Guild Wars 2

Hey guys. I’m trying to compile a list of reasons why we have such consistent disparity over time in WvWvW matches. Some of them aren’t things that need to be or ought to be fixed, others might warrant some attention. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Night Capping – All is fair in love and war. Gotta fight that much harder during the hours you ARE on.

Population disparity – Being outmanned is never fun. Being outmanned because you guys aren’t participating is aggravating. Being outmanned because you just don’t have many players period is the worst.

Orbs – It’s great to have a system with a clear objective. Orbs provide a very significant bonus, and they’re spread over multiple borderlands. They are highly contested, and not always easy to obtain. I’m a big fan. I would recommend, however, that the bonus be lowered slightly, and that the orbs reset every 1-3 days. (perhaps even on a random timer to keep things interesting).

Server Bonuses – They’re great aren’t they? They actually aren’t all that hard to accrue, which makes it a fairly weak incentive. Still, having pvp glory translate to pve quality of life improvements is great! Unfortunately, however, (much like orbs) these bonuses further slant towards winning teams. If we don’t want a system that drives players away, we need to prevent a “snowballing” effect where the best teams just get better with orbs and bonuses.

Bugs/Glitching/Hacking – Will be fixed in due time. (Please be quick!)

Transferring/Supply Dumping – We know you guys are looking into this. Hopefully we can make some more improvements to prevent this from happening.

(Please let me know if I forgot anything!)
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Generally speaking, (and I come from a server that usually does the destroying), the losing team has to contend with, "Well darn, not only are they clearly better than we are, but also:

1. We can’t get a foothold.
2. They have the orbs for an extra 150 to all stats.
3. They have more health and endurance from the server perks.
4. There’s just more of them.
5. They have a huge supply advantage.

If you don’t want players to give up, these are the things that need to be addressed.

Recommended solutions:

1. Reset the maps to the respective thirds twice during the week. Winning teams will have more DEs to complete, so it’s less boring for them, and struggling teams will be able to retake a minimal base of operations, without being humiliated by 10 ballistas pointing at their spawn…

2. Reset the orbs (perhaps with the map resets). Again, the orbs are often the most exciting part of the weekly matches. The more orb fighting there is, the better. Orb fighting isn’t exciting when the guys with the orbs control the whole map.

3. Provide some sort of stacking buff to losing teams based on a point ratio. There’s no reason that the clearly dominant team should have extra health, endurance, and stat boosts after the first few days. There should be stacking buffs that grant extra stats, health, endurance (only within WvWvW), as well as stacking siege buffs. Something like 100,200,300 to stats and 1.5x, 2x, 3x siege damage, as well as 1.5x, 2x, 3x NPC effectiveness depending on the scenario. As servers start to close the point gap, these buffs go away, and the winning team can reassert their dominance. (Naturally this needs to be balanced to where winning teams don’t just take a break and give up until the score gaps close… not that this is so terrible a thing).

4. Mistwrought buff. Some sort of increased chance to get siege plans when your team is way outmanned/outscored.

5. 3 day to week long lockout on server transfers to competing servers. I’m sorry, but if you haven’t been able to transfer to play with your friends at this point, and they just so happen to be on the server you were just randomly matched up with, then you can just wait a few days. If you really can’t wait, perhaps there can be some sort of expedited server transfer ticketing system, with a history where players who abuse transfers can be identified and appropriately punished.

Lastly, and despite all this, I’m really enjoying WvWvW. It’s the most fun I’ve had pvping in a long long time. Keep up the great work, and hopefully this helps shed some light on the current state of WvWvW from a player’s perspective.

They are some great suggestions and I am surprised no one else has posted a reply, I guess they’re all to busy flaming eachother in post about night capping, population disparity, and pvp puzzles.

These suggestions would all work in a way and I would love Anet to atleast try these out now and then, maybe not all at once but at least look into it.

Reseting while probably a highly contested point due to presenting people’s siege placements and keep upgrades may prove a good incentive to get more people involved during the week and when/if they turn to fortnightly matches a reset on the weekend in the middle would be awesome. I think for now the orb randomly presenting would help to get people more interested in long term participation.

Another idea I think may is hiding the scores until its maybe a day out. There is nothing more demoralising then be so far behind points wise that no matter how hard you try you’ll never win. It would also serve to make those closer matchups even more heavily contested.

I like all these ideas, my server has been the weak 3rd the last 2 matches and people arent playing anymore, theres just no incentive to try and launch any kind of real couner attack. So our WvW pop has been reduced to the people trying to get achievements and the people who really only want to PvP in a less structured way then sPvP.

I remember hearing one suggestion of making it so when you are in your home borderland you have a much greater advantage, something beyond what we have now. So even if your server is getting dominated everywhere else on your home borderland you will always have a chance.

(Don’t know if it would work or help but it sounded good)

SherlockBrolmes.4725:

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Recommended solutions:

1. Reset the maps to the respective thirds twice during the week. Winning teams will have more DEs to complete, so it’s less boring for them, and struggling teams will be able to retake a minimal base of operations, without being humiliated by 10 ballistas pointing at their spawn…

2. Reset the orbs (perhaps with the map resets). Again, the orbs are often the most exciting part of the weekly matches. The more orb fighting there is, the better. Orb fighting isn’t exciting when the guys with the orbs control the whole map.

