Guild Wars 2

We all know what ANet wanted to achieve with WvW and why 3 factions were chosen. In their plans, the two weaker forces were to ally against the mightier one, achieving a balance of power. We also know it failed. And we started posting countless of “fixes” to this system, blaming nightcapping, and overpowering numbers, and what not.

But let’s get back to the core idea. It works on paper. It also works in real life. I am currently in a pretty interesting match, where the sides are French, Spanish, and English. Does this ring a bell? This is a situation straight from history books, where France, Spain and England were the major powers in Europe, and often at odds with each other. And pardon my limited knowledge obtained from the Tudors show (lol) but England was allying with either France or Spain, against the third power. It worked there. Why doesn’t it work here? The reason is obvious.

We have no in game diplomacy system!

I can imagine a simple voting system, on the WvW info panel, where you select which server you want to ally with. The votes would be accumulated over time, to sample a significant number of people from your server, not just the current map population. Of course you could vote only for one server at a time, and only once so no double and triple votes, that is guaranteed by the electronic nature of the system.

The system would then calculate the number of votes and decide if an Alliance can be formed. An Alliance can only be formed, if both servers voted for each other, with a significant majority of votes.

Once an Alliance is formed, the Allied Server Players are no longer red in color, but yellow (for example). You can STILL attack them and their lands. If you do, your vote is withdrawn, and you may not vote again for this server for a certain period of time, for example 24h. In addition the betrayed allied players may choose to withdraw their support for this Alliance, and it will be cancelled.

The Alliance status is re-checked by the system every hour (for example), by recalculating the current votes, which may have changed.

The system gives simple and intuitive in-game tools to forge alliances based on democracy. It gives clear visual hints that distinguish ally from enemy. And it allows for real-life advanced tactics such as betrayal and truce. You could for example fake an alliance, and then suddenly zerg your ally, before they realize what’s going on.

This is the bare-bones diplomacy system. It could be extended and made more intricate if need be.

Now you may ask, what is so special about it, why even bother? I mean all it really does is change the color to yellow? I believe it will work as a psychological motivator. You know how when someone is robbing another person on the street, people just stand by and watch? The victim cries “help me”, but people just look at each other and do nothing. It was however determined, that if the victim points at one specific person, and asks him directly, “help me, you in the red t-shirt”, the chosen person is far more likely to act, because he was selected, and the ambiguity is removed (“I’ll wait till others make a move” = no one moves at all). The same should apply to the diplomacy system, once an alliance is formed, people will be more likely to honor it and attack the common enemy, even without getting any boosts or perks for it.

This is a really cool idea. You should ask to move this to the suggestion forum.

This is a great idea but I’m not sure about the voting system.
Correct me if I’m wrong but in EVE they elect leaders, right? How about something like that? Then the leaders would decide.

A commander can be suggested as leader for that server… one more good thing for being a commander.

I don’t think it should be a job for everyone. It should be a council.

No. This is a fix for one problem, but creates dozens more, not least unneeded drama. My idea I had for some time about server alliances, which turn players into neutral instead of hostile targets, was that the two lowest ranked servers automatically become neutral to each other when one side dominates by more than, say, 90%. It not only a pragmatical solution, but is also hopefully a morale boost because suddenly it doesn’t seem like 1 versus 2 anymore, but 2 versus 1.
However, because a fixed percentage could be exploited by highly organized servers, I suggest perhaps an orb-like mechanic to activate the neutral status (like running a “treaty” item or holding and defending a summit) instead, with percentage based preconditions as well. If this is implemented one could even think about turning the “neutral” into a straight-up “allied”.

I am aware ArenaNet intended such ad hoc alliances to arise naturally, but it simply does not work without some incentives to actually adhere to one.

Its very hard to form alliances between servers. Not because there is no diplomacy system but because theres so many different wills pulling in different directions on each server. My organised guild may see the use of an alliance but X randoms who just hop in for the kicks and easy karma could care less. However X randoms will care if an alliance is forced down their throat limiting their freedom and the availability of easy targets.

Also an alliance shouldnt be enforced. No diplomacy system will work unless theres the possibility for real diplomacy. Diplomacy is a finer word for bending the truth to fit your own ends at the expense of anothers, the same way politics is. Therefore Diplomacy and politics is finer words for lying. Which means a diplomacy system isnt working unless there is the ability of backstabbing your allies when you determine that the alliance has served is purpose in your factions plans. A faction should never be hindered from attacking allies, even if its “by accident”. Incidents should be allowed to happen. Which rises the bar for the need for organisation.

Will backstabbing cause drama? Oh yes. But without the freedom to make and break alliances at will, a diplomacy system will NEVER work in a game.

