Guild Wars 2

At least eotm can now finally follow it’s original purpose again.

So what I’m wondering is what are we gonna do about server rankings after the pairings?
You can’t measure the individual server performance anymore so you can’t really have a ranking anymore.

The question is: do we even need server rankings? Does anyone still care about rankings? Shouldn’t we just do our best whatsoever?

This change is definitely for the better…. Tho I wouldn’t mind an increase of the Base condi damage since it always seemed pretty low.

Imagine Lord room fights without being able to pick up your dead. It would be so boring.

I’ve had some of my best battles fighting in Lord rooms for hours non stop with nobody willing to give up.

Spawn camping is one of the worst things to do in terms of fair-play.

If the other server has been a jerk… Okay I’ve done it myself. But there is simply no achievement behind it.

If you wanna make it interesting let half of your zerg stand behind and see if the other half is strong enough. Good practice.

If every treb could be countered they would be considered in huge waste of supplies.

I love playing with Trebs because they are so versatile and require so much precision and perfection to be used effectively. Few people actually consider using counter Trebs instead of pure manpower, but they can be deadly if shot properly.

That being said I really don’t want to see every treb counterable because the first guy to be hit is basically done which is simply not worth the supps.

E: also it’s not like the north towers aren’t counterable. You’ve got a pretty open side and some nice camps down there

One of the only reasons to even bother with the north towers instead of garri is the option to treb it.

If you can’t hold it it’s your problem. You can retake the tower and only outer garri can be opened that way. I don’t see any problems there.

Trebs have already been a heavily underused siege in terms of offense because they do their job so slow and have few places to be used from.

Commander ! We are surrounded.

“good. So the loot is coming to us. "

Well since it is officially intended to be a beta test there should be enough space for feedback after launch and there is no real need for perfection right from the start. Many people will forget this and expect a 100% stable and awesome wvw after the patch.

Rather let them work on the other things right now. They can’t change things within 2 weeks anyways.

kirima san.3760:

Entenkommando.5208:

How about:
-match ups that are decided by the better server not the bigger night crew
-balanced skills
-a meaningful scoring system
-a balances fighting environment?

Given the discussions that have been going on here in the WvW forum I didnt mention this as it was obvious and devs responded.

Nothing is obvious in wvw
I’m sorry I thought you meant it to be an alternative while there are no other changes.

But I’m gonna stay with my opinion. Real pvp players don’t care about rewards. Victory is their reward. All you have to do is put some effort in it at the beginning and all you have to care about in the next couple of years is a bit of balancing.

kirima san.3760:

What could bring back players to WvW if not a legendary incentive?

How about:
-match ups that are decided by the better server not the bigger night crew
-balanced skills
-a meaningful scoring system
-a balances fighting environment?

Yeah there used to be no stacks. 20 seconds of stability meant 20 seconds of complete immunity against cc’s. This of course made so called “paintrains” (~75% meeles) extremely strong because you could just straight run through anything they throw at you.

With the nerf it was basically impossible to push anywhere because you’d need somewhat around 30 stacks of stability for every push you wanna do leading to the pirateship meta. Both not very nice but many people say that the first version at least incentivised you to run in the fight.

Afaik one possible attempt at “fixing” stability could be to add a small ICD to each stack of stability.

X T D.6458:

This will be a nice change, I also hope there will be more uses for them and since they will become account bound, will they be part of the wallet currency as well. For those like me that have all their toons leveled and have elite specs fully unlocked, it would be nice to have something else to spend them on aside from siege.

You’ll only need 100k for any piece of legendary wvw equipment

msalakka.4653:

Entenkommando.5208:

Shazmataz.1423:

Tobias Steele.2071:

Quint.3765:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

No.

We aren’t changing anything regarding the layout of the map.

Thank you so much !!! now you just need to remove the Tactivators because clearly nobody wants them.

Speak for yourself please.

Tobias, did you actually read the “5 things most wanted” thread?? There were alot of people who asked that the new gimmicks be removed or to revert to alpine pre HOT.

