WTF is Anet doing to WvW?

[TheGrimm.5624]

2 minutes ago, Thron Stal.9367 said:

We are not getting more peeps by nerfing classes that do not need a nerf... Pretty soon they will have no wvw. 

Did I ask for any one to be nerfed? I have 32 WvW toons, did you see me ask for nerfs?

Edited April 19 by TheGrimm.5624

[Mabi black.1824]

1 hour ago, One more for the road.8950 said:

1 hour ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Well if boonballers are not liking it, then that means all the anti-boonballers are supposed to now like it.  /sarcasm

I am questioning your reading comprehension.

Sarcasm - Sense of humor - Let's have a good laugh - Ironic

[Thron Stal.9367]

3 minutes ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

Did I ask for any one to be nerfed? I have 32 WvW toons, did you see me ask for nerfs?

That was a reply to all off your comments... NOT at you. Take a chill pill. LOL

[TheGrimm.5624]

3 minutes ago, Thron Stal.9367 said:

We are not getting more peeps by nerfing classes that do not need a nerf... Pretty soon they will have no wvw. 

Warhammer players in my book are a bit mental. We enjoy jokes, banter, fun and since we mixed regions at times could better understand the differences in regions that we don't see as much in GW2. So don't read this more as a Witch Elf and a Choppa having a laugh together over time.

[TheGrimm.5624]

1 minute ago, Thron Stal.9367 said:

That was a reply to all off your comments... NOT at you. Take a chill pill. LOL

All off? Chill lol, its 4:30, this is chill. I still do not understand your reply. And please don't take it as anything more as I didn't understand your point. It is late and I shorthand versus ramble at this hour.

 

[TheGrimm.5624]

6 minutes ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

Sarcasm - Sense of humor - Let's have a good laugh - Ironic

lol, one day if they mix regions, we go and duo keep takes my friend.

[Thron Stal.9367]

Just now, TheGrimm.5624 said:

All off? Chill lol, its 4:30, this is chill. I still do not understand your reply. And please don't take it as anything more as I didn't understand your point. It is late and I shorthand versus ramble at this hour.

 

Anet is driving people to quit IMHO.  WoW took a turn for the worst when  you could Inspect other people and now Anet maroons are doing the same stupid stuff all over. 

[TheGrimm.5624]

Just now, Thron Stal.9367 said:

Anet is driving people to quit IMHO.  WoW took a turn for the worst when  you could Inspect other people and now Anet maroons are doing the same stupid stuff all over. 

Hear you there. I go round and round. We want changes but when they lean towards one degree versus the other the questions raise. The key is for the side that the changes don't favor, we need to adapt and adjust and come back after to apply the WTWs after we can change tactics. Losing stuff makes me grumpy. It also makes me teach players more Havoc tactics so they can still fight outnumbered since I already did that in the tourney days. So we adapt. In the end this just might create stronger roamers and havocs to counter the zerg play. Course, I might be mental.

[ToWildToHandle.6319]

Well Anet officially made me Change my Daily Vault to ONLY Pve instead of wvw.......

 

Scouting is now USELESS unless your on at a time where the server has Alot to defend...

And the comment about people should use siege instead USELESS to...

If your in the low pop hour for your server and the full zerg comes that gate will be down in 5 sec you DO NOT have time to build or use siege before they are In..       

And now on top of that you cant repair, because who the f is gonna go thrue the zerg 5+ times to get to supplies to repear and what zerg will let you...........

So basicly you cant hold anything...

your call outs are NOT needed cause cant be saved......

= if your not in a huge zerg then why even play.......

This pissed me of so bad i have done the min daily until we hit next week where my dailys goes to Pve....

i surgest Others do the same and show Anet that this is just Crap..

if you keep playing they will NOT change it............

[One more for the road.8950]

What do you mean changing WV rewards from WvW to PvE?

WvW is turning into PvE, didn't you get the memo?

[Dawdler.8521]

22 minutes ago, ToWildToHandle.6319 said:

if you keep playing they will NOT change it............

Ok then who stopped playing for all these changes to have happened so we can claim them?

[joneirikb.7506]

25 minutes ago, ToWildToHandle.6319 said:

if you keep playing they will NOT change it............

This is a very interesting point, because I've seen it done before. And the result was that the company thought no one cared/played the game any-longer, and just shut it down, and replaced it with a new game. So it's very much a possibility that if people just stop playing WvW, they'd just shut it down, because well no one is playing it. They'd finally have the excuse they needed to just turn off WvW entirely, and put GoB in a pvp track or something.

[Codename T.2847]

6 hours ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

Tldr: Ranting.

So there's a few topics to break down here:

* Players
* Balance

They do depend heavily on each others, and making changes to one without taking the other into account will just fall flat on its face.

----

* Players:

So the short version is that players are different now than they where at launch/vanilla (2012-2015), and there are a lot of reasons as to why that is so and I don't think there's anyone that could even list all of those reasons. The important part here is that we're never going to get back the type of mentality we had back then, and this is more because of the players than the changes to the game.

