WTF is Anet doing to WvW?

[Sleepwalker.1398]

**Next Patch**

WvW Team: Due to Riba being useless outside of a zerg and always dying to noobs in solo roaming and unable to find 1 more person to go flip back the bloodlust, we have decided to help him/her out with nerfing the bloodlust amount from 30 to 5. 

[Izzy.2951]

Cornerstone gamemode 😂

[Damian.8127]

On 4/17/2024 at 3:45 PM, Riba.3271 said:

 

Defenders had to do nothing to win with weaker group. So what do you suggest attackers were supposed to do? ... Bring even stronger group?  And that is exactly why super stacked servers and groups were born. They might have failed to take T3 keeps sometimes, but they absolutely had 0 challenge to take every tower and openfield fight on the map. This might sound bad to you, but do note that they had More numbers, brain and skills than your server while being 10 Times more organised. Your server just doesnt deserve to stop the enemy that point... If you could, then keeps and towers cannot be spots for good fights

Where to start...

Zergs do not always run at the same time. Do you want to take empty structures? because that is a reasonable result of making defending not worthwhile. This already exists, we call it RBL and EotM. Get your weeklies!  

If you are losing to weak defenders with a 50 blob and 1000 sups, i can offer to teach you how to siege because i must be a tactical mastermind. Towers can be breached in <60 seconds. Keeps can have the inner and outer opened at the same time. Siege can no longer be disabled. where is the struggle? so now the fortified position is open, whats the first thing to do? rush lord? oh? no wait, we go clear the siege and cloud. A lot to take in i know; which part are you and your 50 blob struggling with?

The reason the keep is being hit, is BECAUSE everything else is taken OR some sort of rush to PPT ninja the objective before an alarm is raised. Nothing wrong with that but doesn't really bring the fight INTO the keep. It just flips in the latter case.

If you cant take a t3 keep from the enemy, GOOD! they have a launchpad to fight to regain the rest of the map, a rally point to which they will amass forces, for interaction to occur. You might lose that fight for taking it unfavourably, or still win with "big brain and skill". **1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 intensifies**

 

[yakslapper.8104]

Shutup and Buy Gems - Arenanet

[Chaba.5410]

7 hours ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

Not when a lot of players may not even have been around during 2015, much less to form this strawman at that time.

That don't matter. Their first exposure to WvW at any later time after HoT would mean they never knew anything different, only know how it is with the tactics and auras. Similar effect to playing back then and getting comfortable to the new normal.

Edited April 19 by Chaba.5410

[LordHT.8297]

I thought the repair changes were stupid but after testing it a little but man... it's the worst change ever in gw2 history. The most unfair, frustrating AND stupid change I've ever seen!
I have a theory about why Anet is doing this kind of thing.
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.

[LordHT.8297]

And remember, this all started with the nonsense change to the outnumbered buff.
When anet decided that if you are fighting on an outnumber map you don't deserve extra pips they made it clear that they weren't in the mood to make wvw fairer . 

And we didn't have enough complaints about it in this forum btw.

[Chaba.5410]

7 hours ago, Gehenna.3625 said:

I could've argued the same if defenses were buffed and the attackers were complaining.

Argued for what? That players give kneejerk reactions to changes before even playing them?

If you didn't play back then and didn't know anything about how defense was buffed, that's your normal.  Everyone was complaining at the time because their normal was changed.  Some people quit. Others like myself played with those changes.

Over time some of it was nerfed, like hardened gates and dragon banner; more recently invuln walls. This is no different. Some will quit. Others will still play and adjustments will be made in the future if today's changes turn out to be too much.

Have you seen the kneejerk reactions to the new inspect feature? Now there's another example of people not liking change before they even tried it.

[ArchonWing.9480]

1 hour ago, Chaba.5410 said:

That don't matter. Their first exposure to WvW at any later time after HoT would mean they never knew anything different, only know how it is with the tactics and auras. Similar effect to playing back then and getting comfortable to the new normal.

Except a lot of those things were nerfed within a year.* If someone had only played Gw2 during that year and a half you might have a point.

