Guild Wars 2

Desolation is not doing that well in the current Gandara vs Deso vs Underworld match up, but Underwold is really the server which is getting beaten. Note that all three servers are very high. It just that Gandara has the highest WvWvW population and largest amount of WvWvW guilds right now.

About tools to rally players from pve to WvWvW. Well, the rewards per hour of play should be made more equal for pve farming vs WvWvW. It would still require a lot of work: train new commanders, form new guilds, teach people basics of WvWvW, who have rarely ever done it, organize co-operation between new guilds and so on. Desolation did that after the Spring 2013 Mass Exodus. We managed to bounce back, but it also lead to burnout of many top WvWvW players and commanders. I think a sustainable bounce back is only possible with large external transfers and Desolation hasn’t had them for ages.

Harm.

It is alt unfriendly. Lacking the WXP traits on your alt, steers players to play just one character, which is bad for the longevity of the game, as people tend to get bored fast with just one character.

The WXP traits are also too powerful. Originally they were just +1 to +5% more damage or reduced incoming damage by max. 5%, but now they have went totally overboard. Many siege related WXP traits practically double the effectiveness of that siege weapon or make it even more powerful. Some added siege capabilities are really powerful and I am still afraid what the upcoming golem mastery will bring us. The guard leech and applied fortitude are huge stat buff. The latter gives 2500 more vitality.

Despite my main character has those guard leech + applied fortitude + many other WXP traits, I wish WXP traits were either completely removed from the play or severely toned down. For example the current 25% added damage is a lot or 1.5 radius (2.25x area!), make it more like +10% added damage or 1.25 bigger radius (56.25% larger area).

Even before the mass exodus #2 and Desolation being still rank #3, Desolation was several times enjoying outnumbered “buff” against much lower ranked servers e.g. Gandara. It just tells that the so called mid-tier are not that empty.

Desolation was ranked so high because we had a night capping team, which is still a rare thing in EU. A lot our players were playing crazy hours and getting a burn out, especially several commanders and key players from DVG. Such cannot continue for months. The points we ticked at night really set the score. Now that night capping team, DVG, is at Piken Square, current EU rank #2, soon rank 3.

To my knowledge AFTL, Coin, DVG, FG, TeQ and War have left Desolation for other servers. That is a total of 6 guilds. Some of the above mentioned guilds are small e.g. AFTL and Coin, but very high quality. E.g. Coin went to BG (top NA server) and AFTL to their nemesis SoR (another top NA server). DVG and FG are big. I have been in contact with some of the ex Deso players and some are actually missing Desolation, but I do not think they are coming back anytime soon. Guild loyalty matters a lot.

It is true that Desolation has a really big pve population and lots of good pve commanders as well (doing all those events and event chain farming). However unless something drastic happens when it comes to WvWvW rewards I do not see those people coming to WvWvW. They would also need to change their builds from zerker gear to more like PVT.

Abaddon’s Mouth has the biggest number of players and best coverage. I still don’t rank their zergs high, mostly just win by server wide blob while enemy has outnumbered buff, but I think they will win silver league.

I would not be surprised if Desolation needs to fight very hard to get the bronze or silver medal in silver league. Without the night capping and seriously lacking numbers it will be a difficult fight indeed. Everybody in silver league will target Desolation and be angry that former EU rank #1-3 server is here.

Reslinal.2359:

Some big take away:

1. More rewards in WvW and a way to get back piece.
2. Reduced stat bonus on bloodlust and further changes are going to be made to encourage smaller servers to take them as a come back mechanic.
3. ANET top level are seriously concerned with the alt unfriendliness going on and more changes are going to be made to address the problem.
4. No new map should be expected any time soon.
5. Dev team see lack of incentive to fight when loosing as number one issue in WvW, they are brainstorming however no concrete plan has yet be revealed.

1. Is VERY GOOD. Thumbs up!
2. BL Stat buffs should be removed completely. Winning server with superior coverage and numbers will benefit most from these stats and make the uphill battle even more difficult for the outnumbered party. Guard leech, Power of Mists + all 3 BL buffs together make guild zergs on winning server almost immortal. Now the current level max. +150 stat bonus is crazy e.g. celestial accessories give just +38 to each stat, so the BL blood lust is worth about 4 such ascended accessories.
3. Just do what the player base wants: account based WXP and commander title. Simple and efficient!
4. I would actually want the old BL maps back. The lake replacement is ugly and feels like some dev teleported it from spvp and tries to force spoon def spvp “fun” for their WvWvW player base.
5. Maybe consult some players on this matter? Instead of just implementing something something bad without testing. I repeat what I have written before: the outnumbered buff should vary how badly you are outnumbered (biggest buffs when you only have few) and they should take in consideration the total number of players on 4 maps (to avoid abusing this mechanic via border hopping). The buff should be mostly on the structures and friendly NPCs. Players shouldn’t get any offensive buffs (as this can also lead to problems), but some minor defensive buffs are okay. Increased number of friendly NPC, cheaper cost to build stuff, added carrying capacity etc. are also possible.

tichai.4351:

What? VoTF complaining about game mechanics? Again? I’ve lost count of the threads where they don’t like something. I thought you lot were quitting the game after the changes to arrow carts?

When VotF guys complain, they usually have a point. ACs have been broken since launch (window resizing / zoom hack). Buffing already overpowered and broken siege weapon was just plain dumb decision. Now warriors are clearly the most abundant profession in WvWvW and their constant buffing doesn’t make sense. The banner rezzing could use some toning down and then maybe the warriors would be using other elite skills as well.

I have had the pleasure of playing with VotF, when they were still on Desolation and also as their opponent. Very solid game play and good individual skill as well. Aneu is a very good commander.

I think instead of dismissing valid points made by some of the GW2’s best players, Arenanet should perhaps hire some dedicated GW2 gamers into their team, at least as part-time consultants.

