Guild Wars 2

TA managed to scrap the last remaining competetive 15v15 / 20v20 players in Europe under one tag, went to NA and lost some rounds. compare the european GvG scene today with the guilds that played a year ago. who is still there? the drop in quality is massive, the competition is almost non existent. maybe builds and tactics are a little more refined today, but what does it matter when no one is left to play the game?

these fights were not really impressing, i hoped for some fancy new mechanics, but it looked like more of the same.

i’ll just leave this here

Sadly, these forum fights are much more entertaining than the final matches themselves.

@chase
I don’t think you get my point.
yes, I know I am able to all this stuff i did before, but it’s more complicated, it’s more expensive and it takes more time. this feature patch made a big upside of the game (playing pvp with a freshly made character right from the start without limiting the player in their build, gear, or style choices) worse.

yes, you don’t have to buy them for the stats, but you have to if you want your character to wear a full armor set and look awesome. looking awesome is a huge part of pvp and gw2, thats why the game is so heavily skin-based.

from my point of view, playing a level 80 char or playing a level 2 char made no difference in pvp. but after this patch, i feel limited on my level 2 chars, and that feels wrong…

So this feature patch killed pvp alts.
Before the wardrobe was introcuded, we had a locker for our pvp gear.
I was able to create a fresh character, hop into pvp, equip all (SIC!) skins i wanted to. For free.
Maybe I wasn’t happy with the looks after a few days, or weeks, so i just went to the locker, got some other stuff and changed my look. For free.

I’m not able to do that anymore. After this patch I’ve to dedicate resources to my pvp alts.
They need to level up (to 10?) in order to wear shoulder or head gear, I need to buy weapons, which then I have to transmute with transmutation charges to get the weapon skins I like. I have to unlock new skills, traits (and amulets ?) for gold, if i want to use them.
When I decide I don’t like the class, or the char and I proceed to delete them, everything mentioned above is deleted as well. All my resources I invested are lost.
Before the patch I placed the items back in the locker, deleted the char and was done, nothing was lost. That was good.
Coming from GW1, where I had several pvp-only chars, i was ok with the way of managing multiple pvp chars in GW2 … before this patch.

This change however is a huge let down in terms of toying with alts.
And with no template feature in sight, it totally destroys any incentive of testing out other classes, builds or races for the sake of testing.

let me put it this way.
imagine you’re a some hardcore pvper, rank 70 before the patch and you would have to put in at least half a year of hardcore pvping to get this finisher.
it’s quite good for that it came for free.

i would say, this is exactly what they intended to do. bring pvers to pvp.
almost every aspect of this patch is tailored towards this goal.
enjoy.

hyman.7526:

Thats exactly the reason I want to see ranks. I’m getting tons of noobs today, who 1) refuse to fight on points, 2) do not know what to do. I’m playing solo q btw.

and thats the reason why Anet has removed them :>

after reading the patch notes, i can totally see necros taking the top spot now.

don’t think you will rank up if you only played hotjoin before…

finish your drink for every hotfix

I’m pretty sure it will only take a few weeks until a new, over the top build pops up and all the bandwagoners can hop onto that. With the amount of changes it’s hard to tell which class it will be though.

I’m just looking forward to not having 4-6 warriors among 10 players…

glory booster, naturally

PW is decent, what makes it OP are the amount of shadowsteps which are negating the downside of pistol whipping, being rooted in place. most of them dont require LoS, or a cast time means that they have little to no actual counterplay.

nerf rock, paper is fine
greets, scissors

Lord Kuru.3685:

Glory boosters will be removed, yet they’re still dropping in game. I got one from a black lion chest 10 days ago.

Opened a few hundred tourney chests today, got like 50 more glory boosters. Felt so rewarded

This topic is only an minor issue, but it reflects the whole approach towards pvp rewards and pvp in general, and thats why people are angry and disappointed.

Glory was useless until wintersday patch (and it’s pretty much until today actually, thats why its getting removed). People saved glory boosters and tournament chests in the hope that the rewards would receive an overhaul and they could then profit from the (until now) useless rewards.
But this stuff is officially considered worthless now, with no actual replacement in sight. What’s left is an inventory full of crap.

