Guild Wars 2

This was the exact intention of all the changes to glicko etc over the last 6-9 months, wasn’t it? As I recall the whole idea was to flatten out the ratings so that there would be more “good” matches. The definition of a good match appears to be one in which the glicko scores of each team are as close together as possible so it’s a vicious/virtuous circle.

As things stand, 9 out of 12 teams are within 100 points of each other and everyone is easily in range of everyone else when you add in wildcards so every week can be like this from now on.

Gliders are great. Mounts will be great. If we get flying mounts in XPack 3 or 4 or whenever they will be great too.

Seriously, what’s not to like about any of it? Game can’t stand still and shouldn’t.

I followed a Scrapper Commander for a couple of hours the other night and he was great. Best part was when he stealthed the entire zerg with his gyro and we wiped the opposition at Hills cata wall without any of them seeing us coming.

Over five years I’ve seen a LOT of commanders come and go and in the end, if you plan on Pugmanding, it comes down to a) personality b) tactical awareness and c) persistence. Build and class is way after that. NO point being the tankiest, survivingest commander out there if every time you tag up all you hear are crickets and all you see is tumbleweed.

Whole idea misses the point that ANet designed the entire game mode around huge battles between large numbers of players. To quote from the description of WvW on the main, official site:

“Join World vs. World (WvW)for … pitched battles between hundreds of players.”

Zergs and blobs are what was always intended to be the main attraction of WvW. The entire direction of development (such as it is) over five years supports that concept.

What they need is an engine that can support it properly, not a way to make the fights smaller.

They should just put Legendary Armor and Weapons in the Gem Shop and stop pretending GW2 has some form of “progression”.

zinkz.7045:

Straegen.2938:

I guess 50 players building a half dozen rams to take down a gate against half their numbers…

Actually it is fine, one of the reasons WvW has died off is because they listened to people who lack basic logic and cried about needing tools to defend against superior numbers, so they added siege like shield gens, buffed AC damage, fortified everything, put in trash mechanics like chilling fog, etc.

And all that achieved was more people leaving the game in the post-HoT collapse of WvW, because if 10 guys can use that crap against 50, then so can 50 defending against 50 attackers and make attempting to take objectives boring as hell, to the point most people do not want to do it anymore, but like I said that was the obvious outcome to anyone with a basic grasp of logic, the actual solution to defending against 50 players with 25 was to address population balance, but that involved too much work.

They didn’t add these things because people complained. They added them because the developers’ conception for WvW is a game based around the taking and defending of structures by the implementation and use of siege machinery. That’s what WvW is.

Very hard to look at the way the game mode has been handled over the entire life of the game and make a case for it being intended to be anything other than that, much though many players would like it to be something else.

Please don’t confuse us with facts…

Not sure I see the point. The post makes it clear you have to have 500 craft skill in the relevant craft for every ascended piece you buy from the vendor. If you need to be a 500 Armorsmith to buy ascended armor for a Heavy class, why wouldn’t you just craft the blasted armor in the first place? Okay, it says there will be “a moderate discount in cost” over crafting it but I wasn’t aware that cost was the issue here.

Since there is no crafting in WvW – we had the stations removed to prove that – then clearly the proposed system in no way allows players “to acquire gear by playing the game mode they chose.” Crafting is a pure PvE activity and even if these vendors were added, WvW players would have to be max-level PvE crafters to use them.

MrFluffy.9307:

Ovalkvadratcylinder.9365:

Reading the forums this seems to be subjective.

I don’t think the forums accurately reflect the overall consensus.

Me neither. This forum is over-populated by players who prefer fighting other players for bragging rights rather than those who just like easy wins to collect karma and loot.

Self-evidently there are far more of the latter than the former actually playing the game-mode these days.

Myself, I would prefer a meaningful competition with structure and results. The main content I want would be akin to the Seasons we used to have or to the intermittent periods over the last four and a half years when circumstances meant a critical mass of players were invested in outcomes rather than performance.

There needs to be some progression path. I can see how there could be some serious power-creep issues with a proposal like the OP’s though. It takes a good while to accumulate rank points already, especially for players who don’t grind them out with pots and boosters and EOTM. You don’t want a situation where newcomers feel they can’t contribute or compete until they have a “job”, especially if getting that job takes a good number of hours.

I’d be happy with weak power/utility progression and strong cosmetic progression. I realize many people run WvW at low graphics settings for performance reasons but there could still be room for some kind of visual differentiation according to rank. Of course, if you feel you can provide power and/or utility in a way that doesn’t alienate newer players or unbalance things more than they are already then go for it.

tl:dr – Progression is good.

