Sviel.7493

The stuff about the beta is cool and all, but it was the bits of the end that really grabbed my attention. Why are we removing participation from repairing again? If I'm watching an objective and help defend it, should I then just leave it unrepaired? Usually, I'll run supply from a nearby camp to avoid draining too much in case of another attack--but if that doesn't count as participating then what am I supposed to do? This seems like another "we can't allow this because people might abuse it" change that makes non-zerg life such a chore. Are there hordes of people abusing it unbeknownst to me that warrant this?

I think they're waiting on the blog post about what went wrong with alliances two weeks ago. The upcoming elite spec beta may be delaying that, but I don't know how interrelated these things are on the back end.

It's 15 seconds per guild. If none of the guilds claim it, it's 45 seconds spent waiting for supply. That's twice as long as it takes to break both outer and inner walls of Bay/Hills for a 30 man zerg. I agree with OP that cancelling it should remove the guild from the queue. If someone doesn't want to cancel it for their whole guild, they can wait the 15 seconds for the small box to disappear from their screen. It might also be a good idea to reduce the base claim time to 7 seconds.

They did get rid of it at one point after numerous complaints like this. But, since they brought back the Alpine borderlands, bloodlust was re-enabled because it was easier than reworking the map entirely. It's probably not going anywhere for a while despite the problems you mention.

No. Here's where they'd appear: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/

New maps won't make the game more fresh. The core is rotten and that has to be addressed before applying new coats of paint.

I don't think they're going to design a new map completely in secret and then drop it on us. There's no telling if/when we'll get a new map, but I promise you it's not going to be a surprise.

Per their most recent communication, relinks are going to happen this friday.

Doesn't everyone get one free transfer or such? If it's a PvX guild, I'd wager most everyone still has it--if it really exists. At any rate, would be cool if this happened for you but it's probably not something that resources will be dedicated to. We don't know yet how long it'll be until the next attempt at an Alliances beta since the post-mortem blog post hasn't come, but they mentioned it would be "weeks" so there's a good chance it won't be months. With that in mind, the situation may not be as critical as it initially seems.

As an avid DBL fan, our name for the NW wall of Airkeep is...NW Airkeep. It's pretty easy to remember, imo. When I end up on ABL, I don't always know what people mean when they say Murdergate or Watergate (I just had to figure these out again today). But cardinal directions are self-explanatory. Since walls are evenly spaced on keeps in DBL, every one maps cleanly onto some cardinal direction. As an aside (not a direct response), one of my favorite things about DBL is that Anet used consistent names across all three maps. The reason Bay/Hills/Garrison are instantly recognizable as such is because they are called that on each map. On DBL, this was extended to all objectives. For example, the SWC is always ____ Encampment and the NEC is always ____ Refuge. The towers are the same. There's some name or descriptor in front, then a common name across all maps (Academy, Necropolis, etc.) This is much easier for me than trying to remember what and where Stargrove is. Unfortunately, that's kind of lost since DBL is down to one map.

@Xenesis.6389Once you get used to the jumps, deaths should be rare--my point is that such jumps exist on ABL but not really on DBL. There's no reason to jump off any cliffs to get from point A to point B. It's also worth noting that since you can't jump up cliffs, the one-way camp -> tower route is ~50% longer on ABL than on DBL (62s vs. 42s). Prior to the hay bales, the SEC -> Airkeep route had much more terracing and no speed gain from jumping. It was only after that terracing was scaled back to remove chokepoints that the bales were added and the jump shortcut was created. But I'm not here to say that everything about DBL is rosy. Just, many of the common complaints don't make a whole lot of sense in light of the facts on the ground. BTW, where is that 10ft hole in Firekeep? My team has been blue for months so I haven't been inside it since...last spring?

Now seems as good a time as ever to mention that there isn't a single inter-objective path on DBL that requires a jump or a deviation from a clearly marked path. There's one that's a little faster with a jump (SEC -> Airkeep), but it has a haybale so it's perfectly safe. Meanwhile, anytime you leave the north corner on ABL you have at least one cliff jump. See: NET -> NEC and NWT -> NWC. Thus, when people complain about myriad, dangerous jumps, it's best to understand that they either don't know what they're talking about or are catastrophically bad at following roads. It's like they don't remember the memes about commanders leading zergs off of those ABL cliffs.

Removing the icons would probably reduce the scale a bit, but only on the pugmander side--that is, commanders with a bunch of random people joining them without a guild core. Guild groups will be unchanged. It would be a significant QoL loss for a fairly insignificant change in player behavior since pugmanders are already kind of a dying breed. On the more practical side, I don't think you're ever going to convince anyone to actually do it. It's trying to change player behavior by punishment rather than incentive--something that is never popular and rarely successful. It especially won't fly with the people actually making the decisions as they are, as far as I can tell, all zerglings. They've also stated that they support the current commander-centric playstyle--though they also said they want other styles of play to be viable. It remains to be seen if they actually pull that off.

