Guild Wars 2

So many people want to “fix” WvW. But if you don’t know what WvW is, how can you fix it?

At the macro level, WvW is a political campaign.

Every week your goal is to convince as many players as possible to come “vote” for your server by showing up in WvW. The server with the most “vote” win.

Often, you will see players complain that WvW is not fair that other server has too many players. Indeed, it’s not fair but deal with it. If you can’t convince players to show up for your server, it simply means that you failed at WvW. Sorry to point it… The good news is that it doesn’t mean you don’t have fun even if you lose!

The political campaign is currently broken

Sadly, the political campaign doesn’t work at the moment and hence WvW suffer a lot. It has lost its soul.

Below, I will explain why it’s currently broken and how we can fix it.

#1 You need to have an identity

This is the most crucial point ever. How can you convince someone to play for you, when you don’t have an identity. Who will he be fighting for? The alliance of server A, B and C that will be destroyed in a few weeks? No one has an identity anymore since server link. Not the host that need their links to perform and even less the linked servers that even lost their name.

Sure, something needed to be done about empty low tier server but server link was not the right solution. Since I experienced it myself, a server with low population is not a problem as the game is still fun even if you only have 30 players total instead of 200. The problem is when you ask those 30 players to cover as much objectives as 200 players can. You can’t stretch 30 players on four big WvW maps and hope it doesn’t feel empty.

A better solution than server link would have been to change the number of map depending on the population in each tier. For example, tier 1 have four maps they can play in while the bottom tier only has one map they can play in. You can see going up in tier as a reward since you get access to more map. Another solution would have been simple server merge.

#2. Server transfer is normal, even desired

This will be my most controversial point but bear with me.

The “game” in WvW is literally about convincing as many players as possible to fight for your server. To “win”, you must play it like a politician trying to get votes. Would it makes sense if every voters that wanted to changed their votes to you would have to pay hundred of dollars to be able to change their vote.

Changing your mind and wanting something else is normal, as is server transfer. Just accept it. Trying to put too much barrier on server transfer will only hurt WvW as you can’t play its main “game”, which is convincing players to come play for you, if they can’t transfer to you easily. Sure, transfer should not be totally free but the cost should be more symbolic.

#3. Randomness is not good

Would it make sense to you if during an election you were told to come vote for the candidate of your choice, but then, at the end of the election we would discard all the votes and just roll a dice to determine the winner?

Surely, you would wonder why you even bothered to vote at all since it doesn’t really matter.

Well, that’s exactly the problem we have right now in WvW. At the end of each match up we roll a dice to determine who win the match up and get the chance to move up a tier. It’s ridiculous…

Initially, this randomness was introduced to help with match up staleness and glicko hell, but it was not the right solution. If there was a problem with glicko, you should have fixed glicko instead of introducing a new problem.

#4. Get rid of glicko

It doesn’t work. Glicko is not a good ranking system for WvW. The ratings change too slowly for the change in population. It also creates all sorts of other problems like big gap between tier that you can’t overcome. Don’t try to adapt it either, just drop it.

Designing a good ranking system for WvW is not hard and there is even a multitude of possibilities. Here are three rules that will help you design a good ranking system :

• Rule 1 : If a server completely dominates the other servers in its tier, it should move up.
• Rule 2 : If a server is completely destroyed by the other servers in its tier, it should move down
• Rule 3 : If a tier is competitive, no server should move UNLESS there is a great imbalance in the thier right above or below this one. (see first 2 rules)

The exact details of this ranking system don’t really matter but if you follow theses three rules it will be good enough.

#5. The news channel

We need to talk about WvW. We need to know what is going on in our server, in our match up and in other servers. We need to know about the drama in other servers, which server is imploding, which server is getting bandwagoned. Which server is doing great and which one is doing poorly and why. We need to know what is going on in WvW.

It’s like having an election where no one is allowed to talk about it. It doesn’t make sense.

We all know that the match up forum got closed because it was full of hate post, insults and uncivilized conversations. I don’t think that reopening it would be any different sadly. But the point still stand that WvW needs to be talked about. Players have the right to be informed about what is happening.

