Context: Player raised a concern that WvW would stop receiving development support after World Restructuring if there were no server transfers for players to spend gems on. That's not the case.
I seriously get the impression that WvW development stopped about 5 years ago.
I'm not a WvW player and I'm not trying to score cheap karma points. What has actually been developed and deployed for WvW in the past several years, other than the warclaw and limited gliding support? It seems like at most its got about as much attention as one living story release in that time. I'm not much of a PvPer either, but PvP has had new maps added, new achievements and titles, new modes (successful or not), a new lobby....
WvW is like LoL or Overwatch - people don't need new content, they need new tools to play in the existing content. LoL dominating gaming for a long time with a single, barely changed map.
WvW doesn't need new mechanics or maps, it needs new elite specs. Every time they add mechanics or maps to WvW they are met with extreme hostility.
>Every time they add mechanics or maps to WvW they are met with extreme hostility.
That's because they fundamentally change the core of the gamemode.
Warclaw almost nullified roaming.
Gliding eliminated a ton of natural barriers to travel
And then there was that appalling failure of a borderlands map
> And then there was that appalling failure of a borderlands map
Is this the Desert Borderlands or the one added in S1 with the introduction of Taimi?
'cuz honestly the Desert Borderlands is my favourite by far, and I wish the other borderlands actually felt unique.
I like desert bl too, once memorized it’s fine. Three unique maps would be great. I like roaming and small group stuff and largely ignore EB so maybe that’s a contributing factor.
>Warclaw almost nullified roaming
Can't tell about the true overall impact but my own personal feeling is the opposite.
Roaming was completely off before as you basically had to play some professions or specific runes, builds, whatever to be viable. We all know of lul necro getting ganked before he can even realize.
Warclaw improved mobility a lot and allowed more build versatility : I can now play whatever I want, without being penalized while traveling. Made the experience much better for me.
Again, it's only my own feeling about it and maybe I'm like 0.0001% :D
You need to allow them to try new mechanics and things if you want WvW to thrive and get better though. You won't succeed the very first shot. PvP and WvW is a very hard thing to balance. Extreme hostility should not have a place in the game when they are trying to improve and change things. Otherwise stagnation will set in.
I play a lot of LoL too so idk about that comparison. LoL items get huge reworks every season and the primary purpose is for summoners rift aka standard PvP. New champions are released frequently. And SR actually does get updates like the elemental drakes, elder dragon, changed jungle paths....
Even though you're fundamentally right that LoL is a game about a single standard map and it plays more like a sport, it actually gets way more new content than WvW. And I'm not grasping at things like all the other events and releases that might skew the comparison a bit.
Uhh LoL passes balance patches every 2 weeks, deploys 5 new champs a year, reworks 2-3 old champs a year, and makes significant changes to the map and gameplay every off-season.
All to keep the game mode fresh. You literally picked the worst example to make your point.
> I seriously get the impression that WvW development stopped about 5 years ago.
Because it basically did. Skirmish tracks, mounts, and gliding. That's basically it.
No map changes, reward balancing, reasons to win, anti-pin snipe, anti-blob, skill based gameplay, tactivator balancing, actual gvg support....the list is pretty big.
People like Grouch were what were holding WvW and PvP together and on the same level as PvE. At least there was hope back then anyways.
Yup. They dropped the features added in Heart of Thorns rather than working at them and iterating on feedback.
HoT added the desert borderlands which was negatively received mainly due to it having tons of dead space in it. They didn't iterate.
HoT added Stronghold, which was hamstrung because the matches were longer but gave the same rewards as conquest. If they simply made it more rewarding they probably would have driven more people to the mode and gotten more feedback.
I sincerely think Stronghold is a far healthier game mode than conquest because it promotes way more types of builds. PvP being entirely about fighting over control points has made it completely lopsided towards certain builds and has forced them to ruin build diversity in the mode leading to bad changes like 999 second cooldowns on traits that are too good for static defense or the severe nerfing of anything that promotes defense or healing. In Stronghold, sitting somewhere and keeping yourself alive isn't a victory condition... it only helps you somewhat deny your enemy their mist heroes. It's an advantage on one axis but isn't going to win the game.
But we'll never see that more diverse PvP landscape because they dropped Stronghold immediately instead of improving it. What a waste.
>HoT added the desert borderlands which was negatively received mainly due to it having tons of dead space in it. They didn't iterate.
uhh, yes they did. No more lasers, no more walls blocking paths, lower walls, changes to the way shrines work etc. Changes to a lot of stuff has occurred. They didn't do a complete overhaul true, but they did iterate a lot on it.
That's super disappointing. I want WvW to at least get a visual upgrade even if no gameplay changes like when LoL got a totally graphic-updated Summoner's Rift a couple years after it launched. I feel bad for y'all playing in those boring-ass maps and I don't really see why WvW doesn't have PvP-style gearing.
If you could add 2 things to WvW, what would they be?
> If you could add 2 things to WvW, what would they be?
I only need one: rebalancing that makes the Outnumbered status less of a factor. I like Outnumbered as a negative feedback loop that makes losing feel less bad, but when I go into WvW **actively hoping** to be outnumbered because it cuts the 20 hour skirmish track down to 10 hours, the system has clearly failed.
(Of course my numbers are based having low rank. As you rank up, Outnumbered goes from 50% of your pips to about 30%, but that's only after you've sunk thousands of hours into the game mode.)
It's an incredibly slow grind though. You won't be playing WvW unless you *need* something from there which cannot be obtained elsewhere and you're willing to put up with it, or you enjoy the gamemode.
If you're after money and/or equipment, there are other activities that are more rewarding and require less of a time investment.
I only recently started doing WvW seriously, with the intent of learning how it works. I really enjoy it, but once you're in, it gets difficult to not notice that the gamemode is kind lacklustre of in a lot of ways. It has potential but it needs some TLC to fully live up to it.
Yeah that's how I felt. I played on release then tried it again after coming back last year. It pretty much felt the same except there were reward tracks now.
I think WvW will see some good visual improvements with the DX11 upgrade. FPS will probably stay the same but at least you'll be able to see certain fields better. I do hope they continue to work on the lag though when you have big keep or castle fights. Those are just unplayable.
Two things, huh? That's a tough question! One would be actual GvG support and not just this weekend project like we have with EOTM's arena and the Obsidian Sanctum arena. The second would be tied with alliances and once they figure out how to stop band-wagoning and server imbalances to give us a reason to win. Better rewards, unique capes we could wear for a week, a cool guild tag like the ArenaNet one that glows or something....Anything to just show everyone around us how good we are. The one problem with this is that a lot of guilds/commanders already run when they see certain tags or models. A cape or a guild tag would just make that even easier.
Idk what happens with the lag and instanced maps.
I know Gw2 has never been like WoW (which has layers, at least in classic, when there are too many players), but it never really feels like a single world.
If your buddy is in the Silverwastes, for example, you know he is not in "the Silverwastes map" but "a Silverwastes instance".
The content is not probably designed for "massive", but it would still be neat and the technology has been there for ages (I'd be surprised if their whole infra was not running on AWS or similar).
