Guild Wars 2

It’s really impressive how many servers and enjoyable matchups are ruined by server transferring.

I don’t think WvW will be anything other than a cesspool of idiotically imbalanced matchups until server transfers are ended.

The orbs also seem custom designed to let a single hacker ruin the morale of thousands of players on two other servers.

Superb post.

They need to do something about night capping because people waking up and realizing no matter how well they do in their primetime all their work will be undone and the lead server establish an insurmountable point lead while they are asleep kills participation in Wuvwuv, leading to the series of blowouts we’ve been seeing in every tier since wuvwuv released.

I also like the bonus system: right now, the game downright encourages the two weaker servers to fight each other: those are the easiest points to obtain and their opponent won’t have the orbs and you make it more likely you’ll end up in second instead of third place. Points held by the ‘winning’ team absolutely should be worth more to capture to encourage them to work together.

Implement both of your suggestions and switch the orb and outmanned bonuses, and we may be able to salvage wuvwuv yet. After transfers are closed, of course.

A few of us go out and fight for ‘fun’ no matter what the score looks like.

That doesn’t change the fact their wuvwuv system is flawed from basically the ground up and has created almost no good matchups that are actually good close fights where any server could win. Instead almost all we see are early decided blow outs.

Did you see the score last week? Every bracket that had population, basically, had one server in the lead with 400k+ points and all 3 orbs.

How is that a good system? And it’s been that way for weeks! It looks like that will happen again this week, not just to us, but to everyone.

And when the scores ARE close it’s just two servers trading off which one is absolutely dominant in their time zone – you can tell by the current ppt and who has all the orbs.

This is all arena.nets fault, not TC’s fault or FA’s fault or BG’s fault. They are the ones who continue to allow server destroying transfers left right and center, they are the ones who seemed to have designed the scoreboard to make it most likely to discourage people and make them lose hope by focusing so heavily on the orbs and overall score, and then making those things trivial to obtain in the night hours.

The goal of wuvwuv is to ‘win’ with your server and place #1. Most people don’t bother to participate in wuvwuv when they see that that is no longer possible. There’s no reason we couldn’t have a 3 way battle royale in primetime between FA/TC/DB every night except that people don’t show up. And they don’t show up because arena.net has told them it is hopeless. And it is! The battles in primetime would be fun but they would never let FA or DB overcome TC’s lead or off hours coverage.

So what’s left are the few die hards that enjoy PvP for its own sake, like myself, and are happy running around and killing zerglings even if it doesn’t move the score a single tick in the right direction.

But as a whole, the WvW system has failed utterly and comprehensively.

Just look at the scores: http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA

JQ/SBI/IOJ: 280/225/190
HOD/BG/ET: 15/675/5
CD/SOS/SOR: 120/130/445
TC/FA/DB: 675/15/5
MG/D/NS: 345/195/155
YB/GOM/SF: 680/0/15
EB/AR/BP: 500/130/65
FC/K/DR: 90/405/200

That’s 7 blowouts in a row.

Only in tier #1 is it remotely close.

Is that the end goal of WvW? You only get good competitive matchups on 3 out of 24 servers? That’s not going to maintain an engaged and happy playerbase.

This is why you just shouldn’t give classes stealth.

There are MANY builds that can solo kill a dolyak in just a few seconds.

It’s just that only one of those builds gets free stealth which, with culling, is basically a guaranteed dolyak kill before he even shows up on the defenders screens.

I feel like there’s almost no reason to try to build up a server community and establish your server in WvW until all the rampant bandwagonning transferring has stopped.

I’ve never seen a system designed to so effectively kill any sense of server identity, community, or cohesion.

You have huge numbers of NA players just transferring around to whichever server has a good off peak player presence.

Transfers are being used to stack ridiculous numbers of people on different servers and just destroy the matchups for 6 different servers at once.

It’s a rotating epidemic slowly and surely killing wuvwuv.

I’m bumping this thread after looking at the scores for the top 5-6 brackets last week.

Every. Single. One. was a 400k+ points blow out.

There are no good close fights in wuvwuv. Period. Your system has failed.

All these server transfers must be ended or it’s going to be an endless cycle of massively imbalanced matchups.

But that’s not enough. They also need to do something about nightcapping. It’s completely saps the will to fight hard all primetime, spending gold to buy upgrades and put down siege..then in the night the enemy server with the best nightcapping crew (which is TC this go around) simply walks around and retakes everything with no opposition.

So the next day all the money you spent is gone, your upgrades are gone, all the progress you made is gone, the enemy has ALL the orbs, and all their stuff is upgraded to the max and they have arrow carts everywhere.

