I’m guessing you don’t play NA timezone with your SEA comment and that you think HoD is the blobby server out of the three…NSP can pop 2 sets of OJs on a BL no problem. I see it every afternoon/night I play. I’m willing to bet you don’t see outnumbered buff on your BL and EB on reset? DH does. I’d kill for your numbers. NSP has legions of ppl compared to DH and a bit more than HoD. Scorewise you’d do better if your guilds didn’t voltron up and nuthug, you could cover more of the map(s).
The reason you don’t see HoD as “blobby” is because, from what we’ve seen, DH’s strategy is to avoid HoD at all costs. NSP would probably leave you alone if you’d just hit HoD more than you do. But that’s just my observation.
Yes, we do outnumber you. However, our focus, as should be yours, is on HoD/Ebay.
The problem, for 3+ years already, has been that there’s zero incentive for the 3rd place server to hit the leading server. Better to poach points off of the 2nd place server … making the match even less competitive.
Do a bit of tweaking and make it into a PvE map.
- PvE players will be happy since it alleviates the content drought a tiny bit.
- WvW players will be happy since it’s finally gone.
- Devs save some face.
I think gw2 in general has no bright future.
There’s more people watching Microsoft Flight Simulator than guild wars 2 right now on twitch tv lol
To be fair GW2 is hard to watch on video. Its way too fast and its hard to tell what’s going on. Plus all the effects.
Compare current to past viewership. It’s gone down drastically in the past few months.
Also, we’ve noticed that once the total number of votes has reached a certain threshold , votes tend to stabilize, and doubling or tripling the number of votes tends to make very little impact on the final result.
OP is saying current voters are only from a certain, unrepresentative, subset of players. Whether votes stabilize amongst this group doesn’t affect the fact that it’s unrepresentative.
Whilst the recent WvW focus is good I still think the actual changes show that anet is not prepared to make hard decisions on the mode for the long term.
Even they probably see the writing on the wall: there’s no point putting lots of effort at this time — they missed that boat already (and then smashed it to bits with HoT).
I’ve come to the conclusion that the majority of non-desert haters are a very very vocal minority of the overall population. The majority of the overall population already quit because of desert, and a majority of what’s left will quit when it returns.
I see what you did, there.
Curious as to where you’re getting your “majority quit or will quit” numbers, though, as Anet has never released any sort of population numbers. Ever.
I know, it’s a small thing.
If you played before HoT and then after, you know the majority of players quit WvW… I’d estimate 70%.
Why is it still even in the game? Get rid of it.
They really don’t want to scrap DBL and thus are afraid to release such a poll.
The time to grow WvW has long past — if they had begun to cultivate WvW two/three years ago, there’d be a good chance WvW would be thriving right now. But they did nothing and it’s simply too late at this point.
By now, Anet/GW2/WvW’s reputation has been damaged too much to expect future growth. Given this, it’d be foolish for the devs to put in the massive amounts of work needed to deal with OP’s issues.
The best you can hope for are small, easy to implement, features that can slow down the population decline. Just look at the current and upcoming polls: it all involves small, relatively simple tweaks here and there.
Perhaps things would be different if WvW had some competition two/three years back. Unfortunately there wasn’t any. As for hope of improvement due to the upcoming competition: it’s too late — the negative buzz from HoT effectively put GW2 out of the race. New players interested in this type of game mode aren’t going to consider GW2 as an option when these competitors are released.
If you want 500 players on a map with decent fps, you’re going to have to wait for those other games to come out. It’s not coming to WvW.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the majority of non-desert haters are a very very vocal minority of the overall population. The majority of the overall population already quit because of desert, and a majority of what’s left will quit when it returns.
There must be a plot twist because Dragon’s Watch means they’re working for the Dragon. LOL
Please change to include option of deletion of DBL.
If arbitrary GvG matches were possible (across WvW matchups) GvG would have been much bigger.
With the matchups restriction, it’s amazing that there even was a GvG scene. There really was a lot of buzz and interest behind GvG and Anet just dropped the ball.
