Arya Whitefire.8423

The actual first beta was a buggy mess that ended in EU after a few hours, and didn't start in NA. The first beta that worked, was actually a lot of fun. The second beta was way less fun, and the rest, another 3-5, have been about the same. But I mean, you could still farm pips. The only changes I noticed were the queue behaving weird/better/maybe sort of kind of, in later betas. And some types of "ending up in the wrong matchup", when joining/switching maps bugs, seemed to happen less often.

Time to make my TC alt!

The odds that it solves any of the current significant issues are very low. In my opinion it will most likely either: 1. Kill the mode entirely over 3-6 months. 2. Evolve into EOTM 2.0, if Arenanet provides rewards that are close enough to PVE. I believe the primary reason Arenanet is continuing to work on it, is because they know they need a system that will be able to keep wvw limping along as populations continue to dwindle, since the current system is basically guaranteed to devolve into one dominating server as populations continue to decline.

Mag has suffered significant skill dilution on the weekends, and to a lesser extent during prime time on weekdays, the entire time I've played here(2-3 years). It'll probably get better on Monday. And yes TZs are another huge problem, and I see no way they can be fixed while retaining a 24 hour format.

More people are tired of the guild play style, of running over everything that isn't a guild, so many that the population of this game is a skeleton of what it was. But they were much less visible than the guilds, so it's harder to see. I don't blame most of the new players for adopting the 10 minute afk camp meta.

People have been glitching into keeps since day 0. And some of the glitches are simply not fixable by anet. In my opinion, it's long past time they should take a sledgehammer to the problem. One idea if the walls of a keep/tower/inner keep have been up at least 10 minutes, an effect goes into place that just insta kills any enemy inside the perimeter. Then you can glitch in all you like, but you'll just die.

They aren't running commanders 90% of the time. Oft times someone will tag up to concentrate forces for a siege, but even then there's no move this way, bomb on this target, most of the time. One cause is so many "retired" experienced and skilled players, who know how to play the tag and stack game, but are mostly tired of it. One result, is a server where even the less experienced and talented players are used to not seeing a tag, so they don't get into the habit of waiting for a tag to be up, before they can do something useful. Most servers USED to have significant populations that could play without tags, but thanks to changes by anet, unless those players are both numerous and skilled, they just get pwned by the comped voice comm groups, making doing so a waste of time. Better to play pve or some other game, or wait for your own comped voice comm group to log in.

I'm talking the type where 1 guy who knows where to throw siege, but has ZERO guildies running meta builds, goes about trying to make some moves on a T3. That worked up until a bit after PoF, it doesn't work at all anymore, unless the opposite team's coverage is so low that you're just fighting gates and walls. Or the type where 1 guy who knows to hit the tail, and is providing some boon strips or whatever, tags up to defend a keep. Again that just doesn't work at all anymore unless you outnumber the boon blob 2:1 or more, or you're on maguuma. And yes it used to be that a big problem with new pug manders was them building a following, but usually at least some people would follow, because they were providing some action. But now-a-days, if you play with organize guild groups, you KNOW, with near 100% certainty, that the pugmander is going to be a waste of your time, because even if they do have a clue, they're still going to lose.

I don't see how WR creates any room for pugmanding to return, or even the creation of new mag-alikes. It might slightly incentivize guilds to pug mand a bit more. But for the most part at any given time only 1-2 servers will have the most organized group on, and the other 1-2 servers will just be wheat for them to scythe. NA prime will still produce some decent 3 ways though, on a map or 2. The root cause is with power creep in the fight mechanics not the matchups.

The decline started with the launch of HoT, but didn't really accelerate until 6-12 months after the launch of PoF, once every even mediocre static raid time guild starting running firebrands and friends. A lot of people try to blame the loss of community on server pairing, and guilds transferring. But the real root cause was that players who didn't join and play primarily with guild groups went from having some chance at success to zero chance at success when facing even mediocre guild groups. And (most) players who join (most) groups like that become all about that group, and don't care at all about the server they're on, except in so far as it can get them good fights. For me personally the absolute last gasp of having a chance against guild groups was about the time the warclaw stomp was removed. Before it was removed I would often choose to play the weaker side in any matchup I was in, if I had an alt there. But without it I had no chance, and it was a pointless waste of my time to even try to help the underdogs. That across the board damage nerf was also a turning point, but at least it made small scale better, so it wasn't all bad news. And new players still arrive almost every day, most of them quickly figure out they have to join a guild group to have a good time, and then that's all they do. But over there on Maguuma, they still play like it's 2015, only better, they don't even need pugmanders 90% of the time. And for purposes of taking and holding territory that's way way way better than tired old guild groups who just gave up on seeing alliances any time soon, yet again. To save wvw, making the cliff between organized and less organized groups go away, is way way more important than the matchup imbalances. At least, that's my opinion.

