Guild Wars 2

insanemaniac.2456:

lordkrall.7241:

Angu.3021:

Wait what, so new minor WvW content and changes takes 3-6 months to make and balance while there is PvE patch every 2 weeks with new maps, recepies, features, items, npcs and 100 other things. Im not really into dev hating but just how stupid do you think we are? Atleast be honest and say you dont create content for WvW because you dont get revenues from this.

But it IS much harder to make and balance content that has to do with PvP actions, since if something is imbalanced or exploitable it would hurt the game and player way more than if something like that turns up in PvE.

and yet MOBAs release new content (playable heroes, items) like all the time and just take imbalances in stride without hurting the game for more than a patch cycle or 2

so they release something OP? so what? next patch cycle can take care of it. being afraid to make content is just silly.

Exactly this. It’s isn’t as if we players aren’t already ANet’s primary QA organization. I’d gladly accept some glitches and temporary imbalances if a.) ANet offset that with interesting updates and new content on a regular basis and b.) addressed the imbalances with reasonably timely patches. We’d actually get two forms of excitement from it … the new content and the uncertainty of whatever they broke in the process.

Upon reflection, though, I have to admit that it’s a sign of a stagnant game (I’m speaking about WvW) when I’m actually willing to treat broken abilities as new content.

ghost.3208:

Pretty sad that the whole thread went to hell on the very first comments, hopefully one day we’ll see a much more mature WvW community. Guess that at least there’s some fun in the matchup threads (gif spams!).

Even if we are left out in the dark as some say and not seeing the updates that many want to get, there is no excuse to start attacking each other or the devs, that’s just being lame.

Still it’s not like everything has to be rainbows and bronies, but the hate that you can see on the WvW threads is just too much.

It’s not hate, it’s frustration. And here’s a bit of news for you … frustration comes from caring. From ANet’s position, loudly griping on the forums is NOT the worst thing that can happen (although I’m doubtful they realize it and you sure as hell don’t). The absolute worst thing that can happen is for players (customers) to simply give up and decide that nothing is ever going to change significantly enough to make a difference. For you, lordkrall, Vena, VOLKON, and others … I will tell you that kittening on the forums is actually a sign that there is still hope. When it goes away, one of two things has happened … either the key issues got addressed and the game got remarkably better, or most of the people who actually cared about the game left.

LightningBlaze.4913:

I’m surprise one of the Dev keep replying to this section of the forums after being bashed so many times by rude uneducated players. It goes to show the great level of professionalism Devon possesses. Nevertheless, players that behave this way towards a dev that kindly replies to our threads (when they don’t have to) should be punished with temporary or permanent ban from posting on the forums.

Being “rude” comes from being frustrated, and your use of the term “uneducated” is subjective, mostly inaccurate, and generally ignorant. I have at least some background in computer systems and software, and I watched ANet’s one-hour video presentation prior to launch that described how the game was set up and how the devs worked with it. I wouldn’t classify myself as educated, but I’ll bet a have a far better understanding of things than you do.

Many of us who have complained in these forums have complained not only about missing improvements and outright flaws in the game (like the total fail matchmaking system), but also about the general lack of response and information from the devs in general. Devon has been better than most, but even he will go weeks without commenting and when he does the feedback is still woefully vague. We still don’t have the slightest frame of reference when these things will be addressed, and “soon” has little meaning when we been hearing that exact same word for the last eleven months without result.

Overall, the general impression I still get from Devon’s recent comments is that GW2 was poorly designed on many fronts … a game engine with limited performance and peripheral coding with limited flexibility. He also is crippled with insufficient resources to address many of the user complaints and suggestions, but many of those items would be trivial to fix if the system was designed properly from the start. I agree that it is invalid to personalize our frustrations and heap them on Devon as an individual, but as ANet’s face of WvW it comes with the territory.

Obscure One.4357:

Cactus.2710:

To be honest, I don’t think those are very significant modifications. Some, like colored commander tags, are so minor as to be hardly worth bring up, and while others might address some annoyances of WvW none of them will make it any more fun. Others. like reducing the number of players on a map misguidedly treat the result, not the cause. In my opinion, there have been considerably better suggestions in these forums over the past several months that have been totally ignored, so I would be really surprised if ANet pays any attention to yours either.

And yes, I do have some suggestions myself, but I won’t inflict them on you unless you say you want to hear them … because I know it will be wasted effort as far as ANet is concerned.

Obscure One.4357:

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If there’s anything anyone else has to add, please post it here to make it easier for the developers to find. Oh, and I know its really hard to do when it comes to talking about ANet and WvW, but let’s at least keep this one thread primarily positive and constructive. There’s plenty of other threads to flame, rage, and rant on and I fully encourage that as well, since I’ll be there with you.

I should have also recommended “reading the thread” and “no trolling”. Now if you legitimately think adding entire maps is not a significant modification please enlighten me on your suggestions, that’s what this thread is for.

And no, reducing the number of players on a map is not misguided, as the root of all the problems with WvW skill-lag, effect culling, and why culling even had to be addressed is due to the limitations of the game engine. Barring a total rebuild of the entire game with a different engine or massive restructure to the architeture of the current engine, there is no other way to remedy the biggest problems with WvW. Those naive enough to think any of that can be fixed otherwise are kidding themselves.

Well, since lag is fundamentally a hardware issue I still say that reducing the number of players is treating the effect and not the root cause. And yes, I agree that the chances of ANet actually doing anything about that are next to zero, so are the chances that ANet will generate a few new maps for WvW. It seems to me that if you want to discount one because it is highly unlikely you should do the same with the other.

Obscure One.4357:

This will be the last time I attempt a productive dialog with a development team that has been content to ignore the problems with WvW and the pleading of its community to get them resolved. Any and all posts from me here after from myself will either contain praise for finally implementing these fixes and updates or venomous ridicule as near to profanity as the forum code of conduct will allow. The ball is in your court:

Bug unable to kick logged off players from a party.
Bug stuck inside walls and doors when a point is captured and the previously destroyed objects render.
Bug supply dolyak position mismatches between client and server.
Bug some doors and walls can be bypassed with certain exploits.
Bug when certain NPC’s break aggro they disappear and render at their spawn location (typically when Immobilized during the agro break).
Bug sentry point capture ring in the southeast of the Borderlands does not render in one of the Borderlands.
Bug Supply mastery trait doesn’t grant the full 50% speed boost.
Bug queue time discriminates based on zone from which a player decides to enter a given queue.

