Guild Wars 2

Its clear that that the T4 links were poorly done. Glicko adjustment for matchmaking won’t help if the worlds are not linked properly.

This is a lot of work just for one month. For one thing, EotM is not a per-world map. All the green worlds go on overgrowth, all the red worlds on bad lands, etc.

There is also the issue that EotM was never designed to be a traditional WvW map and doesn’t really work in that format.

Sure ANet can do these kinds of experiments, but dev time is a precious resource. We could end up squandering all of it on one experiment after another and never make real progress.

If you want variety you can just got to EotM as it is right now. My WvW guild occasionally does this just to relieve the routine.

Josh’s build looks good and I might try it. One question I have is how you deal with running – without Shiro, you won’t be able to run very well if things go badly. Mallyx does have the jump skill, but IMO it isn’t enough to get away from very fast runners (thieves, warriors, druids, etc) even when paired with other mobility/blocks such as staff 5.

We used boonshare recently in my squad and I have to say it is pretty OP, as well as annoying to maintain. I don’t think its good for WvW to have this in the game, especially since now it seems a lot of “skill” groups are using (abusing?) this.

I’d be fine with nerfing the Rev’s boon duration facet, if that what it takes to fix it. And I say that as a Herald main. I’d prefer to spend the energy on my skills anyway.

Not a fan of repair hammers, just because it seems to tilt things more in the favor of big offensive groups. Small offensive groups barely have enough supply to build anything and won’t be able to get much usage out of repair hammers, but defenders will.

However, I don’t think hammers would quite “ruin” things…just make them a bit more screwed up.

@Spell, run with one of FA’s many fight-oriented guilds, BOMB, BEEP, covn, sV, DIE, HEL, and a bunch more that I am forgetting.

I’m on BP, and though I’ve had fun being in the OP quadserver, I think it needs to change. I don’t care about winning, but I think its important that the teams be somewhat even, otherwise the “losing” worlds get discouraged – from my times on BP when it was unlinked, I know that feeling all too well.

One of the worlds should move to DH as soon as possible, before the next official relink.

Topics from the salt forms are invading the official forums, ruh oh!

OP, you haven’t seen siege defense until you’ve been in at least T2. The reality is that siege is one of the few ways to defend against the omniblob meta.

Fort Aspenwood BL queue was 30 after reset when I looked at it. Guess it would have been 32 if the crafting stations were still there.

Lets see:

1. Overpower stability
2. Overpower CC (I guess because stab is now overpowered)
3. What does this even mean.
4. ZOMG revs so bad anet pls nerf
5. Hammer train meta so much better than pirate ship meta

Sounds good to me. /s

I thought server linking was only part of the population fixes. So there may yet be more in the works there. Plus the scoring fixes will definitely change the picture, by weakening the effect of coverage gaps, controversial or not.

FA is getting focused this week. FABL was getting bombed by multiple opposing zergs from both YB and JQ last night as well.

As for OP’s question of even coverage/population, Tier 2 is definitely not that. In fact all the tiers appear unbalanced except the current tier 1 (BG/TC/DB)…some dramatically so (quadserver).

It seems like the smaller worlds might just get absorbed into the host worlds over the longer term just through transfers. For instance, I know a pretty major BP guild recently transferred back to FA, and some individuals have done this as well.

OP, what will you do if DR isn’t linked to Mag at the end of the next cycle? If your answer is “transfer guild to Mag” (or another host server), then your recruitment problem may just be short term.

You won’t see a reduction in EB queue times because there were no crafting stations there. The crafting change can only really affect the borderlands.

Anyway you’d probably need to compare something like 3 months worth of queue data before and after the crafting removal to really draw any conclusions; any day to day or even week to week measurement is probably just going to be too noisy. For example, a guild group going into a BL can queue the map and that has nothing to do with crafting.

As far as queue times, one solution might be to add another tier (so 5 tiers/15 worlds for NA instead of 4/12). But then wvw might become too “deserted” for some people.

