Guild Wars 2

Way back when WvW was first announced I imagined it being more of an RTS style game mode. Like Age of Empires. It didn’t really turn out to be that at all though, it’s more just a zerg fest, run in circles and flip camps/towers as fast as you can just to have them get flipped back over to the other team, rinse and repeat. Which I’m sure it works for a lot of people, but it really just isn’t fun to me. I feel like I have no impact on anything, I’m just another dot in the blob.

So yesterday I started to wonder, would it work for WvW if it was more like Stronghold. The foundation to make something like this work is already in the game. And even though it may be too far gone to overhaul WvW to work this way, I thought it was an interesting idea anyway.
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So what if it was essentially a week long Stronghold PvP match (or whatever length of time works). At the start of the match everyone has their borderlands which is your castle/lord room that starts from almost nothing but a basic camp site or whatever. It starts at level 0. From there, the players are the starting workers and they need to rush out into the maps to find resources like food, wood, stone, and metal which need to be returned back to your base. This already exists in game with gathering tools.

As you obtain resources you can start upgrading your borderlands, adding new buildings and troops to make your borderlands stronger. This could work on a passive pre-determined system, or a majority voting system to decide which upgrades you want to go for. Maybe you want to add a blacksmith to get cannons built on your walls, or maybe you want to add an archery training area to produce archers that will patrol the area.

Upgrading your borderlands to have camps will allow you to get supplies faster by having closer locations to drop supplies off at, while the other skritt and ogre type camps can give you other bonuses like extra defenses, tunneling systems to travel through, or scavengers that will collect resources for you. But you have to maintain those relationships to have access to them by sharing your resources with them.

The main goal it to build up a strong base to protect your lord. But you also need to protect your other buildings because if they get destroyed by the enemy they need to be rebuilt which will cost resources. And those building are necessary for keeping your borderlands strong.

Killing an enemy lord would knock that borderlands out of the match, and obviously the last one standing is the winner. If knocking a team out of a match isn’t something that sounds like a good idea, maybe you just gain some extra War Score and then the lord respawns with RI so he can’t be killed again for X amount of time.

Which bring me to the next way to win. As you start to obtain upgrades, kill enemy players and or sabotage enemy buildings, you gain War Score. This is pretty much the same thing it is now, just an overall score of everything you’ve done. But you can also use this score to go for an economic win and avoid having to kill an enemy lord, which is essentially the more defensive style but generally takes more effort because you need to obtain more upgrades to earn more score. This score also acts as the tie breaker in a situation where no enemy lord has been killed.

Anyway, that’s the gist of it. Build a strong borderlands, attempt to break into the enemy castle and kill their lord. Just like Stronghold, but on a larger scale.

I feel like this is what WvW should have always been. What does everyone else think?

This sounds less like a battle between players and more like a competition to PvE harder than the other server. It would also be wrecked by coverage gaps.

That said, I don’t want to brush off your feelings of not having any impact. It’s certainly true that a single body in a zerg is just another foot to trample with. Smaller groups (~20) can benefit from strong individual members, but it goes haywire after that.

Personally, I never run with a zerg anymore. We may meet up for a common goal, but I try to stay on the opposite side of the map to ensure that we have eyes everywhere. It’s very easy for me to see the impact I have because things don’t flip when I call them out or drive off enemies.

I think the RTS side of WvW is there to be had, but you’ll have to leave the zerg to find it.

sgeisi.5981:

Killing an enemy lord would knock that borderlands out of the match

So uh… a server just rush the lord on reset, then you got 7 days of 200 man queues to EB?

Just commenting on the WvW is a strategy game part, here is my view on that:

WvW always reminded me of this little known game called Command & Conquer – Sole Survivor, where players are divided randomly into 2 sides, and each given a random unit from the C&C game, so you could easily end up with a Buggy vs a Mammoth Tank.

Or a bit like Majesty, an RTS game from back then where you trained heroes to fight and protect you, but had no direct control over them, and had to put out bounties to motivate them to do tasks for you, and then try to regain as much of as you can on taxes on blacksmiths and potion vendors etc.

