Arya Whitefire.8423

This is why simply adding more invisible walls, and/or little tweaks to the wall/gate geometry isn't the fix. The walls do nothing if the client is altered to ignore them, since gw2 allows the client to have authority over where the player can move. Another example is the teleporting gathering bots in PVE, which have been around for 10+ years.

It's less about numbers and more that no player or group of players should be able to win too much, and any player or group of players that is seriously trying to do something, should have at least the occasional win. It used to be worth my time to fight to the end in most circumstances defense, or offence. Since sometime between 2017 and 2019, and the rise of the boon ball, I find myself only ever bothering to: 1. Flip camps for participation. 2. Run around with some overpowered guild I like. Very occasionally this actually results in interesting fights. But usually one side or the other just bulldozes the other for the duration of the raid. 3. On the few servers that still have one, follow around the back-capping pug-mander, and run every time we see opposition.

Chilling Fog should have been implemented as a chill effect that was not a boon. It's not too late to fix it.

As I've mentioned before in similar threads... It is possible, for an unmodified client, to load in a tower, such that some of it's walls are missing entirely. When this happens you can walk in and out of the tower, no matter which team you're on. If this can happen by accident, no doubt it can also happen using cheat software. I assume it can happen with keeps too, but I haven't personally experienced it. Here's screen shots of langor and nw tower on red bl loaded with missing wall segments: https://imgur.com/a/gWC40Cs I've also seen Anz load with missing wall segments. So... fixing the glitch spots alone, is not a good enough fix. It seems likely that glitching into keeps and towers, will be normal gameplay sometime in the next 1-3 years or so, unless something drastic is done.

PPK was always a bad idea.

It's really really simple, in 2014, even the best comped players died 5-10-20 times in hour. In 2024 the best comped players often die 0-1 times in 3 hours. Anet has really messed everything up with way way way way too much sustain, and other tools that allow people to stack advantages too high. And the "like-minded" players who "want to win" all bunch up together in certain timezones and certain servers, instead of spreading out, and creating content for each other.

The primary reason organized groups don't fight (in NA), is that most groups know their place in the pecking order. And very few of them want to take fights they know they'll lose more than 1-3 times per play session. If anet really wants to incentivize the large groups to fight, then they need to make the pecking order less important, and/or return to a segmented matchup system where the high pecking order groups are all locked away in 1 tier away from the gen pop.

The "genius" of this idea, is that it completely equalizes the ability of any group regardless of size, to "breach" keep and tower defenses. Part of what made pre-HoT wvw such a tremendously better game, was that both small and large groups had similar success rates at taking keeps. This was because defended keeps were very hard to take, and usually if you got one it was due to outthinking the enemy, rather than just brute forcing it. I don't think we can return to those days, but we could move forward to a new state of equality!

The keep aura nerf was rather hamfisted. It would've been much better to use different strength auras in different circumstances. Home keep, and home towers, held by home team, if anything, should have a stronger aura. Home keeps held by enemy teams should probably always have negative auras for the team doing the hold out. SMC should never have any aura at all, heck you could even add a negative stats aura for the team holding SMC that starts ramping up after it's held 15-30 minutes or so.

I think being able to close a waypoint by letting a guard hit you, or hitting a guard is silly. At the very least it should require killing a guard. If it were up to me I'd change it so waypoints don't close until some wall or gate loses 1-5% or so of it's health. I.e. make the contester build siege, or spend some time beating on a gate. Putting the lord into combat, or contesting the circle, should also keep the waypoint closed. Even if the waypoint behavior was changed, white swords probably should continue to appear due to guards being put into combat.

It's crazy enough that it might work. I think it's worth a 1-4 week test.

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.