Guild Wars 2

Arson.4189:

I think the engine they have chosen is messing them up big time.

http://www.umbrasoftware.com/en/umbra-3/information/

That site lists Planetside 2 as a user of their middleware (not to mention at least four other MMOs), so I rather doubt it’s an issue with that. Most likely anet implemented it a certain way for PvE and didn’t adjust that to meet the needs of PvP.

What on earth? Why would we want any more PvE content in WvW then there already is? If I want to fight a big boss, I’ll go find one in the PvE areas. If I’m in WvW, I’m there to kill people and conquer places. The absolute last thing I want is PvEers making WvW queues any longer than they already are. I further fail to see how this would have any effect on night crews and the like. Mechanics changes will not make up for the advantage a high population server has over a low one.

Flame Legion for burn-heavy spec.

I play an offensive guardian in WvW with a GS/staff and I have minimal issues. Yes, if you’re with a zerg and put yourself in the middle of things, you’ll probably die rapidly; and yes, our options as far as ranged abilities for tower defense are pretty minimal (scepter is the first and last word, and not a very good one).

That said, siege is pretty easy to get if you’re willing to do the borderlands jumping puzzles, which takes care of defending effectively. I find that getting kills from the walls with a scepter to be a total pain, especially since you have to be on the edge for dropping smite. With the arrow cart, set it up a bit farther back, pew pew, gather bags.

For the issue of getting killed in melee, I generally avoid running with groups any larger than 20. 10-15 is a nice range where you can flank and do some damage at melee range without being shredded by focus fire and AOE abilities don’t cause too much trouble (assuming you aren’t fighting at a choke). If fighting a group of 10 or less, it should be fairly easy to stay alive even in melee range full time. Judge’s Intervention + Smite Condition + GS spin in the middle of 3-5 enemy ranged chars usually results in them running away from you more than attacking. Bonus points for using for using GS leap for initial close to get them to use their knockbacks/stuns/rolls/slows since Intervention breaks stuns and Smite will do more damage from the conditions

Yes, but he specifically complained about the battles being too huge to see anything/do anything useful. Only way to get away from that is to get away from the zerg.

I’m also not a big fan of the repair costs in WvW (and for all those people that say “stop dying/get better”, lots of people are going to die in WvW no matter what. Not being one of them just means this is a problem for someone else).

Nonetheless, 20 minutes spent running around Orr zones mining ori/doing events you come across should be enough to make 30-40 silver (four ori nodes will give you twelve pieces of ore, goes for around 2.5 silver atm, which puts you at 30 – tp costs, so around 25; everything else you get is gravy). That’s enough money for a dozen repairs and change, so the costs shouldn’t be a huge deal. (And if you’re getting one-shot, you’re probably running glass-cannon gear. Don’t do that.)

Also, don’t be in the middle of the zerg. In fact, you’re best off not being in the zerg at all. Get together with a small group of friends/guildies and do something else. WvW rewards small group play nearly as much as large groups; there’s always camps to be taken, towers to be defended, places to be scouted, etc. Even sticking with a smaller, 15-man or so zerg should have you dying less quickly if you’re careful (and you’ll have much less issues with ability lag and masses of spell explosions blinding you).

Defense in general is another good idea, as you’re less likely to die, not enough people do it, and it’ll familiarize you with the various siege weapons, defensive emplacements and offensive/defensive tactics.

Can’t say much for EB, but on the Henge borderlands, we didn’t touch SBI except once in eight hours, though they regularly raided our local supply camp and poked our tower. On the other hand we got the orb from HoD and took their garrison, twice, and even had the map split between us and SBI at one point (HoD held one supply camp at the time).

I second the motion. It’d to be able to nice to go where I’m needed.

Def sounds like a bug. You could try having everyone stand down and represent again after a few minutes.

3 day matches would be a mess. You’d have a long line of lop-sided matches where servers that can field people during the weekdays would dominate during weekdays/nights, and would be get dominated during weekends.

I think week matches are decent now and will get better as the ranking adjust. I also think that blocking transfers to winning servers, as well as denying access to WvW if you transfer to a server in the same bracket would help a lot with the endless server jumping.

