Guild Wars 2

Mike O Brien.4613:

Karl is working specifically on WvW-focused skill balance. He’s looking for the wins for WvW that don’t screw the rest of the game.

Means there are still no (or very few) special conditions on WvW skill calculations for the fact that they’re occurring in WvW. In other words, WvW instances remain as PvE instances technically, and will not receive the behavioral or numeric separation that PvP receives, or as was done in the “special” case of Retaliation boon.

Any skill balance change they make will therefore be subject to the pleasure, acceptance, and arguments of PvE players who never enter WvW. Those players will judge the change by their own completely different perspective, and the changes must revert or compromise where they run into conflict.

Note that the fact that many players enjoy (or at least participate in, without necessary enjoyment of) both the PvE and WvW content does not indicate that these two systems should not be wholly separate in combat balance, just as the same is clearly accepted in comparison of PvE and PvP maths.

1. Population Balance
2. Revert Stability/Skill Balance – (Reverting stab has a huge asterix next to it, please, please, please take caution. Old stability used to be susceptible to immobilise, thus hammer trains, however this was also before the introduction of resistance. Resistance/boon/damage reduction stacking still exists in WvW, even after nerfs to bunker Mesmer and Rev in Pvp. On a large scale these comps are.. aids, but are weakened by the current implementation of stab; prone to lots of hard CC. Stab would need to go up in corruption priority)
   Needs to be assessed: Signet of Inspiration/Dwarf Stance/Frost Aura/Superior Sigil of Concentration/Plate of Mussels Gnashblade, this list goes on…
   Needs to be changed: A visible aoe circle for Hunter’s Ward.
3. Scoring
4. (Defensive) Siege Reworks – (Reduce Arrow Cart damage by ~15%. Revert the arc of Omega projectiles back to being able to hit siege placed on the inner edges of walls. Increase Shield Gen cooldowns, Force Dome needs to be 10-15 seconds longer. Can take up to 5 minutes to kill an SMC lord with Iron Guard active, but less than 10 seconds to revive it)
5. Rewards – (Something akin to the PvP rewards tracks would be nice. Also that WvW Legendary Backpiece.)

-1. Reverting back to Alpine: number one herpa kitten band aid fix for WvW. Rework the new Desert BL instead.

I’ve just heard about the possible borderland reversion to the old ones? It’s not April Fools is it? I’m peeking my head out from hibernation mostly and if it fixes does occur to our liking a few of us may return…

On topic according to the title:
*Please note that sub-numbers (alphabetical) is mostly explaining reasons and things to look at and this is based on just before hibernation.

1. Borderland change – back to old borderlands for reasons:
a) Remove PvE content
b) Open spaces to fight and roam

2. Skill balance
a) Stability issue (hard cc)
b) Battle-ship/pirate-ship/_-ship meta that ultimately promotes just range-bombing down enemies before they can get to you. Most of this is extended hard-cc or soft-cc. With the specializations there was even more soft-cc that is extremely difficult to deal with.
c) DH traps
d) Mesmer Gravity Well
e) Venom-share + Aoe (eg wells) procs more than once

3. Something to spend Badges on that is reasonable other than just Siege, snazzy WvW skin(s) that cost a lot of Badges of Honor maybe? Possibly pull in new blood.

4. Reward Track – to gain abilities to do things in WvW
I like the idea that Dolyaks need to be defended to the gate and that supplies no longer affect the upgrades, but I like to keep the open of toggling upgrades open to players. I normally do not have the gold to aid in the server in that way as a scout (long ago), but perhaps instead of gold, WvW experience maybe?

5. Community checks – Basically take warnings into account, if there’s a lot of dissatisfaction before the chance then get ready to damage control or to revise beforehand.

I wrote this a while back, but now I hope ANET sees it:

“WvW: add back the old BL maps for a total of 7 maps. Reduce the amount of servers so that all 7 maps can have a large healthy population. Tiers will be reduced to 2 maybe 3 depending on data. Rewards will be better on larger maps or on tier with lower population densities. This is to balance out the lack of frequent action in such cases.

Possibly increase reset time to monthly, so that capping and defending will be more meaningful. New BL maps will have gliding and new anti-air seige weapons.

WvW rewards will be similar to pvp. WvW boxes will give out badges and crafting mats with some unique or rare skins sprinkled in.

Capping will reward gold but the gold will decrease on each recap of the same territory. So a player capping a keep for the first will get full gold amount, 50% the 2nd time capping the same keep, 25% 3rd time, and so on.

The new rewards should make ascended crafting much more accessible to WvWers.

Also huge reward increases for defending keeps and capturing keeps that have been defended multiple times, rewards in these cases will be XP and karma -in large amounts.

Capping keeps will now require a certain percentage of players to be in the vicinity otherwise doors will become invincible. This is to prevent capping during odd hours, it will suck for players in different time zones. This can be possibly offset by increasing rewards for capping supply camps and other minor objectives during such hours. And yes, it will remove some strategies but it will make WvW a more immersive game type.

WvW will now promote keeping territories and prevent capture instead of mindlessly zerging to flip back and forth. At the same time capturing a heavily guarded territory will yield massive rewards.

In my opinion WvW needs to remain an open sandbox game type, similar to EVE. Devs need to have very little involvement here -for maintaining balance only. The pacing and goals for WvW need to be created by players themselves.

LoL ANET hire me already."

I would love to see some large guilds claim and dominate specific areas of the maps while other guilds try to usurp their control.

Mike O Brien.4613:

1. Stability & skill balance
2. Fix or revert DBL
3. Rewards
4. Population balance
5. Scoring

Yes, we will take the feedback and make stability, general skill balance, and fixing/reverting DBL our top priorities. We’re not currently working on scoring and that has to be a longer-term project.

Karl is working specifically on WvW-focused skill balance. He’s looking for the wins for WvW that don’t screw the rest of the game.

We’re investigating whether to fix or revert DBL. They’re both a lot of work. These next couple days will be your last chance to give feedback before we make a decision, so speak now or forever hold your peace.

Thanks for the post. A few comments to help you understand what players want out of those points you listed.

1. Stability & skill balance, this largely have to do with how stale pirateship meta has become post-stability changes. While some guilds have been trying to break the meta by going nomad frontline (this is boring as well), there’s still too much cc’s and ranged bombing. We see less melee characters being played because people don’t want to be free loot bags. There are way too many cc’s and skills that strip stability for melees to have fun. Skills you should look into tweaking:

-Hunter’s Ward – This skill is a 6 second jail trap that strips ungodly amount of stability. It’s invisible so you can’t see it, so you have no idea if you’re trapped in it until you try to move and get knocked back. Every time you run into it, your stab is gone, and you get knocked down, causing your skills to go on cooldown…which often leads to deaths. This skill needs to be visible so we know when it’s up and when it’s down, and it should not strip stab the way it does right now.