The only people who actually got “rewards” are those who abused the kitten out of the birthday gift bug and skyhammer farmers and converted their glory into gold

0.75 on reaction? don’t think so, because many interrupt skills in gw2 have a cast time themself and fast cast (quickness) is very limited.
in my opinion everything under 1s requires prediction and a clean screen. 0.2s is a good reaction time, add 0.25s (minimum) for the interrupt skill, ping and animation delay (you only acknowledge the skill you want to interrupt halfway through the animation) the time frame to interrupt a 0.75s skill is very tiny

Forzani.2584:

oh I understand why it happens, it just feels very wrong to do it. Also when I watch 2 groups fight I find it amusing they both stack up…do their little blasts…then charge each other..pass through each other…then blob up again for heals. Rinse repeat. Like two Rams fighting or something….or like the movie Braveheart where the two blobs run at each other screaming and clash in the middle. The fights are completely different than daoc and just seem a little counter intuitive.

using game mechanics like combo fields + finishers, a group setup to spread the buffs equally and coordinated movement + the right skills at the right time feels wrong and counter intuitive? thats an interesting point of view

such strong
very damage
pls nerf
wow

best skill in game, hands down

What type of structure would you find interesting for leagues and ladders?
A league system with seperated divisions (i.e. the Starcraft 2 League System as many mentioned before) to segment different skill levels seems a good way to go.
I addition to that i would really like to see a more Guild Wars -esque approach to matchmaking, especially if solo and team queue are still a thing then. this goes hand in hand with the next question…

How would a player earn these rewards?
Keep the winning team together and match them against other winning teams. Set up a specific number of wins (7 for example) which will mark the end of a winning streak and the roster will be disbanded (in solo queue).

What types of rewards would you like to see?
Increase the rewards with the number of wins and per division. More rank points, more gold, better chance to get epic skins, finishers, backs, titles, etc. Add unique skins only obtainable in PvP which have a very rare drop rate from the “winning chest”, but can be sold via the tradin post.
Have a region wide shoutout when a team or guild achieved the highest number of wins in team queue.

Obviously you need to get a bigger inventory to fully enjoy your pvp rewards

all i know is that pvp rewards will be removed in march. and thats about it. what are you hoping for?

great video for everyone who is crying about the aoe cap

no aoe cap? enjoy retaliation then

didn’t know that “total point gain not from ppt !!!11” includes building arrowcarts

I have similar problems, already described in another thread over here
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/The-game-is-unplayable-now/first#post3330492

I have similar issues.
Before last weekend (December 1st) GW2 was running ok. And ok means i had 60-80 FPS on decent graphic settings (high to medium) while playing WvW without streaming, even in big zergfights. I streamed a lot of WvW gameplay, and it rarely dropped below 40 FPS.
Since last weekend it became unplayable. When I’ve more than 50 characters on my screen, the FPS will drop below 25, most of the times even below 20 in a massive crowd.
When I try to stream while playing in these fights, FPS will drop below 10 and the game is unplayable. Surprisingly graphic setting don’t even matter, even on the lowest settings I won’t have more than 15 FPS while streaming.
Meanwhile i got constant 60 FPS in Battlefield 4 for example, and because i didn’t changed any setting on my setup during the last weeks, i’m pretty sure something went completly wrong with the patches last week. I have talked with guildmates and other people, some of them have a better performance since last week, some experienced the same issues as me.

Here is a quick video with the problems i had 3 or 4 days ago, i can validate the problems with more testing tomorrow.
http://de.twitch.tv/yiillusion/c/3355165

So if you have similar problems, feel free to share…

My setup: Intel 4770 Haswell, 16 GB RAM DDR3-1600, nVidia 670 GTX, and GW2 is running on a Intel SSD.

An incredible easy way to give some meaning to sPvP rewards would be adding some unique (and cool) skin templates to the tournament chests, with a small drop rate of course. These skins can be used in PvE/PvP/WvW or sold like any other skins you can buy from the trading post today.

Still don’t know why this isn’t already in the game. When I think back to Heros Ascend in GW1, where you had the chance to get the very best skins and items through PvP, I can’t believe no one came up with this idea for GW2 already

Line of Warding doesn’t require line of sight. So you can cast it behind gates by simply aiming through the small hole above the gates.

our pleasure ^^

Holm.7058:

Aracknoid.2538:

Hebril Amolebin.9817:

Yeah because you run and blob afraid from us you know. It gets frustrating only Baruch Bay is trying not to blob and fight with guild all else losers like you just cry for blob and blob even more…

http://www.twitch.tv/yiillusion/b/467630174

6 hours of getting blobbed by zaBlob
watch this stream, and tell me when we blobed u?
#lolrussians

Edit: and pls watch the scene at 12:00 and following minutes… zaBlob just run away because they are not ~20 more than us

41:36 you build siege against us to handle us. Must have been a big moment for you. 44:55 you changed borders after being wiped hoping we can’t change too because of queue.

