Guild Wars 2

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Firstly, I really enjoy this game. A lot. My characters /age is embarrassingly high, and is without a doubt the primary reason why I am single (Ladies, you know where to find me… and that’s in my room playing GuildWars2 WvW… but seriously, call me). Anyway, as much as I enjoy this game I do feel there are a couple of issues that need to be addressed, especially when it comes to WvW. So being a top bloke and all that I decided I should come on the forums and leave a little feedback for all the various issues that I feel are important to WvW.
Disclaimer: These are only my personal opinions and are therefore subject to being completely subjective and/or wrong. I’ve tried to do my best to remain objective but I have covered a lot and I am sure there’s going to be a lot of controversial opinions in there. Please feel free to rip my ideas to shreds if you disagree.

(Listed in no particular order.)
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Control point upgrading – There’s no safe way to contribute communally. As it stands either an individual must buy the entire upgrade or we must rely on the honour system to help each other. Granted this is not usually an issue for guilds, however it still appears to me to be a less than optimal and completely unnecessary. What I propose is a system where players can contribute as little or as much as they like by visiting the quartermaster for a given control point, and then selecting the upgrade they wish to contribute towards. Once the required coin has been raised any player will then able able to start the upgrade if supply is available. There are three main advantages to this, two for the players, and perhaps another for ArenaNet economists.
1. Players who do not feel they could contribute a large one time payment may now help the war effort with whatever few silvers they have. No doubt this will give them a warm fuzzy feeling.
2. There will be fewer scammers, or at least it will be obvious who is scamming.
3. (This is an assumption) Money will be raised quicker as anyone can contribute and there’s now no awkwardness about asking others for coin. This means that ArenaNet could increase the prices on the control point upgrades without annoying us too much. So there’s room for a larger gold sink here, at least in my opinion.

Keeping on the topic of control point upgrades, would it be possible to add cosmetic upgrades? I mean after all guildwars2 is a game of cosmetics, so why not take it to the logical conclusion and Pimp Our Castles™. I’d love to provide the quartermaster with Badges of Honor so that they could line the walls with the heads of our enemies, paint the walls abyss black, or perhaps raise a giant flag bearing the symbol of my guild in the courtyard.

The last point I’d like to make regarding upgrades is that there’s not yet achievements for contributing. It’s true that we shouldn’t simply being upgrading stuff for achievements, that’s silly, however having an achievement there does give a feeling of progression and long term accomplishment that a lot of players derive pleasure from. It’s also a mechanism that can be used to encourage less generous players to help out with upgrades. Which brings me to my next topic…

Lacklustre Titles and “WvW progression” – So there are WvW achievements, and even a few titles, however I feel this could be improved upon, or even complete overhauled. On the one hand it’s really great that titles are non-trivial to obtain, because if they were trivial then they wouldn’t be very prestigious of course, but on the other hand some of them will take so long to get that they’re essentially meaningless. We will literally be playing Guild Wars 3 before anyone actually gets them. (and yes that is the correct use of literally if this accurate)

I would not like to see these high end super hard titles removed however, but rather have more tiers of titles introduced, similar to the gladiator title system in the original Guild Wars. This way we get a feeling of progression and a way to flaunt our modest deeds. Perhaps these titles could be different colours to help differentiate the easier ones from the super hardcore ones.

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The other thing that really gets my goat about the WvW title system is that even when you do unlock them they’re not actually that swanky, and other players hardly ever notice them anyway, which is totally not cool because I want people to know I am a bad kitten yakslapping WvW champion demigod. Okay, so obviously everyone knows that about me already, I am MajorKong after all, my reputation precedes me, but for mere mortals we’ll still need some sort of system in place for the parading of kittens. As mentioned before I think coloured titles could help alleviate the lacklustre titles somewhat, and that’s fine and all, but maybe we can do even better. Now I’ve got an idea, a controversial one no doubt, but hear me out, yo, because I think this is a good one. Okay, so the first thing we do is get rid of the level display next to our names in WvW, because frankly it’s not very pertinent information. Then what we do is we introduce a prestige system, similar to glory, and we stick the rank associated with that where the level number used to be. You gain “prestige” by completing objectives, capturing keeps and castles, escorting dolyaks, killing players, whatever. It doesn’t do anything. You don’t get stronger the more you prestige up. It’s just a number to give others an indication of how experienced you are at WvW, although it doesn’t have to be a number of course. I’d be totally down if it was a named rank or a icon system like the one that Tribes Ascend has.

