Ok here’s an idea, bakitten as much as you want.
Whether it’s considered as a problem by ANet or not, a certain amount of WvW player base is unhappy about two things.
1. Long queues at prime time
2. Investments going to waste when everyone is sleeping.
The reason is obvious. WvW is 24/7 game, however servers are divided to 2 regions NA and EU. In EVE you don’t have such problems because EU and NA players play together on the same server. In GW 2 you can expect people to do that also (which some servers successfully achieved that) however when a new player enters to game, his first choice is a region (NA/EU) before picking a server.
Solution actually is pretty simple, problem would be solved if some EU players would play at NA servers and some NA players play at EU servers. However it’s not easy to convince them to do that for 2 obvious reasons
1. They don’t want to “permanently” WvW/sPvP/PvE on a cross-atlantic server, due to latency
2. They don’t want to loose all they built on their current server.
So if ANet would provide an incentive to mix those players just for WvW purposes, more than “slightly encouraging” them, perhaps all those problems would be fixed. Encouraging doesn’t work as we see on the past, so perhaps some game feature might fix it.
I call it Dual-servers. Someone might call it Sister-servers.
Idea is to bind each NA server with an EU server for WvW. And make their ranking common. They will continue to do their WvW matches on their own zone and facing servers in their own region, however they will share 2 things
1. Ranking
2. WvW playerbase.
Whenever a player will pick a map, she will also pick one of the dual servers. For example I’m playing on EU zone and Eternal Battlegrounds have 30 min queues. I want to organize a guild event with 30 man, but it’s impossible to port them to EB. It’s not as I can port them to my Dual NA server’s EB and do my event there. By doing this I participate on my ranking also. So as my dual server get higher score, my server get higher ranking also.
Matches and rankings will be decided always by dual-rankings. For example dual ranking of [Henge of Denravi-Piken Square] is 1st they will face the 2nd duo on ranking which is [Anvil Rock-Vizunah’s Square] and 3rd dua on ranking which is [Sorrow’s Furnace/Far Shiverpeaks]. So it will be (HoD vs AR vs SF) on NA, and (PK vs VS vs FS) at EU.
It might sound like HoD facing AR is a bit unfair, but on the otherside VS vs PK will even the odds. And ranking system will work better to match similar duos.
Great things is whenever your maps are filled with queues you’ll be able to play on another regions maps without waiting, and by doing it participate your server’s ranking also. In the same time, you’ll be sure that whatever upgrade invested on a keep, will be defended by your dual server while you sleep
How to pick which NA server will duo which EI server is not included in this concept. I’m pretty sure ANet would find the best method. I didn’t check that but I guess their numbers are not the same, but it could be easily fixed by adding some extra EU servers or even perhaps Asian/Oceanic servers or perhaps merging some NA servers. As free transfers are still up, those servers will even up quite fast. Faster than now.
In time I’m pretty sure great alliances of top servers of NA/EU servers will help form up similar alliances on their dual servers.
I don’t think implementation of this system will be as easy as it seems, especially if character/login servers of both regions are unaware of each other. However this is the best solution, which will keep competition up, organization still there, with less queues and more fun that comes to my mind.
Please shoot your questions, and make me cry.