Riba.3271

Just to be clear, are you suggesting no change in transfer costs? Because if links will have same transfer cost as main server, all their purpose will be is just make the system uglier and harder to fathom for new people. If no, then people can still just stack 2 full servers vs 1 due to how transfer costs and full statuses fail with 2 servers linked together. Either case, removing the deader servers is better than some illogical carebear solution. If you want to not treat anyone unfairly, then delete all and just make completely new ones.

1 Hour is only short in current system where objective fights are rare and PPT doesn't matter. There used to be a system far back in the day back. when all of you were still egg yolks of a dinosaur. where servers fought only for themselves and everyone loved fighting inside keeps and towers.. Siege also managed to slow attackers down and progress wasn't just waiting for next relinking. It is really just that WvW underwent some seriously questionable changed that changed feeling of competitivess within certain locations and the rivalry against servers. Since then you rarely got to use siege or feel that it does anything... It isn't really even necessary, just bring numbers and outstat them.

True, the point of this thread was mostly to critize the introduction and faults of current linking system, then trying to replace it with another bad one and spending years for unnecessary development. Why not just make a few necessary changes to good old one that cemented WvW as the best RvR gamemode out there and got so many of us addicted? Glicko cliffs were bad and there were too many servers. Both which are easily fixed with 1-up-1-down and just deleting excess servers. Anet is acting like a father trying to make up for all the missed birthdays in 1 birthday, it just isn't possible. I know admitting the mistakes you made is much harder than covering them up, but one should really not take down what other people love to cover for their weakness. Be strong, anet, go with logic. Do not be afraid of the past.

This is going to sound like common sense but that is all you need for playing necro: Answer is that stand 1 step behind 5 players when moving backwards or standing still so they tank all the CoRs and Necro axe 3s. When pushing through enemy, press W key as hard as there will be almost no damage behind enemy. It is something akin to plane rising above the storm. Save all your 3 dodges for when you need them (2 + energy sigil). Always choose to stand bit to the left or right whichever is better, middle is never correct: Bad players will always place fields in the middle and they will prioritize targets in the middle of those fields. Your job is to stop anyone stupid enough to come within ~750 range from casting spells by maximing strips and chaining them with fears. Also, play speed runes when not raiding within your guild. They maximize your corrupts and give you ton of survivability. Otherwise other classes will leave you behind if you don't have sufficient superspeed. Scourge is useless if theres no firebrand around. So please stick with the tag.

1. Issue is that lot of gaming friends and guilds come together periodically on same servers and do not use external communications like discord. For example they might only play Summer and when they come up they'll be in random alliance or no way to contact people inside game before choosing the group they fight for. Lets say a commander comes back and sees state of their matchup being all closed commanders and no one defending anything, they won't be very motivated to take a go at it again. 2. Issue with this logic is that these people that are crying about servers being emptied, can transfer as well. So server and seeing people they haven't seen in a long time around holds meaning to them. Being in "equal server" doesn't necessarily mean they're happier as it is obvious they think server communities matter. 3. Well, this is mostly due to fault with the linking system. Let me explain why: Lets say at start of "linking system" each main server had 5 raiding guilds. Over time each of these main servers have lost at least 3 of those to smaller link servers, thus full status is reached 3 guilds easier and those servers can only fit 2 right now since amount of non transfer pugs is constant. Eventually one of those 2 is going to move away and they can only fit 1 before being full.. You can see how this will lead into split of all guilds on ex-empty servers and all pugs on another. Proof of this occurance is the fact that at start of linking system, very few players were from links and now the percentage is over 30. Now all servers go open sometimes but guilds don't have any reason to dish out 1800 gems for same matchups and to play with other strangers longterm. Final words: Anyways stacked alliances or stacked servers, it doesn't matter, you can't get rid of them. Id rather take the system where stacked servers fight other stacked servers in tier 1 and having a choice to go there rather than having no choice and flipping a coin whoever will landslide next matchup.

