Guild Wars 2

If you think its bad in top tier, guess how HoT affected lowest tier servers. Before the HoT we had people, not many, but people who jumped in during the day and eventually gathered up to the prime time fights against enemy servers. There is not a single person, not enemy, no friend anymore in wvw.

The reasons wvw is dead:

• Few wvw oriented guilds left in low population servers are having hard time to upgrade the eternally hungry guild hall. The wvw upgrades being closed behind mountain of materials means all the small guilds lowest tier servers relied on, will be doing this for many months. Again, the stupid upgrade cost is exactly same for 5000 members guilds from tier 1 as it is for 20 players guild in tier 9. basically, no more guilds in wvw.

• Auto-upgrades means everything in everywhere is always tier 3. You used to be able to hop into map for 20-30 minutes, solo some camps and take few towers with couple of friends. You need a zerg to take any structure now because its all upgraded to the max. In lowest tier zergs are rare, people are used to capture with small groups instead. Now it takes forever to build siege, run more sups from the camp, and then sit there for hours waiting that fully upgraded wall or gate to slowly, very-very slowly wear down. So, its zerg up or die at boredom.

• If there was dominant server in low tier matches, it will now exclusively do laser show event to clear the gates on all enemy structures. While outnumbered players have to still hit the maxed up structures. Again, zerg up for the dinolasers or die at boredom.

• There are no fights. You used to have fairly high chance of enemy showing up when you went to their home BL and poked their keeps there. Now its pointless. If enemy wants to defend fully upgraded keeps, you have no chance of capturing it so there is no reason to waste time when 3 other maps are completely empty. If enemy decides to not waste time on defending, you end up hitting the 1 button for next hour. Also, few wvw guilds are all still busy grinding PvE for guild upgrades, and will still do that kitten for many more months.

Quite a lot of wvw improvements are still locked behind guild hall upgrade cycle. So, a lot of wvw guilds, mostly people who played only wvw for last year or so, are now forced to grind through the PvE events to earn billions of different materials so they can unlock another wvw upgrade in the guild hall.

The whole idea of forcing wvw guilds go through this painful misery is pure failure.

Yes, half the guild had troubles with all kind of weird errors popping up.

1 – Nothing has been said about changes in wvw.
2 – Nothing has been said about timeframe.
3 – The word I remember about raids was “months”.

I have played healer in many games. It will never work in GW2. The reason – huge amount of damage coming from everywhere.

For healer to be effective, spread the healing skills over time and apply healing where it is needed, players need to stay alive for enough time. In PvP, WvW or PvE boss battles everyone is at full health and dead 1 second later. There is nothing healer can do when damage hits like steamroller.

First the damage needs to be reduced back to reasonable levels so fights do not end in few seconds. Only then can we start to discuss if there is point being designated healer.

What good does random waypoint do for wvw player? Having just a wp in HoT maps is fairly pointless since you need also several masteries to get anywhere from wp. And you need to grind on those HoT maps to raise those masteries. To get to the actual hero point challenge, you still need things like gliding, mushroom jumping, poison reduction and/or any number of other masteries.

If anyone can these days be only wvw player is even debatable. If you are in wvw guild, you need to improve guild hall which requires gold (you never earn gold from wvw, you only spend gold you earned in pve) and/or materials (none of which can be found/bought in wvw).

I was feeling exactly same, wondering around the empty maps, looking at events full of veteran mobs that each one-shot me and trying to reach hero points only to be greeted with another silly mastery requiements. That was very frustrating and unlocking first couple of masteries took forever. I found it less fun and started to stay in old Tyria more and more.

Then, after elite points gor reduced to 250 and I only needed few more to complete my elite specs, I went back to HoT maps. To my surprise, I found very active comm yesterday on Verdant Brink (there was actually several comms on the map) and I was sticking to him like glue for nearly an hour. We finished the day events and night events and did a lot of events in general. I managed to level up another mastery and my inventory was full of bags and chests.

It was great fun.

Today I was exploring next map, Auric Basin, found another comm and spent long time following him around, doing long event chains until the clearing of Forgotten City Tarir. There was again good number of events to follow. I only wish I would have mastery to buy keys so I could open all the chests in forgotten town (must have been hundred grand, huge and enormours chests there). The map was even more organized, with 4 comms chatting and sending people to help each other between waypoints.

