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.

Defy pain used to be ok-ish for a front-link tanky build in zerg vs zerg, having it activate on a first push or a get out of jail free card if you mess up. With such a long cooldown though, you can't rely on it being ready for the next engagement. So yeah, waste of time.

Gandara have a regular voice tag on Fridays and Saturday nights from 10pm CST until the very early hours. Hit and miss for other nights though. We're closed, but linked with Fort Ranik (for the time being).

Great breakdown. Think we all feel 100 blades is underpowered, but great to see it quantified like this. Not sure I agree with the recommendation - think the skill could use a more interesting rework than reopening the old 'bulls charge > frenzy > 100b' combo, but that's just my preference.

Amen. There may be internal metrics which Anet has, but from what all our player see anecdotally, we should not be considered even close to full. It's hugely discouraging. And in this state, the game punishes you for playing the game mode, in that continued participation keeps the server full. I've been impressed by the discipline of the community in keeping out of wvw, and do hope that once we do open up, guilds still have players. Or that the relatively small number of players staying out of the game has been enough to move the needle in terms of 'voting with your feet'.

Absolutely this. It's pretty hard, and unrewarding, to be an unguilded wvw player. Every server has their own points with low coverage, and in the stage of life of the game mode, you won't be able to login at any time and find a public tag to join. Am also on Gandara, and it has a remarkable close-knit community, with multiple excellent wvw guilds who are super-fun to run with. Most run between 7pm-9pm GMT, so try typing in map chat around then. We are very quiet outside prime-time EU, though.

I happen to think siege is in a relatively good place at present. I'm of the opinion that a 50-man squad with 500+ supply should have a low barrier of entry to enter a tier 2 or tier 3 tower/keep. That's the benefit of having loads of players and accumulated lots of supply. Shield generators help better leverage that advantage, rather than enabling defenders to turtle to quite such an extent. This thread made me think how infrequently we ever see treb wars, for example on Alpine Hills, where siege defense was so OP that the only option was to treb from half a map away. About the most boring thing in the world. Now attackers with such an excess of supply can bypass that tedious fight with shield gens. That said, I've seen 5-10 players who are prepared, with siege disablers, invulnerable fortification tactic, trebs draining supplies, catas behind doors, loads of arrow carts, fend off such an attack amany times. Fully accept that it's a far higher skill/knowledge threshold than facerolling catas against a wall, but is doable and can be rewarding. Eventually though, the only real defense against a big squad with supply is a group of your own (even a smaller group, if supported by good siege usage). And if you don't have that, I hope you find a better suited tier or link (hope...).

Super-tough problem to solve. I played in asian hours on US servers ("night crew") for several years, and now play EU prime on EU servers. Off-hours players clearly shouldn't have their experience hampered in any way though. My idea would be to lessen the impact on scoring that holding structures provides on maps with low playercounts. For example, tir 3 SMC only gives the full 30 points per tick if both enemy servers have full maps. If both enemies are half-full, give 15 points. Bottom out at 10 points per tick. There's still value in owning a t3 SMC, there's still a waypoint, but you get fewer rewards if you're not actually doing anything with SMC. As has been said elsewhere, that an empty map can tier up itself and gain increased PPT is also problematic. Auto-upgrades should not be a thing.

I used the default load out to do roam around the open world for 30 minutes. Haven't done a deep dive or theorycrafted at all, so observations are very high-level. Not going to talk too much about performance either, as number values can be balanced relatively easily. On the positive side, the Willbender does feel like a monk-style class, which you're obviously going for. In that sense, one of the goals has been met. Of far more concern to me, and I think others have echoed it, is the feel of the class in combat. Practically everything except the elite skill feels weak, lacking in oomph or satisfaction. Rather than being able to dive around the battlefield dealing awesome damage as in the profession video, I felt like I was diving around and... waving aimlessly in front of an enemy. Ultimately, it didn't feel fun enough to play over other professions.

For years we've had mesmer sweeps; and mesmer players got extremely good at hiding in objectives, and have some limited access to stealth too. It felt pretty fair though; if you spent the time to look you'd realistically find them, but if you were careless you'd be punished (this was pre-reveal buff on capture though). Once thieves got access to a portal, defenders became obliged to do a sweep of a captured structure which dramatically outweighs the effort a thief needs to put in, combining years of mesmer hiding places with strong stealth ability and fast movement when you do catch them. God forbid the enemy broke into inner and the thief went to hide while defenders successfully repelled attackers. Options for the defender are at least 5 people roaming around a pretty large area (particularly Air keep on DBL), or 1 person perma scouting inner. This is not fun and traps are really limited in their counter play. It was never a good idea to give thieves the ability to portal others. Remove it please.

Removing a link from Gandara, and giving a link to Desolation, is frankly absurd. I do not have statistics, I do not have cumulative played hours across each server. But the first hand insight I do have is just overwhelmingly such that Desolation's population far exceeds Gandaras. I would dearly love to see any data presented to support these linking decisions (such as the charts around Blackgate's population several years ago), but I can't begin to imagine such a logic is working as intended. As Kruimjelte said, this just stinks of Anet trying to bleed some money from people transferring. Such a pity, as a competitive WvW mode with a hint of consideration would bring in more players than you'd be making from at most a few hundred people paying $10.