I agree with the VotF players. Some of the counters mentioned in this thread simply do not work, as illustrated by their posts. It is really frustrating trying to capture the keep or castle, when lord gets rezzed over and over again. And yes, we do have necros and mesmers with boon removal. Sure maybe with some extreme condition spamming and condition stripping that is possible, but let’s say you have just your average zerg, guild team or (worse) PuGs. Do you realistically think they all run +40% condition duration, massive condition spam, CC and boon removal just to counter this?

I think warrior at the moment has bit too much good going on. I agree that several months ago warrior was weak in spvp/tpvp, but now the hotjoin spvp is full of warriors as well. Warriors have always been king of pve and probably the most common or second most common profession in WvWvW (tied up with guardians). They really did not need any buffs for WvWvW. Now warriors have great healing, superb condition removal, extreme mobility and couple of immunities (berserker’s stance and endure pain). Warrior can attack, get down to very low health and still disengage fights with ease using greatsword + sword/warhorn + mobile strikes combo.

Hammer warriors were always king of CC and leaked patch notes say that both warrior shouts and warrior hammer is gonna get buffed in next patch (!!). Now all that combined I really hope the next balance patches would bring some sense to this ruined game, but it seems the developer mind set is different.

Welcome to Warrior Wars 2.

NA seems to have now many very even match ups, where it is difficult to guess the week’s winner in advance:
http://mos.millenium.org/na

Unfortunately same isn’t true for EU, where most match ups are (again) blowouts:
http://mos.millenium.org/eu

@yaseer.2309: Seems like jumping puzzle will be big action soon for haters of bloodlust.

—

Yet another epic game design from Arenanet, it seems.

I do NOT like jumping puzzles. I do NOT want to enter any area via any sort of jumping puzzle, even if I need to just walk in there. And why people should enter EB first to make it clog with queues and postpone GvGs?

Just remove all the stat buffs and give us open large scale fighting area, readily accessible outside WvWvW, via B menu.

Arenanet game design philosophy in a nutshell:
“We are smarter than all our players. Screw previous experience in Game Design, any background is good for a game designer. Here is some game mode, which divides players and many don’t like: Let’s force that to everybody. Game is supposed to be imbalanced. The more imbalanced large scale pvp becomes, the more fun it is for the winner and for us. Good, that most players transfer to the winning servers. More gem cash for us. Hmm, there seems to be too much versatility in this game. Let’s give players all the incentives just to play one character in one way, we define the right way. Amen”

Remove ALL stat buffs from BL bloodlust (Power of the Mists vitality + healing power buffs should also go) from the game and I will come to play WvWvW again and PuG command.

Just more proof that the new BL bloodlust system (= more power to the side with superior coverage) and the upcoming season will lead to even more imbalanced match ups. Now every single match up in EU is a blowout (100k difference):

http://mos.millenium.org/eu

NA has only 2 balanced match ups:
http://mos.millenium.org/na¨

A good game should be fun all for sides, not total blow outs or face rolling, like it is now.

Population on our server has definitely taken a nose dive. When I was still very active in WvWvW, we were EU rank 3, now our current rank is 9 and predicted rank is 11. Yes, I know one solo roamer and PuG commander doesn’t matter much, but I have sometimes been counting the points my solo capping does (at best capping 3 different supply camps within 1 tick), those are still hundreds of points per each week. No to mention those bigger battles.

After the awful September 17th patch I have entered WvWvW only twice: once on that fateful Tuesday and another time on reset night. Despite that time we mostly had those bloodlust buffs, the game just didn’t feel fun. Winning because having the buff on me. No thank you.

I am still in contact with many people who play WvWvW. We haven’t just lost many guilds, but also a lot of people just log into WvwvW for 10 minutes and then go away.

All the changes put a really bad taste to my mouth. Arenanet truly is like Santa Claus showering even more buffs, power, rewards etc. to the winning side with superior coverage. While the side with small WvWvW population is facing mountain Impossible. All these game mechanisms (Power of the Mists, BL bloodlust etc) should work reversely. We should have game mechanisms help the outnumbered sides to make a comeback to have even interesting match ups, instead of total blow outs.

I have been thinking to write a book about game design and one topic there I want to discuss is randomness in games.

We all know the world is not fair, but players do not play MMORPGs with the main motivation of it also being as unfair as possible. In fact most players play the game in order to see their character progress, get continually better, experience new content, beat other players, monsters and socialize with their friends. In GW2 you can reach the maximum level 80 pretty fast and obtain full exotic set to him/her as well. Getting a legendary however requires luck and grinding or very deep pockets.

It can be very aggravating for a player to spend literally hundreds of gold into the Mystic Forge and get nothing. It is possible to throw even 1000 g in there and get no precursor. I think this sucks. Same thing for chest rewards and random drops. Another way is to give player guaranteed drops or time gate them. I have an alternative solution, which is both random, but yet very fair system, giving each player same returns in the long run. Technical rant follows:

Instead of the traditional pseudo-random number generator each player has several randomized lists of numbers e.g. numbers 0-999 shuffled in random order (using e.g. Knuth’s algorithm / Fisher–Yates shuffle). Every time player has some random change to gain important loot e.g. drop from major event or chest, mystic forge etc. the game selects a new number from that list. Once the list is depleted, the game gives the player a new randomized list. Thus each and every player will have equal amount of big and small and medium numbers in the long run. Let’s say a chest has 1% chance to drop exotic and 0.1% chance to drop precursor. Each time the player opens the chest, he gets a new number from the chest. If the number is 0 he gets precursor, if the number is 1-9 he gets exotic, if the number if 10-999 he gets rare. After opening 1000 chests, each player has received same amount of exotics (9), precursor (1) and rare (990). Some players just get lucky much faster e.g. get it on their 1st attempt, while others require 1000 attempts, but will eventually get it.

Of course the randomized list could be bigger than 1000, as memory is really cheap. That would just be 4×1000, which is less than 4 kilobytes per player.