The first time that happens, it seems to spell the end of the match, pretty much. People realize it’s pointless and they refuse to throw hard earned money down the whole. This seems to hold true across all servers, in all tiers, since the game’s release. I’ve only seen 5-6 exceptions, one of which happened on FA when we beat out SOS. They had all oceanic players we had all NA players. They’d cap everything when we went to bed, we’d cap everything when they went to bed. The score was close but the good fights were not there at all. We won only because some dedicated guilds got up early in the morning the last couple days and recapped some stuff earlier than we would normally have been able to.

Thrilling come from behind win , right? Not really. The entire FA/SOS matchup was boring as hell we hardly ever saw each other.

FA has a very good NA primetime crew – and almost no off hours coverage at all. If Arena.net doesn’t want such servers to just collapse and die, they need to fix their wuvwuv scoring system. We do very well in primetime, being competitive against everyone we’ve faced. Then we wake up the next day and everything we worked so hard for is gone. And then people stop showing up. This is arena.net’s fault, not the players fault. People work towards progress. If you are going to take away all the progress they make every time they log off, they are going to stop showing up.

24/7 coverage should not be a requirement to compete in wuvwuv. It should be skill based, not warm bodies in front of keyboards based. If you can’t beat a server in their primetime, you shouldn’t be able to beat them, period. There are only a certain number of people around who can play in the off hours time zone. Certainly not enough for all servers to have such a presence. So does that mean wuvwuv is just pointless on these other servers and they’ll be at the mercy of whichever sever they are bracketed against who does have some people who can run around nightcapping stuff? Apparently. So should we just give up on our server and leave? That doesn’t sound very fun. I like the community here and don’t feel like betraying them by leaving. Just resign ourselves to never winning wuvwuv? That also doesn’t sound very fun. Beg for oceanic guilds to tear up their roots and leave the servers they are on and come here? That’s horrible for the game. Every time mass transfers like that happen it throws all the rankings in chaos and leads to weeks of unfun matchups like that.
Right now servers move up in the tiers by getting more people. They should move up in the tiers by getting more skilled. The whole system is broken from top to bottom.

Points earned during primetime in the face of stiff enemy opposition should be worth about 10x as much as points earned when everyone is asleep. Why not scale points earned to current server population?

Is this how we envision the end game of wuvwuv playing out? All the NA guilds transferring en masse to whichever server happens to have good oceanic presence, and destroying the matchups for their previous server and their new server, in a never ending cycle of kitteny wuvwuv matchups that drive hundreds of players from the game? Because that is what is happening. And it will continue to happen until arena.net does something about nightcapping.

Your balancing system for wuvwuv can’t revolve around people transferring en masse from server to server, chasing whichever guilds are viewed as currently winning. That destroys server community’s, throws matches into completely lopsided stompiness, and plays havoc with queue times.

Scorpio Shirica.1286:

It’s the players, not the game. We TC’ers fought against BG at night

No you didn’t. You lost by 300k+ points. That is not fighting BG. That is getting rolled by BG. BG effortlessly destroyed both our servers. Saying ‘we kept fighting!’ is meaningless when you never, ever, had a chance of winning.

If you have no chance of winning, is it really a fight?

I have no doubt that small groups of TC ran out and killed BG and flipped camps and towers and had fun, just like small groups of us on FA did. But in terms of having an impact on the overall war effort, both our small groups and your small groups did jack squat.

They also need to do something about nightcapping. It’s completely saps the will to fight hard all primetime, spending gold to buy upgrades and put down siege..then in the night the enemy server with the best nightcapping crew (which is TC this go around) simply walks around and retakes everything with no opposition.

So the next day all the money you spent is gone, your upgrades are gone, all the progress you made is gone, the enemy has ALL the orbs, and all their stuff is upgraded to the max and they have arrow carts everywhere.

The first time that happens, it seems to spell the end of the match, pretty much. People realize it’s pointless and they refuse to throw hard earned money down the whole. This seems to hold true across all servers, in all tiers, since the game’s release. I’ve only seen 5-6 exceptions, one of which happened on FA when we beat out SOS. They had all oceanic players we had all NA players. They’d cap everything when we went to bed, we’d cap everything when they went to bed. The score was close but the good fights were not there at all. We won only because some dedicated guilds got up early in the morning the last couple days and recapped some stuff earlier than we would normally have been able to.

Thrilling come from behind win , right? Not really. The entire FA/SOS matchup was boring as hell we hardly ever saw each other.

