Jump to content
  • Sign Up

World Restructuring / Alliances


Strider Pj.2193

Recommended Posts

Re: stackingDon't delude yourselves. Just like in ranked PVP (see bots / duo queue / queue dodging/ etc) and server linking , people will stack (see bandwagon servers , "server blackouts" to game the links) or cheat their way to "get the shinies" easier.Timezones such as OCX/SEA will be especially of note. EU time on NA isn't nearly as skewed. The 3/2/1 skirmish victory points system was supposed to lessen the impact of OCX/SEA but it hasn't overall. You could have top tier NA players but zero OCX/SEA and you will lose the matchup because everything is papered.The fundamental "unit" in WVW is now WvW oriented guilds not servers, due to server links and essentially no communication cross-server outside of team chat at a given time. Prior to megaservers , you could get people to help out in Lions Arch (the main hub to WvW other than armistice bastion). Unless you're able to send out an alert similar to a World Boss Portal device or even a LFG post, there's no way to get additional help outside of WvW.With 25+ counting as orange swords and up to 50 in a given squad, most mid-sized guilds (even if they are WvW only players) can't really keep up with 10-20.

When the going gets tough if you're a casual player (that is trying to get Gift of Battle or something), why stick with a given server/alliance and not transfer to a winning one? That's a dilemma that Arenanet has to solve fundamentally.

Re: activityJust like in open world PVE, players will get carried spamming 1 on longbow ranger , longbow trap DH, or some other ranged class yet they count as "population" despite contributing basically nothing. Looking up a WvW build is "too hard" , "I'm doing fine because I'm the last to die" while firing arrows on the wall while everyone else pushes. Buying non-berserker armor and an equipment slot is basically not going to happen for most casual players ; it's a much larger side effect of equipment and build templates compared to PVP.People are afking in WvW just to get their pips as it is now, likely inflating population counts if it's by player pips. Increasing rewards was never the answer.

Re: new players that actually want to tryWarclaw makes it unappealing for new players to catch up with public commanders if they are literally new. In addition, gliding needs to be unlocked. Siege used to level the playing field a bit, but now arrowcarts are severely diminished in value so basically you have mortar/cannons/shield gen/ballistae. Even if you are a high rank WvW player if you are on an alt you need to get those ranks to be able to use gliding, warclaw, supply, and siege effectively.edit: let's not forget warclaw stomp does damage it doesn't just stomp people , so the force with higher numbers has a major advantage there as well

Why hasn't there been an incentive for people to GvG in PVP in a game named Guild Wars 2? With the upcoming 15v15 mode in PVP there should be the ability to GvG there. Why is steamrolling random players using blues and greens in WVW with an organized squad in coms a thing?

Re: replay value / rewardsWhat incentive is there for people to run yaks after getting the title yakslapper? Coverage is going to be stacked even with "alliances". Tiering structures should be a top priority yet essentially nobody cares about running yaks.What incentive is there for people to scout now that everything has marked or watchtower on it? Other than joining a squad and obtaining the scout designation there really isn't any.What incentive is there for people to tag defensive siege that is about to expire? Literally zero.What incentive is there for people to defend a T3 keep or tower versus backcapping when greatly outnumbered? There's a reason casuals are more likely to follow a backcapping ktrain than to actually try to defend something. You see this happen especially because of the stacked servers, where the entirety of EBG is capped by one color/team.What incentive is there for someone with 10K WVW rank and every WVW title including Ultimate Dominator to even play? "How does it change the game mode in any way meaningful if it's just stab + spam 1" for most of the casual playerbase?With the nerfs to siege and walls to appease fights guilds, what sort of initiative has been made to restore the point of the game mode which is capturing and defending structures? Alliances are more slanted to fights guilds as it is, which have minimal loyalty to a given server.

Reward structure still is boggling: Why do grandmaster mark shards even exist instead of the grandmaster mark box? It's a joke that they take up inventory space for more than an entire month if you get all 3 marks per week (gold tier skirmish rewards) when 10 are needed for a grandmaster mark worth around 10g.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 75
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

@"Dralor.3701" said:The “soon” issue is both an issue of man power on the WvW team and the fact they used to see pretty reasonable revenue from server transfers. I almost wouldn’t be surprised if the alliance system ultimately got canned just to keep those funds flowing.

This is the reason pretty much everyone I talk to accepts for why alliances have been scrapped. We know their plans through end of Q1 2020, which puts us 2.5 years since alliances were announced. After 2.5 years, they will have done NO work on alliances to date. NONE! Why would they start now? People are still heavily bandwagoning to fight doors in timezones (and on servers) where they face no other door fighters. All of which, is about the only revenue gained directly from wvw as a gamemode.

Everytime someone asks, I tell them the same thing. It's never going to happen. Just enjoy backcapping, because the only alternative is to join the bandwagon. Either way, you're gonna be attacking doors. At least the backcap crew gets the perma-outnumbered buff, like we get on TC. Only full server I know of, who starts reset with outnumbered on EB, and can keep it 90% + for the week, while still being "full".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The current match ups sucks. I’m in a mega server full of PvE players, so when we linked up with a smaller server with no wvw guilds, we pretty much sit it out cause we fight servers with 24 hour coverage.

Idk if ANET looks at the actual WvW population when they do these links or they just say “kitten, push the random button and forget it.”

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@DragonSlayer.1087 said:The current match ups sucks. I’m in a mega server full of PvE players, so when we linked up with a smaller server with no wvw guilds, we pretty much sit it out cause we fight servers with 24 hour coverage.

Idk if ANET looks at the actual WvW population when they do these links or they just say “kitten, push the random button and forget it.”

Servers only count WvW participation. Been that way for years now. If your server is listed as full, it is because you have more players that combined spend more hours in wvw than other servers. It might be different hours than you play, or they might stand all day in spawn etc, but they're WvW hours counted, never pve.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@"Infusion.7149" said:Re: stackingDon't delude yourselves. Just like in ranked PVP (see bots / duo queue / queue dodging/ etc) and server linking , people will stack (see bandwagon servers , "server blackouts" to game the links) or cheat their way to "get the shinies" easier.Timezones such as OCX/SEA will be especially of note. EU time on NA isn't nearly as skewed. The 3/2/1 skirmish victory points system was supposed to lessen the impact of OCX/SEA but it hasn't overall. You could have top tier NA players but zero OCX/SEA and you will lose the matchup because everything is papered.The fundamental "unit" in WVW is now WvW oriented guilds not servers, due to server links and essentially no communication cross-server outside of team chat at a given time. Prior to megaservers , you could get people to help out in Lions Arch (the main hub to WvW other than armistice bastion). Unless you're able to send out an alert similar to a World Boss Portal device or even a LFG post, there's no way to get additional help outside of WvW.With 25+ counting as orange swords and up to 50 in a given squad, most mid-sized guilds (even if they are WvW only players) can't really keep up with 10-20.

When the going gets tough if you're a casual player (that is trying to get Gift of Battle or something), why stick with a given server/alliance and not transfer to a winning one? That's a dilemma that Arenanet has to solve fundamentally.

Re: activityJust like in open world PVE, players will get carried spamming 1 on longbow ranger , longbow trap DH, or some other ranged class yet they count as "population" despite contributing basically nothing. Looking up a WvW build is "too hard" , "I'm doing fine because I'm the last to die" while firing arrows on the wall while everyone else pushes. Buying non-berserker armor and an equipment slot is basically not going to happen for most casual players ; it's a much larger side effect of equipment and build templates compared to PVP.People are afking in WvW just to get their pips as it is now, likely inflating population counts if it's by player pips. Increasing rewards was never the answer.

Re: new players that actually want to tryWarclaw makes it unappealing for new players to catch up with public commanders if they are literally new. In addition, gliding needs to be unlocked. Siege used to level the playing field a bit, but now arrowcarts are severely diminished in value so basically you have mortar/cannons/shield gen/ballistae. Even if you are a high rank WvW player if you are on an alt you need to get those ranks to be able to use gliding, warclaw, supply, and siege effectively.edit: let's not forget warclaw stomp does damage it doesn't just stomp people , so the force with higher numbers has a major advantage there as well

Why hasn't there been an incentive for people to GvG in PVP in a game named Guild Wars 2? With the upcoming 15v15 mode in PVP there should be the ability to GvG there. Why is steamrolling random players using blues and greens in WVW with an organized squad in coms a thing?

Re: replay value / rewardsWhat incentive is there for people to run yaks after getting the title yakslapper? Coverage is going to be stacked even with "alliances". Tiering structures should be a top priority yet essentially nobody cares about running yaks.What incentive is there for people to scout now that everything has marked or watchtower on it? Other than joining a squad and obtaining the scout designation there really isn't any.What incentive is there for people to tag defensive siege that is about to expire? Literally zero.What incentive is there for people to defend a T3 keep or tower versus backcapping when greatly outnumbered? There's a reason casuals are more likely to follow a backcapping ktrain than to actually try to defend something. You see this happen especially because of the stacked servers, where the entirety of EBG is capped by one color/team.What incentive is there for someone with 10K WVW rank and every WVW title including Ultimate Dominator to even play? "How does it change the game mode in any way meaningful if it's just stab + spam 1" for most of the casual playerbase?With the nerfs to siege and walls to appease fights guilds, what sort of initiative has been made to restore the point of the game mode which is capturing and defending structures? Alliances are more slanted to fights guilds as it is, which have minimal loyalty to a given server.

Reward structure still is boggling: Why do grandmaster mark shards even exist instead of the grandmaster mark box? It's a joke that they take up inventory space for more than an entire month if you get all 3 marks per week (gold tier skirmish rewards) when 10 are needed for a grandmaster mark worth around 10g.

I am quoting this in full because it deserves more attention. I agree with essentially everything that was said.

It is interesting that organisation in WvW have begun falling to a guild-level. It means that the train has possibly gone for reverting some of the damage that has been done. It makes solutions that involve simply changing the winning-aspect of stacking (like the one in my signature) or the matchup-aspect of stacking (like discussions about GvG) much less impactful as the driving force behind most stacking these days is access to dwindling content and content creators. The other interesting side of that is that it affects the Alliance system (and whatever secret Scoring system ArenaNet are scribbling down in their notebooks) the same way. Alliances need guilds to form Alliances. The winning-, matchup- and content aspects are as important to forced off-zones like OCX as it is to EU and NA. Nightcapping and population imbalance is intertwined. The issue with nightcapping is stacking. It is just stacking in the off-hours. Nightcapping also causes matchup issues because it pushes prime-low servers up to where they can't compete in prime. They just do not match up. So you essentially never get WvWvW. You get WvW and W. Two servers stacking prime and one server stacking off.

The issue with players I take with more of a grain of salt. I see that as less problematic even if that too is tied to guilds. It has always been a thing but it has mainly become a thing with so few new players joining guilds. I see that as more of a result of the developer suggesting in their behaviour that players don't need guilds and in their lack of attention to content for guilds (like providing GvG matchups and events as side-content that keeps guilds interested enough to keep providing main content in WvW) affecting the lifespan of guilds. Alot of servers try to organize these anonymous players and that is where we see these complaints about Bearbows etc. However, in my eyes it is up to guilds to teach and organize players and it is up to the developer to encourage the formation and continuation of guilds. A Bearbow or two in a world or on a map with a healthy amount of guilds is not a problem. A majority of anonymous Bearbows in dwindling amount of guilds is a problem. Casual players are not a problem, the absolute death of casual guilds (PvX, social WvW, explicit training) that can organize basics is a problem.

