Bug: The actual FoV resets to default after restarting the game. However, the slider position in the options remains the same. If I start moving the slider, the FoV then changes to the expected value based on slider position.
A non-player character being associated with an objective does not make it PvE. In most PvP game modes, they aren’t all death-match. In fact, death-match is usually the least entertaining. Counter Strike has the bomb to arm or disarm; DoTA has creeps and towers; but these games are undeniably PvP games.
For example: There are complaints about the oasis event. “OMG YOU KILL DINOSAURS AND TURN IT IN!” It sounds like the creatures that carry these objectives are simply there for the initial spawn of the power cores. Players have to risk carrying it and bring it to the objectives themselves, which is just like what you do with a flag in capture the flag – or the Orb of Power we once had in WvW.
Of course, if there are no enemies to fight, then yes it will just be a boring PvE event. However, if there’s no one to fight, then no lack of PvE events will turn an empty map into a thriving PvP one.
This exactly. I understand some of the sentiments of the detractors of this new map; group fights in WvW are a ton of fun, and if I believed that this new map would undermine them, I would be upset too.
But adding more varied environments, npcs, and objectives to the map does not change the fact that at its core, it’s still a PvP map. Winning will still require fighting, period. The new npcs won’t be running out of the towers and keeps to try and take the other objectives, or to try and complete the new temple event in the center. They won’t be laying down and operating siege weaponry. They won’t strategize over teamspeak to try and direct the flow of havoc squads and larger groups. Only players will do those things.
All the new objectives and environments do are increase the number of viable map strategies, which is irrefutably a good thing. More map strategies = a greater number of viable meta builds and team compositions, and a playerbase that feels energized again and excited to experiment and push boundaries. Tired of the GWEN raiding meta? Now your choke-killer and heavy cc builds have a chance to compete. Not tired of the GWEN meta? From the video it’s obvious that there’s still plenty of potential for hard-hitting large groups.
Please understand; games like DoTA and CS, and even real-life sports games like American football and basketball are more fun BECAUSE of the objectives and the variety of possible strategies they generate. Creating a map like this has the potential to bring a huge influx of new players into WvW, as well as bring back a lot of old players. It’s a lifeline the game mode desperately needs.
No one is trying to kill fights; at the end of the day those are the bread and butter of any combat-based PvP game. But at least allow ANet to try and give the fights a little more flavor. Game modes like this don’t die because there are more objectives and environments. They die because they get stale and boring and the playerbase moves on to other games, and then there’s no one left for you to fight anyway.
Back on topic though. I think a better way to have ti is each objective gains points per tick on separate ticks. Have the timers count down from the time an objective was captured, as the tick for that objective. Not having the tick be for all things every 15minutes, due to many just quickly Ktraining the last 4-5minutes prior to tick for the PPT.
If you got points every 15 minutes your server held a keep, tower, camp, from when it was capped, you might get more defensive play? (Not sure it could swing both ways still.)
I think this is definitely a step in the right direction too. It at least changes the scoring to be more based on “total time the objective is held” rather than who can ktrain the most in the last 5 mins of a period. Of course it slices total time held into 15 minute segments, so I guess then the question is, how long should we expect a team to hold an objective before we’re ok giving them points for it? Is 15 minutes too long or is that an acceptable expectation?
The fear with that (which is probably one reason they went to an overall tick period rather than a per-objective tick period) is that if an objective is flipping a lot, it may not be held by a team for at least 15 mins for a long time, and thus would generate no points for any team during this period. A shorter scoring period might alleviate this, perhaps 5 mins (to match the RI time period)?
(edited by BrickFurious.7169)
I think this ultimately was a good call on ANet’s part (and 90% of my time in this game is spent in WvW). For every person on the fence about WvW that this originally encouraged to try it, it probably aggravated 10 more who ultimately had no interest in it.
There are way more sustainable and fun ways (see the sPvP reward system) to encourage primarily PvE players to play WvW. I hope ANet is working on those.
Constant ppt scoring would lead to nothing more then karma training and everything being paper due to the focus on ppt grinding, and would lead to each server essentially bunkering up in their bl and corner of eb to stop the ktrains, which means tons of siege and ppt becomes harder so its a nondesirable outcome either way. When there is a score timer it gives servers time to prepare defenses, scout, etc and lets servers actually fight each other w/o having to constantly bunker up everywhere with a bunch of ac’s
I’m a bit confused by this. You say constant scoring would cause karma trains and nothing but paper objectives (too much offense), while also encouraging servers to bunker up with ACs (too much defense). How could it do both of those?
