Server pride and identity is absolutely meaningless at this point due to the free transfers.
Whoever is winning is just the people that are willing to tolerate the longest queues to be on top. Probably a vast majority that didn’t even start out on any given server, but simply migrated there somewhere along the way.
Combined with the fact that you get no actual reward for winning a matchup, the whole kitnkaboodle feels more pointless by the day.
DarthVarner: They’re playing a deeper game. The real competition here is with Tarnished Coast for a slot in the 3rd bracket: http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA
Interesting points Darth, but this strategy seems risky. Because such a large win, despite moving you where you want to go if succesful, might thrust the server into a bracket it is actually not ready for. The rest of the server, the non-transfers that were SoR before all these guilds showed up, were playing at one level, and that was the level of a mid-tier server, even though they were doing well. These players may not be as ready for the jump in competition as the guilds who moved were. And if you overshoot what the server as a whole is ready for, you are very likely to get a massive moral drop from the rest of your players, much in the same way has happened to GoM and Yaks this match, if you lose badly higher up.
YB also won a match by such a massive margin once, in fact at the time it was the largest single points jump that had happened, but it wrongly estimated how good YB really were, simply due to that their two opponents quit the filed during the matchup overinflating the end result. They ended up not that competitive in the next match and falling back down again.
It might be better to actually ease off such a tight rein on 99% map control so the rest of SoR can be slowly trained up without skipping an entire tier. But seems too late now, will be interesting to see how it plays out in the weeks ahead.
I find it all pretty nonsensical though. Because as long as there is free transfers there is no way to ‘stealth’ your way from the bottom up into the top server, without duplicating the same conditions (massive coat-tailing) that already imploded servers like HoD and JQ. Even should SoR perform a miracle and get to the top they will become the next JQ, the very server these guilds left likely due to the long queues that will certainly come to SoR. They are already beginning obviously from reading this thread. Why not just bypass the cycle and stay on JQ? Of if you want into th 3rd tier, just join a 3rd tier server straight away. While you get to play more often by resetting farther down the latter perhaps, this can’t actually be fun play for anyone – guarding spawn camps with no one in them to preserve the point spread?
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Our server had one really close and it was great. Like WvW was advertised. Then only one other that was ‘decent’, never really in doubt who would win, but still ok due to 2nd and 3rd were close and respectably competitive, able to hold territory for legitimate time.
Other than that, for 70% of the time the game has been out, its been pretty much blowouts one way or the other. Not good enough Anet.
Mara, no one with a brain is crediting your success to transfers. SoR won last week after all without them. They are crediting ‘ruining the match’ to transfers, making it no fun to play. Not like, “We would beat you without the transfers” (though it might be possible) but rather, “Hey this is no fun due to transfers.”
SoR is apparently so bored at this point, they are down to the lame tactic of letting a gate fall just so they can rush in and kill 6 people with 30. Bravo?
Right now across all tiers the system itself is a far bigger issue than SoR players demanded to be praised over and over. The match is mostly garbage right now because of changes that happened over the last week.
People don’t get the bigger point is not about winning or losing. SoR won last week and everyone in the matchup enjoyed the fight because it was close! The point is about the matchmaking system being ruined since transfers interefere so massively with the tightly formulated ranking system.
Without the transfers and influx the match would certainly have been closer and remained more competitive, instead of a big waste of time and waiting a week for rebalance like it is now. It only takes adding maybe 15-20 consistent WvW players to a matchup – one extra warband essentially – to suddenly switch balance drastically to the point a lead gets extended so big people just call it a wash and wait for the next one.
You can come in 2nd or 3rd and still have a great time during a match, like what happened last week. Even NS heralded what a great battle it was even though they came in last. Only bad thing from it, they dropped to a lower tier where it is also not balanced now again.
Look around, this imbalance is happening in every single tier, and Yak’s is actually putting forth the best 2nd place showing in the top 5 brackets. And yet its still a disaster match now in terms of competitiveness. Something needs to changed in the system so this gamemode is actually fun more than 1 out of 5 times.
Gotta say that this matchup is more evidence of how the Arenanet ranking system is absolutely, totally useless. Time to reset the rankings and start over. Back to 24 hour matchups.
Three servers that shouldn’t have been matched against each other. Epic failure Arenanet.
