joneirikb.7506

Well, same... so yeah, that was why I wanted none 😛

Think I'll just vote blank, I did unlock a couple of them (FB and SB from memory), but I can't stand playing ranger, and I hated and loathed the Tome mechanic back when it was elite skills... I don't like it any better as a class mechanic and can't even select it away...

Waiting for a "none" option 😛

The old traditional: * Friendly Fire * Body collision/block * No target caps

That would have to be some really heavy nerfs on existing boons to make room for this. I'd almost say remove all boon sharing, and make boon generation a personal thing. In addition chopping down on all the boon durations with [Hundred Blades] Since their announcement that they won't make more elite-spez, I've been thinking they might bring back PVE-skills from GW1, which would be a great way for them to further add power creep (that you got to grind for), without affecting/giving anything to pvp/wvw. So wouldn't be surprised if we soon get some skill that gives all boons for 30 sec to party, with 35 sec CD. But yeah, I think this idea could work, if ANet actually went in for it, and clubbed those boons like a bunch of baby seals. But I think they're too deep in the mire to dig themselves out at this point.

I like the idea and think it sounds promising. I'd hate to see ANet hack it up to pieces and present the finished product. But on more serious note: Guessing you're linking this together with the squad system to have a simple way to activate/disable it. So I can imagine it might be a bother for lots of people to constantly join and leave squads to get the boon. Might require some more functions to the Squad system, like having you always be a squad of 1 even if you've not joined a squad etc. I can also imagine some very "fun" "discussions" about "no we need this boon, not that boon!" in squad chat. But on the whole, I'm mostly curious how much it would change up wvw to be able to have constantly pulsing stability for a whole squad no matter the size. What time would we be talking about here ? Every 3 seconds pulse 1 stack of stability with 3 seconds duration? Depending on the numbers this could range from completely useless to extremely strong. And I must admit that trying to imagine ANet balance that frightens me, especially as they'd balance it on PVE anyways.

I'm for the most part pretty neutral to the idea of tier breaker or not. It's not something that usually happens often enough to really be a big deal or have much impact. If I had to chose however, I think I'd go with the current system allowing ties. Simply because it has the potential to create more unpredictable situations, so a small chance for extra variety/chaos to avoid the system becoming too stale/predictable. We also have the re-link system currently that will eventually unknot any situation that is too tied up.

Thus the problem of having 3 different modes in the same game. Balancing for each separately is probably more than 3x the amount of work (just for trying to tie the 3 modes together). Which means that: A) The Management certainly doesn't want to throw money at that. B) It would honestly work better to have each of the 3 modes be their own game with their own development teams. It's unfortunately never going to happen in GW2.

At this point, it's no longer a question of where they get their money from. It's a matter of what their target audience is. I'm pretty sure the current management of GW2 would love to just delete or otherwise remove support from PVP/WVW or at least just delegate it to a minor "minigame" that doesn't need further development/maintainance/care. The game itself on the whole at this point is a PVE game, that's what it's made its name on, and that's how its advertised/word-of-mouth and how it attracts players. So trying to change that, at this point of time, would set the game in an identify crisis, that would make it very difficult to attract new players, since they wouldn't be sure what to expect from the game. GW2 struggled with this the first couple of years, and I'm pretty sure the management doesn't want to go back to that problem. To be clear, talking about the management, and not the devs. The devs themselves seem to be interested in fixing up every part of the game if they where allowed to.

Agreed with Ronin. In 2014 or so, when they lost most of their original developers, and also made the decision to make HOT (and thus all the systems for it), they also completely stopped trying to balance the game around all modes. It just wasn't very visible until 2015, because they didn't really make that much changes until they released the build change update before HOT. EXCEPT for the Stability change in 2015-03-16, which further reinforce this. The first two years, they actually balanced around PVP, and the other two modes basically had to deal with the balance they got from PVP. This was much healthier for the game than the PVE balance focus we got since 2015. One of the main advantages was that it held numbers in check, you couldn't let damage go over a certain point, limited by players health/defences. Tldr: Hoping for any kind of WvW/PvP balance focus now is a pipe-dream. The 2020-02-25 patch is the closest we'll ever get.

The "WvW Guild" selection, is a own thing, and is separate from the clicking on which guild to represent. The WvW Guild thing is set just/only for the game to decide which server to put you in. Has nothing to do with anything else. (like active guild rep, or claiming etc). I could set Guild A as my WvW Guild, and get grouped together with them in a server. Then get matched against another server where my Guild B happens to be placed. I can then represent Guild B and go hunt them with their own Guild represented, take their camp and claim it for Guild B. Just like we can now.

