Guild Wars 2

This went better than expected.

Changes on mechanics

- make it harder to contest a keep. It’s a stupid mechanic that a single player can contest a waypoint by doing marginal damage. Let it be at least a ram, a cat or a treb that contest

About the loot problem. I would improve the loot over reward tracks that a) depend on ranks (like prestige in fps ie) and a realm/server loyalty bonus.
So, it’s rewarding for players that show up and in the best case stick to their server.

A possible way to fix guardians. Remove boons.
A possibe fix for stealth. Delete thieves.

Epi isn’t a problem, deal with it.

There is a lot of ideas on the forums for changes wvw needs (and some that it doesn’t need) and I think we should get a bit more constructive if we want to be heard.

Many, me included, don’t believe Anet will ever hear the wvw players, but we can at least try and see for ourselves. So, let’s do this.

Everyone feel free to add some points you think are necessary to make wvw a better game mode

General changes:
- the algorithm Anet uses to determine which server is full and what servers get links
- a transfer lock after recent transfers
- loyalty bonus for staying on servers

Changes on the mechanics:
- lower siege cap
- lines of sight

Quality of Life changes:
- templates to load for switching gear and builds

Balancing for wvw:
- stealth rework in wvw or reworked revealed buff
- deathly chill internal cd?
- condition apply from mesmer rework
- defender runes, perplexity runes rework

Any other ideas? Feel free to post them, I’ll add everything to the list and feel free to discuss it – in a friendly manner

What I don’t get is: Necro gets a buff – everyone and their mothers arrive to call for nerfs.
Guardian (most played class in zergs and the only one that can be stacked into oblivion) gets a buff – nobody cares
Thief (most played roaming class since beta and viable with at least three builds) gets a buff – nobody cares

How about we nerf all of this in one patch instead of “starting to cry” when necro gets a ridiculous buff? (after failing to get epidemic nerfed)

We also need balance in wvw though and just because someone mentions a certain skill as a problem doesn’t mean there isn’t a load of other skills which need to be adressed – but that in return doesn’t mean that whoever opens a thread about a certain skill isn’t allowed in doing so.

This is the wrong forum. There is a necro forum down below. And there is no separate balancing for pve skills in wvw.

I still think they should delete BG and Mag, give people free transfers to not full servers and reorganize wvw.

Fun thing is: It is broken
More fun is: They buffed guardians, ghost thief and still allow stealth stacking with trapper runes, overpowered warrior builds and things like condi mesmer or evade thieves and most people don’t even care about.

How about you stop focusing on a class that you don’t play and call for nerfs for classes you play too?

Xenesis.6389:

You’re giving them too much credit.

You underestimate YB siege meta they made possible by getting YB out of it’s tier.

You gambled the tiers with your transfering here and then there and I guess it’s you guys to blame as much as Anet. You transfered to YB and left the server a mess, you transfered to TC and this server is a mess now too.
Yes, the new scoring is bad for TC, but you and your friends trying to bring them to Tier 1 is as bad as the scoring.

Couldn’t care less to be honest.

aandiarie.7195:

I saw before JQ was full, but someone said they were opened recently. I know JQ had like No NA, but they seemed fat in other timezones.

In what timezones?
“In other timezones” implies that JQ has many players in at least two timezones, when NA is pretty empty.
As an EU player I can tell you, that JQ is even more empty at EU (and always was) in my timezone. That leaves OCX and SEA as potential timezones you were talking about.
As far as I know JQ hasn’t any OCX left after SoX left some month ago – which was the only active “larger” OCX guild on JQ.
So, maybe or SEA is still big after 3-4 guilds left to BG a while ago. I can’t tell, but still your “fat in other timezones” is wrong.

We just need a full underwater map instead of desert bl.

I don’t feel the meteor nerf is bad, but it’s part of a much bigger wvw problem.
You have walls on towers and keeps to get up there and fight people below and to place siege on them. Walls always should be an advantage for the defender by design.
In wvw it always were the other way around. Walls are death traps because almost every class has a skill that allows them to hit targets on or even behind those walls, while as a defender you mostly miss a line of sight to targets below.
That is a really stupid design.
The other problem in wvw is that siege is by far too powerful and too common so you need classes that can target siege from outside to stand a chance destroy it.

