Guild Wars 2

You must not work in IT

That sounds easy but it wouldn’t be cheap at all.

Coverage is your problem, not PvD.

I think the expectation that 3 or 4 few players should be able to stop a “large skilless blob” is unrealistic and the developers should not build overpowered defences to facilitate this.

If you had proper coverage (say 30 people?) then you should be able to come out and wipe the “large skilless blob” off the door.

You need to post about the match up algorithms instead so they optimise the coverage for each skirmish.

Despite dramatic recent improvements in communication from Tyler and the WvW team, there is a conspicuous silence around the lack of a “No DBL” option.

Don’t fall back into old habits guys. Your communication was good, don’t let it slip.

Be accountable for your decisions and explain why the players can’t choose to scrap DBL entirely if the majority (75%+) vote for it.

DBL is a sunk cost, remove the emotional attachment to it and let players decide.

The current options are designed to achieve your agenda of reinstating DBL while presenting it as a “player driven choice”.

The best and worst thing about SEA mag and DB blobs is that they still run those glassy T3/T4 builds and they melt like butter.

It’s the best because we have to clear our bags a few times every night.

It’s the worst because they’ve wiped so many times that they now they turtle inside and will only ever engage us under heavy siege fire – even when they have far superior numbers to us.

When they can get most of the people on their servers to run proper builds instead of glass cannons they are going to get more courage and be fun to fight.

It’s no fun fighting if you know your group is going to wipe every time.

DB has slightly better builds than Mag. Mag in SEA seem to be like a collection of roamers/gankers running glass cannon builds.

Just leave the objective and destroy them with your weapon skills.

Turtling is really boring and should never be rewarded.

If you don’t have enough numbers to go outside and kill the siege then that is a population problem, not a siege problem.

You need to address the population issue and then the siege issue will take care of itself.

If you have a decent population on your server and you’re still defending outnumbered then that is bad luck. Ask for help from other maps.

Shield generators also work very nicely in the defenders favour. We had 3 trebs attacking hills and nothing was hitting the wall due to shield generators. Instead of complaining we went and destroyed them.

I think it is a good idea, increasing the granularity of the populations to make balancing more effective is a good idea.

The execution risk is that people don’t transfer to those new servers – perhaps incentivise to ensure a population grows there?

Award some gems or gold for transferring to new1, new2 or new3 and those servers will get populations.

Like when you ask players to join a different megaserver instance and offer them a reward for leaving their current instance.

Blackarps.1974:

Getting a bunch of people in my guild and on JQ saying the same thing. Bad lag this week. I’ve been trying to work it out with support and they are pointing at my ISP instead.

I’m in Australia and getting lag on JQ also. I doubt you have the same ISP as me.

The key problem of the system as it stands at the moment is that it ignores coverage.

I would fix that by making the match up algorithm more granular to score/rank at the skirmish level and then sum those skirmish rankings to form a final match up compatibility score.

You could gather the population stats at the skirmish level then for each skirmish you work out the compatibility of each server during that skirmish time and assign it a score, you could say use the average population of all servers (during the skirmish window) and score it like this:

score = absolute_value(server1_population + server2_population – average_population)

The closer to zero you are the more compatible your worlds are (i.e., populations combined, you are closer to the average population).

The further away you are means you either both too stacked during that skirmish window or both woefully underpopulated during that skirmish window.

You then take the sum of the scores for all skirmish windows for all server combinations over the 24 hour period and select the combinations that are most compatible.

This wouldn’t be perfect but it would factor in coverage (to some extent).

p.s., There is probably something wrong with my maths but the idea is there.

killfil.3472:

I would like to know what you guys think. Would you like the staff to be reworked, and do you have any ideas for skills to replace the marks?

