WTF is Anet doing to WvW?

[DarkK.7368]

9 hours ago, ZTeamG.4603 said:

It's a shame that WvW has never really received much developer attention over the years, which is probably in no small part due to it not really having anything directly monetizable (just warclaw skins I guess) aside from the indirect effects of it being fun and keeping people playing the game long-term.

Isn't precisely that the point? If the game is fun and I want to play it a lot, then I'll buy gemstore skins. No matter if I play fractals, raids, PVE stuff, or if I play WvW. So WvW should be as much monetizable as PVE. Maybe a bit less cause you can't monetize other mounts there, but for armor, visuals and that, same as monetizable as PVE.

ASIDE FROM THAT. I see people arguing about "why should I defense now". My question (I'm not super experienced in WvW) is, WHY DEFEND AT ALL?

Getting towers and keeps, killing the champions can drop the infusion to make you rich. And gives lot of experience. When I play WvW, I'm encouraged to let the enemy capture everything and then I recapture. Why should I bother with defending other than fun? I see that a core flaw that must be adressed first

Edited April 28 by DarkK.7368

[Triptaminas.4789]

2 hours ago, DarkK.7368 said:

Isn't precisely that the point? If the game is fun and I want to play it a lot, then I'll buy gemstore skins. No matter if I play fractals, raids, PVE stuff, or if I play WvW. So WvW should be as much monetizable as PVE. Maybe a bit less cause you can't monetize other mounts there, but for armor, visuals and that, same as monetizable as PVE.

ASIDE FROM THAT. I see people arguing about "why should I defense now". My question (I'm not super experienced in WvW) is, WHY DEFEND AT ALL?

Getting towers and keeps, killing the champions can drop the infusion to make you rich. And gives lot of experience. When I play WvW, I'm encouraged to let the enemy capture everything and then I recapture. Why should I bother with defending other than fun? I see that a core flaw that must be adressed first

U can monetize siege skins, u can monetize even objective, guard, dolly etc skins, monetization is just limit of dev imagination.

I seen it as skill based game before, u know, horizontal progression and kitten, git gud and sheit. Dying never tilted me, cuz it's part of process in learning, like souls games u know? End of day reward for success or failure was the same: experience. I could punish zombie semi afk bloblets that came for their gift of battle by showing them battle and their lack of artistry, cull them etc with few other friendly players around, people was punished for their mistakes and rewarded for their skill, it was fun, gratifying, felt like you actually improve and there was hardly hopeless situation, that what driven people in competitive game mode.

I can't care less about item reward for it, yet many do care but if changes for reward tables is done with this meta direction in place wvw just becomes true pve meta train blob, ain't nobody gonna defend kitten, just cycle around in synchro non stop caping stuff in afk mode, just like u do rn, just with higher que's and 99% in map being zombie train.

Players like you, no offence, that seek item reward instead of seeing fight itself as reward, should be punished by outnumbered yet skilled fighters, that's the main issue rn, game is not skill based, game is dumbed down to make veterans = newbies, game is not fun, game is not competitive, devs catter to discord zombies and gvg echochambers.  

Fix the fun factor and u fix the wvw and game as a whole. Make balance team take it meds. 

[DarkK.7368]

1 minute ago, Triptaminas.4789 said:

U can monetize siege skins, u can monetize even objective, guard, dolly etc skins, monetization is just limit of dev imagination.

I seen it as skill based game before, u know, horizontal progression and kitten, git gud and sheit. Dying never tilted me, cuz it's part of process in learning, like souls games u know? End of day reward for success or failure was the same: experience. I could punish zombie semi afk bloblets that came for their gift of battle by showing them battle and their lack of artistry, cull them etc with few other friendly players around, people was punished for their mistakes and rewarded for their skill, it was fun, gratifying, felt like you actually improve and there was hardly hopeless situation, that what driven people in competitive game mode.

I can't care less about item reward for it, yet many do care but if changes for reward tables is done with this meta direction in place wvw just becomes true pve meta train blob, ain't nobody gonna defend kitten, just cycle around in synchro non stop caping stuff in afk mode, just like u do rn, just with higher que's and 99% in map being zombie train.

Players like you, no offence, that seek item reward instead of seeing fight itself as reward, should be punished by outnumbered yet skilled fighters, that's the main issue rn, game is not skill based, game is dumbed down to make veterans = newbies, game is not fun, game is not competitive, devs catter to discord zombies and gvg echochambers.  

Fix the fun factor and u fix the wvw and game as a whole. Make balance team take it meds. 

Sorry if I was misunderstood. My main mode is PVP, so I follow the feeling of "playing mainly for the fun and getting better". I come from Dark souls dueling. I play WvW with a friend, and I'm not super attracted to it, because most of the time it's big groups where you don't know what's happening, follow the leader, that's why I tend to think about that. But it's true, if everyone just did attack and not defense, it would be boring. That's why I would prefer if rewards for defense were as good as for offense. That way, people like me that is not into WvW just for the fun factor, would have more reasons to defende and create fun scenarios for everyone.0

Anything that improves WvW to be skill based I'm up. Maybe I just cannot totally understand it, at least for big blobs zergs. When you roam and do some 1vs1 or 2vs2 then yeah, I love that experience. But roaming will always give almost zero reward vs blob capturing things, and if I want small-scale fights, I enjoy more PVP, so... Complicated.

