First, I’d like to thank the wvw community for all their great replies on this thread. You guys have really stepped up! I want to add my own top five but, to put it in context, I’m going to tell you a little about myself.
I’ve been on TC for the entirety of my 3+ year gw2 career, so all my experience in wvw is at the t1/t2 level. However, in that time I’ve gone from being a guildless pug to commanding for one of the server’s most prominent wvw guilds and everything in between. Here’s what I’d change.
1. REWARDS
-A. Real talk time: I’m currently working on two legendary weapons and would like to get a legendary back piece at some point. Right now, to do those things, I have to take time out of my favorite play mode and do either pve or pvp for reward tracks, because wvw simply cannot keep up in terms of crafting materials or coin per the amount of time invested, and that’s without considering the massive costs for siege and upgrades that keep wvw from even paying for itself if you’re playing at the high levels. Give us reward tracks, give us legendary back items, give us chests for capturing and defending objectives. Make logging in and playing wvw worth the time and effort. Keep veteran players in the BLs, and maybe attract some new ones. (I’m aware that there are materials needed for legendarys that can only be gotten in wvw, and guess what? Just from playing normally I have run out of storage space for those mats, while barely making a dent in the other mats I need. If crafting were my only goal I wouldn’t log into wvw at all at this point).
-B. XP. You can’t gain xp in wvw. Maybe you can if you’re an uplevel (which is not really viable at the level where I play), but if you’re like me or my friends you just can’t, not even the consolation spirit shards we used to get before HoT. You can gain wxp, which is nice and, you know, actually relevant to our game mode, but you can only get that for kills and caps. I remember watching a ‘guild chat’ video around the time of the HoT launch and Ruby was talking about how, in HoT, you can gain xp from anything, including things like gathering and ressing people. Well, in wvw you can’t. If you do those things you get useless xp that gives you nothing, just some gold numbers that fly in front of your face, mocking you. No progress toward a goal. Even in PvP there are rank points for ressing allies. WvW: nothing.
-C. Winning. Two matchups ago, my server was in second place for most of the week but we worked very hard, stayed up late, and managed to come in first by a slim margin. What rewards did we get for all our effort? A couple of masterwork items and bragging rights (and the tears of our enemies, but does having that be the most important reward contribute to a welcoming gaming community or a toxic one?). It makes it really hard to care about the outcome of the matches when that’s all you get for a win. It doesn’t have to be game-breaking, but maybe a celebration booster for everyone on the server (including those who aren’t avid wvw players) would get people to care about the outcome, and that would get people to log in, populating our bls and making the game more fun for everyone. Of course, this isn’t really viable with the current matchup algorithm that tends to favor the same exact matchups and outcomes week after week for months at a time.
2. Maps
Ok, I know I’m in the minority here, but I really like the desert maps. I’m a big blobby open-field sort of commander, and, while there aren’t a ton of spots for open field combat compared to alpine bls, the terrain makes for some really interesting places to fight (some of my favorite being refuge camp and the sentry point south of academy). The shrines, the layout of the keeps, and even the position of the northern camp make it distinct from the alpine bl, leading to new and creative strategies. Do not remove the desert BL. Do not change it. Just give the people who don’t like it an alternative. Right now, that alternative is EBG, which is always queued. Players like me, who spent the majority of their pre-HoT time on the alpine BLs have had to adapt fast or, like too many of my friends have done, quit playing all together. Pretty much all the learning I did in my first two years playing gw2 has been rendered meaningless. I’m adapting, but it’s been hard.
You need to bring back the alpine borderlands in some form. In my ideal scenario, red BL is always desert, blue BL is always alpine, and green BL is a third, new BL, maybe with a jungle flavor. The matchups will be their most interesting and dynamic if each borderland map has a different layout, necessitating, different strategies. Right now, map hopping is an important part of wvw, as is drawing the enemy from one map to another. Think how much more interesting that would be with three different maps running at the same time. (I know, I know, I’ll probably have to wait for the second expansion for a new map, but a girl can dream). Of course, this could get very frustrating if a server’s home BL is the same color week after week and its a map they don’t like, but I think this is a problem best solved by adjusting the matchups, not the maps themselves.
3. MATCHUPS.
Right now, the glicko system heavily favors the status quo. We get the same match-ups week after week and are usually the same color, week after week. In t2 it’s boring. In t1 it was soul-crushing. I think a lot of my fellow players feel that the only way around this is to frequently hop servers which is not a solution and damages communities. Re-balancing populations through something like alliances would fix a lot of things, but is a high-risk move. Any change of that magnitude could potentially force more people out of the game mode. A change in the match-up algorithm could at least mitigate some of the problems with wvw without as much risk to the community, and might be a better solution for the short/medium term. You know what else would help? REWARDS.
4. Stability.
This point has been thoroughly addressed by previous commenters. I simply want to add my name to the petition to revert to non-stacking stability in wvw. Stacking stab works fine in pve, but is a failed experiment in wvw. At the very least, the way stacks are added and removed needs to be re-balanced specifically in wvw.
5. General support for hard-core wvw play (my, that sounds dirty).
When raids came out there were complaints from some players that the content was ‘gated,’ not open to all players, only those with the highest level gear and the time and energy to devote to perfecting their play-style. The answer from the devs: not everything is meant for all players. When players complained about adventures being too hard the response was similar: not all content is for all players. And yet, time and again, when the hard-core wvw community has asked for something (invisible tags, for example), the response we get is along the lines of “but that would prevent casual players from accessing everything!” This is the opposite of the philosophy in pve raids and in ranked pvp. By making wvw so flatly ‘accessible’ you are telling hard-core players that we don’t matter, or, worse, don’t exist. At this point all I want is some acknowledgement from the devs that, even on the same server, different levels of wvw investment exist, and some support for those of us who play at the ‘raid’ level.
Thank you for your time.
PS, I know that gliding would ‘break everything’ but every time, EVERY TIME, I log into wvw and realize I can’t glide it feel like a slap in the face. Doubly so with all the verticality in the desert bl. It certainly makes me feel less like playing. Maybe there’s some way to implement gliding on a limited basis?
