How competitive is WvW in your opinion?

Hey fellow WvWlers,

Back from a 2-year break (desert borderlands, ughh), I just wonder how you would describe WvW atm? It may have changed over time, due to server linking, fight-guild starving, reward tracks etc.

Atm it seem, at the most, some kind of semi-competitive. On one hand, there is still a GvG-option for high-quality fights, and at least some kind of competition between servers that claim the title "best fight server" (btw who is it actually?), or the best server in that region, or the best among those that share the same nationality etc.

On the other hand, constant transferring makes leaderboards feel some kind of meaningless. And server-linking seems like an anti-competitive mechanism:"You are the worst server ever? No prob, Anet helps you out. Get your link and move up to T3 again. Enjoy!".Also, there is no real reward for standing on top. Not even sure, if one gets rewarded with better fights in the upper tiers, or just more massive blobs, and night watchers.

Just from my personal experience, at the beginning, when EBG was a mysterious place, hidden behind a massive queue, it seemed that the commander's skills decided map domination. Then, also the skill gap between casuals and pro's grew bigger, with guilds dominating most of the maps. And today, it seems that there is a stack of 20ish true veterans, that fight for everyone willing to lead them into battle, and that the commander's main skill is to recruit, and entertain, as many casuals as possible to raise up the numbers to 40-60ish, then school them, or accept them, and lead with handbreak on.

Thoughts?

Eh, it's half competitive i guess.

Most of the competition comes from players themselves as opposed to an actual game mechanic.

PPT is what decides who wins or loses- for pips, if you have high PPT -> high war score -> more pips (and also more likely to be in higher teir next week), buuut... it's more rewarding to not care about PPT in a way- flip paper keeps/towers back and forth and all sides get more loot, exp, karma, participation, achievement counts. Despite being the main determinate of teir (via warscore), PPT is an inherently uncompetitive thing for that reason, which just seems weird to me. On the other hand if your server actually wants to rise teirs it matters, but what's the incentive there? I'm always happy to get out of t4 (and t1 for that matter, blackgate boring to fight) because servers stuck in t4 get discouraged and eventually on t4 purgatory servers the only thing you can do is roam. Winning servers get stacked by people who love ez fights people who want more pips i assume, wipe the floor for a month, kill at least 1 server in the process, and in the end all they get is a couple hrs worth of extra pips. I wonder if when the alliance system comes it might get more competitive, either gives ppt a real incentive to chase or provides the foundation for other things to introduce competition.

Not at all. To be competitive it would need:1) Set clear goal(s) of the competition. That they have, but the goal presents little value to most so more attractive ones would be needed.2) Balance each and every aspect in respect to viability in relation to reaching said goal and nothing else. This is completely missing, less than a half of the classes (let alone builds) are in fact viable competitively for reaching the matchup victory. The rest are just for floating around and have fun, but that is not what a competition is about.

Don't think it is a bad thing though, having it non-competitive attracts more people so it can last longer.

Its competitive alright.Everyone is competing for the karma and exp from capturing paper towers and forts.

Need a better definition of what you consider competitive as it seems unclear to me from your post.

@Israel.7056 said:Need a better definition of what you consider competitive as it seems unclear to me from your post.That's a bit of a problem, since everyone has his/her/its own definition. Feel free to add yours ;) For me in short: doing a lot that is not fun, in the first place, but helps to work towards a (mutual) goal, and that's where the fun comes from

What it needs imo:

Riko.9214 already mentioned:

• a clear goal to achieve (I guess winning the match-up would be the closest fit)
• good balance of game mechanics, classes etc.

I might add:

• skill-based MM, good players play against each other in the top league, bad players play against each other in the bottom league (or a guild deciding by their own who is welcome and who's not)
• prizes for the winner
• clear rules (there seems to be a lot of WvW-ethics around, at least sometimes xD)
• a ranking system
• a good system to determine who played better (is sitting in a siege Golem and defending a camp skill? idk xD)
• fair conditions for every participant (is it fair, that one server starts at desert borderlands? idk)
• no pay-to-win. . . there might be more

Nah, it isn't competitive, not even the fight guilds.

In competitive scene, real competitive scene. You don't ever see people part of multiple teams competing in the same game or tournament. They belong to one team. In this game, people can join multi guilds and in fight guilds, you do see people part of multiple fight guilds. That alone already make such guilds no longer considered as competitive. Likewise, competitive plaeyrs don't just hop from team to team so frequently. This also not a very welcomed behavior. This is just from philosophy perspective.

