Guild Wars 2

Cooperation is the thing GW2 does correct. The issues you describe have roots in other parts of the system (i.e. lack of truly rare or soulbound mats dropped by random spawning un-farmable mobs).

This special “hidden” content is precisely why I play MMO’s. It’s what makes them interesting in the first place.

Edewen.8304:

Ok. Someone is tired of losing.
Let us address this point at a time.

1. It is not meant to be balanced. It is meant to be casual war based pvp.
2. Supply. Defend your caravans. Defend your camps. Not their problem.
3. Upgrades. Refer to supply.
4. Orbs. Ill give you that one. Orbs need to change a bit.
5. Loss of moral. Really?!?! How is this unbalance. You are losing your audience sir.
6. Blueprints. You can buy em. Since you all quit with no moral. Go farm instead of licking your wounds in LA. Rewards go to winners.
7. Fighting for second place. Again, This falls under player actions and is therefore not balance.

Fare thee well sir. You have proven no credibility.

Someone needs to play more WvW and get a clue, instead of making himself a laughing stock by dismissing an entirely valid and correct summary by the OP.

OP has summed the issues pretty well. I too have experiences both sides, the crushing winner, and the crushed looser. Neither was fun. ANet would be wise to acknowledge the issues summed up in the 1st post and start to actively look for solutions. I have posted a few of such solutions myself, and so did others. All ANet needs to do is read the forums, it’s all there

Not sure what the OP is talking about when saying “real loot”. Do you mean items that sell for a lot of gold? We do have that, it’s called legendary precursors, however it appears they can’t be farmed due to a drop rate near 0. So you must talk about things like rare drops from boss mobs that you can solo and sell for a fortune, regularly? That’s how I made a fortune in LOTRO, solo group content and sell the loot. Well yeah this is not available in GW2 it seems. But you can make similar amounts of cash by farming and playing TP/Forge. Instead of getting huge sacks of gold at once, you get lot of small ones more often. Not as fun or exciting but it will get you enough gold for pretty much everything in the game. Too bad it’s grind..

Always shoot as many downed people as possible, I sometimes get a badge or two even if a ran by a downed player and shot him only 1 time before the people who actually killed him finish him off.

@Columba
Running back for 5 mins is 10x bigger a consequence than the 1.65 silver.

Agree, repair costs should go away. Luckily town clothing is damage-proof and serves as a temporary fix when combined with the downed state.

Same problem here, really annoying not to be able to quote 80% of the time. I’m using Firefox.

The shame is that even though fixes are available, they have to wait for next patch to implement them, even though they have a system in place that allows for pretty smooth instant patching, compared to other MMO’s that take down servers for half a day.

I think you bought a game accidentally when you meant to buy a fishing rod.. lol.

I thought the karma armor was expensive, but then I played WvW for a while and now I’m above 600k karma..

Kaine.3501:

I was just curious how many of you will be buying the commander icon. I really hope that one day we don’t look at the map and see nothing but commander icons everywhere…because that would get really confusing. It’d be cool if we could nominate commanders. For instance when someone sees that a leader is doing a really good job they could click on their name and nominate them for an icon…and after so many nominations over a very long period of time they finally receive the icon. I know your thinking their friends would just nominate them…but I’m just trying to come up with a solution before we have a map filled with commanders.

Agreed, and already covered in my topic

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/The-Commander-New-System/page/1

You can’t really compare WoW with its cheap and low quality landscapes with the detail rich enviroments of GW2. It is trivial to create a world like WoW, there is probably more detail and data in one GW2 zone than in the entire WoW combined.

This leads to technical problems, you have a very densly detailed world, and the engine as we know has already huge problems with loading models on time. Instanced, preloaded zones are precisely the way to reduce such problems. As far as I have seen GW2 does not rely solely on a simple heightmap terrain model, like WoW and LOTRO (who both have open worlds), but instead relies heavily on 3D models with very detailed texturing (the fantastic mountains for example) – this is no mere texture splatting.