Well that’s not true really. It was a good matchup last week. But the free transfers are what is ruining the system. When you have guilds that decide they need to come down from the top and ‘help’ servers that actually don’t need help. Actually ‘help’ the server that already won – if just barely – the same matchup from last week.
There aren’t enough players on and too many matchups therefore come down to numbers.
Maybe they should dump some servers from WvW altogether. Have ‘PVE’ and ‘WVW" servers. Those on PVE servers will be people who have no care for WVW. Those that want to continue to play will move to WVW servers and you will have much more even playing field. It’s like contraction in a sporting league. And because most players are now 80, combined with those that like WVW mostly do that and not PVE, you shouldn’t have a problem with total populations overflowing on any server.
Or just contract a few servers altogether regardless of PVE/WVW, now that that the player base is diminishing some.
SoR has played well and deserve their lead, but also they do have vastly superior numbers at this point. Those things are not mutually exclusive concepts.
But clearly some transferring has been going on, because this matchup is now nothing like the near even fight of last week.
I actually feel a bit sorry for SoR getting coattail riders, because these people won’t be around when the going gets tough, that’s why they coattailed in the first place. Yet they will not only knock higher quality players into the queue, they will also cause you to be bumped up into facing much tougher opponents the next matchup.
This happened to Yak’s as well when we won big and our opponents left the field. We ended up playing Blackgate which turned out to be a fairly decent match, but they still won rather easily. The free transfers have to end. They are wasting entire weeks of WvW.
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Thief is most annoying not just due to abilities, but because many are useless to their team. Just running around the map trying to be an assassin. These types should go to sPVP if they want to 1v1 or small scale combat. Individual kills matter next to nothing to the larger fight.
Stealth is just about always a poor decision in a game if they want to achieve quality balance.
I think this thread is missing an important point. Regardless if this was Jon Peters or not, and whether he was great or not.
A profession should not be balanced around only if the top 5% can excel at it, let alone the person that designed everything about it. I know Anet is all lusting after the eSport label, but the reality is that the vast majority of their playerbase is not on that level, and probably not that interested in it.
The profession needs to function well at all levels, not just the top. So even if a greatly skilled Necro is on even footing with a greatly skilled Mesmer or Warrior (doubt even that) it doesn’t matter if the 80% of middle ground Necro players have a class greatly lacking against the 80% middle ground of most other classes.
Right now the feeling is certainly that you have to work much harder with the Necro to achieve similar results as other professions more or less hammering obvious button combos.
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I don’t find collecting the Badges that hard, the bigger problem is there is nothing good to buy with them. If you don’t want the single lone stat configuration that is on WvW gear you are just out of luck. There also isn’t much in the way of looks to get them for that reason. There is the basic Invader gear look, then the exotic 80 version, but both pale in comparison to the variety of styles you can get from PVE/Dungeons.
Anet needs to step it up in the WvW rewards department. You already get nothing for winning your bracket, at least increase the item options.
There still seems to be a bit of a problem with this in Guild Wars 2, where players don’t want to defend their holdings that are being attacked, to rather go after something they don’t own. Many players must not realize that you get rewarded well for defending as well, or simply don’t like doing it as much as attacking.
It’s not as common as in say Warhammer Online simply because the design of GW2 WvW doesn’t allow for it to be abused in the same fashion, but the underlying mentality is still there to a undesirable degree.
An example recently from the Eternal Battlegrounds, our server held Stonemist, which was being attacked, and might have been able to be saved but most of the home zerg was too busy hammering on a tower door to bother breaking off to defend the castle.
Anet instituted the recently captured buff on the supply camp NPC so that it could not be endlessly flipped very quickly, I think a similar buff might work well for Towers and Keeps as well, giving a capturing team a bit of a reprieve from an immediate cap back, which happens too often when the capturing team runs off (even though, yes, that is excusing poor play). Perhaps the gates/doors being twice as durable after recently captured, for 5-15 minutes would help to diminish this tactic of ‘trading’ holdings, that still tends to go on too often at times, and lend a bit more permanence and reward for taking a structure.
It’s terrible, maybe 1 out of 5 enemy players loading. Seemed to get worse the longer I was in WvW. Better roll back whatever the heck messed this up.
