Thoughts on WvW

[Renmir.8451]

Hey there fellow Tyrians! I've never been much for PvP in MMOs but recently was introduced to GW2 and WvW and have fallen in love with it. Like I said, I don't like PvP, but tower defense and RTS games are very much my niche, and I find so many elements of that that play out in this mode.

 

My question is though... What even is the point of WvW? I'm on Sanctum of Rall (Jade Quarry team) and we are literally always outnumbered. I understand there's a beta in progress to handle that, but I still wonder what the intended goal of the 'game' is?

 

The masteries and siege mechanics would lead you to believe it would be about holding out and defending your land while pushing into the others. And... at rare times it can feel like that. But when we are up against higher pop servers and it's their 'peak' time, the game's objective seems to be to run away from a zerg, and hold a tower or 2 if you can. Siege is literally ineffective against a zerg unless you have around 10 people and well placed siege... But often you just have random catapults and no shield gens or AoE control set up. Your other choice is to abandon the map and just move to a Borderland... which is fine until the zerg starts to follow you.

 

Now, given combat in the actual game, and how a player's abilities are worded to affect only a set number of allies or enemies, the concept of a zerg in a competitive mode is insane to me. There seems to be no structure provided by the creators of the mode, as you literally can play this team based game mode without helping out your team at all (leading to AFKers and bots (the lack of security against bots is a concern also, but that's another topic)), or stack with 50 + players and just stomp every person you come up against without them having a speckle of hope of resisting you.

 

If the point is to do that and not actually try and hold and upgrade objectives, why have teams at all? Why not just let people log in and assign them to a match in progress so they can play their janky build. The mode feels like it's just a sandbox that has no real goal and for someone who was drawn to it because of the strategy and Tower Defense aspects, that saddens me.

 

What could be done to improve the mode? Overhaul the siege systems? Balance teams (caps based on other server's current pops in EBG and just queue and play in borderlands until your turn is up?)? Change abilities to make zergs less efficient? Add an effect to zones that dampens your power based on the number of your team mates that are also there?

 

Or, am I alone and is this exactly how the mode is intended to be played and I'm just not really the target audience? What are your thoughts?

 

 

[Xenesis.6389]

19 hours ago, Renmir.8451 said:

What could be done to improve the mode? Overhaul the siege systems? Balance teams (caps based on other server's current pops in EBG and just queue and play in borderlands until your turn is up?)? Change abilities to make zergs less efficient? Add an effect to zones that dampens your power based on the number of your team mates that are also there?

 

Or, am I alone and is this exactly how the mode is intended to be played and I'm just not really the target audience? What are your thoughts?

Heh... there are many things that could be done to improve the game. But really, many don't want to have discussions about the problems, because a lot of times it benefits them. A lot players just log in for two hours and don't want to deal with all the extras. They log in, break down your gates, fight in your keep for 20 mins, collect your bags, then move on to the next place they can draw large amounts of players who can't challenge them. They don't want to spend 3 hours breaking into your keep, they don't want to spend difficult times under siege, and anerf agreed, they wanted players to fight more around on the inner parts of objectives (even though they removed bannering lords because of prolonged fights in the first place).

The guilds got what they wanted, the gameplay we currently have, a boon ball can march into your T3 keep, get to your lords in under 2 mins regardless of siege, and run around in a train track for 20mins farming bags paying no attention to the lord because that's not what they're really there for, this is the gameplay anet encouraged.

 

Siege - Nerfed a while ago, the "fites" people advised anet to nerf the damage because they didn't like fighting under siege, even though they could sustain 4 acs raining down on them with the boon ball, and 1 shield gen with mastery negates it all anyways.

 

Stealth - a mess, reveal counters are limited or awkward to use, a couple classes get to abuse it, zergs pretty much always run into a fight with it to try and get the first drop on another group, you have to with boon ball, as the open windows for bombs are more limited to sneak attack or corruption/strip bombs.

