WvW/PvP Update Preview Stream at Noon Pacific Time Today

[Sviel.7493]

That's 2.5 hours from the time of this post.

I couldn't find an announcement on the forums so I figured I'd make one.  Will update with a summary if I don't forget to watch it.

 

Here's the summary:

Quote

-Victory points will now be weight based on player population per skirmish.
    -Range from 6 points for first to 42 for EU.
    -9 points to 33 for NA.
-Warscore on capture is increased for upgraded walled objectives.
    -12/24/40 for T1-T3 towers.
    -24/48/80 for keeps.
    -36/72/120 for Stonemist.
    -They say this should make defending feel more valuable as it denies more points.

-PPK Warscore is increasing from 2 to 3.
    -They don't expect this to be a huge shift as almost no skirmishes were won or lost based on PK.

-Objectives only contest when Lord is in combat or a wall/gate is damage below 98%.  White swords no longer have a delay.
-Keeps/Castles now spawn 3 waypoints for EWP so it's harder to camp all of them.

-Alacrity can no longer be applied to players on siege and is removed on activating siege.  Boons other than swiftness can no longer be applied to Siege Golems.
-Flame Ram health has been lowered by 50%.  Operated flame rams will have Iron Hide (50% damage reduction) applied to them.
    -Dev says they want people to be able to kill the rams faster so the gate can be closed?  But it still takes 50% repair to close the gate?
-Guild golem cost increased from 50 to 75.
-AC cost reduced from 40 to 25
-SAC cost reduced from 50 to 35
-Treb cost reduced from 100 to 50
-STreb cost reduced from 120 to 60
-DEV SAYS TREB AND AC ARE STRONG DEFENSIVE SIEGE

-New weapon skins

 

 

Edited July 10 by Sviel.7493
Added Summary

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

Is there a written version of what they are gonna talk about?

[Symbiosis.8729]

1 hour ago, Sviel.7493 said:

That's 2.5 hours from the time of this post.

I couldn't find an announcement on the forums so I figured I'd make one.  Will update with a summary if I don't forget to watch it.

That seems to be because they did not bother to announce it, either here, or reddit. No; they went to the graveyard of twitter 😬

[Sviel.7493]

43 minutes ago, JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

Is there a written version of what they are gonna talk about?

I don't know of any info beyond this tweet.

[H K.4057]

My prediction for the stream:

"WvW restructuring has been successful overall, but there are some minor issues we need to work on. We are going to ignore all of the horrible matchups, and the fact that the restructure doesn't actually fix any of the issues with WvW."

[Junkpile.7439]

EotM overhaul pls 🥺

[Sviel.7493]

Here's the summary:

Quote

-Victory points will now be weight based on player population per skirmish.
    -Range from 6 points for first to 42 for EU.
    -9 points to 33 for NA.
-Warscore on capture is increased for upgraded walled objectives.
    -12/24/40 for T1-T3 towers.
    -24/48/80 for keeps.
    -36/72/120 for Stonemist.
    -They say this should make defending feel more valuable as it denies more points.

-PPK Warscore is increasing from 2 to 3.
    -They don't expect this to be a huge shift as almost no skirmishes were won or lost based on PK.

-Objectives only contest when Lord is in combat or a wall/gate is damage below 98%.  White swords no longer have a delay.
-Keeps/Castles now spawn 3 waypoints for EWP so it's harder to camp all of them.

-Alacrity can no longer be applied to players on siege and is removed on activating siege.  Boons other than swiftness can no longer be applied to Siege Golems.
-Flame Ram health has been lowered by 50%.  Operated flame rams will have Iron Hide (50% damage reduction) applied to them.
    -Dev says they want people to be able to kill the rams faster so the gate can be closed?  But it still takes 50% repair to close the gate?
-Guild golem cost increased from 50 to 75.
-AC cost reduced from 40 to 25
-SAC cost reduced from 50 to 35
-Treb cost reduced from 100 to 50
-STreb cost reduced from 120 to 60
-DEV SAYS TREB AND AC ARE STRONG DEFENSIVE SIEGE

-New weapon skins

 

 

[coro.3176]

lol @ cheaper ACs. Cheaper trebs is good though. Forcing people to come far out of keep to kill siege is ideal.

Slightly dislike the increase in PPK score. That mostly  benefits larger groups running down smaller groups, and we want people to keep coming to try again for fights, not having additional excuses to quit.