Now, heightmap based terrains are perfect for streaming from the HD, cheap and easy on the framerate, but the downside is, they look really awful for the most part (as demonstrated by WoW). Although you could stream GW2 zones in theory, I predict the fps drop would be so severe, you’d have to double the minimal requirements. Not to mention it would mean even less time to load player/NPC models, because background threads would be busy with loading the terrain models = more invisible players, monsters AND mountains

In other words, currently, unless you use one of the power engines such as CryEngine, and want stunning graphics, forget open worlds in MMO’s (that need to cater to as many people as possible).

Umm what? Don’t the dragon chests already drop the legendary precursors? :S

That’s the HUMAN CENTIPEDE! Grub 2.0! I want one in my server Free badges ^^

Einzelganger.4152:

Saying that you cannot damage a keep door with a hammer, sword, rifle or any other weapon (for that matter), over time, is silly….especially with 50 peeps on the door… However, I can vouch that it would take quite a long time irl to down a keep door of a castle armed only with melee weapons and guns. Now when wielding magic, irl, that is a different story

Lol you do know that in reality 2 arrow carts (assuming they existed) would wipe off a 50 person “army” in like.. 5 seconds? And they would be like – dead, permanently pushing up the daisies and not returning and clobbering the gate? :P There is no point in comparing with reality here.

Haha yeah the drops from the giant dragon chests as so terrible you’d be much much much better off killing wolves in starter zones as they too drop yellows 76+ but more often.

I watched every single vista animation, didn’t get boring at all. I really liked what they did there, panning the camera to capture a screenshot that looks like concept art almost. But I will most likely skip most on my alts.

Yes I was talking about the gem price in gold, it fell from the peek of 410 gems for 1g to ~180gems for 1g now. And no I don’t need an expansion now, but people should know the answer to my question asap, before 1 gem = 1 gold and it’s too late. But of course I realize we won’t get an official answer, since if ANet answers ’yes you will be able to buy expansions with gems", everyone would just buy a ton of gems right now, and ANet would loose a pile of cash. Oh well, secrecy it is. Myself I decided to risk it and bought 14k gems with all my gold right now, just in case.

Awesome, why ain’t this happening on my server ;/ Farm the bots

The reason crafting is not profitable at all right now is that every single mat c an be bought in a world wide market. This means anyone can craft anything at any moment, instantly, which means crafted item price ~= material price.

The solution is simple. Add roaming rare mobs, spawning at random times in random places all over the world, dropping special soulbound mats required for best items. Impossible to farm and camp, you would have to wander the world of Tyria, hoping to meet one of these. The time investment to find these mats would transfer directly into high profit in crafting.

Just got killed by a few invisible invaders, and logged off.

Yeah it was. Especially considering there is no monthly fee, otherwise it wouldn’t be – no game is worth a sub fee.

The 3001st bot sent me a spam mail though

However you can buy Digital Deluxe for gems.. could be the same applies to expansions.

Could we get an official answer whether expansion content will be available to buy for gems, or only for RL money? Considering the fast rise of gem price in past days, and no sight of an end to it, it is an important question – should we stock up on gems now, while we can, or don’t bother?

Yep WvW is pretty much solo, even if you are running with a zerg you ARE SOLO and can go and do as you please. There is no obligation or responsibility put on you, like in a proper, instanced raid. It’s just like in PvE really. Go ahead jump in, try it our for yourself

@cole
to get maximum gold, karma and drops? unless of course you are so pro you can take a whole keep or SM castle all by yourself at prime time, in that case hats off ^^

If it feels long just exit the game, you got stuck, happens often.

One solution would be to add physical volume to players, so they can not occupy the same space. This, combined with “AoE hits everything” would make defending against a zerg a lot easier. Just use the Spartan tactic and take them on in a tight space ^^

Agree though, if you want rewards, zerg is the way right now.

The only strategy in that situation you described would be to call in reinforcements and hold out till then. Without reinforcements available, any keep will fall.

It’s what I’ve been saying all along. Either reduce upgrade costs by 400% (if something costs 40s, make it 10s) or introduce PUBLIC DONATION SYSTEM for upgrades based on filling a bar like in a dynamic event. One person initiates the upgrade, and anyone can put in silver, filling the bar.

Zheitan himself was shrunk by something like a factor of 10, comparing to the concept art.

All I know is they were all dead on the floor for the entire Zheitan fight, leaving us to do all the hard work.

