Guild Wars 2

To people who don’t have trouble with it (and I’ve had no trouble with it at 1)..

-how do you handle him going after mesmer pets? Just not use them?
-do you ever have him aggro the guy up on the ramp? How do you handle it?
-how do you avoid getting killed by bombs that spawn as you are rolling? Has it just never happened to you? Or have you seen it happen, recognized something that causes the mid dodge bomb spawn, and taken preventing measures?

Which fractals are you finding less smooth than this one?

In my experience everything through difficulty 3 can be done fairly reliably and quickly with a group that pays attention and listens, even if no one in the group has seen it before. This one is easily orders of magnitude more difficult, even for people who have seen it before.

The only ones I can think of that have required more than two attempts are the swamp/mist collection one: which is still extremely easy if your group coordinates and knows what they are doing, and the charr assault on ascalon one, which is still pretty easy if your group knows how to handle the siege.

I don’t think I’ve ever wiped on difficulty 1 of the legendary dredge powersuit. The random and unavoidable death by bombs in difficulty 2 is what makes it so infuriating – along with the random aggro switching to the lever puller, which has not happened once at difficulty 1.

Perhaps the server was just performing poorly and normally the bombs are supposed to spawn all at once so you can see where to dodge and where not to dodge – but that was definitely not happening tonight.

The legendary dredge powersuit is just incredibly annoying on any difficulty past 1. On difficulty 1 it was actually a fun and interesting fight. Unforgiving, but you could learn what not to do and what to do and down him in a reasonable amount of time.

But on difficulty 2…jesus. I can’t even count how many stupid, kitten design decisions went into the higher difficulties of this. I’ve done quite a few difficulty 2 fractals and none of them are anywhere near this frustrating. This one is primarily frustrating because of random components.

-aggro is random. We repeatedly had the legendary powersuit aggro the person up top waiting to pull the switch. This should never happen.

-the boss should never target downed players. Again, there are no aggro mechanics to pull him off and his aoe attacks make it suicide to try to rezz anyone. If he decides to aggro someone who is downed, that person will die. Then once they are dead, you can’t send someone back to rezz them because, again, aggro is random and he’ll turn and go after them and you can’t drag him to the next switch.

-the bombs are insanely stupid: making a ‘dodge or die’ mechanic is just fine. However, you can’t put in a ‘double dodge or die’ mechanic on a boss that also does other powerful attacks that need to be dodged. Additionally, he doesn’t drop the bombs all at once: more than once we dodged from one set of bombs only to have a new set of bombs appear behind us MID DODGE and kill us as the dodge finished. This should never happen. Plus your kittenedly idiotic field of view often means you can’t even see that two dodge lengths behind you has bombs there until you’ve already committed – at which point you die.

-whose idea was it to put a fight that depends so heavily on moving out of red circles on a SNOWY background? The pale red circles are incredibly hard to see against the white/orange of the floor. I have a similar problem with the glowy yellow platforms in the harpy platforming section of a different platform – maybe eyes suck, but I just can’t barely see them at all.

-You should never, ever, ever, even kittening think that a boss that heals to full endlessly is a good idea. Just….holy kitten. If the players haven’t killed the boss in xx minutes just end the encounter and call it a wipe. Make them start over from scratch. Making him heal to full if you mess up is just another in your long list of interesting mechanics that you waste because health pools are too big and encounters take too long. Once people ‘get’ something they shouldn’t be forced to repeat it over and over and over and over again.

- the switches need to be a lot more responsive

-the lava needs to fall faster

-the lava needs to hit a wider area – multiple times we had him standing on the burnt patch on the ground and even though he looked like he’d been hit, he never got the debuff

-this entire encounter seems designed to say ‘kitten you’ to illusion/phantams mesmers. He goes after them all the time, which is absurdly kitten given the very precise positioning requirements needed in this fight. You can’t even use them after he is attacking someone else because aggro is random and he can just as easily suddenly turn and go after them and run out of the circle at the wrong moment. And it takes so long for the lava to come down that not even carefully stripping his defiant stacks then immobilizing him under the lava is sufficient to stop this. So the only solution is to tell the mesmer to just not use his build – which then gets you to the low dps problems I mentioned above.