[Dawdler.8521]

If that is true (I cant be bothered to look at this time) then at least Anet remain true to form. You can literally summarize their entire patching practice as this:
The community want 20%, Anet gives 80%. The community want -20%, Anet gives -80%. And then they're going to spend the next 2+ years fixing it until it's closer to 20%/-20% because it's kitten broken.

The VP change seems odd though since the points is presumably still passive from objectives and kills? Maybe it's easy to judge if one team absolutely dominate but if the objective gain and kill points are very close between teams but one has slightly more population they automatically loose? That range is pretty extreme.

Edited July 10 by Dawdler.8521

[Mike.3196]

Got love that there balances don't actually fix issues at all and  same issues stay same. Fyi as months go the matchup will be more balanced if expect to be good on first launch ur mental 

[kash.9213]

38 minutes ago, Mike.3196 said:

Got love that there balances don't actually fix issues at all and  same issues stay same. Fyi as months go the matchup will be more balanced if expect to be good on first launch ur mental 

"They say this should make defending feel more valuable as it denies more points." 

For example, if an issue they identified is that people aren't defending something, only a few number crunchers are going to care about that. There's no visual or tangible prompt to steer people towards the behavior they think is going to catch on.

Edited July 10 by kash.9213

[XenesisII.1540]

Quote

-Victory points will now be weight based on player population per skirmish.
    -Range from 6 points for first to 42 for EU.
    -9 points to 33 for NA.

The Action level victory point multiplier system that was mentioned a long time ago.

Meanwhile their time zone sorting doesn't seem to be working properly.

This could get real messy.

 

Quote

-Warscore on capture is increased for upgraded walled objectives.
    -12/24/40 for T1-T3 towers.
    -24/48/80 for keeps.
    -36/72/120 for Stonemist.
    -They say this should make defending feel more valuable as it denies more points.

Increased capture on higher tier objectives, while they made the effort to break down defense so everything is easily paper anyways.

No one gives a kitten about denying points, cause points doesn't matter. You ever hear anyone cheer about defending something cause they denied the enemy XX points from not capturing garrison?

Nothingburger. Play your own game Anet.

 

Quote

-PPK Warscore is increasing from 2 to 3.
    -They don't expect this to be a huge shift as almost no skirmishes were won or lost based on PK.

Shift it to 10, boon blob bag farmers need to be shot up the ranks to face each other.

 

Quote

-Objectives only contest when Lord is in combat or a wall/gate is damage below 98%.  White swords no longer have a delay.
-Keeps/Castles now spawn 3 waypoints for EWP so it's harder to camp all of them.

The only good change.

No need for 3 ewp placements, just give everyone that uses ewp a 1-2sec of invul like they give guards invul when they spawn in. 🤷‍♂️

 

Quote

-Alacrity can no longer be applied to players on siege and is removed on activating siege.  Boons other than swiftness can no longer be applied to Siege Golems.

Sweet, now how about you stop ignoring boon ball blobbing balance?

 

Quote

-Flame Ram health has been lowered by 50%.  Operated flame rams will have Iron Hide (50% damage reduction) applied to them.
    -Dev says they want people to be able to kill the rams faster so the gate can be closed?  But it still takes 50% repair to close the gate?

Only took a year to figure this out huh.

Still takes 50% repair to close, which you need a zerg to do anyways in an objective battle, which could kill rams easily anyways.

Hey at least cannons are useful for ram killing again.

 

Quote

-Guild golem cost increased from 50 to 75.
-AC cost reduced from 40 to 25
-SAC cost reduced from 50 to 35
-Treb cost reduced from 100 to 50
-STreb cost reduced from 120 to 60
-DEV SAYS TREB AND AC ARE STRONG DEFENSIVE SIEGE

TREB AND AC ARE STRONG AEGIS REMOVALS!

 

Quote

-New weapon skins

More left over black lion skins that couldn't make the cut to sell on the store?

Very excite.

Let me know when you decide to bring in the last legendary pieces to wvw.

I'll be in the first descendant and once human in the meantime. 🤷‍♂️

[Falseprophet.1502]

Another seventeen ugly weapon skins and no WvW legendary accessories. I love this team!

[Sviel.7493]

My thoughts on the changes:

The scoring changes need much more explanation.  My initial reaction is that they are very bad, but not even the people on the stream seemed to understand them so it's hard to know exactly what they mean.  With the information we have, it looks like 1 hour of primetime EU play is equal to 7 hours at low population.  If you're not able to play during primetime, you essentially have no impact whatsoever on the outcome of the match.  I like to think of scoring in terms of incentives, but the incentive here seems to be show up to the scheduled raid or you might as well not exist.