Loot Bags – I’m sure this has been said before, but I could hardly create a feedback post without mentioning it. It’s a real pain to run around picking these things up, especially while you’re trying to fight hordes of enemies, and to make matters even worse the loot key is the action key for pretty much everything else too, so you’ll often end up finishing enemies or manning siege equipment accidentally. Arrrgh!!! I know you guys over at ArenaNet are probably fans of B.F. Skinner and all that, but could we please keep the psychological loot bag tricky in PvE. It’s so kitten annoying. Plus new players don’t even realise the bags are dropping at first.

Tip: If you’re having trouble seeing loot bags due to siege try using the equipment from a distance. Make sure to use /sit to make it look as if you’re nonchalantly leaning against something because everyone knows cool guys lean on things. Example: http://i.imgur.com/CYmmU.jpg

Invisible Players – OK, so this is a really big one. I mean if this issue was a character from G.R.R. Martins epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire it would be Gregor ‘The Mountain That Rides’ Clegane. It’s a HUGGEEE deal. Yes, I know it’s something ArenaNet are looking into, and that’s fine, however they’ve really got to get a move on with that, because frankly for a lot of us this makes WvW unplayable, or at the very least a lot less enjoyable than it should be. I’d talk about this a lot more but my therapist has advised me to avoid the topic entirely for my own mental well-being, and there’s already a lot written about over in this thread anyway.

Badges of Honor – Awkward to loot and store. I see little reason why these shouldn’t be a currency like karma or coins. Oh, and dungeon tokens too please!

The Downed State and Rally – I’d love to see dramatic changes to this across all aspects of PvP, and I know that’s something we can debate until the cows come home. If you’re a sceptic please humour me a little while I try and convince you that the current implementation is a complete and utter ball-buster, at least when it comes WvW.

So in WvW we’ll often be having very large encounters. It’s typical to have dozens of players on each side duking it out over various control points. The major issue here is that the greater the number of players we have on either side the easier as it becomes to rally as things are dying left, right, and centre. In fact, it’s not uncommon to get downed and then instantly revive because someone somewhere killed a necromancer pet, or whatever. I mean if you’re playing a minion necromancer you may well be helping the enemy team more than your allies, and that in my opinion is ridiculous. This to me is not an extra layer of strategy, but rather a frustrating feature that’s in dire need of a rework. Throw in a couple of PVE mobs into the mix and we’re essentially playing le cheese mode on who can best exploit the rally system. Essentially if WvW had a themetune it would be Chumbawamba’s 90s anarcho-punk hit “I Get Knocked Down”.

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Self-fulfilling Prophecy – The more a server loses the less people want to play, and conversely the more a server wins the more people want to play. Given that WvW success depends so much on population this is important, especially during off-peak times and on low population servers. Ideally players wouldn’t be so fickle, but you know, we’re a temperamental stubborn lot, and not all that reasonable. So the end result of all this is that it’s very difficult to break out of the losing streak and catch up. Now I understand that ArenaNet can’t patch human nature, but I do think they are doing a couple of things that aren’t helping this situation.

