Guild Wars 2

earendil.1290:

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What you observed is probably true. WM has particular strategies that you need to be there to understand (even then it takes time – but they are effective).

First – they always play the “server morale” game. Winning is the long term is largely dependent on how many PuGs will come and follow you – I was one of these PuGs. I remember in a highly competitive map, Jang called us and went to the NW door of an enemy controlled Bay. There they attacked the door a few times then we stood on the stairs, killing the waves or reinforcements coming from the enemy garison and citadel. For about 20 minutes. Someone asked him “why are we doing this ?” – " To break their morale".

There is little point in fortifying/upgrading when you have a 600+ lead. You want the opponent to take their towers/keeps – gives you (and the pug zerg) something to do. I you fortify everything and the opponent cant take anything – your own PuGs will become bored and lose morale or start JP/spawn camping. You need to feed them kills and badges – so you need an opponent. I can assure you that in highly contested maps they were building everything – it made sense.

Also – they have the “move like a ball – leave no tail” strategy – a very fast moving zerg group (better have plenty of speed buffs if you want to keep up) hitting targets of various importance (camps, towers, even sentries) – in an apparently random manner. If you can’t take a tower in 5 minutes – move along. All this to break the enemy’s morale.

Granted. We even discussed those exact same things in chat when we were analyzing [WM]‘s tactics. It still comes down to a total reliance on overpowering numbers, though. Swarm like gnats to take an objective, and try to reduce the enemy’s numbers by demoralizing the casual players. I’m not saying that it isn’t an effective way to score points, but it is a good way to take all the fun out of the game for everyone, Kaineng included. Just read all the other forum threads here where everyone else is hoping for balanced matches (often even if it means being in a lower tier) so that they can pit their strategies and tactics against each other instead of just raw numbers. Even the winners hate blowouts.

I was sorry to see Mag leave … I won’t be sorry at all to see Kaineng go.

Faranox.4217:

Here’s a dev post that elaborates a bit: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Incoming-AoE-nerf-and-rezzing-in-WvW/page/5#post1239927
Also, a link to the live stream they did: http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/c/1842734

Note the part about trying to balance both the PvE and PvP effects of any one ability. That’s almost always a path to failure.

Ninya.3942:

Oozo.7856:

Here comes honesty. If you don’t like it, I’m sorry.

Kaineng “zergs” have been the easiest to handle in terms of just straight up killing. That goes all the way back to T8 and judging from last night, nothing has changed there. There are just more zerglings to deal with.

Maguuma “zergs” have been the hardest to handle since they have some leaders and scouts that people actually listen to, are on voice together, and act cohesively.

There was nothing honest there, straight up opinion. And as for the spawn campers, most of us wouldn’t do it. We can’t control everyone :P

By “honest”, he clearly meant his honest view of what he saw. What is so hard to grasp about that?

And for the record, I pretty much agree with him, although I would qualify things just a bit. I played for seven hours straight last night and what I saw were mostly HUGE [WM] zergs that rarely even bothered to place defensive siege in places they capped. They often didn’t even order upgrades for the structure either, even though they typically controlled nearby camps as well. I will say that they were tremendously disciplined and focused, and they truly played like one entity, but whenever we were able to isolate smaller and equal numbers of them they died quickly. I often couldn’t figure out any particular strategy to what they decided to hit at any particular moment, and any time we were able to hold them off at a tower more than a few minutes they left. It was simply the most opportunistic style of play I’ve seen thus far in WvW. Our general impression all night long was that with equal numbers Mag would wipe them out.

On the other hand, there were some small and medium sized groups of non-[WM] Kaineng running around that were pretty tough and seemed to play with broader tactics. I came across one such group just outside of Mendons that included some [RE] that impressed me as being solid. If [WM] ever learns anything from you guys Kaineng overall could be pretty impressive, but [WM] has been around quite a while and I’m not seeing any evidence that they embrace anything except the zerg. I never even saw any [WM] outside of their own zergs … not in Kaineng’s other groups and not even in small teams of [WM].

And yes, that is all simply my opinion, but I am being honest about it.

Sumwun.3846:

Pro moving or not, I do not know. But I will say this. The effort Eyan and a few of his members put into smoothing things out with me and my group was nothing short of sincere. and after my talk with Eyan, and being able to hear him speak, I heard a nice guy talking to me with a whole lot of kitten that got dropped on him. He did mention that he wanted to fix DR, and he spoke about a lot of things that I agreed with. Ideas. Ideals. and a Scope of a less hostile internal environment. I don’t feel he was insincere with me, and I consider myself pretty accurate with reading personality.

