Guild Wars 2

Now that we have megaserver tech, it’s time for ANet to get rid of the fundamental flaw of WvW since the beginning: Attaching it to PvE servers.

Whilst WvW was never meant to be super-competitive, nevertheless it has a ladder and league, and currently the server system makes a mockery of these competitive elements.

On the one hand, highly populated servers with good coverage have a huge advantage, but on the other hand, the player experience gets worse and worse, with huge zergs and long queue times.

Let’s get rid of server and set up a proper ladder with real teams.

I propose the following changes:

- There are no longer any “servers”. When you join GW2, you don’t need to choose a server. The Megaserver tech makes each region a single big server.

- Groups of guilds can pay a gem fee to form an “Alliance”. This is equivalent to a registering a team on the ladder. In the system, an Alliance is similar to what servers are currently. Players who belong to an Alliance can fight in WvW for their Alliance, to win WvW and improve their Alliance’s ladder ranking.

- Players who don’t belong to an Alliance (ie. PUGs), can use the LFG system to be a “Mercenary”. They can be invited to a party by any Alliance and participate in WvW for them. Alternatively, PUGs can play in Edge of The Mists if they don’t want to be a mercenary. (or while they’re waiting to be invited.)

- So now instead of disorganised servers, with spies, bandwagoners, PvE people trying to get their world completion, etc, we have proper competitive teams made up of groups of guilds, who can manage their players, recruit across timezones, etc.

- Since all the members of the winning Alliance actually chose to be there for WvW (rather than just picking the right PvE server), you can give good and meaningful rewards for winning WvW. For example, the winning Alliance for the week gets 1,000,000 Gold and a sum of gems, divided evenly between all members of the Alliance.
(This rewards smaller Alliances – if you can win with the least amount of people, each will get a better reward!)

It’s time for the true spirit of Guild Wars – combat between organised voluntary groups of players – to be put back into GW2.

Edit: The beauty of this system is that, because Alliances are fully responsible for their own success, we can make Winning a WvW match actually have meaningful rewards.

At the moment, whether a Server wins a WvW is partially decided by performance, and partially decided by other things like population, etc. Also, when a Server wins, it’s very difficult to automatically detect who actually contributed to the win, versus other players on the server who didn’t really do much in WvW at all.

When an Alliance wins, it’s assumed that every member of the Alliance is part of its success. The game can dish out a hefty reward and divide it evenly between the members of the alliance.

Whether each player actually -deserves- the reward or not, becomes the responsibility of the Alliance. After the season ends, they can kick out people they don’t like, or train them, or yell at them, whatever. But basically noone can bandwagon for easy rewards, unless their Alliance is happy to let them do it.

Having a prize of 10,000,000 gold (or whatever) evenly divided between all players in the winning team is something that simply isn’t possible in the Server system. So instead of rewarding overall victory, ANet is forced to reward various objectives in the game, like taking a keep, or getting kills, etc.
But this is inherently flawed because it incentivises behaviours that don’t necessarily lead to victory. Eg. two zergs running in an infinite loop taking empty keeps back and forth from each other, is the optimal way to earn lots of rewards from taking keeps.

Ideally, rather than trying to design a system that tries (and fails) to reward certain actions and behaviours that might lead to victory, it’s much better to have a system that rewards victory, and let people do whatever they can imagine to achieve the win.

The name Guild Wars is based on lore not on guilds btw

Do the “Mercenaries” get reward for being in WvW? If not, this system will just be a major headache to anyone who don’t want to belong to a “hardcore WvW guild” since I doubt anyone would like to actually get pugs on the group (You see that already happening on regular wvw), and even if these pugs join, they won’t be rewarded for their efforts.

Also, if the alliances end up not being balanced, it’s clear that every new player looking for easy rewards will choose being part of the strongest alliance (which is basically what we see when everyone just stack in one server), making the balance even worse than it’s already is.

Lastly: We belive that the cap on the WvW maps are somenthing around 80 people. How you expect that 4 maps that can suposedly allocate 320 people to hold all the players from 8(NA)-9(EU) servers at same time? My server which is the dead last on NA ladder can field around 40 people during NA prime time, which means that us alone can take 12,5% of the total capacity of WvW. I’m sure any server above us can field much more than that, which means we’ll hit 100% long before we can get everyone on the game.