So, I have had some really bad times in HoT maps and I have enjoyed it too. My thoughts:

• The maps are horrible to solo. Never, ever, try to do any events in those maps without 2-4 commanders. If there is none, wait or leave.

• You need following masteries to do ANYTHING. I wish Anet would unlock these by default so people dont fall into even deeper despair for not being able to go anywhere: gliding 1 and 2, jumping mushrooms.

• I have not had much problems with hero challenges so far. The ones I got were either soloable or there was already people nearby. I saw even 1 comm doing all hero points one by one, walking slowly from one map to next.

• With gliding and mushroom jumping you can actually explore large parts of the maps on your own. Look around, jump off the cliffs, glide, fall, die, try again. Again, avoid the events without larger group, they take too long and give no real xp in return. Dont try to finish map completion when comms are doing large event chains.

• The maps become more interesting and you will become stronger once you unlock new stuff. It just takes VERY LONG TIME. Be patient. Yep, at first, they suck bad. You cant do anything and cant go anywhere.

• You will die A LOT. You will fall and die. Mobs spawn at your feet and kill you. Or you fall and die. You will be hit by invisible conditions out of nowehere, losing 5k HP per second. Did I mention falling? Lots of falling to death. All that is perfectly normal.

I was just talking about those markers today with guild and most people agreed that they are too bright. The green one looks basically same as plants node. Until you can see the information when hovering mouse over the icons, there is no need for it to be shown constantly.

Yep, first HoT map is completely empty. I asked from guildies what’s going on and apparently everyone is farming single event in last (4th) HoT map. I honestly can’t be bothered to run through million mobs, each taking half my hp in single shot, just to get into farming spot so I have ignored these pointless big empty areas they added for HoT and do stuff in old maps instead.

Its not even just the xp to unlock first tier of crafting legendaries. Suppose you get wvw xp count toward mastery and get legendary going. Then what? The whole process of collecting pieces in each tier involves running around the PvE maps, collecting stuff, doing event, killing champs. You must do fractals. You need to grind in new HoT maps for specific currency that drops only in that single map. You will be doing this all for many months so no time for wvw anyway.

Food needed to nerf because, new armor and weapons stats have condi duration boosts.

Bubi.5237:

And then you would have ppl complaining about “p2w” as you can’t use gliders without HoT but you can play DBL without it.

You can’t use elite specs or play revenant without HoT either so those should be banned from wvw too?

People always complain.

New borderlands are clearly designed to be used with gliders. Then someone decided to not allow them (possible because of the creative ways players could abuse them). But still after running around in new HoT maps and then returning to BL, first thing I did was to jump off the cliff and press space. Again. And again. And thinking, while falling to death, thats weird.

The gliders must be allowed in BL maps. I dont even care if you could jump over some tower walls in EB, just place some snipers in each tower that do 90% damage to gliding players.

I play all 8 (now rev too) just to understand the enemy. I had 200+ HP on all my chars waiting for elite specs. After getting half-way elites, unlocking some weak traits and few skills, they all still rubbish. Thing is, I am not going to replace any of my normal builds with these half-finished weaker specs for months. Basically, yes I have “unlocked” the elite specs but in reality they all remain unplayable until I grind through all the extra HP. Which will take very long time. VERY. VERY. LONG…

Genavelle.9516:

Pretty sure the beta events for these maps were invite-only and mainly consisted of streamers- so no, they weren’t tested by actual WvW players, and those beta events were mostly just for advertising.

Also I remember several months ago seeing in the forums that people complained these maps would be too big, and would kill both roaming and low-population servers. Obviously Anet didn’t care.

Not all beta was invitation-only. I was in one of the betas myself. Thing is, all the beta feedback was exactly same as players are saying now: its too big, too confusing and very hard to find enemy to fight.

So, what was changed between beta and live version? Nothing.

I have had long discussions about low population problem with people in last tier of EU servers. And I’m afraid there is no good solution as long several things change.

Best situation for wvw would be to have all servers with nearly same population. However, as long people can freely change servers at any time there will be servers with low population and servers with high population.

