WvW Is Not Fight Club: GW2

Over the years, ArenaNet has made a series of very poor decisions concerning World vs World, the mass-combat siege warfare mode originally intended to provide the PvPvE endgame for Guild Wars 2. Probably the most infamous disaster was the imposition of the Desert Borderland, a "feature" of the Heart of Thorns expansion that halved the active WvW population overnight.

Much less talked about, but arguably just as damaging to the long-term fortunes of the game, was the banning of so-called "match-up threads" on the official forums. For the first year or two, every week would see the creation of a new thread for each of the tri-partite matches. Forum warriors would then slog it out with insults and zingers while armchaire commanders offered predictions and analyses of the results.

Even with ANet's hyper-aggressive moderation (there's an automated feature that turns every conceivable pejorative into the catch-all euphemism "kitten", for example) these threads often turned nasty. Rather than try to keep everything civil, which would have required even more moderators taking an even more pro-active stance, ANet decided they could do very nicely without the hassle, thanks.

Ever since then any post that even mentions the names of two different Worlds is as likely as not to receive the stern response "Match-up threads are not allowed", whereupon the entire thread will be locked. This heavy-handed behavior has led to the closure of any number of perfectly innocuous discussions but the decision itself is emblematic of a much deeper problem: ArenaNet simply don't understand the needs of their own players.

Inc to defend Hills (by air)

When GW2 was new it attracted a very significant number of players who were looking for the next Dark Age of Camelot or Warhammer Online. There haven't been all that many MMORPGs that set out their stall based on "Realm vs Realm" but there's an established audience always on the lookout for the next one that tries.

The buzz and hype didn't last long. The lack of permanency was a factor. The game-mode had originally been predicated on matches lasting two weeks. That never happened. Eventually ANet settled on week-long matches but before then there was a lengthy sorting and data-gathering period using shorter periods, which made for a fractured and disconnected start.

Weekly resets didn't help but the main reason ex-DAOC and WAR players were unimpressed with what they found was probably the perceived pointlessness of the whole affair. Where DAoC had access to the Darkness Falls dungeon to fight over and WAR had structured progression both in land ownership and gear acquisition, WvW relied on a basket of buffs doled out to the entire server according to how well the world was doing in its current match.

Most people never even noticed those buffs, except when a normally dominant world slipped and PvE players logged in to find they'd lost a chunk of hit points. That was popular...

All of which left one overriding motivation to drive participation in the Mists: pride. For a while, server pride was undoubtedly real. In the same way true sports fans will support their team - and only their team - regardless of how badly the players play or what jackasses the coaches are, so GW2's hardcore WvW aficionados battled for nothing more than the pride of the name.

Inc to defend Hills (on foot)

The coming of Multiserver technology poked a hole in that balloon. Where it used to be common practice for a beleaguered world to send someone to Lion's Arch to rally the militia over map chat, multiservers meant such pleas reached the ears of every server in the region. It quickly became both embarassing and unproductive and no-one did it any more. (The repeated destruction of Lion's Arch and the concomittant loss of a generally-accepted hub zone didn't help much either).

Over the years, ANet have tried any number of gimmicks to encourage players into The Mists. There were the Tournaments, which I loved but which had the unfortunate effect of initiating severe burnout in commanders. There have been numerous "special event weeks" - there's one on right now - and various carrots in the form of Ascended and Legendary armor have been dangled.

Nothing has made much of an impact on the steady decline in numbers of people logging in to fight over structures that don't matter on maps that never change. In a last-ditch attempt to keep the game mode alive we now have the doomsday proposal on Alliances that will rip everything up and start over.

Maybe that will work. Maybe it won't. What it has done, amazingly, is revitalize WvW for those who expect the worst.

In preparation for the new system (even though we have no idea when it will come or much of a clue what it will look like) a bunch of self-selecting heavyweight guilds decided they'd give the Alliance thing a go right now. That resulted in worlds thought dead coming back from the grave.

Guarding Hills (the spare one)

Something I didn't know when I wrote about the phenomenon a few weeks ago was that the bulk of the carpetbaggers who resurrected Anvil Rock were guilds from Yaks Bend, my own server. Because I haven't bothered to sign up for the new YB Discord I missed all the drama but apparently Things Were Said that cannot be unsaid and Claims Were Made that must not be allowed to stand.

The upshot is that Yaks Bend is at war with Anvil Rock. And by great good fortune, since the split, we have found ourselves in the same match a couple of times. Suddenly we have something to fight for once again: pride.

As Wilhelm has frequently demonstrated in his tales of EVE Online, there's nothing like a grudge to get people to put in the extra hours. The Imperium took a thrashing and Circle of Two did a few things that won't be forgotten and all that fed months of economic grinding and a whole new War in the North.

