Guild Wars 2

Deniara Devious.3948:

It seems SFR is playing with more force today. 2/3 of map domination at prime time
http://mos.millenium.org/eu/matchups/map/703

Yup, with the numbers they’re fielding up until 2:00 AM they could probably go back to T1; at the moment they’re the only ones able to fight on all 4 maps. They would still lose to Viz or Elona nightcapping though. Never fought Jade Sea but looking at the T1 scores I’m guessing they too would have enough numbers to nightcap SFR at the moment.

I’m not particularly fond of the idea behind the new matchmaking system. Sure it makes for a bit of excitement at reset but truth is, the problem stems from the scoring system and the way it all depends on coverage. Mixing servers up is not going to magically balance populations, so all that happens now is that you enter WvW on Friday curious about what happens, and then by Saturday morning it’s obvious who has more people and wins the week.
E.g. if next Friday we get in a matchup with one of the T1 and one of the T3 servers, what do you think the final order is going to be?

If they refuse to fix the moronic scoring system the outlook on the weekly matchups is never going to improve.

Aikanaro.2609:

Nice. Hold the whole SFR BL all day long @ lose it in 1 hour after your raid ends. Too bad that Desolation and Kodash guys didn’t press us up until late night, when there were no defenders left. Guess no one wants to be kicked off even from the respawn supply camps. I’m really glad that our russian fellows [Unit] were not so scared and pushed us really hard, thanks to them. Boring! I guess it is time to nightcap, see you on the nights.

Actually, on SFR map we brought a decent force the exact instant you logged off and it was completely random chance.

I was there for your last 30 minutes or so and it was a small guild group (PCG) on Deso (10 or so) + a small bunch of pugs trying to retake the tower in front of our spawn, which was fully upgraded and filled to the brink with siege weapons. We tried to use the commander npc event and every time we were very quickly swept away by fighting against a superior force and under heavy AC fire to boot.
At that point I asked EXG (which was at the time playing in EB, at least those of us who had managed to reach the end of the queue) if they fancied switching to the SFR map, and I warned them to be prepared to face heavy opposition lead by ZD. The switch took approx. 10 minutes, and when we finally started rolling with 30 coordinated people (20 EXG + 10 PCG) we met virtually no opposition anymore. I believe most of the SFR pugs left after we smashed them when they came to retake the tower.

Had you stayed 15 more minutes, we’d have clashed with each other. It was just a completely random thing.

Junkpile.7439:

Maybe you should sleep at night so you wouldn’t be outmanned in prime time.

In terms of points, it’s better to be outmanned on prime and nightcap everything at night, as I’m sure you already know.

But in any case we aren’t outmanned at prime time… not anymore anyway. The difference in late afternoon – early evening is probably due to the fact that SFR has a few eastern european guilds which start playing a couple hours earlier, giving the server an early advantage, that is later lost when they go to sleep a couple hours earlier too.

Repuran.1859:

After seeing most of Desolation complain about Vizunah night capping for the past month they are now doing it themselves. I wake up this morning and all our t2 and t3 buildings have been reset by them.
Hypocrites.

Are you for real?
The last time Desolation won a matchup was during the week ending on February the first. After that, we have been fighting a completely hopeless battle for 16 weeks straight, entering WvW maps knowing before the match had even started we’d have been massively outmanned by Vizunah, then SFR, then Vizunah again, then Elona.

During that period we also lost practically all of the so called “hardcore” WvW guilds whose only hardcore achievement is the speed at which they run away from hard fights.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand why the few who are left on Deso are hungry for a win, after such a long time. In any case, don’t worry, what happened these past 2 days is mostly due to an extremely small number of people pulling all nighters to bring Deso ahead. I don’t know if it will be sustainable during the week, and SFR afternoons are much stronger than Deso.

scanz.4536:

It’s just not worth going onto any borderland map other than Deso at the moment and even that can be torture when outmanned.

I disagree on this. Yesterday I started commanding on VS’ BL, was late afternoon-early evening. Started having nothing except a supply camp, with 15 people managed to get our tower + keep in less than half an hour. How? Quite simply, because no one showed up to defend, and that was weekend prime time. ER and VS “zergs” were fighting each other on the map, and since they both had no more than 40-50 people or so they couldn’t spare anyone to come and stop us.
Today we managed to hold our own on Deso BL until (around 14:00 CET) we lost everything to 10 (ten) Vizunah players. I was tagged up and could not get more than 3-4 other people on me. With a group of 20, we’d have easily held the northern half.

The truth is that while Elona and Vizunah certainly have a lot more players than us, at the moment there’s no EU server left with good coverage. A single hardcore WvW guild with 50 players constantly hopping maps would win the matchup almost by itself. It’s quite a sad state to behold.

Big thanks to Ins for one of the most epic tower defenses I’ve ever witnessed in WvW, on EB this morning.

