Guild Wars 2

When the game came out even lower tier servers(but this was before there was as much server stratification of course) had queued maps during certain hours of each day. Even servers down in tier seven or eight.

When the new map comes out, you will see an influx of new players in WvW, and the game in general. For a couple weeks, maybe a month or two server populations will be in radical flux.

The lower tier servers able to best welcome and encourage those new incoming players will thrive. The servers that just roll over and hope for some “mega-server” fix will stay at the bottom.

Couple of points. First, the reduced queue size I feel is between 60-70 players a side. Evidence? Just a lack of seeing truly massive blobs lately. And watching how many guilds can fit on a given map.

Second, ANet can throttled the population in WvW, they’ve admitted to doing this, so any hard count you get in WvW can change at any time.

Third, we know from places like Teq and Silverwastes that when the breach happens, or Teq spawns, there is a brief window where you can often get into a full instance. So while most people want to think there is a hard firm number on any given map, I think it is more flexible number and based on resource allocation and server hardware that ANet is not particularly keen to show us.

I have exactly this same problem since the last patch. Would love any advice.

One of the biggest things I noticed about Stronghold is how different it is with a pre-made team compared to pugging it up. I played probably around 15-18 games with guildies tonight, usually against enemy pre-made teams, and two-three times against tourny players.

None of these games went to timer, none even came close to timing out. If there was a mid-fight the team that won the mid-fight won the game. Later in the evening people were getting a little more experienced and began using staff eles with sandstorm as the premier defensive players. But even that was a questionable use of resources when more often than not the five man rush when executed properly would still win.

At the end of the night I pugged game or two and was exposed to the O/D/S meta people were developing without the use of voice-coms. And while it makes sense, it is entirely different than what organized teams are doing, and as evidenced by the people in this thread complaining about games timing out, very ineffective.

This event and the superweapon could be bad for weaker servers and it may not be balanced properly.

But I still think it is a step in the right direction, namely getting people out from behind walls and fighting other people while forcing people not to blob up so heavily.

It could result in all sorts of problems, but at least ANet is willing to try something new, and that is good.

Add in friendly player collision. When you touch a friendly player you both get knocked down.

I’d like to see blobs play with that.

Yes, the T1 servers are where they are because they have more people and stronger coverage, but do you think those people just randomly appeared on those servers? Those servers bought guilds and players, paid for them to transfer. Then other people saw that those servers were more organized and serious about wvw and decided to transfer to those servers as well.

Give you a break from what? The idea that people spend thousands of hours and thousands of real world dollars to influence their server? I’m not saying it is a good or bad thing, just that it happens.

Do you think that the servers in the top tiers of WvW just magically landed there? There are structural reasons for those servers to be there, and often those structures were aided or created by community leaders.

Server leaders are the community organizers who can influence how WvW is played on their servers. They are usually guild leaders, officers, popular pugmanders, or owners of various infrastructure(server TS/websites etc).

They are not elected generally, nor have any real power other than what the community grants them.

They are also incredible important. For example I cannot think of anyone more significant to BGs success in WvW than Choc Pudding, even though I never saw him tag up or lead anything in WvW proper. He just moved behind the scenes to influence events.

Make scoring dynamic(player driven), add in substantially improved rewards(better than anything in PVE), and watch the coverage and server stacking issues disappear and hence cycle back to help fix the scoring issues.

How do you make scoring dynamic? There are lots of possibilities. Make kills worth some points. Make stomp kills worth more points. Make kills with bloodlust worth more points. Make kills with bloodlust, and outnumbered buff worth even more points etc.

Make every dolyak substantially tougher and maybe a bit slower. Make them worth FAR more points, and finally make them move from a camp only when triggered by a human player.

Make all structures more dynamic. Allow players to open the gates(or whatever you want to call it). The structures are thus vulnerable to enemy attack, but score more points when dolyaks or other events happen around said structure. These options are unavailable when the enemy on said map are outnumbered.

Make more dynamic triggered events worth points. Say for example a Centaur raid on all three southern supply camps, if successful and able to return home it would be worth a large amount of points.

Add something like the old orbs back into the game, only instead of giving stat bonuses it gives your server points. But it eats away at whatever structure it is placed inside of, meaning it has to move homes every few minutes.