Am I misunderstanding this thread or is the suggestion that currently guilds can’t get on to play WvW because the spaces are being used up by militia/afkers? If so, I can only assume this is a T1 issue because in the tiers where I’ve been playing these last few months (T2/3/4) the problem is finding enough players online to make up even one medium-sized zerg across all four maps. A big zerg these days is 25 people.

As for the question of guilds themselves, I’ve never been fond of the concept. When GW2 started, one of the very big attractions over many other MMOs was the breaking of the genre-wide reliance on guilds. Allowing people to join multiple guilds was part of it but more important was the way the game was built around everyone playing constructively with everyone nearby regardless of party or guild affiliation. It should be completely unnecessary in any part of GW2, WvW very much included, for anyone to need to join a guild; the game structures should support and encourage dynamic co-operative play as a matter of course.

For a while under the previous administration and particularly in the development of Heart of Thorns things went the other way, back towards a traditional MMO take on guild membership but that process seems to have dried up after the relative failure of HoT. If the team working on those features really has been disbanded then that’s welcome news to me.

That’s not to say things couldn’t be improved. There are structural changes that could be made to obviate the real problems caused by blobbing (in the tiers that still have blob-sized population) and afking. Tying those improvements to the insular, elitist and increasingly archaic “Guild” concept would not be the way I’d choose to address those problems.

I’m definitely not UNhappy about the state of WvW, at least as far as how amusing, entertaining and fun it still can be. Over the life of GW2 there have been prolonged periods when I had a lot less fun in WvW than I do now.

For example, I have multiple screenshots of different matches in which one team owned every single structure on all four borderlands. That used to happen not all that infrequently. I haven’t seen it for a very long time. I can remember, particularly during the rise of various bandwagons, entire matches where we didn’t do much more than sit in Citadel and hope for a brief respite to recover a northern tower for a few minutes before the vast hordes returned. Even what we think of as unbalanced matches now have a lot more ebb and flow than those days.

I’m no roamer but I hear that outside of T1 roaming is better than it has been for a long time. Everyone seems to think the fights are better at all sizes of engagement. It’s not all doom and gloom.

On the other hand, the numbers of people playing is way, way down and the interest and commitment of those who are still here seems a lot lower than it was. Commanders are thin on the ground and squads that would have been near-full three months ago are lucky to raise twenty-five people now. A big engagement is 20 vs 20.

The real issue from my perspective, though, is the complete collapse of meaningful competition. Yes, the fights are better but for me a fight is no fun in and of itself – it has to be a fight for something. It’s not necessarily about PPT per se but there has to be more of a reason behind fighting other players than just trying to show off. I’d rather lose a fight over something worth fighting for than win one over nothing.

The current league (NA) is a disaster. Manual score adjustments and the utterly inadequate Glicko process means no win or loss has any significance. The entire thing needs a complete overhaul. I would definitely do away with the whole concept of a never-ending ladder system for a start. There need to be start and end points and movement between teams needs to be controlled.

We don’t need Seasons in the old sense so much as we need the whole competition to be seasonal. We already have the two-month rhythm for linking. Perhaps we could have a one-week window before the links each time and then ANet could lock all servers, look at the populations before deciding on the next set of links, reset whatever needs to be reset to start everyone off on an equal footing – and then keep all servers locked until the next one-week window.

Whatever changes are or are not made to these specific weapons, what’s really needed is the UI toggle as suggested many times in the thread. A simple All/Mine/None toggle for all weapon sounds would do the job.

That’s not a “a better WvW”. That’s an entirely different game mode. If ANet wanted to do that much work they might as well literally start from scratch.

Of course, it’s also just what the OP sees as “better”. Lots of players like PPT, like siege, like the mix of PvE/PvP. If they didn’t, well, WvW wouldn’t be played the way it often is, would it?

Given the will and the resources I’d like to see ANet split the PPT/Siege/Structures part of WvW from the open field fight part and make two separate game modes out of them. That would be much more likely to please a larger number of players. Given the history of GW2 in general and WvW in particular, though, I think the chance of any change on that scale is vanishingly small.

If we’re really, really lucky we might get a new map before GW2 closes down but I wouldn’t even count on that, especially after the way the last one was received.

Delete my server and it’s game over. I have other MMOs I can play, where I have history and continuity, some of it going back nearly two decades. I’ll just move back to a home that still wants me.

Xenesis.6389:

There is nothing in the game to keep players loyal to a server, other than the community and winning, but for a lot of players their guild is their community.

In seventeen years of playing MMOs I have never considered loyalty to a guild to stand ahead of loyalty to a server. Guilds come and go. Your server stays with you until the game closes down. Sometimes you get merged and merged again but you always know where you live. I can tell you the name of every server I played on in all the main MMOs I’ve played but I can barely remember the names of any guild I was in.

