Guild Wars 2

So I missed my chance to add this in the Collaborative Development discussion and would like to apologise if something like this has been suggested but that thread is over 20 pages long.

I understand that some servers have a rather high WvW queue and some don’t have enough players to stand a fighting chance. So I thought this could help solve over and under WvW population.

So you queue for WvW once in the queue you are given your position and average waiting time but also a second option. The second option would be to join one of the underdog servers (not one that the players server is matched against) giving the lower populated servers a player boost and a bit more of a fighting chance and also giving the players an alternative to sitting around waiting for the queue to pop.

Expanding on that you could also list the matches your friends/guild mates are playing and queue to join them giving the option for team play. How about joining a server in a different time zone, so servers have an even fight while the main troops are sleeping. There may be some lag issues for people but it would be a player choice to do so.

We might want to cap the amount of players that can join and fight for the underdogs so the home servers don’t end up in a queue themselves . I think taking away the names of the servers your fighting against and the team points until the end of the match can help moral just make it Red, Green and Blue team.

Now we need some kind of reward system for those that choose to participate and help the underdogs. Some form of new currency that can be traded for items or used to boost your position on your own servers WvW queue, or just a bonus of normal rewards. Throw in some achievements, titles and finishers basically what ever is needed to get people to take part.

Now its not perfect I know so add to this or pick it apart all you want I just had an idea at stupid o’clock in the morning and thought id share to see what people thought.

Thanks for reading and please be gentle with me its my first post!

I agree with this idea, although i thought of one step further, match bronze league servers with gold, the 1st place gold goes with the last on bronze.

if youre queued you can go to the partner server and vice versa so bronze league can get to play high level wvw and gold league isnt on queue to play all the time.

possibly share prizes for what each server ends up with

Don’t apologize for missing the WvW population CDI. ANet pretty much dropped that whole topic like a hot rock anyway and I don’t expect anything significant to come from it.

I do like your idea, though. It’s sort of a guesting option that benefits both the player and the server he/she guests to, and without much chance for abuse if the guesting destination is at least partially random among the various low pop servers.

Rift had a somewhat similar feature for their PvP warfronts, where a player could end up as a “mercenary” for the other team if the queues were unbalanced. Some players didn’t like it, but most far preferred balanced matches to blowouts, and many players found it fun to occasionally play against friends and guildmates.

The only downside that I can think about your suggestion is that most guested players would end up as pugs, but there’s always the slim hope that something positive might come from the recent commander CDI to better integrate pugs into the battle. In any case, it would probably spur more use of TS by pugs … and in my opinion that’s a good thing.

ah rift I knew id played something where this happened

thanks for the feed back guys

There is no way to secure ‘balance’ in WvW other than detaching ‘teams’ from servers. Every server has it’s own population, which isn’t very surprising, and they could only fix it by dumping every single player who goes into WvW in a limited number of “Alliances”, spread over servers.

what if the servers in gold were linked to the lower ranked version on bronze? if you are queued on gold you can go to the bronze server, and 50% of that servers score can be added to your own? silver would not work for that but it would solve the bronze population woes and would let bronze leaguers get to play against the best servers and improve

This is a good idea and it would be a shame if it didn’t receive thorough discussion by the devs.

Yes it would be great fun running somebody elses gollums off a cliff! Awesome idea!

Or maybe they could just balance loads by restricting entry. Low pop server then becomes popular because it has no wait. As of now the low pop server keeps getting lower as week after week they get stomped…because its multipl,e to 1 battles ALL the time.

see the problem there is that a server can have a very high server population but next to no WvW population

Skeletor.9360:

Yes it would be great fun running somebody elses gollums off a cliff! Awesome idea!

Obviously that is an issue among a wide range of similar issues that need to be fixed, however, it is a seperate issue. A troll on your own server can do that just as well as a troll from another server. A good start would be so that siege print owners can take their golems back same as any other siege. It will not fix things completely, but it would be a step in the right direction.

BlaQkout.4168:

see the problem there is that a server can have a very high server population but next to no WvW population

I do not know how a-net defines that “full” “high” “very high” pop etc. But I think currently it is based on total accounts ever created on the given server minus accounts transferred. Thus this includes players who are inactive, have uninstalled the game, are long long gone, are spending more time guesting on other servers for PvE then their own, etc.

A server’s “status” needs to reflect a true account of the actually active player base on that server per given time zone group (NA East Coast, NA West Coast, Oceanic, SEA, EU).

Also, I would like to point out that while there is an occasional oddball transferring for PvE or legitimate “IRL friends” reasons, 90% to 99% of server transfers occur due to WvW, not PvE or other reasons.