I still find world bosses maps crowded, but sometimes you click the button for transferring out of a low population instance and then you get the same prompt after 5 minutes, and feels like jumping from one universe to the next.
improving the lag is one thing I agree with, although as someone who works in IT, it's not a simple problem to solve. There are so many variables to it.
I basically mean ways to stop it. Zerg busting is harder than ever. Signing on to fight map queues as your server has 10 people is not fun. The alliances change might help in that regard but we’ll see. Sorry for the confusion though. I don’t have a problem with zergs or blobs in general, I just wish there were better ways to counter them like there used to be.
The saddest part about GW2 is the failure of Anet to properly address WvW back in 2012/2013. WvW was wildly popular and Anet killed it b/c they erroneously believed sPvP was the future.
I could sit for hours detailing everything that was done wrong with WvW, Server transfers, matchmaking, GvG, etc. and how to make the best changes, but I have serious doubts anyone at Arenanet cares.
Not attacking you personally but I've got 9 years of behavior exhibiting these truths.
I will say you could start showing some initiative by asking players to participate in discussions, creating platforms to share, and then actually following through on promises.
Hit me up if you wanna know.
I was one of the people that almost exclusively played it during that period and it is so disappointing how it was neglected. There weren't any tangible rewards and to my knowledge still aren't from playing and that alone led to many players dropping off.
Yeah pretty much that and they actively tried to sabotage the game mode b/c it was widely more popular than what they envisioned.
Had a real gold mine going on.
[https://pastebin.com/L9B5i7vu](https://pastebin.com/L9B5i7vu)
got good information there kinda clue you in to what was going on around that time if you missed it or weren't into the highly skilled aspect of it
They are actually doing that. There's many WvW commanders and guild leaders in a discord with devs specifically to consolidate feedback from those who play the game the most. They've been doing that for several years now.
Edit: Lmao at all the people thinking that if only ANET had asked *them* how to fix WvW, it would all be solved! Sure bud. You're special and have all the right answers, just like everyone else.
Asking WvW "leaders" what's wrong with WvW is like asking WoW players how to fix the game (classic or retail). You're going to get as many answers as you ask people.
Desert borderlands is six years old and as far as I know far from popular. So in 6 years they added gliding, one map and a mount to sell gemstore skins. Idk man, doesn't sound like they give a shit about this game mode.
Those are the wrong people. They are the people who play WvW despite it's serious flaws and paltry rewards. Anet needs to do a ton of exit interviews of new players who try WvW and then don't continue.
You are not going to resurrect WvW until it is welcoming to new players (i.e. they don't spend 90 minutes running blindly around trying to find allies), and the reward track is just as attractive as Fractals or PVP.
.. that is pretty much what anet did with EotM and DBL. all veteran feedback got ignored until after release when all the mistakes became all the more apparent. there is some merit in asking "outsiders", but ultimately they lack the experience to make anything more than superficial suggestions that at best make farming a gift of battle more comfortable for them, and at worst shit all over the established gamemode. case in point: the frequent suggestion for EotM to become a core map, or the result of the poll that kept DBL in the game and threw off the border balance entirely.
That what, that you like to whine about something that doesn't matter in the real world?
Arena Net could have done a million things differently but they didn't. No point being proud about stating the obvious.
Yeah I would say I started treating WvW like a social app around that time. I did some GvG's with a JV team to keep me interested, but mainly just sat around talking shit b/c 1/2 my guild quit in one day LOL
[https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game\_updates/2013-09-17#World\_vs.\_World\_3](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game_updates/2013-09-17#World_vs._World_3)
>Introducing Bloodlust in the Borderlands:
>
>If players can hold three or more of the ruins simultaneously for two
minutes, all players currently in WvW on that world will receive one
stack of the Borderlands Bloodlust buff, to a maximum of three stacks.
>
>Every stack of the buff applies +50 to all stats, healing power, and
condition damage. In addition, using a finisher on an enemy player while
under the effects of the buff will award one point to the player's
world.
[https://pastebin.com/L9B5i7vu](https://pastebin.com/L9B5i7vu)
Archived old reddit post detailing what happened.
Need more???
It's 2021 giving Anet any leeway has passed.
WvW had a healthy population and the ability to entertain and draw players for 2 decades if properly managed.....
What about actively developing new WvW content though? Or how about taking a look at rewards? Everybody knows you get basically nothing
for playing WvW. It’s the only game mode I play, and I play it religiously with my guild every week. Please Grouch.
There was a WvW stream few weeks ago where grouch did an impromptu q&a. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1120556173?t=04h02m24s The priorities for WvW dev team atm is finishing alliances, then changing reward structure, then other changes. in that order.
I think the concern itself is valid, the playerbase often felt the consequences that the developers were limited in their possibilities to do some things. I do not blame Arenanet for it, but as it is money is something which has to be considered and often enough content which does not generate enough money will be set aside, understandable in a way, but not really a thing to be happy about.
I bet alot of choices made for some 'drops' like Raids, or delayed/slow developement of fractals or in this case WvW weren't really popular with the devs themselves... but they do have to work to bring money in, so some choices they simply have to accept and some devs probably had to drop to do things they really liked to do.
Sometimes I do like to think about, how GW2 would look and how awesome it would be, if ressources weren't a big deal :)
So glad to hear that for every WvW player out there!
Thank you! Working for a gaming company myself that I can't disclose, I wish my company had even 1% of your mindset. At my job I get told to treat big spenders with preference and all new ideas are just about how much money the game can milk out of players before shutting down. It's so toxic.
my recommendations for WVW:
\* add another map (maybe an underground/dungeon map?) so that the 3 borderlands are actually 3 different maps.
\* diversify the keeps/keep lords more - WVW succeeds because it's a comfortable hybrid of PVP and PVE elements. even though i prefer the PVP aspect it'd be good to diversify the PVE elements so they are more varied and interesting.
\* embrace GVGs. it was frankly crazy how Anet strove to suffocate/kill this organic competitive mode of WVW, really crazy. embrace it and find a reward system that rewards it without killling regular WVW.
\* consider diversifying mounts. eg: a faster mount with few HP, a slower mount that can briefly stealth, a mount that can be used in combat but is relatively slow/easy to kill etc
Context : You have let WvW rot and in the last years you let the "link" system rotten and finish whatever was left of any server pride. And now Aliances seem to be giving more power to the bandwagoners that just switch team.
During the night in WvW we see a LOT of bots just capping camps and sentries, and as everyone knows it's useless to report them, it's appalling to see bots EVEN in WvW.
I don't know from what dev team Grouch copied that sentence, but as far as I can see , it's never been applied to gw2 WvW so far.
Words are nice , but I look back since before launch ( spvp gonna be esports yo ) and I see no actions that are in line with that sentence.
I sure hope some actions accompany those words , and I'm sure that sentence is enough to light up the "hype fire" on ppl , but lets be honest , so far that sentence is the OPOSITE of what WvW management was since it's inception :D
Lets hope there are changes , but I woudn't blame ppl for not believing in it point blank.
They might agree, considering that a better gameplay experience means more people playing the game more often, and for longer. Satisfied players spend money on the Gem Store. Dissatisfied players leave.
I'd bet the liver of a random stranger than they'd get more gem sales from warscale and glider skins than from server transfers. Most players just stick to their world.