In GW2 I see guild membership as a much weaker bond even than usual because we can all be in five guilds at once. How does that even work for WvW anyway? Can you be in a guild on all three teams in the same match?

I agree it won’t ever go back to what it was. However, that doesn’t mean it can’t change from what it is.

The old system had the flaws pointed out above and was quite unpopular with some people. There was considerable enthusiasm for moving to an automated system. The problem is, the automated system we got has also proved unpopular with some people and also has obvious flaws.

In an MMO which has a stated, intended lifespan of at least a decade we shouldn’t be expecting to sit with the flawed replacement for a flawed system for the next five years. If not before, these systems and many others should all be reviewed and revamped in the upcoming expansion. Yes, I know the WvW revamp that came with HoT was a disaster but that again shouldn’t mean no revamp next time – it should mean lessons learned and a better revamp.

There needs to be more automation than the old system and more failsafes against trolling but there also needs to be more player agency than the new system. How about a system where there’s an automatic upgrade path but players can speed it up or enhance it by actions they take directly? That way there is no obligation on individuals to act but they have power to act if they wish.

MelGT.8326:

I think the only reason it’s still there is to put some RPG into this MMORPG, it’s utterly pointless right now. The same as those “Teleport to Friend” consumables that I have loads of.

The Teleport to Friend items are very useful. People use those all the time to get to places like the end of jumping puzzles, HoT mastery points or Hero Points and other similarly difficult to reach places. They don’t require a Mesmer and have a zone-wide range.

Definitely wouldn’t put them in the same bracket as repair canisters.

As far as i remember from when megaservers were introduced, the system tries to match you to your home world, your guild, your friends list and people you are grouped with. There may be more criteria than that – I think your language selection may also be in there somewhere.

How it prioritizes those I have no idea but for a while when Megaservers were new I played around with all of them, swapping guild rep, friending random people, guesting to other worlds and so on. It did get me different maps some of the time but it wasn’t at all predictable. And of course sometimes, I guess, there may only be one map of the zone you want running so no matter how often you change things it won’t make any difference.

Also I have, on occasion, been put in a different map to my wife when we were grouped, in the same guild and from the same home server so maybe sometimes it just doesn’t work at all.

OriOri.8724:

Odokuro.5049:

Because the last time they added new content to WvW, people lost their fricken minds and moaned and groaned for weeks… I think they learned their lesson.

This. Every time ANet has added something to WvW for the past 15+ months, people have just whined their kitten off at ANet for weeks. Its no wonder they don’t want to devote developer time to something that people won’t be happy about.

And they have said that they don’t want to do any more tournaments, because after each one they saw a permanent drop in WvW population. Just because you enjoy them doesn’t make them good for the game. Especially for a struggling game mode putting a tournament in only to know that you would lose even more players after its over would be a bad move on their part.

All that tells us is that the previous Tournaments had design flaws. If something isn’t working as well as it should the solution isn’t necessarily to throw it away and forget about it; there’s also the option of fixing what’s wrong with it so it performs the way you want it to.

It’s clearly not impossible to design a limited duration competition for WvW that won’t result in burnout. Many suggestions along those lines have been made on these forums. Making the Season shorter and tailoring it to be something people feel able to dip in and out of without having to change their current patterns of play to any extreme degree shouldn’t be to hard, especially now we have the two hour blocks of Skirmishes already in place.

Bluntly, the original Seasons may have had issues but so does replacing them with…nothing.

Xenesis.6389:

2-1-1 can work if players adjust to the system, but most players these days are lazy and just want to go after whatever is weaker which is piledriver the third place server. The only way it’s demoralizing to second is if second was only playing for second and didn’t care to actually win first, but in that system they’re playing for the same point as third.

The game was built for 2v1, you’re suppose to play to win, not play for lazy man second and call that a win for your server. Only it was suppose to be 2v1 on the winning server, not the losing one. Then again they had systems like the orbs/bloodlust which again favored bigger servers with numbers and coverage to hold it, so even in the beginning wvw was built to favored bigger servers to snowball the smaller servers.

The 2v1 was never built properly from the start, there were no incentives to actually fight the proper 2v1. Scoring changes are useless anyways, players say they want changes, but complain hard to go back to old systems whenever there’s a significant change.

This is all simultaneously true and yet still misleading.

Yes, WvW was envisioned by its designers as a three-way battle in which worlds would co-operate and compete by forming shifting alliances. ANet have openly confirmed that.

For whatever reason, however, that is not how it was received by the overwhelming majority of players. Far from a shifting series of alliances of convenience becoming the norm, the entire concept of co-operating with any other server became seen as something tantamount to cheating or exploiting.