FA has a very good NA primetime crew – and almost no off hours coverage at all. If Arena.net doesn’t want such servers to just collapse and die, they need to fix their wuvwuv scoring system. We do very well in primetime, being competitive against everyone we’ve faced. Then we wake up the next day and everything we worked so hard for is gone. And then people stop showing up. This is arena.net’s fault, not the players fault. People work towards progress. If you are going to take away all the progress they make every time they log off, they are going to stop showing up.

24/7 coverage should not be a requirement to compete in wuvwuv. It should be skill based, not warm bodies in front of keyboards based. If you can’t beat a server in their primetime, you shouldn’t be able to beat them, period. There are only a certain number of people around who can play in the off hours time zone. Certainly not enough for all servers to have such a presence. So does that mean wuvwuv is just pointless on these other servers and they’ll be at the mercy of whichever sever they are bracketed against who does have some people who can run around nightcapping stuff? Apparently. So should we just give up on our server and leave? That doesn’t sound very fun. I like the community here and don’t feel like betraying them by leaving. Just resign ourselves to never winning wuvwuv? That also doesn’t sound very fun. Beg for oceanic guilds to tear up their roots and leave the servers they are on and come here? That’s horrible for the game. Every time mass transfers like that happen it throws all the rankings in chaos and leads to weeks of unfun matchups like that.

Right now servers move up in the tiers by getting more people. They should move up in the tiers by getting more skilled. The whole system is broken from top to bottom.

Points earned during primetime in the face of stiff enemy opposition should be worth about 10x as much as points earned when everyone is asleep.

Is this how we envision the end game of wuvwuv playing out? All the NA guilds transferring en masse to whichever server happens to have good oceanic presence, and destroying the matchups for their previous server and their new server, in a never ending cycle of kitteny wuvwuv matchups that drive hundreds of players from the game? Because that is what is happening. And it will continue to happen until arena.net does something about nightcapping.

Just how broken is wuvwuv? Blackgate is dominating its two servers even more harshly than it beat TC/FA last week – and they are supposedly up against better servers this time around.

I played Friday night and it was a blast. All three servers in close competition, stiff fighting all around. FA was (narrowly) in the lead when I logged off Friday night, each realm had one orb.

Looked every bit like the promising, well balanced, fun matchup we were hoping for.

Couldn’t play at all Saturday due to being out of town. Log on Sunday afternoon and TC owns EVERYTHING. FA has like one supply camp and DB has literally nothing.

TC also has 3 orbs. Ooook then.

What happened? I don’t even know. Pop my head into a couple of the zones to see if there is scope for retaking and there are ginormous TC zergs running around and no presence from FA/DB at all.

At this point I have to realize that WuvWuv is fundamentally broken. As soon as one server gets ahead and gets all 3 orbs, the other servers just seem to give up. This is true across all servers and all tiers.

Last week, every single bracket in the top 5 tiers was a lopsided 400k+ lead blowout. There are no good matches in wuvwuv, none. There won’t be any until server transfers stop, but even then, a serious mechanics change is needed. The orb bonus is absurdly ridiculous and needs to go. They need to find ways to teach people that the lopsided score doesn’t matter you can still go out and win and have fun.

As it is it seems like every bit of information they present to players is designed to discourage them from staging combebacks.

Arc.9374:

Mandatory classes and/or builds in the metagame ftw.

The game involves capturing and defending points. Therefore it is going to be mandatory to have some builds that deal damage and some builds that can withstand damage. Obviously.

Why are you irked that you have to have a bunker to win but not irked that you need to deal damage to win?

Two sides of the same coin as far as I’m concerned.

Eh? It’s a death sentence to use this against a good necro or mesmer.

Removing boons just makes classes that specialize in boon removal less useful, which is not a good idea.

I like how you’ll see entire teams of thieves and you still get told there’s not a problem with the class

It’s all glass cannon burst builds that are irked people don’t just keel over and die for them.

If there were no bunkers, there’d be no anti-bunkers, which generally are beaten by burst builds.

Essentially right now we have a rock, paper, scissors lineup and scissors is really angry about the existence of rock.

I did notice that lots of TC players were being uplevelled to 80. Still, didn’t see anything special at all out of BG’z omnipresent zerg. Groups of 6 TC were harder to take out than zergs of 15-20 BG, it felt like.

Given the huge influx of top tier guilds BG got from all the previous top rated servers, I’m sure there are lots of skilled PvP’ers on that server, however.

mangarrage.1062:

The fact is that server 2 and server 3 should be trying to win regardless if that means attacking server 1, 2 or 3 and if they are not doing that, it is not a game mechanics issue it is a server/player/commander issue plain and simple

This is an absurd and irrational idea.

