Guild Wars 2

I agree with Joe. My version of WvW would be a tabula rasa.

Having said this, I realise it’s not going to happen. I would therefore start with …

Megaserver. That’s right, I’d megaserver WvW. I feel this is inevitable anyway. I’d create allegiances to NPC Generals/Lords (whatever you want to call them) instead. It’d work exactly as it does now, but in the initialisation phase, you select an NPC faction. Suddenly the factions can have individual character such as permanent banners and graphics unique to each (unlike worlds). I’m sure you can think of more ways this is superior to the current system.

Changing allegiance should be very tricky. I suggest ONE free transfer AFTER each “league/tournament” during a very short window – let’s get rid of this “buying guilds” nonsense.

GM online 24/7 so players that get reported for cheating get banned.

Not pretending a 24/7 fight between up to 1200 players that you can join or leave at any time will ever be a competitive team game would be a good start.

Because it has not been mentioned yet. Coloured commander tags. Not just because it looks more fun. You can assign the Blue-tag for defending and the Red-tag for attacking. Easier way to split pug zergs in Eternal Battlegrounds.

This idea might be just fun, not especially an improvement. But what if you could build barricades? The cost could be 10-15 supplies and it could be the lenght of an supplytrap. Set the timer on 10 minutes so it will not stay up for long amounts of time. Maybe even 2 types of barricades. Big ones and smal ones. You can jump over the small one, but it might break a blob/zerg.

Have a limit of the amount of flame rams that can be dropped to hit a door. I’ve seen 6 superior rams on one door. It makes no sense. Just have a maximum 4 per gate, logically there isn’t even room for 4 rams.

The siege timers are really difficult for low tier servers. The defensive siege will time out because there will be no one there. Perhaps it is possible to let the outnumbered buff hold the siege timer. When a server becomes outnumbered the timer would just stop at its current time and resume when the outnumbered buff dissapears.

As previously stated, there is to little of a reward for defending. What if your world gets points for surviving the assault timer? That way tapping a keep with a waypoint will result in a penalty. Ofcourse you can opt to take that penalty for the convience of taking 1 or 2 other towers while their waypoint is occupied. This way you can also add a world reward for taking a tower.

This maybe a little out there. But would it help if a tagged up commander can draw on the map? Might help with giving commands.

Hopefully a dev will look at this thread and read some suggestions. I think there are a couple of good ideas in this thread.

Cactus.2710:

Straegen.2938:

If I could do one thing and only one thing, it would be to convert the system from Server warfare to Guild Alliance warfare.

Guilds could make guild alliances and declare war on non-allied guilds. Each week the matching algorithm would put guilds together into a pool to fight two other pooled group of guilds using guild play hours, guild play times, guild alliances, etc to balance out the match as best as possible. WvW scoreboards would highlight guild and guild alliance victories for bragging rights.

But … but … but … but . . . . . . that sounds like fun, would make a lot of sense, and take some effort from ANet. Therefore it has not a prayer of ever happening.

Would be cool to a just have one world like Eve and all alliances had territory to conquer Ç_Ç

Aeolus.3615:

Straegen.2938:

If I could do one thing and only one thing, it would be to convert the system from Server warfare to Guild Alliance warfare.

Would be cool to a just have one world like Eve and all alliances had territory to conquer Ç_Ç

I would be completely for this but GW2 just doesn’t scale well with heavy populations. GW2’s engine is too limited for this design. If it existed, I would play the hell out of it though.

I feel most of what we have should be scrapped.

Guild Wars

That should’ve been something anet worked toward from day 1 instead of making WvW how it is, does someone like the huge maps where zergs are predominant, tactics are few and far between and having to beg in chat for scouts to prevent ninja caps?

It doesn’t incite world pride, it doesn’t motivate or reward adequately.

I wish to see a WvW format where guild and server pride matter to people, alliances are made to attain goals, this needs truly rewarding content for being able to conquer and retain the castle-keep whatever you want to call it, heck I had more fun playing ragnarok online’s war of the emperium or lineage’s castle assault then anyday I have spent in WvW.

