Guild Wars 2

Death By Osmosis.6250:

In a game titled “Guild Wars” I am amazed at how little guild content there is. We have guild missions we can do once per week. Members of the guild can split off and do dungeons together. We can work on temple events that we’ve all done hundreds of times before. Or we can head to WvW. But as these aspects of the game grow stale, the guild community has been growing stale as well.
…
I worry that in this game, the server and guild communities are dying, in large part because of the execution of the Living World content. ANet please consider making some changes to allow the server and guild communities to grow together, rather than tearing them apart.

As a Guild Leader I couldn’t agree more. Atm guilds can Guild Missions and WvW and everything else is easier with server/alone. Guild Missions were added just over year ago, WvW had Edge of the Mists, that supports guild gameplay even less than normal WvW and new mega bosses don’t scale for medium/small guilds even if they would be able to find overflow where everyone would get inside.

I hope that they come up with something new in following living stories. I know that ANet wants to focus on open world content that everyone can participate. For Example events in maps that would scale up every time you succeed in it and reset if you fail. Those would work for servers, but guilds could also try to push those events to their final boss or something like that.

DevonCarver.5370:

So, let’s say we’ve handled the commander side of it for now and just focus on a squad system. If we added a system for squad management, what are the top 3 things you would want it to do? Examples: Show squad position, allow for orders to be sent to individual players, provide health status of all squad members, etc.

-Squad position
-Squad health
-Squad supply

That if mapdraw is mapwide, it it is squadwide then that instead of supplyinfo

There has been some talk about squad max size and suggestions how to increase max squad size if there is a limit. This talk originated from Isaiah’s post:

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

How big do you expect a squad to be?

To answer this:
-I would expect it to have no limit
-I would hope for ~20 player limit

Expectation is because everything in game for the moment is made for large scale and limiting squad size would be serious limitation for game. It would also cause problems if server doesn’t have enough commanders etc.

Still I would hope for ~20 squad size. This is because now logical unit for WvW is a) guildgroup b) everyone without guildgroup = zerg. If we were to have raid UI or other squad size limitations we might end up with something between a and b.

I would like to toss same question for devs:
How big do you expect a squad to be?

Aye.8392:

Ahmrill.7512:

We often run guild only forces, but occasionally invite non-guild members for multiple group havoc forces. People shouldn’t be forced to leave a guild and join yours, just so they can run under your pin. Making a private option allows for guild only, or guild with some friends. If players enjoy running smaller size forces consisting of a few groups, it shouldn’t exclude non- guild members.

Agree with this to an extent — I’d like to see it where people who are members of your guild, even if not currently representing, can see the tag and join the squad.

It could be guild tag, so that every guildien in map (representing or not?) could see it automaticly. ( I would supose that if you are in same guild as commander, atleast some level you want to play with him) Guild tag could have option to invite non guildies to squad so that they see the tag.

That way we would get guild tag with option to invite non guildies to squad→closed squad. Or is there someone saying that you don’t want to show your commander tag to your guildies? :P

Nike.2631:

Thedenofsin.7340:

Indeed! 4 million + sales must have generated a lot of money. Where did it go?

Consider how much has to be paid back to the people who footed the bill as 300+ employees worked for ~5 years without generating a single cent of revenue.

All MMOs start out in a tremendously deep hole financially. Only some of them ever dig their way out.

Septemptus.7164:

I think that problem should be resolved in 2 parts:
1). Easy changes should be implemented in next few updates.
2). Major revamp should be scheduled in future.

People would feel a lot better if changes were done (those fast ones) so we can feel the change. At the end you could to summary saying: those additional features should come in the future, and those we will try but we aren’t sure if possible.

Epic +1 for this kind of implementation! (not the first one to say)

Fast upgrades:
-Supply info range (should be like one value change, some QA problems about performance, but after Thaumanova without Waypoint…)
-Closed/Guild tag (add invite to squad and limit mark visibility according choise of implement)
-Mark colour (few UI buttons/automatic colour assing)

…and don’t forget long term upgrade.