-Banners – there are enough cc’s, aoe’s, and knockbacks in the game. We really didn’t need more knockbacks that again, further strips stability. Every guild claiming banners have some sort of aoe knockback/knockdown. Plus banners are just not needed, they throw any and all balance out of whack. Even more so when you are facing enemies with greater numbers using 3-5x more banners, making the fights go from hard to impossible.

-Shield Generators – did these things really need that aoe knockback (Force Ball)? Again, over the top. Shield generators should’ve been used to shield players & siege assets from projectiles. It did not need the knockback that again messes with stability.

-Chilling fog, one of the most annoying ideas ever implemented. Iron Hide, over the top, not needed when Lords are already ridiculously scaled up, especially given Desert BL Lords have super annoying abilities (more knockbacks, knockdowns, aoe fear, unlimited target Hunter’s Ward, etc). Airstrikes that bomb you for lots of damage while knocking you around? Over…the…top.

2. Alpine vs Desert BL’s. Alpine BL’s had a flow to its design, from camps, to towers, to keeps. Desert BL’s just seem mashed together, no rhyme and reason for how or why things are. Going back to Alpine is likely the easier route for you, because Desert BL’s are just that bad. Read below for why.

-Alpine BL towers provided strategic values. Taking NE/NW towers meant you could treb the garrison, or setup camp for a long endurance siege. Taking SW tower meant you could treb Bay. Defending the towers meant one less place your attackers could retreat into, and one less place your attackers could treb from. People attacked & defended towers because they gave strategic advantages. They were also great at drawing fights.

-Desert BL towers do nothing, they mean nothing. Not only are they too far for defenders to defend, they are not worth defending because they give no strategic importance. Towers are just farmed by ktrainers anymore.

-Alpine BL keeps gave you plenty of room to fight once you break through outer. The courtyards inside are large, plenty of room for you to maneuver and have some great battles. The garrison was multi-layered, but in a sensible manner. It allowed attackers & defenders room to move around, reset fights, regroup, setup siege, de-siege, etc.. There were some really epic battles in Bay, Hills, and Garrison…battles that have not been seen since HoT expansion.

-Desert BL keeps are too much about chokes, every corner you turn is a choke point. Not much room for fights, such a waste of space really. Not only do you have to worry about gimmicks like lava, cliffs, rock walls, or overpowered lords, you have to stand in siege infested chokes…all the while trying to maneuver with chilling fog on you. Does that even sound like fun to anybody?

-Alpine BL, building a waypoint meant something. It took time, took effort from players to defend and supply up. When you had a waypoint, you knew fights were coming. Especially so if you could waypoint an enemy Bay/Hills, then the fights became epic. Sometimes a commander logs in with a goal to break a waypoint because it’d be achieving something strategically, since letting your enemies have a waypoint on your BL meant they could setup Garrison siege easier. Plus it was always action packed & fun to fight over a waypoint.

-Desert BL, what’s the point of giving enemy waypoints on a freshly capped air/fire keep? Having waypoints up all the time means nobody give a crap, so no guaranteed fights. Some things just make no sense on the Desert BL’s.

-Alpine terrain, lots of flat areas for people to fight for both fun and strategic importance. The flat areas between NE/NW towers and Garrison have seen tons of battles. People often took the towers to taunt defenders, and they fought hours there just for fun. But not only that, they fought there because winners likely get to have an advantage. If defenders win, they probably could recap the NE/NW tower. If attackers win, they likely could setup siege on the Garrison. There was a flow and reason for fighting and winning every spot on the Alpine map. The flat areas around Bay? Winning that spot as defenders mean you likely got the supply camp and spawn tower. Losing means the enemy gets the supply camp and have the supplies to setup siege on Bay.

-Desert BL terrain, chokes, cliffs, canyons, lava, roads that are filled with rock walls that serve absolutely no purpose other than take up space and annoying players. Cripple fields and invis fog are all just gimmicks that disrupt player vs player combat. There aren’t many good spots to fight zerg vs zerg. And while yes there are some flat desert dunes you could fight on, they serve no strategic purpose. It’s why people don’t bother fighting over those open areas. You can’t just design a flat area out in middle of nowhere and say “there, that’s what you asked for, go fight there”. It doesn’t work that way.

3. Rewards, something similar to PvP reward tracks would do just fine. One difference is in WvW we use siege, lots of it. Players would love more WvW exclusive skins for siege, armor, weapons, guild related items, etc.. Guild & Server pride is a big thing in WvW, so use your imaginations to what players may like.

4. Population balance is bad and will only get worse. You can’t trust players to “balance” things out because gamers are fickle. Majority of the gamers will choose the easy way out and get rewarded, rather than pick the hard road and chance at not getting rewarded. This is why server stacking occurs, and why the servers doing well usually continue to do well, while other servers fade away slowly. An alliance/battlegroup system is needed in the near future so guilds stop breaking up, as many guilds right now have no player pool to recruit from. It also is extremely stale to fight the same server every single week for months and months. WoW has a decent battlegroup system, where your server name still displays on your name tag, but you fight in a battlegroup with other servers. Battlegroups will allow you easier balancing as you can swap servers around to balance things out if one side becomes too populated, have too much coverage, or win too much.

Population is not ever going to get back up to what it was a year or two ago. So moving forward, an alliance/battlegroup system is needed no matter how much people want to fight it. The situation is dire at the moment. And population balance has everything to do with the scoring system.

5. Scoring, ppt has to go, or its effect needs to be greatly diminished. PPT is the reason for coverage issues, the cause for server stacking. The need to ppt is also one of the main causes for server drama, it’s responsible for breaking up tons of guilds over the past years. Lastly ppt creates boring ktrains and pvdoors, it makes some people avoid fights. It’s not a healthy design, it can’t be sustained. PPT alone is responsible for some servers giving up on a whole week by Monday because one server in their match up is already too far ahead.

If ppt must continue to be used, there needs to be a system where the leading server gains less ppt than the losing server. You could also place a cap on the amount of ppt you can gain each hour. So even if you dominate 3 maps, you could only gain so much ppt. After awhile you still have to go out and fight player vs player battles to win ppk. The core of the WvW gameplay needs to be player vs player combat. You can’t sustain this game mode by making people ktrain & backcap. Most people come out to WvW because they want large scale player vs player combat. People are not doing WvW just so they could be challenged by PvE lords, gates, and walls.

