Guild Wars 2

Let’s be honest, WvW has drastically changed since launched. WvW used to be exactly what the devs promised us, perhaps even better. Three worlds going head to head in a legendary and heroic battle. However over time WvW (EoTM especially) has become farming zones. After taking a little over a year break, I can easily see the differences. Some of the changes may not be as visible to some people because they consistently played and evolved as the game has.

WvW Before
At launch you would see tons of large groups roaming WvW map capping and defending points. Timing was everything, you would attack when you knew the enemy was across the map and defend it when enemy squads started showing up.

WvW Now
There is one giant zerg for each team, rotating in a set path to farm for gold/karma. There is no such thing as defense of a keep or some might even say, “tactics.”

Reasons Why I Believe WvW Has Gone Down Hill

This can be attributed to a number of things quite frankly.

First, as a mentioned before, there is no such thing as defense. The price of siege items are too low in my opinion. I can’t remember if siege items used to be more expensive (it might just be more gold in circulation) but now keeps and towers drop in seconds. I remember the when capturing the bay use to be a huge accomplishment. Now it’s just another point to farm.

Secondly, there’s no incentive to actually defend. Since everyone zergs, it takes a large (and I mean large) amount to people to thwart off an attack. Even if you managed to get a few people to defend, at best you can stall. However who’s going to come to the rescue? NO ONE, that’s who.

This is perhaps the reason why WvW isn’t near as fun as it used to be
You get way more gold/items rotating in a circle around the map. With uncontested keeps/towers, it’s basically a free farm. It’s like all three worlds mutually agreed to rotate in a circle and capture points without fighting anyone. The only reason the worlds would come in contact is when one world caps faster then the other. This is the only time you’ll see a bloodbath and even then everyone resumes farming after. Let’s be honest, the only reason there’s a bloodbath is because killing the enemy characters potentially increases gold/hour.

One server could completely crush the other but who wins? Everyone because everyone was farming and basically making the same amount of gold. No one actually cares about the score.

Recommendations

This may seem drastic but remove loot entirely from WvW. Give us points based on how much we captured/defended/killed enemy characters. Then at the end of the month the points will be added up and rewards will be distributed accordingly. HOWEVER, make tiers of rewards to stop people from farming. That way people will be encouraged to come WvW but not have to grind to get the full reward. Basically split the rewards into 5 or so tiers that would be easy to get if you played WvW often. Also leave the gold/karma you get from capturing, that way they still have some incentive to play past the final tier.
This would effectively bring people to WvW. If Arenanet really wanted to bring more people, make it something you could only get by WvW.

Next make the reward for defending better. Have a quest that charges up while you are actively defending a keep and make it refresh every minute.*
You may ask, what’s stopping people from just continuing to farm? Make the points you get for killing enemy characters a decent amount. That way you encourage player interaction.

Greatly increase siege price. Harder to capture keeps/towers.

Spawn archers depending on the number of enemies attacking the keep/tower. The archers would have to give no reward for killing (to stop farming of them) and would not scale 1:1. That would significantly make capturing a point more challenging.
__________________________________________________________________
TLDR:

WvW sucks now.

Reasons why:
1)To easy to capture points
2) No point in defending
3) Farming is too good.

Fixes:
1) Remove Loot, add Point System
2) Give better rewards for defending
3) Increase Siege Price
4) Add more/better NPC’s to defend

EotM is not WvW. Please don’t compare the two. EotM is a PvE map where you can kill people. It is definitely the best place to farm karma or level new alts. Great for a PvE people but a disgrace for WvW people.

As for your ideas and I’ll only comment on them from a WvW perspective (not EotM)

1. Remove loot? No. I want people to actually play the game mode. You’ve basically just killed the incentive for new people to even try it.
2. Yes, but remember that defending is boring for most people. I’d also say that upper tier servers already do a good job of defending.
3. Let’s see how the siege disabler works.
4. Please no. More NPCs is the last thing WvW needs.

style.6173:

EotM is not WvW. Please don’t compare the two. EotM is a PvE map where you can kill people. It is definitely the best place to farm karma or level new alts. Great for a PvE people but a disgrace for WvW people.

