I have to say, this was probably the worst Beta weekend I have taken part in. I don’t say that lightly and the cause primarily revolves around Player versus Player and World versus World, but it was all so fundamentally broken or bugged, in so many ways, that the experience was incredibly frustrating. I did manage to take part in some WvW and PvP but far, far less than I normally would.
Structured PvP
My main issue as we rapidly approach release is stability and the continued errors received in tournament games and structured PvP. Across all three days servers would be up and then down with no warning. Server lists would regularly display players in games (even after refresh) and when you joined there would be no one there or worse, you simply couldn’t join. Mid match you would be regularly kicked and even more annoying was tournaments, where I lost count at the amount of times we were returned to the Mists, to be told we had come second (even though you were winning!). Then there was the continued delay when forming a team, caused by hidden lag as you went to accept the tournament invite that resulted in some or all of the party having a bugged tournament window, that required a full computer restart to fix.
Although I did take part in tournaments and we won all that we managed to complete, the entire experience was pretty miserable. What I found annoying wasn’t the errors themselves but the lack of progress in improving these known issues, which has me worried. I think the main cause is likely to be the sheer number of people, across all servers, trying to take part in tournaments and structured PvP. What I found interesting was that many US friends had no such problems when on US servers so perhaps this was confined to Europe, but with the huge influx of news players, I just don’t think it could cope under the strain. I’m unsure of Guild Wars 2’s server structure and whether tournament matches are hosted alongside the structured games, but they both had the same problems that I encountered in the last Beta weekend.
What I’m most worried about is the prospect that with strong word of mouth and a publicity barrage over the next month, we will see sales increase further, making these problems all the more likely when the servers officially open. I fear that if they aren’t ironed out and perfectly, it might be a PR disaster that simply cannot be salvaged for a long time, especially with ArenaNet’s focus on Guild Wars 2 really being the pinnacle of Player versus Player. I’m sure they are hard at work finding the cause but with new server hardware and the knowledge that they’d given out thousands upon thousands of keys, I was slightly surprised to see how poorly it held up.
World versus World
Contrary to the above, WvW was relatively bug free. The problem arose from the fact that many couldn’t actually take part due to queues. It was so busy throughout the weekend, especially on Sunday (when Desolation actually had formidable foes) many of us waited more than 6 hours to enter and still couldn’t access it. Luckily I was online at 6am on the Sunday and although we were significantly outnumbered until our world awoke, we managed to secure plenty of points by disrupting supply camps continually as well as bringing the NPC’s on side. Sadly I had to log off for thirty minutes to eat which resulted in me never being able to get back in until the servers closed.
My fear is that this will only get worse during release as server numbers continue to swell and the competition really does become real. I suspect there might have been some gremlins causing the queuing system to fail or in a worse case scenario it was working but was simply a too longer queue. I’m really hoping for the former as I can’t bear the prospect of not being able to jump into WvW when I need to, as it is such an important part of the game for so many.
All this aside, how did you find the weekend?
Comments
I had a wonderful time in beta but i agree the pvp connectivity and WvW availability were fairly bad.
Wow, you're certainly lashing out. :p
To me, this last BWE was the best of the three.
The first one was great but felt a bit rough around the edges and obviously lacked content & balance.
The second one was infuriating. The game's performance dropped to the floor, half of my traits didn't work. I got so fed up, I stopped playing on Saturday and never came back for the whole weekend.
This BWE3 was fantastic : great content, performance was so fantastic that it seemed like a new game, balance was better, most traits worked (although some were still bugged). I agree the PvP errors were frustrating for the most part but that's what a beta is for afterall.
Call me optimistic but I think some rough beta experiences can make for smooth release. =)
During Beta Weekend 2 the same problems existed and they are still here in BWE3, but actually got worse. I'm just concerned ;)
As for the performance, oh a HUGE improvement. I'm achieving 60fps constantly at maximum settings.
Hooray for an MMO that actually has a fun way to PVE. When I couldn't PVP, PVE kept me extremely satisfied.
A quick solution to the WvW issue would be to let people queue for the first available of the 4 maps. Instead of just queueing for one at a time.
That would theoretically improve speeds on getting into the fight.
