Guild Wars 2

With the new change to WvW coordinators (and I’m sure the whole WvW community welcomes DevonCarver to the role) lets use this time to voice your suggestions and ideas on how to improve WvW for the better.

Please keep your suggestions logical, and if possible backup why you think the idea would improve WvW.

I will add any other suggestions to the list as they come in.
__________________________________________________________________

WvW Suggestions:

• Add a percentage display to health bars of objects (walls, gates etc). Example
• Tweak the Out-manned buff to provide more of a buff.
• Remove PvP assisting World Bonus (Energetic, Robust & Medic) from WvW.
  (As a person who strives to see balance, these closer to the end of the matchup tend to snowball too much for the dominating server, much like Orbs of Power it would be nice to see these changed to more neutral Bonus’ to put servers on more level footing.)
• Allow options to turn off Player titles.
• Allow reporting for Hacking rather then having to manually E-Mail support.
• Allow players to view what queue position they are in when queuing for a map.
• Abbreviate server invader names to remove screen clutter. Example Jade Quarry Invader to JQ Invader. Example Clutter
• Return Orbs of Power to the Borderlands with a Point Per Tick system and make the alter unbreakable until the Keep Lord has been slain to prevent hacking.
• Add Ascended gear to WvW for Badges.
• Remove Speed Boosters from WvW.
• Allow the Queue pop notification to be movable (click and dragging) and remember its location for future notifications. This is to prevent it blocking your screen view.
• Allow people who damage walls and gates (player or siege) to gain capture awards, currently you only get credit for a capture if you damage the Tower Lord.
• Make upgraded escort yaks invulnerable to damage until the 2 guards escorting have been killed to prevent people skipping the guards and just killing the yak.

WXP Suggestions:

• Add back in Dolyak escort rewards, even if its just EXP and WXP.
• Display WXP in the Medals reward notification.
• Remove WXP from pure PVE objectives (Ice Wurm, Harpy, Overgrown Grub Champion Spirit, Centaur and Skritt camps) to promote more team-based objectives for WXP rewards.
• Add WXP rewards to players who buy upgrades for Camps, Towers and Keeps after they complete.
• Reduce WXP given for taking Camps, Towers and Keeps.
• Increase WXP given for defending Camps, Towers and Keeps.
  (The current meta of superzergs promotes taking high value objectives such as keeps and then allowing enemy superzergs to recap undefended only to recap it again.)
• Grant a small amount (1-3 per 2 supply) of WXP for repairing Gates and Walls.

Fixes & Bugs Suggestions:

• Address the infamous Skill lag typically caused by 3-way server encounters.
• Address LoS issues as seen in this thread
• Address the consistent crashing from WvW we believe is caused by too many nameplates.

Look forward to seeing other peoples inputs and lets hope we get some offical responses to these!

- Ascii

Stop timezone wars. Currently the winner is decided by their time coverage and that’s wrong, PvD is as rewarding as PvP. I would like to face T3 servers as I’m sure they don’t suck, however I’m stuck in T1 because my server has more ppl.

Siegerazer, if there are ten+ players stood to activate it, then they should do the work themselves & not require a bot to do so.
They have to walk with it, rather then letting it go to the tower whilst capping camps as it dawdles along the road.
If attackers have camps, then the siegerazer should not provide them with even more free supplies/plans etc.
If there players attacking wipe, then the siegerazer should sulk back to its base, not stand there killing all dolyaks & passing players until it has been killed.
If you insist on us killing it, let it drop a chest or something, rather then grey spikes.
If the defending server are outmanned, again, this siegerazer shouldn`t become active.
Put a cd on it. If defenders manage to wipe the enemy & siegerazer, it shouldn`t instantly become available for some time.