One of the main problems with these kind of discussions, is that anything changed to benefit the smaller groups also benefits the larger group. And usually more than most people think/expect. As others have said above, most just think what they themselves gain and assume that they themselves are obviously good enough to benefit from it. In the case of Increasing the target caps, it would in most cases benefit the larger group, as they're simply able to slap on more AOE's than a smaller group. This means that unless you stealth bomb a larger group, you just get deleted. In general almost all fights would be MUCH faster, to the degree that you wouldn't really have any kind of sustain against a large group, you'd just be deleted. Could a few well organized small teams kill some large groups with it? Yes. Most of the time would large groups just instantly delete opposition? Yes. Which would happen more often ? And how much fun would the average zergling enjoy being on the receiving side of this? If Outnumbered actually worked better (locally rather than map global), there could be an argument for increasing the outnumbered sides target cap, as a way to fight against a larger opponent/zerg. But unfortunately it's way too flimsy and barely functional for that.

Actually thought this since launch, make the portal a PVE skill for all classes, more similar to the racial skills. Would solve a lot of those problems, and not stick people with thief/mesmer for pve helping jump puzzles. And avoid a bunch of these complaints in wvw. I do think portals have a place in wvw though, but might disallow them inside objectives?

At that point, you'd be more successful with just having random matchups each week. Simply to make it impossible to predict who your World gets matched against. I think the best thing ANet can do to prevent/stop the "Transfer culture" we have, as well as to make more varied match-ups, is to finish World Restructure/Alliance. Which is to say, that I wouldn't expect a swift change to anything anytime soon. It would destroy and re-create new worlds every X time, while retaining guilds. There wouldn't be a World to avoid in the same way we have now, it would instead be specific Guilds or Alliances, but not the whole World. And at least as far as they've told us, they plan to disable transfers once you're put into a World, so we should avoid most of the problems we have currently. (We're likely going to get a few new problems, once players get creative enough to game the new system, as usual.) Would that solve most of your points ?

* The number of servers where already too low for Glicko to work properly back at launch. It needs a larger set of samples to match up appropriate servers against each others. * This has been reduced with the Linking system, we're effectively half the number of "Worlds". * Glicko follows the server, and not the link, meaning each time new servers gets linked together, the glicko is wrong. * Glicko is currently frozen for the Linked servers, meaning they can get placed in weird places when they become hosts, etc. * That's not even getting into how abusable the glicko system has proven in the past, and how much it encouraged server stacking, guild buying, time-zone coverage. (We want to get away from server stacking, for the health of the game) It could be adjusted to be more volatile, but at the point where it actually has enough mobility that some servers move each week, you're practically back to 1up-1down. I'll have to vote no on this.

Server population = the number of total hours player from a server spend in WvW only. This was changes many many years ago. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/World#Trivia This is basically entirely normal. This is a 24/7 system, which has a lot of problems like these. WvW will never be able to work like a PVP match, where you wait to fill up before starting the match in order to make it "fair". Even if you completely destroyed all existing servers, and mashed players together entirely random every friday night, this would happen, all the time during the week. Because the mode is trying to work with a very huge number of players over a 24/7 framework. Where each player can and will play as long as they want/can. Which leads us back to the same three main problems WvW has had since the very start: Population, Timezone Coverage, and Fairweathers. And just reserting servers/teams won't fix those. It would make it seem/feel fresh/random for a few days, and then the same patterns develops. Which leads to this, which largely happens when one side starts dominating, causing fair-weathers on the other side to flee because they no longer have fun/enjoy the content. Thus leading the winning team to try to find ways to make "content". Often by trying to provoke/taunt/bait the losing side to action. (Naturally, there exist a few pure trolling guilds as well.) In the long term, the best way to combat this is for ANet to insert more reasons/motivations to actually have server 2+3 gang up on the server 1 (leading). There's many ways this could be done, but a couple of quick examples would be to increase the points you get from fighting against the top server, and also increase the rewards/participation you get from fighting them. In the short term, your best strategy, as always in WvW, is to make the enemy lose motivation/get bored. Ignore them, go to other maps, run around and take camps or towers they aren't defending, and run away before they catch up to you. They'll get frustrated and bored and leave. It's the most effective way to reduce enemy numbers, unfortunately, as it's also just as bad for the game as spawn-camping etc. Essentially, this is what World Restructure/Alliances is trying to do. The primary goal is to make Population as close to even as they can manage, and stop the Transfer/Stacking problems we've had for 10 years. And as ANet themselves have said, this won't fix everything. They specifically said that WR/A won't solve Time-zone Coverage, but that it is something they hoped to look into later on when they had the system in place (Translation, they might be able to slightly tweak it, but not by much). And unfortunately, there's absolutely nothing they can do about Fair-Weather effect. They simply can't force players to play the game/mode when they're bored/don't like it. --- I personally still think the WR/A system is worthwhile to implement, it's still an overall improvement to the 3 main problems with WvW. But also because it's long term dynamic implications, as the populations of the games grows or decreases the WR/A system will self adjust the number of worlds to the number of players. Thus we won't end up with say 5 server per link in 3-5 years time (And just imagine that with half the players trying to stack onto a single server). Despite how long it's taken them to get to even this point with it, it would just take even longer for them to ditch the project and start from scratch on another plan at this point.

