Guild Wars 2

enLight.1695:

Bitter? Absolutely not! I feel nothing but compassion for the plight of top-tier server populations.

I just played a few more hours of WvW on Stormbluff Isle. Boy, let me tell you, it was fun. No waiting times and great fights all around. Still no sign of the queue queue bug here, thankfully.

I can only imagine how many players’ weekends have been ruined by this bug. Come on Anet, roll out a patch to fix this thing!

Skirting reason for theatrics.

Ya, you’re bitter.

GottFaust.5297:

Something else to note. In my experience, the VAST majority of players will never actually type anything in chat. You will never get an accurate head-count by relying on chat activity, just a count of vocal players.

It may well be true but there are other issues in this, such as the otherwise mentioned outmanned buff with hour long queues. So, yes, possibly everyone is hiding from chat, and culling is culling everyone out of sight… but even the game has no idea where these people are because its buffing people as if they were outmanned.

Moreover, people don’t usually engage in chat but they will often speak up for simple things. This is particularly true on big tier servers where calls are important things. If someone asks for a head count, most people will usually respond. You can also compare names responding to people you see… and usually you see only the people who responded.

Culling doesn’t cull chat too.

Which is what many of us have started using a metric for people present.

Six of the top ten threads, are about the queue.

zen.6091:

Milking another $20 from some players before they quit wouldn’t be so terrible. I agree it’s not likely, but when there’s no communication from anet, it leaves the door open for any sort of wild speculation.

It’s utterly counter productive and they wouldn’t make a dime. The people who are most affected are guilds, they would not move. They would break and quit. More over its clearly bugged, its not working as intended, and you can get many people on a map.

The cap hasn’t been changed, the queues are just bugged out to hell and back.

And there’s no communication because there offices are closed. Dun dun dun.

zen.6091:

Anet is hoping to sell more gems when poor casual players are forced to transfer to low pop servers so they can play at all.

That would easily make them zero money and kill WvW. They aren’t that stupid. This is clearly a bug, and you can get a lot of people on a map, it just takes a lot of patience by those stuck in multi-hour nonsense queues.

Yes, because every US guild also bandwagonned to every European server, causing them this same problem where it never existed before. Clearly. Or maybe a few hundred thousand european nationals joined the game and clogged up the servers in a single week! Must be that!

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Bugged-WvsW-limits-queues-on-European-servers

Your stance is nonsensical in light of the evidence. But please, continue being bitter that SBI fell apart because WarMachine left.

fivekiller.1432:

So is your answer to my question a yes or a no?

And Yak’s Bend has the population to queue 4 maps on a friday night. I have seen it happen. Maybe they are excited to actually have a decent fight for the first time in several weeks.

Quite clearly its a no.

You’re making pretty broad assumptions to even simply make a basic justification of your point while all evidence stands to reason/show that what you are saying is not the base cause of the problem. Europe didn’t have this problem last week, a hundred thousand europeans of every nationality didn’t suddenly pick up the game and start flooding their respective servers with players.

More over, reports of empty maps with multi-hour queues don’t make much sense in your argument.

jazzllanna.1278:

Lol you copied me before my edit :P

You’re still missing every euro server.

And no, Yak’s did not suddenly gain a massive influx of players. People very closely follow the flow of transfers, especially in the top tiers.

jazzllanna.1278:

That is exactly right enLight but there are some that really want it to be another issue. It could not be that their ideal wvw server is not as green as they imagined it to be. Seriously 3 million copies of the game sold.. mass exodus off servers was not 1 or 2 hundred players it was more likely 1000s. It would be interesting to see the servers that are having this “bug”, my guess would be JQ, SoS, Kan, FA, TC, SoR, and maybe BG.

Again sorry for the original in inhabitants of those server it certainly does suck that you have this but I find it hard to believe that the mass transfers are not the root cause of your horrendous queue times.

Yak’s Bend.
Every euro server (it has a separate thread).
Why, yes, everyone knows that every guild and alliance stacked on Yak’s Bend and the euro servers.

Oh wait…

fivekiller.1432:

maybe the queues are from everyone stacking on a couple of servers, and maybe that it looks like there are few people on the map while it is queued out is because of the new culling?

Yes, because Yak’s Bend and every euro server who are also reporting this same issue, had “everyone stack on a couple of servers”.

