Guild Wars 2

This post is going to assume that Arenanet is intelligent enough to re-introduce the alpine borderland map due to the failure that is the desert borderland and after watching Ins For Da Wagh’s WvW interview.

To put it bluntly: accept that the desert borderland was a failed experiment and was “wasted” man hours (though experiments aren’t necessarily wasted time when you discover information that you couldn’t have discovered otherwise).

Get rid of the desert borderlands and return the alpine borderlands.
If you don’t give us what we want then you are going to lose a ton of players to other games. Your only saving grace right now is the lack of RvR competition.

Arenanet, your first map was well done. Good job. Nothing to be ashamed of.
The alpine borderland was the epitome of a successful map. I’m not going to list everything that the alpine borderlands did well and the desert borderlands failed at because the dwindling player-base speaks for itself and it’s been said a million times already.

Alpine borderlands did have some issues but they were fixable.

Friday night reset
We want to drink with our friends at the end of our work week – not mid weekend.

Server-wide map dots
“Is anyone at bay?” “Does bay need help?!” “HOW’S BAY?” “I’m going to bay. Nvm it’s K.”
Yeah… let’s have dots for players on your server similar similar to how you can find guildies on the map.

Pop-up objective text
- When an objective that belongs to your server is captured a pop-up text appears to alert players on your server.
- Clicking this text scrolls the map/minimap to the captured objective.

Sentries
- Copy the sentry effects from the desert borderland to alpine borderland.
- Introduce pop-up text that says, “Server X has captured your sentry!”.
- Clicking on this text to scroll the map to the objective allows players to better track the enemy.

Dolyaks
- Increase the amount of supply that a dolyak delivers to keeps and towers.
- Change supply depots at keeps and towers to have a second fixed supply that is untouchable by players being usable only for upgrading the structure. The rest of the supply is usable by the players.

Upgrades
- Remove automatic upgrades – keep tiered upgrades.
- Change upgrade cost from gold to another currency such as badges of honor.
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Bloodlust
Bloodlust needs to be a mechanic designed to support the server with less players.
All of the major problems that WvW has ultimately lead to population issues.

- Remove the stat increase gained from bloodlust.
- Keep the points per STOMP feature of this mechanic.

Honestly, that’s probably all that this mechanic needs, if not forever, at least for now.

Why? A server with more players is able to capture bloodlust for the stat boost to further dominate. Remove the stat boost and what reason will they have to capture it? A server with more players that goes around zerging will not be stomping people – they just won’t. It’s not practical, never has been. Removing the stat boost allows smaller servers to capture this objective to benefit them since they will be able to get stomps. Also, this mechanic is a nice feature for roamers/havoc groups/skilled players to allow them to have an impact for their server. Capturing these objectives in general brings fights.

What if the larger server does send players to capture bloodlust anyway? Then their players get spread out from their large zerg which also benefits the server with less players.
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Signal Fires
- New mechanic added to the inner of all towers and keeps.
- Signal fires can only be used inside of a tower or keep that your server controls which currently has white swords while your server has the outnumbered buff.
- Lighting a signal fire triggers a pop-up message on all 3 borderlands including eternal battlegrounds stating, “Structure X is under attack in borderland X!”. Signal fires have a cooldown of 5 minutes.
- Clicking the pop-up text scrolls the map/minimap to the area under attack.
- Enemies can see the visual appearance of signal fires.

Scout Mastery
The unsung heroes of WvW. These guys need a mastery.

Tier 1 – Gesturing @ NPCs allows you to converse with them. Different per gesture. LOL
Tier 2 – WvW traps and tricks now cost 5 supply and deploy faster.
Tier 3 – Dolyaks near you gain swiftness and take less damage.
Tier 4 – Lighting signal fires triggers a supply drop from the edge of the mists if your server won the last match of the edge of the mists.
Tier 5 – WvW traps now track enemy movement to allied players on the map for 30s. Causes pop-up text for your server: “Server X is on the move!”.
Clicking this text scrolls the map/minimap to their location.
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Wasted Space – Skritt and Centaurs
This map is so well designed that the only “wasted” space are the skritt and centaurs.
Literally everywhere else on this map is used/has been used. The only other area that can be considered wasted space is the area around citadel. Citadel may not be practically fixable, but some “silly” things could be added to that area for some fun when bored.

If we can introduce 2 more objectives, then, that will help for map spread which should help for splitting the zergs. How can we make the skritt and centaurs useful?

