Guild Wars 2

Anatolian Turk.4057:

the end of culling and ‘the start of skill lags’

Yeah … it’s truly amazing how many people don’t understand that culling and lag go hand in hand in spite of the several detailed explanations that ANet has given on the subject. There are not in any way separate issues. ANet could have turned off culling at any time … it would have just meant incredible lag if that had done so. The fact that they are now removing culling simply means that they think they have improved their data processing and transmission speeds to the point that the lag will not be objectionable … but ANet’s definition of “objectionable” could be significantly different than ours. We will find out on March 26.

Cameron.2315:

sea of sorrows is the unofficial oceanic server most of the people/oceanics from ioj went to fort aspenwood so that may be a good choice if not bg now has merc a mostly aussie guild and sor now has the guild oceanix same thing basically any of those choices would make sense jq does not need more people so dont go to jq lol

Punctuation is your friend.

KratosAngel.7289:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/world-vs-worldthe-end-of-culling/
One point confirmed

You realize that they could have turned culling off at any time, right? The flip side of culling is ability lag, and unless they significantly improved how fast they handle data we could still get stuck with some lag. To my knowledge ANet has never told us what amount of lag they consider to be acceptable. I guess we’ll find out on March 26, but their recent stealth testing and the increased lag we’ve been seeing as a result makes me apprehensive.

JaironKalach.4938:

Cactus, I think that your analysis is based on the assumption that population imbalance continues to contribute as much to the disparity as it currently does. (That is population > skill, all of the time.) I believe that there are smaller (not small, but not redo all of WvWvW) changes that could be made which would help reduce to the impact of raw population.

The unreasonable example I use to show that this is indeed possible: they could drastically reduce the size of the WvWvW queue to a number like 5. Obviously no one would want this, but it would provide a better competitive banding of servers. Certainly queue caps are something they could look at manipulating, although it has some severe side-effects on frustrating players who are excluded by the queue.

A more reasonable example would be to dynamically adjust the the AoE cap. Less players=greater number AoE targets. Again, I think this will probably result in seriously unfun play, but it may hint a direction.

In any event, I throw these things out there not because I think they’re the answer (I think they’re not) but to give people more ideas to chew on.

Yeah, I agree that there may be things that could be done to mitigate the impact of raw numbers, but as you say … some of those would make the game less than fun and others could probably be gamed (players temporarily manipulating the population profiles). In general, I think that player caps are a bad idea … the best way to turn people off from anything is to prevent them from participating in it when they want to or are otherwise able to.

Personally, I think an overhaul of WvW is desirable anyway. ANY format gets stale after a while, but I think there are ways to prevent that if ANet wanted to get creative.

Purely as an example for discussion, what if every WvW match started with an empty map and a random spawn point for each team. No camps, no towers, no keeps, and no Stonemist in EB. Every structure would require a plan (purchasable from a vendor by a commander) and need to be built just like siege does now. Supply would come from large ore deposits (infinite capacity but needing to be mined by players at first … NPCs later) and the ore deposits would be randomly relocated after each weekly reset. In such a scheme, scouts and groups would roam the map at reset to find ore deposits and start defending and mining. Fights would break out over ore deposits. Towers would be built over or near ore deposits for defense and for strategic proximity. Towers could be different sizes/strengths and expanded to keeps as desired. Other towers or walls would be built nearby for defense or offense. Points would be gained as a function of territory controlled, not number of structures. Structures captured would be destroyed and have to be rebuilt. Clearly I haven’t thought this entirely through, but you get the general idea.

If standard structures were used for everything, the game mechanism would not be much different from the way siege currently works, so it becomes more of a change in philosophy rather than a huge change in coding (even though I’m sure it would be significant). The basic idea would be to make everything new and different each and every match, but it might also make it easier to balance matches if, for example, servers/factions/battlegroups with lower populations were able to mine ore faster, or if their towers and keeps required less supply to build.

Then again, something like that could probably be done now. A server’s access to supply could scale with their current map population, or their supply cost to build siege could inversely scale to their current map population.

It doesn’t much matter … I don’t see ANet devoting the resources to make big changes in WvW and I suspect that TESO is going to scavenge GW2 like ants on a dead rabbit.

Advent.6193:

A fair answer, Cactus. I suppose it’d also be too problematic to instead add more servers to the mix on both sides? After all – IIRC – EU’s T9 has the same problem at our T8. More servers would also give Glicko additional parameters to calculate with.
From what I’ve seen, forum-wise, the major issue is one of: not enough input for the
system to work properly with, thus it has trouble handling things like fast population
shifts.
Another idea would be to recalibrate the system based on average WvW population.
That would at least account for servers with a skewed PvE/Wv3 balance, I would think.

