Guild Wars 2

WvW isn’t successful enough to meet Anet’s aspirations, and the the way it’s been headed it’s not going to be.

Even with (or perhaps because of) the disasters of the current patch, WvW is rapidly turning into a game focus on the hardcore WvW players and servers. This is emptying out the WvW maps, makes WvW less appealing to new and casual players (they are even more stomp bait than they were in the past), and makes it progressively harder to create successful match-ups in WvW.

The problems seems to arise from two lines of flawed thinking:

• Flawed Idea #1: Imbalance is a defining characteristic of WvW
  This has led to Anet’s Wvw team:
  a) Implementing changes that make WvW even more unbalanced
  b) Being blind to the potential to improve balance in WvW and the benefits that would deliver (WvW would be more fun for existing players and and more attractive to new/casual players)
• Flawed Idea #2: Increasing player power is a successful strategy for WvW
  This idea has lead to changes that directly increase the power of dedicated WvW players and servers and in doing so has:
  a) Made WvW less appealing to new players and players on servers with low levels of WvW participation
  b) Exaggerated the differences in competitiveness between WvW servers.
  Amazingly, this idea (which seems to be derived from the flawed imbalance idea) is directly counter to the approach that has been fundamental to the success of the rest of GW2.

There is one further problem:

• there are too many WvW servers for the number of people playing WvW.
  This results in many servers having WvW populations that too low to be competitive, and avid WvW players flocking to the few servers with competitive populations and in the process further eroding the competitiveness of the servers they abandon.

Anet need to clean up the mess they’ve made of WvW with this latest patch. But rather than plaster over the latest problems, Anet would be far better to use this as a prompt to change direction and improve the balance in WvW. The obvious steps to doing this are:

1. Reduce the number of WvW servers and balance up their populations This can be done by:
   a) Unhooking WvW servers from PvE
   b) Consolidating servers with low populations
   c) Capping WvW sever populations at the highest current WvW server population
   d) Making it free to join or transfer to WvW servers with lower populations
2. Cap WVW gear stats at the exotic level
3. Remove buffs that cause power creep for WvW players

Once that’s in place, we will all have a more competitive environment in which to play WwW (and without which we simply don’t have enough people to play against). From there Anet can take complexity they’ve already put into WvW and make it work by doing things like: fixing the older lag problems, improving the commander system, fixing the party system, and fixing the excessive incentives for zerging.

Overall, this will make WvW more enjoyable for existing players as match-ups and in-game fights will be more balanced and therefore more exciting. This will also make it easier for new players to join WvW as they will a) have less of a performance deficit against established WvW players, and b) have access to more competitive WvW servers without having to sacrifice ties to their existing PvE communities.

Unfortunately, this will also require Anet to acknowledge that it has made mistakes with the direction it’s been taking WvW. The mistakes are there, but to date Anet has shown very little willingness or ability to acknowledge mistakes. Hopefully the disaster of this latest patch is enough to push them past that.

The other problem will be the dedicated WvW players who’ve become addicted to the extra power the recent changes (guard buff, bloodlust, open ended WXP abilities, ascended weapons) have given their characters. They’ve got used to winning more easily and won’t want to give up their hard won superpowers. Their challenge will be to accept that instead of making WvW better, that increase in power has been undermining WvW by i) making participation in WvW less appealing for new and casual players, and ii) making it harder for servers with more dedicated WvW players to find decent competition.

( http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/power-creep covers the basic issues. Anyone have links showing how imbalance and power creep erodes player numbers in PvP games?)

TLDR: Anet have to fix the current mess they’ve made of WvW. It will be far better if they do that in ways that return balance to WvW because that’s what it’s going to take for WvW to succeed.