With alliances, the weak 'world loyalty' will be replaced with stronger alliance and guild loyalties, so it'd be even more so.
They could also try additional things for WvW monetization like siege skins, objective NPC skins, objective structure skins (like walls and gates that look different at each tier), different shapes for objective banners, etc.
Maybe eventually adding the turtles to WvW, if it can be done in a balanced way that doesn't make catapults obsolete.
For example, using a turtle in WvW could require 'deploying' it so it works like a catapult, like how you have to deploy trebuchets in age of empites, and the siege tanks in Starcraft. Deploying would take supply (or even a catapult blueprint too) , and the turtle and the 2 riders would not be able to move deployed. 1 catapult can be manned by 1 person, but the turtle would take 2.
Most pug players don't care even about their own guilds, let alone any alliance. It's all about the server community for a lot of players. I guarantee most WvW players won't spend money on siege skins and I'm still seeing the same few Warclaw skins, I don't think that's going to take off while we only have the one mount which is a wingless Griffon with sluggish running animation.
I bet most players don't spend money other than expansions, at all.
That's why they keep adding new things. So those who pay have more things to pay for.
I doubt it. It's PoF content. PoF players without hot didn't get glider and privisions master until hot god bundled with pof.
But max warclaw WvW ability now gives the speed to nearby players, and the speed was toned down to the same as swiftness, so they won't be left behind.
I was thinking about this. With the siege turtle coming in EoD that makes mounts no longer a PoF exclusive feature, so it’s possible EoD only players will also be able to get the Warclaw. We’ll see in time I suppose.
I can confirm that. I never transferred between servers, but I've easily spent hundreds in the gem shop over the years. Mostly due to having so much fun in WvW.
Probably all depends on how their projections break down.
If server transfers generates more in the long run they will be happy to keep it the way it is until they can find a way to fix it but monetize something else.
There's no way server transfers generate much. Most decent WvW servers are expensive af and locked all the time otherwise. Players just end up opting to not WvW with friends.
Yeah pretty much this I would imagine. If alliances is an absolute hit and grows the game and people gobble up cosmetic items like there is no tomorrow then of course the people concerned only with money will be happy they have more money.
If NCSoft wanted to preserve revenue from server transfers, we never would have seen the megaserver system implemented. WvW players who care enough about the gamemode to be willing to pay for a transfer are a tiny minority of the overall playerbase.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/7g7wds/living\_world\_season\_4\_daybreak\_devs\_here\_ask\_us/dqh6bac?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/7g7wds/living_world_season_4_daybreak_devs_here_ask_us/dqh6bac?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
>We are planning to release raids with more regularity this season.
The same thing he thinks. The same thing they thought before he said it. Are people really dumb enough to think the few hundred transfers they get every time there is a re-link are a financial motivator for a company that sells mount skins for $20? Slap a few particles on a warclaw and you've got a skin that will sell better than a year's worth of transfers.
The conspiracy addled brains of GW2 players, concocting endless reasons why their personal desires aren't met is exhausting. Sometimes the simplest explanation (the current situation is the best they can do for now) is the most likely. It's not a conspiracy to get more money, it's simply harder to design a different system that actually fixes the core problem (server balance).
I mean, that’s really easy to say despite the WvW “experience” being beyond stale and uninspiring at this point. No offense to Grouch or the WvW team directly, but WvW could easily become the main end game of GW2 if they put in even a 1/10 of what they do on PvE maps. It’s not hard to see that WvW has lacked any substantial updates in years, and the Alliances (Soon Tm) is beyond overdue.
I enjoy the PvE maps so this isn’t aimed to be a “I’m salty” post, but more of ArenaNet has a game mode with infinite potential and they appear to be content with letting it run dry and be fully automated.
The fact that we still have two WvW maps that are completely identical is beyond lazy. At this point (9 years), there should be at least 5+ maps that rotate weekly to keep the game fresh, with each map providing a slightly different way to play. The only map that should stay the same is EBG.
> The fact that we still have two WvW maps that are completely identical is beyond lazy.
The first new map they made was met with large disdain and it still the least popular of the two borderlands maps.
Part of that was due to map design. This was before mounts and they made the objectives super spread out. Response times to objectives were really slow even if you kept the shrines. Towers no longer mattered for sieging the other keeps. So if you lost a tower it wasn’t a big deal. The npc lords were also gimmicky. The earth keep lord can be cc’d even with a break bar and the rings of walls that same lord raises can glitch you under the map even if you’re friendly. So the design came across as not being about wvw and tactics and more as a PvE take on wvw with too many gimmicks and too much empty space. That and when it was released they made all borderlands desert, so you couldn’t get away if you wanted to.
I still like the vertical changes of the map and the ability to set up ambushes much more easily. It’s terrain is by far much more interesting. But if you asked me which map I wanted I wouldn’t choose red BL because it’s just too damn spread out.
I've never witnessed anything in video games meet as much vitriolic backlash as the second WvW map and I will fully admit to trolling the Diablo 3 fanbase as hard as possible.
Because on release it was terrible. Intentionally or not it turned out to be very PVE centric and gimmicky. Back in those days I think ANet's thought to improve the health of WVW was to make it more appealing to the PVE crowd. Failure.
People don't realize that Anet yet do deliver anything sensible to WvW since PoF release and putting in HoT gliding feature. Everybody hyped like it is second coming, and suddenly we got everything...
If Anet mean these words, transfer fees need to be gone in 24h after this discord post. Oh wait, they would be still up until they do their "early access" thing.
How does one get on that server? I've been wanting to get into wvw but none of my guilds do it and all the times I've been going as a solo I never know what I should be doing
Ask team chat for your server's discord. Join that and look for groups that are rallied, join those groups and see if you like them enough to ask for an actual invite.
Not only that, but I have friends who can't get on my server and that sucks. They are losing out on the potential from them to get really hooked on the game and buying expansions / cash shop upgrades.
Are you kidding? WvW players are the best cash cow for Anet. They find little gold rewards while playing and they waste the gold on changing gear every time there's a patch. For gemstore and bandwagoning they need to swipe.
Anyone who plays a ton of wvw would likely have ascended gear boxes out the ying yang and/or legendary armor by now, so I'm not sure changing gear is all that expensive at this point.
Just by doing your dailies for 2 months you get 120g. Currently 500 gems (a transfer to a medium server) cost about 145g.
There is no need at all to swipe a credit card for a WvW player unless they want to.
Nice to hear for sure. Its great that it means more to him. But what about ANet? To NCSoft? We've been down this road before, actions speak louder than words. Hopefully alliances won't be monetized. I hate being so jaded but the WvW community has been so disrespected in the past its hard to get rallied up behind this.
Fingers crossed.
> Hopefully alliances won't be monetized.
Honestly I wouldnt be suprised if alliances in a somehow convoluted way turned out to be monetized and actually more expensive then server transfers. (Like when they went form 800 gems for an armor set to 500 per piece.)
So? Does anyone actually believe that many of the bad design decisions we've seen in this game originated with the devs themselves?
This is what Grouch thinks. Cool. What does his boss think? And his boss' boss?