Vizunah’s omniblob had nightcapped our keep as per usual, they had 3 trebs shooting an unrelenting barrage, our tower had more holes than walls standing, they tried by building ACs, ballistas… everything… they kept coming at us again and again… and they wiped again and again, until in the end we breached the wall and got back the keep and everything else shortly after

Funny thing is, T1 in its current state would be heaven for the so-called “hardcore” guilds, numbers and queues are non-existent in all maps except maybe EB and Vizunah has to come out simply because they own almost everything anyway… but all the big names left before waiting for the situation to stabilize XD

One thing I don’t understand is the opposition to the swirling wind nerf. As far as I can see, it makes things go faster, not slower. Sure your treb gets counter trebbed quickly, but in the 3-4 shots you’ve managed to fire off you’ve destroyed much more than 100 supplies worth of siege equipment if you’re trebbing an heavily fortified position with a heavy density of weapons.
Even before the AC buff, you weren’t going to take an heavily fortified keep in a 50 vs 50 engagement before draining supplies anyway. This change lets you drain them faster; speed-build a treb, fire off those few shots in the middle of an AC/treb cluster and you’ve just drained the enemy of 2-300 supply in under one minute. Go cap a camp, resupply, fire another “volley”, that’s another 2-300 supplies gone. How long are they going to be able to sustain it?

It’s sorta using them more like a quick jet strike than a prolonged bombardment.

Witzard.6829:

I agree with you, but imo this attitude is not rewarding enough. Doing a hell of a job repainting a BL map during prime time should give a LOT more points than what happens at night when we on VS are 20-30 and taking every single ennemy fort with no opposition.

I’ve been saying since game release (and actually since before, I mentioned the problem during the second beta weekend) that the scoring system is crap; that said however, having an higher score doesn’t give you anything except utterly useless PvE bonuses which make no difference whatsoever in the WvW fights. The real combat advantage is starting with all your structures at T3 and stockpiled while the enemy has to start with T1 and no supply, but even this (admittedly terrible) starting situation can be overcome with proper play.

As an easy example, there was a point this past saturday where Vizunah (who had totally nightcapped all maps as usual) was completely wiped out of the EB map; they didn’t have even a single supply camp and the map was evenly split between Deso and SFR, despite both of them starting with T1 and Viz with T3. How was this possible? Quite simply, there was a random 2vs1 going on where for a couple hours both Deso and SFR ignored each other and went relentlessly at Vizunah. Viz starting advantage was negated within 2 hours and they could not even hold on to their starting keep. For the rest of the day, Vizunah had to contend with having low supplies and all their structures made of paper whereas at least Deso (I know because I oversaw that) had keep and all 4 towers at full T3. It was only the following morning, after the usual nightcapping, that the situation went back to “normal”.

Now I understand that’s an ideal scenario (a “perfect” 2 vs. 1 and during the weekend on EB, the only time where Deso and SFR have enough people on a map to outnumber Viz if they play together), but truth is, if Deso and SFR commanders started acting rationally they would sistematically and automatically ignore each other on all 4 maps until Vizunah has been completely wiped off any given map. We wouldn’t be able to always do that as most of the day Vizunah actually outnumbers Deso and SFR combined, but the end result would still be to reduce Vizunah’ s starting advantage much more quickly during the day and having a longer period of “balanced play”. There is a bloody reason there are 3 servers and not 2 ina matchup, but noooo, let’ s not use the tools we have to rectify a bad design and instead come here moaning on forums all day and/or transferring to servers who “casually” end up being the winning ones in their matchups due to better coverage and inflict on other servers the exact same treatment we’re moaning about. The hypocrisy is ridiculous here.

Tldr: scoring system, snowball effect, and starting situation after a nightcap are indeed the worst pieces of videogame design ever, but there ARE ways available to work around those and still have plenty of fun, even if there is no hope of ever winning a matchup. Switching servers to be on the winning site is hypocritical and means simply to compound the problem.

Less QQing, more pew pewing.

I don’t get all this QQ and it’s really starting to be annoying.

Yes, we cannot win the point game against Viz. So what? Enter the map with your guild, if we’re holding no point in it all the better, you’ve the easier target already available. Play for 2-3 hours (or however long you want), check the state of the map when you log out, is it better than when you started? Gratz, you won today’s engagement. Forget about Viz and what they do when you’re offline, why do you even care? If they upgraded everything to T3 it’s even better, the higher they are the harder they fall and they DO fall, believe me, if you put the effort in.

What gets me is all the people who proclaimed they are hardcore are the ones who gave up. Apparently nowadays “hardcore” = “I run away if I get kittenslapped more than a couple weeks in a row”. Meh.

Lance.5892:

Ruprect.7260:

FractalChaos.6539:

Breytes.6901:

I ran my overly squishy thief in WvW for several hours last night and I did not die to a single arrow cart the entire time.

Shh. Arrow carts are massively overpowered now. One player with an arrow cart can defend garrison by himself now.

What you guys don’t get is 1 or 2 Ac’s are fine and maybe that is all you run into in yur tier. I wonder how many T3 towers/keeps Fractalchaos took while not dying to an AC. The problem is in my tier it is rare that there are less than 6+ AC’s at every entrance. That many Ac’s with everyone on them trated for range is rediculous, you cant even put up a cata. The range is too much matched with the buff.

heres an example:
http://www.bilder-upload.eu/show.php?file=84e315-1367347752.jpg
or this:
https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/66817/carts.jpg

You do realize if you treb those spots, even if your treb gets destroyed by counter trebbing, you’ve lost 100 supplies and they just lost 150-200?

Caliban.3176:

MagnusLL.8473:

Sorenstam Blackrose.8425:

Caliban.3176:

We open up keeps and towers to get to the people inside, not for any other reason.

The fact that this point has to be reiterated time and time again is probably the most disappointing part about this thread. It’s funny how the zerg-busting guilds are getting lumped in with the mythical karma train zergs simply because they disagree with this patch and see all its implications.

