Guild Wars 2

Magnetron.5823:

Devon, we should say bye bye to you, cause in 11 months nothing has changed.

When I’ve been working on WvW for 11 months, then we’ll talk. I’ve been here for 5, so I still have 6 more before you boot me for someone else. Also, the orb mechanic is coming back.

We are continue to attempt to put more and more Living World content into WvW and while some releases do better than others, it should continue to be more integrated in the future.

We’ve got thick skins, but I certainly appreciate constructive feedback. It’s also much more likely to receive a response both in the forums and in the game. So, as always, make good suggestions in a positive way and you’ll see changes. Cheers!

ParaldaWind.4523:

DevonCarver.5370:

Are the orbs coming back? No. Are we bringing back the buff? Yes, although the way you get it and hold it is going to be drastically different. Are you going to see a major map change in concert with this? Yes. Is it coming soon? Most definitely.

If this orb replacement gives a stat bonus to the zergiest server, I feel like a lot of guilds will quit.

Here’s the thing to remember, it may buff the better servers for a time, but if it is relatively easy to take from a better server, it isn’t going to cause nearly the same problems that the original buff did. I will say that when this goes back into the game, we’ll continue to monitor the effects and make changes as necessary.

timidobserver.7925:

This guy has it right here. Someone that exclusively plays WvW should be able to get rewards just like those that exclusively play PVE. I’d dare say that there should be WvW legendaries.

We are continuing to make progress on these things. You can get ascended gear with badges now, the rank up chests have decent loot in them, including chances for precursors, all of the keep and tower lords drop the champion loot. The daily achievement is extremely easy to get in WvW, we’ve made a change (going live soon) to make many of the events group events to help with monthlies. Believe me, I am aware of the fact that the rewards in WvW don’t always keep pace with PvE, but we are moving to address that as much as we can. There will be an update on achievements in the not too distant future which will help to address the achievement point imbalance as well.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

because people will be disappointed if they tell us about this cool feature which later gets taken out because it doesn’t work as intended.

This would be the main reason. Also, until things are actually completed, they are likely/liable to change. Rather than getting everyone up in a lather about things that aren’t ever going to be in the game, we keep a tight wrap on details until they are ready for release. With our release schedule, that actually tends to be pretty close to when you all see them in game, so we don’t talk about details until that point.

Convenant.7092:

Devon’s a PR.

What the heck is a PR? I am a designer and the coordinator of the WvW team. I am in charge of making the decisions as to the implementation of and final versions of anything that gets put into WvW. While part of my job is to post on the forums to keep y’all informed, it’s also part of my job to not make promises that we can’t keep. So, my answers come off as vague, because that’s as much as I can say. If I’m saying anything, you should consider that to mean something, because if it is a topic I have absolutely no information on, I won’t talk about it at all.

I agree with kitten , take a break from commanding. Whether you roam around tagless, play some PvE, play some PvP, or just take a breather from the game, WvW will be there when you are ready to re-up. And it’ll probably be even better!

While we appreciate the feedback, and we are going to make changes soon that will at least partially address these types of concerns, it is absolutely 100% not the case that WvW is declining in people playing, play time, etc. We’ve seen steady improvement on all those counts since the start of the year and I’m hopeful that some of the changes coming soon will bring even more people into WvW.

As with everything, I’d love to give dates, but until everything is 100% ready to go, I can’t. Suffice to say they will be in as soon as humanly possible.

Are the orbs coming back? No. Are we bringing back the buff? Yes, although the way you get it and hold it is going to be drastically different. Are you going to see a major map change in concert with this? Yes. Is it coming soon? Most definitely.

There are some updates coming soon, quite soon even, that hopefully will dispel this. Say bye-bye to the Quaggan.

New maps take a long time to be built. And even once they are built it takes a long time to get them tested until they are ready to be released. Rest assured, as soon as we can release new maps, we will. And, while it isn’t an entirely new map, you can look forward to some changes to the borderlands soon. Let’s just say you should get your krait killing in now.

We are looking into what happened today. Captain Culling thinks he has found the culprit, but regardless we will fix this as soon as we can.

I’ve been waiting to buy it since we started building it, so I think it is.

Yaks are worth 3 points no matter how many people kill them. As for the points per player kill, well, we explore many ideas over the course of development and I’ll never say never.

Courier speed is a 50% movement speed increase and doesn’t stack with Swiftness.

