Guild Wars 2

The stat boost, while controversial, is there to give the buff meaning in the context of the general WvW battle. Providing boosts like %WXP, etc. don’t have impact in fights against other sides, they are just a nice bonus for you. The stat boost and the points for finishing players mean that not only do you want to have the buff, but you don’t want your opponents to have it.

Sarrs.4831:

On topic, no. Respecs aren’t necessary because you can just get more points. If you could respec, any points beyond 300 would be pretty much irrelevant. Scheduled, very occasional respecs are okay, but people will just game the system if they have the choice to change.

This is exactly why we are taking the path we have in regards to respecs. Because of the fact that you can continue to earn WXP and World Ability Points, giving everyone a respec, even an incredibly expensive one would cause people to shift around their points as the current meta dictates. Right now, you will have the opportunity at the start of a season to rethink how your characters are set up and to spend your points accordingly, without feeling like you are forever bound to your choices. But, because you can’t just back out of them whenever, they have more weight. That’s why we have done what we have.

No. That is not a possibility at this time. The point of the buff is to affect the WvW game mode as a whole disabling it on your character would lessen the value of the buff to a server and completely invalidate the whole point.

Good suggestion, I will see what I can do.

Fishbait.6723:

More temp` content.
Who is surprised?

Huh? This is not temp content. This in character with any number of rewards that are about showing off what happened recently. You will be showing off that you won the previous season, but once a new season starts everyone is back to start. Having the reward for a limited period of time is very different from temp content.

Dekar.2759:

DevonCarver.5370:

Winners will have access to the finisher until there are new winners. At that point those people will gain access and the winners from the previous season will no longer have access to the stomp.

Well that was a fast reply, starting to think I missed some reading about this answer somewhere.

Does this insinuate that the finishers will always be the same every season and it’s only the other achievements that may change from time to time which in theory should be doable in any server?

It certainly insinuates it. But that is as much as I’ll say for now. Nothing is set in stone.

Oroibahazopi.9074:

Well I’d rather have it being playable and slowed down than lagged out and not having any skills work.

Only thing that changes is you have more time to react, it doesn’t “gum” it up. Right now you can’t react at all in large fights because you can’t activate skills I know which I prefer. Also more reaction time only really nerfs the mindless aoe spam, direct instantaneous attacks will be just as dangerous.

You know which you prefer out of the system as it exists now and some system you’ve made up in your head. Obviously the one you’ve dreamed up is one you like more, but the real implementation of it would have a host of problems you haven’t mentioned. When we have a solution that is better than the current system, we’ll get it in, but all of the things we have tried so far have been no better than the status quo.

Winners will have access to the finisher until there are new winners. At that point those people will gain access and the winners from the previous season will no longer have access to the stomp.

Think of it like this, the finisher is intended to show off who won the last season. If you don’t continue to win each and every season, you will not retain the bragging rights.

styx.7294:

And influx of rewards? The influx of rewards is 10 gold/hour farming, talk to NPC for 10 achievement points, and unique weapon skins every 2 weeks in Living Story. You better be bringing hell of a lot of rewards for me to tell someone in Lion’s Arch that it’s worth their time to step away from autoattacking in a PvE map and risk actually dying somewhere.

Well, I can’t promise it will work, but I’m kitten sure trying.

Oroibahazopi.9074:

It’s slows down the server time so that the server and people’s clients have more time to do the calculations. It means that everyone’s inputs will be registered correctly and you don’t have the “am I alive?” moments because you’ve been frozen out.

It’s less of a lag than putting things into slowmo.

GW2 is not a deterministic serious of events. If I cast lava font you are warned and able to move out of it. If we slowed things down to the sense of being queued up it would quickly gum up what GW2 combat is.

Moon.6371:

What do I have to do in order to get my question concerning obvious transfer abuse answered?

Will there be anything implemented (such as weighted league points, server (il-)loyalty debuffs, intraleague server locks or similar) that prevents people flooding the probable winner of the league during the first week, then transfering back to the home server (within the same league) and benefitting from abuse?

When I have an answer to give you, I will give it. That’s just the way it goes.

Evon Skyfyre.9673:

DevonCarver.5370:

We definitely don’t want to go to the level of fragmenting the game to the extent that we have PvP, WvW, and PvE versions of all the skills as that creates a disconnect with the characters we want you to use in all those places. That said, we are certainly discussing the idea of adding skills that would have a WvW focus. But they are just on the discussion level.

