Guild Wars 2

Preface

WvW is less and less attractive as it hasn’t enough players anymore for it’s match-duration, it’ unbalanced teams matched together and it’s total dependency on pure manpower.

EotM on the other side is uncompetitive, mostly unorganized and without identification.

Why not take the best out of both worlds to make a new game-mode?

Proposal

A new mode Guid vs Guild vs Guild is added. (Small guilds may form a meta guild to participate)
Match duration is 4 hours.
Match location is 1 map out of EotM, EB, BL (more maps may come later) selection of map is probabilistic, based on guild preferences and a random roll.
Each guild may have up to 100 people on the map at each time, all members of the guild may play.
Winner is determined as usual by score ticker, BL maps get score by blood lust stomping as well.
Based on match outcome a Glicko rating of a guild is computed. A guild participating the first time get a score of 1500.
A guild ranking is published on the leader board.
A guild not playing at least once per week gets it’s rating adjusted towards 1500.

The day is divided into 8 slots a 4 hours, I don’t know what’s the best alignment, maybe a 19:00-23:00 CE(S)T slot is a good idea for EU (other slots accordingly).
Guilds may register for any slot they like, the PC shows how many guilds are registered for that slot (but not which). Registration may be for any and as many time-slots as you like up to 1 week (or month?) in the future.

When there are at least 3 registrations for a slot at least one match happen. If there are not by 3 dividable registrations, participants are selected by random.
This happens 24 hours earlier, such that guilds know early enough to prepare for their match.

To be registered a guild has to deposit an amount of gems, a fee (similar to PvP map) is subtracted every time a guild is selected for a match.

Edit for Victory’s remark: No drops (Exp, Wexp) from player-kills, no events, only the ticker is rewarded. Every player of a team that is in the match during a “tick” get’s a reward based on the ticker his team has that time (karma/wexp/exp/gold based on tick amount and 1 item exo or rare for highest tick, rare or green for 2nd, green or blue for 3rd). At the end the winner guild is rewarded (influence, 1st get gems for match back, gold, …) based on the achieved score.

advantages

Competitive organized fights with team identification.
Equal rewards for a team members independent of the job done for the team, but
more (longer) commitment gives more rewards.
Individual rewards for the tick-winner are a bit better than participating in a world-boss, tick-loosers ones worser.

disadvantage

WvW and EotM may loose even more players or are demoted to be a training ground for guilds without a current match.

100 people a side? Servers can’t cope with 80 a side in any battles.

100 people will just be more zerg v zerg v zerg.

Gem charge is a bad idea.

Players should not drop anything, gvg should be for guild pride. Making it 100 people makes this a non-starter.

Combining guilds to make a ‘team’ means a lack of organisation that is the key point of proper guild vs guild combat.

GvG needs it’s own maps designed for 10vs10, 15, 20, guild lords, boost aka cap the flag mechanics, death penalty and all the other bits that made GvG such fun in gw1. Something that defeats the current GWEN meta mindless zerg.

You may “abuse” it to play today’s GvG there if you like, but it’s intended meaning is that of MATCH between 3 sides as EotM and WvW is currently. So you may have scouts, defence-forces, more than 1 zerg, … And yeah, if servers cannot handle what will happen there, it should be adapted to what is possible.

The reason why the zerg is the most-used meta is
a) people are to lazy to organize better (smaller cooperating groups)
b) offensive is over-weigthed against defense
c) AoE mechanics, where many people around you helps you to avoid being hit.
d) zerging is the most individual rewarding thing.
a) and d) are improved in this proposal over WvW/EotM I think, improvements to the others would be cool, but thats a different topic.

But I am in doubt that the 100 people blob will be the winning organization in this game mode. If I would be map-commander, I would try something like a 40 ppl fight-group, 2 groups of 20 ppl for capping towers/keeps, 5 2 ppl scout/camp/bloodlust capping groups.

Concerning the Gems: ANet need a reason to do it and something to replace the server-transfer income.

Overal: It’s a game modus that play’s like today’s reset-evening restricted to 1 map.

I like the idea. I want to simplify it first:
WvW as it is now, but with guild alliances replacing the servers on each side. Each week your alliance gets pitted against 2 other alliances of guilds. This does not replace the current server v server WvW but augments it like this

how alliance wars would effect the outcome

• The points from your server’s guild alliances get added averaged into the overall score for your server when points are tallied on friday before reset. How your server does could come down to how your server’s alliances do against other servers.
• Alliances get ranked by skill (through the same glicko that servers use) and are pitted against similarly ranked Alliances. This means that if you have a server with pve alliances that those alliances would fight against other pve alliances while pvp alliances get other pvp alliances. Alliances you fight don’t have to be from the servers you’re fighting for that week.
• The alliance system would work like it did in GW1. One guild is the alliance leader and administers the alliance of up to 10 guilds. An alliance chat allows guilds to coordinate. Commanders from each guild who are active on the same map will be able to see each other’s orders and drawing on the map (map lines are color coded, markers are guild marked).

Take it that way and I can see it working to revitalize GW2’s large scale pvp. Would it detract from the current wvw? probably. It would be interesting to see nonetheless. How would your allied guilds fare in a large scale Alliance battle scenario?

The main motivation of my proposal is
- Eliminate coverage as the one and only factor of wining
- Eliminate PvD as the main (20 of 24 hours a day) play-style.

WvW has that few people interested in it now, that 24/7 on 3 maps results in a population density that is outside 3-4h pimetime a day much to low for interesting fights. And not even in primetime all 4 maps are full anymore, only in the reset evening there is a chance to have fights on 4 full maps.

So why should these uncompetitive fightless PvD-hours be part of a match?

Reduce a match to where competitive play is possible. 4 hours on 1 (randomly selected) map.

I agree that the periods where matches are most balanced in coverage should be what decides the matchup. Alliance battles could fall under the same problem. The 4 hour window works for me.

As far as im concerned the extra chests in eotm when you cap stuff is the best change, wvw is so unrewarding that its easily able to lose money playing it if you run the best food.