Human beings are rational creatures, so your idea is fundamentally flawed.

Everyone (except you, apparently) is capable of realizing when a match is a blowout and they are not going to retake first place. At a certain point it becomes a mathematical impossibility take take first place, even if the leader abandoned the field and let the second place realm take every objective until the match ended.

At that point the logical and rational choice is to fight for second. I mean, what are they supposed to do, just give up and go home? Nope. They will continue to fight and will direct their energies in an intelligent and rational manner – which means securing second so that the week isn’t a total loss.

The best way to secure second is not to attack the leader, but to attack your weaker rival who is also fighting for second. This is undeniable mathematical fact.

Your response is that no one should fight for second, which shows a sublime ignorance of human nature. Systems that do not take human nature into account are bad systems.

I’m talking about primetime, obviously. Not nightcapping shenanigans.

Taking undefended stuff is not really ‘fighting’ in any case.

@mulch: if the lead server is the only one owning any objectives, the match is already effectively over, and the lead server will win with a huge lopsided advantage.

This comes into play when all three servers own some territory, but one server is in the lead and owns most of the territory.

@mangarrage You clearly don’t understand the designer’s intent behind the 3 way fight. Many other player’s don’t either. The reason it’s a 3 way fight instead of a 2 way or 4 way fight is specifically to allow the two weaker servers to ‘team up’ against the stronger server and impose a measure of self balance.

But that isn’t what happens, obviously, by looking at the score. I think every server in the game has been a victim of a blowout loss by this point, now that everyone has abandoned HoD.

Does that mean the ENTIRE POPULATION OF THE GAME should just stop playing, according to your idea?

The idea is that if one of the three servers gets too dominant, the two weaker servers will join forces against them.

This does not work, obviously, as evidenced by the lopsided scores on display all up and down the tiers for the entirety of WuvWuv’s history.

I believe that due to game mechanics, it will never work.

The incentive is very much for the two weaker servers to go after each other.

1. issue is the points issue. When one server opens up a giant lead over the others (which is easy to do with the snowball orb mechanics and night capping) the other two servers realize they will never overtake that lead. So, the two of them are essentially fighting for second. Now, what is the most efficient way to do this? To take points from the leader or to take points from the other guy fighting for second?

Obviously the best choice is to take points from the other guy fighting for second. They are worth twice what the points you take from the leader are worth. If you’re in 3rd and trying to close the gap, you are going to be ferociously attacking the #2 player.

The #2 player will then be ferociously fighting back to keep in #2, while the #1 server sits back and laughs.

The next issue is the orbs: the two weaker servers have an incentive to fight each other as opposed to the server with all three orbs, just because they are on a more even fighting ground. Also, keeps and towers owned by the weaker servers are less likely to be upgraded. It is much much easier to take an upgraded keep from a non orb forcebelonging to the weaker server than it is to take an upgraded keep from an orb buffed zerg belonging to the stronger server.

And of course, since WuvWuv is entirely numbers/time zone based at the moment, the leading server is basically guaranteed to have more people, making them an even less attractive target.

This teaming up of the two weaker sides worked in DAOC, but only because they had no tiers and no server rotations. What you had in your matchup was it. If you wanted to break the dominance of another server, you had to team up and go after the big guy. Going after the little guy had no benefit to you whatsoever.

This isn’t the case in GW2 – you have everything to gain by viciously attacking the other weaker server in WuvWuv and completely ignoring the strong server.

How to fix this? I’m not sure. You would need to completely change the points incentives.

Something like…

If the lead server’s score surpasses the other two server’s combined score, both other servers get dropped down a tier

I’m not saying that will work necessarily, just that it would provide the incentives for BOTH weaker servers to attack the stronger server and not each other.

Right now the incentives all point towards the two weaker servers tearing into each other.

Tarmon.6542:

@ those people who qq about stealth qq’ers I suggest you think about what combining the culling issue with stealth abuse plus adding in a speed hack would do. That is the real issue at hand. Not saying that happens in every instance, but when it does it is a real pain.

There are in fact perma stealth builds that use CnD every few seconds. That is a real issue.

The other real issue is that stealthed thieves prevent the capping of points – and that is the main issue being discussed here.

Usagi.4835:

@Vorpal I think it’s just a miscommunication issue tbh. The same thing has been happening in Toastie’s BL regarding working against BG. It doesn’t work for us because FA still attack us lol. I even used emotes to tell a group of FA I encountered that I wasn’t going to attack them and they still killed me ._.

