There is not much of a problem if you play attacker. However, this game mode needs also people who defend the stuff, or all you have is a bunch of karmatrains flipping objectives everytime the timer runs out.
Play outside of the prime time, don’t change maps, stay in your part of the map, build siege weapons, refresh their timer, guard yaks, defend your camps instead of flipping them back and you may understand, that not only afk’ers are left behind by the new system. Basically, the least rewarding role in the least rewarding game mode was nerfed or at least made more difficult.
The outnumbered change, however, is fine.
All week, I’ve played exclusively as a scout/defender on Desert BL in T4 NA. I haven’t once had any participation problems. The only time I’ve seen decay is after sieging a wall but being attacked before it goes down and failing to kill any of the attackers. Even then, I’ve never actually dropped a tier—even without going out of my way to get participation.
That said, I do think some changes could be made to ease the pressure a bit. For example, defense events should give credit for damaging an enemy player or their siege. They should also give credit for destroying enemy siege. I imagine they don’t currently to make it harder to game the system, but the fact is we don’t have people gaming the system with cooperation from enemy servers on any noticeable level. With the new participation system, there are some edge cases that are now much more painful since getting credit for defending is so spotty.
But this is seriously broken for scouts. The easy fix for that is to make escorting a yak give enough of a buff to the decay timer to allow you to run another yak . . .
Enough? Give it 10m.
No really, dolly escort events giving participation – which as far as I know they dont, not mentioned in the post listing the timers so PLEASE do correct me if I’m wrong – would pretty much solve the “scouting issue” as getting dollys into objectives is an important part of watching over it (and adds something to do around it).
Dollys is also a continous and steady activity, unlike capping an objective (once it’s capped, you cant exactly recap it if the enemy dont cap it) and a natural magnet for enemies, which leads to even more activity if they are escorted.
That is WvW.
Not giving bloody 5 minutes timer to killing a kittening kittened veteran creature no one gives a flying kitten about unless its veteran daily.
It’s mentioned in the post as giving 2 minutes. Listed as ‘defending a caravan.’ I agree it should be more.
You’ll be the one to say it? Sorry, you’re not the first or the only one to even make a thread about it.
Nor have you put anything new here.
The chances of this making a meaningful contribution to the discussion that is enveloping the entire forum are thus…unlikely.
Note, any of the above posts could have been copy/pasted from other threads—even the OP.
^Assuming it takes you over 10m to kill the lord, yes.
If there was no activity on the map, I would not expect to be rewarded for activity. You can argue that there should be meaningful activities to do at such times, as I have in the past, but they do not exist at this moment.
That’s a rather intense population problem and, while serious, is a totally different issue from participation. Still not a reason to expect rewards for “watching paint dry.”
This would imply that scouting is a meaningless activity that should get zero rewards.
If you think scouting is watching paint dry, you’re really bad at it. That said, as I have suggested in the past, I do think that a few participation-generating abilities that do not require enemies present (but that attract enemies) would be good for the game.
However, since it is impossible to distinguish between a random AFK guy and a stationary scout, I do not expect the latter to receive rewards. Thankfully, this is only an issue if 2 servers completely abandon a whole map at the same time…which is unlikely.
If there was no activity on the map, I would not expect to be rewarded for activity. You can argue that there should be meaningful activities to do at such times, as I have in the past, but they do not exist at this moment.
That’s a rather intense population problem and, while serious, is a totally different issue from participation. Still not a reason to expect rewards for “watching paint dry.”
Did we really need another thread about this? Especially one with such dubious opinions and a distinct lack of facts…
Did more roaming/scouting tonight—mostly scouting. I did not end up flipping a single camp, which sort of sucks when it comes to my dailies. I still didn’t have any participation problems.
My activity was mainly defense events, flipping sentries and killing enemy roamers/zerglings. Of course, there could still be an issue with participation, but I have yet to find it.
One other thing—the rate of decay wasn’t changed. People saying that the bar drops really fast must not know what the speed was like before?
It would be helpful to note the changes you’re alluding to. I don’t know how the old system was, but the new system uses these numbers.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Decay-timer-Are-you-kidding/page/2#post6643146
I think some people are confused and think that whenever you do something that gives participation it adds to the decay, which has not been and is not the case. For example when you take an objective, it gives you 10 minutes before your participation will start to decay; then if you kill a guard it will only reset to 2 minutes if you have less than 2 minutes left otherwise it won’t affect the timer. This is how it has always worked; the only thing we have changed is the reset time for each action.
