Guild Wars 2

So every now and again when I find myself doing a late night on Guild Wars I sometimes head into WvW to disrupt some Dolyak supply chains.

Recently the server I’m on (Gunnars Hold) has been pitted against the likes of Gandra and Riverside. I’ve noticed an odd cycle where Riverside will completely dominate on points when the battle resets at night, but during the day the hold very few of the points.

Upon one of my recent Dolyak excursions I discovered a group of around 30 guild members running around, massacring everyone and capturing all the points – uncontested.

This particular group seemed to also sport a lot of extremely well geared players – likely a result of the east WvW tokens.

Working as intended?

Now this raises into question a couple of things for me. Is this ok? Is it ideal the people can play at anti-social hours to get an advantage to take keeps that were previously hard-fought over?

Should there be a variable population cap which only allows an incremental percentage of difference in the number of plays on each team? If like many nights there are only 3 of us from our server in the battleground, should 10x that number be allowed from another server?

On the flipside I’ve also seen individuals taking keeps (very slowly) at anti-social hours. Should there be a minimum number of players required to capture a location?
I think what got to me most about this, is that the large group of players mentioned above had full PvP sets, which are obviously not hard to come-by when you can capture entire maps at a time. This seemed somewhat unfair to those who play during more populated hours.

There’s a number of points covered here, and there are a number of ideas that could be used to mitigate this if people think it’s a problem, however they all have their drawbacks.

Possible solutions?

Population caps related to the number of players online from all server. For example if there’s 5 online from one server, no-more than 15 from another server can join. (Punishes high pop servers)

Have only eternal battlegrounds open during certain hours – this funnels population into one battleground, but punishes people that play at ‘anti-social’ hours because of their routine or time-zone.

Scale the health and difficulty of mobs with relation to the number of players. Currently only players get a small stats buff when outnumbered, NPCs remain the same.

Drawbacks

There are problems with all of the above suggestions which I also acknowledge. Limiting content for some players for the sake of others is a harsh decision and never a popular one. Equally it’s not fair to punish players based on their decided play-hours or time-zones, and finally there will always be the people that take the game more seriously, and they will always be in a position to cause ‘unfair’ situations.

That said, I feel there should be some discussion around this sort of behaviour and playstyle, to see if there is a way of improving on what’s already a good system.

Thoughts? /discuss!

The thought is the server matching will eventually match these severs against one another.

I like the idea of increasing NPC guards numbers/health and Gate health depending on the map population

You shouldn’t be worried, as with any other “ladder” the longer WvW runs the better should the match-ups be. If there are servers with dominant WvW groups they’ll end up matched against similar servers. In general I’m against close to limitless potential to be “better” than the other people by putting in more time and effort but in this case there isn’t much to gain by such “hardcore” play.

I think it’s important to remember that there are people playing from all over the place. Not just the US. So what you are calling anti-social hours is actually some peoples prime time. (Even some of us from the US play late hours)

I guess server ratings will fix this over time. It’s already a bit better than it was previously, at least on our server. But it’s very frustrating to go to bed controlling a decent chunk of the maps, only to wake up to four maps of all green (or red, or blue). You can usually take it back after a few hours, but by that point the “night raider” world will already have more points than is even theoretically possible for any other world to overtake during the hours when most people can actually play.

I have no idea about how to solve it, though. It would be annoying to not be able to do anything if you could only play at night, but at the same time it’s frustrating to know you’ll lose all upgrades just because you have to go to bed to get up for work in the morning. Much of the charm of a persistent world-versus-world battlefield disappears when it essentially all goes away when you log off, as no amount of defenses are any use if no one is online to man them.

Setch.2398:

I think it’s important to remember that there are people playing from all over the place. Not just the US. So what you are calling anti-social hours is actually some peoples prime time. (Even some of us from the US play late hours)

I’m actually playing from the EU, but yeah I realise that there are players world-wide.

Wow, lots more posts about this have appeared.

Maybe another solution would be to give gates/wall and HUGE health buff between certain times to make it not worth peoples while to go around capping at night.