I don’t know if they really would need mores servers, and keep in mind that server capacity is already merged for WvW. You aren’t using a unique piece of hardware when you play WvW … you and everyone else is being spread around as needed. However, splitting players up into more “servers” (realms) and therefore creating more tiers would indeed help the balance and staleness issues. I’m not sure what other problems that might create, though, for things like PvE for example.

As I said above, though, I think the simplest change would be to turn WvW into a battlegroup type of match. Just my opinion …

Harbinger.9645:

Would there be an issue with resetting the ratings and then having a few weeks where no movement happens so the new ratings can build back up and then adjust accordingly?

I don’t have crazy in depth knowledge of the glicko system but it’s obviously flawed so I’m genuinely curious.

I’m afraid that would not work at all. The Glicko-2 system assigns points based upon the competency of the competition you faced. If you faced only the same servers for a few weeks the Glicko-2 system would have no way at all of figuring out where you rank against any server outside your own tier. It would represent the ultimate in tier-locking.

Besides, while ANet’s application of the Glicko-2 system to a tiered competition is indeed hugely flawed, the root problem is and will always be that WvW player populations are so greatly different from one server to another. There is no way that ANY ranking system will give even matches in such an environment. ANet clearly did not expect this to be the case … but it is, and they will have to do something about it if anything is going to change for the better.

I’ve tried to consider this entire topic (unbalanced matches, tier-locking, stale matchups) from all angles, and the only conclusion I ever get is that server-vs-server-vs-server is a doomed concept. It isn’t ever going to work the way players want it to. The only hope I can see for WvW for the long haul is for ANet to revamp it to one of two things:

-1. a battlegroup concept where servers are grouped together based upon active server populations

-2. an instanced type of match where players (or guilds) queue up independent of which server they are on

Battlegroups make more sense for long matches that retain server/guild/friend identity with broader strategic content, while instances work better for shorter matches (daily?) and narrower strategies.

TESO plans to go the massive battlegroup route where ALL players will able to be active on the same map at the same time, with factions being determined by which class you elect to play. In that scheme balanced matches are more likely as long as all of the classes are more or less equally attractive to roll … something a game designer would want to do anyway.

ANet says that they already merge server capacity for WvW so it seems to me that they could convert to a battlegroup concept if they wanted to … but I doubt they will.

Advent.6193:

Heh. A poster in one of these threads recently hit upon an extremely good concept for fixing this kind of situation. Namely, dropping the barrier between NA/EU servers. As such, then Glicko has 17 Tiers to calculate matches with, and this might just provide the combination of volatility and stability ANet seems to be looking for. Honestly, it seems as if it would make sense. Especially when one considers that many EU folk speak English, and there’d be less of a language barrier involved. If we NA servers can (and indeed do) coordinate with people from various sectors of the planet – as is – then, why is there a separation in servers, at all?

ANet has already gone on record as saying that NA and EU servers are separated because there would be too much lag if they were not. Whether that is true or not may be debatable, but you can’t simply ignore the physics of the longer paths and the additional packet exchanges that are necessary. Remember that ANet uses a merged-server concept for WvW … capacity is shared among all servers no matter which realm you are on. Having NA and EU combined would result in a LOT of transoceanic traffic as all that capacity was being juggled real time.

We can’t even get a definitive answer from ANet on how many players are allowed on a map in WvW and you expect them to answer a philosophy question? Then again, there’s no accountability in philosophy so maybe they will.

;)

ilmau.9781:

Fuzzion.2504:

There were plenty of “what is to come” in march but they are scattered throughout interviews and multiple postings.

Basically
-Culling disabled and left to user control
-Badges buy you new stat items and armour patterns
-You get ranking
-Ranking gets you points that allow you to buy passive skill perks
-Refinement of wvw events

and nothing about the lag?

is very bad when u need to use same skill 4-5 times beafore it activate and even if it activate it take 3-5 seconds to resolve

this is called FAIL.

Ability lag is caused by a lack of server-side data processing and/or data transmission capability. It’s basically the result of trying to shove too much kitten through too small of a pipe. Culling was instituted to cut out (in the form of players) some of the data that needed to be processed and transmitted within the server and in/out of it, and also of course limit what then needed to be rendered at the player’s computer.

Culling could have at any time been simply turned off for everyone but that would have made the lag ginormous, so presumably ANet’s March “solution” to culling involves some combination of:

-1. recoding parts of the game engine to make it process data better
-2. revamping the visual rendering of player appearance (and maybe weapon effects) to limit (or give the user a choice) on how much data needs to be sent
-3. possibly adding or improving compression algorithms to limit the data being sent
-4. buying more server-side bandwith to feed data into the internet backbones faster

I’m pretty sure that ANet has been mucking around with this sort of thing lately to try to find the cheapest way to go. Ability lag has indeed gotten much worse for just about everyone and other weird bugs (i.e., random server disconnects back the character select screen .. but not out of the game) have been slipping in after a couple of recent unannounced patches. Remember the night that some servers got dropped from WvW with little notice but not all servers? Keep in mind that ANet merges server capacity for WvW into one large pool … the servers are not unique.