To spread most wvw players between all servers rewards from wvw events should change so that having large blob means everyone involved gets smaller reward. As long having more people is shortest way to victory in wvw, and everyone still gets full reward for it, people will always want to join the server with highest population.

There is a lot of bad relations between servers that have been fighting each other for many months in a row. Forcing them all fight together could be nearly impossible. Players, who have not left the low population servers, are very proud of that and consider fighting for exactly that server very important.

Tournament:

• Each tournament lasts one month. Tournament starts at Day 1 and ends at Day 28.
• Each server has 14 matches. Each matchup lasts 48 hours.
• Each matchup is different. If server A has been in matchup with servers B and C already, that same matchup will not happen again in same tournament. However, matchups of servers ABD, ABE or ACD are possible.
• At the end of tournament server with most points is declared winner, players from winning server who logged into wvw during the tournament will get awarded with special title and costumes that last for 1 month

Scoring points:

• After matchup ends (every 2 days), server with highest score in matchup gets 2 points. Server in second place gets 1 point. Server in last place gets no points.
• Actual score gathered during matchup has no effect. It does not matter if winner has scored 1000 more then other server or just 1 more. Everyone still gets 2, 1 or 0 points.
• If 2 or 3 servers end up with exact same match score, winner is declared based on server rating.
• Maximum points to gather during a month is 28 points if server wins all 14 matches. Minimum is 0.
• At the end of tournament, servers with more then 14 points will have their rating raised, all servers with less then 14 points have rating reduced.

Rating:

• All servers are rated from “strongest” to “weakest”.
• Ratings will change after each tournament (every month).
• Servers with close ratings will likely fight each other.

Setting up matches:

• Every 48 hours new matches will start
• Same matchup can never happen twice in same tournament
• Servers have high chance to get into matches with closely-rated servers. This means high ranked servers will likely fight other high rank servers, and low rank servers usually fight other servers with similarly low rank. This also means most matches are fairly equal.
• Matches are also picked based on current score. If low rank server has won many matches already and gathered many points, it will be matched up with higher rank servers.
• Sometimes matches are still not interesting because one server is clearly stronger or weaker. This only lasts for 48 hours.

Transfers:

• Number of servers can be easily changed after each tournament. The system works with 15 servers, 20 servers or 30 servers.
• If people are leaving from some server and its total population over month drops below limit, that server will be disbanded.
• If total wvw population is growing, before next tournament new server will be added. This new server will have lowest rating.
• All new players entering wvw first time are automatically assigned to lowest rank server.
• You can only transfer to server with lower rating, you can never transfer to server with higher rating.
• Transfers are only allowed in reset time after one tournament ends and before next tournament starts, at days 29, 30 and 31.
• Transfer cost is based on number of players transfering to and from servers during this month. First player to leave server A has transfer cost 0, first player to transfer to server B has also cost of 0. After each transfer the cost for next player is increased by 1. After 100 players have transfered off from server A, next player must pay 100 gems. If 1000 players have transfered to server B already, next transfer will cost 1000 gems.

EOTM:

• is removed

Aradia.5389:

To the right you have Blackgate and to the left you have Jadequarry. Notice how they stay on their respective side. And once Yak’s forces were decimated Blackgate simply strolled out and let Jadequarry claim the garrison. This shouldnt be allowed.

I would argue against several points here.

First you assume in 3-server matchup there is some law or rule against 2 servers combining forces againts third server. There is none. If you actually want to fight against only one server, we would have straight server vs server system. The whole wvwvw is designed for the possible short-or longterm alliances.

It happens daily when one server sends large force to attack other server and third server sneaks quickly behind empty enemy lines to take some objectives. Is it unfair? is it balance problem? Or smart thinking?

In a fight against 2 opponents you should just always assume you are fighting against both of them. Even when one enemy looks friendly and helpful, they are probably only looking easy way to betray you and backstab on first chance.

Second, (and just for a fun, lets suppose this is against the rule) you say anet should do something and not allow this. How would developer detect this? And what would they possibly do? 3-way battles are generally most fun, attacking one server first to kill them off is very often quickest way to victory. Forces leaving battleground could be for many different reasons – ts servers crashing, commanders getting dced, more help needed in other borderlands. Can you prove this was not random event? And what punishment would you propose? Would developers need to give you back your lost garrison and increase your score because fight was maybe unfair?

