Guild Wars 2

I do enjoy how every time I see someone commenting on an underpop server they always seem to think its so simple to get an extra few thousand all hours pvpers. I can assure you, if you went to Lions Arch and asked people to help our under strength wvw team, the only response you would get is:

“Forget world vs world, its terrible and pointless now stop clogging chat I can’t see the gold sellers!”

Anet should have done quite a few things differently. They should never have published wvw rankings. They should not have allowed people to transfer from low pop to high pop servers.

I understand why they did both things. They were stupid to do so and our server, along with 9 or so others have paid the price.

In the end it works out really well in my favor. I can run a 5 man group throughout all the battlegrounds capping supply points and raking in the karma.

lollie.5816:

There is no problem when the servers facing each other will have similar groups of people. 24/7 servers will face each other, and the rest who are not 24/7 will face each other.

and whichever of those servers has even the scarcest population advantage wins 100% of the time. Please come down to the bottom six and see how things work out there before claiming everything is fine.

Messing around with point gain does not fix the main problem that the losing side is underpopulated and can not compete at the same times as the winning one. THAT needs to be fixed. everything else just pushes around problems.

Unfortunately its probably not going to happen. Weeks of going up against servers with twice our off peak population have left Anvil with few players of any skill willing to participate in WvW. The alleged hacks last night were the last nail in the coffin. Anvil is done, if not at least for this match, then forever. Maybe we’ll win in the next tier down, but who knows.

As it stands now most people on Anvil, aside from a select few just do not care about losing anymore.

But in the end I will take satisfaction reading the whine threads from NS when they advance to the next tier and have to fight servers with twice their population like every other server that has defeated our broken-down hobo of a world. The Yak tears about ‘night capping’ were delicious.

SteelRecon.3824:

Once kitten pass realizes attacking us is not going to help them take the lead this should be a good match up.

but yea both servers have so many more players than us.

That happening is doubtful. As observed in nearly every tier, the second place player will simply go for the last place player to get the certainty of a victory instead of only the possibility of one.

Honestly, and no offense to people who came up with them all of these ‘solutions’ to population imbalance are bad. All they do, if they do anything positive, is make the symptoms a little less obvious.

Really the only thing that might even come close to solving the issue is a dynamic population cap. Unfortunately this is avoided like a leper here for various reasons.

But lets face it, the real issue here is that WvW was poorly designed. Full stop. The only way we are ever going to see the WvW we want is if Anet throws away every scrap of WvW they have made and starts from scratch. This obviously will not happen, so we are stuck with what we have now. We might as well get used to the situation as it is now.

If you want to win? Go to a high pop server and languish in queues.

If you don’t care? Go to an underpopulated server and lose, but do it quickly.

Mog.1589:

There already is an incentive to transferring to a lower pop server. It’s called reduced queue times.

Decreased queue times are not enough to make up for the loss of upgrades, influence, and members who do not wish to leave the server.

There is also the problem of people preferring to sit in queue for four hours and win than instantly enter wvw and lose.

Basically, as things stand now, the damage is already done and most low pop servers will never leave the bottom third of the rankings. As free transfers continue population will continue to trickle upwards towards winning servers further cementing the tier disparity.

It will also be difficult for Anet to solve this population problem, if they even care enough to. Incentives to out weigh ‘winning’ and the other costs I mentioned above will have to be so large that they will alienate high population server players.

So really in the end, Anet wrecked wvw for half the servers, can’t fix it, the end. Better just bite the bullet and transfer to a high pop server unless you like swimming in the sea of mediocrity that the bottom 6 or 9 servers are.

Two week matches will just exacerbate the current problems in wvw. Aside from a couple tiers which are surprisingly even, each tier is dominated heavily by one server. Two weeks will just make the leads bigger. Losing players already grow bored with losing in a 1 week match, a 2 week match will further increase this attrition.

If you want to see something truly hilarious get a group of five to ten engineers specced mines mortars and explosives and put them at the end of a choke point.

It’s very easy to dismiss the issues of the underpopulated servers when you are on one of the overpopulated ones. You have to understand, there are 6-9 servers in north America alone which are entirely unable of competing in wvw due to population imbalances. The primary symptom of this is the ‘night capping’ debate.

There absolutely needs to be some system to even the playing field. As it stands now whoever can keep their battlegrounds full longer wins. It is as simple as that. No skill no tactics just butts in chairs basking in the blue glow of their LCD screens well in to the night.

wdspeck.8723:

Then I don’t know what to tell you. Soon enough, you won’t have to worry about it.

Let’s see if you keep that smugness after a few weeks against servers like yak’s bend.

I love running 5 man wolfpacks with my guild taking supply, getting in to small group combat and running from everything we can’t take. Its great fun.

Problem is that randoms tend to just go off and join the zerg and not follow the other blue dots.

wdspeck.8723:

Talk to your community about night crews, so that’s not a problem.