You're deliberately slicing a subsection of Gw2 history where that trend might have been applicable  (Hot release to about late 2016), and applying it to WvW in general-- taking Desert BL and defense buffs at its absolute worst, and attempting to paint that as the norm. You also ignored stuff like megalasers that were clearly anti-defense, and also laced with blatant inaccuracies like "limited approach options to structures" which makes me doubt if you've actually visited DBL in the last 8 years.

Your statement doesn't even hold water even to someone that starts the game in 2017 due to these adjustments. And we're much farther away from 2017 then 2017 is to 2015.

It's also hilarious you actually included emergency waypoints as a buff to defense, since some of us still remember the time when you could freely wp in between defense events in vanilla.

Anyhow, this is why I brought up why archaic versions of the game don't matter-- it can be hard to remember.

*Example: Catapult supply being reduced within 3 months of HoT release: https://old.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5yt6j7/when_did_catapult_supply_cost_change/

Literally the first point you bring up gets undone in 3 months. Safe to say, nobody sees that as the norm.

In reality, HoT was so volatile and had multiple changes of plans that you can probably take any part of  that era and spin into anything you want.

Edited April 19 by ArchonWing.9480

[joneirikb.7506]

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)
 

Quote

“Two things only the people anxiously desire — bread and circuses.”

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.

 

Edited April 19 by joneirikb.7506

[Dawdler.8521]

7 hours ago, Izzy.2951 said:

Cornerstone gamemode 😂

Despite all the random changes in this patch, the invisible cornerstone on DBL garri remains bugged and broken after 8+ years.

Its like the embodiment of Anets attention to WvW.

[One more for the road.8950]

2 hours ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Have you seen the kneejerk reactions to the new inspect feature? Now there's another example of people not liking change before they even tried it.

These are not the same. There were a very small number of people with that reaction, they just happened to be very loud, and people everywhere were laughing at them (including making memes and videos) because overall people really like the inspect feature. The general sentiment has been "nice" for that in every environment I am in.

With these changes it's the opposite, there's a few loud people in the forum that like the changes, other than that the general sentiment has been "wtf" in every environment I am in. Including the "boonballers" so many seems to have such a deep hatred for, as it's ripping content away for them too when things are even easier to take than it was before.

Edited April 19 by One more for the road.8950

[ArchonWing.9480]

The inspect nonsense was a meme because it was either:

1.) Self important people that thought people cared enough about them to "steal" their style. Even if they were exceptional, there's so much visual clutter that it is not reasonable to expect this-- people have much better things to do than look at your character.  Basically these fears were based off of unsubstantiated delusion that isn't even self consistent.

2.) People who are afraid the inspect will extend to builds in the future. They probably wouldn't do this ever anyways Personally I think this angle is silly because again, nobody really cares about what you run unless it's causing problems and instanced content probably demands people ping stuff anyways.

It's simply not a rational opinion that people being able to inspect you would affect your gameplay.

Edited April 19 by ArchonWing.9480

[Chaba.5410]

1 hour ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

Except a lot of those things were nerfed within a year.* If someone had only played Gw2 during that year and a half you might have a point.

You're deliberately slicing a subsection of Gw2 history where that trend might have been applicable  (Hot release to about late 2016), and applying it to WvW in general-- taking Desert BL and defense buffs at its absolute worst, and attempting to paint that as the norm. You also ignored stuff like megalasers that were clearly anti-defense, and also laced with blatant inaccuracies like "limited approach options to structures" which makes me doubt if you've actually visited DBL in the last 8 years.

Your statement doesn't even hold water even to someone that starts the game in 2017 due to these adjustments. And we're much farther away from 2017 then 2017 is to 2015.

It's also hilarious you actually included emergency waypoints as a buff to defense, since some of us still remember the time when you could freely wp in between defense events in vanilla.

Anyhow, this is why I brought up why archaic versions of the game don't matter-- it can be hard to remember.

*Example: Catapult supply being reduced within 3 months of HoT release: https://old.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/5yt6j7/when_did_catapult_supply_cost_change/

Literally the first point you bring up gets undone in 3 months. Safe to say, nobody sees that as the norm.

In reality, HoT was so volatile and had multiple changes of plans that you can probably take any part of  that era and spin into anything you want.

