subversiontwo.7501

> @"MarkBecks.6453" said: > Any ideas Ladies and Gents as I am sure with some people still having some server pride they dont want to leave their current servers. Well, like you're pointing out and as I have been saying for ages: Guilds make up the vast majority of content but a decreasing small portion of the populace. Servers that get stacked get stacked with few players from guilds first and many players without guilds later. Servers that are full have sizable casual- or PvX populations that tend to bloom when those servers get content produced by guilds. This is the situation that the developer has created by not giving the mode any attention in general and when they have made exceptions to that rule they have given attention to players without guilds in particular. This is the result of that. To turn that around they need to give the mode more attention in general and they need to give guilds attention in particular. They figured that out a couple of years ago when they started two major projects for the competetive team: World Restructuring (Alliances) for WvW and Backend Restructuring (10man+) for sPvP. They have just never delivered on those systems in three years. The sPvP project can be important for WvW as it can create more overlap between the sPvP and WvW populations and it could double as a working GvG project for player-run events with guild content for WvW guilds. Apart from that there are a myriad of other things they could do to put more attention and focus onto WvW but those two things are leaps and bounds more important than anything else. Not the least because a system like Alliances where half the game's servers are not locked would mean a chance to get friends to come play the game with us. We can't bring new players to the game with the full server system. With all this in mind, people with server pride never created their servers' content so their oppinion is largely irrelevant. It is people with server pride that make up the casual- and PvX populace that only seems to play when someone else has tagged up for them and thus keep their servers full. You do not solve a problem by listening to the people that are the problem, even if they are the majority. Having accounts on both host and link servers also gives perspective. It's interesting to see how many incorrect assumptions tar people's words. The full servers assume themselves to be much smaller than what they are and they assume the nomad communities to be much larger than they are simply by the disparity in content. The inccorect assumptions is not by some common percentage either but often by three-four times.

This is my weekly appreciation of Raymond's off the clock SAB-project. Praised be the bearded man.

> @"Doug.4930" said: > Lets be honest though, the real problem with these supports is minstrel gear stat. The amount of boon spam/cleansing/healing these pocket healers can dish out all whilst being mobile tanks is insane. > > These supports don't support the group they're in. They outright carry them. Did you just take every word you didn't like and threw them together in a couple of sentences? The gear makes them do two things, yes, tank and heal as heals don't crit or extend. That's similar to condition damage on classes that don't need crit or expertise to be effective. The gear doesn't give more buttons to push. Also, pocket healing is generally just when you put support around what used to be a solo roamer. In most common cases its simply a healer. Is the healing too much? The devs did what is still a fairly recent balance pass and seems happy with the balance between heals and damage.

> @"gavyne.6847" said: > An adjustment to Purity of Purpose is long overdue. Agreed, overall conversion and corruption should be rare, most sources of it now should just be cleanse and rip. Would help the feeling of overall spam alot, possibly help performance a fair bit and could hopefully lead to the conversions and corruptions that remain to feel powerful again. People are sometimes critical of the february balance initiative, but on a concept level I think most of the choices were good (just not implemented or followed-up well). The one choice they made that always did feel wrong though was how they approached the boon nerf with uptime. That just kept the spam but also made many boon-related things feel quite pointless, boring, not possible to build around and internally very malbalanced since some abilities were hit while others were not (so some abilities have their old uptimes and others just have a second or less). That left the boon treatment feeling about as placeholder as the CC/damage changes, even if nerfing boons and compounded control-and-damage abilities is a good idea in concept. The half-implementation just kept some problems, added a couple of new ones and then got riddled with balance issues. It would have been much better to look at cooldowns and sources instead.

Given the necro of this thread I'm not sure if I've posted in it before, but I've posted in similar threads in the past and most of the support classes/builds actually have some aspect of support that they excel at. There's just a difference in how broad the appeal is. Now, that doesn't mean that some classes doesn't need some help. The Druid, for example, was never properly compensated for all the things taken away from it and the somewhat recent rework it saw was very lacklustre. It is still worse after the second glyph rework than it was before the first trait- and glyph rework. The specialisation still suffers heavily from Anet's decision to balance it around the existance of spirits in PvE. It had glyphs and traits gutted because of spirits, more or less, and spirit mechanics have very limited practical use in PvP. The staff is also still in a state of pre-nerf as a support weapon and alot of it's overreliance and management issues with Celestial form would go away if things like the auto mechanics on the staff changes to something more practical (like a no-target narrow but long cone akin to medkit but perhaps, well yeah, longer and thinner for some flavour). Reliable staff = reliable form. At the same time, that doesn't mean that there aren't things Druids excel at. Rangers also suffer heavily from that there is little use to stack them or a lack of learning- or intermediate roles for them. That means that the things you can do well with a Ranger (Druid) tend to require alot of experience (self-governance, leadership etc.) and even then you don't want to stack too many of them. So for someone comming in to play Ranger in WvW, there isn't much of a progression to learn in pickups. The things you can do is often too difficult for you. That conserves the low experience and reaffirms that those players are better off on other classes. The event of immob builds have given the class a bit broader role even if it remains off meta, but it's one of those things where the positives probably do not outweigh the negatives. It is quite a boring effect and problematic strength to build around. It would be much better if Anet just enhanced and put some spotlight on what the class already does well, doing something about the Celestial management and weapon skills I mentioned above. That wouldn't give Druids broad appeal either but it might help put the spotlight a bit more on what it can bring to the table and see a few more players using it in creative ways, not just some mossy old 8-year vets who remember what it did in HoT GvG's.

