Guild Wars 2

CreativeAnarchy.6324:

As far as the WP thing, they also need to make it so a single thief cannot keep that WP contested like they do now otherwise building a WP will be wasted gold since a single thief can keep hitting that door to make it contested.

The invulnerable spot in the 2 south supply camps at the base of the cliff needs to be removed.

Ah, yes, I meant to add in a bit in the opinions section, suggesting a minimum amount of damage needs to be done to a keep/tower before it’s considered contested (say, 8k; the amount a ram does in 1 hit, but a single player is not going to be able to do that quickly).

Opinions!

• Prevent golems taking fall damage. This simultaneously prevents people trolling teams by destroying their golems, and also removes what is one of the more bizarre design choices for golems
• Stop Golems being affected by Quickness. The ‘flash attack’ effect of golems being TW’d is making many assaults occur far too quickly for defenders to react to. Success should not depend on how many Mesmers your team can field for your golem rush.
• Remove all cases where NPCs attack camps or dolyaks. In general, these are unhelpful for players, and also highly random (some NPCs will kill the Dolyaks, e.g. harpies, and some will barely scratch them, e.g. drakes)
  • Possibly make the random NPC events in the Borderlands (Skritt, Centaur, Warg, Wurm, Ghosts, Harpies) tie into the game similar to those in EBG?
• Consider removing Pearls as a method of capturing Quaggan camps in Borderlands. Players – like myself! – stockpile these for immediate capture, making it difficult for different groups to contest these camps
• Combine aggro-tables for NPCs in supply camps to prevent picking them off 1 by 1. I personally feel supply camps should require a small group to capture them, rather than a single player steadily working through them, but this isn’t a particularly big deal
• The supply camp upgrade that adds guards to dolyak supply trains should provide Invulnerability to the dolyak until the guards are killed. These guards are presently useless against everything except random NPC attacks (see above), as most players can simply kill the dolyak without ever having to worry about them. At the very least, this shuts down the exceptionally frustrating Death Blossom&Caltrops bleed/evasion/stealth method thieves have for killing Dolyaks, which is very difficult to prevent
• Add damage reduction to the users of cannons and oil. These siege weapons tend to be useless against large assaults, as players cannot survive the aoe spells enemy players place on the cannons for long enough to use them.
• Allow blueprints to be built faster. This has very little effect on large groups of players, who tend to ‘insta-build’ blueprints. However, it’s very beneficial for small groups, who are more liable to be interrupted while trying to build
• Remove ‘tagging’ of siege weapons. Replace it with a transparent duration. Forcing players to babysit siege lest it expire is anti-fun. Instead, assign all siege a fixed but longer duration, and a provide a timer for the siege showing how long it has left. You could also add a specific icon above the siege weapon when it’s about to expire, for ease of readability
  • To prevent longer duration siege allowing players to hit siege-cap more easily and troll their team, cap the number of siege any player can have deployed at one point. Raise this cap significantly for Commanders. This allows long-duration siege without the potential for someone to spam 100 rams that cannot despawn for 4 hours
• Instance the WvW jumping puzzles (or at least the EBG one) to prevent organised groups of players hitting their server’s WvW cap while contributing little. Not a particularly big deal, but it would cut down on a few problems servers occasionally experience due to this
• Link your supply count to your Borderland. I think it’s a bit silly that, without owning a single supply camp or tower on a map, players can build large numbers of golems by ferrying supply over from another strongly-owned map. Similarly, even if you deny players all their supply camps, many players will hop to another map, get 15 supply, and return. This is probably not a good thing
• Require a certain quantity of damage to be dealt to a keep structurally before it’s considered ‘contested’. This prevents characters running up and disabling waypoints by doing small amounts of damage to doors or defensive siege. If you want to disable a waypoint to slow reinforcements, it should require a concerted effort, not a throwaway thief

Anyway, thank you for reading all of the above. I don’t expect everybody to agree with all of the suggestions (especially the ones in the Opinions! section), but I hope these at least give any designers reading them a sense of what some if your players would like to see done with WvW in the future!

