Guild Wars 2

As one of those people unattracted by WvW, I’d been pondering its waning popularity for a while. Though a lot of people focus on the rewards, and it’s definitely a valid point, there’s other things about WvW that give me no incentive to bother.

1. Population differences and activity
This became very evident while SoR was still top tier and Blackgate was dominating everything. So much of WvW success is rooted in having butts in the seats and zerging around the map. Worse, a dominating server has less competition, which just solidifies their position. While that might be “fair,” it’s not fun.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the neutral WvW environment isn’t nearly hostile enough. The various little tribes that can align with a side don’t do anything other than being a nuisance to traveling soloers/scouts. There would be more potential swing in having third-party (fourth-party?) invasions by neutral factions, or at least a way to hire/recruit them as mercenaries to spawn attack events. I’m not sure how, but WvW needs a way to shake things up and offer struggling servers a way to cash in for support.

2. Blobzerg and a lack of strategy
Maybe it’s different on higher-pop tiers, but there seems to be little for smaller teams and roamers to do. Perhaps there’s a meta-thought around having good commanders and such, but the general perception is Zerg vs Zerg.

For this, WvW could use more simultaneous objectives. The ruins were a decent start, but they’re too centralized and don’t seem to offer much benefit.

3. Movement
This is a kittene to sort out, but quite frankly, if you’re not playing a warhorn warrior, you’re doing it wrong. And there’s plenty to say that movement speed is part of the WvW balance, but I only nomially accept that as a design decision. The sheer boredom of moving through ally-owned territory does nothing to help bring potential WvW players in.

Some kind of movement bonus from ally-NPCs could do wonders for making the experience less of a slough. Perhaps something like bases and checkpoints having an NPC grant a swiftness similar to, but shorter in duration than, the buff in major cities. Other swiftness buffs wouldn’t stack in effect or duration with it, and it becomes a suitable reward for keeping territory while letting allies get through owned territory more easily.

I’m curious what the WvW community thinks would help WvW, and I thought I’d offer the above as a starting point.

Wvw dont need npc events and things like this. Its not pve. We need players on the map.
I can image 2 sollution: atract more players with rewards, events etc…
Megaserver wvw but not like in pve. Players chose a guild every week and next week they play wvw on the guilds server. The game dish out guilds on every reset depends on something warscore. Best guild on server 1, second on server 2 etc

Its sad to have 1 guild flag on a castle that worths nothing, and that dont atrack players.
Problem is the value/ design of WvW, anet keep compensating with rewards when time spent doing WvW is not rewarding itself wich i fear they are to obtuse to see that way, they dont know/ or care about leaving the simplistic themeapark pvd game that is WvW.

NPC event would be fun actually but not in this state, I.E the design and functionally of the maps are what cause some of the most limitations ,and its not the map size but its design, like more care into design castles and not gw1 shrines with walls, also fast movement should be a luxury to have in this “small” maps or even in the whole game except in 1 or 2 classes.

As i stated in the past, and topics like this apear almost every day, most of WvW ideas were given on the GH CDI, i believe Anet got there a good example of how some part of the community was interested in new development arround it.

They need to rework on some aspects of the game(classes inclueded) but due logic improvements i prefer to see it stale than observing bad decisions and a game i loved to play getting worse.

I suggested it months/years ago but I still think it could work…

What if there were pre-conditions on capturing structures?

For example, to capture SMC you would need to have a lord alive in each of your towers and your overlook on your side of the map. If they weren’t alive you could still siege SMC and even kill the lord, but you couldn’t actually capture the point.

As an attacker you would need to defend your own side because you need every lord in every tower and overlook to be alive. As a defender (of SMC) you need only send out a small group to kill a lord in any random tower or overlook to ensure the attackers can’t actually take SMC from you.

You could even expand this to make it so you can’t just go to an enemy borderland and immediately attack garrison, bay, or hills with a surprise golem rush. You’d actually have to take the south tower(s) before you took hills or bay. And you’d need either hills or bay and a northern tower before you could take garrison.

