Guild Wars 2

I know people immediately get upset with any mention of this, but in my opinion, and probably a few more people, it would drastically improve the quality of WvWvW for many players. Some servers are severely bloated, others undermanned. I can speak from both perspectives, and one of the biggest turn offs in today MMO’s, other then no FFA, is that the answer to everything is to throw a zerg or numbers at it. We can barely make any head way out of our guard zone knowing that the other size had 60-70 more players then us in any borderland.

What about limiting the amount of people each side has to remain relevant with each other. Clearly, limiting the number of people one side has over others prevents blobbing. It would prevent a server from over loading 80 off US peak players in a border land and wiping 10-20 defenders. The top tiers probably would not change much, they have a whole slew of people looking to fight. Gone would be night capping, spawn camping, getting over run with mega zerg. It wont stop from losing, because one group will always win over another, however it would be more based on them being better players.

Population would no longer be the biggest factor in winning a match up. GUILD team work, strategy and determination would. JQ, SoR, SoS, others with really good small guilds would still propel their servers. I’m going to go out on a limb here, and say, if something is not done eventually people will stop playing, which will probably result in either server merges or something else. Having first hand watched a server go from full to not being able to get Breakout event to start on a Saturday, things cant continue this way.

Im sure more people can add to this, and would love to get some other ideas. I cant see why it wouldnt work and would love to hear why some one would think this is a bad idea.

I’d much rather see mechanics changed to make it so a smaller group has a chance to kill a larger one at 4 to 1 odds or so, if well played.

Having just a maximum cap for zones set at something like largest opponents force+20 wouldn’t be to terrible, but you’ll just end up with a lot of people complaining even more than they do now about Q’s.

Yeah, but in the higher tiers there are more players, so you wouldnt really have that queue be the problem, just the normal cap one. In lower tiers where its not uncommon to have one side have 50-70 more people per map it would probably make them rethink where they WvWvW.

Bannok.3152:

Yeah, but in the higher tiers there are more players, so you wouldnt really have that queue be the problem, just the normal cap one. In lower tiers where its not uncommon to have one side have 50-70 more people per map it would probably make them rethink where they WvWvW.

Yeah, this is just inaccurate. It wouldn’t be the case 24/7. It hasn’t been. Higher tiers still have large periods of imbalance, especially one on/off times, and when guilds/servers plan big efforts.

I don’t know why suggestions like this keep popping up. The surest way to kill a game is to prevent the ones who really want to play it from being able to play it. In your example, roughly 15 players from each side get to play for a total of 30 players, while 65 players are totally shut out of the game. That’s just ridiculous.

Cactus.2710:

I don’t know why suggestions like this keep popping up. The surest way to kill a game is to prevent the ones who really want to play it from being able to play it. In your example, roughly 15 players from each side get to play for a total of 30 players, while 65 players are totally shut out of the game. That’s just ridiculous.

I agree that that’s a bad solution, but how about a compromise? Leave EB as is and add three more BL each with only half the possible population. As much as I do enjoy the very large battles, there’s nothing worse than going out to a BL only to find the odds are 10-1 (regardless of which side you’re on… outnumbering is just as bad as being outnumbered in terms of fun).

Ross Biddle.2367:

Bannok.3152:

Yeah, but in the higher tiers there are more players, so you wouldnt really have that queue be the problem, just the normal cap one. In lower tiers where its not uncommon to have one side have 50-70 more people per map it would probably make them rethink where they WvWvW.

Yeah, this is just inaccurate. It wouldn’t be the case 24/7. It hasn’t been. Higher tiers still have large periods of imbalance, especially one on/off times, and when guilds/servers plan big efforts.

Thats what im saying. Less focus on numbers advantage. You dont think the current system is not having an adverse effect on population? Remember when every borderland on every server was full at release?

Sokar Rostau.7316:

Cactus.2710:

I don’t know why suggestions like this keep popping up. The surest way to kill a game is to prevent the ones who really want to play it from being able to play it. In your example, roughly 15 players from each side get to play for a total of 30 players, while 65 players are totally shut out of the game. That’s just ridiculous.

I agree that that’s a bad solution, but how about a compromise? Leave EB as is and add three more BL each with only half the possible population. As much as I do enjoy the very large battles, there’s nothing worse than going out to a BL only to find the odds are 10-1 (regardless of which side you’re on… outnumbering is just as bad as being outnumbered in terms of fun).

It truly sucks (for both servers) when the average population of one server over the course of the week is significantly different than the average population of another server, but if the player imbalance is caused by time zone differences or map dynamics, that’s all part of the game and trying to “fix” it merely would turn WvW into large scale sPvP.

Bannok go play sPvP if you are concerned about non equal fights in wPvP, if they introduced something like this most of wPvP player base would quit the game in a second.

Wait, by limiting the amount of players each server has at a given time to be comparable to others? My goodness, how the gaming community has changed. This would have little impact on evenly matched servers, you understand that right? Out of curiosity what do you think is going to happen when people stop showing up? It not an unreasonable request and something needs to be done about it.

