Curse

AngelWJedi · Mar 07, 2011, 09:34 PM // 21:34

ab is boring. If i had to pvp i rather do jq/fa its faster. but i rather vanq for my title not only do i get points i get drops/chests/use of candy cons. which all go towards many titles. where able only goes for 1 technically if you dont get zkeys to use on chest.

Tzalaran · Mar 08, 2011, 12:11 AM // 00:11

Went in the AB outpost the other night when i logged on and was stunned.

i was the only one there.

R.I.P. AB... i'll miss you.

UnChosen · Mar 08, 2011, 02:05 AM // 02:05

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Mireles · Mar 08, 2011, 06:25 AM // 06:25

The final blow was dealt to AB because a faction title is no longer needed for 30 titles in any situation... It has been dying ever since it became more efficient for town holding guilds to farm faction with speed clears...

Terrible Surgeon · Mar 08, 2011, 06:29 AM // 06:29

Quote:

Originally Posted by kajusbonus

i can tell you one thing that makes AB dead:

AB is BORING

Thats a bunch of crap, AB reqs team work and balance for success. One button ROJ monks in JQ and monks spamming heals in FA req no skill or team work. JQ and FA promote dumby pvp which means die->rez->die again->rez->die again again->hit RoJ to cap a shrine->die..that's redundant and boring...ab is not boring imho.
People left AB because the map rotation is bad and the faction rewarded is small compared to dumby JQ and FA. I remember going a week without seeing salt spray beach or even keys in AB. It is always ancestral and the other one which are gay after doing them a million times with no other map. AB has a few fun maps to run around in and raise hell.

up the faction rewarded
This makes sense because it takes more time to form a party and coordinate than in JQ and FA.
rotate the maps every 2 hours
regardless of whether the kurzdicks or the suxons are winning the majority of the matches, the maps need rotated, or it gets stale. Stale like an open beer left on the counter over night and you drink it the next day when you wake up and decide that it was a bad idea to drink it all too late.
offer a chest like in HA
give the winning side a reward like alcohol drops or something small. Incentive is nice, it makes people come back. Even those who already maxed the titles.
A separate AB title
This is a long shot. I know there are a million titles in the game already. But offering a title for AB as a separate pvp+linking it to factions is a good idea imho. Codex has a title.....i think AB deserved one more than that garbage.

Kuchiki_pt · Mar 08, 2011, 12:07 PM // 12:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by Terrible Surgeon

up the faction rewarded
This makes sense because it takes more time to form a party and coordinate than in JQ and FA.
rotate the maps every 2 hours
regardless of whether the kurzdicks or the suxons are winning the majority of the matches, the maps need rotated, or it gets stale. Stale like an open beer left on the counter over night and you drink it the next day when you wake up and decide that it was a bad idea to drink it all too late.
offer a chest like in HA
give the winning side a reward like alcohol drops or something small. Incentive is nice, it makes people come back. Even those who already maxed the titles.
A separate AB title
This is a long shot. I know there are a million titles in the game already. But offering a title for AB as a separate pvp+linking it to factions is a good idea imho. Codex has a title.....i think AB deserved one more than that garbage.

Those are some great ideas but i doubt about the chest thing....

FengShuiDove · Mar 08, 2011, 02:05 PM // 14:05

30 minutes of wait time for 5 minutes of facepalming 2/3 of your team.

The random 8/12 parties don't work. Imagine having to PUG Deep/Urgoz where you can't see 8 of your 12 party members and you have a high likelihood of getting utter trash.

Also rewards suck and pretty much every conceivable way of gathering faction crushes AB in terms of speed and fun.

JONO51 · Mar 08, 2011, 04:33 PM // 16:33

I'd play a lot more if saltspry/etnaran got more play.

bungusmaximus · Mar 08, 2011, 09:44 PM // 21:44

broken map rotation, make it switch map every 3 hours so everyone in every different timezone gets to see some other maps every now and then. I think that will solve a lot of the problems.

AB is just a similar old boys club as HA is atm (Yea im looking at you MaSS, Cnex, TaG

), some fresh blood is definitely needed to make it a little fresh again. People DO play more often when there's a sudden map change to, say, saltspray.

Luxons synching is garbage, its impossible not to synch when there's only 4 teams forming luzl.

