Guild Wars 2

Yesteday in the afternoon I noticed some [CaSu] (the alleged Canadian guild) in the Augury Rock zerg. No idea if that is a spoof guild, since tags are not unique, or a sign of the fact that they, or some of them, moved to the other French speaking server.

Confirmed. Infact we’ve seen several Vizunah guilds play on AR in the past 2 days or so. At the same time, this is when AR started nightzerging, while previously they fielded the same numbers at night as we did.

They are most likely asking for help from VS on their french forums and teach them in the ways of lame WvW nightzerging for easy wins. But hey, if that is all they care about, then next matchup they can fight their own accounts… Oh wait.

By the way, did the last patch fix ANY of the WvW bugs and exploits as undocumented changes? I get the feeling ArenaNet is ignoring the WvW exploits as they don’t comment on them. They seem more concerned about PvE players getting gear from dungeons.

Desolation borderlands did alright again this evening. It was a train wreck when I arrived but thankfully most players were interested in playing properly and with some directions, we were able to quickly take 100% of the map.

We can work wonders as long as everyone is willing to listen to a person trying to lead (and give them a chance to lead), and as long as we have atleast one person trying to lead…

On a side note, since we don’t have server forums yet (hint ArenaNet!), I hereby promote this to the… err… Desolation General WvW Section… or something.

This thread is gold. Servers wanting to team up to fight us when the reality is we have the same amount of night players. Every night, each borderland is for the most part controlled by the defending server, and EB is usually the place where one server has an advantage.

But looking at the score gains (potential points per 15 minutes), it’s usually about even.

I have little good words for neither GN or AR however, you both exploit bugs and play dirty, as a previous poster in this thread already pointed out. And now you want to try and team up aswell? You’re pathetic! Man up and fight beter, Desolation is hardly the most organised server, so stop crying.

Yes, I was thinking something like this the other day, but I believe a slightly easier way of doing this is to instead allow players with an outmanned buff to pick up 20 supply, the same way the +5 supply guild buff allows players to pick up 15 supply. Upgrade speed and cost could be reduced a bit when outmanned aswell, I certainly see that helping a lot, more so than +15% Health from switching the outmanned and orb buffs.

Another nice bug this matchup (which has been happening since release to be honest), is the Gunnars Hold borderlands untakable Garrison (lord invulnerable), and GH kindly exploiting this bug all day.

And in the same matchup, Augury Rock exploited the orb in Desolation borderlands and made it permanently theirs, even when they got no keeps left on the map.

The Augury Rock keep in EB is claimable without killing the lord first as the capture ring is permanently active.

The list goes on…

My biggest issue with Orr was the overal horrible experience in Cursed Shore. I mean, at the very least I was expecting one interesting event chain with some nasty dragons, instead, all there is, is endless “kill hordes of mobs that spawn in a single location for XX minutes”.

Straits were fine, you have a big event chain that requires 3 different lines to be completed to unlock a nice, challenging boss fight. Wonderfull first Orr zone, if it wasn’t for the horrible fact over half of it was underwater or bugged, but aside of that, it was a good first Orr zone. It set my expecations for the other two zones rather high, because this was only just the first Orr zone, right?

Malchors Leap gave me the feeling the writers kind of ‘lost the plot’. Two more temple events that kick off on a timer, without any real event chain leading up to them. The bosses here and complete jokes compared to the Straits temple boss which WIPED zergs that didn’t know the fight. The ‘escort troops across the map’ system is neither fun, or does it appear to affect the spawning of the two temple events. Why is escorting a group of useless NPCs across a map not fun? Well, first of all, because half the ‘dynamic events’ up to Orr already have you do that exact same thing, and second, players have no way of really controlling when the next group of NPC’s needs a hand walking around the map.

Cursed Shore, essentially continues the bad designs we see in Malchors Leap. It, too, lacks a big, interesting event chain/web. You got two more temples which work exactly the same way as the two in Malchors Leap, and then you get to attack/defend the gates of arah which is just more waves of the same mobs you’ve seen the past several zones. No big bang, grats you’re level 80, kill some more zombies for karma now.

