Greetings, I’d like to just write my thoughts regarding some of the mechanics in WvW at present, and how they could improve the current situation where late night zergs will win a 24h match.
For those unaware, currently, the 24h match setup is applied to WvW by ArenaNet in an attempt to ‘balance out the servers’ and match them against ‘equal’ servers. This matchmaking process is based on the server score. The server score is, unless proved otherwise, the sole factor in this matchmaking process.
As of now, the servers reset at 00:00 GMT midnight, when most people go to sleep, what happens after this reset is what causes the main issue that WvW is currently suffering from. The hand full of servers that are capable of fielding a blob at these hours (notably the french on EU) will end up capturing all holdings almost uncontested, and upgrading their key holdings to almost untakable status. These servers gain such a large amount of score during these late/early morning hours that they by default win, as the remaining time in the 24 hour match period is not long enough to close that gap. Last but not least, they obtain the 3 Orbs with little effort, giving them a massive stat advantage the rest of the day, with Orbs locked in their upgraded keeps.
Suggestions to solve this (and related issues):
- Change the matchmaking reset time to something sensible, like early in the evening GMT for europe, and something else for NA players.
- Matchmaking process should attempt to factor more than just score. I know it likely won’t happen, but an attempt to factor the number of organised guilds on a server would help out the casual servers a lot. Desolation for example has no organised guilds what so ever, our blob is entirely mindless and has no hope of beating organised servers (myself and other people tried to organise it, it is not possible, only a small number care to do something organised), but we get put on the top tier because we simply have a lot of players.
- Change the reset period to 2 or 3 days for a while so that people got a chance to fight over a longer period, and actually consider it worthwhile to pay for upgrades. Currently the common argument is, why pay 75s for an upgrade when the matches reset in a few hours? I know eventually this is going to be a 2 week period, but while Arenanet is trying to balance the servers, I believe this balance can be obtained more accurately with a longer match period, giving servers a chance to fight for more than just late night hours to win, and a more reasonable time frame for people to consider paying for big upgrades.
- Change the Orb buff. Rather than giving the biggest zerg a stat buff which they do not need, do something different with Orbs. For example, Orbs could grant something unique ONLY to the Keep they are put in, or, a server holding all 3 Orbs gets acces to a unique area (central jumping puzzle or something else?).
- Make the outmanned buff usefull. That extra magic find will not help them when they can’t even realisticly kill anyone. The 3x Orb buff could become the new outmanned buff.
- AOE needs to be affected by line of sight. Tried defending a Keep or Tower from a zerg? You need to spawn siege equipement in very creative places to even save them from AOE damage that people cast on the wall from outside. It just promotes blobbing more, since Arrow Carts are no threat to a zerg, unless they are not on a wall but in a different choke point (Stonemist Lord room is one example).
- On the note of Arrow Carts, currently Retaliation renders them entirely useless. 50 man at your Tower and you got 15 defending? Just bail, because those Arrow Carts will get one shotted by Retaliation, assuming you even get to build any siege equipement with the AOE issue.
- And finally, there need to be more ways for a mindless zerg to try and organise. The team chat simply is not working, people don’t read it and continue to do their own thing (and die, over and over, I’m honestly wondering if they are real players sometimes, or bot farmers). I know there is a ‘commander’ feature, but no one on Desolation has this yet, and it’s just a horrible pain for people like myself to try and organise things. Eating my own fingers off seems like a more pleasant thing to do.
This touches some of what I believe are more critical issues. There are more issues, such as looting being a pain, and the audio bug that happens after 5-10 minutes of WvW, but I think those issues are too obvious to try and ‘discuss’ about.
Thanks for reading.
Thorny Scrub – Thief
Desolation
(edited by Raap.9065)