I am not in [PRO}, but I will certainly have to echo those comments. I ran with Eyan’s group a couple of late evenings this past week and listened to him in TS for quite a long time. He was very knowledgeable, had good strategies (especially when being outmanned), worked great with members of other guilds, had solid ideas for how to improve the server, and was simply an overall nice guy. He was definitely getting frustrated with the general situation, though (we all were) … most notably the time we had the inner wall mostly down on a keep in EB and just needed a few more players to pull it off. There were at least a dozen DR mindlessly and continuously fighting some Mag immediately in front of our spawn, and we could not for the life of us persuade them to come help take that inner wall down even though several of us spent probably fifteen minutes trying to convince them to do so as we died, rez’d and ran past them back to the keep.

So, to be honest, I wouldn’t blame Eyan for raising anchor and taking his crew to a different server. It’s one thing to be outmanned, but it is quite another to try to work with players who simply don’t share the same outlook on the game. I plan to stay with DR and I hope [PRO] does as well, but losing folks like Eyan will be a bigger loss for the server than the numbers that go with them.

Taras.4367:

I HATE THIS WVW. Anet you killed IoJ with your paid transfers 5 month after the release. Also not just IoJ. I have been following this whole guilds moving from 1 server to another all day long today. IoJ lost almost every major WvW guild we had. There is only 1 guild that is staying that has a great wvw presence. Im really not having a good day today and unless some guilds will come to IoJ in the next week, i will be done with gw2.

OK … let’s put this in perspective. If all of the servers in GW2 were comparable to IoJ as it is AFTER all these supposed guild desertions, would you even know the difference as far as WvW itself was concerned?? I mean, you would have been playing against servers similar to yours and the game would be what it was. So the game itself isn’t the problem, and ArenaNet isn’t the problem (at least not in this case) … the problem is the behavior of the guilds on your server versus how you would like them to act.

Morningstar.6208:

I am asking a serious question to get a serious answer from a person who really knows what he is talking about. I am not trying to troll anybody.

If you were talking about something that happened weeks ago, why didn’t you say so?

Morningstar.6208:

I am asking a serious question to get a serious answer from a person who really knows what he is talking about. I am not trying to troll anybody.

I WAS giving you a serious answer. Based on data supposedly posted less than an hour ago, the “Next Matchup” chart on http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA still shows Maguuma going to Tier 4. Where did you see that they weren’t?

And DR shows dropping to Tier 6.

Morningstar.6208:

How did maguuma fall from T4?

Do you mean a few weeks ago? Because the current ranking projections I see still shows Mag comfortably moving to Tier 4. It does, however, show DR dropping to Tier 6. Things are still VERY tight between us and BP.

Plok.6145:

Can we please have a /urinate emote so I can bless the flame ram for Mag?

I’m pretty sure the following invocation would work, not that we’re likely to have a chance to try it out for a while …

/e enthusiastically urinates on Lord Flame Ram

Disclaimer: user assumes all risk, corporeal or spiritual, for invoking said emote

Esoteric.5490:

Cactus, you imply that I don’t enjoy this game which is silly because I play it with much of my spare time and somehow you took me saying that rewards should be applied to those players who played WvW in spite of massive transfers, culling problems, the removal of orbs, rampant hacks and glitches left largely unresolved as me saying I hate WvW. I love this game type, it has had its ups and downs, but your statements seem to be entirely charged at personally attacking me and my character rather than replying to a single point I made. You seem like the kind of person who would tell a person talking about ducks that they weren’t talking about ducks. Idiot.

Well, your exact comment was “We played a thankless game with few rewards and no progression for months.” It doesn’t make me an idiot for responding to what you actually posted instead of what you kinda maybe think you really meant, but you calling me that does make you something. And do you not see the monumental irony of accusing me of making a personal attack just two sentences before calling me an idiot? Apparently not …

Foghladha.2506:

Convenant.7092:

Please no dragons in WvW. Please no world bosses in WvW. Nobody in the WvW community wants that. That line story event sounds kind of shady. “Escort mob X to position Y” type of thing is always a failure, because it will just turn into a PVE farmfest. It’s always easier to just SvE (Server vs Environment) than to actually fight the opposing faction, and remember, people choose the fastest possible route to their gear. If that route excludes killing players, then they won’t attack each other.

I have 50K kills and over 10K badges. Nobody I’ve ever met wants more PVE in WvW.

Not everyone thinks the same way. I for one think it would be awesome if the top team got a dragon to fight against them on top of the other 2 factions to knock them down a peg. Some of the most fun i’ve had in a game was in DAOC where they had NPC’s in the WvW lake. It adds yet another element to the mix.

But not everyone will agree with me. ArenaNet needs to keep their ideas open to all types of players. The hard core PvPers will have their thing. The Mixed PvE/PvPers will have their things, etc. They want to make something for everyone. I welcome creative ideas from the devs to bring something for everyone into WvW.

I love it how people propose these things without actually thinking them through. How exactly do you kill a flying dragon? The only people with a chance to do anything are those that have decent ranged abilities … those with primarily melee or AoE abilities are going to be just standing around watching.