When same servers fight each other for weeks and months over and over, people get bored and start to look for other ways to make matches more interesting. They duel. They have GvG fights. They form alliances with other servers. They post angry things on forum about how boring and unfair wvw is. Yet, when matches are mixed up, and servers with hugely different population are thrown against each other, fights are again boring and unfair and people start to look for different ways…

gavyne.6847:

How did Daredevil play in WvW btw, anybody try it over the beta weekend?

For group fight Daredevil brings nothing new. Staff is another melee weapon, just like daggers and sword, and yes, you will still instantly die if you try to join hammertrain. All the new skills are about single target damage, something that thief already has plenty of access to. There are no new group support skills and none of the new skills has anything to do with stealth.

TehHobNob.4687:

When you get down to it when was the last time your commander said in ts that you needed more engineers…We need more Rangers…We need more thieves…

I do not know situation in very large zergs, but we run small guild group of 10-15 against similar size or slightly larger enemies. Every single person needs to contribute something useful to the party (5) or group (10-15). Before the big change in June I used to run both thief and engineer, mostly because I like to play those classes, but also I felt useful and helping the group in ways other classes did not. Since the update I dropped both.

There just isnt anything thief contributes that cant be done better by some other class. Stealth is done better by mesmer. Group damage, single target damage, applying and removing condis, healing, boosting, tanking. Thief has no good role.

Enemy thieves attacking our backlines are usually annoying at most. And then they die.

HoT beta did not bring anything good for thief. And I doubt poor engineer will get much needed boost either.

I play in tier 9 (EU). Looks like there wont be any playable maps left for tier 9…

I do agree that for low population servers maps (specially new HoT bl maps) are too big and empty most of the times. WvW maps without players to fight is just boring PvE, and if we want to play PvE we can do it in actual maps designed for PvE.

But this does not solve bigger problem, that we have low population servers and high population servers. For most interesting matchups all servers should have fairly equal population, and once total playerbase is shared among all possible servers, it may turn out we dont need to reduce number of available maps because much more people will be playing in every server.

I agree that engineer needs improvements, and very few people them in wvw. But no class, skill or trait is designed FOR wvw. For PvE, yes. For PvP, yes. Some of those PvE and PvP designs just happen to work well in wvw too, and some dont.

Got about 18k, nothing to buy with them.

FogLeg.9354:

Was that DrN or BTA? And where did they go?

Just few days ago I asked which guild left. The real answer – they ALL left. Another server left completely empty.

I have mixed feeling about BT death. The hackers have ruined game for me and many other players for too long to forget it all suddenly. The bad attitude of many BT members during whole hacking spree was horrible and insulting.

If I would be really evil, I would quote here number of replies from BT players about their superior skills and how great the server is. Well…

So, in EU tier 9 we now got 2 playerless servers. And before some i-know-all-about-wvw-because-I-play-in-high-tier guy pops in with some meaningless reply, when I say empty, I mean empty. Completely empty. As no players left. None.

Funny thing is – they still both marked as “medium” population, same as Dzagonur, Vabbi and Arborstone. Gives new meaning to word “medium”.

From the recent matchup, I would not be surprised to see another server die same way very soon too. Exactly what is the purpose of having 9 tiers and 27 servers when there simply is not enough players, is not clear to me. If it is just to show BIG numbers, why not add 99 more tiers with 300 more servers, surely it will work even better.

So, if any guild in high EU tier complaining about queues and lags wants to get their hands on whole server where they can play as much as they want whole day long, there are now 2 to offer.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Hacker in our matchup is still around and still doing hacking into towers. Updates on this guy?

Which matchup are you talking about?

Have not seen any hacking in current FoW/UW/BT matchup yet.

Was that DrN or BTA? And where did they go?

I imagine both Vabbi and RoS are just much more organized servers, covering whole 24h fairly evenly. When BT was in tier 9 with us (FoW), they completely relied hackers for nightcapping, allowing their server jump in the morning and upgrade everything to the max. Eventually our nightcrew was first to boycott the game. Now that BT looks to be hacker-free, their night score is constantly 0. Also, considering their main prime time tactics has always been to run around in one huge mega-blob, I am not surprised they keep losing points against 4-5 smaller groups.