I hope you do understand that a game mode including towers, keeps, siege weapons, supply camps and supply lines, and whose score is computed on structures owned and not on total kills was never intended to be played as a bigger deathmatch arena.

I understand and that is why we don’t do it. We use the objectives to get those fights and it provides for more things than just deathmatch fights. You get ambushed while building trebs or you ambush people yourself by baiting them with a seemingly undefended tower. We might not play the ppt game but we use the tools that the ppt mechanic gives us to make our time in this game as enjoyable as possible.

I do not believe that Anet actually intended any specific concrete kind of gameplay just that they give us tools and we use it how we see fit.

I understand your point of view, and I’m not saying anyone’s idea of what’s fun is better or worse than anyone’s else, but I still think the whole idea of “siege and all that stuff is boring, the real thing is the character vs. character fight” is very clearly going against obvious design elements like the presence of supplies and its intended use as a way of starving the enemies of it and gaining siege weappns superiority. These design elements have been there since day 1 and you cannot seriously tell me with a straight face that the ability to flip towers and keeps in 2 minutes not by stealth but by simple brute force was consistent with those. The whole idea of having to implement a prolonged siege by progressively starving the defenders of supply and sistematically taking down their siege defenses was very clear in things like each structure having its own supply stockpile which could be used to replenish those defenses.

I don’t think this patch makes the system perfect; far from it, in making siege and supply more critical it’s actually increasing the snowballing effect and giving the stronger side an even bigger advantage; mostly because the stronger you already are, the more supply you have access to, so the force multiplier element of the siege weapons is going to be more accessible to those who already outnumber the enemy. But paper towers flipped by zergballs facerubbing the gates while happily ignoring area denial fire by anything less than 4 of the old ACs were quite clearly not intended.

Sorenstam Blackrose.8425:

Caliban.3176:

We open up keeps and towers to get to the people inside, not for any other reason.

The fact that this point has to be reiterated time and time again is probably the most disappointing part about this thread. It’s funny how the zerg-busting guilds are getting lumped in with the mythical karma train zergs simply because they disagree with this patch and see all its implications.

I hope you do understand that a game mode including towers, keeps, siege weapons, supply camps and supply lines, and whose score is computed on structures owned and not on total kills was never intended to be played as a bigger deathmatch arena.

Caliban.3176:

Johje Holan.4607:

So have any Tier 1 or Tier 2 (I mean the matchups not the keeps – as in JQ vs. SoR vs. BG is Tier 1 NA) keeps or towers flipped since the patch? Is it really as bad as you’re claiming up there?

Things still flip nowadays but only under either of these conditions:

1) Nobody to defend, not a single person

2)HUGE incredible large zergs attack stuff with little to no defenders

Usually however this happens:
people go to tower, see people in tower and leave

people build siege, play some treb pingpong and leave

This is what I have gathered from people still trying to play (in higher Tiers) and from what I can see in T7

That’s… Not entirely correct.

My personal experience in the last 2 days:

• commanded a couple hours on deso BL the first day of the patch. When I came on map we only held north supply camp. Got a group of people going, at the start were probably 15-20 or so. Flipped LV, while vizunah was busy getting it back activated the 2 commanders event, flipped cliffside, sieged it up, retook LV, started trebbing outer garri wall. Flipped garrison, which was then flipped again by vizunah 15 minutes later. While I was setting up another attack at garri, IRON came on the map, started attacking hills, destroyed the viz zerg going there to defend it, flipped hills while I was waltzing in an undefended inner garri. Logged off at that point after getting booted for a new build.

• commanded 45 minutes or so on vizu BL yesterday, flipped tower in front of our spawn with approx. 15 people against 10 or so vizu defending it by setting up cata + ac to defend cata position. Dropped tag after I had a grand total of 4 people following me for a try at hills, stood in the map for another hour, finally lost tower to 4 or s vizunah after they trebbed it from hills and we had none left to defend.

As a brief side note, the lack of swirling winds protection means that not only attacker treb goes down quickly but also defender siege. And defenders have a much greater density of siege weapons for obvious reasons, meaning they are burning supply at a much higher rate.

Sarevok.2638:

The game of “Will you get your skills off”?

No, the game of “this evening Vizunah was holding his whole BL with 30 people, in the 2 hours I commanded [first] and kept playing without a tag [after I got a grand total of 4 people following me for a try at Hills] there with 15 people we managed to get back our tower and hold it until I had literally no one left, had I had 30 people I’d have swept half the map in an hour so stop moaning and start playing”.

Witzard.6829:

More people on the fields, less troll/whine here, I don’t think it has to be a bad thing

Unfortunately there’s far less people in WvW now, by all 3 servers. Arenanet really has to do something about providing balanced matchups or everything else will be pointless.

That said, I’m starting to get annoyed by all the defeatism going around on Deso. We cannot win but we could still have fun if only people bothered to come and actually play the game.

Aneu.1748:

Do you mean trebs inside a tower/keep or those on the field? The problem with attackers attacking a keep is that people can suicide onto your trebs and take them out, there is a finite amount of supply you have and trebs require quite a bit of supply so a continual trail of people suiciding (not fighting just running through to kill treb) will become even more prolific than it already is.

I mean both, trebs simply become invulnerable to other trebs. And suicide runs become problematic if you also have ACs defending your treb spot… you need a proper rush to take them out.

Aneu.1748:

Those good fights have been reducing of late and now with the arrowcart changes those fights will be reduced to attempting to peel a wall/gate off more people in order to get them out to fight us.

