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Live Forum Q&A Devon Carver - Guild Wars 2 (WvW)
Devon_Carver
Guild Wars 2 WvW CoordinatorMember Posts: 8
Hey all,
I'm here to answer your questions about WvW in Guild Wars 2. I'm the coordinator of the team, as well as a designer on the team. There are a bunch of exciting things happening in WvW, some coming soon and others being worked on right now. I'm happy to answer as many questions as I can about WvW. If you could keep your questions to WvW topics, you will be more likely to get a response. I can't make comments about things that are far off in development, but otherwise, it's open season. I'm putting this up a little in advance so you can start posting some questions. I'll start answering questions around 5PM ET, but feel free to put some up now. I'll get to as many of them as I can until 6 PM ET. Fire away!
Devon Carver
WvW Coordinator
Comments
Hey Devon - thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions. Here's a few things I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts on.
The Tyria Herald
The Camelot Herald was an amazing website in the DAoC days that allowed you to see a vast amount of information for each realm (faction), guilds and individual players. You could track their total/weekly amount of kills, the Realm Points they earned and a variety of other things on a constantly-updated website. It ranked guilds, it ranked players, it ranked everything and was a wonderful out-of-game tool for people to use.
Camelot Herald did a very good job of keeping the community engaged, fostered healthy competition (among both enemies and friendlies) and kept people playing in general. MMO's are very much about numbers and PvP in MMO's is very much about competition. If you give playes the ability to compete by comparing their numbers with other players they will love you for it. The more you give people the ability to check how they've done, challenge their guild to beat another and allow them to compete among themselves, the more active and happy they will be.
Almost all of the stats required for this are already there to be picked from our Achievements/World XP tabs. With all of this information freely available (if the player allows it to be) people could make some truly astonishing websitse! It would do so much good for the WvW community to be able to track these things.
I suppose my question is; is there any chance of this happening? What would the hurdles be for it to not happen quite soon?
Examples of Camelot Herald: Top Guilds - Weekly Champions - Guild example - Wizard rank
Ruins
The map change was amazing for the Borderlands. It's a really varied and fun area which your team did a great job on. You mentioned that the Bloodlust buff will see some changes before the Season starts, which is great news.
The issue here is that, in my view, the Ruins have as of late seen less activity than since they were introduced. They will be captured for the purpose of the buff by medium-sized groups fairly often, but solo players cannot capture the buff alone and without other solo players in the area there they have little incentive to go there (even less so on the maps where the Sentries don't appear).
A large majority of "small scale" WvW happens with solo players clashing randomly and others adding into it. I may engage one person, that person gets backup, I start kiting and I encounter a friendly and the two of us try to take them on again. Fights escalate in a natural way. Without attracting solo players, the Ruins are not creating opportunities for small scale to happen.
You've obviously touched on the fact that you cannot give rewards for something that has no challenge in capping it (and no "cooldown" in doing so, ala camps/sentries). How do you intend to deal with the diminishing activity in the area?
Achievements
You've mentioned previously that WvW Achievements are something you intend to address in the future. You've delayed the issue somewhat with the introduction of Seasons and Season-specific Achievements, but it's still an issue out there for 2014 or so.
The thing is, Achievements are the only way we have to track progress right now. If you rework them so it's easier to reach the maximum, that will make it impossible for us to track how many kills we have in total or how many Camps/Keeps we've capped. Numbers are fun. Comparing them to friends and guildies is enjoyable. Working towards the 250k has been a driving force for many people. And those that have reached 250k no longer even know how many total kills they have! It makes no sense to have a system that tracks our totals suddenly stop simply because we hit an arbitrary "maximum."
When/if you end up reworking the Achievements (which is sorely needed to put them in line points-wise with other gametypes), will you be looking towards an infinite system (with appropiate tiers, so the 250k and similar goals remain) of some sorts or perhaps letting us see our totals in another way not connected to Achievements? The last point would allow you to set the Achievement cutoff anywhere you like as long as we can keep tracking our totals.
Breaking up the Blob
With the impending Season start upon us, the Worlds are gearing up and most likely organizing themselves for a massive push come October 18th. With this, the massive groups and the skill lag that we are all acquainted with will also follow.
You've done some work in fostering small scale fighting with the introduction of the Ruins, but it has done nothing to lessen the massive zergs that most higher tier servers run now. It ruins a large part of the enjoyment of WvW when the skill that follows happens which I am sure you have experienced.
Something needs to be done to work towards breaking up the zergs somewhat. Can we expect anything on this front? And if so, what are your thoughts/ideas on it?