I have lots of under combat experience. Engineer is good underwater, but I would argue that e.g. ranger and warrior are even better. Necro and mesmer are also strong contenders underwater. Many of those attacks with the original poster calls “overpowered” are in fact very easy to dodge or even just kite from distance. Granted bad players will die quickly to them, but then similarly you could do insta gib enemies with zerker warrior underwater.

Please see my long post about the relative strengths and weaknesses of each profession underwater:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/sPvP-Underwater-Class-Tier-List/first#post2902943

Every single WvWvW update in past 5 months have benefited the server with the best coverage. Even more power, rewards and buffs to the winner. When will this madness end?

I guess the original idea for the BL ruins and bloodlust was that it would benefit small scale play and “force” to split zergs (LOL), but the developers didn’t understand that the seriously outnumbered servers will be at huge disadvantage. If you have just, let’s say 30 people, how to spread them on all 3 BL maps to capture the points, defend them, plus defend and attack keeps and towers, supply camps and all. Not gonna work if the enemy has 70+ and can dedicate 3×5 = 15 for the BL bloodlust and the rest will still outnumber and easily will that smaller WvWvW population server.

I can only conclude that all this just is further evidence that the WvWvW design team is not just incompetent and lacks previous game design experience (background in QA doesn’t count). I am not saying this is an easy job. It takes easily 10-15 years minimum experience to design stuff like this well.

Good ideas, feedback and problems pointed out in these forums are consistently ignored with arguments like “You don’t represent the real player base”, “WvWvW is supposed not to be balanced”. No bad decision gets reverted as truly bad designers cannot even admit that they were wrong.

PS. I don’t play WvWvW anymore.

I don’t remember rifle #5, jump shot, being a blast finisher. It has been and still is a leap finisher. Jump shot does different sized leap and landing damage, so that explains the 120/240 radius difference.

Logically blunderbuss, rifle #3, should be a blast finisher. It is currently a very situational skill and blast finisher would suit it much better than many existing blast finishers (e.g. why is warrior’s “call to arms” a blast finisher? or necro’s putrid mark, which is already an incredibly powerful skill).

This is not an official reply, just my personal opinion and observations:

Desolation managed to make an amazing come back after losing over 1500 dedicated WvWvW players and 10 hard core guilds in Spring 2013. After the mass exodus of Spring 2013 we were basically a spvp/tpvp and pve server. Now that the pvp is dwindling to obscurity due bad game balance and players getting bored of the slow pace of changes, Desolation is more or less just the pve capital of EU.

After mass exodus Desolation hasn’t gotten any major influx of players from other servers. Except for FG, which returned to Desolation from Piken. FG has now left Desolation again for Gunnar’s Hold. We basically just trained new players and commanders from our huge pve population. Several dedicated people worked their kitten off to rebuild our WvWvW community. We got new forums, server wide TS. But you can imagine all this hard work lead to burn out.

I am not the only Desolation player, who feels extremely unhappy of the direction Arenanet is taking WvWvW. All the changes in past 5 months have made WvWvW more imbalanced and less fun to play: totally unneeded buffs to Arrow Carts, overpowered WXP traits, account bound WXP, borderland changes, especially the borderland stat buffs and points from stomping. The worst thing was the timing of the leagues + introducing several power creeps (ascended weapons) and massive easy sources of pve farming (Orr farming, Queen’s gauntlet + Pavilion etc). That together launched another mass exodus. Desolation can still have multiple overflows in pve areas to farm events. That is where the players are!

Our morning coverage has always been close to pathetic, but our prime time has also been often exaggerated by our enemies. While we enjoy the outnumbered “buff” most of the time (clearly showing that we have less players the other 2 servers) we have still often managed to capture enemy keeps with concentrated well-timed efforts. Forum threads tell this and this Desolation guild with 40-50 people, while anybody on our side could see that that guild had 20 or 25 people in the TeamSpeak and 5 of them were AFK at the spawn point. Now past 6 weeks have already been almost nothing but outnumbered, except for reset night, pain train and some guild raids, which usually last just 2-3 hours. With 90% of time being outnumbered by even rank 15 enemy servers, don’t you expect our rating to drop?

Our realistic non-night time numbers are close to a rank 15-16 server or so. Without the big influx of points from night time our rating would have been much lower.

We haven’t had any major NA player group or base to do night capping. Basically just some of our most dedicated players were staying up at night and going to bed in the morning. Now those many of those players are at Piken. Now look how close Piken’s rating is with Vizunah if you do not believe the importance of night time coverage:
http://mos.millenium.org/eu

Many players, including some Desolation players, think that Desolation will utterly steamroll the silver league. I beg to differ. Without night force and our current numbers we will have a lot of trouble to get even bronze medal in silver league. But it is possible that the players come back from pve. Silver should be better for roamers. We still got some truly amazing commanders and roamers, humor left in the TeamSpeak.

Now I hope several things would happen:
1. Arenanet will revert all the changes made to WvWvW in past 5 months
2. We can rebuild our WvWvW community in the silver league

Please let us do this.

Mortar should be turned into an elite kit. It is a very underused elite skill for a good reason. It is full of bugs e.g. it cannot critical hit at all!

I would like to see it reworked into a mobile version of mortar, which cannot be destroyed, but no longer gives super long stability (which wasn’t useful anycase, as the stability ended the moment engineer abandoned the mortat).

Mortar skills also need some adjusting. Projectile speed is really slow making it super easy to dodge. Launch elixir (mortar #3) heals a measly 370.

Mortar skills should be counted as explosions (to benefit from traits).

I was expecting something more useful and interesting, but the talk focuses on Living Story.

Take a look at the ratings of EU
http://mos.millenium.org/eu

No server has over 2000 rating at the moment. And if you ask from players of SFR they are afraid their server will become over stacked: crazily long queues to access WvWvW. Piken Square, which is EU rank 3, but under 1900 points, is just a medium load server, but their prime time is very full and as more guilds just transferred there I can imagine the queues.

