It should be a guild research item.
Makes no sense to buy it with gold.
Thats the thing WvW isent competitive at all its who got the greatest numbers wins, its a win/win solution think about it.
^ This.
WvW is not a week-long “competition” for the vast majority of servers. It’s something you go into and have fun in for a while and you have to ignore the scoreboard because all it really indicates is which server has the greatest 24/7 presence.
If you’re a top-3 server, you can enjoy a real 24/7 competition along with your 3 hour queues.
For the rest of it, it’s a runaway scoring situation every single day when it comes down to simple population advantage. The score, in these cases, is harmful to the community.
Reinforce walls: mandatory
Reinforce doors: mandatory
Fortify walls: questionable. Expensive and most people go through the doors anyway.
Entire line of oil, cannons, mortar: mostly a waste. You only get 1 cannon, easily killed and hardly anyone is dumb enough to die to oil anymore. The mortar is nice but really not worth the cost to get there.
Entire line of second worker, additional guards, raise guard level: mostly a waste. The second worker can help with the walls and doors but at 100 supply he drains a lot of the stuff he needed to do the upgrade! NPC guards are all worthless. They MIGHT help in a few edge cases but generally guards just get squashed flat instantly and making them level 82 and adding a few more doesn’t change that. 20 people won’t even notice the difference.
Entire line of outfitter, siegemaster, patrol: mostly a waste, unless you really want forward vendors. The patrol has the same problem of the other NPC upgrades, which is that “NPC guards are useless”. A level 80 can solo a whole patrol, so why spend 15 silver on it?
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In summary, upgrades could use some work, especially on towers. I’m starting to see more and more places upgraded with walls and doors and nothing else, because it’s just not worth it. Some keeps have good placement of cannons and mortars, but not towers. Guard upgrades are a waste everywhere you go.
I hope to see some adjustments made in the future to make more upgrades more useful.
Agreed.
Turn them off until a fix to the hacks (flying, superspeed) and the bugs (keep lord turns immune) can be fixed.
Speaking for myself, I find myself logging into GW2 on a daily basis because I want to help make sure my server remains ahead in the scores.
In other words, if you were too far behind in score, especially with the reset coming up, you’d quit. You’re actually a representative of the problem we’d like to fix.
I want to play 7 days a week, not just the ones where we have good population because we’re winning or close to it.
The only purpose of claiming forts is to run a fort buff (and to display your banner). Some people think it provides bonus influence to the owner but it doesn’t. It’s purely for buffs. If you don’t have buffs running, there’s no reason to claim anything.
To that end, if a guild isn’t running buffs, they shouldn’t get the option to claim.
Or let them claim, but every few minutes do a check: if the owning guild isn’t running a buff, the fort becomes unclaimed again.
I’m tired of getting caught running guild buffs, losing the fort we had and then not being able to claim anything else because literally everything in the world is claimed by nobody-knows-who and none of them are running buffs.
It’s a fair point. Keep the scores but hide them.
Planetside never had a scoreboard. DAOC never had a scoreboard. Battleground Europe never had a scoreboard. Does WvW need a scoreboard?
They could still track it for server matching purposes but I don’t know that seeing the score does anything for us except cause more problems than it fixes (what DOES it fix, anyway).
Ironically, I think, it’s the free transfers that are preventing servers from becoming balanced. Population is too much in flux to ever be “balanced”.
Thanks for reporting it. It would be nice to see a developer response on blatant hackers (and why there is no way to report them).
Yet another reason rams should cost more.
I want them to cost more because casually dropping 4 rams to blast through a reinforced gate in 60 seconds is damaging to WvW anyway but using them as a cheap way to drain a castle of supplies just adds to that. If they were arrow carts, ballista or even catapults, they’d at least stand a chance of being useful. Rams, however, are useless.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Ehmry Bay!
We have a good match going, no queue on Eternal Battlegrounds and we’re holding a keep in Yak’s borderlands with the undermanned buff.
Crazy XP, karma and loot drops up in here.
