James.3982

PREPARING FOR BETA (Lack of motivation) and matchup balance Coming into this June beta test, the lack of motivation to organize was noticeable. Coming from a big server community like RoS. There was no significant effort to organize teams. Few days before the beta start couple simple chat messages were sent on discord and couple lucky people managed to find their way into Kazo -based alliance group and I'm guessing a handful of players joined another Alliance mentioned on the discord a week earlier. I'm guessing a big chunk of players were left outside organized beta guilds and went with whatever guilds they had available. Myself, I went with my old friends from [QWOP]. [QWOP] = aka. [Beta] was sorted into Grenth's Door -team with their 100+ experienced WvW players. Surely one of the most stacked WvW guild made for this beta. Trough RNG, Grenth's Door gained other experienced WvW guilds/gamers and the first matchup felt incredibly easy, outnumbering and often just having more skilled players too. 2nd matchup started 16th - and we were set to fight vs. new teams. Gathered 50 players on discord but called the Friday reset 30minutes later - when there was nothing to be found on empty maps. Hopefully we'll be able to set up some smaller squads trough the week and find stuff to do. For the next beta even - hopefully with Alliances implemented in game. I'd love for you to make sure there is enough communication and even "hype" for the upcoming beta with now Alliances implemented. Repeating the same beta event multiple times with no visible progress to us players isn't motivating enough for people to organize like in the first ever beta event. This beta week has most likely been one of the more unorganized ones in all servers. Not sure if it matters to the feedback you're trying to gather from testing, having more organized teams and guilds (?). In game mails we got for the Alliance pick were good, do that again - but with proper notice so people have time to pick their alliances/guilds (at least 5 days). Would you consider sticking to the beta for more than 2 weeks? Since I feel like even with the old system, it takes 3-4 matchups before more balanced WvW tiers are created based on server performance/population. With beta only lasting a week or two, you risk just RNGing people into unbalanced/boring/empty matchups.

Spellbreaker in WvW Feedback. I feel like you're half a year behind in state of Spellbreaker in WvW. Most 20-40 player squads see 1-4 spellbreakers in them these days due to it not being the most effective class at any role. (Maybe the general nerf in boonstrip will balance this out and make it more popular class again?) Winds of Disenchantment: Lowered the duration from 5 seconds to 4 seconds in WvW only. GOOD CHANGE = Less area denial, promotes melee heavy fights. 4 Second duration already gives the desired effect and the extra second only removes the lingering area denial. Break Enchantments: Reduced the number of boons removed from 2 to 1 in WvW only. MAYBE TOO MUCH NERF = I feel like this goes against what you said on stream, when nerfing long range boonstrip (nullfield, scourge) in order to promote more melee gameplay and risk taking. Break Enchantments is a melee boonstrip skill and requires a push. Leave this as it is - or add few seconds to the cooldown. This should potentially balance Spellbreaker on par with Scourges in strips after the nerfs go trough.

Devs, you were gettin so much better with communication 😄 Two day notice is too short - especially when it was mentioned how "in game mails" helped reduce the number of wrong world selections. Well, now we're bound to have players miss their team picks coz they don't see the beta coming or are unable to login before reset. Also - the world selection panel will confuse people. I assume it does not work, since it's not at all how Alliances are supposed to work? In game mails and more announcements on social media/forums please o/ and clarification on the world select window.

Sure, in short: Better matchup ACTIVITY balance - MORE Pride in communities/Alliances. Server Pride/Communities: Since you played from 2012, you probably remember when the servers actually meant something. Back when you would teleport to PVE, Lion's Arch, and ask for help in EBG. Nowadays server communities mean less and majority of the players changing homes do that to: Find more competition, more opponents and enemy activity - or stronger server communities to join and win more fights and rewards. Server pride or server events mean less and less. Alliances are supposed to bring back some of that pride and meaning behind YOUR TEAM. Since now you can create your own alliance and train and improve to challenge others. Next up Anet has told that they'll be working on WvW rewards - hopefully finding good rewards for well performing alliances. Server Balance (For balanced activity in matchups!): Right now - all Anet has are Worlds. They look into player activity in certain World and pair them together as evenly as possible. With the Alliance system, you would have: Worlds - Alliances - individual guilds outside alliances - individual players outside guilds. These options give you a lot more freedom to try and balance Worlds/Matchups to have as even activity as possible. (or even reduce the number of worlds if there is not enough action to go around.) Balancing the fighting power of an alliance is impossible, that is up to the players. Stacking will still happen, but activity of each world is way easier to balance. Hope that helps o/ There is no perfect system, but it'll be much better than what we have right now.

Love you buddy.