3. Provide some sort of stacking buff to losing teams based on a point ratio. There’s no reason that the clearly dominant team should have extra health, endurance, and stat boosts after the first few days. There should be stacking buffs that grant extra stats, health, endurance (only within WvWvW), as well as stacking siege buffs. Something like 100,200,300 to stats and 1.5x, 2x, 3x siege damage, as well as 1.5x, 2x, 3x NPC effectiveness depending on the scenario. As servers start to close the point gap, these buffs go away, and the winning team can reassert their dominance. (Naturally this needs to be balanced to where winning teams don’t just take a break and give up until the score gaps close… not that this is so terrible a thing).

4. Mistwrought buff. Some sort of increased chance to get siege plans when your team is way outmanned/outscored.

5. 3 day to week long lockout on server transfers to competing servers. I’m sorry, but if you haven’t been able to transfer to play with your friends at this point, and they just so happen to be on the server you were just randomly matched up with, then you can just wait a few days. If you really can’t wait, perhaps there can be some sort of expedited server transfer ticketing system, with a history where players who abuse transfers can be identified and appropriately punished.

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1. Reset the maps? When? Because whenever the reset happens during someone’s primetime, they will have an advantage over the other servers. Also, what about location upgrades? I think this is a very complex unneeded change, that will either make some problems worse or cause new ones.

2. Reset the orbs. Meh, I think the orb bonus needs to be changed to prevent slippery slope, but otherwise, I’d be fine if they stayed the same. I don’t feel that an orb reset is going to solve anything. Instead of these exciting battles over the orb that happen regularly, you’ll have slightly bigger battles happening at the orb reset. And if you have the orb reset at the same time as the map reset, it’ll instead become a race to the orb.

3. Outmanned needs to be changed to help prevent slippery slope, instead of letting people farm. Most people are who are actively PvPing are not interested in receiving a bonus to karma, exp, and magic find. (I think they’d rather receive a stat increase.) My suggestion would be to swap the functionality of the orbs and outmanned, as others have stated. (Makes the orbs a lot less useful. I’d say new orb bonus, old one to outmanned.)

4. Another addition to outmanned. See 3.

5. While intuitively a good solution there are too many problems. IMO, much simpler to put a 1 week cooldown on free transfers. If that’s too hard, just remove free transfers completely except to the lowest pop servers.

Thanks for the replies guys.

@Jewel.

You make a good point about complaints regarding the investment made in securing the keeps, placements etc. If we use a singular reset a few days in, the advantage gained from secured keeps, placements, etc. will still be significant in acquiring a lead. If players are less interested in fortification, there are fewer obstacles to capture, which leads to more active gameplay. If communicated well, players shouldn’t feel that their money was wasted. Instead they might not contribute to their own defense. While A-Net misses out on some goldsink, players will have to accept that their frugality decreases their ability to compete.

@ Crispeh.

I also like the idea of giving servers a home server buff in that particular borderland. Since people can specific queue, this could lead to some frustrating queue times for that particular map if you’re struggling. Other than that, I think it’s a solid recommendation.

@Epsilon: Most of the changes I mentioned serve to rectify a scenario wherein matches are exceedingly boring from a lack of participation. Bearing that in mind:

1. Map resets would need to be announced ahead of time. For example, weekly WvWvW running Friday to Friday would see a reset at 5pm on Monday. This is going into primetime, and is consistent with daily resets. Your concern about server advantage only becomes an issue in highly competitive WvWvW matches. Currently, not many pairings are highly competitive, certainly not half way into the match. I believe that a primetime reset captures high populations for all servers. It should not be very complicated as it would be a hybrid of a standard reset (everyone is booted out temporarily, and the scores are preserved) and a weekly reset (the maps are split into their respective thirds.)

2. It is fully illogical to suggest that orb resets would supplant regular fighting over the orbs. The point is that many matchups currently have NO fighting over the orbs, since they are all controlled by a team overseeing 90+% of the map. There is no reduced incentive to obtain the orbs between resets. Resetting orbs only increases the likelihood that they will be contested, and temporarily removes the “winners advantage,” that currently exists. Races to the orbs post reset will be a bastion of activity, which is precisely what is missing at the moment.

3. I think swapping the orb bonus with outmanned is a good idea. However, I think that the bonus provided from the orbs in competitive play should represent an advantage, and not be incentivized solely as a reward-booster. I feel that such an advantage should be countered if the score gap becomes sufficiently high.

4. Are you suggesting that the winning team should get an increased chance to obtain siege plans? Would you be adding it to current outmanned, or after it was swapped with the orb bonus? I think it should be a bonus for the losing teams, as more siege confers an advantage to the weaker side.

