Do WvW dies slowly? Would it be empty like Edge of the Mists game mode in the end?

[Oblako.6048]

Maybe I'm wrong, but lately I see less and less zerg actions on WvW. Most of the time it's empty and only few roamers play. Do WvW dies slowly?

[Chaba.5410]

Yes.  As long as nothing changes that brings people back.  Just more slow than EOTM.

[subversiontwo.7501]

1. Yes. It always has been.
2. If you're looking at one of the few remaining stable servers in EU right now they have roughly 15 guilds.
3. Before EotM the same example had roughly 40 guilds. Back then it wasn't even among the largest servers.
4. It is also evident by both server caps and map caps moving down while we have relinks and servers paired as worlds.
5. Now, it isn't all doom and gloom. Before relinks many servers now usually becomming links were always small.
6. Also, the many years of trying to make the mode appealing to casual, solo and cross-mode players means they make up a larger percentage of the total now.

Summed up, despite some players comming in, essentially every metric that we players have available to us suggests that the WvW mode today is smaller, more disjointed from other modes in the game and most importantly has far less organisation and content production that can be shared with other players or matched up against other players (public tags etc.).

Spoiler

 

You should also account for how the alliance project as a whole affects the players. It has made players come back and go away since it seems to have completely lost development momentum again. The same goes for players who wait. The project made many players re-organise themselves early (before the betas and in time for the betas). Them waiting means ambition is extra low at the moment while the project delaying means that they are just waiting for longer, losing more and more will to play or even keep a routine level of activity or ambition. So we've been seeing more and more players just go through the motions and from there we see more and more players not even doing that anymore now. For example, I'm sure you've seen all the "Gandara pause" threads here on the forums. Even after that pause ended, it feels to me that this time they have been unable to get back on their feet. Many days of the week their activity still feels as if on pause and most of their public content has not returned. It's a decent enough example.

Something similar goes for some GvG guilds. It is not like they have completely stopped playing. However, they play less in general now and they spend proportionally more of their remaining time playing EotM than normal maps. It's not that GvG is flourishing it is simply that the time they are taking off is mainly taken off the normal maps (and only to some degree that normal-map content is so scattered that many players spend more time with "inhouse" content, just playing amongst themselves).

Finally, while ArenaNet are "communicating" in name they aren't really saying anything about the progress made on the project as a whole. The players who can see-through that are also less motivated to play now. No amount of photoshopped flowcharts is going to motivate them to play or keep any ambition in their playing at the moment. We can never tell what the future has in store, but I am beginning to worry a bit about the next beta's ability to motivate players to play and test it unless substantial progress has been made, considering the time that has passed, how little progress has been made or presented so far and how much time passes between each one-time beta. Meanwhile servers are still "full" and population balance just gets worse making more and more matchups into poorly matched up matchups. The mode isn't dead, but ambition is low and there's increasing instability in worlds.

 

Ps. Whoever added the /spoiler tag to the editing page deserves a pat on the back, good job webdev! It saves plenty of people from... me 😊

Edited June 28, 2022 by subversiontwo.7501

[Dawdler.8521]

Oh but summers are always well populated in WvW despite normal people going on vacations and it being 30c in the shade so your mouse is flying across the room because it got too wet and you couldnt hold on to it, we've never hardly ever seen a dip in the player count every summer of every year for the last 10 years no sir.

Edited June 28, 2022 by Dawdler.8521

[enkidu.5937]

There was a time when a world played as a team vs. 2 other worlds with the intention to win the match.

 

Now we have private or password-restricted squads fighting other private squads for lewd and glory.

 

So basically, WvW is already dead, in fact it became an EotM brawl.

 

Anet now tries to reanimate WvW with alliances. But all they will achieve is to completely split the player base in private communities and randoms. Anet decided against using a defibrillator, instead they choose a wooden pile and a hammer, aiming at the heart. Lets see how this will work out . . .  😏

[subversiontwo.7501]

18 minutes ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

Oh but summers are always well populated in WvW despite normal people going on vacations and it being 30c in the shade so your mouse is flying across the room because it got too wet and you couldnt hold on to it, we've never hardly ever seen a dip in the player count every summer of every year for the last 10 years no sir.

Yeah, it must be summers, because we've never seen a dip every year for the last 10 years looking at general activity either 😋.

[Chaba.5410]

1 hour ago, subversiontwo.7501 said:

Summed up, essentially every metric that we players have available to us suggests that the WvW mode today is smaller, more disjointed from other modes in the game and most importantly has far less organisation and content production that can be shared with other players or matched up against other players (public tags etc.).

