A Sampling of WvW Communication Until HoT

[Sviel.7493]

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World vs. World is a lot about tactics, and when you fight the same worlds with the same tactics you never really get to learn anything new and adapt your strategy. This is your chance for your world to rally together, recruit more people, and try to overthrow a server above you. Like most of you, we love a good underdog story and now you’ll be able to write your own in WvW. At the end of the day, this is going to create new fresh matchups, let you see the tactics from different teams, bring some variety to the Eternal Battlegrounds, and help us to establish a more accurate new World vs. World order.

Date: May 23, 2013

Source: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/big-changes-coming-to-wvw-matchups/
This was back before megaservers, I think, during the height of server identity.

 

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Each world will be matched up with each other world in their league at least once over the course of the season. 1st place in each matchup will gain the world 5 points, 2nd place 3 points, and 3rd place 1 point. At the conclusion of the season, the worlds will be ranked in order of the total number of points they’ve acquired and all players who have completed the season long meta-achievement will be given prizes based on that ranking.

Date: September 6, 2013

Source: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/welcome-to-world-vs-world-season-1/

Sounds sort of like how skirmishes work now, just on a vastly different time scale.

 

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We’ll have more details about the map as we continue to develop it and as we start the actual testing. Your involvement in this process will be critical to the final implementation and design of the map. We will be making decisions based on the feedback we get from these tests and that feedback will determine the final version of the map.

We are thrilled to be entering into a new phase of development for WvW where we get large groups of players in to test and provide feedback on large-scale projects before they go live.

Date: October 18, 2013

Source:  https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-edge-of-the-mists-a-new-map-is-coming-to-wvw/

This was the EotM announcement.  I don't know how the feedback process went so I don't know if they followed through or not.

 

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We are also making some significant changes to the way that world transfers work as part of the tournament. We’ll be setting prices for world transfers based on world rating rather than population. Our goal with this pricing structure is to incentivize transfers to worlds that are near the bottom of their respective tournament leagues and to disincentivize transfers to worlds at the top of their leagues.

Date: March 7, 2014

Source: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/get-ready-for-wvw-spring-tournament-2014/

This was the start of the first tournament or second season.  Apparently, the bandwagoning had begun and steps were taken to address it.

 

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We’re pleased to announce that now all PvE maps and the Heart of the Mists have been moved over to megaserver technology!

Date: April 25, 2014

Source: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-megaserver-rollout-is-complete-2/

This wasn't the death of server identity in WvW, but rather the contraction of an incurable wasting disease.  To my knowledge, nothing was ever done to mitigate or repair the damage.

 

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This new assortment of colors will facilitate a range of tactical uses. For example, in World vs. World, you could select one color to represent an assaulting commander and another to designate a defending commander. In open world events, you might coordinate your efforts with other commanders by tagging up with different colors to help organize groups. Or you can just grab your favorite color to stand out from the crowd!

Moving forward, we’ll be evaluating future possibilities for recognizing experienced and prestigious commanders. Right now, we’re excited to empower commanders with the ability to use all of their characters and choose the color that best fits their needs! We can’t wait to see all the ways this feature is put to use.

Date: August 20, 2014

Source: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/big-changes-are-coming-to-the-commander-system/

By now, I really can't imagine not having multiple color tags in WvW.  I do wish they had added some different shapes over the years, though, and perhaps come up with some ways to recognize experienced and prestigious commanders.

 

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Your friendly neighborhood Traps and Tricks outfitter is about to be stocking his first trick, the Siege Disabler. This item consumes supply on use, just like the existing WvW traps, but unlike traps, the Siege Disabler is thrown like a grenade. Upon landing, it discharges and temporarily disables all enemy siege weapons within a radius of 450 for 45 seconds.

Date: August 19, 2014

Source: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/wvw-improvements-in-the-september-2014-feature-pack/

The duration on these is currently much shorter than 45 seconds, so that must have changed sometime--I don't recall when.

 

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We went into this hoping to learn more and get information, and the devs involved didn’t just report back their findings – they became fiery representatives of their host guilds, big and small. They brought back not just the needs and concerns of their new guilds but also tales of amazing fights, epic sieges, and hilarious antics.

Date: October 31, 2014

Source: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/adopt-a-dev-was-a-blast/

This is from the Adopt-A-Dev program.  Based on the video they put together, it sounds like all of them went to zerg guilds--I even recognized a name or two.   On one hand, I think this was a really cool thing to do--on the other, I wonder if it's related to the decisions that ultimately drove most scouts to abandon the game.
 