[progenitex.8465]

8 hours ago, Chaos God.1639 said:

so you think when players will die more they won't quit wvw faster? I think people will quit wvw faster, because they will see that their boons can't be used to defend themselves properly. they will just quit or probably wait until there are more players on their team. you want an inferior team to be afk in wvw and stare how superior teams will destroy everything?

when both equally strong teams will learn when to use the boons at appropriate times we will get the same situation. endless fights without any decisive moves. in other words these boons probably won't change anything and will just create higher learning curve. and if these boons weren't designed to be used like that it will probably break something else in the game.

you want the boons to be temporarily and this will make superior teams even more superior. I don't think that smaller well organized groups will have a chance to fight well organized bigger teams, because the bigger group already learned when to use the boons at the appropriate times. or we will get the same endless fighting situation we are having right now.

this is what you are thinking. you think that somehow the bigger group won't react to the smaller group and will get destroyed, because they didn't react properly and didn't use their defense abilities correctly (for whatever reasons). it's called guerilla warfare or some type of a ninja tactic. and you think this will be somehow possible just by changing how the boons work. so only for these type of situations you want to change how the boons work.

many skilled wvw players are leaving the game/mode entirely because it isnt fun anymore at this current point and that is degrading the quality of fights overall. boonballing is simply making wvw become a k-train fest and pve mode. we were all beginners in wvw once and we all learned by dying over and over again. we learned how we died and got better from there . if you want to retain new players in this mode, you need to show new players how fun fights can be. boonballing doesnt make fights fun.  

you need to understand that the whole point of wvw is for fights. if fun fights dont happen and no one is actually dying (because of boonballing or otherwise), players will stop playing. structures and sieging puts you in different situations in which fights occur in and thats what makes it fun. capturing structures without any resistance and ktraining is no different than pve loot/meta trains.

with a nerf to boonballing, when equally matched teams fight each other, there will be decisive moments when a down/kill can occur and that swings the whole fight. if you ever seen a proper gvg before in the past, you would understand what its like for equally matched teams to fight each other on equal footing.

with boonballing, fights dont happen because when you see a critical mass of players in a group, you simply just avoid them and dont fight them at all because you know the fights will  not yield anything and are meaningless.

 

8 hours ago, Chaos God.1639 said:

you want boons to basically have a higher learning curve and you think that smaller teams will be able to destroy bigger teams, just because the bigger teams havent learned how to use their boons correctly.

thats why i'm now thinking maybe you want a different pvp mode, like 30 vs 30 fights on smaller battlefield, or maybe a new wvw game mechanic, because you also didn't say anything about siege battles or lag/stutter. maybe they can add hardcore mode/event to wvw, that will make players die quicker.

any pvp game mode out there (in or outside of GW2) should be skill based. if you are a better player, you should ideally win fights outnumbered or not. it seems like what you are advocating for is you want to level the playing field by making it not a skill based game mode. 

wvw is the "different pvp mode". if you have forgotten, wvw stands for world versus world, meaning player versus player on a large scale. it seems like what youre trying to advocate for is a large scale pve raid mode. wvw isnt that and should never be that.

 

On 4/14/2024 at 8:04 AM, Dawdler.8521 said:

Except, it's not really about "numbers" anymore. It's only about how invulnerable of a boonball you can stack. Many zergs that people call boonballs arent actually that, they have a tiny core and the rest PUGs. Once a true boonball reach critical size and start cycling boons, bubbles and barriers indefinitely - which is really only around 30 people - no amount of PUGs up to map cap can stop them unless they also bring an equivalent boonball. The failures usually lie with the commanders moving too far in one go so that people cant keep up with the ball circles and thus get picked off (with many commanders not giving a kitten if anyone goes down, huge difference if they maintain their peeps), not with the actual numbers.

i agree exactly with what @Dawdler.8521 said here.

Edited April 28 by progenitex.8465

[TheGrimm.5624]

17 hours ago, ZTeamG.4603 said:

The pessimist in me wonders if that's the point of the way changes have been going. It's a shame that WvW has never really received much developer attention over the years, which is probably in no small part due to it not really having anything directly monetizable (just warclaw skins I guess) aside from the indirect effects of it being fun and keeping people playing the game long-term.

Not sure I agree here. Example, I have 33 toons. All were added due to WvW when we had lots of different, interesting and fun build options and wanted a variety of toons that had different roles and goals. I go on about the Feb 2020 nerf patch since a lot of those toons still remain shelfed. Is that balance? Don't know. To me haven't seen as much depth in build options as before so haven't seen any need to add more. With character spots come bags and other things. I think using gem store sales as a reason for lack of development is over used personally.

[One more for the road.8950]

10 hours ago, Chaos God.1639 said:

so you think when players will die more they won't quit wvw faster? I think people will quit wvw faster, because they will see that their boons can't be used to defend themselves properly. they will just quit or probably wait until there are more players on their team. you want an inferior team to be afk in wvw and stare how superior teams will destroy everything?

when both equally strong teams will learn when to use the boons at appropriate times we will get the same situation. endless fights without any decisive moves. in other words these boons probably won't change anything and will just create higher learning curve. and if these boons weren't designed to be used like that it will probably break something else in the game.

you want the boons to be temporarily and this will make superior teams even more superior. I don't think that smaller well organized groups will have a chance to fight well organized bigger teams, because the bigger group already learned when to use the boons at the appropriate times. or we will get the same endless fighting situation we are having right now.

this is what you are thinking. you think that somehow the bigger group won't react to the smaller group and will get destroyed, because they didn't react properly and didn't use their defense abilities correctly (for whatever reasons). it's called guerilla warfare or some type of a ninja tactic. and you think this will be somehow possible just by changing how the boons work. so only for these type of situations you want to change how the boons work.

you want boons to basically have a higher learning curve and you think that smaller teams will be able to destroy bigger teams, just because the bigger teams havent learned how to use their boons correctly.

thats why i'm now thinking maybe you want a different pvp mode, like 30 vs 30 fights on smaller battlefield, or maybe a new wvw game mechanic, because you also didn't say anything about siege battles or lag/stutter. maybe they can add hardcore mode/event to wvw, that will make players die quicker.