The mode doesn’t really support it well because it doesn’t help your team much. Kills don’t matter on the scoreboard. If you kill one guy going to an objective, ok one enemy down, but then you also have wasted an equal amount of time waiting and fighting at the same location, not contributing to team points.
Structured seems the far better place for 1v1 playstyle, as you can get roles where you are on your own, defending or roaming, etc.
Sounds like an obvious one but for some reason we don’t have it.
Having one would make our condition / bleeding builds more effective and help with some of the DPS concerns we have.
what most aren’t realizing is effecting the scoring eventually will become a double edged sword. at some point YOUR server will be the “nightcappers” and will have limited returns on your scoring.
Bring it on.
What you aren’t realizing is that fair minded people are OK with having scaling if they are winning too easy. Not everyone is arguing from a selfish point of view. But rather a competitive one.
Until other servers organize, fund and coordinate together, those who are already doing this will continue to win.
By ‘already doing this’ you mean just having people that live in another part of the world play in a time that is more lucrative simply due to location. LOL, yeah more servers should ‘start doing that’.
Only problem is most of these players rolled on 1 of about 3 servers, and they don’t want to move. They want to play with their friends and countrymen. There are no more people to recruit to ‘start doing this’. If anything, the game is losing population, as players go back to Pandaland, and many are quitting as they are finding the game not fixing its problems, including the one under discussion.
We can bury our heads in the sand all we want, but how fun will it be if this becomes Warhammer 2. A failed game and RvR experience.
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What people don’t realize is that a scaling system would also help a lot of low population servers in general. That has nothing to do with peak vs off peak.
Many servers right now struggle to get maps full at any time period, let alone overnight. Under the current system, these servers will be forever weak, because no one wants to go there. However, if they could gain more traction simply by playing ‘better’ than their opponent, even with less men, this would begin to close the gap in points by which they lose by, and more servers might become attractive destinations. Not based on just zerg, but by how skilled they are. Imagine that, rewarding skill.
Actually We cant agree. At some point you are going to be matched to a server where YOU are in prime time, however to another server its offpeak. Are you gonna be happy with your efforts counting half as much? during your prime, you will be gaining points at a disadvantage while the other team will gain full points during their prime
does this sound like a reasonable tradeoff?
Yes.
The only time points should be worth 100% is when servers are full.
If my server is playing an Off Peak server, they will likely not be fielding 100% population in our prime time. We will get less points. That is fine. Then they in turn will get less when our manpower is weak. And whichever side fields less in their weak period, the % will scale to them in some small degree to provide balance. It won’t totally negate the value of their numbers, but will make it not all-important. For either side.
The problem though with tying the points into server population is that as you said competitive players will take any advantage they can get. You might run into the situation where competitive servers initially avoid joining WvW to slow an enemies point gain until the situation favors them.
This would still be a loser for them. The idea is still to make having a big population advantage on a map an advantage, but just not be as lucrative as capping when it’s hardest against full caps.
The scaling would not be a 1 to 1 ratio. In other words if one server had 100% population on a map while the other two had 50%, they would not get 50% less points. It might be only 25% less. Therefore having more people contributing would always be an advantage, you would never want to purposely abandon playing in this system.
If they don’t want to balance this in any other way, then they should make regional servers. Which should have been done from the beginning.
Stick the servers that have similar prime times together, and have them play each other. That would make the most sense.
A couple servers can defend against off peak capping, because a few huge alliances rolled on a couple servers and these are die-hard PVP’ers who either have the time, or inclination, to schedule their lives around a video game, and play at times when most normal people are sleeping.
But there aren’t enough players like that to populate every server. Nor are these die-hard folks going to spread out in order to make off peak time more fair for all servers.
That doesn’t mean every server below the top 3 should just automatically lose their matchup against off peak servers, due to that no matter what they do when their majority plays, no matter how good they are, they can never make up for the points an opponent gains while holding 4 maps with weak resistance for half the day, every day.
Points just piling up at locations that are rarely or never being attacked for hours. Diminishing returns should kick on these locations.
The Oceanic folks are doing nothing wrong, they are in fact not “night-capping”, they are playing during their prime time.
This part is right. They are doing nothing wrong, and should not be insulted in various ways.