Some of those changes in player behaviour is that:
* More reward driven
* More impatient
* Less skilled (in nearly all ways)
* Less goal driven/tenacious

Some of the obvious ways this changes the game mode, is that zerging becomes more and more popular, and less and less people want to play outside of zergs. The old "karma-train" (yeah I know, no karma involved any longer) becomes the most approachable and desire-able activity for a larger group of players than before, and steadily increasing.

We further see this with the "Participation" system, which makes a very large amount of players consider anything that isn't giving them participation to be a waste of time and thus not desire-able. This is one of the most behaviour shaping mechanics we have in the game mode today.

All of this together is already shaping the entire player-base as a whole toward attack and zerging (impatient, reward, easy), and away from defence (patience, outnumbered, less-rewards, community driven).

Where the "mechanics" that should work toward getting players to defy odds and keep fighting would be:

* Points
* Community (server, guild)

Has largely been ignored by the player-base over the years, until they're no longer sufficient to motivate enough players to make a change/difference. And this is more the fault of the players than of ANet.

----

* Balance: (game-mode, not class)

While there has been a lot of changes to defence vs offence over the years, I ultimately find that they're of less impact than the changes to the player-base-mentality itself. Their primary impact is in how it affects players perception of the game mode, and thus leads players towards viewing the game, and thus affecting their player-mentality.

That said, there are some mechanics that I do feel shuts down a lot of player-interaction. I'm not going to try to make a complete list, I'm just going to mention some examples and why they mechanically complicate the situation.

* Static stat boosts

The problem here is that if you have 10 vs 10 it's supposed to be a fair fight, determined by skill. If you give a +X stat boost through an objective, outnumbered or bloodlust etc, then those has to be rebalanced into say 12 vs 10. But that means a 10vs10 is no longer considered fair, and a 10vs12 would be even more unfair. Static stat boosts never actually help balancing out anything, they just push the needle a bit in one direction or the other. And player/group skill is still such an important matter that the stats are often completely irrelevant, or the number difference between the sides is so big that the starts are again irrelevant.

So with all these variables that affects the outcome of a fight far more than a passive stat bonus, the stats themselves only barely push the needle a little bit back and forth, and just makes it even murkier to decide if it was a fair fight or not.

Now each of those (claim bonus, outumbered, bloodlust) requires different solutions, there isn't a one solution that fits all of them. And it also depends largely upon what they (ANet) actually want each of those to actually do.

Example, if they want the claim bonuses to stimulate fights in towers/keeps, then the current +X stats doesn't really do anything, as it still depends entirely upon if the defenders can get a larger group to come defend or not. One thing they could do, was to have a changing buff system, that modifies the defenders inside walls stats by +/- X% based on how much they're outnumbered/outnumbering. So if there's 20 attackers against 5 defenders, the 5 defenders get a massive bonus to stats so they might survive and deal some damage back, to actually make a noticeable dent in the attackers. And also if a group of 50 comes to defend, then the now 55 defenders could also get a similar -X% so the 20 attackers can at least still do something, or at least do a fighting retreat.

This would naturally disrupt a lot of the current idea of "fair fights" about messing with stats etc, but it would do so in a way specifically to encourage fights IN objectives. I'm not sure if this is the way to go or not, just talking about it as one way to make a "stat bonus" matter, and actually affect gameplay to encourage specific types of gameplay behaviour. And there'd be a lot of side effects that would have to be dealt with, more than I can manage to predict.

There are several other things that would fall into this same issue, Siege for one thing has static numbers that just doesn't scale well into larger groups etc.

Other ideas:
* Make the objective claims instead give bonuses to supply/siege. Stuff like get x2 use out of your supply, do x2 damage with siege, gain pulsing stability on siege etc. That would make the guild claims desire-able for defence, and actually give relevant bonuses for slowing down enemies or sometimes even beat them back. But without the mostly irrelevant bonus stats.

* Force Multipliers

Yes, this is where we're talking about Boons among other things. Basically the game mode is dominated by force-multipliers, the two most obvious being boons and just player numbers. And while I think they could tweak some of the boons, there's not really much to do about the player numbers, as those are honestly outside of ANet's control.

The biggest thing in WvW has always been just sheer player numbers. Population + Coverage, these two has always been the two largest issues with the game mode. I say that the third biggest issue is Fair-weather mentality, but it's just as much a result of the first two. If the enemy has full maps, and your server barely has people on when you play then:

* You don't have fun
* You generally can't do much to affect the map/situation
* You're stuck in a losing situation which you're not responsible for
* You don't have a way to change it

And most players, when they don't have fun with a game, leaves. Either to another mode, to another game, or goes back to cleaning dishes or finish of that spreadsheet the boss is complaining about.