Equally though, I’m not going to point fingers or anything but FA have been in our BLs, hitting our camps whilst we’re facing off against DB and then swooping into the bay keep with their zerg to try and cap it, even though we did all the hard work. In either case, you guys sure are annoying lol ^^

I’m not blaming TC for going after FA at all. In fact, the game encourages the two weaker servers to fight each other instead of the big guy. The incentives are all wrong.

In this specific, unusual case, I think it would benefit both TC and FA if TC’s score and FA’s score got closer together, but I realize this will not always be the case and not everyone will see it that way. So I don’t blame TC people for attacking FA – the idea that ‘the two weaker servers will gang up on the stronger server’ simply doesn’t work with the way the game is set up currently.

FA was making efforts tonight for a final push in our BL and in BG’s, hoping to show BG they can’t have it all their own way! We made quite a lot of progress. When we started in FA BL, I think FA literally owned not a single thing.

We retook our garrison, and then even dreaming bay and nabbed the orb, which ran out the north gate as some BG with golem showed up at the south gate. We fought a long battle with BG around south dreaming bay gate, once even pushing them back far enough to grab the supply camp. Eventually they layered the area in siege and we couldn’t put up enough of our own because TC was very assiduously attacking our supply camps (but not, apparently, BG’s). You’d think the two weaker servers would work together against the stronger, instead of the two stronger servers double teaming the weaker, but game mechanics actually encourage picking on the little guy so I don’t blame them at all.

We eventually lost DB after a nice long fight, then proceeded to have running battles with BG in between LV, arah’s, and DB. They’d get up to LV and get massacred by our siege then we’d go down to DB and get massacred by theirs and the cycle would repeat.

A good time was had by all, which just goes to show how misleading the score is. We didn’t make a dent in BG’s embarrassingly large lead, but at one point were almost doubling TC’s points, helping to close the gap between us. I really don’t want to be facing overpopulated server xfer dumping grounds like sea of sorrows or sanctum of rall next match up. If sanctum passes TC, then TC winds up with FA and DB in a bracket which I think would probably be fairly balanced.

FA can give BG a fight at least during our prime time, but only really in two of the zones. Ideally next match up we’ll all be sized up against opponents more our own level.

BGv2 has by far been the least classy server we’ve faced so far. BGv1 was good tough opponents. Not sure what changed.

I had such high hopes for WvWvW, as I loved the RvR in DAOC. It has mostly been a debacle, in every respect. From player culling, to all players going invisible, to rampant unrestrained hacking, to absurdly imbalanced matchups, it’s been a disaster. Far from being the most engaging and fun part of the game, it’s a huge turn off to vast swathes of players. You know you’ve failed when people prefer farming karma in Orr to actually playing WvW.

We haven’t had a good matchup yet. We went from roflstomping two servers that were clearly not in the right bracket, to being roflstomped because of mid match transfers, to winning because we were up against a server who wasn’t in our time zone and we played the player vs door game better than they did, to getting roflstomped because of, again, transfers and a huge population imbalance. Not one of these matches was engaging or fun.

WvW is dying. Entire servers are dying. You need to wake up and do something about it.

What is the goal fo WvWvW? To PvP and have fun.

This goal is utterly unmet in today’s WvWvW, which seems designed from the ground up to create the most unfun, lopsided nonsense I’ve ever seen.

There are no good matches in WvW

Every score I look at, one server is absolutely stomping the others. By ridiculous, absurd margins. Like, 4x as many points as the next closest server. Entire servers just give up on that aspect of the game because they just get rolled all the time.

Your matchmaking system is a total, complete, utter failure. Even two months after launch. Why? The foolish decision to allow all these server transfers. They completely break your model.

You should never, ever, have decided to start week long matchups while still allowing server transfers. And you should NEVER have allowed people to transfer from a less populated server to a more populated one. Anyone could have told you that would lead to relentless bandwagoning on the ‘winning’ server, and that is exactly what is happening.

Blackgate received a ton of transfers and is massacring their supposedly evenly matched opponents. Sea of Sorrows received a ton of transfers and is massacring their supposedly evenly matched opponents. Sanctum of Rall received a ton of transfers and is massacring their supposedly evenly matched opponents. Do you see a trend yet?

This is completely ruining WvW. People whose focus is WvW are just quitting your game and going off to play XCOM or Borderlands 2 and saying things like “Maybe I’ll be back once all the bullkitten is fixed”.

Victory in WvW is entirely non skill based

If you have more people you win, simple as that. This is due to the 5 player aoe cap mechanic, the downed/rezzing mechanic, and most importantly, player vs door. It’s extremely hard for a smaller force to win against a larger, thanks to rezzing, and it’s utterly impossible for a smaller server to win against a larger, because all that matters is how many people you have when the other server has gone to sleep. They can run around taking everything without opposition.

