blp.3489

Look for the silver lining, you get to play with your guild starting on the 12th for the duration of the WR beta without paying for a transfer.

"But servers do have identities." In the future community guilds will have identities, and core players, etc. We have to realize that guilds will have an additional role to play under WR, some of the new guilds will be different from typical current guilds in that their main purpose will be to establish groups that want to play together. A lot of people will continue to play with/represent their current guild but will set a community guild as their wvw guild in the guild interface. That community guild isn't that different from the planned alliances, two or more guilds that want to ally themselves and play together will have all of their members set one guild as their wvw guild. The biggest difference will be that the individual members of each guild will all have to set their own wvw guild instead of the guild leader moving the whole guild into an alliance. A second difference is that there isn't necessarily a single Alliance Leader determining how many players from a guild can join the alliance, when two guilds want to play together they can create a guild and give both guild leaders, and possibly others as well, the ability to add players. Until the guild reaches 500, which is a lot of players, the participating guilds can handle their own adds and removes. I suspect the players that will be most affected by WR are the individual players without a wvw guild who may be placed in a completely different team with no overlap in players at all and hence no familiar faces or the faces they are familiar with being on opposing teams. Guilds, of various sizes and compositions are going to play a much more central role in WR, and we are all going to have to adjust. I very much doubt it will be the end of wvw though.

I think this would be very interesting. Then again, I think a special event with no stability boon would be a hoot. Give the firebrand players a week of freedom and remind the composition oriented players what a huge advantage they have over pugs.

Just a wild guess but, if they want the next beta to start at the start of a season then switching to 4 weeks now gives them more options for the start date, and then if they decide to go live permanently they can do so sooner without messing up a season.

There's an option: Melee Attack Assist — Enables collision detection between your character and your target (e.g. making the target "solid") when you are both directly facing each other, preventing you from running through them so that you stay in melee range. If that could be expanded to collision detect with allies too that would be an interesting short duration event. Actually you could apply it to enemies too. But probably the collision detection with more than a single target would be computationally costly. And it would open up to griefing with players able to block other players. It would certainly be more realistic and would open a lot of new possibilities, but maybe too much of a departure from the current game.

The last update says that they have already added time zones to the team-building algorithm:

How about you get your participation extended by a small amount of time when you do a significant amount of damage to a player while keeping a list of the last five players you got participation from, and you don't get further participation from engaging those players. Clear players from the list after some period of time long enough to minimize exploitation. You could also extend the participation of the player receiving the damage, perhaps again keeping a list of the most recent players you got an extension from. Naturally, players using stealth are excluded from gaining this type of participation, maybe for N seconds before and after using stealth. 😉

I wonder if there is a way to make people care about/more explicitly reward winning the 2 hour skirmishes? Or at least making gains, or minimizing losses to the extent possible, during the 2 hour skirmishes. If we accept that, beyond manipulating the 1up/1down system, people don't care that much about the match scores, and indeed are a little frustrated that anything they accomplish during their play time is more than likely to just be lost during off hours, maybe we need to narrow the focus down to a timeframe that is closer to the time that players are online for and at least have some degree of agency over?

You have far far more experience with this than I so I may be out in left field, but... Are you sure that the dynamics of the guilds that you are familiar with compare to potential 500 player super-guilds that could potentially start being built once WR is in place? Who knows if it will happen but there is the potential for quite a few very large guilds being created and matches involving those guilds might be quite different in scope than with typical guilds currently. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't imagine that you are dealing with more than 500 of the players on your server anyway?

Glad to be wrong then! I foresee some fun!

I could very well be wrong but I don't the the guild hall changes include "every other player is an enemy" capability. It would be a great option to have.

It is also quite obvious that if you allow players to select the best team for them and their friends that you will get bandwagoning and imbalanced matches. Whether being limited to selecting the best guild for you is a downgrade vs the current problems is far from obvious.

As far as I know every player has a world/server they selected at account creation or transferred to, so yes, I believe everyone is assigned to a team today. It is certainly possible that the team making algorithm will assign every account a team and maybe they'll do that. It is also possible that they will only assign guilds and individual players that have played wvw - possibly within some set timeframe, and then assign players and/or guilds with no wvw history when they first enter wvw. If they wait until they first play then it opens the possibility of adding them to teams that are currently not performing well. Whether that would be a benefit is hard to predict. As far as I know the current system assigns everyone on a server to a team without regard to playing time. I don't see a reason to conclusively presume that the new system will assign every account to a team at the start of each system.

Can you not just substitute "guild" for "server" and work on organizing your guild, including recruiting players - perhaps especially from your current team, and help with training the guild members? All the results of your efforts with your guild will still be with you after the next round of team making. With up to 500 players per guild there is a lot of room for building up a group, you probably wouldn't be able to work with more than 500 members of your server anyway.

You have a point. But... 😁 Are all 12 million or whatever players going to be assigned to teams regardless of whether they have ever played wvw? If not, will they be assigned a team when they first enter wvw, even if it is mid-season? It is unlikely to be common, but what about a guild made up of players that have never played wvw but have set their wvw guild? Will that guild be assigned to a team at start of season?

