Guild Wars 2

Blacktide hot on our tails… Well, boys, I reckon this is it – nuclear combat toe to toe with the Roosskies.

Genev.2450:

We are not Russian, we’re mostly European in the regular European timezones.
I guess you’ll see us soon

Maybe it’s just because of the time that I choose to play, but the only significant Blacktide presence I’ve ever seen has been the Russian guild [Xaoc].

http://www.gw2guilds.org/guilds/eu/blacktide?sort=members&order=desc&search_id=Fp3TEKLeGrZcZATn

Genev.2450:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v38/Revanche/gw002_zpsbebb9581.jpg

Just saying, for ye of the “Desolation owns during daytime” persuasion
Also, a 5-minutes-ago update of the score

Evenings then. It’s 2pm UTC on a Monday afternoon. So that’s about 6pm if you live in Moscow :>

This week we’ve often attacked the weaker realm in an attempt to drive them off the borderland entirely so that we may focus on the stronger foe wholeheartedly. I don’t think I’ve had gained more badges than usual for doing this, although I am sure my repair costs have been lower.

Ah, la vache!!!

English: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Desolation-Augury-Rock-Blacktide/first

French: https://forum-fr.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Blacktide-EU-Augury-Rock-FR-Desolation-EU-13-10-19-10

It would be quite a bit cheaper to buy third party gold and transfer it into gems. Of course that would also break the ToS.

Sum the ASCII values for each character in your name and then take that value modulo 100. This is your priority in the queue.

@Syntax.9602
You raise a good point. We’ll see how it plays out I suppose.

Vayra.3290:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Is-exploring-hard-to-reach-areas-of-maps-conisdered-an-exploit/first#post420781

Not directly related to WvW, but the premise still holds, so long as you do not hack you can jump wherever you please. Though they will probably fix this hole in the keep’s defences in the next patch.

It’s completely understandable that they’d take that position, however we should probably also consider that by the same reasoning I could use a Mesmer glitch/skill to swim “under the world” and destroy the alters of power from below. Whether or not it’s officially cheating I am sure we can all agree it’s bad sportsmanship. Naughty Russians, naughty!

We don’t have any videos so here’s a picture to explain what happened.

There’s an issue where players can enter the garrison keep without breaking the first gate so it was probably that. Having said that it’s also possible that either a mesmer was hiding inside the keep unknown to the defenders or a teleport hack was used.

Jezath.7395:

nice feedback…

One of the main points of contention for me is the outmanned buff…. This buff contrary to popular or unpopular beleif does nothing to help the team that is outmanned in any way… all it does is give a boost to karma xp gain… This needs reworking imo.. At the moment alll this buff is doing is helping botters.

Well, maybe. I’ve been thinking about potential solutions for this and I haven’t come up with anything satisfactory. It’s easy enough to say that outmanned should do something to increase combat effectiveness, such as increasing health or damage, however some may argue that this rewards losing, leads to cheesy victories, and does little to stop the defeatist attitude of people quit upon seeing the buff.

In my opinion the following two criteria need to be satisfied:

1) Encourages players to join and stay.
2) Don’t make undermanned players significantly stronger.

Thanks Mike, appreciate it. Looks like this requires some manual labour, any plans to automate it? Or even better, have a public API so we can pull the ratings and WvW in real time.

The final countdown is upon us and the results are all but set in stone. It was a week marred by hackers, invisible armies, and late night population differences, but in spite of all that many a good battle was waged.

So long, and thanks for all the Badges of Honor,

MajorKong

@OP The patch notes are referring to a bug that made all but pets invisible NOT the other invisible issues that we’ve all been having.

Narcosis.3812:

Could you reduce it to bullet points? I think that would help your cause immensely.

