adammantium.8031

Amen to reusing pve maps. We've seen that when there's a new feature or event added to WvW, participation spikes. There is interest for what's truly special here. It would be incredible if Anet experimented with repurposing pve maps with some - hopefully - low effort additions of keeps and towers. They could then drop them into a rotation in place of Edge of the Mist to get player feedback without 'disrupting' the ongoing competitive WvW. Of course new maps doesn't fix everything. But in terms of reinvigorating WvW, this is the lowest hanging fruit there is, and it drives me spare they never do it.

Maybe you're well intentioned, but we should incentivize pve players to come play WvW to enjoy this unique game mode, not to fish. There's limited space on each map, and filling it with players just fishing - not fighting - would reduce opportunities for people who want to actually fight. Siege turtles attacking a keep might be funny, imagining them surrounding the keep in EB, but hard to see beyondit being a meme.

I'd hazard a guess that it's been on a backlog for years and years, but has worked 'well enough' to never get prioritized. However, since the staff #3 skill is built on top of it and there's attention on it now, there's justification to fix. And I wouldn't be surprised if there's some internal politics that make it easier to fix rush, than adjust staff #3 to use bulls charge or some other model. So, thanks staff #3.

Sounds a sensible decision. World restructurings are the piece which should bring improved matchups with more event coverage across timezones. I'm personally cautiously optimistic and excited for this. Alliances were a cool idea, but in practice, pretty close to what we already can do and did do during beta's with existing tools. On Gandara, we have a community guild ("Dara") and all the main guilds (bar some fight guilds) joined that one for the purposes of being together in restructuring, but then repped their original guilds afterwards. I would prefer some 'light' work to make this easier, such as a 6th guild slot, would be far cheaper to develop than building a hierarchy for guilds (an alliance). Particularly having seen all the bugs from the world restructuring betas.

Agree with everyone about staff 3's targeting being pretty horrible. Rush skills in general are just terribad. Otherwise, this felt a lot of fun. Looking forward to it being on live.

Oh what genius 🙂

Love that you actually came back a month later 🙂 Anet does a horrible job telling new players how to contribute to the 'mist war'. Taking (and holding!) objectives is what the game mode is meant to be about. If you're proactively flipping camps and joining with other players to flip towers, the content will, population balance aside, come to you. I am in complete agreement that there needs to be more done to encourage fighting around these objectives. Flipping them as PVE is content is no fun at all, but the incentives to defend are low. This has been the perennial problem of WvW's lifetime IMO, that the game mechicanics don't quite do enough to push players into combat with each other. Siege is probably ok. The alterative in the past was a few AC's being able to fend off a huge zerg, forcing them to move out of range and drop catas, and then you turn into siege wars which is frankly boring. Balance, yeah... we all know that's a mess. Last thing I'd say, if you're a thief, mesmer, willbender, and you're trying to roam and see me, sorry. I'm just not going to waste my time. Too many classes are no fun to fight.

Agree about inventory space. There's just too much junk being thrown at you for playing WvW. Organizing your inventory for 10 minutes isn't "fun".

Alliances feel like a victim of merciless prioritization for years on end. Obviously, nobody has been working on this for 4 years, or however long it has been. Any attention has been in fits and starts. WvW doesn't have as large a playerbase as PVE. If you're looking to grow your game and generate revenue, you build more features which engage those players, such as raids, dungeons, expansions, skins. I don't doubt alliances was picked up with the best of intentions, as can be seen from Floyd's enthusiasm upon joining the team and the brief upturn in communication and movement. Maybe someone thought there was an opportunity to grow the game in WvW at that time. But with the imminent launch of a new expansion, these guys were pulled off the project and/or moved on and were not replaced. WvW was simply deprioritized. It's a painful message to deliver to your playerbase, and a can that must feel very easy to kick down the road. It's pretty kitten cowardly to not be up front about it though, when project management fails so badly so often. Alliances feel as likely to happen as updates to GW1 at present. Just a charitable bit of work done by some committed devs after hours.

Lack of support for guild vs guild combat. The days long ago of zerg busting and community-driven gvg events were glorious, but short-lived. A lot of serious players lost interest when that didn't go anywhere. Disappointment over alliances delay. Saw a good number of people come back and get hyped for alliances years ago, but just lose patience (obviously) and left again. That said, I'm not down with the doom-mongering premise of this post. There are still plenty of players as the game is doing well as a whole. And I am broadly hopeful that alliances will solve population problems.

World restructuring gets my vote. Improving matchups and building new communities is critical to whatever long-term future this game mode might have Other items would all be great, no denying, but there has to be a priority.

OP asked about WvW, and I assume zerg, so I have to disagree with what your commanders/squadmates are saying. Spellbreaker's boon strip is still very strong, beaten only by a chrono and sometimes necro. Winds remains a crucial tool in fights. In melee engagements a SPB can have damage potential that can easily put us in the top 10 of damage. True, at range we just stand around doing a whole lot of not much... You mentioned longbow - in zerg vs zerg can be very effective, see below. Of course we're not perfect, but your assessment is way off.

This was a long time ago, and my glasses may be rose-tinted. But it certainly did make the matchups at the time more meaningful (to the point where some commanders totally burnt out). Could be a fun event to compliment the eventual release of alliances, but one thing at a time.

Hard to access, short duration... not really a problem IMO.

To me, an objective being contested should indicate that it's "under attack". A single player on an objective does not constitute a serious attack. Guards are too sensitive/low risk to constitute any serious attack worthy of a reaction from players, wasting a defender's time. As suggested by others: only contest an objective when walls and/or gates are damaged. I'd suggest a threshold of 98% before going contested. This would mean either multiple players attacking the gate, or at least some siege damage. I'd hope the outcome of this would actually: - encourage sneaking of objectives, as the attackers won't know you're there until you're already damaging doors. - make scouting more valuable, as you can be more certain something is there. - make objectives flip more easily, encouraging more fights over objectives. I believe this would be a really low-hanging fruit for the quality of life of WvW, but we've obviously seen no changes to this system in years and years, so not holding my breath.