This is, bar none, the worst encounter I have ever seen in a video game. Not even the worst WOW dungeons were this bad in terms of sheer stupidity. This is the most unpleasant and unfun gaming experience I have EVER had in my life. Yes, even worse than Dark Souls. The fact that the rest of the fractals at difficulty 2 are, while tough and often merciless, generally sensible and doable and some of them even fun, only highlights what a clusterkitten of fail the dredge one is. It’s 10x harder than any other level 2 fractal I’ve done so far. We spent 2 hours on it and eventually decided to just quit after about 10 deaths each. 2 hours! You can do an entire run of 6 fractals in less time than that! Inevitably someone would get screwed by bombs appearing behind them mid dodge and die and then you no longer have the dps necessary to get him down, or he’d wander up the ramp after the person trying to use the levers and we’d have to reset and start over.

Why does he even reset health anyway? Each rotation we were doing about 5-10% damage to him. You don’t think having to repeat the same thing 10-20 times is enough on its own? He has to try to heal up to full in between all this?

We lost the hammer as well.

The hammer carrier was blown off a the bridge and died due to fall damage. The hammer immediatley respawned on one of those platforms right next to the dead party member’s corpse.

The next time around the hammer carrier was stunned and then blown off the bridge and died. No hammer anywhere, and we searched all around.

We experienced a DC. entire party had to leave the instance and come back for the party member to get back inside, losing all progress achieved so far.

This is just… I am so angry right now. Holy kittening kitten. I go through the bugged kitten dungeon for 3 hours. At the end, everyone else in my party gets 40 fragments, bringing their total to 85. I get zero fragments, instead I get two bags of gold worth about two silver, which is just kittening insulting considering all the effort I put into it.

Basically everyone else got double the reward I did. 85 fragments vs 45. Great. Terrific.

Can you PLEASE get over your sick fetish for making everything random. I don’t want to be randomly screwed in the kitten and not get any bonus.

The rewards are not ANYTHING close to balanced.

You want fragments. Several of my party members got FOURTY FRAGMENTS which is as much as the entire rest of the run combined. (Which took over THREE HOURS)

I got two bags of gold, which were worth two silver each. That’s… I Just.. kitten you arena.net. kitten you right in the kitten kitten you and your stupid kittening kitten RNG systems.

At the end of the run, I had 45 fragments, everyone else had 85. How the kitten is that balanced?

Thank you for posting the cinematic for those who may have missed it.

video shows quite clearly why one time events are epic fail.

“Ooh a karka go go go -…why can’t I attack? <entire server stands around aimlessly suffering from lag>”

One time events are a horrible idea and should be abandoned. It’s been shown conclusively from this event and the halloween event that the servers just can’t handle it.

I think Arena.net is hoping we walk away saying “Wow I got to participate in something special!”

Instead what happens is we get booted to server, sit in log in queues, experience lag, and walk away saying “That clusterkitten was an absolute waste of time”

And that’s not even getting into how many people can’t make it to the one time events.

Raksha.8049:

Saying give up and go to another area is out of the question if there is only 1 or 2 areas left which may very well be a keep is not an option.

I see this becoming a serious issue when it could only take 6 – 7 people to lock down a zerg of 50 people into a bottleneck.

If there are only one or two other areas left, congratulations, you are clearly winning.

The defenders will always be able to stuff enough siege and bodies in a single choke point to make it almost impossible to take.

The thing is, that does nothing for them on a map with many objectives: if they lose everything else, they lose the match.

“I couldnt take it anymore so im in ehmry bay and server is 10 times better than fort asp.”

Emry Bay is currently losing pretty badly to maguuma, which FA has beaten every time we fought them. So we can assume you are talking about the server community rather than wuvwuv ranking. I’ve been very happy with the maturity and intelligence and comraderie on FA. Your comments make me think you are deeply unhappy with some people on FA – combined with your other incorrect assertions I suspect it is you rather than FA that is the problem.