It really gets me when people say garbage like this. If it were that easy do you honestly think we would be in this situation? No of course not. Having one or two guilds move to our server won’t help either. Anvil needs hundreds of new players, possibly even thousands. Nobody plays 24/7 people have lives.

So yeah, super great you are winning, but I can tell you for a fact that the most people Anvil had on ANY battleground tonight was under 50.

If you can find a way to convince about a 250-500 active pvpers of all time zones to leave their choked, but competitive servers and come to a ghost town server like Anvil, I would love to hear it.

But they won’t because sitting in a queue for hours and winning is preferable to them than having no queue and possibly being camped at spawn anyway.

Here is a scene from the front at Anvil Rock’s borderland for everyone’s enjoyment.

Welp.

There are servers where you can not field a single full battleground in prime. Those servers could take a couple thousand players each from the current overpopulated servers, and would have very minimal queues.

Splintrr.7391:

I’m surprised to see Northern Shiver winning, why were they in our bracket last week if they can win in the their own bracket by so much?

Because Anvil still has points from the 24h matches which we did okay in, but nearly every organized guild has evacuated to higher pop servers.

The sad thing is, neither Yak nor NS were actually better than AN in terms of skill. Once they got an population advantage in a map they just roll it. At that point nobody wants to spend 1-5g a day on siege to grind our way back.

Helheimr.2485:

Queues are perfectly fine.

The actual problem is people staying on massively over populated servers.

Whats more fun, waiting 1-5 hours to play WvW where you MIGHT be able to play with friends, or instant queues on one of the losing servers and getting fights immediately with all your friends.

Hrm…

Problem with that is they might lose and not get to see their colour fill a pie chart. They might have to uselessly beat their faces against superior numbers all night long and get nowhere.

You can see why its preferable to sit in queue for six hours and not get to pvp at all.

Oh and they will lose the 5000 IP they have invested in to their 4 man guild.

Zigasmash.7429:

Ahh, sad to see some of the lower tier match ups are still imbalanced. And look at Storm holding the lead, nice.

To be honest, the bottom six, possibly nine servers are in a battle to see who is the worst and most horribly crippled by the first round of 7 day wvw. The first 5 hours of the AN FG NS match was some of the best pvp i have seen so far, and then everyone went to bed and NS won the week 6 hours in.

Fed.8594:

Free transfers while these week long games are going on are killing the servers that are getting stomped, why put up with a week of getting stomped when you can simply transfer off? Anet is keeping up transfers for PVE reasons… very bad move.

The transfers hurt that is true. But the real problem is as far as i can tell there is no mechanic aside from the useless outnumbered buff to balance player population in battlegrounds. If there was a system which would not allow new players from team A and B to join if team C was heavily outnumbered then there would be a more even playing field.

As it stands now the second someone gets a population advantage they win, that is it. I could have told you yesterday when the queue population figures were out that N Shiver were going to dominate this round, because they have on average 30 more people on than Anvil does.

People will cry you just need to get more skilled, but this would not really help. You can do surgical strikes on supply, you can raid towers with 10 people, and we did these things, and we won fights all over the map. But, when they come to your tower and you have 15 people defending and they have 50, you lose no level of skill can stop that.

More is more, and will always be more is the moral of the story here.

He is talking about the Anvil Rock borderlands battle if i am not mistaken. Was a very fun match until Northern Shiverpeaks started getting a large population advantage on us.

As of now I think its pretty safe to say Northern Shiverpeaks have won this match, and we are in for another week of losing and desertion.

Draygo.9473:

Stop playing WvW to win points.

Start playing because its a video game. Points come as they may. They really dont mean anything to me.

Losing is not fun, this is not Dwarf Fortress. It is not fun to be outnumbered 2:1 and not be able to accomplish anything. It is not fun to grind against a keep for four hours, win it, and then have it taken back in minutes because the servers start crashing and half your server drops and are unable to come back because the login server is down.

MikeFerguson.8921:

I do not expect things to somehow magically be much better in the next match, but I do expect that matchups should start getting better as worlds will now start being sorted based on their 7 day performances.

I hope you like surprises then. I can already see lower population servers beginning the losing spiral already and we are only a few hours in to the new wvw cycle.

As long as you can transfer from a lower pop server to a higher pop one losing servers in wvw will continue to become ghost towns. Once one side gets gets even a marginal population advantage in a battleground they just begin rolling up everyone, and once that starts happening the losing sides lose the will to fight, making the problem worse.

Don’t the npcs just follow whoever talked to them last?

Recruitment is still open

Daxramas.1940:

The game mechanics ARE for 24/7 battles, you need to understand that it’s you that has a problem with the 24/7 WvW and that you should go to a server that has a larger player base outside of the US or harden up and wait till player come to your server. The server wasn’t made for just you, it’s for everyone.

The game wasn’t made for one side to have twice the population of the other side either. Leaving things the way they are and waiting for time and migration to fix the problem won’t help either. Nobody will want to move to low pop loser servers, as they will just constantly lose in wvw.

Tzash.5748:

A queue denies people the ability to play. Being outnumbered means they can still play, they just need to play smarter.