1. Repair costs – If a server is losing hard then they’ll die more. A lot more. So there’s larger repair bills and less incentive to play, which is counterproductive considering a server is often losing because there’s not enough players participating. I am not saying the repair costs should be removed, although I’d be fine if they were, but I would like to see the system tweaked a little bit. Perhaps damage to armour could be reduced when the outmanned buff is present.
2. Orbs of Power – These scale insanely well with vitality (and therefore toughness). So once a team gets their filthy little mitts on a few of these bad boys it’s really an uphill struggle for the other sides. I am of the opinion that they should not give hard stat gains, but rather only contribute victory points, perhaps the same value as a keep (+25 per tick). This way we keep all the good things about the orbs. They’re still worth capturing and defending, They’re still a fun mechanic. But now they longer actively aid landside victories, and hopefully they won’t discourage losing players from joining to quite the same degree that they do currently.
3. Reset time @ 00:00 UTC/GMT – During the early hours of the morning it’s common to have large population imbalances between the worlds. Given that the first few hours of a WvW matching are generally very important it could be more productive to move the reset over to a time when people are playing more. This way we don’t have the team with a large night-time presence having a disproportionate early lead. It’s also really fun to be there for the initial zerg rush, but unfortunately as it’s quite late many players will miss out.
4. Outmanned – I’ve seen some players call this the white flag of surrender. Whether it puts players off or encourages them I don’t know, but what I can say is that if it does encourage participation then it can’t be doing it very effectively. It is however a nice a buff for the night-time botters who hangout at that Minotaur camp!

Squad UI and Commander Icons – When you join a squad it removes all other commander icons from the map. I assume this is a feature intended to prevent members confusing commanders with their own squad commander, however by doing this squad members are put at a disadvantage. In my opinion a far more elegant solution would be to have your squad leader appear in a different colour-blind safe colour, or even have a completely different icon. There’s also no UI showing members but I think that must be a bug.

Supply Indication – It’s awkward to accurately gauge how much supply others have. What I’d like is some sort of graphic next to our name giving a visual indication as to whether we have supply or not. Asking in local chat often falls on deaf ears and although /squadinfo for commanders attempts to do this it’s pretty impractical to use.

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Scaling / Fundamental Design Flaws As I understand it each map is designed to hold 166 players on each side, or something like that depending on who you ask. So that means there’s roughly 500 players at maximum in a given area. If we go over that limit we start to have lengthy queues, and if we have significantly less than the limit we’re left in a barren PvGate wasteland. Unfortunately we have large variations in population numbers due to pesky things like having to sleep and go to work (ugh, being a human sucks). WvW doesn’t really do anything to account for these large population differences at different times of the day. It’s a one size fits all solution and that has lead to all sorts of issues. I believe this will remain a problem for the foreseeable future as any fix will no doubt require a total rework of WvW and I really doubt this is on the table right now. Still it would be nice to see a more dynamic WvW environment that takes into account population numbers and deals with them accordingly.

Duplicate Maps – Duplicated maps are great for balance, but they’re really quite boring too. The names get confused with each other, and personally I don’t feel quite as awesome after holding a keep because I know it’s only one of three identical ones. In my opinion even doing something relatively simple like having different themes for each of the borderlands would help alleviate this a lot. For example we could have one winter world, one summer, and one autumn, or something like that. Anything that makes them distinct from each other really.

Skill Lag – I’ve seen lots of players complaining about it. It’s something I’ve had myself sporadically since release too. Most of the time it’s fine so this isn’t major issue, but still something definitely something that needs to be looked into.

Low level Players – Low level players are often told they are “taking up the slot of a exotic geared level 80”, and in my cases they actually are. This leads to a situation where they are made to feel like they should leave or do less interesting jobs like run supply.

PvE Farming – There’s some really great spots for farming, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, however I do think it’s lead to some unintended consequences. It’s frustrating to those participating actively in WvW to see players essentially playing PvE content ignoring the objectives, especially if these players are on in a period where there’s a queue. It’s also common to see botters killing Centaurs at the top right of borderlands and Krait in Quaggan’s lake.

Exploits/Hacks – There’s a lot of hacks going around at the moment. Obviously these need to be fixed as soon as possible because it completely undermines WvW. It goes without saying that if the problem persists WvW will start to die. Another worrying issue is that the hackers are simply not getting banned. Does this mean NCSoft support (or whoever it is that handles bans) are understaffed, what’s up?

Server Transfers – It’s great that we can transfer servers for free whenever we like, however there are some consequences for WvW that haven’t really been dealt with. There’s this tendency for players to jump ship if their teams losing, which no doubt exacerbates any issues WvW server matchings already have in terms of balance and queue times. There’s also been incidents where players have swapped servers to simply grief or give their “home server” an advantage, such as massing useless siege to burn supplies or spying on player movements.

