Guild Wars 2

I have been thinking a lot lately, on ways to improve WvW without requiring any drastic changes or major new mechancis added. I think the basic concept of WvW is a good one, but I think that some of the numbers are off, and this is causing the game to be played in a way that I do not think was intended. So I have put the below suggestions together in the hopes they would improve the PvP aspect of WvW.

Part of the problem I have with WvW is that groups of players do not clash frequently enough. I think Anet intended WvW to be an epic battle between 3 worlds, but most of the time it feels kind of empty with players too spread out. Unless you are on at peek times, it often boils down to zergs roaming the map, flipping empty towers and keeps with little to no resistance. It feels more like a race than a battle. So to help try and improve this, and to find ways to get players fighting each other more often in off peak times, I propose the following tweaks:

1) Make the baseline health of towers and keeps a lot higher. The longer it takes a group to break a wall or door, the more time enemies have to respond to the threat. I am not suggesting it takes hours per tower. It simply needs to be long enough to increase the chances of actual PvP conflicts, but not too long that it is boring to take an empty keep on a borderland with little to no enemy presence. Maybe just enough to double or triple the time it currently takes.

2) Give siege weapons more health. The big problem with increasing tower/keep health is that it may take a lot more siege to take/defend it. This in turn makes an attacking force’s task a heck of a lot harder. Without siege it is almost impossible to take a tower. And with siege that is often easily destroyed, the attackers will need a lot more supply and blueprints to have a chance of taking a tower, if it takes longer to break the walls or doors. If siege lasted a lot longer, that would compensate a little for the first adjustment. So I would suggest a similar increase to keep up with increased wall.door health.

3) Increase world score points the longer you hold locations. For every 15 minutes a tower or keep is owned, the amount of points it adds to your world’s score is increased, up to a maximum that is higher than the current base. Alternatively, the higher the upgrade tier the more points the tower/keep adds to the score. This will not only give more incentive for attackers to take towers, but also for defenders to keep them. This will essentially mean it is more important to keep towers than to simply ignore them and flip another.

4) Earn bonus points for owning more than one tower/keep in an enemy’s borderland. This is to encourage a more offensive strategy, and encourage worlds to put more effort into attacking worlds on their home borderland. Many of us already have the natural desire to protect our home land, but there is not much incentive to attack enemy worlds, and this normally only occurs when our home lands are stable.

Anyway, those are my suggestions. Not sure how effective they would be, or if there are any potential problems with them. Let me know what you think.

I think the general idea of WvW is good, but the speed at which locations are taken often means players do not clash. WvW is supposed to be about large groups of players fighting each other, but this normally only occurs at very busy times, and even then you are not always guaranteed conflicts. WvW offers a combat experience that sPvP does not, but sPvP has a more on demand feel to it that is lacking in WvW. I think most players play WvW for the PvP fights, so anything that will increase that is a good thing imo.

If anyone has any other, simple and relatively easy, tweaks to improve WvW, I would be interested to hear them.

One of my biggest suggestions is that ANET create some kind of penalty for guilds who switch servers in order to be associated with a higher “T” rating. It leaves those of us who want to stay on a server and WvW, endure crappy numbers and lose a lot. It takes the fun out of WvW. The point of WvW is the struggle to become the best. It’s not to move to another server in order to be the best. When things get tough on a particular server, people leave in mass. Those of us who stay, have to rebuild and endure beating after beating before we get enough numbers again. Then it seems to happen all over again. It gets very tiresome and takes the joy out of WvW. I don’t know what the exact answer to this problem is, but I would ask that ANET seriously look at and discuss this problem.

Sincerely,

—Arten The Great

There is already a penalty. You need to pay for a server transfer, which I believe is more expensive for popular servers. While this may not put everyone off, it will deter some. I am not sure they can add any more punishments without running the risk of it becoming unfair on people who want to transfer for other, more understandable, reasons.

I think it would be far better to incentivize players to stay than to punish them for leaving. How that would be achieved I do not know.

