Arya Whitefire.8423

In an even fight, i.e. for about 4-8 hours a day, on the average server. It is true that HoT made defense stronger. But for uneven fights, which occur the majority of the day, for most servers. That patch, which went live, shortly before HoT, which doubled the health of all siege, along with whichever patch made ACs only able to damage a person once each second, no matter how many ACs are firing, was basically the end of the ability to hold territory with a small team vs braindead blobs. And it is the enablement of braindead blobs that turned this mode from a somewhat engaging siege warfare simulator, with open field 15-25 man fights on the side, into the ez mode nearly pointless sandbox, that it is today.

If you were able to set things up so organized guilds were forced to only fight organized guilds, 90% of them would quit within a month.

It is likely going to become easier to make new MMOs, but that's going to drive a lot of competition. So waiting until it's become obviously easier to make one, is probably not the best move.

I like being done. If you want to go again, make an alt account. Then you get to do everything again, which is a lot more engaging than just wvw ranks.

In retrospect, I think it was less burnout, and more the tournaments clearly revealed how uncompetitive wvw actually was. Every league had at most 2-2 servers that actually had a chance to win, and it was apparent who they were after 2-3 weeks. Also the tournaments incentivized a lot of cheating and other dirty tricks, which no doubt completely turned off some people to the game mode.

Hammer train, was probably the peak. Hammer trains were very powerful offensively, but any similar sized group of skilled players could eventually attrit them and kill them during defense. Against less skilled players Hammer train let you win 15 vs 60s. Basically it was a skill vs skill game, instead of a meta vs meta game at that point. Post HoT Boon share was probably worse than boon ball, but very few guilds actually ran it to it's full potential, so it had way less impact on the overall game, for most of the day. The various pirate shipey metas, were all yawn-fests. Pretty much everything post PoF has been some shade of terrible. There was a period from 2017 to about 2019 where the meta hadn't been made ez-mode-able by enough guilds where you could still squint and pretend to play wvw. But post 2019, wvw is just a sandbox for farming pips, wxp, and kill count. In the distant past when the game was much better, most guilds were very poor at playing the meta or metas. So it had way less effect on average game play. You really only saw the meta's full effects in open field fights of voice comms vs voice comms guilds in the 15-25 size. And in that environment the larger, but still strongly organized groups, were often pariahs. Which was probably a good thing. And I think the addition of PPK(Points Per Kill) had a much larger effect on destroying "will to fight" than is generally recognized.

In my ever so humble opinion, the biggest issue with the boon ball meta is not the mechanics of the meta. But rather the huge gap it creates between organized and less organized groups. Most previous metas let decently skilled, less organized players have some chance to win fights, especially when defending objectives.

I blame PPK(Points Per Kill). People, especially zergs of people fought to the last persons standing, a lot more often, before PPK was added.

I voted delete it. But... that's because there were only 2 choices. I think the biggest problem with it, is that it negatively affects the red team, which is typically the weakest team in the matchup. Optimally things would be changed so that it was only used occasionally, but when it's used all 3 teams use it. If that's impossible, moving it to the green team would be better than leaving it red.

I don't think the mode is capable supporting tournaments anymore. There are too many extrinsic motivations for dailies and weeklies, which are at odds with actually playing to win a PPT war.

Also I should add, that the system that was going to need to be implemented with alliances, to allocate player counts to guilds, and then within a guild, to decide who is in and who is out, would've been a micromanagement nightmare even if implemented. It's probably a good thing alliances are gone, and I doubt they'll ever return as a system like was originally envisaged.

Alliances would not provide any sort of world identity, and alliances would still be dictatorships, just like guilds. About the only truly useful thing alliances would do, is save people a guild slot. So it's completely rational that anet dropped them since they're a lot of work, for almost no further functionality.

I think the novelty has already worn off. This Saturday afternoon and evening are significantly less active than the previous week, on the servers I'm playing on. And this is with the same power of bonus event running, albeit with a less noticeable icon.. Maybe the remix next friday will bring it back up a bit.

Outnumbered should be game wide, and the more outnumbered you are, the more it should do. Then it could do something useful without weird incentives and edge cases.

WvW is just eternally doomed. I accepted this years ago. Though I am pretty convinced that WR will doom it even faster. Guess we'll find out!