Yeah I’ll do that in a moment. Probably a good idea given that a lot of people don’t have the time or the willpower to read a relatively large post like that. I actually tried to be concise believe or not

Edit:
Control point upgrading – Needs to be more communal.
Lacklustre Titles and “WvW progression" – We need better mechanisms for this.
Loot Bags – Annoying system.
Invisible Players – Ruining WvW for a lot of players.
Badges of Honor – Should be a currency like gold or karma.
The Downed State and Rally – Needs a rethink. Necromancer pets shouldn’t be rezzing entire swathes of people.
Self-fulfilling Prophecy- The more you lose the more you lose, and the harder it is to come back. We can’t expect ArenaNet to patch human nature but there are a couple of things that I think they are doing which make it worse.
Squad UI and Commander Icons – Needs polish and a few convenience improvements,
Supply Indication – Would be cool.
Scaling / Fundamental Design Flaws – The game is designed for X amount of players but we often have more than X and less than X depending on the time of day etc
Duplicate Maps – Good for balance but boring.
Skill Lag – Something a minority of players get sporadically. Happens at a greater frequency in WvW it seems.
Low level Players – Made to feel like they should leave or do boring tasks like run supply, especially if there’s a queue.
PvE Farming – Frustrating for players participating in WvW to see others essentially playing PvE content and ignoring the objectives.
Exploits/Hacks – Undermines everything. Needs a fix A.S.A.P or some band-aid fixes until it’s sorted out properly.
Eternal Battleground Puzzle Blocking – Killing other players in here is fun, that’s all part of the charm, however if you can block others completely without counter then it’s less about trying to counter the blockers and more about trying to dupe the in-combat slow while the blockers autocast spells/siege.

That’s no commander. That’s a walking castle.

Sniku.6837:

Also would be nice to have a ETA timer until any upgrade currenty working on finishes

Yeah that’s something that’s really needed too. It’s pretty simple yet it actually provides quite a lot of convenience. I’d also like to see number on enemy gates/walls (perhaps toggleable in the options).

^True that. Anyone get the name and guild of the hacker?

Unless there’s a proper fix coming in shortly we really need a temporary band-aid solution. Perhaps disable them entirely or remove the stat bonuses.

Thanks for all the feedback everyone. I really appreciate anyone taking the time out of their day to read my ramblings

P.S. Oh Kodash/Seafarers stop hacking mah orbs!

No comments. Okay

(page 5 of 5)
Eternal Battleground Puzzle Blocking – This is a PvP area so we should expect to get blocked, murdered, and molested at every turn. That’s all part of the experience, and that’s what makes it so fun. That said, being completely blocked with no way to counter the blockers is not at all fun. For example if I were to set up my arrow carts and ballista in savvy locations then it’s unlikely enemies will be able to counter me, regardless of their skill, numbers, or resources. This leads to a situation in certain areas where it’s less about trying to counter the blockers and more about trying to dupe the in-combat slow while the blockers autocast spells/siege. That in my opinion is not a fulfilling experience.

========
If you read all of that I applaud you. I wrote a little more than I was planning too and I literally covered every single topic I could think of. It’s getting pretty late now and I think I may have started to ramble towards the end, so apologies for that. Like I said before this is all just my own opinion. Please feel free to be as critical as you like.

(page 4 of 5)
Scaling / Fundamental Design Flaws As I understand it each map is designed to hold 166 players on each side, or something like that depending on who you ask. So that means there’s roughly 500 players at maximum in a given area. If we go over that limit we start to have lengthy queues, and if we have significantly less than the limit we’re left in a barren PvGate wasteland. Unfortunately we have large variations in population numbers due to pesky things like having to sleep and go to work (ugh, being a human sucks). WvW doesn’t really do anything to account for these large population differences at different times of the day. It’s a one size fits all solution and that has lead to all sorts of issues. I believe this will remain a problem for the foreseeable future as any fix will no doubt require a total rework of WvW and I really doubt this is on the table right now. Still it would be nice to see a more dynamic WvW environment that takes into account population numbers and deals with them accordingly.

Duplicate Maps – Duplicated maps are great for balance, but they’re really quite boring too. The names get confused with each other, and personally I don’t feel quite as awesome after holding a keep because I know it’s only one of three identical ones. In my opinion even doing something relatively simple like having different themes for each of the borderlands would help alleviate this a lot. For example we could have one winter world, one summer, and one autumn, or something like that. Anything that makes them distinct from each other really.

Skill Lag – I’ve seen lots of players complaining about it. It’s something I’ve had myself sporadically since release too. Most of the time it’s fine so this isn’t major issue, but still something definitely something that needs to be looked into.

