Guild Wars 2

I had written this in another thread but thought it would be a good separate discussion…

The biggest problem with WvWvW is the population issue. At the moment if you cannot field at least 80% of the numbers the top team is fielding you are going to lose. So although there are many other valid issues fixing any of them will not change the fact that the population imbalance (coverage wars) is the real issue.

There is a silver lining of hope however that could potentially fix the population problem and wonderful thing is it already exists.
Scalability.
In PvE bosses scale in difficulty to meet the number of individuals during the encounter. Why not make the NPC guards scale to meet the number of players engaging in the encounter?
Example…
Attack a supply camp with 5 people and you are on equal ground.
Attack a supply camp with 50 people and the damage and hit points of the guards scales up to make it challenging for the number of people there.
The bonus would also be applied to defending players as well giving them an opportunity to survive and participate in the fight. If you did not apply it to the players as well than they would not stand a chance.
Apply that same principle to every guard and supply yak on the map.
Everything scales from 5 and up. The system would take into account the other opposing force as well. example 20 vs 50 is a 30 difference so the encounter would scale to +30.
In order to qualify as someone who scales up the difficulty it would be anyone that gets tagged for the event bonus on either side.
Sure there are other problems in WvWvW but the population one is the biggest and this just may help out enough to even up the odds a bit.

Just an idea….

I once had a similar idea about this though you should consider a couple of other things.

I would scale structure health as well and not only NPC’s. The percentage of health would always be the same but that percentage would mean something different. Catapults and Trebuchet sieges would be hard to balance like this since they can be out of range of the attacking event. (Don’t know how that could be fixed but there should be at least 1 person at ANet who can fix that)

With scaling you have to make sure that 1 extra person doesn’t make things go slower or they will feel left out, yelled at and it would be too easy to grief like that.

So if it takes a 15 man (a normal size to take a tower) 5 minutes to get a tower gate down (obviously a fictional number) it should be faster if they had more players. It should however never be faster than 3 minutes (still a fictional number to be used as example).
So I think the ideal situation would be that it would take a 25man group 4.5min. A 75 players zerg/blob would still need 3minutes. It is a disincentive for people to blob up completely because they don’t reach there full potential yet an extra player doesn’t hurt the tower they are trying to take at that moment.

How to handle a situation when 2 servers are attacking the same thing would still be something for the ANet team to handle.

I don’t think that population imbalance issue can ever be fixed. At least I have never seen any solution that’d be satisfying to everyone. The most obvious, and as I think the sole efficient solution is to cap teams to the least populated, allowing further joins if enough players of the opposite teams enqueue. Yet I don’t think this will be welcomed by the community, especially if you encounter not WvWvW oriented server while beeing keen on that type of gameplay.

A reward system based on points and population is really the only way to fairly balance populations. If a underman force is able to hold it own Faust a server twice its size it should get a greater reward

Recent developer post by Devon stated Anet is aware of said issues and are making changes to the wvw ranking system. Let’s see what they have up their sleeves in the coming weeks.

Tarin Twisted.4183:

I had written this in another thread but thought it would be a good separate discussion…

The biggest problem with WvWvW is the population issue. At the moment if you cannot field at least 80% of the numbers the top team is fielding you are going to lose. So although there are many other valid issues fixing any of them will not change the fact that the population imbalance (coverage wars) is the real issue.

There is a silver lining of hope however that could potentially fix the population problem and wonderful thing is it already exists.
Scalability.
In PvE bosses scale in difficulty to meet the number of individuals during the encounter. Why not make the NPC guards scale to meet the number of players engaging in the encounter?
Example…
Attack a supply camp with 5 people and you are on equal ground.
Attack a supply camp with 50 people and the damage and hit points of the guards scales up to make it challenging for the number of people there.
The bonus would also be applied to defending players as well giving them an opportunity to survive and participate in the fight. If you did not apply it to the players as well than they would not stand a chance.
Apply that same principle to every guard and supply yak on the map.
Everything scales from 5 and up. The system would take into account the other opposing force as well. example 20 vs 50 is a 30 difference so the encounter would scale to +30.
In order to qualify as someone who scales up the difficulty it would be anyone that gets tagged for the event bonus on either side.
Sure there are other problems in WvWvW but the population one is the biggest and this just may help out enough to even up the odds a bit.

Just an idea….

This suggestion has come up in one form or other several times before, but frankly it doesn’t show much thought.

Are you only suggesting this for supply camps? It kind of sounds like that, but if so that’s a pretty limited “fix” for WvW since at least on my server the great majority of the population problem shows up at towers/keeps or in the open field. Camps usually just get flipped.

How exactly do you determine the size of the group(s) in the fight? Anyone that gets tagged or tags within 1200 units? If so, you just initiate the fight with a small number to set the ratio and swarm in later with a larger one. No way you could make the buff dynamic as the population ratio changes..

Within 1200 units of what? The center of the battle? If so, how exactly do you even determine that for a bunch of spread out players.?

How do you handle players that die and rez nearby to rejoin the fight? Do they count as extra numbers?

tl;dr It’s not definable in practice and can easily be gamed.

@OP

All servers are high pop or full already. It’s just that some people would rather PvE than WvW. So the solution to your problem is to go to LA, and recruit.

Couple comments…
Cactus….Distance has nothing to do with the buff to the guards / keep (I think buffing the structures is a great idea). It is based on whether or not you have been tagged for the event which means you have in one way or another participated. you know…when the event either succeeds or fails and you get the event reward…that means you participated.
Smooth Penguin…I am almost only a pvp’r and I am not a recruiter. Why should the game be built around me needing to do PR for it to be balanced? Why should the winning team be the team willing to farm enough gold to get transfers from another server to help fill their time zone? This is what is happening right now and it is sucking teh fun out of the game…at least in T1. A real system is smart enough to adapt to players and situations to ensure a fair and balanced game for everyone.

Valik….in theory you have a good point but in practice the problem is not the will of the smaller groups and in alot of cases not even the skill…it is simply numbers. By inflating the statistics to give the lower numbers a fighting chance it would be scalable and actually tackle the real problem behind imbalance which is getting steamrolled by 50 when you only have 10. They tried to address this recently by buffing arrow carts but it was not as successful as they wanted it to be obviously.

Dadamosky…capping the amount of people based on the people the other two servers can field is not good. It would kill the game. Some servers at off peak times can only field 50 people across all maps…that would most likely really kitten the people off that want to play but cannot based on something out of there control.

Lastly, the mechanics for everything I am proposing already exists in the game…they simply need to be applied in WvW to guards and structures.