I think I was attacked once by one such solo thief, he got me to half health in like 1 second, but I managed to drink elixir S and get invulnerable for 3 sec, so his burst failed, and then few of my allies came and the ganker got ganked :P It was obvious though if my elixir were on CD or if i used it too slow, I’d be down in 2 seconds.

I’ve been playing WvW for weeks and trust me there is a ton of rivalry, between servers, not individuals. You learn to “hate” the enemy, and I’ve seen plenty of hateful remarks being thrown around in the map chat.

No a commander, in the current state, can not be suggested as a leader to form alliances. Anyone can buy the commander badge – EVEN an enemy spy. It might however work with the new commander system I have proposed, which is also based on voting.

However, any commander in the current form, can easily ask and convince people on the map, to vote for a particular alliance. If he is convincing, it will happen. There is no need to force anything on people if you can accomplish it with simple voting.

Of course, at first it would be tough to do anything, because people would pull in random directions. But in time, through reasoning in map chat, more and more people would agree to support one alliance above the other, and vote for it, making it happen.

Is it really so hard to understand that people do puzzles to get siege machines? That’s the only way I’ll ever get mine, except for rams maybe. Badges are a nice add too, considering the abysmal drop rate.

As for camping the puzzle, I both did it, and experienced it on my own skin. I did it as a retaliation, they started it first :P Anyway, the solution is obvious, “Siege Deployment Blocked” buff in all puzzle areas. Isn’t it why ANet added traps? Siege is way too overpowered in the puzzle.

We all know what ANet wanted to achieve with WvW and why 3 factions were chosen. In their plans, the two weaker forces were to ally against the mightier one, achieving a balance of power. We also know it failed. And we started posting countless of “fixes” to this system, blaming nightcapping, and overpowering numbers, and what not.

But let’s get back to the core idea. It works on paper. It also works in real life. I am currently in a pretty interesting match, where the sides are French, Spanish, and English. Does this ring a bell? This is a situation straight from history books, where France, Spain and England were the major powers in Europe, and often at odds with each other. And pardon my limited knowledge obtained from the Tudors show (lol) but England was allying with either France or Spain, against the third power. It worked there. Why doesn’t it work here? The reason is obvious.

We have no in game diplomacy system!

I can imagine a simple voting system, on the WvW info panel, where you select which server you want to ally with. The votes would be accumulated over time, to sample a significant number of people from your server, not just the current map population. Of course you could vote only for one server at a time, and only once so no double and triple votes, that is guaranteed by the electronic nature of the system.

The system would then calculate the number of votes and decide if an Alliance can be formed. An Alliance can only be formed, if both servers voted for each other, with a significant majority of votes.

Once an Alliance is formed, the Allied Server Players are no longer red in color, but yellow (for example). You can STILL attack them and their lands. If you do, your vote is withdrawn, and you may not vote again for this server for a certain period of time, for example 24h. In addition the betrayed allied players may choose to withdraw their support for this Alliance, and it will be cancelled.

The Alliance status is re-checked by the system every hour (for example), by recalculating the current votes, which may have changed.

The system gives simple and intuitive in-game tools to forge alliances based on democracy. It gives clear visual hints that distinguish ally from enemy. And it allows for real-life advanced tactics such as betrayal and truce. You could for example fake an alliance, and then suddenly zerg your ally, before they realize what’s going on.

This is the bare-bones diplomacy system. It could be extended and made more intricate if need be.

Now you may ask, what is so special about it, why even bother? I mean all it really does is change the color to yellow? I believe it will work as a psychological motivator. You know how when someone is robbing another person on the street, people just stand by and watch? The victim cries “help me”, but people just look at each other and do nothing. It was however determined, that if the victim points at one specific person, and asks him directly, “help me, you in the red t-shirt”, the chosen person is far more likely to act, because he was selected, and the ambiguity is removed (“I’ll wait till others make a move” = no one moves at all). The same should apply to the diplomacy system, once an alliance is formed, people will be more likely to honor it and attack the common enemy, even without getting any boosts or perks for it.

Yeah something similar was in LOTRO too, many titles for amount of kills. Some titles were only achieved by few after YEARS of constant PvMP.

