Guild Wars 2

The only two things that ever dragged me into WvW once I’d done it enough to learn it during my “everything GW2 is awesome and I must try it” phase were world completion (now moot) and playing with my friends.

One of the big complaints about the holiday activities is that you can’t join as a group to play with/against your friends.

So I posit that people forced into random factions, unable to go in with buddies to help them learn or at least give them moral support, will become people much less inclined to go in at all. We already had one major WvW overhaul almost completely reverted when players proved unwilling to play the new version.

Though if it were made part of the sub-based idea that is the main point of this thread, then I suppose it would be a tossup as to whether the WvW change to random forced factions or the financial change to asking for regular payments would drive out the most players.

edit: Lol! One of the better forum bug fix notes I’ve seen /cheers Orpheal

Orpheal.8263:

A Faction System doesn’t let you “move” anywhere, the faction System moves YOU for the set amount of time of a match to one of the Factions.

You can’t know, how it would work out exactly, before Net hasn’t tested it out first.
I think it would be very interestign to see what would happen with the game, if Anet would simply test out for a month, so 4 matches a faction System where players ared decided by their servers they are bonded to for which side they have to battle, but instead the game decides via an assigned Faction for which side you have to battle with a system, where you play internationally together with people of all kinds of servers together randomly mixed with you into the same faction, where it plays no role anymore then from which serbver yo uare comign fom, at which time you play, which tiem zone you have ect. the game would always ensure that that players from all servers find togehter for their faction to fight agaist players from all servers of the other two factions that are mixed together in those too.

I thing this owudl be a very very interesting experiment, just to see, how it would end up and to turn back to the old current system, if it really absoutely shouldnt work out at all like hoped

Oh I see.

I think a system where you don’t get to choose who you’re fighting for would be extremely unpopular. A lot of people, particularly dedicated WvW players, go out of their way to play with their guild or friends (making sure they’re on the same server and always online at the same time) and that’s a big part of the appeal.

It’s also important for tactics. The best groups work well together because they’re used to working with each other. They have a Teamspeak server or some other voice chat program set up (and password protected) for their server, or even just their group. They know who can do what and how to make it all work together.

If every match was just random people thrown together based on making sure each side had equal numbers I think you’d see a lot fewer active WvW players…which would unbalance the numbers again.

But however you do it always having equal numbers is impossible because you won’t get everyone online at the same times. Sure there are regular groups (many of whom take care to be online when other organised groups are not because it’s easier for them that way) but there’s also a lot of people like me who might play WvW every night for a week and then not enter it again for a month. And that week doesn’t necessarily correspond to the match resets. Or I might have a week off work and play at times I’d never normally be online, then go back to my normal times. One person doing that isn’t a big impact. But I’d bet I’m not that much of an exception, it wouldn’t surprise me if there are thousands of ‘occasional’ WvW players whose activity is very hard to predict (even generalised).

So the computer might sort people into factions based on their activity over the past match, making sure each faction has an equal number of WvW players and then all of a sudden 1/3 of them don’t log in and there’s 1,000 people who weren’t accounted for at all at the start of the match because they didn’t play WvW the week before who are now playing…but only for an hour a day, 5 nights out of 7.

Unless you’re changing which Faction someone is in each time they enter WvW it’s not going to be any more balanced than the system we have now. And if you do that then the matches become meaningless to the players and they lose motivation.