If Anet really would care they had changed the line of sight from most of the spells so they cannot target siege or players behind or on a wall – just those on the edge of a wall (ie same as with pulls)
And they should have made a radius around siege where you cant place more siege and you have to decide if you want two arrow carts behind or near a gate or a catapult and a treb or a treb and an arrow cart – not all of them and more.

But as we all know Anet doesn’t play or care for wvw, so feel free to ignore this post.

So, if Ascended Gear in pvp will be more expensive, I really hope it finally has the same status normal Ascended Gear has and the stats can be changed with the mystic forge.

Players are the main reason for the rollercoaster. it isn’t Anet – even with their stupid changes they are not the only ones to blame.
It’s the stupid thinking that transfering to another server changes the fights or something. Then they play there for some weeks and get bored again or get farmed and transfer elsewhere. With every transfer you lose some players that are sick of transfering and stop playing.

I never get it why this is so much of an issue on NA.

The idea is good, but it’s too little and much too late.
This system should have been in place since start and with much more important features like “no repair costs” “better loot” “additional reward tracks” “ascended wvw armor” and " additional wvw skills". There would have been so many great ideas you could have put into this loyalty reward system (thinking of prestige from other games eg)
But it won’t work with the actual state of the game. The playerbase is so small, you had to get rid of f2p accounts in wvw and you should prohibit people having a second account on other servers – all these things could have done with start of the game but won’t work after 4 years into the game.

Sad part about this is that Anet has abandoned wvw as a game mode. So nothing will happen besides stupid changes to desert borderland – the map no one really wants and that fixes non of the issues the game has.
But at least some pve dudes can go to desert borderland for the ruins daily now.

Crazy.6029:

What a lot of players and probably Anet doesn’t realize is the number of people zoning in just to farm the nodes in towers and keeps and camps.

This is pretty much the point. Same as login in and doing a daily quest in the ruins or killing a sentry.

And we still don’t know if Anet is smart enough to not count them as wvw population – to be honest I think they just count accounts that log into wvw regardless what they do there or how long they are in there.

We had a similar problem in 2014 when home borderland was queued on many servers because people used the crafting stations, farmed centaurs or afk’d in the jumping puzzle. It took them forever to “fix” this issues.

Sorry, Anet, I won’t transfer. I don’t invest any more money before you put developers on the many issues your wvw has.

And obviously you forgot that wvw is the only thing were your game is better than the other games on the market – you’d be stupid to ignore that.

Jim Hunter.6821:

^This is your problem, it’s not that you lack the players, it’s that they log off when they don’t have the numbers to steam roll.
JQ is even worse about it, when Cloud Fly tags down 90% of their players leave WvW.

Mag on the other hand almost never has a tag running all through euro, but there are still a kitten ton of people playing, and those people respond to calls in team/map chat.

Your servers are listed as full because they are full, they don’t need to be opened just because you have a lot of fairweather players.

And this is pretty much bullkitten, but hey, who am I to disagree, right?

JQ has lost a lot of players in the recent months. So in two timezones there isn’t even a population greater 10-15 players – not even talking about a lack of commanders here.

Ok, but let’s consider the option “JQ is still full” – how are BG and Mag not?
Right, it makes still no sense.

Fat Disgrace.4275:

Thief isn’t that great in raids, dungeons, pve in general. It’s only good for +1 and decap in spvp it cant zerg fight or blob up like everyone else can do the only 1 good thing thief can do is roam in wvw and everyone loses their minds.

Thief is a terrible designed class. And it has no real counter in wvw. Every other class can be countered somehow.
The only thing that counters a thief is the thieves own failures or getting blown up by unforeseen random ae damage.
That’s just a real bad gamedesign.

No, the opposite.

After this weeks server openings I’m pretty sure there is either no algorithm that controls player numbers on the realms or it’s a terrible faulty one.

Here is the actual list of tier 1 and tier 2

Tier 1:
Tarnished Coast — Full
Blackgate — Very High
Maguuma — Very High

Tier 2:
Jade Quarry — Full
Fort Aspenwood — Very High
Sea of Sorrows — Very High

I don’t understand how this works. Everyone playing in those tiers knows about the transfers off servers and to servers and how stacked the single servers are. There is no reason TC or JQ are full while Mag or BG aren’t.

