Guild Wars 2

I think world linking is a good start but it needs to factor in timezone coverage weighed against the larger of the 3 servers in a matchup. Because it isn’t just raw numbers that’s the issues, it’s the off peak coverage that’s always thrown off the balance.

Hold on, hold on, hold on. I think a little history lesson is in order here. BG is a server that’s been superstacking itself for years, even finding workarounds for the full status, to cram more people into WvW. All of this PvE/PvX stuff is…. nonsense. BG was in tier 6, then superstacked to try to push up to tier 1, destroying ever server in its way and having no problem with that. Shortly after that, SoR did the same thing, and the two clashed in tier 2 for a very long time. Eventually SoS (I think it was) fell apart, and TC came up to tier 2 being a tier 2.5 server. Then, SoR ended up superstacking again and made the push up into tier 1, while Kaineng had superstacked and ran roughshod over every server from the bottom all the way up to tier 2. Then BG eventually superstacked more and pushed into tier 1, and FA came up to tier 2.

But the reality is BG is a server that’s been superstacking all the back to around launch, and has done so in multiple tidal waves, and actively circumventing the server limits to cram even more people in. All the while playing the exact same style, regardless of who was there and who they were going against. The basic 4 map strategy, bring a blob of 50 people to every engagement, drop as much siege as you can possibly fit, and just overwhelm the smaller force. In fact, for a long while “That’s too much siege, said no one on BG ever” was BG’s catchphrase that they even used themselves. And the entire time, when dealing with even numbers, BG hasn’t fared so well. During off peak timezones, when their numerous guilds could outnumber other servers 4 to 1, that’s when they paper the other servers’ borderland and EB third, and pretty much run constant karma trains after that to keep it paper. And this goes all the way back from 2012 to today.

So, the reality recap is, BG pioneered the fields of “coverage wars” and “siege wars” as well as “blob wars”. So…. for anyone on BG to complain about that is disingenuous at best. And for anyone to call BG a PvE/PvX server is nowhere even close to accurate.

Right now, BG is the only tier 1 server. TC is tier 1.5, YB is tier 2. DB might be tier 2 as well, but beyond that, I’m not sure. What I do know is that the only server with tier 1 coverage is BG, because they’ve been superstacking for as long as superstacking has existed.

Kano.3720:

Nice idea. Don’t worry too much about negative feedback, most people on the forums are arrogant/stubborn on their own ideas and just narrow minded. The only thing I yet to figure out is just a way to make people loyal to a server. people talk about bandwagon, its not a system problem, its a problem created by players themselves. Just need to add motivation to server loyalty and motivation to play wvw frequently.

Loyalty rewards. Make it like a reward track, only over a much longer period of time, such as one level per week, up to 10 weeks, and have it give unique/WvW specific rewards. Things like WvW specific skins and minis, as well as fairly large boxes of superior blueprints, for example. To qualify, you’d have to complete one regular reward track per week. Then add a 2-4 week cooldown period post transfer, where a person couldn’t enter WvW at all, and you’d see a LOT less hopping around.

Personally, I’d much rather have the quaggans back. The thunder temple was a lot more strategically relevant than the ruins are. Being able to let the lightning strikes take out the defensive siege in the keeps corresponding to the nodes held was a good way a small team could soften up a keep before the main assault.

The current ruins are just a way they shoehorned in the worst part of the orbs, the buffs, without putting the best part of the orbs back in. No one wanted the buffs back. People wanted the capture, the run, the chase, the extra objective, the importance of holding a keep on each map. But because they couldn’t be bothered to hire GMs to ban hackers and exploiters (desite thousands of reports, a lot of them usually included video evidenc), they removed a strategically important area to slap “esports” into the middle, and the worst part of the orbs brought back.

And what happens now? A zerg blobs the ruins, and the biggest server gets even stronger as a result. Roamers? Yeah, you’re fodder when the blob rolls in. You might be able to come back in after the blob’s gone, but by then it won’t matter. They already accomplished what they needed to there, and now you have to fight at a disadvantage to try to get it back. Either that, or a few people just sneak in when no one’s around, and just….. stand there for a few minutes.

Personally, I’d rather both the center area and the orbs be restored to how they were at launch, with some GMs around to actually punish cheaters. It takes a lot more time, energy and resources to have to keep coming up with new duct tape solutions (that still usually don’t seem all that effective) than it would to just do the job right the first time.

Cecilia.5179:

This idea recently occured to me, and I think it might be a part of what WvW needs
Laffingseals made an excellent point in his video that gw2 WvW is old. The biggest issues in WvW are same matchups endlessly and same meta
There’s a really fun solution to the first issue. Destroy everything. Beat out the dusty old rug, make new servers and redistribute the entire game population randomly.
Now there’s a problem that you and your guild are scattered. Simple fix: enable monthly faction changes (or quarterly). Now everybody can reunite their guilds. However, it is unlikely that everybody will find themselves in the same fights again, because if things get stale, they can simply move out with their guild or find a new guild on a different server.
Will server pairs still exist? Yes, but they change more frequently. I think weekly or bi weekly would be best. What’s the difference? Enemies will be able to know if you’re on server a or server b and because everything was redistributed, there will no longer be hugely disproportionate differences in the server sizes.
There will be chaos, bandwagoning, and politics; but it will be different.
Tl;dr points
A) new servers, new people, new population
B) monthly free/cheap transfers that allow guilds to have a greater influence
C) current server congestion would be permanently destroyed
D) enemies being able to see both server nameplates aids server pride of paired servers

On a side note, I think WvW should have its own independent balance instead of PvE balance, because they are way too different to be balanced the same.

I actually mentioned a similar idea to a few people a little while back. What I think they should do is put everyone back on their native server, then give everyone 1 free transfer. Impose a hard cap, so that no server can just re-superstack. It’ll be a bit rough initially, since guild members may end up split across multiple servers, but with enough warning ahead of time, and good planning on the part of the players in the guild, They can all get back together easily enough. It won’t necessarily be on the same server, since some of them are filled well beyond capacity, which would mean that some guilds would need to spread out. The result would be some shifting of the ranks, hopefully which would be done quickly, and then far more even matches. Once the ranks are settled in, the hard caps can be relaxed a bit to allow any remaining players to rejoin their guild members. It would need active Anet attention, to ensure that everything settles into the proper place in a couple of weeks, rather than allowing Glicko to sort things out over a few months.