 

Blobs - a lot of guilds are now stacking, or holding hands, whether from the lack of commanders and anyone left gravitating to guilds left, or boon ball too tough to crack on their own, or it's too good to not abuse it with more numbers. The past few months I've seen so many double guild groups running in a map blob on enemy maps where they can have 50-60 players, while the defense guilds are running 30-50 but hindered with the extra scouts on their map and sometimes can't even get all of their raid in to counter, and as if one blob isn't enough imagine when all three sides are on the same map and defenders need to fight two sides that won't touch each other.

 

Boon ball - change abilities, yeah good luck with that. This is the gameplay anet has setup with guilds for the past 6 years, it's not going to change, because it benefits them the most and that's who anet is catering to in wvw. Instead of having boons be used in appropriate times to push your sustain or burst, they just made them spammable and 100% uptime.

 

Matches - meaningless, because winning is meaningless, therefore points are meaningless. A lot of players just play for the rewards, which are meager in comparison to the rest of the game, but also require less effort. They finally after nine years and declaring wvw a "cornerstone" of gw2, want to fix population imbalance. While the method will be a little extreme, at this point there's no way to avoid it, it has to be done, anet has to have lines drawn to make it happen because players cannot police themselves in spreading out properly. Maybe then we can move on to things that make playing for points or rank worthwhile again (eg tournaments or seasons).

They need to do this while keeping the overall gameplay of wvw intact, and not break it down into "instanced battlegrounds" as you would find in other games. (and for the people who keep suggesting to "replace" wvw with such ideas, need to keep in mind there are people who actually still LOVE the gameplay of wvw, and don't want 2 hour instances, and want to still play wvw their way and not some typical spvp conquest match, think about that before presenting your idea to "replace" instead of reside along with wvw).

Alliances won't be perfect, it probably will only solve one problem, but it's a big one in spreading out the population more evenly among all the servers, but also slow the random bandwagons into more controlled bandwagons, where instead of players control building servers, it's anet building around those players instead.

 

Snowball effect - coverage, population, points, stats from claims and bloodlust, boons, two strongest prey on the weakest, lots of things to throw under this category. Anet loves this type of gameplay unfortunately, not much can be said or done, we are not the people they listen to.

 

You can still get decent tower defense and your rts game play in, just don't bother when the blob of infested terrans are around.

[Dawdler.8521]

A new person asked the same question a few days ago. The answer is simple: the point is to waste your time. 

Hopefully you find some entertainment while doing so. Whether it is being social with friends, finding something you really like to do, guild raids, zerging, roaming, fighting, ppting etc doesnt matter. If you dont... well there are many, many other games that can waste your time too - or even PvE/sPvP, believe it or not. Dont go looking for a deeper meaning where there is none.

Edited January 7, 2022 by Dawdler.8521

[Mabi black.1824]

right , if you had fun then everything still works fine.

and welcome to this mode of wild madmen.😁

[joneirikb.7506]

The Goal of the mode is for your World/Links/Team/Guild etc to try to work together in gaining as many points as possible, by capturing and holding/upgrading objectives.

The vast majority of players completely ignore this, and focuses on other things. Mainly loot or fights. And the only ones left that really care about points, are the ones trying to control win/loss in order to avoid fighting against servers they don't like (or that will beat them).

This used to be a thing back on launch, but World pride has been eroded over they ears, and few left care. So unless ANet somehow managed to come with some updates (and that would take years, as they're already working on World Restructure), it's not really coming back.

Your best bet is to find a guild of like-minded people, and play it as your own mini-game inside WvW.

[kamikharzeeh.8016]

did u people ever see strong blobs fighting? there u get showcases how fast your "OP boonballs" get blown up within seconds.

 

50v50, same and high skill level, still groups with perfect comps can be wiped with one strong bomb.

 

boons are literally food for scourges, spellbreakers and chronos... ppl just often don't play these classes right - like bringing pvE or spvp scourges or even worse, reapers of corestuff to wvw will be rather useless in a lot of cases.

 

@Renmir.8451 wvw is in fact sort of a sandbox mode. the stuff within it never changes and reset every week. there are no real goals, outside of the ones you guilds set themselves.

 

like, u can technically write your own stories within Wvw. the community mostly communicates via discord. lots of people in voice calls for hours nearly every day. guilds forge identities and reputations. one man rambos are rather viewed as clowns, as the gamemode of Wvw is basically a largescale combat mode for bigger groups.

