Guild Wars 2

I’ve heard you need to do 2k to get credit but that’s close to 10% for an average build with some vitality in it so maybe 10% is on target.

I hate playing my Guardian because I use staff/hammer for the utility and the staff hits people like a wet noodle. I rarely get bags even spamming the thing. My engineer, on the other hand, does more damage with his flamethower in one second than the guardian will do in 5 seconds and gets a whole lot more bags.

Thieves are up to their eyeballs in bags and the main complaint I hear from them is “Oh man I died and there are like 20 bags around me”.

Support classes get screwed.

This isn’t that unusual to see:
1st place team: Losing rating points
3rd place team: Gaining rating points

The way the system is setup, a team with 1500 rating losing to a team with 1800 rating can potentially gain rating, provided they don’t lose by that many points.

It’s actually a great system because it means that the Thursday fight is just as important as the opening Friday fight. You might not lose 1st place but you can easily go from 1st place (+10 rating) to 1st place (-2 rating) by slacking off.

The problem is that this isn’t obvious in the scoreboard. People just see the score. “We can’t make up 20,000 points, we’re stuck in third, we give up”. But they might keep fighting if they understood that as it stands, they’re actually going to go up 1 rating point. If they give up and let their score slide further, they may lose numerous rating points. Either way, they’re getting third place, but there’s a difference in “third place by a little” and “third place by a lot”.

.

So my proposal is that the in-game scoreboard shows “Rating Change” — how ratings would change if the game ended now with current points.

“Score” should still be displayed too, but as a very small number, underneath the large display of “Rating Change”.

I go to WvW to kill bad guys.

Whether you are currently fighting him in a “duel” or not is immaterial. I’m going to kill him if I can. I don’t go to WvW to listen to someone’s list of arbitrary rules on who I can and can’t attack under what circumstances. “Red is dead.”

1) Automatic announcements on gate/wall attacks. First call at 99%. Other calls at 25% increments. (“Ogrewatch gate 75%, 15 enemies nearby.”)

2) Remove golem blueprints from the jumping puzzle loot tables. Ideally, remove them from the game entirely. Golems are only useful for ninja keep takes, which are not fun and mainly result in frustrating gameplay for one team while the other team brags about not having to fight anyone.

3) Show gate/wall health on the overhead map (at least for friendly forts). It should be apparent from looking at the map where defense is needed.

.

Basically we need more head-to-head combat and less ring-around-the-rosy fort swapping.

Play for fun, not “usefulness”, unless the usefulness of a class is sufficient fun in itself.

For engineer, I personally made a “flamethrower shocktroop” build that I think is pretty awesome. There are a lot of variations you can use but build for juggernaut and alchemy-line survival traits, then aim power/toughness/vitality with some precision (e.g., on upgrade slots). Be sure to pick up automatic elixir S (I forget the trait name).

I play on the frontlines with the flamethrower and use my survival traits and toughness to retreat and recover as needed.

For utilities I like:
Elixir U — the secondary ability is a throwable wall that will either be reflection (awesome), smoke (good enough — blocks projectiles), or some etheral one that gives you invis if you step through it, which is still useful enough in that it makes enemies lose you as a target. Throw it in front of you when the fighting is heavy or if you need to run away.

Slick Shoes — The secondary ability is awesome. The primary purpose of it is that when you get snared, you hit it and you’re pushed back up to the speed cap so you can get out of there. The primary ability is an oil slick that knocks people down, and then you can figure-8 over them to knock them down a couple more times. It’s great on heartseek-spammer thieves. Also handy for making an escape.

And then, of course, the flamethrower.

Elite ability → supply drop just because all the other ones are junk (and in particular do not mesh well with this build).

Heal ability is debatable. I use the elixir because I picked up the trait that cleanses one condition when you use an elixir, so between the drink and the F1 throw, that’s two conditions cleansed.

This is an “AE DPS with survivability” not a “utility build”. I think it’s tremendous fun.

Sporadicus.1028:

People figure out new ways to attack or assault. Strategy comes in many forms. Decoys, diversions, stealth assaults (those darn golems!), and supply starvation are just a few of the strategies I’ve seen in this game.

