Guild Wars 2

Wow. Just, wow. It took you 4 years to notice that? Even more incredible is the fact that you admitted it in the forums.

And what the heck are you doing wrong that is resulting in such few loot bags? Necro’s are aoe machines. The only class that could get more bags than a necro is possibly ele. I suppose a full nomads guard that just spams staff #1 would get a lot too.

OK, let’s not turn this valuable and important data into an open forum to discuss statistics. The OP’s original method of adding the chances of getting X together to arrive at a single number is, statistically speaking, incorrect. However, it achieves the desired goal of roughly determining probabilities and I appreciate the OP’s time and effort involved in collecting the data.

To those of you who argue the math is wrong, you are correct. Obviously, you can’t add up probabilities. If you have a 50% of getting heads every time you flip a coin, you don’t have a 100% of getting heads every other flip. However, if you flip that coin 1000 times, you will get heads around 500 times, more or less.

Can we get another subforum under Game Discussion and call it Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! I think this post should be moved there.

Anyone who considers themselves a serious dueler would work really hard to establish a dueling zone in a fairly remote are in the BLs so they would never have to deal with zerg interference. Why don’t you all spread the word that the new secret hideout for duelers is the open area near the windmill south of south camp.

Vinceman.4572:

Fractals were never meant to be pugged in the first place. The lfg is an offer that Anet has made for the players. You can’t expect to have a cake walk with ppl you don’t know and with only a tiny chat communication.

I have to disagree with you there. Fractals are basically dungeons that scale up in difficulty. With the exception of thaumanova, none of the fractals require much in the way of coordination or chat. With the exception of t1 fracs, everyone expects the other members of the party to know what to do in every fight. RAIDS were not meant to be pugged.

BTW, got my first ascended weapon box last night on scale 75. There is hope!

I can’t speak for all on Mag, but my impression is that the stability buff was the #1 reason for many to return to wvw. ABL helped as well, but is probably #2 at best.

Before anet implements a map rotation, I hope they introduce a new map that also has the wide open areas and few chokes that makes ABL preferable to so many players. I, for one, really don’t want to play on DBL every other week, but I guess I could deal with it one week in three.

anet really should have brought back ABL a week or so before they released all the other wvw changes. That way, we would have a little more data as to whether the huge population spike was due to the BL change or the other changes.

2 weeks later and I think I have a big enough of a sample size to dispel the whole “bad RNG” explanation. Definitely a nerf on loot. I’ve done about average of 2 t3 daily fractals per day since my initial post and loot is considerably worse than before the patch. Every single daily chest I open, regardless of tier, only gives me the minimum resonating sliver, fractal encryption key, agony infusions, and pristine fractal relic. Not that I need them, but i used to get 1 ascended ring per day on average. Now I don’t even get those. Really disappointing. Imo, considering you can’t just do 3 ezmode swamplands for a chest anymore, the rewards deserve a bit of a buff.

I have no problem with anet bringing back DBL as long as it is in some sort of rotation. It would be even cooler if anet adds more and more maps to said rotation. As long as maps are in a rotation, anet can spend the week fixing/improving whatever map is not being used.

So basically you think the wvw match system should be similar to Elder scrolls online? That is a reasonable suggestion. The ESO campaign system is just about the ONLY thing that works in that godawful game.

When I read these reactions, it becomes crystal clear why anet usually does not announce big changes well in advance. You all are like a bunch of toddlers with zero patience. When told you are going to get something you want in the future, rationally, you should be happy. I want that and I am going to get that, so that is a good thing, right? However, whenever anet announces we are going to get a good thing in the future, so many of you scream and cry because you aren’t getting it NOW. Grow the f up.

I know your pain, but this has got to be a really difficult problem for anet to solve. How do you create incentives for players NOT to join a map blob when they get so much positive feedback for doing so in the form of wxp, loot bags, fun, etc? The main problem I see in blobbing is it demoralizes the enemy. This may be just me, but the most fun I have in wvw is when my force is fighting against an equal-sized force and battles tend to be long and intense. The least fun is to be had when a huge blob crushes my side again and again in battles that are over in seconds. I also don’t have much fun being on the winning side in a one-sided battle. Again, fights are over in seconds and I get no sense of accomplishment.

I’d like to see something like a movement speed penalty, loot reduction, or some other non-combat penalty for being in a map blob. Or, nice rewards for beating a superior force would also be nice. However, I would never support a combat buff created to offset a numbers advantage. That would just create a toxic social environment.

