Guild Wars 2

Step outside your biases and server location folks. Anet manually adjusted CD first, adjusting YB is just a continuation of that trend. Unless you made the same arguments when CD was adjusted then you’re being inconsistent.

Personally I don’t think Anet should be manually adjusting glicko. At best it will sometimes make things better, sometimes worse, but always at the price of someone else. And it will deny players/servers the agency of deciding the fate of those servers.

But until they get a more responsive glicko system(which is going to require a partial or full glicko reset/redesign) in place it is the only way they can help manage some of the imbalanced tiers and server match-ups that exist and are causing players to spend less time in WvW.

A large part of the reason the glicko wall between T2 and T3 exists is because Anet gave CD that 200 extra invisible glicko, which led to CD pulling glicko off T3 servers even when losing, and creating the glicko gap we see now.

Manually adjusting glicko has consequences. But until Anet gets an automated system that responds to dynamic changes in population rapidly it might be the best choice.

The “What-if” I want is a week where each character has only one life in WvW. Once that character dies they are locked out of WvW for the remainder of the week.

It would promote some toxic behavior for sure. But it make fights realllllllllyyyyyyy matter.

Thanks for the clarification on glicko/victory points Chris.

Do you think that overall the new system will allow servers to move more rapidly between tiers as population/activity change, or will it be semi-stratified and fairly hard to move tiers as in the old system?

So victory points is directly tied to glicko placement? Did Anet confirm this?

So right now in T2 NA Maguuma is winning in total score, but Jade Quarry is winning in Victory Points.

So who is actually the winner of the match-up if that continues to the end of the week, and how does that effect glicko gain/loss and tier placement?

I’d prefer them to merge the NA servers into three tiers and give them a full glicko reset at the same time.

And to actually try to spread the off hours people around these nine servers.

As to YB, it would be an interesting fight to see if FA or YB is stronger atm. Despite the rumors DK is not really back, hasn’t even tagged up this week so far. So SoS and SBI gain some ground during OCX and SEA time zones.

I like the bulk of the changes. But the new scoring system needs to be transparent and easily understood. And most importantly not be able to be gamed.

Also I think making upgraded objectives tick for more PPT is a bad thing that will lead to more blowout matches.

There should be other ways to promote defending your structures.

Messing with volatility and deviation is fine, but its only a short term fix. The longer term and better solution is an actual glicko reset where all that inflation that has occurred since the game launched is removed and the servers can start fresh.

During NA primetime EBG on YB is always queued. The organized guilds usually play the BLs instead of sitting in queue.

Wish we could get on EBG more often, but we can’t.

WvW works best when people care about the outcome of the match. When you feel that your contribution is important, and winning is valued.

So get rid of tiers, get rid of stale match-ups. Alter scoring so nightcapping and K-training don’t rule the day. And then let people fight.

API data tracking more accurately now, at least for the moment.

http://coveragewars2.com/death.php

T1 having significantly more kills/deaths than T2.

These numbers are not accurate. The API data is still not entirely fixed.

Before the PPK went in and borked the API data T1 was averaging between 30-50% more kills per week than T2.

Or do you really believe that T1 is only as active as T3-T4?

T1 in NA is still significantly more active than any other tier in NA, and once the API is back up and fully repaired, the numbers will show that.

You could get a small group of longtime WvW players, hopefully ones experienced in all aspects of WvW to pitch ideas and comment on Anet’s ideas. That would be good.

But once you start testing those mechanics and ideas you need full map queues of testers to really make sure things work properly. Maybe even a public test server for WvW. Otherwise you’re just going to get things like Oasis event that just don’t work when exposed to the rigors of WvW demands.

Who are “real” WvW guilds?

PPT guilds? GvG guilds? Roaming guilds?

A couple guilds were invited in to test PVE raid content early. But I have seen nothing to suggest that any guilds are being invited in to test new WvW content, what is your source?

There are plenty of problems with the DBLs, but primarily the problem is that WvW is dead, losing players every day. The remaining players in WvW don’t want to have to work to learn a new map, nor work to find fights or things to do. They want that stuff handed to them. Hence the queues on EBG down into the lower tiers.

At the small level, a few players per side defense v. attacking is about the same.

Once you get to higher population levels taking keeps is insanely harder than it ever has been due to all the upgrades, the stats boosts, the tactics etc.

Aaron.4807:

Caliburn.1845:

I like the idea of banners, but I do think they need to be nerfed. Primarily Dragon banner.

I would go about it like this.

1) Remove the defiance bar on all banners.
2) Make Moa instantly get rid of banners.
3) Make Continuum Rift not work with banner skills.
4) Reduce range, and increase CDs on Dragon banner.
5) Possibly make all banners melee range only.
6) Move the banner tactivation levers to a locate right outside their respective tower/keep.
7) Make the tactivation levers be able to be destroyed by a long multiple person commune(steal that mechanic from PVE).

