Guild Wars 2

WvW has some very fundamental problems. What should have been the crown jewel of GW2 was never fully developed and has been withering steadily since release. However, there are some simple modifications to WvW that require very little effort by ANet that can help WvW live up to it’s current potential and make it an accessible and fun format for a much wider player base.

Fix One: Automate upgrades and repairs. Upgrades start automatically and at base level pace. Whenever a yak reaches a tower or keep the upgrades temporarily go a lot faster. At no point is supply spent on upgrades or repairs. In addition to cannons/mortars/oil automatic upgrades include some carts and ballistas. Workers automatically work on repairing walls/gates/permanent siege that has been damaged if it stops taking damage for a minute. Players can spend supply to make additional repairs the the workers’ automatic repairs.

Fix Two: Match WvW rewards to PvE. An hour of WvW should give a similar amount of personal rewards to players as an hour of PvE. Currently the players who contribute the most to the success of the server reap the fewest rewards because it costs so much to run upgrades, and buy blueprints and traps. There’s nothing interesting about the blueprint mechanic; it’s just a gold sink and inventory space waste. Give players a button to the right of their elite skill to select a piece of siege to build; make partially built siege decay a lot faster than the current ten minute build window. Decrease awards for player kills, which is where most of the WvW rewards are right now, even though that’s not how the game is scored. Increase awards for events, especially for defense.

Fix Three: Close borders when population is low There is nothing interesting, and a whole lot that is tedious, about maintaining defenses on a border that is dead. There’s also nothing interesting about the PvD of capping a dead border. When the participation of any one server falls below a threshold, or the total participation of all three servers falls below a threshold, close all three borderlands, and stop scoring them. If the remaining population is too large for EB, start a second EB map. People could be given a several minutes warning and a chance to queue for the new map so it gets “reset night” type activity when it opens.

Certainly there is much, much more to do to improve WvW, but just these three changes could have a big impact quickly. Imagine if you knew when you played WvW it was going to be personally rewarding, the maps would be active, and there wouldn’t be any tedium required!

I like these, they’re not perfect, but could bring some interesting and good changes. Looking forward to read some discussion on this.

The closed border idea works only if It is closed to battle. There are still those who would go into those lands to MAP, or finish their AP’s. That would also leave the WvW faithful, in EB fighting for honor. It would leave those dis-interested a pve challenge for map completion.

Funny thing, EoTM actually works like your fixes one and two (except that supply is still spent for upgrades and repairs). That place really fixed WvW, right?

1 and 2 sound good, not 3.
Closing the borderland and stopping scoring would punish any server with a population by not improving it’s ranking while competing servers would continue to improve (possibly) on their ranking.
*Your neighbor lost his job, so now you can’t buy things you want…
A declining server falling through the ranks is one thing, when it causes damage to other servers as it falls is a totally different animal.

@One Prarie Outpost:

You don’t need to link Glicko directly to the amount of points, since shutting down all borderlands would remove equally much points from the server at the same time, you could have the glicko be based on the difference in point scoring, instead to the exact numbers. In short it could work the same with 1 or 5 maps.

joneirikb.7506:

@One Prarie Outpost:

You don’t need to link Glicko directly to the amount of points, since shutting down all borderlands would remove equally much points from the server at the same time, you could have the glicko be based on the difference in point scoring, instead to the exact numbers. In short it could work the same with 1 or 5 maps.

So shut down not just the 3 servers in the match but all servers from scoring?
“We’re sorry to inform you that WvW is dead because [insert server name] is empty. Please play something else in the meantime”

What ? I think you misunderstand what he said in point 3.

Close down all 3 "Borders" (Read Borderland maps).

EBG still open, scoring still works, people can still play, just in 1 map instead of 4. For when the population is low.

And if one server is ticking for 40% of the PPT in EBG alone, that can still count the same as 40% of PPT over all 4 maps for Glicko rating. So the amount of points themselves isn’t that important.

Pikka.6023:

Fix One: Automate upgrades and repairs. Upgrades start automatically and at base level pace. Whenever a yak reaches a tower or keep the upgrades temporarily go a lot faster. At no point is supply spent on upgrades or repairs. In addition to cannons/mortars/oil automatic upgrades include some carts and ballistas. Workers automatically work on repairing walls/gates/permanent siege that has been damaged if it stops taking damage for a minute. Players can spend supply to make additional repairs the the workers’ automatic repairs.

Favours the more populated server in an imbalanced matchup, so not a good addition.

Pikka.6023:

Fix Two: Match WvW rewards to PvE. An hour of WvW should give a similar amount of personal rewards to players as an hour of PvE. Currently the players who contribute the most to the success of the server reap the fewest rewards because it costs so much to run upgrades, and buy blueprints and traps. There’s nothing interesting about the blueprint mechanic; it’s just a gold sink and inventory space waste. Give players a button to the right of their elite skill to select a piece of siege to build; make partially built siege decay a lot faster than the current ten minute build window. Decrease awards for player kills, which is where most of the WvW rewards are right now, even though that’s not how the game is scored. Increase awards for events, especially for defense.

Bad ideas – there are people who make their gold from WvW (because of the aforementioned lack of similar rewards to PvE) by making superior siege from their regular siege (bought with badges) and selling them on. Same with guild catapults. As for decreasing the rewards for player kills… arguably one of the main draws of a versus match against other humans is to directly kill them. I get that you’re trying to make defense more important and to remove incentive to zerg, but taking away existing rewards from WvW isn’t the way.

Pikka.6023:

Fix Three: Close borders when population is low There is nothing interesting, and a whole lot that is tedious, about maintaining defenses on a border that is dead. There’s also nothing interesting about the PvD of capping a dead border. When the participation of any one server falls below a threshold, or the total participation of all three servers falls below a threshold, close all three borderlands, and stop scoring them. If the remaining population is too large for EB, start a second EB map. People could be given a several minutes warning and a chance to queue for the new map so it gets “reset night” type activity when it opens.

You get that about the half the people who WvW and have an opinion prefer the BLs over EBG, right? That investing some time getting your home BL ready for the epic fights that tend to come during prime time is an investment that people make in advance of their actual fun? I personally would be quite pleased if EBG was closed, but I’d prefer none of them close at all. And, at least for my server and many of the servers I’ve encountered while climbing back up from T8, it’s the home BL that matters, not EBG. Taking that away would be as bad for a server as megaservering WvW.

Pikka.6023:

Certainly there is much, much more to do to improve WvW, but just these three changes could have a big impact quickly. Imagine if you knew when you played WvW it was going to be personally rewarding, the maps would be active, and there wouldn’t be any tedium required!

To the highlighted part – no doubt they would. They’d make the game a worse experience, force a zergier playstyle on people who didn’t want it (closing maps to concentrate people all together? No thanks!), and overall favour the most populated server in a match.

I appreciate that you’ve come up with some ideas, because people thinking of how to make things better is definitely a good thing, but I don’t care for any of these particular ones.

These all sound like low-pop server problems. None of these would be acceptable to gold league servers. Just do what everyone else does given the current constraints – figure out your favorite wvw playstyle and move to the server/tier that supports that playstyle.