Guild Wars 2

Blude.6812:

Mirta.5029:

Zenguy, I’m sure that this question belongs in your email conversation with customer support.

Actually not. They are legitimate concerns/questions and the rules need to be clearly stated.

Thanks, Blude.

Mirta, I laughed when I saw your post. FYI, I’m infraction free and like to keep it that way even (or especially) when discussing more contentious areas of the game. Fortunately, the evolution of Anet and its moderators’ approach to these forums is making that a lot easier.

Thanks.

Forgot to say first time round: I’m really appreciating the changes Anet is making to the way it’s handling these forums and interacting with this community.

Thanks, Anet – a move in the right direction.

Martin Kerstein.3071

But we will draw a line when posts include personal attacks on members of the studio (yes, “cleverly” disguised ones as well).

I thoroughly agree with banning personal attacks- they have no place in these forums (or any civilised discussion for that matter).

However, clarification is required regarding what does or does not constitute a “cleverly disguised” personal attack.

This clarification is needed because “cleverly disguised” is a very open ended phrase and, while the quality of moderation on these forms has typically been very high, there has also been a pattern of overzealous moderation of critical posts and threads which over-interpretation of this phrase could continue.

In particular, for the avoidance of doubt please advise which of the following are or are not acceptable on these forums:

• Criticism of Anet in general
• Criticism of changes being made (or not made) in an area of the game for which Anet has an identifiable developer or team
• Criticism of the quality of work Anet are doing in an area of the game for which Anet has an identifiable developer or team
• Criticism of the processes Anet, its teams or developers use to design and/or implement changes to GW2

(I’ve used the word ‘criticism’ in the above instances, because it is posts of a critical nature or tone that are most likely to be (mis-?) interpreted as personal attacks.)

P.s. I’ve posted this in the GW2 General Forum as it’s not clear where else this should belong.

Bumping this thread so Anet can read it with their Collaborative Development glasses on.

DevonCarver.5370:

The rewards for finishing 2nd in the Bronze League will be markedly better than the rewards for finishing 6th in the Gold league.

Svarty.8019:

Changing the final rewards won’t do it, you need a dynamic system which incentivises the two losing sides to attack whoever is leading at any given time.

^This

This isn’t going away – Remove the stat boosts from Bloodlust!

TLDR: Match-ups will only improve when the imbalance between servers is reduced.

It doesn’t matter how you shuffle the servers, the difference in WvW effectiveness between servers is too great to produce good match-ups.

The best match-up system was the tier system that matched adjacent servers on the ladder. However, the ladder was so static that those match-ups became repetitive.

The problem is that there is too much variation in the WvW effectiveness of servers (i.e. the ladder is too steep), with the following consequences:

• Match-ups rarely produce a change in position of a server.
  (This is because the WvW effectiveness of a server rarely changes enough to alter its position on the ladder. The exception to this is when WvW heavy guilds deliberately stack or leave a server – which only shows that stacking by dedicated WvW players is the biggest influence on server effectiveness.)
• Match-ups that span more than three rungs of the ladder become blow-outs – this discourages WvW participation on the weaker servers further exaggerating the match-up imbalance.

Anet seem to be hoping the new League rewards will be the incentive that starts to level out the servers. Unfortunately, Anet have announced rewards that will increase the effectiveness of winning servers and in doing so further exaggerate the gaps between rungs on the ladder. This seems destined to aggravate the problem of bad match-ups rather than help it (the only exception is likely to be where dedicated WvW guilds have chosen to stack on a different server.)

For there to be any hope of good and varied match-ups the imbalances between servers need to be reduced. Fortunately, transfers by WvW player have shown that it is possible to purposefully alter the WvW effectiveness of servers, so Anet just need to encourages transfers that reduce the WvW differences between servers, which will in turn improve the quality of match-ups.

sostronk.8167:

It doesn’t hold up against organized guild in T1. It holds up against mixed PUG groups, but not against decent guilds running set compositions. Its been falling off for some time. There are still guilds in T1 who aim for this as a composition in their guild, but they are months behind the stronger guilds and get wiped accordingly. Using heavies is still ok, a frontline is useful OFC, but melee trains melt eventually.

