Guild Wars 2 Catch All

Well, you can go faster so quantity/time does go up, but I don't think there's any qualitative difference based on grouping.

I'd be surprised if the difficulty scaling of events for larger groups has any impact on loot tables, those are probably bound to the baseline difficulty of the event/mob.. which is also probably part of the issue with not getting loot appropriate to your true level when downscaled. because the loot table roll isn't based on your level(real or scaled) but on that of the mob/event.

I don't know if it's proven, but there is a widespread belief that grouping leads to MORE and BETTER loot. That's why you'll see people in the 80's zones who are running event chains together just forming random groups.

In addition, Badges of Honor apparently drop more frequently in WvW if you're in a party as well. (And I certainly seem to see this effect when I play.)

Costing more to transfer to a high population server and blocking moves to full servers is smart, should help spread people around.

Really great news on all counts.

Scratched wrote:

Costing more to transfer to a high population server and blocking moves to full servers is smart, should help spread people around.

I don't see this being the case. Nobody is going to transfer without a specific reason for choosing a particular server. If their desired destination server is high cost they'll either pay it or just not move at all.

I see it as making people slightly less likely to move at all, but can't imagine anyone is going to look at the list and say "Wow! I can transfer to Lowpop Crapserver for only 200 gems, let me at it!"

The fact that they've allowed free transfers up to this point shows that the highest population servers are apparently occupied by people not bothered by queues.

Elycion wrote:

...Nobody is going to transfer without a specific reason for choosing a particular server. If their desired destination server is high cost they'll either pay it or just not move at all.

I see it as making people slightly less likely to move at all, but can't imagine anyone is going to look at the list and say "Wow! I can transfer to Lowpop Crapserver for only 200 gems, let me at it!"

The first example that pops into my head is: random new group of friends decide to start playing together and form a guild, 3 of those players are on server A, 3 are on server B, 3 are on server C...

"hey guys which of our 3 servers has the lowest pop, that way we can all transfer there for cheap"

GrandmaFunk wrote:

"hey guys which of our 3 servers has the lowest pop, that way we can all transfer there for cheap"

Precisely. It's not preventing moving to the high pop, but there's an incentive to move to the low pop.

The only place I can see it being a problem is guilds in it for the WvW or people who want to be on a glorious server, but I think most guilds that exist now for WvW are already placed, I know one big WvW guild on my server upped and left, but for the future they'll have to think a bit more about it.

Scratched wrote:

The only place I can see it being a problem is guilds in it for the WvW or people who want to be on a glorious server, but I think most guilds that exist now for WvW are already placed, I know one big WvW guild on my server upped and left, but for the future they'll have to think a bit more about it.

One trend that's being happening lately is guilds have been leaving top tier servers for lower tier servers. (For easier match-ups? For the challenge of dragging a weaker server up by its bootstraps? For the hell of it?) See Kaineng and Maguuma for two recent prominent examples of recipients of this trend.

It'll be interesting to see if the guilds that moved to the lower tiers stay there, or bail now that free server transfers are coming to an end.

It would not surprise me to see some metagaming going on with it.

Man, speaking of server transfers; now, Northern Shiverpeaks has always been loitering near the bottom of the world WvW rankings; but holy hand grenade batman; we have gotten slaughtered by Kaineng...I've heard talk that a bunch of tier one wvw guilds transferred over, but I can't seem to find out what *makes* for a tier one; I dunno if it's numbers or skill or what makes the difference; but damn, we're getting squished like bugs:

http://mos.millenium.org/servers/vie...

Edit to add: Apparently, we are also the worst server in the world for WvW score. That's kinda sad...http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA I mean, someone has to be, but now I'm wondering, since I really like WvW, if I should move to a server with a dedicated WvW player base, and guest on Shiverpeaks for dungeons and running around. Hmmm.

duckideva wrote:

Edit to add: Apparently, we are also the worst server in the world for WvW score. That's kinda sad...http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA I mean, someone has to be, but now I'm wondering, since I really like WvW, if I should move to a server with a dedicated WvW player base, and guest on Shiverpeaks for dungeons and running around. Hmmm.

We have the worst current score because everyone stopped playing after saturday morning when we were already 100k in the hole... after having gone through the same problem with the previous DR matchup... morale is low and ppl just don't bother when they know it's going to be a blowout. That being said, we've always held our own and done well against servers of the same caliber.

as for "since I really like WvW, if I should move to a server with a dedicated WvW player base" ... that attitude accounts for half of our problem. We lost several big guilds over December because of it.. and desertion hurts much more permanently than other servers getting large transfers.

