Guild Wars 2

This is a plea to anet to say/do something to show their commitment to WvW. The player base is steadily bleeding out, and most of this stems from the fact that there has been almost 0 support and new content for WvW since the release of the game.

Edge of the Mists does not count as new WvW content. If anything, EotM is now part of the problem. It pulls bodies away from WvW and sends them off on a happy little endless karma train, running around in circles to capture objectives that don’t matter. Back in the days when WvW was still going strong, this might have been a good thing — filtering out the people who just want easy karma so the WvW-dedicated guilds could get their players in. However now, at a time when we are desperate just to have enough warm bodies on the field to keep WvW viable as a game format, it is not positive in the least.

The few updates to the WvW abilities have been nice, but not enough on their own to really entice people to keep playing.

Seasons I and II were like rough bandaids that staunched the bleeding for a little bit, but the made it even worse again after they were ripped off and people realized they were just chasing after an imaginary reward.

WvW rewards still suck overall compared to every other part of the game, and the only reason why people keep playing today is because they enjoy the competition and/or still feel some semblance of loyalty to their server and the other people that they enjoy playing with.

All it would take is a little hope to give people a reason to stick around and see what happens next. It wouldn’t take all that much effort and failure to lend support at this stage in the game will be as good as officially putting a stamp on the game that anet no longer cares about the future of WvW.

Oh, but they ARE committed to WvW! You* paid your gems for a transfer to another server, right? Keep doing that, and they will remain as committed to creating valueless digital shinies to chase which results in server stacking, population imbalances, server implosion, and the destruction of WvW communities as they’ve ever been.

/sarcasm

* “You” in this context is the 3rd person plural version of the pronoun and is not to be construed as being directed at the OP.

No doubt server transfers have been part of the issue. However, the fact that they failed to pull the plug on transfers within a reasonable time frame means that it essentially became an ingrained part of the game.

More often than not, people are rewarded for jumping ship and those who try to remain loyal to one server are punished.

Still, I would rather not make this another thread about server transfers. That topic really deserves its own dedicated discussion (even though I really don’t think anything can be done about it at this point.)

What I would really like to see is just some legit reason for people to have hope about the future of WvW.

Unfortunately it seems many people are just starting to get bored. The only way ANET can remedy that is to mix things up so that the competition has more variety in it—right now it’s stale. I don’t think it is necessarily a “content” issue as much as it is a variety issue. Variety in the match-up won’t mean anything if they don’t deal with the massive population imbalance first (or in tandem).

Essentially, there are two things that need to happen in order to rejuvenate wvw: 1) they need to find a way to make the match-ups competitive for each server—primarily a population/player base issue. 2) they have to figure out how to bring variety to the competition—this means a full re-work of the match-up system and ranking system.

Again, adding variety to the match-ups won’t accomplish anything if they can’t balance the populations first though (what good is a JQ vs. FA match-up with the populations the way they are). I don’t have any great ideas for how to balance populations but ANET has some creative minds working over there—they should be able to figure it out.

WvW has a smaller player base than PvE → less resources allocated to WvW development → WvW player base shrinks further → lol

nobody cares about wvw but the players, when patience finally runs out anet can finally abandon this game mode officially and focus on pve and E-Sports™ like they’ve always wanted to but never could publicly admit

Yeah, we need a spark, but not of hope but the precursor one… These 1000g would be welcome.

/endjoke

What could be added would be a point system for kills that the points can be spent for better gear for WVW. WVW can get costly and pricey to compete with the costs of upgrades siege and food and gear on top of it. And having some really nice looking powerful gear that must be earned through kills in WVW would help mix it up between PPT and actual fighting.

WVW is very repetitive. Take tower/keep. If its close to your keep you try to upgrade it. If not you hit it and move to the next. And your server is rewarded based on the PPT. Yet that is it. Bragging rights more or less. You do better taking keeps camps and towers then actually fighting the enemy. Only reason to fight the enemy is to run them off your place or to kill them to be able to take their place.