As a WvW player I would like to see:

1. A range increase on auto attack to match the Rangers 1500 and increase in projectile speed and rate of fire.
2. Staff #4 – if you have no conditions it will corrupt 1 boon per player (max 5 players)
3. Staff #5 – reduce cool down OR increase fear duration to 1.5s
4. Marks trigger on unmanned enemy siege weaponry
5. Mark radius increased to 360 so Necros can hit arrow carts like Meteor Storm.
6. Power necro DPS increase on #2

(side note: would also like a range increase on Life Transfer

Iceband.3714:

Knob.6835:

I was in a dead tier for a year. Why would you want to go back to that. I’d understand adding another tier to lessen the queues & make a more roaming friendly tier, but going back to the way it was isn’t an option imo.

ok, but you had a choice, to move to higher tier server and play with the zerg kiddies?

I dont get a choice, the choice was made for me….

JQ is packed with zergs but you can still roam easily (2 maps queued in SEA time zone). However, when I go to the other two maps they are a ghost town.

I don’t see why you can’t find a map that is a ghost town and do your roaming/havoc there.

I’d vote Yes twice if I could.

It has reinvigorated WvW.

Although I would prefer JQ have a stronger partner server because we tick at over 400 during SEA and then the filthy day cappers PvD everything for the other 18 hours.

Jim Hunter.6821:

Yeah I’ve never understood the argument that “the map is boring”. That’s like saying a chess board or soccer field is boring. The map serves a purpose, it works. You can have boring opponents but that’s not the maps fault. The dbl doesn’t work for the game mode, that was the problem.

Agreed, after playing DB and Maguuma (SEA tz) this week they are WAY more fun than I’ve had in T1 against YB, TC or BG.

WvW is actually fun again.

DB and Mag actually want to fight us and actively engage us.

It is so much better playing against guilds and pugmanders that want to fight instead of win PPT.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

at the end of every tournament we saw a permanent dip in the number of players playing WvW. Presumably this was due to players burning themselves out during the tournament.

That’s really interesting.

I think from a lot of Teamspeak chat the duration of the tournament is what burnt people out.

Perhaps make tournaments frequent but with a lower duration.

Maybe once every 2 months launch a 1 week tournament (whoever wins the most of the next 50 skirmishes?). Winners would get a tournament reward box, second place would get a slightly worse reward box and third place gets a certificate of participation

Launch the tournaments at random times so servers that hibernate don’t have time to ask their mum for permission to stay up late.

Another idea is that you only announce that the mini tournament is active when you are 15 skirmishes into the tournament. So servers will never know when the tournament is active so hibernating servers will be punished for only fighting when a tournament is active.

Chris Barrett.3280:

there is no time which exists that will please everyone.

Exactly.

End of thread

yanniell.1236:

And to think that when all those guilds left BG months ago, everyone of them were sure that BG would die and fall down the tiers. T1 would be a happy place with the might “I’ve always been in T1” JQ, TC “for the toast” and “Siege” Bends.
Now all of them are just a shadow of their former self, while Beastgate reigns absolute.
Funny how life is.

No one respects wins that are derived from blatant cheating (using stolen information to manipulate server ranking algorithms).

They are basically the Lance Armstrong of servers.

EremiteAngel.9765:

honestly, BG is owning mainly because ND guild returned to BG.
Any server that ND joins, you can be sure that they will become twice as strong.
10 ND members led by Hasax can take out 2-3 times their size easily.

Hilarious. Is that why their 20 player ND guild group would run away from Cloud Fly when he had only 30 people on him?

The only time they would ever engage was when they had a map blob, the rest of the time they would just PvD and run away. Maybe they weren’t being lead by Hasan at that those times but they didn’t get the name Always Die without a reason.

Basket of Boxes.1976:

Did any of you whining about OCX/SEA being discriminated against even read the initial post? It says prime time will tick some modifier (3 in the example) and the other time slots will tick anywhere from 3 to 1, depending on the population.

If you guys who are saying some server’s OCX/SEA outnumber their prime time then it is likely you will still tick the same as prime time (3). However your blow out ppt from pvding won’t be as high because the scoring will be standardized.

Winning the skirmishes in off peak times will still matter it just won’t decide matches anymore.

Consider this scenario:

Server A: Stacked with NA players, poor SEA
Server B: Stacked with SEA players, poor NA

A gets rolled during SEA time, plenty of PVD from server B.
B gets rolled during NA time, plenty of PVD from server A.