I have still not seen hackers this week, none from UW, and have not heard any rumors about BT hackers either anymore. We may end up against BT again after reset, so then we will see if the hackers simply want to avoid tier 8 or have truely left.

Our nightcrew in FoW is very good, and we are all very thankful to them. We still have some completely empty times when practically nobody manages to get online, thats when we lose too much to both UW and WSR.

And I hope UW gets some wvw guild running too, beating up just 2 same old WSR guilds for whole week is not enough

Here is our FoW vs WSR fight couple days back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCOzGWhWHOA

Again 2 crashes last night. The weird thing is, none of my guildmates are affected. It also only happens to me in wvw, was playing for hours around the pve maps without any problems.

I had 2 crashes during last evening raid. Before big patch on 25.Aug I have been raiding for months without any problems. On the patchday whole server disconnected whenever larger fight started.

Now it looks like mostly me, other people in my guild did not crash. This is also different crash as I do not get any errors messages, game does not close. Everything on my screen just freezes on the place, animations and sounds keep repeating but nothing reacts to my input and all stands on same spot. This goes on for fairly long time, several minutes and once I even had to close GW2 from taskbar eventually. Its not my connection problem since TS keeps working normally.

I last saw that hacker on friday before reset ganking our people in EB. It is way too early to say if he has been banned, is just bored or Anet has actually managed to fix something for now. This matchup against UW and WSR has been boring as hell but I have not noticed any weird capping going on.

reddie.5861:

i just hope this UW hacker if he exist will kitten BT constantly cus from what i have seen is BT came “alive” when the hacker was active in WvW and started to think they where actually cappin stuff legit. (not all but majority thought so)

BT isnt in tier 9 anymore, we managed to boycott the wvw for month so their rating got high enough for tier 8 now. Meaning they are not our problem anymore.

Thats why hacker went to UW, so he can stay in tier 9 which everyone knows is out of Anet interest. Just once the hacker went to tier8 with BT few weeks back, the servers there started reddit thread about it and boom, next day Anet security chief was posting about “that he is working on it”. We been complaining about hackers over 3 months now and all we got was threads removed, locked and people warned for posting names of hackers in public. Not a single reply from Anet.

Sirendor.1394:

Is the hacker still active btw? I haven’t seen him today.

I have not seen the hacker after reset. In fact, I have not seen any UW players today, which makes this match really boring now that WSR with their 3 times more players has built waypoints on every keep and has nothing more to do then just spawncamp us whole day.

Just now, this very moment, UW guilds TAL and VA are working with the UW hacker killing us in EB, taking our keep while invisible hacker kills our siege and jumping on our dead people the hacker has killed. So before you UW people start to talk again how much better you are, you are not, you are as bad as BT ever was.

The invisible UW hacker is again in EB right now. Anet, stop sitting on your lazy bum, ignoring the problem, get your people online and stop this rubbish already.

Why? Why? Why?

What have we done to be punished with another week of BT in tier 9? We were having so much fun with WSR and now this again…. So unfair…

Im going off-topic here but there is little reason for creating new topic. I like players trying to fix and improve the game, I truely want developers to write about these things too, explain why and how and what they think.

But like with every such proposal to change the game lets consider this from Anet view too. Basically, they are here to make money from the game. If they dont make profit anymore, game is shut down. The GW2 business model has 2 parts: sell the game for x sum upfront and then people can play for how long they desire, and sell them gems that can be exchanged for goodies in the game.

Thing is, best possible customer for Anet is someone who buys the game, then buys bunch of gems and quits playing in fairly short time. Someone who plays free for years is just wasting resources. Anet still have to pay for server hardware and connections and hire people who fix bugs and deal with customers but they earn 0 from those veteran players. Its quite different from games with monthly fees that have to ensure every paying player every month over and over to hand out more money.

Anet can make more money by attracting more new players, not by keeping same players around forever. Since there is very little reason for wvw players to buy piles of gems either, why bother improving the wvw at all? Anet only has to invest enough to prevent too many wvw players wandering off to write negative comments about the game that would scare away new potential buyers.