When queued for either borderlands or EB, do not let the ui pop up mid screen if we are in combat, therefore blocking anything we are trying to do. (common sense)
Chests reset at a set time, like the dailies, rather then 24 hours after opening them. EB one alone takes loads more effort then the dragon chests.
Once a keep has been captured for a set amount of time, bank, repair, vendors etc automatically appear. I`ve never understood why pvpers have to pay for these, especially as drops in WvWs is nothing compared to anything in the rest of the game.
All the ui clutter on top right, spread it along the top in a thinner line. Aiming arrows etc can often get blocked by this ui spam. Also, do away with shields.

My suggestion would be to post a frank outline of what you felt went right and wrong with the latest ‘wvw’ patch. Showing the players you understand the current issues and thus able to eventually address them, will go a long way in stopping people from leaving the game.

I think any handicap on Siegerazer would be going in the opposite direction of what he was added into the game for (i.e. forcing players to remain with him all the way to the tower, adding a time limit on his respawn or requiring a non-outmanned borderland) You have to return to the tower to take it so 1 or 2 camps whilst he is on route isn’t game changing.

Adding in a loot chest or reward to killing Siegerazor would just promote the dominating server to stop the breakout more.

Allowing the UI for the Queue pop to be movable is a good idea. It should be movable by click and dragging and remember its location once moved.

Merchants do play a supportive role in keeps. For example having the Siege Blueprint Merchant on-site is vital when defending a keep from pushes, it saves you having to port back to the home waypoint to buy blueprints if you have none.

Top right hand UI notifications are collapsible, and they remember if they have been minimized or not.

I agree Ascii. Also nice summary of things that need to be looked at.

Niim.9260:

My suggestion would be to post a frank outline of what you felt went right and wrong with the latest ‘wvw’ patch. Showing the players you understand the current issues and thus able to eventually address them, will go a long way in stopping people from leaving the game.

To be honest i don’t think anything went ‘wrong’ with the 26th Patch. Granted some things can be tweaked for better results but all in all i think the patch was a very big success in the reviving WvW process to compete with upcoming non-GW versions of WvW.

Posted this somewhere else but this might fit better:

To be honest I understand why they did it and ofcourse its a good reason. No doubt some smaller servers got their kitten handed to them during WvW or couldnt group all that well or get their guild up in numbers.

I however dislike the fact that we now have constant que in WvW which we never had, and which wasnt needed for us to be pretty high up in the rankings as a medium population server.

I vote for more maps in WvW rather than the medium servers though. I think adding 1 or 2 maps, will first of all split up those CRAZY huge zergs of 50-80 people. And it can provide more room for players to join wvw rather than stand in Que most of the day (especially casuals with only 1 or 2 hours to spare).

I get it that Ques are needed so medium servers dont get run over, or less WvW focussed servers, but now it is like holding out on content people did pay for.

miniL.7361:

I vote for more maps in WvW rather than the medium servers though. I think adding 1 or 2 maps, will first of all split up those CRAZY huge zergs of 50-80 people. And it can provide more room for players to join wvw rather than stand in Que most of the day (especially casuals with only 1 or 2 hours to spare).

New maps would be cool but unfortunately it was stated by a Developer not so long ago in a podcast with GW2Guru.com that they have no plans for adding new maps into WvW anytime soon and the current maps are already the biggest the engine will allow them to be.

Maybe with a new coordinator this might change in the future but for now there’s no sense in hoping for this change.

Allow structure upgrades to be purchased with badges as well as gold, tho I honestly don’t understand why they cost anything at all other then supply..

Players should not be able to cause damage to gates. A group of 40 can auto-attack a wooden or reinforced gate down without using any siege, it’s just dumb and encourages mindless zerging. Changing this would allow smaller groups of players to defend against larger groups of players that use poor tactics. This change would also prevent one player from being able to keep a waypoint endlessly contested.

Bring back the Orbs with a different mechanic like PPT, but change the altars of power so that all of them behave like the northern altar. If you have to kill the keep lord before taking the orb it would prevent nearly all the “hacking” of the orbs.

Change the outmanned buff to give the same buff 3 orbs use to give, this would definitely encourage people to stay and fight when they are outmanned.