> @"grave of hearts.7830" said: > Yeah i pretty much agree on this. > basicaly everything still screams abandoned by development,something that shouldnt been a thing a year after the layoffs. > I really wish the current anet team could see this from the veteran customer point of view,but i am afraid that them understanding is impossible. > A developer who doesnt play his own product at regular intervals to see the changes in effect,might never understand a veteran customer who has spend hundreds of hours on the game mode. > If we are going to see the same kind of neglect on GW3 WvW (assuming some specific country regime doesnt have another bioweapon gone rogue and we all end up dead) then theres no reason to buy GW3 for me,heck i dont really have a reason to buy the next expansion and the whole mystical chinese setting is scratching a lot of fresh wounds on me and others who lost family to the epidemic. > Yeah, I mean, just to drive my point home a bit more: Alot of people mentioned maps, [this Anet about PvP maps in 2011 leading up to the release in 2012]( ). [This is Anet about PvP maps in 2020 leading up to EoD in 2021]( ). [This is Wooden Potatoes on Megaservers in 2014]( ). [This is Wooden Potatoes on EoD in 2020]( ). It says something about gameplay, content and player content or content creation in general. What is said and what has transpired is also very interesting if anyone can muster up the patience to chug through it. As far as GW3 goes. I don't think that there will ever be a GW3 (and if there ever came a GW3 it wouldn't be an MMO, it would be a 1up adventure, a Guild Witcher 3 but perhaps more like 2077). As far as EoD goes, nothing in the behaviour of the developer suggests that we should expect anything different than from PoF, so I don't. If something more comes I'll be pleasantly surprised but I'm keeping my expectations low or have none (and per the meme, I will still probably be disappointed :3 ). I also wouldn't be surprised if we were to have a third, fourth or fifth round of "we are sorry we couldn't fit PvP into the EoD crunch, but we are determined to build something for you as our next priority" (we will talk more about it in the comming months), [look at this guy we gave the task but not the resources who gets to weather your Alliances-when and only-PvPer-in-the-room goofing].