In the current state of WvW, victory is entirely, 100% determined by geographic coverage. That’s it. It doesn’t matter if you win all the fights, the enemy can just come along and take everything when you are asleep – and rack up huge points. Until you find some way to make the points gained in WvW related to skill, at least peripherally, many people are going to regard the whole thing as a huge joke.

WvW seems designed up to encourage snowballing and discourage the ‘losing’ servers

The way you present information to players is all wrong. You emphasis the total points, which is just a marker of who has more people awake at night, as indicated above, and bears zero relationship to which server is actually ‘winning’. When people see the points are incredibly far ahead – they feel discouraged and stop coming out.

You need to not show this information at all, or else prioritize the current score over the total score. The total score simply records what has happened in the past, the current score of ppt shows what is happening right now.

The orb bonuses are a terrible, terrible idea. That’s the #1 thing that seems to discourage people on the losing server from coming out: not only are you losing in score and outnumbered, but, man for man, the side with MORE PEOPLE is better than you thanks to the orb buffs! Far from tilting the playing field towards the people who are struggling, you stack the deck in favor the people who have already won. That’s part of what makes every battle so ridiculously lopsided – after an initial advantage, the other two servers just give up. You see this everywhere in just about every matchup. Late come from behind wins are an absolute rarity (and are usually due to server transfers)

This is such a horrendously bad idea. You should swap the orb and outmanned bonuses, or something like that. It wouldn’t hurt to reduce the repair fees of the outmanned side as well. The absolute epidemic of hacks leading to single hackers grabbing the orbs multiple times during a match up also doesn’t help matter.

BG is still roughly quadrupling the score of the next nearest server, I imagine.

klineshrike.9034:

We would not necessarilly HAVE to pass TC (although mathematically with 24 hours left we would only need to maintain 160 more points the whole time to do so) but simply drastically close the gap.

Things do reset late friday correct?

Well I will be on tonight and tomorrow to try to help make that happen, armed with siege blueprints!

Sanctum of Rall and Sea of Sorrows have both received buttloads of transfers and are effortlessly steamrolling their opposition.

If at all possible I would like to fight in a bracket without either of those servers in it. TC has been good this matchup. Last time we fought dragonbrand they were better than us, but it was still competitive. A TC-DB-FA matchup would probably be pretty good.

Fade.5904:

This thread is ridiculous
You change the thief in the microcosm that is sPvP and kill it for WvW and PvE.
Ive seen it happen in every MMO i can remember.
Stealth class gets nerfed because of PvP and in PvE the same players who called for the nerf wont entertain a stealth class in their group because ‘they bring nothing to the team’

This is why MMO’s should just stop having stealth classes. They are always absurdly overpowered for pvp (invisibility + huge spike damage) while generally not having much in the way of pve utility.

At least GW2’s thieves aren’t lacking in the utility department.

After playing a guardian, which does pretty terrible damage while downed, I was amazed at how much damage my thief deals while downed. It’s easily enough to guarantee a win in a fight between one enemy and one ally.

Bunker builds only beat poor glass cannon burst builds.

If you have an actual balanced team with good boon removal/ condition application, you can beat bunker builds.

If there were no bunkers, condition /boon manipulators would lose out to glass cannons and every team would just be 5 mobile burst classes.

The orb bonuses need to be changed. They are the #1 thing demotivating people from participating in wuvwuv on the losing servers.

People don’t like knowing they are going in at a huge disadvantage on a per person basis.

Haker.5067:

It would be fun to see TC vs FA vs SoS, that would be an amazingly even match, and a hell of a lot of fun XD.

Actually I hope that is not our matchup. I’ll happily play the gentlemen ton TC, but SoS has gained a metric kitten ton of people since we beat them last and are currently rolling all over maguuma and dragonbrand. It’s not even funny.

FA has a large presence and excellent commanders and coordination the EST evening prime time, after that, though the commanders and coordination remains, the numbers drop significantly. I think we’d just get nightcapped out if we fought SoS again.

Mysticforce.5096:

Tonight in FA BL had a rare case of FA and TC largely leaving each other alone while focusing on BG. Granted, this is mostly FA’s decision, as they pretty much ignored us even when we had a raiding team running all over their area stealing camps. I didn’t recall a single pitched battle with FA, while BG was under constant pressure, mostly from FA, and sometimes from TC.

We’ve been trying to help TC against BG on the theory that the two weaker servers need to team up against the stronger server. It might be tempting to go after the ‘easier’ points but I’d rather take on BG’s forces directly and keep them from having it all their own way.

