True about ac’s and siege in general. In DAOC people used siege to open up keep walls & doors. But the core of the RvR gameplay was always player vs player combat. Siege was just a tool to enable player vs player combat.
WvW right now is too much about siege, too much about fighting siege or siege capped keeps. Siege shouldn’t be the focal point of WvW combat. Siege should never do this much damage and disruption to players. I’m all for siege on siege, but right now siege are used against players more than anything else. A look at a siege capped keep these days will turn people’s stomach upside down, and make them want to logout rather than attempt to open it.
We do need changes and updates to WvW now rather than later. Never thought the 2 new games released would cause population issues, but I can confirm bns & especially bdo both have taken quite a big chunk out of WvW player population. We’ve lost majority of some guilds on a T1 server lately due to it. And the funny thing is that it isn’t the new games are so much better, it’s just that Anet’s vision of WvW is so bad, and the lack of attention to fix & update WvW have ruined it for most of the core players.
There are things that really annoy players, and most of them are things implemented with HoT expansion.
1. Oasis event on the BL’s still cause major lag, nobody likes to do it, everybody dread it when the timer countdown begins for it. This event needs to be disabled because it’s not getting fixed. 4-5 months is way too long to force your players to wait for a fix to this problem. Imagine this kind of lag happening during Tarir meta event, or DS meta, would it have lasted this long without a fix?
2. The cripple fields annoy players, the rock walls make people rage. Nobody likes them, not even for defending team where these rock walls are supposed to help. They make you get stuck, they ruin your pushes & retreat, they are not needed when players just want player vs player combat. I didn’t think Anet could think up of worse things to implement in WvW than ac’s…but the rock walls have got to be one of the worst ideas ever, next to chilling fog.
3. New BL’s are too big, takes too long to find action, and it’s near impossible to save towers. Old BL’s you could respond to scouting calls, new BL’s, well nobody gives a crap because you can’t do anything about it.
4. Keep designs are terrible for sieging. People crowd to EBG because smc is the right design for keeps, it’s large, you can siege from all around the keep, and the courtyards inside are large enough for you to maneuver and get some good fights out of it once you crack the walls/doors open. The new keep designs force you into tiny chokes and areas where you are constantly rained on by ac’s and siege. I get the original idea was to design keeps so smaller groups could fend off larger zergs. But did devs ever run the scenario where a map queue sits inside a fully fortified and siege capped keep, to see just how impossible it is for the attacking teams?
5. Emergency waypoints are fine, because you can time it and know when it’s up and when it’s down. But chill fog, air strike, iron hide, etc.. all should go. Again, annoying gimmicks that have nothing to do with player vs player combat. Iron Hide was a decent concept to give smaller groups a chance to defend a keep vs a larger zerg. But again Anet failed to run the scenario where a map blob is defending a keep how impossible it is to take the lord down with the iron hide buff on it. These PvE gimmicks are annoying players too much, people just aren’t having fun anymore.
6. ppt is an outdated concept. The need to ppt creates issues for many servers in all tiers. It also deter fights, forcing people to knock on doors and spend excessive boring time doing PvE. This also leads to where a server gets too far ahead by Monday, and then there’s a serious lack of action as other servers give up playing for the week. My suggestion is to cap the amount of ppt you can gain per hour, so no server can do nothing but ppt. There’s too much emphasis on ppt right now when majority of players really don’t care for it. Make it so if you want to gain the scores like you are now, you have to kill players for it once you’ve hit your hourly cap.
Something has to be done soon. I would say it’s already too late, but I know there are people waiting to come back to play the game once these annoying things are gone, lag is fixed, and WvW becomes fun again. Server activity pop keep going down, NA now have no Full servers, and one of the Very High just went down to High. I’m sure Anet sees these activity changes with their internal monitoring and stats collection. But the question is, will they do the right things? Do they are?
and it stayed that way all night, was still that way even after I slept! If that’s what “ruins it for you” (three people being able to roll a whole BL on their own) then get your QQ butt out there and learn the maps (and stop me/us) !!!!!!!!!!