Caliburn.1845
-
Posts
160 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Forums
Blogs
Events
Downloads
Gallery
Store
Posts posted by Caliburn.1845
-
-
Camelot Unchained is essentially trying to do what the OP suggests.Beyond designing and running such a game however, I see two large structural problems that such games will find hard to overcome. First, the RvR/WvW crowd is small relative to say the Battle Royale population. Players who participate daily in WvW style gamemodes across the various MMOs that offer some form(GW2, ESO etc) of it probably number under 100,000. The population that play BRs daily(Apex, Fortnite, PUBG, Tarkov etc) is in the millions. You're going to need a serious hook or fantastic marketing to broaden that population.That directly ties in to the second problem. How do you make money off a WvW style game? BRs, FPSs, or even mobile games are easier to monetize due to the large number of people playing them, and any company that wants to make money would frankly be foolish to sink large amounts of money making an AAA+ WvW game, when the playerbase just isn't there to support it.
-
I wouldn't define eras by what was thought to be in the "meta". It was GWEN pre-HoT, and GWEN-R after HoT. All the tweaks and adjustments are pretty much just minor refinements within that framework for zerg purposes. For roaming its an entirely different story of course.
The biggest systemic change to WvW was that over the course of roughly a year we had the three WvW seasons. Those seasons gave servers a reason to organize, and communities to seek new players, guilds and commanders. People played to win, they were invested in the outcome. Then Anet decided seasons were problematic, and removed them. And WvW has been in decline since then.
-
We've asked for a GvG format since before GW2 was released. Why when WvW is suffering all the problems that come with a decreasing population and activity levels would we finally get a GvG mode? That ship has sailed, those players are long gone.
-
Yeah, maps aren't changing. Funny how hysterical the rumor mill gets.
-
No, you don't have it right. You lost those world communities when megaservers went in.
-
@hunkamania.7561 said:
@Caliburn.1845 said:@hunkamania.7561 said:@Caliburn.1845 said:If alliances succeed in making people care about winning,Where did it say that alliances would make people care about winning? It's just a population balance is all I got from it unless there's some info i didn't see.The excuse a lot of people use for not playing to win is population balance. "We can't win, they just have more people than us etc etc." Take the population balance problem away, make everyone(at least early on) think they have a chance to be #1, and you'll see people try to win the week again.Just ask someone like Xushin, he is already sniffing around talking to off-hour guilds for his potential alliance. And he is not alone.Number 1 for what? You get nothing for winning. Balance doesn't change the waste of time with no reward ppt is. Xushin is a PPT guy still to this day so he's always gonna be about coverage and all that stuff.You don't care care about being #1, and I don't care. But you have to admit that WvW works better, people play more and put in longer hours, when they want to win. Or they are under the illusion that winning matters. If population balance and alliances are done correctly, then as the 8-week cycle progresses(if your alliance+world advances up the ranks) you'll find more and tougher fights. Which is primarily what those of us who don't care about winning do want.
-
@hunkamania.7561 said:
@"Caliburn.1845" said:If alliances succeed in making people care about winning,Where did it say that alliances would make people care about winning? It's just a population balance is all I got from it unless there's some info i didn't see.The excuse a lot of people use for not playing to win is population balance. "We can't win, they just have more people than us etc etc." Take the population balance problem away, make everyone(at least early on) think they have a chance to be #1, and you'll see people try to win the week again.
Just ask someone like Xushin, he is already sniffing around talking to off-hour guilds for his potential alliance. And he is not alone.
-
I think a lot of people don't fully understand that WvW right now is very stratified and exclusive because for most of us winning does not matter, if anything many of us try to avoid winning. So we run closed, try to shake pugs, and look for the fights we consider quality.
If alliances succeed in making people care about winning, it will become much more inclusive. You're going to be grouped with a random assortment of other alliances, guilds and solo players, and if you want to win you're going to have to at least marginally be able to work with them.
All these fears about guilds being super exclusive, and toxic, and kicking people to the curb are sort of silly when we see that numerous guilds and some entire servers are ALREADY LIKE THIS.
Some alliances will no doubt take the exclusive route. And they will lose. The alliances that are more inclusive will win. And the option of whom to join will rest in the hands of the individual player, as it should.
-
@Jumpin Lumpix.6108 said:
@"Caliburn.1845" said:Blackgate has not lost a match in what, well over a year now? No alliance is going to be capable of that.The only way any alliance of guilds could match that level of success is if alliances had an enormous player cap(say 2000 or more). More importantly you would have to change the mindset of most of the leadership of the competent WvW guilds out there. The "fighting" guilds are not going to all flock to the same alliance it would be counterproductive. And yes, we're already having meetings about that stuff.Great that you guys get to decide for all of us.We just get to decide for us, you get to decide for you.