In addition. The best working diplomacy in a game that i have experienced, and i have played pretty much every MMO out there, has been from web based war games that has their community and therefore alliances on IRC. For example Planetarion. It puts EvE politics to shame.

Intriguing through that medium wich allows instant direct contact between anyone or between groups of people, Meaning theres the possibility of injecting spies into enemy alliances and your organisation is only as good as the loyality of your members, will be hard to surpass in a more controlled environment like GW2.

The best alliances put up their own IRC servers and were VERY careful about their recruitment and thus who was privy to information. They also were the best at diplomacy because they could not only play the game well but keep their secrets (mostly). Also the internet never forgets. If you backstab someone you better be prepared for the consequences to your reputation unless you can justify it. Thats diplomacy for you.

Example of a legendary PA alliance is Legion. Wich is a gaming community nowadays after their PA adventure ended. That amount of trust shared between people could go no other way than to survive outside the game that spawned it.

Really cool idea.

Scorpio Shirica.1286:

This is a really cool idea. You should ask to move this to the suggestion forum.

No, you shouldnt. Any good suggestions on that forum will be buried under two hundred “suggestions” crying for more loot for less effort and/or cries for nerfing class X. WvW players don’t go to suggestion forum. Devs sure as hell don’t go there.

So no.

No a commander, in the current state, can not be suggested as a leader to form alliances. Anyone can buy the commander badge – EVEN an enemy spy. It might however work with the new commander system I have proposed, which is also based on voting.

However, any commander in the current form, can easily ask and convince people on the map, to vote for a particular alliance. If he is convincing, it will happen. There is no need to force anything on people if you can accomplish it with simple voting.

Of course, at first it would be tough to do anything, because people would pull in random directions. But in time, through reasoning in map chat, more and more people would agree to support one alliance above the other, and vote for it, making it happen.

I never understood why those who bought the ‘commander’ thing couldn’t notify another server that they wanted to initiate an alliance to overthrow an overwhelming power on a map. In which case they would meet on neutral ground and a terms popup would appear with the amount of time the alliance would last for, the territory each server would claim as a result of the alliance etc etc….

You know a negotiation of sorts and as a result of the negotiation both servers would become neutral and wouldn’t be able to kill each other unless someone tried to break the terms of the agreement :P

I don’t know but I feel there’s one server dominating our server at the moment and I’d love to team up with the enemy!

@zerospin: Voting, or representative democracy (which isn’t real democracy or freedom) works on a majority vote. That means that whatever is voted on is forced on the loosing side. Lets say the loosing 49%.

This means that a vote will never work for a server as you will still force the diplomactic status or alliance on the still potentially large part of server population that voted against you and they are now a prisoner of the majority.

So this is a bad suggestion for a controlled environment. I fully agree with adding diplomacy tools, possibility for same server guild alliances, set other server alliances/guilds to enemy status to allow for grudge battles and so fourth. But i do not agree with a system that essentially disables the three faction RvR and forces it down the throats of the population by making them unable to attack all factions in w3.

While there may be problems with enforced alliances, I think we should at least be able to actually communicate with the other team, even if only by proxy. Map communication is only between people on their own team. Perhaps commanders should be able to speak to other commanders, then communicate that to the rest of their team? That would allow for at least some communion at times, even if only in squads.

Last thing we need is political drama and back stabbing. No thanks. Enough of that in Eve Online.

Sign me up for uneasy alliances.

I like the voting idea that the OP proposed, but I don’t think it would work in the context of this game. Automated neutrality toggles are the way to go. However, I feel that 90% coverage is way too high as a trigger point. Something around 75% would give the whole game a much better tug-of-war feel. Even going as low as 50% for a trigger would be fun. Imagine ransacking a keep with a group of yellow “allies”, and the moment you capture, they turn red and all hell breaks loose.

Only real problem I see with it is that it’ll be tough to prevent people from “accidentally” AOE’ing yellow allies during sieges. But an easy counter-fix to that is to make it so yellows don’t drop badges.

I think the amount of time people actually spend in (relative to their total played time, of course) WvW and their participation in WvW should be considered.

My meta-ideas:
I feel like all the suggestions for “who gets to vote” have missed the idea of how much time people spend in WvW. For Commanders, you could buy the Commander book without spending any time in WvW, and “everyone votes” assumes everyone cares the same amount and should be counted equally, but that may not be the case, given the rich PvE experience ArenaNet has provided for us and not sufficiently pushed/enticed us out of. And no, I don’t consider the centaur/skritt/etc PvE objectives necessarily apply to WvW participation.

Or, you could join WvW focused guilds. But that would require people to use sorely lacking social skills.