EVE players, rightly, may regard most other MMORPGs with systems of territorial acquisition as something less than child's play by comparison, but children hold grudges too. The first week we played Anvil Rock was widely believed to be one of the most exciting Yaks Bend has had in six years. This week, the rematch, is pretty good too.

When the half-dozen or more sizeable and active guilds (aka "The Traitors") were with us I rarely saw full zergs on YB outside of weekends. With those people gone, we have them often.

We have commanders working in series to maintain "raids" for 10, 12, 24 or even 40 hours. I was in a squad last night where the commander tag hot-swapped twice without my even noticing, a practice which successfully keeps people following the tag for longer. I see names playing now that I haven't seen for years. The atmosphere is vibrant and exciting and the result is that I have played more WvW in two days than I normally play in a week.

That's a lot of work for 10 AP!

What's more, we are winning both the territory-holding game and many of the big, set-pece battles. And I'm killing a lot of pesky AR. I'm still working on getting my Ultimate Dominator title by completing the Realm Avenger achievement, for which I need to record fifty thousand player kills. After six years I'm up to 36,200 and I got almost 900 of those on Saturday and Sunday evening. Nine hundred kills in two sessions!

As I type this, Yaks Bend holds every structure on Anvil Rock's borderland. We have waypointed all of their keeps, which was the plan when I logged out last night. While most servers like to waypoint one enemy keep for convenience, waypointing all of them - particularly their Garrison - is considered bad form by many. It's something you do to make a point.

The point in this case is that, contrary to the exit line taken by the Traitor guilds, Yaks Bend has not "fallen apart without them". Rather the other way around, if anything. And this is what competetive games are all about: pride and rivalry.

Pride and rivalry will motivate more people for longer than any amount of rewards. People will stay up late and go into work without having had enough sleep if it means they can hold their heads up and wave their colors high. It's not pretty and its not nice but it works.

Which is why ANet should never have banned match-up threads.

Link Love? : GW2

Last Friday, while we were fast asleep in bed, ANet reset the underlying scoring mechanism for WvW and linked the bottom twelve servers with the dozen above them. The intent and effect is laid out clearly in this forum post:

We will be resetting glicko volatility and deviation for all worlds to the same value, but leaving their rating unchanged. What this means is:

• The first matchup will use current placements (T1 worlds vs T1 worlds, T2 worlds vs T2 worlds, etc.)
• The reset volatility and deviation values will come into effect at the end of that match.
• Worlds that win, especially by a large margin, will have their rating increased by a larger amount than normal.
• Likewise, worlds that lose, especially by a large margin, will have their rating decreased by a larger amount than normal.
• The result is that when a world no longer is meant to be in a specific tier, they’ll move out of it more quickly.

As a direct result, Mrs Bhagpuss and I spent most of this weekend in The Mists, joining in a largely futile attempt to hold the line against the resurgent Blackgate hordes. As I write, around fifty hours into the match, Yak's Bend is in second place, 4k ahead of Jade Quarry and just short of 50,000 points behind BG.

Yak's Bend's has never been at its best either at reset or across the weekend. We often start the working week a little behind and have to go hard to pull out a lead during the week. That trend goes back almost as long as I've been on the server, which is always.

Usually, though, the deficit is a few thousand points at most. Last weekend, with the changes imminent, we came out of Sunday chasing a 38k lead. This Monday it's 48k.

Like the enormous queues that caused a flurry of angry forum threads on Friday night and left a lot of people disgruntled all through the weekend, the large influx of people logging in to play WvW isn't entirely down to the linking of servers. In Tier One the addition of low population worlds like Anvil Rock and Eredon's Terrace to the mix probably has less impact than the transfer of one or two large guilds from one T1 server to another.

We lost nearly 2k just in the time it took me to write this piece...

Indeed, as could readily be seen the weekend before the patch, most of the effect was caused by dormant accounts waking up as lapsed players (or, at least, lapsed WvW players) logged back in to see what all the fuss was about. Blackgate, with a long history at the top, has a lot of dormant WvW accounts.

The primary, immediate result of the change has been a tidal wave of action. All four maps were in highly active play all weekend, with multiple zergs and blobs from all three servers circling the borderlands. In the larger battles, when two fifty-strong squads clashed over possession of a keep or struggled to take or break a choke point, my aging PC almost gave up altogether.

Playing a berserker staff elementalist, the classic glass cannon, going into slide show mode and losing any control over placement, movement or reaction should make the game unplayable. My character ought to be dead before I can see an attack coming. That she managed to survive any number of battles without being picked off and eliminated while helpless suggests that there are plenty of other players struggling to cope with the conditions.