ItsJustMe · Mar 14, 2011, 10:34 PM // 22:34

Special items should drop in ALL PvP venues, just like GvG. Tone down the amounts awarded, but when these special weekends pop up, everyone farms PvE.

Rotate the maps....somehow.

Offer better faction.

-i

Don Zardeone · Mar 15, 2011, 12:55 AM // 00:55

3 years ago I used to play it almost 50% of the time. Then 40% GvG and 10% PvE.

I ran a guild team on kurzick side and we hardly ever lost a match.

Now I've noticed that the frontline or battle line is all the way to HzH or has been that way for several weeks. I was about to ask what is up but it seems AB is dead and the line is stuck now.

If it wasn't dead I probably wouldn't play it because all the people I used to play it with are long gone by now. Or, I would show up and force my balanced build on people which they probably don't want to take and rather run an MM or something else that's slow and sitting duck-like. Maybe some alliance or guild would take me?

If all this is true, boost the faction reward and add an AB pvp title, maybe revive the old commander title and make it AB commander, Alliance commander or something.

Imo, AB is the main allegiance rank PvP setting and JQ and FA are secondary.

I don't want to grind PvE for allegiance rank and I don't want to always have to do JQ.

In JQ I have control over 1/8th of my team. In AB I have control over 1/3rd.
That's 12.5% vs 33%.

This means that if my team loses in JQ, it may not be my fault. But if my team loses in AB, I can see what went wrong and maybe we need to adjust our approach to it all.

I used to use AB as a training ground for GvG beginners.
I used to run a sort-of shock axe, a BA, something else and an AB monk.
The unique nature of the healing of NPCs, healing of other teams not on your redbars, it trained our monks into battlefield healers instead of redbar-starers.
Shockaxes could train their spiking and targetcalling and all that in much more laid back environment and the BA's could practise their skirmishing, interrupting, positioning, etc.

I mean, if AB is dead, it wouldn't surprise me that GvG is dead too

ItsJustMe · Mar 15, 2011, 10:21 PM // 22:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by Don Zardeone

...
I used to use AB as a training ground for GvG beginners.
...

This is where I cut my teeth monking/pvping, and I think it's a wonderful springboard into GvG.
In fact, if there were an OBS mode for AB, it might be the best stepping stone/training tool for GvG.

Of course, my dream would be to actually allow for alliances to form a 12 man team and enter vs another.

I do miss AB.

-i

makosi · Mar 16, 2011, 12:33 AM // 00:33

I don't do AB because, regardless of my performance in the map, it makes very little difference to the outcome.

There's no way to communicate to people that capping shrines means victory and mobbing or farming players means a loss.

kedde · Mar 16, 2011, 08:21 AM // 08:21

I have only played AB the last year with full teams of people I know and trust to be decent at the very least. Anything else is just torture. There's way too many retards that ruin the game for anyone who isn't an idiot.

A few years back, all the newbies, random retards and just generally terrible players were much less of a hassle since your team of 4 decent people could pretty much tank and eventually farm all of them in succession without too much difficulty.

With skills being so much more powerful today however, it's just a giant slugfest of idiots doing dumb things and eventually getting lucky with kills and the spouting random shit in all chat.

This all is made a lot worse due to constantly playing on a map that heavily favors one team. Even long ago it made fewer random idiots play as luxon since they had little chance of winning on a stacked map such as ancestral, leaving organized teams that could easily roll the opposition. Getting rolled isn't fun and it ends up in the usual vicious circle.

Judge Nl · Mar 16, 2011, 10:35 AM // 10:35

Quote:

There's no way to communicate to people that capping shrines means victory and mobbing or farming players means a loss.

Capping is only one of many tactics in AB. True, it's important to get new shrines, but capping without keeping isn't worth much. (Opponent could cap straight behind you).

Preventing enemy shrine captures is one of the part where ab becomes pvp. Note that every opponent you kill is 3 points for your side and you might be able to keep the shrine instead of losing it as well as give your opponent 30 seconds respawn time.

##

Quote:

I used to use AB as a training ground for GvG beginners.

I still enjoy AB pretty often. Mostly play mesmer(s)

these days, but having played nearly every profession in the past in AB (, except for para and rit, ) certainly helped in facing those professions.
(Not much GvG exp though here.