I vividly remember the famous occasion in Season One when Yaks Bend formed an alliance with Ehmry Bay for the express purpose of denying SBI, which had stacked and tanked get into the second tier pool and was looking likely to win. That alliance lasted maybe 36 hours at most and required constant maintenance. People had to explain over and over and over again in map and team chat what was going on and even then many YB players refused to go along with what they saw as cheating.

Although at the time that was seen as a famous victory, it was very much a one-off because of the peculiar circumstances we found ourselves in. Since then I have heard players complain about being “double teamed” a thousand times (almost always entirely without foundation) but any suggestion that we as a server should make any kind of arrangement with any other server is treated like overt treachery akin to supply trolling. Allying with another server is something most players simply don’t want anything to do with, at least in my experience.

I would welcome a system whose mechanics encouraged and supported alliances. I like the politics of it and the strategy. I think you really need more than three servers though. Five would be ideal. For that to work, and more importantly for it to be accepted, however, you need to do a lot more than just put three (or five) cats in a sack.

I realize not everyone cares about the score, but for those who don’t care presumably any scoring system is the same as any other. As someone who does care about the score I can tell you that getting zero for two hours when we have come second would be enough to make me quit WvW altogether.

It was bad enough when we got the same for second as for third. That was extremely demoralizing. To get nothing at all would be the last straw.

What needs to happen and soon is for meaningful results (doesn’t have to be material rewards) to be attached to position in each skirmish and to position in the match at the end of the week. Make it matter more whether your side comes second or third, not less, and make it so that everyone is aware that it has some significance, even if they don’t personally care what order the teams finish.

There was a time when most people (judging by map and team chat, anyway) used to find it funny but it may be that those days are over. Players seem to find it annoying now, again judging by reactions in open channels.

Claiming towers and keeps with the ANet flag is probably a joke that’s not funny any more. Might be time to give it a rest.

The problem, like a lot of WvW issues, isn’t the mechanic of being marked but the automated process behind it. Giving control of processes like marking and upgrading to NPCs and autonomic systems reduces the involvement and participation of players.

Give some classes the ability to “spot” hidden players and “mark” them. Put the controls and the gameplay back in the hands of players. So many interesting and compelling additions to WvW gameplay could be made by letting people do the things that are currently done by systems.

Dawdler.8521:

CrimeMaker.8612:

Server loyalty is dead. Server community is dead.

So because a few servers are dead, lets destroy the server communities that still live and make new servers! Brilliant!!!

The Yaks Bend thread gives the lie to the false notion that server community is dead. If that was true then YB, far from still being “Full”, would have dropped population weeks ago as people transferred off. In fact the same people are still playing because WvW is about defending a homeland if it’s about anything. You don’t just up and leave because the grass is greener somewhere else.

Svarty.8019:

The goal of the matchups is exacerbating a lack of interest in the gamemode.
As has been said before, the official Arenanet goal of linking is “good matches”.

Our goal with World Linking is good matches.

source
Linkings led to the disappearance (or invalidation) of the ladder and reason to win a match.

This, however, is entirely true. Good matches are not the same as a good competition. You can have great matches in a sports league but a terrible, dull, predictable season. Except we don’t even have the hope of a new season at the end of it.

Xenesis.6389:

Them being locked and not getting ppt performance out of their population is a little baffling, could be any number of reasons for that. Not enough tags on to motivate players, not enough people backcapping, one sided time zone coverage, too much defense and roaming and not alot of aggressive play, who knows.

We are kinda sorta semi-officially not playing this match in an attempt to get out of the FULL lock. There’s supposedly a server meeting tonight related to how to proceed but those always happen when I’m asleep so I only get scraps of hearsay.

We also lost our main OCX PPT guild this week which means we now have no major presence in OCX, SEA or most of EU. HoD, meanwhile, seem to have picked up some ability to field big numbers outside of their traditional SEA dominance. Dunno who they got but my EBay account was linked to HoD for two months last linking and i never saw HoD doing this back then.

Add to that, playstyle on YB has changed markedly over the last few months. Not only do we have a lot more “fight” Commanders than we did, we also don’t have the PPT ones any more. It would have been good if we could have increased the fighting ones while retaining the PPT ones but instead we have see-sawed from one extreme to the other. I think a good deal of that is because of how little the outcome of matches means these days.

I strongly suspect that that would change if and when ANet finally get around to attaching the promised rewards to skirmishes. Indeed, if the rewards are any good I think most servers will be in for a significant change of playstyle whether they want it or not. I’m waiting on that, personally.

Oh, and I’d rather we stayed locked and unlinked forever than we ever go back to T1, at least in its current form.