> @"kash.9213" said: > All these points make kind of one larger point of our characters hardly existing in this game. > - WvW isn't open world pvp but when prime time is burned out this mode isn't self propelling enough to warrant staying logged in when the action is done. You can roam around if you want but what's the payoff of content to the amount of time you're looking for something to do? > - There's no feeling of our characters belonging to our game mode maps and our characters don't live there, even the WvW specific gear is an insult (they still haven't given the light effect from our Mistforged chest piece it's own dye channel) compared to other modes. > - But then we're also disconnected from the core game, living story, and expansions. We get almost no aesthetic, music, or story from the rest of the game, and the rest of the game gets no mention or news from our corner. So our characters really don't belong anywhere and we don't get to enjoy downtime exploration like we would in an open world mode or game. PvE should fulfill that need for us but WvW it's basically a separate game that's not complete. > - We get a forgotten promise of Alliances, but even that might scrap any sense of community our servers have currently. It's not just guilds who make up a game community, I think the strength of my server if there ever was any has been in our pubs, floaters, and havok commanders. But none of that matters either once prime time is done. I agree with most of these things. The issue is though that these things are just symptoms of the same stuff we always talk about. It is hard to get a sense of purpose, belonging or impact when the same things that have been imbalanced and broken since the start are still imbalanced and broken. It is hard to care about an objective when you know it is just going to get swiped by coverage- and population imbalances and it is hard to care about overall matchup score when that is still subject to the same problems. It's the same in 2021 as when people felt it was pointless to spend gold on upgrading objectives in 2012. This is why we, the community, have kept talking about **scoring, nightcapping and population imbalance** since 2012. All of these things that Kash brings up are results of that. At the end of the day what WvW "is" is a competition on a ladder but the ladder has always been broken. It is a king-of-the-hill with a multitude of subcontent (roam, raid, havoc-cap, GvG, pickup, havoc-on-pickup, defense etc.) under that strategic layer. The king of the hill has just never been the king of the hill, nore the queens, knights or knaves. That was broken in 2012, that was broken in the 2013 tournament, in the 2014 tournament and in 2021. Scoring can fix that, objective fixes can fix that and Alliances can fix that. Other issues have later appeared once those original issues have begun driving enough players who care about WvW (and playing with the mechanics that are surrounded by those issues) from the game. Those issues are still the portal and still govern behaviour though. **What divides and unites?** I've said this many times now. I want Alliances but I don't even think Alliances will serve much of its original purpose anymore. The only reason I still want Alliances now is that they are still a reason for people to build and rebuild community again. Today, some groups spend big piles of gold to form new communities. Other groups may perhaps even still give Anet gems to do that. However, most groups do not and as such communities die out and things get stale. That is the big problem now. It is now for the social-constructive side of the mode kind of the same as it was for the players who cared about score and the ladder or the players who cared about tending to an objective. It feels pointless and not worth the effort. These things also divide and split the playerbase apart more and more (rather than uniting and overlapping it). There have always been differences between PPT and PPK, between content at different scales (roamers, raiders, zergers etc.) or between players who primarily see themselves as PvP, PvE or PvX. However, the longer these issues have lingered, the larger the differences have become: The larger the divide and the more the isolation, frustration and dislike. If things like scoring and nightcapping were adressed properly (which tech has existed for, for years) it would also start bridging the divide and turn the ship around in a positive direction (only then can we see if things are not too far gone to be worth saving, population wise). The tower someone feels like taking or defending would impact score and define the comming matchup for those who want to matchup and fight against someone else. These things are interconnected but since they are broken they pull apart rather than interact, perhaps your server doesn't want to go up, because up isn't really up, as scoring is broken and the king isn't the king, etc. **The exception and the rule - the example and the system** Instead we have things like a server in EU that has been given an exception in the population cap in order to accomodate players speaking that language from another region, continent and timezone. That is literally shooting oneself in the foot. Now, that issue in itself is not the big thing here. It is just a very obvious example of how incredibly daft the developer has been with things like this. I don't know how superlative I can get to underline that but: It is literally monkey level. Let's build a game mode and then just break it ourselves by both leaving the day 1 systemic flaws unaddressed AND putting all those core rules out of play, then just stand by and watch the dumpster fire ensue. The real issue isn't of course that exception but rather that all the other servers are locked and that we have systems with those kind of locks. They should in fact never have existed since Megaservers were always intended and Servers themselves was originally an ad-hoc. It was a band-aid ripped from PvE in 2014 yet we still have it in 2021. The system itself is the problem but the example just shows an incredible disregard for their own system and the flaws in it. The example wouldn't be a problem if problems like locks, scoring and objectives were fixed, but those are not treated with any kind of priority, urgency or iteration (outnumbered and EotM's backend were leads into that, but how much iteration have they seen? and what impact do they have on the mode today?). **The Getting out of jail Card** Since all this is intertwined it also the answers the age-old question of why groups transfer: They transfer to get good matchups (finding the frienemies to fight in lieu of a GvG arena or matchup system that lets them find each other on maps), they transfer to avoid bad matchups (like an EU server with an NA [sA] population and scoring profile that becomes a disproportionate obstacle to good matchups on the ladder; a knave dressed a knight), they transfer to build community with players who want to be social and play WvW, they transfer to get away from players who are anti-social, who have filled the gap left by social groups leaving but are not interested in actually participating and have become anti-social because the developer has now developed an anti-social product: The single-player "MMO". WvW is one of the few things left that actually is an MMO in this MMO. The PvX'er who used to come into WvW was an MMO player, the PvE'r who do it today is often a 1up RPG player. There is little overlap there, beyond the stale divide that already exists. It is very hard to play multiplayer games with people who doesn't want to talk, doesn't want to listen, doesn't want to lead and doesn't want to follow. It is even harder if you get locked into a room with them that you have to pay your way out of. It's also miles from [when Jon Peters talked about the importance of friends and frienemies.]( ) That was the Anet that made GW2. [This is the Anet of today, completely devoid.]( ) I guess it is more profitable to be a kidnapper than a game designer these days, at least until all the kids break out and run B) .

Why did we necro this? Is this Alliances? Ed. If we're gonna real-talk for a second: I think this is just another example of good-old Anet being good-old Anet. They likely gutted the few resources competetive had and put them into other things for a while again. That rebalancing of teams have always been rather lopsided. It seems to work internally the same way we are used to it externally, with competetive giving but never getting, kinda like how PvP players who give never really gets. The guiding ideas behind the changes are still good and some areas of PvP (eg., larger scale WvW) are arguably better even now in this less than stellar situation. However, the iteration just hasn't been there or has been highly underwhelming. It wasn't too hard to figure out where things were going a month or so after the first patch or two. The problem is that we haven't seen much change from there over 10 odd months now. There are some very obvious condi issues that immidiately appeared that still have not been addressed at all. The gutting of the Warrior with the CC/damage changes is a sensitive topic but I'd argue the big fault with it is that it still lingers as a "beta" this much time later, not that the ideas behind it would have been bad from the onset. It's good ideas but a bad approach, especially given the infamous iteration/always-beta issues that always plagues the PvP modes overall (nevermind the dangling).