This only speaks about how you either are so you new you have never experienced, or haven't ever played with, don't understand or don't know how a good commander can work with their squad.

The ebbs and flows in a battle is EXACTLY what makes fights interesting, and right now there is no ebbs and flows. Either you got a proper comp with barely no holes in it, or you don't. There's like.... no middle ground. There's no variations. There's no flavor. Looking for the right moments, the right terrain, the right move, the right counter to smack an enemy somewhere it hurts, or have it happen to you so you're learning a lesson, is what makes fights fun. Learning new tactics for next time, figuring out new ones others didn't see coming.

Two same size blobs fighting each other with nothing happening no matter skill or level of either commander or players is no fun, neither is bigger blob just training over everyone else be it smaller blobs or randoms, and neither is just taking a bunch of objectives over and over.

On 4/27/2024 at 11:43 AM, Mabi black.1824 said:

For all the confusing faces that I see and that will continue to be added, I say: look at the Friday night reset, you will notice that all the structures are being reset to T0. You'll also find content everywhere because the various teams/guilds will be stimulated to try out their attacks. They will be stimulated to take control of your border map. As in EBG SM. Try to ask yourself why.

All structures being reset to T0 doesn't say anything about content. It says something about a certain type of activity. That activity is just taking objectives, in other words you're implying just having three squads taking the objectives clockwise with about five minutes delay between each other and no one defending anything would be the perfect reset evening/night.  If even reset night turns into a ktrain from reset, even I am out. Then we're just back to choo choo EotM. 

Edited April 28 by One more for the road.8950
missing words

[One more for the road.8950]

We just don't have the "oh kitten it worked", "oh my they just screwed up CHAAAAAAARGE", "oh oho ho no no no kitten kitten kitten" or "how did we even manage that" moments any more.

[DarkK.7368]

Reading a bit in this topic, is a bit heartbreaking. When I play with my friend, she usually says "I love that I can disconnect my brain and relax and kill and do stuff and get rewards", specially when finding a commander. She tries hard to play good, of course. But we are in the zerg with no responsability, just spam aoe stuff, and if you go down, wait to be revived. No compared to small scale fights where you get almost all responsability, and if you fail, you lose. Here people talking about strategies... Indeed something that long time I don't see and it hurts. I guess that's why I'm more into PVP. It would be nice indeed to experience that type of big commander groups with experience and strategies in WVW again, and not the called "boon ball"... But I almost never experienced another thing, I thought it did not exist in WvW XD

[XenesisII.1540]

Numbers = Advantage

Organized = Advantage

Meta = Advantage

Voice = Advantage

Revive skills = Advantage

Target Caps = Advantage as you get more numbers, throw more aoes, mitigate more aoes.

Boon/Support spam Game Mechanics = Should not be an advantage one set of players get to take full advantage of, applying infinite boons should have a proper counter of removing those boons. Some classes fart and spam out boons. If you don't want counters in the game for that, then you have to place better/strict restrictions.

Snow ball mechanics are not fun, especially in a pvp setting, unless you're bad and want all the advantages in a game to carry you through everything, like using cheat codes in a single player game. Then you are just a pathetic player that doesn't actual enjoy sport or competition or challenge, stop saying you want competition when you roll up on a map with 50 players.  

Stop being biased and do your jobs as a developer, and balance the game properly to all players and groups. There's no excuse that it's too hard, it's too much work, you can only bother balancing to big fat 50 squad groups. It's pathetic and sad it's gotten to this point, not everyone wants to play in 50 squads. Everyone should have the opportunity to play the game how they wish, whether that be a scout, roamer, havoc, defender, builder, dueler, zerger, blobber, as whatever they wish but that means all 9 classes and not shoehorned same support into 4 out of 5 for every single group.

Not be hampered because some meta blob decided to break everything because nothing stops them but another meta squad of 50, it's pathetic that you think only those players should "feel better" about playing the game, pathetic you continue to destroy the morale of defenders every single patch, it's pathetic when you nerf boon strips every single patch when I see groups in game calling for more boon strips, it's pathetic you continue to punished the little guy so "your friends" can "feel better" about rampaging through maps. All this wouldn't be a problem if the game was matching groups up in instances, but it doesn't, it's a mismatch across 24/7 in open pvp zones.

Maybe start playing the game outside of your blobs and walk in others shoes before you continue down this pathetic nerf parade because you still think somehow in someway boon blobs are still not strong enough and breaking into T3 objectives in less than 5mins is somehow still too slow. The game still extremely fun from 1-25 sizes, but above that it "feels like a slog with little payoff" fighting those groups.

Your small rings did not promote more pvp interaction, it chased it away, your tactical game play now is more players using siege to hit those circles in smc and run away as soon as the ring goes up. More often than not an objective will flip without defense counter because guess what, more objectives are paper and players have less time to respond! especially if they're caught in a 2v1 on them which is happening even more on the weakest side, so congratulations on continuing to make the game mode worse.

Edited April 28 by XenesisII.1540

[One more for the road.8950]

23 minutes ago, DarkK.7368 said:

Reading a bit in this topic, is a bit heartbreaking. When I play with my friend, she usually says "I love that I can disconnect my brain and relax and kill and do stuff and get rewards", specially when finding a commander. She tries hard to play good, of course. But we are in the zerg with no responsability, just spam aoe stuff, and if you go down, wait to be revived. No compared to small scale fights where you get almost all responsability, and if you fail, you lose. Here people talking about strategies... Indeed something that long time I don't see and it hurts. I guess that's why I'm more into PVP. It would be nice indeed to experience that type of big commander groups with experience and strategies in WVW again, and not the called "boon ball"... But I almost never experienced another thing, I thought it did not exist in WvW XD

I am not sure how you haven't experienced that if you have played longer than just for a short while, because that's what WvW has been about up until very recently. Together with everything else. Nothing can carry WvW alone.