Create all sort of events and mechanics for scoring that are visible from the map and draw people into objective based fights outside of walls. Open field warfare for points. Create enough of them so that map blobbing is no longer an optimal strategy. To aid this process take waypoints out of all keeps, and perhaps add a 60 second(or whatever) death timer. This will make the maps seem much larger, and moving around will require more strategy.

The current scoring paradigm in WvW is something around 70% of points from holding structures, 30% from kills/dolyaks/sentries. Change this to something like 20% from holding structures, 80% from dynamic player triggered decisions and choices.

Make the better rewards only better when fighting enemy players or enemy triggered events. This is will help create an incentive not to be on a massively stacked server. You would actually get better rewards when fighting larger enemy forces, instead of taking an empty enemy keep.

Add me to the “like” Skyhammer side. Having to alter my weapons, utilities and traits for max effectiveness is good. The damage on the cannon could be nerfed a bit, or perhaps made dodgable.

But other than that the map is quite good. And should be played in team queue.

Bump for great justice.

Leave downstate as it is.

BUT introduce various new skills and fields that interact with downed state.

1) “Death” field aoes, you go down when in one of these fields and you die die, no downed state.

2) “Anti-rally” field aoes, long duration, if you’re downed inside it no rally for you(nice counter to warrior res banner and other res skills as well).

For example.

You want to stop hammer trains? Let’s handicap zerging as well, I like killing two birds with one stone.

Two words,

“Player collision”

Do it Anet! Do it!

WvW is not akin to whatever professional sports league you want to draw an analogy to. Even the worst team in the NFL can beat the best team. Upsets happen.

But in WvW it is not about skill, or luck, or clutch plays. The outcome is determined by numbers and coverage, pure and simple. Of course the servers with the best 24/7 numbers went 7-0 during the season in their respective brackets. This shouldn’t be a surprise.

With that said, if you have servers matched closely enough(SoR/JQ/BG league week 1) inter-server politics can be the deciding factor. Unfortunately this sort of balance is rare and hard to maintain.

Crazy Friday, each character only has one life. You die, that toon is locked out of WvW for 24 hours.

Play smart, WvW just became hardcore.

I could vote for a field commander, the GW2 version of a Rommel or Patton. I’ve seen plenty of good ones.

But to me the best commanders are the ones who work behind the scenes, giving the server the optimal chance at victory, making sure the guilds all pull together and with as little friction as possible. An Eisenhower or Epaminondas type creating the conditions for victory.

To me that person on Blackgate is Choc Pudding.

Blackgate would win due to coverage.

But a six hour exhibition match(say from 6pm server time until midnight) would be interesting. If all three servers could maintain full queues on four maps for all six hours, it would be a test of quality instead of coverage quantity.

Anet did not create the disparity, they just allowed people to transfer to other servers. Eventually all serious WvW players migrate to those servers seen as “serious” about WvW.

Why should anyone serious about WvW have to play with people who do not share that mindset?

It creates enormous population imbalances. But it is driven by player choice, and Anet giving the players the freedom to transfer.

There isn’t a particularly good solution to the problem, unless you want to ban server transfers entirely.

We had an Anet programmer in teamspeak with us a few nights ago(he was playing a thief on our map). He mentioned that in the last patch they cleaned up the way health was being calculated in WvW. Apparently it was more complicated and hogging more server resources than it needed to.

Good job whoever was behind it.

All this talk of coverage, and numbers, and morale is interesting. But I think it leaves out a crucial detail. When we see wild fluctuations in PPT within the same time zone over consecutive days, it implies that key-leaders are playing, or not playing as the case might be.

BG has many commanders of differing strength and fame, but it doesn’t feel like we have any dominant ones. Do SoR and JQ talk about specific BG commanders? On BG, we know when we’re facing Tarkus, Wrex, Waha etc. They pull big numbers. When those commanders do not show up for a day or more, we see it reflected in PPT, and we see it on the battlefield as SoR and JQ forces seem less focused and effective(and numerous).

I think this is the true lesson we should take from season one. Do not place the burden of success or failure on just a few key commanders. Spread that responsibility out. BG has a seemingly more decentralized command structure, and our numbers night to night are mostly constant because we’re not drawn in to follow this or that charismatic commander.