It didn't used to be that way. Back when there was much less of a cliff between guild groups and pugmander groups, the pugmander groups consisted of a lot of guild players. But now even with guild players the pugmander groups would lose 90+% of the time, so it's no longer worth those players time to show up outside of the raid, and it's no longer worth having pugmanders except for a bit of backcapping.

Average skill level. In my estimation, for every one great positional and momentum player on the average server, mag has 4-6 such players. And yeah most of them transferred to mag over 8+ years. Or rather other servers do have at least some of these more skilled players, but most of them only show up to raid with the commanders they know and trust, and when that commander tags down, they quit. Also even the less skilled mag players have practice playing with the more skilled ones, so even if some or multiple aspects of their play are not very good, as part of the team, they are able to accomplish more than similarly unorganized forces on other servers. As recently as 1-2 years ago BG probably had 2-4 such players for every 1 on an average server. And FA, AR, and TC, all exceed the average maybe 2-2.5ish for FA and AR and 1.5-2 for TC. Again my estimates.

I was trying to demonstrate why I think mag is actually more skilled. That doesn't mean any other server is going to easily be able to reach similar skill levels especially the combination of skill + playtime + ability to play without commanders holding their hands constantly.

I never even remotely implied you'd be able to skill up to overcome mag. I clearly said Arenanet needs to fix it 🙂 Though some sort of "alliance of the light" probably would be able to have some fun wrecking Maguuma for a while til they got bored. But it would take a lot of work and transferring and such, probably not worth it.

The biggest advantage of alts for pve is the login dailies. Especially the mystic coins. I do sometimes play 2-3 accounts at a time, but anet does not allow for macroing or event repeating, so it's a workout with alt-tabbing and the use of multiple keyboards and mice. Rangers are good class for that sort of thing. You can also use 1 account to drag 4 other accounts through most story content. Useful for unlocking reward tracks, or doing collections, for instance for the legendary amulet. Another advantage of alts is they make playing the market significantly easier since you can use the TP pickup area as basically infinite storage. A single account can do this, but then you can never pick up anything from the TP without a major hassle. And being able to mail things back and forth between accounts can be handy.

I always had alts for PVE, started playing them majorly in wvw about the 5th time my home server of YB had a major guild exodus. If the guilds can do it, I can do it too. And alts are way more efficient in the long run than paying for transfers, and about the same cost when you can get PoF keys for $15 on sale.

Maybe half the servers do have the same number of good players. But on Mag, those players don't require a tag they know and trust to be around for them to bother playing. They don't need that tag to tell them to go defend a camp or a T0 tower. There are 2 servers I consider "mini-mags", AR and FA. (TC also has a few) They have a smaller nucleus of players who can play the position and momentum skirmish game well without relying on a tag, but they are much more irregular about being able to take and hold territory. And yeah the territory taking difference, is because they have less SKILLED players actually playing. If you gave AR and FA 5x as many skirmishing skilled players willing to play without a tag, they'd probably up their tagless territory game too. But if you gave them 5x as many normally skilled players, they'd just donate more bags to boon blobs, and maguuma, until they gave up and quit trying. BG used to be good at the position and momentum fighting game on EBG, but gave it up, since they basically always lost to Mag eventually. I may have seen someone refer to this as the "ogre-watch meta", in this or a related thread. I think a big part of why Mag broke out from OP to Monstrous was the Mag+AR pairing, all of a sudden you had the #1 skirmish fighting server paired up with one of the second tier skirmish fighting servers. Which just made EBG completely unplayable by anyone else. Once everyone else stopped contesting EBG, Maguuma had to go to the Borderlands for fights. Then YB comes in with their still relatively huge latent/fairweather NA population, add some bandwagoning, and here we are now. BUT BUT BUT, again the root cause of all this, is the powercreep, which has made most people be unwilling to play AT ALL without an organized group. And mag being the one server that can play without organized groups is just a huge advantage in that environment.