[Edit: Included statement about there being too many WvW servers]
[Edit: revised recommendation #1 to explicitly state it will reduce the number of WvW servers]

I don’t see how anything affects WvW matches more than population and coverage. When I heard how the league things were gonna be split up, I almost choked on my beer. There should be more divisions created, solely based on population. The last four weeks of WvW for my server has seen us and another unfortunate server matched up with servers ranked anywhere between 6-8 ranks higher than either of us. They win due to coverage and sheer numbers, not strategy or skill (I give props to some guilds, however). The power creeps and ascended weapons and all that other stuff don’t affect a server’s WvW morale near as much as being thwomped by a server that’s literally three to four times larger. It’s no fun for anyone involved.

Q: how come I can upgrade an EB tower to t3 with full supply and hold it against two tier 1 servers for 12 straight daylight hours almost completely by myself? How much coverage does anybody really need?

Of your entire post I either disagree or am neutral with every point except one. I like the idea of disconnecting PVE servers and WvW entirely. That said, it would be really resource intensive to do it correctly.

Ill add to it a bit. I would create battlegroups, for lack of a better term. Only servers in X battlegroup will face each other. There would be a low intensity battlegroup and a high intensity one and maybe a medium one. At that point, you allow players to pick which kind of server they want based on the type of battlegroup it falls into.

In other words, they shouldn’t create a bunch of super maxed servers. They should specify the type of experience that the new servers offer and allow players to pick.

Zenguy.6421:

WvW isn’t successful enough to meet Anet’s aspirations, and the the way it’s been headed it’s not going to be.

Even with (or perhaps because of) the disasters of the current patch, WvW is rapidly turning into a game focus on the hardcore WvW players and servers. This is emptying out the WvW maps, makes WvW less appealing to new and casual players (they are even more stomp bait than they were in the past), and makes it progressively harder to create successful match-ups in WvW.

The problems seems to arise from two lines of flawed thinking:

• Flawed Idea #1: Imbalance is a defining characteristic of WvW
  This has led to Anet’s Wvw team:
  a) Implementing changes that make WvW even more unbalanced
  b) Being blind to the potential to improve balance in WvW and the benefits that would deliver (WvW would be more fun for existing players and and more attractive to new/casual players)
• Flawed Idea #2: Increasing player power is a successful strategy for WvW
  This idea has lead to changes that directly increase the power of dedicated WvW players and servers and in doing so has:
  a) Made WvW less appealing to new players and players on servers with low levels of WvW participation
  b) Exaggerated the differences in competitiveness between WvW servers.
  Amazingly, this idea (which seems to be derived from the flawed imbalance idea) is directly counter to the approach that has been fundamental to the success of the rest of GW2.

Anet need to clean up the mess they’ve made of WvW with this latest patch. But rather than plaster over the latest problems, Anet would be far better to use this as a prompt to change direction and improve the balance in WvW. The obvious steps to doing this are:

1. Balance up server WvW populations This can be done by:
   a) Unhooking WvW servers from PvE
   b) Capping WvW sever populations at the highest current WvW server population
   c) Consolidating servers with low populations
   d) Making it free to join or transfer to WvW servers with lower populations
2. Cap WVW gear stats at the exotic level
3. Remove buffs that cause power creep for WvW players

Once that’s in place, we will all have a more competitive environment in which to play WwW (and without which we simply don’t have enough people to play against). From there Anet can take complexity they’ve already put into WvW and make it work by doing things like: fixing the older lag problems, improving the commander system, fixing the party system, and fixing the excessive incentives for zerging.

Overall, this will make WvW more enjoyable for existing players as match-ups and in-game fights will be more balanced and therefore more exciting. This will also make it easier for new players to join WvW as they will a) have less of a performance deficit against established WvW players, and b) have access to more competitive WvW servers without having to sacrifice ties to their existing PvE communities.

Unfortunately, this will also require Anet to acknowledge that it has made mistakes with the direction it’s been taking WvW. The mistakes are there, but to date Anet has shown very little willingness or ability to acknowledge mistakes. Hopefully the disaster of this latest patch is enough to push them past that.