- Rewamp WvW abilities, you are too much caring causal players and forgetting the others.

- Fix skill lag.

- Queue timer informations.

- Overflow WvW informations.

-A potential cooldown on waypointing to deter thoughtless zergball ushes
-Arrow carts doing less damage to rams, because placing them behind gates is unfair

Although head bashing against gates is unskillful and annoying, removing player damage to gates would provide a huge boost to the defensive force. All it would take is 5 superior arrow carts behind a gate and gates would be unbreakable.

Something does need to be done about tagging gates to contest way-points.

Change to Orbs of Power to PPT has been suggested, keep lords should be slain before an orb can be captured though.

Change to the Out-manned buff has been suggested, it would be down to the developers to deem what would be fair but it does need to be changed from PvE gains to PvP boosts.

Revolution, not Evolution. Evolution is nice, but it will not revitalize WvW and bring all the old people/guilds back. Small changes and even big changes like current WXP system will pass by unnoticed mostly.

For months we seen tweaks in WvW, making it better – but even in state it was it sell was great and fun and people played it and fought thousands of battles. However in all that time barely anything “new” was there (wxp being the nearest).

Frankly speaking, people did wvw for X monthes and if asked to return to GW2 to “improved” WvW they`d ask – whats new? to do the same thing for X more months?

We need something drastically new, and not bit by bit – since even if in the end such changes will change wvw entirely, they still will pass unnoticed. We need a whole add-on amount of content, no matter how long it`ll take to develop: new maps, underwater sieging, new siege weapons, new mechanics. I know arena.net decided not to go for GW2 as they did in GW1 – releasing standalones/expansion packs, however essentially – all wvw “evolution” is evolutionary path to extinction. Even current surge of players checking out WXP and returning queues are laughable in comparison to amount of people and battles fought in first months of GW2. The population will only decline. Basically it reminds me of path AoC went with its pvp system – adding vxp, than pvp gear etc. but in the end it still died.

If you want people back, do something entirely new, and in big piece, so they wouldn’t “check it and leave”. I know one such thump card for Arena.net is GvG, but as WvW fan – i`d rather see WvW really have a big update/expansion so that i`d could tell my guilds and friends “look! theres year more of thing to do! and its not the same thing you did for year before! lets try it again!”.

TLDR
Evolution of WvW is evolution to perfect, stable,.. and empty WvW.
Pick up pitchforks, fire the torches and bring us Revolution!

Developers have already said new WvW abilities will be introduced in later patches as-well as changes to the current ones.

Queue timer information (position in queue) has already been added.

WvW information on Overflows i think is a cross-server issue.

Arrow Carts have already been nurfed 3 times since beta to the point you can out-heal there damage.

Ascii.9726:

Although head bashing against gates is unskillful and annoying, removing player damage to gates would provide a huge boost to the defensive force. All it would take is 5 superior arrow carts behind a gate and gates would be unbreakable.

Or they could.. I donno.. make catapults, golems or trebs.. or have an overall strategy that involves attacking when the enemy isn’t expecting it? Is taking a keep without ever needing to use a single piece of siege working as intended?

Cain.9724:

Or they could.. I donno.. make catapults, golems or trebs.. or have an overall strategy that involves attacking when the enemy isn’t expecting it? Is taking a keep without ever needing to use a single piece of siege working as intended?

If there taking keeps without even needing to use siege, then the defense has a serious problem defending. Certain damage needs to be reduced against gates (such as Conjured Fiery Greatswords) but all in all the time it takes to man-mode a gate down from full gives the defense plenty of time to set up siege.

Heres an example of afew arrow carts and about 30 SoR pushing over 60 JQ who were man-moding a gate down. They were on the gate so long we had time to set up 4 arrow carts, and have scattered forces waypoint to citadel and run down to the garrison to rally up.

I support this thread fully. Might I add another?