A lot of things won’t get better unless you change scoring and ppt. So this isn’t as low on the list as you may think. But bottom line is, everything listed is important. It kind of shows you how bad the state of WvW is at the moment. It’s hard to just focus on one thing because you really need to do them all. WvW needed a revamp, players thought they were getting that with HoT expansion, but WvW got worse with HoT.

Mike O Brien.4613:

…
We’re investigating whether to fix or revert DBL. They’re both a lot of work. These next couple days will be your last chance to give feedback before we make a decision, so speak now or forever hold your peace.
…

Just a quick response on this part. Yes, please revert back to the old alpine maps.

Important note 1:
The OLD alpine maps, without any of the map mechanics that got introduced with HoT; no banners, no tactivators, nothing!

Important note 2:
This also means NO WvW related HoT-locked guild feature like claiming and upgrading camps and keeps!

Mike, thank you for the transparency, it is greatly appreciated.

I would ask you to consider rolling back the stability change for WvW only (or extend the change to PvE if WvW and PvE cannot be separated – changes for the competitive game mode should take precedence) and returning to having it stack in duration. With the large amount of crowd control abilities in the game, stability that stacks in intensity is removed nearly immediately upon application, forcing primarily melee classes into a ranged role (and in the case of warrior, no role other than support). Stability that stacks in intensity also severely favors larger groups, whether organized or not, at the detriment of small, highly organized groups.

I won’t speak to rewards or the map as the sole reason I stopped playing WvW late last year was the stability change.

Yes on fixing stability vs cc issue, the pirateship is rotten ! Most memorable events in WvW are the fights which are so sorely missing these days and happen almost exclusivly on EB, theres no space to fight on DBL and i still dont get the bay/hills wp switch + the removal of porting in when contested timer was up. Thats where the good fights happened, defending bay/hills could drag out to epic evenings of fights, whatever the DBL was trying to achieve failed miserably.

Mike O Brien.4613:

There is one thing that doesn’t need to get wrapped up into the April release: Friday night resets. That doesn’t require a Live build. We’ll do it.

Just to be sure I’m not interpreting this wrong, but as I understood it, WvW reset is changed back to fridays? As of now?

expandas.7051:

I believe issues such as population balance (gold vs bronze server pop) and “nightcapping” (primarily directed at eu/ocx/sea players) will resolve themselves if an effective and engaging framework for WvW is reintroduced.

I have been playing WvW since day 1, and nightcapping has been an issue since day 1, even when all 4 maps were queued during NA prime. Back then Anet’s stance was that the players need/will balance themselves out. In 3.5 years, it hasn’t happened. My server perpetually has no ocx force, any ocx guilds that come give up and bandwagon somewhere else because they don’t want to be blobbed day in and day out.

So you want to revive WvW and bring more people into it….

My suggestions:

1)INCREASE REWARDS!!!!!!

People don’t play that much WvW not because it’s not fun, but because it feels unrewarding.

2)There should be a better motive for people to fight for their servers. Right now what you get isn’t making people even trying to win.
I open the WvW tab now and then and i don’t really care if my server is first or last, or how many points we get, there’s no difference. In the end you get some passive buffs that doesn’t really matter.

3<bonus>)Add EPIC Gigantic Robots/Siege machines to the game.

If you haven’t felt the iching when you where sieged by Siege Golems at L2 you didn’t feel anything!
Now with the guild halls there should be new epic siege gear added to the game, more siege machines to make siegeing a castle more awesome.

………………………………………………………………

That’s it.

Thank you for your time

What I would like to see are these:

1) Stability changed back to what it was before “stability stacks”. Smaller groups are still having hard times blob-busting because we just don’t have the numbers (and boon uptime) to face blob guilds.

2) Reward System. Currently WvW rewards are so subpar compared to PvE and PvP rewards. Something along the lines of the PvP reward tracks or making rewards better the higher WvW rank you are. This would benefit both veterans and new WvWers as it would be a reason to keep playing and make it more-so “end game content”.

3) Bring back server pride. Currently, there are a lot of us that reminisce about the “good ol’ days” when we could go to LA and ask for players to help push our WvW enemies off a certain map. I understand mega-server probably won’t be reversed, but can we see a return of server pride in some way, shape, or form?

Thanks for listening to the community about our precious game mode Anet

Get rid of PPT. It’s not a fun way to play. Make rewards for capturing and holding structures into combat buffs like you already do with Shrines.

Keep PPK.

Like people’s idea of rotating the maps. I’ve been away from the game a while and away from WvW even longer, but I didn’t mind the Desert Borderland. It has some fun mechanics. It just wasn’t fun to play because most people left WvW. Even if you remove it from WvW, it could be converted to a PvE map.

Population balance. I don’t have any new ideas…people have previously implied/mentioned server alliances or superservers. Or let people rotate what faction they’ll play in WvW.

Faction-wide PvP reward tracks everyone contributes to, so there’s a group effort for rewards.

Not sure about people’s ideas of just reverting to old stability. Both the old and new have drawbacks.

My top five priorities would be:

1. Balance the game mode -roaming is only viable on a few classes and specs due to the amount of stability or stuns a class can dish out. Most of us roamers in T1 just form dueling spots around SMC because we know certain classes can /faceroll their keyboard and never worry about being beaten in a 1vX situation (looking at you, druid). Likewise, condition dmg in the WvW game mode is superior to power damage.

2. Give us back the Alpine Borderland maps while the DBL maps are being fixed -the borderlands are not fun to play on due to how the objectives are so widely spaced.

3. Give the WvW a meaningful play experience by adding rewards. So far us WvW’ers have been inventing and coming up with our own motivations to stay in the game mode. As a roamer, I know most faces on my tier. Bring new life to this game mode and new persons by giving it the reward system it deserves. From hearing that this overhaul has been going on for about a year now, I can only expect great things.

4. Have dedicated staff members play the game. Have them tasked to hang out with a community, whether it be a havoc or a zerg or a few roamers, and get to know why it is those groups do what they do over and over again. Join a guild! Or, better yet, find some of those groups in WvW and ask for their “two cents” on a topic of interest. These forum posts are a great and efficient way of collecting data, however, to have one spend the time to truly get to know, live, and experience the issues is a long term value that should not be underestimated. They say effort is the best indicator of interest, you know?

5. Population imbalance does hinder fun game play. Now, I find it totally fine when another server’s zerg outnumbers mine. Totally fine. However, deadzones, where a server does not even have 15 players to defend or ward off two blobs of 40 or so players is quite the trouble. I personally do not know how this can be fixed under the current system, however, I must say that if servers are somehow disbanded because of population balance changes I will be quite sad to see the communities I’ve come to enjoy go.