So what do you think of untrebbable trebs? Because I haven’t seen any feedback from you on the actual proposal until now.

Aneu.1748:

Because previously it took 12 people to hold off 30-40 people, now it takes 4!

That’s good. That’s anti-zerg.

And yes, I know the objection which is flying around now is “no this is pro-zerg, it will make people zerg even more”.
By that logic, you cannot do anything at all against zergs, because whatever you do, hey, people will just zerg even more to counter it!

The only type of mechanic which could avoid it is same kind of ability (whether on siege or character skills) which gives more damage the more people get hit in its radius. And while I’d be all for it, Arenanet has the problem that WvW gets treated the same as PvE and any such ability would be ridiculously op in their PvE content.

That said, I certainly wouldn’t mind if they implemented something like that. But I still think stopping a STUPID zerg with 4 people is a good thing.

Teel.9036:

Both your proposals are unrealistic, in real life a trebuchet would deal damage to another trebuchet for example and not be immune to it somehow. And the thought of “global supply” isn’t either realistic, you can hopefully figure out in what way.

Who cares about realism? We’re talking about how making the game more fun here. Or at least, I do.

Aneu.1748:

Try facerubbing 12 pre-nerfed arrowcarts… sure…

So you’re telling me that all that is changed is that now you need 4 instead of 12? If that’s the case, why all the rage?

Now for my second proposal, which is not directly related to all the AC’s hubbub which is going on.

The net result of your change, after all is said and done, is that siege weapons are now more important than before. This, in turn, means supply is more important than before.
I agree with this, since I’m not in WvW for a deathmatch arena with bigger numbers. Having things like objectives and supply lines should be a critical distinction between WvW and PvP, above and beyond total player count.

My problem stems from the fact that your supply implementation is the opposite of what it shoud be; namely: the biggest your advantage is in terms of coverage and map control, the easier it becomes to stockpile supplies.
This is due to the fact that controlling more of a map gives you both access to more supply lines, and more deposits in which to keep stockpiling supplies once your upgrades are done.
The net effect will be to increase the nightcapping snowball effect even more. Now outmanned servers will have to fight even harder when they “come back to the fight”, due to starting with zero supplies (as opposed to the thousands the nightcapping server has accumulated in all its fully upgraded towers/keeps) and supplies being even more critical to successfully assault a position.

My proposal to reverse this situation:

• Keep all the supplies a server has in its structures in a global map stockpile from which it is taken every time a player or a worker takes them from a “local” deposit at one of the towers/keeps and gets replenished every time a dolyak reaches a destination point. The maximum amount of supplies this global deposit can contain should increase with the amount of structures and their upgrade level like what happens now, but at a much slower rate.

The logic once again should be obvious here: instead of becoming easier and easier to manage your supply lines the more structures you have, it becomes harder and harder. If your first tower gives you a maximum stockpile of +700, your second tower +500, and your 5th tower doesn’t add anything, sustaining that last tower becomes much more difficult than what it is now. It also provides less of a starting advantage after a nightcap or in general in any “total map control” situation.

It also creates difficult decisions. Do you want to keep defending all your structures even when sustaining this is going to completely deplete your global stockpile? You could face a situation where your whole map position suddenly collapses as you don’t have any more supply stockpile left, thus rendering you completely unable to sustain sieges on ANY of your structures.
In terms of UI, I’d simply make it so that you can see the exact amount of supplies you have in the “global” stockpile whenever you are near one of your keeps/towers, and you can see the enemy’s when you pass nearby one of his structures. Essentially the same as it is now, except related to the global stockpile instead of the “local” ones which do not exist anymore.
I’d also increase the amount of supplies the breakout events provide to help servers reverse a blowout situation.

… or two actually, plus a minor feedback point.

Let me start by stating I’m one of the people who likes the principle of increasing AC’s damage. As they were before, anything less than 4 AC was utterly inconsequential to a 40+ man zerg coming to facerub your gate; they could simply shrug off whatever pitiful damage you were dealing and cap the structure with the most braindead of all tactics. At least now there’s some thought process needed to assault a fortified position, as it kitten well ought to be.

My minor feedback point is that 3500 AC max range is too high; first of all, it’s too close to the catapult’s 4000 max range and second, it allows hitting outer walls from inner ones which is a bad idea given the structure of your maps.

Now for my modest proposal to correct the perceived problem of sieges becoming either all out impossible or a prolonged treb – counter treb war:

• Make trebs immune to enemy treb fire. Make them despawn after 15 minutes whether they’re manned or not.

The logic should be clear here. You cannot countertreb a treb anymore, so if you want to silence it, you’re going to need to do it the good old fashioned way and bring the fight to the enemy’s position.
In terms of assaulting a strongly defended tower/keep, what happens is that you still cannot facerub it anymore, but you can put a treb in a suitable position and destroy the enemy siege weapons (except other trebs but they aren’t all that useful as anti infantry weapon) and their gates/walls. It is still going to take longer than the mindless “hurrdurr we’re 50 and they’re 10 let’s just facerub” tactic, and it will still require at least a modicum of rational thought. But eventually the tower/keep is going to fall as you can just keep smashing their ACs/ballistas and their gates/walls.

It is also not an “unbeatable” tactic, as the obvious counter is to rush the treb’s position. What it does, is to move the “critical spot” away from the gate and to whatever position the attacking group chose to put their treb on. In this way it’s advantageous for the attackers, but they are still going to need more time to cap the structure thus allowing for a better response by the defending team.