Mungrul.9358:

Here’s what may be a controversial idea; how about limiting the number of commanders per team and per map?
From a programming point of view, it makes colour-coding different commanders easier as you can choose from a set number of distinctive colours.
And while people may object to a limitation, I can’t help but feel that it would promote more coherent teamplay. I would say that maybe 8 commanders maximum per map per team would be a good limit, maybe even less.
I think it would allow for more clearly defined goals.

Colour coding shouldn’t be problem as there are over 400 dyes and if commanders get RBG slider amount of possible colours is bigger than screens can produce.

If I remember correctly there was atleast talk of system limiting amount of commanders based on achievement points at the time of launch of the game. Might be good or very bad idea; I personally think that it is players problem to choose what commander they are following and it shouldn’t be affected by some artificial rule. Sure, commander limit could decreese amount of grieffing commanders but it could limit uses of commander tag. (if we have scouting, roaming etc commanders)

I have to say that what could be better way to troll commanders with siege than suggested commanders ability on commanders to limit siege placed on certain spot? If other commanders have ability to bypass that it wouldn’t really do anything against those who really want to grief with siege, they just get commander tag if they don’t have it already. And if commanders cannot bypass other commanders limit trolls just pop limit on before actual commander arives. System would be either bad or semi useless→not used.

I mostly play as a raidleader for medium size guild and I really think that WvW doesn’t have certain content/mechanics for this kind of groups. As said in previous posts, one of the greatest problems is the way you have to manage groups and players in raids. Commander mark is simple and effective way to show your allies where the leader is and it is somehow easy to spot and follow at battlefield but it has flaws:

My biggest problem with current functionality is that like everything else in WvW, it encourages to zerging. I don’t think that any upgrade to commander mark would completely fix that, but for every upgrade/fix you have to be careful not to make zerging any more beneficial! From my point of view I suspect that these problems originate from point in GW2’s development where ANet decided to simplify their base mechanics.

I personally think that there are few much needed upgrades for commander: some kind of progress/simple upgrades to commander and upgrades to commander mark visuals. The most important ones could be guild commander/closed squad, better ways to distinguish commanders and greater support for different kind of gameplays. In the spoiler are few ideas about possible commander rank upgrades.

In my examples I speak about widely suggested custom commander colours and pair it with squad wide map draw. Commander icons on map could also scale with the amount of players in commanders squad so other commanders would know roughly how many players other commanders have with them. (size, bronze/silver/golden edges etc) Idea in here is to give other commanders more information about other groups in map and make the communication easier.

As I talk from guild point of view the most important upgrade for me would be guild or closed commander mark. This upgrade would encourage to use commander mark even in smaller raids and might that way spread population on map. As part of this, it would be nice if players in squad would be marked in guild roster somehow and would have option “Join in WvW”. Atm when you log inside you might see that players are in WvW on some map, but you wouldn’t know if they have group up, what map they are on etc: simple and effective way to encourage joining WvW but offtopic.

ty on feedback!

I added some details, but started to think more about those team contribution announces: you could only use these if the party does most of the work. On top of that, ANet doesn’t use enemy player names, so team annoinces wold most likely be own team only. :/ I have to think about this more.

Great news btw!

Chris Whiteside.6102:

The next topic for WvW after skill lag is: Commander mechanics and Commander tag functionality.

Chris

Atleast something might happen at one point hopefully not so distant future.

Carize.8532:

So why not just have the guild claimer Lord wear the same tag as any guild member would? I shouldn’t need to look outside the game—like having to check the live map websites—for info about what’s going on IN the game. Just looking at them now, the mechanic seems to already be in place for this. They’re called something like: Champion Keep Lord [Guild-Claiming] <=== just put the guild tag in those brackets, instead of ‘guild claiming’

That is nice and possibly easy quality of life update. Going to add this in some way to final version. When I said possibly easy it might be hard to get the tag after lords/guards name. But atleast some kind off artificial interactive object where you coul check the guild should be easy one to add.