If JQ/SoR could transfer enough players to Mag/SoS to make BG take second or even third in week six, it would be the most spectacular logistical and strategic feat ever seen in GW2.

Have No Faith In Me.1840:

BG and JQ:

Why do your guilds always blob around in 80 man tri-guild+pugs blobs?

Plzrespond.

Unfortunately, due to the small size of maps, and the speed with which people can move around this is the most effective tactic.

One or two five man havoc teams, a few scouts. And every single other body stacked together.

It would be nice if say for example three 20 man stacks running around worked as well as one blob. Sadly it does not, in most situations.

There is a very famous military maxim often attributed to Omar Bradley but perhaps dating from Clauswitz or earlier, “Amateurs think tactics, professionals think logistics.”

We all spend gold on upgrades, superior siege, consumables. Yet using some of that same gold to help allies move to a server is somehow dishonorable? That is an interesting imaginary line to create. Particularly when I know that at least one SoR posting in this very thread had their way paid to join SoR.

Every serious WvW commander knows that it isn’t tactics or skill that win a week long match-up. It is coverage. Did you honestly expect Blackgate to sit around and do nothing as JQ/SoR flip our T3 keeps and gain easy points during SEA/EU? We had a massive coverage gap. ZD helps to fill that hole.

We didn’t expect it to crush the spirit of SoR in one fell swoop.

Neither Anet nor the player base in WvW is ever going to put up with gating populations, or forcing people to play certain ways or valuing the time of certain players in WvW less than other players. So long as players can transfer servers whenever they desire, and play with whoever they desire we will never have population balance. The hardcore WvW players want to play with hardcore WvW players. Various nationalities want to play with people who speak their language. And those factors will always cause imbalance.

What Anet can and should do is change the way you score points in WvW. Instead of looking for an unguarded objective to take and gain PPT, points should mostly be scored when you have an actual enemy to fight.

For example, killing an enemy player, scores a point for your server. Killing an enemy player while you have the outnumbered buff, two points for your server. Killing an enemy while you have bloodlust buff and outnumbered, even more points. Make taking a tower or keep almost worthless, unless it is defended. The more heavily defended it is, the more points it is worth.

And tie the point value into the level of rewards(karma/coin/items) you get. You fight harder more outnumbered fights, you get better rewards(you can always add in some titles or something).

Overhaul the scoring and reward system to favor even or outnumbered fights, and you will see the population imbalances start to fix itself.

Doomdesire.9365

If you’re talking about how you guys lost your bay last night, I don’t have any regrets. BG golem rushed SoR hills in that map 3 times within 30 minutes, while JQ was hitting north hills. JQ would hit our north hills, and BG would hit south or lake tower. SoR was getting double teamed hard, however we did what was appropriate and defended in a smart manner. Eventually JQ got bored and hit BG, so we had had time for revenge. IIRC what screwed BG over was the fact that they took all the supply for the golems in their bay to 2v1 SoR…oh how that backfired on them. The irony….

No supply inside Bay was used to build those golems. And BG was attacking SoR Hills on JQ bl while wearing the outmanned buff with the intent to pull one of SoRs two main float forces onto the map.

What screwed BG over was JQ finally realizing BG was enormously outnumbered on the map and taking advantage of it.

The problem with zergs is simple.

A player in a zerg does not feel important or significant.

This turns many, many people off of WvW, especially when they can do the PVE zerg thing and recieve far better rewards.

I’m enjoying the oceanic hours of this match-up greatly. DB still doesn’t have a single guild that fields more than 15 during oceanic, so we have to be careful about picking fights with TS, ART and whichever other oceanic SoS guilds are rolling around.

Every night it is the same thing, stall the SoS oceanics long enough for DBs SEA guilds to log on and reverse the population balance.

It is fun fighting outnumbered when we know that our Asian friends are coming over the hill like Gandalf and the Rohirrim.

Potentially good idea, but depends entirely on how it is specifically implemented.

