Guild Wars 2

I think what everyone here is missing is the most important point to the reward system.

It’s not that veteran WvW players get rewards faster, which they should, it’s the fact that the rewards take a long time to get for everyone. FOR A GOOD REASON.

WvW has been dying, slowly dying.

When Anet made the rewards take a long time it was done so that by the time the new WvW players got the reward they would actually like WvW and play WvW not for the rewards but because it’s fun. Map completion in WvW used to do this but there was so much complaints from the PvE crowd that was completely removed from the Gift of Exploration.

EotM was ruined by the players when they found out that they could get WvW ranks, level up characters faster and get the all important Gift of Battle by just running around in a circle and flipping everything, never fighting a single player in a PvP map. It got so bad that there were guilds formed just to organize this.

Anet has had three tournaments which gave rewards based upon participation. Tons of PvE players flooded the maps, got their achievements, AND THEN LEFT. After each tournament the WvW population dropped, permanently. If Anet made the rewards for the armor easy to get the same thing would happen. If you are complaining about how the reward system in WvW is you only need to look at yourselves.

There is much learning that needs to be done.

The other thing I see constantly is players attacking camp supervisors with RI. Since white swords pop up 30 seconds after the camp is attacked seeing a camp with RI and white swords screams “new player here.”

While callouts are nice to see, those callouts to queued maps in team chat are wasted. I see more callouts that link the POI instead of the WvW abbreviations for each place. I used to roam on DBL but I’ve forgotten what all the camp/tower names are but if you just say NEC I know exactly where that is and how to get there.

Another thing I’ve noticed is players in team chat asking if their map is queued. This would be a nice QoL for Anet to show queues on every map, even the one you are on.

I also see more players standing around spawn.

While it’s nice to see a tag on every map it’s rare to have more than 2 tags per map. One of the opponents this week is a famous blob server. I never see them in groups of less than 50. It would also be nice to actually have commanders in Teamspeak. It’s gotten to the point that I might start using team chat just to ask if there’s a commander is using Teamspeak.

I think that the OP will find it harder to actually have an area in EotM to actually fight then it is to get all three sides into the same map.

I remember coming into WvW for map completion. I also remember green keep EBG was almost impossible to flip during my normal play time. This was back when server colors didn’t change much. I also remember transferring, when it was free, several times to servers that dominated matches in order to get map completion when it seemed that I would never get that last couple locations.

I played WvW for map completion long enough to start liking WvW, and stayed for years.

How many of you also got hooked the same way?

I’m glad Anet made it a grind to get WvW rewards. Don’t change it like you did for Gift of Battle.

Last night I had three different experiences on three different maps.

First map was red BL: Two tags, neither on TS. Sometimes I was outmanned. The other two servers had blobs. We ran around hitting camps, towers, sentries and shrines. Only once did we go after a keep, flipped it and while we were running out the enemy map blob almost had the paper gates down. 10 pips/tic

Second map was EBG. Followed commander who just ran around flipping things and most times wiped enemy groups. I didn’t see the commander on TS. I couldn’t keep up because I kept running out of inventory space. 4 pips/tic. Left to find map with commander on TS.

Last map was home BL. Commander was on TS. We were facing enemy map blob that always seemed to have way more players than us. You could tell they had more “regular” WvW players because of how they moved. Lost every fight to that group but won most of the fights against the other server. WvW really sucks now when you’re 35 vs 50. 4 pips/tic. Wondered why the map was queued when we could only get 35 in squad on our home BL. Makes me think that Anet’s map limits/server aren’t accurate.

Aeolus.3615:

Straegen.2938:

Now that so many are in full PvD mode, WvW is just a farm mode now. I enjoy seeing the new faces but any semblance of defense is seemingly gone. WvW is one dimensional now more than ever. Typically commanders avoid outright fights and often happily leave structures undefended for PPT flipping later.

Maybe others enjoy this style more than I but I would rather have fewer dedicated players than mobs just farming paper. Can there be something in between?

