Guild Wars 2

What I would do with WvW!

I feel like the WvW team is lacking a real vision for their game mode. WvW is amazingly fun but often feel neglected by its creators.

As I love this game mode, I often find myself thinking about what I would do if I could design it.

Below, you will find a compilation of the ideas I would add to WvW.

(I will update this list as I write the posts)

1. Fixing the bugs
2. Redistributing the population
3. Shorter matches
4. A new ranking system

All these suggestions are things that I would like to see in WvW. You might or might not agree with me and it’s fine. If you got new ideas or would like to improve on these ones, feel free to comment!

N.B. Whenever I think about an idea, I also ask myself how easy it would be to implement. Sure, I would like to see new WvW map every month, but it’s impossible.

N.B. I will add better formatting and link to the posts when I’m not stuck on my phone.

Fixing the bugs

As a programmer myself, I find it very surprising that game breaking bugs are not fixed sooner. Especially when they are known and easy to reproduce for testing.

Most of the time, the hard part about fixing a bug is either not knowing that it exists or being unable to reproduce it. Since these two cases don’t apply here, what is your excuse?

I won’t name any bug (otherwise this thread will be deleted…), but please look at the following thread and fix the issues.

:(… Still trying to find this amazing thread where players were listing all the bugs they found in WvW (help pls)

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs

Nymph of Meliai.6739:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs

lol… Not really the thread I was looking for but I guess that will do

Redistributing the population

Let’s face it. Population imbalance, which bring uncompetitive blow out matches, is one of the biggest problem in WvW. Every days, thousand of players are complaining about it.

There got to be a solution!

Let’s start by looking at non-solution

1. Forced redistribution : It has to come from the players or it will alienate them.

2. Unlimited free transfer : No one like band wagon that destroy communities

Now, my solution! It’s a 3 steps solution : 

1. 100 free transfers per week to the lowest ranking server
2. 100 free transfers per week out of the highest ranking server
3. Half transfer cost if you transfer to a server ranked lower than your current server.

Give it a few weeks and it’s almost guarantee that the population will stabilize across all servers.

The biggest benefits will be for tier 1 and 8. These 2 tiers might consistently have the most balance matches every week.

Gudradain.3892:

Redistributing the population

Let’s face it. Population imbalance, which bring uncompetitive blow out matches, is one of the biggest problem in WvW. Every days, thousand of players are complaining about it.

There got to be a solution!

Let’s start by looking at non-solution

1. Forced redistribution : It has to come from the players or it will alienate them.

2. Unlimited free transfer : No one like band wagon that destroy communities

Now, my solution! It’s a 3 steps solution : 

1. 100 free transfers per week to the lowest ranking server
2. 100 free transfers per week out of the highest ranking server
3. Half transfer cost if you transfer to a server ranked lower than your current server.

Give it a few weeks and it’s almost guarantee that the population will stabilize across all servers.

The biggest benefits will be for tier 1 and 8. These 2 tiers might consistently have the most balance matches every week.

Will not work, transfer costs alone will not produce balance, people payed up to 2500 gems to increase imbalance.
But in fact they payed to get more individual reward, and this is the only way to reach balance:

Make playing on a underpopulated world individually rewarding above average and playing on an overpopulated world individually rewarding below average

E.g. no WEXP chests on an overpopulated worlds, 1 as usual on a mean populated world, 2 on an underpopulated world.

But make sure: populated means the right thing, e.g. personhours spend in WvW over the weak and not registered PvE/EotM players on the world.

@Dayra

You are right that this change alone would not fix population imbalance alone but it would help.

Like you said, rewards are very important for players and one of my next post will be about it.

Taking WvW back to the drawing board would not be a bad idea.

Basically, anything besides nothing would be welcomed.

Fix the bugs
Break up the blobs
by introducing diminishing returns for the amount of people in x radius when capturing an objective
and raising the AoE limit
Also remove the downed state, death= sent back to spawn

This paired with free transfers to the lower servers would go a long way towards fixing the population imbalance.

Jim Hunter.6821:

Fix the bugs
Break up the blobs
by introducing diminishing returns for the amount of people in x radius when capturing an objective

Add increasing points to higher tier targets and you got a winner. Of course a blob taking a T1 keep should get considerably less points, but a blob taking a T3 keep should be encouraged to do so and get more points even with diminishing returns in place.