I know they specifically wanted player traps to reset on build change. As various classes made trapnests, and then swapped build. It might be the that "siege traps" works too similar to skill-traps, that they just got sucked into the effect/they can't separate them.

Just some random thoughts: Might be interesting to look at making markers that can leave something very visible on the field and not just the mini map. Personally I'm useless with voicecoms anyways, as the moment I concentrate on the game, I shut my ears off. So not sure if it would help as many as you'd think.

I'm wondering if having combos, especially Light field, do reveal as part of their triggers might have helped having more dynamic counter play to stealth? Possibly others, Fire? To divide it more evenly around. I'd also second another common complaint, that stealth shouldn't also be fast. Something like Half speed in stealth, and be immune to swift and superspeed. At least while in combat. If they stealth in combat, there should be a counter-play of just running away while they're hiding.

Tough choice between no and low stealth/mesmer. Went with low simply because I think it would be way too much work for ANet to balance the game for removing stealth entirely. But it really is one of the most annoying things to play against in the game.

Some problems with scaling stats based on outnumbering: 1: The balance of the stat scaling, which will depend entirely on the skill level between both sides. Which means there really isn't a gold standard to balance around. 2: This can carry good players quite a lot, my guild leader has ran solo into 20 pugs and nearly won. With only a few stat buffs he would have won that. Which strikes me as a bad idea. 3: A lot of the people that enjoy fights, enjoy it for the "general" sense of fairness. Where getting buffs outside of your control would be seen as a negative for the experience. Say 2 people are dueling in a spot away from the action, and 5 friends/guildies of player A comes to watch, suddenly Player B gets buffed, ruining the fairness of that duel. 4: And one of the things many players find "fun" in this game mode, if they're not very skilled themselves, is to be able to gang up and take down players they normally wouldn't stand a chance against in 1vs1. Which translates to taking the fun away from the vast majority of players, as well as their only real way of being able to get back at/counter a good roamer. I can see where you come from, but I think it would cause more problems that it would solve, and I'm not sure if I could say it's really a problem in the first place.

This is exactly what Tyler Bearce asked us a bunch of years ago, if we where willing to delete all servers, create a whole pile of smaller servers, and basically use the link system to glue X number of them together. The forums/community clearly voted no to that. The usual reasons, people doesn't want to lose their server/name, community, etc. But essentially, World Restructure will do all of those, and in a more dynamically adaptable way, by using guilds instead of servers. If they have to do 90% of the work anyways, why not let them do 100% and give us World Restructure with Alliances. It will already do all the things you've suggested. With a few less flaws.

Careful what you ask for, the only thing they've been able to do in the past to deal with the lag, is reduce the player cap per maps. So you'll get less players into the game/more queue's. Imagine how salty players get when they have even less off a chance to join EBG.

Population will never be equal in a game mode like WvW, because of the way the game mode works. When people are free to play as the like 24/7 and come and go as they have fun or is bored, it's quite obvious what will happen. * People flock in when they hear their friends/guildmembers etc have fun. * People go away when they no longer have fun (getting beaten typically does that). So no matter how they try to balance the teams/servers/links etc, every player will always feel that the game is unbalanced, because that is what they experience in the moments they play. ANet can sit with numbers that shows/tell quite clearly that a match up might be entirely balanced, same PPT, same participation/activity over a week, etc. And players will refuse to believe it, because: * "There was no enemies when I played for 2 hours yesterday!" * "The enemy server outnumbers us 14-1 all of the 2 hours I had time to play yesterday!" The sad fact is that the kind of balancing the majority of WvW players actually want, is named EotM. 2 Hours, collapse, new servers, balance numbers out decently close. And it takes at least an hour or so until people realise it's hopeless and give up. --- Population per server is actually down from when linking was introduced. If ANet made a similar chart to the one they showed us (with no names) back then, but updated with todays numbers, it would look very different. Constantly locking the highest servers, moving links around, making people transfer to links, and then closing off the top servers again, has spread players out more than ever before.

Patrolling Legendary Defenders, that routinely patrol out between spawn and nearest objectives (but doesn't go into them), and crosses all exits from spawn. Wouldn't help you take objectives, but would give you a way to breach out and break spawn camping. And get you close to an objective. And won't stay around to carry you either as they keep patrolling.