Guild Wars 2

Base server transfer cost on actual WvW queue length in a set time zone against your own median play time zone.

NPC bonuses based on current PPT tally order (1st/2nd/3rd): +0/50/100% increase to invulnerability duration, +0/2/4 level bonus

Outmanned bonuses: +10% Swiftness bonus, -10% condition duration (self), +100 defense bonus

I definitely disagree with removing penalties for moving guilds since that breaks the significance server choice and may also encourage frequent server hopping.

It will all depend on the players though. Any server regardless of population count can queue their wvw if they want to and be competitive.

Samhayn.2385:

Points will only be accrued when you first capture an objective.

also you could have objectives be worth more.points the longer they are held.

Quite contradictory, and players won’t fight on newly captured points then. So your defenders are going to be lonely.

I do feel that removing the AOE cap on skills or increasing it to 15 would be a good idea. This allows a small group to hold points against a larger invading force more efficiently without depending on siege too much in open world.

Also the ability for a commander to pack up built siege and redeploy it (give a time limit, say 5 minutes, and limit it to siege he throws down) would be useful in helping smaller pops fight against big zergs.

I’ve been casually browsing this thread all day and I don’t know if anyone brought this up but I’m seeing alot of mentions of perhaps making the “off-peak” times less influential on the outcome of a match.

Speaking as an Oceanic player this makes me a little sad. I don’t think punishing “nighttime” players by making their contributions worth less than NA players will benifit the game at all. It WOULD probley fix the population imbalance, but only because most of the non-NA players wouldn’t bother playing anymore…

On the plus side I do think the idea of consolidating / merging low populations servers is a one of the most interesting ideas as it works in those server’s interests. I’m sure some people on those servers wouldn’t like being teamed up with “the enemy” :P but I think it would be a viable option to at least trial.

Also a reworking of the NPC system (i.e. more Seigeraiser type events when a server is outmanned for a long period of time), as well as re-doing the outmanned buff and the bloodlust buff would help low population servers or servers with a low off-peak presence BUT that doesnt specifically solve “over popultion” and may create problems for those servers that are in the middle population / coverage wise.

WvWvW being what it is it was never going to be a fair fight to begin with and I don’t think that implementing countless changes upon changes to try and fix it will completley solve anything in the long run as players will always find new issues, nor do I understand how so many people think it should be a such an even playing feild such as SPvP currently is.
Yes I’m on a T1 server that can be considered “stacked”, but I want to be a part of a competative and balanced all-round matchup as much as anyone and would love to see if any of the changes mentioned would make a difference in the competitiveness (is that even a word?) of some matches. Though sadly, I dont think the general concept of WvWvW was ever going to be balanced.

Finally, I would just again like to remind people that there are people playing across ALL timezones and I think we all deserve to be playing the same game and not be getting lesser rewards or feel like we are not contributing as much to the score just because we arent playing at the same time everyone else is

The game mode rewards stacking servers on a fundamental level, and all changes so far have basically promoted it. There is no way to beat a server that consistently fields more people, so all you have to do to win is to go to a server that already has a massive amount of people. People like to win – you make loot and feel good when you overrun enemies and take objectives, and stacking will always perpetuate itself.

The awful ppt system also ensures that servers will never be balanced, because there simply aren’t as many off-hours players as there are native “prime-time” players. That is to say, the servers may be labelled EU and NA, but the ppt war is won by the unnamed timezones – Oceanic and Asian (and perhaps EU on NA servers and vice versa). The vast majority of WvW players in these minority timezones are localized on a few servers – once these communities are established, they only grow bigger. New players from these timezones (many speaking their own languages) join servers with existing populations rather than spread out. WvW players from these time zones have no choice but to transfer to top servers in order to play with decent numbers of players who share their timezones or language. Top servers realize this and aggressively recruit for these timezones, further concentrating the player pool into the top 3 servers (this is for NA) – the result is that no server comes close to being able to compete ppt-wise against the top 3.

The reality of stacked timezones is that it affects all other players because of how upgrades work. Servers with massive advantages in specific timezones can not only gain a points lead simply by being there against no opposition, but also fortify the maps and make it even harder for the other servers. Even after the weaker servers endure their low-population hours and reach a state where numbers are comparable, all their holdings are wooden while the enemy’s are fortified.

I don’t have a solution to propose (if it were that simple someone would have thought of it already), just pointing out exactly how awful the current situation is for off-hours players that don’t play in the top 3 servers and have to face those servers every week thanks to the decision to include 6 servers in NA’s gold league.

De-stacking is NOT going to happen by itself, especially not in the off-hours where ALL matches are decided. If you guys can’t think of anything to help this, at least lock the obviously stacked servers together matchup-wise.

1. Remove bloodlust buff – Favors winning team and definitely favors zergballing, keep downstate PPT +1.
2. Remove guard line buffs – Favors winning servers who pretty much all have these 2 bufflines thanks to zergballing downtrodden opponents.
3. Encourage free transfers to servers ranked 18 and below. The rest should have a cost increase (Ie 400 to 800 gold for servers ranked 17 to 7) and a huge transfer fee to rank T6 to T1 as it should be expensive (2000 gems+) to discourage people from piling up to the winning server.
4. Accountwide WvW points should be implemented to encourage more players from getting bored being forced to play ONE character in WvW and quitting WvW. See Point #2 being a large reason why people choose to play one character only in WvW. Terrible game design.
5. Outmanned buff should give players BUFFS as in stat points or damage. Outmanned buff only applies if you are LOSING in Overall Points. Anything that makes it easier for lower population servers to remotely even have a fighting chance. Make this based on Total points and applied after 24 hours of WvW reset. For example, losing by 6k = Buff of +100 Stats and +3k hp. This will also help with timezone lack of coverage. Make it scale on how blown out the other team is.

