Guild Wars 2

I originally posted this as a response to another topic, but the more I think about it, the more I think it belongs in its own topic.

Rather than having players enter into WvW to represent their world, why can’t WvW be made such that at the beginning of the season, players are assigned to 1 of 3 teams, green, red, and blue? For the duration of the season you will be representing that team. All matchups would just then be green vs. red vs. blue. What team a player gets assigned to should be based on some ‘simple’ rules. To list just some that I can think of right now:

1. Players of the same guild will be placed onto the same team. This would require a new guild selection feature that each player must set for themselves such that they identify which one of their guilds they wish to represent while in WvW. Once they’ve set this, and they then enter WvW for the first time in a season, that then defines which team they will be placed on and changing the selection will have no effect until the next season begins.

2. Affinity and Anti-affinity rules to spread WvW guilds as evenly between the 3 teams as possible. This would take a bit of calculation based on the number of players within each guild and combining those players WvW account stats to determine each guild’s overall WvW participation footprint or ‘ranking’. Perhaps a timer can also be added which tracks how much time a player spends in WvW which can then be plugged into the equation. The idea is simply to prevent any one team from being assigned all the top playing WvW guilds. The effort here is to build each of the 3 teams as equally as possible based on some real data that is already being collected; the players’ WvW achievements.

3. When players enter a WvW map, each time the system will attempt to group up members of the same guild onto the same maps whenever possible. Since this will not always be possible, it will spread players out more across the various maps. While there is a bit of a downside to this, it does promote a greater variety as players will be playing with and against an ever changing player base. In other words, you’ll not just be facing players from the same 2 worlds all the time, and instead would face players from across all worlds and this would vary each time you enter a map.

The point of this suggestion is to simply spread WvW players out more evenly onto the maps so in theory the matchups should be much closer in both player participation and scores. It benefits lower population servers because their own server population has no actual impact when they enter WvW as they would match up with players from across all other servers.

This also addresses server transfers and guild transfers such that once your team is set at the beginning of the season transfers have zero effect on what team you will play for during that season.

The problem I see with this, is that some servers have quite an organisation, distributing guilds across maps according to preferences, balancing the presence of defenders/attackers on each map.
Some guilds/groups are not in for the score… If you are blue and wants to play the points, but most blue guilds could’nt care less… you are not going to enjoy the MU.

If it is possible to get moved to any “set of maps”; a) “I’m in a guild to play with my guildies – why can’t I be with them?”
I do not feel any attachment to whatever is in my team…

Coordinating a server is already kind of hard… coordinating “colors” is never going to work.

Of course, it would make it so there would be less problems with imbalance, but it would completely obnubilates server identiities and diversities, which I find is a high price to pay.

I chose Augury Rock because of the liberty of people playing there. Guilds can coordinate – or not – players can play as they wish – coordinators guide without imposing. There is some structure, but no hard structure…
On some server, there are alliances between guilds – on other, a big alliance decides of everything – on others, every one play as they please…

I do not wish to lose server individuality – to be unable to play with people I enjoy, and forced to play with people I don’t know – and likely never will really know, because I will never meet the same people…

I’d like to see this at least explored in some beta form because I think the pros would outweigh any of the cons you’ve mentioned, Jocksy. I do appreciate the counterpoints you’ve made, but I don’t feel they are as problematic as you seem to imply.

1. Organization becomes more challenging, but not impossible. I think only a beta test could truly determine how much more challenging that would be.
2. My suggestion would actually result in more maps that a player could queue up for. There would just be multiple EBs, greenBLs, blueBLs, and redBLs so now queue times are shortened if not eliminated altogether to get into WvW. You could still queue up for a full map if you want, but would still be able to get in under another map while you wait rather than riding the Lion’s Arch bench waiting to be able to get into the game.
3. Because there would be players pulled from so many other worlds, and because there would be more maps to chose from, I don’t really think you will find yourself playing on a map where the majority of players aren’t going for team points. If you do, queue to one of the other many maps.
4. Server identities might be lost, at least for WvW, but I cite recent world transfers as evidence that this doesn’t appear to be as critical to many players as you make it out to be. At least with my idea, server transfers would become a moot point in terms of WvW so you might actually finding players moving to lesser populated servers to bring some life back to them in the open world.
5. Alliances might get broken up, which can be a bad thing for some, but it also opens it up for new alliances each season which might make things more interesting. Worth beta testing in my opinion.
6. As for your playing with people you enjoy, you might lose some of that, but if those players and you are both in the same guild, then you would be on the same team. As for playing with people you don’t know/like, well what’s different than how it currently is? It’s an open world so you currently have no control in WvW nor the open map as to who is there with you.

I could be wrong, but I think it’s worth discussing further. I really like to see a beta test just to further to explore the pros and cons. Meh, it probably won’t happen though.