The automatic despawning is simply a way of giving an higher cost to treb usage, which I feel would be needed giving its increased usefulness. You want to keep using long range artillery? Fine, you need to keep paying for it’s upkeep. After all, projectiles have a cost.

(Second proposal in second message. 5001 char limit…).

Caliban.3176:

You’re missing the point. These guilds attack keeps not because they want to but because they need to to get the fights going.

That’s the problem though. You’re looking for a 20 vs 20 deathmatch battle in a game situation which was very clearly designed with completely different goals in mind.

Ruprect.7260:

So the smart guys build a cata outside of ac range. They build a ballista and destroy the cata. The attackers build a treb, lol, the defenders build a counter treb, being that it takes far less hits to take down the treb with the counter treb than it does for the attacking treb to take down a wall (we are no longer able to block treb shots) the defenders win again. How again is anyone in a high tier going to take a tower/keep lol.

You don’t need to take down the walls, just the enemy ACs, THEN you plop down your rams.
And yes, they could rebuild more. That’s why supply-starving the enemy becomes (more) critical.

In other words, you can’t go and facerub down a structure anymore. You need to plan how you’re going to take it, using things like detaching a doliak sniping team to stop them from receiving more supplies while keeping YOUR supply flow intact so you can win the siege weapons’ arms race. This means you now need at least 3 separate fighting groups instead of the mono zerg. How is this a bad thing?

Terrahero.9358:

Cheers. Now try playing in a tier where 6 arrowcarts on a gate or wall are the norm, instead of 1 lone defender.

I play in T1 EU against Vizunah. Trust me, I know everything about getting caught in a massive AC crossfire.

I stand my case, this buff is good. And it is good EXPLICITLY for the reason you state: 3 men on superior ACs can now stop a 50 man zerg dead in their tracks, IF the 50 man zerg is dumb. Of course, it just takes one smart guy in the zerg to go outside of AC range and build a catapult.

One of the biggest reason of WvW devolving into “zerg wars 2” is the efficiency of running around the map in a single huge zerg steamrolling everything and easily capping the whole map. This is due to lots of reasons, like the small size of the maps compared to the number of players, the increased amount of supplies you can carry around with more people etc. etc.

Stopping the monozerg from being so efficient is of paramount importance to let the game evolve from its current sad state.

Also, it’s not like ACs are an unbeatable tactic now. Just cata/treb them from outside their range, problem solved. Yeah, it takes more time. That’s the whole point. You cannot just join the zerg karma train and waltz in towers/keeps anymore. You need to think about how you’re going to take it. Setting up trebbing positions also means having to defend them from an enemy blitz, etc. It makes the game more tactical instead of this stupid benny-hill-like zerg perma-run-around we’ve been seeing so far.

Just give it at least a couple of weeks to let the meta evolve before crying doom.

It’s a good change. It kills the mindless zombie zergs dead. You cannot just use the old “walk up to gate, plop down 3 rams, facerub, get tower” tactic anymore.

The way to take defended positions now is to preemptively treb them. And please don’t tell me “they can treb our trebs so impossible”. Just build another treb. It becomes a matter of supplies. And besides, if you manage to get a few hits in, sooner or later their ACs are going down. Also, you can use YOUR ACs for area denial when attacking.

Now it’s also more possible to use stealth attacks thanks to the 30 seconds delay. Scouts are more important.

It’s a move away from the mindless zerging and toward needing a more structured approach to assaulting a position. Like it should be. Cannot you see the point? If attacking a well defended position takes longer, moving around in a single huge zerg becomes impractical. Having the ability to split your forces and properly commit them to several positions becomes crucial.

tita.6358:

graverr.6473:

BIG GRATZ TO VISUNAH SQUARE Drinks are on me :p

Added new abilities:
Arrow Cart Mastery
Increase range on all arrow-cart skills.
Increase damage on all arrow-cart skills.
Increase effectiveness of applied conditions.
Increase radius on all arrow-cart skills
New skill (slot 4): Toxic Unveiling Shot. Removes stealth and applies poison to targets.

seen? we know the way the game is meant to be played. you don’t.
towers, doors, arrow carts.
thank you arena net!

edit: you forgot the best part:

Increased arrow-cart damage:

Increased Fire damage by 80%.
Increased Fire Crippling Arrows damage by 17%.
Increased Fire Barbed Arrows damage by 60% and increased the Bleed duration to 15seconds.

nice patch!

Actually this change is (very slightly) anti-zerg as it makes it easier for an inferior force to defend against a clueless blob of 40+ people facerubbing the gate.

Won’t change anything in T1 as it takes much more than this to fix WvW, but it’s a small step in the right direction.

Witzard.6829:

FYP, afaik no other server than VS did win 11 time in EU, SFR being second with 8 wins.

Yes but RG was part of BT first and then SFR during their strong periods, I think that’s what he was referring to. Of course it’s debatable how big of a difference did RG make to two superstacked servers but meh.

Bokassa.5396:

There are two different playstyles, essentially, “WvW” and “GvG”.

I have to admit I have a hard time understanding the GvG mindset in GW2. I mean, everyone knows in WvW you find towers and arrow carts, the obvious intent by the designers is for people to use them otherwise they wouldn’t be there in the first place.

