Guild Wars 2

Falkynn.3789:

Please, do not misunderstand me: I do not cause players RS. I just notice that you have lost a bit of fighting spirit, compared to before the league. This is not a criticism, and you still have an impressive fighting force.

No offense taken.

And yes, we had very mixed performances since the league started, which (in my opinion) was a by-product of the leagues achievement system that actually rewards bad (= strategically dumb) play. I for one hope that the overall quality of our play will improve after the season.

And to be clear: I think there is not one weak opponent in this “gold” league. It’s just the PPT mechanic that is broken and that needs to be fixed for so many months now. The league weeks just made this flaw much more visible again.

~MRA

Falkynn.3789:

You lost your keep (Lowlands) on Eternals during the prime-time (before 22h30), not the night…

Sorry, try again…

Sorry, read again. This is the 2v1 I was referring to. And nevertheless, Sunday 23h59:

Riverside: 84k
Jade: 77k
Elona: 70k

I am pretty content with our performance this weekend. There have been much weaker performances by us since the start of the season, this was a good one.

~MRA

Falkynn.3789:

You dropped in this league, and you have lost your fighting spirit. Sorry, RS has lost his fighting spirit,

Yeah, right. Very funny. Our lack of fighting spirit must also have been the reason that were leading 10k points by the end of the weekend, with Jade never even coming close to crashing anything in our third on Eternals (we only lost Klovan once against ER, if I recall correctly). And Jade essentially had to profit from the nice attack played by ER yesterday (the fast-cap of Jerifers) and the following 2v1 for their first success in this match-up.

Last time I logged on (today before work) I still saw Riverside fighting, so maybe you want to check your sense for reality.

~MRA

Dayra.7405:

Placement doesn’t matter et al in a PvD-league.

Ok, this sentence gets nominated for the most incorrect usage of the phrase et al in any context, ever.

~MRA

Yrvald.8971:

changing the subject : we are all reporting the [AV] team of RS day after day, i hope they don’t need their accounts anymore but i believe you know what i’m talking about (i’m not blaming RS, just them ^^ )

Actually, I have never even heard of that guild in more than 15 months of WvW for Riverside. I’d say good riddance if they get banned for their deeds.

~MRA

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

You can also go in through Timberline Falls (A <L60 zone). The run to the story start does skirt by some L68 mobs (don’t try to take the shortcut through the troll cave!) but it’s quite doable at L66.

Just like Rouven, I assume CharrabungaDude is asking for a way to reach the story’s step in Icespear’s Shelf in Fireheart Rise. I am not aware of any way to reach that location from Timberline Falls. Are you sure that you are not mixing up the locations, or am I the one who is missing something?

As an aside, I always found it quite strange that the PC was sent off to such a remote location at this point of the story. I understand that it was maybe the intention to have an “adventure all around the world”, but to me this was more like a nuisance. After all, I was just preparing to bring the fight to Zaithan’s home turf, and now I have to pay a short visit to some random guy at the other end of the world? In the end, this trip felt kind of forced on the player, and resulted in a very strange pacing of the storyline at that point.

Just my 2 cents.

~MRA

Neverender.7581:

I for one do not like it. This is just the first of what will surely be many more universal skills to come. If we start adding universal skills, then what is the point of having professions?

Pretty much this. I was actually a little bit shocked when I read the announcement.

I am not against players getting more options to cleanse conditions or whatever, but I want each profession to have their own and unique take on achieving this. Universal skills are just the most boring way of adding new skills to the game. They were already a bad idea in GW1 Nightfall/EotN (where in EotN they also happened to be OP and broke game balance completely).

I understand that universal skills might be a more cost efficient way of adding skills to game (i.e., design and implement 1 skill to please 100% of your player base, instead of just ~1/8 of it) but I hope ANet will not go this way for adding new skill, maybe beside some minor “just for fun or flavor skills”. Also, I am seriously hoping that these universal skills will be PvE only (and here for once I even mean “not allowed in WvW”).

~MRA

DevonCarver.5370:

Agreed. We have a plan for doing something like this that we’ll have more info on later. Right now we have to get it tested and do all the other things before we can be sure it is what we’d want.

While this is a nice feature and I am not against it, i don’t find this to be the most pressing missing commander feature. (Actually, our server does have only rarely more than one commander available/willing to lead a pug squad at the same time anyways.)

In my opinion, the most important improvement would be a guild commander feature (even if it is sold separately from the usual commander tome) which has the following feature:

• Only players representing the same guild as the guild commander are able to see the commander icon or join the squad.

After playing for over a year, I am so tired of having to call-target the acting commander of a guild squad, which has become the standard work-around, and thereby loosing the intended functionality for the calling-a-target feature, and not having a reliable marker on the mini-map.

~MRA

Unfounded and most likely inaccurate speculation: A lot of krait have been driven off from WvW Borderlands in the Mists lately. I guess they had to move somewhere ….

(edit:) Of course, my main hope that these are (finally) the first portents of the super secret Tengu-as-a-playable-race-DLC/Expansion that nobody has been talking about lately …

Well played, ANet, well played. You have my attention.

~MRA

Thanks for starting a great and productive thread. The downside is that it has grown way to large to read through all of it so please excuse if the ideas below have been given before.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

We have, with your support, created a truly unique platform. One which is in its infancy, and one we build with the continued support, and collaboration of the community.

We do need to build out more time to be in dialog with you, specifically, following up on our own investigations of your suggestions and concerns.
We will work harder to achieves this.

Please allow me just give two small suggestions on improving the communication platform between players and developers.

Actually, I am an not part of the crowd that thinks that ANet is giving too few feedback to player concerns in the forums. Of course, more interaction is always nice, but from my perspective the dev presence is adequate. I do, however, have a major problem with the way feedback is given in the forums by many players. Most of the time, feedback is polluted by the very loudly voiced opinions of a few people who yet have to learn how to interact properly and constructively among adults. This makes it immensely painful for a user to look up information in the forums: Interesting threads vanish into oblivion as soon as they leave page one of a sub-forum, constructive posts get buried deep in piles of rather useless comments, and every thread has a quite large chance to derail at some point. (I understand you addressed this point in the opening post as well.)

