If you don’t post this thread to your facebook wall, how will all your RL friends know you’re not a noob?
So here’s a fun little game design/social experiment the dev team could tackel this week:
- Create a new server (not tied to WvW or EoTM) on NA and EU
- Integrate WvW map mechanics into the cities/forts/villages throughout Tyria. (suggestions on how to do this included below)
- Tie objectives to Guilds rather than servers (eg; “blahblah” guild captures The black citadel).
- turn on world PvP. (Skills do damage to all players outside guild/party). -make a toggle to turn the damage to other players off if you can do it in less than 30 minutes. If not then skipit. It’s not that important for this to work.
- turn on triple exp boost for dynamic events and hearts (to leverage incentive of leveling in open world PvP)
- Capping objectives for the guild yields Guild exp for the guild + normal exp/gold/ascended mats for individuals.
- If a guild captures all the objectives within a zone at same time, the bosses get that invincibility buff and the guild gains control of the zone for 24 hours and receives all gold from NPC transactions + matched guild exp for all exp earned by people playing dynamic events and hearts within the zone during this time period. (people will flock to the locked out zones to level and avoid zergs).
- Add political coloring to maps to show regional influence of guilds.
- Lions arch is safe zone, all Guards attack players they see pvping. -don’t change anything about guards, just put that into their script and give them a respawn timer +downed state.
- See how many players guest transfer to the server. If >15% of player population are using the server after 1 month, lock guest-transfers out of capturing (eg; you have to fully transfer to the server in order to cap objectives).
- Rake in that xfer $$$
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WvW mechanics integration
Literally just have an intern go through each zone and put a non-hostile boss NPC at the top of each village that players can take down in groups. Copy/paste the EoTM code so that after killing him, players stand in a circle (like in wvw or EOTM) and it will claim the objective -but for the guild that has the most players standing within the circle rather than the server that does. If there aren’t 2+ people in the same guild, the objective goes neutral.
If the town has a vista or jumping puzzle; have the intern put the boss up there to discourage zerging and confuse the hell out of people. For main cities; wall off the boss in a “throne room” (just have another intern recreate the Iron Throne from King’s Landing in your game engine using nothing but black lion chests -this will take days, so go ahead and just copy/paste the hall of monuments room into the ground below each city and render it in different shades -no one will notice. Oh and don’t tell the intern. Also, just instance it so you can throw up some random wall texture somewhere for players to beat on without having to worry about overlapping polygons in the existing maps) that only members within the controlling guild can enter. Make the walls like SM and put backdoor entrances around main cities for guildies to get into it to defend (think like all the portals in divinities reach).
- Add a world chat for trash talking, and enjoy the ride.
Final Note
Srsly though, this is how the game should have been designed in the first place (in hindsight). It puts more emphasis on guilds and less on servers (wvw). Which fosters growth of guild patriotism and subcultures. Having a meaningful guild system gives people the opportunity to be a part of organised content in a way that’s prestigious to them. It means more people repping the guilds they worked hard to get into and less people running around with guild tags like “Take Notes Kids Im Going in Dry” or “Ez Pz Lemin Skweezy”. The game is called guild wars and I’m currently in 3 guilds; Meth (guild I made to troll then lost leadership of -but put a bunch of crap into the guild bank that I’m hoping to get back one day), Mist League (used for communication on a project that ended about a year ago), and Bad@ss Diarrhea Bombers; a guild me and some rl friends made to troll, but that I now use to keep tabs on who’s still logging in. Guilds just aren’t as meaningful as they could be.
Also, this took me like an hour to type, so please share it. My self esteem will be seriously hurt if it doesn’t get at least 100k views by the end of the week and I will be forced to throw a tantrum in heart of the mists map chat.
(edited by Moderator)