Ok, before this gets closed as a matchup thread…and speaking as a YB player since beta…
1) Taking and holding structures is the point of WvW. That is what YB has always done. It’s utterly ridiculous for anyone claiming to be a YB regular to have an issue with other servers doing what we’ve been doing for four years. The point is to GET other servers to play that way not to stop them. Great to see Mag getting on board!
2) Spawn camping is cheesy but standing around for hour after hour being spawn camped is plain idiotic. Not only does our spawn have five exits, there are three other maps! Go somewhere else! Do something else!
3) Which is what the EYE commander was doing for the three hours of EU prime I played on Saturday and Sunday evening. Taking stuff on FABL and fighting both FA and Mag, when Mag came over to help FA. The open field fights were some of the best for a long time and we even won some of them!
4) YB is always underpopulated on Weekends. Always has been. Mag is always hyperactive on weekends. Always has been. If you don’t like the weekend experience, take a short break and come back in the week. It will all change.
5) And if you think this is bad, think back to being run over by Kaineng, HoD or Dragonbrand back in their original bandwagon days. Forget not having a keep in EBG – we spent most of the week not being able to get out of Citadel!
This is a fun match. Mag and FA both hate YB (and not without good reason, either) and this is what to expect when we play either of them, let alone both. With DK absent it’s a bit more one-way than it might have been but it’s still far from a washout. Better than being in T1 with BG blobbing on all maps at once, that’s for sure.
How about we lock all NA servers except BG, JQ and TC and then close out all other tiers because that’s what WvW is all about. Anyone that can’t play the game the way Anet wanted it to be played should just go to EotM.
This might have been meant as a joke but it’s actually a really solid idea. Leaving three, fixed servers permanently open for transfers and locking all the rest would allow everyone who wants huge blob fights to transfer up to get them and leave everyone else to play in a more nuanced way. It would also enforce and maintain server pride.
Allow everyone on the three unlocked servers a free, one-time transfer off just so no-one who doesn’t want to be there is trapped when the walls go up for the rest of the worlds. That would include transfers up – you get one and only one chance to undo your decision if it was a mistake. In that case you get no choice about where you go – you re vert to the server you left.
F2P accounts all automatically start on one of the three unlocked servers. Paid-for accounts get a full choice at Account creation as now, leaving that as the only means of population increase for the Locked servers.
Better than picking the current top three servers, use this as an opportunity to create three brand-new Open servers. Then BG people can decide if server loyalty outweighs the desire to be on the biggest server, which very soon will not be BG.
(edited by Tiny Doom.4380)
There are countless ways a better version of WvW could be implemented but a moment’s thought will tell you that none of them are liley to see daylight due to the costs involved. About the only way it might happen would be as a (major) part of a paid-for Expansion but given that a) the WvW contribution to HoT was limited to a single new map and b) that went down like the proverbial lead balloon and then some, it seems highly unlikely the necessary development time and money will be directed towards a full revamp of WvW, even for an expansion.
One thing that would presumably not cost all that much would be to turn WvW off and on again. A full reset starting over with all new worlds. That would certainly allow for a period of interest and excitement but the effect would be short-lived. Possibly running WvW as a series of discreet campaigns in which the reset button was pressed every six months or even every quarter might keep people interested but even then I’m pretty sure the organized guilds and alliances would find a way to game the system and we’d soon end up back where we started.
Is it your objective to have everyone compete at the level of BG? Because every single action you’ve taken is starting to point to that direction.
Yes, I think that’s exactly their plan. The original concept was for huge army-vs-army scale battles involving the taking and holding of structures by use of siege engines. Like much of the original design brief for GW2 it didn’t survive contact with the enemy playerbase.
Over the life of the game so far ANet allowed their original vision to drift until we hit the nadir of Heart of Thorns, after which there was a soft reset back to the original values. Since the change of leadership that brought, there has been a series of revisions in all modes of the game that seem to be aiming to steer the ship back to the original course. The current round of changes to WvW are part and parcel of that revisionist stance.
Personally I don’t see how it will be possible to revive the original conception of WvW which was all but destroyed by the dual assault of the PvE Megaserver system and unlimited server transfers, which all but destroyed the concept of “Worlds” as originally conceived, but that seems to be what they are trying to achieve.
Never. Never will. Don’t believe server transfers should even exist. If you want to play on another a server buy another account (or these days get a free one) and start over.
IMO, none of these options are viable. BG, Mag, JQ, TC, Yaks, and FA are all established server communities with server pride. Taking away their name would be a game mode death move.
Stick to the primary server in a linkage to show their server name.
Completely agree.
Any solution has to retain the identity many of us have adopted and lived with for the past four years. I could see blowing up ALL server names and starting again from scratch but the idea that you could either replace server identity with a random name drawn from a hat that changes every couple of months or Red/Blue/Green is ludicrous and the third option is just even more confusing that what we have already.
On the subject of confusion I have no idea why it’s supposed to be confusing to see, for example, both Stormbluff Isle Invader and Gates of Madness Invader displayed when those worlds are linked. The links last eight weeks. How stupid would we have to be not to learn the names of each of the teams we are fighting by the end of the first match? Most people are going to know which servers are on which team by the end of the first session they play. You’re making it sound way more difficult and complicated than it actually is.
Hmm. I quite like the idea of more worlds although I personally will never move from the server I chose back in beta. If we are still going to have (in NA) four tiers of three servers, though, doesn’t that mean we end up with a few single-name worlds and the rest are a hodge-podge of, what, six or more linked worlds? Given the issues over a) server identity and b) name confusion you’re trying to address in the other thread, isn’t this going to make those problems even worse?