I think the transfer cost to <900 rating servers should free (they need the biggest help in WvWvW). But I seriously doubt Arenanet will implement this as they want to make $$$ with gems.

Determining WvWvW population should not be that difficult. Just measure people who are inside WvWvW at each time tick and tally numbers together.

I seriously doubt that many people enter WvWvW maps just to craft, even on pve servers. I playing on a so called pve server and generally the crafting area has nobody there.

Gem transfer cost should be based on WvWvW population, because you can guest pve for free. I see players super stacked top WvWvW guesting at Desolation, because they know that pve is better here. E.g. SFR might have 5x more WvWvW players than Desolation, but their pve is really small compared to Desolation.

My spvp undercombat experience is little, but there is just one map, Raid on the Capricorn, with underwater combat.

I used to do tons of solo roaming in WvWvW in the lake in WvWvW before the September 17th patch (the patch was so bad it made me stop WvWvW completely). In fact people on my server called me “King of the Lake” or “Lord of the lake”. Comments like “best underwater fighter in EU” are overrated. I am NOT that good. I am an old man with slow reflexes. I have played all the other professions underwater against other players except guardian (all my 7 other professions are level 80, but guardian is still level 61). Most of the my fights have been against ranger (by far the most common profession underwater), but I have been fighting against each profession multiple times, having 1 vs 1/2/3/4/5. 2 vs 2. I have been able to beat two enemy engineers at same time alone with my own engi, but that is only because most players are so bad underwater and think that grenade kit is overpowered (basically most enemy engineers use only the grenade kit and harpoon gun #2 and #4 and that is one major reason why they LOSE).

The underwater combat in WvWvW isn’t that different, so I think this applies:

S tier:
Ranger
- 1500 range with eagle eye trait, both spear and harpoon gun are solid weapons, but do auto attack does rather low damage. The pet seems to have massive range, around 4000 and e.g. shark pet has massive health pool
- Ranger is very difficult to kill alone underwater due bugged downed state #3, lick wounds. Even if the pet is dead, it still continues to revive the ranger. Basically you need either massive dps or interrupt lick wounds right at the moment and keep pet away

Tier A

+Warrior
- good mobility, high survivability, superb condition removal and good damage
- spear #2, spear #5 and harpoon gun #5 and both burst skills are very strong can do very big damage. Harpoon gun #5 and spear #2 seem to have homing ability and hit further away then the skill description says

+Necromancer
- unyielding blast and reaper’s might traits make life blast (death shroud #1) very strong underwater (e.g. use gives might, causes vulnerability, pierces and transfers one condition to target).
- both underwater weapons are solid + plague is one the best underwater elite skills
- Necromancer can very quickly stack so massive amount of conditions underwater that most professions have trouble cleansing them all.

Engineer
- Engineer used to be very good underwater with the grenade kit + grenadier trait, but few months ago they changed the grenade kit so that the spread is now great. Only 1-2 out of 3 grenades hit from range. Grenade barrage is a joke, even at melee range it can fail to hit any grenade. It is very easy to kite grenades from range due their slow projectile speed (no need to use dodge, just use swiftness).
- lacks any gap closer underwater
- Harpoon gun #2 hits hard and so does #4, but especially the latter is very easy to dodge. Harpoon gun #1 is probably the worst underwater auto attack dues its tendency to miss (it says homing missile, but it misses!) and super slow projectile speed. High damage doesn’t help if the firing rate + speed sucks
- bomb kit + EG also very valid underwater choices

Mesmer
- good mobility and damage, one of the rare professions besides warrior and engineer which can spike hard underwater with shatter
- spamming all those endless illusions is a bit too easy, AI for the win
- both underwater elites are more group utility

-Thief
- good mobility + decent damage
- used to have easy perma evade with spear #5 (no more)
- lack of stealth underwater is a serious issue, as many thief traits are related to stealth and thus a stealth build thief loses a lot underwater, but on the other hand abundant stealth underwater would be utterly broken as it is true 3D and stealth allows extremely easy way to reset fights underwater and position yourself for the win

Tier B

Elementalist
- pretty easy to dodge the high hitting attacks
- auto attack does really low damage
- elite not that great

Guardian
- a bunker guardian is difficult to kill alone underwater, but won’t kill anybody alone either
- guardian attacks are easy to dodge underwater except for trident #5, which is good

Vena.8436:

• Buffs suck, ruined balance! Keep stomp and map!
• Stomp sucks, too many points are not from PvD, how dare 40% of our points come from fighting! Keep only the map!
• Map sucks! (No clue what the reason for this one is…)

And two weeks ago, we were crying about:

• Change the maps or give new ones! This is boring!
• Too much reward for PvDoor! Reward the fighting!

The wonders of the internet.

This is a matter of taste: I do not like the aesthetics of the expanded ruins. It feels and looks too cramped and forced. But that is just me: I never much fancied the looks of ruins (cliché in RPGs). Like I wrote before: a small underwater castle instead of the island of the storms would have been a much cooler idea. Part of this small castle could have been above water line. I like underwater combat a lot and now the new area has very little water left, thus less chances for underwater combat. Plus opponents can always exit the water before the kill. Versatility is good and now the water combat was pretty much taken out of the menu (except for very short dips into water). WvWvW already had capping points (e.g. capping the sentries, camps, towers etc) so adding more standing in a circle is in fact adding more of the same. Plus we have seen this in spvp before.

Obviously there are a lot of players, who want to have some sort feeling of fairness. I am not gonna say WvWvW has ever been fully fair, but if you know your enemy has all the 3 bloodlust buffs and you just lost a fight, which was fairly even, most players are gonna feel bad, because they knew they lost because of the bloodlust. Also when your server has all the buffs and won a duel and at one point you had just 1500 health left, you knew you won because of buff, not because of your skills. Since the buffs are affecting all maps, if you are yourself in EB.