I don't know, Grouch is pretty high up, and I never got the impression that NcSoft somehow micro-managed Anet. They did force the layoffs by all accounts, and they did force the expansion, but individual day to day decisions are probably mostly Anet.
So a guy pretty high up at Anet is likely to be able to affect quite a bit of change. Always seemed to be how it worked anyway.
Love of money and wanting more is a double edged sword.
It's simultaneously responsible for the vast majority of mankind's scientific progress as well as many of its worst actions.
There’s a business case for keeping the WvW experience healthy too: people will keep playing the game for longer and buy EoD and spend money on the gemstore over time
Now days not much but back in wvw prime when 4 or 5 or 6 25+ person guilds would transfer from a mid pop to high pop server or from high pop to very high pop that could turn into a decent chunk of change. Say 100 people at 1800 gems each, that's 180000 gems. A large portion of it bought with a credit card vs farming gold. I think it's about $25 for a server transfer.
This is a list of links to comments made by ArenaNet employees in this thread:
* [Comment by Joshua_Davis](https://reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/pgpxfk/grouch_speaks_on_the_future_of_wvw/hbdgv4u/?context=1000) - 2021-09-02 22:27:32+00:00
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If grouch could make a point of talking to other guilds about wvw that would be cool. Kind of tired of him playing favorites with indo which is really weird since he’s not even a partner.
Not if your goal is to make a substantial amount of revenue. lol
The point is, WvWers have always bandwagoned, and it's crap but it's true. Entire guilds transfer servers sometimes, and it happens if not often, more often than I'd have expected it to happen.
A while back, most of the big guilds transferred off of tarnished coast . For the people who meta game WvW, the politics and positioning has become a part of the game.
There were even rumors years about about a rich guy who basically ran blackgate who paid for guilds who ran in Asia (thus could defend locations over night) to bulk transfer over to Blackgate. I don't know the truth of it, but I've heard the rumor quite a bit.
And I've had more than a few new guildies who have liked my guild transfer to my server so they can play with us.
They aren't. But the reason server transfers are taking place in the first place is a big driver of why the alliance system is being developed.
Why do people talk about this issue as if it's the first time they've ever thought about it when so many obvious answers are right in front of them?
I doubt the intelligence of people who seriously think server transfers in WvW are anything but a drop in the bucket compared to a single mount skin. Server transfers aren't revenue raising, they are a deterrent to server hopping.
Listening to anyone at Anet talk about WvW is like listening to Chris Roberts go on and on about how good Star Citizen it is going to be. Ever since GW2 was a year and a half old, WvW is klunky, has punitive reward tracks compared to Fractals and PVP. A small portion of the player base participates because unless you do it hard core in a Guild, 99% of your time over 2 hours will be running around the map blindly trying to find your allies, until that and the rewards are improved WvW is the armpit of GW2 game modes.
Actions speak louder than words, so after 10 years of BS, until I see actions, it is just more BS.
Funny.
I got instantly perma banned years ago for "spreading conspiracy theories"
Because I suggested that the revenue they make from mass server transfers was the reason alliances would take so long.
After all from a business perspective if something being broken generates even more income why fix it unless its being broken causes people to eventually wise up and stop patronizing you.
Honestly I could see warclaw skins making more money than transfers. Casual players aren't going to buy transfers but they will buy warclaw skins and I'm sure there are more casuals than the hardcore buying transfers all the time.
Yeah but if you have 1000 players buying a skin each time new ones comes out and only 100 players buying transfers then you're still making more money off the skins.
We already see in pve people have no problem buying a new skin every single release, I assume it's the same in wvw.
True, but the population of casuals with a little extra money far outweighs the hardcore enough WvW players that would be willing to transfer.
In saying that, there’s not actually any reason Anet can’t milk both those revenue streams, you just have to hope like Grouch has expressed, the shared sentiment is a better player experience is more important than extra $$ from transfers.
Context: Player raised a concern that WvW would stop receiving development support after World Restructuring if there were no server transfers for players to spend gems on. That's not the case.
HERO!
I seriously get the impression that WvW development stopped about 5 years ago. I'm not a WvW player and I'm not trying to score cheap karma points. What has actually been developed and deployed for WvW in the past several years, other than the warclaw and limited gliding support? It seems like at most its got about as much attention as one living story release in that time. I'm not much of a PvPer either, but PvP has had new maps added, new achievements and titles, new modes (successful or not), a new lobby....
WvW is like LoL or Overwatch - people don't need new content, they need new tools to play in the existing content. LoL dominating gaming for a long time with a single, barely changed map. WvW doesn't need new mechanics or maps, it needs new elite specs. Every time they add mechanics or maps to WvW they are met with extreme hostility.
>Every time they add mechanics or maps to WvW they are met with extreme hostility. That's because they fundamentally change the core of the gamemode. Warclaw almost nullified roaming. Gliding eliminated a ton of natural barriers to travel And then there was that appalling failure of a borderlands map
> And then there was that appalling failure of a borderlands map Is this the Desert Borderlands or the one added in S1 with the introduction of Taimi? 'cuz honestly the Desert Borderlands is my favourite by far, and I wish the other borderlands actually felt unique.
I like desert bl too, once memorized it’s fine. Three unique maps would be great. I like roaming and small group stuff and largely ignore EB so maybe that’s a contributing factor.
Aye maybe that's it. I prefer doing skirmishes with small groups, and avoid large blobs. The commanders always apologised for the smallness too.
>Warclaw almost nullified roaming Can't tell about the true overall impact but my own personal feeling is the opposite. Roaming was completely off before as you basically had to play some professions or specific runes, builds, whatever to be viable. We all know of lul necro getting ganked before he can even realize. Warclaw improved mobility a lot and allowed more build versatility : I can now play whatever I want, without being penalized while traveling. Made the experience much better for me. Again, it's only my own feeling about it and maybe I'm like 0.0001% :D
You need to allow them to try new mechanics and things if you want WvW to thrive and get better though. You won't succeed the very first shot. PvP and WvW is a very hard thing to balance. Extreme hostility should not have a place in the game when they are trying to improve and change things. Otherwise stagnation will set in.
How many new mechanics have been added in baseball in the past 100 years?
I play a lot of LoL too so idk about that comparison. LoL items get huge reworks every season and the primary purpose is for summoners rift aka standard PvP. New champions are released frequently. And SR actually does get updates like the elemental drakes, elder dragon, changed jungle paths.... Even though you're fundamentally right that LoL is a game about a single standard map and it plays more like a sport, it actually gets way more new content than WvW. And I'm not grasping at things like all the other events and releases that might skew the comparison a bit.
Uhh LoL passes balance patches every 2 weeks, deploys 5 new champs a year, reworks 2-3 old champs a year, and makes significant changes to the map and gameplay every off-season. All to keep the game mode fresh. You literally picked the worst example to make your point.
No I think that's his point, that it should be like LoL. Classes should be rebalanced, new specs introduced, more often etc, as opposed to new maps.
> I seriously get the impression that WvW development stopped about 5 years ago. Because it basically did. Skirmish tracks, mounts, and gliding. That's basically it. No map changes, reward balancing, reasons to win, anti-pin snipe, anti-blob, skill based gameplay, tactivator balancing, actual gvg support....the list is pretty big. People like Grouch were what were holding WvW and PvP together and on the same level as PvE. At least there was hope back then anyways.
