What is the goal fo WvWvW? To PvP and have fun.
This goal is utterly unmet in today’s WvWvW, which seems designed from the ground up to create the most unfun, lopsided nonsense I’ve ever seen.
There are no good matches in WvW
Every score I look at, one server is absolutely stomping the others. By ridiculous, absurd margins. Like, 4x as many points as the next closest server. Entire servers just give up on that aspect of the game because they just get rolled all the time.
Your matchmaking system is a total, complete, utter failure. Even two months after launch. Why? The foolish decision to allow all these server transfers. They completely break your model.
You should never, ever, have decided to start week long matchups while still allowing server transfers. And you should NEVER have allowed people to transfer from a less populated server to a more populated one. Anyone could have told you that would lead to relentless bandwagoning on the ‘winning’ server, and that is exactly what is happening.
Blackgate received a ton of transfers and is massacring their supposedly evenly matched opponents. Sea of Sorrows received a ton of transfers and is massacring their supposedly evenly matched opponents. Sanctum of Rall received a ton of transfers and is massacring their supposedly evenly matched opponents. Do you see a trend yet?
This is completely ruining WvW. People whose focus is WvW are just quitting your game and going off to play XCOM or Borderlands 2 and saying things like “Maybe I’ll be back once all the bullkitten is fixed”.
Victory in WvW is entirely non skill based
If you have more people you win, simple as that. This is due to the 5 player aoe cap mechanic, the downed/rezzing mechanic, and most importantly, player vs door. It’s extremely hard for a smaller force to win against a larger, thanks to rezzing, and it’s utterly impossible for a smaller server to win against a larger, because all that matters is how many people you have when the other server has gone to sleep. They can run around taking everything without opposition.
In the current state of WvW, victory is entirely, 100% determined by geographic coverage. That’s it. It doesn’t matter if you win all the fights, the enemy can just come along and take everything when you are asleep – and rack up huge points. Until you find some way to make the points gained in WvW related to skill, at least peripherally, many people are going to regard the whole thing as a huge joke.
WvW seems designed up to encourage snowballing and discourage the ‘losing’ servers
The way you present information to players is all wrong. You emphasis the total points, which is just a marker of who has more people awake at night, as indicated above, and bears zero relationship to which server is actually ‘winning’. When people see the points are incredibly far ahead – they feel discouraged and stop coming out.
You need to not show this information at all, or else prioritize the current score over the total score. The total score simply records what has happened in the past, the current score of ppt shows what is happening right now.
The orb bonuses are a terrible, terrible idea. That’s the #1 thing that seems to discourage people on the losing server from coming out: not only are you losing in score and outnumbered, but, man for man, the side with MORE PEOPLE is better than you thanks to the orb buffs! Far from tilting the playing field towards the people who are struggling, you stack the deck in favor the people who have already won. That’s part of what makes every battle so ridiculously lopsided – after an initial advantage, the other two servers just give up. You see this everywhere in just about every matchup. Late come from behind wins are an absolute rarity (and are usually due to server transfers)
This is such a horrendously bad idea. You should swap the orb and outmanned bonuses, or something like that. It wouldn’t hurt to reduce the repair fees of the outmanned side as well. The absolute epidemic of hacks leading to single hackers grabbing the orbs multiple times during a match up also doesn’t help matter.