> @"Diku.2546" said: > Can we have Healthy Competitive Tournaments with Alliances? > > Example of How to Host Healthy Competitive Tournaments: > https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/1064956/#Comment_1064956 > > Credibility requires critical insight & time. We can if they ever delivered on the 8-year old request of a GvG arena that actually works. A tournament does not have to be server-tournament. Alliances, a guild-based system, could drive further incentive towards more guild-based content, like tournaments. In this game there have been plenty of good, player-run guild-based tournaments. In other games there are such tournaments, some even run by the developers, that capture the eyes of the entire game. Anet/NCsoft are even outdone by their chinese-market partner. [GW2 China GvG Tournament 2020 run by the partnered publisher](http://gw2.kongzhong.com/activity/GuildChallenge/)

I don't think a change like that would have much effect. The same goes for the people who think reducing tiers would have any larger effect. In fact, it is even related to the people who complain about having no population while being full. This isn't a total population issue as much as it is a productive population issue. I'm not denying that the total population has likely seen a sizable decline over each let-down but that isn't what makes servers 'dead'. **Background:** The real issue is rather to get more of the playerbase to be socially- and productively active again. That is what creates content and content is what the appeal of the mode is. It's intertwined with total population in that sense since more activity means more players will come to play. That's an important distinction for both sides of "the fence" in discussions like these. Total population is important, yes, but people often mistake that with productive population. So people here have a tendency to believe that highly productive groups are larger than they are and they have a tendency to believe that rather unproductive groups are smaller than they are. It is important to pull your head out of that to further the discussion and address the real problems, but there are nevertheless problems with these things so the overarching discussion is important. **Result:** All in all, the problem is much more that there is a lack of commanders to lead groups than there is a lack of players to fill out groups. That is true for dead T5 servers and for full T5 servers (or any server who feel smaller than what they are). On a server level the problem is much more that there is a lack of guilds to form cores and produce tags (and a general point seen in overall organisation or off-hours) than it is total server population, with something as low 1-2 guilds being incredily important for alot of servers' overall content-production. Figures that by HoT was still in the 10's and in vanilla in the 20-30's. If a small server gets a good community, people flock to it. That is how the stacks are made. If a large unproductive server gets good tags, people flock to them. Many times those servers have no issues filling out three maps and their problem is rather that they have maxed one map instead and created a 50-man queue. That is an entire extra squad in queue and likely another squad of players that did not want to sit in queue who went off and did something else. There are easily upwards of 150 people looking to play most of the time in prime. However, there are not 3 players looking to lead that at all times (and I can understand why). As always, solving these problems involves Anet supporting guilds and other content-producers. Server magic has little to do with it.

> @"Nitrosiili.5628" said: > The solo roaming meta nowadays is a group of 2-5 players. At least 1 of them is a pocket healer. Well, yeah, that is what the Thief balance creates. This thread is pretty indicative of that. If the most common thing you're gonna see out there is 1-3 Thieves running ganks then your option quickly becomes to group up and run support. The same could be said about the prevalence of condi, even though the current popularity of condi obviously has more to do with condi simply being better than power on far too many classes/builds due to the ongoing rebalancing. Still, condi has always been a way to at least stalemate gankers so when the climate is just trolling and ganks you are going to see more of the coping too. If you look into duelling there are more classes/builds popping up that see a fair bit of use but even the duelling stuff seems pretty BM these days and prone to take on the realities of small-scale roaming. Just comming off some impromtu low-content clouding/roaming in/around SM and the 6 players streaking about on the opposing side was 4 Thieves and 2 Mesmers. As has been noted elsewhere, every server, match up or tiering isn't the same but the more populated areas of the game tend to be more prone to show the possibilities of the balance and the lower-populated areas of the game a bit more sensitive to the content. So people's perspectives will differ (EU to NA, tier 1 to tier 5) but the less gentlemanly areas of the mode tend to be more representative of the actual balance. If we're talking roaming rather than duelling and we're looking at the solo climate and possibilities (1vX), well, this is what we have. Also, as noted elsewhere, I'm not too fussed about it as I prefer things closer to 5-man than solo at the smaller scales and the balance is driving players into my content, but if you want change in the 1-3, then not looking at- or letting yourself be honest about what drives trend is putting your head in the sand.

Boonbeast is pretty strong, yeah. It is probably the strongest option for a boon-tank type of build. It sounds more like you are complaining about glassy builds that are apt at farming inexperienced players or players not built for smaller-scale content though. Those builds have quite alot of holes in their game and pretty scuffed envelopes when looking at what other builds are popular, so your findings come off as limited even if you played it for a whole month. Overall, there are other builds that are more oppressive at the lower end and there are certainly other builds that are more prevalent at the higher end.

> @"Mil.3562" said: > Nowadays WvW tags run closed squads because they only want and need meta classes, they need voice comm, they need numbers and still half the time they get wiped. Before, WvW Commanders ran open squads, invite anyone that ran next to them, no need for voice comm and still they win encounters most of the time. > > Notice the difference? Real Commanders vs just tags. Sure, and as per page one, those "real commanders" also had, out of a squad of 50, perhaps 15 guildmates, 10 friends from their best-friend guild and another 5 each from aquainted guilds so only 10-20% of their squad was made up by guildless, faceless snowflakes. Not all the time of course, but that was pretty normative, and that seems constantly overlooked as this thread goes on. Once the majority of your squad is snowflakes or, indeed, if you are not a proper commander with any support from friends and rather just a random tag yourself, then your reliance on those snowflakes tend to come with requests of them to help shoulder the burden with coms and builds.

