Guild Wars 2

Here’s a question. Do you want wvw to be a competitive tournament system, or a matchmaking system?

Here’s the difference:

- in a tournament system, you fight a variety of opponents, some much weaker or stronger than you, until someone is the “winner.” The upcoming leagues is an example of this system. Winning and losing matches matters a lot, because it is used to determine the champion.

- in a matchmaking system, if it is working well, you are matched against opponents of equal strength. In a hypothetical “perfect” matchmaking system, everyone would have 50% win ratio (in wvw’s case, 33%) because you’re always fighting equal opponents and pretty much luck and other minor factors determine the winner. This system is more like a sand box: winning or losing doesn’t really matter, you stay in your tier, one week you lose, next week you might win, repeat forever.

So there you have it. In a tournament system, we have proper competition, and winning matters, but we’ll often have very uneven matches.

In a matchmaking system, you get fair matches, but winning doesn’t matter and you’ll likely be fighting the same opponents every time.

Which do you prefer?

Incidentally, there are ways to make either system successful:

Tournament: create social systems to aid communication between wvw players and the rest of the player base. Recruitment is now an important part of wvw gameplay. Getting your population and coverage up to a good and skilled level is part of success.
Implement some sort of system that penalizes excessively high populations. I guess server queue already do this to some extent.
Maybe disconnect pve server choice from wvw server choice, to make recruitment and transfers more easy.

Matchmaking: Anet should by now have data on average wvw participation on each server. Sort servers into tiers based on wvw participation, to start with. If a server wins multiple times, do a winner up loser down exchange.
Make transfers expensive, to keep populations stable.

We see that, atm we will have a tournament system with expensive transfers and difficult recruitment, which might be the worst of both worlds :/

Hmm, one last bump. I’m just curious what people want out of wvw.

I want balanced and varied matches. Perhaps impossible with the current structure of WvW.

As to your two choices, if there could be relatively even matches then a matchmaking system would be fine. But with the exception of a couple, most matches are not close to even. And its impossible to arrange the servers so that everyone has even matches. This is the main reason people move to T1 NA despite the complaints about stacking – its the only way to have relatively balanced WvW and to be able to find fights 24/7.

Tournament System. This would work if changes were made. But it should never be permanent. The best change would be to encourage allying against the strongest server. For some reason that I cannot fathom people refuse to make alliances in blowout situations on their own even though it would result in more fun for all three servers.

In conclusion, balanced matches are the best. Neither matchmaking nor tournament can give that. I would favor a combination of the two:

Anet should institute a manual matchmaking system that matches servers in the best possible combination, changing it up weekly slightly for variety but not having rediculous blowout matches.

There can then be a tournament every so often if they want. But make the tournament intelligently so that it doesn’t cause too many imbalanced matches. Also make it so that it encourages 2v1 against the stronger server in the case that there is a match with huge imbalance.

I see so many threads every week trying to make this broken system of pitching massive amounts of random people together in an around the clock three way fight work. On four maps no less.

“Strength” in WvWvW means numbers, and nothing more. Numbers that could be affected drastically by many variables and no matter what you do, populations and thus servers will never ever be equal in “strength” so let’s not start off on that false premise.

One way you have complete blowouts where sometimes even these so called alliance forces that people like suggesting are outnumbered anyway. Or some servers might put up a good fight with commanders working in shifts(and I do mean working) but let’s get real, they weren’t going to “win” anyway.

The other way you have run of the mill matches until there is a burst of transfers or people leaving GW2 then then everybody gets stuck in lopsided fights until the system adjusts.

It is not a well thought out mode and would require radical core changes to be balanced.

What would work though, is instanced large scale GvG(or alliances) across all servers.

I very much like the pointsthat everyone has contributed so far just thought ill add my 2cents. I do not mind that the winner of a matchup can be determined by coverage. For example, my server seems to have a pretty competitive NA presence but very little oceanic, however the presence of one reputable commander increased our oceanic numbers significantly to the point in which we were able to hold on to upgraded structures. The issue I had in games I have played past was that crossserver events lasted for only a limited amount of time and then I would have to do pve. Ultimately this is why I rushed to buy gw2 as soon as I found out it lasted 24/7. I prefer tournament style matchups(variety) over static ones (same tiers). It is very exciting strategizing for reset night knowing you are getting new opponents, that excitement dissapears when your server cannot compete. Therefore although variety is a positive element it should not be prioritized if it means suffering blow out matches, players losing the will to compete and opportunistically letting enemies take structures then taking it back just for the wxp, karma. In other words, although I prefer the introduction of leagues, however I do not approve of servers being matched up against other servers that pretty much have a guaranteed victory without competition. For instance, any of the t1 servers Jadequarry, sanctum of rall, Blackgate should not be matched up against the other servers that cannot compete against them.