From “Cornerstone” to ghost town. What happened ?

[Hotride.2187]

On todays reset, there were queues for like 1 hour at most and it wasn't even right after the reset. I wouldn't call this necessarily dead, but its definitely way deader than an year ago.

[SFShinigami.1572]

wait, you get queues?

[Virdo.1540]

22 hours ago, Shiyo.3578 said:

My post here was deleted...? Why? This is all I said:

• Perma stealth thieves
• Insane mobility(mainly disengage)

bump. 

 

+ most are in EoD atm...maybe because there are no thieves to play against

[Riba.3271]

If I had to list 4 main things why WvW is "ghost townish", not ghost town actually since there is action as long as you're willing to tag up and know how to go to right place:

 

1. Bad updates. Yep. It isn't even competitive gamemode anymore. It is pretty linear what comps you can run or what you can do. Roaming, Dueling, Scouting, Sieging, Sniping are all pretty much dead due to siege/objective balance. It is all watchtowers, sm camping and shield gens.  All roamers deviate towards servers that "hold sm the most".

 

2. Invisible/closed squads. Over 80% of the voice commanders run voice only squads. This puts larger barrier for new players since they'll be constantly dying in a group of veterans while trying to learn while listening to some weird sometimes overly toxic banter. The split between PPT and fighting groups is so hard drawn that people play game according to discord announcements, not when they feel like playing the game.

 

3. Meta. Well as if it wasn't enough to make people super fast and CC immune,  it was accociated with reducing most important buff and debuff skills to around 10 seconds with new specs and nerfing overall damage making meaningful ability cooldown management obsolete. You are doing a lot, but nothing really feels that impactful. Spam, spam, spam, spam. It didn't help at all that most long ability cooldowns were CC abilities, and they removed all damage from those. So you don't cast/run those anymore.

 

4. Linking system. Yep. If WvW servers have to experience forced migration every 2 months and avoid actually being enjoyable server 24/7 due to being punished for doing well, it causes not only instability and downtime but also lack of rivalry. 500 gem transfers to higher tier servers and player pop resets should never exist in world based system. Top servers were top servers and had good population because they provided activity across all timezones and were actually enjoyable, so all you're doing is removing people from enjoyable servers and adding people to less enjoyable ones.

Edited April 6, 2022 by Threather.9354

[Dawdler.8521]

32 minutes ago, Threather.9354 said:

If I had to list 4 main things why WvW is "ghost townish", not ghost town actually since there is action as long as you're willing to tag up and know how to go to right place:

 

1. Bad updates. Yep. It isn't even competitive gamemode anymore. It is pretty linear what comps you can run or what you can do. Roaming, Dueling, Scouting, Sieging, Sniping are all pretty much dead due to siege/objective balance. It is all watchtowers, sm camping and shield gens.  All roamers deviate towards servers that "hold sm the most".

 

2. Invisible/closed squads. Over 80% of the voice commanders run voice only squads. This puts larger barrier for new players since they'll be constantly dying in a group of veterans while trying to learn while listening to some weird sometimes overly toxic banter. The split between PPT and fighting groups is so hard drawn that people play game according to discord announcements, not when they feel like playing the game.

 

3. Meta. Well as if it wasn't enough to make people super fast and CC immune,  it was accociated with reducing most important buff and debuff skills to around 10 seconds with new specs and nerfing overall damage making meaningful ability cooldown management obsolete. You are doing a lot, but nothing really feels that impactful. Spam, spam, spam, spam. It didn't help at all that most long ability cooldowns were CC abilities, and they removed all damage from those. So you don't cast/run those anymore.

 

4. Linking system. Yep. If WvW servers have to experience forced migration every 2 months and avoid actually being enjoyable server 24/7 due to being punished for doing well, it causes not only instability and downtime but also lack of rivalry. 500 gem transfers to higher tier servers and player pop resets should never exist in world based system. Top servers were top servers and had good population because they provided activity across all timezones and were actually enjoyable, so all you're doing is removing people from enjoyable servers and adding people to less enjoyable ones.

I guess that EoD releasing about 2 weeks before the thread was made and everyone was still doing PvE had absolutely nothing to do with it.

[CrimsonHandHiro.9574]

T1 NA is dead in all time zones. Maybe it’s time to actually shake up the meta. Overall activity and skirmish kill totals look to be down.. We have ended up with 1 day per week of WvW effectively. It’s not good. 

[subversiontwo.7501]

What happened? ArenaNet happened, they pretended to do things for you to sell you EoD on hot air. They sold it, you bought it, now they are back to releasing Strike stuff and LWS1 before they can even muster the willpower to write beta 2 feedback from 4 months ago. This isn't the first time and it will not be the last. The 🧱 game mode that has resources constantly taken away from it but never put into it.