If you want to throw in some sort of equalizer, it would be far simpler to just turn the outmanned buff into a combat buff that actually meant something, or maybe grant the option for commanders on 2nd and 3rd place servers to recruit NPCs that could be assigned to squads.

But simply adding an element because you think it would be visually “awesome” isn’t particularly clever.

Gilgamesh.2561:

Actually, dragons in WvW would be awesome. I wouldn’t mind if all PvE was removed from WvW except dragons or other “boss” type creatures (e.g. giants).

However, you don’t just throw in “dragon event” in some barren corner of the map as a distraction for players to fight. Don’t make this another dumb grub.

You make the dragon part of the WvW struggle.

The dragon could be involved:

• As a neutral party that randomly spawns once in awhile around areas where a large amount of players are located. The dragon attacks anyone.
• As a “siege engine” that could be purchased and ordered to attack your foes. You wouldn’t ride it or control it, although that could be a cool idea.
• As a keep upgrade, and the dragon would patrol the skies and protect your keep. However, this could have the effect of making winning teams on imbalanced matches being nigh impossible to defeat.
• As a rare bonus for underdogs or servers who are greatly underpopulated. The dragon would aid the underdogs for awhile or until killed.

Personally I am only in favor of option 1: Dragon as a neutral party that randomly spawns in areas of mass player population. Dragons in Guild Wars lore-sense don’t fight for anyone, so a neutral dragon only makes sense. Plus, it would be pure chaos and add a new dimension to battles if a dragon suddenly shows up in your 3-way battle. The dragon’s AI would have to be tuned so that it favors attacking anyone in the vicinity, not just those who have attacked it, and make it so it can attack those on walls within a keep’s wall, from air. Otherwise dragons would just serve to inadvertently defend keeeps.

-1 is a distraction, pure and simple. Everyone who is actually trying to accomplish something will hate it. The only people who will like it are the JP’ers.

-2 is simply a fast golem.

-3 is just defensive siege in a different skin

-4 is just the breakout commander without wings.

Stiv.1820:

Big bosses are great in open world PvP zones. It creates huge fights around trying to down them. Lets factions try to screw each other while trying to kill them. Aion has this and it was pretty good.

That only works if killing the boss grants some award that contributes to the server score, such as a tactical advantage somewhere on the map, a buff to the “winners” (see next comment), or simply some extra points. If it does not do that, you end up with HUGE friction within the server due to conflicting objectives. Players who just spent the last hour trying to take a keep are going to be irate when they are abandoned by team mates who decide it would be more fun or rewarding to run off to fight the boss. If ArenaNet wants to ruin WvW, putting server mates at odds with each other is the way to do it.

And how exactly do you determine the winner of a three way battle to kill the boss? The one that does the most combined damage?? Take it from someone who for months endured the travesty that is Conquest in Rift … if the winning team is the one that drops the most damage on the boss, the majority of players are likely to stand around (shoulder to shoulder even if they are enemies) DPS’ing the boss until it is down. If the reward for contributing damage to the boss is an individual reward as opposed to a team reward, this kind of temporary truce is almost guaranteed to happen.

And if the boss spawns randomly around the map, such that one faction will almost certainly have an advantage fighting it, ArenaNet can count on LOTS of qq’ing in these forums about the unfairness of it all.

All in all I view these proposals for random boss fights and similar artifacts to be misguided (even simpleminded … sorry, but that’s how it is) attempts to add additional content to WvW that take the easy way out. The emphasis instead should be on cleverly adding PvP content that broadens and deepens the existing conflict, not detracts from it. Adding noise to a familiar piece of music may give it more variety, but the net result is not pleasing.

Esoteric.5490:

We played a thankless game with few rewards and no progression for months. Many left the game in droves while we did not. ANet denying all of the achievements we have to date would be spitting on us. The audacity that players who quit WvW could complain about something that we earned. That would be like me complaining that I don’t have enough fractals relics to buy a back piece, but ANet should give me one because I just started yesterday and it isn’t fair.

I am honestly flabbergasted by that post. Why on earth would you “play a thankless game for months”?? Seriously, why would you? There is something truly bent in your life if you need to play a video game that you don’t enjoy purely for achievement and progression versus other players. On top of that you made a horrible choice when you decided to get it from PvP in GW2 since ArenaNet has widely advertised that aspect of the game as trying to avoid things like gear grinds as much as possible. GW2 was supposed to be a game where the action itself was the primary reason for playing it.

There are LOTS of other MMOs out there with a heavy emphasis on progression and grinding. You sound like somebody who shows up on a tennis court and starts complaining that there aren’t any basketball hoops.

deracs.1762:

As far as PvE players being attracted to try WvW, I simply dont see it happening. Imagine a PvE type player, goes to WvW to do (insert pve objective here), gets there, is instantly ganked by thief, or run over by 5-10 players, and you will never see that player again. Now take same PvE player, joins into WvW follows the zerg, has some protection, sees a little action etc. maybe has some fun and gets into it so more. Just my view

I fully agree. PvE players that avoid PvP mostly do so because they don’t like PvP, not because they don’t know what it is or how fun it might be for the rest of us. The number of players who are likely to get recruited to PvP by watering down PvP in WvW would likely be very small, in my opinion. It’s not like players can’t jump back and forth between styles of play to have the best of both worlds.

