Guild Wars 2

Since it was suggested that a thread be posted with the ideas brought up in a closed thread in the WvWvW forum, here we go:

(a note: If my posting tone comes off as combative or overly critical, it’s because I’m having to bring up something that should be obvious to anyone that has played any sort of competitive team game.)

The premise: With how server transfers and populations and the WvWvW queues are currently being handled, there is a strong incentive in the short term for players to stack up with as many people in their time slot as possible to form a mega zerg that dominates that time-slot due to lack of any effective opposition on the other servers in their cluster.

Why? Unfortunately many people are shortsighted and don’t realize they are killing the game mode by doing this in the long term. There is no pvp if no one shows up to oppose you. Add into this that the out-manned buff appears to be ineffective at giving the outnumbered server a fighting chance against mass numerical superiority, as well as the supply/logistics model rewarding the side that can dominate the field first to upgrade their forts and keeps, and also add in players swapping servers specifically to drain supply with no way of addressing it in game for the server getting sabotaged this way…..

It becomes increasingly clear the player community cannot handle server balancing on their own without some hand holding.

And just so I am not just complaining without offering some sort of constructive ideas: (please feel free to add in some, people!)
—-
One idea could be scaling transfer costs- if going from a server that in the time slot you are playing in is high population to a lower pop server, you get a discounted or possibly free transfer. Maybe even retention of guild influence.

In reverse, you could be locked out entirely of going to a server with a high population in that time slot from a low pop server; or pay a higher transfer fee.

This will of course require accurate and up to date data mining tied into the transfer system. Could be a nightmare to implement.
—-
Another option could be to alter the supply system to make it harder to have a fully upgraded battlefield once your opposition has logged off, or make it so you can only have so many upgraded forts at one time, etc. Basically give the server that had people that aren’t on 24/7 a fighting chance once they do log on by making it harder to support a zerg logistically.
—-
Another option is scaling WvWvW queue caps; queue is capped to what the lowest in the trio can field at a given time. An incredibly draconian option though, and exploitable if you allow transfers to be too unrestricted/frequent.
—-
Another idea is to actually give the players access to some server metrics to better assist them in making informed (and hopefully good) decisions on their own, such as what time slot coverage a server has in terms of total population, etc. Of course, on it’s own, many might use this to continue to be silly and server time slot stack and then wonder why they can’t get a good fight.

All I can say is, unless something gets done, the server pops are likely to continue to condense down to three main time slots: EU, NA, and Oceanic, and none of them with anyone to fight since the players kept flocking to whomever wins during their play time slot.

Yay.

another option:

1) You cannot transfer to a server your current server is in a WvWvW match-up with.

2) You cannot transfer to a server that is in the lead score wise for its match-up.

Server transfers have nothing to do with anything. It’s just the boogeyman for some players.

Most of the problems in WvW stem from population. Obviously having more people to work with than the other side have a big influence on the outcome of a battle. You can (and I have) beaten much larger forces with much smaller ones, but these are individual battles. You can’t be everywhere, at all times, and you most certainly are not going to stop a huge zerg of fifty people, all on TS, with your group of five. No matter how many NPCs you add to a tower, they aren’t going to stop a zerg at all. You need players manning cannons/siege for that. Unfortunately, unlike real life, the barracks don’t always hold sleeping guards at night.

On one hand you want to make sure that whoever is playing is as legitimate a player as anyone else. If you’re Oceanic and it’s your primetime, you shouldn’t be punished for that by locking out towers from being capturable once the east coast goes to bed, or similar. On the other hand, you also don’t want to punish the other side of the world for their hard work, colliding against the enemy during “real” prime time, earning a hard fought victory, and then waking up the next day to find a single guild has taken your entire side of the map, just because there are no Australians or whoever on your side.

I think the solution – as good as one as you’d want without destroying game balance for one hand or the other – is going to be related to boons and upgrades that are based on population figures, both map-wide and local. This way, if both sides are active, fights are interesting. If the sides are uneven, fights are still interesting.

For example, if you are globally outmanned, you receive a buff that increases your stats. This should be what the Orb bonus is now, or similar. (The Orb bonus itself should only be related to point-gains or player loot, never stats, but that’s another topic.) When you are locally outmanned, participating in a fight against far superior numbers, you receive another buff that makes it easier to escape the situation (actually beating them should be left up to the players involved). Swiftness duration buffs, stance durations, stealth duration – that sort of thing. This is necessary as zergs always have infinite swiftness, tons of CCs waiting for you, and usually won’t be rendered anyway.

For locations, being globally outmanned may increase the amount of supplies an outpost receives when a dolyak arrives, and increase worker build speed and reduce repair costs a little. Perhaps the worst outmanned state (and best improvement) could be the addition of emergency waypoints to every held area, allowing small populations to move across the map quickly enough to respond to situations, with their limited numbers. As the population increases, the waypoints are lost. In general, mobility is a big part of the problem with late night fights, as there’s no way to be everywhere at once, even if you can anticipate the need to be somewhere, and it’s very easy for oceanics in their prime time to cap off your spawn exits while your one external waypoint on the map remains contested.

Of course, all this has to also be offset by point totals. There has to be a correlation between how well a server is doing, being outmanned, and the actual need for the map to be balanced. After all, if you’re blue, oceanic time slot, and your guild arrives to a map held entirely by, say, red, you don’t want to also have to fight evenly with a handful of people with insane buff totals and fully tiered fortifications when you literally have nothing on the map to help you. So, ownership of territories should also influence the frequency of these kinds of improvements and boons to individual players.

It’s a complicated balancing system. The three side idea works sometimes, but not too often. There are some cases when all the servers end up spawncamping one other server on either side of a borderland exit, just because out of circumstance, that’s where the fighting is, and upon death, everyone will just flock their way back there. It’s my opinion that the solution is having several kinds of tiered buffs to both players and held areas, and not just one or two that do little other than help you win one or two minor skirmishes, in what is ultimately a futile battle in the middle of the night against the entire other side of the planet, who just woke up.