They only reset deviation and volatility, not rating. CD’s initial rating is apparently too low for it to break into tier 3 before the next relink, even if it wins repeatedly. Of course ANet could manually bump their rating, but there is no indication that they will do this.

Yeah, most of the people I play with regularly seem to have more than one account. I actually have a third account on DR which I don’t even log in to. Wish it didn’t have to be this way though, multiple worlds per account doesn’t seem horrible to me (especially if they can be transferred independently).

Eventually Expac2 will come out and probably introduce some more power creep, so I’ll have to decided which of my accounts to upgrade and when. Sigh.

I wonder if many serious WvW players will end up having 2+ accounts on different tiers just to keep things from getting stale (or else just stop playing the mode). I have an account on FA and BP, and although the quadserver is overpowered, I feel like things are just more fun in tier 4 just because they are so chaotic. T2 (FA) tends to just be blobs, meta and siege everywhere; there are some good fights to be had, but you spend a lot of time looking for them. Jumping between the two tiers, I have so far managed to keep things interesting for myself.

Of course having two accounts is suboptimal in other respects (to say the least), but so is transferring around looking for the greener grass. I wish ANet would let each account play on two worlds, but they don’t exactly have the economic incentive to allow that.

I could not care less about balance and scoring. I just want fights and I want variety. Therefore the shared BLs option got my vote.

Agree with RodOfDeath. One reason I don’t get into roaming more is that it just looks so boring and lame. Roll the thief or condi mesmer and go gank people running to the zerg or taking a sentry. Just not my thing, but I guess it works for some people.

@Josh, I have successfully followed BEEP before and fight guilds on FA while not in TS. I agree that your average PUG isn’t going to be able to do this, but players who a have a lot of TS and fight experience can.

Remove all the things! Mystic forge, vendors, merchants, banks, guild dude, TP, nodes, all must go! Reduce those queue times and #MakeWvWGreatAgain! /s

I also don’t think WvW needs any more PvE elements. However it is worth thinking about how to “convert” more PvE players into WvW players. This game mode needs a healthy supply of new players to keep it going. If we just say, buzz off PvE players, eventually we’ll probably find that a lot fewer people are playing. The most readily available source of new players in PvE.

EotM is a weak answer I think because a lot of players there don’t really convert to WvW.

Sadly I don’t have many ideas on this, other that organized/experienced guilds offering mentorship.

I agree that TS is important, but once you’ve been in a certain number of fights where you WERE on TS, you can start to predict and follow the commander even if you aren’t on.

Some times I don’t feeling like getting on TS or even joining squad, I just follow the group around as a green dot (aka “booger”). But I have enough experience to keep a close eye on the commander, so I usually don’t get killed unless the whole group is wiping.

The sorry state of roaming is: gank if you can, and run away/stealth if you start to lose.

I don’t roam much (I’m a Rev) but yesterday I was doing dailies solo and a necro ambushed me. We fought for a while and I barely won. The refreshing thing about the fight was that there was no +1 and neither one of us ran away, and neither of us was running a cheese condi build. All too rare these days. It seems like Rev, Necro,and DH are the only classes that really fight when roaming because they can’t stealth or run well.

My favorite are the warrior gank and flee types. Look its brave sir robin!

Removing these is a bad change. Few spots were actually used, and were only a “problem” at peak time anyway on weekends/reset.

Its also one fewer way for new players to get into WvW. This is how I got into it.

This change has my downvote.

@Chat, you are right, stab change was the first thing. But HoT reinforced that meta, for sure. Even though they have improved stab a bit, its still very piratey and thats coming from HoT.

For instance, no class really has enough stab to deal with the CC thrown at them. So you group ends up frontlining a bunch of guardians to provide AoE stab, and if you don’t have them, you die stunlocked.

PvP: Yes, you need it.
WvW: You probably need it unless you want to hang out with the backline of a zerg all the time. Also the expac gives you true autoloot. $50 for a UI feature, a bargain.

HoT definitely changed the core gameplay from what it was before. Whether it ruined it or not is entirely subjective; some like it and some don’t.

