Guild Wars 2

what are you guys calling the “last patch”? It has been a lot worse for me and guildies for the last month since the middle of Flame and Frost or longer so I am not sure which last patch people keep talking about because the threads last week said the same thing and we’ve had 2 patches since then or are is only major patches that count? I am confused. =/

And lots of people have been talking about the skill lag issues for quite some time but maybe not ANET so much. I don’t expect to hear a lot from them until they are well on the way to fixing the problem since the last time there was a peep was back in March when the “next patch” was suppose to be a start of many yet to come improvements to skill lag. I worry they did make some decent headway back then and decided to raise the WvW map population caps to celebrate which put us back into the same bloody mess as before only worse cuz now we get killer zergs along with killer skill lag. Yes SM is an old story in that regard but now it is everywhere including at your spawn when no speed boosts will fire.

Hickeroar.9734:

SlothBear.9846:

Eh, if its only 20 people I can probably still find an outmanned bonus on any map that isn’t doing a GvG so I guess that’s okay. No more though, server’s full. Try SoR please!

I’m confused.

There haven’t been any “Full” servers in a month. ANet raised the server caps.

Or were you referring to something else?

I think he means more along the lines of tier 1 being overly full in general due to blackhole sized zergs that suck the entire map into their skill lag 1!11!!11!1!11!! nightmare. >< If ANET isn’t going to do anything about this problem it is our hands to make this more than a game of who can mash their #1 key faster. Which means I don’t much hope for improvement anytime soon.

On the hand, PRO has always been such a joy dying to, I look forward to learning from you guys. More chaos always is a fun thing. Welcome to JQ where the score never matters, only the fight left in her hardy warriors. Let lose the dogs of war, blood by the buckets will flow this weekend.

So we can get some more confirmation from smaller population worlds that skill lag has become an increasingly annoying problem for them?

For those of us in the top tiers strongly considering a move down due to skill lag making the game unplayable on reset nights and highly difficult in other large prime time battles this would be very important information to have. For a long time now everyone kept saying top tiers are doing it to themselves and if they were serious about helping with the problem they would transfer down to less populated servers but if that no longer helps you escape the skill lag problem then this is a much more serious issue that needs some official acknowledgement. ><

Lower WvW map population caps will increase queues and force us all to spread out a bit. That will help with the lag issues and make being outnumbered some hours of the day less of an issue. They just have to come up with some way to let people transfer easily down tiers but lock up transfers to the top ones.

We know what causes skill lag and what we can do to avoid it (transfer to lower tier servers and stay away from busy three-way battles but now that apparently includes staying off any map with big fights on it) along with some of the things ANET could do to help, throw money at the problem (bigger server farm) or lower WvW map population caps. I was more looking for data to help understand why the problem is getting worse instead of improving while ANET claims to be working on it. Is it really just more skins and animated wings on corpses that are lagging out all our skills or did they increase the WvW map population caps thinking things were better than they actually are?

A bunch of anecdotal threads complaining about increases in the occurrence of skill lag do not help ANET very much in their isolation and correction of the problem. Plenty of us theorize that the main reason we are seeing increases in skill lag have to do with behind the scenes increases in WvW map population caps but ANET does not share those numbers with us so it is a lot speculation without more data.

I would love to hear from commanders on what they estimate is their maximum size of followers has been these last couple months and if they have noticed any changes in that number more recently. It is easy for me as a small scale roamer to say the maps feel a lot more full lately but that isn’t something that is easily measurable.

I’d also like to get more specifics from folks on the kinds of situations they were involved in when being hit by crippling skill lag and how long it took for it to clear up for them along with maybe what else was going on across the map that they were aware of. It would also be interesting to know what server you play on, what class you were playing and which skills were most effected at the time (besides skill 6, since everyones heal has always suffered the worse skill lag for compounded data packet complication issues). We all know that pc specs and settings do not really have an impact on the occurrence of skill lag but you can add that information if you like.

I generally do not play in situations where I would regularly notice skill lag since I try to avoid EB for its infernal hell of a lagger SM and do mostly small scale skirmishing with guildies. I keep my WvW Character Limit on High and Quality on Low for maximum sight distance. My pc is one of gamer average performance, more than adequate for GW2 but friends with top of the line hardware experience similar issues. We’ve all noticed an increase in the performance of lagdar and our ability to feel when a zerg is approaching and have used it to escape or avoid a few wipes lately so that is a bonus. Skill lag can at times make the game un-enjoyable and those instances seem to be increasing.