Dawdler.8521:

The thing is, the WvW we knew and loved year one is not the WvW we have today. Not because of skirmish score experiments or OP HoT builds, but because of the severe upgrade creep.

T3 was once an achievement that took a long freaking time and fortifications where nowhere near as strong as they are today on top of that. We couldnt sit and wait out passive upgrades, we had to maintain supplies and heaven forbid there was an attack that drained supps. Speedy dollys didnt exist, keep claims with roflstomp tactivators didnt exist, all we had was our feet and hands.

Loosely and probably somewhat innacurate, you could describe as we used to spend 75% of the time fighting for an objective and 25% sieging it, but today we have to spend 75% of our time sieging it and 25% fighting for it. It gets tiresome.

Yes, that’s a good point. I still enjoy keep sieges but they were a lot more enjoyable and certainly a great deal more satisfying before all the automation. I remember spending 30-45 minutes just casting Windborne Speed on workers at the gate while someone else did the same at the supply dump so we could get a structure upgraded faster. Lots of stuff like that used to happen and that constituted gameplay for players. Now it’s all been handed on to NPCs.

I do like Siege disablers and Emergency Waypoints have their moments but the rest of the trimmings we could do without. I also miss having Guardians and Mesmers throw up shields over siege. Why take that out and then replace it with Shield Generators that do exactly the same only for a lot longer and for any class?

Lack of consistency and no coherent plan is what WvW seems to have suffered from for most of the last couple of years.

Digikid.7230:

I am not going to spend 3 hours breaking a defended T3 tower.

This, right here, is why it’s so hard to get any agreement on what WvW should look like. There is literally nothing I look forward to more in WvW than a three hour assault on a keep, preferably Bay – unless it’s a three-hour defense.

When I was following GW2 before launch I read about WvW and thought it would be something I wouldn’t even bother to try. I didn’t like GW1’s PvP and I didn’t expect to enjoy it in GW2 either, not in small groups in sPvP or large ones in WvW. My wife, however, quickly got into WvW from the start so naturally I did give it a try and I found to my surprise that it wasn’t really “PvP” at all but more a game of tactics and strategy involving taking and holding structures.

That is very much more interesting to me than fighting other players directly has ever been and for the past four, heading to five, years I’ve had a lot of great times trying to attack or defend large stone buildings. Just last week, twice after work, I logged into WvW intending to do my dailies and leave and ended up involved in protracted keep sieges that used up my entire evening.

People on these forums often claim no-one enjoys fighting under heavy arrow cart fire or trying to break very heavily sieged keeps and towers but I absolutely love it. It’s easy to assume that players who jump on siege at the first opportunity only care about being the ones to use the " easy option" but I like fighting and overcoming siege engines every bit as much as as I like using them myself. I play a staff ele for a reason.

Anyway, it’s not about who’s right or who’s wrong. The problem is that WvW has been trying to be all things to all players for too long now and it isn’t working. I do seriously believe the whole game mode should be rethought and there should be a formal split between the tactical/strategic structure-based, territory holding, points scoring matchplay and the larger-scale, Guild vs Guild direct person-to-person PvP game. It’s not impossible for the two to go hand in hand but as populations harden and scores become less meaningful it’s becoming increasingly difficult for WvW to support both playstyles effectively.

UmbraNoctis.1907:

If there would be a condi dmg reduction stat … can i then get the ability to cleanse power dmg after i got hit too? To make it fair, you know …

You do. It’s called a heal.

For the next expansion Anet should split WvW into two separate modes: a pure siege vs siege game with no PvP and a pure PvP game with no siege. Same maps, same objectives, only in one players attack and defend structures ONLY with siege while in the other all gates are open and attack and defense is all about holding and breaking choke points.

Failing that mobile waypoints sounds like the most hilarious thing ever.

Did an entire thread vanish while I was reading it? I was enjoying it too. Such nostalgia. Reminded me of the classic “No-one come to Maguuma, we don’t want any more people – seriously, we mean it” thread of the old pre-Season days.

Oh well, this one’s not bad either.

Justine.6351:

Grim Reaper.3048:

Jim Hunter.6821:

Arcaedus.7290:

Liston.9708:

kefro.9312:

Probably because siege counts as population

this is 2017 not 2015…..

Yeah, but disloyal, bandwagoning “fight” guilds ignorantly perpetuating an old and now highly inaccurate stereotype, whatcha gonna do?

Lol are you trying to say YB doesn’t still hug siege? Because that’s not what I’ve been seeing this week.

Every server has those players that like siege. I see it in the same match up as you. I will say this about YB, on the first day that I came to YB, ( 2 Years ago ) up to now, YB has changed for most of us. We don’t use the amounts of siege that most of you think we do.

