Guild Wars 2

Good idea. Can you include the potential points as well?

Borlis Pass – 64,473 (630)
Devona’s Rest – 10,361 (40)
Kaineng – 8,624 (25)
—————-
Stormbluff Isle – 35,658 (285)
Eredon Terrace – 26,074 (185)
Henge of Denravi – 21,824 (225)

I tried to hang with Kaineng on my second account, but I’m honestly going to have to abandon it. There are a few players on Kaineng that actively want to lose, and they don’t even get shouted down by players that want to fight to win. Even a few players with that attitude really ruin the experience, but that attitude being allowed to prevail in /map takes away all the fun.

So to all the players with amazing spirit and fight on Kaineng, I apologize for abandoning your fight. Special thanks to all the guys in KBL right after reset, as holding our own for hours was truly a blast. My sincere best wishes.

I’m pretty sure the matchups are green for top rank, blue for middle rank, red for lowest rank.

Awesome job tonight by both SBI and ET. It was great fun battling against you, and quite fun trying different things. Hopefully all 3 servers can defeat the queue boss often enough to have a truly great week.

And to the couple random HoD players whining about being ganged up on, that’s how it always feels in the top matchup. If it’s not your style, there are lots of other servers to try out.

Yes, another map would help queues. But I think it’s too early for that since we’re all still learning how to play on the current maps. Overflows for practice or whatever might work better as an interim step. Even letting us know the real-time queue depth for each map would help spread the people across the maps.

Starting Tuesday, the queues might get a lot more bearable since a lot of players will probably go play with pandas or something.

Good job, SBI. You are making it look like this week’s matchup might be even more fun than last week’s matchup, and I sincerely thank you for the challenge you provide us over on HoD.

Daish.6139:

Richard.8207:

If we really need balanced player counts, add a bunch of NPCs to the lower pop sides. Just put in mindless zerg AI for those NPCs and nobody would even know they weren’t real players.

thats a horrible idea are you trying to kill PVP?

nothing is stoping players or guilds to make another server their home world and have a instant queue every time they wish to take part in WvW

there is nothing stoping players from taking part in WvW with this idea its making the game more enjoyable for everybody

Of course it’s a horrible idea. That was my point. There are PvP-oriented games with AI bots, and that solution is received far better than games where developers intentionally prevent people from playing the game. Developers are God in their video games, and there is just no point fighting against God.

I have an account on Kaineng. Even Kaineng does not always have instant queues, and Anet even released graphs showing that. Not to mention it is silly to tell players they need to move away from their friends if they want to actually play the game anyways. If I wanted a game where I can’t play with friends, I’d buy a single-player game.

People have told you plenty of reasons your idea will not make the game more enjoyable for everyone. You just choose to ignore their points rather than actually addressing them. It doesn’t really make for a very convincing argument, especially when other games have implemented your idea and the consequences are very real and seem to happen every time developers are stupid enough to think “this time will be different.”

emoleas.4309:

HoD put up a great fight this match; JQ sometimes did, but seriously: learn to defend properly.

JQ definitely did put up a great fight for the first few days of the matchup, and they do deserve massive credit for that. They just never seemed to transition to that next phase of the battle, so they got stuck constantly fighting to take back what should have been theirs the entire time. I suspect most JQ players did learn from that, and we probably should recognize it’s only a vocal minority of JQ that are acting like sore losers.

I think HoD has so much respect for SBI because they haven’t been whining. They’ve just been learning and adapting and getting insanely good. That demands respect, and admittedly at least a little fear

Rodarin.6058:

I always love these ‘youre forcing people out’ arguments. THEY ALREADY DO, its called the existing Queue. I know a lot of guys who cant get in during primetime because of the queue, the queues are that long. So what is the difference there? One is limited there just like they would be if there was a dynamic cap in place. had there ALWAYS been one people wouldnt even have noticed. They would just figure there was a queue because every wannabe moved to their server for free when the scores were posted.

Have you ignored every thread that complains about the WvW queues that we already have? The solution is not to make the queues even longer.

Your solution is “restrict entry” which means fewer people will get to play. In a video game, every solution that says fewer people should get to have fun will be a bad solution. Other games have plenty of examples of that stupid approach blowing up in their face.

If we really need balanced player counts, add a bunch of NPCs to the lower pop sides. Just put in mindless zerg AI for those NPCs and nobody would even know they weren’t real players.

Azure Prower has it right. To get the best of both worlds, just keep your 2 melee weapon kits equipped normally and swap to 2 AoE kits (and possibly other skills) whenever you join in with the zerg crowd.