The replay value and rewards are also tied to scoring. If they never solve the scoring issue they will never solve the winning, pride and self-valued rewards issues. All of these issues branching out come back to the same root issues: Population, score, matchup (queues). However, Infusion is 100% correct in that it is fucking mind-boggling why PvE can get a legendary armor set in 6-10 weeks and WvW gets 18-30 fragments in that time so they can only get one of the cheapest (3 marks) ascended precursors. The comparison is just laughably ridiculous to all of us and just screams of all the good old days of mistreatment from the "WvW-players are really PvE players" qoute (suggesting that we should PvE to tradeskill our marks unlike sPvP, lack of attention/iteration and the completely unfounded fear that WvW somehow is more in the risk of exploiting reward systems so it can never get anything that is valuable elsewhere).

It is quite the joke that it isn't even like twice as fast to do PvE or sPvP but closer to 10x faster should you not spend more time out of WvW than in it to make your WvW armor.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@subversiontwo.7501 said:

@"Infusion.7149" said:
Re: stacking
Don't delude yourselves. Just like in ranked PVP (see bots / duo queue / queue dodging/ etc) and server linking , people will stack (see bandwagon servers , "server blackouts" to game the links) or cheat their way to "get the shinies" easier.Timezones such as OCX/SEA will be especially of note. EU time on NA isn't nearly as skewed. The 3/2/1 skirmish victory points system was supposed to lessen the impact of OCX/SEA but it hasn't overall. You could have top tier NA players but zero OCX/SEA and you will lose the matchup because everything is papered.The fundamental "unit" in WVW is now WvW oriented guilds not servers, due to server links and essentially no communication cross-server outside of team chat at a given time. Prior to megaservers , you could get people to help out in Lions Arch (the main hub to WvW other than armistice bastion). Unless you're able to send out an alert similar to a World Boss Portal device or even a LFG post, there's no way to get additional help outside of WvW.With 25+ counting as orange swords and up to 50 in a given squad, most mid-sized guilds (even if they are WvW only players) can't really keep up with 10-20.

When the going gets tough if you're a casual player (that is trying to get Gift of Battle or something), why stick with a given server/alliance and not transfer to a winning one? That's a dilemma that Arenanet has to solve fundamentally.

Re: activity
Just like in open world PVE, players will get carried spamming 1 on longbow ranger , longbow trap DH, or some other ranged class yet they count as "population" despite contributing basically nothing. Looking up a WvW build is "too hard" , "I'm doing fine because I'm the last to die" while firing arrows on the wall while everyone else pushes. Buying non-berserker armor and an equipment slot is basically not going to happen for most casual players ; it's a much larger side effect of equipment and build templates compared to PVP.People are afking in WvW just to get their pips as it is now, likely inflating population counts if it's by player pips. Increasing rewards was never the answer.

Re: new players that actually want to try
Warclaw makes it unappealing for new players to catch up with public commanders if they are literally new. In addition, gliding needs to be unlocked. Siege used to level the playing field a bit, but now arrowcarts are severely diminished in value so basically you have mortar/cannons/shield gen/ballistae. Even if you are a high rank WvW player if you are on an alt you need to get those ranks to be able to use gliding, warclaw, supply, and siege effectively.edit: let's not forget warclaw stomp does damage it doesn't just stomp people , so the force with higher numbers has a major advantage there as well

Why hasn't there been an incentive for people to GvG in PVP in a game named Guild Wars 2? With the upcoming 15v15 mode in PVP there should be the ability to GvG there. Why is steamrolling random players using blues and greens in WVW with an organized squad in coms a thing?

Re: replay value / rewards
What incentive is there for people to run yaks after getting the title yakslapper? Coverage is going to be stacked even with "alliances". Tiering structures should be a top priority yet essentially nobody cares about running yaks.What incentive is there for people to scout now that everything has marked or watchtower on it? Other than joining a squad and obtaining the scout designation there really isn't any.What incentive is there for people to tag defensive siege that is about to expire? Literally zero.What incentive is there for people to defend a T3 keep or tower versus backcapping when greatly outnumbered? There's a reason casuals are more likely to follow a backcapping ktrain than to actually try to defend something. You see this happen especially because of the stacked servers, where the entirety of EBG is capped by one color/team.What incentive is there for someone with 10K WVW rank and every WVW title including Ultimate Dominator to even play? "How does it change the game mode in any way meaningful if it's just stab + spam 1" for most of the casual playerbase?With the nerfs to siege and walls to appease fights guilds, what sort of initiative has been made to restore the point of the game mode which is capturing and defending structures? Alliances are more slanted to fights guilds as it is, which have minimal loyalty to a given server.

Reward structure still is boggling: Why do grandmaster mark shards even exist instead of the grandmaster mark box? It's a joke that they take up inventory space for more than an entire month if you get all 3 marks per week (gold tier skirmish rewards) when 10 are needed for a grandmaster mark worth around 10g.

I am quoting this in full because it deserves more attention. I agree with essentially everything that was said.

It is interesting that organisation in WvW have begun falling to a guild-level. It means that the train has possibly gone for reverting some of the damage that has been done. It makes solutions that involve simply changing the winning-aspect of stacking (like the one in my signature) or the matchup-aspect of stacking (like discussions about GvG) much less impactful as the driving force behind most stacking these days is access to dwindling content and content creators. The other interesting side of that is that it affects the Alliance system (and whatever secret Scoring system ArenaNet are scribbling down in their notebooks) the same way. Alliances need guilds to form Alliances. The winning-, matchup- and content aspects are as important to forced off-zones like OCX as it is to EU and NA. Nightcapping and population imbalance is intertwined. The issue with nightcapping is stacking. It is just stacking in the off-hours. Nightcapping also causes matchup issues because it pushes prime-low servers up to where they can't compete in prime. They just do not match up. So you essentially never get WvWvW. You get WvW and W. Two servers stacking prime and one server stacking off.

The issue with players I take with more of a grain of salt. I see that as less problematic even if that too is tied to guilds. It has always been a thing but it has mainly become a thing with so few new players joining guilds. I see that as more of a result of the developer suggesting in their behaviour that players don't need guilds and in their lack of attention to content for guilds (like providing GvG matchups and events as side-content that keeps guilds interested enough to keep providing main content in WvW) affecting the lifespan of guilds. Alot of servers try to organize these anonymous players and that is where we see these complaints about Bearbows etc. However, in my eyes it is up to guilds to teach and organize players and it is up to the developer to encourage the formation and continuation of guilds. A Bearbow or two in a world or on a map with a healthy amount of guilds is not a problem. A majority of anonymous Bearbows in dwindling amount of guilds is a problem. Casual players are not a problem, the absolute death of casual guilds (PvX, social WvW, explicit training) that can organize basics is a problem.

The replay value and rewards are also tied to scoring. If they never solve the scoring issue they will never solve the winning, pride and self-valued rewards issues. All of these issues branching out come back to the same root issues: Population, score, matchup (queues). However, Infusion is 100% correct in that it is kitten mind-boggling why PvE can get a legendary armor set in 6-10 weeks and WvW gets 18-30 fragments in that time so they can only get one of the cheapest (3 marks) ascended precursors. The comparison is just laughably ridiculous to all of us and just screams of all the good old days of mistreatment from the "WvW-players are really PvE players" qoute (suggesting that we should PvE to tradeskill our marks unlike sPvP, lack of attention/iteration and the completely unfounded fear that WvW somehow is more in the risk of exploiting reward systems so it can never get anything that is valuable elsewhere).

It is quite the joke that it isn't even like twice as fast to do PvE or sPvP but closer to 10x faster should you not spend more time out of WvW than in it to make your WvW armor.

You put a lot of emphasis on guilds which makes me think you are in EU. The talk of GvGs.. guilds leading the content.. that's not how NA works.

Guilds in NA rally maybe once a week for an hour or two. There are no GvGs or GvG guilds.

There is like 2 guilds that I would call "active" and they just join the blob linkups to run train like everyone else. No reason to segregate under their banner.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@displayname.8315 said:

@"Infusion.7149" said:
Re: stacking
Don't delude yourselves. Just like in ranked PVP (see bots / duo queue / queue dodging/ etc) and server linking , people will stack (see bandwagon servers , "server blackouts" to game the links) or cheat their way to "get the shinies" easier.Timezones such as OCX/SEA will be especially of note. EU time on NA isn't nearly as skewed. The 3/2/1 skirmish victory points system was supposed to lessen the impact of OCX/SEA but it hasn't overall. You could have top tier NA players but zero OCX/SEA and you will lose the matchup because everything is papered.The fundamental "unit" in WVW is now WvW oriented guilds not servers, due to server links and essentially no communication cross-server outside of team chat at a given time. Prior to megaservers , you could get people to help out in Lions Arch (the main hub to WvW other than armistice bastion). Unless you're able to send out an alert similar to a World Boss Portal device or even a LFG post, there's no way to get additional help outside of WvW.With 25+ counting as orange swords and up to 50 in a given squad, most mid-sized guilds (even if they are WvW only players) can't really keep up with 10-20.

When the going gets tough if you're a casual player (that is trying to get Gift of Battle or something), why stick with a given server/alliance and not transfer to a winning one? That's a dilemma that Arenanet has to solve fundamentally.

Re: activity
Just like in open world PVE, players will get carried spamming 1 on longbow ranger , longbow trap DH, or some other ranged class yet they count as "population" despite contributing basically nothing. Looking up a WvW build is "too hard" , "I'm doing fine because I'm the last to die" while firing arrows on the wall while everyone else pushes. Buying non-berserker armor and an equipment slot is basically not going to happen for most casual players ; it's a much larger side effect of equipment and build templates compared to PVP.People are afking in WvW just to get their pips as it is now, likely inflating population counts if it's by player pips. Increasing rewards was never the answer.

Re: new players that actually want to try
Warclaw makes it unappealing for new players to catch up with public commanders if they are literally new. In addition, gliding needs to be unlocked. Siege used to level the playing field a bit, but now arrowcarts are severely diminished in value so basically you have mortar/cannons/shield gen/ballistae. Even if you are a high rank WvW player if you are on an alt you need to get those ranks to be able to use gliding, warclaw, supply, and siege effectively.edit: let's not forget warclaw stomp does damage it doesn't just stomp people , so the force with higher numbers has a major advantage there as well

Why hasn't there been an incentive for people to GvG in PVP in a game named Guild Wars 2? With the upcoming 15v15 mode in PVP there should be the ability to GvG there. Why is steamrolling random players using blues and greens in WVW with an organized squad in coms a thing?

Re: replay value / rewards
What incentive is there for people to run yaks after getting the title yakslapper? Coverage is going to be stacked even with "alliances". Tiering structures should be a top priority yet essentially nobody cares about running yaks.What incentive is there for people to scout now that everything has marked or watchtower on it? Other than joining a squad and obtaining the scout designation there really isn't any.What incentive is there for people to tag defensive siege that is about to expire? Literally zero.What incentive is there for people to defend a T3 keep or tower versus backcapping when greatly outnumbered? There's a reason casuals are more likely to follow a backcapping ktrain than to actually try to defend something. You see this happen especially because of the stacked servers, where the entirety of EBG is capped by one color/team.What incentive is there for someone with 10K WVW rank and every WVW title including Ultimate Dominator to even play? "How does it change the game mode in any way meaningful if it's just stab + spam 1" for most of the casual playerbase?With the nerfs to siege and walls to appease fights guilds, what sort of initiative has been made to restore the point of the game mode which is capturing and defending structures? Alliances are more slanted to fights guilds as it is, which have minimal loyalty to a given server.

