Category: Guild Wars 2

I should be about done commenting on GW2 WvW Season One. I have been wondering all weekend why I can’t just give up, but I may be getting there. Like all seven weeks of Season One, my server of Isle of Janthir has no chance of winning this week, but this is the first week we have been up against either of the two servers that have a chance to win NA Silver. It is a ridiculous mismatch; during times when I play, Stormbluff Isle outnumbers us on every map including our borderlands, usually to the point of having the official Outnumbered buff. One night, I went to try a bit of yakslappiong in SBI BL, and there were full groups parked at all the exits from our spawn in case anyone came out to play. It’s not like they have anything better to do in WvW when they already control most of the map.

I think the weight class discussion summarizes the week-to-week matchup problems. You can argue about the fine details, but you know who the top servers are in each league, so you can pick who is going to win most weeks. The first and seventh weeks look potentially interesting, but most of the weeks for most of the servers you can pick out the winners in advance. I had said that in the abstract, but I had not taken the schedule and plotted it out. Merus told us, and folks plotted out Gold, and right now there is a very narrow range at the top of the NA leagues.
Continue reading [GW2] Predetermined Outcomes

Scarlet is at it again. Apparently not happy with her other three armies, she bribed the krait with ancient relics to team up with Nightmare Court. A toxic alliance, which may portend ultimately another failure for Scarlet’s Doofenschmirtzian ability to craft coalitions. Then she destroyed half of Kessex Hills. It could have been worse if the Lady Kasmeer hadn’t cracked the gigantic mesmer illusion. Now, the free peoples of Tyria are on the attack. Only this is more of a containment phase since the tower is too poisonous to breach.

This is an interesting update because it completely changes a huge portion of a fairly well-traveled zone. ArenaNet further hints that there are more changes to come. It’s also an interesting update because the content is kind of light. There is plenty of activity in Kessex Hills now, but after a good hour of play most of the update’s content is apparent. Continue reading [GW2] Free Hit of Hallucinogen

I play on a losing server, and I am at 14/15 less than two weeks into Season One, so the meta-achievement is pretty clearly doable. Not all the achievements are reasonable doable for all the servers, but I would guess most for most. The popularity of the Eternal Battlegrounds can be a barrier: players in some servers have long queues, servers without queues may not have much chance to take Stonemist Castle during hours you play (depending on opponents, say opponents who have a queue and are therefore at max pop in EB at most times).

When guildmates talk about the achievements, the main question is “225?!” You need to be either a regular WvWer or have big binges or both to get some of these. Pondering them, the numbers are individually reasonable, but then they are multiplied and added together in a way that makes the whole daunting. Some of us can knock it out in a week or two; others are too put off to bother even when they would certainly get it over 7 weeks.
Continue reading [GW2] WvW Season One Achievements – By the Numbers

Judging decisions based on their foreseeable consequences, I presume the intent of the WvW seasons is to discourage players from fighting each other in WvW. The structure is stacked to reward players for fighting NPCs and creates punitive disincentives for fighting other players.

Of the 19 achievements, you get 2 from killing other players, one of which is set trivially low as a freebie. All the others are more efficiently achieved by avoiding players: play during the off-hours, ninja supply camps, but avoid fights because those will slow you down except for the couple of achievements you are certainly going to get just from the PvP fights you cannot avoid. There are no rewards for defending and 1 for repairing, which again is a one week (or one long night) achievement.

More so, you are trained to avoid other players because of the crushing population differences. When you have the “outnumbered” buff in your own borderlands, you can work out your odds of fighting the enemy head-on. After pre-season transfers, our server has one of the lowest WvW populations in the league, so we are continuously outnumbered even after concentrating our WvW forces on one map. It took less than a week for most of our WvWers to adapt and most of our PvEers to just give up on WvW, further exacerbating the downward spiral in WvW population. They have not given up on WvW entirely, but they should be able to get the meta-achievement around the halfway point of the season, and our Saturday morning “EB zerg” was already 9 players by the time I logged off. On the plus side, the remaining people we have are getting really good at siege placement while the big teams are getting sloppy.

To strengthen my previous whining, if the goal is to turn WvW into PvE, where small teams are trying to fight undefended towers and large teams are just hoping to find the small teams, pitting the #7 team against the #15 team is a great plan. This is also great for gaining WvW ranks and achievements, because you have a constant stream of mostly undefended towers and camps flipping.

As someone who thinks of himself as primarily a PvE player, this should be an unmitigated win for me, but it presently feels more like one part of the game has just been ruined.

