Guild Wars 2

Pirhana.8935:

I have played GW2 since launch i how stuff is working in WvW, it means very little to hold anything. Most people move on and never come back to defend it when its attacked.

Aside from winning maybe… which tends to mean a lot.

And your last statement is just malarkey. I have never played against a server that hasn’t come rushing to defend their keeps and towers unless otherwise occupied or simply outmanned and unable to do so.

Pirhana.8935:

it is very hard to defend in this game, unless you have 1200 range you cant hit attackers and even then the line of sight is horrible.

Unless you have 1200 range… so, every class? Its as if we’re playing vastly different games.

A sieged up, upgraded, and scouted tower or keep is not an easy target to take.

Pirhana.8935:

I guess i Should change what i said
anyone who played DAOC will move to TESO PVP.

No, they aren’t.

Pirhana.8935:

WvW the area feels like it doesnt really belong to anyone it just an opne area up for grabs. this cause people not to care of feel like they need to protect anything. DAOC areas belonged to your side, it was your lands you had this feeling like you needed to protect what was yours, when keep guards died or the alliance said a keep was under attack, people stopped what they were doing to go defend, they even stopped doing pve and crafting.

The first sentence is an issue of balance: static maps are fair because everyone has the same playing field (EBG has a slight imbalance against red & blue). The remainder is hardly always true and often times detrimental. We can rally the militia and in key times we do, but it hardly helps to rally complete randoms for an activity (that is WvW) that requires coordination for success.

Pirhana.8935:

WvW you exchange keeps and towers in minutes sometimes, they mean nothing to protect or even have and are flat out to easy to take. DAOC it ment something to own a keep, it was hard to take them and it couldnt be done in minutes. since they had to go into your territory and travel, the defending side had a “homefield” advantage.

The only keep you can take in minutes is an empty one.

The only tier in which a server will let you take a keep is none of them.

Do you know how hard it is to take and hold any of the northern borderland territories?

Pirhana.8935:

WvW has no reward system. DAOC you kep building a character in RVR after max level ..for years.

5 days?

Johje Holan.4607:

Ok, well let me put it this way. Something they did recently caused it.

Oh no doubt, and it likely came in the Feb patch. It could be anything, though, for example: a change to skill tracking & calculating (to make sure its done more properly) that, on a glance, seems harmless but when multiplied 100x, starts to hammer the system. Or, since this is programming, someone forgot to carry the 1 somewhere. :p

But as it stands, the statements of re-rolling culling are uninformed and (almost assuredly) wrong.

Johje Holan.4607:

I don’t believe that. Because I don’t believe in coincidences. The serious crippling lag started recently.

The problems are caused by two separate things, again this has been elaborated upon by multiple people here, but you’re free to believe that Habib is lying to you for kittens and giggles.

Not to mention that, on the majority, the issues of these past few weeks are a bit far removed from two months ago when affinity culling was added. Its a matter of coincidence if they actually happened together, not close to or over a month apart.

PredatoR.5247:

Just go back to the original culling

This is unrelated to culling (as you would quickly learn if you read the handful of large posts in this thread).

Eclipses.7152:

Ever evolving meta? There is only one meta here and its name is Zerg.

Meta is with regards to skill compositions, team comps, counters etc; you can’t with a straight face tell me that this game hasn’t gone through several shifts in group methodologies and make-ups. The team comps have shifted with just about every patch and new approaches to engagements in open field to towers to keeps have come and gone.

We’ve had the turtles, the portal bombs (this has been in particular volatile in regards to counter creation and from skill changes) or black hole portals -> sweeps, veil bombs, earthshaker trains, cond bombs, open-field siege is becoming more prevalent now, and when the culling is removed, the meta will shift again (veil bombing is going to become pretty much pointless with the patch since you won’t be able to chain them any more or abuse their culling mechanics*). And the ever novel ways of placing and using siege and counter siege and counter-counter siege.

…Engineers used to be a clutch class for camp flips. Now its necromancers or thieves for their fields. Leg-specialist warriors on arrow carts. Cond damage necros and mesmers on trebs. The lists go on and need to be appended with every patch. Rangers re-roll every patch to something more useful.

I don’t think many games would be able to produce this sort of meta without just outright copying the skill/trait/siege system in this game and this is one of the few things that call back to the origins in GW1.

*This change alone is going to shake the meta because many a player hardly even knows how to mount a proper approach without abusing veil + culling, and its been one of the biggest driving points of the map zerg. The approach becomes ever harder when ballista will now work and be able to target you as you’re running at them since you’re neither stealthed nor culled. Two ballista popping you from several thousand clicks away… are going to ruin any zerg’s day especially if its a choke + line spells.

Portal bombs are also going to change.

Eclipses.7152:

I’m pretty sure that in TESO we’ll have mid-large size grouping mechanics that don’t necessitate the purchase of an outlandishly priced, poorly designed money sink like Commander.

Can’t say what TESO will or won’t have because whatever they intend or say vs. whatever the players prefer and will do in spite of mechanics, are things that can only be found out posteriori. For all we know, a priori, it may have nothing but zergs to make even Aion blush.