-Add event bonuses for repairing. Even if it was a small dolyak sized reward an event bonus for every 20 supply used seems fair. If you make this only achievable on a non-contested tower or keep boost it to a supply camp sized bonus.

-Give credit for tower/keep takes to the poor people running trebuchets or catapults. Significant wall damage should be enough to get credit.

-Give a separate event bonus for taking down an enemy wall. Again even a small dolyak sized bonus would do. This would obviously have some sort of limitation or cooldown to prevent farming reparing walls. But treb drivers should be rewarded too.

-Healing X% of somebodies life makes you elligible to receive credit for their WvW kills for a short time (30 seconds?). For example maybe if I heal 20% of a warriors life while he kills 2 peoples I get credit? By comparison I could do 5% dmg to each person and get credit under current system.

Placing an arrow cart behind a gate that has a huge opening above it, one would expect to be hit by arrows, and the damage is under 400 a hit off a ram, nothing unfair about it.
I would like to see escort guards be useful i. e. allow the escort the ability to revive the dolyak if just the yak and not the guards are killed, in it’s current form the guards vanish when the yak dies making it a useless upgrade(the yak makes it past most NPC threats 90% of the time with no guards, and the guards occasionally get busy and ignore their sworn duty.)

I’d like to see WvW rewards such as maybe a rare for every 10 towers you help capture or like an exotic for taking 5 keeps. As a guild leader I have lots of members complaining that they don’t get anything out of doing WvW.

Making it where just taking a camp, tower or keep give not potential only as you upgrade it does it start to give potential points but give more pts for structural then service upgrades.

Dovgan.8605:

I would like to see escort guards be useful i. e. allow the escort the ability to revive the dolyak if just the yak and not the guards are killed, in it’s current form the guards vanish when the yak dies making it a useless upgrade(the yak makes it past most NPC threats 90% of the time with no guards, and the guards occasionally get busy and ignore their sworn duty.)

I completely agree with this.

It would help make the camp upgrades more worth it without making the camps harder to take and would help prevent 1-2 people being able to bomb a heavily defended yak. Defenders need the time to react.

Allow supplies taken from dead dolyaks to exceed the supply cap by 5.
Most of the time they go to waste because people will bring supplies with them whenever they leave, so currently yaks mostly only give supplies to zergs stripping an enemy supply camp.

Added lack of rewards for players who do not damage a Tower Lord, but causes damage to the gate/ wall (i.e. Treb operators)

Added small rewards for repairing Gates and Walls.

Added make yaks invulnerable until yak escort guards have been killed.

Ascii.9726:

Added lack of rewards for players who do not damage a Tower Lord, but causes damage to the gate/ wall (i.e. Treb operators)

Added small rewards for repairing Gates and Walls.

Added make yaks invulnerable until yak escort guards have been killed.

Yay! I gotta say your list is really good. It had most everything I think WvW needs on it. Now I’m struggling to find anything not listed.

I would like to suggest something for Camps since we have great problems with that. When you take camps you basicly take them so dolyaks can go to tower/keep and bring supplies so you can upgrade it. But after 4 minutes give or take you loose the camp and all upgrades with it are lost. So i suggest another Upgrade for Camps:

Barricade – This will make Barricade to the camp and protect the camp with Gate ofc the gate and the barricade will be easy destroyable but will tell the owners of that camp that battle is there and you will have time to react and protect the camp and the upgrades with it.

(Need Name for this upgrade) – 2 Dolyaks when you upgrade the keep or the castle you will find that the supply that is coming is too low and you need supply to make the upgrade and than time so the upgrade is finished so After Upgrading all 4( or 5 with Barricade) than you can upgrade second Dolyak that will go together with the first dolyak to bring supplies to Towers/keeps/castles.

Ralathar.7236:

Yay! I gotta say your list is really good. It had most everything I think WvW needs on it. Now I’m struggling to find anything not listed.

Thanks. I just hope the new WvW developer is more communicative on the forums about whats happening with WvW, teasers for whats coming and input into player suggestions. As we know community communication isn’t there strong point!