BroScientist.9875:

I’m really starting to think it’s not a bug. They must have significantly decreased the population cap because we were getting hour long queues immediately after reset. Actually, it may even be a combination of the two. Bugs+population cap decrease=not a good combo with ESO right around the corner.

Its not right around any corner, its a good many months away and I pray to god TESO doesn’t release in the state its in currently…

Its pretty clear that they didn’t decrease the cap, when people finally started getting through the queue, there were sizable forces on the field, the problem was getting through the queue. You can have maps with 30 people on it and hit a queue, which you realize the moment you enter and find three commanders in one spot leading a total of twenty people. You can also have maps with 100+ with multiple zergs heading every which way under a commander. This literally happened last night on EBG for Blackgate late CST. We started with some ridiculously low number of people in a zerg that was everyone on the map… of about thirty people, and by the time we went to bed and as people started coming in reporting “lower queues” we had people all over the map and under various commanders.

There is clearly something wrong when the queue somehow shortens as more people get into a map. We had also been telling everyone that, as they leave, to use a portal to get out of WvW and not log out in WvW.

TurtleofPower.5641:

Player count on map seems broken on Yak’s Bend. I don’t know if it’s an issue with the queue being broken so it thinks there are people on that aren’t… or WHAT but we have hours wait time and then 50 people on EB.

This is pretty much the case with every server at this point.

This bug definitely came in with the recent patch, there were never queues like this before, and there certainly weren’t low tier servers and just about every euro server reporting an inability to pass through the queues.

This is beyond silly, we have queues to empty BLs and EBG is half full if that. Our “zergs” are maybe ten people. Guilds cannot deploy because they get stuck in bullkitten queues.

At this point, just keep all five of these threads at the top of the forum until someone responds.

There is a serious issue here, we have almost no one on EBG and we have a queue. This is wrong on far too many levels.

I don’t know if something changed or if the general message was delivered to pugs and guildies alike (do not log out in WvW, exit through a portal), but BG’s queues on EBG dropped significantly and people were readily able to get in and the population was definitely looking full~ish. Contrast this with upwards of 4-5 hours of queue at reset with less than a full roster of people actually playing.

There is definitely a bug in this. Keep one of these queue threads up because this is clearly not working as intended.

There are people “in” WvW even if they are offline, on log screen, or somewhere else entirely.

There seems to be a definite queue bug going on with this reset. That or they nerfed the hell out of concurrent players or we just gained a mass of guilds to clog up the queue for hours.

This is bugged on BG at the very least at least, unless we have some very, very dedicated hardcore players on every map. A good number of us have been stuck in queue for hours, and the people on the inside do not report nearly the same numbers of people on map.

This seems like an odd question right now.

Right now we have something that’s actually workable, playable, and fun.

Ask after this week is over… unless ANet does the unthinkable and just scraps p-torunies for the superior 1v1 set-up, deletes Capricorn, and puts the rest of the maps in 1v1 rotation. We can have tournies once a week or something.

All events have DR on them if you repeat the same one non-stop, this has been in game forever and ever, but the chest not appearing seems more like a bug than the actual DR itself kicking in. What it looks like is, if the game thinks you’ve hit DR on an event (repeating it more than twice without any intermittent change of events (this is why Pent/Shelt works, because you are constantly swapping two events so you never hit the DR to diminish the rewards, but if you just sat around farming Pent or Shelt, you’d eventually get nothing from the event) and somehow doesn’t reset the DR when you change events, this could happen.

For example, say you did the escort the Quaggans, but between events the game didn’t register Tequatl as different from Quaggan, you could possibly bug into DR killing the chest.

xplode.6903:

okey so this means we have to wait or be lucky i really cant understand what we have to do …. arhghhghg this is pathetic 1 month away from fractals?xD

It means that, as has been reported but with no verification from my personal self, that the 99% trick for surviving works just fine. But until we get some more people running at 50+ to try it, we don’t have enough info to confirm or otherwise.

Res Orbs and Pets, however, do not work. At all. As you get infinite agony.

daydream.2938:

Quick popping paids are great. The fact that they fixed it from 3 to 1 tickets did so much to accomplish this.

Indeed, and since I am sitting on a nuclear stockpile’s worth of tickets from the dailies/monthlies, this is a very quick in-and-out structured format. Why didn’t we have this months ago?

evilapprentice.6379:

This question isn’t sarcastic, is all this praise based around quickly popping Paid tourneys? or were there also bug fixes I’m unaware of?