However, I don’t think these are the result of an nonconstructive community (since I don’t think that the community — as a whole — is unreasonable; excluding maybe a misbehaving minority) . I rather do think this is an immanent flaw of forum systems that is as old as Internet newsgroups themselves. While I am not against the use of forum systems (they certainly have their advantages), I think It may be worthwhile to have a look at different technologies that allow for additional, constructive ways of providing user feedback. Two tools that have emerged recently and that can, in my opinion, provide very valuable feedback from a large group of users are the following tools:

a) Q&A websites — Those are websites that do not focus on discussions and the presentation of opinions, but on concrete questions and concrete answers. Answers are accepted by the questioner, and easily ranked by the whole community. Of course, the prime example of a very useful and established resource of this kind is stackoverflow.com . A GW2 Q&A website could be a very useful resource for technical support questions and any “players helping players” related content. They support that the same questions are not raised over and over again, and form an comprehensive, adaptive, and ever growing FAQ.

b) Community wishlists — The name may be misleading: I am talking about a version of a Suggestions forum, that does not focus on discussions and the presentation of opinions, but on the presentation of ideas and feature requests. Those ideas can be up-voted by the community to give an interesting insight in what is currently bothering the community as a whole. A very well working example of such a system is the community wishlist system at gog.com . Everybody in the gog community fully understands that this is not really a “wishlist”, and that most suggestions may never come to life. But they form a great way to submit suggestions in a visible way, as well as a great way for the dev team to signal when suggestions have been picked up, and they are far less prone to the noise provided by the vocal minorities.

As an aside: Since both tools do require a fair amount of community interaction, I’d say a community reputation system for participating constructively in the forums/Q&A-site/wishlist would be really helpful (e.g., “Forum-XP” similar to stackoverflow.com reputation score, and as a mode of gamification).

Also, I do understand that the “Q/A mode” and the “+1” features of this forum aim to provide some features that the systems above naturally provide. However, my observation is that both features do not succeed in giving a non-negligible amount of insight in the “state of the community”, nor do they help the reader to find interesting reads, and I consider them more or less failed attempts to structure user feedback.

Just my 2 cents, thanks for reading.

~MRA

rainmakercano.3152:

I don’t like to say that, but ZERO respect for IF, […]

rainmakercano.3152:

Such a behaviour […]: no honor, no respect for the rival, no skill at all.

(boldface by me)

Seriously, guys like you crack me up!

~MRA

zamalek.2154:

It seems as though we might have a saboteur in AG from another server.
[…]
So how are we allowed to deal with them? Or are we going to see a firmer stance on sabotage (essentially saying that transferring to a server is pledging allegiance to them)? Or am I going to be making siege ram art in keeps during the tournament?

I’d say it is much more likely that this is just a simple griefer instead of an elaborate clandestine ploy of your opponents. On Riverside, we had our fair share of trouble with such sad, sad individuals in the past.

If I were you I wouldn’t expect to much action from ANet addressing that problem. Although I advise to report the individual, even very obvious cases (like, building ~50 useless trebs in a keep to drain all of its supply and block the upgrades) have not lead to a suspension of the griefer. Instead, tickets were closed with the information, that one has to respect that “different players are enjoying the game in different ways”.

However, players who lost their nerve and insulted griefers via map chat have been suspended before. So I advise your server to just ignore the obvious troll, and to not let yourself get lured into trouble. After all, it is mainly the attention that these sad individuals are desperately looking for.

To some degree, I can understand ANets unwillingness to address such problems. After all, those are mainly social problems of a servers community, and ANet cannot start playing the kindergarten teacher and solving a servers quarrels. Also, from a technical standpoint, it is simply impossible to distinguish a griefer from a just very, very dumb player. And any suggestion of adding game mechanics to hinder such griefplay that I have read so far do backfire on the regular game play in one or another way, so they may not be worth it. It’s a dilemma, and I don’t have a solution, either.

~MRA

Markus.9084:

ProVeN.8423:

Haters gonna hate. Why is RS a bad server to play against? Because they’re good at what they do? You want to win? Go and adapt your strategy to your enemys you’re facing. Complaining on the forums won’t get you a single point.

RS isn’t winning because they are better than us (and are they really better than us ?). Time coverage is a much more important parameter than skill. The data show clearly that you make the difference between 5 am and 11 am, when our players are sleeping/working.
You just have a better time coverage.

No one is acting like “we are better than you”. (And if someone seriously is, he or she shouldn’t, since it is childish.) We are playing a match-up in a competitive scenario, and as it turns out, we are winning this week.

And I find ProVeN’s analysis is actually quite to the point:

• We are winning, because we are good at what we do.
• We are winning, because we want to win.
• We are winning, because we have a strategy that allows us to beat your servers strategy.

Coverage, night shifts, off-hour crews, surprise attacks, etc etc are just examples of valid server strategies, and every server uses a fair share of that tools. For instance, our now traditional “good morning raid” only exists because we didn’t want to get crushed in the early morning time slot, as we had to endure time and again. So we formed an opposition within that time frame, and it has now emerged as one of our strengths.

We have faced defeat many, many times, and certainly not for the last time. And from my observation, you do not see the same amount of complaining, disdain, and unfounded accusations from RS players as Riverside has to endure here in the forums. I find it a strength of our community to accept defeat, to keep on improving and adjusting our game play, and to try to do better next time. I wish some individuals (not necessarily directed at you) that do nothing but complain about RS’ game play would show a similar attitude.

ProVeN.8423:

Go and adapt your strategy to your enemys you’re facing. Complaining on the forums won’t get you a single point.

Quoted a second time, for truth.

ProVeN.8423:

Haters gonna hate.

Also true, although I still wish they wouldn’t. After all, this is a game, not real warfare, so hate is even more unnecessary as it already is in real life.

Thanks to our opponents for the fun match-up this week. Please excuse us going on a rampage on our national holiday, but, well, we could, and we had a lot of fun doing so. And don’t tell me you didn’t have fun finally trashing our SM (and Anza) after its eighteen-hour lasting reign of terror. After all, those are the sweetest victories.

~MRA

rainmakercano.3152:

Riverside is the best living proof that WvW is not about PvP any longer.

Last time I checked, WvW was still players fighting players, so I don’t necessarily support that statement. I know that you are talking more about a balanced and structured approach to PvP, but that’s quite logically not what you find on an epic battlefield.