Xsorus.2507:

Things like Collision Detection will also not exist, because you technically don’t have Tanks, I mean…The reason it worked in warhammer online for example is because you had Classes like the Blackguard which had a lot of utility but had little damage, In exchange though they could face tank a zerg of players with ease.

Collision detection was removed because no one wants to play “Ping Wars 2” when the population is world wide but servers cannot be. So instead they added skills to take its place but you don’t seem to be aware of their existence.

Xsorus.2507:

hell it’ll never been Warhammer Online… it won’t be able to compete with games with 2 Factions (WAR) in terms of actual good combat/gameplay.

No one wants to be WAR… and no one can compete with WAR on the fact that its a dead game that died faster than a mayfly in spring.

Eclipses.7152:

However I have to say that from what it appears to be, TESO is taking their WvW like experience much more seriously than Arenanet.

As far back as the first glimpses into WvW, it was never considered as even remotely what it ended up becoming (by the devs and even by a lot of players). They didn’t consider it anything more than an extension of PvE and designed it as such, PvPers had sPvP. Problem being… the core mechanics ended up being good, really good, and it sucked in a whole lot of people and it became a big thing. Unfortunately, development doesn’t work nearly as quickly nor does internal management.

Eclipses.7152:

We can at least hope that over there players won’t have to wait 6 months to see updates and positive content and progression system additions.

What you’re going to get is: six classes, a map designed around geography of a past game rather than designed to actually be balanced, a long vertical progression system post leveling, and the same exact game structure as here with “world” replaced by “alliance” all fighting in their “campaigns” rather than “tiers”… and some bigger maps, sort of kind of.

…In maybe six months.

Could be the greatest game ever… or it could be a stinking pile of manure. But, at the end of the day, at least WvW ended up a stable game mode, with functional/good mechanics, and an ever evolving meta. This is why I hate comparison with non-existent entities, too much “grass is greener” mentality.

Darkjoy.3092:

Drop the ram or just the blue print? Didn’t know that worked, never seen it used ever

You place the flame ram as if it was going to be built, just don’t bother building it. Can’t see anything with it on top of you.

… If you happen to build it… well maybe the stars will align and someone will use #2 to wipe a zerg.

Acelerion.6820:

Releasing broken features, fixing it, then calling it an expansion….Sounds like my company….

“Expansion’s worth of content” and not charging you for it.

Hu?

JaironKalach.4938:

Oh… to clarify, the worst skill lag I was seeing was not ikittenerg situation at all.

That sounds like a latency issue… unless it was everyone, then there was a big fight somewhere (though be aware that WvW tiers currently share server resources over what I believe are two clusters (Borlis Pass and Yak’s Bend?)). It may well not even have been in your tier but on a map that was sharing resources with your map and 80×3 people all found themselves in Garrison.

The simplest thing they can do is to just put T1/T2 of EU/NA on in their own separate server configuration (per region, naturally), and split the remaining tiers as they have been doing. T1/T2 are the biggest hogs and their current re-allocation method just isn’t fast enough to keep up with the sudden demand spikes. Put those tiers in their own resource rich environment and many of the problems may well solve themselves.

Oni.5429:

^Which is what I fear the most, it’s an absolutely kitten idea and it’s why Guild wars 1 failed as an esport despite being such an amazing game. The majority of players in any game will always be soloplayers. And a huge part of those soloplayers will want to be able to play competitively and be aknowledged as a skilled player without having to pick up the chore of playing with a full team.

Hopefully arenanet understands that or this game will never grow past the tournaments arenanet will host on their own.

If the population recovers, you’re likely going to get split queues, but growing a team environment at this stage of the game isn’t bad if they give you adequate tools for solo play and competition. Which leads us to…

Custom Arenas allow for the creation of solo play tournaments at player/community discretion. The best GW1 had was skirmishes… If my understanding of the breathe and flexibility of CA is adequate, you should be able to have whole tournament rotations built with any number of rules ranging from solo-q duel arenas to 8v8 team zerg fests.

I know we’d love to have “official” solo-q ladders but I think they are trying to avoid splitting the “official” competition for now but they aren’t stopping us from making our own ladders or groups hosting whole tournaments for solo with their own ultimate rankings.

This is something that GW1 severely lacked.

Oni.5429:

That wont stop making people care about their spot. For example, me and my entire team will never pug/soloq ever again once the leaderboards come out, since it’ll hurt our teams average.

ANet more than likely has the metrics for determining a weighted solo-q ranking system if it ever mattered but it likely won’t in the near future. When they add rankings and the weekly tournament rotations, all of these things will be/are team centric in the current system (tournies being team focused just about always irregardless of the system). Even the current queuing system is set-up in such a way as to encourage team formation: solo-q till you hit a wall of probabilities -> form team -> grow as team & climb the ladder -> partake in weekly tournaments.

The replacing of HJ with CA will probably help give solo-q breathing room for play without worry about ranking or stupid zergs/mechanics. But the ranked aspect of the game will be about teams.

clay.7849:

Same developers.

