Guild Wars 2

SilencingMachine.5049:

That’s what you call a “zerg”?!?!?! hahaha Guess your mind would be blown if you saw T1 !!!!

and your mind would be blown at our lack of queues and your potential play time to wait time ratio (its infinite cuz you divide by 0 omg)

Cactus.2710:

insanemaniac.2456:

Cactus.2710:

-1. The Glicko-2 system was never meant to be used for tiered competition. It was intended to be applied to competitions where every participant plays a continuum of opponents in the general vicinity of his own rank. A tiered system locks opponents into a bracket from which they cannot escape if they are evenly matched … even though they may be better or worse than the participants in adjacent tiers.

i see this problem cited constantly any time there is discussion about glicko flaws.

and every time i see it, its wrong. we just call our matches tiers. tiering hardly applies at all, as the definition here is vague and mutable. what makes a tier? well the 3 servers in the match of course. we dont define it based on ranking, which is what we actually should do. like 1001-1200 is tier 7. 1201-1400 = tier 6. etc.

because of this, the actual issue of having a low population of possible competitors gets confused with whatever youre saying. matchmaking repeatedly creates matches based on the most even matches, always resulting in little change in opponents, because there are so few opponents to choose from. a server doesnt get stuck with bad matches because of the tiers, it gets stuck because there are 0, 1, 3, or not 3N-1 equal opponents. and the system requires 3N-1 equal opponents for such a low competitor population.

It isn’t wrong at all. Picture a Tier 6 matchup where the three servers are equally matched and battle to essentially the same score. Unless one of the servers in Tier 5 loses by a large enough amount to drop down to Tier 6, or one of the serves in Tier 7 wins by a large enough amount to climb up into Tier 6, those three servers in Tier 5 will be playing each other week after week. It’s entirely possible for the servers in Tier 5 to be losing proficiency (population, coverage, key commanders) to the point that they are actually weaker than the servers in Tier 6, but if they do so collectively the Glicko-2 system won’t drop one of them down to Tier 6 unless a blowout happens.

The Glicko-2 system was designed to be used in situations where, for example, the player or team ranked #12 played #‘s 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, and 15 … and where #13 played #’s 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, and 16 … etc That creates a constantly overlapping reference for every team that more or less properly assesses their relative proficiency. You don’t get that when you lock teams into tiers … you lose the reference to teams above and below you unless there is lots of disparity in proficiency (i.e., blowouts happen) or unless something happens beyond your control above or below you. That’s a fundamental flaw any way you look at it.

the glicko 2 system is designed to have multiple matches in a small rating bracket. not 1 match covering a 300 point rating span. its meant to have a population of hundreds or thousands of competitors. not 24. not 50. at least 100.

my point is you may as well call “tier 6” “match 6”. the meaning would be no different. with only 8 concurrent matches, there is no room for opponent variation when server participation differs so drastically from server to server. giant rating gaps are an unfortunate and probably unforeseen side effect of only having 24 competitors, and wouldnt be an issue with a few hundred competitors to fill in the gaps. blaming so called tiers for a lack of competitors is whats wrong.

as an example of a fully fleshed out rating system: league of legends. there are millions of competitors. the ranking system is merely a flavor, riot chose a modified elo system as opposed to glicko. but a 1700 player does NOT get matched against a 1500 player because there are enough people playing that you can always matchmake 10 1500ish players. it only runs into issues with 2300+ players, they always get matched up against each other with oddball 1800+ players tossed in to the mix when matchmaking forces a match to be made with insufficient closely rated players. because the population of 2300+ players is really small. just like the population of servers in wvw. when you only have 24 players, weird things happen.