Ohhhkayyyy

https://youtu.be/jarKFnCQqhU

That video was taken nearly three months ago. A lot has changed since then. Basically, whether YB sieges or doesn’t siege depends on DK and/or the people who follow his approach. As of now he’s not logging in and other commanders with very different ideas are running things – if anyone can actually be said to be “running” anything.

Mind you, even DK wouldn’t siege up a camp like that. He’s very particular about specific placement for siege. No idea who might have been behind that one. Sieging up camps is a real T1 thing anyway, come to think of it. I’ve not seen it done often except when we’re trying to WP a keep on someone else’s BL, of course.

Then again, as I always have to add, I have literally never played during NA prime in the entire life of the game so for all I know werewolves and leprechauns come on then and knit siege out of unicorn hair.

You can play GW2, including WvW, with ALL communication switched off if you want. Don’t limit it to not joining voice channels – switch off map, party, squad, say, team and all the rest of the channels. That way you get GW2 all to yourself as a solo RPG with some NPCs with really good AI.

Try it sometime. it’s very relaxing.

Not that I want to encourage you in any way but you don’t need to do anything other than pure, solo PvE to fill out that WvW track. Just do the WvW PvE dailies (Guard Killer, Land Claimer, Caravan Disruptor, Master of Monuments, Veteran Creature Slayer, Camp Capturer, Big Spender) every time they come up, which is every day, often several a day.

That gets you WvW Track participation while you are doing it and every two Potion of WvW rewards you get is a tick on the track. You’ll have the Gift of Battle in a couple of weeks. Of course that does require a modicum of patience, which may be the stumbling block…

Arguably, it’s taking ideas from these forums that has put WvW into the chaotic state it’s in. If you read back over the dev posts here just about everything post-HoT has been done “at the request of players”. And then there was all that polling…

On the other hand, before that we had ANet making WvW changes without consultation, or with consultation that was largely ignored, which is how we ended up with both EotM and DBL, neither of which has been a runaway success in terms of helping the core WvW mode to prosper.

It’s threads like this that gave us the current 5:4:3 scoring system and the Tiered points for structures. Over and over again ideas are suggested on these forums that, when adopted, are vilified on the same forums. It’s similar to the way posters here routinely denigrate the current metas and playstyles visible in game although almost without exception those are the outcome of direct player choice rather than anything imposed by ANet.

It’s clear that there is and has never been any consensus. On balance I would prefer the least bad choice, which I would contend would be for ANEt to make the WvW they want to make and stick to it. If that does eventually result in a “ded gaem” then they can close it down and use the resources elsewhere. All this endless tinkering and fiddling around the edges is just prolonging the agony.

Grim Reaper.3048:

Jim Hunter.6821:

Arcaedus.7290:

Liston.9708:

kefro.9312:

Probably because siege counts as population

this is 2017 not 2015…..

Yeah, but disloyal, bandwagoning “fight” guilds ignorantly perpetuating an old and now highly inaccurate stereotype, whatcha gonna do?

Lol are you trying to say YB doesn’t still hug siege? Because that’s not what I’ve been seeing this week.

Every server has those players that like siege. I see it in the same match up as you. I will say this about YB, on the first day that I came to YB, ( 2 Years ago ) up to now, YB has changed for most of us. We don’t use the amounts of siege that most of you think we do.

Everyone uses siege. It used to be that certain Commanders on YB turned it into an art form. That’s what’s stopped because those commanders mostly aren’t playing any more and neither are quite a few players who learned from them and spent hours every day tapping the vast quantities of siege to keep it alive.

A year ago, if certain commanders were taking charge, those structures would be sieged in what they considered the key positions, which would be a lot more than some servers (although not all) would use and often the same siege pieces would still be in place 24 hours later because there would be people watching a stopwatch to refresh them.

Those days are long gone. If you make a character on YB now and truck around the keeps and towers you’ll see very little siege. Mostly siege gets built as and when structures get attacked and when the attack stops no-one bothers to refresh it so it rots.

Personally, I liked the siege culture and I’m sorry to see it go, but gone it most certainly has. Not to say it won’t return. Just needs a few key individuals to come back…

Sarika.3756:

YB isn’t remotely interested in being in t1. Better yet, it’s in no danger of being there any time soon. There’s a silver lining to having no link and being locked…

Very true. T3 and T4 are fun. T1 was never fun. A lot of YB never wanted to be dragged there in the first place and are only too pleased to be well out of it.

My guess is because the algorithm weights how long a player spends doing stuff on a WvW map as well as how many people there are doing it. That would be the “activity” measure.