Actually a decent idea too. Adding a 6th option below the guild choices in the WvW tab for original Server, like: 6: [ ] No Alliance guild. But I would like to be treated as former "Far Shiverpeaks" member. For the system to pair up the player who choose to not pick a guild, but want to stick together with parts of the old communities. It does not have to be an "auto guild" at all. What I don't like is the possibility of the system not making your wish come true. That would be a massive bummer to anyone trying to affect their allegiance - and then being told "nah, you go elsewhere while your buddies can fit to world X". Hard to estimate how many players there are on servers who would not join an alliance/guild and want to pick an option like this.

No need to belong to a active WvW guild: You don't have to be a member of a WvW guild. You can join a server community guild - or decide to flag your PvX guild to stay with your buddies from there. This is not turning the game mode into a GvG, not by a longshot, nor was that ever an Anet vision. The fact is that the since 2014 megaservers the server communities have never been the same. There is no more teleporting to Lion's Arch to call for help in the borderlands - or sharing the game with your servermates both in WvW and PvE. With alliances there could be more pride and meaning behind belonging to a larger WvW community again. "Filler material" None is being used as "filler material" - but every single player has a chance to choose who they want to spend their time playing WvW with (community guild, roamer guild, GvG guild mates, casual PvX guild mates etc.) In the case you don't have a WvW community to play with, you will be paired with other alliances/players/guilds for you to find people you want to play with. Once you find people you enjoy the game with - simply join their alliance and be together. (For free, no gem transfer prices needed!) EotM and GvG scene: EotM was purely a PvE karma train and leveling up zerg. It did not have any competitive or strategic edge to it. And GvG does still exist - the fights are now held in the EotM arena. On top of that there is also the EU Inhouses discord with +1000 members who organize arena fights weekly. The players there are the same guys who tag up and organize events in the borderlands and EBG - one part of the most active core of WvW players.

If any players want to stick together they can join a community guild, make a new guild, join an existing guild as "friends" to tag along. There are options. You don't have to commit and join a raiding WvW guild to be a part of an Alliance / World. The WvW system will be revamped to work around Guilds, no point arguing over this part. There ain't a single solution that would satisfy all players. I said in my post that I believe most of the servers currently experience clearly worse WvW gameplay experience and activity compared to just a handful of active/stacked realms. This new guild based system has potential to improve the game for majority of the players. And to my understanding the matchmaking system is only one part of the upcoming changes to WvW. Rewards are being handled next - maybe there will be changes to Scoring and Maps too later in line. (But changing a map is a lot of work.) (Also, I'm not re-distributing roamers as some live stock. Just saying that players who are not teaming up with a guild in my opinion should be equally divided between realms for server balance / and for them to find new communities to join if they want. Or stay by themselves and be re-moved to a new World every X months Anet will do the shuffle.)