Tanryth.1074:

Wed and Thursday night we organized our guild and a few others and brought in all our Noobs to teach them…. It was great actually having a decent size zerg and being on Mumble to coordinate…. I was almost happy… As we were walking them around the BL we happened upon multiple SF and ET invaders that had a sudden Oh kittenmoment… I would again like to thank the SF and ET crews we annihilated multiple times. Our noobs are now all about getting into the fray and I pray we can get some more in there…. Coordinated Noobs are as bright as a bag of hammers…. but they are fun to watch….

please please please turn them into regulars
we do NOT have enough regulars

Cactus.2710:

-1. The Glicko-2 system was never meant to be used for tiered competition. It was intended to be applied to competitions where every participant plays a continuum of opponents in the general vicinity of his own rank. A tiered system locks opponents into a bracket from which they cannot escape if they are evenly matched … even though they may be better or worse than the participants in adjacent tiers.

i see this problem cited constantly any time there is discussion about glicko flaws.

and every time i see it, its wrong. we just call our matches tiers. tiering hardly applies at all, as the definition here is vague and mutable. what makes a tier? well the 3 servers in the match of course. we dont define it based on ranking, which is what we actually should do. like 1001-1200 is tier 7. 1201-1400 = tier 6. etc.

because of this, the actual issue of having a low population of possible competitors gets confused with whatever youre saying. matchmaking repeatedly creates matches based on the most even matches, always resulting in little change in opponents, because there are so few opponents to choose from. a server doesnt get stuck with bad matches because of the tiers, it gets stuck because there are 0, 1, 3, or not 3N-1 equal opponents. and the system requires 3N-1 equal opponents for such a low competitor population.

i would like to be able to spend karma on anything i could buy with gold, but have it account bound on purchase.

trading post excepted.

well nothing has changed so all the old issues are still pretty relevant…

i would have rather had a month of bad matchups due to the ratings reset… than a month of bad matchups due to a rating gap trap.

either way. but at least one of the ways doesnt guarantee anything.

i was anxiously anticipating the reset. because something must be done. glicko is obviously not meant to accommodate 200 rating point gaps.

guess i shouldve been more vocal. all the whiners have ruined the hopes of ebay, bg, and t8.

/squadinfo

/151515151515

edit
nice necro
got me

katz.8376:

heh. one person does not speak for the entire server. i would not be opposed to such an… agreement. but i do agree they are fraught with peril for the weaker ally.

yeah but one person with a commander hat speaks for his zerg…

[BOSS], [MOTS], and [KILL] jump on the dead when its 5 people defending vs 40

stay classy!

credit for not dancing!

in case you dont know, the new exotic jewelry at the orr merchants is account bound + soulbound on use instead of just soulbound. gear up your alts.

JK Arrow.7102:

insanemaniac.2456:

this is an impossible issue you are having, i think you are dreaming

if you are really THAT focused on doing your dailies, do a dungeon run and any mob interaction related ones will be done by the end of it.

seriously, you dont need to farm dodges.

You do if you want the XP bonus on an alt.

what does this even mean
i smell a non sequitur

Warlord.9074:

Ya it was a really bad decision to reset, when finally what we have for the most part are balanced match ups except for 2-3 servers.

no it wasnt. tier 8 was a trap for any hapless server unfortunate enough to drop to it because of the rating differential. a server could have won by a small margin and lose 100 rating on their first reset, which was then impossible to recover with similar showings. heaven forbid they lose the first week like SF did. it took DR 8 or 10 weeks to get out of it. it took kain 4+ weeks of total domination to get out.

this is an impossible issue you are having, i think you are dreaming

if you are really THAT focused on doing your dailies, do a dungeon run and any mob interaction related ones will be done by the end of it.

seriously, you dont need to farm dodges.

katz.8376:

hrm… ok, new player here… was running with a zerg either yesterday or the day before… and someone popped a portal and said “use it”. i did not at the time know it was a glitch or an exploit so i used it and thought to myself “cool!”.

now that i know, i will not be taking advantage of any further such portals i see, and if i notice who casted them, i will report said behavior. apologies to the people who’s towers i helped take illegitimately during the shenanigans.