I hope you have more fun on your new server.

Dedicated pvp’ers have more fun when you are losing than when you are winning, certainly, as there is stuff to do when you are losing but nothing to do when you are winning. Other than portalling people up to the jumping puzzles to get siege bp’s to stock up for the next fight (which I actually enjoy doing).

I will say that so far, FA doesn’t seem to be in danger of being a bandwagon server. Unless one of the current top servers implodes.

I have been on FA since release and I have never at any time experienced a queue other than the initial rush Friday night directly after reset. I’d love it to stay that way

In week 40, we were in T3, and lost to blackgate, who gained quite a few transfers mid match. We dropped down to T4, and beat Maguuma and sea of sorrows. Back in T3, we and TC get curbstomped by the newly bandwagon filled server Blackgate.

That massacre kicked both of us down to T4, and TC beat us quite handily (definitely being good T3 server material). That got us kicked down to T5, where I think it’s pretty clear we are pretty good T4 server material, so we handily beat Maguuma and Dragonbrand)

Then we move up to T4 again and now we are fighting darkhaven and HOD. Next week we’ll be in T3 and get rolled by TC again unless we’ve got some more off hours coverage.

All these swings were more or less due solely to numbers and off hours coverage.

@Regrets of Sini

You need a longer perspective.

For all but the top 1/2 tiers, matches are generally absurdly uneven and decided entirely by numbers/off hours coverage. You can see this by looking at past match histories. It’s pretty much a long list of absurd blow outs, for all tiers, for all matchups.

FA is in a strange position of being better than most of the T4 servers due to a very populous, very skilled, and very well organized NA primetime. But the T3 servers generally have much better off hours coverage than us. So Friday night it’s a good hard fight that could be anyone’s game, then we wake up Saturday morning owning nothing and everyone calls it quits and it’s another blow out. Or our numbers just let us outzerg anything the smaller servers throw at us. Not to say we don’t have skilled guilds, we do, it’s just that you don’t need to play well to win when you outnumber your enemy (anyone remember, the absurdly huge and absurdly bad blackgate zergs?)

As far as people calling it quits when a match goes bad, this afflicts every server in all tiers. As soon as it becomes obvious that your server isn’t going to be #1, a huge number of people stop showing up. They view the point of Wuvwuv as getting the highest score, and if they can’t do that, they stop showing up. That’s how these 400k blowouts happen – everyone on the losing servers just gives up. There’s no way you’d get these blow outs if every server came out and fought as hard as they did on the first day.

Arena.net needs to do something to incentivise losing servers to come out and fight more. I highly approve of removing orbs, that helps.

But we’ve had a long string of rolling effortlessly and getting rolled effortlessly – it’s just the way Wuvwuv plays out right now. It’s nothing unique to FA to have imbalanced matches. What is unique to FA is that we dominate T4 servers and then get dominated by T3 servers with better off hours coverage. I think we’re a tier 3.5 server the way TC seems to be a tier 2.5 server.

The only way to fix this see-sawing is to recruit more off hours players so we can try to compete in T3. I don’t think imbalanced matches are fun for anyone, winning or losing.

You need a longer perspective.

I suggest we take it a step further. Only let the very top person on the QP boards post. Everyone else is clearly less good than he is, so why bother listening to them?

Of course, a forum with only one person is pretty boring, so probably the best thing to do is shut down the whole thing.

I do think we need a tPvP board and an SPvP board, however. 8v8 is nothing like 5v5.

@Zilm no worries, I understand it is probably just a small cadre of disgruntled posters who don’t reflect the server as a whole. It was just surprising to see such a bunch of quickly debunked hack accusations in a row.

I do appreciate that some on Yaks bend like Severim have been pouring oil on troubled waters and pointing out that how to explain what folks are seeing.

I wish YB well and hope you guys continue to have fun on your server.