Let’s be honest, it’s not the numbers during NA primetime (for NA servers) or EU primetime (for Eu servers) that are causing the biggest complications. It’s the numbers outside of those primetimes that are. The ideal goal is for everyone to be fighting against an equal number of opponents, regardless of what timezone anyone plays in. The only way to do that is to reset things to undo the damage that was done with “coverage hoarding”, and to have people spread back out. One way or another. I don’t know if it’s possible, but if the timezones a player actually plays in could be tracked, that would be the best way to ensure somewhat balanced matchups.

The risks with this, though, is that some guilds may end up locked out of the server they had previously transferred to, and may not want to play on any other server. Which very well could result in them leaving the game. Guilds could also end up split up across multiple servers and not able to fully reform. But…. most of the people I’ve run across prefer balanced fights, so this could potentially work. If nothing else, it could be an option in a poll.

Najten.2418:

Merendel.7128:

This has been mentioned off and on for the last couple months. Yes they didnt put up a big flashing alert on the launcher telling us “Were removing gifts of battle from the vendor tomorrow” but we had warning that it would be coming some point soon. I bought 6 of the things when I first heard about it, I doubt I’ll craft that many legendaries but I figured I’d have them just in case.

Honestly 500 badges was prety cheep anyway. A good zerg could get that in an evening or two or even daily’s for a couple weeks as 2 of them on average are soloable every day. Even on the reward tracks it wont be all that hard as you can get almost 1 tier of them every 15 minutes just roaming around hiting camps and sentries.

So assume you’re going for a WvW title; kill x ammount of Dolyaks. Would you be happy if it’s removed next patch, and ok with the info if it was mentioned as a sidenote under “New Titles for Heart of Thorns Areas”? ‘Also, as a result of this change we will be removing all WvW titles in an upcoming patch.’

Actually, when I first started playing WvW, I had hoped to get the Realm Defender title, but that was removed because people were just burning supply on repairing walls and building useless siege. So…. yeah….. I cowboyed up and I dealt with it, and moved on with my life. It’s called being an adult.

So…. basically, this dude’s trying to hold WvW hostage. Awesome. Someone has to have a very severe void in their life to sink to this level, especially over a shiny in a video game. There’s no words to properly articulate just how pathetic this is. I do hope this dude tries it, though, and ends up getting banned for it. Then he doesn’t get any legendary at all. That’s called cosmic justice.

And the real irony is that now it’s actually easier to get the GoB than it was before. Follow a tag and spam AoE, just like you’d do during a champ train, and you’ll get it in a few hours. Resort to threatening to sabotage your server, trying to hold WvW hostage until the devs cave, and hopefully you’ll be finding yourself unable to log in at all, and needing to find a new game to throw a tantrum in.

About the Desert Borderlands…..

Do the towers have any relevance to the keeps? Do they help defend them? Can they be used as staging posts to attack them? No? Then it’s a bad map. Everything else is just additional problems. But the lack of strategic relevance and cohesion of the areas is the root problem. Those aren’t issues that can be solved by forcing yourself to play on it. Those are issues you don’t even have to log in to be able to recognize. That’s a major problem at the very core of the entire building process. Everything else is just problems with the details. If the foundation is faulty, it doesn’t matter what’s built on top of it. I don’t care if you know ever nook and cranny of a house, if the foundation isn’t solid, it’s going to collapse. And the foundation of any map is the layout of the major areas, and the layout of the Desert Borderland is deeply flawed. Alpine isn’t exactly perfect, but Desert took the problems Alpine had and made them far worse. The areas have zero cohesion on DBL, and until that’s changed, it will always be a bad map.

To put it another way, think of a pizza. The layout of the areas is the crust. Everything else is the toppings. People can argue forever about whether they’d prefer pepperoni or mushrooms or green peppers on it, but if the crust is made from a cow pie, it’s all going to taste like crap.

I’ve been very hard on Anet over the years, very hard on them, due to the lack of attention they had shown WvW, the lack of understand of how WvW operates and needs to operate, and the disconnect between them and the playerbase. That being said, I’m very happy with the way they’ve been approaching things recently, the attention they’ve been giving to WvW, and for how they’re reaching out to the community to get real feedback.

In my opinion, WvW has certainly improved since they began with their current efforts, and it looks like it will get even better as they continue. This was the dramatic shift that’s been so desperately needed to pull WvW out of the tailspin it was in, and while it’s not a “wave of a magic wand, poof, everything’s perfect” situation, there have been gradual steady improvements.

Hopefully, this greater understanding will lead to more pronounced improvements in the future, such as a new map that actually is functional for WvW and is designed around strategic layout rather than a thematic landscape. And hopefully they’ll continue getting community feedback every step of the way to ensure that it will be a map people will enjoy playing.

While I do agree than a well informed opinion is far more valuable than an uniformed opinion, customer feedback on all levels is crucial for success. Will every step of the way be perfect? No, there will still be misteps here and there, but overall the general direction of the game mode will be moving towards a much better state. One that will bring a few old players back, and help attract new players as well. I can’t really complain about that.

Mighty Sorceress.2387:

omg, yes, thank you! This is a great thing for small guilds! Also, may i make a request for there to be a reward track that awards purely siege (superior preferably). I think a lot of wvw players would appreciate working/playing towards something as useful as that. Thanks again for the change to the aura orders!

I second this suggestion, emphatically. As someone who tends to set up defenses every day, I tend to go through tons of blueprints. Sometimes multiple times a day. Commanders tend to burn through blueprints just as fast. This would go a long way towards helping us all out.

To raid for 2 hours every couple nights and usually lose half the map.

To blame every failure on “pugs not in TS”

To spam “get on the tag, get on TS” in map chat, and nothing else except for their guild recruitment info when their raid is over.

To shamelessly pat themselves on the back no matter how badly they failed.

To act as though their main commander is a messiah.

To expect reverence and fealty from the lowly peasants that don’t have the same tag over their head.

To not have anyone handle map maintenance or defense (or, at most, have 1 girl doing it) then complain when areas get lost.

To behave like frat boys who are too drunk to go to class and will end up flipping burgers for a living.

To avoid anything that even vaguely resembles “work” or “effort” or heaven forbid “strategy”

To be farming PvE during tough matches, yet back in force during easy matches, asking people to leave the map so they can get their full guild in.

To come and go, to bandwagon onto the server then bandwagon off just as fast when their egos aren’t appeased, or get bruised.

To implode under the weight of their own drama.

To try to dictate everything about their players’ game time. From classes, to builds, to roles, to playstyle, regardless of what works and fits the player best, and then to try to expand that outwards to others not in their guilds.