The differing WvW populations are the big problem, but they could start to be fixed if the WvW team is creative enough. One method would be simple. If you transfer mid-season to a HIGHER ranked server you are locked out of WvW for the duration of the season. If you transfer to a lower ranked server you can still play.

Or, even harsher(and better imo) just lock transfers entirely for every server that wins its league and season. Meaning that the next season that server will be facing servers that are potentially stronger, while the winning server remains exactly the same(weaker in practice due to attrition).

What absolutely cannot work is just allowing certain servers to win each respective league and get stronger each repetition. That would lead to even more staleness and boredom in WvW.

ParaldaWind.4523:

I think that the recent popularity of GvGs in NA is in a large part due to ACs.

It is one factor, but only a minor one in my opinion.

More significant factors are easy to spot;

1) We know who is going to win each match-up at the start of a week(with the sometimes exception of T1).
2) No drive to push harder, since the RNG roll will determine who we fight next week, not our performance. Player’s agency in their fate is removed.
3) We’ve all taken hundreds or thousands of towers and keeps.
4) Everyone who plays WvW for any amount of time knows that numbers and coverage win.

All of these factors put together force people to recognize one conclusion, “WvW is not, and has never been(even before buffed-ACs) a competitive game mode.”

Everyone who spends long hours in WvW want it to be competitive. And since Anet is not making any moves to foster a competitive environment, players have taken it upon themselves to do so in the form of GvGs.

-Lag fixed.
-Down state removed from WvW.
-AoE cap removed from most damage spells.
-Getting hit by a treb results in instant death.
-Orbs returned to the game. They now grant 10PPT, but will rapidly destroy the defenses and structures of any building they are placed in.
-Slight tripod added to ballistas rising its firing height.
-Arrowcarts are now line of sight.
-Unique skins and items attainable only in WvW.
-More attainable WvW achievements and titles.
-Greek Fire added to WvW vendors. Grenade kit equipable by all professions. It creates an uncurable damage dealing condition that increases and spreads exponentially based on the number of enemy players stacked in tight proximity.
-A system of complex tunnels has been discovered underneath the borderlands that accesses all the keeps and towers on the map. Only ten players per server are allowed in the tunnels at a time due to risk of tunnel collapse. Traps, chokepoints, gates, canyons, and darkness await anyone brave enough to venture downward. But if strong enough they might resurface in an enemy keep.
-WvW match-ups now offer substantially greater rewards to the winner server.
-Extensive statistics tracking added to WvW. Including man-hours played by server. WvW kills by server. WvW deaths by server. Number of siege equipment deployed by server. Average player lifespan on server.
-New rewards added for guilds that upgrade and hold structures for longer than 12 hours.

Dev team?

After the “WvW Patch” where Habib turned things over to Devon it seems pretty clear that dev resources focused on WvW were diverted to other things. Hello four Living Story teams.

I like Devon, he’s pretty open with us, and his post a month or two back showed that he understands some of the core problems that are wrong with WvW.

But I think he is stuck in a dank corner at A-Net totally alone, with a lopsided desk propped up on a phonebook, with a solitary flickering lightbulb to light his workspace.

Every morning he walks into his cubicle past the dozens of happily humming Living Story designers and flips on his computer. Desperate to provide even one line in the patch notes related to WvW he opens notepad and starts doodling, “Building upgrade mastery” upgrades cost 5% less, “Dolyak Slayer mastery” take 10% less damage from dolyaks…

I don’t blame Devon, he’s been given a thankless job with apparently zero resources.

I just wish A-Net would wake up, and realize what every other MMO has realized at some point. WvW/PvP populations are small compared to PVE, but they are vocal and important. When you lose that population, the PVErs start to look around and think to themselves, “Why do I need cool skins, when there are no 70 man zergs to run around with and show off?”

Anet isn’t going to force people to move to different servers, they might incentivize moving, but never force it. BG and SoR seem stable. FA/DB can’t influence things. The folks caught in the middle are JQ and TC.

Eventually the populations are going to shift and one of those two servers will come out on top. What form will that take? Guilds getting bought by other servers, people just getting annoyed and stop playing WvW, influx of players from lower servers, some mix of all three probably.

As countless others have already pointed out there are no even match-ups in T2 of NA with the current state of the top six NA servers.

