Guild Wars 2

The timing of the SM exploit is very fishy. The past couple of months, most of the known exploits are usually on EB towers and borderland tower/keeps. And most of the accusations posted on the forum are usually exploits regarding these holdings on the map.

I have not heard of SM being exploited in the past 2 months on the forum. The SM exploit was posted on youtube 3 days ago, and then suddenly, you get a case of an accusation of SM being exploited. Just too coincidental… And to make it even more fishier, it’s a mesmer hiding 2+ hours in SM which is one of the more busier keeps on EB if there is constant fighting.

This reminds me of how the diablo3 forum blew up when the players got to Inferno. Players hated it so much they would rather spend time on the forums than playing the game. Many players also started asking for refunds at the time also.

GreyFeathers.8175:

They are trying to keep that 2% of gamers happy that grind and do have hours to spend each day playing but your casual gamer is suffering. It’s not only new content but I see the same bias happening in normal dungeons. Try to get a group for story mode sometime ( You’re a level 80 and have not done this dungeon ? Sorry no noobs in my group ). It isn’t just this update it’s happening through out the entire game.

I actually don’t think it’s the case that they’re trying to keep the 2% of the gamers happy. I think the patch is mainly to get players to spend more. This has Nexon influence written all over it..

The 2% which is the hardcore grinders usually do not buy items from cash shop. If they have time to grind 8+ hours a day, they tend to have tons of gold and can get whatever items they want.

The intent of this patch is to create a gear treadmill that requires lots of grinding. It forces the casuals who have the money but not the time to grind to spend a ton on the cash shop to get the items they want. Casuals who usually work are the ones who are most likely to be buying gems.

This direction goes in hand with how Nexon runs their games. Grind, low rate on item drops, RNG, cash shop related content, etc… Since Nexon purchased 15% of NCSoft and now is one of the major shareholders, I am not surprised that their influence has made it into GW2.

Again, I’ll use a Nexon game as an example since I’m starting to see Nexon’s influence in GW2 after Nexon buyingt 15% of NCSoft and is now one of the major shareholders.

In Nexon games (Vindictus), there will be 3 types of players:

1) Hardcore grinders who will play 8+ hours to grind gear/money.
2) Casuals who will be required to buy from cash shop to gear their players and enjoy the game. GW2 initially (before the recent updates) allowed casuals to have fun and enjoy the content without having to spend enormous amount of money. Nexon tends to focus on this group to make money. If you’re a casual, and you want to compete with the hardcore grinders in pvp or enjoy the content (not getting 1 shot by bosses), you will need to empty your pockets.
3) Botters who just bot for gold to get all the gear they need.

I see the “normal players” in GW2 fitting in category 2. So, if this is the direction GW2 is heading, then I foresee this group of players having to spend a lot on cash shop (buying gems to trade for gold) to be able to enjoy GW2.

Phoenix.6735:

Phy.2913:

So much negativity. There are people out there who are on lvl 1, but if try to play an mmo by yourself it’s not going to work out when you want to do group content.

EDIT: It took WOW 6 years to make the content gate as small as it is. Remember BC? If you started late you were left behind.

You mean a 2012 MMO couldn’t take pointers from a 2007 MMO because now both are in different stages of their life cycle?

What a utterly crappy argument.

Not disagreeing with you but then I think of Diablo3…. When greed/money is the main goal, then it happens…

A suggestion..

Try posting this in chat, I’m sure you will get in a group:

lfg fact lvl2. Offering 1 gold to get in party.

On other Nexon games, to overcome this, you have to offer gold to the higher level players to have them party with you to complete the mission. If you don’t have enough gold, you will need to buy items from cash shop to trade for in game gold. That is how Nexon games are run.

If RNG is introduced, it is a Nexon influence. In Vindictus, boss drops, enhancing, enchanting items, and almost everything are controlled by RNG. On Vindictus, I have killed a boss 250+ times over a year and not have gotten the item needed from him to craft 1 piece of armor. And there are 7 pieces of armor for that set, so I need to somehow get 7 boss drops to complete the armor set.