Reward structure still is boggling: Why do grandmaster mark shards even exist instead of the grandmaster mark box? It's a joke that they take up inventory space for more than an entire month if you get all 3 marks per week (gold tier skirmish rewards) when 10 are needed for a grandmaster mark worth around 10g.

I am quoting this in full because it deserves more attention. I agree with essentially everything that was said.

It is interesting that organisation in WvW have begun falling to a guild-level. It means that the train has possibly gone for reverting some of the damage that has been done. It makes solutions that involve simply changing the winning-aspect of stacking (like the one in my signature) or the matchup-aspect of stacking (like discussions about GvG) much less impactful as the driving force behind most stacking these days is access to dwindling content and content creators. The other interesting side of that is that it affects the Alliance system (and whatever secret Scoring system ArenaNet are scribbling down in their notebooks) the same way. Alliances need guilds to form Alliances. The winning-, matchup- and content aspects are as important to forced off-zones like OCX as it is to EU and NA. Nightcapping and population imbalance is intertwined. The issue with nightcapping is stacking. It is just stacking in the off-hours. Nightcapping also causes matchup issues because it pushes prime-low servers up to where they can't compete in prime. They just do not match up. So you essentially never get WvWvW. You get WvW and W. Two servers stacking prime and one server stacking off.

The issue with players I take with more of a grain of salt. I see that as less problematic even if that too is tied to guilds. It has always been a thing but it has mainly become a thing with so few new players joining guilds. I see that as more of a result of the developer suggesting in their behaviour that players don't need guilds and in their lack of attention to content for guilds (like providing GvG matchups and events as side-content that keeps guilds interested enough to keep providing main content in WvW) affecting the lifespan of guilds. Alot of servers try to organize these anonymous players and that is where we see these complaints about Bearbows etc. However, in my eyes it is up to guilds to teach and organize players and it is up to the developer to encourage the formation and continuation of guilds. A Bearbow or two in a world or on a map with a healthy amount of guilds is not a problem. A majority of anonymous Bearbows in dwindling amount of guilds is a problem. Casual players are not a problem, the absolute death of casual guilds (PvX, social WvW, explicit training) that can organize basics is a problem.

The replay value and rewards are also tied to scoring. If they never solve the scoring issue they will never solve the winning, pride and self-valued rewards issues. All of these issues branching out come back to the same root issues: Population, score, matchup (queues). However, Infusion is 100% correct in that it is kitten mind-boggling why PvE can get a legendary armor set in 6-10 weeks and WvW gets 18-30 fragments in that time so they can only get one of the cheapest (3 marks) ascended precursors. The comparison is just laughably ridiculous to all of us and just screams of all the good old days of mistreatment from the "WvW-players are really PvE players" qoute (suggesting that we should PvE to tradeskill our marks unlike sPvP, lack of attention/iteration and the completely unfounded fear that WvW somehow is more in the risk of exploiting reward systems so it can never get anything that is valuable elsewhere).

It is quite the joke that it isn't even like twice as fast to do PvE or sPvP but closer to 10x faster should you not spend more time out of WvW than in it to make your WvW armor.

You put a lot of emphasis on guilds which makes me think you are in EU. The talk of GvGs.. guilds leading the content.. that's not how NA works.

Guilds in NA rally maybe once a week for an hour or two. There are no GvGs or GvG guilds.

There is like 2 guilds that I would call "active" and they just join the blob linkups to run train like everyone else. No reason to segregate under their banner.

Many of the NA guilds have stepped away secondary to the extended time waiting for Alliances along with the poor balance that exists.

Many will organize and come back with alliances. If you choose not to join a WvW guild, you won’t see a change... except for the people you play with.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@subversiontwo.7501 said:However, Infusion is 100% correct in that it is kitten mind-boggling why PvE can get a legendary armor set in 6-10 weeks and WvW gets 18-30 fragments in that time so they can only get one of the cheapest (3 marks) ascended precursors. The comparison is just laughably ridiculous to all of us

PvE raiders can only get legendary armor in 6-10 weeks if they actually kill bosses.WvW players can get legendary armor by repairing the walls in SMC.

Not defending how the system is set up for WvW, but we aren't talking apples vs. apples here.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Dawdler.8521 said:

@Turkeyspit.3965 said:WvW players can get legendary armor by repairing the walls in SMC.You must play another game where you get 100 gold every time you repair that wall.It takes 21+ weeks to get all the WvW mats and cost ~2000 gold for a set.

A player with 100K Gold and 2000 of every material in storage, but 0 Legendary Insights / 0 WvW Skirmish Tickets cannot craft legendary armor.

The key component to the leg armor are Legendary Insights / Skirmish Tickets

Legendary Insights are only obtained from killing bosses.Skirmish Tickets are obtained from pip chests awarded from WvW participation, which is possible to maintain by standing in SMC and repairing the walls.

Nothing of what I've said is terribly complicated :(

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@TheGrimm.5624 said:

@Whiteout.1975 said:@Strider Pj.2193I have just been playing other games and doing more IRL things. Feels a lot better than waiting around for "Alliances" IMO. I think it was still good of you to have made a post about the Alliances; to say you did so if anything. I just feel sad for everyone that is still actively waiting on a company that takes their players (WvW/PvP especially) for granted, speaking as a veteran. Still, I honestly wish you best of luck and Anet (because they did keep me for 5-6 years). I just wish I could play the game again, but I just feel like I'd be shooting myself in the foot at this point (for about the 5th time). If anyone else enjoy's, be they new or whatever... I'm happy for you all. Enjoy while you can.

I'll come back around when population balance is fixed/Alliances and check those out. That's all I'm interested in at this point. Again, best of luck...

At this stage that is the healthy choice. I’ve played minimally over the last three months.

I also wonder about their timing of the balance patch preview. Right on the two year anniversary of The announcements about Alliances lol.

That is a positive about GW2, you can take a break and the game will be available to you when you get back. And agree, fitting in other games to keep things fresh helps. The flipside to the same argument though is that the less people there are in WvW the less fun it becomes. It really is a game mode that more the better, and I say this as a roamer/havoc player.

And it will still be about the same as it has been for the past 3 years.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Turkeyspit.3965 said:

@subversiontwo.7501 said:However, Infusion is 100% correct in that it is kitten mind-boggling why PvE can get a legendary armor set in 6-10 weeks and WvW gets 18-30 fragments in that time so they can only get one of the cheapest (3 marks) ascended precursors. The comparison is just laughably ridiculous to all of us

PvE raiders can only get legendary armor in 6-10 weeks if they actually kill bosses.WvW players can get legendary armor by repairing the walls in SMC.

Not defending how the system is set up for WvW, but we aren't talking apples vs. apples here.

Well, yes you're right, you have to play it. It's not like actually killing bosses is a feat (when I played the most our WvW crew would pop into raids and fractals after WvW raids with players who had little to no knowledge and non-optimized builds and even do CM's just because those modes were so ridiculously more valuable) so while ticking pips is a kind of ridiculous outlook on the onset one would assume that if you are building a legendary set in either mode you are actually looking to play it on the regular and if you play those things on the regular you are expected to drop the bosses as about as much as you are expected to camp to gold (and beyond). It's apples vs. oranges, sure, but they could 10x mark drops and it wouldn't be a problem making WvW into some legendary goldmine. It's still just a precursor set and it's still the crappiest materials farm in the game.

It becomes even more ridiculous if you are just trying to get ascended gear in WvW where your 10-week effort equates to 1-2 hrs for a 3-mark farm piece. Sure the WvW version is a precursor in such a comparison but its not like there are any other WvW options that drop below a week-long farm per piece (once you get the WXP to brush past the marks, but that in and of itself is a years-long farm). Now, I didn't make the post to comment too much on the system so I have no idea why I decided to nitpick at details here either, the point I originally wanted to make was simply put that the gearing options for WvW in WvW still suggests to players to go elsewhere. That chimes with the 2014-remark and is yet another example of how the developer's choices drive players away from the mode, especially new players.

Like, if a new player interested in WvW came to the game and asked about how to start out in WvW and become competetive as quick as possible, then you might try to convince them that exotic gear is easily competetive enough within a 10% margin at best (slightly less once you factor in base damage values on power weapons should they go for such a class/build) but if they are persistant in asking about how to get to an equal footing on stats then you'd have to tell them that the best option to get into WvW is to play PvE first :s .

That goes for us too, we may talk about how exotics should be good enough but the vast majority of us who play WvW actively also supplement our income with PvE. At one point in time that may not have been a major problem, when even WvW players could enjoy the odd World boss here and there and that was enough, but I'm pretty sure many of us these days either have locked down our accounts and approaches to play in WvW itself into needing little to no account upkeep or are doing PvE stuff that we enjoy less and less because PvE has become more commitment to time-consuming dull farms.

I, along with some friends, recently swept some accounts clean to move and start them over (this account I am posting from actually) and I can clearly see that my own behaviour rebuilding the basics of the account involves alot of PvE even though I absolutely hate it because it is by far the quickest way to rebuild the account and keep it low-effort going forward. So I am spending time out of WvW that I would have wanted to spend in it. It has actually been an experience that has given me some fresh perspectives on things WvW to get off my accounts that have everything and let me see the mode from much of a reset, and let me tell you, things are not looking good for new/returning players. The barrier of entry is pervasive and I am not talking about skill-levels or low-TTK on the balance side here.

That is interesting given how both game and mode are marketed as something that you can just hop into.

I guess we are floating way off topic now but it actually has one hint of a relation. The reason for the account reset was to play with friends and since Alliances are not here yet that is one out of two (to four) options to facilitate transfering to where your friends are meeting up. I wanted to try it out.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Strider Pj.2193 said:

@"Infusion.7149" said:
Re: stacking
Don't delude yourselves. Just like in ranked PVP (see bots / duo queue / queue dodging/ etc) and server linking , people will stack (see bandwagon servers , "server blackouts" to game the links) or cheat their way to "get the shinies" easier.Timezones such as OCX/SEA will be especially of note. EU time on NA isn't nearly as skewed. The 3/2/1 skirmish victory points system was supposed to lessen the impact of OCX/SEA but it hasn't overall. You could have top tier NA players but zero OCX/SEA and you will lose the matchup because everything is papered.The fundamental "unit" in WVW is now WvW oriented guilds not servers, due to server links and essentially no communication cross-server outside of team chat at a given time. Prior to megaservers , you could get people to help out in Lions Arch (the main hub to WvW other than armistice bastion). Unless you're able to send out an alert similar to a World Boss Portal device or even a LFG post, there's no way to get additional help outside of WvW.With 25+ counting as orange swords and up to 50 in a given squad, most mid-sized guilds (even if they are WvW only players) can't really keep up with 10-20.

When the going gets tough if you're a casual player (that is trying to get Gift of Battle or something), why stick with a given server/alliance and not transfer to a winning one? That's a dilemma that Arenanet has to solve fundamentally.

Re: activity
Just like in open world PVE, players will get carried spamming 1 on longbow ranger , longbow trap DH, or some other ranged class yet they count as "population" despite contributing basically nothing. Looking up a WvW build is "too hard" , "I'm doing fine because I'm the last to die" while firing arrows on the wall while everyone else pushes. Buying non-berserker armor and an equipment slot is basically not going to happen for most casual players ; it's a much larger side effect of equipment and build templates compared to PVP.People are afking in WvW just to get their pips as it is now, likely inflating population counts if it's by player pips. Increasing rewards was never the answer.