The other problem will be the dedicated WvW players who’ve become addicted to the extra power the recent changes (guard buff, bloodlust, open ended WXP abilities, ascended weapons) have given their characters. They’ve got used to winning more easily and won’t want to give up their hard won superpowers. Their challenge will be to accept that instead of making WvW better, that increase in power has been undermining WvW by i) making participation in WvW less appealing for new and casual players, and ii) making it harder for servers with more dedicated WvW players to find decent competition.

( http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/power-creep covers the basic issues. Anyone have links showing how imbalance and power creep erodes player numbers in PvP games?)

TLDR: Anet have to fix the current mess they’ve made of WvW. It will be far better if they do that in ways that return balance to WvW because that’s what it’s going to take for WvW to succeed.

+1

Nanyetah Elohi.4852:

Q: how come I can upgrade an EB tower to t3 with full supply and hold it against two tier 1 servers for 12 straight daylight hours almost completely by myself? How much coverage does anybody really need?

T1 servers do have their low population times and not all structures are a target during those low population times.

I reall don’t mind the guard or bloodlust stat increases. I haven’t ranked up any to get the stat increases from killing guards and I don’t mind bloodlust either.

Only thing that concerns me is the population imbalances. That is the only real factor in determining score at the end of the match which often leads to blow outs. Rewards for winning are going to be hollow and if you are not on a server that can field around the clock, you are not going to win. Forcing people to spread out is a bad idea because there are only so many to go around and some would like to have people to roll with and against. Spreading out, for example the EU population on the NA servers, would leave those players without any one to actually fight against. There are very few of these players to go around and only a few servers have a decent enough population during this time.

Nanyetah Elohi.4852:

Q: how come I can upgrade an EB tower to t3 with full supply and hold it against two tier 1 servers for 12 straight daylight hours almost completely by myself? How much coverage does anybody really need?

because you are at a keep that is so far behind their lines that only small groups are going for it ala ninja style?

Or your lying.

Ostra.3927:

Nanyetah Elohi.4852:

Q: how come I can upgrade an EB tower to t3 with full supply and hold it against two tier 1 servers for 12 straight daylight hours almost completely by myself? How much coverage does anybody really need?

because you are at a keep that is so far behind their lines that only small groups are going for it ala ninja style?

Or your lying.

Pretty sure I know which I’d choose…

CreativeAnarchy.6324:

Forcing people to spread out is a bad idea because there are only so many to go around.

Thanks for highlighting this point, CreativeAnarchy, as it wasn’t clear in my OP. I’ve edited the OP to address this (ref recommendation #1).

The imbalance between WvW servers is the direct result of their being too many servers for the number of people playing WvW. A few servers have addressed this by stacking their WvW populations to more effective levels, but this has further depleted the WvW populations on the remaining servers. Spreading the WvW population out across the current servers wouldn’t work because, while balanced, the effect would be that every server population would be below what works best for WvW – and what we want is great WvW.

Instead, the number of WvW servers needs to be reduced to the point where all WvW servers have an effective WvW population. The steps for doing this are:

• Unhook WvW servers from PvE – this is required to be able to reduce the number of WvW servers which right now is directly tied to the number of PvE servers.
• Consolidating WvW servers with low populations – this is where the actual reduction in the total number of WvW servers happens.

The following steps are required because there will still be significant differences in WvW server population after consolidation, and these will help the numbers even out voluntarily without having to forcibly break up populations:

• Capping WvW server populations at the highest current WvW server population – this prevents blows outs on the highest population servers.
• Making it free to join or transfer to WvW servers with lower populations – this helps grow less populated servers.

Zenguy.6421:

too many servers for the number of people playing WvW.

In its current sad state, this may be true. But this may primarily be a symptom of the problem instead of a major source of the problem. Remember that Anet has pushed many many players away with its poor handling of WvW. If they turn around and put some honest effort into saving WvW, these servers may begin to fill up again.

Nanyetah Elohi.4852:

Q: how come I can upgrade an EB tower to t3 with full supply and hold it against two tier 1 servers for 12 straight daylight hours almost completely by myself? How much coverage does anybody really need?

