Hello everyone,
Some of you might know me as the guy who organised the ESL GvG Ladder.
I’m a dedicated WvW player since the betas and I’m a veteran GW1 player who focused on PvP (be it AB, HA or GvG)
To understand the core of WvW, we need to understand it’s roots:
It is most compareable to the GW1 alliance battles.
You had objectives to capture by killing a few NPC’s on the point.
ANet understood to split the “big” group of 12 players into 3 small groups to have small scirmishes, but to pull them on certain points together to have epic big fights with a 12v12.
In WvW you have the same roots, with some upgrades to the capture points. you have big fights but the splitting of the big group is not given somehow, so there should be a promotion in the game for splitting the big zerg into small groups to cap different objectives.
WvW is a PvP/PvE mode, but the PvE part of it should concentrate on the necessary things, like objective defenders. the rest of the PvE environment is there to make the map more lively, but this is not needed and can cause performance issues since this is server resources spend. so remove all the neutral creatures (they don’t have a big use to the WvW experience anyways) the neutral events could be used in a better way as well, instead of letting them stand around somewhere in the world, why not letting a neutral group attack an objective to get the player split as well.
WvW shouldn’t be about avoiding fights, it should promote PvP battles. So give the maps a more open look, the Desert Borderlands are nice to look at but it’s really easy to miss a fight. If the maps have clear ways to get from point A to point B people can flank them on the way or what ever. The maps still can look fancy but there is no need for 5 different levels. With more fights people will have more fun with the Game Mode overall and will enjoy the sieges as well.
Next the popluation issue:
This can be solved in a way GW1 showed with alliance battles as well:
The game already has 3 factions, so why not use them?
The guild can decide which faction they want to join and fight for. With that a balance of population will occure in any way.
Short excourse to PvE:
You might ask: why should the 3 factions fight each other, aren’t the a big alliance?
This can have a nice story Line for a Living Story in it. We just killed another dragon in PvE and now we want to go for the next Dragon, but which one? well every faction wants to go for another. since the AMA we know you are working on expac2. why not one of them wants to go to another continent (Cantha) to conquer it and the other two have a problem with it? Here you have a PvE influence threw WvW, like the AB’s had an influence on PvE as well (gets important later). I’m not a Story Writer nor do i know what you have planned for that, but it’s a suggestion.
Back to WvW:
we fixed the population. What now? yeah rewards would be cool.
we have a faction system, so why not spending a new/old currency onto them and some merchants. we have WvW ranks so why not doing a currency out of this, one rank up gives a certain amount of faction reward points. so now you can spend them on a vendor for ascended gear (trinkets, armor and weapons) no need for players to go to PvE and craft really expensive armors, you once told us we can play the game however we want and have the chance to get everything we need, asc gear is not one of those things you can get with wvw in an “easy” way like in PvE. so you might now say: well there will be people getting everything when we would do that. yeah there are but they already played WvW for 3.5 years so why not give them what tehy deserve for their dedication. in my opinion a player with WvW rank 500 should be able to get a whole asc set. this takes a certain amount of time to get, so this should be fair.
What if I have everything and don’t need anything of that vendor? Spend the points on supplys for the PvE war going on. Earn with your guild the control over a city in PvE (like GW1
)
Legendary Back Pack threw new WvW achievements, like fractals and PvP.
Exclusive Looking WvW Legendary Armor?
So let’s talk about the Maps:
in GW1 AB we had a rotation of maps depending on the state of the border in PvE.
GW2 WvW could have this too so people would have a rotation in maps and wouldn’t get bored of some maps. and you could give a weaker faction an advantage. go for overflow maps with an indicator how the population of the map is, like: you have an advantage on overflow 3 so it is marked with a symbol to show. you have a disadavantage on overflow 5 you have another mark to sign it, so people can decide where to go to help their faction and know which overflow they are on to tell their friends.
we talked about the map design earlier, so again short, clear paths to obejectives promote open field fights.
Match Duration:
problem with the 7 day match is that it’s a long time so if you loose a certain objective it doesn’t feal like this is a big issue you can take it back and be fine with it later as well.
so I would recommend a one day Match. Why? a loss of the objective would mean a bigger impact to the matchup. and there is more happening in PvE border movement as well.
Lot input for WvW but this should basically fix the major issues to it.
Let’s talk about Guild PvP:
GW1 had two big Guild PvP Modes: Guild versus Guild and Heroes Ascend
What the GW2 GvG community reffers to GvG is basically a Heroes Ascend kind of Game Mode. (to clarify it)
GW2 has the potential for both:
a pure Guild Deathmatch mode: kill the enemy team and advance one round
a GW1 like GvG mode: fight to kill the enemy Lord
Let’s talk about Game Mechanic:
The Game promotes a kinda bigger combat than 5v5 since in a pure 5v5 fight you have certain things to look at, condition pressure can get ridicolous so noone will ever be able to clean it and power burst dmg can get negated easily.
to get a balance between the extremes, a bigger group is needed with supportive players as well as dmg players, in a 15v15 power and condition is working quite balanced, both have their counter play in this scale. so in the future we will talk about 15v15 as a standard match size.
15 player rosters open up a lot of varity to the meta team comp (more back line focus <-> more frontline focus)
there are enough condition cleanses in the roster to clean a certain amount of conditions but still be able to get damage done themselfes and it is still not to much so conditions are still a viable option.
How to do a Deathmatch:
no respawns like in Coutyard more like a round based system you kill all next round starts with again 15v15, so a complete snowball isn’t possible. there are a lot possible match ups in a queue form bo1 bo3 bo5, (bo3 would be my way to go)
have different maps with enough space to fight but still have some obstacles to have a postion game in it as well. go threw maps like in GW1 HA until the Hall of Heroes where the ultimate fight happens of the best teams of the queue.
How to implement GvG:
Stronghold is not a revamp of GvG it’s a try to get GW2 into a MOBA game. sorry devs but if you wanted to do a MOBA you should have prolly go somewhere else or shouldn’t have developed a MMO Game, THIS IS NOT A MOBA GAME!!!
What’s wrong with Stronghold? people are running back and forth and not fighting for the aim. It’s completely different to what GW1 GvG was. in GW1 one player ran the flag the rest was trying to kill the enemy team or the enemy flag carrier, so it was a fight around the mid of the map and who won that could push further into the base to kill the lord.
It was a PvP fight with nearly no PvE elements which interacted with it.
give the game a clear aim: Kill the enemy Lord!
how to reach that objective: get threw the enemy team, they want to hinder you, after that get threw a gate and push for the lord.
Have a revive mechanic (not setted like in sPvP) with a monk who is reviving them at a certain time, so he can be killed so no respawns would happen after that and would give the enemy team basically the win.
Long post if you read it all thank you:
for everyone else:
tl;dr: ANet get back to your roots, you made some really good things in your past with GW1 use this experience you got there and with the new Game Mechanic you can create something really great.
That’s it from me, for questions regarding the topic or the GvG ESL Ladder, just feal free and ask me
To ANet: Thanks for a great game, let me help you to make it really GREAT
Join the GvG Ladder now! http://play.eslgaming.com/guildwars2/global/gw2/open/ladder-gvg-europe/
(edited by Pimpi.7843)