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

Yes ^^

cleaned my post , wasn’t expecting 3 more pages

np, but I get your point. I don’t understand why WvW core mechanics have been left without much love from ANet.

We talked much about this during betas: my guildies were so disapointed about only two WvW maps, but we agreed that it isn’t as important in long run than solid core mechanics for WvW.

Since then we have had many good technical repairs and few good WvW mechanics, like wall/gate repair treshold at 10%.

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

This has been suggested and ignored a year ago..

How nice from you to read whole text.

I personally have to read documentations and feedback/development ideas on weekly basis and nothing is more annoying than someone saying something like: “we need x” Unless you have good grasp on the specific topic, like you have personally thought it before, you cannot processes whole topic with a single read trough especially if you get tens of these suggestions daily. That’s why I would like to refine my suggestion and carefully form it to “We need x, because” before posting it as a suggestion.

Yes, as I said, most of these ideas have been posted before, but can’t I atleast try?

Scout bonuses:
Ascended materials are kind of weird as you can get those only from attacking; you removed the Quaggans from BL, those could have dropped Empyreals and other stuff. You could still add some kind of NPC attacks for scouts to kill to give them something to do/report that it was only the NPC’s. Let me add that it is weird that you can afaik complete “Mists Merc Camp Vanquisher” in EB, show some love for borderland about this or remove this kind of achievements from meta next time, please.

[i] There has been many suggestions about this. I don’t have anything original to say about this, but something needs to be done for this. If someone wants to write this part, be my guest.

I had idea, that is now cut out from this that was about siege resetting as a part of scouting bonuses. I removed it because the system was too easy to exploit by building siege next to supply depot.

I personally liked barracks door idea in this topic. [/i]

Map points (for team/taunts)
What I hate in WvW is that it rewads too much for night capping/map jumping in match points. Ok, map jumping is nice mechanic to “fix small maps”, but still. While you are working on queue revamp, (I suspect it has something to do with map population vs. max population on map) consider that points would be calculated based on population. For example, Green team has everything capped on all maps and they have 25% of potential own max population in WvW -> they get 25% of points.

This could go like in example for whole WvW or separately for each map. (previous example: all active players (25% of total max = 100% on one map) on one map -> full points from there) Active servers would get advantage in addition of upgraded keeps, but night capping would not dominate match outcome. This could also go for taunts: upgrading keeps on empty maps with 5 players is beneficial for team, but not as “good” (if you consider leaderboard) as upgrading keeps on full maps.

And btw, [XxX] doesn’t refer to any guild, it is just generic guild tag.

Notes
-Guild tag on NPC’s

Guild Taunts:
When Guild claims object they gain ability to start Taunt Challenge by talking to objectives Lord and choosing objective upgrade that they are going for. Every upgrade has it’s own challenge that is bound to it’s difficulty with some kind of mechanic – for example supply camps increased supply delivery is kind of easy as you only have to protect the objective for few minutes if camp is already full of supply and lord might have buff on most of the time. Keep’s waypoint is much harder as you really have to upgrade walls, gates and then cannons and mortars to be able to achieve Waypoint.

You could pop only one challenge/objective. For example supply upgrades would be easy, but you could choose to go for increased Guard Level, as you have to complete Doly Guards and Increased Supply Deliveries before you could get Guard Level. This would create risk vs. reward system where you could go for easy/“trivial” goal or you can risk longer challenge for greater reward. Guild can also pop only one taunt/map to give other guilds something to do and to encourage communications between guilds/raids. (you can upgade Keep much easier if there is other guild upgrading camps)

If Guild success in taunt they get Guild-WvW influence or something that guild can use in WvW as buffs, rewards etc. This reward system needs some consideration as you would have to have some way to rank these upgrades. Trivial way would be supply spend/incoming so that each supply is 1 point. To prevent Increased Supply Delivery farming objectives could give guilds extra points for each completed upgrade before the last one (i.e. amount of supply spend on that upgrade) and extra tick for completing the challenge. (i.e. all supply spend for upgrades from start of challenge doubled) That way you could “easily” get 200 points from full camp, 100+2x(100+100)=500 for Increased Supply and Doly Guards, but if you risk going for fully upgraded camp you could get 100+100+150=350 from upgrades on the way and 2x(100+100+150+150)=1000 points from final tick!