Yes, but we don’t actually talk about them, because all of these are now routine and do not require more than about 15 minutes worth of planning.

Except for Friday openers, nobody says, “Okay guys, tomorrow we’re going to attack Dreaming Bay, and here’s the plan…” You can’t have that discussion 24 hours in advance because you have no idea what the map will look like tomorrow. Everything is short term — minute by minute or hour by hour at most.

I think when you look at long term “WvW” games, you look at EVE or Battleground Europe. While never scratching the surface of WOW’s popularity, they nevertheless have been around for about a decade and continue to add subs and employ full dev teams. These games have elements that you log in and read about and discuss well in advance of the event. Today we patrol HERE or defend HERE or attack HERE and tomorrow we’ll do A, B or C depending on X, Y, Z.

We can’t talk about tomorrow in a game like GW2 because while the WvW is certainly fun and action packed, it’s so fleeting that there’s no planning to be done more than about an hour in advance.

I think long term player retention will be difficult without something that keeps players talking. (Complaints about thieves don’t count.)

I would have written less, but I ran out of time.

General “game design theory” topic.

Hypothesis:

• A game can be judged by how much chatter it generates between players, especially on internal guild member forums.
• Lack of chatter means a game, however fun, is becoming routine, which will translate into “boring” eventually.
• What are the secrets to creating a game that’s interesting enough to generate a lot of chatter between players 4 months after launch?

SWTOR, for example, died quickly with relatively little chatter generated. There just wasn’t a lot to talk about. Early on you talk about your class and class interaction and tips on leveling and zones but after 4 months that’s all been hashed over. Nothing more to discuss. You might still be logging in and playing and having fun but there’s nothing to talk about. (“Today I logged in and had a great time doing basically the same thing I did yesterday.”)

I have a growing suspicion that what you need to keep a game interesting are goals that require a minimum of 24 hours to achieve. For example, no matter how interesting a particular Stonemist Castle battle might be, it’s not going to generate much chatter because it’s a fleeting thing. It starts and ends one way or another over the course of a couple of hours and unless there’s something really new that someone is doing (trebuchet in a spot you hadn’t seen before), there’s not much to talk about.

Pirates of the Burning Sea was probably the best game for this. Day-to-day strategy could change based on the state of port ownership and which ones were under attack. If my oak production port is being attacked tomorrow, we may have to discuss what to do about oak if we lose it. We may have to discuss which areas we should patrol and which areas we should attack tomorrow because it’s not going to be the same as today. What’s more (something EVE lacks here), the actual combat mechanics are interesting enough (and get tweaked by the devs frequently enough) that there’s usually something to discuss there: dealing with rageboarders or stern campers or what’s the new hot ship this month. Battles were also lengthy and costly so it was kind of a big deal — it was worth discussing if you could pick up a new tip that would save from you losing an expensive ship.

POTBS never really became routine. (The only reason I quit, really, was the need to always have exactly 6 players online… I never got bored with it, it’s just that sometimes I’d log in and not be able to play.)

Games like Rift and GW2 will always have their days numbered because ultimately you just run out of things to talk about. (And half of Rift discussion was actually just complaints over raid rules so I’m not sure that should count.) Even if the games are fun and mechanically interesting to PLAY, it’s too minute-by-minute to really come to the forums to discuss, which means it’s starting to become routine and “fun” + “routine” will become “boring” eventually, which means people will quit soon.

.

How busy are YOUR guild’s forums? On my guild’s forums, GW2 is actually doing pretty good with over 10k posts, relative to SWTOR which died after only about 1.5k posts, however, the post rate has slowed to a crawl over the last month. We still have a good WvW presence, but there’s not a lot to talk about. There’s no real day-to-day strategy to discuss because WvW strategy is minute to minute or hour to hour, not day to day. There’s nothing worth planning 24 hours in advance because everything on the map will have changed hands three times between now and then anyway.

I’m afraid that what WvW lacks is goals that can take more than an hour or two to accomplish.

I think it needs things that require 1-3 days. (Weekly scores don’t really count because that’s not exactly a “goal” so much as the result of playing well from hour to hour. There’s no long term planning required.)

Ultimately I think they have no choice, if they want to stay true to their philosophy that you don’t have to PvE to get the best gear.

