WvW, Errrrybody is afk

[DAN.7314]

Also a lot of afk because there are so many playing one shot builds that can't be touched (cancer mirage, deadeye thief, holo, soulbeast, spellbreaker, etc). It's no fun to play against. Especially when they are literally griefing, and spawn camping. You're forced to roll a class/build that has built in passive invulnerability or perma stealth. If you just want to play casually and not one of these class/builds prepare to get griefed (or don't and just don't play WvW). It doesn't matter how good you are if you have no passive one shot protection. Add on the need for having to equip expensive armor (although not as important as build), and that's just asking too much for casual players. There's no learning to fight when you just are dead instantly from power creep. Even me, 2k WvW level, am sick of it.

Instead, you can do what half of my server does (Henge of Denravi), just afk pip farm. Get a noob zerg of 15 players and just take a camp or kill one player every 10 minutes. Then afk. It's depressing having fights where you should have a 5v3 or 10v5 (in your advantage) fight, after taking a camp, but all of your teammates just run away because half your server just doesn't want the grief. Take a camp, and if there's a fight at sentry, your whole team from camp vanishes. Heck even if still trying to take the camp, outnumbering them 2 to 1 in a fight, they'd rather just teleport to another map and afk. A 10v5 might actually be a good/even fight for my server, but so many just run away. Even better when you can't get outnumbered buff with 15 people afk in spawn.

The afk pip farmers really don't add much to the overall outcome (asides for your server getting kill farmed, and the non active players counting against your server population), but if they take away afk pip farming I can't imagine how many people will just completely ditch WvW. It's already a pretty unpopular game mode. My server would be a ghost town. They should give weekly pips for WvW experience if they want to promote people to play, and not afk.

It's probably too late to fix, but I'm semi-hopeful for the alliance system. I seriously doubt it will fix anything to be honest, or even ever get implemented at all, but I can hope. Need to fix the balance/power creep first. Having an update every few years, and poor balance patch every 6 months tells me how little attention the PvP game modes get. I don't see anything changing. Just embrace the power creep, or quit playing (like most), or cry (like me).

[MedievalThings.5417]

@"Noha.3749" said:I loved WvW back in vanilla. After my return a few years later i find the WvW completely dead even during its primetime.There are a few hours every week where anything happens at all (reset day), but outside of that its stale.

Im on Deso (T1)Wondering if your experience is the same and what you think is affecting this?What terrible change mentally or gameplaywise is ruining your will to do anything in WvW?

Even T4 NA isn't "dead". There is almost always something to do. Watch 30 guys try badly to take your T3 tower with 5-10 defenders...and fail. It's ok, no time for boredom because they will be back in a few minutes with 40-50, just so you have something to do. Win or lose you shouldn't get bored. If they win, they move to the next tower. If they lose, they will be back in 10 minutes or so with 60-70. Which, honestly, is nice of them. It keeps participation up, and when they paper your third, you can get the daily tower or keep take done getting your stuff back.

[Syrus.2174]

You are on Deso. Being on RoS, linked to Deso, I'm there as well.I learned two things playing there that are different from other servers:1st don't play on EB, 2nd seriously, don't bother playing on EB.

On all other servers I had been so far due to links and all, EB had always been the most active area. This is not the case with Deso, it feels like. And I can very well understand why, when people try making a zerg there, just to end up having it half filled with non-zerg classes, or only 30 people in the squad, while there's a sizeable queue.Sure, there is not always a lot going on, but most often there are zergs on the borderlands, and we had some really good ones lately on home. People say it's Vabbi players - makes sense, seeing how effective they fight. Hope they stick around more often, otherwise I do have to agree, the server can often appear dead due to a lack of commanders.What annoyed me about Deso is the lack of proper roamers. On other servers I at least could find some action running around flipping camps and towers with a few other people, on Deso it felt like there's rarely any such stuff going on, and if there is, I found the other people to mostly be liabilities instead of help due to not actually being roamers.I don't think Deso carried itself, it really feels like the server is mostly carried by people either from their links - previously - or as it is now, by people who (for now?) went there.But in the last two weeks the activity really was quite decent. Not as enjoyable as on Gandara, where I didn't feel like people relied as much on (specific) commanders being around for there to be any action, but it isn't "dead" either lately.

It's been way too long for me to remember how it was in vanilla and I didn't play much WvW back then anyway, so I can't compare it.And yes, overall activity is time dependent, it depends a lot on commanders (and their guilds) being around (doing public zergs).

[subversiontwo.7501]

I'm late to the party, but to give something of a summary: There are a number of conflating reasons

1. Transfer circus. Servers are less stable with fewer players. The transfer circus involves more servers now and they climb and drop much more frequent. This may be affecting your server right now and may come to pass soon. There are still a handful of EU servers with daily queues on at least one map.

2. Balance/neglect. Pirateship hell. PoF much like HoT came with glaring balance holes in the new specializations. Anet has been even slower and/or less effective at plugging these holes with PoF. A year down the line where Warrior bubbles and Sandshades are still too dominant on the overall gameplay. That is nowhere near okay. Decreasing bubble size is a simple fix to one. The ranged pirateship meta (result) also drives away guilds and commanders.

3. Hype/attention. HoT had some things for WvW (even if the desert map turned out poorly it was still there to build hype, while guild halls turned out decent for most of HoT with the arena supplementing WvW play for the WvW community). PoF had nothing.

4. Alliances. Anet are working on a major overhaul on the engine-level design (servers/linking etc.). Alot of players are on hiatus while waiting. It's one of those double edged swords where doing something good can cause people to stop while waiting for it. Additionally, with a long undefined timeframe it is difficult for players to prepare and keep expectations going. People will most likely become far more active again once Alliances hit or when updates about it nearing completion (measure in months) hits.

[b ranger b.9348]

the link i am in has a guild called ppt, and all they do is stand around in lower overlook on trebs or repairing smc walls all day long

[CrimsonRise.7650]

Yeah we often have a squad of at least 30 with a queue, 40 if we're lucky, if it's not a squad that is something as organized like on reset night.

I don't know where everyone else is, but home border and EB can be bad, with afkers, roamers and some people roleplaying as being useful scattered around the map.So we end up with 30 and the same amount on discord/TS against a full blob, no matter the amount of times we advertise discord. o\