Every time you activate any of these challenges or complete any upgrades in those objectives enemy teams get notified via map announcements: “[XxX] is trying to build Waypoint at Dreaming Bay”, ”[XxX] completed Reinforced Walls upgrade at Dreaming Bay, are you letting them to build that Waypoint?”. This could also be handled via map icons or something, but there is reason why I call these “Taunt Challenges”.

My orginal idea was that you could pop these challenges only when objective is just capped, but then I realized that it would create situation where it would some weird way benefit guilds to loose fully upgraded objective. That’s why I think that there would have to be some incitiment to hold fully claimed objectives or to start new upgrades when orginal Challenge is done. For example Guild could get 1/4 of incomming supply as reward after the keep is fully upgraded or they could start to build “Guild Trophy” as a challenge, but only after keep is fully upgraded. Fully upgraded supplycamps could have option to pop “Dolyak caravan” taunt every 20 minutes.

Other thing that could cause problems is attacking guilds that just cap objectives, leave and let others handle the upgrading. Because of this major objectives like Keeps and Towers should have some kind of opposing mechanic like: one could talk to objectives lord and oppose the claim, then the claimed guild would have 15 minutes time to report to Objectives Lord that Guild is still defending the objective. If orginal Guild Checks in they can keep the claim and challenge, if it doesn’t the opposing guild gets the claim. Guild could oppose only 7 times/week to avoid unnecessary drama. (claim ninjaing)

All this is about defending, but what about attacking? If you success in capping the enemy keep under challenge attacking team would get some kind of reward. For example all spend supply so far x2 100/300/500 divided with players. So if there was 50 attackers and 10 from [XxX], keep had 2250 supply inc in challenge [XxX] would get (2250×2500)/(50/10)=500 points!

And if you keep record of all these points we would have Guild Leaderboards for WvW!
(You could count also the kills some way but…)

This system could also be used for “kill challenges”. Something like this suggestion with fixed rewards. I may have write about this.

I have had this suggestion topic on our forums for a while and haven’t got much feedback. Before posting this to suggestion forums I would like to fine tune this and need feedback for it. I’m not saying that every idea is mine, but idea is to add content/mechanics for certain parts of WvW. Try to enjoy and please post your feedback/additional ideas.

I mostly play as a raidleader for medium size guild and I really think that WvW doesn’t have certain content/mechanics for this kind of groups. In some ways the game rewards only the attacking team. For example there is no way to get any loot/ascended materials by defending, when compared to attacking. You can wipe ten attacks to supply and get virtually nothing while attacking team might get 50 Empyreal Fragments. (Well, you get the basic player loot, but I suppose you get what I mean) Main idea is to make WvW Guild Wars and reward/encourage scouts/upgraders:

Commander upgrades
Few possible ideas how to upgrade commander functionaly via WvW rank or separate upgrades. Main idea is to improve quality of guild gameplay and commanders ability to inform raid members/other commanders.
1. Guild tag – option to show commander tag only for guildies and other commanders
2. Custom colour – option to change tag colour
3. Map draw – for everyone on map/squad with your custom colour
4. Commander precense – optional, +10 to every stat, not stackable, glow on commander that also the enemy sees.
5. Supply buff – while near commander, +5 supply carrying capasity for everyone (not stackable with camp claim)

1-3 are things that would support guild gameplay and communications between raids. Atm Guilds tend to raid without tags (atleast on our server) to avoid randoms a.k.a “Rally Bots”. Main problem with nontag culture is that commanders are not always aware where other commanders are. This was not big problem before buff revamp as before it you could have all commanders in same group. Atleast Guild tag would be relatively small change that would increase quality of gameplay for guilds and co-operating raids significantly.