Low level Players – Low level players are often told they are “taking up the slot of a exotic geared level 80”, and in my cases they actually are. This leads to a situation where they are made to feel like they should leave or do less interesting jobs like run supply.

PvE Farming – There’s some really great spots for farming, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, however I do think it’s lead to some unintended consequences. It’s frustrating to those participating actively in WvW to see players essentially playing PvE content ignoring the objectives, especially if these players are on in a period where there’s a queue. It’s also common to see botters killing Centaurs at the top right of borderlands and Krait in Quaggan’s lake.

Exploits/Hacks – There’s a lot of hacks going around at the moment. Obviously these need to be fixed as soon as possible because it completely undermines WvW. It goes without saying that if the problem persists WvW will start to die. Another worrying issue is that the hackers are simply not getting banned. Does this mean NCSoft support (or whoever it is that handles bans) are understaffed, what’s up?

Server Transfers – It’s great that we can transfer servers for free whenever we like, however there are some consequences for WvW that haven’t really been dealt with. There’s this tendency for players to jump ship if their teams losing, which no doubt exacerbates any issues WvW server matchings already have in terms of balance and queue times. There’s also been incidents where players have swapped servers to simply grief or give their “home server” an advantage, such as massing useless siege to burn supplies or spying on player movements.

A lot of people on the forums have been calling for paid transfers, but I think that’s totally overkill. I don’t know about you guys but I don’t like microtransactions, and it seems to me this problem could just as easily be solved by limiting a players access to WvW for a small period of time after they transfer. i.e. a few days or until the next WvW matching.

(page 3 of 5)
Self-fulfilling Prophecy – The more a server loses the less people want to play, and conversely the more a server wins the more people want to play. Given that WvW success depends so much on population this is important, especially during off-peak times and on low population servers. Ideally players wouldn’t be so fickle, but you know, we’re a temperamental stubborn lot, and not all that reasonable. So the end result of all this is that it’s very difficult to break out of the losing streak and catch up. Now I understand that ArenaNet can’t patch human nature, but I do think they are doing a couple of things that aren’t helping this situation.

1. Repair costs – If a server is losing hard then they’ll die more. A lot more. So there’s larger repair bills and less incentive to play, which is counterproductive considering a server is often losing because there’s not enough players participating. I am not saying the repair costs should be removed, although I’d be fine if they were, but I would like to see the system tweaked a little bit. Perhaps damage to armour could be reduced when the outmanned buff is present.
2. Orbs of Power – These scale insanely well with vitality (and therefore toughness). So once a team gets their filthy little mitts on a few of these bad boys it’s really an uphill struggle for the other sides. I am of the opinion that they should not give hard stat gains, but rather only contribute victory points, perhaps the same value as a keep (+25 per tick). This way we keep all the good things about the orbs. They’re still worth capturing and defending, They’re still a fun mechanic. But now they longer actively aid landside victories, and hopefully they won’t discourage losing players from joining to quite the same degree that they do currently.
3. Reset time @ 00:00 UTC/GMT – During the early hours of the morning it’s common to have large population imbalances between the worlds. Given that the first few hours of a WvW matching are generally very important it could be more productive to move the reset over to a time when people are playing more. This way we don’t have the team with a large night-time presence having a disproportionate early lead. It’s also really fun to be there for the initial zerg rush, but unfortunately as it’s quite late many players will miss out.
4. Outmanned – I’ve seen some players call this the white flag of surrender. Whether it puts players off or encourages them I don’t know, but what I can say is that if it does encourage participation then it can’t be doing it very effectively. It is however a nice a buff for the night-time botters who hangout at that Minotaur camp!

Squad UI and Commander Icons – When you join a squad it removes all other commander icons from the map. I assume this is a feature intended to prevent members confusing commanders with their own squad commander, however by doing this squad members are put at a disadvantage. In my opinion a far more elegant solution would be to have your squad leader appear in a different colour-blind safe colour, or even have a completely different icon. There’s also no UI showing members but I think that must be a bug.

Supply Indication – It’s awkward to accurately gauge how much supply others have. What I’d like is some sort of graphic next to our name giving a visual indication as to whether we have supply or not. Asking in local chat often falls on deaf ears and although /squadinfo for commanders attempts to do this it’s pretty impractical to use.