The reset times are as follows:
• Killing a Player – 10 minutes
• Killing a Caravan – 2 minutes
• Destroying a fortification – 5 minutes
• Killing a Guard – 2 minutes
• Killing a Lord – 5 minutes
• Killing or reviving a merc npc – 1 minute
• Repairing – 5 minutes
• Siege Damage Wall/Gate/Player – 1 minute
• Destroying Siege – 5 minute
• Killing a Veteran Creature – 5 minutesThese happen on event completion:
• Defending a Caravan – 2 minutes
• Completing a Merc Event – 5 minutes
• Completing a Defend Event – 10 minutes
• Capturing an objective – 10 minutes
• Capturing a Ruin or Shrine – 2 minutes
• Capturing a Sentry – 5 minutesIt is still possible that we will tweak these numbers going forward.
I understand “adjusting” the decay timer for participation but wow, can’t even get from one camp to another without losing a tier. If you wait for a timer, rip pips. It’s decays far too fast. There I said it.
Here’s a post with the new timers as stated by Anet: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Decay-timer-Are-you-kidding/page/2#post6643146
After capturing an objective, decay should not set in for 10m. I assume you can get from 1 camp to the next in that time, so perhaps you’ve found a bug? Or…
That said, I’m also liking this patch. It’s not ground-breaking, but it’s significant, positive steps.
(edited by Sviel.7493)
Ran several hours tonight of scouting/roaming. I didn’t notice any changes to participation and never had any problems with decay. It did set in once or twice, but I had plenty of time and plenty of things to do so it never actually dropped a tier.
McKenna posted how much time each activity should buy a player and it seems reasonable. If you’re not getting that much time for those activities, it should be treated as a bug. Also, I got the impression that the speed of decay was not changed? Could use clarification on that.
If someone feels that the new decay grace periods are off, that would be a good place to start. We can’t expect good changes if our feedback isn’t rooted in facts.
Multi-hit skills did a disproportionately large amount of damage to barricades, which allowed even low power classes to take them down. However, it was possible to have a skill/build combination that was far less effective than others.
Barricades were still more of an issue for roamers than zergs, in terms of going through them, though I’m not sure why people were so adamant about going through them in the first place. The walls that preceded barricades had a clearer purpose and were more even in their application of it.
For roamers, you could attack the tower without taking down the wall, so there were no supply issues. If your goal was a camp beyond the wall, using supply would again be a non-issue. If you absolutely had to re-sup, for some reason, it was less than 30s to the nearest camp from any barricade.
The sole purpose of the walls was to make it easier to track enemies. One person could watch the Oasis and another could watch the area south of each side keep. Maintaining control of the sentries at these points was key. Maintaining control of the southern towers was also useful. Roamers could still sneak over the western dunes or eastern plateaus without detection, so they still had more cover than any part of ABL. Zergs could do the same, but there would be ample warning before they could hit Rampart and sentries prevented them from hitting northern towers. The side/north ends of the side keeps were also possible to reach.
In short, the walls (before barricades) focused activity into certain parts of the map and created flashpoints of extra strategic importance at the towers. One can argue that it was inconvenient, but the map does miss that component.
The barriers were supposed to be a hindrance. It would have been better if they were walls as they would not have been ‘porous’ and would have been consistent in their job across classes, but oh well.
Your hyperbolic complaints about them belie their effectiveness.
what would being smart about it look like to you?
EB
It would be a rehash of Eternal Battlegrounds, the most popular map for a reason.All the environmental effects and falling to your death are major flaws of DB: and EotM
The map doesn’t need to be a star, the combat is,
What environmental effects, specifically? As for falling to your death, is there any area in particular that gives you trouble?
EBG ‘works’ because it’s a 3v3 with a center objective. It would not work as a borderland. Even if it did, having multiple EBGs would severely hamper how well the map worked. Unlike the borderlands, EBG is very difficult to do much on if you’re outnumbered. There’s not enough space to do anything other than clash over and over—which is fine, for that map.
Borders have always supported a different mode of play from EBG. Removing that would not be smart.
I had enemies helping me getting down the barricades. I left my chars there auto attacking that thing while I went afk for 5 mins – how much fun is that?
You can just block acess to the map – even better control over who enters the map.