I think its more that 1v1 teams is actually fun.
You don’t need to wait for eight teams to show up.
1 ticket to play, to win 1 ticket to keep playing, is fine.
Fun.
Its quick. Its easy. And I don’t need to be queuing up for randoms in 5v5 hot join.

The changes to kits, bundles, and several trait/bug fixes, while probably not immediately relevant, have probably add some wobble to the meta, or might.

Sanel.5603:

I mean, i would do daily in any case, not depending on amulet, but i would love that amulet so i can progress into fractal, now im FORCED to wait 20ish days for it….

So much of policy " we want our players to be free to do whatever they want"… sure…

Well that’s why I think its bugged. They said they’d add MORE ways of attaining the loot, not shift it to a different and completely unrelated NPC while not adding more ways. It seems perfectly fit as a drop at 30+ and, honestly, should be added as a Pristine for several times the price of Rings but I can understand that they don’t want instant amulets everywhere from all of us who have hoarded p.relics. I don’t mind, in particular, as I’m happy using the p.relics for alts that will never set foot in Fractals.

Prowler.2589:

So is this fixed or not? I don’t want to spend 2 hours into level 50+ and get stuck at jade maw when I get home. Can anyone verify this?

I’ve seen reports of 99% still working.

Res Orb and Infinite Agony on res, honestly seems like a bug. If you want to play it safe, wait till tomorrow as more info comes out and the devs wake up.

This almost feels bugged to me. The gear is specifically designed for fractals yet is currently, since no one has reported it, not found in fractals. That seems far too self contradictory and bizarre to be intended. I can see two options: its bugged, its got a tiny drop rate, or someone done messed up. I’d imagine we’d get more answers within the next few days as this seems most bizarre.

• 10+ Rings
• 20+ Infused Rings/Skins
• 30+ (one would assume) Amulet
• 40+ Infused Amulet

Is what would make sense.

I didn’t think that WvW was even getting updates till February but now I see that I was mistaken, at least to a point. I’ve gone back through the interviews that I missed and I’m left rather confused as to what (if anything other than culling) is coming to WvW. Are we getting other stuff or is it all hypothetical down the road talk? Is there a list of things, because the Flame and Frost page literally tells you almost nothing.

Thanks in advance.

StrayDilettante.8671:

I am not saying nerfing Guardians is the way to go but is it possible to make other classes as desirable for fotm as guardians?

As I doubt the current encounters will get much of an overhaul, adding encounters that more heavily favor other professions (or their presence in a group) could potentially help out weigh the lopsided set-up we currently have. This is a bit of a saving grace for how the fractals are designed, they can have maps that favor some professions over others, allowing groups to pick and choose and really have equal odds no matter the set-up given the randomness of the maps.

Some classes are a bit hard to accommodate for, though, (how do you design a dungeon to favor rangers without just making it a dumb gimmick?) so the best approach would be to just tone down how unidimensional some of the current fights are or just give their projectiles some sort of “piercing” or give them AoEs to bypass getting wall camped.

Kumakichi.2583:

I’m assuming a guardians WoR would negate his pull also…. although I rarely see many guardians even using WoR in pve!

Waste of time, “Stand Your Ground” makes him unable to pull you, on a shorter cooldown, and much easier to use on the whole group.

kiba.2768:

vena- i’ll say it again because even though your tone has softened, you still stand behind the same points.

we will NOT see a nerf to wor/soa because of fotm because it would affect all other areas of the game where wor/soa is considered balanced. if a nerf were pending, it would be because those 2 utils are imbalanced across the board, traited or not.

i would argue that soa has it’s very important uses in wvw, but wolf is convinced it’s not…and that is another discussion altogether.

I’m not really even arguing about nerfing them anymore, if you look at my last post’s final paragraph. A few posters made some very good points on the fact that its the encounters that are messed up in that they just are too unidimensional or just not designed to punish/work around what guardians bring to the table. That, however, doesn’t change the fact that ~1/3 of fractals is currently designed poorly in that it heavily favors stacking guardians to trivialize the mechanics of the fights into non-events.