(page 2 of 5)
The other thing that really gets my goat about the WvW title system is that even when you do unlock them they’re not actually that swanky, and other players hardly ever notice them anyway, which is totally not cool because I want people to know I am a bad kitten yakslapping WvW champion demigod. Okay, so obviously everyone knows that about me already, I am MajorKong after all, my reputation precedes me, but for mere mortals we’ll still need some sort of system in place for the parading of kittens. As mentioned before I think coloured titles could help alleviate the lacklustre titles somewhat, and that’s fine and all, but maybe we can do even better. Now I’ve got an idea, a controversial one no doubt, but hear me out, yo, because I think this is a good one. Okay, so the first thing we do is get rid of the level display next to our names in WvW, because frankly it’s not very pertinent information. Then what we do is we introduce a prestige system, similar to glory, and we stick the rank associated with that where the level number used to be. You gain “prestige” by completing objectives, capturing keeps and castles, escorting dolyaks, killing players, whatever. It doesn’t do anything. You don’t get stronger the more you prestige up. It’s just a number to give others an indication of how experienced you are at WvW, although it doesn’t have to be a number of course. I’d be totally down if it was a named rank or a icon system like the one that Tribes Ascend has.

Loot Bags – I’m sure this has been said before, but I could hardly create a feedback post without mentioning it. It’s a real pain to run around picking these things up, especially while you’re trying to fight hordes of enemies, and to make matters even worse the loot key is the action key for pretty much everything else too, so you’ll often end up finishing enemies or manning siege equipment accidentally. Arrrgh!!! I know you guys over at ArenaNet are probably fans of B.F. Skinner and all that, but could we please keep the psychological loot bag tricky in PvE. It’s so kitten annoying. Plus new players don’t even realise the bags are dropping at first.

Tip: If you’re having trouble seeing loot bags due to siege try using the equipment from a distance. Make sure to use /sit to make it look as if you’re nonchalantly leaning against something because everyone knows cool guys lean on things. Example: http://i.imgur.com/CYmmU.jpg

Invisible Players – OK, so this is a really big one. I mean if this issue was a character from G.R.R. Martins epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire it would be Gregor ‘The Mountain That Rides’ Clegane. It’s a HUGGEEE deal. Yes, I know it’s something ArenaNet are looking into, and that’s fine, however they’ve really got to get a move on with that, because frankly for a lot of us this makes WvW unplayable, or at the very least a lot less enjoyable than it should be. I’d talk about this a lot more but my therapist has advised me to avoid the topic entirely for my own mental well-being, and there’s already a lot written about over in this thread anyway.

Badges of Honor – Awkward to loot and store. I see little reason why these shouldn’t be a currency like karma or coins. Oh, and dungeon tokens too please!

The Downed State and Rally – I’d love to see dramatic changes to this across all aspects of PvP, and I know that’s something we can debate until the cows come home. If you’re a sceptic please humour me a little while I try and convince you that the current implementation is a complete and utter ball-buster, at least when it comes WvW.

So in WvW we’ll often be having very large encounters. It’s typical to have dozens of players on each side duking it out over various control points. The major issue here is that the greater the number of players we have on either side the easier as it becomes to rally as things are dying left, right, and centre. In fact, it’s not uncommon to get downed and then instantly revive because someone somewhere killed a necromancer pet, or whatever. I mean if you’re playing a minion necromancer you may well be helping the enemy team more than your allies, and that in my opinion is ridiculous. This to me is not an extra layer of strategy, but rather a frustrating feature that’s in dire need of a rework. Throw in a couple of PVE mobs into the mix and we’re essentially playing le cheese mode on who can best exploit the rally system. Essentially if WvW had a themetune it would be Chumbawamba’s 90s anarcho-punk hit “I Get Knocked Down”.

(page 1 of 5)
Firstly, I really enjoy this game. A lot. My characters /age is embarrassingly high, and is without a doubt the primary reason why I am single (Ladies, you know where to find me… and that’s in my room playing GuildWars2 WvW… but seriously, call me). Anyway, as much as I enjoy this game I do feel there are a couple of issues that need to be addressed, especially when it comes to WvW. So being a top bloke and all that I decided I should come on the forums and leave a little feedback for all the various issues that I feel are important to WvW.
Disclaimer: These are only my personal opinions and are therefore subject to being completely subjective and/or wrong. I’ve tried to do my best to remain objective but I have covered a lot and I am sure there’s going to be a lot of controversial opinions in there. Please feel free to rip my ideas to shreds if you disagree.