~the blue ranger with the white hat in [PK].~

this man deserves cookies, props, to get laid, to have this post read by every (noob) ET wvw’er, and much more for having the balls to say this

no sarcasm

please yes

i want a real 3 way fight
sf is like a referee holding us apart

but then again you guys have a reputation for being smart with your golem rushes…

Neeks.2760:

How hard does the burn hit for in a condition build ? Wondering if this would help in a wvw build to counter theifs that i am having issues with.

doesnt really matter, this wont counter thief very well since they do about 2-4 huge hits where most other burst skills are like 10+ smaller hits. you wont get much mileage out of the burn, condition spec or not.

rogerwilko.6895:

there will always be 5-10 ppl who will shout “ENG are solid in WvW! I can drop 2-3 on my own!” and so on.
I say they are pretty rare, and they are the exception.

im one of 2-3 people whos shouting “engi is solid in wvw! i can drop 5-10 people on my own!” but its pretty rare and when i do its definitely an exception.

nevertheless.. “weak” doesnt do that.

FilthyRat.4652:

Well guess I wont be seeing you guys in the jp anytime soon.

i kind of want to grant you minimal attention with 1-2 line posts so you keep posting walls of text and wasting your time, and our thread gets to be respectably long from your double, triple, and quadruple posts.

FilthyRat.4652:

[insert quintuple post here]

^ forum warrior doesnt get people riled up like he wants so he talks to himself?

well at least our thread hit 2 pages this week! it was close, i thought wed stay at 1 page until this guy showed up.

the only thing claiming an objective does is allow the claiming guild to put up buffs. if you want to be a big help there are a couple things you can do:

-turn on only the extra carrying capacity and claim a camp
-claim a front line-ish objective and turn on a few stat buffs, or just everything that affects a players fighting ability
-claim an objective deep in your territory and turn on the couple of buffs that are still useful but not really fighting related (move speed, supply, salvage chance)

beyond that, i generally leave nothing (important) claimed if i dont have any guild buffs up. the buffs are always greatly appreciated whether people say thanks or not.

i dont know if claiming affects influence gains. i hope it doesnt.

Knox.3748:

QQ on Dragonstooth? really? gawd why

cuz iberserker was op at killing siege too?

at least 90% of SF players attack in puzzles
at least 75% of ET players dont

…in my experience

its a different culture for SF, and one of the things i miss most about Kain/DR.
and SF has the balls to proclaim their superiority when the free golem rushes they try end up being promptly stopped at the first gate with oil or mortars. well whatever.

reflect! /15151515151515

FilthyRatkitten.8953:

Lol golems are nothing when we own the Eternal jp…do yourself a favor and stay out of puzzle. Or save youself the trouble and jus stay Out of EB

youre boring. camp the other puzzles too please. if you dedicate enough people to it the matches might be less lopsided.

leave the swords.
as a tier 8 player, my nightly/morningly x v x (x<5, and thats the whole MAP) would be stupid. i cant have a player at each point to tell me someone is attacking. white swords are often enough to save a camp when noticed early. and the orange swords are even more helpful, because then i know to not bother with that camp when im alone.

i did daily vets entirely in wvw. easiest part ever.

tried it out since its close to my build. im mostly wvw. hated it. cant stand kit refinement. the box of nails on toolkit is the only freebie that doesnt annoy the kitten out of me. medkit and grenade kit freebies are stupid. and it doesnt work in the air and underwater.

promptly changed back to 30/10/0/0/25, 5 more in either firearms or alchemy (either way doesnt matter).

maybe if i had a dedicated small group to run with, it wouldnt be so bad. but the point of a grenadier glass cannon is to scare the hell out of people from 1500 range, not 0.

nothing should be unblockable. (and blocks should be a bit rarer.)

yep, any of the 3 tier 8 servers would have to hold 650+ ppt the whole week for 2-4 weeks in order to move up to tier 7. that aint happening.

Take a look at League of Legends for example. Every single ability (with maybe 3-5 exceptions for abilities that auto-smartcast because of their spammability) has a blue area that appears when you select the ability that shows you exactly your hitbox. Skillshots have well defined areas that also describe more or less what you should expect from the skill. Targeted abilities pop up a ring around your hero at the edge of the skill’s range and change the cursor to a targeting reticle. Autoattacks are excluded from rangefinding and the player is left to learn their hero’s auto range (mostly for graphical simplicity/elegance I think).

What do we have in Guild Wars 2?
Selecting a target puts a red bar under your skill if it’s out of range, or not if you’e in range. Deselecting targets does the same, but changes it to “if something is in range”.