I kinda hope it’s not badges, because badges are already useful for buying siege. I wouldn’t mind seeing a karma vendor though. I have tons of karma obtained through WvW and nothing further to spend it on.

I’ll tell you why people are quitting WvW and I don’t need 15,000 characters to do it:

THERE ARE ONLY TWO MAPS TO PLAY ON.

How can you launch a game with 25+ PvE maps and only 2 unique WvW maps and claim WvW is a major part of the game?

I have largely stopped playing, largely because thieves are absolutely no fun to fight.

If they have you at a disadvantage, they win.
If you have them at a disadvantage, they poof and reappear far out of range and you’ll never catch them.

Fighting them is basically like fighting air, except I don’t see what they sacrifice for this ability. They still do more damage than anyone else and “glass cannon” doesn’t apply if you can’t see them to hit them. “Being invisible” is one of the best damage mitigation abilities in the game.

I think if thieves couldn’t stealth in combat at all, they would probably be a balanced class. Or if damage knocked you out of stealth, that might work.

It’s not thieves that are broken, it’s stealth. Stealth is also what makes mesmer portals so effective (that is, the mesmer stealthing through the fight to drop a portal behind the lines, amongst the siege).

Am I the only one who still reads “hue hue” as “hew hew”? I mean “hue” is a property of color, pronounced “hew”. It wasn’t until I had a French Canadian in Teamspeak one day that I finally realized it’s “h-we”, as in “wet” without a T and with a “h” sound at the start. He actually laughed like “hwe hwe hwe”.

I recommend we change the official spelling of goofy non-English laughter to “hwe”.

In the spirit of Christmas we would also accept “ho ho ho”.

“No new maps anytime soon” is the worst news of all.

WE HAVE TWO MAPS.

Is WvW supposed to be a major feature or not? If it’s a major feature, why are there only two maps??

Fleshing out WvW with more map variety should be their top priority. I mean if I were king, I would make 1 unique map for each server’s borderland. If we fight Crystal Desert, their borderland will be a desert with crystals in it. If we fight Fort Aspenwood I expect there to be a really big fort. Ehmry Bay would have a bay in it.

I think lack of map variety will kill WvW quicker than lack of rewards. Who cares about rewards when we’re bored of the same two maps over and over?

The real problem with portal bombs isn’t actually portals.

It’s stealth.

This game has no effective counter to stealth, which is why stealth-build thieves are so popular and why mesmer portals almost always work. The mesmer uses stealth to run in and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Rhyis.7058:

From a defensive standpoint, waypoints are overpowered. You can jump into the keep regardless of how many attackers are blocking the entrances into it

wat

If attackers are at the doors, the keep is contested and it’s the same thing as not having a waypoint. Waypoints are for offense. They get turned off in defense.

I would think 1-2 million, tops. Timewise I think you could make your legendary in less time than it would take to make 1 million karma.

10 million karma doesn’t make any sense. That’s way more expensive, time-wise, than any other method.

One of the big problems with WvW is that maps tend to stalemate.

You’ve taken the eastern keep. You’d like to push barracks but it’s a really long run. You might be able to “ninja” it but if your siege attempt fails, it’s unlikely the friendly zerg will come right back because it’s such a long run. Stalemate.

Or you’ve got the barracks in your homeland but you lost the keeps. It’s a really long run to take those keeps back. Again, you might be able to ninja it but if the siege breaks most people won’t come back. Stalemate.

Eternal tends to stalemate once you’ve gotten your third of the map and the enemy is dug into Stonemist with trebs on the upper levels.

Solution:

• Keeps start with their waypoints. They can still be shut off when the place is attacked, like now, but you don’t have to buy them. This will keep momentum going.
• Eternal Battleground NPC camsp will also come with a free waypoint for the owning team. This will keep momentum going there.

The lack of spawn options tends to bog the game down. I think it helps make people bored sooner. It’s a vast difference between the feel of GW2 and the feel of Planetside 2, where spawn options are plentiful.

The problem could be solved with more clever map design. Current map design means all 3 teams are almost always in contact with each other. The top two teams can simply beat up on the 3rd place team all week long if they want.