(I saw the recent post on skill lag - my post is not about fixing that, but rather what you are doing to try and bring people towards less full-zone fighting)
---
There, now you've got something to work with!
Well hopefully I can ask a few.
Hello,
I came up with a few questions and hopefully you can answer a few of them ^^
1) With the current state of masteries and power creep that seems to be going on, are there any plans to allow tier 4 upgrades at keeps? Especially the reinforced gates melt within a minute these days.
2) The loot in WvW is lackluster compared to PvE at the moment. On the official forums you talked about improving these, can we expect any improvents before the end of this year?
3) Escorting dolyaks used to be a full event, meaning you got karma and silver aswell. This got changed due to the mass amount of bots going on at that moment. Currently I don't find any bots anywhere anymore so my compliments for that, however does this mean we will see the old rewards back? As a commander it's nearly impossible to convince people to escort dolyaks as the reward is very lackluster at the moment.
4) Can we expect commander system improvents before the end of this year? Maybe the first quarter of 2014? It's very hard for anyone not on TS to keep track of what every commander is doing on a single map during peak times.
5) You shared some of your vision with us when the leagues got announced. Personally I think you want to turn WvW into more than a "practice zone" for sPvP so that is something that excites me, could you maybe share more details on how you envision the future of WvW?
6) This is a more personal question but as lead designer of something major as WvW, how do you deal with the huge amounts of stress and pressure that the community throws at you?
In my opinion GW2 has gone from very alt-friendly like GW1, to the exact opposite of that with the additions of ascended gear and WvW ranks. Will we be seeing real improvements to this (like account-based WvW ranks) anytime soon?
*wvw xp drops aren't cutting it, nor is spending laurels*
Wow, that's a post. I'll try and hit these in order:
Tyria Herald: It's not something we've really explored up to this point, so I can't really comment on the feasbilty of it, although it sounds really amazing. Something we are hoping to do more of is making an effort to create that type of information base, whether it be in this format, on the leaderboards, or via forum posts I don't know.
Ruins: That's a good question. One thing is we will fix the bug with the sentry points in the other maps, which should help somewhat. We'll also be adding daily/season achievements that relate to the ruins. We aren't totally against providing rewards for the events themselves, it's just a difficult balance, as you noted. It's also generally the case that we want to increase rewards in WvW, especially in the rank up chests.
Achievements; The first crack at this should be out by the end of the year. It's going to be a process of adjusting the achievements to fit reasonable goals. We still want them to be long term, just more like 1-2 years, rather than say 10 years. We also would like to make more use of the leaderboard system to provide some of that tracking. Letting people look up who has the most kills, the most dolyak kills, etc. I think that's a little easier to use and more flexible than the achievement system at the moment. I don't have a timeline for that, however, as we have other tasks that we are focusing on right now.
Breaking up the Blob: We have some ideas here that are likely to come out next year, in the earlier portion of the year. It's a complicated problem because of the principles of our game, namely that we don't want to punish you for playing with more people. So it comes down to ways to incentivize and/or empower small groups more so than punishing large ones. That creates the problem of finding solutions that don't help even larger groups. We have some ideas for changes to siege weapons that I think might help, but it is a major concern for us. To be clear, we are concerned about the value of skill over simple manpower. If you get together 50 skilled players operating in unison, we don't want to hamper that. But we do think a smaller, more coordinated group should have the advantage over a larger, uncoordinated group.
Q1: Are there any plans to disincentivize the coverage wars/off hours PvD to scoring?
Q2: Under the current scoring metric why leagues?
Q3: If there are no plans to change scoring how is Anet going to help lower ranked servers be more competitive given the participation gap between tiers?
Does anet have any plans to look at the way the current transfer pricing is worked ? As is, it does not really help the low ranked server's thay are considered high/very high due to over all population. PvE has Guesting and SPvP is server wide so the only aspect of the game that is truly effected by Transfer's is WvW. Would it not be better to base pricing off server Rank instead of Over all population ?
Also a poster on the official forums asked that we provide this link for the WvW team http://youtu.be/qHcO6Xo8eJ8 many believe this system would be a step in the right direction for your new Leagues. Is this something the team would be willing to look at implementing ?
Is there any possibility of merging the smaller servers together for the purposes of WvW? T1 WvW is SO MUCH FUN because of the constant action no matter where you are. Going into empty borderlands on even T2 servers is really disappointing by comparison. If not merging servers in some way, do you have any plans to address the low turn-out on some servers without having WvW interested players transfer upwards?
My idea of merging servers would something like an "XYZ Accord" where you would use internal metrics to combine servers into having the most coverage possible, and reduce the total number of competitiors in WvW from the current 24 to like 9 or so.