Mike O Brien.4613:

As we said in the AMA, our top internal priorities have been population balance and rewards. From this thread, your top five priorities are, in order:
1. Stability & skill balance
2. Fix or revert DBL
3. Rewards
4. Population balance
5. Scoring

I’d like a fix to the Desert maps or to play on the old maps as much as the next guy but I’m really disappointed they’re prioritising that over population balance and rewards.

The map changes might appeal to a portion of the current WvW playerbase (not all, but a sizeable chunk) but is it seriously worth prioritising surface happiness for that group rather than enticing the return of players (and influx of new players) with better matchmaking via population balance and actual rewards for playing the game mode?

Once the initial happiness of the changes wears off, we’ll all be left with the same problems we’ve been facing for years, stale matchups and watching PvE and PvP players getting nice shinies for their time. I can guarantee that the same players that are actively campaigning for the old maps back are dedicated enough to be there to complain (complaining isn’t always a bad thing so don’t take offense to that) about the other problems we’re facing.

Hello Mike, we appreciate your communication. Thumbs up for changing the reset to friday. All I wanted to suggest has already been mentioned so I only have one question for you, namely about server pride and community.

Would it be possible to take Lions arch out of the megaserver system and assign a map overflow to each server, like before? The reason I’m asking is because we used to rally and call for reinforcements in the city or just hang out with our fellow mist warriors from the server.

I think that this would be a huge boon for WvW and (partially) bring back the server pride which many of us miss.

Just to throw my two cents in as a passing comment. I think you have a lot of good, interesting concepts in the Desert Borderlands, however I think there is way too much going on. The appeal of the Alpine maps is that there is a simple keep/tower/camp structure, without too many of the other elements getting in the way (the PvE stuff everyone seems to complain about). I would suggest taking what you’ve learned from the Desert Borderlands and break its various concepts into several other maps with wider spaces for fighting and a much simpler structure. This would allow for a frequent rotation to keep things fresh, but not so overly complicated that the fun gets zapped from each map.

You don’t even have to permanently combine servers. It’s possible to have lower number of tiers instead where 2 or 3 smaller servers can represent a single color.

Thanks for showing up and giving us that post DEV! Great news I think.

1. Change back to the old maps. That will give you ALOT of players back to the game, and the people that play other game modes in Gw2 atm will probably give it a try for the old time sake.
This thread have over 180 signs from real players that want the old maps back:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Want-the-old-maps-back-182-Signs/page/7#post6044455

2. Stability the way it were before.

3. Auto-loot, yes we deserve it as much as PvE-players

4. Seems like many servers are dead when it comes to WvW. Maybe its time to remove some servers and fill the servers that are left. Maybe give all players a chance to change server for free if you change back to the old maps.

5. Please no gliding & no more PvE to our WvW maps

Thanks! and good luck.

1) Bring back old stability
2) Bring back old Alpine maps, but with some cosmetic and mby mechanics changes
3) Make rally system for 3 people. This is a rly amazing and interesting system, which gave a kind of seesaw battles, but five is too much, one is too less, you can experiment with three i think.

sorry for my eng ;p

please bring back the old stability (without the stacks) so the pirate ship meta can go away cause that turned a lot of people and a lot of small guilds off of wvw as they are unable to withstand mindless cc spam against bigger numbers. Another thing i would like to see is autoloot (as in auto pick up) feature in wvw.

Mike O Brien.4613:

Hi all,

This is a great thread. It’s constructive. We’re all reading it and referring to it in team discussions.

As we said in the AMA, our top internal priorities have been population balance and rewards. From this thread, your top five priorities are, in order:
1. Stability & skill balance
2. Fix or revert DBL
3. Rewards
4. Population balance
5. Scoring

Yes, we will take the feedback and make stability, general skill balance, and fixing/reverting DBL our top priorities. We’re not currently working on scoring and that has to be a longer-term project.

Karl is working specifically on WvW-focused skill balance. He’s looking for the wins for WvW that don’t screw the rest of the game.

We’re investigating whether to fix or revert DBL. They’re both a lot of work. These next couple days will be your last chance to give feedback before we make a decision, so speak now or forever hold your peace.

I want to reiterate that everything we work on either ships in April or starts beta-testing on Live servers in April. We’re locking down dev work for the April release soon — next up is localization, QA, integration and regression testing — but we’ll extend the deadline for WvW skill balance.

There is one thing that doesn’t need to get wrapped up into the April release: Friday night resets. That doesn’t require a Live build. We’ll do it.

Mo

This post right here goes a long way towards my #1, communication. Letting us know what’s being worked on with a tentative time line.

1. Stability
2. Skill balance
3. Rewards
4. Fix or revert DBL
5. Population balance

Vissarion.6509:

So you want to revive WvW and bring more people into it….

My suggestions:

3<bonus>)Add EPIC Gigantic Robots/Siege machines to the game.

If you haven’t felt the iching when you where sieged by Siege Golems at L2 you didn’t feel anything!
Now with the guild halls there should be new epic siege gear added to the game, more siege machines to make siegeing a castle more awesome.

As someone who doesn’t WvW, this would get me to try out the game mode. They would have to be balanced around specific weaknesses (extremely long visibility + breakbars would work, that would force a team to rally around their giant robot and give the other team forewarning on where their enemies are) Actually, this could open up some new strategies too.

PS. you could totally use the Risen Giant rigs to make a believable looking Clockwork Tyrian mech. Massive bonus points if the player character is visible xD

1. Pop balance + remove night capping.

2. Rewards.

3. Transparent development. Most ppl quit because they lost faith in your ability or interest in wvw development.

Keep new bl with some changes. You can rotate Alpine with it. But just returning Alpine isn’t going to fix wvw. It was a boring map, most ppl quit before HoT because wvw was stale.

2. Skill balance ; Please do not kitten everyone in PvE for WvW or PvP! Nothing worst than having one game play style which by the way is the most populated while balancing another, if need be take the time and separate the skills! I do not want my Necro / Reaper to be thrown into the kitten ed toilet bowl again, we spent 3 years floating there and it sucked large! I can’t stress this enough, I’d rather play with the devil i know than revert to the quagmire we spent years in!!!!

1. Bring back the Alpine maps without the new HoT gimmicks.
2. Stability change
3. The guild WvW tactivators, banners, etc reworked or removed
4. Rewards
5. Autoloot

I really appreciate when feedback is asked. I think this is what has been the weakest part of anything WvW related. That said here are some of my opinions:

1. Desert BL vs Alpine: Return Alpine. I understand the DBL were indeed a lot of work work from the team but they encourage too much PVE, are too large, have way too many choke points, the keeps are nigh impossible to take if defended and the map provides little to no room for good havok. We even lost certain aspects we had in the old BLs like how towers actually meant something (every tower except SE tower could be used as a strategic place to siege up keeps). The keep lords in DBL are ridiculous, have way too much CC, scale too high and provide way too much of an advantage. Without solving all these issues first the maps will never be a good place for what should be a large scale player v player experience.