Also, consider this. What do you get when you combine all of the most colorful and vibrant paints on the palette into one little pile? You get an ugly, muddy looking brown that appeals to no one.

Indo.8629:

It should be kills only, and yes it should be retroactive.

And no it shouldn’t be easy to gain ranks.

The realm rank system will also allow people even though they are losing to have a side goal.

No. No. No. No.

You need to do things before you post again. First, read the post above from Ljiona … he/she is spot on regarding the pitfalls of making these additional rewards too individualized instead of basing them upon overall success for the server. Secondly, fire up a free trial version of Rift and go play a few matches of Conquest. Note all the friction and arguing in chat among the members of the same team as some of them go for group objectives and the others go for individual objectives.

If ANet isn’t extremely careful how they handle this, it will absolutely ruin WvW for everyone … you included.

Ethose.5694:

The problem comes when the PvE doesn’t help the Realm score.

This … totally this.

I’m generally against any kind of PvE in WvW, but if done right it doesn’t have to ruin the game. For example, the dredge/frog/ogre camps are pure PvE when viewed as a standalone activity, but PvP fights do break out there when they are contested and having the dredge/frog/ogres on your side is a tactical advantage that supports the overall WvW objectives. If any additional similar content added to WvW was handled properly, in theory it could simply add extra layers to the strategies/tactics of the match.

Such “PvE” activities absolutely need to directly contribute in some manner to the overall server score, though. They cannot grant individual awards other than the usual XP, karma, etc that comes with any completed event, they need to directly contribute to the overall match effort, and they can’t overpower other aspects of the game. I’ve suffered under situations where PvE was mindlessly added to PvP, most notably in the large scale three-faction Conquest map in Rift. Players on the same team were constantly at each others’ throats there because of the competing motivations Trion built into that abortion.

As I said, I’m in the camp that would like to see such diversions kept to a minimum, but the real key is to keep EVERYTHING in the game focused on the same net result.

ParaldaWind.4523:

Eh, I like fight club better. You can tailor your gear more situationally in WvW than you can in sPvP.

Point taken.

There are lots of hacks readily available out there now that are ruining the game experience, some so blatantly obvious that the users clearly don’t care if they get caught. We have hacks to make you fly, hacks to allow you to travel under the map, and of course the various god mode hacks.

Three nights ago three level 80 and exotic geared server mates fought an elementalist for about five minutes who never took damage and who was able to continuously jump in and out of the same attunements with no cooldowns. Two nights ago I and a guild mate followed a solo warrior in WvW off a cliff that killed both of us but didn’t move the enemy’s health bar off 100% at all … ever. Last night I jumped a solo mesmer who literally and instantly one shot my 19.5K health to zero without it even showing up on my combat log (my toughness was about 1200).

I’m one of the least knowledgeable software people on the planet, but wouldn’t it be possible for the server to do some sort of client check randomly throughout the game to look for hacks? I don’t mean like a checksum that would take a lot of time … maybe something more like an initial file check and then a random byte check to see if anything had moved in memory that wouldn’t normally do so.

Oglaf.1074:

/love would be a very creepy emote

“X makes love to Y.”

Especially since you can target things like dolyaks …

That same Colin Johanson release also included this bit on sPvP:

“For those more interested in competitive PvP, we’ll be adding the core features required to truly make Guild Wars 2 shine as a competitive game—things like being able to watch other competitors and see major ranked matches to learn how to play better, the ability to host your own custom arenas to setup your own rules and host your own team practices, and visible places for everyone to see rankings of the best teams/players in the world. We also want to make it easier to play games against good opponents, and give the ability to compete in games where ranking matters quickly and easily. Of course, this also means down the road we’ll have major tournaments, prizes, and more to help drive the growth of this competitive PvP community along-side our less hardcore PvP players.”

So maybe there is hope that all the folks looking for duels and fight club activity will find it there instead of in WvW. I don’t expect that will dramatically affect WvW itself, but it would be a huge improvement for these forums to have the associated smack talk moved elsewhere.

DarthBenedict.3410:

I think culling has a lot to do with the zerg accusations. At the moment, any group of 3+ people could be 3 people or 40 people, and you don’t know until you’re in the middle of them.

I had a funny example of that a couple of nights ago. I and a few server mates had just successfully defended Speldan against a small group of Maguuma, and since we needed reinforcement supplies in Anz I ran after the yak headed in that direction in order to escort it. Just as I got to the yak it simply vanished. I stood there for at least three seconds trying to figure out where it went (I even started to run back toward the camp), whereupon a much larger Maguuma zerg blinked into sight right on top of me.

