Guild Wars 2

A suggestion:

Remove the whole server vs server crap that obviously never worked here and transform it in a big Red Vs Green Vs Blue battlefield.

Pretty much like a player choose his race, the first time a player open the WvW UI window he is forced to pick one of the 3 colors to fight for until the next reset.

Now the usual suggestion-feedback non-TL:DR post:

Pros:
- Stop dividing the WvW community in multiple parts and slowly killing the smaller ones. After all those who are winning obviously love to play WvW, meanwhile the smaller groups keep getting hammered down to oblivion.
- Changes the hate between servers that plague this forum for a bigger Rivalry between Guilds. Since servers will stop making difference, Alliances and Guilds will start showing off their real colors. Hence the name of this game.
- Helps with the timezone issue since it will concentrate more players at the same place.

Cons:
- The way it is now, servers can’t handle the workload of players. Read Below.
- Problems with Stackers will emerge if not handle correctly. Read Below.
- Together with the Guest system, it will make the whole concept of servers meaningless except for Guild Missions.
- Flame wars between Guilds are going to get more frequent.

The idea

I have no idea how many years of MMo and PvP games people have around here. But after more than a decade killing pixels I gotta say that:
PvP between different communities is an awesome concept, but never works
- People will always stack at the winning team if they are allowed.
- People will always use the cheapest strategy to win any fight
- People that are losing will always get bitter and rage quit faster than those who are Winning.
- People won’t play something they deem to be to complex.
That’s a fact.

I see 2 different ways to put my suggestion in practice, both with their pros and cons:

Suggestion #1: Removing Servers entirely.
Works like mentioned a few paragraphs above. Ever start of the week, after reset, the players need to pick one of the 3 sides to fight with.

To make easier for guilds, any guild leader or higher ranking member can set in the guild menu the side the members are joining before hand. This is obviously just a suggestion and when you are prompt to pick your side, you will be informed that Guild X is joining the Red team instead of Green/Blue. Once chosen, it will be listed in the Guild Member list that said player is joining a certain color.

The choice can be made at any point of the week and its valid until the next reset.
Players that are not playing the game or don’t choose the side to fight with are simply labeled as “inactive” and won’t affect the WvW balance.

Suggestion 2: Balance trough servers
Basically, depending on the efforts of the individual server in the last 2 weeks, the servers are going to be temporally merged for the next 7 days.
For example, taking the current Rankings:

PS: I am using the Silver League members as an example here, since listing all 24 US servers would take too long. Have in mind the the whole idea of this topic is to prevent segregation of the WvW community and I WOULDN’T want something like leagues happening again.

Team Red:
- Fort Aspenwood, Stormbluff Isle,
Team Green:
- Yak’s Bend, Isle of Janthir, Dragonbrand
Team Blue:
- Ehmry Bay, Crystal Desert, Northern Shiverpeaks, Borlis Pass

Name in bold are said league top 3, in case you haven’t noticed:
You can notice in the above example that 2 ranked servers joined in the team Red. At the same time that Team Blue would be formed by 4 different servers together.
In the final idea, servers would be classified and the division of all 24 servers would in theory, balance the playerbase.

In case the combination of two bigger servers are simply too much to handle, the other teams are simply gonna stack more and more servers until it reach a point that the balance will shift. The more you win, the harder it gets. The more you lose, the more reinforcements it will get.

Part 1 End.

Solution to expected problems
1º in case of Suggestion 1#, a Team color with automatically have all registers closed off in case that the total community in that Team is 10% higher than any other server.
This sucks when you get separated by your friends, but that prevents Stackers from always choosing the winning team bandwagon and screwing up everything.

2º New methods of server balancing would be necessary to help with the auto-balance of Suggestion 2#. Some ideas that I could give to help that are written below.

3º Server workload:
That’s IMO, the biggest issue here.
With the way the current WvW is programmed, its simply impossible to make such a big amount of players fight in the same map. Pretty much all maps would get Queued 24h/7d and we would prolly have like 10 or more “Edge of The Mists” maps running at the same time to hold all the extra players.