TLDR: Bugs aside, Straits was a good first Orr zone with an interesting 3-way event chain leading up to a challenging boss fight, the other two zones were plain horrible in almost every single way, especially for ‘end game’ zones.

I have been leveling an alt a bit, and yes, the game right now seems more buggy than ever. It appears that, many events and skill challenges have ways of blocking up at some points after several repeats. It’s currently so bad that I can’t enter an area without reading about bugged skill challenges and encountering several bugged events in each zone.

The lack of events working forced me to level my alt entirely unlike I leveled my first character at release. Instead of simply going from 1 level zone to another, I have to visit atleast two zones of the same level range to gain enough experience to go to the next level range. Yes, this includes gathering, personal story, and WvW. There are just hardly any ‘dynamic events’ happening that are not bugged themselves, or blocked from happening by a bugged event in the chain.

Main source of experience? Grinding hearts (Yes, I said grinding, it really is a grind without many events boosting progress), and waypoints.

A lot of puzzle reward chests are bugged, and in general their rewards are… pathetic. Most only do it once for the achievement.

I have completed all jumping puzzles and I’d say about 1/3rd of them have bugged chests. Bugged chests also appear in the ‘normal PvE world’, for example the (minor spoiler) Aurora Glade event chain, after killing the last boss and following the ghost to the chest, the chest never becomes functional but opens only visually.

I have reported each of these bugs. But, just take comfort in the thought you would have gained a few terrible blue quality items only. They have no repeating value for that very reason.

Perhaps jumping puzzles need a unique gear set along with them, so say, each jumping puzzle (note: all chests have a 24h respawn time) also gives a few ‘tokens’ based on their difficulty, which can be used to buy a unique gear set. Maybe something with new stat flavours that increase chest loot rewards, movement speed, jumping height, magic find, gold find… ect. Gives people something extra to do on a daily basis (and there are a fair few puzzles one can run each day). Just to throw a positive idea into this thread.

Sorry but this is rubbish.

We are holding stonemist for over 30 hours now. Me and others have been leading past 2 days and have seen awesome players, listening to objectives, helping with upgrades, working together and we pretty much won EB yesterday.

We also took first place while the borderlands are barely holding what they have….

Sorry but can’t agree with you saying EB is not the place for organised WvW….thats just complete kittens.

My experience and that of many others is that EB, in general, is where most zerg-minded players queue up. The type of players that just want to circle cap towers and not do anything else, such as defending when needed. This has been the case in EB very often, you can’t deny facts.

However, that doesn’t mean organised EB play is entirely impossible. Clearly you have been doing well in EB so far during this week’s matchup. But because EB always has an endless queue, organised guilds rarely get in as a force, and in general, you end up with the bulk of zerg-minded players who just don’t listen.

Borderlands on the other hand, rarely have a queue outside of primetime, so managing the amount of players in those maps becomes easier, and results can be achieved without gaining a headache in the process.

But again, this is “in general”, and based on experience of myself and others, and even the queue statistics back this up. I am by no means saying “playing organised in EB is impossible”, because it is, but you need a bit of luck in terms of who ends up taking player slots. Too high a percentage of “slackers” and you get nowhere, and with long queue’s, this can be difficult to overcome.

I was playing on my Thief alt ‘Thorny Scrub’, tired of playing a ‘support’ elementalist.

Playing in a one man guild for bank space benefits! Also doing the rare WvW upgrade when influence cost allows me, which isn’t often as you might realise.

Don’t play in EB if you want organised WvW, it isn’t going to happen as all the players that never listen always queue for EB.

The whole of yesterday and early this morning (4-6 AM) our borderlands have seen improvements in organisation. Take a look at Desolation borderlands where myself and a few others actually – yes, believe it or not – managed to organise ourselves to the point where we eventually got 100% of the map. People responded fast when we needed to defend somewhere, people generally listened well in offensive sieges (we had some mindless ones ofcourse but most of the blob actually did as told).

The results were obvious, we outplayed both enemy servers and pushed them out of the map during primetime. I hope people took note, that listening and staying organised gets beter results than just zerging around aimlessly.