Transfer to Ehmry Bay. Good match and you generally get right back in when disconnected because we don’t have that many queues. 3pm eastern, Saturday, no queue on Eternal Battlegrounds.
Maguuma mostly comes at night.
Mostly.
Population Imbalance, not “night capping”.
Population imbalance, combined with keeps falling way too fast, way too cheaply, is the real problem. Once one server gets a modest population advantage they roll up the maps over the next 60 minutes and that’s often the end of it.
By the time balance is restored, the other servers are at a tremendous disadvantage. The momentum of off-hours population imbalance is hard to stop, and that’s a problem.
(edited by Slamz.5376)
Goons, or someone claiming to represent them, already admitted in another thread that this was “play to lose”. Not their exact words or intentions, but rather, the net result of an experiment that backfired on them. They had hoped to use this match to propel Maguuma and Tarnished Coast ahead in ratings at the expense of Ehmry Bay, but instead ended up causing Tarnished Coast to run away with the ball.
Dev posts in the past have said that rating changes are based not just on 1st, 2nd, 3rd, but also on the score. They didn’t spell out the formula, but I imagine the net result of this match is that Tarnished Coast will springboard into a higher rating while Maguuma and Ehmry Bay will both lose some points, probably about the same amount since they are almost tied in score.
Goons are famous for their forum experiments but they miscalculated a bit here, and they accidentally shot their own server in the foot.
(Although with server transfers still being free, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Goons simply move to Tarnished Coast by Friday. After all, their experiment was only a failure if you assume they are trapped on the server they caused to lose rating.)
You should be there to defend it. If you’re already occupying all the map, there should be a room/way for other servers to even the odds with ninja attack. Otherwise it’s gonna turn to zerg fest, spawn camping.
You are under the impression that small groups should be able to ninja a tower as a way of making an elite sneak attack and to enable small group play.
The problem is that by enabling this, you create a situation where that’s all there is.
I guarantee that with no changes to the system, within 2 months WvW will consist of nothing BUT ninja attacks. The only reason it’s not like that now is lack of organization and a lot of new players who don’t understand the system.
The best way to take anything is to gather 30 people and go hit a back door or backline tower. If you can bring 4 golems, that’s nice, but rams will do too. No need to worry about defenses because you just rush in before the defenders can respond.
If you defend a keep 24/7 with 5 people, you can do a lot to slow down these attacks, but nobody mans a keep 24/7. You’re lucky to keep 1-2 people on-hand, much less 5.
Ninja attacks can’t be empowered because by doing so you undermine the entire siege game. It will eventually be nothing but ninja attacks, because that’s the easiest, quickest and cheapest way to take anything.
Tell me seriously how would you capture a keep, where it’s keep lord can tank half of your zerg and other server’s zerg attack you behind as they have a lot of time to gather up?
That’s easy. As I said, give him 20x health. Not 20x damage, just health.
Keep Lord DPS is already negligible. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone downed by him as long as the attackers had at least 10 people. I’ve never seen a tower lord or a supervisor down anyone without having the invincible buff (that also buffs their DPS by about 5x).
So you’d have to wipe the enemy players and then kill the Lord. Currently everyone does it the other way around because you can kill the Lord in under 10 seconds and then you just have to sweep up.
How will any keep change hands except one server is outmanning the other (aka night capping)?
Same way every single battle in the game eventually goes one way or another. One team fights better than the other, or has them outnumbered, or plops down siege.
DAOC has massively stronger NPC defenses, and keep attacks are automatically broadcast server-wide, with people in PvE having time to run all the way there, yet keeps did change hands frequently enough. But you had to expect a fight. You couldn’t just ninja them away without defenders having a chance to show up.
That’s why I advocate things like stronger doors, stronger walls, more hit points on NPCs. We aren’t necessarily making it more dangerous to attack, but we are giving defenders a chance to show up in time to join the battle.
I think the bottom line is you like sneak attacks and think a group should be able to ninja a tower without resistance if they’re quick enough. I think that’s a huge problem and is a big part of why population imbalances so quickly turn into a full map sweep.
