Guild Wars 2

Loosmaster.8263:

If you can’t que all 4 maps 24/7 then yes.

Disagree very strongly. Having every map filled to the brim forces people into playing in a certain way. Having a variety of map populations is for the better; a variety in activity levels lets players who enjoy the low-pace times do what they like. Map size does a similar thing but can only do so much with a fixed number of objectives per map.

Rincewind.1207:

Time q for 5 team premade team is 20-40 mins that why !

adjust the MM or add more players to the game. forcing 5man teams doesn’t help that. adding more players is the absolute no.1 thing anet can do to try to revitalize the queues

part of me thinks that a lot of people taking a break from pvp because they’ve pushed through their wings (me included shh don’t tell nobody) is making up a non-trivial portion of these queue issues

Shiyo.3578:

Not many people looking for 5 man premades because they can simply quueue up alone.

If you force people to have to find 4 others, the pool of players seeking and trying to form a party greatly increases. It’s basic human psychology.

get friends or a guild

Cruzy.3706:

if you have one game mode it doesnt matter if you queue solo or with a team, but with different game modes it is a huge difference

click off stronghold

if you want to not soloqueue and instead queue up as a 5man team why don’t you just queue up as a 5man team

lil devils x.6071:

A proper poll would have been one that was email invite only to WvW players past and present over a certain rank. Not a poll non WvW players and people who have 20 accounts can vote as many times as they like. I pointed that out in the first poll they chunked on forums like this, we have not seen a proper poll as of yet. IF you have 20 accounts, you can vote 20 times.

I mean if someone really wants to win all they have to do is go to Busy PvE centers and start offering gold for people to prove they voted the way they wanted them to. It isn’t like PvE players care what happens in WvW. But that would have to mean people still care enough to do that. LOL

lil devils x.6071:

Most people I know are not even voting.. and I didn’t bother telling them there was a poll at this point when I realized how many times I could vote.. There are more than you realize. The thing is people are tired. If you have to tell developers that the purpose of updates is to increase game population, increase player satisfaction, and increase game longevity and they still choose to run off their existing population with the unprofessional way they conducted these polls, ( They didn’t even have to have an option to remove it entirely, they could have just agreed to take it back to beta until players vote on when it is ready as was suggested as a compromise to make sure neither side leaves the game.), taking upgrades away from guilds that some guilds never were able to obtain again, breaking up friends, families, and guilds by server merging/ locking, adding a ton of lame PVE gimmicky crap to WvW that makes more players leave the game than it brings in, it is not worth wasting my time on.

Basically what Anet is doing now is sloppy and ridiculously too little too late, and still in the wrong direction.

EDIT: I did not ask or tell a single person on this game that there was even a poll this time. Not going to bother.

So basically

The people who disagree with you are going to massive efforts to buy votes, and use extra accounts to make extra votes to make themselves seem bigger

And the people who agree with you are tired and apathetic and couldn’t be bothered expending the effort to vote in the poll.

…Huh?

W:L means relatively little in ranked play. What matters is your rank.

Real question is whether you are completely stalling at the bottom tier of Ruby and cannot progress beyond that.

Rednik.3809:

For some reason, fractals have exactly same thing and don’t have any of your “problems”.

Long story short; because fractals and raids are very different content. Fractals are explicitly designed with playing around with the idea of difficulty scaling, it’s the core concept and has ancillary systems which interact with it, like Agony and Instabilities; raids and dungeons are not designed that way.

Rednik.3809:

We can see how Blizzard doing exactly same thing for balancing various difficulties for raids, and its not something very different from original encounter. More generous enrage timers, less damage overall, less boss health. Encounters are already balanced and tested, reducing their difficulty requires only some numbers tuning.

No, encounters are wildly different across modes, especially across the Heroic-Mythic and LFR-Normal divides, and you’re completely ignoring the content strategies of both games by trying to make a 1:1 comparison.

misterman.1530:

When the DBL comes into play, if someone doesn’t like it, other than EB, to which map do you suppose we should zone in order to have fun?

Vote 1DBL:2ABL in the next poll. Go to one of the two Alpine Borderlands or to EBG.

dzeRnumbrd.6129:

33% cool down reduction is not a major positive outcome, it’s average for a trait.