To essentially be cults, complete with indoctrination, removal of analytical thinking, and demonizing anything and everything outside the cult, and especially to demonize and harass anyone who presents logic and facts to disagree with them.

Yeah, it’s not an ideal nor pleasant list, but I have realistic expectations from guilds. Granted, this doesn’t hold true for all guilds, but this list is accurate for the majority that I’ve seen. Though it should be noted that this isn’t limited to any one server, nor even just this game.

Daemonne.5018:

That’s a variant definitely worth looking at.

1 tower per Keep, Owning the tower gains the Keep Defender a buff, not owning the tower = Keep with no extra buff.

2 Towers for the Garrison. 2 towers = double buff 1 tower = single buff No towers = normal level upgrade no buff. This would take out Penalties/Debuffs on the Keeps/Garrisons
Also it wouldn’t be as difficult as having to obtain multiple. The buffs should still be strong enough to make taking the tower(s) a priority prior to attempts to take down Keeps/Garrison.

I like the Yak idea. I left out camps and yaks as I figured I had enough to work with on the towers for now without spreading the focus to thin.

Eventually after (if of course) the towers show promise, even owning the Keeps could end up with an effect on the Garrison. But one step at a time or we could end up in a worse situation as far as balance goes.

i like the idea of the keeps having an effect on the garrison. The question would be which direction to go in. Have it add additional layers of buffs to the garrison for the home server, or have a keep remove 1 layer of the garrison’s buff for the away server so that servers are encouraged to take their corner first?

I like this idea. Combined with a proper layout of the areas, it would make the towers very strategically relevant. Though, I would make it so that just the tower(s) that share the same yak path as a keep provide the benefits. So NET and NWT would be tied to garri, SET would be tied to the hills, and SWT would be tied to the bay.

Also, I’d lower the benefits one stage from what you’re proposing, and add a twist. I think that the yaks should take supplies to the towers, then a second set of yaks should take that to the keep. So if a tower isn’t held, the keep wouldn’t get supplies, and if the camp isn’t held, the keep would be able to at least get whatever supplies the tower had in it as long as the yak makes it from the tower to the keep. Though that might require a change in the layout, but….. to really make the towers strategically relevant a change in the layout is necessary. (swap the position of the north camp and the garrison, for starters, so that the towers are actually in front of the keep instead of behind it)

I’m on TC, and I’ve been having a lot of fun the past couple of weeks. Sure, things get pretty rough at times, but that’s part of what makes it fun. If it wasn’t challenging, it would be boring as hell, and I’d be playing something else. Sure, our numbers have dropped significantly, but every server has their fair weather players that come out for the easy matches and fade away during the tough ones, so that’s to be expected. But it’s good to see how many are still coming out in the face of impossible odds, who will get knocked down but not knocked out. Brings back a lot of fond memories, and makes me pretty optimistic about the future of the server. So… yeah, I don’t really have any complaints about the matchup, and I hope we get to face BG every week because they’ve always provided the challenge that we need. TC’s always needed its back to be against the wall, broken and bleeding, to be at its best. Sure, we’re losing fair weathers, but we’re also making new zombies.

Ultra Hades.4691:

Come to TC and play OCX, pls show us how to do it.

I’m already on TC, and I’ll be happy to teach you how to do this at every tower and every keep on the borderlands. I can also teach you how to effectively desiege each area as well, so that when you get your fight it won’t be under 10 carts.

You already know how to contact me, just name a time and place.

The thing is, even if you put waypoints in the towers, they still wouldn’t have much strategic value. I’ve always said that the alpine towers had minor strategic value, for the reasons pointed out in the OP. To give them actual strategic value, it’s not about what gimmicks you can tack onto them. Strategic value boils down to the 3 rules of real estate. Location, location, location. In order for them to have any real strategic purpose, they have to actually fulfill the purpose actual towers would have. They have to be placed strategically, to act as forward outposts for the keep. They can’t be forward outposts if they’re behind. That one fact is what kills the strategic value, and no amount of gimmicks or duct tape solutions will change that. Anything else is just a waste of time, energy and dev resources.

Now, if they somehow do break down and fix the locations of the areas so that they actually have strategic value, then waypoints in the towers would be a good idea at tier 3.

You miss being able to do this to contest circles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j54bkD-3Nr0

What you’re looking at as basically useless cannon fodder, you should be looking at as potential students. The last thing you want is for people to have EotM be their basic training for WvW. Then all they’re good for is running karma trains. And when that isn’t viable, they’ll end up getting farmed, pushed back into your spawn, and then leaving WvW. You want them coming up in the trenches, facing challenges and overcoming them. Learning the intricacies and strategies of the maps. That’s what makes them valuable players. Not just being a warm body with a working finger to spam 1.

Offair.2563:

Skynet.7201:

Swagger.1459:

Skynet.7201:

No no no x infinity cubed.

So are you saying you like a struggling wvw that will need a ton of developer manipulation to balance? A wvw that doesn’t even receive 1/10th of the development that pve does?

I know the devs are trying, but it’s easy to see the road ahead. Something big needs to happen to make WvW better for the long run.

We are coming up on four years into the game. Why the hell would we want a whole revamp done to a game mode that we love? If I wanted a “new” game, I’d play something else.

He just want to megaserver wvw and be the one that killed it.

“Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” – Alfred Pennyworth

Josh XT.6053:

Sartharina.3542:

Clearly, the reason why BG and DB are teaming up against TC is because it takes two long-standing Tier 1 servers to even have a hope of taking us down! =D

Except the “double team” does not exist.

There’s certainly nothing widespread, but there has been some minor collusion here and there. Certain roaming guilds trading flips of the north camp in TCBL for most of yesterday, while standing peacefully beside each other isn’t something that can be mistaken. But…. that’s pretty much just certain people who have grudges being petty and spiteful. (And no, it wasn’t any of the guilds that left recently)

As a whole though, no, there’s no double team going on. Just smart map politics, and and we need step up our game, and get back to being able to hold down our own borderland too. A lot of very bad choices happened over the years which need to finally be corrected. Will it happen? I don’t know. But those bad choices need to be undone if TC wants to handle this level of competition. Otherwise, we’re just going to keep getting pushed back into our garrison by BG, while DB take an occasional swing at us at opportune times. I think a lot of people had gotten used to resting back during the easy matches in T2, so a tough matchup is exactly what we’ve been needing. It’s like just starting a workout after your muscles have atrophied. There’s bound to be some pain and occasional groaning, but… in time that’ll all fade away as people get used to exercising again. Personally, I welcome the challenge, and look forward to the benefits that it will provide.