Never liked EotM myself and never understood people in those stupid trains. It should be removed from the game with all other mindless trains (silverwastes train, champ train, dungeon train and whatever boring trains there is). The points you make why its needed are :

*it is place to play instead of queueing. The problem is population inbalance, so many players flog into few servers leaving other servers empty. If you spread wvw population equally over ALL servers we would never have queues. So EotM is not needed.

*it teaches new players how to play wvw. Now, really? It does not teach anything but bad habbits and how to avoid fights. People who start in EotM and then try to go real WvW are horrible, it takes forever to teach them how to actually behave. So, EotM not only does not teach anything useful but it also makes harder to teach new people later.

Points you had for rewards:
1,3) Remove Karma, WXP, badge gain from EotM. – sure, or just remove EotM completely
2) Increase gold rewards on rank-up – sure but even 1g is still nothing compared to PvE rewards
4) Unique Armour skins – ok
5) Provide an alternate way to obtain WvW weapon skins – ok
6) Make WvW Armour Salvageable – ok
7) Fix the Achievements – ok
8) Increase drop rewards on player kills – well… I can see huge problem with this. Just like fixed PvP matches, this will be abused. You do realise that players from same guild, in same party can be fighting in wvw against each other. So there will be area, not far from spawns, where one server kills everyone in other server, then they run back and kill everyone in other server and in very short time everyone involved have gathered 100 kills and piles of godly stuff. I am quite happy with lootbags you get currently, with good raid you get plenty and something good drops out of them eventually.

Koenow.1807:

But i know, there ppl from your server who use hacks too, like the FLY hack (dont point a finger, but JD look at your guild).

Koenow.1807:

UW and FOW also use hacks, BT uses them too.

You keep saying FoW and UW use hacks, specially Jd, but you have not shown anything yet to back up those claims. Jd for example has hours of videos showing our raids, even with original sound from teamspeak. Please point out the person(s) who use hacks there, the times when they are hacking and what kind of hacks are being used.

Jd is not even big guild, just provide the wvw rank of hacker with some nice video and screenshots and we will know exactly who that it.

I see some full servers, some very high, one high and everything else is medium. Maybe medium is simply lowest grade? It just means there is penty of room for new players, which surely tier 6 servers like Dzagonur or Fort Ranik, have. Heck, you can even transfer to tier 3 server if you want, its population is very high but it does not block transfers.

Atoss.1056:

Record him, send to anet. Then they should track his original account and ban that one as well.

Please stop trolling serious threads with meaningless posts. If you have nothing to contribute, if you know nothing about the history of problem and have no real solution, just try not to post.

Selufein.8307:

FogLeg.9354:

We placed scout on the game when hackers were roaming. We did make a video and we posted it. Anet deleted the links. Why? Because you can see hackers name in the video. And the person posting video about hackers got warning for doing it.

It’s a shame to hear that, but maybe a second video without his name appearing would work. Or if you can blur the name in the original video. They didn’t accept the video because it didn’t respect Anet conditions. :/
gl on that.

Let’s be honest here, we are customers who payed for the game and want to play it. We are not going to waste our time hunting down hackers, proving that hackers are hacking or doing whatever things people who work for game publisher are suppose to be doing. Nobody is going to pay us for that effort, we already payed to anet and we are not allowed access to the game mode we want to play with fair chance of actually winning.

Its not up to players to figure out whatever weird exploits hackers are using, its what people working for anet are getting money for. If they can not do their job properly, maybe its time to replace them with someone who can.

Its not actually up to paying customers to patrol the game, looking out for hackers, buying extra software and learn to use it to record videos, then edit the videos to hide names of potential hackers, then getting the videos deleted because anet does not allow edited videos, then recording more videos, then getting new ones removed because you can see the names of hackers. Honestly, its up to anet to use the tools they already have or should have to do this kind of investigations.

We, the players have no access to server logs, like anet workers have. We have no access to the GM tools to teleport into any location, to know what other players are doing or have done in the past. We are just players trying to play the game.

This whole hacking spree started already 3 weeks ago. In the week June 26 – July 3 our nightcrew was still trying to capture points and do whatever they could, hackers were careful and tried to hide when anyone was around. We started thread here on official forum to get them banned. We did not lose that many points yet.