And I could already see the posts from all the guilds who spent hundreds or thousands of gold on the upgrade.

So? Tough.

Nobody reimbursed me jack kitten when HoT completely invalidated my three-man guild’s upgrades and removed us the ability to +5 objectives or build guild siege.

Fair point. Though you didn’t have to pay for the upgrades before. All you had to do was to actually play with your guild.

Shazmataz.1423:

Tobias Steele.2071:

Quint.3765:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

No.

We aren’t changing anything regarding the layout of the map.

Thank you so much !!! now you just need to remove the Tactivators because clearly nobody wants them.

Speak for yourself please.

Tobias, did you actually read the “5 things most wanted” thread?? There were alot of people who asked that the new gimmicks be removed or to revert to alpine pre HOT.

And I could already see the posts from all the guilds who spent hundreds or thousands of gold on the upgrade.

No changes to alpine? Well that sounds interesting. Now I’m really curious what the new DBL will look like.

Depends on how they change the alpine border.
I could see it coming since ruins basically had 0 impact and we are given ppk anyway now.

Or they bring back quaggans…

I don’t have a problem with them if they are being tweaked a bit. It adds a fun bit of tactical play that can surprise your enemy but shouldn’t take away from the main part: fights.

OP basically got the one point that defines wvw: server pride.

If you take this away everything will be like eotm. No matter the fancy mechanics that may come.

He said on the stream that it took 8 devs almost half a year for one world.

That is indeed quite huge for such a small part of the game.

Still going to get the DBL upgraded before Alpine comes back.

Shazmataz.1423:

XTD wrote this and it is the “word”
“Siege wars/creep is cancerous gameplay, and is not fun nor does it require any skill.”

I have to heavily disagree on that one. Siege war requires a lot of skill to be successful. People are just too lazy to do it right (Which I understand because there is no reward as long as you don’t cap)

Let’s look at a keep your enemies want to defend. What can you do? (considering you also got decent numbers and don’t suck completely at open field fights)
There could be such an enormous amount of coordination required to do something if people were to organise it.
First of: get 3 small parties to constantly cap their camps, keep them empty and kill their dolyaks. Second: make sure you got a constant supply flow on your side. Get scouts to follow their zerg and go defend your supply camps if needed.
Now we go offensive. Try to get a relatively safe spot. A plateau that you can defend with ac’s yourself or whatever. Build some trebs and attack their supply camp until the keeps supply is drained empty. Get some cata attacks going, do everything to get inside. (on the old borders I would have said go for the North towers but… Dessert) Once inside you can easily clear all their siege and because they have neither supply nor camps left they won’t be able to rebuild anything and the keep is open for you.
At this point you could even consider an omega rush to finish the inner keep.
And what can also help a lot is to leave the 3rd party entirely untouched. They may first try to go for your easy targets but once you show them how things are going you may have double the forces going for your enemy.

You have to note that this procedure can take several hours and only really rewards you in the end (besides tons of loot if you don’t suck at fighting) which is why this is almost non existent nowadays. Your people need to have the endurance and the iron strong will to pull this off. To show who’s got the pants on in this match up. And if you regularly achieve things like that you won’t need a score to tell you who is the better server.

That’s the wvw spirit.

Oh yeah… Ac’s are fine.

I’m not really sure if the idea is that bad.
It should probably be lower than 5 minutes but the new keeps are like 3-4 times larger than the old ones which makes looking everywhere insanely time consuming and annoying. (And that is being said by someone who always went through the entire keeps to look out for mesmers)

Something like marked for 20-30 seconds and revealed for 2-3 minutes could work out I think. That way you can have an initial idea of where he is hiding and after that it comes all down to his skill of running and hiding.

+1 for Friday.

1 more day of serious action when life comes back to wvw.

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

Jski.6180:

The old bl do not fit wvw any more. The only way to bring them back is to update them to fit current wvw and that would require a major over hall. So every thing you see in the new bl you will need to retrofit the old bls from towers to keeps to camps.