5. We pretty much agree here. Free server transfers won’t be around forever, which will help things a bit. I believe (and hope) they’ll still be free to lower pop servers. The question then becomes whether or not players will sacrifice the gold cost for the sake of winning at WvWvW. If they are already willing to buy Golems for 1g a piece, then perhaps gold is not an obstacle to them. I believe therefore, that paid transfers should also be accompanied by a weeklong transfer lockout, and ideally, that players would be unable to transfer to servers with which they are directly competing.

Was talking with someone in WvW and came up with an idea.

You only get points for the bases you control in your home borderland and EB.
If you can capture and hold all the points in an the opposing teams borderland than you get a burst of points and/or lower the other teams points pool.

This way even if you are on the losing team you can have a focus to keep your garrison and turn towers and supply camps to stop the dominant teams from getting a huge point increase. It wouldnt really stop better servers from winning it would just cut down the point gap and maybe add a little focus for the losing teams so everyone doesn’t just quit.

After all the points in a zone are captured that borderland could maybe even reset to give the defeated server a chance to come back a little.

(We were just bs-ing so I dont know how valid this is, just an idea)

Haha. Definitely giving you guys points for creativity. That’s a fairly massive overhaul of the current system, so I’m not very optimistic. Clever idea though. I think the notion of privilege within your own server’s borderland is a good one. It already exists somewhat with the convenient placement of MV, and the optimal starting zone, but I believe it should be more significant than that. Perhaps something like the orb bonus of 150 stats combined with something like 1.5x siege damage. Better teams will still find ways to win, but that will go a decent ways to closing the gaps.

I don’t like the idea of a reset(s) part way through the week, this would cause people to lose interest during the run up to this time, even if the resets were random and unannounced this would be infuriating, say you had a well defended keep in enemy territory under siege for a hour, then just as you take it the map resets! (i’m not one to rage quit, but this would probably send me over the edge).

I think to help balance things massively, firstly stop the WvW bonuses from affecting players while they are in WvW, they should only affect players in PvE. Next, the server in last place gets a stat buff and server that is winning gets a stat debuff, the strength of the buff/debuff would be directly proportional to the margin that the server is winning/losing by, but could have a cap of, say, 15%.

This could maybe not be in affect the whole time, but only when within range of a keep/tower (or where there is a significant number of players all in one place), this would prevent unfair 1v1s, 2v2s etc when you are just running around, which should still be kept as a fair fight.

Edit: Oh and yes, free server transfers need to be scraped asap. People have had long enough to work out where they want to live and it’s screwing with WvW.

I really like this thread. I hope it gets due consideration.

Great thread, and I do hope ANet is listening.
I would +1 but as usual the forums are kinda buggered. No quote options no +1.

SherlockBrolmes.4725:

Hey guys. I’m trying to compile a list of reasons why we have such consistent disparity over time in WvWvW matches. Some of them aren’t things that need to be or ought to be fixed, others might warrant some attention. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Night Capping – All is fair in love and war. Gotta fight that much harder during the hours you ARE on.

Population disparity – Being outmanned is never fun. Being outmanned because you guys aren’t participating is aggravating. Being outmanned because you just don’t have many players period is the worst.

Orbs – It’s great to have a system with a clear objective. Orbs provide a very significant bonus, and they’re spread over multiple borderlands. They are highly contested, and not always easy to obtain. I’m a big fan. I would recommend, however, that the bonus be lowered slightly, and that the orbs reset every 1-3 days. (perhaps even on a random timer to keep things interesting).

Server Bonuses – They’re great aren’t they? They actually aren’t all that hard to accrue, which makes it a fairly weak incentive. Still, having pvp glory translate to pve quality of life improvements is great! Unfortunately, however, (much like orbs) these bonuses further slant towards winning teams. If we don’t want a system that drives players away, we need to prevent a “snowballing” effect where the best teams just get better with orbs and bonuses.

Bugs/Glitching/Hacking – Will be fixed in due time. (Please be quick!)

Transferring/Supply Dumping – We know you guys are looking into this. Hopefully we can make some more improvements to prevent this from happening.

(Please let me know if I forgot anything!)
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Generally speaking, (and I come from a server that usually does the destroying), the losing team has to contend with, "Well darn, not only are they clearly better than we are, but also:

1. We can’t get a foothold.
2. They have the orbs for an extra 150 to all stats.
3. They have more health and endurance from the server perks.
4. There’s just more of them.
5. They have a huge supply advantage.

If you don’t want players to give up, these are the things that need to be addressed.

---

Recommended solutions:

1. Reset the maps to the respective thirds twice during the week. Winning teams will have more DEs to complete, so it’s less boring for them, and struggling teams will be able to retake a minimal base of operations, without being humiliated by 10 ballistas pointing at their spawn…

2. Reset the orbs (perhaps with the map resets). Again, the orbs are often the most exciting part of the weekly matches. The more orb fighting there is, the better. Orb fighting isn’t exciting when the guys with the orbs control the whole map.