The only skill I really have a beef with is SoA, which is just too good in terms of projectile denial. Yes, I am opinionated about it. :P

Darx.9842:

Can’t we have some boss fights where we can actually CC the boss and use strategy to win? I’m so sick of kiting every single boss. It’s so boring, not fun.

Properly timed interrupts do actually work to interrupt bosses (or at least on some bosses, I haven’t really sat down to test). Defiant prevents you from just stun-locking a boss but if you time against animations as they kick off an attack, you will actually see “Interrupted” pop-up even with defiant still up. Captain Ashyn can have his crouching Agony attack interrupted, for example. The interrupt won’t work AFTER the attack has already started but it seems that many attacks have sweet spots that can be hit to shut down the attack. I’ve seen Kholer’s spin interrupted (though a proper word for it seems to be blocked) through defiant by a hammer guardian. (Though I have no clue if these interrupts are intended or some sorts of bugs… and the Kholer one has only ever happened once. I’ve tried it myself only to get a full serving of his Daggerstorm.) The issue, if this is intended, is that its really hit or miss because of how hair-thin the timing is and how hard some animations are too spot before its too late.

You can also “block animations” for certain bosses. This is easiest to see/do with the Jellyfish boss in Fractals. His eat animation can be interrupted by any sink skill but the timing is very, very fine and can easily be missed by either going too early or too late. Interrupting the animation does not add/remove Defiant.

Darx.9842:

How about we remove Defiant? Then bosses would be fun. And not a kite-fest.

Removing defiant will just lead to CC spam, and the bosses won’t be able to do anything. You’d have to give them some sort of retaliation if CCed too frequently but then that will punish certain weapons that have intrinsic CC built into them (Necro’s and Warrior’s pop to mind right away).

Xynn.2748:

Do you play fractals? The only boss this matters at all on, in any way shape or form, is Legendary Grawl Shaman and that is only because the Lava Elementals are just straight up stupid design.

EDIT:
“The Lava Shaman and his adds cry at the sight of Shield, and the Shaman will dutifully kill himself AND his adds by shooting into WoR. "
—>Never mind, I can see that you don’t play fractals at all lol.

Except that’s not the case at all, and you know it or you’re just BSing me.

Bloomhunger is entirely ranged, and all of his attacks can be reflected/blocked. With SoA and WoR on two guardians, the most dangerous thing in the fight is Storm Spirit because of Retaliation. Your whole team can sit inside of bubbles and literally AFK auto-attack him to death so long as the two guardians maintain their rotation and in frequently kill the Storm Spirit. This isn’t as big of an issue with Mossman as he will move and engage in melee, anti-projectiles just stop his dagger post-stealth aspect which is predictable and can be dodged since you know exactly when he’ll do it. (That is… if anyone ever did Mossman without just climbing the tree.)

The Uncategorized Map has the same problem. Old Tom can be shut down completely by SoA (I realize he’s a mini-boss). Two guardians rotating SoA + Sanctuary removes the only way Tom had for dealing damage, and the most dangerous aspect of the fight becomes poison… which is irrelevant because you’ll likely burn him down haphazardly since he cannot do jack. The Raving Asura’s balls can be completely blocked off by WoR/SoA, meaning that the fight devolves into fighting four veteran mobs, twice, without any Agony to worry about.

That, right there, is two of the whole set trivialized. The Shaman is greatly abated in difficulty by Walls and SoA (and I don’t think Feedback will actually work all that well because of the Shaman’s height). Something is certainly wrong when one class will greatly reduce the difficulty of ~1/3rd (3 of 9 bosses sans Jade) of the fractals content.

And to make amends, I don’t want to see guardians blown up (it is my class, after all,) but they really need to be toned down a bit either by (a) making encounters less tailor made for them, (b) buffing the other classes to be as desirable. And yes, reading some posts, I see I’ve bit a bit overzealous, I apologize for that. I still stand by that SoA, at the very least, is too over the top as a skill, especially when traited.

tom.7468:

well smoke screen is only 30CD but this is really balanced because guardian lack the mobility, decoy, burst,ranged, useful elite skills etc other classes have…

I’m not sure what class you’re been playing…

Mobility:
- The Interventions
- Sword #2
- Greatsword #3
Burst:
- Sword/Torch
Decoy:
- You’re the tankiest class in the game, you don’t get decoy like the squisshies.
Useful Elite:
- All of them

tom.7468:

Anti projectiles is unique for guardian just like portals is unique for mesmer, stealth for theif, pets for ranger, banners for warrior, kits for engineer, attunements for elementalist,wells is unique for necromancer…DEAL WITH IT

But its not, at all, unique to them.