 

Now to address some points of discussion here:

4 hours ago, Threather.9354 said:

If I had to list 4 main things why WvW is "ghost townish"

1. Bad updates. Yep. It isn't even competitive gamemode anymore. It is pretty linear what comps you can run or what you can do.

2. Invisible/closed squads. Over 80% of the voice commanders run voice only squads.

3. Meta.

4. Linking system.

 

Available squads, comps and meta isn't so much a question of what is possible and rather a question of who is still around, who still do things, what they can do with things and so on. Much of the manpower issues you see today is the result of years of letting organised players bleed out in favour of disorganised players. Most servers have the same public commanders in 2022 as they had in 2015. When commanders tag up you might see 5 out of 50 players use their microphones even if they run discord-only public squads. You can't expect to do more than few, pretty linear and basic comps with disorganised players who has no interest to actually cooperate and play as a team; who have to be goaded onto voice just to listen so the commander doesn't have to type or make no visible calls at all. WvW players, organised in guilds that produce tags have been replaced by selfish tourists and bagfarmers who can't even tie their own shoelaces without being carried around. Public squads never produced lasting commanders or training. All of that usually was, and is, done in guilds. Guilds educated, produced and shared. The comps, the meta, the closed squads is all about a clash between leaders and followers over the path of least resistance. It is going through the motions, keeping what ever can be kept, up.

I'm not saying that to be elitist. The fact that guilds did educate, produce and share is what made the climate of old easier and less filled with conflict. When squads first came out, they came out with the norm of guilds fielding their own parties, to public tags being cored with parties from their own guild and so on. That made them far less reliant on new, lone players that got picked up. That made them less likely to demand, blame or mistreat them. So while I choose some spicy words above, I'm pointing to things that made squads nicer, more open (confidence in players) and more elaborate in the past. Kill the fundamental guild nerva and you get the same old 1 leading the 49 who do not make themselves leadable, leading to, low ambition and going through the motions while hoping for a future.

Assuming it needs to be underlined: There are fewer guilds relative solo players now compared to then. That governs most of the guilded players' behaviour from squads to server transfers to comps to meta or the status and place of meta in the larger whole.

As for the linking system. It depends on what you mean by the complaint. I'd say it is part of all of the above. The linking system was there to buy time. It bought time. It was there to be around for perhaps a year or so while they worked on that whatever version of what you today know as Alliances/World Restructuring. It was not meant to last 6 years. Had they not done it, we would just have seen (kept seeing) what we see now much earlier. The game already had effectively dead servers in 2016. Guilds already left in droves with the EotM fiasco in 2014. Relinking had to be done quickly in 2016 because they had abandoned everything considered for WvW from 2014-2016. So Relinking had to roll to show "something", Relinking itself has then lost us players over time as a system not built to last, has unsurprisingly not been able to last. It did what it was supposed to do, when its expiration date was met it started to do bad things instead, like sour milk.

World Restructuring is sharply beginning to tilt in the same way, in case anyone's noticed, since while the betas brought hope and players back, it also made the playerbase expect it and organise for it. We're all waiting for World Restructuring and Alliances. The waiting means no doing. It's not our fault though, all of this is square on ArenaNet, their abyssmal communication and their sale of hot air with no hiring or resource-allocation to show for it. There are narrative teams up the wazoo, there are still raid (strike) teams etc. (they had multiples of those during HoT). That stuff has release dates. Where's the WvW team? EoD has been out for 6 weeks. The pulled the one balancing guy from balance for 6 months. They pulled the programmers working on World Restructuring likely already by beta 2 (and just relaunched beta 2 as beta 3 to get you to buy EoD) so that alone is 4 months now. The mode is clearly a ghost town because the development has been a complete ghost town for 4 months and has been in maintenence with a skeleton crew for 6 years. It has been 3 years since Mike Z stood on a live podium to assure us that World Restructuring was still their #1 priority. It has soon been 1 full year since Josh called this a cornerstone game mode. A corner stone game mode without dedicated developers. It has been 8 years since World Restructuring launched for PvE and the first wave of WvW guilds quitting GW2 transpired. When Red Guard quit. When my first guild quit, etc.

Edited April 6, 2022 by subversiontwo.7501

[Strider Pj.2193]

3 hours ago, CrimsonHandHiro.9574 said:

T1 NA is dead in all time zones. Maybe it’s time to actually shake up the meta. Overall activity and skirmish kill totals look to be down.. We have ended up with 1 day per week of WvW effectively. It’s not good. 