If you want longer battles, go siege a keep as the defenders won't fully wipe everytime and can keep trying. Oh wait, nvm, keep sieges are dead for several years now. Maybe fixing the siege and objective balance would help. You can tell from how guilds act, that taking things isn't exactly challenging in a fun way anymore. Well it isn't exactly competitive having to deal with lord, multiple respawns, tactics, stealth bombs, siege and considerable stat disadvantage at the same time. Back when lord was weak, tactics didn't exist and stealth bombing was extremely hard requiring a thief and waste of cooldowns, it was just siege and respawns. Yes, walls were stronger and catapults more expensive but waiting a few minutes to catapult something was never the issue since it paid itself back with fun instead of misery. Start by removing combat stats from claim buff by replacing it with some more magic find or supply stuff, and removing any easy ways to AoE stealth.

Honestly, I think the people who are for alliances underestimate how little most people communicate or play the gamemode. What do you think will happen if your favorite commanders will take over 3 months break from the game and comes back surrounded by strangers? Will he even contact you and even if does, will you tell him to spend 20 euros to transfer to their alliance linking just so he can play maximum 10 hours a week with your alliance as there won't be any pugmanding? Alliances just do not work because people will quit the game rather than wait couple of weeks for a new alliance linking. They want to play today, not in 2 weeks. Of course trusting game developers to arrange activity for everyone is a weight off your shoulders but unfortunately only person you can trust is yourself, and even if anet throws every server "30 hours of pug commanders" and couple of guilds, half of those pug commanders and guilds will be having a break and won't command or maybe might instead be leading in different language. It will truly be land of idiots as no one will have reason to change as the people critising will be gone after a few weeks... And no one within alliance can critize you acting like a toddler with dirty diapers or 13 year old edgelord as you can just get them kicked. What I have been trying to say is that stability of servers is good. Having 20 percent of your server being regular that requires you and people you're allianced with to be active, really isn't a great system that incentivises you to reach out to anyone or be reached out by. Of course no one wants WvW to be dead but if we had few enough single servers, we could have active WvW with stable population and goals as a community. Reason to log in even when alone or a new player, that is.

Single worlds will be healthy as long as it is possible to climb up in tiers, which 1-up-1-down and only 4 tiers enables unlike glicko system. So competitive environment where win matters no matter how small. In addition to this, transfer costs to Tier3-Tier4 servers will be much cheaper than in the past since 500 or 1000 gems to go there was a pipe dream in the past. Issue is Anet had a great system but knew they had too many servers, but went with the carebear solution of keeping all servers around while destroying the great systems stable matchmaking, transfer costs and server communities.

Old server system had problems from glicko rating and too many servers. There were propably lot of willing players at lower tiers but no commanders or groups that could the critical mass of players to sustain income of more players. If we keep 1-up-1-down and reduce amount of servers, it will be vastly better than having links with transfer sprees and lopsided matchups every 2 months

Well, WvW is mostly blobbers where cele isn't used due to hard split between supports and DPS, and pugs who run random stuff and can't bother with how hard cele is to craft. Roaming/dueling is kind of dead since supply, upgrade and claim buff changes. In addition to this gliding and mounts don't exactly make it easy to roam around. Point is, roamers that care about meta make maybe 5% of the WvW population. Rest run useless oneshot pewpew stuff or blob/guild around.

Depends: either you have lot of pug commanders and no enemies or too little "competent" pug commanders that are worth following (so discord and minstrel chrono/FB). Activitywise, Gunnars and Gandara (+ their links) are so stacked right now that I doubt they get many challenging fights.