Every time I hear someone complaining about “there should be more duels in open large-scale warfare” I imagine the same scene in the context of WW2’s D-Day offensive: The allied blob is pushing in from the sea, the German lamers are hiding in their T3 bunkers, manning their superior arrow carts (or whatever), and in between a single soldier is running, screaming “Anyone up for a duel? 1v1, 1v2, anything? Guyz? Ah kitten you, Eisenhower, no roamers, no PvP, you designed this all wrong!!!!1!”

Hence, I find it quite logical that, on a battlefield, you will rather find this:

rainmakercano.3152:

80+ players together plus 4+ arrowcarts and always covered by a supply-taking treb. Once. Twice. Time and time again.

Honest question: Have all people interested in dueling ever thought about meeting up in the Obsidian Sanctum (EB JP) as the canonical place for small-scale duels, similar to the BL Windmill ending up to be the canonical meeting place for GvGs? I rarely see a zerg running through there, and there are also no arrow carts.

Also, from my (brief) experience with the new center of the borderlands, zergs also seem to move around that area When I was capping bloodlust shrines for some hours lately, I only encountered 5-people groups at max in there. Maybe you should look for small-scale duels there?

Konrad Curze.5130:

looks like Riverside is a bit too fond of cramming every single person on the map inside a tier 3 with dozens of superior carts.

That’s hyperbole, and I assume you know it. Of course every objective that is to be held will be upgraded to the maximum and should be manned by a small skeleton crew. That’s just common sense. However, “a small skeleton crew” usually refers to one, maybe two, players. (I can vouch for that since, so many times, I end up as the only player manning a tower, and a replacement is harder to find than a precursor.) The rest of the players on the map are usually operating offensively, or do their own thing.

Actually, it is more likely that your 50+ zerg was just scared away by one or two players at superior arrow carts while — unknown to you — the defenders were frantically calling for help on every available channel. When they eventually see you running away they usually cannot believe their luck, since the defenders usually know pretty well that it was only your inability to set up a decent siege and go for the kill that saved the tower. I see this happen many times, it is really funny.

~MRA

village idiot.1436:

What is the point of picking up turrets presently?

If I am not mistaken: a slightly reduced cool-down.

~MRA

Kaon.7192:

Does any other class mechanic have a counter that outright disables the mechanic like Revealed does to Stealth?

Does any other class have a low-cooldown panic button that can be pressed essentially at any time to get out of a bad situation unpunished, again and again, with pretty much no player-skill necessary?

Right. I didn’t think so. Therein lies the logic that there needs to be a counter to stealth. I don’t have the slightest problem with the ability of a thief to sneak in undetected and to hit very hard, maybe even finishing off an unwary player in less than 2 seconds. But it drives me crazy that if the thief made a bad decision she may just pop invisibility, disengage, heal, and try again, leaving me with almost no chance to give a bad player a well deserved beating.

I am very happy that ANet will finally introduce the missing counter to stealth (other than AoEing blindly).

~MRA

Magnetron.5823:

But for a tagged EU server on server selection, should only EU players play it but that is my personal opinion.

Just in case you were implying that we would host non-EU players to boost or performance in WvW: I am actually not aware of any non-EU player/guild on Riverside, nor has this ever come up as part of our servers strategy. We currently have [scnd] playing on Riverside, but from my understanding they came from Piken/Baruch and are EU players as well. As far as I can tell, the coverage we have at off-hours is solely due to the dedication of a number of our native Riverside players.

Magnetron.5823:

But only assaulting wont make us enough points, and that shows in the score.

Quoted for truth.

Magnetron.5823:

I wonder how Vizunah vs Riverside will be, Trebs vs Trebs and no one on the battlefield? haha

We had a number of clashes with Vizunah in the past weeks. In the first match-up, they were eating us alive, plain and simple. Over the course of the next match-ups, we adapted and we are currently only “losing without losing face”, but still with a significant difference of 100k points by the end of the week.

There is only so much you can do against the full force of a server like Vizunah. But I guess we have learned two things: First, you can still deny them what they want to capture by playing a tight defense. Maybe not for a whole week, but still for a long enough period to make a statement. (I remember a siege of Ogrewatch which lasted for at least 4 hours. Vizu was attacking with 4+ trebs, the wall was down to 10% with no supply left at one point, but in the end, we pushed them back.) And second, you can still hurt them by trashing something they hold dear in a focused attack, provide that you server is willing to corporate to reach that goal.

~MRA

stof.9341:

While we are at it, are you planing on doing something about the kitten filter? I swear, this thing must have a 99% false positives rate because I don’t even remember the last time it filtered something legitimate.

Personally, I think the kitten filter is actually the single most hilarious implementation on this forum. I hope ANet never removes/replaces it. Seeing a false positive and trying to guess the original meaning is always a fun game. Also, I actually started using “kitten” as a curse word in real life.

~MRA

gwawer.9805:

that’s not a mean spirited statement

Oh yes, it is.

Maybe not primarily directed at you, but from my point of view the whining part of the community as a whole is acting like a parent who is giving its misbehaving child a thorough beating and who is yelling all the time: “This is hurting me more than you!”

~MRA

Draygo.9473:

There is pretty much no way around the O(n^(n-1))

How exactly do you end up with O(n^(n-1)) for the algorithm you give? Comments in algorithm by me:

Draygo.9473:

For each player                                                            // executed O(n) times
  otherplayer = player->get_visableplayers()   // kind of O(n)
  For each otherplayer                                               // executed O(n) times in each iteration
     otherplayer->sendupdate(player)               // kind of constant w.r.t. n
  endfor
endfor

Even when doing this for all n players in sequence, this looks more like O(n^3) at worst to me.

saiyr.3071:

nor is O(n^n) considered to be exponential time.

Well, this depends on your precise definition of exponential time. You are correct that n^n is not O(exp(n)), but it is O(exp(poly(n))). And the class EXPTIME is actually defined as the latter one.

~MRA

DevonCarver.5370:

MRA.4758:

I know that this is a direct quote by Devon Carver, but there is no sane reason to believe that the need for computational resources is indeed exponential

It is not misinformation, it is the reality of our system.