At last reset while playing my warrior we got bogged down in a three-way lords room invasion of Bay on SoR’s borderland map. That was probably some of the worse skill lag I have experienced to date. There were times when nothing would fire, not even the auto attack but you could run all around the place, living much longer than you should since no one could attack you either. Every now and again some action you tried to perform a few minutes before would go off or you would warp a bit. The battle lasted much longer than it should have, long enough for 2nd waves of all sides to make back into the fight and for map chat to fill with a lot of cursing at the skill lag gods. ><

After death our little group of guildies decided not to go back and instead tried to head to the opposite corner of the map. None of us could get our speed boost skills to fire and most of our utility skills were problematic at best for the next 5 to 10 minutes. Once the fighting spread back out across the map there was still noticeable skill delay even for those who joined the map after the massive three way clogged everything up. I expect the problem to go away much more quickly than it did and not to be affected in smaller battles later in the nite but no such luck.

We experienced the same thing the next day at Hills on BGs borderland map under similar circumstances but this time I was playing my guardian and it was even more frustrating since so many more of my skills were tied to being heal related and simply would not function anywhere on the map for a short time. In both of these cases the maps had queues to enter and likely did for the other sides as well so I am assuming we were playing at max WvW map population cap. I really wish I knew what that was. I am pretty sure just lowering the WvW map population cap would help a lot. I know the best solution is to move to a lower tier server but that is not an option for our guild as we chose JQ back in beta to stick with the realm pride folks through thick and thin. <3

We also encountered three instances of RI not dropping from the camp supervisor after the timer had expired due to assumed lag issues as he continued to beat on us for up to 30 additional seconds and in one case this delay lead to us getting overrun by defenders. There were also a lot of instances of lagged out and invulnerable warping supply yaks but that is becoming increasingly common to the point no one remarks on it anymore.

Any further skill lag and WvW map population cap data you can add to this discussion could be useful to someone somewhere one would hope. There are already too many short raging skill lag topics out there so I hoping to give people a place to vent and collect some stats at the same time. Thank you for your time & help. Cheers,

Magnetron.5823:

First deal with the skill lag please one step at a time.

Yes please! New WvW maps would be fancy fun for many I am sure but the basics need to be solid before going down that road of more cosmetic upgrades. I think the WvW team has a lot of their plate right now and new shiny stuff probably needs to be a little less of a priority. I would hope we all properly showed our appreciation with our pocket books when things like culling and free realm transfers were addressed and not just for more adorable backpack skins. ANET will focus on the things we reward them for paying attention to so make it known loudly where your priorities lie so the work can reflect our desires accordingly.

I’d like to remove the skill lag Stonemist saddles us with and if getting rid of that huge center castle was the only way to do that I would be all for it. I don’t think we need more PvE in WvW tho, just maybe a bit more open space to goof off in.

Sykper.6583:

There are probably a lot of other issues that I haven’t addressed with the idea but skill lag and rendering issues would probably be much better off if the cap were reduced even slightly.

And that is the thing, just a simple reduction in WvW map population caps would actually help with so many other problems WvWer’s have been fussing about lately (zergs, skill lag, rendering, off peak hours caps, PvDoor, lopsided matches, ect. . .) that it seems a no brainer. The queue problem and server transfers is where everything falls apart so at the risk of upsetting a vocal bunch of temperamental short attention span gamers we all get stuck with sub-par performance to slog though. ><

I like idea of giving everyone one free world transfer ticket, locking off the top 2 tiers to transfers in and keeping the bottom 2 tiers free to transfer to for a limited time. Lower WvW map population caps and a more spread out player base will be better for everyone in the long run but it is obviously not something we will do by choice without some kicking and screaming.

as azizul said above this problem is easily correctable by ANET by lowering WvW map population for the short term while they are working on long term fixes. I think the long term fixes might require some serious revamping of their hardware and code because it could be buried pretty deep down in how they decided to structure things early on.

The problem is finding a way to lower WvW map caps down far enough to be useful without massively upsetting a big chunk of the playerbase due to queues and the need for server transfers. Ideas on how to deal with that issue are for other threads and there are a ton of them out there. I am pretty sure ANET will not even consider lowering the map population caps down until they get significant feed back from their users making it very clear to them this level of skill lag is not acceptable and is ruining some great battles. If skill lag is negatively affecting your enjoyment of the game make sure ANET knows it! ><

we’ve got guilds jumping all over the place screwing with things already so I don’t see what the fuss over community is these days. Yeah in a perfect world things would have been set up for stability from the start but that didn’t happen and now we are stuck with the stack at top mentality where we keep getting more and more guilds moving up regardless of the price of transfers while skill lag in WvW becomes insane.

Lower WvW map population caps would fix so many other problems that it can only be the queue / server transfer issue that is holding them back so I am all for anything that can be done to make WvW playable again. There’s been a lot of good ideas on way to do it that would not be community or game breaking.

oh darn, I thought this was another skill lag thread (CD reads cool down in my mind).

Everyone find fun in games in their own way, sometimes one person’s fun isn’t so much of it for another. And when something stops being fun for you, you have the power to remove yourself from the unfun to you part. Amirte?

