Guild Wars 2

I for one welcome our new overlords maps. Although the maps are larger, there is generally more time to respond to a contested area, and I like the automatic upgrades. When you find fights the terrain is much more of a factor which is fun. If a zerg hits a sentry then you can see them in map now, and that can be great (except that good zergs are now avoiding sentries).

Unfortunately the maps have been a bit lonely. It’s been hard at times to muster enough people to take a tower or camp, much less take the fire keep, but when a zerg gets together it can be fun and often the big wvw fights happen in those locations when one zerg is trying to take a keep and the other is defending. I think solo players have a much bigger role acting as scouts in these maps, letting people know when they see small groups or zergs either traversing the area or starting to take a keep. Even solo players can help coordinate the whole map.

Unfortunately the rewards for those solo players suck. You get nothing for telling a zerg where the enemy is. A large map can lead to a lot of cooperation, but the people who help coordinate need some rewards, potentially in a map-wide system such as we are seeing in the new PvE areas, or maybe some increase to defense rewards. The maps also seem to require a large number of players and I imagine that the lower tiers of WvW must be very boring with occasional sentry and supply flips. I’m not sure what the solution is, but I like the idea of stepping away from the rapid point to point karma trains we had before. I like the idea of maps with a lot less turnover where strategy and coordination are more important, but I feel like we’re not fully there yet.

It’s early days still and people are still finding their way around the maps and figuring out their strategies. We also have a few bugs to resolve, but I think regular WvW players will soon know these maps like the backs of their hands and they wont seem as huge anymore. I am taking an optimistic view that we will settle in to new and more interesting WvW play styles with some tweaks from the devs along the way to help reward the solo roamers and small team players.