Guild Wars 2

DAOC worked just fine without target caps on AOE. You’d just need to reduce the damage and radius of AOE damage spells in GW2 to compensate. In DAOC aoe spells did about 1/3 the damage of a single target spells, so you’d only use them if they would hit 3 or more enemies (and the radius was much smaller).

Here aoe is typically just as damaging as single target, all the extra targets it hits are a bonus.

Being able to zoom out that far as a result of the mad king stuff was the single best part of halloween for sure. It just feels wonderful to be actually able to SEE THINGS.

The default FOV is horridly restrictive and so narrow it makes my head hurt because it is so unnatural.

Didn’t we beat sea of sorrows right before blackgate? Granted that was two different set of player vs door crowds, so not the most exciting of matches.

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.

Still can have lots of fun in wuvuv, even if you are losing (it’s easier to have fun if you own nothing than if you own everything, IMO)

I’ve been doing mostly halloween this matchup, tbh :p

Phuriok.9307:

Maguumans need to stop fighting DB and get caught up to FA in points before they start wasting their resources on the 3rd place server. Stop fighting for silver and go for the gold lol. We dont have enough points to move you above FA and I know for a fact we as server are doing our best to focus FA. So if you’re cool with 2nd or 3rd please feel free to keep attacking us, but if you wanna try and win something for the first time in a month or two, let’s hit #1 yeah? cool.

The game is specifically set up to encourage (more like force, actually) the second and third place servers to fight each other. Don’t blame Maguuma for playing the game the way it is currently designed.

I think it’s a stupid design, but that’s the way it is. Human beings are rational, logical creatures. They will not ‘go for the gold’ when it is imposisble to do so. Instead, they will limit their losses (you know we typically fear potential losses more than we value potential gains, right?) and secure second. The best way to do this is to take points from the other server that might compete with them for second, because those points are basically worth double to them compared to points from the winning server.

The whole thing needs rework. Arena.net imagines the two weaker servers will work together against the stronger, but what REALLY happens is the two stronger servers work against the weakest, because they give up the easiest points. :|

Outnumbered people need to not pay more repair costs. If anything they need to pay NO repair costs.

I agree that the orb buffs should give the winners vastly higher karma/honor token drops.

Basically you don’t want to discourage the losing team from coming out and you want to make the orbs desirable without making the team that has them way better than the team that doesn’t.

BG was by far the least classy opponent we ever faced.

However, I wouldn’t call this exploiting, as it’s clearly the way the code is supposed to work. It’s just mind bogglingly terrible design.

AOE’s exist to punish people for clumping up like noobs instead of learning to spread out properly.

However, unlike every other realm v realm game, GW2 has implemented a system where the best way to avoid aoe is by… clumping up!

The mesmer portal bombs and culling issues are just technical limitations icing on the cake of bad game design.

They probably decided that since every match is a huge blowout, why bother keeping track of the scores?

But yes, this should be an official arena.net service – we shouldn’t need to rely on the kindess and hard work of volunteers to have this information.

Grit.9061:

This will be a difficult thing to fix, as we all know that allowing AoEs to hit an unlimited number of targets would be disastrous

AOE hit an unlimited number of targets in DAOC, and it wasn’t disastrous in any way, shape or form.

Then again, DAOC didn’t have ridiculous culling issues.

The WvW tactics in GW2 are just laughably clumsy and inept compared to what we saw in DAOC – almost all of them revolve around exploiting bad design decisions or problems in the code (like culling).

When you can’t distinguish between WvW players and ranger bots in frostgorge because both just stack up in a tight ball and mash the ‘1’ key, your design has failed.

Orbs give a massive advantage to the winning team.

Upgrades give a massive advantage to the winning team.

Outmanned buff gives no advantage at all to the losing team.

FA has a really big and really good NA primetime presence. We usually do exceedingly well Friday night.

Then we stumble and fail against servers with any kind of off hours presence.

All of WvW seems specifically catered to provide boring, uninteresting blowouts to one side or the other. The orb bonuses do not help. It’s boring being the winner in a blowout, even more so than being the loser.