So the way this was handled in GW1 was bad?

Yes. Not only was it incredibly complex to maintain it became completely unwieldy to players as well. GW2 has made a great number of changes to systems specifically to avoid the complications we created in GW1. Not creating multiple versions of skills for 3 areas of the game would be one of those changes.

bradderzh.2378:

The issues are not usually that a server has low population, it’s that a server has a low wvw population. A top tier server that has lots of dedicated wvw guilds around the clock who primarily care about wvw don’t neccasarilly have a higher population than lower tier servers, it’s could just be that the ratio of wvw to PvE/spvp players is higher.

However, you can’t tell people what game type to play, so you will still lose each week because they don’t want to help out in wvw.

The issue is, that while you may be on these lower tier servers and still care just as much about wvw as the higher tier servers, you are essentially on the wrong server and if this system rewards the heavily stacked servers more it’s only going to promote more stacking.

You mention in this post why nothing is changing here. We can’t merge servers based on what percentage of players on a server play WvW. We make determinations about servers based on their overall population. Your best bet is to use the influx of rewards from the season to convince people on your server to start paying attention to WvW. Or convince people to transfer to your server to boost your WvW ranks.

bradderzh.2378:

We, the people of lower tiers, don’t mind testing our metal against tough odds. We do however mind it when the servers with the most players and best coverage gets the best rewards purely for the numbers reason only.

But as you said in another topic, wvw isn’t fair. All rank 12 has to do is throw enough matches to drop to rank 13 and get the best rewards.

So, as I’ve said before, we are still looking into ways to try and alleviate those problems, but that is also what WvW is like right now, so while this season will create new rewards and new incentives to play, it isn’t as though this is a brand new problem. We want to make it so that skill is more important than sheer numbers and we have some ideas. None of them are so easy/safe to implement that they are going to happen in the near-term.

Oroibahazopi.9074:

For every season or just the first one?

We are talking about season one for now. What the future may hold, who can say?

Oroibahazopi.9074:

Oroibahazopi.9074:

https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Time_Dilation

I am aware of Time Dilation and that would very clearly not work for our game at all. Skill lag is a problem and we are doing what we can to fix it, but I don’t see how deliberately lagging out those fights would be better. I mean, I suppose we could also just kick everyone out of the map right then as well and it would solve the problem. But it wouldn’t be fun.

I’ll scoop the blog post. World Ability Points will be refunded to everyone at the start of the season.

skeet.1390:

So do 4 leagues in NA. This eliminates the enormous population difference from server 1 to server 12 and 13 to 24.

If you really think the server that is ranked 12th at the start of this stands any chance against the top servers you are delusional.

I never said they did. However, I’d argue that they do in fact stand a chance against the 6th ranked server and the 5th ranked server. We are not trying to only ever match you up against your closest comparable server. That was what was happening with the system before and it was bad. If you are saying you don’t ever even want the chance to try and show your skill against a higher ranked server, then I don’t know what to say.

We will continue to look into ways to change scoring to try and even out some of the population based imbalances, but that is not an easy task and it won’t happen during the season.

Walabone.6713:

I hope you take into consideration adding achievements that encourage zergs to disperse. Lets not have another WvExp situation.

Although, all in all, I’m not enthusiastic about this new system. I fail to understand the concept of “competition” that you hope to instill, when the playing field is inherently unbalanced. Numbers win everything. How is that a fair competition?

At no point did I, or would I have, said “Fair competition” WvW is not intended to be “fair”. There are servers with more people, there are servers with better organizations and that will always be the case. This competition will be about showing how your world can do over a defined period of time, against a variety of opponents. SPvP is the part of our game that aims for a completely level playing field. WvW would never be able to match that goal.

draugris.9872:

After watching the Pax Stream yesterday i have no hope that anything will be done in a reasonable amount of time. Devon made his announcement and for the rest of the panel he just sat there. Not a single kitten question came from the audience regarding wvw and only one question about spvp. Almost all questions where about living world / rp / lore, so that does say anything about the interest of the people and therefore the focus of the development of this game.

Well, regardless of questions on the panel, I spoke for a good 1-2 hours with folks about WvW after and before the panel. We are very, very focused on WvW. The issue with skill lag is quite large and while we’ve continued to hammer at it, there is no single solution available. We’ll do what we can, but it is a war, not a battle.