Some have suggested FA and DB need to get stronger. This is unlikely, a shrinking WvW population base(despite what Anet thinks) will continue to migrate upwards to a decreasing number of servers.

The quickest and most probable way to bring balance to the upper tiers of NA is to make TC or JQ weaker. Moving some of JQ’s Asian guild to TC for example, would allow TC to compete better in T1, while at the same time creating a more even playing field in T2 between FA/DB/JQ. Or alternatively send some of TC’s NA guilds over to JQ to allow JQ to compete more evenly in T1.

So long as TC and JQ are relatively balanced, none of us in T2 are going to have as much fun as we might like.

Joseph Stalin once said, “Quantity has a quality all its own.”

This is almost always the case in WvW.

I would love if there were a mass exodus to lower servers, it would greatly improve the WvW scene in NA.

But I keep a close eye on my home server Dragonbrand, and the 6-7 other top ranked NA servers. We’re still gaining more people from lower tier servers then the few we are losing. The WvW population in general is continuing to migrate upwards and onto fewer and fewer servers.

BP to the best of my knowledge received a transfer guild or two recently, which probably helped boost morale and get even more numbers on the field. But I think overall this is an aberration and not indicative of the higher servers losing people.

The only time all four maps are queued on DB are for three hours immediately following reset. At any other point in the week you can get in.

I was in those queues myself, but they are predictable as clockwork. Go do some spvp, watch a movie, read a book. I spent my time doing that Hunger Games minigame.

pot.6805

Bugged tower gives 960 points per day.

True. But incomplete.

Two somethings walk into that tower every five minutes if left unmolested. They are worth 3 points every time they do.

2×12×3x24=1728 per day

Add 960, and you’re at a maximum of 2688.

With camp raiders and dolyak snipers this number never actually happens, it is purely a theoretical maximum.

BG certainly has the best numbers and coverage in this match-up.

But the score(BG up about 40k at this point) leaves out certain specific details.

DB over the weekend spent a vast amount of our limited off-hour numbers holding SoR bl’s bay keep for several days. Add in the tower and nearby supply camps and dolyaks, and that sapped between 10-15k points from SoR(Assuming SoR had taken and held it generally from reset night onwards).

Second, the bugged SE tower in BG bl along with dolyak deliveries there gives up to 2700 points a day.

Taken together, these two factors would peel roughly 20k off BG’s current lead if neither had occurred.

So while BG would still be in the lead, it would not be quite so far in the lead.

NNK and TFV fight hard, but don’t have quite the numbers they used to field. As of 5am pacific today we have outmanned in all three borderlands, and not even close to a queue in EBG.

Had an interesting extended 4v4 mirror fight with the STAR guild, two thieves, guardian, and mesmer on each team. Followed by a more messy 5v5ish fight with HB.

Which guilds should I be looking for on BG and SoR that roam in numbers under 10?

How you count WvW participation is a good question, which is why I hope Anet will release some information about it.

Which is worth more? 10 players playing for 1 hour, or 1 player playing for 10 hours?

I think the number of players putting ten, twelve, eighteen hours a day into WvW have definitely dropped. But maybe the number of players jumping into WvW for an hour or two a night have made up for it.

Colin Johanson made an interesting claim in his latest blog entry.

“WvW population has been rapidly on the rise since January.”

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

If true, this is great. And I would like to ask Anet to release those numbers and metrics to the public. We would love to see them.

But assuming these numbers are accurate, does this jibe with our own experiences? I’ve put thousands of hours into WvW, played on four different NA servers, talked to players on most of the other servers(I am ignorant of the EU WvW scene however). I’ve watched guilds leave the game, guilds merge into other guilds, leaders quit, players quit. And yes, there is a constant stream of new players and guilds coming into the game to replace them. But not enough to make up for the losses.

Without concrete numbers it is all subjective of course. None of us play every hour of every day, none of us can be everywhere at once across all the maps. But it often feels like playing on a high ranked NA server today has fewer players in WvW than a low ranked NA server did before Christmas.

What say you? Do you believe WvW player populations are increasing?

kerona.3465

Pretty sure I got ran over by a 5 man WE DB roaming group while escorting yaks less than an hour ago. Was ready for 1v1 or 2v1 but 5? o wells.