Or you can be smart about it.
On a sidenote: Can we please get rid of the DBL for good?
It took me 40-90 seconds to take down a barricade without siege, though even that was excessive considering that they only took 20 supply to fully repair. With a catapult, it took like 2 hits. I usually just walked around them, though. A single person can avoid being funneled whereas a zerg may want to avoid the side roads as they tend to have more dangerous chokes.
Also, and I’m a little afraid to ask, what would being smart about it look like to you?
The OP’s suggestion is good. The thread seems to have derailed from that point, though not without merit. Shield gens shouldn’t be able to cover themselves. Since they can, stacking 3 of them makes you practically invulnerable.
The towers originally had walls attached that would cut off access to some map routes to those who didn’t own the tower. They were incredibly effective at controlling map access. Some people complained, however, and the walls were downgraded to barricades which did not get stronger as the tower tiered up. People kept complaining and the barricades were removed too.
So, yes, DBL towers had a more clear purpose but it has since been largely removed. They’re not just PPT fodder, though.
For the northern towers, they’re needed to get supplies from NWC/NEC into Rampart. They can also give excellent visibility with Watchtower upgrades. The southern towers can also benefit from Watchtower, but it’s not worth the trouble unless you’re able to upgrade them.
There’s no sense listening to people who claim the map was meant for PvE or that there was never any point to the towers. The facts simply do not support such speculation.
Anet saw how towers were used on ABL and saw that the blob vs outmanned case happened more frequently than the other way around. Safe sieging from a tower made it far more difficult to hold anything since the outmanned group had to somehow wrest a tower out from a babysitting blob just to get to their siege. Meanwhile, when the outmanned group staged an assault from a tower, it was quickly overrun by the blob. Thus, sieges were moved into the open field where an outmanned group could as least get to them. At the same time, the map was made less of an open field so that outmanned groups had a chance to hit objectives without being spotted from enemy citadel.
I don’t think Anet does everything right, but even when they do, it gets shouted down by zerglings and teabag heroes.
On the borderlands, as others have said, it’s easier to defend and ugprade your own Garrison. If you take the enemy’s, you’ll have it until w/e guild group logs off. If you upgrade your own, militia and in-between crews can hold it pretty well. Since an upgraded Garrison is worth 20 points compared to 8 points for paper, it makes more sense to hold onto your own than spend far more effort holding onto an enemies.
That said, it definitely makes sense to take an enemy’s Garrison. Getting rid of upgrades and waypoints makes a huge difference. However, it isn’t a flat trade-off. You’re betting on your server being able to re-build and re-upgrade faster and, either way, you’re losing 12 PPT compared to the third server that presumably has their Garrison upgraded.
On top of that, morale, side keeps and so forth.
As for side keeps, preventing enemy waypoints makes it much easier to defend your northern triangle. Keep in mind that the northern triangle takes longer to upgrade than the rest of the map (12 hours for north towers on ABL, ~6 hours for Garrison compared to ~2.5 hours for south towers, ~3 hours for Bay and ~3.5 hours for Hills), so losing those upgrades means a large PPT loss over time than other objectives. You can trade them for the enemy northern triangle, but you are then losing to the third server and, again, betting on your team getting more Yaks in over the next 12+ hours.
Of course, a T3 sidekeep on an enemy BL is of comparable importance to a T3 sidekeep on your own—but the one on your own BL is important for defense whereas the one on the enemy BL is important for offense. Naturally, players who bother to defend tend to value the defensive keep over the offensive one.
I feel like I’ve seen this troll post before.
^The cap is per server. You can’t prevent the enemy from building siege by spamming your own.
If it’s just hills, it isn’t the siege cap. Can you test at any other place and see if you have the same problem?
Good research—now we just need to hope Anet has read this thread and put it on their list of things to fix.
This also works with thief Scorpion Wire, so I imagine it’s just any pull at all. It seems like if they’re at a higher elevation that you have no path to, you’ll get stuck.
What server are you on? Most have some sort of community set up that could help you get started and connect you with the appropriate folks.
Sometimes, you just get too fed up with WvW and have to fly away for a while. We’ve all been there.
@Walls and Siege
If you remove exp from repairing walls, you take away 30%-50% of the exp earned by a dedicated defender…as well as their primary method of obtaining defense participation. Also, building player siege already grants 0 exp/participation. Only building cannons/oil/mortars gives anything. Finally, trying to remove everything that people can use to quickly build participation is not a viable answer. There will eventually be nothing left.
