subversiontwo.7501

Also, we can't have this discussion and post videos to the thread without this excellent video getting posted 😁

I don't think much of what you say here is controversial. I believe there is a general agreement that WvW is rather casual (or better-yet, open, as you put it) while player-events is where things can be more competetive, with agreed-upon rulesets for more direct competition (events, tournaments etc.). What seems to be argued about more so is the definition of what competetive implies. That's not too surprising either as there isn't a clear-cut answer outside of computer games either. Oof, outed as an american 😛 . It's fine, you can admit that you knew about it beforehand. We know all about Patriots, cheating coaches and goats even though hand-egg is much less widespread in EU than football is in NA. It's fine not living under a rock 😉. This is a good example to bring up, but that's also where it feels like your argument goes off course. Whether it is Yatzhee or Milan, having the fundamental rulesets of the game being orderly is what makes the game (not just for viewership or other such things, but for there being a point to playing it). The number of players or number of dice is something quite fundamental. Yatzhee with different dice just isn't Yatzhee, even if it can have varying degrees of competition. Football is also a good example of how the term competition scales and span from simply having a ruleset that ends up with some kind of winner (as per Yatzhee) to something played professionally solely to win (as per Milan). Football is played in backyards, schoolyards, in PW teams and all the way up to varying degrees of adult professionality (in fact, many league systems go in like 10-ish tiers from amateur to semi-professional to professional in one long ladder, as seen in WvW - the beer league is connected to the same overarching system as the premier league). All of that goes to show that the definition is not without its problems and it is best kept close to its vest: We have WvW and somewhat emergent grades of eg., roams/raids -> skirmishes -> GvG/events. Yet at the same time events offer some kind of counter point to WvW: the whole, open (or casual) thing. The only thing of larger importance though is that we kind of need both those things (which ArenaNet hopefully have all figured-out by now) and that the basic ruleset that makes the game requires teams to be somewhat balanced, matched-up, pitches and fields be properly painted while rules are both generally understood and sometimes officiated. If people don't understand the rules of football in the backyard, it will descend into anarchy and the game of it is lost. Even if you play in the schoolyard, PW or beer-league there are usually people who take it upon themselves to officiate: either officially or unofficially. The issues we have in WvW all stem all too much from ArenaNet not holding up their role of the agreement. The lines are not properly painted. The fundamental ruleset is not in place or followed. The occassional somewhat more official officiating needed is just not there to a degree that is generally accepted (the visibility/optics on infractions etc.). They have, quite fittingly, dropped the ball (or egg) on much of that. I think we can expect much more from them and that would establish the "game" (from team sizes, to winners and ladders) not change it to something unrecognisable. Much like football, it is fine for WvW to have leagues (perpetual, open, a span of competition included) and tournaments (finite, specific degrees of competition). Like I said, it's a good example. It's just not an example that illustrates team-inequality to be naturally endemic, well. Even though they will never reach 11-a-side perfection ofc.

It feels like you've been gone for a bit, it has been like that for a while now. While somewhat crude, the forums can easily be categorised these days. You have your relative beginners - and they do what relative beginners have always done: play longbow and rifle builds while complaining about everything they don't understand from boons, to reflects to not getting to freecast from walls or the power of their 1-2 button burst. They make threads about hacks, sometimes they may be right. They also tend to parrot what others say, even if that is the names of comps from 2015. Then you have your entrenched mains and roamers - you'll see them attempting to gatekeep balance discussions about other classes than the traditional 3-4 ones. It's your typical Thief suggesting that Willbenders are faster or your typical Warrior complaining about how bad their class always is, even in a 2-berserker per party group meta or while the class has never really ceased to be relevant in 11 years. Skilled people just happened to pick their main classes, the classes have always been rather weak. Most of these people seem to not like cele for some reason 😏. Then there are the typical solo / cloud / PPT crowd - they tend to complain about organised things. It may also be things involving either PPK/PPT issues or playing to purpose/behaviour of others and the ease of taking defended objectives (though they tend to be rather pecularily quiet about the ease of taking undefended objectives). I dare not say more else we might resummon Lipton to the thread, meming more about pulling for the weak . Finally, you have some overwintered boomers who mostly just come to the forums because they've always come to forums (or because they live under some illusion that official channels matter or that it's bad to have cries/fallacies plastered all over them). You're more likely to see them in threads about Alliances/WR or complaining about the developer. Few of these frequent users tend to be very positive about, well, anything 😜. Though I guess that can be backdropped by what they have to be positive about.