That doesn’t prove anything at all. Name the tower and I’ll bet it’s one that nobody bothers to capture because it isn’t really strategic.

+1 to either:

Reducing the max # of WvW servers, or: reducing the max # of players for each map.

Zenguy.6421:

WvW isn’t successful enough to meet Anet’s aspirations, and the the way it’s been headed it’s not going to be.

Even with (or perhaps because of) the disasters of the current patch, WvW is rapidly turning into a game focus on the hardcore WvW players and servers. This is emptying out the WvW maps, makes WvW less appealing to new and casual players (they are even more stomp bait than they were in the past), and makes it progressively harder to create successful match-ups in WvW.

The problems seems to arise from two lines of flawed thinking:

• Flawed Idea #1: Imbalance is a defining characteristic of WvW
  This has led to Anet’s Wvw team:
  a) Implementing changes that make WvW even more unbalanced
  b) Being blind to the potential to improve balance in WvW and the benefits that would deliver (WvW would be more fun for existing players and and more attractive to new/casual players)
• Flawed Idea #2: Increasing player power is a successful strategy for WvW
  This idea has lead to changes that directly increase the power of dedicated WvW players and servers and in doing so has:
  a) Made WvW less appealing to new players and players on servers with low levels of WvW participation
  b) Exaggerated the differences in competitiveness between WvW servers.
  Amazingly, this idea (which seems to be derived from the flawed imbalance idea) is directly counter to the approach that has been fundamental to the success of the rest of GW2.

There is one further problem:

• there are too many WvW servers for the number of people playing WvW.
  This results in many servers having WvW populations that too low to be competitive, and avid WvW players flocking to the few servers with competitive populations and in the process further eroding the competitiveness of the servers they abandon.

Anet need to clean up the mess they’ve made of WvW with this latest patch. But rather than plaster over the latest problems, Anet would be far better to use this as a prompt to change direction and improve the balance in WvW. The obvious steps to doing this are:

1. Reduce the number of WvW servers and balance up their populations This can be done by:
   a) Unhooking WvW servers from PvE
   b) Consolidating servers with low populations
   c) Capping WvW sever populations at the highest current WvW server population
   d) Making it free to join or transfer to WvW servers with lower populations
2. Cap WVW gear stats at the exotic level
3. Remove buffs that cause power creep for WvW players

Once that’s in place, we will all have a more competitive environment in which to play WwW (and without which we simply don’t have enough people to play against). From there Anet can take complexity they’ve already put into WvW and make it work by doing things like: fixing the older lag problems, improving the commander system, fixing the party system, and fixing the excessive incentives for zerging.

Overall, this will make WvW more enjoyable for existing players as match-ups and in-game fights will be more balanced and therefore more exciting. This will also make it easier for new players to join WvW as they will a) have less of a performance deficit against established WvW players, and b) have access to more competitive WvW servers without having to sacrifice ties to their existing PvE communities.

Unfortunately, this will also require Anet to acknowledge that it has made mistakes with the direction it’s been taking WvW. The mistakes are there, but to date Anet has shown very little willingness or ability to acknowledge mistakes. Hopefully the disaster of this latest patch is enough to push them past that.

The other problem will be the dedicated WvW players who’ve become addicted to the extra power the recent changes (guard buff, bloodlust, open ended WXP abilities, ascended weapons) have given their characters. They’ve got used to winning more easily and won’t want to give up their hard won superpowers. Their challenge will be to accept that instead of making WvW better, that increase in power has been undermining WvW by i) making participation in WvW less appealing for new and casual players, and ii) making it harder for servers with more dedicated WvW players to find decent competition.

( http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/power-creep covers the basic issues. Anyone have links showing how imbalance and power creep erodes player numbers in PvP games?)

TLDR: Anet have to fix the current mess they’ve made of WvW. It will be far better if they do that in ways that return balance to WvW because that’s what it’s going to take for WvW to succeed.

