Guild Wars 2

apharma.3741:

The thing about the ones who are racist, sexist or generally rude is they often don’t think they are when really they’re alienating a lot of players. The people that don’t want to join TS because of the general rudeness, sexist remarks, racism whether mild or extreme aren’t doing so because this one time someone said something mean. They don’t join because more often than not they hear these remarks over and over again and decided their life is better off not hearing people. You don’t need TS to stick to the commander, push, regroup, blast, change direction etc, if you’ve ever done anything slightly organised you can read the situations and know where to be.

This isn’t about talking either, it’s about having to hear this rubbish while being on TS whether you talk or not.

I don’t generally join TS because having fought the server we are linked with I came to the conclusion they’re a bunch of immature players who happily gank others, spam emotes and bleed them out for no reason than to be salty. I don’t care if the commander has a voice like the smooth crooning of Frank Sinatra, I won’t join because I think they’re a bunch of kittenbags.

If those remarks are not intentionally inflammatory, maybe it’s time to grow a thicker skin. You know, despite what some splinters of society and certain blogs are trying to make you believe, you do not have a duty to take offense.

RyuDragnier.9476:

But you’re fighting a lot of AI opponents for camps/towers/keeps…

This. We have to take the wellbeing of both players and AI into account. Expand your horizons, OP.

North Keep: One of the village residents will now flee if their home is destroyed.

I have been awaiting this moment for four years. As an avid World vs. World player (haven’t played GW2 for about 2.5 years, but at heart, I am still a wondrously big WvW fan) this has always been a black stain on my otherwise flawless WvW experience: The villager in the north keep.
Not only is it imbalanced and I daresay favoritist that the people of certain colors get a different treatment than those of others (with rather questionable implications), but especially was it immersion breaking. We know what big part story, lore and immersion are in this game, and WvW was supposed to be a place where everyone can come together, where hardcore PvPers and roleplayers can battle each other on an equal footing.
But whenever I fought a hard battle to protect the northern keep, or tried to instill into our enemies fear by laying fire and iron to it, there was one villager that didn’t respond to any of my heroic or viciously martial actions, and this was sometimes annoying, sometimes downright frustrating, but always distracting and a big immersion breaker.
Now, as a major part of the four big updates WvW gets this year, it is finally fixed!
I am right now in the process of writing a “thank you” post on Reddit for this update. Thank you ANet!

Mike O Brien.4613:

It was nice that there was always something new, but I’m personally not wistful of that cadence, because we sacrificed so much to be able to ship that frequently. With Season 3 our goal is to deliver content sustainably, at quality, establishing a pattern we don’t have to take breaks from.

So … another area in which you finally, years later, admit that it was a terrible idea and in which the critical part of your player base was correct on at the time and even before the game/content release. You could have listened and saved yourself a lot of trouble.
When will you do the same about PvP and admit that it’s time to completely scrap and rebuild it from the ground up? No amount of “iterative” approaches with mini-fixes every few months, which is a abysmal cadence in online gaming, can save it.

I wonder if the adopted devs even work at ANet anymore.

Junkpile.7439:

Before people wanted much bigger map so players can’t run back in fight after death.

What was requested was that the empty areas like the lake (initially) and the top corners/former orb area be utilised. Whether a new map would then have to be enlarged relative to the now-better used space could be looked at after that had been done. No one wanted a labyrinth that artificially lengthens paths (i.e. makes it “bigger”) for the new map. Quote just one post from this subforum out of the last three years that asked for a map filled with obstacles and mountain ridges, instead of open terrain. Just one such opinion!

Aight. I won’t give a 10x Platinum-rated developer props for baby steps. Especially if they come years several years into the game’s life.

Why did they ever change it in the first place? During the golden age of WvW (as well as when I was the most active), it was friday and no one had a problem with that! It simply makes sense that the new WvW week begins when for most people their weekend begins.
So what was the reasoning?

Daddicus.6128:

WvW dailies, not PvE. I already do all the PvE dailies every day. I’ve avoided WvW for the reasons above, but mainly because I play solo most of the time, and that’s painful to endure in WvW.

