Fair fights

[Sansar.1302]

i want wvw to be about fair fights and not using superior numbers to win.

[Alsandar.7420]

Maybe you’d enjoy pvp more. But WvW is a beautiful, social, guild oriented experience. Love my guild so much. If you want to play solo/havoc Mag is a great option.

[Luthan.5236]

I think this is the wrong thing to look for into WvW. Ideally the main focus of WvW would be to cleverly distribute your numbers to the different locations ... trying to hold as much stuff as long as possible (+ upgrading it). Imo they even should remove the points you get for kills.

I'd still prefer ot see a mid-sized game mode though. With PvP-gear and 10-20 vs. 10-20 players and a match duratoin where you can play the whole match and feel your win. (20-40 minutes maybe)

People in WvW in general just seem not to really care about winning the matchup. Just trying to get some fights and loot and winning the individual zerg fights. Even if it means just zerg vs. zerg somewhere off the objectives.

Edited February 19, 2023 by Luthan.5236

[Gehenna.3625]

Not sure if WvW should be about fair fights. It's just that in the current state there is the potential to make fights even more unfair than they have to be. And some servers cash in on that potential and others don't. 

22 minutes ago, Alsandar.7420 said:

Maybe you’d enjoy pvp more. But WvW is a beautiful, social, guild oriented experience. Love my guild so much. If you want to play solo/havoc Mag is a great option.

To say WvW is a social, guild oriented experience is a bit much imo. There's lots of people playing solo because they just want to get the rewards (legendaries) and are not there for the WvW itself.

11 minutes ago, Luthan.5236 said:

I think this is the wrong thing to look for into WvW. Ideally the main focus of WvW would be to cleverly distribute your numbers to the different locations ... trying to hold as much stuff as long as possible (+ upgrading it). Imo they even should remove the points you get for kills.

I would agree with this but it often isn't the case. Whereas some servers manage to have a more holistic approach to WvW, most servers do not.

11 minutes ago, Luthan.5236 said:

I'd still prefer ot see a mid-sized game mode though. With PvP-gear and 10-20 vs. 10-20 players and a match duratoin where you can play the whole match and feel your win. (20-40 minutes maybe)

Interesting idea. Though it might take a lot of people away from WvW.

11 minutes ago, Luthan.5236 said:

People in WvW in general just seem not to really care about winning the matchup. Just trying to get some fights and loot and winning the individual zerg fights. Even if it means just zerg vs. zerg somewhere off the objectives.

Yeah but it's what Anet encourages. I feel they really need to talk a good look at WvW and make some major changes to it. For the moment it's just tweaking things left and right, which focus on the behavior you mention so they encourage it even more.

Not sure if Anet will make the changes I would like to see because they would take a lot more resources to fix things. In essence there are issues in the combat system (boonballs and class imbalances) and in WvW systems and maps that need to be resolved. That's not something you can just fix in one step. 

[TrollingDemigod.3041]

It's always nice to see how enemy calls for help when you're alone fighting against 1 guy in towers lord room and few seconds later you're chased by whole zerg.
I play Ele, so of course I should be able to solo all of them, so it's fair fight I guess.

[Sansar.1302]

3 hours ago, TrollingDemigod.3041 said:

It's always nice to see how enemy calls for help when you're alone fighting against 1 guy in towers lord room and few seconds later you're chased by whole zerg.
I play Ele, so of course I should be able to solo all of them, so it's fair fight I guess.

If you interfer with objektive then I understand getting zerged down as solo or smal grp, what I don't understand is grps chasing or adding on solos. 

[KeyOrion.9506]

Fair fight?  In the early days we used whatever method, and every trick in the book to win.  We used siege.  We Pin-Sniped.  We set traps.  We used deception and spies.  Honor, on a battlefield, especially in a game?  Use what you can, when you can.  Right now, a lot of unbalanced play is caused by an inability of the Devs to notice that some professions are overpowered, and you need every last trick in the book to beat them, and the current "Meta".  Now if I can teach and ingrain that into today's commanders and zerg drivers in the game, I think you would have a "near" balanced fight system.  But for some reason, they want an "honorable" fight by showing the enemy that they can beat them without any "tricks".  Does not always work out in the way they believe it should.  That's where they throw themselves 15 times into a brick wall, just to hit their heads repeatedly against it.  That becomes frustrating to watch.

[TheGrimm.5624]

On 2/19/2023 at 6:04 AM, Alsandar.7420 said:

Maybe you’d enjoy pvp more. But WvW is a beautiful, social, guild oriented experience. Love my guild so much. If you want to play solo/havoc Mag is a great option.

Roamers and Havocs live everywhere. Its kind of ironic, most roamers and havocs aren't looking to fair else they wouldn't do either attack more with less or less with more. So lets not group us all with Mag if you don't mind. Especially while Mag gave me less reason to defend them with their alt accounts. Regaining my karma and enjoying it thanks.

