Guild Wars 2

Many people, even the developers seek the easiest tweak and lose sight of the single biggest problem in WvW : Population balance. So they never fix anything, really, they just move the problem around hoping it fixes itself. By population balance I mean the average amount of players taking part in WvW within a 24-hour window. The simple fact that those numbers are not being shared only highlights the fact that it is really as disgusting as it seems for the lower populated servers. I feel the overall general direction of the game is detrimental to its longterm well-being and hopefully some of the recent bad decisions will be reverted, especially the 12-team leagues.

The objectives of WvW should be fun and competition. Perhaps a leveling method too. In fact, it feels like there has been an unexplainable major crackdown on leveling speed within the game lately, with absolutely no reason given, which is strange from a game that boasted the fact that zones were replayable no matter the level you were. Regardless, it is not much fun to level in WvW. As for competition, well, that has led to several problems the major one being spies. Along with the “addon” that tracks commanders – which does give an unfair advantage to teams using it – the competition has given way to cheating. To make matters worse, the development team wants to add in a system that allows the strong to get even stronger. That cannot happen.

The solutions to the major problems appear quite simple in writing, though I know that in coding things get more complicated especially if a technological hurdle exists. So the quick fixes to quickly improve WvW would be:

1. Remove the seige deployment limit. This will fix the spy-greifer problem.

2. Remove the server transfer cost when transfering to a lower ranked server (that you are not playing against). This should help improve player balance.

3. Make WvW the primary method of gearing up and having gear for other builds by greatly augmenting badges of honor drops once a character is 80. Pre-80 should award 3 times more XP, at the very least! That would give incentive to at least join in on the WvW effort. Players would join lower rank servers for that XP/Badge boost without having to wait in queue.

4. Show the quarterly average amount of players taking part in the WvW effort for each server depending on the time frame (server time). ie: Amount of players on each team at each update / number of updates in the past 6 hours.

Solutions that may take some time to develop:
1. Leagues must be limited to 6 teams and divided in pools. Every 4th week, the top 3 face off while the bottom 3 face off in relegation. The current implementation will only provide pre-determined top 3, who wont play each other every week, which means pre-determined results most of the time, which removes both fun and competition. Teams could be tiered with better competition, rewards given every 4 weeks instead of 7, which coincides pretty well with monthly. The loser of the last week would be relegated to the lower tier and the winner would be moved up to the upper tier.

2. Winners of the top two tiers could get better rewards than those on the lower tiers and anyone taking part in a specific tier during the month would get another server-wide PvE boost based on their tier. For example, tier 4 could get heart completion rate increased since they need some love while tier one could get server-wide PvE damage boosts. As long as tier 1 is better than all others to make it so no one wants to get relegated.

3. Server merges. This will fix some of the lack of numbers issues but may take longer to implement than opening transfers to lower-ranked servers. Instead of having 24 teams, we would end up with maybe 18 which means 3 pools of 6. So it works out just fine.