WvW Thoughts

[Brogarn]

How are you even getting into WvW together and in a timely fashion?

I can tell you how I get into WvW solo almost instantly whenever I choose: By being on a losing realm against a server with 3 times as many points.

[Crumbs]

Jackie Chan going "oooo?" .jpg

So if a guild wants to do WvW together for fun and influence, 5 is the max size?  Or do we just need to be near each other? 

How are you even getting into WvW together and in a timely fashion?

TBH not really either.  In last night's case, I don't think people realized how long it would take.  It was, "we're going to do some guild WvW in about 30 min, whoever wants to go."  My immediate thought was that we should queue right then and there, but unfortunately I didn't say anything because I thought maybe they knew something I didn't.  When the time came, after the whole "how do we make a group bigger than 5" conversation happened, we just all said 1...2....3...hit queue!

Result:  some queues popped in 5 min, some in 20, some never. 

You play on Tarnished Coast, right? I'm sure you've heard about the Send Money To Odinzu For A Compendium Fund by now. 

Tee hee.  Which guild are you in?  And how is it? 

[Kageru]

My guilds bought the book for the PvP commander, seems to have pretty much a constant presence in evening hours but teamspeak is the focus of co-ordination. It's not really a 5 man event.

[Zetor]

You play on Tarnished Coast, right? I'm sure you've heard about the Send Money To Odinzu For A Compendium Fund by now.  

Tee hee.  Which guild are you in?  And how is it?

I'm in Jademoon. We're really not a srs bsns pvp outfit, but there's 1-2 of us in wvw basically all the time -- I know at least one of our people levels his characters 100% through wvw. Right now he's having a bad week.  

In ouir first 'long' matchup we're up against Dragonbrand and Maguuma. I don't mind the Maguuma part (it's fun to fight the goons, and they're far from being scary 100% map dominating mofos -- we do a lot of back and forth and our scores aren't that far apart), but Dragonbrand is one of those huge servers with many wvw-focused alliances that dropped off from the highest tier. Needless to say, they're dominating all maps except EB, and their organization is so good that surgical zerg strikes fail to accomplish anything of lasting value (all gates are reinforced, people are actively scouting and destroying siege as soon as we set them up, they have dedicated defenders in every tower who WILL repair the gate and keep the tower going until a much larger zerg shows up and nukes ours, etc). I think the best "op" I was in involved taking the two supply camps and a weakly-defended tower in quick succession, and quickly doubling back in the water (omg stealth) to flank their people who were just about to retake their tower, then trying to go up against another tower and getting obliterated. The last matchup before the 1week one was pretty much us steamrolling two lower-tier servers, and everyone was ecstatic -- however, I was afraid something like this would happen.

[Furiously]

They needed to turn off server switching before they went to the long matches with big bonuses.

[Falconeer]

Interesting thing is happening in Europe.
Basically, one giant (500+ members) guild from Quebec decided to roll on the EU French server, for obvious linguistic reasons, and this is basically killing any sort of competition since every night when EU goes to sleep the Canadians come up and capture every single point on every single map, literally.



This is pretty much what you can see every morning when Vizunah Square is involved. Mind, the other two servers are the second and third ranked out of the 27 European ones. Things are quite even at night. Then the next day the match is lost. Obviously Vizunah Square has very good PvP players to begin with, not just the Canadians, but the overnight advantage is what makes them literally unbeatable.

Of course it's all fair, but it quite sucks.

[tazelbain]

Yep, 24hr coverage is the most important thing.   Guru forums has servers asking off hours guilds to move to their server so they can compete. WvW is doomed at this rate.  A system that tells a large majority of players that they are meaningless because they play in prime-time is messed up. It is sad. A.net is denial about it too.  Obviously some weighted score by population is what is needed.

[Falconeer]

Another good idea would be to award full points for keeps towers, castles and camps you control between 3pm to 3am, and only half points for what you capture and hold between 3am and 3pm. It wouldn't hurt anybody and if anything would help making all matches a little less one-sided by keeping the score a little closer.

[Furiously]

They needed to turn off server switching before they went to the long matches with big bonuses.