What I’m asking in this thread is if it’s possible to wander WvW without as much fear of instant death as it used to be. (Last time I did anything in WvW, the mapping title was the only reason I went there, so that tells you how long it’s been.)

You haven’t answered his question …

BrickFurious.7169:

I think the guild hall arenas were developed specifically for these players.

The part of your quote that I bolded is so true, and it amazes me that so many posters on this forum complaining about “PvE” don’t seem to realize it. It’s almost as if they have made themselves oblivious to WvW’s fundamental design. WvW is an open world objective-based PvP game mode. It has always been about managing environments and objectives. Often that means fighting other players over those objectives, but not always. It has been like this since the game launched, from the original orb event and quaggan island, to ruins/bloodlust, to the very basics like escorting/sniping yaks, taking down walls and gates, killing guards and lords, etc. The oasis event and the shrine bonuses are completely within this design philosophy.

Dude?

The removal of the Quaggan/Krait event (that absolutely no one did because it’s a brainless PvE grind) in favour of the ruins was hailed as an improvement. That they now went back to PvE centric objective design is a step back!

And here, Cogbyrn, you see the second reason why I save my posts into a .rtf file. It is because of the weird tendency ‘these forums’ have to simply delete entire posts for them quoting one other that was deleted, instead of editing them to remove the offending part.
Utterly … I’ll say nothing.
Anyway, I did it, here’s the bundled feature pack of my two lengthy deleted posts, minus the quotes to the offending posts deleted.

Cogbyrn.7283:

I’m not saying you should be ignored, but I don’t understand why people think their voice should carry so much weight, to the point where others (potentially not you if I misread you) get hostile and make demands.

Because some people are more passionate, more informed, more articulate, and have better ideas.
And yes, despite your frequent labelling of them as “children” (a behaviour that, in its simplistic dismissiveness, strikes me myself as juvenile) a lot of them simultaneously have become jaded, cynical, negative, pessimistic, and/or angry. Also no one is angry at video games or beverages like you said. When people get angry it’s because they feel ignored or betrayed by the people working at this company. And what they fear to lose is not only their continued ability (which was rightly purchased) to have fun in this game, but also the social circle they have formed within it over the years, which are disintegrating due to the actions of this company.

Cogbyrn.7283:

@Jamais: I had a thing written up, and it was eaten by the logout monster. Why don’t I ever learn to at least copy post text.

Ouch, that is my horror. I always keep a .rtf file open for pasting before I submit a post in this forum, for this exact reason.

- I would always love more communication with devs. Always. But that sort of communication requires an agreed plan internally at ANet, as if they try to just do on-the-fly discourse, odds are it’ll somehow backfire on them. They should direct the feedback so they get the most benefit, and that plan might take a while to finalize/implement, especially with review processes on post content etc. They might also be whipping up a news blog. Either way, if something was going to happen, I wouldn’t be surprised if it took another week or two at least.

The original reason they are so silent might very well be their philosophy about extreme secrecy.
However, I think that is completely the wrong approach, at least for PvP. I do not care about how they handle information in PvE, maybe it might be better there to not reveal your design plans, I don’t know/care. But they definitely have to treat PvP (sPvP and WvW) entirely separately from that approach.
They were also quite secretive in GW1, not even having an official forum (until ~1 year before GW2 was released and purely for technical support), so this is a tradition, quite a stubborn company philosophy that won’t be changed overnight, if ever. Still, during GW1 times we at least had a frank dialogue with the PvP devs, which were all PvPers themselves. They had a invite-only forum (don’t know if the GW2 PvP closed forum is still active), reasons and lines of thought were communicated, and it was established that balance notes would be public before the patch itself it.

To be honest, I think it’s too late for GW2 this point. It’s clear they don’t have full-time PvP staff anymore and/or people who have been “hardcore PvPers” at one point. It’s like going to a local supermarket and expecting to get advice from a sommelier. Of course they don’t have any, they don’t specialise in wine, it’s just one little side business of their product assortment.