It does and we're all in that same boat when it comes to having points across (especially at night). Thanks for the effort you put in. I don't have much more to add to the conversation besides what was already said though. I think you raise some good points as to situations where fresh threads may be helpful, but at the same time I don't feel as though they outweigh or outplay the value of keeping threads that hold important information and conversation curated - especially for relevant and current topics. Like I said above, I would be fine with new consolidated threads appearing on recurring topics if former threads of similar value were effectively curated and archived. My issue is that such work is not being done (beyond a single month in 2019, ed. or possibly what Archon did a decade back) and we then have to resort to second-best options, including #when.

Now, here's some realist commentary that I'm sure some will find pessimist: Last time they said this it took a few months instead and information was far from a technical deep dive or progression-oriented beyond simply stating it. While this is a potentially really nice change from a technical (w/e) standpoint, it serves to point out that that it will mostly just restore functionality that we already had 2015-2017, before they threw all other balance out the window in favour of instanced PvE. It would be nice to hear more about this. When they were asked by players about this in the past the response always was that it was technically infeasible yet suddenly here it is with little fanfare after years of fallout. That raises questions. It would also be interesting to hear about whether any of the older bugs and issues (such as problems sluicing players in for the standard 15v15) have been addressed with these changes as well. Again, positive news, just odd, blindsiding and contradictive news that raises questions about what time and resources were spent on it. A year's systems programming for WR? Again, the last few expectant time frames we were given for things like this were overshot by multiple months. Early 2024 may mean june, august or excuses. Adjust expectations or factor that into your reactions or commentary. While a final beta for a last set of data may be prudent (especially if they have added new algorithms etc., and plan to run multi-week betas) it also suggests running a (multi-week-) beta that was already postponed this summer. I don't mean alliances. It's not chippy to point out, but I think it is fair.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/studio-update-guild-wars-2-in-autumn-and-winter-2023/ "World vs. World We’ll have another blog out with more detailed information on World vs. World in a few weeks, but here are some highlights for this quarter. In late January 2024, we’ll be expanding the ways you can use your guild hall to create unique gameplay experiences with a guild hall arena update, including a selector to control which game mode rules your guild arena uses. This new feature will give you the ability to set your personal game mode in the guild hall, enabling the skills and balancing for the Player vs. Player or World vs. World game modes. In addition, we’ll be introducing options to select teams outside of the confines of the guild arena, giving you access to the entire map so you can battle your friends. We’ll also be running another World Restructuring beta in early 2024. As we discussed in our last studio update, the WvW team has shifted their priority to releasing a live version of the guild-based World Restructuring system. Doing this allows us to get consistent live data and feedback from the community to inform our continued development and improvement. Since our last beta, we’ve addressed a number of issues with guild selection, queue failures, reset issues, and more. In the next beta, we’ll be testing the new team builder, UI updates, and bug fixes. Assuming everything goes well with that test, we will be able to move forward with turning the system on full time. While we don’t have dates for the beta or initial release at this time, we will let you know as soon as possible to allow you time to organize your guilds."

I'll be honest, I didn't really get what Grimm was trying to say in that other thread, but I doubt he was unquestionably right about it. Putting these threads on the front page serves a couple of positive outcomes regardless of the quality of the latest post. It is not like we can trust the developers to curate their own information anyway. The "Library" from 2019 contains three primary links: This very thread, a 2019 NA tournament and a 2019 bi-monthly relink thread. I'm sure they had every intention in 2019 to keep the highlighted relink thread(s) somewhat current, but they lasted... well, one month. That was the endurance of their commitment. Keeping relevant threads either buried or locked to be buried does not serve playerbase or furthers either discussion or knowledgebase. Though, perhaps that is the purpose. I'd rather have most of the "I'm new and don't understand why WR/Alliances will help"-threads consolidated here than littering the entire subforum, especially since this makes it much easier to refer them to relevant information - instead of having to dig up links to dead and locked threads. Some of us have these links saved, so we can help other people find that information. That may be helpful, but whether it is healthy is highly doubtful.

