Guild Wars 2

As we all know, one of the biggest problems in WvW is that when there is a large discrepancy between the populations of the servers, the fighting is boring and one-sided. The worst case of this typically happens when one server has a large night crew, but the other two servers does not. Since most people can only play during their evenings, this means most match-ups are decided by the night crews. This causes a general disconnection with the result of the match-up, as any participation from your side will not have the slightest influence on the end result.

I think I might have stumbled upon a solution to this problem. Although I think the general idea has lots of merit, the idea is pretty raw and not well thought out yet, so lots of tweaking will be needed to make it a good solution.

As I am currently in the process of moving from EU zone to NA zone in RL, I started to look for a new NA server to play on. I was quite torn though, as I really like the people on my EU server, but since we have zero night crew, I would not be able to enjoy WvW. As I was struggling with this, I found myself wishing that I could play on both. It then occured to me that if I was allowed to have both a EU and NA server, it might actually help in other ways as well:

• Lets say it is primetime in EU and the queue is full. Why not go and help out my NA server who is struggling to cope with the opponent’s night crew?
• My EU matchup is one-sided as we are winning, but my NA server is struggling. Why not take our guild to play on NA this week. This will not only help my NA server, but also my EU opponents as there are less people on due to the imbalance.
• I like both zerging and roaming, why not join a Bronze league NA so that I can roam more easily.
• My guild wants to GvG against another guild on our server…Lets just make sure we are on different NA servers and GVG each other there…in OS ofc
• a NA guild and EU guild wants to GvG each other…now you can.

These are just some situations that I could think of that would benefit from this. I am also pretty sure that latency would not be such a big issue, as people already play across the ocean.

I am interested to hear what people think about this.

TLDR: Allowing people to have both a NA and an EU server will reduce coverage discrepancies between servers.

I suspect the 3-worlds thing is one of the main reason if not the main. Mind, there’s other problems, but where, as Anet stated early on, it would have been a good way to solve the issue of one of the servers being way too strong compared to the others, it just solve an imbalance by replacing it with another imbalance if the opposing teams 2v1.

I actually experienced the issue in spvp recently, I was in a team of 4 facing a team of 3. My team was winning easily, until halfway through the match, matchmaking kicks in. I’m transfered to the other team and the 4v3 becomes 3v4. My new teams caps two nodes, then three,… you know the story. Note that like in the case of a 1v1v1, the total amount of players here is uneven.
While that did something about the issue of the early 4v3, what it really did was to flip it upside down, in the end, there’s still a frustrated team that lost unfairly. They’re maybe even more kittened off, since they had the golden carrot of the win in sight and it was removed as unfairly as it was given to them in the first place.

So as long as Anet considers that the only response to stacking is the possibility for servers to turn it into a 2v1, it’s not gonna work.

I have a simple solution…Keep the whole Server vs Server vs Server for casual WvW’ers and institute a Professional WvW League comprised of Armies (Teams) that are not server specific.

Each season a player interested in the pro leagues would pony up a game fee (maybe 10g?) and select an Army to Join. The top three Armies finishing the season should split the gold all the players used to enter, as well as get some decent rewards from chests…

Each Army should have a cap for each coverage time zone…once filled enlistment to that army is closed and people have to choose another Army to enlist into.

There are technical reasons why EU and NA don’t play together.

Besides that “go helping a struggling team” will not catch the interest of many players, as is you can even have a queue but the people on the map will stay in the keep idle or pretending to do something if they’re being beaten on the field.

Lastly, pro WvW? You know how many treads about “Gendara was declared a winner before the torney started because it was the only EU English server with free transfers” there is?
You’d basically get guilds teaming up, and a lot of solo players getting the wiser of where to go.
So it would be #1 place, the clever people, the rest just the guys that didn’t know any better.

Something like that would only work (maybe) on EOTM but only if it randomized the players placement for the 2 hour match.
Pay 10 gold to enter, get 30 if you win.

One thought I had as a way to solve the ‘coverage wars’ problem would be to change PPT to a sliding scale based on numbers of the various teams in the battlefield..More people in the battlefield? More PPT. Less people? Less PPT. The problem is, after all, that you get rewarded the same way whether or not there’s a lot or very few people on the opposing sides at any given hour.

Let’s say Blue owns all its borderland, but there’s no real fighting going on there. Less PPT. There’s /tons/ of action, however, in EB. All EB objectives are now ‘worth more’.

Capturing and holding relatively uncontested objectives shouldn’t be worth as much as capturing and holding /contested/ objectives. Holding your enemie’s Garrison on their borderland and fighting a huge battle over it and winning, for several hours, should be worth more than PVDooring an entire map.