YB has quite a lot of people who are on the maps 8, 10, 12 hours every single day. Always has had. Maybe that skews the “active” count.

Otherwise, no idea. Algorithm is broken?

How does being in TS get you boon share?

A more sensible suggestion to get over the issue of asking people to download and install 3rd party software would be for ANEt to add integrated voice coms to GW2. Other MMOs do it and have been doing it for a decade (although even then some people insist on using a 3rd party alternative…)

Before the ban, each match someone would start a thread with the three worlds’ names in the title and players from all three would come on and jibe at each other. It could get out of hand – surprise surprise – so it got stopped. That’s a “matchup thread”.

What seems to be happening these days is that whenever anyone uses named worlds to illustrate a point or compares what happens on one world to what happens on another, or refers to specific things that have or might happen in a specific match, those threads are likely to be closed. Basically, mentioning the names of more than one world in the same thread seems to risk getting that thread closed as a “matchup”.

It does make it very difficult to use examples to make a point and it no longer seems to have much to do with the problem the ban was originally intended to prevent.

As I recall, one particular Commander went to T1 sometime in the first 6-9 months after launch to observe tactics and learned siege placement there. I remember when he came back and explained how it worked. It took him a while to convince people.

I think it was TC from whom he got the details. They, at that time, were reckoned to be the experts when it came to siegecraft as I recall.

Then, when The Alliance came to YB years later, the first major guild to transfer, a few weeks before the rest, was a TC guild I won’t name. They took siege usage up to yet another level – I remember being astonished by the sheer number of blueprints they would routinely drop and flash build. That then became the norm on YB and pretty much remained so until about six months ago, when the siege culture began to fall into decline. It all started with TC I believe, although it was a long time ago and i may be misremembering.

These days YB uses a fraction of the siege it used to. Sometimes commanders don’t even use Superior siege, which would have got them a public dressing down in the old days.

While much of Mal’s op ed piece is true enough, the observable facts seem to be somewhat at variance with the interpretation. Four years of WvW development suggest that ANet’s vision for the game mode is primarily as an alternative form of entertainment for PvE players who like some PvP as well, not as a specific PvP mode. The consistent buffing of siege, the addition of EotM, the entire design ethos of the Desert Borderlands, the ongoing encouragement of large-scale, low skill ceiling combat, all of this and more indicates the intent to provide knockabout fun for exactly that demographic that gets labelled “fairweathers” or “militia” on these forums. They, not the ever-diminishing hardcore that posts here, are the target demographic.

As a corollary to that intent development focus, once they wrestle the populations into some kind of “balance”, assuming that’s even possible, will move to improving rewards for winning skirmishes. The aim there, I would contend, will be to give GW2 something akin to a “Battleground” offer without actually having to create a new game mode from scratch. Once there are tangible, desirable rewards affixed to the conclusion of each two-hour skirmish any concern over who wins a week-long match will be consigned to a handful of obsessive server loyalists, as will the idea that there is any overall competition going on.

Of course, if and when ANet finally reveal details of the long-awaited second expansion, this could all change. Maybe they will actually pull WvW altogether at that point and replace it entirely. It’s not as though 95% of their paying customers would even notice.

I’d like to be able to reset map completion on my characters, map by map, so I could do it again on the same characters. It always irritates me a bit when I go to a map and see it all completed, which is why, despite having played since launch and having many Level 80s, I have never done global map completion on any of them. I’d be much more likely to finish it on a specific character if I knew I could switch it off and start again.

I’d make it optional, though, with a simple “Clear Map Completion” toggle in Options.

Liston.9708:

HazyDaisy.4107:

Most people on servers 18-24 have have already transferred to a host server, so the fact that some higher hosts got 2 pairs means very little, because their pairs pops are extremely low. Since most people on those lower servers have left, I think, looking at T3-4 this pairing seems to be all about phase 2: trimming down pop on servers 13-17.

Any players at all is better than none…. If you want to “throw away” the links to server 3 and 4, then 5-6-7-8 still have better links as well. Clearly the thought was to try and make t1 competitive and well YB can compete by itself in T3 (with little to no chance of improving to T2 without a link AND full)

Presumably no Host server is ever going to get a link when it’s marked as “Full”. Whether or not a server is classed as “Full” is determined by an algorithm whose paramaters we aren’t permitted to know, other than that it is based on “active” WvW participation that doesn’t include EotM.

The question is, how does the algorithm rate the bottom server in T3 as “Full” in the first place? There have been plenty of guesses but no-one knows for sure. Clearly it doesn’t follow any kind of logic that a human might apply.

