Be careful about introducing any tools that allows players to regulate other players because they could create a whole new set of problems. Anyone who has been in the thick of their WvW community and has dealt with TeamSpeak or forum politics can tell you that giving players power over one another can turn ugly real fast. Gamers are not always reasonable people.
I think the dismantle/exhaustion idea has some merit since it can be tweaked to reduce its impact on legitimate play. I also like that it directly addresses the impact on siege cap and a fortification’s supply. I would suggest giving the dismantle skill a really long cooldown to stop a few trolls from running around dismantling good siege, and perhaps scale the number of votes needed based on the type of siege.
I am in favour of simply placing this in the domain of GMs because the few worst offenders have a disproportionately large share of the impact. However finely you can tweak a solution it will still affect ordinary players.
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I do wonder if there is any number you can find that will strike the right balance across all servers and all times. Making it so that 5 or 10 people can go around dismantling siege will create problems. With a higher number, then it’s a real distraction for a server if the griefer decides to mass their siege in an inconvenient location. I hope you can do a good job of accounting for all the different roles in WvW and thinking about how the player experience will change for each of these roles once a candidate situation is implemented.
Anyways, I have to hand you my compliments for catching the idea of making build sites have a smaller footprint, I didn’t see that myself while reading the thread but I like it!
This was more or less my reaction. Those first hours in Metrica when everything in the game was so novel are going to be so much emptier for players starting out today. It was the richness and eccentricity of this zone that sold me on this game.
As people have raised, there are issues with many of the ideas and these questions need to be asked:
Implementing any feature which gives players power over one another has the potential both to be abused by trolls and to create conflicts within server communities.
My recommendation is to empower the players so that they are not affected by griefing/trolls. Give players the ability to see more easily where they are spending their supply and to block out build sites that are improperly placed. Improve the siege cap, siege decay, supply, claiming, and upgrade mechanics so that a few disruptive individuals can’t hold an entire server hostage. While you are at it, you can also improve the QoL for individuals who devote themselves to defending their server’s fortifications.
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This idea sounds like it has potential, but I think a simple option of “Interact with trusted siege only” would be simpler and more convenient. This would also include information to tell the player that siege is “trusted” if it is created by someone on your friends list, someone in your guild, one of your party members, or the commander of your squad if you are in one. Burning oil, cannons, mortars, and siege golems would always be trusted, but not siege golem build sites if build sites are included in this restriction.
I like those additions to the idea I suggested of making squad members able to put supply only on their commander’s build sites: add friends, party members and guild members to that list. That would definitely make it much less restrictive while accomplishing the same objectives.
With regards to siege cap abuses, I think changing siege timeout and the actual siege cap, perhaps making some interaction between the two, could go a lot further than any sort of system for automatic reporting or dismantling.
Wasting supply is probably the hardest to deal with since players can claim they are trying to be constructive (wasting supply on a damaged wall), and they can consume supply very easily with poorly-timed upgrades.
Also having a commander siege type system, where only those in a squad, or a commander, can throw/build siege only hampers and limits those not in a squad or not a commander. I generally run with a small havoc group, and sometimes we will take a tower or keep. In order to do so, we would need to have a commander, or party up into a squad just to take the objective. But whats stopping a troll from tagging up and continue on doing what they do? Nothing really.
I’ve recommended such a system that would have zero impact on havoc groups and other people who would want to deploy siege without tagging up. Basically it would be an opt in for anyone following a commander to prevent them from spending supply on build sites placed by players other than the commander. It would be automatic when a player joined a squad. This is entirely in line with the concept of the squad as a way for players to pool their supply and hand its management over to one individual.
This sort of system would mean you wouldn’t need restrictions on what could be placed near a gate, it would also be effective against trolling build sites in other scenarios, such as when a commander needs to place a treb or cata or AC.
It wouldn’t solve siege cap or supply drain abuses, but frankly that’s a different issue. There’s a lot of casual trolling and sometimes inadvertent sabotage by inexperienced players, as well as aggressive and frustrating griefing, that could be avoided by implementing this.
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Yes, unless there is a third option which is better than either of the two we’ve been given.
Just going to articulate my idea more fully.
SUGGESTION: Restrict players who are in a squad from building siege that isn’t placed by the commander whose squad they’ve joined
This addresses the issue of siege that is either intentionally or unintentionally placed against the commander’s will and which wastes some of the supply carried by a squad. This does not address the issue of wasting supply in defensive structures or building excessive siege to hit the cap.