DeWolfe.2174:

May I just add something for everyone posting here? Just wanted to say that seeing so many concerned with creating fairness and balance in the virtual realm’s, shows great promise for our civilization in the real world. Good on ya’!

:) Love you too.

What has been the main cause of server imbalance? – Transfers!!!!! How is even more emphasis on transfers ever going to resolve the situation?

It becomes a never ending circle, people transfer, server starts being competetive, more transfers, same old problem.

Not all communities want to be split up and for some servers the community is the biggest draw of WvW.

The damage was done a year ago, it is too late to close the door, the horse is away over the hill

Make a multiplier which multiplies the ppt you get based on the enemies numbers. If you play in a map with a lot of enemies, you get a multiplier of x1.0, thus getting full points. If you play in a map with hardly any resistance you get a multiplier of for example x 0.5.

This gives nightcapping etc. less of an impact on the outcome of the match.

Katasaurus.6238:

I’ve been casually browsing this thread all day and I don’t know if anyone brought this up but I’m seeing alot of mentions of perhaps making the “off-peak” times less influential on the outcome of a match.

Speaking as an Oceanic player this makes me a little sad. I don’t think punishing “nighttime” players by making their contributions worth less than NA players will benifit the game at all. It WOULD probley fix the population imbalance, but only because most of the non-NA players wouldn’t bother playing anymore…

It’s not a punishment, it’s a correction and a badly needed one at that.

I’m an oceanic and my view is the exact opposite of yours. Our contributions at an individual level are currently worth way more than those in US time, because our total numbers are fewer, yet the map size and PPT gain stays the same 24/7. That’s not balanced.

Everyone – no matter what part of the world they are from – should have the same degree of influence over their PPT. In busier times, PPT should tick faster. If a server’s oceanic population is 1/5 the size of their American crew, then PPT should tick at 1/5 the speed. Simple, effective, balanced.

Katasaurus.6238:

I’ve been casually browsing this thread all day and I don’t know if anyone brought this up but I’m seeing alot of mentions of perhaps making the “off-peak” times less influential on the outcome of a match.

Speaking as an Oceanic player this makes me a little sad. I don’t think punishing “nighttime” players by making their contributions worth less than NA players will benifit the game at all. It WOULD probley fix the population imbalance, but only because most of the non-NA players wouldn’t bother playing anymore…

On the plus side I do think the idea of consolidating / merging low populations servers is a one of the most interesting ideas as it works in those server’s interests. I’m sure some people on those servers wouldn’t like being teamed up with “the enemy” :P but I think it would be a viable option to at least trial.

Also a reworking of the NPC system (i.e. more Seigeraiser type events when a server is outmanned for a long period of time), as well as re-doing the outmanned buff and the bloodlust buff would help low population servers or servers with a low off-peak presence BUT that doesnt specifically solve “over popultion” and may create problems for those servers that are in the middle population / coverage wise.

WvWvW being what it is it was never going to be a fair fight to begin with and I don’t think that implementing countless changes upon changes to try and fix it will completley solve anything in the long run as players will always find new issues, nor do I understand how so many people think it should be a such an even playing feild such as SPvP currently is.
Yes I’m on a T1 server that can be considered “stacked”, but I want to be a part of a competative and balanced all-round matchup as much as anyone and would love to see if any of the changes mentioned would make a difference in the competitiveness (is that even a word?) of some matches. Though sadly, I dont think the general concept of WvWvW was ever going to be balanced.

Finally, I would just again like to remind people that there are people playing across ALL timezones and I think we all deserve to be playing the same game and not be getting lesser rewards or feel like we are not contributing as much to the score just because we arent playing at the same time everyone else is

Guess you are afraid that what happens to most players now will be happening to you?
I play on an euro server at prime time. Even if we get 90% of everything at midnight. So a very high PPT it doesn’t matter because most of the time , if you log in the next day(even if it is early morning) you will see at least one of the servers who did PVDoor all night to take back everything… even upgraded everything(easier to upgrade when there are no enemies in the zone you have to respond to) having a lot more points then you.

But that’s I also didn’t mention time zones in my post. Population Difference should be calculated 24/7 every x minutes. The point rewarded for objectives and the rewards people get should be given according that difference.
So if you notice you play during a time on a server that always fight with almost no opposition, and don’t get much reward or PPT for the stuff you do. You can change to another server that have a low population during that time.
That’s the whole plan… spreading out people over all time zones.

Merging servers will not solve any thing. Because it will bring more queues during prime time and probably doesn’t help both servers during off hours (since adding only a very few to a small night crew doesn’t help against a server who has recruited many players during that time)

Take out downed state.

Lower the queue ceiling by 25% per map.

Make towers and other structures unreachable by siege from other towers/structures.

Decrease siege cap ceiling.

Voila.

SmoothHussler.6387:

Take out downed state.

Lower the queue ceiling by 25% per map.

Make towers and other structures unreachable by siege from other towers/structures.

Decrease siege cap ceiling.

Voila.

- removing down state will make people transfer? or will balance servers?

