Guild Wars 2

Few new PvP oriented games that are coming out around the corner. They may not be as RvR oriented as GW2 is, or as polished, but any change is better than none right now. My guild will be taking a break in one of those games (NCSoft game, you guys should know what it is :P) since WvW has been going down the gutter after HoT release.

The less seriously you take WvW, the more you’ll enjoy it. That’s the way ANet is driving the game mode. They are taking any aspects of the game mode that a serious guild can use to become successful (especially the PvP aspects) and dropping a fat log on it.

So if you want to enjoy WvW, enjoy it casually.

Be part of the group. Come join us today

Welcoming mature WvW players on Blackgate!

Come join in the festivities with us~

Merry Christmas everyone!

displayname.8315:

New map too BIG!!!! Why you make so biiiig! New content not working cuz too big! Shrink da map!

The Alpine borderlands was bigger. 2/3 of the Alpine borderlands was never used, making it feel smaller. It is unfamiliarity with the map that makes you think it’s bigger.

That being said, the Desert Borderlands are still absolute poop. There’s absolutely no incentive to PvP on that map.

Hey bro, Faerie Law [FL] is an Australian/Singapore based WvW (Blackgate) guild, so if you’re into that kind of stuff, hit me up. We do require Teamspeak3 participation from all members for our guild events.

Our members are on average around 25, so you won’t hear much juvenile talk here. Some, sure, but not a lot. Many of us are parents (or in one case, grandparent) and have full time jobs/study, so our guild events are usually scheduled around Friday → Sunday to accommodate for that. As for PvE, many of our members do PvE outside the 5-6 hours of WvW we do a week. Especially through the weekdays when we do little to no WvW due to my lack of availability. Our members will generally do PvP and PvE then.

Just send me a mail ingame if you’re interested (and willing to transfer).

Come join us as our guild expands!

Dream In A Dream.7213:

I agree with off hours pvd ktrain high lord Reverence. Those fast catas are a godsent, when he is running a queue ktrain vs walls. Pls keep it as is till we can get all the heroics. I will be honest I have no clue where he can find a blob even 2x his size though, but at least its a less annoying way to get elite specs unlock than hp trains in hot.

Excuse me, my title is “#1 Karma Train Commander OCX” tyvm. I shall forgive your ignorance as it appears you are not familiar with the OCX time zone. Now run off and let the big boys and girls talk.

1. 60 – all 60 are WvW players (WvW focused guild with no PvE or PvP activities organised by leadership outside of guild missions)

2. No

3. We’ve got Camp Claim. That’s it.

4. PvE farming/grinding. It’s not really taken time away from our WvW raids, since all the grinding has been done outside of scheduled guild activities at a very casual rate.

5. I quite like the new system. Would like it even moreso if it was less grindy. Pre-HoT, it was too easy to get guild upgrades and it didn’t feel like much of an accomplishment.

6. As said above, less mats for upgrades, or some kind of scaling system depending on the roster size of your guild (which will encourage purging of inactives, meaning there will be less fake advertisements of 500 man guilds that only have 20 active players).

Dawdler.8521:

Reverence.6915:

Dawdler.8521:

Downwood.3192:

Every yak counts. Every camp counts. Every supply counts.

Every Roamer counts.

Until of course around 02:00-03:00 when nothing matter anymore and the smart servers go from ~200 in tick to ~600 tick within the span of an hour and getting a 20-30K or so headstart the next morning.

I don’t understand the players who play on those servers ticking 600+, when there’s literally nothing to do but drop siege, press 1 (or 2 if you use catas/trebs) and collect awful loot at a rate of less than 10% of what a PvE player gets.

… You have never nightcapped I take it? EU servers is not like the US servers, there is only one timezone. Even if your server is pathetic during the day, matches are won during a couple of hours every night. Pretty easy to understand and something that 99% of WvW players cant affect.