For the ranger (my main), your pet is kind of wimpy at low levels. I ran two tank pets until about 35 to compensate (probably too long). After that, I switched to a spider and eagle since they seemed quite capable of tanking a veteran or two anyways. I do have to keep them healed with healing spring though, and the kiting you learn when your pets suck still comes in handy when you get swarmed and your pet can’t tank everything for you.

You can also man siege equipment like a beast starting at level 1. Depending on your matchup, that could be useful.

I’m with Xandax on starting at level 30. I just stick with support while leveling since you can survive about 100 times longer that way, and L30 combo fields are infinitely more useful than L30 dps.

If you can tell more about your preferences, it would help people give you better information. Do you like sPvP, PvE, WvW? Solo or group? Do you enjoy support, control, or dps?

Mesmer is the hardest of the three I’d say, and least powerful profession until somewhere around 25 or 30. But Mesmer can be really fun once you get past that initial “oh my god, I suck at everything” phase. And it feels really cool to finally hit that point where you say “wow, I don’t suck any more!”

Necro is a beast. I have no idea why a clothy tanks better than most other professions, but it’s just crazy survivability. The playstyle sometimes feels like you just survive until the enemy dies of boredom though, although you can kill non-veteran mobs in massive groups really quickly.

Elementalist is the glass cannon of the game. Super powerful at dps or healing or whatever you want to do, but dies to a strong sneeze.

I actually agree with the OP, even though I think he’s insane for not loving WvW. WvW has high enough demand without wasting slots on people that don’t really want to be there, so let PvE players have an overflow WvW map or a WvW map with NPC opponents or whatever they want. Just give them anything they want if it reduces pressure on real WvW.

With your suggestion, isn’t the best overnight strategy to ensure absolutely nobody queues? I don’t ever like solutions that basically boil down to “let fewer people play” since that obviously means less people having fun. Why would you want to remove fun from a video game?

I think all this will work itself out anyways. Servers that can field night crews will naturally rise through the ranks, and those that can’t handle overnights will fall down to matchups with other servers that can’t handle overnights.

I think most people on HoD will readily admit we focus more heavily on attacking JQ than SBI. That’s not an alliance, but because the JQ bases are rarely upgraded and have little siege presence and abysmally few defenders to deal with when attacking. I’m sure JQ players have attacked SBI positions and know SBI has very heavy defenses, not to mention faster reinforcements. Perhaps JQ can take notes on why your attacks on SBI and HoD fail and implement the same defenses to improve your game?

As for ignoring people on the road, that’s probably true. Fighting in the road doesn’t really help the score, so what’s the point of chasing someone down unless they’re going somewhere you want to protect? Heck, if you scare someone away from reinforcing where you’re heading that’s a victory in my book.

Sevati.6724:

I think the majority of these complaints comes from the servers that dominate WvW 24 hours a day with large forces. Once you get out of the top 4 servers, you rarely have a queue, and if you do, its only a couple minutes.

Remember we’re in the first weekly matches still, so there was bound to be mismatches since things that work on a 24 hour reset don’t necessarily work the same on a 7 day reset. Things will get more competitive, either through different matchups or through developer intervention. And when things get more competitive, I think we’ve all already seen there will be a huge need for solutions to the queue probblems.

Matt Witter,

Thank you! While there is always something to complain about in such a complex game, you guys really have been doing an awesome job rolling out fixes at breakneck speed.

@Thesilentflute, you have to realize most players don’t know what to do regarding commanders. Most players still don’t even realize they need to represent a guild, let alone how commanders work in WvW.

And I’ll transfer back to Dev’s Rest (or maybe Kaineng) before the new matchups start. My main account is on HoD, so there’s no way I’d stay once you’re up against HoD. But right now the other 2 med pop servers can’t do jumping puzzles due to their matchup, and your server really isn’t hurt by dead weight in your current matchup.

vrgadin.1943:

@Richard

we split up the BL between guilds, we are not being unfriendly, just doling out responsibility. we routinely check in with other guilds ts and ask if they need backup.

if someone spouted in map a comment like “its the other guilds job” was likely cause they didnt feel like explaining the setup.

While I can respect splitting up the work, you really should make sure you portray a good image to others in team/map chat. I’ve only been on the server a couple days and have already seen people having a very negative view of how things are run. Non-guild players also don’t feel included, and when they ask what to do in map they go unanswered. While it might be fun just organizing the guilds and ignoring everyone else, I think you’d really benefit by ensuring your non-guild players are at least semi-productive and helping you instead of hating you.

Honestly, best of luck and I really do hope you guys succeed at becoming significant competition for HoD.