In Planetside, the winning team tends to cut the other two teams off from each other by virtue of owning the intervening territory. 2nd and 3rd place are forced to gang up on 1st place simply because they can’t get at each other.

GW2 maps are all clearly designed to create non-stop 3-way battles — you can always cut through the ogres or cross the southern bridge, etc, to fight the 3rd place team. It’s really hard for the 1st place team to own so much stuff that 2nd and 3rd place are cut off from each other. Maybe the thinking was that this would create better wars but it leads to “smear the kitten”.

Yak’s is a displaced tier 3 with good night coverage but seem kinda “meh” during the day with a lot of mindless zerging. They are actually going to lose a bunch of rank points this week because while they are beating Maguuma and Ehmry, they are not beating them by that much.

Maguuma never seems to play smart. They have a lot of “hit and run” squads but no “capture and hold” squads that I ever seem to notice. They usually fight for 2nd place and leave the 1st place team largely untouched which is why they are stuck in tier 4. Goons + AoN, nuff said.

Ehmry is probably a tier 5 server that got bumped up after beating Hedge by like 300,000 points as they fell past. Ehmry does seem to be holding in Tier 4 though. They recently got some new guilds and seem to be hanging in there.

Next week will be a rematch between these three since Yak’s failure to bring in a resounding stomping means they are losing points and the other two are gaining.

They had dolyak rewards but removed them because they couldn’t figure out how to stop the bots.

Bots would just follow the dolyaks around 24/7. Originally they promised to bring the rewards back after they sorted out a solution but that was months ago.

I would like to have world completion but I have no interest in PvE.

Please remove all world completion points outside of those in WvW.

Thank you.

Krosan.2890:

Yea because no one can afford 6 silver for the same arrow carts.

Why pay 6 silver when you can do 3 easy jumping puzzles per day and end up with a load of them, and possibly trebs and golems too?

You’ll go for the 1 gold golem blueprint but you’ll still use the 6 silver arrow cart blueprint.

So you went into a PvP area and found some PvP.

I don’t understand the point of this thread.

Krosan.2890:

My guild usually lets people do the jumping puzzle, if they attack us they die.
I don’t see the point of killing random PvE players that want to do the puzzle.

Next time you try to take a tower and get pelted by multiple arrow carts, just remember that most likely those arrow carts came from the jumping puzzles.

THuGaNoMiX.5036:

Starting with only about 15 silver… it literally took me 5 days playing 2-3 hours a day to make an ascended backpack.

Really not a “gear treadmill” here at all.

I read this as “It will take 5 days doing something you don’t want to do 2-3 hours a day to make an item that will improve your stats in a way you couldn’t otherwise obtain”.

Nope. Not interested.

I don’t “play games” to engage in activities I don’t find fun for 2-3 hours a day.

Jumping puzzles mainly provide free siege engines, which people on your server can use to destroy people on my server.

I will be at one of the jumping puzzles tonight, manning an arrow cart at the drop-in point. No free siege for you.

Really I wish they’d just remove the puzzles, or at least the free golems. Free golems are a huge part of the problem with upgraded keeps getting ninjad in 5 minutes.

“Somewhat disagree.”

I think NPCs are an overlooked, under-appreciated aspect of wargaming. NPCs can be present 24/7 and can provide direction to a war that players may not be able to adequately do.

I love the Hyleks and the Ogres and the Dredge (I’d love the Quaggans if I didn’t hate water combat). That’s PvE done right and if anything I wish they were a little more sophisticated.

Where they go wrong are things like the centaurs or the giant grub — things that have nothing to do with WvW.

PvE can be an important part of WvW, but Arenanet needs to keep their eye on the ball. All NPCs should fulfill some role in WvW. Camps of NPCs that don’t contribute to the war should be removed or reworked.

allways.9270:

PvE players are the main source of income for any MMORPG – cos there is plenty of them. So to ask the developers to pay less attention to them, might literally “kill” GW2 as a project.

Yes but the game’s content is 95% PvE.

PvE has, I think 26 maps, not counting dungeons and storyline content. WvW has 2, or 4 if you count the copy-pasting.

WvW players also had to contend with long queues and highly annoying culling issues which no doubt caused a fair number to quit.

