Guild Wars 2

Plains of Ashes.5941:

I have read thru pages of this thread and I see a lot of complex solutions, alot of gaming the PPTs and buffs. Most of what I see is cures for symptoms. The first step is to separate the cause from the effect, identify the root cause, then solve the root cause.
The population imbalance, the stacking of servers, the fact that coverage defines the winner, the outmanned buff, the week after week of lobsided matches are not the problem, they are symptoms of the problems.

I submit the primary root cause, but not the only one, is the fact that servers are allowed to field unequal number of players. I have never played a game which allows one team to field unequal teams as its default mode. WvW allows you to field 70+ more players on one side than the other. Not even GW2 sPvP allows unequal teams. I cant name a game or sport which breaks this rule.

This i would contend is the underlying cause of most of WvW’s problems. Its a violation of fundemental game design. What flows from this flaw is what you would expect of human nature: everyone stacking the teams because stacking is rewarded with what people want the most: and that is to win. Its simple, if the NFL changed the rules which allowed a team to field all the players on its bench (like WvW), and players didnt cost the team money (like WvW), and the winning team gets a super bowl ring, well, the NFL would look like WvW next season with all the same flaws we see now.

WvW WILL BE BROKEN FOREVER UNTIL SERVERS ARE CONSTRAINED TO FIELD EQUAL NUMBER OF PLAYERS. Without this we will continue to have kludges (outmanned anyone?) and incentives, and the horribly complex solutions to manipulate PPTs and buffs when the solution is very simple. You must remove the incentive to change the behavior, and the incentive is stack a map and win the game.
So how do we fix it?

• limit the fielded teams to equal sizes, just like every other game does.
• make the remainder wait in queues, like other games
• Dont kick in the dynamic cap till the teamsize is over 20.
• if the teams are equal and one server has people leave then this offset is ok, balancing should only prevent folks from joining a team when that team is larger than the other teams (ie nobody ever gets booted for the sake of balane, let normal attrition do this)
• once this is in place, allow matchups between any 3 servers. thats right, for some matches it means HUGE queues (like for JQ vs AR), but that is what it will take to show players that a) stacked servers have no statistical advantage in winning, and b) stacking to a server means less playtime as a reward for their choice. with even teams, skill and tactics will matter more, where now they almost dont matter.
• keep statistics on which servers are cronically limiting the map pop and make a finite number of transfers avalable for free. Keeping statistics will allow ANET to know the specific number of transfers a server needs.
  …

I’d say queues are symptoms as well. Why should I, as a player, would need to wait in queues just to play. For people who play an hour or two a night, wvw becomes a non-option for them to play unless they move to a low pop server and leave their friends behind.

Even transfering servers is a symptom. Why can’t I, as a player in the gold league, play for another team (say Kaineng) while I wait for my home server queue.

I have no idea for a solution though.

akanibbles.6237:

Of solutions mentioned, I like:

- Implementing the ‘colour’ system. To create a flexible league environment, where you can guest to servers in your ‘team’ (allowing you to find a fight elsewhere should the current fight not appeal to you).

- Reworking the supply system, to create longer supply lines as more objectives are captured (meaning the more of the map you take, the more it takes to retain it).

- Reworking the reward system to favour some form of ‘alliance’ between 2nd and 3rd. Such as greater reward for capturing objectives from the 1st place server.

Ok, I guess I was too lazy to read all 13 pages; because those ideas sound nice.

KeeZee.7312:

Times BG/SOR/JQ fought each other = 26
BG 10
JQ 9
SoR 7
•All first place finishes

Times BG/SOR fought each other = 7
BG 6
SoR 1
•BG finished first all 6 times.

Times BG/JQ fought each other = 7
BG 3
JQ 2
•2 matches neither BG or JQ placed first.

Seems to me that BG’s matches against SoR were easy fights for BG. Stats don’t show BG to be in anyway considered the under dogs. They actually show them to be the strongest server over all between the 3.

Matches included beginning “Week 01 05-12 January” to present.

Unfortunately, rosters change so much frequently that historical data, while nice, is not an accurate representation of the current state.

Besides, the point of the thread is not about who will win, it’s about how ANet prepared the matches in a non-even way; with who-gets-to-play-whom not seemed to be decided with some reasoning that they can defend.

Andrew Clear.1750:

As far as the schedule goes, this is what you get with 6 team leagues. You aren’t playing each other every week, you are gonna have to deal with that, and with 2 match ups, someone is gonna get 1 more round of t2, in the 7 week season.

Not true though, you can create 6 weeks of tier1-tier2-tier2/tier1-tier1-tier2 then one week of tier1-tier1-tier1/tier2-tier2-tier2; or some other variation with even distribution.

Ties doesn’t matter, they can eventually settle it with total points or with their ELO (forgot what it’s called).