Issue with alliances is that while you can bring an organised alliance and have control of players you play with, you will be relying on enemy servers to bring groups to fight you. As all groups that aren't in these alliances, ones that care slightly or lot about server or score, will be considerably less active thus there will be less fights. There will also be no incentive to train random people. It will most likely end up with groups running invisible closed tags with only their alliance in it, as every teammate outside their alliance will be gone next alliance linking, with very little enemies and WvW population diminishing over time. But alliances do fix matchmaking which is better than current server system which doesn't. Old server system also allowed player control since your servers playerbase was somewhat stable and transfers to higher tiers cost more. And you had better matchups and you could publicly get pug commanders to stop or increase PPT just by communicating with them. With random servers or alliances with you, you have no power which servers you face. Essentially current servers systems issues are that 1) links have different transfer cost and population status from main server, 2) it disincentivises people from logging in during hard times, 3) The matchups are completely lopsided 4-5 weeks out of 2 months and 4) almost 40% of playerbase changes every 2 months so any reaching out to new players will be very ineffective. In fact I would claim that in both current system and alliances people dislike anyone that is focused on public progress and teamwork rather than being only entertainment with a core carrying them. So current server system is worse than alliances but alliances aren't without a fault since while they do give you power to choose who you play with and fix matchmaking, they also make the gamemode rather dead since scoring and trying to improve future playerbase doesn't matter. Improved old server system (less servers and 1-up-1-down) would nurture WvW overtime. I am not against alliances as they will be improvement over garbage we have right now but original single server system with slight adjustments would be vastly better and keep WvW and multiple scenes alive longterm.

This actually isn't true because strong alliances do not PPT. With linking system these "strong players" usually just log in for hour or two to smack at each other either at borderland or EotM. Well this is mostly due to how objective balance and anet making fights inside keeps unfair, but this is how strongest groups act in WvW. They do not tag up to night or morning PPT (because it is mostly objective fights). Well this is true but they will have less to fight for and even for those commanders reason for tagging up depends on the timezone. While right now some popular guild commander might do couple of hours of PPT for their servers to face better opponents, it will be even rarer in alliance system. Not to mention they will have less people willing to tag up to kill and less knowledge of what opponents are on which alliance linking which makes them even less incentivised to tag up. Well of course it fails if there are too many servers for the amount of players and glicko system holding servers from going up and down tiers for months even if they win matchups. With 1-up-1-down and only 4 tiers of servers, old system will be improved vastly

From what I have seen is that alliances is that people will have even less incentive to tag up since all the commanders building their server or fighting to keep it alive will be gone. This leads to other commanders having less fights too and tagging up less too. It is same slow cycle towards death of WvW as links were. For example, right now if I tag up it will be like 30% perma Jade seas (our link players), who I do not care about training or entertaining. With alliances it will be over 80% random people that I would have to stick my face to their face and say "WILL YOU JOIN MY ALLIANCE" to have any meaningful progress. We all know this will be followed by their alliance talking badly behind the scenes for trying to steal their members as if I knew they were already part of alliance. Lol... People.. Whereas linking system is 5/10 system at best, alliances are 6/10 at best as populations will finally be balanced. Original server system was 10/10, just held down by glicko rating and too many servers. In the past if you wanted to transfer to stacked server, you not only needed to wait for the server to open up but then dish out 1800 gems. After that you fought other stacked servers in high tiers. Now you just go to the link for 500 gems and enjoy your megamonster server facerolling all low pop linkings. What I am trying to say is that while alliances are terrible illogical system, at least it is fair and better than current system that allows unlimited transfers and has terrible matchmaking. Original server system was obviously the best and most polished since it was spent half a decade designing taking model from other succesful RvR games, not slapped together during some company meeting and announced day after for sales.

Cele is just stupid on anything right now. 70+% of power damage of full berserker while being unkillable. Granted you can disengage from them or run heavy sustain+burst build to RNG victory with crits. I dont know which idiot thought giving already decent stat line 40%+ boon duration and 40%+ condi duration for free was fine.

It is how the WvW infrastructure is flawed due to keeping temporary system around too long. You can't have guilds + pugs on same server anymore since links took 40% of population capacity of main servers as people transferred to them over time. And why wouldn't they, it was cheaper and allowed you same matchups. Just delete link servers to fix the population caps.