 

ofc, u can have 1v1s and 10v10s in cloudformation as well, but then u may be on half-empty maps at best.

 

it really is way more fun to have maps with (20+25+cloud) vs (20+20+20+cloud) vs (50+cloud) for example. even 20~+cloud can easily work against 50 player blobs

 

if u want to play, there need to be guilds on your server, or some people have to found guilds. with 20-25 people ideally u can get competitive in few months, as long as u have a good commander and use full meta builds. (u can very once u are good, but not while u learn the largescale combat, or u may never learn it)

 

NA has also less players - depending on which tier/server/matchup u are in, it may be more empty at times. also: timezone and maps. red border is usually least populated, the respective other home border (green or blue) is the main place of action, beneath eternal battlegrounds.

 

one map can contain about 74~ people of each team. still, a random blob (40+) can be beaten by a moderately strong zerg (25-35). anet did nerf damage in feb20 coefficient messups, making it harder to kill big numbers fast. this led to an imbalance of huge groups, no matter how good u are.

still, with 20 mechanically strong players, u can even wipe 50ish sized groups, it is pretty hard though. and only if they are not very experienced.

 

 

[enkidu.5937]

On 1/6/2022 at 1:37 AM, Renmir.8451 said:

I'm on Sanctum of Rall (Jade Quarry team) and we are literally always outnumbered.

Only who gets spawn-camped for an hour by l33t pro's with ballistas has experienced the true meaning of being outnumbered in WvW. 😝

[gloflop.3510]

On 1/6/2022 at 2:37 AM, Renmir.8451 said:

The masteries and siege mechanics would lead you to believe it would be about holding out and defending your land while pushing into the others.

I like your "pushing into the others land". It is a nice description.

 

What is WvW? I would condense your post to this one question. In my interpretation, the following happened and the following development led to the current issues in WvW:

Once upon a time, anet sat down and wanted to develop a new game called "gw2". They wanted to include a game mode where players hold out and defend their land while pushing into others (great formulation still). This is the core idea of WvW. However, when gw2 went live, not all players played as intended. Some players were playing as intended but some others used WvW rather as a huge fighting ground. Anet recognized the new playing style and reacted accordingly. They now changed the game mode and tried to adapt to the fighting players and also include them. The outcome is what we have right now. WvW is shared by players pushing into others land and players just interested in fights. The consequence are tensions between the two player groups (in fact there are more groups but let us keep it simple).

 

One problem which was mentioned earlier is that many fights are imbalanced. One group has an advantage because of their size or because of their position. E.g. a full squad in the morning can flip everything and run over everyone because the enemy simply does not have the numbers to fight them. Some players like to play like it. The outcome is that the enemies are running and hiding behind walls.

 

Also, a problem is that the individual quality of one player is not so important in a blob-fight. I saw so many playing styles of highly ranked players where one can only shake the head about. The players sometimes feel like the best because they get carried nicely.

[kamikharzeeh.8016]

wvw IS a huge fighting ground. it is clearly a pvp format in a large scale

 

like, no idea how anyone can view it differently. makes no sense really, and yet its very common that players are just too afraid to fight.

 

the feb20 dmg coefficient nerfs made it also impossible for smaller numbers of strong players to carry random players against strong blob in keep defeneses. kinda made everything worse, that very patch. also, the removal of retaliation... made selfish glass bomber builds way more easy to use - a thing that is extremly unnecessary and harmful for wvw.

[gashen.3874]

a complete waste of time,riddled with cheats,more cheats and even more cheats

don,t waste your time do something positive like knocking nails in to your head

[gloflop.3510]

19 hours ago, kamikharzeeh.8016 said:

the feb20 dmg coefficient nerfs made it also impossible for smaller numbers of strong players to carry random players against strong blob in keep defeneses. kinda made everything worse, that very patch. also, the removal of retaliation...

A good point hidden here. In my eyes, anet does not know themselves what WvW should look like. Do they want equal number fights? Do they want to have skill > numbers? etc.

If I was the head of anet, I would let the team provide me with an idea, a vision and then let the development go straight into this direction. I got in the last years the impression that they wanted to please everyone. Like this, one does not please anyone.

