saerni.2584

I can answer questions although the video link speaks for itself.

Sinister is something that could certainly work, but people often want a bit of expertise so they go with Viper stats instead. All of those glassy stats (no vitality or toughness) are just trade offs between different options for major and minor stats. Carrion will do less damage than Sinister, but Carrion will be more durable due to high HP. And, when you are going glass the extra boost to duration from expertise (ie Viper) will add more dps overall than Sinister.

It's not about "what you call it." It's an incomplete feature. So the complaint would be valid if the social and community building aspect had been built into this test (they weren't). And I disagree that Anet didn't communicate this. There were blog posts and forum posts. That's how Anet communicates. I'm not saying it's the player's fault for being uninformed. I'm saying I think Anet did "enough" here. It's not like players weren't able to quickly find out what's going on after the beta started (multiple blogs, a new sub-forum, many official posts about this beta and the previous beta attempt that didn't get off the ground). And the test wouldn't have been canceled if the players who had issues with being informed HAD found out and raised a stink. So really, the only think Anet needed to do was make sure there was plenty of info out there for those who didn't hear about it in advance.

Depending on your content a lot of combinations work. In PvE the standard answer is to use Vipers for max damage. Mixing carrion in will increase your survivability. If you want a good mix of medium damage and survival then celestial is a solid choice, but Dire/TB gear will work out well enough (lower damage) if you are looking for higher amounts of HP with decent condi damage output. In WvW you can go the celestial route or mix carrion and vipers (also consider Rampagers stats for some extra crit if you want that).

WvW Restructuring: the forum where matchup threads are allowed and encouraged! 😛

Yeah early on I notice TS seemed a little stacked (was 1st place over the weekend with a huge lead). I'd suspect it was the outsized presence of a weekend wvw guild(s)...so I wonder if the population overall evened out (my alt account is on Seven Pines for this beta). If not this is useful data for us to ask "did Titan's Staircase have excessive population or did it have lopsided time zone coverage?"

@Daerth Riverstone.3218 Can you clarify what beta matchup your guild is in? Also, can you identify a little more detail about the server populations in that matchup? My own match up was fairly balanced early on (although I think populations probably shifted during the week as different players logged on/off). Im curious because there are a few posts like yours and if there was a population imbalance bug it would be good to know more.

I actually have one of those 100g Commander tags...And I have never changed servers either. So I've been outnumbered to the point of absurdity and (after relinks) been on teams that had players everywhere and outnumbered the enemy 100% of the time. I get it. But I don't think Alliances rewards the server hoppers (if anything it finally puts server hopping to rest). Alliances is a more healthy way to let friends play together without the server hopping and the bandwagoning that came with it. You're free (and I absolutely encourage you) to say you don't like the beta. Just as I'm free to say I like it. I disagree, I have my reasons, and would highly suggest you share "why" you think the way you do too. I've seen a few people here saying the people who like the beta are salty or stupid or irrational and I have to laugh. Because they are the ones personally attacking and insulting people who like the beta. You at least just say "I don't like it and left it at that, your feedback and your perspective. Me? I respectfully disagree with those who disliked the beta because it was a beta of backbone systems and didn't implement sufficient community match making (to me that comes later). I also respectfully disagree with those who think WvW should never change because of a sense of tradition or server loyalty (I think the status quo is untenable). Further, I respectfully disagree with those who say that Anet should have personally ensured notice-in-fact to all WvW players (or all players) before launching the beta test (There's always going to be someone who didn't see the news and it's only a single week, then everything goes back to normal). I think we should have productive conversations about time zone population balance in a post restructuring system. Why did the population work out so many people think (maybe erroneously?) that the population isn't balanced in their favor? I think we should also have constructive discussions about the in-game community building systems we'd want to see in the final implementation of server restructuring. That obviously really important to people and they are worried it won't be built correctly. And, while we are at it we really should have another conversation or two about rewards and how to motive players and reward them for gameplay we want promoted. After all we need rewards to make playing the game feel like fun and not a grind. Instead, all I've been seeing is "stop the beta" and "cancel restructuring." This isn't a recipe for improving WvW. That's a recipe for the devs throwing up their hands and deciding to let the feature stagnate further. I wish the posters here were a little more mindful of how long it's taken to get to this very initial stage of testing the backbone tech to let us, maybe, have a better system in place. And I wish people were more constructive and not just bandwagoning on personal attacks without contributing.