@Free Accounts
Do we really want all the new players to be trained in EotM? Also, banning everyone due to a few trolls is overkill.
@Server Linking
This is an issue, but it’s probably not a good idea to suppress transfers to low-ranked servers. There needs to be a way to discourage stacking so hard, but this probably isn’t it.
@Outnumbered
I don’t agree with the pip reduction, but the 5 minute start-up freeze is a good idea.
@Map Hopping
This is a bit extreme. Don’t forget that participation affects reward tracks too. Besides, if your outnumbered suggestion was in play, map hopping wouldn’t even be an issue.
@AFK at Spawn
You’ve cast a wide net and caught everyone clearing their bags or respawning at the wrong moment. Instead, defer the pips they would have gained and let them get the pips when they leave spawn. Only one tick’s worth of pips can be deferred this way, so you can’t just afk ad infinitum then cash in by leaving spawn.
@Log Off Pips
Sure. Why not?
Fighting and dying near an objective could count, but just getting farmed is probably not a good idea.
I’ve also had this issue when covering a wide area—I won’t be fighting as I’m trying to stay alive to give information, but what combat I do engage in usually results in enemies leaving (I prevented them from building siege) or me getting run over (got too close to the zerg).
As muerte.3842 said, the fatal flaw in this design is that it promotes K-Training for pips. I want to like it, honestly, but history has shown that if you make K-Training the best method for rewards then it will flourish.
Perhaps these bonus pips could be awarded at the end of the week and have a cap on how many you could get? The incentive to do active things remains, then, but if the cap is low enough then perhaps it won’t be such an issue.
If you’re gunning for a battlegroup or alliance system, just say so. Then I know better than to try and get details out of you. There’s a reason Anet decided against doing those—they work out great for the big guilds, but are much worse for pugs and most small guilds. Since most of their WvW players fall into the latter group, it makes no sense to switch.
As for mitigation, Skirmishes are an example of an update that aimed to reduce the effects of population imbalance. They didn’t solve the whole thing, but they did make a tangible difference.
Yeah, this is the most annoying thing about reward tracks. I get busy, spend an hour defending a tower, then realize I have a bunch of Kodan boxes or w/e.
Ok, that’s a real problem, now let’s see you try and fix it.
Blowing everything up isn’t going to solve anything. Even if you make the servers even now, that potential population will still be lurking. Even if you force people who return in the future to disperse evenly, people playing now will quit/return and the cycle will begin anew.
It’s not a solvable problem. The only hope is to mitigate it.
I think this is an ok idea provided you’ve actually been online for a while. As in, you can’t cash out for as many pips if you played 5 minutes versus playing an hour. It doesn’t hurt anyone in game and releases the pressure to do something that can potentially hurt people trying to play the game.
Population is used, not either MM system.
The ‘at high tiers’ requirement sounded like it was just for SMC/Garrison. That would stop the karma train for sure, but only if it was required for everything. There would still be an issue of turning pip farmers into keep hunting zerglings, but at least they’d ignore the paper keeps…?
Rather, it would encourage players to do nothing but flip keeps. Probably by running in circles with the other servers capping keeps while refusing to defend their own.
I don’t work for Anet but the answer is definitely no. As it should be. They’ve got to get their house in order before they put resources into another map.
I honestly spend way too much time directing people to the banker in map chat.
I second this as a cool thing.
How is a lord room fight any different from another fight? To you, that is. I’m not saying there isn’t a difference, but I want to more closely evaluate what it would mean to have a DBL lord in SMC.
You say some smart things, but I don’t think your suggestions pan out. Some won’t work for engine reasons (removing target cap) and others have mechanic problems such as Caliburn pointed out.
Rather than such drastic measures, I think you’ll have to be content with making smaller changes with the same goals in mind. Instead of rewriting the game from the ground up, make a few, small tweaks.
Does NSP have all 3 bloodlust buffs? It’s hard to notice when they’re gone since it isn’t shown in the WvW UI anymore and it can have a massive effect on score…though probably not this massive.
I have to admit, I get a real kick out of duoing the firekeep lord. I haven’t had a chance to try a full solo, but I was doing alright to about 50% of her health before help arrived, once.
