A Chat w/ Roy and Cecil About WvW Development Goals

[Sheff.4851]

1 minute ago, Hesione.9412 said:

Which is why, when people like me see those guild names, we avoid them and sigh that we are unlikely to be playing again that night. If we can scrape together 20 people, so it's even numbers, we're going to get killed very fast. Even a group of 30, scraped together, is not going to kill a comp'd group of 20.

Out of curiosity, how many of those guilds are in the same mega-guild/alliance?

KnT and Bomb are in the same Alliance, because we are both Fort Aspenwood veteran guilds.

Ryvalia is one of the leaders of the Sanctum of Rall community alliance, Shadows of Rall.

Vashot is one of the leaders of the Ehmry Bay community alliance, Pending Alliance Name.

Saiga and Nic, benefitting their position as public tags first and foremost, I don't believe have joined any alliance at all. They both operate mercenary guilds, basically.

So the only ones that are in the same Alliance are us and Tyrion. Again, I tend to use Partner to see people who I don't already have the opportunity to play with inside my own Alliance.

[Hesione.9412]

3 minutes ago, Sheff.4851 said:

KnT and Bomb are in the same Alliance, because we are both Fort Aspenwood veteran guilds.

Ryvalia is one of the leaders of the Sanctum of Rall community alliance, Shadows of Rall.

Vashot is one of the leaders of the Ehmry Bay community alliance, Pending Alliance Name.

Saiga and Nic, benefitting their position as public tags first and foremost, I don't believe have joined any alliance at all. They both operate mercenary guilds, basically.

So the only ones that are in the same Alliance are us and Tyrion. Again, I tend to use Partner to see people who I don't already have the opportunity to play with inside my own Alliance.

So that would be 5 alliances in OCX, spread across 15 shards, with others in a large guild/alliance (e.g. GONE/REAR), so at max there will be 6 alliances that play during OCX spread across 15 shards, leaving 9 shards with few people. If the guilds/alliances are put on the same shard, even more shards miss a large group/fight guild, creating 10 or more shards with few people.

This is what I mean about a lack of players across all the 15 shards.

[Sheff.4851]

5 minutes ago, Hesione.9412 said:

So that would be 5 alliances in OCX, spread across 15 shards, with others in a large guild/alliance (e.g. GONE/REAR), so at max there will be 6 alliances that play during OCX spread across 15 shards, leaving 9 shards with few people. If the guilds/alliances are put on the same shard, even more shards miss a large group/fight guild, creating 10 or more shards with few people.

This is what I mean about a lack of players across all the 15 shards.

None of the guilds that I listed play OCX -- I listed them as representative examples of different squad size preferences in World vs. World. I'm east coast US, so I'm not really qualified or experienced enough to speak to OCX and other off-hours issues, because it's not a timezone that I am active for. I thought we were talking about this point still: 

> I also think there's a lack of understanding here about comped squads. Not all comped squads are rolling 50, or even want to roll 50. In fact, most comped groups these days will intentionally limit their squad size to avoid blobbing down fights too heavily, because then enemy groups just give up.

[Hesione.9412]

7 minutes ago, Sheff.4851 said:

None of the guilds that I listed play OCX -- I listed them as representative examples of different squad size preferences in World vs. World. I'm east coast US, so I'm not really qualified or experienced enough to speak to OCX and other off-hours issues, because it's not a timezone that I am active for. I thought we were talking about this point still: 

> I also think there's a lack of understanding here about comped squads. Not all comped squads are rolling 50, or even want to roll 50. In fact, most comped groups these days will intentionally limit their squad size to avoid blobbing down fights too heavily, because then enemy groups just give up.

I specifically asked about OCX. Also, I have seen BANE and KnT during OCX hours.

[Kozumi.5816]

2 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:

In fact, most comped groups these days will intentionally limit their squad size to avoid blobbing down fights too heavily, because then enemy groups just give up.

almost like there might be a huge issue with wvw

[Arete.7019]

14 minutes ago, Kozumi.5816 said:

almost like there might be a huge issue with wvw

Yeah the issue is that the average player is terrible and doesn't care about working as a team or putting in any effort to improve in a PvP gamemode, which makes it too easy to win if you put in even a small amount of effort.

[Kozumi.5816]

9 minutes ago, Arete.7019 said:

Yeah the issue is that the average player is terrible and doesn't care about working as a team or putting in any effort to improve in a PvP gamemode, which makes it too easy to win if you put in even a small amount of effort.

Yes, blame the player, not the game being made for 0.00000000000001% of people.

Sure great way to ensure your game mode dies the death it deserves.