WvW at the momment is what was suposed to be sadly GW2 pvp modes are a bit of placebos(as in FARM WARS) rather than a warfare gameplay, still its what ment to be.

WvW is in opportunity mode for each server. Now is the time to show how organized your server is. It used to be that you had guilds sign up for a BL and there were scheduled raid times. Now with queues during prime time you’re lucky to get everyone in a map. Reset tonight is going to be interesting.

It’s funny that we complained about not having a team chat but now with all four maps queued, team chat has become noise.

This means that your real WvW leaders should be making sure that commanders, even the PvE ones, are on the server’s voice comms and that builds for each class are given out. Also try to get players to refer to BL camps and towers and keeps by their accepted WvW abbreviations instead of linking or typing in the full name. You might just find that some of these new players will stay.

Eventually the novelty will wear off and you can go back to being elite and exclusive.

Maybe the queue prioritizes players not in WvW over players in WvW, so getting into WvW puts you ahead of trying to switch maps, but I doubt it. That would be a lot of unnecessary coding.

What measure are you going to use to determine who should get higher rewards as a long time WvW player?

Kills? What if you were loyal to your under populated server? How would you punish the OS kill traders?

WxP? How do you distinguish between WxP earned through fights, ktrain, EotM? Which is more worthy?

How about we use Yaks killed as the measure instead?

When linking happened there were queues for a few matches before it all settled down.

Next month you’ll probably see people complain about how few players there are in the map.

When you were talking about gameplay, I thought that you were going to mention how there’s no PvP in WvW anymore. I hope the PvE reward hunters will see the length it takes to get all the skins and decides to go back to PvE. Let the real WvW commanders and guilds back into WvW.

Last night there was at least 20 queued on every map. The first map I went to was DBL, big mistake as the two tags didn’t really want to take down the T3 keeps. I felt like I was roaming, except it was with 15 others.

The second time I went into WvW I queued into green or blue BL, don’t remember which. When I got in there were at least 4 tags, two seemed to be just showing off their tags because they ran around as a pair the whole night. I joined up with one of the other tags and it looked like it was a decent guild group. It eventually grew to 20-25. There was a lot of PvD. Not once did I see the tag run to orange swords. There was a scout calling out 10 enemy players, rams north hills, gate 40% and not one tag came to defend.

We were capping SWT and there were a bunch of orange dots around the sentry by SWC moving to bay, which was ours. I was thinking great, this is the time I’ll see some action. We went out of the tower, stacked outside the gate. I moved my camera view to point towards bay and the commander went the other way.

I finished the skirmish and left, it wasn’t the WvW I remembered.

atticus.5284:

I’ve been playing WvW almost exclusively (had to PvE to get elite and durability runes) since Seasons 1. I’ve been in fight guilds, GvG guilds and PPT guilds. Now, I pretty much run guildless because of the intra-guild drama that inevitably happens.

It pains me to hear all this “elite guild” stuff. That’s not what GW2 is about nor what makes WvW so blasted great. I’ve been in guilds where we would run tagless, trying to shake the pugs. Bottom line is it doesn’t work (pugs still follow) nor does it really affect things in the long run. Sure maybe we lost a fight or two that we would have won otherwise, but no big deal.

We then tried running half our raid time closed and tagless (announcing it to the map…but also saying we’ll be opening it up in an hour). That worked OK – people would mostly respect it. Then we started to always run tagged and invite the pugs in. Our driver would teach builds, positions, rotations, etc. Over time, the overall quality in pugs got better and we had built in recruiting tool.

GW2 is about inclusion, not exclusion. WvW isn’t closed ended like PvP or raids..it’s open to everyone. Maybe if the “get gud” guilds would spend some of their time teaching, they might get some good fights and some good recruits to boot!

Only open world PvE is inclusive. Everything else in GW2 has players that want to get better and there are some that want to get better with a limited, exclusive group of players.

Why is it OK then to be excluded in sPvP and PvE raids and fractals but not in WvW?