Ascii.9726:

Added make yaks invulnerable until yak escort guards have been killed.

Gotta disagree here. All that change does is promote zerg play again. I think dolyaks are pretty close to fine the way they are. A better solution would be to up the dolyaks level to 82 when guards are purchased and to 84 if the increased guard level upgrade is purchased.

Having escorted and attacked hundreds of dolyaks it would give the extra time needed while not requiring even more people to attack the dolyak and take it out.

Ive stopped small groups from taking out dolyaks under the current system and ive suicide heavily escorted dolyaks. I believe I deserved those dolyak kills, and the defenders had plenty of chances to stop me or just drop some major healing on the dolyak.

I would ask that you keep the op to things that have majority support.

As far as what I would like to see?

I would like to see a large open (there can and should be plenty of chokepoints etc though) map without castles, or close towers. handful of towers and supply camps, a lower pop limit than the borderlands, and plenty of other small time objectives to fight over.

I would like to see the whole tier system revamped personally. Change it to a tournament or round robin, just something to remove tier stagnation. Would be exciting and bring a freshness every reset not knowing who you will be facing.

With their really being no rewards for being first or winning your tier other then saying you are first I don’t see a reason this couldn’t work. You could go from dominating one week to being dominated the next, except for the extreme cases like the top t1 and maybe the bottom t8 but who knows.

2 suggestions:-

1) May not be possible but please switch euro server reset to a reasonable time for euro zone, or maybe do reset 2 or 3 hours earlier overall. Midnight resets are really anti-social.

2)Orbs of power alternative needed to give strategic depth to borderlands. It is a long trek up to the northern supply camp in enemy borderlands, with little reward for doing so. In effect this severely compresses the map. The orbs of power mechanic itself was a flawed concept, but could be replaced with a more useful one. I would suggest invading a northern ‘keep’ and killing the guild lord should itself provide a high point per tick yield, perhaps even as high as for holding Stomemist. This would ensure far more map usage, and much greater capacity for varied overall strategies and some epic battles. The zerg cannot rule supreme in this scenario as it can be harried en route, and reinforcements (waypoint after defeat) would be severely reduced.

-I need npc troops like PvE or same Vigil story mode, so commanders can command them… such as def the south gate or atk enemy gate.
-Give free golem at the waypoint or respawn point every 15 minutes like BF3!!!! It is a vehicle that can take the game more fun.
-I need Orbs comeback to the WvW once again, because I want to see tactics in wars, whice everyone has already forgotten.
-Finally, I want to see Dragon event in WvW!!! Outmand world can control Dragon to atk everything

Great initiative, pretty much agree with everything you’ve suggested, so not going to repeat what you’ve mentioned already.

WvW Suggestions:

• Improved Commander tag:
  - Commander tags are now displayed in different colors (except blue, which is explained further below) depending on the amount of commanders in the same zone. These colors are decided by which commander has activated his tag first. Turning off/leaving will open up that color spot for new arrivals.
  - Commanders now have the option to place symbols on the map for people in the zone to see, in their respective color(s). (To avoid clusterkitten of symbols on your map simply join the squad of the commander your following, as this will only display your commanders symbols placed on the map.)
  - These symbols are: Attack(axes), Defend(shield) and Rally-point(banner). These can be placed anywhere on the map.
  - Example: Green commander wants people to defend Garrison, he therefore places a green shield symbol near the watergate, because that spot needs defending. When the threat is over he removes the symbol.
  - Commander tag now requires minimum ranking of 100~, and costs both Badges of honor and gold.

• Guild Commander:
  - In order to make it easier for guilds to do stuff on their own without involving the whole zone their in, they are now able to research their own guild commander tag(s), for influence. These tags are only seen by the people representing the guild, all guild commander tags are shown in blue, so is the symbols mentioned above.
  - Including making it easier for guilds to do certain things alone, this will hopefully also split up the larger groups(megablobs), which again would reduce the skill lag.

