Guild Wars 2

Personally, I blame myself for the following problem, since I wasn’t quick enough on the draw to dispense my wisdom to Anets eager ears before they made a series of paradoxical decisions. So, I am willing to accept everyone’s hate for the next few lines.
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Still hatin? I’ll give you a few more lines.
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Alright, that’s enough. Get over it you spiteful lil’ boi.

Enough fluff. Here’s what I’m talking about. O.K. just a bit more fluff. You’ve gotta love that bunny. This thread will be two posts: post one is what the problem is, and post 2 is what should be done as I decree it.

But to be serious now, there is a strange, almost paradoxical philosophy that Anet has developed regarding WvW, and in fault I blame the players for it because they have developed these expectations. But, I will not resolve the next few lines for my hatred, because I’m better than that. Most importantly, I’m better than you, you hateful lil’ boi.

I’ve seen a few MMOs that have a permanent faction based conflict in the overworld. DCUO and Aion are two such examples, and they are an example as to why this idea sucks: the faction based conflicts result in servers being heavily stacked in one direction or the other, turning the game into a free ride vs. gank fest depending on which side you stumble into.

WvW was designed specifically to be a three-way gank to prevent one-sided domination. If one side had superior numbers, coverage, and skill, then the two smaller sides can team up and kill the biggun’. Disproportionate populations were meant to eventually be balanced out on a server by server basis, but with changing active populations there’s no guarantees, so the whims of the seasons means one server will be roflstomped by the other quite frequently. This was expected, and so the rewards in WvW are based mostly around being in WvW, lest one server be punished for another’s inactivity.

To this end, it has always been my understanding that WvW is inherently unfair. It is a war where the treatise are shaky at best, the size of anyone’s army is up for debate, there is no standard time of engagement, and you will always be fighting on two fronts. The monetary incentives are contrary to the game’s scoring system, causing a conflict of interest in the players. So, you get into big fights for the lulz and for the thrills of large scale combat, and after each week you laugh about what happened and prepare for the next fight.

But, what Anet is doing with WvW isn’t based on this premise. No, the premise of “It’s not fair, have some fun” gets thrown out the door as soon as you have seasons, tournaments, and rankings. Now, we see complaints about 2 vs. 1s, coverage vs. coverage, buying guilds and recruiting players to shore up numbers, time zones and which one is overpowered, etc. Now, under the premise of all being fair in love and war, this is just whining. But if you have an actual competition, then these complaints are legitimate.

Think about it: When in a game of soccer have they put 3 teams on the field, and then tried to award medals for whomever won that game? When has there been a game of football where all the players wait for the other team to fall asleep so they can score touchdowns unopposed? When in a game of basketball is it fair for one team to outnumber the other on the field 3 to 1? When is there a game of chess when the players get paid for how many pawns they take, regardless of if they win? The answer to all this is “never” because these are nonsensical and stupid things, and any serious spectators will laugh in your face over how utterly ridiculous the system is.

A 3 team soccer game might be fun. I won’t argue that. But will it be fair? Absolutely not. The season has epitomized the problems with this model. I mean, look at the standings and ask yourself if anyone is surprised about the outcomes. The only upset I can see is that BG was doubleteamed, which under non-tourney standards is par for the course, but in a tournament is a cheap move.

These problems are endemic to WvW. You can’t fix cheap moves, coverage, time zones, and population differences. It is because of this that the whole tournament thing is utter rubbish. You end up having to hand out cheap, nigh meaningless rewards in a hodgepodge that strangely punishes or rewards tiering in an arbitrary manner. The whole thing ends up more convoluted than U.S. tax laws, except that the rewards have to be low or else people will feel even more ripped off for things out of their control.

If you want my advice for WvW in the future, it would be simply thus: no more tournaments. Change incentives, and add new things to WvW.

So, what should be done about WvW? My answer to this are to rework the incentives. As much as I like the lulz of playing WvW, the fact is that a certain level of incentive is needed to keep people interested. So, for the remainder of the thread, if you don’t want to be a bitter lil’ boi, this can be a good place to come up with new ideas and incentives to help make WvW a more attractive option for players to play in.

Currently, the rewards in WvW are also as strange as U.S. tax laws: the primary rewards in WvW comes from player kills, which have little to do with the actual scoring system in WvW. This creates an extremely strange and unfair reward system for WvW, in that the capacity to get rewards is based upon enemy population, which is based on your own server’s rank. This creates a form of negative feed back where the fewer people there are, the fewer reasons why you’d want to get into WvW, which makes fewer people want to go there, which gives even less reasons to go there in the first place.

Sucks, doesn’kitten Well, as for the “fix” to this problem, I take inspiration from a few other games. And by taking inspiration, I mean “shamelessly ripping off and claiming these ideas as my own”.

The simplest idea I can borrow is to put a series of high rewards that are based in holding towers and keeps, and exploration. Here’s some highly basic and unrefined ideas on stuff that can be done:

-Towers would have workers that would gather materials, and a respawning chest that will give players fine crafting materials after they’ve had control of the tower for a consecutive half hour.
-Keeps would have farming patches and gathering nodes that will replenish themselves regularly (half hour, 15 minutes with worker upgrade).
-Stonemist would have both of these, and also increase the magic find of players in WvW.

The basic idea being that WvW would be about grabbing and holding real estate long enough to get a series of perks from doing so. Supply camps wouldn’t get anything, since their ability to provide supply would directly contribute to the ability to grab and defend other places. In lower population servers, it would be easier to grab and hold things without worrying about flipping immediately, but high population servers will end up with players farming each other for drops.

Likewise, currently in EotM it is far more profitable to just capture places than to keep them. Another idea, albeit a more punishing one, is to make it so capturing any tower/keep starts a 15 minute long event where you have to defend it, and if you don’t defend the tower/keep, then the event fails and you don’t get any awards. That way, instead of gigantic zergs just rushing around grabbing whatever they can, the players would have to hold their captures long enough to get the gold/karma off of the keeps. I say this is “punishing” because ultimately it delays players from getting rewards, instead of giving incentives for playing differently than they do now.

Unfortunately, the flow of creative juices has run dry on my end. But alas, I think this will open up the discussion to more things. For now, I’ll just throw these out

-Week long rewards for player servers winning matchups
-A score scaling incentive other than Power of the Mists

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

If you want my advice for WvW in the future, it would be simply thus: no more tournaments. Change incentives, and add new things to WvW.

You really need your TL;DR up front.

it’s more like war not like a soccer match.
in war you always try to attack the weak side to gain the max and lose the min: supplies, man, equipment…
is it unfair? it is
should be done something to enjoy better the game? prolly

I hate this illness of mine. A little window into the mystery of ME, I have severe unexplained stomach pains that wave in and out. Under a wave, my thinking is totally shot. Between then and now, I literally flooded my own bathroom because I lacked the sense to not flush over and over again.

So… big issue that probably should’ve been in a third post. There are a lot of people who want to have a tournament where large bodies of people fight each other. So, what can be done to have massive wars that are fair? I, one of many, simply recommend that Guild vs. Guild be put into the game in some manner. Trying to get WvW to be a legitimate competition is like putting a pig in a dress: it ain’t hot. Server identity is fading anyway, so now might be the time for guild identity.