Guild Wars 2

Everyone’s sick of Living Story getting all the devs attention (although I am happy with the increase in communication from Devon in the last few days) so I wanted to put forward a few ideas for WvW updates in the hope that it gave Anet some inspiration/motivation.

I will add to it and update it with feedback I receive.

New map:

The new zone will be an underground map with a maximum of 30 players from each server at a time.

The objective of the map is to gain ‘favor’ with the dredge and skritt. Favor can be used to gain assistance from these races on other boarderlands.

Favor with the skritt can be spent on ordering a supply raid on any tower or keep on any boarderland. The exact amount or % of supply stolen the devs will have to judge and the amount of supply which dolys supply keeps (not towers) with may need looking at to avoid all keeps being starved of supply too easily.

Favor with the dredge can be used to spawn a single-use dredge tunnelling capsule at any friendly spawn point which will tunnel 10 players past the outer wall of any keep. Where exactly the device will pop up should be randomised between a number of points.

To gain favor with the skritt players will need to eliminate destroyer nests placed around the underground map. These will be tougher than your average supply camp and require roughly 3 coordinated players or 5 less coordinated players to eliminate.

To gain favor with the dredge players will need to hold ore-rich mining points of which there will be 9 across the map. These points will function like large sPvP points and have no timer unlike supply camps meaning that they can be quickly flipped if left undefended.

Blobbing on this map quite simply won’t be an option as for every point you take you’ll lose 2 others and I expect squads of 5-10 to be optimal.

I expect this map will have long queues due to it being new and smaller in size and so to help counter that you will not be able to solo queue. You will need a party of 5 to join the queue (although there’s nothing stopping 5 pugs forming a party).

Knock-on effects:

This will slightly help to disincentivise blobbing on boarderlands as there will be even more opportunities for mesmers to portal squads into unguarded keeps making spreading your forces a more viable strategy.

This will help to even out numbers across servers as some people may wish to transfer to lower pop servers with shorter queues to this map. (Pay attention Anet! You will profit from these transfers!)

Simultaneous Updates:

Increase rewards for defending. Increasing the defensive event rewards would be a very small start but I think loot and wxp chances should be increased for kills within the boundary of your own keeps or towers.

Release a number of WvW-focused gemstore items including the likes of:

Commander badge colors
Badge Of Honor Drop Booster
World XP Booster
Unlimited Repair Canister
Account Bound Siege Weapon Backpack
Premium Guild Emblems
Automatic Feeder (consumes designated food and utility consumables in your inventory when their duration ends)

(Credit to Obscure One for these gemstore ideas)

Change the way keep waypoints open up for limited windows of time during sieges. It promotes blobbing as once the WP opens a whole zerg can instantly come to a keep’s defence from the other side of the map. There’s no need for this. The WP should stay closed until the siege has been concluded so one massive zerg cannot cover an entire map at once.

If possible, in game team speak (with multiple rooms) and an improved squad system. Team speak is currently a barrier to entry for newer, younger or more casual gamers. Frequently boarder lands have queues and multiple zergs but no (or at best 1) commander tagged up and pugs running around looking very confused. If it was very easy for a PvE player to drop into WvW and join in the fun we’d see the popularity of WvW shoot up even further and it would become a more profitable area of the game for Anet (and hopefully allocated more dev time as a result). This change would be amazing for PvE and sPvP too as pug groups would have the option to use team speak with each other.

This would no doubt take a while to implement but we’ve all seen how fast Anet can release content when they put their minds to it. If they planned it, made it public that they had something like this in the pipeline, I think they’d make a lot of friends in the WvW community even if it took 2 months to actually be released.

Reserved for more ideas.

There could be a lot to improve for WvW shadowraith, the problem is that people expect the improvements to be implemented right away. The WvW community is smaller and is less profitable for Anet. But like u said in your post, put wvw items in gemstore could solve that problem.
But there are many many more ideas. Ideas like:

1. New and improved commander badges, different colors, guild commanders,
2. Account bound rank
3. Put blueprints in wallet as well, or don’t let it require bagspace (you can even put something like that in gemstore for some gems)
4. More sceneries in maps like desert, ocean, mountains, jungles, we got them in PvE so why not WvW?
5. Different types of towers (Like passages through mountains)
6. New (bigger) maps, maybe without borderlands.
7. Improved neutral camps, camps that can be upgraded for defending towers or scouting in your corner. Also put defensive turrets on towers.
8. Better upgraded towers, like using char or asura technology (read my post for more info)
9. Special supply camps to boost towers.
10. New matchup system
11. Other traits for wvw (they currently implementing it)
12. Put PvE bonuses like Lyssa or Grenth to WvW. (Temple of Lyssa is active – increased dmg by 5%, Grenth is active – random boons every 30 seconds something like that). We give them passive bonuses aswell.
13. Different rules (Let towers be only 5 points and camps 15 points for a week, capping dredge rewards 300 points for 1 tick etc.)
14. Cap on golems (like 3 or 4) (our server has golem rushes with 20-30 golems, that ain’t fun)
15. Rewards for winning WvW. (like a bonus chest if your participated >10 hours of that week/ ranked up x ranks in this week) Less loot for losing ofc.
16. New blueprints, new traps, for diverse fights and different tactics (for Instance a flame trap) Let an area burn for 5 minutes, so zergs have to watch out where they are walking (friendly fire implied)
17. Randomly block passages and pathways with natural landslides or avalanches.
18. More dynamic events in wvw. Let centaurs capture camps or towers. Afterward defending it, like they are doing in PvE. (svanir perhaps to in snowy area’s)
19. Special blueprints of neutral camps ( can only be used when they are active) example: Hylek gives hylek dart shooter as blueprint.
20. Unique wvw weapon skins, from badges or the chest I mentioned in 15.

These ideas come from everywhere off the forum, so sorry if I used your idea and it’s only a small part of ideas. But to realize these ideas, you’ll need a lot of devs and time and most people aren’t patience. But its still nice to post them ofc better yet, collect all the ideas in 1 post.

Bigger maps might strain the engine constraints. More maps with less people on each and more objectives on each map (like Devon alluded to the filling in of board lands lakes and a new objective there) would be better.

I respectfully disagree with the contested WP idea. As much as a counter to blobbing as it would provide, it would still hand over great advantages to more populous servers.

A good example is DB. When facing CD and SoS last week they learned to split their groups very effectively, making BL defense essentially impossible for their outnumbered opponents.

I also think that in-game VoiP (or ANet managed VoiP) would necessitate added servers, support, and frequent downtime that would cause needless forum hate.

I love your idea for gem store purchases and think that ANet might want to dedicate one of their upcoming 2-week updates to be “THE WVW UPDATE” and include such items.

I like your idea for the additional map, but why not make it easier? Replace the Centaurs with the dredge, and beef up the difficulty of the NPCs in the skritt and dredge in those areas.

Now here is the brilliant part, make the influence account-bound (set to zero every week at reset, but kept all week for the match) so that it follows you map to map.

The point of this is that you can build up influence on your home map (but you have to balance defense as well), making it a difficult balancing act. That influence could then be spent on any BL map.

The brilliant part of this, is that it provides an excellent strategy for people to do on a map when outnumbered. Facing off-hours numbers, go farm the dredge and skritt; then save it for a lightning strike the following day.
It will allow small groups unprecedented mobility and ability to attack any location on any map.

This will encourage full participation at all hours, and we can stop all the whiny posts about limiting night-time scoring (though it’s funny watching self-centered NA folks embarass themselves).