This topic comes up very frequently now, partly because my guild commander has made it his life’s goal to find and bump every commander pin idea thread he can find on this forum and then they all promptly get moved over the suggestion forum where they languish for lack of attention.

On the bright side both commander issues and guild issues in WvW are on ANET’s radar but since this has been a hot topic for awhile now it is more a question of when and what direction they are looking to take things. Guilds really desperately need a way to organize more than 5 players on a map and that is something that should have been in game since release imo. Lots of great ideas out there on how to get it done so I anxiously await news on which avenue they decided to pursue and a time frame for when we can expect to see changes going live.

Skill lag is getting worse because they’ve been fixing it! And every time they do something to fix it a little bit, they up the WvW map population caps and we get even larger battles (seriously the battles I’ve seen over the last 3 weeks are much much bigger than anything we’ve had for the previous 6 months).

So the way for us to feel the effects of all the work those guys have been doing is to lock down the WvW map population caps to something much lower like say where it was back in January after the free server transfers ended and everyone went bat kitten crazy about how awful the queues were. Many threads put the estimate at that time around 60 players per side per WvW map with EB maybe having a higher cap in the 75 range. It is not that we have suddenly gotten better about getting all 60 of our guys in same spot for big keep takes but that there are a whole heck of a lot more of us out there. This is only feeding into the super stack at the top mentality we’ve got going on where everyone is always feeling outnumbered and needs to get more guilds.

Lets go back to queue town and force us to spread our numbers out across the servers so we can have smaller more manageable battles using all our skills instead of just smashing our #1 ability over and over. ><

Yes new threads over and over about skill lag get old but the day (weekday would be better) the whole first page of the WvW forums is covered in threads about skill lag I guarantee someone at ANET will notice and maybe even say something on the topic.

It has been discussed a lot lately and mostly comes down to ANET increasing the WvW map population caps. My guess is they just upped them yet again with this last patch. I know the zergballs I saw last nite at reset seemed especially humungous. Large scale WvW in the top tiers has been miserable this reset but that would not explain what you’ve been seeing, huge skill lag spikes in smaller battles. Are you sure there were not other large battles happening else were on the map? Three way fights are especially prone to serious skill lag and it does effect the entire map regardless if you are at the “big” battle or not.

The solution of course is for us all to spread ourselves across servers better and for ANET to put lower WvW map population caps in place. Yes, this will return us to era of hella long queues and whining about not being to play but might do some of the work of making us act against our human tendency to stack at the top.

fewer players all in the same place is the way to fix the problem. Lower tier / population worlds do not have the same level of problem with skill lag. Human nature will not let us all do the right thing and spread ourselves out evenly between all the worlds so instead we flock up to the stacked servers hoping some how the epic huge battles 24/7 will absolve us of having to ever have to lose . . .

ANET has to lower the WvW map population caps back down to whatever level their poor servers can handle and force us to wait in kittening queues or move down to lower population worlds. They also have to stop raising the world population cap levels and do something to encourage some PvE’ers to spread out as well. Now that guesting works there is no reason for all the PvE crowd to stack on the top servers.

all of those are long term ideas for the distant future except for number 1. Something has to be done for guilds to organize more than 5 players more effectively and colored pins for different purposes would help with that but so would a lot of better ideas out there that have been suggested since beta which we still have not seen yet so yeah . . . keep dreaming, someday maybe but nothing else you suggest has much chance in happening any time soon (the no environment mobs is just not what the devs had in mind for the game so even if that would be easy, its not gonna happen). It can be fun to play the “perfect world with unlimited resources MMO” game but don’t get overly delusional with it or bitter when it takes years to see those kinds of changes.

There are a lot more pressing immediate issues in WvW that need serious focus first like skill lag and murderball mechanics that taking the fun and competitiveness out of the game.

The skill lag is not getting worse because of the things in the patches themselves although maybe each new skin added the game makes for a tiny increase to server delay. Skill lag in WvW is something mainly felt in the upper tiers and is felt map wide when there are clashes of large numbers of players in one location. You can be across the map from the huge battle and still suffer your most complex skills to lag. Heals and speed boost skills seem to take more system resources than others, group buff type skills also turn into button mashers when the server is overloaded checking back and forth between way too many players at the same time. This is why you can be having a decent small fight at a camp and still be slogging thru skill delay when a huge battle is happening somewhere else on the same map. It also “feels” like once you picked up some skill delay by being in a big fight it takes awhile to wash the icky effect off your connection but I have no idea why that would be. Also, EB and the area around SM is a special kind of skill lag hell that I don’t entirely understand but battles there have always been notoriously laggy and unplayable leading some guilds to avoid that map altogether.

The reason new patches make it sometimes feel like skill lag is getting worse imo is because the WvW map population caps are dynamic and ANET has been slowly inching them up with each patch ever since they announced they were making system improvements that should be reducing these problems. I think that it began to get worse back in April after the culling fix when through.