I love PvE in general, but I can’t stand the HoT PvE. So I mostly play WvW now. Its great that you can now unlock of a lot of HoT equipment and elite specs through pure WvW. However, even there, HoT has left its mark; the elite specs are very powerful and basically caused the pirate ship meta as well as other undesirable things like CC and condi spam.

Who knows what expac2 will bring, but I am definitely not going to be an earlier adopter.

Lets get a Tier1 forum subcategory!

???????? RIOT ????????

INB4 Desert is garbage, nobody plays it, ANet is killing wvw, ANet should listen to the wvw vets, ded gaem.

I’m on BP. This matchup has been fun so far, but I agree that this quad server linking is overpowered, at least for this tier. Even our small roaming squads seem to outnumber 2:1.

Could chalk it up to glicko reset, so eventually we may move into tier 3. But I have noticed however that the tier matchmaking seems to prefer one dominant server in each tier.

It could be worse. At least we are getting some smaller scale fights in this linking. I have another account that is still on FA, and Dragonbrand in that tier is pretty much all blob.

BTW, I don’t think BP was stacked much while we linked with FA. I suspect our size hasn’t changed much overall, though its hard to identify player world right now – the only way I know of is to get in a squad with someone and then inspect them via the tooltip.

All animals should be yellow or white, or just gone. I still get tagged a couple times a week by some stupid animal and put in combat.

A polar bear on the north side of hills tagged me a week ago and caused me to be unable to outrun an incoming zerg. Oh man was I salty.

Even if that list was accurate as of last week, there is nothing to stop devs from changing it at the last minute to deal with stacking. I.e if you are shopping for a specific pairing, transferring right now seems fairly risky.

Agree that T2 fights are definitely not as good as T3. Too bad FA and Mag can’t just switch places, I think T2 is more suited for Mag and T3 for FA.

A recent poll determined that world relinking will occur approximately every 2 months, yielding 6 potential relink periods per year.

How do people feel about having 1 of these periods be set up so that all worlds are unlinked, that is, each world stands on its own as it was before the linking. For instance, the last 2 months or first 2 months of each year could be unlinked. The rest of the time, the servers would be linked as they are now and readjusted to balance population.

The reason is to develop the “home world” community and simply to get to know them better, or maintain existing friendships. With server links, its really easy for people on your world to be lost in the noise especially if you are the smaller partner.

Its also the case that at least for the smaller worlds, the gameplay of WvW can be considerably different, and better in some ways, when there are fewer active players.

Finally, some EU players who play on NA have had markedly increased lag since the links started (no doubt due to the increased average blob size), so this would be a relief for them as well.

Thoughts?

I suspect they have separate data centers for NA and EU. Linking that is non-trivial.

Anyway, I don’t see the point in linking for PPT, and for actual gameplay (i.e both groups playing on an NA or EU server) the lag would probably be too severe.

I know a guy from Spain who plays on my NA server. After the links, the game is borderline unplayable for him most of the time due to lag.

Even other NA people in my guild often have multi-second skill lag in EB.

I’m not in T1, but I’ve never seen a rev roamer. It doesn’t seem like the class has a viable build for roaming – even condi rev is quite weak compared to other condi builds.

Revs are good for squads and zergs, but not in groups of <= 3.

I read the wall of text because I was bored.

OP’s main argument, as far as I can tell, is that polls are skewed because non-serious players cause poll responses to be non-representative of the real wvw population. The alleged non-serious players include: those who use wvw for crafting, laurel vendors, mystic forge, practicing emotes, chat rooms (specifically discussing game of thrones), trading posts/merchant, dailies, etc.

OP suggests that ANet hire an “admin” to email all the “real” wvw players with a survey instead.

Various other tangents in there. I don’t agree with any of it, but shrug

I don’t care too much about the price/time investment. If I can get even one set of durability runes every couple weeks with just wvw play, I’ll be happy.

I ground one set in Auric Basin, and I never want to go back there.