I have never seen a server whine as much while winning as Yaks Bend is. I just read the thread in one shot and uh…it’s pretty jarring. There are repeated very angry assertions of hacking directed at FA by furious Yaks Bend members…and each and every one has been shown to not be a hack at all but rather a (what I thought was rather common) specific build or tactic.

A cnd thief got called a hacker. A d/d elementalist got called a hacker. People who used portal bombs got called hackers. People who used the report function to message people on other servers got called hackers.

Yak’s Bend, you gotta pull it together and rein in the whining and baseless hack accusations. It’s very unseemly.

I have no idea if FA is getting transfers mid match or not, but you should note that FA was matched up against DB and BG when BG first got its huge bandwagon of transfers and went from losing the match to effortlessly dominating it, so we know full well the pain of having a match decided by transfers. That said, if FA is getting some oceanic/EU transfers, great! I welcome them with open arms. We have an excellent NA primetime crew with skilled commanders, great communication and tactics, and excellent response times. But we have traditionally lacked off hours coverage.

And it’s for that reason I hope YB wins. We fought TC before and that match was also decided by off hours capping.

The only queue I’ve ever experienced on FA has been in the initial rush on Friday nights.

If you swapped the orb and outmanned bonuses, it wouldn’t really matter if hackers took all the orbs.

That said, if orbs are to retain their current ‘winning team wins harder’ bonuses, then yes, I definitely approve their removal until a more balanced bonus can be worked out and hacking issues dealt with.

You know how TC was spawn camping us? Now they are being spawn camped in their matchup and don’t even have 40k points, because instead of outnumbering us, they are outnumbered by SoR.

It’s just a total numbers game. Additionally, when one server looks like it’s losing, 80% of their people stop showing up. Which leads to pretty boring fights, IMO.

Then when you’re winning, everyone flocks to the zone to be part of the victory

There’s no point in complaining about a 2v1. The matchup is 3 servers precisely so that a 2v1 may occur. Two servers ganging up against a 3rd is the way things are supposed to work.

I never once saw my skill bar change in the dungeon.

I ran it enough times to get two exotics, so….I was in there quite a bit.

RNG systems are bad, now, always, and forever. They are illustrative of either lazy designers, or ones who outright hate their players.

There is no excuse for them to be any part of the game.

They used to work, now they don’t. Now you enter a value, click ‘craft’ and it crafts exactly one item.

Your terrible, terrible attempt at implementing a scroll wheel fails in every way imaginable. You can’t click on the arrow to the right of the box. Using the mouse scroll wheel just zooms the camera in and out. If you click inside the box and hold and then drag outside, the scroll wheel goes up a random small amount.

This is utterly unacceptable when I’m trying to craft one hundred of something.

He is evil, but he is also mad. Thus is actions aren’t always evil, sometimes they are simply irrational.

The strangest thing is that he refers to himself as mad.

Badges dropping on the ground is a terrible, terrible design choice. The badges should show up in your inventory. Rest of the loot can remain on the ground.

The ground drop method steeply penalizes melee classes that always have to be moving around or risk death.

TheBob.9863:

Sorry but you are hilarious, no thief will stop 30 people from capping a supply camp unless none of those 30 people are competent

Given that those same 30 people would be competent enough to take out a solo

guardian
mesmer
ranger
elementalist
engineer
necromancer
warrior

but are suddenly magically not competent enough to take out a thief….I think it’s obvious the problem here is the thief class, not the competency of people trying to take a supply camp.

No other class can stall 30 incompetent people indefinitely. Why should the thief be any different?

I will add that the cascade of absolute blow outs (one server winning by 400k points) has persisted, across all tiers, for the last month. Typically the very top tier is competitive and the very bottom tier is competitive and everything else is absurdly imbalanced.

Part of this is transfers. A bigger part are the snowball orb mechanics, the snowball upgrade mechanics, and nightcapping.

There’s no reason that points gained in the face of zero opposition should be worth as much as points gained when you have to fight the whole enemy server. Arena.net has stated they want all players time to be worth the same amount: well right now, the time of people who can cap stuff in off hours is worth far far more.