I don’t think anyone wants a full exotic set after two days. Problem is I have 800+ kills in WvW, I’ve spent probably 10 hours a week in it minimum since 10 days after launch, I do most of the jumping puzzles with regularity… and I’m still more than a hundred badges from getting a greatsword. Which would be my first badge item. I don’t see how spending a month at a time for a single piece of equipment is anything other than absurd.

That seems pretty whack. I’ve shot people with a superior ballista while holding a couple of orbs and the best I would do is about 9k a shot. 17k shouldn’t be possible.

Unless… crit-related stats apply to siege? Seems ridiculous, but I dunno what else would be the cause.

A gift for HoD and SBI…

Kaineng. The threads I’ve seen from these guys are awesome. I hope they attract some good/nice people and start kickingkitten

Sheen.8196:

If someone plays another mmo for years and years, and the game had over 10million subscribers, the game can still be awful and a waste of money (in a certain type of posters eyes) but if you play gw2 for 3 days you got your money’s worth.

More time spent does not equal better. Plenty of people will pay $60 for a 10 or 20 hour game; plenty of people will pay $10 for a 2 hour movie at the theater. In this case, most people are probably assuming that because GW2 has no sub, it should be compared on play time to other games that have no sub, by which it provides a solid amount of play time large composed of enjoyable activities.

On the other hand, something like WoW might be considered a a bad value because it requires extensive play time on boring activities to get to the interesting parts, or because of having different expectations of available content due to having a sub. It’s a personal assessment.

I’m not sure why you continue to wail on this with your posts. If you don’t like the model GW2 follows, the other MMOs are still around…

I’d say cut your time back.

GW2 has tossed a lot of standard grindy stuff. You no longer have to grind out two dozen dailies to get BiS gear to prep for raiding, you no longer have to grind out stuff for flasks, or massive money for repair bills (well, not too much), or a huge amount of time and effort to get the new crafting recipes, and so on. You can pretty much jump into whatever content you want with minimal preparation, and I think a lot of players aren’t used to that.

I see people saying how most of their guild is offline now that it’s been a few weeks. So? Pick your times when you want to do something, get together, and go do it. You don’t HAVE to spend every waking moment in the game to get your subscriptions worth. My guildmates might not be around for most of the week, but we still get together Friday nights for some serious WvW action, for as long as seven hours, and we have a blast doing it.

For the people that want the grind, the gear treadmill, and the trouble/drama/sense of achievement that comes with coordinating raids, WoW hasn’t gone away. And I’ve got nothing against that. But I’m getting a bit older and I no longer have the time I did in college to blow on MMOs, so GW2 suits me just fine.

And hey… if your hardcore group moves on to something else, what stops you from playing the bits of GW2 you enjoy a few hours a week with a new guild on the side?

Come again? At last check, we topped you in 5 of 6 24 hour matches.

Most certainly.

Um, the point of 24 hour matches was so there would be a baseline of where the servers fell as far as rank, so that 10 random servers wouldn’t spend two weeks each getting beaten by HoD on their way to the top. It should be patently obvious that things would become less balanced going from 24 hour matches to 7 day matches, but it’s much better than starting at 7 day matches, which would still be better than starting with 2 week matches.

Similarly, the point of having one week matches before two is precisely because of what’s happening now; further world balancing due to issues that weren’t present in the 24 hour matches. If you can’t understand something as simple as this, I really don’t know what else to say…

Chill out dude. My best guess would be they’ll continue to implement changes on a weekly basis as the ranking adjust to match the weekly scale. Until things seem fairly even, I doubt they’ll go to two week matches.

Thieves can kill squishes and rangers. Who knew?

Your character looks pretty boss though, I’ll give you that. Also, “there” != “their”.

This suggestion is new and surprising.

As for JQ being organized, that is rather funny. They’re completely disorganized, they just have numbers. In fact, they weren’t leading during the prime time weekend when the match was even numerically. Heck, they even claim that they need more organization on the Guru forums — that’s the reason why they aren’t very competitive in tier one at the moment.

Actually, we do have a decent degree of organization. While obviously we aren’t up to the level of HoD, we do have a big TS server that gets frequent usage and regular discussions of targets and tactics in /team. What we don’t have is any major alliance or set of guilds that dominate WvW for us, as seems to be the case with the other top servers.

And we were already leading by Saturday, increased our lead by Sunday, and naturally started steamrolling with the arrival of the weekdays, so I’m not sure where you’re getting your info about the weekend unless the only thing you’re counting is Friday.

