Guild Wars 2

An obvious place to look for performance improvements would be buffs that simultaneously affect more than five players or that simultaneously affect players on more than one map. ;-)

The buff wasn’t needed.

What was needed was:

• fix the lag
• fix the party functions
• improve commander and grouping options
• make WvW as rewarding as PvE
• fix the disproportionate incentives to zerg
• . . .
  the list goes on

The buff was supposed to help with the fifth of those bullet points, but it doesn’t address the rewards imbalance (fighting in WvWs’ new PVP arena gives a very low reward rate).

So no, the buff was not needed.

The design of the buff mechanism seems to be a recipe for lag.

Even if the effect of the buff changes, the impact of the mechanism will still be there causing lag whenever the buff changes hands.

The performance impact alone is unacceptable for WvW play.

WvW may run as usual when the buff isn’t changing hands, but the moment it does change hands . . .

WvW needs less lag, not more. (IIRC, fixing lag was voted one of the top priorities for WvW players.)

(Please let me know of any errors in the following.)

The main sources of lag seem to be (in descending order):

1. The number of server calculations performed per tick
2. The number of server-client messages sent per tick
3. The complexity of each server calculations

Changes that reduce these are good for WvW; those that increase them are a bad for WvW. Changes that increase just one of these will degrade WvW performance. Any change that significantly increases two or more of these across a large proportion of the WvW population is likely to be very bad in terms of lag in WvW.

Put all this together and it makes a lot of sense for ANet to be working to eliminate or curtail features affecting the combat values of large numbers of players in WvW. (There’s a very good reason why AoE, conditions and boons are capped to 5 players.) The converse of this also applies.

Applying this to our current situation, it looks like Anet are going to have to find an awful lot of performance from somewhere if they want the bloodlust buff (or any version thereof) to survive. The obvious way to get this performance is by significantly reducing the volume of condition and boon calculations. However there are problems there:

• The majority of condition and boon stacks are small, which means the maximum number of stacks will need to be cut to fraction of their current level to make a material difference to performance
• Cutting condition and boon stacking to that great an extent is likely to have marked and potentially unanticipated impacts on the dynamics of GW2 combat

The Bloodlust boon may turn out to have a far greater impact on GW2 than Anet anticipated.

The buff can change so fast you can gain or lose it in the middle of a fight = more unnecessary RNG in combat.

Not being a PvP’er, this patch has made roaming in WvW less enjoyable for me.

I main an Eng in PvE which I use for late night roaming in WvW in the BLs. However, I’m far less inclined to do so now after this patch because:

• The changes have turned the bottom half of the Borderlands maps into a low reward PvP zone – if I wanted to PvP I wouldn’t be in WvW
• The buff is far too powerful and prone to changing in the middle of a fight – I want to know I won or lost a fight because of skill, not because someone on a different map stood in a giant’s toilet at the right/wrong time.
• Capping the buff is unrewarding and takes time away from more strategic activities
• Solo roaming on my Eng is too easy when we’ve got the buff and a waste of time when my enemies have.

I noticed that, too. I’ve only played a few hours in WvW since the patch, but the return was significantly lower than usual across the board (wxp, loot, etc).

Well played Engineers are not button mashers. Concert pianists, maybe. But definitely not button mashers.

If that’s the best comment your opponent could come up with . . .

It’s the nature of combat that’s different in WvW. Small scale PvP combats are a part of WvW, but people who get caught up doing that all the time aren’t necessarily doing their server a lot of good. (E.g. a classic role for roamers is baiting groups away from more important objectives.)

If the PvP’ers want to come out to the BLs and do their thing in the new WvW PvP arena, then good on them. But if that means my combat effectiveness (and of those I run with) is going to be going up and down like a yo-yo, then that’s a bad idea.

Why are you wasting your time alt-F4’ing?

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.

Posted about 10 hours ago.

I take it back:
Now that I’ve had more time to play in the new WvW environment my view is that I don’t like either the new locations or the buff.

• The new map areas are way too PvP (all there is to do there is PvP fight or squat in the middle of a giant toilet). If I wanted to PvP I’d go there and do that.
• Doing the rest of WvW with the buff was just weird. Having the outcomes of fights determined by flutters of activity on the other side of the world takes the fun out of it.
  (The group I was with kept running into the same two enemy groups. Sometimes we’d wipe the floor with them, sometimes they’d wipe us – it all came down to which of us had more of buff at the time. A couple of times the buff changed in the middle of a fight, and it was noticeable because suddenly we’d go from winning to losing or vica-versa.)