Yeah. Did Os move? I know War Machine moved to Kaeneng, and that's why we're getting treated like warm butter near toast, but I usually follow Os guys around, but I haven't seen them since this new matchup. Meow is out there a lot, and they have pretty good commanders, if anyone would actually listen to them. But the last time I went out in EB; kain had our team backed up to the portals, and had a zerg so big it wasn't worth even trying to break through. (To be fair; I died 3x trying to rez others and get out, but they had 30+ people on each exit.) They also seem to have longer reach than we do; they could hit me with things like the necro pull, when I couldn't even hit them with a staff. How they were getting that extra 400 yards out of the spell, I cannot figure out. Cause I would spec for it if I could.

But you're right, even with the last set of matchups, where we were still getting stomped a bit; I had a good time running around out there. I died a lot, and got almost no badges, but it was fun. And I do have a regular run going with a west coast group on Fri and Sat nights for some late night zerging. I'm probably just annoyed at being stomped so hard by War Machine.

duckideva wrote:

Yeah. Did Os move? I know War Machine moved to Kaeneng, and that's why we're getting treated like warm butter near toast, but I usually follow Os guys around, but I haven't seen them since this new matchup. Meow is out there a lot, and they have pretty good commanders, if anyone would actually listen to them. But the last time I went out in EB; kain had our team backed up to the portals, and had a zerg so big it wasn't worth even trying to break through. (To be fair; I died 3x trying to rez others and get out, but they had 30+ people on each exit.) They also seem to have longer reach than we do; they could hit me with things like the necro pull, when I couldn't even hit them with a staff. How they were getting that extra 400 yards out of the spell, I cannot figure out. Cause I would spec for it if I could.

But you're right, even with the last set of matchups, where we were still getting stomped a bit; I had a good time running around out there. I died a lot, and got almost no badges, but it was fun. And I do have a regular run going with a west coast group on Fri and Sat nights for some late night zerging. I'm probably just annoyed at being stomped so hard by War Machine.

It probably was not extra range as much as the zerg invisibility bug - when you get allot of people together they do not always show up on your machine in a timely manner. I have been killed by invisible warriors before.

I find many of the OS commanders other than Birdsong to be a bit arrogant. I remember one commanding me not to repair a breach in a wall because it might get trebbed again, but there was an enemy Zerg coming in fast. I mentioned this to him, but basically told me I did not know anything. Guess what? It was not trebbed again and kept the Zerg out, but he and his toadies had to berate me for questioning their judgment.

Many of the NSP commanders tend to want to command instead of persuade, not realizing they paid 100 G's for a title and a little marker that shows where they are on a map . . . and no real authority over others.

My annoyance with NSP WvW is this: People rarely bother defending upgraded structures, often with siege, so people are reluctant to upgrade structures, yet upgraded structures make winning easier. I spent 5 G Saturday before last fully upgrading two supply camps and purchasing 3 upgrades each for a keep and tower in the south west corner of our border lands map. I had to log to help my son with some stuff, and when I got on a hour and a half later, all the upgraded areas were overrun. I have seen this happen again and again.

Yeah, I wish the game had built in voice chat for things like battlegrounds, so I could tell people to stop taking the supplies from keeps we're trying to improve, and to get their asses over to the supply camp.

I think the problem with defending is that there's no points/badges in it, compared to zerging, and so everyone zergs. There should be points/badges awarded for those who upgrade and defend.

Well, defending is a bit like fishing.. you have to be ok with standing on a wall for potentially 20+ minutes without anything happening.. and that's understandably not that fun.

and I've actually done this, sit in a tower, refreshing the sieges, reporting in team chat any enemy movement as I saw small groups run by... but in the end, when the enemy did show up after about 20 minutes... they were 30+, i was alone.. me being there made little difference.

Running yaks from camp to keep/tower and beating up NPCs along the way is a decent compromise between sitting idle while defending a point, and just running off with a zerg. If the yak is attacked by a player or NPC, you get xp and karma for the event. Refreshing siege every few trips is a good idea too.

Another activity that could use a more tangible reward is resurrecting allies during battle. I have a neat healing build for my mesmer, but I rarely play it because I sacrifice the ability to get badges for the utility of res'ing my teammates. Giving resurectors a chance to get lootbags would be a nice addition.