“Fixing” culling completely means simply turning off a switch, but whether ANet does things thoroughly enough to be able to turn off culling without leaving lots of lag is the question. My guess is that we’ll be stuck with some amount of it because if ANet had really wanted to brute force a solution they could have done so long ago.

Fjandi.2516:

Guys you are wasting your time. There are tons of threads like this and guess what…nothing is gonna happen. Devs don’t consider wvw balance important (hey you devs you could prove me wrong on this point eheh…). Anyway it’s too late to balance classes in this game, lots of work should be made and they are way too slow at making changes.
Ahah tonight i was fighting a thief while on my guardian. He attacked me from distance at first, spamming sb #1 like a boss. The strategy didn’t pay off much so he switched to melee. No luck for him sadly…perfect time for a shadow refuge. I pulled him off ofc but i couldn’t finish him fast enough…he stealthed again. Last time i spotted him he was running away while spamming c&d on random mobs to keep himself stealthed, no way to catch him ofc. Working as intended.

Exactly my point. The thief ran away, he didn’t kill you, and the only thing you lost was the time spent kittening with him. Annoying? Yes. OP? No … because you knew what you were doing.

Havidos.9328:

I’ll humor you Cactus….Say I control the Garrison, I spend the money for all the upgrades, I apply all the buffs to keep it safe. We then move south and take over one of the keeps. I choose to claim it because I have full buffs. Now the Garrison becomes vulnerable because I am now helping to protect this keep because we have full buffs.

If my guild works hard to take something, we fortify it and protect it. When it’s safe and upgraded we move on to another area. Why is it our banner should come down when we take ANOTHER keep? It’s a matter of representation for our guild.

Go humor yourself. Why do you need to claim the second objective? Is yours the only guild on your server with buffs? Get over yourself.

Are you sure you were using the pick and not the axe?

just kidding ..

ANet has been floating various stealth patches the last few weeks, and all sorts of bugs have been cropping up as a result. Lots of new lag, server DC back to character select screen from WvW, etc. My wife even claims there’s a place on one of the maps where some of the trees suffer from culling, so who knows what gremlins might be lurking out there.

I’m pretty sure that’s so that smaller guilds have a chance at whatever benefit there is in hoisting their banner over a tower instead of having larger guilds hog them all. Why do you need to claim more than one? Color me extremely unsympathetic to your rant.

Waffler.1257:

Volrath.1473:

Waffler.1257:

Hexin.5603:

Not true, even traited with gear for duration, thieves have a window open on CD’s. Often will leverage CnD on npc’s in the area not to use there utilities.

Here’s one of the first videos I found on Youtube by typing in perma stealth thief, please point out where the CD window is that you can see the thief to attack.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSbw8Cpy-3s

Video is outdated, stealth doesn’t stack like that anymore, d/p thieves are harmless if you died to one that you probably played bad. Plus to stop him from stealth all you had to do was get close to the smoking ring on the flor, one of the heart seeker will surely hit you and trigger reviled.

Which patch changed that? Most of the thieves I fight use this technique to stay in stealth indefinitely, including ones I’ve seen 1-2 days ago. And sure they won’t burst you down in a second or two like other thief builds, but in the wide open area of WvW you don’t need burst to kill another player when you can always stay just out of range and remain untargetable with stealth. I personally don’t die to them because I play a healing power guardian so there are very few things that can kill me, but I don’t waste my time trying to kill thieves either.

That’s the funny part about so many of these thief threads. People complain because they can’t find and kill the thief more often than they complain about being actually killed by the thief (not counting pure burst thieves, and I honestly don’t come across many of them anymore because the CDs are so long). If they can’t find the thief and he runs off they aren’t any worse off than if they didn’t see him in the first place … but somehow they don’t seem to understand that. Stealth is undeniably annoying (to me as well), but there’s a difference between annoying and being overpowered (ignoring culling for the moment).

Marcarus.5012:

Fot the second time today I was defeated by a thief inside a castle and I can’t see them until they attack more than once. In both instances they had defeated another player and then myself. Apparently they have abilities that extend beyond a few seconds and can remain cloaked. My complaint is that they cannot be spotted for what seems like an 15 -20 seconds and apparently have full offensive capabilities to attack in addition to not being able to be spotted. Whats up with this? Why should I have to run for my life just because there is a thief in the area? If they just used resources to defeat another player then they shouldn’t have the advantage on another player who has full resources. What gives here, I read about this situation before, so it’s not that this is a unique occurrence?