A lot of people on the forums have been calling for paid transfers, but I think that’s totally overkill. I don’t know about you guys but I don’t like microtransactions, and it seems to me this problem could just as easily be solved by limiting a players access to WvW for a small period of time after they transfer. i.e. a few days or until the next WvW matching.

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Eternal Battleground Puzzle Blocking – This is a PvP area so we should expect to get blocked, murdered, and molested at every turn. That’s all part of the experience, and that’s what makes it so fun. That said, being completely blocked with no way to counter the blockers is not at all fun. For example if I were to set up my arrow carts and ballista in savvy locations then it’s unlikely enemies will be able to counter me, regardless of their skill, numbers, or resources. This leads to a situation in certain areas where it’s less about trying to counter the blockers and more about trying to dupe the in-combat slow while the blockers autocast spells/siege. That in my opinion is not a fulfilling experience.

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If you read all of that I applaud you. I wrote a little more than I was planning too and I literally covered every single topic I could think of. It’s getting pretty late now and I think I may have started to ramble towards the end, so apologies for that. Like I said before this is all just my own opinion. Please feel free to be as critical as you like.

No comments. Okay

Most people are vexed to have to read 5 pages worth of stuff if they’re not in school. Indeed, I skimmed it mostly, as well.

In general, many of these are common complaints and Anet is working on them, particularly the obvious need to fix lag, hacks, invisibility, transfers, etc. I even hear that the repair bills are being reworked.

I registered just to approve this thread. This is a fair and respectable view of some wvw issues in a game we love. I had a good laugh comparing wvw to the hit song “I Get Knocked Down”. Would be nice if this got stickied or a Developer took a look at this. Very professional. /Golfclap

It was long, but it was also one of the most enjoyable reads on the forum.

Read it all, outstanding suggestions, hopefully some of these ideas are already in the works. As it stands, WvW is fun, but once the landslide begins, there’s honestly zero point in participating on the losing end. When you’re 50K points in the whole and don’t own a single orb, time to go catch up on Homeland or Fringe.

Very well said!

Thanks for all the feedback everyone. I really appreciate anyone taking the time out of their day to read my ramblings

P.S. Oh Kodash/Seafarers stop hacking mah orbs!

Great Ideas Majork

Good feedback. I especially like the idea of being able to contribute to upgrades.

For pop imbalance I really think tweaking NPC power one way or another and adding more patrols for under pop realms would help a lot.

Also would be nice to have a ETA timer until any upgrade currenty working on finishes

Sniku.6837:

Also would be nice to have a ETA timer until any upgrade currenty working on finishes

Yeah that’s something that’s really needed too. It’s pretty simple yet it actually provides quite a lot of convenience. I’d also like to see number on enemy gates/walls (perhaps toggleable in the options).

Could you reduce it to bullet points? I think that would help your cause immensely.

Narcosis.3812:

Could you reduce it to bullet points? I think that would help your cause immensely.

Yeah I’ll do that in a moment. Probably a good idea given that a lot of people don’t have the time or the willpower to read a relatively large post like that. I actually tried to be concise believe or not

Edit:
Control point upgrading – Needs to be more communal.
Lacklustre Titles and “WvW progression" – We need better mechanisms for this.
Loot Bags – Annoying system.
Invisible Players – Ruining WvW for a lot of players.
Badges of Honor – Should be a currency like gold or karma.
The Downed State and Rally – Needs a rethink. Necromancer pets shouldn’t be rezzing entire swathes of people.
Self-fulfilling Prophecy- The more you lose the more you lose, and the harder it is to come back. We can’t expect ArenaNet to patch human nature but there are a couple of things that I think they are doing which make it worse.
Squad UI and Commander Icons – Needs polish and a few convenience improvements,
Supply Indication – Would be cool.
Scaling / Fundamental Design Flaws – The game is designed for X amount of players but we often have more than X and less than X depending on the time of day etc
Duplicate Maps – Good for balance but boring.
Skill Lag – Something a minority of players get sporadically. Happens at a greater frequency in WvW it seems.
Low level Players – Made to feel like they should leave or do boring tasks like run supply, especially if there’s a queue.
PvE Farming – Frustrating for players participating in WvW to see others essentially playing PvE content and ignoring the objectives.
Exploits/Hacks – Undermines everything. Needs a fix A.S.A.P or some band-aid fixes until it’s sorted out properly.
Eternal Battleground Puzzle Blocking – Killing other players in here is fun, that’s all part of the charm, however if you can block others completely without counter then it’s less about trying to counter the blockers and more about trying to dupe the in-combat slow while the blockers autocast spells/siege.