And again, the mechanics that are supposed to be there to assist or counter this doesn't work as intended:
* 3 way fight
* Community
* Points (to some degree)

Honestly, boonballs isn't even a blip on the radar compared to the problem that Population/Coverage/Fair-weather is to the game mode. Boons is stills something that needs a look on, that I never expect is going to happen.

But essentially, since force-multipliers is what is driving the game mode, counters to these should also be force-multiplying. A passive stat boost will never affect these problems, you'd need something like an AC do a multiplier per enemy hit, until it actually starts devastating 40+ zergs. Abilities that actually can hurt players with large amounts of boons. And these also needs counter play, the most obvious place to put these are Siege since siege is a unique mechanic to WvW and thus won't affect other game modes, so they're in theory easy ways for WvW devs to affect the entire game mode with sweeping easy changes, without having to go through the balancing team and mess up their plans for the rest of the game.

----

Couple of things that affects both:

* Points:

One of the largest problems with the game, is that players completely ignore Points. It's an entire game mode designed around points being the "big thing", and players completely ignore it. This is creating more issues than I can shake a stick at, but the main ones:

* Points was supposed to be the main thing to drive player behaviour
* Thus it was the main way for ANet to try to adjust player behaviour
* This has 99% been replaced by "Rewards" (Participation, PIPS, Bags, GoB, etc)

If players cared about points, they'd defend, even if just to slow the enemy down, and then back-cap right afterwards. Because under a "point centric" game, that makes sense. If players cared about points, then big-zerg/blob is a moronic idea, because you can only capture 1 thing at a time. You'd split up into multiple havoc parties, run around and take everything that's undefended, and then team up to take things that are defended. That way you constantly have smaller groups running into each others, and get constantly shifting numbers at objectives. The mode would largely self balance itself constantly. If you already have 20 fighting 10 in a keep, it's better to use the remaining 5 man parties to take other stuff, the 20 can handle the 10 even if it takes a bit longer.

When player doesn't care about points, all we're left with is:
* Rewards (Participation, PIPS, Bags, GoB, etc)
* Spectacle (Big fights, running over others, etc)
 

And when those are the main motivations, you can see how and why we're stuck with the kind of player mentality we have nowadays.

* Interaction:

All of these things collects up into that players feel unable to meaningfully interact with the game. They feel like they can't do anything that makes a change, like they can't affect any outcomes, feel useless and insignificant, and obviously that's really bad for a "Game".

Most players will generally not think too hard about any of these, and just associate it with something they personally felt changed this. So say a patch comes and changes X into Y, and that patch changed the player experience to hit under the tolerance threshold for player Z, then that player Z will blame that patch for the changes to the game mode, and will want that patch reverted in order to make "WvW great again!". When in the majority of those cases it's just a steady change/decline in player-behaviour that's to blame.

The most obvious example: If ANet now caved in to my completely unreasonable demands to roll back the ENTIRE balance to 2014, which is the last time I felt class balance and wvw balance was good... the result wouldn't be very good. Largely because the player-base is completely different from back then, the player-behaviour is completely different, most players wouldn't enjoy the more skill based and more interact-able gameplay/balance we had back then, and would largely complain about everything we lost that they thought was fun (elite specs, new trait system, new stat sets, runes, sigils, foods, QoL, mount, gliding, every single guild bonus and guild aura grind etc)

And it still wouldn't change that players today are much more reward driven, still don't care about points, still are lazy and want easy wins and stack servers (Population/Coverage/Fair-Weather). And even if we had better tools to deal with that (as we'd still have the near full powered old zerg-busting options with oldschool stability), there's even less people that would use those, as they require a different type of dedication/interest than the majority of players have today.

----

/rant

Okie that's more than enough, I gotta shut up now. Sorry for the mostly unstructured mess.

 

Great read! Now that almost all the oldheads left who were still playing the gamemode when I started, it indeed feels like player mentality changed a lot. Also the fair-weather phenomenon and the related population issues are probably more dangerous to the health of WvW than any cele build or boonball and it really sūcks Anet can't get their act together and figure out some anti-bandwagoning device : (

we live in a society

Edited April 19 by Codename T.2847

[Chaba.5410]

7 hours ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

Yes but there's something called degrees. We have a keep claim buff now, and we have a keep claim buff last year, but these are not the same thing.

You're not saying anything different from what I wrote.  I never intended to claim that everything was the same.  Not sure where you're getting that from.  I provided evidence of my claim that defense was buffed at some time in the past.  Then I acknowledge that the most egregious stuff was fixed.  Then I conclude that we still have some of those features.  We still have claim buffs.  We've had claim buffs for 9 years.

Picture a trend chart where 9 years ago there was a spike upwards.  Then the trend line starts heading downwards but still hasn't reached the level of 10 years ago.

 

7 hours ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

Just because it doesn't fit into your narrative doesn't make it a minor detail.

Granted, I think what happened 9 years ago is a minor detail in the grand scheme of things.

You could have mentioned the EWP buff. People would have countered that the change is outnumbered recently, but it would be a valid point, and hey it's not a 9 year old change and actually something people would remember.