At one point earlier today, our home borderland had a queue and EB actually didn’t for a change. People were in shock. I think it’s safe to say that if you’re not finding people in the Alpine borderlands, you’re not actually looking.

I’m on TC, and I had a blast on TCBL last night. A ton of great fights brought right to the doorstep. BG and DB came out of the gate gunning, and caught us with our pants down a bit, but…. we kinda needed that as a wakeup call. We’re going to have a challenge on our hands for the first time in a long time. I look forward to it, it’s the most fun I’ve had in this game in a full year, if not longer. Now it’s time to cowboy up, get back to the basics, adapt, and come back out swinging. What’s not to love?

Swagger, you’ve been pushing for megaservers since HoT came out, and countless people have said no, given numerous reasons why it wouldn’t work. Which you’ve blatantly ignored, while you’ve single mindedly pushed your agenda of turning WvW into the EotM that you love. WvW is not, nor should it ever be EotM 2.0. You can spew the same few lines of rhetoric all you want, but it doesn’t change that.

The server linking showed that people do still have server pride. While, yes, the bandwagon guilds that hop from server to server never had any, they’ve also been kitten to WvW as a whole, and should never be catered to. Catering to those bandwagoners, by killing off server communities, would be the biggest disaster WvW’s ever seen. If you thought things were empty in the Desert Borderland after HoT released, you’d quickly find out what empty really is when there aren’t enough players left to fill one tier worth of servers.

It’s a bad idea, that will kill WvW if implimented, and one that people (aside from server hopping bandwagon guilds) have been rejecting and will continue to reject. Let it go.

Now, moving on to the single map idea, that’s just plain not feasible. There are indeed technical limitations. The devs have already flat out stated that the maps are as large as they possibly can be already. They just plain can’t make them any larger. So that’s not going to work either.

Three simple solutions.

1. Allow for a dueling option in PvE

2 Duelers gather at the windmill near the south camp, like the GvG guilds used to, and no one will bother them there and they won’t be bothering anyone else.

3. Duelers gather in OS, like the GvG guilds eventually did, and no one will bother them there and they won’t be bothering anyone else.

The only things that need to be done to fix the Alpine map are the garrison and north camp switching places, and the two norther towers slid north to within treb range of the new garrison location. Do that, call it a day.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see the quaggans back, but they’re not a need. The location swap is, and it’s the only real need the Alpine map has.

DeWolfe.2174:

You folks realize the Mega Server still tries to place everyone of a World on the same map instance right? Even right now, if you look around in the cities, you’ll find players of our linked worlds being prioritized to the same instance. With that said, I’d still rather have the Capital Cities be Worlder only instances.

The OP’s idea is still absurd. Though if you wanted “Alliances” then the Dev’s could simply make special Guilds, outside of our regular guilds, that we can join. The big thing is that these guilds cannot be player controlled.

The thing about megaservers is, it was flawed from the get-go. They never perfected it, so there’s still mixed groups and people are still put on different instances. That made things a major headache for the RP community as well. Even people in parties still get split up and need to be pulled into the instance, as long as it’s not already full. So, that’s another plus for making cities server based again. It’ll help two communities that have kicked in the junk by the megaserver, and go a long way in restoring community relations with Anet too.

Here’s a MUCH better idea, that was stated countless times by countless people. Make the cities server based again. Then guilds could recruit people from their actual servers again, and servers could actually call in for backup again, and WvW could get influxes of new players again.

So….. kick PUGS out of WvW entirely…?

Josh XT.6053:

I think the amount of points rewarded should be determined by how much resistance there is. Basically count how many players are online in WvW in one server vs the other server.

Whatever percentage one server is out numbering the other by is the deducted off the amount of points they would be receiving that tick.

So if server A has 10% more people in WvW than server B within the 15 minute point tick, they receive 10% less points that tick. So if they were at 400PPT but outnumbered the others by 10%, they get 360 points that tick instead.

Same goes for the reverse way, if they’re out numbered by 10%, they get 10% more points than they have that tick.

That seems like that would be a BALANCED way of scoring.

Simple, elegant, and while it may not be 100% perfect, it would a good step in the right direction that would an all encompassing solution. It doesn’t focus on any specific timezone, and it accounts for population imbalance during peak hours as well. I would add one thing though, to try to prevent people from gaming the system, and that would be to have it calculate the average over the previous hour to determine the numbers used to get the percentages. Then people can’t log out en masse just before the tick to try to manipulate the score.

Gaile Gray.6029:

What? You have purple. That’s all you need!

Ok, I really don’t know if there’s an option to add colors or a plan to do so. But just in case, what would be on the wish list? Keep in mind the tag should be visible on the mini and world/overhead map, so it might be best to suggest bold, non-metallic, non-transparent-ish colors.

What’s I’d suggest to do is to keep the current colors, add orange and green so that all three primary and all three seconday colors are available, and then let players use their guild symbols as their tags as well. That gives unguilded players a decent variety to work with, as well as more options for the server in general. And it also gives guilds visible recognition, and takes care of the “private guild tag” issue as well, since people will be able to see the tags and know which guilds will welcome people to join them and which ones prefer to run privately, reducing the amount of arguing and harassment that can and does go on already.

It should be pretty easy to take the existing guild symbol and shrink it down to half or one third size and put it in its own box next to the other colors and you’ve just created a TON of options with minimal work. Everyone wins, everyone’s happy.

Isis.3841:

So far only eotm is ok but i am worried about it as well.

Is it? Or is the megaserver system they’re using for it just hiding the problem behind smoke and mirrors? That is, afterall, the reason it was introduced in PvE. To hide the fact that the playerbase had shrunk to the point where world events just plain couldn’t be done on a lot of servers. Cause people will see the 80 other people around them, and not realize that’s only a small portion of how many there used to be. It’s noticeable with regular servers, but with megaservers the problem is easily swept under the rug and ignored.

Notsoperky.4291:

Only a wvw player is grateful when the devs finally get around to discussing changes to the achievements after 3 years, coming soon with HoT..

Only a WvW player is still waiting for said changes to be discussed 6 months later.

Personally, I’ve always felt that the commander tags should be locked behind an actual test. I’ve seen a lot of good commanders over the years who wouldn’t have any problems passing a test of strategic knowledge, and lot of really bad commanders that shouldn’t have ever been leading anything that would never have been in the position to be allowed to if they had to show they were actually capable of it. I still stand by that. Being a commander is a LOT more than watching some videos on youtube, screaming out “bomb bomb bomb” on TS and then blaming pugs when you wipe. There’s too many commanders who do that already, and all they manage to accomplish is driving people off.