This all seems to be getting ridiculously over-complicated now, though. If it takes this kind of manipulation behind the scenes just to get the basics working maybe it really is time to consider stopping the whole thing and starting again from scratch.
Can we get some movement on going to “one up, one down”? A poll on the possibility, at least?
Failing that, a re-poll on frequency of links. Two months is just too long, as indeed ANet devs said it would be.
Other than that, welcome back to our friends from Anvil Rock and good luck to everyone from Ferguson’s Crossing. Must be a wild trip for you folks, up and down the tiers like this.
This is how Hearts should have been from launch. I love being able to redo them. It also opens the possibilities for new things to be added to vendors going forward. I hope this is a portent of things to come in both new LS maps and the expansion.
Well, it’s a definite improvement on what we’ve had for the last four years, no doubt about that. I’m sure it could be tweaked all kinds of ways and it might be interesting to vary duration and detail from match to match, but I’ll certainly settle for it “as is” if that’s what’s on the table.
I would like a few obvious signals as the timer counts down – an audio or visual cue when we hit half-time in a skirmish and, say, ten minutes before the end. It would also be good to have the skirmish score (War Score) on the HUD instead of (or, even better, as well as) the current “Potential Points” counter. There have been a few skirmishes that were close enough at the wire that it actually felt like individual actions might make a tangible difference but I only noticed those when I remembered to check – it would good to have the current standing of the skirmish always in view.
(edited by Tiny Doom.4380)
Late to thread but at least that means I’ve had plenty of time to explore the new map fully.
One of the best updates since launch. Certainly the best new non-expansion map in four years. This is the kind of “real” new map many have been asking for for a very long time. Bloodstone Fen was also good but Ember Bay is much better. If we can get a map like this every Episode then the game will have improved by an order of magnitude.
The story was also very good. LS3 is a big improvement on LS2, which I thought was nowhere near as good as LS1. Yes, we all complained bitterly about LS1 while it was happening but that was before we knew what was coming next! LS3 is a big return to form.
Don’t do Fractals so no comments there other than it’s good to see ANet able to add significant content to multiple game modes simultaneously. Ditto the new sPvP map, which I haven’t tried, although I do occasionally PvP. Nothing significant for WvW, which I play a lot, but that’s understood – it has a separate, ongoing development plan.
Since this is supposed to be High Level commentary I won’t go into great detail but the main reason I like Ember Bay better than Dry Top, Silverwastes etc is the replacement of the zonewide meta-event model with a much freer, looser choose-your-own-adventure style of play. The chains are short and very manageable and they layer excellently across each other so there’s always something happening. Many of the concluding fights resemble the “World Bosses” from launch, something we very definitely need more of. The rewards are good and for almost the first time in four years there are multiple karma vendors selling multiple items I find genuinely desirable. The minis especially are an excellent addition.
The return of Hearts is also very welcome and I very much like the way they need to be re-earned after each reset. I bet you guys wish you’d thought of that for launch – it would have given the entire game vastly more replayability and allowed you to continue adding new rewards to Karma vendors to drive activity on specific maps.
All in all I’d give this Episode and the content that came with it a solid A-. If you can make this the standard and hit 4-5 updates like this per calendar year then you have a game!
There is but one server who will give you what you want. I speak of the masters of siege, their engineers are the finest at placement and execution.
I speak of the land of Yaks Bend.
Pains me to say, but they may be the last true community left in game.
Other than that, anet made sure to dig the dagger deep. 2 inches is required btw to hit a major organ. At least that’s the Italian way. Moving on…..the megaservers were the start to killing communities, then we mvoed onto linking.
I suggest you move to YB if you are looking for support, having a feeling of contribution, and a more welcoming feel.
I for one will spend my days on SOR, in which I absolutely don’t know anyone.
You mean the server that treats anybody who did not start there as crap? The server that treats anybody who left there and came back like crap? That ain’t a community.
Well, even if that was an accurate description, which it isn’t, it kind of would be a community. An insular one, sure, but a coherent and sustained one.
In fact, although many of the people I see on in WvW on YB every day are indeed the same people I’ve seen there for three or four years, some since the first tentative weeks after launch when no-one had a clue what to do and no-one even owned a Commander tag, there are also plenty of people who are new and plenty who’ve left to try other servers and returned to the welcome of a prodigal child.
On the other hand, there are a few who left in a blaze of recrimination and insults only to come skulking back when they found the grass on the other side wasn’t the verdant swathe they’d been led to believe. They might not have such a comfortable homecoming.
Either way, for good or ill, YB does have consistency. That said, I also have an account on Ehmry Bay, now a free -floating linked server, and I feel that has a distinct, coherent and unique identity too. Server pride, like pride in just about anything, is largely what you make it. If you believe in it you’ll find it. And it’s definitely something worth believing in if you’re going to find yourself spending countless hours of your time taking and defending imaginary buildings in an imaginary world. Otherwise, really, what the heck are you doing there?
Spawning food trays on top of the tactivators, especially the Emergency Waypoint, is a common and irritating tactic in WvW. I couldn’t target the EWP at Hills a day or two ago because someone in the incoming zerg had dropped about 20 trays on it.
It’s not something I’d make a fuss about but to rely on players being careful, considerate and honorable seems a lax way of handling what is in essence a technical issue. It would be a lot neater if all interactables, spawned and static, had a small exclusion zone around them that prevented placement of others within the immediate vicinity.