Pros
Cons
Make it so that when you join a squad, you can only put supply on siege placed by the commander (excluding defensive siege like cannons and repairs of course). This will encourage commanders to place their own siege, this will encourage people to join squads, and it will stop trolls from wasting a squad’s supply. Sometimes well-meaning but inexperienced individuals can also interfere with a commander’s plans by placing siege at the wrong time, so this problem would also be resolved. A visual indicator on siege that is placed by other players or a chat notice when attempting to use supply will let players adjust (leave a squad) if they have to build siege placed by other players.
You could then conceivably also adjust the exhausted limit for commanders based on squad size. Then you wouldn’t run into this issue when trying to implement an exhausted limit to tackle other types of siege trolling. You also can’t troll this solution just by purchasing a commander tag.
All in all, this will make squads more functional, which will do more to help players to hop in the game and contribute to an environment with real strategic depth.
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Love the guide, you hit a good balance here.
One of my pet peeves in-game is a player or players that are literally demanding at events if someone fully dies just use the way point instead of having other players wasting time resurrecting them.
Wait, what? As much as I would like people to bring positive attitudes to this game rather than unleashing their frustrations, this behaviour is clearly inconsiderate at a world event. You’ve scaled up the event by joining in, in hopes of getting rewards, but now your refusal to cough up a couple silver to waypoint back into the fight puts the rest of the players in an uphill battle.
There’s no excuse of ignorance for this one, nor is there good reason for other players to try to resurrect you, because if they are in combat it will take a very long time and they are vulnerable while doing it. They might end up getting downed and killed themselves, spiralling the event towards failure. So it’s right for people to ask that those fully killed to waypoint back.
There are many situations in which people should be more cooperative and helpful, but in this case there is nothing to be gained by supporting those who expect someone else to pick them up off the ground, nor is it fair to reward someone who spent an event staring at their own corpse.
So there was a hint for it, but I was probably just so enamoured by the asura dodge animation that once I discovered it I couldn’t stop. I still can’t, actually.
That being far from an isolated instance, I do wonder just how much deliberation was spent on this particular “feature”.
You would think this is exactly the sort of stuff they’d want new players to see when trying to set GW2 apart from the competition and get new players to invest into a new character. It’s something that showcased the richness of the universe and the flexibility of the game.
I can’t remember when I learned to dodge. Does anybody have any idea when this might have happened?
How is it sad. The game as a target, it can’t appeal to everyone, that’s life. It’s sad that baseball is slower than football and appeals to different people?
Well, it would be sad if they changed the rules of baseball that said you couldn’t hit a double, triple, or home run until you were in the 7th inning. That if you hit it on the ground in the infield you were automatically out – no trying to run to 1st. And you had to reach the 4th inning before you could steal any bases. Then, yeah, baseball would be sad.
Except that MMOs change rules all the time. Anyone playing an MMO that doesn’t expect change will be disappointed. Some changes you’ll like, some you won’t. Just like there are some changes I like and some I don’t. But you know, if you don’t like a game, or what a game is becoming, there are other games.
I’d like to point out that Vayne pulled out an analogy then declared his own analogy to be inapplicable the moment it became inconvenient.
Point it out. People stretched the analogy beyond the bounds where it was true, which is pretty much what happens when you try to stretch any analogy. Let’s try facts instead of analogies.
1. MMOs change. All of them.
2. It is unlikely that every change will be universally loved by all players.
3. Anything made four years ago talking about an MMO is likely going to be outdated on some level. MMOs change a massive amount in four years.I think that covers it nicely.
Funny that you saw that as the stretch, because professional sports change their rules too, including baseball. Sometimes people feel the rule changes are justified, sometimes they don’t. So this guy gives you a set of rule changes that he thinks would be comparable, to make the point that such changes would be absurd. If you found that particular analogy a stretch, that I can understand – I found your original analogy to be a stretch. I just feel a little let down because after bringing in this analogy you decided not to play ball after all.
How is it sad. The game as a target, it can’t appeal to everyone, that’s life. It’s sad that baseball is slower than football and appeals to different people?
Well, it would be sad if they changed the rules of baseball that said you couldn’t hit a double, triple, or home run until you were in the 7th inning. That if you hit it on the ground in the infield you were automatically out – no trying to run to 1st. And you had to reach the 4th inning before you could steal any bases. Then, yeah, baseball would be sad.
Except that MMOs change rules all the time. Anyone playing an MMO that doesn’t expect change will be disappointed. Some changes you’ll like, some you won’t. Just like there are some changes I like and some I don’t. But you know, if you don’t like a game, or what a game is becoming, there are other games.
I’d like to point out that Vayne pulled out an analogy then declared his own analogy to be inapplicable the moment it became inconvenient.