Story needs to be detached from combat, that’s the long and the short of it. Put the story in cut scenes or r-click interactions and don’t attach ANY rewards to them. Add all the rewards to the combat instances and make those fights as “challenging” as you want.

Allow players to complete the story without ever entering a combat instance or to get all the rewards without ever seeing a scene from the story, as they prefer. Anyone who wants both can still do both, just as they have to do now, but everyone who only wants one or the other can also have what they want. Everyone’s happy! (Well, no-one’s ever happy but you get the idea…)

Before you extract the rune do check the price of both the rune on its own and the armor complete with rune on the TP. Some armor is more valuable with the rune in than the rune is alone.

The OP is an eloquently expressed and not entirely unfair assessment of some of the shortcomings of the storytelling in GW2 but I think there’s a much more fundamental issue here. This is an MMORPG, not a single-player RPG.

The assumption that there is a clear, linear storyline that every player will follow, understand and share is simply untrue. Although the term “virtual world” has fallen out of fashion, MMOs by and large do still feature multiple perspectives within a global whole that is not designed or intended to be wholly visible from any one perspective.

As a player you aren’t “expected” to play all the classes or races in order to understand every aspect of the wider story. That would indeed be asking a lot of most players. Instead you are not expected to know, experience or understand many of the details of the story first-hand at all. Playing a Charr, as the OP is, you would not be expected to know the minutiae of the Asuran or Sylvari backstory and it would be entirely proper for much of it to seem puzzling, assuming you even notice it at all.

In an MMO with five playable races you can reasonably assume that 80% of the story content in the early part of the game does not apply to you at all. As a player you can indeed roll other characters and experience it if you want to, but you don’t need to and the game doesn’t expect you to.

As you level up those stories will come together and by the time you’re 80 you will mostly be doing the same thing and seeing the same story as all the other races. Even then, however, there may be elements of flavor or small tidbits specifically included to amuse and entertain players of other races that mean little or nothing to you. That’s intentional and is the sort of thing that makes many people prefer MMOs and their virtual worldliness to static, single perspective RPGs.

That said, the story the game tells you about the race you are playing should be clear and consistent and I agree that in GW2 it isn’t always. Because GW2 is a sequel to a long-running game that not only had multiple, complex storylines but also spawned a number of novels, a great deal of foreknowledge is assumed or even expected and that’s a flaw. I certainly would not have the insight and understanding, and certainly not the emotional connection, with much of the main storyline of GW2 had I not made a point of buying and reading the “Edge of Destiny” novel in particular.

I don’t think there is any point fighting it, though. This is how most successful and/or long-running MMOs work. It’s part of the form of the genre. Happily, a failure to follow the narrative rarely has any impact whatsoever on gameplay so if it all seems too much to bother with you can safely just ignore it.

Tentonhammr.7849:

Magira.6390:

Dawdler.8521:

So the big question:

Will balance between the classes in WvW both zerg/roaming be considered even once or is this a pure PvE/sPvP rebalance as usual?

You only need to remove the silly PVE Gear from the Open PVP and accept WvW as PVP mode.

Then they could handle SPVP and WvW together and the PVP players would no longer have to deal with PVE Gear.

Holy kitten someone actually gets it… Someone else actually understands…. Having a pvp game mode governed by PvE rules was never a good idea…

WvW is not, has never been and was never intended to be only a “PvP Mode”. It’s PvPvE, a very common game mode in MMOs going back long before GW2. Of course, you could still have PvPvE using standardized gear if you wanted to. Personally I think that would be a terrible idea but each to their own.

Like almost every suggestion on these forums, though, there’s no danger of it happening. WvW is what it is for better or for worse. Maybe GW3 will do things differently – if any of us live long enough to see it…

Arden.7480:

I am so happy that in the story we didn’t get USA politics.

That’s irony, right?

Weli.4568:

what’s the point of having end boss fight if you can kill it easily like any regular mob.

For my money (and I would actually pay money, or at least gems, for it, although I think it should be provided for free) there should be fully non-combat versions of just the story for all “Personal Story” and “Living Story” instances. It’s not because I can’t do the fights – I already did this final boss, first time, pre-nerf. It’s because I am not interested in the fighting I’m interested in the non-combat interactions.

Just make a fully non-combat version of the same content each time – as-is but with mobs removed and fights replaced with cut scenes. Remove all the rewards, none of which are of any use or interest anyway. Let players choose whether and when to do the fights or just watch and listen to the dialog and cut-scenes.

As it is I do each episode once and once only on a single character on one of my three accounts then I’m done. In fact, of late, I then go and play other MMOs instead. If I could take my other characters through a non-combat version, however, I’d go through it several times because I want to see how/if the dialog differs for different races/classes/genders. Not enough to do the fights twice though.