Guild Wars 2

It does seem a bit awkward but you only have so many ways around it with 2000 ranks (as there are not enough synonyms to cover all those ranks without just getting stupid at some point). That said, this isn’t exactly uncommon where tiered ranking has bizarre jumps in what sounds better. (For example leagues can have beginners through veterans tier for competition pairings, and each tier will have placements within the tier and you can be 1st place Beginner to be promoted to 16th place Intermediate, or some such.)

That being said, I don’t particularly care because (a.) I don’t do it for the title, and (b.) I cannot see it.

dank.3680:

Bay can be trebbed from tower, inner can be trebbed from supply camp – hill inside bay – or walls and the lord room can be assaulted from many angles and from the walls and doesn’t have that nifty circle wall zone of death full of 50 AC’s like hills does. A defended Hills is much harder to take then a defended Bay.

But it does not need a nerf, like already mentioned the others need a buff. Hills is a perfect example of what taking a Keep should be. It takes time dedication and tactics, rather then just brute forcing like every other keep can be done.

It is next to impossible to get reinforcements into a compromised Hills. It is incredibly easy to get reinforcements into a compromised Bay. Hills is an engagement of attrition for the attackers to wear out the bunkered defenders who, sans a easily nuked waypoint, cannot be supplied man power. Conversely, Bay can see an almost endless stream of defenders coming in from almost every direction (likewise attackers) but is on a low ground to its outer perimeter making sieging the inner easy. With proper siege placement where trebs cannot hit, it is possible to also turn bay into a death trap as it only has three choke paths leading to its lord room: north, south, or the docks door. The waypoint for bay is in the heart of the keep and is not cut off from its defenders like the Hills waypoint.

The way I see them is as such:
Bay outer: Crap.
Hills outer: Golden.
Bay inner: Golden.
Hills inner: Crap.

Garrison is garrison and it often takes a 2v1 to bring it down.

elorei.6251:

1) Take away the 5 target limit on AoEs. Standing in the AoE with all of your team mates is the best defense to AoE. This is counter intuitive, and supports sloppy gameplay. Make people use some tactics other than hit tab and auto attack while standing in a pile. If you are too lazy to get out of AoE, you should be punished, not rewarded.

No. Go to any T1 fight, if you see an enemy stacked, you will laugh at them and proceed to kill them. This why might stacking in the middle of an engagement is tantamount to suicide. You do not stack up in plain LoS, you stack behind kitten, buff, and then charge (no longer being stacked) and go from there.

You must also consider what happens when you uncap all AoE that includes: healing (invincible zergs, we had this for a while before they capped healing), boons (invincible zergs), condition removal (invincible zergs), and the zerg too will not be able to blow away any force smaller than it with its uncapped AoE. You seem to think that the AoE will somehow not uncap for the zerg too, and all you’ve now effectively done is make the zerg MORE powerful while also turning every. single. engagement. into a ping check of who can shoot first.

Also I hope you like invisible zergs too because that’s what you’re going to get from an uncapped, constantly refreshed Shadow Refuge and Mass Invisibility.

Meanwhile I’ll just say:
l2siege
l2linespell

elorei.6251:

2) Make gates immune to damage other than siege, like walls are now. This still gives gates a purpose, because they can be rammed/golemmed. The current state of the game allows for a zerg of 40+ to just auto attack the gates down in no time. This is pretty disturbing. Why even have siege if this is possible?

I am ok with this.

Issues.5789:

All the gear is given in Spvp.. I’m talking about WvW.. not Spvp.

Seeing as how the statement was never said for WvW… then I have no idea what you’re even thinking. Not having to PvE to PvP has almost certainly never been said about WvW especially since at launch it was advertised (and treated) as an extension of PvE.

Issues.5789:

Lol not everyone uses siege weapons and camps on them all day. Ooo 5 supply. I actually do know quite a lot about small group play; It’s just my guild doesn’t carry supply and take keeps as it’s not our goal. I also like how you address me talking about the reward system, but I’m guessing you play PvE so you’re content with it

Then you’re playing the wrong format? I’m not sure what to tell you or what you expect the buffs to do from ranks. They are designed around the mechanics of the format which is: supply and siege.