3. Provide some sort of stacking buff to losing teams based on a point ratio. There’s no reason that the clearly dominant team should have extra health, endurance, and stat boosts after the first few days. There should be stacking buffs that grant extra stats, health, endurance (only within WvWvW), as well as stacking siege buffs. Something like 100,200,300 to stats and 1.5x, 2x, 3x siege damage, as well as 1.5x, 2x, 3x NPC effectiveness depending on the scenario. As servers start to close the point gap, these buffs go away, and the winning team can reassert their dominance. (Naturally this needs to be balanced to where winning teams don’t just take a break and give up until the score gaps close… not that this is so terrible a thing).

4. Mistwrought buff. Some sort of increased chance to get siege plans when your team is way outmanned/outscored.

5. 3 day to week long lockout on server transfers to competing servers. I’m sorry, but if you haven’t been able to transfer to play with your friends at this point, and they just so happen to be on the server you were just randomly matched up with, then you can just wait a few days. If you really can’t wait, perhaps there can be some sort of expedited server transfer ticketing system, with a history where players who abuse transfers can be identified and appropriately punished.

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Lastly, and despite all this, I’m really enjoying WvWvW. It’s the most fun I’ve had pvping in a long long time. Keep up the great work, and hopefully this helps shed some light on the current state of WvWvW from a player’s perspective.

Everything said here is perfect imho. ANET take a lesson from this dude.

Although I agree with almost everything you posted the one thing that really sticks out to me. And I am sure many people especially servers that win alot will disagree with is simply put the system does not allow for a definitive what server is better
Your number 3 I like alot because of this
You should not lose a match due to population. Everytime people talk about having pop cap equality people cry. But really the best servers can only emerge when we have equal numbers regardless of time on every map 24/7

I mean just using an example who is to say that Kaineng having 100 people on every map can’t compete against HoD with 100 people on every map?

But right now you won’t have that because you will have tons more from HoD then Kaineng, doesnt make them better really

this is the only way to fix it

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/World-vs-World-Player-limits-are-needed

The orbs are probably the thing people blame the most while also being the thing easiest to fix.

You shouldn’t make people feel they are at a huge disadvantage in a fight compared to the server in the lead with three robs.

1. We can’t get a foothold.

This is partially silly, but partially very key. First, players have 3 exits out of the spawn, two of which dump them into supply camps so they can build siege to regain a foothold. I think the design is pretty effective for the losing team to regain a foothold, TBH.

The thing that is a big problem that needs to change is to make the winning team more vulnerable is the decay of supply.

The current issue is that when a team starts winning, they get a supreme supply advantage. Note that this has nothing to do with orbs or bonuses. Those don’t actually matter. What matters is this:

1. The winning team has the keeps.
2. They have the towers.
3. They have the tower in your face.
4. They have 100% control of several supply camps.
5. They have moderate control of your supply camps.
6. They have tons of siege in all their towers and keeps.
7. Their rear positions are “invulnerable” to moderate attacks.
8. They can invest their forces completely into spawncamping you.

What needs to hapkitten the following:

1. Siege needs to decay more quickly.
2. Siege needs to decay while being used.
3. Maximum supply in keeps and towers should be reduced. Corresponding upgrades should be decreased.

This is what will help the losing team gain a foothold and make a comeback — by reducing the winning team’s biggest advantage: free supply everywhere. If their siege at their rear tower decays, and their tower/keeps themselves have a smaller supply cap, it makes them very vulnerable to harassment from the losing team, or better yet a full assault from the 3rd server.

This will force the winning team to break camp and go defend “seriously”. Without the spawncamp, you can now take back your tower or several supply camps.

That aside, most of your suggestions are completely horrible. Reseting in the middle of the week? May as well just have a new matchup. Absolutely terrible idea. Stat buff to the losing team? I understand the sentiment, but unnecessary idea.

You’re thinking in terms of a novice in WvW. The supply changes would change everything. A random stat buff is irrelevant. At best, I would say give a random % bonus to karma and a small one to gold. This would get people doing things in WvW — incentivize them to go take some supply camps and towers. The magic find is a problem because that gets them farming mobs.

The only suggestion that’s really key is the free server transfers. HOLY kitten THIS IS STILL IN THE GAME. Sigh.

SherlockBrolmes.4725:

If you don’t want players to give up, these are the things that need to be addressed.

---

Recommended solutions:

1. Reset the maps to the respective thirds twice during the week. Winning teams will have more DEs to complete, so it’s less boring for them, and struggling teams will be able to retake a minimal base of operations, without being humiliated by 10 ballistas pointing at their spawn…

2. Reset the orbs (perhaps with the map resets). Again, the orbs are often the most exciting part of the weekly matches. The more orb fighting there is, the better. Orb fighting isn’t exciting when the guys with the orbs control the whole map.

3. Provide some sort of stacking buff to losing teams based on a point ratio. There’s no reason that the clearly dominant team should have extra health, endurance, and stat boosts after the first few days. There should be stacking buffs that grant extra stats, health, endurance (only within WvWvW), as well as stacking siege buffs. Something like 100,200,300 to stats and 1.5x, 2x, 3x siege damage, as well as 1.5x, 2x, 3x NPC effectiveness depending on the scenario. As servers start to close the point gap, these buffs go away, and the winning team can reassert their dominance. (Naturally this needs to be balanced to where winning teams don’t just take a break and give up until the score gaps close… not that this is so terrible a thing).