Eternal Battlegrounds

• The outer wall of Red Overlook should be moved to prevent trebuchet fire between it and SM North walls. Neither of the other keeps have this option/weakness, and it puts a lot more focus on the red team than should exist
• Fix the odd cylindrical movement blocker on the steps beside Overlook’s "water"gate/JP entrance.
• Remove the lip surrounding the watergate entrances into Green Lowlands’ outer court. Replace it with a sloped exit for golems. There’s no reason to force the use of portals for golems here, and it dissuades many players from using these watergates
• Redesign Mendon’s (and to a lesser extent Quentin) to remove problems caused by its open back. Against a Commander who knows what they’re doing, defending Mendon’s is impossible. There are absolutely no safe places to place defensive siege, mostly due to the open back.
• Widen the entrance from Ogrewatch into Orgath to prevent excessive chokepoint. Trebuchets against Ogrewatch are made overly effective by the great ease of locking down this tiny entrance, and the high time cost of running a force around into blue territory to attack the trebuchets from behind
• Move Speldan Clearcut closer. This supply camp is bizarrely further away from everything than any other supply camp on the map. Its distance makes it and its dolyaks vulnerable, as well as slowing supply to Mendon’s and Overlook
• Broken terrain in the cliffside southwest of the Aldon’s needs closing.
• Consider changing the side of the destructible wall on Jerrifer’s and Bravost. In both cases, attacking these towers is almost impossible due to covering mortar fire from their keeps. Switching the side of the destructible wall allows Commanders to set up catapults or trebuchets in positions that cannot be trivially destroyed from the keep (this is more opinion than straightforward improvement; these towers see almost no action due to their positioning and destructible portions)

Borderlands

• Fix Garrison inner watergate to properly upgrade to Reinforced quality when gate upgrades are purchased.
• Move back the cliff on the southwest of Garrison inner to prevent players using trebuchets to hit outer north Bay wall.
• Consider properly clipping the wall of the RGBVale supply camp (southwest), to prevent trebuchets hitting the inner Bay wall from there. I feel this position is far too strong, and there is no counterplay beyond forcing a large defensive group through a narrow chokepoint or over a difficult jump
• Move RGBLake tower slightly southwest to prevent it from being trebucheted from Hills I feel the towers, being the staging grounds for a team’s entrance into the Borderlands, should not be getting trebbed from a much more defensible position, often held by the enemy force
• Expand the area around inner east Bay entrance to give players more room to manoeuvre, and add slopes to the water to allow golems to exit. Almost nobody uses this approach due to limited movement. Golems cannot ‘jump’ out of the water onto the pier, so either add slopes, or fix golems.
• Considering redesigning the two northern towers to suffer a little less from enemies building siege below them. For example, trying to treb Garrison from “Longview” is made difficult as enemy players can hit many of the trebuchet positions with ballistae using its open back, likewise, arrowcarts can bebuilt on the cliffs below “Cragtop” to hit trebuchets built on its slope

I’ve played World vs World since the headstart, and over that period I’ve both stuck with my home server, as well as hopped around all the different tiers of server to pick up tips and tricks. A lot of what I saw start on higher tiers has gradually filtered down to lower tiers, and the meta-game has shifted appropriately. In some cases this has been for the better; in others, for the worse.

Through all of this, I – like most of us – have gained a lot of opinions on what is being done well and what isn’t, and indeed many suggestions on both how to fix underlying problems, as well as how to generally improve WvW in the long-term.

So, since we now have a new game designer on board, I felt it was finally time to present most of these suggestions on the board.