A system that rewards players for their individual roles and what they do in WVW would be nice. A certain amount of points guarding a place. Some points for guarding camps. Some points for protecting yaks. And points for killing players and flipping mobs. Add this on top of the WVW PPT system. This would give some more goals and some thing to work towards. And may draw in some non WVWers to at least earn some of these cool rewards helping to bring in more people. That be my suggestion to help revitalize it more.

ykyk.2740:

WvW has a smaller player base than PvE -> less resources allocated to WvW development -> WvW player base shrinks further -> lol

nobody cares about wvw but the players, when patience finally runs out anet can finally abandon this game mode officially and focus on pve and E-Sports™ like they’ve always wanted to but never could publicly admit

That line of thinking doesn’t work. Spvp has less players than WvW, and all the balance patches are practically determined by it. :/

You said it yourself. Anet no longer cares about the future of WvW.
WvW has to compete with spvp for developer attention (same devs for both game modes) and there’s no way in hell anet is letting go of their poster child sunken ship known as spvp.

RyuDragnier.9476:

ykyk.2740:

WvW has a smaller player base than PvE -> less resources allocated to WvW development -> WvW player base shrinks further -> lol

nobody cares about wvw but the players, when patience finally runs out anet can finally abandon this game mode officially and focus on pve and E-Sports™ like they’ve always wanted to but never could publicly admit

That line of thinking doesn’t work. Spvp has less players than WvW, and all the balance patches are practically determined by it. :/

But spvp is E-Sports™

The problem with varying the match-ups is that it leads to un-balanced matches. While this can be nice, in some cases, simply for the sake of variety and those who want to map or whatever, it leads to even greater boredom amongst those who honestly want to fight. The WvW core from the winning server get bored from lack of competition.

More so than being tired of stale match-ups, I think that people are tired of following the same mechanics over and over again — capturing the same supply camps, assaulting the same keep/tower, and defending the same points. This is what has driven people to seek out open field combat and GvG, or else seek out other games to try.

It should be news to no one that WvW as it currently stands is not in a very healthy position. The only solution I can see is addition of new content, whatever form it may take: new maps, game mechanics, abilities, siege, whatever. And a commitment to regular updates at periodic intervals.

The thing is current e-sports is all about 2 small 5-man teams fighting each other.

Anet could have changed this with 3 teams of 100 all fighting each other in a huge map!
A spectator mode for WvW would be fun to see.

And didnt a small WvW/GvG team beat the puppies out of a “well-known” spvp team a while back?

I think some simple rewards would go along way, towards bringing folks back. Gold rewards for players who have actively participated in wvw at the end of each week, 1g 50s for a win, 1g for 2nd place and 50s for 3rd and possibly a roll for ascended items or rare skins tied to wvw rank, similar to fotm ring rolls. While its not much (a couple hours of dungeons would make more) that might be enough to encourage players to push for their server each week.

Lurock Turoth.9085:

Gold rewards for players who have actively participated in wvw at the end of each week, 1g 50s for a win, 1g for 2nd place and 50s for 3rd

Wow, 1.5g a week you say. Some PvE players make that yawning in a dungeon for 5 minutes!

Multiply that by 100 and then we’d get somewhere closer to the amount of effort some of us put into WvW.

Do you honestly think they would ever give you much more than that? given that they have refused to give any kind of truly good rewards for seasons.

I don’t think it would have been out of line to make the mist forged heroes weapons ascended, given the amount of time many of us put into the season, but…ya….its anet were talking about.

I got more loot drops in playing the 1 hr LS and new area than I made all last week in WvW.

CyRuS.6915:

Essentially, there are two things that need to happen in order to rejuvenate wvw: 1) they need to find a way to make the match-ups competitive for each server—primarily a population/player base issue. 2) they have to figure out how to bring variety to the competition—this means a full re-work of the match-up system and ranking system.

Those are mutually exclusive goals. You can’t have variety and always have balanced matches.

Balanced matches are always going to be against the servers that are closest to you, which means the same servers all the time unless a lot of guilds suddenly move to or leave one of them.

So, what anet has done … and I think this is quite clever … is split WvW into in-season and off-season.

In-season we get variety, this is when you get a chance to fight against the servers that are usually in the tier above or the tier below.

Off-season we get the generally static, as balanced-as-it’s-gonna-get matches.

There is nothing anet can do to evenly distribute the player base across all the servers. The best they can do is what they’re doing, make it tricky/expensive to transfer to the higher tiers. It’s human nature to clump up. From server selection, to actual gameplay it’s just the way it’s going to work out.