So, what kind of population gets counted here that leads to this results?

- players on the server?
- accounts on the server?
- people logging into wvw in 24h?
- people spending more then 10 minutes in wvw?

The only way this opening in the last weeks make sense is:

- people logging into wvw in 24 hours without checking how much time they spend there or what they are doing.

So if 100 people log into wvw over a day to get a ruin for their daily that would be more population then 25 people running a group in a borderland for 3 hours.

How about you show us what you track, Anet?
Your game mode is kittened up beyond recognition and wasn’t it for some kittens transfering around every few weeks it would be dead already. So how about you check your metrics and bring some changes into wvw?

- fix your server linking and opening

some things that should be changed:

- fix your class balancing
- lower the siege cap
- give people a reason to log into wvw like you did for pvp with free gold and ascended armor
- give people reasons to defend their stuff
- make backcapping harder (indig change maybe?)
- give more points per kill and switch back to 2-1-1

I’m pretty much done with the game in it’s current state. It’s not even wvw getting old, it’s the ignorance of developers throwing new stuff at pve on a regular basis and giving a kitten about the game mode most people came here for.

Yeah, we know warrior deserves a nerf, but what’s your point?

and the power warrior should beat you in 4 of 5 fights.

I spilled my coffee over “high risk” depending thieves. Do you know what high risk means? No, run a necro or ele.

And still people run kittened things like ranger or warrior in marauder gear, right?

And while at it, tone down damage from power builds?

Nice trolling, Arenanet.

Will be totally fun with the actual server population balance. I’m sure. /sarcasm

Impulsive.8240:

You reminded me of a necro who was sitting on a mortar shot to stack burning and then transferring them to someone else, lo and behold, you’re dead!

Which is very clever. Why would you want to punish this? It’s by far better gameplay then to headbutt and 100blade someone.

There are many things they should track.
- accounts in wvw
- time of accounts in wvw per day
- total number of accounts in a week
- accounts active on more than one server (should be trackable due linked accounts, ip and mac adress
- accounts in eotm count towards population

That would be a fatal stupid way to measure numbers, but could be totally Anets way.

Digikid.7230:

Crazy.6029:

So by that logic no matter how stacked a server is, if it loses 2 guilds and doesn’t have sea coverage it should open. It shouldn’t matter how it is in comparison to other servers. Ok, thank you for your input.

….. You mean the server population dropped with the leaving of a 1 decent sized and 1 massive guild leaving and that lead to it being opened as a result, what exactly is your point?

TC: Full (after losing a lot of guilds in the past month)
JQ: Full (TW left) – empty at EU, empty at OCX, normal sized NA, big SEA

MAG: High

Don’t know how this system works, but something can’t be right.
Maybe Anet needs to check IP adresses for second accounts on servers. Maybe on TC and JQ there is an army hidden somewhere that is in the borderlands but never participates in wvw.

martin.1653:

I really hope this is a good troll to make Anet wake up.
Smite looks like a bad joke.

Smite is a fantastic game. End of story. The only reason I stopped playing it wasn’t anything balance or gameplay related but a problem with their launcher and patching system.
It’s one of the better MOBA out there – imho the best one.

MMORPG aren’t great for esports. It may work if you have a complete pvp esports balancing team inside your mmorpg company which balances especially for this part of the game.
No mmorpg ever did this, because it costs them money and brings almost none. Anyone remember WoW esports?

For the denial team it’s a great decision and maybe it’s good for gw2 pvp too when they don’t have to think about balancing of a minigame inside their game anymore.

I had this guy in two matches. It’s just disgusting to meet players like this.

• How would you describe the current condition of WvW?
  Terrible and there is no reason to log into wvw.

• What do you believe ANET needs to do in order to make positive changes to WvW?
  - stop opening tier 1 servers
  -adjust the queues to the smallest servers numbers. Check the map numbers every hour and adjust them again. If you face a server that can only bring 20 to a map, you should only be able to bring 20 to a map.