Imagine if this game had launched with 50% WvW content, more maps than players could fill and culling that worked at least as well as Planetisde 1 (which came out 9 years ago…) I think we’d be wondering why they even bothered with PvE because WvW would be the whole game.

If you build it, they will come. That’s my word to developers on PvP content. When your game’s content is 5% WvW and yet so many people spend so much time there, that’s a hint!

That’s an amusing thought. WvWvWvWvWvWvWvWvWvW with 25 maps…

Planetside 1 did a few of interesting things that I think Arenanet should be pondering when they think about future WvW development:

1) Not every map has to be full.

Planetside had more player slots per map than could be logged in at a time. There would generally be queues on a couple of maps but there would be other maps with no queues and still other maps with nobody on them at all. You always had an option to go somewhere else. In GW2 a lot of times you can end up stuck.

But XP rewards were based on conflict. You could roll onto an empty map and take it over but you got very little XP for this until the enemy showed up to start fighting you for it. GW2 rewards you for no-contest takeovers the same as for hard-fought battles, which is a problem.

2) “The Lattice”.

World War 2 Online and Planetside both ran into the same problem: players spread out too much and there was no real “front line” or focus to the fight. They both added their own style of “lattice” system — Given bases A-—B—-C—-D—-E, you own B and the enemy owns C, you can attack from B to C but you cannot attack D or E. You need a link to them. Of course, the real lattice was multi-pronged so you always had options on where to attack next but you couldn’t just abandon “B” to go on the offensive somewhere else because if the enemy took it behind you, your offensive would be dead in the water with no friendly territory to link to.

3) Total map population is less than the 3 teams combined.

I’m not sure what the actual numbers were but, say, if a map could hold 500 people then each team could have 200 people. There were 3 teams, though, so this meant you could run into situations where two teams had 200 each and one team had 100 and that was the poplimit for the map.

It was interesting, I think, because it meant each map was largely a 1v1 battle with the third team taking a “spoiler” role. And usually, due to the lattice, they could only attack the winning team (they would likely have no links to the losing team and vice versa).

I think this added up to a situation where you never had the “1st place + 2nd place beating up on 3rd place”, which happens all the time in GW2.

Basically, I think WvW/RvR is a rich topic that doesn’t get enough attention (most of what we talk about in this forum is class balance or server arguments).

I recommend everyone goes to check out Planetside 2. It’s free and even if you hate it, at least play it to get an idea of alternative ways to handle WvW maps and “lattice” type systems.

Long after so many other PvE games died out, Planetside 1 and Battleground Europe (aka World War 2 Online) kept players interested enough and these were not terribly strong entries. EVE Online is another good “Guild vs Guild” PvP game and it has also survived (and grown) for many years.

I hope Arenanet looks to these for inspiration and sees Rift for the warning it is.

Waking.6052:

Most of us have played other games in which culling wasn’t an issue. That was in the past, when connections were generally less stable, slower, and more expensive. It was also when graphics were worse. Games 7 years ago at least could have large scale WvW.

I call it Slamz’ Law of Density

Moore’s law states that computer power will double every two years (basically).

Slamz’ law states that the player density on physical server hardware will double every two years while game mechanics will stay just as weak as ever.

That is,

10 years ago: 1000 people per server array with weak game mechanics
8 years ago: 2000 people per server array with the array running two servers with weak game mechanics
6 years ago: 4000 people per server array with the array running four servers with weak game mechanics
4 years ago: 8000 people per server array with the array running eight servers with weak game mechanics

The servers running Aion are vastly more powerful than the ones running EQ, but the game mechanics are identical and the number of people per “server” (i.e., “Triniel”, “Vallon Zek”, etc) is roughly the same.

All of the improvements in hardware are being eaten up behind the scenes to lower the cost-per-user to run the game.

GW2 has serious culling issues.

Planetside 1, launched in 2003, did not.

“Slamz’ Law of Density”! Hardware dramatically improved but it all went into reducing the cost-per-user. We got no improvements in actual game mechanics and in fact, they may be getting weaker.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/183304/Rift_MMO_hit_hard_by_layoffs_at_Trion.php

As much as one-third of the development team working on MMO Rift at Trion Worlds was let go on Tuesday, Gamasutra has learned.