At the same, taking over an entire map with hardly any resistance should not be worth the same points, as it doing it vs full server caps, and when that means it takes many hours longer and is many times harder to achieve.
And this goes for anytime, regardless who or where the players are from. With a points scaling system, the Oceanic population servers would also benefit, as they claim a ‘dead zone’ during NA daytime. Then in this deadtime, while ‘they’ are severely outmanned, their opponents wold earn less points in return. Even steven.
May I ask you what server you’re on and what servers you’ve faced? Because I’m from Sea of Sorrows and I have 3 Isle of Janthir friends that will back me up on this, The pure American servers are in no way inactive. You act as if NO one is there during Australian prime time, I got news for you, every server has just as many people as ours. I’m not playing the blame game like you, but WvWvW more before you comment on this situation.
I’m from Yak’s Bend, and yes we played Janthir a while back and I find their trying to defend these easy wins disgraceful. I play at night (NA) often, and I was there watching their entire zerg run roughshod over a map we had mostly held, with at best, us having 5-7 defenders at our towers and keeps, while they steamrolled them with 20 or 30 people. We had an outmanned buff for all the hours I was on.
Sorry, that is just not well earned captures, and should not be worth the same ticks to hold such a map against such little opposition as that as when you are doing it 30 vs 30 or full vs full. This is supposed to be player vs player, not win the matchup largely with player vs environment.
Also, sometimes these servers think they are facing real resistance because they see a fair number at one location defending them. What they don’t realize is that is because almost every player on for their opponent has rushed to that location. So if they are fighting a battle say with 30 against an opponent 20 men, then the rest of the map is largely void of defense for the low nighttime side, yet the Oceanics still have dozens more in the rest of the map taking camps, towers, etc, that are not defended. It’s just a garbage scoring system right now.
And if people from these servers were being honest and claiming its fair because their own side is weak in the NA day, then they would be all for a scaling system, since the gains they made when they were on would not be so easily lost when their server was weak itself.
That they won’t speak up for a fair system, just tells me they simply are defending individual greed gain (Karma, Exp, Gold, & of course WvW points) over the good of the game and a real quality competitive game mode. When the rubber meets the road too many players just want what is best for them as a lone player, over what would make a better game.
If I’m playing on a side that has a full capped server and we are playing against an undermanned opponent (say a Oceanic that has weak NA presence) I would have no problem having our points scaled down 25% or whatever, because of this. You would still be making great progress for your server, it just would not decide the whole thing practically.
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The Oceanic folks are doing nothing wrong, they are in fact not “night-capping”, they are playing during their prime time.
This part is right. They are doing nothing wrong, and should not be insulted in various ways.
At the same, taking over an entire map with hardly any resistance should not be worth the same points, as it doing it vs full server caps, and when that means it takes many hours longer and is many times harder to achieve.
And this goes for anytime, regardless who or where the players are from. With a points scaling system, the Oceanic population servers would also benefit, as they claim a ‘dead zone’ during NA daytime. Then in this deadtime, while ‘they’ are severely outmanned, their opponents wold earn less points in return. Even steven.
It sounds like they just don’t know how to fix the problem or don’t have the coding mechanics to fix it, so are just saying ‘working as intended’, even though it means leaving extreme imbalance and unfairness in the game.
Even though the obvious solution is to scale points down when the opponent is severely undermanned. Which does not bias against anyone, but only makes the integrity and fairness of WvW much higher.
Right now if you are a night time player, in most matchups you are getting a free gravy train of experience, karma, and gold, while impacting the scoreboard many times more than the majority, who has to play in NA primetime, and fight tooth and nail for every small gain. Only to see it often erased totally by nighttime zergs running largely unopposed or in such lopsided battles, that there is no hope of the other side being much more than speedbump.
Saying all is fair in war is just a trite and unacceptable copout.
It’s not just supply either. In our (Yak’s) current matchup, a Blackgate (or possibly Gate of Madness) transfer stole an orb from a keep we just captured and ran around for 10 minutes to the other side of the map to try and die in front of a BG held keep, to presumably give the orb to his team. It despawned to the top of the map when he finally did die, but was far easier to assault there than where we had it in a keep.
These dirty tactics have to stop or WvW and Anet’s attempt at balancing it via matchups is going to be a giant fruitless failure.