Even simpler, we went from 8 tiers in NA and 9 tiers in EU down to 4 and 5 respectively.  There wasn't enough population across all servers to have more tiers.

[Leo.8326]

In short... In the past, Arena Net did not care, and at that time the number of players was good, and when many decided to leave the game, the game decided to try to repair what was destroyed

 and this will not happen in WvW in order to restore the WvW, unfortunately it will not happen, they are too late..If you want to be sure, look at the number of guilds r active rn, not the number of players

[subversiontwo.7501]

2 hours ago, Leo.8326 said:

In short... In the past, Arena Net did not care, and at that time the number of players was good, and when many decided to leave the game, the game decided to try to repair what was destroyed

 and this will not happen in WvW in order to restore the WvW, unfortunately it will not happen, they are too late..If you want to be sure, look at the number of guilds r active rn, not the number of players

Well, here's the thing, Arena Net still doesn't care. I can appreciate Grouch and him trying, but nothing suggests anything different. Instead, for the past 6 months they have managed to speak but say nothing. Some players are seduced by that, others are not.

Spoiler

 

It is a bit hard to explain but think of it like this: We can understand that it is impossible for them to give us a date of release, a perfectly accurate estimate. However, what would be logical for players to expect then is the 2nd best piece of information or the 3rd best. Not the 14th best that says nothing (and is more likely to imply that no work is being done than to imply that work is being done or what work is being done).

Giving assurances that work is being done, or just broad sweeping comments on what has been done like "bugs have been fixed", is itself not communication about progress on the project as a whole. Some players may see that as communication but others will not and those are not necessarily wrong or overly demanding.

Is it 10% done? 25%? 50%? 75%? Another year has passed. That's the type of communication we need, with added details, if they can not give us an estimate in time. If they can't deliver at all on their roadmap we need to know why, transparently so. Not just "queue bug" + "concept design and flowcharts".

What does queue bug and concept design say about a project that has, let's say, 4 phases and is not meant to mark the end of a recommitment to the mode as a whole? Even if we go by the direction given and just assume one full year of development.

It is worrysome, because if we account for whatever groundwork has been done in 2015, 2016 and 2018 while they over the past year have managed to get Phase 1 of the project to about 50% and Phase 2 to 10% (or whatever their current communication is suggesting), what are we to expect of the future?

The same goes for the resources allocated and used.  If the team working on this, even just over the past year of assurances, has essentially just gone +/- 0 from a team that was  already only skeleton crewed, what are our hopes and expectations for the future? That is after the promises of overall recommitment, post-expansion refocus, hiring/investing in WvW, that the Alliance-project (despite its multiple phases) does not solve all pressing issues as well as communicating better. They can communicate about that too and give actual reason to rest assured rather than just empty assurances like that work is done, communication will improve and on.

 

No betas have been held, that is clearly off schedule and uncommunicated! That means communication isn't good and it means that things are not progressing as intended! That's not four years ago, that's now! Yet all we hear is that work is continuing and so will communication.

Spoiler

 

I'll try not to overanalyse this second brick but the past few days drama about the balance patch also suggests to me that Arena Net still do not have their ducks in a row. Most of the outrage with the patch is limited to instanced PvE and all tells available to us still suggests that all (albeit valid-) concerns raised about that still does not reflect any trends of product, players, market share or where sustainable development lies for GW2.

I was hoping Arena Net would be past that now with everything that has been said and drawn up in terms of direction over the past year or so. With that it boggles my mind that, while the outrage was large, so much attention was given to the balance concerns. It feels more like a kneejerk reaction than the developers leaning on a direction that they are comfortable with.

I even believe that the outrage itself could have been avoided if the studio had been better set in their direction for that specific content. I don't pretend to know the finer details about the instanced PvE in this game but if they had kept their direction on appropriate attention to instanced PvE as a whole and stayed the course on separating what is meant to be easy PvE and hard PvE, I have feeling that there would have been less of an outrage from both the more casual and the more competetive sides of that content type. It is clear to me that some players are worried about the balance due to class-accesibility and gatekeeping while other players are worried about competetive aspects and it seems like both could have been avoided if they had let easy content be easy and hard content be hard. Instead they fumble around with making some content hard but still maintaining some notion of it being for everyone and that is just anathematic.

So to me it seems that their sense of direction is crumbling both in how they relate instanced PvE to open PvP (ie., Strikes/Raids/Fractals/Dungeons to WvW with all of its subcontent), but they also seem to have lost direction when it comes to the internals of instanced PvE too (ie., how Strikes, Raids, Fractals and Dungeons are meant to relate to oneanother, normals and CM's, class balance for that subcontent and how that later impacts how much general development attention, time and resources it will need going forward).