This pathetic attempt at justifying a loss having to go on forums with this mentality. Trash talking another guild after they force you to change border. Trash talking us on forums sure as hell wont stop us for spawn farming you again.

I never understood this mentality in GW2. In my counter-strike, dota, natural-selection times whenever my team lost, won, draw we would analyse the match and find our flaws. In guild wars 2, you go on the forums and flame your opponent. Probably why the general skill level in GW2 is the lowest of any game I’ve played. Sad community.

watch 1:12:00
ZBs suicide rezzing the keep lord, port rallying and dying like flies because they are not 40+. The Vizunian Spirit right there.

http://de.twitch.tv/yiillusion/c/2948734

raw and uncut spectator POV

You guys were clearly one step ahead in every aspect. Well deserved victory and an impressive display. Hats off, hopefully we can give a better display next time. Congratulations and thanks for these fights.

twitch footage has some issues right know, seems like the last two fight are missing from my point of view (spectator). I will look into it tomorrow, i hope it’s not lost.

We will be streaming aswell (http://de.twitch.tv/yiillusion), but make sure to get the numbers up at Chemsos stream. There is an ESL final to beat.

FirstBlood.7359:

There’s no successful competitive game that uses pure deathmatch. History is clearly on ANet’s side.

Uhm, Starcraft (2) and Quake, some of the biggest e-sports titles ever made?

Ok, i want to give my thoughts on Sacrx video, and on some points he has stated.
His video is quite lenghty, it isn’t really well structured or made. He just rants about several facts and tells some stories back from the alpha days.

He pointed out correctly, that the basic core mechanics are good, maybe the best out there right now. The combat system itself is quite fun, engaging and somewhat competetive (balanced) on a larger scale. But as he stated, the rest is absolute kitten. It begins with inflated armor stats, orb buffs, bad siege mechanics, goes on to massive bugs, flaws and technical issues they failed to fix for a long time and still haven’t (queue issues, group party bug etc etc) and ends with features they add(ed) or promised (commander tag/system rework, the actual orb mechanic (ctf-mode inside WvW) and so on).

Anyone who can add one and one together, sees that ArenaNet not only fails to understand their community, they don’t even understand their own game. They have no idea about large scale combat (20vs20 for example) and its issues, they have no idea about ranking/ladder, they have no idea about wall-to-ground-combat (shoot up the wall vs shooting down) and they certainly don’t know siege weapons. Or has anyone traited oil-mastery yet?
When I see a showcase of some new PvE-content, and I see a dev clicking skills on his skillbar with a mouse, well I certainly don’t see experts doing their job then.
Many great guild and communities already quit WvW or the entire game, not only they had to experience game breaking bugs but also because they felt ignored and overlooked.
So many great suggestions came from within the community, but ArenaNets job of communicating with the community is kitten poor, and all the ideas were just a waste of time.

They desperately tried to bring sPvP up, but with their lack of understanding PvP and what PvP means, they just made fools of themselves, climaxing in that PAX-final. As a WvW-player you see this and ask yourself: “really? all these resources, this whole time and they just made it worse”

What we have right know are some leftovers. People who’re playing the PvP modes (sPvP and WvW) because there is nothing really out there which provides PvP like this.
But instead of improving their game experience where it is actually good, ArenaNet desperately tries to forces us into certainy playstyle, which nobody likes anymore. Once a reasonable alternative pops up, the devs will regret the majority of choices they did over the last year, you can quote me on that.

And of course, we have these people who still haven’t realised that every two weeks they just get another meaningless PvE carrot, on which they can grind their kitten off.
I accidentally participated in the grenth temple event last week, and it was horrible. How people can actually enjoy such “events” for more than 5minutes is beyond my mind. It wasn’t even something I would consider a game anymore.

tl;dr
The devs can’t handle their game.

Hebril Amolebin.9817:

It ws fun figthing you but the poor thing is when you lose few you rage and quit:D
I suppose stomping Opt in practice unofficial gvg lifted your mood?