These particular changes are indeed on the client-side. They won’t impact lag, unfortunately. We are still both investigating additional ways to combat skill lag, not that there are any particularly good looking options at the moment, and continuing to make improvements to overall game performance as we can.

Master of Timespace.2548:

Simple question. Why is there an aoe cap? And no, please do not come up with that “technical limitation” lie. There has been thousands games before this with massive pvp and no aoe cap, why would your engine be somehow so infernior to that of these older games?

What you seem to be missing is that technical limitations are not about the fact that a solution somewhere may have existed for some other thing. Our game is using an engine that has these technical limitations. We could, for instance, display everything as text, which would solve the problem quite nicely, however we’ve found that our graphics offer something a text-based MMO couldn’t quite deliver. The point is, it is very much a limitation of our engine. The load on the server CPU would be quite simply unsustainable if we were to increase the AoE cap as the more players hit by skills the more calculations it has to do and it actually starts increasing exponentially, rather than sequentially. We continue to seek out ways to squeeze more performance out of our game and our servers, but it is highly unlikely we would ever make a change to the AoE limits on player skills.

Shimdroid.2765:

Because with this system they can add ranks without touching the existing ones, in the other way you propose they should modify the entire ranking system each time they add a rank.

This is indeed why the system is built as it is. It is also intended to last for a very, very long time. Beyond that, we are going to be continuing to increase the rate at which you gain those ranks.

It doesn’t count. It’s only based on players on the map.

That is an unfortunate bug with the skill fact system. You do in fact get more damage from those lines.

You can get them in any of the chests from rank 6 on.

Troop.1369:

DevonCarver.5370:

We are going to have to do some complicated things to let people keep what they have already done in addition to adding new achievements. So, I’d love to be more informative in terms of date, but I don’t know either, so I can’t.

Uh… you knew these achievements were unrealistic at least 6 months ago. Today you’re still telling us anything good about it…

All I read is a lot of pretty words that when put together don’t mean much.

Six months ago, I was making Orr a much more enjoyable place to play. Now, I’m in charge of WvW and we are making progress on a number of things. Nothing is ever easy, however.

EnemyCrusher.7324:

DevonCarver.5370:

Changes to turn speed sound great, but we are unable to do them with the system as currently set up. That’s why you won’t see any changes of that sort for the foreseeable future.

Then I highly recommend reworking that system to be extensible. Fixing inextensible systems earlier in development can save a lot of effort and prevent bugs down the line.

Plus, +100% turn speed would be a worthwhile trait on catapults, mortars, and trebuchets.

I agree on all counts, but I hope you’ll concede we are no longer early in development. Making those changes nigh impossible to make at this juncture. If you happen to have a time machine handy…

I’d like to think I’ve shown that when I have a timeframe I can talk about, I do so, but there are many, many things that don’t clear up until closer to being ready to release. Rather than get all your hopes up with phrases like “We appreciate your concern and we’ll have a solution soon!” I try and be a little more realistic. In this case, achievements in WvW do not match the achievements in the rest of the game in terms of the amount of effort required to achieve them or the reward for that effort. But it’s not as easy as just saying “Let there be new achievements” We are going to have to do some complicated things to let people keep what they have already done in addition to adding new achievements. So, I’d love to be more informative in terms of date, but I don’t know either, so I can’t.

There is a per map cap. It is higher than 20.

Changes to turn speed sound great, but we are unable to do them with the system as currently set up. That’s why you won’t see any changes of that sort for the foreseeable future.

I’ve said it before, and I will repeat it here. We are aware of the problems with the WvW achievements and will be doing more to address them in the near future. Currently it is more complicated to solve the problems than I would like, which means we need to have a fully comprehensive solution before doing anything.

So, we are looking into what we can do to deal with these sorts of problems, but they are very tricky to deal with. The threshold I always have in mind is that any change we make has damage legitimate play less than whatever we are trying to address does. That being said I think we have some interesting ideas for the future, but they are not guaranteed to make it out of testing, because they have to work. I agree that this behavior is frustrating, and we will do as much as we can to try and put a stop to it.

You had better believe it! Which is a yes.

Thrumdi.9216:

I would personally like to see Robes of Power. Stylish lounge clothing for the relaxed WvW’er.

What about Robes of Powder? In a nice powder blue color. That’s stylin’!