Is this an issue because it's a non subscription game? How will they finance the ongoing upkeep of the server infrastructure? Surely sales alone won't cover it?
ArenaNet have already said server upkeep is extremely low, if non existent for them. :)
It all went almost flawlessly for us, but we're primary PvE players and only get into PVP for a change of scenery once in a while - although WvW can be a hoot. Both the graphics and smoothness are greatly improved on our mid-level boxes and the only critical observation we have at this point is that the game still goes into PowerPoint-mode when large groups congregate and fight in a small area or go after a boss - hopefully fixed when the game is optimized and bound to the gpu at launch. We're located on the west coast which *shouldn't* affect our connectivity, good or bad, but we get excellent ping and almost no lag on a 50/35 FIOS pipe.
It appears to those of us playing via our LAN that when someone puts all of their eggs in one style of gaming, i.e. PVP, then they are in for a greater letdown if something goes awry, such as what it sounds like happened to you... BUT, let me get this straight. You knew that the servers were busier than a Wal Mart on Black Friday and you logged out to....eat? Who does that? Really? And then you complain about not getting back in? Oh, my... here, Lewis, take my whaaakerchief ;)
PvP was unstable and went down a few times. Pretty disappointing. WvW was laggy at some points, and waiting in queue is kinda awful :/ Not sure what they can do about that without breaking up people and their friends trying to get in, or creating even larger zergs if they raise the cap at all. Had a great experience in WvW and then a lot of sPvP however, when things were running smoothly.
Hey, in WvW we had many AFK people giving problems to people who actually wanted to play plus Jon Peters said in game that they are working on an AFK timer. I just hope it makes into release!As for the PvP problems, I guess it is really based on the sheer number of people and I hope Arena Net has managed to learn enough about this issue in one weekend...
As for me, it was a blast of a weekend. On this BWE I actually decided to go around and take my time, finding places, following events and "smelling the roses" in PvE. It was really cool and entertaining, plus I didn't have any lag issues be it network on graphical based, yet I reported at least ten bugs, the ones that worried me the most were the party bugs: I was in party/guild yet people could not see my chat, that was annoying.
Anyway I can't wait for release and you guys over here better keep posting! :p
I had the best experience yet. Exploring the amazing PvE content with friends this weekend was the best time I've had in an MMO in a great while. There is a lot to look forward to.
sPvP and WvW were down because I believe they capped the population of WvW at 450 people per side (i.e. green side, red side, blue side)
I believe they did this to really stress the servers for the incoming launch. That is also why they decreased the servers that one can actually go into, yet increase the cap to 1000. On top of that, they wiped our characters so that they can fully stress test the starting areas come launch.
They're intentionally making these stresses to the servers to as to avoid this happening in the launch.I think they did a good job learning from Blizzard. No one wants to go into a buggy 3-day headstart.
This guy gets it. They handed out over 100,000 beta keys while simultaneously cutting the number of worlds to 1/3rd their original number. ANET isn't stupid - they knew the effect this would cause and used it for research leading into the launch. We will undoubtedly see more worlds for launch than we did in BWE.
I was blown away by the game. The artwork, articles and previous BWE vids didn't come close to communicating the whole experience would be for me. I had an inkling that it was last gen graphics, stripped down skills, with an easy trip to max level, I was wrong. I have never really played a game where I could become immersed in the story (not my thing usually) and forget I was playing a game for a moment.
My wife and I started playing BWE3 on Friday evening at around 5:00 PM, blinked and it was midnight. I finally had to stop because I didn't want to invest any more time in a disappearing toon, but every minute was bliss.
I have played WoW for a few years, tried Conan, Aion, Rift, SWTOR, Tera and TSW and more recently the original GW series, I think GW2 is the best of all of these with almost none of the bad. If I could bring one more feature over form another game it would be the smooth controller play from Tera just because it's easier on the wrists :)
This was the first BWE that I got to spend more than a total of six hours over the whole weekend to play the game. I can easily say that I did fully enjoy the game. A lot of the good points that TB brought up in his wrap up video are reasons I enjoyed the game. I also enjoyed the WvW zergs.
I didn't have too much fun with the hunger games event at the end, but meh, that's just me.
What are you willing to sacrifice?