Saul.3905:

Man I am from JQ and I consider the OP a kitten. Why post something like this in the first place? There’s no point in bragging through words. Let’s beat the tier 1 folks fair and square and you will get whatever recognition you’re looking for. Shame on you dude. Shame on you…

Agreed. And for the love of god, if you’re going to post something under the general JQ banner, at least learn to spell.

That def sucks Sisho, but the suck seems to be reasonably distributed. We tried to take DB’s garrison Friday night and after we smashed our way in, the commander was permanently invulnerable. Disappointed, we moved our zerg to the hills keep which you guys were taking back from DB. You captured it right as we were about to break the outer door, reseting it to full health. Adding insult to injury, right as we broke it you attacked back after claiming the keep and dropping a full set of 12 hour buffs on it. We got wrecked. And then this morning, one of the orbs was bugged and held by DB, even though we had captured the keep it was in a while ago… go figure.

Nicely produced video. On the flip side, I don’t see why you would ever attack a bay keep with anything but trebs. The way you can pile them on the cliff inside garrison is frankly broken imo. The other two keeps have no such way to attack them from an easily defended unaccessable position.

I quite like the heart-shaped plan for EB.

Same thing happened on Friday between Jade Quarry/Crystal Desert/Dragonbrand. The orb was in the eastern keep and we attacked the north, but the lord was invulnerable.

I strongly approve of this idea. Saves the trouble of spamming /team for donations to get a waypoint upgrade, for example.

I clicked this thread expecting it to be another “wtb daoc system” thread or something that would imbalance things in favor of people that have been playing WvW for a long time, but actually… I find these to be pretty good.

I don’t like the stat boons. We already have foot/pot buffs, guild claiming buffs, and orbs. And they’re a direct “buy power by playing longer” mechanic, which I always find frustrating.

The F5 and F6 ability slots, though, have a lot of potential. I think that as long as the rank system allows you to unlock the slots at reasonable places (say, 50 kills for the first slot, 250 for the second, roughly) and you can choose from all the abilities to unlock, I think this could work very well. (Also, toss the bit of buying commander rank with 100g and integrate it with the system, possibly as a toggle-able ability or something.)

Right now, the reasons to WvW in GW2 are all focused around acquiring gear.

I dunno about everyone else, but I WvW because smashing down walls of a keep, getting killed, changing tactics and eventually taking the place after an hour of back and forth is awesome. It somewhat annoys me that I have to take time off from this to improve my gear as I’m all in yellows.

Casia.4281:

Yeap. I knew they were strong. But having now seen 3 orbs on one team. Completely changes WvW tactics. And its clearly too much. had no idea just how large an advantage it was.

Teknobug.3782:

…now we got matched up with tougher servers and now realize why we dominated the other two servers.

As I’ve often said before, this here is precisely the problem. Its not the orbs themselves; its that people don’t understand how powerful the bonus is. And as usual, once people get it, they come here to complain instead of going to capture orbs.

as others have stated orb buffs should be what outmanned gives. (although karma, exp, etc are not desirable enough to make orbs good.)

You’ve suggested a change and outlined the problem with making exactly that change in the very next sentence! Full points.

Queues for EB are already much longer than for borderlands as it stands, and taking away the orbs current effects would make this even worse. Not to mention anet has already nerfed capture bonuses due to people trading objectives for max karma/gold/xp, meaning that having an orb effect that increases those rewards (enough to be meaningful) would bring that issue back again.

The other problem is orb placement.
1. They start undefended effectively. A home team needs to let another team steal the orb. kill the carrier, THEN move it to garrison, in a protected position. That is itself a very strange setup.
2. Why are they placed in strongholds at all? This makes holding orbs way way too easy. Especially for their benefits.
Orbs should be live balls. Alters should be either outside keeps entirely. Or in outer courtyards, so only the outer gates/walls need to be dropped to assault and steal an orb.

There’s nothing wrong with the current setup for where orbs start, as it gives all sides a reasonable chance of capture. Further, since there are three borderlands, every world has an equal chance to handle the problem of capturing from each starting position.

As for it being too easy to hold them, that will change as people start focusing on them more. If your keep is being besieged from both sides by two opposing forces, it’s basically guaranteed to fall.