I would have to agree, we have 1 single target fear when there is usually several players around, so its meaningless. And even if there is only 1 its easier to come back and kill us than other classes with much better diversions.
I also feel my life runs out in no time from damage in downed state, does downed not use toughness or something? I see other classes taking a beating on the ground for 5-10 seconds and it seems like my downed health bar gets taken out in a few seconds by comparison.
Ascii, I cannot duplicate 100%+ chance to bleed on crits with two Sigils of Earth. Some still fail to provide two bleeds with scepter, or one bleed with dagger deathly swarm crits.
I never once saw 3 bleeds from Scepter auto-attack while untraited. If you did, it is likely from the free 5 point trait in your curses line which is a 1 sec bleed on crits itself – separate from the sigil.
Percentages don’t stack like that anyway in math. With two 60% chances, if they are both working your odds to proc a bleed on crit would be very high, but less than 100%. I believe 84% actually.
My testing on the test golems is getting very odd results. The scepter does appear to proc a lot with 2 sigils, prob at the 84% number, but off hand seems far less. And Feast of Corruption seems to rarely ever proc a bleed on crit, and Deathly Swarm is similar on its bounces.
Anyhow figuring out if the extra 24% to proc bleed from two sigils – if they do work – is better than straight out 5% crit sigil is rather tricky.
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From what I can tell Greater Marks with Chillblains still doesn’t work right. I can cast between two mobs and hit them with Putrid or Mark of Blood , but Chillblains will cast in the same spot in the middle of them and hit neither.
You have to be careful about making Lords too powerful or the best way to defend a structure would be to sit on top of them and spam AoE and such while he deals big dmg and tanks the enemy zerg for you. It’s already semi effective.
What they could do though is make more NPC’s spawn at keeps and towers for a side who is severely undermanned. Then despawn them if more numbers show up. They wouldn’t be as good as players, but could at least diminish night capping and rolling up the map so fast when numbers are low.
I’m not sure this should be mixed in with the WvW maps. I know DAoC vets wax nostalgic about it, but there are already too many dolts that do nothing but hang around the maze and jumping puzzles in WvW, camping it or otherwise, when they should be out defending their server.
The difference in GW2 is that there are only so many player slots in WvW. Many of these players are just wasting slots screwing around that other players that actually want to PVP could be using. This sounds like it would only massively magnify the problem. There just are not enough players in each WvW map, borderlands or EB, to afford to have a large amount of them farming PVE mobs and bosses. It would seriously dilute the main fighting.
Anet advertised that you could get top gear in this game in any number of ways and essentially based on what you liked to do in the game. Be it running dungeons, PVE events, crafting, or WvW.
Yet the gear selection for WvW is incredibly limited with every piece having Power/Vitality/Toughness.
I do not want any of this stuff. I play a Necro that wants condition damage gear. Why should the WvW gear only cater to certain classes/builds?
Now I realize that the you can take karma from WvW into PVE vendors and spend it there. It still requires you often to do long PVE chains to unlock them – often there isn’t enough people to do them – when you might rather be playing World vs World.
Then the specific WvW reward that drops, Badges, are no better. All the weapons and armor bought with badges also have…. Power/Vitality/Toughness.
It seems like the rewards in this mode are getting short shrift compared with crafting and dungeons, which offer much more variety. Including down to the looks. In WvW I don’t think the look of the armor sets changed at any level interval between 1-79. Only at 80, did the exotic set have a new look, and you only get one choice.
This is really starting to annoy. Both Balathazar and Grenth temple chains appear busted on Yak’s Bend. Grenth is for sure, because there is a missing NPC supposed to complete an event and he is just missing. Yet the event does not fail or pass, mobs have just been zerging into the event for hours and hours while people sit there and farm them.
Balthazar has not progressed for hours either, even though all the surrounding events have been completed numerous times.
There are broken skill points all over the Orr zones.
So fine, go into World vs World for a while. Whoops, one of the Garrison Keep Lords is bugged in one of our borderlands, he simply cannot be damaged and reads invulnerable. Which led to the silliness of 50 attackers sitting in the garrison holding it for all purposes except we cannot actually cap it since the Keep Lord will not die.
Anet has a lot of work to do.
