Guild Wars 2

My current thinking with regard to how we could improve WvW.

It’s been my opinion since the beginning that there’s way too much emphasis on the score. It’s an irrational emphasis, there is no prize for winning beyond a few percentage points of bonuses in the closing days of the match. Never-the-less, as we all know, when one server starts to take a large lead the other servers have a tendency to stop playing. Obviously the die hards still play, probably most of the people reading this forum do, but a lot of other people just stop queuing.

My original thought was “well, let’s just hide the score, we don’t really need to see it”. But that’s a band-aid really, and even if the score was hidden it wouldn’t be that hard to deduce from what bonuses everybody has.

So I think what is really needed is a mechanism so that if certain goals are accomplished it has an immediate server-wide effect (i.e., it applies to PvE areas too). Sure, we have the bonuses, these are great but they are not great motivators …

1. You don’t go into WvW thinking “Let’s get that next level artisan boost!”
2. There’s no risk of losing them.

My idea then, is first to switch orb and outmanned bonuses. This is not a new suggestion. What I haven’t really seen put forward before is to also apply the orb bonuses to PvE areas. Most people who are playing WvW on the losing side aren’t really doing it for the exp, mf and karma and swapping orb and outmanned without also applying it to PvE simply removes all relevance from the orbs.

This achieves the following:
1. An objective that gives benefit to the server entirely independent of the scoring system, encouraging week long play even if there’s a “night crew” on the other servers giving them a strong point lead.
2. It’s a player bleed for the winning side. Once a server has the orbs, many of those players may move off to PvE areas to take full advantage of the bonuses.
3. Somebody can type in /guild or /map in Lion’s Arch that an orb is in danger of being taken and there is motivation for people to actually come and defend it.

An alternative to swapping orb/outmanned and applying to PvE would be to have the current bonus system scale with number of orbs held. For example …

If you have no orbs the bonuses would be multiplied by 0.5.
If you have 1 orb the bonuses would be multiplied by 1 (the default position).
If you have 2 orbs the bonuses would be multiplied by 1.5.
If you have 3 orbs the bonuses would be multiplied by 2.

I think I prefer the outmanned bonus though because it would be entirely score independent.

Regardless of the actual mechanism used, my main point is that there should be something in place that brings people in to WvW regardless of what the score is. If anybody has other ideas of what that could be, I’d love to hear them.