Good fences make good neighbors.
Me thinks JQ is playing hooky. Im on YB, and most the time they are just steam rolling us bad, so is DB. I know we are beating them score wise, I guess we do well during NA, but any other time, JQ is just beating us like a read headed step child. Talk about Blobs. I think they are throwing the match to stay in T2 so they can farm us. Its bad. Think over the weekend they took our keep 2 or three times. Its like we are back in T1 which I HATE.
Giving serious thought to either stop playing or transfer to a lower server, the times I play, JQ is just farming us so bad, the game is unplayable. Even if we move maps, here they come……..and back to spawn I go.
I miss T3. During the times I play, them guys have given us some of the greatest fights I have ever been in. Lost many a time. I got all the respect in the world for em. They know how to fight. U even the numbers up, and the t3 servers would stomp just about any t2 or t1 server out there.
You must play during SEA because in any other time nobody is getting rolled because there is nobody but YB playing. From EU to early OCX there is barely any resistance from JQ, let alone DB.
It’s a somewhat exaggerated picture of SEA. YB has never had a strong presence in SEA in the entire life of the game. JQ and DB (especially DB) have historically been very strong in that time period and still are. Considering the population imbalance in SEA about all YB can do is try to defend as many upgraded assets as we can to make recovery faster when the SEA folks drift away.
Other than that, yes, we do seem to have strong coverage. I’m still mystified where it’s come from. We certainly didn’t have it a few weeks ago and, while a good few old faces have returned as the summer fades away, I can’t believe that accounts for all the extra numbers. There must be a lot more people on Ferguson’s Crossing than I thought…
So, now that it has happened…how are SoS and SBI enjoying being steamrolled by FA now?
Eh, SoS wouldn’t know because they got punted into t4 as a side effect. Bu hey, anything better than having every tower and even camps loaded with siege.
Just as a reality check, YB barely sieged up anything last week, for the obvious reason that most of the time there was minimal risk of anything getting attacked much less taken. Towards the end of the week, when neither SoS nor SBI seemed interesting in defending (for perfectly sound, logical reasons) there was a point at which Commanders were barely bothering to place offensive siege either because the zergs were just PvDing through the paper gates anyway.
I’m sure we’ll get right back on our arrow carts this week thanks to ANet’s deus ex machina intervention.
YB is odd this week. We have traditionally done poorly at reset and have struggled across the weekend and only a few weeks ago when we were in T3 we barely managed to edge CD for 2nd. Suddenly this match we come out of reset with a lead and continue to build all through the weekend to the point where we have a 60k lead.
DK is back but he’s really only doing some small-scale stuff and a bit of cheer-leading because of his ISP problems. We have Ferguson’s Crossing with us and there seem to be quite a few more of them than there were of Anvil Rock but it’s not clear exactly how many more. Meanwhile I see a ton of Guild tags and names that I never saw before but who turn out to be YB not FC when inspected.
I really have no idea what’s going on but the fights have been great, there’s a vibrancy and a flow that’s been lacking for a while, and as i type YB is ticking 46 and just had a huge battle to keep our Garri, which is the last keep we hold on our own BL, so it’s hardly all one-way traffic.
Having traveled up and down the rankings with YB for the entire life of the game I can say categorically that I never want to go back to T1, which was dull when we were winning and dismal when we weren’t. I don’t relish T2 either although fighting Maguuma is always…interesting. Personally I’d prefer to stay in T3, in the expectation that the new scoring system, when it finally arrives, will make things look as “balanced” as they currently feel.
Far, far too much doom and gloom is talked about WvW, especially on these forums. Yes, the populations are down (a lot) from a few years back and yes, there is a lot of wasted potential, but even playing EU hours on an NA server in T3/T4 there are always plenty of people on from all three teams, plenty of action, plenty of fights, loads of fun. Hell of a lot better than T1 ever was, that’s for sure, although that’s another issue….
The strangest thing about WvW after all the recent changes is that some weeks I have the option of playing on more than one side in the same match. I have three accounts and the first two are on the same server but when I made my third one I deliberately picked a server that was, at the time, five tiers below my regular one, to get some variety while specifically avoiding any conflict of interest. Then with the linking and glicko resets and abandonwagoning I find I have characters on two out of three teams in the same match.
That certainly puts a different perspective on things. I absolutely do not use the information to spy, but I have swapped accounts to go defend my smaller server’s Keeps against my larger server’s attacks and that’s added a huge amount of extra excitement and interest, especially with my wife in the attacking horde.
Gives me a much better perspective on the perception and opinions other servers hold about the ones I’m playing on, too. Some of the criticisms in both directions have more validity than I’d previously recognized, while some remain unfounded prejudice.
remember a T3 rolled the T4 match this week
Yes…but HoD had been in Tier 3 with SBI…and I don’t remember seeing numbers like we are seeing now from YB. We saw big groups…but not with the kind of consistency I have seen over the last few days.
I’m not sure if its been bandwagon’d or what…but it just doesn’t come out in the wash.
I give YB credit for having a large active WvW pop, which HoD/EBAY/ET obviously do not, at leats not in the BLs…<shrug>…who knows…I won’t speak for NSP/DH/DR…but this is why the pairings and matchups still do not work.
If there’s even a chance this coudl re-roll for the same matchup next week…something is still obviously and dreadfully wrong. lol
What’s happened on YB is mainly that a bunch of very active WvW players who’d been absent for various reasons (mainly just Summer, vacations etc really) all returned last week. A whole load of people are playing now who were barely seen for the whole of the last link, including one commander who can and does pull a much bigger crowd than just about anyone and who is a lot more likely to hold the stuff he takes for as long as he can.