Another foolish thread about stealth. If you actually played a thief for any length of time you’d know that we have all sorts of vulnerabilities. You’d also know that anytime we actually damage someone we come out of stealth for a few seconds, so unless you’re spec’d stupidly or he’s spec’d for burst you aren’t going to die without seeing him. If you’re dying to a thief 2v1 you’re going to die to a well-played mesmer or elementalist just as easily … you just won’t have the excuse to come here on these forums and whine about it.

OK, when I first read the original post I assumed that it was a facetious attempt at humor … that he was saying something along the lines that ANet was GRANTING one server the right to have more people by assigning the outmanned buff to the other server(s). Remember the deer lady interview? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFCrJleggrI (except that she was being serious)

After reading the rest of the OP’s comments, though, I have to admit that I have no frigging clue what he is trying to say … and I suspect he doesn’t either.

runeblade.7514:

Since my server went down in rankings to servers that sucks in WvW, I would like to take this time to research about traveling in WvW since my server capped every single objective in WvW before my server fight the bigger leagues.

The purpose of the thread: I want to know more about the mathematics in traveling in WvW before I waste time that has already been researched. Like, how long will it take to get from tower a to tower b. How long is it from point a to point b. How fast does a character move at without swiftness? The radius of the lake in each Borderland. The average rate it takes to take down an unupgraded/upgraded tower or keep while undefended. What is the gate/wall’s hp? etc etc…

Why it matters: Mobility is one of the key part of WvW. If there was a more information on mobility, commanders can easily judge if they can make it in time or not. Commanders can also see crossed swords on the map and judge if they can take over this keep/tower before the zerg comes in. After all, war is ruled by logistics.

Goals: Create a website that allows commander to inputs two points and outputs the time it takes to reach there, for example, If a Commander orders everyone to rally at Ogre camp, he can use the website to determine how long he should wait for. The commander can also use it to determine if resupplying is worth the trouble. Another goal is to create another website where commanders input data and the program outputs results if they can save the tower/keep possible. Obviously is there for heroic saves or ninjaing keeps/towers.

That’s kind of silly when you consider the many other factors that come into play when making such decisions. It’s kind of like wanting precision to two decimal places when you can only choose a whole number between six and nine. And what good does it do to know to the second how long it takes to get from point A to point B when you don’t have ANY idea what represents being “in time” since that is a function of what the other side is doing.

Besides, any commander worth his sigil has a pretty good idea of how long it takes to get anywhere on the map anyway … certainly to the accuracy that would be relevant.

There is already a rather large thread discussing that interview.

Pendragon.8735:

Why not, PVE people get their dragons and bosses for loot and money, these seem like reasonably difficult targets to reward large chests for WvW players.

Of course you keep the 1 chest per event per day in effect so there is no keep trading. But you have a possible 4 chests total over the BLs and EB.

You mean because Garrison and Stonemist are not important enough or rewarding enough to take in their own right? I can’t see how a chest would have any positive effect on the meta of the game at all.q

JesseBensen.4817:

Was that “hypothetical” scenario using sf and fc the actuall server(s) your issue was in? I just have a hard time believing anyone in sf would consider that even remotely necessary.

I only used FC and SF in the example because they are in Tier 8, where presumably a server transfer would be inexpensive because of the relatively low pops. I absolutely meant no disrespect to either server.

Aurust.8961:

Anet better get their stuff together… a poster mentioned in a thread on guru that Anet “wrote the ten commandments on what NOT TO DO for large scale pvp combat” and all of their business competitors im sure have taken notice.

I couldnt agree more.

Rift (in the form of their Conquest 3-faction map) probably did it the worst, but GW2 is a close second. The trouble is, ANet seems to have neither the inclination nor the resources to fix the key shortfalls of WvW … points that two very large Tier 1 guild leaders seemed to reluctantly acknowledge when they publicly stated in one of the recent weekly GW2Junkies telecasts that GW2 was now merely a place holder for their members until TESO and ArcheAge come out later this year. I honestly don’t think WvW in GW2 will recover in time even though I truly wish it would.q

Shinigami.2495:

Just do something for the jumping puzzles,borderlands one,i hate when someone arrives and kill you without reason.

On the contrary, there are several very good reasons for players to try to kill you in the jumping puzzle:

-1. They get loot for killing you, and most likely you are an easy target.
-2 . You get siege plans for completing the puzzle … siege that most probably would be used against them.
-3. You get Badges of Honor … a PvP award that you shouldn’t feel you deserved if you got it without having to fight for it.
-4. On a busy server with a queue for WvW you waste a player slot that should more appropriately be used for someone who actually wants to contribute to the server’s score, so nobody on your server is likely to go out of their way to defend you.
-5. The more that people like you complain about getting killed in the jumping puzzles the greater the chance that ANet will remove them from WvW maps.