Wrong. The man who created GW1 PvP hasn’t been with ANet for years. Only one of the original three founders is left and the team has changed drastically in the interim.

Want to try again?

Sovta.4719:

Nah, PVE didn’t really got new things (after february geartreadmill)
They just changed daily achivements to keep you logging in for laurels, some “epic” events where you search for some items or something and guild missions that you can’t play unless in big guild and even then only when guild leaders want to activate.

At least get dates correct if you’re going to say incorrect things. The gear was introduced in November, so even giving you the benefit of the doubt you’re off by three months. Meanwhile since that time they: revamped three whole zones, re-did their scaling event feature, reworking the dailies, the guild missions are a major chunk of guild content (q.q a game called guild wars happens to emphasize large guilds and communities). Hell, the “PvP” patch was the Guild Missions patch… (And I’m not going to bother to list everything else that PvE got.)

PvE has gotten an incredible amount of attention but that’s understandable, it’s likely several orders of magnitude a large audience than PvP is/was/ever would be. Be glad you have developers like Tyler and Evan who actually try or engage with the community in SotG.

Cactus.2710:

As we both agree, lag is caused by server-side bottlenecks so I totally do not understand how Habib can now claim that culling and lag are independent issues when his previous posts have explained that they are not.

Ultimately, I do think we are reading this differently, perhaps specifically on where one puts emphasis and where one reads what is being presented in layman terms: ie. the word “fundamental”.

I do not see the issue in his general claim when they are different problems in terms of what needs to be changed (ie. where the bottleneck occurs): bandwidth (the normally understood use of bandwidth) vs. throughput (cpu bottleneck) → (loosely) connection vs. hardware. They both tie into engine efficiencies (processing data and how well compressed said data is for subsequent trafficking) but fixing the problems requires different approaches. Yes, at the very root, they are an extension of engine optimization but they lead to different issues that don’t in particular impact one another (and I feel like focusing on the word “fundamentally” outside of layman usage is playing at semantics). Likely, the reason culling is the first to be addressed is because outside of re-working engine controls and giving client side power over rendering, it is an “easier” (big quotation marks on that word) problem to solve than changing the hardware.

If they cannot figure out how to ease the load on the servers from engine optimization (which they may well be doing and testing, I cannot say) they would need likely need an extensive down time to replace the servers. (I don’t think a gradual shutdown/shift of operations would work well in this case because the WvW servers are already taxed and resource shifts just to keep the game running while servers are replaced, is likely not going to work out or the game will simply be unplayable.) Such a change, however, is likely costly and they need to take these steps one at a time.

If he wanted to be disingenuous or hide the facts, there are far better ways of addressing us than to actually even admit that there is a problem and that it needs to be addressed, or that it differs from the culling problem.

Cactus.2710:

In any case, none of us really know whether the real limitation at ANet’s end is game engine, server hardware, or in/out bandwidth. It could be all three, but I’m putting my money on game engine being #1 and network bandwidth being #2. The reason I say that is that recoding the game engine takes LOTS of resources and is fraught with opportunity to screw something up, server hardware isn’t particularly expensive (although the software to manage if might be), and network bandwidth costs a lot of money each and every month.

I don’t see why you don’t believe the answer provided when it is logical. Its not like he’s saying the problem with skill lag is related to magical faeries or kittenroaches in the cogs. Its a bottleneck on the processor for skill lag (processing in-game events), and its bandwidth for culling (sending info about said processed in-game events… most of it, hence the culling). Makes sense… and they need to upgrade their hardware.

Culling is a bandwidth issue, it has little to no bearing on the data that was already all being processed and bottlenecked to begin with (the game did not not process data it wasn’t sending… it just wasn’t sending it :: your character is still going to die to culled player X spamming his aoe on your culled body without the two of you ever seeing one another). Removing it will certainly add another layer of stress on the servers but it will be much more an issue of bandwidth than an issue of stressing the server → all the data is already processed or trying to be processed (before bottlenecked into lag), sending it isn’t going to blow out the wall sockets.

I don’t doubt their engine is poorly optimized but I’m pretty sure they have a solid flow of income from the store to fund servers/bandwidth. If they can appease the WvW crowd with some good developments, and throw some fun stuff into the shop for us too… who knows, maybe they’d get even more money.

Cactus.2710:

Culling was put in place to minimize skill lag in high demand situations (lots of stuff for the servers to process).

Culling or not, the server was still processing all in-game activity, it just was never trafficking all of that data back to the players involved (particularly in regard to opposing players) but it was still trafficking it frequently such as to allow your machine to update what to render and where. The only “unit” in the whole situation that was not getting adequate information was your computer and no amount of throughput or graphimagics could render information that you didn’t have. The servers were still processing all of the relevant data -> why cull bombs are so effective: you’re blind to your opponents position and they are to yours after bombing you, but the server is well aware of where everyone and thing is and was processing that data: ie. damage, player position, player statistics, etc. That data was simply not all going out the pipes to the players involved nor in a timely manner (culling), it was still being processed in full and in real time until bottlenecked by processing capabilities (skill lag).