I should clarify too, I’m not talking about removing RI, I think that should stay.
When the game shipped, the timer for awarding points for held objectives in WvW was originally 5 minutes. This was sometime later changed to 15 minutes (i.e., every 15 minutes, whoever owns an objective at that time gets points for holding that objective). My understanding was that this change was meant to deter frequent objective-ownership trading and encourage defense.
However, I’m not sure if this has actually had the effect of encouraging defense, and the change has some perverse side effects. For instance, a server can take a keep near the beginning of a 15 minute period, and they are only guaranteed to hold that keep for 5 minutes due to RI. If they try to defend it but are ultimately unsuccessful near the end of that 15 minute period, the attacking server will get points as if they instead had held the keep for that whole 15 minutes, even though they only just happened to hold it during the end of the period. In fact, 5 minutes later they could lose the keep back to the first server, and they would see no consequence point-wise. In other words, this system creates an odd situation where total time holding an objective is somewhat meaningless, and only the amount of objectives held during a tick really matters. I think this kind of perverse scenario can happen quite often, and that this can be a deterrent to defense.
My question is, do you think if points for objectives were counted continuously (or at least close to continuously, such as once per 30s or 1min) while owned, similar to sPvP, this would encourage more defense?
Obviously this is only relevant to those who like to play for PPT. I’m inclined to think that, since a defending server would know that every minute they hold an objective counts, they would be more incentivized to stick around and defend. In my earlier example, even a server that felt they wouldn’t be able to hold an objective for 15 minutes after taking it, would still try and hold it as long as they could beyond the 5 minute RI, because each minute still helps the score. Instead, most servers today would just abandon the objective and not bother defending, knowing they likely won’t get any points for trying to hold it.
Given ANet’s stated goal to increase defense in WvW with the expansion, I hope changes like this are being considered.
I don’t think the game experience should change*, just how the points are counted. The great thing about reset once a week is that your game only gets interrupted once a week. Timeslicing addresses the off-peak issue without changing the rules for only a specific group of players.
That’s one way to do it, but then it doesn’t address one of the key complaints of defensive players, especially in the lower tiers, which is that they can spend a day upgrading a map only to see their work undone overnight because they have poor overnight coverage. A lack of WvW players doesn’t have to last long to see a whole map of fully upgraded towers and keeps flip. It still puts a lower-tier server with poor coverage during part of the day in a repetitive cycle where they need to retake and upgrade everything again every day after their dead period.
I think the timeslicing idea, if done correctly, could actually address this in the long term.
If, say, the weeklong match was sliced in 4 hour scoring periods, per mine and others’ suggestion, it means that a server with lopsidedly superior coverage during a single period of the day will only be rewarded for that coverage in that part of the day. They will still lose the match if their coverage is inferior the rest of the day (as opposed to the current scoring system where it is highly possible for them to win the match solely due to that one period of lopsided coverage).
This won’t change what you’re concerned about immediately; it is likely that initially servers will continue to have their current coverage patterns for the short term. But over time, as players and guilds transfer, they will have the opportunity to decide on which server their coverage will make the greatest impact toward improving the server’s performance. And the timesliced scoring means that they will have the greatest impact on a server where their addition makes the server more likely to win a particular time slice, aka, a server that is lacking in coverage for a particular time slice. In other words, there’s no incentive for them to go to a server which would result in them further stacking a time slot; they’re better off choosing a server that is lacking during a time slot in which they regularly play.
Long story short, over the long term the timeslice scoring change has the potential to result in servers whose coverage is more balanced across a day, and thus are less likely to have populations that regularly paper your T3 borderlands overnight (of course, servers could still organize night raids, but those would not be an every-night thing like you’re complaining about).
(continued from previous post)
There are a number of reasons why this scoring system has the potential to make matches seem more fair and fun (and thereby stimulate greater player interest in WvW).
- It rewards servers (or possibly Alliances in the future) for developing player populations that have balanced coverage throughout the day, rather than stacking an extremely high amount of coverage in a single time slot of the day.
- Even if a server still has a stacked player population during typical off-hours for that region, it will not put them so many points ahead as to decrease morale for the player populations of the other servers.
- Every scoring period still feels like a victory for the winning server in that period. Even if that server doesn’t win the match, the guild groups and other players in a given period can feel a sense of accomplishment for their victory in that scoring period (you could even, say, reward players who play for at least an hour in a given scoring period some kind of chest for getting 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place in that scoring period).