Guess you gotta just keep going out there and killing mans and having fun where you can, but the idea that these matchups are creating a tense exciting match where any server could win is just laughable. In about 95% of cases the winning server is immediately obvious after the first evening. And that’s when lots of people from the other two servers stop showing up.

Also so many bugs in WvW – our orb was invisible almost the entire time Maguuma picked it up, which made it just a bit harder to track down and intercept :p We managed once or twice though!

And who else thought taking the servers down 1 hour into the new match was stupendously poor timing?

“Now we wait for next weeks reset”

And that pretty much sums up WvW right now.

There are just no balanced matches in this game. Two weeks ago Blackgate just effortlessly rolled TC and FA.

Last week TC/FA/DB had a terrific Friday night fight, then TC pulled into the lead and kept it, winning by huge amounts. FA/DB guys got discouraged and gave up due to TC’s off hours presence.

Now TC is fighting the much more populous SoR, and getting rolled. ET is a ghost server and doesn’t show up, so TC is basically in a 1v1 with SoR.

Blowout after blowout after blowout after blowout. Even when you win the blowout, it’s boring as heck. I think out WvW system is broken.

It’s a rather silly situation.

AOE is designed to punish people for mobbing up and not spreading out properly.

However the AOE cap essentially means that the BEST way to avoid AOE is to….clump up all on top of one person!

It’s bad and silly game design. Counters do exist, however. I think in general it is much harder to counter the stack than it is to form the stack in the first place.

All aoe should be a counter to excessive clumping.

one hour matchups!

Week long matchups were just too long!

Servers just came down one hour after the new matchups opened, and I can only ASSUME it’s for something important like calculating the new matchups :p

I just…the timing of bringing down the servers just now was terrible

No, unless they tell us the odds of success up front.

I can’t believe Arena.net implemented week long matches while server transfers were still an option.

That has led to weeks of absolutely silly matches as huge masses of players run back and forth from server to server.

It will take months for ET and HoD to sink back to where they belong with their new populations. And weeks for servers like BG to get up to where they should be. Meanwhile, every bracket in between is ruined by horribly lopsided matches.

I doubt anyone on BG is having fun with literally no one to fight, and servers who have no chance of winning are probably not enjoying themselves, so this is very much a lose-lose situation.

Yep. It’s just a way to prevent the enemy from getting some badges. Same as jumping off a cliff to your death.

Spamming F 20 times a second for 5 hours in WvW is no solution at all and any game designers who think that is an acceptable situation need to wake up and pay attention.

Not too mention spamming F will very frequently cause you to start ill advised stomps on enemy players or have you start rezzing ranger pets.

And NONE of that changes the fact that even spamming F constantly, loot bags drop where you WERE and so if you are moving in a straight line, spamming F, you have to GO BACK and pick up all the bags afterwards.

Put the badges in my backpack the instant I earn them. There is no excuse, none, for me to have to run around collecting a currency like that. If you want to make me spam F like a fool to pick up my sharp spines and scraps of metal, fine.

Transfers are ruining Wuvwuv, but are not ruining this matchup. This is actually a pretty balanced matchup. Friday night was extremely fun and extremely close.

This matchup, like many others, is ruined because of snowball mechanics and off hours capping being vastly more profitable than it should be.

This is not the fault of people who play when there aren’t many other people around – this is the fault of arena.net for having a faulty design.

People aren’t going to go all out every night for two weeks, pouring their heart and soul and money into siege and upgrades, if they know another server is just going to take it all while they are asleep. This is entirely rational and logical behavior and will never change.

Right now the first server to nightcap everything and take all the orbs basically wins the match right then and there. This was true of all tiers last week, it seems to be true of all tiers this week.

The sole exceptions to the 400k blow outs are the top tier, where all servers have full coverage outside prime time, or the bottom tier, where no server has full coverage at any time.

Also sea of sorrows is basically an oceanic server and is thus always in a match that is points closewise because they and the dominant NA server just take turns nightcapping each other. Leads to incredibly boring matches but close points.