Edit: But, there's a but. With a good commander you also almost don't have to think when playing like that, it'll become second nature.

Edited April 28 by One more for the road.8950

[Cael.3960]

12 minutes ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

Numbers = Advantage

Organized = Advantage

Meta = Advantage

Voice = Advantage

Target Caps = Advantage as you get more numbers, throw more aoes, mitigate more aoes.

Numbers = Advantage.   I don't want that advantage. 

Organized = Advantage. I don't want that advantage

Meta = Advantage. I don't want that advantage

Voice = Advantage. I don't want that advantage. 

Target Caps = Advantage as you get more numbers, throw more aoes, mitigate more aoes. I don't want that advantage. 

13 minutes ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

Stop being biased and do your jobs as a developer, and balance the game properly to all players and groups. 

Hmm. So what you're saying is that people who don't want to work together, don't want to play high-performance builds, don't want to organize or improve the skills of their community, and don't want to use voice coms should be buffed so they can get wins against people who do? The game devs should design around the fact that people who refuse competitive advantages should be able to regularly beat those who do? 

From a games-theory perspective, I'm very intrigued at this mindset and even more intrigued to see what the solution that makes it work might be. 

[XenesisII.1540]

22 hours ago, Cael.3960 said:

Numbers = Advantage.   I don't want that advantage. 

Organized = Advantage. I don't want that advantage

Meta = Advantage. I don't want that advantage

Voice = Advantage. I don't want that advantage. 

Target Caps = Advantage as you get more numbers, throw more aoes, mitigate more aoes. I don't want that advantage. 

Hmm. So what you're saying is that people who don't want to work together,

Numbers, organized, voice is working together. I didn't say I don't want them, I said it's an advantage, advantage I am ok with, these are external optional advantages that players can take advantage of.

 

22 hours ago, Cael.3960 said:

don't want to play high-performance builds,

There's nothing high performance about using 4 support 1 dps to form a group for pvp, if anything that type of groups should be demolished by a 4dps 1 support group.

 

22 hours ago, Cael.3960 said:

don't want to organize or improve the skills of their community,

I'd like the skill of the community to go up, using proper builds and skills, learning to use them in the appropriate times and not just rely on 49 other people to carry them.

 

22 hours ago, Cael.3960 said:

and don't want to use voice coms should be buffed so they can get wins against people who do?

No clue where you're getting this.

 

22 hours ago, Cael.3960 said:

The game devs should design around the fact that people who refuse competitive advantages should be able to regularly beat those who do?

I listed the competitive advantages those groups already have, all of which I am fine with. Not that it matters because all those groups aren't looking for competition, they're looking for people to roll over, they even avoid each other often looking for pugs to farm instead.

 

22 hours ago, Cael.3960 said:

From a games-theory perspective, I'm very intrigued at this mindset and even more intrigued to see what the solution that makes it work might be. 

Nerf boons, pretty simple. Why are they nerfing strips? that also requires coordination yet they nerf it every patch. Boon spam = ok somehow, strip spam = nerf to the ground.

P.S If you think 50 should only be challenged by 50 then the wvw game mode is done, they might as well tell everyone to f off, or go make a separate instance for the 50's. It use to be celebrated when 25 would take on 50, when those groups would use creative skill and tactics to take on those groups, these days y'all say only boon spammers 50 should take on 50 boon spammers. Pathetic, I guess too many groups have PTSD from Mag cloud ripping them apart.

Edited April 29 by XenesisII.1540

[Chaos God.1639]

3 hours ago, progenitex.8465 said:

many skilled wvw players are leaving the game/mode entirely because it isnt fun anymore at this current point and that is degrading the quality of fights overall. boonballing is simply making wvw become a k-train fest and pve mode. we were all beginners in wvw once and we all learned by dying over and over again. we learned how we died and got better from there . if you want to retain new players in this mode, you need to show new players how fun fights can be. boonballing doesnt make fights fun.  

you need to understand that the whole point of wvw is for fights. if fun fights dont happen and no one is actually dying (because of boonballing or otherwise), players will stop playing. structures and sieging puts you in different situations in which fights occur in and thats what makes it fun. capturing structures without any resistance and ktraining is no different than pve loot/meta trains.

with a nerf to boonballing, when equally matched teams fight each other, there will be decisive moments when a down/kill can occur and that swings the whole fight. if you ever seen a proper gvg before in the past, you would understand what its like for equally matched teams to fight each other on equal footing.

with boonballing, fights dont happen because when you see a critical mass of players in a group, you simply just avoid them and dont fight them at all because you know the fights will  not yield anything and are meaningless.

 

any pvp game mode out there (in or outside of GW2) should be skill based. if you are a better player, you should ideally win fights outnumbered or not. it seems like what you are advocating for is you want to level the playing field by making it not a skill based game mode. 

wvw is the "different pvp mode". if you have forgotten, wvw stands for world versus world, meaning player versus player on a large scale. it seems like what youre trying to advocate for is a large scale pve raid mode. wvw isnt that and should never be that.

what also can happen in the high skilled games is it can end in a draw, like in chess. when both players don't make any mistakes it will 100% draw. this is also what we are seeing right now in wvw. and I think that this will still be the case when you are going to change how boons works, because we already see this. the boons are designed like that.

why do think the battles will be different after nerfing the boons? for some reasons you expect the battles to be 100% win or lose.

if both teams don't make any mistakes we will still see long fights. so your problem isn't solved. having a draw situation in a game sounds normal to me. I think some just want to feel great about defeating inexperienced players/noobs or getting the loot bags.