In any server outside of NA T1 or T2, I would be considered a nightcapper (or morning crew on EU servers). My point is that those players that do the nightcapping are pathetic and should move to a server where they would have players to fight against.

Defending is way too freaking easy right now. Let’s not make it too overpowered. Your structure has to be somewhat vulnerable to being flipped, or else what’s the point of even trying?

We’ve wiped zergs 2-3 times our size while they were attacking keep lords, because the keep lords right now are insanely strong. There’s really no reason to buff defense any further.

On my server (Blackgate), Saturday night OCX time (early Saturday morning, few hours before reset) is still quite active for fights, despite most of the activity shifting towards Sunday. Friday and Saturday are both less active than they used to be, while Sunday isn’t a whole lot more active. Overall, less activity over the week than with the Friday night NA reset

Bring back old reset!

~ Kovu

There are still plenty of players around, which the great thing being that everyone’s clustered onto EBG now so you don’t have to keep jumping maps for fights.

Only downside is it gets stale much faster, so there’s fewer people playing for extended periods of time, since the BLs are laggy as heck and miserable to traverse.

Dawdler.8521:

Downwood.3192:

Every yak counts. Every camp counts. Every supply counts.

Every Roamer counts.

Until of course around 02:00-03:00 when nothing matter anymore and the smart servers go from ~200 in tick to ~600 tick within the span of an hour and getting a 20-30K or so headstart the next morning.

I don’t understand the players who play on those servers ticking 600+, when there’s literally nothing to do but drop siege, press 1 (or 2 if you use catas/trebs) and collect awful loot at a rate of less than 10% of what a PvE player gets.

The carebear attitudes in here are sickening. That’s all I got to say.

Bump
/15characters

Dawdler.8521:

Simonoly.4352:

I accidentally went near a Revenant. Won’t be making that mistake again!

But you are a Mesmer, how did he even see you?

Tbh, I find this whole argument somewhat amusing. Dont get me wrong, I think its horribly OP and unbalanced, but this is what many “hardcore” WvWers have wanted all along. Zerg crushing skills. The eqvivalent of no AoE caps. 10 people walking in and pummeling 30 to submission with unforgiving AoE damage. Most of us knew that would mean 30 people can pummel 10 into submission even faster, but nope people wanted this and raved about how great it would be and how much “skill” it would suddenly introduce to WvW.

Well. Did it?

No. Most of us wanted the stability nerf to be reversed, or have stability buffed, allowing a well organised group to run through a disorganised blob and actually have coordination matter, rather than just stacking numbers and throwing CC and CoRs out.

Come join us today! Mail/Whisper me ingame if interested. Teamspeak is required.

hey jonemirant.1653. Faerie Law [FL] is an OCX/SEA (GMT+8 – GMT+11) WvW focused guild on Blackgate that does not require 100% rep (allowing you to get a PvE or PvP guild for your other needs). Our main WvW raid nights are on the weekends and we have a big focus on self improvement and doing it as a team. Our weekday activities are far more casual, often involving duels in our arena, PvP, and open world PvE, sometimes doing untagged raids in WvW if enough guild members are online.

We do require all members to have teamspeak for WvW and PvP purposes.

Whisper or mail me ingame if you’re interested.

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

I hadn’t given any serious consideration to crafting a legendary before… but when the legendary collections came out I was hooked. It’s a great big scavenger hunt and I’m enjoying it. I haven’t got to the part of actually crafting the precursor as you describe, and maybe that’ll seem daunting when it happens, but the initial stages of finding the items is quite fun so far.

Enjoy the massive time-gated crafting grind when you get there

I think a major way we can tone down CoR is to give it a 2 second rooted cast time with a 5 second cooldown. That way, we can keep its damage while giving us significant counterplay by having ranged classes being able to focus out the revenant before they can cast the skill, or have them tank the damage and land the skill and deal the broken damage it deals now.

Want to be part of a tight group of players improving on their gameplay together? Join us today

Running closed as well as open raids! Interested? Inquire with me today!