- queues are actually a reason why lots of people already transferred to lower populated servers. So lowering would be a good idea. But biggest problem unbalanced servers have is during off hours(from 8 to 12 evenings most servers have even numbers on all maps(queued)) So you plan to lower queue ceiling to 0 during off hours when a server has no players in that border?

-for decreasing range of siege or lower number of siege, I don’t see how both will help with this problem? It only need 1 golem to take everything in a border when there are no defenders (usually a night crew use a few though but still far away from the ceiling)

Don’t need 4 maps for WvW if there will continue to be 27 servers in EU and 24 servers in NA.
I can’t speak for EU, but in NA, aside from reset night, I doubt any of the bottom 12 servers ever have even 2 maps queued. That’s even pushing it, 80% of the time it’s doubtful that even 1 map is queued. Is there really a need to have 4 maps when most of them are unused by most servers? The extra maps are simply exploited by the side with the bigger playerbase for massive PPT gain.
Get rid of the borderlands maps altogether (bloodlust along with it), make 1 new large map similar to EBG where all 3 sides have relatively equal footing, and simply run with 2 maps with 120 person cap per side per map or whatever the current cap is.
The servers with big WvW playerbases will be forced to spread out. Offer free transfers for a few weeks before the changes. As someone already pointed out, transfers are completely pointless outside of WvW.
You’ll then have 24 NA servers with relatively equal WvW population which will make for far more parity and better gameplay.

Limit the number of golems on a map. A garrison taken in under a minute, just by sheer number of people and golems (20++) or omegas is just ridiculous when there’s a decend defense. Zerging down structures is just annoying and highly frustrating.
Give the defending structure a buff on “hardness” when there is more poeple attacking outside than defending inside, based on the ratio of this, though, if there is no one defending, make the structure forfeit to encourage a scouting habit on servers. Of course, the “hardness” on a structure needs to scale, so if there is one inside and 50 outside, it should not be impossible to take and easier as if there were 10 inside and 25 outside.

Reward ticks when a structure is under attack, but held:
If a structure like a tower is attacked in one tick (meaning the “attack timer” is triggered) and not taken by the attacking faction, make it tick more points than when it is unmolested.
This is to encourage and reward thoughful play on both sides. A commander or a faction then would need to decide if it’s worth it causing a distraction or blocking a port in a garrison.

Encourage smallscale captures by rewarding extra points for taking a structure with 10 people or less.

Encourage big scale captures by rewarding taking a big structure in one tick, but make this hard!

My first thoughts.
Cheers

PS.: Fix the homeland garrison waterside door on the inner keep. it needs to be reinforced too when the gates update is done.

I would like that we had the possibilities to have diferent traits than PVE, like PVP, but keeping our armor and weapons with diferents stats/runes. The hard work we did in PVE we want to use our skin in wvw. My opinion

lordkrall.7241:

Caliban.3176:

Please provide accurate numbers about actual WvW population and not just server population and base transfers on that. I believe that would already go a long way.

But how would they actually do that?
What would be considered WvW-population?
Someone that logged in for 5 minutes one day?
Someone that is logging in daily but only does it for crafting?

I often hear people wanting stuff based on WvW-population, but I have never actually seen anyone come up with a good way to actually get an accurate number for WvW.

I think this would be simple, the top 3 servers, one of which I’m on, during reset, they are always qued, and all night every night that whole weekend, every borderland and EB, have a team watch the count on them servers in them borderland and what not and check to see if there is an even count from each of the 3 servers, if there isnt, why?

This is easy to do, and if it isnt being done then it’s because they can’t control it, can’t figure it out, or just don’t think it’s important.

This is in no way making them money, so I’m guessing it isn’t important to them.

Still waiting for Devon’s responses, Chris Whiteside is all over the LS Collaborative thread as the coordinator, why is he not taking the initiative to approach us?

What is the outmanned buff improved the AOE cap? I mean, I know it’s hard in the servers but surely if there is extra space for more players the servers have some room to expand the AOE cap? I wouldn’t know as I’m ignorant on the subject, but I think hat could go a long way.

I also know there is some reluctance to give the outmanned buff any significance due to people potentially being mad at each other, but I’m not sure how widespread that would be, or how that is really any worse than the current situation.

I don’t like any idea that gives points for capture only. It only encourages even more zerging and less defending. I stand by my previous post that the rewards need to be improved for losing servers and there needs to be more incentive to hit the winning server instead of hitting whoever has paper doors, meaning the objectives that have also recently been taken and not upgraded.

Making transfers down WvW tiers cheaper could also help. I can already guest to any server I like for PVE, so WvW seems like the best motivation to transfer.

I think this would be a fantastic and fresh change for season 2:

Where instead of 3 servers fightin the servers are split by 3 colours and fight each other with WvW guesting allowed to servers within your colour.

UltraHiDef.4809:

Still waiting for Devon’s responses, Chris Whiteside is all over the LS Collaborative thread as the coordinator, why is he not taking the initiative to approach us?

WvW really don’t make them any money, so it isn’t that important to them, so they won’t be to concerned with it so don’t expect them to be all over this like they will be with the LS since with every new installment of the LS they add new items to the gem store and make money, even though the content of the LS is only worth about 1-3 hours of the persons time that is doing it, and WvW is on going and seems to be the only end game in this game and they seem to care very little for it. Least that’s what I get from all this.

styx.7294:

I think this would be a fantastic and fresh change for season 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHcO6Xo8eJ8

Where instead of 3 servers fightin the servers are split by 3 colours and fight each other with WvW guesting allowed to servers within your colour.