Nabrok.9023:

CyRuS.6915:

Essentially, there are two things that need to happen in order to rejuvenate wvw: 1) they need to find a way to make the match-ups competitive for each server—primarily a population/player base issue. 2) they have to figure out how to bring variety to the competition—this means a full re-work of the match-up system and ranking system.

Those are mutually exclusive goals. You can’t have variety and always have balanced matches.

Balanced matches are always going to be against the servers that are closest to you, which means the same servers all the time unless a lot of guilds suddenly move to or leave one of them.

So, what anet has done … and I think this is quite clever … is split WvW into in-season and off-season.

In-season we get variety, this is when you get a chance to fight against the servers that are usually in the tier above or the tier below.

Off-season we get the generally static, as balanced-as-it’s-gonna-get matches.

There is nothing anet can do to evenly distribute the player base across all the servers. The best they can do is what they’re doing, make it tricky/expensive to transfer to the higher tiers. It’s human nature to clump up. From server selection, to actual gameplay it’s just the way it’s going to work out.

I am going to have to respectfully disagree with your contention that these are mutually exclusive goals. They are mutually exclusive the way things are now but the point was to change the way things are now—think outside the box man.

I also respectfully disagree with your contention that there is nothing anet can do to balance out the populations. I believe it most definitely can be done (though perhaps not without upsetting some of the player base in the short run).

Please just let WvW die in peace.

This hasn’t worked 2 years ago, 1 year ago, and it won’t work now, GW2 is a PvE game and the rest is just eye candy.

Personally I never had any real serious problem with WvW when it was lively and active. It has become a tad bit repetitive and that is my most serious complaint.

However, now I see guilds, friends, and acquaintances from all different servers dropping out of WvW and out of the game at a record pace. Unless this is part of the long-term plan that Anet has for WvW then they need to do something to right this ship, and do it quickly.

Karuna.1357:

Personally I never had any real serious problem with WvW when it was lively and active. It has become a tad bit repetitive and that is my most serious complaint.

However, now I see guilds, friends, and acquaintances from all different servers dropping out of WvW and out of the game at a record pace. Unless this is part of the long-term plan that Anet has for WvW then they need to do something to right this ship, and do it quickly.

Agree

80% of the threads on this board are about people asking Anet to just “do something for WvW”… We certainly need some hope because things won’t get better for WvW as PvE content keeps getting released and some servers lose the little players they had.

WvW isn’t dying out due to no new content. It’s dying out because people are getting tired of the unbalanced matches and getting their butts handed to them in a sling week after week. If there is nothing done to allow the servers to be matched up on a more balanced scale, WvW will continue to crumble and fall.

Add ability to become a traitor and attack ppl on your own server. V gud suggestion. ty, I want to kill ppl on my own server plz

i have hope , but i can not play with “it” . can someone help me ?

stale maps and population wins are the two problems. If they changed up the maps (we know it’s possible, they pumped out EoTM) and revamped how wvw works in terms of points then it would maybe have some hope. Right it’s just stale matchups week in and week out, same maps, same bases, same siege placement, zerg servers blowing out lower pop servers, etc. etc. They really should focus more on WvW because considering the current state of PvE, WvW is the end game.

Our small guild is all but dead. Only three of us play and we do so pretty sparingly. I still manage to log in to do my dailies but rarely stay more than is necessary to put 10 enemies in a pine box.

Stale game play, no new significant features in a while, virtually unchanged game play since release and a slew of minor issues that have not been addressed. I got my monies worth out of the game and then some. Now I have moved onto LFD2, Payday 2 and a few other co-op games.

For me even as stale as WvW can get, if you are chasing some esports then it’s your own fault instead of focusing on finding good fights, progressing and having fun among your community/guild.

If we got to fight Servers other than SFR as much as we all expected it to happen, and I don’t mean in the sense that we like the chance to steamroll lower coverage servers in terms of PPT.
My Guild which is far from being hardcore wants to find fights against even-ish numbers to progress ourselves along with the more hardcore ones, but all we face most of the time is blobs.

I know that sounds ‘Pot kettle black’ because we Deso blob ourselves, you have to understand that the only reason I and many others play is among our Community and with our Guildies.