• WXP Suggestions:
  - Reward people with new purchasable skins as they progress in rankings. These skins are only wearable for people above the required ranking.

Siege Owners to get rewards
To encourage more to buy and place siege, if you placed the siege, then even if your not using the siege equipment you should still get xp and drops from the kills from it. It could be a much smaller chance of bag, and smaller xp amount, but it would be good for those the buy all the siege to get some king of reward for it.

WvW Legendary
Also it would be great to see a legendary WvW weapon.. but there is a catch when you die, the person who killed you gets the weapon. Like a hot potato weapon. Could be a weapon with slightly higher damage than an exotic, but perhaps a condition damage every so often, so carying the weapon has some negatives as well as positives.

Commander icons
Let us buy commander tags with Badges, add more functionality to icon. Stats like numbers, hot maps etc.

WvW – GvG
take away 3 maps, and make a GvG version of WvW, only on 1 borderland. Or even a schedulaed match type map, so an alliance of Guilds and set up a match with another.

Best recommendation I can make is for the new coordinator to push, and push hard for a public test server.

Emotes like in Pvp.

T-Rex emote buyable for 10 000 badges + 2M Karma.

Things I think should be addressed

Guardian skills -Wall of Reflection- -Sanctuary- and -Shield of Absorbtion- need to actually work against Ballistas/Trebs

Trebbers need love Give them Wxp Exp Karma Silver etc.

Make all Camp/Tower/Keep Guards scale with the amount of enemies on the map just like PvE Events do.
Raise Guard Level should increase +5 on top of scaling at least for the amount of money and supply it costs.

The yak speed and supply refreshing in camps needs to increase or make it an upgrade(WvW moves faster than originally tested)

Breakout should only happen on the HOME map! you should not get a free supply siege ride on someone elses map.

Ballista needs to fire from the actual tip of of Ballista (it seems to fire from behind the shield thing cause blocking even though the tip is cleary unobstructed from wall lips etc.

New Skill Ballista -Spread Shot- Fix the Range tooltip to the correct range and/or fix the skill so it does shoot upto 3000 and so that it can shoot up or down.

Show how many allies and enemies are on any map, a simple number along side the score (this shouldn’t be hidden at all)

Commanders should be able to see all Home Players anywhere on the map that they are on (maybe tie it with Squad)
Give people more of a reason to be in area of a commander (Buffed like siegerazer?)

Waypoints should only be contested if enemies are within 1000 range, I mean come on, I plink a guard and boom something 6000 away is contested?

If you insist on having animals in WvW please make them into ambient critters (or get rid of them completely)

Objectives could give less rewards the more people do it. I think this is one of the possibilities against zerging.

If it’s more profitable to do objectives with a group of around 20 than with 80, even if it takes a little bit longer to complete, people will start to avoid being in the zerg. They will most likely even leave if the group gets too large and create their own new group.

Ascii.9726:

miniL.7361:

I vote for more maps in WvW rather than the medium servers though. I think adding 1 or 2 maps, will first of all split up those CRAZY huge zergs of 50-80 people. And it can provide more room for players to join wvw rather than stand in Que most of the day (especially casuals with only 1 or 2 hours to spare).

New maps would be cool but unfortunately it was stated by a Developer not so long ago in a podcast with GW2Guru.com that they have no plans for adding new maps into WvW anytime soon and the current maps are already the biggest the engine will allow them to be.

Maybe with a new coordinator this might change in the future but for now there’s no sense in hoping for this change.

Actually, Colin Johansen just gave an interview to mmorpg.com where it was reported new maps were a possibility:

There are likely going to be new and different home-maps, new map objectives, new things to do in World vs. World all around, because now that it’s gotten to the point where it’s rock-solid technically they get to decide where it grows from here. To build on that game-type and take it to a whole new level. So now they’re all coming together and deciding where to go with the system to give it a lot more variety from week to week and day to day.

I started a thread on this information here because I thought it was pretty important, but no one bothered to comment.