Guild Wars 2

ANet hinted the rewards for winning would be “worthwhile”. I am expecting way more than the nigh meaningless Reward Tracks we have now.

I agree WvW needs more strict migration policies.

Before thinking of punishments for transferring servers ask what are acceptable reasons for a transfer. With a complete list, think how to recognize such cases apart from any invalid reason to transfer.

There is no need for a punishment really; just deny any transfer which is not acceptable.

On that other topic: PvE absolutely needs rewards to stay interesting. If PvE did not offer the best rewards in the game, nobody would play PvE. Please think of all the PvE devs going out of work or being forced to create engaging, interesting content.

Um, at least I have not seen this suggested before. Props for making an original suggestion.

But no.

What if all guilds choose to bandwagon rather than pay up for a new alliance? No WvW?

How welcome would those bandwagoners be to my guild’s alliance? I’d insist on some migration control. Which would lead to elitism and exclusion.

Chaba.5410:

Korgov.7645:

So Factions with a single instance for all servers? No thanks.

Chaba.5410:

What this does
- Opens ability for guilds to recruit from a larger pool without having to move anywhere

Guilds recruiting red team players would have their roster split between 3 different teams when the servers get new colors at the next reset.

You didn’t read. Teams would be linked by server links, not colors.

OK. So not linking all 4 tiers, but just 2 tiers on NA. The 2 new super tiers would have 8 maps of playable area having each team consisting of 4 servers on average linked together. For EU this would be trickier since there is only one Spanish world.

Anyways linking is bad. It erodes server identity, lowers fighting morale, removes competition, renders matchup victory and leaderboards meaningless, causes exodus from guest to host worlds, amplifies bandwagoning. It has positives too: more players on each matchup, more balanced teams, rebalancing every 2 months. But what’s the point with a balanced matchup when there is no reason to win?

So Factions with a single instance for all servers? No thanks.

Chaba.5410:

What this does
- Opens ability for guilds to recruit from a larger pool without having to move anywhere

Guilds recruiting red team players would have their roster split between 3 different teams when the servers get new colors at the next reset.

- Opens more choices to guilds on who they want to fight that night which decreases “stacking for fights” on a single server.

Nightcapping k-train would have not 4 but 28 maps to hop on to flip undefended objectives.

- Allows guild members on other servers a chance to play with their guild on a Full server.

Full servers do not need any more players.

- Restores linked server identity through separate matches; FABL and SORBL become separate maps, FA and SoR players would have home position on both maps, FA nameplates show as SoR in the SoR match, etc.

I agree linking destroys server identities. Getting rid of the linking is the way to go. However with factions you would not fight for your server but for 1/3 of all the servers. Identity is lost again.

- Spreads out the population of Full servers by increasing number of maps to play on; I.e. players sitting in a queue for EB in one match can play in EB on another match. (And if you followed the sarcastic server links above, Full servers like BG would not have their own match.)

Players on Full servers choose a map where they can blob up. They would not go to maps with only few other friendly players.

As in the past suggestion, you can even tie scoring to how well linked teams do across all their matches in order to provide incentive to players on the “stacked” server to help out on the other maps.

Score bias has its own issues and should not be introduced in WvW either.

Factions with single instance would lead to massive scale k-trains chewing their way through the maps. Like locust swarms eating through upgrades.

Smaller worlds would not be able to defend their home borderland against these multi-server karma-trains. So they won’t after finding it futile. Even the strong worlds would struggle under such pressure.

There is no incentive to defend other world’s home borderland. Strong worlds will not swoop to defend the weaker ones of their team.

Score bias has been suggested before. Thanks for writing it out so well and in such detail.

There are several issues with this approach:

• One team can prevent the other worlds gaining any points by simply not playing the game.
• Tinkering with scoring does not make the gameplay any more enjoyable for the small team against blobs.
• Artificially inflating a weak world’s score does not make them any fitter to get matched up against strong worlds.
• Players will find it demeaning if their team gets carried by handicaps.

I can’t think of a reason there are objectives in EotM. They might as well line up all the lord NPCs just outside the spawn for easier access. :P

migellito.7301:

And after all, the game is called Guild Wars.

Guild Wars name refers to a series wars in the lore. Not to the guilds we have in the game now.

august.8016:

So factions? That’s been suggested before and shot down for good reasons.