That is the worst idea I have ever heard of, has anyone given this any real thought? Or was this thought up by just people on lower tiered servers? If we guest to one server to help them out, who is gonna watch my server when we aren’t there? And there is no way I would want to depend on other servers for our score, no thank you…

Gut the server system and replace it with a guild alliance system. Guilds would be grouped together based on alliances, typical play time, average play duration, overall ranking and some randomness to keep the matches fresh. Basically each match up would be reformulated each week to optimize and balance populations. Instead of fighting for XYZ server you would be fighting for your guild and its alliances that week. Everything else would stay the same.

This would mostly even out population and coverage as well as create fresh matches every week. The WvW scoreboard would become a Guild scoreboard for bragging rights. Rewards would be based on how well a guild alliance does in a match up.

If someone can pluck a hole in that system (aside from the work necessary to do it), I would like to hear it.

Would it be possible to pair lower populated servers together for a match-up or even a whole league season? So instead of 1v1v1 we could have 2v2v2 or even things like 1v2v2 or 1v1v2 matches? This would give a lot of flexibility in creating more population balanced WvW matches without actually merging entire servers.

I do not know how the population is imbalance.
If the players limit for each map is equal for all participating server, then the it should be balanced thus the problem lies in the population of WvW participants of the different server.

In such a case, it is rather hard to balance the world population. One method that I think might work is data mining to determine the average number players and have all the servers with the same number of participants paired up, fighting each other. However, this method too has its flaw because WvW is 24 hours ongoing battle. It is extremely hard to balance this. Even there might be a chance to balance it, there will be a odd server out.

In this case, I believe the better method is to promote better rewards for WvW, thus encouraging more people to come. Also, renovate the WvW map to be more interesting and more important to the extend that it will influence the PvE environment.

The current WvW is repetitive and is nothing but a larger sPvP environment of capturing buildings instead of points. From a gamer’s POV, there isn’t anything unique about WvW. The lost of WvW also does not affect the server to a huge extend thus people will never see the needs to go WvW.

What I am gonna suggest might change guild wars 2 from a casual into a more hardcore game but it will make WvW becoming part of the game instead of being a feature of the game.

Firstly, merge all the maps into one mega big WvW map. There will be borderland areas and battleground area. During reset time, all servers will have to break out from the borderland areas and proceed towards the battle ground areas. This will make the battle more realistic, proper defense and offense strategy have to be derived if any server want to invade the inner borderland.

Secondly, by merging the maps will make borderland seems extremely hard to be invaded because there are three servers. Thus, a incentive should be given to server who manage to break into the borderland and that is to allow them to invade the server itself and pillage the land. Of course, this might be too much for gw2’s gameplay thus certain type of reward can be given, like the entire server given certain reward like ascended mat? The server who got invaded should be penalized, perhaps imposing sales tax for buying and selling for limited time?

The suggestion I made about offering new Traps and Tricks to servers that are being dominated was not to give these servers a way to actually comeback and win the match, but to give these dominated servers a way to actually come back and PLAY and have fun. They wouldn’t kick in just because the map is temporarily the wrong color, they would kick in when the certain point disparity thresh-holds are met… 50k, 100k, etc.

No matter how you alter transfers, people will still stack servers where they think they will get better rewards… guilds will still transfer because of disputes… and many people will never transfer for any reason. There will always be population imbalance. So figure out ways that people can still play when the population/coverage imbalance leads to one server ticking 600+ and having several times the score of the nearest server.

Blow-out WvW matches need “more play.”

Hi, im from EU server.
Free transfers on low-tier servers I see a problem, at least in EU servers:
Why would my guild want to transfer to a server where there isn’t any decent enemy?
we don’t care about the gold we can gain or spend, we want fights and no queues, if we move down we wont find these fights. There are some guilds, but not too much WvW activity, so we would end bored and transferring again.

The Gate system at my server would be a problem. We have the prime time and the raid guilds more late than the others servers, with that system would break all guild raids doing an awful matchup for us and for our enemies who would see their queues also increased during their playing time.

Personally, i liked the idea of a “crossed matchup betwen servers” with guesting the same team servers of Nuzt.7894.
More reasons for a guild to move to another server and cover different times for win the global matchup.

Nuzt.7894:

There has been solutions a plenty suggested here on these forums on how to fix this. A personal Favorite was Teambattleaxe’s suggestion on how to work Leagues, he adressed many if not all of the issues regarding balancing, blowouts, population, and fun factor. I think the WvW team would be wiise to take a look at his purposal and take it into serious consideration.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHcO6Xo8eJ8

I understand you may not want to do this exact solution, there is many good ideas in the video, that allows for alot of our concerns, and the best part of all, with three colors everyone is a winner, 1st, 2nd, 3rd.

Even if you only take the how to blanace servers from this, it will be a step in the right direction.

If you choose to ignore the video, thats your choice howeve I then ask you start basing transfer’s off of Server Ranking instead of Overall population which means nothing when it comes to WvW.

Ebisun.9682:

Hi, im from EU server.
Free transfers on low-tier servers I see a problem, at least in EU servers:
Why would my guild want to transfer to a server where there isn’t any decent enemy?
we don’t care about the gold we can gain or spend, we want fights and no queues, if we move down we wont find these fights. There are some guilds, but not too much WvW activity, so we would end bored and transferring again.

