WvW Thoughts

[sachiel]

That means in the long term players are going to lose interest in WvW beyond world completion and legendaries.  Why pour time, sweat and money into taking and holding objectives when other team is going to take back over night when they aren't defended?  You can't stay up all night every night. There is a limited amount of off-hour guilds.  There are 6 servers who have a strong off-hours presence in NA. All of top 5 do. And the only server that can field 24hr coverage is number 1. That's not a accident. Timezones > player effort. People are going quickly lose interest in playing a NA game were NA players have structural disadvantage.

EDIT: Imagine LoL were IPX was out of a finite pool every half-hour.  You'd get shit return IPX playing in primetime and awesome rewards in the dead of night.  No one would be defending it to fair with "LoL is 24-hr game! L2P!"  Before you say IPX is a reward, score is not. I feel very rewarded with score, and I regularly count how much score my group generates for the team.

Night ninja'ing was pretty common in DAOC; didn't stop players from playing and having fun.  Of course there were VN posts bitching the next day.  Relics didn't have weekly resets on the server either, so you had to live with the loss until you mustered the troops, organized and got it back.  I don't remember Igraine having too many euro guilds at the time which could pull off relic raids, but if there was a ninja, it was usually done by Americans waking up at off hours to perform the raid.  One primetime relic raid we did on Igraine took a couple weeks to coordinate every guild in the realm to simultaneously take down all 7 keeps and then head to the relic keep.  With a 1-2 week server reset, I can't see having the planning time or determination to organize big events like that.  The opposite side is voice communication is much more prevalent and available for coordination, so it might not be as tedious as sending out emails to guild leaders and keeping excel sheets of guild group organization and who's doing what with what siege responsibilities.

I don't know if ArenaNet does it currently, but they should give home teams on their colored borderlands an advantage buff on their map IF they're losing quite badly so they don't get cornered and stuck in their home keep.

[Tmon]

How did DAoC handle it?  I didn't do much RvR so I don't know if there were lockout times or something.

[sachiel]

How did DAoC handle it?  I didn't do much RvR so I don't know if there were lockout times or something.

Same way ArenaNet is... valid tactic.  DAOC didn't have server matching or balanced realms either.  Albs were usually the most populated, followed by hibernia and then midgard on most servers and definitely on Igraine.  Some realms were relicless for long stretches of time.  I'm not sure the relics had as much impact on stats as the orbs do in this game.  I didn't see much honor in night ninja'ing, so didn't participate in those.  I played to have fun, not to win at any cost, and organized the raid I mentioned earlier to prove that relics could be taken during primetime, after Mythic instituted the realm announcement code where when one of your keeps or its guards were under attack, the defending realm would get spammed with warnings.  By using every guild in the realm and dropping the 7 keeps simultaneously in the span of 5 minutes, the defenders didn't have time to mobilize to defend the relic keep.  It was amazingly fun, even while I played in the underdog Midgard and we were just trying to get our taken relic back.  That's the point and why *the good* people won't stop playing: organizing large groups of people for a common goal is the point of wvw; whether it's taking an orb or just a tower is immaterial.

[Ingmar]

Yeah this isn't nearly as bad as it was in DAOC. The nightcapping bothers me not at all.

Sach: relics in DAOC, at least caster relics, were a bigger impact than the orbs in this game. They were completely nuts. Melee relics I'm not so sure how they'd stack up, but due to lolmythic mechanics, the caster relics were insane.

[Nebu]

Relics in DAoC ruined balance.  Having a 10% boost to magic and melee made it really tough to take the relics back.   GW2 seems much more reasonable about the bonuses and the resets help. 

[Ingmar]

Even worse, 10% per relic was just how they described it to us rather than how they actually worked - a realm holding 3 relics actually did more than 20% bonus damage in practice, with the magic ones at least. Holding 3 relics actually meant something more like "always cap damage on all targets".

[tazelbain]

"organizing large groups of people who play outside of NA primetime for a common goal is the point of wvw" is the situation. It is clearly reflected in the rankings.   WvW should be trying appeal average gamers. Average gamers play in NA prime time. Hardcore will adapt to whatever.  I agree that the situation isn't as bad as DAoC, but its still quite a significant.  Again Anet has the population numbers...

[Ingmar]

There are always going to be times when shit changes hands when you're not logged on though - that's just what you get with persistent PVP. And in the case of this game it isn't like being on a losing realm has a big impact the way it did in DAOC.

