Guild Wars 2

Should probably have a serious discussion about spectators and advertising games in advance.

The sheer number of trolls at the VII vs Scnd match, made it take twice as long as it should have. Should also be noted that having 60+ spectators on the hill creates a significant FPS drop for those GvGing. If the match wasn’t advertised in advance, and wasn’t streamed live, but instead recorded and uploaded later, then I’m pretty sure the match would’ve gone alot more smoothly.

That said, I can see the merits of having lots of spectators to create a “party” atmosphere, and advertising in advance to get lots of viewers on streams helps the community grow.

I’m not sure what the answer is tbh.

Fuzzion.2504:

Hugh, wear PVT Armour, carry a legendary , buy a TS channel, tuck some maintenance oil in your vest, bring a bottle of lemograss soup and most importantly, hire 14 bodyguards.

He’ll need to put up a public commander tag, because there’s no way for those 14 bodyguards to group up with him currently

The entirety of the WvW population, the collective effort of every single player to ever enter WvW, millions of players across 51 servers, from lowly newbie all the way up to forum-troll-master, playing non-stop for an entire year has achieved….. 23 Yakslapper titles.

http://www.guildwars2hub.com/news/guild-wars-2-first-year-infographic

Just let that sink in :P It’s totally an achievable goal for an individual!

Zerg-busting has far more to do with the quality of the zerg than the quality of the “busters”. 10 guys can rip apart a scattered mess of 50 upscale beginners, but don’t stand a chance against 50 fully geared veterans stacking tightly and spiking together. The top zerg-busting guilds, running between 15 and 30 players, can often roll across blobs of 80+, but if that blob contains one or two decently co-ordinated guilds then they’ll fail. The variable isn’t how well the zerg-busting guild is playing, it’s whether the blob is a herd of PvE-newbies following a blue-dorrito, or is a mass of veterans on teamspeak.

People often don’t take this into consideration, and only consider the quality of the “busting” group.

It’s pretty disgusting that now, if you want to stay competitive, you pretty much have to grind a legendary.

Ascended is time-gated, so can’t even be considered an option if you want any more than only one build on only one character.

Then again, judging by WXP, that’s working as intended :/

This goes way beyond guilds. There needs to be a reason for anyone to defend, because right now it’s just a boring waste of time. By any measure you care to use, whether PPT or loot or just fun fights, attacking is always more worthwhile.

A 10-second internal cooldown wouldn’t ruin them, considering the 5 stacks from 6th rune last 10 seconds. The ability to maintain 5 stacks of confusion nearly 100% of the time isn’t underpowered at all, but it isn’t game-breaking either. IMO, what’s broken about them is that you can get all the way up to 25 stacks very easily.

Luiz Swordbreaker.6547:

A suggestion for the “orb buff”.
Instead of stat buffs, why not make something like:
“Every enemy player killed is worth 1 point to your server’s score”
Kinda like the yak killing bonus works right now. That would probably be a reason for people to go out and have fights and kill people, wouldn’t affect roaming and GvGs, and still be something worth fighting for.
Heck, if you have the buff and go do a GvG and win, you’d actually be doing your server a favor, so people would stop complaining that we’re only taking queue space!

If they do this, my respect for ANet would go up by many many orders of magnitude. That would be an awesome way to encourage fighting instead of PvD, and to make both small-scale roaming and hardcore-guild zerg-busting feel more relevant to WvW.

Tsezar.6950:

th probelm with this runes is the duration as well.. i got today 20 stacks confusuin wich last like 15 sec.. 15 sec wehre you cant do anything when you already have low hp

Can’t do anything…… except cleanse the condition.

But only noobs slot condition cleanse right?

MartyPartys.9187:

Reztek.7805:

Trollomatic Immunity /evilgrin

It’s just been revoked!

kittennit.7648:

There is no info at all if its going to be a stat buff or not

It’s true there’s nothing conclusive. However, it has been heavily implied in various places that the buff will be the same as or similar to the old orb-buff.