---

Suggestion implement a commensurate reward structure, equally valuing the time spent in WvW to PvE.
Suggestion reduce sever population caps on each map and increase the total number of maps to 7 (two borderlands for each server, identical if need be, but preferably different and varied maps)
Suggestion make commander tags color customizable with a gem store purchase.
Suggestion make world rank account bound, or the entire WxP system, or limit the number of trait lines available to any one character to produce the desired effect of multiple builds.
Suggestion add a badge that corresponds to world rank similar to world completion next to player name.
Suggestion add a title track that corresponds to achieving world ranks.
Suggestion rework WvW achievements into repeatables similar to the Agent of Entropy achievement.

---

If there’s anything anyone else has to add, please post it here to make it easier for the developers to find. Oh, and I know its really hard to do when it comes to talking about ANet and WvW, but let’s at least keep this one thread primarily positive and constructive. There’s plenty of other threads to flame, rage, and rant on and I fully encourage that as well, since I’ll be there with you.

To be honest, I don’t think those are very significant modifications. Some, like colored commander tags, are so minor as to be hardly worth bring up, and while others might address some annoyances of WvW none of them will make it any more fun. Others. like reducing the number of players on a map misguidedly treat the result, not the cause. In my opinion, there have been considerably better suggestions in these forums over the past several months that have been totally ignored, so I would be really surprised if ANet pays any attention to yours either.

And yes, I do have some suggestions myself, but I won’t inflict them on you unless you say you want to hear them … because I know it will be wasted effort as far as ANet is concerned.

Thesilentflute.8761:

The stability/lag problems we run into are because we asked anet to raise the wvw player limit for each map and they did. Now what we have is a problem where if they lower the limit to stable numbers they are screwing our larger communities.

So are we being trolled? Yep we did a dam good job of it… especially milky.

but this is really just a guess.

Ahh … so we’re the reason that the game can’t handle the number of players who want to play it. Got it.

lordkrall.7241:

^ What about the new graphic options and champion loot? I suppose those won’t count because they were added to PvE as well?

They don’t count because they don’t add anything or change anything to how WvW is played. The content isn’t any different, the reliance on zergs has actually increased, bugs galore still exist, hacks are rampant, lag has gotten worse if anything, maps haven’t changed a bit, and matches are still horribly unbalanced.

If my car is performing badly, adding a new hood ornament or giving me a nickle every time I have to stop for a stop sign doesn’t represent improvement.

pantsforbirds.9032:

I’m not sure what everyone is complaining about. The dev’s (either J-Dawg or Devon, but i cant remember) told us that we are getting 1) new maps “sooner than we might think” 2) a replacement for the orb system, and we can assume 3) bug fixes along with that. In the meantime we get these WXP upgrade lines constantly being added so that we can customize how we are going to enjoy our WvW experience. (Plus all of this content is being added without a subscription fee).

TLDR; Buck up my friends, change is coming.

A full year after launch and we’ve had no content additions, almost no bug fixes, no map modifications (i.e., draining the stupid BL lakes), no counter measures to hacks, no fixes to the squad system, no fixes to the grossly unbalanced matchmaking system, and no fix for ability lag. The most significant thing ANet has done to WvW was to remove culling WHICH THEY IMPLEMENTED IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Don’t tell me to just buck up and assume change is coming … history says you’re dead wrong.

lordkrall.7241:

Do you really think that all those 2-week content are produced without any kind of cost?

Try to pay attention. The point being discussed here is that virtually none of that money is being spent on new WvW content, not whether or not it costs a lot of money to fund continuous new PvE content.

lordkrall.7241:

People need to understand that developing stuff for WvW is most likely takes much more time and work than PvE stuff.

You’re an incorrigible shill …

Obscure One.4357:

What’re they gonna do? Ignore us harder?

I laughed out line at that line. Nice quip … and so true.

Aeneasx.1589:

Would it be possible to introduce a live Feed in WvW similar to the one we have in Structured?

Maybe not in the exact same fashion, maybe even a new/separate chat window featuring WvW specific updates, but something like this would be awesome. I’ll list examples of some of the events that might roll through the feed. You could base some of this on the BL, or an area of the BL… I.e. divide each BL into fourths. Players in each quadrant receive updates from that quadrant only etc (if needed).

Player x has been killed by Player y.
Devona’s Rest has lost Redbriar to Isle of Janthir.
[GUILD] X has claimed Redbriar!
Redbriar has completed Upgrades under [GUILD] X

Would something like this be welcomed? Is it even possible considering the games engine etc? What do others think about this idea?

EDIT: My reason for suggesting this is to help create a community within WvW, both between team mates, but also enemies.

I hate that idea. The whole intent of WvW is to simulate an environment where strategy and positional awareness means something, and that includes having to devise your own means (scouts, deployed defenders, etc) for figuring out what is going on. Even crossed swords on the map somewhat defeats that.

Jinks.2057:

Ok I don’t understand why this hasn’t been published already. I think it would be a cool thing to see….I’d even go with Very High, High, etc they use now.

If we can get an Anet fella to explain that would be great!

forgot to add:

I’d like to see timezone populations as well. Like how many are on during each period of the day. These would be VERY interesting stats we could all have a great time with!

I don’t think ANet actually knows precisely. If you search the archives from several months ago where we were discussing long queues on empty maps you’ll see what I mean. I’m not sure any of the issues that were identified back then were ever fixed.

In any case, I don’t think ANet is willing to let us see those figures, and if they did I don’t think they’re willing to devote the resources to code it.

King Amadaeus.8619:

lordkrall.7241:

AMP.2398:

They will not come naturally by simply playing the game, exception aside. Go and crunch the numbers yourself – or check out the post that has already crunched the numbers for you in 5/10/15 year figures. The vast majority of players are going to fall into the 15+ year estimates. A small amount are going to fall into the 10 year estimate, and if you fall in the 5 year estimate you’ll likely be dead in a year or two from muscle atrophy, malnutrition, and sleep deprivation from physically being attached to a computer that much.