[Genev]

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/67743-gunnars-hold-working-together/
Looks like people going up against us (Gunnar's Hold) might ahve an advantage since 1 of the commanders put all toher commanders and several community leaders on ignore and completely blames 1 of them (my guildleader) for all things bad because he's a bit of a troll, and isntead of accepting everybody else going "Let's open communication and cooperate", the original commander is jsut raging

[tazelbain]

Yes, shit is always going to change hands.  But when a server has a timezone presence that is uncontested, they run up the score which makes the contested timezones irrelevant.  NA primetime is the most contested timezone

[kildorn]

It's open world objective based pvp. Of course real world timing is going to matter. I guess what I don't understand is that this is typically considered a feature by the open world crowd, just as being able to bring 20 people to kill 5 is a feature, not a bug. I'd have an issue if there was some massive bonus tied to winning, but with the bonuses as is.. who cares?

[Phred]

  WvW should be trying appeal average gamers. Average gamers play in NA prime time.

There are no average gamers in Europe or Asia? Do you want to rephrase that?

[Crumbs]

The only thing I can think of that wouldn't be too restrictive would be to match the lolcap-at-night servers against one another.  Other than that, I think it's too dangerous to implement any restrictions on when things can be capped.

[Ingmar]

It's open world objective based pvp. Of course real world timing is going to matter. I guess what I don't understand is that this is typically considered a feature by the open world crowd, just as being able to bring 20 people to kill 5 is a feature, not a bug. I'd have an issue if there was some massive bonus tied to winning, but with the bonuses as is.. who cares?

Yeah this.

[Phred]

It's open world objective based pvp. Of course real world timing is going to matter. I guess what I don't understand is that this is typically considered a feature by the open world crowd, just as being able to bring 20 people to kill 5 is a feature, not a bug. I'd have an issue if there was some massive bonus tied to winning, but with the bonuses as is.. who cares?

Yeah this.

Ya sadly the serious business crowd managed to convince anet to nerf server transfers anyway. I'm still pissed about that as I now have 4-5 bugged skill point events I can't just server hop to fix. So anything that bugs the serious business types is just fine with me.

[Nebu]

Ya sadly the serious business crowd managed to convince anet to nerf server transfers anyway. I'm still pissed about that as I now have 4-5 bugged skill point events I can't just server hop to fix. So anything that bugs the serious business types is just fine with me.

WvW is essentially meaningless fun.  How could there even be a serious business crowd? 

[Phred]

Ya sadly the serious business crowd managed to convince anet to nerf server transfers anyway. I'm still pissed about that as I now have 4-5 bugged skill point events I can't just server hop to fix. So anything that bugs the serious business types is just fine with me.

WvW is essentially meaningless fun.  How could there even be a serious business crowd? 

We had people on this very board who claimed that it was VERY IMPORTANT that the server transfers be limitted before the 2 week seasons began. Beats hell out of me though.

[tazelbain]

  WvW should be trying appeal average gamers. Average gamers play in NA prime time.

There are no average gamers in Europe or Asia? Do you want to rephrase that?

Well I wouldn't be the average gamer if moved to an EU server, but the scoring system sure as hell value my contribution more if I did.

[Fordel]

Even worse, 10% per relic was just how they described it to us rather than how they actually worked - a realm holding 3 relics actually did more than 20% bonus damage in practice, with the magic ones at least. Holding 3 relics actually meant something more like "always cap damage on all targets".

It maxed out damage and doubled healing, more or less. Hibernia always prioritized the Power Relics because of it, keeping our own str relic was often thought as a detriment because of how it impacted keep guards and stuff.


The fact WvW resets every couple weeks is whats going to keep it going probably. You'll always have at least those initial 2-3 days of activity after each reset, before people get discouraged and stop showing up. With DaoC, the situation was basically permanent, if Midgard lost all it's relics, it lost all it's relics for months or even years.

It also lets you hate on a new group of assholes, instead of the same old assholes.

[KallDrexx]

Alright well now I'm bored.

The matchups switched and we went to somewhat even battles to  having 2 borderlands with nothing belonging to us and our spawn is constantly camped, so everyone changed to the other 2 borderlands so the queue on them is dumb long at 11 am.

Combine that with the fact that PvE is pointless now (since they are incompetent and can't fix the skill points or other things I cant' 100% so whats the point) I might be nearing break time.

[Threash]

Shit, when do the matches switch? i keep hearing thats when the best fighting is.

[KallDrexx]

They just switched sometime in the past day I guess

[Outlawedprod]

They reset with the daily on Friday if I remember correctly.