What’s missing?
Players have no way to tell where the edge of their range is. We can’t know if we’re 1201 units away or 1300 because both ranges give us the same feedback on 1200 range skills (For a situation like this, it could be the difference between tapping your move key once instead of twice and saving your dodge while still getting in/out range quickly). We have to develop a sense of how far a given range is and are given no aids, making the game hard to pick up and hard to come back to.

What do I suggest you do about it?
Optimally, probably a system similar to League of Legends with a circle lighting up around you when you hover over or select a skill. Preferably with an off switch, and/or doesn’t activate on pushing a hotkey.
At the simplest, show us the number for our range to our target (for example, place the number under the target’s picture). It’s already calculated in real time for the red bars, just show it to us. Doesn’t have to be huge, just readable.

MithranArkanere.8957:

insanemaniac.2456:

in caledon forest, i cannot defeat Meztli in a crab battle (solo).. he uses block on cd and gains regen, which heals all the damage i can put on him in the time between blocks. event isnt tagged as group.

I’ve done each of the bosses solo at least a couple of time.
The moa and drake are relatively easy, but the crab and jellyfish can be tricky.

It will only get regen if you do not attack it while it blocks. So the trick is saving your evades and blocks to avoid its attacks, and spam 1 and 2 while it’s blocking.

Since you become allied to the crab if defeated, you can’t lose, so you can keep trying again and again until you get the knack of it.

“tricky” is not something i expect or want from really low level open world content… i dont have the attention span for it while on an alt, and would be frustrated with it if it was my first character.

thanks for the tips though. i was a bit more worried about being 2 or 3 shot by the silly thing (and avoiding its damage with a hotbar ive never used) than i was worried about figuring out how to actually damage it and keep it from regening.

Draygo.9473:

There is some hard to track bug that prevents the devs from making them account bound at the moment. (Breaks skill #2 when you pull a blueprint out).

You can pass them by using the drop bundle button and a trusted friend.

@ OP: this was a dev comment somewhere or other

they know, and itd be nice, but priorities.

in caledon forest, i cannot defeat Meztli in a crab battle (solo).. he uses block on cd and gains regen, which heals all the damage i can put on him in the time between blocks. event isnt tagged as group.

we turned SF border blue this morning! well except for sunnyhill.. which we took later once a few defenders showed up and we lost control of a few camps.

also rumor is ET got a transfer windfall, EB turned red while we were painting SF. hope things dont get too out of whack, but sort of glad the underdog will probably be able to fight better.

and yes, thats right guys… sf had PPT’s around 10-50 ish ;D

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

Other than [Group] events, they all scale for 1-10 players. We’re also looking at scaling past that for world bosses and Orr megaevents, but that will take time. If there’s an event that you’re convinced isn’t scaling, please post the name and location and I’ll look at it. I know I’ve solo’d all of the Wayfarer Foothills events that I worked on.

escorting the lionguard in southsun cove

of course, i cant be sure if scaling during event is even possible or if the scaling is chosen only at event beginning, but i found the npc dead with 5 young karka standing over them. 5 young karka are easy to solo at once mostly because of reflect skills. and i solo’d about 1/2 of the path you walk along once i rezzed the npcs. however, the first vet karka was ridiculously hard. and once i saw the npcs walking towards 2 more, i just left.

that was yesterday. today i find the npcs dead just past the 2 vets, so ill see about completing the event. the event is not tagged as group.

edit: they walked straight into camp karka and died to another “unsoloable” event without a group tag. (vet karka + vet young karka in the same vicinity with hatchlings, need more space to fight than there is AND cant avoid pulling more when pulling 1)

Manoa.5897:

insanemaniac.2456:

Manoa.5897:

So if we are getting transfers and/or more PvEers involved, it certainly isn’t enough yet to bump us to max map capacity terribly often.

all of our populations are low enough that you could quadruple our numbers and not hit queues

or well… they were.

I’m not trying to argue that our WvW isn’t getting more numbers and/or doesn’t have population advantage over FC or ET at this time. Just sharing my personal observations, nothing more.