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If the developers listened to people like you when they were starting out then the game we have would never have existed in the first place. This game broke barriers, including for people like myself and the friends I joined with who never played a MMO before.
Just to address the example you gave, I have friends in this game who are veterans of open world PvP who play this game for WvW.
You may be right that they can’t satisfy everyone, but by diversifying the content they found a way to satisfy a lot of people.
GW2 at release was magical base-foot-basket-cricket-tennis-golf-snowball. You may not remember or understand that, but it had the potential to be all those things, and it still does. That was the vision, and it would indeed be quite sad if it does not live up to that, because it would make a lot of people happy if it does.
It’s sad that the only conclusion you can offer is that some players should give up on the game because they are not the developer’s target audience. In fact, it would have been absurd to suggest that not so long ago.
GW2 had the virtue of bringing together all kinds of players, not simply one group. Everyone found content that was fun for them! Where did that content come from? It wasn’t metrics, it was a design decision from someone who had a vision, and it was great.
But for the people who enjoyed that content, it now doesn’t feel like the work that needed to be done is being done. Every area of GW2 was released as a work in progress, which is alright if there’s progress, but the fact is that after 2 years there is no appreciable advancement towards core goals for many of the game modes.
There have been additions to content and QoL improvements, stuff that is worth checking out now and then, much of it genuinely good, much of it in response to the needs of the game as it is being played. But PvPers don’t have any new game modes, WvWers don’t have additional maps or depth, GvGers are hardly even recognized as a group, there’s still nothing dynamic about dungeons and nothing in the pipeline, no new regions for lore enthusiasts… it goes on.
I get that these things take time, but players are paying attention to what the company is doing, and for many parts of the game it doesn’t seem like a whole lot has been going on. We have a churn of casual one-size-fits-all content alongside this China release, and now the developers are actually removing content that had been enjoyed since the start. They’ve moved their focus from creation and innovation to making the game conform to opaque metrics.
Imagine if the original release had been marketed as a product of advanced metrics into player’s habits and preferences, rather than the realization of the ideas and ambitions of creators! Thankfully it wasn’t, yet that’s the kind of kitten you’re shoveling now. This game still has potential, which is why we hang on, but it’s no longer clear that there’s anyone with the will to realize it.
You can’t find any quests? Follow the compass! New challenges await you in Dry Top!
It’s incredible that they’ve come to the point of taking out content that has existed since release and that no one asked to be removed. I thought it was great that RC golems were something you encountered right away, I remember seeing other people’s toons standing at the controls when headstart opened up. When I found an open panel, I plinked away at the buttons without really having a goal or strategy. I’m sure that I lost and didn’t even know that it contributed to the heart. It was an odd little game, but it told you so much about GW2, because it was this tiny part of the world, with such a limited function, yet it was there.
Someone at Anet had this idea to design and program a minigame that fit in with the asura culture, just so that the environment was that much more immersive. For someone who didn’t know much about the lore, this was one of the moments that got your attention, and made you feel that these asura really had a culture and an identity in this particular fantasy universe.
But some pencil pusher decided we didn’t need to have this moment, that it was too hazardous to have such a peculiar feature in the game and out it went. I wonder if they even spoke with the dev who made it, if they could consider the perspective of a game designer when the project tasked them to trim out anything that involved more than one button, because some suit concluded from the numbers that this is what they should do.
Old mimic would have been so useful now. Yes, it was situational, but this one is more so. It’s just a less versatile version of arcane thievery, and there can’t be more than a handful of situations where it’s better to choose mimic over arcane thievery.
RC golems are gone. The metrics said they shouldn’t be there anymore. Of course they came to that conclusion. 4 out of 5 players probably stopped at the golems, spent 5 seconds trying to figure out what was going on, then gave up and moved on.
The metrics said to ignore that 5th player, brimming with excitement and anticipation having just created their first character, an asura, who spent enough time here to figure out what the golems were about. This person who was ready to explore this world of the asura, a world of cloistered tinkerers in the arcane and arrogant scholars, found a game crafted for the sole purpose of enriching this small virtual world. This person had a chance to learn and play game with its own set of rules, even its own programmed opponent, occupying its small corner of this Guild Wars 2 universe. And this fifth person may first have been baffled by the existence of this miniature game, but then they realized were upon the threshold of a truly deep and promising experience, one filled with nuggets such as these, and that it would be up to them to find and share them.