There’s a further problem:
The new WvW mechanism (maps/buff) is designed around a level of organisation that really only exists in the top 8 or so servers. (I’m on TC, which is (usually) the #4 NA server, and even here the level of organisation the updated WvW is designed for is patchy. )

I suppose the idea was that if ANet made the rewards good enough, then somehow the organisation required to properly utilise the new mechanism will somehow magically appear. The reality is that only the top tier of WvW is that way inclined. The rest of us seem to enjoy a more casual WvW than that.

scootshoot.6583:

Relentliss.2170:

If you made it buff supply instead of stats it would be very worthwhile.

7% more supply per area held on you Dolyaks and in your supply camps

Therefore, holding that buff will make the buff very tactical. Holding all 3 would allow you to fortify your Garrison or SM 21% faster.

This is actually a good idea.

Agreed

Separating WvW and PvE would ease the community issues.
It would also make it possible to (approximately) balance WvW servers.

That is a great change.

To be clear, the Roamer’s paradise is the new capture locations and mechanism, not the buff that’s given as a reward.

The buff itself hurts the majority of roamers in unbalanced match-ups (which is most of them).

Sandman.4192:

i know. but why aren’t they fixing it.

I don’t think they will fix it, and here’s why:

GW2 is an incredibly complex game which makes it very hard to identify all effects of changes before release. GW2 live, on the other hand, is a phenomenal test environment with an enormous pool of active testers – and it’s free!

ANet have to decide what’s the best way to use their resources. Do they put more resources into development, meaning they can develop more changes? Or put more resources into testing knowing that even then they can still only test a subset of the interactions within GW2? What if they used GW2 live as part of their testing cycle?

ANet have clearly decided they will get the best results overall by not trying to test everything extensively before release, and instead using GW2 live as their comprehensive test environment supported by the dev teams rushing out hot-fixes to minimize the impact of bugs in live.

The result is ANet can get more changes out faster, and all we have to put up with is a day or two of buggy code and Anet rushing hot fixes into production.

Even the timing of patches (early in the day, early in the week) indicates they’re organised, not around the players, but around giving Devs time to produce hot-fixes before the bulk of players are online.
(Why Tuesday morning , not Monday morning? This means dev teams that are late with their changes can work over the weekend and still have the Monday for packaging and basic testing before the roll-out on the Tuesday.)
(This also explains why Devs sometimes get chatty on the forums in the day or two after the immediately after a patch. On those days they’re scheduled to keep an eye on the forums and produce hot-fixes for any bugs that appear. But if there are no bugs in their area, or the ones that appear are easy to fix, then the Dev has time to input to the forums.)

TLDR: Short notice updates are inevitable on the day or two after a patch. This is because Anet have worked out that overall this lets them produce more changes with less bugs.

ANet have a track record of quick releasing hot-fixes after a patch.
We can complain about it, or get used to it.

Habib Loew.6239:

After a careful reevaluation of orbs of power we have decided to remove them from WvW in an upcoming build. As implemented, orbs tend to strengthen teams who are already winning and make it even more difficult for underdog teams to fight back. In addition, the current implementation seems to be irresistible to hackers/cheaters and will require significant modification to prevent cheaters from having an unfortunately large impact on the state of any given WvW game. Under the circumstances we believe that removing orbs completely is a better choice than attempting an in-place redesign/re-implementation as it will immediately put a stop to all orb hacking. It is likely that orbs, or some orb-like mechanic, will return at some point in the future, but only after we are confident that they will not exhibit the sorts of issues that we see with orbs today.

Why did the impact on underdogs get mentioned ahead of the other problems with the orbs?
Was that just random? Or is there a reason why that issue was first on the list?

Let’s not forget the process bug that meant these things weren’t found before release.

Or is the system working as intended: keep the testing short, get the changes out quick, use the might of live GW2 to find any bugs, and use hot-fixes to clean-up any serious bugs?
(FYI, this is a perfectly legitimate approach, and while it does mean releases will be messy, it is a way to shorten the development cycle and get more changes out faster.)

The new locations and their capture mechanism are a good idea.
The problem is the wrong reward.

ANet have a history of balancing things a bit, but not of backing out changes they’ve introduced. Their track record is one of persisting with changes until they either make them work or people give up complaining about them. Which means, for better or worse, the BL map changes are here to stay.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Guard stacks and ascended can theoretically be obtainable by everyone but are bad for the game as a whole. Both these discourage alts — leading to less play variety and quicker burnout. Both these discourage newer players; to be disadvantaged for a short time while you learn the game is ok, but both these take a long time to obtain; no one wants to be disadvantaged for a long period of time.