Ability lag is what you get without culling when you don’t have sufficient server-side data handling capacity. It seems almost certain that ANet is playing around with various live trials in advance of whatever they have planned for the March WvW update. They’re probably playing around with some minor game engine mods (compression algorithms, etc) and they’ve dropped a couple of undocumented stealth patches in the last couple of weeks that most likely include some trial client-side mods. The clumsy trick they pulled in WvW a few nights ago where they shut down some servers (but not all) suggests they are also trying out some hardware mods, keeping in mind that ANet uses some sort of server capacity sharing scheme for WvW.

All of these apparent trials have actually made things worse … we still have bad culling but the ability lag is now much worse and they’ve added random disconnects that put you all the way back to the character select screen. They seem to be trying to find the absolute minimum approach to fixing the game, and while that probably makes sense from a business point of view it’s likely to give us some scary surprises in the March patch given the various probabilities. The more complex the environment and the less you actually know about it (keep in mind that ANet has admitted they didn’t know queues didn’t correlate with the number of players actually active on the map), the less likely that a rifle shot will hit the target.

EndPoint.1024:

Cactus.2710:

sigh …

Let me try to explain to you (“dude”) what the OP and others were referring to. Follow closely because you seem to have difficulty with this stuff. Let’s say that you are a member of Ferguson’s Crossing in Tier 8 and you are normally fighting Sorrow’s Furnace there. Somebody from Sorrow’s Furnace either gets a second account and rolls an additional character on Ferguson’s Crossing, or he temporarily transfers one of his characters to Ferguson’s Crossing. He tags along with one of your teams when you capture Durios in EB. As soon as the tower flips to Ferguson’s Crossing he starts building five ballistas inside the tower on the ground right behind the gate using supplies from the depot there. The ballistas are useless, he wastes the depot supply building them, you and the rest of your team cannot build anything within 500 units, and if he keeps it up the tower never gets upgraded. No defensive cata behind the gate, no defensive arrow carts on the wall, and possibly not even anything on the supply shed … nothing within 500 units. He does all of this simply because his real allegiance is to Sorrow’s Furnace, not Ferguson’s Crossing.

It’s sabotage, not defense, and there is no way to stop it. You can’t even kill the unwanted siege since as far as ANet is concerned it was built by a member of your own team. If you still don’t understand please don’t bother replying.

I think you’re a month too late….read this https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Willing-to-share-WvW-details about siege despawning….furthermore; you can’t just temporary transfer from another server unless you have another gw2 account. I’m guessing you haven’t tried “guesting” yet. While you are guesting to another server, you cannot participate in World versus World for that world; you will be moved back to your home world. You should try and it won’t hurt your currency or account.

I told you not to bother replying if you persisted in being obtuse.

Siege absolutely does not automatically despawn, at least not in EB as the fellow above pointed out, and even if it did 30 minutes is plenty of time for a saboteur to wreak havoc with useless siege placement and wasted supply. And I didn’t say guest transfer … I said “temporarily”, as in a week long server transfer. I purposely used Tier 8 as the example because those servers presumably have low population, making the transfer relatively cheap.

You might consider searching through any one of the several recent forum threads that discuss exactly this same situation if you still don’t believe me.

Encore.7053:

This is a Constructive thread, meant to help the game designers to get stealth back on track in WvW.

Anyone who plays the game WvW knows that stealth is overpowerd. Ppl playing stealth classes will try and shoot this thread down. So let me refer to the post “Stealth in WvW needs a nerf” where the OP is a stealth user and feels its very overpowered. Some will try to claim he is lying but at the end of the day. ANYONE playing WvW knows that there are way too many advantages when using stealth as Mesmer, Thief.

1.You can take out a group of 4 ppl, no other classes can do anything similar.
2. If you are close to loosing a fight you can cloak and run to safty and start all over again. No other classes can do anything similar or even close.

So pls give some constructive feedback on how stealth can be fixed in WvW.

This is NOT a yes it is NO it isnet thread. So when ppl start try to shoot the thread down pls try to be the wiser and stay on topic. I hope to get a lot of great ideas with this post, so we can help the gamedesigners with some great input.

An idea could be one of the following
- To prolong the cooldown on stealth.
- reduce time in stealthmode
- Let more skills interrupt stealth.
- reduce backstab damage
- not being able to cloak while using “finish him”

Thankyou for your constructive feedback on the thread.

Say what you want about not creating another “yes it is, no it isn’t” thread, but you’ve already assumed that stealth is broken so you’ve already trashed your own guidelines.