• Mesmers have it.
• Elementalists have it.
• Thieves have it.
• Engineers have it.
• Warriors have it.

Problem is, that Guardians have it in spades, requires no investment to be better than every other profession’s version (some professions don’t have it as an utility but is stuck on a long cooldown mainbar (Engineer)), and is too long lasting in comparison to its brethren AND is stuck on the tankiest class in the game. Smoke Screen, Magnetic Shield, etc, all of these last for a couple of seconds at best with cooldowns that are equivalent to the Guardian cooldowns, except WoR and SoA last far, far longer than them. Hence why you can have two guardians layering them indefinitely.

Good luck layering Smoke Screens and Magnetic Fields.

Shuguard.7125:

Also feedback is as big as shield of avenger the move i can’t remember is almost the same(little z axis issues) as wall of reflection and if you line of sight yourself with the warden(while he’s channeling) at the bosses feet then mesmer could technically be better at reflecting, not to mention time warp.

It may be as big, but it doesn’t last nearly as long. One feedback will last through one bubble of Shield but it bubbles three to four times depending on how quickly you trigger it’s first bubble, Wall + Shield, completely untraited, have a ridiculous uptime that can be maintained indefinitely by two guardians. Mesmer is good at reflecting, no doubt, it just cannot do it so effortlessly while also sacrificing no survivability (as that is all built into the virtues for Guardians).

Yes, Time Warp. Can’t do much about that powerful skill, and this is why groups will run Guardians as well as a Mesmer. :P

See, Cliffside was a good example of a boss where a Guardian can be good when used actively. Walls and Shield don’t do anything for the Archdiviner fight but knowing how to time Retreat + Virtue can keep a whole team up through the Archdiviner’s blanket AoE without having to worry about dodging. This is active playing because you can’t just throw out Retreat + Virtue and hope to accomplish anything but randomly blocking some irrelevant attack. Conversely, using Wall and Shield on a fight like Bloomhunger takes no more effort than hitting the buttons on cooldown.

Shuguard.7125:

The mesmer also can do a huge reflect build with wardens, feedback and another move(can’t remember the name off the top of my head).

The flip-side is you cannot face tank with Mesmers (as this is another problem with Guardians as they are simply too hard to kill even with their low HP), and I’m pretty sure you can never (might get close) reach the area wide, whole team safety of Shield which requires utterly no investment in to be used to great effect. Of course, you bring Time Warp so that’s nice.

There comes a point where a realization is made: Guardians trivialize more than half of the fights of Fractals (and elsewhere). The class is currently better than every other class in the game at Fractals (along with just generally fighting against any boss that is ranged) because of its fire-and-forget, no penalty, long lasting anti-projectile mechanics. Tack on their ridiculous survivability and team-wide buffing, there’s hardly a reason to run anything short of at least two guardians in every group and… this is a serious issue.

The problems are quick and easy to identify:

• Wall of Reflection
• Shield of the Avenger

The combination of these two skills and two guardians, means that bosses like:

• Old Tom & Raving Asura
• Lava Shaman & adds
• Bloomhunger or Mossman
• Any other boss that relies or carries heavy damage on their range.

All get to stand around while killing themselves and, in general, not putting any sort of fight at all. Bloomhunger, for example, can be afk-wanded to death from a zone of complete safety behind two Guardian’s rotating WoR and SoA. Old Tom’s lone dangerous mechanic can be blocked by Shield of the Avenger, Raving Asura may as well be completely ignored. The Lava Shaman and his adds cry at the sight of Shield, and the Shaman will dutifully kill himself AND his adds by shooting into WoR. The biggest dangers of higher level fractals are the powerful ranged attacks that can possibly down you if not leave you hobbling with little to no health (melee can be kited, immobilize cycled, and generally just ranged) unless you time your dodge properly, but with WoR and SoA, you don’t even have to move lest an inconvenient red circle (and only on one of the many bosses does this even occur) show up for a couple of seconds forcing you to step either a step to your right or left.