[SweetPotato.7456]

too long didn't watch version to the video is "Just because things were said out laud, doesn't mean you have to keep working on it....you got to make decision that are good at the time" 
end

Edited July 24 by SweetPotato.7456

[Mistwraithe.3106]

Thanks for posting the video. I finally listened to most of it. It's good to hear from Roy and Cecil. When WR and the gameplay changes aren't going quite the way people would like (myself included) it helps to recognise that they are trying to improve things, they are just working with different data and viewpoints.

[Arete.7019]

27 minutes ago, Kozumi.5816 said:

Yes, blame the player, not the game being made for 0.00000000000001% of people.

Sure great way to ensure your game mode dies the death it deserves.

You think that few people are putting in any effort to play the game properly? I guess the mode really would be doomed if everyone was on your level.

[Sheff.4851]

4 hours ago, Hesione.9412 said:

I specifically asked about OCX. Also, I have seen BANE and KnT during OCX hours.

KnT does not run during OCX. You have seen either KnM, which is all the OCX KnT players that split off during our time on BG, or you have seen JnT, which is an unrelated OCX guild.

[Sheff.4851]

5 minutes ago, Gorem.8104 said:

Did you tell them to revert wvw balancing to pre 2021 so that the game mode is good again instead of it being terrible ever since they announced the "change" that has constantly made wvw worse in every way? 

Have they even made a single good wvw change? Even one? They are terrible at their apparent "job" 

I did not, because as we've said about a hundred times now, this is not the profession balance team. For your second point, here's a list of good WvW changes that have happened in the last two years.

= Added Dugan, a weekly vendor that can convert account-bound currencies that have no functions for veteran players into consumables and tradable materials.
= Added the TEID exotic vendor bot, giving players the ability to purchase cheap, stat-selectable exotic armor to make gearing easier.
= Increased the rate that pips are distributed at lower WvW levels, making the pip grind a little more tolerable.
= Improved the way that support professions earn kill credit, increasing the rewards that dedicated support players earn from their play.

[Chaba.5410]

7 hours ago, Hesione.9412 said:

1. People who really hate comp'd squads, who don't like to be told "you can only play this build or you're out of the guild/alliance" will quit.

When I read this all I could think of is groups like Magswag who haven't quit yet.

[godfat.2604]

2 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:

I did not, because as we've said about a hundred times now, this is not the profession balance team.

Please tell them to forward the messages then, or find a way to contact the balance team, because I firmly believe the single most important problem for WvW is skill balance. Solve that so the combat can be more fun again, and guess what, population will be back again, making it easier to balance population, too.

Skill balance is an important part of WvW, the WvW team can't just ignore it and it makes no sense if they have no saying on that.

[Lalary.3561]

2 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:

I did not, because as we've said about a hundred times now, this is not the profession balance team. For your second point, here's a list of good WvW changes that have happened in the last two years.

= Added Dugan, a weekly vendor that can convert account-bound currencies that have no functions for veteran players into consumables and tradable materials.
= Added the TEID exotic vendor bot, giving players the ability to purchase cheap, stat-selectable exotic armor to make gearing easier.
= Increased the rate that pips are distributed at lower WvW levels, making the pip grind a little more tolerable.
= Improved the way that support professions earn kill credit, increasing the rewards that dedicated support players earn from their play.

Ah yes "good changes to WvW" are just bunch of insignificant rewards to veteran players. How about the actual gameplay changes? Do people seriously believe the balance that encourages people to wear celestial/support gears(or possibly power users if there are enough healers for all), cluttering each other like bunch of sheep, have every boons in the game for almost at all time with no counter play in sight, moving at snail pace, literally Chinese GvGing as if who ever uses dodge less wins is healthy for this game?

All this WR update did was chase away roamers, casuals and newcomers.

[TheGrimm.5624]

Via testing what I have seen is open tags matter. Private tags are still needed. Havocs still mater, roamers still matter. Scoring being biased, I question. So I spent these 6 weeks to see what looks like what. I admit that meant skipping sleep. So, per each Alliance prime team you will find less open players. But open tags will cover where tags might be missing and there are option there. But when you add in weights, you discourage players in all time zones to go for it. Be it their normal time zone or not. If a time zone doesn't diversify is that a fault of one that does or the ones that doesn't?  I agree the sorting logic should cover this, but there are fights 24x7 to be had in both regions. If a player decides to extend their play periods, why should that not be balanced?

 

Edited July 24 by TheGrimm.5624

[Chaba.5410]

1 hour ago, Lalary.3561 said:

How about the actual gameplay changes? Do people seriously believe the balance that encourages people to wear celestial/support gears

No people don't believe that it is healthy. But that's literally not this topic and wrong dev team. There's even another subforum to discuss profession balance.

