Guild Wars 2

PLEASE READ THE ACTUAL SUGGESTION BEFORE COMMENTING, NOT JUST THE THREAD TITLE

This is a slightly gargantuan post. If you want to get right to the meat of it, scroll down to the second post.

The number one reason I see people leaving, time and time again, is stale play. We’ve had the same maps, seige, matchups and mechanics since the game launched. And while what we have is excellent, one of the most unique and interesting game modes I’ve ever played, once you’ve been doing it for 2-3 months you tend to have seen it all. By now, anyone who’s been playing WvW regularly since Christmas knows exactly what treb placements can reach where, where all the sneaky cata spots are, where ballistas will work and where they won’t, and good spots for arrow carts. I remember the first time I saw catapults on the little ledge hitting the water-wall of Bay and thinking “OMG, that’s genius”. That was back in November or December. By now, it’s simply another thing on the list of spots to check when Bay gets contested.

For whatever reason, it appears ANet are unwilling or unable to create new maps, which would be the best way to resolve this. However, they have shown that they’re willing to add other things to WvW to spice things up a little. The addition of breakout events and WXP ranks/abilites are proof of this.

This is compounded by the change to the server ranking/matchups. Previously, even if you thought you’d done it all, you might still decide to put the effort in “for the server”. If you wanted to see your server climb a tier, or get/avoid a certain matchup, or simply grind a rival into the dust, then you might decide to make the extra effort to stay up late defending that waypoint in an enemy Hills or scouting garrison watergate. Now, with random matchups, it kinda feels all the more pointless. Why should I stay up escorting dolyaks to a keep and watching watergate, when in all likelhood it’ll get zerged down by some insomniac guild half an hour after I log out? Anyone who’s been around WvW for several matchups knows that server rankings are largely a simple measure of population and coverage. Organisation and skill do come into it a little bit, but population and coverage can completely over-ride it.

For example, my server (Gandara) in tier 5 has the guilds and commanders to compete on even(ish) terms with tier 2/3 servers during primetime and late evening. However we have no presence during mornings and early afternoons, and that’s why we’re in tier 5 instead of tier 3. Likewise, lately we’ve been matched against servers from tier 8, and while we’ve been stomping them on points for 20 hours per day, there were times during the week when they were able to put us on the back-foot.

Now this suggestion isn’t trying to fix population imbalances or night-capping. However, it will try to adress the problem of lack of purpose. Before, server ranking points were a back-ground curiosity used to ensure fair matchups. Now, apparently, server points are actually what we’re supposed to be fighting for.

Getting stomped in your matchup by a server 4 tiers above you? Unable to even move out of spawn? Don’t worry, you’re still gaining server rating!!

Unsuprisingly, this doesn’t cut it for alot of people. We want even and interesting fights and seiges, not the chance to see a number go up once a week.

The other reason people (rage)quit is the omni-presence of zergs. I don’t think anything will ever completely remove zergs, it’s human nature to group up and stay together, particularly when we feel unsure of ourselves or threatened. However, the problem as I see it is that zergs don’t just offer shelter for the new/cowardly/lazy. They are also by far the most effective way of taking objectives and gaining server points, loot, WXP and karma. This has gotten to the point where the game looks more like “musical keeps”. Nobody bothers defending or upgrading anything, not just because its boring/expensive, but because its actually less efficient to try and defend a point than it is to move on and take another objective as quickly as possible.

So, this suggestion aims to address these three reasons; stale play, no reasons to compete, and no reasons to defend instead of PvD.

Okay, I’ll stop rambling and cut to it.

Introduce objectives/achievements/events for servers to strive for, on hourly, daily and weekly timescales. Achieving these goals rewards server points as well as the usual wxp/loot/karma, and possibly special extras (possibly in the form of unique abilites/buffs for a short period, special/free siege, bonus supply, etc)

It is important to note that these objectives/events will be ONLY PvP. I am not suggesting PvE content. You achieve these objectives by fighting enemy players, not NPCs.