As for this statement:
…that just shows they are detrimental to the tactics an attacking commander can use. In other keeps and SMC, attacking zergs can bunker inside the lord room because the lords themselves have very little impact on the fight itself, as (in my opinion) it should be.
Given that the lord is the ‘boss’ of the structure, it makes no sense to me that enemy zergs should be able to bunker in lord room and turn it into an advantageous situation for themselves. It’s ok if that’s a strategy they decide to employ, but the lord should be a significant drawback if they go that route.
The problem was ascertaining what the wording of your statement meant, but I get it now.
Still…do you want the exploit removed, or do you want the lord turned into an EBG potato? These are two very different things.
I think this is a pretty good OP. As such, I plan to poke lots of holes in it. This is how I show love, or something.
I like that you acknowledge the need to avoid incentivizing K-Trains, but your suggestion for build-up pips seems to do just that. In order to maximize pip gain with the high participation pip, you have to do a bunch of things in a short period. That means running in a huge zerg to quickly cap many objectives—no time to deal with defenders or to defend yourself as it doesn’t build much participation.
The new player pip has a similar issue. It incentivizes capping something but not holding it. In fact, it’s better if things flip constantly and best if every team focuses solely on offense.
The outmanned build-up pip has a different issue. If the buff drops because people come to farm it then comes back because people didn’t actually plan to help, nobody gets rewarded at all. Not even the people that were there the whole time. In addition, since you have to gain participation every minute, you can’t afford to use a cata in a small team unless everyone switches off on the siege to gain participation.
As for the other suggestions, dynamic participation levels have merit but, again, they incentivize doing lots of things all the time with minimum downtime. That means no time for scouting—even if it’s active roaming scouting, no time for sieging since everyone not on siege has their participation decay, no time for dealing with defenders and no time for defending since, for some reason, killing enemy siege doesn’t grant participation.
The participation penalty in safe zones will drastically slow reward track growth (since it’s tied to participation levels) if you don’t have an uncontested WP outside of your starter area. Simply respawning will knock you from +195 to about half that. You could make participation decay go faster in such areas, but that punishes people who are trying to clear their bags and get back to the fight.
The difficulty with afk pip farmers is that pushing pips onto more active play incentivizes K-Training while punishing downtime too harshly also incentivizes K-Training. It’s a pick-your-poison situation and I’m firmly in the no K-Train camp.
WvW doesn’t have separate balancing like sPvP, so don’t hold your breath. There have been a handful of changes that split WvW and PvE but there was never any discernible justification behind them—it’s certainly not a balance motive or they’re incredibly inconsistent with it.
I’ve heard tale that PvP changes should eventually make their way over to WvW, but it seems more accurate to say that the skills are eventually unsplit and WvW/PvE get the PvP version. Thus, a change made to improve PvP that has a negative effect on PvE is unlikely to get unsplit.
Short answer: Nope.
I’m having a lot of trouble understanding your second paragraph. Specifically, “it’s an 100% sure flaming to people trying to normally kill that lord” doesn’t make much sense to me.
More generally, while WvW is about people, it is also about territory. There is some territory where one team has an advantage and some territory where another team has it. Lord rooms are meant to give a significant advantage in combat to the home team. Lords are literally the last line of defense. Thus, unless the lord is an actual factor in the fight, it isn’t doing its job.
You can argue that you don’t like the manner in which the NPC accomplishes this, but there’s no point saying that it shouldn’t factor in at all.
Cool idea, but it’s not really WvW related.
The chief difference is that PvE masteries separate the points and the exp gathering. There’s not really a mechanic in WvW where it would make sense to gather up points in a separate manner from gaining exp.
That’s not to say adjustments can’t be made, but to point out that there is a non-graphical difference between the two systems.
As to why that difference exists…it may be because one came well before the other or because the current system makes more sense in this gamemode than the PvE system.
Not Chronomancer, probably. I’m basing that on how often I see them and what people say on here, not personal experience.
Dragon Hunter is decent and has some really dumb anti-range potential, but they’re a very lopsided class. Either their stuff works and you can’t do much about it, or it doesn’t work and they just get rolled.
Herald has so much power tied up in team stuff that it is not all that amazing alone. It can be done, but there’s not much flexibility.
That said, DH or Herald works very well in havoc parties and can make a respectable showing alone. The meta is still condi or bust when it comes to small-scale and you’ve chosen the latter.