Tyeme.6589:

So, server A has 100% of it’s population playing during the prescribed hours, and server B (who has the exact same total population) has 50% of it’s population play during prescribed hours, and 50% at non-prescribed hours. Server A dominates during “primetime”, but server B comes back each night. Except, the rules are going to change so the night peoples efforts don’t count as much and Sever A gets to win every time because they all play during the prescribed hours?

By your math, 75% of total players are active during prescribed hours and 25% are active during off hours. Shouldn’t any point system benefit the 75% majority?

Break wvw? Such drama. Seriously? You are going to quit wvw if nighttime ppt is reduced?

If anything breaks wvw its night-capping. Does it make sense that one server should “win” the ppt battle because they take the whole map after NA goes to sleep and “defend” it from a couple roamers until NA gets back on?

You are defending an unfair system purely because it benefits you, and not the majority of players. Who do you think deserves to get paid more, a fast food restaurant security guard, or a president’s bodyguard? Does it make sense to you that you should get the same points defending an empty map that those of us get with all maps queued? There’s a reason you get better rewards killing a raid boss than you get killing a dungeon boss. It’s more difficult.

Anyone who can’t solo a camp is not doing it right. You need to practice.

This change helped, but its still not enough imo. On my warrior, I can operate against moderate sized zergs, but against queue blobs, there is just too much boon strip and boon corrupt. Instead of losing all my stab in 1 sec to CC, I lose it in 2 secs to boon strip. Stability needs to be reset to pre-nerf status.

I have moved from hate to strongly dislike. The maps are still too big, have too many chokes, and the entire center of the map is now a complete waste of space with the whole laser thingy event gone.

Don’t forget the broken step at the top of the stairs leading up to the area above the northern outer gate on air keep. Those get me every time.

It’s pretty dumb tbh. My biggest issue with it is the potential for it to make forces too scared to leave their keeps.

I’d love to see cloaking waters turned into something less game-breaking like giving a 1-minute buff to endurance regeneration.

Chilling fog I would change to Marking fog giving anyone hit with it the “marked” debuff that sentries give.

Airship defense should either be dialed back in damage or only damage the attackers’ siege.

Kasteros.9847:

Now, look, atm there is 15 ppl queue for EB and NO ONE in queue for other borders. So why can’t u just go to other border instead of blobing at Eb?

DBL is still much less fun than EBG. Queues need to get pretty big before a guild will spill over into a BL. Probably would’t be the case if we had Alpine back….

Never been so happy to not make it into wvw on reset. 80-deep queue in EBG and average 40-deep in the BL’s.

Anyone complaining about queues or blobs is seriously missing the big picture. Massive queues mean massive interest. Full maps are going to lead to blobs. Anyone who considers themselves a wvw’er is going to recognize last night as a huge success. Thanks anet!

I hope it’s just bad RNG on my part, but is anyone else seeing REALLY awful loot from the daily chests? I’ve done 6 tier 3 dailies (18 total fractal chests) since the update and have gotten pathetic loot. Just a couple fractal encryption keys and maybe 1-2 rares.

Malediktus.9250:

Since you are saving 3*4 map servers this way, will you use the server resources you save by this to make t1 fights less laggy and increase the max amount of players per map?

You can have one or the other, but not both.

Happens to me constantly. Extremely irritating.

I like the changes made to DBL but still prefer Alpine. Judging from queues, I’d say DBL still has a way to go. Now that the event is gone from the central valley, I’d like to see a huge sand storm blow in and just fill the whole space in with gently rolling dunes.

Pirate ship is sunk. The hammer train rises again.

Meh. All is fair in love and wvw. Love it or hate it, it takes 2 sides to spawn camp. If you are on the receiving end, starve the beast and take a different exit. If you CHOOSE to walk out the front gate and get mowed down by a superior force, you are feeding the trolls and being part of the problem.

dubstax.9102:

Without siege? WITHOUT SIEGE? lol I am sorry. I had to laugh at that one. I guess all the balis, trebs, and catas you guys have had buzzing over top of our spawning area were just my and many other people’s imagination. You guys really do live in your own fantasy land. Just…… wow.

OMG OMG OMG!! Relax dude. I don’t play 24 hours a day. If someone built siege when I wasn’t there, they didn’t inform me. There wasn’t any the few times I swung by so I’m just telling you what I know.

BTW, you can avoid all that (alleged) siege if you take another exit from your spawn.

Sorry for the spawn-camping and other (perceived) bad behavior, but Maguuma is a fight server. When there are no fights, people get bored. Boredom leads to bad behavior on any server. Maguuma is my 4th server and I’ve seen spawn-camping happen on all the others.

Look at the bright side, when Maguuma spawns you, we do it without siege. As soon as they can do it without any opposition, DH creeps out, retakes their keep, and goes back to siege-humping which is much worse behavior in wvw, imo.