P.S. This will sound stupid, but please have your guilds use /say to tell everyone at the supply depots to grab supplies after capping one. You’re really going to want randoms carrying supplies next week, and unfortunately a lot of them just don’t know how supplies work yet.

I recently transferred my second account to Eredon Terrace so I could do jumping puzzles in peace without queues while I level a toon. For that, ET is absolutely great. Other than that, it’s not so great. The “main” guilds are not friendly and don’t even help each other when one is undermanned (I was truly shocked at the response of “that’s X guild’s job” when someone pointed out a different borderlands could use some help). The only requests for help were not just ignored, but flatly rejected as “not our problem”. And offensive pushes are not pre-announced in team chat so others can join, which means anyone not in the guilds would find the experience frustratingly disorganized.

ET might become a better server eventually since most of the people seem nice, but some of those guilds trying to run WvW desperately need to learn how important it is to build a community that responds to calls for help instead of a community where guilds seem to rejoice at the failures of other guilds on their own server. WvW needs to be server against server, not guild against guild.

Yea, the human starting zone just doesn’t seem to have as many dynamic events as the other starting zones. I don’t know if that’s because they are more spread out, or if they’re just bugged right now, or something else, but I’ve noticed that both times I played through humans and have never had the problem on any other race.

I use gw2cartographers.com to see which other zones are the right level. As Pyrrhic said, Lion’s Arch makes jumping around the map a lot easier. And you can always get to Lion’s Arch for free by using the PvP tab of your hero pane to jump to Mists and take the portal.

If you have keybinds that do everything you want well on your current setup, there is no reason to bother getting a mouse with more buttons. But if you struggle getting keybinds set up in a way you like, more buttons on a mouse will help a lot.

If you’re not great with thumb dexterity, you might consider a G600 instead of a Naga. You’ll get two extra buttons by pushing the mouse wheel left and right and a pinky button compared to the 17 button Nagas. I also like the concave thumb buttons over convex on Nagas, but that’s obviously personal preference.

My main reason for using a mouse with 20 buttons is so I can have keys that I accidentally hit bound to the same ability as the button I mean to hit, and so I don’t have to rely on shift/ctrl/alt modifiers as heavily. I can fit all my keybinds on a 3 button mouse + keyboard, but I’m just more error prone on that setup.

drwookie, have you played a pure dps recently and compared badge/hour rates or such? How big is the current discrepancy?

There is just a lot of noise mixed in with potentially useful comments on this issue. Some of it is support players foolishly believing dps players that are just lying about how fast they get badges right now. Or people are comparing their current support badge generation to their badge generation on pure dps builds weeks ago. Or people are seeing diminishing returns on loot and thinking it is because they aren’t doing enough damage. I’m hoping people can provide more specific details about their experiences so any specific problems that exist can get the attention deserved.

stof.9341:

In the mean time, do the same to them :o

I’m not sure if recommending someone should commit a bannable offense is good advice.

Report any players doing this to Anet.

What support roles don’t have a way of tagging the enemy and generating badges? Support ranger has traps that definitely tag and generate badges. Even water-heavy elementalists should be dropping some earth or fire effects for combo fields, so they’re covered as well. Support necro has pretty much every single staff ability. Guardian has the ground heal that damages opponents. Mesmer use clones to attack the guys retreating.

Is the issue just that support players get a few less badges than a pure DPS? I know the balance isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty decent and I definitely never feel punished for running a support build.

I do understand the criticism about defending a supply depot and other lookout positions sucking for rewards, but I’m not sure how they could fix that without rewarding AFK/bot players though.

Sometimes you get 4 hits off a node instead of 3 (or 2 harvests instead of 1).

I assume the only reason we get gold from events and everything else in WvW is because damage to your gear is enabled. I’ll gladly keep damage to gear enabled to keep getting a slow trickle of gold while in WvW.

tyhanon, I think the travel costs being free to a capital city is just trying to provide a more efficient alternative to the already free mists→lion’s arch→capital city teleporting that is so common.

I’m glad to see the invisible army fix, and the buff for being behind in score seems like it might help things out. Here’s hoping WvW just got a whole lot better with this patch!

krakenstar.1674:

Some recommendations for queue issue – some are temp solutions to mitigate the pain a bit:

1. Close off the jumping puzzles in the WvW zones for now. A lot of people are trying to get into the zones not for WvW but to jump puzzles.

2. Remove the WvW maps from the “100% explorer” requirement. There is a ton of PvE people queuing up to get in for this purpose only. They won’t queue to WvW other than some minor curiosity if this was removed.