Culling wasn’t much of anything to alleviate data processing, the data was being processed irregardless -> it just wasn’t all being reported to the players (a bandwidth limitation, and that’s what culling was -> a bandwidth alleviator and a way to let people play on toasters).

Hence why, long ago, Habib provided bandwidth as a limiting factor on culling which makes sense. Trafficking data like models, coordinates, configurations, colors, etc, would gobble up bandwidth. Having the servers constantly streaming the relevant data without culling will indeed put strain on them, however the issues are not 1:1.

Skill lag will likely require a change in hardware.

Also, I’m bizarrely baffled by why you bothered listing the specs on your computer when this whole discussion is server related (even the person you quoted was referring to the servers not your irrelevant machine). Your computer specs are about as relevant to the server structure and capabilities (ie. skill lag) as my ability to make sandwhiches is relevant to Iron Chef.

kfarb.6732:

I am. I’ve seen t1/t2 servers pass by us and it seems they win by rolling in huge zergs.

Regardless, it seems this is mainly an issue for those higher tiers, while culling is a separate issue. So t1/t2 can keep their epic fights of spamming 1 but soon they will see who they’re hitting.

A large problem in T1/2 is that large forces (which pretty much every server can maintain at least one full map at all times) exploit culling as it currently is because:

• Balista cannot target more than half of the enemy force even if everyone but the 20 people who culled are standing in a neat, explosion friendly ball. (Also, could we please up balista splash to 20?)
• Arrow Carts don’t know what to shoot at except what is in sight… and if you can’t see most of your opponents, you sure as hell cannot target them.
• Culling/Veil bombs… self-explanatory.
• Portal Bombs… you know the drill.

And, as it stands, you have superiority in large numbers because culling basically makes the majority of your force not only invisible but also pretty much immune to the siege that cannot see or target them. The massive skill lag that ensues leads to skill-1 spam… which the team with bigger numbers will win; so it ends up being an almost self-feeding loop.

Eniav.9064:

Well if not the guesting function it was something in that patch as that was when this persistant lagg/skill lagg started, posted in a thread a couple weeks back which was closed with a mod stateing they already know about this and the lagg came with the patch and was being worked on, responses have since changed and varied lol

Its possible that they know what it is and are working on fixing it/have fixed it but won’t launch till the next patch if its a very large change that requires a lot of testing. They certainly aren’t denying its existence which means they are aware of it and doing something about it. If not, they wouldn’t even acknowledge it.

treyalsup.4627:

But like them or hate them, those mechanics in the game disproportionally reward the larger force. That is demonstrable fact.

We have skills that have no caps: line spells. And if, for the sake of the rest of the game, AoE be capped at 5 and remain capped, then adding siege effectively fills the exact same role and does not leave the negative caveat in the system when team sizes start to verge on the 20+.

I think we need a bit more variety in siege but I also want to see how powerful siege will be when you can actually see everyone and target everyone. One of the biggest issues with balista is that they cannot target anything being culled, effectively limiting their target # to the 20 players who were reported to a player. (Same thing for ACs to a degree since you will only know to shoot at what you can see.)

As for clipping. That is something that punishes everyone involved by turning any bottle necked competition into a test of ping (see: GW1 PvP -> exasperated further by GW1 Mesmers who were ping checks). For that reason, they gave us a different form of “collision detection”: warding and line spells. You can still get through them with stability or by taking the condition/damage associated with the line. You could cross a necromancer’s Spectral Wall… and you could run into the enemy force with 10 stacks of vulnerability.

Five line spells on a choke leads to “you” entering combat: on fire, blind, poisoned, multiple stacks of vuln, and possibly knocked on your kitten by a staggered LoW.

To summarize, I think they gave the game plenty of “counters” to certain issues you’ve raised such as to discourage zerg balls. But, in large part, due to culling, you cannot (largely because you simply do not know what you’re even fighting half of the time) use the tools to your advantage. I do, however, think that a few more tools need to be added to the game.

treyalsup.4627:

1. (Unintended) Culling.

This is probably the biggest issue since you cannot see half of your opposition to target them with siege, or to properly assess threat and numbers. Right now you can see the closest ~20 people and you can shoot at them with your siege. Now imagine if you could see all 80 of them, crammed into a tight spot right in front of your gate, which is lined with balistas and arrow carts, and be able to actually shoot all them with said siege.

I think the biggest issue is that there’s just a lack of anti-personnel siege available to discourage clumping. Add a defensive siege variant that does splash damage on each target hit (for example), effectively scaling upwards with the number of people hit, and you will introduce a deterrent to running in congested globs.

treyalsup.4627:

5. Lack of collision detection- (again worthy of its own thread).

This exists for a far better reason than any I can think of for removing it: latency and rubber banding. When the whole of taking any keep/tower requires that you be forced to go through multiple chokes, body-blocking will lead to an unwanted amount of rubber banding and people with lesser connections or from other regions would effectively be barred from participating because they’d be rubber banding like mad (even more so than they are already).

treyalsup.4627:

6. AoE cap. The zerg provides tremendous protection for its inhabitants. The AOE cap means the enemy AOE gets distributed and manageable. Whereas, against a smaller force all damage finds its intended target. Numbers normally win anyway, but this mechanic exacerbates it. It means that even when the smaller force gets the jump on the larger that their advantage is diminished.