A gold cost isn’t a good barrier, because anyone can bypass it. I’ve had situations where I was leading a group and we were pushing into an area, and I told everyone to take the stairs and get onto the wall. However, when it came time to push in, someone popped a tag and drew half of the group into a chokepoint to get farmed. Before they separated OS, there used to be a dude who would pop a tag in there and try to call people in so he could be a jumping puzzle commander. Just because someone can grind out enough to buy a tag, that doesn’t mean they should actually be able to actually have one.

If there’s a test, that actually tests their strategic ability, sure, you’d have fewer commanders, but the ones you would have would actually be good at it. They’d end up causing more players to come in, rather than causing existing players to leave. And the more players there are, the bigger the pool to find quality commanders would be. Which would be a lot healthier for WvW overall.

Ricky.4706:

ouch, I love wp’s reviews – I have to say ….though I know he didn’t intend to focus on it…..the one thing that stands out is that anet keeps dropping the ball on their promises – almost anything that was hype “didn’t turn out that way” or “Changed their focus” “this was said 2 years ago” and unfortunately it seems to be branded on Anet now to the point that anything they announce now is considered a lie. I’m not saying thats the case, but as wp puts it, “hindsight is 20/20” and just about every form of hype put out by anet is now considered more smoke and mirrors than a dependable promise. simply put, the trust is gone and marketing will backfire with the wave of comments that point out these failed promises. It’s as if you can depend on anet to not live up to the hype now :x That’s not a good thing to trust

Tough spot to be in when the trust is gone from most of the community. that lack of trust will end gw faster than any bug or bad update because it becomes personal to any player whose preferred mode of playing was ignored.

I have to agree with you on this assessment. I mean, I wish that I could argue against it, since that’s a pretty sad state of affairs, but…. that’s just how it is. Since launch, there have been numerous significant missteps, and instead of trying to correct them, or trying to learn from them to do better next time, or even just owning up and admitting them, they’ve just focused on hyping up their next thing. Which always just repeated the same pattern. After this long, people know what to expect. Sure, there’s new players or the occasional white knight who try to argue, but…. the evidence is overwhelming. Trust is a very fragile thing, that’s very hard to rebuild once broken. At this point, it’s been shattered into pieces, and people know what to expect. They need to stop hyping things and just focusing on fixing thing.

1. A new map. No. A GOOD new map. The maps need to have actual strategic layouts, where taking an area gives you a territorial advantage, and losing an area gives you a territorial disadvantage. Not PPT. Not colored dots on the map screen. Actual territorial advantages and disadvantages. So when someone asks “why are we taking this tower?” The answer is ‘because it will make taking their keep easier." And when someone asks “Why are we defending this tower?” The answer is "We need to hold this tower or they’ll be able to press our keep". Everything needs to be viewed from the perspective of “If I were to actually build towers, camps and keeps in this terrain that I actually wanted to hold onto, where would I put them?” This thread has a few examples of maps that we brainstormed up 3 months ago: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Constructive-Features-for-a-good-BL-map/first There’s explanations and pictures.

2. Incentive. No, not shinies and loot, though that does need bumped waaaaay up. I mean real incentive. Ok, we’re going into try to take over their map. Why? Why are our groups pushing the front line? Ok, we take a tower, then a keep, then another tower, then their garrison. So what? What’s the purpose behind it? PPT? A karma train? Just a way to kill some time in the evening? Those can’t be the justification, because they’re extremely weak justification. When the orbs were in, there was a clear incentive to get those and hold them. If you held an orb, your entire sire got a stat boost, which made everything easier. A clear incentive. What do you get if you take a borderland? Points? This isn’t Pacman. There needs to be a legitimate justification for people to want to take and hold territory. A war game needs to be like chess. Thought, counter thought. Planning moves in advance. Splitting your forces for specific purposes, all tying together into one overall strategy. If you watch any decent chess match, they’re positioning their pieces around rook and knights that they need to pin or remove for their strategy to be effective. They’re not just flinging all their pieces towards the king and hoping they happen to somehow have more pieces than the other guy. Hell, put a “king” piece in each server’s garrison on their home borderland, if that king gets killed all territory owned by that side reverts to neutral. Now the incentive is to defend your king, while trying to kill the enemy king. People need to defend the king, and want to try to kill the enemy king. If yours gets killed, he respawns when you take the place back.

3. GMs. This should have been a given since day 1. There needs to be 1 GM in every match. How many countless hacks and exploits have happened that wouldn’t have if there were actual GMs around to watch, then ban anyone doing it? When there’s no punishment for these things, it tells everyone that they don’t need to worry about playing fairly. If that message is sent, the game loses any sense of integrity, and it drains people’s interest.

4. Better scoring and ranking system. PPT is absurdly easy to abuse and thus everything else becomes irrelevant. Lost your tier 3 garrison? Meh, just flip it back before the next tick. Well, if we’re just going to flip things back before the tick, why bother defending them at all? Screw it, call the gold farmers, karma train. As for Glicko, it certainly has its proper uses. This is not one of them. Ever. Despite whatever alterations are made to it. At all. Glick is used for 1 on 1 contests where competitors are consistent in both ability and presence. WvW is a 1 on 1 on 1, where competitors vary drastically in numbers and ability from one minute to the next. Furthermore, in WvW an entire side can just plain give up for the week, which wreaks havoc on the glicko system. Add in the fact that a server can drop a tier, absolutely slaughter both other servers and still somehow lose rating, and it’s crap system. Glicko is a system smart people developed for chess and dumb people try to steal for other purposes because “hey, dem smart guys use it, it gots ta be good!” Hire someone who actually understands numerical systems and make your own. Worst case scenario, go with something basic and have it reset every now and then.

5. Coverage. Before anyone says anything about megaservers, stop. Look, the issue with coverage has never really been NA coverage on the NA servers or EU coverage on the EU servers. Those are pretty much fine, and trying to cram them all together into a megaserver system won’t actually fix any problems. It will only create new ones. The current problem is that a small number of people who play outside of the server’s prime time are able to completely skew the score and territory with little to no resistance. Their contributions are worth 10 times what the majority of the players on all 3 servers contribute. At the very least. Aside from tier 1, servers don’t have round the clock coverage. They just don’t. And they probably don’t even have that in tier 1 anymore either. They have timezones where they have a lot of people, and timezones where they barely have anyone. It’s all a matter of who can recruit the right guilds to take advantage of the other servers’ coverage gaps. Thus rendering everyone else irrelevant, and rendering the entire match irrelevant.