Talking about the rewards? I didn’t talk about them at all because I don’t care about it.

Yamato Shinobi.4378:

This points to a bottleneck in Anet’s network and likely server, and to some extent internet connection (however IMO less likely). All of which could have been spotted proper stress testing. Heck, I guess we’re stress testing for them now in the ‘live’ environment. :/

More, server architecture only goes so far and is only so advanced. Depending on how things are calculated, it could simply be physical technological limitations wrapped in awkward optimization, but even then there’s only so many servers you can stack atop one another before it becomes pointless.

Stress testing with bots is different from stress testing with a truly chaotic system (i.e live).

Bllade.1029:

If arenanet would take a look at WvW, and fix the issues many people are bringing up just like you, Guild Wars might be interesting for a much longer period of time.

You got new developers who, in the last month, did more for this format than we’ve seen in the six months prior to culling going poof.

Issues.5789:

Completely agree. They said that you can do PvP and be up to par with PvE players. Now that’s complete not true. Ascended items lol? The amount of gold PvE players have vs WvW only players. You cannot even begin to compare with them. I wish that they give us WvW players only better drops for us (remove some of the already garbage drops we have) and increase the drop chance, and do something with ascended items so we can have access to them through WvW. This would fix the reward system for WvW. The ranks in my opinion are completely lulz worthy. They contribute to nothing.. I hope they do something to encourage smaller group play and possible remove all this balling up zerging 50+ man..

First off, you’re quoting something that was stated for sPvP… and where said statement continues to ring true. Second, to say that the ranks are useless/contribute nothing (which provide you several incredibly powerful siege upgrades as well as allowing smaller groups to carry more supply (which is the heart of this game)) shows that you likely have no understanding of how the format actually works. Some of the ranks are useless but most certainly not all of them: Cannon Mastery Lv1, Balista Mastery, Supply, and soon to be the Arrow Cart Mastery are anything but useless.

The fact that ranks don’t make/help you “pwn nubz” doesn’t make them useless.

scootshoot.6583:

According to Firor…

I’m glad that you can eat his bullkitten up, I’d also love to interest you in a notepad document where I’ve outlined the greatest game eva! Please send me money and blind belief.

Meanwhile, the more that is leaked about the this game, the more apparent it becomes that its not (made) for PvP. Which is a bit bizarre when you think about how much they’ve marketed their unseen PvP. Ahh, but marketing.

Teknical.9746:

I never got this. Along with the mercenary skills, I think it’s just a waste of skill points.

Because some people like to see bigger numbers, so why not give them bigger numbers against stuff that no one else is affected by in the least.

Teknical.9746:

Why not something useful?

Like Spread Shot? Or all of the Balista line? Or maybe this new AC ability?

Teknical.9746:

Like faster build/repair skill/s? Or increased movement speed during combat?

Because this imbalanced players against one another.

Yes. Why else would I play it or be on the forums for it?

Kharr.5746:

Maybe each newly formed group has its own MMR? If so, does that mean that groups who swap out a member start at a low MMR and can go on 10+ win winning streaks against lowly ranked players despite individual members having high MMR?

From what I’ve been able to gather, the MMR is averaged on the team so the moment you bring in someone with “low” MMR, you immediately start to confuse the system into not knowing where to properly place you (would be nice if we had group, solo rankings to avoid this) (or, instead of any low rating, four average players and a fifth high rating player will still be close to average when averaged over). If one or two people in your PUG are low ranked, then the game would average you to average or so, or if you whole team was average or close to it. Moreover, new players enter at a median of sorts on the rating scale. The system doesn’t know how good or bad they are for a few games, so it assumes average.

So, if you enter the system with an average rating, it doesn’t take much to imagine that the system would/could match you against other perceived similar averages. There’s definitely a pre-made vs. pre-made bias in the system but if that fails to be met after enough time it seems to default to just MMR averages. This is an issue of populations, more or less. Once you play a number of games as a pre-made, the system would expect your rating to climb to such a point as to never really run into solo-q averages unless they have some bizarrely high ranked solo-qed players.