Skritt Tunnels
- Add pop-up text, “Server X is attacking the Skritt!”.
Clicking this text scrolls the map/minimap to the location.
- Completing the skritt event chain allows use of skritt tunnels in the borderland [map].
- Only the server that completed the event last can use the tunnels.
- Tunnels should all interconnect, meaning: you can get to any tunnel from any tunnel.
- Tunnels cannot be used while in combat.

Centaurs
- Add pop-up text, “Server X is attacking the Centaurs!”.
Clicking this text scrolls the map/minimap to the location.
- Completing the centaur event chain grants everyone on your server on the map 25% movement speed as long as the centaurs remain under your control.

Simple and not useless. I’m sure guardians will roam that area quite a bit.
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That’s all I got. Don’t really care to expand because Anet won’t do it anyway.

Did you read the justification for their changes to cat supply? They’re obviously sticking with the Desert BL.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Did you read the justification for their changes to cat supply? They’re obviously sticking with the Desert BL.

Sadly… Watching anet “improving” WvW feels a bit like watching a bad horrofilm. You know someone will suggest something verry stupid. Then someone DOES suggest something stupid and then they DO the stupid thing. And everyone watching it KNOWS how stupid it is… Just not the ppl doing it…

For the suggestions: I rly like most the ideas, The “scoutmastery” sounds awsome to me!

I love everything you suggest. The Ins interview is a must-watch, because he nails it, as do you OP!

Love all of these ideas, really well thought out.

Only thing I’d change is level 5 mastery to say:

Map screen announcement when enemy trips the trap.

So if someone trips a supply trap at Golanta, it will say “Golanta trap triggered by SFR” — but that message will only pop up for the person with the level 5 mastery who placed the trap and not the entire map. And I don’t think you need the 30 sec reveal since sentries on map do that already.

Great idea, hope anet listens to players, but as we know best predictor of future is the past. If they keep with their new bls and unbalanced classes as well as cc changes they made, they will loose the rest of wvw population. I bet anet still dont realize that they actually had huge player base who only did wvw, and got revenue from in terms of gems, whelp thats mostly gone now.

Crixus.9247:

Great idea, hope anet listens to players, but as we know best predictor of future is the past. If they keep with their new bls and unbalanced classes as well as cc changes they made, they will loose the rest of wvw population. I bet anet still dont realize that they actually had huge player base who only did wvw, and got revenue from in terms of gems, whelp thats mostly gone now.

yes, massive. omg we used to have entire teamspeak channels with multiple borderland channels all connected and made a whole plan on who defends which borderland at what time and who roams around and which guilds are playing when… all i played was wvw and i only played spvp to test out different builds after anet had the glorious idea to balance wvw and spvp the same way…..
lots of balance changes and the horrible gwen meta that came out of it, made many of os quit or only play casual, but worst was the lack of gvg support, guild halls and YES WE WANTED A NEW MAP.
anet listened only to some parts of it…the result is the disaster we have now.

1 desert borderland that is worse than eotm map which clearly was rejected by most of the hardcore wvw communities due to too many pve gimmicks and complex terrain.

2 we get guild halls that took everything we ever worked for as a smaller zergbusting guild and lock EVERYTHING behind a massive grind which needs pve. man we could barely unlock the stupid hall….

we got gvg support finally but but had that before in os(which was awesome with an arena and all

who ever they put in charge of wvw, this map, and the entire hot disaster, clearly wasnt part of wvw in the beginning. otherwise they would remember that any kind of invis mechanic is op( culling was horrible),that automated upgrades would make scouts useless, that the wps being uncontested for a few seconds is actually a feature that we have always used and that can actually help outnumbered defenders….

anet had gold with wvw and they turned it into kitten

WvW friday resets on old bls used to have all map qued for at least first 4 tiers, now small que on ebg for short time, rest bls empty with small groups running, rest of time everyone spend time in ebg with no ques during na. So wvw population is likely 20% of what it was before they released hot or actually much less.

Crixus.9247:

WvW friday resets on old bls used to have all map qued for at least first 4 tiers, now small que on ebg for short time, rest bls empty with small groups running, rest of time everyone spend time in ebg with no ques during na. So wvw population is likely 20% of what it was before they released hot or actually much less.

WvW population is about 1/4 of what it was before HoT on Maguuma. For a while we had people but the depressing state of the game suffocated the population.