An affected source tells us that the number of developers out of work today — developers spanning several disciplines, including artists and designers — numbers somewhere in the neighborhood of 40.

The company confirmed that there were layoffs today “in response to market conditions, product timelines and the natural evolution of our company,” though refused to confirm either the number affected or whether it was the Rift team specifically.

The first expansion pack for Rift launched just last month. Trion does not share its subscriber numbers (or the sales of expansions such as this), but it may be worth noting that the expansion became accessible for free just one month later as part of a promotion.

So originally Rift looked like it was going to be an awesome game about invasions and, well, rifts. In beta, NPCs from the other player team would mount invasions which players could join in on and capture villages with. The owning team would have to take them back to get their NPCs (including quest NPCs) back. PvE whining ensued and that whole idea was gone on launch day. Rift invasions by hostile NPCs were toned down as well and in the end, Rift was basically just another PvE MMORPG. It was a pretty good one, really, but it ran into the same problem as all PvE games:

PvE players run through content faster than any developer can create it, then they get bored and quit. They also complain about gear grind. They also complain about the lack of new items.

In short, I don’t know why every MMORPG developer continues to focus on them.

WvW/PvP is where it’s at.

Look at us.

We have basically two maps.

TWO.

A lot of people are like me and have done almost nothing except WvW and all we’ve had to play with are two maps. I haven’t even done my story quest. I have one level 80 with like 300 spare skill points and another level 40 all done 99% in WvW. And all I have access to are two maps! (Well, four maps but one of them is copy-pasted three times. Laaaame.)

Imagine how entertaining and long lasting WvW would be if it was the size of the PvE world. Like, what, 25 maps? That would be crazy. I’d have to quit my job. And every zone would still be useful, instead of like now in PvE, where mid level zones are mostly empty except for the occasional alt or genuinely new player passing through.

WvW is the future of online gaming. Developers focusing on PvE are just going to get run over by the fickle dungeon crawl players who are quick to abandon ship for a new shiny dungeon crawling game.

So instead of getting night capped, you will cap everything and have nothing to do because you are all on the same server.

That’s actually worse.

At least you can have a fun break-out from a nightcap. There is no fun to be had once you own the entire map.

I think the real problem with portal bombing is that it’s too easy.

I have never seen a mesmer fail to create the portal. Regardless of how much fire is going on, they invis up, run through, drop the portal, we all portal in and wreck all the siege, GG.

I suppose this game’s complete lack of anti-stealth is to blame. There’s nothing you can drop at the wall opening or doorway to unstealth people trying to run through, so the mesmer always makes it. Guardians don’t know to drop their barriers because they don’t have any way to know someone is coming through.

Same.4687:

Sure Thieves are annoying with stealth and crap, but you can still kill a thief.

Wrong.

If the thief is even mediocre, he will use one of his stealths to run away and by the time you figure out where he is, it’s not even worth trying to chase him.

Defeating an elementalist means you killed the elementalist. Defeating a thief just means you made him run away without killing you. The only way to actually kill a thief is to catch them while they are AFK or somehow, inexplicably too dumb to run away.

You never played APB…

The original company that made that game went bankrupt. There were just waaaay too many cheats for the game that they never seemed to get a handle on and I think word going out of beta was “don’t buy this game; it’s full of hackers”.

Arenanet does need to be seriously on the ball with hacks and cheats in this game, to avoid that same fate.

What I don’t get is why they’re so quiet about it.

Mount & Blade Warbands has a hack that lets you automatically block all attacks. The makers of the hack announce that you should not use the hack in the Warband mod, “cRPG” because the mod makers have figured out how to detect the hack and they loudly and permanently ban everyone who uses it.

When even the hack maker tells you not to use the hack, you know the company is doing something right.

I want to go to hack websites and read about how “everyone who used this got banned last night”.

As it stands, I can’t even adequately report cheaters because there’s no “cheating” option on report and no “cheating” option in the support page either. Stop hiding from the problem; that only makes it worse.

You can hit those walls from the shore nearby with catapults. I have never seen anyone successfully attack this way but I don’t see why it’s not possible.