ANet doesn’t define a guild of less than 5 as a guild. Can’t remember which blog/dev post said this, but it was in relation to the guild hall capture and upgrades.

Welcoming anyone with a penchant for PvP! Contact us ingame today

These guys are amazing. During the time they were active, they did tons of work for Blackgate and its community. Can’t recommend them more, especially if you’re an EU player looking to be on an NA server.

We will become your home away from home. Inquire today!

Dawdler.8521:

So. Much. Text.

To me, its really simple. Lets ignore the awfull timer based autoupgrade system here and just focus on the WvW gameplay of desert border. The reason we click the button to join a border.

With no “ultimate upgrade” to an entire secured border – waypoints in all keeps, with garri being #1 priority – players have no sense of purpose. Why do I need to defend garrison? Simple answer; you dont. Its just another keep. Its just PPT. Hills, bay, same thing. The most defining features of a border, its keeps… Useless. All useless.

I can nitpick a dozen other things that is wrong, but it doesnt matter. When the heart is broken, nothing can fix it.

tl;dr Desert Borderlands has bad map design where you could have 2 map blobs right next to each other and neither would know it beyond lag. Makes the map feel empty, which makes people bored of the map, which leads to a vicious cycle.

English major \o/

While most of us agree that the Desert Borderlands (DBL) are visually stunning, almost all of us can agree that they are extremely boring to play in. The following are just a few of my thoughts on why that is and what could be done to change it

1. Why were the Alpine borderlands seen as fun?

This would come down to several factors, but the main reason is that the terrain allowed for you to re-enter fights extremely quickly due to not having any environmental obstacles. Moreover, the fights were centred around 4 main areas and 4 more minor areas being – between Bay and Garrison, between Hills and Garrison, South of Bay, South East Tower being the more major points of conflict, with the more minor ones being the 4 side camps. This is just from my experience in WvW since early 2013

If we look at the locations of most of the conflicts, you could see that they all occurred in mostly flat terrain with very few environmental hazards or choke points. We can probably safely assume that this is what would lead to more fights in either open field or contentions for objectives. I’d disagree though, that having flat open terrain is the main reason why the fights were in those locations. I would assert that instead, it is the location of the major objectives in the map that funnelled players towards these objectives, allowing for an easier time for players to find other players to fight or interact with.

The locations of the camps easily lead to either a tower or a keep. Holding a keep on an enemy borderland allowed you to more easily attack their garrison, which made it worth something. Especially if you were able to upgrade it to having a waypoint, which allowed you to control more than your 1/3 of the map. This made it important for zergs to pressure the side keeps, for roamers/havoc parties to snipe/contest camps and for the server as a whole to maintain defense on their borderland. This play style became the norm for many WvW players, even spawning the term “home borderland defenders”.

The only downside to this was the snowball effect when you have a server that can significantly outnumber the others in their matchup, which is more of a problem with the scoring system than with the design of the map (especially since it’s actually worse now). Another downside to the Alpine borderlands was in its overall design. While not a necessarily a bad thing in particular, over 2/3 of the map hardly ever saw action or rarely used at all. In particular, north of the north towers and south of the south towers saw little to no interaction outside of the 2 camps. That’s a huge chunk of the map that was never used. In fact, you’d find that the Alpine borderlands are actually larger than the Desert borderlands – just that the Desert borderlands is much better with objective placement.

2. Why are people avoiding the Desert Borderlands?

Well, there are many reasons, but the main reason I think is the fact that it actively funnels people away from each other. The pathing and environmental obstacles don’t allow for 2 enemies (either roamers or zergs) to easily encounter each other due to all the twists and turns on the map. You could be right next to each other, hidden by a single wall, and you wouldn’t know it. This makes the map seem extremely empty and desolate, which then forces players onto a map that doesn’t have this issue – Eternal Battlegrounds.