Jinks.2057:

DevonCarver.5370:

I’ve consistently said we are doing 2 leagues in NA and 3 in EU. The leagues will be broken up strictly by world rating at the conclusion of the matchup prior to the league start.

Its still fail.

In NA you will have the 12th ranked server vs T1 coverage.

WTF

3 leagues is way better module with championship week to close out

We literally can’t do three equal leagues in NA as there are 24 servers. That would leave us with 2 servers per league with no match up every single week.

Oren.1736:

Community concern is that incentives will be high enough to draw players to transfer up the tiers, killing even more low tier servers, over filling silver tiers with players and so forth for gold. Can you comment on any plans to address community size issues?

I can’t comment at this time as we haven’t finalized anything. In addition, you should look at it this way, if people flee lower league servers to get into the top leagues, it opens the opportunity for people to move to those lower leagues and finish 1st or 2nd, rather than being in the top league and finishing 6th or 7th. The rewards for finishing 2nd in the Bronze League will be markedly better than the rewards for finishing 6th in the Gold league.

NA will be 2 leagues of 12 servers, not 4 of 6. In addition server merges are not on the table as the population of the game as a whole doesn’t suggest they are necessary.

Oren.1736:

Devon, will Gold league players receive better achievements points/final rewards over silver/bronze league winners?

The achievements and achievement points will be exactly the same across the leagues and there will be few, if any, rewards that are different across the leagues. The dolyak stomp is the clearest example. The winners of each league will get a finisher specific to that league. From Gold to Bronze. The rest of the rewards will be more about how you performed in your league, than which league you were in.

Oroibahazopi.9074:

Will be the only sizeable amount of achievement points I can get at them moment since the WvW ones give hardly any ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

Srsly if you add PvE components to this WvW meta achievement it will be a joke.

I didn’t say PvE components, I said that they will function like the Living World achievements. They will be WvW specific and much like the achievements you see already, except actually reachable in 7 weeks. As to the total number of points, it will be hundreds, nothing like the achievements currently in place.

Convenant.7092:

… A finisher… ooooooooooooooooh man.

There will be considerably more rewards than that. But good sarcasm!

Rieselle.5079:

3. The player must meet some form of minimum activity requirement or lose his registration for that season. (we can discuss what constitutes activity worthy of receiving the reward i guess.)

The season long reward will require you to complete the WvW season meta achievement. Which behaves much like the Living World achievements. The server for which you receive rewards will be the 1st server you log in on once the season starts. Any transfers after that will not change your rewards.

I’ve consistently said we are doing 2 leagues in NA and 3 in EU. The leagues will be broken up strictly by world rating at the conclusion of the matchup prior to the league start.

Swamurabi.7890:

Are there different causes for lag server side? Can there be lag derived from map population (WvW or PvE) as well as lag from server population?

Strictly speaking the lag isn’t due to population per se, it is due to concentrated groups of players using skills on each other. The server calculates things every time a skill fires off and the more people it hits the more calculations it does. So if you get enough people fighting against one another, or even fighting with one another, you start to see server CPU problems.

Tom Gore.4035:

You have to realize people making content such as new maps are totally different people from the ones doing the backend server architechture.

Tom is correct. This is not an either/or proposition. Working on a new map is entirely dependent on designers and artists. Working on skill lag is an issue for programmers. Working on one doesn’t prevent the other from being worked on.

style.6173:

DevonCarver.5370:

We are aware of this, but it is a non-trivial fix. We are hoping to make changes to this by the end of the year.

Not really something to fix. Of all the things that could be implemented in WvW, this is the low to no priority category.

When I said we, I meant ArenaNet in general, I will not have anything to do with the change other than to make sure it plays well with WvW.

oZii.2864:

@DevonCarter for this https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/WvW-news-at-the-GW2-Anniversary-Bash-Panel/first#post2728316

Do you have a time when you will be having this WvW announcement or what panel event it is before or after? I plan to watch the whole panel but some may only have time to just catch your announcement.

It will be at the top of the panel, so nominally 3:30, but it will depend on when it actually starts. But it should be basically the first thing that happens at the panel.

Rennoko.5731:

DevonCarver.5370:

Daendur.2357:

What’s happening? They realized WvW is part of the game ?

Good one!

I think you just did this to add another red topic to the front page….

I see through you.

I’m going to assume that is a comment on my skin pigment and that is offensive!