No, it’s a major positive outcome and it’s well above average for a trait. The trait affects 6 skills, unlike a lot of utility -CD effects, and it reduces CDs by 66% more than any other basic CD reduction trait (not looking at stuff which is more complicated, like mesmer Pistol or Torch traits). Just on that, it’s way stronger than most other CD-reduction traits.

The skills it affects are some of the strongest skills in the game; even if you taking only CC, you should be considering taking MoC.

Stacking more conditions on yourself is not a negative as a necromancer provided you don’t spam your utilities like a goon. You have high health and can take the damage. You have condition-sending skills which mean that giving yourself more conditions can actively help you.

Master of Corruption is not the ‘worst trait ever’. Frankly, as far as raw power goes, it’s probably one of the best traits. As far as game design goes, it’s one of the best traits, as it and the Corruption school at large play very well with risk-reward decision making. As far as flavor goes it’s pretty much perfect.

HazyDaisy.4107:

I started trying to think about this issue from a If the shoe was on the other foot standpoint. Not that it hasn’t been on the other foot at times, but let’s think about it none the less.

“At times” is a massive understatement. From the game’s launch until the current reward tracks for WvW were implemented, WvW was playing second fiddle to PvE in the rewards department.

There were very, very few ways which a WvW player could even think to compete with a PvE players’ earning power; practically none until recently.

PvE exclusive statspreads like Sinister and Nomad’s were entirely unobtainable in WvW; if you’re a pure WvW player, getting Sinister gear is still a stretch. Only with this patch were the HoT spreads made broadly available to pure WvW players.

And we’re talking about a component of a legendary which takes, assuming you can push your participation reasonably quickly, about 8 hours to farm out, if you are consuming no Daily potions and are not using the guild flask. We’re completely ignoring the other components including Gift of Exploration which requires far more than that invested in PvE. Like really if ya’ll so stressed out about it just chill, build it over a longer time, do your daily vet beast slayer and land claimer and master of monuments, drink the potions and get it easy.

Besides, if you had explicit plans to build a legendary and already had the required Badges of Honor and rank, why didn’t you already buy them? It was a steal; ANet has always been explicit about wanting some kind of WvW requirement for Legendary weapons, you knew that the status quo wasn’t working to push you into WvW because you’d just get your badges from Achievement chests and if you were really stingy about getting the ranks you could get them through guild comms/LLC/KC.

Let’s think about putting the shoe on the other foot in another way: Maybe WvWers should get 4 legendaries whose precursor collection steps take place exclusively in WvW, you need to run in WvW for about 50 hours (that seems like a fair guess for World Completion time to me) and you need to do about 8 hour’s PvE.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just rambling. But WvW gets practically no rewards for over three years, nobody bats an eyelid, ANet decides to change the WvW requirement for Gift of Battle to actually require you to WvW and everyone loses their minds.

letting roamers/small teams contribute more seems good to me

wyalse.7543:

I think it’s a bad idea. During this beta, I’ve already witnessed some reward track farmers performing as few tasks as possible just enough to keep their participation ticking. Gating more items behind reward tracks might not necessarily help WvW become better.

Really depends on when they’re doing it. Like right now- literally right now- nobody cares because there are very few maps with queues. BG EBG probably has a queue but I’m guessing that’s probably it. (I don’t know EU servers so I can’t make guesses there)

If they’re blocking people on reset night because they just want to tap a sentry every 10 minutes while their map has 100 queue then fair enough but at this sort of hour even sentry tappers are worth more than the nothing they’d otherwise be.

Calendra.9074:

Desert map have some problems can be fixed, like north strategically useless towers, but removing the map will not improve the wvw. It only needs some fixing.

North towers actually kinda interesting and I don’t know if I’d want them to be strategically attached to the keep. That’s an interesting element of ABL sure but DBL north towers are actually realistically upgradeable for attacking servers because you aren’t dependent exclusively on north camp to supply them.

Could something be done with the towers, since they generally have little impact on the strategic situation on the map? Sure. But idk if I’d want it to have the same interactions/layout as ABL. The north end of the map having a very different layout from ABL is part of that.