Care to elaborate on this rather bold claim?

The same stale gameplay for 3 years. Maps so small that you could move to every objective within half a minute making blobs extremely strong and destroying tactical, organised, small groups.

The new borders aren’t perfect by any means right now but with some tweaks they could yield a much deeper strategical potential than the old maps.

You just wanna ez loot ktrain if you really want the old maps back. But that is what made wvw die before hot. The new borders were just a final flaw. Stop acting like thousands of players would come back for the old borders. The only difference was that maybe 50 out of 100 guys queuing for ebg still played the borders. I even doubt that most of the guilds would actually bother to come back to this pile of kittens with a dev saying “soon” every 6 months.

WvW died with the stability change. Not with the maps.

Idk why every idea right now needs to fix wvw.

It will not contribute to the current situation but can be an interesting concept in the future.

lil devils x.6071:

Dayra.7405:

I am seriously in doubt, that if you merge all 27 EU-server into 3 server, you can even queue 1 map in EU-night, not talking about 4 (a whole match) or even more (more than 1 match).

I do not see how you would not be able to, considering T1 NA can queue a map any time of day or night at times, and I thought there were more playing on EU servers than NA….

Guess why we always speak about a serious problem for EU…

This is just what flew through my head today and may have been requested in a bit of a different form already.

I imagine having a dynamic ppt system in which holding a structure gives you more points the more it is in danger of beeing retaken.

ANet would basically collect all the data of each individual server at which time they attack which structures and when they manage to cap it as well as population data during these times.

When the servers are matched together they’d combine the 3 servers’ stats calculating the actual “danger” a structure is in and adjust it’s ppt according to this and how well you manage to hold it.

Taking ebg as an example:
It would mean that the servers would be rewarded more ppt the closer the object is towards the enemy. For example Anzalias and Durios are capped very often. So if the defenders actually manage to get it upgraded and defended it gives much more ppt than say Bravost or Veloka that never flip and therefore are much safer.
On the other hand if you actually manage to attack and cap one of the closest spawn towers holding it would give you a massive reward because it’s very difficult for you to hold it.
If you manage to get SMC to t3 in prime time where it ususally always looks like swiss cheese you’d also get quite a big boost.
And there may even be some funny situations when people are actually trying to defend their supply camps because a fully upgraded camp is much harder to accomplish than taking a t0 SMC and would therefore even give more points.

This system would create an incentivise to go for the more difficult structures because they are more rewarding. And defending would of course also be improved because upgrading an endangered structure rewards you with more ppt, but on the other hand may result in some very nice fights because people now start to care about structures that they are used to watch color flipping faster than a traffic light.
Also the dynamic scaling with the upgrade status would mean that a) upgrading and b) especially taking the effort to attack a keep over and over and over again until you finally manage to take it would finally have an impact instead of it beeing all the same value as a simple wooden tower.

The reward factor should ofc be visible on the map so you know what keep gives you best results.

Until this point the system could even be fairly simple to implement without requiring much fancy data. But I’d like to include the time factor which basically means having an activity graph for each object depending on the time:

An example: The system knows that at 5am server A has an active night crew of say 60 people capping their way through the maps. Server B only has 20 left during the off time (probably mostly on ebg) so their keeps are in big danger. Now the system would say “Hey server A it’s nice that you are slaughtering all over the borders but where is the fun in fighting NPC’s only? There is no reason for me to greatly reward you for doing this. Though I may give server B points for holding their stuff if they were still here. But look there are still some guys from Server B left on ebg. How about you try and take their stuff and have some nice fights? Then you’d deserve your points.”
That of course doesn’t mean that fights become more fair for server B but defending a structure with 20 guys against 60 is fairly possible with the right communication. And they wouldn’t feel useless because their effort has a huge impact on the score.

The system basically always compares the values of the server owning and the server attacking a structure. That would also passively encourage the two low activity servers to go against the high activity server because capping things from each other is no big action when they are fairly balanced, but taking it from the big guy over there is.