Notice a theme? With the way things are set up, nothing matters at all. Territory, strategy, points, ranking, actually bothering to even log in. Every aspect of that needs to change. And not just minor tinkering. A complete 180 dregree turn in the complete opposite direction everything’s been moving in. People actually need to have a reason to care about things, or they won’t. If they don’t care, they won’t bother with it. And if everything about the game is irrelevant, people will go play anything else that can actually draw their interest in. That’s what was going on before HoT released. HoT walked up those those people who were already losing interest and kicked them all in the groin. The maps are gimmick filled disasters. The guild upgrades were blatant theft. And the new masteries not working in WvW was a slap in the face. The 6 months of silence afterward, while the playerbase was crying out and begging, was just heartless. You NEED to make things right. And that goes well beyond just fixing the game. This entire situation was a PR nightmare. Countless paying customers were driven off in droves and felt relieved to get away from you. If you don’t fix the game AND fix the damage that was done to the community, you might as well just pull the plug now. No one’s going to pay to get treated like dirt by a video game. It’s just never going to fly. So you gotta cowboy up, fix the problems, make amends and heal the wounds you created. No more moping about negative feedback on reddit, no more ignoring your own forums. No more acting like your playerbase are mindless hamsters on treadmills. And no more telling people what to like instead of actually listening when they tell you. It’s not about you. It’s about the consumer.

Dawdler.8521:

Lord Kuru.3685:

From the reddit AMA on moving resets to Saturday:

“This is a conversation we’re going to need to have with y’all. We moved to Saturday because sometimes we do a build on Fridays and just about the time we wanted to activate the build was during the reset time. So we thought it would be better if there was no conflict in the timing of those things. Since people love Friday, but we might do a build on Friday, we need to talk about exactly what time of day would be good for the community, and then adjust based on that.”

So they still think maybe, sometimes having a new build on Fridays is worth losing probably 20% – 25% of weekly activity? Either they’re not being straightforward with the real reason reset is on Saturday, or they really don’t care about the loss of population.

The problem with this is that the saturday “solution” still make no sense whatsoever, especially since few patches on friday affected WvW (its all about enabling sPvP and PvE weekend events). Even if this was a concern (after 3 years for some reason) the answer was stupid simple – patch an hour earlier, dont patch 20 minutes after reset. Or even better – dont patch at all on friday unless its absolutely critical.

Also add in that when they made the switch, the reason given was that according to their metrics, more people play on Saturdays than on Fridays. Patches seems to be a new excuse.

Sird.4536:

Phantom.8130:

Can this thread be stickied, so that it doesn’t keep falling off the page, and people can post their suggestions here instead of making new threads for them?

Mods don’t operate in this section of the forum.

It seems they have their phasers set on “Lock” today so let’s hope they don’t end up targeting this one.

Haralin.1473:

They will make it an expansion pack for 2017 and it will cost 39 $/€

Preorder gets a new WvW Gilder and Autoloot for WvW

I see you still have optimism left.

I’d think it’s more likely that preorders will open up the option for people to buy a WvW glider for 1000 gems, and autoloot for 1500. Both would be per character.

It would be interesting if it could provide an area buff while the drum was being played. Nothing over the top, but 1 stack of might or some minor swiftness or something to all friendlies within a certain radius.

Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Time out. Time out. Time out.

The GW2 forums are two separate stories. There are the PvE and PvP forums, where the devs actively filter through the topics and communicate regularly. Then there are the WvW forums, where they don’t say a word. WvW is currently a disaster. Yet people are making up BS excuses and acting like Anet is able to handle something on one section of the forums, yet turn into drooling imbeciles and can’t handle the same exact thing on another section of the forums? Really? “Oh, it’s super tough technical stuff and it’s really really hard and complicated, so it’s ok for them to be incompetent at their jobs, and no meanies are allowed to say that they are, cause it might hurt their feelings!” And….. we’re supposed to fall for that….? Really….?

Look, if they can do the job in one section of the forums, they can do them in all sections of the forums. To state otherwise is completely disingenuous, and pure BS. The fact is, they show what’s important to them through where they focus their communication efforts. PvE and now PvP are important to them. They couldn’t care less about WvW. To ask everyone to just ignore everything over the past 3 years is insane and stupid. No. Pay attention too, and stop asking people to bury their head in the sand. Look at how they treated the RP crowd. They tried to placate them with hollow words, while actively screwing them over. The same exact thing they’ve been doing to the WvW crowd. With the PvP and PvE crowds, they’re actively engaging them in conversation, and putting real effort into improving those game modes. They’re not ignoring suggestions, pushing hideously flawed content out once every couple of years despite feedback explaining the flaws, then hiding behind a wall of silence for months with PvE and PvP. Why should it be acceptable for it to happen in WvW? And why shouldn’t customers be allowed to voice their displeasure about it? Because some White Knights on a forum expect everyone to deify video game developers, and demonize anyone who isn’t kowtowing to them? Fortunately, the playerbase isn’t that stupid, and a good portion have spoken louder than any words could. They’ve left. That trumps pretty much any apologetic mental gymnastics. Until Anet starts treating WvW with the same level of dedication they’re giving PvE and PvP, and that includes communication on the forums as well, it’s just going to keep going downhill. That isn’t an unreasonable request. That isn’t too much to ask for. That should have been standard from the very beginning.

The OP raises a very interesting question, and one we’re all feeling the sting of as well. What is the motivation to enter WvW and fight to win? Why do it? Looking at things from a practical standpoint, the actual provided motivation is twofold. To advance your server’s ranking, and the PvE buffs if those even still exist. However…… server ranking is largely static, and the glicko system was never designed to be used the way it has been. So the actual provided motivation has largely been an illusion. Smoke and mirrors. And that problem trickles down to the entire rest of the game play. Why take that tower? Due to bad map design, just PPT. Why bother with PPT? To win the match. Why bother to win the match? To try to raise your Glicko rating. Why bother to raise your rating? To move up the ranks. Why bother to move up the ranks? To get to the top tier. Why bother to get to the top tier? To…… have a year of the same exact matchup. Why bother with that? Because there aren’t any games currently on the market that handle things any better. Why isn’t there any games that handle things any better? Because game developers are basically slaves to the money, and the money tends to be absolutely clueless and couldn’t care less about the quality of the product, as long as they get a good return on their investment.

Seasons was really the only actual motivation that WvW ever had. Sure, a couple of guilds could go down to the bottom tier and try to raise a sever up through the rankings, but…. why bother? There’s no carrot being dangled, there’s no brass ring to grab, there’s no trophy for 1st place.