We definitely don’t want to go to the level of fragmenting the game to the extent that we have PvP, WvW, and PvE versions of all the skills as that creates a disconnect with the characters we want you to use in all those places. That said, we are certainly discussing the idea of adding skills that would have a WvW focus. But they are just on the discussion level.

To clarify, Hugh will be out and about during PAX, not on panels. So you should absolutely feel free to ask him questions and test his evasion skills. :P Seriously though, we love talking to all of you face to face, so never be afraid to come up and talk to us.

We are aware of this, but it is a non-trivial fix. We are hoping to make changes to this by the end of the year.

Daendur.2357:

What’s happening? They realized WvW is part of the game ?

Good one!

See above quote.

Ahmrill.7512:

I agree Zeitlogik that the commander and squad system could use more functionality.

As do I. We will address this system when we are able to completely revamp it and bringing it to the level it should be at.

Niim.9260:

End of the year…. so sometime in the next 4 months, I guess that is better then soon?

One might question why adding achievements is taking 16 months, I am sure it is a technical limitation of some kind as that is the most common excuse.

We tackle each task as it comes up. Every thing we add or fix has an opportunity cost. In this case, the achievements have not been at the top of the priority list when we have had things like bugs to fix, ability lines to add, and other large projects (what Hugh previewed in the Livestream) to work on. All that being said, we are going to address this because it has become more and more problematic as we continue to add reward systems tied to achievement points and add more and more achievement points through Living World achievements. It would be ideal for us to have an unlimited number of people on the team and to be able to do everything at once. Reality is that we have the resources available to us that we do and we get as much done as we can within those constraints.

Lead.1784:

EvE doesn’t really get time dilation until you hit about 700-800+ players. Just saying.

While I appreciate the spirit of this response, I think it is clear that EvE and our game have very different types and amounts of calculations to make. We are making strides to improve the skill lag, but it is a very large and very difficult problem to solve. We can’t do more than take little chips off of it at a time and eventually those should add up to sizable differences, but each little change isn’t going to make a major impact in and of itself.

I’ll also point out here that I am not involved in this system, outside of making sure the interests of WvW are appropriately represented as it is designed and implemented. If you have suggestions for different ways to handle this, you should find a more appropriate forum.

Tommyknocker.6089:

Stormleaf.1769:

And once they make the WvW achievements more attainable, you’ll move on to whining about the lack of especially ‘difficult’ and ‘prestigious’ WvW titles like this one.

Hmmm, well I can’t say that I would “whine” I am just stating an obvious failing of this portion of the GW2 world. However if they can add titles for such things as say, “respected achiever”, what is the problem with adding a respected yakslapper title?

As for the achievements, you could just make it so that instead of getting say 10 achievement points for 50000 kills you could get at least 50 for such a milestone! If it is possible to get this same amount for doing 16/16 easy achievement in PvE, I for one cannot see the harm in upping the rewards.

Although these titles might not be considered as “prestigious” if done in tiers I can see no harm in showing to others what you have achieved thus-far. The same goes for the “milestones” in our achievement points offering a title, even though 5000 ap’s isn’t much I see many many players touting that particular one.

edit: clarity and spelling

Last time I’m saying this for a good bit. We are going to address this system before the end of the year, ideally, and make it more in line in terms of numbers and rewards as the rest of the achievements in the game.

lunyboy.8672:

I just want to level TEST TEST TEST TEST TEST and see what it does.

Can you pass the TEST? Who can say?

zen.6091:

I take it that since legendaries will soon be able to have stat changes out of combat, it would be possible to do this for other gear?

I don’t see that happening and the main reason is that it sets Legendaries apart. It makes them cooler, it makes them more worth trying to get if you care about stats and not just looks. I could be proven wrong at some point, but I don’t expect us to head down that road.

P.S. No.

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

DevonCarver.5370:

The mats will absolutely drop in WvW. In addition, generally speaking, we are putting a heavier emphasis on finding long-term solutions to redressing the reward imbalance between PvE and WvW. I can’t claim they will ever be 100% equal all the time, but we would like it to never be the case that you are choosing between playing WvW and getting good rewards. The two should be one in the same.

Does this mean we can also look forward to Ascended items from WvW badge rewards? I’m talking about back pieces and accessories of course.

I’m not going hold my breath on this one.

Purely from badges, no. We will be getting Ascended back items into WvW and accessories are already there. We’ve been focused on the Ascended items more generally and not specifically in WvW right now. However, we will make sure WvW is at parity with the rest of the game in terms of Ascended gear.