Basically, WvW is like a strategy game, where you have RANDOM units of RANDOM quality, that does their own RANDOM thing. And no amount of changing the basic system to resemble a more traditional RTS game is going to change that, because it affects the most crucial part of RTS design, the unit.

But WvW is like a larger more complex Stronghold. You kill guards, you break gates, you kill more guards, you kill the lord, and capture the point.

sgeisi.5981:

Way back when WvW was first announced I imagined it being more of an RTS style game mode. Like Age of Empires. It didn’t really turn out to be that at all though, it’s more just a zerg fest, run in circles and flip camps/towers as fast as you can just to have them get flipped back over to the other team, rinse and repeat. Which I’m sure it works for a lot of people, but it really just isn’t fun to me. I feel like I have no impact on anything, I’m just another dot in the blob.

So yesterday I started to wonder, would it work for WvW if it was more like Stronghold. The foundation to make something like this work is already in the game. And even though it may be too far gone to overhaul WvW to work this way, I thought it was an interesting idea anyway.
_________________________________________________________

So what if it was essentially a week long Stronghold PvP match (or whatever length of time works). At the start of the match everyone has their borderlands which is your castle/lord room that starts from almost nothing but a basic camp site or whatever. It starts at level 0. From there, the players are the starting workers and they need to rush out into the maps to find resources like food, wood, stone, and metal which need to be returned back to your base. This already exists in game with gathering tools.

As you obtain resources you can start upgrading your borderlands, adding new buildings and troops to make your borderlands stronger. This could work on a passive pre-determined system, or a majority voting system to decide which upgrades you want to go for. Maybe you want to add a blacksmith to get cannons built on your walls, or maybe you want to add an archery training area to produce archers that will patrol the area.

Upgrading your borderlands to have camps will allow you to get supplies faster by having closer locations to drop supplies off at, while the other skritt and ogre type camps can give you other bonuses like extra defenses, tunneling systems to travel through, or scavengers that will collect resources for you. But you have to maintain those relationships to have access to them by sharing your resources with them.

The main goal it to build up a strong base to protect your lord. But you also need to protect your other buildings because if they get destroyed by the enemy they need to be rebuilt which will cost resources. And those building are necessary for keeping your borderlands strong.

Killing an enemy lord would knock that borderlands out of the match, and obviously the last one standing is the winner. If knocking a team out of a match isn’t something that sounds like a good idea, maybe you just gain some extra War Score and then the lord respawns with RI so he can’t be killed again for X amount of time.

Which bring me to the next way to win. As you start to obtain upgrades, kill enemy players and or sabotage enemy buildings, you gain War Score. This is pretty much the same thing it is now, just an overall score of everything you’ve done. But you can also use this score to go for an economic win and avoid having to kill an enemy lord, which is essentially the more defensive style but generally takes more effort because you need to obtain more upgrades to earn more score. This score also acts as the tie breaker in a situation where no enemy lord has been killed.

Anyway, that’s the gist of it. Build a strong borderlands, attempt to break into the enemy castle and kill their lord. Just like Stronghold, but on a larger scale.

I feel like this is what WvW should have always been. What does everyone else think?

Well, you imagined wrong, and that’s the problem…

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/World_versus_World

Under “Trivia”…

“The inspiration for World versus World came from Dark Age of Camelot’s realm vs. realm battles.”

… Seriously, if you peeps can’t handle massive amounts of players in a game mode specifically designed as an “open world” pvp sandbox experience, with hundreds of players battling it out, then please venture to structured pvp. Stop trying to change WvW into something that it’s not designed to be.

Please read…

“World versus World (also known as WvW) is a Player versus Player game mode where players from three different servers, or worlds, battle in the Mists. It features open-world combat on five large maps with up to several hundreds of players per map. In World versus World, players can besiege objectives such as Keeps and Towers with siege weapons, and battle over resources, to win rewards for their world and World Experience for themselves.”