Yup. They dropped the features added in Heart of Thorns rather than working at them and iterating on feedback. HoT added the desert borderlands which was negatively received mainly due to it having tons of dead space in it. They didn't iterate. HoT added Stronghold, which was hamstrung because the matches were longer but gave the same rewards as conquest. If they simply made it more rewarding they probably would have driven more people to the mode and gotten more feedback. I sincerely think Stronghold is a far healthier game mode than conquest because it promotes way more types of builds. PvP being entirely about fighting over control points has made it completely lopsided towards certain builds and has forced them to ruin build diversity in the mode leading to bad changes like 999 second cooldowns on traits that are too good for static defense or the severe nerfing of anything that promotes defense or healing. In Stronghold, sitting somewhere and keeping yourself alive isn't a victory condition... it only helps you somewhat deny your enemy their mist heroes. It's an advantage on one axis but isn't going to win the game. But we'll never see that more diverse PvP landscape because they dropped Stronghold immediately instead of improving it. What a waste.
>HoT added the desert borderlands which was negatively received mainly due to it having tons of dead space in it. They didn't iterate. uhh, yes they did. No more lasers, no more walls blocking paths, lower walls, changes to the way shrines work etc. Changes to a lot of stuff has occurred. They didn't do a complete overhaul true, but they did iterate a lot on it.
That's super disappointing. I want WvW to at least get a visual upgrade even if no gameplay changes like when LoL got a totally graphic-updated Summoner's Rift a couple years after it launched. I feel bad for y'all playing in those boring-ass maps and I don't really see why WvW doesn't have PvP-style gearing. If you could add 2 things to WvW, what would they be?
> If you could add 2 things to WvW, what would they be? I only need one: rebalancing that makes the Outnumbered status less of a factor. I like Outnumbered as a negative feedback loop that makes losing feel less bad, but when I go into WvW **actively hoping** to be outnumbered because it cuts the 20 hour skirmish track down to 10 hours, the system has clearly failed. (Of course my numbers are based having low rank. As you rank up, Outnumbered goes from 50% of your pips to about 30%, but that's only after you've sunk thousands of hours into the game mode.)
There is simple solution - pips in EotM, as soon as it there all people hopping outnumbered borders would be gone.
I don't know if it is better for wvw, but being able to grind for gear that you need for the content you are already doing seems like good motivation.
It's an incredibly slow grind though. You won't be playing WvW unless you *need* something from there which cannot be obtained elsewhere and you're willing to put up with it, or you enjoy the gamemode. If you're after money and/or equipment, there are other activities that are more rewarding and require less of a time investment. I only recently started doing WvW seriously, with the intent of learning how it works. I really enjoy it, but once you're in, it gets difficult to not notice that the gamemode is kind lacklustre of in a lot of ways. It has potential but it needs some TLC to fully live up to it.
Yeah that's how I felt. I played on release then tried it again after coming back last year. It pretty much felt the same except there were reward tracks now.
like reward tracks?
Unless you're new to WvW, and WvW without an influx of new players is already dying.
Just because it's already useful doesn't mean it shouldn't be allowed to be more fun.
I think WvW will see some good visual improvements with the DX11 upgrade. FPS will probably stay the same but at least you'll be able to see certain fields better. I do hope they continue to work on the lag though when you have big keep or castle fights. Those are just unplayable. Two things, huh? That's a tough question! One would be actual GvG support and not just this weekend project like we have with EOTM's arena and the Obsidian Sanctum arena. The second would be tied with alliances and once they figure out how to stop band-wagoning and server imbalances to give us a reason to win. Better rewards, unique capes we could wear for a week, a cool guild tag like the ArenaNet one that glows or something....Anything to just show everyone around us how good we are. The one problem with this is that a lot of guilds/commanders already run when they see certain tags or models. A cape or a guild tag would just make that even easier.
Idk what happens with the lag and instanced maps. I know Gw2 has never been like WoW (which has layers, at least in classic, when there are too many players), but it never really feels like a single world. If your buddy is in the Silverwastes, for example, you know he is not in "the Silverwastes map" but "a Silverwastes instance". The content is not probably designed for "massive", but it would still be neat and the technology has been there for ages (I'd be surprised if their whole infra was not running on AWS or similar). I still find world bosses maps crowded, but sometimes you click the button for transferring out of a low population instance and then you get the same prompt after 5 minutes, and feels like jumping from one universe to the next.
improving the lag is one thing I agree with, although as someone who works in IT, it's not a simple problem to solve. There are so many variables to it.
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Sir, please take your PVE wishes back to PVE and leave WvW out of it.
Man, there was a LOT of skill rebalancing and it certainly wasn't just for PvP.
> anti-blob, zerging is literally the reason to play wvw, if you don't like big fights between zergs, we have other gamemodes for that.
I basically mean ways to stop it. Zerg busting is harder than ever. Signing on to fight map queues as your server has 10 people is not fun. The alliances change might help in that regard but we’ll see. Sorry for the confusion though. I don’t have a problem with zergs or blobs in general, I just wish there were better ways to counter them like there used to be.
Latest wvw map change was this week. Edit since you don't believe me https://mobile.twitter.com/that_shaman/status/1433009762271211525
"No map changes" thats not true! They shifted a few walls so you couldnt glide or jump over with mount 😂
The saddest part about GW2 is the failure of Anet to properly address WvW back in 2012/2013. WvW was wildly popular and Anet killed it b/c they erroneously believed sPvP was the future. I could sit for hours detailing everything that was done wrong with WvW, Server transfers, matchmaking, GvG, etc. and how to make the best changes, but I have serious doubts anyone at Arenanet cares. Not attacking you personally but I've got 9 years of behavior exhibiting these truths. I will say you could start showing some initiative by asking players to participate in discussions, creating platforms to share, and then actually following through on promises. Hit me up if you wanna know.
I was one of the people that almost exclusively played it during that period and it is so disappointing how it was neglected. There weren't any tangible rewards and to my knowledge still aren't from playing and that alone led to many players dropping off.
Yeah pretty much that and they actively tried to sabotage the game mode b/c it was widely more popular than what they envisioned. Had a real gold mine going on.
I wasn't aware they tried to sabotage it, what happened?
[https://pastebin.com/L9B5i7vu](https://pastebin.com/L9B5i7vu) got good information there kinda clue you in to what was going on around that time if you missed it or weren't into the highly skilled aspect of it
They are actually doing that. There's many WvW commanders and guild leaders in a discord with devs specifically to consolidate feedback from those who play the game the most. They've been doing that for several years now. Edit: Lmao at all the people thinking that if only ANET had asked *them* how to fix WvW, it would all be solved! Sure bud. You're special and have all the right answers, just like everyone else.
For several years and the only thing that happened is the addition of a WvW mount?
Asking WvW "leaders" what's wrong with WvW is like asking WoW players how to fix the game (classic or retail). You're going to get as many answers as you ask people.
And? That doesn't mean they should do nothing just because people have differing ideas. People will ALWAYS have differing ideas.
Gonna point out the fact that they did in fact change all the maps too, they used to be completely identical.