Additionally, giving the winners the orb bonus is a terrible idea.

I see why you want to give guilds the option of upgrading and such, but upgrades just tilt the playing field even further in the direction of the team who is already winning. The winners will have upgrades, the losing team(s) won’t.

Additionally the fighting for 2nd mechanic basically forces the two weaker realms to tear into each other instead of the leader. You need to get way more points taking a tower from the leader than from the 3rd place server.

Arena.net also needs to give players a reason to come out and wuvwuv even if their server cannot win. Right now there is no reason to, in the minds of most players, so as soon as it looks like the match is going to be won by another server, 80% of people stop showing up and the match is effectively over – a day or two into the matchup.

DAOC has realm ranks. Arena.net needs something.

Nut.4713:

You seem far too focused on total score.

That’s how you win. That’s how arena.net presents the information.

If the total score is not important, it shouldn’t be the very first thing players see when they open the WvW tab.

eCheese.8240:

People talk about stack fighting as though it is some sort of deplorable tactic… It takes a lot of coordination to move your stack all at once, etc.

Listen. The bots in frostgorge sound move as a stack. Stacking up takes no skill, effort, or coordination at all. When bots that are incapable of mimicing any but the most basic elements of actual player behavior can pull something off, you really shouldn’t try to claim it’s some complicated bit of brilliant and clever playing.

Again, I don’t blame people who use it. That’s how the game works currently. We use it, TC used it, DB uses it, you use it. And you use it better than most! And of course, it has counters. Just please don’t insult our intelligence by holding it up as an example of really rich and skilled play that makes the meta game that much better.

Irrespective of who is using stacking (and everyone uses it), I think it’s indicative of a very dumbed down and flawed realm v realm system. That kind of nonsense wouldn’t have flown in far inferior games like WAR which crashed and burned in a relatively short time, and wouldn’t have flown in DAOC, which I regard as a better game. So far. GW2 has promise, it just has a ways to go.

I also agree that culling encourages people to stack, because if you can’t see your enemy, it’s difficult to organize anything really complicated. Culling creates an absolute plethora of ridiculous wuvwuv situations and really needs to be addressed.

Rhyis.7058:

Vorpal.4683:

I kind of feel like if your entire zerg stacks up in one spot and nobody notices or deals with incoming pbaoe enemies, you deserve to be wiped quickly.

That said, that wouldn’t work at all with GW2’s current culling issues, which makes enemies virtually invisible until the fight is already decided.

I don’t know how GW2’s realm v realm engine is less good than DAOC’s or WAR’s.

Culling doesn’t matter when you could pull every enemy within a 100 ft radius to a single location, stun every single one of them for 5 seconds, then kill them all long before those 5 seconds are up. Regardless of how many enemies there were. That’s how WAR was played. Whoever got the pull/stun off first, won. Speaking as a person who used that tactic pretty much exclusively, the design was absolutely kitten and I promise you do not want this game like that.

Just curious, were those abilities on new classes? I quit before they really got the slayer/choppa released and I heard afterwards that they were pretty absurd. I also don’t think I recall 5s aoe stuns though there was a 3s one.

I kind of feel like if your entire zerg stacks up in one spot and nobody notices or deals with incoming pbaoe enemies, you deserve to be wiped quickly.

That said, that wouldn’t work at all with GW2’s current culling issues, which makes enemies virtually invisible until the fight is already decided.

I don’t know how GW2’s realm v realm engine is less good than DAOC’s or WAR’s.

I have found the mesmer to be glacially slow in getting around out of combat. I believe mesmer and guardian are the only ones without a passive speed boost signet like thief and necro get.

Guardian however has staff #3, greatsword #3, retreat (which grants swiftness), save yourselves (which grants swiftness) and the class naturally lends itself to +boon duration so the swiftnesses it gets last forever.

Mesmer is just a plodding dullard by comparions. Focus #4 just doesn’t cut it.

Jest.9276:

So DAoC’s RvR was comprised of Castles, Towers, and Camps that are by the nature of their design, filled with chokepoints? Or was it more of open maps with choke points in key places as you fought over possession of Relics.