Mesmer’s can do similarly with Feedback but that cannot be maintained indefinitely by only two mesmers, and even just one guardian properly specced can leave only a tiny window of down time on WoR/SoA. No other class can turn whole encounters into AFK wandings. This applies to just about any ranged boss with only ranged mechanics, can be wholesale trivialized by just hiding behind endless, perfectly safe, anti-projectile walls.

The two skills need to be changed to reward proper timing rather than just layering them behind two guardians indefinitely… of course we could easily just trip into the scenario of just running five guardians layering them (and I don’t really see why you couldn’t/wouldn’t just run five guardians even today aside from a slight slowdown of pace or a terrible fear of winning).

The class is too good in too many fights but its especially an onerous issue with any range-based fight where the mechanics of the fight become: Stand behind Wall of Reflection, Shield of the Avenger.

And just to round this off, I main a guardian and I don’t see why anyone would run anything other than one at this point for dungeon/fractal effectiveness. Have your favorite class for every other activity: gathering, mini games, crafting, exploring, but you may as well just roll a guardian if dungeon/boss is somewhere in the job description.

ninnnnnja.2345:

I’ll just come right out and say this, you guys know that GW2 PvP will never amount to anything big anymore right? The competitive interest of this game has been lost long ago when most organizations and sponsors took a look at how stale the current state of the game is – the addition of these features will only bring back/in a minimal amount of players (and mostly from the PvE GW2 community, not from new players).

Basically, esport features aren’t really needed anymore in a game that will never become an esport. Just being realistic, those of you in denial of this now will get a rude awakening later down the road. And as far as I know, ANet still has not admit that they shipped sPvP/tPvP as an unfinished product – and still until now it does not even have these basic features everyone expected to be available at launch.

This development cycle is par for the course in GW history. GW1 PvP, which many of reference but don’t seem to actually remember in any light at launch, was a mess. The much flaunted GvG was completely locked off for most people behind having to farm HoH for the Sigil. HoH was gating itself off of rank and had some of the worst map designs in the game (and still does). The entirety of PvP was itself walled off from just about everyone until they farmed 100000 Ettin in NKP and CapSiging those random spawn bosses that held your elites. And all that your average nobody had to play was really RA and TA.

It took a quarter of a year to get Balth Faction added to the game, it took several months more to get the kitten thing balanced and rewarding (and you still had to grind basic PvP in order to be competitive in PvP). That means it took close to half a year for the game to allow you to PvP without forcing you to PvE. We should only consider ourselves lucky that this is not a problem now. Ironically, that long delay to truly enter PvP that many faced in GW1, allowed for the degenerate meta in HoH to die off behind several key nerfs that took a long while to come out (I’m looking at you NR, Prot Bond), for the GvG sigils to get detached from HoH, and for some class balance to find its way into the meta (and that you couldn’t spike down the Lord in 10 seconds with Waestrel’s Worry). We’ve basically got a similar issue here, competitive content is gated behind a stupid design but unlike in GW1 where we were walled off by “Grind PvE for X hours!”, we can all see it clear as day because we have access to everything.

The popularity of GW1 PvP shot up with the first world championship. TL;DR, a (b2p being a rather helpful feature) game can become popular long after launch. Pretty sure LoL took about a year to actually get anyway too, though feel free to correct me.

Pyrial.2917:

Raytek.6193:

How are you guys going to pull off matchmaking when the population is so low?
How are custom servers supposed to teach people how to play?

This February patch better be worth the wait or I fear for the PvP scene which gets smaller every day.

One word…advertising

Three more words: Word of Mouth.

If they make the format playable, with matchmaking, people will talk about it and word will spread. Its not like people who already bought the game have anything stopping them from trying out PvP again if the most egregious issues are fixed.

ZenoSpyridon.1396:

snip

Zeno, I think you misunderstood how the 1v1 is going to be implemented (or I misunderstood what you were saying). In order to test Storm for Tournament play, they are going to use it as the basis for 1v1 to test it as well. If both work, the 1v1 will be added to general PvP (and all maps) and the Storm map will be added to Tournament rotation.

Having 1v1 on one map is better than no maps, and I expect most teams to find their way there because Tournament is not only too time consuming but punishing with ticket systems. If 1v1 comes with MM… this aspect of the game might actually start crawling out of the pit its been living for a while.

Coopers.4376:

Will anyone actually bother with paids once 1 team vs 1 team maps come out? Seems to me like this is the final nail in the coffin for paid pvp.

