Guild Wars 2

Having over 9k hours playtime and being a permanent fixture in WVW I want to share with anet the things that can make WVW awesome.

these things are in no particular order…

1.) Lose the auto upgrade system and lower the cost to upgrade stuff to 1/4 of what it was. There is a small section of the WVW players that enjoy watching over their 1/3 and participating in the upgrading. One of the biggest reasons people didn’t help to upgrade stuff in WVW was you could easily spend 5-10 gold running around keeping upgrades going. The running around and upgrading and scouting our 1/3 for your team is something some people enjoy if it weren’t for them going broke doing it. It also maintains a sense of family with the fighters out taking stuff. People will upgrade stuff if they don’t have to go broke doing it. But spending 10-30 silver for a camp that is going to flip over and over gets expensive. It may seem like having to pay 1 silver to start a upgrade is a waste but it puts it within cost range of more players and leaves the player participation part of upgrading in the game. WVW is players vs players, not players vs AI.

2.)The new BL… was nice idea but the implementation is terrible. WVW maps need to be open and and easy to navigate not mazes with cliffs and such that can’t be traversed. I had many times complained about the small maps in WVW and what Anet delivered with the new BL maps wasn’t what I had envisioned. This is going to be long but lots of issues here so bare with me.

2.a) The structures of the old towers and keeps was way better, yes certain aspects of the newer structures are cool but frankly confusing. The way I look at this is when you stand at a distance you should easily be able to see a structure and and its walls, it shouldn’t be worked into the hillside in a way they takes away from being able to distinctly identify where the gates, walls and portals to enter it are located. The first time I went to the garrison in the new BL it took me a few minutes just to understand I was actually in a structure and then as I made my rounds inside it trying to identify the gates and walls it seemed confusing and I keep losing a sense of when I was actually leaving the garrison or was I still inside it (this a bad, very bad). My only complaint with the old structures were the walls and in some instances choke points. The old walls needed to be wider making it easier to jump up and fight without over-jumping the wall and falling off into the enemy zerg. The outer walls of the old structures need more of a slit in the wall design so ranged classes could easily move in and out of the slits to fight without being pulled off the wall. To sum it up when I am scared and want to hide I shouldn’t have to be familiar with the map or structure to know that yes I am in a structure and yes I can go bio real fast and won’t be dead when I come back. Bring back the old style structures with some slight changes and this will be moving in the right direction. Briefly all structures should have a choke point leading to the lord, one that protects the defenders from attackers outside the structure. The old Hills keep had almost a perfect choke point leading to the lord and created many fun battles even after the gates had been broken with the exception of the north inner gate which should have never been their in the first place. If all structures had this type of choke point the battles would be more fun, especially in regards to towers which basically have no choke point and the walls offer no protection you will either be pulled off or knocked off. Choke points = fun imho and can buy time for other people to respond and possibly save a structure from being capped. All structures need to have a well thought out choke point leading to the lord.

2.b) Map navigation… mountains and such are great and add to the ambiance of the world but having too many just makes navigation difficult, again the old bl maps had a good balance in this regards. The new BL maps feel too constrictive and too much having to run around something to get somewhere. I understand wanting to have choke points out in the field because choke points generally lead to better fighting but the new BL map has gone way over board and instead created more of a maze tunnel feeling when playing on it. People trying to get to the action want to be able to run over a mountain to get to the battle not run around it. The new Bl maps just seem too much like pacman, stuck in a constrained environment with only two directions, forward or backward. WVW needs openness and versatility.

2.c)Map size… When I had envisioned bigger maps I had just assumed this would mean more towers. The purpose of having bigger maps is to spread things out so that these battles of 200+ players and people start lagging and crashing happen less often. Why not have 3-4-6 more edge of the map towers? Towers that one or two people can take knowing that they can most likely take it before the enemy can run there. It adds a dynamic to the game for less skilled players or servers that are heavily outnumbered so they can at least do something rather than give up and go pve or worst yet log out. Moreover bigger maps should have more objectives causing a spreading of the forces NOT just bigger as to take longer to run to a tower or keep.

3.) Guilds… committed WVW players are a different breed than your average WVW player. The committed players usually come with over grown personalities also (their a tuff crowd). But its a fact the glue to WVW are the egotistical players and its thanks to their commitment that when casual players get a fancy to do some WVW, someone will be there to guide them. It’s the egotistical players that tag up and lead and help organize the casual players when no one else wants to tag up or lead. These are they players that when things look bad you will still find them in WVW trying to make a difference and turn things around while all the casuals have left for something more fun. These players don’t expect any special treatment nor do they want any special rewards, they are secure in knowing what they bring to the party and that’s all the reward they need. These people are usually leader types or at very minimum self starters and don’t need someone to tell them what to do. I know these things because I am one of them and just on my server alone can name 20 other players that if they quit playing , WVW on my server would go to kitten. These 20 players are mostly from different guilds and most of the time they are running with pugs or solo. What am I trying to say? simple…..