This patch really benefits those servers, which have the largest number of players and best coverage. The situation came even more desperate for those who have just couple of players on a map. You cannot realistically hold the bloodlust buffs plus take a tower or defend tower or keep if you have just 3 players on the entire map. Spawn camping has been happening before. Now the enemy servers who have much more players are going to get stomping points from those few lonely players who dare to exit their spawn area.

The biggest complaints on these forums have been:
A) the lag
B) imbalanced match ups

Now the recent patch made both of these just worse.

PS. I would really want an official reply from dev, when this patch is going to be reverted.

It is actually possible to hit even higher than your screen shot shows against 3.4 armor. It requires the right traits, gear (full ascended berserker + scholar runes), 25 stacks of bloodlust, maximized guard leech WXP trait and lots of might stacks. With the new BL bloodlust stacks things get even more hairy.

I am always shaking my head when people write on forums that thieves are never any problem in WvWvW. That their warrior just shrugs off their damage. They have probably never been facing a true glass cannon full ascended gear thief. Two-three such thieves can burst down almost any character in a game literally in 1 second. Unless you are psychic with the dodge button there is nothing you can do about it. Of course such thief is very squishy and will die also very easily if you manage to hit it back.

MiLkZz.4789:

The people that post on the forums are the one that represent many others. Many in my guild refuse to post/visit these forums, so I give them updates because I do. Meaning I represent ~50 people.

Bloodlust was a fail, absolutely no way around it.

And yes, there are less people in WvW. I noticed it aswel and the WvW discussion feels dead. Post update really really slow considering it is the weekend.

I fully agree on this, despite I play on a different server and belong to a different guild (I am member of TLA. Velocity [Vcy] is also a very good guild).

When I chat in game with people or read our server wide forums it is obvious that the 17th September patch was deemed a big failure. Everybody dislikes the bloodlust buff (except those rare players playing on balanced matchups or super stacked servers) Most players also dislike points from stomping and the spvp-map alike stuff where the BL lake used to be. Spvp/tpvp was never popular in this game compared to WvWvW. WvWvW has probably 10-50 times more players. I do not understand why Arenanet tries to force feed spvp capture the point everywhere as majority of players who love WvWvW want open field battles.

There are some players who never liked the lake or underwater combat. They tell that they like the new area, but still most of them are following the zerg, rather than roaming. Those who truly enjoy the new middle area seem to be minority and tend to be those type of players who like to roam in groups of 3-8 players and using spvp like builds.

It is a fact that solo roaming became harder thanks to this patch. This alone is driving off many players from WvWvW.

I hope Arenanet comes to its senses and either removes all the new changes or changes the way bloodlust works (no stat buffs at all) before the WvWvW League season starts as otherwise they are gonna lose a lot of guilds and players. Lots of new MMOs are coming out or in beta and I know several who stopped GW2 and trying / playing other games already.

Jayne.9251:

There’s no NA guilds on PS. In fact Desolation has more NA players than us, unless those guys from previous matches have bailed?

Desolation doesn’t have any major NA guilds. All we have are some individual commanders and players who are American. If you take a look at the last night’s tick:
http://mos.millenium.org/servers/view/15/106

You can see that we don’t have any significant night crew.

Our night capping crew, DVG, just partially transferred to Piken Square. DVG are mostly European just like most of the night capping teams in EU. Some players are so dedicated that they just decided to stay up whole night and go to bed in the morning. The size of the Vizunah Square (VS) Canadian night force has often been exaggerated. Mostly it is just some French nerds staying up all night.

To my knowledge SFR currently holds the biggest amount of NA players in EU and they are also the host to massive amount of Russian guilds and Russian language is widely used on their server. In a way one could call SFR semi-official Russian server. SFR has the best coverage in EU and unless something drastic happens, they should win the golden league.

But really who cares who wins? This game is dying. And the decisions by the Arenanet developers are a big reason for that. Even many SFR players are against the recent changes (bloodlust idiocy etc). We will be seeing even more imbalanced match ups. 100 players vs 3-5 players.

Jayne.9251:

Time to move to EU. While there’s grumbling about potential matchups, the population is by far more evenly spread out than the mess that NA is …. and should make for some interesting matches. Honestly, pick any server but the top two, and you’ll likely have a blast.

The top 3 EU servers are also stacked, meaning long queues, unless you want to play on off-hours. What’s the fun if you cannot even access the WvWvW and spend just hours in queue? I heard that both SFR and PS have NA players and guilds doing night capping. Servers who are rank 5-9 when season starts are gonna be heavily night and morning capped by the stacked top servers. No chances of win for them.

Desolation can hopely drop to silver league (rank 10 or below) as our current WvWvW player numbers are hopelessly low for the gold league. I stopped WvWvW, but I still got some friends who occasionally play it, but currently Desolation really is the #1 pve server in EU.

I stopped WvWvW completely after the 17th patch. I will probably come back if ALL player stat buffs from both Power of the Mists and BL Bloodlust will be removed. The winning side doesn’t need any offensive bonuses (to siege or player stats) nor extra defenses to win.

I wrote my 1st article a bit hasty (on the way to work). The biggest cause of the lag is of course still two or three server blobs in one location e.g. Garrison or Stonemist castle. When Arenanet server becomes extremely loaded it doesn’t matter what part of the map you are in, you can still experience massive game breaking lag at any part of the map. But the lag is even worse those near that huge blob fight. The lag is also linked to many people getting disconnects.

I think pretty much everybody agrees that this is one the worst things in WvWvW (I cannot comment the situation right now as I stopped WvWvW completely after September 17th patch).

Unfortunately it won’t be fixed unless Arenanet reduces the amount of players per map (would mean more queues to stacked servers), changes the map (capture points, keeps etc further away from each other) and/or gives players good incentive to spread around the map. Lots of small teams roaming in small central part of BL wasn’t the fix, as you can see.

The lag is caused by a lot of players in same vicinity (nearby area), fighting each other.
It has nothing do with your computer, but Arenanet servers. The number of computations is O(n^2) where n is number of players so e.g. going from 5 to 50 players, increases the amount of calculations 10*10 = 100 times.