Or ANet should do what they need to do and get rid of banners so guilds like yours with minimal fighting talent can stop thumping their chests when they double banner the whole map?

Eh? We’ve never double bannered. And chest thump? What are you rambling on about?

We’ve slotted a grand total of one dragon, one centaur, and three turtle banners in our entire existence. Mostly just to get a feel for what they do.

Question Gudradain, can you get/post the same sort of numbers from EotM? I am very curious how active that is compared to normal WvW.

I like the idea of banners, but I do think they need to be nerfed. Primarily Dragon banner.

I would go about it like this.

1) Remove the defiance bar on all banners.
2) Make Moa instantly get rid of banners.
3) Make Continuum Rift not work with banner skills.
4) Reduce range, and increase CDs on Dragon banner.
5) Possibly make all banners melee range only.
6) Move the banner tactivation levers to a locate right outside their respective tower/keep.
7) Make the tactivation levers be able to be destroyed by a long multiple person commune(steal that mechanic from PVE).

One of the reason almost no one cares about PPT is because there is no reason to care about PPT. Winning the week is meaningless. The only time you see any real interest is when a server is on the verge of moving up a tier, or down a tier. But the problem is only that server cares, not the other servers in that match-up, in general.

But do away with tiers, create a system that makes you want to win. Gives you an incentive to win. And keeps things from stagnating and locking into stale match-ups. People will play WvW more then, and they’ll care more about PPT too.

People going to WvW have more fun when they have people to fight.
People have more fun when matches are between fairly even populations with well distributed populations(ie no one side having overwhelming coverage advantages).

As already hinted at this is probably going to require the destruction of the “tier” system, and probably WvW servers as we know them.

About a year ago John Corpening was heavily involved in some of the CDI stuff. And he posted some interesting things about what direction he thinks WvW should go in. Then he got promoted to lead the WvW side and since then has been more or less silent.

This is not a coincidence. Anet has strict policies on the release of information. But I think if you want some hints at what he and the WvW team have been working on you should go read his posts from a year ago.

And you should understand that wherever there is a black hole of silence, it not because the devs hate us all, it is because their hands(or voices) are restrained by studio policy. Remember the silence before the announcement of HoT? The silence about WvW is the same situation.

I want something to aid attackers. Defenders got an almost endless list of new toys, abilities, and features. Attackers got almost nothing in return.

Attacking and defending is now way out of balance, and the Oasis, if implemented properly could help correct that.

First fix the lag it causes.

After that make it target one keep or tower of the winning side’s choice.

Then make it devastating. Every gate and wall regardless of level fully destroyed. Every piece of siege destroyed. Every upgrade(banners, tactics etc) destroyed. If someone wants to hold that objective, they’re going to need a defensive force in place to defend it and repair it.

I was in several of the betas. We talked directly to Tyler B since he was on map with us. We mentioned various problems we had, and he tweaked some minor stuff. But we were there too late in the design phase for him to effect any major changes to the map itself.

Add in to this, the WvW betas were barren. There were zergs running around when the streamers were doing their thing. After that it became a ghost town.

How can you beta test a map designed for groups of all sizes to fight other groups when you have no groups of any size running around for 90% of the test?

Tongku.5326:

False statement which is valid exclusively to your server and / or tier. Druids are a huge part of our meta.

Again guys, there are some decent streams left, watch them, adjust your builds to what you see. Also most of all your commander will need to adjust, this is of utmost importance as coordination and timing of abilities between druids is what makes or breaks it. You can watch some nice streams on weekends, perhaps not many right now cause holidays, but they are there.

And again I apologize for keeping things to myself, but until our meta is out from people figuring it out, we are keeping it to ourselves.

Since expack I’ve fought 125 scrim rounds, against 15 different guilds from NA tiers 1-5.

If there is some guild out there doing something cool with druids that is awesome. But it is apparently a well kept secret from most of us, and until this guild(s) steps up and begins wrecking the rest of us, I am going to be skeptical.

We’ve tried to make druid work in WvW and GvG, but overall it was lackluster. The guilds who beat us generally don’t use druids in open field or GvG. In the NA scene druids aren’t used really(except here and there experimentally). EU might use them, but I haven’t seen that in their videos either(the few I’ve watched).

I still think the class has potential, but haven’t seen anyone able to utilize it successfully yet.

It is just a trickle over from PvP, stuff like scrapper, druid, tempest? Maybe mallyx revs?

They’re very strong in small fights. If you’re running a zerk build, they’ll out sustain you, if you’re running a zerg build they’ll out damage you.

Which is fine with me, if people want to run classes and builds that are very strong in 1-5 man fights, good on them.