You can reliably have a competent comp without a guard (or stab) in every group (party). The problem is that it demands more of the players in the squad, not less. It demands more in the sense of taking initiative within parties rather than overrelying on the tag. .

So everyone else in WvW need to keep dealing with full servers, 2:1 population matchups and paid transfers because you don't want to leave your jumping-puzzle guild? That sounds like both a reasonable and compelling argument. I'm sure they can hold off on WR a little bit just for that.

Well, you mention it being rude, so let me be equally blunt to give you as direct a reply as is possible. The two guilds you love are highly unlikely to together surpass 500 players who want to play WvW together The two guilds can make a third guild together and then all your problems are solved come WR - that goes whether each is WvW-only or PvX If the two guilds have not yet decided to make a third guild together it is up to you to convince them to do so If you are not in a postion to do so - as you are no leader or have no influence over either guild - your opinion does not matter - it's someone else's guild, not yours If you or those guilds are not prepared to (temporarily) devote an additional guild slot to play together, you/they are not committed enough to stay together You/they are then also not committed enough to have an opinion on the matter (at least not an equally valuable one to those who are prepared to commit) The people who have spent years scattered or paying to stay together should not have to suffer those not committed enough to use the free, new options available It isn't more complicated than that.

As for the topic at hand, I'm not sure if you can call 10 years to rush things out. The problem is quite clearly that they are not allocating sufficient resources into WvW to develop it. No additional amount of time will solve that problem. One more year or five more years of no tangible progress still means no tangible progress. Do note the tangible.

Let's not forget that the balancing itself is said to put every world around 90% of its cap on relink, putting the amount of players who could even begin to move from world A to B in the low hundreds instead of the low thousands, as is the case now. After WR, if one sizable guild/alliance decides to move, literally, no-one can follow them. If they are at the guild/alliance cap, they might not even able to move in the first place. That doesn't mean that the new system is void of possible problems. However, them being same problems ranges from improbable to impossible.

The videos in this recent other thread about celestial builds shows quite clearly that it is much less about the stats or even boons on their own and much more about all the gratuitous passive and spammy sources of barrier, heals and boons persistant among the traits of many builds. Celestial may add to make those things more problematic but it is not the root cause and many of those things would remain problematic even if you outright deleted celestial stats. The real problem is years of PvE-only balance that is being clawed back in far too limited scope - even if balance passes are more frequent now. Many of the things we see throughout a number of builds these days goes against alot of the original design principles in this game. The original developers were very cautious with these kind of synergies in the early years of the game for good reason. Many of the originally tanky classes paid for it through things like mobility. Classes that had boons or breaks paid for it with limited access to conditions and strips etc. Much of that original concept design just went out the window when ArenaNet went full PvE-hard. Celestial is ultimately relatively unimportant. If they want to make WvW balance better they should revisit the concept design of each class and make sure that they excel at the few things they should excel at each - and trade away from it with specialisations that gives something else.

A longer timer until you get thrown off a map, so you can take a dump, answer the door/phone or prep a snack without stress A way to cash out remaining ticks of participation at the expense of not being able to rebuild participation for as many ticks A multi-instance system that does away with the queues altogether and solves a number of other issues / creates new ways to play at the same time What's stopping us? A developer that doesn't care about WvW. / Thread

Oh, yes it will. It will help, that is for sure. If it will be enough to turn the ship around at this point remains to be seen, but from a tech standpoint, that is the issue WR will solve. I've just been around this game so long that I have learnt to speak Anet. The whole "we're refocusing on WR" might as well mean we get a post in 2025 that says "whoop-di-do, we dropped the ball again, we're sorry, please understand us, this update you WvW people really really need is very very complex and difficult for us, nudge nudge, wink wink".