Watch the video…

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dnOhMeYxhRM

Dawdler.8521:

sgeisi.5981:

Killing an enemy lord would knock that borderlands out of the match

So uh… a server just rush the lord on reset, then you got 7 days of 200 man queues to EB?

No, it would not be that simple. Obviously. That’s why Righteous Indignation exists in the game, to control when you can and can’t attack. If they had it at reset for the first 24h or however long, you would have no reason to rush over to other borderlands except to take resources.

If you’ve ever played Age of Empires, something you could do was scout out near the enemy base for their resources nodes and deplete those ones first so the enemy team had to go further to find more.

Sviel.7493:

This sounds less like a battle between players and more like a competition to PvE harder than the other server. It would also be wrecked by coverage gaps.

That said, I don’t want to brush off your feelings of not having any impact. It’s certainly true that a single body in a zerg is just another foot to trample with. Smaller groups (~20) can benefit from strong individual members, but it goes haywire after that.

Personally, I never run with a zerg anymore. We may meet up for a common goal, but I try to stay on the opposite side of the map to ensure that we have eyes everywhere. It’s very easy for me to see the impact I have because things don’t flip when I call them out or drive off enemies.

I think the RTS side of WvW is there to be had, but you’ll have to leave the zerg to find it.

Well isn’t that what WvW is? A mixture of PvE and PvP? The majority of the game mode is killing NPC’s until the zergs run into eachother which. I just think there is room to make it more engaging, that isn’t just running in circles continuously flipping building over and over.

And to your other point, there are ways for smaller groups to do things, true. But that’s also partly an issue. The fact that a group of 6-10 people can easily take a tower alone shows those towers aren’t very secure.

Taking towers should be a well planned event that should require slightly more than a roaming party. While something running resources, scouting/patrolling areas and defending buildings from the enemy team should be something more fit for smaller parties.

I think this idea has merit but does need an answer to the reset night lord rush which is guaranteed to be a problem every reset.

No, knocking out the server for the match isn’t going to be viable, but you can treat it like a football goal. The field resets but the score has changed.

I’d certainly play that, but it is vulnerable to the same population issues as the existing WvW so I’m not sure it’s solved much yet.

Odokuro.5049:

But WvW is like a larger more complex Stronghold. You kill guards, you break gates, you kill more guards, you kill the lord, and capture the point.

It is. But the way it is now, it’s literally just running in circles flipping buildings. I’m saying it should be more involved, work to get those building built and make them mean something. And give the match some kind of end game. Killing lords in towers now is basically the same as what I’m saying, but it should have more meaning than just “Oh we lost the tower, guess we have to come back in a few minutes to take it back.”

Ben K.6238:

I think this idea has merit but does need an answer to the reset night lord rush which is guaranteed to be a problem every reset.

No, knocking out the server for the match isn’t going to be viable, but you can treat it like a football goal. The field resets but the score has changed.

I’d certainly play that, but it is vulnerable to the same population issues as the existing WvW so I’m not sure it’s solved much yet.

Yeah that’s true, like I said it was just basic idea of what it could be. It would obviously need to be worked out how to deal with the whole time issue. I just think there is way more potential for WvW. I know the way it works now might satisfy a lot of people. But for me, it’s just not very involved and doesn’t encourage small groups or even solo play.

Sure you can roam around scoring kills, but the people doing that are essentially just trying to work their PvP skills outside of the actual PvP mode. They’re not there so much to actually get their server to win. So I think there is room to improve on that and give people who actually enjoy that type of play a reason to do so. Eliminating enemy players or destroying camps actually has an impact.

I like the idea, but I was thinking more like instead of rushing the lord right away (which people will try to do if that is the main objective to win the map), the lord wouldn’t be available to get attacked until all keeps and towers have been claimed by the enemy team. And so keeps and towers wouldn’t be available to get taken back by the home server right away as to not stall the enemy so soon from getting to it’s main goal.

This will probably (hopefully) encourage zergs to split up and attack several sites at the same time, leaving no choice for the home team but to split up as well and defend their bases.