2. Balance: Pay more atention to the amount of CC available in game, theres just too much and it has a heavy ripple effect on the meta. The stability change for example is a result of this where stability was nerfed (for pvp purposes) but CC generally went up, this in turn made guardians even more necesary and warriors declined as a result. Counter options arent available either because balance is PVP based which is small group – example is that boon corruption could help balance our the rampant amount of boon sharing but corrupt boon (and most boon strip) is single target which works in pvp not in WVW. Long Story short you have to balance exclusively for wvw knowing its a LARGE SCALE group combat, what works for PvE or PvP wont work in WvW

3. On Tactivators and Siege: Both things are meant to give a smaller group an advantage vs larger groups BUT there is no way to restrict it to this intention. It is very common that a large map blob abuses siege, tactics and buffs provided by WvW to the point smaller groups cant compete. Tactics should have a way way way longer cooldown, they should be emergency buttons and some things like SMC stealth water/airship defense should just be removed simply because of the overpowered nature they have. Siege caps, locations they can be placed and ability to use them should get looked at as to stop the siege creep from a group with already superior numbers.

4. Rewards: this is simple, WVW rewards suck and they have sucked for a long long long time. Since WvW is tied to PvE in its equipment and as a result WvW should have access to EVERYTHING in PvE without having to grind it out in PvE. I shouldnt have to grind PvE to get my ascended armor when I want it for WvW while not getting any worthwhile rewards when I actually play the game mode. Also make the rewards for for winning the week actually worthwhile so that people CARE about winning the match.

5. Population: Balance is much more complex and I wish you luck there. Frankly id think that removing the transfer costs between servers so that players can move as they please. If the worry is that players will stack a certain server then it doesn’t matter because impossible queues will be their own punishment and eventually people will move naturally as a result of not being able to play because they bandwagoned into high population server.

6. On Scoring: The only suggestion I can give you here is to make a better balance between PPT and PPK (points per kill) probably making PPK weigh in much more into score. PPT scoring is fine the problem is that it heavily rewards population imbalance where you have coverage at times where the enemy server doesnt. Maybe a multiplier that changes the weight of your PPT depending on how heavy your population at a certain time is would work stave off night capping. (Example: a server with extremely high wvw population against 2 servers with low population at OCX time would get a PPT multiplier of x0.5 while enemy servers get x2 during that time zone)

And as far as priorities:

1. Stability
2. Skill balance (separate from PVE/PVP, if possible)
3. Population Balance
4. Fix/revert DBL
5. Rewards

As a former WvW player, with ~2000 hours in wvw, but not currently playing, I would say my structural priorities are:

1. Stability (the boon). Can I put this as all 5? WvW has unique circumstances, needs unique solutions.
2. Scoring, finding a way for matches to be competitive without exaggerating the population imbalance by time zone. There are more ppl in America than there are in OCX, so there are always going to be more players on during NA prime. That is not something Anet can fix. So scoring is what needs to change, either through PPK, or weighting ppt by global wvw population. I don’t know how to fix it, but it needs to be fixed.
3. Total population. There are too few people playing WvW right now for the number of servers that exist. WvW needs people like me, former WvW players, to feel like they can return. In addition, WvW needs new blood.
4. Rewards. There is no reason why PvP game modes can’t allow players to accumulate wealth. For some reason, adding gold to PvP game modes seems to be impossible. Just like in PvE and PvP, players need to feel invested and rewarded to keep playing, and winning your matchup every week is not enough, and aside from tournaments, players don’t push tiers, they xfer between them. So tangible rewards are key for encouraging this game mode. This is not a player asking for his game mode to be more rewarding, as I don’t play wvw for the rewards even if they are there. I just think that more tangible and numerous awards would be best for the gametype as a whole.
5. Consistent Updates and Events. This should probably be #1-5 on the list as well. With no flow of content and updates and events, WvW players feel disenfranchised, and develop an antagonistic relationship with Anet, more than any other game mode by a country mile. While rescources often can’t be devoted to a dying game mode, if WvW gets back on its feet again, it needs more obvious and sustainable support from Anet. Seasonal tournaments w/ transfer locks, a separate balance patch scedule, and more events like Sneak Attack. These go a long way towards keeping the players you already have, and more ppl visit the game mode.

I love WvW more than any other game I’ve ever played, and have pulled all-nighters commanding, sunk hours into theory crafting and working on server community. I would love nothing more than to feel that WvW has returned to a state where I can invest my time, and I sincerely hope that this update will begin the trek in the right direction. Thank you Mark O’Brian for being more open with your players, you do not know how much it is appreciated.

P.S. (GvG shoutout, RIP NA GvG)

Please focus priorities around fixing the following:

1. Fix Stability (Bring to Previous Form)

a. The stability nerf/change in WvW has caused WvW battles to become stale, and one-dimensional. It used to be that there were three distinct groups (the melee train, casters, and pick team/gank) in WvW that helped shaped the Meta and each group which contained two or more classes filled a unique role/purpose in the game-mode, which were of equal importance and significance to victory in any battle. No doubt any class could modify its role to some extent because of the versatility of Guild Wars 2’s class design but this was the general breakdown of how things used to work.

b. The stability change has caused melee players to be powerless because any disable instantly removes a stack of stability from the melee player. The problem with this change is that the amount of stacks initially given is not enough to balance out against the overwhelming number of disables being thrown towards the melee player. For example, siege such as the catapult, shield generator, and trebuchet, all which have disabling effects on their primary skills can remove a stack of stability on less than 10-second intervals (ex: shield generator skill (#1) [Force Ball] which can hit 50 players on a 4-second cool down and removes a stack of stab every hit). Often times when siege is placed, there is more than one piece of siege placed down so the amount of disables is generally magnified. In addition to siege-based stability-stack-removers, there are a plethora of skills that every class has access to which also contribute to stability-stack-removal in fights. Some examples would be [Unsteady Ground], [Static Field], on the Elementalist, or [Reaper’s Mark] on the Necromancer. There is nothing wrong with these class-based skills, but they do contribute to stability-stack-removal along with siege and many other class-specific skills not mentioned here. The overarching point being that there are too many ways for stability to be removed and not enough ways for it to be applied in fights on the scale that WvW supports. As a community, WvW players understand how the stability change may or may not contribute to a better PvP environment but in WvW it has crippled the game mode and the Meta.