-
Blackgate has not lost a match in what, well over a year now? No alliance is going to be capable of that.
The only way any alliance of guilds could match that level of success is if alliances had an enormous player cap(say 2000 or more). More importantly you would have to change the mindset of most of the leadership of the competent WvW guilds out there. The "fighting" guilds are not going to all flock to the same alliance it would be counterproductive. And yes, we're already having meetings about that stuff.
-
Poster in this thread have actually read the OP I hope? The one with nice graphics showing that individual players will have the same ability to play WvW as any guild or alliance.
Almost every guild in this game is recruiting. Every alliance is going to be recruiting. Every player is going to have a buffet of hundreds of options to align themselves with in WvW. If some players are so picky that none of those options work, and they're too lazy to make their own guild/alliance then they can remain as a solo player, sampling different guilds/zergs/alliances every eight weeks.
You get to pick and choose, you can literally do whatever you want, with more choices than have ever been offered under the server based system.
-
There was an informal poll taken on these forums shortly after Anet posted this alliance idea. Roughly 75% of players supported the idea.
I'd like to see an official Anet poll on the topic to get a real sense of what players want. But I suspect that an official poll would have upwards of 80% in favor.
-
If you play WvW because of server loyalty, but refuse to hit the "opt in" button to join your server Alliance when the time comes. Then all your protestations of loyalty mean less to you than one mouse click.
And if it means that little to you, why should anyone else(including Anet) value that loyalty at all?
-
This graph was posted earlier in this thread by Anet Raymond, the driving force behind the Alliance revamp. Each column is the man hours(read activity level) of each server. Which columns represent which servers were not provided, except for the first column which we know is Blackgate.
Maybe Blackgate has a better skilled WvW playerbase, maybe Blackgate has better commanders, maybe Blackgate is better organized. All of these things are debatable.
What we know via this graph is that Blackgate spends more man hours in WvW than any other server, and that due to the population caps placed on servers, no other server has the chance to stack to the level of activity that Blackgate enjoys.
Thus every server is outnumbered by Blackgate overall(Linked servers mitigate this somewhat, and individual times zones will vary, we're talking about overall). I'm not making an argument or stating my opinion, I'm just reading the data that Anet has given us.
And after looking at that data for a very long time Anet has decided to do away with servers and give us a more dynamic flexible system.
-
If winning matters all those fight guilds will revert back to being ppt guilds.
If.
-
While dependent on how you judge "activity" I don't see any server on NA being able to fill 1000 alliance slots with active players. Including BG. Most of the biggest most visible guilds playing WvW have less than 50 actives on their roster. Amalgamated guilds like TSYM/SF/TTD and a few others might be nearer 100 actives, but there are only a handful of guilds like that.
If the alliance cap is 1000, no one should have a problem getting basically everyone on a server into it. If the cap is 500, then it became much more selective. And of course the wildcard is returning players/guilds that show up. And the second wildcard is how many worlds Anet creates. I could easily see them only doing 9 NA worlds instead of the current 12(with links).
-
@"Gaile Gray.6029" said:A message from McKenna Berdrow:Even though making a choice between the two systems might seem like too drastic a change for some people, we have been exploring other designs to deal with WvW populations for years and we believe that World Restructuring or World Linking are the only solutions that meet our requirements.
Anet has already explored other options apparently. There is no third option they feel is viable. "Bigger maps, more powerful servers" seems a tad less viable for them then "Alliances"
-
@ixl.7190 said:
@Caliburn.1845 said:From my perspective the reaction to the WvW changes have been mostly positive on these forums.Overwhelmingly positive on the parallel Reddit thread.And from people who don't read either, even more positive, although examples of this type of person are for most of us anecdotal.The one unofficial poll that sort of asked the question on these forums had the changes at something like 78% support.I would love Anet to do an official poll in-game to reach the largest amount of players, and am confident it would have more than a super majority(66%) in favor of altering WvW as discussed.I wholeheartedly agree, as long as the the poll includes 3 options instead of just a yes/no.What do you have in mind for a third option? Undecided?
Because the choice as presented by Anet at the start of this thread is very binary. Move towards the proposed Alliance solution. Or, leave WvW as it is.
There is no third party candidate in this race.
-
From my perspective the reaction to the WvW changes have been mostly positive on these forums.
Overwhelmingly positive on the parallel Reddit thread.