Edited July 24 by Chaba.5410

[Loke.1429]

50 minutes ago, Chaba.5410 said:

But that's literally not this topic and wrong dev team.

Better balance is clearly a WvW development goal, and apparently necessary feedback, regardless of how their responsibilities are split. That split does not matter whatsoever to us as customers wanting a good wvw gaming experience.

[Triptaminas.4789]

5 hours ago, Sheff.4851 said:

I did not, because as we've said about a hundred times now, this is not the profession balance team.

Whos making those (only in wvw) changes to classes? Is it not people responsible for wvw? Do they not cooperating with wvw team? 

Is it all made by people who doesn't play game mode and balance according to feedback of their friends or people they simp to? 

Ah yes, I know the answer.......

 

Class balances and overall combat experience is core thing of wvw. All these discussions in the end sums up to that- combat experience.

How can u balance things like siege, tactics, or whatever the dev team (people keep repeating here) is responsible for if u can't balance the classes? Your changes might be negated or contradict the balance team changes...

I mean cmon guys, I don't want bunch of my posts deleted and my account temp banned again. Just stop lmao

 

[Chaba.5410]

5 hours ago, Loke.1429 said:

Better balance is clearly a WvW development goal, and apparently necessary feedback, regardless of how their responsibilities are split. That split does not matter whatsoever to us as customers wanting a good wvw gaming experience.

I agree that how a company organizes internally doesn't matter all that much to customers except for when I'm looking for information about a specific product.  Like I'd consider it a great waste of my time if I attended a Tesla user's group meeting to listen to and talk with a manufacturing engineer of the Cybertruck only when I was hoping to have a discussion about the functionality of Tesla's Autopilot.  Manufacturing engineer might not be the right person...

Edited July 24 by Chaba.5410

[Sheff.4851]

5 hours ago, Triptaminas.4789 said:

Whos making those (only in wvw) changes to classes? Is it not people responsible for wvw? Do they not cooperating with wvw team? 

Is it all made by people who doesn't play game mode and balance according to feedback of their friends or people they simp to? 

Ah yes, I know the answer.......

 

Class balances and overall combat experience is core thing of wvw. All these discussions in the end sums up to that- combat experience.

How can u balance things like siege, tactics, or whatever the dev team (people keep repeating here) is responsible for if u can't balance the classes? Your changes might be negated or contradict the balance team changes...

I mean cmon guys, I don't want bunch of my posts deleted and my account temp banned again. Just stop lmao

 

As mentioned in the video, Cecil has been public tagging on his server during off-hours and participating in GvGs, and ArenaNet employees are not required to rep ArenaNet when they're playing, so yes, they do play the game pretty regularly. I mean we talk about this one in like, the first ten minutes of the video. There's a lot of answers in there! You may learn something new if you sit through it.

[Sheff.4851]

7 hours ago, Lalary.3561 said:

Ah yes "good changes to WvW" are just bunch of insignificant rewards to veteran players. How about the actual gameplay changes? Do people seriously believe the balance that encourages people to wear celestial/support gears(or possibly power users if there are enough healers for all), cluttering each other like bunch of sheep, have every boons in the game for almost at all time with no counter play in sight, moving at snail pace, literally Chinese GvGing as if who ever uses dodge less wins is healthy for this game?

All this WR update did was chase away roamers, casuals and newcomers.

Yes, the dreaded "veteran player" change that made it easier to gear a new character than before, and earn faster pips until rank 300. I don't seriously believe you actually read the post. And even if you did, "good changes to WvW" might include changes that you, personally, don't like.

[Dinas Dragonbane.2978]

I finally get to catch up on this thread, and it has been a crazy one. I watched the video, and enjoyed it. They seemed earnest with what they are trying to accomplish, and at least know they aren't going to be able to solve everything. They remind me of politicians who want to do the right thing but don't know how exactly to accomplish that. Thanks for the opportunity Sheff.

Now this thread got hot and for reasons all too familiar to these forums. The conversation about all changes moving towards big groups seems true to me. Adding on changes to make attacking easier(this does help my small group too), the flow of the game is in a state of change, now greatly accelerated with the permanent arrival of WR. The dust has not settled and may never get a chance with restructuring. I myself am on vacation and won't be able to see this first restructure till a few days in. I do hope for the best for all worlds as we all win if its improving.