I don’t agree, as I’ve said countless times: do not change the rules of the game, add tools to enrich the game. Give zerg-buster siege and you don’t need to change AoE rules.

Calae.1738:

You could count the entire sPVP population on your left hand.

If you had several thousand fingers maybe…

Esprit Dumort.3109:

My solution? At least 50% reduction in loot and rewards and higher damage tag requirement, while in a group larger than 20. Rolling a 20+ group with your 40+ will suddenly becomes far less rewarding. This is an indirect solution to tower blitz’s as it reduces the cohesion of zerg balls because people will want smaller groups for loot and WvW XP.

Arbitrary “You must be this tall to ride.” rules are bad, poorly thought out band-aids. There is no justification for such rules aside from because you/someone decided that X was the right number to play with before X+1 becomes a zerg? Even if you make it an exponential curve, e^t, the rules still amount to an arbitrary distinction based on someones judgement call.

Changing the rules of the game isn’t how you fix the problem, changing the tools available is how you fix the problem. Give arrow carts an ability that scales based on targets or simply can stack splash damage on multiple target hits within its radius; its meant to be the anti-infantry, anti-zerg tool, make it do its job better. You don’t need to set arbitrary # rules, you don’t need to change the AoE mechanic of already too powerful AoE, you simply provide players with tools to punish disorganized globs of players.

eldavo.6054:

It’ll be fun to test all the possibilities in the meantime…hmm…condition necro on treb cows?

This already exists. You put your highest cond damage on a treb for cow usage.

What did I learn from GW2? That you need devs that care and communicate openly about their decisions. Actually… I learned that from GW1 because that veil between community and developer is what killed the game’s PvP. (Frankly I like Tyler and Evan’s up front communication and the SotG that we have going, things we sincerely lacked in GW1. Bad as the start we may have had… at least we have some of what GW1 was missing and that led to its demise as an e-sport.)

Jacobin.8509:

If a PVE game claims to be an esport run the other way.

Pretty sure… they didn’t claim it would launch as an e-sport, so technically they aren’t wrong. Just food for thought.

Jzaku.9765:

“Necromancer has a lot of viable builds”

They do…

You may want to play the game more than post.

Nihevil.8024:

It’s only going to get worse when culling is removed.

Might go the opposite way, actually, since they’ll be off loading a lot of the server side graphics handling onto the client now (hence why you will be able to control how its presented).

Adaneshade.2409:

What burns me up is all throughout development this game was hyped as the “player skill matters” PvP mmo….then we get this, development of individual skill is not incentivized AT ALL.

Except that was not for this format as you can plainly tell by it being tied to PvE rather than PvP.

Niim.9260:

They use formulas and player inputted data. Even if they entirely used that data alone, then its already done, why spend time and effort spitting out what we already have, when what we want is something with substance?

“Because it already exists, I don’t want it to be made better/streamlined!”

<(q.q<) ^(o.o)^ (>p.p)>

Adaneshade.2409:

No it doesn’t at all. I’m suggesting that rewards for taking objectives such as Keeps that REQUIRE teamwork on a large scale be MASSIVE compared to those of solo content. I just don’t feel that taking a small objective intended for small groups with a massively oversized group should be very profitable.

The caveat being that five people can also flip a keep. They only require teamwork if another team is also working to stop you… which was where the discussion you quoted was having its break-down point. Do the two teams vying for the keep get punished/rewarded less for working as a team when it comes to kills or whatever.

I don’t think making things like camps or keeps or kills weigh against “how many people are here” is a good solution. I think adding mechanical objectives that favor roamers would be far better.

Adaneshade.2409:

Regardless of how “well trained” those 30 players are, 30 players should not be rewarded as highly as a soloer for objectives or kills. Less risk, less reward…….The way ANet is proposing to do this it’s Less risk, same reward (in fact faster rewards because a group of 30 can flip 4 or 5 objectives in the time a small group could spend doing just 1.)

Team game (guilds some would even say)…

…reward soloers more than teams…

…ok.

Samhayn.2385:

I see your point but here is your mistake, when 30 v 30 happens and your side wins you will split the total amount of xp from 30 kills amoungst 30 people meaning you will get the same amount of xp as if 1 v 1 happened.

But a 1v1 did not happen. Surviving and winning a 1v1 is not somehow a direct corollary to surviving and winning a 30v30. For one, there are 29 elements on your team that lie beyond your ability to control (and who’s skill level varies wildly) and there are equally 29 other things on your opponents side all trying to murder you.

