Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone,

I think can be interesting to have a summary of the state of WvW to have in mind all the issues we have yet ingame. It’s a long post but I will try to do it as short as I can. I hope everyone can share his vision on every aspect so

Scoring:
A new system is going to be implemented “soon”. We had some information about it time ago, but maybe we need an update from Anet to let us know more details on what they are working on. So I will not go any deeper here, it’s clear we need a new scoring system to avoid coverage being so powerful and let’s hope the new system is robust enough to make coverage less important.

Population and World linking:
Probably one of the main topics nowadays with the recent world linking changes. After few months of world linking we still have old issues and new ones, there is not a fast answer on how to balance world population but from what we know any system needs to match the next criteria:

CRITERIA

• (only EU) People should be able to enjoy the game with other people speaking the same main language (german, french and spanish).
• Bring interesting matchups, with close gap in skill and population between servers => makes the game fun for everyone. Preventing blowouts.
• Spread people through different servers. The ideal case will be that every server has a similar amount of people for every single time frame, this has proven to be imposible but at least make it as closest as posible.

World linking was meant to solve some of those problems but the real situation is.

Good things:

• More people playing in the same matchup, cause lower tier server are mostly linked with someone, making it easy to find enemies to fight and allies to support. Making sometimes more equal matches.
• People from linked servers can meet new people, this is a good thing, isn’kitten
• This system allows people from EU to keep interacting with people with the same main language.

Bad things:

• Blowout matchups still happen.
• The changes are artificial to meet special requeriments, so the player has the sensation of matchup and ranking manipulation by Anet.
• After world linking are done need to wait 2 or 3 weeks till the glicko is adjusted to start enjoying the matchups. No matter how world linkings are done we end having some monster servers (now it looks we have FSP) and some have very small chance to win any other servers (GH + Vabbi), so new links needs to be done at some point starting again.
• Many people complains about the server community being destroyed. Two main reasons, the first one being how easy is now to join a winning server (since you can transfer to a low populated server linked to a big one by a low amount of gems). Also makes hard to handle strategies, community, voice chat, etc. with new people coming and leaving from a linked server.

The solution to the population problem is hard to handle and we all have to assume we will never have a perfect solution to it with the server structure that we have. Some people suggested removing the requeriment of having national servers to allow more spread of people, I’m not sure if this will help but in any case a poll should be created on those servers to evaluate their opinion.

Transfers are the other big thing here, because at the end of the day it has been demonstrated that people tends to join winning servers. An idea to adress it is with a rewards system (after new scoring system is implemented, which I guess will bring rewards in the small skirmishes of 2 hours duration), making the rewards you win for your server victory depending on how much people has participated compared to the other 2 servers, so if you win just by numbers you will get a very small reward, and if you win in lower numbers you will get a big reward, this can help people to move to servers less populated or mid populated instead of stacking in the winning one. The reward track can also be affected by this “proportion number”, so the more people on your server slower advance in the reward track. Making people feel interested into joining into a no winning server is one of the biggest issues with server population, I suggested 2 ideas, but a deeper thought on it should be done. Server transfers should not cost so big amount of gems (I know business here is important), instead maybe we need a larger CD on how often we can change servers. But this is another big topic on his own.

Balance:

There are 2 diferent fighting styles in WvW, small scale and big scale.

• Small scale right now is quite good, maybe more build diversity will be welcome but almost any class has a viable build to play. Still some gimmick builds are out there, but should not be difficult to fix them.

• Big scale: As always, only some classes has chances to be in this style without being to be carried by the others. Right now druids and scrappers are in a bad position for zerg gameplay (maybe thieves and mesmers are also in a bad spot). Also there are some mechanics which needs to be addressed: durability rune, boon stacking, easy heal + prot with auromancer, condition stacking, and some other issues. This is also a giant topic on it’s own but I’m only giving some thoughts on it.

Gear:
Getting equipment in WvW has improved if we compare it to the situation 2-3 years ago. WvW is one of those places in GW2 where Ascended equipment is relevant and is still difficult to get it if you play WvW most part of your time. HoT stats and other stats are easier to get now, so this is good but we still not have any way to get all the pieces of our equipment with our desired stats (I’m talking about everything here, armors, weapons, runes, sigils, trinkets) without spending a lot of time outside from WvW and playing content we are not interested in because GW2 is a really big game, Anet cannot expect that we feel interested in every single mode, in fact, is more common to find people focused only in 1-2 modes (sPvP, WvW, fractals, dungeons, open world, raids, big world events, etc) instead of everything at the same time, so forcing players to play an specific content doesn’t look a great idea.

So this is my summary of WvW state now, what will you add? In which points am I wrong? What do you think can be improved? Do you have ideas?

Hey,

I have a good idea delet all servers creat new ones with new names. Creat a little bit less server then before (count out how many needed) and with no DE or other language segregation ( English could be the main everywhere).Very important dont let ppl transfer only onec a half year (or less).
Thats it porblem solved. I realy cant see any other good solution of this sitautaion, because they let out wvw our hand wayback.