- Over time, this scoring change could have an impact on shuffling around player populations through transfers, to better even out the servers (at least in terms of having balanced player populations throughout the day).
In terms of a low-hanging fruit, relatively easy/cheap to implement solution to scoring that could have a large impact on making matches seem more fair and fun, I believe that the scoring periods idea has the most potential. I’ll try and illustrate why.
Here’s an example of a server matchup, broken into six 4-hour scoring periods per day. The table shows the average percentage of total players in the match commanded by each server during each scoring period over the course of one day:
1 2 3 4 5 6
Server X 85% 60% 25% 20% 10% 20%
Server Y 10% 30% 40% 35% 40% 35%
Server Z 5% 10% 35% 45% 50% 45%
As you can see, Server X is extremely dominant during the first scoring period, fairly dominant during the second, and not a force to be reckoned with the rest of the day. Server Y is weak in the first period, but more even throughout the rest of the day. And Server Z is largely MIA in the first and second periods, but makes a strong comeback in the rest of the periods and clearly seems to be the dominant server the majority of the day.
Let’s assume for the moment that a server’s current % of total player population in a match is linearly correlated with its current PPT (not a completely valid assumption in every situation, but I think most agree that population = PPT much of the time). We might intuitively assume that Server Z, as the dominant server the majority of the day, ends up with the most points. But here is what the scoring breakdown looks like using the current scoring system and that assumption:
1 2 3 4 5 6 Total (day) Total (week)
Server X 9452 6672 2780 2224 1112 2224 24464 171248
Server Y 1112 3336 4448 3892 4448 3892 21128 147896
Server Z 556 1112 3892 5004 5560 5004 21128 147896
Server X wins the match easily, simply because its utter dominance in scoring periods 1 and 2 carries it the rest of the match. The weekly total also assumes that each server carries on with its normal player populations during the week. In reality, we know that as servers fall behind on points during the week, especially to a server with vastly superior off-hours coverage, those servers that fall behind are likely to see a drop in morale that results in less players showing up. So in reality, it’s likely that Server X would win by a far greater amount of points at the end of the week.
Now imagine instead, using the exact same population % values in the first table, that the scoring were based on each period, rather than total PPT accumulated over the match. Say, for example, that in each scoring period, the winning server would receive 5 points, 2nd place would receive 3 points, and 3rd place would receive 2 points (I happen to like this scoring allocation as it gives a lot of credit to the winning server without putting losing servers too far behind). Here is how the match would look with that scoring system:
1 2 3 4 5 6 Total (day) Total (week)
Server X 5 5 2 2 2 2 18 126
Server Y 3 3 5 3 3 3 20 140
Server Z 2 2 3 5 5 5 22 154
Now Server Z wins the match and Server X is 3rd place, which makes more intuitive sense given its their respective dominance of the match over the course of the whole day, not just isolated time periods.
Importantly, I should note that there is no need to reset the entire WvW matchup (i.e., reset ownership of all keeps, towers, etc) every 4 hours. You only need to reset the total points that have been accumulated during that 4 hour scoring period; ownership of all current objectives, as well as all upgrades, siege, etc can carry over into the next period. This means there is still an incentive for servers to upgrade and siege up objectives, as these efforts will be passed on to the players in the next scoring period.
I’ll second permanent defensive siege build sites as the best solution to this. This could even be a separate, new upgrade if they wish (or just rolled into one of the cannon/mortar upgrades). Have spots around keeps/towers which contain permanent sites for ACs and ballistas, perhaps highlighted a specific color to indicate they are permanent, and still allow players to place more siege if they wish that would be subject to the timer.
Question.
I’m on SoR already, but have been somewhat inactive for the past few months due to school intensity. So I come back and my former (mainly WvW-oriented) guild has left. I love the community here though, so I intend to stay.
I’d like to join a new guild that is fairly well organized for WvW, and though it doesn’t have to be the main focus, WvW is still the primary reason I play the game, so it would be nice to have at least some guild members playing most nights.
Also, I’m a serious WvW player (as in I love to theorycraft, experiment with build synergies, and I’m a good team player and have no problem following orders) but my real life schedule means I’m not a hardcore player (case in point, the months long breaks I sometimes have to take from the game).
Could you recommend a few guilds still on SoR that would be a good fit for me?
I’d like to know the answer to this, is this intended? Because if so, it completely negates flame rams and golems when sieging a keep. Catapults aimed at our own gate from the inside have become standard on defense now.