Actual numbers probably haven’t changed an awful lot but there is now a much higher level of organization and also a desire to do something about the glicko bleed and stabilize it if possible. Unfortunately that does mean stomping all over everything whenever possible – although you’ll note YB by no means has the coverage to do that at will.
Whether it would be all that much different with CD in T4 I somewhat doubt. They seem to be pretty competitive in T3. Let’s hope the scoring changes when they arrive shake things up a bit because the linking seems to have gone about as far as it can and that’s not really far enough.
It would literally have never occurred to me that anyone would do the dailies to get the skins from the AP. To me the hellfire and radiant skins have always just been annoying bank fillers (being a pack rat I can’t bear to destroy them but it’s a racing certainty I’ll never use them). Takes all kinds I guess.
All the same I agree the cap is a daft idea. Wouldn’t it make more sense to change the rewards than mess around the with the points?
T4 is mostly a mess because there are effectively 4 T3 servers reasonably equally matched but only three slots to put them in. So every week T4 gets one T3 server, which then has to dominate like crazy to try to avoid bleeding glicko. Hopefully the relinking will do something to address this although given the last several attempts to do something about it I wouldn’t count on it.
Totally agree. More maps that exist just for the sake of being there, please. No need to fill them with intricately linked event chains or any of the complex, time-consuming stuff. Just some villages, caves, ruins, lakes and some wildlife at a sensible density. More breadth, less depth.
Regarding SoS/YB vs. CD, I’ve seen it. I have a video of it. YB held SMC and briefly before the reset last week, CD grabbed it (I believe we lost it again just before reset). We owned (mostly) the south corridor. We fought YB in the NW corridor and SoS in the NE corridor. Did YB/SoS fight each other? Nope.
I’ve also seen, but don’t have a video for, YB and SoS grabbing the CD towers on either side of the CD EBG keep.
If it isn’t coordinated, they’re certainly making it strongly feel like it is.
CD is bags, the KDR says so, only natural that people go for the easier target.
I can’t speak for NA Prime because I’m asleep through that but in the rest of the day there is no organized co-ordination or even communicatin between YB and SoS whatsoever. The YB commanders in OCX, SEA (if we ever have one then) and EU are mostly either running guild raids, which tend to either go where they think they’ll get a fight or do PPT according to the kind of guilds they are, or they’re pugmanders running the typical reactive PUG squads, firefighting or taking targets of opportunity.
This is pretty much what happens all the time. It often looks as though two servers are following a plan but really they are just watching and taking advantage of what the other is doing. As for SMC, everyone loves a 3-way or a steal.
I can count the times YB has formally double-teamed with another server over the entire lifetime of the game on one hand and I don’t need to use my thumb or all my fingers. It hasn’t happened for a very long time and, given that YB has no functioning server command or hierarchy it would be next to impossible to organize anyway.
Genuine, organized double-teams are very rare, I think, even though you’d imagine the tripartite structure was intended to encourage them. They are far harder to organize and maintain than people seem to think because most WvW players neither listen nor do what they are told!
Having been on YB since beta I can attest that YB has no “server council” such as other servers have and never has had one. YB is and always has been a loose, anarchic federation of disparate guilds with a large PvE militia that plays when there’s something in it for them and/or when certain charismatic commanders are running. Consequently, while certain individuals, guilds or commanders may have tried to affect results by playing or not playing at certain times, that has had almost no impact on actual results. It has led to the odd commander throwing his toys out of the pram when no-one would do what he wanted them to do though…
Currently we are missing several key community figures for a variety of reasons and things are even more chaotic than usual. It’s pretty good fun! Having been up and down over the four years I am very happy to see the back of T1, into which we were dragged by a bunch of slumming T1 guilds without so much as a by-your-leave (although it’s fair to say most of us went along for the ride willingly enough) T1 was pretty dull the whole time we were in it. T2 was ok for a while but became very stale.
By far the best times were on T3/T4 back when 5 out of 6 teams were evenly matched and you never knew who you were going to play from week to week. I’m hoping that the current T3/T4 ends up something like that. If it does then I’ll be more than happy to stay there for good.
The simple answer to all of these issues, which come up every time, is to have a “No Reward” story option that just uses a cut scene instead of a fight (can just be a single illustration – no need to animate it or do voicework). Then those who just want to follow the story can click through to get to the next relevant part at the cost of not getting the rewards that come form doing any actual fighting.
I did the story a second time on a druid instead of the berserker staff ele I used the first time and it was like a different game. Complete cakewalk. Class and build makes a huge difference to these things but I don’t believe anyone should have to change class or build just to watch and read a story. These things shouldn’t be connected, or at least not inextricably so.
It’s a tricky one. Firstly, I don’t do Fractals at all and I don’t do much sPvP so nothing I say refers to anything there.
I’ve done the full story episode on two characters and spent about six hours in Bloodstone Fen as well.
The story is solid, interesting, better-written than some previous entries and considerably better paced. There are some genuinely funny lines. I laughed out loud five times (yes, I did count them). The voice acting is decent. Rytlock is better than decent – he’s excellent. Taimi is good. Caithe and Canach are a tad hammy but enjoyably so. Phlunt could do with having his part worked up a little – he’s good value.
