Guild Wars 2

Scribbles.7493:

So what you then have left is a tsunami of pug players who abuse the transfer system to join the ‘winning team’.

So what does this make you, losing to a tsunami of pugs?

Vorpal.4683:

It’s evident that night capping is a huge issue.

I don’t see why points gained when there are no enemies present should be as valuable as points gained when fighting stiff opposition.

That’s not even the worst issue.

The absolute worst issue is having the work (and the epic fights) of several thousands people duking it out at prime time being made utterly irrelevant by 150 or so night cappers who can get a 10k+/day advantage for their server in a trivially easy way.

But of course, if you point this out and propose a solution, you’re being “unfair” to those 150 people. Never mind the current situation royally s….s up the other 5k or so players… let’s f..k up the overwhelming majority to protect the vanishingly small minority, it’s certainly going to do wonders for the game.

Mr Magoo.9065:

I was matched with Desolation a couple of times when they were still in the top bracket, they couldnt defend against our superior tactics and quality army though.

Uh-uh.

Example situation at peak time VS vs FS vs Deso:

http://imageshack.us/a/img696/9539/gw031xb.jpg

Example situation at morning time VS vs FS vs Deso after the amazing PvDoor work of the VS night capping team:

http://imageshack.us/a/img696/975/gw032z.jpg

It’s clearly your “superior tactics and quality army” winning the matches for you

Try again buddy.

Wasting your time in puzzles, either doing them or camping them, is always detrimental for your server. The only thing you’re doing is getting money, or denying it to the enemy… except you aren’t, because said enemy can just go farm gold in a pve zone (in fact it’s more efficient) without using any of the precious 166 spots.

The only time when it makes sense is when your world has capped 100% of the map through numerical superiority and the absence of a few people from the front line is not going to change anything. Even then, ideally, only a few players at a time should go there to ensure the numerical superiority is kept and so is the 100% capping.

A thank you to the (few) people from Desolation who were playing today in the morning (10-12:30 am) in the Gunnar’s Hold borderland and started to follow the lead to claw “our” territory back.

For those who weren’t there, we had a pretty rough time as we were being essentially double-teamed (either by design or by random chance, I strongly suspect the latter) by the two enemy servers and I also believe we would have been outnumbered anyway by any one of them (entered without any queue, during the fight crashed twice and always managed to re-enter instantly so we didn’t have full numbers for sure).

Half an hour of heavy fighting against the enemy zerg just to manage to hold onto the Greenvale supply camp and only thanks to abundant use of siege weapons at that :P, but it was beautiful how we finally used the strongpoint to stage a comeback.

Ofc, I logged out and relogged in after 30 minutes only to see us having lost everything again because someone decided to attack DB despite the dire warnings to not try it until we had a secure base, but hey, that’s how things roll at the start :P

For a server without organization and with only bottom of the barrel players we ain’t doing too bad. Gunnar’s hold had a 7k points advantage this morning thanks to the usual night capping wonder, have been kicking everyone’s bottom (OMG stupid profanity filter) for the whole day and now the advantage is down to 2k. Of course they will probably just recap everything tonight, heh. But still. Desolation is far from a bad WvW server.

You know what the funny thing is?

There are at least 2 maps now on Desolation where you can enter instantly or nearly instantly at almost every time of the day.

Unfortunately, that’s very easy to explain and it’s the crux of the issue: when one server dominates at peak time the scores are still something like 350 vs 250 because the other server still has full map presence so it’s not like you can completely wipe them out.

OTOH, at night playing 100 vs 10 vs 10 you CAN EASILY wipe the others out thus ending up with a score of 710 – 0 – 0; so in those few hours you gain a disporportionate point advantage.

Nyota.7062:

I agree with you on the situation being frustrating. But there’s no imaginable and feasible change that is able to fix it – you could just give someone else the stick. But who ‘earns’ to get privileged in your opinion?

You have to admit that the current situation where the overwhelming majority playing at prime time gets the shaft to protect the vanishingly small minority playing at 4AM is just about the worst possible system…

You will always have useless nabs at any time of the day wasting precious slots, that’s just a fact of life but it’s the same for everyone. What the guild group provides is a core of 15-20 people who DO follow orders. Once you have those, alongside the non-nabs joining them, all of a sudden you have an effective fighting force. It won’t win you the match but it sure as hell can easily turn around a map for the duration of its presence.