We made an effort to get as many folks into the FA BL as we could, and even managed to get a queue! Like, a 30s queue, but still a queue. We had a lot more presence there than normal and had good fun battling back and forth with BG between LV, Arahs, and DB. We needed every soldier we could scrape up, and didn’t have any extras to chase down the TC raiding parties. Taking our supply camps really hurt us with the supply at LV but we felt we really shouldn’t go after you guys instead of BG.

We really wished the TC guys would have gone after the BG supply camps instead of our own supply camps, but instead they pretty much took our N supply camp every opportunity they got.

In other BL’s our FA guys would specifically target BG supply camps instead of TC supply camps to try to give you guys an edge in the fight.

Confirmed that this is not fixed after the forum maintenance. It seems to happen most often with the first and last pages of a multi page thread, though it can happen to any page.

Refreshing sometimes, but not always, fixes the problem.

Navigating back and forth between different pages in the thread sometimes, but not always, fixes the problem.

Observed in firefox and chrome.

That video does an excellent job of showing how the thief is the most grotesquely overpowered class in the game right now.

He goes in solo against a zerg of enemy players and manages to kill several of them, live, run away, and repeat the process. no other class can even come close to doing this.

It also gives the complete lie to people who claim that ‘the thief is squishy and will die to random aoes’.

he survived just fine in the middle of a hostile zerg for minutes on end.

The thief has the most burst damage of any class in the game paired with the highest survivability of any class in the game.

Note that many people in the zerg tried to swing their weapons at thin air in the hopes of hitting the thief, but he easily avoided them. Note also the aoe’s they threw down left and right to try to hit the stealthed thief, but he easily avoided those or just took the damage.

I thought CND required too much initiative to keep spamming like that – what build is he using?

sinister.9216:

One thing I must mention is the complete lack of good sportsmanship from FA. Yes, I know you’re getting beat. Badly. But its really no excuse to spam emotes at people. Yesterday I saw a group from FA with about 8-10 people in it. They pushed back the 5 BG people who were camping their spawn point. But the thing is, when they’d kill 1 person, the whole group would spam emotes like /laugh and they’d all jump and sit on the dead player.

Are you for real?

In every game like this, camping a spawn point is seen as a completely kitten move.

You deserve every insulting emote you get when you are spawn camping. There have been multiple complaints in this thread already about BG’s poor sportsmanship and taunts after running over TC and FA players with their omnipresent zerg, and if you are ALSO engaging in spawn camping it’s quite possible FA players have had enough with your rude, unsportsmanlike behavior.

There have been almost no rude emotes from opponents in all the previous matchups (maybe a couple from terrible sea of sorrows thieves) but now that we’re up against BG the number of such incidents is off the charts.

And you’re winning handily, so one would think you would be in a better mood. Server’s like maguuma displayed much more grace in defeat than blackgate has far in victory.

Body shot and head shot are indeed underwhelming, but the other abilities are quite nice.

scoobymode.1942:

I hate seeing them nerf the Thief with every patch also… I mean seriously, a Thief is supposed to be able to kill you within seconds, and supposed to be the most deadly class there is

All classes are supposed to be equally deadly.

No class should be killing another in 2-3 seconds. That’s just bad gameplay.

Currently MANY classes output too much damage and can drop people near instantly. That is bad design. The thief is merely the most egregious example. Does the thief’s damage need to be lowered? Yes, but so does the damage of other classes.

I have no idea what on earth you are talking about. If you think pve is hard for a thief you must literally have never equipped pistols.

Use dagger/ pistol. You can use 3 to endlessly jump out of range of a single enemy, or if you just want to play it lazy, drop the smokebomb continually for perma blind on the enemy.

Like…I can kill veterans two levels above me without getting hit once.

I feel like as a thief in spvp I could play to 90% of the effectiveness level of most other classes just using my nose. I tried the noob heartseeker spam build and tried to consciously play terribly (IE, not using cripple on people who were running outside of my range and just spam heartseeker. Blinded? still spam heartseeker. completely ignoring my own elite, never switching weapon sets, not trying to stay to peoples back and sides, etc). It was absurdly effective for the total lack of skill it takes. I would generally even heartseeker spam to kill people instead of using a finisher (this makes people extra angry)

Cloth classes just died. Elementalists dropped like a sack of bricks. (on a side note, elementalist downed skills work well in team fights but are useless 1v1) Mesmers would die once their bag of tricks was exhausted (as I have a mesmer, most of their tricks don’t phase me much). Necros had a chance, barely, and then only if they used their ultimate. Rangers dropped like a sack of bricks. Engineers were harder. Other thieves either dropped like a sack of bricks or dropped me like a sack of bricks. (There were some thieves out there playing the class properly, not using a noob heartseeker spam build, and they are much more effective) Warriors were quite tough. Guardians didn’t seem to have HP to really stand up to HS spam.