Pssst:  Mag is in T-1.  No one wants to play on EbG vs Mag.  And Mag won’t go to red bl.  🤷

[kamikharzeeh.8016]

if u guys in NA would just try to not run clowncomps u wouldn't have such a bad time with maguuma xD considering they made most of their kills in ebg, i'd say u give them a lot of content there tho.

 

and idk how u manage that even, but on RBL t1 NA every server has negative kd/r... that's solid lol

[Xenesis.6389]

Mag is busy punishing ppters with with their ppt! You are next SoS!

[TheGrimm.5624]

3 hours ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

Mag is busy punishing ppters with with their ppt! You are next SoS!

 

Xen, are you on Mag? Am on SBI. If so next time we are linked wanted to send a wave in case we can hunt together.  Sent a friend request either way. 

[Xenesis.6389]

9 minutes ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

Xen, are you on Mag? Am on SBI. If so next time we are linked wanted to send a wave in case we can hunt together.  Sent a friend request either way. 

Cool. But nope, haven't been on mag in like 2-3 years. My main is on ET and my alt is on JQ.

Edit: waitaminute we're facing each other this week lol.

Edited April 7, 2022 by Xenesis.6389

[TheGrimm.5624]

1 minute ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

Cool. But nope, haven't been on mag in like 2-3 years. My main is on ET and my alt is on JQ.

 

Depending on alliances will still try and catch you if we link. Don't always agree but appreciate the view point, group think isn't a good thing so multiple views helps define a thing and come up with a better answer to an issue.

[TheGrimm.5624]

27 minutes ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

Edit: waitaminute we're facing each other this week lol.

 

lol, we are. If you see some idiot charr with the guild tag of OLD attacking solo it might be me, wave to my corpse. 🙂

 

Edited April 7, 2022 by TheGrimm.5624
bad grammar/spelling when out of coffee

[Mabi black.1824]

15 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

I guess that EoD releasing about 2 weeks before the thread was made and everyone was still doing PvE had absolutely nothing to do with it.

hi dawdler,

I do not think this is the reason, the player who likes a competitive mode with other players, hardly dedicates himself to pve, if not in less active times or sometimes to break the rhythm.

and if I have to say it all, as an EU player at the moment (for six months to be honest) without a link server no longer full, I still see many players and activities, and if I look at the enemy side I really see a lot of activity. at least 3 if not 4 times ours (just add up and compare the number of dead and killed).

all this is a good thing. it means that despite everything we know the players are actually there and also many, after all the game and its dynamics are done really well and it is fun to play it, and I think there are no competitors for what arenanet has built.

it would take very little to give a whole other knowledge to the players of this mode. a little will and a little time , as in all things, if you want to take care of something or someone you love you have to devote a minimum of time to it.

I am also convinced that what we see is already the effect of alliances, you all underestimate the fact that we delete communities, teams and servers. a lot of players get busy and find motivation and feed their competitive spirit for their team.

the awareness that they no longer have their team in the near future, is already influencing the mode, people wait, want to understand, become invisible, transfer because so soon the server no longer exists. The behaviors and general attention we see around us is most likely due to this.

so I say to the administrator, let's complete the work of alliances we complete the work on how to build balanced teams (all absolutely fundamental).

after that take a deep breath and start thinking about how to use the new mechanic so that your players can still build communities, competition, servers.

whatever it is or whatever comes to mind start thinking about it and comparing yourself with your players, around here you will find a lot of initiatives and ideas.

Edited April 7, 2022 by Mabi black.1824

[Kontrolle.3514]

guys you need to chill, srsly. People are getting older, most players are getting kids, making career, buying a house etc.

They just cant be online 24/7 like a couple of jears ago. This game is old and needs new players. But without marketing and with crybabys all over the forum/internet it will be difficult. 

 

Thiefs are a real issue though. Most Fiends i know stopped playing because of this class. 

 

 

Edited April 7, 2022 by Kontrolle.3514

[Strider Pj.2193]

4 hours ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

 

lol, we are. If you see some idiot charr with the guild tag of OLD attacking solo it might be me, wave to my corpse. 🙂

 

He might wave with a siege blueprint 😬

Edited April 7, 2022 by Strider Pj.2193

[Sahne.6950]

48 minutes ago, Kontrolle.3514 said:

guys you need to chill, srsly. People are getting older, most players are getting kids, making career, buying a house etc.

They just cant be online 24/7 like a couple of jears ago. This game is old and needs new players. But without marketing and with crybabys all over the forum/internet it will be difficult. 