Straightforward Improvements

• Outmanned buff should no longer be visible to enemy players. It’s far too easy for players to spot and immediately capitalise on outmanned servers without proper scouting
• Correctly connect siege weaponry to events. If I destroy an enemy ram attacking a tower gate using a mortar at another location, I get no credit for defence, despite being fairly important. Similarly, if I trebuchet a tower wall down, but my team captures the tower before I reach it, I get no credit, despite again being fairly important. Correctly rewarding players for these activities is important
• Recolour Superior blueprints to a different colour to normal Siege, to make them easier to distinguish. They’re easy to mix up at the moment, and it’s not at all a difficult task!
• Force player release on corpses after a few minutes of being dead. This prevents players hiding their corpses for scouting purposes, as well as dealing with the mesmer-hiding-on-a-door exploit
• Allow salvaging of WvW gear. It’s not like people are getting this gear at rates any higher than players are in PvE
• Add a 10 second delay to waypoint use to prevent people spamming the waypoint in the middle of an assault. You said you were going to do it!
• Allow players to use karma to purchase keep/tower/camp upgrades. WvW is hardly profitable; don’t make us your goldsink!
• Allow Commanders to choose the shape and colour of their tags. Combine the two to aid colourblind players; consider the targeting icons added in WoW, for example, as they had both distinctive colour and shape on each icon
  **Consider allowing Commanders to set ‘Guild-only’ tags. Some Commanders want to run with their guild, without attracting large amounts of attention from other players if they’re the only Commander on the map
• Allow players to use all of their supplies in a single channel. Currently, if you have 15 (or more) supply, you have to channel twice because you each channel caps at 10 supply
• Allow keep/tower walls/gates to be repaired in by less than 2 supply. If you have 1 supply, you can only use that supply to build siege; not to repair
• Instead of dropping loot behind a player on the battlefield, all loot is collected by an NPC at spawn in a ‘bank-like’ stash, with a certain cap. Having to spend half a battle mashing F to pick up loot, or indeed losing it for the same reason, is not enjoyable; an NPC stash where loot accrues is much simpler for players to retrieve their gains from

Quality of Life

• Allow guilds to purchase skins for the keeps/siege weapons/NPCs This goes a long way towards improving guild status in WvW. The modular nature of your keeps that was used to make upgrading from t0 to t3 easier is ideal for this.
  • Racial Themes (Charr, Asura, etc.)
  • Order Themes (OoW, Vigil, Priory)
  • Other (Krait, Risen, etc.) Think back to the variety of Guild Halls in the original Guild Wars
• Better skins for superior siege (similar to the guild catapult). Not only does this reward the upgrade, but it also makes spotting superior siege more easy for enemies
• Consider player-enabled content. For example, a player might pay a supply camp to start an extra-large supply event to a specific tower. If they successfully escort the event, the tower receives a supply bonus. You could do the same with siege blueprints or defensive NPCs.

Blobdara vs Blobuch Bay vs Aurora Blob!

If any FSP are wondering why your Hills are sieged to the teeth right now…

I think Nugos’ most charming features are their fingers and toes, which they are often seen using when counting their own numbers.

Wamgor.9347:

Riverside want your spot just so you know

Its going to be close but i think GD will edge it and remain tier 3

Yeah, we need a concerted effort of apathy, misplay and plain old misfortune if we want a holiday next week.

Yeah, the defence was a shambles.

There was no reason we should’ve lost Garrison there, but hey, well played to whichever of you it was who decided to go for water gate under cover of treb fire from Cliff. Was a good move; if our group had gotten itself in gear about taking those trebuchets down, we probably would still have a t3 Garrison right now.

Oh, and well played to that single engineer who got my counter-treb down at an undisclosed location.

Judging by how much effort was being put into EBG at the same time, I guess most of Gandara wants a week off in t4.

Thousands of Branded Risen Destroyer Gandarans in full PvE Ascended gear with Legendaries in all slots were holding a human sacrifice to the Titans in Gandara Garrison during prime time.

“Hahaha, we have the strength of five hundred night caps and our server population is over the server limit, and you must worship Trahaerne as your god and take him on all your Personal Story missions!”

At this moment, no more than 5 brave, Low population, underlevelled, green-wearing, no night presence Piken Square with fifteen stacks of Outmanned forced their way into the keep using only their bare hands, and tried to disrupt the ritual.

But the Gandarans did fifteen Flame Legion salutes, then called upon Zhaitan, Kralkatorrik and Mordremoth all at once, and also their Dredge and Icebrood allies. And although each of the Piken Square completed their Slayer achievement for each of the enemy types, and completed all the Personal Story branches at once, even these brave heroes could not save Tyria from the Gandarans, and they had to tactically retreat.

The craven Gandarans hid behind their walls with their five hundred Superior Arrow Carts and two thousand Ballistae and performed their dark ritual, and all was lost.

Just to follow up on what trickfred has said:

I posted in the old thread, and I’ll include this again.

On my main character (Human female Priory Guardian), I chose “Letting an innocent die” as my fear. I have never played any of my Personal Story missions on this character with any other player. I completed Tower Down, Munition Acquisition and Breaking the Bone Ship correctly.