Aissia.2965:

I have some Transcendent Chests sitting in the bank. All they contain are badges of honor and resonating sliver. Where’s the Potions of WvW Reward?

They added new boxes which are the new reward. Those boxes will still grant XP boosters.

splits the community
gives anet less options when it comes to managing mechanics (easy mode mechanics need to be similar to hard mode or they aren’t the same fight)
increases the amount of work required by anet
creates a reward split which is especially dangerous in GW2 with rewards being viable for roughly forever
has no tangible advantage over creating a learning curve spread across multiple instances

easy mode+hard mode makes sense in other games because those raids are expected to ‘time out’ with the release of the next tier or expac or w/e, so people will get frustrated if they can’t get through the content in that time. gw2 is explicitly designed such that content never goes out of date, though, so the core reason to do it doesn’t really exist

Very happy that people aren’t voting to delete the DBL. You might not like it, sure, but other people do, and whether DBL is voted to stick around has an impact on future development.

Looking forward to 1DBL:2ABL. I think, judging from the last poll, the next poll will make it a very clear winner.

Kossage.9072:

Even if your statement was sarcastic, ironically enough there’s actually a pretty salient argument buried deep within about dungeons being accessible. Ín my opinion dungeon story modes should be soloable because out of all the instanced group content they’ve provided the most crucial lore to GW2 experience about the adventures and eventually re-bonding of Destiny’s Edge (which includes some huge chunks of character development for each DE member; see for example Caithe finally stepping out of the shadow cast by Faolain, or Logan and Rytlock finally forgiving one another) as well as us confronting (and in a select few cases finishing off) key villains from Personal Story such as Caudecus, Kudu, Faolain and Gaheron who would’ve otherwise remained loose ends in lore.

Thankfully at least Arah story mode is soloable now so people don’t have to team up with others to finish their Personal Story if they don’t want to (as dungeon story modes in general seem to attract less people to them nowadays than explorable paths based on what I’ve seen on LFG over the past few years and even in these past few months after the most recent dungeon rewards revamp).

Because fewer players went to experience the dungeon stories, they missed not only important moments with said villains but also failed to bond with Destiny’s Edge during their trials and tribulations, which hurt the narrative on their side especially for that big payoff later in the Personal Story. Luckily the same is not the case with raid lore thanks to Bobby’s statement that any crucial information learned from raids will be delivered to players via other means in Living World season(s) and whatnot if needed, so the developers have learned their lesson about what lore to gate behind group content and what to keep more accessible to players.

Actually an interesting point. It’s really worth looking into how story dungeons currently operate since the main mechanical functions they provide are reward track unlocks and unlocking explorable, both things which don’t need to be done more than once.

Personally I’d think it a good move to make these modes single-player, and possibly a formal part of the personal story.

If conditions are too powerful, why is the meta builds spread 3 condition offensive classes(nec/mes/warr), 2 power offensive classes(rev/thief) and 3 defensive power classes(ranger/druid/engi)?

BeepBoopBop.5403:

not viable, nice try

not having a perfect toolkit in 1-2 legendaries is kind of the point of legends and of utility skills in general. you have to sacrifice some elements in exchange for the thing you want. if you want more condi clears, as with anyone else, you have to slot more condi clears.

revenants are no different. if you want more condi clears, slot the legends that give you those condi clears. ventari is one of them. jalis is another

if revenants are so weak against conditions that they become unviable, then ventari and jalis become as viable as your current build, so why not play ventari or jalis? obvious answer is that they aren’t unviable as they stand- power herald is already a meta build, so adding condi clears just makes them even stronger!

actually really cool to hear that they’re adding catchup stuff at the start of the new wing

merciful intervention?

BrotherBelial.3094:

Simple fix, remove division crossing achievement. Up the days played, kills and wins with class, wins in a day, points and overall wins achievements. I will bet a lot of the QQ threads would disappear. As talking to friends guild members and randoms in HoTM, people really stress about this one. If I only get to ruby this season, I have to get to ruby next as well, I didn’t play much during season 1 and only got Hal way through emerald. If I had know how much of a pain this one achievement would be, I would have played alot more. Once I have my back item I can’t see me really trying for the next. I’m not going to stress my self out for a year trying to get enough crossings for the next item.