Heartseeker is completely spammable AND is a gap closer AND is a finisher. Oh and it hits quite hard too. When it’s hitting for 2k-4k, most targets are simply not going to outlive your initial burst of initiative.

And if they did? I just stealthed off came back a few seconds later when all their cooldowns were gone. I feel the HS stuff makes an atrociously badly played thief better than most other classes played to average proficiency. Sure skilled players can bust out all their tricks and moves and ‘win’ in the sense that I have to run away – but they are playing about ten times as well as I am. And they get a draw. That doesn’t seem very fair.

The hilarious part was all the cloth classes I mowed down with endless HS spam would say things like “You are bad learnto use another button” as I was finishing them off or “how many HS in a row was that, 7?” and I was all “I AGREE WITH YOU”. Then there was always the guy who mains a thief in the match who would try to defend them and say everything was fine

And that’s just the idiot noob build owning people. Imagine what I could do if I played a thief properly! Next up is the requiring only slightly more skill plan of steal – cnd – signet, backstab and THEN spam heartseeker.

I feel like the thief has a bit of an identity crisis. It’s trying to be a burst damage dump assassin class – which it is. While also being a hit and run class – but if you are going to have a hit and run class that can fade out of a bad fight and come back a few seconds later – it has to not have giant spikes of damage.

Thieves just do way too much damage. They are not the only class that does way too much damage. The crit backstab thief actually kills people much faster than spamming HS, but at least that takes SOME skill to pull off. Games are not fun when people are dying in 2-3s. There are several classes who do to much damage, the thief is simply the most egregious example.

Jedahs.2713:

Why are you guys even arguing?

SoS is winning because we have more people

I think some people hoped that success in wuvwuv might be skill based to some degree.

That is easier to say than do, however. As it is, yes, the servers with more people on more times will stomp all over the servers with fewer players.

With the culling delay as it is, there’s no reason for a thief to ever really die in wuvwuv as he can stealth for closer to 6s than 3s.

That said I’ve seen solo engineers and elementalists roaming about as well.

1. change is end free server transfers to higher ranked servers

followed very closely by

1. swap orb and outmanned bonuses

The problem of people not logging in once one server gets a big lead is universal to all servers.

Sure, each sever has smaller dedicated groups of people who go out and have fun rolling the enemy no matter what the scoreboard says (and I feel FA has better than most).

But for the majority of players, if the scoreboard looks hopeless, they just don’t show up to wuvwuv. At all. This is true across all servers which is why ALL the matchups are ALWAYS so lopsided. The lead servers doubling the score of the second and third place servers is the new normal.

FA coming from behind to win over SoS last match was more the exception to the rule, and happened only because some dedicated guilds started getting up very early in the morning to undo the SoS nightcapping in time for us to accrue some points.

The scoreboard, no matter how lopsided, doesn’t tell you who is winning at the moment or how much fun you’ll have in pvp. In a way that information mostly really harms players.

Giving those big orb buffs to the winning side is, however, an incredibly stupid design decision and one I hope they revert. They should switch the orb and outmanned buffs.

They also need to introduce something like realm ranks so even if you spend the evening ‘losing’ you can feel you made some progress towards advancing your character.

Sure, sure, there is karma and gold, but you can get those anywhere (and usually more efficiently in pve). wuvwuv needs a specific pvp only path of char advancement. The badges are trying to do that, but the absurd decision to make them drop on the ground means it’s really hard for classes that have to stay mobile or die to rack up badges while people who can sit back and use ranged can get lots.

The problem is that most of wuvwuv is set up to encourage snowballing (the ridiculous, insane orb bonuses)

It sounds like a bug that the golems disappeared upon server crash.

As such, arena.net should absolutely reimburse you the lost golems.

Bunkers are not the problem. Players who want to run around in glass cannon mode and never have to adopt tactics are the problems.

There are many classes that can wreak havoc with bunker builds (necro being the most easily learned). So then you have roamers, damage, bunkers, and anti-bunkers.

That sounds way more fun than 5 thieves running around in full glass cannon mode which is what the game would come down to with no bunkers.

80% of players in spvp matches seem to be thieves and mesmers. These two are head and shoulders above all other classes.

100B warriors are able to annihilate newb players, that’s about it. All the rest of the classes seem to be roughly even, with ranger’s seeming pretty darn weak by comparison.