So why does the team that wins, given superior cohesion and skill, get rewarded as if they were one person… completely undermining the effort to reward ratio of gaining the ability to function as a capable team (which is far and away from the same thing as learning how to play solo). The scenario basically makes teams inferior to soloers in effort to reward because a soloer requires only one thing: you. You don’t have communication issue or hurdles to overcome with yourself or coordination to time (you don’t need set up/organize or be in TS giving orders to yourself hoping you will properly follow and understand the orders you gave to yourself), you have only you; and one would hope you are on good terms with yourself and the only thing that defines whether you win or lose is how much better are you than your singular foe. Team fights are not just the sum of their parts, a team is not 30 soloers bunched up each fighting a singular opponent of 30 in 1v1s, this is simple systems building and basis of the fact that systems get more complicated as you add more components/variables trying to work in tandem and is further complicated when an equally complex counter system is introduced.

Samhayn.2385:

What Anet is doing is makeing it so if the same battle happens you will receive xp as if it was 1v30 and if those same 30 run over a guy solo and all tag him (unlikely but still) they all get xp as if it was a 1v1. That’s not right.

No one said: “it was right”. Hell, I don’t think there is a good answer to this question because how much sand goes into a pile is a definition that varies from person to person.

Its certainly not right that a 30v1 is treated as 30 1v1s, but it certainly isn’t right to go a complete 180 and treat a 30v30 as if it were 30 1v1s. (Not to mention the time variations to be attributed to full teams fighting each other vs. a 1v1.)

SteepledHat.1345:

I like killing people in a skillful way rather than spamming 1. Some times you feel like a nut sometimes you don’t.

And some people play sPvP…

Samhayn.2385:

I understand this and I also think its a bad idea that’s why I’m giving suggestions.

Stiv.1820:

Allowing zergs to tag people for full XP is a terrible design decision that will make this entire system meaningless.

And yet, no one bothers to address “what is a zerg”.

Are 30 well trained, fluid guild members all working in tandem a zerg? Or are they an army? How bout 50 of them? Is that a zerg yet? Is 30 vs. 30 GvG a ZvZ?

Might as well just go with the sandpile paradox in reverse:

• Are X guild members a zerg or are they a well coordinated?
  +1 to infinity where X is <1 than your definition of how many #s it takes to make a zerg a zerg.

Who would and how does one draw the line on “X is too many teammates, you’re a zerg”. I don’t consider the likes of my servers big, organized guilds running in groups (20, 30, even some 40+) zergs, I consider them a guild and a team. Yet, because we’re to assign some arbitrary distinction of “the zerg”… they suddenly aren’t going to be rewarded as if they were a team. How is such a thing fair? Why do two X0 vs X0 guilds going at it head to head suddenly being rewarded less for their efforts? Did the fight somehow become a lot easier when it was X*10 vs. X*10 people rather than just X vs X?

If you want to break up the zerg, add more incentives for scouting (or, as the sword change did, more punishment for not scouting). However this is a difficult balance because its often times impossible to discern a scout at a keep from an afk at said keep.

I would rather see this game be something we all (wvw community) can enjoy and not the rest stop on people’s way to TESO or CU.
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edit: Seriously Anet, reconsider this. It’s going to be a big make or break it point vs this game and TES.

Stop this already, you cannot compare a game that exists as bullet points and in a mystical ether called your imagination to a game that actually exists in purchasable media.

scooby treat.8420:

ok let me go with a superior sharpening stone where 6 percent of your toughness and 4 percent of your vitality is converted to power which ends up being 10 percent total. Lets say you have 2200 tough and 2200 vit you are going to end up getting 220 power. Now lets say you go with something like plate of truffle steak which gives you 100 power and 70 precision thats a total of 320 power and 70 precision. 320 power is more than you can get if you put 30 points into your power tree by itself. putting 25 points into my toughness tree gives me “5 percent of my toughness is given as a bonus to condition damage” so add 110 condition damage on top of that because I wanted more armor to gain more power.

Now if I was a condition mesmer i could get the one that gives me condition instead of power and now I have 420 extra condition and 70 precision on top of whatever cond/power/prec i can add in my armor while still having 2200 tough and 2200 vit.

2200 tough and vit would require almost exclusive soldiers gear.

320 power may well be more than a trait line but it certainly isn’t more than every single piece of glass cannon gear added together, we’re talking orders of magnitude here because offensive power isn’t just “I HAVE THE POWA!” it needs to factor in crit rate, precision, crit damage, and cond damage (or whatever assortment of those float your offensive build). You will have comparable power to a glass cannon but you won’t have squat in any of the other offensive categories, ie. you won’t get crits, you won’t get boosted cond damage, you won’t get critical boosts, none of this will apply to your build. You’ll basically be running a steady build…

Your argument is further flawed by the fact that you are, for some reason, adding the pow/prec food as if it has anything to do with how much vit/toughness you’ve stacked. It doesn’t. There are foods that have % boosts based on toughness, should have used those.

scooby treat.8420:

You gain so much in fact that a full tank build can hit close to a glass cannon but take hits because they are all tough/vit.

Tough/vit nourishments FTW

Uhh… correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t the most you can get from food/maint ~14% to any one stat or divided over multiple stats? Say you add that to power exclusively, how’s that going to make up for all of the non-existent precision, condition damage, critical damage, critical rate, etc…?

Loco.4561:

Legs?