Hey Devon. A few things;
1) When can we expect new commander stuff (maybe tag is only visible to guildiees?)
2) Can Communal Bonfires get a WXP option?
3) Will server transfer costs be changing according to sever WvW performance (as PvEers can guest)?
4) When will bloodlust be changed?
5) Will there be a WXP booster guild banner?
6) Can we get a EMP trap to stop golems (causing them to depower) for 40 seconds? Make it cost 15 supply so you can't spam them down, and once a golem hits one it can't be hit by another for 2 minutes.
I'll answer the ones I can here:
2) We should be doing something about being able to acquire ascended back items in WvW in the next month or two. I want to stress that it will be something that makes it easier to acquire them, not necessarily adding unique WvW pieces. We do want to get unique WvW pieces in, but that process takes longer and so it won't happen right away.
3) We are working on fixes to many of the sigil problems but have no estimate of when we will fix it.
5) Yes, absolutely. In fact you'll see some of those improvements in the game on October 15th, when the chests get the first round of improvements. We are not saying that is the end either, so you should expect additional improvements. Ideally, I'd like those chests to be a big deal and where a lot of the rewards from WvW come from. That puts us in a position to improve the ways you get WXP generally, so everyone has better access to the chests, whether they are capturing SM or defending Durios.
1) Not anytime soon and really just for technical reasons. The way that system is put together makes it very difficult to change. We have some plans for revision of the upgrades generally, but there is no timeline on when or true design as to how that would work.
3) This is really just a side effect of the way our event system works and, unfortunately, it's not really fixable without major changes to things. That being said, I'd like for us to make those changes so that players who are doing the dirty work of escorting dolyaks are appropriately rewarded for it. But until we have a solution that doesn't reintroduce the bot problem, we will leave it as it currently is.
4) We have some ideas for commander system improvements but none of them are at a point that we have a release timeframe. We absolutely want to provide more ways for commanders to impact the battlefield because we know they are straining against the limits of our current system.
5) The biggest thing for me, is I want WvW to be the place that people go when they want to experience tactics at a large scale, take territory, hold it, and show who is boss. I'd like it to be the place that rewards large coordinated groups with in-game rewards and out of game fame and I hope it is the place that most players spend their time once they hit 80, as I do.
6) I've found it takes a few things. 1: Remember that the passion people show is a comment on how much they care. 2: Take breaks from reading the forums to recharge the batteries. and 3: Play WvW whenever I can, because it reminds me how awesome the game is and how much I want to keep improving it.
This is something we have been discussing very seriously recently and we agree with this assessment. It's important to us to maintain a sense of individual character progression while still encouraging alt play in WvW. We have some plans for this as it relates to WvW that I hope to be able to talk more about soon. In the mean time, all I can say is that we agree and we'll do more to make WvW alt-friendly in the coming months.
1) Are there any plans to add new skins through the introduction of WvW Seasons?
2) Will there be ways to earn Ascended items through WvW that are more progression oriented then RNG oriented?
3) Any plans to make WvW progression account wide? I know you guys have been against this in the past, but this system does not correspond with pretty much the rest of the game. All the currency based progression in the game is account wide as well as sPvP.
New maps are something we are very much looking forward to doing at some point, however the amount of time and development resources required is large and as such it will not be anytime soon that any new maps arrive in WvW.
1. Are there any plans to remove the stats from bloodlust buff & change it to something like mf/wxp/exp/karma gain instead so that the server with higher population doesn't get stronger?
2. Are there any plans to change the league system on US servers to Diamond (T1 US) /Gold (Next 6) /Silver (Next 9) /Bronze(Next 6) because of the population/coverage difference between T1 US servers and T2 servers?
3. Are there any plans to change the cost of transfer to servers with high PvE population with little to no WvW population? Currently it costs 1800 gems to transfer to T1 servers & T3-4 servers with 5times less WvW population.
Hi Devon,
Glad to have you here and I am glad as a community we are having this exchange. I just have couple questions:
1. One of the perceived problem with WvW is that losing servers with significantly less coverage than their opponents have no incentive to keep fighting. The recent league announcement has made a lot of players worry that the problem will be magnified, especially in NA gold league where servers in Tier 2 are expecting to get dominated by servers in Tier 1 due to the large gap between the two tiers. Is the dev team planning anything to encourage the loosing server to keep fighting in the new league system?
2. The new area in the center of the borderland map is very well designed, good job the dev team. However, we do know that there is significant controversial around the bloodlust stat buff. Can you share with us what is dev team doing to try to change it?