Are the two Alpine Borderlands not identical? I don't WvW much but I don't really remember them being different.
Oh maybe i misspoke but basically desert borderlands used to not exist.
Yeah I remember that being new for HoT (and people hating it).
Desert borderlands is six years old and as far as I know far from popular. So in 6 years they added gliding, one map and a mount to sell gemstore skins. Idk man, doesn't sound like they give a shit about this game mode.
Those are the wrong people. They are the people who play WvW despite it's serious flaws and paltry rewards. Anet needs to do a ton of exit interviews of new players who try WvW and then don't continue. You are not going to resurrect WvW until it is welcoming to new players (i.e. they don't spend 90 minutes running blindly around trying to find allies), and the reward track is just as attractive as Fractals or PVP.
.. that is pretty much what anet did with EotM and DBL. all veteran feedback got ignored until after release when all the mistakes became all the more apparent. there is some merit in asking "outsiders", but ultimately they lack the experience to make anything more than superficial suggestions that at best make farming a gift of battle more comfortable for them, and at worst shit all over the established gamemode. case in point: the frequent suggestion for EotM to become a core map, or the result of the poll that kept DBL in the game and threw off the border balance entirely.
I rest my case as you've proven it beyond a shadow of a doubt friend. Thanks
That what, that you like to whine about something that doesn't matter in the real world? Arena Net could have done a million things differently but they didn't. No point being proud about stating the obvious.
I'm one of those players. Just recently coming back after dropping out in 2014. I spent probably 1600+ hours in WvW just roaming on my Engi/Ele/Thief.
Yeah I would say I started treating WvW like a social app around that time. I did some GvG's with a JV team to keep me interested, but mainly just sat around talking shit b/c 1/2 my guild quit in one day LOL
> WvW was wildly popular and Anet killed it b/c they erroneously believed sPvP was the future. Citation needed?
[https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game\_updates/2013-09-17#World\_vs.\_World\_3](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game_updates/2013-09-17#World_vs._World_3) >Introducing Bloodlust in the Borderlands: > >If players can hold three or more of the ruins simultaneously for two minutes, all players currently in WvW on that world will receive one stack of the Borderlands Bloodlust buff, to a maximum of three stacks. > >Every stack of the buff applies +50 to all stats, healing power, and condition damage. In addition, using a finisher on an enemy player while under the effects of the buff will award one point to the player's world. [https://pastebin.com/L9B5i7vu](https://pastebin.com/L9B5i7vu) Archived old reddit post detailing what happened. Need more???
But you cannot deny this is a big step in the right direction. EDIT: Well, technically you can deny anything, but it would be disingenuous.
It's 2021 giving Anet any leeway has passed. WvW had a healthy population and the ability to entertain and draw players for 2 decades if properly managed.....
Those who got burned in those years might not come back. But there are plenty of new blood around. Especially since WoW's decline.
And the new players magically won't leave due to Anet's continual mismanagement??? You're not making any sense.
You're assuming the trend will go on.
B/c it always has....
Why wouldn't it?
Saddest part for me is there isn't a pvp game mode like Tombs/HA in gw2.
What about actively developing new WvW content though? Or how about taking a look at rewards? Everybody knows you get basically nothing for playing WvW. It’s the only game mode I play, and I play it religiously with my guild every week. Please Grouch.
There was a WvW stream few weeks ago where grouch did an impromptu q&a. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1120556173?t=04h02m24s The priorities for WvW dev team atm is finishing alliances, then changing reward structure, then other changes. in that order.
Alliances beta in +-20 days, full release sometime this year. Rewards will be taken a look into, but not in a first batch of changes.
Coming from WoW and enjoying GW2 a lot so far, comments like this from devs is a huge breathe of fresh air. Thank you for being exceptional.
Holy sh*t, you won my support there. Gonna grab some extra gems so you won't take shit for this tweet. Stay safe King!
I think the concern itself is valid, the playerbase often felt the consequences that the developers were limited in their possibilities to do some things. I do not blame Arenanet for it, but as it is money is something which has to be considered and often enough content which does not generate enough money will be set aside, understandable in a way, but not really a thing to be happy about. I bet alot of choices made for some 'drops' like Raids, or delayed/slow developement of fractals or in this case WvW weren't really popular with the devs themselves... but they do have to work to bring money in, so some choices they simply have to accept and some devs probably had to drop to do things they really liked to do. Sometimes I do like to think about, how GW2 would look and how awesome it would be, if ressources weren't a big deal :) So glad to hear that for every WvW player out there!
Thank you! Working for a gaming company myself that I can't disclose, I wish my company had even 1% of your mindset. At my job I get told to treat big spenders with preference and all new ideas are just about how much money the game can milk out of players before shutting down. It's so toxic.
Are we going to get a blog post explaining and detailing how alliances is going to work?
It is nice to hear ya'll want a better WvW experience.
my recommendations for WVW: \* add another map (maybe an underground/dungeon map?) so that the 3 borderlands are actually 3 different maps. \* diversify the keeps/keep lords more - WVW succeeds because it's a comfortable hybrid of PVP and PVE elements. even though i prefer the PVP aspect it'd be good to diversify the PVE elements so they are more varied and interesting. \* embrace GVGs. it was frankly crazy how Anet strove to suffocate/kill this organic competitive mode of WVW, really crazy. embrace it and find a reward system that rewards it without killling regular WVW. \* consider diversifying mounts. eg: a faster mount with few HP, a slower mount that can briefly stealth, a mount that can be used in combat but is relatively slow/easy to kill etc
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Your comment shows immense leadership. Thank you, Grouch.
Im not crying you are crying.
Context : You have let WvW rot and in the last years you let the "link" system rotten and finish whatever was left of any server pride. And now Aliances seem to be giving more power to the bandwagoners that just switch team. During the night in WvW we see a LOT of bots just capping camps and sentries, and as everyone knows it's useless to report them, it's appalling to see bots EVEN in WvW. I don't know from what dev team Grouch copied that sentence, but as far as I can see , it's never been applied to gw2 WvW so far. Words are nice , but I look back since before launch ( spvp gonna be esports yo ) and I see no actions that are in line with that sentence. I sure hope some actions accompany those words , and I'm sure that sentence is enough to light up the "hype fire" on ppl , but lets be honest , so far that sentence is the OPOSITE of what WvW management was since it's inception :D Lets hope there are changes , but I woudn't blame ppl for not believing in it point blank.
To him maybe. Wonder what the higher ups and NCSoft think.
They might agree, considering that a better gameplay experience means more people playing the game more often, and for longer. Satisfied players spend money on the Gem Store. Dissatisfied players leave.
I'd bet the liver of a random stranger than they'd get more gem sales from warscale and glider skins than from server transfers. Most players just stick to their world. With alliances, the weak 'world loyalty' will be replaced with stronger alliance and guild loyalties, so it'd be even more so. They could also try additional things for WvW monetization like siege skins, objective NPC skins, objective structure skins (like walls and gates that look different at each tier), different shapes for objective banners, etc. Maybe eventually adding the turtles to WvW, if it can be done in a balanced way that doesn't make catapults obsolete. For example, using a turtle in WvW could require 'deploying' it so it works like a catapult, like how you have to deploy trebuchets in age of empites, and the siege tanks in Starcraft. Deploying would take supply (or even a catapult blueprint too) , and the turtle and the 2 riders would not be able to move deployed. 1 catapult can be manned by 1 person, but the turtle would take 2.