Legs too powerful. Get opponent from point A to B, too good. Please nerf.

chrisk.4320:

There is more than enough population to support a PuG-only queue. It’s the teams that there are not. ArenaNet can’t accept that all their hard work would be for naught if team queuing died.

Instead, they mix PuGs with teams so PuGs are the bait to keep teams playing.

There’s also the problem that newly formed teams have no proper competition. If they queued in team queue only they’d get stomped because that po kitten o low that the only matchmaking would be against far superior, far more experience opponents. At least in this current scenario they can play against “high” rated solo/duos/etc, and have room to grow before ascending to full on team vs. team play. I can understand their reluctance in this regard.

If they want to keep solo/team combined, they need to add a scaling factor to solo-q that weighs your score based on the composition of your and your opponents team.

I like the idea of the boon-hate talent trees. When can we expect something like this? It felt vague on expected time though I can understand this taking a while given that it would need considerable balance testing. Would be great to be able to run boon punishing builds that serve as the ever-absent counter to bunker guardians or elementalists.

If they work it in properly, I can see other builds opening up for Guards and Elems outside of the dominant bunker more naturally through meta-shifts than changes to the classes themselves since the bunker builds will have punishing counters/talents to keep them in check.

I can see a lot of thieves re-rolling after the stealth AND damage changes…

Warrior changes… grab your banners.

Mackdose.6504:

Are supply camps pushovers in ascended where previously they were difficult?

Wut? Supply camps are pushovers in greens. The only “hard” part of a camp is a buffed supervisor, and when he’s buffed it doesn’t matter if you have whites or ascended.

ShRNA.4376:

Because the whole Rank thing is stupid to start with. It is nothing but mindless grinding. And the last thing you want in a good PvP game is grinding.
They should simply remove Rank and replace it with a real ladder as many other games do. Then people will have something to compete for in PvP.

You know, GW1 had this exact same thing right? HoH Fame Rank. And it was nothing but grind, meant jack kitten, and didn’t interfere with having a ladder… that thing we’re getting within the month and that is already, technically, in affect just invisible.

The system may be (sic: fundamentally) flawed against solo-q players (and Tyler’s reply in that thread gives me hope that they will split the queue), but that doesn’t change the fact that it does exist and will become visible.

Rerroll.9083:

This game won’t be an esport for sure. Gw2 so far has done everything wrong to be an esport.

It can become a good pvp game with some money rewards for sure, but not as big as an esport is.

This is still one of if not the most (helpful) developer active sub-forum on these forums. It’s also home to some of the more engaged developers I’ve seen when it comes to PvP. Not starting as an e-sport does not preclude becoming an e-sport, but we have some of the more important things that it takes to become an e-sport worthy game: developers who engage in conversation and players who engage said developers in conversation.

Now… we just need to sort out some of the glaring issues with the game. >.>

Nuzt.7894:

When did players get so lazy that they expect everything to be account wide, or retroactive.

Dunno, I don’t think there’s anything bad about giving us an account bound rank like sPvP’s rank.

Ubi.4136:

Why do I get the impression that the reason they have ‘decided’ to go with character bound is because they just aren’t capable of making it account bound? Seriously, like no one there actually knows how to do it.

They don’t have issue tracking other things across multiple characters (they do this regularly with dailies), so I don’t see why tracking “experience” would be an issue (and they already have an achievement that does that too). In this case they’d simply be adding a WvW experience bar and tracking it… just as they track any other WvW related achievement or achievement in general, or sPvP rank.

If anything is to be likely is that, even if they change their mind, they may not have time to change it before March launches. (The other likely thing is that they thought that people would like character progression in WvW… since that’s what people scream about fairly regularly.)

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

appreciate the new rotation and the better rewars on 3-round tournaments. Yesterday there was a significant increase of teams that were playing tournaments.

We get bored of the same map, can’t be helped. The increase in rewards for 3-round was a nice boon to get people into the rotation there.

Steelo.4597:

SM trebs, golem rush, invisible stomping, portal bombing, solo-contesting, thief damage, camp buff (fixed version), glitching into gates, invisible circles, culling, lag, bugged queue, orbs..

theres a lot that should be fixed..

I think only the last half of those are actual problems… some of them aren’t even problems in and of themselves but aspects of a problem you later re-mention, making them redundant.

Moddo.7105:

Not least of which is 90% of tiers have big population tine slot imbalances.

And that’s not something that can actually be “fixed” by some miracle patch. ANet cannot force people to play fairly.

Lightsbane.9012:

-More types of NPC units
-More objectives to take IE vantage points, more neutral tribes

NPCs will never serve any purpose but to be outwitted, and if you make them too good then its going to be PvEvP… err WvWvWvE. Or maybe WEvWEvWE?

Lightsbane.9012:

-New types of siege engines

Such as? I think we’ve pretty much covered the basics of “useful siege for sieging”; we have anti-personnel, anti-door, anti-wall, anti-siege, and anti-everything. If I can make a suggestion, build-able barricades (but limit to only 1 per very large area), as its the only real lacking build type.

Lightsbane.9012:

-A cavalry type siege weapon? Charr(iots)?[hurr]

Mesmers already exisit.