This assumes that new people won’t start QQing after you change the requirements. They will, just instead of being “omg i can’t push divisions!” it’ll be “omg the requirements are too high!”, or it’ll be the other side of the aisle going “omg all these nubs have muh wings!”

if you want more condi cleanse, run legendary dwarf or centaur

SolarDragon.7063:

A good treb player can reliably hit side nodes on the first shot, and if you play the map more than I do you probably have almost memorised how long you need to hold the rotation buttons.

The idea of a good treb player, though, is precluded by the notion that the trebuchet requires very little skill, as per OP. The opening assertion is built around the presumption that there is no element of skillful trebuchet use.

Agemnon.4608:

2.It’s a tiny map, meaning there’s no real commitment in hitting a node. Mid provides very fast easy access to these points in a very short timeframe. Classes with more mobility therefore have their advantage weakened.

3.Trebs do way too much damage for the low skill required to use them. This enables otherwise bad players to contribute more to a fight than they have any right to. Destroy the treb? No problem, a repair kit will soon spawn ensuring the skill gap between teams won’t matter as much.

Don’t these two kinda contradict one another?

Yeah you can hit either point quite easily from mid but mid is the only point that can be consistently covered with trebuchet fire.

If the enemy team is committing a player to use the treb then you can commit to the side points. The main reason they’d use the treb is to hit mid. The only reason they’d hit mid is because they don’t have it or because you’re attacking it, so move out to the other two points.

Jim Hunter.6821:

But if it does switch to monthly anet has to give back the smaller servers tags. They can’t keep treating this like a merger.

i got the impression that they wanted to do this anyway, they just can’t put it as a high priority because they’ve got other stuff to do

Just wanted to talk about how the poll was different from the other ones and hopefully give a little bit of feedback

The “benefits of short links/benefits of long links” segment of the poll was really good to see, more information never hurts. I didn’t work through the mental arithmetic to see if the assertions stacked up, but you guys have thought about it for longer than I have so I think it’s probably fair to say you guys have a better idea of it. I hope you guys go into this level of detail for the other polls, especially the planned upcoming one for DBL removal/DBL:ABL ratios.

I expect this won’t be a supermajority poll considering the nature of the poll and its results. I hope you guys go with a simple biggest number wins, maybe with a little bit of weighting added towards your (ANet’s) preferred option. This seems like a system that would be relatively easy to adjust.

On the actual results of the poll; interesting that so many people picked 1-month. My pick was 2-month but this is ultimately something that I don’t really mind. It does mean that people will get to play with a very broad field of players very quickly, which is really cool. I hope the MM systems are robust enough to support this rate of change, though.

cptaylor.2670:

Best for carrying? Well hats off to you because you must be one hell of a thief.

At best we can attempt to out-rotate the other team, but even then there isn’t much carrying you can do if the rest of your team is accumulating more points in deaths for the other team than you can manage to make up for by capping/decapping.

thief carrying works because it assumes your team isn’t just getting absolutely stomped in every engagement

most of the time, the optimal position for a thief to be in is when your team is slightly losing every single fight without your involvement, and your thiefy carrying pushes every fight into a win because you can just bounce between each of them and decide the engagement with your contribution

if your fights are so far behind that you can’t actually engage in time to turn them into 2v1s then it’s not that you’re a bad carry class (unless you’re really slow as a thief for some reason); your team is just so far underpar that you would have no opportunity to swing the match, even if you were the no.1 thief in the universe

the system should always prioritize creating good fights in a reasonable timeframe (<3min, ymmv)

going shorter than that and creating bad fights would just make it unfun

building a complicated system of pip rewards around imbalanced matches is putting the cart before the horse

shion.2084:

Ah right, and every class’ reasonably competitive meta has boon strip… our bad, the answer is so obvious.

necro, mesmer, thief, rev all have competitive boonstrip
ranger, engi, guardian, elementalist do not have competitive condi builds

idk, are warriors in that bad of a place

you’re a revenant, just take the traits and skills that let you stack resistance and send the confusion back

if you’re playing against dire+perplexity and it’s common in the meta just run a build that either spams cleanses or sends it all back or both

Heimlich.3065:

Does ANet plan to distribute Triumphant Hero armor in the same way? If so, it would be sensible to make a prediction for which server will get the most overstacked pairing and transfer now. Since there are only two current Medium population worlds for NA, those are the cheapest options and best guess to get an easy ride for insta-win next quarter.