It’s either merge populations or reduce the scale of the maps, both are too big for what it is, if the maps can’t have more than the current numbers than they should be much smaller, concentrate people to certain points to allow for better use of people that play WvW and strategize accordingly and that’s just to start with.

NonToxic.9185:

I would lower the max players per map, forcing players from enormous servers to spread out amongst all the other servers to avoid queues.

I’m from Desolation and we came second on spring tournament and by enormous servers you mean servers like Deso. Funny fact is that we never have queues except friday evenings when servers resets. I can literally go WvW without waiting pretty much anytime of the day and instantly. During prime time we have 10-40ppl queue on EB but all borderlands are usually clear to go, 24/h. This really isn’t problem anymore.

The rewarding would need some major changes as it is now the offensive gameplay is more rewarding than defending. You get nothing from escorting dolyaks even though they are very important for upgrades.
Defending in general is not rewarding which result in the so called karma trains. Majority doesn’t defend and just flip woodem structures, you can see that in EOTM, it is basically WvW when you throw away the identity of your realm and thats why nobody sees EOTM as real WvW. If you don’t have a cause to fight for, you would simply avoid fights and PvD all day long.
A simple but significant change would to change the rewarding-system.
I do believe that this would be the first step in the right direction and it should be manageable for A-net to work on.

I would also conduct a comprehensive analysis to ascertain which colour has waypoints over each week. If it’s green, then green’s map could perhaps be changed to make capturing things easier. Alternatively, Arenanet could offer incentives to the other teams to take green’s objectives.

I (and others) suggested incentivising teaming-up on the currently-leading-server-at-any-one-time in the original round of CDIs.

Guess what: nothing happened.

1. No rezzing while in combat and if a player is spiked, they cannot be rezzed.
2. T3 (or make a T4 option) to make doors only damaged by seige.
3. Either a slight-but-not-insignificant zerg speed debuff, or a slight-but-not-insignificant small party speed buff. a larger army should move slower than a small havoc group. This could be done by having a swiftness duration increase/decrease sliding scale depending on the number of allies nearby.
4. Either remove the AOE cap, or increase it to 10-15 players.
5. A reward for defending. One I have in mind is to reward players for escorting dolyaks and have the rewards for escorting dolyaks increase as the distance you walk with them increases.
6. Have the Bloodlust buff inactive in the center of the maps(which could be denoted with a glowy ring), so it’s a fair playing field when attempting to cap/defend the nodes
7. Having the Outnumbered buff provide a decent tactical buff to players. Perhaps an 25% increase in speed and endurance regen.

Aeolus.3615:

Would be cool to a just have one world like Eve and all alliances had territory to conquer Ç_Ç

There is literally nothing more like work than EVE. WORK is less like work than EVE.

Silalus.8760:

Aeolus.3615:

Would be cool to a just have one world like Eve and all alliances had territory to conquer Ç_Ç

There is literally nothing more like work than EVE. WORK is less like work than EVE.

0.0 space has not much to do with EVE being a job though. 0.0 is just that one shining gem in amongst an ocean of the kind of pain that gets you $30/hr in real life.

Some rough thoughts:

• Dissociate your WvW team from your home server. Instead, there would be 3 WvW armies/empires that players can choose to join (and switch between with fees/penalties), regardless of what home server they belong to.

• The game is divided into “seasons” and has a Risk-style world map:
  http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/Risk_game_map_fixed.png

• At the start of a season, the three armies are randomly assigned starting regions, with some minimum distance from the other armies.

• There is a playable map for each country, where the armies involved fight towards some victory objective to claim the country , e.g. destroy all of the enemy bases, hold x% of the map + key points for some duration, kill N enemies from each team, etc.

• Regions closer to an army’s “homeland” would give advantages to that army over the other two teams.

• The season ends when a time limit is reached, or when one team claims the entire world map.

The ability to place supplies into towers and keeps. You can run supplies from depots and place it into the keeps to help build or restock.

I love almost every one of Kraag’s suggestions a little up.

Perhaps have EB/OS access linked to control of your home borderlands? 45% would be a reasonable minimum, though 60% would be better. Perhaps have this different for the various WvW tournament tiers. They could potentially use the Contested Waypoint mechanic to make it work.