4. Mistwrought buff. Some sort of increased chance to get siege plans when your team is way outmanned/outscored.

5. 3 day to week long lockout on server transfers to competing servers. I’m sorry, but if you haven’t been able to transfer to play with your friends at this point, and they just so happen to be on the server you were just randomly matched up with, then you can just wait a few days. If you really can’t wait, perhaps there can be some sort of expedited server transfer ticketing system, with a history where players who abuse transfers can be identified and appropriately punished.

1. This would ruin the whole idea of upgrading a keep you’ve just taken to make it more sturdy. I understand we want to keep things interesting but the fact remains that people need to work for their victories. We shouldn’t change this to 5 3-day long battles (which is what it would be) when the whole draw for some of us is a 336 hour war between three servers. All that in the name of people who don’t like to lose but don’t want to put effort into winning….sounds like a bad idea.

I actually doubt it would make any difference anyway. If they were getting rolled, these same people would probably be even more likely to just abandon WvWvW until the battlegrounds reset, increasing the lead of the server who was having fun.

2, 3, & 4. I mostly agree. As they are currently, orbs should reset every 7 days. I love fighting for them and would love to see more large battles where one team is fighting off the other in an attempt to protect their orb from being stolen. In order for that to happen, the orbs need to be valuable and they need to be worth taking. I, unfortunately, have come to the opinion that if we switched the outmanned buff with the orbs bonus (as many people are suggesting), nobody would fight for them. They would become a fringe benefit only sought after once you had a solid hold over territory.

As it is, the first things people do in their weekly match up is to take StoneMist and to try to steal the orbs. A single goal that outshines every other goal in every battleground is definitely the way to go.

What really should be changed is the outmanned buff. It should be the equivalent of the orbs, an increase in damage to keep/tower walls and doors, or even just lootless NPC reinforcements…..something other than what is essentially a PvE buff.

The other thing that could really be considered is the orb location. Maybe a less formidable location immune from capture would be a better choice, that way the orb is always a semi-fragile target rather than a prisoner in the deepest, darkest castle on the map.

5. Yes. Personally, I think both free transfers should go AND transferring should lock you out of the entire current WvWvW battle. I know it sucks to switch servers and then be unable to play but it really is just too tempting to abuse. The price of a server transfer is not prohibitive enough on it’s own since in-game gold can be used to buy gems and send in a spy. They really just need to stop this now. It’s already taken too long….the WvWvW lock out should have been done almost from the start.

Another suggestion I would like to make on WvWvW concerns rotation of position/colour. I notice many people just use the free transfer to go to a specific server that pretty much owns everything due to nightcapping, soon however this will not be possible any more and since there is no way out of the situation people will have a very hard time getting 100% map completion, especially on Eternal battlegrounds.

Therefore I suggest making a simple rotation system to make it possible to get all POI’s, vista’s etc. in a decent time frame. Currently I assume the system is based on ranking, I know that my server and the other server have been the same colour/position from the start, with no change in sight. The rotation I suggest pretty much consists out of 3 rules:

1) You cannot be in the same position 2 weeks in a row, if this week we are blue, the next we can only be green or red.

2) In a 4 week time frame you should have been at every position. I put in 4 weeks to make it a little more easy you should go every 3 weeks but that can have more problems.

3) If any of the rules cannot be followed (due to a server getting into a higher or lower bracket), this server can ‘break’ these rules.

This should make it a bit more fair for people to get 100% map completion, especially after free transfers are gone.

I just want to see the orbs gone. I’ve been on both sides, holding three orbs and holding none. Neither is fun. This isn’t RvR, it’s a completely different game. If you wait until friday, the game will start again on an even footing. There is no real “incentive” to get the orbs once you are extremely far behind. There is also no real incentive to try once you can’t win.

Personally, I still do, because I love PvP. That being said, the winning team (regardless of whether I’m on it or not) should not get this huge advantage because of the orbs. It’s hard to not make comparisons to DAoC because of the orbs — since the entire WvW concept is a clone of DAoC’s RvR. Let me just list the reasons why the orbs don’t have the same effect in WvW as they did in RvR:

-Matches were permanent. You always knew who the dominant server was and had months/years to work with the other underdog and build a mutually beneficial relationship
-In DAoC, the more keeps you controlled the weaker your guards became. Also, guards in general were much stronger in DAoC.
-It was much harder in DAoC to sweep the entire map on off peak hours (pretty much impossible), claim all of the orbs (relics), and upgrade their keeps.
-There is no incentive to get orbs back once the game has snowballed to the point where you realize you cant win. In DAoC, you HAD to try or you weren’t going to ever see the relics or DF again. There was no “waiting for reset”, what you saw was it.