What do you think of this? Do you see any major drawbacks to the actual system that may not have come to my mind?
I don’t see much potential for exploiting the system, because it relies on long term collected data and therefore would be pretty hard to manipulate unless you wanna completely stop playing for 2-3 weeks.
There may be some problems with sudden bigger population changes on a server, for example if the guild that took care of the night crew for the last half year suddenly quits the enemies would suddenly get a much higher score. For me that would be an acceptable compromise tho because it still has less exploit potential that only relying on the immediate measurements.
For ebg it is of course quite unrealistic to hold the closest towers but it should work on both alpine and dessert borders.

PS: It’s pretty late already so it may take some time until I can answer again.

My personal problem with nightcap is less about the amount of points you gain but rather how your entire day is ruined, because it’s almost impossible to get enough people for capping something back if everything is t3 and fully sieged-even if the night cappers are long gone.

Sounds interesting.

E: Just a few questions that flew through my mind.

-How would you actually determine the winner of a fight? Would you simply say the group with the most people alive going out fight wins? Then what if a 20 man guild kills 10 guys out of a 50 mam blob and the last 40 decide to run away. How do you technically know that the guild “won”? Or of the guild runs away how do you know that the blob won?

How long would the event last? As long as you have orange swords or with a restarting event timer? And would it seem possible to have an imaginary endless reward stacking? E.g. If you attack your enemies garrison and they keep defending it so you fight in their Lords room for maybe 1-2 hours straight and kill hundreds of red players it would seem fair that you get a lot of gold out if this. (I could easily imagine a 10-20g reward after such a long fight and it would still not be as profitable as pve farming)

-How would you determine your group size if it changes infight? Say you have a 50v50, kill 10 guys and in the mean time 20 are joining again. Is it 50v70 or 50v80? Would this mean that your ppk value changes dynamically within the fight? Or maybe set it fix for this event if you do it with a timer?

-What about siege? I think if a small group manages to kill a larger, attacking one with some clever ac’s they deserve the points. But do others think like that as well?

I think the biggest problem is to know who won the fight. Everything else is just a design question.
It would certainly encourage smaller groups engaging blobs (maybe you could even take away the blobs ppk if the difference is big enough?)

It doesn’t really have to do with this topic, but I think there should be enaugh mobs on the roads to kill unprotected dollyaks, forcing servers to guard them if they want upgrades.
This would be a useful kind of PvE on the maps.

Nightcapping is a problem. Let me tell you a little story from the old days.

We are in EU t1 before the random match up patch. Every week would be between seafarers rest and Vizunah. Every week. Over and over and over and over and over again.

What happened was that every day of the week Vizunah would get up at 5am, ktrain every single map, upgrade everything to t3 and for the rest of the day they hide in their keeps behind one million arrow carts, never taking on a fight they don’t have to until you eventually managed to find a weak point because normal people finally came back from their real life and you get ques on every border. Now you slowly start to fight your way through all the keeps (because they never win fights unless having 20 ac or outnumbering you by more that 2v1…literally) and eventually you have a decent control of all maps until the late evening with everything nicely upgraded.
Then you have 5 hours of ppt in your side until their morning crew gets up and takes everything that is not their color.

Please explain me how a server almost entirely playing like this is supposed to be the number 1 (=“best”) server for several years? Clearly nothing is broken there….

dzeRnumbrd.6129:

Entenkommando.5208:

Breakbars seem like a great solution to this

Stability stacks are the same thing as a breakbar, just with different visual representation.

They both require a series of CC’s to hit a player until a stun occurs

But once you are stunned with the break bar you become immune to cc for a short period of time, which is the important part here.

If I recall correctly Colin said that the culling fix took an entire year of work for one of their senior engineers.
That means either he just made coffee breaks 75% of the time or something about their code is severely broken which makes changes take for ever.

A gamemode with that amount of cc spam simply needs a cc timer.

Breakbars seem like a great solution to this

You are all wrong. That’s the wvw dev team right there.