> @"Threather.9354" said: > Invisible tags are a problem, guilds are becoming more and more inbred instead of working together with other guilds. > > Closed squads are fine, invisible not. This would push you to advertise voice more, invisible just means you shouldn't be "open tagging" as you're not ready to take in the "introduction to WvW" role. 99% of the people don't join voice comms on their first day, invisible tags just make it seem its dead. WvW needs more players and queues, not less. What gives people incentive to join the discord is maphopping and getting instant queues (as it is unavoidable), not being invisible and only catering to people that already have voice coms installed and are paying attention to it. > > An as such like some people already mentioned invisible tags have already done massive damage to the gamemode. Guild players almost never join open tags because they can just run alongside those open tags with invisible tags. Almost everyone these days have only 1 commander (most likely their guild one) they follow, not multiple on their server. **Closed tags and invisible tags:** Before we got squads the norm was for guilds to form their own parties to make up a pickup group. When we got squads it was normal for most tags to respect wishes from players to be put in the same party. They can just leave the squad if you don't respect those wishes and they may reconsider trying to be helpful. 99% of the mechanics are still party-based. It makes little to no difference if they are in your squad or not as long as they play as apart of the group and help the tag. The hidden tags for havoc purposes just give them tools to operate better. It doesn't make or break their ability to just form a party or squad on the side. In fact, even before the hidden tags you could glitch the game to get an untagged squad by passing tag to players without tag bought. So the anecdote isn't historical and there's no way to- or positives to come from trying to force players to do what you want in that way. If they form a group on the side to help you out, be thankful for that instead. Also, that many servers only has one tag up at a time has much more to do with there being few guilds and tags left in general than it has to do with hidden tags or the seclusion of guilds. There are plenty of other things that could be said about the collapse of helpful routines, unwritten rules and server infrastructure but that has little to do with hidden tags, closed squads or expected coms use. **Open tags and number of tags:** Again, the big kicker is that new players comming in have not been interested in WvW to the point of forming new guilds and producing new tags. There are fewer groups and tags left to share the burden and spread over maps as a result. That also causes alot of the good practises and unwritten rules to deteriorate since keeping them up wouldn't add much positives anyway. That ties into your remark about working with other guilds. That is hard if there are few to no guilds to work with left. Even I can sometimes by irritated that guilds today no longer adapt to content, where for example, if there are no blue tags around and there is pickup content to fight, it used to be customary that some closed group just went open to dip into that content. However, stuff like that rested upon that there were multiple closed groups around on your side and open groups providing content on the other side. You get that variety when there are alot of groups total but when there are few it is much harder to find and adapt to content. Perhaps your side has no open tags but the other side has both open and closed. Then your closed group can pick and choose. There is no reason for them to pick fighting the open content over the closed content and the real problem is that your side simply provides far less content than the opponent. That may be annoying but it is also understandable with those things taken into account. Much of the organized cooperation I see these days is focused around making sure there is at least one public tag in prime for most days. Tags for multiple maps over multiple days is a luxury that few servers can afford these days, even if they build community and guilds cooperate. **Tags and servers:** Getting around those problems require building community to a level that few servers can do anymore. We've gone from like 30 guilds on some servers to some 10 guilds on servers down to like 3 guilds on some servers over vanilla, HoT and PoF. If groups get inbred and, let's say, almost all remaining commanders on a server gets into the same guild on a server that still claims to try to build community, then that is fair critique. However, if it happens just to keep the guilds alive then it is another story and nothing that is different from guilds having a couple of tags each in the past. The motive is what's important. You can't fault anyone for keeping their guild alive but you can point out mistakes if they try to build community. In the end, most servers I see these days just have few regular tags in general and almost all of them are old players with old guilds or who used to have old guilds. New guilds are not formed and new players who may try their hand at commanding end up in one of two situations: It's either just disorganized backcapping (which is fine, just something different) or they too tend to join the few established guilds remaining because that is where the support and team-players remain. If you look to learn to lead, you need those players that let themselves be lead. They are as rare commodity as the tags themselves these days and a downside for servers that stack their tags in few guilds is that all those tags rely upon the same groups of players for help to lead. In fact, the problem is that many players do not even help "their guy" anymore when they tag public as a result. If more groups did that and more groups formed we would have more content and less reliance on the picked up, leading to less frustrations with the picked up. That is a big difference between the past and now when most pickups had cores of at least one guild related to the tag and thus did not need to rely on the picked up. When the norm becomes 1 player expected to lead 49 random players that is another story. That is when tags start doing closed, hidden and demand coms: to get help.

> @"Grand Marshal.4098" said: > Wow, so if you could maintain high stab uptime you were basically immune to any cc? I'd imagine the counterplay was that the cd on stab skills was longer and the stab applied for less time? > > In any case hammer guard rn captured my interest. I've only seen 1 hammer guard in PvE lol. And I guess core rev never got to shine since it appeared along with herald right? > It stacked duration so you only had one stack. On the other hand, CC did not rip stacks so you had to use rip-skills to catch the stab and then rip through all the cover boons. That's why I mentioned how use of rips kind of separated the better and worse groups since effective rips kind of required focus and synchs. If people were not they would usually never cut through to the stab and it just ran its duration. There were less sources of stab too so the pacing of combat (that you can still see with guilds running and stopping to regroup with empowers etc.) was usually determined by stability uptimes. That too of course differed a bit when certain guilds were good enough to break the typical pacing and be more aggressive or be agressive for longer (at the risk of getting out-regrouped and counter-pushed). There was also much less on-the-run healing so the regroups were usually heal-ups too (using water field blasts). That wasn't the only source of healing but water blasting was seen as the main source of healing.