Once all sites have been claimed by invaders, they will have their chance at the lord. Meanwhile, a timer would be set until a keep and tower can be re-claimed again by the home team, and it could be sped up a bit by feeding it supplies and such. Keeps and towers should have different timers on them too, as one is easier to take than the other. This way, the enemy will have to seriously take a strategic approach on how to take the lord in a matter of time, and with little stalling from the defending server.

So now you have 2 servers going against 1 server, the home server has no chance right? Well it’s suppose to be harder to defend, plus it’s not the main goal for the home server to occupy ALL sites, but to defend where it’s possible and stall where they can once a site is available to get re-claimed. And after a certain amount of time, if the invaders can’t take the lord, the home team earns massive bonus points and a victory.

And just so it is clear, if it’s not obvious, when the home server re-claims a site, the lord is off limits until the invaders can take it back again.

sgeisi.5981:

Yeah that’s true, like I said it was just basic idea of what it could be. It would obviously need to be worked out how to deal with the whole time issue. I just think there is way more potential for WvW. I know the way it works now might satisfy a lot of people. But for me, it’s just not very involved and doesn’t encourage small groups or even solo play.

Sure you can roam around scoring kills, but the people doing that are essentially just trying to work their PvP skills outside of the actual PvP mode. They’re not there so much to actually get their server to win. So I think there is room to improve on that and give people who actually enjoy that type of play a reason to do so. Eliminating enemy players or destroying camps actually has an impact.

Preaching to the choir there! I think if you had server leaderboards for who’d contributed most in a certain area each week, with bonus rewards associated, there’d be a bit more interest in it. Unfortunately you can’t reward too much on whether the server wins, as most players have no agency over that outcome.

sgeisi.5981:

Odokuro.5049:

But WvW is like a larger more complex Stronghold. You kill guards, you break gates, you kill more guards, you kill the lord, and capture the point.

It is. But the way it is now, it’s literally just running in circles flipping buildings. I’m saying it should be more involved, work to get those building built and make them mean something. And give the match some kind of end game. Killing lords in towers now is basically the same as what I’m saying, but it should have more meaning than just “Oh we lost the tower, guess we have to come back in a few minutes to take it back.”

But you do work on getting those buildings built, by escorting dolyaks and keep captured supply camps yours (Your server’s.) WvW really isn’t meant to have an, “End-game”, it’s an open-world pvp with capturable objectives, and in a sense, to people who enjoy it, WvW is the End-game to them, a lot like Fractals and Raids are to others. It’s meaning is to see which server works the hardest during the week, scores the best, and comes out on top. If you over-simplify things with, “Oh we lost the tower, guess we have to come back in a few minutes to take it back.” anything would lose meaning, because of boredom and lack of things to keep busy.

sgeisi.5981:

Sviel.7493:

This sounds less like a battle between players and more like a competition to PvE harder than the other server. It would also be wrecked by coverage gaps.

That said, I don’t want to brush off your feelings of not having any impact. It’s certainly true that a single body in a zerg is just another foot to trample with. Smaller groups (~20) can benefit from strong individual members, but it goes haywire after that.

Personally, I never run with a zerg anymore. We may meet up for a common goal, but I try to stay on the opposite side of the map to ensure that we have eyes everywhere. It’s very easy for me to see the impact I have because things don’t flip when I call them out or drive off enemies.

I think the RTS side of WvW is there to be had, but you’ll have to leave the zerg to find it.

Well isn’t that what WvW is? A mixture of PvE and PvP? The majority of the game mode is killing NPC’s until the zergs run into eachother

And this is why the mode is effectively dead.

In its prime, barely anyone played to PvE. A lot of the HoT maps and so on are mixed elements of PvP and PvE. For many, there is still far too much PvE in WvW, and many more have left because of it.

If there weren’t mechanical implications and justifications for keeping a lot of the PvE elements in WvW (basically just “timers” as lord health pools and so on), I think most WvW players would be supportive of removing the PvE elements altogether.

Or, rather, former WvW players. I don’t know anyone who took it seriously when the format was good that still plays the game.