Re: new players that actually want to try
Warclaw makes it unappealing for new players to catch up with public commanders if they are literally new. In addition, gliding needs to be unlocked. Siege used to level the playing field a bit, but now arrowcarts are severely diminished in value so basically you have mortar/cannons/shield gen/ballistae. Even if you are a high rank WvW player if you are on an alt you need to get those ranks to be able to use gliding, warclaw, supply, and siege effectively.edit: let's not forget warclaw stomp does damage it doesn't just stomp people , so the force with higher numbers has a major advantage there as well

Why hasn't there been an incentive for people to GvG in PVP in a game named Guild Wars 2? With the upcoming 15v15 mode in PVP there should be the ability to GvG there. Why is steamrolling random players using blues and greens in WVW with an organized squad in coms a thing?

Re: replay value / rewards
What incentive is there for people to run yaks after getting the title yakslapper? Coverage is going to be stacked even with "alliances". Tiering structures should be a top priority yet essentially nobody cares about running yaks.What incentive is there for people to scout now that everything has marked or watchtower on it? Other than joining a squad and obtaining the scout designation there really isn't any.What incentive is there for people to tag defensive siege that is about to expire? Literally zero.What incentive is there for people to defend a T3 keep or tower versus backcapping when greatly outnumbered? There's a reason casuals are more likely to follow a backcapping ktrain than to actually try to defend something. You see this happen especially because of the stacked servers, where the entirety of EBG is capped by one color/team.What incentive is there for someone with 10K WVW rank and every WVW title including Ultimate Dominator to even play? "How does it change the game mode in any way meaningful if it's just stab + spam 1" for most of the casual playerbase?With the nerfs to siege and walls to appease fights guilds, what sort of initiative has been made to restore the point of the game mode which is capturing and defending structures? Alliances are more slanted to fights guilds as it is, which have minimal loyalty to a given server.

Reward structure still is boggling: Why do grandmaster mark shards even exist instead of the grandmaster mark box? It's a joke that they take up inventory space for more than an entire month if you get all 3 marks per week (gold tier skirmish rewards) when 10 are needed for a grandmaster mark worth around 10g.

I am quoting this in full because it deserves more attention. I agree with essentially everything that was said.

It is interesting that organisation in WvW have begun falling to a guild-level. It means that the train has possibly gone for reverting some of the damage that has been done. It makes solutions that involve simply changing the winning-aspect of stacking (like the one in my signature) or the matchup-aspect of stacking (like discussions about GvG) much less impactful as the driving force behind most stacking these days is access to dwindling content and content creators. The other interesting side of that is that it affects the Alliance system (and whatever secret Scoring system ArenaNet are scribbling down in their notebooks) the same way. Alliances need guilds to form Alliances. The winning-, matchup- and content aspects are as important to forced off-zones like OCX as it is to EU and NA. Nightcapping and population imbalance is intertwined. The issue with nightcapping is stacking. It is just stacking in the off-hours. Nightcapping also causes matchup issues because it pushes prime-low servers up to where they can't compete in prime. They just do not match up. So you essentially never get WvWvW. You get WvW and W. Two servers stacking prime and one server stacking off.

The issue with players I take with more of a grain of salt. I see that as less problematic even if that too is tied to guilds. It has always been a thing but it has mainly become a thing with so few new players joining guilds. I see that as more of a result of the developer suggesting in their behaviour that players don't need guilds and in their lack of attention to content for guilds (like providing GvG matchups and events as side-content that keeps guilds interested enough to keep providing main content in WvW) affecting the lifespan of guilds. Alot of servers try to organize these anonymous players and that is where we see these complaints about Bearbows etc. However, in my eyes it is up to guilds to teach and organize players and it is up to the developer to encourage the formation and continuation of guilds. A Bearbow or two in a world or on a map with a healthy amount of guilds is not a problem. A majority of anonymous Bearbows in dwindling amount of guilds is a problem. Casual players are not a problem, the absolute death of casual guilds (PvX, social WvW, explicit training) that can organize basics is a problem.

The replay value and rewards are also tied to scoring. If they never solve the scoring issue they will never solve the winning, pride and self-valued rewards issues. All of these issues branching out come back to the same root issues: Population, score, matchup (queues). However, Infusion is 100% correct in that it is kitten mind-boggling why PvE can get a legendary armor set in 6-10 weeks and WvW gets 18-30 fragments in that time so they can only get one of the cheapest (3 marks) ascended precursors. The comparison is just laughably ridiculous to all of us and just screams of all the good old days of mistreatment from the "WvW-players are really PvE players" qoute (suggesting that we should PvE to tradeskill our marks unlike sPvP, lack of attention/iteration and the completely unfounded fear that WvW somehow is more in the risk of exploiting reward systems so it can never get anything that is valuable elsewhere).

It is quite the joke that it isn't even like twice as fast to do PvE or sPvP but closer to 10x faster should you not spend more time out of WvW than in it to make your WvW armor.

You put a lot of emphasis on guilds which makes me think you are in EU. The talk of GvGs.. guilds leading the content.. that's not how NA works.

Guilds in NA rally maybe once a week for an hour or two. There are no GvGs or GvG guilds.

There is like 2 guilds that I would call "active" and they just join the blob linkups to run train like everyone else. No reason to segregate under their banner.

Many of the NA guilds have stepped away secondary to the extended time waiting for Alliances along with the poor balance that exists.

Many will organize and come back with alliances. If you choose not to join a WvW guild, you won’t see a change... except for the people you play with.

It is nice to think that WvW players will come back years after an announcement that hasn't happened but who knows.

Only change I need to see is 60v10 changing to 35v35. Don't really care about guilds and their various motivations.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@displayname.8315 said:

@"Infusion.7149" said:
Re: stacking
Don't delude yourselves. Just like in ranked PVP (see bots / duo queue / queue dodging/ etc) and server linking , people will stack (see bandwagon servers , "server blackouts" to game the links) or cheat their way to "get the shinies" easier.Timezones such as OCX/SEA will be especially of note. EU time on NA isn't nearly as skewed. The 3/2/1 skirmish victory points system was supposed to lessen the impact of OCX/SEA but it hasn't overall. You could have top tier NA players but zero OCX/SEA and you will lose the matchup because everything is papered.The fundamental "unit" in WVW is now WvW oriented guilds not servers, due to server links and essentially no communication cross-server outside of team chat at a given time. Prior to megaservers , you could get people to help out in Lions Arch (the main hub to WvW other than armistice bastion). Unless you're able to send out an alert similar to a World Boss Portal device or even a LFG post, there's no way to get additional help outside of WvW.With 25+ counting as orange swords and up to 50 in a given squad, most mid-sized guilds (even if they are WvW only players) can't really keep up with 10-20.

When the going gets tough if you're a casual player (that is trying to get Gift of Battle or something), why stick with a given server/alliance and not transfer to a winning one? That's a dilemma that Arenanet has to solve fundamentally.

Re: activity
Just like in open world PVE, players will get carried spamming 1 on longbow ranger , longbow trap DH, or some other ranged class yet they count as "population" despite contributing basically nothing. Looking up a WvW build is "too hard" , "I'm doing fine because I'm the last to die" while firing arrows on the wall while everyone else pushes. Buying non-berserker armor and an equipment slot is basically not going to happen for most casual players ; it's a much larger side effect of equipment and build templates compared to PVP.People are afking in WvW just to get their pips as it is now, likely inflating population counts if it's by player pips. Increasing rewards was never the answer.

Re: new players that actually want to try
Warclaw makes it unappealing for new players to catch up with public commanders if they are literally new. In addition, gliding needs to be unlocked. Siege used to level the playing field a bit, but now arrowcarts are severely diminished in value so basically you have mortar/cannons/shield gen/ballistae. Even if you are a high rank WvW player if you are on an alt you need to get those ranks to be able to use gliding, warclaw, supply, and siege effectively.edit: let's not forget warclaw stomp does damage it doesn't just stomp people , so the force with higher numbers has a major advantage there as well

Why hasn't there been an incentive for people to GvG in PVP in a game named Guild Wars 2? With the upcoming 15v15 mode in PVP there should be the ability to GvG there. Why is steamrolling random players using blues and greens in WVW with an organized squad in coms a thing?

Re: replay value / rewards
What incentive is there for people to run yaks after getting the title yakslapper? Coverage is going to be stacked even with "alliances". Tiering structures should be a top priority yet essentially nobody cares about running yaks.What incentive is there for people to scout now that everything has marked or watchtower on it? Other than joining a squad and obtaining the scout designation there really isn't any.What incentive is there for people to tag defensive siege that is about to expire? Literally zero.What incentive is there for people to defend a T3 keep or tower versus backcapping when greatly outnumbered? There's a reason casuals are more likely to follow a backcapping ktrain than to actually try to defend something. You see this happen especially because of the stacked servers, where the entirety of EBG is capped by one color/team.What incentive is there for someone with 10K WVW rank and every WVW title including Ultimate Dominator to even play? "How does it change the game mode in any way meaningful if it's just stab + spam 1" for most of the casual playerbase?With the nerfs to siege and walls to appease fights guilds, what sort of initiative has been made to restore the point of the game mode which is capturing and defending structures? Alliances are more slanted to fights guilds as it is, which have minimal loyalty to a given server.

Reward structure still is boggling: Why do grandmaster mark shards even exist instead of the grandmaster mark box? It's a joke that they take up inventory space for more than an entire month if you get all 3 marks per week (gold tier skirmish rewards) when 10 are needed for a grandmaster mark worth around 10g.

I am quoting this in full because it deserves more attention. I agree with essentially everything that was said.

It is interesting that organisation in WvW have begun falling to a guild-level. It means that the train has possibly gone for reverting some of the damage that has been done. It makes solutions that involve simply changing the winning-aspect of stacking (like the one in my signature) or the matchup-aspect of stacking (like discussions about GvG) much less impactful as the driving force behind most stacking these days is access to dwindling content and content creators. The other interesting side of that is that it affects the Alliance system (and whatever secret Scoring system ArenaNet are scribbling down in their notebooks) the same way. Alliances need guilds to form Alliances. The winning-, matchup- and content aspects are as important to forced off-zones like OCX as it is to EU and NA. Nightcapping and population imbalance is intertwined. The issue with nightcapping is stacking. It is just stacking in the off-hours. Nightcapping also causes matchup issues because it pushes prime-low servers up to where they can't compete in prime. They just do not match up. So you essentially never get WvWvW. You get WvW and W. Two servers stacking prime and one server stacking off.

The issue with players I take with more of a grain of salt. I see that as less problematic even if that too is tied to guilds. It has always been a thing but it has mainly become a thing with so few new players joining guilds. I see that as more of a result of the developer suggesting in their behaviour that players don't need guilds and in their lack of attention to content for guilds (like providing GvG matchups and events as side-content that keeps guilds interested enough to keep providing main content in WvW) affecting the lifespan of guilds. Alot of servers try to organize these anonymous players and that is where we see these complaints about Bearbows etc. However, in my eyes it is up to guilds to teach and organize players and it is up to the developer to encourage the formation and continuation of guilds. A Bearbow or two in a world or on a map with a healthy amount of guilds is not a problem. A majority of anonymous Bearbows in dwindling amount of guilds is a problem. Casual players are not a problem, the absolute death of casual guilds (PvX, social WvW, explicit training) that can organize basics is a problem.