The more we hear, the more it sounds like T1 works completely differently from the rest of WvW, which means you need to pick your class/build depending on whether or not you’re in T1 (or your server is organised enough to compete against T1 – the majority aren’t).

insanemaniac.2456:

these questions need answers

^This

Lord Kuru.3685:

Anyway, if you’re just a casual WvW player you’re pretty much screwed. Those who play more than you are gonna leave you way behind in abilities.

Sad, but true.

gennyt.3428:

How are the ruins nice against blob power? They give you a spot to maybe move around the zerg, that’s it. While you’re sitting in a circle getting nothing but probably a sporadic ganking, they’re sitting in other circles inside your towers and keep and getting sweet loot too. It doesn’t stop the zerg, it doesn’t even slow them down lol.

^This

Alacrity.4312:

maybe they will res you?

I’m sure this has been patched by now, but still one of the funniest WvW clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EUIIkwP2eU

ROFL

My guess is they don’t show the enemies HPs because they can change when an event scales up. Can just see the complaints in chat if it wasn’t this way “We had it down to just 90,000 HP and then you all showed up!!!”

chemiclord.3978:

Again, players need only look at themselves when assigning blame for this.

A constant gripe was that a realm would wind up playing the same two realms week after week after week after week (I dunno how much kittening I heard in Tarnished Coast along the lines of “Fort Aspenwood and Dragonbrand? AGAIN? That’s like ten weeks in a row!”

Yet again… an example of Arena.net “not caring” is really a player-side problem.

Incorrect.

If someone designs and builds a plane that’s very difficult to fly, whose fault is it when the plane crashes? The pilot’s? Or the people who designed the plane?

WvW is like that. Blaming the players for the massive imbalances between servers is a cop out that ignores the design features that exaggerate those imbalances and takes attention away from things that could start to reduce the differences between servers.

WvW needs the differences between servers reduced, and Anet can do far more about that than simply hope that this disorganised community of mainly casual players will somehow magically solve that problem for them. It will be far easier for Anet to make the WvW plane much easier to fly than it will be to turn the GW2 players into the communal equivalent of master pilots.

This will work when people can chose a different WvW server from their PvE server.

Zephyrus.9680:

That’s the illusion of competitiveness Anet wants you to believe. But actually it’s not that you ‘probably’ wont win. You won’t period. There might be 1 or 2 servers that are so close in population it could go either way with their two particular slots but otherwise everything is 100% predetermined before the season even starts. The statistics are already set, the season is just playing them out.

The issue isn’t that leagues will ruin WvW or anything. It’s that they’re trying to build something competitive on a foundation that is fundamentally and completely noncompetitive. It’s that they’re sort of an epic joke or pun on competitiveness.

If they wanted to fix up PPT and 1v1v1 dynamics to make things competitive, cool; but they don’t. Building leagues on a currently meaningless system is a complete joke.

Well said.

The test will be the extent to which the rankings change over the course of the League. If the only changes are a small number of single place adjustments and a couple of lower placed servers that race up the league because they got stacked by ex-T1 guilds, then the league will have truly failed. Still, we get 7 weeks to see how it plays out.

Roe.3679:

Again, servers were stacked months before there were even decent rewards for WvW. So I this whole reward argument is null and void.

First sentence = correct.
Second sentence = incorrect.

The stacking on servers is a direct and natural consequence of the way personal WvW rewards increase when running with more people. This applies at both the map and the server level. This is the reason why server staking occurred in the first place – the latest rewards announcement simply aggravated the already existing problem.

It seems there is a major disconnect between the level of organisation Anet expect from the WvW community (i.e. that players will collectively organise themselves in ways that make WvW most enjoyable) and the level of organisation that actually exists (i.e. most players are casual WvW’ers as are most most guilds). Either that or Anet do appreciate the low level of WvW organisation overall but simply haven’t thought through the implications of that through when making changes.

The leagues seem to be predicated around the idea that if Anet provide good enough rewards for winning then the whole WvW community will get organised to take advantage of that. Unfortunately this overlooks the far simpler solution that the already organised will reap the benefits and the disorganized will find it easier to do something else (all those empty maps in unbalanced match-ups).