3. Server Transfers: these are and/or options

a – FREE server transfers to low queue time/population servers… Heck throw in some bonus! Like a thank you jacket for being a great guy.

b – Only 1 transfer every week.

c – After you transfer, 48 hours no WvW.

4. For the love of god, how hard is it to show the size of the queue and estimated time of entry? A lot of player will stay out of the queue if they knew the ques were 3 hours and counting thus decrease the queue size.

5. An instantiate-able (aka overflow) , non-point scoring WvW map.. a lot of people don’t give a crap about points, they just want to roam around the map killing other players. These people can queue there and just find other people to kill. This will satisfy the curiosity of a lot of PvEer without making the queue worse. Heck make it fun and make it a Eternal battlegrounds clone.

I don’t think any of the above should take too much development time.. and will instantly reduce queue time. Mean while go and find ways to increase players per map without making the stupid invisible enemy problem.

1. I actually prefer if they just remove the portals from WvW and put them in the training/tutorial island instead. No need to remove content, just move it to a more accessible location. And we’d have something to do that helps our WvW nature while waiting in queue!

2. I agree completely. Maybe if there were overflow WvW servers the map complete would be less disruptive, but right now it sucks to see someone valiantly trying to figure out how to get to a vista after you just waited 2+ hours to get into the fight. I don’t blame the players for doing what they enjoy, but most could easily enjoy it outside of the WvW environment.

3. I think even 1 free transfer per 24 hours would be fine, and deny access to WvW for 24 hours after a transfer. Even a short cooldown would fix the most egregious abuses of the server transfers (even outside WvW like resetting gathering nodes).

4 and 5 would be great.

Doxshund.9235:

Anyone that wants to WvW probably transferred off the server. no fun to lose all the time.
I am on Dovan’s Rest and am thinking of transferring to a higher pop.
Not because of WvW, we do have some amazing WvW guilds. but for PVE.
The server is low pop and running into a champion mob, you are on your own as the zones are sparse. On high pop realms there would be a bunch of players in the area ready to help on the champion mob.

Don’t give up yet. I know I bought a second copy of the game to start new toons on Devona’s Rest, and seeing the people around the noob zones makes me think a lot of other people must have done the same. Go to the lower level zones and see how many people are there. Give it a week for all of us to level up before you give up!

Brannoncyll.1978:

Richard.8207:

Get some support players to drop heals or bubbles where people are defending on the wall. Throw down abilities that make the melee back up or die (ranger traps, elementalist meteor storm and earthquake thing, etc.) and then get back to safety. Have mesmers work together to clone attack the same target, then hide while the clones get busy. And most important, get a coordinated group to flank the attackers. You shouldn’t be able to defend a keep against far superior numbers, so getting a reinforcement group to flank those attackers is key.

Unfortunately the aoe heal effects are nowhere near powerful enough to negate the damage of an aoe attack. As a ranger I will immediately drop my aoe heal on a group of defenders, but it only ticks for a few hundred healing which is nothing compared to the amount of incoming damage.

Also, melee are not the issue here. An attacking ranger or elementalist need only walk into range of the defenders for a few seconds to drop an aoe attack on the walls. This is a short enough amount of time that they don’t need to worry about the aoe attacks dropped by the defenders. This also makes clone attacks redundant as the attackers are rarely in range for more than a few seconds.

A coordinated group attacking from the side is definitely the best strategy, but it should not be the only viable defence.

I think I misunderstood. The only effective thing defenders on the walls can do is disperse the melee, not actually damage ranged. By providing your heal (I do the exact same on my ranger) in a good spot without a dozen red rings of death, you can keep everyone alive long enough to unload their cooldowns before they retreat back. When everyone does that, it disperses the melee and drops pressure on your gate or wall.

You need other teams flanking the ranged. Guardian groups and similar groups can provide protection for the couple of seconds needed to take out siege equipment. Large groups flanking can wipe out the ranged, especially when spread out.

And if you have enough people on the walls to effectively repel the melee, get off the wall and stand at ground level where the melee used to be and start pushing everyone back. You can always run back inside using the portal anyways.

The top 3 (JQ, SBI, HoD) has been pretty good. While HoD got an early lead, it actually has not really been growing. That suggests JQ and SBI learned quickly and next week’s match should be really interesting. HoD could probably even still lose this week if anyone can figure out a workable way to cap SM and protect it while defenses are built back up for a new owner.