For me it's okay if battle are ending in a draw. I prefer to have long fights, instead of running from one side of the map to another after dying. I also see wvw as a rts game with macro/micro strategies. so not everything should be about the micro strategies.

you think there are no stalemates on real battlefields?

 

Edited April 28 by Chaos God.1639
edit

[ArchonWing.9480]

1 hour ago, Cael.3960 said:

Numbers = Advantage.   I don't want that advantage. 

Organized = Advantage. I don't want that advantage

Meta = Advantage. I don't want that advantage

Voice = Advantage. I don't want that advantage. 

Target Caps = Advantage as you get more numbers, throw more aoes, mitigate more aoes. I don't want that advantage. 

But what's really fun is people that stack all these advantages together and think objectives are hard to take still. But you know, many are behaving the same way.

Numbers = Advantage. No, I don't want to play with people outside our squad, and I don't want people stealing our fights.

Organized = Advantage. No, I just ask where the fights are and remain invisible but expect people to help me.

Meta = Advantage. Eh, you got me there. Of course adjusting your play to fight a cloud would also give one, but screw that.

Voice = Advantage. Nah, I need it to talk kitten about other players.

A lot of WvWers of old at any scale realize that the game really breaks down (in some cases literally) when everyone takes these advantages to their logical extent  and usually made concessions for better content. Unfortunately, the posers that got left behind don't comprehend that at all.

But if you ask me the problem with both your random braindead pug and braindead fly by night blob guild is they only treat working together in the context of their own bubble, aka whatever's convieient for them, meaning what's good for them = what's good for the team.

 

Edited April 28 by ArchonWing.9480

[ShadowStep.3640]

Definitely the core feeling that I think causes a lot of angst is the feeling of powerlessness that comes from a very large group attacking your structure when you yourself dont have a similar group to counteract it. The attacking boon ball so to speak is both the unstoppable object and the immovable force. The defensive boons of protection, stability, healing power boosted regeneration, barrier, etc etc means even a glass cannon fitted player cant do meaningful damage. At the same time the offensive boons being continuously vomited out like permanently 25 might, fury, etc mean that the "support" specs in the boon ball do far too much damage relative to their build and gear setup. Support style full minstrel builds running full defensive/support trait lines should have close to 0 offensive presence and might and fury allow them to have more than they should. 

 

Basically there isn't much you can do to a group that is both the unstoppable object and immovable force. If the group was one or the other then people wouldn't be so frustrated but its a feeling of "well what am i really getting out of this play session?" that players ask themselves. 

[Aratoa.7398]

2 hours ago, Chaos God.1639 said:

what also can happen in the high skilled games is it can end in a draw, like in chess. when both players don't make any mistakes it will 100% draw. this is also what we are seeing right now in wvw. and I think that this will still be the case when you are going to change how boons works, because we already see this. the boons are designed like that.

why do think the battles will be different after nerfing the boons? for some reasons you expect the battles to be 100% win or lose.

if both teams don't make any mistakes we will still see long fights. so your problem isn't solved. having a draw situation in a game sounds normal to me. I think some just want to feel great about defeating inexperienced players/noobs or getting the loot bags.

For me it's okay if battle are ending in a draw. I prefer to have long fights, instead of running from one side of the map to another after dying. I also see wvw as a rts game with macro/micro strategies. so not everything should be about the micro strategies.

you think there are no stalemates on real battlefields?

 

Nerfing boons allows for more mistakes to be made and exploited by the opposing force. You're talking as if everyone is performing perfectly 100% of the time, they aren't. Even the best guild with the best comp is continually making mistakes of some sort. Currently, those mistakes are being covered by a variety of things but especially boons. What does it matter if you mistime a stab skill if you're already rolling with 10+ seconds of it? or protection or any other boon really. You reduce those boons, reduce the duration and whatnot and you'll see groups getting wiped more which is healthier for the game.

The current meta commits the greatest sin of all in PvP style games because of this type of coverage of mistakes: It's boring. 

 

Edited April 29 by Aratoa.7398

[Cael.3960]

19 minutes ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

Numbers, organized, voice is working together. I didn't say I don't want them, I said it's an advantage, advantage I am ok with, these are external optional advantages that players can take advantage of.

I'm glad you recognize this. Many of the problems which hurt <5 player gameplay the most involve the advantages which exist external to the game. I would argue that these external factors are a more significant advantage in game than many players realize. 

 

21 minutes ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

There's nothing high performance about using 4 support 1 dps to form a group for pvp, if anything that type of groups should be demolished by a 4dps 1 support group.

If 4dps and 1 support could beat it, than 4dps and 1 support would be the meta. Since that isn't the case it means the 4-support meta has higher performance.  For the record, I don't like it either. I think 2 support with a hybrid slot and 2 dps should be the ideal baseline to work a balance around. But I don't play this game like it's a job; those who do have the kind of time to theorycraft all the possible combinations of skills/boon/cooldowns/consumables and gameplay mechanics involved to create a near-perfect 5-man party. I say near-perfect because individual skill can be such a significant variable that it overwhelms an ideal comp and so you usually have to bake in player weaknesses as part of a quality build. 

29 minutes ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

I'd like the skill of the community to go up, using proper builds and skills, learning to use them in the appropriate times and not just rely on 49 other people to carry them.

Yeah, the problem with that is it requires your community to take personal initiative to find those 'proper' builds and then learn to use them in ways that are effective. Many don't even realize there's a skill-split between what they use in PvE and what those skills do in WvW. That's your first barrier to overcome; a general ignorance that, if not corrected, persists to include every form of WvW gameplay they're likely to encounter.  When players  aren't incentivized enough to learn their build, when it works and when it won't, they'll do what people instinctively do when they feel threatened; flock together. There needs to be enough success to keep players playing without creating an environment where success is only possible in one form of gameplay. 