Anet clearly care about WvW but don’t seem to have realised that it is far easier to change the game than it is to change the people.

Does Anet care enough about WvW to start understanding the psychology of their player base and adapt WvW to work successfully with that ? They’re not look good on this one atm.

Roe.3679:

Players are just as guilty of creating stacked servers.

Not true.

Individual players are making transfer decisions that make sense as an individual. Guilds are making transfer decision that make sense for the guild. On its own an individual or guild transfer is not enough to cause the stacking imbalance that is plaguing WvW.

The problem is that, because of the way WvW rewards are distributed and obtained, it makes sense for individuals and guilds to stack on a small number of servers (even guilds that transfer out of T1 would be far better off stacking on a couple of lower tier servers than spreading out evenly). This is why the announcement of greater rewards for League winners has lead directly to increase in stacking on the T1 servers – the people are just playing the game the way it is designed. (I can only assume Anet either didn’t think this through or don’t care about the impact of the stacking – either way it’s not a good look for Anet.)

TLDR: Server stacking is a direct result of the way WvW rewards are designed. Change the rewards and the stacking will change.

I like the philosophy of this except that, on its own, growing the WvW population is unlikely to:

• improve WvW as a game mode – it is far more likely to produce more zergs and more lag.
• change Anet’s perception of WvW – Anet take participation as evidence of success, and Anet have stated that WvW is now ready to be run it as the ongoing league it was always intended to be.

DevonCarver.5370:

The rewards for finishing 2nd in the Bronze League will be markedly better than the rewards for finishing 6th in the Gold league.

This begs the question: How is being in the Gold Leagues going to benefit the #4-6 servers that don’t have a chance of placing in the top 3?

There is no WvW population cap, only a PvE one.

e.g. As one of the most popular PvE servers, TC (rank #4 NA) can be harder to get into than the T1 servers, even though it has a much lower WvW population.

This is why WvW and PvE servers need to be separated because without that there is no way to start balancing WvW populations.

There’s a sticky on this subject.

Nothing beats zerging for rewards, which is one of the two major reasons why people zerg (the other is it’s the safest way to WvW). So we need things like this that make non-zerg activities more rewarding if there is to be any hope of breaking up the zerg meta in WvW.

I like the idea.

Glitchfull.5826:

Edit: Added a vote portion information

You’ll need to remove that again as petition threads are not allowed on the forums.
(Does that mean my support for your idea breaches forum rules? Or is it ok because I used text and not simply ‘+’? Or… Heck, I don’t know, I just think it’s a fun idea.)

Rackhir Tanelorn.9123:

The idea in Zenguy’s post is you stay (or go) to whatever PvE Server you want for that, and then separately also choose a WvW Server Allegiance for Matches. There would be fewer WvW Servers than PvE Servers and the idea is to keep them all better populated/balanced.

Thanks for that summary, Rackhir.

Yaro.3251:

OK so my main is 314 WvW rank and 39 fractal lvl. Where should I go?

A: nowhere.
You have a PvE server which you would remain on. You have a WvW server which you would also remain on. If you are on a server with a low WvW population, then your WvW server may be merged with another low population WvW server to bring it up to a more competitive population level.

After that, if you change PvE server that would not affect your WvW server, and if you change WvW server that would not affect your PvE server.

FearedbytheGods.8617:

WvW is ‘supposed’ to be unbalanced.

People keep posting this as if it is gospel. Why?
Why is WvW supposed to be unbalanced’?

Sure, WvW will never attain the levels of balance that sPvP aspires to, nor would we want it to (the constraints that would impose on WvW wouldn’t be worth it).

But equally, we don’t want WvW to have too little balance because that leads to too many bad match-ups – and who wants that?
FYI, we have lots of bad match-ups at a time when the mantra has become “WvW is supposed to be unbalanced.” – Coincidence?

It’s time the mantra changed to “We need an appropriate level of balance in WvW, because that’s what it will take to get better match-ups more of the time."

DevonCarver.5370:

3) The buff is something we will continue to think about. There are alternative frameworks for the buff that I think we will at least look into.