)

##

On the matter of the seperate AB title:
Is AB wrothy enough for one seperate title: yes
Does it draw people out for AB: yes
Do we have enough titles in GW as it is: yes

Sum it up and get: don't know, probably other reward boost

Killed u man · Mar 16, 2011, 12:01 PM // 12:01

The 2 biggest problems with AB are the low rewards and the amount of terrible players. (It's said, but it's true)

For the rewards, I'll just quote from another thread of mine:

Quote:

Increase Faction compared to PvE-farms

Anet always claimed they're against grind, yet to achieve ranks in these titles one needs to do a redicilous amount of MQSC's or DTSC's. For years on end, people actually botted both titles, and noone simply cared, because deep down, everyone (including Anet) realized the these titles simply take too long to get.

I'm suggesting to create a large influx towards PvP (Which is good for reasons much more than to reduce grind. Think more people playing RA, GvG and HA) by increasing the rewards of Alliance Battles and JQ/FA so that they're superiour to Speed-Clearing.

Luxon/Kurzick titles should never have been so hard to get in the first place, so I see no reason to atleast double the current rewards for PvP matches. Right now, it's double JQ/FA weekend, and I find that I'm still barely scraping the bottom-end faction I would have been getting if I was Speed-clearing. Luxon/Kurzick titles initially got introduced as PvP titles and I think it's time to take a step in the right direction again. Double, or even triple JQ/FA and AB faction rewards. There's no such thing as making a grind title 'cheap'.

Now alot of people tend to see "double" rewards, and there like "WAAAYTOMUCH", but look at it from the perspective as if you've never played Guild Wars before.

You'll see that Kurzick and Luxon titles were initially introduced as PvP-titles, and up to this day people still concider someone with high Luxon/Kurzick titles good at JQ/FA/AB while chances are pretty high they've never landed a foot in those formats.

After that, compare it to other grind titles (Lightbringer, ...) which are all almost identical in nature (Grind the same thing over and over again) and we find that Kurzick Luxon take about 10 times as long to get and much longer if you only use the PvP formats. It has even come to the state where everyone seems to have accepted Kurzick/Luxon take over a year (Read: Over a year) to get using PvP-only methods playing several matches daily when PvP should've been the fastest method all along. (And any PvE farms should've been inferior in rewards, with the advantage they're always available and soloable aswell as basic PvE rewards -VQ and such)

Triple or Quadruple AB rewards. Before people go: "OMG THAT'S WAY TOO MUCH": There's no such thing as making a cheap title cheap. Alot of people (If not majority) HFFF'd their titles, alot of which used bots. If not that, they probably did MQSC's or DTSC's which (And I'm sorry for those who did it) is not something to be really proud of.

Luxon/Kurzick titles are already cheap and hold no value whatsoever, aside from the: "You've succesfully vanquished one of the easiest areas in the game alot of times", ignoring the handfull of people who got them PvP-only.

By granting over 20K faction reward per AB, you're still barely looking at breaking even with PvE, so that's still months and months of AB'ing, assuming you win all of them. Assuming you win all of them: 40K/10 minutes => 10M = 41.6 hours - Which is still alot longer than most PvE titles take to get. Assuming you win 50% of the time (Which will be true for the intire population, as for every winner, there's a loser), you're already looking at 83 gaming hours, which for the casual gamer is already several months per title.

As for the playerbase, I've also explained in my other thread that PvE'ers nowadays are alot worse than PvE'ers 4 years ago (As with PvP'ers) because the game got dumbed down so much. You can either cather for the masses and let it be this way, or you can shape people up and give AB atleast an illusion it's PvP by allowing people to observe AB matches to see how it's played. (Observer mode does alot)

Either way, as long as more faction rewards are implemented (ALOT more), I'll be playing any Luxon/Kurzick format anyways, regardless of wether or not I have to carry my team.

urania · Mar 16, 2011, 12:48 PM // 12:48

what makes you think those playing AB play it for title/faction? or in other words, what makes you think quality player base would play AB for those goals to start with.

for real pvpers its just a side effect of playing in a format that is (well, used to be) a lot of fun and had potential, but over the time turned into another victim of devs neglect.