If the players would be spread all over the map, there would not be any lag. But now the “wise” minds of Arenanet decided to replace the lake with 5 capture points, making it way too tightly compacted and looking like an spvp map.

Before this patch there wasn’t much players in the lake, now the central area of the map has much more players in there, so of course there is considerably more lag.

The only way to fix this is:
1. Change the map
or
2. Give players motivation to spread all over the map

I am still extremely sad of the removal of the lake. The North West (skritt area) and North East (tamili area) of the maps, plus the place just above the Northmost supply camp are heavily underused. They would have been logical locations for the capture points and instead have just 2 capture points in the ruins.

Epic design fail.

Why everybody keeps forgetting the Power of the Mists? I have pointed out before why it is also a BAD game mechanism, as it adds more survivability for the winning side.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Power_of_the_Mists

Robust gives you up to +10% bonus to vitality, based on how many points your server has (305800 server points gives max +10% bonus) and also up to +10% bonus to healing power ( with 439240 server points).

Let’s assume that basic vitality is 1500, +10% to that is 150. Another +250 from defense against guards and +150 from the bloodlust. That is +550 to vitality without ANY consumables. 550 vitality means 5500 added health, which is a lot, especially on low health professions, like thief, guardian or elementalist.

Arenanet’s original philosophy was that everybody who enters WvWvW, no matter of level etc, should be on even level. Now this clearly isn’t the case.

The Power of Mists should be redesigned not to give ANY buffs to player’s stats.

Sol.4310:

My opinion of GvG is just an opinion. Reason I can’t stand your guy’s version of GvG simply due to fact I played GW1 for over 6 year’s in GvG so I’m used to GvG being rather small scale and require’s allot more work to achieve results.

Everybody is entitled to their opinion. I also spent well over 2.5k hours playing Guild Wars 1. For the first two years I was doing a lot of gvg, sometimes in top gvg guilds (our guild reached world rank #2 at best, but we stayed there very short time). I agree that gvg in GW1 was different. The game mechanism was deeper and better thought out. I was mostly playing a healer/prot monk and flag runner in gvgs. As you know those roles are not easy, especially when you will be facing some of the best GW1 players in the world. But after my daughter was born I didn’t have time to be in the top gvg world. You need to play 20+ h per week to stay in top shape against the very best. So I went to play arenas, tens of thousands of victories there, no sync farming.

Now I am thinking to go back to GW1. I am not sure if anybody still plays it.

Thanks for DVG for the effort they put for Desolation. I wish them the best of luck on Piken. I hope some will stay on Desolation.

September 17th killed WvWvW for me. The last drop. I was getting bored of the same and seeing incompetent crew responsible of the development. I knew the patch was gonna be bad, but it was worse beyond expectations. Time for some other games.

Ayna Micro

I have been mostly a WvWvW player, spending roughly 90% solo roaming (if allies from my server happen to be near me, that is fine, but I am not in a party). Even when my guild is doing a raid, I am often scouting with my engineer quite far from the group with my engineer. I have also been a PuG commander under the most desperate moments, when our side has had just few random players against a huge blob, which is mowing the map. When other commanders have left the map and we have just few upleveled players, I step in and usually stop when we hold at least 2 towers + 1 keep + few supply camps.

I do not like spvp/tpvp type of play where you contest/hold points and I am surely not the only one with this opinion. Just go to the tpvp/spvp forums and you will find many more. Ruins looks aesthetically ugly. The 5 Power of Ruins points are too close to each other and the who place just feels it was stitched there. Why not to put two capture points where the skritt and Tamili are? Those were the most useless areas in BL maps. I mean the North East and North West of the map instead of deleting the lake. And why to add siege weapons (cannon) to the ruins?

Giving more power to the already winning side and rewarding server points from stomping just feel unfair. This encourages the side with larger numbers to spawn camp the outnumbered side. The winning side +150 on all stats and up to +10% bonus from the Power of the Mists to their vitality and healing power.

September 17th was the day when I stopped WvWvW. This is when roaming and fun died.

“Thanks”

Ayna Micro

PS. The OP of this thread doesn’t seem to hold high opinion of gvg. He probably hasn’t faced the best guilds of this game in combat (I have seen pretty all the top names on EU side):
http://gw2gvg.com/

I used to be a solo roamer in WvWvW. This new patch pretty much killed it.

New Flaming ram mastery WXP trait “iron hide” seems to persist on players until death. “Nice” -50% damage reduction even when you are not on the ram.

-1 No.

Adding BL bloodlust statu buffs and points from stomping was bad.

Instead of deletion of the lake, we should have gotten an underwater fortress. Imagine siege free fortress, you can defend and attack, underwater tunnels. Part of the underwater fortress above water. That is how I would have redesigned the lake.

MagnusLL.8473:

Funniest thing is, SFR is now basically impossible to play against, +150 to all stats on all their players… as if the massive bandwagoning going on wasn’t enough XDXD

What annoys me the most is Devon will come and say “we couldn’t possibly have predicted this would happen” or something to this effect.

Actually I expect Devon to tell “This is working as intended. The side with more dedicated players deserves to have everything. It is your server’s fault that it doesn’t have the BL bloodlust stack”.

I will be amazed if they would quickly revert the changes. I am expecting them to add just more power creep.

But any case thanks for everybody for the great moments in WvWvW: My enemies, my fellow warriors. I wish you luck!

Sovereign.1093:

the terain is fun to put an ambush, you can have 5 man parties taking these nodes and often in tc, we’d fight db and fa other 5 man teams

I get that you are playing for TC, which is – surprise surprise – leading the match up against FA and DB by a large margin. No surprise that the players on the winning side are having “fun”. Talk about power creep.

I am not at all surprised that majority of the players, who like the new changes are playing on a server, which is A) leading the match up and has bloodlust buff on them.