The Gate system at my server would be a problem. We have the prime time and the raid guilds more late than the others servers, with that system would break all guild raids doing an awful matchup for us and for our enemies who would see their queues also increased during their playing time.

Personally, i liked the idea of a “crossed matchup betwen servers” with guesting the same team servers of Nuzt.7894.
More reasons for a guild to move to another server and cover different times for win the global matchup.

Nuzt.7894:

There has been solutions a plenty suggested here on these forums on how to fix this. A personal Favorite was Teambattleaxe’s suggestion on how to work Leagues, he adressed many if not all of the issues regarding balancing, blowouts, population, and fun factor. I think the WvW team would be wiise to take a look at his purposal and take it into serious consideration.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHcO6Xo8eJ8

I understand you may not want to do this exact solution, there is many good ideas in the video, that allows for alot of our concerns, and the best part of all, with three colors everyone is a winner, 1st, 2nd, 3rd.

Even if you only take the how to blanace servers from this, it will be a step in the right direction.

If you choose to ignore the video, thats your choice howeve I then ask you start basing transfer’s off of Server Ranking instead of Overall population which means nothing when it comes to WvW.

It really is a good system but with that said, I can not take credit for this. It was a player from the GoM server that took the time to put this together I just really liked his idea. I post it in hopes the Dev’s will look at it, but all credit should go to TeamBattleAxe of GoM and whom ever helped him put it together.

styx.7294:

I think this would be a fantastic and fresh change for season 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHcO6Xo8eJ8

Where instead of 3 servers fightin the servers are split by 3 colours and fight each other with WvW guesting allowed to servers within your colour.

I can +1 this. I have reservations about it, but still… very promising!

@Nuzt.7894

What would stop people not doing the same thing as happened before?
All join on one promising clustered server to have a better population coverage.
Then during off hours out zerg all zones and take everything. Switch to next server and take everything there .. then next??

I think the clustering server solution will have the same problems. With no way to stop people of joining the winning server, where you can get better/more/easier loot, enough people and guilds will do again the same thing and join the easy mode servers where they can win and get easier more loot.

In PVE, other games, even real life it is doing something hard will mean you get better rewarded. In PVE you have quests where you can chose betweem killing a easy, medium or hard(veteran) mob to get quest exp. Killing the veteran over and over again will mean your quest bar will get to 100% faster then killing the easy mob. So reward is harder doing the hard mode.
Why not do the same in WvW? If you outnumber an enemy with a lot and can take the whole zone without seeing many enemies(PvDooring)(easy mode), I hope all agree this is easier then taking stuff when you being outnumbered in a zone(hard mode). When all servers has same numbers (if they all have queues for example) it is normal mode.
Then you only have to adjust the PPT and drops/rewards according the mode you are playing at that moment in that border.

Hi,
Thanks a lot again for taking the time to communicate with your customers.

Guild alliances
Like in guild wars 1, but without the 10 guild limit. No limit in fact. Instead of having PvE instanced by server, it should be instanced by guild alliance. Allowing guildless people (tagless) to join into a guildless server as if it were a guild. Obviously, it would turn into a massive recruitment zone, but that is fine since most newcomers would benefit from having a guild available to teach them. That way, you would load into instances for your guild alliance, instead of a pug group where no one cares about the guys beside him anyways. PvE wouldnt count for world representation.

Account-bound WXP
The WXP system only hurts and discourages alt-o-holics. For the rest of the players, it is a silly time-gate which creates “trolls” who throw their own siege not to get kicked off, who then get named and shamed and are basically shunned by the WvW community. Hell, we got one guy kicked from his guild just yesterday for that and we hope he never comes back, he’s not an asset if he takes up slots from XPd up players.

WvW servers
Make the servers a WvW only thing. Classify them by tier, for example, the bronze tier has a lot of guilds teaching people to WvW right now. Point out the difference between the servers, give people information about queues, population average by hour for the past months, etc. Reduce the cost of going to losing servers.

What makes a WvW player count for population?
Create a weekly WvW achievement and see how many people complete it. It doesn’t have to be hard, but please don’t make capping SM any different than capping a keep.

Cull turtling
Turtling is playing a game where you just try to outlast the enemy by hiding behind walls and siege. The best way to do that seems to be the removal of arrow carts. It does a server no favor if they learn to play that way. They will always wind up losing. No one likes losing so they quit playing. Yes, I know arrow carts can be countered. 15 of us sat in 6 of them for an hour yesterday and no one went down. The issue is that they cannot learn to play if they have something that discourages most groups. So they keep on losing until they stop logging in. Inactive players still count in the population count, which shows lack of foresight by the dev. team.

Gear trading
WvW gear should be tradable to the vendor to allow people to spec differently. Its not like it is salvagable. The loss of the runes should be penalty enough. Try playing WvW then learning all the effort you put into gearing your character was in vain and you have to start over. Not fun for anyone which in turns leads to more people sticking to PvE. You can’t really go wrong in PvE since at worse it costs you 3.5silver to spec into something that works with your gear.

Reward defending
Allow people who can’t keep up with an assault team to help by defending. Let them be rewarded too. Not everyone should be expected to be as fast as those teams. Give defenders a chest for defending against 10+. Also, give incentive to cap it, by awarding a chest according to the tier it was at so more people go for it. A good chest this time of course, not the lame ones we get for WxP levels.