Feedback, no dooming and glooming and kitten this kitten that. Coming from 5000+ hours of WvW, being a former leader of two WvW guilds, officer/class lead and member in few more, open tag commander, training event organizer and a pug. Having been part of/played on different server communities with varying populations, coordination and activity [AG, RoF, SFR, FSP, WSR, Dz and now back in AG]. To give context to the feedback - I'm a zerg player, guild player, (GvG player) - I love 20-30 player voice coordinated raids and enjoy overcoming challenges and opposing guilds/blobs. WvW Guild players form a major part of the active WvW community and offer most of the organized events and commanders in the game mode. I don't roam, so you won't get a roamer's PoV from me. Alliance beta feedback from [Pleb] Skrittsburgh: As far as I know, the world consisted of [Pleb] alliance of former WSR players + friends, 3 other actively raiding WvW guilds (20ish members each) and free agent pugs. We had open mic leads daily, often multiple trough the evening and night. Very short queue times during prime time and active [Pleb] discord trough the week to communicate with each other. 1) Matchup Balance. To be honest, I've not cared about winning a matchup or PPT in years so I paid very little attention to this. What interests me more, is how the PvP balance felt. In the past different servers have very varying levels of coordination and player experience - this leads to uneven zerg warfare, and getting stomped by an team of experience players is no fun. It discourages players and commanders from playing the game mode and promotes stacking into selected few servers. As server transfer is considerably easier - than it is to train and bring together a mediocre fighting server. By Comparison to previous months in Aurora Glade (+WSR) the FUN for me was increased tenfold. There were challenging and evenly matched fights throughout the week. To be perfectly honest, [Pleb] is stacked with experience. But it was still nowhere close to how it felt couple years ago on Stacked WSR server - where every single reset raid would end in boredom within the first hour as the level of experience was too overpowering [Kill, LAYS, FAIR + Friends blob]. It was close enough this time, that I could see any of the three Worlds in that matchup being able to compete in zerg vs. zerg PvP depending on day and effort. (I do not have the Kill/Death ratios for the matchup, but I'd guess the numbers were more balanced than in some of the current matchups.) 2) Prime time Activity in WvW compared to the server I spent the last 3-4 months in was a MASSIVE upgrade. Evenings in WvW went from struggling to find even a single opponent to fight with - to having at best 5-6 guilds on the same map brawling it out. Evening queues, if there were any, were below 10 players. 3) Off Prime time activity felt very normal compared to the usual server system. Daytime consisted mostly of non-voice commanders or roamers. There still isn't much of a reason to compete 24/7 for control and matchup victory, bringing more activity to off hours. 4) Community aspect. Many former AG players let out a sigh of relief once they were united back to the old server, I heard many voice their opinion that the alliance system had broken the communities and made WvW feel empty and boring. My own experience with [Pleb] was of course the exact opposite, with an already prepared community I had a blast. In order for Alliances to work, the old communities need to be broken and re-made into the new system. Doing this, it is very important that every world gets an EQUAL AMOUNT OF FREE AGENT PLAYERS as these are the PvX players, roamers, casuals and returning WvW players that are essential pool of recruits for the alliances and guilds to sustain and grow their player bases. Also, unbalanced amount of free agents creates unbalanced matchups in player coordination and skill. Which brings us to... 5) Needed in-game features for community re-organization. - in game WvW Alliance panel containing: Alliance chat to announce events, open tags and information. Alliance "Crest" or other in game ways to tell Alliances from apart and push for Alliance Pride (willingness to improve, host events together and something to fight for.) - Reward System. I won't go into detail here, but well performing Worlds should be rewarded with something that carries over to the PvE side of the game too. This is to promote WvW and give reason to step into the game mode. Don't make it too hard to acquire, more like something that encourages PvX players to step in, join in the action and PvP, meet new people and find fun experiences in WvW that will hopefully bring them back again. 6) WvW (imo) consists of three core pillars: Leaders: the commanders and community leaders, who build events and bring people together, provide content and experiences. It's crucial that Alliances (once ready) give these players tools to organize events and communities in game. Being a leader in the game requires effort and as time goes on we have less and less of these guys. Guilds: The class leaders, experienced players, theorycrafters, veterans of the game mode. Bring the core and make the game mode feel exciting and competitive. It's crucial that these players have opponents to compete against and reason to keep coming back to the game (challenge, reward, Alliance pride). PvX Players: Eventually every player and leader will quit the game or take a break - we need fresh new blood. These players need the reason to step into the game mode in the first place and then find the experienced players and leaders to guide them to the FUN and challenge. End Word: Overall I see loads of potential in the system. WvW has been in a stale state for years and needs this revamp to stay enjoyable for ALL the worlds - not just the select few stacked ones. Players should not have to pay gems and server transfer in search for good WvW content - as your experience in WvW is highly dependent on which server you play for. Currently I'd estimate 3-4 EU servers provide more players, more commanders, more experience and more FUN to be had during the matchup. Will there be stacked Alliances in the future, 100%. But guild/player limitations in each Alliance should promote having multiple alliances competing vs. each other (along with rewards and in-game ways to organize the Alliances to perform better). Waiting for the next beta - hopefully with guild Alliances this time o/ -Bassett

Class I played most during the beta - only in WvW and PvP. 1) Blight and Potions. Adding the throw element and blight bonuses on potions was a game changer. Potions went from feeling dull to active skills. Blight is really hard to keep track of from a white number/small grey icon on boon bar. IMO I'd love there to be a green outline on a utility skill as the blight lvl needed for bonus effect is active (much like the current combo field indicator on skills, but green.) Also just change the icon/font/colors - make it more visible. 2) Boon support / DPS hybrid in WvW. Harbinger has potential to be strong boon support, but in WvW it does not offer enough imo. Could you add flat out grp healing on the heal skill (when blight lvl is met) or maybe a AoE stunbreak on elite skill, to save those boonstripped and trapped allies with stun break/all boons. If released like this, I'm afraid Scourge will just outperform Harbinger hard in WvW ^^

3 restarts and 4 attempts later, game just works. Did nothing different.

Same issue: Logged in fine, got into a map. Then realized I have dx11 and arcdps on. Turned off dx11, exit game, deleted the 2 arcdps files. Now starting gw2: Music plays and nothing else happens. The game monitor is also "frozen" - as in Gw2 is blocking the use of mouse on my main monitor.

Was always supportive, frequently took time to help others out. One of the biggest supporters of the guild. Love and strength to all of you who are touched by his passing.