[Custodio.6134]

Well, you cannot really say "WvW is exactly that" because like others already said: 
ANet doesn´t make content for WvW. It´s the players' sandbox that ANet gave us to create OUR OWN content. 

How that content looks like is totally up to the players, and what we do with our tools. 

1. for one it may be roaming solo or in small groups around the maps, flipping camps and dueling other players/groups
2. for others it may be large scale Zerging, fighting other Zergs/blobs
3. some may just wanna sit in a keep and upgrade it, defending dolyaks, building siege
4. the next one just likes to scout, make calls when needed
5. some people then may want to get deeper into the competetiveness, joining a guild and raiding with them progressively. 

yet again: it´s the players that create the content. 

Ofc there are mechanics in place that theoretically should encourage to play the mode (reward tracks, skirmish tracks, matchups, leaderboards etc), but the impact with the current system is rather low. WvW has one of the worst (if not THE worst) converted gold gain per hour in the game, and a few years ago it used to even be a gold sink (the times where we didn´t have reward tracks, had to manually upgrade objectives etc). That´s why the people play mostly for the listed reasons (besides for the ones that only want Gift of Battle). 

[Svarty.8019]

On 1/7/2022 at 6:43 AM, Dawdler.8521 said:

A new person asked the same question a few days ago. The answer is simple: the point is to waste your time. 

Hopefully you find some entertainment while doing so. Whether it is being social with friends, finding something you really like to do, guild raids, zerging, roaming, fighting, ppting etc doesnt matter. If you dont... well there are many, many other games that can waste your time too - or even PvE/sPvP, believe it or not. Dont go looking for a deeper meaning where there is none.

Indeed. Life, equally, is a waste of time. 

[Ausar.9542]

On 1/5/2022 at 7:37 PM, Renmir.8451 said:

Hey there fellow Tyrians! I've never been much for PvP in MMOs but recently was introduced to GW2 and WvW and have fallen in love with it. Like I said, I don't like PvP, but tower defense and RTS games are very much my niche, and I find so many elements of that that play out in this mode.

 

My question is though... What even is the point of WvW? I'm on Sanctum of Rall (Jade Quarry team) and we are literally always outnumbered. I understand there's a beta in progress to handle that, but I still wonder what the intended goal of the 'game' is?

 

The masteries and siege mechanics would lead you to believe it would be about holding out and defending your land while pushing into the others. And... at rare times it can feel like that. But when we are up against higher pop servers and it's their 'peak' time, the game's objective seems to be to run away from a zerg, and hold a tower or 2 if you can. Siege is literally ineffective against a zerg unless you have around 10 people and well placed siege... But often you just have random catapults and no shield gens or AoE control set up. Your other choice is to abandon the map and just move to a Borderland... which is fine until the zerg starts to follow you.

 

Now, given combat in the actual game, and how a player's abilities are worded to affect only a set number of allies or enemies, the concept of a zerg in a competitive mode is insane to me. There seems to be no structure provided by the creators of the mode, as you literally can play this team based game mode without helping out your team at all (leading to AFKers and bots (the lack of security against bots is a concern also, but that's another topic)), or stack with 50 + players and just stomp every person you come up against without them having a speckle of hope of resisting you.

 

If the point is to do that and not actually try and hold and upgrade objectives, why have teams at all? Why not just let people log in and assign them to a match in progress so they can play their janky build. The mode feels like it's just a sandbox that has no real goal and for someone who was drawn to it because of the strategy and Tower Defense aspects, that saddens me.

 

What could be done to improve the mode? Overhaul the siege systems? Balance teams (caps based on other server's current pops in EBG and just queue and play in borderlands until your turn is up?)? Change abilities to make zergs less efficient? Add an effect to zones that dampens your power based on the number of your team mates that are also there?

 

Or, am I alone and is this exactly how the mode is intended to be played and I'm just not really the target audience? What are your thoughts?

 

 

WvW originally didnt have all these rewards you see today. It was just a Open World PvP sim. Thats why a lot of the design flaws are still there. There is no objectives in WvW because it was never designed that way. They added little stuff here and there.