c. The stability change has not only negatively affected melee players. Classes such as the Thief, Mesmer, and Necromancer have suffered as well. These classes are particularly good at boon-removal. Yet, since the arrival of the stability change, these types of skills which remove boons have been devalued. The most prized boons to remove tend to be protection and stability and when you can by-pass all boons by using disables, the need for boon-removal skills is diminished.

d. The stability change did not just affect primarily melee classes such as the Warrior or Guardian either; it is not as feasible to run an Elementalist or Necromancer in a more melee-centric role because of the stability change (ex: D/D Elementalist).

e. The stability change heavily favors large groups because they can send out a greater number of disables and subsequently damage than smaller groups can. This gives larger groups an advantage over smaller groups who rapidly lose their stability and mobility which essentially renders them immobile and vulnerable to overwhelming amounts of ranged pressure and siege fire (which also removes stacks). One of WvW’s greatest aspects was that a smaller group could defeat a larger group with skillful play and chemistry, this is no longer possible with stacks-based stability. Prior to the stability change, winning fights through more organized/efficient/skilled play was something that many guilds worked towards being able to achieve and helped create and sustain many WvW guilds.

2. Overpowering the Defender/Siege Wars 2

a. Currently the defensive force is extremely overpowered. There are a multitude of options for the defender to overwhelm the offensive force. Most notably the shrines, design/chokes on new maps, pact fleet air ship, chilling fog, nerf to omega golems (golems can no longer hit siege above walls), shield generators, cloaking waters (EBG), sentries, banners, emergency waypoints having unlimited respawns, etc.

b. The problem with having the scales tipped so heavily in the defenders favor is it takes the excitement away from the game mode. The offensive force should be equally powerful in fights. When defending is too easy, the battles become stale and there is nothing suspenseful about defending structures. Offensive forces need to be able to have an equal chance against the defender. A good start to fixing this issue would be revert Omega Golems back to their previous form so they can attack siege above walls, returning the waypoints to their previous form because the emergency waypoint is far too powerful in its current form and while I do like the emergency waypoint conceptually it was more engaging to be taking a keep and expect the enemy force to either run back from their Spawn or Garrison and try to save their structure or teleport in via their keeps waypoint if possible, and finally limiting offensive siege somewhat so that there isn’t 10+ arrow carts around a choke.

c. Keep/tower/camp lords are too strong and take forever to kill (most obvious with the Stonemist Castle lord) which doesn’t allow structures to be stolen through map manipulation and strategy which is unfortunate because it took away the important role that havoc guilds used to play in WvW matchups through sniping structures with a few players who took it upon themselves to tackle a large task (greater effort should equal a greater reward and havoc groups also manipulated the map this way and created a fog-of-war on the mini-map). Keep/tower/camp lords should only have these effects when a server is under the influence of the “outnumbered” buff. During times of equal population, servers should have an opportunity to punish each other for being out of position and not using available resources (mini-map, scouts, sentries) to keep an eye on the enemies movements and actions.

3. Rewards

a. WvW players should be able to earn new types of armor, runes, sigils, legendary weapons, legendary armor, food recipes, etc. when they are released by playing WvW instead of having to leave the game mode and the difficulty for earning new items should be equivalent.

b. WXP Points should be a currency earned through WvW play that can be spent in lieu of going to PvP or PvE and earning those game modes specific currencies so that WvW players can access new armor and items when they are released like players in the other game modes are able to (when you hit rank 10,000 you should still continue to earn WXP points for currency purposes even though you have reached maximum rank).

c. A WvW track similar to PvP would be a nice new feature that might also incentivize players to continue daily play in the WvW game mode.

d. There should be a WvW currency or some other form of reward given to anyone who participates in WvW based upon their placement and participation during that week. This reward should allow WvW players to earn something on the equivalent level of someone who invested the same amount of time/effort in PvE so that WvW players can properly gear their characters and afford necessities for the WvW game-mode.

4. WvW Titles/Achievements

a. Removing the old WvW titles and replacing them with new ones caused uproar in the community because many players had been working on the WvW achievements for three years and had only asked that the requirements be toned down, not the names of the titles which were highly sought after. The new names for the achievements and their complete re-work caused many players to be upset with Arenanet for taking away all of their efforts and essentially casting them aside.

b. In this video from Reyana’s interview with Colin Johanson and Mike O’Brien at PAX South 2015, Mike O’Brien says the following between (0:48s) and (0:56s) “We have always made a promise with Guild Wars 2 to respect players time and investments in their characters.” Yet, the multi-year investment(s) thousands of WvW players made towards the highly sought after WvW titles were tarnished and not respected as promised.

c. Link to the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMaqOSE1Kx8

5. Outnumbered Buff (Population Balance)

a. Many of the new Heart of Thorns exclusive features should be only usable during the outnumbered buff so they empower defenders when the defender is significantly outnumbered. These features include: Hardened gates, hardened siege, iron guards, the dragon banner, centaur banner, and turtle banner, chilling fog, cloaking waters, and the pact fleet air ship. Allowing these features to be exclusively used when a server is “outnumbered” will help players feel like they have the ability to balance the scales and protect what they own. Both the chilling fog and the pact fleet air ship’s cool downs should be increased to 45 and 60 minutes respectively.

b. In addition to providing tools to defenders specifically when they are outnumbered, it would be ideal to also give additional incentives to players to join the map while outnumbered so that WvW population can improve overtime back to a healthy level. Non-player based buffs such as % increases to: WXP, Gold Find, EXP, Supply Carry, Badges, 25% movement speed, etc. would help players be incentivized to play the game when the odds are against them.

c. Players who are “outnumbered” should be rewarded higher than normal until their server’s population reaches a near-equal level to the other servers because it takes more effort for WvW players to make an impact on the map, get kills, etc. when outnumbered.

d. In the WvW panel it should tell players in PvE/PvP which maps are outnumbered and their potential reward(s) if they choose to join a map that is outnumbered. If a player joins a map that is outnumbered to help out their server they should receive a residual effect on those rewards (non-player based buffs) that last 1 hour after the outnumbered buff drops (unless they leave WvW) to encourage them to keep playing and reward them for fighting against the odds.

Thank you Arenanet for reaching out to us!

We’re investigating whether to fix or revert DBL. They’re both a lot of work. These next couple days will be your last chance to give feedback before we make a decision, so speak now or forever hold your peace.

I do wonder if you could put DBL and ABL on half year rotation; roll ABL now as they used to be before HoT was released (sure you got some backup), tweak it to work with HoT and move people to work over DBL.