- Players also need to realize that even if they are banded together by anger, alleviating one person’s anger might inflame another’s. Right now the anger feels very generalized, and I bet everyone has their own unique way they’d like to see the problem solved. There’s no silver bullet that’s going to please everyone, and expectation management is, in my opinion, really important.

Eh I get the impression almost all criticism has common a thread running through them. It’s not like there are huge differences and arguments between DB critics what the best solution would be. Most everyone agrees (as an example) that the map has too many obstacles in it, hindering movement.

“That is a large part of the issue. Essentially any change to WvW rewards has to be balanced against the idea that players, servers, etc. might collude with one another to just farm rewards.”

And instead of at least attempting a workaround, something, anything in three years they chose to do … nothing. Incredibly insulting to the playerbase. They literally treat us like second class citizens.

Problem
Originally EotM was added as a waiting map, for when you were in a queue for regular WvW. Hard to believe at this point but true.
Well it is clear now that WvW is not as active as it was 2013, and EotM just sucks additional potential players away from the other maps, lured by the constantly-populated megaserver matchups. So it not only has outlived its usefulness as a waiting area, but is actively detrimental. There is no reason anymore to include a waiting map if the regular WvW maps aren’t filled to the brim, or indeed played on much, at all.

Solution
Make EotM a regular WvW map. I do not think it is as well designed as Alpine or EB with its insta-death opportunities galore, but it would keep the map in the game while solving the issue of it vacuuming away players. EotM could then be further improved for core WvW gameplay.
In regards to a waiting map, if there are n people currently in queues across all regional servers, copies of one of the four maps are created and queueing players are asked if they want to visit such a copy. It would only persist for a single few-hour match. If there are no or very few queues globally, there would be no such option.
Also I realise many people have become fond of the KT gameplay of EotM, but considering it only exists as a perversion of the original purpose and actively harms the parent game mode, I think the change I suggest is reasonable.

TheBravery.9615:

In all reality, the new borderlands is a flop. Take for example, blood gultch in the Halo series. It was so simple, yet became so popular, it made a return in Halo 2 and inspired similar maps in sequel games. Learn from this. WvW does not need complex terrain and tacked on PVE content, players play wvw for many reasons, but I could safely assume that we are not here to explore or PVE. I’m here to player kill (something that the regular game mode lacked). [/spoiler]

It’s like Game Design 101. For PvP, simple maps with few to no player-independent variables are preferable.

The Deserted Borderlands are the exact opposite.

Or symbols for each colour, and you see the full name of the server only once you select a character. It could then be outlined by rank of the player. None for a rookie, bronze for a bronze, a gold border for a gold rank, etc. (a nice echo to GW1 cape days).
If servers were turned into a faction system (e.g. greatly diminished number of “servers”), it would also become possible to make fully unique, recognizable symbols for each new faction.

Also reading great suggestions like those in this thread always makes me excited, then depressed.

Cogbyrn.7283:

I thought HoT released on October 23rd. Seeing as it is November 5th, that’s 13 days ago. Are you counting the beta events? If you’re exaggerating dates and times for effect, I have a difficult time thinking you aren’t doing the same with whatever else you say.

Incredible! Wow! That you really think extreme pedantry makes a good point, and not just sound like an attempt to troll. Anyway it’s funny that you say that when just yesterday you made this post:

Cogbyrn.7283:

Everyone always assumes they have everything perfect after a week, or even just a few days, and it never ceases to amaze me.

^ True. If I recall correctly, ANet stated in the run-up to HoT that they would focus on WvW in the coming months. That was probably another, errrr … PR phrase. But if I had been following GW2 back then, I would have given them the benefit of doubt. I still give it to them, but they gotta show it by actions, not promises. We are several weeks into HoT, so now would be as perfect as time as will ever come to commence with the “WvW focus”, and with that I mean that they should start with a dialogue with the playerbase. If they belief the forumite/Reddit/etc. beliefs reflect only 0.00001% of all WvW players, they are wrong . There is not a single online PvP game (and of course GW2 WvW is an online PvP game) in video game history that didn’t tremendously suffer over dev/player disconnect (to the point of most of them dying early. As players are, kinda, their customers, you know), and there isn’t a single one that wasn’t improved by dev/player dialogue, for both technical and morale reasons.

