Guild Wars 2

(Posting a new thread because Fallen’s topic title is ambiguous and I want this post to be read and not buried in an older thread.)

The strongest argument for adding a raid-scale PvP feature is the core game design philosophy of Guild Wars 2.

Making a social game was part of the original Guild Wars 2 design philosophy.

Here I’ll quote:
“MMOs are social games. So why do they sometimes seem to work so hard to punish you for playing with other players? If I’m out hunting and another player walks by, shouldn’t I welcome his help, rather than worrying that he’s going to steal my kills or consume all the mobs I wanted to kill? Or if I want to play with someone, shouldn’t we naturally have the same goals and objectives, rather than discovering that we’re in the same area but working on a different set of quests?”

The manifesto goes on to describe WvW:
“We even redesigned the competitive part of the game to be friendly like this. Now worlds can compete against each other, through the mists that separate them, for scarce resources that benefit an entire world. … You don’t have to join a party to join the fight. All you have to do is get out there and start helping. Everyone has the same objective, and if your world can get 501 people working for the same goal, that’s only going to be more helpful than 500 people.”

Think about how sPvP players are given “Custom Arena”, “Unranked”, and “Ranked” options in order to self-select their PvP goals. Players in a “Custom Arena”, for example, can naturally have the same PvP goal as other players in that same arena. Now clearly WvW is a sandbox PvP environment because it does not have any self-select mechanism. It allows players to PvP in a manner that is not consistent with the idea of everyone having the same objective.

Recently Anet identified one of those areas of WvW where the objective was not consistent, something that put players at odds with each other, and they announced a change to that. To me it looked like Anet was making the game more closely align with the game’s design philosophy.:

“Players no longer have to worry about taking supply from an objective while another player is waiting to have enough supply to upgrade it. Players also won’t have to worry about making an upgrade decision that other players may not like or feel like they’re the only person spending gold to upgrade objectives.”

Separating the Obsidian Sanctum was a good first step yet because the demand is greater than the supply, players are still punished for playing with others. Players with naturally different objectives queue up borderland maps. Then they blame each other when a keep is lost or can’t be captured back and end up harassing each other in multiple ways, giving each other bad names – like harassing a player for taking supply or ordering the wrong upgrade. How could this result not be inevitable when player goals and objectives are naturally different rather than naturally the same?

So this discussion needs to be about making the game more closely align with its design philosophy. As long as there is no ability to have some sort of raid-scale, instanced PvP outside of WvW that meets demand – be that through guild halls or a mega-server OS or whatever – WvW players will never feel that they naturally have the same goals and objectives as other WvW players.

Bring back alliance battles from GW1.

anet does not want raid scale pvp.

8 vs 8 hotjoin was working well and nicely, people were having mad chaotic fun, but they removed it anyway.