3. On a related point, many players are worried about what they perceived as power creep in WvW, with the wvw rank guard ability lines and the recent addition of bloodlust stat buff, and many would prefer to have a more leveling playing field regarding to stat (as it is also easier for playing alts). Can you share with us what is the Dev's team's view on this and how are you planning to address it?
Thank you for your time.
"The Obsidian Sanctum. Eb jumping puzzle will have a new area added to the left of it down a hall it will lead to a big open arena/colosseum area. Dingy lit/moss etc kinda like the environment of jumping puzzle, war dogs statues around few braziers on big pillars. looking good. They are working on the art its not final there is water but probably will be removed. Vendors/Repair guy hopefully. The bloodlust buff will be disabled in sanctum.
We are going to make it so that you can access this map via a portal in LA and via the dropdown menu in the WvW panel. I assume that will be enough."
Coming sometime Oct/ Nov.
You made a post yourself regarding this on reddit, all but confirming it. Is it safe to say this is true?.
Also why is this Q&A session not taking place on twitch gw2 stream like all other parts of the game PVE/SPvP/ART are usually hosted on?.
1. Why are arenanet so against WvW ranks being account bound? Character bound ranks do nothing but limit a players experience in WvW which will lead to burnout and players leaving sooner rather than later. Especially when combined with the ascended weapon system which only serves to limit our experimentation with builds.
2. Is a GvG battleground in the works, perhaps in the obsidian sanctum?
There have been comments on the forum about how bloodlust is changing. What do you have instore for us and why are you unhappy with the way bloodlust turned out?
In past discussions there was talk of possibly removing the waypoints in various BL's because they make the world feel smaller and the WvW experience too fast. Is this still an agenda item?
Class balance is not strictly a WvW issue, but several classes have remarkably low value to the current WvW. These would be the engineer, thief, and ranger taking up the 6th, 7th, and 8th class spot in overall value to WvW. Is anything going to be done to improve the group utility so these classes have more value?
Just to reiterate some other questions because of their importance to the community:
1. The bloodlust buff is widely disliked in the WvW community because it reinforces the stronger servers position, this was given as a reason for getting rid of the orbs, so why was it reintroduced and is anything being done to look at changing it.
2. How do you expect leagues to work given the wide disparity in server populations between servers in the same leagues? Do you acknowledge that coverage is the major reason for a server winning?
2) We haven't discussed this, but I'll raise it and see if it is something we could do as I think that is a great idea.
4) The build on October 15th will have the initial changes to bloodlust. We want to see the impact it has during seasons before we make any additional changes to the buff. We think it still needs improving and we want it to be something that encourages servers that are falling behind in the battle to take the buff without overpowering servers that are already winning. That's a complex balance to meet, which means we will make changes as needed to get closer to that.
6) It's certainly an interesting idea, and we do want to make additions to the traps and tricks vendor in the future so this will certainly be added to the list of possibilities.
1) We have talked about it but don't have any firm plans as of right now. Our main focus is on the gameplay of WvW generally and we expect to have a lot of new things to add in future seasons to make them even better.
2) Yes. And I'll add that the current Ascended gear in WvW is mostly progression oriented as you can buy it with Badges and Laurels.
3) We are discussing this and we will provide more information when we know how we intend to address this issue. It is important to us that World Ability Points are a character specific progression system and that when you spend those points your characters feel like they are distinguished from one another. It is also very important to us that people with more than one character don't feel like they shouldn't play all of those characters.
1) Why will there be no WvW development during the league? The stated reason was, I believe, to maintain a level playing field, but any balance changes or whatever would surely effect all sides equally. And WvW is not a balanced game mode anyway. Can we expect major changes at the conclusion of the season, to balance the 7 weeks of no change? At this point the leagues feel like a change no one asked for that only serves to lower the priority of WvW development.
2) Do you believe the addition of ranks and masteries has been a boon to the game? Personally, I feel it has been somewhat detrimental, not only because it discourages alts but because of the power creep. A superior ram with rank 3 can kill a paper gate in 1.8 minutes, which is somewhat ridiculous. This has made defending even less popular than it already was, as response times have to be nearly instantaneous. Do you agree many of the masteries need re-balancing? Very few of them have been changed at all since they were introduced.
3) Recently free transfers returned for low pop servers and were discounted to medium ones. Why are transfer costs dictated by total server pop and not WvW pop or rank? The guesting system means nobody should have to transfer for any reason but WvW. It seems silly that it costs the same to transfer to GoM as it does to SoR. Will we see more aggressive attempts in the future to address the population imbalances between servers?
Thanks for answering our questions.