You can't really get the full effect playing against them. The largest confounder, is that you often aren't fighting Maguumies, or at least you're fighting the more mediocre ones. Also the skill difference is less visible in 1vs1s, it's more a skirmish dueling thing. I play NSP, YB, and Mag very regularly. I'm well aware of how TC, CD, JQ, AR, FA, SoS, and BG play from playing linked with them or on alts. And if you're playing with mag during prime time it is a night and day difference. Maguumies actually talk on map chat, when you ask for help they actually show up. Maguumies are capable of pushing a defended T3 for hours until it breaks, without any centralized commanding required. And when it comes to actually fighting, if you make a good play and go deep, they support you and generate downs. EVERY OTHER SERVER, the players are 90% likely to just run away and watch you die. Maguumies simply understand momentum and positioning, as an unorganized group, significantly better than any other server. None of this is just the last 2 months, it's the last 3 years. I generally ration my play time on Maguuma, because the more I play there, the more I hate playing anywhere else. Though with YB being my main server, this pairing has been Maguuma overload.

I kinda like it. Plusses: 1. It stops "punishing" servers for going up a tier. 2. It "punishes" the overstacked servers by increasing their boredom. 3. It spreads out the pain of having to deal with the most overstacked servers, or servers with massive off hours coverage. Minuses: 1. It. makes it easier for the players that just want to "win", to keep "winning". 2. It could be argued it makes the game mode less competitive.

I can't speak to what has happened since Mag opened. But before Mag opened. IF we assume anet's "average daily play hours to server fullness" algorithm was working properly. Then Mag had roughly the same average daily play hours as every other Full server. The reason you saw so many extra players on the mag side was a combination of: 1. T1 servers tend to have many of their play hours outside NA prime, since it's easier to win the PPT war outside NA prime. 2. For 1-3 years most servers have spent less and less time actively fighting mag, and more time taking the week off any time they face mag. 3. Winning servers pretty much always get bandwagoned on the guest server if it's open, in this case, Yak's Bend. 4. Since the launch of path of fire, allowed the sustain meta to become so strong, it has become less and less worthwhile to play if you are not playing as part of an organized squad. So most players, especially the type of players willing to "git gud" now only log in when a guild commander they know and trust is running. If those commanders play less, all players associated with them also play less. Mag is nearly 100% exempt from this effect. 5. People simply play more when they're winning, and play less when they're losing. So, while Maguuma absolutely is fielding more numbers at the moment, they do not bear much if any responsibility for it. It's all on Arenanet. It's possible that Maguuma being opened has now moved it's average player hours threshold over some limit that triggers the no link state, but I wouldn't count on it.

Rather MOST off hours guilds are Timezone stacking, they usually just play 2-5 hours a day, 3-5 days a week, just like NA guilds. MAG guild has a lot of players who play 8+ hours a day, and do so with significantly greater skill at fighting.

I'm saying both problems existed in the alliance betas. Excluding the 1st one, which was a great time all around. [MAG] is an example of SKILL+Playtime stacking... most off hours guilds, are more just playtime stacking with less skill disparity.

It's possible they were more balanced in a score sense, but in a "I'd like to play a bit on ebg sense", during mag's prime time 10ish am to 2ish am EST, it was catastrophic. Also the matchups in general, at any time of a weekday other than during NA prime, typically had one side dominating, and almost no one playing except on the dominating side. Anet's idea of balance by "average play hours per world", interacts very poorly with clumpy off hours guilds to produce worlds where if they have good off hours, their NA always loses, and if they have no off hours, their NA dominates. So while it might make the scores look better, the play environment is actually worse for much of the day. At least that's what I saw, it was especially prevalent the last 2 betas. And to not be all bad news.... The first beta was awesome, almost festive, and I expect launch of alliances to be pretty fun for a month or3, but it will fall of rapidly after that, unless Anet does something drastic like crank the rewards, and turn alliance wvw into EOTM 2.0. Which, I guess would be better than nothing.

As far as I'm concerned, world restructuring has already proven to be unable to solve the Maguuma problem. I have lots of accounts, and played in most matchups of every beta. [MAG] guild completely dominated whichever matchup they were in starting Monday, if not sooner. As someone else on this thread mentioned, you're going to have to cut guild sizes to the bone, to fix lopsided matchups based on skill+playtime stacking. And Arenanet hasn't indicated much willingness to do that. Also doing it probably would cause a mass cascade of quitting.

What players or servers have done, or could do is irrelevant. Only Arenanet can fix the systemic problems with wvw that have led to this state. And sadly I don't even think they're aware of most of them. Anything that special cases Maguuma, or any other server, is absolutely not a fix.