That worries me because if they lose sense of direction there they then risk to further lose sense of direction how all of that is to relate to us. We're back at where suddenly that needs more resources and suddenly that is their priority again and suddenly all resources have been pulled from WvW to accomodate that and suddenly changes made there are allowed to trickle through the entire game again and disrupt all other modes and suddenly someone forgot to tell us... again.

So it does worry me that the outcry from that subset of the playerbase renders a response within a workday (even if it was as non-communicative as the information we get) whereas we have to wait more than six months for the same amount of effort being spent on communication. Perhaps we need to whip up more of a shitstorm on public-facing platforms, too? To me at least, this suggests that we are back to where instanced PvE is a cornerstone game mode again while WvW is not; which is odd given how this game is built, what direction was communicated and what competitors do and do well.

 

With all said and done. GW2 is an MMO. An MMO has four dimensions of content: open and instanced PvE plus open and instanced PvP. The various modes and subcontent in GW2 fits into that paradigm. GW2 excels at open content. It always has. That is what it is built for and that is unsurprisingly where it outshines competitors and make its core systems shine. If the studio then want to develop any instanced mode or subcontent, that is fine as long as they have the resources to. However, any time they attend or prioritise that over what their game does well, they are off in la-la land and destroy their own product and legacy. That has always been the case but ArenaNet have known it, lost track of it, known it and to me they seem to waiver again now despite everyhing that was said and recalled. That is direction, that is communication, that is eventually marketing. The, same, old, things. It is quite clear right now that certain things get more attention, more communication and sees more progression than other, that also raises warranted questions and doubt over what sees more development.

Edited June 28, 2022 by subversiontwo.7501

[ghost scyth.3148]

7 hours ago, Oblako.6048 said:

Maybe I'm wrong, but lately I see less and less zerg actions on WvW. Most of the time it's empty and only few roamers play. Do WvW dies slowly?

aranet try kill wvw with nerfing fun class to play with

Edited June 28, 2022 by ghost scyth.3148

[RisingDaewn.8703]

WvW will always be around, especially if there is no Competition in terms of a 'Competitive' game mode (or dedicated RvR games like that DaOC successor that has never been out of Alpha), which is flexible in terms of Large and Small Scale PvP/E. 

That's even if the population of Open field WvW or Community Guilds and players is far, far less since the Launch of the game almost 10 years ago, it's just not been a priority and been on the bottom of their list, in terms of marketing it towards those type of MMO players for many years.

Even in terms of Youtube or Twitch these days, it has a low niche audience for End game content, also perhaps because it is so confusing to watch, like most Large scale content in this game has so much visual clutter.

So there's no marketing hype for wvw in that respect either. The same goes for spvp, which is also competitive endgame content, except you can compare spvp to other dedicated f2p competitive PvP games like lol, Dota and several fps games.

Edited June 30, 2022 by CrimsonNeonite.1048

[Reborn.2934]

yes and now it's half dead...

why? because they had to merge servers to have people during prime time of the day...

wvw is an old system that created a decade ago and for a game that hasn't 3 expansions... 

these 3 expansions changed the whole battle in wvw and wvw needs reconstruction now too. 

until the recostruction they can do some changes without a serious development cost but i have a feeling that nobody cares for wvw anymore since what changes are bringing is only to  bring some balance to classes of the 3rd expansion that had the role to create dominated classes for roaming in wvw and only ...

i posted yesterday in my site 2 changes that will make wvw a more enjoyable place for casual players but i am sure with what i have write until now, they are avoiding it like i avoid their wvw and the eod classes in roaming 😜

Edited June 28, 2022 by Reborn.2934

[Oblako.6048]

1 hour ago, Reborn.2934 said:

yes and now it's half dead...

 ...

i posted yesterday in my site 2 changes that will make wvw a more enjoyable place for casual players but i am sure with what i have write until now, they are avoiding it like i avoid their wvw and the eod classes in roaming 😜

Cool blog, with deep thoughts on the WvW system and how to make it more enjoyable . What a pity that the developers do not read this 😞 I wish Floyd Grubb (from this post: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/world-vs-world-update-june-2022/) read your blog ❤

PS. I think you need to add the ability to leave comments on articles on your blog. You would know what others think about the same things. 

Edited June 29, 2022 by Oblako.6048

[Ausar.9542]

were you here during the vanilla days before server links? WvW was dead. 