But we’ve been having these discussions for years now. They havent fixed anything. We still dont have the orbs back after they where “temporarily” disabled and we where promised a redesign in the system. They’re probably hoping we’ve all forgotten about that weird northern structure in the borderlands, lol… Oh wait, they even removed it some time ago. Nevermind.

Shorter matches

There has to be an happy medium between too long and too short. EotM is too short with its 4 hours matches, but week long matches are too long.

Why are they too long? 

They are too long because usually matches are decided in 1-3 days. We don’t need week long matches when the winner is already known by the end of the week end. Yes there are exceptions but they are few.

Why are they too long? (2)

They are too long because it takes way too much time for a server to adjust to its population shift. Look at Sanctum of Rall. How many MONTHS, yes months not weeks, did it take them to drop from tier 1 to finally stabilize in tier 6-7? No it’s not 1-2 months. It’s more around 4 months. It’s crazy!

They basically spent the last 4 months getting destroyed week after week because the rating doesn’t adjust fast enough. And why doesn’t it adjust fast enough? Because the matches are too long. 

Cut the duration of match up in half and it would already be much better. 2 months is still bad but it’s 2 times better than 4 months

Shorter matches bring diversity

If you are tired of the same match up every week, shorter matches is what you want. The more matches, the more likely you are to face new opponents.

The solution

I talked before about an happy medium between too long and too short. For me, the perfect duration would be between 3-5 days per matches.

It’s long enough for everyone to participate in the matches and short enough to not get bored of your opponents.

+ 1 to shorter matches.

It would be something easy for Anet to do (I would think).

We’ve heard that new maps take a year to make. Changing commander tags takes a long time – given that we haven’t seen it yet. Developing new stuff takes awhile.

Changing it to 2 resets per week? Could probably be done by next reset.

A new ranking system

Blow out matches or stale match up? Which one of the 2 would you pick?

For me, it’s none of them. I think there is a way to rank server so that there are very few blow out matches without stale match up.

First, let’s look at what is good and bad from our current ranking system.

Good

Glicko 2 : This is the algorithm that it used to rank the server together in the same match up and it’s very good. It gives a very good approximation of the strength of each server, much better than any point based ranking like in tournament.

Bad

Huge gap between tier in ranking : Ever wondered why tier 1 and tier 2 are always stuck together and why the top server in tier 3 can destroy its opponents for weeks without being able to move up? 

This is the cause of stale match up : huge gap between tier. It also makes the glicko algorithm worse because there are few cross tier match up which makes it impossible after a few weeks to correctly kitten the relative strength of servers that are in different tiers.

If you want to fix the ranking/matching problem, you need to attack this issue.

Random : Random is bad. Random was introduced to fix the problem mentionned above, huge gap between tier, but it didn’t work.

If you add too much randomness you get blow out matches every week. If you put too few randomness, you are still stuck with stale match up because of huge gap between tiers.

Random also bring other problems. Server that are supposed to go down a tier stay stuck in the same tier or server that are supposed to move up don’t.

A good example is Gate of Madness after season 2. They won every match in the season, but when it ended, instead of moving them up in tier 5, it was Sorrow Furnace that move up to tier 5. Even if Sorrow Furnace lost every match against Gate of Madness.

Random was introduced as a band aid solution for a problem it is not able to fix and it introduced a whole new set of problems.

My solution

- Keep Glicko 2 as it is very good
- Get rid of random factor as it is not working
- Adjust the rating of the servers each week to keep the average of each tier fixed

The last point might not be very clear so let me explain.

I want to adjust the rating of the servers to keep the difference in the average rating of 2 tier smaller.

For example, take tier 2 and tier 3 from NA. Currently, the average rating of tier 2 is close to 1900 while the average rating of tier 3 is close to 1700. This gives us a gap between the 2 tiers of 200.

It is this gap of 200 that makes it very hard for a server to move from tier 3 to 2, or vice versa, and this is what creates stale match up.

Now let’s see what my solution would do.

Let’s say we chose a gap of 100 between tier and keep the average rating of tier 3 to 1700. This means that the average rating of tier 2 must now be 1800, hence we substract 100 rating from each tier 2 server.

Now, since the ratings are much closer, the winning server in tier 3 will naturally move up to tier 2 when it is stomping its opponents hard enough.