Stealth is annoying, stealth is exaggerated by culling, and glass canyon thieves can be highly disruptive. But a thief who spends a lot of time in stealth is not spending a lot of time killing you or anyone else, and a thief out of stealth is dead meat for almost any competent player.

EndPoint.1024:

Cactus.2710:

You are correct … you don’t follow (i.e.,you don’t understand). There is a maximum of five siege allowed within a certain area so a saboteur can, for example, build five ballistas in the inside of a tower near the gate to prevent defenders from building catas on the ground or arrow carts on the walls in that area. A saboteur can use up all the supply by building flame rams inside a tower to prevent it from being upgraded, or to prevent defenders from using the depot supply to repair walls or gates under attack. Whether you consider that to be cheating or not, it most certainly is not called “defending the keep.”

dude have you seen the range of those siege? Cata can go range from 4000. On the other hand, Ballista can go range from 3000. So you don’t need to build Cata within enemies’ siege range near gate or wall. Great distance within 3500k distance won’t prevent defender from building those sieges.

maybe i’m guessing he meant by this cheating about the enemies used up all the siege in one map. "There is also a hard limit to how many weapons can be placed on the map. This map limit is explained by Mike Ferguson of ArenaNet as “basically anything that is not a ram counts towards one ‘limit’ for the purpose of this explanation and each team can have up to 100 of these types of weapons out at any time per map. Each team can also have up to 100 rams placed on a map.”

sigh …

Let me try to explain to you (“dude”) what the OP and others were referring to. Follow closely because you seem to have difficulty with this stuff. Let’s say that you are a member of Ferguson’s Crossing in Tier 8 and you are normally fighting Sorrow’s Furnace there. Somebody from Sorrow’s Furnace either gets a second account and rolls an additional character on Ferguson’s Crossing, or he temporarily transfers one of his characters to Ferguson’s Crossing. He tags along with one of your teams when you capture Durios in EB. As soon as the tower flips to Ferguson’s Crossing he starts building five ballistas inside the tower on the ground right behind the gate using supplies from the depot there. The ballistas are useless, he wastes the depot supply building them, you and the rest of your team cannot build anything within 500 units, and if he keeps it up the tower never gets upgraded. No defensive cata behind the gate, no defensive arrow carts on the wall, and possibly not even anything on the supply shed … nothing within 500 units. He does all of this simply because his real allegiance is to Sorrow’s Furnace, not Ferguson’s Crossing.

It’s sabotage, not defense, and there is no way to stop it. You can’t even kill the unwanted siege since as far as ANet is concerned it was built by a member of your own team. If you still don’t understand please don’t bother replying.

EndPoint.1024:

I still don’t follow….building the siege inside the keep is called ‘defending the keep’. It is not cheating. If you had a problem destroying the enemy’s gate where all the enemies’ sieges are pointing at that direction, you are doing it wrong. The gate isn’t the only place you can destroy. You can also destroy the walls (some wall) with cata or treb in great distance.

You are correct … you don’t follow (i.e.,you don’t understand). There is a maximum of five siege allowed within a certain area so a saboteur can, for example, build five ballistas in the inside of a tower near the gate to prevent defenders from building catas on the ground or arrow carts on the walls in that area. A saboteur can use up all the supply by building flame rams inside a tower to prevent it from being upgraded, or to prevent defenders from using the depot supply to repair walls or gates under attack. Whether you consider that to be cheating or not, it most certainly is not called “defending the keep.”

Nodeninja.5321:

This post is also the result of people throwing wild accusations out with no real basis and a player with admittedly limited PvP experience in this game taking their rants about spies to heart.

The OP may have limited experience in WvW, but if you don’t think his complaint has any basis in fact then your experience in WvW is even more limited than his.

I have never … ever … understood why people seem to think that adding PvE to WvW is the best way to make it more interesting. They are different playstyles. It’s as brain dead as saying they should add some elements of football to golf to make it more exciting.

Narcissus.1058:

Do you think you are good at wvw?
If you do, why not try t8, the best place to test your skills and see how you really stack up with others. because if you bandwagoned to t1 and think you are good because of that, you are kidding yourself

LOL. Because this currently running thread makes it sound so much fun to be playing in T8 in general, and for FC specifically:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/T8-Frustration

Dual.8953:

Siege needs people to use them or they’ll despawn after about a half an hour, so staking them out may let you catch the spy.

That’s not true. In spite of what ANet has repeatedly stated, the only siege that reliably despawns after 30 minutes is trebs … everything else is indeterminate and often lasts until destroyed by the enemy.

