Guild Wars 2

By better I mean less running around looking for fights, more even fights, less ppt, less siege humping, less pvdoors, pvlords, and general less pve. More open field fights, more map variety, and more fun

Map Design

Step 1: Merge all servers, and spit them out into 3 servers.

Step 2: Create a continent map like this https://i.imgur.com/fzdIANW.jpg (remove victorian and oreole continents to get the idea) and give each server a “home instance” within their continent Can be the existing citadel locations in alpine borderland.

Step 3: Create map instances within each continent, like this http://i.imgur.com/3q6m72M.jpg

Step 4: Create new maps that can comfortably fit 100 players in it without excessive roaming to find an enemy player, or take snippets of existing wvw maps, or even pve maps. (example: http://i.imgur.com/n9Kepjc.jpg or even the garden of divinity’s reach)

Step 5: Further divide the map into quadrants (e.g. https://i.imgur.com/BqOw0ru.jpg ), and place an “Obelisk” within each hexagon. Make half of the quadrants red, and the other half of the quadrants blue, with a visible front line.

Step 6: Open up all keep / tower doors, remove all supply camps, and make all map objectives neutral. Give two spawn points in the form of an impenetrable tower, located in opposite sides of the map. Remove all forms of PvE from WvW. (Includes lords, guards, ambient creatures, moas etc). Have an uncontestable waypoint in the impenetrable tower, allow use of the waypoint to return to your spawn tower, but include a 10 second channel before returning.

Mode Design
Within each continent, battles are now initiated by invading a bordering enemy instance, called by 10 players from a server. This starts a timer where players can begin to populate the instance and prepare for battle (see the right side of http://i.imgur.com/3q6m72M.jpg to get an idea). This controls the number of players one side can have, and prevents one side from outnumbering the opposing side through the use of queues (e.g. if the red side has 40 players, and the blue side have 39 players, the red side is queued and locked until the blue side gets 40 players. The third server is allowed to join either side as mercenaries, to fill a sides army.) The battle will begin in 3 minutes of declaring a battle.

Instead of a continuously active wvw mode, battles last an hour. Players will need to kill enemy players, or destroy the enemy obelisks to score points. Obelisks reveals the location of enemy players nearby (think sentries in current wvw), and when destroyed, turns color and begin revealing locations of nearby enemies for the team that destroyed it. Obelisks deeper within enemy territory reward more points, but are more difficult to destroy. Players can turn their obelisks back into their color, but will award less points.

The victorious side in the battle will be determined by equal consideration through kills, and captured obelisks. When a side is victorious, the instance will change color and allow a battle in a different map instance. ( http://i.imgur.com/3q6m72M.jpg )

Both of the impenetrable spawn towers have a supply depot that periodically refills itself from a yak that walks to it from several random corners of the map. The supply can be used to build siege weaponry. (Catapults and trebs can damage obelisks that are deeper beyond the frontline, flame rams can damage obelisks faster, etc)

edit/ 3 times a day, the original borderland maps would open up for 2 hours for the ppt/siege zombies that prefer that over fights.

What this hopes achieves

• Allows for the introduction of fresh new maps
• Embrace the player oriented action in WvW more over PvE elements
• Facilitate open field fights while enabling roamers to cause havok at various locations in a battle, reducing the effectiveness of a zerg blob.
• Greatly reduce the controversy of night capping
• Facilitate for more evenly matched fights through queues and mercenaries.
• End server identity crisis

WvW match making system like PvP, guild base, not server base., group them onto 3 maps. let fight begin.

All good and well, but do you know how much work that would take…

@OP anything that make WvW change from what it is is ment to be ignored.
For some reason they only tweak internal vaules from glicko, ppt related stuff, that is the only thing they are alowed or they can only do for WvW.

i bet they cant even end servers and start adding normal maps to be controlled and taked by guild V S guilds system…

That’s not a “a better WvW”. That’s an entirely different game mode. If ANet wanted to do that much work they might as well literally start from scratch.

Of course, it’s also just what the OP sees as “better”. Lots of players like PPT, like siege, like the mix of PvE/PvP. If they didn’t, well, WvW wouldn’t be played the way it often is, would it?

Given the will and the resources I’d like to see ANet split the PPT/Siege/Structures part of WvW from the open field fight part and make two separate game modes out of them. That would be much more likely to please a larger number of players. Given the history of GW2 in general and WvW in particular, though, I think the chance of any change on that scale is vanishingly small.

If we’re really, really lucky we might get a new map before GW2 closes down but I wouldn’t even count on that, especially after the way the last one was received.

I think… and i say this being a person that played since 2012. I don’t think it will recover. Lots of people left (core members) in HOT release. You don’t just make a game ftp thinking they will become interested in lore , builds and community. With the current matcheup system i think it’s the last straw. T1 messing stuff up and what not. I cannot say more cause my reply will be deleted. So this isn’t a matcheup reply. But yeah it was fun while it lasted. Now it’s all about keeping EBG and endless spawn battles with un-matched ’’PARTIES’’ more less like a casual cs go match. Structured WVW guilds on lower tiers are getting fed up and some taking breaks. Some even thinking calling it quits. I mean it’s not alarming at all. It’s all good what we lose we gain in the same numbers right?.

@Sweetpotato, that’s the general gist of it, but retains its wvw qualities by having an always active continent overmap that shows active battles.

@Slo/Aeo, True. But given the current state of WvW, a rebuild from the ground up is necessary.

@Tiny, True. Better is subjective. Perhaps if people want the original big maps and the ppt/siege wars, then maybe 3 times a day would a map at the center become unlocked for 3 hours (EBG), and a map in each continent (borderlands) become unlocked for the ppt wars.