Indeed, we need to choose between 3 lines, and one is already taken by the elite specialization.
“Side-grade” indeed.
GvG probably could have been esports for GW2 — certainly much better than the PvP it has now — if it had been supported 2-3 years ago. Lost opportunity by Anet, who never liked GvG.
It’s because the merges did nothing to solve the game mode’s problems. So now we’ve fallen back to where we were before the merges.
WvW: definitely no where close on dying, we are seeing huge queues across most servers on peak hours. WvW is in amazing shape after spring update.
Stronghold: Anet need to increase the reward for it, the main reason people don’t play stronghold is because the time and reward is not up to par and people generally want faster games.
That’s an illusion from merging of servers.
Because it gives the illusion of content when there isn’t any.
They are trying to revert all the damage caused by HoT first.
Maybe do all these polls together, at one time. That way it’ll be easier to throw out the responses of the pve players who want more siege.
- Mixed Borderlands: No. Delete Desert.
- World Linking: Every week if you want servers to keep their identities.
- Deployable Mortars/Cannons: No. Have you learned nothing about people disliking arrow carts?
- Repair Hammer: No. Same as above.
- Priorities: At the core of it, specializations being OP is hurting the game tremendously, from decreasing diversity, to having core/F2P players be second class citizens (and considering low HoT sales, that’s a lot of players). Anet would never ever do this, but: Make all specializations available to everyone in WvW (and PvP).
What happened, exactly?
Thanks Gaile.
I only have one question in regards to this change. Why not require every member of the raid group to have at least 2 legendary weapons to progress instead of just ley line gliding?
If you’re gonna go hardcore, you gotta go hardcore to the max. I feel like you guys are being way to generous with this requirement.
Just my 2¢.
Hopefully for the next raid.
Also, working on communicating to the team responsible for scaling to determine what can be done to fix the legendary downscaling bug. The hardest part for me to gauge right now is what priority they consider the bug, but I’ll keep you all informed.
They need to just make all dungeons level 80 and upscale those who are low level.
- Downscaling screws up stats for level 80 players.
- Upscaling screws up stats for lower level players.
- Level 80 players are by far the majority and almost literally no one plays dungeons at lower levels.
So why are they still using downscaling?
[quote=6159445;Harbard.5738:
That kills most of what I like about gw2: spontaneity.
[/quote]
There hasn’t been any spontaneity in GW2 for years. It plays like a bus schedule. Next scheduled stop: Fire Elemental.
I would say its more like entitled players like ohoni that are bad at the game and have little to no pvp skill are expecting to receive the same rewards and level of progression as actual pvp players who are actually winning games.
Entitled PvE player? Yes. But Anet is the one who decided their strategy to get people into PvP was not to make it fun, balanced and competitive; but instead to give rewards that PvE can’t resist.
The current plan is to rotate the borderlands maps each quarterly update. That said, now that we are actively polling the community, perhaps we can start exploring other options.
If you dare, make a poll asking for whether people want the DBL deleted forever.
Next patch: captchas?
It’ll last until Anet decides they want another precipitous population decline.
It’s NSP, not NS. So NSP/SF is the pairing.
“Beta” in WvW means 99.9% this is going to be the permanent mergers.
- As a rough number, PPK may increase to 3-5 points, rather than 1, with diminishing returns on killing players who have been alive for less than 5 minutes.
Depending on the numbers, it may be worth it for zergs to log out and back in regularly.
If you look at the PPT graphs, it’s clear the merges did nothing for population balance.
They were working on a fix for the desert BL being just plopped on top of the map — six months ago. It’s clearly extremely difficult and complicated to fix, so don’t start getting impatient until maybe mid 2017.
Sloppy and half-done. Sounds about right.
Interesting that people hate the desert BL so much they don’t mind a change to alpine right in the middle of a matchup.
Really interesting seeing the decline of GW2 visually. Reddit’s dataisbeautiful subreddit (www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful) might like this.