So the only actual motivation comes from the players. You do it for your server community. You do it for your guild. You do it for personal improvement. You do it to kick back and relax for an evening. Unfortunately, that resulted in the situation that was going on before HoT came out. Where a good number of people weren’t sticking around for the game, and had actually grown pretty bored/fed up with the game itself, but were sticking around for their server, their guild, their own personal achievements, or simply because they didn’t have anything better to do. Then HoT came out, and severely escalated everyone’s frustrations with the game. Those who were on the fence, left. Those who had recently returned turned right back around and walked right back out. The game had reached a point where its level of failure had outgrown the motivation to stay for a lot of people. And the lackluster responses from Anet only furthered that downward slide. Which actually eroded the player created motivation, essentially turning the situation into a downward spiral.

So what’s the point of WvW? Unless you were 100% happy with WvW before, and have deep connections with either your server or your guild…… there really isn’t any, anymore. Anet hasn’t provided any, and has actually managed to do a good deal of damage to the player created motivations. Though there is actually one motivation, and it’s actually growing stronger. Morbid curiosity, to see just how much more damage Anet can do before things completely bottom out. Though a lot of people are just as easily watching this death spiral from the safety of other games.

Lightsbane.9012:

like, i’m seriously wondering why anet continuously attempts to re-invent the wheel here. the current system is …how it was on core launch day? Minus the workers.

Hmm….

Lightsbane.9012:

Minus the workers.

Anet took dey’re jerbs!

This is a concept that’s been discussed several times in the past. I’m all for the idea. I tend to place a lot of siege, and I’d like to be able to adjust something I didn’t put in quite the right spot, or remove something that turned out to be pretty much useless. However, it needs to have failsafes. Otherwise, a troll will just come by after any cooldowns, and tear it down and will most likely just burn the supplies on troll siege. Then you run into the weird situation of a troll and a legitimate player going back and forth tearing down each other’s siege and rebuilding their own. Which actually works to the troll’s advantage, since more supplies would need to be spent with each rebuilding.

One failsafe idea we kicked around was a public vote, and/or having it so only a commander would be able to deconstruct siege. Sure, you’d get the occasional troll that would be stupid enough to tag up to deconstruct siege, but…. that would just make it easier to report them. Granted, that doesn’t mean much if Anet doesn’t actually do anything about them. But it does let everyone on the map know exactly who’s deconstructing what at least. Names on who placed the siege would help too.

But….. Anet’s solution will probably just be an NPC that places all of the siege (improperly) at a structure for you the instant you flip the towers, so the karma train can keep on chugging.

i’d like this idea, because zergs would need to actually take a moment to repair the damage they just did, instead of cap-and-run, cap-and-run to each objective and leave the work for some other poor sucker to take care of. It would also encourage them to be a bit more careful and precise in their attack methods, rather than to just fling bodies and siege at a keep until eventually gets overrun.

The main downside that I can see is that it would encourage zergs to avoid anywhere there’s actually defenders, and encourage attacking empty keeps/towers. However, proper map design, where they’d have to deal with defenders no matter where they attacked, would easily solve that problem. You want people fighting over objectives, and fighting on the way to objectives. You don’t want people avoiding fights and attacking abandoned buildings. Sure, it’s fun to ninja things, but that should be a precise strike from a small team, with careful coordination with the main zerg to pull off. The direct and the indirect, straight from Sun Tzu.

I can do it in one word.

“Soon”

Dayra.7405:

I wonder, if I am the first (outside ANet) who ever noticed that, but

The basic design of WvW is not PvP, but three teams that are in a race of doing PvE-event.

Capping an objective is an PvE-event, killing or escorting a dolly is an PvE-event. The difficulty of this PvE-Event only determines the reward: player-wise (loot, karma, Exp …) as well as server-wise (points of the objective). The amount of player (defender as well as attacker) have zero influence on the reward (only on the speed of getting it, sometimes in denying). That is also the explanation why EotM had better rewards: The PvE-Events where harder (doors always upgraded, lords more difficult) and therefore are more rewarding.

The only PvP-aspect of it is: instead of PvEing faster, you can decide to disturb an enemy team to slow it down in it’s race.

This also explains why ANet never had problems with Off-Time-Capping: The PvE-Event is the same, so should be the reward.

WvW-Improvements in this sight are therefore are better i.e. more demanding and variant PvE-events. Which explains very well why the new BLs (and EotM) are as they are.

No wonder that WvW and EotM have a tendency to mutate to champ-trains, that’s what they are designwise.

Maybe WvW would be better, if we would have a more PvP-centric design.

How could a more PvP-centric design look like?

Now that you mention it, that does make a lot of sense and seem to fit the state of things perfectly. The overall incentives are designed from a PvE standpoint, so champ trains are the natural result. In fact, it could even be said that PvP has persisted in spite of the overall design, rather than because of it. It’s a testament to the WvW community, really.

Now, as to how to change it, a few quick fixes aren’t going to cut it. Things need to be designed from the foundation on up with incentivizing PvP in mind. The maps have to have a strategic layout, first and foremost. So that strategy is actual strategy, rather than exploitation of loopholes. The point worth of areas needs to be related to its upgrade level, and how many were killed during its capture/defense. The rewards needs to be handled in a similar fashion. The auto-upgrades need to go. The gimmicks need to go. The center event needs to go. The orbs should come back, but with a different benefit to having them than stat buffs. I’d like to see player collision added, so that positioning and formations would become important, but I know that’s a pipe dream. Classes need to be balanced, and all made at least viable in main rolls (zerging, roaming, etc). Bugs and exploits need to be fixed. Pretty much all of the guild upgrades need to be reworked. Actual GMs need to be added, so that people using hacks or abusing exploits can be banned in a timely manner.

Essentially, they need to hit the reset button on WvW, re-fix culling, and then go in the complete opposite direction as they have been. Something I’m sure they’re not going to do.

The last time I went into EotM, it was pretty much identical to how the champ trains used to run in Queensdale. Very little PvP whatsoever. However, for all the of PvE we were doing (pretty much on autopilot) we were getting rewards that contributed towards a PvP game mode (WvW). Wxp ranks and badges, primarily. It wouldn’t be much different if we got Wxp ranks and badges from clearing out the temples in Orr. Sure, every once in a while, players would break down and actually fight each other, but it certainly wasn’t commonplace. There was only one time I’ve ever been in EotM where players actually fighting players actually was common, and that was during season 2 when the guild I was in went there on reset night because all of the WvW maps were full and we were the ones initiating all of the fights. It’s basically WvW-lite.