With all due respect, but then I am really, really interested in learning more about what you are actually doing. I cannot imagine a single scenario where n nodes (players) interact, maybe using a simple node-to-node model of communication (a maximum of time O(n^2) per node necessary to exchange all available information) and solve pretty well formulated and straightforward computational tasks (adjusting health, checking spacial coordinates, interact with the condition queue, etc.) where the individual tasks should by no means take more than polynomial time, each. That is, if you are not solving some unrelated NP-hard problem out of in curiosity in your idle time.

Please remember: Exponential growth means that if you add just one player to the scenario, then the complexity of computation scales up by a full constant factor. (Such as: 100 players fighting takes up twice as much computational resources as 99, or four times as much as 98 players, or 8 times as much as 97, or…).

I am really curios to learn more about the “exponential” challenge you seem to face in the game, and I am hoping you are willing to shed some more light on it.

Straegen.2938:

Multi-threaded development must be synchronized and very very few systems can be designed to eliminate this. All heavy processing systems have this basic problem and struggle with wait states between I/O systems.

We run an enterprise database system (TBs of data) in a multi threaded environment processing over a billion dollars… wait states kill us as well despite having a relatively high budget for hardware. Just a fact of development life.

True, and I am not arguing against the practical difficulty of the problem. But you are talking about systems that usually aim for quasi-linear time algorithms (or even sub-linear algorithms, using special data structures). What problems do you face that scale exponentially?

~MRA

Deniara Devious.3948:

The amount of computations needed at the server side e.g. which targets your AoE or cleaving attack hits grows exponentially with the number of players in the same map area.

Please stop spreading this piece of misinformation. I know that this is a direct quote by Devon Carver, but there is no sane reason to believe that the need for computational resources is indeed exponential. As I tried to explain in another thread, it is much more likely that the growth is quadratic. While this still may be to much to find a viable real-time solution, quadratic growth is substantially different from exponential growth.

~MRA

Draygo.9473:

No other MMO has done 300+ man battles without lag.

DAOC lagged
WAR lagged
Planetside lagged
Planetside II lagged
EVE lagged (now they force the lag with time dilation)

so why are we expecting Arenanet to solve a problem no one else has really solved yet?

Because ANet has earned a lot of trust and raised pretty high expectations with the high technical quality of the first Guild Wars. GW1 was the technically most robust MMO in the market. (~8h downtime in 7 years? ‘Nuff said.) This was, of course, made possible due to the solely instanced architecture of the world maps, but the robustness of GW1 is still a very impressive achievement and don’t I know of any similar example in the market. If you had asked me 18 month ago which company would be able to pull off an absolutely problem free MMO launch, I would have answered ArenaNet without a second thought.

Ironically, from my (outside) perspective, it seems to be the heritage from the GW1 engine that is the primary limiting factor for solving many of the performance/lag problems of the game.

Straegen.2938:

The game you are probably looking at is Planetside which can have more players, but the combat is REALLY simple by comarison. DAoC is probably the closest but it doesn’t have stacked conditions, heavy stacked boons, combo fields, dodging, etc so its combat is more static. To date no game exists (that I know of) that can field as many players as GW2 with such a high level of dynamic combat.

Quoted for truth.

~MRA

Meglobob.8620:

Bring on the deathstars…

Ever been to the Black Citadell?

Since I first set my paw in there I was wondering when the Charr will finally return to their home planet …

(edit:) Just some small remarks to be at least a little bit on topic:

• Science fiction, steam-punk, cyber-punk, etc., and even Lovecraftian horror or strange settings like Planescape, are just as much fantasy genres as is Tolkien-style fantasy. As a fantasy world, by definition, GW2 cannot step away from fantasy.
• SciFi-like aspects have alway been part of the GW world. In fact, part of me still believes that the conflict of the Mursaat and the Seer is the conflict of two space races stranded on Tyria …
• I am glad that GW has always been kind of original and not bound to established settings. I write “kind of”, since of course all of the used tropes have been seen in one or another form elsewhere in fantasy literature. Truly original fantasy settings are more than rare (or exotic).
• Air-ships and sky pirates are the “cheap trick” of fantasy genres. Yes, they are a cliche, and yes, they have been used a hundred times before, but, heck, I just love them! Here’s still hoping that future guild halls are air ships that can be seen floating in the sky above Tyria.

~MRA

apoko.5246:

I looked at this and thought what a load of BULL. I am sorry but Picken is getting smaller by the week there are several reasons for this but getting the kitten kicked out of you week after week be some overpopulated server is not fun and when you try and upgrade your side to have it rolled over with a blink of an eye is not fun, we do not want it easy but we need to have someo kind of a chance and facing server with much higher population is not going to help the matter.

I am sorry that you feel that way, but I still stand by my statement. Riverside is not necessarily a server with a high (WvW-)population either, and as soon as we and end up with T1/T2 opponents, many of our “Schönwetterspieler” flee WvW way faster than they were ever able to run when the goal was to defend a tower. However, even when facing de-facto defeat, there are ways to find your satisfaction in the game by focusing on achievable goals.

I certainly know, since only last Sunday, I was part of the defense of Ogrewatch for over 6 hours. Vizunah wanted that tower, and we were dedicated to not let them get it. They constantly tried to siege us, they pulled each and every trick of WvW siege play, they knocked at our door multiple times, they even got our wall treb’ed down to 20% at one point (treb’ing from ogres and SM simultaneously) but we defended that tower. I made a net loss of about ~4g due to tower upgrade cost and buying superior siege equipment from the TP, and the tower went down once our guild took a break for a guild mission some hours later. But, heck, this was a helluva fight and a great display teamplay from both our offensive and defensive forces, and the satisfaction to deny Vizu its prize was oh-so-sweet.

<forced break to keep forum from kittening up my text in a crazy way, please read on>

As said above, I am sorry if this is not a viable way of gaming for you, but I certainly had one of the best WvW weekends in weeks.

apoko.5246:

As you will have seen this week there has been little fight back from picken because people are fed up with it.

I don’t agree, Piken did a fair job fighting back through the week. Maybe Piken wasn’t dominating through manpower and quality guilds in the same way as we used to know them, but they were still playing decently.

~MRA

Wish.5637:

Do any of you gather all of your own materials for crafting?