You told us you were playing for points, so why should we bother fighting you with your arrow carts and cannons and portal gates in the back, when you had nearly twice our numbers (20vs35)? Go play for points and stuff, i’m sure Vizunah will approve of this.

colesy.8490:

Seuche.4809:

Nice Skilllag blobs sfr and piken

<3 your baggys <3

it’s not like you guys need to do anything else than run in and press 1 anyway so I’m not seeing where the problem is

Apparently thats enough for you to run away, hide behind walls and build arrow carts on top of it, blob up with other guild groups to fight 20-25 people. For quite some time we thought we were fighting Vizunah.

Pryda.8257:

Don’t misunderstand everything. Orbs buff are really good to improve WvW.

If buffs were kitteng useless, no one would care and fight in the center of the map to capture points. Now you’ll have to spread zergs between keeps/towers for PPT and capture points for buff.
Since there is no timer or anything, if a zerg shows up (and might lose a keep or something else), you can just let them cap and cap 30sec after they’re gone.

Orbs are really good for WvW, period.

Actually, I disagree. The “orb” mechanic back in the days was quite exiting, because it broke up the standard “cap a point” mechanic. It was more like capture the flag and provided a different angle to the game. Now they just add more points you need to capture. But look at sPvP, or look at all the other competetive games out there. Capturing and holding points is a boring mechanic, because it promotes reactionary gameplay. You’re being rewarded for actively “not fighting” the enemy, i.e outlast him, or just keep him off the point or just heal against his damage, or the ultimate way: cap unattended points, that’s most effective.
Other games which have similar mechanics, like plant the bomb in Counterstrike (kind of “cap a point”) provide different methods to ensure activity and action, like asymmetrical gameplay (Terrorist vs Counter-Terrorist) or switching the capture points around the map (Call of Duty)

Right when the community shifted to a more action oriented gameplay, ArenaNet promotes a reactionary and defensive playstyle, combined with bad game design choices in form of a massive stat increase. I agree that their intention is to split up zergs and promote small group play, but there are more effective ways to make a 80man zerg less effective (bigger maps for example) than adding more capture points.

the idea of a gvg specific matchup sounds great, but I think it’s to way to complicated and uncontrollable to actually make it work. I don’t want to spread negativity and would love beeing able to fight the best guild in the game everyday, but I lost all hope.
Every patch, every update and every release is quite frankly a hit in the face for players who enjoy competetive gaming. Not only in WvW, but in sPvP too.
Why should I try hard to set something up what isn’t wanted and actively sabotaged by the devs? They made quite clear that they don’t want a competetive scene in this game. Look back and think about what they did the last year. There were so many great suggestions and ideas by great players and people, to create something competetive, to create actual fun but it’s just ignored. And if you’re ignored all the time, well you start to ignore back…

Well, Orb Buffs just confirmed to give +50 on every important stat per buff. It was fun while it lasted, I don’t think anyone want to fight with these buffs randomly popping up. They make to much of a difference…

Phoebe Poison.4875:

Sup. So how about GD stopping refusing to GvG us for… let me count… 3rd time? Just asking, y’know.

What I posted is my personal opinion, not an official guild statement. I would GvG against VII 24/7 all day long, the current matchup we have is more than boring. I represent my opinion in my guild too, but it’s not my decision if and when and with whom we GvG.

the thing is, we want to perform at the limit. When several people which fulfill important roles in our setup can’t make it, we are not able to bring our best game. It’s not an ideal situation and i can understand that you guys are not happy about it, but that’s how our situation is right now.

You said to us before, that several of your people had to take holidays so you can GvG. It’s the same situation, isn’t it?

MartyPartys.9187:

Sneak peak at the new leaderboard, what the [VII] vs [Scnd] match did to the rating (using the new formula)
http://i.imgur.com/dXB8FrO.png
Ratings are all really close, can’t wait for the [GD] match
(only 20v20 matches are taken into account on the screenshot)

I don’t believe this ranking shows anything. I agree that a leaderboard creates competetion and sets up a goal for guilds/players to climb ranks, but the GvG system in its current state is not really comparable. I actually hope guilds don’t take this to seriously and start playing GvG the way they were intended. Have good fights with even numbers, nothing more. We see guilds refusing GvGs, because they don’t want to lose rank points and hurt their reputation and that gets in the way of the actual GvG spirit. When this ladder starts making things complicated and constrain fights, it’s something to worry about, at least in my opinion.
Also, many guilds see GvGs as a one time thing. They fought Guild X once, end of story. I don’t know why so many guilds have problems with fighting the same opponent more than once. Thats the point were you actually can improve, and see and feel that improvement too. Hopefully we can put that mentality behind us and move on to a more competetive, but also fight oriented environment..