There are mismatched prime times from both sides, both sides are blowing out ppt and both are doing PVD – only at different times during the 24 hour period.

Answer me, why does A get to contribute more just because they are in the North American time zone?

Liston.9708:

No way you were fighting TC and fa in the same match yesterday.

You’re completely right, it was YB – I get those two mixed up.

Ogre.3124:

Well, this is more of a personal issue. If JQ players are hurt for NA servers having centralized NA prime-time then just transfer to other servers. Either way JQ is not doing so hot in PPT land. You are currently bordering on entering Tier 3. Your players will be transferring off whether or not these changes go through.

I don’t know about transferring off, it was actually pretty fun fighting TC and FA last night.

Props to the FA SEA map zerg (GK guild?) for taking us on continually during SEA prime (even though they were wiping quite often).

It’s a refreshing change from a certain T1 server that likes to run away from every fight (not BG).

I don’t think we want to transfer off JQ, it would only fragment an already great community (some wouldn’t transfer due to cost, some would transfer, some would go to different servers, etc).

JQ’s match up with IoJ is obviously quite wrong when you compare it to the other T1 servers. I think Arenanet should be doing a one off rebalance based on this weeks stats that haven’t been manipulated by people logging off (and then revert to the 3 month rebalance).

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Prime Time would be universal per datacenter. For example, all worlds in NA would have the same 6 hour period (of highest activity) as their Prime Time hours. All EU woulds would have a different 6 hour range for their Prime Time.

Firstly, congratulations on being the best communicating developer the WvW forums has ever had. Your OP is exactly what everyone has been asking for in terms of communication. Arenanet, give this man a pay rise

Second, this prime time being a static 6 hour window consistent across data centres would NOT work for Jade Quarry.

Our prime time is always during the South East Asian time zone but we are on a North American data centre.

Prime time must be dynamic based on current map populations.

We were running two full map zergs last night during SEA prime which is more than I can say for what we would be running during NA prime.

How do you solve this problem below:

If JQ runs two map zergs in SEA time zone and TC and FA can only field one then SEA is JQ’s prime.

If TC and FA run two during NA time zone and JQ runs one then that is TC’s and FA’s prime.

We can end up with three servers with different “prime times”.

We can’t be giving preferential treatment to a server just because NA is their prime and NA is most common prime time. Many NA servers actually have prime times that are during the EU, SEA or OCX windows.

We can’t have JQ being penalised on scoring just because TC and FA can’t field two map zergs during OUR prime without also punishing TCs and FAs scoring when JQ can’t manage to field two zergs during THEIR prime.

Please allay my fears by telling me I’ve misunderstood how it will work

DeceiverX.8361:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Skill lag is a perpetual battle. By far the biggest contributors is large scale combat involving high target player skills. Of course high target skills are exactly the preferred skills to use in WvW. This starts to become especially true as skills start activating faster and doing more things on each activation: traits/runes/sigils/food/quickness/alacrity etc. So we continue to make optimizations skills and combat, but there’s no single big offender, it’s a combination of thousands of smaller parts.

Another argument to shut down passive procs and increase cooldowns of extremely powerful abilities is what I’m seeing, which is the opposite of what we’ve been seeing in recent profession design.

Really, though, if this is attributed to proc effects, please, let’s just push to remove them. Big emphasis on restoring high WvW populations to only be redacted by these performance issues as a result of proc effects (which have been scrutinized by the competitive PvP scene for ages) is going to get the game as a whole nowhere fast.

He’s believe saying lag is fundamental to the game engine. Nothing short of making a new game would solve it.

I doubt increasing cooldowns wouldn’t stop it happening. When two zergs first engage everything is off cooldown and that is when the main problem is going to occur. After they stack everything is usually off cooldown again for the next engage.

I believe he’s saying lag is fundamental flaw of the WvW game engine since day zero and it’s virtually impossible to fix without rewriting the entire game and its mechanics.

TL;DR – You’re stuck with lag forever.

