Guild Wars 2

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

To clarify further this is the first week we are using this new algorithm. So some of the complaints that are being brought up were problems with the old algorithm.

We use play hours to determine the size. Rank gains is tracked for comparison purposes since they usually follow a similar curve, but isn’t actually used to determine the world size.

We have simulated other algorithms to measure world size and ultimately found that player hours gave us more accurate results because we are mostly comparing active WvW play. The past algorithms weighed more heavily on individual players, so we ended up with situations where JQ was ‘Full’ because they had a lot of players, just not necessarily ones that played as much as Blackgate.

TY for the change, albeit its come far too late, and this confirms exactly what I’ve been saying for months.

Tork is apparently looking to transfer there, dunno if they already did. They apparently went to BP to check SBI out.

havoktwo.2147:

1 up 1 down won’t work.

the third t1 server will get screwed over no matter what.

Anet should have given TC a stronger link. The problem is that there no Anet dev on the ground floor. Most players could tell you currently Mags is dominating, BG has the coverage to keep up and TC / JQ are not even close.

I know Anet devs plays WvW, im just wondering how they are not clued in on current situations.

Anets problem is that they make population decisions and linking decisions based on metrics, and those metrics are clearly flawed. Yet they won’t devote resources to fixing these backend systems.

You have to channel the purity of purpose and blast those light fields.

Blockhead Magee.3092:

Anet puts a system in place, players gamethe system and then blame anet for allowing them to do it.

Its clear that more people want to ‘win’ than be competitive otherwise these massive imbalances wouldn’t exist.

So, I blame anet for being absent and unwilling to dedicate resources to building a better framework, but the real culprits are the players who use the tool to their advantage (and then come here to whine about it).

Thats just human nature, its up to Anet to design a system to account for that sort of player behaviour which is why the blame is squarely on them as far as I’m concerned.

Its worth noting that in the only other WvW mode around, in ESO, they got the framework pretty much right from the start. So they don’t need to waste resources tinkering with the system itself they spend resources on balance and technical issues like server performance.

gebrechen.5643:

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.

People really need to get over his past actions. His post is spot on.

Its unbelievable that anet clearly didn’t do any modelling on 5-4-3 as to what the effects would actually be. They just tossed it in as a test. They have to get it through their heads that undesirable flow on effects can happen relatively quickly and its not good enough to use the mode as a beta testing ground.

Spartacus.3192:

I hate this change on my engie. I loved blasting light field from elixir gun 5/4 for AOE retal. Especially when fighting a DH that likes to use procession of blades. Could easily take a nice chunk of its HP if the trap hit a couple people with retal buff.

Yep, this change goes a long way to ruining my engi build in small scale pvp due to that.

Jski.6180:

Chaba.5410:

To add, the fight this was from was not near an objective lord nor WvW gate/oil/cannon.

And wvw doors something you cant even condi…. dose this guy even play wvw / gw2?

Er you do know doors were changed to take condi damage along with siege.

Jski.6180:

The nerf to meteor shower for non player targets is huge because siege counts as non player targets. I hope this is an over sight on there end or there simply no way to counter siege unless you use siege (still waiting on my dam deployable mortar for a real counter tool.)

This is the END of dmg ele in wvw.

I wouldn’t mind betting WvW siege was not even considered when they made this change.

So apart from eles meteor shower this whole balance change is a power creep for every class. Given the power creep since HOT is that really what anet wants to do?

My opinion……….. WvW players shafted yet again.

Silverstone.4539:

So I took a break a bit after the big server merge in WvW. I come back and the numbers look worse than before the merge?! WvW seems beyond pointless right now. Where did everyone go? on CD btw.

Just a continuation of the HOT trend, especially linking has been not what was promised and not an answer.

So patch notes are out and WvW shafting has been confirmed. PvP and fractals both have the chance to buy the recipes for the ascended crafting tokens with their respective currency so why wasn’t WvW using the proofs of heroics?

If anet devs still wonder why WvW players feel so ignored, stuff like this is why, it would have been so easy to include us.

Er, Colin has left Anet and the new format is clearly the battlegroup proposal that was talked about a while ago.

Justine.6351:

Ya it’s so bad in wvw,

You just play the game mode and occasionally you get an acended box drop that you can then choose what piece of gear to get. Then use a cheap mystic forge recipe and roll whatever stat on it you want. So much worse than over 60g in crafting materials and time gates for the cheaper pieces (wvw boxes don’t care if you pick chest or gloves, 2hander or offhand), assuming you have 500 crafting of course.

Your comments on this have already been comprehensively refuted on the main thread on this.