The titles and achievement point values for WvW play are absolutely out of character with the rest of the game and we will be addressing that. What form that will take specifically I am not entirely sure.

Mif.3471:

DevonCarver.5370:

Sooner than you might think, but not nearly as soon as we would like. That’s as much as I can say.

Seems to me that’s the kind of info you would put in a “6 month plan” blog post…

I think it is safe to say, based on the response here to my comment, that putting that in a blog post would be a little less specific than we generally like to be in something that visible. Here, in the WvW trenches, I’m willing to be less specific but a bit more forward looking. If I had specifics, we’d give them, believe me.

While I do try and take time out to respond to posts in our forums, it is also the case that time spent on the forums is time not spent getting something else done. Right now, we have a lot of balls in the air, so it’s less possible for us to post frequently.

Colly.4073:

DevonCarver.5370:

Sooner than you might think, but not nearly as soon as we would like. That’s as much as I can say.

Why can’t you give us that kind of an answer on the skill delay issue? :/

Because the people working on that are in charge of those things. While we are doing as much as we can, which is not much, in specific terms of WvW to address this, it is a much more complicated and much more holistic problem than just WvW.

Glad you guys all caught this. Anthony really rocked it on that area of the map. It’s one of my favorites anywhere.

It’s my intention to have as much of the Living World stuff drop in WvW as possible and to do it in a way that gets you a good return. We want people playing in WvW during these events too.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Policy-3rd-Party-Programs-Multi-Boxing-Macros/first#post354869

That is and continues to be our stance on macros.

Mad Rasputin.7809:

While I agree with the sentiment that this is WvW and if you don’t want to fight don’t come here, getting their rears handed to them by ‘griefers’ is in no way shape or form going to encourage anyone to stick around and play WvW. Just the opposite I think.

There is definitely some amount of truth to that, but I’d hesitate to say that much of what is going on in the JP is griefing, it is more that people unused to WvW are coming into a much deadlier map than they are accustomed to. That is the risk you take.

WvW is about many things, but one of the biggest of them is siege weapons. We will continue to make changes and additions to the game to make siege weapons more varied and more interesting while also changing other aspects of the game. But it will always be a game type that uses siege weapons and uses them a lot. It is part of what makes WvW unique and the strategy involved is important. And before you mention it, I have died to many, many arrow carts.

Just wanted to hop in and mention, again, that the AoE cap on player skills is a technical limitation. Were we to increase that, skill lag would get considerably worse.

New maps are definitely in the plans, however I can’t say with any degree of certainty when that might be. It takes a good deal of time to get a map to the level of polish that the current maps are in and while we want to get new maps out to mix up the gameplay, we aren’t going to release them until they are totally ready. When there is more to tell, we will tell it, but for now all I can say is we definitely want to do new maps and will when time allows.

We have been looking hard into this issue and we believe we’ve figured out the source. It will get fixed as soon as we possibly can.

XII.9401:

DevonCarver.5370:

Orbs will never come back in the form they had as they simply were too easy to hack around. With that said, we are definitely working on finding a suitable replacement for the best parts of the orbs, while avoiding as many of the downsides as we can. It’s not simple task though, so it isn’t as simple as deciding to do it one day and finishing it the next. Our goal is to get a new and improved version out when we can, but we can’t say yet when that will be.

How can you NOT address a simple hack of the game you created, run and monitor?

Change the mechanic of carrying the orb.

Track down and ban people hacking it. I’m sure tracing who picked it when a hack is reported is easy. Track how fast it moves. If it moves beyond a certain speed then ban the person.

A few slaps on the wrists will address the issue.

It is not easy to be done in a day but you had months to fix it..

We have continued to do our utmost to track and ban all hackers, but if you think it’s possible to always be ahead of them, I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you. Unfortunately, this particular mechanic is far too susceptible to any number of hacks of this sort and while we can do as much as possible, it doesn’t prevent it from happening all the time and even 1 instance can unbalance a matchup a great deal. Hence, we are attempting to solve the problem on the content side as much as we can.

Johje Holan.4607:

Darn, when I saw the little red bubble next to the thread I thought Devon had come in here and said the orbs were coming back.

I don’t understand why they’re easy to hack. But then I don’t understand how people hack anything in a game.

They were easy to hack because of the fact that if you managed to fly or teleport hack you could do that and pick them up and take them right back to your base.