Dev post by Jon Peterson about WvW
https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Night-Capping-and-YOU/page/5#post294179

[KallDrexx]

LOL, so apparently GW2 developers got too used to the no jump code of GW1 or something and failed "how to prevent hacking 101".

I was bored and reading the WvW forums and people were talking about a Gates of Madness player who somehow ran into the enemy keep, stole the orb and then flew (yes flew) through the sky and put it on the GoM altar.  Intrigued I started doing some googling.

Apparently all location, speed, jumping data is done clientside.  I just saw several recent videos of people changing their jump and run speed to ridiculous amounts via 3rd party programs, and apparently this has been going on for a while (some videos showed this happening over a month ago) so Anet has no safety nets or detection for this.  Another hack lets you activate "no clipping" mode, which essentially means you can fly through the air.  And finally I even saw a video tool that lets you teleport anywhere on the map, letting them cap a bunch of vistas in the span of a minute.

[Nebu]

Apparently all location, speed, jumping data is done clientside.  I just saw several recent videos of people changing their jump and run speed to ridiculous amounts via 3rd party programs, and apparently this has been going on for a while (some videos showed this happening over a month ago) so Anet has no safety nets or detection for this.  Another hack lets you activate "no clipping" mode, which essentially means you can fly through the air.  And finally I even saw a video tool that lets you teleport anywhere on the map, letting them cap a bunch of vistas in the span of a minute.

This just made my day.  It's proof that little to no thought went into their pvp design.  If you leave important information client side to save on processing time, you're destined to have 3rd party exploit programs.  Anyone that pvp'ed a decade ago learned this. 

[Zetor]

Yes, this was pretty obvious. It's also how every other MMO and FPS does it - because if you put checks like that on the server side, the game becomes sluggish and unplayable unless you have single-digit latency. See also: why we aren't playing everything through OnLive right now (it's a theoretically 100% secure system, EVERYTHING is server side!!).

The solution is to have some sort of server-side intrusion detection algorithm that can notice when a player is travelling in a way that is "out of whack" and/or using something like punkbuster or warden on the client side to *try and notice* people attempting to patch the executable at run-time. The latter sort of detection can still be avoided of course, unless you use a rootkit... but you don't want to go there.  

[Tmon]

Isn't "The client is in the hands of the enemy." taught in MMO 101?  As far as I know it is just as true today as when I first read it in one of Raph's postings almost two decades ago.

[Zetor]

It's not just MMO 101, it's security 101 (see also - using javascript to authenticate users to your site, and yes, a non-zero number of websites does this). It's just that putting everything server-side doesn't actually work in practice.


e: and to reiterate - gw2 needs to implement some kind of *server-side* anomaly detection to prevent problems like this. That is the real problem, not failing to turn the game into a "send keystrokes - receive screen contents" remote desktop app.

[kildorn]

Isn't "The client is in the hands of the enemy." taught in MMO 101?  As far as I know it is just as true today as when I first read it in one of Raph's postings almost two decades ago.

And some day we'll have the bandwidth and latency to send the server a movement request every time you change which pixel you're touching. :P

Noclip/teleport/etc are pretty much in every MMO due to this: collision is handled by the client, always and forever. I'm going to be quite shocked if Anet doesn't have a sanity checking script that sends GMs to investigate folks however. That's pretty much the only way to properly deal with this shit.

[Tmon]

The context of the client in the hands of the enemy thing isn't that everything should be done on the server it's that anything you send to the client can be seen and that you shouldn't trust anything you get from the client.  Obviously you can't realistically check every single transaction and use national security level encryption for client server communication, but you should be sanity checking what the client tells the server and understand the implications of what the server tells the client.

[Simond]

Apparently all location, speed, jumping data is done clientside.

what

[Maledict]

As people are saying this is completely standard - the technology and bandwidth isn't available to have this all done server side. The trick is to have server side program's monitoring behaviour to catch the cheats. I presume Anenanet have this (they a hardly amateurs here) but given they sold 2 million + copies presume they are doing the blizzard thing of banning tons of people in a single wave.

[Fordel]

All they need is a sanity check on movement.

[kildorn]

All they need is a sanity check on movement.

Yup. You can move at 500% movement speed, but the server is going to go "yeah, 133% is the max so fuck you and here's a GM ticket"

It wouldn't shock me with their ticket backlog that they lack a focused team just for exploit tickets and are behind on their banning waves.

[Furiously]

They had some detection in one of the last beta days. Problem is the warrior leaps, ride the lightening, thief steal move at a rate that looks like cheating. I'm guessing they probably have tracking abilities of some sort.  It will be interesting to see when their response is.