I hope that isn’t the case and will be delighted to be proven wrong, but you can’t blame us for assuming so when all the evidence points that way.

DevonCarver.5370:

I’ll post this here as well:

WvW is a game type that we believe very strongly in. We’ve seen that people have been organizing their own combat in WvW and that’s really cool, but WvW requires changes that are not always in step with the gameplay that has been emerging. Our focus is on making WvW as strong as it can be and we will continue to make changes with that in mind. We have been and will continue to discuss these open field battles, but in the meantime the changes we make to WvW will always have that game type first and foremost in mind.

Firstly, thank you for recognising our existance.

I can fully understand that the WvW team wants to focus on WvW, and that infact if we’re ever going to see a separate GvG map/mode it’ll most likely come from the sPvP guys and not WvW. That’s fair enough.

I think what frustrates and confuses the GvG community most is that out of all the possible changes you could make, and all the possible fixes WvW needs, you go straight for the option that will make GvG virtually impossible and has a good chance of killing off the scene. And despite you acknowledging this, you’re going ahead with it anyway. It feels rather like we’re being targeted for punishment.

Do remember that GvG guilds are also WvW guilds and that pushing them to quit will have repercussions for WvW as a whole.

y u hate me Jdge :<

Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should, and doesn’t absolve you from being a kitten.

Why are you sitting in a griffin tonic with your kite out wasting valuable queue slots and not earning your server any points?

There’s a clear link between you using tonics and your server’s performance. Ban tonics in WvW!

These are the new maps guys!

They may look like the old ones, but they’re brighter!

The problem is that it’s effectively a never-ending character progression. At the rate they’re currently releasing masteries, nobody is ever going to complete them all (at least, nobody with any life outside GW2). So you can’t really compare it to the PvE character progression, where you can reach level 80 in just a few days.

If I could “complete” WvW character progression in, say, a month and then move onto progressing a different character, then it would be a totally different story.

The other problem is that this character progression has a real, significant impact on combat, and as such you can’t just ignore it as “roleplay” or “aesthetic”. Up until now, post-lvl-80 character progression has been stuff like new shiny skins and story-mode, which you can do if you like, but you aren’t at a disadvantage if you choose not to follow them.

Art.9820:

Ragnar.4257:

Can you do 20v20 in sPvP? No? Enough said.

when did you people decide GvG is where you fight 20v20 or 15v15?

Did you people consider all the balance factors? Are you guild wars 2 designers? No? Enough said.

if they ever reintroduce GvG where you fight 8v8 I hope you guys don’t complain about it, this is just a mini-game mode made by the community I really don’t consider it GvG at all…..

I direct you to point 7.

Advent Leader.1083:

Chiming in: one thing I noticed in GvG is that it promotes heavy booning, with blast multipliers and the likes. I think that’s the reason why ranged can’t propagate well in GvG – retaliation countering multi-shot ranged plays, as well as conditions not even penetrating through with the prevalence of condition time reduction food, almost nullifying spread condi, and weakening duration boosted condi. Just two cents, though.

Well, the aoe-limit is in part to blame for melee-balling. However, the main reason for melee being the meta is because only melee can effectively “burst”, and because it’s much easier to focus melee-damage on a single point (“everyone stick tight to leader and spam skills around him”) than it is to focus ranged damage (particularly if you can’t use the target-system because you have to target the leader instead).

Because it’s incredibly easy to get back to full health if you survive a clash, the strategy in GvG, and high-end WvW in general, is to make sure you burst players all the way from full-health to downed before they can even react, escape, and recover. Melee are just much better at providing that insta-kill burst damage.

You can make ranged-damage work, but it’s much harder to do effectively.

I wouldn’t mind banning food buffs, however, unlike stacks you can’t get rid of them. So if you wanted everyone to do without, you’d likely spend alot of time stood around waiting for food to time-out.

Thesilentflute.8761:

If you don’t already understand your not going to. My advice is read the Art Of War or Platos the Republic these will help you understand cause and effect among other things.