I would love to see how the game plays now with the old WvW map population caps in place even if the insane queue’s it would cause would make me pitch a fit. I have a feeling they have actually improved a lot of the problems given that the 1/2 the map doesn’t disconnect in large battles anymore but for every improvement they make, they up the map caps a little bit as reward for themselves to be able to say “see those epic 100vs100vs100 battles we promised can happen!” but then we get a ton of skill to pay for it. I don’t think it is fair trade off. I want lower map caps that force us to spread the WvW populations out more. As it is now, people just keep transferring up to the top tiers and making the situation worse.

People will tell you to transfer down into the bottom tiers to escape skill lag and while that is the truth, ANET is living in a fantasy land if they believe the playerbase will do what is best for themselves without some sort of incentive. Lower WvW map caps and longer queues along with one free server transfer per account and maybe another very rare way to earn server transfer contracts besides gems/gold are the only tools ANET has available to make us do the right thing and spread out.

Only limited time free transfers at the same time they lower map the caps (which desperately has to be done because the game is currently unplayable in large zerg on zerg battles on top tiers). Sadly we can expect us silly humans to do what is best for us or our communties by better spreading out our population without lower map caps and hence back to evil long queues. Please, please for the love of my number 1 key please lower map caps in WvW to something the hamsters can handle.

seems legit, gogo ANET devs . . . make it so. And just for the sake of my guild commander who enjoys flooding the forums with guild commander threads . . . something, anything that allows more than 5 guildies in WvW to coordinate with each other besides VOIP or pinning up for the whole map to see is strongly needed in WvW to give guild groups more meaningful structure. Private squads, gold guild dots, guild commander pins . . . whatever it takes. WvW is losing so much potential for guilds and turning all us WvW lovers into sadists with this prolonged tantric delay of getting something good out in WvW for guilds. o.O

AndrewSX.3794:

Gamadorn.2659:

I agree there is an easy EASY fix for population. Open free transfers for two weeks. Lower the queue limit on each map to say 60. Done. Watch all the guilds with large groups 1.) Break into smaller 30 man groups to accommodate. 2.) Transfer to servers with a lower population.

LolgodpleaseNO.

Destroying communities is not what i call “Even out population”.

The WvW communities seems to be a fairly small % of the playerbase and the tight ones could easily relocate to a bottom tier without seeing much effect. Some communities might be shook up a bit but I think you could keep the core intact with a little effort. These communities are already being hurt by the super stacking going on now as guilds jump worlds and leave the old one to wither in the sun so lets at least fix the problem to keep it from continuing.

I am still disappointed in ANET for not providing us with solid community building tools before launch so a lot of the pain of stacking in the first couple of months could have been avoided but to be honest, this game was released 6 months too soon based on just the guesting and culling issues alone. If they had that stuff in order to begin with maybe we would have know what the caps needed to be before all the mega stacks happened and been able to prevent it.

The WvW map caps are somewhat dynamic and I think they might have been raised recently (maybe when they raised the world population caps last month) which is for sure the wrong way to go about things given how crazy large of murder balls SoR can put together these days. I think we may have already seen borderland population caps as low as 60 per side a couple of times so that is not an unreasonable target to start with. Meta shake ups are not a bad thing. We’ve had several months of the zergtasic now lets see how things play out differently in a reduced format.

To be honest, the thing ANET needs to do is the thing they have already tried and we the playerbase went batkitten crazy over it so they had to back off. They need to lower the WvW map populations and there is no way around it. Keep going in the direction they were heading after the free transfer shut down in January. It will solve so many problems at once that it is unreal to me that they just did practically the opposite by uping server population caps recently. This would force some of the mega servers to spread out more and make it so when you are outnumbered on some hours of the day on some maps it doesn’t feel like a complete waste of time to play.

The difference 20 vs 40 can make is huge compared to 20 vs 80. This would also be great for skill lag issues and other problems that often get brought up here. But instead we get players freaking out because they cannot have those epic huge 100v100v100 battles they were promised before beta. I would rather much have 40v40v40 and actually feel like my actions had an effect on the outcome than the faceroll button mashing we get to do now in big zerg fights hoping skill 6 might actually fire in time to save your life if anything is actually ever able to hit you. o.O

I hate queues too and given where I play and the fact that I will never be transferring for personal reasons, I will have to suffer through major queues if map caps were to be lowered but for the sake of the game and healthy competition across servers for the long term this really needs to happen and very soon. Please, please lower WvW map population caps by a lot . . . like a 1/3 or more and maybe do some discounted server transfer tickets or another way to earn them in game besides straight up gems. The population needs to spread back out so we can get a little balance. There is always going to be time zone imbalances but they wont hurt nearly as much this way and instead help to drive some better healthy rivalries across the matchmaking system when we get servers a lot closer together in total WvW populations.