I remember the CDIs (or was there something else before the CDIs?) two years ago. Has anything ever come out of these official threads, each of which was concluded with official dev summaries? I think only coloured commander icons.

If not, there is for the devs still plenty of archive to be raided. Not as if much has changed since then, heh …

coglin.1867:

Insane Pancakez.9182:

I’m surprised how many people still think anyone from Anet will do anything to help out WvW. They haven’t made a good change that I can remember since they’ve released GW2 in 2012. Good luck getting any sort of replies from them, and if a legendary reply does happen be ready for a solid “We’re working on it”.

That being said, if you’re new to WvW, refer to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezVy-zLUq6g

You appear to confuse your subjective opinion with that of actual objective fact. They have mad a vast amount of positive changes and improvements.

We are seeing 20 man queues on the BLs that everyone is swearing do not have queues.
http://imgur.com/cdF7q2n

Not on “the BLs” but on “a BL”. That is because there was probably a guild event on that particular BL or something.

Of course, the seemingly radical premise of this thread is entirely correct. However, it comes at an awkward timing. The management and the devs involved, at the sight of the abysmal participation numbers, are still in the “players are just conservative. They will eventually adapt and learn to like it”-stage. Thus they are fully resistant to any of our informed implorations to come to reason–they wear an iron armour. Like a child that wont listen to a parent telling him to not touch the hot cooker plate, they have to make the experience themselves. In this case, that means at least 2-3 months of consistently low Deserted Borderlands numbers. Only after slowly coming to that realisation will they (both consciously and unconsciously) open up and become receptive to feedback like OP’s or general community feedback.

If the problem is the occasional clipping with large shoulder pieces (WoW aesthetic…), then just rework it slightly and make them stretch the arms to the sides or forward. That would look badkitten actually.

EDIT: Somehow it filters the entire word to “kitten”. I modified it, it’s now atleast “badkitten”, so you can probably guess what I meant. But yes, it’s a positive word, not a swear word.

Nate.3927:

how would that solve anything Cogbyrn said in his/her post? You’re going to get bursted by a small group of thieves/mesmers. Group generally means 3 or more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequality_%28mathematics%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N#Other_uses

Catalin.5341:

Didn’t enjoy the trebbing from one objective to another. If I was scouting lake and someone took hills and placed trebs to hit lake then I was feeling helpless because there was nothing a scout can do defend lake from being trebbed from hills.

Except call for aid? Trebbing gave strategic depth and provided another emergent (rather than artificial) objective.

Honestly I would rather not have WPs at all on the map only at spawns. This makes the zerg less mobile.

I don’t think you thought this through. Only one side is now less mobile – the losing one. The winning zerg can just steamroll on because they can rez each other (during the battle they are winning or afterwards).
A wiped zerg or small-scale group is infinitely more disadvantaged now versus the opposite zerg. This also negatively impacts morale. No one likes to run 5 minutes back just to wipe again, whereas re-engagement is much less of a morale issue with close (or in-keep) WPs, if only as a delaying tactic if seriously outnumbered.

Cogbyrn.7283:

The game/damage/etc. is designed around downed state. Small groups would probably just turn into packs of Thieves/Mesmers bursting targets down and disappearing until a group was dead. Is that skill? I’m hesitant to call it that.

Only apply instant down when you have been damaged by n>2 characters.
> solved. Took me all of 3 seconds. Next 4-years-in-the-making WvW dilemma?

DeusVI.7942:

ITT: bad wvw zergers discuss about the map.

This map is zergers paradise. Blockades stopping roamers but cut thru like butter by zergs, snakey valleys funnelling smaller groups and soloists (roamers, respawners,…) directly into the zergs maw without the ability to evade, vast mountain ridges making it comfortably impossible for opposite zergs to intercept you so you can focus on your PvE raid …

Arius.7031:

Key word in your final sentence isn’t “worse”, it’s “arguably”.