It's a minor detail because it didn't budge the needle away from the overall trend of defense being buffed.  It's a minor detail because it says nothing about the big picture - the overall trend of offense/defense balance over an almost decade length of time.  It's a minor detail because it gets countered with that change being outnumbered by other changes that trend in a different direction.

[XenesisII.1540]

6 hours ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

This is a very interesting point, because I've seen it done before. And the result was that the company thought no one cared/played the game any-longer, and just shut it down, and replaced it with a new game. So it's very much a possibility that if people just stop playing WvW, they'd just shut it down, because well no one is playing it. They'd finally have the excuse they needed to just turn off WvW entirely, and put GoB in a pvp track or something.

It sorta has happened in Gw2 before though... Desert borderlands and HoT release, then after 6 months Colin had left, Mike had taken over, and then alpines came back and WvW enjoyed new development for another year. 

I don't think wvw would get shut down this time, I think WR is close enough to being done that it would get done and then wvw would just go back to maintenance mode forever and not even be made in gw3.

But for any of that to happen it would require a massive amount of the fight guilds "food sources" to quit, or the fight guilds to finally rebel against their master, lol yeah right. So it's not going to happen.

[Dinas Dragonbane.2978]

10 hours ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

Tldr: Ranting.

So there's a few topics to break down here:

* Players
* Balance

They do depend heavily on each others, and making changes to one without taking the other into account will just fall flat on its face.

----

* Players:

So the short version is that players are different now than they where at launch/vanilla (2012-2015), and there are a lot of reasons as to why that is so and I don't think there's anyone that could even list all of those reasons. The important part here is that we're never going to get back the type of mentality we had back then, and this is more because of the players than the changes to the game.

Some of those changes in player behaviour is that:
* More reward driven
* More impatient
* Less skilled (in nearly all ways)
* Less goal driven/tenacious

Some of the obvious ways this changes the game mode, is that zerging becomes more and more popular, and less and less people want to play outside of zergs. The old "karma-train" (yeah I know, no karma involved any longer) becomes the most approachable and desire-able activity for a larger group of players than before, and steadily increasing.

We further see this with the "Participation" system, which makes a very large amount of players consider anything that isn't giving them participation to be a waste of time and thus not desire-able. This is one of the most behaviour shaping mechanics we have in the game mode today.

All of this together is already shaping the entire player-base as a whole toward attack and zerging (impatient, reward, easy), and away from defence (patience, outnumbered, less-rewards, community driven).

Where the "mechanics" that should work toward getting players to defy odds and keep fighting would be:

* Points
* Community (server, guild)

Has largely been ignored by the player-base over the years, until they're no longer sufficient to motivate enough players to make a change/difference. And this is more the fault of the players than of ANet.

----

* Balance: (game-mode, not class)

While there has been a lot of changes to defence vs offence over the years, I ultimately find that they're of less impact than the changes to the player-base-mentality itself. Their primary impact is in how it affects players perception of the game mode, and thus leads players towards viewing the game, and thus affecting their player-mentality.

That said, there are some mechanics that I do feel shuts down a lot of player-interaction. I'm not going to try to make a complete list, I'm just going to mention some examples and why they mechanically complicate the situation.

* Static stat boosts

The problem here is that if you have 10 vs 10 it's supposed to be a fair fight, determined by skill. If you give a +X stat boost through an objective, outnumbered or bloodlust etc, then those has to be rebalanced into say 12 vs 10. But that means a 10vs10 is no longer considered fair, and a 10vs12 would be even more unfair. Static stat boosts never actually help balancing out anything, they just push the needle a bit in one direction or the other. And player/group skill is still such an important matter that the stats are often completely irrelevant, or the number difference between the sides is so big that the starts are again irrelevant.

So with all these variables that affects the outcome of a fight far more than a passive stat bonus, the stats themselves only barely push the needle a little bit back and forth, and just makes it even murkier to decide if it was a fair fight or not.

Now each of those (claim bonus, outumbered, bloodlust) requires different solutions, there isn't a one solution that fits all of them. And it also depends largely upon what they (ANet) actually want each of those to actually do.

Example, if they want the claim bonuses to stimulate fights in towers/keeps, then the current +X stats doesn't really do anything, as it still depends entirely upon if the defenders can get a larger group to come defend or not. One thing they could do, was to have a changing buff system, that modifies the defenders inside walls stats by +/- X% based on how much they're outnumbered/outnumbering. So if there's 20 attackers against 5 defenders, the 5 defenders get a massive bonus to stats so they might survive and deal some damage back, to actually make a noticeable dent in the attackers. And also if a group of 50 comes to defend, then the now 55 defenders could also get a similar -X% so the 20 attackers can at least still do something, or at least do a fighting retreat.

This would naturally disrupt a lot of the current idea of "fair fights" about messing with stats etc, but it would do so in a way specifically to encourage fights IN objectives. I'm not sure if this is the way to go or not, just talking about it as one way to make a "stat bonus" matter, and actually affect gameplay to encourage specific types of gameplay behaviour. And there'd be a lot of side effects that would have to be dealt with, more than I can manage to predict.