Don’t worry covenn, I don’t think Doiid Exploit speaks for RG. He has already earned himself some ignores on JQ for being a bit of a disruptor / authority troll type even if some of the things he was on about in chat are important discussions to have at some point. Actually . .. he reminds me a lot of you in that regard. You two should get along famously. Enjoy!

Missed out on most of the RG vs TW for running around but map chat was buzzing everywhere I went. I think guild rivalries such as these are great for generating more interest in WvW. Kudos to both sides, the vids are lots of fun to watch. Thanks for sharing!

Devon,

Thank you for acknowledging your teams awareness of the issue and lack of functionality in the commander pin. No one is expecting changes overnight but it is always appreciated when we can begin to have the discussion about where those changes might happen or go. There have been a ton of great ideas on how to improve commander squad functions all over these boards and subsequently moved to the suggestion forums so hopefully you’ve got people keeping an eye on that sort of stuff since I would hate to see you guys go through a lot of time and effort to give players something totally the opposite of what is needed. At the same time, I fully expect you all to stick with your vision of what ANET wants WvW to be but just in case anyone wasn’t sure what the players think . . . it has been documented in intense detail and there are some really great ideas that don’t even sound overly complicated that the team could start with.

Please don’t let this go to Ahmrill’s head as he has been hounding on this issue for quite awhile now and I am sure he would become insufferable if too obviously rewarded for his effort since he is my commander after all.

Avenge.1478:

Uhm, the TS numbers last night for JQ BL were around 26 choo, 27-30 HL, and 25 HEL. So whoever that BG dude is who says we have one guild per BL zerging it up, youre wrong. We all ran independently and all encountered the massive JQ blob and BG Zerg. It’s a shame open field fighting on the other servers is all about stacking numbers, and not putting out strategic teams that work with one another to perform different duties across a map. Maybe your tactics aren’t working out over there with your blabbing guys :p

I love SoR, I really do and I have a ton of respect for so many of the guilds over there and what you guys were able to accomplish a few months ago with smaller numbers but please don’t try to pretend your underdog tactics of consolidation and map jumping did not create the blob meta we are living under today. I was hopeful once SoR started winning more often some of your guilds would consider returning their smaller scale sized roots but it is not surprising they are sticking to the plan or feeling obligated to dance with the one that brung ya.

JQ suffers a lot more in this regard having a lot of independently minded smaller guilds who like doing their own thing but we embrace our renegade nature and just keep on trying our darnedest. I must really need to play in some other time zones to get a chance to meet this JQ blob you speak of.

you have been a very busy boy my commander ~^ hope it pays off in good ways.

Ahm you’ve been a very naughty boy having so many good ideas across so many threads over so many months. Thank you for continuing to fight for some of these changes and helping to keep all the possibilities and suggestions fresh in everyone’s mind. I think we can be pretty safe to assume ANET is working on some kind of improvements since they’ve been acknowledging the weakness of the system since the beginning so the only question is how long we have left to wait and which direction they will take things. Hopefully special consideration is being made for guild commander options similar to like what you have been begging for. Good luck good sir and try not to strain anything cuz we need ya out there!

I have no doubt in my mind that SoR is a great world to WvW on but I think JQ and SoR are a lot more similar than the OP seems to indicate, enough so that I have to question their level of experience on JQ. I would think the difference would be a lot less night and day but more of a comfortably familiar albeit maybe a bit bigger WvW community from JQ’s. I am also fairly certain most of SoR’s leadership does not feel any need to recruit to their server at this point and has been actively steering guilds away from joining them when looking for more balanced WvW competition. SoR is most likely a really fun place to play but they are big enough now and seem to want to see more evenly matched fights at the top. Cheers,

More importantly TW and Indo were a huge part of shaping JQ’s WvW community during beta and for the first couple of months after release so many of their members still have friends and former guild mates on JQ. They have always said they would be returning home once they accomplished everything they set out to do on SoR. You never know, maybe they will stick around awhile once they see how hard we continue to fight on with limited resources but I think Indo will always be ever careful about creating another bandwagon situation on any world.

TW is one of the few guilds out there that actually practices what they preach in trying to maintain balanced fights (along with Laylyn from BG who never seems to get a lot of support from his own server in his efforts) and looking for strong competition across worlds. I expect the reason they did not chose to visit DB this week instead has more to do with playing the new glicko system than anything else. It would not help to promote more even match-ups in the future to inflate DB’s rating and then leave them high and dry the next week whereas keeping JQ’s numbers solid helps to ensure more BG/SoR/JQ sets for the best competition under the new system. It will be interesting to see what changes to scoring ANET has in mind for the next batch of WvW fixes tho. Trying to think long term now might not pay off in the manner expected.