Good summary

And before anyone says WvW isn’t meant to be balanced: Balanced match-ups are far more fun than unbalanced ones.

TLDR: +1 to separating WvW from the PvE servers

I’d love to WvW on a less populated server in the hope of doing some WW that’s not so zerg dominated. But I’m not leaving my PvE server because of the community I’m part of there.

The idea that WvW players will recruit PvE players to “join us to fight in the Mists” hasn’t worked, for the simple reason that the player community just isn’t that integrated. Also, what happens in WvW doesn’t have a material effect on the PvE community – nobody notices when their WvW bonuses go up or down (because the difference they make is indistinguishable from the chaos of the RNG). The only reason for PVE’ers to participate in WvW is world completion, and even then their interest is in avoiding as much WvW activity as possible.

Given the PvE/WvW link has well and truly failed, then separating WVW and PvE servers seems like a great idea. For starters, that would make it far easier to create more balanced WvW match-ups as the WvW populations would be much more balanced, which would make WvW a lot more fun.

Konrad Curze.5130:

the answer is simple
no, because its a zero sum game, and you need at least one foe willing to show up to make any profit from it.

only 1 side can win a point, and the other 2 then are at a big disadvantage
once 1 side got the buff, it becomes increasingly easier for them to cap the remaining 2

hence, the other sides tend to avoid fights entirely

Is that another way of saying if you don’t fight over the Bloodlust buff you may as well go off and PvE?

Given how powerful Bloodlust is, are WvW players wasting their time going for server points?

Capturing all three Bloodlust locations gives 150 points to all stats – this a major bonus to combat effectiveness, and is available for the entire duration of a WvW match-up. That increase in combat effectiveness means more WXP, more drops, more experience – in short, everything you need for WvW.

Compare this with the server points, which take a long time to build up and even at their maximum only give a 10% bonus (crafting and gathering get 20%). Are the server point rewards really worth it? Are the gathering and gold bonuses worth risking the loss of the Bloodlust buff? What about the xp bonuses? Or the PvE bonuses?

In short, would WvW’ers be better off ignoring the other locations and just fighting over the Bloodlust buff?

bradderzh.2378:

Guys we are the minority, didn’t you know everyone who plays the game and doesn’t comment on the forums agrees with the devs and loved the idea of bloodlust and league systems

ROFLMAO – grabs cloth to wipe coffee off screen!

Balanced match-ups are a lot of fun. Unbalanced match-ups aren’t.
This is even more pronounced in WvW where match-ups last for days or weeks.

There are several reasons why balance is poor in WvW and why it is getting worse not better:

1. There are too few WvW servers and too great a variation between servers to make most WvW match-ups balanced.
   Compare this with PvP where a) there are far more participants, b) a huge amount of effort goes into ensuring balance for everything except personal skill, and c) matches are so short that unbalanced match-ups have very limited effect (yet even in PvP this is one of the biggest complaints).
2. WvW assumes a level of organisation that is rare in a casual gaming environment.
   The level of organisation required to participate competitively in WvW is far beyond what most casual communities of this size can achieve, let alone sustain. – My hat goes off to the three or four WvW servers that have achieved that (even if it has been at the cost of depleting the number of WvW players on other servers.)
3. The idea that people will rally the PvE community on their sever to join the WvW fight simply hasn’t worked.
   As with 2 above, the GW2 community simply isn’t that well integrated.
4. WvW lacks mechanisms that support less organised servers allying against stronger foes.
   The three way WvW competition is supposed to allow that, but the tags of players from both opposing servers look the same so they all get treated as enemies.
5. Anet are focussing incentives on winning servers at a time when losing servers are struggling to get WvW participation.
6. The WXP system rewards depth of individual participation in WvW at a time when servers are struggling to increase the overall number of people participating in WvW.
   As a result it is becoming harder for casual players to join WvW and experience the early success necessary to capture their interest.

The idea that WvW can be about skill overcoming greater numbers (and coverage) has failed to manifest in reality. Yes, the organised WvW servers can and do show how WvW can be done. Yes, an organised guild group can wipe a larger zerg, or have a disproportionate effect on a WvW map. But these are the exceptions. Most of the time WvW is determined by whichever server has the most people in WvW.

However, improving balance is the way to break us out of this. Better balance means better more interesting fights, as well as more loot bags (because the leaders will have more enemies for fight). Better balance makes matches more exciting which attracts more attention. Better balance means that more of the people who participate in WvW will feel they are being (or could be) successful and so will be inclined to stay longer and to recommend the experience to others.

TLDR: Server balance matters most in WvW and right now it’s getting worse not better. This needs to be turned around if we want more people playing WvW.