Remove RI
That makes no sense. If a character cannot get a buff, then a WvW npc shouldn’t have access to it either. It makes us feel more like zeros than heroes. It would also help for smaller groups going around not being stopped by RI in active zones. I run around WvW thinking my character is a pile of crap, not a hero since it is not rewarding. If the PvE wasn’t so boring, I don’t think I would even bother with WvW. If some people like the state of PvE I totally do not blame them for not entering WvW.

Add diminishing returns by pausing caps when lord is up, not resetting it
Bannering the lord is a fun tactic, however, warrior rushing should be stopped. By that I mean, 15 people getting on warriors and just rushing to the lord instead the cap should be paused, not reset. It’s not like we can go and kill the warriors in their spawn so it shouldn’t be viable for them to just constantly rush in from there either. It is just another form of turtling and that leads only downwards.

Commander ratings
Show ratings for commanders that is lost or obtained depending on successful caps, defenses, open-field fights, etc. It is only normal that a new player following a bad commander just quits because that commander cannot show him well enough how fun it can be. With ratings, it would at least help the newer player make a better choice of whom to follow. Reset those upon transfer.

Contested keeps port
When there is a door or a wall down, PAUSE THE TIMER! PAUSE THE NPC RESPAWN TIMER TOO! Perhaps also require gate guards to be dead for the contested to begin.

Second and Third place servers should not have to pay repair or upgrade costs.

That would be a nice start.

The point of my previous post is to increase the odds of success and to increase the value of you taking your character to WvW as well as to counter ways of playing that leads to losing automatically against organized groups. It will always be hard to retain someone in a game if the game makes him feel like crap no matter what he does.

It is no secret anymore that the play is based on zerg play, but some people just cannot follow, so they must be rewarded to keep them interested, even if they spend a lot of time scouting a tower and don’t deserve it for their kills, they at least deserve it for their time spent.

Fixing the zoom-hack and the wall-hack would go a long ways to prevent bad play too since some people rely on that too much. Just put a programmer on that please.

Dutchares.6084:

@Nuzt.7894

What would stop people not doing the same thing as happened before?
All join on one promising clustered server to have a better population coverage.
Then during off hours out zerg all zones and take everything. Switch to next server and take everything there .. then next??

I think the clustering server solution will have the same problems. With no way to stop people of joining the winning server, where you can get better/more/easier loot, enough people and guilds will do again the same thing and join the easy mode servers where they can win and get easier more loot.

In PVE, other games, even real life it is doing something hard will mean you get better rewarded. In PVE you have quests where you can chose betweem killing a easy, medium or hard(veteran) mob to get quest exp. Killing the veteran over and over again will mean your quest bar will get to 100% faster then killing the easy mob. So reward is harder doing the hard mode.
Why not do the same in WvW? If you outnumber an enemy with a lot and can take the whole zone without seeing many enemies(PvDooring)(easy mode), I hope all agree this is easier then taking stuff when you being outnumbered in a zone(hard mode). When all servers has same numbers (if they all have queues for example) it is normal mode.
Then you only have to adjust the PPT and drops/rewards according the mode you are playing at that moment in that border.

While I can’t comment on how he decided on colors (I’m sure he was just using examples) if it was setup correctly the matches would be fairly balanced. The big 3 probably wouldn’t jump server’s because with the matches scatter like this (by scattered I mean the possibility of X server guesting to Y server or Z server or V server or … you get the point) it would be pretty difficult to determine which color would be the winner, unless Anet completely dropped the ball and put all the super servers into one color. There is way to many variables in this idea to guestimate who would win, so I’m sure you would still have people jumping server’s it wouldn’t have the impact it does now.

Lets say JQ has a 4 hour Queue, those ppl in Queue get bored of waiting so they jump down to Anvil Rock, the population in JQ’s 4 hour Queue probably exceeds Anvil Rocks population so now AR has a very large force pushing on whom ever they may be facing. the same could be said for BG, SoR, TC but maybe they jump to the middle tiers and help there. Who is going to win ? I can’t answer it, can you ?

I’m not dismissing your theory but, with the system presented in the video it would be ALOT harder to try and figure out who will win, it would be even more difficult to figure out who would win if Anet didn’t release server color until reset time then and only then you would know what servers your teamed with, and as we all know you get the rewards from the server you started on. There is always the chance Anet would drop the ball when teaming up server’s i suppose.

Edit: I’ll also say that with this system every server wins either 1st 2nd or 3rd, people are less likely to hop servers if they are going to win at least 3rd vs. a pat on the back for showing up.

Rama.6439:

UltraHiDef.4809:

Still waiting for Devon’s responses, Chris Whiteside is all over the LS Collaborative thread as the coordinator, why is he not taking the initiative to approach us?

WvW really don’t make them any money, so it isn’t that important to them, so they won’t be to concerned with it so don’t expect them to be all over this like they will be with the LS since with every new installment of the LS they add new items to the gem store and make money, even though the content of the LS is only worth about 1-3 hours of the persons time that is doing it, and WvW is on going and seems to be the only end game in this game and they seem to care very little for it. Least that’s what I get from all this.

styx.7294:

I think this would be a fantastic and fresh change for season 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHcO6Xo8eJ8

Where instead of 3 servers fightin the servers are split by 3 colours and fight each other with WvW guesting allowed to servers within your colour.