There are a ton of threads suggesting something similar (there was one even on the first page this morning and another I posted in yesterday), some from as far back as beta and they all get moved into the suggestion forums where WvWers don’t see them or keep them bumped and then we get a new thread started over here again.

And that is why we need a WvW suggestion subforum imo. Lets help keep our WvW community ideas together where we can better discuss them without as many new threads stringing things out. Needless to say, I am pretty sure it is an idea ANET is very aware of and hopefully part of the commander tag improvements we will be seeing someday soonish . . .

For sure, JQ’s SEA strength for a long time was the main reason we stayed #1, it is the oceanic time zone gap when everything turns to paper that I worry for which if I am not mistaken is one of BG’s strongest periods. It is just unfortunate that one side always ends up with a different weak time in the 24hr cycle. I wish there was a better way to get everyone the fun fights they all deserve but someone always ends up outmanned or PvDooring somewhere along the line. And yeah, I was on BGBL which has suddenly become the new SoRBL of this match up that everyone likes to avoid. Hopefuly TW visiting will change all that see it only makes sense for them to come fight there.

JaredKincade.9761:

lol SOR and JQ 2v1 us even when they aren’t even in the same match up.

Too funny.

I knew I could count on someone from BG to go there

Was really fun running around with TW once again after such a long time having them on the other side. I think you all are forgetting what strong ties TW has kept with JQ even thru the rough times and even tho there was drama way back when they left no one on JQ was ever mad with TW over their choice. We may love to rant about them in map for perfecting those zergball maneuvers over on SoR but those Wolves have always had our respect. Might even get some of our bitter WvWer’s back into action again for the fun of cutting lose with old friends. BG should be welcoming the challenge and consider it a compliment that TW enjoys fighting you guys so much.

Was some fun fights out on BGBL but boy does JQ crash hard after midnight. I am not sure what BG is going to do to keep themselves occupied with so few to fight in their prime hours. I hope DB can help keep ya entertained.

Not sure but it feels like they may have raised the WvW map caps as well which is unfortunate for lag & skill lag issues. Lots of 1 . . . 1 . . . 1 . . . laaaaaaaaaaaag . . . 1 . . . . . . . 1 . . . all while mashing 6 to no avail ><

I love ideas like these that fit in with ANETs desire to keep a clean and open UI but put useful information where someone who wants it can find it. I have a feeling those most benefited by such information may also be the types too lazy to go look for it so maybe ANET has to work out a more visual way to get it out there. I would love to see different flavors of dorito (colors of commander pins chosen by the user) for different actions at the least and suspect they might already be working on some thing along those lines but it would not hurt have it available in text format viewable prior to entering the map from World panel. It would also be really neat to see where your favorite commanders are working that evening and help other commanders know which flavor of commandeering is needed where.

Raine Akrune.8416:

Azylynne.9487:

Right now, once I join someone’s squad (or they join mine), we cannot see another commander pin. It makes it a little difficult sometimes to follow map chat or VOIP when noting activity elsewhere on the map. For coordination, it helps to know where OTHER commanders are too.

As a commander you should be able to see other commanders on the same map as you, I know I can. I would disagree if your suggesting everyone in a squad should be able to see other commanders as this can confuse people/new comers. It makes a lot of sense that once you join a commander squad that you can no longer see the other various commanders on the map as you should NOT be following them.

That is true but I think what he is getting at is that there are more players than just the pinned up commander that help direct the flow of battle and his other suggestion of co-commander or some other officer rank in the squad that can both see other commander pins and help with invites and pings would be very useful. Right now squads are only useful for turning off other blue dorito stacks when you get too many in one place and I rarely see commanders using them at all.

Best of luck to you guys on your epic crusade to get improvements to squad functions, it’s been a long road. Though it is nice to hear Devon talk about the issue, ANET has mentioned it before and has known about the problem for a long time so I am not going to start holding my breath just yet. Sometimes trying to re-invent the wheel isn’t the best plan when you have limited programing hours but I am sure if given enough time they can make something work.

It is just sad that it is so low on the priority list. Yes culling and guesting to lock down transfers had to be fixed first but the waiting has already done a lot of damage. I just hope being so easy to jump back into with Pay 2 Play that ANET sees big returns once they get things in order. I miss a lot of those who have already moved on out of frustration.

I don’t think anything of what you guys are suggesting is vaguely possible at this point and to be honest, I would rather ANET spend whatever WvW dev time they have devoted to long term solutions that will keep the game viable all year long. Once they get to that point then we can start thinking about special WvW events and such. It is already painfully obvious that even slight changes in how WvW behaves are difficult for their code/servers to handle.

It is a nice idea to put on a shelf for someday tho and I am sure ANET is aware of the desire for more ways to shake things up in WvW. I still think they really missed the boat on providing us better ways to form more cohesive world communities so the competition between worlds would have more personality and maybe even mascots.