 

Thiefs are a real issue though. Most Fiends i know stopped playing because of this class. 

 

 

Thiefs are not a problem. I am sorry but its l2p. If you die to a thief in a 1vs1 scenario it is not because thief is blatantly overpowered, or because he was using stealth, bla bla. It is because you got outskilled. And that is okay. Just accept that the Thief was better than you and move on. If you are playing anything other than mesmer (Thief hardcounters mesmer) you should not loose a 1vs1 against a thief. If you do... he was simply better. And again... that is okay! you cant win em all. I myself have lost numerous fights against thiefs, but that is not because thief is overpowered... i just panicked/played it bad/ or got outsmarted. There is no shame in that, it happens.

Anyone that is saying that thief is overpowered / doesnt die, should just play Daredevil for a day and afterwards tell me with a straight face that they have not died once. Seriously! play it! If you have turned into a god all of a sudden you can surely come back here and complain.

-sincerely, someone that is not even playing teef

Edited April 7, 2022 by Sahne.6950

[Dawdler.8521]

3 hours ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

I do not think this is the reason, the player who likes a competitive mode with other players, hardly dedicates himself to pve

Not true at all, everyone knows that WvW players are really into PvE.

[Xenesis.6389]

8 hours ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

Depending on alliances will still try and catch you if we link. Don't always agree but appreciate the view point, group think isn't a good thing so multiple views helps define a thing and come up with a better answer to an issue.

Thanks Grimm I appreciate the thought.

My entire guild doesn't play wvw anymore, and my other one is on SoS, so I tend to be a loner these days, running about helping with zerg fights. I mostly try to offer a viewpoint of what may occur in the future based on past experiences for a suggestion(like asking for a bunch of new maps when we know the history of anet and wvw maps, but maybe the person doesn't). Mostly to get the person thinking about their idea and maybe improving/fleshing it out. Sometimes I'm crusty on issues in here, but I like seeing good ideas for improvements to the game too, as long as we keep expectations in check.

 

8 hours ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

lol, we are. If you see some idiot charr with the guild tag of OLD attacking solo it might be me, wave to my corpse. 🙂

lol now I'm gonna look back on my videos this week to see if we met already. I'll be on the lookout for the tag. I'm mostly on my pull chrono the past couple weeks, so I apologize if I accidently pulled you off a ledge somewhere. 😀

 

3 hours ago, Strider Pj.2193 said:

He might wave with a siege blueprint 😬

LOL despite graduating from Maguuma University, I only siege bury in extreme cases.

[Hotride.2187]

4 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

Not true at all, everyone knows that WvW players are really into PvE.

The devs first and foremost know this. Or rather... only the devs?

Anyway wvw on my links has been kinda dead for the last half year. The alliances betas were pretty active and thats about it.

Edited April 7, 2022 by Hotride.2187

[kash.9213]

20 hours ago, subversiontwo.7501 said:

What happened? ArenaNet happened, they pretended to do things for you to sell you EoD on hot air. They sold it, you bought it, now they are back to releasing Strike stuff and LWS1 before they can even muster the willpower to write beta 2 feedback from 4 months ago. This isn't the first time and it will not be the last. The 🧱 game mode that has resources constantly taken away from it but never put into it.

 

Now to address some points of discussion here:

 

Available squads, comps and meta isn't so much a question of what is possible and rather a question of who is still around, who still do things, what they can do with things and so on. Much of the manpower issues you see today is the result of years of letting organised players bleed out in favour of disorganised players. Most servers have the same public commanders in 2022 as they had in 2015. When commanders tag up you might see 5 out of 50 players use their microphones even if they run discord-only public squads. You can't expect to do more than few, pretty linear and basic comps with disorganised players who has no interest to actually cooperate and play as a team; who have to be goaded onto voice just to listen so the commander doesn't have to type or make no visible calls at all. WvW players, organised in guilds that produce tags have been replaced by selfish tourists and bagfarmers who can't even tie their own shoelaces without being carried around. Public squads never produced lasting commanders or training. All of that usually was, and is, done in guilds. Guilds educated, produced and shared. The comps, the meta, the closed squads is all about a clash between leaders and followers over the path of least resistance. It is going through the motions, keeping what ever can be kept, up.

I'm not saying that to be elitist. The fact that guilds did educate, produce and share is what made the climate of old easier and less filled with conflict. When squads first came out, they came out with the norm of guilds fielding their own parties, to public tags being cored with parties from their own guild and so on. That made them far less reliant on new, lone players that got picked up. That made them less likely to demand, blame or mistreat them. So while I choose some spicy words above, I'm pointing to things that made squads nicer, more open (confidence in players) and more elaborate in the past. Kill the fundamental guild nerva and you get the same old 1 leading the 49 who do not make themselves leadable, leading to, low ambition and going through the motions while hoping for a future.

