Guild Wars 2

I’ve seen this a couple of times before, and this week it happened again. After the first couple of days of the latest round, the other two servers competing against us in WvW just… faded. Whether they became unwilling or unable to fight, or simply stopped caring, I don’t know. The whole map is basically my server. The result is now my server has lost interest in the match so the queue has gone from many hours to almost non-existent.

Regardless of what real world 3-sided war may look like, this is not good for a game. I want to see additional mechanisms that either terminate a WvW match through victory so another round can start, or assist the losing sides with increasing boons so there is incentive to fight even when things look desperate. WvW is an important part of GW2, and two days of frenetic activity followed by indifference until the next cycle is not a good sign.

The underlying problem is that the system is unstable. And I mean that in the engineering sense – a stable system will return to equilibrium and balance itself, an unstable system falls over. In other words, what we have here is that when one server starts to dominate it cascades and they become stronger and stronger.

Have a strong enough force to capture all 3 orbs? Here, have even more strength!
Able to take over an entire map? Here, have more supply than you can use!

Conversely, if you’re down it gets harder and harder to come back. Oh, you took a tower?Too bad you have no supply, no upgrades and the enemy zerg is at your door.

Something needs to happen such that holding more objectives actually makes you dilute your strength. Right now it gets to a tipping point such that, if you control enough of a map it’s all down hill to control the rest. And that’s without even considering the morale of the losing servers.

I suggested in another thread that your siege engines become weaker if you hold more than 50% of all WvW objectives. Maybe limiting the total amount of supply available to a server might also work. Then you’d have to pick what was worth upgrading and what would have to wait. I don’t know.

I’m not sure how you address the problem of people looking at the score, thinking “we can’t make up that many points” and then not bothering. Or the related issue of trying for second place, as if that actually got you much of anything. So many people play to earn something rather than playing for fun.