Nucleotides.6928:

I really don’t see the need to buff the already winning team and can see the need to buff the people who are outnumbered to give them a fighting chance. I SUSPECT they will change this after servers start balancing out more and they continue to make changes to wvwvw.

Erbun.3564:

I love the concept of the orb, but I do agree that their implementation should be done differently. It does make it very difficult for a low pop server being dominated when the dominating server gets such great stats benefits.

These are matchmaking issues. My server is currently going against Crystal Desert and Dragonbrand, both of which we heavily outmatch (200+ point ranking difference). For all that, we have never held more than two orbs. Even now we hold only one (one is bugged) and DB holds the other, and though they don’t have enough people to match us (we own our borderlands top to bottom) they keep the map where they hold an orb at max population all the times and defend it with efficiency.

Nothing is going to change the fact that we’re going to win, but even against such odds CD and DB have shown its still possible to fight/hold/capture orbs with good play.

I don’t necessarily see constant combat for hours on end as a bad thing. And I suspect that by erring on the side of static, it would place more emphasis on well-coordinated strikes and teamwork to make the difference rather than raw numbers. And raw numbers making too much of a difference is probably the number one complaint I see, especially in extreme cases.

I would argue precisely the reverse. By erring on the side of static, well-coordinated strikes and teamwork become superfluous, because by extending your territory you instantly increase costs across the board not just for the group that made the strike/capture but for everyone from that world. Thus, the musical chairs scenario.

And combat, while interesting, is only means to an end in WvW. Fighting for hours with no visible progress is tiring and disappointing. On Friday night I was on a borderlands where, after pushing one of our opponents off our keep, we went to attack theirs. We used the water entrance to garrison, dropped three rams per door for speed, smashed our way through the place and… the keep lord was bugged and invulnerable. That was a lot of wasted coin and effort for no real victory, and I would be similarly disappointed in a scenario where capturing a keep would actively make it easier for the enemy to take it back. Both cases encourage a “why did we bother?” attitude.

I strongly disagree that harsh changes such as population control or closing WvW during off hours is the only viable solution. While there may be some minor negative effects to my suggestions, they’re far far more mild than anything else I’ve seen posted in these forums, especially compared to the potential benefits.

I didn’t mean population control, I meant what’s currently happening now with the rankings being adjusted through week-long matches. (Although… I could see pop control as viable. Make it so any one world cannot field more than the sum of the players from the other two worlds on that map and you have a semi-reasonable, if crude, population balance mechanism.)

And both the things I mentioned aren’t meant to be viable solutions; they’re just the only things I’ve seen that would not have negative side effects that affect play/balance. (Naturally, closing down WvW at night would lead to a whole other set of negative side effects, ie. people with odd schedules not being able to play; but that would be a problem for players, not system balance).

And while your suggestions are indeed better than the vast majority of orb whining that passes through this forum, I hold to the position that the current mechanics of WvW are fairly solid and the problems will fade in the coming weeks as rankings adjust and people learn to play.

No offense, but that’d almost be counter productive for the two losing teams. Even if they both worked together to get inside, they’d end up fighting each other at the lord. Only one team could claim the castle, and the defending force could just hold the Lord’s chamber and focus their efforts. The underdogs want to avoid fighting each other at all costs.

For both underdogs, regardless of which of them ends up with the orb, things even out more. And they hardly want to avoid fighting each other at all costs; the stat boost is only 15%.

No offense, it was a nice story. And I’m glad you were able to get people to work together. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be the same across all servers and all people. Balancing the game around the social habits of gamers is a pretty sketchy prospect at best.

If your server doesn’t want to work together, they’ll drop in rank until they’re against appropriate opponents. My point was simply that it can be done. The game mechanics highly reward it, much as teamwork is rewarded in Dota, LoL, L4D, etc.

Did you even read my suggestions? They directly address the issue of a night crew cleaning house and fully upgrading everything without stopping people from doing it if they choose to put forth the effort and resources.

Yes, I read them. To me, it looks like all your suggestions do is tighten the potential variation between winners and losers and force an equilibrium. As it stands, it’s already costly to expand beyond your “default” territory. You have to travel farther to get there than your opponents; you have to spend money to upgrade defenses; and you expose yourself to attacks in more places. With the current system, by default, if one side controls the entire map, you’re left with an automatic 2v1 situation. Even if one side only controls most of the map, you have a near 2v1 situation as it’s generally silly to travel a distance and hit your second opponent when the first one is right in front of you.