My suggestion is to create a news channel just like we watch on our TV. Basically, appoint a bunch of journalists, aka willing players, that will gather the interesting news and present it to the rest of the player base in a format that is not “toxic”. These journalists would be allowed to post as much as they want about what’s going on in WvW.

Yes, I know, it’s a strange suggestion. I don’t even know if it would work. But I firmly believe that WvW needs to be talked about for it to be healthy. So, if you have a better suggestion please step up.

Conclusion

I expressed a view that I have rarely seen in this game or on this forum. I figure that most of you must be scratching your head right now wondering what the hell I’m talking about and that’s fine.

It’s hard to define WvW and define what it needs because everyone plays it differently. To do so, you need to take many steps back and try to look at the global picture.

I see WvW as a political campaign because at the end of the day the server with the most players and most coverage will practically always win. So, the path to victory is basically to convince more players than your opponents to play for you. I find it pretty similar to what politicians do during elections.

Tell me, how do you see WvW?

@Gudradain.3892

A very good read, thank you. I can definitively agree to most of your post, love the comparison used.

The more I read, watch, play, talk about and analyze WvW, the less I see it as anything resembling a competitive play-mode. At this stage, I think people should just embrace that it is a completely casual mode, and ANet develop it as such (if they ever do).

Which is why I really would love to hear ANet’s actual vision/goal/purpose for WvW, since it is meaningless to argue if WvW should be casual or competitive, unless we know what ANet wants with the mode (or wanted).

So for the next stage of WvW, Reality Wars 2, we should start changing the entire WvW over to voting wars, at the end of each match, the server with the least votes (active players) gets kicked from the game. Until there is only 1 server left! That feels like the logical conclusion to the current WvW

delete wvw, make gw2 a full pve game.

I think they should just decrease the gem prices… Most populated server full gem price decreasing to free to the least populated server and stagger the the gem prices quite considerably between top and bottom.

Then add two reward systems (gold only)
first reward would be where you finish In the league most gold goes to top place and again the rewards decreasing all the way to the bottom tier.

The second reward should be for transferring… the less populated server you go to the more gold you get.
What could make it work is if you migrate to the bottom server and win your match up, then you would earn as much gold as the server that come top off tier one… Whist this has no server pride it may tempt guilds to move about.

SkyShroud.2865:

delete wvw, make gw2 a full pve game.

At this point sadly I agree with you. I dont see any real solution to the mess aney created.

anduriell.6280:

SkyShroud.2865:

delete wvw, make gw2 a full pve game.

At this point sadly I agree with you. I dont see any real solution to the mess aney created.

Thankful that just because one person cant think of any thing to fix problem we do not destroy everything. That far worst then having a problem.
Its a very bad mind set and you would only say this for problems that you may not have to deal with all the time. I mean how often do you feel you need to pull out all your teeth because the ice in your drink cause you harm?

There are ways to fix wvw and they do not need to be a lot of flash or even that big. Anet just got to put real work into it and communicate with the wvw community. The WvW devs NEED to post here at least once a week.

Diku.4620:

anduriell.6280:

SkyShroud.2865:

delete wvw, make gw2 a full pve game.

At this point sadly I agree with you. I dont see any real solution to the mess aney created.

No…don’t delete WvW. There’s a real solution, but it’s like Harry Potter…we can’t mention the details here.

From a political campaign viewpoint…it’s all fake news. WvW is perfectly fine.

---

Seriously…I do agree with the OP most of the time:

AGREE

#1. You need to have an identity
#2. Server transfer is normal, even desired
#3. Randomness is not good
#5. The news channel

---

DISAGREE

#4. Get rid of glicko

Glicko isn’t the problem.

Tiers is the real problem that screws up glicko.

We should just Get rid of the Tiers separating all the Worlds.

We should let players visit any World with a Limit to how many & which Worlds they can visit…then let glicko do its job of Ranking ALL Worlds in relation to each other…while players are allowed to drive the Match-Ups on all Worlds.