Naithe.4271:

- Oasis event lag should be fixed, BUT I think if fixed and kept, it should do more damage to doors or flat % damage regardless of upgrades. Make it worth it. As it is now, if Server A’s home border land is fully owned by Server A and Server A has presence on the map, even if server B gets the event won, it will barely scratch fortification. Also, you obviously split up in the event but it’s easier to split with 40 then 7!

In Beta I asked that Skysplitter destroy all gates fully regardless of level. And I still think that would be the best option.

Naithe.4271:

On the note of strategic structures, some people here get it, some do not. Try to assault a fully fortified, fully guild upgraded air keep with a ton of siege and equal numbers. They ALWAYS have the high ground, you’ll never get in. Like ever.

Yup, the game is way too heavily weight towards defense right now. Especially with bugged out waypoints. We haven’t even seen the tier 3 tactics used much yet. Or emergency waypoints, or the door ballistas, and all sorts of other stuff.

My own guild and I have been running on the desert borderlands 3-4 nights a week since HoT release. And we’re having a blast on it. The primary problem with the map is a lack of people. It isn’t the mechanics, or the geography, it is simply that people refuse to play on the map, which has led to EBG queues during primetime all the way down to T3 NA. It isn’t a perfect map of course, it has bugs and problems. But I enjoy it far more than EBG currently.

So lets look at your points.

1) The northern towers are strategically unimportant. Unfortunately that is not something that is easily fixed.

2) There are a lot of chokes, and pirate-shipping is a problem. But there are various ways to deal with it. Turtle banner is actually quite effective for pushing a hard choke.

3) The amount of ranged damage and CC is too high, it is not a good time to play as a melee.

4) I’m not terribly concerned about the cost of upgrades, but I can understand why smaller guilds find it difficult. The main problem to me is that the vast bulk of upgrades favor defense and defending. Add some upgrades that help with attacking to balance things out.

5) Small groups can actually kill keep and tower lords quicker than big groups. It is just a matter of getting to those lords. What needs to be adjusted is lord scaling from the number of BOTH attacking and defending players.

6) Just fix the lag when the Oasis event hits, and it should be fine. It certainly doesn’t promote zerging more than anything else in WvW. I’ve actually seen a lot of groups split into small groups to kill the creatures and move the cores faster.
As to your suggestions,

7) In regards to chokes, just get rid of the earth spikes that pop up everywhere. I’d be fine with that.

8) What do you suggest specifically? You’d need to nerf a lot of classes/weapons/abilities to bring melee parity with ranged.

9) Try killing a tower lord with 5, then with 30. Use a stop-watch, see which is quicker.

10) Shrinking the map is a pipe-dream, you’d have to change a bunch of hills, cliffs, walls and other things to bring the old SWT trebbing west keep, or NWT trebbing Garrison stuff back into the game.

11) I’d get rid of auto-upgrades myself, but slowing them down is a step in the right direction. Also need to find a way to make dolyaks relevent to strategy again.

There are a lot of assumptions being made about the megaserver or alliance system that are frankly silly. We don’t know the details of what Anet is planning.

All the loyalties tied to servers should be able to be moved to an alliance without too much effort, because all a server is, is a group of people tied together by a name they picked at server selection.

And Anet isn’t stupid, they’re not going to destroy the server communities without setting something up to replace it.

You might have to become Darkhaven Alliance instead of just Darkhaven or something, but adding a word shouldn’t be a big deal to a tightly knit community.

Factions, alliances, whatever it ends up being called will all depend on how it is executed. The devil is in the exact and specific details. And the stuff that was leaked on Reddit I doubt is even remotely close to what the actual changes will be.

It could revitalize WvW, or it could make it even more dead.

Considering how stale and dead WvW currently is, I’m willing to risk going to a new system. And I think Anet has had enough time to look over the system and cook up something new and better.

I know, I know, we’ve been burned before, but call me an optimist.

And for all you people worrying about server communities dying, don’t. Just turn your website from AnvilYakQuarry.com to AnvilYakQuarryAlliance.com.

Content in this or any game is tailored to a certain number of players. Not everything in GW2 can be done by one player. And it would be ridiculous for anyone to say that every dungeon, every world boss, everything in GW2 should be doable by the solo player. Or even duos.

You want a guild hall for two people? Go hire some mercenaries to help you clear the guild hall. Heck 10g and I’d be happy to come. And if you think hiring 10 players for a 100g to clear the guild hall is a burden, then I have news for you when you get to upgrading the guild hall later…

The Alpine BL was carefully designed with the ranges of trebs in mind. The Desert BL threw out those concerns. I have yet to see anything taken by trebs.

We mentioned the utterly pointless positioning of NET and NWT to Tyler during the beta when he was on the map with us, but it too late in the design phase for them to really do anything about it imo.