Of course, I don’t really know why I never run into these problems all that much? I do spend most of my time in WvW, but when I do solo-q, I’m very rarely pitted against a pre-made and most nights I won’t even see this problem. Maybe I just play at the wrong time.

Isaac.6041:

I can’t believe they’re choosing to focus on this very minor issue over other more important issues like tier stagnation, use of hacks, and overall improvement of the WvW experience. This change only benefits a few people (the ones that asked for it) on one day of the week.

You may want to realize that the server team, who’s problem this is, is not the WvW team. So… no.

Valkyriez.6578:

Ironically I am on the same bandwagon. How can wildstar launch with a full rating system, ELO, a LFG feature and 2v2 , 3v3 and 5v5 arena system and be published by NCSoft and GW2 can’t get a leaderboard together (that works properly).

Just to be koy, the fact that it has features doesn’t mean much of anything if the rest of the game amounts to poppykitten; particularly in balance, mechanics, combat engine, pvp entry gating or not, etc. (The 2v2/3v3/5v5 arenas at launch seems hap-hazardous to me, I don’t think its possible to balance that well and you really don’t want to split a competitive scene three ways to sunday like WoW did on a balance that will teeter back and forth between multi-faceted FOTMs between the three modes of the same gametype.)

We ran this same gauntlet in Guild Wars 1 as new games released with the next game to have PvP being the “next best thing eva” in a long line of “next best things eva”. Somehow we made it out alright back then…

Sokar Rostau.7316:

1. Each server gets their own borderland that reflects that server’s name. Dragonbrand actually is in the Dragonbrand, Maguuma actually is in the Maguuma jungle. These are released over a period of eight months to cover the eight tiers.

While themes would be nice, the BLs need to remain identical in form because that is the only way to guarantee balance between them and for all sides on the home-field. If you were to just put an overlay on the map, a skin of sorts, then sure, but I wouldn’t open the can of worms of different maps; no one wants to be on the server with the most disadvantageous map and everyone will want to be on the servers with the most advantageous maps.

jkctmc.8754:

They don’t need [MAPS], they need a single, very large map. Take a look at the Elder Scrolls Online concept of PvP, and how everyone will be fighting on the same map.

http://elderscrollsonline.com/en/media/videos/411

I don’t see why anyone cares about a game that’s stuck in 2005 with nothing but bullet points to its points. And, no, everyone will not be fighting on the same map. Its still broken up into zones: alliance home zone and central city, or, if you prefer, borderlands and an eternal battleground.

No Walking.6349:

Sorry, but GW2’s dreams as an e-sport are long gone. Maybe we’ll have better luck with TES:O

You’re joking right? TESO?

Have fun with kitten PvP and combat, and grind baby grind.

knight.8926:

This concept is pretty much what all skilled thieves use. The pressure they put in stealth with insane dmg is what makes it so crazy as well. We think their health is down to half but when they stealth it goes back up to 75% then they restealth again which hits for at least 3k and they regain their health to 100% by the time they pop out of stealth

Short of an ele, no class can disengage faster with what can amount to 5+ rolls back to back (not even counting SB chains after the fact). Terrible for PvP, mind, but hilarious in WvW where a single thief can dodge roll through a zerg and come out unharmed. Actually, I don’t even think an ele can do that.

atheria.2837:

Not getting laurels…

You still get laurels…

So your memoir sort of falls on the first hurdle.

Almostfaceman.1804:

They could do this, migrating to one “mega server” like Elder Scrolls Online is doing, phasing this so that matchups could be more even thus true tests of player teams.

That’s not what TESO is doing for their RvR; the RvR is sectioned into “campaigns” which are, in simpler less deceptive words, server shards. You sign up for a “campaign” with your faction and fight in that “campaign”. And for a fee you can even change “campaigns”!

Boy, that all sounds awfully familiar.

Oh… and the game hasn’t even released or even been shown to the general public, so let’s not compare our ability to imagine the “perfect game” to a game in existence.

Polismassa.6740:

Bigger maps.

Engine structure limitation, and not likely to change.

