only class I really get worried about underwater, but I’ve had good Mesmers give up after downing me 3-4 times but being unable to actually finish me off (one of the few things a Ranger’s pet is good for in WvW — go ahead and sink me, I don’t have to surface to rally). So, go ahead, and laugh at the Ranger as you follow him into the water.

Hmmm. Maybe only a WvW player would make an ascended spear gun?

shaktiboi.5194:

Longtime player, 7 classes at 80, pretty much all I care about is WvW play (your dungeon endgame is terribad, and I’m not an SPvP type of player). As a “hardcore casual”, I play nearly every single day, and usually for 60 to 90 minutes. Sometimes life interferes and I miss a day, but that’s rare. Sometimes I play only for 30-45 minutes because that’s all I have a window for. I usually dub dub for as long as two food/oil buffs last. Oh, and I’m on JQ, so there’s lots of nice dub dub to be had.

So here it is, April 21, and I’ve got only 7/10 achievements finished for the WvW Tournament.

I only have 3 level 80s. GW2 is the only MMO I’ve ever played. On total, I probably play WvW about as much as you do. I don’t bother with food or oil because I usually forget to maintain it, so I’m hardly hardcore. I play on ET, at the bottom of the NA rankings, where people complain it’s hard to find good fights. I’m already done with 10 of my achievements and I’m close to getting another 2. I haven’t set foot in EotM all season. I didn’t even feel I had to do a WvW jumping puzzle to get an achievement like I did in the first season. I don’t think it was too hard at all. If anything, maybe a little bit too easy given the rewards. I’m more annoyed by the narrowing of the selection of general daily achievements, which makes them difficult to complete reliably in 30-45 minutes, if that’s all the time I have for GW2 during a day.

shaktiboi.5194:

You really need to rethink the requirements for the tourney tickets. I’m quite dispirited.

Think about getting the achievement knowing that your server will never get more than 250 ticket, and probably only 200 tickets, no matter how hard you play thanks to the dominance of numbers and coverage for victory. Want to trade dispiriting realities?

Jeknar.6184:

Also, the Upgrade Extractor Tool argument still stand.

Yeah, great, now we need to spend an additional 50 gems to get an Extractor, which, unlike the old Transmutation Crystals, doesn’t seem to drop as part of normal gameplay.

This is another example of a “fix” that fixes some things while breaking others. One used to be able to use the transformation crystals to move runes between armor. Can’t do that with the new system, which means there is no way to get runes out of armor that can’t be salvages without buying a very expensive upgrade extractor. Is that the point of this “fix”? Yes, the Extractor gives you everything back but I haven’t seen them dropping as part of normal gameplay like the Transmutation Crystals.

Zepidel.5349:

You HAVE to run Frost Spirit, and Spotter.

Which means I’m giving up all but one of Piercing Arrows (AoE-like damage firing into clumps), Eagle Eye (extra range), Signet of the Beastmaster (active signets effects apply to Ranger), and the new Read the Wind (faster arrows). I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing if you are normally running as part of a dungeon team or team in WvW, but it’s not necessarily desirable for other types of play, including solo roaming in PvE or WvW. Not everyone spends all their time in PvE or WvW in 5-person parties.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

Read the Wind is a bugfix. With this trait the LB can hit people like any other weapon already can (exept guardian scepter). It also requires Eagle Eye to be worthwhile.

…if you are willing to do without Piercing Arrows (which provides AoE-like damage when firing into clumps of opponents), Spotter (a useful support trait for dungeons and WvW), and Signet of the Beastmaster (which lets signet active effects work on the Ranger). I’m not.

The “Collaborative Development: Ranger Profession” thread (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Collaborative-Development-Ranger-Profession/) ran for 67 pages and went over the various problems Rangers have. The little ANet feedback we got during that thread tells us that ANet intents Rangers to be a “slow and steady” damage class and so they don’t want to give the Ranger viable power builds for doing burst damage.

wondo.2870:

With the new wardrobe and balance changes I have a lot of sigils and runes “locked” to wvw gearsets. where the only option is to gem store an extractor per piece or rebut entire runsets/sigils….

Yes, you should always be able to tear down an armor set to get the runes out of it, especially if they are not the original runes the armor came with (I suspect the lock is to prevent mining armor and equipment for certain rune sets or sigils). Before, the runes could be destructively moved with a transformation crystal. Now, I’m not sure it can be done. Is this still a problem with karma armor, too?

For all the bluster I keep hearing in WvW about wanting good fights, good challenges, and to face players instead of PvE content in WvW, plenty of people seem quite happy with imbalanced fights, no challenge, and a day spent doing PvDoor.

Thank the people who transfer to opposing servers to spy and sabotage their enemy.

Reikan.2908:

All I want is the ability to do “something” on whatever map. There are the siegerazer NPCs which are nice but usually they aren’t usable for us because we don’t have 10 available players or if we did that’s pretty much a zerg for us and we don’t need them. Some kind of NPC assistance would be nice during the outnumbered buff.

It would be nice if the breakout commanders would start for fewer people (like 3-5), maybe with a longer wait and the requirement that you talk to him to avid accidental activation if a small team is just hanging out nearby. Getting the mercenary camps is a way to do it on Eternal Battlegrounds. When you get the mercenaries on your side, they send a group to attack the nearest supply camps. I’ve done that solo on ET (of course I can also solo empty camps without NPC help, but the NPCs help if there are upgrades or defenders).

Sadly, in my opinion, they killed the NPC mercenaries on the Borderland maps that would do the same thing (the quaggans in the lake that was removed). They should have put the bloodlust in the outer corners where the centaurs and skirt are because almost nobody goes there except for map completion.