The best part was that Desolation borderlands didn’t have a single commander or large WvW guilds present, it was one giant ‘pug’ that did what was needed to be done, when it was needed. Also, there was almost no kittening at eachother, which was another critical factor. (Edit: Really, that filter cuts out perfectly normal words aswell? Sigh…)

Once most left the map to help in other borderlands, a WvW guild from Gunnars Hold tried to ninja all the keeps in Desolation borderlands. They managed to blitz-cap SH but we were able to call in help from other maps and stop them at DB. After we had retaken SH, no serious offensive was made by enemy servers.

So there is hope for Desolation yet, just don’t join EB.

It’s a start. It won’t solve the issues but hopefully we will stop seeing people “transfering to the winning server for the night”.

Which raises the question (no offence) how the hell are we third?

I wondered about this, but I came to the conclusion that it’s because of the score system and transfers.

When we’re winning or on more even grounds, our WvW activity sky rockets, we’ll have queue’s almost 24/7. This might aswell be because the other two servers have people transfering to us, in the same way we have people transfering to vizunah square where we’re losing.

Because we usually win against a matchup that is anything other than VS and FS (or when we have a more equal fight, we still win because suddenly, Desolation is the one with a nightzerg, and another fact is that those servers are ‘equally organised’), our score is high enough to put us 3rd, as we out-score the 3rd server at that time who is fighting against VS and FS.

As far as I am aware, most chests in the game reset every 24 hours including the EB puzzle one.

Locke.1680:

Xandax.1753:

Raap.9065:

<snip>
This post comes mainly to mock the international english speaking guilds that have been transfering from Desolation to the french server for free wins. I was laughing (or was I?) when I saw a red invader from VS with the tag ‘Gatekeepers of Desolation’. Very funny!
<snip>

Not that I doubt some people server jump to winning servers and all that – but seeing as Desolation is actually an area in the lore/game; do you actually know whether Gatekeepers of Desolation were a Desolation server guild or do you just assume because of the name?

Gatekeepers of Desolation are a pretty big guild on Desolation
Seen them recruit several times in the past week.

Aye, I know for certain this is (was?) a Desolation guild, as I’ve seen them recruit. Obviously I don’t know how many of them, or from other guilds have transfered, since I don’t have acces to such information, but I’ve seen several tags that I was sure I saw on Desolation before, and I believe I also saw a few Shiverpeaks tags on the french side, but can’t 100% verify that.

I really just hope they close free transfers… Or atleast close transfers TO high populated servers, and still allow transfers FROM high populated servers for a while.

Been reading this thread, and it seems to be an NA vs EU argument, where NA players keep saying “recruit nightcrews”.

NA players are not realising, EU has a very small timezone. While the NA playerbase goes from asia, west coast, east coast, and autralia, europe only stays in europe… The african guilds we have are in the same timezone.

So how would we recruit night crews? Exactly, we can’t.

The other argument I see is, let matchmaking put the nightzergs to face other nightzergs. Again, you do not realise that EU only has one nightzerg, the french/french-canadian server. The two other servers that fight the french are on even ground during the day, but lose everything at night. There is no way to balance this other than for arenanet to step in with fixes.

If these fixes are only for EU or not, I don’t care, since NA has a wider timezone and doesn’t have this problem in the magnitude EU currently has.

To make the whole thing worse, every free-rewards loser is transfering to the french server to join in on the late night Player vs Gate zerging. I have even seen several guilds transfer from Desolation to VS… Next time you see guilds like ‘Gatekeepers of Desolation’ on VS, be sure to laugh at them.

Are you stuck on a losing server that losses everything they fought for during night times? Are you tired of seeing your server’s work go up in smoke while you’re sleeping?

Good news! Arenanet provides the solution: You can transfer, entirely for free, to the winning server, so you can join the Player vs Gate train for free rewards too!

This post comes mainly to mock the international english speaking guilds that have been transfering from Desolation to the french server for free wins. I was laughing (or was I?) when I saw a red invader from VS with the tag ‘Gatekeepers of Desolation’. Very funny!