My guild consist of me, yes just me. Is it a guild? You bet it is, and I use to claim stuff, add buffs and upgrade/defend constantly. But with the changes in the way claiming and upgrading has changed with HoT it means that I must have a guild house and I must upgrade that guild house to large extent which as a solo player is beyond my reach. Now how many times have I heard one person isn’t even a party much-less a guild, let me just say this…

As a one person guild I have contributed more to WVW than 95% if not more of the guilds out there and unfortunately many of the 20 egotistical players I mentioned above can say the same thing. So basically Anet you have created a situation where the people you depend on to make WVW happen have their hands tied now and must depend on the large guilds to fill in for them. I don’t think this is going to happen, large guilds are run by a different sort of personality. Sure auto upgrades fills in the gap some and in time we will probably seem more larger guilds for further upgrades to structures. But the problem is… its not the large guilds that make WVW work its the dedicated WVW’ers that are there all the time, the guys that when a casual logs in they can depend on to help lead them to some sort of fun. Either the requirements for obtaining a guild house and upgrading it need to be drastically reduced or the way towers/keeps/camps are upgraded needs to be changed to something more closely to the way it use to be because the very people that make WVW have been made into nothing more than gloried pug commanders and there is so much more to WVW than just throwing a tag up and zerging. Myself I have stopped wvw’ing for several reason my guild is useless now, I can’t upgrade anything nor can I buff anything. It’s either follow the tag on the map around or go solo. Scouting I use to do as a side thingy as I ran around checking upgrades just doesn’t feel worth messing with anymore(can’t upgrade anything anyway). To be honest I fell pretty worthless in WVW these days. So go join a big guild and get in on the action you say? I don’t think so its just not what us egotistical WVW players are made of.

4.) Population Balance. In many ways the server model has been proven to not work, DAOC comes to mind. But in the spirit of server pride I can see why it keeps getting used. So why not implement a way for two smaller servers to work together as one server? Example instead of 3 servers fighting each other why couldn’t one of the teams actually be two servers that have been lumped together for WVW purposes that week. To carry this even further if a top tier server goes undefeated for so many weeks why not put then against teams comprised of 2-3 even 4 servers so each week it’s harder and harder till eventually they lose? Seems to me this would bring about more variance in the match-ups and provide some much needed balance relief and still maintain server pride. Populations don’t have to be a perfect balance just not being terribly out-manned moves in the right direction. This concept opens up the opportunities for players to get to know people on other servers better and would certainly improve the balance problems if not solve it. Who knows Anet may see more income from people changing servers also when they see a match-up that looks like fun to play in and could even keep Anet from having to lock out transfers to top servers because no one server would be top tier forever they would eventually lose. The top servers may complain but seems to me their would be a lot of pride knowing you held top spot for 6 weeks and it took 6 servers combining to eventually beat you. I know there are many under lying details not covered here but I really think this concept could work with proper thought and implementation.

5.)Misc… Keep/Tower portals sticking up out the ground seemingly in the middle of nowhere take away from the game, all portals need to be on the wall of a clearly defined structure. These little jumping pads sitting in the middle of the air just get rid of them, in WVW they seem out of place for real player vs real player and belong in the land of pve were players can fly and shoot missiles out of their toes. Golems should be constrained to just a certain number per map (3-4). Having golem rushes were 7-10 golems go take and objective is cool and fun but it actually hurts the game. Gates melt so fast that even if a server had the people to respond many times they can’t get there in time to do anything because 7 omegas and 15 players melted the gates and took the keep in 90 seconds. This is just not right. I can understand that maybe golems were meant to offer a balance factor to smaller populations but in reality that’s not how its working, in fact its just the opposite. The larger population has the coin and players to golem zerg the smaller population and in most cases there is no possible win scenario for them. They are against larger forces and gates that melt so fast they stand no chance of defending. Get rid of the stupid looking synthesizers and bring back nodes, synthesizers were a terrible idea(whats next Buck Rodgers?). Some of this seems petty but they add up. One person stopping WVW is a petty thing, but 20 of the servers main WVW’ers stop and it becomes a HUGE deal.

In conclusion most if not all of this may seem small in the grand scheme of things so I will end with this.

WVW is about people not gimmicks and gadgetry. I just want to be able to whack Bob in the face or be able to run like Forest if he has a lot of friends with him. I want to be able to call my friends and know they can reasonably get to me if Bob gets inside a Keep and I need help smacking Bob and his friends around. I want WVW with people on the map, doesn’t have to be full all the time but certainly not a map with just me or 1-2 others on it. It’s your committed WVW’ers that prevent empty maps don’t run them off(this is a BIG DEAL in many ways I could write pages and pages about this). It’s open flexible maps that make fighting zergs fun or finding an off the beaten path tower to cap with me an a few casuals when we are heavily outnumbered. This isn’t rocket science and people will rise to the occasion if the game will get out the way and just let people have some fun. WVW isn’t meant to be one big jumping puzzle or maze and the maps should reflect that and not get in the way.

see Part Two
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/How-to-Fix-WVW-Part-Two/first#post5824199