Assuming it needs to be underlined: There are fewer guilds relative solo players now compared to then. That governs most of the guilded players' behaviour from squads to server transfers to comps to meta or the status and place of meta in the larger whole.

As for the linking system. It depends on what you mean by the complaint. I'd say it is part of all of the above. The linking system was there to buy time. It bought time. It was there to be around for perhaps a year or so while they worked on that whatever version of what you today know as Alliances/World Restructuring. It was not meant to last 6 years. Had they not done it, we would just have seen (kept seeing) what we see now much earlier. The game already had effectively dead servers in 2016. Guilds already left in droves with the EotM fiasco in 2014. Relinking had to be done quickly in 2016 because they had abandoned everything considered for WvW from 2014-2016. So Relinking had to roll to show "something", Relinking itself has then lost us players over time as a system not built to last, has unsurprisingly not been able to last. It did what it was supposed to do, when its expiration date was met it started to do bad things instead, like sour milk.

World Restructuring is sharply beginning to tilt in the same way, in case anyone's noticed, since while the betas brought hope and players back, it also made the playerbase expect it and organise for it. We're all waiting for World Restructuring and Alliances. The waiting means no doing. It's not our fault though, all of this is square on ArenaNet, their abyssmal communication and their sale of hot air with no hiring or resource-allocation to show for it. There are narrative teams up the wazoo, there are still raid (strike) teams etc. (they had multiples of those during HoT). That stuff has release dates. Where's the WvW team? EoD has been out for 6 weeks. The pulled the one balancing guy from balance for 6 months. They pulled the programmers working on World Restructuring likely already by beta 2 (and just relaunched beta 2 as beta 3 to get you to buy EoD) so that alone is 4 months now. The mode is clearly a ghost town because the development has been a complete ghost town for 4 months and has been in maintenence with a skeleton crew for 6 years. It has been 3 years since Mike Z stood on a live podium to assure us that World Restructuring was still their #1 priority. It has soon been 1 full year since Josh called this a cornerstone game mode. A corner stone game mode without dedicated developers. It has been 8 years since World Restructuring launched for PvE and the first wave of WvW guilds quitting GW2 transpired. When Red Guard quit. When my first guild quit, etc.

If I'm on a map and a guild asks for room so they can get people in then I'll switch. If they're trying to get bodies I'll float near and back them up. If they throw an invite I'll join squad and do what I know what to do with my build. I know what to do with my build and I know how to respond to actions in a team, I don't need to be on their discord to get kittened up by bad calls or get caught in bad positions after they face plant a blob and get most of their squad wiped. I'm talking to my own guildies or half watching tv while I vibe on a map anyway.

If some smaller team was actually doing stuff that really did require voice comms then I'd probably jump on their server for a minute but large squads rarely need more than in game tools to ping a map and Alert to Target. What they need is for everyone who's with them (especially their own guildies) and knows their build to agree to be present and alert for the hour or two they're raiding. They wouldn't even need the whole map right on them at that point and would benefit more from more teams running around a map or working loosely with other groups. People complain about the tagless squads running around but while they're usually smaller, they're also usually pretty solid and effective. 

Just take your guild out and perform and a map will roll up on you. Some people are aloof and don't want to hear you. Some people are chill and sane and will watch for your calls but don't want to hear you. Some people want to hear you so take them out for a ride regardless of how many are with you.

[Telgum.6071]

21 hours ago, subversiontwo.7501 said:

What happened? ArenaNet happened, they pretended to do things for you to sell you EoD on hot air. They sold it, you bought it, now they are back to releasing Strike stuff and LWS1 before they can even muster the willpower to write beta 2 feedback from 4 months ago.

This level of conspirancy theory is 10/10.

[Strider Pj.2193]

51 minutes ago, Telgum.6071 said:

This level of conspirancy theory is 10/10.

I mean it could be.  But none of what that poster wrote is actually inaccurate.  ‘Pretended is likely a stretch, yes, but none of the rest is wrong.  Find the beta two feedback summary.  Would love to see it.  I won’t wait.

[TheGrimm.5624]

19 hours ago, Strider Pj.2193 said:

He might wave with a siege blueprint 😬

 

All good lol, I would see that as one less resource he had for the next conflict. 🙂 lol. That's why I like our forum crew, we might not always agree, but I still hope between all of us we can provide feedback to help the game be better or provide multiple view points to make peeps say, hmmm. Good hunting and good gaming!