Of course. But I do not farm, I just pick up everything that I find along the way while playing normally. This usually suffices for 95% of my crafting. When crafting and I am missing some ingredients, I usually just postpone the crafting to later when I have all the material I need. In the rare occasion that I absolutely have to craft NOW, I just buy the missing pieces from the TP.

With maybe the exception of the scarce supply of some of the low to mid tier crafting materials during leveling, I find GW2’s system the most well-designed and stress-free crafting system I ever played in an MMO.

~MRA

Contiguous.1345:

Rivercart – It’s become so accepted that some people probably aren’t aware it’s not actually their name.

This is actually kind of funny. I just wish it would be more true than legend … (While you may still find the aforementioned carts, I oh-so-often miss the players manning them. :/ )

Also, I disagree, Piken is by no means without a chance in this match-up. Just look at the chart at MoS, and you will see that all three servers actually perform on kind of the same level when at full strength during prime time.

Colly.4073:

And what else did you expect? There is putting up a brave fight and there is Urinating against the wind.

As someone who had the fate to fight Viz four times in the past 7 weeks (as well as Elona, Baruch, SFR, and other stronger servers), I can report that there is actually a lot of fun in a match-up even if you are doomed to end up on the loosing side. Put your efforts into achieving small victories, and I guarantee you that they will taste much sweeter when achieved against such strong opponents. Also, after they have already taken everything from you, they cannot punish you anymore if you trash something that they hold dear.

So, as the saying (almost) goes: “The only loosing move is not to play.”

~MRA

RC/VZ/PS 16/08/2015

RC?

On topic: Best wishes for the match-up, everybody. We already had some tough clashes this morning on EB, they were quite fun.

Still, I don’t understand how we ended up with these bi-weekly scheduled matches against Vizu. There goes my hope for a more lazy week…

~MRA

Erasculio.2914:

What if we, as in those asking for better Dynamic Events, are the minority?

What if the great majority of GW2 players only wants to farm content like the bottom of the Crown Pavilion? What if the great majority doesn’t care about interesting dynamic events, about a rich storyline, or about relatable characters, but would rather farm for more gold and more shinies?

Taking the many, many whining threads in this forum and the pessimistic voice in my head into account, I fear that you might be spot-on with this conjecture.

I would also add as a conjecture (without having any actual inside knowledge) that with the dynamic event system, it turned out (a) to be quite time consuming to design/build new events and (b) those events are exceptionally prone to errors. I base that conjuncture on the facts that we have only seen very, very few complex dynamic events in the game, and that there are still dynamic event chains stuck that I have never seen running since release. (“Save the merchants from the Bloody Buccaneer kidnappers”, anybody?)

And now think on the other hand how easy it must be to implement mere simple checklist quests like in that other game. For me, it is no wonder that we see so many Living World achievements pop up, since they are essentially nothing else than disguised checklist quests.

I remember the discussion about GW2 that took place at GDC before launch. ANet was claiming quite optimistically at that time something along the lines “We are building an MMO where the actual fun game play is the reward!” while the ‘experts’ from the industry reacted more like “Wait, what? Flat leveling curve, power plateau, no long term infinite leveling character improvement grind? You crazy? Epic fail!”. ANets manifesto approach was against any model the industry had developed for the long-term commitment of players to games (aka: profit).

It might actually turn out that the industry ‘experts’ were right and that a majority of the MMO target group does actually not appreciate good or innovative game play, or at least just not as much as a constant flow of loot drops. And a constant flow of loot can be obtained easily by means much less difficult to build than a dynamic event system.

Game development is a business, and one sad truth of the GW2 experience might be that innovation in an MMO just isn’t profitable enough to justify the time and resources that are needed.

Fiontar.4695:

I don’t know what the truth of it is. Is it that the Live team tramples on the soul of the game out of ignorance? Or, is it resentment that the game rejected the established MMO design tropes and paradigm that drives those now at the helm to undo the hard fought gains of those who were able to think outside the box?

Having said that and understanding your disappointment, I don’t think it is helpful for the discussion to indulge in hyperbole. After all, the game isn’t a failure, and nobody is actively destroying the gaming experience. I am playing since launch and I am still having lots of fun with the game, and this doesn’t feel like a failure to me. It’s just the feeling that the game could actually be even more than it is.

~MRA

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

The very first living world team actually did the thing some of you have called for. Some 40 or so permanent events were added around the game in our very first content update. They were met with little interest or fanfare.

Oh so true. I think the main problem is that 40 new event are so well hidden among the other existing event so that one simply doesn’t notice them. (Frankly, you maybe can’t even tell whether an event you encounter is really new, or whether you just have missed it before.) And, of course, many other player seem to be so obsessed with their quarterly farming revenue that they maybe didn’t notice, either.

So here are my 2 pieces of copper:

Either Colin Johanson or Eric Flannum stated at some point after GamesCom ‘10 that you could not just take a mechanic like dynamic event and put it on top of a standard old-fashioned quest design as some kind of fancy gimmick. You rather have to make dynamic events the core content of your game. (I am obviously paraphrasing, don’t recall the source anymore.) I still agree 100% percent with this assessment. However, I fear you have not yet reached that goal of making them truly the core of your game world.

I once thought 1500+ events would be pretty much. However, considering the huge size of the game world, it turned out that 1500 events are not even close to enough. In some regions of the world, you can still wander for 15 to 30 minutes without anything happening around you, or finding something that could maybe trigger an event. This is especially true for the “in between” areas for levels 15 to 70. Don’t get me wrong, the map design is awesome and I like the exploration, but there is not really a huge sense of “dynamic living world” if nothing is happening. And, ideally, there should be variation or alternatives to the events that are happening, instead of the short cycles of just two or three states that dominate the game.

Another problem are still the open world mega-bosses. Beside the obvious balancing problems of the low level bosses like the Great Jungle Wurm or the Behomth (for Dwayna’s sake, make them survive at least for a minute, there is nothing epic about butchering them at the speed of light like trashmobs) there are still only so few of them. We have what, 25 maps? I say it should be ANets goal to have one such mega-boss on each of the maps. And they should always be the consequence of a lengthy and interesting meta-event chain pushed and triggered by the players, and not something people farm based on a timer. And if you could please take a lesson from your guild mission team and make them necessarily require teamwork to take damage at all (instead of just mindless dps spamming) I would be truly delighted.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

But in the mean time, please keep telling us what you’re thinking.