Lightsbane.9012:

-Keep/castle exclusive armories. IE: the charrzooka pickups at the jormag event. would be another upgrade

Me likely.

Lightsbane.9012:

-Spiked doors for a tier 3 door upgrade

(Superior) Arrow carts already exist.

Lightsbane.9012:

-Most of the above requires bigger maps so…bigger maps or more of them

Maps are already as big as they can be within the specs of the engine.

Lightsbane.9012:

PS: world vs. world needs to be more about strategy and less about heart of the swarm

It is… (*sic: depending on the tier).

Paradox Xion.1038:

Commander title: Account bound

Nah.

Account bound facilitates bad commanders getting around name recognition of being bad, amongst other negatives (PvE clutter of doritos, and PvE “commanders” running around in WvW, refusing to turn off their tag, etc; these things are minimized by the cost). It also makes it an exercise in bookkeeping if everyone is running around with alts with commander tags just to remember who is who and who isn’t who (particularly the latter when the formerly noted issue comes into play).

(A good commander is not and really should not, have trouble getting the necessary capital to buy another tag if they are in dire need of an alt. That’s what a community is for (on your server), and that’s what name recognition is for (on your server)…)

Feel free to point out some glaring issue I’ve missed, though. I’ll happily amend my views if I’m shown something paramount that I’ve missed.

Cactus.2710:

Too little server-side data capability, whether it be server capacity, game engine capability, or in/out bandwidth, is what causes lag. Culling was instituted to reduce lag by restricting the number of character’s data that the game had to track and transmit for client side rendering. Given enough players active in the same localized area you can theoretically have lots of lag even if you have lots of rendering culling because some player actions need to be transmitted even if some of those players are visually culled. It all depends upon the relative magnitudes of the packets involved.

I strongly suspect that ANet is stealth experimenting to determine just how little server-side capacity they have to add to follow through on their pledge to eliminate culling, and they probably are stealth experimenting with different rendering algorithms as well. There have, after all, been a couple of small undocumented patches lately.

The patch will be off-loading a lot more work onto the player’s computer. They’ve likely rewritten and/or rebuilt an underlying part of the game’s engine (hence the need for a specialized programmer) and how it handles data to do this as this has not been a capability in the game as of so far (I’d imagine they’ve also streamlined the data compression methods to better optimize the engine in general and how it sends data and at what sizes it sends said data).

Their servers have been handling a lot of the data to allow for toasters to play this game, but this is 2013 and the sooner we move away from toasters, the better. A lot of people may soon find the game very brutal on their computer, though…

Esoteric.5490:

As of right now, everything in WvW is account bound. What I am proposing is the “passive abilities” are unlocked based on the World XP you have per character. Titles should be account bound, even in the new system. This gives you more attainable account progression while it gives you meaningful character progression that still nets you ranks. This way, it isn’t discriminatory where each alt is its own entity. If every single alt has to start from square one, people won’t be able to play them if they want any sort of progression. The only way it won’t be awful in its planned state is if the titles are entirely too easy to get, and then it’s just about who can grind them faster and be max rank, which would still be terrible.

I made a slight mistake in that I confused what titles you’re speaking of, the titles from achievements are very much are and very much will remain account bound (and this is to what I mistakenly thought you were referring).

What is coming in the update is not a “title” as the game defines it, but a ranking as seen by opponents (as far as I’m aware, do allies even have a way of seeing your “rank”) which, in turn, is coupled to passives. This is an information scheme that let’s your opponent know that (a.) you’re not Random Invader #1128739348949, (b.) that you’re a high priority target (like the commander icon), and, to wit, (c.) it follows that these be character bound mutually. This whole scheme is thrown to the curb if abilities are character bound but the “title” isn’t as it throws off any sense of information from name (in this case plate) recognition, or vise versa. Seeing “Blackgate Conqueror of Worlds” with an upscaling arrow is going to be quite jarring… and confusing: does he have the buffs or not? Do we kill him or not? When you see a commander icon you know full well what it means just as you know what any boon or condition means, the “rank”, unsurprisingly, seems to function in the same light.

So we cannot have one or the other, its one of either boths: character bound mutually, or account bound mutually. We already have account bound progression (when it comes down to the nitty gritty details) but WvW lacks in any aspect of character progression <- something which PvE has, and PvP has (in a way) based on statistical breakdowns of what you play and win/loss ratios.

PS: As I said, I see this as how they handled GW1 PvE skills, and if the account vs. character bound scaling is of any reference as to what to expect here… pray to the lord that we won’t need to farm out 10 million Kurzick/Luxon faction points rather than the much easier alternative of Lightbringer/Sunspear/Ebon/Asura/Norn/Dwarf.

Esoteric.5490:

The one single compromise I can think of here is to make titles account bound and abilities based on each character’s time spent in WvW.

Isn’t that what it is now?

Titles are already account bound, the skills will be based on how much time a specific character spends in WvW.

Per example, they could be doing this in the vein of GW1 PvE skills: easy as butter to unlock, commitment requiring to actually make worthwhile.