What if you don’t have HoT?
well this does seem to be designed as a raid tool so anet probably assumes people will have HoT
Dungeons and fractals both could benefit from DPS. So why was this designed exclusively for HoT? Cash grab perhaps?
Don’t worry, I’m sure they’ll shave a couple seconds off its duration next update.
What if you don’t have HoT?
Add a WXP-gain sparkle trail. - really?… Really?
The sparkle trail will get non WvW players to vote for QoL, which is clearly what Anet wants.
Its Beta for a reason. They’ll evaluate and relink as needed.
Look at their “beta” history. What changes did they make to DBL from beta to release — despite the flood of negative feedback? They’ve done this a lot — talk like they’ll make the appropriate adjustments and tweaks, but in fact do next to nothing. What you see now is very likely the permanent merges, with maybe one or two token modifications.
Now if I am incorrect and the current servers that are tied together at this point in time are what the Dev’s have in mind for the final result then Dynamic Merge does make more sense.
Anet also had a “beta” for the desert BL. Everyone gave valuable feedback as to how terrible it was. Nothing changed on release. There’s plenty of other examples (remember dungeon rewards?). So taking Anet’s past history into consideration, it’s more likely these are the final merges with at most one or two tweaks.
New Legendary weapons! This time for real. Right? (Exclusive to new expansion, of course.)
Also keep in mind the matchups are not exactly balanced because some of the servers are not in the tier they belong in. Moving one position up or down a tier can make a difference in the matchup.
You speak as if they were locked into the merges we have by some algorithm. But they’re not. They have 100% control over how to merge. They have all the population and coverage data to do this properly. So why didn’t Anet make the appropriate merges? Maybe if they put more thought and work into the merges, the resulting matchups could be more balanced… and really importantly: it might even be possible to create more diversity of matchups.
large part because it would require updated text, which in turn needs to go through our long editing and localization process.
Wow. So improving the game mode has to take a back seat in large part because you don’t want to write text and have it translated?
As for removing the upgrade entirely, that also isn’t really an option, due to how it’s intertwined with the Scribing and Guild Halls systems.
Intertwined with the scribing and Guild Hall systems? That sounds like the scribing and guild halls aren’t designed to have features added or removed. Really?
OK, make the duration zero then.
Though I feel that a couple things have been done kinda poorly, two that come to my mind is that overstacked servers are now even more overstacked when they did not need to be, and at the other end of things you have a combo of NSP + SF that has a giantic timegap vs any other server pairing. Basically 2 prime time NA servers with next to zero off-time coverage will give a very predictable result, they should have been merged with some different timezone servers.
This was very apparent reset night when NSP was ticking in the 40s on reset night (late night). They should have put some effort into analyzing coverage data to create merges that would result in more balanced matchups. Instead they took the least-effort route. So really none of WvW’s problems will have been solved in the long (or even medium) term.
I dont think the point of the merge was to automatically balance out servers according to their skill, but rather to consolidate the populations so that they could eventually balance themselves out.
Before the merge there was like a dozen empty servers, and a few full servers, this makes it so there are more high population matchups, so the new tiering of the servers will adjust according to which servers do the best rather than being stagnant and being seperated pretty much dependent on population.
the tier lists were pretty much just a list of servers seperated by population size
If the reason Anet did the merges was just to clear out the desolate landscapes of the lower tiers, then they’re doing it wrong.
At the moment, the number one factor in determining who “wins” a matchup is population and coverage disparities within the matchup. That’s what needs to be fixed by the merges if Anet really wants any long term benefit from this move. Otherwise, population will just continue decreasing steadily until another merge is done.
Ideally, you’d want to merge so that population/coverage were balanced throughout — allowing much more diversity of matchups. That would fix the perennial problem of stagnant matchups. More realistically, you can aim for tiers (gold, silver) where every server within a tier is well-matched. That would require some thought and data analysis to do right.
But it doesn’t look like Anet thought about this at all: their merge was simply top with bottom, second with second to bottom, etc. Sure, there’s a lot of people online right now, but how long is it going to last with such a simplistic merging?
Perhaps the merge combinations should have been done differently?