(Listed in no particular order.)
========
Control point upgrading – There’s no safe way to contribute communally. As it stands either an individual must buy the entire upgrade or we must rely on the honour system to help each other. Granted this is not usually an issue for guilds, however it still appears to me to be a less than optimal and completely unnecessary. What I propose is a system where players can contribute as little or as much as they like by visiting the quartermaster for a given control point, and then selecting the upgrade they wish to contribute towards. Once the required coin has been raised any player will then able able to start the upgrade if supply is available. There are three main advantages to this, two for the players, and perhaps another for ArenaNet economists.
1. Players who do not feel they could contribute a large one time payment may now help the war effort with whatever few silvers they have. No doubt this will give them a warm fuzzy feeling.
2. There will be fewer scammers, or at least it will be obvious who is scamming.
3. (This is an assumption) Money will be raised quicker as anyone can contribute and there’s now no awkwardness about asking others for coin. This means that ArenaNet could increase the prices on the control point upgrades without annoying us too much. So there’s room for a larger gold sink here, at least in my opinion.

Keeping on the topic of control point upgrades, would it be possible to add cosmetic upgrades? I mean after all guildwars2 is a game of cosmetics, so why not take it to the logical conclusion and Pimp Our Castles™. I’d love to provide the quartermaster with Badges of Honor so that they could line the walls with the heads of our enemies, paint the walls abyss black, or perhaps raise a giant flag bearing the symbol of my guild in the courtyard.

The last point I’d like to make regarding upgrades is that there’s not yet achievements for contributing. It’s true that we shouldn’t simply being upgrading stuff for achievements, that’s silly, however having an achievement there does give a feeling of progression and long term accomplishment that a lot of players derive pleasure from. It’s also a mechanism that can be used to encourage less generous players to help out with upgrades. Which brings me to my next topic…

Lacklustre Titles and “WvW progression” – So there are WvW achievements, and even a few titles, however I feel this could be improved upon, or even complete overhauled. On the one hand it’s really great that titles are non-trivial to obtain, because if they were trivial then they wouldn’t be very prestigious of course, but on the other hand some of them will take so long to get that they’re essentially meaningless. We will literally be playing Guild Wars 3 before anyone actually gets them. (and yes that is the correct use of literally if this accurate)

I would not like to see these high end super hard titles removed however, but rather have more tiers of titles introduced, similar to the gladiator title system in the original Guild Wars. This way we get a feeling of progression and a way to flaunt our modest deeds. Perhaps these titles could be different colours to help differentiate the easier ones from the super hardcore ones.

Cut out a cardboard flap and super glue it over the bottom left corner of the screen. You don’t have to use cardboard, in fact material will do so long as it’s not transparent.

There’s an ignore feature in the contact list interface. Hopefully ArenaNet will implement /mute /squelch and custom channels at some point.

Also, if you want to PvE you should consider going to a PvE zone. It’s frustrating for those that are actually trying to complete objectives to see others not participating, especially during peak time when there’s often queues.

I play Elementalist for the most part in WvW. Thief’s Shadowstep and Backstab is my main PITA as you’re on half health before the encounters even really started. Heartseeker, Pistol Whip, and Spin2Win builds much more manageable (unless they haven’t rendered because good luck evading those).

Hell, I pop a Shadow Refuge and smart enemy players will pop all their AoE within the Refuge to continue damaging me.

Funny thing about that skill is that given all the rending issues it actually makes the opponents more “visible”. There’s nothing like spamming aoes into shadows refuge and picking off low HP thieves that I can’t see regardless of the situation.

P.S. If someone goes invis on you make sure you spam your number 1 attack if nothing else. It often hits.

Demitsuru.9361:

i saw videos, where only young people were at ArenaNet office.

but all game developers are young at heart

also you are dumb

Oh you’re not totally useless. You do give the enemy team some nice rallies with your pets. So technically you’re worse than useless.