Monztor.9207:

1) I’m just wondering…was the first person you fought a Dagger/Dagger ele? If so that would explain the 1v3 situation where that person wouldn’t die or regen faster than he was taking damage. Would also make more sense if you and or your teammates weren’t actually on level 80 chars. Dagger/Dagger eles have some of the highest survivability, regen, mobility and dueling ability in the game. Lots of posts were made about Ele’s hacking, but if you’re upleveled and fighting a D/D Ele for the first time, its understandable. Keep an eye out for the usual opener of a lightning rush, into updraft, burning speed into flame circle + fire grab, earth knock down then churning earth move.

2)First of all, I’d like to mention for the jumping off the cliff situation, your Total Health Does Not Matter. Falling damage is percentage damage. I could be in a golem suit with 100k+ hp and drop from the same height as a glass cannon thief with 11k HP that would bring him down to half, and the golem suit would also be brought to half. Also, if was a necro….necros can pretty much jump from any height and not take a single bit of damage.

If your situation did not match either of these, then it may have been a hacker so next time try and make sure you have a button ready for screenshot to report.

The first suspect player was indeed an ele but there were three of us hitting her at once and only for a brief instant did her health ever drop below full bar over a period of at least four minutes. I and my guildmate were exotic geared 80’s … not sure about the third person. The thing about the ele was that she was switching between the same attunements with no apparent cd at all.

The second player wasn’t a necro. I think it was a warrior but I really didn’t check closely. Good point about the falling damage mechanism, though … I actually knew it was percentage based but apparently suffered neural lag when I wrote the post. This guy’s health bar never dropped below full even though that fall was huge (I clearly didn’t properly scope it out before I jumped). This is something he apparently likes to do a lot. My guild mate says he’s seen him standing in that same spot at the edge of the cliff before, and after we died my guild mate went back up there and caught sight of him again before he ran off.

So yeah … Prt Scr button at the ready.

Sorry to say this (because you seem like an earnest player), but all of the points you list are not problems with WvW … they are problems with the way that you or your guild/server are playing it. None of those items are issues if you deal with them properly.

ExZee.8109:

And it staggers me that you can’t come across the idea WvW was never designed for any specific playstyle, and as such people complaining about not getting good 5v5 battles is just as justified as people complaining about not getting good 40v40 zerg battles.

Try thinking before you type. Of course WvW was never designed for any specific play style, so why wouldn’t it occur to you that WvW might not offer the best opportunity for any specific play style … such as good 5v5 battles? Especially since arenas were designed specifically for that purpose.

And the preconception that classes aren’t supposed to be balanced in 1v1 as well as team play is even more staggering.

Now that truly is a clueless comment. There isn’t a single MMO in this world with multiple and highly disparate classes that has ever been balanced for both 1v1 and mass battles. It simply is not possible to reconcile all the possible scenarios and combinations of players without either drastically reducing the complexity of abilities for each class or making all classes much closer to being the same. If you don’t believe that you simply haven’t been paying attention.

Ashanae.9362:

MMOs are supposed to be balanced around team play not 1v1 duels.

It staggers me that so many players are incapable of understanding this. It’s even more astounding to me that players complain they can’t get good 5v5 battles in WvW when sPvP and arenas are available and were specifically designed for such play styles.

It’s rather amazing how blatantly some players have so openly turned to hacking for their jollies. I came across two of them last night in EB that not only couldn’t be killed … they never even lost health points. The first hacker was an ele who held off three of us at the same time, eventually killing two of us and almost killing the third (who finally escaped into a keep after it was obvious this was not a fair fight). The battle lasted several minutes and the hacker only dropped about 5% in HP for a brief moment once that entire time … the rest of the time he was at full health.

The second hacker was just standing near the cliff on the OL side of the hill between OL and Anz. I and a guild mate saw him there and went after him, at which point he jumped off the cliff. He landed near a third server mate who started fighting him, so I and my guild mate jumped down as well from a slightly lower height. We both instantly died from the fall. I had over 19K health and died, while the enemy fell from a higher height and never took ANY damage at all.

Both of these players were out solo in fairly isolated areas that weren’t even being contested at the time. They pretty obviously weren’t acting on behalf of their server so there’s no point in identifying it, but it’s pretty clear that there are some god-mode client-side hacks out there that pretty much ruin things for everyone.

Slamz.5376:

Wouldn’t the game be more fun without trebuchets?

No.

Some of the most exciting times I’ve had occurred trying to take out an opposing treb, either with “infantry” AoE or with other siege. Besides, trebs play a very strategic role and eliminating them would just narrow the scope of a game that already is probably too narrow.