I’m not sure if this is a buff or a fix (100 is less than melee with most weapons). Either way this is much needed change.

WvW Suggestion: use different tag color for enemies from each of the WvW servers to make it easy to distinguish between players from the two opposing servers.

One of the ideas about having WvW as a 3 way competition is that, in the event of an unbalanced match-up (a common occurrence in WvW), the two weaker servers can ally to counter the strongest one.

This is great in theory, but fails for the simple reason that in WvW battles all enemies look the same. This is because the same color (red) is used for the tags of players from both opposing servers. The tags do contain text identifying the specific server, but in the heat of battle (or the press of a zerg) the text is unreadable and players from an allied server are indistinguishable from those belonging to the ‘enemy’ server.

Solution: Use different color tags for WvW enemies so players can easily distinguish between foes from the two opposing serves.

This won’t change the automatic ally/foe identification and effects of skills, but it will mean players will be able to better select who they target for combat, and in doing so give WvW servers more options for countering stronger opponents.

naphack.9346:

If you want a fair match, play spvp. WvW was never fair, will never be fair and was never supposed to be fair.

And that’s WvW’s biggest weakness. Imbalanced matches, at the individual or the server level, just aren’t a lot of fun.

This just shows up the problem that the design for WvW abilities is massively unbalanced – unlike all other aspects of character builds in GW2.

For everything else in GW2, characters have to choose a subset of the abilities available up to a common limit (and Anet put significant resources into improving and maintaining that balance). The result is diversity with balance.

But WXP abilities are open ended, which means that the more experienced characters just keep getting both more powerful and more versatile. (All this on on top of the improvement in skill that comes from greater experience.)

Why, when balance is such a major factor in success of the rest of GW2, have Anet decide to abandon it as a design goal for WvW?

• Was this a conscious decision? If so, what’s the logic behind it (because that logic seems very elusive)?
  (And, no, “giving good rewards to the winners” does not inherently lead to “more people will play and enjoy it”.)
• Or was there no decision? In which case why is ANet allowing unbalancing features to be implemented in WvW? Is there a need for better long term design and planning for WvW? Or is this a QA problem?

While they’re at it, maybe Anet could find a way to make Engineers and Thieves viable in zerg v zerg as well.

The ability to reset any combat that I’m losing (short of being rolled by a zerg)! That’s a great idea.

Why don’t we give that to the other classes as well?

• Warrior: weapon skills grant 1s block whenever health drops below 25%
• Guardian: Aegis stacks up to 25 times
• Ranger: divert all damage to pet for up to 6s even when pet is downed
• Engineer: Teleport device that moves engineer to location 2000 away and clears 3 conditions
• Elementalist: Vapor Form triggers whenever health drops below 10%
• Mesmer: Escape Artist (Master Illusionist trait) Decoy repeats once for every active clone and phantasm
• Necro: Wraithform timer only ticks when inflicting damage on a foe

Now what would be wrong with that?

CC Danicia.1394:

Pavel.8531:

. Your type of reply I think we can stomach much more and it sounds a lot more diplomatic.

I know I don’t comment as much as many others do, but the Community Team is listening, too.

Hooray! And thank you.

Our objections are being heard. Now to hope they will get acted on.
(Though it’s a wonder Anet let themselves get into this situation, given they removed the buff for the very reason that it’s a bad idea now.)

The new objectives sound great. The reward for them is bad for WvW.

Solution: use a different reward! How hard can that be?

DevonCarver.5370:

The stat boost, while controversial, is there to give the buff meaning in the context of the general WvW battle. Providing boosts like %WXP, etc. don’t have impact in fights against other sides, they are just a nice bonus for you. The stat boost and the points for finishing players mean that not only do you want to have the buff, but you don’t want your opponents to have it.

The only thing people value in WvW is combat strength?!? That is an overly simplistic way to look at WvW.

As for this being “Controversial”! It’s not controversial to us. It’s simply a bad idea – one that has a proven history as a bad idea. It there’s any controversy here, it’s about why this buff is being reinstated at the risk of further imbalancing WvW match-ups instead of providing some incentive that at worst a neutral effect on balance in WvW match-ups.

There are many types of rewards that would be worth fighting over and which will not aggravate the imbalance in WvW match-ups. People value loot, prestige, convenience, … the list goes on.

We’ve explained why giving a buff that increases the combat effectiveness of the leading team is a bad idea for WvW.

