#202 - Sept. 29, 2012, 8:10 a.m.
I wanted to post a bit on here because I was playing last night at a time where our numbers were dwindling and the influx of enemy players from another region pushed our server back to basically its last tower/supply camp. I spent a good portion of my time split between a few different things.
1) spamming, stay here and defend in team chat once ever 15 seconds. Please if your team only has a small foothold please get it supplied up and upgraded before trying to take a keep on the other side of the map.
2) Organizing a small group of people (5-10) to make targeted raids on supply camps to slow down enemy supply gain. Synchronizing taking all supply camps right around the score tick is a good way to mitigate some of the overall score damage being done by not holding any keeps.
3) Chatting with various people about night capping. This third one was time consuming, especially because I wished I could have posted what I was telling them on the forums. Well now I am trying to do that. Let’s assume that my private chats were much more compelling, eloquent, and well reasoned than this because it was midnight and I was frantically chatting in /whisper with 3 people while simultaneously fighting off hordes of enemies.
First of all I just want to say, the game is young. We know there are areas that we want to improve. Being steamrolled into a corner of your map is not the only problem in the game and not even the only problem in WvW. We are working on these areas, but I know it’s still possible to have lots of fun playing, and as the game matures these areas are going to get better and better.
I know we all know this, but it is nice to remember that WvW is persistent. This is one of the best things about it and we don’t want to inherently make logging in at non peak hours less rewarding than logging in during primetime. We already have long queues and off-peak is a chance to avoid those and still play the game. That being said, there are some things we need to do to encourage you to log in even when your world is being dominated by a massive rush of enemies who live in a part of the world where they aren’t checking their watches to see if the sun is about to rise. We have been talking about this since about 2 or 3 days into launch and have some ideas. The problem is many of them require resources which we do not have right now as we work to keep the game stable and bug free in its infancy. However some of these ideas have some traction and we are working on them actively. They will still take some time to implement and time to test, but we are not ignoring the fact that players want to feel like their late night efforts are worth more than just a pat on the back.
- Players need more rewards for WvW.
- Players need to be given opportunities to break out of their base when they are trapped in by a wall of arrow carts.
- Guilds need a better reason to claim and HOLD objectives.
- Commanders need to be rewarded for their success and need to be able to reward their followers in turn.
- And so and and so forth.
We are just as into playing GW2 and WvW as you guys are, and we welcome and appreciate all of your feedback. Just know your feedback is going to a good place where we are constantly trying to improve the experience for each and every player. I hope this helps clear up our position and ease your concerns about the long term health of this part of the game. I know this was really long so…
TL;DR Night capping is fun, WvW is 24/7 but getting steamrolled is not fun and we need to work on that to make it better.
OK, time to get back to Bluelake Tower in JQ Borderlands, there is bound to be a mass of HoD invaders at the front door!
Jon
Thanks.