[KallDrexx]

Another good idea would be to award full points for keeps towers, castles and camps you control between 3pm to 3am, and only half points for what you capture and hold between 3am and 3pm. It wouldn't hurt anybody and if anything would help making all matches a little less one-sided by keeping the score a little closer.

That doesn't really do anything to solve the problems.

First of all, 3pm to 3am makes no sense, because what time zone are you basing that off of?  Two american servers could have completely different peak playing times, so one server might have a stronger presence between 3am - 3pm American EST so that system just screws them.

Second of all it doesn't fix the core issue with WvW that you can gather a lot of forces and take some keeps, only to lose it to the midnight crew because there's a big base of players on your opponent's server that plays in your server's off hours.  It makes it feel pointless to take keeps and you have less drive to take them back since you know they'll just be retaken later.  That's the issue that the devs need to solve, how to make it so the keeps just don't get zerged in low population hours.

I honestly think Shadowbane had a good solution to this, though maybe not the best, where a Guild's city could only be seiged in a certain window the guild chose, so that your guild at least had the chance to fight back against a siege.

[Crumbs]

I'm in Jademoon. We're really not a srs bsns pvp outfit, but there's 1-2 of us in wvw basically all the time -- I know at least one of our people levels his characters 100% through wvw. Right now he's having a bad week.  

In ouir first 'long' matchup we're up against Dragonbrand and Maguuma. I don't mind the Maguuma part (it's fun to fight the goons, and they're far from being scary 100% map dominating mofos -- we do a lot of back and forth and our scores aren't that far apart), but Dragonbrand is one of those huge servers with many wvw-focused alliances that dropped off from the highest tier. Needless to say, they're dominating all maps except EB, and their organization is so good that surgical zerg strikes fail to accomplish anything of lasting value (all gates are reinforced, people are actively scouting and destroying siege as soon as we set them up, they have dedicated defenders in every tower who WILL repair the gate and keep the tower going until a much larger zerg shows up and nukes ours, etc). I think the best "op" I was in involved taking the two supply camps and a weakly-defended tower in quick succession, and quickly doubling back in the water (omg stealth) to flank their people who were just about to retake their tower, then trying to go up against another tower and getting obliterated. The last matchup before the 1week one was pretty much us steamrolling two lower-tier servers, and everyone was ecstatic -- however, I was afraid something like this would happen.

Have you seen the "pizza delivery" guys yet?  That's a fun zerg when they're on.  I just follow them and set shit on fire. 

My guild is pretty small and I don't know them all too well, but it's good for now.  I'm still trying to figure out why I even need a guild    Maybe when we've all got some 80s it'll be more clear.

I honestly think Shadowbane had a good solution to this, though maybe not the best, where a Guild's city could only be seiged in a certain window the guild chose, so that your guild at least had the chance to fight back against a siege.

SWG also; when you dropped a base I think that was the beginning of the 2 hours a day it was attackable.  But how would this work in GW2?  Nothing in WvW "belongs" to anyone.  My guess would be that there are two outcomes:

1.  Guilds that run around in the off hours get bored and begin to want a challenge
2.  Devs intervene and force matchups between the servers that play in the off hours.

[Kageru]

Another good idea would be to award full points for keeps towers, castles and camps you control between 3pm to 3am, and only half points for what you capture and hold between 3am and 3pm. It wouldn't hurt anybody and if anything would help making all matches a little less one-sided by keeping the score a little closer.

So there should be "our" time which is valuable and "their" time which is not?

It's an inherent problem in persistent open world games. It's why Eve is all about space bricks and reinforcement timers and why those terrible browser army games are so punitive. There's a couple more possibilities in GW2 because it's not truly persistent in the Eve sense of permanently losing your foothold in space.

You could have the match-ups split into multiple time-zones but then you get alarm clocking and lose the identity of the conflict. You could have points diminish in some way if the domination is excessive but then you are punishing someone for playing well. Or you could hope that the players will realise it's not fun and fix it themselves (it's partly why my large Aussie guild isn't on the un-official Aussie server). Sadly obliterating a sleeping opposition has proven to be quite popular.

Then again it should balance out to some extent. If they dominate in one time-zone they'll get ranked higher and matched against stronger servers which will dominate them the rest of the time.

