Posts Tagged ‘WvsW’

Guild Wars 2 World vs World Review

29 October 2012 | No Comments » | Mike

Having hit the level cap almost two weeks ago, my focus, aside from the on-going Mad King Halloween event, has been World vs World. I touched upon it a bit in my Guild Wars 2 review, but it really deserves it’s own review since it’s a completely separate system then PvE. So here we are.

As I stated in that review, my currently relationship with WvsW is a love/hate one. It solves a lot of problems other MMORPGs have with RvR, but doesn’t get in quite right and makes a few errors itself.

I’m going to start off by talking about map size as I feel everything is in some way influence by it. The World vs World area is split into four deceivingly large maps and while they feel and appear to be large at first, they’re actually very small and the source of many of WvsW woes.

Currently the primary, and really only successful tactic, is to form massive armies to attack structures around the map and while this type of tactic is expected, it ends up being the only tactic used. I’ve tried soloing or running with smaller groups, but they don’t last long; you’ll run into a massive army after taking a camp or two and will be forced to retreat. The problem is that maps are so small, these zerg armies are able to go after small bands of players while on their way to larger structures. There’s no decision to be made whether or not to take a camp as it’s only a few seconds off the path and players that separate can quickly regroup with the zerg in a few mins.

If you expand the size of the maps, these zerg armies will be forced to break into smaller groups to go after small hold points or bands of players. Creating a greater variety of combat other than massive scale.

Moving on, lets discuss towers, forts and castles. Towers require small armies to take over, while castles are the crem della crem of massive PvP combat, with forts being somewhere in the middle. Sound good, right? Well the problem again comes from the small map size. While towers should be objectives taken by smaller groups of armies, it ends up being large scale combat most of the time. The problem is that 2-3 defenders can successfully hold off a group of 10-15 attackers fairly easily to give enough time for reinforcements to arrive. So what ends up happening is people get discouraged, join the zerg, then attack the tower. The problem again stems for small map sizes. While a group of 10 attackers might eventually overwhelm the defenders, they can’t take over the structure in the speed required to avoid reinforcements.

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Hours in queue; No World vs World

22 July 2012 | 4 Comments » | Mike

The last Guild Wars 2 beta weekend is about to end and at least for me it was a complete disaster and waste of time.

Late Saturday night (actually early Sunday morning), about 1am EST was the first chance I had to even log into the game and within 10 seconds of logging in a server maintenance message saying World vs World was going to be taken offline went up. I did some PvE and got to level 4 when another message came up saying it was back online. Of course I was excited and immediately went to join World vs World when I was hit with a “World vs World is full” message, asking me if I wanted to join the queue, which I obviously did. Hard to believe that I didn’t get in when I literally tried to join within 5 seconds of the message. An hour and a half later, I was still waiting in the queue and at 3:30 am EST I finally gave up. During that time I tried multiple times to log into WvW, incase the full message was an error, but no luck.

Today was no better when I logged in late afternoon around 6:30pm EST and got the same WvW is full message and waited in queue for another hour and a half and still couldn’t get in.

Now I know the beta was packed, every single server had a “High” server load when I logged in today, but these queue times are not acceptable. At least give an estimate wait time or something.

I certainly  hope this is not going to happen when the game launches next month as I have zero interest in PvE and the only reason I’m playing GW2 for its World vs World PvP. My confidence in ArenaNet has been a bit shaken after this beta weekend, but hopefully they can make it up next month with a smooth launch.

 

Guild Wars 2: PvP or PvE?

26 April 2012 | 9 Comments » | Mike


Call me biased, but I was under the impression that the hype surrounding Guild Wars 2 was all about its World verse World PvP system. This was the big selling point, the killer feature that would change the MMORPG genre and save us from the horrid existence of theme-park games, but after reading a post on ScaryWorld’s I’m not so sure.

I never even really considered that PvE would be the reason for some people to be excited about GW2. I mean, been there done that, right? Sure PvE is a must have and ArenaNet is adding their own features and flavor to it, but in the end, it’s just more PvE. There’s dozens of other games that have great PvE, but not one triple A title I would consider to have great PvP, with the exception of Eve Online of course.

To be honest, if Guild Wars 2 didn’t have WvsW, I don’t know for sure if I’d even try it out. So how about you? Are you guys excited for PvP (WvW) or the PvE system? and if PvE, why?