Honestly the WvW team really just needs to get the community involved in the design process much, much earlier.

Do any of you guys actually do WvW with your guilds, or command for your guilds? Every guild member who is repping is a yellow dot on your map with their name displayed. Being able to see how many people are missing from your stack, the exactly location of your pick team, the distance you are from various guild members. This is hugely helpful for any commander.

Plus, when you’ve been in a tier for a decent length of time you don’t need to see guild tags to know who you’re fighting, you can tell by how they manuever or the profile pictures of their commanders, or other indicators.

Exactly. The NA ladder is more stratified because GW2 has no Oceanic servers and at release had no Asian servers. The players from those regions for the most part played on NA servers, and over time they found themselves moving higher and higher as only a few servers had the off-hours coverage to compete.

Now we’re at a point where outside a guild here and there almost all of the SEA/OCX guilds are clustered in T1-2. If those players spread themselves out, the top four tiers of the NA ladder would be reasonably balanced. But it is not in the interest of the SEA/OCX players to scatter, because there is not enough of them to populate four tiers. And despite the meme that they only want to PVD, that is not true. They want to have people to fight.

Anything above 3 and you get alliances. 2 servers v. 2 servers. Which would be fun at some level. But the problem is that the stronger alliance wins.

The reason the 3 server system exists, and has worked this way in prior games as well, is so that does not become a direct heads up fight between two sides, in which the stronger side automatically prevails, and the weaker side has no reason to play. That third side, that wildcard, is important.

The final numbers and tweaks to the elite specs are still in flux, so this may change, but after experimenting with the various specs in GvG and open field I know what my guild will likely be using.

All necros will probably be reapers.
All engis will be scrappers(we expect nerfs on that spec though), very OP right now.
Will likely have 1-2 druids for focused frontline healing and support.
No daredevils.
No berzerkers.
No Dragonhunters(although if their numbers keep getting tweaked up, might see them used in a limited gimmicky fashion in gvg).
Revenant possibly replacing a few of my guardians in a support frontline build.
Tempest will not be used most likely.
All our mesmers will likely go chronomancer.

SBI has near zero organization internally, so the idea of us coordinating anything with MAG is laughable, when we can’t even coordinate stuff on our own server.

As far as the win trading, that is up to MAG’s EU people for the most part. If MAG doesn’t try for a week that week will be won by SBI because of SBI’s Korean and SEA population. If MAG EU tries(note the MAG wps on SBI BL from time to time now) then MAG can win.

It would be nice if another two or three guilds went to CD to balance things out.

Thanks Colin, this is a great change.

Even in this early limited form, I am really looking forward to this. Been waiting for over three years for added commander/squad functionality.

What is the reasoning for time-gating the Guild Arenas behind two months of upgrades? A basic arena available as soon as you acquire your guild hall, similar to how guild missions will be available immediately, seems more in-line with the way other features allow for immediate or near immediate access.

As already noted a winner-up/loser-down system would create blow-out match-ups every single week.

It would make matches less stale, but at the price of massive one sided weeks.

What is needed is a Glicko reset, perhaps every year or six months to get rid of the inflated scores of the upper tiers. This would automatically create more varied match-ups and allow more rapid mobility as servers gain or lose population, because you’re not beating your head against the hoarded glicko points that each of the bandwagon servers dragged to T1 then deposited there when they fell.

I love the recognition that guilds are important and giving us more options and decisions to make while defending.

But, I think that in a vacuum all of these upgrades and abilities skew things too far onto the defending side. It is already very tough to take a T3 tower or keep that is defended competently. With these upgrades it might be near impossible.

So my question, is there a set of upgrades or abilities coming for the attacking side? Something to even the odds?

For example defenders get an emergency temporary waypoint, perhaps give the attackers a temporary waypoint jammer?

It feels like the defenders get to play Chess with all these choices and abilities while the attackers are playing Checkers still, “See gate! Attack gate!”

Unfortunately to pull glicko off the orphan T1 server we’d probably need Mag and SBI or CD in T2.

Which isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

^The bulk of OCX and SEA players play on NA servers instead of EU. What this has meant for NA is that servers who can beg/borrow/buy those guilds to their servers have a coverage advantage and over time have all become the top of the NA ladder based on that overnight coverage.

If purely looking at NA primetime coverage the top 9(or so) NA servers could compete with one another on a relatively(very loosely)even footing.

The night part of the diurnal cycle on the desert BL is pretty dark and very atmospheric, and adds a different feel to the map when playing at night. However has any thought been given to making night more relevant to gameplay?

Stuff like lowering the draw distance on enemy players, lowering the agro range on guards/npcs. Perhaps making the shrines act in different ways.

Or even removing the name plates from enemy players during the night.

Hardcore Week please!

Every character gets one life in WvW(ressing disabled).

Make it a survival game.