(emphasis added by me). I for one will be hoping that they will realize that team transfers are the root of some of the biggest and most intractable problems we have, and decide not to ever implement them. I'm not really sure what the compelling legitimate use case for unrestricted transfers is. I can see where if you are new and want to join to play with some friends then you should be able to join their guild prior to first entering wvw and get placed with them, that might help with recruiting new players. If you are an existing player I don't think you should be able to specify what team you get transferred to. There could be an option where you and the people you so desperately want to play with collectively create a new guild and the guild members are transferred together to a team that the team building algorithm picks. Of course that team is likely to be one of the lower performing teams in order to promote balance. I was thinking of tiers as a system for moving teams into more closely matched matches rather than as a competition to reach the top tiers. As I said, we can hope that the teams will be so well balanced that the one up/one down system just shuffles teams to provide variety in matches, but I was thinking of the issues with the current system where uneven teams get randomly matched up and the one up/one down system shuffles teams into hopefully more even matches. I'm guessing that the team building algorithm will be far from perfect and that there will be lopsided matches that will get shuffled into more even matches, and that too short of a season might not optimize the overall evenness of matches. Actually, one of the more interesting things to see will be how much "dynamic" balancing occurs. If a guild has never participated in wvw starts participating half way through a season, will the team get assigned at that point in time or will all guilds be somehow assigned teams at the start of the season even if they have never participated? Likewise for individuals without guilds. Depending on how dynamic participation is there seems to be a lot of room for updating the teams during the season as new players and/or guilds start playing, thereby improving balance within seasons. I haven't seen any mention that they intend to do anything like this, but, there is also the potential for the team building algorithm to be somewhat incremental in rebuilding teams, i.e. maintain some fraction of the team intact from season to season and only shuffle the remaining fraction, in order to provide more continuity. Depending on the portion of the player base that has a guild, for example, you might only shuffle the players that aren't in guilds, or only the individuals and guilds smaller than a certain size in terms of player hours. Or you could randomly pick a certain fraction of the players/guilds.

Did they say somewhere along the line that there would be transfers other than via changing guilds? Given all the problems associated with transfers I'm not sure I see the desirability of anything more than changing guilds so you are moved the next time teams are generated. I do see that waiting 8 weeks to change which guild you are playing with is a bit of a long time, but doesn't it take about 4 weeks just for the 1up/1down process to sort teams into tiers? I guess in a perfect world the teams would be so perfectly balanced that sorting into tiers isn't that big a deal, but it remains to be seen how well balance will be achieved.

My guess is that there will be a lot of players that haven't got organized prior to the beta, and a lot of guilds that will want to join together into a single larger guild, and that having a few shorter "seasons" will allow all that to happen faster and reduce the number of complaints about having to wait eight weeks to set the right guild, organize into larger guilds, move from their long term guild to the larger guild that everyone else in their guild has already moved to, etc. Allowing players to "choose" their team on initial entry would be a complete disaster, they almost certainly will be placed according to the team-builder algorithms. If you want to choose your team you should join a guild on that team before your first foray into wvw.

You have the agency to coordinate your guild with other guilds with all the members joining a single guild, either existing or new, to form a guild with up to 500 members, the same cap as Alliances. Outside of organizing effort, the only gotcha is for people who don't have a spare guild slot and refuse to leave any of their current guilds.

But Mag's 500 player guild will only be 1/5 of the team, based on an estimated 2500 players per team. Even if they have 500 players that spend a lot of time online, they still have to compete for spots on the maps with the other 4/5's of the team.

All that needs to be said in this thread. Turtle hits door harder. But the turtle slam has a 4.5s cooldown while my impression is that you can spit a fireball every second or so, maybe faster. You can use the invigorating something or other skill to avoid the cooldown after using your stack of shots so you can fire quite a few shots in a row. So the damage/second isn't as different as the single skill damage numbers would indicate.

I can't find it for some reason but someone posted a fairly succinct summary, basically, the reward for composition is far far too much. A group that keeps all the boons up all the time gets an absolutely HUGE boost that isn't justified merely by getting together a particular set of classes. Teamwork and coordination should be enough advantage in themselves, and right now teamwork and coordination are far outperformed by boonball group composition. P.S. Arguably, the problem is not so much boons themselves as much as the proliferation of boon sharing, which oftentimes doesn't even come at significant tradeoff cost.

I was just looking at the Fall/Winter Studio Update (the table near the bottom of the page) and noticed that it has the WvW World Restructuring Beta listed in the November to January list. Schedules can slip but at least they are currently thinking of January when they say early next year!

The WR solution is mega guilds and/or community guilds. The Alliance stuff, to the extent we saw, wasn't going to offer that much more, other than for players with full guild slots that refuse to give any of them up to join a community guild. WR will eliminate stacked servers and stacked guilds will still make up a fairly small minority of the players on a team so, if players can sort out organizing guilds, WR will have solved stacking. Iirc changing your wvw guild only takes effect on the next team building so you have dealt a major blow to the transfer problem too. It will be interesting to see if non-guild players find guilds to join or just let themselves be placed near randomly on teams. Players with alts also take a hit in that they have no control over what teams their alts end up in, having their guild mates on the same team is the only thing guaranteed, and they may sometimes end up with alts on the same team. WR is going to be a big change, with some added chaos from the team building algorithm, but if players can manage to build guilds it has the potential to make guilds a bigger piece of the puzzle, potentially drawing the solo players into group play.

At the risk of being lynched, Celestial might be a good option if you are looking for six of the stats, if only because the total stat points for Celestial is much higher than for the three and four stat sets. If you take some of the might generating build options the might will raise your effective power back up near where it would be with more specialized stat sets. The concentration will help length the might duration making it easier to stack might. You might take one of the boon duration equipment bonus items too if needed. There are some Celestial Dead Eye builds on the usual build sites.