You were escorting the dolyak on YB bl coming out of SE camp I assume?

Yeah, we took no pride in that. 5v1 is just silly.

We did however find a 3v3 against SWAG and a 6v6 against VR which were more fair.

Still haven’t lost to any of the roaming groups on Mag or YB, but the better groups can fight us to a draw and disengage. Most Mag and YB roaming groups seem to run with mesmers and thieves which allow them to disengage, whereas I am usually running with heavies. Once we’re in, we’re all in.

Blobbing is a problem. A problem that we as players largely created. At least as far as the NA scene goes.

Since the release of GW2 players and guilds have been transferring off losing servers to better servers. In the vast majority of cases players transferred to servers of near the same tier or a higher tier.

As months passed WvW guilds started transferring to servers for “the fights”, and the often unstated reason of recruitment(WvW guilds need new recruits which are hard to find on servers that don’t WvW). This trend just sped up the process of consolidation of WvW populations onto a few servers.

I’ve been playing since release, I started on Darkhaven, at the bottom of the ladder more or less. I met a lot of people, and keep in touch with a lot of people. 90%+ of the people and active WvW guilds I knew on low tier servers are now stacked on the top 6 NA servers. This process is still continuing, and by the end of summer (barring some sort of internal schism) JQ, SOR, BG will have picked up even more players, and no other server in NA will ever be able to compete. And blobbing will be a problem for the top three servers alone.

The problems of blobbing, and the lag that goes with it go hand in hand with we the players having stacked a handful of servers.

It would be nice if Anet introduced some in-game mechanics to deal with blobs, and beefed up their servers to handle the lag. But the far more viable solution is to somehow incentivize de-stacking the servers and spreading the hardcore WvW players out across all servers. Blobbing and lag won’t matter at that point.

Relax~

we are only tiny guild with 13 member trolling around WvW, most of us plays at SEA time
and from my information WE isn’t going anywhere…..

As WE’s GW2 leader, I can confirm this, we’re not interested in moving to tier 1 at the moment. We’ve had offers from SoR, , BG and TC, which is strange considering we’re just a 5-10 man havoc squad type force most nights.

We’re just a tiny little guild, and after eight or nine months of zerg fighting many of us are more interested in small WvW fights or SPvP.

The best part about orbs were the dynamic open field fights they created. Chasing down the orb carrier, running it back to your own keep etc. Once they got inside a fortified keep it just became boring.

With that in mind I would look to enhance that dynamic.

First, the orb carrier can only move at a walk.

Second, when the orb is in a keep, it cannot by upgraded. After a few minutes the orb begins to degrade any already present upgrades, as well as damaging the walls and gates. After about an hour or two all gates and walls collapse, all upgrades are gone. An orb could only stay in a keep for say 30 minutes before its aura goes to work degrading the keep.

Which means you have to keep moving it to different keeps. And moving it in the open gives the other side some opportunities for good open field fights.

The most striking thing about EBay that I have noticed is a much higher percentage of rangers(all using the aoe root elite). I have never seen any server run so heavy on one class, except maybe FA with elementalists(which has faded in recent days).

Why do so many players on EBay love rangers? Is there some sort of meta-strategy involved, some sort of server decision to play more rangers? Or is it just random chance?

Short answer no. So long as players get to pick their servers, and transfer as they desire, there will never be balance.

More complex answer, the question doesn’t even matter anymore.

1) WvW populations across the game is dropping.
2) With the random factor in match-making and tiers no longer truly existing, there is no particular reason to push hard to win. Because next week will be some roll of the magical Anet dice, and a new match-up. You can’t effect the outcome.
3) Hardcore WvW guilds do not care about PPT or playing to win. They play for the fights, and to play against the best other WvW guilds.
4) Over time every guild that takes WvW seriously migrates into higher and higher servers, looking for better fights.
5) By the end of this summer almost every major NA WvW guild will be on the three top ranked servers, trying to keep WvW alive and interesting. You’ll see a lot of guilds disbanding, and a lot merging into other guilds as a by-product of this.

Possibly there will be some sort of balance in the lower tiers, but it will be a balance of most empty WvW maps(already is you could argue).