Oh we understand what you think is happening, that an hour or two of demoralising play will cause people to lose morale and log out, creating a knock-on effect for several hours or days.

It’s just that, in reality, GvG has barely anything to do with this, and in alot of cases does more than enough to raise morale of certain players to cancel any negative effects.

And Sun Tzu is totally relevant to a video game where you can respawn an infinite number of times. Totally relevant.

Thesilentflute.8761:

It is about the tide of battle and sadly it is something I can’t teach you about here.

Another example is blackgate had 2 gvgs last week one at reset and one on sunday both against sor and there first loss in weeks the winner was jq with no gvgs.

I had fish for dinner twice last week, when I haven’t had it for months before that.

You’d better ban me from eating fish before BG lose another match!

GvG’s last, at most, 2 hours, which is 8 point-ticks. Even if the other server can gain a full +695 tick for that entire period, they can still only gain 5560 points. And in reality they’ll probably only be ticking +100 above the other servers, not +600, so a GvG is unlikely to make any more than 500-1000 points difference, or even no difference at all.

“don’t assume your ignorance is fact” did you say?

@assasin of warr: IMO the best thing to do is to simply avoid ever using map-chat or commander tags, and to not advertise your GvG beforehand. Instead, record the match and share it publicly later. Trolls don’t camp in the GvG spot 24/7, they come when they hear stuff’s happening. And they come with the specific goal of getting an angry response, so stay calm and polite and eventually they’ll get bored and go away.

@Thesilentflute: zergs attempting (and failing) to run over GvG teams is usually the highlight of an evening :P

4. “It’s an Elitist Ego-Contest”

Obviously there’s a certain amount of that going on. This is the internet, and GvG is a community with thousands of members, so there will always be some. But for the most part, GvGers aren’t doing it for bragging rights. They’re doing it to experience the most intense and exciting combat WvW, and indeed GW2, can offer.
And there’s nothing elitist about it. Anyone can form a GvG-team, and they will always be able to find opponents. The top teams are always willing to have sparring matches with newer teams, as it gives them a chance to try new tactics and keep in practice.

5. "It’s detrimental to the server, to the “real” WvW effort"

Firstly, remember that there are jumping puzzles, crafting stations, vistas, skill-points, and PvE mobs by the hundred in WvW. WvW was clearly intended to cater to a wider audience than simply “follow the commander”, so if that really upsets you how about you go take your anger to the guys using the crafting stations first.

Secondly, some people seem to think that the guilds who GvG don’t do anything else, and never help the server. This is quite simply false. The vast majority of guilds who GvG spend 6 days a week playing WvW “properly”, that is taking, defending and upgrading keeps/towers, and then set aside 1 evening per week for GvG/training/skirmishes/dueling.

Take a look at gw2gvg.com . Every single one of the guilds registered on that site are assets to their server, backbones even in some cases. If the guilds who enjoy GvG were to leave your server, your server would drop several tiers within the space of a week. I’m not even exaggerating. These are WvW guilds that spend countless hours tearing down T3 keeps, busting zergs, and propping up your server, and you can’t even let them have 1 hour a week for some rest and relaxation? You think making these guilds bored/frustrated enough to leave your server is going to help your server?

6. “It takes up queue space”

This is, of course, sometimes true. However, GvGers dislike queues just as much as anyone else and will seek out maps that don’t have them. It’s incredibly frustrating to be unable to start because a single key-player is stuck in queue.

Sometimes it just can’t be avoided. But then consider; is it better to get 20 extra upscale casuals in for one hour, or is it better to have an active, enthusiastic, skillfull guild on your server for the rest of the entire week? If you’re concerned for your server’s points, the answer should be obvious.

By the way, I’m not saying casuals don’t have a right to play, I’m talking merely from a cold-hard-points perspective. If you want to debate “right to play”, then I would direct you back to the jumping puzzles and crafting stations, and the non-sensical server transfer system. Sort those out first.