I liked it a lot. It was my first BWE and GW2 experience. Most of the time I was trough the PvE and idea of not having "standard" quests with NPCs. also one important thing to me was that some dynamic eevents culiminated into raid scale with 20+ players killing big boss (especially one in the swamp was good). My point is, usually thise things need to be prepared in adwance and usually people have to wait for tenk and/or healer etc. Here nothing to wait just hop in and have fun. Also I like the concept of spontanous happening in the world. I had time for only 4 characters all ranging from 3-15 I liked the most so no high level zones. WHat I saw I like it. I tasted WvWvW and like that one too except it was very low FPS on me I think (and hope) it is just temporary engine optimization as regulary I have 23FPS as minimum on high settings while in WvWvW when we clashed with all over 40+ players it droped to 6! Now I am reading one article and see direct answers to those lamers wanting to know everything in front and makes me angry that ANet has to respond in such way - game is misterious and it is up to the player to discover it. In this article it says in the beggining zones player is concerned with trivial problems and as it progress player discover real global threat and transform itself into someone above others. I like that but others will hate all over the internet...
Possible spoiler here:
http://www.arena.net/blog/telling-stories-from-global-to-personal-and-ba...
It has been my concern for some time now, that WvW will be too popular and queues will ensue. Hopefully they can so something about it.
I found it to be pretty much more of the same. Uninteresting weapon skills that get old by lvl 10 which you'll be using til 80. Useless 2ndary skills which rarely add to survivability or combat effectiveness, mainly they seem like fairly worthless flavor things which do pretty much nothing. Then add to that that the plant people starting area was unplayable all weekend and the character wipe meaning I had to start all over from the beginning (beta I know but I'd have liked to keep my beta chars through beta). Just made it an annoying frustrating time. Also the lack of skill diversity is incredibly lame boring and uninteresting. 1handed weapons should at a minimum all be like thief weapons, and get skills based on offhand, though I would prefer if only the weapons auto attack remained the same, and that the 4 other skills were different based on both the main/offhand. So you're using axe/warhorn on your necro. You get the axe auto attack skill in slot 1, then you get 4 skills based on axe/warhorn in the 2-5 slots, then you switch weapons to axe/focus, now you keep the axe auto attack, but you get 4 different skills in the 2-5 slots based on axe/focus. Then you switch to dagger/focus, gaining the dagger auto attack, and 4 new skills based on dagger/focus. Your entire kit should ideally be based on both weapons. And they should spice up the crappy selection of 2ndary skills.
This was my first BWE and I came away quite impressed. I'm playing GW2 more for the PvE content atm so things for the most part went quite well. I did get in a PvP match that seemed to be bugged due to the fact it never ended and appeared to have no goal. All in all the weekend was a good experience and played its role in familiarizing myself with the environment.
Yeah Desolation was packed massively, and for once we actually had 2 good servers to go against (which was a nice surprise)
Our guild mostly tested out the Asura and Sylvari and the new maps, the Asura jumping puzzle is a lot of fun and can't wait to find the other ones :)
Hopefully come release the numbers will be sorted out and we can have a relatively lag free game :/ (crosses fingers)
Well when it was working it was fun. I got a great low level sword I hope to find when the game launches. I did have a major crash that locked up my pc twice, where I could not access the task manger, and had to restart the machine. This happened once when I tried to go into a story instance and the computer locked up and a second time when I tried logging back in. I waited a few hours logged in with the other char and it finally got me back in. Since I did not get to play as long as I would have liked I did not get back to find out it the story quest for snow leopard at level 10 still crazy hard.
After all the complaints about balance etc. for PvP on the boards, I was sorely tempted to post the following:
For perfectly balanced PVP follow link below.
http://www.atariguide.com/0/090.php
@Tricks
Friends and I stumbled on a jumping puzzle in the Sylvari area. It was fairly well hidden and when we came upon it we all went "woeeeee" in vent
Very cool jumper and the area looked incredible.
It was amazing! My fps was around 5-10 during the first bwe, and now I had 20-30. I could even play WvW without too much lag. And here I though I'd have to replace my toaster...
Are you a guardian? Let me introduce you to my Flesh Golem, he's getting a bit hungry.
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