I’d love to be in one of the cash sPvP tournaments with one of the top teams except I suck at sPvP.

I’d love to join one of the top raid guilds to get legendary armor but I don’t have the right gear for raids.

I’d love to do the highest level fractals but I’m still at fractal lvl 2.

So why is it OK for the totally unprepared to join a squad of one of the elite WvW guilds?

I just hope there’s not that many “PvE” commanders running around in WvW. It’s been years since I last saw a troll commander tag in WvW. There were a couple that tagged up, hit only camps and sentries. They just wanted to let the map know they had 100g to pay for a tag. They never tagged down and made a general mess of things whenever a real commander was on the map and it was worse when the real commander left the map.

Maybe they should have a “commander” reward track that lets tagged commanders choose between items that commanders use most.

I’m going to assume that somebody at Anet has “tested” the War Score and pip system using the current matchups.

Would it be possible to post the data for the current matchups in terms of of the new scoring system as well as average pips/player for each server?

I’m curious how the NA T3 matchup would look like under the new system. Currently the winner of this match has won all but one skirmish.

Can’t wait to see the overstacked servers do a 5 player commander swap squad for better rewards for everyone in the squad.

I can see how this might reduce the chance of a single map blob but can anyone answer how this is going to promote destacking?

Current WvW LFG process.

If you are in a guild that raids, ask in TS “what map” port to map, or if you are waiting for TS to load, check in guild roster which map everyone else is on then port to map. Join squad.

If you are not in a guild that raids but want to be part of a zerg. Either choose Blue/Green BL (Choose BL of the server that isn’t dominating), or EBG, look for pin, head for pin. Join squad.

If you are a roamer, go to Red BL. Type in map chat “anyone else here?”

Considering that the post culling, pre-HoT, EBG/ABL, hammer train meta was the golden age of WvW, maybe it would be better if Anet rolled back some of the changes.

Sarika.3756:

One up one down won’t solve the problem of completely influenced matchups. It will just guarantee that a good match-up can’t be repeated twice in a row.

And it won’t solve the issue that relinks cause: massive instability that is behind the randomness we currently see.

One up one down along with a limit on players per map WILL balance WvW as it will force players to transfer down to play.

Merging servers eliminates linking.

Here’s the easy solution, one that can be done with limited resources.

First of all transfers are free.

Secondly, have a one up one down system to replace glicko.

Thirdly, merge linked servers into host servers.

Finally, limit the number of players in a map to what the lowest server has +10, force all excess players into EotM. Disable map choices where your server can’t add players.

Do you need to pay gems to enter sPvP seasons?

Do you need to pay gems to enter PvE raids, fractals or dungeons?

Why pay gems for WvW?

Looking at the posts here you can see some common responses.

Given that there aren’t any complaints in the WvW forums about power shatter mesmer, unlike all the other cheesy builds running around, the OP could have instead asked advice on how to survive better against one. They would have gotten good advice on it too. Some people here have given that advice. But did OP do that? No. They went on a rant on how they should be able to play how they want to play in a PvP area.

The OP hasn’t even responded to any of the posts here either. They could have easily said this is my build, this is my equipment, what can I change to be better next time. I bet there are even power mesmer players that would even duel the OP if the OP asked for in game help.

Chorazin.4107:

lol @ this thread.

This thread really makes me want to go to one of the PvE forums and complain about legendary armor, even though I’ve never done a raid. Don’t have a build to do a raid or even know where to start one.

XenesisII.1540:

Micah.2108:

So I also vote with others on no thanks on the OP’s proposal without some major tweaking.

Well now you all know why Anet scrapped the battlegroups idea for links instead, links were the easiest change for players to stomach, devs also thought. Now they’re probably just sitting on links until the day players dwindle to the point they give up and finally all scream for hard merges or battlegroups. By the looks of this thread we’re not there yet.

The main problem with WvW stems from two design flaws. The first was when Anet said that WvW wasn’t designed to be balanced and the second was when Anet said they thought that the players would balance themselves.

