Guild Wars 2

The WvW rankings system has been a head ache ever since the game released. No matter what tier servers are put in, someone ends up unhappy about it. That unhappiness translates to forum posts here complaining about it. So I propose the simple and easy fix.

Remove the scoreboard from WvW.

DAOC (the mother of WvW) never had a scoreboard, and players loved the game. We never needed an artificial means to tell us if our realm was winning or loosing the overall fight. This was because every time you logged on, the only thing that mattered was how your realm was doing at that very moment. What castles you had, what relics your realm owned, etc. etc.

RvR was played for fun & enjoyment. Guilds didn’t server hop to join the “winning side”. Because it was all about just having fun. I played Hibernia on Lancelot from the game’s release. We were almost always the underdog for the first several years. And we didn’t care. We still went out every single day, and gave a good showing of our selves. All because it was just fun to do so.

As it stands now, once a realm starts to fall behind on the scoreboard often times they will just give up and stop queuing. As they know they have no chance to win that round. Which progressively gets worse and worse until the match is reset. If this continues week in and week out, guilds start to leave that server for a server that wins more often.

The scoreboard serves no purpose in an RvR type of a game. The only reason for that is to stroke other players kittens. Leave that crap in SPvP. Keep the scoreboard for your in-house use, so that you can properly match servers when needed. But please take it out of the game.

I hope this doesn’t get ignored, but it might. But what do you have to lose trying this out for a week or two? You will most likely find that players respond quite well to it. There will be some people that shout “I can’t tell who’s winning” at first. But they will hopefully soon realize that WvW is just as fun, if not more fun, when your not always worried about the scoreboard.

If you want that sort of fun underdog play get yourself over to Vabbi. We have the smallest zergs, lowest scores, occasionally dress in humiliation pink, wipe frequently and rarely have to pay for armor repairs due to being outmanned 90% of the time. All that said we have a good time and don’t much care for all that scoreboard nonsense.

The only downside is we’re often against fissure of woe who sometimes have a small group of griefers [JD] lurking in the jump puzzles. They down you but won’t kill you or let you rez and you can’t map out. I would prefer Anet fix that personally but there you go.

This goes way above and beyond just wanting an underdog type of fight. The scoreboard quite literally takes a lot of the fun out of WvW. Trying to make what should be a casual & enjoyable experience into an esport. When we already have SPVP for that.

I strongly support this suggestion.

1. It just makes few sense trying to measure an highly dynamic and unstable enviroment with a (more or less) static value, that was designed to measure the performance of an individual (that shows a more or less stable performance) in a 1vs1 game (chess). WvW has too many influencing variables to give this value/rateing a good reliability.

2. It would prevent a lot of complains about issues like nightcapping.

3. Hopefully it would bring the fokus on fun fights again, not some “leaderboards” to boost some egos.
I come from a game with 3 faction openworld pvp, pretty much similiar to wvw and when they introduced rankings and personal scores, it only boosted the most unfun ways of playing the game, like camping the outnumbered faction or weaker (lower lvl/worse equiped) players, tradeing of points and so on. Some people are just too much attracted by this virtual kitten representations and start to fall into the patterns of doing them the easy way (farming them), just to see them grow – even if they have less fun doing that than they have fighting close fights.

I might add that anet should remove the wvw server boni as well. Its just not fair to get punished in pve as well, just because i happen to be on a lowpopulation server (vabbi here).
At the moment anet gives too much incentives for people to stack on the big servers, only makeing the population problems worse.

sticx.5823:

what do you have to lose trying this out for a week or two?

Player confidence in ANet, and therefore player accounts.

I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, but you don’t just “try something out” on a live playerbase of millions. Since they don’t run a public test server, ANet has to have enough confidence in idea to commit to it.