[jaif.3518]

I'll say it again. You're an ANET suit, and you can put resources into:

 

A) Tailoring PvE to attract the WOW diaspora, or

B) improve WvW

 

I think the first is vastly more likely to result in profits.

[Reborn.2934]

15 hours ago, Oblako.6048 said:

Cool blog, with deep thoughts on the WvW system and how to make it more enjoyable . What a pity that the developers do not read this 😞 I wish Floyd Grubb (from this post: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/world-vs-world-update-june-2022/) read your blog ❤

PS. I think you need to add the ability to leave comments on articles on your blog. You would know what others think about the same things. 

 

thank you for your kind words but the main reason that i haven't add a comments system is exacty the same reason that wvw is losing casual players overtime and i wrote in your quoted link of my blog.

 

TIME

 

the most precious item in our life. 

 

trust me, comments in sites earn a lot of time from the site owners. maybe i will implement one in alliances if they don't ruin servers with it... 

 

4 hours ago, jaif.3518 said:

I'll say it again. You're an ANET suit, and you can put resources into:

 

A) Tailoring PvE to attract the WOW diaspora, or

B) improve WvW

 

I think the first is vastly more likely to result in profits.

can i help them with a statetement of what WvW is?

 

WvW is a PvP extension of Guild Wars 2 PvE and much more....

 

Explanation as i worte it in my site:

1. WvW level : based on PvE level
2. WvW weapon: same with PvE weapon (WvW vendors sell weapons that can be used to PvE too)
3. WvW armor: same with PvE armor (WvW vendors sell armor that can be used to PvE too)
4. WvW runes: same with PvE runes (they can used in PvE too)
5. WvW sigils: based with PvE sigils (they can used in PvE too)
6. WvW builds: same tab with your PvE builds 
7. WvW legendary Gear: Same With PvE and Depended From WvW Progress Now!

 

Also, if you watch the videos of Aurora Glade's zerg fights playlsit in the frontpage of my site you will see 1st a video from 2012 zerg fight and from a well known guild (Boon Control) that was in Aurora Glade and stopped playing GW2 and returned to... WoW.😂

 

My opinion is that devs should find the magic formula to make the WvW funnier for casual PvE players and more challenging to PvE addicted players with the best PvE element that gw2 has and it is not the fractals or the bounties but the GROUP EVENTS as i explain it in my site again (boring already?😇) but this time i have included a social media example from ... a WoW player.😂

 

too much WoW in these forums today... lol

Edited June 29, 2022 by Reborn.2934

[Riba.3271]

WvW has declined but it isn't dying anymore. It is a retirement home. Small amount of people come and go. Some make zombie guilds that disband in 6 months. There will always be people to lazy to swap from cubic 30 kg televisions to better ones.

Is it in thrash state? Yes. But lot of people are content with that. They are free cows to milk money from, any farmers dream.

What is truly worrysome is that Steam release could make GW2 top MMO, but Anet chooses to throw the chance away by focusing on something that won't fix the gameplay/infrastructure of their most outstanding game mode. Tomfoolery. It is obvious they want money but dont know how to make it. I am 100% sure they will miss the crystal clear opportunity of a lifetime.

Edited June 29, 2022 by Threather.9354

[Dawdler.8521]

24 minutes ago, Threather.9354 said:

WvW has declined but it isn't dying anymore. It is a retirement home.

It does explain why so many need a crutch to get around.

[Hotride.2187]

3 hours ago, Threather.9354 said:

What is truly worrysome is that Steam release could make GW2 top MMO, but Anet chooses to throw the chance away by focusing on something that won't fix the gameplay/infrastructure of their most outstanding game mode. Tomfoolery. It is obvious they want money but dont know how to make it. I am 100% sure they will miss the crystal clear opportunity of a lifetime.

Kinda weird how from 3 game modes (conquest, wvw, raids) they chose to work on the only one where other MMOs are better. What can you do.

Edited June 29, 2022 by Hotride.2187

[Xenesis.6389]

25 minutes ago, Hotride.2187 said:

Kinda weird how from 3 game modes (conquest, wvw, raids) they chose to work on the only one where other MMOs are better. What can you do.

Kinda funny to see them try hard on chasing the smallest group of players in the game, while it collapsed in wow and they mostly went to ff14 instead. Maybe that's where the majority of the whales plays. One day I'd love to see a percentage breakdown  again of population from each area of the game, wvw, spvp, fractal, raid, strikes. Years ago it was over 30% for wvw, I would imagine the same for spvp, and like less than 10% for raids, probably the same for strikes, but I imagine the numbers there have inflated since you're forced into strikes for the new mount. Just funny to see them chase the elitist, and not keep a balanced content release, but going by the last balance update totally not surprising. 🤭

[Strider Pj.2193]

On 6/29/2022 at 1:46 AM, Ausar.9542 said:

were you here during the vanilla days before server links? WvW was dead. 