There is also the attitude perspective. Trash talking. Trash talking and words out frustration are complete different things. Competitive people don't trash talks, they don't talk down on other teams or guilds. They are focused on being competitive. In that aspect, this make it such that extremely little guilds are competitive in this game. Also note that it is important to differentiate between retaliation to trash talking and the one who literally initiate the trash talk.

There is also the balance perspective. Well, you can visit the balance threads.

There is also the match balance perspective. I mean, you can't consider 20 vs 30 as competitive right?

This game isn't competitive by design. The community isn't competitive by nature.

its just a pvd game no wonder most ppl find it boring. World vs Door ! lol

Its a video game where you press buttons and pretend that its somehow a real 'competition'.

@enkidu.5937 said:

@Israel.7056 said:Need a better definition of what you consider competitive as it seems unclear to me from your post.That's a bit of a problem, since everyone has his/her/its own definition. Feel free to add yours ;) For me in short: doing a lot that is not fun, in the first place, but helps to work towards a (mutual) goal, and that's where the fun comes from

• a clear goal to achieve (I guess winning the match-up would be the closest fit)
• good balance of game mechanics, classes etc.
• clear rules (there seems to be a lot of WvW-ethics around, at least sometimes xD)
• a good system to determine who played better (is sitting in a siege Golem and defending a camp skill? idk xD)

with a clear goal, clear rules aswell as balance of game mechanics you dont need an additional 'system' to determine who played better as winning will indicate who did play better. tho from your example i guess for you playing better is pulling of more difficult moves instead of doing the best thing you can do in any given moment to achieve victory?ever fought a burst ele inside his camp that had multiple golems for stealth bursting?(ele goes down, vapor into golem , golem explodes, full hp stealthed ele bursts you)

It was never competitive to begin with, and what you have here is already a pale shadow when many that pretended to be competitive already left.

Go to PvP.

Completely non-competitive

Some sandbox with open world pvp

Less competitive than EotM was.

Nope the auctioneers were beaten and sent away from these lands never to return. Although I'm pretty sure anet is working on this plan starting with deadeye where they are going to make a supply consumable that completely counters every class in the game so that there won't be anymore complaining you will soon just throw supply at your enemy and until one side wins.

Warrior: cannot meleeRev: All power damage reflected back to you (unavoidable) and all damage being reflected back is converted into condition damageGuardian: Using boons and healing kills all allies within 10000 rangeRanger: Rapid fire heals the enemyEngineer: Turns all turrets and gadgets into terminator dolyaks with lasers on their headsnecro: all keybinds are removedele: meteor shower summons an asteroid and kills all allies and enemies on all of the maps at oncemesmer: pushes you into an entry portal and then pulls you out of an exit portal and then turns you into a clone

All of these things will occur when marked now depending on your class to make the game more competitive.

@ArchonWing.9480 said:It was never competitive to begin with, and what you have here is already a pale shadow when many that pretended to be competitive already left.

Eeeeexactly.

I would say it's competitive insofar as people are competing against other people but that the competition itself isn't usually particularly fair.

It plays out more like a sim war than a sport which was the intent as far as I can tell.

It has come to the point of being subjectively competitive. Like P.E. classes or special olympics.

Well we have alleged "fight" guilds trying to stack themselves all on 1 or 2 servers, yet the actively avoid fighting unless they have double or triple the numbers. Or they end up logging when smaller groups are beating them. As for the rest of it, it's basically mostly avoiding T3 structures while flipping paper ones... anything but competitive.

I'm ready for the GW3-waiting room.

@enkidu.5937 said:there is still a GvG-option for high-quality fightshigh-quality fightsquality

@"Kraljevo.2801" said:there is still a GvG-option for high-quality fightshigh-quality fightsqualityI'm about to find an up-to-date mind-set, that suits todays WvW, so I can't get around to ask: what does "quality fights" mean for you (definition)? :) (or anyone else who likes to share his mind on this issue, as well

Competitive... that ship sailed long ago.There's no leader boards for anything.T1 just means you have more people and coverage.There are no fight servers, now it's a bunch of guilds bandwagoning to a server in the name of alliances to run over enemy servers that have been pillaged for players and now ran over for bags.The last NA gvg tournie was filled with guilds that had no business being in a gvg.

@Junkpile.7439 said:Less competitive than EotM was.

Hehehehe