This was two weeks ago and is the only indication that Anet are giving any consideration (however small) to alternatives to the bloodlust buff.

8 days ago Devon Cater posted this (in a thread about the upcoming WvW league):

To head it off at the pass, there have not been drastically declining WvW numbers, or even marginally declining numbers. WvW continues to be as strong as it has been over the past several months. We made some decisions internally and were able to accommodate changes that it didn’t seem feasibly originally and that’s why the changes that are going to be announced later this week happened.

None of the announcements since then have related to the bloodlust buff.

Anet have made a number of posts indicating they base the success or otherwise of content changes on participation in that content. Given that WvW participation has not dropped since the introduction of the Bloodlust buff, Anet have most likely assumed that the buff is in fact fine and that our complaints about it are mere noise.

What’s missing from this is consideration as to why, after introducing all that new WvW content, there has been so little change in WvW participation (Devon would surely have said if WvW participation had gone up). Either the new content was a waste of time or there was something in that content that is undermining its value.

Right now, Anet seem myopically focussed on increasing rewards for the winners/leaders as their way of improve participation in WvW (if we offer big enough rewards the leagues will be successful). More nuanced approaches, such as improving the commander system (to make it easier to organise players on the map) or removing unbalancing buffs, do not seem to be on their radar. I look forward to the day when they are.

One key, one function. If you have one key that sends “Water fields now!” in chat, that would be one function, because all it’s doing is one single chat comment.

Now if it sent “Water fields now!” in chat and then triggered your weapon’s blast skill, then that would be more than one function and potentially in conflict with the rules.

However, Anet’s concern over macros is far more likely to be about their potential use in bot farming, and not for basic combat. E.g. if macros were banned in combat then there probably wouldn’t be any Eng’s in the higher tiers of sPvP, because Engs require so many button presses that the more competitive ones rely on mouse macros for some of the longer or more timing dependent chains. The same may also apply to many of the stun chain Warriors in WvW.

Zenguy.6421:

-snip-

Nice overall conclusion. You forgot skill lagg and blobbing though.[/quote]
My bad. (It’s a worrying sign when problems become so ingrained we start to treat them as part of the furniture.)

Hexin.5603:

SUGGESTION:
Only way to promote not playing zerg style play is to REWARD other playstyles further.

^This

DevonCarver.5370:

The rewards for finishing 2nd in the Bronze League will be markedly better than the rewards for finishing 6th in the Gold league.

Good ideas, hints.
I’m not sure sure about the EB JP changes, but the rest are all very good.

That’s not fair, Anet have clearly been working on WvW . . . just not so much on things we want.

Somewhere along the way a Dev (Devon Carter, I think) stated that WvW battles are inevitably unbalanced [because there is nothing to ensure each side has the same number or level of characters present at the time of the battle].

This statement, which started life as an observation about individual battles in WvW, has somehow grown into an overarching strategy that is making WvW less and less enjoyable.

WvW is about a far bigger game than any single battle. So what if individuals battles in WvW are unequal – that’s just the natural ebb and flow war. Its far more important that the warring ‘nations’ are of comparable strength overall, because that’s what will make the conflict exciting.

WvW needs to become more balanced, rather than less balanced, overall.
Because the more balanced WvW is overall , the better and more exciting each match-up is going to be – and that’s what we want most of all.

The lack of personal rewards from the ruins means that they really are just another hot-join PvP arena for those that play in them. The only exception would be those few organised guilds which pay for a team to cap/hold the bloodlust buff – but that would be uncommon outside of T1.

Conclusion: nice idea in theory, but not successful in the reality of WvW.

WvWvW’s 3 server system fails because the way WvW scores, the weakest servers is effectively the ‘rally bait’ for the middle server. Add that there is no in-game support for alliances between servers and players from the other two servers are virtually indistinguishable in combat (identical colored tags), and the potential of the 3 sever system never gets realised.

Solutions:

1. Change the scoring system to reward taking on the stronger server
2. Make the enemy tags for the two opposing servers different colors

Here’s a suggestion for making match-ups better: reduce the population differences between WvW servers.