SW:ToR had to fuse (mostly) because PvE sucked for the servers. Megaservers take care of that. For those who prefer a 24/7 gamemode you have EotM or high tiers. t1/2 both have servers open to transfer to. Deleting the lower tier servers will destroy a very cultured and appreciated style of play that a lot of people prefer. Not to mention it destroys the culture/identity of each of these unique servers and effectively kills the game for server-loyalists (who do exist, despite the “fiites fites” propaganda you’re prone to hearing on these forums).

Anyone who tells you a server is the same as the other is BSing you, community-wise they’re generally night and day.

Yeah and now ask 10 WvW people from these bottom servers if they also think these qualities you mentioned trump being able to actually play WvW on a more than infrequent basis.

Your post reminds me of some North Korean situation, where policewomen are assigned to direct the traffic to uphold “orderliness” and a “clean, neat image” of the capital, and which they vigorously do day-in-day-out – when there is in fact no traffic around her at all.

Good keyword Justine, because I was just about to reveal the major flaw behind the Deserted Borderlands: It is dead because it plays exactly like EotM, but without the single biggest EotM characteristic: megaservers. It placates nobody. It’s not an easy, quick, always-on karma bonanza, and it is also not designed along the lines that are conductive to WvW gameplay (read antithetical).
That is why it’s a failure.

Cogbyrn.7283:

They announced this days in advance. As much of a bummer as it might be to some, it’s dishonest to claim that they swept the rug out from under you with no warning.

There are a lot of people who are only seasonal, or a-couple-days-a-month players, or those who have returned to the game with HoT after a long absence.
There is also a category of people who don’t follow the devblogs/pre-release notes at all.
Those two together dwarf the people who religiously keep up with them.

And if you expect a game company to send an in-game mail to every single character with all of potential changes in an upcoming game, your expectations are at fault.

This is a major invasive change. Imagine the PvEer outcry if a large chunk of their gold or XP or some other central form of progress was deleted from the game. You can say the situation isn’t the same because it wasn’t consumed yet, but that would be a bad point. It’s tiring to click on them after every single battle. Normal people just save a stack of them and then use them when there’s a reason to update your effective WXP count, like a change behind abilities (like they expected would precisely happen with HoT) or when there’s level gaining achievements like during tournaments.

All of this doesn’t change the fact that it was a bad change regardless of communication. This should never have happened. The old liquids should be smoothly grandfathered over. Idiotic.

With the current pops, 3 maps is already too big. Deserted Borderlands is already big enough to hold (together with EB) the remaining skeleton WvW crews of most every server.
I think they should rotate all three maps every week or so. One week EB and DB, next DB and AB, then AB and EB.

W-what? They just essentially just destroyed a huge amount of our earned WXP?

Wow they don’t even really care anymore. They just f* over their WvW playerbase without a care in the world.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

We are looking at adding a way for players to earn Quickloot in WvW as well. We wanted to keep PvE progression (Masteries) separate from WvW progression (Ability Lines). However this means when a new Mastery ability is created, that might also be useful in another gamemode, it doesn’t automatically crossover.

Yeapers and that’s that, final word spoken, sealed & archived. “You’ll get it too, soon. See you in six months, WvW comm.”
(actually we never get time tables in WvW so I am being overly generous)

Infusion.7149:

Some of these are not bugs and are simply gripes.

These are most definitely all bugs. You are way too anti-Anet if you think a dev could seriously place them in their game by their own volition/design, rather than being innocent slips.

briggah.7910:

Always anets fault. Never the players.

Um, yes? I did my best by making countless productive suggestions. Of course it’s their fault if they do nothing substantial to the game mode in three whopping years.
You may like by your own admission some static, unchanging game mode, like checkers or backgammon or something (even chess has had significant changes over the centuries), alright fine, I can understand that perspective. But there’s a reason WvW has been in a steady decline since last year, only accelerating with this xpac, leaving checkers guys like you alone. It’s because none of the core problems ever get addressed.

You quit close to 2 years ago yet still lurk the forums and spit out your hate towards anet and this game mode.

You must be even more inactive than me if it somehow escaped your attention that GW2 just got an expansion pac which are designed to make former players check the game out again.