[Knighthonor.4061]

Numbers should matter.  But the game developers should have made tools for players to counter events like this when you are outmatched. Those Champion NPCs that stay in the starting area was supposed to be something like that. But that turned out to be a really poorly implemented idea.  What should have happen was adding a new mobile siege that was built for mob/zerg fighting rather than taking out walls like golem. These sieges were never tuned for Elite Spec level incoming damage numbers. 

[Serp.3264]

On 2/19/2023 at 5:59 AM, Sansar.1302 said:

i want wvw to be about fair fights and not using superior numbers to win.

 

I don't think we should really try to shoot for "fair" fights in WvW. It is supposed to be a "war" like scenario where fairness isn't really important. All is fair in love and war as they say...

 

With that said, that is only one part of your comment and I want to address the "not using superior numbers to win" aspect as I think this is probably your primary issue. I'm still relatively new to WvW in GW2 (decade+ experience playing RvR in DAOC though), so take this with a grain of salt, but I do think there is something a bit off about how WvW feels to play. I think the incentive structure is just off. Right now, it appears that playing in a zerg is by far the most "efficient" way to play if your goal is WvW XP/rewards. This by default filters a ton of players directly into a zerg. The issue I see with a set up like this is that zerging is also very safe. Why risk running alone or with a small group when you can just run with the tag and steamroll things? This leads to the zerg growing and just PvEing down objectives quickly without much coordinated pushback (as the opposing teams also consolidate into large zergs). Eventually, the enemy zerg meets up with your zerg on one of the main objectives of the map, you have a fight where one side wins (typically the side with more bodies although coordination can play a massive role here too), and then you start over. Obviously, time of day and your server will impact this significantly, but this general gameplay loop seems to be inherently designed into the system as the most efficient way to play if you are interested in maximizing WvW XP/rewards.

 

The main issue, from my perspective, is that the higher risk playstyles, which promote variety in terms of engagements, should be incentivized much more heavily than it is. In my personal opinion, I think there should be something, I don't know exactly what, that should directly cater to smaller WvW playstyles (solo/small group). Those playstyles should be able to do something important more efficiently than a zerg (for instance, maybe objectives/kills WXP scales so that fewer people taking an objective provides more bonus shared amongst that group than for a zerg of 50 - or it could be something related to getting reward tracks completed faster - I don't really know, but something). From my limited experience, it just feels like there are a ton of players who want to either zerg or do nothing. Those players will venture out on their own to capture some objectives, but only objectives directly next to safe zones (and those objectives are basically undefendable typically - they tend to flip every 5mins on cooldown). The map design causes some of this on its own too (not only are some camps almost directly next to safe areas but all structures are too close to each other to facilitate any real open world engagements that don't immediately get piled on by others looking to outnumber). I don't really know how to change any of that without breaking the game mode, so I don't have any concrete solutions, but I hope someone working on the game is more creative than I am.

 

TL;DR - I disagree that WvW should care about fair fights, but I do think zerging is too incentivized given its relative "safety in numbers" feature. More riskier playstyles should give a higher reward, imo.

[Evenge.4067]

I like to portal bomb a zerg onto solo players. That's good fun. 🤪

[Bigpapasmurf.5623]

On 2/21/2023 at 2:31 AM, KeyOrion.9506 said:

Fair fight?  In the early days we used whatever method, and every trick in the book to win.  We used siege.  We Pin-Sniped.  We set traps.  We used deception and spies.  Honor, on a battlefield, especially in a game?  Use what you can, when you can.  Right now, a lot of unbalanced play is caused by an inability of the Devs to notice that some professions are overpowered, and you need every last trick in the book to beat them, and the current "Meta".  Now if I can teach and ingrain that into today's commanders and zerg drivers in the game, I think you would have a "near" balanced fight system.  But for some reason, they want an "honorable" fight by showing the enemy that they can beat them without any "tricks".  Does not always work out in the way they believe it should.  That's where they throw themselves 15 times into a brick wall, just to hit their heads repeatedly against it.  That becomes frustrating to watch.

We were in a ZvZ last week, tried our garri (big known guild...wont blast them however they are known for giving ezbags) and me a DPS druid hopped up on the very top as they were running all around killing all siege and such. Well I noticed who the driver was and you bet your butt I pinsniped them down and was able to finish them off. Group fell apart very shortly after and I felt good. Someone noticed in map chat and thanked me. Pin sniping is effective when ya know how to do it. Havent tried in forever however I felt like I should start doing it again xD

[Riba.3271]

WvW competitive scene was killed with overly potent tactics, bad siege balance and claim buffs. I am guessing it was attempt to make WvW more casual and drive hardcore players into worse, but better balanced, games. Or in the worst case, they thought it was a good idea for one side to have over 20% damage dealing advantage and cheese tactics just by owning nearby location. Maybe they just didn't do the math and threw some random numbers around.

Essentially if you have unbalanced game, people will try to overcome being the underdog, so the servers get unbalanced as well. Transferred to servers are player balanced around being able to take objectives, and transferred away servers are much worse since they are balanced around barely being able to defend objectives.

So essentially bad balancing isn't just about one side having combat advantage, it has also brought about quality advantage.

Edited March 1, 2023 by Riba.3271