I have the feeling it was the latter. AoE being uncapped and used at Chokes is fine provided that the enemy can realistically overcome the tactic and progress. To progress in this game you’re literally forced through multiple chokepoints in Towers, Keeps, and the Castle.

There were lots of chokepoints. However AOE in DAOC did less damage, was targetted, and had lengthy casting times. So you couldn’t just rain aoe on an area (they had gtaoe spells, but those had long cooldowns and had miniscule damage and were just for interrupting).

You couldn’t start aoe’ing an area until people were in it. If the enemy team charged in, you could start casting as soon as they were in view and get off a spell or two in the choke point – which hurt the enemy but did not make it impossible to get through.

additionally there were many temporary damage reduction abilities that people would use to get through choke point.

Yep, the way downed players can be mass rezzed by the zerg basically means numbers wins, almost every time. You just don’t see stuff like you did in DAOC of an 8 man group flying in and dropping 40 people.

Like I said, I don’t blame you or anyone else for using the stack. I’m just disappointed it exists.

DivineBeing.2086:

I am sure a lot of people from Blackgate would knock off the nicknames if everyone would knockoff the whole “blackgate is exploiting/hacking to win”. When in reality ALL THREE servers are using them! That is exactly why you guys are being thrown that nickname is because of the whining. Blackgate isn’t whining about our orbs getting hacked, turtle strategies used against us, and portal bombing. We deal with it. So suck it up and man up, and I gurantee those nicknames will go away.

I’m sure you know that’s not how it works. You can’t be righteously indignant about people tarring your whole server over the actions of some individuals, then turn around and do the same thing.

You give the impression you are far more upset about people complaining about hacking than you are about the actual hacking.

That’s not a good vibe to give off. You should make it plain that no one is more upset at the hackers in your midst than you are. That’s how you make it plain that the hackers don’t represent your community at all. You don’t do that by mocking people upset at the hacking and by coming to the hackers defense.

I think the main thing everyone should be doing, is pressuring arena.net to be far more proactive and visible with the bans on hackers. I understand they like to follow botters around for weeks before taking action to glean more information. Well, that doesn’t work for hackers at all. Hackers can ruin the morale and motivation and hence WvW matchup for thousands of players. They need to be dealt with immediately, harshly, and publicly.

There have been more orb hackings in a month of GW2 than there were in five years of DAOC, I think.

There were some relic hacks in DAOC. They caused a huge sensation, the hacker was banned, and the relic was returned to the original owners.

Arena.net may wish to consider doing something similar.

Sometimes, particularly in mass engagements, I’ve seen people just disappear from view, then later they fade back in, still doing whatever they were doing.

It’s like the culling decides to just randomly change who it was showing to me and who it wasn’t.

That video of the stacking made me sad. I don’t at all blame maguuma or anyone else for using it: it’s absurdly effective and you play to the way the game is currently designed, not how you think it should be designed at a later date. And everyone pretty much uses these stacks.

It’s just that it pains me to see the pinnacle of wuvwuv organized group tactics be something so utterly mindless that the AI bot farmers in frostgorge can pull it off.

Clumping up like noobs and standing stationary in one spot should never, ever, be even a remotely viable strategy in a competitive realm v realm game. Here it is one of the most effective. Yes yes, it has counters, but deploying those counters is harder than forming the stack in the first place.

It all hinges around how almost all aoe damage abilities are capped at 5, while protective area buffs and heals are not, a design decision I find rather questionable. Plus if you are in a stack and one guy goes down it’s trivially easy to rezz him before he is finished off.

That stack would have been instant suicide in DAOC or WAR. GW2 still has a long way to go, both in terms of creating matchups that are fun, and creating a good level of realm v realm organized large group combat with a rich and diverse set of tactics. Right now almost everything you see is just set up to abuse glaring deficiencies in game design or engine limitations.

Elemantalist went from being ludicrously easy to kill (by far the easiest in the game) in the downed state to being the absolute hardest, harder even than thief/mesmer.