Karuna.1357:

Personally I never had any real serious problem with WvW when it was lively and active. It has become a tad bit repetitive and that is my most serious complaint.

However, now I see guilds, friends, and acquaintances from all different servers dropping out of WvW and out of the game at a record pace. Unless this is part of the long-term plan that Anet has for WvW then they need to do something to right this ship, and do it quickly.

I 100% agree. I wish we as a player base had not spent the last 2 years playing the boys who cried wolf. Our season 2 rewards were a week late, and the players on the forums freaked out like Anet had committed a felony and should be brought to justice. Every single slight, real or imaginary, has been blown out of proportion to the 100th degree on these forums for nearly 2 years.

Now here we are screaming and yelling that the WvW community is dying at an exponentially growing rate. But nobody will hear us. Cause we’ve spent the last 2 years complaining about anything and everything, but most of the time about absolutely nothing.

I sincerely hope the people at Anet have ways to discover WvW’s deterioration on their own. Cause I wouldn’t expect them to rise to action from the most recent in our never ending line of complaints.

what? no. it took weeks with poor communication, and if you don’t give these people hell then they won’t give you anything. We’ve offered reasonable discussion of issues for years and what sort of response have we gotten? unless you are confusing us with the BLTC/LS forums

I’m sure they’re working on it

I still think the solution could be to limit the population of all servers in a BL to the same number as the lowest population server at any given time. This way the maps will always be relatively even in numbers and there will be no reason to server hop because you’ll only fit as many people in a BL as the lowest population server at the time. Better yet, it will work in any tier at all times and isn’t technologically complicated or expensive to do.

EotM is a great map but from a game production stand point that has to be the most expensive and time consuming answer to map queues I’ve ever seen.

The real solution is more drastic. They have to get rid of Server based WvW and make it Guild based.

Guilds join an alliances, you have several version of each maps (we could call them campains 1-2-3-4 etc…) to account for the global WvW population. Specific guilds could join a specific campaign, and eventually change campaign for an amount of guild points if they wish. Along with this you have a Guild ranking/ladder system, Guild Halls and GvG maps (along with alternating GvG and WvW tournaments).

Then you have Guild Wars 2 as it should always have been.

Xilllix, that’s a complicated and expensive procedure. We have to keep the solution within certain feasible expectations I think.

Quells.2498:

Xilllix, that’s a complicated and expensive procedure. We have to keep the solution within certain feasible expectations I think.

They could start by just scraping the current Server based WvW and replacing it with a Guild based WvW that has a ladder system…

Personally, I think if they do away with server-based WvW it will be the last nail in the coffin and the remaining dedicated WvW guilds will end up jumping ship.

As tenuous as it is (especially with the damage done by the megaserver implementation) a server still gives people a sense of identity and community — something fight for and defend in other words.

If it all gets divided up into arbitrary colors or alliances then all you will have is an extended version of Edge of the Mists.

I’m not against having a ladder for guilds, in fact that would be a great thing . . . but that would be GvG really and not WvW.

Karuna.1357:

Personally, I think if they do away with server-based WvW it will be the last nail in the coffin and the remaining dedicated WvW guilds will end up jumping ship.

As tenuous as it is (especially with the damage done by the megaserver implementation) a server still gives people a sense of identity and community — something fight for and defend in other words.

If it all gets divided up into arbitrary colors or alliances then all you will have is an extended version of Edge of the Mists.

I’m not against having a ladder for guilds, in fact that would be a great thing . . . but that would be GvG really and not WvW.

I don’t think so, all the serious guilds are waiting for it. Everyone has transferred so many times that nobody cares about the servers, it’s all virtual anyway. Specially now with Megaservers for PvE it doesn’t mean anything. We’re not proposing arbitrary colours like EOTM, that was very badly implemented. What we are proposing instead is a guild-based system of alliances. It could originate from regions of the PvE World thus populating the empty cities and creating an even stronger sense of community.

There is much potential in that idea, much more than with the current broken server system.

See my post:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Here-s-how-to-fix-WvW/first#post4141404

What’s funny is that everyone (me too) agrees that gw2 isn’t a pvp/wvw game but it’s just a pve game.

And the PVE mode of this game pretty much involves you using the most AoEing weapon set you have and spamming 1 while following random people.