I’m not sure if this has been brought up before. Frankly, I’m not going to dig through the refuse that is the forums to see if there is another thread on this already, because man there are a lot of cringe-inducing threads here.
Anyway, what if regular W3 (that’s WvWvW, wuvwuv, world versus world, realm vs realm, rvr, whatever you want to call it) functioned a little more like EotM does as far as matching goes?
What if instead of being tied to your specific server name, players from 1/3 of the servers will be on green, 1/3 of the servers on blue, and the remaining 1/3 on red. This selection of servers to colors would rotate every week, and once a month the servers that get grouped together in colors would rotate each month so that the same servers are not always paired into the same color cycling group. This could all occur regardless of outcome, so no one is stuck on the same color for weeks/months at a time (and possibly help people with world completion). There would be no more [insert server name] invaders, only red/blue/green invaders. Guild names/tags could still be visible for variety, if you want.
Basically, each week when you go into W3, regardless of what server you play on, you are on either red, green, or blue team. At the end of the week you will be one of the other two colors no matter what, and on the third week you will be the third color. Rinse and repeat, forever until GW2 servers are shut down.
Maybe something like this could end the mad rush for everyone to try to be a tier 1 server and not worry that their server is a low population server. Perhaps then people would stop complaining that the game is ‘dead’ or ‘dying’ because they are on a low population server or one that doesn’t care about W3. The megaservers have definitely helped the general PvE zones feel more populated, which is fantastic, but W3 might benefit from something similar. People should be able to just log in and play some W3 and get put in to their respective colors and just enjoy playing and still get their rewards, all without having to worry about the low population of their server.
The seasonal rewards are already tied to the achievements that people complete, regardless of whether or not their server wins matches, so there is no harm to the seasonal rewards, and it will only get better with the changes coming in September.
Some things I’ve considered:
- Some people have this thing called ‘server pride’, but from a gameplay perspective it really is detrimental to the overall game. Low population servers get the shaft because of it in some cases. Server pride seems to have become “get on as high tier of a server that you can so W3 has more than 10 people on at one time”.
- I realize that this would put a hamper on people’s ‘bragging rights’ that they are on the ‘best server’, but at the end of the day, you don’t really get ANY sort of monetary reward for winning first place in this week’s match. The passive W3 server wide bonuses (such as the crafting/gathering bonuses) are really all there is as far as a ‘reward’ goes, and you really don’t notice it much because it is still at the mercy of this game’s brutal RNG. Aside from that, being on a tier 1 server doesn’t really do anything for you.
- I’m aware that many of you W3 players have grown accustomed to follow a select few commanders exclusively because reasons, but that exclusivity is also somewhat detrimental. Now that more and more players have commander tags (myself included because I’m not about to pay triple later), this gives EVERYONE a chance to be ‘special’. EVERYONE will get a chance to learn to ‘command’. EVERYONE will be able to contribute just the same, and with that, W3 will become more than just a massive zerg train where everyone follows just one commander, when instead there should be multiple squads throughout the map, each helping to take different objectives.
Anyway, what do you all think about this? Does this sound like an okay idea? What are some other improvements that could be made from an idea like this?