Well, in that case: Please keep improving the dynamic event system SIGNIFICANTLY. I still believe in the vision dynamic events as presented by you prior to release, e.g., at this wonderful “design a dynamic event workshop”. I still believe that they should be the bread and butter of GW2’s open world. But I am not sure whether ANet themselves still believe in their vision.

~MRA

Gee, really, you people act as if this whole piece of cutthroat politics would have been about your personal gain, and not about supporting your candidate to build a better tomorrow for Tyria, tomorrow. You spent your time and resources, and, hopefully, your candidate won. Hooray for you, you can be proud of yourself, you made a difference! That’s your reward. (And if you supported that other guy — whatshisface, can’t remember the name — you had been on the wrong side anyways. )

If you had ever supported a real political candidate you would appreciate the authentic feeling of having stockpiled about a myriad of buttons, posters, banners, shirts, etc. in the back of your garage which, in just one day (aka election day), seem to have somehow lost their purpose completely, but you are just to stubborn to throw them away. Which is especially funny if your candidate ended up loosing.

~MRA

lioka qiao.8734:

I would have assumed that it’s a network bandwidth issue. The calculations for boons, conditions, and combat cannot be anywhere near as intensive as they say ..

I was not necessarily thinking of network bandwith, but rather of the internal communication complexity of GW2’s data structures. That is, whenever an event happens (such as AoE damage), which and how many data objects (the targets) do have to trigger an action (loosing health). Such typical “everybody tell everybody” situations do have a quadratic complexity, hence my assumption. In such a case, a 50v50 situation would be about a hundred times worse than a 5v5 situation, and not just tenfold.

Gamadorn.2659:

That’s because the technical limitation is a BS response.

The original reason back months ago: http://gw2.junkiesnation.com/2012/05/01/dev-tracker-jon-peters-on-aoe-target-caps-for-all-skills/

Don’t get me wrong, even “just” a quadratic growth might be a problem. In the context of real time systems, you always want to be “as close as possible to linear” (or, preferably, sub-linear). I just wanted to point out that it seems Devon Carver was most likely speaking of exponential growth “figuratively”, and not literally.

Also, keep in mind that Jon Peters is a game designer, and not a systems guy (if I am not mistaken). Hence, I am not surprised that he was giving an answer from a game design perspective. However, I wouldn’t overestimate his statement with respect to the problem of making actual network code work.

~MRA

DevonCarver.5370:

The load on the server CPU would be quite simply unsustainable if we were to increase the AoE cap as the more players hit by skills the more calculations it has to do and it actually starts increasing exponentially, rather than sequentially.

I am not arguing against your point of the load being unsustainable on the server without a certain AoE limitation, but I am pretty sure you are wrong that the load would be increasing exponentially.

Unless you are doing something truly crazy, the additional load should be more along the lines of a quadratic increase.

~MRA

Empyre.2531:

Haven’t seen a single RS guild run alone in maybe 6-7 matchups vs the server. I must be really unlucky. Fighting RS there’s just nothing more then the pu zerg, when all your individual guilds melt into one blob.
If you ever played solo with the size of xxx raid vs 60+ pu zerg you would know that killing them is actually not a piece of cake or let’s say surviving the random damage (and res flood) coming from the ball. Seeing your answer, I know you never did.

About what Nemesys wrote. Nah, RS wouldn’t stand a chance vs BB, Elona or even Viz. They are unorganised, their prime is mediocre to say the least and their night force is just big enough to outcap AR during RS planned night raid on holiday season, there’s no natural night and morning force.

Best laugh in this thread so far.

FYI, the only part of your post that is factually correct is the statement that we wouldn’t stand a chance against BB, Elona or Viz.

~MRA

Nemesys.7251:

hope dont met river again

Well, never say never …

Nemesys.7251:

this server deserve to play much higher tier against elona or baruch or seafarer or vizuna not against a server like gandara where almost all are moving with 15/20 ppl,

No, we have been there, and we are not really a match for the servers you mentioned. They have a “larger” WvW population (by which I mean especially the coverage at off-hours) and they show a much better discipline than we do (sadly, the likelihood of a queue for Riverside is still reciprocal to the strength of our opponents — aka our “Schönwetterspielerproblem” — and only about 50% of our players use TS).

Our current rating in the 1700 to 1800 range is actually a pretty accurate estimation of our capabilities.

Nemesys.7251:

just put all the german national server against each other all of them like play this way they can enjoy more the game.

I tend to agree, I never played more intense sieges as the ones against Abaddons Mouth, or even Kodash (many months ago). Sieges by or against these servers did sometimes last for hours, demanded for every trick up your sleeve, and had been really great gaming experiences. Unfortunately, the predominant “spot-weakness-and-strike-fast-with full-force” meta of WVW makes usual sieges last way below 3 minutes. I wish more servers would defend properly.

Having said that, thanks to both opponents of the week for the many interesting fights. It was a dream match-up for me, personally, since Augury Rock is the server where “my account was born” (I created my first character there, back then at BWE1, before it was given to France by the powers that be), and Gandara was the server I almost joined instead of Riverside at BWE2. I will particularly remember the Siege of Jerrifers on Wednesday (?) morning. Augury Rock was severely outnumbered but fought brave with cunning and skill. Kudos. Also, nice try to come back during the week and win the match. Also, while Gandara may not have the same manpower than the other two servers have, you always knew that you should better be vigilant when [Yak] and [dius] are on your map. Those guilds proved that they are renown for a reason.

~MRA

Direwind.8409:

You enter WvW, …

What you describe surely matches the observation of new and inexperienced players (or a player who just doesn’t want to dive deeper into WvW). It is surely one of the game’s problems that while it is easy for new players to jump right into the action as you describe, the game itself doesn’t help new players to understand that there can be more to WvW than just this.