I know it’s easy to say from player perspective but it would be a real waste of time and work of these guys if DBL would be just simply thrown away.

I don’t really have a top 5, but I think reverting stability and AUTOLOOT would be really good.

I have a big list of things I would like to see changed in wvw(and I probly shoud post that list soon) but for the top 5 it would be

1)Incease defendablility for player defened objectives. (It’s very disheartening when your solo protecting a tower for two hours just to be flipped by 10 people and some catas.)

2)Make scouting worth it.(This is probly one of the most important jobs in wvw and you get nothing for it.)

3) Population balance. (Would love to see a system that gives each team the same chances no matter how many are on map.)

4)more versitlity(encourages crazy stategies)

5)Encourage multi commandering. (too many still belive 2 commanders is too many.)

Mike O Brien.4613:

Karl is working specifically on WvW-focused skill balance. He’s looking for the wins for WvW that don’t screw the rest of the game.

Or you could just balance the modes separately like you have in the past.

Mike O Brien.4613:

We’re investigating whether to fix or revert DBL. They’re both a lot of work. These next couple days will be your last chance to give feedback before we make a decision, so speak now or forever hold your peace.

OK so how are we supposed to provide feedback if you aren’t telling us what your planned fix to DBL is? If it sounds good I’ll vote for Fix, if it sounds bad I’ll vote for Revert.

Mine are:

1- REVERT TO ALPINE MAP
2- Revert Reset days to Fridays
3- Rever Stability back to previous iteration
4- Specific WvW skill-balance (aka: Skill split)
5- Promote player vs player fights instead of PvE events

In no order, just number form:

1. Rewards. Not everything should be tied to PvE. It would be nice to get our own legendary equipment from WvW, even if its a backpiece like PvP. Also increasing actual rewards is necessary. We run for hours and its work but only a 2-3 gold profit per night at the most (excluding outliers like junk or exotic items)
2. A real reason to win each week other than an extra bonus chest at the start of the next week.
3. Too easy to defend structures. Just throw up siege and wait until the attackers get bored. This is mostly due to the new buffs like chilling fog and hardend gates.
4. Auto-loot. It was mentioned to us before HoT and it never came. What happened?
5. Coverage changes to avoid hard work going to nothing because players across the globe were online and took everything you had.
6. DBL map needs better pathing to make it less frustrating to navigate. Same attention that Tangled Depths got post-HOT launch.
7. Legendary lord in SMC shouldn’t regen health when he drops combat. It makes the castle too hard to take.
8. Stability doesn’t need a revert but it should be changed/adjusted. More access to it, more stacks, or something to combat the power creep. I have made suggestions to Roy about the Revenant getting better access to it.
9. More things to spend badges on. Food, gear, runes, tomes, wxp boosters, etc. Make them account bound if necessary.
10. More ability lines. You hit the 1,500 rank or whatever and the next 8,000 are pretty much pointless.
11. Tweak level-up rewards to give more WvW related gear or ascended items.
12. Changes to the guild arena to use PvP gear system so that we can have somewhat proper GvG’s in them.
13. Adjusting to prices and access to upgrades for camps, towers, keeps, castle. Its about 20g if I’m not mistaking to queue a night worth of upgrades. This could be another thing people spend badges on. Upgrades should also be more balanced. The pact airfleet and cloaking waters are laughable in their current state.
14. Devs to play with us more to keep a better understanding of what the current issues are.
15. I have more but I just saw we only need to post our top 5….whoops.

Okay. Auto-loot, buffs to rewards, stability adjustments (PM me for ideas), night capping, more ability lines. How’s that?

Please do not revert the borderlands to alpine. Desert borderlands have a lot of promise that’s totally absent from alpine. Nostalgia will not save wvw no matter how people wish it would.

Mike O Brien.4613:

We’re investigating whether to fix or revert DBL. They’re both a lot of work. These next couple days will be your last chance to give feedback before we make a decision, so speak now or forever hold your peace.

Thanks for the response, I understood from the reddit AMA that you were already working on revising the DBL. Having a rotation of a fixed DBL and the ABL updated for current mechanisms would be ideal.

I also hope you aren’t putting population balance on the backburner. And by population balance I hope you mean not just the off hours capping issue but also overall world population and that you are looking at dynamic solutions like a server alliance solution. Because the overall population is so low that the mode needs some sort of dynamic way to adjust for that whilst maintaining enjoyable competitive play.

Hi fellow gamers & developers,

Here’s my input as you have requested

1. Revert back to the Alpine Borderlands

a.) The desert borderlands continuously make me feel like I’m in Edge Of The Mist, I firmly believe this map shouldn’t be eliminated, but should be an “extra” playable map like Edge Of The Mists.

2. Rewards

a.) Currently the only incentive for me and I’m sure many others is the joy of WvWvW combat and it’s unique quality to this game, that I’ve never experienced. However, that can only last so long, as I’m sure you’ve seen quite a decline in WvW activity & attrition in many WvW communities.

b.) Bringing back seasons and having WvW specific items / achievements or whatever like dungeons, raids, etc … Badges don’t “hype” people up. Those skins you guys released were neat!

3. Population balance

a.) I believe that fixing the borderlands and implementing a much more rewarding system with WvW specific gear, skins, achievements, etc .. will help bring population back into the mix of things and then maybe your population balance isn’t such a difficult task, though it should still be reworked.

b.) I like the idea of combining some of the lower tier servers into the top (4) tiers; all based on my idea of having that “extra” DBL map like EOTM can help keep WvW interesting if the BL & EBG are stacked! (also increase the cap)

4. Stability & skill balance

a.) This is lower on the totem pole. I think the stability rework brought new challenges to WvW but in the grand scheme of things, WvW should have it’s own unique “Stability” like the golden days.

b.) Skill balance I feel is … leveled out, but that can change the second you make stability unique to WvW. These classes that “1” shot people .. please, you guys implemented the dodge function for a reason.

5. Scoring

a.) I’m indifferent about scoring, I like PPK & Bloodlust. Otherwise the scoring system is good.