There will be two paths to get the entire armor set. Either grind everyday for like 10+ hour for gold to purchase the boss drops or spend a ton of money on cash shop to trade for gold in game to purchase the boss drops. There are people who have spent $100+ on 1 piece of item and thousand of dollars to stay competitive on Vindictus. Also note that, since it’s RNG, spending $100 does not guarantee that you get the results you want. Players on Vindictus have spent hundreds of dollars to try to enhance/enchant a weapon and have the weapon break or not increase 1 level (failed like 10+ times in a row). I hope GW2 is not turning into that type of game but with this new gear treadmill and RNG (chest keys during halloween event), it may seem like this is the path GW2 has taken..

I think it’s ok. The gates hp goes down to fast currently when multiple rams are set up. It doesn’t give players time to rush back to defend it.

I don’t think the wvw world rankings are even updated this week on the stickied thread. I think we have been abandoned…

If you’re on the borderland map with FIRE (the guild Agress is on), you would notice that they do well during the evenings and when 9pm PST hits, most of FIRE members log off to go to sleep. By midnight, they lose almost all of their tower/keeps or resorted to only defending since there are around just 20 players on (with around 5 from FIRE).

What I noticed is that JQ usually has outmanned buff on at least 2 of their maps at around 9pm PST. Either a bulk of the population on JQ is from NA east coast (midnight there) or the overall wvw population is declining very rapidly. This is very concerning since if a tier 1 server cannot have more than 20 people on at least 3 of their maps at 9pm PST, how many are actually doing wvw on the lower tiers on NA servers.

By midnight PST, the JQ’s wvw population drops even more since west coast goes to sleep. Without any EU and oceanic presence, by 2am-3am, all maps except maybe 1 will have any people. The only defense on the towers/keeps at this time zone is the “door defense.”

I’m actually very surprised that JQ is able to stay in tier 1 with almost zero EU and oceanic presence.

Kyiv.9621:

Ranc.7192:

Get out of here with that bs

We already seen what happen’s when WM doesnt show up SBI gets facerolled

Look at this weekend

Stop it, WM played the weekend 2 and 3 weekends ago. 3 weekends ago BG crushed JQ and SBI during that weekend and 2 weekends ago SBI has a small 2-4k lead by the end of it.

People give too much credit to WM for overall server performance. Yes they are great pvp players, but the reason why they get so much credit is their coverage times. That coverage makes up the biggest difference for SBI in winning the games and hence why people love them on SBI. Just look at Europe and what Ruin transferring over to cover nighttime has done for a particular server.

Without WM, SBI would still compete during the weekends but they would not win as much during weekdays. Everyone knows there is the weekend wars where coverage is not a factor and the weekday wars where coverage is king.

Just stop talking about it already, WM is just a PART of SBI, but their part is crucial no doubt.

The other guilds in SBI probably deserve more credit, but I can see why they’re not getting the credit they deserve right now since there is so much evidence that says otherwise. Evidence not from just NA servers but EU servers as well.

As mentioned before, for this week’s matchup, SBI was losing badly with WM out of action, and the comeback was made when WM rejoined the fight. The past few weeks have shown a pattern of SBI either losing during the weekends or the score being very close, and then SBI making comebacks or erasing large deficits during the weekdays when they were able to night cap with their huge off hour zerg (WM).

Now, lets look at EU servers. Desolation was a tier 2 server based on performance and a borderline tier 1 based on the zerg/population. Vizunah was the undisputed number 1 server in EU at that time. Whenever Desolation battled against vizunah in tier 1, they would get slaughtered.

When RUIN joined Desolation a few weeks back to become their off hour zerg, the Desolation server got transformed into a powerhouse overnight. With RUIN night capping everyday, not only did Deso able to be competitive in tier 1, they were finally able to overcome Vizunah and become the #1 server in EU. From what I heard, RUIN has decided to leave Desolation and now we see Desolation getting slaughtered again in tier 1 this week (currently 3rd place and very far behind in points). This is how important an off hour zerg like WM and RUIN can be for a server. Their impact to the overall score makes contributions from other smaller guilds during regular hours seem less important. Everyone can argue it’s not true but events from both NA and EU servers the past few weeks says otherwise.

zhonnika.1784:

Sooooooo much fun as a JQ player tonight. We seriously had rallied so many people and were just on a crazy flipping rampage. [fire] [esol] [aos] — you all kick so much butt. It’s interesting playing when everyone has paper walls again!

