Guild Wars 2

WvWvW is a lot of fun but the current system has a bias towards the world that is already winning by a large amount. The hopelessly losing side is actually punished for losing and have an even more difficult time to accomplish anything. In my humble opinion this is strange, and I feel that a key concept from Small World could make WvWvW more fun and more competitive.

You can find a basic description of the board game Small World here:
http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/40692/small-world

Similar to GW2 WvWvW, the basic key to winning in Small World is to occupy as much territory for as long as possible. Without going into the actual details here, the game did really good job to capture the logistical problems a large “civilization” has. The more places you control, the harder it is to mobilize units while maintaining control over all your holdings. Conversely the less territories you control (in a new civilization), the easier it is to concentrate your units and launch attacks in superior numbers. A lot of other games try to capture this idea, but Small World is one of the best at executing it.

In GW2 WvWvW the world that basically controls everything does not seem to suffer from any sort of logistic (or supply) issues. I think the supply feature is great, but it currently isn’t vital enough to the winner in a lopsided fight. The problem really shows up when a the server enjoys an overwhelming presence in a certain timezone, where they stockpile a massive amount of supply while simultaneously upgrading and fortifying all their territories by making a lot of siege weapons. It is not any harder to defend any of the key positions when you control the whole map, in fact one can argue that it is easier to do so compared to controlling only parts of the map. The keeps, towers, etc. won’t fall any faster than before. Your supply level really isn’t being drained hard enough when you are not actively using them.

My suggestions for change would be:
1) When a world becomes hopelessly behind in territory, its players can carry more supply (i.e. more than 10).
2) Killing yaks will leave behind some amount of supplies that the killers can pick up within a certain amount of time.

The basic idea is to allow smaller groups from the losing side(s) to deploy siege weapons easier and quicker. You don’t even have to take over (well guarded) camps in order to get supply. This will enable the losing side to perform asymmetrical warfare (killing key siege weapons or actually taking over keeps, etc.) much more efficiently. When even small enemy groups can do damage, the winning world will have to be that much more vigilant and be potentially spread out to maintain all their holdings. Hopefully this will entice individuals on the losing world to participate even when the world is behind because they can accomplish (events) and contribute to the outcome easier. They probably still won’t win, but it’s better than feeling utterly hopeless and useless in the fight.