Skynet.7201:

Stack with your team. Push through opposing zerg. While pushing through, drop traps, and entangle at the back end. Turn around, barrage snared victims.

What I would like to see: an option to remove the pets from the bar.

Eat Pet: You and up to 5 people in the area are cleared of conditions and are applied with all boons. No cooldown as long as you have a pet to eat.

BG since headstart! The server with the best name as well! Be part of Beastgate!

Respect for MERC for all they’ve achieved in Blackgate and their dedication to play. It’s sad that few guilds are able to keep up with such burnout during oceanic/sea time.

MERC came into BG during a fun time of this game’s life when there’s a lot of active guilds. Each night, 2 guilds are assigned per map (for SEA when I play). They, and ND, helped a lot to carry the server into T1. Unfortunately, as my subjective observation, a lot of people could not handle the burnout of T1 play; not everyone likes 50v50 battles(that number’s probably an understatement if you look at recent matchups). Those that are able to keep up everday eventually joined MERC. I guess a big factor is that most good English speaking commanders (I like Tarkus’ calm voice) are in it.

Which is the key point in my post: I disagree that you are not getting much support when a big (I won’t know how much, and “big” is subjective here) part of your guild are not from SoS. I would have suggested you split your guild, but that’s just my opinion.

Thank you and good luck in your future endeavours.

Letting enemies through is griefing your server mates. Those red names are going to attack your allies on top. The achievement does not excuse anyone from pvp battles in the pvp zone.

I’d say it’s perferfectly fine; the repetitive use of the mechanic is the annoying part. I suggest improving downed penalty.
Maybe by having it affect downed skill cooldowns? Or longer duration?

Wings of Dwayna, shooting arrows made of light, would look cool on a guardian!

MagiKarp.8201:

morrolan.9608:

MagiKarp.8201:

For those in their haste that missed this I quote “Subtle movement” “Perfect rolls” stop the doom saying, probably just means that TC and DB will occasionally make an appearance in T1.

Yabbut the example given didn’t match the words. The example was anything but a subtle movement.

The example was from statistics 2 weeks ago, which had Kaineng was still in T2.

It lists KN as rank 8 there. Anyway, the example is probably “perfect roll” for KN to be against BG and SoR

Sounds chaotic, I like it! I hope they open free transfers for a few weeks so everything really shakes up!

I just don’t like that “Retreat” is really not just for retreating. Sometimes we charge in wvw and hearing the shout is annoying. Same for “Save Yourselves”, when my allies didn’t really saved themselves

chronometria.3708:

EightyEs.5873:

That sucks – I enjoyed everyone seeing the titles I have worked hard for!

Which one is yours again?

That one guy has a “Mosquito” title!

Can’t blame SOR for not showing up this late into the week. What are they going to do, make up 60k in one night? Probably going to rest for the reset.

Anyway, if moz is correct, I think we might have a chance to be green next week. Blue keep is lame.

You can’t actually just wait until retal runs out though. A smart group will wait until you release barrage before shouting retaliation. And after a certain point, you cannot stop barrage anymore.

Still think it’s fair though. And Anet probably can’t make barrage cancellable without it turning into a channel skill.

If I may chime in with my suggestion.

I would like for confusion stacks to be capped at somewhere between 5 to 10 (I know that’s a big range), with additional stacks adding duration, and glamour cooldowns reduced by about 20~25%. The idea is, fighting a mesmer should generally be “confusing” in both literal and gameplay sense of the word but confusion shouldn’t be spike damage.

(Disclaimer: I have 2 level 80 mesmers).

It’s resolved now.

I have the same problem. Black screen with “game client lost its connection to the server” when reloading. It told me to try again, but the same happens if I do.

Each siege placed should have the account name of whoever placed it visible to allies.

A lot of people run team-oriented builds for WvW.

If you want to 1v1 someone, you need to ask. You don’t “impromptu” 1v1.

Minor complaint: can you make the fonts consistent? It changes from serif to non-serif. My head hurts.

Comebacks as really just when the “they’ll win this one without me” people stop playing PvE. Same thing happened when BG mounted comebacks against SoR in T2. Top servers in each tier has the luxury of “scaling” their efforts.

Leo Paul.1659:

Yea sorry I mean SEA… I have another accoun and Im thinking whether to move it to JQ or BG depending on which server has more filipino guilds/players that I can join. So far I know BG has Urge while JQ has Exitializ. I’m only considering strictly wvw with Filipino’s. I’m not going to spy or whatever for SOS.

I’ve seen more [Omen] than [Exi] in wvw; maybe join them instead if you ever get into JQ.

Edit: Ofcourse [Urge] in BG is looking for more wvw focused players.