[Edit: Included statement about there being too many WvW servers]
[Edit: revised recommendation #1 to explicitly state it will reduce the number of WvW servers]

QFT +1

Zenguy.6421:

CreativeAnarchy.6324:

Forcing people to spread out is a bad idea because there are only so many to go around.

Thanks for highlighting this point, CreativeAnarchy, as it wasn’t clear in my OP. I’ve edited the OP to address this (ref recommendation #1).

The imbalance between WvW servers is the direct result of their being too many servers for the number of people playing WvW. A few servers have addressed this by stacking their WvW populations to more effective levels, but this has further depleted the WvW populations on the remaining servers. Spreading the WvW population out across the current servers wouldn’t work because, while balanced, the effect would be that every server population would be below what works best for WvW – and what we want is great WvW.

Instead, the number of WvW servers needs to be reduced to the point where all WvW servers have an effective WvW population. The steps for doing this are:

• Unhook WvW servers from PvE – this is required to be able to reduce the number of WvW servers which right now is directly tied to the number of PvE servers.
• Consolidating WvW servers with low populations – this is where the actual reduction in the total number of WvW servers happens.

The following steps are required because there will still be significant differences in WvW server population after consolidation, and these will help the numbers even out voluntarily without having to forcibly break up populations:

• Capping WvW server populations at the highest current WvW server population – this prevents blows outs on the highest population servers.
• Making it free to join or transfer to WvW servers with lower populations – this helps grow less populated servers.

Problem with consolidating is that people moved to lower tiers for the types of fights. Not everyone wants to zerg like T1, not everyone wants to be in lower tier zergless maps. Some want a mixture of both.

Also, NA has a whole lot of NA and consolidation would probably put consistent queue for maps. In T1 now, I may get a queue but unless it is reset night, I don’t expierence longer than 15 minutes typically. Some people don’t want a queue at all so they moved to lower tiers.

I don’t ever see any server based team having any kind of population balance to provide the 24 hour game that some would like to play. Any server vs server game will have a few stacked servers of people that are wanting that kind of play and any other server that isn’t stacked will just loose out on rewards since they won’t be any competetion.

Zenguy.6421:

Even with (or perhaps because of) the disasters of the current patch, WvW is rapidly turning into a game focus on the hardcore WvW players and servers.

I didn’t get past this gem. There is no game in the history of MMOs, including WoW, that has done more to cater to the exact opposite of ‘hardcore’ than GW2. The entire game is about lowering the bar so low that even our pets can play.

Everything about WvW favors casual zerging and the only reason any hardcore players are still playing is because there is really nothing else to switch to.

Zenguy.6421:

1. Cap WVW gear stats at the exotic level
2. Remove buffs that cause power creep for WvW players

These are probably the only things that could make me go back playing.
Too bad it’s never going to happen

Agree 110% with OP.

And i’LL add another Anet misconcept:
-WvW is just room for casual karma trains of bored PvErs, never a real pvp mode
Self explanatory i suppose.
And no, i’m not talking a out GvG, but general “multiple smaller zerg pvping” vs “zoneblobbing and siegewar” kind of playstyle.

Niim.9260:

I didn’t get past this gem. There is no game in the history of MMOs, including WoW, that has done more to cater to the exact opposite of ‘hardcore’ than GW2. The entire game is about lowering the bar so low that even our pets can play.

Everything about WvW favors casual zerging and the only reason any hardcore players are still playing is because there is really nothing else to switch to.

qft.
in response to the next poster. the only thing that would get me back playing was if player kills were worth something like 1000 wxp, but split between the number of ppl tagging.
im on a t1 server and the last few times ive logged in, during primetime, it took ~30 mins of roaming to find enemies that weren’t sticking with groups of 20+

even solo’ing supply camps by the handful, and never seeing an enemy unless i saw 50

Great post by OP and comprehensive roadmap of how to begin fixing it, and actually returning wvw to the gw2 manifesto, instead of the un skilled, power grind, buy advantages, snowballing cluster frack that wvw has degenerated into.