Of course, the shrine effects, keep effects and the oasis event all adds onto this as well, as they are rather bad at funnelling players into a “hot zone” like what the alpine borderlands did, and instead spreads players out around the map away from each other. The oasis event in particular forces groups to spread out, meaning that if your group is the one trying to complete it, you’re extra vulnerable to being ambushed by a group that has no interest in completing the event, but simply wanting to kill you.

This all leads to a vicious cycle whereby there are less and less players on the borderlands because they can’t find enemies to fight, then people coming on find less friends to fight enemies with, resulting in even fewer players on the map.

My opinion is that the terrain needs to be changed in a big way. Remove a lot of the cliffs, gorges, ravines and valleys and allow an easier path from your waypoint to where the action should be (around the major entrances of the keeps) and instead replace the Oasis with those kinds of terrain for roamers to play hide and seek in with the Oasis objectives – making it a roaming/havoc only objective. Tone down a lot of the environmental hazards and obstructions to where it would slow down a large zerg to give enough time for defenders to call for backup, but not to the point where groups are de-motivated to try at all. Both the side keeps need their effects removed as well, since all it does is make it harder to take for the outnumbered side – were it to be defended.

Defense sorely needed a boost, but it got too much of a boost. WvW stays interesting when you have delicate balance between the attacking and defending forces – not when defenders can split your zerg before you even got to your objective. The new borderlands went overkill with the aims in splitting up zergs and buffing defense on keeps and towers, which kills action even faster than before when attacking was too easy.

Before we started our raid last night, we held a moment of silence in remembrance of those killed in France.

Probably cause those guilds are sick of randoms tagging along and started snapping at anyone that came close. I usually have open raids with my guild since we’re the only group running in our time zone on our server on the nights we raid, but being able to run closed raids would be so desirable

Yuffi.2430:

Finally – it’s too many changes. Introducing something new like merging servers in addition to the recent changes already made is not going to bring people back, if anything it may well push more people out of WvW. After all if I’m forced onto a different server to play a style I don’t really want to, in a map I don’t know well with people I don’t know yet… where’s my motivation?!

Just picking this last paragraph out since I don’t really have an issue with your opinions above it.

Try server surfing with a F2P account. You’ll find that basically all servers are the same, with similar players and play styles. The only difference in play style between T1 and T5 is in numbers. There are only small cultural differences between servers. Your server being merged with another won’t affect you much at all, especially since you’ll probably still see the same people that run with you now (if server transfers aren’t given and the entire server was picked up and merged). Playing on Blackgate (roaming) and playing on Eredon Terrace (when I can find people to run with there…) is more or less the same experience to me so I take issue with your claim that there’s a different “play style” on other servers.

Arius.7031:

Why does it matter what happens in bls other than the one you’re in? If you’re getting action, you’re getting action. Doesn’t matter if while you’re getting action the northeast tower flipped in red bl, and sw camp/sentry flipped in green bl. All that matters is 1 map imo, anything more than that is unreasoned “I just feel like it’s better this way”, and I’m pretty certain that’s not a line of thinking we should be acting on.

Because we want a variety in maps available to play on. We’ve had EBG since launch and it’s only had a few gimmicky changes with HoT. The Desert Borderlands aren’t conducive for fights since they funnel players away from each other than towards each other (all the while trying to deal with the environment – PvP map design at its worst), which means that you need an overwhelming amount of players on the map to get any action at all, which the servers can’t deal with.

I avoid the borderlands as much as possible now. Sad, cause I used to try avoid EBG if possible since it was just full of pugs.

WvW as we knew it is more or less dead. Karma trains are roaming around unchecked, then logging off as soon as a force logs on to stop them. Organic fights are more or less gone.

Well Blackgate is full again. Still accepting Blackgate based players only

It’s funny that my guild is less active after the expac. As a WvW focused guild, there’s just less for us to do. Sad.

Looking for people interested in World vs World. Accepting Blackgate based players only (get in while the server is still open!)