I play a ranger spec that drops combo fields (healing spring, ice trap, fire trap) and use shortbow and axe/warhorn. The last skill you can kind of decide between a lot of utility (Muddy Terrain for immobilize and cripple, poison from snake trap, run faster signet, condition curing signet, etc.). I’m usually out with small groups recapping our supply depots since SBI and JQ are doing awesome at cutting off supplies, so we’d usually have less combo coverage if I were running a different build. Longbow would definitely work well as a keep/castle defender though.

buzzkapow.8465:

We go attack something, it gets reinforced by a group twice our size before we can do anything. This is because of 1 problem. Lack of numbers.

Send a very small group to the closest enemy waypoints to contest them before you start attacking the real target. They just need to survive and contest, not pose a real threat. That way enemy reinforcements can’t teleport close to you. You don’t need huge numbers to do that. In your situation, I’d assume you’ll need to contest SM and the nearest keep.

Best of luck.

Get some support players to drop heals or bubbles where people are defending on the wall. Throw down abilities that make the melee back up or die (ranger traps, elementalist meteor storm and earthquake thing, etc.) and then get back to safety. Have mesmers work together to clone attack the same target, then hide while the clones get busy. And most important, get a coordinated group to flank the attackers. You shouldn’t be able to defend a keep against far superior numbers, so getting a reinforcement group to flank those attackers is key.

Yes, option 1 is probably the best recommendation. I think you’re focusing on the wrong issue though. You can just rebind whatever keys you want to hit while circle strafing to a key you can reliably hit. There is absolutely no way I could hit ‘8’ (the default bind) while circle strafing, so it is instead bound to ‘c’ for my setup. I have 1-5 as 1-5, then 6-10 rebound as zxcvb. You can also use qe or ad for more binds (whichever F1-4 abilities are best for your class maybe) once you unbind keyboard turning.

You can just help build someone else’s siege equipment since they do require more supplies than a single person can carry. Your server has guilds that can afford to fund siege equipment even if you cannot. Your server is really good, so you have to expect they’ll be using advanced tactics even if it costs multiple gold to do so.

You can also scout to see the 8 golems early enough and say 8 golems are heading to your keep in map chat or your server vent/teamspeak. Your server is good enough that a lot of people will come defend if you give them enough warning that they can still use the waypoint at the keep.

You can also get siege designs every once in a while from loot bags, so be sure to loot everything.

Or you can take advantage of free server transfers to jump onto a worse ranked server where siege weapons are nowhere near as common. WvW plays very differently on the top servers, and it just might not be your definition of fun. But please don’t try to suggest ruining our matchup (HoD, JQ, SBI) by limiting siege equipment. The players on all 3 servers are just too good to get through defenses without planning and siege equipment. Keeps would literally never fall since people would respawn and run back before you could get a wall or gate down. The fact that we have a matchup where nothing is safe is a really fun thing for a lot of us playing on these servers.

For everyone saying people should transfer servers, how exactly can you make an educated decision about servers? I transferred to Henge since it never showed up as full when I looked, even at peak times where there were like 10 other servers marked as full. And once on Henge, my own queue experience was less than 10 minutes the first couple times I jumped in WvW. It appears those 10 minute queues were just a bug, so I stuck with a server with really long queues because a bug made me think the queues were really short. So how do I avoid doing the same thing?

And while I enjoy WvW a lot, I also enjoy PvE immensely. Henge has coordinated and helpful players out in the world doing dynamic events and everything else the game has to offer, which my prior servers definitely did not. How would I find a server with similarly helpful players without a truly painful approach of trial and error where I have to hope I magically find a decent one before the clock runs out on free transfers and I just get stuck on some miserable server? Has Arenanet said they’ll give major advance warning about disabling free transfers so people don’t get stuck somewhere terrible?

Edit: for clarity, I transferred to Henge a while back and not just yesterday or something.

I recently tried WvW for the first time myself, and it’s not as scary as you think. At first, I just ran with a crowd or ran to a big conflict symbol on the map if I knew that was where tons of people would be. I just threw down traps for combo fields and healing spring as often as possible, and tried desperately not to die.

Eventually, I learned where the supply depots are and started running supplies to help finish building siege weapons wherever I could find people building them. I figure the siege weapons were causing us the most problems, so building our team’s siege weapons seems like it would give the enemy the most problems

You will unfortunately have to sort of ignore the calls for help for a while since they keep saying things that aren’t on the map. I’m sure eventually I’ll learn the lingo, but I can stay busy just running supplies and helping the group for now.

I love the idea, although it should be optional. Sometimes people might rather work on exploration or crafting or whatever than an overflow WvW, so let them still queue for the real server without entering overflow first.

I have had that happen. You can still get to the list of stuff you can buy by clicking the buy instantly link or whatever, although you can’t really sort by price effectively and other things.

Unless they recently changed it, you can free server transfer as often as you’d like without the weekly restriction.