It is good for game to have goals in it, and they do not always need to be easy. 300 Gold is couple of days doing pretty much anything other than whining at forums as long as you sell the mats. So still easy. You want to lead people? Show it with your ingame wallet.

WvW won't be becoming very popular with all the illogical systems still in place. Not like this . Anet, get yourselves together else you can't retain your playerbase since GW2 PvE won't be any better than other top of the line MMOs. Not talking about class balance btw. Don't expect any magic happening without magician: Success of the game is in your hands.

Deso only has voiceless commanders around that timezone. Only voice commanders that lead around that time is the JUST or whatever guy from WSR (or whatever bandvagoner server he is now) and Miko from ILL (German). You can always try joining [KISS] tho since they end their raids around 24:00 CEST and are rather blobby. Not sure which server they are right now but they're rather famous guild that has been around forever so shouldn't be hard to find out.

Well while there were skilled individual players, as soon as you dropped through the GvG stack at T2-T3 and my experience when facing T4 servers like Gunnars Hold, Augury Rock and Aurora Glade, they had nothing skilled even if they had large groups. Which wasn't bad, they could slap each other with noodle builds and have lot of fun fights against each other. Alliances have issue of giving up any knowledge of what timezone to log in (regarding both allies and enemies) for activity and reason to push through weaker timezones since points and server building won't be a thing. For example in old system GvG guilds chose communities willing to stay T2-T3 for most of the time so they get maximum amount of fights. With Linking and Alliances, any pug nightcrew linked with you would force you to transfer. Yes I already mentioned that glicko system was terrible as even if you won your matchup, there is a chance you lost glicko points. What I was suggesting was original server system with only 12 servers (renamed or lowest pop ones deleted) and 1-up-1-down matchmaking. This way any group transferring to T4 only needs to win a 2-3 matchups to be in T2 or T1.

I don't know if the balance would mess up larger fights but I have been thinking about sPvP amulet system but with multiple amulets. For example 4 amulets, each contributing 25% to your total stats. So you could have mixture of stats, flexibility and build variety. 2 of the amulets would have all stat combinations available (minstrel, trailblazer, cele, marauder etc) whereas the other 2 would have at least 1 offensive 3-stat combinations available (Cleric, berserker, Apocathery, soldier etc). So 50% of your total stats could be anything you want and rest 50% have to be 3-stat semi-offensive gear. Of course the more amulets there would be, the better since you would have more build variety. 4 is just simplified example of how they could control people going too tanky.

Disadvantages of 7 day matchups: Alliance linkings and relinking servers take a while to settle to their correct tier meaning too many weeks wasted playing unwinnable/faceroll matchups Matchups get stale around half point Advantage of 7 days matchups: Server strength doesn't vary as much since player amounts playing friday to tuesday is different from tuesday to friday Anyways I would test out 3.5 days matchup system where every 2nd reset is "morning" reset (not sure how popular it would be). Friday reset would stay same and next reset would be exactly 3.5 days from it (84 hours)

