You couldn’t pay me to move to a T1 server right now. When the February WvW patch hits, you’re going to have tens of thousands of people coming back to give WvW another shot. Those servers will be the ones with 4 hour queues again.
In related news, 4 elementalists can render siege (except for arrow carts) useless.
You really only need 3 elementalists if facing a single max-range trebuchet.
This game is too pro-zerg. Too few wide area AEs that can hit more than 5 people and too many ways to nullify them.
If Oceanic players are on EU servers with no lag why would they move to US with lag by the same logic?
Because that’s not what I said. EU players moving to US or vice versa makes little sense because of lag.
As far as I know, Oceanic players should have about the same lag whether they play in Europe or US servers, so it’s more of a toss-up for them.
At any rate, the problem really isn’t that “US needs more Oceanic players”. We just need the ones who are already here to spread out a bit. I don’t see how all of them on the same server is fun for anyone.
It is interesting how servers can get mired into a tier.
Maguuma got pushed from T4 into T5. They crushed the other two T5 server BUT the other T5 servers were rated so much lower than them that despite winning the round, Maguuma actually lost rating and stayed in T5. This week they have redoubled their efforts of crushing the other two servers and it looks like they’ll move back up.
Meanwhile, Ehmry had some guilds say “We’re tired of T4 competition and want to move to a lower tier server”, which they did (some, I hear, went to Maguuma). Ironically this is going to cause Ehmry to be a lower tier server itself (maybe they’ll come back!)
I think the bottom line problem is that players playing “chase the winner” are generating too much churn and no server can really be pegged to a tier for very long.
Also, I think, people see a failure to win as, well, a demoralizing loss — a serious problem requiring drastic action to fix. This, despite the fact that every week 2 out of every 3 servers must, by necessity, lose. Sometimes great pairings are ruined because even though the 3rd place team actually did well and had a close, fun match, too many people said, “3rd place?! This server sux!” and they moved away, because moving is easy.
Once Anet removes free server transfers I think WvW will become a lot better. It’s a shame its taken them so long to implement something that was, I thought, intended to be ready to go on launch.
Try out a Logitech G13.
Among its many features is that WASD becomes joystick movement, which you use with your thumb, freeing up your fingers for action abilities.
It takes time to get used to but I will never go back to a keyboard if I can help it (you still need the keyboard to type on but it’s G13+mouse for gameplay).
Or at least make the puzzle designers do their testing as a max size Charr.
Preferably while another max size Charr is also trying to do the same thing. All you get is a big screen full of Charr.
“Events” are generally shared between everyone in the area.
Surely you mean “hearts”? Those do not seem to be shared and I agree that this makes the game messy for people trying to work together.
Really I hope to see more events and fewer hearts moving forward.
The problem I see here is that AOE through the gate is one of the few practical options that the defense has. While the AOE also prevents repairs to the gate, “gate repair” isn’t really practical to begin with. 3 rams will run through 200 supply in, what, maybe 2 minutes? Repairing is only really useful once the rams are dead.
And AOE through the gate is the only reasonable way to do that.
Maybe if people on walls had some advantage against people on the ground….
Or maybe if repairs were FAR more efficient…
But this change, today, would simply turn offense into “easy mode”. Moreso than it already is.
PvEvP > PvP
The problem is when they introduce PvE content which stands completely separate from the PvP. The giant grub is an example of bad content. Killing it has no bearing on the WvW environment. If you see the enemy attacking it, there is no reason to interrupt them (in fact, there is good reason not to!)
Conversely, the ogres, frogs, etc, are good content. The impact the WvW game and you have good reason to interfere with the enemy there, creating a “PvEvP” environment.
It’s not a question of “PvE vs PvP”. It’s a question of well-designed, good content versus poorly thought-out, lazy content.
Even better! why don’t you send some US guilds to Europe?
If 100 Us players transferred to my server Underworld then hell they would make 1000x the difference they do man to man on a US server.Honestly though, why don’t US guilds move here? I see a lot of your servers asking us to move then none of you moving yourselves.