[tazelbain]

Right now, the system says people who play in off hours are massively more valuable than people who play on hours. Just divide the number of points available by the number of players on field.  During primetime on most matches, it's 700/2000. I think its generous to say the populations only drops 1/4th in the middle of the night..  700/500.  1.4 vs .35 points per person.  Numbers aren't exact but you can see the issue. I don't see why Aussie players deserve to be treat so favorably.

A.net knows the populations, they can adjust points accordingly.

[Falconeer]

Brand New Mike Ferguson on the state of WvW

Mike Ferguson on the Current State of the World (vs. World)
by Mike Ferguson on September 18, 2012
 
Hey everyone, time for another world versus world update! Today I’ll be recapping some of the more important WvW related issues we’ve dealt with since we launched the game.
First, let’s talk about queues for WvW. Here’s how they work:
You can only be queued for one WvW map at a time.
If you try to enter a WvW map while queued for another map and the new map is not full, you will join that new map, but still be queued for the first one you tried to enter.
If you are queued for a WvW map and try to queue for a second WvW map that is full, you will be asked if you would like to queue for the second map. If you select ‘No,’ you will still be in queue for the first map. If you select ‘Yes,’ then you will enter the queue for the second map and no longer be queued for the first map.
You can be queued for a WvW map while in an overflow map, but you will not be able to see scores or team names at all while you are in an overflow map.
As many people already know, quite a few worlds frequently have multi-hour queues to get in to WvW (particularly the Eternal Battlegrounds), but there are also worlds that have minimal or even no queues at all during prime time.

If you are playing on one of the worlds that has extremely long queue times and can move to one of the lesser populated worlds, we would recommend doing this, since spreading out the player population will not only reduce queue times, but also help provide better competition for all worlds.
One reason some people experience long wait times is that we are still seeing extremely high concurrency rates, which makes queues longer on worlds that have a large number of players focused on WvW. We also discovered a bug that was allowing people to queue up and enter maps ahead of players who had been queued for much longer. Please check on our forums for an announcement when the fix has been implemented. This should fix the problem of some people staying queued for hours while other people can queue up for the same map and enter within a matter of minutes.
Another thing that is fairly constant across all worlds is that Eternal Battlegrounds (the central map in WvW) is by far the most popular map for people to queue for.  You may help lower your wait time by queuing up for a borderlands map first, then entering the Eternal Battlegrounds queue once you are in the borderlands.

Now let’s talk about matchmaking and match timing.
During Headstart Access, we encountered a few issues that required us to take world matchmaking offline for a few days at launch. During this period, we let the matches run a bit longer, which is why some of you noticed that we had matches that lasted 2-3 days or scores would not be cleared out properly when matches were supposed to be reset.
The good news is that we were able to fix those issues quickly and have been running 24 hour matches since September 1. These games have given our ranking system enough data that, starting Friday, September 14, matches will run for 7 days.
We’ve changed to 7-day WvW matches instead of 14-day matches to let the ranking system get a few more points of data faster and to help people get used to playing in a longer match format. WvW match results and the initial world rankings can be found on our forums.

[Brogarn]

Is it me, or is that just a copy paste of 3 different posts he's made elsewhere. I know for certain I've seen the first almost if not verbatim. The second I recognize and the third mentions something that's already happened on a date that's 4 days passed.

[KallDrexx]

I was thinking the exact same thing.

[Falconeer]

Yes. Sad.

[Nija]

While you cannot queue for two WVW areas at once, what you can do - and it seems that not many people know this, but you can enter a borderland and attempt to walk into the Eternal Battlegrounds portal. Doing that it will ask you if you want to queue for EB. You can do the same to the other two borderlands from the one that you're in.

So you can be in a lesser wvw match while you're waiting for the EB queue to pop.

Here's a shot of what life on Eredon Terrace looks like:

[Crumbs]

Heh, I'm in EB right now.  Someone just said "wait till Odinzu gets on.  Then we'll get coordination."

We're getting pooped on atm.

[Phred]

They needed to turn off server switching before they went to the long matches with big bonuses.

Fuck that until they get guesting working.

[Kageru]

Apparently they have said that guesting works it is just disabled while transferring is free and they wait for server populations to settle.