Blah, I could go on and on. The point is that this isn’t DAoC, and this concept simply doesn’t translate into WvW the way it was meant to. Please, if you like (somewhat) balanced PvP, support removing the orbs or changing their bonuses. It is something that really turns off the losing side to trying to compete, and that’s a bad thing REGARDLESS of whether you’re winning with three orbs or losing with none, it’s just NOT FUN.

Orbs are much less impacting than people are making them out to be. While they are notable and do add up, they do not directly cause any significant swing in WvW performance.

I agree that the orbs should go.
I also agree with people who have favored some sort of point increase depending on number of players in the zone, so with fewer players the points per objective go up a certain extent. So if, for example, the populations are 100v100v5 (extreme I know), if the server with 5 people on somehow manages to hold onto a supply camp for an hour they should get a ton of points for it.

You would have to somehow also try to protect against exploiting it, so a server can’t take everything in a map and leave right before the point calculation, for example, but I’m sure there are ways around that.

Im on CD and right now we are just shy of 80,000, while IoJ has 118,000 and ET has 243,000. Basically we have no chance of getting first and a slim to no chance of getting second. This is completely due to the fact tht everyone on CD got frustrated and either quit playing or transferred.

Everyone of our borderlands has no queue time basically all day long, and even trying to get a whole zone together we are lucky to get even close to 50 sheep. Nobody wants to play anymore and I would love to just suicide brawl over and over with some ET guys for the fun of it but I cant afford the repair costs for dying.

Now I think the ET has earned their victory over us but at the same time the vastness of how much we are getting stomped by is just outright a downer for anyone that wants to play. So people just don’t play and WvW grows emptier. The worst part is that ET and IoJ ppl have admitted that when all that matters is points, constantly smashing the weakest team is the easiest way to earn them so why would they spend to much time fighting eachother. Im not accusing at all just pointing out the mindset ppl seem to have, which in the games current state is perfectly logical, why would IoJ even attempt to mess with ET they know that they cant take them alone and CD is too weak to really ally with so in the end they would just be helping CD to get closer to tht second place spot.

I have been on my server the entire time so I cant speak for other ones but it seems like this will be the trend of WvW, the groups in tier1 will have awesome battles while tier2 and 3 will just be dominated by the groups that got knocked down the last round. While this is fair and all it has that “every server has the potential to win” attitude to it, which isnt true. If you dont have the players you dont have the players.

I understand that server pride is important and the most organized servers deserve the victories they get in WvW, but what would be more important to me is keep WvW the constant battle royal back and forth tht it was meant to be.

ET beat us within the first couple of days and while I wont condone server hoping I cant really blame people for doing it. The few ppl left WvWing on CD have had a week getting facerolled and ganked at every corner of the map and still have another 3 days to enjoy.

I think even ET would want us to have somekind of advantage so at least they have some more people to fight.

@Easymode. “You’re thinking like a novice.”

I’m deliberately thinking like a novice. I’m not interested so much in fine tuning the highest level of competition as shoring up the drastic iniquity facing most server pairings. When 1-2 servers completely fold each week, it ceases to be fun for anyone. If there are 10 ballistae and 15 defenders standing out in front of your spawn, easy access to the supply camps means nothing. The best teams won’t ever find themselves in that position, so appealing to the highest caliber teams for fixes won’t address this root problem.

@Judas.

-“This would ruin the whole idea of upgrading a keep you’ve just taken to make it more sturdy.”

No, it really wouldn’t. It would have an effect on the margins. You’d declare ahead of time that the battles have a 3 day PoI reset built in (not a score reset, mind you). On the margin, players at 2 days and 23 hours might not upgrade their keeps, but why should they? It doesn’t mean they’ll stop playing right before a reset. Currently, there’s no dearth of players leading up to a reset. Why would this change that?

-“I understand we want to keep things interesting but the fact remains that people need to work for their victories. We shouldn’t change this to 5 3-day long battles (which is what it would be) when the whole draw for some of us is a 336 hour war between three servers. All that in the name of people who don’t like to lose but don’t want to put effort into winning….sounds like a bad idea.”

The problem right now is that, given population and “winner gets stronger” mechanics, the deck is stacked against teams that are already at a disadvantage. This isn’t really a tough love situation. (It would be like the San Antonio Spurs playing the Miami Heat, but giving the Heat a 10% shot accuracy buff, while asking the Spurs to play with only 3 men…) If you want to dominate a map for 336 hours, what’s stopping you with occasional map resets? You’ll just take everything again anyway, only this time you’ll get more gold, xp, and karma in the process. Sounds terrible, right? It wouldn’t be 5 3-day battles. The scores don’t change, and everything can be recapped again between resets. If anything, it provides more excitement than the dull, spawn-camping for no rewards that currently goes on.

“I actually doubt it would make any difference anyway. If they were getting rolled, these same people would probably be even more likely to just abandon WvWvW until the battlegrounds reset, increasing the lead of the server who was having fun.”

This is fundamentally no different from people leaving right now. The only difference is that resets give them a reason to come back EVER. That’s currently not happening at all in most pairings. The dominant team stops getting xp, gold, and karma, and the losing team stops playing completely. That’s the whole point.