7. “It isn’t GvG. GvG was in GW1 and was totally different”

This has got to be the stupidest argument to ever appear on these forums. GvG just means “Guild versus Guild”, ie. 2 guilds going against each other in a contest. Its just like “Deathmatch” or “Capture the Flag”; a generic name for a game mode. GW1 does not have “rights” over the term GvG. You could call two guilds having a race to collect the most copper “GvG” if you like. It’s just a name.

8. “It’s kill-trading and badge/WXP farming”

Seriously?

Above (world) rank 5, all chests give the same (or have the same chance of dropping) level of loot. There is no improvement after rank 5.

You can get rares and exotics, and even ascended, from these chests, but the drop rate is very low. From ~200 chests I’ve opened, I’ve had I think 2 exotics, 10-15 rares, and the rest all greens.

Gudradain.3892:

Halo.8976:

Gudradain.3892:

GvG is sPvP with more number. Go talk about it on sPvP forum and ask for your deathmatch arena with spectators.

WvW is zergballing for karma and loot. Might as well just to PvE and farm some champions or dragons.

Only for those that don’t know how to play WvW…

WvW is strategic and intensive use of siege weapon as well as complex community organization in order to achieve total domination against the opposing servers!

And in the same way, GvG is only sPvP to those that don’t know how to play GvG.

Your petard, sir; you appear to have hoisted it.

@lordkrall: That’s utter nonsense. The vast majority of guilds who GvG spend 6 days a week playing WvW “properly”, that is taking, defending and upgrading keeps/towers, and then set aside 1 evening per week for GvG/training/skirmishes/dueling.

If you think GvG guilds do nothing other than GvG, then you simply display your ignorance of the community.

Furiousbeard.7602:

We cant blame the players that burnt themselves out?

Preventing burnout and population decline by adding new and varied content to keep up interest is pretty much exactly the job description for game developers post-launch.

Admittedly, it’s an un-ending and un-winnable task and you can’t please everyone. But blaming players for getting bored is a silly way of thinking.

Inb4:

“OMG why you no take WvW seriously? Your server mates are trying to help the server and you waste valuable queue slots with your silly role-play community events! Go do that in sPvP and stop having fun!”

Seriously though, that video’s awesome

You kinda answered your own question in your post. Sure 27% extra damage for cannons is a better stat increase than 2500 HP. But the number of times you’re likely to use a cannon, compared to the number of times you’re likely to gain 5 stacks, makes cannon-mastery a joke. 2500 extra HP is always useful, cannon mastery is useful for, if you’re lucky, 2 minutes per week.

Mizhas.8536:

In the first place both guard killing stacking bonuses should be removed/changed. No one cared about account Wxp before theese became so popular because of the absurdly OP bonuses that they gave.

Those 2 bonuses break the powergap between vet players and new players. Only exp and skill should do that.
Without theese 2 Wxp traitlines soulbound system would have sense because no character would need the same thing than other.

This.

I wouldn’t care at all about character vs account bound WXP, if those 2 traits weren’t in the game. However, since they are, I feel obliged to bring the character I have those traits on for guild raids. 250 vitality and 100 power is not insignificant. And the prospect of grinding out 230 world-ranks if I want to change “main”…… lolwut?

As for “Liquid WXP”, this is a clear admission on the part of ANet that they know they got it wrong with character-bound WXP, but that it is more work than they’re willing to do to repair the system. So instead, just add an item.

DevonCarver.5370:

Equinox.4195:

So, in regards to GvG and openfield, I don’t see a lot of “rampant speculation” going on. If nothing else, you chose your words poorly. The complaints about this new system potentially killing the GvG scene is entirely grounded.

This forum and this topic in particular are about WvW. WvW is about sieging and controlling objectives and about open field combat. All our changes are with that totality in mind and will continue to be.

Well at least we’ve got that clarified.

We’re now clear that the hardcore/dedicated/veteran WvWers who want fair, balanced and interesting competition will continue to be 2nd class citizens, and that no support for GvG or small-scale-roaming is planned, at least not within the next 2 years.