You need guild groups taking the lead. My guild at the moment is still growing and only organizes WvW events at Sunday; however I will push and try to setup groups more often, but I still need to level even one toon to 80 (being on holiday last 2 weeks didn’t help) and in any case I cannot play too many hours/week.

Another huge problem is the lack of server subforums which makes coordinating guilds on the server more difficult.

There is a fundamental difference between the NA and EU situation.

On the NA server, night capping is achieved by having a strong Oceanic presence in your server.
The EU servers don’t have this possibility. The natural complement for them would be to have NA guilds, but funnily enough…. NA guilds play on NA servers. Oceanic guilds do not have Oceanic servers to fall back to, so they are forced to play on NA ones.

Vizuna Square is the single EU exception to this and this is why it’s so utterly dominating (and BTW to whoever was saying it’s just a matter of organization: it’s not, VS simply has at least 5x the amount of players of FS and Deso at night time, no matter how well organized you are you are going to get stomped with those numbers).

I have no clue whether they simply have a much larger number of no lifers or if there is some magical hebrew-speaking canadian megaguild on Vizuna doing all the capping for them at night, but the numbers are undeniable. TBH I think the server is simply overbloated because all the french players even remotely interested in WvW jumped ship and went there, resulting in the other french servers being ghost towns in WvW. This has resulted in a big WvW-focused population that simply does not exist anywhere else because the rest of the EU servers have a much more “normal” spread of players types on them.

Anyway, the bottom line is very simple: this is not a war, this is a game. If the game is not fun, players will jump to a better one; and for a significant portion of the playerbase WvW is the most important aspect of GW2. Either Anet finds a way of making the game fun, or it will lose those players. Simple as that.

nidwin.6731:

If I understand it well during Prime-Time it’s Desolation the besst of the best EU server.
This can become very interresting coming weeks.

Desolation is very strong whenever it has full population on a map, yes. But FS and VS are no slouches either.

For me the worst thing about this system is how 7 (and soon 14) day matches are decided within the first 24-48 hours. It simply doesn’t make any sense. In the last 2 days on Desolation you could instantly enter the VS or FS borderlands with no queue at almost any hour of the day. Participation is already dropping very sharply and it will keep going down if things aren’t changed quickly. If ArenaNet thinks they’ve got several months to fix the mess they are deluding themselves.

My personal experience: did Ascalonian Catacombs story mode yesterday. Semi-pug group (there were 3 people from the same guild + me and another person); none of us had ever done it although a couple had apparently read about the tactics needed on the bosses. We also were a pretty unbalanced group with 2 guardians, 2 warriors and a ranger. Levels varied from 30 to (IIRC) 45. Personally I went in with a level 38 guardian. We were a bit worried as we had all read the horror stories about dungeon difficulty in GW2.

Completed the dungeon dying a total of 3 times. Hardest fight was the lovers; died once there, the rest of the group died 2 or 3 times. The fight was annoying but I believe with properly executed tactics we could have done it in 2-3 more tries “the proper way” i.e. without graveyard zerging it (letting the fight reset after a wipe).

First death was after a pull of 3 mobs at the start of the dungeon. After that, I started calling targets on every pull. Worked wonders.

I think the problem is that AC is the first dungeon and doesn’t offer any proper learning curve. You simply jump from stupid open world mobs which can just be zerged to dungeon bosses requiring proper tactical analysis and coordination, without the slightest hint, training, or preparation in between.
Another very annoying factor: with all the particle effects sparkling around it’s often extremely difficult to detect a “charged” big attack. Some easier to distinguish visual clues would go a long way toward making the experience more fun.

All in all, as far I’m concerned, AC could do with a VERY SLIGHT downtuning but the difficulty level is not really the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that you don’t have any previous “learning mobs” i.e. single bosses with some specific (and quite obvious) mechanic which let people have a better learning experience and be more prepared when they start encountering “the real stuff”.

Kraken.7514:

1) no one in a war asked Julius Cesar, Napoleon or Ghengis Khan not to atack at night because it was “unfair”, its just laughable and stupid.