Do something with leather, seeing how my bank is full of it and none of it is worth anything on the market. :-p
some spy earlier capped our keeps / towers and wouldnt upgrade them so we would lose them on purpose.
You know, anyone can upgrade a keep.
You don’t need to be the owning guild and in fact the owning guild get no deductions in cost or anything like that.
As far as I know, the only reason for a guild to claim a keep is to run the guild buffs, which hardly anyone seems to do anyway.
I maintain that the problem is keeps and especially towers are simply too weak. With a force of 30 attackers, a fully upgraded tower with reinforced doors, cannons, mortars, upgraded guards, etc, will fall faster than any defenders can get in there. In some cases you’re lucky to even get a warning that a tower is under attack before it falls. I’ve seen back-line garrisons get sacked with almost no warning, especially if they come up from the water entrance, because who wants to stand there staring at a gate for 4 hours waiting to see if enemies are coming? By the time anyone shouts a warning, the inner door is halfway down.
5 clued people can significantly slow down 30 zerg-tactic attackers but only if they’re already inside the tower when the zerg shows up.
Honestly these threads need to stop, and start making threads that help make the game better.
Btw, night capping is a legit strategy you mad?
So you started a new thread about how there shouldn’t be so many threads and end it with the popular meme from 2003, “you mad”. What are you, my dad? Get current!
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The real question is, how does HoD do during prime time when all participants have queues on all servers? That’s the real measure.
Night capping is “legit” but you have to admit there’s little skill required to defeat outnumbered opponents. People whine over the scoreboard but it’s usually a boon to the “losing” servers because there’s a lot more money, XP and karma rewarded for defense than for offense.
in WvW
Posted by: Slamz.5376
The theory about quaggan lightning strikes seems most plausible, though I’ve never seen it myself.
There were accusations that we “bugged” the Lord on purpose but it’s actually incredibly inconvenient for us because whatever is happening results in a permanently broken altar. We can’t put the orb back into the garrison because the broken altar won’t accept the orb and there’s no way to repair it. Putting it in the northmost altar is almost as good as handing it to the enemy because that place isn’t realistic to defend long term. Putting it in one of the side keeps isn’t ideal either since they’re a lot more likely to be taken sooner or later.
Fixes to “altar bugs” is one of the things I’m most hoping to see in a patch note.
Seeing Arenanet acknowledge that they know about the issue would be nice for starters.
I don’t really support any of that.
I would rather ask two simple questions:
Is it fun now?
If it’s not fun now, how can we make it fun?
Adding things like realm abilities, realm ranks, etc, is just a bypass for people not having enough fun. If a game is fun, I play it. I don’t need a new hat or to unlock some new ability every day. People have been playing chess for over 500 years and never once needed to unlock a new ability. Either you like it or you don’t. If you like it, you play it.
If people aren’t liking WvW enough to play it, then let’s ask “what’s not fun about it?”
I wouldn’t mind seeing more stats, of course. I’m a big fan of stats. But unlocking new abilities or new pants could cause problems and you didn’t really address the root problem of the game just not being fun enough to play it without rewards.
You’re still arguing against reality. I bet a quick survey of any server would reveal many towers and several keeps that have nobody in them. Get 30 people together and they are yours in less than 5 minutes.
You can say you have people in your guild willing to defend. I, myself, log more than my fair share of hours on defense, ready to jump on the siege the moment the enemy attacks. And 99% of the time I’m there by myself or else with people from my own guild.
The vast majority of the population does not sit on defense.
We agree that NPCs and gates should be “speed bumps” but currently NPCs, even Lords, are not even that. Keep Lords die in ~10 seconds. Guards we don’t even stop for because they die if everyone hits them once on the way by. My idea of a speed bump is something that slows you down dramatically. Not something you run over at full speed and don’t really notice.
I heart this thread.
I think it highlights how Maguuma got outplayed in forum warfare by Tarnished Coast. Ehmry vs Maguuma is a close match but TC ran away with the score. We should have been working together against TC starting about day 2. TC doesn’t have a totally overwhelming night crew but it’s still better than either EB or Maguuma.