Justine.6351:

Before spvp season 5 the easiest way to get ascended weapons and armor was WvW. All you have to do is play the mode and occasionally an ascended weapon or armor box will drop. It allows you to pick the weapon/armor piece with core stat of choice. Zero crafting involved.

Yeah easy except for the RNG. I play WvW almost every day. I have not had an ascended armor or weapon drop from WvW for 7-8 months. Soooo easy.

Justine.6351:

morrolan.9608:

Grant only mentions currency from PvP and Fractals. What about WvW?

There was some verbiage about expansion into other modes in the future. Likely an off suggestion that “its possible but I’m not going to get raked over the coals by the community if it doesn’t happen”.

If WvW isn’t included there will be a huge outcry from that community given the neglect over other rewards. Given that they are revamping the system it would be a huge mistake to not include all modes in the revamp, take a little more time to do it if thats requried.

Grant only mentions currency from PvP and Fractals. What about WvW?

And how do we get the crafted token?

Poor story with bugs in its conclusion that still remain AFAIK. Increasing grind to the extent that GW2’s grindy nature became much more apparent to many people who previously didn’t notice it. Not enough content for a premium price, content that was promised to come later never came. Power creep with elite specs that all but ruined spvp and wvw because balance changes were not prioritised enough. The game turned away from its casual nature and became more elitist with raids and the open world content that was unreasonably hard.

These are all reasons why players turned away from GW2 with HOT as the financial numbers show.

Xenesis.6389:

It really does seem like something odd is going on with their calculations.

It might just be a case of some servers having a greater number of players logging in for much shorter periods of time, but enough time over the minimum needed to count their participation in wvw like maybe BG.

This is clearly the case, its the only explanation.

Why anet can’t see the issues with this and why they don’t work out another way of working out a population cap I have no idea. They probably don’t have the resources to actually work on entirely new code like that.

Xenesis.6389:

Ashen.2907:

Five posts above yours.

Oh lol I read his post wrong thought he said it is counted and wanted to see the counter quote. My bad sorry morrolan.

No problem :-)

1. Population imbalance
2. Skill balance
3. Population calculation (although this has less relevance if 1 is achieved)
4. Nerf siege damage
5. Bloodlust on DB

JemL.3501:

Jeknar.6184:

I rather belive in the developer than in a random no-name player that have nothing to backup his claims.

same goes for you

Except there is the word of the developers on this very forum that it isn’t counted.

JemL.3501:

Jayne.9251:

JemL.3501:

eotm activity count towards wvw activity, so yes they are the ones to blame from the start

Someone’s been lying to you. EoTM in fact does not count towards pop count. The devs have said that on numerous occasions.

it does count

Based on what?

gebrechen.5643:

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

I’m totally convinced its how they do it. Whereas it should be based on total man hours.

Threather.9354:

Population is based on people I think, not on active hours.

If server x has 50 active people that are 10 hours online/day and server Y 50 active people that are 3 hour online/day. They have the same population but server X feels like they have 3 times more people.

It makes sense in a way that servers are not being punished for having active people and being fun to play in it. Servers are basically set full if they are not fun to play in (people dont stay online for long) and/or they have lot of PvE dailyfarmers

Yes this is exactly it, I keep saying this but clearly no-one listens. It perfectly explains why some servers are closed and others are open. JQ has been a casual servers for a long time, They have a lot of people that player for short periods but enough to be included in the population, BG in the last few weeks has gone this way as well. They come out for reset and maybe 1 or 2 days for the rest of the week and thats all. Whereas Mag still has a lot of people playing for long hours.

Sindex.9520:

Oh the PvP cynic, while badgering the community for not taking the e-sport section seriously is leaving? Don’t get me wrong he was right to be a cynic over how they balanced PvP. However being a jerk to the community is a big fat: No.

I’m cynical about the way he announced he was leaving before then came back as a big supporter but watching the video he makes some good points.

Ithilwen.1529:

shrug I guess it really was all about the money.

How about you actually watch it.

Lord of Rings.5371:

BG is still Full and Mag is open @ Very High.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/World#List_of_worlds

LMAO

Chaba.5410:

Addressing your edited post about people leaving and friends list getting smaller, I’m not exactly sure what you expect to happen after four years. In the first year of this game my WvW guild died when the GL quit. Half of them never logged on ever again. The other half went their own ways. Today there’s maybe three people of that guild left still playing this game, myself included. We’ve all moved on to other social circles, made new friends, etc. The GL quit back then for many of the same reasons people quit right now: dead game, “all the good players have already left”, burn-out, numbers imbalance, real life.

Generally the population is dwindling though and its dwindling faster than other modes, at least thats how it appears, megaserver may cover up PvE losses. I think its almost unarguable though that had anet developed the mode better that it would have more players now and be a far better experience.