Anet sold the professions in this game in a way in which each one could be built to play just about any style.
Yet the Necromancer struggles mightily to play any high or burst damage role. Let alone to have it available at a moments notice in any other build that isn’t entirely dedicated to sacrificing everything else just to fail to achieve it equally with others.
The example of the engineer is especially painful, or equally ranger, how they can rival a Necro in condition stacking, but then also flip a switch and turn on high damage almost on demand.
One of the reasons I believe the Necromancer is not matching up to other professions right now, is that his power is spread too wide, largely on account of Death Shroud.
Because we have little other survivability or escape tools, Death Shroud is essential for every Necro to use and to be in quite often. The problem is that this entirely different form does not benefit from most of our traits and abilities we use to empower our other main form weapon sets.
Most other professions do not have to split their power in this way. If they focus on power for instance or buffing up a 2h weapon, those enhancements are going to be available to them the vast majority of the time they are in combat. Except when they switch weapons, but Necro’s must do this as well – and have Death Shroud on top.
Of course there is an entire line dedicated to making Death Shroud better, to make it last longer do more damage, etc. But if you spend a lot of traits down this line, then you get much weaker in your main form, which you are in most of the time, and the same problem exists.
I think the development team has to understand that because a Necro is going to be in Death Shroud say between 10 and 40% of the time, that their abilities must be perhaps scaled up higher in base ability or damage, to compensate for that fact that they are getting less mileage out of traits and other stat bonuses that other classes and builds can make use of in a far more focused consistent manner.
If you do not sacrifice any traits or item stats to making Death Shroud better then it becomes nothing but a weak sponge form, that while helping you live a bit longer, does very little to actually move the health bar on opponents either, so they just wait you out and you’ve gained very little, except wasting time, without changing the dynamics of a fight much at all. The opponents heal is in fact refreshing at the same time, while they’ve taken little damage.
Right now the problem is even heightened because a condition build is one of the few builds that is very viable for the class, but Death Shroud makes little use of condition damage outside one fairly long cooldown ability. So Death Shroud becomes a bad combination to try and continue to execute your role in a battle.
I really do not know that there is a great solution to this dilemma as the profession mechanic won’t likely get replaced at this point. But I think some across the board upgrades, on increased scaling on certain abilities and traits needs to be looked at in order to understand and compensate for how a Necromancer must split power and attention between his different forms, and how by nature, it spreads his power thin.
what I think is that if you are good at tourneys you can probably bring your spec into a WvW game and contribute well.
Ideally, I think you need entirely different specs for sPVP and WvW. The latter its far more helpful to have a spec that helps your team or for dealing with large numbers of enemies. Or for example a speed buff, because you are running so much more in WvW, it makes much more sense than perhaps an ability that helps you in single combat more. Though if your adept you might try and switch on the fly and hope not to get surprised.
If you are an sPvP-er and you go into WvW you will see a palpable level-of-skill difference between the people you fight in sPvP and the people you fight in WvW.
I hope I’m not being a major elitist here, but in reality to be good at PvP it requires a certain amount of practice. A lot of people in WvW probably mouseclick their hotkeys and backpedal rather than sidestrafe or simply autoattack all day long.
WvW is not really about 1v1 skills. Of course they matter, but in a 20 vs 20 battle its not so important to understand what skill thief #8 just fired off. In fact, in most cases you couldn’t if you tried.
sPVP is indeed more about individual skill. WvW success is more about tactics and strategy, communication, coordination. At a group and map level even much far beyond a 5 man sPVP team.
For example, I’d rather have an average player doing something productive in WvW, being a team player, than a top 1v1 player off doing his own thing trying to gank people, which is something that really adds next to nothing to your team’s success.
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The eventual plan is for matches to be 2 weeks. This would make at least the first week and a half pointless.
It’s getting worse!
Seriously, the game was running great what seemed like a couple patches ago, even in big zerg battles.
Now today, I’m at our home keep in Eternal Battlegrounds, and the engine is not even rendering about 10 enemy players coming across a bridge within range of the cannon I’m manning, until they are right under the walls of the keep.
Meanwhile it did show about 6-8 of my own team running toward said bridge. I don’t get it. But I’d rather see more enemy and less of my allies if I really had to choose.