The replay value and rewards are also tied to scoring. If they never solve the scoring issue they will never solve the winning, pride and self-valued rewards issues. All of these issues branching out come back to the same root issues: Population, score, matchup (queues). However, Infusion is 100% correct in that it is kitten mind-boggling why PvE can get a legendary armor set in 6-10 weeks and WvW gets 18-30 fragments in that time so they can only get one of the cheapest (3 marks) ascended precursors. The comparison is just laughably ridiculous to all of us and just screams of all the good old days of mistreatment from the "WvW-players are really PvE players" qoute (suggesting that we should PvE to tradeskill our marks unlike sPvP, lack of attention/iteration and the completely unfounded fear that WvW somehow is more in the risk of exploiting reward systems so it can never get anything that is valuable elsewhere).

It is quite the joke that it isn't even like twice as fast to do PvE or sPvP but closer to 10x faster should you not spend more time out of WvW than in it to make your WvW armor.

You put a lot of emphasis on guilds which makes me think you are in EU. The talk of GvGs.. guilds leading the content.. that's not how NA works.

Guilds in NA rally maybe once a week for an hour or two. There are no GvGs or GvG guilds.

There is like 2 guilds that I would call "active" and they just join the blob linkups to run train like everyone else. No reason to segregate under their banner.

Assuming that you are talking about the first half of the first paragraph:

You would be right in your assumption, or at least half right. I am in both. I am in NA on one account and in EU on three accounts. However, what I am describing is the loss of organized players relative player totals while you are describing some sort of cultural difference. The thing is, there is no such cultural difference that you describe. What you see in NA is the same as you see in EU but just at a whole other level of fallout. NA had tournaments only this summer and while there are certainly alot of guilds there that have packed their stuff up and quit, some of them also went to EU instead and are part of the reason why EU is not looking as barren and content-dry as NA. So it's not like such groups don't exist or have not traditionally existed, NA have just dropped so low overall and the players who would make up such groups are on vacation in the EU at the moment. So it's not as much a question of how NA "works" it is rather that NA does not work at the moment while EU is clinging to whatever content is left. It's not just the guilds in NA that rally for the occassional organized content, it's the players.

What you see in NA is the proveribal death of the mode. WvW being "dead" does not mean that no one plays it. There will always be some pockets of resistance and there will always be some tourists. WvW being "dead" implies that there is no broader level of organisation left and NA is dangerously close to that, if not already there. EU is heading in that direction. Past that it's pretty much up to the players and the developers to figure out what they want but suffice to say, attempting some sort of objective perspective on it, a WvW mode that has no sustained level of organisation is per definition "dead". It's perfectly fine to play it in a manner of casually popping in to do some roaming and see if you find something or throwing up a tag like a PvE mentor, grab some bodies and PvD some objectives. That's how the game mode was in 2012. It's still the definition of dead from any sort of objective sense. When people karma trained EotM it was still a bit populated but it was dead as a PvP mode.

The thing is, the only way to change this direction is to encourage the formation (and reformation) of guilds again and the way to do that is to make sure that players can play together and recruit as well as there being some additional content for guilds beyond helping the players who are not in them. That's why things like Alliances and GvG keeps getting mentioned. Alliances ensures that guilds can be (re-) formed. GvG ensures that guilds have something more to do. Guilds ensures a level of organisation and a rebirth of commanders. So while we can talk about the risks of Alliances being dead on arrival its still something that addresses what must be addressed if WvW is supposed to be something more than an afterlife.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This ship has sailed. "Soon" has come and gone. An update is deserved at this point because they announced this content and have been silent past the point that is reasonable. It would be foolish to allow the silence to continue and the people who left WvW are not coming back. Not after this long. I usually defend the devs but this is simply irresponsible. I hope the balance patch breathes some life into the game mode but I stopped playing this mode a while ago because it isn't fun.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@subversiontwo.7501 said:

@"Infusion.7149" said:
Re: stacking
Don't delude yourselves. Just like in ranked PVP (see bots / duo queue / queue dodging/ etc) and server linking , people will stack (see bandwagon servers , "server blackouts" to game the links) or cheat their way to "get the shinies" easier.Timezones such as OCX/SEA will be especially of note. EU time on NA isn't nearly as skewed. The 3/2/1 skirmish victory points system was supposed to lessen the impact of OCX/SEA but it hasn't overall. You could have top tier NA players but zero OCX/SEA and you will lose the matchup because everything is papered.The fundamental "unit" in WVW is now WvW oriented guilds not servers, due to server links and essentially no communication cross-server outside of team chat at a given time. Prior to megaservers , you could get people to help out in Lions Arch (the main hub to WvW other than armistice bastion). Unless you're able to send out an alert similar to a World Boss Portal device or even a LFG post, there's no way to get additional help outside of WvW.With 25+ counting as orange swords and up to 50 in a given squad, most mid-sized guilds (even if they are WvW only players) can't really keep up with 10-20.

When the going gets tough if you're a casual player (that is trying to get Gift of Battle or something), why stick with a given server/alliance and not transfer to a winning one? That's a dilemma that Arenanet has to solve fundamentally.

Re: activity
Just like in open world PVE, players will get carried spamming 1 on longbow ranger , longbow trap DH, or some other ranged class yet they count as "population" despite contributing basically nothing. Looking up a WvW build is "too hard" , "I'm doing fine because I'm the last to die" while firing arrows on the wall while everyone else pushes. Buying non-berserker armor and an equipment slot is basically not going to happen for most casual players ; it's a much larger side effect of equipment and build templates compared to PVP.People are afking in WvW just to get their pips as it is now, likely inflating population counts if it's by player pips. Increasing rewards was never the answer.

Re: new players that actually want to try
Warclaw makes it unappealing for new players to catch up with public commanders if they are literally new. In addition, gliding needs to be unlocked. Siege used to level the playing field a bit, but now arrowcarts are severely diminished in value so basically you have mortar/cannons/shield gen/ballistae. Even if you are a high rank WvW player if you are on an alt you need to get those ranks to be able to use gliding, warclaw, supply, and siege effectively.edit: let's not forget warclaw stomp does damage it doesn't just stomp people , so the force with higher numbers has a major advantage there as well

Why hasn't there been an incentive for people to GvG in PVP in a game named Guild Wars 2? With the upcoming 15v15 mode in PVP there should be the ability to GvG there. Why is steamrolling random players using blues and greens in WVW with an organized squad in coms a thing?

Re: replay value / rewards
What incentive is there for people to run yaks after getting the title yakslapper? Coverage is going to be stacked even with "alliances". Tiering structures should be a top priority yet essentially nobody cares about running yaks.What incentive is there for people to scout now that everything has marked or watchtower on it? Other than joining a squad and obtaining the scout designation there really isn't any.What incentive is there for people to tag defensive siege that is about to expire? Literally zero.What incentive is there for people to defend a T3 keep or tower versus backcapping when greatly outnumbered? There's a reason casuals are more likely to follow a backcapping ktrain than to actually try to defend something. You see this happen especially because of the stacked servers, where the entirety of EBG is capped by one color/team.What incentive is there for someone with 10K WVW rank and every WVW title including Ultimate Dominator to even play? "How does it change the game mode in any way meaningful if it's just stab + spam 1" for most of the casual playerbase?With the nerfs to siege and walls to appease fights guilds, what sort of initiative has been made to restore the point of the game mode which is capturing and defending structures? Alliances are more slanted to fights guilds as it is, which have minimal loyalty to a given server.

Reward structure still is boggling: Why do grandmaster mark shards even exist instead of the grandmaster mark box? It's a joke that they take up inventory space for more than an entire month if you get all 3 marks per week (gold tier skirmish rewards) when 10 are needed for a grandmaster mark worth around 10g.

I am quoting this in full because it deserves more attention. I agree with essentially everything that was said.

It is interesting that organisation in WvW have begun falling to a guild-level. It means that the train has possibly gone for reverting some of the damage that has been done. It makes solutions that involve simply changing the winning-aspect of stacking (like the one in my signature) or the matchup-aspect of stacking (like discussions about GvG) much less impactful as the driving force behind most stacking these days is access to dwindling content and content creators. The other interesting side of that is that it affects the Alliance system (and whatever secret Scoring system ArenaNet are scribbling down in their notebooks) the same way. Alliances need guilds to form Alliances. The winning-, matchup- and content aspects are as important to forced off-zones like OCX as it is to EU and NA. Nightcapping and population imbalance is intertwined. The issue with nightcapping is stacking. It is just stacking in the off-hours. Nightcapping also causes matchup issues because it pushes prime-low servers up to where they can't compete in prime. They just do not match up. So you essentially never get WvWvW. You get WvW and W. Two servers stacking prime and one server stacking off.

The issue with players I take with more of a grain of salt. I see that as less problematic even if that too is tied to guilds. It has always been a thing but it has mainly become a thing with so few new players joining guilds. I see that as more of a result of the developer suggesting in their behaviour that players don't need guilds and in their lack of attention to content for guilds (like providing GvG matchups and events as side-content that keeps guilds interested enough to keep providing main content in WvW) affecting the lifespan of guilds. Alot of servers try to organize these anonymous players and that is where we see these complaints about Bearbows etc. However, in my eyes it is up to guilds to teach and organize players and it is up to the developer to encourage the formation and continuation of guilds. A Bearbow or two in a world or on a map with a healthy amount of guilds is not a problem. A majority of anonymous Bearbows in dwindling amount of guilds is a problem. Casual players are not a problem, the absolute death of casual guilds (PvX, social WvW, explicit training) that can organize basics is a problem.

The replay value and rewards are also tied to scoring. If they never solve the scoring issue they will never solve the winning, pride and self-valued rewards issues. All of these issues branching out come back to the same root issues: Population, score, matchup (queues). However, Infusion is 100% correct in that it is kitten mind-boggling why PvE can get a legendary armor set in 6-10 weeks and WvW gets 18-30 fragments in that time so they can only get one of the cheapest (3 marks) ascended precursors. The comparison is just laughably ridiculous to all of us and just screams of all the good old days of mistreatment from the "WvW-players are really PvE players" qoute (suggesting that we should PvE to tradeskill our marks unlike sPvP, lack of attention/iteration and the completely unfounded fear that WvW somehow is more in the risk of exploiting reward systems so it can never get anything that is valuable elsewhere).

It is quite the joke that it isn't even like twice as fast to do PvE or sPvP but closer to 10x faster should you not spend more time out of WvW than in it to make your WvW armor.

You put a lot of emphasis on guilds which makes me think you are in EU. The talk of GvGs.. guilds leading the content.. that's not how NA works.

Guilds in NA rally maybe once a week for an hour or two. There are no GvGs or GvG guilds.

There is like 2 guilds that I would call "active" and they just join the blob linkups to run train like everyone else. No reason to segregate under their banner.

Assuming that you are talking about the first half of the first paragraph:

You would be right in your assumption, or at least half right. I am in both. I am in NA on one account and in EU on three accounts. However, what I am describing is the loss of organized players relative player totals while you are describing some sort of cultural difference. The thing is, there is no such cultural difference that you describe. What you see in NA is the same as you see in EU but just at a whole other level of fallout. NA had tournaments only this summer and while there are certainly alot of guilds there that have packed their stuff up and quit, some of them also went to EU instead and are part of the reason why EU is not looking as barren and content-dry as NA.