It’s a refreshing change having devs communicate with our group so frequently and honestly. Thumbs up from me. Thank you Tyler.

We’re supposed to changing WvW to make fights the priority.

JQ was attacking Stonemist castle with a reasonable sized zerg and there was a suitable sized BG zerg for us to fight (bigger than JQs zerg but not entirely unreasonable).

JQ couldn’t engage with BG for a fight because the airships and fog.

It’s just an orb remodelled.

Chuck the whole Tactivators idea in the bin.

Mike O Brien.4613:

Karl is working specifically on WvW-focused skill balance. He’s looking for the wins for WvW that don’t screw the rest of the game.

Or you could just balance the modes separately like you have in the past.

Mike O Brien.4613:

We’re investigating whether to fix or revert DBL. They’re both a lot of work. These next couple days will be your last chance to give feedback before we make a decision, so speak now or forever hold your peace.

OK so how are we supposed to provide feedback if you aren’t telling us what your planned fix to DBL is? If it sounds good I’ll vote for Fix, if it sounds bad I’ll vote for Revert.

Entenkommando.5208:

Breakbars seem like a great solution to this

Stability stacks are the same thing as a breakbar, just with different visual representation.

They both require a series of CC’s to hit a player until a stun occurs.

I personally think static field is overpowered and has been since launch. Make static field blockable, evadable and limited to five charges.

Many skills have potentially unlimited levels of CC (static field, unsteady ground, line of warding, spectral wall) which in my opinion is too powerful.

You could have a series of charges (say 5) for each field and if the maxium number of people have been stunned/CC’d the field disappears.

This number of charges could be tweaked until there was a nice balance between stuns and stability in WvW.

You want balance though, not tipping th scales completely in front line player’s favour.

You want mass stuns to be often enough to make them worth using but not often enough that frontline players fear engaging.

The last time Arenanet listened to defenders we ended up the New Bordlerlands travesty.

Hopefully they’ve learnt their lesson.

I truly can’t believe this line:

We may not be ready to reveal more in early 2016, but you’ll have an opportunity to get all the details and give feedback when we go into the beta phase of this massive project later this year.

Did they not learn from the New WvW Borderland Map debacle/fiasco that consulting the community during beta is way, way, way TOO LATE.

Have some guts, tell players what you are doing ahead of time and listen to them.

Don’t just blindly plough ahead with bad ideas leaving it until beta when it’s too late to make fundamental/core changes.

Anyway, I’ve been playing Fallout 4 and Witcher 3 while I wait for the repair job (was hoping for a April/May/June timeframe).

Late 2016 is a bit too long to wait

I think my chances of coming back to WvW are now very low.

I’m with you on everything you’ve said except for a couple of points:

Fozzik.1742:

You’ve got to figure out game design ways to break up the blobs.

Breaking blobs was the cause of the current poor design. So let’s not instruct them to break up blobs again. Let’s just stick with what you originally said – we want fights, everywhere. Whether are blobs, havoc or solo.

Fozzik.1742:

Viable defense for a tower or keep needs to account for a small number of players defending against a zerg…because this is what happens the vast majority of the time.

Fozzik.1742:

There should be objective upgrades which over time create defensive positions in the objective where defenders and siege can function to defend and can’t be hit by attackers until the attackers enter the objective. Yeah, you read that right. Don’t worry about the attackers, they’ll figure out ways to succeed, and the game already heavily favors the PvDoor blob.

In my experience (T1 JQ SEA timezone) most defences start with two players and then it grows to a zerg or blob as everyone arrives to defend.

If you allow 2 players on their own to fully defend against a blob then it doesn’t encourage fights. It stops the blob vs blob from occurring because the defensive blob doesn’t need to attend. The key we want in the design is to allow the attacking map blob to win IF the defending map blob doesn’t choose to attend.

We also need to make the objective valuable in some way so they care about defending it.

The design needs to give enough time for the defending blob to attend. So you should allow two players to delay but not defend, two players should never be able to stop 50 players for a long time.