Link to this discussion pls. I want read this reason.

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=faction+megaserver+site:https:%2F%2Fforum-en.guildwars2.com%2Fforum%2Fgame%2Fwuv

In essence the factions would turn WvW into EotM. We can already go play there to experience the fast, effortless rewards, mindless grind and carefree boredom.

This is the Action Level – Victory Point Multiplier system introduced in Let’s Talk Scoring thread. It is a lengthy thread but you if you wade through it, you will discover why this feature is not in the game.

Pity these forums do not have a search that works.

So factions? That’s been suggested before and shot down for good reasons. Pity these forums do not have a search that works.

BTW megaservers is a curse word for WvW players.

Introducing task specific squads is a fresh idea. I do not want to micromanage my play session hopping between squads according to the task at hand (scout/roam/fight/zerg). Not even if there were few extra green items as rewards.

For example: I am roaming and see a fight nearby. I leave my current squad to join the guild squad fighting before I kill off enemy stragglers. Then I leave the guild squad to join my earlier roaming squad before going to capture nearby supply camp. The camp capture gets interrupted by an enemy zerg coming for resupply. I have to leave my roaming squad to join a scouting squad before I type in the details to map chat.

1. How do you feel about this proposal?

I’m happy you are focusing on the server population issue. This proposal magnifies the downsides of world linking:

• Loss of world identity
• Meaningless matchup victory (you got carried by ANet linking your server)
• Meaningless leaderboards

2. What, if anything, would you change about this current proposal?

The proposal is necessary if you want to more balanced matchups and still hang on to the world linking system. But is doubling the worlds enough? Quadruple? Or maybe this system is just not worth it.

3. Would you be interested in transferring to a new free world?

No.

1. Which proposal is your favorite?

Solution 2: Guild Focused Proposal

The guild focused glory rewards are exactly what WvW needs. The guest server identies have pretty much died due linking.

Adding 51 new world names and 27 new world alliance names every 2 months is way too many. You will play with upto 7? other worlds linked to your side. That’s too many to claim victory for yourself should your side win.

2. What, if anything, would you change about any of the current proposals?

Include team color in the guild focused announcement.

Display the announcements in chat only. Mid screen announcements should be reserved for server messages only.

Expand the guild focused announcements to include major battles. For example “Green [ABC] has defeated red [Much] in a fight near [Redbriar]”. Major battles shape the matchup maybe even more than objectives. Often 3 wipes in a rapid succession is enough for a squad to move to another map.

3. Is there another proposal you think is better?

Return back to non-linked worlds. Merge servers and reduce playable area in a matchup if need be. Introduce strict migration policies to keep the populations equal but yet allow guilds to transfer as whole. Adjust worlds’ Glicko parameters when transfers occur. Publish weekly activity levels for all worlds.

OriOri.8724:

Korgov.7645:

OriOri.8724:

Korgov.7645:

• In conjunction with population rebalancing, updating Scoring allows us to decide a winner of a match more fairly, and thus reward players more fairly
  • Currently we can’t give out worthwhile rewards for winning, as most match-ups are already decided before they begin

source

The best thing about match winner’s reward is that they will finally fix server population imbalance. I could not care less about few more green items invading my backpack. The server population fix gets my vote here.

How on earth did you draw that conclusion? By handing out rewards for winning skirmishes, ANet will just be increasing the appeal to stack servers since you would get more rewards for being on the winning server.

ANet is fully aware of the upcoming server stacking issue. That’s why before releasing the rewards, they will have to prevent stacking and force server populations equal.

There is nothing forcing them to do that though. Absolutely nothing.

They’d make complete kitten of themselves if they did not address the server population imbalance prior rewards.

OriOri.8724:

Korgov.7645:

• In conjunction with population rebalancing, updating Scoring allows us to decide a winner of a match more fairly, and thus reward players more fairly
  • Currently we can’t give out worthwhile rewards for winning, as most match-ups are already decided before they begin

source

The best thing about match winner’s reward is that they will finally fix server population imbalance. I could not care less about few more green items invading my backpack. The server population fix gets my vote here.

How on earth did you draw that conclusion? By handing out rewards for winning skirmishes, ANet will just be increasing the appeal to stack servers since you would get more rewards for being on the winning server.