Furienify.5738:

Spotting/sentrying/scouting has no reward. You get nothing from doing these activities beyond the goodwill of your teammates, yet you’re elbowing people to do them even more.

And with the new loot bag change, there’s even less incentive to do them.

And here I am thinking that we should have ship battles in the middle of borderlands using cannons. I need more imagination apparently.

I’d suggest that people with outmanned buffs should be able to take twice the amount of supply.

This makes it easier for their team to build siege; something that the populated team can easily do. This will also give them the incentive to take camps and drain the populated team’s supply. And, it would promote less confrontational gameplay for people who can’t confront their enemies on equal terms.

This will probably lead to people going to outmanned borders to get supply then go back to home border… but that may not be such a bad thing, because it would spread people (even if all their take is camps).

You see it as tribes and nations battling.

But I see it as 3 teams competing against each other. In the end, it’s just a game; score doesn’t matter; winning is just a strike in the score card; and transfers are just “trades”.

Sunspots.9861:

Frenk.5917:

While I don’t agree about the siege weapons I do agree about walls being useless for defenders. A fix could be:

1) Find a way to not to force defenders to stand on the very edge of the walls in order to effectively hit attackers. This would help to lessen the pulls and the effectiveness of the small AoEs, since only the largest AoE could hit defenders, who are no more forced to stand on the edge, who are trying to hit attackers.

2) Do not let defenders place AC in spots which are not reachable by attackers. This would mean that siege weapons could stil be placed in spots which are not within the range of the normal enemy AoEs but ARE within the range of e.g. enemy AC.

3) Provide a defense bonus for defenders on the walls. For example a 5% damage reduction for people standing in wooden walls, 10% in reinforced walls and 20% in fortified walls.

I tried to say it in a constructive way, but you didn’t read it? It’s not broken so it requires no fix.

I think “fix” is a wrong term, but he does have a good suggestion. Providing wall people with boon advantage will move the siege a bit farther away from the wall. But I don’t think that’s enough to make defending from the wall viable.

Personally, I like it when my guild goes for FA rather than TC. We’ve played with TC before, and we’ll play with them again next week. But we didn’t got to play with FA and IoJ opponents for quite a while.

Solori.6025:

It would be so nice if they just removed the badges from the JP chest .

Agreed with this.

Why even have badges of honor on the jumping puzzle. Is jumping around really that honorable? But mesmers porting people up the jp; now those guys deserve badges.

I don’t get why we are trusting the info from a third party site.

But I do agree that we need to squeeze-out more information from Arenanet about this new maths. Work week is just starting, which is probably why we don’t get any answers yet.

I actually want it the other way: show large groups of people (>25?) on the map, with a colored flag representing their server. Doesn’t have to be by default, it could be a tower upgrade (binoculars?) or something.

This way, new people entering the map can easily see where the ally and enemy frontlines are.

I have done this for 2 characters (well second one at 71 currently), and just doing PvE here and there for daily kill variety (though you can get it in WvW too thanks to rangers) and skill points. Also some crafting, but I don’t have to leave WvW for that.

Neuromancer.2148:

Win or lose, Blackgate will always have the coolest server name!

The only reason I joined this server on release day.

As others said, this is just a short-term issue. So you just have to… wait for 6 days.

Liquid.9672:

What I do see is SoS and JQ duking it out for 1 and 2, and BG and SoR swapping places as their red headed step child every few weeks or so.

I agree, at least until 2 of the bubbling servers prove to be too good that whoever gets caught as the 4th server when things settle gets stuck in tier 2.

I’m all for paid transfers, which should have been there from the start, but I personally believe that ANet should not have announced it until it was live. What happens is this gave people time to jump to the top servers, and they will, and leave the wvw population of lower tier servers broken.

BG side is more extended!

Playing in T1 is better than stomping T2.

No-one sane believed it will be easy to win, especially after our T1 losts last time. We’ll just need to get more PvE people into WvW and we’ll be as competitive the whole week as much as reset day.

I think BG has a lot of people with “they can afford to win this one without me” mentality, then goes “oh kitten!” towards the middle of the week. The only upside to that is that we’re not as burned-out to stage a comeback. I even played when I was supposed to be in bed already these past few days.

I visited the forum today and it greets me with the login page. Now this is fine as my cookies probably expired since I last visited, but I can’t seem to visit anything without being redirected back to the login screen.

I tried opening a different browser (well, incognito) and was able to browse fine anonymously. So it seems the forum detected that I was a past logged-in visitor and wants me to log in.

Could you just log me out if my session expires instead of being unable to browse the forums. Probably with a noticeable prompt saying something like “hey your session has expired and we logged you out, to log back in click here”; or something.

Suggestion: make siege blueprints purchaseable only using Badges of Honor (they should increase drop rate, and decrease the ones you get from JP to compensate though).