I’d hardly say that qualifies as a testing grounds for WvW, nor as a replica of WvW to handle overflowing queues. So it’s failed in its intention. In fact, I’d be willing to wager that if they turned PvP off in EotM, very little would change. However, if they got rid of EotM, the majority of the players would just go back to PvE and making occasional trips into WvW when they wanted to get Wxp ranks or Badges, while a smaller number of players would just go back to WvW full time. If they just got rid of the Wxp ranks and badges in EotM, it would probably just take a significant hit in population.

And that’s something else that needs to be mentioned. Look, don’t believe everything you see. The megaserver system is an illusion. The reason they brought it into PvE was because the population on the servers were so low that many of them couldn’t handle doing the world events. Just because you see 80 other people running around, that doesn’t mean that there’s numerous other instances with identical numbers. It just means that all 24 NA servers have been mashed together to make one or two full ones. The same goes for EotM. If they merged all of the servers into tier 1 and 2, all of the maps would be full too. That doesn’t mean that anything is healthy. It just means that the obvious problems have been swept under the rug. Just something to con the rubes.

And yes, EotM has had a negative impact on WvW’s population. Only an idiot would argue otherwise. Before EotM, players used to come into WvW to get badges or finish the map completion for their legendaries. Not all of them stayed, but enough did that there was healthy influx of new players. EotM took away that influx. So when natural population turnover happens, there aren’t any replacements, and the numbers gradually go down. It certainly wasn’t the only factor, but it did play a part. As did the PvE megaservers, since servers weren’t able to do rallying calls in the cities, to bring new players in. Both EotM and the PvE megaservers are 25% of the problem. The other 75% is horrible design decisions, neglect, and complete lack of communication from the WvW design “team” (I’m pretty sure it was just Devon Carter, a bowling bat with a hat and a picture of Mel Gibson from Braveheart for a good 8 months until Hugh got in trouble and they stuck him down in the basement too.)

At this point, the game as a whole is dying. Don’t let the megaserver illusion fool you. That’s why they went back on their original intention to not put out any expansions. There wasn’t enough money coming in from their shrinking playerbase, so they decided to con a bunch of people out of $50 each. And true to Anet’s style, it’s a short term “solution” that only hurts them in the long term. They’ve been sacrificing the future for the here-and-now since they put out ascended gear, and the house of cards everything is built on is now crumbling. There aren’t any quick fixes that’ll work anymore. The only thing they can do is reset everything back to how it was at launch, and go in the complete opposite direction to even have a chance to save things. But they’re not going to, because that would be admitting that they made mistakes. And Anet’s proven to be incapable of admitting their mistakes. So they’ll just keep slapping poisoned band-aid on top of poisoned band-aid until all that’s left is just a festering corpse. WvW will just be the first major casualty.

A guild symbol commander tag. Instead of displaying a colored dorito, it displayed your guild symbol over your head and on the map.

Tower/Keep customization kits. To give an area we claimed a personal touch. Nothing that would affect the layout, just cosmetic changes to make it feel more like it was ours.

Yak Customization Kit. Something that could be used at a claimed camp to alter the appearance of the packs the yaks wear. Put a guild symbol on it, have a few options for different packs, etc.

That being said, I saw the direction Anet was pushing WvW a couple years back and made the conscious decision not to support them with any money based on that. Everything since then has only gone deeper and deeper into the proverbial rabbit hole, gradually building up to the disaster we now have. From everything I’ve seen from Anet, they’re just going to keep going in this direction, despite the countless protests from countless players and all of the people who have left because of it. So it doesn’t matter what they stick in the gem shop. In good conscience, I just can’t give them any money until they make a product that I can actually be happy about supporting. Several other games have gotten money from me, and I’ve been happy to spend it. But they’ve actually earned it through the quality of their product. Not though flat out lies, endless hype (that turns out to be more lies), and horribly flawed game design.

If the only two options are the Desert Borderland an the Alpine Borderland, then Alpine wins hands down. That being said, I don’t want either of them. Alpine was fun, but it had some issues, and after 3 years a chance of scenery is needed. Both things should have been taken care of with the Desert Borderland, but they failed miserably. They actively made the problems the Alpine map had worse, and then added a ton of gimmicks to everything. We need a new map, but we need a good new map. We need strategic layouts of the objectives. We need flat areas between them for open field fighting. We need large scale and small scale fights to be encouraged by the map’s design. We don’t need a layout that promotes karma training. We don’t need gimmick mechanics. We don’t need automatic upgrades. We don’t need PvE events that lag the servers so bad that people actually stop what they’re doing and wait until it’s over, even if they’re in the middle of a fight.

Unfortunately, Anet doesn’t seem to get it and doesn’t seem to be capable of admitting their mistakes. So I don’t expect a good new map to ever come out from them, and I don’t even expect them to go back to the lesser of two evils with the Alpine map. I fully expect them to steer even further into the skid, and just keep doubling down and making everything even worse.

In retrospect, one has to wonder if Devon Carter was actually shielding us from the “if you’re into WvW, you’re really into PvE” management at Anet, and they ended up just getting him out of the way so they could push forward with their HoT disaster without having to listen to anyone telling they’re wrong.

Dawdler.8521:

Phantom.8130:

To me, it kinda boils down to location. If people are dueling off in the corner of a map, who cares? Let them have their fun.

So what do you think about the areas around SM? Just curious, as its by far the most popular dueling spots (more often than not, the only spot) and it can sometimes cause SM to be contested.

Personally I dont care for dueling or GvG. I just walk past what I consider to be a fair fight where my allies determine whether they live or die. If they die because I didnt “help”… so be it. A good fight is what gets the heart pumping.

Eithet way 1v2 (or more) is the ultimate test of your combat skills, hugging that dueling safety blanket does not impress me.

Well, it’s right next to an objective, which means there’s going to be traffic coming though. SM especially is going to be a heavy traffic area. So someone coming through and interrupting them is pretty much guaranteed. And if it’s causing SM to become contested, it’s having an impact on the WvW gameplay itself, since it would be typing up a waypoint. They’re pretty much making themselves giant targets, and if they get killed or if someone jumps in, it’s really their own fault for their choice of location.

People used to duel and GvG south of the windmill on the old borderlands, and that was perfectly fine, since it was out of the way, and didn’t really have much impact on anyone else. Except when queues would become an issue. But a friendly talk would usually resolve that. Now, if they were holding their GvG in between the garrison and Hills, they’d pretty much have to expect jump ins and they wouldn’t really have a leg to stand on if they were to complain.