In NA, 1 hour of primetime is a bit more than 3 hours elsewhere.  Again, the incentive is saying that there's no point in logging in for most of the day, so why bother retaining the 24-hour mode?  In fact, if you log in during off-hours, you run the risk of the dominant server getting more points so you're actively hurting your team by existing within the game.  No one should show up unless it's in an organized guild raid where they will boonball better than the other boonballs.  And if you can't beat the other boonball?  Just log off to deny them points instead of artificially inflating the population.

It's very bad.  Terrible even.  I hope a subsequent explanation helps, but that seems unlikely.

Warscore on capture doesn't matter.  If PPK wasn't determining any skirmishes, this won't either.  It could be good or bad depending on the total scoring environment, but it absolutely won't make defending more valuable as it doesn't have any significant impact on points.  Consider: If you successfully defend and thus get the upgraded points from your objective instead of the enemy getting points, that difference will very quickly dwarf what the enemy would have gained on capture.  That's what makes defending valuable.  The problem with defense is not the value, but the futility.  This doesn't address that.

PPK Warscore increasing by 50% is bad.  It apparently wasn't deciding many skirmishes before, but we shouldn't be changing that.  If we look at it in terms of incentives, it once again says that you better act only in an organized raid where you never wind up as an easy kill for enemies.  This isn't going to break the game, but it's not helpful in creating a game where people actually want to fight for things.

Objectives only contest when actually threatened and that's, by far, the high point of the changes.  Should have been done 10 years ago, but now is also a good time.  I look forward to not having to sweep the entire keep because someone coughed on a guard.

Multiple EWPs is also good.  Might need tweaks going forward, but they've acknowledged the problem so that's great.

Alacrity no longer working on siege is fine.  Of all the problems that exist with siege, this wasn't very impactful.  But it's an easy change and a good one so, great.  Glad it happened.  However, the primary issue with siege is how uninteractive it is between offense and defense.  When I heard they had siege changes, I was hoping for things that would make the guaranteed slow down more of a battle.

Golems can't have boons and it always should have been this way.  Golems are extremely poorly implemented in that they can only be used by teams that already have overwhelming force because they die to zerg pressure but they are incredibly powerful if you don't have a zerg to pressure them.  You certainly can't rely on allied siege to kill them since mounted siege is quickly destroyed and ballistae are a meme.  Anything that weakens golems is welcome, but they're still terrible to have in game at all.

Flame Rams change but not really.  They have 50% less health but 50% damage reduction when manned so you don't actually kill them faster.  I think the explanation was that players could clear them faster and get back to other things, but those same players would also need to repair the gate and that takes much longer than before since the 50% repair change so...which is it?  Do we want players sealing breaches faster or slower?  Why didn't we do the same for catas if this is about reducing the time to clear siege?  I don't see how this change matters whatsoever, but thanks for the extra 20 seconds?

Siege cost changes don't matter.  If siege in general was in a more interactive state, then this might have an impact.  As it stands, siege is just a formality.  The greatest boonball is going to win and nothing you do with siege is going to slow them down unless they're ramming a gate without stability which...should not be a thing.  Just use proxy catas like everyone else.

Arrow carts do nothing to zergs.  They could be free and nothing significant would change in most cases.  Trebs also do nothing in most cases.  It's probably good that they're cheaper, but this isn't going to change the game.  The devs seem to believe ACs and Trebs are strong defensive siege but I don't know where they're getting that from.  Again, just use proxy catas like everyone else and you won't have to deal with any of this.

---

Overall, there was even less scoring QoL than expected but the impact was much higher--namely, the impact is that it no longer matters if I log in because I'm not running in a zerg during primetime.  I could singlehandedly win every skirmish I play and not change the outcome of a single match.  On one hand, I know that people were complaining that primetime play was pointless compared to off hours, but it was not to this degree and this is absolutely not the right solution to that problem.  Anet's constant drive to remove any ability to defend made that worse as the things you upgraded during primetime were instantly loss when your raid ended--you couldn't have any reverberating impact into the off-hours.  More and more, it seems like they really don't WvW to be a 24 hour mode.