Date: March 27, 2015

Source: N/A

Here, the environment and game designers for DBL (Tirzah Bauer of Bauer's Farmstead and Tyler Bearce) talk at length about their design decisions for the map.  Notably, they say they included some open, flat areas for guild fights, laid the map objectives out in more of a square for a better map flow, gave towers strategic importance with barricades and intended unique keep/tower lords/themes to keep the game fresh but did not want said lords to be too powerful.  Tirzah notes that inter-objective travel times are similar if you are not impeded by barricades and that there are multiple routes with varying levels of safety or sneakiness.  Also, they were when adding more verticality to avoid too many locations where players could easily fall to their deaths.

[subversiontwo.7501]

Nice digging and summary 🙂 .

[Gotejjeken.1267]

Heh, rewatching that Twitch video on DBL, they sure did change a lot.  I feel like possibly the reason people don't like it now is a lot of the charm is gone with those changes.  

[Sviel.7493]

1 hour ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

Heh, rewatching that Twitch video on DBL, they sure did change a lot.  I feel like possibly the reason people don't like it now is a lot of the charm is gone with those changes.  

What changes would you revert?  The only thing I want back is the barriers, tbh.  People raged about them prematurely and severely crippled the map design by getting them removed.

I think it's more residual hate than anything.  When people actually talk about quantifiable stuff, they tend to be pretty far off.

[Dawdler.8521]

2 hours ago, Sviel.7493 said:

What changes would you revert?  The only thing I want back is the barriers, tbh.  People raged about them prematurely and severely crippled the map design by getting them removed.

I think it's more residual hate than anything.  When people actually talk about quantifiable stuff, they tend to be pretty far off.

Raged prematurely... the barriers was horrid for the roaming and smallscale crews that turned out to be the only ones interested in DBL. They severly obstructed movement while bigger zergs literally just ran through in a second with damage. The mid event was kind the similar thing - roamers could in theory fight over it, but ultimately bigger offensive zergs just jumped on the border, finished it in seconds and took everything while the ones remaining on the border had to pick up the pieces. Because a defensive zerg never bothered. At least normal borderhops need to bring siege themselves.

 

But of course ranting on it the one thing they can never fix is the distances between objectives and how they are positioned. 2-4 scouts have eyes on the width of ABL no matter where you draw a horizontal line between NC and SC. On DBL you need like 10-15 to do the same. Best example being SW tower where 1 scout on ABL see the entrance to the camp, entire bay south and the left half of mid. On DBL you see... nothing from the tower. Spawn and thats about it, assuming you stand on the west side. You need 2 more west to cover all the way to the ascent and then you still dont fully see bay south. You need another 2 down there. And 1 toward the east but then another one because there is an obstructed central path. Thats 6 people needed to see roughly the same combat area 1 does on ABL.

 

DBL is a go to for resets and mindless solo runs because I dont mind running around there but even so the design remain as bad as it always was.

[Sviel.7493]

1 minute ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

Raged prematurely... the barriers was horrid for the roaming and smallscale crews that turned out to be the only ones interested in DBL. They severly obstructed movement while bigger zergs literally just ran through in a second with damage. The mid event was kind the similar thing - roamers could in theory fight over it, but ultimately bigger offensive zergs just jumped on the border, finished it in seconds and took everything while the ones remaining on the border had to pick up the pieces. Because a defensive zerg never bothered. At least normal borderhops need to bring siege themselves.

 

But of course ranting on it the one thing they can never fix is the distances between objectives and how they are positioned. 2-4 scouts have eyes on the width of ABL no matter where you draw a horizontal line between NC and SC. On DBL you need like 10-15 to do the same. Best example being SW tower where 1 scout on ABL see the entrance to the camp, entire bay south and the left half of mid. On DBL you see... nothing from the tower. Spawn and thats about it, assuming you stand on the west side. You need 2 more west to cover all the way to the ascent and then you still dont fully see bay south. You need another 2 down there. And 1 toward the east but then another one because there is an obstructed central path. Thats 6 people needed to see roughly the same combat area 1 does on ABL.

 

DBL is a go to for resets and mindless solo runs because I dont mind running around there but even so the design remain as bad as it always was.

Note, I said I wouldn't want any of the other changes reverted.  That means I do not want the Oasis event back.  It was bad in almost every way.

Can you specify what path, specifically, the barrier's made onerous?  I plan to go into this more later (though I don't know if I'll share that work due to lack of interest), but the current fastest paths from non-home spawn to any objective on the map except North Camp do not cross any of the old barrier lines.  The southern barriers only blocked entrance to the Oasis, but it could still be accessed via myriad other paths.  The northern barriers blocked access to North Camp and the north walls of Rampart.  Their main function was in protecting that supply line.