Or, just make it impossible to drop ACs outside of a keep or tower.

Or, make them only hit 5 enemies.

Mattox.1503:

http://imgur.com/teDaONq

New record has been set.

I would like to be the first to warmly welcome all 4 Kaineng players to Maguuma in the upcoming server merge.

You gonna have to suck it up and pve. It is actually not that bad. I decided I wanted to get durability runes and was able to get the 900 AB currency by doing 3 meta events.

Not sure asking for someone to pay for your server transfer is a good strategy. It smells fishy. I know Xushin occasionally helps guilds transfer to Maguuma. Not so sure about individuals.

Fact 1) Anet never gives wvw players what they want.
Fact 2) Many of the changes in the leaked patch notes are what wvw players want.

Therefore, the patch notes must be a hoax

Topography more conducive to fighting. ABL movement is pretty much straight line between 2 points, and since the BL is so flat and open, you can usually see enemy forces and intercept. There’s multiple paths between DBL points, and all of them are in channels that can be used as chokes. And then you have all those stupid stealth gimmicks around garri. Basically, you have many more places to hide on a map that is much less populated. Size is an issue too, especially the size of towers and keeps. ABL keeps took about 15 seconds for one scout to check ALL doors and breakable walls. You need a party of 5 to watch DBL keeps. That means more people doing boring stuff. Heck, you could fit the entire ABL Hills keep INSIDE the Fire keep lord’s room.

I’m honestly ok with the banners and airstrikes and other gimmicks. I really just two things from anet for wvw: 1) bring back ABL and leave it as close to pre-HoT condition as possible, and 2) stop making big changes to wvw and start making smaller, incremental changes that address player wants.

Join/start a Jade maw farm. Lots of that junk drops in there.

I could really care less about low level players in the casual fracs (1-20), but if anyone dies from agony on the level 40 frac while waiting for the cutscene, I am kicking them on the spot. Yes, it is kitten move to kick someone before they get a chance to prove they can keep up with the party. But it is even MORE of a kitten move to join a fractal pug KNOWING FULL WELL that you don’t have the minimum AR for it.

Don’t know how much AR you need? Check here http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Fractals_of_the_Mists

All anet really needs to do with regards to dungeons is add a scaling system like in fractals. I admit raids are the new hotness, but I just don’t have the kind of schedule that allows me to game for a solid, uninterrupted hour. Fractals are great because they rarely take longer than 10-15 minutes. I’d run dungeons for some more variety, but since the rewards were gutted, I can rarely find a group, and when I can find one, half the party is relatively new to the game and we end up wiping a few times. Therefore, I just gave up on them entirely.

Rocketmist.5436:

As someone on SoS, its interesting to see we out-capped one T1 server and one T2 server.

SoS gets a gold star in night-capping. Gratz! Now, if you could just get over 50 ppt during NA prime….

I’d love to see AC’s treated more like mortars and cannons. IMO, they should have fixed build sites inside towers and keeps set back far enough so they can’t be killed by attackers. That would fix a lot of AC abuse. If they could only be constructed in set locations, a defender couldn’t spam them. Also, this would remove them as an option in open field battles.

Moving reset one hour in any direction is going to make half the players happier, and half less happy. It just doesn’t matter. Let’s all just be happy that Saturday means something again.

Assuming PPT is not going away (I think that’s a fair assumption), I think the best way to tweak it is to introduce scaling to PPT to take into account relative populations. For example, when wvw populations are the at the highest point for the day (like NA primetime for NA servers), PPT is at 100%. However, when population levels drop to 50% of peak, PPT also drops to 50%. Nightcappers can still cap at night, and they still get the same individual rewards for flipping keeps, but since holding territory when there is no one around to take it back is not much of an accomplishment, the points drop accordingly. Further, when the BLs are completely empty, PPT drops to zero. Each side still retains its keeps and towers, and they upgrade normally, but the servers don’t get points for doing nothing.

Anet won’t ask for input. That would leave them vulnerable to too much negativity. They don’t want to hear comments like, “the stability nerf destroys skilled gameplay.” They know better than to ask a question when they know they won’t like the answer. If anything, they’ll let us fill out a survey that has questions like, “did the new npcs have cool looking outfits? Agree or disagree? Would you buy the outfits in the gem store if they became available? Yes or no?”

So basically what you are saying is something, anything must be done to rebalance wvw populations. I’m fairly certain the big wvw revamp in the works will include either removing low pop servers or a switch to a faction system.

Actually, it was the change to stability that dealt a mortal blow to wvw. All the balance, overpowered specs, pve bs you mentioned happened after the fact.

