Guild Wars 2

One of the problems for WvW is that there is no real way to balance the overwhelming quantity of players on one server vs another with less players so I have a proposal:

We already have an outnumbered buff but it isn’t enough to really force balance, the game is supposed to be a three way death match between three servers but it always ends up being “lowest population looses” because the other two teams go ganktastic on the underdog.

This, is where I propose forcing balance:

[The Underdog Lockout]

A faction with a lower score than the other teams gains the underdog buff, this causes three things to happen for that team:

1. Their home area is locked out from the other two teams, forcing the other two teams to focus on EB and their own home areas until that team has retaken all of the towers and keeps in their home area, they get a 30 minute warning at that point before they are attacked by the other two servers, giving them time to prepare a solid defense.
2. When invading an enemy borderland, that team gets the buff “counter attack” which adds an immediate 100% buff to WvW stats including, killing guards, destroying siege weapons, destroying walls and gates and generally making life difficult for the attacking forces.
3. A special “Overseer” that replaces Keep Lords, during which time these bosses are SIGNIFICANTLY harder to kill for the winning teams. They make capping keeps a lot more difficult, while tower, camp and castle lords remain mostly the same.

In addition, the team becomes UN-attack able in EB by the team in middle place, unless it attacks their towers, camps or keeps which the player then gets a 5 min debuff called “truce breaker” where the player is no longer neutral and thus attack able to both sides.

Now I am not saying this is the perfect solution to the problem but it would definitely make the game more “Planet side 2” opposed to “lets gank the weakest team” because right now the problem is that there’s nothing encouraging the loosing teams to turn on the winning one so much as the winning teams turning on the loosing one.

Thus, it is “not” fun for the loosing team.

Really these are rather radical ideas that take a lot of gameplay work and overhauling so naturally its optimistic to assume they’ll be possible or doable but that doesn’t mean systems like them couldn’t be integrated to encourage two loosing teams to pick on the bigger server and thus stabilize the balance.

Food for thought.

What we need is for Anet to stop making kittenty updates on PvE that give you 30g/h and start putting effort in WvW so people will go and play it.