Dranul.2094:

Nice job on the show Ogre. Looking forward to a potentially quality week in store for us. Hoping to get the trio of VotF, WAR and GD. 2 out of 3 lined up atm, GD having some issues with numbers atm, so I remain hopeful they will be our 3rd of the week.

Either way, keep up the good work boyo.

As to the Orbageddon we shall keep our fingers crossed on that front.

I hope so too. Our fights and raids last week were disrupted by heavy lags, starting from monday to thursday, which was very upsetting for many of us and our mood was at rock bottom, because we couldn’t play properly. We’re working hard to set up everything for a week full of quality fights, unfortunately we can’t promise anything. But it would be a shame to not fight such qualitiy opponents.

greets

@Darkened
Looking forward to it I don’t really like the actual heavy condition meta we have in sPvP right now, but that’s a personal opinion and I’ll always respect guilds which create and improve their own style and setup. It adds depth to the fights and makes them so much more interesting.

As for the GvG issue with TA I can’t really say anything about it. We did a lot of GvGs ourself, and never had major issues with the elona community. One time a guild even changed borderlands to free some space because our leader was still in queue. Some people don’t like GvGs, but most of them are tolerant enough to let guilds do what they want and move on, never heard of the community actively sabotaging a GvG like some vizu guild did.

Hvaran.6327:

COIN vs GD what’s the score? If u’ll have some vid. please share it. Interested.

It wasn’t a GvG. We fought them in the field and they asked how many people we had, because they felt a little bit outnumbered. So we suggested some quick even fights (20vs20), because they are more fun for everyone. It was nearly the end of our raid evening, we changed a lot of players during this fight to test some new recruits and see how things are going, so it’s hardly comparable to a real GvG setup which involves more preparation.
We had quite a few problems with Coins playstyle beeing very condition and caster heavy, felt a bit like the spvp meta transfered to WvW, which is really unusual.
Hopefully they will stick to their style, because it’s great to see different approaches to guild fights.

3million? I actually doubt there are more than 3 thousand playing WvW actively. Combined in NA and EU. If you count the guilds on gw2gvg.com, you would get something around 1,5k players who are interested in GvG, maybe more. That would be more than 50% of the player base, and thats why you read valid concern from them about GvGs. It isn’t a small minority anymore.

Oh boy, a long awaited discussion arises.
I’ll only express my own opinion on that topic, but I know many people in our guild have the same mindset.

Orbs and their buff were always criticized. They were removed because many hackers abused this mechanic and the situation was getting out of hand. Not bringing back orbs is essentially admitting that the game developers can’t deal with these hacks, atleast that’s what it looks like to me. But bringing back the stat-increase is a valid concern for many players, as it was last year.
GvGs aside, making a strong server even stronger by increasing their stats is never ever a good idea. It’s bad game design in my opinion. People don’t like bad game design, and I can only encourage everyone who is dedicated to pvp and wvw to try to prevent such changes. Think back to the arrow-cart buff, and you will get my point.

Now on to GvGs
I think without the orb removal we would have never seen the organized fights we’re able to watch almost every day of the week right now. The stat increase would make a major difference and fair fights almost impossible. The scene would take a great hit, if not deminish completely when this buff is reintroduced in its former state.
GvGs may be a small side event in the WvW game mode, but it’s becoming more and more popular, as the desire to have equal fights on the fields is growing.
A few months back we were the only (bigger) guild to not play for points but fights on our server. When I watch the guilds on our server today, I see them more and more shifting towards this playstyle.
Apart from one or maybe two servers, the point game is dead in EU. No one cares anymore, as people realised they are playing this game for fun. But playing for points isn’t fun. There is nothing to win, no bonus if you reach 200k points or come in first at the end of a matchup. It isn’t rewarding your efforts, because there is nothing to gain and it’s decided when there are no enemies around. So people are doing what they like to do, and for many players and guilds who played WvW for months the focus is moving more towards equal fights. Throwing huge stones into the direction of these players is not really helpful to improve the game itself.

That is something ArenaNet needs to acknowledge, and the discussion about orb buffs is a step in the right direction. They need to listen to the community carefully, not only in the forums but also ingame.
I would encourage the devs to log in and see what WvW is like these days (spoiler: it’s not what is was a year ago). Get in the game to get a feeling for the different servers, guilds and players and make proper adjustments based on that.