Because of lag. We actually had a big Euro guild move to Ehmry at one point only to move away one week later because of the lag. Makes little sense for Euro to come to the US or vice versa.
Oceanic is different because there are no “Oceanic servers”. They must play on either Euro or US, and it seems a lot of them prefer US. Which is fine. Except they all pile into the same server, which results in that server running a +650 score all night with no real WvW going on because there is nobody for them to fight against.
Really you just need some Oceanics to transfer OFF of Dragonbrand.
I don’t see how they have any fun. They cap the entire map and then….what? Twiddle their thumbs for 4 hours? What fun is there in having every Oceanic player on the same WvW server? I’m sure it’s convenient for PvE but it looks pointless for WvW. Meanwhile DB lacks the daytime presence to really be a tier 3 server.
Can we hear about the February updates soon? There must be SOMETHING in there that’s all done and settled and can be talked about.
All I’m really getting out of these dev postings is an ever growing list of things that I should “not expect to see soon” and “would be nice but nobody is working on”.
I agree. Maybe the yak could get the same buff as supervisors right after a supply camp flip. To remove the buff, you must kill the guards.
That said, the guards could use a buff too. It’s not that difficult to solo both guards and the yak. NPCs that used to be a challenge back in beta are pushovers now. With the right gear and spec (and class) you can solo an entire supply camp today.
I’m pretty sure the only thing stopping people from soloing towers is that it takes too long to get inside… (DAOC tower lords were beasts. GW2 tower lords are, for whatever reason, almost completely worthless. That NPC breakout commander could probably solo 10 tower lords at the same time.)
-Upgrades to towers and keep are an unnecessary financial drain
Agree.
Frankly I think they should all be free and cost only supply. I don’t see the downside to this. Making fort upgrades cost personal money makes no sense except that it’s a money sink for the sake of having a money sink. Why am I spending personal money and personal karma for something that does little or nothing for me?
-Badge drops punish WvW players
Somewhat disagree. You can buy siege engines with badges which saves a ton of cash.
You can also turn badges into cash by buying siege engines and then selling them to other players.
-armour repair costs are an excessive money sink
Strongly disagree. Armor repair serves a strategic purpose in that it discourages “mindless suicidal zerging”. You can still zerg, but if you’re suicidal, it’ll cost you. As well it should.
Proposal – increase event rewards for towers and keeps, but not for camps.
Increase event rewards based on the number of “unique kills” (i.e., not 1 person 5 times but 5 people 1 time each).
There should be very little reward for “PvDoor” against an empty fort. Ninja for strategic reasons if you want but “karma trains” shouldn’t exist.
What about us solo runners? What will we do? Kill yaks for gold/karma/xp?
I can solo cap a supply camp. Do I deserve no reward for that effort?
a) Supply camps should not be soloable. The original intent was for “small groups”. The devs haven’t really kept pace with “mudflation” allowing people to now solo small group content.
b) You deserve very little reward for a soloable effort.
Ideally, the reward would scale based on the PvP action. No PvP = minuscule reward. Lots of PvP = much bigger reward. As it is, the game effectively rewards us for avoiding PvP because we get the same reward, only much faster.
I don’t see a problem with it. Engineers get roughly the same thing with automatic Elixir S, except instead of being downed it happens automatically at 25% health. That lets me run outside and fight and safely make it back inside 19 times out of 20.
The 1 time it fails is the same as for when vapor form fails: when someone realizes they can still root me.
I agree that rewards should be increased.
I don’t think that “PvE karma farm trains” should be the way to gain money/karma. That’s mainly what supply camps have become.
Interests falling after reset night is a problem with the point accrual and ranking system, which gravitate increasingly towards stagnation over time.
That’s not true either.
Interest falling after reset night is a problem with people not understanding the point accrual and ranking system.