That is the worst idea I have ever heard of, has anyone given this any real thought? Or was this thought up by just people on lower tiered servers? If we guest to one server to help them out, who is gonna watch my server when we aren’t there? And there is no way I would want to depend on other servers for our score, no thank you…

You are more than entitled to your opinion and I’m not sure which server you are on so this question may or maynot be relevant.

This is assuming your on a server with a Queue, Would you be willing to use this method if you were stuck in a large Queue and able to retain your place (provided Queues were working correctly) in Queue for your server ? Basically you can hope where ever and once your Queue pops, off to your original server to assist where you feel is the most important.

I understand you not wanting to rely on other servers for your score, there may be others on your sever that feel diferently, or maybe they don’t. Theres alot of complaining right now about Queues and waiting X hours to get into WvW, this would certainly help that issue.

Let’s not forget this system will allow for those guild interested in GvG to face guilds they may otherwise not be able to without a server transfer. Yip that was a shameless plug to get the GvG community on board ;P .

IMHO, the easiest solution to current WvW population issues:
1. Remove PPT from objectives. Add points per capture. This with defeat the purpose of late night PvDoor. Even if stacked server PvDoored entire map all night it will give zero points to them.
2. Add more emphasis on killing players. Orb buff is a step in the right direction. The final score should be defined by which server killed more enemy players.
3. Balance map queues so that big servers cannot stack full map (166 players?) against small numbers. Balance it the same way as it is now in PvP. If server A has X players on the map and server B has X+Y players, no one from server B can join map untill server A fills up the gap in population. All upset people from server B can go gank each other in new overflow map or transfer off to server A to balance general population out.

UltraHiDef.4809:

Still waiting for Devon’s responses, Chris Whiteside is all over the LS Collaborative thread as the coordinator, why is he not taking the initiative to approach us?

Not sure about anyone else, but I never expected Devon to be very collaborative in the first place. He hasn’t shown much interest in that sort of thing in the past and I suspect he isn’t very on board with it now. I’m not saying he’s a bad guy, but his view of WvW seems counter to what most of the community has been asking for and he’s pushed out a lot of things we begged him not to.

And in case you forgot, it was Devon himself who so famously answered our complaints about population imbalance with the statement that “WvW was never intended to be fair”, so I don’t think he’s even sympathetic to the topic in the first place. I guess we’ll see ….

Make the world porpulation (currently playing at the moment) a “thread level” and make the earned ppt based on that thread level, so if you fight 2 crowded servers you will earn more ppt simply because its harder for your server to atain them, also making the gap between high WvW-populated servers less, just rewarding the prime-hours more than off ones.

by thread level i mean the sum of the other 2 servers your fighting

SkyShroud.2865:

The current WvW is repetitive and is nothing but a larger sPvP environment of capturing buildings instead of points. From a gamer’s POV, there isn’t anything unique about WvW. The lost of WvW also does not affect the server to a huge extend thus people will never see the needs to go WvW.

What I am gonna suggest might change guild wars 2 from a casual into a more hardcore game but it will make WvW becoming part of the game instead of being a feature of the game.

Firstly, merge all the maps into one mega big WvW map. There will be borderland areas and battleground area. During reset time, all servers will have to break out from the borderland areas and proceed towards the battle ground areas. This will make the battle more realistic, proper defense and offense strategy have to be derived if any server want to invade the inner borderland.

Secondly, by merging the maps will make borderland seems extremely hard to be invaded because there are three servers. Thus, a incentive should be given to server who manage to break into the borderland and that is to allow them to invade the server itself and pillage the land. Of course, this might be too much for gw2’s gameplay thus certain type of reward can be given, like the entire server given certain reward like ascended mat? The server who got invaded should be penalized, perhaps imposing sales tax for buying and selling for limited time?

You know, this is exactly what I tought they would do with WvW when they first talked about it before the release, but they have chosen another way.

Anyway, I find interesting the idea of limiting in some way the access to some maps, because maybe 4 are too many compared to the total population of WvW.

Having empty maps is bad because it still give points so people will always try to play on them if possible because it is easier to get points this way… you should try to give incentives for people to play togheter on the same map (as an example, giving more points if there are more enemies), and not the contrary as it is now (spreading people everywhere to take the objectives that give less “attrition”).

I don’t like the idea of limiting the number of people allowed in WvW, since queue are already bad as they are, but if you can find a good way in the gameplay system to limit the access to maps (as example: remove waypoint upgrades, allow the access to EB only under certain conditions related to WvW performance on other maps) would be nice and maybe help to balance numbers between servers.

Rama.6439:

styx.7294:

I think this would be a fantastic and fresh change for season 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHcO6Xo8eJ8

Where instead of 3 servers fightin the servers are split by 3 colours and fight each other with WvW guesting allowed to servers within your colour.

That is the worst idea I have ever heard of, has anyone given this any real thought? Or was this thought up by just people on lower tiered servers? If we guest to one server to help them out, who is gonna watch my server when we aren’t there? And there is no way I would want to depend on other servers for our score, no thank you…

And now? For example, for what is competing Vabbi? He need a mass migration for him to be competitve.
This way all servers can compete for the win, and the servers with more queues have some real reason to change server, even through guesting.

Actually there isnt any real reason to move. All the guilds are competitve enough to want the victory, and this is why all people are concentrated in a few servers.

If you want ppl to change of server and move to another, you have to give them some reason, not only free change for low rankeds.

Either this way or another.

i think its about time for anet to come here there isn’t much of a discusion without half the parties.

gidorah.4960:

i think its about time for anet to come here there isn’t much of a discusion without half the parties.