How?

1. Unhook the one-to-one link between PvE and WvW servers
   (required for #2)
2. Combine the low population WvW servers onto a smaller numbers of servers
3. Cap WvW server population at the highest WvW population
   (players cannot join or transfer to a full WvW server)
4. Make it free to join or transfer to a WvW server with below average population

The result: fewer WvW servers but with more even and therefore more competitive populations = more successful match-ups.

Narrenbart.5182:

I am burned out playing my Guardian atm, to play one of my alts is so depressing cause I would start at wxp Level1.
In fact since char bound WXP Level came out I didn’t touch any of my other 7 level 80 alts. Cause of the WvW Queue is just allowing me to enter with the active char.

Would love to play something like Engi in WvW but everytime I open the WvW window it’s a slap in the face.

regards
a sad Player

If experienced WvW’ers have this problem with their Alts, imagine what it must be like for people new to WvW!

Solution:

1. Unhook the one-to-one link between PvE and WvW servers
   (required for #2)
2. Combine the low population WvW servers onto a smaller numbers of servers
3. Cap WvW server population at the highest WvW population
   (players cannot join or transfer to a full WvW server)
4. Make it free to join or transfer to a WvW server with below average population

This will result in fewer WvW servers but with more even and therefore more competitive populations.

It’s not that Anet haven’t pay attention to these forums – they clearly have, as evidenced by the fact that they make changes that we’ve requested: e.g. gameplay that rewards multiple groups over monolithic zergs; more opportunities for roamers and small groups; new content in the WvW maps – all things we’ve been asking for.

The problem is Anet’s attention to these forums appears to stop once they’ve got ideas of areas where we want changes.

Once they’ve got a list of possible areas they then ignore anything about the priority or nature of the changes we want in those areas. Instead they pick some items off that list that could involve new content or addtional rewards and go off to develop those according to their own ideas, independent of any wisdom that the forums might have on the subject.

This is why ANet can deliver a poorly thought out WXP system, some map changes a buff we’ve been protesting about for months, and a premature league system while ignoring some of our top complaints (e.g. massive server/match-up imbalance, the broken party system, the stone age commander tags).

Cactus.2710:

DevonCarver.5370:

I’d just like to make a note of one thing that I think people aren’t considering when they transfer to stacked worlds. You will not, repeat will not, be able to receive the reward based on overall world place in the league, unless you achieve the meta achievement for the season. If you aren’t able to get into WvW much, you won’t get the rewards. So it is absolutely taking a risk to transfer to a world that has a large WvW population.

You really don’t get it, do you. The great majority of WvW’ers … at least the ones that have been playing it since launch … don’t (or at least didn’t) play it for “rewards”. We played it for an enjoyable and entertaining competition against other players in the context of medieval warfare involving equal measures of team strategy and individual player skill. You, or at least ANet, sold the game on that premise … minimal focus on gear and heavy focus on content. The great majority of what ANet has done in the meantime, however, and virtually everything that you (Devon) have personally done, has been contrary to that. You’ve taken the fun, excitement, and entertainment out of WvW and turned it into something to be endured. And you keep doing it over and over again.

+1 and this is from a player that only started playing WvW seriously part way though this year.

This is needed.

Kimhyuna.1035:

For point 3, people arnt going to waste the money just for meta.

And in doing doing so, drive the Leagues into even more of a train wreck than they’re headed for already. But Anet will get the transfer revenue, so that would be ok, right?

Personally, I hope Devon’s post really was just scaremongering.

(I put this in a separate thread, but it probably belongs in this thread with Devon’s post – Mods, please feel free to delete my other thread.)

DevonCarver.5370:

You will not, repeat will not, be able to receive the reward based on overall world place in the league, unless you achieve the meta achievement for the season. If you aren’t able to get into WvW much, you won’t get the rewards. So it is absolutely taking a risk to transfer to a world that has a large WvW population.

Now that’s an interesting twist. But has it been thought through properly?