Coldtart.4785:

Silalus.8760:

Aeolus.3615:

Would be cool to a just have one world like Eve and all alliances had territory to conquer Ç_Ç

There is literally nothing more like work than EVE. WORK is less like work than EVE.

0.0 space has not much to do with EVE being a job though. 0.0 is just that one shining gem in amongst an ocean of the kind of pain that gets you $30/hr in real life.

Show me a Null alliance that encourages full time (little or no combat) industrialists to work there – who are not alts of the leadership. :p Until that happens (perhaps the next patch?) I was happy with staying clear of that region.

Currently, as I see it, there are two incentives regarding WvW which take effect apart from each other:
1) Loot from kills/rank chests, etc.
2) War score

At the moment 1) is dominant and as for the rewads for agressive, large-blob playstyle in contrast to small group roaming, scouting and defending objectives are (much) smaller, the much criticised karma-training is encouraged in a way that it almost becomes the sole rewarding kind to play WvW at all. I’m not just talking about, or demanding greater rewards for defending etc. (as there still are problems like botting) but the efforts of fewer people trying to do so are negated by large zergs that simply do not care or even see it in a positive way to being able to recapture an object and again claim type 1) rewards for that.

Of course, giving higher rewards for defending could reduce this problem in a certain way, but apart from (again) the bot problem and the manner in which this can or can not be controlled, still the discrepancy between the two reward types remains.
As long as this dichotomy persists, people will always tend to play WvW in a style that isn’t about winning a matchup but about reward type 1) and the time, it takes to claim a certain amount of it (in terms of forts/keeps/etc. per time unit).

There are a lot of good propositions regarding the “karma train problem” concerning rewards and/or game mechanics in this thread and I’d wish that some of them would just get tried out on a base of shorter (e.g. 4-week) tournamets/seasons because the only way of sorting this problem out lies in practise rather than theory.

As for changing game mechanics like, for example the AoE cap, the often criticised circumstance of WvW not having changed in any way from the start on would be adressed and people would have to develop new strategies facing different settings of rules.

As for rewards, I believe, things can only get better for the existant rewards completely negate the way WvW should work in terms of a stronger linkage between type 1) and 2) rewards and being a competitive PvP success-/ rather than loot-oriented game mode.
I’d even go so far to try removing in-match capturing rewards completely for one season and see what happens to WvW participation. For the greater rewards for defending ended in a failure, this might even be the last logical, reward-based step granting the possibility of changing WvW playstyle. Furthermore, rewards could also be granted every 15min-turn on a basis of war score points and individual player participation (e.g. determined by the amount and quality (gold/silver/bronze) of non-rewarding events completed).

There’s a lot of possibilities – I’d just like to see them trialed so that the community can give more specific input about their experiences with them resulting in a better learning process to improve overall WvW experience.

Balance.

I (and many others) have posted so many threads suggesting ways to even up teams in WvW our fingers are bleeding. Its the one thing that WvW is mainly lacking in overall, and the one thing it really needs the most.

Ive been on both sides of the fence when it comes to either outnumbering other teams (boring), and being out manned (frustrating), and neither one is much fun.

The moments I really remember about in WvW were those close battles that had me sitting on the edge of my chair while all sides went at it, and after it was all over, win or lose, you sit back and say “wow… THAT was a good fight!” Fun times.

When teams are so unevenly matched that your either running over them or their running over you, I would rather spend my time grinding in some boring PVE zone then be in WvW.

Here’s what I don’t agree with:

1. Combining servers. WvW is one of the few areas of the game where community exists. People have their favorite commanders, roam with others friends. Doesn’t make sense to do this.

2. Choosing one of 3 alliances. This is arbitrary. It might make sense if we had good, evil and neutral, different kingdoms, or 6 or 9 races that we could divide into 3 camps.

3. Increasing siege timers to 4 hours. there are siege trolls on many servers and Arenanet does nothing about this.

4. Increase AOE cap. Then you would have AOE wars. yet I understand the reason for advocating this. Hammer trains are dull.

I would support:

1. Adding more objectives. The skritt and the centaurs just waste map space.

2. Combining lower tier servers. I’m not on one, but it sounds like a good idea. I would imagine the lower tier servers look like a ghost town. It’s not long the concept of a “server” has any meaning any more.