Ironically this isn’t really that bad (don’t hate me), most PUGs can always stick to the Edges of The Mist since they are there just to kill some players here and there. Mostly because that since a certain PvP mode is conquest mode only, people that like to to PvP just for the sake of killing players ended up always on WvW. EotM would end up a interesting place for a good brawl.

For the the rest, I would recommend dividing the current Borderland maps in 3 different maps. Would work as 2 Front Lines and one Main Camp.

##Red##……………………………….
###Base## _ _ _ _ _ # # # #…….
……..###……………… # Red #….
………..\………………..# Border 2 #
…….##Red##…………….. # # # # …..
##Border 1##…………………………
…….####### ……………………………..

Invaders can enter freely trough both Frontline Borders, but can’t access the Main area straight off.
Each Border will have its on Garrison, and in the Garrison is the only entrance to the Main Map. That said, players can’t attack the main map unless the Garrison is down.

About the maps layout, both front lines need to give a slight edge to the defenders side pretty much like it happens in the actual maps. The Main Map where the “Team Castle” is, in other hand, a completely Biased map in the defenders side. After all is more than proved that in the current WvW, the attacker has the advantage most of the time.

If, and only if, the castle is taken down, the castle will be considered as Pillaged, or defeated and the invaders will get their usual prizes and be allowed to stay in the castle for 15 minutes. After that every invader is kicked of the castle and it flips back to its current color. That said, the Castle will never be flipped entirely and will forever be a place for any Nation to Rally their forces back to capture anything back.

Other stuff to add is that the numbers of defenders will always be higher than attackers. On the Main Camp, for instance, would be a difference of 3:1 to the defenders. Capturing a Castle should be something really hard to do.

Eternal Battlegrounds could be left the same. I wouldn’t suggest serving as a middle ground since it would create more problems that solutions. Free entrance for any Front Line border works better.

This would rise the total maps in WvW from 4 to 10. Add EotM to the count and you have plenty of space for a lot of players.

4º To help figuring out what servers contribute more to each Team and to improve that fights in WvW I would also make a few extra changes on the way PPT works:
- Double the amount of points gained per 15 minutes for each camp/tower/keep/Garrison. Reason Below.
- Make every death in the battle field add 1 point to the nation Score. This is interesting because in case that defending a spot is impossible, you can “deny” points to the enemy by killing as most players they can before the walls fall. Would work as a impact against zerks and Karma Trains since, depending on the defenders, capturing a point can give more points to the defender, even tough the attack was successful.
- “Finishing” a players grants 5+(Bloodlust stacks) extra points. That said, a team of Roamers can compete with a zerk in a amount of points per kill. In fact, since most players run away from zergs, Roamers are going to score more points than Zergs in general. This make fights in EotM important.

5º As a new general Reward system: Any solable content stay the same, including towers. Capturing a keeps will always grant a Rare, capturing a Border Garrison will grant a exotic. Border Castles will grant up to Ascended Itens.
- Depending on damage done by sieges, players and NPC killed and etc, the Guild and it’s members that contribute the most on capturing anything above Keep level will automatically flag the place and get extra rewards.

Could have written more, but this is getting a bit long already.
Discuss.
Please do

I think rather than scraping the server vs server matches, servers can be grouped into color factions. The question of how many servers per faction match-ups, that will need some tweaking. But this way, high WVW population servers can be paired with a low one to even things out.

For instance:
Server R1 + Server R27 (green) vs Server R2 + Server R26 (blue) vs Server R3 + Server R25 (red)

nikitnq.7143:

I think rather than scraping the server vs server matches, servers can be grouped into color factions. The question of how many servers per faction match-ups, that will need some tweaking. But this way, high WVW population servers can be paired with a low one to even things out.