There are several other things that would fall into this same issue, Siege for one thing has static numbers that just doesn't scale well into larger groups etc.

Other ideas:
* Make the objective claims instead give bonuses to supply/siege. Stuff like get x2 use out of your supply, do x2 damage with siege, gain pulsing stability on siege etc. That would make the guild claims desire-able for defence, and actually give relevant bonuses for slowing down enemies or sometimes even beat them back. But without the mostly irrelevant bonus stats.

* Force Multipliers

Yes, this is where we're talking about Boons among other things. Basically the game mode is dominated by force-multipliers, the two most obvious being boons and just player numbers. And while I think they could tweak some of the boons, there's not really much to do about the player numbers, as those are honestly outside of ANet's control.

The biggest thing in WvW has always been just sheer player numbers. Population + Coverage, these two has always been the two largest issues with the game mode. I say that the third biggest issue is Fair-weather mentality, but it's just as much a result of the first two. If the enemy has full maps, and your server barely has people on when you play then:

* You don't have fun
* You generally can't do much to affect the map/situation
* You're stuck in a losing situation which you're not responsible for
* You don't have a way to change it

And most players, when they don't have fun with a game, leaves. Either to another mode, to another game, or goes back to cleaning dishes or finish of that spreadsheet the boss is complaining about.

And again, the mechanics that are supposed to be there to assist or counter this doesn't work as intended:
* 3 way fight
* Community
* Points (to some degree)

Honestly, boonballs isn't even a blip on the radar compared to the problem that Population/Coverage/Fair-weather is to the game mode. Boons is stills something that needs a look on, that I never expect is going to happen.

But essentially, since force-multipliers is what is driving the game mode, counters to these should also be force-multiplying. A passive stat boost will never affect these problems, you'd need something like an AC do a multiplier per enemy hit, until it actually starts devastating 40+ zergs. Abilities that actually can hurt players with large amounts of boons. And these also needs counter play, the most obvious place to put these are Siege since siege is a unique mechanic to WvW and thus won't affect other game modes, so they're in theory easy ways for WvW devs to affect the entire game mode with sweeping easy changes, without having to go through the balancing team and mess up their plans for the rest of the game.

----

Couple of things that affects both:

* Points:

One of the largest problems with the game, is that players completely ignore Points. It's an entire game mode designed around points being the "big thing", and players completely ignore it. This is creating more issues than I can shake a stick at, but the main ones:

* Points was supposed to be the main thing to drive player behaviour
* Thus it was the main way for ANet to try to adjust player behaviour
* This has 99% been replaced by "Rewards" (Participation, PIPS, Bags, GoB, etc)

If players cared about points, they'd defend, even if just to slow the enemy down, and then back-cap right afterwards. Because under a "point centric" game, that makes sense. If players cared about points, then big-zerg/blob is a moronic idea, because you can only capture 1 thing at a time. You'd split up into multiple havoc parties, run around and take everything that's undefended, and then team up to take things that are defended. That way you constantly have smaller groups running into each others, and get constantly shifting numbers at objectives. The mode would largely self balance itself constantly. If you already have 20 fighting 10 in a keep, it's better to use the remaining 5 man parties to take other stuff, the 20 can handle the 10 even if it takes a bit longer.

When player doesn't care about points, all we're left with is:
* Rewards (Participation, PIPS, Bags, GoB, etc)
* Spectacle (Big fights, running over others, etc)
 

And when those are the main motivations, you can see how and why we're stuck with the kind of player mentality we have nowadays.

* Interaction:

All of these things collects up into that players feel unable to meaningfully interact with the game. They feel like they can't do anything that makes a change, like they can't affect any outcomes, feel useless and insignificant, and obviously that's really bad for a "Game".

Most players will generally not think too hard about any of these, and just associate it with something they personally felt changed this. So say a patch comes and changes X into Y, and that patch changed the player experience to hit under the tolerance threshold for player Z, then that player Z will blame that patch for the changes to the game mode, and will want that patch reverted in order to make "WvW great again!". When in the majority of those cases it's just a steady change/decline in player-behaviour that's to blame.

The most obvious example: If ANet now caved in to my completely unreasonable demands to roll back the ENTIRE balance to 2014, which is the last time I felt class balance and wvw balance was good... the result wouldn't be very good. Largely because the player-base is completely different from back then, the player-behaviour is completely different, most players wouldn't enjoy the more skill based and more interact-able gameplay/balance we had back then, and would largely complain about everything we lost that they thought was fun (elite specs, new trait system, new stat sets, runes, sigils, foods, QoL, mount, gliding, every single guild bonus and guild aura grind etc)

And it still wouldn't change that players today are much more reward driven, still don't care about points, still are lazy and want easy wins and stack servers (Population/Coverage/Fair-Weather). And even if we had better tools to deal with that (as we'd still have the near full powered old zerg-busting options with oldschool stability), there's even less people that would use those, as they require a different type of dedication/interest than the majority of players have today.