Lauren Kamieniecki.6245:

While I have all the answers, really I am the next thing to a walking encyclopedia of the GW2 bug DB at any time, I can’t really go around shouting what is happening one way or the other because it can change daily… and letting some things I know be known would probably result in my not working for ArenaNet anymore. That’s something that would be kinda poopy and I would like that not to happen, so I avoid it and instead just say slightly nebulous things like “soon” when I see a fix coming for the next release. One day that “soon” will have some real intent behind it. Today actually seems like a good day to “soon” some threads so…

.

This somewhat became my understanding of “soon”

ErazorZ.5209:

Ive talked about this in this thread allot of times already. Even in my OP, What it comes down to is that skill in the end doesnt matter in PvP if thats the case. If they trully want Rock Papper Scissors balancing, the only ‘skill’ you have is rerolling your character faster then the opponent to counter there build with your own if thats what it boils down to.

You think thats good?

The skill involves playing around your weakness, shining with your strength and assisting your teammates if they are in an unfortunate position.
If everyone can do everything what do we even have 9 classes for?

Same here.

/15chars

Supporting your teammates in a group based game is a waste.. Sorry but I can’t follow your logic.

E: this is the problem with gw2 pvp. This “everyone can do everything” mentality simply doesn’t work in a pvp gamemode. And this is the reason they are not able to create an esports friendly pvp environment.

Keadron.9570:

Ele isn’t a hard counter to anything atm. It can’t survive a burst and even specd into full damage doesn’t do enough to put down anything but a thief (lots of people playing thief now who don’t know the class well enough)

I didn’t say that every class needs to be a hard counter to something.
Ele has its qualities in group play. Are thiefs complaining that they can’t support well in a group fight? No, because thief is intended to be a quick +1 out of the shadows striking class.
The broken thing about Ele was that they were able to fulfil almost every role in a group and now that they need to choose one they are crying. (Not saying that everything is balanced properly)

In pvp games there is something called “hard counter”, and it’s very useful.

With the current way wvw works it would definitely be a dream for ktrain.

But I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to punish a playstyle that involves sieging the keep from everywhere, slowly draining supplies instead of rushing it with 20 omegas so you don’t do any unnecessary damage to the keep.

I would love to play it with some tweaks tho.

I’ve got another one
“WvW is out (gliding). Because the wvw team is weak… And… Fearful "

So you can basically still exploit the system by bringing down your MMR as far as possible while you can’t derank from your division and farming low MMR players afterwards?

“You done kittened it up”

The Oasis event is supposed to be a comeback for weaker servers which will never work as long as it’s mechanics are numbers based (gather most items, kill most npc’s, whatever)

Fellfoot.8156:

Vermillion.4061:

Are you guys really that blind? WvW overhaul is timing right around when CU is being released.

What’s the date on CU?

“soon”
;)

Your arguments aren’t very strong. Exclusive gliding would be p2w since it’s a mechanic that gives you an insane tactival advantage.

Is revenant p2w? No, because it doesn’t add anything new. It’s just the old things smashed together differently. Everything a revenant can do you could do on other classes as well (Not talking about specific balance issues)

Is the bufffood p2w? Yes, technically it is. It gives you an insane advantage over someone who doesn’t have hot. I mean we are talking 10% less damage. The only reason it doesn’t have a big impact is because crafting costs are so high that very few people actually use it and that very few people play on a level where this is the deciding factor before any communication, timing, skill, movement issues.

Another thing that I still consider p2w: shield generators. Their mechanics have huge impact on fights. But since everyone around you can place them it’s not that much of a deal for the individual not having hot.

In difference to all of the above not having gliding would give you a very noticable disadvantage. WvW is a team game afterall. You don’t have a rev? Fine but you can still help your group with a necro or whatever. You can’t use shield generators? Well someone on your team can. You don’t have the op food? Well it surely won’t make that much of a difference. You wanna follow your team over the cliff? Weeeell…I’ll be there in 2 minutes because I have to take the long way and will most likely be killed by some random roamers on the way. GG.

http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/v/36989122?t=14m10s