ANet is fully aware of the upcoming server stacking issue. That’s why before releasing the rewards, they will have to prevent stacking and force server populations equal.

• In conjunction with population rebalancing, updating Scoring allows us to decide a winner of a match more fairly, and thus reward players more fairly
  • Currently we can’t give out worthwhile rewards for winning, as most match-ups are already decided before they begin

source

The best thing about match winner’s reward is that they will finally fix server population imbalance. I could not care less about few more green items invading my backpack. The server population fix gets my vote here.

Entenkommando.5208:

I didn’t mean creating the lobby itself but you have to realise that they’d have to make it a separate gamemode like pvp on order to allow separate settings and so far we don’t know how easily they can implement this complex framework once more.

Let’s not kill dreams because the development may or may not be challenging.

Cerby.1069:

Trust me, this will make wvsw great again.

I’m going to build a wall between guest and host servers and make guest servers pay for it. :P

Norbe.7630:

Korgov.7645:

ANet already has an unreleased/unfinished feature for server population rebalancing. No details revealed. The feature was shelved while the server linking is in testing. There’s another thread discussing about it somewhere on this forum.

Hmmm, no details no dates and unfinished, so you wanted something you don’t know or doesn’t exist yet.
What if that balancing is completely turning WvW into EoTM, would most want that?

ANet originally wanted EotM to be an area where WvWers would spend time while in queue and also a zone separate from live WvW where new ideas could be tested. Both goals failed; live WvW is now a beta test zone and EotM is avoided by WvWers. I am sure they have learned from this disaster.

I know I do not want to continue with server linking. I want even less to return back to lower tiers being dead most time of the day. If ANet has a brilliant solution in their back pocket, bring it.

Norbe.7630:

Korgov.7645:

New players should have an equal footing in every aspect with more veteran players.

Does a new player with full exotics have no chance of defeating a full ascended with legendary weapons Diamond Legend? Let me tweak a little bit, an enemy Silver Knight perhaps?
Ofc on a siege/3rd party involvement the one with the most wxp upgrade breaks walls and doors faster on a 1 on 1 basis, but again this is WvW not PvP,

New players in WvW already have too much stacked up against them. If they face N months of rallybotting just to become viable stats/abilities wise they will move to other games.

Getting over environmental obstacles (walls/gates/guards/supplies/siege) in a timely fashion allows your team to focus on fighting enemy players and often choose a more favorable position. The masteries are not isolated from player vs player.

Norbe.7630:

Korgov.7645:

You do cannot learn your profession if you only have access to few skills against opponents with all possible skills. You will just be frustrated that you have no counters to some attacks and that makes you lose every combat.

as i’ve explained before, slowly but surely
before you view WvW on a PvP perspective, you must first embrace what WvW is.
before dueling, learn how to roam/gank,
before ganking/roaming, learn how to zerg,
before zerging, learn how listen on commands
before everything else, buy a commander tag

I hear you, but I disagree. You want to lay out a beaten path for every player to follow. First you learn this and only then you are allowed to learn the next thing. It is safe, proven and requires no thought, just labor.

I’d rather give players a choice what to do. If you like roaming, go and roam and never be a zergling.

This would be awesome addition. I would love have duels with easy switching between different builds and stat combos.

Few ideas for the implementation:

• Let Lion’s Arch be changed to one team only area (non-megaserver zone). The WvW Lobby could be a district within the city.
• Share /team as read-only with this district, so that you could be called to battle while spending time in the lobby.
• Move all gathering nodes from WvW maps into the lobby. The nodes become available when your team has corresponding objective in WvW. That way PvE players would want to spend time in the area, and maybe be get lured into real WvW.

Norbe.7630:

Korgov.7645:

• Server population balance; server linking is not good enough
  -how do you do that?

• Base professions buffed to be just as powerful as specializations
  -1special trait + 2base trait = 3 traits is not equal to 3 base traits?
  -how would you buff the base traits without buffing also the special profession in the process?

• WvW masteries made baseline for all players (I don’t want to see anyone told off siege because they don’t have enough mastery levels yet)
  -play a little more time on WvW, maybe you’ll earn the right to be a siegemaster

• All best-in-slot gear/consumables made easily available for all players in WvW; no time gating; no grinding; *no PvE dependency!
  -WvW will be boring as hell if this were pushed, we all want diversity from time to time, no more stagnation.