Kaliron.4098:

The only other conclusion I can come to is if you want something you have to complain about it on the forums for it to get fixed

Regards

There may be exceptions, but as a rule that last part is rarer than badge drops.

testpig.5018:

Can we please keep this clean.

And bring back the focus to the WvW fight.

I fully agree.

-2nd place, and 3rd place servers(currently BP & DR ) need to stop attacking each other, and start attacking the team with the most control over the map.

Uhh … because that worked so well last time? I suspect that if either of us had the discipline and coordination to pull that off within our respective servers we wouldn’t need it in the first place.

I would really like to see this thread stick to actual WvW topics instead of being derailed by a handful of people doing a lot of 1v1 or 5v5 trash talking. There is, after all, an entire forum devoted to sPvP, including tournaments, which seems to me to be a more appropriate place for fight club activity anyway.

saiyr.3071:

Cactus.2710:

DR has learned a lot already going up against Mag

This is going to sound really, uh, inflammatory, but I’m not really convinced that’s the case…you guys make identical mistakes several times in a row from my experience. I think it would be better if you openly or privately discussed with Rebel, as he offered above, things you could do better. Saying you’ve learned a lot from us is nice, and maybe you personally have, but as a whole, I don’t really know. Maybe it is just a matter of letting it sink in throughout the server, but I am curious: what exactly would you say you’ve learned from us? I can’t resist saying that I hope you learned that walking 10 golems across an entire map is a bad bad idea.

Hhhmmm … I thought that I rather openly admitted that we don’t have great coordination yet, and certainly not from one map to another. I’ve actually agreed with many of your criticisms of DR in the past, but I think it’s a bit beneath you to characterize the entire server based upon particular examples. I’ve seen a couple of pretty illogical actions from occasional (even large) groups of Mag myself, such as attacking isolated and fully fortified objectives with no hope of success and no other apparent value (such as distraction or attrition). I assume that every server has their share of rogue players just out to have some fun or try something different, and while we may have a larger share than some it doesn’t mean that we all are the same.

Besetment.9187:

The above dialogue really belongs in private message.

I’m a little sad that DR and BP got the pointy end of the wvw population stick. I hope that our server culture doesn’t change too drastically, too quickly because I like that Maguuma has always been like one giant guild and Mags pubbies are my guild mates.

I don’t like competition blowouts so if DR and BP guys want help with server organization, comm structure and WvW tactics, I’m happy to help out. Its in nobody’s interests when the matches are not fair. This matchup is definitely not fair on DR and BP, who have nevertheless shown real heart against impossible odds.

Purely from my own perspective as a DR grunt, this is how things have seemed to go against Mag and BP:

1. DR and BP both gave Mag a decent run the first weekend, but once it was apparent that Mag was fielding a larger and more experienced team a lot of the more casual WvW’ers on DR seemed to lose interest and fade away. Even I can count dots on a map, and the only way we could keep from getting steamrolled was to consolidate forces in ways that strategically were less than ideal. Not sure what happened on BP, but the fact that I encountered them in fewer places on the map as the week wore on leads me to believe the situation was similar there.

2. Neither DR nor BP have adequate coverage around the clock, and Mag’s ability to take and fortify objectives during off hours is a significant advantage. For DR (or presumably BP) to take a major objective during peak hours, we again have to consolidate forces to the point that we mostly just become aggro for a large Mag rescue squad. Even if the battle itself happens to be more or less even, the objective is unlikely to flip sides. And even if it does change sides, it takes so little effort and resources to starve supplies that upgrading is pretty tough and it becomes easy for Mag to take back later … particularly during off hours.

3. After reset for the second week of this match up, I thought that DR rather significantly attempted to adjust its strategy and tactics for the better, but our numbers are significantly down and it has been really difficult to cope with that. It’s pretty hard for our commanders to formulate, coordinate, and implement any strategy to make the best of what they have to work with when what they have to work with is so variable and uncertain. Just to be clear, this is nobody’s problem other than our own … it simply speaks to where we are as a server. As you say, both DR and BP have shown serious flashes of heart, but it hasn’t been sustainable for either of us.

4. It seems that BP has had their own internal problems this week that have reduced its general effectiveness, and with that has come the ability for Mag to pretty much focus on whichever of us they may want to at their will. That flexibility is pretty powerful, as the current scores show.

Could we be doing better, even with what we have? Certainly. We still lack somewhat in overall coordination and communication, but DR has learned a lot already going up against Mag and in my opinion we’d be putting up a better fight if we simply had more consistent numbers even if they weren’t dramatically larger numbers.

Loading.4503:

I was thinking about a reward system that awards the server for not just winning but a reward system that would make people contribute to helping their server. Something like a ranking system within each world that keeps track of everything you do like kills, camp defends, wall repairs, etc and at the end of the week the highest person in each category would get a reward, I wanna say 100 gems, but knowing anet something more realistic would be …. Maybe…. >.> a gem shard where you can combine 4 to make 1 gem … -_-;

Just an idea to promote wvwvw and people actually contributing in a positive way

It seems to me that that is the opposite of what we need. If anything, WvW needs more organization and teamwork, not a lot of people out trying to get a bunch of individual awards that may or may not have anything to do with what might be needed at the moment.