The reality is that Thursday night is just as important as Friday night. “1st, 2nd, 3rd” isn’t as important as “point separation between ranks”. That is, earning 10,000 points on Friday night is just as good as 10,000 points on Thursday night, with regard to rank adjustments. While it might not change your ranking from 3rd to 2nd, there is still a rating difference in “losing by 20,000 points” versus “losing by 10,000 points”.
If people understood this, I think they would fight just as hard every day.
The score should show your “pending rating change” in large numbers with the “current point total” in small numbers. People should see that they are in 2nd place with “+23” rating points and then watch that drop as they slack off. Now they’re slacking off for Wednesday-Thursday and they are still in second place but instead of “+23” rating points it’s going to be “+5” or even “-20”.
Even the first place team can end up losing rating points.
People need to understand that every point cycle is equally important when it comes to rating change.
Some of the most exciting times I’ve had occurred trying to take out an opposing treb, either with “infantry” AoE or with other siege. Besides, trebs play a very strategic role and eliminating them would just narrow the scope of a game that already is probably too narrow.
How is doing this against a treb in any way different than the same action against a couple of catapults?
In fact, the catapults are better for this because if they’re hitting a wall, it means they are in a field somewhere and you can actually attack them. 99 times out of 100, when a tower in Eternal Battlegrounds is being trebbed, there will be no “exciting times” to counter them because they can’t be countered, except with another treb, in which case the best you can hope for is to break even.
I would be in favor of a siege tower to bypass the gates/walls. It would be fun!!!
No. Absolutely no.
There would be nothing “fun” about bypassing walls/gates. The only thing it would do is lead to even more takeovers with no PvP. As it is, dropping 4 rams on a gate will let you inside faster than defense can respond, unless they are already there waiting for you. You’re imagining a siege tower as a thing you roll up and drop the ramp and there’s a big fight on the wall but the reality is that it would mainly be used to fast-cap forts before the defense could show up.
Golems are already a stretch for me in breaking the whole fantasy element. Let’s keep tank, places, helicopters, rocket launchers, and biochemical warfare outta here
Wat
Ram = real
Trebuchet = real (even launching rotten animal parts is real)
Ballistas = real
Arrow carts = real
Golems = fantasy
So the one siege engine that only exists in fantasy is the one that’s the biggest stretch for you? I don’t get it.
Anyway, I conceptually like the idea of a tank. It would basically just be a “catapult golem”, though I suppose it could also be a ballista.
Sure as long as it doesn’t just become more PvDoor.
Incidentally, that was another problem that other big “WvW” type games have had to solve: how to generate PvP instead of “round robin capping” where players basically avoided each other and instead farmed rewards til they all got bored and quit.
Planetside implemented a lattice system. Fort A <—→ Fort B. You must own B to attack A. If you lose A while attacking B, you can no longer take B. They also implemented a “rewards based on violence” system. If you take B and nobody is home, you get very little for it as a reward. If you take B after a 30 minute battle with enough “unique kills” (i.e., not 1 person 50 times, but 50 people at least one time each) then you get maximum reward.
GW2 is basically what Planetside was on day 1, with many of the same mistakes. PvDoor is the result of these mistakes.
(Battleground Europe aka World War 2 Online also had this problem and also implemented a “lattice” type system to focus players into each other instead of into random back-capping where nobody was home.)
Do trebs help or hurt the WvW experience?
I’m starting to think they are a negative to the game overall. Mostly what they allow you to do is “safe siege” from one fort to another. Stonemist to Durios. Blue Keep to Langor. And vice-versa. In some cases the only counter to a treb is another treb and how much fun is that, really? Some towers can change hands constantly purely because one team has safe trebs to keep taking it back with. Is that fun?
And treb operation from a safe point, while strategically effective, is so boring that I’m pretty sure most people macro it. And there’s no real downside to macroing it because you are so safe, why not macro it and go watch some TV?
Wouldn’t the game be more fun without trebuchets?
I agree.
I’ve heard people say that we don’t need more maps because “we wouldn’t be able to fill them up”.
Good! Why do you want to fill up maps?? All that means is that there is a queue.