The fact is, i was on queue, then when i travel, the “outnumbered” icon popup-ing out. Is this even a normal thing? How can be true? All three servers population are counting together for queue, not separate?
I would suggest to load balance the WvW population on a map, like: if a team has already 50% from total players (red+blue+green), block others from this team to join the map. This solution is simple. And, for players that need badly to join WvW and can’t, allow them to join overflow wvw servers, like in pve.

fosfor.9076:

I would suggest to load balance the WvW population on a map, like: if a team has already 50% from total players (red+blue+green), block others from this team to join the map. This solution is simple.

The QQ this would cause. :P But I do actually approve. Stackers should be punished for stacking.

It really doesnt work to go after the population of a server. This imbalance will always be there and is impossible to take away. Hell it even exist in T1 – having outmanned buff when the enemy servers bring 60+ man mega blobs on EB is good fun :/

The only way to help the “underdogs” is to completely revamp the score system. No more PPT. Reward actually taking objectives from strong opponents, not holding them against a weak one. Right now, the score is 100% based on sieging up keeps and staying inside them to win. You dont fight the enemy to win, you just have to sit there on your arrowcart all day long. It doesnt have to be that way. Score should at the very least be 50/50 between taking and holding keeps, but personally I think it should be 75% offense and 25% defense.

But unfortunetly it probably just cause an outcry from the servers that siege up a paper keep 10x more than other servers siege up T3 Garrison.

Anet obviously want to reward people sitting on arrowcarts all day. They havent even nerfed the damage or increased the cost yet – that in itself is proof that Anet want this type of gameplay, they dont want the underdogs to have a chance at winning.

I don’t particularly care for this idea but a simpler, more elegant solution would be to make wvw only servers.

Quells.2498:

I don’t particularly care for this idea but a simpler, more elegant solution would be to make wvw only servers.

like the guesting system for pve?

Well the only really fair way to do it would be to limit the population of all servers on every BL by the server with the lowest population at any given time. So if server “x” has 50 players on their BL then all other servers can only have up to 50 players on that particular BL as well. Of course no one will like this idea at all but it’s the only way I can think this issue would ever be solved.

Quells.2498:

Well the only really fair way to do it would be to limit the population of all servers on every BL by the server with the lowest population at any given time. So if server “x” has 50 players on their BL then all other servers can only have up to 50 players on that particular BL as well. Of course no one will like this idea at all but it’s the only way I can think this issue would ever be solved.

Hence why it cannot be solved by going after the population “issue”.

This also assume that its a steady increase in activity until primetime – it never is. It can be incredibly hard to “get the ball rolling”, sort of speak. After primetime you also have the issue of when people leave and not enough new players come in. The bar would be constantly set too high by the server that has the highest coverage, once again defeating the point of such a system.

Tongku.5326:

Skeletor.9360:

Yes it would be great fun running somebody elses gollums off a cliff! Awesome idea!

Obviously that is an issue among a wide range of similar issues that need to be fixed, however, it is a seperate issue. A troll on your own server can do that just as well as a troll from another server. A good start would be so that siege print owners can take their golems back same as any other siege. It will not fix things completely, but it would be a step in the right direction.

No this would be a special case….if you are not from that server you don’t need to behave. What is your incentive to not be a bad person as you have no connections to this one. After all you played these guys before and think they are all kittens. Time for some revenge!…just saying…this will be done.

well they could always make it so that people guesting on WvW from another server cant use siege equipment or something there would have to be some sort of fix put in place

Dawdler.8521:

It really doesnt work to go after the population of a server. This imbalance will always be there and is impossible to take away. Hell it even exist in T1 – having outmanned buff when the enemy servers bring 60+ man mega blobs on EB is good fun :/

The only way to help the “underdogs” is to completely revamp the score system. No more PPT. Reward actually taking objectives from strong opponents, not holding them against a weak one. Right now, the score is 100% based on sieging up keeps and staying inside them to win. You dont fight the enemy to win, you just have to sit there on your arrowcart all day long. It doesnt have to be that way. Score should at the very least be 50/50 between taking and holding keeps, but personally I think it should be 75% offense and 25% defense.

But unfortunetly it probably just cause an outcry from the servers that siege up a paper keep 10x more than other servers siege up T3 Garrison.

Anet obviously want to reward people sitting on arrowcarts all day. They havent even nerfed the damage or increased the cost yet – that in itself is proof that Anet want this type of gameplay, they dont want the underdogs to have a chance at winning.

It is not true that there isn’t a solution to the population problem. The solution is to break WvW free from the server-vs-server-vs-server system, but just because ANet is unlikely to ever embrace it does not mean that it couldn’t be done.

It is definitely a shame, though, that ANet is so unable or unwilling to fix what is by far the single biggest flaw in what could otherwise be an awesome open world, strategy-based PvP mode.

what about separate wvw servers with a set number for each team, then an overflow, also with a set number and so on. All scores would add together. I can see problems with guilds not being able to get in together, this could be solved by prioritizing guilds and parties in the cue, after all if your playing solo you would still be playing for the same team.