This explains why servers like Desolation have been suffering from a decline in WvW player activity on almost a daily basis, and this issue will continue, because the only thing the wow-generation of MMO gamers care about, is rewards, and preferably easy rewards. To them, this is the solution.

Arenanet needs to stop free transfers before we’re left with one permanently dominant server on each continent. Arenanet also needs to adjust score scaling at off-peak hours, or a lower player cap at off-hours. This is just getting silly…

It happened yet again tonight on Desolation. A french player runs into our Garrison on our border lands where we had the orb, he picks it up, and walks out of the door with it to the waiting french group and ‘gives’ it to them.

This has been happening several times now because the free server transfers make it very easy to do. Our morale instantly dropped since we already face impossible odds.

We managed secure the orb again before it got carried away, however, the altar always bugs out when this happens, and we were unable to put it back in our garrison. 15 minutes later the orb respawns at the north altar, and a blob of 50-70 french pick it up again and carry it to their completely fortified keep, because for some stupid reason the designers thought it was cool that the realm defenders cannot pick a beter orb location, and need to wait for an enemy zerg to capture it first?

This is just annoying as hell, and it is happening too often now.

Close free transfers, prevent ‘friendly’ players from picking up placed orbs, and allow defenders to decide where they want their orb; usually garrison, not an undefendable supply camp all the way north of the map.

Rather sad, yes. I don’t do any sPvP, but I run into the same problem in WvW all the time especially against thieves. The amount of damage they can deal is just stupid, not to mention often they can kill me while they are stealth (and loading players from stealth in WvW takes several seconds more), and there is entirely nothing I can do about it, even with half my gear being power/vit/toughness based.

Either classes like the thief need a massive nerf, or the elementalist needs fixing. Or more likely, both, since our current traits are… well, simply broken by design in my opinion, and that’s excluding actual bugs.

Related to the world completion reward: Since the 100% reward apparantly scales with the area to obtain it in, make sure you complete it in Cursed Shore, should you still have that option. People reported getting a lot more rewards than just the 2 gifts of exploration, but all I got was those two gifts when I completed it in the chantry of secrets (this area also yields an empty completion reward of it’s own).

Not sure if that’s accurate however. You also never get mail from the last zone you complete and the 100% completion.

Overall, very buggy, and unfair if the first part is correct. If Anet manages to fix the issues, sending out the missing items would be nice.

Those are culture armors, and not even exotic item quality (orange), but just rare item quality (yellow). They should be selling these items as a single ‘tier’ without stats, since all 3 tiers look the same anyway. Selling them without stats makes it clear to players that they are for customization perposes.

The amount of times I read people complaining about the gear grind or asking where to get gear… such a mess, and most of the confusion comes from vendor-sold gear.

If you hit level 80 and want exotic gear to cap out your stats, either craft them, or buy crafted items from other players. These items usually costs about 3.5g a piece on the current market. This is the fastest and cheapest method of obtaining max-stat gear, and gives you 7 different stats flavours to pick from aswell.

Vordus.1250:

Raap, that happens to us also, when we attack the French we start losing our stuff in the back from you guys, maybe we should ally up and kick the frenchies :P

It’s the mindless zergs that both our servers have. Organised guilds/commanders are the only things that can attempt to take charge of most of these ‘mindless ones’ and direct them. The sad part is however that these organised guilds/commanders aim for one sole perpose: Capture undefended holdings for rewards without looking at a bigger picture.

Mescaline.2743:

Every single time i join a WvW map there is rage and swearing in team chat , people claiming themself as the leader of some kind of alliance calling others in bad ways , acting in a very immature way , giving stupid orders like attacking the “already in bad position” server ( desolation , riverside ) while frenchs conquer everything .

This is indeed the case. Whenever Desolation has an organised effort and is hitting the french (succesfully I might add), Shiverpeaks comes in from behind taking our holdings while we’re on the offensive, forcing us to bail on the offensive and defend. Then, usually, after we defended, the french hit us while we’re out of supply.

This happens over, and over, and over. We’re starting to think some of your ‘organised guilds’ favour having the french win, as they are always there backstabbing us when we’re out to kill the french.

Eventually we end up with 0 holdings and you have to fight the french, server to server, and ofcourse, you lose this.