For instance:
Server R1 + Server R27 (green) vs Server R2 + Server R26 (blue) vs Server R3 + Server R25 (red)

Basically what I wrote down on Suggestion 2#

Just that I think I would leave the number of servers per team with a bit more freedom.

Because the current Tier 1 servers are prolly strong enough to trash all Tier 5+ server pretty much by themselves.

SoulSin.5682:

A suggestion:

Remove the whole server vs server crap that obviously never worked in 20 years of MMo history and transform it in a big Red Vs Green Vs Blue battlefield.

Um, it hasn’t been TRIED in 20 years of MMO history. If you want to make an argument to change something you can start your post with something better than a half-truth.

SoulSin.5682:

nikitnq.7143:

I think rather than scraping the server vs server matches, servers can be grouped into color factions. The question of how many servers per faction match-ups, that will need some tweaking. But this way, high WVW population servers can be paired with a low one to even things out.

For instance:
Server R1 + Server R27 (green) vs Server R2 + Server R26 (blue) vs Server R3 + Server R25 (red)

Basically what I wrote down on Suggestion 2#

Just that I think I would leave the number of servers per team with a bit more freedom.

Because the current Tier 1 servers are prolly strong enough to trash all Tier 5+ server pretty much by themselves.

Maintaining the servers as a team rewards servers that build their community hence I would prefer it to stay.

Granted T1 servers are in a league of their own, hence you group them with lower tiers. In a way T1, probably some T2 servers will be “seeded” and cannot be teamed with another server of similar strength.

So you may have match ups like Vizunah + Vabbi vs Desolation + Gandara vs Riverside + Fort Ranik.

But never Vizunah + Seafarer’s team.

Draygo.9473:

SoulSin.5682:

A suggestion:

Remove the whole server vs server crap that obviously never worked in 20 years of MMo history and transform it in a big Red Vs Green Vs Blue battlefield.

Um, it hasn’t been TRIED in 20 years of MMO history. If you want to make an argument to change something you can start your post with something better than a half-truth.

Truth.
I got lost while writing.

What I am saying is that PvP between static communities has never worked properly.
Between Servers vs Servers or Race vs Race games (and its variations), there always will be some kinda of imbalance that will only get worse with time.

In the end, players Winning will still win, and the losing team will rage quit or will move to the winning side. News players are going to usually, join the winning bandwagon as well. This always end with balance issues in every game of the kind.

Years ago though, Devs could give the excuse that this is a community problem and they can’t do anything about it. Mostly because transferring accounts between different databases on some old games takes too much work and balancing becomes a eternal source of trouble for both company and players.

Nowadays, games like GW2 and some new MMOs doesn’t suffer that database problem. See our guest system for example: it was something unthinkable years ago.

Sadly tough, GW2 has such an amazing system build from start and we STILL suffer from those problems. Hence why I say that this simply doesn’t work.

Draygo.9473:

SoulSin.5682:

A suggestion:

Remove the whole server vs server crap that obviously never worked in 20 years of MMo history and transform it in a big Red Vs Green Vs Blue battlefield.

Um, it hasn’t been TRIED in 20 years of MMO history. If you want to make an argument to change something you can start your post with something better than a half-truth.

It has, it was done in another game (can’t remember the name) but very successfully. When this was brought up before, some people popped in the thread and brought it up and how successful it was.

To the OP, this idea has been brought up before in 2 other suggestions, Faction vs Faction vs Faction or Guild vs Guild vs Guild. Another variation, Red vs Green vs Blue.

Either way, this is the way it should have been implemented in the first place IMO. It could still easily be done as the maps are already set as is; the only thing that needs to be changed is on how people log on or choose which color they fight for.

Take for instance (the way I’d like to see it); you log onto WvW except this time you see how many instances of each map are active and how many players for each colour are on each map. This way the player can pick and choose how they want to fight. Do they want an even match or an uneven match? Do they want to be outmanned or do they want to be on the dominate side. Set a whole new set of achievements for each color, then it becomes a case of, who do they want to fight for today. Or with your example, who do they want to fight for each reset.