There is a lot of of watching and listening but there’s also plenty to do for the character so you feel you have agency. The difficulty is extremely class-dependent. My first run through was on a full berserker staff ele: every fight was tough and the final two boss fights were attritional. Not much fun. The second run, however, was on a full healing druid and it was a cakewalk. Scarcely seemed like the same content. Not sure how you tune solo instances for the range of classes and builds but I think it needs to be done better than this.
Overall I enjoyed the story in all aspects. I’d give it a solid B+.
Bloodstone Fen I like a lot. I love gliding and its the best gliding zone since Verdaant Brink. I like the way it uses all the gliding skills. I’ve used stealth gliding more in a day than in more than six months of Heart of Thorns. I have to wonder if the new map would be even marginally playable for a fresh 80 with only basic gliding, though. I don’t think it would. Given that you’re promoting LS3 and HoT and the 80 boost all as one package that could be problematic.
The map events are a huge improvement on HoT. I love that there’s no specific meta. The looser arrangement feels hugely more natural and much less forced. There’s always a lot going on and the set piece events are fun. About time we got a new World Boss too.
The collects for the books are excellent. I finished the first today and read the whole book in order and enjoyed it very much. The gathering of material for the Ascended items looks very reasonable and the backpack, while a bit over the top, does at least look wearable. It will probably be the first Ascended Backpack I make because even though I have all the mats for some others I can’t bring myself to use them because a) the packs are hideous and b) the mats are too valuable.
The general QoL changes seem to be okay. The mass salvage option is useful although my bags are always so full it doesn’t really work very well. Pets learning their names is very welcome even if it is four years overdue. How was that not fixed in beta?
Overall I think it’s a good-to-very-good patch in terms of the actual content. The serious problem is that there’s probably, at most, a couple of weeks in it. I have 11 level 80s on my HoT account (not this account – this is my posting account only) so I can certainly wheedle a bit longer out of the patch but someone with the regular Main+alt set up is surely going to be done in a few days unless they decide they like Bloodfen well enough to grind there instead of in Silverwastes or Auric basin or wherever people are grinding these days.
I think the recent flow of Current Events has been good and I hope that continues between the Quarterly updates. If you could get the updates to bi-monthly instead of quarterly and then add (or add back) several Festivals so that there were at least six a year, spaced to fall on the off months between updates, then I think you might finally have a viable content distribution system.
On its own, though, judged as “The Content” for the next three months, Out of the Shadows is more than a little thin. Probably best to hold back on hyping these releases as something special because it just invites disappointment even if they are, in and of themselves, not bad at all.
…But I Would Like To See My XP Bar Move
“Added back the ability to receive Spirit Shards once all the Masteries in a given region (Central Tyria or the Heart of Maguuma) have been earned. Players will continue to earn experience, and with every 254,000 experience points gained, players will earn a handful of Spirit Shards, which are useful to spend in the Mystic Forge or with the Mystic Forge attendant Miyani.”
From Patch Notes
My problem is this:
I haven’t finished either the Heart of Maguuma or Central Tyria Masteries and I have no interest in doing so. I have everything I want filled out and none of the remaining ones are of any interest whatsoever. I would rather have Spirit Shards from now on but because I am not taking the remaining Masteries my XP bar is empty and doesn’t register anything at all no matter what I do.
Actually, I would be perfectly happy just to have the bar fill and refill without giving any reward at all just so long as I can see it move because as it is now the XP keeps coming, the big yellow numbers flash up on the screen and all those autoconsumed tomes just vanish into thin air. It’s very irritating. I don’t need either the masteries or the Spirit Shards but I used to love seeing the bar tick over.
I really hope I’ve missed some toggle or option that would let me just consume xp normally but I’ve looked everywhere and I haven’t found one. Is there really no way to cancel or opt out of further Mastery acquisition? If not, why not? It seems ridiculous to have to acquire more than forty more Mastery Points and spend them on abilities I will never use just to get the bar to move again.
The Summer Quarterly Release is about the size I expected. It’s just not going to do the job it needs to do. There needs to be a split between producing episodes of the ongoing story and adding big set-pieces. Clearly it hasn’t been possible and isn’t going to be possible to produce full episodes with instances and boss fights on a two week cadence and apparently the insistence on multi-language voiceovers means even non-combat sections take a long time to produce.
The solution is to come up with content that is more obviously story-related and that can be added at each regular bi-monthly update. The Current Events are a great starting point for that – just keep doing those and tie them more clearly into a narrative.
As things stand, there is no way 2-3 monthly releases of the kind we got yesterday will make a meaningful contribution to what a subscription MMO would call “retention”. People will finish up what’s on offer in a few days or a couple of weeks at most and then wander off, only coming back to check out the game when they hear something new has been added.
LS1 and LS2 may have been hard on the devs and the quality may have been lower (although we have our share of bugs this time of course) but I would bet the metrics will show that both did a much better job of keeping concurrencies up and players engaged and active.
Also, isn’t it about time we had some kind of PR announcement beginning to build anticipation for the second expansion? Are we really looking at a WoW-style two-year gap between each expansion? GW1 players were used to expecting better than that and so are the players of many other MMOs. You really have to be the Big Name to get away with making your customers wait that long.
(edited by Tiny Doom.4380)
I finished the whole storyline last night. It was very enjoyable up to the Justiciar. That fight wasn’t difficult, just long and tedious. It took about 20-25 minutes of running round and round and round, occasionally being downed, being revived by Marjory and just waiting for it to be over. Didn’t die, didn’t enjoy it at all.