It needs saying again: JQ has not been in cahoots with SBI against BG. I guess it could feel that way, but… really, no.

I agree that these matches have been great, I just wonder how much longer we can sustain the player enthusiasm when not much is changing. SoS coming in may help, but it also comes at a time when anet is pushing in the first huge content patch.

The problem is that the first huge content patch is all PVE. WvW will suffer even more when it comes out. Since beta, only 1 wvw issue has been fixed, and it was more of a workaround than an actual fix (removing orbs).

Look at all the glaring issues so far:

-Orb hacking. Semi fixed by removing the orbs. Players have suggest better solutions such as having to take over the keep or killing the lord before the orb can be taken.

-Culling issue. Not fixed.

-Night capping. Not fixed.

-Transfers. Not fixed. Guesting feature is getting pushed back.

-Snowballing effect. Partially fixed with removal of orbs. But again, better solutions were offered such as swapping outmanned buff with the orb buff.

-No new content, maps, rankings, rewards…

Chapel.2706:

Snow Aeth.1937:

So SBI (only when WM is present) can be compared to HoD in its current state.

Why is it alot of people from SBI and the other 2 servers always have to mention WM as if they are the only guild in SBI thats doing something on WvW. I understand they’re seen alot but what about giving the other guilds credit that put in the work day in and day out for SBI. They work just as hard as WM to help us win. They deserve praise too.

Just to give a few names i’ve seen alot (DICE, CaLM, SENT, TwiA, TB, Pact, ect…..)

Again, let’s just use the matchup this week. WM didn’t show up on Friday night (or was it Saturday night?) because they were partying and were drunk. SBI without their main night time crew was losing badly. They were in 3rd place and getting dominated on all borderland maps. Only on EB were they able to hold majority of their keeps and towers.

WM came back after their hangover to night cap, and the match became competitive again for SBI. When weekday hit, whole borderland maps were flipped over night and the 15k deficit was easily erased in a few hours. People can debate all they want about coverage not being the reason why a server wins, but the same pattern that has shown the last few weeks is painfully obvious. Weekeend has fierce, competitive battles. Weekday is when coverage and night capping triumph.

Xyanide.8650:

kidbs.8920:

I know in my guild, a lot of us just play for fun on the weekend and aren’t too concerned with the score (we bring in our alts and grind xp). We save our serious push for the weekdays. WM generally hangs out in the borderlands so they aren’t “carrying” the entire server. Also, as Vyrance above me mentioned, many of our players are hardcore nuts that will stay up for 12+ hours in WvW, so it’s not just our Euro/Ocean coverage that pushes up our scores at night.

lol, it’s quite true. Weekends has long queues, sometimes could not get in wvw. Even if u get in you will find some player doing weird stuff like claim stonemist without buffs, dropping flame rams and trebs in the lord room of stonemist castle, killing grub when we should siege bravost. that’s what would happen in weekends. In the meantime some of the guilds in all 3 servers are just farming for karma, running around cappin’ supply camps where conflict with the strategies. And quite a few whining about other servers camping jumping puzzles, keep offering them badges in the puzzle area instead of doing normal wvw content. Anyways we struggled hard to catch in points in the weekend, until when all things above are settled, when ppl start to play seriously, it is already weekdays :P

If SBI has a long queue during the weekend then I think they’re the only NA server that is able to maintain their wvw population (transfers maybe?). I’ve noticed many from other servers saying there is a considerable drop in wvw population. On other servers, even during the weekends, there is NO QUEUE on borderlands.

The score is always close on the weekends since the weekend is when all 3 servers can field the most people – no school; no work; players can stay up late. It’s usually a fierce battle, and the server in the lead has to fight for every inch on the map. However, when weekdays come with work and school, most people cannot stay up late. That is when SBI shows their coverage advantage.

