Guild Wars 2

There has been a lot of talk lately about players wanting WvW to become a competitive PvP mode, and it leads me to wonder, do people really know all the needs to be changed if they want WvW to become a serious competitive PvP mode, and if they did know, would they still think it’s worth the costs?

There’s some huge changes that’d need to be made, the biggest of all being coverage. Coverage and population if by far the biggest hurdle between WvW being casual and competitive. The vast differences in WvW populations is where almost all the balance problems in WvW come from. Be is Bloodlust, skill lag, spawn camping, blobbing or blowouts.

Unfortunately, the only way to fix this is to somehow spread the WvW population evenly across all servers. Which can be achieved in many ways but all are either high cost or unreliable. Anet could arbitrarily assign players to servers, but the uproar of relocating the entire game’s population shows why that wouldn’t be a popular idea. They could incentivize transferring, but that’s almost guaranteed to fail. They could lower the player cap to the lowest common denominator, but that’ll get a similar reaction to forced relocation. Lastly, they could also limit the time WvW it open, which would be an enormous middle finger to Oceanic players, and alike. Scaling the stats of outnumbers servers would prove problematic; it’s a pipedream to create a powerscaling system that would make every uneven fight in WvW fair.

Next is the general equipment level of the players. WvW allows fresh out spawn players to partake of it. It also has 6 tiers of equipment at the top level. To make WvW competitive they’d need to standardize the gear in a similar way to SPvP, change all gear to match the stats of a certain level, or block all gear that isn’t of a certain quality, say Exotic. They’d also likely either have the ax the uplevels, if they want people bringing their own gear, or pretty much turn WvW into large format SPvP. They’d likely also want to get rid of foods.

In closing I ask again, is it turning WvW into a fully competitive game mode worth the sacrifices that would have to be made to achieve it?
We’ve already lost the only place where you could use PvE consumables against other players, do we really want to lose everything else that makes WvW unique?

I don’t think there’s been any desire on the part of players to make WvW seriously competitive (esports level).

People just want a fun PvP-type environment where you can play-how-you-want, whether that be zerging, roaming, GvG, sieging, or whatever. I don’t think anyone wants WvW to become another sPvP debacle.

But definitely make it so that a new player to the game can relatively quickly be on equal terms with veteran players. That would mean getting rid of Guard Leech, Applied Fortitude, and Ascended armor.

No but people do want GvG. you can have 1v1 matches, 1v1v1, or even GvGs between 4 or more guilds in a map.

Seriously just how hard would it be to make a simple map, it’s just an extension of custom arenas. They simply dont want to do it.

Ascended gear and who knows what other upcoming gear alone makes wvw not balanced enough. Exotic gear was like oh well okay I get them some day.

Ascended gear is like oh yeah, 8 characters, good luck getting one weapon set until next year for ONE of them, unless you go pve and grind yourself to death every day. And don’t forget to log in daily, it makes you bad if you don’t.

Too much daily grind in this game.

With the changes they have made and are making in WvW it’s fairly clear that they are trying to drive PVP players from WvW to go and join the circle jirks in SPVP. Sadly, even with the soon to be introduced Death Match and KOtH modes in SPVP I think they have/will probably lose a lot of those players instead as they are effectively throwing WvW under the bus and SPVP does not have the flexibility of build and consumables that people have become used to using.