The fight with the Jade construct was much worse. It was exceptionally poorly explained – in fact it wasn’t explained at all. Using the same tactics from the Justiciar fight did not really work, Marjory wasn’t able to revive me very effectively and in the end I found it was easiest to die over and over and over again then hit “try again from checkpoint”. This respawns you right inside the arena at full health so you can just grab the next bloodstone line and whittle down a bit more of the endless shield.
I didn’t count the deaths but it must have been twenty at least – maybe thirty. I finished in my Asura one-piece swimsuit, which made for some odd victory screenshots. It was a horrible, boring, pointless half hour that largely spoiled what had been a good experience up to the Justiciar.
In hindsight I think I was doing the final fight wrong. I thought the Jade construct could only be damaged by the beam so I kept using it until the thing died, which meant scores of attempts. At the very end I got so frustrated i started to nuke it and saw it was taking full damage so maybe I should have done that earlier. There was no indication that I saw, however, that the construct had a specific shield or a breakbar so it looked as though only the beam would damage it.
All in all the two fights did a fair job of ruining the whole episode. I would happily take a “Skip Fight” option and forego ALL the rewards just to get past these things. I am not interested in any of the material rewards from Living Story, I just want to talk to the characters, hear the voiceover and follow the plot. Can we not have a “no combat, no rewards” version in future? I’m not playing GW2 for the combat, that’s for sure!
It can be done with two people – my wife managed it with one other. I have done it twice with three. It’s hard, though, and not all the locations are the same level of difficulty due to adds and geography. It could certainly scale better.
Raid team is still around and working…..
Legendary team isn’t.Draw your own conclusion.
Don’t get cute. It’s not working for you.
http://dulfy.net/2016/03/05/gw2-reddit-developer-ama-summary/#Raids
We’ve slowly started talks about what the raid after Forsaken Thicket is and where it will take place, but that’s the extent.
Yes, I know. Facts are a funny thing.
You were sayin’ chief ?
Link’s more recent, states the team is together and working on the next raid.
Checkmate.You’re both saying the same thing… we’ll have next raid but no one knows when and team is working on it. Anything besides that, is speculation; My guess is that it will take at least ~5+ months to start getting some updates on that matter, so not much purpose in worrying about it :p
That second reddit link does not state that the raid team is working on the next raid. What it actually says is “We just wrapped Raid 3 and have not shut down the team”. What that means is anyone’s guess. You’d need a lot more information to draw any meaningful conclusions about what they were working on let alone when anyone might get to hear about it.
Anyone want to explain what whoever is talking is saying? The music’s so loud I can’t make out more than the odd word…
welp……we technically got something…..a forum post. I guess that counts?
There’s a trailer too. Mostly stuff we’ve already seen but it’s…something.
If you go back and look at the PR build-up pre-launch, WvW was indeed envisaged as some kind of end-game, but then so were the three Orr maps. Things didn’t turn out quite as intended.
Megaservers really killed off the original conception of WvW, which assumed that players would retain considerable loyalty to the Server they’d chosen, in the way people have loyalty to their home town or sports team. Coupled with server transfers that concept of representing your World first and foremost (not your guild, for example) went into steep decline, although some of us still hold fast to it. Personally I’d uninstall GW2 before I moved any of my characters from one World to another.
The gameplay itself was always what other MMOs would call “PvPvE”. As much of the time is spent fighting NPCs as other players and when you do fight other players you are mainly defending or attacking NPCs or NPC-maintained structures. The clear intention was to make a form of PvP as attractive and unscary as possible for PvE players, an attitude and approach that the addition of EOTM, the Desert BLs and most of the changes to siege and skills over the four years very plainly continues.
The problem is that as time goes on, fewer and fewer PvE players have any interest in WvW and the game mode has become the province of a small hardcore of WvW specialists, few of whom agree on what they want from it. There are PPT factions, GVG factions, roamer factions, dueling factions…
The reason I find to go on playing WvW is simple – entertainment. I play it when things are happening that I enjoy and I stop when they aren’t. If we have a good match or if a Commander I like is on then I play for hours. If the match is dull or (as it usually is these days) extremely unbalanced or if no-one I like or recognize is tagged up, then I go do something else.
I’m not sure you can expect a lot more from a video game so I wouldn’t say I was disappointed. On the other hand there are things that could be done to make it more entertaining. There doesn’t seem to be much prospect of any major change, though, just some tinkering around the edges. At this stage of WvW’s life it is what it is. If you aren’t enjoying it much now I wouldn’t hold out much hope of anything very much affecting that.
(edited by Tiny Doom.4380)
Just imagine how much faster we could get content and how much more content we could get if you just dropped the voiceover work. Seriously, voice acting in MMOs is and always was a gimmick. It’s not needed and if it’s really this much of a drag anchor then it definitely ought to go. I have played a number of other MMOs that started off using a lot of voicework and then dropped it and without exception the experience of playing them improved as a result.
Added to that I loathe hearing my character talk so the news that that is returning is irritating to say the least. The voices almost never match any conception I have for how my characters would sound and the dialog is usually something I cannot imagine them ever saying. If you’re going to force words into our characters’ mouths could you not at least add a toggle so we can opt out? I’d far rather they were silent. And yes, I know you all have a thing about toggles at ANet although I have never been able to understand why.
Your proposal misses the main point of why people jump on siege every chance they get. Put plainly,
using siege weapons is fun.
I use siege all the time. I like the sounds the machines make. I like the animations. What’s more, I get to stay in one place without having to hare around like a hyperactive toddler. Compared to running after a colored tag like one of Benny Hill’s extras it seems positively grown up.