If this was PvP, a buff like this would be fine, for the following reasons:

1. PvP has several mechanisms designed specifically to ensure teams are of equal power (excluding skill) when they take the field.
2. A lot (a huge lot) of work has gone in to ensuring balance in PvP
3. PvP matches are short, so the maximum duration of any reward taht alters the balance is is equally short.

Compare this with WvW:

1. In WvW, servers do not field WvW equivalent numbers of WvW troops nor are they of equivalent power (uplevels/L80s/L80s with full ascended gear)
2. There is no way to balance WvW capability at the server level (the only mechanism is rankings and the difference in WvW capability is often significant even between adjacent places on the ranking board)
3. WvW match-ups are long, so imbalanced match-ups affect WvW play for days or weeks.

Lets face it, most WvW match-ups are unbalanced.

_Oh, what the kitten, … I shouldn’t have to explain WvW to you. _

WvW is very different to PvP, and for a range of reasons that should be obvious to you, imbalance between servers is a serious problem (which impacts participation in WvW). All of this means introducing a change that will aggravate imbalance in unequal match-ups (which, lets face it, is most of them) is bad for WvW.

Don’t introduce a buff that will exagerate the differences in unblanced WvW match-ups – that’s really dumb (by dumb, I mean bad for WvW participation and enjoyment).

And please don’t try and hide behind the fact that this buff is included as part of range of other changes. That those changes may be great still doesn’t make up for the fact that the Bloodlust reward is bad news for WvW.

You don’t need to use the bloodlust buff. Use another buff. Give the holders of the buff increased magic find or something.

If you need to get WvW’ers to play the new WvW content, then give them something else they’d want. But don’t, don’t, don’t make our server match-ups even worse than they are now.

If you really, really want people to fight over the buff, then forget bloodlust; just have it give a 0.001% chance of dropping a precursor from a WvW loot bag.

Savoy.6824:

“After a careful reevaluation of orbs of power we have decided to remove them from WvW in an upcoming build. As implemented, orbs tend to strengthen teams who are already winning and make it even more difficult for underdog teams to fight back”

This was posted by Habib Loew.6239, one of your own designers.

^This sums it up perfectly.

Want to be at the top of your game in WvW? Then take time out in Fractals to farm your ascended weapons. You’ll get the weapons faster, you won’t have to put up with skill lag and the scenery is great.

This message bought to you by the GW2 PvE team.

One of GW2’s strengths is the way we can try out different builds.
So, please, let us have access to that for WXP builds (rather than restrict us to one-off changes every 7 weeks).

TBH, the WXP system seems like it’s grown haphazardly, without applying any of the great thinking that went into the rest of GW2’s character build system.

Vena.8436:

The best way to fix the unfixable is to work around it, give servers a secondary “win” to work towards.

That’s a good point.

One of WvW biggest problems is the lack of incentive for losing servers to stay in the game. Why take a hammering in WvW when you can earn better rewards in PvE while you wait for the next WvW match-up?

The Bloodlust buff won’t affect blobbing within a map directly.

But it will promote blobbing at the server level: people will transfer to the server most likely to have the buff.

With population trumping skill in WvW, the servers with the biggest WvW populations will get even more WvW players and the buff, making the imbalance in match-ups even worse than it is now.

I like intelligent play. I like it when skill matters.

But I get more loot, WXP, etc (and the lowest repair bills) when all I do is run with the biggest zerg ball on the map.

That’s what’s wrong with zergs: they reward population over skill.

No

And I don’t GVG!

Zergs get the best rewards (they cap fastest) for the lowest risk (AoE damge cap) – why would you do anything else?
Until Anet change the rewards to make other ways of playing WvW more profitable, or as profitable for the same risk, then zerging will remain.

Ideas:

1. Reduce capping rewards based on the number of players involved
2. Increase the rewards for capping with small numbers
3. Increase rewards for other non-zerg behaviour (e.g. defending location against an attack)

Perma-swiftness is a huge help in small group roaming, but this is a real weakness for Guardians.
If run with a group that can help you out with extra swiftness buffs, then Guardian is great for roaming.

I’m beginning to wonder if part of Anet’s purpose in reintroducing the Bloodlust buff despite the very strong opposition against this, is the hope that it may divert the energy currently going into GvG back into more core WvW participation. If that’s that case, I can’t l see it working very well as it doesn’t address the reasons why GvG has split off in the first place.

The new capture points are supposed to be tactical.

However, the major reward from these (the Bloodlust buff) are universal, rather than personal, and there will be kitten all reward for people who hold the points against recapping. This means it will fall on those who are already tactical to take and hold these point while the rest of the zerging grousp will a) continue unchanged and/or b) transfer to a more successful server that is more likely to have secured the buff.