@Hayabusa, ok

Any more feedback?

Yeah… Thats a new WvW. It being better would only be a potential sideeffect of it being new.

GW2 isnt really helped by this. They already gave up on much smaller ideas because… well they where too big. You need to think inside the box for a better WvW, or at the very least on the edges. Your suggestion is outside the box, the room, the building and up in space.

But hey its an open forum, maybe an Anet developer scribbling down thoughts on GW3 goes “hmm that give me an idea…”

On the upside, at least you didnt call it globes.

I have to agree with the point that this proposition of OP strays far from the WvW that we have now. To be honest I am quite content with the system of capturing points and have NPC’s guard them for a bit. As I am a roamer myself I see it as a nice way to keep a little passive map control, and gives you some opportunity to protect your territory.

Aside of that, the idea of having colossal maps sounds very appealing and would have great potential. If we’re thinking bigger than EotM there might dawn the problem that, based on my view, there will just be a map control meta comparible to three player snake in essence. The way I see it is that this relies on the fact that the rewards are based on the quantity of objective capture instead of implementing a reward for being in control of an objective for longer periods of time.

The re-sorting of servers has good opportunities too, for example: per match-up there could be three servers from different time zones per team to try and cover a full 24-hour cycle with enough activity, in the optimal setting.

I hear plenty of people say they just “do WvW for the dailies” or for certain items/reward tracks. The rewards for the dedicated became the reason for the casuals to enter WvW. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, the rewards got me into WvW as well. It gave me an opportunity to see how it was and I stuck to it eventually. In the start I just ran around with some guildmates, which were almost all roleplayers, but as I got more serious with it I saw them play less and less actively compared to myself. In the end I haven’t seen most of them since the new WoW expansion was released but their accounts are still stuck to the server. There’s a lot of dead weight that makes it difficult for the hard core of the server to keep up with the competition.

A solution to that might be implementing a ranking system to WvW comparable to that of PvP which separates the dedicated from the reward hoarders. This could be based on hours spent in WvW over the time period of a month or so.
A second divide could be based on both time spent in WvW and the WvW-rank exp gain over the same period of time of the player. This might be able to get the PPT-ers, the GvG/zergVzerg oriented and everything in between grouped together.
My goal with this idea is to get like-minded players teamed up to get less conflict between PPT/combat performance/reward hoarders as that is frustrating for all players to a certain extent.

TL;DR
Good idea, has potential as a new game type but I’m okay with WvW as it is.
Try to match up several servers from different time zones per team to get optimal activity coverage over 24-hours.
What about a ranking system that creates an equal playing field for both the hard and the soft core?

You guys need to come up with ideas using the existing maps and gameplay, anything else new will take a lot of development time that wvw does not have or anet is willing to devote to. It takes them a year just to create a wvw map.

Ideas for better WvW:

Give the community the tools to create content and host/manage servers.

Anet will always choose the most simple way, or none. So this is (can you imagine the lag with this?) too much work.

So a system like the one used in planetside 2.

I definitely like the idea but to completely rebuild wvw from ground requires too much resource that even transcends what an expansion can provide.

But I think it is worthwhile to consider implementing some basic ideas the OP suggested. For example, megaserver everyone into three factions is definitely the right way to go. Current server pairing system only slightly improve balance but over the 24/7 match, most of the timezones, you still have very imbalanced population across the servers that seemingly have equal strength determined by glicko.

I miss planetside 1, that game was a lot of fun. All the buildings gave bonuses and unlocked weapons or vehicles to use on the continent you were on, plus lattice system you had to attack certain bases first to get the next ones. Once you conquered the continent it locked to your side for a time providing a bonus, and everyone had to shift to another map. Course they too suffered from population stacking at times, but they had stat bonuses to deal with outnumbered.

It would even be possible to have a lattice/structure bonus system to wvw actually. Although I don’t really want to bother writing up ideas for that.

Was a mistake designing wvw around points with matches lasting 24/7, or 24/14 as originally planned. Point systems are only good for short duration or even sided matches. Structure capture for access to bonuses is better for population fluctuations.

It’s coming across to me that the only way this wouldn’t happen is the presumption that Arenanet has no resources to allocate in making this possible.

However, if that presumption was false, what are your opinions on this idea now?

Given the current design of WvW, don’t expect any new wvw maps or borderlands. This idea is one way to allow for the addition of new maps. Hell, they don’t even need to design any new maps. Just copy and paste from current PVE maps and place obelisks everywhere. The only real work is designing the world continent map, which is all UI based.

Xenesis.6389:

I miss planetside 1, that game was a lot of fun. All the buildings gave bonuses and unlocked weapons or vehicles to use on the continent you were on, plus lattice system you had to attack certain bases first to get the next ones. Once you conquered the continent it locked to your side for a time providing a bonus, and everyone had to shift to another map. Course they too suffered from population stacking at times, but they had stat bonuses to deal with outnumbered.

It would even be possible to have a lattice/structure bonus system to wvw actually. Although I don’t really want to bother writing up ideas for that.

Was a mistake designing wvw around points with matches lasting 24/7, or 24/14 as originally planned. Point systems are only good for short duration or even sided matches. Structure capture for access to bonuses is better for population fluctuations.

This guy gets it. Don’t think that any server linking, relinking, or reorganization will help balance WvW. Player count fluctuates during the day and guild transfer in and out of servers like it’s a commodity. Arenanet needs to step back and look at the roots of the problem rather than doing quick fixes that would only help temporarily. (E.g. sweeping junk under the carpet rather than picking up the dirt)

Shorter OP: Fox only no items final destination