nice feedback...

One of the main points of contention for me is the outmanned buff.... This buff contrary to popular or unpopular beleif does nothing to help the team that is outmanned in any way... all it does is give a boost to karma xp gain... This needs reworking imo.. At the moment alll this buff is doing is helping botters.

Fantastic post buddy, hope that Anet reads it, so much stuff hitting the nail on the head!

Jezath.7395:

nice feedback…

One of the main points of contention for me is the outmanned buff…. This buff contrary to popular or unpopular beleif does nothing to help the team that is outmanned in any way… all it does is give a boost to karma xp gain… This needs reworking imo.. At the moment alll this buff is doing is helping botters.

Well, maybe. I’ve been thinking about potential solutions for this and I haven’t come up with anything satisfactory. It’s easy enough to say that outmanned should do something to increase combat effectiveness, such as increasing health or damage, however some may argue that this rewards losing, leads to cheesy victories, and does little to stop the defeatist attitude of people quit upon seeing the buff.

In my opinion the following two criteria need to be satisfied:

1) Encourages players to join and stay.
2) Don’t make undermanned players significantly stronger.

Very nice post MajorKong

I really agree with you on pretty much all your points and hope Anet takes your feedback into account.

I would very much like to see more differences between the three borderlands – While Warhammer Online had many issues RvR across the different lakes was at least very different and far more interesting to explore. Your idea of just simply changing the theme to match the seasons would be very simple to implement for example;

Blue World ~ Winter / Ice / Crystal Theme
Red World ~ Summer / Fire / Volcanic Theme
Green World ~ Spring / Water / Storm Theme

Again great post and it would be nice to see an Anet post supporting such feedback

Actually one the face of it Outmanned buff does make sense. When my tiny guild forms a raiding party to hit things we can (camps, flags, dyols, lakes) we look for outmanned buff. Why? Cause if you are smart this is low risk/ high profit activity and outmanned makes it even more profit. Huge problem is that you need to know that it is huge profit.

New players login. Run out. Die. Repeat. Especially if eternal is full (and it’s always full first) and you choose and opposing team area. You see your armour repair bill and you say I can’t afford to play this. Back to PvE! Now many hours later I understand that I was wrong, but for many low pop servers like mine, it’s an issue that the learning curve is so steep in terms of cost. I did it cause I wanted to see what monthly was. It sucked. Now it’s all I do. If we are to keep armour repair cost, as we should, at least maybe have a 5-10 hour grace period for new players.

One other thing I didn’t see you address:
Reward structure is very poor. It favours offense at expense of defence. I know everyone talks about points, but that’s an overreaching goal that’s probably too far removed from an average player. Every soldier wants to win the war, but in an individual battle the goals are rather different. So in our case it’s xp/karma/money/fun per minute in the battle, while hoping you are contributing to the winning side.

So out reward system gives us points only for taking stuff. When everything been secured your rewards stop. Defence usually gives you nothing or very little? Why?

Because you often don’t kill anything. You can hold the gate long enough for them to give up. You can down them enough times without anyone dying and they will back off. Or you could be holding out for the zerg to get there (best option as you will get that one kill to get the bronze at least).

Best option for everyone involved is to pve by first team capping empty towers and camp and moving on and defence recapping 5 minutes later. Everyone gets tons of xp/karma/money and maybe less fun but that’s 3 out of 4.