I've also seen that kind of gameplay arise in the absence of commanders, but I don't think that removing them entirely will mean we see that gameplay more often. Many squads already run without an actual tag. Commanders aren't just popular because it's easier to let them make your decisions for you. There is also true power in numbers. If you have a large enough or organized enough zerg, then it doesn't matter what the other people do--you're going to run over them and get handsomely rewarded for doing so. At the same time, I think there is a place for large, commanded groups in WvW. I wish they weren't so good at everything, but players should have the choice to group up and the tools to organize that if they so desire. Rather than removing commander tags, it would be better to nudge the game towards allowing greater effectiveness elsewhere. This way, players wouldn't have to choose between the sort of gameplay you witnessed and actually having an impact on the battlefield.

It only lasted a few hours before being postponed due to myriad issues. They're retooling and will try again later.

We've been waiting a couple hundred weeks now. I don't think waiting a few more will be an issue. I'm looking forward to the assessment of today as well. Since I'm on NA, I didn't get to personally experience it, but a tangible Alliances beta has been delivered and I'm happy about that even if it kind of blew up in our faces. It's not the dream, but it's still a win.

For the people experiencing queues, I'm being told that the names on the maps correspond to servers rather than the new alliance teams. Is this the same for everyone? Is it possible that queues are being calculated based on servers still? That would explain how a map could be queued and outnumbered at the same time.

@Chaba.5410You initially mentioned it in the context of fight generation. This seemed to imply that DBL would have fewer fights generated due to a difference in fight lanes. My point was that objectives are what actually generate fights. Thus, the only people experiencing fewer fights on DBL are the people who do not hit any objectives (of whom there are plenty). If all you're saying is that the fights on ABL are more likely to happen before an objective is directly hit, then I agree with that, but it is a difference in the location of the fight rather than the number of overall fights.

That part is definitely a bug. I was talking about the massive queues some people are reporting.

I mean, there are likely people (including vets) who haven't been playing much recently who decided to come back for this test. I don't think there's a way to account for that if they're being matched as solos. The number of matches was probably fixed based on the population active at the time--new people (or old vets) popping up won't generate additional matches, so the existing ones just get stuffed.

I'm guessing that a bunch of people that were not all that active in WvW suddenly showed up again for this test. That will likely mean that each team feels more stuffed than it usually should.

@Chaba.5410That Reddit guide assumes that fights primarily happen because players happen to run into each other while running from point A to point B. It's more accurate to say that fights are driven by objectives unless two groups both decide to ignore objectives. Their statement that fights only happen around waypoints ignores the fact that prior to DBL there were usually no waypoints in the sidekeeps since they took significant time to upgrade (at the time of this guide's writing, waypoints were instant in sidekeeps). Yet there were still fervent fights in these areas. These fights were not generated by the waypoint, but the objective. They say that's it's not a fight lane because defenders don't have a waypoint, but there is a long history of defenders fighting there anyway. The primary difference is that, without a waypoint, there was a greater need to have scouts in the area so that the zerg knew when to run back. When waypoints did exist in the side keeps, they were defended fervently by whoever owned them--but that defense was driven by wanting to keep the objective's upgrades rather than a direct result of the waypoint itself. What they're talking about would more accurately be called travel lanes. They assume that players spawn at waypoints and generally head towards other waypoints then meet and fight in the middle. From that view, their maps actually make sense. It just doesn't have much to do with how fights are generated on DBL. Further, since their goal is solely to find fights while walking around and ignoring objectives, they completely discard the utility of the non-waypoint travel lanes (see: deadzones map). In reality, the quickest way to find a fight is to hit an objective--any objective. Hitting the closest one to you works, but on DBL you also have the tools to hit something further back in enemy territory if you want using those non-waypoint travel lanes. This is especially useful if the nearest objective is being closely watched by more people than you're able to engage. On ABL, you're more likely to encounter people en route to an objective, but fights still tend to happen around them--even the open field fights are usually just pre-emptive defenses of some objective. For these reasons, the travel lanes theory of fight generation doesn't really hold up. They partially acknowledge this multiple times when they say things like: -"this area will not be an active fight zone. The caveat on this is when groups attack/defend the keep this south area will be become active from the conflict" -"The lanes are very important, but they just represent the conflict area between two waypoints." -"had many fun fights in the keeps so we definitely recommend trying to capture and defend them"

"Fight lanes" is just a fancy way of saying "open fields where we can fight without objectives."

Congratulations, you've kicked the hornet's nest! DBL was designed for a version of WvW that had long since ceased to exist by the time it was released. If you go onto the old forums and look at player complaints from the early days of WvW, people said that the map (Alpine) was too small and too zerg friendly and that upgrades were too expensive and so on. DBL increased the map size, reduced sight lines to allow small teams to do sneaky stuff and a bunch of other things that players directly asked for...but it came too late. The players who wanted those things had largely quit due to years of silence from Anet. The remaining crowd was hyper-focused on having large-scale fights--preferably on open fields with no interference from objectives or the map. Thus, when DBL dropped, the fights-oriented players hated that it wasn't 75% open fields like Alpine. That's the short version, anyway. There's a lot more--the whole thing is a superbly interesting debacle. The map also had substantial flaws on release, though most of those have been addressed or toned down. The backlash was also amplified because HoT dropped at the same time with new guild hall mechanics that forced WvW players into PvE to get their bonuses back. This meant a huge drop in the playerbase at the exact time the larger maps came in...it was a mess.

@reddie.5861The Alliance beta hasn't started yet. You'll be shuffled at reset tonight.