I think the real problem is just that there are better / more protected ways to attack the fort. The water entrance isn’t really necessary.

This didn’t seem to spark much conversation and my thread is vanishing into the mists.

What I meant to say was:

Thieves are perfectly balanced. You suck if you can’t beat a thief.
Mesmers are too weak and need buffed.

/popcorn

Same.4687:

Lol how can anyone still complain about Thieves in WvW when you simply CAN’T beat a D/D Ele that is as skilled or better than you.

Because you can see them.

The thread didn’t ask “who’s the best class” or “which class kills you most”.

The thread asks who is the most annoying. Thieves are more annoying than D/D eles. They aren’t remotely fun to fight against. Even if I beat one, it’s no fun because I spend over half the battle swinging at the air.

Thieves.

Really JUST thieves. I don’t find other classes to be annoying. I’d like to see “portal bombing” restricted but that’s not remotely as annoying on a minute-to-minute basis as thieves.

I’d love to see population trends. I bet thieves started out as maybe 6% of the population and now are more like 20%.

By the time they do their update in February, I expect we will simply all be thieves.

This happens all the time:

• Big defense
• Lots of damage numbers flying around
• Fort is out of supply
• You personally dropped siege and are keeping people off of the door
• You aren’t getting any kills because it’s suicide to step outside
• You aren’t repairing anything because there’s no supply left

NO DEFENSE REWARDS FOR YOU!

Currently you must get a kill or repair something each round for defense to give a reward. The AOE limit of 5 targets and people stacking up and generally being good at getting out of the siege sweet spot can make it impossible to many classes to get a kill.

I’d like to see it something like:

• Bronze: you did > 15,000 total damage OR healed other players for > 15,000 total health OR you used 10 supply in repairs
• Silver: you got a kill (final deathblow or stomp)
• Gold: you killed a siege engine or you killed someone with a siege engine

The only way to get no credit on a defensive tick should be to stand there and do pretty much nothing.

I’m not “refusing” anything.

I’m just playing the game I enjoy playing, which is 100% WvW. If this ultimately means I end up behind in gear and eventually unable to have fun anymore, then I guess I’ll quit playing at that time (as I did for WOW).

I will never go off and participate in a section of the game that I don’t find fun, just because it gives me “loots”.

Zephyrus.9680:

Seems entirely unnecessary. There’s already a system in place where your drops are based on damage. If you just to a few hits like in PvE you’ll never get good drops. Pretty sure you would actually get less drops and badges with magic find gear in WvW.

^ this

I think by running magic find, you actually get fewer drops in WvW. Probably the best drop rate comes from full berserker gear and some kind of +damage food. That guardian spamming his staff for 250 per hit with stacks of magic find isn’t getting ANY drops.

I know because I’ve been that Guardian. :-p

Not sure if this is widespread or only happens in WvW (which is all I play) but I see increasing problems of players getting disconnected.

It seems to happen most often while they are in the downed state, before they can get stomped. There may be a bug in the server code there somewhere that keeps booting these players at that specific time.

I can only imagine the frustration these players experience with being disconnected so frequently. It never happens to me but it’s only a matter of time, since it seems to be impacting more and more people. I hope they can find whatever networking or code issue is causing this problem, before it spreads to the whole playerbase!

Portals should be limited to 5 people per portal.

If you want to portal in 15 people, get 3 mesmers to coordinate. If you can’t get 3 mesmers to coordinate, then your server lacks the skill and organization it needs to portal 15 people.

Portaling 50 people because your server has 1 competent mesmer is what makes it overpowered.

Diehard.1432:

I pray for Fort Aspenwood not getting bashed or called “mindless zergs” on this forum next week, IF they do move down to tier 4

Personally I have no beef with CD. They have a much bigger Oceanic presence than Maguuma + Ehmry combined. Good for them, though I’ll be happy to see the backside of them. Logging in every day to see the entire map owned by one team is never going to be very fun. I hope Fort Aspenwood is just more on our level in terms of nighttime presence.

You really can’t avoid the “mindless zerg” accusations when one team shows up with 50 players to the enemy’s 5. Even if they aren’t a mindless zerg, there’s no way to prove it!