Using this week as an example, JQ battled for 2.5 days and gained a 15k point lead. When monday hit, SBI and their night crew, by just playing at their normal time and doing nothing different from what they did during the weekend, erased the 15k point lead and eventually took over the lead. It took a server 2.5 days to build 15k point lead and it took 1 day of night capping to erase it.

glock.2089:

SBI in the lead after overcoming a 16k point differential in approximately 12 hours

Not really surprising. Many have already noticed the pattern. Noticed that the difference in points is usually made during the weekdays. Many have already said that the real battle is during the weekends and then it’s a coverage war during the weekdays. SBI currently has a night time crew that other servers cannot match (similar to how HOD was dominating during its prime).

Ranc.7192:

^^^

You mean “and thus begins the [WM] push”

Dont get it twisted sweetie

Many have called it the “Ruin” push also…

Forest.4197:

I know JQ has quite a nice Taiwan/Japan alliance, but WM actually still trumps because they get on earlier (which boggles me)

Right now, WM alone probably has more players than both BG and JQ combined on some borderlands at night time. Combined that with the Oceanic guilds, SBI currently has by far the best night time crew on NA servers since HOD prime days. WM is essentially like RUIN on the EU servers.

Forest.4197:

What time slot does this so called “Chinese guild roster” play? In EST terms preferably.

China is right next to Korea, so they play whatever time zone WM plays which should be 2am to 10am PST (or 5am to 1pm EST), essentially night/work time for NA servers.

Dynheart.5402:

Forest.4197:

What time slot does this so called “Chinese guild roster” play? In EST terms preferably.

It’s not a “so called” Chinese guild/roster. HD, Holy Dragon is the big one that’s missing, though. It’s already been known that Chinese players cannot log on.

Thing is, HD is a biggy on JQ, along with many other Chinese players.

Although I haven’t participated in this weeks match (too busy..I still don’t think they are back), they have been missing for awhile now. Something about their internet being cut off/messed up over there. /shrug I didn’t get into the details much.

If I remember correctly, China is currently having elections to select the new leaders for their Communist Party. Censorship has been vamped up so many people in China have had their internet blocked or restricted during the elections.

The US based members of some of the Chinese guilds have said that their guilds are currently in shambles due to many of the Chinese based members having their internet cut off or restricted. Some of the guilds went from 100+ online with 40+ in wvw regularly to not even having 5 people online. Some who have managed to go online are using VPN to bypass the IP restriction but can’t play due to the lag.

Morpheis.2356:

jojojoon.8607:

This is an FYI for the guild leader of SF in sbi. You guys have members who are trying to glitch into keeps. I saw a few incidents of the glitching by SF members at Langor keep in EB.

Actually I can tell you exactly what happened, I was there. There were a handful of us standing flush against the tower wall next to the door when a treb shell from your main keep hit us and the knockback effect pushed us inside the wall of the tower. At that point three of us were stuck inside the wall until we eventually managed to make it out using various skills; I, a mesmer, had to use my Main hand sword skill #3 on the keep door and swap with the clone which then put me inside the keep.

So there was no hacking, it was just a rare bug. Obviously they will want to get that fixed, but since the conditions for it to manifest require you to be directly next to a tower wall and then get hit by your enemies siege from the opposite side, it shouldn’t be very abuse-able.

First time, I’ve heard of that bug. I hope they get it fixed then.

cold.3946:

jojojoon.8607:

This is an FYI for the guild leader of SF in sbi. You guys have members who are trying to glitch into keeps. I saw a few incidents of the glitching by SF members at Langor keep in EB.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Can you please clarify whether this was Shining Force [SF], Select Few [sF], or Strike Force [SF]?

We take allegations like these very seriously. If we find a member of our guild has exploited, rest assured they will be removed. To help our investigation can you please gather any screenshots or evidence collected so that we can identify the offending player? If you happened to right click their name and select report you would have their account id – that would be very helpful.

Thanks again for helping out.

Here is an screenshot. Unfortunately, I was not able to get the account id. From the screenshot it looks like it’s from the guild Shining Force. I didn’t even know there were two guilds with the name until now.

http://i49.tinypic.com/11glyyw.jpg

This is an FYI for the guild leader of SF in sbi. You guys have members who are trying to glitch into keeps. I saw a few incidents of the glitching by SF members at Langor keep in EB.