“2, 3, & 4. I mostly agree.”

Sweet. Me too.

“5 as well”

Awesome.

Edit: I do also believe that awarding 1 point per kill would also be a welcome change. It might contribute to spawn camping, which would need to be countered some other way. But it makes the scores tally faster when there are more players playing, and it makes defending points a bit more valuable.

SherlockBrolmes.4725:

1. Reset the maps to the respective thirds twice during the week. Winning teams will have more DEs to complete, so it’s less boring for them, and struggling teams will be able to retake a minimal base of operations, without being humiliated by 10 ballistas pointing at their spawn…

2. Reset the orbs (perhaps with the map resets). Again, the orbs are often the most exciting part of the weekly matches. The more orb fighting there is, the better. Orb fighting isn’t exciting when the guys with the orbs control the whole map.

3. Provide some sort of stacking buff to losing teams based on a point ratio. There’s no reason that the clearly dominant team should have extra health, endurance, and stat boosts after the first few days. There should be stacking buffs that grant extra stats, health, endurance (only within WvWvW), as well as stacking siege buffs. Something like 100,200,300 to stats and 1.5x, 2x, 3x siege damage, as well as 1.5x, 2x, 3x NPC effectiveness depending on the scenario. As servers start to close the point gap, these buffs go away, and the winning team can reassert their dominance. (Naturally this needs to be balanced to where winning teams don’t just take a break and give up until the score gaps close… not that this is so terrible a thing).

4. Mistwrought buff. Some sort of increased chance to get siege plans when your team is way outmanned/outscored.

5. 3 day to week long lockout on server transfers to competing servers. I’m sorry, but if you haven’t been able to transfer to play with your friends at this point, and they just so happen to be on the server you were just randomly matched up with, then you can just wait a few days. If you really can’t wait, perhaps there can be some sort of expedited server transfer ticketing system, with a history where players who abuse transfers can be identified and appropriately punished.

1&2. Resets kill the fun factor. Not only would you avoid building siege and upgrading keeps prior to the reset, but taking orbs or territory prior to the reset would seem pointless.

3. You’re not supposed to be rewarded for playing poorly, and what’s the point of a long match if you implement mechanics that force each match to go down to the wire? You might as well just argue for shorter matches.

4. Those siege weapons will probably just be saved for the next match, giving the losing team an unfair advantage.

5. I’ve never transferred servers or anything, but I guess this is a good idea.

Personally, I think they just need to increase the incentive for losing teams to play (rather than introducing mechanics that practically force them to remain competitive). No one likes losing, but people would still play if there was a point to it.

I think the server bonuses are supposed to provide that incentive (raising your score is rewarding no matter if you’re in first or last), but it’s obviously not really working. The rewards are too abstract, and people don’t really pay attention to them. Instead of getting a bonus to gold from kills, it’d be a lot better if everyone received a check in the mail praising the WvW crew.

But beyond that, I think it would be cool if there were “desperation events” that rallied everyone on the map to a certain goal (offensive or defensive) and rewarded them with plenty of gold and karma for succeeding (and, of course, even some for failing). It’s difficult to complete events when your team is getting roflstomped, and it would be fun to go all out to hold that last tower, even if it’s not significant to the overall standings.

If the match is going to reset 2-3 times per week, just give us back shorter (far more enjoyable) matches again by making the matchups themselves last 3 days or so.

I don’t think resets are a bad idea and based on the current swing between 24hr, 1 week & 2 week match ups it doesn’t sound like it would be impossible to implement. I’ve been what could be done to off set these devastating match ups and keep players playing for the full duration of the match up.

I posted a few ideas I had and a few that I’ve heard being discussed in another thread earlier.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Morale-The-4th-Enemy-solution-seeking-thread/first#post339854

Ive covered the solution (which is similar to the OPs) in my thread here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Server-Balance-Cap-and-Offpeak-Solution/first#post317893

Basically, have a few sprints during the cycle and give minor rewards.

@Sooty

Sounds like we definitely agree on those points. I guess the blanket term would be “Sporadic Incentives.”

@Lymain

“1&2. Resets kill the fun factor. Not only would you avoid building siege and upgrading keeps prior to the reset, but taking orbs or territory prior to the reset would seem pointless.”

People keep saying this, but I don’t buy it. The logical extension of this is “People will now never build siege or upgrade keeps.” You’re correct on the margin, that there will exist a halo around the reset where players stop pouring resources into WvWvW, but there is still plenty of incentive to upgrade and deploy siege for the first 2.5 days at a minimum. Recall, that you’ll want a significant lead, and whether you control the first 3 days or the last 3 days, it’s about your overall score, and both are as important.

The effect of a reset is minimal on player investment, and it increases player activity by reestablishing map parity in a way that temporarily removes obstacles to participation for losing teams and provides newly available rewards for winning teams.

“3. You’re not supposed to be rewarded for playing poorly, and what’s the point of a long match if you implement mechanics that force each match to go down to the wire? You might as well just argue for shorter matches.”