We can rest easy now and stop speculating/hoping.

EDIT: I come across as more scathing than I mean to be there. I appreciate you dropping in and giving us some insight and feedback on the direction of WvW, rather than getting “the silent treatment”. But its difficult not to be disappointed by statements like that.

You’re right Vena, its much better if the server in first place can sit with T3 keeps and a stat buff. And golden mushrooms.

Why do you assume Gamadorn is talking about point-total, and not PPT, for determining who is “weakest” ?

http://mos.millenium.org/eu

Take a look at the Elona/Gandara/FSP matchup, and the Drakkar/RoS/Blacktide matchup.

Now honestly tell me that an objective-held stat-bonus will do anything other than turn these blow-outs into full on genocide.

If the game was so perfectly balanced that ppt was always exactly equal, then I would agree that adding a little imbalance to shake things up would be good. But we already have more than enough imbalance, tyvm.

EU doesn’t count though, right? Everything outside America is a lie made up by communists.

IMO it would be better to move away from “rankings” and “champions”. It would be better if GW2GvG.com was simply a record of matches so we can see what’s going on in the community.

Guilds change over time, they rise and fall, rise again, and sometimes just disappear. They’re also constrained by the WvW matchups in who they can face. Some guilds only do 10v10, others won’t do less than 20v20. Without a standardised format, and without the ability for guilds from any server to play each other, the whole “rankings” system is pretty meaningless.

Just play for the fights.

Thief is a much more forgiving class when you’re learning, because you can escape/evade almost any fight if you’re feeling uncomfortable. Warrior can escape well as well….. on one specific build. Thief has a dozen builds that are all good at escape.

I main warrior and love it, but while you’re getting to grips with WvW I’d recommend thief.

dzeRnumbrd.6129:

The main issue is that you want an objective to be difficult to open/take when there overwhelming numbers outside (e.g., 80 outside vs 15 inside) – but easy to open when there are smaller (5 vs 10) or even numbers (18 vs 22) outside.

This is the heart of the problem. You want to make it possible for 10-20 players to be able to make a decent attempt at defending against a blob of 80, because zerging down T3 keeps in under 2 minutes is both boring and stupid. But if you do that, you make it basically impossible for any smaller groups to ever successfully attack a defended keep.

IMO, all that’s needed is a cap of damage-per-second on gates (and walls). Make it so gates can’t take any more damage than (for example) 3 rams (4-5 golems) worth. This means that a group of 20 is just as much of a threat to a tower as a group of 80.

A thousand times no.

Following a zerg around is no better a measure of a good commander than the willingness to spend 100G on it.

I know plenty of excellent commanders who have far less WXP than your average zergling. This is because they aren’t farmers and instead spend their time seigeing up towers and scouting.
Are they not good enough for you? Should they not be allowed to command?

Convenant.7092:

Ragnar.4257:

You have far too much faith in people doing what is best for themselves.

People zerg because they’re lazy and hate being killed. Even if you increase the rewards for small group play 100x, people would still rather just auto-run and auto-attack with one hand while their other hand is doing, well, you fill in that blank.

I fully support what you’re trying to achieve, but I’m not sure this will change much.

Completely false. Did you even read his post? You are unbelievable. IF they made changes to hurt zergs (penalities for large numbers, nerf of downed state, increase of AoE cap, stronger AoE abilities), then small-men would be able to better compete vs the skilless ‘’guild groups’’ (aka 40 people with the same tag being completely innefficient while stroking themselves). Numerous times have we been able to down 15 of them out of 30 within the first 10 seconds, only to have them all rally by one person getting stomped. So even if they got completely outplayed, the mechanics of the game hurts small-men.

Then obviously there will be more small-men, since it’ll be easier and more accessible to all.

Did you even read his post? He didn’t say anything about AoE cap or downed state. He only commented on rewards/loot.

How about you read before accusing others of not doing so.