So, for example:

Small Scale Objective:

Hold the Temple of Storms for 2 hours. Reward: 500 server points, and deploy a team of Quaggans to all camps on the map.

Ensure 10 Dolyaks reach Briar tower before time is up. Reward: 100 server points, 200 extra supply in Briar.

Make sure no Dolyaks reach enemy Hills for 1 hour. Reward: 50 server points, WXP Rank Chest.

Medium/Guild Scale Objective:

Take Cragtop on enemy borderland within 2 hours. Reward: 500 server points, full tower supply.

Leading on to->

Hold Cragtop on enemy borderland for 6 hours. Reward: 2000 server points and a WXP Rank Chest.

Kill 10,000 enemy players in 2 hours. Reward: 1000 server points, WXP Rank Chest.

Escort a Dolyak-Train from Spawn to Centaur camp. Reward: 500 server points, WXP Rank Chest.

Large Scale / Server Objective:

Take enemy Garrison. Reward: 1000 server points, full keep supply.

Leading on to ->

Establish a waypoint in enemy Garrison. Reward: 10,000 server points. Grand Chest.

Hold Stonemist for 48 hours. Reward: 10,000 server points. WXP Rank Chest.

Hold all camps on every map for a full tick (15 mins). Reward: 5,000 server points, WXP Rank Chest.

These objectives/events wouldn’t always be “on”. Only 1 of each scale would be “on” at a time, and sometimes none at all. Also, they would scale with the relative ranking of servers. So if your server is 3 tiers above the other 2 servers in your matchup, then you’d have to hold Stonemist for 72 hours, while the other servers would only have to hold it for 12 hours.

Also, the objectives your server has would be known to the enemy, and they would have a “counter objective” and a reward for that. So, from the example above, if your server has the objective to take Cragtop within the next 2 hours then the enemy will have the objective to hold Cragtop for 2 hours. If they fail that, and you take the tower, they will then have the objective to take it from you before you complete your objective to hold it for 6 hours.

Perhaps, if ANet are feeling super-creative, these objectives could even be woven into a sort of “Living Story”, except instead of NPCs and Tyria, we have Player Invaders and Servers. Think along the lines of the Balthazar Temple event chain.

Crucially, these objectives award server points on completion. This means that it actually becomes worthwhile defending places. As it is now, there is no point bunkering down in an enemy Cragtop and defending it all evening, because they will just ignore you and go take the rest of the map. However, if you can earn some serious points for your server, as many as you would get from PvDing the rest of the map, then it becomes worthwhile to defend it. Also, if the enemy can gain some serious points by taking Cragtop away from you, then they might actually attempt it instead of just ignoring you and zerging everything else.

Hopefully this will stop the joke that is musical keeps. Hopefully it will create more interesting fights as well. As things are, people run around in a PvD zerg, the commander looking for a tower to take that won’t take too long. If it looks like it’ll take more than half an hour, generally they don’t bother and will go searching for an easier target. This leads to huge amounts of PvD, and only occasional clashes of zergs either by accident or when a commander mis-calculates how long it’ll take to get into a keep before the enemy zerg arrives. This isn’t the epic seige warfare we want in WvW. We want to see entire batteries of trebuchets pounding a tower, seiges that take over an hour to complete, with the tide of battle ebbing and flowing, both sides gritting their teeth and refusing to let the enemy keep that tower. As it is now, this just doesn’t happen.

Hopefully this will add a sense of purpose, and a reason to defend objectives. As I said at the start, its been many many months since I stayed up late watching over a tower upgrading, because it just isn’t worth it either in terms of personal gain or server (points) gain. If, on the other hand, my server would gain some serious points and I would get a nice shiny chest because I stayed up another hour to make sure the objective completes, that would be much more of an incentive.

Now, these are just examples of what the objectives/events might look like. I don’t want to get too hung up on the details. I’ll point it out again though, that these events are PvP events. I just know that someone is gonna post something about how we don’t need more PvE in WvW. That person hasn’t read what I’ve written and is an kitten .

PS. I realise the chance of a player suggestion being implemented is less than zero. But I can dream can’t I?