Scrapping the orb bonus and making it even more costly to expand/cheaper to defend would lead to a musical chairs situation (during prime times) – world A takes objective X, thus increasing their costs and decreasing the costs of world B, which takes objective Y elsewhere. Let me further note that defenders already have powerful advantages – 12 hour claiming guild bonuses are roughly equal to an orb bonus, but only in the local area of an objective. By making it harder for one side to win strongly when there’s a major player number imbalance, you make things static during times of balance. In fact, now that people are learning to play WvW better, I’ve already seen instances where things were basically static for hours.

Also, where did you get that 6 hours number from? Seems made up. I think the actual time that a night crew dominates is going to vary from server to server.

Naturally, it’s a guess. The amount of time a night crew dominates is mostly irrelevant; it exists, and it creates an automatic imbalance between servers that have one and servers that don’t. The only practical ways to fix this are to match up servers with night crews against similar or to shut down servers for a span of time at night. Changes to mechanics and balance, like your suggestion, will inevitably have negative side effects (or at least, I’ve yet to see one that doesn’t).

I tend to agree that the two servers on the losing end of things should be working together, or at the very least, not attacking each other. But unfortunately that really doesn’t work in the current reality of the game. The two underdogs are still enemies as far as the game mechanics are concerned, so there’s no way for the two teams to coordinate effectively. Worse, if they’re in close proximity their AOEs will do just as much harm to each other as the side they’re attacking.

Hold up there. There’s no need for the losing servers to work together or coordinate at all. Every keep has at minimum two (most have three) entrances to attack, generally from entirely opposite directions, for both outer and inner walls. There’s no reason for two attacking worlds to even see each other until they’re at the inner gates or at the lord.

I completely agree that servers should be trying harder to coordinate themselves. But have you ever tried telling people what to do in an online game? I imagine herding cats is probably an easier job. And cats don’t yell back with “S T F U” or “Ur not my dad!”

I imagined similar, until I started doing it. My server is Jade Quarry, which is notable for its ridiculous number of players, tendency to complain about things that seem unfair, and a general lack of coordination. We don’t have any large alliances (that I know of) or major notable WvW guilds, the way ET and HoD do. Our biggest advantages were a generally decent playerbase, large night crew, and strong zergs.

Two weeks ago, we would have nothing to do with coordination. We had been more or less steamrolling everyone we came across, so even though we have a TS server big enough for several hundred people that was advertised, most didn’t use it. Most instructions sent in team chat and the like were ignored.

Then we started losing. Badly. We were beaten, repeatedly, by HoD, and it soon became clear that as much as people disliked coordinating, they disliked losing more. We’ve reached the point now that I’ve seen people asking for someone to start directing things through /team when we’re being pushed back or our zerging is ineffective.

The long and short of this is, stop imaging people might complain about you giving instructions are start doing it. If you’re server wants to win badly enough, they’ll start listening.

(Couple caveats for this: most players hate even a hint of arrogance from someone trying to direct them. Keep things simple, to the point, and be willing to discuss tactics with other players in /team. Commanding in a battleground will most likely end up being a cooperative effort, not one random strategic genius that everyone magically starts listening to. Explaining why something should be done, ie. “Help def dreaming bay, we’ve dropped 3g in upgrades on it and we can’t afford to lose it!” will work better than “get yourkitten to dreaming bay NOW!”, generally.)

Yes, every realm has an equal chance to get the orbs in the very beginning of a match. But knowing the importance of the orbs doesn’t address the issue of servers with off hours players vs servers without. Nor does it give a player any reason to try the uphill fight every day when they repeatedly lose the orbs every night because their server has no off-hours players.

This is a matchmaking issue, and removing orbs won’t fix it. Even if orbs were removed, a world without a night crew will still lose to a world with one; they’ll still have to deal with fully upgraded keeps and towers to retake in the morning; they’ll still have to deal with 6 hours of massive point loss every night; they’re still going to lose, regardless. I have faith that matchmaking will balance things out eventually, but you may have a bad time until it gets there.