There were no hints of any greater changes coming either even though they have, in theory, gotten a better handle on population balance in the new system.  I don't know what World Restructuring was for if there weren't plans for major changes to other systems going forward.  The game grows more and more zerg centric while core systems are left to rot because meaningfully addressing them might curb the zerg's power.  It's not new that I have no idea what they want going forward, but somehow I am disappointed anew because I thought now, finally, they might jump at the chance to get things into shape.

Edited July 10 by Sviel.7493

[Zevelon.6512]

This change of war score points  is totally useless . What do we win in the end ? The biggest impact we get from that stuff is maybe getting the chests 30min faster every week. Rams have been so tanky since the buff they got few months ago they had to be tuned down but is the change enough?  Lower cost on AC huge change now if they only did dmg so ppl would build them. And the biggest thing i don’t see is the nerfs on boons , scrue alac on siege tune down the boons on groups this meta is so boring, we don’t fight we watch each other to death. 

[One more for the road.8950]

41 minutes ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

If that is true (I cant be bothered to look at this time) then at least Anet remain true to form. You can literally summarize their entire patching practice as this:
The community want 20%, Anet gives 80%. The community want -20%, Anet gives -80%. And then they're going to spend the next 2+ years fixing it until it's closer to 20%/-20% because it's kitten broken.

The VP change seems odd though since the points is presumably still passive from objectives and kills? Maybe it's easy to judge if one team absolutely dominate but if the objective gain and kill points are very close between teams but one has slightly more population they automatically loose? That range is pretty extreme.

The VP change isn't based on how many ppl is on a team, but which skirmishes are most populated. So prime time skirmishes gives a lot more VP than night time trains.

[Junkpile.7439]

Doesn't this make weak server lose more? It's frigging annoying stay totally wrong tier because some people nightcap.

[ArchonWing.9480]

Well nice try with ACs but they still suck; it's not the supply. It's the siege cap and their general weakness. So in reality you cannot build 50% more ACs.

I guess you can build some in the front of the keep to reveal stealth lol. Mostly, you should use trebs to defend; should be built everywhere in a keep. Of course you will need 3-4 in a single area to do much but it is viable.

They nerfed tapping. I feel like this is a problem of their own doing but whatever.

PPk = 3? Meh.

Seems like the thing is balanced around bad scouts. I guess at this point....

 

 

Edited July 10 by ArchonWing.9480

[Symbiosis.8729]

38 minutes ago, Sviel.7493 said:

the impact is that it no longer matters if I log in because I'm not running in a zerg during primetime. 

Yeah! how about Devs who clearly don't want to play actual WvW and just want GvG, remove GvG from WvW altogether and put it in EotM rather than killing off WvW. So now unless I'm  in a 'progression' Guild, play only zerg and only prime time and only acceptable builds and classes; making sure of course that sub group has 4 healers out of the 5 players cause kittening boon ball, then I may as well not bother?

This feels like the same situation as the old pve balance team that got removed due to understandable outrage at 'private' discords peopled only with a certain type of player treating game development as some sort of private resourcee. The same is happening here, these private groups dictating their GVG obsession onto the actual game mode of WvW.

kitten this.

Edited July 10 by Symbiosis.8729

[TexZero.7910]

The siege cost changes are questionable at best without more context. Are they planning on normalizing all siege and their levels respectively or is it just we arbitrarily decided these specific values ?

I say this because unless im missing something of note Trebs just got the worlds wildest adjustment with guild siege actually being more expensive to build than superior by 40 which flies in the face of the conventional siege scaling and reason to have guild siege to begin with.

[lindstroem.3601]

Victory points will now be weight based on player population per skirmish

So they did not only show pugs and roamers with the WR update the middlefinger and literally told em to join a big alliance or f... off. They do it also now with guilds and players that play during offhours. This game mode will be so dead in a few weeks, oh lord. 

Warscore on capture is increased for upgraded walled objectives.

Just the point with gaining warscore for capping structures depending on the structure tier made me laugh.  They really think defenders will show up when the incentive is to deny the other server a higher warscore for taking tiered structures and to keep the own warscore up for a bit. This dev team is so out of touch with this game mode, its not even funny anymore.

Objectives only contest when Lord is in combat or a wall/gate is damage below 98%.  White swords no longer have a delay.

Pretty much the only good change. Says it all about the quality of this update

Changes to siege 

Will literally change nothing on the big picture and all the issues WvW has

Edited July 10 by lindstroem.3601

[H K.4057]

Victory points will now be weight based on player population per skirmish.