Other than that, it’s all blow outs, all the time, from top to bottom. This does not lead to a fun or engaging wuvwuv experience. It will be even more mindlessly terrible when they switch to 2 week matchups. This is an arena.net problem, not a problem with the morale or coordination on any particular server.

Most people think the point of wuvwuv is to win wuvwuv and have their server have more points. If this can’t happen, they see no reason to wuvwuv. If arena.net wants their matches to be longer than 2 days, they need to completely revamp their scoreboard system so that it incentives players to come out and keep playing no matter what.

Right now they come out and keep playing only if there is a chance their server will win, because that is what they have been told the game is about.

It’s not so much night capping as off hours capping.

Points gained when no one else isonline need to be worth less than points gained during server primetime (when the most people are online) or you are making the time of the off hours crew much much more valuable than the time of everyone else.

At this point I’d recommend they make several BL, one for each ‘primetime’ and just lock those BL’s after the window is gone. So if you win, say, the oceanic BL during the oceanic prime time, it gets ‘locked’ to you and all the NA players that log on during the oceanic night time can’t just effortlessly take it back.

The NA players won’t be bored because they’l have their own BL to fight in.

Well, if I can’t see thieves when I’m dead I guess I’ll never see them!

They never render while I’m still alive :p

I don’t see them doing this. There are many, many servers that are not where they should be, arguably, either due to transfer influx or transfer exodus.

If ANET starts manually moving one of them around, they set a precedent where they can now be expected to move all of them around.

If wuvwuv is going to revolve around nightcapping, wuvwuv will eventually die. Simple as that. That’s not a fun situation for either the nightcappers or the nightcappees. No one is having a fun, engaging, PvP experience.

I do not think the 20% of us who like PvP for its own sake and will be out there, regardless of the score, regardless of orbs, regardless of the chance of winning the match, are enough to sustain a wuvwuv population.

You need all those people who get discouraged and quit when their server is behind and looks like there’s no way it can win or when the other side controls all orbs and the entire map.

If they are going to reduce the duration of the boons, they need to reduce the duration of the conditions you absorb, and reduce the cooldown.

I hope they don’t make the skill so useless that guardians never use it…a guardian who has just popped SYS is one of the most fun things ever, as a necromancer.

The biggest reason melee gets screwed out of loot bags is that they drop on the ground where you were a few seconds ago, so if you are constantly moving and dodging, you will never be where the loot bags are. And if you are standing still in the middle of the enemy zerg as a melee class, you are dead.

I will say implementing a non gambling method would be nice as well for those who don’t like gambling.

Thank you for that addition!

Lets people who opened a million chests without getting anything halloween related take another shot at it.

If only I hadn’t thrown away all my tonics because of lack of bank space. oh well, lesson learned I guess!

We told you guys that stacking such an absurd amount of people on a single server wasn’t a great idea.

That said, getting 50 kills in WvW is pretty trivial and can easily be accomplished in the first night before it’s obvious you are going to dominate the match.

A little more information would have been nice.

But I think the circle and pumpkin on the map give you a fairly good indication of where at least to get started.

Wow. Minion necromancers already had so many problems.

Downscaling is great. I really like it and wish more games had it.

If I want to feel impressive by steam rolling AI creatures I go kill a rat or something.

By the way arena.net, I was planning to go home from work and spend $10-15 on gems to open some chests and get some fun halloween stuff.

Thanks to your atrociously low drop rate, I will not be doing that.

Additionally, I will not be buying the gems for another character slot expansion, because the disregard and lack of concern for ripping off players that your staff has displayed makes me question the long term viability of the game.

Do you see now how being greedy works? It doesn’t get you more money, it gets you less. People don’t like being ripped off. You will end up with more money, and much happier customers, if you offer items at reasonable prices instead of trying to trick people into playing your rigged odds game and sinking absurd amounts of money hoping to get one of the items they desire.

“You want something in life. Learn to work for it.”

Work is something unpleasant you do in exchange for money. It’s not fun.