Reikan.2908:

I am playing on Ferguson’s crossing and usually on during off peak so I think its normal for me to want a little more filling my WvW experience

If you are having trouble finding something to do, I recommend learning how to solo camps, get mercenaries on your side, and kill Dolyaks (worth points for your server if they are headed for an enemy site). That’s all PvE stuff but it’s something to do. If you want PvP action, take it to the enemy and camp something they’ll want back. You can be quite a thorn in an opponents side if you drop some siege in a tower or camp and man it. With ballista mastery, you can hold off quite a few (the spread shot, particularly on a superior with extra mastery damage) can down opponents in one shot. ET had a havoc squad that would crack a tower but not take it to keep swords on it so they could fight enemies that came to investigate.

Basically, if the enemy servers are sparsely populated, figure out where they are or lure them to you. If you are outnumbered, you should run into enemies while you take things and kill Dolyaks and don’t be afraid to build some siege weaponry as an equalizer. Ballistas are cheap and don’t have a minimum range, so they can work well in camps (some points in mastery recommended).

If there are no enemies, take some towers and help push your server to a higher tier with points. Two people can take an empty tower.

If you are being overwhelmed, that’s the toughest problem to work around. My recommendation is hit and run attacks on Dolyaks and camps and don’t be afraid to try going deep behind enemy lines or onto their BL. Attack stuff where they don’t expect it by sneaking past where the do expect you.

Ynot.8397:

Jappy.6907:

I’m from TC and its really fun playing wvw on high populated server. Hopefully anet will reconsider merging lowest population server or they can merge like no. 1 and no. 24, 2 and 23, 3 and 22, 4 and 21, something like that. Or at least that was the format of the tourment. So the swiss system could have work much better with 12 teams fighting

I’m on FC and it is really fun playing on a low populated server. I hope anet will consider splitting up all the tier 1 and 2 servers into 3 or 4 new servers. Then everyone can enjoy what I like. The balance will be far better for all the low tiers.

As an added bonus, we wouldn’t have to listen to those high tier players whining about queues and lag.

But, seriously, I think it’s good that there is a variety of play styles at different tiers. The main reason the top tier is balanced is that the map population limits impose it.

Imagine if ANet had a breakthrough in their code that solved the lag and the could remove the queues so every server could field as many people as they had on any map with no queues. What do you think would happen to the top tier’s balance?

Also, seriously, if I wanted the Tarnished Coast play experience, I would transfer to the Tarnished Coast server. The money to transfer isn’t what’s stopping me and there are people who do transfer down, even all the way down to Bronze League servers like FC and ET to get away from high tier play because they don’t like it.

The fix isn’t to make all WvW play like top tier play. The fix is to make play at other tiers less sensitive to population and coverage imbalances (which could mean anything from point handicapping or making hard targets more profitable to attack than weak or undefended targets to adding and scaling NPCs when a server has poor coverage) rather than have the population caps impose balance when the queues full up.

Shonie.5297:

I really have a hard time believing anything that goes on in lower tiers outside of a few hours during NA prime, is anything but pvdoor.

PvDoor happens, and I’m sure it happens quite a bit during the truly off hours (overnight and midday on weekdays) in NA, but I’ve rarely seen a case where there were no other players or no fights to be had during a fairly extended primetime. I think the real problem is that the game rewards easy victories (including PvDoor), which doesn’t give the players an incentive to find other players to fight or pick hard targets to take. The strength of structures and NPCs also don’t scale to make them a challenge.

Shonie.5297:

I would imagine 80% of structures or maybe more, are anything but unupgraded, unsieged and unmanned… just waiting fokittenrson havoc squad to happen along, put down a regular ram and bash away at the paper door until it goes down with nobody around to do anything about it.

Only if they’ve been turned to paper by an attacking zerg thanks to a large population imbalance or the server was being lazy about upgrades. As much as it might surprise you, we actually know how to upgrade sites in the bottom tiers.

Shonie.5297:

And you call this WvW? Is there even anyone to fight with outside of NA prime?

Given that I don’t play much outside of NA prime time, the only reason that would matter to me is when another team has much better coverage during off hours and ticks a lot of points on us while few people are on. Again, I think this is a problem with the scoring system and mechanics more than anything else.

Shonie.5297:

I’m maybe biased because I play in t1,

It’s generally a bad idea to try to fix a tier you don’t play in, because you won’t understand it. The same is true for suggestions like eliminating the top 3 servers and forcing all those people down into the lower population servers or making population caps even smaller.

Shonie.5297:

but we’ve held our garrison for almost 6 days now against huge forces. Why? Because there’s lots of people on 24/7 to defend it.

Yes, we’ve held our garrison for days, too, even when we were at the bottom of the rankings. We do manage to hold things overnight when the population balances aren’t too great in the match-up.

Shonie.5297:

It’s nice knowing your efforts don’t go to waste the minute you log out. It’s nice knowing you have support from commanders and others on the map when the enemy attacks because there’s always people around 24 hours a day. It’s nice knowing that anything valuable like upgraded towers with siege don’t go to waste because there’s nobody on a map to refresh siege or defend it.

The only reason that matters as much as it does is because the game doesn’t handle population imbalances that well and it gets really bad during certain times of the day. The way the top tier servers deal with it is to have enough people to queue a map or two most of the time and the queue keeps things balanced with a participant cap, but that imposes certain styles of play on people and has negative side effects (e.g., complaints about people playing non-optimal characters or mediocre players taking up a space that could be used by a hardcore player). Lowering the queue limits would do the same thing on lower tiers, which is why a lot of low-tier players suggest it, but I think that’s all just a workaround for a more fundamental problem, which is that the game needs to reward based on difficulty and some things need to scale better in WvW the way they do in PvE.