I wouldn't say that it is always an issue, there are plenty of matchups that are better than that. However, you should consider that any given matchup includes 3 servers and regardless of tier it's not that uncommon to see one server that has inflated itself through PPT and actually don't or can't match up to the prime content of the tier it finds itself in. It's a combination of identity, coverage, momentum, evasion and the variety in the matchups themselves.

Not to mention all the people who have left servers that they can't come back to because those servers are full. What do you expect them to do? Just quit the game? Because that is what they will and those players include primary commanders and server-managers for their respective servers. A return to a worse system that had to be left because some servers were already dying in 2016 is hardly the way forward. Also, given what we know today it should be obvious to everyone that life on server is far more about content-creators (aka. enablers and instigators with EVE-terminology; such as commanders and server organizers) than actual numbers. A small server with good organization and commanders do not stay small for long. The only negative impact numbers have is that they can lock servers and maps down, making life harder for those commanders and organizers. The way forward is for some way to encourage and support those content creators. The most important steps in that involves doing away with the locks on servers and maps that stops those players from playing with their friends and using their friends to leverage and help out their effort. Other important steps involve giving them things to do with their friends that may not directly aid their server effort but could indirectly benefit their server effort because it keeps those players happy, active and playing.

> @"Dawdler.8521" said: > > @"Grand Marshal.4098" said: > > And before scrapper, I guess engineers didn't do much? Or did they utilize as much of a potent cleansing capability? > Engineer had bomb/grenade kit builds but they where never really meta anywhere. Scrapper had some power builds early on but only became popular after Anet fixed the pathing of gyros and **buffed medkit by alot**, wasnt even during the HoT era it was later. Unfortunetly they've nerfed everything else to the ground. I'm not sure medkit was all that super buffed (the coeff was changed from 0.04 to 0.2 [or per 1k Hpwr from 40 to 200] but overall output was 33% down) but they certainly made sure it was far worse without Hpwr, leading people to discover Minstrel builds for it and giving up alot of the old gear varieties. That in turn obviously turned focus towards its purely supportive build functionalities. https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game_updates/2018-05-08#Engineer

> @"Sviel.7493" said: > @"subversiontwo.7501" > Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're saying that the borderlands aren't 'real' fun, as defined by you, so they should be replaced by a drastically different form of gameplay that you do consider to be legit? **No** no, not at all. I like the typical borderlands content too. I'm just saying that ABL and DBL to some degree have the same issues as EotM had in that many of the players who prefer those maps prefer them from a perspective of the biggest blobs or strongest groups not being there. They like that content but have no control over it and it is pretty volatile as other players can just take that content away from them. **However**, a system more akin to the original vision of EotM (ie., a system with world-restructured overflows) and a scoring system built for that has so much more potential to let the developer build more map variation (within the frames of a blueprint) and deal with some of the age-old problems we have, like queues. Even if it isn't completely unavoidable, the whole idea of Borderlands somewhat stand in the way of making such changes that could open up the game mode simply by the nature of what they are. The slightly different mode as you called it. I am definately willing to sacrifice that. Part of the reason I am willing to do that has to do with the paragraph above: If people's enjoyment of the borders can be stifled by players simply chosing to blob there. **In fact**, already today on a number of servers that relationship between the borders and EBG has been swapped. The nomad communities in EU tend to use the borders for organized play and keep EBG for clouding and defense as some sort of overflow map. Other servers in EU use DBL and (if on an ABL) their HBL for that. The difference of course lie in those servers' balance between pickups and closed squads. The root behaviour is not entirely different since many guilds prefer to run closed on ABL. That too however has less to do with the map and more to do with queues and propensity among the populace. **That too** has the ability to change if there are no queues. Think about it as the lab farm. During Halloween you will see many overflows of the same map but they are all designated in different ways (mounts or not, all bosses or not, some bosses or none etc.). A similar system for WvW could let pickups match pickups, guilds match guilds and roamers match roamers etc. However, such a system is best managed with one type of map for the developer to balance. Alternate modes within such a mode quickly becomes complex and perhaps that is not something for Anet. That is what EotM was a beta of and still is. As the players did not like the "PvE map" that it got, Anet just abadoned the project in typical Anet fashion and it has been in forever beta ever since, with only some minor experiments being tried on the map. **It is the potential** to build something better using only the even 3-way system that has appeal. It has little else to do with the maps and I certainly wouldn't want ABL to be replaced with EBG under the existing system, for the same reason I see little point in removing DBL under the existing system. However, if they are to build a better system then the core idea of WvWvW combined with overflows is best done on an even 3-way and not on attack-defense maps. **Overall**, this has been my spiel for a while now: That we have alot of unfinished systems that were all once good ideas but were never fully implemented and Anet only seemed to get scared when they dipped their toes in. Those systems were not well-received as they were never fully sampled or explored. There are many mechanics and systems that have plenty of good sides to them that could be salvaged and combined whether we talk about EotM, Outnumbered, Guild Upgrades or something else. There are also many flaws to them that obscure the good stuff or the good stuff may just be so pre-nerfed that it has never been visible. If I was Anet and had to start somewhere that is where I would start: I would reskin EotM with EBG, I would finish the Outnumbered scoring components, find some way to create a leaderboard from that score (eg., a guild leaderboard) and I would make sure the overflows were more visible and informative - informing players on using the LFG system to denote map content. Those are all relatively small changes with existing tech even if there is pasta code and should be implementable within a couple of months. That's a foundation to work from if they can not deliver on Alliances. **Let's end this behemoth of a post** on a different perspective to serve as an example: Let's assume that we had an overflow system (so people could just see the numbers/scale and pick any map they wanted to) and we had a scoring system adapted to that (so uneven maps gave no score). Then, even if ABL's and DBL's were kept around, do you think they would be played? It's not like they have to be deleted. However, it's pretty likely that alot of the content on them today would choose to move elsewhere if the queues were gone and maps were chosen on the merits of the maps themselves or the scoring would make holding onto a dead map pretty pointless. Guilds and pickups don't play attack/defense much there anyway. It's not like it would be in the way of anything but I'm just not sure if it is worth keeping around or at least not developing for. It wouldn't hurt me though if we had 20+ maps and maps 18, 19 and 20 were ABL's or DBL's. If people choose to play those maps then score could be attributed and it would be easy for Anet to just follow demand and slot maps.