Jomg.9061:

Tala.7638:

Jomg.9061:

It’s really boring to never see a true answers about siege weapon despawing, or do you guys at Anet dont even know how it works ?

MikeFerguson.8921:

Sure, I’ll spill dome details!

DonRobeez.3560:

- How does siege despawning work?

Unbuilt siege sites that are placed by players will go away if someone does not bring supply to them within 10 minutes. Anyone that adds supply to a site should reset that timer.

Completed siege weapons will despawn if they haven’t been manned for 30 minutes.

Why do we have to do this? Each weapon takes up some small amount of resources on the server because we register a few pieces of data for each weapon in the field. One thing we absolutely cannot do is remove the timer entirely or else we have a situation where someone can put down a ton of weapons that could potentially be around forever (or until matches reset) and it would start to cause bad things to happen to the server. We also use some placement restrictions to help prevent there being too many siege weapons on the field, I’ll explain those more in the next question.

It’s admittedly not an ideal system but it is something we are required to do to keep the game running as smoothly as possible. We’d like to make it more obvious that the weapons have some sort of despawn timer since it is a completely hidden mechanic, but we don’t have a way to expose that timer to players yet.

Fergy answered.

If you played a bit of WvW you would know that it doesn’t work like that most of the time.

True that …

Hymnosi.5928:

All of last night was Maguuma propping up Devona in EB.

It was exceptionally funny when we abandoned our slots on EB and went to maguuma BL, and a few groups of Devona followed us there to attack us as well, ignoring the entire map.

ho hum, I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but there sure seems to be some match manipulation going on.

It’s not manipulation just because you aren’t able to understand what’s going on.

Mich.3981:

saiyr.3071:

Owning our half of the map on both of your borderlands = 2v1?

lol. you can’t convince anyone that there isn’t an alliance between DR and MG. It has been made very obvious at this point.

Convince yourself of whatever you want, but I just spent the last six hours in EB and I was aware of pretty much all that was going on there because we had guild members scattered all over the map. At no time did we enter into any sort of alliance with Mag, and in fact at one point someone in BP offered to make an alliance with us (our commander declined).

Rhyis.7058:

You dudes need a server forum. You really do. You guys got more internal drama than any other server I’ve ever come across.

saiyr.3071:

This thread is so getting locked before the match starts.

Going for the record.

Well, you have to admit that it mostly comes from just a handful of players, publicly vocal about it they may be. The bulk of us simply want to play the game as best we can, and don’t embrace the drama any more than you do.

I’m not sure what’s happening here. All of a sudden we’re getting timely and useful feedback from ANet here on these forums. Any chance that Mayan calendar was off by a couple of weeks?

Obsidian.1328:

I can confirm the “max of 5 pieces of siege per 1000 unit radius” just from experimenting during long hours of the night.

Your numbers for finished siege despawn are off though. I’ve seen siege last hours and hours with no one touching them. Unfinished siege does seem to pop after 10 minutes though.

I understand the reasons for limits on siege numbers/placement/despawn time/etc, however, I think almost all players would agree 10/30 mins for unfinished/finished siege is way too short. Sometimes simply running to the camp to grab supply for it takes longer because of all of the random attacks on the camps/dolyaks/towers all over the map you are called to to defend.

With the limits to # of players/map/server, it’s impossible to man every defensive structure and still field a good size force to assault other camps/towers/keeps. We rely immensely on the various pieces of siege still being there when we have to run back into a tower under attack. With the current power of golems and superior rams, there simply isn’t time to build one before the doors are down.

As it stands now, the fact that a lot of siege actually remains in place long after someone touches them(except for trebs, they always pop) is probably the only reason W3 hasn’t succumbed entirely to a giant zerg-fest. Zerging requires almost no strategy. Defense, counter-attacks and supply management are the things which require a good amount of tactics and training. It would be sad to see them go.

^this^

/lots more characters

insanemaniac.2456:

Cactus.2710:

Catisa.6507:

it’s working as intended, nothing wrong.

It may be working as intended, but if you knew anything at all about the Glicko-2 system you’d recognize that it was never designed to be applied to tiered competition. It was designed for open field competitions like chess and tennis, and it was statistically invalid for ANet to have chosen it for WvW. Go look it up on WikiPedia if you don’t believe me. You don’t even need to follow the math … just read the description.

wrong. its designed for larger populations than 24. chess and tennis still have finite populations with a conservation of rating points law… they just have rather large populations. when you drive the population size down to a number you can easily comprehend, you run into weird cases like current tier 8 where matches become repetitive enough amongst all players so the lack of diversity translates into a positive feedback loop or a trap instead of a measure of skill. glicko isnt designed for 24. its designed for 1 thousand. or 1 million.