Jedbacca.6297:

I can get you all on the same page right here on page 8. We all love competition and thoroughly beating someone or teams in battle in this video game thingy called gee dubya toooo. Boom!

GfnG

::drops mic::

Jed out!

/swoon throws panties

Everyone wants to be on the same page as Jed

More three-ways in Hills plz <3

Pretty sure SoR leaders have been publicly begging BG and JQ for the double team for the last month or so but for some reason both sides really can’t resist hitting anyone other than each other in the big battles. Glad to hear a little natural 2v1 against the score leader actually happened like it is suppose in order for 3-way wars to hit that balance sweet spot. ~^ Hope to see a bit more of it out there. Sadly none of the servers have any sort of population balance across timezones so it is always going to feel dirty ankitteny when it happens to you but I would hope by now we’ve gotten past the 2v1 thing anyhow.

We will all need to change our mindset about 2v1 with the new match up system or else we are going to see a ton of boring kitten facerolls when there are mismatches. I for one will be begging teams to double down on JQ when we get paired against worls outside of T1 and have a lot of respect for SoR using those tactics back when they were red in rankings. The last thing JQ needs is a few weeks of boring match-ups to sap more interest in WvW from our server.

The reason the three way war is not working so well in GW2 as a means of balance is simply human nature, we always tend to pick on the little guy and seek most efficient means to an end not to mention our general lack of far sightedness. It did not always work wonderfully well in DAoC either but the bonuses to 3-way battles much outweigh the downsides when implemented correctly.

3-ways add an element of random unexpected chaos that cannot be controlled which allows for amazing illogical but incredibly fun moments to happen that are otherwise impossible to achieve. Like when the 3rd team shows up at a hotly contested keep battle and despite being outnumbered can take out both opponents using the elements of surprise and distraction. Those are the kinds of fights that keep us playing for hours on end and prevent stagnation. The difference between two similar MMO’s like DAoC and WAR was pretty major and I think someone with more experience in the end game of the latter can do a much better job explaining why a third team makes a world of difference when it comes large scale PvP but I can simply say I played DAoC for 8 years and WAR for little more than a few months because it got boring to me so quickly.

There is not a whole lot ANET can do to combat lazy human habits of feeding off the weak and jumping ship or giving up when the going gets rough but maybe if there was a bit more incentive to win the week long war aside from ratings and PvE bonuses no one ever pays attention to and maybe if they find a way to bring back orbs in a non broken way or tweak the outmanned buff a little bit then we could all better see the bonuses of having a full out three way war. I think WvW is close to achieving that difficult balance but the devs might just need a bit more time to tinker with it so lets give them that before giving up on three ways all together. It is no easy task after all and I personally love have 2x more badies to fight.

Let’s rephrase, the map caps are too high for the current game population and the way the servers perform at this time. The map caps have been lower at times when the active WvW population was higher which caused of a lot of negative experiences for players (myself included) regarding queues and ANET having to deal with said unhappy players so this is understandably a touchy subject for everyone.

I agree however that at the current levels of WvW activity and the ways the maps were designed, the map population caps should be closer to 50 per side in the borderlands and maybe a little more than that in EB. If this results in significant queues in the top tiers some incentives to population re-balance to the lower tiers should be added.

Maps caps are currently too high for the map sizes and server performance abilities. I would love to see less skill lag and the disappearance of the more recently added crazy rubber-banding effects and crashes to desktop.

Gratz to SoR this week, you guys really fought hard for a long time for this so enjoy your well deserved victory! <3 So many great guilds on SoR I love seeing out there everynite, just sometimes wouldn’t mind seeing a few less of you in the same spot but we make do best we can.

I am excited at the possibility of seeing some balance in tier 1 as that has been rare and think it is time for us all to chill out over the outmanned buff, think of it as a boon instead. Lets give this some time and see how things settle out. I get nervous whenever people start screaming for more coverage in off peaks hours because WvW players have become a rare and precious commodity and therr are only so many of them out there in any given timezone. If we are pulling them all into tier 1, what does that do the rest of the worlds? I think we will all have a lot less skill lag and blob attacks if we ease up on the WvW player vacuums and let things balance out a bit.

/salute to SoR, way to go guys! TW love you guys forever even if I could do with few less of your forum warriors.

yup this bug has been reported in numerous ways and threads over on the bug forums and seems to have been since the last big patch. There are some players who seem to be more susceptible to the problem than others and some places like in the borderland jump puzzle where you can almost guarantee getting yourself stuck in a falling loop that will eventually kill you if you let it go on long enough.

Last nite our whole group went through a comical falling damage loop coming down the ramp towards Stargove with half of us ending up dead from multiple falls on a drop we normally take without issue. It was hilarious at the time watching 1/2 of us face-plant repeatedly on top of our guild leader but it would have really sucked if we had in been in hot pursuit of another group.