You Maguuma guys got played.
Environmental slow-downs encourage PvP by giving the defending team time to respond.
One fairly simple idea might be to make oil have 20x normal hit points. You’ll want rams for the doors and ballistas for the oil or else risk having an defender slip inside to start dumping oil on your rams.
This will also help encourage “real siege”.
Currently the game is about surprise zerg attacks. If you can simply leave a keep alone for a while, most or all defenders will get bored and do something else. You then organize about 30 people together and you can go knock through the whole place in about 5 minutes. This is easiest if you have your own zerg guild but I’ve seen it work with pugs and Commanders.
The whole objective, at this point, is to smash through things faster than the enemy can respond.
Therefore, the whole objective is to AVOID PvP.
And it totally works.
I’m saying “defend your forts if you don’t want them to get recaptured”.
You have an unrealistic view of how people play games.
DAOC. Planetside. Battleground Europe. Time and time again games like this have been made and in every game it’s the same result:
People don’t want to just sit on defense, doing nothing but waiting for an attack. They want to go out and participate and enjoy the game and still have enough time to get back to the base to fight on defense.
DAOC provided server-wide warnings of attacks and ample time to get back. The Lords were very strong and the guards were like lords in GW2. Rams were very expensive and heavy and you didn’t plop down 3 of them if you could possibly avoid it.
Planetside had a 10-minute capture timer (might have been 15, I forget) where attackers had to defend before the structure went over to them.
Battleground Europe had multiple capture points within each town and you had to cap them all to claim the place (picture Stonemist with 3 capture points and it’s a little like that).
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Each of these games had a problem with “nobody wants to defend.”
Each of these games had people like you claiming it wasn’t necessary. It was.
Each of these games set out to solve the problem and came up with something that worked and added to the fun of the game.
GW2 attempted, I think, to mimic the DAOC method but they are way off in their values.
:More hitpoints on doors/walls will destroy the value of organized 10/15 man groups as they can’t carry enough supplies to bring down an objective before “mindless zerg” responds.
So basically your vision of WvW is small groups avoiding each other and wiping through keeps before anyone can notice them or do anything about it.
That’s not PvP.
That’s PvE.
It’s an XP farm, which I guess is your goal, but I prefer fights between warring groups of players. This “capture-recapture-capture-recapture” see-saw action is the result of the current design with weak doors, weak lords and weak guards.
Let’s get back to having a war, not a PvE farm.
No good, organised group of people will assault a stronghold head-on without taking over the nearby supply camp. That gives the defenders more then enough time to muster a defense.
On the contrary, “good, organized groups” AVOID the supply camp precisely for that reason.
Even our pug zerg avoided the supply camp. That’s why we were halfway through the inner door before the first defenders managed to get in. Not that it did them much good. Too late.
Oh, now this is good.
We’ve bombed Maguuma’s tower at Anzelias to where it has no walls.
Tarnished is running past it, ignoring the fact that it has no walls, to continue attacking us. We’d take it but we can’t get through the Tarnishing/Maguuma alliance.
Oh yeah, no deals going on here.
(And we wiped Maguuma at Ogrewatch AGAIN. Welp, gotta go. Here they come again!)
Suggesting a conspiracy is being generous.
The alternative is simply that Maguuma is a clueless zerg server. We were trying to be nice by suggesting the conspiracy! On eternal, we’ve crushed Maguuma’s attacks on Ogrewatch for, no kidding, 5 hours straight.
Five
hours
straight
Meanwhile, TC is attacking us on the west flank, meaning TC and Maguuma are both basically undefended at home, ignoring the fact that they each have far easier targets.
Not so much as a supply camp has changed hands between green and blue. They’re just bashing themselves against our defenses.
I’m not exactly complaining. 5 hours of money, karma and XP from Ogrewatch defense has been awesome!
WvW is good as it is now. 5 people can already hold back 30 with little trouble. There’s no need to boost the defensive advantage even more.