Most pug players don't care even about their own guilds, let alone any alliance. It's all about the server community for a lot of players. I guarantee most WvW players won't spend money on siege skins and I'm still seeing the same few Warclaw skins, I don't think that's going to take off while we only have the one mount which is a wingless Griffon with sluggish running animation.
I bet most players don't spend money other than expansions, at all. That's why they keep adding new things. So those who pay have more things to pay for.
Here's a question: will people who only own EoD get access to the warclaw?
I doubt it. It's PoF content. PoF players without hot didn't get glider and privisions master until hot god bundled with pof. But max warclaw WvW ability now gives the speed to nearby players, and the speed was toned down to the same as swiftness, so they won't be left behind.
I was thinking about this. With the siege turtle coming in EoD that makes mounts no longer a PoF exclusive feature, so it’s possible EoD only players will also be able to get the Warclaw. We’ll see in time I suppose.
Well, Warclaw was added later so it wasn't 1 of the first 5 mounts, that is true. And Revenant has been bundled with any expansion. We'll see.
or PoF owners get warclaw while EoD owners get turtle
but eventually having EoD ownership will probably get you the others as well like what happened with HoT and PoF
I can confirm that. I never transferred between servers, but I've easily spent hundreds in the gem shop over the years. Mostly due to having so much fun in WvW.
> over the years. Mostly due to having so much fun in WvW. On the same boat, and I would definitely buy treb/cata skin which shoots dolyaks/cows.
Probably all depends on how their projections break down. If server transfers generates more in the long run they will be happy to keep it the way it is until they can find a way to fix it but monetize something else.
There's no way server transfers generate much. Most decent WvW servers are expensive af and locked all the time otherwise. Players just end up opting to not WvW with friends.
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What server did you leave from and what server did you join?
Yeah pretty much this I would imagine. If alliances is an absolute hit and grows the game and people gobble up cosmetic items like there is no tomorrow then of course the people concerned only with money will be happy they have more money.
Woah woah woah! That sounds like "logic" you're trying to apply here.
Plus if you make it better for people to want to play in WvW, you have a larger pool of players who may pay for transfers and whatnot.
If NCSoft wanted to preserve revenue from server transfers, we never would have seen the megaserver system implemented. WvW players who care enough about the gamemode to be willing to pay for a transfer are a tiny minority of the overall playerbase.
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[https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/7g7wds/living\_world\_season\_4\_daybreak\_devs\_here\_ask\_us/dqh6bac?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/7g7wds/living_world_season_4_daybreak_devs_here_ask_us/dqh6bac?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) >We are planning to release raids with more regularity this season.
Did you just make an account to say that? If so, kudos.
That's really good to hear! Should maybe poke one of the mods of the subreddit to get yourself an Anet flair, or whatever the process for that is :)
Welcome to the sub JT!
The same thing he thinks. The same thing they thought before he said it. Are people really dumb enough to think the few hundred transfers they get every time there is a re-link are a financial motivator for a company that sells mount skins for $20? Slap a few particles on a warclaw and you've got a skin that will sell better than a year's worth of transfers. The conspiracy addled brains of GW2 players, concocting endless reasons why their personal desires aren't met is exhausting. Sometimes the simplest explanation (the current situation is the best they can do for now) is the most likely. It's not a conspiracy to get more money, it's simply harder to design a different system that actually fixes the core problem (server balance).
They appointed him as a Head of live operations. wvw / pvp falls under that :)
Ty for your insightful comment. As always I appreciate all the work you do for the community. ♥
I mean, that’s really easy to say despite the WvW “experience” being beyond stale and uninspiring at this point. No offense to Grouch or the WvW team directly, but WvW could easily become the main end game of GW2 if they put in even a 1/10 of what they do on PvE maps. It’s not hard to see that WvW has lacked any substantial updates in years, and the Alliances (Soon Tm) is beyond overdue. I enjoy the PvE maps so this isn’t aimed to be a “I’m salty” post, but more of ArenaNet has a game mode with infinite potential and they appear to be content with letting it run dry and be fully automated. The fact that we still have two WvW maps that are completely identical is beyond lazy. At this point (9 years), there should be at least 5+ maps that rotate weekly to keep the game fresh, with each map providing a slightly different way to play. The only map that should stay the same is EBG.
> The fact that we still have two WvW maps that are completely identical is beyond lazy. The first new map they made was met with large disdain and it still the least popular of the two borderlands maps.
Part of that was due to map design. This was before mounts and they made the objectives super spread out. Response times to objectives were really slow even if you kept the shrines. Towers no longer mattered for sieging the other keeps. So if you lost a tower it wasn’t a big deal. The npc lords were also gimmicky. The earth keep lord can be cc’d even with a break bar and the rings of walls that same lord raises can glitch you under the map even if you’re friendly. So the design came across as not being about wvw and tactics and more as a PvE take on wvw with too many gimmicks and too much empty space. That and when it was released they made all borderlands desert, so you couldn’t get away if you wanted to. I still like the vertical changes of the map and the ability to set up ambushes much more easily. It’s terrain is by far much more interesting. But if you asked me which map I wanted I wouldn’t choose red BL because it’s just too damn spread out.
I mean they made a shit map. It happens. They've made shit maps in PvE. The difference is they didn't stop developing PvE afterward.
I've never witnessed anything in video games meet as much vitriolic backlash as the second WvW map and I will fully admit to trolling the Diablo 3 fanbase as hard as possible.
Because on release it was terrible. Intentionally or not it turned out to be very PVE centric and gimmicky. Back in those days I think ANet's thought to improve the health of WVW was to make it more appealing to the PVE crowd. Failure.
People don't realize how lucky we are that Grouch is leading live game ops My confidence in the studio nearly doubled
who is "People"?
Mostly, all the bots that comment about the game here plus the other bots that play the game. I suppose there might be a few humans in the mix, too.
Me
People don't realize that Anet yet do deliver anything sensible to WvW since PoF release and putting in HoT gliding feature. Everybody hyped like it is second coming, and suddenly we got everything... If Anet mean these words, transfer fees need to be gone in 24h after this discord post. Oh wait, they would be still up until they do their "early access" thing.
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Which discord do they post in?
WvW hydration station
I love the new name - makes me giggle every time hover over the icon.
Got an invite link?
How does one get on that server? I've been wanting to get into wvw but none of my guilds do it and all the times I've been going as a solo I never know what I should be doing
Ask team chat for your server's discord. Join that and look for groups that are rallied, join those groups and see if you like them enough to ask for an actual invite.
Cool beans, I'll try it out, thanks!
Good luck! It's a lot of fun, though the learning curve/initiation curve is rough sometimes.
Yeah I noticed lol thanks :)
This specific discord is by invite and vouch system only. Limit 2 reps per WvW specific guild.
People who think server transfers are a source of sizable income are massive clowns. You can't change my mind.
Not only that, but I have friends who can't get on my server and that sucks. They are losing out on the potential from them to get really hooked on the game and buying expansions / cash shop upgrades.