The goal is to encourage that epic lord room battle between the two groups and the only way to get the defending blob there is to let them know that if they don’t attend they won’t retain it.

The other problem is that often in T1, defending blobs will fully turtle. They’ll build 15 ACs and just sit inside the keep and use counter trebs to take out the attackers siege. Zero fights.

This behaviour doesn’t promote fighting at all. The design needs to find a way to pressure them to come outside and either remove the attackers or remove the attacker’s siege.

It is quite often the case in JQ (SEA) that we had an attacking blob (about 40 people) and defending blob (YB with about 40 people).

Basically they were two fairly evenly sized blobs but YB used to just turtle inside rather than fighting us.

For my money, if you’re going to give defenders unreachable areas then you should also grant the same to attackers with the siege positioning (siege that can’t be counter trebbed).

Having attacking siege that can’t be reached requires that defending blob come out of their turtle shell and fight.

I think your objective cascade is a similar idea to this.

Anyway, I think the key design should be trying to delay zergs/blobs to give enough time to respond but forcing a fight once everyone is in attendance.

I don’t think two defenders should be able to fully defend a blob.

Often times the attack is just a solo roamer on a cata or a small havoc group putting up a couple of rams, so giving two defenders extreme blob defending power against these smaller forces also makes WvW worse.

hi Colin,

Can you please tell us what is planned for the new major WvW overhaul?

Please go into the detailed design so we can give you our feedback now while you’re still developing it and have time to change any design we don’t think will work.

I think we’ve learnt from the borderland drama that developing a concept to maturity and then asking for feedback during beta testing didn’t work. Everyone gave feedback that the maps were too big during beta week one but it was too late by that stage.

I think this time around the team should adopt a ‘communicate early, communicate often’ approach.

In the great words of Ken M, if we don’t study the mistakes of the future we’re doomed to repeat them for the first time.

In the context of WvW:

Primary issue is the 40s cooldown – it is way too long, given how weak the heal is for myself and allies – I’d want a 20s to 25s cooldown as the skill stands now.

For a 30s to 35s cooldown I’d want many extra features before I’d use it:

Condi clear (3 if caster only or 2 if caster and allies) or a water field (for myself & allies).
and
Block Projectiles (like corrosive poison cloud)

Projectile block I’m thinking would come in handy when ressing people.

Dude chill out. Edit your post to remove that last paragraph unless you want a ban.

Bump for Arenanet response.

Jayne.9251:

No guilds/players stacking into tier one affects EVERY server, except tier one.

I agree there is an impact, but making guilds play somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t a way to advance the game.

If you lose a guild to tier 1, that guild wants to be in tier 1 (for whatever reasons).

Forcing them to stay in a tier they don’t want to be in isn’t healthy for the game.

Jayne.9251:

It no longer is a game of skill, but simply numbers.

Nope, your assumption is that we’re trying to win the PPT game in T1.

Most of the time we are actually trying to get good fights.

Both sides having numbers helps start fights.

Defenders can’t turtle against huge numbers so they have to come and defend their keep.

It is a false assumption that lower tiers players are more skilled than high tier players. From my experience the majority of the players from T2 that make it into T1 (i.e., Yaks Bend, Tarnished Coast) take 6 months to adapt to the increased skill requirements in T1. There are always some talented/untalented exceptions on both sides of course.

Jayne.9251:

Games stagnate when players don’t improve and grow.

Games stagnate when players can’t get fights and can’t play the game the way want to play it.

If they want to blob let them. Why dictate to other players that they must roam in parties of 5 when all they really want to do is get drunk on reset and run with their massive guild taking on some other massive guild?

Holding people back from doing what they want in the game is unhealthy for the longevity of the game.

Jayne.9251:

There’s a certain reticence with Tier one servers to see beyond their own tier.

I agree, hence I asked why T1 stacking had an impact on T2/T3.

If it is just a case of losing a guild to T1 that didn’t want to play with you anyway. I don’t think it is a good idea to force that guild to stay in T2/T3.

I think it is fairly selfish of non-T1 players to demand that players that don’t want to be on their server/tier must stay there.