Zenguy.6421:

WvW isn’t successful enough to meet Anet’s aspirations, and the the way it’s been headed it’s not going to be.

Even with (or perhaps because of) the disasters of the current patch, WvW is rapidly turning into a game focus on the hardcore WvW players and servers. This is emptying out the WvW maps, makes WvW less appealing to new and casual players (they are even more stomp bait than they were in the past), and makes it progressively harder to create successful match-ups in WvW.

The problems seems to arise from two lines of flawed thinking:

• Flawed Idea #1: Imbalance is a defining characteristic of WvW
  This has led to Anet’s Wvw team:
  a) Implementing changes that make WvW even more unbalanced
  b) Being blind to the potential to improve balance in WvW and the benefits that would deliver (WvW would be more fun for existing players and and more attractive to new/casual players)
• Flawed Idea #2: Increasing player power is a successful strategy for WvW
  This idea has lead to changes that directly increase the power of dedicated WvW players and servers and in doing so has:
  a) Made WvW less appealing to new players and players on servers with low levels of WvW participation
  b) Exaggerated the differences in competitiveness between WvW servers.
  Amazingly, this idea (which seems to be derived from the flawed imbalance idea) is directly counter to the approach that has been fundamental to the success of the rest of GW2.

There is one further problem:

• there are too many WvW servers for the number of people playing WvW.
  This results in many servers having WvW populations that too low to be competitive, and avid WvW players flocking to the few servers with competitive populations and in the process further eroding the competitiveness of the servers they abandon.

Anet need to clean up the mess they’ve made of WvW with this latest patch. But rather than plaster over the latest problems, Anet would be far better to use this as a prompt to change direction and improve the balance in WvW. The obvious steps to doing this are:

1. Reduce the number of WvW servers and balance up their populations This can be done by:
   a) Unhooking WvW servers from PvE
   b) Consolidating servers with low populations
   c) Capping WvW sever populations at the highest current WvW server population
   d) Making it free to join or transfer to WvW servers with lower populations
2. Cap WVW gear stats at the exotic level
3. Remove buffs that cause power creep for WvW players

Once that’s in place, we will all have a more competitive environment in which to play WwW (and without which we simply don’t have enough people to play against). From there Anet can take complexity they’ve already put into WvW and make it work by doing things like: fixing the older lag problems, improving the commander system, fixing the party system, and fixing the excessive incentives for zerging.

Overall, this will make WvW more enjoyable for existing players as match-ups and in-game fights will be more balanced and therefore more exciting. This will also make it easier for new players to join WvW as they will a) have less of a performance deficit against established WvW players, and b) have access to more competitive WvW servers without having to sacrifice ties to their existing PvE communities.

Unfortunately, this will also require Anet to acknowledge that it has made mistakes with the direction it’s been taking WvW. The mistakes are there, but to date Anet has shown very little willingness or ability to acknowledge mistakes. Hopefully the disaster of this latest patch is enough to push them past that.

The other problem will be the dedicated WvW players who’ve become addicted to the extra power the recent changes (guard buff, bloodlust, open ended WXP abilities, ascended weapons) have given their characters. They’ve got used to winning more easily and won’t want to give up their hard won superpowers. Their challenge will be to accept that instead of making WvW better, that increase in power has been undermining WvW by i) making participation in WvW less appealing for new and casual players, and ii) making it harder for servers with more dedicated WvW players to find decent competition.

( http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/power-creep covers the basic issues. Anyone have links showing how imbalance and power creep erodes player numbers in PvP games?)

TLDR: Anet have to fix the current mess they’ve made of WvW. It will be far better if they do that in ways that return balance to WvW because that’s what it’s going to take for WvW to succeed.

[Edit: Included statement about there being too many WvW servers]
[Edit: revised recommendation #1 to explicitly state it will reduce the number of WvW servers]

First things first. Get rid of Devon Carver!
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Devon_Carver
The guy came from craigslist :/