• I like this change. I don't know if it will actually do what it's supposed to do, but the fact that they are trying to address is good. However, I wonder if this doesn't make off-hours guilds feel like they aren't actually contributing much on top of not having any good fights.

Warscore on capture is increased for upgraded walled objectives.

• I don't think there needs to be even more incentive to attacking. People don't defend because they aren't personally rewarded for it, not because it's not valuable for the team. Why would I sit at an objective and see my participation slowly drain away? Everything is based on getting kills, and it's pretty much impossible to secure kills versus zergs while outnumbered on defense. Note that we DO NOT get defense credit for killing siege or repairing walls.

PPK Warscore is increasing from 2 to 3.

• I don't really feel like this matters too much, especially they admit that the matchups are so lopsided that this wouldn't even matter. Plus, most winning servers also dominate K/D, so this doesn't really do what they think it would do.

Objectives only contest when Lord is in combat or a wall/gate is damage below 98%.  White swords no longer have a delay.

• This is a GREAT change. No more riding past a tower or keep and contesting it. showing contesting immediately is also super important, and actually allows us to respond to attacks on maps with very few scouts/roamers.

Keeps/Castles now spawn 3 waypoints for EWP so it's harder to camp all of them.

• Also a great change. Makes the E in EWP actually valid.

Alacrity can no longer be applied to players on siege and is removed on activating siege.  Boons other than swiftness can no longer be applied to Siege Golems.

• I guess that's fine, but what about quickness? Also, does this mean superspeed doesn't work on golems? How does that make any sense?

Flame Ram health has been lowered by 50%.  Operated flame rams will have Iron Hide (50% damage reduction) applied to them.

• I like this a lot.

Guild golem cost increased from 50 to 75. AC cost reduced from 40 to 25.
SAC cost reduced from 50 to 35
Treb cost reduced from 100 to 50
STreb cost reduced from 120 to 60

• I very rarely see guild golems being built. It's already not really worth building over superior golems, so why would the cost increase?
• AC reduced to 25 means that a single person can build it, so it's a good change. SAC to 35 doesn't really do anything because you still have to resupply, but it does make guild AC completely worthless.
• Treb to 50 and STreb to 60 are good changes since trebs aren't really being built outside of towers/keeps. I like seeing open field trebs.

Overall, good changes. Did they say when it would be implemented?

[Dawdler.8521]

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

The VP change isn't based on how many ppl is on a team, but which skirmishes are most populated. So prime time skirmishes gives a lot more VP than night time trains.

If they meant 6 points for 03:00 or something and 42 points for 20:00 wouldnt that completely mess up the prime vs off scoring? I mean we got the skirmish system just to make every 2h fair vs every other 2h in a 24h mode (when nighttime before could absolutely dominate the 24h of points in a 4h session). The change would swing it the complete opposite way and only mean you literally dont have to care about 20h out of 24h in EU.

Anet telling everyone they're worthless if they dont play in a zerg in prime time. 🤷‍♂️

[Sviel.7493]

Just now, Dawdler.8521 said:

If they meant 6 points for 03:00 or something and 42 points for 20:00 wouldnt that completely mess up the prime vs off scoring? I mean we got the skirmish system just to make every 2h fair vs every other 2h in a 24h mode (when nighttime before could absolutely dominate the 24h of points in a 4h session). The change would swing it the complete opposite way and only mean you literally dont have to care about 20h out of 24h in EU.

Anet telling everyone they're worthless if they dont play in a zerg in prime time. 🤷‍♂️

This is correct.  Right now you get 3/2/1 points or so.  In the new system, depending on the population, you'll get more points.  In the example they showed, the minimum multiplier for EU was 2 and max was 14, it seems.  That meant the lowest skirmish was worth 6 points and the highest skirmish was worth 42 points.

You can spend 14 hours (7 skirmishes) playing but if there's no large groups on, you'll get the same points from winning all of those as if you won 1 skirmish (2 hours) during primetime.

[Grave.5683]

You can leave more than a few classes on auto hitting a ram and it is guaranteed they won't kill it before it despawns.

You can stack damage reductions and passive healing with auras and you can ignore all arrowcarts because they will passively die to the flame auras and won't out damage the heals due to arrowcart not doing damage to a player more than once every 2 seconds.

If 2 arrowcarts are firing at the same time on the same group one of the arrowcarts won't be doing damage,but 8 rams and 50 golems with quickness on a gate is fine.

"Here build more arrowcarts at less cost so you can make more death traps at the walls for your team,while thinking that it will make a difference against a boonblob"