Fun is something you do because you enjoy it.

When you start calling your game ‘work’ you know you have totally failed. This isn’t supposed to be a more grindy world of warcraft.

If arena.net is going to start paying me a salary to grind up a legendary weapon I’ll be happy to ‘work’ for it.

Arena.net, you seem to have quite effectively destroyed the good will of hundreds of players, as well was taught everyone that the #1 takeaway from this event is:

Never, under any circumstances, buy keys from the gem store

I have to think that was not the intended goal. So let’s look at what went wrong.

First of all, let’s dismiss the silly argument that the drop rate should be low because these are supposed to be ‘rare’ and ‘unique’ items. Hogwash. Nothing bought with cash is rare or unique or in anyway deserving of ‘legendary’ status. The same goes, only more so, for items that you got randomly out of a bag without having to accomplish anything.

If you want items to be rare, you make them hard to obtain. You don’t make them trivially easy for some people to obtain and almost impossible for everyone else to obtain. Moreover, what made you think that having halloween costumes be a ‘rare drop’ on halloween was going to be a popular decision?

People don’t like feeling as though they have been screwed over by the RNG. There is nothing they can do to combat the RNG. People hate feeling as though they dropped $50 on your game and got nothing to show for it. You seem to have quite effectively convinced many people who were previously quite happy to spend $$ on this game to never give you another dime.

Always reward the players with some tangible progress towards their goal

You handled this all wrong. Instead of getting a full costume out of a bag 1% of the time, you should have gotten random components for crafting a costume out of EACH bag. The former plan means someone can buy 100 chests and be screwed by bad luck out of getting anything. The latter means everyone who buys chests is happy.

Additionally, you should have just put the costumes available outright in the gem store for, say, $3-$5 each. League of legends, another F2P game, routinely introduces new holiday/special skins, and that’s about what they go for.

Occasionally they’ll introduce a really legendary skin which I think goes for about $20.

These are all guarantees, by the way. You give them your money, you get a skin. Most people are quite happy with this arrangement.

The way you guys at arena.net are quite happy to soak some poor soul for $50 and give him literally nothing in exchange makes you look like the worst sort of soulless money grubbers. I don’t think that’s what you are, but appearances matter.

If a person dropped $20 on gems to by keys, the odds that they pull out at least one costume should be pretty astronomically high. I’d say that should be the case for even $10.

It’s all a question of where you draw the line. People expect things like this in the microtransaction model, but you have to price things appropriately. If you offer horse armor for $1, people will happily buy it. If you offer it for $100 people think you’re selfish exploitative kitten.

Server transfers cause ridiculously imbalanced matches.

Imbalanced matches combined with snowball mechanics cause people to quit WvW.

I want to say yes.

Probably the best matches would be just a couple days.

On FA last night we didn’t have queues for anything anywhere :p

Still had some fun in FA BL and EBG!

The culling issues seem like the biggest factor in zerg clashes. Sometimes our whole zerg drops and I don’t even know why until 45s later when 50 TC render on my head, sometimes we plow into their zerg and they are uncharacteristically easy kills, which I assume means we aren’t rendering for them.

I had fun defending the smoking ruins of durios (getting trebbed pretty fierce from SM) with one other person against small groups of TC. We were basically defending a gateless/wall less tower :p

The only reason these ‘tactics’ exist is because of the rendering issue.

And you say you want the rendering issue fixed…which removes these as tactics.

I’m not sure how much of a benefit this would provide…and they’d have to accept they invite, wouldn’t they?

Thank you for the communication and update, Matt.

Happy to know the culling issue has a priority.

How do you measure fighting spirit?

Are you looking for a server that never gets blown out by 400k points because they keep showing up and fighting?

There are die hards on every server that will keep going out and fighting no matter the score – but every server I’ve seen basically, as a whole, gives up when the opponents takes all 3 orbs and a modest lead.

That is the only way in which 400k point blowouts happen, and those blowouts happened all up and down the rankings last week.