I thought Planetside did well in that the total number of players per map + total number of maps exceeded the number of players who could be logged in — that is, it was IMPOSSIBLE to fill all maps, by design. This meant that there was always somewhere else to go. If players were full up in maps A and B and partially full on C, you could still launch a new front in maps D or E. Granted, launching a new front with any effectiveness would mean you’d need your own sizable guild to roll with but at least the option was there.
In GW2, we often don’t have that option. Maps A-D may all be full. There is nowhere else to go. I’m worried that the February WvW patch will bring this to a head and the old 4-hour queues will come back to visit us.
I would really prefer more maps. It’s fun to play on a full map but sometimes it’s also fun to have another option available.
I’d gladly buy siege for, say, 50% vendor cost. Maybe 75%. At some point it will not be worth my time to arrange a meeting but for 50% I’d do it with a smile.
As someone else said, people will call you out for doing this and you’ll never be able to stop that, but personally, I’d love some discount siege. Pretty much 100% of my money since this game launched has gone into siege and fort upgrades and saving some cash by buying player siege would be an improvement.
Supply camps:
They’re already very valuable locations. They generate supply, which you will personally need to build siege and which your team will need to upgrade forts. Taking them is pretty important.
They are also virtually indefensible. Even Pangloss, which is probably the most defensive supply camp in the game, is pretty easily overrun if you just have a mesmer on hand.
They are also a “karma farm”. You can capture them and recapture them all day long for easy karma generation. Since they are virtually indefensible, it’s rare to fail to take a supply camp and rarely does a large force simply stand around to defend one (because that’s boring and not worth much).
…
So what if capturing a supply camp generated no reward? No gold, no karma, no XP from the event.
People would still attack them, but only for strategic reasons.
I’m really tired of seeing round-robin “karma farm trains” dominating WvW. At least make them attack a tower for their karma farming, since tower attacks at least have a chance of bringing in defenders in time to make a difference. Having to constantly retake supply camps purely because they are being grabbed by karma farmers is a real drag on the fun of the game. I don’t think most of them are doing it for strategic reasons, or because they want or care about supply — they are just farming karma, and it’s turning into a full-time chore to deal with them.
The problem is that “easy” becomes “boring” too quickly.
Currently, supply camps are “easy mode” for WvW. There’s no walls and most of them are completely open which renders siege almost entirely useless for defense and unnecessary or impractical for offense.
You can, and many do, simply run from supply camp to supply camp in round-robin fashion, often with one or more groups simply following each other around taking supply camps back and forth. I’ve heard it referred to as “karma farming”.
But it’s boring, and without fail people get tired of it and either go do something else or log off. Particularly in my guild, where we are all long-time MMORPG veterans, “farming” doesn’t sit well with us and we tire of it quickly. I think even for fresh faced players, new to MMORPGs, who still see farming as an exciting way to watch a meter increase, this form of entertainment is going to be short lived. An entire map of it will be popular and first and then a drag on the game after a few months.
Basically I see an “easy map” as a map full of open field objectives with no fully enclosed structures and easier access to waypoints. I just think that would get boring quickly unless there’s some new mechanic to prevent round-robin capping and recapping where nobody would bother to defend an indefensible location.
How it should work:
Siege engines have 30 minute timers.
Siege engines inside of a fort have 4 hour timers.
A siege built in the middle of nowhere should expire normally but defensive siege should stick around. It’s too easy to make defenders waste money by watching them setup siege and then you just go lol and attack somewhere else. Easiest way to destroy defensive siege is to just go away for half an hour.
Make sure the resser is in combat. If I’m out of combat, I can rez faster than you can stomp. If you give me a little tap to put me in combat, it will drastically cut my rez speed.
There are two intended ways of playing WvW:
WvW is a huge money sink and you can only make money in it by basically leeching off of other people.
I love WvW, only do WvW and have basically been forced to become a leech. I never have more than about 1 gold on me. I usually avoid upgrading anything anymore because I just can’t afford it. Even doing all I can to save cash, I still frequently do not have a siege engine where I’d like one. Can’t afford it.
