Guild Wars 2

Greetings fellow players, ex-players, developers

For the past year a (nearly) half, I’ve been playing GW2 for most of my gaming time. I found it an entertaining and well-made game, giving me 1,5k+ hours of worth.

The last weeks, more and more, I feel like something lacks in the game… a more competitive and meaningful Player vs. Player mode. I was in most games usually a PvE player. GW2 changed that, by making PvE the easiest part of the game. I always look for challenges, and I found them in WvW and (less) in SPvP.
Still, the current PvP modes are rather disappointing.

1- WORLD VS. WORLD VS. WORLD offers a large scale battlefield… and that’s about it. True, we have sentries, camps, towers, keeps and Stonemist Castle, but they don’t feel like they’re worth defending nor capturing. You capture them and sit staring at the screen: “Oh wow another +5, +30… for our tick”. And then you wonder: what tick? Our server score? Okay… and what do we get for winning the match-up? Oops, nothing.

So we have different servers fighting eachother, for no reason at all, other than domination of a zone, that doesn’t mean anything, because if you hold it or not, doesn’t affect anything. Then if we look at the combat, it’s rather meaningless aswell.
You have 50 people? We have 70, you loose. Basically you could just get max population and you win, you don’t even need to fight, because the server with biggest population and coverage will win, no matter what. You don’t even need to be organized, you don’t even need to use any skill other than auto-attack. All you need to do is “Stack”, the magical ‘strategy’ of GW2.

So what does WvW lack:

• Strategy [Instead we have stacking, zerging, coverage wars]
• Rewards [Instead we have ‘world bonuses’ that nobody ever notices or cares about]
• Customization [Instead we have ‘Upgrades’ that don’t allow any room for personal input and even if your keep is T3, the enemy zerg can portal up some golems and break the doors down in 2 minutes]
• Competition [Every match-up you know what server will win: the one with biggest coverage (nightcapping) or overall population (zerging)]
• Impact [It is totally void of story and of consequences for Tyria]

2- STRUCTURED PLAYER VS. PLAYER is, equally, very disappointing. Instead of real Player vs. Player experiences, it offers nothing but Point Capping. In the end, all we see is bunker builds for Team Arenas (originally Tournament or TPvP), and more of the mindless zerging for Hotjoin.

Personally, I want a PvP mode that:
- Needs strategic play. [You can’t just mindlessly charge into your enemy pressing skill #1, instead implement body blocking, so you can’t take a keep with 30 against 5 well organized: why can’t 5 people on a bridge stop twice or thrice their number so long as they block it off?]
- Gets rid of Numbers > Win [Instead get Equal Numbers]
- Has impact on the world: battles involve destruction and creation (à la sandbox).
- Involves fighting and offers a place for both small fights (such as duels) and large ones, such as taking keeps etc.
- Place it IN THE WORLD, not outside of it where it doesn’t matter.
- Allows you to customize the world. If you hold a fortification with your guild, you should be able to build things around it, place traps, hang guild banners, war ornaments, rooms for guild members, sentry towers and so on and so forth.

Hope you read it and recognize the need of GW2 for a true player vs. player mode, with true competition and true meaning.

Don’t we all......

Have you considered a moba or rts?

I have. Played LoL, SMITE and Forge, but they lack lore and result in a completely random killfest, without any goal at all.

Sirendor.1394:

I have. Played LoL, SMITE and Forge, but they lack lore and result in a completely random killfest, without any goal at all.

Looks like WvW is the closest to the PvP you want that GW2 has. Unfortunately, it seems Anet doesn’t really care for it much.

I don’t think you can ever get away from (numbers = win) with any large battlefield game. Only in rare occasions can a perfect setup counter large numbers, and how can you program that into a game really, maybe with choke points and not letting one team be able to pass through the other. But then in real life, larger numbers win most often unless one side has a technical advantage in some way such as air power etc.
The only way I can see it easily being helped is to remove “downed state” and just turn it into a kill.

I agree the keeps and such should have more robust doors, walls and defenses even with no upgrade, they fall to easy still as is.
The attack angle from the top of the keeps are poor, you have to stand on the wall to be able to hit the target below, which shouldn’t have to be that way.

Short answer to question….yes!

I had some ideas on fixing WvW, but that would need a large overhaul.
1. Create 3 factions with actual faction leadership npc’s instead of the no named bodies we have now.
2. Scrap the current WvW maps in favor of a hollowed out version of the current PvE world and call that the mist.
3. Keeps/Towers/Camps in each of these maps hold a buff on Npc leadership. Taking keeps reduces buffs on leadership making them easier to kill, less and less body guards and such.
4. Remove points.
5. When head honcho leader is killed, that ends the match for that faction and their ability to get certain rewards (6) at match end. Without leadership you can not own closed property. Meaning no doors.
6. At match end an Npc vendor shows up with exclusive rewards such as skins/minis and maybe even components to craft a precursor(reserved for the winner).
7. Could even implement a Leaderboard that shows stat tracking…lords killed, camps taken/defended and such.
8. Larger maps would almost certainly be detrimental to the zerg defense.

As far as Realm Bonuses go, have that be a donation process much like players donate to guild influence. A player chooses a faction for the week. Feats completed by player in WvW goes to your home realm.
Basically it’s like your supporting your home realm no matter what faction you play for.

This I think would lock up some of the open space in coverage which is really what WvW is about currently. 3 factions just would lessen the uneven splintered state among servers we have now while giving us some decent rewards to actually fight for.

This idea of mine kind of resulted out of me remembering city Raids years ago in WoW with a bit of AV thrown in. War felt that way too the short time I played that.

As for Spvp…

What I would like is something like Fort Aspenwood (FA) in the original game. It was basically a spin on Tower Defense. /wiki it if you need an explanation.

CTF I’m not very fond of in many MMO’s. The only one I kind of liked was Huttball in SWTOR. Mainly because of the map design with traps and different levels coupled with the ability to pass the ball.

Death Match isn’t something that I personally would like either. I think that would sponsor an even larger bunker mode than what we have currently with conquest mode and it’s objectives.

I would also recommend that we get what has already been suggested many many times. Something like GvG in the original game. 8v8 GvG in GW is probably the only pvp mode I have literally sat there and watched like it was a real sport. Even Heroes Ascent (HA, /wiki it), was very watchable. If Anet wanted Esport, those were the two modes that screamed it and should have been emulated.

i believe gvg and tdm may be coming sometime soon, there was a map teaser in a stream that someone posted in pvp section, you should check there.

They need to release GvG and TDM for the “boom headshot” crowd. Other than that, there is not really a need to muddle up PvP even more when so much is broken in the current sPvP and WvW.

Aeonblade.8709:

They need to release GvG and TDM for the “boom headshot” crowd. Other than that, there is not really a need to muddle up PvP even more when so much is broken in the current sPvP and WvW.

That’s why they should keep WvW for people who like to zerg (It’s hard to believe but there are people who do) and SPvP for people who like to win a match by capturing points and bunkering, and give everyone else good PvP.

@ Akari that’s more or less what I had in mind