Guild Wars 2

With the new updates to World Vs. World it has come to my attention and my concern that WvW still has some major problems. This is going to be a post about the multiple flaws I see within the current version of WvW. Please read the full post before commenting or responding.

WvW is still a game about numbers -
Sadly WvW battles, fights and server dominance is determined not by the skill of your soldiers but by the number of your zerg. WvW is still about the number of your zerg and not the individual skill and teamwork of your soldiers. A simple solution to this problem that has existed for a long time is buffing the ever so useless outnumbered buff. Yeah it’s great that you get certain buffs like experience, magic find, WvW experience and such but that doesn’t help you in battle. We need to revamp this buff so that it gives you more strength and will allow you to take on larger groups and should give you a fair chance of beating them. A 10 man group should be able to put up against a fight against a 25 man zerg. In this scenario one soldier from the 10 man group should equal 2 thus making the fight more fair. This would make fights for small numbered groups against larger zergs more fair. 20 vs 25 in this scenario is now so much more fair making it so that any group can win the fight. Now it’s not about how large your zerg is but about how good your individual skill is and your teamwork as a group.

The new objective captured notice –
With HOT and the new borderlands came a new idea that hasn’t been seen in WvW. This new notice pops up on the screen as soon as an objective on the map has been captured. For example if a group is at north camp and the enemy is at north east tower and they cap the north east tower the group at north camp now knows were the enemies are. Personally I believe this ruins roaming parties that carry smaller numbers and ruins the whole idea of scouts and people that feed information to the commander on the map. I believe removing this capture notification would improve WvW and would allow more scouting to go on. Also something WvW players used to do before HOT was actually look on the map and keep track of bases to see where the enemy zerg was by paying attention to the color of the base and seeing if it switched.

Other new added features to WvW such as automatic upgrades and even more guards defending keeps and especially a lot more at camps has ruined small roaming parties and their goals within WvW. I think the first step to improving WvW is increasing the outnumbered buff and then focusing on the different areas of WvW.

Regarding Outnumbered buff: No.

The outnumbered buff is for entire map, so if team A has a giant zerg on the map somewhere, and you’re from team B and goes to cap a camp solo, and run into a team A roamer, what happens ? You can have 2-3-4 times as much stats/power whatever, as that roamer in a 1on1 basis. This is one of the reasons why ANet will never "buff" a player with the outnumbered bonus.

The other reason is that ANet will never (ever!) make it an advantage to have less players on the map, as that would encourage people to yell at others to leave the map so they can get the bonus. Example a fight guild of 20 could probably take out the entire enemy 60 players easier alone with the outnumbered buffs you suggest than with 30 other players.

When outnumbered, the idea is to take to the towers/keeps, and defend. Use the advantages you can get against them until it evens out. Doesn’t always work, servers seems to be so reverse stacked it’s kittened. Several times played games where 2 or 3 of the servers almost take "shifts" in dominating all maps.

I’m always a bit critical when people say that only numbers matter.
I play on sfr and I can tell you that skill is much more important than numbers (in a decent ratio ofc) and I’d always take 40 awesome guys over 60 random noobs.

I haven’t had any problems capping camps as a roaming group but solo capping became really hard.

The pop-ups are really annoying and I really don’t understand why we’d need it. It’s not that hard to look at the map for once.

joneirikb.7506:

The other reason is that ANet will never (ever!) make it an advantage to have less players on the map

Yep, anet only give bonus to the best team on the map (look at the oasis event).

Entenkommando.5208:

I’m always a bit critical when people say that only numbers matter.
I play on sfr and I can tell you that skill is much more important than numbers (in a decent ratio ofc) and I’d always take 40 awesome guys over 60 random noobs.

I haven’t had any problems capping camps as a roaming group but solo capping became really hard.

The pop-ups are really annoying and I really don’t understand why we’d need it. It’s not that hard to look at the map for once.

Try coming to a low population server and you’ll see what I mean by numbers are what matter. 10 Vs. 20 is always highly likely to be in favor of the 20 players. Also it’s not just about 10 Vs. 20 or fill in the blank number vs fill in the blank. If you have only 20 people on a map compared to the enemy that has 40 they will always have more controlled on the map. This is because with 40 players you can always gain more map control than 20 players can. With 40 players you can split up into two zergs of 20/20 or you can go with 30/10 with the 10 players being roamers/scouts. You see it’s not just about the number of the zerg but the number of people on a map and even collectively on all of the maps. That is why it’s important that Anet looks into ideas on how to buff smaller servers so that the game can revolve around skill and not how popular your server is.

RIP Roaming – One of my favorite things to do in WvW was take camps and eventually take towers. I could only do this because a guild catapult only took 30 supplies. With my +5 supplies I had to make 2 trips to build a guild cata…now 50 supplies? really? So ideally they want for a 5 man team to have to make 3 or even 4 trips to build 3 guild catapults? I feel that is excessive.

RIP Small Team Tactics – With the objective announcements on screen in your face suddenly everyone knows where you are. Good luck making it to the next objective. I remember when we could run around on a map zigzagging all over and keeping the enemy guessing…ANET SAYS NO LONGER!

RIP Scouting – See RIP Roaming and RIP Small Team Tactics

RIP Players Fighting Players – I only get to play late at night or for an hour in the middle of the day. I have spent 3 hours on the new BL maps and fought a total of 3 people…IN A T1 MAP.

RIP WVW…I guess I will go PvE some….guess that’s what Anet wants us to do…

If your 10 cant stand vs 20 then your 10 need training. I know that is harsh but really. I understand numbers play a factor but a skill group of 10 can annihilate groups even over 20.

@Kellth:

I’m from a low pop server as well (We’re playing against each other this week! Well, if anyone was playing WvW this week that is). So I know well how much low population affects the game. The only reason we haven’t been stuck in T8 last half year, is because we have some 10-20 people at late NA (night capping). When most other servers got 5 or less. Current T8 are the only time I can remember Kaineng without Outnumbered buff in NA time.

But that is a Population and Coverage problem (and a PPT problem as well indirectly). We will just have to see what they do with those problems now that HoT is released, and supposedly the main dev team is moving over to the WvW department. This is where such fixes should come from, and will be the "Do or Die!" moment for WvW.

The Outnumbered buff won’t change or fix Population/Coverage, it isn’t even a half decent band-aid. The objective notice doesn’t really make any difference, most dedicated WvW players hawk the map anyways, or have WVWIntel open on a secondary monitor so they can see the flips in near real time (few seconds delay). If anything I’m mostly annoyed by it so far, wish there was a way to turn it off, or move the text to somewhere else.

I have no idea how the new upgrade system will work out, see some good and bad with it, but mostly just happy we don’t have to push gold at it any longer, so I’m happy with it myself.