Julius Caesar, Napoleon or Gengis Khan didn’t have to fight the same enemy multiple times though; once their armies killed someone, those guys were dead permanently.

Are you suggesting we kill the players in real life once their toon has been killed so we can better simulate real-life war conditions?

Oh I agree on the fun part but that’s the whole point, it’s no fun going 10 vs 50, organization or not you’re going to get squished; neither is any fun logging in on day 2 of a 14-days matchup and know for a fact you’ve already lost.

I think most people who claim things will fix themselves up are not really understanding the magnitude of this problem. I’m on Desolation, the 3rd ranked EU server, and I can already enter borderland maps with zero queue and having the outmanned buff at 23:00 on weekdays. This means the exodus has already started and it’s already massive. And matchmaking won’t help a thing, because we ARE indeed the 3rd best server in EU, letting us drop a bracket will simply insure we steamroll the other servers. Matchmaking can’t help if there is no one of similar strength with which to match you in the first place, and given the current implementation, as I said, even the most ridiculously small imbalance snowballs into colossal point differences so it’s essentially impossible to find a server of “equal strength” because the operating window of “equal” is far too small.

I see a lot of people on the forums who keep repeating like a mantra “wait a bit, give the server ranking algorithm time to work and wait for free transfers to end, soon enough we will have perfectly balanced matches” etc.

It’s never going to work. You could give a billion years time to the algorithm to do its job and it still wouldn’t work.

The current WvW implementation creates an intrinsically unstable situation. Meaning every slight population imbalance quickly snowballs into unassailable leads. The only way to have balanced matchups would be to somehow miraculously have 3 servers who get to have the exact same population on all 4 maps at every hour of the day for a week (or 2 weeks when the matchups will last as long). It just ain’t gonna happen.

There are several reasons for this, and all of them have already been reported many times. Just to make a quick recap:

A) The system does not try to put itself back into an equilibrium state, meaning that whenever there is slight or no opposition even a very small force will manage in a trivially easy way to have a colossal impact on map state and that impact will persist for several hours (aka “night capping”).

B) Having bigger numbers is still too big of an advantage due to how quickly you can simply move a huge zerg over the whole map and the bigger amount of resources (not just dps but supplies carried, money gained from events etc.) the bigger zerg is continuously getting. Anti-infantry siege weapons are too weak and (especially) too fragile to counter this effect.

C) The stronger you are on a map and the more of it you control, the easier it becomes to hold all of it, leading to spawn camping.
Part of it is the speed of movement: there’s no penalty for “overextending” simply because you can reach any point of the map from any other point within 5 minutes, which means you really only need a couple zergs moving around to cover all your points.
Another part is that there’s absolutely NO “home advantage” to speak of so holding that keep/tower right in front of the enemy spawn is exactly as easy as holding the one in front of your spawn.

D) Orbs make the strong even stronger, while the outmanned debuff is nigh useless in helping fight superior numbers.

E) The linear accumulation of points during the week makes it painfully obvious which server is going to win right after one or two days, leading to reduced participation on the losing servers.

If these fundamental design points are not addressed, the matchups will keep being total washouts and WvW will die on all bar maybe a couple servers per region within a couple of months.

Title says everything. Unfortunately I cannot guarantee constant presence and my playtime will be mostly limited to weekends (hence the non-hardcore part).

My main interest in the game by far is WvW. I’m really desperate to try and go in it with a decently organized group; I’m sick and tired of seeing mindless zergs fighting each other without the slightest sense of how this game mode is actually supposed to be played; even a group of just 20 can really turn the tide in a map if they know what they’re doing, but alas, 99% of the people don’t have a clue.

I also plan to enjoy the PvE and sPvP part of the game, but my main focus is likely to stay in WvW. So if you’re looking for someone to give some help in this part of the game, you have the intention of doing it “seriously” and you’re on Desolation, drop me a note please…

Orbs are only a small part of the problem.

The actual problem is that WvW can simply be translated to “whoever has the biggest zerg more often auto-wins”, coupled with “we at Arenanet couldn’t be bothered putting in hard counters to stop achieving complete map domination despite being told in no uncertain terms it would become a huge problem, because we thought the match-making system would automagically create perfectly balanced servers in groups of 3”.

Meh.