: Zubon

Again, the picture will differ where the weight range is smaller.

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

The realization that our server has no chance to win the NA Silver league and few chances for even winning a week is remarkably freeing. Doing well, playing competitively, winning? These are not reasonable goals and can be laid aside. The only sense in which those ideas matter is at the individual fight level, and even then only until the zerg arrives to swat the gnats.

This is like the PvE situation, where (no matter what the personal story says) you have no hope of changing the world or reclaiming Orr. All that matters is what you do during the minutes you are logged on, which will be wiped away immediately afterwards except for a few motes of character advancement. We take it one supply camp at a time and live in the moment, because the larger situation is entirely beyond our control or even ability to meaningfully influence.

“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”

Also, we can expect to have the Outnumbered buff a lot, so all we risk is time and the silver pieces we spent on siege equipment.

: Zubon

At least that’s the theory. So far, I’m still really annoyed by bad play, being vastly outnumbered, and both servers attack us instead of having both of us attack the leading server.

Looking ahead to WvW season one, my server of IoJ is going to be in silver league, getting absolutely crushed every week with no chance at all. Our larger WvW guilds transferred away, but that is not factored into what league we will be in. The running debate is whether we will be in last place or next-to-last, which will probably be determined by whether the last few WvW guilds leave. I don’t see anyone transferring TO the bottom servers in each league. As is said of the server competing with us for last place:

They need much more firepower to compete in this league, and being at the bottom of Silver League makes it unlikely their PvE players will be very interested in stepping their toes into WvW.

This is probably true in all leagues, so a system designed to encourage WvW will probably discourage ot in about 1/3 of the servers. And not necessarily the least populated servers: IoJ still has plenty of bodies, but the ones that spent their time primarily in WvW mostly just left, so you get a downward spiral as fewer people find it worthwhile/fun to visit the Mists.

I am not sure how I would design server vs. server competition with the possibility of server transfers without encouraging this sort of thing, but it seems immensely corrosive. I’m deciding whether I want to be the last rat on a sinking ship.

Updating with a golden quote from that thread I linked: “I figured I would start the discussion of what this crapfest of a league will look like. I honestly feel bad for the other servers in Silver league” There will be a few competitive servers and 6-7 victim servers.

: Zubon

Guild Wars 2 is experiencing the first nostalgic event. After the game’s launch just before September ’12, Shadow of the Mad King was the first big update that happened in October ’12. Of course, that update already had strong roots and expectations from Guild Wars 1, where the Halloween festival was considered one of the best. The Shadow of the Mad King was a great hit, and before the launch of Blood and Madness, people were getting excited about the return of the Halloween festival.

It is even more notable because this is the first update where ArenaNet had built up their foundation so as to push resources towards the other updates such as the previous Twilight Assault or whatever is coming next (possibly even some skunkworks). This isn’t totally true since The Secret of Southsun and Last Stand at Southsun both built on The Lost Shores, but in that case ArenaNet was not really building on a fan favorite. I’m not sure anybody knows what to do with Southsun Cove, but if it got dev resources I would love for it to become the preeminent champion farming zone. Continue reading [GW2] Return of the Mad King’s Memories

Readers, many of you play Guild Wars 2, so I come to you with the question: in what ways have exotic-rarity items become easier to acquire since launch? The ones that immediately come to mind for me are:

• exotic drops added to more drop tables
• guaranteed rare or better drops from some classes of events
• increased champion and boss rewards
• increased karma rewards, particulalry from daily/monthly achievements
• increased WvW badge rewards, particularly from achievement chests
• anything that increases rare-rarity items, because you salvage them for materials to craft exotics
• anything that increases ascended-rarity items, because that frees your resources to pursue exotics

Others? In the vaguely ongoing debate about the perceived need for ascended-rarity items, I noted the argument “exotics are too easy to get.” One of the things that struck me after my return to Guild Wars 2 was that I had multiple level 80 characters fully outfitted in exotics about as quickly as taking them to a tailor to be fitted. I was tempted to say that ascended items only became “necessary” because the difficulty of acquiring exotics had been lowered so much, but that is the wrong order of events. I left town as ascended items were introduced, and fully outfitting characters in exotics was not exactly trivial at that time. I imagine the following dialogue:

Dev: We need ascended items because becoming fully geared in exotics is far faster and easier than we had intended.
Player: It’s not all that quick or easy.
Dev: Really? Give me a minute here. [UPDATE] Okay, now getting exotics is far faster and easier than we had intended, so we need the ascended items.

: Zubon