The new pve content is actually challenging. Mobs there give me better fights than 99% of the players I run into in wvw. Plus they don’t nike away when they get below 50% health. Its no longer boring stack here and spam 1 to win. You would know all this if you actually still played then you might actually realize why wvw is so empty ATM.

Alrighty.

For starters I heavily dislike the nerf on -40% condition duration on food.

ANet thinks because conds are (were? haven’t kept up) useless in PvE that, to buff them, they should nerf anti-cond in stuff only used in a game mode that isn’t PvE.

This dev man … and endless sauce of hilarity.

joneirikb.7506:

If they just start doing things/changes before they see how people move back and forth between new content with halloween and expack etc, they would most likely end up doing even larger mistakes. In the case of server merges, we could end up with some very badly matched merges. For example Kaineng + Isle of Jantir, two of the servers in bronze with the least NA presence, and best off-time presence. Or even merge together three different servers that would end up filling all queue’s in NA time, and be a waste land at night time. Information is needed, and right now people are moving so much about and trying different things, that it’s the worst time possible to make changes.

Map design is completely separate problem. More interested in what people think of the map one month forward than right now, this forum is incredibly resistant to change.

I do agree that WvW needs a lot of fixes, and that they should have been done 1-2 years ago. But expecting them to start just pushing out changes for changes sake now is not going to do anyone any service. They’ve had about a year since the DCI threads, they should have some plans ready, and now they have the live dev team (once the HoT patching is done I guess).

They should’ve had the foresight/intelligence to institute a new server paradigm for WvW with the release of HoT. That they are still not prepared to deal with the problem of ghost town servers and would need another few months and “more data” to decide on the best way, I don’t know how to comment except call it utter, total unprofessionalism on their part. I guess we both agree on this point, but I still find it flummoxing to the max.

I think you underestimate the danger of an empty major game mode, originally the third pillar of the game, during the very biggest release the game has had since launch 2012. The maps should be BURSTING, regardless of Halloween and the new PvE maps. Instead, they are dead, leaving everyone interested in it indifferent in a vicious circle. Once a game mode is dead for a couple weeks, its insanely hard for it to recover, since core player losses during that time are usually permanent or semi-permanent.

They should put out some server mergers now to stave that dead zone off. It’s naive (on ANet’s part) to think WvW will get a player influx 1+ months down the line, during a xpac’s lifetime when most returning surplus players have started going back to other games/hobbies. Nothing will change, it will only get emptier or stabilise on a low level at best.

Of course they won’t do it, because “server merges” PARTICULARLY after a major release is absolutely toxic PR. That is the cross they have to carry for still not having abolished servers. If they had a WvW-specific faction/alliance system or something else, it would sound much less drastic.

Just to clear one thing right away, I said what i thought most likely from ANet’s side, and not what I personally wanted.

Aight, my bad.

joneirikb.7506:

Agreed with Arius.

Is it opposite day? Is it opposite day? Is it? Because your post is so clownish otherwise.

Completely wrong time for even considering something as drastic as server merges. They would at least have to wait 1-2 months to get better statistics to base things on.

“Get statistics”. Lol! The standard soulless ANet “method” for “feedback”. You can wait for statistics, but please be advised that to Fortune 500 companies, a psychologist is an even more valuable asset than a statistician. And honestly, you don’t need a psychologist to get a feeling for what people are currently feeling about the new WvW content: They are utterly meh’d. They think the map is just boring and/or poorly designed. At best. At worst, the new map represents EotM 2.0 in all aspects except (still) server-based, and is thus toxic to them.

Also waiting 2 months just to START considering changes, which at ANets tempo would then follow at the soonest half a year later amounts to … yeah. Gamers and consumers don’t like to wait more than half a year for a solution that should be high priority.

Also suspect they would rather solve this in other ways than server merges, and guessing they will find a variant use for their MegaServer/EotM technology. No idea how they would do it though.

This just made me doubt you are actually a WvWer. Megaservers would be the extinction of WvW. It would just become EotM, there would literally be no difference anymore (unless you think the reason EotM is universally despised among WvW circles is because of the map).