Really I just wish Arenanet would lock down transfers so we could get more balanced fights. I imagine Crystal Desert probably was tier 4 material before they got an influx of players. Now they are at least tier 3 material but we’ve had to put up with the population imbalance for 2 weeks while the ranks adjust themselves.

Hackuuna.4085:

No. Last week:

Maguuma gained 2.9 rank points.
Ehmry Bay lost 8.8 rank points.

I believe that’s showing you the point total for the previous week. So last week shows you the evolution from the-week-before-last, when you came in second place and gained 8.8 rank points.

If that’s not correct then I have no idea how you could gain 8 rank points by coming in 3rd place. You would have lost points versus both Ehmry and Crystal Desert.

Ehmry Bay!

We started as a tier 7 server and are currently a solid tier 4 server. Many servers have more “elite” guilds than us, but as we’ve recently been seeing, “elite” guilds are fair-weather guilds that server hop as soon as things go slightly wrong. We watched Henge and Eredon sink past our tier with hardly a peep because the elite guilds just up and abandoned them one day.

Ehmry is built around a core of guilds that stuck it out in tier 7, so we don’t change that much from week to week. “Elite” guilds have come and gone and our rank has gone up and down but the core sticks around.

• Community server forums (ehmry.com)
• 512-seat community teamspeak server (WvW focus)
• Always at least one zone with no queue

Some guildmates shook their fist at my decision to stay on Ehmry, back when it was tier 7, but I think the decision has proven to be a good one. It’s a good middle-of-the-road server. We won’t be challenging tier 1 anytime soon but really I don’t want to, because that’s when you get flooded with hangers on and queues.

We’re in a good position right now.

Bones.5762:

Not to throw fire on oil, but did anyone noticed how EB lost rank points and Mag gained rank points? Just and FYI for those that care about points i guess.

http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA

Last week:

• Maguuma lost 39 rank points.
• Ehmry Bay gained 9.

That’s why I said their current gaming strategy of “play for 2nd place” is going to keep them stuck in tier 4 forever. Crystal Desert stomped Maguuma+Ehmry for two weeks now because only Maguuma pugs seem to put any pressure on CD.

If you guys would actually go for the point leaders, you might win once in a while.

Next week will be Maguuma vs Ehmry again, looking like Fort Aspenwood coming down and CD moving up. I predict it will again be Maguuma in 2nd or 3rd place because once another team squeaks ahead of you, you give up and let them keep 1st.

I keep hearing from the PvE crowd about how much money you can make in PvE. There are youtube videos showing how to make as much as 5g/hour farming minibosses.

There is nothing in WvW I can do to make 5g/hr. I can’t even make 1g/hr. Yet WvW is a huge money sink for the game — I could easily spend 1g/hr if I could actually make that much! Between siege weapons and upgrades it’s a struggle for me to have any cash to play with.

Do I really have to leave the fort fights to make decent money? The fort fights are the only part of this game I really enjoy. Don’t make me do PvE. I include jumping puzzles in this (I’m a huge Charr. Jumping puzzles aren’t that easy when you can’t see your own feet.)

Please give:

• More cash inside player loot bags
• Bonus cash for tower flips based on how many enemies were recently killed there (bigger battles = bigger cash drops)
• Siege vendor that sells siege for karma points (I have gobs of karma from all this WvW but nothing else to spend it on)
• Quartermaster (Upgrade) vendors that sell upgrades for karma points+supply rather than gold+supply.

Arenenet saw this coming and had a plan for it but has been dragging their feet on implementing it.

Way back in beta it was said that if you transferred to a new server, you would be locked out of WvW for at least one full round, possible two, and that’s when rounds were supposed to last 2 weeks, so 1 transfer = no WvW for possibly a month.

Here we are over 3 months after launch and you can still transfer for free every week, meaning every matchup the miscreants can simply transfer to the new target to cause all the same problems.

It only takes a handful of these people to effectively ruin matches by sucking all the fun out of them. These people call it “meta gaming” and think it’s perfectly legit. Arenanet needs to bring down the banhammer to show them it’s not. (Log siege placement. Review logs for people who place a lot of siege or place them far out of the way. Permaban those who are obviously abusing the game.)