Vote Diku for president!

Wait, how does the last point help identity - realised that’s part of disagree

Diku.4620:

anduriell.6280:

SkyShroud.2865:

delete wvw, make gw2 a full pve game.

At this point sadly I agree with you. I dont see any real solution to the mess aney created.

No…don’t delete WvW. There’s a real solution, but it’s like Harry Potter…we can’t mention the details here.

From a political campaign viewpoint…it’s all fake news. WvW is perfectly fine.

---

Seriously…I do agree with the OP most of the time:

AGREE

#1. You need to have an identity
#2. Server transfer is normal, even desired
#3. Randomness is not good
#5. The news channel

---

DISAGREE

#4. Get rid of glicko

Glicko isn’t the problem.

Tiers is the real problem that screws up glicko.

We should just Get rid of the Tiers separating all the Worlds.

We should let players visit any World with a Limit to how many & which Worlds they can visit…then let glicko do its job of Ranking ALL Worlds in relation to each other…while players are allowed to drive the Match-Ups on all Worlds.

Issue is the random roll. Been complaining about this for a while and predicted this issue creeping up about 6 months ago. Half of my posts on this topic get deleted by moderators. All you need to do is change the random roll threshold to 50-66. I don’t know the ideal number as I haven’t studied this in that much detail, but it’s really that simple. It could be fixed in 5 minutes by Anet.

To OP,

I appreciate your ideas and always saw a problem with Gliko myself (not just in WvW) and also miss server identity a lot.

That being said, I see a problem with your political analogy.

In politic, it’s ok if everyone vote for the same party. It is even fantastic in many regards. In a game of war, however, you NEED people to wage war against you regardless of how seductive one side seem to be (we can’t all play in the white hat team, there has to be black hat people too). Beside, a server can only accept so many.

Also, if I agree that winning or loosing doesn’t prevent from having fun, what is often the most fun is the game of tug of war between servers of similar strenght.

Weeks where you either dominate or are utterly crushed are usually pretty boring indeed.

In that sense, I would urge players to not be politicians, but intelligent human beings that understand what it takes to have a fun game and act accordingly. Because they are first and foremost, players, not politicians, and players want whatever is fun.

People need to stop caring about winning not even knowing why they want to win, and care more about having great tug of wars.

Winning in a game mode that offers no reward save personnal satisfaction is irrelevant. And satisfaction can be obtained without victory.

TL;DR: Players need to be coherent with their desires.

I completely agree about the need for a strong, defined identity for each competing world but I can’t begin to imagine how that can be achieved by encouraging people to move about more freely.

Far from facilitating server transfers the option should simply be removed, permanently. If people want to play with friends on other worlds they can do so in every part of the game other than WvW at will. If they want to experience WvW from the perspective of other servers or tiers then let them buy another account (or get a free account and level to 60) and start over on the new server.

Server transfers are the root cause of most of WvW’s problems. Sadly they probably make too much money to be consigned to the bad idea bin where they belong.

I would say that I agree there’s a political element to the game and that there has been a degree of campaigning to attract transfers. I don’t agree that this is something that should necessarily be the case and I think this whole element is undesirable and makes WvW seem tainted. Should we be thinking of the ladder, rather than the one particular world we are currently on?

I agree that each world should have a unique identity, but what? I mean, it can surely only be some kind of fluff, a world banner or a statue or something to do with the world name. I don’t think this would be enough to help people bind themselves to a server more securely, especially when their commanders are telling them to move around. BUT it is a start.

joneirikb.7506:

Which is why I really would love to hear ANet’s actual vision/goal/purpose for WvW, since it is meaningless to argue if WvW should be casual or competitive, unless we know what ANet wants with the mode (or wanted).

That’s easy.