Jayne.9251:

And no, queues did not make players “self-regulate.”

Yes they do. I’ve heard guilds say they are moving servers to avoid queues.

bloodletting wolf.2837:

The issue at the moment is that anet broke WvW so far fewer people want to play. You apparently haven’t ever been stuck in the stupidity that IoJ and NSP had to go through with stacking the end of last year and the beginning of this one. Players want the easiest win. Give them the choice and they will sit in q just to blob all over the place and Ktrain. It really pains me that the people on these forums and in game claim to want fights when all they really want is to spam 1 while watching Netflix beating the skritt out of doors and run away when there is one ac.

Btw I could care less about T1 or T2.

How is the current system stopping T4 bandwagoning given your servers are open to all transfers?

The current system only blocks transfers into T1 or high end T2 servers.

bloodletting wolf.2837:

Really? The player base created this problem with constant band wagoning and gaming the system to stack. I’m not going to say that the system anet set up was perfect but most of the problems came from players.

What exactly is wrong with stacking? It means we get some decent fights, unlike now.

Right now I logon we have no commanders and no one to fight. This is in Tier 1.

I’d actually really love some guilds stacking in T1 right about now.

If JQ/BG/YB get too full and we end up with 45 minute queues then people will start transferring off.

Queues make the player populations becomes self organising, not arbitrary “Full” designations.

Do guilds stacking onto Tier 1 servers impact play at Tier 2 levels? Is that what you’re concerned about?

Chaba.5410:

The playerbase has already proven it is unable to unfortunately.

Perhaps but players did a better job than what is happening right now.

neville.3420:

Population is becoming an issue even on T2 servers (I’m on FA and anything but EBG is routinely empty).

They simply need to revert the server transfer rules so we can adjust the populations ourselves.

C Gunner.9406:

Its dead. To the people who think people will come back after doing HOT content, then you’re wrong.

I haven’t played since release (because it was dead – T1).

I have now completed my nine elite specs and will be going back into WvW full time.

I think you’ll find that people will return.

I am also seeing a lot of hardcore WvW players on my maps doing all the hero points as I ran around.

I can say goodbye to PvE for another three years.

I would just like “BG Invader” or “YB Invader” in red and a health bar on enemies/friends.

No ranking displayed.

I still want to see boons, condis, stacks, signets, food, oil etc.

Pin sniping is really boring because it ends the fight early.

If we had gliders the fall damage traits would become useful openers when you drop on someone’s head

EotM is supposed to be for level 80 players – it’s an overflow for when maps are queued. It’s not supposed to be under level players trying to get XP to level up.

EotM keeps XP farmers out of WvW so I prefer it stays how it is.

The people you lock out of EotM may join WvW but then they’ll just want to karma train which is really boring. We don’t want those types of people in WvW.

We want people that want to fight.

I think if anything you should gate WvW and EotM so you can’t go in until you’re geared level 80. Nothing is going to put you off WvW more than dying constantly because you’re wearing yellows/greens or you’re level 56.

Jim Hunter.6821:

As someone that likes to solo roam I have found the new maps to be awful.

Everything said was spot on.

I was really looking forward to the new maps.

I find they are very nice looking but rather unpleasant to play in small teams.

I understand WvW dev team won’t have enough budget to create a new map – so in the context of having to work with what we already have…

My constructive feedback is as follows:

Problem: We are finding it difficult to get from A to B quickly but we don’t want map hopping blobs to get from A to B quickly.

Solution: Add something like a Nuhoch Wallow (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Nuhoch_Wallow) that allows fast travel for 1 person. It will have a 5 second cooldown once used. So a 50 man zerg would take 4 minutes to go through, a 5 man roaming group would be through in 25 seconds and a single roamer would be through instantly.

The wallows would connect towers and keeps with supply camps (and possibly also keeps with keeps) so we can run supply quickly when building a cata. We can also respond quickly as individuals but not as map blobs. A defensive map blob will have to “run it”.