More – I would add a multiplication bonus for taking a certain keep. If it takes you 20-30-40 minute to take a keep you still get the same reward and if you are “farming” karma or gold …. it does not worth wasting time.

Tl;dr

/15characters

So, to be clear, your strategy for breaking up zergs is to introduce highly rewarding, location specific events?

Your ideas have merit, but they are hardly a solution for the problems in wvw.

proteininja.5891:

So, to be clear, your strategy for breaking up zergs is to introduce highly rewarding, location specific events?

Your ideas have merit, but they are hardly a solution for the problems in wvw.

There’s a distinction between “zergs” and “PvD musical keeps”.

To be honest, I’m fine with “zergs”, if by zergs you mean epic clashes of large armies. What makes them boring in WvW is that they make a joke of the objective-game.

Some of the most fun fights I’ve had in WvW are when all 3 servers are fighting in forces of 40+ inside a single keep, building siege, pushing, withdrawing, for over an hour in some cases, and ignoring the rest of the map. Epic, large seiges are fun and clearly what WvW was designed to be.

Some of the worst times I’ve had in WvW are watching 2 blobs running around a map PvDing their way through T1 keeps, not even bothering to try and defend or fight each other, only aiming to try and PvD faster than the enemy can.

I want more of the former and less of the latter.

I think I love you…

Great ideas. More events in WvW is needed.

I’d also like one “Kill 100 enemies while outside of a tower/keep – min 3000 range” – to bring people out of Tower/Keeps and start some more open field battles.

Sounds interesting…
But needs some tweaking.
More small objective, less large ones, like one small objective per server PER MAP, while there is one mid- to large-sized objective per server and one huge objective(hold stonemist for xyz, hold all 3 garrisons for XYZ, hold all 3 keeps in Borderland X for Y), which applies to the whole matchup and lasts for a week.

Btw, most impossible achievement ever:
Stop Siegerazer from reaching the tower. Siegerazer will not stop to attack players.

I really like a lot of these ideas.

naphack.9346:

Sounds interesting…
But needs some tweaking.
More small objective, less large ones, like one small objective per server PER MAP, while there is one mid- to large-sized objective per server and one huge objective(hold stonemist for xyz, hold all 3 garrisons for XYZ, hold all 3 keeps in Borderland X for Y), which applies to the whole matchup and lasts for a week.

Btw, most impossible achievement ever:
Stop Siegerazer from reaching the tower. Siegerazer will not stop to attack players.

Oh, I thoroughly agree. The objectives I posted were just a few off the top of my head. Ideally there’d be half a dozen small objectives going on across all the maps at any one time, maybe 2 or 3 medium objectives a day, and 1 or 2 week-long objectives, and none of them would be repeated/spammable.

Thank you for taking the time and writing this up. The forums need more well written ideas.
In my opinion this is exactly what the game needs. You Sir are a gentleman and a scholar. I hope someone at ArenaNet is reading this.

Cmon, no more comments?
BUMP CUZ I LOVE THOSE IDEAS!

Edit: got ninjad
2 minutes…

Like others, it needs some tweaks by better folk them I. But a big thank you Ragnar great ideas and a great post in general.

Definitely support

These are some great ideas. Anet really promotes their never ending story for pve …and they should, since it keeps things fresh and interesting…and no one else does it.

Something like that for WvW would be very cool.

WvW has quite a few problems when you consider the format as a whole. The most obvious is, as you mention, the lack of renewal. WvW – more than anything – needs new maps. I’m still amazed that it is possible to continuously keep a “living world” going with regular content updates, yet it is apparently impossible to produce even a single new map for WvW players. However, whether this is because a.net are unwilling or unable does not matter. In the end, regardless of whether the inherent nature of WvW places larger demands on resources, the simple fact is that the format will wither without new content. We will need new maps – eventually. And sooner is better than later.