It was especially bad on my guardian, who rarely gets loot bags.
Roughly 3,200 badges and 1.3 million karma for me.
I may seriously hurt something if they make badges worthless.
You know you can buy siege engines with badges, right?
They’ll never be worthless. The only question is if you should keep saving up in case Anet releases a new armor set that you’ll need those badges for.
I have hundreds of badges.
If I knew for sure that Anet would not be making new armor that costs badges, I’d spend them all on siege.
This is the bank vault argument.
If you build a bank with a vault that had a screen door open to the street, people would rob the bank all the time. You could argue that the fault is in the people; that the bank vault wouldn’t need to be secure if people would just agree to not rob it.
But it’s more practical to just admit and it’s a really stupid way to design a bank vault.
And so it is with software development. It may be the fault of cheaters and hackers but it’s also really stupid to not have designs for contending with them.
Planetside (1&2) do nice things with waypoints and mobile spawns that I think makes the game more fun overall.
Generally defenders can respawn inside when killed.
Attackers can setup their own spawn point and respawn outside when killed.
The challenge, therefore, is to shut down the enemy spawns. Although it’s possible to take over a fort without killing the enemy spawner, it’s a lot tougher/riskier. The goal is to reduce “uncontested caps” and create more big fights and I think that’s a big draw of the game.
In GW2, a surprise golem rush or sneak-capture is very “hurr hurr” for screwing the enemy over, which is, to some extent, fun in its own way, but they can do the same thing back to you and the end result is a lot of flip-flopping without much real PvP, which gets old fast. Stealth golem rushes are essentially just “PvDoor”.
Strongly disagree. In fact, I believe that there should be automatic announcements when forts come under attack, as DAOC did.
Short term, you take a fort with 5 people — hooray!
Long term, that is not fun gameplay. You will quickly find yourself getting bored and your players not logging in anymore. It’s just…not…fun.
What’s fun are hotly contested battles. To have those, defense has to be alerted and they have to have time to respond. I dunno about you, but when I think back on fun fights, I think back on the times we saw a fort under attack and got there in time to have a huge scrum. All of the times where we snuck in a capture unopposed are not really “fond memories” because they were just something we did, about as entertaining mining mithril.
I do agree that small groups should have things to do, but “sneak attacks on major forts” should not be a main staple.
I think an easy fix… at least for “fly hacking/jump hacking” would be to make all vets/guards within a tower/keep have a buff that stops them taking any damage unless a wall or gate has been breached. Once a gate or wall has been breached the buff vanishes and will only reappear once all gates/walls are at least at 10% hp so they are “up” again and have been at a stable up position for “X” amount of time to give any players still inside chance to take down a lord.
Not a bad idea. As long as “X” is, say, “45 minutes”. That gives hidden mesmers ample opportunity to take advantage of their position while still meaning that most forts have that buff most of the time.
Ultimately, though, everyone is correct that Arenanet will have to become more efficient at cracking down on hackers. We don’t want this game to turn into another APB (where the game was completely swarmed with 3rd party hacks/exploits and the original developer actually went out of business and laid off all the employees because not enough people were buying their game full of cheaters).
You’ll start seeing focus a lot more in sieges.
3 eles are enough to completely shut down incoming fire from 1 trebuchet (you don’t need 100% uptime, you just need enough uptime to stop each incoming treb shot). So if you have, say, 1 treb in your fort, the enemy zerg can show up, drop a counter treb within range and then use swirling winds on all of your treb hits against them while killing your treb.
The net result is that it’s one more “pro-zerg” measure in the game. The zerg should always be able to provide enough elementalists to protect their siege, rendering a skeleton fort defense force largely useless. You can stop them from using rams but you won’t be able to stop their catapults or trebuchets.
The only thing that can stop a zerg force using catapults/trebs is another zerg force capable of overwhelming them in the field. As more elementalists catch on, the ability to “counter-treb” a zerg force is becoming a thing of the past.
Disagree.