 Vanilla was before HoT.  WvW wasn’t dead.

 

It tanked heavily after HoT release and for the 6-9 months following.  

[Mabi black.1824]

the good thing maybe is that you got to the bottom of the barrel, now you can only go up. the status of themode and therefore the state of the player is fatigued precisely because the player lacks motivation. my personal opinion is that what you see now is already the effect of alliances. when you saw the first betas arrive, it became aware that alliances come and there is no going back. all those players who somehow were still clinging to their team which gave them a reason to work for a goal common to many other players, surrendered to the evidence.

all guilds have started / set their beta alliances, these players yes, these players no, those are too numerous, those are too small, this is nice , that and less nice etc etc . the communities have gone even more into difficulty the guilds have started even more in motion than before, with the result of completely losing identity and therefore motivation. in short, we have already suffered the earthquake of alliances , the damage he had to do is what you see. now it's about rebuilding and finding a way to restore motivationto the player.

[SlateSloan.3654]

not dying but it will change alot.

the classic public zerg gaming will mostly vanish and be limited to moments where several commanders can agree with each others to be online at the same time and to join the same border. you can see that today already when some of them already post across all discord communities who are involved into a matchup to organise some activity with each others.

Zerg or Guildfighting will move more and more to arena / eotm cause the last remaining who like that want "proper content" which they can hardly find these days. A result of the masses not wanting to "be forced to play like others say" but rather want to fight the never ending battle for ogrewatch or smc. alot of the new players or PvE players who are there for the gift of battle seem not be willing to prepare themselves and refuse to play "zerg-builds". So I think the wvw gaming will change to mostly cloud gaming / roaming.

Alliances will just balance the clouds. Guilds who would need to take care for an alliance to exist still cant choose their opponents for a proper matchup of their fightstrength. a big minus. Voices like "the matchup is dead see ya next week" will remain. People will just check all their alt accounts for a proper matchup. Nice for anets account sales but what???

Anet would have been better off to get rid of servers and just fill up matchups with players who activate some "wvw player" checkbox so the player can get randomly assigned to an wvw ppt matchup which needs more participants. If a matchup is full the system generates the next one and fills up and so on and so on.

for the fight oriented there should be an ingame match browser. Like i once wrote already a browser where coms and guilds can create matches with. gvg with some spvp-type ladder system.

there you go all would get the "content" they want when they are online to play. Fighting on demand when people come online together will be the future here not some empty alliances matchups cause "no proper content".

Times have changed alot. A random fillup alliance system wont change the situations of guilds and commanders who still want coop groupplay.

Changes are needed cause there is different demand among different audiences by now.

 

[kash.9213]

On 6/29/2022 at 2:13 PM, Xenesis.6389 said:

Kinda funny to see them try hard on chasing the smallest group of players in the game, while it collapsed in wow and they mostly went to ff14 instead. Maybe that's where the majority of the whales plays. One day I'd love to see a percentage breakdown  again of population from each area of the game, wvw, spvp, fractal, raid, strikes. Years ago it was over 30% for wvw, I would imagine the same for spvp, and like less than 10% for raids, probably the same for strikes, but I imagine the numbers there have inflated since you're forced into strikes for the new mount. Just funny to see them chase the elitist, and not keep a balanced content release, but going by the last balance update totally not surprising. 🤭

Good point. I think Numbers for all modes would go up if they tied all of the modes together better so people don't have to feel like they have to drop one thing entirely to get into something else. WvW should be in the form of flagged open world pvp with an updated instanced EBG map for a few perpetual battlefronts and lanes and to house a new Spvp with instanced locations around the new EBG map accompanied with open world map versions, with thematic arenas that tie it into some world building story premise. Then have more in game ambient chatter and story telling through setting and worldbuilding to promote, guide, and inform on all of the different modes.

Most players would likely be playing the majority of modes instead of everyone funneling into one because the other modes demand all their time. 

Edited June 30, 2022 by kash.9213

[jaif.3518]

43 minutes ago, AlCapwnd.7834 said:

WvW is only dead to people who never play the mode, then come here to complain about how bad "their" class is and why they wont play. People are playing. You might just be on a low pop server that never gets a good match up. idk

 

No, I was here when I was playing as well, and I think many if not most play many classes as the mood and situation suit them. 

 

We do come here to complain, that's true, but it's players and non-players, and people who play all classes.