Now things like keep upgrading and defence are not profitable and are not rewarded at all. You have to do it out of your altruism or some grander desire to give your PvEer some buff or just to have better score. All fine and good but if you gave more incentive for upgrading the keep (you payed money you get a trickle of karma or money or xp so that if the keep staying on your side long enough you get your investment with interest) and incentivise defence by giving constant xp or karma or money trickle so that if i’m sitting on a balista in the middle of the camp for 3 hours and no one wants to take it in the first place I get nothing. Give it a thought. Reward defensive play. Just make sure to reward it in a way that will make people afk in every keep and camp, but to actually be ready and defend (like some damage threshold on enemies to actually cap your reward)

^
some interesting points, thanks. I know what you mean about sitting on a ballista at a supply camp and not getting rewarded (at least in terms of karma, gold, and fun for the person guarding).

Plenty of good recommendations. Nice post.

- Xeeron

“Badges of Honor – Should be a currency like gold or karma.”

This I think should get priority (over some bug fixes). The reward system is inadequate and not very fair. This new currency should reward activity other than just killing (like being a support player – I know, tricky to measure, but something rather than nothing is better).

There are some things that frustrate me and I just wonder if more experienced players feel this way .
I feel like when i go in there anything I do does not feel like an accomplishment as most things you do such as buying seige equipment and spending the time to erect it or upgrade your keep can and is taken so quickly .

I wonder if other players would feel happier if once you upgraded one of your servers structures it stays upgraded and is obviously more valued ,to be defended and to be attacked until the match is reset at the weekly or whatever is decided to be the reset and rematch .?

At least when you purchase upgrades for your structures you can see your contribution every time you enter the zone until reset .
I know passionate players that have spend time and lots of gold striving to fight for there server only to come in the next day and it was all for nothing .

At least if your tower was taken with all your upgrades in place organising and focusing on retaking it would be much more satisfying knowing all your previous hard work is still intact.

Just a thought to give players a feeling of accomplishment even if it is only for a week .
We do not get much feedback from devs so unless any of the above is implemented we will never know what they thought .

Very good post. Great information.. yet another thread I hope ANet is reading and considering.

i can just sign this. All the current problems listed very nice

Overunity.4273:

There are some things that frustrate me and I just wonder if more experienced players feel this way .
I feel like when i go in there anything I do does not feel like an accomplishment as most things you do such as buying seige equipment and spending the time to erect it or upgrade your keep can and is taken so quickly .

I wonder if other players would feel happier if once you upgraded one of your servers structures it stays upgraded and is obviously more valued ,to be defended and to be attacked until the match is reset at the weekly or whatever is decided to be the reset and rematch .?

At least when you purchase upgrades for your structures you can see your contribution every time you enter the zone until reset .
I know passionate players that have spend time and lots of gold striving to fight for there server only to come in the next day and it was all for nothing .

At least if your tower was taken with all your upgrades in place organising and focusing on retaking it would be much more satisfying knowing all your previous hard work is still intact.

Just a thought to give players a feeling of accomplishment even if it is only for a week .
We do not get much feedback from devs so unless any of the above is implemented we will never know what they thought .

Yeah, it wouldn’t have to be anything complicated either. Perhaps the quarter master could shout out the names of the top contributors.

I read the whole post and I have to give you at least 100 internets for not coming off as a a whiner and being very specific!

You pretty much nailed most if not all big WvWvW issue on the head!

Hopefully Anet will resolve these issues, or address them at some point in time. Honestly I don’t even bother logging in much anymore because I fall into the group of people that can only play US prime time and find myself waiting in Q for 30min-1hr+ and let’s be honest I can always find something else to do with my time so I do. I think I would pee with happiness if they would bolster the amount of people that can be in at the same time.

Good post!

Nice post, and accurately addresses a lot of the issues. The game is still young, but I can only hope that they’re working on major fixes before a significant portion of the population decides the game isn’t for them due to the listed issues. Some of the issues seem minor on their own, but they very heavily compound each other when looking at them all, and there are definitely some pretty big design flaws that counter the intent and enjoyment of WvW.

MajorKong.8095:

Jezath.7395:

nice feedback…

One of the main points of contention for me is the outmanned buff…. This buff contrary to popular or unpopular beleif does nothing to help the team that is outmanned in any way… all it does is give a boost to karma xp gain… This needs reworking imo.. At the moment alll this buff is doing is helping botters.