Besides, GW2 servers simply won’t be around to play on so many years in the future.

Don’t take this as a personal attack but one would have to be completely deluded or ignorant of the numbers involved to say they are achievable from simply playing the game mode as usual.

Which of them doesnt come naturally with time though?
If you actually are playing WvW you will be escorting dollies, you will be killing dollies, you will be taking and defending camps/towers/keeps/stonemists, you will kill players, you will siege and you will repair. And there we suddenly have all the achievements being worked on.

Lets not assume that the servers will shut down x years in the future, since we have no actual information about this (GW1 is a good example about how ArenaNet works with “dead” games. they simply makes stuff automatic and keeps the servers up, the same could be done for GW2).

He is trolling us right? No way anyone is that pro-ANET (I mean I knew he was but not to this extent), even ANET said they failed at those and will be scaling those achievements to something more realistic….For you to insinuate that casually playing a game 15+ years is SOP, is simply ridiculous bro.

And yes it is a grind, because achievement points “matter” now…And for people that don’t play that kittenfest they call PVE, this is the only real manner they have of getting said points. Had they left achievement points alone, I would have sided with you more.

No, lordkrall isn’t a troll. I honestly suspect he’s on ANet’s payroll, but this is what he always does. He’s extremely consistent in his defense of ANet no matter how silly it makes him sound. Personally, I’d have more respect for him if he WAS a troll.

Mizhas.8536:

What i can’t understand is why is all this happening. Don’t you Anet run tests for these features before putting them into live?

Actually, they don’t. They don’t really have a player test server so everything they “test” has to be done on a small scale setup with simulated players. The player base is their real QA system, and it is done live. It’s cheap and it’s irresponsible, but it’s ANet.

lordkrall.7241:

So, playing the game is “grinding” in your eyes?
Because that is exactly what these achievements are about. Playing WvW. By playing WvW you will, sooner or later, finish these achievements.

I know that you feel compelled (or paid) to always defend ANet, but at least try to be objective. How about actually quantifying what “sooner or later” is before making such a comment. Please offer your own calculated estimate of how long you think a truly serious player would take to complete a few of those achievements. I’ll bet you don’t, but it should be humorous if you do.

Vena.8436:

I know your posting history, we go back and forth too often not to know it. But I’m not actually here to defend what ANet has or has not done or delivered, the whole crux is: why bother to keep playing and investing time in something you don’t like anymore?

That was the whole point.

I don’t switch MMOs lightly, and once I’m invested in one I tend to stay invested until I truly can’t stand it anymore or something demonstrably better comes along. I stuck with Rift (which at least had interesting PvP) for months after the frustrating piece of open world crap that was Conquest came out … hoping that Trion would fix it (they didn’t). WvW in GW2 still has the potential to be done properly so I have this irrational hope that ANet can be somehow shamed into fixing it, and at the moment I think we can all agree there really isn’t a clearly better alternative out there. Hence I remain.

However, there ARE games on the horizon whose developers are quite obviously trying to address the very aspects of open world PvP that WvW so badly sucks at, and when they pop I most likely will indeed throw in the towel for GW2 and you and I will stop butting heads.

Vena.8436:

Cactus.2710:

Learn to read. I said I was checking on release updates of UPCOMING MMOs. Checking on the release dates of past MMOs apparently makes sense only to you.

Before chastising, you should be more careful in noting that I said I was amazed you hadn’t found one (a new MMO), which is, as common sense would dictate, what one seeks when looking to upcoming release dates. Since you’re opinion about this game has been the same thing repeated without end for the past several months, one would have imagined that you’ve been long looking into replacements. Unless you happen to be someone who simply looks at release dates as some sort of prophetical tool, or a masochist.

As in: “I’m amazed that you haven’t managed to find an MMO yet in your six months of repeating yourself on this forum.”

And I know how to read.

If you bothered to check my forum posts over the last six months you should have noticed that none of the MMO’s I expect/hope to have decent open world PvP aren’t due to be released yet. Just because I think ANet has woefully squandered their opportunity to make WvW something worthwhile doesn’t mean that anyone else has yet introduced something better, and the fact that there isn’t anything yet better doesn’t mean that ANet has followed through on the implied promises they made when they so heavily hyped (even prioritized) the WvW aspects of GW2 back before launch. There’s a reason that my opinion of WvW has been the same for the last six months … it’s because WvW itself hasn’t materially improved in that period of time in spite of literally thousands of forum pleas and suggestions for how it might be.

And for AT LEAST the last six months you and Lordkrall have taken every opportunity to defend ANet no matter how indefensible their performance has been, so at the very worst I’m just on the flip side of the same broken record you guys are on.

Vena.8436:

Cactus.2710:

*sighs … checks for release date updates on other upcoming MMOs

You’d think you’d have found one in the past six or so months of you seemingly having this exact same sentiment.

… Oh there are quite a few! But… they were all kitten. Oh well.

Learn to read. I said I was checking on release updates of UPCOMING MMOs. Checking on the release dates of past MMOs apparently makes sense only to you.

Gudradain.3892:

Anet should sell WvW to another company. A company with WvW dedicated servers and a development team. I’m willing to pay for that.

I think they have proven that they can’t manage WvW and they will just let it die if it continue.

This would be a great suggestion … except that ANet coded GW2 on an outdated game engine and it would require a lot of time and money to port the game over to an engine that actually did WvW justice. I suspect it would be cheaper and more effective for another company to start from scratch and also provide the opportunity to fix some fundamental flaws in the process … like switching to an instanced matchmaking scheme instead of server vs server vs server.

AidanTaylor.3872:

Cheers for letting us know. So we can gather some more info, could those of you that are affected please create Tech Support tickets: https://en.support.guildwars2.com/app/ask/ with as much information as you can (include screenshots or video if you have it).

Uhh … because you guys can’t see it for yourselves?? This isn’t some obscure effect that only procs under some rare combination of factors. Try actually playing your own game once in a while.

And while you’re at it, consider pretesting major changes instead of simply throwing them against the wall to see if they stick. Oh wait … you guys can’t actually do that, can you, because that any-dev-can-make-live-changes-on-the-fly scripting system you’re so proud of led you to believe you could get by without a test server.