----

/rant

Okie that's more than enough, I gotta shut up now. Sorry for the mostly unstructured mess.

 

Beautiful and really hits some Mark's, was already said but this should be its own thread and it might actually get some anet attention? Has already gotten lots of attention!

[apoko.5246]

On 4/17/2024 at 5:25 AM, MaLong.2079 said:

Anet is on a mission to end individual play in WvW. That is all.

Am i missing something most of the players on WVW outside blobs are thiefs and mesmers mixed with rangers, there seems to be a lot more single players now than there was 5 years ago.

[joneirikb.7506]

22 hours ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

I feel like stat bonuses or whatever other bonuses need to exist for territories and objectives, otherwise what would be the point of attacking and defending objectives anymore? because points from warscore and victory points simply don't matter anymore, no one is racing to be in tier 1 anymore, it's completely meaningless, most only care for the tick. Not to say I'm for stat bonuses, I think they probably should all be do away anyways, but some bonuses for owning something needs to exist to keep driving the players to capture and own them.

I don't have a problem with a team of defenders having a slight advantage over attackers in their own territory, especially deep in their territory, Langor should be harder to capture than Quentin lake, Jerrifers should be harder to cap than Klovan, Nwt should be harder to cap than Swt. Did anyone honestly ever look at a T3 objective and say they wouldn't attack it because of the " stat bonuses" it has, or because they knew the defenders would actually respond because it was a fully upgraded objective. Players weren't afraid of the stat bonuses, they were afraid of how many would respond. Apparently fight guild had no problems with any of this though and still farmed keeps on a nightly basis.

That 10v10 might just be more of a 10v12 because of the stat boost but it could also be negated in a way with bloodlust which is open for anyone to take, the problem is people don't want to bother with the finer details, they want to brute force everything, the more numbers the better. Regardless if we remove all the stat bonuses, players will still run as big as they possibly can for an easier time. We can strip down the game with no bonus stats but we are not going back to the old days of 15 stealth bombing a group of 30-40(organized not ragtag pugs obviously) in one shot simply because the game and meta itself no longer allows it.

I still get a laugh when I see a group of 10-15 try to do something to 2-3x their numbers only to have that blob turn and completely overrun and swallow them up. Problem really isn't stat bonuses or cap ring sizes, you can nerf those all you want, in the end it's still player numbers and meta problem.

Suggestion, if instead of stat bonuses (power/vitality/toughness/precision), instead you got bonuses to something else, for example to defensive benefits (Siege damage, supply use, specific boons when on siege, or other relevant bonuses to defending).

I feel that would be more impactful and relevant, and would actually help players defend better overall. But unless those numbers where off the charts, you'd still have to rely on a big group coming to aid you, but that big group wouldn't be getting the piddly +100 vitality either.

----

Regarding numbers and players wanting the easy solutions, that's kind of what my overall rant was about, and I don't think there's any kind of easy fix for that. With as few tools as ANet has these days, I suspect the only ways they could really do something about that at this point to shift this:

* Reduce rewards the more players you're with. Taking a tower gives X rewards, divided on the number of players that captures it. So people want to capture things with as few players as they can to maximize their own rewards. This has some serious issues and goes completely against every design philosophy ANet has.
* Change some gameplay mechanics to strongly handicap players the more numbers they have, like upgrading all guards in a tower to scale like champions to the number of players, including all 4 main stats (power/precision/toughness/vitality) to the point where above 20 players they start one-shotting most players and takes a lot of effort to take down. This has some serious issues and goes completely against every design philosophy ANet has.

Things like Points where supposed to be one of the main "knobs and levers" that ANet could use to adjust and shift player behaviour, and as that completely failed, together with most of the other minor "levers", they're sort of stuck.

Players, by learning to ignore points, have basically taken away ANet's means of changing the game mode.

Except... for the option to turn WvW into an EotM style karma-train... That's about the only meaningful change they're still able to do.

[joneirikb.7506]

22 hours ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

I agree with what you wrote, and you were also very good at expressing it clearly by embracing many aspects of this modality. Congratulations aside, with respect to what I quoted and what you wrote: how many times have we asked to give a meaning to winning or losing? How many times have I recommended refreshing our points system? How many times have I suggested a flow coefficient that filters out our victory points to highlight quality over quantity? How many times have I stressed that making the competition more credible should be our priority? How many times have I said that this is a team/server game so identity, team spirit, belonging, participation, motivation are the most important thing that has made WVW a unique game mode? How many times have I written that investing everything in WR is wrong? How many times have I written that with WR you are dismantling a slice of players Why do you need a ''filler'' ?

I really appreciate what you wrote. But I want to ask you something. If you tell players, to your community for a few years now, that the future of WVW is to make the concept of ''team/server'' useless in the name of balance, because it is the only possible solution. If you tell a portion of them that they will be used as filler, what do you think this same community can mature in their own game thinking/mindset?