I am still a firm advocate that the Orb buff be changed. It just doesn’t make sense to buff the team that has the strongest position on the map. There are other options. Even giving them extra points would be better than the current option. The undermanned buff just makes me sad. It does nothing to help the situation.

A 15% buff is entirely insignificant compared to a 2v1. And if the two worlds without orbs aren’t working as hard as they can to get at least one back from the current leader, they’re doing it wrong. The entire point of a 3 way battle is for things to balance themselves out; the problem is that currently, the vast majority of players fail to realize the important of orbs and zerg the nearest target instead.

Here’s the good news: you can do something about this. Get on those borderlands and start telling people what to do. Tell them to work on capturing the orb at all costs. Get your guild together and do it yourself. Every world in the battle has an equal chance to get the orbs.

HellsMachine.4083:

…

I responded to your points in your thread. Stop reposting all over the place.

On the one hand you’re implying that direct increases to player stats such as hitpoints, healing, and damage output are fine(The buff Orbs give), but then turn around to say that Tenacity, which does the same thing, is something you dislike?

The difference is one of degree. With a tenacity type buff, a small outnumbered group can become a farming machine, as they’ll be able to get more kills and therefore more loot/badges per person; the effect is worse if its a coordinated group/guild. (This naturally assumes they’ll be buffed to 2-3x the strength of the opponents based on numbers).

The orb buff isn’t strong enough to be useful in such a manner. Further, every world has an equal chance to get orbs, players just don’t realize their importance.

This may have been mentioned before and I do apologise if it has.

Of course not man, its not like there’s an orb complaint on the front page of this forum already… and the second page, and the third…

No they are not fine! Have you played on a dominant server? Have you played on a server getting steam rolled? Have you played on both sides of the fence?

When I first started WvW I was on a server that was getting dominated, even in a 1v1 fight (wasn’t aware of the orb buff) I thought to myself, kitten I must be seriously under geared as I normally play well in sPVP.

One day I got sick of getting slaughtered and switched to the winning team, I noticed this Orb buff 15% more HP and 150 to all stats?? WTF?

Yeah, they are fine. Yeah, I have played at times where we held all three and times where all three were held against us.

Here’s the problem: you don’t read. The effects of the orb buff are clearly stated at any point if you have even one, or if you take a glance at the opponents buffs. If it took you a world transfer to even figure out what the orb buff does, you have bigger problems than the enemy holding all three.

It seems that even after the game has been out for a month, people still fail to realize the importance of orbs. They queue up endlessly for EB to fight at SM, they ignore borderlands that don’t belong to their world, they zerg locations of secondary and tertiary importance.

Orbs are the single most powerful buff in WvW. More important than the stat bonus they provide is that they apply to all four maps. But as is usual in too many games, when people finally start realizing which objectives are important, they complain about them on the forums and ask for changes instead of adjusting their play and tactics.

Stop whining about “OMG orbs too good” and start capturing them for your world.

One more post about WvW balance to add to the pile…

Its the second week for the one week matches, and we’re already seeing improved balance between worlds. Ranks are adjusting properly, people are learning what’s important in WvW, players are getting better. There’s no reason to implement changes without at least a few more weeks of seeing how things go.

Orbs are fine. As it stands, the queues for Eternal Battlegrounds on most worlds are far longer than those for the Borderlands, and changing the orbs to have no impact other than points would only cause people to ignore the borderlands more. At least this way, Borderlands have a objective of critical importance (and imo, more important than SM). But it may take some more time for the majority of players to realize this.

The out-manned buff could use some changes. I’m not too sure in what direction, but I do like reduced repair/upgrade costs.

I strongly dislike the idea of something like tenacity in WvW. First off, it didn’t work (I was on a Horde heavy server and we dominated Wintergrasp regardless of the buff on our opponents) and second, a skilled guild could abuse it to farm opponents efficiently. Waiting for the matches to adjust rankings should work just fine (and already is).

Jade Quarry – 37k (295)
Crystal Desert – 27k (200)
Dragonbrand – 26k (200)
1 orb held/world

I’m rather unsatisfied. None of our elites are practical in a 1v1 PvP situation, which I have a tendency to find myself in regularly in WvW. Renewed Focus is that only one I’d consider a 1v1-ish ability, and it’s almost entirely useless. Tomes are good for support in big battles, decent in small battles, mediocre in PvE. If Renewed Focus reset all abilities, or cut the current CD timer of all abilities by 10 seconds, or something, then it would be useful. As it stands, meh.