Pretty much every other class in the game can be finished off reasonably by one player using stability properly. Thief and mesmer buy themselves some additional time and you have to be aware of where they go.

Yorkie.8950:

Agincourt -

English “Lets use archers because there cheap… its a cheap tactic but it work…”

French “The English have a lot of archers…. Best not bunch up and use shield to protect ourselves because its an exploit”

I take it you have never studied history. The English archery at Agincourt was so effective precisely because the French were all bunched up.

The idea that you can protect yourselves from area of effect damage by bunching up is just hilariously stupid.

AOE exists to counter noob players to dumb to spread out properly. yet in this game, failing to spread out properly is actually the best way to mitigate AOE damage.

It should have been obvious that capping aoe damage at 5 targets while not capping aoe buffs and heals, would lead to situations like this.

The system is absolutely set up so that the two weaker servers will viciously tear into each other in their fight over second.

The game needs to be set up so that the most efficient way to guarantee second, rather than 3rd place, is to attack the leader, rather than your rival for second place.

Points taken from the leader need to be worth about twice as much as they are now. Maybe 3 times as much. Remember, besides the built in bias that if you are trying to edge out another server for second, every point you take from them is essentially worth 2 points to you, the winning server also has all the orb buffs, more people, and tons of upgrades. Taking their stuff is just harder, as WELL as being less points efficient.

ET is a ghost town. The current scores of SoR vs TC vs ET are hilarious.

No idea how good Yaks is. We’re a bit in the same boat TC is: a really good coverage window for the tier, but if we move up, outside that time window we get whooped because we don’t really have coverage the next up tier of servers do :p

dirtyklingon.2918:

the spartans weren’t conquerors. their military was for defense.

Incorrect. Please google ‘helot’.

Yep. There is a die hard core of about 20% on all servers who will come out and fight no matter what – however the winning server gets extra people who wouldn’t normally fight but come out when they are winning and the losing servers lose 4/5s of their guys so you have a matchup that on primetime on Friday was a pretty darn even fight, turn into a mess where the winning realm has 4x as many people out as the other two realms.

That’s not really a matchups issue, as the matchup WAS good and tense and close and well balanced at first – it’s a snowballing issue.

A lot of people think the only reason to wuvwuv is to make their server ‘win’ by being #1 in points. If that’s not possible, they don’t show up.

There is no way each realm has 500 people in a map. This is most evident if you stand by the portal when a reset happens and watch all the people streaming in. The number that get in before the queue hits and no more come in is much much closer to 100 than 500.

I thought the cap was 100 people per BG.

If you’ve got a bot ball of 20-30 bots and a handful of afk players you can have to wait in queue and then when you get in hardly see anyone on your side actually fighting.

Sadly such stacks are highly mobile through the use of mesmer portals. They’d have to be chumps not to just portal over to the siege and destroy it :p

Cogbyrn.7283:

Vorpal.4683:

As a mechanic of generating good close matches where any server has a chance of being #1 in points, their match making system has been a complete failure.

Hasn’t the failure been with free transfers? How could a matchmaking system possibly accommodate for mass transfers around servers after it collects data on the performance of each server?

That’s a good point, and I’m amazed and baffled that Arena.net switched to week long matchups while still allowing 24 hour transfers. That’s a sure fire recipe for disaster.

Additionally, however, the mechanics promote snowballing. We’ve had very balanced matches (like last weeks’ TC/FA/DB) that end up ludicrous blowouts, because as soon as one realm gets all 3 orbs and nightcaps and the people in the other two servers wake up and see the whole map owned by the enemy and all 3 orbs and them 20k-30k points ahead, about 80% of the population just gives up. This is true on every server, except possibly at tier 1. It doesn’t matter how balanced the populations are or how tense and even the fighting was, once one server gets a lead you get a huge blow out.

The only come from behind wins I’ve seen have been masssive, massive midweek server transfers, or something like we pulled vs sea of sorrows when we realized they had no NA presence at all.