I have had countless of small scale fights before this patch (note I am 90% solo roamer in WvWvW). And they were more fun. Now the fun is gone.

Sovereign.1093:

unfortunately nothing changed, stronger coverage wil always win. but the fights and roaming in the ruins is more fun now

Please explain how fighting and roaming in the ruins is more fun after these changes. I will understand your answer if you are playing on a server, which is leading the match up and has 2 or 3 of the bloodlust buffs.

The side with superior numbers have +150 buff to all their stats, plus +1 to +10% buff to their vitality and healing power via Power of the Mists and much more players all over the map. These are really balance breaking buffs considering small scale and solo roaming. I am mostly a solo roamer, but after seeing how bad this is, I think I will just call it /quit.

A lot of players do not like spvp/tpvp, because it is mostly about capturing and contesting the points. Now the 5 BL bloodlust ruins points are pretty much the same. Instead of having more versatility (underwater combat), we got more of the same.

To make things even worse. The server, which has superior coverage and number of players is getting 3 points per stomp. Yet another stupid idea.

Ayna Micro

PS. I am NOT whining, because I died. I have not died in WvWvW today, but I saw my fellow Desolation players ganked and stomped left and right. This just feels so bad. Despite I run a CC build, I don’t have enough interrupts to stop all those stomps.

This forum had hundreds of posts from veteran WvWvW players telling that the bloodlust on BL was a bad idea. It just adds more power to the winning server, making already imbalanced matches even more imbalanced. We already had the Power of the Mists, which was also doing the same (even up to +10% bonus to vitality, healing power based on your WvWvW server score). Both should be removed / changed immediately. I want even match ups, not that one side face rolls the others.

I don’t wanna repeat what I already posted on the buffs topic, but here is very short summary. Defensive buffs for the weakest (outnumbered side), especially their structures and NPCs, make sense, but adding any offensive buffs to any side, especially to the winning side, doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

I used to be called the King of the Lake or the Lord of the Lake by the members of Desolation WvWvW community. I spent a lot of time in the lake and really enjoyed the underwater fights. Now I am king of nothing. The lake is almost 100% gone. I am incredibly sad, beyond words to express what I feel. The new map replacing the lake looks ugly. Instead of something more creative, why to add yet another ruins? Why to entirely remove water combat from WvWvW? Nobody was forcing anybody to enter the lake, thus it was optional. Versatility is good, especially when it is not forced.

This is the day when WvWvW died.

Ayna Micro

PS. Attached a screenshot. Normally SFR, Kodash and Desolation would be ticking roughly equal score at prime time. See income evolution history:
http://mos.millenium.org/servers/view/15

Right now Desolation is ticking 35 and SFR is ticking 590 and has all the 3 blood lust stacks. Trying to hold them is very difficult as SFR has far greater number of players. A good game should be fun for all sides involved. I do not understand how this could be fun for all.

StressHead.9750:

A little birdy tells me DVG are leaving Deso soon.

No, but to Piken Square. Piken has “only” 2 hour queue on prime time (Desolation has none). Now the question remains how many DVG will actually transfer. Their roster is big, but I suspect some will stay at Deso.

Sadly DVG was point wise the most important guild on Desolation. Without their night capping and other off time coverage, I would say Desolation doesn’t have numbers to match even rank 15 server at the moment. Sadly the season 1 begins already in Oct 4th. Ratings change slowly, so we are most likely gonna still be in top 9, which will mean starting from WvWvW league Desolation will be enjoying the outnumbered “buff” even more often.

Of course anything can happen with the transfers, but like many predicted in these forums, gazillion players transfer to the top servers and especially those which have low transfer cost (Piken is in the cheapest category, Desolation in the highest). Welcome to Bandwagon Wars 2! Skill breaking lag fest + long queues to all top servers.

Depends to what you compare it with. If you compare it to Desolation, which is the top International pve server in EU, SFR’s pve looks small. Desolation has around 10 times more people on several map zones, can have several overflows to a pve map and even 30 pve commanders on champion farming. When I was guesting on SFR I saw almost fully empty map zones.

Please transfer to SFR! I want server breaking lag and never ending 3+ h queues to them. ;-)

I am NOT complaining our enemy. Just stating a fact:

Desolation is regularly outnumbered even on our own borderland in prime time e.g. almost all this evening the outnumbered “buff” has been on. No queue except on some special situations like reset.

Numbers on our side are soon approaching the record lows we had in late Spring 2013. If we would not have any night capping team our rating easily be below rank 15, since even rank 15 servers can pull more players to WvWvW. When we were matched against Gandara, rank 14 on our 1st match up against them, they were regularly outnumbering us. Gandara would be placed much higher in rating if they would care more about points than just ambushing and ganking.

Comments about Deso players average quality dropping. This may be partially true on certain hours, but the many hard core players are still there. In fact the PuG group defending some objective maybe so that 1/3 of them are veteran commanders (tag is just turned off). But the real problem is numbers. Our enemies tend to inflate our numbers 2-3x as much. If we had so many players then why do we have the outnumbered “buff” on us like it is permanently stamped to display?

Glad to see that Kodash has gotten their act together again. You can still make it to the Gold League

The “Gandara” strategy is old and used by a lot of other servers. I have used it as a Desolation PuG commander. It sometimes works, sometimes it doesn’t.

Most important is:
1. Attack at the right moment
- take the initiative, do not give the organized melee train time to buff themselves, rush like crazy, but split immediately when you get in range
- if they are already buffing, wait and circle around until the buffs mostly wear out

2. Have the right composition (yes, go ranged and mix)
- a PuG group of having several medium armor actually works pretty well e.g. several grenadier engineers (watch out for retaliation) and longbow ranger (both having very long range), thieves, but also elementalists, necros, mesmers, guardians and warriors. In general a complete mix. Where as a typical melee train is mostly warriors, guardians, several eles and necros, 1-2 support mesmers and almost no medium armor.
- ranged attacks are the best for most PuGs as you don’t wanna end up having 5 hammer stuns in a row + getting all your boons ripped and smacked with a massive condition stack from their necro at same time.