Population dominates in WvW, so the most stacked servers are most likely to get the top rewards. But if players on those servers will miss out if they don’t get enough WvW time on their own server to get the achievement, then the following seem to be logical consequences:

1. Some players will miss out on the rewards due to queuing and be really kittened off.
   If Anet set the requirements to get the achievement above what would be normal WvW participation on a stacked server, then there are likely to kitten off a lot of WvW players, and not just on the dedicated WvW servers either. I really can’t see Anet setting the requirements that high, in which case all of this redundant and Devon’s post is mere scaremongering.
2. Players from stacked servers will spend more time playing in off-peak times (rather than miss out on the achievement) making it even harder for other servers to catch up.
   This seems inevitable if queuing on the most popular WvW servers really does get in the way of people on those servers getting the achievement.
3. Players on stacked servers will stay with their server until they have a clear lead then transfer to another server to get the achievement. While on the other server they will have a vested interest in making sure that server does not threaten their home server’s lead.
   This seems inevitable if queuing on the most stacked servers really does get in the way of people on those serves getting the achievement. This is the worst consequence overall, as it rewards both stacking on the top servers and distorting play on the less populated servers.

I hope Devon’s post really is just scaremongering, because if it’s not then what he’s talking about has the potential to make the leagues even more of a mess than they are headed for already.

p.s. Please point out any errors in the logic presented here and add anything that’s missing.

DevonCarver.5370:

You will not, repeat will not, be able to receive the reward based on overall world place in the league, unless you achieve the meta achievement for the season. If you aren’t able to get into WvW much, you won’t get the rewards. So it is absolutely taking a risk to transfer to a world that has a large WvW population.

Now that’s an interesting twist. But has it been thought through properly?

Population dominates in WvW, so the most stacked servers are most likely to get the top rewards. But if players on those servers will miss out if they don’t get enough WvW time on their own server to get the achievement, then the following seem to be logical consequences:

1. Some players will miss out on the rewards due to queuing and be really kittened off.
   If Anet set the requirements to get the achievement above what would be normal WvW participation on a stacked server, then there are likely to kitten off a lot of WvW players, and not just on the dedicated WvW servers either. I really can’t see Anet setting the requirements that high, in which case all of this redundant and Devon’s post is mere scaremongering.
2. Players from stacked servers will spend more time playing in off-peak times (rather than miss out on the achievement) making it even harder for other servers to catch up.
   This seems inevitable if queuing on the most popular WvW servers really does get in the way of people on those servers getting the achievement.
3. Players on stacked servers will stay with their server until they have a clear lead then transfer to another server to get the achievement. While on the other server they will have a vested interest in making sure that server does not threaten their home server’s lead.
   This seems inevitable if queuing on the most stacked servers really does get in the way of people on those serves getting the achievement. This is the worst consequence overall, as it rewards both stacking on the top servers and distorting play on the less populated servers.

I hope Devon’s post really is just scaremongering, because if it’s not then what he’s talking about has the potential to make the leagues even more of a mess than they are headed for already.

p.s. Please point out any errors in the logic presented here and add anything that’s missing.

Luvpie.8350:

Swamurabi.7890:

Johje Holan.4607:

AndrewSX.3794:

The only good and acceptable change to bloodlust is the removal of stat buff.

Period.

Such a simple statement. And spot on. This is really all that you need to know regarding the Bloodlust buff Devon.

Oh and while you’re changing things, change the way the leagues are scored to encourage 2v1 against the stronger server. Change it from 1st – 5pts, 2nd – 3pts, 3rd – 1pt. to winner take all. Winner 5pts, two losers 0pts.

Better if you put a map cap of 40 on the BL, 60 on EB and your own BL. That way nobody from stacked servers gets on AND they can’t get the requirements for the season rewards.

THIS. You need to reduce the number of players on a map till you fix skill lag issue. This will also cause kitten destack cuz of queue times. I suggest 25% reduction on player limit (100 to 75).

You know, that’s a darned good idea which would improve the playability and enjoyment of WvW overall.

. . . waits for the howls of outrage from the stacked T1 servers . . .

The idea of a crowded penalty is a great one because it would make large battles far more interesting.

The impact on enjoyment in larger fights may well be so great that even if it required cutting the AoE cap down to 4 to do this it would probably still be worth it.