I have “officers” who can control the flow of guild buffs and claim keeps but additionally I have “Raiders” who can claim keeps but not activate the buffs.
The point is to keep “things that cost influence” under tighter reigns while allowing more people to help take advantage of those buffs once they have been activated. The buffs run for 12 hours and officers can’t be everywhere so I think it makes sense to have people that can move the buffs around the map without necessarily having to educate them on the ins and outs of influence expenses.
I don’t really see what problem you’re trying to fix by removing this option.
Who cares, attack multiple spots at the same time and make this useless. If they are protecting siege outside of the walls, then push out and get them or portal bomb them.
If you can “rush out and get them” then it’s zerg versus zerg. Your argument in invalid.
The question is what can a non-zerg do to thwart or hold off a zerg. There are 5 of you inside with access to all the siege you want. There are 25 outside, including competent elementalists running swirling winds. What do you do?
If the answer is “nothing; wait for the friendly zerg to show up” then we might as well just not have forts because the game will just be open field zerg on zerg fights.
Build siege…
5 coordinated elementalists within the zerg running this: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Swirling_Winds
Your siege is 100% useless. It blocks trebuchets, catapults, ballistas, arrow carts, everything.
If this game had no AE limits, the damage from it would have to take a massive nerf across the board. If they uncapped my AE, I could wipe a zerg by myself at a choke point.
Yes, that is exactly how DAOC worked. It was feasible one for guy with really good AE to wipe a zerg if they all clumped up nicely.
It is surprising that this game is so “pro-zerg”.
They SAY that they used DAOC as a model for WvW, but DAOC had no AE limits. 5 people defending a fort against 25 attackers could be very dangerous if they had good AE.
GW2 has nothing I can think of that serves as anti-zerg.
Bug. Submitted a report about it in beta, with screenshots. Still not fixed. Probably lost in the slew of other reports.
It would be nifty if Anet had time and resources to post live update values. Also maybe posted what they’re doing to come up with said values.
There is a website that does this.
What I want is to see it in-game, in the WvW scoreboard screen. It should be prominently displayed.
Basically it’s something I think most players don’t “get”, and the fact that you have to go to the forums or a 3rd party website to find out about it means most people will never get it. It needs to be in the game.
Arenanet could also fix most of these problems by changing the design slightly…
Not the best example, but there is, for sure, some legitimate cross-team griefing going on:
Most of this stems from the fact that transfers are free, you can do it once a week, and you can jump into WvW immediately.
Arenanet saw all of this coming and said that transferring would lock you out of WvW for at least one full cycle, perhaps two, but they have never implemented this. All of the predicted abuses are in full swing now.
I disagree. I think DB NA prime is Tier 4.
Mmm, no. You’re usually under +200, if not under +100 and almost always in 3rd. If you did that all day, you’d be pushed into tier 5 if not lower.
But you make up for it by being +500 or more during oceanic times.
DB is a poster child for the worst thing that can happen under the current system:
DB oceanic presence is probably Tier 2 in size, but they are in Tier 4, which means they run over the map in no time and spend a lot of the fight either waiting in queues to get into the 1-2 maps with a real fight still happening or else they go twiddle their thumbs in one of the empty maps.
DB daytime presence is probably Tier 5 if not Tier 6, but they are in Tier 4, which means they get squashed pretty handily across most maps for most of their prime time.
So you have two groups, neither really operating within their appropriate tier. I don’t see how that server is much fun to play on, for most hours of the day.
Problem with a “turret build” is that there is no such thing. There aren’t any really good turret traits. There’s a big difference in an engineer with grenades and an engineer that has traited for them, and the same goes for the flamethrower, rifle and pistol.
There’s very little difference between an engineer spec’d for turrets and one that’s not. Turrets also just don’t fare well in a mobile WvW setting.
10 seconds after I drop my Superior Arrow Cart, during prime time. I’m pretty sure Arenanet devs follow me around for that exact purpose. (“He dropped a superior arrow cart! ENGAGE THE PATCH.”)
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