As to my adjustments, does anyone think they would help? If not why not? I am interested to see if anyone has any ideas on how to improve WvW, without requiring any drastic or big changes. I believe with some clever tweaks WvW could be substantially improved.

Arten.3915:

One of my biggest suggestions is that ANET create some kind of penalty for guilds who switch servers in order to be associated with a higher “T” rating. It leaves those of us who want to stay on a server and WvW, endure crappy numbers and lose a lot. It takes the fun out of WvW.

If they wouldnt be allowed to leave, they would probably stop raiding instead and you would still endure crappy numbers and loose alot. You are pretty much asking Anet to imprison people.

Anyway, its always been fairly pointless to suggest even the simplest of improvements as Anet always does their own thing and rarely visit the forums for feedback or revert changes when they break things (masteries breaking siege like the insane damage on superior arrowcarts). Currently, its extra pointless. Alot will change with HoT which means WvW is going to be different.

I’m already burned out on the whole PPT system/mechanic, so these changes wouldn’t really do anything for me personally.

increasing the health of walls/doors is just going to make PvD even more boring. Making siege more health is just going to make fighting against siege more boring. Making it worth more points to hold one object longer is going to favor the side with the greatest numbers even further, and create even larger landslide victories.

Instead of rewarding for taking things in enemy BL’s reward players for actually holding/defending something. Atm you will be better rewarded by taking a tower, running to take next objective while defenders back-cap it. There is no reason to defend anything.

When playing with guild, our main reason to take towers etc in enemy BL is mainly to get the defenders to come out and play with us. Unfortunately not often they do, it is just so much easier to just scout from the next nearest walls, and run and back-cap when we get tired of waiting and goes to take something else.

Those are valid points about the tower and siege health, joneirikb. You’re right, that would likely only make PvD more boring. I do still think it should take longer to take towers and keeps though. They seem to be made of paper and fall far too quickly, but like you say, that is probably intentional to keep things fast and fun.

It seems to me, that the only things most players fight hard over are the 3 keeps. If one of those is threatened, you often see a lot more people rally to their defense. So how do you make the other towers more attractive, so players want to try harder to keep them? Or should they be more attractive? Maybe having too many attractive objectives would spread things out too much?

Maybe the answer isn’t in the core mechanics of the game and rather in the map layout. In which case maybe the new HoT map will address that. I guess we just have to wait and see how the new BL plays out to see if things improve. I have high hopes for the new map, but it would be good to find ways to improve the alpine maps, for if/when they return. Or perhaps they will redesign the alpine map layout.

The problem with making (for ex) towers longer and harder to take, is that they at the moment serve little purpose, they don’t really give you much other than a bit more PPT than a camp. I think the HoT map could change a bit on this, but we will have to see.

And because towers are largely so pointless to take, making them take longer to take will just make people ignore them, unless they have a zerg of 30+. There is also the whole population issue here, not many servers can actually spare enough people to defend a tower, especially when you take coverage into consideration. So everyone focus on keeps and ignores towers.

If you where to make towers take longer to capture, I think I’d rather see something like focusing more guards inside the tower, and have other defense mechanisms that would slow down an attack inside the tower. I’m going to get accused of being a filthy PVE’r now, but add a bunch more guards (especially the zealots and ritualist ones) inside the tower, and make the lord scale with the number of players, and have aoe abilities (the tower lord is stupidly annoying on single target, and not good for much else).

That way, instead of banging head at a door, we can at least kill a few guards, slight improvement.

Regarding the whole keeps vs towers and numbers. I’ve suggested before to have ANet scale the number of maps to the number of players. So we don’t sit with 3 empty borderlands depending on the Population & Coverage. There is no reason why Tier 7+8 for example should have 4 maps open at night time when nobody is awake anyways, EBG would probably be enough. This would force more activity on the remaining maps (and could also possibly remove the queue problem on higher tiers by opening more copies of maps).

Regarding HoT map I think it will be interesting to see what they do, but I doubt a single map can fix everything. Still looking forward to it though.