SuperHaze.4210:

True but it’s hard to see Asura animations in the middle of aoe fields.

Just add an race “scalar” in PvP that downscales Norn and upscales Asura to human levels. A cast bar isn’t going to help you against five identical asura of the smallest possible model size, and especially not when they are in an AoE field.

Boulderbolg.3460:

I am curious if the JQ or SoR communities are considering pledging to Camelot Unchained’s Kickstarter? If so, we should all go separate realms on the same server! >:)

I pledge money to games that exist and have proven stable in population and mechanics.

I’m not one to wait for Godot.

You guys are thinking too… out of scope of the game.

What we need is simple: An upgrade path in keeps/SMC that allow you to promote the lord into a Champion/Ancient Karka. No zerg will ever rush blindly into a keep/SMC again because we all…

…remember, remember the end of November.

Boulderbolg.3460:

In regards to the effects:

“Now, where we’re going with things: Over the next week, I’ll be tweaking this some more and dropping in an effects system. A lot of people have been saying “but how will it go with effects???”, so we’ll answer that for you. We’ve got a really powerful design for the tech, heavily inspired by something the tech director on Wildstar showed me back in the days when we worked together at Troika. (The game industry is a very small place.) A little story on that — on one of the projects we had at the time, an artist came to me and said his level was running a little slow, and I found out that he’d accidentally spawned out five million invisible particles that were bouncing around forever. The fact that we could sustain that on 2002 hardware gives me great optimism for what we can do on modern hardware and taking advantage of GPU computing.”

That’s not actually addressing anything, he’s never once mentioned inter-object interactions, he’s just talking about being able to put stuff on a screen. I can make matLAB put millions of stuff on the screen but the moment I actually have that stuff interact in a non-linear and trivial fashion, the moment I need to upgrade from a PC to QUEST or similar supercomputer architecture.

What the former poster was addressing was this interaction environment that goes behind the particle effects and shinnies, as well as all the data that is never even taken into account when all of the stuff is non-identical. The GW2 engine may not be optimized all that well for 240 living people piling up on top of one another and interacting in a completely chaotic and exponential fashion, but I’m going to take a guess that if you just had a thousand bots, all identical, standing around doing nothing… that the game engine would render and handle it just fine because none of the actual CPU load would be present.

Kil M.3680:

WvW leaderbord is realy poor. 10 times better is Matchup on Millenium. I thought WvW leaderbord show players score from new system, kills ect. not server rankings ;/

There’s about as much relevance in showing the WvW Rank as there is in showing a PvP Rank, or kill/death ratio. They don’t measure anything on any gradient of a formula that can actually judge player worth.

Its very hard to measure much of anything of worth in WvW since its not a truly structured format.

dejay.2598:

also highly unlikely he would actually win unless it’s a new account

Could be well be a new account, or its someone who bought an account after playing on a friend’s, for example. No real way to account for such objectively and, if the person played and beat top teams, he deserves his rank.

Since “quality of win” is clearly in effect, does it work in the opposite direction too? If I solo-q and get blown out by a pre-made, does the system take this into account to make my loss worth less (and the win worth less as well)? If I happen to beat the pre-made do I get a higher “quality of win” than if a pre-made had beaten the pre-made?

Sprawl.3891:

why is timmy playing vs kobe if there is match making supposedly in place?

Because 1v1 is a poor comparison to a 5-man oriented rating system.

Imagine, instead, having Timmy + All Star Teammates.
Even if Timmy has 0 ranking or whatever the median is, he’s still going to be ranked against All Star Teams because the rest of his team more than makes up for his low ranking. He and his team won’t start at the top but after a few games of winning, from which his ranking skyrockets from each win, the averaging needed by his teammates becomes less and less relevant the more quickly the aggregate team value reaches a stable median.

So, yes, if Timmy plays with pros, giving him the ability to play with the pros, and wins against other pros, he is indeed considered a pro.

cosmicegg.8502:

Bethesdaso produces good products.

Not really about the topic in and of itself… but no they don’t. They produce bugged, copy-pasted (heellloooo skyrim dungeons!) content which gains most of its fame either in the modding community, in the hilarious game-breaking bugs that result, or the lore and expansive world where you can muck around however you see fit.