I’m not sure why you’re saying I’m wrong since I think we’re saying the same thing. The Glicko system was designed for competitions (and it was indeed specifically designed for chess) where everyone plays everyone else on a more or less regular basis … it falls apart when applied to tiered systems where competitors (servers in this case) might spend a significant number of their matches playing against the same two enemies. It loses contact with the other tiers even though it purports to rate teams in one tier against those in another tier. GW2’s implementation is also messed up in that it treats AvsB, BvsC, and AvsC within the same tier as if they were independent matches, which they most certainly are not. Lastly, the score for one server in one tier, for example, is influenced by their history in other tiers even though it may have been a long time since they were in that previous tier and radical population shifts may have occurred in the meantime. ANet can say all they want that this was the best implementation they could come up with, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t heavily flawed.

Syeria.4812:

orchid.4726:

Also, does anyone know how the wvw ratings are calculated?? I mean, precisely.

Yes

And if you carefully read that thread you will see several reasons why it’s a flawed system as applied to WvW.

Catisa.6507:

it’s working as intended, nothing wrong.

It may be working as intended, but if you knew anything at all about the Glicko-2 system you’d recognize that it was never designed to be applied to tiered competition. It was designed for open field competitions like chess and tennis, and it was statistically invalid for ANet to have chosen it for WvW. Go look it up on WikiPedia if you don’t believe me. You don’t even need to follow the math … just read the description.

Nuzt.7894:

So as a person that generally avoids PvE like the plague, what is it that people are doing in PvE to get said gold. I’m really curious, buying gems on a weekly basis is putting a dent in my bank account and if I could actually make some decent money in PvE then I might be tempted to spend at least a bit of time doing it.

The best bet, at least from my experience, seems to be to join with another couple of players to farm mobs and foraging mats in Cursed Shore. Roaming will net you lots of stuff, but there are also some events where tons of mobs will come to you for an extended period of time, and when that happens your bags will fill up quickly. It gets kind of boring, but it works.

Others have said that they can collect even more gold faster from farming certain dungeons, but I hate that whole mechanic and don’t do them.

Besetment’s post pretty much nailed it for me. I’ve been on DR since launch but I really don’t see the point of racing to Tier 1, or to be honest, even particularly striving for it. I play WvW for the simple enjoyment of aggressively competing in an environment where strategy and tactics, both large scale and small team, mean as much or more than simple head-banging 1v1 proficiency, and for that all I need is to be in a reasonably balanced tier. I want to win, and I want to win against competent competition, but I have sufficient validation elsewhere in my life that it doesn’t matter a lot to me which WvW tier I happen to do that in. I want to constantly get better, but I don’t need to constantly get bigger … they aren’t necessarily the same.

Instead of being critical we should be impressed that ANet was able to port the forum software over to an Atari.

wads.5730:

DR doesn’t lack numbers to compete in this tier, what they lack is experience, organization, and moral.

I never said we lacked numbers as a server, or even for WvW in general. But we have certainly lacked numbers actually playing WvW the last few days … and certainly at key times of the day/night. When I run all over EB and DR BL and can’t see many team mates anywhere on the map, and every time I attack anything at all I can count on anywhere from 8 to 20 enemy to respond, then indeed there is a numbers issue.

Please understand, though … I am NOT trying to use that as an excuse. We could indeed be fielding the numbers to be more competitive, and it is for sure our own fault where we don’t. And in spite of the fact that we do need more experience and organization (I was one of several DR who posted that we probably were not ready to move up from tier 6), when we field a decent force we are capable of much better than we’ve been doing lately. Is that a morale issue?? Probably.

Bad idea. Any suggestion that gives a trailing server the opportunity to more easily catch up does indeed penalize the leading server. How can you claim otherwise?

saiyr,

Yeah … we’ve taken a huge hit in the number of DR players in WvW lately, especially in our own BL. I personally prefer EB because of map issues, but the last two evenings I’ve spent quite a bit of time in DR BL just to see what I could do. Most of the players I came across were just hanging around our spawn, and I couldn’t even find people willing to snag a camp or two. I mostly amused myself killing yaks for a while, but even that wasn’t productive since most of the enemy held objectives were pretty much upgraded by that time anyway.

I suspect that many DR have given up for this week and will be back after reset, but it’s pretty clear that we don’t have the coverage we need to be serious competition throughout the week. It’s not necessarily a pure numbers issue, because as others have said we can mostly hold our own at times, but we certainly can’t do it around the clock.

In any case, I fully agree that cutting us any slack is not the way to fix anything. We either have to figure out how to cope with this tier or we don’t belong here.

Some advice for the OP:

1. You should have listened to those people who told you this thread was a dumb idea

2. The rampant use of random capital letters doesn’t make your decision look any smarter