• Players boosted to full level 80 with all skills unlocked when entering WvW
  -How would you learn your class?
  there is a saying, “slowly but surely”

• Guild War Chest items available by materials gained from WvW only; *no PvE dependency!
  -Triumphant Armor?

im in no QoL fan, i just want to face the main WvW problems

ANet already has an unreleased/unfinished feature for server population rebalancing. No details revealed. The feature was shelved while the server linking is in testing. There’s another thread discussing about it somewhere on this forum.

Specializations give access to new profession skills (for mesmers is it F5 shatter) and a new weapon (for mesmers a shield) and new skills (for mesmers wells) in addition to the trait line itself. Nerfing the specialization trait lines or those new abilities would be the simplest approach, but players hate nerfing more than power creep. So buff up all other weapons and traits and skills.

New players should have an equal footing in every aspect with more veteran players.

Let the diversity come from different builds and playstyles, not differences in amount of stats a player can access. Insta-gibbing under geared newcomers is boring. The quarterly profession balance patches will keep things in motion to prevent stagnation.

You do cannot learn your profession if you only have access to few skills against opponents with all possible skills. You will just be frustrated that you have no counters to some attacks and that makes you lose every combat.

War Chest contains Tactics and Improvements you can slot to claimed objectives in WvW. (I’m not talking about a chest armor item) The point is that I do not want to spend gold buying Flax Fibers or other materials from PvE players because WvW does not provide those in sufficient quantities. I’m OK if they cost Badges of Honor only.

Few items from top of my head. Some have been mentioned in this thread already.

• Server population balance; server linking is not good enough
• Glory rewards for individual players and guilds (unique weapon/armor skins, titles, objective decorations, leaderboards)
• Remove map wide lagging during large fights
• Base professions buffed to be just as powerful as specializations
• WvW masteries made baseline for all players (I don’t want to see anyone told off siege because they don’t have enough mastery levels yet)
• All best-in-slot gear/consumables made easily available for all players in WvW; no time gating; no grinding; no PvE dependency!
• Players boosted to full level 80 with all skills unlocked when entering WvW
• Guild War Chest items available by materials gained from WvW only; no PvE dependency!
• Guild War Room upgrades available by time gating and materials gained from WvW only; no PvE dependency!
• Quality-of-life items
  • Scoring user interface revamp; especially the leaderboard is missing in-game
  • Loot management (players ultimately turn 99% of all loot into gold and the process doing so is very laborsome)
  • How siege is operated
    • Remove camera spin when using siege
    • Get rid of siege refreshing (it’s seriously not fun)
    • Mortar #5
    • Trebuchet/catapult/mortar #1 and #3 turn channeling
    • Trebuchet/mortar long distance camera; add ability to see target’s health
    • Trebuchet Mastery #5 into combat log and to floating combat text
    • Arrow cart line of sight anomalies; communicate the reachable target areas when player is placing the siege
  • Stop mini-map zoom-pan-locking inside keep lord rooms
  • How supplies are consumed in even numbers only (tick 10, tick 4, tick 1… that’s just wrong)
  • Stop build channeling immediately when a siege is built or a wall/gate is fully repaired
  • Infusions (get rid of duplicate stat items; make WvW rings have 3 infusion slots by default; change WvW amulets to have an infusion slot instead of that other type of slot)
  • Combat log time stamp precision to seconds and tenths
  • After death instant replay video and damage statistics
  • Automatic equipped items switching upon entering WvW, like we have traits/skills switched now
  • Build saver (quick switching between equipped items/traits/slotted skills)
  • Change guard/worker NPCs not to respond to F-key
  • Make towers/keeps/castle contested only when a wall or a gate is damaged or when the lord is in combat or dead
  • Remove the roaming skritt/centaur NPCs on Alpine borderlands
• Bug fixes
  • Reward Tracks random track activation upon completing a repeatable track
  • Teleport skills failing or succeeding without any logic depending on the location on the map and sometimes on the upgrade level of objective
  • Siege placement deny/allow indicators inaccurate
  • Presence of the Keep
  • Returning dolyak displacement
  • Release workaround fixes for bugs that have existed for over a year
    • Have those bugs added to the Known Issue Tracker
      • Make the tracker link work (bug tracking tool is bugged. lol)

I do not want the old manual objective upgrading system back. I prefer this automatic one.