So it's not as much a question of how NA "works" it is rather that NA does not work at the moment while EU is clinging to whatever content is left. What you see in NA is the proveribal death of the mode. WvW being "dead" does not mean that no one plays it. There will always be some pockets of resistance and there will always be some tourists. WvW being "dead" implies that there is no broader level of organisation left and NA is dangerously close to that, if not already there. EU is heading in that direction. Past that it's pretty much up to the players and the developers to figure out what they want but suffice to say, attempting some sort of objective perspective on it, a WvW mode that has no sustained level of organisation is per definition "dead". It's perfectly fine to play it in a manner of casually popping in to do some roaming and see if you find something or throwing up a tag like a PvE mentor, grab some bodies and PvD some objectives. That's how the game mode was in 2012. It's still the definition of dead from any sort of objective sense. When people karma trained EotM it was still a bit populated but it was dead as a PvP mode.

Your right that it looks like PvDE. It reverts to that right after the clash of 60v10. Not hard to see why.

I'm just saying its not driven by the once a week guilds who barely play. The organization must be done on map queue level.. server level, relative activity FULL status lockout level, 4 matchup 16 maps level.

Guilds are whatever.. they play, they don't play, they care or don't care..

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@displayname.8315 said:

@"Infusion.7149" said:
Re: stacking
Don't delude yourselves. Just like in ranked PVP (see bots / duo queue / queue dodging/ etc) and server linking , people will stack (see bandwagon servers , "server blackouts" to game the links) or cheat their way to "get the shinies" easier.Timezones such as OCX/SEA will be especially of note. EU time on NA isn't nearly as skewed. The 3/2/1 skirmish victory points system was supposed to lessen the impact of OCX/SEA but it hasn't overall. You could have top tier NA players but zero OCX/SEA and you will lose the matchup because everything is papered.The fundamental "unit" in WVW is now WvW oriented guilds not servers, due to server links and essentially no communication cross-server outside of team chat at a given time. Prior to megaservers , you could get people to help out in Lions Arch (the main hub to WvW other than armistice bastion). Unless you're able to send out an alert similar to a World Boss Portal device or even a LFG post, there's no way to get additional help outside of WvW.With 25+ counting as orange swords and up to 50 in a given squad, most mid-sized guilds (even if they are WvW only players) can't really keep up with 10-20.

When the going gets tough if you're a casual player (that is trying to get Gift of Battle or something), why stick with a given server/alliance and not transfer to a winning one? That's a dilemma that Arenanet has to solve fundamentally.

Re: activity
Just like in open world PVE, players will get carried spamming 1 on longbow ranger , longbow trap DH, or some other ranged class yet they count as "population" despite contributing basically nothing. Looking up a WvW build is "too hard" , "I'm doing fine because I'm the last to die" while firing arrows on the wall while everyone else pushes. Buying non-berserker armor and an equipment slot is basically not going to happen for most casual players ; it's a much larger side effect of equipment and build templates compared to PVP.People are afking in WvW just to get their pips as it is now, likely inflating population counts if it's by player pips. Increasing rewards was never the answer.

Re: new players that actually want to try
Warclaw makes it unappealing for new players to catch up with public commanders if they are literally new. In addition, gliding needs to be unlocked. Siege used to level the playing field a bit, but now arrowcarts are severely diminished in value so basically you have mortar/cannons/shield gen/ballistae. Even if you are a high rank WvW player if you are on an alt you need to get those ranks to be able to use gliding, warclaw, supply, and siege effectively.edit: let's not forget warclaw stomp does damage it doesn't just stomp people , so the force with higher numbers has a major advantage there as well

Why hasn't there been an incentive for people to GvG in PVP in a game named Guild Wars 2? With the upcoming 15v15 mode in PVP there should be the ability to GvG there. Why is steamrolling random players using blues and greens in WVW with an organized squad in coms a thing?

Re: replay value / rewards
What incentive is there for people to run yaks after getting the title yakslapper? Coverage is going to be stacked even with "alliances". Tiering structures should be a top priority yet essentially nobody cares about running yaks.What incentive is there for people to scout now that everything has marked or watchtower on it? Other than joining a squad and obtaining the scout designation there really isn't any.What incentive is there for people to tag defensive siege that is about to expire? Literally zero.What incentive is there for people to defend a T3 keep or tower versus backcapping when greatly outnumbered? There's a reason casuals are more likely to follow a backcapping ktrain than to actually try to defend something. You see this happen especially because of the stacked servers, where the entirety of EBG is capped by one color/team.What incentive is there for someone with 10K WVW rank and every WVW title including Ultimate Dominator to even play? "How does it change the game mode in any way meaningful if it's just stab + spam 1" for most of the casual playerbase?With the nerfs to siege and walls to appease fights guilds, what sort of initiative has been made to restore the point of the game mode which is capturing and defending structures? Alliances are more slanted to fights guilds as it is, which have minimal loyalty to a given server.

Reward structure still is boggling: Why do grandmaster mark shards even exist instead of the grandmaster mark box? It's a joke that they take up inventory space for more than an entire month if you get all 3 marks per week (gold tier skirmish rewards) when 10 are needed for a grandmaster mark worth around 10g.

I am quoting this in full because it deserves more attention. I agree with essentially everything that was said.

It is interesting that organisation in WvW have begun falling to a guild-level. It means that the train has possibly gone for reverting some of the damage that has been done. It makes solutions that involve simply changing the winning-aspect of stacking (like the one in my signature) or the matchup-aspect of stacking (like discussions about GvG) much less impactful as the driving force behind most stacking these days is access to dwindling content and content creators. The other interesting side of that is that it affects the Alliance system (and whatever secret Scoring system ArenaNet are scribbling down in their notebooks) the same way. Alliances need guilds to form Alliances. The winning-, matchup- and content aspects are as important to forced off-zones like OCX as it is to EU and NA. Nightcapping and population imbalance is intertwined. The issue with nightcapping is stacking. It is just stacking in the off-hours. Nightcapping also causes matchup issues because it pushes prime-low servers up to where they can't compete in prime. They just do not match up. So you essentially never get WvWvW. You get WvW and W. Two servers stacking prime and one server stacking off.

The issue with players I take with more of a grain of salt. I see that as less problematic even if that too is tied to guilds. It has always been a thing but it has mainly become a thing with so few new players joining guilds. I see that as more of a result of the developer suggesting in their behaviour that players don't need guilds and in their lack of attention to content for guilds (like providing GvG matchups and events as side-content that keeps guilds interested enough to keep providing main content in WvW) affecting the lifespan of guilds. Alot of servers try to organize these anonymous players and that is where we see these complaints about Bearbows etc. However, in my eyes it is up to guilds to teach and organize players and it is up to the developer to encourage the formation and continuation of guilds. A Bearbow or two in a world or on a map with a healthy amount of guilds is not a problem. A majority of anonymous Bearbows in dwindling amount of guilds is a problem. Casual players are not a problem, the absolute death of casual guilds (PvX, social WvW, explicit training) that can organize basics is a problem.

The replay value and rewards are also tied to scoring. If they never solve the scoring issue they will never solve the winning, pride and self-valued rewards issues. All of these issues branching out come back to the same root issues: Population, score, matchup (queues). However, Infusion is 100% correct in that it is kitten mind-boggling why PvE can get a legendary armor set in 6-10 weeks and WvW gets 18-30 fragments in that time so they can only get one of the cheapest (3 marks) ascended precursors. The comparison is just laughably ridiculous to all of us and just screams of all the good old days of mistreatment from the "WvW-players are really PvE players" qoute (suggesting that we should PvE to tradeskill our marks unlike sPvP, lack of attention/iteration and the completely unfounded fear that WvW somehow is more in the risk of exploiting reward systems so it can never get anything that is valuable elsewhere).

It is quite the joke that it isn't even like twice as fast to do PvE or sPvP but closer to 10x faster should you not spend more time out of WvW than in it to make your WvW armor.

You put a lot of emphasis on guilds which makes me think you are in EU. The talk of GvGs.. guilds leading the content.. that's not how NA works.

Guilds in NA rally maybe once a week for an hour or two. There are no GvGs or GvG guilds.

There is like 2 guilds that I would call "active" and they just join the blob linkups to run train like everyone else. No reason to segregate under their banner.

Assuming that you are talking about the first half of the first paragraph:

You would be right in your assumption, or at least half right. I am in both. I am in NA on one account and in EU on three accounts. However, what I am describing is the loss of organized players relative player totals while you are describing some sort of cultural difference. The thing is, there is no such cultural difference that you describe. What you see in NA is the same as you see in EU but just at a whole other level of fallout. NA had tournaments only this summer and while there are certainly alot of guilds there that have packed their stuff up and quit, some of them also went to EU instead and are part of the reason why EU is not looking as barren and content-dry as NA.

So it's not as much a question of how NA "works" it is rather that NA does not work at the moment while EU is clinging to whatever content is left. What you see in NA is the proveribal death of the mode. WvW being "dead" does not mean that no one plays it. There will always be some pockets of resistance and there will always be some tourists. WvW being "dead" implies that there is no broader level of organisation left and NA is dangerously close to that, if not already there. EU is heading in that direction. Past that it's pretty much up to the players and the developers to figure out what they want but suffice to say, attempting some sort of objective perspective on it, a WvW mode that has no sustained level of organisation is per definition "dead". It's perfectly fine to play it in a manner of casually popping in to do some roaming and see if you find something or throwing up a tag like a PvE mentor, grab some bodies and PvD some objectives. That's how the game mode was in 2012. It's still the definition of dead from any sort of objective sense. When people karma trained EotM it was still a bit populated but it was dead as a PvP mode.

Your right that it looks like PvDE. It reverts to that right after the clash of 60v10. Not hard to see why.

I'm just saying its not driven by the once a week guilds who barely play. The organization must be done on map queue level.. server level, relative activity FULL status lockout level, 4 matchup 16 maps level.

Guilds are whatever.. they play, they don't play, they care or don't care..Well, here's the thing, you have to think about it more like this: Why does one server have 60 and one 10? Well, most likely because one server has a commander and the other does not. It could also be because one server has a competent commander that can attract, organize and maintain 60 while the other server does not. Where does a commander that can lead 60 players come from? A guild. Where does a brunt of players who can make up a body of 60 and let themselves be lead by a commander come from? A guild. Organized groups have commanders and the commanders want players who let themselves be lead. If a server can put 60 people in a squad they usually have some semblance of that. If a server struggles to put 10 in squad they have not.

No stacked server has ever been stacked by random players first. They have always been stacked by guilds first. The guilds have made sure the server gets more tags than everyone else and the players in the guilds make sure that there is help in a party if you make mistakes. That is attractive to play with and then the server grows out of control. That is how it has been since forever.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@subversiontwo.7501 said:

@"Infusion.7149" said:
Re: stacking
Don't delude yourselves. Just like in ranked PVP (see bots / duo queue / queue dodging/ etc) and server linking , people will stack (see bandwagon servers , "server blackouts" to game the links) or cheat their way to "get the shinies" easier.Timezones such as OCX/SEA will be especially of note. EU time on NA isn't nearly as skewed. The 3/2/1 skirmish victory points system was supposed to lessen the impact of OCX/SEA but it hasn't overall. You could have top tier NA players but zero OCX/SEA and you will lose the matchup because everything is papered.The fundamental "unit" in WVW is now WvW oriented guilds not servers, due to server links and essentially no communication cross-server outside of team chat at a given time. Prior to megaservers , you could get people to help out in Lions Arch (the main hub to WvW other than armistice bastion). Unless you're able to send out an alert similar to a World Boss Portal device or even a LFG post, there's no way to get additional help outside of WvW.With 25+ counting as orange swords and up to 50 in a given squad, most mid-sized guilds (even if they are WvW only players) can't really keep up with 10-20.