That’s just a myth, but has nothing to do with reality.

I don’t know for primetime (my Inet is to bad to play at prime), but for off-time even the opposite is true: EotM has much more fights and WvW has at least as much PvD. I switched to EotM because it has more fighting than WvW. In WvW I heard much to often: “If we defend our score goes down to much, faster capping is better than defending.” to continue playing WvW.

The archer spawn system might actually be a good idea. Put some sorts of barracks, and when swords are triggered, spew out some archer npc!

Yeah, I remember when it could take at least a couple hours of non-stop fighting before you took an enemy’s T3 garrison.

Now you can pretty much take it within minutes.

style.6173:

EotM is not WvW. Please don’t compare the two. EotM is a PvE map where you can kill people. It is definitely the best place to farm karma or level new alts. Great for a PvE people but a disgrace for WvW people.

As for your ideas and I’ll only comment on them from a WvW perspective (not EotM)

1. Remove loot? No. I want people to actually play the game mode. You’ve basically just killed the incentive for new people to even try it.
2. Yes, but remember that defending is boring for most people. I’d also say that upper tier servers already do a good job of defending.
3. Let’s see how the siege disabler works.
4. Please no. More NPCs is the last thing WvW needs.

Entirely agree here.. ^^

Oh, and EotM kitties shouldn’t bother replying here.. WvW is WvW, not some “avoid the enemy and go K-train some more objectives”.. When you come to true WvW, you’ll still suck monkey balls, if you have ‘learned’ everything in EotM.. Whether you are gold/diamong/platinum/whatver..

Taylor Swift.4190:

Let’s be honest, WvW has drastically changed since launched. WvW used to be exactly what the devs promised us, perhaps even better. Three worlds going head to head in a legendary and heroic battle. However over time WvW (EoTM especially) has become farming zones. After taking a little over a year break, I can easily see the differences. Some of the changes may not be as visible to some people because they consistently played and evolved as the game has.
[…]

Go back on hold from the game, seriously, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about…. Just taking a look at gw2wvw.net, wvwintel.com, mos.millenium.com proves you wrong on the fact that no one cares/defend and flip things in a circle in WvW.

Most mu, at least 2 servers regularily build/lose/destroy WP multiple times a week (when it’s not multiple times a day) and people are actually assaulting/defending objectives.

IF it wasn’t the case and it was only a ktrain, people would be in EotM, not in WvW (no, EotM isn’t WvW, it’s a nice “tutorial”/discovery map for WvW mechanisms with a karmatrain to replace the Queensdale/FSG ones that got gutted), because EotM has 10 times the rewards of normal WvW, a much higher population cap/map, and in the end, lower distances between objectives when compared to WvW maps without wps or with contested wps.

What changed is people got “better” in the sense that while playing the game, people learned what works or not, there was a few balance changes that made things different, and the masteries and buff to siege happened too.

But actually it’s mostly defense that got buffed with sieges, because with their AoE cap, their damage with mastery, the fact you can hit through walls/doors and place them in places they can’t be hit/killed but still can hit the ennemy, you can hold a FAR larger group for a looooonnnggg time (basically for the time it takes them to drain all the sups from the keep if you don’t have the people to come relieve the siege, and they can treb/cata walls, hurt doors a lot before dying and coming back) in an upgraded and sieged keep.

Hell attack on defended objectives/defense events with lots of people there happen every day, multiple times a day, even in T9 EU (and that’s a desert).

Stop using EotM as your baseline for WvW “Affirmations” and “Truths” because it’s not WvW, it’s EotM, as in PvE Ktrain spiced with a bit of WvW mechanisms and the occasionnal kittenfest between zergs of unorganized, ungeared, unbuilt, headless chicken upscaled zergs.
(unless it’s a group of 15 to 20 players from a WvW guild, on TS, with all lvl 80 toons, built and geared properly, farming said zergs)

(and that’s the good and fun part about it btw, i play it quite often to level up toons, since i’m an altoholic and it’s basically the only way i can still manage to lvl a toon, that and doing it only with dailies/monthlies xp bonus, and it’s the place i farm Wxp and ranks because i need them)