As a fan of the Alliance Battles(AB) and Fort Aspenwood PvP formats in GW1, I personally would like to see some changes to WvW that encourage defending and different play styles, as well as making it more tolerable to continue playing even with little hope of winning. To explain some of the issues I have with WvW, I will use AB from GW1 as an example, which I enjoyed because there was little punishment for experimentation and defeat.
To start off, for me personally, armor repair is my biggest gripe with WvW, which excessively punishes defeat and discourages defensive heroism. Whether its a 2 v 5, 4 v 10, etc, the current system encourages retreating from battle instead of taking a stand against a numerically superior opponent. Repair costs discourage defending when outnumbered, because you risk incurring an armor repair cost should/when you fail and death removes you from the battle for a long period of time due to traveling distances. In AB (at least in the early years), even if you faced an opponent who outnumbered you, you still had an incentive to defend a shrine because it would slow down your opponent and you could return in less than 2 minutes, without worrying about a bill. Now in WvW, if you stand your ground you not only get repair costs/bill (a punishment for death that doesn’t exist in GW1) but it can be well over 5 minutes before you can find, let alone reasonably fight, another opponent.
Also, over the course of a week, it becomes quite clear who will win and who lose a matchup; for various reasons. Because of this, near the end of the matchup for some people it becomes more about the experience than hope of victory. If that experience comes with a repair bill and running around to avoid enemy mobs, it discourages people from coming out, producing a spiral of lessening participation.
As for rewards, the reward of AB during the early years was the experience, win or loss (in my opinion). There were no Zkeys or rankings, and pretty much the only physical reward for winning was that you could donate faction to your guild. If you lost, there was always next time and there was no punishment for failure (aside from the map). However, imagine that if every time you lost you got a bill (armor repair). It would dampen the experience for you, especially if you couldn’t afford it and had to leave to avoid further bills.
From a few of my games in sPvP, I recognized that there were a couple of elements that could be taken from that format and applied to WvW to make it more enjoyable (or at least less painful) for the losing side while still allowing the 2 to be different, distinct PvP formats.
Remove armor repair:
Personally, I feel that the punishment for defeat is defeat and that the reward for victory is victory. You don’t need to punish the loser more by telling them to go pay a bill; that discourages them from playing.
PvP split skills in WvW (optional):
Possibly have skills that were split between PvE and PvP versions have their PvP versions active in WvW. In WvW you are still fighting other players, so I would imagine that skills that are unbalanced in sPvP are also unbalanced in WvW when competing against players. I have yet to notice any of the split PvE skills affect a battle (mostly because I don’t which ones are split), but I imagine that these balance issues could appear amongst an organized guild group. Racial skills (which are banned in sPvP) would still be allowed in WvW.
PvP armor and skill set in WvW (if possible):
I realize that this 1 may be difficult to implement due to the current way PvP armor is handled. To me, 1 of the great aspects of GW1 PvP was that you could quickly create a PvP character and experiment with whatever build and max armor setup you want (assuming you’d unlocked the appropriate items), and if there was something you didn’t like about your build you could change it quickly. If your team had lost a battle in AB, you could stay in the outpost for a couple of minutes and change your builds. Now imagine however, that if in order to do that you had to pay a fee for losing (armor repair) and pay a fee to change your skills (trait retrainer). I doubt that AB would have been nearly as popular under those circumstances.
My suggestion is to allow players to use either their PvE or PvP armor and weapons in WvW (no partial sets; all PvE or all PvP). Upon entering WvW, a player’s build is saved automatically (like a skill template) and restored upon leaving or logging out. While in WvW, players will be free to reassign their traits or change armor types (to PvE or PvP) while in the safety of their world’s main/starting base.