When the going gets tough if you're a casual player (that is trying to get Gift of Battle or something), why stick with a given server/alliance and not transfer to a winning one? That's a dilemma that Arenanet has to solve fundamentally.

Re: activity
Just like in open world PVE, players will get carried spamming 1 on longbow ranger , longbow trap DH, or some other ranged class yet they count as "population" despite contributing basically nothing. Looking up a WvW build is "too hard" , "I'm doing fine because I'm the last to die" while firing arrows on the wall while everyone else pushes. Buying non-berserker armor and an equipment slot is basically not going to happen for most casual players ; it's a much larger side effect of equipment and build templates compared to PVP.People are afking in WvW just to get their pips as it is now, likely inflating population counts if it's by player pips. Increasing rewards was never the answer.

Re: new players that actually want to try
Warclaw makes it unappealing for new players to catch up with public commanders if they are literally new. In addition, gliding needs to be unlocked. Siege used to level the playing field a bit, but now arrowcarts are severely diminished in value so basically you have mortar/cannons/shield gen/ballistae. Even if you are a high rank WvW player if you are on an alt you need to get those ranks to be able to use gliding, warclaw, supply, and siege effectively.edit: let's not forget warclaw stomp does damage it doesn't just stomp people , so the force with higher numbers has a major advantage there as well

Why hasn't there been an incentive for people to GvG in PVP in a game named Guild Wars 2? With the upcoming 15v15 mode in PVP there should be the ability to GvG there. Why is steamrolling random players using blues and greens in WVW with an organized squad in coms a thing?

Re: replay value / rewards
What incentive is there for people to run yaks after getting the title yakslapper? Coverage is going to be stacked even with "alliances". Tiering structures should be a top priority yet essentially nobody cares about running yaks.What incentive is there for people to scout now that everything has marked or watchtower on it? Other than joining a squad and obtaining the scout designation there really isn't any.What incentive is there for people to tag defensive siege that is about to expire? Literally zero.What incentive is there for people to defend a T3 keep or tower versus backcapping when greatly outnumbered? There's a reason casuals are more likely to follow a backcapping ktrain than to actually try to defend something. You see this happen especially because of the stacked servers, where the entirety of EBG is capped by one color/team.What incentive is there for someone with 10K WVW rank and every WVW title including Ultimate Dominator to even play? "How does it change the game mode in any way meaningful if it's just stab + spam 1" for most of the casual playerbase?With the nerfs to siege and walls to appease fights guilds, what sort of initiative has been made to restore the point of the game mode which is capturing and defending structures? Alliances are more slanted to fights guilds as it is, which have minimal loyalty to a given server.

Reward structure still is boggling: Why do grandmaster mark shards even exist instead of the grandmaster mark box? It's a joke that they take up inventory space for more than an entire month if you get all 3 marks per week (gold tier skirmish rewards) when 10 are needed for a grandmaster mark worth around 10g.

I am quoting this in full because it deserves more attention. I agree with essentially everything that was said.

It is interesting that organisation in WvW have begun falling to a guild-level. It means that the train has possibly gone for reverting some of the damage that has been done. It makes solutions that involve simply changing the winning-aspect of stacking (like the one in my signature) or the matchup-aspect of stacking (like discussions about GvG) much less impactful as the driving force behind most stacking these days is access to dwindling content and content creators. The other interesting side of that is that it affects the Alliance system (and whatever secret Scoring system ArenaNet are scribbling down in their notebooks) the same way. Alliances need guilds to form Alliances. The winning-, matchup- and content aspects are as important to forced off-zones like OCX as it is to EU and NA. Nightcapping and population imbalance is intertwined. The issue with nightcapping is stacking. It is just stacking in the off-hours. Nightcapping also causes matchup issues because it pushes prime-low servers up to where they can't compete in prime. They just do not match up. So you essentially never get WvWvW. You get WvW and W. Two servers stacking prime and one server stacking off.

The issue with players I take with more of a grain of salt. I see that as less problematic even if that too is tied to guilds. It has always been a thing but it has mainly become a thing with so few new players joining guilds. I see that as more of a result of the developer suggesting in their behaviour that players don't need guilds and in their lack of attention to content for guilds (like providing GvG matchups and events as side-content that keeps guilds interested enough to keep providing main content in WvW) affecting the lifespan of guilds. Alot of servers try to organize these anonymous players and that is where we see these complaints about Bearbows etc. However, in my eyes it is up to guilds to teach and organize players and it is up to the developer to encourage the formation and continuation of guilds. A Bearbow or two in a world or on a map with a healthy amount of guilds is not a problem. A majority of anonymous Bearbows in dwindling amount of guilds is a problem. Casual players are not a problem, the absolute death of casual guilds (PvX, social WvW, explicit training) that can organize basics is a problem.

The replay value and rewards are also tied to scoring. If they never solve the scoring issue they will never solve the winning, pride and self-valued rewards issues. All of these issues branching out come back to the same root issues: Population, score, matchup (queues). However, Infusion is 100% correct in that it is kitten mind-boggling why PvE can get a legendary armor set in 6-10 weeks and WvW gets 18-30 fragments in that time so they can only get one of the cheapest (3 marks) ascended precursors. The comparison is just laughably ridiculous to all of us and just screams of all the good old days of mistreatment from the "WvW-players are really PvE players" qoute (suggesting that we should PvE to tradeskill our marks unlike sPvP, lack of attention/iteration and the completely unfounded fear that WvW somehow is more in the risk of exploiting reward systems so it can never get anything that is valuable elsewhere).

It is quite the joke that it isn't even like twice as fast to do PvE or sPvP but closer to 10x faster should you not spend more time out of WvW than in it to make your WvW armor.

You put a lot of emphasis on guilds which makes me think you are in EU. The talk of GvGs.. guilds leading the content.. that's not how NA works.

Guilds in NA rally maybe once a week for an hour or two. There are no GvGs or GvG guilds.

There is like 2 guilds that I would call "active" and they just join the blob linkups to run train like everyone else. No reason to segregate under their banner.

Assuming that you are talking about the first half of the first paragraph:

You would be right in your assumption, or at least half right. I am in both. I am in NA on one account and in EU on three accounts. However, what I am describing is the loss of organized players relative player totals while you are describing some sort of cultural difference. The thing is, there is no such cultural difference that you describe. What you see in NA is the same as you see in EU but just at a whole other level of fallout. NA had tournaments only this summer and while there are certainly alot of guilds there that have packed their stuff up and quit, some of them also went to EU instead and are part of the reason why EU is not looking as barren and content-dry as NA.

So it's not as much a question of how NA "works" it is rather that NA does not work at the moment while EU is clinging to whatever content is left. What you see in NA is the proveribal death of the mode. WvW being "dead" does not mean that no one plays it. There will always be some pockets of resistance and there will always be some tourists. WvW being "dead" implies that there is no broader level of organisation left and NA is dangerously close to that, if not already there. EU is heading in that direction. Past that it's pretty much up to the players and the developers to figure out what they want but suffice to say, attempting some sort of objective perspective on it, a WvW mode that has no sustained level of organisation is per definition "dead". It's perfectly fine to play it in a manner of casually popping in to do some roaming and see if you find something or throwing up a tag like a PvE mentor, grab some bodies and PvD some objectives. That's how the game mode was in 2012. It's still the definition of dead from any sort of objective sense. When people karma trained EotM it was still a bit populated but it was dead as a PvP mode.

Your right that it looks like PvDE. It reverts to that right after the clash of 60v10. Not hard to see why.

I'm just saying its not driven by the once a week guilds who barely play. The organization must be done on map queue level.. server level, relative activity FULL status lockout level, 4 matchup 16 maps level.

Guilds are whatever.. they play, they don't play, they care or don't care..Well, here's the thing, you have to think about it more like this: Why does one server have 60 and one 10? Well, most likely because one server has a commander and the other does not. It could also be because one server has a competent commander that can attract, organize and maintain 60 while the other server does not. Where does a commander that can lead 60 players come from? A guild. Where does a brunt of players who can make up a body of 60 and let themselves be lead by a commander come from? A guild. Organized groups have commanders and the commanders want players who let themselves be lead. If a server can put 60 people in a squad they usually have some semblance of that. If a server struggles to put 10 in squad they have not.

No stacked server has ever been stacked by random players first. They have always been stacked by guilds first. The guilds have made sure the server gets more tags than everyone else and the players in the guilds make sure that there is help in a party if you make mistakes. That is attractive to play with and then the server grows out of control. That is how it has been since forever.

Anecdotally I see a tag pop up if and only if there are numbers at said timeframe. I see tags drop when its 60v10 and heading into the 3rd dead timezone in a row. Some great commanders can try their hardest in a dead timezone but its often set in stone.

Now that wouldn't happen with overarching organization on a map/server/matchup level.

Commanders are seeking the numbers to command sure. If they lucked out maybe they will play or if not they will quit. They are at the whim of the map/server/matchup at any given time. Sadly its all or nothing when you log into your 1/16th of WvW. Good luck commanders.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@displayname.8315 said:

@"Infusion.7149" said:
Re: stacking
Don't delude yourselves. Just like in ranked PVP (see bots / duo queue / queue dodging/ etc) and server linking , people will stack (see bandwagon servers , "server blackouts" to game the links) or cheat their way to "get the shinies" easier.Timezones such as OCX/SEA will be especially of note. EU time on NA isn't nearly as skewed. The 3/2/1 skirmish victory points system was supposed to lessen the impact of OCX/SEA but it hasn't overall. You could have top tier NA players but zero OCX/SEA and you will lose the matchup because everything is papered.The fundamental "unit" in WVW is now WvW oriented guilds not servers, due to server links and essentially no communication cross-server outside of team chat at a given time. Prior to megaservers , you could get people to help out in Lions Arch (the main hub to WvW other than armistice bastion). Unless you're able to send out an alert similar to a World Boss Portal device or even a LFG post, there's no way to get additional help outside of WvW.With 25+ counting as orange swords and up to 50 in a given squad, most mid-sized guilds (even if they are WvW only players) can't really keep up with 10-20.

When the going gets tough if you're a casual player (that is trying to get Gift of Battle or something), why stick with a given server/alliance and not transfer to a winning one? That's a dilemma that Arenanet has to solve fundamentally.

Re: activity
Just like in open world PVE, players will get carried spamming 1 on longbow ranger , longbow trap DH, or some other ranged class yet they count as "population" despite contributing basically nothing. Looking up a WvW build is "too hard" , "I'm doing fine because I'm the last to die" while firing arrows on the wall while everyone else pushes. Buying non-berserker armor and an equipment slot is basically not going to happen for most casual players ; it's a much larger side effect of equipment and build templates compared to PVP.People are afking in WvW just to get their pips as it is now, likely inflating population counts if it's by player pips. Increasing rewards was never the answer.

Re: new players that actually want to try
Warclaw makes it unappealing for new players to catch up with public commanders if they are literally new. In addition, gliding needs to be unlocked. Siege used to level the playing field a bit, but now arrowcarts are severely diminished in value so basically you have mortar/cannons/shield gen/ballistae. Even if you are a high rank WvW player if you are on an alt you need to get those ranks to be able to use gliding, warclaw, supply, and siege effectively.edit: let's not forget warclaw stomp does damage it doesn't just stomp people , so the force with higher numbers has a major advantage there as well

Why hasn't there been an incentive for people to GvG in PVP in a game named Guild Wars 2? With the upcoming 15v15 mode in PVP there should be the ability to GvG there. Why is steamrolling random players using blues and greens in WVW with an organized squad in coms a thing?