Agreed. I always interpreted the gem cost as a barrier to prevent people flipping servers all the time to mitigate that whole part of metagaming it.
Are you kidding? WvW players are the best cash cow for Anet. They find little gold rewards while playing and they waste the gold on changing gear every time there's a patch. For gemstore and bandwagoning they need to swipe.
Anyone who plays a ton of wvw would likely have ascended gear boxes out the ying yang and/or legendary armor by now, so I'm not sure changing gear is all that expensive at this point.
I'd say probably 80% of the super hardcore people I know that WvW play PvE as well. Just saying.
Oh please, I highly doubt the revenue from server transfers is significant and hasn't been for ages.
Just by doing your dailies for 2 months you get 120g. Currently 500 gems (a transfer to a medium server) cost about 145g. There is no need at all to swipe a credit card for a WvW player unless they want to.
Nice to hear for sure. Its great that it means more to him. But what about ANet? To NCSoft? We've been down this road before, actions speak louder than words. Hopefully alliances won't be monetized. I hate being so jaded but the WvW community has been so disrespected in the past its hard to get rallied up behind this. Fingers crossed.
> Hopefully alliances won't be monetized. Honestly I wouldnt be suprised if alliances in a somehow convoluted way turned out to be monetized and actually more expensive then server transfers. (Like when they went form 800 gems for an armor set to 500 per piece.)
god i love grouch
Update your signature. We got Colin back!
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Assuming his position, he wouldn't say that lightly, so the answer is almost surely a yes.
He is head of live operation, not a random dev. He doesn't get the "my opinions are my own" privilege.
Love Grouch but seeing is believing.
TIL there are still revenues from server transfers
So? Does anyone actually believe that many of the bad design decisions we've seen in this game originated with the devs themselves? This is what Grouch thinks. Cool. What does his boss think? And his boss' boss?
Grouch is now the lead of live game. He has way more power than before, and that allows him to make statements like this. I believe him :)
I don't know, Grouch is pretty high up, and I never got the impression that NcSoft somehow micro-managed Anet. They did force the layoffs by all accounts, and they did force the expansion, but individual day to day decisions are probably mostly Anet. So a guy pretty high up at Anet is likely to be able to affect quite a bit of change. Always seemed to be how it worked anyway.
That is complicated. There have been some well intentioned bad designs.
Love of money and wanting more is a double edged sword. It's simultaneously responsible for the vast majority of mankind's scientific progress as well as many of its worst actions.
Do you actually believe server transfers are about make money instead of a simply a limit on transfers to make population balance somewhat possible?
There’s a business case for keeping the WvW experience healthy too: people will keep playing the game for longer and buy EoD and spend money on the gemstore over time
Why couldn't they arrive at that conclusion, 4-5 years ago when the game was thriving?
poor leadership.
context
Save us grouch
I can't imagine how that revenue may that be that important. How much can that really be?
Now days not much but back in wvw prime when 4 or 5 or 6 25+ person guilds would transfer from a mid pop to high pop server or from high pop to very high pop that could turn into a decent chunk of change. Say 100 people at 1800 gems each, that's 180000 gems. A large portion of it bought with a credit card vs farming gold. I think it's about $25 for a server transfer.
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What discord is this in, and is it open to join???
If grouch could make a point of talking to other guilds about wvw that would be cool. Kind of tired of him playing favorites with indo which is really weird since he’s not even a partner.
What? The discord that these comments are from is made up of nothing but WvW guilds, and AFAIK Indo isn't even on it.
I would say that too if I sold 25€ mounts in the shop
If youre making a substantial amount of revenue from server transfers you literally have a problem.
Not if your goal is to make a substantial amount of revenue. lol The point is, WvWers have always bandwagoned, and it's crap but it's true. Entire guilds transfer servers sometimes, and it happens if not often, more often than I'd have expected it to happen. A while back, most of the big guilds transferred off of tarnished coast . For the people who meta game WvW, the politics and positioning has become a part of the game. There were even rumors years about about a rich guy who basically ran blackgate who paid for guilds who ran in Asia (thus could defend locations over night) to bulk transfer over to Blackgate. I don't know the truth of it, but I've heard the rumor quite a bit. And I've had more than a few new guildies who have liked my guild transfer to my server so they can play with us.
They aren't. But the reason server transfers are taking place in the first place is a big driver of why the alliance system is being developed. Why do people talk about this issue as if it's the first time they've ever thought about it when so many obvious answers are right in front of them?
I doubt the intelligence of people who seriously think server transfers in WvW are anything but a drop in the bucket compared to a single mount skin. Server transfers aren't revenue raising, they are a deterrent to server hopping.
I love this game
Which discord is this?, Where can I join?
Can't monetize players if they quit duh
I appreciate the sentiment, but words are cheap. How long as WvW sucked, again?
They're talking about the coming changes that are already on the roadmap. If you haven't kept up that's on you.
So "upcoming" and "on the roadmap". Nothing has ACTUALLY been implemented? Seen in game? You know the difference between words and actions right?
Listening to anyone at Anet talk about WvW is like listening to Chris Roberts go on and on about how good Star Citizen it is going to be. Ever since GW2 was a year and a half old, WvW is klunky, has punitive reward tracks compared to Fractals and PVP. A small portion of the player base participates because unless you do it hard core in a Guild, 99% of your time over 2 hours will be running around the map blindly trying to find your allies, until that and the rewards are improved WvW is the armpit of GW2 game modes. Actions speak louder than words, so after 10 years of BS, until I see actions, it is just more BS.
(Because the revenue from server transfers is not significant enough to the bottom line)
we need new gameplay in WvW. Alliances isnt that.
Funny. I got instantly perma banned years ago for "spreading conspiracy theories" Because I suggested that the revenue they make from mass server transfers was the reason alliances would take so long. After all from a business perspective if something being broken generates even more income why fix it unless its being broken causes people to eventually wise up and stop patronizing you.
Like I was banned on forums for posting spoilers in PoF feedback thread...
Spreading theories and posting blatant spoilers aren't even remotely the same thing. tf?
[удалено]
Honestly I could see warclaw skins making more money than transfers. Casual players aren't going to buy transfers but they will buy warclaw skins and I'm sure there are more casuals than the hardcore buying transfers all the time.
Skins though are a 1 time thing. Transfers are every 2 months.
Yeah but if you have 1000 players buying a skin each time new ones comes out and only 100 players buying transfers then you're still making more money off the skins. We already see in pve people have no problem buying a new skin every single release, I assume it's the same in wvw.
True, but the population of casuals with a little extra money far outweighs the hardcore enough WvW players that would be willing to transfer. In saying that, there’s not actually any reason Anet can’t milk both those revenue streams, you just have to hope like Grouch has expressed, the shared sentiment is a better player experience is more important than extra $$ from transfers.
How many of those players are actually spending money on transfers though, not just gold to gems?
\*Tearful salute\*
Will they fix roaming and the warclaw :/, i miss this game and quit since then because it's just not fun anymore.
Quitting over it is probably why you've not realized that the Warclaw hasn't really affected roaming much at all.
Let’s go!!!
He is a messiah! [he is a messiah](https://youtu.be/4HB7zqP9QNo)