Guild Wars 2

I want to bring attention to something in WvW that I think is incorrect game design.

The way I see games (in general) offering advantages to players for winning something.

In old school car racing games when you were losing the race your car would go faster to allow you catch up to the winner.

As you got closer to the winner this speed advantage would dissipate.

This “catchup mechanic” would keep the game fun because it would be close racing throughout the matchup.

In later games the catchup mechanic was swapped so the winning driver would be rewarded for their effort (a neutral advantage mechanic).

However, the way WvW is structured right now, the winning car goes faster when they’re winning (a “cascade” mechanic) which allows them to make the race a complete blowout.

In my humble opinion is plain wrong in terms of game design and game mechanics.

The way I see it various mechanics exist in WvW that are cascade mechanics:

Stonemist:

• Gives full control to the centre of the map – in a hub+spoke map design the owner of the hub has great advantage
• Especially difficult to take when T3 upgraded
• Unreachable trebuchet means you must breach inner and reach top floor – trebuchet can then by rebuilt in seconds once the blob has cleared your players out.
• Relative safety for dominating server’s pugs running back to their pin
• Constantly keeps losing server’s towers as paper towers (WC/ANZ/Durios/QL/OW/Klovan)
• Improved response times and scouting for the dominating server

Changes suggested – stop massive siege advantage and weaken SMCs defences.

• Block all siege deployment on the third floor of SMC
• Block siege deployment on supply huts or move them so trebs can’t hit towers
• SMC can only upgrade to Reinforced gates/walls never Fortified
• No waypoint for SMC
• No tactivators for SMC (especially airship bombs and chilling fog)

Bloodlust:

• Good for low population server to have
• Bad for high population server to have
• Regularly dominated by high population server due to having more people free to capture it

Change suggested – allow weaker serves to use the stat boost but deny stronger servers

• Can only be active for 2nd or 3rd place server
• If 1st place owns bloodlust they don’t get any stat boost, they only deny server 2 and 3 from having a stat boost

Tactivators:

• Allows large servers time to blob respond – often EWP and Invulnerable wall is the difference between taking an objective and not taking it.
• Allows large servers to do higher DPS when they’re already dominating – Dragon/Centaur banner

Change suggested – allow weaker servers to use the advantage but deny stronger servers

• Disable tactivators for the first place server

The “orb” used to be a cascade mechanic but was rightly disabled due to offering the dominant server an advantage.

I think the other cascade mechanics should also be removed (like orb was) which would help keep everything a bit closer and more interesting.

I expect a huge resistance to these ideas from players on servers that dominate each week so let me have it.

I probably haven’t articulated my point that well or covered every aspect fully and in perfect detail but please look at the “overall” concept rather than nitpick on detail.

Not really a fan of outright disabling things because a side is winning, less power sure, but not disabling.

SMC to me for the most part is fine the way it is, it’s basically a “king of the hill” game mode on the map. If you can’t take it yourself, then learn to double team it. The point of that structure IS to give an advantage to the side holding it.

I hope you realize, if the dominant server is holding it so well to t3, they probably have the power to take all your stuff without needing the siege from smc anyways. Which they most likely do when you setup trebs to hit SMC, eventually that structure will get taken to stop the trebs. SMC is also usually open somewhere, the 3rd floor trebs can be taken down with just an ac under it.

The orb was taken out because of fly hackers, not because a dominant server had the advantage, otherwise they wouldn’t have brought back bloodlust.

The problems of a dominant server lies deeper than smc, bloodlust and tactivators, and that is having greater numbers than you more often than not.

XenesisII.1540:

Not really a fan of outright disabling things because a side is winning, less power sure, but not disabling.

SMC to me for the most part is fine the way it is, it’s basically a “king of the hill” game mode on the map. If you can’t take it yourself, then learn to double team it. The point of that structure IS to give an advantage to the side holding it.

I hope you realize, if the dominant server is holding it so well to t3, they probably have the power to take all your stuff without needing the siege from smc anyways. Which they most likely do when you setup trebs to hit SMC, eventually that structure will get taken to stop the trebs. SMC is also usually open somewhere, the 3rd floor trebs can be taken down with just an ac under it.

The orb was taken out because of fly hackers, not because a dominant server had the advantage, otherwise they wouldn’t have brought back bloodlust.

The problems of a dominant server lies deeper than smc, bloodlust and tactivators, and that is having greater numbers than you more often than not.

Unlock the AOE cap for servers with the outnumbered buff. Problem mostly solved.

