Guild Wars 2

WvW has a few very minor issues, that all stem from a greater design flaw that I haven’t personally seen discussed.

The space between objectives is not complimentary to the amount of players and number of objectives available. I see this as the primary issue with the current WvW maps that would resolve most of the reasonable complaints I’ve seen here.

Defense being too easy. Obvious benefits to spreading out the keeps in particular. There is little tactic to how you approach objective taking because of this. Having to make a decision to leave a current spot to defend another should be a factor. Instead it’s just a mindless back and forth between zerg bodies.

Small groups being ineffective. As above, a small group would benefit greatly from the increased response time required by a group to defend a location. Also it would allow more time for fewer people to establish a defense and rally for help.

Steam-rolling. Again, time should be a factor. I’ve been on both ends of the stick with this one. It’s just as unpleasant to see your entire battleground is already controlled, leaving nothing to do but stand around with your zerg, as it is to realize you won’t make it 30 yards out before you are zerged down yourself. More space = more time = more chance for a smaller group to make a lasting impact.

It is a simple concept, and maybe easy to dismiss and I would doubt even a lot of support of the idea would make it change any time soon… but it’s food for thought I suppose.

Somehow, I don’t think a complete redesign of the wvw zones is in anyway practical a month after launch. Maybe something to ask for in an expansion. Also I could swear I read somewhere that the wvw maps are as large as they can be currently. It would be nice to have much larger zones I just don’t think it is possible.

I actually think a serious problem is pretty much the opposite of what you said.

It’s far too easy to take over things very rapidly in this game. There have been times where I saw swords on the garrison, ran there as quickly as I could and the enemy was already on the back inner door to the lord room. All it takes is a couple of siege golems or 3 rams (which are far cheaper) and doors just melt away. NPC guards might as well not be there at all and even Keep Lords die in under 15 seconds to modest sized groups.

Defense has very little time to respond to anything.

This results in a lot of back-and-forth.

WvW shouldn’t be about “ninja caps” with groups whisking away holdings faster than defenders can realize there’s an attack. Every tower attack should take time, even against an undefended keep, and defenders should have time to respond. It’s up to attackers to bring sufficient force to ensure success in an epic battle, rather than trying to sneak things in with little or no opposition. “WvW” is not meant to be “PvE assaults against undefended towers”. It’s meant to be epic.

In DAOC, keep attacks took so long, you’d hear automated warnings while in the PvE area and have time to run all the way to the PvP section and all the way to the keep before the door was down. The NPC guards were almost like a tower lord is in this game and the actual lord had a ridiculous amount of hit points that took some time to down.

So really I’d like to see:

• More expensive, tougher rams. You should want 1. You should be loath to drop 3 of them just for giggles.
• Tougher guards. Upgraded guards in particular should be a bigger improvement.
• Lords and Supervisors that either scale to the number of enemies or else just have a lot more hit points than they currently do.

Just say no to flip-flopping and ninja-capping!

Main solutions would be to not WvW when you can’t get a kill or complete a event. Which on this server is most of the time.
The winning side should have a geometrically more difficult time holding more area. Right now it seems the more keeps you have the easier time you have doing everything. It should made to be near impossible to hold the entire map.

A. You could offer free transfers of spefic guilds off the dominate servers to low rank servers based on there wvw stats. You could retire the dominate server and force a move to others less populated servers.
B. If a server is dominating early in the week, end the match. You could have the dominate server play itself only. It’s side choose by the zone color you enter under. The two losing teams would fight each other or enter into a mid-week compeition with the other losing servers.
C. You could balance by number of players allowed in the zone. Limit the winning (kill/hour) sides numbers and increase the losing sides numbers for the zone. The winning side would have fewer and fewer players.
D. You could balance by de-buffing the winners and buffing the losing side. I prefer this cause the winning side is organized tight guild groups vs the losing sides solo wandering (I’m casually solo and wander).
E. You could add a map icons for the enemy’s having killing streaks like Aion had. The losing side could be able to see all the enemy players dots as red dots on the big map.

The 1 week of being trounced by a better server isn’t fun. If one sides winning badly, conclude the match. Let the winners have the area to themselves for the rest of the week. Setup new matches for the loser for the rest of the week.