One of the devs, I think Tyler, said that they have no plans to run future tournaments because of this overstacking problem.

Heroes’ weapons are becoming a reward track. Mistforged Weapons and Triumphant Hero are up in the air.

Trepidation Lost.3469:

why cant they just add them to the bloomin laurel vendor????

Possibly they’re working on doing something that’s a bit more interesting than that. Who knows

They’ve already said that they’re considering implementing a new currency based on who wins matchups. They might plan to do it with that.

I’m still repeating the tracks to get the armor achievements. At the moment I’m doing the CM ones.

Yeah they’ve said previously that they’re not happy with certain statspreads for the accessory slots only being available in raids. The particular one they tend to single out is Viper’s but all spreads have applications in WvW. They’ve said they want to open up access to these spreads in LS3 but how precisely they plan on going about that is anyone’s guess.

There are a ton of things to keep in mind that’ve already been brought up that mean that PvPers have unique advantages when it comes to crafting the Gift of Fortune.

For the gifts of Might and Magic, since you don’t need any of those materials, you just kinda build them up. And since you don’t need Laurels for anything, you can feed those straight into T6 bags.

For the Ectos you have very clear targets in the Dungeon tracks, and in some of the one-time and other tracks. Every box can be mulched into multiple ectos, dark matter and insignias/inscriptions.

For the Mystic Clovers you have a massive advantage over PvEers. The Mystic Clover recipe requires Mystic Coins which are obviously still rising quite steeply. You get two clovers from every repeatable reward track and seven from the one-time tracks. If you both sPvP and WvW and you clear all the HoT tracks as well as the Silverwastes track, you’ve just pulled 56 of the 77 clovers you need to make a legendary. Don’t underestimate this; this is, in the current state of the game, a huge portion of building a legendary.

Acandis.3250:

—Step 1
The crux of the problem is caused by having a seemingly “obtainable for everyone” legendary at the end of a long grind (similar to the PvE model). However, this is something that could very easily go away.

So it sounds like a problem of perceptions rather than reality. But you knew from the start that you needed to clear ten divisions to get the wings. The targets are less opaque than Ad Infinitum and also arguably not as hard as the Mai Trin clear so there’s no fair argument of precedent to make. Legendary weapons and legendary backpieces are different things.

Acandis.3250:

PvP players don’t really care for the exclusivity of the skins available (save for the Glorious Hero set; it’s nice to see people that actually win tournaments get rewarded).

• ANet could just as well make the ascneded and legendary backpiece obtainable through PvE means, and PvP players (for the most part) wouldn’t care about this.

ANet changing the requirements for an item after the fact does bother me, and leaving modes without unique long-term goals does as well.

Acandis.3250:

—Step 2
Ok, the people that care for that, now have an option at grinding their legendary another way. With that out of the way, we can easily restructure every Ranked Division to have pip and tier regression in events of a loss.
This is crucial to having a system that actually works for matching similarly skilled players together.

Why not have it anyway? I see no problem with having full pip loss for every division while also locking legendary progression behind it.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the game having difficult goals for players and putting legendaries behind that goal.

Cynz.9437:

ah idk, maybe members from TCG, 55 etc.

that’s like saying your definition of a car is a datsun 180

cmon

what makes a player good at pvp

ohboy

for what it’s worth, i agree. a lot of people seem like they think they should be higher than the win/loss/win/loss pattern but evidently they aren’t.

to the people who say that they aren’t in the right division and that they deserve to be higher, simple challenge: prove it.