How about cut supply delivered to T1 objectives by 1/4
cut supply delivered to T2 objectives by 1/3
cut supply delivered to T3 objectives by 1/2

Owning a tower/keep/SMC that isn’t part of your side of the map lowers supply that can be delivered from camps, and further lowers supply as the tower/keep/SMC upgrades.

On the other hand, increase supply as camps upgrade.

I’ve seen several threads about ideas to give advantages to the loosing server or disadvantages to the winning server (or both).

Some of these ideas sound good on the first view, but I fail to see how this would benefit anyone. When your server can’t compete in the current tier, wouldn’t it be better to just drop down?

When your server dominates a match up but doesn’t win because of different disadvantages (and/or because the loosing server gets lots of buffs), the server stays in the tier and gets another boring match up with too less fights. The constantly outnumbered server wins and rises a tier and meets even stronger enemys. How is it fun for them to always fight bigger numbers?

Rhiannon.1726:

I’ve seen several threads about ideas to give advantages to the loosing server or disadvantages to the winning server (or both).

Some of these ideas sound good on the first view, but I fail to see how this would benefit anyone. When your server can’t compete in the current tier, wouldn’t it be better to just drop down?

When your server dominates a match up but doesn’t win because of different disadvantages (and/or because the loosing server gets lots of buffs), the server stays in the tier and gets another boring match up with too less fights. The constantly outnumbered server wins and rises a tier and meets even stronger enemys. How is it fun for them to always fight bigger numbers?

One up, one down kinda fixes a server being stuck in a bad matchup.

Wouldn’t you rather see a WvW where any server can win any match?

Why should a server that loses 30 vs. 50 most of the time win the match because it gets e.g. more points for upgraded objects? And because one up, one down this server will fight 30 vs. 70 in the next week.

A server that has to fight 30 vs. 50 should lose, so that it drops down and gets nice 30 vs. 30 fights in the following week.

What do you gain by winning a match by points while having a K/D of 0.3? I won’t call those fights “fun”.

Have to agree that losing server is losing because of lack of players or coordination. In both cases they SHOULD drop down to lower tier where they have servers equal to their own numbers. It is the same problem we have when one server has HUGE nightcap crew keeping them in higher tier where their population at primetime can not compete with other servers – we end up with boring match.

The first problem is that 30 can’t beat 50 very often now. That is a problem that further reinforces the stack to win WvW meta.

The second problem is that if the server with less players actually won over a server with more players wouldn’t you think that this would change the WvW meta that’s been around since the beginning?

If Anet can’t/won’t balance WvW they can at least try to make WvW so that smaller numbers and smaller coverage can have a chance to win or even a chance to have fun.

Interesting I remember when 30 vs 50 was just about who was organized better. Guess things have changed since I was a zerger. Yea encouraging fun and rewarding smaller scale fight would make wvw better overall instead of focusing only on the large scale stuff. That would require A-net balancing professions in wvw.

The lack of catchup mechanics make players want to stack to win. Implementing a catch-up mechanic and rebalancing servers would greatly improve wvw. Those idea would require alot of work and planning because if either one fails it could break wvw in its current state. We saw how implementing new poorly planned new wvw maps destroyed a large part of the wvw community. I do not want to see something like that happen again.

OK after reading the responses I can see some issues with my solution and I will propose something different.

I agree generally that our server (JQ) should drop to T2 (and we did).

However that didn’t work as you would have hoped.

Despite being smashed in tier 1 SEA we then proceeded to easily dominate our opposition during SEA.

So we are too big for T2 and too small for T1.

The problem with my solution though is that Mag totally dominate JQ during NA.

So Mag are in the lead but should not be nerfed during SEA, they should be buffed.

JQ should not be nerfed during NA and should be buffed.

Meanwhile, DB shouldn’t be nerfed at any time.

So I see the issue with my solution is that it doesn’t address coverage imbalance it only addresses the net coverage imbalance.

The goal is to maximise the enjoyment of the maximum number of players — the goal is not to make the competition even.

So to address coverage I would want to see:

• Tier 2: JQ to be nerfed during SEA
• Tier 2: Mag to be nerfed during NA
• Tier 2: DB to never be nerfed
• Tier 1: BG to be nerfed all the time (because they dominate every skirmish)

To to accomplish this goal my solution would simply be a case to applying my proposed solutions to the server that leads the skirmish, rather than the server that is leading overall.

The key thing here isn’t about who wins every week it is about maximising fun.

Servers that steamroll other servers get bored. Making them have to rescue objectives at the last second is far more fun than them EWP’ing into an objective and facerolling a small group 3/4 way through the keep lord’s health bar.

TL;DR – my solution was bad, new solution: server leading the skirmish gets neutered rather than server leading the week.