Edit: added few QoL items

The camp is haunted by restless guaggan spirits. Offer pearls appease them. :P

Titles are not even displayed in WvW. Except for your party (squad?) members.

I doubt being able to display server name is enough to restore identity/community/morale on guest servers. The leaderboard rating – the only thing servers were able to compete in WvW – was removed from guest servers with the linking feature. No matter how well guest server plays, the host server probably won’t even thank you.

In Nox Mani.7892:

tricky thing is reistance, I wanted to get it higher but its only 3 seconds per mes, and tapping it first makes duration shorter =<

Our only reliable source of Resistance is F5 shatter. Saving F5 and Signet of Inspiration to mid fight would give your party Resistance when needed at the expense of lower pre stacked boons.

This looks great. With a perfect execution your party can expect:

• Resistance 6 seconds
• Quickness 8.5 seconds
• 1x Stability 10 seconds
• Retaliation and Swiftness 14.5 seconds
• Aegis 24.5 seconds
• 10x Might 28.5 seconds
• Fury and Vigor 32 seconds
• Regeneration 1 minute

You will get 14x Stability for yourself, but it will be all wasted because you will use your shield block anyway.

Tides of Time can hit your entire squad giving everybody up to 6 seconds of Quickness. Most of which is wasted since you all stand still buffing. You should consider using Tides of Time in mid fight to give your squad Quickness when it is most needed.

In Nox Mani.7892:

Same Group, so boons take priority share with the mesmers themselves but they WILL overlap to other players.

Boons given to mesmers are waste of boons. Better give them to professions which are useful in zerg fights. So only one mesmer per group.

Edit: Note! The boons were calculated when there is only 1 boon sharing mesmer in the party. With more mesmers you start hitting the stacking limits and boons will bleed to the rest of the squad.

BlaqueFyre.5678:

Korgov.7645:

Mesmers don’t have much use for long duration stealth. Glass cannon base mesmer may need some seconds to recharge the mantras and wait for Mind Wrack/Prestige cooldown. Other mesmer builds just lose damage if hovering in stealth.

PU Mesmers require long duration Stealth since it effectively shortens all their Torch CDs which means more Condis and faster access to stealth so their condis can do all the work.

Extra 1.5 seconds off torch cooldowns in exhange for doing nothing for 1 second hardly justifies taking Prismatic Understanding trait. PU condi mesmers have upgraded to chronomancer condi which does not even take Chaos trait line. Besides PU delays the Prestige damage by 1.5 seconds.

Hanza.6872:

An interesting discussion. However, to be talking about the same thing the discussion should be split into two factors. (Disclaimer, I’m a thief main, but trying to stay objective)

1. Stealth Stacking.
In my opinion there is currently too much of this. Both thief and mesmer can stay in stealth for prolonged periods of time. However, many of their builds need stealth to stay alive.. Not easy to fix.. However, people often don’t slot reveals, because that would hurt their build against other opponents. Pick your poison I’d say.

Mesmers don’t have much use for long duration stealth. Glass cannon base mesmer may need some seconds to recharge the mantras and wait for Mind Wrack/Prestige cooldown. Other mesmer builds just lose damage if hovering in stealth.

What thief build (other than this ghost) absolutely needs stealth stacking in combat?

babazhook.6805:

A one second cooldown on all stealth applications would fix…

Why would thief need any stealth stacking? Other than to support this troll build or to hide in keeps in WvW?

Ghost thieves have been carefully evaluated and found working as intended in WvW. Otherwise the latest balance patch would have removed stealth stacking.

Jeknar.6184:

Korgov.7645:

Next time you see a poll for adding a feature just vote against it. It will of the same quality.

So we just keep WvW as it is forever because we’ll just vote no for everything? Ok…

If the WvW designer is unable to decide whether some feature is worth adding to the game or not, then players who have no access to WvW road map, feature’s details, test reports, etc. are given the responsibility in form of a poll. That’s not good.

Both repair hammers and deployable cannons were features ANet had developed long time ago. The features were just waiting on the shelf to be released. That’s why it was so easy to add those into the game now.

Apparently X months of development + Y years of shelf time + 3 months to release was just not quite enough time for WvW designer’s evaluation nor testing.