Looking forward to them. I hope that Mixed Borderlands survives and I hope the harsh words about DBL are just that. I enjoyed it and for people to want it completely gone is kinda sad.

they’re explicitly removing buffs across game modes (power of the mists) so that they can further improve wvw rewards

incentivizing pve players to ‘steal’ wvw objectives from wvwers is a very very bad idea

I don’t remember if it was an option in the survey but I would probably think about buying a mug

i like being able to clear all 3 dailies in a single ranked win when i’m playing one of the classes/builds i’m familiar with

Woop S.7851:

Comments/thoughts welcomed!

waaaay beyond scope

as far as i can tell this is mainly about easing the server pops so that people can form guilds and play wvw together with their friends

Chinchilla.1785:

Only if there was a good fight, and no cost/grind associated with seeking the fight. To your point of “community” that gets thrown around as well, how is it defined? How much community do the BG (or any server) NA really share with the Sea, eu, ocx, other timezones?

By community I mean

Let’s say you and your guild decide “yep, let’s do it, we’re moving”. Kazo goes to the new server. They’d be leaving behind CERN, GS, OnS, etc. That presumably has costs to you and your guild; you’ve got friends there and you’ve got infrastructure like the server teamspeak and the forums.

What incentive would make the loss of those friends and that infrastructure acceptable?

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Ah, just to clarify. These hypothetical new worlds would be linked upon creation, and they’d be linked to the lowest/lower tiers (depending on how many we created.)

Using existing T4 NA as an example:

• HoD + Ebay + New1
• DH + FC + New2
• NSP + SF + New3

I had a thought; what if instead they were targeted server transfers from T1 servers(&JQ) to new servers, which were linked to their host servers?

Let’s take TC as an example. You have plans to make 2 new servers to try to split the TC population. TC gets free transfers to these two servers and the immediate server linkup becomes TC+Kaineng+Bob+Steve. Maybe Kaineng also gets transfers to these servers.

This’d mean that immediate matchups aren’t compromised, you have a very clear window of transfer length and you’re not putting at risk servers which you feel already have a healthy head count. Also gives you a bit of time to say “this migration program isn’t working let’s cancel it”.

I can see how this benefits you but I am not sure what benefit I would get from such a system, and I don’t know how this would meaningfully encourage the top 4 servers that you’ve previously noted as being heavily stacked to break up.

I don’t dislike the idea, I think it would help if it did succeed, but I don’t see it succeeding. If you found an appropriate incentive that would actually pull players and guilds from the larger servers onto the new servers, that could work, but I can’t immediately think of an appropriate incentive that would convince people to go through the hassle.

Question specifically to T1+JQ players; what sort of thing would actually make you and your guild want to leave your T1 server+community and take a chance on a new world? Will enabled transfers be enough?

Valky.2574:

LOL what a stupid reason if that was the case then why the hell do we have spvp tournaments not only do they BURN OUT faster for having so many so often but also the cash prizes to!

How is “there’s no point having a tournament because blackgate wins by default anyway” not a valid reason not to hold a tournament?

cakemonkey.6347:

I hope you mean armors only. The weapons are already in circulation. I don’t see the point in restricting those now. As for the armor, I guess people need something to earn and show off, but this to me seems like you’re encouraging grind which I thought is actively being reduced.

How would you implement it such that it were not a grind?

PvE and sPvP have it easy. If you beat the boss, you get the loot. If you win the match, you get the loot. How do you create that kind of incentive structure for WvW?

Personally I think that Skirmishes could be a really interesting option for this. If your server wins the skirmish, you get X.

Good list, messiah. It seems spot on. So many games I’ve had where I post in teamchat where I’ll be going and what I’m playing, and I’m met with crickets, and you just know it isn’t going to go well.

Gwaihir.1745:

Ignore the ele, they are the strongest attrition bunker in the game atm. I hate when 2 of my guys go after the ele and spend all game chasing the kitten.

They’re extremely fragile if you sic the right person on them, like a power rev. You’re right, though, you should usually mulch something else first.

Ohoni.6057:

You can argue in favor of that outcome all you like, but as a player and a customer, I can tell you for a fact that I do not enjoy that.

Their goal should be HAPPY PLAYERS, and systems that end up with fewer happy players than upset ones cannot be justified in any way.

by your own admission you don’t like pvp you’re impossible to please, why should they bother