I have to agree with some of the posts above about either wvw or the game is dying. In a close matchup, on Sunday prime time, there is no queue on any of the maps. It’s happening on tier 1, not some bottom tier when wvw isn’t a major focus.

I think the major issue is lack of updates by Anet on some glaring problems with wvw. It’s been months since beta and none of the issues have really been fixed. Removing the orbs is really just a “quick hack” and not really a solution to the problem. Hopefully now that the halloween event is over, wvw gets a look next patch.

I heard from a reliable source that there will be a new “spy tactic” that will be used in this match. I warn everyone to be careful with players you don’t normally see on your map or your account may get banned/suspended.

JQ is actually affected by it the most. SBI is made up of many oceanic and korean guilds while Blackgate has numerous oceanic and EU guilds. Majority of the bigger JQ guilds are from NA with many from the east coast.

Wait, you want bandwagoners to jumped to blackgate before the 24 hour hour transfer ends? Isn’t that something you DON’T want to happen? This makes no sense.. Most of the hod guilds left for blackgate because they don’t like the bandwagoners, and now they’re encouraging them to join blackgate?

It’s possible for sure.. I leveled to 68 all in wvw in about 3 weeks.

JQ also has a huge group of players from the east coast. There are far more important things to deal with in the east coast than online games at the moment. That’s if they can even get online due to the power outages.

It’s posts like the few above that makes more and more start to hate the blackgate server. If people on your server hacked, let Anet deal with it and move on. Stop trying to hide or pretend that it didn’t happen, or worse, defend and justify that hacking is not a big deal. These types of posts will get legit wvw players riled up since all they want is a fair match.

Some of the popular posts:

“I saw the orb fly from the other team’s keep to our keep in a few seconds, but it’s just probably lag”

“Who cares if we hack. The orbs only give us 5% hp.”

And the famous one from a commander in Blackgate:

“We only hacked twice that I know of of, but it’s no big deal. It’s only a big deal if we hacked more.”

Kefke.2435:

Sad thing is games are moving away from pet classes because it’s hard to do them right. Especially the Necro, that generally has more dynamic minion behaviour and not a single static pet like the ranger.
Necro in gw2 borders on severely underpowert, at least the minion aspect (which I consider to be the may draw for the necro class, everything alse is just “mage with a shadow theme” for me). Minions are not duarable enough to reliably tank for you. And since gw2 is not designt around “facetanking” and minions cannot evade they are ususally killed in 2-3 hits come endgame. Ranger at least get their bears with tons of health and generaly have more controle over them.
I recommend waiting a bit for Anet to fix necros when the first big class reworks are comming around (and some classes are in dire need of one) and make minions more viable. As I said, minions are hard to balance and probalby the part Anet didn’t care about when rushing the necro out for release.

For the meantime I can strongly suggest a warrior. It might not hit your need for a magic-based class but it simply has the easiest and most enjoyable leveling experience. You will literally feel weak with any class after playing a warrior in pve.

It will take awhile for the pets to be fixed. Not months, but possibly years… If it were a simple fix, they would not have changed the description of plague and lich elite forms to say “it will kill off the pets.”

I’ve been wvw’ing for awhile.. On average, on tier 1, there are usually about 3 to 5 of these “orb disappearances” total committed by all 3 servers combined in a week. But this week, one server has committed it 5 times in less than 2 days.. I guess the closer we are to Halloween, the more of these events will occur with Mad King’s minion roaming around..

Agree with the above post.. 5 orb “disappearances” in less than 2 days makes it not fun. I know all servers have bad apples but that has to be a record for any server so far in less than 2 days..

shortcake.8659:

those things really have a mind of their own

Well, I don’t think they have a mind of their own. It has to be the work of the Ghost of Halloween. SBI border has actually been relatively free of these “weird occurrences” until today. And as we know, today is start of the Shadow of the Mad King event. His 2nd in command, Ghost of Halloween must be out doing his thing and just happens to be helping SBI. That is why weird things are happening to orbs…

Sebyos.4089:

Pretty exciting, but there’s a lot of weird stuff too…

I juts logged off after defending the Hills in JQ BL 3 times in a row against simultaneous attacks from SBI on south gate and JQ on north gate… Quite a weird timing once, but what’s the chance of that happening 3 times in 4 hours ?