*sighs … checks for release date updates on other upcoming MMOs

benbe.5890:

Exactly the same issue, changed all my graphics settings about to anything that may effect, no result. Running on lowest, still don’t see aoe’s/lines/marks. Running on lowest with char limit at highest, same, lowest with view distance up same etc… etc… Running at highest, middle, everything; still the same.

It’s impossible to play in WvW when you can’t see static fields, lines of warding, rings of warding, marks etc…

I really hope they sort this out, because it’s now either: Buy a new processor, or stop playing gw2. And that’s not a choice a game that came out, saying it would be playable on a large range of machines, should make me make. I could run with 20-30fps in big blob vs blob fights before this patch. Now this patch comes out, same frame rate, but it’s now unplayable.

And as well as fields, it’s also siege. Which means I can’t use siege on anything the enemy has because 1) I can’t see my own siege. 2) i can’t see their siege.

Your processor is not the culprit.

I think it’s funny how ANet’s “solutions” to poor game performance are always to cripple various things they originally built into the game instead of directly addressing the obvious limitations of the game engine, server capacity, and network bandwidth.

Vena.8436:

Convenant.7092:

“We’ve also transitioned from our original single Living World team, which operated with very short turn-around time for most of the first half of the year, to four Living World teams for the second half of the year.”

in https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/looking-ahead-guild-wars-2-in-2013/

Okay. Glad to see this game’s heading in the direction we all want it to.

Why is this thread even a thing? The four teams were formed months ago.

… Right around when actual devs took over WvW with a full team.

Please post the link that says ANet has a full team for WvW. The last reference I remember at all was Habib telling us that WvW had two part time software guys who were being shared with other needs.

You certainly can’t point to anything since the removal of culling as evidence of a full time team. PvE is adding relatively major new content every two weeks with four teams, implying that one full team for WvW should be able to do something similar every two months or so. We’re not seeing anything remotely comparable. They haven’t even drained that stupid lake in the BLs yet like they said they would months ago.

Laii.2780:

BillFreist.1527:

Here’s a copy/pasta response i made the other day on the topic.

BillFreist.1527:

Speak of the devil, and he shall appear

First off, I do realize that I kind of ninja’ed in a response in a post that had nothing to do with addressing skill delay. The reasoning behind that was simply that I wanted to make it clear of why I wasn’t spending much time on the issue that I was addressing there. I’d like to say that I pride myself in keeping things as transparent as possible with you guys.

That being said, I know that seems contradicting since I haven’t really said anything on the matter since. I’m doing my best to lurk in the shadows here in the forums more often and chime in where appropriate. Frankly, I just don’t always have something to update you guys on .

But! I do have a small update for you today.

Over the past several months (boy time can really fly by), we formed a small team (myself, with the help of a couple others at times) around addressing the issue of skill delay in large groups of players. It’s actually a part of our Skills and Combat team that are responsible for balancing and, in the near future, introducing new skills, traits and other combat improvements. When tackling such a large project, you don’t just dive in and start shooting from the hip. It takes a lot of research, data and planning to really start addressing the issue at hand. The past few months have mostly consisted of these things (referring to data gathering).

As of recently, really as of just a couple days ago, we’ve gotten to a point where we have the data we need to take the bull by the horns and get down to business. Meaning that I hope that the results start speaking for themselves in the coming months. Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean we haven’t already made several improvements, just sadly that they weren’t really noticeable from a players standpoint (but have made a significant difference).

It’s not just skill lag that we hope to start resolving in a more noticeable way, and even eliminating one day, but getting PvE culling disabled game-wide. These two projects are beasts that really go hand-in-hand, which is why we’re working on them simultaneously.

Now this brings me to another seemingly tight-lipped change; PvE culling. You may have noticed that we temporarily disabled it in Frostgorge Sound for a short duration. That was us, lurking in the shadows, gathering extremely vital data. We’re making great strides in getting that removed, and hoping that happens really soon.

That’s all I have for today, but hope to have some great news in the near future. Ideally moving forward I won’t need to update you all, as the results should start speaking for themselves.

<3 Bill

So assuming you didn’t skip all of that…We are chipping away at it and hope that you, the players, start noticing an improvement soon. But to answer the initial question, no, there aren’t any significant changes coming in the August 6th release. There’s mostly client-side goodies in that build.

-Bill

They’re working on it :<
Coming in 2014~ lol

You realize that Devon Carter had this to say in that very same thread, right?

“These particular changes are indeed on the client-side. They won’t impact lag, unfortunately. We are still both investigating additional ways to combat skill lag, not that there are any particularly good looking options at the moment, and continuing to make improvements to overall game performance as we can.”

Let me extract the key phrase for you …

“We are still … investigating additional ways to combat skill lag, not that there are any particularly good looking options at the moment”

LOL

Nak.8315:

I think to a degree they need to make sure balance is perfect so it doesn’t give one side an edge, so its slower to come up with stuff.

Having said that, Devon has commented recently about New maps/tweaked borderlands, and a mechanic to replace the Orbs coming soon.

Commenting isn’t the same as doing. We’ll still have devs “commenting” on the same things six months from now, but if that works for you so be it.

Kincaidia.3192:

Has anyone considered making ACs work like Catapults? You have to aim a direction and then a power. This would make them more static (easier to evade), eliminate ALL the issues of ground targeting, and reduce the rate of fire at max range.

If it requires recoding (which it does) it isn’t going to happen.

hoschi.8693:

Dear ANet.

Rock is Overpowered.
Paper is fine

signed,
Scissors

That sums up just about every profession-focused thread in these forums. Very well done.

The part that amazes me to no end is how many players don’t understand that the game (probably any MMO) isn’t necessarily designed to be balanced for every combination of players in every context. It IS a rock/paper/scissors format that will sometimes give you and edge and other times put you at a disadvantage. Warfare has been that way in real life forever.

makku.2508:

Kalan.9705:

I think it’s great that living world exists, even if I’ve never seen any relevance to myself at all as a WvW player. I am however concerned that there is so kitten much spare dev time that living world content can be made every 2 weeks and thrown away as disposable content and yet….