Spartacus.3192:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Spartacus.3192:

I really hope min games for next season will be at least 100 matches.

but thanks for doing this now.

We were thinking something like 10 per week, but it is configurable. We could to 1 a day, 20 per 2 weeks, etc.

The only problem with 10 per week is if people going on vacations for a week and failing the requirement,

So it could be every 2 weeks at least with a minimum total amount of at least 100 please.

Irrelevant, if you go away within a season don’t expect to make the top leaderboard. You’ll have the next season.

40 is not enough, it should be 100 and yes I get that you’re implementing this most of the way through a season, however you’ve sat on your hands doing nothing when this problem came to light, this should have been done weeks ago.

Junkpile.7439:

RodOfDeath.5247:

morrolan.9608:

Junkpile.7439:

RodOfDeath.5247:

Nikola.3841:

Reaper Alim.4176:

Seems to me that all of yall are actually having fun just being able to stack servers. Then completely carelessly kill your enemies by out blobbing them down, with effort or expectation of counter play. So again yes you will absolutely hate ESO. Skill, gear, and tactics, win against numbers in ESO. You have been warned not to try this game. But if you do just get ready for that one to 4 month Champion Point system grind, get ready for the month of gear grinding, get ready for that looking a guides time to optimize your skills and builds, just to begin to compete with some of the more dedicated PvPers of ESO. ZOS is making the game more and more of, your carefree skill-less numbers will not save you type of game.

It actually took about a year to ding 50 on my first character in DAOC
And let me not start about crafting there

Sounds like your dedication and skill means something in these other games. GW2 is practically handing out everything for free, there’s no sense of…..difficulty?

You can always try l2p in gw2 or go play games where gear give you advantage.

But gear does give you an advantage in GW2, a big one in some cases, and GW2 is pretty much the least skillful mmo around.

Isn’t it like a 10-15% boost or something in stats if you run full ascended crap? I still run exotics, I just don’t care enough to win anymore lol

My friend use exotics and win almost all fights.

I meant in terms of stat combos ie. using trailblazers.

Junkpile.7439:

RodOfDeath.5247:

Nikola.3841:

Reaper Alim.4176:

Seems to me that all of yall are actually having fun just being able to stack servers. Then completely carelessly kill your enemies by out blobbing them down, with effort or expectation of counter play. So again yes you will absolutely hate ESO. Skill, gear, and tactics, win against numbers in ESO. You have been warned not to try this game. But if you do just get ready for that one to 4 month Champion Point system grind, get ready for the month of gear grinding, get ready for that looking a guides time to optimize your skills and builds, just to begin to compete with some of the more dedicated PvPers of ESO. ZOS is making the game more and more of, your carefree skill-less numbers will not save you type of game.

It actually took about a year to ding 50 on my first character in DAOC
And let me not start about crafting there

Sounds like your dedication and skill means something in these other games. GW2 is practically handing out everything for free, there’s no sense of…..difficulty?

You can always try l2p in gw2 or go play games where gear give you advantage.

But gear does give you an advantage in GW2, a big one in some cases, and GW2 is pretty much the least skillful mmo around.

Eval.2371:

Reaper Alim.4176:

Noob friendly? Lol quite the reverse actually. They are trying to make it more hardcore and spread the zergs out more. They are just trying to make the zerg playstyle have cons, and not just be face roll. So there’s not whats going on in GW2, where people are just stacking servers and just running over much smaller groups. ZOS actually wants to make players pay dearly for utilizing skill-less stack, outnumber , and steamroll zerg tactics. They want to make the zerg playstyle more risk versus rewards, and not all rewards and no risks. Solo and Small Group activities are a thing, in other MMOs.

But then again, I don’t expect many people in these forums, to understand such things.

I don’t understand how you have this perception of things. We anet has continuously reduced aoe caps and damage, while increasing group defensive capabilities since june 23rd 2015.

What? The AOE cap has been at 5 since the games launch.

DevilishLyx.2340:

These collection items are supposed to be hard to get. Used to be you got these spoons for almost every kill, that people had stacks of them! But I guess anet changed the drop rate as people were getting annoyed with them.

I get them all the time, always have, even now.

Tongku.5326:

morrolan.9608:

Given that the aoe cap has been in the game since launch what former glory?

Incorrect. AOE cap has not been in the game since beginning of the game. It got implimented within first few months though. I forgot exactly when, but I was in WVW on my 2nd lvl 80 at that time already and running precisely and exactly an AOE nuke build because of the lack of cap.

You’re thinking of beta.