This way we would no longer need white swords at all (or way points imo) because you could see when an enemy force was actually attacking because you’d see your tower was taken and you’d be able to properly defend a higher value target.

This general idea could be expanded indefinitely as well. You could make it so you can’t take an enemy tower in their own borderland unless you owned 3 of your towers in EB. You couldn’t take SMC unless you have your bay, garrison, and hills, etc etc.

Just something to make attacking and defending more vital to the game mode.

I would agree with some variations of the above:

1) Make some new NPCs and different types of upgrades, – wouldn’t it be interesting to have a champ escorting yaks or plop a dragon at a chokepoint? Or how about building your own walls?

2) Have more chokepoints into defensible zones to encourage fights; people complaining about a lack of swords would have set areas where a legitimate defense could be mounted instead of “guessing” which tower will get hit next or running around a huge wall trying to see what is getting hit. It should get harder and harder the further you get into somebody else’s territory (perhaps making camps non-flippable to stretch supply lines for an invader?) This MAY aid lower populations in keeping their game fun instead of sitting by hopelessly watching their entire bl turn over due to lack of coverage. As the above mentioned; maybe you need to take the enemy keep in EB to even gain access to their BL? (or something to that effect).

3) Make a neutral zone that means something. Right now ruins give a slight buff but overall are not really important. Make some zones that you need to conquer that give interesting buffs to aid you. These zones would also be gathering points for fights. Stonemist? Flush it for something more interesting and useful.

4) Daily reset: This may be a bit out there, but to help with balance, the leader at the end of each day should be put at a disadvantage and the maps reset. This would keep it interesting for servers getting crushed or suffering from low populations. A bad day can be forgotten, and if the losing teams are getting huge buffs, they can have fun getting some vengeance against the hordes that had rolled them over the previous day. If the horde wins again, the buffs get larger. I would think this would make it more fun for the dominant server too as it will give them some challenge and an interested opponent

5) Map variation and randomization – This may be difficult to pull off, but part of what makes WVW tiresome is the same old maps and the same old opponents every week. Add some randomization to the maps so invasion pathways and enemy strongholds need to re-discovered. This would probably need to coincide with the daily reset.

A suggestion I read a good 8 or so months back & thought was great was thus

1: Get rid of the idea of the “home server” and it deciding where you are placed in WvW.

2: Create an alliance based system that is tiered both by how many players are in said alliance & by performance of said alliance.
Sizes could be (This is an example) Large 1000-1100, Medium 800-999, Small 600-799.
Each size tier would have a max size of members however to ensure more balanced mach ups & a greater variety of opponent groups than is present now.

3: Leaving an alliance will be free, joining an alliance costs gems increasing by the alliance size & placement. Anyone who decides not to join an alliance is just placed in a randoms group that cannot effect alliances.

4: Lore wise they could say that powerful artifacts have been found in the mists. Due to disagreements on how to obtain & use said artifacts groups have formed alliances and fighting has broken out.

By splitting alliances into groups based on size & placement you ensure that sides retain roughly equal numbers (at least much more so than is now) & by making alliances smaller the entire server populations you ensure that there is a much larger variety in who can be pitted against whom.

Other then this it would also be nice if they

1: Created a wider variety of maps.

2: Create maps with more choke points, cliffs etc.. and other things to encourage larger groups to split into multiple smaller groups & tackle objectives from different angles.
(One idea I read was to have multiple keep lords for larger keeps & having to kill a 1-2 weaker ones before the final lord is killable at a different location in the keep)

3: More siege varity. (paceable bombs, molitov’s, dredge siege etc..)

4: Allow keeps/towers to keep some of the upgrades after being flipped. (Like keeping the walls that were not damaged)

5: NPC’s that actually matter when you get them on your side. (Make em not only guard your stuff but attack a larger variety of locations & offer alternative ways to fight as well as alternative siege.)

Give WvW a set of exclusive rewards you can earn outside of the limited seasons. Improve rewards in general. Create a system to reward scouts – perhaps an item inside a tower/keep that, when you interact with it, broadcasts a message that the objective is under attack?