Guild tags could also be implemented via guild influence upgrade or guild commendations. You might still need commander mark or you could just bye guild tag with 50 guild commendations or get it as a activated upgrade. Single use guild upgrade could just be simple mark for guild members that could be used without any commander functionaly as “party leader”.

Custom colours would make it easier for players to follow their commander and you wouldn’t have to check which commander is which. It could be automatic or every commander could choose own for dye colours or something. It would also be kind of mandatory for wider mapdraw to see who is drawing what. Map draw is such a great way to show “we will run from there”, but you really cannot atm use it in raids. Commandes could use this to mark enemy trebs etc for other commanders.

4-5 are fillers in this suggestion, but I wanted to add 5 to take in to account that objective claim is currently only mechanic in WvW that directly gives guilds benefit against random raids. As WvW seems to be Zerg Wars atm. it would be nice to give random commanders some way to get to same level as Guild Commanders who can claim camp almost always.

If you have better suggestions for commander rankline abilities go ahead!

Map announces:
”Red has capped Dreaming Bay!”
”Enemy guild [XxX] has claimed Dreamin Bay!”

Small change to increase quality of gameplay. If it is techically posible, you could add party leaders name to some of these shouts like in GW1 HoM announces, as
suggested here.

“Devon’s team has protected Lowlands supplycamp”

Before I though that these could be used in PvE like Scarlet announcements:

“Your realm is defending Stonemist castle and it’s outer walls have been breached, join Eternal Battlegrounds to defend it.”

Cool way to encourage players to join WvW, but with all the whining about PvE-players ruining WvW it’s more than year too late for it. I would personally prefer that these announcements would be only for captures, claims and upgrades so that they wouldn’t replace scouting and map tactics. How lame would be announcements like:

“Ten Green attackers at Redbriar with 2 catapults”

I thought that the whole idea in this game was not to look UI most of the time. I supose this is just one of the firsts steps towards same kind of minimap as in GW1.

Ironvos.9014:

Why not just make the scepter auto attacks do a small aoe at the target.
This would also make it more viable in zerg fights.

If aoe autoattack seems to be OP, just make the second autoattack be aoe.
So that it goes:
1) small bolt, as current autoattack
2) aoe 120 radius, same damage.
3) same as current, so higher damage no aoe + clone

I have used Scepter in WvW since launch only few minutes. If it had atleast small AE it would become viable weapon option with “on clone death” builds. So +1 for this.

Clones would be semi usefull without any additional attack mechanics just by dying. Small AE would make scepter OP in SPvP but it would help Mesmers with tagging in PvE/WvW. Clone AE would be nice yes, but only for sharpen images, 5 AE dmg isn’t much…

So, here is center of BL-maps after upcomming patch:

https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/102046/Bloodlust_Capture_Points.jpg

I don’t get it. Bay has been the harder keep to defend all the way from launch and now it is even more harder.

1) If you dominate you can treb Bay’s east walls/Watergate from new ground areas
2) Bay S-Doly’s route is much closer to SW point than Hill’s doly’s from SE point
2.1)You also have to run right next to Lake-tower when you can stay away from Briar
3) Bay’s North Doly’s and Hills north Doly’s route are almost as close to capture points but (seems that Bay is bit closer…)
3.1) Sentry is right next to capture point
3.2) Ramp from doly to capturepoint is closer on Bay side…

Have you actually tested this new map and found it to be in balance? Please, consider to move NE sentry to crossroad or/and move NW crossroad bit west and shortern Bay’s Northern Dolyaks route or show some other love for Bay at some point.

I hope that there is bit-off and those are not the right skins, otherwise…