In the meantime though, “server events” are probably the second best option. We need more incentive to defend the locations we capture, and less incentive to form The Blob™ and take over everything. In addition to the things you’ve already mentioned, which are all good baseline suggestions, I’d like to add that it also doesn’t help that objectives cost a relatively prohibitive amount of gold to upgrade. This only further discourages smaller groups and commanders without large guilds to support them to leave the objective as is, and simply go looking for yet another objective to compensate for the eventual loss. Upgrades should grant you a return on your investment in the form of a reward when they complete (as a minimum the amount of gold invested to begin with, and preferably an additional amount).

Breaking up the zerg is a more difficult problem, and as you point out we’ll probably never get rid of them entirely. Furthermore, some objectives simply often require a larger group to capture. That being said, it’s obvious that zerging is by far the most effective (and profitable) option when it comes to tactics. However, there are at least two obvious places you could start. First, it needs to be easier to form squads that do not rely on a commander pin that is visible to the entire map. Small and medium sized groups need more tools, and while it’s true that forming and running such squads is currently possible in bare bones form, it could be made a whole lot easier. There are multiple ways you could go about it as well, from simply implementing a few changes to how commander pins work to adding additional UI elements. The point is that it’s low hanging fruit and therefore should simply be addressed.

The second thing is waypoints. The current maps are just not large enough to justify the presence of portal mechanics that allow you to travel half way across them in a matter of seconds. In the same vein, the ability to constantly travel between different borderlands is counterproductive and only further encourages giant groups porting around to cap whatever they can, while always being able to quickly port back to save important objectives. I am by no means advocating revoking the ability to travel between different maps altogether, but I do believe some meaningful restrictions could be implemented.

Truth be told though, it is my firm belief that a.net’s original approach to WvW was to simply throw it out there and let it take care of itself. It is not a format that, in their minds, require any larger form of ongoing maintenance. Indeed, the suggestions I’m bringing up here are by no means new, they have been discussed at length in other threads many times. And still we have seen little to no improvement. Heck, even the wxp system encourages zerging. I swear every time I repair a structure and the game rewards me with a mere one wxp, I can hear a dev somewhere laughing at me. Likewise for escorting yaks, or defending towers/keeps. The incentive structures in general, be it wxp/gold/karma/whatever, are just a plain mess.

But like I said, I doubt we’ll see any major shift in attitude towards WvW on the part of a.net. While this is admittedly an assumption on my part, I doubt it was ever in the cards to begin with. But +1 nonetheless, for what it’s worth.

Steps like this might address some of the current speed bumps with WvW. I enjoy WvW a great deal, and perhaps if someone is getting bored with running with a successful zerg flipping paper objective, they need to take a break, as you can get burned out from any repetition.

The OP makes some very good points.

The problem I see is that Arenanet does not seem to have clear long term objectives for WvW. They clearly have goals for sPVP, and in PVE they have the whole living story direction. When they speak of WvW it is like it is done, fini, and all that is left is polish and tweaks from here on out.

If they have a clear statement of purpose for WvW, I seem to have missed it. About all I have been able to glean is that they see it as a game mode that should be able to stand on it’s own, i.e. players can earn most of the same stuff there that they can in in other modes (leveling, gear, AP’s etc.)

I hope they do take the suggestions of the OP to heart and consider redoing WvW rewards and mechanics so that flipping paper camps and keeps by zergs gets balanced more by holding and defending the same.

My experience is WvW in the lower quartile of the rankings, so for all I know, WvW may be very different farther up the ladder. But at the lower end, defending objectives is a lower priority than flipping mostly undefended or lightly defended objectives. Take it, and move on, rinse and repeat for most of the evening etc.

Is there a difference in the reward between taking a paper keep and a well defended one? Is there a difference between taking or defending an objective in terms of rewards?

From a world standpoint, I’m not sure what the benefit is of being in 18th place or 10th place in the rankings, other than the obvious bragging rights and tougher opponents.

Bravo to you for excellent suggestions! WvW is in serious need of tlc for those who have been at it for months. You are correct, it is stale, needs new maps, needs new ‘living’ objectives to re-energize the players. I genuinely hope that Devon reads this list of suggestions and pushes them up the chain of command.