There’s been no new content in WvW for nearly a year.

No! fixing horrible bugfests after months, like culling bugs not displaying 70% of your opposition and allies, is not new content.

No! disabling rather than reworking a major mechanic like orbs (partly because it was exploitable, and also detrimental to fun) is still not new content.

No! still having massive skill-lag bugs that can leave one unable to activate some or all skills for minutes at a time is not in any way new content, even if it ever gets fixed.

No! adding horrible vertical power grinds that make one have to replay the same content (for decades apparently) to not have massive disadvantages like 2.5k less hp, isn’t new content. It’s just an endless grind to repeat the same content. (Also doesn’t it contravene the whole design promise to have skill matter more than grind?)

No! Having a few of the armour options finally available to wvw players, and many still entirely unavailable, this isn’t new wvw content.

Why is there no new art in WvW in a year?
Why is there no new zone in WvW in a year?
Why is there no new subzones or meaningful changes to existing zones?
Why is there no new NPC’s or environment changes?
Why is there no new objectives or mechanics?

Why is WvW, which is such a popular game mode I frequently have long long queues to even enter it, treated as ‘dead-world: no new content’ by A-net? Is no-one in design & art working on WvW at all? Couldn’t you spare even a single 1 of the now bi-weekly updates to do anything for WvW players?

I’ll try to explain.

First and foremost, you need to understand that A-Net is a company, and companies want to make money. There may or may not be other (minor) interests as well, but essentially it always boils down to this: $$$.

As a non-subscription based game, the live system of GW2 does not grant them the same amount of revenue a subscription based game would. In a subscription based game, you want to make sure to allocate a sufficient amount of manpower to enhancing the live game, providing new content, features and whatnot. In a non-subscription based game, you don’t want that. You want to have all your highly talented and experienced people working on the next expansion/chapter/add-on, because this is where the money is, while the live system basically costs a lot and generates only very few $s.

WvW suffers the most, because it generates the least profit for A-Net. It puts a huge stress on servers and provides little to no income. There’s hardly any gem store stuff WvWers would buy, and WvW itself has never been more than an afterthought & marketing aspect to A-Net anyways, while PvE has by far the biggest amount of players and they’re still desperately trying to get into e-sports money with sPvP. So PvE and sPvP get at least some dev attention (for the PvE part still only a fraction of what a subscription-based game would get tho) and WvW gets the short end of the stick and is just flat out ignored for the most part: As soon as they ‘fixed’ the gigantic culling issue (and introduced the gigantic skill lag issue) they pulled away what was probably the last active developer on WvW and replaced him with a designer. I wouldn’t be surprised if that designer (Devon Carver) is the one and only person ‘working’ on WvW exclusively (more or less) at the moment.

I wouldn’t completely rule out all possibilities of getting REAL new content for WvW in the future, but one thing’s for sure: It won’t be for free. If you ever want real new content for WvW, expect to pay for it (in the form of an expansion/add-on or w/e).

I would agree with all of that … but all it means is that there is a reason why those of us unhappy with what has been happening with WvW (or more accurately, NOT happening) are unhappy. Maybe we should all just concede that WvW is never going to be materially any better than it is now and suck it up until some company that knows what they’re doing and cares enough about open world PvP to do it right comes along. Maybe ANet will be happy with that situation, maybe not, but I think it’s pretty clear they won’t be doing anything significant enough to change it. I’ll be very surprised if WvW has queues a year from now, even in Tier 1.

LilMcGinley.3890:

ANet said they were “working on ways” to make smaller groups more effective and I really hope it’s something good.

LOL

…………

There is no priority whatsoever. ANet has already admitted that it is random.

styx.7294:

I don’t think you’ll get much of an answer when you’re asking them to commit to a position so far in the future.

I don’t think he’ll get much of an answer when he’s asking them to commit to a position at all.

Zylonite.5913:

LotuS.4378:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/august-06-2013/

hip hip huray. Another big update for WvW.

thx AN.

Any1 is working for WvW in this company? What is doing leader of WvW designer?

Are you for real are just being sarcastic? If you think this is a big update for what WvW needs then you probably don’t play WvW…

Even I could figure out he’s being sarcastic. Did you bother to read his last sentence? If so, read it again.

Vena.8436:

Cactus.2710:

I also happen to think that WvW sucks and needs a LOT of work, but I certainly don’t want to see it merely turned into “fighting in the road” (an old WoW term).

How about adding a small scaling factor based on kills a world gets within a tick. So, for example, on an off tick where all that occurs is PvD, the structures will tick at their normal values because no one is fighting. But on a tick when defenders hold off hordes of people or some epic mass slaughter occurs on the open field, one tick (15 min interval) will scale.

This gives value to those last ditch defenses of Bay/Hills/Garrison, and also punishes mass-up-die-to-aoe-respawn-run-back-die-again-to-win-by-overwhelming-your-opponent strategies. And it gives open-field fighters something to gain from open-field fighting.

That’s an interesting thought, but I’d bet it would be difficult to code … and therefore isn’t at all likely to happen.

LilMcGinley.3890:

Cactus.2710:

LilMcGinley.3890:

VOLKON.1290:

LilMcGinley.3890:

VOLKON.1290:

Jscull.2514:

You’re right. Why would we want an end game that requires more than spamming a couple keys, key turns, and fighting npcs that you can get defense against? Lol you guys realize you play the easiest mmo joke of a version of “player vs player” in mmo history right? Mario cart is more challenging that sitting on an arrow cart for an hour just to press 2 buttons.

This is the same guy begging for more power to beat people with and expects to be taken seriously. I’m getting the impression he doesn’t actually play this game anymore if he thinks the fields are littered with rows of arrow carts or something. Either that or he got taken out by an AC and rather than develop a counter has been hiding in the forums ever since.

We bashed on Bay door for 1 minute (2 reg rams and 25 people) and were met by 6 insta-built arrow carts… I wanna know where the heck you play that this doesn’t happen…

What’s the counter to AC? Treb for 2 hours? Screw that. I want to fight people, not siege/walls.

Give me one treb and five minutes tops and you won’t have an AC in sight to worry about.