Re: replay value / rewards
What incentive is there for people to run yaks after getting the title yakslapper? Coverage is going to be stacked even with "alliances". Tiering structures should be a top priority yet essentially nobody cares about running yaks.What incentive is there for people to scout now that everything has marked or watchtower on it? Other than joining a squad and obtaining the scout designation there really isn't any.What incentive is there for people to tag defensive siege that is about to expire? Literally zero.What incentive is there for people to defend a T3 keep or tower versus backcapping when greatly outnumbered? There's a reason casuals are more likely to follow a backcapping ktrain than to actually try to defend something. You see this happen especially because of the stacked servers, where the entirety of EBG is capped by one color/team.What incentive is there for someone with 10K WVW rank and every WVW title including Ultimate Dominator to even play? "How does it change the game mode in any way meaningful if it's just stab + spam 1" for most of the casual playerbase?With the nerfs to siege and walls to appease fights guilds, what sort of initiative has been made to restore the point of the game mode which is capturing and defending structures? Alliances are more slanted to fights guilds as it is, which have minimal loyalty to a given server.

Reward structure still is boggling: Why do grandmaster mark shards even exist instead of the grandmaster mark box? It's a joke that they take up inventory space for more than an entire month if you get all 3 marks per week (gold tier skirmish rewards) when 10 are needed for a grandmaster mark worth around 10g.

I am quoting this in full because it deserves more attention. I agree with essentially everything that was said.

It is interesting that organisation in WvW have begun falling to a guild-level. It means that the train has possibly gone for reverting some of the damage that has been done. It makes solutions that involve simply changing the winning-aspect of stacking (like the one in my signature) or the matchup-aspect of stacking (like discussions about GvG) much less impactful as the driving force behind most stacking these days is access to dwindling content and content creators. The other interesting side of that is that it affects the Alliance system (and whatever secret Scoring system ArenaNet are scribbling down in their notebooks) the same way. Alliances need guilds to form Alliances. The winning-, matchup- and content aspects are as important to forced off-zones like OCX as it is to EU and NA. Nightcapping and population imbalance is intertwined. The issue with nightcapping is stacking. It is just stacking in the off-hours. Nightcapping also causes matchup issues because it pushes prime-low servers up to where they can't compete in prime. They just do not match up. So you essentially never get WvWvW. You get WvW and W. Two servers stacking prime and one server stacking off.

The issue with players I take with more of a grain of salt. I see that as less problematic even if that too is tied to guilds. It has always been a thing but it has mainly become a thing with so few new players joining guilds. I see that as more of a result of the developer suggesting in their behaviour that players don't need guilds and in their lack of attention to content for guilds (like providing GvG matchups and events as side-content that keeps guilds interested enough to keep providing main content in WvW) affecting the lifespan of guilds. Alot of servers try to organize these anonymous players and that is where we see these complaints about Bearbows etc. However, in my eyes it is up to guilds to teach and organize players and it is up to the developer to encourage the formation and continuation of guilds. A Bearbow or two in a world or on a map with a healthy amount of guilds is not a problem. A majority of anonymous Bearbows in dwindling amount of guilds is a problem. Casual players are not a problem, the absolute death of casual guilds (PvX, social WvW, explicit training) that can organize basics is a problem.

The replay value and rewards are also tied to scoring. If they never solve the scoring issue they will never solve the winning, pride and self-valued rewards issues. All of these issues branching out come back to the same root issues: Population, score, matchup (queues). However, Infusion is 100% correct in that it is kitten mind-boggling why PvE can get a legendary armor set in 6-10 weeks and WvW gets 18-30 fragments in that time so they can only get one of the cheapest (3 marks) ascended precursors. The comparison is just laughably ridiculous to all of us and just screams of all the good old days of mistreatment from the "WvW-players are really PvE players" qoute (suggesting that we should PvE to tradeskill our marks unlike sPvP, lack of attention/iteration and the completely unfounded fear that WvW somehow is more in the risk of exploiting reward systems so it can never get anything that is valuable elsewhere).

It is quite the joke that it isn't even like twice as fast to do PvE or sPvP but closer to 10x faster should you not spend more time out of WvW than in it to make your WvW armor.

You put a lot of emphasis on guilds which makes me think you are in EU. The talk of GvGs.. guilds leading the content.. that's not how NA works.

Guilds in NA rally maybe once a week for an hour or two. There are no GvGs or GvG guilds.

There is like 2 guilds that I would call "active" and they just join the blob linkups to run train like everyone else. No reason to segregate under their banner.

Assuming that you are talking about the first half of the first paragraph:

You would be right in your assumption, or at least half right. I am in both. I am in NA on one account and in EU on three accounts. However, what I am describing is the loss of organized players relative player totals while you are describing some sort of cultural difference. The thing is, there is no such cultural difference that you describe. What you see in NA is the same as you see in EU but just at a whole other level of fallout. NA had tournaments only this summer and while there are certainly alot of guilds there that have packed their stuff up and quit, some of them also went to EU instead and are part of the reason why EU is not looking as barren and content-dry as NA.

So it's not as much a question of how NA "works" it is rather that NA does not work at the moment while EU is clinging to whatever content is left. What you see in NA is the proveribal death of the mode. WvW being "dead" does not mean that no one plays it. There will always be some pockets of resistance and there will always be some tourists. WvW being "dead" implies that there is no broader level of organisation left and NA is dangerously close to that, if not already there. EU is heading in that direction. Past that it's pretty much up to the players and the developers to figure out what they want but suffice to say, attempting some sort of objective perspective on it, a WvW mode that has no sustained level of organisation is per definition "dead". It's perfectly fine to play it in a manner of casually popping in to do some roaming and see if you find something or throwing up a tag like a PvE mentor, grab some bodies and PvD some objectives. That's how the game mode was in 2012. It's still the definition of dead from any sort of objective sense. When people karma trained EotM it was still a bit populated but it was dead as a PvP mode.

Your right that it looks like PvDE. It reverts to that right after the clash of 60v10. Not hard to see why.

I'm just saying its not driven by the once a week guilds who barely play. The organization must be done on map queue level.. server level, relative activity FULL status lockout level, 4 matchup 16 maps level.

Guilds are whatever.. they play, they don't play, they care or don't care..Well, here's the thing, you have to think about it more like this: Why does one server have 60 and one 10? Well, most likely because one server has a commander and the other does not. It could also be because one server has a competent commander that can attract, organize and maintain 60 while the other server does not. Where does a commander that can lead 60 players come from? A guild. Where does a brunt of players who can make up a body of 60 and let themselves be lead by a commander come from? A guild. Organized groups have commanders and the commanders want players who let themselves be lead. If a server can put 60 people in a squad they usually have some semblance of that. If a server struggles to put 10 in squad they have not.

No stacked server has ever been stacked by random players first. They have always been stacked by guilds first. The guilds have made sure the server gets more tags than everyone else and the players in the guilds make sure that there is help in a party if you make mistakes. That is attractive to play with and then the server grows out of control. That is how it has been since forever.

Anecdotally I see a tag pop up if and only if there are numbers at said timeframe. I see tags drop when its 60v10 and heading into the 3rd dead timezone in a row.

Now that wouldn't happen with overarching organization on a map/server/matchup level.

Commanders are seeking the numbers to command sure. If they lucked out maybe they will play or if not they will quit. They are at the whim of the map/server/matchup at any given time. Sadly its all or nothing when you log into your 1/16th of WvW. Good luck commanders.What are you talking about? If a commander has a guild he already has numbers. He could wipe that 10 with 10 every day of the week. He doesn't need 60 but he gets 60 because he can wipe that unorganized 10 any day of the week. When a whole server gets stacked its usually even more than that its often something like 3-4 different guilds who are friends who suddenly can put 10-15 tags on a map thoughout a week and has a pool of 90-120 active and experienced players to draw from when they decide to open up their tag to the public. That's how you create a stacked server and that is why some servers quickly get squads upwards of 60. They produce two tags, they put 20 odd guild players in one squad and an additional 5 in the other squad and then they fill out the first squad with 30 random players and the second squad with 5 random players. They have half a squad or a quarter of a squad or whatever regardless of the server. That's attractive to join and so they never have problems finding those 30 odd random players while random players on other servers will transfer to get a chance to join that half- or quarter premade squad. They may not flash their tags in the pickup, but the guy who gets 60 he likely has friends and a degree of renown helping him.

The only way to reverse that is to encourage all the random players to make their own guilds, produce their own commanders and be in a position to lead another server/alliance. The way you encourage that is to let them recruit from outside the game, from within the game. The milking system does not let us do that. If your server is full its full. If you server is dead its dead. To overcome that you buy gems (or seek less known means) or you settle or you quit. Every time a server gets overpopulated or underpopulated some people get gems and transfer, other people quit, other people settle and then potentially quit because the once full server becomes dead. They may settle and chill for a few months. Then some of their friends want to start a guild and play together. No one is on the same server and the project dies. Then they all become discouraged and quit whether they are on a healthy server or not. That is not just players leaking out of the system, that is experienced commanders leaking out of the system and a player-group with a much higher % of commanders-to-followers than what exists in the general playerbase, thus making the problems worse.

Like, this is what has been going on for years and years and years. This is why things are bad, why it is Anets fault and why their lack of urgency when it comes to addressing these fundamental issues is bad.

Fixing issues on the maps? Sure, I'm all for it. I have a suggestion regarding that and scoring in my signature. However, the most basal problem right now is that Anet have been milking the crap out of this starving cow for so long that everyone is everywhere and people can't play with their friends anymore. Alliances or any other option that lets friends simply play together without having to repay for the game every god damn time is far more important than fixing the scoring issues. They are both different sides of population imbalance but while scoring may have been more important in the past, delivering on a non-exploitative system just to get to play the game mode with friends is urgently important now. Competition was an issue in the past, content is an issue now. Scoring alone will be insufficient to encourge players to spread out over the existing servers. It would have been good a couple of years ago. Now they have split up so many friends with their inattention to solve that problem that we have new more severe and urgent issues to deal with.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@"Zexanima.7851" said:I think they discovered the secret to infinite content with zero investment. Say you'll do a thing, don't give a release date, then just never do it. It's genius. When we start to get suspicious, just say a new thing. -clears throat- "Expansion level content!" All they have to do is keep people floating around enough to sell gemstore skins after all.

Cynicism aside, it'll probably save you a lot of frustration just to play the game expecting absolutely nothing to be released for it ever again.

They didn't invent that nor did they master it. Politicians have been doing it since the dawn of time and Trump has perfected it. They should have just said "The Best Matchmaking", "The Lowest Queues", “We are going to take care of everybody … Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.”

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Zexanima.7851 said:Cynicism aside, it'll probably save you a lot of frustration just to play the game expecting absolutely nothing to be released for it ever again.Would you really play the game then?I mean, I am frustrated my posts should show as much, but I am trying to be constructive, I criticize where it is due and try to be levelheaded when it's needed. If I expected nothing I would obviously be quiet but I also wouldn't be playing this game.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@subversiontwo.7501 said:

@Zexanima.7851 said:Cynicism aside, it'll probably save you a lot of frustration just to play the game expecting absolutely nothing to be released for it ever again.Would you really play the game then?I mean, I am frustrated my posts should show as much, but I am trying to be constructive, I criticize where it is due and try to be levelheaded when it's needed. If I expected nothing I would obviously be quiet but I also wouldn't be playing this game.

There are lots of games that don't change but people still play them. If the core mechanics are good things like updates are just nice to haves.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...