Yeah, rezzing should totally be worth points, agreed.

Edit: Hey, how often do the server matches change? In other words, when will we be rid of Kaeneng?

Every week, starting Friday at reset time. So in about 32 hours we'll be rid of Kaineng and be up against Anvil Rock and Borliss Pass.

That is the thing though. Badges do not seem an important enough currency to actually change the whole shape of the game. You can use them to buy overpriced yellow items (dungeon items superior), buy siege equipment (from what I understand), or get enough for a Gift of Battle for a legendary item, which, I might add, has the same stats as items you can get much easier from doing dungeons (eg. Compare Frostfang with a Ghastly Axe).

Rumor has it that more gear will be coming that you can spend badges on.

duckideva:

GrandmaFunk's answer is correct for this week. In a more general sense, the WvW game resets every Friday around 7pm EST. New match-ups are based on the points ladder, which you can see here:

http://mos.millenium.org/matchups#NA

You can see the current score for the round, current rating, and expected rating for next round on the site. The bottom half of the page predicts the next match-ups assuming that the ratings points stay the same.

And so the bleeding commences.. one of the main Os commanders just confirmed that a bunch of our smaller overnight guilds just jumped ship to Kaineng and other servers last night.

Edit: ugh, apparently this now also includes Meow.

GrandmaFunk wrote:

And so the bleeding commences.. one of the main Os commanders just confirmed that a bunch of our smaller overnight guilds just jumped ship to Kaineng and other servers last night.

Edit: ugh, apparently this now also includes Meow.

Oh. damn.

GrandmaFunk wrote:

And so the bleeding commences.. one of the main Os commanders just confirmed that a bunch of our smaller overnight guilds just jumped ship to Kaineng and other servers last night.

Edit: ugh, apparently this now also includes Meow.

Maybe it's a blessing.
Maybe if we lose enough then a couple of guilds will decide they want to come own Tier 9billion and join us.
Then the crazy ranking system will shoot us up 3 tiers higher than we should be, then we'll settle back down where we are, but with a couple more WvW guilds.

Bwaaaaahahahahahahahahahaha! I crack myself up.

GrandmaFunk wrote:

And so the bleeding commences.. one of the main Os commanders just confirmed that a bunch of our smaller overnight guilds just jumped ship to Kaineng and other servers last night.

Edit: ugh, apparently this now also includes Meow.

For a tier 1 guild it's an interesting strategy... whoever moved to kainening gets to make their wait up and essentially audition/seduce the opposition in the lower tier servers. Meow was one of the few guilds putting up a decent fight, easy enough for kainening leadership to evaluate their skills and invite them over.

Then when they get to higher tiers they will have recruited a few satellites willing to work with them.

My server is working on an advertisement to lure suitable* WvW guilds over by January 28th. I suspect most serious WvW communities are doing the same.

* - i.e. guilds who play during times that our server is weak.

With guesting finally getting released, it looks like now is the time for me to find out which server currently has the highest concentration of my local players active in WvW during my playtimes (Oceanic) then guest back to NSP for group ups with the GWJ gang or just to chat.

EDIT: Quick check says it should be Crystal Desert but it's already full. Looks like Henge of Denravi is the next choice.

Falchion wrote:

With guesting finally getting released, it looks like now is the time for me to find out which server currently has the highest concentration of my local players active in WvW during my playtimes (Oceanic) then guest back to NSP for group ups with the GWJ gang or just to chat.

I'm sort of tempted to do the same, just because I really like WvW, and I really hate it when all it is is "port in, run a few steps, die, repair, repeat" like it has been for the past week...but I think I'll stick it out on NSP and see if we can't build a coalition or alliance or some semblance of order and fight our way back.

Of course, I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that Os and ROFL don't leave. They are the last of the big WvW guilds I see out there.

Falchion wrote:

With guesting finally getting released, it looks like now is the time for me to find out which server currently has the highest concentration of my local players active in WvW during my playtimes (Oceanic) then guest back to NSP for group ups with the GWJ gang or just to chat.

EDIT: Quick check says it should be Crystal Desert but it's already full. Looks like Henge of Denravi is the next choice.

CD has a really large Oceanic WvW presence for sure. Come over to the dark side when it's not full. (check morning/afternoon EST....)