Now… your scenario… you had a Bay gate without scouts and didn’t build a field AC or two to keep the walls clear while you rammed? Only used regular rams too? Yes… obviously arrow carts are the problem.

None of the defender ACs were on the walls…

I can play for ~2 hours a night, I don’t want to spend half of that getting supply and building siege just to knock down more siege which will just be rebuilt because they have 1700 supply in a keep.. I want to kill PEOPLE.

It wasn’t a valid attack I’ll give you that, hence the regular rams. We wanted to find people to fight rather than cata/trebing a wall for hours so just 2-3 portal bombs to knock it out happen and that’s the extent of the action.

LOL. Your desire to merely bash heads with other players is perfectly valid, but it’s amazing to me that you didn’t bother to pay attention to the point mechanisms of the game you’re playing. You get points for having control of structures! You don’t get points for player kills. How is it possible that you couldn’t figure out you’re playing the wrong game for the style of play you want?

Points that do what? Nothing. I do apologize if I want to be skilled in open field rather than hide behind walls all day, it’s just boring. Bashing heads is the only way to see other people point of views btw… If someone could explain their feelings when they sit on an AC for 2 hours a night, I’d be all ears but no one does..

This is the only place where you can find actual open field fights in GW2… spvp isn’t an option.

I love how people always say “you are playing the wrong game”.. kind of the go-to reasoning behind anyone’s valid concerns as to what they believe is a weakspot in GW2.

Look … WvW was always supposed to be a game populated by lots of players doing LOTS of different things, each “thing” strategically (in theory) contributing in some way to the total point score of the team. The method of keeping score that ANet chose was simply granting points for the the time various structures were under control. You kill other players to capture or maintain control of a structure … period. It’s the means to the end in WvW.

sPvP and tournaments were supposed to be the places where folks like you, who mostly just want to kill each other and nothing more, would hang out. The fact that those facets of the game suck (brain dead objectives, small maps, total lack of creativity, etc) doesn’t mean that the premise of WvW should be altered to accommodate you. As I said, you’re playing the wrong game and you’re trying to change the wrong one. You need to be airing your complaints over in the sPvP forums.

I also happen to think that WvW sucks and needs a LOT of work, but I certainly don’t want to see it merely turned into “fighting in the road” (an old WoW term).

Alchemist.3692:

SeNoZinD.9874:

I’m not the only one getting fps drops in wvw right? Mostly zerg on zerg battles? Normally my fps is around 40-60 normally but when theres a zerg fight it drops like skrillex drops the bass. It tends to then stay around at 13-20 fps. Am I the only one with this problem?

no this is normal. Because you need to render and process more models your GPU gets taxed. Also, having a good cpu and decent ram 8g+ will go a long way. You can always adjust the settings in graphics and reduce the quality and count of the models which will have a decent impact on your fps.

FPS drop in GW2 is mostly a CPU issue, not GPU. The game engine in GW2 is very poorly optimized … it puts most of the rendering burden on the CPU and doesn’t even properly use multiple cores of the CPU.

Hule.8794:

In news post made by Chris Whiteside there is this sentence:
Adding brand new content to World vs. World as well as adding new reward progression.

Can you please explain what the first part of this sentence means? I know about new reward proggression. We have supply mastery now. But what about brand new content?

Thanks

Player of Your game and paying customer

It doesn’t mean anything. We have over 11 months of history to tell us that.

LilMcGinley.3890:

VOLKON.1290:

LilMcGinley.3890:

VOLKON.1290:

Jscull.2514:

You’re right. Why would we want an end game that requires more than spamming a couple keys, key turns, and fighting npcs that you can get defense against? Lol you guys realize you play the easiest mmo joke of a version of “player vs player” in mmo history right? Mario cart is more challenging that sitting on an arrow cart for an hour just to press 2 buttons.

This is the same guy begging for more power to beat people with and expects to be taken seriously. I’m getting the impression he doesn’t actually play this game anymore if he thinks the fields are littered with rows of arrow carts or something. Either that or he got taken out by an AC and rather than develop a counter has been hiding in the forums ever since.

We bashed on Bay door for 1 minute (2 reg rams and 25 people) and were met by 6 insta-built arrow carts… I wanna know where the heck you play that this doesn’t happen…

What’s the counter to AC? Treb for 2 hours? Screw that. I want to fight people, not siege/walls.

Give me one treb and five minutes tops and you won’t have an AC in sight to worry about.

Now… your scenario… you had a Bay gate without scouts and didn’t build a field AC or two to keep the walls clear while you rammed? Only used regular rams too? Yes… obviously arrow carts are the problem.

None of the defender ACs were on the walls…

I can play for ~2 hours a night, I don’t want to spend half of that getting supply and building siege just to knock down more siege which will just be rebuilt because they have 1700 supply in a keep.. I want to kill PEOPLE.

It wasn’t a valid attack I’ll give you that, hence the regular rams. We wanted to find people to fight rather than cata/trebing a wall for hours so just 2-3 portal bombs to knock it out happen and that’s the extent of the action.

LOL. Your desire to merely bash heads with other players is perfectly valid, but it’s amazing to me that you didn’t bother to pay attention to the point mechanisms of the game you’re playing. You get points for having control of structures! You don’t get points for player kills. How is it possible that you couldn’t figure out you’re playing the wrong game for the style of play you want?

Zikory.6871:

Beachead.4127:

Well my “dumb” questions are answered with the statement of “Soon”… something they have been saying for months and months. I think they owe us a bit more than soon.

take your “dumb” comments elsewhere.

They don’t like giving out exact timelines because people will complain if those timeline are not met. IF the said new maps coming in Dec. Then something broke and they didn’t release it on time, every one would flip there kitten. Your questions are “dumb” because they have been asked before and you’re not magically going to get some better answer out of anet. They release a lot of content, yes its not all WvW but none the less it still a lot of content for FREE.

Maybe people shouldn’t give anet so much kitten because they aren’t catering to your interests and they are trying to make the best game they want to make.

That’s really a bullkitten response. Go do your own survey of forum posts and you’ll see that the great preponderance of complaints come from not being told anything (or being told something so uselessly vague that it’s irritating) rather than being given a commitment that didn’t happen. Even the great majority of complaints about unfulfilled commitments are because ANet made a pseudo-commitment and then didn’t say another word about it even when they missed it!

