Guild Wars 2

Hello,
I thought I would bring up some suggestions I’ve been brewing on for some time, some of these have been mentioned by others, which I mention again for the sake of getting more attention to them.

1. Commander Tags.
It has been discussed to death, the things holding this up is apparently they want to rework the entire system to add more to it, or there is some coding limitations? I know Anet has plans for a revamp with more options for the tag, but maybe leave the extra options for later?, we could use the separate tags even in their current limited options form.

Add a Purple tag for wvw, earned by paying 1000 wvw badges (or whatever number you deem fit). Green tag for guild commander, only their guild can see it, earned with 500 wvw badges and 10000 guild influence from guild research (again whatever number you deem fit). The guild one would be nice for running small ops on maps without attracting the entire map zerg to you.

2a. Lower borderlands population caps.
To help promote small group play in them, many servers I would guess don’t have the population to cover all three maps anymore, at most one at a time along with eternal battlegrounds(I’m using Sea of sorrows as a base of experience for this). Lower the caps and maybe people will be able to spread out again in the three borderlands at once. Maybe with queues on the top three loaded servers it would make transfers to lower servers attractive again.

2b. Another solution would be to balance the cap to the lower of the three servers in the map, starting at a minimum point. For example starting point is at least 50 players, if serverA has 35, serverB and serverC will only be able to bring in 50, once serverA starts moving above 50 players in a map so will the other two. This should help a little with the massive zerg happening from certain servers and again promote small group play.

3a. Change Bloodlust target.
Make it so that it affects only those in Eternal Battlegrounds, this should promote more borderlands participation to keep the points captured, while also still providing some even competition without the bonuses, and with the lower population caps in there it would also promote small group game play as well. The borderlands will then still be a place for GvG as well with no buff to trouble them, although having them around in a lower population cap borderlands wouldn’t be helpful.

3b. If 3a is not possible for GvG then maybe create another copy of Eternal battlegrounds, have it reward no match up points, no loot or exp/wxp, no bloodlust or outmanned buff as well, it would only serve as an area for guilds or duelers to go to do their battles. This could also be used as a training ground for guilds. This is a game called guild wars, having a separate map just for that seems appropriate.

4. Lower cost of transfer to lower population servers.
1800 gems for the top six, 1000 gems for the next six, 500 gems for the next six, and 100 gems to the remaining servers. This should make it more attractive for guilds to move to lower servers again.

Cont…

5. Remove the glicko points system.
I know this doesn’t have a shot in hell especially with the league coming soon lol, but here goes. Install a new system of 1st moves up a tier, 2nd stays in current tier, 3rd moves down a tier. This will ensure that the match ups are always different every week, it gives the winning servers a chance to move up one tier to test their strength on higher servers, this would still ensure that servers are fighting against other servers at their levels. We know that WvW is not “Fair” but people want equal competition, we all want fights to be about skill and the population throws that off. The close race for points at the end of the week are exciting, the blowouts at the end of the opening weekend are not.

While the system in place does allow for different match ups every week and it does allow lower ranked servers the opportunity to earn points to keep up in ranks, any true competitor will tell you it doesn’t feel right having lost in a blowout and still coming away with points while the actual winners lose points, the rank begins to feel like it wasn’t earned. The problem also is it’s too extreme in picking servers for the match, an 8 or 12 rank spread is way too much. You want to give servers a chance to test their mettle against higher servers, but all it’s doing most times is throwing them to the slaughter when they are placed in tiers 2-3 higher than them. The randomness present now just makes the points system meaningless.

Again population is a problem here, on the North American side there are 3-4 stacked servers while there are 20 mid-low wvw pop servers who can barely compete with servers a couple ranks higher, there are many suggestions to help so please look into them.

6. Add new messages to WvW zones.
Add messages for guild players when their claimed tower/keep/castle npcs are under attack on any map (not supply camps as they can be capped pretty quickly). Give guilds a better chance to respond on defense and keep the buffs they may have added to it, and make anything claimed other than stonemist castle something more meaningful for guild players to hold. It may even tempt the pve players to enter wvw to help defend their claim. I would even suggest adding a new buff to the guild that manages to hold their claim for more than 12hrs, something similar to the outnumbered buff.

7. WvW Cash shop.
GW2 survives on the cash shop, and probably doesn’t get much from pure wvw players, but I think that’s because a lot of things don’t apply to WvW player’s needs. Finishers are a good place to start and I would suggest getting more creative and adding more to the game, finishers as flashy as planting a big banner on a corpse that reads [Finished by (Guildname!)]. Other things such as different skinned siege equipment like catapults made of bones, or rams lit on fire, taunting banners that players can be planted anywhere like warrior banners but bigger, ones with messages written such as [(Guildname) wuz here!], [(Guildname) 4 lyfe!] etc. Think of it as selling t-shirts with different messages. Players tend to have some pride in their guilds, so give them more ways to express that and make some cash from it.

8. Guild recognition
Need guild names to be shown on buildings, many times I walk into a keep held by a guild but have no idea what guild it is, on the claim banners around the claimed buildings there should be the name of the claiming guild under the logos.

If people don’t agree with something here then feel free to discuss it, maybe I’ll change the ideas around to what we want from the devs, lets keep the discussion clean please. Thanks for reading.

2 and 4 are a huge no no. Just because your server can’t fill all maps doesn’t mean others should suffer. There’s already enough incentive for small group play. Transfer costs should never ever be decreased. It will destroy servers. You seriously need to consider how your proposed changes would affect the EU servers, not just NA.

I’d like to see more discouragement of mega-zergs, and since people behave according to how they are rewarded…

Significantly increase the base reward for capturing a control point, and share the rewards evenly between capping players. Increase the base reward per completed upgrade (say +10%); increase the base reward per active defender (say +5%); decrease the reward significantly if there are no active defenders (say -80%).

Example. Stonemist base reward is 10000 wxp; 2 upgrades gives +20%; 15 defenders (actually attempting to repel an attack) gives +75%. If a 20-man group take SM, they’d get 19500/20 = 975wxp, but a 50-man zergball only gets 390 wxp. If there is no active defense when it caps, the cappers share 12000 minus 80% = 2400 wxp (120 wxp for the 20-man team, and 48 wxp for the zergball).

In addition, significantly increase the reward for killing players (say 4x increase) – make it worthwhile for players to want to fight. Fighters will fight anyway, but better rewards might make zerglings think it’s worth it too…

Deli.1302:

2 and 4 are a huge no no. Just because your server can’t fill all maps doesn’t mean others should suffer. There’s already enough incentive for small group play. Transfer costs should never ever be decreased. It will destroy servers. You seriously need to consider how your proposed changes would affect the EU servers, not just NA.

Would you mind sharing some personal experience on the EU servers then? I should have mentioned that the transfers only apply to the NA servers as I haven’t played or kept track of EU servers, would assume a similar situation happened there as it did on the NA side of things though.

Lower cost transfers would only affect the top 3 servers as they have been super stacked since the closing of the free transfers. Obviously I would not leave the lower cost in permanently, as that would be like pre free transfer era and that was a mistake on them for having that open so long in the first place. For 1 week at most until some movement has been made. Even WoW rotates offers to transfer to certain low pop servers, although I’m sure that will go away too since they have new server tech.

For a healthy WvW scene especially now that they plan on having a league, I think it’s necessary to have a spread out population. As it is rank 3-6 cannot compete with 1-3, 7-9 cannot compete with 1-6 at all. If it is healthy on the EU scene then I’m happy for you guys. Yeah we all know things are not fair in wvw, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t bother with tweaks and completely ignore the problems.