• Is there anything wrong with the current system? If so, what? What do you think needs to be changed the most?
  - lock accounts from transfering after a recent transfer for 3 month
  - reward players for staying on their homeserver. give out armor or weapon rewards for every month of server loyalty
  - give players a reason to get into wvw. ie better rewards
  - close EotM. It is no longer needed
  - lower the siege cap
  - get rid of automatic updates in keeps and camps
  - get rid of banners, fog and airship
  - finally rework walls to make them less of a death trap for players on it and get rid of skills that hit things on or behind walls – the siege cap will take care of siege creep

• What are some of the good things, if any, currently being implemented in WvW?
  - desert borderland has some nice graphics

• What is the biggest concern you have relating to skill balance and what are your thoughts about fixing it?
  - there is no balance, so either you put the pvp system in for wvw (gear doesn’t matter, no food, etc) or balance everything separately for wvw

• What do you believe is most important to (insert server here) as a server? (i.e. population, coverage, community, coordination).
  - community and commanders should be most important, sadly it’s all about coverage and numbers

• Do you think (insert server here) currently has enough coverage? If not, which time zones need help? Which time zones do you think are doing ok, if any?
  JQ lacks coverage, JQ was full on SEA for long time, had many OCX and a “normal” sized NA – almost no EU
  At the moment I think we lack EU and OCX while SEA is fine – don’t know about NA

But recruiting into this mess of a gamemode does not make much sense to me.

• Lastly, what would you say is the best thing about (insert server here’s) community?
  On JQ we have a lot of players that really seem to care about the server and the community. We have good commanders and guilds that stayed here in good and bad times and still try to get thing done. Thanks to them. Love you, guys.

The attrition is selfmade. Let’s take BG for example. In the normal times BG queued 4 maps on reset and at least 3 on a weekend while commanders pulled crazy overtimes and players that followed them too.
You will lose players because “the queues are too long” and players by “burning out”. Instead of accepting that queuing so many maps on a regular basis is bad they recruited even more and keep recruiting.
On the opposing servers players burn out too, because they feel that they have to be online to not get their stuff taken in off hours or help their commanders facing huge numbers.

In the end you create a bottomless hole of recruiting and burning out people in a gamemode.

It’s not a server specific problem. So all servers should be treated equally, but that never happened due to BG manipulating player numbers and Anet falling for it.

Blackmoon is a poor guy from ancient rome or lacking education? My advice is to go to a library and start reading books.

Stand The Wall.6987:

gebrechen.5643:

snipples

this is funny and sad.
if we take this to heart, then server transfer shoulda been disabled from get go and new players assigned a server based on the lowest average wvw population.
or, raise aoe cap for most damage skills, remove cleave, and lower/remove it on a few anti zerg ones. change support skills to only work on your party. limit boon and condi duration stacking. lastly, everyone listen to me I’m an expert hurrdurr.

It’s much easier and still brings Anet tons of money.
Just put the player cap for a map based on the smallest server of the matchup.
If the server can bring 40 into a borderland, the other two servers can bring 40 and the rest has to go to eotm or any other map not full. And make sure the queues are dynamic and numbers corrected every hour or so.

So, either you sit in queue for days or you transfer somewhere were you have a chance of playing wvw.

X T D.6458:

gebrechen.5643:

X T D.6458:

Swamurabi.7890:

Why does Anet let other servers fall out of T1 but BG always get re-opened before they have the chance to fall? JQ, TC, DB, YB have all dropped at least one tier. Some have dropped three. Why don’t you test the “great community” of BG by letting them drop a tier or two?

What do you mean let servers fall out? Do you not understand what tier 1 is? There is nowhere to go but down in tier 1, therefore a server must remain competitive to remain in it. All those servers went through large exodus’ and issues with server drama that made it difficult if not impossible to stay competitive in tier 1.

Also, do you really want BG rolling a lower tier match…really? I don’t think anyone wants that lol.

All of those servers were locked for a long time which made them drop because no one could transfer there.
BG always was the special snowflake which got opened for transfers.

BG is locked for months at a time, and only had a link the first time it was implemented. Any other excuses?

Excuses? Your server is full since 2015 and always was. You never really lacked numbers and the only time you did, someone at Anet decided to “open” BG for some days.
As last week for example. And the link was the same stupid decision.

Others servers were treated completely differently. ie TC, YB, JQ. They never had similar numbers and got locked until they dropped into tier 2 or tier 3.

X T D.6458:

Swamurabi.7890:

Why does Anet let other servers fall out of T1 but BG always get re-opened before they have the chance to fall? JQ, TC, DB, YB have all dropped at least one tier. Some have dropped three. Why don’t you test the “great community” of BG by letting them drop a tier or two?

