Hello, I’d like to give a quick introduction to illustrate my position on this “faction” talk that has been floating around.
I haven’t been playing since headstart but I’ve probably logged more hours in 2 years than a lot of the people that have been playing for longer (due to my health/living conditions). WvW is almost literally all I do in Gw2. Of course I’ve explored other areas and for a brief time after HoT I was doing a lot of PvE but WvW has always been my main focus. I’ve been on roughly 12 servers between EU and NA, I’ve commanded plenty (albeit most of it being in EotM), have been a big time solo roamer for ages up until recently when I just kind of got tired of it; basically I’ve done all WvW has to offer and then some.
I’m still not tired of it. I still play WvW every day and I still feel like it’s alive and well despite all the cries of a “dead game mode.”
I’m still not tired of it because of community and pride. I’m not certain how factions would change the game but I do know that any degree of pride I’d have for my own faction would be a lot more watered down version of what I currently have for my home server. Your server is like a neighborhood or a village; you become familiar with people and it starts to feel like a home. You can even go there just to strike up random conversation because you feel comfortable enough with your servermates that the conversation will carry. Or you recognize offending server mates while roaming/zerging and know what they’re like as a player from intimate battles. It gives WvW a special feeling of home/familiarity that I think keeps a lot of us playing despite feeling like it’s a neglected area of the game.
I love to go to EotM to relax sometimes because it feels less strenuous. It’s like a WvW playground for newbies and PUGs that might one day relieve themselves of their training wheels to discover “true” WvW. That’s all fine and good but it also has a feeling of anonymity. I don’t often recognize names that I see there and I don’t really feel like I’m fighting for anything. It’s just red versus blue versus green. I’m not going to have any type of competitive hatred for these colours because one week I might be fighting someone and the next they might be my allies. In real WvW, that never happens and that’s why you develop a competitive distaste for certain servers.
To some, it might sound like a negative side effect that could be remedied with the anonymity of mega-server WvW but it’s really not a bad thing. It just gives you a type of pseudo-patriotism that makes you feel like your server is worth fighting for to beat up those guys. Those bad guys you just oh-so wish to see defeated that mega-server WvW like EotM doesn’t accomplish.
If they pack everyone on to one server, like for example, shove a bunch of people on to JQ that stay JQ but changes colours every week, then that wouldn’t be quite so bad albeit confusing with how many players there would be. But if people aren’t really on a server, they’re just rotating out every week like EotM then it loses a lot of that special community feeling that servers provide.
I understand the idea that those of us on lower population servers should move up but I hope others understand the idea that not all of us care to move up. We love our server and our friends there too much to care that we’re low pop. Of course if factions become a thing we can still talk to our friends but one week they might be our buddies, the next we might be fighting them and personally I’m not cool with that…
So I don’t know about everyone else but if factions become a thing it may very well be the straw that broke the horses back… I’ve weathered a lot of things through out my days in WvW and this isn’t one of those things I’d be willing to weather.
See memories of good and bad times attached below:
1) Golem rush week on Crystal Desert, #winning
2) Siege trolled on Ferguson’s Crossing.
3) The one time we managed to pull that kind of PPT against Dragonbrand!
4) 25 PPT during Isle Of Janthir’s downfall against Fort Aspenwood. I sieged a camp and held my ground for 4 hours.
5) Going ham on Desolation EU – everyone put a commander tag up just for lolz and we rolled all of EBG (back before coloured tags).
Champion: Phantom, Hunter, Legionnaire, Genius
WvW rank: Diamond Colonel | Maguuma