Personally, I don’t give a hoot whether players I’m shooting with a cannon or an arrow cart die or not. I certainly don’t care whether they drop loot or give points. It’s a targeting game with a moving target and that’s fun in itself.
You can take out every practical reason and reward for shooting moving targets with a projectile-firing machine and shooting them is still going to be fun. Only way you’re going to stop it being fun is to take the siege out of the game entirely, at which point the game is over and we move on to something else that’s fun.
Kaineng and ET both formerly linked to the 2 top tier servers did learned a thing or 2 from their peers during their time together. The overwhelming hospitality and friendly environment enjoyed makes it an memorable experience. The same cannot be said for the others like DB and YB who from personal experience were quite hostile and not sharing TS and some even made nasty comments about their partners.
That said, maybe others from Kaineng and ET would like to comment on the above?
I’m sorry if you had a bad experience on YB. It would, I am certain, have been the exception. Anvil Rock players were welcomed with open arms from day one. Everyone was immediately invited into TS on that first day. I was playing and I heard the invitations being extended and accepted.
Anvil Rock were extremely welcome guests and great fighters. I don’t play NA hours so I can’t speak for what happened while I was asleep but in OCX and EU the only regrets about I heard about the link were that there weren’t more AR players and that we had to separate from them at the end of the trial.
I know some have chosen to stay because I’ve seen them on YB in this match. I hope the rest return, either as transfers or in a future link. The players I came across, mostly from EYE, KAOS, and METL would be an asset to any server and I’m certain most on YB would be delighted to see them again.
Many of the criticisms of Yaks Bend when it comes to strategy, tactics and gameplay preferences may have some basis in fact but one thing has always been immediately apparent to most who actually come and play there – the YB core community is open, friendly and welcoming to anyone who wants to be a part of it.
And I’d like the XP boost from my 200+ saved chests so that’s two votes that cancel each other out.
The takeaway from all this is that the terms and conditions of the polls need to be stated clearly and unequivocally at the time the poll is set. For all the arguing here over logic and math and statistics the plain fact is that the poll ran with no specified framework given for how the result would be interpreted or implemented.
I think it is entirely reasonable for ANet to run polls in order to gauge interest and feeling on a particular topic and then use the information gained as part of their internal decision-making process, which is what appears to have happened here. What isn’t reasonable is to run a series of polls, some of which have “hard” results that are implemented even against the preference of the people responsible for drafting them and others which have “soft” results that can be finessed, without making it very clear which is which.
I voted for one month. I’d have voted for one week if it had been an option. That said, I don’t think bimonthly is a bad compromise. I do think the polls need to be much more coherently drafted and explained in future, though. And we are certainly having too many, too close together and on some decisions that are too low-level to merit a referendum.
Personally I don’t believe WvW can be “fixed” in its current form no matter how many polls we have. It would probably be better to scrap the entire game mode and start afresh.
Let’s see,
YB lost a bunch of commanders and is imploding.
DB is a bunch of fairweathers who will quit when they start getting throttled in T1
FA is T3I guess that leaves JQ as the sensible choice for NA guilds looking to supplement a powerful SEA server and take on the BG / TC monsters.
Or you can always transfer to my server IOJ!
YB lost OnS and LUN to TC. Other than that no, no other guilds or commanders. Also no implosion on YB, just completely outnumbered. Of course any server would be completely outnumbered in T1 atm, so…..
Also YB didn’t “lose a bunch of commanders” . A few key people went to play Overwatch for a while and have a bit of a vacation. They’re back now.
YB core is largely the same people it was three years ago. No-one’s going anywhere. The server may go to T2 but it’ll be the same people logging in and doing the hours there as is it was when we were in T4. Nothing much changes on YB, ever.
Nice to have it as on option, but weird that I am the only one enjoying player chatter so far.
You aren’t the only one, Zedek.
I like hearing other people too. Makes the game seem more alive to me.Hearing a sylvari run past me shouting to the world,
‘I feel FURIOUS!’
still makes me chuckle and grin.
I love the chatter. I’ll be leaving mine on. It’s nice to have the choice at last, though, all the same.
If that’s the price of playing by the rules I’m fine with that.
Good riddance to them. Never built one, never fired one, never even tapped one. Have logged out and played something else when my team was exploiting them though.
Well, someone on the server I play used to make a habit of soloing T3 keeps so anything is possible…
More realistically, as a solo roamer you can and probably should be making sure as many Sentries as possible are repping your team. Sentries flag up enemies on the map and slow down enemy supply deliveries, both of which are very welcome. Anyone can solo a sentry and they are always changing sides.
All enemy Dolyaks need to be killed, of course. You want to stop the supplies getting to enemy structures so as to prevent them upgrading, plus you get War Score for killing the yaks, so long as you kill them when they are moving. If they are standing around in camp you don’t get war score for them.
Of course, if you’re taking the camp you’ll have to kill the yaks or they will try to kill you! I think just about any class and build can solo a T1 camp easily enough. Soloing upgraded camps takes a bit more concentration and tactics but it isn’t that difficult – until someone turns up to defend of course.
There are many defensive roles you can take solo – scouting and reporting the enemy’s movements in map or team chat or directly to a Commander; standing watch in towers or keeps and sounding the alarm if there’s an attack – especially a sneak attack that could otherwise see an upgraded structure suddenly change color before anyone realizes the danger. And siege always needs to be tagged (i.e. refreshed so it doesn’t de-spawn).
