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!

I did say "most". There absolutely are some community minded players left on many servers. But they are a minority. I was one for years, even after it stopped mattering. But like my server all but died over 7 times. So I moved on to other motivations to play.

A few ways to look at it. Skill stacking: In my observations, there's probably less than 500 players on NA, who's presence in a squad makes a real significant difference in fight performance. Atm most "good" guilds have like 5-10 of these players. Lesser guilds have 3 or less, and average guilds generally have 0. Put even 50 of those players in 1 guild, and for the timespan that guild plays, they're going to be all but unbeatable. The probably won't PPT hard, but they'll make 3-5 hours of NA pointless. And they'll get bored, and probably go do something else. But like, if you make some sort of way for guild performance to matter, then this WILL happen. Play-time of off-hours stacking: I could name some guilds, but we know who they are.... They basically always win their timezone(especially on weekdays), except for the rare occasions when multiple other guilds are arrayed against them. A guild that could combine something close to 125 each of late NA+ OCX+SEA+EU, who play 4-8 hours per day, would probably be the optimal guild to win PPT on NA. It's kinda hilarious that the last thing you want, to win PPT on NA, is NA players ..... Pure playtime stacking: Put together a guild full of players who play 8-16 hours a day, and just the pure pressure of backcapping is going to make them almost unbeatable. Pugmander stacking: I think there's less than 25 commanders on NA who do a good enough job to beat average comped+vc guilds when typemanding Put 5-10 of them in a guild, and it's over, they win, especially if they have some TZ spread. Heck this method would probably even work if guild sizes were dropped down to 25.

There is no longer a greater good, except just a smidgeon left on a handful of servers. *cough* Maguuma *cough* Most organized players show up for their "selfish" guild raid, and leave when it's over. Most solo players are here to "selfishly" pip farm.

Yeah matches longer than about 8 hours will never have any chance of being competitive, or even providing a good illusion of competitiveness. One better system, might be to run a weekend long matchup for that old school flavor, where the illusion is typically much stronger. And then 8 hour matchups during the week.

The problem with your scenario started at step 1, players should've never been allowed to stack talent, play time, and organization to start with. And a WR that has any hope of creating "competitive" matches, will also need to disallow such. 500 player guilds are way too large. And if the goal is more to be a sandbox, then if anything there should be even more need to disallow stacking.

Of course you can leave, but when you do, you don't just leave the guild leader, you also leave everyone else. In most cases this evolves into a case of how much of the bad sides can I stomach to benefit from the good sides. But obviously you lucked into one of the better ones, and thus you favor a system that works for the ~5% of the wvw population that is in a guild with leadership that is: 1. good 2. long-term focused 3. not having health issues 4. at least semi-competent at playing wvw. I'm in a few of the better ones too, but I also play on servers where there aren't any better ones, and thus when I do play with the better ones I know how abnormal that situation is. And I know WR is going to make things even more lopsided between the few good guilds and the gen pop, and is thus not a well baked idea.

I'm having a bit more fun than the average week. But it's like 90% due to it being new/different. By week 3, I think I'll be feeling below baseline. But like I'm playing on 6-8 accounts, if I was playing on 1, some worlds I'd be utterly miserable on, others I'd be ok....

I think anet has not really considered how their large guild size + off hours guilds interacts with how worlds are built. Basically any world, that is built, which includes a large guild that plays many hours during off hours, will pretty much by design be a world that outnumbers other worlds during the times this guild covers, and be outnumbered during prime time. It would likely work a lot better if the guild size was 200 players or less.

There's no such thing as a "community guild", all guilds, by design are dictatorships. Some few will have long term competent leadership, that can also play wvw (semi-)competitively. The vast majority will not.

I was about to make a thread with a similar title. I seem to be hitting the queue bug(queue pops, you accept, you don't travel, and the option to join the queue appears) 2-3 times in a row, before I finally get in, when queuing for EBG atm. Happened twice yesterday, and once so far this morning.