It seems clear that ANet does not have any kind of centralized control over what gets sent to a live patch. Watch this video of Cameron Dunn explaining how GW2 is coded … jump ahead to the “Iterate” section.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/180776/Video_Guild_Wars_2s_programming_tricks_revealed.php#.UTof81fGBp1

It seems that almost any group of devs can pop a patch without any coordination with anyone else.

Massive ad hoc bugs like these are ANet’s idea of adding creative content to WvW.

I can only imagine what’s in store for us in the update. The sad thing is that ANet is probably in the same boat.

morrolan.9608:

Obviously anet don’t actually have a process n place on this its just at the whim of the devs.

ANet does not have a centralized process in place for dropping patches. If you listen to the 45 minute video they did back before launch where they describe various aspects of their coding schemes, one of the things they mention is that any group of devs can drop a live patch at their whim without involving anyone else. It’s been pretty obvious since then that they think it’s pretty cool to do so.

I can’t believe that you didn’t like this advance screening of the March patch …

Maladon.5760:

If players want balance they have to create it themselves through teaming up with other servers to take down the largest force on the map(s). Arenanet gave us the perfect method of dealing with zergs and imbalance, all we have to do is use it.

Actually, they didn’t. Aside from collaborating on which targets for each server to attack, there isn’t much that can be done, and even then it’s next to impossible to coordinate such things around the clock. No way, for example, that DR and IoJ could team up on the same battlefield to counter an SBI zerg as you suggest … AoE’s don’t honor agreements. If ANet had actually WANTED to do something like that, they should have given us the ability to mark the players from an opposing server green instead of red.

You get loot commensurate with the level of the enemy you kill. It doesn’t really matter whether you have a choice who you kill or not … you don’t get good loot for an easy kill.

Mank.2183:

Cactus.2710:

Mank.2183:

You want everything just handed to you don’t you.

You mean because we paid real life money for a game that was hyped to have little to no grind? Yeah, pretty much that. Video games are entertainment, not some real-life character-building experience. I don’t have to earn the right to see a movie that I pay for, I don’t have to earn the right to buy a ticket to a basketball game, and I don’t have to earn the right to watch a concert on TV. I shouldn’t have to slog my way through anything to enjoy WvW the way it was originally portrayed, with an immediate focus on skill, strategy, and tactics and without the need to grind for anything of substance.

Take your misdirected sanctimonious crap elsewhere …

Ugh, are you self entitled or what. You didn’t read anything did you. No one has said it will be a slog, we don’t even know how difficult it will be to progress, and we don’t know how beneficial the skills are yet. With how easy 1-80 is now I highly doubt it will a terribly grind. If anything character bound progress will bring more skill, strategy, and tactics to the field, as the buffs/skills could encourage some sweet emergent gameplay, with our characters having a more defined role in WvW.

If you’re going to completely disregard everything I said, only to ignorantly insult me and exaggerate something you know nothing of, then you are one of those people I kindly warned ANet not to listen to.

Say what you want, your comment that some of us "want everything just handed to " us deserved that response. “Self entitled?” Bullkitten. I can practically guarantee that I have worked harder in real life for what I have than you have, and I have a great deal to show for it as a result. I just don’t see the carryover to a video game that I play as a diversion from such matters.

Besides, it’s pretty silly of you to warn ANet to ignore the 90% or so respondents to this topic that disagree with you. I would say that ANet does so at their peril.

Mank.2183:

You want everything just handed to you don’t you.

You mean because we paid real life money for a game that was hyped to have little to no grind? Yeah, pretty much that. Video games are entertainment, not some real-life character-building experience. I don’t have to earn the right to see a movie that I pay for, I don’t have to earn the right to buy a ticket to a basketball game, and I don’t have to earn the right to watch a concert on TV. I shouldn’t have to slog my way through anything to enjoy WvW the way it was originally portrayed, with an immediate focus on skill, strategy, and tactics and without the need to grind for anything of substance.

Take your misdirected sanctimonious crap elsewhere …

Why is it that people think the way to improve WvW is to clutter it up with more PvE-style stuff?? Why can’t you instead try to come up with ways to improve the actual fight experience? Or the map strategy? Or make defense less tedious?

Not that ANet will listen anyway, of course, but at least there would be less drivel here on the forums.

MiLkZz.4789:

Cactus.2710:

dagneyandleo.6378:

I would agree, but I’ve dealt with the instant looting in LOTRO pvmp and all I can say is… Be careful what you wish for. If you think lag’s bad now, try having the server bogged down with 30 people looting at once.

Nonsense. I’d bet that it takes more bandwidth to render all those bags on the ground that it does to simply send a byte or two that logs the loot into inventory.

Not true bags don’t give lag and this is confirmed by Anet. Good luck being encumbered in the middle of a fight.