I’m mostly hoping someone could post a screenshot of the WvW stats window from a world that’s currently steamrolling their opposition (Crystal Desert, ET, whatever) to see if there’s a point where the PvE bonuses stop going up regardless of point gain.

As a JQ player, I had a pretty good opinion of SBI until this week. I tend to play at off hours so maybe I’m not seeing them at their best, but there was a notable fight in the HoD borderlands where we held an orb in our keep and HoD was attacking from the north while SBI was bottling us up near our tower/spawn/camp. The whole thing felt like badly done opportunism, which was only made worse because HoD had two orbs already at the time. If you’re going to be opportunist, at least go attack the keep and get the orb for yourself rather than handing it over to HoD freely.

A few days later, there was a similar event except with the positions reversed – HoD was defending a keep with an orb on JQ’s borderlands from us, and SBI was bottling them up at tower/spawn. At least this time, SBI had a zerg that tried to take the orb as we moved it to our keep, but it was still badly done; even if they’d killed our escort, its doubtful they could have gotten it to their keep before it reset, which would have left it in our hands anyway.

Finally, I’ve never seen HoD camp the borderlands jumping puzzle; I saw at least three instances of it this week by SBI players.

TL;DR – Several instances of poor strategic choices by SBI made me wonder what the heck they were thinking.

Dee Jay.2460:

I’ll begin by saying that over my time of WvW, I felt more like playing an RPG version of Battlefield 3 than I did playing a open PvP game. In general, everything was very fast-paced. Over the course of an hour, we layed siege to 3 bases, lost them again, took 5 resource hubs…lost them again etc. Taking these bases felt more like capping a flag in BF3 (and it was almost as fast), than it did conquering a fortress.

Essentially, due to the rapid exchange, everything felt rather meaningless. This applied to minor things like Dolyaks as well. If I took the time to kill one, I could see the next one walking up the hill just in time. Whether I killed it or not, ended up feeling rather inconsequential.

[…]

Lastly there’s the disconnect between what’s happening on my current map and the rest of the worlds. I don’t actually feel like I’m part of the same battle (because I’m not). Instead of feeling like a gigantic battlefield it feels like 4 different shooter maps which share a score.

If you’re taking multiple towers/keeps and losing them within the the space of an hour (not to mention the camps), then it sounds like no one on your side bothers to defend anything. That’s not a map problem, its a player and coordination problem. My server is JQ, which might mean that our players and opponents are better in general, but I find that capturing a tower takes 15-45 minutes on a good day, more on a bad one; and capturing a keep tends to take an hour minimum.

In situations like this, things like Dolyaks become extremely important. An upgraded camp will bring 140 supply per trip to a keep, which is a massive amount of gate repairs or several siege weapons. Killing them while attacking the keep or even taking the camps thus becomes an important part of the strategy, and the reverse applies when defending. If you find Dolyaks irrelevant, it sounds like your opponents don’t defend well or don’t bother.

For your second point, I’m fairly sure the entire point of the orbs is to encourage cross-map coordination. Can’t make a dent trying to take SM? Get out to the borderlands and capture some of the orbs, so things are more in your favor. People seem to sorely underestimate the value of orbs; they’d often rather zerg the nearest tower than coordinate to go secure a keep with an orb. And that’s a big problem, because orbs are tremendously powerful; +5% to all stats on all maps is a massive advantage.

On the plus side, this will change over time as people learn more about WvW. Just this morning, with me a few other guys coordinating through /team, we took three camps, two towers and two keeps on borderlands where we started with a single camp, capturing an orb in the process. The whole thing met my definition of awesome with ease, but the epic part was when we grabbed the orb and grouped up to run it back to our main keep.

On reaching the north wall of the keep we’d just taken (green) and stepping outside, a HUGE zerg of blue players came around the bend straight for us. We barely retreated in time, took a different route, and though our orb carrier died at one heart-stopping moment, another player grabbed it in time and we ran him to the keep. Those moments, or the moments when a siege weapon I build takes down a door, or when we finally rush in and capture a keep after an hour of heavy back-and-forth – those are the things I play WvW for.