Well, one could argue for shorter matches. I’m instead trying to design more competitive and interesting longer matches. These are not suggestions on how to preserve an even split of points 100% of the time. Far from it. These changes are to reduce the likelihood of entire servers (or both losing servers) from giving up entirely, or suffering from a “too stacked deck.”

“4. Those siege weapons will probably just be saved for the next match, giving the losing team an unfair advantage.”

If they are perennial losers, than all the siege in the world won’t save them, but it will take some of the sting out of losing, and could make them more formidable in the future. And think, if they save it and deploy it later, it still gets used. Let’s say it’s used to destroy the lower bracket. Well, now the lower bracket has extra siege for the future. There is a bottom to WvWvW brackets, so eventually the extra siege will be used to combat superior forces, and not eternally inferior ones.

The most excitement appears to be coalescing around this idea of “sporadic incentives.” The question is, how do you provide additional incentives to play without simply gifting extra rewards to the perennial pubstomping servers. How do you put in incentives to get servers to elect NOT to “take their ball and go home.”

SherlockBrolmes.4725:

@Easymode. “You’re thinking like a novice.”

I’m deliberately thinking like a novice. I’m not interested so much in fine tuning the highest level of competition as shoring up the drastic iniquity facing most server pairings. When 1-2 servers completely fold each week, it ceases to be fun for anyone. If there are 10 ballistae and 15 defenders standing out in front of your spawn, easy access to the supply camps means nothing. The best teams won’t ever find themselves in that position, so appealing to the highest caliber teams for fixes won’t address this root problem.

Good Lord, someone actually gets it. I was beginning to despair

Another things i have been thinking over is to remove the gold sinks at least for those completely outnumbered or maybe drastically behind. if your losing badly you should at least get free gear repairs.. i would also like to have upgrades and such in camps/towers/keeps to be a lot cheaper and maybe even completed faster to at least give people a hand at creating and maintaining a dependable position.

I also think the rewards for completing events ie. capturing defending should be scaled based on the amount of attackers and defenders.. and maybe even present on the map. It is rather silly that a zerg of 30+ can crush a few players defending acamp and then getting full gold rewards for it.

It still won’t be a fair fight.. nothing can really fix being entirely outnumbered but lets at least take a few of the negatives away from the people losing

There some good changes you mentioned and some I personally like less cause to me it feels like you’re more helping the winning server even more so. I can understand why the outmanned buff appears sometimes and yet it won’t change anything cause it doesn’t really give any sort of advantage to actual PvP. Some of the choices I like to see differently.

Outmanned buff – Either remove or change it in someway. Changing it would mean giving buffs that work similarly to the Orbs (extra stat boost, health increase and perhaps a boost in gold and karma if people are so interested in that)

The other way I could see this turn out to be would be changing the orbs.

Orbs can make a winning faction win even more so cause it’s harder to take out a group vs group fight with people that have 15% more health and 150 stats points extra.

If the outmanned buff would be removed i would use these orbs as a factor:

Put a Orb in each factions home area (one you cannot conquer) and bring out 3 orbs into the Eternal Battlegrounds. The Orb from the borderlands homeland will activate if you’re race is outmanned or down by a certain amount of points. The Orbs of Power within the Eternal Battlegrounds will have more chance to exchange hands.

Nightcapping: I don’t care too much about this. Servers with a global population will always go up in the list during the evening and will go back down in the day. Weekends they can show off their real strengths and weaknesses and usually turn into a deciding factor for those specific servers.

Population Disparity: I agree some servers have less active people at night time and that sucks. Changing transfers will happen sooner or later if we/I like it or not. Since I have a guild on Far Shiverpeaks and friends on Blacktide (i switch every now and then between these two) which for me is tiring and I hope this guest system goes up sooner then later. Transfering won’t change much about the WvW though ofcourse some transfer to winning factions but every server doesnt win every time when they go up in rank eventually they’ll have a roadblock with full servers.

I do agree what one mentioned was that emphasis on supplies should be more immediate in towers, keeps and castles. The more upgrades the more supplies you’ll need to hold to maintain your upgrades perhaps and decrease the cost of them somewhat cause of the upkeep. This will force you to decide between upgrades or also defend your supply lines making the fights a bit more dynamic then it is at the moment. It’s a bit easy to predict how the bowl movement will be.

On further note after rereading some bits. Outmanned or Orbs maybe some sort of siege weaponry buff which only works in the siege area (not the puzzle area) I can agree on. I do jump into the puzzle area sometimes to grab myself some Orichalcum Ore afterall. I cannot imagine if someone just happened to be outmanned at night suddenly one shotting me with an arrow cart on top of the kitten well.

the stronger the orbs are the more chance of the 2 servers without the orb going for the server with the orb

the orb really helps to balance out the game making it weaker/worthless would be like cuting yourself

getting a foothold in a 1v1v1 is very easy

getting a foothold in a 1v1 is hard

You have outlined correctly that snowballing is the problem. If more people knew what this was or what it meant, your task to change it to something proper would be easier.

If I can kill you all the time, why make it easier for me? At the very minimum, just leave it the same.