I didn’t say that bags give lag (I suspect the data required to render them is small), but I can’t see how autoloot would require any greater bandwidth. All items have an object code that is trivially small (a few bytes, maybe), and that’s pretty much all that needs to be transmitted to the client. No rendering, no position, no “I picked it up” traffic … nothing.

dagneyandleo.6378:

I would agree, but I’ve dealt with the instant looting in LOTRO pvmp and all I can say is… Be careful what you wish for. If you think lag’s bad now, try having the server bogged down with 30 people looting at once.

Nonsense. I’d bet that it takes more bandwidth to render all those bags on the ground that it does to simply send a byte or two that logs the loot into inventory.

Catisa.6507:

Cactus.2710:

I don’t think you ever get credit for escorting a yak unless it gets attacked (by mobs or enemy players) and you actually do something to defend the yak.

That is incorrect. If you walk a yak to the end of its path you will get credit whether its attacked or not.

The problem as the OP noted is that yaks are on static paths regardless of what you own. In the OP scenario above you’d have to walk the yak to the enemies SM because that is the end of its path. Yak paths should be dynamic. if you do not hold the objective the yak should not try to stop at it.
I’m sure we’ve all seen where a yak from say danelon will try to stop at QL on its way to SM even if QL is held by a different team. The paths are fixed when they should be dynamic.

I meant award (XP, karma, etc) credit, and no … you will not get award credit for escorting a yak that doesn’t get attacked.

felivear.1536:

I may be the vocal minority here but having everything account bound is so care bear. If you want something on another character, then earn it. It’s what MMOs are. This isn’t some IOS game that you play to pass the time between bus rides. It’s meant to engage you and have you coming back. Accoun bound items are the bane of longevity to MMOs.

Character by character grind is the bane of enjoyment in MMO’s.

One of the key selling points for GW2 when it was first being hyped by ArenaNet was that it would try to avoid gear/ability/skill/etc grind as much as possible. They said they were going to focus on making the game equally enjoyable and playable for new subscribers as well as old. Having to resort to progression means that they couldn’t figure out how to live up to their promise. It isn’t carebear to want to just play the kittening game you paid for without some crap like having to “earn” your way there.

Mank.2183:

Ignore the whine and don’t try to please everybody ArenaNet, it’s your game, you’re the designers and programmers, you have the stats and logs, you have a vision for this game, and no matter what you do people will sook.

Stick to your guns.

You know what I do when I’m truly fed up with a company (in any commercial environment)? I don’t tell them a thing. I don’t tell them what they did wrong, I don’t tell them why I’m upset with them, and I don’t tell them what I think they should do differently. I simply quit buying their products or services. I want them to keep screwing up and I want them to go out of business.

If ArenNet is stupid enough to listen to your advice instead of listening to the feedback from their customers , they deserve to go out of business too.

Straegen.2938:

Cactus.2710:

… and imbalance is not going to ever get fixed without a complete overhaul of WVW to go away from server versus server matchups.

I disagree. My suggestion above works inside the existing framework with relatively minimal changes. It would change the duration of matches (which they can do and have done previously) and changes how a server lands in a tier (population count during that time rather than weekly score). It also completely resolves most “staleness” complaints.

I ignored your suggestion because it can too easily be gamed. Lots of servers have huge disparities in coverage from hour to hour so any particular server could find itself in a high tier from, say, 2 PM to 10 PM and in a low tier from 10 PM to 6AM. All it would take is for players to shift their operating schedule a couple of hours to roflstomp a weaker server at reset and set up the map for easy defense the rest of the match. Or a server could deliberately shift their population time-wise for a day or two to distort the rankings for a particular time period, and depending upon the scale factors ANet used in the Glicko-2 formula the distortion could last longer than the time it took to distort it (i.e., shifting populations for two 2PM/10PM shifts in a row might cause a lingering effect for several days).

You’re making the same mistake that ANet did … assuming that player populations would be stable. ANet assumed that populations would be stable server to server, while you’re assuming they would be stable time period to time period. You’re both wrong.

LOL. Lots of people here who apparently are incapable of reading comprehension. Both the title of the thread and the text of the OP talks about trying to mitigate STALENESS … not imbalance. They are two entirely different things, and imbalance is not going to ever get fixed without a complete overhaul of WVW to go away from server versus server matchups.

While I am generally not in favor of winner-up/loser-down schemes, the version proposed by the OP actually has some merit. It would greatly help to reduce the inherent flaw of the Glicko-2 rating system in a tiered environment that causes tier locking. To be honest, I don’t really see a downside to his proposal.

robert.3475:

if your a glass cannon thief you can kill but die easy .are you can be a scout which is what most are because glass cannons die fast so be a scout

Protip: your future lifestyle would be much better if you spent more time now studying English and less playing video games.