My Battle for Fort Trinity was bugged, though I didn’t realise it until afterwards, and put me onto the “Making another suffer” path, as at the start, Trahaerne referred to the Orb as having be acquired by me. At the time I thought this was just a writing error, but having completed Battle for Fort Trinity, my next step is Liberating Apatia.

I haven’t completed this step (since it bugged a few days after launch), and would very much like it to be fixed, though at this point I’ve pretty much given up hope.

What puzzles me most is that apparently the game can’t detect that Liberating Apatia isn’t on the “Letting an innocent die” story line.

Casta.5697:

drongas.4189:

again small group of nug/ small group of sprt and small group friend together. QQ ^^

nug@ take those kitten in guild

again gandarians sitting in the keep behind 5 arrow carts on every entrance + trebs and catapults. coming out to play only after 2am when everyone’s except french are a sleep. sounds familiar? maybe you should transfer to viz, sounds like match made in heaven

Oh, you enjoyed my trebuchet work at Hills did you?

:D

It didn’t help that one of our Commanders had a hissy fit when nobody accompanied them on a suicide mission into SM, and then took half our early morning defenders with them to Borderlands 10 minutes before you hit the Keep the first time (when it was still t3).

Basically our entire morning’s woes come from that particularly bad decision.

Total tally of defensive siege built at Mendon’s this morning:

5 ACs
1 Trebuchet
1 Ballista

Total tally of offensive siege destroyed at Mendon’s this morning:

1 Alpha golem
5 Catapults
3 Superior Catapults
3 Ballistae
2 Arrow Carts
5 Flame Rams
1 Superior Flame Ram
1 Trebuchet

And at the very end, we only had me and one other person defending it against an AR group of 30. I think this should put to rest the naysayers on Gandara who believe you can’t defend Mendon’s. There’s no excuse for losing it every hour!

Good job AR for eventually taking it, good job to those Gandarats who stuck around to defend it!

For example, will they require Politics 5? I think small non-maxed guilds would be interested to know this beforehand so we can start plotting out upgrades, given they take a few days to complete.

Maulor.9847:

Most people will eventually give in and do the story they didn’t ask for, begrudgingly.

Nope, the rewards from completing the PS are too bad for me to bother if it’s not my story.

1: The Mad Moon
2: The Mad King’s Labyrinth
3: The Mists

Takeko.8735:

Unfortunately they’ve been pretty adamant that they are unwilling to do any retroactive storyline fixing where the detection step can’t be completely automated. So skipping 18 levels worth of missions they can detect and fix, but a choice being mis-recorded they can’t search the database for so no fixing.

That’s for when their order gets switched within a quest.

That’s not what happened here.

I did all three quests with Engineer Tonn. There is a history of this in my Personal Story tab, which is obviously stored in a database somewhere.

Now I have the quest Liberating Apatia. That’s very easy to check against my Greatest Fear selection.

My issue is that this issue was considered recognised beforehand in this thread, and now it’s not even included in the updated OP.

Silvermink.1456:

This isn’t clear enough?

Jason King.2647:

I’m not a programmer, so I can’t speak to the specific of the system, but it’s been made clear to me that there are no differentiating “artifacts” in the currently affected players’ character data. In other words, while we would reset players if it were possible, we cannot make any further retroactive fixes.

As Jeffrey stated, we’re come to a point where we want to make this clear so that players who have been waiting for a retroactive fix know what the status of this issue is. Thank you for your understanding on this matter.

This is in reference to having your order changed because of playing in a group isn’t it?

I – and many others – had our greatest fear mucked up without ever playing in a group.

To any Arenanet employee reading, may I suggest a separate fix? If you can’t fix a chain that has been broken in this way, could we simply ask you to reset us back to the beginning of the Greatest Fear choice in our quest line? That way, assuming you’ve fixed the issue now, we can pick the same fear again and this time progress without bugs.

I noticed the updated OP no longer includes the issue where a player’s greatest fear choice is mismatched in the Battle for Fort Trinity and onwards.

I still have Liberating Apatia when I should have the one about Engineer Tonn.

Is a fix for this still in the pipeline, or should I give up and just do the quest?