3. Maybe nerf thief stealth. WvW seems to be losing numbers. My view is that thieves discourage a lot of newbies from really giving wvw a shot because a good thief can really embarass inexperienced players.

4. Do something to weaken hammer trains/bloobing. Good luck at that one.

Make it 3 factions, you pick a faction for your account, and replace server transfers with faction transfers since this would effectively be removing the final item that even makes servers exist.

Instead of instancing WvW under this new megaserver factional system, open and close leagues as population demands. If queues are getting insufferably long, open a new league. If areas become dead, close older leagues. Maybe use this system for monthly tournaments. If July had 3 leagues open and still had long queues at prime time, August should have 4 leagues, etc.

Darkness Falls style mega dungeon with faction controlled access. Nuff said.
http://camelotherald.wikia.com/wiki/Darkness_Falls

Change loot distribution in all WvW zones, anyone in the faction who captures an objective who was within a certain range of the objective gets a loot chest similar to the way you get bonus chests when increasing your world level (or faction level in this new system). No more loot from tagging champs and being inside control rings, make it this way in WvW and EotM. Don’t use this as a way to nerf EotM loot, use this as a way to buff WvW loot.

Give loot chests like this to defenders for completing defense events, make the defense events less stringent. A defense event should be running at all times on an objective you own. Every 5 minutes this event will complete and you’ll get a bronze silver or gold defender chest depending on how many minutes out of the 5 you spent guarding the objective. Scouting and defending should be just as rewarding.

Balance loot and karma so that defending, capturing, or fighting enemy groups all give loot worthy of people’s times, AKA about as much loot as someone could get chaining explorables or low fractals. Playing WvW shouldn’t be widely seen as an absurd waste of time.

thaooo.5320:

Hire a dev team for WvW.

^^^^^^^

this.

The most important thing of all, and while at it, kick the living story and the 5v5 balancing teams out of WvW completely and totally.

One problem of WvW, I think, is deserted BL maps even on T1/2 servers resulting in a great inequality between a few servers that can cover all of these maps for a large amount of time with a lot of players and those who can’t. Having the EBGs (quite) full and one more group that try to cover the three remainig BLs won’t compete against the two(?) servers in EU that are able to cover all of the maps with a decent amount of players.
Of course, anything that can be changed in WvW wont fit the perceptions of all players, so the following suggestion surely won’t be much loved by Deso and FSP players for example as the are able to get that full coverage working. On the other hand, this suggestion would perhaps result in a greater spread of players to lower populated servers which might even be resulting in a tendency of player-based server strenght equilibrium.

So here’s the idea: Just give us the EBG and one BL map per matchup consisting of three rounds each with every server taking one different starting position each round. The War score points of each of the three matches would just have to be added to get the final score of a matchup determining a winner.
Two maps are much easier to fill even by low populated servers and there’d be a huge incentive for players on servers with a high WvW playing population to switch to “lower” servers in order to avoid queues. This could be easily combined with the possibility to join on in EotM only if there is a queue on both/every map (as I understand it, the way EotM implementation was meant anyways). Furthermore a free- or cheap transfer to lower (WvW-[?])populated servers should be made accessible to contribute to a more equal WvW map coverage for all servers.

What I’d desire from the devs would be some kind of thread/post with their views of what they want WvW to be like or what they criticise about it’s current state (technically, not in terms of “amazing” or such) and a list of approaces that aren’t realisable for the amount of work that would be involved with them’d be too large (e.g. completely new maps as I have read in other posts). This would allow a more distinct discussion about approaches that could be realised and, additionally would cope with the community’s desires to get a signal of the responsibles that there is a noteworty interest in improving/advancing WvW and including player’s opinions in that process.

I would change the entire set up, so that there could no longer be 2v1 …

I would make it, so that all servers have a chance to fight for first at each WvW reset, by making it an all server elimination style match up even if the WvW reset had to be separate from the regular reset such as every 2 weeks to a month ..This would insure that each server would try their best to win each WvW reset and would help put a stop to top guilds making deals with other servers to week swap for wins and 2v1 another server…..

Infract me please.