And then, depending on whether the attack succeeds/fails, you get bonus chests?

You’ll always have the problem of PvE players who avoid PvP encounters at nearly all costs, though.

The only reward I want is meaningful WVW. DAOC had a good model YEARS AGO. This has gotten old, boring, and lackluster

• HOW TO REVITALISE “WvW” ?

Revitalise the Tier system. Motivate the servers to be competitive. Some general ideas.

Kick a server to a lower Tier when it’s last 2 weeks in a row, or when it’s last 2 times in 4 weeks.

Promote a server to a higher Tier when it’s first 2 weeks in a row, or when it’s first 2 times in 4 weeks.

After a kick or a promote (whatever comes first), the kick/promote counters of the servers of the 2 Tier groups concerned are put to zero and we start again.

This system will motivate the servers to be competitive instead of “waiting for the next season” to start; and give lower and ambitious servers a chance to move up more quickly; while an “established” server who takes it too easy runs the risk of finding itself in a lower-season group when an new season starts.

• SOME IDEAS CONCERNING NEW “SEASONS”

When a new season starts give the servers that were in the lowest Tier of that season group – for more than 49% of the time in between seasons – some advantages. They are the weakest server(s) in that season group, so give them the ability to do some guerilla warfare and some other advantages:

- No “white swords” or “orange swords” when they attack an objective.
- Plus “1” point for every kill. ( “0” for the other servers)
- The waypoints of their keeps can’t be closed.
- Their supply camps always give +5, and +10 when upgraded.
- …

I think they should remove the server thing.

And make it in to a mega guild vs mega guild thing.

I think some dev talked about it a while back. But not sure where that is heading.

The thing to me is I honestly don’t care if my server wins, but maybe if it’s my guild, I’ll care a bit more.

"Derdraeken"

Promote a server to a higher Tier when it’s first 2 weeks in a row, or when it’s first 2 times in 4 weeks.

Just pointing out that this part would frighten the kitten out of the existing Tier8 servers, as right now most of us don’t WANT to go up in tiers, because we’re so understaffed we would just be punching-bags for other servers. It could quite possibly end up in a race to NOT-WIN. That said, my own server wouldn’t mind bouncing up to T7 every now and then, now that we got some new and interesting servers there.

I can also imagine that the T1 servers would blow a kitten over this, or just organize theyr week pushes ever further to avoid any change to happen.

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A well done "Alliance system" as they are calling it, could be interesting. But if they don’t pull it off "well done" it could very well break what is left. I am curious to see where they are going with the idea, but I also fear where this could possibly lead.

A GvG game mode would bring a lot of people back to the game and also allow guilds to move to the server they naturally want to be on instead of moving to a server just so they can fight against X guild on Y server.

1st of all new map, meanwhile Anet can end servers and server rotation.

This week marks 7 out of 8 weeks that both T3 servers are getting beat down 3to1 by a T2 server with a Glicko rating nearly 300 points higher than us. There happen to be four T2 servers and only two T3 servers, and it is not fun for all parties, I’m guessing.

With no white swords, the new procedure for gameplay in WVW for me is to

a) go to home bl
b) watch everything turn to the T2 server color
c) patiently wait for the “outnumbered” buff to disappear
d) gather up the 4-5 people on the map and reflip everything
e) repeat

There are rare occasions where guild runs will give us the numbers to fight for things in our bl, but the default is sitting and watching the enemy zerg move around the map. Anybody throwing defensive siege down in an environment like this is crazy. It’s a total waste.

EB is not really an option and has stayed rather monochrome all week; my server can’t even take their own keep back.

Since this isn’t much fun, the problem exacerbates itself, with fewer people getting into WvW.

If they aren’t going to change the server model, my idea above of giving huge buffs to servers getting badly beaten is the only other thing I can think of. If 5 people can beat a 15 man zerg due to buffs, people may become interested again to experience that.

Aeolus.3615:

1st of all new map, meanwhile Anet can end servers and server rotation.

So destroy wvw then? Not sure how that would improve wvw.