3. Cripple their melee, but really wreck their ranged
- blind + chill etc spam on their melee part
- the melee trains ranged spell casters, mainly staff eles and necros are often kiting on the rear and sides and do not have any stability on, launch them, knockdown them, stun them, give them the hell as they have low armor and full glass thieves can crit them 20k+ with backstab.

It would be interesting to see video of this.

I also agree with the comments by other Desolation players in this thread about Gandara. Gandara is probably the #1 ganking server in EU. So many run ganking builds (= builds made for solo or small group roaming and killing fast, not that efficient build for zerg support). It was pretty sad to see even good players like [JDGE], an ex Desolation guild, to do that. I watched them near a sentry (sentry guard on their side) to ambush Desolation solo roamers. I observed it. 10 minutes later they are still waiting there and ganking. If Gandara would actually spend less time ganking they could easily have a higher rating with their number of WvWvW players. Desolation was very often outnumbered in matchup against Gandara.

I expect to see more ganking very soon as the masterminds of Arenanet are going to give us 1-3 points from stomping. Welcome to Gank Wars 2.

AgentChaos.4932:

Only servers that are active at midnight eu time are sfr and vs

This is not true. Desolation and Riverside also have a night team. And it seems Piken Square also got some guild to do night capping, but that seems to be rather small guild, so they are lacking in this respect and Piken bleeds points at night time.

SFR has the strongest morning presence (100+ players + golems) and an SFR player confirmed that they can short queues then. I can imagine the queues are worse in prime time.

The server rank has little to do with skill. I would say that for example Augury Rock, a rather small French server, has some very high quality players and guilds, but they are rank 8 at the moment. The servers who are in top 2, are there because they stacked with huge amount of WvWvW players, have the best coverage (and also the longest queues). It boils down: Do you want to be on a winning server and spend time waiting to enter the WvWvW? Or do you want to play on a server which has no chance to win gold league, but there are no queues to speak of?

Great words by the OP, but unfortunately Arenanet will not listen to any words of wisdom. History has already proven thakitten

seems the entire WvWvW design team, at least those who are making gameplay balance related decisions, isn’t experienced in game design. I don’t know how many people are in the entire team, but it seems the lead designer has 4 years of experience in game industry and working on QA counts as a game design experience:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Devon_Carver
Now compare this with Mike Brien, whose track record is indeed really impressive:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_O%27Brien_

Game design is very difficult. I began myself making my own board games when I was around 10 years of age. At the age of 15 I started to design my own pen & paper role-playing games. I made 4 role-playing game rule systems, which was a massive task. Some of my ideas 1st sounded great until I tested them. Oh boy, I made a lot of mistakes, creating for example overly complex and realistic fighting simulation (calculation the blood / bleeding by 1 milliliter, of course all the lead to horribly slow combat simulation), but I learned from those mistakes. I don’t even want to embarrass people how many bad games I programmed in my youth (most were bad clones of existing games). But that was when I was under 20. Now I am over 40 and hopefully much wiser.

Now we are talking about a triple A MMORPG, which has a development budget of tens of millions or more. In such case, it doesn’t make sense to give important roles, to people with little experience. Your earn your wings doing something smaller first.

About balance still:
Imagine a FPS game, which has 5 different weapons: pistol, rifle, shotgun, rocket launcher and crowbar. Let’s say pistol shoots further than any of the other weapons, fires faster, has cheapest ammo and does more damage than the others. Why would anybody use the other weapons (except if they wouldn’t know better) if the pistol would always be the best choice. This just underlines that there needs to be balance.

Savoy.6824:

Have you read this yet Devon?

“After a careful reevaluation of orbs of power we have decided to remove them from WvW in an upcoming build. As implemented, orbs tend to strengthen teams who are already winning and make it even more difficult for underdog teams to fight back”

This was posted by Habib Loew.6239, one of your own designers.

Posting any suggestions to these forums is an utterly useless waste of time. As long as new WvWvW crew has been in charge, they have always implemented the opposite of what the majority of the player base wants, disregarding of also what has been stated before by Arenanet. See:

Since Autumn players complained about Arrow Cars able to shoot into locations they shouldn’t —> Arenanet massively buffs their damage and adds overpowered WXP traits
(the Arenanet devs originally said “small changes and small steps at time”, now we can see is surely wasn’t the case. More than doubling the damage and area in just one patch)

Players have been been begging for account bound commander tags and WXP —> not going to happen (“Guild Wars 2 will not require you to grind and everybody can fight in level ground” LOL… now imagine the time to level up WXP for 7 different alts to give them just max ranks in guard killer and defense against guards, not to mention all those other WXP trait lines).

And so on.

I predicted this would happen. SFR has the superior numbers and coverage to win EU gold league, but long queues might shuffle the deck as it happened before. In Spring 2013 the free transfers caused massive amount of players to bandwagon to SFR. As result many hard core guilds could not have their raids or even get to WvWvW. This lead to mass exodus away from SFR. Now SFR is super stacked again and I heard they got queue to EB even at 8 am in the morning (can somebody confirm this?). Time shall tell if the history will repeat itself.

Luckily Desolation doesn’t have any queues worth mentioning. Our challenge is the lack of players, especially in the morning. I was commanding this morning + afternoon) at Deso BL. We got got control all keeps + towers on that map, but then Riverside came with zerg + 9 golems (“nice”). Time to cook lunch, then capture the keeps back. 4 WXP ranks in 3 hours of commanding and I think Deso players who followed me got their daily + hundreds of loot. Not bad.

I think it is up for the players to decide. Do they want to be on the winning super stacked server, which means long queues and less time spent on WvWvW. Or play on server with smaller WvWvW population. No queue, but also not going to win the league nor end up in top 3 (as all top 3 servers are gonna become super stacked).