For the record, 50+ groups of players aren't the only form of successful gameplay. Small squads can flip keeps and towers much faster than a zerg can. Multiple squads can maintain supply lines far better than a single large group can. Solos and roamers can maintain bloodlust bonuses for their entire server (which, by the way, provided stat bonuses almost as potent as Presence of the Keep used to be only across all maps). One person constantly refreshing friendly siege can save an objective hundreds of supply every hour. Roving 20-30 man squads have enough map mobility that they can shift defending populations to such an extent that they can empty a other map of defenders just by being content for them to attack. You don't need a boonball to achieve any of the things a boonball does. And  quite frankly, if winning the PPT score is what matters most, a boonball is far less effective than a swarm of 5-15 man squads. It's funny that so many players here have an issue with 50 players when they're largely ineffective on a map aside from taking tiered-up objectives. Personally, I think tired-up objectives should be important enough to merit a maximum response from your community when they're attacked. If you can't get the numbers and the organization to throw back an attack, that's not a problem with the game balance... that's a problem with server balance. You lost because your community wasn't big enough, skilled enough, or organized enough to beat the 50 players thrown at you. That's a community issue that needs solving, and there are tools to do exactly that. 

On a side note, I feel the reason many defending players are so hyper-fixated on large groups is because it's the only content they can't easily beat. It's unfortunate that so many of them on these forums proclaim 'boonballs' as removing all challenge from the game when removing boonballs would do the exact same thing for their own gameplay. There's a certain willful ignorance about what goes into creating a high-quality boonball as well, but that's a different point to address and I'd rather not complicate this post with an adjacent discussion. Suffice to say, we need a greater effort to understand both sides of the situation here, not knee-jerk outrage and persistent animosity toward different points of view. 

1 hour ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

No clue where you're getting this.

I think you do, but you don't want to vocalize it because it weakens your position. Solo players, and especially solo defenders, tend to refuse the kind of easily offered advantages that groups take for granted. When you deliberately handicap yourself and then demand buffs to accommodate an engineered weakness it creates an inevitable balance issue. There are limited options to enhance your gameplay without also enhancing those you're playing against. That's why force multipliers need to be handled delicately; things which replace a lack of active players shouldn't become something that can be abused by those with an abundance of players. Defenders aren't always outnumbered. That means situations will inevitably exist where defensive buffs can easily overwhelm attacking groups and discourage that content.

As an example, this used to be the case with Mag and SMC (and perhaps still is, my server hasn't fought them in several months so I can't say for sure). With most of a map population sitting in SMC with tiered walls, fixed siege and placeable siege on every gate, many servers ignored the place altogether. A map-que with a seasoned commander and voice coms could sometimes crack that nut, but more often than not it simply wasn't an enjoyable enough experience for them and so they didn't bother trying. SMC could be held for days in that state, sometimes the entire week, and content on the map evaporated because overcoming a constant map que's worth of players with entrenched defenses wasn't palatable. Hilariously, this is also why many players on that server picked up alternate accounts on different servers. When no one came to you for fights, you had to swap servers to get the same content. 

1 hour ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

Nerf boons, pretty simple. Why are they nerfing strips? that also requires coordination yet they nerf it every patch.

P.S If you think 50 should only be challenged by 50 then the wvw game mode is done, they might as well tell everyone to f off, or go make a separate instance for the 50's.

The problem with nerfing boons is that most people don't understand what makes a boonball a boonball. The overwhelming majority of player-generated boons cap out at 5 targets, which is one party. A boonball doesn't overflow with boons because it has more numbers, it does because each 5-man component of the group has a self-generated maximum of boons. Parties which don't have the necessary classes and builds can't even generate enough boons on their own to hit these caps even with the overflow from other squads. The floaters and hangers-on who chase after closed tags are probably included in your 'boonball' and they're practically defenseless until those comped parties suffer enough attrition that the surviving support can extend boons to them instead of the dead slots in their group.

When people complain about permanent boons, what they're really complaining about is are 5-man party builds that generate a permanent maximum of boons within that party.  A 5-man squad can have the exact same amount of boons and duration as a boonball. But 5-man squads aren't the perceived problem, it's the 50-man squads full of those 5-man parties that's the problem. Nerfing boons would make collapsing poorly built zergs easier, yes. It would also remove a lot of the self-contained benefits of small groups too. I should also add that there are a few solo-builds which provide full boon coverage and duration as well, so they too would be nerfed. A big hit for some players who prefer duel-style content. That being said, there are too many boons in the game. Too many conditions too, frankly. I'd like to see more skills with no boons or conditions that provide movement or unique effects instead. Boons should enhance key moments in combat or facilitate a burst. Conditions should do the same. The need for every skill to do 4 things at once, along with all the calculations necessary to resolve them, is a bigger issue than 'boons' as a general focus of outrage. 

On a more personal note, I feel you need to separate 'boonball' from 'full-squad' when you're venting your dislike of the high-population meta. Population imbalances are the big issue here and more efforts should be put toward creating a meta where the choice is about how a map uses it's full population rather than which server has a fully-populated map. Also, when making suggestions about how defenders can attain parity with an attacking group despite being outnumbered, consider what your buffs might mean if defenders had equal or greater numbers. Even rare occurences need to be taken into account to create a healthy balance, because competitive players will seek competitive advantages however they can. If a rare occurrence creates a highly favorable position, they will do what they can to make that occurrence happen more often. That's how 'boonballs' became a thing. It was rare for a large group to have sufficient boon coverage to keep everyone topped off without a dedicated support comp to provide it. When it happened it was obvious that those who could maintain these buffs often overwhelmed those they were trying to fight. When a way was found to create this more regularly, it was adopted and became the meta. The fact that it grew to 30+ sized groups is a testament to how those guilds and communities were able to train a core of players to play it and learn to excel in it. 'Casual' boonblobs are the joke no one talks about here, but very few recognize the skill and dedication involved to create truly unbeatable squad comps. And most of the people on here also fail to realize that many of those who play in quality comps aren't interested in PPT at all; PvE isn't a challenge for them, it never was. The nerfs to defenses are for those casual blobs who would have no chance at all against veteran defenders otherwise. If they've gotten more confident as a result of the changes to actually fight you instead of running away, that's a win for you. If you can't beat a group of casuals without significant PvE buffs (which quality groups will steamroll anyway) that's a community issue. 

