Guild Wars 2

Dear Anet,

I’ve been playing since launch and currently am only doing WvW content. I feel (right or wrong you would know), that there are many others like me who feel the end game of Guild Wars 2 is in fact, WvW. It is also my strong belief that the WvW’ers tend to be more passionate about Guild Wars 2, more so than those who like the themepark PvE.

Now, first off i would like to say Anet you made a really good game (we wouldn’t still be playing or posting on the forums if we didn’t love it). There are plenty of issues that still need to be worked out and no game is perfect even after 1 year of launch, however in this post i would like to focus on WvW.

Me and many other WvW’ers i know have been playing this game for free a couple of months now. It is not because we are stingy old men, but because there has been a lack of attention to monetize us WvW’ers as a group.

Put short, in my opinion (echoed by the friends i know) you have a good sized, passionate player base who are dying for WvW improvements, and will gladly pay for it. It is saddening to see month after month of PvE updates, almost nothing for WvW.

Here are a couple of my suggestions,

- Dueling tokens (more a pvpish idea)

I know the default answer is “you can duel in spvp”. Well, like it or not, people much prefer to use their PvE / WvW gear + food to duel. Even optimizing spvp trinkets (which have terrible stat distributions imo) will do little to change this attitude.

Let us pay for dueling tokens to be only used once the other side has accepted the duel. Let the duels include 2v2s, and 3v3s. Tokens can be sold in batches of 5 or 10.

If coding geography is a problem, make the obsidium sanctum a place where you can duel people from your own server. I know my guild would have a ball of a time doing 3v3s or 4v4s against each other.

For those that hate duel invitations, give them a option to auto-reject duel requests.

- Give us more WvW related items instead of asking us to PvE

You know the banner potion that you can get with guild commendations? Well a couple of us would pay gems for those.

Guild commendations are extremely hard for any WvW guild to collect. Especially if your guild consists of working adults where coordination of a login time is tough.

Also, there’s no way currently to get ascended items if you don’t like crafting. Ascended weapons add almost a 5% increase in damage. And believe me, a lot of us hate the crafting system and PvE. Give us WvW’ers a way to receive these items to put us on par with the rest.

- Realise whats great about WvW

When you’re outnumbered 3v6 and win, its a rush.
When you have a prolonged fight 5v5 in a camp and your side prevails, its a rush.

The combat mechanics in this game perform very well for small skirmishes. You know your team won because of your individual effort.

When you’re with a 50 man zergball rolling into another 50 man zerg ball, its really not as fun as skirmishing. Thats what T1 looks like now.

There are many people who are looking for the next DAOC. Give them a reason to stay.

Do not give any incentives to form a 50 man zerg ball. Create an environment where there are more skirmishes. Let us spend gems on Arena entry, duel tokens, more guild-orientated cosmetic items, guild halls, etc.

WvW’ers love to be competitive, we love bragging rights. Create a ranking system for which guild takes the most towers / keeps, most kills in a week, etc. Make us competitive with each other.

How about a 8v8 death match tournament every week in a certain section of WvW. Schedule it near the end of a match-up. We would love to watch and place our own bets! The prize can be bragging rights (so it doesn’t disrupt the economy, something cosmetic).

Divert more resources to service and ask questions to your most passionate player base.

Encourage and build an environment for them to constantly experience WvW the way they love and i believe you will be surprised how much more gems you can milk from us

Fix the bugs/exploits first.

Add some unique wvw things on the gemstore, like siege skins or the duel tokens mentioned above etc.

You will make profit out of WvW then but yeah if nothing is added to WvW you can say its not profitable /doh

I think there is room for both the small scale skirmish and that huge zerg fights… I actually like both.

The problem I find is that the servers find it difficult to cope sometimes with the big fights and the whole karma train experience.

There are no servers playing WvW as it is intended to be played… I am not sure how you would fix that in GW2… but my suggestion would be to take WvW and make it into a new game outside of GW lore. Add a gvg similar to GW1 in its placement for GW2 fans but have WvW a completely new game.

Then you could change the dynamics of the game to match historical accurate battle situations. Different design of keeps, weapons, siege, and classes. The theory being that if things were historically accurate to warfare battles, then the dynamics would be reflected in the game play… so you would have the big battles, the big sieges between opposing armies… but you would also have room for the small skirmishes, the scouting, the defense and supply mechanics etc.

Also being a new game, it is more likely that it would then gain more attention from the developers than at present.

There is so much potential for the wvw game dynamic that goes untapped.