Guild Wars 2

The current problem in WvW is a population problem much more than a game-mechanic problem. Solution: do away with “servers”. How you say? Bare with me… If Anet matched up faction vs. faction vs. faction the population problem would solve itself.

What factions you ask? Name them whatever you want. Right now they could be red vs. blue vs. green. In other words, when you create an account, you don’t choose a server, you choose a faction. A lot of things to clarify, be patient.

Obviously, at first more people will choose to be the red faction than the green. If they really didn’t want to sit in queue, they would trade factions. It would take awhile, but we would take pride in our faction more than we ever could have taken in our server. People jump servers all the time, but it is much harder to get Alliance players to jump to the Horde.

Lets get to the mechanics. Each BL has a 133 player cap. In server vs. server a BL can literally be 133 vs. 1. Not so awesome, (try to log in to Anvil Rock on Thursday, or Friday with any enthusiasm). So, we could have instance caps based on the population that is logged on. Okay so, 3 BLs + EBL = 532 per faction, 3 factions = 1596 maximum players per instance.

Simple rules would need to be implemented. No human system is perfect, but this is better than the one we have. These rules would need to be tweaked, because non of us can foresee all it’s problems. Rules like:

1) The first instance has no population rules, so anyone can log into WvW. A second instance would not exist until enough people logged on to demand one.
2) No “demand” instance can ever be populated more than 2 to 1. Any more than that and you will wait, in queue, until enough people from the other 2 factions log on to at least make it 2 to 1. (If there is a giant population gaps that create giant queues, this is where faction transfers would auto-correct the problem.)
3) Dynamic queues. One could either queue up for an abandoned spot in a high populated instance, or just queue up and wait until enough other people queue up in other factions to start another WvW instance.
Guild queuing. Instance queuing. To try to get into the instance the rest of your guild is already in.
4) Insert more population-equalizing “backbone” rules here.

What this does, is create WvW instances based on the population needs. If only a total of 1,000 people are logged on across all factions, only 1 instance is needed. When multiple instances exist, all red points go to the red faction, etc. When an instance is filled up, another will be created to accommodate. As people log out, we would be required to be ushered into higher population instances, based on population balance, (in a way that doesn’t suck too bad – see rule #4).

I know the “bottom instance” will have problems, but that’s better than ALL the instances having problems. Which is what we have now.

Side note: in EB, the factions would have home-field advantage. If I was green, I could never spawn on blue side. I have many arguments that I could address, (money spent on upgrades etc.) but this post would need chapters. I’m just trying to identify the actual problem, and solve it.

Hint: To Anet. If you think you would make less money this way. How much less are you going to make with continuously unhappy WvWers? We aren’t going to T1 transfer forever. Un-fun games dwindle… We might actually buy gems for in-game stuff, if we weren’t so kitten ed about buying them to make WvW fun.

Thank you, Recluusa.

I guess servers would still exist for PvE, and factions for WvW only. This slipped my mind because since level 46, I’ve never done ANY PvE. I’ve never done a dungeon. Not even one… ever. I have a hundred games for “crawling”.

How would guilds work?

Guilds would probably have to pick a faction.

The usual argument (including the one from ANet) against instanced matches instead of server-vs-server-vs-server is that doing so would diminish “server loyalty” … which I find to be an insanely ridiculous argument considering all the server hopping that has gone on in WvW since launch. I see absolutely no reason why the game wouldn’t be 1000% better if matches were instanced with controlled populations to make them fair/balanced. If done properly, there is no reason why guilds or friends couldn’t join as teams and link up once they were in the match.

OP suggestion x1000

but lets trow this post on the pile of other ignored posts suggesting this since beta.. or even before..

thats sounds an awfully lot like “working on WvW”

sorry OP, but ANet doesnt do that. they dont work on WvW content. ever. they are too busy with living story, and banging their heads against the wall of E-sports when everyone with a IQ slightly above their shoe size has realized it will never happen.

the only thing you can count on them doing is stuff that takes the least amount of work possible, and fosters tier stacking to earn them more easy dollars.
i.e: leagues.

Excellent idea OP. Definitely better system than what we have in place. Hope Arena consider these suggestions.

Agreed, I suggested something similar around release. Structuring around servers has shown to be flawed. WvW could do better if centered around factions, or some other determinant. Though WvW is fun, it has been going for 1 year and is still determined by population imbalances and 24/7 coverage. Plus, there is still no point to winning (ok maybe leagues will fix this….)

Do away with servers and overflows, reintroduce districts, restructure WvW team composition, make guild tied to region (or global) = gg the game is now more like gw1.

But of course Arenanet has been making $$$ off of server transfers.

OP’s suggestion has a lot of value, but this seems more inclined to high population fights ONLY. Or did i just not read the whole kitten thing?