That small moment was never recorded, and thanks to metrics, this little gem has now been trimmed out of the game. No new player will ever have that experience again.
its unfair to others who likes the feature patch.u made it seems game gonna die tomorrow while majority have no problem with this patch.it is just unhappy guys speak more.u can just delete the game and leave if u dont like it,but whats the point to post it here.nothing changed on every map. ppl still enjoy this game.could u just leave it alone and play someting else if it bothered u so much.
“while majority have no problem with this patch”
Which is why there’s dozens of threads beaming about how good the changes are.
Oh wait.
You think all the forum post in the last few days combined accounts for 51% or more of a ALL ACTIVE gw2 players? I mean I dunno the numbers, but it should be way more.
Maybe the 51% “just delete the game and leave” because they “dont like it”, and ask “whats the point to post it here”. Maybe I’m just speculating.
Thanks for articulating these points. People who are trying to cast those critical of the changes as elitist or lacking of empathy for new players, or pointing to metrics as a justification for these changes, are missing the point that many of those changes don’t actually do anything to teach new players.
If some players really are struggling with the basic mechanics of this game, then surely what will help them is a series of (optional) tutorials that explain those mechanics and then test the player’s ability to use them. Simply forcing those mechanics to appear later on does not directly address the issue and may well do nothing to improve the situation.
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A lot of people are using either the very young or very old in hyperbole to talk about how much the changes simplify the game, but they really ought to give those groups more credit. Yes, there are ways to make game environments more intuitive to other audiences, but the problem isn’t that there’s too much noise from the various aspects that needs to be blocked out, it’s how they teach the game to begin with. Though I don’t think they did a bad job on that score initially, this was always a game you could start off very slowly if you wanted to.
Yeah, decide for yourself. Even for those who dislike the changes, it’s still a great game.
I’m dubious that this method will actually “work” in any tangible sense at the end of the day. It’s not that the game is any easier. The mouthbreathing Candy Crush Saga iStore crowd is still going to quit because they’re still going to be frustrated by things being “too hard.”
Exactly! The game doesn’t get easier as you go on, but harder. If someone can’t grasp those extremely basic aspects of the game that have now been level-gated (although restricting the content doesn’t actually do anything to teach it), imagine what happens if they ever get to the endgame. The kind of people who conceivably could have benefited from those changes will never invest themselves in this game to the point where they have an impact on its revenue.
The logical direction that this NPE takes us is to a dumbed-down endgame, at which point it does directly affect veteran players. I think it’s too soon to sound the alarm bells and announce that this is what will happen, I’m personally fine concluding that the present changes are a result of gross misjudgment.
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And you think veteran players universally like challenge OP? All veterans? Most veterans? Most veterans who happen to post on forums?
I’m a veteran and I think the leveling experience is one of my favorite parts of the new patch.
I’m glad to hear you finally had time to learn Greatsword Swing before being overwhelmed by the introduction of Hundred Blades thanks to the patch.
You obviously have experience from other games before, and you know how to observe your environment and adapt to your surrounding situation. And you know how to write coherent sentences on a forum.
I like how the necessary answer to this concern now is, “You obviously aren’t dumb enough to understand.”
Roybe, I think there’s a bit of confusion about the point I’m making which started with the unfortunately ambiguous phrasing from my first response.
If the intention is to bring this game to new demographics as you suggest, then my question is what do the most controversial changes do to assist with that? I don’t think people really have a problem with tool tips and the like, it’s the very poorly paced level restrictions. The way it was before was an “at your own pace” kind of thing, but now limiting what players are allowed to do does nothing to help those who can’t find or follow instructions while annoying everyone else. Someone’s grandmother isn’t going to find it any more helpful that she now has just one button to click 50 times to kill the tutorial boss than an experienced gamer, and that experience does nothing to help her with the next part of the game.
Yeah, the implication is that 70% of the market shouldn’t have had any problem with the existing system. My first sentence was incomplete, I guess.
to specifics;
7) They’ve been pretty clear
8) By the description of the feature pack process, they have teams working on each feature in parallel, this probably didn’t directly cannibalize another feature too much.
9) Between being actual specialized designers and the vast amount of user data they have, how can you say that you know better than them whether this will help or harm the new user experience?
7) Clear about their goals and what the changes are or about how restricting content accomplishes those goals? Those aren’t the same thing.
8) No, just whichever one it took priority over being done at all.
9) Maybe I can’t, but new players can and have.
Because the top players are upset that the new business model shifts the focus of games to the center and left of the standard curve.