Next week, July 3-10, our nightcrew gave up on trying to capture anything because hackers were retaking everything within minutes. Hackers were always there and we lost the matchup. Our thread here about hackers with videos and proof was removed.

This week, July 10-17, we started server-wide boycott on wvw. Nobody bothered to even go there beside finishing some daily achievements.

I am sure anet has many skillful people working day and night on this case, but its been 3 weeks and some questions may arise. If they have been investigating with great care and found no evidence of any hacking, most of our server is crazy and imagining things that do not exist. The videos showing hackers are probably faked by FoW players who can not really fight properly and just want to get rid of honest and much better skilled opponents from Blacktide server. If this is the case, it would be nice to get reply from anet stating their conclusion so we can all find a game reflecting better our reality.

If anet has not investigating this case because they lack of people or other resources then perhaps its time to spend some of that huge profit GW2 is earning to hire more people or develop tools to catch hackers and prevent this kind of situation in the future. Again, some message would be nice, is it worth for us to keep waiting and hoping something will be done eventually or is it all waste of our time.

In the moment we are left in sate of confusion and anger. We have done our best to report illegal activities and prove hackers are ruining our game. We have waited for replies. We have waited for hackers to get banned. We still can not play the game we payed for. We have no idea whatsoever if anything has been done, is being done or will be done any time in the future.

Selufein.8307:

Instead of complaining and boycotting WvW, you guys should move out there and make a video of the hacker in action. Place a scout ready to record on your forts (I don’t see any links to usefull videos in this subject!). Of course, report him is important to facilitate Anet tracing him.
That’s how the last BT hacker got kicked.

We placed scout on the game when hackers were roaming. We did make a video and we posted it. Anet deleted the links. Why? Because you can see hackers name in the video. And the person posting video about hackers got warning for doing it.

Thats why you don’t see links or videos anywhere anymore.

Yeah, video worked last time but not anymore (and its probably same hacker with new account btw). Looks like anet has changed their mind about considering video as proof about hacking.

There is exactly 0% chance I will be buying gems to run away from hackers and broken wvw. I simply wont be paying anything to anet again. Ever.

Every game has bugs and with enough time and resources can be hacked, exploited, abused etc. You plug one hole, they will eventually find another.

But it is easy to place some sanity checks into your game code. Tracking player position for example, why the player managed to move over to the other side of map in second is irrelevant if your code catches the flaw and prevents it happening. No online game trusts game client on these matters as all clients running in pcs all over the world are out of control and vulnerable to countless attcks. As long server can handle some sort of tracking, attacks by confusing game client can be ignored.

Its also important to design game mechanics with potential hackers in mind. Why these hackers are so horrible is how current wvw mode amplifies their actions. When you got hundreds of people on the map, fighting each other, defending something, building stuff, even if the hackers manages to hack the game, appear online and do something impossible, other players are there to fix it very quickly.

But with game system where high tier servers constantly suck players from low population servers, the effects of one or two hackers on bottom tier communities are huge. Because maps are mostly empty there is nothing and nobody to prevent hackers from hacking. Threads about the population problems and server imbalance are posted every day, hundreds of ideas to improve and handle the problem have been proposed. The result so far – nothing.

Why few individual hackers can ruin game for so many players is also possible because wvw ticks never consider number of players online. The ticks from prime time have exact same value as ticks from middle of the night. So when hackers appear at night, cap the maps within seconds, the flawed score ticks on for hours before some players finally appear again in the morning. By this time the score of hackers server has already increased so much it is impossible for honest servers to catch up with them. This is such a huge design flaw, and again, players have been proposed daily new and better scoring systems since the start of game. Have anything been changed in years? Nope.

So for me its not about just finding the exact hole some idiot uses to ruin the game for everyone else. Its also about making changes to game itself so next time some stupid hacker appears (and they will, they always will), whatever stupid things they do, their actions have much less impact on honest people who want to enjoy the game.

oh, they have been banned many times, but new accounts are cheap. Thing is, every time we got them banned and they reappeared again with new account, we have to start all over the horribly long process of proving that they are hacking.