Devs haven’t even told us what they define WvW as. It’s quite likely they lump EoTM in there.

Bump to fix broken page

Come join us exploring the new Desert Borderlands

I haven’t been able to recreate this reliably and nor do I have screenshots unfortunately (it was 2am, bite me :P) but I came across an odd bug last night when all the merchants inside our Garrison (Blackgate desert borderlands) became siege merchants rather than selling what they were supposed to (Outfitter and Mystic Forge NPCs). Merchants in spawn were still selling the right items just fine, but those in Garrison only showed siege blueprints.

Best day would be Wednesday noon (around 1pm) in my opinion. This will remove a lot of coverage/night capping issues that many servers have, as weekends naturally allow for more game time out of players, rather than forced overtime. Having the weekends being in the middle of the matchup means that there’s more activity spread over the course of a week, with Tuesday nights leading up to Wednesday evenings being low on activity (which is fine, since they’re work days anyway).

Bump!

/15characters

Come hear me complain about silly stuff while we have fun in WvW

My guild’s raid times start at 4-5am EST as an OCX guild. Checked out EU servers during that time. It is very, very quiet.

Your new playing time will be late NA -> OCX. It will be around 2-3 hours before SEA prime after you finish. It will be no where near EU prime.

tl;dr stay on NA servers, get into T1 or T2.

Menaki.6329:

I don’t think that the saturday reset is bad move and I don’t care about it. There will be more players (aka weekend warriors) around. Many players could go outside to enjoy a friday nightlife with their friends now. Of course, I feel sad for our ocx-players, I know a bunch of them who are dedicated defenders of the borderlands.

If you fear that the karma-friday become a karma-saturday, then it’s up to you real world versus world players to deny such request.
Defend structures, crash your zerg into the opposite karmatrain, hunt them until they log off or fight back. Work together to fight such behavior, save the normal wvw gameplay of your Tier. Don’t be worry or sad if you lost players because of that, they aren’t worth to lose a single tear, comrades. The whole idea of karmatrains in wvw belongs into the trash can of the history. I never understand why commanders have started this at all? You have now the unique chance to change it.

This is… the ignorance is… please stop…

Karma trains were started on Friday nights before reset as a way for the WvW community to come together and chill out a little. It became hijacked by PvEers looking for easy loot. Guilds then came together to farm karma trainers because they ruined what the WvW community had, pushing out those PvE karma trainers (mostly failing due to ANet’s own ineptitude at keeping WvW a hardcore game mode).

Current karma trains don’t happen because of any organisation to karma train. The current karma trains happen because no one cares to chase people down whose sole motivation is to farm some loot from NPCs. We form up 10-15 people to chase down 30-40 karma trainers, and then what? They disappear onto other maps to continue the hunt for some crappy loot. That’s not how we want to spend our Saturday evenings (OCX – Saturday mornings NA).

So you know what will happen? People will try and fight a while on Saturday evenings, but after a while, people will stop trying. There’s nothing to fight for for the PPT guilds since the scores are already decided, so there’s no targets for the fight guilds. With no fight guilds stopping karma trains, the karma trains start back up.

This is overall such a bad idea. If ANet wants to move WvW reset night away from patch night, just move it to a Wednesday or Thursday night NA. Us OCX and SEA players don’t get very much from this game due to the worst support I’ve ever seen (unless you’re NA or EU). At least let us have our weekend of play.

DeWolfe.2174:

Can we get a recall on this? Or, at least a recall on whomever actually thought of this??? Oh, and in typical Anet fashion, no one cared to communicate with the player base and ask if it’s something we’d enjoy first.

ANet? Communicate with WvW players? When’s that ever happened outside a couple guys who came in here to talk about security measures and banning hackers (love those guys).

It’s always been them dictating to us what they think is good for the game, which has resulted in drastic declines in the hardcore population in the only hardcore game mode they have.