This alleviates so many problems:

- No more que times
- No uneven matches (unless you choose)
- Far bigger potential to fight different players and guilds
- Guilds can organize Guild vs Guild easily
- A whole new set of achievements to work towards
- Likely to draw more people into WvW

The way I look at it, in NA, we have 8 different matches going on, so they obviously have the potential to have different instances of each map. Now if we log onto WvW and see: EB1, EB2, EB3, RB (Red borderland)1, RB2, RB3 and so on, I highly doubt we’d see every instance of every map full, given what we know now about population. I really don’t think server load would be a problem. This is where it’d be easy for guilds to set up GvG on maps that are near empty. This is also where you can set up GvG against other server’s guilds in which we aren’t able to do now.

The only logistical complaint I’ve seen so far is server pride; people like to fight for their servers, well I do see a way around this too. Offer a point system that accumulates for players downed, killed, yaks slapped, and objectives captured etc..

Despite who your fighting for, your still linked to a server. Keep a server list with all the points they accumulate through various objectives and voila, you now have server rivalries. Rank it by rating like it is now, but it’s based on how many active players there are in WvW vs how many objectives are met. Low instances of players + lots of objectives = high rating. Consequently, high amounts of players from a server + not many objectives = a dreadfully low rating.

I think with this, you’d find your top servers probably wont be your top servers any more. Just my 2 cents, but yes OP I like your idea, and wish they’d take steps to implement it.

Draygo.9473:

SoulSin.5682:

A suggestion:

Remove the whole server vs server crap that obviously never worked in 20 years of MMo history and transform it in a big Red Vs Green Vs Blue battlefield.

Um, it hasn’t been TRIED in 20 years of MMO history. If you want to make an argument to change something you can start your post with something better than a half-truth.

If you want to accuse someone of playing loose with the truth you’d better be certain you know what you’re talking about. You don’t. The 3-faction open world PvP portion of Rift called Conquest was exactly a Red-vs-Green-vs-Blue format, with players able to choose which team they wanted to play on when they queued. There were some HORRIBLE flaws with Conquest, but the lack of server alignment was not one of them.

No way. #SaveBessie #Gandara4ever #YOLObus

I very much agree to the OP. It’s time we got a stable PvP game mode.

Either start WvW again from scratch, or make a completely new game mode that is based on GUILDS instead of SERVERS.

Just my 50 cents anyways. I don’t think I’ll stay in the game if a better alternative for PvP comes out and it would be a shame to see as good a game as GW2 loose all their PvP population because of better alternatives, while they could actually make their PvP so much better.

Ignoring for the moment copyright infringement issues, imagine what would happen if a different game developer introduced a version of WvW that simply offered balanced faction-based (red-vs-green-vs-blue) matches and addressed only a handful of the other most significant complaints that players have had with ANet’s version over the past year. Players would flock to it in droves and leave GW2 in their rear view mirror, never to look back. To me, that’s an amazing situation … that ANet could be trounced by some other company simply by fixing a few things in WvW that ANet has been unwilling to do.

I for one would be more than happy for this to become reality.

Cactus.2710:

Draygo.9473:

SoulSin.5682:

A suggestion:

Remove the whole server vs server crap that obviously never worked in 20 years of MMo history and transform it in a big Red Vs Green Vs Blue battlefield.

Um, it hasn’t been TRIED in 20 years of MMO history. If you want to make an argument to change something you can start your post with something better than a half-truth.

If you want to accuse someone of playing loose with the truth you’d better be certain you know what you’re talking about. You don’t. The 3-faction open world PvP portion of Rift called Conquest was exactly a Red-vs-Green-vs-Blue format, with players able to choose which team they wanted to play on when they queued. There were some HORRIBLE flaws with Conquest, but the lack of server alignment was not one of them.

Please understand what I wrote about, and that the op has since edited his post.

Server vs Server vs Server has never been tried before in any Triple A MMO.