Kranlor Greyhelm.8417

No, it isn't. Fixing the problem of support players not getting credit meant that it's easier to get people to play support, but the reason that the meta is 3-4 support for each 1-2 dps is because the end result is an unkillable blob of players that barely need to use their brains. A commander isn't thinking "I have to get more support so that they can get more bags". He's focused purely on the benefits that setup gives his group. If you took away the rewards for support players, they'd still be trying to build a squad the same way. It might be harder to persuade enough people to fill the roles, but they'd still be trying to do it. It won't be fixed until boonballing has some degree of disadvantage to it. At the moment it's all pluses and no downside. ANET needs to be sorting out a rock for the boonball scissors, otherwise they can't fix this.

I would hope they don't, considering that hasn't even been possible for.....years now? Hard to take any other points seriously when this either suggests you haven't been playing WvW for some time, or if you have you REALLY haven't been paying attention.

Or do what I've suggested elsewhere; every player in WvW has an aura, and every friendly player in range of that aura gets a stacking debuff that lowers speed, damage and healing by 1%. Stacks up to 50 times. You want to run a blob? It's slow, does less damage and can take less damage. Suddenly 10 groups of 5 players can jump in and out damaging the blob. Suddenly positioning and tactics come into play. Suddenly there are genuine choices to be made. We need to come up with ideas to make it so that a boonblob isn't the best choice in every circumstance and in every way. There needs to be downsides to it that others can exploit. There needs to be a rock to their scissors, otherwise everything stays paper (see what I did there?)

The fact ANET have responded in this thread is interesting. Especially with it being pretty quick after the last set of changes. I suspect they've seen the participation numbers and realised that a LOT of people have either stopped playing or are playing significantly less. Personally I've been logging in to finish wood each week, then noped out for the remainder. Where I've been finishing diamond every week for a pretty long time prior to that. I just don't find the current setup fun, and I'm not going to force myself to do something I don't enjoy.

FTFY

So that people use the EWP when it's too late and provide extra bags for the great Boonball god. All must go to feed the great boonball god Pee-Pi-Tee.

Tactics now give their benefits to attackers instead of defenders. For ease, activators for tactics are now outside the structures. All tactics have been buffed.

"If it doesn't look like an intern came up with it, we probably put too much effort into it".

Translation; "The boonball blobs that our ANET devs like to run in wasn't immediately winning every fight, so we had to make changes so that they would". When the best setup to attack a structure is a boonball, and the best setup to defend a structure is a boonball and the best setup for an open world fight is a boonball, sensible people would start to question whether they've made a mistake in balancing things. ANET look at their stats, see that 5% of the time the attacking boonball doesn't win, and nerf defending into the ground. This is an objectively terrible change for anyone that doesn't play boonball. If they carry on with this they are going to drive a lot of people away from WvW.

I'm angry because ANET have decided that there is a "right" way to play WvW and are nerfing anything that might oppose it. Just because you are happy with that way of playing doesn't mean it doesn't cause a problem weighting a competitive game towards one way of playing with no alternative counter. But don't worry, if it stays like this you'll get your wish and it will only be large organised "skillful" groups left. Because the rest of us would have left, as ANET apparently wants. Then you can have fun playing "hunt the opponent" when you suddenly realise there aren't as many people happy to play your way as you thought there were.

Skill and leadership have an impact, sure. As do numbers. But the impact of ALL of those things is way less than the one ANET god of composition. You get a skilled, well led group of 50 with a composition of random classes and specs and put it up against a poorly led, less skilled group of 30 with a perfect meta composition and there is only going to be one outcome. And it will be the same fight after fight after fight. ANET have decided that their boonball can only be challenged by another boonball that's equally well composed. Only when the compositions are both equally good will skill, tactics and numbers start to have an impact on the result. In the meantime, anyone that doesn't want to play boonball is just food for the boonball. I've logged out of WvW for the week after getting wood on Friday. Because WSR isn't fun to play, and facing a massive boonball on every map that we now have zero chance to stop is just painful. If this is what ANET want WvW to be, then I just won't be playing it. I suspect I won't be alone.