This, of course, is how WvW used to be, years ago. This is why, back then, we rarely went to the most popular and populated map, Eternal Battlegrounds. Fighting in Stonemist Castle, the centerpiece of that map, often contested by all three zergs at once, used to crash the game for me with tedious reliability.

Visual metaphor

As GW2 in general and WvW in particular has bled out we have all come to accept and expect things to be quieter, more sedate. As Yak's Bend first ascended and then was shoved further up the ladder we heard a lot about Tier 1 and its high population. I expected major problems with my old hardware when we finally got to the top but our rise to glory coincided exactly with the arrival of Heart of Thorns, whereupon WvW numbers fell off a cliff. And as we all know there's no gliding in WvW.

Consequently these gigantic battles come as a bit of a shock. They are also by no means universally welcomed even by those who don't have technical issues. Gameplay in WvW has long been diverse. Although it's a game mode seen from the outside as a primitive clash of zergs, the format hosts a wide range of playstyles.

There are roamers who travel alone, hoping for single combat opportunities. There are havoc groups of two, three or half a dozen, hopping maps and hitting hard behind enemy lines. There are scouts sitting in towers and keeps, tagging siege and reporting on enemy movements. And, of course, there are the merry PPT crews, battling doors and walls and NPCs for the good of the team and their own karma.

As of now, most of those activities are on hold. Structures are barely defensible when fortified. Below that you can forget it. Even a well-drilled response team can't handle multiple roaming 30+ zergs on both sides of two or three maps at once. On Saturday havoc teams had to run twenty deep to have much hope of taking even a couple of camps. As for solo fights it is to laugh!

If all this comes as something of a shock to the system for players used to life in the top tiers, imagine the trauma for the conscripts from T8. Impressively, the Anvil Rock players we've picked up seem to have taken it in very good part.

If I'd known then what I know now...

A good few have outed themselves in map or team chat and I'm happy to say that the response from Yak's Bend has been exemplary.  We may be vilified for our gameplay but we have always had a well-deserved reputation as an open and welcoming server with little time for drama. I ran for a while on Saturday with a very nice guild from AR who seemed to be enjoying themselves a lot and there have been several AR commanders tagged up, which is great to see.

Over on Blackgate the story hasn't been such a happy one, at least according to the forums. There are some eloquent and impassioned posts from distressed Eradon Terrace exiles that explain very clearly why world-linking, good though it may be for the health of WvW in general, could be catastrophic for established server communities.

There do seem to be some major flaws in the plan. Freezing the glicko score of the junior partners, removing all visual signs of their previous identity, the knowledge that any pairing may be changed, perhaps as often as four times a year, all add up to a class system for WvW. A lot of players are going to feel like refugees, conscripts or second-class citizens.  Even at best they are going to feel like guests or junior partners.

First impressions

For players who transferred to lower tier servers specifically to escape the overcrowded upper levels or in search of specific types of gameplay, mainly roaming and small group fights, that were better supported by a low population, this must be particularly galling. Especially given that money changed hands to facilitate the move.

This, though, is the risk you take by choosing a low population environment in a commercial MMORPG. In my experience, low population servers often have tighter communities, better atmospheres and offer gameplay options that are hard to find on busier worlds. I always prefer to play on a low population server if I can find one.

The trade-off for a better quality of life is insecurity. Low pop servers get merged. If you're lucky, when that happens, you might get a choice about where you go but sometimes you just have to go where you're put.

I feel for the displaced of Eredon Terrace. My third account is on Ehmry Bay. EBay is now twinned with Henge of Denravi, a server I would never in a million years have chosen to support. Every time I log in to do my dailies I have to think twice to remember which is supposed to be my "home" borderland.

We are lucky on Yak's Bend. We kept our name. We welcome Anvil Rock - we even joke about changing the server's name to Yak's Rock but only because, well, we all believe that Yaks do rock. And, obviously, anvils don't bend...

I will not miss Fire Keep.

If I'd woken up on Saturday morning and found that I had to log into another server to play, though, I am certain it would have diminished my enthusiasm. I might have decided to go play Black Desert instead.

As some of us have been saying this weekend, trying to raise the spirits of certain disheartened players who are already finding the blobbing and the queuing and the lag to be more than they bargained for, it is only a beta. Over the next few weeks things will settle. The novelty will wear off. The dormant accounts will go back to sleep. The scores will adjust, worlds will find their level, things will go back to normal, albeit a new normal.

Then the Alpine Borderlands will come back and the whole frenzied cycle will begin over again. Interesting times. Fun to look back on; not so much to live through.

If there's one thing I've learned, though, it's that I really need a new computer.