And how often do you see 5 people sitting in a tower 24/7? I almost never see that and I do it a lot.
Against 30 good attackers (who understand siege), 5 can delay them long enough for help to arrive.
30 good attackers against a fully upgraded keep with nobody home will sack it in about 3 minutes. You won’t have time to get 5 people there.
I’d be happy with a badge or karma reward. Not sure how much good that would be to the bot-farmers, but I’d love it.
A chance of siege blueprints would be great, too.
I get a ton of karma from WvW and I buy the level 80 exotic karma gear from the PvE zones that way. I bought exotic weapons with badges. I see no need to do PvE.
I don’t quite get why games have to give advancements to be fun, though. Is it not possible to play a game just because it’s fun?
I’ve long said that golems were for surprise commando attacks NOT mainline attacks. 120k hit points that can’t be healed goes away real fast and they take extra damage from siege engines. Ballistas obliterate them.
If there’s no defenders it’s a great way to rush but against a defended position they’re a total waste of money.
I think they are precisely meant to be a hindrance. The walls, doors and guards are meant to prevent late-night capping by small groups (they fail at this; I’m pretty sure you could cap a keep with 5 people — possibly 2 nicely geared people could do it if they were careful. I could solo a supply camp were it not for the blinds).
They are also meant to be a slow-down — or they should be. I just don’t think a fully upgraded keep is meant to fall so fast. Yesterday my server did a literal pug zerg and took down a fully upgraded borderlands keep in what couldn’t have been more than 5 minutes. This was by no means an elite attack by the best of the best. It was a zerg of various small guilds that just grouped up, ran over and kicked the place down faster than the enemy could respond. Reinforced doors, reinforced walls, cannons, mortars, upgraded NPCs, orb, poof.
(edited by Slamz.5376)
This problem contributes to why so many matches end up so unbalanced. Once your server has a small population advantage, it’s quick to sweep the map.
It also helps encourage “zergs”. 30 people can sack a fully upgraded tower in literally about 3 minutes unless there are defenders already inside, already manning siege engines positioned to deal a beating to rams and golems. If nobody is home: 3 minutes.
Keeps and even Stonemist will fall in just a handful of minutes unless defenders are posted there 24/7. Keep lords die to 30 players in…what…about 15 seconds? This is not hyperbole. I’m pretty sure we could time it at 15 seconds or less.
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By slowing down “zerg caps” and “off-hour caps” I think we’d stabilize the game a lot. Give defenders a chance to respond to attacks.
Currently it’s just way too easy to assemble a zerg and sweep through an area.
(edited by Slamz.5376)
You don’t need an exploit to sack a fully upgraded garrison in under 5 minutes. It’s one of my complaints and part of why matches so quickly become “400,000 vs 30,000 vs 20,000”. Once one team gets a population lead, it’s less than an hour to sweep everything on all of the maps.
There’s no alert for doors being hit. The doors are swiftly killed by 3+ rams/golems. NPC guards are useless and present no threat to even a single group. Lords have few hit points and die to a modest group in under 30 seconds and die to a zerg in about 10 seconds (5 if supervisor).
They really need to slow zerg-sieges down.
Commander should be guild research.
Making it gold makes no sense.
There is no alliance.
There are just some agreements between a couple major guilds.
Ehmry Bay borderlands, Ehmry Bay server have had a queue for a fair part of today.
We’ve had bots in there all day too. Currently several of them are stuck at the spawn in, auto-attacking the air and they’ve been there for a while. We’ve reported them but that seems to take hours to get anyone to review it, so here I am.
Please ramp up bot bans for WvW areas. There is limited space so they are more critical.
At any rate, this is the closest match I’ve seen since the game launched. If anything, we should be discussing how best to double-team Tarnished Coast now, since they are 15k in the lead with Maguuma and Ehmry virtually tied. TC is proving to be good at locking a team out of the borderlands, giving them an enormous advantage in points from towers.