The state of fights is usually the issue at large for the mode. All too often the outcome seems predetermined before it commences, and the times both groups seem near equal their first skirmish can decide the outcome of the rest of either group's playtime. The majority of nights almost feels like gw2 wvw is a fancy version of the card game, War. Depending on the timezone, one world can have an ace or king or two, while their enemies at best can field a 4 or 5. If you ever were dealt a hand in war with NO aces or kings, you are not in for a fun time. This is how the average player feels. I have no problem with the serious players trying to find ways to turn their king into an ace(this is healthy for the mode too), but they need to stop preaching to EVERYONE else to "Get more, get organized, get good".  This reminds me of when raids came out and most dungeon runners and fractal players were just like "nah, we're good" and mostly ignored raids. Raids did continue to be pushed but their popularity didn't really change, and so strikes were introduced, adding a 4th venue to the instanced content scene(did it help bridge the gap or split the content further? I don't know). We are hitting a similar threshold for wvw as well and whatever happens next can be a big decider for how many play this mode.

As a smallish group lead(8-12) that runs 3x a week, we feel like one of the last because we rarely ever find groups close to that size. I would like to add that we are not even very good, but the fights we find that are near even in number end up being lopsided for OR against us 75% of the time, with the other 25% being kitten good and close battles. The real problem is the rarity of these scuffles, as our group usually sees (in this order), zergs, solo players, or groups of 3-6 experts, and if we are lucky in 1.5-2 hours, a group our size. Call it what you will, but the wvw ecosystem has over all these now almost  12 years made smaller groups less relevant and as a result we are going extinct. It ALMOST feels like the new changes are to "encourage" more players during primetime so these organized groups have more content. If the game was balanced for all, this wouldn't be a problem. Again it seems obvious who on these forums have drunk the organized kool aid, but don't drag everyone down that path.

Lastly I must add that I am in a community based guild that *I* began, only because nobody else was(surprising or no?). We were placed on Lagula's Kraal, so have been in tiers 3, 2, 1 and have been in 1 since getting there. We are just an average joe guild, but have hit 200 members. We fit somewhere in between players that chose nothing, and the very organized types. From this perspective we have seen obvious fight based servers, on life support servers, and those seemingly run of the mill servers. Activity varies wildly anytime of the day, but I was completely baffled when our server made it to t1 and then stayed there, because being on the server felt like a t3-2 server. Any servers with strong potential only seem to attempt to go down, and I don't see that behavior changing easily with scoring changes, as again with these near 12 years the wvw community has slowly grown to ignore or even hate the score. Those that want to bash others for "not prepping" for WR are doing so from an advantaged position, but seem to forget that fact. It rings of t1 telling t8 to transfer up. Being in a good spot for this first restructure myself, and even in a guild that continues to grow as one of the higher ups, I do not have optimism for WR, due to shifting attitudes in the wvw playerbase.  Too many people are either eternally chasing "content", or not caring. Most would see this as a problem.

Lastly I LIKED watching this, it was nice to hear these things, but I did notice yall kinda took some of the most heavily fortified structures with only some difficulty.  Not the best example to show on these forums as it highlights what many of us here talk about.

 

[Sheff.4851]

Hello, Lagula's Kraal friend! I think you make a lot of good points here. I'm certainly not trying to minimize how hard it is to be a small-scale, 15 man squad right now. Some of that is down to activity in the game mode being higher than it was before Restructuring, and some of it is down to balance, but either way, giving smaller groups viable tools to compete against 30, 40, 50 man groups would be a positive thing for diversity of play styles in the game mode.

As far as what we took on the video, I'll confess, it was my second time playing EU -- I'm really not qualified to talk about the state of the game mode in that region specifically, it was just something we chose to do so that EU audiences wouldn't be left out from me streaming at my normal 9pm eastern timeslot.

[Zok.4956]

On 7/23/2024 at 4:37 PM, Sheff.4851 said:

Yes, because the roamer is one player playing for an hour, and the zerg is 50 people playing for an hour. Your score should reflect the number of people on your team actively playing, so that your tier placement reflects the activity of your server overall. The old scoring changes allowed small groups in dead timezones to have an outsized effect on VP, which is why all the servers at the top tiers were coverage servers that we relatively dead in NA prime.

I think the scoring changes are wrong. For example, if 50 attackers fight against 50 defenders (generally, or in prime time) for a structure, it should have the same impact on scoring as if 5 attackers fight against 5 defenders (generally, or outside of prime time) for the structure.

In a competitive game, it's always the results that count, not how much effort a team has put in.

In fact, the changes mean that the game mode of WvW will be changed from a 24h/7days game mode to a "few hours prime time only" game mode. They apparently want to close WvW in the off-hours without closing WvW in the off-hours.

It should be understandable that those players whose prime time is outside the prime time set by Anet are not happy about this.