Guild Wars 2

Before anyone gets in a huff, the point is this:

The WvW maps require a very high level of play to be consistently enjoyable. In our server and tier (Tarnished Coast, tier 2) this only occurs on reset night, and to a lesser extent, the day afterwards.

On reset night, there is great communication across the server, all our guilds are out in force, people are conscientious about placing siege, upgrading keeps and so forth. But towards the end of the week, play mostly becomes PUG skirmishes and keep flips. This is still fun at a certain level, but it is nowhere near the heights reached on reset night.

My proposition would be this: Keep two “hard” maps. This would be Eternal Battlegrounds for those who like static defensive play, and a Borderland for those who prefer offensive and run and gun.

Make the other two maps “easier” i.e. they would not require large organization for satisfying play. I would defer to those who have more map awareness on how to do this. But the overall scale of the maps should probably be shrunk, including objectives. This doesn’t need to be permanent, but perhaps could be tied to the mid-week population.

I’d end by saying this is a serious issue. Population drops mid-week in part because the play just isn’t very satisfying at the “mass” level (the raise d’etre of WvW). It can seem a waste of time to run around looking for the same level of play you experienced on reset night. As a result, many people play other PvP games mid-week (or RP/PvE) until Friday comes around again.

you think dumbing it down is somehow going to bring in more players? And if it did this would be a good thing?

shakes head

People naturally want to be there to help out at the beginning and taper off when score margins get to the point nothing is going to change. The only solution would be to shorten matches, but then with resets so close together people wouldn’t care if they missed one, they can always get the next one.

Also consider resets are friday night and the first two days of the match are on the weekend. That is the time most people have free. Come monday the majority of player have work/school commitments that come first.
I would say if resets happened on monday you’d get the most participation at the end of the match, just because that when people can play.

There are several reasons why populations drop off midweek (especially on our server).
1. People get really tired of night capping. Why spend countless gold, and 5 hours a night capping stuff, upgrading it, etc, if it will just get taken effortlessly by a server (who then ironically most of the times brag about taking an unguarded keep) during the night? Many PuGs lose hope eventually, so they’ll only come out to take stuff the first time.

2. People who move up in tiers, like ours, have to face a different environment. We went from constantly winning, having an easy time and basically just farming badges to having to fight for what we take. Many of the people on our server I think got used to it being easy, and are “waiting” for it to get easy again, or get down about WvW and stop, especially since there are very rewards for it outside server pride.

So we don’t need new maps, we just need something to allow players who have to fight very hard to keep stuff to stop from losing morale and leaving because they see no point. Things like cool loot from badges or WvW only loot from the bags (even if it is purely cosmetic), or titles which are more feasibly attainable (i.e. not killing ten’s of thousands of people), might provide a bit of incentive.

The problem is that “easy” becomes “boring” too quickly.

Currently, supply camps are “easy mode” for WvW. There’s no walls and most of them are completely open which renders siege almost entirely useless for defense and unnecessary or impractical for offense.

You can, and many do, simply run from supply camp to supply camp in round-robin fashion, often with one or more groups simply following each other around taking supply camps back and forth. I’ve heard it referred to as “karma farming”.

But it’s boring, and without fail people get tired of it and either go do something else or log off. Particularly in my guild, where we are all long-time MMORPG veterans, “farming” doesn’t sit well with us and we tire of it quickly. I think even for fresh faced players, new to MMORPGs, who still see farming as an exciting way to watch a meter increase, this form of entertainment is going to be short lived. An entire map of it will be popular and first and then a drag on the game after a few months.

Basically I see an “easy map” as a map full of open field objectives with no fully enclosed structures and easier access to waypoints. I just think that would get boring quickly unless there’s some new mechanic to prevent round-robin capping and recapping where nobody would bother to defend an indefensible location.

I understand the frustrations of the original poster but I disagree with the proposed solution.

If we accept that WvW populations on each server are never going to be exactly congruous a better way to deal with it would be to have some kind of reward system that benefits a WvW team beyond getting the highest score each week. Perhaps guild rewards for getting a lot of influence, or for having held a keep a long time. These are just examples off the top of my head, I haven’t thought them completely through so they are probably full of holes or would need a lot of refinement.

Interests falling after reset night is a problem with the point accrual and ranking system, which gravitate increasingly towards stagnation over time. It’s not a problem with the maps.

If your leg is hurt, you don’t bandage your finger.

Heinel.6548:

Interests falling after reset night is a problem with the point accrual and ranking system, which gravitate increasingly towards stagnation over time.

That’s not true either.

Interest falling after reset night is a problem with people not understanding the point accrual and ranking system.

The reality is that Thursday night is just as important as Friday night. “1st, 2nd, 3rd” isn’t as important as “point separation between ranks”. That is, earning 10,000 points on Friday night is just as good as 10,000 points on Thursday night, with regard to rank adjustments. While it might not change your ranking from 3rd to 2nd, there is still a rating difference in “losing by 20,000 points” versus “losing by 10,000 points”.

If people understood this, I think they would fight just as hard every day.

The score should show your “pending rating change” in large numbers with the “current point total” in small numbers. People should see that they are in 2nd place with “+23” rating points and then watch that drop as they slack off. Now they’re slacking off for Wednesday-Thursday and they are still in second place but instead of “+23” rating points it’s going to be “+5” or even “-20”.

Even the first place team can end up losing rating points.

People need to understand that every point cycle is equally important when it comes to rating change.