Similar to those lava pools in the fire keep but without needing to own the objective to use them and also having a cooldown so the map blobs can’t use them for mobility.

Additionally, make speed buffs ubiquitous and last longer (30 minutes). However, make them not on a “direct path” along which map hopping groups would run to defend keeps.

You can make the use of a Wallow part of the WXP mastery points (create a new line called ‘Combat mastery’ and it includes wallows and auto loot).

Problem: Everything is fortified.
Solution: It doesn’t make sense that a tower upgrades itself magically, there would need to be someone inside building the pot of boiling oil etc. As such, I suggest you make automatic upgrades operate on a 15 minute dead man switch. If no one is pressing the dead man switch the upgrade halts entirely (15 minutes is enough time to run supply to build siege or flip a nearby camp). Having a DMS makes someone put in some effort to making the upgrade happen, it still costs them zero gold. It makes it worth flipping an objective because you know they put effort into upgrading it and if you flip it they might not put the same effort in again. It means that when a group decides to flip to another borderland they won’t find every objective being fortified.
Add an extra DMS ‘lever’ next to the other three near the keep. This is especially useful for the common case where a map is pretty much dead then a map blob comes back and flips everything to their colour, hops back to EB and everything upgrades to fortified even though there are zero players on that map.

Problem: NPC respawn/damage are OP against ram based attacks and wall guard NPCs make sneaky catas more annoying for solo roamers also.
Solution: Reduce the count and strength of defensive NPCs. Remove wall guard NPCs. Quadruple the the respawn delay on NPCs.

Problem: Keep lord is OP against small groups and mild against map blobs.
Solution: Make the keep lord vary his power/defence/health based on a dynamic buff/debuff calculated based on net population count in a large range. So for example, in a 3000 or 5000 radius. Net_Population=(Enemy_Count – (Friendly_Count + 3)). The +3 is for Keep Lord.

Why do this? Well I see that making the buff dynamic makes a keep lord easy for a solo/small group ninja but very strong for a “zerg” doing PvDoor. However, if it is GvG or ZvZ then the keep lord stays fairly neutral in the fight and the other guild will actually have to fight to defend rather than let the keep lord do it for them.

Basically, with a dynamic buff the keep lord will favour whichever side is weakest.

Problem: Barricades block roamers progress but not zergs.
Solution: Remove barricades from the game.

Problem: Fights are not fair if one side has a buff running
Solution: Disable buffs (not swiftness).

Problem: Laser is meh.
Solution: Disable laser.

Apparently the account bound chests are a bug.

It would be nice if they left that bug alone and also made PoH’s account bound at the same time.

We had the same issue with WXP being alt based and now we’re back into the same frying pan with hero points.

It is significantly faster to get HPs in PvE than it is in WvW so I think it would be a fair move if they let us earn HPs for our alts without actually using that alt. Not all of us are ‘allowed’ to play our alts when doing organised WvW.

Punter.7648:

Please can we have one week without downed state in WvW as a trial? It may lead to a WvW revolution where tactics pay off for smaller groups.

I like downed state, but I don’t like “rally from player death” state.

If they could keep downed state but remove the rally I would like that.

‘Rallying on player death’ is one of the last remaining ‘anti-social’ aspects of GW2.

It makes groups really dislike less skilled players running and fighting alongside with them.

morrolan.9608:

Just to add to the discussion since your post. WvW masteries were originally soul bound until you came around to the player POV that WvW is more about player/account progression than character. Now you’re talking about taking that account progression system and bolting another character progression system on to it. They are in opposition to one another. The same decision that was eventually made to make WvW masteries account bound applies to the proofs of heroics.

This is such a good point I’m quoting it so everyone can read it twice.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

The chest, containing Proofs, being account bound is a bug. Earning specializations (skills and traits) is intended to be character progression. Ex: If you want to fully train up your warrior, you actually need to play your warrior for some amount of time. I say some amount of time since Tomes of Knowledge have allowed players to bypass a lot of existing character progression.

Make it all account bound. Character progression in WvW is overrated. We need to stop thinking about WvW as an extension of PvE and start thinking of it as an extension of sPvP. If it was treated more like sPvP then that would mean instant unlock for build related changes.

