Guild Wars 2

Hi everyone.

There’ve been some fast paced changes with WvW maps and lots of arguing around “alpine/desert” map is better, and surely everyone can empathize with pros and cons of each map without pointless arguing. So that’s not what my topic is about.

My topic is about suggesting a way to solve this, and satisfy the most players by letting them choose.

How does it work ?

The central new idea is to create a “war of the mist enlisting” NPC which would ask you “War of the mists need your help. Which border do you want to fight in ?” and let you pick Alpine or Desert, or whatever new map that’d be created in an uncertain future.

• That NPC would be found in each main city (like, where the NPC chat about war of the mists)
• Once you’ve chosen, the portals will send you to that specific borderland, from the next reset on, *Once you’ve chosen, blue/green/red maps would all be the same (i.e. if you choose alpine, green, blue, and red will be alpine).
• You can change your choice as often as you wish, considering it becomes effective at next reset.
• The choice is account-wide.
• As long as you don’t change that setting with the NPC, you’ll be sent in the same borderland at each reset.

Population and balance issues

Those points can be handled easily by duplicating the existing systems and algorithms, considering each server would be divided in subservers that’d have each week a constant population, and a slight ability to forsee the upcoming changes of population.

• Having like 90% server population in alpine and 10% in desert won’t be an issue when the world linking feature can compensate this to make balanced populations in each map.
• There’d be a matchmaking for desert, and one for alpine (and one for each new map…), with the current matchmaking system.

Conclusion

As alpine and desert maps involve very different ways of understanding and enjoying WvW, it seems fair to let the players set which map they want to join, while allowing them to change should they change their mind, or want to join specific events. Allowing the change in a weekly basis seem fine for oversee and tweak purposes.

There wouldn’t be so many things new, but more of a duplication of what already exists, and having both maps work in a parallal fashion.

You’ve highlighted the problem- population. If you keep playing one matchup per server you are spreading the population across 7 maps instead of 4. If you try to increase the overall pool to potentially fill 7 maps the queue for EB would be insane. If you are suggesting each server is involved in 3 different matchups – EB, DBl & ABl, with different opponents and allies, that just sounds really messy.

Rotating the maps is far simpler and if some want to take a break every few weeks that’s probably not bad for their health! In fact some percentage of the players do that already because they get burnt out or bored. This just gives them something else to hang it on.