Man, how did you get so off-track? Please don't attribute stuff I quote like "limited approach options to structures" to me.  Did you just skim quickly through my posts and miss the citations?  Took me a hot minute to try to understand why you're talking about EWP as if I specifically mentioned it instead of tactics IN GENERAL.

My only point is that defense was buffed in the past (*provided evidence*) and we're still playing with many of those changes despite subsequent nerfs.  We still have tactics and improvements today.  We still have automated upgrades.  We still have guild objective auras.  They weren't all nerfed before 2017.  We had them in 2015.  We had them in 2017.  We have them in 2024.

Taken on a whole, minor details like the megalaser event or even the recent buff to EWP (notice that no one here is mentioning that either?) doesn't affect overall trends and I certainly won't be pestering others for not mentioning the recent EWP buff.  "Oh look guys, there were all these nerfs but this one buff makes up for it!"

Edited April 19 by Chaba.5410

[Chaba.5410]

13 minutes ago, One more for the road.8950 said:

Including the "boonballers" so many seems to have such a deep hatred for

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

[Chaba.5410]

1 hour 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.

 

Excellent post.  Please make this as it's own new thread.

[ArchonWing.9480]

3 minutes ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Man, how did you get so off-track? Please don't attribute stuff I quote like "limited approach options to structures" to me.  Did you just skim quickly through my posts and miss the citations?

Well not only is your format confusing, I feel like you should have probably filtered these posts a bit better because you didn't really explain the context of individual quotes well on how it related to your conclusion, or really at all, so I thought you were endorsing the points or just not aware they had such issues.

I'm sure it made sense to you, but it confused more than a few people it would seem.

 

5 minutes ago, Chaba.5410 said:

My only point is that defense was buffed in the past and we're still playing with many of those changes despite subsequent nerfs.  We still have tactics and improvements today.  We still have automated upgrades.  We still have guild objective auras.  They weren't all nerfed before 2017.  We had them in 2015.  We had them in 2017.  We have them in 2024.

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.

6 minutes ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Taken on a whole, minor details like the megalaser event or even the recent buff to EWP (notice that no one here is mentioning that either?) doesn't affect overall trends and I certainly won't be pestering others for not mentioning the recent EWP buff.  "Oh look guys, there were all these nerfs but this one buff makes up for it!"

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.

[One more for the road.8950]

20 minutes 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.

[XenesisII.1540]

43 minutes ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

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.

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.

[ArchonWing.9480]

2 minutes ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

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.

Well it's often 2-3 groups of 10-15 wiping separately, so in a way it is even numbers!

[joneirikb.7506]

26 minutes ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Excellent post.  Please make this as it's own new thread.

Thanks, but too much effort, I'm just here for my easy zerg-post-surfing for salt rewards 😛

Besides, it would take way too much work to actually clean that up into something readable.

(And honestly, it's kind of multiple 2-3 different topics/threads worth, sort of stuffed into a single post)

 

Edited April 19 by joneirikb.7506

[Thron Stal.9367]

No one.... no one was playing scrapper healer since the last nerfs.  NOW Anet nerfs the scrapper again... who the heck is making these insane decisions?

[Mabi black.1824]

2 hours ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

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)

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?

[TheGrimm.5624]

13 hours ago, Luranni.9470 said:

I have felt a song coming on.....

lol dear, let me spin this, even when you call them out, apply counter points, taunt, joke, joust, disagree and all the others... you still create great content that draws players to WvW and we need that. You do you. Pick on them, show the WTW, have fun and draw more into the mode even while some of us are WTW! Its better content then alot of others to draw peeps to try. 

We do need more peeps, WvW does better with more. Personally you are a value add, so keep it up. +10 from me.

[Thron Stal.9367]

5 minutes ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

lol dear, let me spin this, even when you call them out, apply counter points, taunt, joke, joust, disagree and all the others... you still create great content that draws players to WvW and we need that. You do you. Pick on them, show the WTW, have fun and draw more into the mode even while some of us are WTW! Its better content then alot of others to draw peeps to try. 

We do need more peeps, WvW does better with more. Personally you are a value add, so keep it up. +10 from me.

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