There could be so many titles here. You defended Wildcreek 10 times? You get a Wildcreek Guard title. 100 times? Wildcreek Saviour. And so on. Right now you get only 1 title for a particular thing, while there should be dozens, at different levels.

There could be special cosmetic rewards for achieving the final milestones. For example defending Quentin Lake, you could unlock unique pieces of Quentin Lake Armor Set, starting with boots at 10 defenses and helmet and 100. Clear progression and goals.

I mean there are thousands of things that could be added as rewards. The already mentioned new animations. Modified particle effects on your skills. Armor skins. Titles. Ability to port to a tower even if it’s contested and has no WP, if you have defended it 1000 times. And so on.

I am yet to see a winning server that actually “worked hard” to be there. It’s either automatic win though nightcapping or through numbers. You can not achieve a 100k point difference though “hard work”. The other servers log because they have no ways to beat you, that’s why you win. I have experienced both sides of the spectrum, one week we were dominating, another week we were crushed. In no way were we working hard when we dominated, we just took all 4 maps with 10 people at 2am. No opposition.

In this case adding more PvE content to balance PvP, would generate MORE PvP. Why? Because instead of logging off after 2 minutes, people from the loosing servers would invest more time trying to win, knowing the unbeatable 1st server might get hit by a natural disaster. Right now my server has no queue in EB at prime time. Why? Because people see the ridiculous point advantage the winning server gets at night, and quit.

Dragons destroying keep defences and walls would allow small teams to take keeps at night, even though the enemy server has overwhelming forces at this late hour. IT would help, a bit, to even the score and more importantly give hope and new motivation to keep fighting.

The team that is winning not only takes all keeps at night, but can safely upgrade and fortify them to a point where it would be silly to even attempt to take them back in the morning, Dragons could solve this issue. And no, building 10 golems as a loosing team is not a solution to taking a fortified keep we won’t be able to hold for more than a few hours.

Right not, there is no hope. I still log in and play, but I see many are not. And we are not even at the end of the first week!

How about this idea:

When a server gets really far away from the rest in points, there is a chance every hour or so, that the lands and keeps that server controls will be attacked by dragons. The dragons would start damaging walls and doors and destroying siege machines, forcing that server to deploy a significant number of people to repel the new threat, opening new opportunities for the other two servers to attack the leading team.

There are two ways this could work. Either dragons that land in predefined spots, and start launching attacks at nearby keeps (owned by the leading team only), sort of like a super-trebuchet-fireball-attack, or the dragons could fly in circles around a keep damaging the walls greatly, then flying away. The 2 other servers could use this as an opening to strike.

We could even have the existing dragons make an appearance, the Claw, Shatterer, Tequatl. Or just some random dragons like those from the final story quest.

It is clear there is a need for some PvE mechanisms to balance WvW, since otherwise we get stuck in multi-week long scenarios, where one server dominates, and the weakest server looses all motivation. This would be a lore friendly solution. It would probably not make a huge impact, but would be a step towards a more balanced field of war.

Well for one if you use grenade barrage while your riffle is out, you deal lot more damage. It is also very good for WvW and PvP, with the knockback and net shot. For PvE, I agree, grenades all the way for best drops (AoE tag) and damage.

This needs to be in, it’s a basic feature of most shops and auction sites, and MMO’s too.

There are many good ideas in LOTRO that could be adapted for GW2, and the outfit system is certainly one of them.

I agree the maps are rather small, I am not even sure if the LOTRO Ettenmoors Monsterplay map is smaller or actually larger than these. And that game is rather old now.

The size of the maps combined with certain mechanics, like the invulnerability buff on camp leaders, makes it possible to reach a contested camp from anywhere on the map, making it hard for individuals or small groups to take them, before the zerg arrives.

1. Mesmer
2. Thief

Have no complaint about the rest. Funny thing though, these two were my primary choices at first, but once the game launched I rolled an Engineer instead. Maybe it’s good, I don’t like playing OP classes.

I WvW all the time, in fact I don’t do anything else, but this is not about me. It is new to me that only 6 commanders can show up on the map, and that it is tied to their PvP ranking (I am on a relatively small server and this limit has not been achieved yet).