The servers themselves need to be drastically reformed into a WvW exclusive system, so pop balancing is not impacted by PvE player count. But yes, this would definitely include merges and would also have to be more flexible in other aspects.

Knee-jerk solutions are always bad solutions.

Are you aware that the exact same WvW problems have persisted for two-and-a-half two-billion-plus-kilometre-earth-around-the-sun-float years? Since the locking of free server transfers?

Tiffany.8576:

It’s amusing. The other month people were up in arms because Mike O’Brien insinuated that very few people played the WvW game mode exclusively. Now when you ask where all the WvW players are, you’ll be told “they’re in PvE.” Guess he was right afterall.

Heyo! I’d like to introduce you to a guy – me! I am a hardcore WvWer! I exclusively played WvW during its heyday.
Due to a plethora of reasons, I have quit WvW (and thus GW2) in early 2014. I am not the only hardcore/exclusive WvWer who quit. Far from it. Guess who is mostly left now? Non-hardcore players, who only do WvW like 5% of their game time as a novelty thing. Because those who only did WvW have quit long ago because ANet does a p-poor job at WvW.

Seriously, you could have arrived at that yourself.

HoT just killed WvW for good. I don’t mean it in the figurative sense (e.g. one or two years ago I might have said it in a jocular way, but not this time). It’s really terminally about to die. Well for the 95% of the people that do not play during prime time on the top 3 servers on EB only, anyway.
Please realise the weight of these words, I am telling you it’s really just a few weeks short of becoming as dead as Alliance Battles is right now in Guild Wars 1.

That is, of course, unless ANet does something about it. And they will. Oh I tell you, they will. In six or seven months, after the borderlands and non-primetime EB on top servers have long been deserted (what an unlucky, foreboding name they chose, Desert Borderlands), they will attempt a fix. They will slightly boost rewards! YAY! MORE VIRTUAL CARROTS! MORE CURRENCY! (This has been the modus operandi of Anet since the very release of GW2).
Please, I invite you, screenshot this post. Save it on your hard disk, move it to a USB stick, go your local printery and make a gloss print. Frame it, hang it up in your living room and ponder it with your sweetheart date over a glass of wine. Make a novelty auction on eBay and sell an image of this post for 50’000$, then live of it for half a year. Hunt down illegal replicas on etsy and send a team to raid Chinese pirate manufacturers churning out cheap ripoffs of this post, with typos, questionable grammar and random Hanzi characters in it.
But still, keep this post in mind.

Also WvWers will still be poorer than PvEers.

Ha! Nice one! I made a thread two years ago with almost the exact title!
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Let-us-make-WvW-something-greater/first#post2961015
Heartily ignored back then too, I might add!

But your suggestions are all very good.

Here’s a radical thought:
SERVER SURVIVAL
Firstly, fully decouple WvW and PvE servers, which should be a no-brainer (i.e. apparently still too cerebral for 2010s ANet). People now can freely pick a “world” they represent.
If the world is at the bottom of the leaderboard and generally a ghost town, it is defunct and you have to pick a new world.
New worlds, too, can be started up once the bottom-most worlds are at a medium population and activity.
This constant flux between dying, born, rising, and declining servers would be immensely interesting IMNHO (not humble opinion because I know better than ANet what’s good for WvW).

The map is best described as baroque.

Good luck! You are me 2 years ago. (If you are feeling stalkey you can even check it out)
You are talking against a wall.

Pink Ninja Man.4375:

I don’t think all players playing WvW want to ‘escape’ from PvE. They want open world PvP and in most MMO’s that means PvP in a PvE zone. Its fun ganking a player or group trying to do ‘quests’ (flipping a camp or tower), and fun to avoid a larger group trying to gank you. If you want pure PvP then sPvP is probably the place for you, and guild halls arena/OS for larger fights.

Lol are you serious? I dare you, I DARE you ask 100 people on their reason why they log into WvW every evening. If you get even two who’ll reply with a straight face “for the PvE content.” or even just “for the PvX gameplay like in other MMOs” I’ll pay you 1k gold.
What the kitten would you PvE-side in WvW do? Kill drakes and harpies? There’s nothing. On this new borderlands the same.
(Grinding vistas and stuff is an exception since it’s a one-time off thing, not something the person in question would do every day/week)

I have never seen a dev so out of touch with their PvP community.
This is not a hyperbole – atleast other games with devs like this crashed WAY before the 3 year mark and thus couldn’t accumulate the sheer volume of disappointments as ANet, or they actually managed to set their house in order.