Only doing the easy fixes is what’s prolonging the agony.

The one thing the battlegroup needs is the ability to voluntarily pull players/guilds/squads from one instance into another to balance the sides or even allow players/guilds/squads to move from one side to another to achieve balance. I’d even allow pulling players from EotM.

I played EotM when Fearomancer ruled.
Don’t know how many kills, don’t even know if they counted. Don’t care, it was so much fun.

Nokomis.5076:

Sorry, but WvW is NEVER fun when I’m trying to do my dailys there.

There’s your first problem, expecting to do dailies in a WvW map like it’s PvE.

Nokomis.5076:

I don’t care about builds.

And that’s your second problem. Don’t bring PvE builds into WvW and expect success.

Seeing your posting history of less than two years and this is your first post in WvW, let me give you some advice. There are players in WvW that have developed builds that do what they are supposed to do very well, whether that’s roaming, small squad, zerg or even commanding.

WvW isn’t PvE, you will get attacked by other players, sometimes by players you never see.

Adapt, Improvise, Overcome.

Just don’t come on the WvW forums and expect sympathy.

I think timeslices is the way to go for WvW, but a 6 hour block would mean that there’s a handoff between guilds mid-block. There’s no way most players would be able to play for 6 hour blocks.

You can divide NA into a three hour EST raid and a three hour PST raid, so the second skirmish would see a transfer between timezones. Is there something similar for OCX, SEA and EU?

1. Past tournaments decreased PERMANENTLY the WvW populations after they ended.

2. But if the players REALLY, REALLY want another tournament, Anet will have another.

Do you still want another tournament?

How does linking work with AnetChrisB’s test

Jerus.4350:

And we wonder why they’re hesitant to do much with WvW. Make a change, people complain, don’t make a change, people complain.

The problem is, we’ve already seen one up, one down in action. It was called tournament season two.

Mercifully, that only lasted nine weeks. The only thing that made it remotely entertaining was the organized 2v1 that JQ and TC did to BG.

Djamonja.6453:

Swamurabi.7890:

Since with 1U1D every other week will be:

T1: T1 winner, T1 second, T2 winner
T2: T1 loser, T2 second, T3 winner
T3: T2 loser, T3 second, T4 winner

After the server rankings settle down, I wonder how long before the expected winners from T2-T4 start tanking just to avoid getting stomped every other week.

There are no rankings, you just go up or down if you win a tier or come last in a tier.
You are assuming that the winner from the tier below can not compete in the tier above, but I think they probably can? YB/FA might not be able to win in tier 1, but I am pretty sure they can be competitive. Mag is just going to beat everyone no matter what tier they are in since they are so stacked, it doesn’t matter if you use 1up/1down or glicko/RNG.

Since the servers will eventually settle into their ranks, tiers or whatever you want to call them, there will be no way that a lower tier server will be competitive with one from a higher tier unless one of three things happen.

The higher tier server implodes
The lower tier server gets a massive influx of players
The top server decides to play “matchmaker” and join the lower tier server in a 2v1.

None of these are competitive.

Since with 1U1D every other week will be:

T1: T1 winner, T1 second, T2 winner
T2: T1 loser, T2 second, T3 winner
T3: T2 loser, T3 second, T4 winner

After the server rankings settle down, I wonder how long before the expected winners from T2-T4 start tanking just to avoid getting stomped every other week.

Probably because all the glicko threads in the forums turn into matchup threads and get deleted, but why does Anet have to respond to Reddit instead of the GW2 forums?

apharma.3741:

Yeah ANet has really made a lot of good changes to the map, hay bales are another really good addition that lets you get down off the cliffs easier. The new launch pads for getting around the shrines are great, the changes to earth keep removing many of the outer barriers and AoE cripple was good.

The only 2 things I can really complain about desert Borderlands now is:
1. The towers/keeps are too spread out offering not a lot of strategy to having them.
2. It is far too big a map so even with large numbers of players it still feels a little too empty.