Smart companies keep their customers informed. Smart companies respond to request for changes as specifically as they can and then follow up with updates. Smart companies don’t let their customers get kitten ed off by ignoring them. Customers will accept bad news more readily than no news.

“Intern work.” That’s a terrifically appropriate description!

silvermember.8941:

Beachead.4127:

Well my “dumb” questions are answered with the statement of “Soon”… something they have been saying for months and months. I think they owe us a bit more than soon.

take your “dumb” comments elsewhere.

Ok, if you knew all of that what made you think they will answer your questions with a very specific timeline?

“Very specific timeline” isn’t what’s being asked for here. I think most of us would be satisfied with an answer with a resolution of plus/minus two months or so. Anything less vague than “we’d like to be working on it sometime” works for me. But just for clarity, I don’t expect them to answer his question at all … nor any similar question that comes up between now and the point at which none of us give a kitten anymore.

Aside from #3, which ANet has already hinted at, the answer to your question is >never<. They may “want” to do some of those things, as Devon is fond of vaguely assuring us, but it’s pretty clear they have neither the resources or commitment to do so. We’ll all be playing another game long before any of those things happen in GW2.

If it’s missing from your log it’s probably missing from ANet’s log, which possibly explains why they never seem to be able to fix anything.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a game with such a large gap between potential and execution.

TCDJ.5378:

A lot of people still hold a grudge against Kaineng. When the bandwagon kicked off we stomped everything in our path on the way up the rankings, angering many people. And I can see why – it completely ripped apart the balance of the lower tiers when we rushed up. However, I’d like to remind everyone that that Kaineng is not the current Kaineng.

Except that while [WM] was totally skewing game play by using extremely single minded overpowering zerg tactics literally everybody else on Kaineng was defending it, and many were bragging about how much better everybody else had suddenly gotten as well. I know for a fact that there have been some great people on Kaineng and I assume there still are, but I can’t help but thinking that as a server Kaineng got what they deserved. It wasn’t just the results that garnered resentment, it was the attitudes expressed here back then as well (not that any other server is immune to that, of course, including my own).

EchenSketch.9142:

Because WvW is the current endgame, Anet wants to buff PvE, hence Living Story. How much attention they should put to that is another debate. A majority of players PvE, and with no PvE endgame people are getting bored / stop playing. Almost every MMo has a strong PvE endgame to give players something to do, not gw2.

Anet is a business, they need to make money. Sorry kids, it’s the cold, hard truth. MMO’s are ridiculously expensive to maintain. People often criticize Anet for not knowing they’re doing, but they’re not stupid. They just have different priorities than we want them to. What we can hope for is that they become more efficient at generating Living Story content so they can divert more attention to PvP aspects of the game, which is already happening.

People need to stop saying if Anet doesn’t make quick changes the game will die. It’s a $60 game. I would say everyone has gotten more than their money’s worth and are still playing. And if you get bored, just take a break and come back when things improve. There’s no sub-fee, so there’s no need to smash your head against the keyboard.

I don’t think I have seen many people saying that GW2 will die, but I have seen lots of players say that WvW will die. And it will. As you say, ANet clearly has different priorities than those of us on this forum and that is obvious to just about everyone. Right now there really isn’t a viable alternative to GW2 for folks who want open world PvP with strong strategic elements, but that is likely to change in the coming months. When those other games show up anybody left here won’t have to worry about queues or lag, and sadly enough I strongly suspect that’s what ANet is counting on.

Ceeps.3185:

I just wonder what the problem is – how costly is it to get servers capable of hosting large fights? Why is it that two large forces of players fighting far far outside of my current area cause lag for those of us way over here? It’s not like these technical issues havn’t been addressed in other games.

Two way fights get skill lag for the map over, and three way fights with map zergs become 10-15 second skill lag unplayable spam 1 fest. It’s the biggest issue in the game, not just WvW. It’s so crappy losing a fight because the enemy is just spamming 1. Or being unable to get away when you’re havocing on the other side of the map because of a large fight at a keep.

If this isn’t the #1 issue on Anet’s priority list, it ought to be. It’d be nice to hear that they are at least working on it in an interview or something, all I ever hear about is “exciting new lore” and “more content every 2 weeks that you can play through quickly and get bored again”

PvP is replayable, it needs to be good. This game has the potential to be the best for a long while if they showed WvW some love

If the issue was purely server capacity I suspect that even ANet would probably have moved to address it by now. More likely, the issue is some combination of:

- raw server capacity
- game engine capability (it’s an old engine and ANet has already admitted that it limits the size of maps)
- the cost and difficulty of rewriting the software that ANet uses to dynamically merge capacity across servers for WvW
- the amount of bandwidth they buy from their ISP

I have no idea what the relative contributions of all of those are, but I’d bet the software side (particularly the game engine) represents a pretty large proportion. In other words, forget ever seeing any significant improvement in lag until enough people get fed up and change to one of the new games due out. Once WvW is essentially dead, lag will go away. WvW is most certainly not ANet’s #1 priority as you can plainly tell from the resource splits they’ve admitted to.

MightyMicah.7451:

The Gw2 community in general is not very thankful for anything in Gw2.

There’s a message there somewhere. As best I can tell, though, the PvE people are reasonably satisfied.

The point is that the developers are slowly but surely evolving this game forward with every update in PvE mainly, but also in WvW.

Slowly, meagerly, and in mostly unwanted directions … at least in WvW. If that’s satisfying to you, you either don’t care much for WvW or you have really, really low expectations.

Obviously you disagree so let me ask you why. What is it that you want? Or are you just here to complain?

No, I’m not here “just to complain”, and in fact for several months I tried (along with hundreds of other players) to suggest ways to improve WvW. I won’t pretend that my ideas were unique or better than others, but if Anet had aggregated all the various ideas from back then and tried to find a few common threads, there were some really worthwhile directions that they could have gathered from it. Nothing ever happened to those ideas, of course, and WvW is still stuck in the same muddle it was then.