If this is the experience merely for those to the center and left of the curve then I’ll withdraw my complaint because we are doomed as a society already. I didn’t realise Anet was in the business of creating games for special needs
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7) The opaque reasoning for these changes, which hurts my brain
8) Realization that we have fewer actual new features because the devs had to work on these changes
9) Recognition that a diminished experience for new players results in fewer players staying, which harms the game’s long term prospects
Thanks for the post OP, a great reminder of what was so great about first starting this game and a warning of what we lose with this feature pack.
Devs definitely need to step up and realize these ideas. They would provide a lift to the GvG community without disrupting the existing WvW format.
I am quite shocked, that even after I took the time, calculated and broke down for you guys on an example the benefit of all 3 stats – condition dmg, condition duration and precision – you still are claiming false statements.
The main message I took away from your spreadsheet is that if you want to double your condition damage you just need to swap in some optimal runes and traits (for necros it’s more than double, you ignored food despite the fact that the Lingering Curses trait can actually push condition duration over 100%), and you still get to keep vitality and toughness as secondary stats on your gear.
PPT = Points Per Tick
Points are what you get for holding objectives like camps or keeps, the tick is indicated by clock in WvW that counts down every 15 minutes, and this is what decides the final score.
Regarding your suggestion, that’s already how it works, although the total maximum number hasn’t been officially disclosed. If you read through this forum you’ll find a lot of threads suggesting how to deal with the population imbalance but all of the solutions would create problems of their own. That isn’t to say the devs shouldn’t pursue one of the proposed solutions (and in all fairness, they have tried to realize some of the suggestions), however there are also fair reasons why they haven’t.
This isn’t pertinent to the discussion in this thread, though.
WvW is just garbage in general. Stick with the smaller scale more well developed pvp in the game.
It doesn’t even matter anyway. WvW now suffers from the same symptom that Planetside 2 does. Whoever has the population has the map. End of story.
sPvP is garbage because if you don’t pigeonhole yourself into a meta build you’ll lose the match for your team. Since sPvP matches are even, winning and losing is taken way more seriously.
You can play WvW all the time and never fret about the score or how many fights you win. Sure, some people do, but that’s because they overlook the obvious things you pointed out.
It potentially adds a lot of variety, which makes balance more difficult to be sure but I think a lot of people enjoy the opportunity to tinker with different bonuses.
The problem with +/- condi duration food is that with the proliferation of condition builds it becomes the only viable type of food to run.
Condi gear need to be good at something. Condi spec mainly work against low skilled players.
If by low skilled players, you mean players who aren’t jumping on the condi meta, sure. So we can correct that to say, “Condi spec mainly work against non-condi players.” Problem much?
They could give the same titles you get with www rank
Ex SFR bronze colonel, or JQ silver legend etc etc
If they had made WXP server bound instead of character bound at the start, bam, there you go.
Full of conspiracies. I’ve seen several matching guild tags from different sides in WvW and usually they’re just friends dueling.
Except you can duel in the Obsidian Sanctum where it has no impact on PPT.
Tons of dueling just happens on the spot. So yeah, you could go to the arena to duel, but if you’re roaming and you just happen to come across a friend who plays on another server (same guild or not), you’re not going to decide, “Oh, we have to make sure we don’t impact PPT so let’s go to the arena and if it’s primetime we might have to queue to get back into this bl.”
Anyone else wondering what could have been avoided if they had announced megaservers before they had free transfers instead of after? A logically backward sequence if I ever saw one.
How is this unfair? You can also organize a guild and enter EotM.
Next it will be unfair to wear ascended armor, use food, or bring a level 80 character…
Only a WvW player wonders why “Daily Corpse Jumper” is showing up on his enemies’ achievement panels but not his own.
I like the OP. His responses are prompt and reasonable, and he’s seized upon an important fault of the game while proposing a solution that would address it. The fault is that the game and the PPT match does not function properly when servers have gaps in their coverage, and the solution is to remove enough redundant servers so that those gaps no longer exist.
I do wonder which time slot the OP plays in, and if this is blinding him to the obvious problem with this proposed solution. If you look at T1 off-peak coverage, that’s where most people accuse the players of stacking onto servers. Before a lot of players moved to these servers, they would have encountered fairly sparsely populated maps. As such they were not creating a problem by moving to servers with better off-peak coverage but amending one, at least as far as their experience was concerned.
However, this problem of having a low population only exists at certain hours for nearly every server, and you would need to travel at least 3-5 tiers down the ladder to find servers that don’t generate queues at their peak coverage hours. What I found imperceptive was the OP’s response to my first reply, where he said that multi-hour queues were “acceptable”. This was conditioned on being “in the current server and queue system”, I’m not entirely clear on what’s implied there.
Gandara was fun
Then they announced free transfers
Now we wait in queues
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