Against ranged players on foot, my warrior did a sufficient job of tearing them to pieces. Ranged damage is substantially lower than melee, so even if they plinked a few shots at me as I closed, it didn't matter; I could still use a Savage Leap to get on them and hamstring them. I was actually surprised at how often it worked.
Hit one sumbitch so hard he dropped Trebuchet Schematics.
ANet has clarified that Ranged feels stronger because there's a distance buffer between you and the target. But melee has the tools to get close (if they're smart) and packs a HELL of a lot more punch.
My only problem with WvW is that people were disorganized (big surprise considering it was a 3-day test) and lots of people fell off towards the end to go see the closing event.
That's a good point. The fact of the matter is ranged was more effective because it takes no strategy or planning to get a big mob of people to throw out ranged auto-attacks and spam AOE spells, but in order to counter it you actually might want to employ strategy. Since there was no real coordination in this BWE (for obvious reasons) it appeared to be the best strategy (and probably was under the circumstances).
Even when people tried to rush the ranged mob, they didn't do so in any way that was tactically sound. So you would have a huge mob of guys throwing out ranged attacks, and your strategy is to run straight for them... from the front... with less units than then have. Yeah, its a wonder that didn't work.
Now, something I would like to have tried if coordination were more possible is to do a pincer attack. So if they have a mob of 40 ranged guys, and you have 40 guys of your own (a decent number of them having access to melee), take 20 around behind the mob (terrain permitting) and attack from behind. That way they have to split their attention between two groups, making it difficult for them to employ control skills to keep everyone out of melee range or lay down walls of AOE damage. On top of that, they will be in disarray, not be able to simply focus down the closest target, and have no real avenue of retreat. All the more glorious of a victory if they are so convinced that ranged is the ultimate strategy that they didn't have any effective means of holding their own in melee combat.
These are the kinds of things that are going to make WvW so much fun to play, but they are going to require effective leadership (which obviously wasn't there in the beta) and proper communication (which was largely broken in the beta). Here's hoping we can get more of a taste of the true WvW experience in the next beta.