Everyone knows paids are messed up right now, it may be best to add things to save the format rather than the limb. If they want people to spend money in the format, they need it to be alive and thriving.

There’s too much work being put into things that force people to pay to play. We need a format where whole teams (not just random queued players or groups) can participate ranked in a matchmaking environment.

The game could certainly use:
Unranked Skirmish: two teams are put together based on their ranked matchmaking. Win/Lose does not affect the their rank and record, its a skirmish for practicing and fostering team growth. (If you want to put this into the custom arenas, which seems to be the idea, fine, so long as a general ranked environment in which people can compete is left free of charge to access. There’s admittedly any number of ways to implement this and my idea may well not even be remotely close to the best one.)
Ranked Battle: two teams matched on ranked ratings. (This is the format that needs to remain free.)
Free Tournament: teams enter and face off in what we have now based on the aforementioned matchmaking rank. Winning the free tournament (and certain placements after the winners) should award tickets and will be the free way of acquiring them. (Add in a minimum rank for ticket rewards such that people cannot just remake characters or whatever loophole they might find to farm low rank brackets.)
Paid Tournament: teams enter and face off without matchmaking being used to pick opponents. Winning in this format will reward a unique ranking adjacent to personal matchmaking rankings, akin to the Arena methods of Halo (as an example). Top teams here will be the ones who end up in the big tournaments for PvP.
Grand Tournament: Or whatever the heck you want to call sanctioned big tournament events, only the top X# of teams from Paid can participate and the rewards are, rightfully, large.

Your custom arenas will draw in all the money you might want if they allow private servers, groups, or whole websites to create specialized tournaments based on any number of criteria they might well choose, with the freedom to set maps and rules (TDM, downstate y/n, etc) as they see fit. The idea behind them is great but it shouldn’t distract you from creating an environment in the game itself, beyond the reach of cash and money, where people can compete on some level.

My above idea, the paragraph before the last, is flawed no doubt but it will at least give people some venues to compete on leveled footing and unleveled footing: those who partake in ranked will have a visible matchmaking score, a ladder to climb, and a way to show off their “leet skillz”; there will also be a format for the truly hardcore players and those who want to show just how good they are, where they can compete against everyone for a chance at partaking in the “big” tournies. Other posters are free to rip apart my ideas as they see fit, I’m sure I made plenty of nonsensical claims and decisions.

And for the record, I am not rushing you on this or saying its all needed immediately. It’s just needed, at some point… preferably sooner rather than later. I don’t care about game modes, magical unicorns, or even balance at this point, we need to have these basic features added to create an environment that inspires competition rather than the only current defining quality we have which is QP… and time spent grinding said QP.

Mrbig.8019:

I want an ETA.

You got half of an ETA, sort of, unless Mr. Sharp wants to clear this up for me, it seems that there will be none of what was spoken about in his post in this months update. That means I’d expect to see rebalancing, some streamlining on the 5v5 hotjoin… and that’s about it. That means another month of struggling without the key features like ladders and matchmaking.

What I want to ask is, for the 1v1 for teams, are you planning on rolling it out like Temple as a “beta” format (much like how storm is a beta map) and keep it out of general PvP, or, when you say testing and popularity, do you mean within your own QA? I don’t quite understand what you meant with that part of the post, Mr. Sharp. I don’t think you’re going to be surprised if you find that 1v1 is going to be popular becuase it would be the, currently, only format where people would really be able to practice their teamwork and builds without having to enter whole tournaments. It would need MM to really work but we really need a quick format for teams to be able to jump in and out of for practice and team building.

Even a vague “some x month” would go a long way.

Broken Angel.4956:

There is a difference between ANet being stupid and putting in a recipe like that, and the actual game code not working properly (say, bugged boss).

Bugs are a result of human error. The incorrect mats are a part of the game not working properly since, given every other recipe in the game of the same tier as the snowflake, it was vastly different, better, and completely circumventing of the price of salvaging where the major ingredient is either lost entirely or almost entirely.

Banning people for playing the market? After Arena specifically stated that playing the market is perfectly valid. Good luck with that. Its a ~free market~ and unless you want Arena to decide the price of everything for you (hello communism), you will deal with the ebbs and flows that come with a free market.