Ok, so all of your points basically sums up into "Motivation". And how WR ruins your personal Motivation. And from what I could understand the question could be summed as "How do you think being put into WR as a solo player will affect Motivation?".

The answer to that is that it depends on the person in question.

But if I where to try to narrow it down to a median of the player-base, I'd assume that would be represented by a mostly PVE/hybrid player, that jumps into WvW occasionally for a bit of side fun and working on a reward track, that isn't very invested in the mode itself, and is happy as long as they find a commander to run around with for a couple of hours.

As such, their entire enjoyment of the system is going to depend on them finding a commander when they want to play. So some might end up using that 6th guild slot to try to join a guild that runs frequent commanders at certain times. Others might just just running when there is a commander and just ignore it otherwise, while some are going to get angry and say it's WR's fault because they always used to have a commander before! etc. (And not use the tools available for that)

Overall, I don't think that itself is going to change motivation much, not for that group of players. I think it will negatively affect morale strongest on players that likes to scout/defend/roam that are in small guilds or hybrid/pve guilds. And obviously it will affect morale the least in big zerg guilds.

----

But at the same time, I don't think it will actually change overall player mentality at this point. It won't really change the way players play the game mode.

Example:

* Meaning to win/lose
* Fix points
* credible competition

You mentioned these in your post, and they're all related to both Motivation and Player-behaviour. You can also sum all of them up into just "points" for simplicity. I feel that the question you tried to ask was something like: "How can we get players Motivated again?", which would be to get players interested in Points again.

Frankly, I think that ship has sailed. I don't think it's possible at this point. Players where extremely interested in points for the first 1-2 years, but this also highlighted the flaws with the Points system, and now that we've seen it, we can't really put the geenie back in the bottle.

If ANet where to try for a similar type of engagement again, they'd honestly have to tie the entire point system (or a replacement) into rewards, as it's the only thing they're left with that can motivate/affect player behaviour at this point.

And frankly that would be disastrous for the game as a whole, not just WvW. Something like:

* Access to unique dungeon/raid/strike etc with unique rewards
* More rewards in general the higher rank/tier
* Higher reward the higher the tick

Basically every way to reward players for winning, means that the entire WvW system (no matter if it's worlds or WR) will again de-evolve back into what Black Gate perfected back when they basically "won wvw" and beat the system. Server stacking, buying coverage, creating a monolith to take all the rewards for a select group (server/guild) that everyone else wants into at any cost for the rewards.

 

[XenesisII.1540]

37 minutes ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

Suggestion, if instead of stat bonuses (power/vitality/toughness/precision), instead you got bonuses to something else, for example to defensive benefits (Siege damage, supply use, specific boons when on siege, or other relevant bonuses to defending).

Except they've nerfed siege damage, supply in objectives, stats, and every other advantage you can get for defenses. I doubt they want to add any bonuses of that nature.

Might have been more interesting if they went and split the bloodlust stats into pieces and place them in different objectives.  Like Set would be like +10 power, Swt would be +10 condition damage, etc, etc, or maybe every tower gives your team +5 to all stats, and the keeps give +10 to all stats. Maybe every camp you own on the map gives you +1 to your max supply total. maybe capturing an objective reduces cooldowns on all current tactivators on cooldown, maybe each objectives give +1% swiftness top speed, or mount speed, or glider speed. Maybe owning firekeep lets your auto attack proc burn, maybe Air keep lets your auto attack proc a free sigil of air, maybe owning earth keep lets your auto attack proc protection, etc etc etc.

I'm sure there's a bunch of interesting things we could do there beyond stats and points, but the reality is, this is anet, they don't really want to work on wvw, it will not change from a points system, and they don't believe in straight balance, only extreme lopsided balance, comfortable snowballs that favors the blobs they run in. And the "listening to feedback and monitor how these changes" is a bunch of crock, nothing we say in here matters anyways.

🤷‍♂️

Edited April 20 by XenesisII.1540

[joneirikb.7506]

2 minutes ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

Except they've nerfed siege damage, supply in objectives, stats, and every other advantage you can get for defenses. I doubt they want to add any bonuses of that nature.

Might have been more interesting if they went and split the bloodlust stats into pieces and place them in different objectives.  Like Set would be like +10 power, Swt would be +10 condition damage, etc, etc, or maybe every tower gives your team +5 to all stats, and the keeps give +10 to all stats. Maybe every camp you own on the map gives you +1 to your max supply total. maybe capturing an objective reduces cooldowns on all current tactivators on cooldown, maybe each objectives give +1% swiftness top speed, or mount speed, or glider speed. Maybe owning firekeep lets your auto attack proc burn, maybe Air keep lets your auto attack proc a free sigil of air, maybe owning earth keep lets your auto attack proc protection, etc etc etc.