Well, maybe. I’ve been thinking about potential solutions for this and I haven’t come up with anything satisfactory. It’s easy enough to say that outmanned should do something to increase combat effectiveness, such as increasing health or damage, however some may argue that this rewards losing, leads to cheesy victories, and does little to stop the defeatist attitude of people quit upon seeing the buff.

In my opinion the following two criteria need to be satisfied:

1) Encourages players to join and stay.
2) Don’t make undermanned players significantly stronger.

I completely agree with you here, the +karma and +Exp encourage players to join, or at least should imo (but could also encourage players to leave once too many gather, maybe have a timer on it once the population hits a certain number?). Just b/c your undermanned doesn’t mean we need to make them equal with the other two servers. If everything was equal then there would be no reason in the ranking system.

I approve this post once more! Gogo, Mike Ferguson, if you still work for Anet that is…

On the server transfers point, I agree with you that paid transfers would be overkill and with blocking transfers between servers (or just blocking from WvW) that are currently facing off against each other. However there is another issue with free transfers affecting WvW, when you are the top ranked server you are going to get huge numbers of players transferring into your server. For a while this leads to increased dominance for the top server, which now has more players and can cover more hours, but eventually longer and longer queues make it harder to get a group into WvW, which make it harder to get organized group cohesion. To address this I’d like to see transfers (not new players though, just in case people get their friends interested) blocked to the top tier, this should then result in the second tier servers getting more and more competitive as they are the highest server that people can still transfer to, eventually getting enough to come up and kick one of the top tier servers down, unlocking them to new transfers again until they climb back up.

My biggest gripes w/ WvW are:

1. The downed state should not exist in WvW. Repair costs halved or take 75% off.

2. No char progression. Gonna need something to keep ppl playing.

3. No way to identify who just owned you. Names of enemies need to appear in Chat Boxes but not in the health bar area. This will help develop rivalries among the servers, and lets players separate themselves from the lands of the nameless.

Fix those 3 things and you’ll see a more personalization of WvW that’ll make people get even more attached to it. The rest of it I really don’t care about since I’m not a big “FTZERG” player.

There are a significant number of issues with WvW, and most have been addressed. However, one of my biggest problems at this point, which is something that just isn’t going to change because of how the game is designed, is the detachment of WvW from the rest of the game. It’s something I’ve been aware of, but hasn’t really been at the forefront of my opinion of the game. It’s been settling in lately, and I miss PvP aspects being integrated with the rest of the world. I miss random natural PvP and the excitement of knowing you could get jumped at any moment.

Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy GW2, but I can’t help but yearn for the integration of PvP in the natural explorable world. I find myself already looking to future releases of games that may or may not offer it. I particularly look at a game like TESO that’ll have three factions and natural PvP, and seems it’ll be closely resemble DAoC than GW2.

I just think that ArenaNet tried too hard to appease all crowds without stepping on any toes, and it leaves the feeling of detached and separated features. I’m not gonna quit GW2, but I don’t feel compelled to spend as much time in it as I did in the first month because WvW from a larger picture is kinda broken, and it feels inconsequential to the rest of the game aside from PvE style bonuses. It doesn’t help that the zerg mentality plagues WvW, and not only that but it’s an effective and rewarded style of play.

I can’t predict the health of the WvW aspect of the game, but it’s not looking to great at this point.

As this was recently referenced I took the time to read through it. I agree with the OP and think that the points it makes are still relevant today.

From a true Guild Wars / Guild Wars 2 Fan /Signed

Great post and agree with most.

Dynamic balancing of population is sorely needed. It should not be so easy to zerg whole maps in such a short time. And it should be easier to defend fully upgraded keeps/tower with a small force.

Add more rewards for taking a keep/tower such as a chest. And same, if not more so, for defending. A chance for something rare that can only be obtained would be nice…but could be something as simple as siege blueprints. Sorry….I HATE jumping puzzles and I am frugal. Tired of spending hard earned coin on siege.