And, really, are we so pathetic as to compare (what was) a clearly bugged recipe that existed for all of a few days with a method of income that has existed since release? Sure seems desperate.

Birdo.1768:

I would love to see them add a desert themed map and a heavily wooded forest map, so we could have 3 styles to rotate over the weeks.

Unfortunately, if memory serves, the estimated time for properly creating and testing a WvW map was slated at being approximately 6 months for whatever amount of manpower and work hours the WvW team has at their disposal (and I’m not about to doubt it considering just how careful a creator needs to be in setting these things up). These sorts of things, new maps, I’d expect in the loooong run. Right now the format needs to have key features added and be given a sense of autonomy from PvE.

Tala.7638:

i cant believe it is that difficult to come up with new wvw maps, they came out with lost shore and who really goes there minus gold farmers. i mean…come on. WvW IS this game. if the Devs want to keep this game around and sell thier gems, i would think they would want to hear from us. Maps isnt the only issue in WvW.
We[ppl reading and posting on forums] obviously still like and enjoy this game, only trying to help create a convo that the devs can pull from to hopefully help keep GW2 a viable option for ppl’s gaming time.

A WvW map has a much higher need for attention to detail and proper placement of just about everything than a PvE map like SSC. Moreover, seperate WvW borderland maps would be a balancing disaster and I would not expect that in and of itself to change. Rather, an additional BL map put into rotation with the other that swap in and out from week to week (one week all snow, one week all fire, etc, you get the idea, you’d still be fighting on identical BL maps). (This however, does not seem to be what will be coming as the forum post here stated new homemaps is not happening unless they meant new seperate, all unique home maps. I have no clue really.)

The issue right now is that just “adding” a new map (and I have no idea as to what exactly was meant in the “hint”, yes some sort of new map is coming but its completely vague on what said map even does or will be for) isn’t going to do anything to help. We don’t need MORE maps at once, its already hard enough to cover three in T1/T2. What we do need is MORE VARIETY in the maps and mechanics from week to week as well as a sense of ranking, progression, and general visible bragging rights (and rewards that I can use to play without needing to PvE to do so) to give people a reason to play beyond just “server pride”!

If the beacons mechanic, which I hope they add soon, is worth anything that will be good.
If the rewards and progression give people a sense of, well, progression to work on and climb the “ladder” so to speak, that will be good.
Fixing culling would go a LOOOOONG way.
Just adding a fifth map to spread already thin populations… isn’t going to accomplish anything.

Narkosys.5173:

The game is in trouble. It has shed the vast majority of the population it started with and the exodus continues. I dont want to do a huge post about all the bad decisions Anet has made. Accounts on a server does not equal the amount of people playing or population concurrently online. Just the amount of people who have their account on it.

Leaving the rest be and pointless unconformable statistics aside. The status of servers is actually only a half truth due and this has been discussed ad nauseum in other threads. There is a peculiar volatility to the server population counts (Full/Very High/High etc) that changes with the peak hours of the servers. It would seem that the way the status of a server is calculated either has a timeout feature (X days of not logging in removes you from the tally) or there are multiple criteria going into accounting for server status. (It would be, after all rather bizarre and nigh impossible, for people to be able to enter Full servers ever if the cap was defined only by attached accounts since, when people quit, they don’t leave the server nor do they make room. As people enter they’d never be able to join a Full server and yet they do so by doing so at off hours of the day for said server.)

Of course, as a caveat, it may well be that the actual value of what is full or not is changed regularly (we know they change it during holidays for the increased traffic, which would actually seem to imply, again, that logging in/out has some affect on capacity statistics) so it could be a completely nonsensical, useless thing to look at.

The Agony upper wall will always exist. If they add every piece of gear in the game in ascended and you fill out every slot with AR, and if they (fix) raise the cap on fractals beyond 80, you’re going to still hit a point at which the only thing that is going to keep you alive is coordination and teamwork (and creative use of PvE environmental tools from all over the world, and res orbs). People have been facing this already with the challenge groups that try to see how far they can get into fractals with absolutely no AR.

The AR is there for grinders to grind in an endless dungeon. People who don’t want to grind AR can still play the instance to its fullest well into the teens of the dungeon, at which point they are already gaining everything there is to gain from the dungeon except for the skins that are locked behind 20+. But, since they are skins and this whole game is effectively designed around grinding skins, there’s hardly a reason to complain.