I'm sure there's a bunch of interesting things we could do there beyond stats and points, but the reality is, this is anet, they don't really want to work on wvw, it will not change from a points system, and they don't believe in straight balance, only extreme lopsided balance, comfortable snowballs that favors the blobs they run in.

🤷‍♂️

Well, depending on how you see it, any and all bonuses are void in front of the zerg. So at that point does it even matter if you get any bonus at all?

And from a design perspective, getting stats for owning more objectives feed into snowball issues. It also feeds into the zerg mentality. Since most players today isn't going to bother to aggressively back-cap, and just wait for a zerg of their own to come and express take them all back.

In that regard it would almost be better to give penalties the more objectives you own. I'm particularly fond of the idea of having a -X% move speed (including mount) the more objectives you have. 😛 Unfortunately here we run into ANet design philosophy, so won't happen.

[XenesisII.1540]

1 minute ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

Well, depending on how you see it, any and all bonuses are void in front of the zerg. So at that point does it even matter if you get any bonus at all?

And from a design perspective, getting stats for owning more objectives feed into snowball issues. It also feeds into the zerg mentality. Since most players today isn't going to bother to aggressively back-cap, and just wait for a zerg of their own to come and express take them all back.

In that regard it would almost be better to give penalties the more objectives you own. I'm particularly fond of the idea of having a -X% move speed (including mount) the more objectives you have. 😛 Unfortunately here we run into ANet design philosophy, so won't happen.

Yeah like I said before I'm not really a fan of stat bonuses, even for outnumbered situations, that was just more of an example of breaking up bonuses over objectives. I'd much rather use tactics and strategy to over come situations like that, it's why I love  something like pulling people out of groups, especially when they're running on walls, I don't need extra stats for this, I just needed to get creative with skills and the surroundings.

Most other passive bonuses people aren't really going to care about anyways, most didn't care about the pve bonuses from power of the mists, and they probably don't even notice the magic find or speed boost you get from guild claims. Planetside had a nice system of using lattice system of captures, and every objective was unique and offered unlocks for your army as you went through, like unlocking drop ships or tanks on that continent. Unfortunately that's harder to translate for wvw, or maybe if you capture hills it unlocks char cars there for you to take like eotm has the scorpion unlocks for siege. 🤭

But in the end it all really doesn't matter, everything will be ignored as usual. 🤷‍♂️

[joneirikb.7506]

9 minutes ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

Yeah like I said before I'm not really a fan of stat bonuses, even for outnumbered situations, that was just more of an example of breaking up bonuses over objectives. I'd much rather use tactics and strategy to over come situations like that, it's why I love  something like pulling people out of groups, especially when they're running on walls, I don't need extra stats for this, I just needed to get creative with skills and the surroundings.

Most other passive bonuses people aren't really going to care about anyways, most didn't care about the pve bonuses from power of the mists, and they probably don't even notice the magic find or speed boost you get from guild claims. Planetside had a nice system of using lattice system of captures, and every objective was unique and offered unlocks for your army as you went through, like unlocking drop ships or tanks on that continent. Unfortunately that's harder to translate for wvw, or maybe if you capture hills it unlocks char cars there for you to take like eotm has the scorpion unlocks for siege. 🤭

But in the end it all really doesn't matter, everything will be ignored as usual. 🤷‍♂️

That said, ANet did try some of this with DesertBL. With the 3 shrines around each keep. I honestly don't remember/know how they've been nerfed/changed by now, if they still do anything at all or are just "whatever". But back when the map came out, you could turn some battles around with taking shrines. Which was honestly really interesting. Iirc especially air and fire keep, not so much earth.

Edit: Oh yeah, also EotM, tunnels, siege-scorpion etc. Honestly fun stuff.

Edited April 20 by joneirikb.7506

[TheGrimm.5624]

23 hours ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

lol, one day if they mix regions, we go and duo keep takes my friend.

lol, sorry confused peep, I like Mabi and would enjoy sitting down and enjoying a beer together as I would with many forum peeps. 

[Bunny.9834]

On 4/18/2024 at 9:02 PM, LordHT.8297 said:

They know that the WvW player base is shrinking and they are afraid that blobmmanders stop playing the game and taking their hordes of zombies with them. So, they are being blackmailed by these guys and anet is making all the changes that these easy mode lovers demand.
Arenanet needs to trust in their player base and their game. If the lazy dinosaurs and their giant boomblobs leave the game other guilds will grow and take their places. We still have many medium and small guilds looking for a place in the sun even with the anet working hard against them. Just trust that the game tends to renew itself we have a fair and balanced and fun  environment that didn't  punish smallers groups and individual players.

What these changes are doing are just continuing to kill servers that don't have a lot of blob guilds.  

Every time I see blobs on other servers, I just automatically log out of the WvW.

1. Our server and our poor link don't have any comp squad. 

2. You can't defend objectives anymore effectively. 

3. All other "tactics" that you can use are "fixed" meaning all you have left is to fight blob with blob... which goes back to problem #1.  


GJ devs.