Are there still Arenadrones left that have hopes in the sPvP/WvW side of the game three years in?
Even the new WvW map will not salvage this stretched out slow-mo catastrophe. For every good decision WvW gameplay-wise, there’ll probably some PvE/EotM tumor right next to it. But worse than the actual map design is that I clairvoyantly know that nothing will change even after it’s released. ANet won’t suddenly start giving a kitten about their WvW community, and they wont change anything about their M.O.
A new map is an utterly calculated marketing move. Atleast one new battleground per expansion is MMO standard fare, otherwise game reviewers would nag and moan. So you have to check that box, too.
But we shouldn’t pretend it has anything to do with suddenly listening to our begs for an actual core WvW map for three years.

Just to add my 2 cents, I also asked for a refund.
What an anti-consumer decision that was. If you have to pull it for a week to fix it, fine. But then release it actually fixed, not greatly altered, especially not for the rest of us who didn’t experience bugs.
As I understood it, only certain body models had the problem, so it should have been trivial to release a hoop-skirted hotfix (and I hope it’s only a hotfix) only for those types until they actually fixed the look.

Dand.8231:

And it will be FUN!!!

Why?

It’s a ‘vacation’ from WvW
The WvW you know and love is not going anywhere. Regular ol’ WvW will be coming back the following week. Think of this like a vacation, spring break, a chance to go wild and have fun. After the smoke clears, we’ll be back to stacking on tag, empowering, blasting water fields, and flash building rams just the same as always.

I think you are overestimating the time people have available for playing GW2.

One entire week of “broken” WvW during summer is a lot. Maybe it was their only week of the summer where they aren’t on a vacation/moving to a new town/making up for school, or have only two weeks free from work that they planned to partly spend on WvW sprees with their guild/buddies. Serious WvW, not lolsorandom zergfests.
That plan is now ruined.

>this thread
Even considering the necromancy:
top kek

Thatkitten Rat.1236:

lordkrall.7241:

No.

Race should never in any way or form be “useful”. It just stay as fluff.

Do me a favour and never design a game please? Deliberately gimping an option is bad design, you’re basically setting a trap for unwary player. If an option is going to be there it should have a point otherwise it’s something that needs to be trimmed. An argument I’ve seen may use in favour of the new specialisations system.

looooooooool
looooooooooooooooool
looool

Regards, the PVP community.

Putting it into the same queue won’t result in more people in circulation/revitalizing Conquest … it will result in people who only come for Stronghold avoiding both game modes altogether. What makes ANet think people who want to play Stronghold, but also Conquest, aren’t already playing it right now (thus giving a snapshot of how many people are actually interested in Conquest)?

Seems like ANet has too many CS people, but not a single marketing psychologist. Though to be fair, I didn’t need a psychology degree to come to that conclusion, but not everyone can have as much common sense as me and the people in this thread.

EDIT: I’ll break it down more understandably. Once the mode hits, there will be exactly three types of people:

1. Those who care only about Stronghold.
2. Those who care about both equally (i.e. like both or don’t have strong opinions either way)
3. Those who care only about Conquest.

The large majority of group 1. can’t be bothered to “enjoy” boring, stale Conquest matches, disrupting their fun and suck away time from their free evening. They won’t play the queue at all.

I don’t see a reason why group 2. isn’t playing Conquest RIGHT NOW (or have done so historically), since the enjoyment they derive it would be the same as from Stronghold.
That Conquest never was really popular in the last 2 years proves that this demographic wouldn’t be very large compared to group 1. or pure PvEers/WvWers.

For group 3., once the novelty of the new game mode has worn off, they might stop playing the queue as well.

What exactly is your fear for “PvE balance”? That you can’t kill mobs a hundredth second faster than before? That your class will be discriminated against … in open world content?