Add catch up tools.

Remove cascade tools.

selan.8354:

yeah i beta tested it and feedback was exactly this for months now. its too large, too complex and not a real wvw map. it should have been a new eotm map and not replace the old maps. simple is more in wvw. ill eb only i guess…

1. Design with minimal/no consultation.

2. Build a map they think we want (which probably costs their company a 6 figure sum).

3. Ask for feedback when they’re already deeply committed with the amount of money they’ve spent coding/building it.

4. Hands are tied because the money is already spent.

If they were to implement your feedback (shrink the map) they’d be up for another 6 figure sum.

They need to do more customer centric design with early iterative feedback.

I think the map encourages running zergs over small teams more than the old map.

I do a mixture of solo roaming and T1 map blobbing (20:80 mix respectively).

Operating as a solo/duo roamer I found it harder to get things done than I normally would.

All the NPCs are stronger and in greater numbers making it take much longer (and thus more dangerous) to take an objective. Still achievable but gives emergency responders too much time.

Building siege is much harder because the run back to the supply camp is so much longer (or is that just in my imagination?).

The multi height layers in the map were also an issue. I dropped down a ledge to build a cata against a wall and then I turn around to run back to the supply camp to get more supply and I see I can’t get back up to the level I came from without running a marathon around the entire tower. So I gave up. It may just be a case of me needing to learn the new build locations, but I didn’t have that issue in the old borderlands.

While guilds are getting siege that have superior damage:supply ratios, roamers, the players that actually need a “low supply” solution don’t get one. They can buy guild catas from the TP but that’s not really the point.

I would like to a supply depot in near proximity to each each objective (so roamers can build things quickly) and a reduction in NPC strength/numbers (so roamers flip things more quickly). I see no point in designing a map to be counter-zerg and then making everything harder for small groups.

On the plus side, it’s very pretty map and once the Hero Point debacle settles down it is going to lead to some interesting fights in future. So I look forward to that.

I just wish Arenanet would gift WvW their elite specs so we can return to WvW. Right now having JQ/BG having organised Hero Point farming in WvW shows how bad the idea was.

Note: This is my early opinion and subject to change.

Spurnshadow.3678:

Have war score directly tied to total population.

One of the key tenets of GW2 is social gaming. Nodes are instanced, loot is instanced, everything encourages cooperating and playing together (except the rally-from-player-death system which makes guilds hate on pugs).

Say JQ was ticking 600 in EU, the logical thing for BG to do would be to have everyone log off WvW to minimise the damage during EU timezone.

So your new system would encourage other players to tell people to log off WvW.

You’ll see things on map chat like: “Log off WvW we need to keep their tick as low as possible”.

This is anti-social gaming.

You would also get the scenario where BG builds up a 15k lead and tells everyone to log off so that JQ/YB can’t close the gap by reset.

Your system would be way too open to manipulation.

The real solution is to simply revert poorly thought out algorithm for detecting full servers back to the way it was originally done.

There are probably other ideas like rewarding outnumbered players with more points when they capture objectives but I haven’t thought through all the permutations of what could go wrong with that idea or adding a catch up system for servers that are trailing (to keep the match ups close/tight/fun).

Are we getting any new traits we can spend our excess points on? I have lots of points sitting around unused.

kefro.9312:

That SMC mass inv fountain looks like an april fool joke

It is like the ‘orb’ of the old days.

It is a cascade tool.

By cascade I mean that it is a tool that helps dominating teams become stronger.

WvW should have no cascade tools – it should all be anti-cascade.

An example of anti-cascade would be the losing server in a match up should have invisibility fountain at their spawn point become active (and the castle/garrison if they manage to take it). That would help stop spawn camping also.

WvW needs more catch up tools (Siegerazer) rather than more cascade tools (Orbs, Fountains).

The most fun race car games were always the ones that had catch up on them – even if you were the better driver you’d still win with catch up turned on. It’d just keep it more interesting for everyone playing.