GavinGoodrich.1382:

OP’s suggestion has a lot of value, but this seems more inclined to high population fights ONLY. Or did i just not read the whole kitten thing?

No … his suggestion is not only relevant to high pop servers. I’m on Devona’s Rest (currently at the bottom of the heap) and the WvW population there is now so low that we can’t get a decent effort going even during prime time. Instanced matches would address issues facing BOTH high and low pop servers, and would of course at least give population-balanced matches for all.

I’ve been beating this same drum for months, though, and I have zero expectation that ANet will wake up and change how they generate matches. They simply don’t listen enough, clearly don’t understand enough, and apparently don’t care enough to do anything about it. The most enlightening comment we’ve seen from them (Devon) was that WvW matches were not intended to be fair.

GavinGoodrich.1382:

OP’s suggestion has a lot of value, but this seems more inclined to high population fights ONLY. Or did i just not read the whole kitten thing?

The thing is, there will be no such thing as “high population” as GW2 players understood it.

Think of it this way. Instead of guilds all belonging to one server, with the update, guilds will form an alliance. WvW become alliance battles. Some alliances will be huge, and likely fight in centralized areas, while other smaller groups do more guerrilla or occupy “outskirt” areas.

In GW2 it’s unlikely that they can put everyone in one map, so there will be different instances where these things take place. Ideally, they allow cooperation between people who do huge blobs and people who solo roam/small group (this should naturally occur as long as the system accomodates it. ie. choose your instance). Then everyone can contribute, and no one feels left out.

I find myself agreeing with the idea of making the competition not between servers, but between factions/guilds/alliances. Would encourage non-zerg behavior and fix blobs.

I don’t think this can happen until Anet can fix the lags in large scale fights. Zerg/blobs will still exist as that will still be the most efficient ways. More organized zergs will demolished the lesser organized one. To redo this WvW into factions sounds good in theory, but how much work will developers need to go through for an entire overhaul? Anet can still do dynamic queues and balance the game a bit by using existing server formats if they put servers into different alliances based on their coverage gaps and or rating scales…

What’s to stop people bandwagoning to the ‘strongest’ alliance though?

I agree with the concept of having 1 super matchup of Red vs Green vs Blue.
Whatever other flaws it might have, I think the format is sound, but trusting people to spread themselves out sufficiently might not give the results you hope for…

An alternative to this?
I’d suggest the 3 teams being formed from current server populations, but in a more dynamic fashion. This is to say:

Green Team (#1 Server + #4 Server + #7 Server + …) vs Blue Team (#2 Server + #5 Server + #8 Server + …+ vs Red Team (#3 Server + #6 Server + #9 Server + …)

Where arenanet would still maintain some sort of server ranking system updated weekly etc. (How well your server has contributed to the overall score etc). Populations / PvDooring would hopefully averaged out etc.

You’d still have server pride, but server rivalries might be more ‘interesting’. This weeks allies might be next weeks enemies and vice versa.

Lots of alternatives with regards how many maps you have ( 1 BL per server + X ‘instances’ of EB, maybe even some new maps ) and also lots of different ways to rank servers etc.

(Regardless of the above, I’d actually be in favor of having Anet publish more metrics about each servers WvW performance. Average number of people in each map, average WXP per person, Average Kill/Death ratio etc).

Of course, the above would rely on a significant amount of work and a reduction in income stream from server transfers so we’re completely dreaming.. But ultimately, if WvW is going to have any form of longevity (particularly if & when official GvG comes around) then Anet is going to have to address the population imbalances somehow.

A single Megamatchup per region (properly handled / however implemented) seems like it’s the best way of achieving that.

Just my $0.02

Faction stacking couldn’t work, see rule #2. If all the “great” guilds went to one color, they would wait in queue way too long, get bored, jump faction. That’s the point, you could faction stack, but you couldn’t actually play the game. Leet guilds want to stack up against each other anyway. We only have 8 instances now. No matter what server you log into, you are in 1 of 8 instances (US). Those 8 instances are broken into 32 smaller instances (24 BLs, 8 EBs) We are already in the instances set forth, this system would simply change only how the population is dispersed.

Lag spikes are because of the current pop cap per instance/BL. I don’t think the game would fail if they changed the cap from 133 to 123 or 113. If they dropped it to 100, that’s still 300 people killing each other per instance/BL. Besides, most lag spikes are caused on the player’s end.

It doesn’t matter how many instances we play in, as long a we rid the system of 128 vs. 23. That is what is making WvW suck so much now.

Good points all. As we realize, there are alot of things to consider in making such changes. But, we aren’t the ones being paid to work on and improve ‘the fastest selling mmorpg of all time’. There is so much more potential for gw2 and wvw, it is up to ArenaNet to rise to the challenge.