As long as anet considers wvw to be basically a crowded version of spvp, none of the “fixes” will accomplish much.

Not sure what the point of this post is. If the problem is large groups of players blobbing up and being unstoppable, what is their incentive to break up into smaller groups for fair fights? WvW is basically a war sim, right? Why would one side volunteer to give up their advantage? Also, keep in mind that blobs form when there is only one person willing to tag up. A blob will never split in 2 unless another respected commander tags up.

Given the population problems wvw faces, do you really want a subset of wvw to pull MORE players out?

If anet wants to make blobbing less attractive, they should tweak the reward system until it influences behavior. If I know that my magic find goes up 200% if my group wipes a blob twice it’s size, you can bet I’ll be more interested in taking on bigger forces. However, a HUGE downside of that is how it will influence player relationships. Now, guilds don’t really care if pugs follow them. If those pugs prevent the guild group from getting better rewards, commanders will get hostile to pugs and/or run tagless, and you’ll alienate even more players. Therefore, I doubt anet will ever support a change to wvw that penalizes large groups.

zinkz.7045:

MomentofWeakness.1246:

That was because many people left when Anet changed stability and essentially rendered melee a second tier group of classes in WvW behind casters who are still dominating the meta even now (i.e. pirate-ship meta).

LOL, yes “melee” classes are second tier, poor guardians how do they cope, the lack of objectivity and hypocrisy is amazing, for second (or rather third tier) take a look at how engy/ranger/mes & thief have fared in large scale WvW for the entire game, at best bit parts at worst non-existent, where were the cries about those, ah that’s right nowhere, that “melee” classes were totally overrepresented, totally OP, for much of the game (and guards still are) was just fine.

As for the old stability it was just as broken as the current system, which is why you had 60 man “melee” blobs rolling face across the keyboard with unstoppable amounts of stab that would not be stripped & that rendered supposed strong long cooldown hard CC skills useless, it says a lot about how bad the WvW playerbase is, how similar it is to the mindless drones in Silverwastes, that some think a system was “good” with a mechanic so broken that it rendered hard CC useless and made ‘positioning’ and pushing braindead easy.

Lemme guess. You main a zerker LB ranger?

Your arguments make no sense. The old stability was not OP or broken, it was simply something that made melee viable in wvw. A 60-man zerg is going to roll over anything whether it is mostly melee or ranged, so how does that have anything to do with stability. I sense this is just another rant from someone who was repeatedly killed by a guild group that practiced hard and successfully honed their skills to such a degree that they could take on blobs twice their size. There is absolutely nothing mindless or braindead about that. If it was so easy, why didn’t you do it?

TorquedSoul.8097:

I would worry that servers would play in bursts to gain a lead and then sandbag, intentionally keep the population low, so that other servers couldn’t make a comeback. I think this could easily be manipulated by clever servers or alliances.

One more reason to have a fight league with substantial guild and individual rewards, and only minimal server rewards. No points means no gaming the system. Let us play with like-minded players rather than deal with this cancerous ppt mentality.

I don’t think fight guilds want an arena. We already have arenas in our guild halls. Fighting on wvw maps is more fun. We like using terrain, setting up ambushes, coordinating with other guilds, etc. If you think we MUST have some arbitrary point system, one is as good as another. I wouldn’t get rid of EBG or keeps and towers, as long as there is some sort of incentive in place that rewards fighting for the objective, not just sitting on it.

OMG! What ground-breaking news! Camps get flipped more often on high-pop maps. Who could have imagined that?

You’ll never fix PPT so its no use trying. Too many players would have strokes if they were told they actually have to use their weapons instead of siege. The best thing anet could do is create a new “league” that caters to the wants of fight-focused players, and let those players transfer. PPT’ers and fighters are so far apart in terms of wants and needs that it is better to just let them self-segregate.

How you do points is difficult. How do you reward one side for winning a battle? Should you get more points for winning against a larger force? Probably? Should you lose points for running away? It depends. Let’s face it, PPT is a really really easy scoring system for anet. One that rewards actually fighting is difficult. I’d suggest that if anet actually created a fight league, points per side/faction/server would be unnecessary. I would argue that my guild and most of the people I play with could really care less about points, so why do we even need a points system? It would make more sense to instead reward individual players with the kind of loot that is awarded in spvp-style reward tracks.

The way I see it is this: in the opinion of most fighters, points are arbitrary and stupid. I can’t speak for others, but my guild only really ppt’s when there are no fights. We’ll attack a tower out of boredom, or a keep just to make swords on the map to bring the enemy out. As was previously mentioned, a point system that is designed to reward fights is just going to be gamed anyway, so why bother. Reward the player and/or the guild for victories, not the server.