I don't think it's a bad thing. I have 3 guilds I use for WvW claiming as a 95% solo player. By your argument I should be sad to see Alliances. But I'm not and here's why: when the feature comes out I can associate one of my personal guilds into an Alliance with people in my current server I want to keep playing with. I don't have to join anything other than the Alliance of people I like playing with (which is like being asked to make a group of players for an sPvP team only at a larger scale). It makes perfect sense to me and I'm excited to see improvements in the match making that will come from even teams (people are wrong to think even teams means never being outnumbered in a time zone, it just means being able to have even man hours over the whole match).

See this is what I'm talking about. You have someone who wanted more of a heads up; and tbh that isn't unreasonable. However, we had two attempts at a beta that were cancelled, people have been talking about the beta in Team chat for months, and there have been multiple Anet blog posts about the tests over the last 6 months. I don't think Anet could have given more of a heads up that would have been satisfying. Should Anet have sent an in-game mail? Or maybe an email sent to all Guild Wars 2 players? I could see that working "better" but I don't read most/any emails from Anet and in-game mail is not really how Anet communicates (most of that is the blog). And a threat to not buy the expansion based on a test run of only a part of an experimental / developing feature...idk it just comes across as a bit of a tantrum. Don't buy it if you don't want to I guess...but maybe calm down first?

If casual players want to play with their guild mates then all they will need to do is select that PvE guild or join a community Alliance. Or they can float, but that depends on if they really care about their server in the first place. A "casual" player doesn't "know" many people and won't lose that much under an Alliance system by floating (other than an identity with a specific server name, which I don't think is what motivates people to play). Alliances, when implemented, allow any group of guilds up to the maximum to associate together into an Alliance for match making. Meaning you just need to join an Alliance with whatever guild (even a personal guild) to play with a large community (there will be plenty of opportunities to build those Alliance communities before/during/after this part of the feature is developed). Many communities have been laying the groundwork for that for years in anticipation of Alliances. I do think we need more guild slots. That will help a lot of players who want to play WvW but also will improve things for everyone else who have asked over the years for more slots. That seems likely to happen given how important joining guilds or Alliances will be for organized WvW. Also, to all those "confused" reaction people: try joining the conversation. Understanding why some people like or don't like the beta requires more than a emoticon reaction. I don't fully agree with the person I just quoted (for the reasons I stated) but I'm responding and not using the reaction feature because it doesn't foster a conversation. Give it a try.

A lot of people (at least those with new accounts on the forums) seem to be under the mistaken belief that this IS the Alliances feature. For some reason they don't understand that the Alliances feature isn't implemented and most of this beta has been about testing the background systems required for a new match making system to work on a technical level. People who want to associate with more PvP oriented players will be able to make Alliances based on that (also I'm confused by the claim that any particular servers NOW are more PvP oriented than others, although some servers have map preferences like Maguuma with EBG). It's not really implemented yet so a bunch of "I hated the beta because this is the finished product" posts are really frustrating from the perspective of someone who plays quite a bit of WvW and knows this is far from a finished presentation of the updated game mode. Anecdotally, I associated with a WvW guild for this Beta 1 and everyone in game (in the guild and otherwise) has been positive about the Beta. People actually playing the game who play a lot of WvW actually like the feature (in limited form and understanding that) quite a bit. Even Reddit has been positive. There's a serious disconnect this time between what I'm seeing/hearing in game and in other websites and what I'm seeing on this forum.

There's a few bugs going around. Yaks no longer count as kills for kill sigils. After the beta there needs to be a full WvW bug investigation (right now I'm sure they are focused on the large number of beta related issues).

If you heard it after you started holding your breath I'd be a little worried...

Salt is salt. I don't understand the people who are offline or block you after sending though. Once, I had someone salty whisper me about hacking. I was confused so I mailed him (cause offline) and turned out he didn't understand the skill I was using so thought the effect was not legitimate. I'm not frustrated at the salt. I'm only frustrated by not being able to educate the children when they're wrong.