Out of combat weapon swap would be nice.

Webley.1295:

P.S. I am an Aussie player, it is 2pm here

Hey, ya silly dingo bogan hulk hogan, why don’t you just go play on oceanic servers? Oh, yeah…

Players should always be able to transfer freely to servers of their choosing. This provides a much nicer experience (although perhaps a less financially successful one for ANet). So considering that I think a more elegant solution would be a temporary restriction of WvW access upon a server switch.

It also seems to me that griefers who mass pointless siege often haven’t transferred anyway.

tkalamba.2541:

They simply cannot replicate the number of concurrent users and connections that seems to trigger the glitch on their own. The only was to do this is open up a public test server to test changes to code, but that in itself has issues.

Sorry, but I don’t think this is the case at all. I’ve worked on projects where we’ve emulated tens of thousands of simultaneous connections as part of the development process. It’s expensive and time consuming of course, but entirely possible.

Whatever the case me be, us bleating on about how ArenaNet didn’t do something in testing isn’t going to help now. I am sure they’re intelligent enough to learn from their mistakes and fix them. Hopefully sooner rather than later because right now WvW is really suffering, and dare I say it, dying.

Have you asked others if they can see it? I have the world completion star, and although I can’t see it myself others can.

The only other thing I could think be (other than completely broke) is a rounding error. Are you certain you have everything 100% because maybe it’s sitting on 99.98% and rounding to 100% on the display.

Good luck

The skills often lag in WvW. I’ve had this issue sporadically since release.

This happens all the time, especially when targeting another player. Sometimes you’ll hover without moving or dealing damage to the target, which wastes time and lets your enemy get a very large advantage. It’s very unpredictable

(and yes I have turned autotarggeting off!)

tluv.5821:

This won’t work. If you want population balance there is only ONE way to do that.

Stop free world transfers to higher population servers. Make those cost gems. You want to even out the population, people will realize, “Oh, I can’t transfer without paying money, I’ll go somewhere with no queue.”

That is what should have happened, but Anet kittened that up.

Or put a time restriction on WvW after a player transfers world. Making us pay $/£/€/Gems/Gold for transfers is another bull microtransaction thing. It’s bad enough that I am region locked to Europe already.

It looks likes something else it as play there because you literally have no players loaded at all. Whatever the case may be there’s little doubt that this is real and major issue.

More to the point, why do we get glory rewards for playing 8v8 anyway? It’s actually quicker than 5v5 for glory, especially considering the ready times we’ve got to deal with in tPvP. As far as I can tell 8v8 is just a mode for farming glory and kittening around, which is fine, but it does undermine the glory/title system.

you’ve got it even worse than me!

Monk, if you would like to know how we really roll check out http://www.majorkong.net.

interesting!

Rezo.4815:

We at IRON and our allies SHC, AA and Yum are holding down one borderland but thats about all we can do.

and [LoR]!

It’s possible to kill the guildlord from under the floor with the no clip hack. What I’d like to see is the orbs disabled until a suitable solution is implemented to deal with these exploits.

Exploiters flying under the ground killing siege equipment. Thanks to the majority of Kodash and Seafarers players who are not hacking. Please do your utmost to remove the minority who are.

Securing a computer system has traditionally been a battle of wits: the penetrator tries to find the holes, and the designer tries to close them. I imagine the wits of a wvw cheater are pretty low. Step it up ArenaNet.

It’s poorly designed I think. If the enemies are component then you can’t counter it i.e. chain portals and pull them off with mesmers.

If there wasn’t a combat slow then I wouldn’t care because obviously I can remove debuffs like cripple etc and just get on with it.

I wouldn’t say no organisation. My guild ([IRON]) has been very active, albeit only on a single borderlands so far. It’s true that we’ve done a lot of zerging, but that’s really because we’ve got a few commanders who can gather up randomers like kittens to catnip. That said we’ve also been defending objectives, upgrading forts, building golem armies etc

Ramanthes.5916:

In the end it boils down to this; Desolation has a huge population and randoms will always “steal” spots away from organized guilds.

That’s often an issue at primetime, and a few weeks back it was horrible! The queue times are getting shorter now it seems.