…None of which are going to exist or be good in an MMO, except lore.

As such I have no idea why they are making an MMO on a single-player franchise that was about player freedom. But we’ll see how it goes.

fivekiller.1432:

These days T1 servers don’t have near the coverage they used to.

A lot of guilds don’t like T1/2 in general and have moved down tiers.
A lot of guilds have quit because… well, nothing lasts forever.
A lot of guilds do PvX.

Or if you prefer:
Dead game. Zero subs. TESO/Neverwinter/“Insert Game Here” that will kill this one or do everything better.

Israel.7056:

Well I talked to some people who are currently in t2 and I got the impression that it’s gotten zergier at that level too.

The moment ANet adds one thing, one little thing, to break the zergs. T1 will fall to pieces since half of the people here don’t know what to do but mass up and win by skill lag.

Of course, this won’t affect BG at all.

So… what are the odds we get that soon? :p

Avenge.1478:

The quicker they rise, the quicker they fall.

R.I.P. “Beastgate” (2013-2013)

That’s a pretty stupid statement, since most of blackgate has been the same since launch and has hovered between T1-T2 for months and months.

Ardon.4105:

I don’t suppose you have some screenshots or a video, before we all start jumping to conclusions.

Our scouts got the shots of them on top of the tower (which is impossible to reach for Dawn’s), they’ve been sent in as reports since we’re not actually allowed to post vids or screenshots of this on the forums.

JQ – [Omen] Map hacked T3 Dawn’s with three people. Please see to this nonsense.

And we’re taking our tower back from this bullkitten. In the spirit of sportmanship, leave our tower alone until it is again T3.

morrolan.9608:

Dunno where you get that from. TESO combat looks fine to me and with the active blocking, the greater array of skills and the ability to equip any armour and weapon I think combat has the potential to be better than GW2 which has been compromised by the esports paradigm.

Unless something has magically changed since the PAX video “leak” (I use that word because Zenimax sure did a number trying to have that video deleted), I wouldn’t be very generous with the TESO combat. It just looks bad: clunky and lifeless.

Probably explains why they have yet to show us any meaningful in-game footage.

Infor.9703:

Required a lot more than thief burst or 22222 spam.

Ehh, it wasn’t exactly earth shatteringly hard.

Engies, if anything, will gain a lot of ground if the ele is slapped around since at the moment they are basically stuck in the shadows of anything they can do, eles can do better. Still a lot of the traits, skills, and tool belts are crap.

But the more RNG they remove, the better.

Neat as a niche-mmo like that is to see, I think its likely ultimately better to have a game like GW2 do it right within the confines of its own larger structure than to have a game dedicated solely to it. Feels healthier for the long run since you have three separate game populations that can intermingle and bring different things.

I’ve never been a fan of tunneled homogeneity though.

SuperHaze.4210:

The general consensus is that pvp is incomplete. With that being said, Anet should’ve never released the game and extend the beta until most of the problems have been addressed. They were able to make changes to skills, utilities, etc. during the betas (which not very long). So if it was a programming issue that prevented them from adding pvp features, at the very least they could’ve addressed the bugs in the game. But there are still bugged skills/utilities AND there are no significant additions to pvp features. How much longer do they expect players to wait? I think most pvp players have waited long enough.

In theory this sort of logic could leave a game in beta forever, but there’s also the fact that ANet has others to answer to and if they say “Release it!” they have little choice but to comply. I don’t doubt that that, if anything, had a lot to do with the release and its timing just before the holiday season… and NCSoft’s then struggling NA sector.

Ya it launched broken… that’s the story in the end. But my point was in regards to the comparisons between PvE and PvP/WvW content which many people make without realizing the err in such comparisons.

SuperHaze.4210:

There’s always a new event for pve players, but they are still trying to fix the problems in pvp.

Designing a map or fancy mario platform is something done with pre-coded, fully functioning mod tools that were made with the engine. This work, which is the majority of what PvE updates are, is not done by programmers but by designers using the already available tools made by the programmers before the game launched. There is no doubt that the staff of these projects is large, creative and love what they do, but its a poor comparison I see made far too often.