Thank you,

~ Haematic
Guild Leader “Legends Never [DIE]”
http://lnd-gw2.com/
DIE Youtube Playlist

ALPINE BL PLEASE… got a few points on that:

1. alpine is smaller and now with decreasing WvW population much more suitable option
2. we had DBL here for a while now, can do with some change
3. once you bring back ABL, just fix DBL too and implement map rotation (weekly, preferably)
4. all the other points folks made here already, map too big and complex, too much verticality, too much dying by falling, too many choke points and overpowered PvE gimmicks…

1) keep current stability stacking, but make it so that you can only lose one stack of stability every 0.25-0.4 seconds.
2) keep desert borderlands, but:

• adjust terrain and objective placements to reduce (but not eliminate) the number of narrow chokes.
• move the overlook cliffs on the north east/west closer to garrison keep, so trebuchets placed there can attack both inner and outer walls of garrison keep.
• make the teleporters on those cliffs be controlled by whoever that owns the north east/west towers. this adds tremendous value to those towers, without having to actually move them.
• add a mechanism that allows players to turn off shrine effects completely, one for each type of shrine (air/earth/fire)

3) split consumable (food/utility) usage from PvE, make consumables used in WvW last forever, until the player uses new consumables. this would drastically reduce the cost of running certain builds; some of which literally cost over 1 gold per hour to run.
4) add new meaningful rewards, like new stat combo gear, ascended gear boxes, ascended trinkets that are currently raid only.
5) bring back periodic tournaments, perhaps automated.

1. I would /love/ some skill balance directed at WvW, but not if you guys aren’t set on splitting skills into pvp/pve. I don’t even pve and it sucks how pvers are screwed by skill balance due to spvp.

2. I don’t think reverting the map back will help since WvW was dead long before the new maps, however it’d be nice to have them.

3. I’m all for a WvW reward track. I spend 95% of by time in WvW and it sucks that I’m not really getting anything out of it besides a couple gold a day (since I just roam and don’t zerg too often). Another WvW season would be great tbh.

4. Pop balance… I’m not sure what to say besides merging some servers to fix some problems. t6 and down are probably completely dead and anyone who wanted to WvW has likely transferred off already.

5. Scoring… Can’t say I care much about this issue.

Sitkaz.5463:

Please do not revert the borderlands to alpine. Desert borderlands have a lot of promise that’s totally absent from alpine. Nostalgia will not save wvw no matter how people wish it would.

I dont agree, I know over 25 players that left when they changed the maps, and 70% of them will return if the old maps do.
New maps are killing WvW slowly, it can’t get any worse.
Old maps back mean Old players back, and the new one will get easier & funnier maps to play on.

dear god whatever you do, DO NOT revert back to the alpine borderlands. Everyone here that thinks this will solve the problem with WvW is wearing rose-tinted glasses and simply think reverting everything to it’s original state will make the game type fun again. Removing content from a game that is already slow to add new stuff is the LAST thing your playerbase wants. That’s right it’s still new content. I bet the majority of the informed playerbase has not even stepped foot into the borderlands due to the waves of complaints.

I used to WvW on blackgate back during the “glory days” and had a blast. I’m primarily a hard-pve/pvp kind of player and it really pulled me into a new aspect of the game that felt very refreshing. I stopped long before the HoT just because it became monotonous and unrewarding after having a couple of great fights.

If we revert back to the alpine borderlands we will not see a resurgence in WvW play. There will be a short period of time where everyone will get out the WvW itch they’ve been having and after no more than 1 or 2 weeks everything will be as dead as it was before HoT.

I love the new maps, they are some of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in this game and it would be a nail in the coffin of me ever returning to WvW if the alpine borderlands were reverted.

OBVIOUSLY something needs to change with the current desert borderlands and quite frankly I don’t care what direction they take that will get people to load back into these maps. My personal anecdote to the conflict would just to increase rewards like they did in PvP and players will come flowing. Some commodity that is currently difficult to get (Such as transmutation charges for PvP) make abundant from WvW rewards. Problem Solved.

Hello, this is Finality, I use to be the GM of GoF, at one time one of the largest WvWvW 100% dedicated guilds on Blackgate. The priorities you’ve listed make a lot of sense, and I’m glad to see that it is taking into account the many concerns people have.

My credentials are here along with input and thoughts to improve the current WvWvW experience. My guild has historically only run on the new desert maps so we can really vet if we like it or not. Here’s my synopsis and credentials https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/The-Plight-of-Dedicated-WvWvW-Guilds/first

Here’s your recommendations:

1. Stability & skill balance
2. Fix or revert DBL
3. Rewards
4. Population balance
5. Scoring

I’d recommend this:

Skill balance needs to include all of the very . . . overpowered and abused guild buffs (airship, banner, etc.).

I honestly think that Desert BL can be saved, a lot of the frustration comes from the guild buffs coupled with the map. I made some suggestions in my post on how to change the map.

Lastly, on rewards point: This has never been a major issue in my opinion for the dedicated WvWvW guilds. Better rewards would encourage players in other game modes to try out WvWvW.

That being said, one thing that MUST happen in WvWvW is WvWvW swag. In short, titles, cool finishers, etc. need to have some sort of exclusiveness to WvWvW just like the banners in PvP. I’ve played 5000 hours, mostly in WvWvW. I’ve commanded for 3 years. I have nothing to show for it except my reputation. It sure would be a level of pride to have unique banners based on say WvWvW levels (say level 100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000, etc.)

Best of luck, you have an opportunity to be the main RvR experience for players as your battle system is a league above anything else. As a business person myself, I don’t know your numbers, but I think if you look closely, you’ll see the WvWvW community is worth it (check life time value of a dedicated WvWvW player).

1. Revert to Pre-HOT Alpine Maps
2. Eliminate lower tier servers and allow these players a one time transfer to other servers. DO NOT go to an alliance system. Keep server system intact.
3. Eliminate all pve content from WvW. This is a pvp game mode, there are plenty of other places in the game for pve content.
4. Revert to old upgrade system and get rid of auto waypoints. Those things should be earned which makes people want to defend them which creates better fights.
5. Fix the scoring system.

Rawrakai.2908:

I bet the majority of the informed playerbase has not even stepped foot into the borderlands due to the waves of complaints.

If we revert back to the alpine borderlands we will not see a resurgence in WvW play. There will be a short period of time where everyone will get out the WvW itch they’ve been having and after no more than 1 or 2 weeks everything will be as dead as it was before HoT.

That’s probably true based on my experience.

I’m not a hardcore wvw player by any means, but I’d fix the desert map to make it easier to get around in and easier to get where the action is. Also your focus on population imbalance needs to be a priority. Right now i think you have a wildly different wvw experience depending on the server you’re on. Any dramatic changes you make in an environment like that will have unintended or uneven consequences.

1. Population Balance.
2. Bring back Alpine BL.
3. Stability/skill balance.
a) do not bring back the old stability (too strong) but do not leave it the way it is (too weak)
4. Rewards/Ranks
a) Reward Track ( I would love to get a legendary without being Force to do PVE, PVP)
b) a way to show your wvw rank, like armor, symbols or titles.

5. Scoring

Karl is balancing? xD “we are in a good spot” Guardians say Hello