They have officially answered many times:

• you have to use in-game message to notice the GM if you see hacker
• when GM is online and hacker is hacking in front of GM, he will then investigate
• since there is never GM online, we dont have hackers

Everything else is ignored.

All the Blacktide hackers threads have been deleted by Anet. All the links to countless videos we have recorded have been removed. None of the hackers have been banned.

I am from FoW and we currently “fight” UW. Or we would if there was any UW players left. There is nobody in UW.

Which is kind of sad, we are now left in lowest tier against 1 completely empty server and another full of stupid hackers. Both completely unfun. We are basically on the edge to stop all wvw completely until HoT is released, and thats stupid because we are pure wvw guild.

FoW has been in similar situation for long times, being constantly outnumbered and only gaining some points when enemy left the map. I remember fighting against UW too when they always had 3-4 times the players we had and not once did UW complained about the situation then. But I am not here to blame you. I would like you not to constantly stab us in the back whenever we go fight BT but of course you pick your enemies and if you like backstabbing, thats your way.

I still got advice for you. Stop worrying about the score. Enjoy the fights you can win (until the enemy zerg runs over you). Try to establish community feeling within players who still bother to play. Welcome every noob who gets lost into wvw first time.

6. Change to supply cost

Result of most of siege battles is based on amount of supply both armies are able to spend. Assuming one side is stronger and already controlling most of the map, it becomes increasingly difficult for weaker server to defend remaining structures. If you are outnumbered and pushed back into last keep, you rarely have enough manpower to even recapture neighbouring camps that provide much needed dollies and even with camps under your control your players are probably busy fighting and do not have time to run away into camp for more supplies.

Same time, army with more people is already controlling most of the map with all the nice full supply camps, they can always run into defenders, build some siege, fight a little, kill off some siege defenders managed to build and lose some they built, and then pull back for re-supplies. With much larger force you can afford to send players away to bring in more and more supplies.

It is always desirable to have all 3 servers control more or less same amount of each map so they all gain about same amount of points and match remains interesting.

Proposed change

Change the cost of each siege you are building, based on number of towers and keeps you control on current map. If you currently control 3 or less structures, siege costs remains whatever it is now (40 sups for basic ram). Every tower, keep or castle above 3 adds cost of 10 sups to each siege you place. To capture that last tower in your borderland, while already having taken all 3 keeps and 3 towers means every siege cost is increased by 60 (basic ram has cost of 100 now).

Improvements by change

This change would make sure that capturing full map becomes increasingly difficult even with much larger army. It means all servers can manage better the amount of supplies they have access to, more supplies available means you also need to spend more. It does not prevent capturing full maps, just makes it slower and more costly meaning other sides can defend better.

Improvements by change

Obviously packing players into smaller space means you must fight more. No longer can you run away into empty map whenever enemy shows up. Also capturing keeps becomes hugely important, you most certainly want to build up defences and make sure no enemy can take your keep. But same time simply sitting in your keep forever with billion sieges gains you little since 2 remaining enemies could take remaining keeps and open access to borderland bypassing your heavily defended keep completely.

Once 2 keeps are captured and held by 1 server, it needs to consider how to spread up the forces. There is now at least 5 important spots to defend and fight for:

• as usual the Stonemist Castle that should be defended or captured
• both the keeps, one of those near enemy waypoint and almost certainly under attack by other server
• active asura gate which can be used by enemy to access the opened map
• and the now accessible map itself where structures must be either captured or defended if enemy enters the map too.

Remember, you only gain points from Bordeland map until gate remains open, you want to go in and capture structures there quickly but same time you must make sure gate remains open and no enemy can go through it. This means if 1 server is hugely outnumbering other servers, and captures much of Eternal Battlegrounds, it must split up to gain more points from borderland maps, making Eternal Battlegrounds more balanced area. In the borderland map it is probably bad idea to run around in huge 100 man zerg, taking only few structures one by one while most of the zerg does nothing at all. Splitting into smaller groups with each their own target is smarter but it means smaller enemy groups sneaking in are able to fight those split groups off without being constantly overrun by much bigger enemy. Because most borderland maps are not available during off-hours with few players around, current total dominance of off-hours in score calculation is reduced.