I can’t say for certain whether or not we are indeed seeing more numbers (as I haven’t been active during this particular match) and if so, what the actual source of that population increase is (i.e. transfers or PvEers joining us when we’re winning or a combo of the two).

There are many reasons for score discrepancies due to population. We may very well be seeing more folks joining us in WvW, thereby swinging the population advantage in our favor. Or the other two servers may be loosing WvW population (either to other servers or to PvE), which would also swing the population advantage in our favor. And the two are not necessarily mutually elusive either…it could be some mix of the two.

i was agreeing with you o.O
even if your population doubled… youd outnumber us/et and still not hit queues

Manoa.5897:

So if we are getting transfers and/or more PvEers involved, it certainly isn’t enough yet to bump us to max map capacity terribly often.

all of our populations are low enough that you could quadruple our numbers and not hit queues

or well… they were.

sf suddenly doubles their potential points and holds it…

in tier 8 theyre quite common

we often run into coverage issues and the related towers change hands fairly often, so theyre pretty useful (and very frustrating for the opponents defending)

the underwater combat is pretty bad. limited range of motion, unreliable dodging, “natural plane” based strafing and turning. try porting the engine to a space based game. youd be laughed out of the room.

maybe you should play an aoe class so you can kill all 3 while they rez each other. aoe op.

maybe not touching engineer will be good enough since they will be nerfing “tough encounters” as well

we all have great showings for reset, i havent seen any new sizable guilds with a leader so far this match… but we do run in to the problem(?) of having a ridiculous(!) response to anything being taken on our border so you guys tend to give up trying on it and just let us have it and fight elsewhere. which leaves us with a very decided advantage in fighting on it and allows us to head other places. im quite surprised to hear we had a 60+ zerg actually. that prolly happened in your border because they got annoyed at how territorial SF is about EB (same deal as our border).

but once your border was blue, it didnt really take long for SF to zerg us out of their border, so the really beautifully colored blue everywhere didnt last too long!

Gilgamesh.2561:

Engineers are arguably the least played profession in every aspect of the game (WvW/sPvP/PvE).

We have always been, since the very first BWE.

It confuses me as to why ArenaNet tries to enforce this status quo, by making changes that make the Engineer less appealing. Once upon a time you could say “Well, Engineers are such a complex profession that when played to its potential, you excel other professions.” I used to think that was true, in the early days of GW2, but then I realized some professions simply have more going for them.

The thief is the easiest example:

1. Make a glasscannon Rifle engineer (Berserker’s), and attack golems in the sPvP lobby. Watch them die slowly.
2. Make a glasscannon dagger Thief (Berserker’s), and attack golems in the sPvP lobby. Watch them melt in sub 4 seconds.

holy kitten golems dont dodge!

CHIPS.6018:

insanemaniac.2456:

wait lemme get this straight

youre unhappy on SBI but you want the EU 1/2 of the guild to hop servers and come to you where either 1) youre unhappy or 2) you dont know if youll be happy

why arent YOU hopping to their EU server? problem solved. its not like there are ip blocks.

Our guild has way more NA than EU players. However our alliance (from GW1) had more EU than NA players. Our guild won’t be moving over to EU.

gee, its a shame youre taking a workable option off the table. who cares where the majority of your people are located irl. the move costs nothing. unless you delay.

if youre gonna have a closed mind, stop complaining.

wait lemme get this straight

youre unhappy on SBI but you want the EU 1/2 of the guild to hop servers and come to you where either 1) youre unhappy or 2) you dont know if youll be happy

why arent YOU hopping to their EU server? problem solved. its not like there are ip blocks.

you guys are just too focused on EB

you completely dominate it at the expense of abandoning coverage of all 3 borders, and you just sit on it instead of even trying to make any headway on fc or et borders. numbers are not your problem in this tier.

please dont recommend arrogant hotheads to transfer to t7/t8. we either chase them out or they transform our communities for the worse.

…because the only people who think theyre a top guild are arrogant hotheads.

they come in thinking its their duty to teach us how2wvw when all theyve ever done is run around in a 40 man zerg. they have no clue how to take a keep when its 2v5v0… on the whole map. or defend one. or how to take objectives efficiently, because gold is a much scarcer commodity.