Luna.8691

eotm is an overflow map for players to queue and do WvW stuff when the 4 main maps are full. Eotm can spawn multiple instances / maps because you can have a few hundred players queuing and multiple eotm maps are needed to fit them. It is similar to Pinata maps in PoF. It is a measurement of Anet's former success as hundreds of players were willing to queue up hours in eotm to get in WvW compared to now when people would rather go farm PvE content if all 4 maps full. The WvW game mode was so fun that players would go to sleep dreaming of WvW and wake up, login to play WvW. Why it was fun ? Because there was real competition between players and relationships with other players on your team. eotm had unique terrain and the beneift of meeting other server's players of the same color but in different matchup groups. Savvy server recruiters will tag up and teach newbie players basics of WvW aka k-train. They also identify exceptional players and recruit them to join their servers. Eotm is like a side-dish. It does not affect the main matchup scoreboard and has a very chill atmosphere because after 3 hours, map closes and you may not get same team mates in next round. However, there was a flaw that excessive playing on eotm is mind numbling boring because you mainly take objectives and hardly meet opposing forces to fight or defend. eotm was fun but players still want to get onto the 4 main maps for the real WvW. Occasionally you will get famous commanders that do meme runs like using broken OPed runes or hiding in a keep's corner to let enemy zerg in to ambush and wipe them while they were focused on the npc boss. But meme runs are short lived as the enemy zerg will log off after wipe. Which brings us to the crux of PvP : most players will not continue playing the game to be the victim {punching bag] unless there is a chance to improve and win. eotm is a huge map with difficult terrain and no mounts which brings in the extra factor of enemy forces positions. It was possible for an experienced commander leading trash skill newbies to predict and avoid enemy zergs by taking on undefended structures. Sometimes, we would attack and bait enemy zerg to a faraway objective then all will waypoint to our keep when they arrive to defend, just to make get them out of position for our true objective.

War Machine triggered the 1st golden age of WvW in GW2. They transferred [with gems/cash to Anet] to the lowest populated server Kaineng and ranked last on the WvW scoreboard. From there, they dominated and raised Kaineng to the top , This caused many other players to bandwagon and also transfer to join in the 'fish barrel shooting' fun. Credit has to be given to [WAR MACHINE]'s organisation as well as grooming newbie PUG commanders to pull this off. Then Kaineng became full and player started transferring to the 2 other servers matched up with it as opposing servers. Players learned and copied [WAR MACHINE] successful strategies and innovated, added on new tactics. Many Guilds grew strong and had responsibility for different maps at different time zones. There was both attack and defence as points matter and also top server bragging rights. International guilds popped up and grew due to the need to have numbers at all hours. It was refreshing to see new tactics from players from different countries. I remember being impressed with a subsidiary china guild which fielded 80 chinese players consistently which divided into two 40 player forces to take objectives. They would fight for a heavily defended keep for hours and used multiple strategies which would make sun tsu /zhuge liang proud. Not every attack was successful but everyone on both sides went to sleep feeling that it was a fun and hard fought battle. There were also Taiwan, Australia, European, Brazilian guilds that grew to fill up the needs to fight and defend at all time zones. The 2nd golden age of WvW would be the rivalry of Blackgate, Jade Quarry and Magumma. The competition was so intense that deals had to be made to entice entire guilds to switch servers with rewards of gold and legendary weapons for their commanders. Flashback to now. Winning a week's matchup does not matter. Defending is useless and not rewarded. Objectives trading for personal gain. Hacks and exploits in WvW not fixed. No GMs to monitor. Anet WvW devs failing technically to implement promised World Restructuring/Alliances.

You are missing the point /big picture. Large scale battles need to have strategic elements like luring enemy zerg, false flagging, sentry intelligence, defending, building defensive siege and repairing damaged structures. The weekly objectives are changing player behaviour to just run in one large zerg to complete the weeklies and ignoring the important playstyles that are not in the weeklies. Namely : Repairing damaged keeps / towers , sentry duty, dolyak escort. I am seeing Magumma throw the defense of SMC just to be able to capture it back to meet weekly achievement. Same with keeps and towers. Let the enemy take them so we can capture back and meet weekly achievement. Oh, have you not seen yet the zergs wasting time to take 1 single ruin but ignore the sentry point ? Have you not experience the whole zerg changing course to chase you across a long way to get weekly player kills ignoring their original objective ? In a way, the weekly has turned the 4 main maps into eotm, which was really a few hours of random zerging. This is bad as it removes the motivation of a server to win the week's matchup. To encourage participants, they could have just use back the old WvW tournament and reward top 3 servers with dolyak cosmetic potions etc.

I am really disappointed with the WvW restructuring team. So much that I will probably retire after 10 years. The golden rule of game design in large scale conflicts is to have 3 sides that attack each other depending on force positions and strengths. The weekly achievements introduced just made all players zerg up and beat up the faction that is weakest repeatedly and exchanging structures between 2 aggressors. There is no point in defending anymore. Anet just need to check their logs on how much structure ownership time the weakest faction has and easily see how 2 stronger factions semi coordinating to beat up the weakest faction sinmply to finish weekly. Weekly achievements is not what we asked for. Just concentrate on your promise : same guild members all on same server. Before weekly achievements, I got linked with Magumma and this server is massively dominatin the other 2 servers just by itself. That is alreay a problem as it caused very low participation from the other 2 servers. Anet developers, you need to play on weak servers that are underdogs and learn how to make it fun for them despite getting killed repeatedly. Not go on strong servers and implement their feedbacks for more loot. Adios ! It has been a great 10 years. I miss EoTm and {War Machine} .