Also, what’s the point of fighting a 20 vs 20 deathmatch in the middle of nowhere? You fight the other group, you wipe them… and then wait for them to rez and start another round because nothing actually changed. At least with a keep or tower assault/defense there’s a little bit of tactical variation depending on the specific one you’re attacking, a GvG deathmatch is just a coordinated twitch skill exercise, there’s no use whatsoever for things like logistics. Might as well go playing an FPS if that’s the only purpose.

I can understand criticism like “the way supply is implemented in GW2 makes no sense” (which is unfortunately true), but not wanting to even bother with supply in the first place… I don’t know, to me it sounds like you’re after a completely different game mode. Essentially just PvP, except with 20 men squads instead of 5.

Timpsu.9324:

The level of attendance we have atm in Desolation doesn’t look very promising, and I’d actually be very surprised if T2 doesn’t turn out to be a very tight tier for us, if we ever manage to get there.

That will depend a lot on how the first night goes. If people come online at Saturday afternoon to see a Deso in first place, or close to it anyway, you will see a sudden surge of activity. Otherwise activity levels will keep being low.

Check out the scores in prime time, and you will see we’re still more than able to match Vizunah and SFR even while intentionally playing badly. Prime time has never been Desolation’s problem, and many of the guilds which left were indeed mostly prime time guilds. Our problem has always been off peak and that hasn’t changed much: we didn’t have anyone before, we don’t have anyone now.

The one time we had good off peak coverage, during RUIN’s 2 weeks stay, it took Vizunah a massive concerted effort and a brutal Friday morning capping made possible by a French holiday to win one of those weeks, and we crushed them on the second one. Then the “monster” BT superserver came (the strongest server ever in the EU bracket history, although it lasted only 4 weeks) and RUIN disappeared essentially overnight, and from then on our off peak has mostly been provided by ridiculous hours put in by prime time players to try and keep the score up.

Desolation just needs a 70-100 men asian (or russian or whatever) guild providing coverage during the 6-12am period to completely crush any current opposition and make the other 2 servers’ life FAR more miserable than Vizunah is doing right now to us.
Problem is, it looks like none of them are interested for whatever reason.

Desolation is not empty, not by a long shot. It just suffers from morale loss and a (very bad IMO) decision by some of its major groups to try and drop out of T1.

I can understand the frustration and the demoralization of playing for over 3 months without the slightest chance of winning, starting the matchup every Friday/Saturday night knowing from the very first tick that no matter how hard you try, no matter how insane the play hours you put in, you don’t stand a chance because VS first, then SFR, then VS again needs just a couple morning cappings to completely erase several days worth of fights and you cannot do anything about it simply because you don’t have the players. I really do.

BUT.

Changing tiers is not going to change the intrinsic fact that the scoring system is fatally flawed and cannot ever give balanced matchups except in rare and random circumstances. All you do by dropping a tier is to move from the side of the one getting roflstomped to the one roflstomping the enemy. And while I can see how enticing it looks after 3+ months of no hope whatsoever, truth is, after a while even roflstomping the enemy week in week out becomes stale too.

It is far better to simply accept the system for what it is and take your fun where you can. Personally, I have a very simple criteria: if when I leave the map Deso caps more points than when I entered, I consider myself to have “won” the engagement. All the more true when I start from utterly desperate situations like having nothing on the map and the enemy having all T3 structures with full supplies and trillions of siege weapons inside. What happens after I log out doesn’t change the fact of what I did while playing myself, and it’s outside of my control anyway.

I guess in a way my mindset is more hardcore that many self proclaimed hardcores, I don’t know. But there’s no denying the scoring system is a pile of crap, and once you realize just how bad it is, the only paths you can take are either to learn to ignore it, or leave the game altogether. Trying to “maneuver” around it is useless, its flaws are too deep and structural to be mitigated in any way.

Oh and one last thing about “it’s all Vizunah’s fault”.

You do realize Arenanet is laughing all the way to the bank thanks also to the money you keep spending to transfer from one server to the next, don’t you? From their perspective, the current system is perfect because it keeps people throwing money at them.

If you want to effect change, vote with your wallet. Preferably after having engaged the brain.

Timpsu.9324:

Effectively, if one is proud of winning the weekly points, then atleast in the case of Vizunah, it’s the proud of avoiding combat. Vizunah doesn’t need to engage in direct combat, since they can log on whenever there’s no opposition and get everything back with their better coverage. W3 scoring should encourage to more direct combat, or atleast it shouldn’t encourage to not having to do direct combat.

On the subject of the scoring system sucking to high heaven, you won’t face any opposition from me.

I take some exception to Vizunah not fighting. There is this weird concept that parking your zerg on some hill and trebbing the enemy is “not fighting”. It IS fighting, as a bare minimum you need to be able to defend your position or the artillery gets overrun. And no one forbids the opposing team to go strike somewhere else.

Vizunah fights, they just stack things in their own favor as much as possible. Wouldn’t you do the same if you were in their place?

The fact that the off peak superiority not only gives ridiculous amounts of points but also massively carries over in the form of fully stocked T3 structures is another huge design flaw, on this I agree too. It’s the snowball effect.