What do you mean let servers fall out? Do you not understand what tier 1 is? There is nowhere to go but down in tier 1, therefore a server must remain competitive to remain in it. All those servers went through large exodus’ and issues with server drama that made it difficult if not impossible to stay competitive in tier 1.

Also, do you really want BG rolling a lower tier match…really? I don’t think anyone wants that lol.

All of those servers were locked for a long time which made them drop because no one could transfer there.
BG always was the special snowflake which got opened for transfers.

The last time people on NA tried to make wvw great again killed the game mode and most servers.
The majority of NA players doesn’t want to fight, they want easy karmatrains and “winning” their tiers. You had your chances and you failed and with that you killed wvw on NA.
You won’t get fights when everyone transfers off to the bandwagon of the week. It was stupid from the beginning to recruit people into timezones which were already on high and still people transfered into this servers on their own.
Mag is the latest example of this stupid behaviour (which BG perfected over the years and JQ’s SEA was great at it too).

Everyone, their mothers and fanboys transfer with guilds to server A, while server B and C can’t compete from numbers.
A is stacked for some weeks with all the players from a timezone (or three timezones) and people on server A get bored because no one wants or can fight their 50+ people blob or their 4-6 25 people guild groups.
The servers B and C get bored because they can’t fight due to lower numbers or because hiding behind 30 arrow carts per gate isn’t really exciting in wvw.
What’s the solution for this since 2015?
Let’s transfer to server D, the server that has "good fights on tier 2 or tier 3. Let’s go there and get the server into tier 1.
While the servers B and C finally can get some fights with server A, server D roflstomps servers E and F over three to four weeks until the players from both don’t show up for fighting anymore and quit the game.
With server D winning even more bandwagoners and “so called fight guilds” transfer over and server D (stacked in 2-4 timezones now) reaches tier 1 to fight servers that still have the same numbers as before the death of server A.
People get bored again and someone finds server H which seems to be great for a “so called fighting guild”.

That’s NA wvw in a nutshell and it’s broken since the beginning of the game because the majority of you guys never cared for fights or balance. It’s all about trolling, flaming and stroking the kitten on cancer forums.

I don’t think it needs a nerf.

As stated before.
- if the number of conditions is too big, the target goes into downstate before epidemic hits and all conditions are removed in downstate
- if you put tons of conditions on someone in downstate, the target often dies before you can epidemic off it
- guardian and rev stacking makes epidemic mostly useless
- epidemic on siege is the best answer to siege wars which is the real fun killer in wvw. don’t stack on your siege and you don’t get hit by epidemic
- you can counter epidemic by turning around when you have stacked too many conditions and you are no longer an epidemic target
- you can cleanse conditions
- epidemic has a cast time and limited range

asking for an epidemic nerf will just shift the meta to more guards and revs and more pin sniping

That’s wrong. I still get siege commanders spoons even after getting my first one. Never seen a broken one.

A pug running with your group is a l2p issue too. Just teach him not be a kitten.

Got three in the last two weeks.

I don’t see anything wrong with pushing esports, but …

- they need to balance more often
- all classes should have a place and not only the elite specs
- they need to balance pvp separately from the rest of the game
- they need to rework the mmr system and give players a reason to stay and play every day

And nothing of this will happen, because it costs money (they’ll need more developers and a bigger team for pvp only) and it’s not safe to say they will earn money with it.

The sad part is that WoW esports has ten times the viewers and is by far worse then GW2 esports on all levels

Lag is a real issue again tonight.

Are we talking lag or ping?

I’m connecting from EU to NA and got terrible pings tonight. Spikes up to 3k, average about 500ms

Meanwhile tier 1 has terrible lags for everyone. How about an infrastructure upgrade, Anet?

If you stack many conditions on someone in downstate there will be a high chance the target dies before epidemic hits.
If you stack too many conditions on a living target it ends up in downstate before epidemic hit and you spread nothing.

And just because a server is losing doesn’t mean it has no population. BG went into hibernation again. Never had so many BG players in EotM like this week.

A tier 1 server shouldn’t be opened and never get a link. Anet really needs to check their system of “activity measurement”.

Trust them, they know what they are doing!