> @"Grand Marshal.4098" said: > Very interesting. Thank you for the responses. Browsing around, I stumbled uppon frontline healer druid. How helpful was it? Did at any point, ranger, become a class that was needed in zergs? And before scrapper, I guess engineers didn't do much? Or did they utilize as much of a potent cleansing capability? > > Interesting to think that core necros would be in zergs tbh. Life force means no shades, so taht must have played out interestingly with no barrier/aoe coverage. **Rangers:** Not really. Same as with the imob builds now, it has seen some use but never really been regarded as meta for pickup play. Pickup meta is often derived from GvG trends in one way or another and Rangers have seen some sporadic use in guilds throughout the years in various roles. It never really made into common use in pickups though. In part because of its wonky mechanics and in part because Anet snubbed quite alot of its interesting uses early. **Engineers:** Scrapper didn't really become pickup meta until PoF. It was widely used by guilds in HoT but then more as stealth/stealth-counter with some cleansing. Detection pulse used to be the F-skill on Sneak Gyro. Sneak Gyro also used to have something like a 40/40 up- and downtime but be regarded as an object (think Ranger spirits). Many HoT Scrapper builds were power damage as a result. In vanilla Engis did not see much use, no. **Necros:** Core Necros were mostly used for wells and Lich forms along with weapon skills and the shroud was used to tank or in melee crossovers. It's not too different from how Scourges are used now with Shades, Wells and Breaches on crossovers. Scourges have really just become creeped vanilla core Necros. Even though core Necro may not have been as strong most classes did not have as many damage options as now and even more importantly, boon rip was far more restricted to classes than it is today so Necro was really the only class that had broad boon rip (even if some groups dabbled with Mesmers for some of that, then same as now). The way the old stability worked though, knowing how to boon-rip or the value of Necros for that was one of the telling signs that separated the decent enough guilds from the run-of-the-mill.

> @"Sviel.7493" said: > It's so wild to me that people don't realize EBG and the borderlands are essentially two different games. You really can't just interchange them. It's not like we haven't understood that EBG is map-control and ABL was designed to be home-defense. However, most of us also realized that home-defense is pretty pointless when PPT/scoring is out of whack. Some of us also see throwing ABL out with the garbage as a worthy sacrifice if that can ultimately lead to EBG getting many more maps, no queues and scoring that works. That is worth infinately more than clinging to an idea of defending a map that most players do not really view as a defense/attack map anyway and do not care about the PPT outcome of. In fact, ABL have some of those issues that EotM or DBL has too if you just look at common behaviour patterns. Many k-trainers on old EotM did not really like EotM when organized squads came and farmed them. Roamers on DBL finds DBL far less entertaining when there are blobs filling up the map. The people who who still play home defense on ABL tend to be pretty defeated if a competent raiding squad comes around and takes all their upgraded stuff. That's not to say I am against all those players preferred content. I roam and have friends who roam on DBL alot. I occassionally cloud ABL and have friends who do that alot. However, I've played this game long enough to see how the enjoyment is pretty hollow and often hinges on how content commonly is, rather than how content easily can be. It is relatively easy to break the spirit of alot of those players by just moving the apex-content into their content zone.

@"DarkDream.2380" Have you ever been apart of a guild that engages in zerg-busting? I mean, it is still possible and some guilds still do it. Is it challenging? Sure, but isn't it supposed to be challenging? You can obviously make changes to make that easier but what will that do with guilds who are already capable of doing it? They may either risk just becomming oppressively powerful or their challenge may be taken away to the point where they stop doing it because it isn't fun or engaging anymore. It is a slippery slope.