Next time you see a poll for adding a feature just vote against it. It will of the same quality.

mammasaura.5907:

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

As a reminder, we held a poll 2 months ago and the community voted to beta deployable cannons: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/WvW-Poll-18-July-Cannon-Blueprints-Closed/page/3#post6252969

I can be fine if anet decides to have these polls to show you care of, but not use them to drop the responsability to the WvW community about the changes. 1000 players will never take a designer’s decision, because they aren’t and they will never be even if their number grows!

Well, thinking about, no, I’m not fine at all with these polls:
Come on, I don’t play pvp and still I can vote the current pvp related poll.

There’re many other ways to show you care of WvW but putting the cannons in the current state, a prototype of the previous WvW siege state (no cd, no condi/crit dmg on them, no cap), show me lack of effort, the opposite of anet intent.

Very good point. WvW needs a designer taking charge. Outsourcing all responsibility to player polls is not the way.

By the way are EotM players allowed to vote? I bet they are and they have nothing to do with WvW.

The conditions are cleared in a specific order: the most recently applied condition is cleared the first. Condi players take advantage of this and apply the most important conditions first and then cover conditions on top.

If you change the clearing order, the condi players will adjust their play accordingly.

You already cannot rally off ambient creatures in WvW. Only from enemy teams’ NPCs.

Killing a guard when downed without any preparation is not that easy. The downed person probably intentionally took the guards to low health before you and your friends downed him.

I do that often while solo capturing supply camps when I know there are many enemy roamers nearby. The rally is my ticket to escape when things go south.

If this a case when you cannon down someone killing gate guards and he rallies and escapes, you have no symphaty from me. Man up, leave the cannon and go out finish him.

Yes, a rally can turn the fight around. You need to incorporate the possibility to your tactics. It is well mindless skill spam at the same target does not always work.

Dayra.7405:

A very weak form of friendly fire would alrady do it, and cannot be abused:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/How-can-we-changed-WvW-to-prevent-the-blob/4821283

Dayra.7405:

How about a weaker form of friendly fire (which has to many negative side-effects)

Every Friend in your AoE Area count against your AoE-Limit

So if you put AoE onto an area with 5 friends you do no damage. I guess this will take out all teeth of the Blob-Stacking Meta.

This will make single-target skills more valuable as single target skills will be the only way to hit enemies in your blob.

It will make small groups valuable that can “hide” in the enemy blob.

Both could need an upgrade for large-scale fights.

Generally I would propose the following priority in AoE target selection:
Invisible Friends > Invisible Enemies > Visible Friends > Visible Enemies
I.e. you only hit a visible enemy with AoE, if there there are less than 3/5 friends or invisible enemies in your target area, you only hit invisible enemies if there are less than 3/5 invisible friends in your target area. The higher priority for invisibles is needed as you cannot target them with directed skills.

Interesting idea. But…

Scenario: 5 enemies are capturing the Wildcreek tower. The lord is at 50% health and I rush in for the rescue. I manage to create 3 illusions while the enemies do not pay attention to me. I move into middle of them and hit Mind Wrack to shatter the clones. Since there are now 5 friendly targets in the area Mind Wrack does no damage. (1 tower lord, 3 clones and myself)

I guess you would not count NPCs as friendly targets which consume AoE charges.

Scenario: 4 melee jarheads are attacking a downed mesmer in the Wildcreek lord room. They are spamming #1 skills which are AoE cleave attacks. They are standing right on top of the mesmer so everyone is within each other’s the cleave area. Since there are 3 friendly targets in the area, the cleaves do no damage.

Would you exclude cleave attacks? If so then you are on a slippery slope to apply this feature on specific skills only.

Thanks for posting this. It would be nice to try out something like this.

It is rare to get 2 mesmers to play together. 5 would be impossible. They are solitary wanderers living in a world of their own illusions.

There is one glaring problem with your set up: no condi cleanse except 1x Mender’s Purity and 2x Null Field. Both have radius 240. If you force 5 mesmers to stand in a small circle right next to a blob, guess what happens.

ShoVok.1905:

also what is meant by no reward?

Also does a very large server have more lag than a medium server in general? need to ask for boss his comp is well meh

Servers are awarded by Glicko rating after each matchup. The rating is used to match up servers of close equal power. The leaderboards show how good your server is.