Or better idea it could be work like in diablo every half year (or 3 month (or good sized period of time)) there is a server reset you can choice agine and there is no transfer in the middle of the ‘season’.

Saidly they are happy for this situation because many ppl buying gems for transfering and this is good business for them.

GvG gamemode would be awesome too… and HA AB RA (guild wars 1 best pvp gamemods) etc… but those could be good for players… so hell no ;D . You can add this modes like before with an good standalone expansion like Nightfall or Faction. Anet your realy best PVE field was Nightfall all time, and for me the best PvP was AB.
This is the only way you can came out this akward situation step back and do what you are good at.

( btw my opinion not so important because i just stop playing after 4 years ^^ . I played mostly WvW before. )

best regards,
Fairy Wars

HuLa.3154:

Hey,

I have a good idea delet all servers creat new ones with new names. Creat a little bit less server then before (count out how many needed) and with no DE or other language segregation ( English could be the main everywhere).Very important dont let ppl transfer only onec a half year (or less).
Thats it porblem solved. I realy cant see any other good solution of this sitautaion, because they let out wvw our hand wayback.

This is a solution only under the assumption that no one has friends, no one has server pride and that everybody is a robot that plays the exact same times everyday until the end of time because even one person getting disgruntled and leaving would make your perfectly weighted new servers just as unbalanced as current servers.

The first idea could be done onec and not anymore, only sure they have to do something soon or servers will be empty.

Server pride… I played on WSR like 4 years.
I liked and still love it. I started play there the very beginning and never left it and i wont, but this linking thing totaly destroyed the good server community even we have less player then the popular servers.
We have (had) a very great and good community but now everyone just leaving or stopped playing…

So dont talk about server pride for me ;-) .

Scoring. I think the skirmishes will be the best thing to happen to WvW since the culling fix. Hope I’m right.

Population and Linking.

• I think it should be clear after 4 years that it is completely impossible to balance population across multiple servers in a 24 hour, 7 day contest.
• I agree with your assessment of the good and bad of linkings. Some things that can be done to improve the system:
  • With the next linking Anet you MUST change the transfer costs. You cannot have Medium servers linked to Full or Very High servers and have people able to transfer to the Medium server for just 500 gems. All servers in a link need to have the same transfer cost – that of the highest population server.
  • Do something about the slow response of Glicko. Being in a bad match for a week is no big deal. Being in a bad match for weeks on end without hope of getting out is devastating.
  • Don’t just look at the numbers. Anyone who knows anything about WvW could tell you that the FSP link in EU and the NSP link in NA was not going to work. Especially with the transfer costs being the way they are (see above).
    • Alternatively if you are linking servers specifically to match other servers – set the matches that way the first week instead of having some RNG matchups. (This relates to McKenna’s comment about FSP being linked to match the French servers population).
• Having said that, I think linkings have been good for WvW overall. I got lucky and have had 3 good linkings. WvW is better now than it has been in 3 years imo.

Balance and Gear. I got nothing. I don’t have HoT. I’m still playing with vanilla stuff lol.

delete all servers
delete eotm
create 3 factions with a continent.(several maps), sotry is even easy to link with LS….
* each faction has its own BL
* less tower on EB no longer blob server treb towers and red keep from SM.
(will be mostly a fight for SM for those who are blinded about it)…

add more maps, more structure types (with no gimmick*) .
*Guild ladder system for point contribuition.
*Remove the noobs weapon banner(it is a idiotic gimmick)
* Remove Airship, needs to be redesigned.

Issue with WvW is its design how is ment to work (with the actual gimmick game design it is unpleasent and ugly to play).

Deleting and recreating servers were considered, but anet decided majority will not support it, without any polling as supporting evidence. Well, anet decided to engineer tiers through linking already anyway, confirmation bias is strong.

I agree with deleting dead servers, include SOS it is starting to loose more ppl everyday ,cause no one wants to play WVW

there was something done tot he scoring and nobody is saying anything, like some conspiracy kitten lmao

I think linkings have been great for the wvw-community and I personally enjoyed it very much. I think the current focus is great for most servers and players (maybe less so for the very small server veteran communities).

I don’t think the number of players should affect the reward system, because I think people should not be “punished” for being on a high population server. If the matchups all are balanced, then it doesn’t matter if you are in tier 1 or tier 4.
If the matchup isn’t balanced for example because of bandwagoning to tier 1 linking servers, then arenanet should just adapt the linkings on a weekly basis when they see serious inbalance. Only the news about arenanet doing this would be enough for people not to transfer.

Two words: “Really bad!”

Two words: “Casual game”

Yeah they bulding it since 2012 (still in beta state -.- )
You have to decide you stay or leave… that’s it.
Only sure veterans won’t stay (only karma bandwagoning).
GL over there, and May the loot be with you \o/.