I agree, I hope Devon and his team really read all of the suggestions and think about them, sure were not always right but there is nothing wrong with admitting that some of the ideas are really good and worth investigating. This would probably bump Devon up a notch or two with the players if he came here open minded and ready to work together. I can see why he might be a bit reluctant, were not always the easiest people to please and one wrong sentence could mean the wolves are snapping at his ankles.

Nuzt.7894:

gidorah.4960:

i think its about time for anet to come here there isn’t much of a discusion without half the parties.

I agree, I hope Devon and his team really read all of the suggestions and think about them, sure were not always right but there is nothing wrong with admitting that some of the ideas are really good and worth investigating. This would probably bump Devon up a notch or two with the players if he came here open minded and ready to work together. I can see why he might be a bit reluctant, were not always the easiest people to please and one wrong sentence could mean the wolves are snapping at his ankles.

i may be confused by what chris meant by collaborative discussion if what the meant was start a thread then abandon it I wouldn’t call it a discussion.

At this point I think most of the different ways to address the issue have been stated. It would be nice to have anet come and try to direct us or add to the discussion.

Samhayn.2385:

At this point I think most of the different ways to address the issue have been stated. It would be nice to have anet come and try to direct us or add to the discussion.

i think it’s pretty bad that anet started a process to make up for the lack of dev interaction and then doesn’t take part in that process. It is starting to get ridiculous at this point. I think most wvw players already feel ignored by dev’s to ignore the players in what is supposed to be a collaborative process is a problem.

I’m still surprised that so many people want to address the score discrepancy by trying to address the population imbalance. The notion I walk away with during matches with enormously different score, is that the losing team’s population feels discouraged and thus doesn’t organize or even enter WvW as much as they otherwise would. At least part of the population imbalance is caused by the score system in the first place, making it a chunk of a circular problem. I don’t think the two are separate issues in the order that many people describe them. They’re much more intertwined. Even if you managed to magically fix the populations without adjusting anything else, the current scoring system doesn’t really take the quality of play into account to the degree that it could.

I know I’ve pimped this suggestion before, but really, changing the scoring system would most likely have a positive effect on the populations.

For many people it’s more fun to fight when there’s a chance to “win”.

DevonCarver.5370:

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to provide a little direction here to the discussion. Firstly I want to reiterate Chris’ point in the original post: “2: We will not be disclosing information pertaining to what is currently in development.” I think there are a lot of really intriguing ideas to be found in this thread, but it’s not the purpose of this space for us to discuss what we are or aren’t doing to address the issue. More broadly speaking I wanted to clarify the types of things we take into consideration when we make large changes to WvW. One of the most important aspects of Guild Wars 2 is the spirit of collaboration that we want to foster between players. It’s a core principle behind the event system, the skills in the game, the way we created gathering nodes, etc. Simply put, if a change will cause players to be less inclined to playing with other players, we won’t make it. Changes to WvW that incentivize players to avoid others on the map or that create incentives to have a smaller general population on the map create just that problem. When we look to make changes to WvW we look towards encouraging players to play together, finding ways to empower groups of skilled players to be able to make their mark even against superior numbers, etc. Solutions to the population imbalance would absolutely have to take that into account.

In addition, we don’t release specific numbers in terms of populations, queues, etc. and I can’t comment directly on those statistics. I’d be more curious to know what people think is the reason behind the fact that score is so directly related to the number of people on a server 24/7 and how WvW could be designed differently to address that moving forward. My personal observation is that the momentum you gain from even a small period of having more people online is so large that it can’t be overcome. Which makes me think we need to be doing more to slow that momentum.

Again, this is intended to be a discussion about the design principles, and not a forum for requests for information about current projects or to request specific changes.

Thanks again for the discussion, I hope it continues to progress positively.

collaborate – to work with someone else for a special purpose
discussion – the activity in which people talk about something and tell each other their ideas or opinions

I must have missed the entire point of these threads. Clearly everyone else did too. Nothing to see here, might as well move along.

Why not start the entire thread with just this “I’d be more curious to know what people think is the reason behind the fact that score is so directly related to the number of people on a server 24/7 and how WvW could be designed differently to address that moving forward.”

I’m desperately trying NOT to be cynical but actually sounds to me more like the fact you have already decided a direction and want to steer the community to discuss it and somehow rubber stamp whatever you had in mind anyway?

I think the best way to stop population imbalance is to reward smaller servers for ganging up on larger servers. Give diminishing returns to PPT for servers who are in the lead in terms of total points and/or PPT while giving bonus PPT to servers who take objectives from the leading server. This would encourage 2v1 on larger servers which would help ease out the population imbalance.

Also add more “tactical” locations for smaller groups to outmaneuver larger groups. The terrain for most of the maps is relatively flat; make more choke points, make underground tunnels such as the one by Blue Keep in EB, and make more uneven terrain with sloping hills that can’t be climbed from certain angles so that smaller groups can take a tactical advantage on larger groups.

Some good ideas remain from these videos:

QUICK LINKS:

Number 10: Poor Advertising — 1:01
Number 9: World Vs. World — 2:54
Number 8: Loot and Magic Find — 5:27
Number 7: Personal Story — 8:22
Number 6: Dungeons — 13:48
Number 5: Guesting and Realms — 17:45 – Good ideias
Number 4: Events — 21:49
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Number 2: User Friendlyness: — 28:24
Number 1: Polish and Optimization — 30:47