It's almost like this is a beta of an unfinished feature and all the worries you have about being able to maintain communities are unfounded speculation based on a hysterical description of how the system (that hasn't been built yet) will work.

If they put the bonus this week people would be mad they are "forced" to play the beta to get the bonus. This way you can get the bonus in a normal wvw week and not feel unduly burdened to stick around this week if it's really that painful for an individual to play with the bugs etc.

But more brain dead zombies are better. More opportunities for skilled players to make kills and more fights overall. Siege humping aside (we could use a siege revamp for wvw) I am happy we have more players (some might have joined wvw for the first time because they wanted to check out the beta).

To answer your "why" question I think it has a lot to do with how servers today make it hard to play with your friends, actually. In theory, you can just transfer to play with your friends. However, transfers 1) cost money and 2) may not always be available to you because the server may be "full." Repeated match making not only tries to solve the overall player activity balance (not population directly but an attempt at it) but also this "play with friends" issue where you can select the same guild or select guilds in the same alliance (or make your own alliance as you like). I've been on Northern Shiverpeaks my entire time. I've never transferred. I remember "NSPride" and the excitement of the wvw tournament. I also recognize that NSP has consistently been outnumbered and outmanned in many matchups and suffered from very very low overall playtime activity across many time zones (even in supposedly prime time zones). Pride in my servers tenacity and the quality of some of its players (many of whom I'm playing with in the beta because I joined their main guild) doesn't justify sticking to the status quo in my opinion. Sometimes you need to accept that things won't stay they same. I'd like a title for my long service on Northern Shiverpeaks but that's all I can really ask for. I won't deny this weekend has been better quality due to overall enemy players on the field than in a long time. Maybe my experience will change after today but right now it's been fun.

I also have an alt (one is on Skrittsburgh and other is on Seven Pines). Seven Pines is losing badly (last I saw). It's still more players to play with than in some match ups. People were around (but something may have happened to tip the scales in that time zone balance wise) so it wasn't as even as the Skrittsburgh match up. I think the beta is a valid opportunity to ask "why did some servers end up so outnumbered?" Anet might say "that was a bug" or "that was an unintended side effect" or "overall the playtimes balanced out over the course of the beta." I'm assuming those macro level disparities are something that can be addressed with iteration. I'm not so worried that an early beta like this one didn't produce perfect results. We had "900" players mismatched. However, those are the ones Anet knew about and other problems could have arisen that made some teams not work as intended. But the population was there. That is my experience in two match ups at least (maybe fewer players were willing to play after being outnumbered in certain time zones and feeling like it wasn't worth it to play for various other reasons too decided to not play wvw).

I'd say that's where rewards come in. Sure we don't fight for server pride (although maybe our own) but we should have been able to fight over rewards from the start (even if those rewards are just some pips and some small chance at a nice infusion or other unique rewards).

I direct you to my first post in the thread about how numbers won't solve everything and we need rewards to help improve the game mode (rewards for promoting healthy gameplay). You admit your bias. You think because other people have similar beliefs you are "right." There's really nothing more to say.

Here's the problem with your "argument." You basically hate the thief class. That's "bias." It's obvious you think thief, regardless of how it's played, shouldn't exist in the game. That's fine for an opinion but it colors your position. It clouds your reasoning and it basically undermines your credibility because you start with a huge assumption (that everyone should and must agree with you). My point, that the game mode is more fun with more people to play with, hasn't been addressed by you. To the contrary, you attacked me for playing a thief (ad hominem logical fallacy for you kids in school). That hasn't been addressed and fundamentally I don't see how, in an MMO, you can credibly argue that more people to play with is a bad thing. Stop trying to cast the argument in terms of the "who" and more in terms of the "what." It will make your thinking better.

I don't use permastealth but that's a nice attempt at a straw man. Maybe you should reconsider your obvious and inflated bias and sense of entitlement. It would improve your ability to relate to others.

You are wrong. I defend and upgrade objectives. I scout. I make strategic use of tactics and divert resources from the opposing teams. I support larger groups in their fights. I kill people who fall behind a group trying to take a keep and help secure downs into kills. I contribute as much or more than most players in the game mode. To say otherwise is not just factually wrong. It misunderstands the nature of the game mode itself.