WvW’s culling issue was a game-rendering change on the client side of the connection-dance, this is a coding undertaking not a designer undertaking. This can work easily or it can take months to work out, it can take one engineer or thirty. Designing maps for WvW/PvP is not like designing maps for PvE, balance is immaterial in PvE it is not so in WvW/PvP and so it takes marketably longer to do this.

PvP’s promised features have almost all been programming related ones (aside from their resistance to game modes) and new maps fall into the above mentioned. The comparison is faulty therein. Balancing being slow is a bit of a different issue as they are trying to follow a “slow but steady” approach but I think its time they just slapped some classes around for the better of the meta.

tl;dr: Design oriented additions can be solved by throwing more people at the problem. Coding/programming additions rarely if ever work out this way and throwing more people at the problem is rarely a good idea.

The rule of coding:

• On time
• On budget
• Bug free

Pick one, maybe two if you’re really good.

Krakah.3582:

I’ll give everyone the best fix to zerg play, Friendly Fire. You’ll still get some dumb kitten trolls on a team, but zergs will be history.

That would break blast finishers, would be the biggest problem I can foresee and more-so since many weapons have these things built into their regular rotation and aren’t ground targeted. Mighty Blow, for example, would become unusable because of how close-to-home it can hit by proc-ing a blast where you kick off from rather than where you end, and the animation is long such that you can hardly control if a combo field ends up getting dropped somewhere along the way..

Also melee, since all melee attacks sans daggers have cleave.

Just add a siege engine to the game that does splash damage per target and we’re done with zergs. No one would ball up under that thing’s fire because they’d each proc splash onto one another and die instantly if enough people are stacked. This solves the problems of retaliation, of breaking game mechanics, and of adding a weird split dichotomy between game modes.

loseros.5912:

Negative. Yaks, the more ppl are killing it, the more points they give you, up to a limit which i don’t know which it is.

So that’s not encouraging small groups to kill yaks. It’s an objetive that can be taken by small groups, but game mechanics don’t encourage it.

The limit is ten to fifteen and that amount is further scaled by how far along its route the yak is (and yak’s that have no destination award 0). Ten to fifteen is a small to decent sized group.

The mechanics are not exactly clear but the next time you roll over a yak, watch the points. They’ll only ever increment upward by a max of 15. Solo kill a yak at near the end of its route and see how many points are awarded. This happens in real-time on the scoreboard so its not hard to watch and track.

There was a reddit post about this a month or two ago and we (as a server and just players) looked into it a good bit. The conclusion then was that by the end of its route, three taggers could maximize at 15 points on a yak if its killed just outside of its arrival point. This may not be perfectly true but it did seem to have some validity to it through some play-testing.

I’ll do some checking tonight when I’m off from work and let you know how it goes. I’ll even get ten people to slap some yaks just to watch the ticks.

Ravenor.3612:

Speaking of them being able to make money off a WvW update, I’m surprised that they didn’t introduce a WXP Booster item to the cash shop.

They’d make more money off of skins and shinnies than off of boosters. Not really much need to monetize WvW (specifically) much as how there is little need to monetize PvP (and hence the disappearance of tickets); PvPers tend to be less spend-y anyway. The custom arenas will likely be monetized for upkeep since you’re going to literally be renting server space to play however you want but the question there will be price to rent.

Sube Dai.8496:

I was also hoping that the scoring would be tweaked. There should be instant points awarded for objectives to make it feel like your efforts mean something. It would also give smaller worlds a chance to bridge the points gap against superior numbers by having roamers earn points even if they can’t take towers.

Yak’s and sentries award points on kill/capture and are specifically made for small groups to kill.

Israel.7056:

You didn’t predict Smokee leaving.

You can’t predict real life.

iiMulch.2138:

So now instead of an arrow cart hitting me for 2k dmg it hits me for 1.9k OMG WHAT AN AWESOME TALENT.