[Cael.3960]

28 minutes ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

But what's really fun is people that stack all these advantages together and think objectives are hard to take still. But you know, many are behaving the same way.

Numbers = Advantage. No, I don't want to play with people outside our squad, and I don't want people stealing our fights.

Organized = Advantage. No, I just ask where the fights are and remain invisible but expect people to help me.

Meta = Advantage. Eh, you got me there. Of course adjusting your play to fight a cloud would also give one, but screw that.

Voice = Advantage. Nah, I need it to talk kitten about other players.

A lot of WvWers of old at any scale realize that the game really breaks down (in some cases literally) when everyone takes these advantages to their logical extent  and usually made concessions for better content. Unfortunately, the posers that got left behind don't comprehend that at all.

But if you ask me the problem with both your random braindead pug and braindead fly by night blob guild is they only treat working together in the context of their own bubble, aka whatever's convieient for them, meaning what's good for them = what's good for the team.

 

It is, which is quite revealing in and of itself. For some players even having all of these advantages isn't enough. I would view that as players who don't want to interact with the competitive aspect of a competitive game mode, they're just here for the unique rewards. Or those who want the experience of PvP from a place which removes almost all possible risk or recognition of failure. But we don't complain about the fights that never happen, just the ones in which we don't win all the time. 

I agree with the perspective of veterans who recognize the advantages these bring and the logical conclusion of adopting all of them. That's what separates the sweaty-try-hards who will push to the absolute max and then burn out, moving on from the game altogether, from the long-view veterans who just want a healthy environment to enjoy with their friends. There's organized and then there's regimented. There's meta and then there's 'good enough for everything that isn't MLG-standard'. Not everyone on a server has the skill, the time, or the social desire to incorporate all these advantages into one experience. But you can raise the raw ability of a community just be encouraging a greater awareness of the game and how to play it within your level of ability. A large aspect of WvW is simple teamwork; map callouts, supply runs, repairs and defensive siege building. Manning said siege, or placing traps to increase map awareness or stymie enemy groups. Things which require no skill at all but are crucial to a server's success in a matchup. But if your pugs can't, or won't, do even that much... complaining about the other competitive advantages is putting the cart in front of the horse. Yes, both things need to be balanced, but it's very hard to see the impact of a nerf/buff if your community isn't engaged enough to provide authentic feedback in the first place. 

 

[ArchonWing.9480]

13 minutes ago, Cael.3960 said:

But we don't complain about the fights that never happen, just the ones in which we don't win all the time. 

lol! That's definitely something to agree on.

13 minutes ago, Cael.3960 said:

I agree with the perspective of veterans who recognize the advantages these bring and the logical conclusion of adopting all of them. That's what separates the sweaty-try-hards who will push to the absolute max and then burn out, moving on from the game altogether, from the long-view veterans who just want a healthy environment to enjoy with their friends. There's organized and then there's regimented. There's meta and then there's 'good enough for everything that isn't MLG-standard'.

Hmm yea. There's a difference between meta and merely "good" vs, meta and "wtf is that even?" Like there's no way Anet can cater to bozos that auto attack into a reflect for years or fail to mount up on top of a wall and die because nothing will help for them.

In general, I like to say that if the current meta is bad for someone, that's ok. But if they're literally at the wrong side of every meta, then well you know.... I can't see how that can even be fun.

13 minutes ago, Cael.3960 said:

But you can raise the raw ability of a community just be encouraging a greater awareness of the game and how to play it within your level of ability.

That I agree 100%. Part of why I post on the forums and how I act in-game is just to toss out these ideas to increase the overall quality of play and to at the very least get people reevaluate their gameplay. No, I don't expect everyone to play at omg MLG levels, but just to ask themselves if they are happy with the results.

And believe it or not, I actually learn things on the forums so I can reevaluate myself. Contrary to popular belief I just don't sneak into the middle of threads just calling people bad. (though there is a lot of that too)

 

Edited April 28 by ArchonWing.9480

[Joao.3410]

I would be really interested to hear from the devs to see what their opinion on the perceived counterplays for boonballs.  Boon strips are pretty much irrelevant after all the nerfs, plus the fact that boons can be applied much faster than they are stripped.  I view the 4 support 1 dps boonball groups to be a problem as they are largely indestructible unless you go at them with a much larger force. 

If you need 15 pugs to fight off every 5-man boonball, then what happens when you're facing a 50-man boon ball? Where are you going to get  those150 pugs?  Doesn't this just allows the bigger groups to snowball, making the population imbalance much worse than it needs to be?

This problem doesn't exist in pvp because boon durations are generally shorter, tanky stat combinations are unavailable, and healing numbers are lower - you can't just sit there and tank the damage.  Positioning, skill timing, terrain, LOS, active defenses, etc - actually being able to do meaningful damage to the opponent - are what makes fights fun, all of which are currently missing and largely irrelevant with the boonball situation in wvw currently.

 

Edited April 29 by Joao.3410

[Chaba.5410]

2 hours ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

But what's really fun is people that stack all these advantages together and think objectives are hard to take still.