ANET need to get past this notion that boonballs should be the only way to play. Some people like to roam. As it stands, roamers just get in the way of any possible defence against a boonball, unless they are willing and able to switch to a boonball spec and join the throng in defence. Some people like to run in smaller groups, but again unless they are willing to lead a larger group, or subsume themselves in one and pass control to someone else, they also get in the way of a possible boonball defence. Watching a boonball wreck your stuff and knowing there is zero chance of stopping it is not fun. Having to switch your way of playing to have ANY chance of defending is not fun. Especially when the chances are it STILL won't work, because the boonball has been carefully crafted to be meta. While we're at it, spending extended time getting smacked around by both opposition servers who are BOTH stronger than yours individually isn't fun either. There needs to be something in place to mitigate that too. Because if people can't enjoy their time in WvW, they are going to give up. If the choice is "play the way you want and screw your side over, or play the way ANET wants and hate it" then personally that will be me gone. Maybe I'm the only one, but I doubt it. There needs to be legitimate choice in WvW, there needs to be room for different playstyles. And the changes need to stop catering to one group of players. Don't get me wrong, I've played in some boonballs and it can be fun for a while. But not if it's the only game in town. Punching down might feel great for the one doing the punching, but it's kitten for those being punched. That's true for those on the receiving end of an unstoppable boonball, or a server pair up. If those people start to quit, pretty soon there will be nothing to punch down on, then will the people punching quit as well? It's well past time for a change of course for WvW. Because if we carry on like this ANET are going to kill it.

So basically, if a full map of players on a single upgraded and sieged position decide to defend, it is difficult to remove? And you think that somehow negates the complaints on here? And let's be honest, if you had a full squad on an upgraded, fully sieged target and it was attacked by a boonball group, there is still ZERO chance for the defenders unless they are in a comparable boonball. Because all that defensive siege will do nothing, and as soon as you try and engage they will kill you while you pointlessly bang your head against them. And once they are inside its game over. It's a joke at the moment, and not a very good one.

That wasn't the point they were making. They were saying that the attacker can decide WHERE to attack, and WHEN. Sure, once they've committed to a target then the defenders can respond, and assuming they've got there before the 30 seconds needed to get a wall down these days, they can choose when to engage. But if they are up against one of ANETs pet boonballs, what does that matter? They've basically got 3 choices; sit back and let them take whatever they want, then flip it when they've got bored and left the map, try and defend as a cloud and just feed them bags until they get bored and cap, or make a boonball of your own and hope that you've got a composition closer to the meta, because if you haven't you will STILL be just feeding them bags. Just in bigger clumps. Until we get a proper rock, paper, scissors setup, where boonball actually has a counter that isn't another kittening boonball, this is going to be a kitten form of so called gameplay. But every indication we get from each successive patch is that they think the fix is to make boonballs stronger. Which is just mind blowing. Until they understand the problem they are creating, there is zero chance they will fix it.

Clearly it isn't just PvE where ANET appear to have zero idea how their game works. The very last thing WvW needed was making PPT boonballs even harder to stop. Unless of course you've decided that PPT boonballs are the only way that anyone is supposed to play the game, in which case well done. Mission accomplished. So we now have two choices for how to play; get into a boonball of your own, and hope that your group composition is better than the boonball you're going up against (if it is worse, you are going to lose every single time). Or get one of the meme roamer specs that lets you dip in and out of combat at will and spend your time trying to one shot people before flying halfway across the map to reset your cooldowns. Sharpening the knife wasn't enough. They've now decided that paper needs to be dunked in water and rock needs to be permanently banished from the game. Can't bear the thought that their precious boonball doesn't work as perfectly as possible. What next? A boonball logs onto a map, gets inspected by an ANET dev and if it passes the meta test the whole map instantly flips? If they want us to stop playing this mode of the game, they should just tell us.

There was a point where we were a fairly strong second place. So if Vabbi wanted to go for the "weaker" opponent, they could have hit green and knocked them down. Instead both blue and green were exclusively hitting us on multiple maps. This is Vabbi wanting a "vassal" server to be with them on T1 to make their position stronger. Whoever has just been promoted to T1 best watch their back, because they'll almost certainly be doing it again.

This is teams 1 and 2 having an informal alliance so that they can effectively double team 3 on any map. Not much you can do to defend when you have two zergs taking your stuff at the same time. If you split, you lose both, if you focus on one you lose the other. Now this does happen from time to time, as normally if you see 1 attacking 3, you might decide to go after them as well. But over a normal week it would balance out with different combinations grouping up. This scenario has 1 and 2 going after 3 ALL the time. It's even had 1 (the dominant server) going mysteriously missing in prime time PPT, to allow 2 to come first and make up two points on 3. For the 3 team setup to work, there has to be a mechanism to balance things when there are teamups like this. Otherwise it's just 2v1 all the time, which is disheartening and unfair.