It is actually simple, just fix the WvW infrastructure closer to the old one where you had strategic decisions available and were meaningful, small scalers also had more to do: Watchtower shouldn't activate unless contested. Watchtower limits too much map from roamers passing to danelon and Rogues and stuff. Then they just get ganked by 5 people. Circumventing that usually also means multiple enemis. It also punishes new players from exploring WvW as learning watchtowers might take a while. Dolyaks should carry less supply, escort buff should be lowered from 90%->50%, and keeps/castles should require more dolyaks. Small scalers play around camps and should be able to overcome defenders and be more meaningful. Once keeps or castles are T3, there is no scene anymore since defenders don't care about dollies at that point. Minstrel stat should be nerfed. You can see gods of the arena running around with 1 minstrel + 1 DPS. Only way to match them is bringing 1 minstrel player too and then neither side can kill another. Reduce concentration effectiveness in WvW. This will also fix blob fights. Claim buff should be reduced considerably (+120 total max).You having +100 power, +100 precision + 100 vit, +100 toughness vs enemy having it is around 15% damage and 15% survivability difference. So 2 runesets. Roaming shouldn't be just defending and dueling should be fair again. Tense rivalries between similarly skilled players should be allowed to develop instead of owner of nearest location deciding who wins.. Shield generators should be reworked, siege vs siege damage buffed and wall/gate hp buffed. Shield gens blocking treb/cata fire makes most fight baiting or supply draining tactics obsolete. You can't even slow down enemy blob with siege anymore since siege vs siege damage was halved and wall/gate HP reduced in the past. My solution to reviving roaming isn't balance changes but simply giving you more things to do, more enemies and making everything you do meaningful while giving you possibility of tense rivalries to incite emotions. Note that all these things were already in the game years before being made obsolete by massive HoT changes that were never revisited.

The single server system accomoditated that since overstacked servers fought other overstacked servers and stayed in high tiers. Whereas with World linking system (and alliances) the matchups will be completely garbage first 3 weeks. With old system groups had control over going where similarly skilled groups are for fights and faced them more regularly. Of course GvGing, open raiding or following commanders is more enjoyable where you have more options of enemies and allies. Overall, let people stack. Just keep tiers less as tier 4 won't be completely empty and there is a chance for some servers to climb a few tiers from there with 1-up-1-down instead of taking 3 months of building glicko rating. Overcoming internal server drama and problems actually gives long-term purpose and shouldn't be reset every few months with new players. Typically lower tiers had smaller groups and less skilled players, which is something people willingly wanted instead of dealing with tryhards and 5 people showing up to defend a camp. Not everyone wants a 25+ man constant EB crowd on their and enemy side. Having a choice of playing lower tiers or working hard to grow them up, isn't a bad thing. About glicko system. It was problematic itself and shouldn't be back. I remember spending 2 months on AG+Blacktide winning every matchup trying to go up 2 tiers. It was just impossible to make new servers.

Some servers have been full for years mostly because linkings changed population algorithm. There was exodus of several hundreds of people from each high populated servers to links leading to full status being reached with lower and lower population. The servers that didn't lose as many people are essentially the baseline for full status. So by removing link servers, you can fit more players and guilds in your server and there will be more incoming traffic. Yes, there was SFR on EU and Blackgate on NA. But Jade quarry could give Blackgate run for their money. Exactly same is happening with link system, where Desolation lost only like 1 matchup last linking and Gunnars hold will lose 0 this linking. Full status does nothing these days since people can just transfer to the link so linking system is just worse regarding this matter Well, this doesn't exactly mean unfair matchmaking if lot of servers in highest tier did the same. Sounds more like guilds had more fights and pugs had more commanders to follow? While scrubs could fight scrubs at lower tiers. You can do same with link servers (Blackgate still wins everything!). Alliances does fix the population difference but removes any regular timezones, quite a bit of acquitances and reason to log in unless farming bags. Usually you get through hard times with expectations people will get better doing so but as most players change with alliances/links, it is better to just log out. Each game has people who refuse to lose and will stack a team. Thankfully you could dodge this by finding a comfortable staple server in tier 2 or tier 3. Obviously if commanders weren't flaky people who often lead a lot some months and very little others, such matchmaking would work. So main issue with alliances is that you have no way of saying after new alliance linking that the commanders that are supposed to be "linked with you" are gone, whereas you could tell it within your server. For about half commanders main thing that incentivises them to tag up is knowledge there will be similarly skilled activity. For example piken has a daycrew thus you will be aiming to tag up around that time as it will be more fun. With alliances you have to learn it again every 2 months and run maybe dozen raids with nothing to challenge you. So essentially while primetime will most likely not be affected much, other timezones will be more dead as not only is server building irrelevant, it is also unlikely there will be any enemies.