More disturbing is the recent strange lag occurrences unrelated to settings not unlike lag ghosting and rubberbanding from the good ole DAoC RvR days. That stuff really messes up good fights and is sort like those warping Dolyaks. >< Beating on something or chasing after something only to find out it is not really there is always frustrating.

I think the stream was very useful in showing players more playstyle options. Everyone is whining about zerg balls and complaining they have no way to get in more small scale fights. Well, really the only way to have more small scale and less zergs is to have more groups doing it and now after watching an ANET team trying to do a little bit of roaming while on a live stream all you haters can get out there and show us how it is done better.

Players need to be a bit more proactive if they want to see changes. Of course it is not always going to work out and of course there are times when a zerg is needed but Izzy wasn’t saying anything new, just maybe trying to encourage more worlds to give the small stuff a try. He gave a lot of common sense advice and tips for players who are maybe not use to running smaller groups and more smaller groups out in WvW would be much loved by everyone. There is definitely still a place for small man action in GW2 WvW but you have to be smart about. Good luck and have fun there kiddies. <3

Jedbacca.6297:

Mr. and/or Mrs. Moderator, this may be the wrong spot for this, but without being able to target the individuals in question, we are unable to report as you say so. We have been forced, as gamers, to take these situations up ourselves. We try to clean our own communities with our own initiative. No member from any server would want to be associated with said activities. Everyone strives for legit gaming and to at least have a positive lime light around them.

Until you guys supply us with a better means to report people, we will be forced to report these matters to each others’ communities in order to keep things the cleanest as possible on our own ends. We only do this because we do not possess an in game mechanic that can properly do this in certain instances. You will have to forgive the 3 communities you have here for making things known as public and making individuals walk the walk of shame to the best of our ability to show that we as gamers will not tolerate such activities within our gaming experience. This, all being in the fairness of a legit win/play vs another team/server.

/signed

The community really is trying very hard to do all those good cohesive things Martin use to talk about being the real strength behind any successful MMO’s but it is difficult without enough support to make it workable. Please give us the tools to realize that dream.

This has been suggested and begged for pretty much since day 1 so I have a feeling it is for some reason more difficult to do than we imagine. At this point any changes they can make in increase the commander functionality will be appreciated as it is not much more than a blue dorito on the map right now.

Another reason they don’t release the WvW map cap numbers could be that it gets changed sometimes, possibility even dynamically without patching as they have the ability to do with World Population caps. But since we never know exact numbers we can’t be 100% sure about that either. Number geeks have put WvW caps somewhere below 100 per team and above 60 (lately closer to 100 imo) and it has even been suggested that EB might actually have a lower map cap than the borderland maps to help address the lagtastic hulking feature of Stonemist and less open space.

Thanks for the reddit link Liquid, Mike made a lot of good points and more players need to read that interview. It amazes me that even today there are many who believe that proposed hypothetical 500 player cap limit # that was tossed around last year before beta even started was something real they had been promised and are still be cheated from having. /doh!

It is possible the top tiers are going to see some insane queues again with this patch (how long they will last is the real question tho) so I think this week of free transfers is a way to preemptively address those whines while trying to get a bit more population balance in the lower tiers. I think worlds making dramatic rises to the top or crumbling on a whim are going to be a part of this game regardless of free transfers or not, it is human nature to flock or flee, ANET can’t do much about that.

There is also a chance that the culling fix means they have to monkey around with WvW map population caps again which could also make for longer term insane queues in the top tiers. It is nice to have options but I don’t think anyone, ANET included, knows what this patch is going to do for WvW population or world pops in general. For me it is a wait and see time and I don’t think I’ll know much more by April 1st. Funny that it falls on April Fool’s Day tho since ANET is so famous for their awesome April Fools jokes.

Rawnoodles.1398:

EMP is having a blast this reset! We had a record high of 90 on the map!

Great competition! Good luck all T1 contenders!

90 EMP on one map?! 90 JQ in one place? Or some other count? Details on how it was determined? This is very important information for those of us who have been trying to track changes in map cap #’s. If they up the population cap again we might be in for very laggy weekend. Wondering if they are testing something for the upcoming patch. =/

ComeAndSee.1356:

JQ needs to start up that recruitment train again!

For kittens sake, please don’t even joke about it . . . or at least wait until well after the March patch so we have some idea what the WvW population is going to shake down to. Know a lot of players and guilds on JQ sitting this round out waiting for culling and lag to take a dive. There’s too many players in tier 1 for the servers to handle as it is. We likely have the power to address lag ourselves if we would all just spread out a bit (across maps & worlds) but I don’t see that happening any time soon.

can’t wait for April Fools this year. ANET always delivers, this one was quite epic at the time but the GW1 missions with Corporal Bane were hilarious.