Guild Wars 2

Well, as the above title says my suggestion is to add WvW overflow servers.
I don;t mean to include random server’s like the overflow pve server’s, but an actual ‘overflow’ from one WvW match.

Recently i joined a friends guild on a high population server and i ended up having to wait over an hour to join the WvW match which is one aspect of the game i really enjoy.
it occured to me that since there was an hour wait, there must be hundred’s of players, if not more, already waiting from each world to try and play. If that’s the case…why not have multiple copies of the WvW match ongoing to cope with such high participation?

My suggestion is to start each game off with multiple copies, but that they only work if there are X amount of players in the waiting queue for it to kick off. With the queue system in place it would make it very easy to balance the amount of players each team has per WvW match up per main and overflow server aswell as you could control the amount each team has to a greater extent than currently by adding the cap per team dynamically by how many are waiting per team.

Obviously, this is not perfect. If one side has an enormous amount of players more and takes up the majority of the population of the main match then having an overflow system doesnt really equalise things. However, once the balancing system has been sorted out that sort of match up should not happen down the line and each match up should have similar history of wins/population but with overflow’s active a much higher population can play in WvW which is becoming an increasingly more popular to play.

I know some might say that the population cap should just be raised but that does not solve the balancing issue and would lessen the quality of the gameplay for those on lower end machines as the lag would increase aswell.

i agree that something has to be done about the wait times for WvW. as for an overflow server i think that issue really complicates the balance of WvW. I dont know what the player caps are currently set to but maybe they can be increased a bit without upsetting the balance i dont know. Another WvW map in general would be nice to alleviate the huge list of queued players perhaps. I have also experienced over an hour of wait time on several occasions

This idea could actually resolve many of the issues I’ve been reading about with WvWvW if done properly.

The complaints I hear a lot are:

1. Long queue times
2. PvE’ers doing jumping puzzles and fighting bosses instead of capping or defending
3. “Night-capping” of keeps and forts

The suggestion that I would make as to how the overflow servers act would be that it’s a “limited” overflow server. It’s the same content for the most part, but you shouldn’t allow any upgrades or siege weapons that cost gold to get. Have things cost supply instead. That way, if someone just wants to get a feel for WvWvW, they can play in the overflow server and it won’t cost them anything. It’d be more like a casual WvWvW that doesn’t have any impact on the REAL WvWvW. These overflow servers also wouldn’t contribute to the WvWvW scoring. The players would still get the normal rewards like coin, karma, etc. though.

Rinbox stated above that this would reduce queueing times, but in actuality, it would reduce the “perceived” queueing time. You wouldn’t be in the ACTUAL instance of WvWvW that contributes to the scoring, but you’d be able to capture keeps, gain karma, do jumping puzzles, etc.

Since most players will be dumped into the queue when they try to join WvWvW, those wanting to do the jumping puzzles could choose to STAY in the queue rather than going into actual WvWvW combat. It’s likely that a player that’s doing the jumping puzzle wouldn’t want to lose their progress to leave the queue, so I think you’d see a LOT less of those people.

The perceived reduction in queue times would also be benficial to those wanting to participate in defending their server because at least they’re not standing around doing nothing.

These overflow servers would NOT combat the issue of “night-capping”, but that’s not really the intent of them. The intent is to give players a place to do things that are WvWvW related.

I probably didn’t fully explain all of the ways having these overflow servers could benefit the community, but I see VERY few drawbacks and a LOT of benefits.