Soloing towers isn’t that hard – one person with a catapult can often get the wall down and Alpine lords are certainly soloable by a number of builds. Better, though, to knock the wall down on your own and then call in map or team to say there’s a breach. Someone will come and help.
And naturally you can roam around looking for enemy players doing any or all of the above and put a stop to it! Plenty of things to do without a zerg or even a havoc group – until a zerg or havoc group finds you, anyway…
I don’t doubt for a moment that there are people who will use macros to run siege but I personally know people who will happily treb for hour after hour, sitting at the keyboard pressing the hotkey every time it refreshes. I’m not that heavily into it but I do like to spend a quarter of an hour or more just lobbing rocks – it’s relaxing and I like to watch the trajectory. All siege machines are fun to use. I try to get on rams whenever possible – it’s pretty competitive. Like a lot of other things some people choose to automate, whether legally or not, getting a script to do something you could do yourself is, to me, just removing something that I would prefer to be doing. I mean, if firing a treb is so boring you’d rather run a macro to do it for you, why bother using it at all? Why not log out and go play a game you actually enjoy?
If four week tournaments cause burnout and pre-announced tournaments cause mass transfers trying to game the system, why not simply drop single-week tournaments every so often with no warning at all?
At reset, instead of the next expected match, we log in to a seven-day tournament with daily resets. Basically, one week, no advance warning, some kind of scoring system that gives fast movement during the week, ending with a final result and some smaller rewards than the 4-week tournaments gave.
That way no-one has time to get burned out and no-one has a chance to game the choice of server beforehand. I mean, if you could do the appalling and unwanted Golem Week you can definitely do single week events that people might actually enjoy…
Four different maps would be ideal: EBG, Alpine, DBL, a new map.
Pending the creation of a new map sometime-never then a mix of Alpine/DBL/EBG would definitely be preferable to a three monthly rotation.
A poll on this would be great, now you have discovered polling!
I’m not surprised the majority of Mystic Coins are sitting idle. I can’t remember if I’ve ever actually used a Mystic Coin for anything. I’ve been playing since launch, I have three accounts and over the years I’ve collected thousands of the things. Literally. I have 1300 on my second account that I’m logged into as I write this and probably more on the main account. The third account has a few hundred.
My banks are totally stuffed with things like this that I have no use for but which I might, conceivably, have a use for someday. I could sell them but I don’t spend much gold other than to buy new character slots one in a while – and, inevitably, more storage – so I don’t really feel much incentive.
I guess I might think of selling some of the coins now the price is so high. I certainly would if it went to a gold apiece. If the price drops suddenly and I get stuck with them then it could be mildly annoying. I wish I’d sold my vast silk stockpiles a few weeks ago. I should probably sell my leather on the same principle.
In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter. I’ll be no worse off than I was.
It isn’t them fixing everything on the list that is concerning, it is HOW they are proposing to fix them that is the biggest problem here. Before this poll should have even been considered, they should have shown different ways to solve the problem and considered the numerous alternatives that are much better than their proposed solutions. If all of the solution’s being offered are bad and fail to address the core problem, a bad poll is just bad.
end game for the proposed solutions = PvD undefended objective, KIll NPC get Chest, Siege it to the teeth, Zerg avoid fight get i n tower siege hump and kill 5 ppl outside . This only matters during 6 hour period, everyone else outside of that time left game already.As long as PvD undefended + zerg siege humping is the way to win END GAME is YB 2.0 for all servers eventually, + devalue players outside of prime time = kill the game faster because this is bad/ lame game play that treats players like crap.
WvW is PvPvE with a strong emphasis on siege mechanics. You can accept it or not but that’s self-evidently what it is and what it has always been. If that’s ever seriously in doubt then ANet is going to have to come down on one side of the fence, decisively, pick a direction for WvW, stick with it and change the rules to encourage that style of play and discourage others. If that’s done we will end up with a clearer WvW offer and those who find that offer appealing will stay and, if they are acting rationally, those who don’t will go and find other things to do that suit them better.
It has been apparent since launch that the official vision for WvW is, approximately, a ladder-style competition between Server-Level entities in which gameplay is based heavily on taking and holding structures. The trope is “medieval siege warfare” and siege machines are designed into the gameplay at the most basic level. It may well be that a more open-field, guild vs guild oriented offer would have been more popular but it wasn’t the offer that was on the table and in four years it has never been suggested that it ever would be.
If these changes do move WvW to a more unequivocal “take and hold territory” model then that’s all to the good. Lack of clarity has been a huge part of the problem with directional drift until now. Get WvW into shape, make some definitive statements about intended gameplay if necessary and then let that clear offer define what population the game mode can attract and keep.
Thanks for your consistently clear and informative posting, Tyler. It’s a refreshing change!
Most of the changes look good on paper. As a player who plays WvW almost entirely for server pride and who would quit GW2 entirely before changing servers I am very heartened to see that ANet is keeping faith with the original concept of World vs World vs World that brought many of us to the game in the first place.
Increasing the score for upgrading structures and/or capturing upgraded structures is an excellent idea. Personally, when I log in to WvW I could hope for nothing better than a three-hour Keep siege, either attacking or defending. To me the entire game mode is about that. Any changes that enhance the perceived value of attacking and defending structures is very welcome.
As a UK resident playing on an NA server my play hours will exclude the entirety of the 6 hour prime for my server. I’m guessing that will be around one in the morning until seven a.m. my time. I have no problem whatsoever with that. So long as there is good action and the chance to contribute to my world’s score during the time I am playing that’s fine.
The sooner you can roll these changes out to beta and start tuning them the better!