There wasn't really a reason for roamers/smallscale crews to engage with a barrier rather than taking one of the many paths around them unless they were making a play for North Camp at a time when no one else had also broken into the Northern Triangle.  For a zerg, being forced to wait and allow defenders to prepare/assemble or spend significant supply on a barrier changed the Rampart sieging dynamic entirely.  Without access to North Camp, you can't make any sustained siege on Rampart.  You could one-tap it, if you were able, but the Keep became significantly more vulnerable if either northern tower, and it's barriers, fell.

To be clear, I'm not trying to be sassy or anything.  It's been a long time and my memory is not infallible, so perhaps some things have shifted around.  I'm also digging through forum posts, Reddit threads and Youtube videos from the time to see what people were saying in the lead-up to the release and shortly afterward.

The reduced visibility on DBL is a huge plus in my book.  Technically, that specific facet did make my job harder as a scout--however, once I learned the map, it was not difficult to track enemy movements even if I couldn't sit in one place and see literally everything.  On the other hand, I got a lot more agency to actually do something about said enemies other than just summon an allied zerg.  Supply traps become so relevant I regularly got salt whispers about them.  Same for trebbed cows.  I could follow a zerg using alternate paths to remain unseen or use hay bales or odd nooks to escape if needed.  On offense, I was able to much more effectively harass keeps precisely because I couldn't be easily spotted by someone standing still in a tower and few people seemed willing to scout more actively.  I developed strange relationships with roamers who I would constantly track down, duel, rinse and repeat.  I knew what paths they liked to take, what objectives they would go for or ignore, what builds they used, etc.  Sometimes they'd throw a curveball, and I loved that.  It was only possible because, with effort, they could traverse the map without shouting their location to the whole world.

In short, the reduced visibility is essential to why I feel like I actually get to play the game on DBL whereas ABL is just aimless fighting in the southern fields with zerg clashes interspersed.  Perhaps you play differently and don't like it, which I respect, but I disagree that it was an objectively bad change.

[subversiontwo.7501]

7 hours ago, Gotejjeken.1267 said:

I feel like possibly the reason people don't like it now is a lot of the charm is gone with those changes.  

The changes were universally lauded as improvements and I don't think that has changed. It is rather just that, that they were improvements on a flawed design. They made a bad map better but it is still not good. It is still largely regarded as inferior to both Alpine and EB as a map and even though you have people swearing by DBL you can also gauge how well received the map is by how it is used.

 

There is this unfortunate situation with discussion of maps (or discussion in general here) where sides just entrench. DBL as a map ends up in this nowhere of people arguing for that it is nice with an alternative to the same old boring starter maps (which is true), or that certain design aspects make the map more appealing to smaller scale roaming (which is also true), while not aknowledging that large portions of DBL isn't used neither by themselves nore anyone else (which is equally true). Critique is assumed to be against the existance of the map at all, rather than actually looking at what is being critiqued (as it initially was, which brought on the changes). DBL could be an even better map with even more changes; keeping the things that work and are used while iterating on the areas that are underused and making them more appealing to be in (eg., it is still very much a north-south map, whether you roam or raid/pickup).

 

This is similar to EotM and different to Alpine and EB, which isn't surprising since DBL was somewhat designed with similarities that people spoke out against already with EotM (differences between good and bad chokes, sizes and traverse times, degree of PvE elements etc.). In fact, DBL can in many ways be seen as an EotM light, in some regard. The situation has not really been helped with Anet's overall lack of iteration (abandonment in the face of critique) or lack of attention. It's a shame that player discussion delves down into map or no map but it also isn't surprising when the developers' reaction is similar with poorly received elements triggering a surrender of a larger positive context. New maps are good and alot of the backend stuff from way back then is still part of the way forward imho. However, we need to distinguish good and bad design - and we need to promote iteration instead of just settling down into "for or against us" camps.

 

Edited August 16, 2021 by subversiontwo.7501

[Gotejjeken.1267]

Yeah, for me some of the changes that I didn't like are mostly southern half of map.  I think the fire keep pathing was better before going downward through and around rather than the current design of it.  

 

Also I think they could have definitely revised the oasis event to be something unique rather than another capture and hold mechanic because players are unwilling to change.  

 

It's problematic because hanging on to Alpine essentially means they can't create a new map.  At this point even Alpine is very flawed--it is old (samey towers and keeps are boring) and gliders / mounts make travel way too fast. 

 

Essentially, I doubt they will go through the effort of assigning an artist to make a brand new map again when both DBL and EoTM were flat out rejected and still are.