I have played WvW on a few servers and although its totaly awsome I have run into some major problems that could be addressed to improve gameplay.
Zerg-Lag, Lag-Spikes and Lag-Lag.
From reading the GM posts about this issue and from personal experience it is “excepting issues outside the control of Anet” caused by the number of players in close proximity to one another. AKA the ZERG.
A possilble solution to this would be to implemt a condition that is applied to players if a zerg becomes too large to handle rather than limiting the total number players on a server. If alot of players zerg together to the point were it causes server lag, each player in the zerg receives a condition based on how many in the zerg that reduces their effectiveness. This would be tailored so that it becomes more effective to create two smaller zerg’s “or smaller more organized groups” rather than one large lag creating zerg.
Invisible enemies or enemy culling
From reading GM posts and from personal experience this is caused by a large amount of players in your vicinity. Your client will only render a certain number of characters so if a large group of new characters or a single new character gets close to you quickly it takes time for your client to render that players character on your screen. Untill it does that character is invisible to you but is still able to kill you.
The above lag solution might help reduce this problem but it will not eradicate it especially on slower computers with fragmented hard drives. One solution to this problem would be to use proxy characters. If the number of characters in a given area exceeds the number of characters the client can handle then simply display a 2 poly plane with a generic enemy mapped to it. Set the plane to always face camera and then only have the client send the characters X,Y,Z coordinates. If its also possible to have the characters name above like normal that would be a bonus. At the moment its next to impossible to see what I am shooting at with my catapult as players disapear 10 meters away from it.
“You are Outnumbered” or “you killed everything and then salted the earth”
This is caused by one server being far better than the other two, to the piont were you either cant leave the starting location because the other side of the gate is camped. Or you have no one to fight or nothing to do because no enemy players want to log in to WvW and die repeatedly
One idea to reduce this problem “other than better server matching or forcibly redistributing players across all the servers” is to implement a temporary alliance between the two losing sides when one side becomes too dominant. This would not just allow weaker servers to compete but it would also be a challenge for stronger servers who would otherwise just wipe the floor and then get board.
Additionally you could implement a logistics multiplier on walls and gates so that if one server ownes all the pionts “this is often the case when a server mismatch occurs” their walls and gates are weaker. But if a server only owns a single keep its walls, gates and vets are stronger and more effective.
Just some ideas I wanted to share.
Thank you.
(edited by MCHammond.1472)