It would be alright if your mindless blob ends up backstabbing us without thinking (because zergs don’t think), as our own zergs can do the same aswell, but when I see organised Shiverpeaks guilds do a timed backstab when we’re on an offensive, it’s just pathetic.

I hope this post makes you consider if you just want to cap things for rewards, or if you wan’t to have a fighting chance against the 24/7 french zerg. This goes for any server fighting the french.

Agreed, please move it to a PvE zone. Same regarding other PvE activities in WvW, they only serve to get in the way of PvP.

I lost a few 1v1’s because of random mob aggro, especially from mobs that use crowd control in WvW (most of them do).

I can live with the jumping puzzles, since they provide a source of small scale PvP and a way for poor people to obtain a few blueprints, although I think the EB jumping puzzle needs a change in terms of when you can acces it, because at any given time we usually have 20 people in there, that’s 20 people less to fight with. Perhaps make it accesible only to the server that has all 3 orbs, doubling it as a ‘zerg bleeder’ for a larger/stronger server.

Keep it. Player creativity like this is what keeps WvW more fun in the long term. It’s simple enough to counter anyway, either build another treb, or a ballista, or charge it.

Other than the player spawn point areas, no other areas should get these ‘no build’ zones!

I guess my post was too long for anyone to bother reading it. I was hoping players would see and agree with some of these points, or atleast discuss them.

I just hope Arenanet sees the problems.

Ugh, if anything, the last remaining mobs needs to be removed from those maps. Atleast the ones out in the open. Too often random mob aggro destroys 1v1’s, especially mobs with crowd control abilities (I mean, do they really have to be there?).

WvW is not a PvE mode, so PvP balance should be resolved through the systems that support it, not gimmicks that will just end up annoying players. We already got mob camps that play a factor in the maps, anyway.

A (properly random) dragon attacking a random PvE zone on the other hand, would be more suitable.

Greetings, I’d like to just write my thoughts regarding some of the mechanics in WvW at present, and how they could improve the current situation where late night zergs will win a 24h match.

For those unaware, currently, the 24h match setup is applied to WvW by ArenaNet in an attempt to ‘balance out the servers’ and match them against ‘equal’ servers. This matchmaking process is based on the server score. The server score is, unless proved otherwise, the sole factor in this matchmaking process.

As of now, the servers reset at 00:00 GMT midnight, when most people go to sleep, what happens after this reset is what causes the main issue that WvW is currently suffering from. The hand full of servers that are capable of fielding a blob at these hours (notably the french on EU) will end up capturing all holdings almost uncontested, and upgrading their key holdings to almost untakable status. These servers gain such a large amount of score during these late/early morning hours that they by default win, as the remaining time in the 24 hour match period is not long enough to close that gap. Last but not least, they obtain the 3 Orbs with little effort, giving them a massive stat advantage the rest of the day, with Orbs locked in their upgraded keeps.

Suggestions to solve this (and related issues):

- Change the matchmaking reset time to something sensible, like early in the evening GMT for europe, and something else for NA players.

- Matchmaking process should attempt to factor more than just score. I know it likely won’t happen, but an attempt to factor the number of organised guilds on a server would help out the casual servers a lot. Desolation for example has no organised guilds what so ever, our blob is entirely mindless and has no hope of beating organised servers (myself and other people tried to organise it, it is not possible, only a small number care to do something organised), but we get put on the top tier because we simply have a lot of players.

- Change the reset period to 2 or 3 days for a while so that people got a chance to fight over a longer period, and actually consider it worthwhile to pay for upgrades. Currently the common argument is, why pay 75s for an upgrade when the matches reset in a few hours? I know eventually this is going to be a 2 week period, but while Arenanet is trying to balance the servers, I believe this balance can be obtained more accurately with a longer match period, giving servers a chance to fight for more than just late night hours to win, and a more reasonable time frame for people to consider paying for big upgrades.

- Change the Orb buff. Rather than giving the biggest zerg a stat buff which they do not need, do something different with Orbs. For example, Orbs could grant something unique ONLY to the Keep they are put in, or, a server holding all 3 Orbs gets acces to a unique area (central jumping puzzle or something else?).