[Falconeer]

Thieves 

[Nebu]

"Put some skill points here, toss a few there... it doesn't even matter... you're a thief!"  That video is hilarious.

I don't know how any game developer can have stealth, teleports, and stuns/knockdowns in their pvp game.  It's seriously clownshoes.

[murdoc]

Pfft - 24% map completion on a level 80. My 54 has 35%!

[Nebu]

Pfft - 24% map completion on a level 80. My 54 has 35%!

Damn man.  I'm at 47% and I hate exploring. 

[01101010]

"Put some skill points here, toss a few there... it doesn't even matter... you're a thief!"  That video is hilarious.

I don't know how any game developer can have stealth, teleports, and stuns/knockdowns in their pvp game.  It's seriously clownshoes.

Maybe because a stiff breeze knocks off half their health? And stealth lasts what? 4 seconds?

[Threash]

Between 2-5 yeah, spamming heartseeker is retarded and easily avoided and about the worst way you can play.  I'm sure it destroys newbs in pugs though.  And elementalists fucking rock, what a dumbass.

[Bzalthek]

Hit 68 yesterday, 63% map completion.  I'm so OCD I have to complete everything I see and harvest every node.  And rez every player.  It's not even an option anymore...

[Ingmar]

I don't get how you can have that high a map % and not be 80! Especially if you're gathering! I feel like I get XP just for getting up to use the bathroom in this game.

[proudft]

Are you making discoveries in there?

[01101010]

I don't get how you can have that high a map % and not be 80! Especially if you're gathering! I feel like I get XP just for getting up to use the bathroom in this game.

I am 41 on my Warrior and think I am around 37-38% map done. I tended to do all the cities and starter areas then all the 15-25 areas though.

[WayAbvPar]

Are you making discoveries in there?

 

[Falconeer]

Invisible enemie packs have been devastating me and my server for a couple of weeks now.

This thread talks about it and has a dev telling us what was already obvious but not coming up with a solution.

What I find terribly annoying is that, as someone else points out, this didn't happen until a couple of patches ago. I wonder what they noticed server-side that required for some settings to be changed, and make what is a horrible mess.

Hi all,
For a variety of performance reasons we limit the number of characters that are reported to any given game client. This report limiting (or culling, as it’s also been referred to) is generally distance based and limits both the amount of bandwidth and client side processing (rendering, etc.) required to play the game. Ideally this shouldn’t be something that you notice happening as characters will simply fade in when they’re “far” away from you. In the best case this happens far enough away that even if you’re looking right at them when it happens it isn’t too visually distracting. Unfortunately, there are some situations in the game in which this setup doesn’t work as well as we’d like and it seems that those situations come up in WvW rather more often than in other parts of the game. The higher player densities that we see in large battles are an obvious example of where this system goes awry. If only the nearest N characters are reported to you but there are N+100 characters within effective battle range then many of those characters will be invisible. There’s never a great time to be dealing with invisible characters, but I think that it’s fair to say that during a large battle is one of the worst times.
In WvW one of the things that we see exacerbating the issue is this: From the moment a character is first reported to your client to the first moment that your client is able to render it a non-zero amount of time passes. During this time your client is doing things like loading textures from disk, which can be (at least in computer terms) fairly slow what with all that accessing of spinning, physical storage media. So that means that a character who is moving towards you can potentially appear first at a much closer point even than the one at which they were reported because, of course, they were still moving during that load time.
MajorKong’s screenshot doesn’t immediately look like the situation I just described so it may be that there’s some kind of bug lurking in there as well. We will certainly be looking into that possibility.
That was a lot of detail but really I’m posting to let you know that we’re aware of the issues associated with invisible enemies and we’re working on finding both the root causes and effective solutions. I understand that these experiences can be quite frustrating but please rest assured that we do care and we are working on improving the experience.
Thank you for reporting your issues here on the forums and for your patience and understanding as we work to resolve them.
Also, MajorKong, that really was a great screenshot even if it does show a bug and bugs make me sad.
—
ArenaNet Gameplay Programmer

[tazelbain]

You have to use scouts away from your zerg to see theirs.  Sucks but you can work around it.

[Ingmar]

The culling is terrible when it happens, yes, which is also in the big Orr zerg events.