If you’re looking for a server which maintains the same level of population, presence, and enthusiasm all week as they did Friday night when they thought they could still win, I don’t think there are any.

Come from behind wins are very very rare.

His system doesn’t penalize oceanic players. It makes a players contribution (points earned) proportional to the difficulty of earning those points (enemy players contesting)

Currently a player who can play when no one else is around and can go easily cap stuff unopposed is vastly more rewarded for his time than someone who can only play when lots of enemies are around – and this goes against the stated goal of the GW2 dev team, of making sure that one player’s time is not worth more than another’s.

Players should receive a unique, useable, USEFUL weapon for defeating Zhaitan.

Not something that is going to be thrown into a vendor/msytic forge at the first opportunity.

You should absolutely get a token for an exotic weapon at the end of the storyline. An exotic weapon isn’t even as impressive as it used to be – you can buy dozens on the TP for less than 2 gold.

Being given a rare for defeating an elder dragon, one of the greatest threats to face the world ever, is just ridiculously insulting.

I can go kill one of a million random zombie pirates in orr and get equally good loot.

Knyx.5926:

You are not getting 3 shotted if you had retaliation up against a burst thief

You obviously do not know how retaliation works.

It doesn’t reduce incoming damage at all.

It reflects a set amount of damage that scales on your power. So it’s pretty useless for combating several big punches like a backstab build uses.

“I dont remember the last time i died to heart seaker, roll one, if you have a shield block the other, you may get hit with one, but they can only spam it 3 times in a row far as i know?”

I can do about 7 HS in a row. I think I could do more, but almost nothing lives through 7 HS for me to find out.

Snido.4827:

Servers are getting more organized so I can seriously see a point where server A is up by an amount and organizes it such that they don’t login to wvw so the multiplier kicks in and the opposing teams can’t score enough to win.

An easy fix to this is to look at server population as opposed to WvW population.

Or, heck, don’t apply the penalty to servers that are currently a certain percentage behind.

Will there still be anyone left playing the game or doing WvW when it is fixed?

There are a million ways to spend your free time out there, and even if you look at only the sphere of videogames, there are many, many, top flight competitors out now or very soon.

This looks like as thrilling a match for BG as last week’s was. Another easy 400k+ lead blowout.

What’s worse is that ET and HoD are virtual ghost towns now, as all the WvW guilds transferred off of them. So now they get to be destroyed in WvW for a month or two as they slowly sink through the rankings to where they should be with their new population.

Until transfers are stopped, it looks very much like WvW is going to be an endless cycle of newly overpopulated servers, bursting with transfers, effortlessly rocketing up past old empty servers that everyone has transferred off of, sinking down to the bottom.

I’m not going to name any names, but the individual who hacked the orbs is a well known hacker who transfers from server to server…has been going on for weeks and arena.net hasn’t done a thing about it. Hell, the face he hacks is even identified in his name…

Orb hacking is absolutely rampant, and has been for weeks. Arena.net should have disabled the orbs ages to until they could sort it out. Not only are the buffs a poorly thought out snowball mechanic that makes the winners win harder, they are easily hackable by one unscrupulous person from another server who has the power to ruin wuvwuv enjoyment for thousands of people on two other servers. We’ve had orbs hacked away from us in at least three different matchups and it really sucks. I’m sorry it happened to you.

I saw calls for FA to not defend the exploited orb in the other thread. It’s almost certain no one there even knew the orb was exploited. As you saw Friday night, we do turn out to defend our orbs seriously The information provided to players in game is not enough for them to know the orb was hacked. Also if the orb is placed in a keep we took and held legitimately, absolutely I think it’s reasonable for people to keep defending the keep and not just hand over one of the few fortifications we’ve managed to retain.

I’d make a different plea: if you are the winning server and an orb gets hacked away from you – let it go. You’ll probably get much better competition when your zergs aren’t rolling around with all those extra stats compared to your competition. Do you really need to imbalance things even further?

Of course the primary party that needs to change their behavior here is arena.net.

orb hacking is utterly; rampant. They should have disabled the orbs ages ago until they could prevent the hacks.