What would I like to see? I am in no way trying to claim my desires are more valid than others that have been posted in the past, but here they are in no particular order:

@ Matchmaking that isn’t dependent upon servers. It was a worthy goal of ANet to try to develop and capitalize on a sense of server community, but it flat out fails in terms of population disparities and coverage imbalances.

@ Game performance that doesn’t choke on the quantity of players that want to join the match. ANet clearly screwed up something, given that they originally stated they expected to be able to comfortably handle up to 500 players on a map without problems, with the reality being that the game can’t handle a fraction of that properly without long queues and skill lag. ANet short sheeted GW2 through some combination of an incapable game engine, insufficient server capacity, and inadequate network bandwidth. I’d like them to care enough to fix it, but I’m pretty certain that they aren’t willing to commit the resources to do that.

@ I’d like to see new maps and revisions to existing ones (i.e., drain the stupid lake in the BLs). Given ANet’s comments on the subject, we all know this isn’t going to happen in our lifetime … or at least GW2’s lifetime.

@ Fix the many bugs and glitches in the map that disrupt and pervert game play.

@ Add some kind of periodic error detection (checksum, file comparison, whatever) to detect modifications to client-side files in order to deter hacks.

@ In the absence of a better way to fix server imbalances, institute a handicap system based upon Glicko-2 ratings. In any match, both lower ranked servers would be granted a “headstart” of a quantity of points determined by the disparity between their Gicko-2 ratings and the Glicko-2 ratings of the highest ranked server. This wasn’t my original idea and it doesn’t solve everything, but it’s better than the silliness we have now.

To be honest, my preferred solution would be to totally revamp WVW. I’d make matches instanced (more or less equal populations determined by dynamic queues), and I’d have matches start on a blank map … terrain features only, no structures. I’d scatter ore deposits randomly around the map (different for each match) so that the first thing each team had to do would be to scout for deposits and secure the surrounding land. Mining the ore would develop the camp, and the ore thus mined would be used to build towers and keeps anywhere on the map that players chose. Towers and keeps would require a blueprint just like siege does now, with each blueprint costing Badges of Honor or some such non-gold currency. Siege (both offensive and defensive) would be pretty much as it is now, with possibly some changes to address current grievances. Towers and keeps could be destroyed, but not captured … they’d have to be rebuilt, either in the same place or somewhere else. Ore locations could be captured and recaptured, but would need to be redeveloped to be productive. Ore could be stockpiled in keeps and towers by players.

I suspect that such a scheme would have some unforeseen (by me) flaws, but I think the general concept would entail much greater strategic play, require better overall coordination (possibly questionable in an instanced setting), and generate some much harder fought battles over key locations.

Anyway, you asked what I’d like to see done differently. There it is.

MightyMicah.7451:

Cactus.2710:

MightyMicah.7451:

Any massive update would be completely ignorant on the part of Anet. The only way to fix something that is broken is by repairing it one piece at a time. That is exactly what you see the devs doing! Why people don’t get this, I’ll never understand. If you have ever been any kind of game developer, you would understand. Shoot, even if you’ve been in a game that failed because they did some massive update that caused problems, you might understand. Sometimes I wonder how developers even maintain their sanity with everyone and their dog wining about something.

Are you and Lordkrall twins?

By the way, the issue here isn’t massive update versus smaller update. The issue is updates at all, whether bug fixes, balance fixes, or additional content. The complaints about WvW all center around the general lack of attention paid to it by ANet versus the amount of development effort that apply to PvE. I would have thought that had been obvious, but apparently not.

I’ll ignore the personal attack and say that they have been adding constant updates to WvW since day one. They haven’t been ignoring WvW at all. They have been focusing on their two week updates mostly because that is what the game is all about. The game doesn’t revolve around WvW. Neither is WvW being ignored, though. The sooner the community realizes this, the better.

LOL. Not sure which you consider to be a personal attack … the comparison to Lordkrall or the reference to being obvious.

In any case, my point (which I thought WAS obvious) is that >by comparison< to PvE WvW IS being ignored. Those updates you refer to are minor and for the most part disdained by the WvW community (nobody asked for them or in many cases even wants them), while on the other hand major living world content is being pushed out every two weeks.

Vena.8436:

Cactus.2710:

Where did I say they weren’t important? L2R. What I said was that ANet has far better access to that information from the history logs than players would be able to describe. All ANet should have to know is place and time to research an issue if they wanted to.

I know how to read, your statement is nevertheless still crap. The idea that you’d expect someone to sit down and data sort based on a time and location stamp, where there is usually a concurrency of hundreds of simultaneous events looking for the one peculiar event that got through the tower… which would be nigh indiscernible unless they sat down tracking each and every player’s specific location over some width on the time stamp, is just mind boggling.

Not to mention that, on the by and large, people almost never submit anything useful like accurate time stamps, makes the whole thing all the more asinine. I know almost for a fact that many, many players don’t do kitten about bugs. They will see it, they will say waaaa!, and then they won’t lift a finger to report it. Of those who do, even less know how to actually be helpful in reporting a bug. I linked a post not more than five posts back, that shows a detailed bug report… and even then, the conditions cannot be reproduced exactly. Now imagine what your average gamer is going to report: “I smacked the tower, ended up inside tower. Please fix.”

---

The issue isn’t in the reports, the issue is in the claims that people have sent detailed videos showing and reproducing the bug. That’s the bigger thing because that makes me wonder where the hell those reports go… and I suspect they get buried and lost in the Bug Reports “department”. More times than not, I’ve seen bugs get sorted out on the(se) forums because the developer wasn’t even informed of the issue.

Not crap at all. Expecting a QA person to be able to methodically sort through the data logs seems to me way more valid than expecting a player to somehow be able to identify all the various factors (many of which he probably wouldn’t even recognize as relevant) that existed at the exact time of a bug occurrence during the heat of battle. In every other game I’ve played, all that was required for somebody to investigate a bug was time, location, and a description of what happened. The difference is that in those other games somebody actually gave a kitten about the problems.

In any case, we all know what happens to bug reports … complete or not, specific or not, accurate or not, multiple or not.

titanlectro.5029:

This is part of a larger problem, where generally elites suck. Ask yourself, if you were allowed to slot a utility skill in the elite slot, would you?

I absolutely would prefer to put a utility skill into the “elite” slot … no doubt about it.