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Incidentally, 15k may not sound like much of a lead, but at +100 points every 15 minutes, it will take almost 38 hours to catch up to Tarnished Coast in score now.
Ehmry or Maguuma COULD potentially come out #1 still. Or is this a “battle for 2nd place” already?
Current totals:
Tarnished 35,519
Ehmry 33,182
Maguuma 26,433
Current situation:
Tarnished +340
Ehmry +215
Maguuma +140
I don’t have any illusion that all of Maguuma agreed to an alliance with all of Tarnished. You can’t control the zerg. They don’t even read chat, much less the forums. But it does look like a few key guilds agreed to something, and the Maguuma guys got played. Tarnished basically said, “Let’s you and him fight” and Maguuma said “Ok!”
Tarnished is on their way back up to 1st by planting one boot firmly in Maguuma’s face.
Maguuma meanwhile is focusing on Ehmry, not appearing to notice that Tarnished has almost a +100 income lead over them. Good “alliance”, guys. Maguuma taking one for the team, I guess?
During prime time, populations are balanced. There is not much you can do to “make up for it” during prime time unless you totally outclass your opponents in organization and skill.
Sweeping the map when your team is popcapped and the other two teams are running at 20% capacity requires no organization and no skill, yet counts for more because that’s generally about 16 hours of the day.
It’s true that PvP, just like PvE, needs content to survive. No modern game would set a player out in a field with a bunch of NPCs and say “have at it, there’s your PvE”. Many MMORPGs do precisely that for PvP, though.
GW2 improved things significantly by providing WvW, which is “PvP content”.
But it’s also true that WvW represents, what, about 2% of this game’s land mass? And that’s including one map being repeated 3 times.
It’s a good start, and it’s better than most, but I do agree that long term, we’re going to need a lot more WvW content than we currently have. Allowing PvP in PvE areas isn’t really an improvement in my opinion because it’s not “PvP content” — it’s simply allowing players to kill each other for no reason in the middle of the map, which is pretty shallow. But certainly WvW could be expanded on greatly.
I believe Arenanet stated that the WvW maps are the largest maps possible.
Although I do agree it would have been nice to have more than, essentially, 2 WvW maps.
Eternal Battlegrounds is fun but it’s very dense. You can hit one structure with a trebuchet from another structure. It’s a good design but sometimes I’d like to get away from that into something a bit more sparse.
Borderlands are a bit more sparse but they’re very hilly. Again, it’s a good design but again, sometimes I’d like to get away from that into something with good space, but not so many annoying cliffs (and without a giant lake).
Basically I wish we had 4 different maps rather than 2.
Planetside launched with 10 maps, from icy cliffs to pleasant plains to swamp to jungle to blasted crater. All very large maps. Planetside had its faults but lack of map variety wasn’t one of them. I’d love to see more WvW maps here, to give us that same sense of variety.
This would be a good step. However, even just 1 hour where one server has a queue and the other 2 don’t could mean that server is able to capture every holding on multiple maps, and also give them position to upgrade those holdings to make it harder to take them back.
That’s a critical point, I think.
1 hour is about what it takes for a server with more people to take the whole map away, particularly when they outnumber both other servers combined.
I think Arenanet should look into ways to slow down the capture rate. A team shouldn’t be able to sweep the entire map so quickly once they get a population advantage. Fully upgraded structures in particular should take longer to knock down.
in WvW
Posted by: Slamz.5376
I agree that this is the only feasible solution, though I would change the formula:
Population cap should = the sum of the two smallest teams.
So if the population is:
60/50/30 then the popcap is 80.
If the population is:
80/10/5 then the popcap is 15 (and the team with 80 players online will simply have a queue until the population drops)
It doesn’t really matter if Red outnumbers Blue, even if it’s by a wide margin. Where it gets ugly is when Red outnumbers Blue + Green combined.
I don’t understand the problem.
100% world completion means you have seen the entire game. Not just the parts you enjoy. The ENTIRE game.
You basically want a “Just The Parts I Like” achievement award. Sadly, Arenanet did not put that one in.
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