Guild Wars 2

Lets set aside the first order problems of overall population clumping and queues. Anet has attention on this problem and I trust you are looking at incentivizing the behaviors you want to see ( it’s not going to work until you do ), some greater distribution of the WvW population across more servers.

The second order problem, which deserves design review now to avoid being the next herby, is why do we see such a large preference for playing one map over the other three. The queue length data-set shows that Eternal Battlegrounds is the overwhelming preference.

I speculate, but my point of view is heavily influenced by my team and their preferred activities:

Number one Reason – Getting paid.

The eternal battleground has better resources, better drops, and a larger ability to influence the map and flip objectives at smaller levels of organization. Whether you’re looking for fun, Karma, coin, influence or items, the EB provide a better vehicle for obtaining all those things at lower levels of organizational overhead.
Recommended action – Normalize drops, coin and gathering nodes across all boarderlands to => Eternal Battlegrounds. This will provide better incentive to Queue outside EB with very little technical effort.

Number Two Reason – Boarderlands map design

This is not going to be an easy problem to solve. 3 out of 4 of the maps available are laid out in a very challenging, movement restrictive way. North / South movement is intentionally funneled through choke points which promote 2v1 pressure against the defender. I think I understand the design intent of making the maps centered on Orb Defense, but the corridors of movement created by the current layout make it far harder for small groups to flip objectives. This, intern, forces larger clumping and with it the associated overhead of larger force organization and coordination: Slowing the pace of action on the map, creating more static ( entrenched ) lines of defense; increasing the size of inevitable conflicts while slowing the frequency. All of these behaviors are pug/small group unfriendly. At it’s core, It’s a failure of objective size and quantity ( too few supply camps / control points ) and the large difficulty in horizontal movement.

Don’t get me wrong, if you are dealt into a strategic role in the boarderlands it can be a hoot. If you are not plugged into what your realm or alliance is working to achieve though, you are relegated to using the borderlands as a waiting room till you can go where you can actually have fun ( aka influence the map ).

Thanks,

-Mort

I agree with the above.
Bump for equivalent loot incentives in the home/orb BGs.
Bump for reducing the travel barrier and/or improving the small group impact/experience in the home/orb BGs.

I’m iffy about the movement restrictions ideas, even though the issue is aptly identified. Normalizing the loot drops is a very good idea though.

Very good post, I agree 100%

Speaking for myself only:

I prefer EB because of the map balance. EB is balanced between all three colors, with one major objective to fight over.

The BL map is unbalanced. Unbalanced maps can be fun sometimes, but it feels like the strategy is more one-dimensional.

OP I agree that EB map is by far more popular and probably because of the equal footing each server has and in large part due to loot. A.Net should balance all maps to offer the same loot.

The map design well I can see your point but I do not see how that can be changed tbh. At least not until and expansion.

Funny thing though is so far for my guild WvW events (we do 3 a week) we have only once bothered to go into EB, mainly because of the queues and lack of players in Borderlands maps.

It’s easy and a good tactic to scout out a Borderlands map and see that there is very little players in it. With that we then pop 50+ of guild members in said map and proceed to storm it and capture many points before the enemy can respond, at which point we proceed to just defend and hold what we took.

In fact this tactic has allowed us to secure more point per minute then the other servers we faced on numerous occasion because they were so concentrated in EB. Sadly when our guild leaves the map at the end of our event we lose it all

I disagree about the map design of the BL maps needing work. All of my best memories from WvW actually took place in BL maps, so they really do encourage some epic battles.

But I do think the BL maps could benefit from resource nodes being normalized. I am guilty of going into EB more than once because I wanted more mithril or whatever other higher level resource.

Bump for BG cookies.

Disagree with op. I do exit the queue of eb to remain in borderlands if the fighting is hot. I do not want people going to borderlands to farm the crafting resources there, nor do I want people farming npc in borderlands. Those should be asides of PvP. The jumping puzzle would bother me too, but it turned out to be a fun skirmish area for small group or solo fighting. Sky.9347 is correct, eb is best because it does not advantage one server, conceptually.

I am not really calling for a change to the borderlands maps. It’s likely impractical from a ROI perspective. At a high level, I like them in concept, I am simply attempting to point out possible root causes for the population imbalance between them and the Eternal Battlegrounds. Move time spent in negotiating the terrain, is less time flipping objectives.

Further, I would like to set aside the idea of people coming into WvW to farm mobs / resources. I don’t agree that this is healthy for the product as it’s depriving a seat to someone who is their for WVW. At best it’s a secondary aspect of the WVW experience and tangential to the points I am trying to make.

As a leader who has operated a team of 5 – 15 players in WVW since launch, I will state that the Eternal Battlegrounds pays ( in all ways : Gold, Karma, Influence ) at much higher rates as compared to the BLs. Often 3:1.

Clearly this is a second order problem as compared to other Anet priorities right now, general population distribution, stability and exploiting. I think this issue will bubble up in priority soon, so I would love to see it make it onto a solution roadmap in the near future.

Thanks for the comment love.

-Mort

It seems like the design intent was that lower level folk would try out Borderlands before the Eternal Battleground but it just hasn’t happened that way. When my mates are not around and I am going to fool around solo or attach myself to folks who look like they have a clue I am going to the Eternal Battleground. Better harvesting, better karma, better drops, just plain better pay off.

I do not understand why the Borderlands do not pay out the same.

They already said the current Borderlands maps are placeholders and they will eventually have 4 completely different maps.

RamzaBehoulve, that is good to hear. I would love it if each map was different. I would love to track down the source of that statement as well, but that is work for another day.

Original poster, I agree with most of what you say. The pay should be equivalent across the maps. The borderland maps are difficult in a different way than the eternal battlegrounds but all maps have their challenges.

As for your second point I agree the borderland maps encourage larger groupings of players, but I disagree that players are funneled into choke points. My perspective is that there are just fewer objectives in the borderlands. Control lines become static and groups become larger because of the lack of points to attack, but moving to those points is free and open. Groups can easily evade and circle around other groups. The problem is that with fewer points to attack that locations to defend become very predictable. You may not know what path your enemy is taking but you know where they will end up.

I guess you could argue that the towers and keeps are the choke points but I view it differently. Towers and keeps are targets to attack and the rest of the field is where choke points are created depending on terrain.

I hope new maps are coming for the borderlands. I also hope they will have more targets to attack. More targets equals less predictability which in turn helps with surprising your enemy. More surprises can be very fun for WvW.