Do you call being camped in your spawn point by a cluster of siege engines because the best your server can muster at your play time is 30 people? I do not.

Every other game has team population balancing, are you saying that if you join a bf3 server and saw 32 people on one side and 16 on the other you would thing “Man i am going to have to play super hard on this one by gum!” no you are going to think that the server needs to balance teams and find another one.

Really a dynamic population cap is the best solution to this problem. It may make the playing field a little more restricted for a small subset of players, but it will at least make it even.

The price you pay for having your colour fill the pie chart is not being able to pvp. The price of being able to instantly queue is to not be able to pvp either.

Honestly I think this would just turn the game in to a stalemate where no side is able to make meaningful progress, and end with us being right at the same place, but with an entirely different problem to rage about.

Honestly, leadership, participation and basic ability to read map chat have been all but annihilated on Anvil and Dark during this match with Yak’s. Maybe these things will regenerate with the next match, but unless we meet up with a pair of servers who are equally ruined it will just continue the losing spiral.

The queue times may be nearly instant, but people would rather wait six hours to camp someone’s base and win than grind their face against a heavily fortified keep all day long.

No.

More time of free transfer shenanigans will just continue the downward spiral WvW has taken on a shocking number of servers. Loss of pvp guilds and players to winning servers, spying, exploits, all are killing the general population’s will to participate in WvW. Compared to these problems a few people who can’t get in on the basecamp fest because the queue is too long is not important.

Furthermore, transfers are not being taken out of the game, they will simply cost gems, you can still move your guild, it will cost you a little gold or money.

Agent Orange is still looking for new members.

I have to agree that the reward for winning being the ability to win even harder and the underdog bonus being a PvE buff is a little backwards and needs to be looked in to.

Really the best solution is just to have a dynamic player cap based on the lowest population group in a battleground. So if Server A and B can only muster 35 people in their off time, but server C can muster a full bg, they do not just instantly win.

Agent Orange is looking for new players to casually enjoy PvE, dungeons, and WvW with

About us:

We currently play on the Anvil Rock server

Guild prime time is usually 5:00 EST to 12:00 EST

We are an old guild, which has been playing MMOs together for nearly a decade. Our history includes Guild wars 1, Eve Online, World of Warcraft, World of Tanks, Aeon, Everquest and Shadowbane. While we may be a tightly-knit community, we are very welcoming to new members.

We run nightly pvp wolf-packs in wvw, and dungeons to help members gain gear and level.

We primarily communicate with Teamspeak 3, however we do have forums, irc etcetera.

What we are looking for:

We are primarily looking for casual players who are at least 18 years old and want to dabble in wvw with us and run instances. We are not looking for any specific class. Level 80s are preferred, however we will accept applicants of at least level 30.

If you are interested in joining, either PM or Mail Kiviar, or Chordal Stirling

Aside from some tweaks to 2 and 5 to fix the obvious bugs with them the engineer rifle skills are pretty good. they give us control, displacement,mobility and damage when combined with the right elixirs.

Yes they do not have the flat damage skills that a warrior has. Engineers aren’t warriors, and guild wars is more than just hit 1 to win. Really, if a warrior is trying to 1v1 and he isn’t spending 3/4 of his time on the ground due to explosions, throwmines, overcharged shots ect, you are doing something very wrong.

Played solo an engineer lacks the effective damage output to make the best of his abilities. However, even paired with one other person, the engineer’s ability to control, displace, and debuff make them truly shine.

In general I think the flamethrower skills are fine. As it was said above, the AOE from 2 needs to be triggered when the projectile hits an object, it is incredibly difficult to use this ability in hilly, cramped, or indoor locations.

Aside from that, the only problem with flamethrowers, and its a big one, is not getting damage, runes etc from your equipped weapons.

The randomness of some elixirs is a little annoying, but in general they are all effects you would want anyway and as it was said above, they are secondary bonus abilities to an already good personal buff. The only one which i think needs a little work is the toolbelt for elixir u. Its variations are too niche and too random to be used with any certainty.

As for the elite skills, the utility of supply crate and mortar are so much greater than any of the other abilities that they are almost useless in anything other than a very specific niche situation.

As long as I am not against a large group of autoattacking ranged mobs, or a gold with stun/root immunity I’m able to solo just about any sized group of npcs with ease on my 80 engineer. Engineers are not an in-your-face dps class. You need to play with this in mind.

Issue: Build Queue erased
In queue: Economy level 1, Politics Level 2
Influence loss: 1500
Guild name: Agent Orange
Tag: [AO]
World: Anvil Rock

The build queue history shows both constructions started, but no cancellation for either.

Issue: Unable to access Guild Bank
Guild name: Agent Orange
Tag: [AO]
World: Anvil Rock

Several guild members are unable to access the guild bank from certain cities, such as Divinity’s Reach, but are able to access it from others like the Black Citadel. Others are unable to access any guild services and are told they are not a member of a guild despite being on the roster and representing said guild.