I neither belong or want to belong to a “hardcore WvW guild”, and I hate EotM with the heat of a nova. I guess, should this be implemented, as a scout I’d have to wait for someone to approve my “Mercenary” status or simply not play at all.

Megaserver already fired a bullet into the temple of whatever interest I had left for fighting cron scripts in PvE; this would do the same for WvW.

Jeknar.6184:

Do the “Mercenaries” get reward for being in WvW? If not, this system will just be a major headache to anyone who don’t want to belong to a “hardcore WvW guild” since I doubt anyone would like to actually get pugs on the group (You see that already happening on regular wvw), and even if these pugs join, they won’t be rewarded for their efforts.

Also, if the alliances end up not being balanced, it’s clear that every new player looking for easy rewards will choose being part of the strongest alliance (which is basically what we see when everyone just stack in one server), making the balance even worse than it’s already is.

Lastly: We belive that the cap on the WvW maps are somenthing around 80 people. How you expect that 4 maps that can suposedly allocate 320 people to hold all the players from 8(NA)-9(EU) servers at same time? My server which is the dead last on NA ladder can field around 40 people during NA prime time, which means that us alone can take 12,5% of the total capacity of WvW. I’m sure any server above us can field much more than that, which means we’ll hit 100% long before we can get everyone on the game.

1. Well, I envision mercenaries to be fairly free-market. If an Alliance feels that they need the extra people, then they can be very proactive in inviting mercenaries. This is also a great way to find good players to join your WvW guild. If the demand for mercenaries is high enough, then the alliance can certainly choose to sweeten the deal by paying people (presumably well-known skilled mercenaries) money or items directly.
It all depends on the needs/attitude of the alliance. In GW1 we certainly had many guilds that were very friendly and open towards recruiting people.

2. The key difference is that Alliances are player-managed. At the moment, every new player who wants easy rewards can join the biggest server. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it, even if it means terrible queue times for everyone. But in my system, the biggest Alliance chooses how big it wants to be. They don’t have to accept every random newbie. (especially if extra players dilute your rewards!) The top Alliance will presumably recruit the best, and only the best, from a wide range of timezones. It’s unlikely that they’ll want to get so big that these players have to fight for queue spots.
And heck, it’s possible that we might see a quantity vs. quality matchup between a lean skilled Alliance and a bloated zerg one. That would be interesting in itself. We’ll get to see the true limits of WvW’s game mechanics, whether well coordinated teams can defeat massive zerg etc.

3. The number of Alliances that can exist on the ladder will have to be rationed (and divisible by 3). For starters, we could have 1 alliance slot per current server. So we would be doing a straight swap from servers to alliances, and nothing changes from the population/server resources point of view.

As for which wannabe-alliances get the alliance slots, there’s plenty of ways to do it. You could auction it off, so whichever wannabe alliances can raise the most gems will get the slot. You could make it a competitive process, where you hold a small scale WvW tournament (1 map, 20 players each, 4 hours) and the winners get the ticket, etc.

The guilds that miss out can either wait for their chance next season or start asking to join the existing alliances.

If ANet gets the gem pricing right, then it’s possible that WvW can become self sustaining – ie. enough players to fill 3 Alliances will pay enough to run another WvW instance. Then we wouldn’t need a limit on the number of Alliances on the ladder, ANet can afford to run as many WvW matchups as there are players willing to pay for it.

msalakka.4653:

I neither belong or want to belong to a “hardcore WvW guild”, and I hate EotM with the heat of a nova. I guess, should this be implemented, as a scout I’d have to wait for someone to approve my “Mercenary” status or simply not play at all.

A good thing about GW2 is that you can belong to multiple guilds. Surely it would be ok for you to join a casual WvW guild in a middle-rank Alliance that mostly just plays for fun?

Mercenary is mostly just for newbies to meet up with potential guilds, or players who really like jumping around, spies, or potentially famous high-demand MVP players who can charge for their participation

If you can be happy as a PUG on your server, then you can be happy in a casual guild in mid-tier Alliance, surely?

The only people who lose are the ones who want to PUG on the most crowded servers, I guess.