If they flip the old orb buffs and outmanned would work a lot better then any idea posted here so far. Don’t limit players, increase their effectiveness when facing larger populations. They should have stages of the buff if a server has 50 players and another has 30 those 20 people they lack should be built into a buff. Having scaling built into the buff would aid in keeping things even. If you don’t like to fight fare that’s a whole other issue

You have to remember that, given the way rankings and the WvW game mode are structured, it’s not about playing to win like in sPvP, it’s about playing your matchup. Every server has a different population so you’ll never get an entirely balanced match, you focus on the gains you can make.

If you give a handicap by limiting population size at off-peak, you make it harder for the ranking system to accurately determine where each server belongs in terms of rank. It looks like you’re from SBI, and Yak’s Bend is dominating? You won’t be facing them next week.

I guess the purpose of the cap limit cant seem to sink in. JQ/SoS/SoR is a prime example. Comparable size. They would have the same numbers, the better coordinated server would win. Thats what they would want, and I think thats what we would want. Go to say Kaening. Huge off peak US advantage. Huge numbers over all. Steamrolled a few match ups now. For those weeks, enemy had no reason to log in. SBI, good server, lost a lot of people. 75% jumped to higher population server. Old points mean probably 7 to 8 weeks of landslide. That means 7 to 8 weeks of not WvWvW’ing. If they had cap limits to keep everyone in relative check, say for instance no more then 10 above what one server had, would lead to a more competitive match up over all. Thats all I was trying to say. From what I gather, all anyone is concerned about is zerging and the fear that they wont be able to zerg to get wins for kittens.

I like WvWvW. We run around with less numbers daily, and havent stopped. However, more and more people leave and those 10×30′s become 10×60′s. Its going to spread to other servers eventually. Im not even saying one for one, but limiting the number others have to keep it competitive.

Certainly server WvW population collapses/explosions were never supposed to be part of the system, hopefully with paid transfers there won’t be such drastic population changes in the future. I understand you’re frustrated with keeping the old points, but it’s probably for the best for all the other servers who have found their balanced match.

Everyone here has pointed out the issues with a cap, and it’d make it harder for every server’s ranking to adjust appropriately to a match where a cap wasn’t necessary.

I’d prefer if they just made the outmanned buff better…and possibly add a “desperate” buff to the mix. The desperate buff would only work if the highest server’s points are triple that of the lowest or double that of the server in second place, with the highest server having more resources than the other servers combined. The server in 3rd place would gain the desperate buff, which doubles the speed of upgrades, dolyaks, and increases the stats of that server’s players by 100. The server in second place would gain a 1.5 speed boost on the upgrades, dolyaks, and would increase the stats of that server by 50.

Add a “relaxed” debuff to the winning server that lowers their stats by 50, and halves the speed of all their upgrades and dolyaks, and we’d possibly have a way to ‘even’ fights out.

The thought came to me earlier, and because its requirements are…well, when one server is curbstomping the others, I doubt it would come into play much. Plus well, I doubt it would be implemented to begin with because I’m pretty sure there are some major problems with what I just suggested (there usually is).

Player culling should be thier number 1 priority. That alone breaks it for me. I cannot tolerate culling.

The designers should also change certain rules and place multiple crtical locations in order to force zerg tactics to be ineffective. In addition, there should be much tougher penalties for dying. Only 1 person should be allowed to help another person up from a downed state. If a player is dead, they cannot be ressurected. They will automatically respawn at the start. Waypoints in WvW should be disabled at all times.

I am very heavily against a group of 5 people killing a group of 50. Not only would this be impossible to balance but, the game would degenerate into an AoE spam fest.

Bannok.3152:

I guess the purpose of the cap limit cant seem to sink in. JQ/SoS/SoR is a prime example. Comparable size. They would have the same numbers, the better coordinated server would win. Thats what they would want, and I think thats what we would want. Go to say Kaening. Huge off peak US advantage. Huge numbers over all. Steamrolled a few match ups now. For those weeks, enemy had no reason to log in. SBI, good server, lost a lot of people. 75% jumped to higher population server. Old points mean probably 7 to 8 weeks of landslide. That means 7 to 8 weeks of not WvWvW’ing. If they had cap limits to keep everyone in relative check, say for instance no more then 10 above what one server had, would lead to a more competitive match up over all. Thats all I was trying to say. From what I gather, all anyone is concerned about is zerging and the fear that they wont be able to zerg to get wins for kittens.

I like WvWvW. We run around with less numbers daily, and havent stopped. However, more and more people leave and those 10×30′s become 10×60′s. Its going to spread to other servers eventually. Im not even saying one for one, but limiting the number others have to keep it competitive.

I think it is you that cannot comprehend things here. What we both want is balanced matches, but capping map populations at the level of the lowest population server is the very worst way to accomplish that BECAUSE IT PREVENTS LOTS OF PEOPLE FROM PLAYING. The proper way to achieve balanced matches is to fix the ranking system so that servers in any matchup have more or less equivalent populations.