Nkrisc.7408

Dragonbrand, I think? I'm not sure if that's the server or not, but it's on the login screen. And yeah, I kinda came to the same conclusion that wvw seems to require organized play, but I thought it would be something I could just jump into on my own, but definitely didn't feel that way. Which is kind of stark contrast to PvE. I can go to any zone and just kinda join up with a big group of people doing meta events and such, it's what I like about GW2, and I thought it would apply to wvw too. I was playing at 9PM Eastern so I thought it would be a populated time, if any. Unless those tutorials show me where people are on the map when I join a match, I don't think it's going to be as helpful as you seem to think. The few things I did read about wvw mentioned joining up with a large group running around, but there's nothing in game (as far as I can tell) that shows if there even is any groups or which zone I should join. Why are there always 5 zones available if they're all most empty? Shouldn't the number of zones available scale based on how many people are participating? Seems silly to thinly spread everyone out over five zones, but maybe I'm missing something. That's why I'm trying to figure it out.

To begin, I have played GW2 before. I played for maybe 6 months at launch, and then stopped after that. I think I probably entered wvw once or twice then, but honestly I can't remember. Then over the years I'd log in for a few days here and there just to check out the game but never stuck with it for that a few days again. I've started playing again for the most I have since launch and have been playing for a few weeks now. This is not a complaint. I just think the introduction experience to WvW is very lacking and just wanted to share my experience so that perhaps one day it might be improved. I was recently reading about all the different ways to get geared, and looking at end game activities and rewards, and that's when I saw WvW get mentioned a lot. I saw that for some legendaries it's necessary. I'd like to start working on a legendary item, so I figured I'd give wvw a shot and learn about it in the process. Trying to figure out how to even get started in WvW left me confused for quite some time. I opened the WvW screen and saw 6 different options. There was no indication what any of them really were beyond a vague description. I saw that three of them were each red, blue and green. So I chose the red one because red means bad guys, right? I'm looking for PvP. So I enter the map. I'm in some kind of fort and there's a bunch of vendors that are clearly for more progressed players than I. I scan the zone map and see it's very large with no Waypoints, so it's going to be a lot of running it looks like. I find a group of people leaving the base so I follow them. They stop at a smaller base next to ours, we fight a few NPCs and capture it. They all mount up and run off, leaving me in the dust. I can't keep up with them because my mounts don't work here. I make a note to look up why at a later time. I can see their dots on the map for now, so I try to catch up but by the time I find a way to get to them, they're long gone. I give up trying to follow a group since they're too fast for me to stick with them. I look around, and there's not much around me. No NPCs, no friendly players, no enemy players. Honestly the whole thing felt pretty empty and dead. I find an enemy base and manage to kill the guards, but then I'm downed in about half a second by an enemy player. I was trying to figure out what happened and how I could take them on when... looks like I have to resurrect all the way back at the main base. It took me like five minutes just to run to where I was before, and I really didn't feel like running all the way just to find no one was there. There was no indication of what to do. I found the participation score which seems to be tied to my rewards, but I struggled to keep it at tier 2 because there was simply nothing I could find to do. Killing NPCs didn't do anything, and I couldn't capture any bases by myself, and I could keep up with the groups who were capturing bases. There were still the 5 other wvw zones that I had no idea what they were for, or how I know which one to go to. Did I just go to the wrong zone? Should I have gone to Green or Blue or one of the ones without colors? How do I know which ones have any people? The game explains none of this, or if it does, I missed it. I can see how WvW could be fun, and it looks fun in some of the YouTube videos I've seen of people doing it. But all those videos are from a year or so ago. Is WvW just completely dead now? Did I miss all the action? I tried it again a few days later and it was the same. I ran around a giant empty map for 40 minutes and couldn't find anything that seemed like it was worth doing. Anything I did do have no effect on anything or didn't get me any rewards. But really the thing that irked me the most was that I HAD found a group of people to run with, but because new player mounts don't work in WvW, I couldn't even play with them. Seems weird to artificially segregate new players from experienced ones in that way when this seems like a game mode that requires a group of people. I thought it would playable solo since you can enter solo, but it doesn't feel that way unless you're some kind of PvP god who can take on a group of five by yourself. Anyway, that's all. I'm going to keep trying to figure it out a few more times and ask around in chat. Some people were helpful, others just told me "maybe wvw isn't for you" when I was just asking how it even works.