This is yet another flaw of the system, how is the PvP skill even remotely correlated to the strategic and people skills a commander needs to have? So let me get this straight, currently, Napoleon could start playing WvW, buy his badge for his riches, and won’t even appear as an icon because some PvP fans already claimed all 6 top spots? And all he could hope for is to wait until some of them log out (even though they may be completely incompetent) in order for his icon to be visible?

My system is clearly superior. I am sorry you can’t see it. It’s more natural, democratic, self-regulating, hard to exploit, easy to implement, and has the spirit of what the game stands for. It clearly does not stand for “grind 100g”, it stands for “the choice is yours”.

Let’s just clear one thing. No class should be able to stand in middle of 3+ enemy players, with other enemies nearby, be able to attack them at will, kill some, and then easily escape. NO CLASS.

Thief can do it. I saw it today and on numerous other occasions in WvW. There was even another thief on our side, and he too couldn’t catch the other thief. This is the very definition of OP. I do not care how skillful he was and how bad we reacted, most classes can NEVER hope to do what he did and survive.

The only other class that could do this would be a Mesmer, but we know they need a nerf as well. Instant creation of infinite clones (pets) that on top of that deal damage is OP in PvP.

Of course it might be that the thief in question was aided by the culling issue, but still, I saw many thieves vanishing and never appearing again, even though ally players spread out and there are plains all around.

Either break stealth on taking damage, or break it on dealing damage, or give every class an ability to reveal stealthed objects. A counter must exist.

I really don’t care about the orbs, they do not make any difference, as the buffs are too weak. If your server is winning 3 orbs wont make any difference, if it’s loosing, it won’t make any difference either. My server was in both situations, the orbs were never helpful.

I know that in THEORY more hp and stats should be HELPFUL right, but when faced with INVISIBLE armies, even 100 orbs would not change a thing.

I agree with the score system being flawed in the current implementation. It may work in systems with thousands of individuals gathering points such as PvP ranking, but it fails when applied to a very small group of very different servers. Currently unless the points received are being scaled by things such as number of people and number of objectives held, there can be no balance and we will see matches being already over after 1-2 days. It was so in pretty much all the matches I’ve been in since the launch and I can easily predict the outcome of future matches with the servers my server has encountered.

Once it is estabilished, usually after the first day, which server is the nightcapping one or the one with most players, the match is already over and the loosing servers loose a lot of motivation. Last match, my server had the strongest night crew, which translated to a 100000 points difference from server 2 at the end of the week. And no surprise there, we had full queues through the day. This match, we are faced with servers who have more night presence, and it is us who are at rank 3, and the other 2 servers are steady drifting away, there is no hope to ever catch them. It was decided after first night – but we have to suffer this for 2 weeks. And no surprise there, it has clear effect on the morale, EB has no queue for most of the peek time now, and the chat is pessimistic in general.

People are upgrading even more rarely than before, because what is the point, knowing we will loose all 4 maps during the night. This only makes the situation worse, we loose more keeps at peek time, and that pushes the other servers even further ahead. A closed circle.

@Kabuki

I don’t need to spend any time to reveal the obvious broken parts of the current implementation, but fine here it is.

1. Currently being a commander is completely independent from having the skills and knowledge to play WvW and lead. Any “noob” can be a commander. 100g is easy to get, whether by playing the TP, farming DE’s or simply buying it for money.
2. Currently, the system is quickly going to collapse on itself. Imagine a situation when you log in and see 99 commander icons on the map. What is the point of having a commander then at all? This will happen within next few months.
3. Currently, people can easily buy the commander title merely to say ‘hey look, i’m cool, rich and here!"
4. Currently, when you’re a commander, you will often be ridiculed about being rich and having no clue how to play, a logical assumption considering the above flaws.
5. Players have no say in who should lead, and who should be displayed on their map, it is forced on them.

@Speno

I disagree. I seriously doubt SWTOR had anything close to what I am suggesting. Have you not read about my layer implementation? Guilds voting for their own members is perfectly fine in my system, and does not harm the system in any way. Non-guild players have still the option to also support these guild commanders, or choose other, non-affiliated public commanders. Nothing is forced on you, you have free choice whom to follow. If you as a guild want to vote on a newbie (why??) your guild will be hit by his actions, if you choose to follow him. It is far more likely, you will vote on a good leader inside your guild, you do want karma/gold/loot/and points right?