• Arenanet wants to keep players playing and buying gems.
• There is a misunderstanding that this means churning out vast amounts of content to keep people …er… content.
• There seems to be a perception that this should be developed in the same way as PvE.
• Sadly, since they can’t simply add a new map/story/whatever play-it-once content and then move on to the next thing, WvW is really expensive to develop.
• There have been attempts to satisfy WvW players with big developments like EotM, Desert map and Guild Upgrades and WvW Rank Abilities – the smaller of these changes seem to be the more successful.
• And that, I think, is why we’re not seeing anything really big happen.

Idc about the political analogy, but because you asked what I thought WvW was…it’s a mess. It evidently tries to be something for everybody, but gives up being everything to somebody. Which no doubt leads to division among the community.

joneirikb.7506:

Which is why I really would love to hear ANet’s actual vision/goal/purpose for WvW, since it is meaningless to argue if WvW should be casual or competitive, unless we know what ANet wants with the mode (or wanted).

There. It’s under competitive so…yeah.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/competitive-play/

That’s their little mission statement , and “World vs. World—it’s PvP combat on an epic scale!” surmises it all.

Sadly the focus hasn’t necessarily veered towards “epic scale” with the servers trembling beneath the reality that “massive” battles are not stable.

joneirikb.7506:

Which is why I really would love to hear ANet’s actual vision/goal/purpose for WvW, since it is meaningless to argue if WvW should be casual or competitive, unless we know what ANet wants with the mode (or wanted).

This is the most important thing Anet needs to decide and communicate. The gameplay of WvW is still great but it feels like there is no direction to the game.

Gudradain.3892:

joneirikb.7506:

Which is why I really would love to hear ANet’s actual vision/goal/purpose for WvW, since it is meaningless to argue if WvW should be casual or competitive, unless we know what ANet wants with the mode (or wanted).

This is the most important thing Anet needs to decide and communicate. The gameplay of WvW is still great but it feels like there is no direction to the game.

Why go on what it feels like? Find out for yourself (scroll down to the reviews).

I like your idea about identity. A way to introduce new players to WvW and give them an server identity is to make a similar relase to “Cutthroat Politics”. Introduce three npc candidates competing for a leadership position. Each candidate providing different benefits for winning. The WvW servers will be attributed to the different npc candidates. By winning in WvW matches and/or looting token of dead WvW enemies you can show your support to the npc candidate which your server is representing. This would be a fun way to bring new people to WvW which would want to do Wvw because they want to support their candidate. These benefits would have to also affect PVE to draw those players in. Furthermore It is easy to imagine people would buy gems to server transfer in order to move to a server which supports the candidate of their choosing.

@ Svarty.8019

I probably worded myself a bit unclear there. I want to know what ANet’s design vision for the game mode, what it was on release, as well as how they view it currently.

Because I can not see it as a competitive mode the way it is now. And it reminds me of what ANet commented that it was supposed to be a half way between pve and pvp, so I’m curious if that also applies to “half competitive” and what their take is on it.

@ Chinchilla.1785

WvW was definitively shown as a competitive mode, but it has always been a “half way in-between”. One of the main purposes with the mode at launch was to be a middle ground between PVP and PVE, to attract players of one kind more towards the other.

Considering how it has been played over the years, including that we’re the smallest game-mode, I’m curious where it stands in regards to that goal, and how it has changed ANet’s design vision for the mode.

A lot of the suggestions I see around on these forums are aimed pretty heavily toward making WvW more “hardcore” and “competitive”, but depending on what level of “competitive” ANet actually wants WvW to be or not, those might not be relevant.

I want to know just what they want the game to be, both originally and currently.

@ Gudradain.3892

Sorry for the slight take-over of your thread Gudradain Your comparision of how the numbers/voting is the effectively competitive mode of this game, just reminded me once more that we just don’t have any way to know just where on the competitive scale to put this game-mode.

And honestly, recruiting/voting is a horrible competitive system, at least for anything that last more than 10 minutes.

I also fear/worry that if ANet where to try to adapt a “identity” at this stage, we’d end up with a faction system as little developed as the EotM ones, or with Stronghold style NPC’s replacing Siegebreaker. And honestly, I can’t see it is worth their time to direct more resources at developing it.