Rambitshouse.8712:

I’m gonna guess ESO, but what game is that? It looks really fun and challenging. I never tried that one personally.

Yep the guy in the video is one of the best ESO pvpers in that game both in terms of playing and theorycrafting pvp builds.

Nikola.3841:

Fay.2357:

Stand The Wall.6987:

If said servers could handle the lowered caps?

How would you nay sayers nay my say for yay?

Wishing the servers could handle that load won’t make it so. The reality is that they can’t, so there’s no point in making threads complaining about the cap. The cap is first and foremost due to hardware limitations. Unless you’re hiding some new netcode and server stacks under your pillow, that’s not likely to change any time soon.

I’m just curious how Mythic did it in DAOC 15y ago, was hardware stronger back then? And many clients on dial up, too

Its worth noting that the GW2 engine is essentially an upgraded form of the GW1 engine and as such is extremely inefficient in modern day terms. Add to that the sheer volume of calculations required for conditions and boons.

Given that the aoe cap has been in the game since launch what former glory?

DeceiverX.8361:

Sadly, that team seems to be the one that tries to make the fewest changes possible, while somewhere in the chain there’s a critical failure of understanding that the entire game is tilting away from success because of the poor decision-making made here.

Because there’s a fundamental lack of resources in that area and with the resources they have they put an incompetent yes man in charge of it.

If you start playing when an update hits the playable mark but before its entirely finished downloading you will find many areas of the game unable to be accessed and you will have to log out and finish the download.

The GW2 client doesn’t seem to be a normal streaming client which continues downloading in the background whilst you play, it just stops downloading altogether which makes the decision to let a player begin playing before its fully downloaded a silly option.

mulzi.8273:

gebrechen.5643:

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”.

umm, what? EotM has been completely dead all day on BG side, except for a few hours in the evening EST/PST. BG went into hibernation since xmas…too much eggnog i think.

Last week they won, that was on the back of playing from reset through the weekend and I think Wednesday they came out big. The rest of the week they backcapped while Mag was looking for fights and so ended up winning.

This week so far they have played 1 day on reset (Fri night and Sat) where they outblobbed Mag and TC and thats it.

Rashy.4165:

And this is why we can’t have nice things.

It’ll likely be fixed for next season.

I don’t see why it can’t be fixed now. The only players who would complain are the exploiters and of course they can be completely disregarded.

Tyrx.2471:

archer of fatalis.5398:

2: 3 servers remain closed, bg in t1 and jq and… yb? yb is in t3, so I got really curious about how they could have that many numbers.

YB doesn’t match T1 servers in pure numbers, but I believe one of the devs stated that “population” has something to do with the aggregate amount of hours played on a server. Many YB players spend their life on GW2 (such as DK), and that leads to an inflated hours played count per capita. Many of them also camp in keeps hugging their siege, so I’d wager a guess that also inflates their hours played and makes them look more active compared to servers that don’t play passively.

Maguuma has a lot of players who spend most of their time in WvW so on that above basis it should have remained closed. I keep saying but my inference from what the devs have said is that the population is based on number of players and to be included in that population you have to spend a certain amount of time in WvW or activities like dailies. So BG, JQ and YB have a lot of players who spend smaller amounts of time in WvW than Mag players but they spend enough time to be counted. I think population caps should be based on total man hours but I don’t think it is.

Jeknar.6184:

“Hi! My blob can’t respond quick enough to defend our stuff because a thief keep taping our keep all day. Please make it impossible for it to happen so my blob can respond quicker so we can all go back to mowing down smaller groups and k-training faster. Ty”

Motives are irrelevant, its simply ludicrous that its that easy.;

Nikkinella.8254:

Yes, lets make it so you’re forced to blob up to do anything anymore. you people really dont think of the long term consequences when you ask for stuff like this do you?

Its not like this is the only or even main activity for roamers so you’re drawing a long bow there. I don’t think its too much to ask for a guard to be actually killed or for the objective to be damaged even slightly to draw swords.

The only players likely to be affected would be the OCD idiots that sit near an objective for hours and running in to contest it every few minutes. Its not reasonable for a garrison or EB keep to be unable to be waypointed to for literally hours due to these players who have to effectively do nothing to contest the waypoint.

Swamurabi.7890:

Devs have always said that WvW is for large scale combat. However, they also said it can even be for the lowest level character to contribute.

WvW isn’t just for map queue blobs full of lvl 80 players.

Roamers contribute without contesting objectives. I agree with the OP its ridiculous how easy it is to contest.

Burjis.3087:

By what measure do people say that the overall quality of pvp have increased, I don’t know.

Matches in bronze and silver are a lot closer than they were in previous seasons in general.