And I remain unconvinced that changing loot/rewards will make people stop zerging. People don’t zerg to make money, PvE will always be better for that. They do it to laugh in the face of the other server while requiring almost no effort on their part.

urieldhynne.2743:

Azraelle.1683:

d/d backstab thieves can’t do much vs armored targets(guardian, warrior, bunker ele, eng)

Lol, i am a guardian with 3400 armor and 19k health with defensive traits and they back stab me for 5/6k damage when i am without defensive boons (and they can spam it).

This game has no resilience vs critical damage (this game has no resilience at all), and you can raise the critical damage what scale WAY better than defensive stats like toughness. Critical damage is too kitten powerful in this game.

Obviously if vs ligth armor they can output a 12k critic, sure they do less damage vs high armor if only hit by 5/6k. But 1/4 health in 1 spameable hit is really high anyway.

Why are you ever without defensive boons? Quite easy to spec for 100% uptime on Protection, Regeneration and Retaliation for guardian. Not to mention all the various blocks and blinds you have to negate backstab.
Thief cannot down a decent bunker guardian. A decent thief will never get downed by a guardian either, but that’s a different discussion.

You have far too much faith in people doing what is best for themselves.

People zerg because they’re lazy and hate being killed. Even if you increase the rewards for small group play 100x, people would still rather just auto-run and auto-attack with one hand while their other hand is doing, well, you fill in that blank.

I fully support what you’re trying to achieve, but I’m not sure this will change much.

Make sure you aren’t running Beserker/Rampager gear. That works in PvE, but is horrible in WvW. Thieves are specifically designed to punish glass cannons, but against a guardian or warrior in full Soldiers gear with defensive traits, they can barely do anything.

I totally agree that WvW needs some variety. Orbs and a map-change will make things seem fresh for a few weeks, but 6 months from now it’ll once again feel tired and repetitive.
Things need to change on a weekly, if not a daily basis. Of course I don’t expect a new map every day, but maybe some different achievements to aim for or events to complete each week (PvP, not PvE events). I made a rather lengthy post about this a few weeks back, which met with general approval. But of course ANet and their bum-lickers on the forums keep insisting nobody is making any useful or thought-out suggestions.

I’m not sure 24-hour matchups will help all that much. You’ll probably end up with even bigger blow-outs. People will decide “well, we’re not winning today, best not bother, and try again tomorrow”. It’s easy to throw in the towel on a 24-hour match, harder to do so on a week-long match. And of course some servers are very strong on weekends and weak on other days, so rankings would become useless. IMO 3 days is the minimum for a matchup that people will care about.

It depends what you mean by “roaming”.

If you want to only take undefended camps and dolyaks, and avoid all fights apart from ganking lone players, then undoubtedly Thief/Thief is better for that.

However, if you want to be able to successfully engage and fight slightly larger groups eg. 4-5 players defending a dolyak, then imo Thief/Mesmer would be better. Mesmer played right can easily kite and lock-down 2-3 players while the thief takes the opportunity to burst/finish weaker targets. The only thing a group of 5 has to do to beat 2 thieves, is to stand on top of each other and spam 1. With a mesmer in the picture, that isn’t an option.

Vamp Rook.7835:

Zerg vs zerg is not GvG, call like this is just awful .You should try to play GW1 GvG.

sPvP is not GvG, call like this is just awful. You should try to play GW2 GvG.

covenn.7165:

Ragnar.4257:

Its rather telling that it is mainly Americans who have no idea about GvG isn’t it?

And the guy calling it “kill trading” is clearly trolling.

What does being American have to do with anything aside from you making a lame and uncalled for jab at an entire group of people from across the pond? Grow up.

It simply points out the differences in playstyles and game-cultures in the two different leaderboards. You’re the one reading more into it

Its rather telling that it is mainly Americans who have no idea about GvG isn’t it?

And the guy calling it “kill trading” is clearly trolling.

I love how people think that annoying/boring/trolling/aggravating/alienating the most potent fighting forces on their server, will somehow improve their server’s performance.