Fortunately, this gap is usually filled by your server’s community. There are simple ways to gain access to a deeper WvW experience:

• Most server’s do have a “world-wide” TeamSpeak/Mumble/whatever server open for all players. Listening to your server’s communication really helps to understand the current situation leagues better that reading map chat and mini map can ever achieve. Just ask for IP and credentials using the in-game chat.
• Active WvW communities also host forums or VoIP meeting to coordinate their strategy. This communication helps to make to most of your servers resources. and to extend the map coverage to the off hours. I’d ecourage you to also follow your servers discussion outside of the game.
• And, most importantly, join a WvW guild and start discussing/training strategy and tactics with your peers. Dedicated WvW guilds usually train group tactics that are way superior to a random zerg’s tab-and-spam-1 lack of tactics.

~MRA

(Having a blast in WvW since March 2012. And I literally mean blast, as in blast finishers.)

Omaris Mortuus Est.2738:

But let’s not forget that it’s Anet’s fault […]

I still find it funny (and by this I mean sad) how people are willing to blame everybody in the world for their inability to cope with the given challenges at hand, except of course themselves.

~MRA

AkiraZero.8514:

MRA.4758:

About to the (unexpected) match-up: After having faced rather weak servers for the past two weeks, this week will be a tough one.
~MRA

Made me lol…. someone from Rivercart saying they faced weak servers despite having to hide constantly in towers with more AC’s than really necessary! What you mean, MRA, is for two weeks you fought servers who couldn’t match your coverage and didn’t want to fight against your AC’s

I mean what I have written. And after having endured the full force pressure a server like Elona Reach is able to put on your map for the past 5 hours on the Eternal Battlegrounds, I have to underline the above statement.

In comparison, the past two week (despite the occasional respectable deeds by our opponents) have been a cake walk on easy street.

~MRA

Absynthe.4093:

I think there should be a thread…. Even if it will be an emtpy one

I think you just created the number one thread for all WvW haters out there to pour their disdain. At least the discussion in the German forum has remained civil so far. (And I really, really hope it stays that way.)

About to the (unexpected) match-up: After having faced rather weak servers for the past two weeks, this week will be a tough one. However it will end, I am sure this will be a fun week. The past sieges against AM had been the most intense and exciting ones in months. And I can’t even remember anymore when we met Club Elona back in November, so I am curious to see your T1 mojo.

~MRA

For the sake of the Eternal Alchemy, please, Mefk, ask someone to help you with your English. I (partially) understand what you mean, but what you write can only be taken as a very rough approximation of a forum post …

On-topic: At the beginning of the match-up, I had only one tiny wish for this week:

MRA.4758:

The inflammatory accusations from last week had been enervating enough. Could we please at least try to have a civil discussion this time?

I am still very sad that I have been disappointed again.

I hope you guys will grow up one day to realize that respect is not a currency that has to be earned through actions (by rules that you assume to have the right to specify for everybody else), but that it is rather a universal matter of course to approach people in a respectful way.

~MRA

Thanks for sharing such information. Working in software development myself (although on a much larger scale), I can fully understand the many issues and challenges you face.

JonPeters.5630:

How can we help?

Here I have a question: Which is the preferred channel by which we can communicate our bug reports to you?

I currently know of three ways to report bugs: Using the in-game bug report UI option (/bug), posting in the Game Bugs forum, or even submitting a support ticket (https://en.support.guildwars2.com/).

What is the option of choice to give you our feedback on bugs (i.e., which channel fits your workflow best so you can proceed to fix the bug most efficiently)?

Thanks for your effort in fixing the game. I can’t wait to see a number of events up and running that I still haven’t encountered in a non-broken state since release …

~MRA

Ok, you can have one round of response, but only where you misread my point (either due to my incapability of expressing my point adequately, or due your inability to read what I have written.) . After that, you may have the last words and I won’t object. I don’t have any interest in such bickering.

Karahol.9840:

How can one account one guild for a server’s “bad” performance is beyond me really. :O

I never stated that TUP is responsible for your server’s “bad” performance. I am sure your guild is doing fine. I merely claimed that some members of TUP are doing your server a disservice by acting kittenish in the forums.

Wamgor.9347:

To me your opinion means nothing because the lack of condemnation about your own players being abusive and calling someone a racist for having a different opinion…

I am not endorsing the General’s choice of words in his post. I think the word he has chosen was inappropriate. I don’t know what the General’s intention was when he was writing his post, but assuming good faith, I imagine that he was looking for the word bigot.

Do you think the latter term is inappropriate, too? Judge for yourself.

Wamgor.9347:

Ive fought a lot of servers and its just a german server mentality

Wamgor.9347:

I look at other national servers or international, Augury rock, Baruch Bay they know how to fight… so it’s not a national server thing… its a german Ideology

Their love for arrow carts, bunkering, zerging knows no bounds. They are point’s fanatics, they play the game for points not fun. They still feel the need to do alarm clock raiding and pv door this far and deep into the game and think score actually matters?

Wamgor.9347:

So it’s not like germans cant fight, its more the case of they won’t fight unless odds are really stacked in their favour even then still lose too often with all the advantages.

~MRA

(How come i missed this hilarious thread for so long?)

Only a WvW player has saved 10 gold in his bank vault and thinks she is rich.

Only a WvW player can see his whole guild on screen, at the same time!

Only a WvW player knows how thankful a Dolyak’s eyes can look when it wants to tell you “Thank you for protecting me all along that way!”

Only a WvW player would then move on to ruthlessly slaughter the very next Dollie that crosses her way.

(edit:) Only a WvW player gets flamed for playing the game as intended by the 1337-uber-guild-only-small-scale-open-field-skirmish-is-honorable kiddies.

~MRA

Bimk.5634:

You play for fun and your guild … we play for fun and our server Riverside!

Oh, so true. Why can I upvote only once?

~MRA

TheGreatA.4192:

I saw Riverside being forced into bunkering in their garrison last night when faced with our guild groups. No guild groups of yours showed up to solve the situation. You were merely forced into waiting that the enemies leave from boredom in order to take your stuff back.

Yes, I have seen this happen before. After all, what else do you expect an opponent to do if outnumbered or outmatched by an attacking force? The right decision is, of course, to retreat to a position which allows him to fight more effectively. I take from the fact that you were obviously unable to take our fortification that this was the right tactical decision.

But I really think you are grossly over-estimating the number of active, coordinated guilds on Riverside if you expect that there is always one around to play the cavalry. Raids on Riverside are dominated by pug squads, with coordinated guild squads being the exception.

