Guild Wars 2

What if instead of WvWvW it was GvGvG? Are you having a seizure? Guild vs Guild vs Guild?! What a stupid idea! Who is this noob?

No. Not Guild vs Guild vs Guild but God vs God vs God!

I’ll ’splain.

So, one of the biggest problems in any open world, multi-team PvP is the perpetual population imbalance. It wasn’t solved in my last favorite MMO (R.I.P. Warhammer Online), and it seems like it’s pretty much just as big of an issue in my current fave (long live GW2).

However, Warhammer Online had one insurmountable imbalancing characteristic that GW2 does not: hardcoded factions. It was Chaos vs Order. Period. End of discussion. If one server had 300 people on Chaos partaking in PvP and the other had 100, well, tough. Many things were tried to make it more rewarding to be the underdog but nothing ever was done to force equal numbers per faction on the same map at the same time. In other words, there was never a numerically fair fight.

GW2 does not have this limitation. There is no reason why WvWvW has to form teams based on server selection. It could form teams from any arbitrary elements. I think it would be a pretty spiffy homage to GW1 if instead of server selection being the basis of teams, self-selected Gods would be the population gatekeeper.

How would this work? Glad you asked!

At the beginning of every league season, each player would be given a choice of a number of ‘Gods’ to choose from. The population of each ‘God’ would be carefully monitored by systems that ensure each God had as equal a representation of players from each time zone as possible.

For example: Season 1 of God vs God. There are six choices of Gods to start: Melandru, Balthazar, The Eternal Alchemy, Owl etc.

By the end of the enlistment, not all Gods will be available to pledge to. As their ranks fill up, they will be scratched from the list and players will be prompted to fill the ranks of the less populated Gods.

Also, imagine the possibilites that making WvWvW into a battle of the now departed Gods could bring to open world PvP. If you’ve ever played Populous, then you know what I mean.

Well, that’s my idea for balancing the population. I think it could be great.

While that might balance the sign up, it can’t remotely guarantee that actual WvWvW participation would be balanced. In addition, some folks might not be available for early sign up and that could lead to guilds getting split.

With that said, I wouldn’t mind seeing something like that at least tried. If nothing else, it would be something different.

Rely on iron, not false gods.

Like the idea, but there are still many issues with WvW that need to be solved first.

To address this one area “imbalance” I have a few issues – perhaps you can come up with some thoughts on these:

1) Servers, regardless of gods will attempt to play the same god. There has been a lot of work put into maintaining guild relations among every server. This idea could backfire are kitten off any allied guilds who could not get to play under the same god.

2) Same issue goes for non-NA (assuming no night time protection is implemented) – many of the non-NA guilds will go to the gold of their fellow server guilds, or if atleast the guilds they like. Few will go to another god imo. This maintains the current issue of lopsided non-NA matches on NA servers.

3) This potentially could lead to “gaming the system” since guilds could split across many gods, but work together when they face each other. Infact, this will happen considering point #1.

IMO, balancing will occur if/when night time protection is added for off-peak hours of a specific server timezone (ie. pst-cst-est as one ‘peak time’). Since you won’t have to rely on coverage guilds for non-peak hours. This ends up making only NA (or EU, or whatever) peak times the only time that points matter, the off-peak times don’t contribute to score (or very minor contribution).

@CEDWYN – this wouldn’t be such a problem if a player were asked to pick a primary WvW guild off of their list and then have that guilds leader sign up the whole guild to a team. Taking that one step further, allowing guilds to form alliances and appoint council leaders would then allow a few to sign up potentially thousands of players who want to be together in one quick action.

I’ve put this similar idea forward in the past. WvW should be decoupled from server choice if we are ever going to have any sort of even and competitive matches. Making some kind of Alliance vs Alliance system with a default match tied to home server for new to WvW players or guildless ones who aren’t sure where to go would be the best way to go I believe…

While this would be an improvement, it would still leave most of the problem unsolved.

Total server population over the course of weeks/months isn’t the main problem with population balance. The problem is on more of a minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour basis. You can have servers that are roughly equally matched in ppt/population over the course of an entire week, and still have massive imbalances during certain parts of the day.

And if you can only play during those parts of the day, the fact that your server benefits during the other parts is of no consequence to you, you still get stuck facing a hugely imbalanced fight.

Actually, guildvsguildvsguild would be better. Its been suggested before. You dont pledge your allegiance to a God, you pledge it to a guild “alliance”. A creation of Anet inside the game, free for any player created guild to join just like a server. This would solve/introduce lots of things:

- It would decouple WvW and servers. In fact, they could remove servers altogether with this concept and just have one big world with all players, see below.

- Overflows become selectable “servers”. No more hazzles when an overflow is full, no more guesting. You simply join on specific overflow – any overflow. If all named overflows are full, you get moved to an unnamed overflow just like now. Vizunah players and Vabbi players can easily mingle in the same Lions Arch by joining on the Desolation zone. No transfers, just a simple mouse click and loading screen. Add a “prefered starting zone” which is the replacement of servers.

- It would create a living world in terms of GvGvG (is that guvguv, lol?), not just PvE like they have done this past year. Instead of having abstract servers, there can actually be representatives of your guild alliance ingame. Massive NPC guild halls where all the player guilds gather. Want even more links to the world? Make ingame story characters part of the guild alliances.

- We would be able to create a competetive guild enviroment by having open, ingame lists of what guild is part of what alliance.

- It would vastly improve Anets ways to actually balance WvW (err, GvG). Is one alliance weak? Well then make the alliance NPCs recruit player guilds! Offer gold and give the players the illusion of being able to moderate alliances themselves.

- Is a tier completely failing and about to implode due to player counts? Simple – dissolve all three alliances fighting there. No problems with servers, player guilds just choose new guild alliances. No more dead servers because there are no servers.

It would be… Guild Wars.

… Never going to happen.

Personally, I don’t care about the whole God part of it, I just want to see it changed from representing Servers to picking “Alliances.” Each Guild can form an Alliance like in GW1, and when you go into WvW, you are matched based on ladders to fight two other Alliances. The Alliances would have a cap on how many guilds can be members of the Alliance.

For those who can’t get into an Alliance, or happen to be Guildless, there could be public Guild/Alliances created for those who want to participate in game but don’t really have an interest in playing for ladders, so these match-ups would be random.

it wouldn’t be GvGvG it would be PvPvP, because all GvG is, is larger scale pvp battles by like 3 to 7 more people.
how about leave WvWvW alone and just increase the pvp lobby size, and make multi server lobbies.

Dagraan.2854:

it wouldn’t be GvGvG it would be PvPvP, because all GvG is, is larger scale pvp battles by like 3 to 7 more people.
how about leave WvWvW alone and just increase the pvp lobby size, and make multi server lobbies.

… GvG in the sense many people want it is the same as WvW. You’re just not fighting for a server anymore, you’re fighting for an alliance of guilds. That alliance can be called “Blackgate” if you want, it doesnt matter. Same structure, same everything, its just moved ingame. Actual GvG raids/matches ingame now has nothing to do with this suggestion. You are confusing the two.