Guild Wars 2

~~Reply to this thread to bump it if you think it is an important issue~~

There has to be a reason why there are barely any players in WvW.

There are 2 reasons to do anything in a game:
>Pure fun
>Rewards

I know there are people out there who will complain that people should do things for fun rather than rewards. The fact is, people will do it anyway. Rewards make people have a feeling of accomplishment. This is the main point behind legendary weapons. Denying that fact won’t make it go away.

Fun Oriented__________________
For people who play WvW for fun, lacking population makes it far less fun. They want to take over the map, have epic battles…. but instead, they own nothing on the map. They are stuck zerging on a commander to take camps and maybe some towers. This is not what they really want. They want tons of people with them taking over a keep in an epic battle.

Reward Oriented________________
These people want to get some cool looking gear. They want to progress their character. They don’t want to invest money into towers that will get reset after a couple of weeks. They want to amass a fortune or get the new ascended gear. They want to farm for hours upon hours having little to no fun in the Cursed Shore; day in and day out. Yet, if you asked them if they like this game, they will say yes. They like it because they like to achieve things. In WvW, their efforts are useless and progress thrown away with no material remembrance.

Combine the 2__________________
If WvW had some reward for playing, it could come alive. Reward oriented players would go in WvW and play with the fun oriented players, making everyone happy. Right now, there is actually more incentive to lose in WvW. Losing allows you to zerg any camps and grab the money and karma. Winning only allows you to sit in a tower while it’s getting attacked.

What needs to happen is, there needs to be a reward for defending what you have. Now, I know there is a reward. However, it is barely noticeable. It is the same as zerging a camp, which takes 5 minutes max, compared to defending a tower which could take over 15 minutes.

Possible Solutions________________
Note: I’m not saying Anet should definitely pick one of these. This is merely raw brainstorming. Feel free to brainstorm with me in this thread

- Income rewarded to the guild holding it for the duration that it is held (deposit per score tick)
>Influence
>Gold put into a stash called the “War Treasury”, which can not be withdrawn, but only spent to purchase upgrades on forts or buying siege. There will be a new permission in the Guild permissions allowing the use of this money.

- Pay people who defend
>Pay them per enemy kill. This can be karma, gold or badges of honor. Ex: 2 badges of honor per enemy killed while on defense, along with possible loot bags which you normally get.

-Have “Successful Defense” Points/Tokens
>Give points/tokens for each defense which did not result in a failure.
>1 for camps
>5 for towers
>20 for keeps
>These can be turned in for something which would show that you have contributed to the winning in WvW. I’m not sure what this could be. Possibly weapon skins, armor skins, titles, or even an icon next to your name indicating your rank. Similar to the 100% world complete, on the other side, you can put a military rank. The more points you have, the higher the rank you can have.
>Do NOT give another version for attacking. Attacking merely allows you to defend more, so it would have enough incentive.

I’d do two things:
1 – Make everything relating to ascended gear tradeable. That way gold can purchase it.
2 – Design WvW to be GW2’s main gold faucet. Other areas may be more profitable if your selling stuff to players, but only till most players have the gear and demand falls. But WvW will always be profitable, so it will keep attracting players.

WvW does definitely need to be more profitable for the massive gold sink it tends to be, totally agree there!

Things I would add:
1. WvW skill balances, you do it for PvP to keep everyone at an equal playing field so why ignore WvW which is another for of PvP. Heck I would be fine if they were based of the WvW skills balances.
2. Add incentive to protect dolyaks as if it doesn’t give an award at all most people have no interest in doing it.
3. Add two new borderlands to give players a new selection of what to play. Borderlands tend to struggle the most because they get bland and feel the same thing from week to week and people lost interest when the rewards are are bigger incentive then the content.
4. Make Medals more common, you are forcing people that want to WvW to have to run through PvE just so they can gear up, and not everyone likes that and it pushes players away from the game.

Past that I really do like some of the Walrus’s ideas.

Cant quote them but I’m pretty sure someone from ANet said that WvW isn’t supposed to be fair. There is no balance. That’s way a large number of people can fight against a small number of people. There just is no fair fight going on even if everyone had the same stats/skills.

The rewards for dolyaks have been removed because of bots who got tons of money/karma/xp whatever…
Maybe they will add them back, I don’t know

I don’t think we will get new borderlands. It wouldn’t really fix anything in the long run and if ANet wanted to implement them they could have done it by now to give people shorter queue times. Instead they told everyone to look out for less populated server by showing us the queue times.
So I’m pretty sure they don’t want to implement new borderlands and I can understand that.

Don’t know about the last point. ANet stated that it is possible to get pretty much everything in WvW you would normally get in PvE. It might be harder but it’s still possible. So I don’t know if they plan to change anything (I hope they do something) but I doubt they will.

For the income, I wouldn’t put it tied to a guild. Anyone can currently claim a keep for their guild, even if they had no part of helping taking/defending it. Also, anyone can currently buy upgrades for it.

Instead, either have an income steadily accumulating for upgrades, or reduce the costs of upgrades the longer a point is held.

On the point of the dolyaks…. I still don’t see why the rewards weren’t reimplemented. They say it was because too many people were abusing/botting them. They even said the removal of the orbs was also largely in part of people exploiting to get them (balancing was also a large issue, but I remember reading this statement).

Instead of fixing their issues with WvW, they just keep removing things that can be exploited. How about fixing the exploits instead?