TheGreatA.4192:

It does not mean you are better players when you can golem rush at morning empty keeps and towers with nobody else playing. It does not mean you play more for the points than the other server. It means nothing.

Was someone claiming that this means we are “better players”? But it also does not mean “nothing” either. It means exactly what you stated yourself: That our coverage and the coordinated effort of our community, currently, is more effective than yours.

And yes, at prime time this match-up is much more balanced. This comes at no surprise since many guilds from the Glade have always been known to be formidable opponents. But I wouldn’t ignore the Drakkari, either. They displayed a great deal of coordination that could not necessarily be expected from a “lower tiered” server. And they have also already been in lead according to the ppt.

TheGreatA.4192:

I know we used to do the night train thing, but I don’t think we ever gloated about how great we “play for points” when we were able to hit empty structures. It would have been in bad taste for the few players that were forced to play during those times vs overwhelming numbers.

Funny story: I still claim it is thanks to AG that we do even have coverage in the morning hours!

Months ago, when your server was playing stronger, you harassed us so many many times during the night time by crashing everything we had, while we were unable to provide a similarly effective night-shift. What happened, however, is that we adapted to your strategy by recapping the map in the morning hours with a relatively small force, so that you would not also be ticking points for the whole day. These morning raids have become ridiculously popular on our server. So, thanks to AG for the “Riverside morning zerg”, which has been kind of a fun tradition ever since.

~MRA

And here I am, once having thought highly of a guild like TUP.

But after reading this thread and the many sad and sorry excuses of their leaders and members for why they are not doing that fine in this match-up (of course, it must have been that their opponents are honorless dogs!) I guess that feeling is gone now. What hurts especially is the fact that so many of you are unable to show the slightest bit of respect for your opponents, or even openly show nothing but hate and disdain. This is something I will never understand.

It’s really a shame that the sad display of just a few players can harm the public perception of a server so harshly. Yet, I still firmly believe most players from AG are actually really ok. I just hope that if we inevitably meet tougher opponents in an upcoming week, the bad loosers from our server (which we quite obviously will also have a few of) will not give a similarly shameful display.

~MRA

Pheppo.9286:

I really don’t care about the rankings … but i would like to understand the concept xD

Oh, that’s not too difficult: The given point rating is not some kind of “earned” points through winning games (such as, say, points in a soccer league). The are rather a numerical estimate of the “true” server strength in WvW.

When servers of equal rating would be matched up against each other, then the system assumes every server to be equally likely to win the match-up. So the rating evolution would match the usual gut feeling of “winner goes up, looser goes down”.

However, if the ratings of the match-up is fairly unbalanced, this means that the rating predicts a decisive victory of one server over another. If this decisive victory happens, the ratings would stay kind of the same. However, if the supposedly dominant server just wins by a slight margin, then this means that either the rating of the winning server was estimated too high, or the rating of the loosing server was estimated too low. This is corrected by the rating system by reducing the the winning servers rating, and boosting the loosing servers rating to some extent, as should be the logical action in that case.

So, stronger servers are not penalized in any way. They just have to keep proving that they are in fact as strong as the rating expects them to be. By repeating the rating system over and over again, it is assumed that ratings converge to the true skill estimate of the server.

Teppic Indica.3487:

PS: atm RS is down 2 positions even if they are stomping AG(my server) and we’re 2 positions up – go figure? who is playing the better game

While this shows the right spirit and your observation about the ranking is factually true, you should also have a look at the server rating evolution. This shows that currently, RS is performing “better than expected” while AG is performing “kind of as expected”. The change in ranking positions is the result of the parallel games.

However, keep up the good fighting. The ranking evolution is known to tend towards extreme values at first and moves closer towards +/-0 during the course of the week. We will see changes happen, and it might in fact be AG who will end up “winning in the first derivative”.

~MRA

Reborn.2934:

you fire out of the water when you are in watergate of our keep and you want polite conversation ….

just lol

Pardon me, what did I fire from where?

And yes, I do want a polite conversation. My mother actually invested quite some time trying to explain to me that being polite and respectful is the normal thing to do when interacting with other people. Considering these forums, sadly, this approach does not seem to be universal.

~MRA

JonSnow.5610:

I have to ask

What do you germans do when you’re sitting in the keep waiting on people passing through your AC fire?

tell jokes?

Well, at these times we are usually operating deep inside your territory and are capping a tower or two, while the one or two guys that volunteered to stay behind keep an eye on enemy movements, or may manage the keep’s economy. But yes, telling jokes in TS is usually also part oft he fun.

~MRA

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I think one of the main problems is that there are too few events. Let me explain. …

For the most part I totally agree with your point of view, but I would put it a little differently: The number of events seems just fine, but they are spread out over far too many zones. If GW2 would have started with, say only 2/3 (or even 1/2) of its current number of maps, but these maps would have been fully loaded with events, then the game would have been a completely different experience. Further (fully loaded) zones could have ideally been released as living content every so-and-so many months, and I would have even gladly paid, say, 600 gems per zone to obtain a pass to visit them.

Also, I am still a little disappointed that the event chaining is way to simple. Most chains seem to be a simple cycle of two or three states. Very few events do not follow that formula, with the meta event chains being the main exception (yet only to a small degree). However, what I am desperately missing, is “event branching”, where events chain in an uncertain and unexpected way, and “event interaction”, where events do tweak and adapt conditioned on the state of other events. And, more than everything else, “event failure” other than being pushed back one step in a linear chain, that would lead to new an interesting failure tracks of the chain instead. This is what would made the world truly lively.

I still believe that, as a concept, dynamic events are way superior to the old-fashioned checklist questing, and also to the invasions/public events from other games. However, many events are admittedly not at all different from a static Rift invasion. I fear that ANet might have come to the conclusion that event design, especially designing complicated events, does just cost to much time and leads to to many technical problems (there are events that I have never seen in a non-stalled state since release!), so they do not want to go further that road. After all, the majority of this “locusts swarm of MMO players” consumes any content without asking to much questions or looking for subtle event interconnections, as long as they get their precious loot. It’s a shame, but I have the feeling that innovation on that end will not be appreciated, and might turn out to be not profitable enough to justify the development cost. Makes Quaggan sad.

~MRA