But once again, the bucks stop at Arenanet because there have already been plenty of suggestions on how to fix this. Simplest thing would be to modify the outmanned buff to give affected players combat advantages to avoid making it so easy to completely cap maps due to numerical superiority in the first place. A more advanced approach would be to have the system “fight” to reset itself to an equilibrium state by e.g. creating dynamic events in which superbuffed NPCs attack towers/keeps held by a “foreign server” (i.e. one different from the “natural owner” of the structure, like if an enemy server controls one of the 4 towers in EB which are “yours”) with the strength of the event increasing depending on how much the enemy controls / how long they have been controlling it. They even have the technology already in place for it, this is essentially identical to what happens with temple events in Orr. This would severely mitigate the snowballing since after a certain point it would become impossible to hold on to the whole map and the players of the weaker servers would find themselves with a much better starting position once they begin filling their maps again in prime time.

But if Arenanet doesn’t even bother to mention they’re considering changes to this effect… how is this Vizunah’s fault?

Junkpile.7439:

Maybe just make that every server have same amount players in every map. If we have one player enemies should have one player too. That would be fair.

That would make queues impossibly long on the server with the highest off peak population; it would also promote silly tactics like “let have no one log in map X so the enemy cannot log in that map too”.

No, there have already been plenty of excellent suggestions on how to fix it, mostly revolving about a scaling scoring system which gives less points the higher your numerical advantage is, with a fixed minimum cap to avoid the above mentioned “tactic”.

Problem is, Arenanet’s WvW devs are treating their WvW design choices (“WvW is 24/7!”) like religious dogmas instead of approaching the problem in a pragmatic way. I’ve seen the same phenomenon in many other MMOs, once a design team adopts a “pet design tenet” you’d have more chances getting the pope to renounce catholicism than getting that team to reconsider their pet tenet.

graverr.6473:

Nobody in gw2 want’s to play against visunah because ironicly they preffer to play wvw,where with visunah is an endless vortex of sucking the fun out of it at any costs since acording to them “This is how it’s intended to be played”

Do they, now.

Vizunah DOES play the game the way it’s meant to be played. If the game was supposed to be a 20 vs 20 deathmatch in an open field, you wouldn’t have the following game concepts:

- supply
- towers and keeps
- siege weapons

Those concepts are there though, and they are meant to be used.

Just as an example, Vizunah is the only server I’ve seen which has dolyak escorts over 80% of the time.
Escorting dolyaks is slow, boring and unrewarding, but it’s also utterly critical as without those dolyaks you cannot refill your towers/keeps (much less upgrade them) and without those stockpiles there’s no way of doing things like golem rushes or trebbing enemy strong points.

What Vizunah does is to use its devastating numerical superiority in off peak time to gain loads of points and properly setup the maps in the best possible situation and then use that advantage to carry them through during peak time when the opposition finally matches their numbers. I don’t see how any other server in their lucky position would play differently.

The servers fighting Vizunah have a tendency to go looking for open field fights while ignoring (or at least not caring enough) for the logistical part of the game mode. I know that’s definitely the case for Deso; just as an example, last thursday I could play in the morning due to a day of holidays, stood 5h 30 minutes in EB, and was personally responsible for 90% of the tower upgrades and 80% of the siege weapons deployed during the whole period, despite carrying the commander tag for only 20 minutes.

A proper task distribution by commanders would render Vizunah’s task much more difficult because their zergs, being so pug-heavy, tend to melt whenever faced by 1/2 or more of their own numbers, and that forces them to oversiege positions to have any chance of capping points. But you cannot oversiege if you don’t have supplies. Cutting their supply lines would force them to come out in the open much more often.

So accusing them of hiding in their towers with a zillion siege weapons is only half the truth; the other half is “so why aren’t your forces killing all their dolyaks while escorting yours, then trebbing the crap out of their towers?” At least during prime time, the other servers DO have enough players to employ this tactic, especially given Vizunah’s so often cited need to respond to a 20-man squad with a 60-man zerg. Accusing them of sucking in open field fights and then complaining about the inability of taking their positions is a self-confessed lack of understanding on how to properly employ your forces.

I’m not saying proper tactical play would change the result of the matches; they simply get way too many points in the night/morning/afternoon for anyone to be able to overcome that deficit without a massive boost in coverage; but this is the result of the awful scoring system and you cannot fault players for a game design mistake.

Charmide.4891:

Honestly, at this point thinking that Vizunah has multiple blobs and “70+ people” in them during off peak is beyond delusional.

My personal estimate is that Vizunah right now never drops below 300 people in WvW at any time of the day.

Anatolian Turk.4057:

when the kitten are we going to drop down a tier? i havent logged on to gw2 for couple of weeks now. am i the only one who thinks tier 1 is boring?

We will never drop because the other servers can play the same “let’s not score too many points” game too and they are doing it. Time to either man up and accept that playing with the big boys implies sacrifices like queues (which are non existent on Deso at the moment anyway), big zergs, skill lag, and getting wiped off the map by a force 5X to 10X yours, or do what nearly everybody else is doing, give the finger to any hope of ever building a serious, stable server-wide WvW community, pretend that WvW actually stands for “GvG” and start the perpetual server hopping in the eternal search for the mythical land of milk and honey.

TatsuKan.5412:

Yep…

With all due respect, that screenshot proves nothing at all. We cannot even see what’s going on in the other channels of that very same TS server, much less what could be going on on other servers, how many people not logged on TS are there etc.

Honestly, at this point denying that Vizunah has an utterly massive off peak population advantage is beyond silly.

Troma.3250:

Anyway, i’m starting to receive privates messages with angry people saying i or vizunah killed the T1. This is totally crazy.

LOL, that’s beyond pathetic.