The guest servers have been taken out of this system. They get nothing but a random linking no matter how well they play.

On top of this ANet is giving away Glicko rating manually to servers left and right. They explain it is to create more balanced matchups. At the same time they manually do the linking of servers creating the very imbalance.

All servers suffer from lag. Even the teams in the lowest tier matchup can muster up 3 blobs to clash in Stonemist.

The medium population servers are guest servers now. They get linked every 2 months to a random larger host server.

If the guest server is lucky with the new host, it becomes the bandwagon server of this 2-monthly period. Players transfer to the server for easy victories and then transfer out when the next linking is announced. The linking has eroded any sense of community the guest servers may still have left.

Med pop server = guest server = no community = low morale.

You could think of yourself as a mercenary but with no reward nor a choice who to fight for. Sure you can help the host server, but after 2 months you get linked to another host server. What’s the point?

Red is dead. Do not make agreements that hurt your team. Be it dueling or swapping keeps.

I would condone “dueling” if done to benefit your team.

• keep the enemy forward waypoint contested
• capture interest of N+ enemy spectators who just stand there in awe
• slow down enemy zerg forcing them to go long way around your dueling grounds
• engage in lenghty discussion with the enemy commander about proper dueling ethics
• protect your team’s gank squad saying they are dueling whenever they need to escape enemy zerg
• kill solo enemy players returning to the frontlines
• cut off supply lines to enemy keeps
• halt enemy roaming party to 1v1 you instead of killing you 1v5

If dueling was popular, ANet would extend sPvP, guild halls arenas, LFG tool or major cities with a dueling option.

[Suggestion] Fix the forum search already

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Suggestion-Team-chat-change/first#post6354355
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Team-Chat-Really/first#post6351255
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Team-Chat-identify-message-source/first#post6351427
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/map-tag-for-team-chat/first#post6352453

Good riddance.

There is 1 rare scenario where repairing is actually needed: Cannons and mortars on keeps can be taken to 1% health by solo roamers making them useless when a zerg finally comes knocking on the gate.

Off-peak hour golem armies and prebuilt arrow cart arrays are unhealthy for the game. Repairing them would make it worse. I’d rather have all siege unrefreshable (it’s so boring anyway) and golems denied access to invulnerable areas. To compensate lower the supply costs within friendly objectives so that early scouts can build responses to assaults on the spot.

The actual implementation of the Repair Hammers was terrible. Had the implementation been better the vote results would be different. For example: oils/cannons/mortars regenerate health when keep is not contested.

ozzeh.7398:

I think it would be beneficial to tag team chat messages with an identifier telling people what map the message is coming from. What do you think about that idea?

Right now every wannabe internet hero is spamming the /t chat. I have turned off the team messages until end of this matchup.

The novelty will wear off soon enough. Players will learn the difference between map and team chats. At that point there will be an etiquette for typing in the source when it is relevant for the team message. Or leave it out when it is not needed.

For example:
we need a new pug cmmdr on EB soon
wheres the action at?
hbl garri needs help. 30+ AM moving to inner mid gate
can someone get bloodlust already?

Swagger.1459:

Idk, I see this stepping on the level 80 food and utility market too much. However, I would be down with being able to purchase any recipe in the game with badges.

There is no reason for WvW players to make gold transfers to PvE farmers. Make the provisioner sold consumables work in WvW only. Problem solved.

Artemis Thuras.8795:

I would be interesting to see how +x/0/-y (x,y being arbitrary numbers, maybe the same), or +2/ -1/-1 would work out too.

2-(-1)-(-1) sounds like the best distribution so far.

• allows victory score buildup (51 skirmish wins guarantees a matchup win)
• prevents the weakest team falling too far behind
• emphasizes the later part of the matchup
• forces teams to fight for the win, not for the second place
• the weakest team can choose to play a king-maker for catching up later

NA T1 matchup would be at Mag 32, YB 2, BG 12 victory points now. YB would need a win streak of 11 to catch up with Mag.

Rink.6108:

1 /-1 /-1 would currently lead to rankings like Maguuma 8 / YB 1 / Blackgate 0, every server that doesn’t win more than 50% of all skirmishes will have 0 points, so most balanced matchups will be 1/0/0 in total points at the end and the winner being the one that won the last matchup before reset. Would be funny but would it be better?