Or it's that Anet wants those people who stack all those advantages together to fight in and around the objectives instead of what they do mostly now: fight outside in corners of the map while roamers get mad for them not showing up to their T3 NWT being hit by the third server.  That's always fun.

[Mabi black.1824]

19 hours ago, Chaos God.1639 said:

you want boons to basically have a higher learning curve and you think that smaller teams will be able to destroy bigger teams, just because the bigger teams havent learned how to use their boons correctly.

You've made some good observations. People only complain because it's easy to complain. Don't see a little beyond your nose. As if giving an advantage to the smaller group doesn't affect the larger group as well. It's called equilibrium for a reason: aequi = equal        libra = scales.   We are all children of Latin. We are all children of Rome. 2000 years later.😉

[Mabi black.1824]

23 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

The exponential gains of tiered objectives - both in terms of passive points and defensive boosts - has been known for a decade and noted to Anet so, so many times. The "problem" with the wall/door change isnt that they are "harder" to repair or open for longer, it's that it's more fun and active to build it up even just a tiny bit and tear it down in quick succession rather than get bogged down. Because that's literally the gameplay cycle of capping objectives.

No one should need to ask themselves why.

like climbing on mirrors. I just have to justify my complaints. In fact, every time I'm online and I see other players logging in, they always write '' Are there walls to repair? Or maybe you also read '' Are there fights going on? '' 

So, do we want to stay all day throwing stones at each other to open a wall or do we also want to play together? Because these changes are just addressing that. Do you want to play alone or do you want to group up to 10 friends? So you can still close the wall in 60 seconds, because these changes are only addressing that.

[Chaba.5410]

1 hour ago, Mabi black.1824 said:

We are all children of Latin. We are all children of Rome. 2000 years later.😉

Some of us are the children of the barbarians at the gates....

[joneirikb.7506]

On 4/28/2024 at 2:59 AM, ZTeamG.4603 said:

The pessimist in me wonders if that's the point of the way changes have been going. It's a shame that WvW has never really received much developer attention over the years, which is probably in no small part due to it not really having anything directly monetizable (just warclaw skins I guess) aside from the indirect effects of it being fun and keeping people playing the game long-term. It seems like the amount of work required to fix the problems in the mode is high, and it's of course a much more delicate balance compared to PvE. How many years are we going on for Alliances now? At this point I'm not convinced Alliances would even fix much since the problem seems to be a deeper disconnect than just population balance, and who cares about population balance if there's no reason for groups to do anything other than karmatrain though undefended objectives?

Drive off smallscale players and players in outnumbered servers by only balancing in favor of massive, low-intensity zergs; drive off defenders by making it much harder to get rewards from defense (especially if it's not a successful defense--it doesn't matter how long you delay attackers or if you repel them, it only matters if you get kills); drive off the remaining defenders that defend for fun by making it impossible to defend against a larger group; drive off medium-sized groups by making it impossible for them to do anything to fight map queue boonblobs; and eventually, the loss of all the former groups will lead to the large fight-seeking groups being driven off since all the fights are gone and the mode devolves into a karmatrain.

I'll ramble a little more 🙂

(Nope not talking about balance, because that's handled by a different team)

If you look back at ANet and WvW, you can see that every time they spot a problem and tries to fix it, the same patterns follows. They identify the problem as it is as that point, they come up with ideas and plan out a solution, they start working on it, and when they finish it and release it, well the situations changed because of the time it has taken.

On launch the problem was massive queue's, so they identified the problem, through out a solution, and started working on EotM. By the time it was released, the queue's wasn't nearly as big a problem any-longer, because it had already taken a good while and the situation had changed.

World Restructure is probably the most extreme example of this. Back when they held polls and actively asked on the forums etc, and they narrowed things down to a couple of things that needed fixing and they set population as the top one, and started working on it (and then got pulled off, put on pause a few times, and then started again with a skeleton crew etc. Usual stuff). So bunch of years later, while WR is still going to be useful (for the background systems if nothing else), the situation has changed, and other things are affecting the game-mode/player-base more.

So if I was to point out the main problem with ANet regarding WvW development: They're reactive and their work-flow is too slow to keep up a constantly changing player-base. This could be because of various reasons, examples:
* Awkward/complicated tools/programs
* Low priority/resources (money and devs for ex, being told no by bosses)
* Company philosophy/design restrictions (overdevelop and only released mostly polished content).

At the same time, if they constantly tries to re-consider their priorities, then the long development process will work even harder against them, and nothing would ever get done.

I'm not sure how they can change that. I'd make a guess that the thing that separates a veteran "realm vs realm" team from the rest is honestly just experience enough to be able to spot which direction the player-base is "roughly" heading, and start building counter measures before hand. From what I've seen ANet seems to change people around too much for anyone to be allowed the time to build up that kind of experience.

----

The only thing I'll say about balance is that it feels more like a conflict of departments. You have the balance team, and they're ordered to prioritize X over the rest, and only make small numerical changes for Y and Z when needed. And when you then put a bunch of mostly system-engineers on the other teams (like WvW) that might not be very versed in actual combat and balance, it will be near impossible for them to come with meaningful input or to argue against the balance team.

As I've suggested before, the WvW devs should still be able to make changes to Siege without interference from the balance team (Assumption on my part, since Siege is WvW only), so they could potentially use those to make sweeping/drastic changes (like mass boon-rips, big damage, etc). But in that case you got to realise that chances are high that the WvW devs are unlikely to be very good at balance, and those numbers would probably be all over the place, and they'd have to go by trial-and-error to find some good numbers for things. I'd expect anything from 3-6 months of highly random changes.

----

One related point, changing participation, is the single most powerful way ANet has to change player-behaviour at this point. If you got plenty participation for defence, players would defend. If you got participation for dying to another player, players would happily suicide into each others.