For anyone hating people here, if you want to do something vaguely constructive focus on the true culprits – ArenaNet devs and their religious attachment to faulty game design tenets.
Skill lag is due to badly optimized code, unbalanced matchups are due to one of the worst excuses for a scoring system ever devised on this planet, and zerg friendliness is due to the ridiculous conviction that WvW is designed as a casual game mode.

Yaro.3251:

This is to inform you that as of yesterday, Golden Horde began the process of transferring to Piken Square.

Great… LOL… instead of getting more people to have even the smallest of fighting chances we’re losing them. Cannot fault you though, WvW’s current state is as sad as it gets and Arenanet’s unwillingness to acknowledge the problems and fix them is not going to help.

Wish you the best of luck in Piken Square; it was great having you guys with us until it lasted.

Meanwhile, everyone knows this week’s winner by SATURDAY MORNING.

Brilliant piece of design, Arenanet. Truly brilliant. You can all pat yourselves on the back.

salluks.6017:

we decided to deliberately tank this game and go to tier 2, and i hope we actually lose 200 points in tier 2, so we dont have to come back to tier 1 anytime soon.

The way the ranking system works, every time there’s a change in T1 it becomes harder and harder for another server to enter it afterward. That is because the total amount of points of the servers in T1 always increases after a switch while remaining the same if no server changes (zero sum game). It’s the opposite problem for the last tier, whose total number of points is always decreasing making it harder and harder to climb out of it.

If we drop in T2 it will take a significant amount of time to climb back in T1, and it might even prove to be impossible unless one of the 3 T1 servers chooses to deliberately throw the match like we’re doing now.

Wemil.7052:

they are a guild that looks for fights ALONE they don’t want a hugh blobb like iron and mn want they don’t want this 80+ zerg they want a pure guild vs guild fight this is solely on what I think about it and I think im pretty right:)

There is no GvG mode in the game. WvW is about world versus world.

Even if you wanted a “pure” guild versus guild fight, if you wanted for it to be relevant to WvW, you’d have to organize a 2-round tower or keep assault, switching defenders and attackers role around. The whole point of WvW is to attack and defend strong points, not a 20 vs 20 deathmatch in the middle of nowhere.

IRON plays to have maximum impact on score. That’s the correct way of playing.

Rizzy.8293:

Push him

Tried everything, stripping the defiant stacks and then using the CC etc, he would simply keep standing there, then awake all of a sudden.

Ghost Eater has a tendency to bug horribly. I’ve seen him stay immobile for MINUTES at a time, standing just one meter outside a trap doing absolutely nothing. Same goes for trying to convince its moronic AI to follow you into a trap.

DarkieDuck.9521:

IRON doesnt have those yet?
Disappointing

You know, it’s not like I have lots of love for IRON as my posting history shows, but for all the crap they’re getting, they never bandwagoned on the current fotm server… rather, they stood on Deso and helped rebuild during the two periods in which the server fell in trouble.

Not many left, now, after not even a year from game release, who can claim having done the same. Especially not between the so-called “hardcore” WvW guilds.
We might be using different interpretations of “hardcore” here…

DarkieDuck.9521:

MagnusLL.8473:

And the very instant SFR falters, Vizunah is back up…

Nice to see viz is back.
Hope we can meet you in full force next week

I’m not Viz, I’m Deso.

You know, for a change I’d like to have some 500-men asian WvW guild whose primetime is 8-12AM CET to join us. Oh the fun….

In high tier servers it’s pretty much impossible as at least the EB keeps never get flipped. Those servers always have at least enough residual presence, even in off peak times, to try and hold their “starting area” in EB.

However they’re looking at randomizing colors rather than having them linked to ranks, and that should make map completion way easier.

And the very instant SFR falters, Vizunah is back up…

rebelnomad.4502:

Today, Deso and Viz teamed the whole day on EB againts SFR. took Klovan, Deso took WC, viz took golanta, deso took rogue, viz took jerrifer, deso attempted a few times to take aldon and failed. It has been for hours, deso is trying to take sfr keep, while viz is either on the sfr spawn area hunting for sfr or sandwiching sfr with deso. Even some serious occasions viz and deso managed not to kill eachother.

Nevermind that both deso and viz have huge blobs and bunch of sfr, still failing to take the sfr keep.

This remainded me of how did viz and elona teamed up against deso…

Lets not talk about how sneaky, how low this 2v1 against sfr, but lets talk about how prideful, honorable, one of a kind, saint deso is.

You do realize that going 2 vs 1 against the winning server is proper strategical play and if people were more rational this is what would happen all the time, don’t you?

Genev.2450:

But then it wouldn’t have been free :p

Wasn’t SFR initially excluded from the list of worlds to which you could transfer for free?

If they’ve backed down on this, that’s another slap in the face of the WvW community tbh. It doesn’t exactly take a genius to foresee what happens, so the only logical explanation is that they made the offer to try and rebalance the server’s general populations, disregarding what would have happened to the WvW populations and the matchups’ balance.

It’s starting to be extremely annoying to always get B-class citizen treatment, in every single freaking MMO out there, whenever you’re not exclusively about PvE…

For what is worth: after one month from the changes, on Desolation (one of the most populated EU servers) the entrance to AC is deserted. Used to be full of people, you could setup a group for any path within 5 minutes. Now you’ve to wait 20/30 minutes and/or use gw2lfg to setup a group, especially if you’re looking for a specific path (and even more if that path is #3).

I don’t know what the intention behind the changes was, but I find it hard to believe the aim was to make people not bother with the dungeon anymore.