Also quite weird how SBI made it in once and only entered trough the south gate to kill our north gate siege equipment then got out without even trying against the inner hills keep that had 0 defensive siege…

To me that says a lot about the kind of players in the opposition.

Yeah, definitely lots of weird things happening today. On SBI border about 15 minutes ago, the orb mysteriously disappeared from JQ’s keep and appeared in SBI’s keep. Some say spiderman did it, but I think it’s the ghost of halloween.

Server transfer is just part of the problem. I think the bigger problem is night capping. Why do I say this? Right now, on a Sunday evening, during prime hours, other than EB, if you go to any of the borderland maps on the JQ server, there IS NO QUEUE. Why? JQ basically owns majority of the map so there are no fights, leading to many people logging out of borderlands.

If TW and Fate want to play together right now, they can all log into borderlands. However, there won’t be much fighting.

Server transfer has given JQ what every other server lacks, something HOD had during their dominance, and that something is “24 hour coverage.” WvW is made up of 2 groups. Group 1 are people who would fight regardless if they’re losing or not. Group 2 are people who will only fight when they’re winning. Sadly, majority of wvw is made of group 2. When group 2 checks the score in the morning and see that it’s essentially out of reach (due to night capping or outmanned), or when they log into wvw and see their server own absolutely nothing on the map, they tend to not want to fight and will just log off. That leaves just group 1 fighting the other server. And eventually, this group will get discourage and stop fighting.

If Arenanet does something about the 24 hour coverage, I think that even with transfers, the score will always be close. If that’s the case, it will lead to more people wanting to participate. If I’m on HOD right now and see that my server is only 5k points behind, I wouldn’t mind jumping in to help. However, if the score is 50k points behind with zero chance of catching up, I’ll find something else to do.

The difference is that in real wars, when spies get caught, there are severe consequences (usually death). However, in gw2, even when we find out who the spy is, what can we do? Account doesn’t get banned… Can’t boot them off of the server… They can stand in front of you and admit they’re a spy and there’s nothing you can do…

Banono.4597:

kefro.9312:

The honorable players left before HoD started losing, the bandwagonners just left because they started losing…

The people who hate competition left before they started losing, and then of course Bandwagoneers followed suit. At least the Bandwagoneers stayed in the same tier…

Yup.. What were the 3 guilds out of the alliance that left before hod started losing? Those 3 guilds were the ones who left due to lack of competition (lots of respect for them). However, the rest of the alliance that have now ditched hod since they are losing, I see them as being part of the bandwagoners aka noob train.

Frizz.6704:

There is an extremely easy way to test whether the ‘Titan Alliance’ was the winning factor or whether it was the Zerg. The Titan Alliance has moved to Blackgate, the Zerg has moved to JQ, and so in a few weeks if JQ is an no.1 then clearly it was not the ‘Titan Alliance’ that was winning the match ups. The titan alliance was merely a catalyst for driving the zerg off HOD.

There’s really no need to look that far. We have already seen the evidence that the zerg (aka 24h coverage) was the reason for HOD’s dominance. When the TA alliance disbanded, only a few guilds left the server. Majority of the alliance stayed on the server. What led to the demise of the server was the “bandwagoners” (as referred to by the current hod players) leaving hod since hod isn’t dominating anymore. This led to eliminating the 24 hour coverage advantage they have during their dominance, and it turned into a snowball effect that led to more people leaving.

If you think about it, the main reasons why TA disbanded were due to long queues and getting bored of always winning. HOD now has no queues and is an underdog on the tier 1 matchup. However, the remaining guilds like PRX and SYN actually LEFT the server to join other top servers (sbi) or a lower tier server (blackgate) so they dominate the matchup. We already have threads of other servers, who are competing against blackgate in the lower tier, complaining on how it is unfair to see blackgate dominating now due to all the transfers.

Does it make any sense? TA wanted short queues and competition yet they leave hod which can give them both of these now. Instead, they either jump to a winning server or a lower tier which they can dominate. Doesn’t it just seem like TA is part of the “noob train?”