- Make the outmanned buff usefull. That extra magic find will not help them when they can’t even realisticly kill anyone. The 3x Orb buff could become the new outmanned buff.

- AOE needs to be affected by line of sight. Tried defending a Keep or Tower from a zerg? You need to spawn siege equipement in very creative places to even save them from AOE damage that people cast on the wall from outside. It just promotes blobbing more, since Arrow Carts are no threat to a zerg, unless they are not on a wall but in a different choke point (Stonemist Lord room is one example).

- On the note of Arrow Carts, currently Retaliation renders them entirely useless. 50 man at your Tower and you got 15 defending? Just bail, because those Arrow Carts will get one shotted by Retaliation, assuming you even get to build any siege equipement with the AOE issue.

- And finally, there need to be more ways for a mindless zerg to try and organise. The team chat simply is not working, people don’t read it and continue to do their own thing (and die, over and over, I’m honestly wondering if they are real players sometimes, or bot farmers). I know there is a ‘commander’ feature, but no one on Desolation has this yet, and it’s just a horrible pain for people like myself to try and organise things. Eating my own fingers off seems like a more pleasant thing to do.

This touches some of what I believe are more critical issues. There are more issues, such as looting being a pain, and the audio bug that happens after 5-10 minutes of WvW, but I think those issues are too obvious to try and ‘discuss’ about.

Thanks for reading.

I play my Elementalist in PvE and WvW mainly as support, using heals and fields with the staff. I haven’t done any sPvP so please take note my comments do not involve that aspect of the game.

My ‘1v1’ with a mob can be tough since any high level mob deals lots of damage, which Elementalists can’t handle for longer periods, yet my damage compared to other classes is a lot less. It’s raw damage that’s lacking, plain and simple. I can stance dance and combo finish all I want, but other classes can go AFK with an autoclicker and still out-DPS me.

The same issue is present in PvP fights in a 1v1 situation, raw damage is lacking. Other classes reach the same DPS with 1/3rd of the user interactions required, and often with more base health aswell.

On top of that, most Elementalist utility skills are extremely lacking, giving us little build choice. I simply find myself playing support roles in PvE and WvW since I can’t carry my own weight in DPS compared to other, easier classes.

That said, it is doable to play “DPS focussed”, and I win a lot of my “1v1’s” in WvW, but it requires a ton of user interactions while the other player mostly spams 2 buttons, one of them being ‘W’. Often when the enemy dodges my big hit (air staff skill 2 notably), I fall behind on DPS and have to retreat, unless the other player is extremely bad.

I’d like to give this thread a slight bump, as I know a lot of players, including myself, are having issues during long play sessions comming from the camera turning delay and low FOV. Having options to turn off camera delay and increase FOV would be great.

Having a higher FOV also has the added benefit of being able to see more of the world than the ground next to you, and puts the work of Arenanet’s artists to greater use. Honestly I never get to see the sky unless I tilt my camera to the point where I can’t even see the ground any longer, the FOV is just that small.

Rabbitstew.2756:

I do think WvW tokens should be gained by not only killing people but also by doing map objectives. I love to kill dolyaks/kill sentries/take camps, but they don’t give any tokens whatsoever. Only if you run with the giant mobs that seem to go back and forth do you seem to get a decent amount of them.

That would be a bad thing to do. As it is, people are already ‘circle farming’ undefended holdings for their rewards (side note, lords already drop tokens if you do enough damage to them, but this is hard in a zerg). Giving more rewards to this will make people try and avoid PvP entirely.

I think either the drop rate on tokens from enemy players needs to be increased a bit, or changed. Alternatively, reduce the cost of WvWvW gear to something less insane.

There are however, ways of ‘farming’ badges. If you’re in an organised WvWvW guild, you can repeatedly bait an enemy zerg into attacking a well fortified holding, and using siege weapons to wipe them out. Good use of siege weapons and focus firing can yield 30+ tokens in a single wave of enemies (~60 seconds). However this is hard to accomplish in a mindless zerg unless you happen to man an arrow cart in a Stonemist lord room defense situation or something of that sort.