Mallyx pain absorption is one of the few general defenses against the condi meta. Nerfing it without a corresponding weakening of conditions will only make that meta stronger. And IMO condi is already out of control in WvW, and really bad for the game.

The driver in our fight guild often gets 8-10 seconds of immobs on him, in addition to huge stacks of bleeding, vulnerability, etc. Without resistance, he dies, and the rest of us have a much harder time fighting after that.

I enjoy the desert map, but I suspect that all the desert-haters make the results of that poll a foregone conclusion.

I’d like to see desert reworked into a balanced three way map rather than removed entirely. I’d go there instead of EB 90% of the time.

I have had both positive and negative experiences with the world linking, but I know several players from my small NA world who dislike it intensely. I can understand some of their concerns: lack of world identity, shift towards blob based combat, harder to roam, conflicts with the linked world, etc. It also seems that the linking has been more controversial/disruptive in the EU.

Here’s an alternative. First, revert the links, so each world is independent again. Next, allow each user account to have two worlds associated with it, instead of just one. Call them the Primary and Secondary worlds. Each world can be transferred independently (for gems), and you can play any character on either world. However, there is a restriction; if the Primary and Secondary are in a matchup with each other, you can’t play on the Secondary world during that matchup. That could lock the Secondary out for you for a week or more, or it might have no real effect, depending on which worlds you picked.

This doesn’t directly address population imbalance, but it makes transferring worlds less of a socially drastic decision for the player. I could keep my primary world constant and “roam” with the secondary, or just keep both on contrasting worlds so that I can experience both small and large scale WvW. Some occasional discounting for world transfers could, over time, help even out the population.

There is also an opportunity for a Gem Store upgrade that unlocks additional world “slots”. To prevent exploits, these would need to be subject to restrictions like above (i.e you can’t play on a Tertiary world if it is in a matchup with Primary or Secondary). A true WvW junkie might have slots for each tier.

I’ve written a mod program that works with Guild Wars 2. However, it is general-purpose and not specifically coded for the game. I don’t want to say exactly what this mod does, but suffice to say it is purely cosmetic; I do not think it confers any in-game advantage, and it isn’t a bot.

I’d like to show it to someone at ArenaNet. I’m not looking for an official statement, but it would be good to know if my account will be banned for releasing this. Even if my account will be banned, I’m probably going to release the program anyway, because it is applicable to other games. However, if I am banned, I will certainly warn others not to use it with GW2.

So, anyone at ArenaNet, please send me an in-game mail if you want to see the mod. If I am not online, just let me know when you will be available.

Another way to get “a bad map” is to join a Teq map late. In my case, Teq started at 7PM my time and I zoned into Sparkfly Fen (no taxi) at 7:04.

It was a less populated map and people were struggling, but wasn’t so bad that it was an early fail. We got to the first burn phase and Teq woke up and attacked after the stun; shortly after, the whirlpools formed and I was sucked down (was standing near his leg).

Hello, first off have to say this game is really good, I was hesitating buying it because I thought it would be a time sink, and I was right

I can’t really play the mac client though. My mouse behaves very strangely with clicking…there are some UI screens, like the trade screen, where I just can’t click on anything at all. Also hover-tooltips don’t work at all. Even if I unplug all my USB devices and just use the trackpad, I get same behavior. Also, I run SmoothMouse, but turning that off doesn’t help (and I’ve verified its off because the process goes away in the task list).

My specs are: Mid 2012 MBP, non Retina, 16GB memory, 512MB nvidia GT 650M video card.

Still, I have actually been playing on my mac, but I play under Parallels 8. The experience is pretty good, clicking/tooltips work as expected. The loading chugs a bit (I have non-SSD disk and only about 2.5GB allocated to the VM), but once an area is loaded performance is adequate. One thing is that the camera still completely freaks out when I right click to adjust it, but I’ve conditioned myself to not do that too often Oh, the fans on my MBP spin up like crazy too, pushing 160 degrees F on the CPU, but hey thats the price that must be paid for awesomeness.