Spec into balista… its really not that hard to realize that some traits are bad while others are good. The fact that you’re obsessing over one that’s terrible while simultaneously ignoring how powerful the masteries are along with +5 siege (and arguably the +5% for wall/door based siege)… makes me think that you just wanted to rage and couldn’t find much of a talking point on this particular subject.

Zen.8497:

Again, when you point one finger, there are three fingers pointing back to you or even better we see the straw in the eyes of others and yet we do not see the beam in ours.

I don’t know about you but I use the right-hand rule, so my fingers are always pointing to the side. It’s handy because, at anytime, while pointing at someone, you can also visualize the torque on their head if you spun it off.

So in my case, fingers point at SoR and JQ… which seems fair. May as well point at them at the same time since their such a good team. (Too soon?)

ensoriki.5789:

You don’t have to say soon, just update if there has been a delay and anyone sane will understand.

Didn’t the patch notes say up to two weeks?

Acelerion.6820:

But seriously, dont stand in the red circles! Its just that easy.

What is: Leg Specialist Superior Arrow Carts + Uncapped AoE.
What is: Roots + Uncapped AoE.
And the list goes on…

I hope you find that fun.

Otokomae.9356:

As it is now, it is still a hidden mechanic, since it wasn’t even acknowledged to exist at all until yesterday.

We’ve known about this for more than a month if not far longer, the only new information is the clarity on how points are calculated.

Otokomae.9356:

But if a server that was really bent on winning knew that they could trade all the Supply you have listed in your example for an above +1,000 PPT, they would probably consider that a good trade.

No they wouldn’t. They would never win if they let every single yak be killed, do you realize how silly and absurd that sounds? Ten soloers shutting down every supply route to your keeps and towers would make you literally have an order of magnitude more people escorting those yaks and murdering every single thing that moves on the map, rabbits included.

Otokomae.9356:

TLDR: 10 points (same as a Tower) > 1 Yak worth of supply

You are still failing at basic logistics here: 10 points requires 10 people you cannot compare this to 1 point requiring 1 person. Its 10 vs. 10 or 1 vs. 1 but not 10 vs. 1 thats not how scientific arguments or logic work.

ExZee.8109:

It remains a fact that it’s much riskier and harder to roam alone compared to being in a small group (especially if you come across enemy players rather than just focusing on yaks) and this difference in skill requirement is completely disregarded in your and wvw’s balancing formula.

Its not anywhere near a fact.

A soloer (usually a mobile class) is hard to catch. Its also hilariously stupid when 20 people are chasing said 1 person who is, more than likely, specced for mobility. If you see a thief soloing a yak, unless he’s tunneled visioned or improperly specced, you’re never going to catch him unless he suicides for the yak. The only soloer who will ever be finding it harder to survive than in a group setting is either (a.) not very good or (b.) not very aware of his surroundings. You’d have to have your camera pinned against a wall to not see a zerg coming for you from a mile away.

ExZee.8109:

Added to the fact that your conclusion states that roamers have done more than just earn an equivalent amount of points (scouting, and in general done more favor to their server than some 10 points to the scoreboard), there’s absolutely nothing in-game that confirms this form of effectiveness.

Sure there is:

• Winning
• Holding your property

ExZee.8109:

Like I said, the more effective you are in this game, the less you are rewarded. And if “less rewarded” means less in relevance to what should be earned rather than relevance to what a zergling earns, then that’s what “less” means. You say there’s not much to be done in such a scenario to better reward the soloer. I say you’re wrong, and especially when it comes to WXP.

I don’t disagree that the reward formula is borked but its hard to objectively define effectiveness because nothing is clear cut. A scout could be an afk-er, how do you discern? I kill a yak that was going to a tower with maxed supply… why would I be rewarded for that? I was running around in the open field looking to gank… stumbled upokittenerg. Why is this meriting a reward?

ExZee.8109:

This. WvW is fundamentally structured to reward LESS for MORE effective play and vice versa. This kind of ridiculous system controls skill differences so that instead of bad players whining about how they can’t get any points they don’t deserve, you have good players whining about how they can’t get any points they do deserve (Guess which one’s the majority?). Because obviously that noob ranger who pew pews behind 5 allies should get more xp/wxp off a solo roamer that’s been alive for the past x-hours than that solo roamer stomping said noob ranger while 5 allies try to revive/interrupt/kill. No offense to any rangers.