You know what else needs to be fixed? When two servers blatantly work together for the entire week to ensure they both stay in T1. There is nothing in the way that the 3 way matchup is set up to stop that happening, or to punish it in any way if it does. But what's the point of having a 3 way fight if it always ends up as 2 v 1? Vabbi and Blacktide this week have made the T1 matchup a complete joke in the EU.

Abilities have got to be completely independent from the PvE versions. So that it can be balanced independently as the game mode requires it, without screwing up PvE. Matchmaking has to be improved. This game is hell to try and play in an unbalanced fight, there either has to be mechanics to avoid those imbalances, or to mitigate them so that outnumbered servers/teams have a fighting chance. Every method of playing has to have a counter. Blob might be easily beaten by 10 teams of 5 working together. Teams of 5 might be easily beaten by a cloud. Cloud might be easily beaten by a blob. Something that looks to encourage fluid, intelligent gameplay where the side that can react and adapt has an advantage. Appropriate rewards as well. You should get the same level of rewards as PvE for the same time invested. And unique WvW rewards too, that you can only attain through this mode. Nothing in the rewards that is required in the PvE space. They need to be detached entirely. Damage boost, defence boost, mobility/disengagement boost. Pick one. Just one. You don't get the other two. I'm sure there is more, but that's all that springs to mind.

The ones that were dicks are the ones that are now on WSR. And possibly elsewhere. Don't blame toxicity on particular servers when it's the toxic morons that keep hopping servers that are causing the issue. We've got a lovely bunch of people on FOW. There are just a lot fewer of us now.

I don't think fow is as dead as you think. A lot of people just stopped playing this week due to WSR being complete dicks.

Want to fix one thing? Stop huge numbers of players switching to T5 servers just before reset so that they can pretend to be good players by wailing on smaller servers for a week or two. Or just carry on letting that happen, which will just lead to more and more players giving up and quiting, because it makes for a very kitten gaming experience. It isn't fun spending most of the week with one server camping both spawnpoints on EBG while they hold the entire map, and showing up mob handed if anyone dares to poke their head out. But if the plan is to kill wvw, then keep it up, you're doing a great job.

It very much WASN'T cleared up. This is ANET finally admitting that they changed their minds about something that they had specifically and explicitly explained to the players, and not even bothering to tell players that they'd made that change. I know you are desperate to carry water for ANET for some unknown reason, but suggesting that this is enough to shut down the discussions in this thread is laughable. But given that you've spent a good amount of time blaming the players for the mess that ANET have made of this whole situation, because we have the temerity to complain about it, I shouldn't be surprised. They also aren't suggesting they are going to go back on it; so once again it's a poor decision that goes against a previous decision and works to the detriment of a subset of players. It's starting to become a pattern, and a worrying one at that.

So let me try and get my head around this. ANET decided to change the way runes worked, didn't think it through and significantly irritated anyone with legendary runes. They then decided to fix it with a legendary relic, but they didn't think it through properly and irritated anyone with legendary runes AGAIN because they'd need to craft the legendary relic to get the benefit back that they formally had. So then ANET decided to offer SOME progress towards the relic based on how many runes you had, but didn't make it at all clear. Leaving people to flounder in the dark. Deep breath. Then, at the last minute, they decided that anyone that had one legendary rune would get the relic automatically. Screwing over anyone that had got 6/7 after the relic change, on the basis that it was going to provide progress towards the relic. But they also announced that this new relic wouldn't work the same way as old legendaries, for no reason that they could clearly articulate. Irritating people yet again. Now it turns out that the way that this new process works for unlocking the relics for the legendary works in an entirely different way to how they described it. Meaning that even MORE people are irritated by what they've done. Not sure if I missed anything in there, but the whole process has been a shambles from where I'm sitting. An utter clusterkitten of incompetence. Generally speaking in life, if you make a mistake you make every effort to fix it once, and fix it right. This process has been ANET making ignorant, poorly communicated design decisions one after another. Making them look barely competent to the player base that they rely on for their livelihood. Their best bet would be to revert the legendary relic to work the same way as ALL the other legendaries. Removing any possibility of unintended consequences like this thread. But my expectation at this point is that ANET will make another poorly thought out decision and double down. Probably breaking something else that they haven't thought through properly. It's no way to run a company, sadly.

Heresy! How dare you suggest that anything other than a boonball rolling around doing PPT is the correct way to play this game. ANET have made it very clear; there is only one way to play WvW, and they'll "fix" anything that gets in the way of that. And they don't care how many players they kitten off enough to leave in the meantime.