.

The third and biggest issue with DBL is that it doesn’t lend itself to zerg vs zerg encounters. It’s even worse when ZvZ happens at the lord’s room.

DBL is great for roamers, havoc, ktrain but not open field ZvZ fights because there’s so little open spaces for most of the map, especially around the keeps.

I’ve never even heard of the “wiggle” strategy is used in WvW.

Anyone hear a commander callout a wiggle stack, or a wiggle blast, or a wiggle bomb?

I’ve never seen a thread where someone was looking to go to a server that was outmanned when they play. It’s always “Where can I overstack an already overstacked server more?”

RodOfDeath.5247:

Reset night and disappointment example.

“Oh god…we are DBL this week”
-Every single person in Teamspeak.

It would be interesting to know the player percentage for each map at reset.

Also it would be nice to see how reset DBL population compares to map kill stats.

Adamarc.7463:

Sviel.7493:

I really wish you all would stop saying that the only reason people defend is because they invested money.

Nobody is saying that. People will defend if there is a fun fight in doing so. But there isn’t a way to tell whether people before you put any effort into upgrading anything (unless you see them doing so yourself), so there’s less reason to prioritize defending at all. It’s about effort and teamwork, not gold.

There was also a time when players/guilds would NOT invest gold into upgrades because they knew that minutes after they logged off their investment would be erased.

Since most of the matches are blowouts, why not have the winner of last weeks match have upgrades cost twice as much.

Let the third place server have upgrades cost half as much.

Or you could have auto upgrades only apply to structures in your natural territory of each map.

Or you can make SMC walls unrepairable once destroyed.

Or once a strucure becomes T3, it’s upgrades cost double. This effect will be cumulative the whole match.

WvW needs to be fun for the loser. When the loser doesn’t have fun and quits, there’s nobody left to lose except the winners.

The problem I see with the update is that there was only one instance where WvW was specifically mentioned.

Necromancer
Our biggest focus in this iteration for necromancers was that of Epidemic, in that its impact is too instant in most PvP scenarios, as well as its heavy toll on our servers.

It seems to me that if the sudden condition transfer from one skill taxes the server, what happens in WvW when one zerg hits another zerg and every skill adds a condition?

A three way fight in SMC caused lag in WvW years ago, before epidemic was meta.

Should the WvW version of skills have less conditions to improve WvW server performance?

GW1 had capes. A guild that was successful in GvG got to have copper, silver or gold trimmed capes.

After a while some of those guilds sold memberships for those that wanted to wear the special capes.

I don’t think Anet would repeat this or something like it in GW2

And if you’re looking for two reasons why WvW is in decline.

1. A game mode that allows severe population imbalance so one side can completely capture a map and…..

2. Players that think that this is a good thing.

Maybe Anet should contact all these legendary commanders and ask them what would bring them back to WvW.

That’s funny, I don’t remember TC doing anything of the kind when they were dominating T2 against FA, SoS, and DB when TC was a T1.5 server. This went on for months and months.

This should go into the EotM forum, not the WvW forum.

In defense of YB, they are linked with two other servers.

Since 5-4-3 scoring has brought server glicko ratings closer together: a good thing
and matchup variance has ended glicko hell: a good thing

Locking servers and linking servers has not evened out server populations: a bad thing

Question for Anet: How is the new skirmish reward system going to persuade players to de-stack certain servers?

WvW was a priority, then the project was scrapped, then WvW was not a priority.

The priority for Anet was working on WvW. The priority for you was a released updated WvW.

Two completely different things. You can’t blame Anet for lack of communication on this one. They did tell us why WvW was scrapped and why it was no longer going to be a priority.

Too bad you can’t split each server into NA, OCX, SEA and EU teams and have four “resets” every day. This would totally eliminate the night capping problem.

I can’t remember other than tactivators, SMC fountains and resource nodes, all from HoT, has there been any other map change to SMC since launch?

I don’t count the wall issue as a map change.

I think threads of this type should be put into the

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