Moxie made an interesting observation, the past few days have seen an uptick of threads that just seems to complain about WvW for being WvW. I think there is stuff in the OP here that are a bit interesting at least so I'll give it the favour of doubt and give it an honest response. > @"Sealamin.6549" said: > I have been playing WvW for around 8 Years and WvW is on a terrible down slide for the worse. More and more I am seeing hidden tags and closed squads with regular players unable to join unless they use Discord. I understand the need to use voice comms and have even owned and managed a TS server for WvW but this was for Guild battles and Fun nights, the server was there if people wanted to use it. I have seen far better commanders in the past than current ones and they used no voice coms and they earned the respect and following of other players by their commanding skills and success in battles. If you've been playing for 8 years you should probably know the answer to your own questions already. There's action and reaction or behaviour begets behaviour, right? The only little attention given to the mode has been in favour of people looking to come in and consume whatever content is available. Those players behave in a certain way. In the past there were enough of your friends around you that could be counted upon to support you, take initative or actively use what was laid out for them. There were other commanders who also had their own set of support that would let you just use what was made available. That extended to less experienced players. There were a sufficient amount of other players supporting the tag, taking initatives and being capable of silently utilizing what was at hand so commanders did not have to stress organization and use of coms. The norm then to now is very different, if a commander simply asks for the respect of supporting their effort put in you will see that few join or try and even fewer turn their mics on and interact. The guilds are few, the players comming in are not team players, do not form new guilds and do not produce new commanders. That remaining guilds or commanders distance themselves a bit from that and meet the egoistic expecations comming in with some demands of their own is only natural. WvW is not PvE mentoring and treating it as such causes these kind of situations. In fact, the entire game used to be a social game, that was the casual definition (casual=social). These days the developer has made sure it isn't even social anymore and most people who still have some social circles here cling to them and that keeps them playing (for WvW it is in spite of the hoops and hurdles that are scattered about in form of fees, queues, locks and unlinking miscalcs). There's zero surprise as to why the remaining creative players asks for more control over their populations (Alliances) and content for their circles of friends. The only way to turn this around is for the developer to get their heads out from their cheeks and direct content in favour of the content creators. Keep in mind that many of the old commanders that earnt respect and following are most likely still around in some capacity but are not tagging up under existing conditions or share their content as they are no longer showed respect and the following has been replaced by swarms of anonymous, faceless solo-players who queue up maps, turn servers full and just expect to be fed without helping out. In fact, "Where are the old commanders?" is a far less interesting question than "Where are the new guilds?" or new commanders that actually commands to earn respect and following. The developer has made sure that there is no reason for new guilds to be born or the commanders they in turn birth. The old commanders may very well be the same people who now only go through the motions or are distancing themselves in various ways because they are not being given any reason to behave any differently by the developer either. As always, the players WvW needs do not sit in Drizzlewood coast. They sit in Alterac Valley, Cydoriil, Lowsec/Nullsec, Calpheon etc. Those players, same as the existing core population in WvW, are interested in actual WvW gameplay like roaming, havoc (attack, defense, focus), raiding, skirmishing, GvG, BvB and the like. The content that exists in WvW and that also exists in their games but is arguably better here (or could be).

My biggest gripe with the map is that so little of it is commonly used for the day-to-day content, leaving alot of dead spots and just transversal areas. The map is like a broken donut with very little ever taking place in the middle. The sides with the fire and air keeps are also mostly only played around when necessary. The vast majority of content, regardless of scale, takes place in the south with the towers and camps or the north with the backtowers and garri. North-south is very dominant whether we talk about roamers, closed squads or pickups. Then add to that alot of stuff that has already been mentioned, that the size of the keeps also means that alot of the map is just swallowed by the structure interiors and those fights are rarely fun and just gives both defensive advantages ( that has worse class-class [weight] balance than open field) and rewards heavier composed groups who can just constrain space and leverage mass. That is not unique for DBL, that is any objective or structure fight but as they take up so much space on DBL that such fights are usually prolonged on DBL and take up more of the content relative the other maps' spread of content. While the map was certainly improved with the changes that came some time after its inception, it still suffers the same kind of issues, it's just the same problems light. I also still maintain that I believe most people who say that they prefer that map do not actually prefer the map and rather prefer that it tends to be less populated or that it attracts their peers to find matched up content at smaller scale. That is supported by the above since while people claim they prefer the map they rarely create content in the areas of the map that contrasts it from the other maps. Whether we're on EBG, ABL or DBL flat surfaces with possible slight terrain shifts seem preferred by everyone. As for changing the map. I don't know. I don't necessarily see a removal of DBL and a return to all ABL borders as a step forward anymore. I'm far more in favour of moving away from borders completely and using overflow technology to do away with queues and enable rotating map variations with EBG as the blueprint for variations. I've toted that for a while now, that EotM should just be reskinned and/or that overflow tech should come to WvW so we can have map carousels like WoT has and then use the overflows and outnumbered to change the scoring to enable on-map scoring balance and do away with queues so friends can actually get on the same map or enemies can get on the same map to match up without having to go through the hoops of socially engineering around the shitty queues. At the end of the day, the two biggest problems these days are that servers are full and maps are full. Population balance has fallen to a close second or overlaps since it is kind of the same issues bundled together. That kinda goes for map design too. Finding a system around the full maps like the one described would also provide a better overall strategy for map design, variation and replayability.

I have no larger issue with any of the options listed. I have several issues with the content but none of them are listed.