The individual soloers still get full reward for their yak kills, I was speaking of point breakdowns and why the yak is worth less for a solo kill rather than a group of up to 10. There’s not much to be done in such a scenario to better reward the soloer (in terms of personal reward) but you could take steps to less reward the zerger, though I don’t necessarily think that is necessary.

What I’m talking about is balance on the part of how points are rewarded to the server vs. the functions provided. That is to say that something that provides a lot of X will provide less of Y, so for example 5 soloers soloing five yaks rewards only 5 points but denies 350+ supply while a five-man killing a yak gains 5 points instantly but only denies 70+ supply but they can also flip the camp more quickly.
The yaks in the end are a matter of balance on ten or more people killing a yak:

• Less likely and common than a soloer ganking them.
• More manpower intensive outside of coincidental convergence.
• Incapable of covering the same territory as an equal number of soloers

So they earn more points in the instance where they have killed that yak, but in the meantime the soloers have denied much more supply (probably killed as many yaks anyway, making the point idea moot to begin with), covered more ground as scouts, and in general done more favor to their server than some 10 points to the scoreboard.

JonathanSharp.7094:

They’d just Mist Form out of it.

Fine, fine: Singularity. I’ve seen Mist Form and I’ve seen RtL, neither move faster than light. Have them stuck in combat with Cthulhu for good measure so that they can’t waypoint, oh and overflow so that they can’t enter WvW.

Did I miss anything?

Zikory.6871:

No offence to you but I think this argument is dumb. There is a big difference between sPvP and WvW. Stats are different, your character is different, and the battle field is different. sPvP is a more “balanced” (for the lack of a better word) game then WvW. Having a small group of 3 or 5 people taking a camp when a group of 10 come rolling through and your small group kills them or holds them off for your server to act on it is much more rewarding then what take place in sPvP.

No offense taken.

My line of thought is more that if you want your small team effort to have tangible reward or tracking of said effort, then there is a format specifically for it. WvW is not designed for it and expecting it seems like a case of trying to have ones cake and eat it too.

If you want to do it in WvW then you come in understanding that WvW is not about small team-vs., imbalanced fights or otherwise, and as such isn’t going to be tracked. One doesn’t join a team relay marathon expecting to be clocked on their 200m sprint, it may be a useful thing and they can brag about it but at the end of the day all that matters is who finished the marathon first (and of course who had the most fun).

I feel like I may have tortured that analogy a bit.

How would such a thing be tracked?

Why does everyone want all this 1-5 man gameplay when PvP exists literally two button clicks away for that exact thing?

JonathanSharp.7094:

Hotfix incoming. It’s so hawt and lava-infused. It’s like molten sun magma is dripping into an ocean of flames. And then put it in the microwave on popcorn setting, but then push the “add 30 second” button like 400 times. And there are lit candles around.

It’s that hawt.

Did you hotfix eles too? Throwing them into the sun would be a great hotfix.

Otokomae.9356:

So… 1 solo roamer gets 1 point from killing a Yak. On the other side of the map, a 10-man-group gets 10 points for killing another Yak. “Which of those two scenarios is actually more damaging to the enemy’s supply chain?”

Your logic is off:

• 10 solo roamers can kill 10 yaks for ten points, denying 700-1400 supply from the enem(y)ies.
• 10 zergers can kill 1 yak for ten points, denying 70-140 supply.

Even if the zergers move, so too can the roamers -> roamers cover more area for less man power in less time. 10 solo roamers can cover every supply line on a borderland. 10 zergers cannot do this and zerging every supply line means you 0 standing army ready to go or moving on the map to pressure anything.

This is why the yaks rewards are structured as such. There is reward for a small group of 10 (when did this become a zerg anyway?) but the damage is best done by people soloing them but such a damaging maneuver earns a lesser reward as a sort of personal sacrifice for the server.

Dynnen.6405:

U
N
C
A
P

T
H
E

A
O
E

Buy siege, use line spells, stop posting this.