And from people who don't read either, even more positive, although examples of this type of person are for most of us anecdotal.
The one unofficial poll that sort of asked the question on these forums had the changes at something like 78% support.
I would love Anet to do an official poll in-game to reach the largest amount of players, and am confident it would have more than a super majority(66%) in favor of altering WvW as discussed.
-
So RPers don't want to meet new people every eight weeks with the option/chance to RP with them, because those people are probably not RPers. But the RPers also don't want to go to the trouble of making a RP alliance because then they lose the chance at spontaneous roleplay and it would take some effort to actually make the alliance. So lets hold up the progress of a non-RP gamemode(WvW) so that RPers can have the chance to pretend to be a dolyak or a skritt with another player in WvW?
By this line of reasoning we clearly need to make PVE raids and PVP more friendly to roleplayers. There isn't enough chance to spontaneously roleplay in PVP, and PVE raids need to remove all boss time limits so that roleplay is more encouraged.
My tongue might be in my cheek. Maybe.
-
@Drinks.2361 said:That is exactly it, none of the strong fight guilds are particularly worried about mega alliances because they'll farm the ktrain blob as is tradition & VERY few actually still care about winning a week beyond manipulating their tier to get other fights.
For the most part if the fight focused guilds get in alliances it'll be so that there more active members have people to run with on their off nights. They've pretty much self limited their rosters to be in the 20-30 range to get fights for years now, they're unlikely to start blobbing it up to PPT just because their old server got deleted.
True up to a point. The fights guilds are not going to all stack together, they'd get no fights obviously.
But roster size is related to guild purpose and how WvW functions. GvGs are small, so you keep a small roster. When winning doesn't matter, you prioritize other things such as GvG.
But under this new system, at least when it begins, people will care about winning. And what do you do when winning matters? You run as many people as you can on one pin. First few months after release I was on Darkhaven, no where near a top tier server. And we still had 5+ guilds fielding rosters of 60+ members a night. As GvG has faded we have already started to see the return of mega-guilds that field 50 or more a night. SF, and TSYM for example. When this new system goes in, we're going to see more guilds break from the traditional 20-30 man roster, and get real large real quick.
-
Actually pugmanders are going to return with a vengeance if winning matters again. Guilds can only typically rally for a few hours, but pugmanders can rally for much longer.
Within the secret places where alliances are being forged pugmanders are already being recognized as being extremely valuable, and each current successful pugmander is going to be courted by different alliances.
Especially because a pugmander doesn't take up the alliance manpower slots that a guild will take. The most bang for the buck so to speak will be a popular pugmander.
-
That graph from Raymond is the best smackdown of Blackgate I've ever seen. But aside from any petty satisfaction from seeing our assumptions about population confirmed it leads into a feature that I don't think many people have grasped yet.
Playtime, activity hours.
So I get together with a bunch of hardcore players. We make an Alliance of 500 players across all timezones. To be in the Alliance you have to be in in WvW 12 hours a day at minimum. We dominate in Season 1, we have 250 players online at any point in the day. We queue all maps. We kill everyone.
And the matching algorithm notes that. It assumes we are going to be putting in that level of performance EVERY season. So in Season 2, we get linked with a bunch of NA primetime players who play for 1 hour a day. They take queue space, they don't stay on pin, they don't run good builds. We lose Season 2.
And that is what this new system if designed properly will do, create more balanced matches, more balanced teams, and more balanced population.
-
When the game first launched Titan Alliance won every match in NA. Week after week, month after month. Supposedly they had 15 guilds and 3000 members. They dominated everything.
And then they started having internal issues, drama. Burnout. They realized winning in WvW didn't actually mean that much. So they broke up, scattered to different servers.
I have no doubt someone will try to make an Alliance under this new system who's aim will be to win every week. And maybe they'll get all the hardest core players and best commanders. And maybe they'll win season 1, and season 2, and season 3. But they'll have to do with perhaps only a 3rd of their world's total population, while other Alliances will get formed to topple the first Alliance.
I have never been more bored in WvW than when I was on the winning server. Winning is boring. Trying to beat an enemy that you've never beat before is fun. Sign me up for the Rebel Alliance.
The Strongest Roaming Guilds in the History of NA
in World vs. World
Posted
There is a strong recency bias to this list. Meaning that the list is compiled mostly of guilds from the last four years, instead of the last eight years. Many of the best roamers the NA servers ever saw had left the game before many of the guilds listed here were even formed.
Covenant's AoN(I think that was the tag) 6-8 man roaming group for example were the best roamers I ever saw in the game. But very few people here can remember the first couple years of the game.