Guild Wars 2

Hey folks and hey ArenaNet,

Wall-of-text incoming
I have to say: I am a naysayer if it comes to discussing GuildWars 2’s WvW. Upcoming Tri-Faction MMORPGs have potential ideas including a really good engine which is adjusted to largescale battles with a lot of objects ensuring a fluent gameplay. But they are actually delayed for like one or two years.

GuildWars 2 obviously has some problems which are solvable if you let this system evolve! I don’t mean adding new progression or adding new weaponskins and new stats for WvW-specific equipment.
There are two mainproblems I see for many players and for players which keep avoiding the WvW-system of GuildWars 2.

The Engine, lags and not fluent gameplay
A lot of players have a computer which should be able to run most GuildWars 2 fluent. But its no surprise if we see 60vs60vs30 battles the client tends to crash or having slow and unstable gameplay experience.
Yes. There are indeed players who have an absolute highend computer which is able to run GuildWars 2 fluent in every case. Even if it comes up to 100vs100 fights in Stonemist – beside Skilllags.
But WvW should be more playerfriendly and an easy accessable content as standard dungeons, events, sPvP or even the personal story. Unfluent and unstable client experiences keep a lot players outside of the WvW system though their computer meets the system requirements of GuildWars 2.

Continueing in the next post.

Combat and Largescale
Its a controversial issue. Lets start from the beginning here.
GuildWars 2’s combat is based on cooldowns which means we need timing and we need time if we don’t have any skills ready.
Having a 30vs40 battle. After those 30 players win, 20 players of the 3rd faction join the battle and fight the 30 players..
Its not about fairness but its a good example that most of them will have huge cooldowns including the elite-skill.

The elite-skill doesn’t seem REALLY special in such big fights – especially in even bigger ones when it comes up to 50vs50 battles. But they should. Else they wouldn’t be threated as sort of Ultimate Abilities of that class.
While a guardian is able to get invincible for 2-3 seconds in such a battle the mesmer’s AoE-stealth or Timewarp is blocked by an Area of Effect capacity. This doesn’t seem very fair but that AoE-cap exists due to technical issues. Maybe the client would run even more unstable and more slowly if such a spell would affect 50 players at the same time.
Most eliteskills sadly end up being just normal skills with a really big cooldown in such fights compared to other eliteskills.

Such a blockade is the root of unbalancing for some classes. The elementalist is able to deal a lot up to only AoE-damage being useful in this cases while a ranger ends up being more effective fighting singletargets together with his pet.

My suggestion
A solution to AoE-cap problems, class-blockades AND empty server problems.
What about having more and smaller maps?
We have three borderlands where players are easy to outnumber due to a big player capacity. It creates a focus mentality: Fill up one borderland until we have a player queue. The chance is kinda high to match with a server which doesn’t have a really big WvW population.
Its not fun to fight while being outnumber for everybody, it discourages new players and after all it pushes some players to transfer to another server with a bigger WvW population.
A second solution in this case would be: Server clustering. But I think we still have players who would be interrested in WvW with fluent gameplay without buying a new computer.
But World transfering and World clustering hurts and would hurt the realmpride of that server. And it ends up – in the first case – matching a server which doesn’t have a WvW population at all.
After all its about about fun. And you should join the action and the fun pretty fast. Even GuildWars 2’s current WvW maps are controversial and were even pointed out as being way too small for their server’s current WvW population.

I heard that the current WvW-maps are the capacity of ArenaNet for whatever reason (sorry if I’m wrong here) on these forums too. Maybe due to technical issues – who knows.
But we would have more maps (each of them should have a smaller map capacity), maybe even more variety (especially if each of them would be designed differently), more fluent fights and sieges and it would support instant fun/action for less populated WvW worlds which just want to compete on that map they currently fight on. Those fights would be kinda smaller than 60vs60vsX but even more friendlier to a lot of professions. (to clarify: I’m not speaking about SMALLscale maps which are only designed for 5vs5 battles.)
Maybe each map could be about different objects – as Eternal Battlegrounds having its focus on Stonemist as an important strategic point.
There could be a lot of options …
Wanna fight about a lot of camps and just a few towers? No problem, join map#1!
Wanna fight about one huge castle and three or six towers? No problem, join map#2!
Wanna fight about three towers and six keeps? No problem, join map#3!

Regards