Good point. Having a win streak at the end of the matchup would be almost a guaranteed win. Like Last Stand on steroids. A confident team could safely ignore the first part of the matchup upto 2/3. Even longer depending on other teams’ total VPs.

5-4-3, 4-3-2 and even 10-9-8 only change how teams are rewarded Glicko rating at the end of the matchup. It is just as difficult to catch up as with 3-2-1 system.

2-1-1 means the matchup can be decided by only 1/2 into the matchup. 3-2-1 can be decided by 2/3 into the matchup. I agree 2nd and 3rd teams fighting for winning a skirmish is a valuable property.

I’d suggest 1-(-1)-(-1) where a team loses a VP when it does not win a skirmish. Of course a team cannot lose a VP it doesn’t have yet. That keeps the scores close and forces teams to win skirmishes.

OTOH the Glicko ratings adjustments need some rethinking. The early skirmishes of the matchup become less valuable. And players in general do not want to lose anything – be it VPs, nerfing skills, gear, titles or whatnot.

The goals for the skirmishes feature were outlined in the Lets talk scoring thread.

Benefits

• Winning a Skirmish by a small margin, or a large margin, awards the same number of victory points.
• This keeps the winning and losing scores closer together, allowing the losing worlds a fighting chance
• Teams will still want to win as many time slices as possible, off-hours coverage is still important, but less dominant

The victory points numbers were closer together. Well done. But looking past the absolute numbers, catching up after losing the first part of the matchup is just as difficult as before. “Yey! we are only 50 VPs behind the leader. We can still win… oh wait! We can’t.”

Nightcapping (off-hours coverage) was addressed by the skirmishes. Well done. There is now an upper limit how much nightcapping can distort a matchup. I have not checked whether any team actually hit this limit.

The old total war score vs new victory points differences were surprisingly small. See TorquelSoul’s charts.

Maybe the teams didn’t adjust their tactics to take full advantage of the new system yet: like bunkering in towers after reaching a lead in a skirmish.

The trend in the comparison was alarming:

Stronger servers benefit from Victory points 10 out of 11 times. And weaker servers are hurt by Victory points 10-11 times.

The skirmishes had less impact on the Glicko ratings than I expected. ANet artificially modifying some of the ratings eroded my trust in the system.

It was frustrating to have lost all skirmishes in the first part of the matchup. Playing on Wed-Thu-Fri would not change the winner of the matchup; not even if the dominant team had stopped playing after Wednesday. The Last Stand feature might address this. However the root problem is still the population imbalance – Glicko-match-making and world linking are not enough to create balanced matchups.

It felt somewhat unfair that the quiet hours skirmishes were as valuable the prime time skirmishes. I would not want to try out the Action Level – Victory Point Multiplier feature, though.

The UI still needs lot of changes.

• I had to open WvW window often to check remaining skirmish time. Which most of the time said 1 hour left in the current skirmish. At which point I had to check the clock to see how long really.
• The Score Tick Timer on top of the screen is useless now that objectives are guaranteed to tick at least once after capture.
• The objectives held balance on top of the screen should be changed to skirmish war scores balance because PPT is only minor part of the war score.
• Glicko rating is still not displayed anywhere in-game. Nor predicted rating evolution. It is impossible to tell if your team is losing or winning. Sometimes finishing third in a matchup still raises the Glicko rating.
• Score breakdown is also not displayed. Only PPT. It should be very clear what activities count towards the war score.

If possible, they made it even worse. Now the objective aura buff fails to apply every now and then.

Still worse: player may get the Presence of the Keep with full auras, but at the same time no objective aura buff.

I agree. This is infuriating.

The WvW Reward Tracks were inspired by the PvP Reward Tracks. Does the same problem exist in sPvP? Or did they develop this behavior just for WvW players’ annoyance?

There are still 2 bugs alive with the Presence of the Keep:

• The buff is not applied over 50% of the time when player enters the keep.
• Sometimes even when the player gets the buff, the buff is missing one or more auras.

The bug that the latest patch did fix was this:

• When a keep is claimed by a guild which has Objective Aura 1: Supply Capacity, but not Objective Aura 8: Magic Find, the Presence of the Keep granted players Magic Find instead of Supply Capacity.

One would think it was easy to fix all related bugs at the same time, but let’s be grateful for this crumb dropping off PvE development.