Guild Wars 2

So, for the umpteenth time, this is a thread for improving the current situation in WvW because let’s face it: population imbalance really hurts the game.

First things first: If an ANet employee, preferrably one of the devs reads this, please give some feedback on how (im)possible it is to make this happen as after all, that’s the most important factor.

Since most of the ideas we offered in the old suggestions forum, in this forum and during the adop-a-dev thingie got ignored by ANet, here’s my next attempt at trying to even out imbalances somewhat.

How does it work?
This works by small pop. servers “borrowing” players from high pop. servers.The basic idea behind it is, that you as a player from a high pop. server feel like helping out, looking for a challenge or your matchups are simply full, so you queue up for “other realms”.
Once your queue pops, you get a message saying something like “The realm of Server X requires your help. Etc…” and you get the usual queue dialog with Travel, Leave Queue and Reenter Queue.
As you get to visit another server’s WvW maps, you keep your skills, traits, equipment etc. but you assume some spirit mist warriorish form for coolness purposes and to distinguish borrowed players from the native ones.

How does one server get to borrow players?
Well this is rather tough one to balance but here is what I came up with. One server should be able to trigger this only once every couple of hours (eg: 6 hours, meaning 4 times a day) and each event should last for one or two hours, this is for balancing purposes.
The exact time of cooldown and duration could also be linked to the current server’s placement but this is up to the devs. It should be somewhat similar to the Siegerazer event. Maybe costing gold and badges or requiring a pre-event to occur? This is something that should be discussed in this thread.

Rewards?!
Yes, there shall be rewards. Other than the usual rewards for capping stuff, there should be additional rewards. My initial thought was, to give bonus chests for every 15 minutes you stay in the match but this would only lead to people AFking everywhere. So maybe the rewards should be linked to a change in overall tick during the event? This would give people an incentive to actually try and improve the matchup.

Additional thoughts:
- Borrowed players count towards the player limit on maps, leading to high pop. servers having no benefit from it at all.
- Event can be used strategically to improve your numbers for a short amount of time to achieve something specific.

- Like everything else, it might be prone to trolling. However, the positive effects most likely outweight the negative ones.
- Server identity might suffer. On the other hand, borrowed players would not have access to their host server’s TS/Mumble so this might balance out.

- Players should NOT be able to join their own matchup in any way, to avoid manipulation!

Please add some constructive criticism.

I have also been thinking borrowing the players from high population servers, but this idea simply doesn’t work well anymore as the player base is smaller.

I play on a very high population EU rank #2 server and most of the time we don’t have any queues besides a queue to EB. And outside the 1st two hours of reset, there is either at least one borderland without any queue or the queue lasts just 1-5 minutes. Majority of players are willing to wait few minutes and play with their friends, than go play with strangers.

The only thing which will bring more players to WvWvW is better rewards. Rewards should not be just tied to loot and WXP. Several of these should be implemented:

WvWvW should be a good source of Achievement Points

Currently the WvWvW tied achievements are more or less impossible to achieve. Escorting half a million dolyaks to get Ultimate Chaperone title and mere 25 achievement points. The pve side of this game gives 10 achievement points by just visiting and talking to a NPC or going to place X! The amounts required for the WvWvW titles should be put to a realistic level e.g. 5000 dolyak kills to gain the Yakslapper title (instead of 1 million kills). Ideally the titles would be made into a ladder like the pvp conqueror titles are. And instead of being able to gain just 800 achievement points from wvwvw.

Rewards for defense and upgrades

Currently upgrading keeps, towers and camps is a huge money sink and you can easily lose everything as enemy loves to run as massive blobs and golem rush everything and you often just don’t have enough people to scout and defend everything. And why to defend as capturing stuff and big open fights are rewarded better? I have spent a lot of gold in just 2 days doing that, without counting the money spent on siege. If an objective is attacked, yet successfully defended, the person who did the upgrades should be rewarded 50% of the costs spent on the upgrade. In most cases, the supply camps are taken (they are difficult to defend, unless you have numbers).

More gear available with badges and gear made salvageable

Players should be able to salvage gear bought with badges normally. Now many players sit on their badges and don’t want to put expensive runes or sigils on them, as they know that they only way to get them off is the super expensive extractor.

Give players to way to purchase more varied gear with badges + gold + laurels: superior siege, ascended back piece, ascended weapons and armor, sigils and runes. The cost can be high e.g. 5000 badges + 30 laurels for a backpiece or ascended armor piece/weapon.

General Rewards

Rewards from WXP chests should be increased so that the likely hood to gain good items (ascended weapon/armor/trinket, rare/exotic items) is increased. Currently most chests give 2 green items, which is a bad joke. At least 1 rare item should be guaranteed. It is more work to get 1 WXP level, than do one guild mission or world event (both which give 1-3 rare items).

The rewards from player kills should not be dramatically increased as most the kills happen in zerg fights and this would just encourage players to band wagon to the most highly populated servers as a bigger blob is likely to win over a smaller one. This could also be exploited using dual accounts on opposing servers. So the rewards must be tied to something else (like I suggested above).

And more unique skins which you can only obtain by playing WvWvW.

I think guesting on another server in a population imbalance situation would be awesome. I know I would do it when my server is in a match when we are blowing out the competition. I always prefer to be on the side that is getting demolished rather than doing the demolishing.

I would like it to be not so limited but I realize that there would have to be some limits. And I guess you’re solution of events would be a good compromise.

Some additional rules would need to be put into place though. For example, the guests would only be able to attack the strongest server. It would not be good for the #2 server to ask for guests just to attack the #3 server.

would we have to throw ratings out the window? if you have an 1800 rating and you win consistently as long as you get a lot of guest players, but you lose consistently without them, should your rating go up or go down?

if you lose to another server only because they got lots of guests and you didn’t, should your rating go down as a result?

I’m supposing that guesting would be disabled during tournaments, there would be chaos otherwise.

-ken

1.) How are players to be ‘borrowed’ chosen?
2.) What if nobody wants to be an borrowed merc?
3.) Is the borrowed player upgraded in any way?
4.) Reward me with unique stuff – not extra chests that drop greens and useless inventory fodder.