sure, rewards are crappy, but even if you quintuple them, as long as players are stuck on one map for months and as long as one side can synch in 2-3 teams and farm hordes of nubs screwing up maybe one good team on the other (or as long as its one big nub fest on both sides), those who wish to do "proper" pvp and be up vs a challenge that doesnt necessarily involve fighting 2-3 synched teams with 8 baddies on your side rather go somewhere else (a completely different game would qualify as a valid choice too, given the state of afairs in the last few years).

when it comes to skirmish matches, AB is the closest to TA, or synched RA, and thats what made it fun, next to the few tactics involved, but with things listed above, not even that is a motivator big enough to put up with ridiculous entry times and plain horrid allies. everyone gets tired of carrying, especially when those 8 baddies cost you the match in the last 10 s by massively wiping and giving a huge point bonus to the other team.

so please, its far more than just the rewards one'd have to fix, and its not just about increasing them either. its about making a dynamic system that would give MORE reward to whichever side is the underdog in a certain moment. its a system gw2 will supposedly be using in WvW "pvp".

the one-size-fits-all idea you got going there might prove ok for pvers or casual pvpers, but for anyone who actually wants challenge or at least have fun in AB, its rather appalling and ridiculous.

Don Zardeone · Mar 16, 2011, 01:20 PM // 13:20

I'd play AB to play AB, to get the title and once I get the title to dump jade/amber and then, well, I guess the jade.amber market would get saturated from me dumping so much jade/amber :P

The other teams tend to be horrible pugs indeed but the same counts for the other side. It becomes a different aspect. It's like when Charlie Sheen says "move forward man". Yes, the other teams are crap but you can work with that.

I don't remember specifics or anecdotes but I do remember monking and healing the other teams despite them being crap. When two crap players fight each other, the one who got the random heal will win.

It also became a very tactical game on an entirely weird different bizarro level.
"Ok our crap team number one is defending the bridge for no reason while craplords number two are being kept busy by a 55 monk so we can take the bridgeluxons from the other side, clear our crappers1 right after I gaze of contempt that 55 to free team 2"

I remember going "wait for it........ ... ... ... GO"

I remember rolling luxons at, dunno, 4 luxons per minute, flawless, while some guy on our side went "I just killed 2 guys in one death, woot!!!"
Those were the days

btw, what's this talk about a map being stuck on one level for months? Is it a bug or are there not enough games played?

Killed u man · Mar 16, 2011, 01:22 PM // 13:22

I think you're underestimating the value of rewards.

HA in it's current state is unfun to play. I played since the start, and thus I believe I myself, aswell as some other people have a good view on "how fun" HA is compared to 5-6 years ago. I can safely say that HA is unfun, and the only reason I still play is nostalgia.
Yet, due to the fame and chest rewards, there still is douzens of (euro) HA guilds who actually teached themselves to like an unfun format solely to reap the rewards. (It is arguable as to what is fun, but I can throw that statement around just aswell in saying AB currently is "fun")

The truth is that the playerbase most likely bends itself around the rewards. Playing in Pre-Searing, for example, is incredible fun, the fact that it has it's own dedicated community is proof. Yet the majority of people never even came back for Pre, but instead went straight for the supposed end-game in order to farm rewards, which you must admit isn't that fun. Farming DoA, UW or whatever can be fun for a couple of times, but after that it's just the same old routine. (Because GW wasn't designed around endgame, but that's an old story)

Point being: a large part of the community don't know what fun is, they get told what fun is, as a result of human psychology in games I presume. Look at DoA, look at HA, heck even look at GvG which is only a shadow of what it once was. How much fun could farming R1000 guilds possibly be? Yet there is guilds who've been doing that during dead GvG hours for years on end.

The community will just bend itself around the rewards, and then "create" the illusion of fun, which is arguably just as good as "fun". If pushing a button a million times gets you a nice reward, after so many generations, people will have thaught themselves that pushing a button a million times is fun, and the rewards are a nice bonus.

Hence, increase rewards = increase fun. Atleast for lower end PvP arenas were improving isn't really a goal, but rather should be a natural consequence.

Judge Nl · Mar 16, 2011, 02:39 PM // 14:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by Don Zardeone

btw, what's this talk about a map being stuck on one level for months? Is it a bug or are there not enough games played?

Lux side has been strong for pretty long. In the days that it continuesly was grenz, lands, grenz, lands, ab regulars were hopping kurz when the map was lands. These days people sharpened their tactics on lands, making it less difficult to win.