SpehssMehreen.5897:

The name Guild Wars is based on lore not on guilds btw

Kinda like a backronym, that explanation was obviously made up after the fact.

I can guarantee you that, when ANet was making their GW1 sales pitch to NCSoft, they didn’t waffle on about lore and gods and whatever, they said, “We wanna make an MMO… and it’s gonna have Guilds…. and they’re gonna have Wars… and it’ll be awesome!! So please fund us!!!”

Then later on they assigned some writers to make up some backstory to fit the name and premise of the game.

So yeah… the true spirit of Guild Wars is… Guilds. Wars.

I signed up to play GW2 based on that “fundamental flaw” of WvW (e.g. 3-way server vs server.)

If I wanted GvG, I would play Wildstar’s version which has the concept implemented in a way that was designed from the get-go and not something that would be spliced in after the fact, displacing players from the original WvW intent at release.

I agree there is a constituency of players in this game that would like to have viable GvG implemented. There have been suggestions and discussions back and forth regarding this for over a year, including ones similar to that from the OP.

There is still not consensus among the players regarding GvG versus server vs server.

Megaserver creates issues for WvW but does not necessitate the elimination of the original design.

See: threads here regarding previous GvG suggestions, server loyalty threads (including suggestion for rewarding loyalty), and countless threads asking for improvements to current server vs server design.

You gem-fee cost reasoning of creating alliances is flawed and would ruin this otherwise decent idea.

Imagine if there are only 4 major alliances willing to pay gems to form decent teams. Then what? What’s the 4th going to do, facing no one? It wouldnt work at all.

No, this need to be free and it need to be more managed by Anet. To me, the implementation would be quite simple:

- Instead of choosing server, you now choose a guild alliance upon joining the game, ie you’re in a guild alliance as a “mercenary” before even joining a proper guild. This is a fixed list in order to make the matchups possible, just like servers.

- Guild alliances have visible listings via NPC characters so that you can see how many players and what guilds are there. At those NPCs you can also choose to join another alliances, but it require a guild leader to do so – this will require a new feature with “primary” guild that dominate which alliance you fight for (ie you can be in guilds both in your own and other alliances, but you can only join WvW if the guild you rep is the same alliance as your primary guild).

- The guild alliance matchups handle just like regular WvW, but now Anet got ingame tools to actually balance them. Imagine the following scenario: You enter a city, you go to the guild alliances HQ (ie “neutral” ground). Outside there are a number of NPCs yelling how their alliance need your guild. You go to one of them and listen to him. You are in a T1 alliance and the alliance he represent is T6, so he recognize that and offer everyone in your guild 250 gems to transfer to this T6 alliance, it need some new blood. In other words, Anet can balance WvW by making NPCs pay for guilds to reinforce weak alliances (ie servers), but you still have to pay to freely transfer.

goldenwing.8473:

I signed up to play GW2 based on that “fundamental flaw” of WvW (e.g. 3-way server vs server.)

What aspect of Server vs. Server gameplay do you love/need, that would be missing from my Alliance system?

To help you explain, let’s pretend that GW2 launched with my system in place, and you had to tell us what the benefits of moving to a server vs. server system would be.

As far as I can tell, there’s only one key difference between Alliance v A and Server v S – whether “teams” get to choose who to recruit or exclude.

So why is it better that “teams” don’t get a choice in which players take up their queue spots?

Dawdler.8521:

You gem-fee cost reasoning of creating alliances is flawed and would ruin this otherwise decent idea.

Imagine if there are only 4 major alliances willing to pay gems to form decent teams. Then what? What’s the 4th going to do, facing no one? It wouldnt work at all.

No, this need to be free and it need to be more managed by Anet. To me, the implementation would be quite simple:

- Instead of choosing server, you now choose a guild alliance upon joining the game, ie you’re in a guild alliance as a “mercenary” before even joining a proper guild. This is a fixed list in order to make the matchups possible, just like servers.

- Guild alliances have visible listings via NPC characters so that you can see how many players and what guilds are there. At those NPCs you can also choose to join another alliances, but it require a guild leader to do so – this will require a new feature with “primary” guild that dominate which alliance you fight for (ie you can be in guilds both in your own and other alliances, but you can only join WvW if the guild you rep is the same alliance as your primary guild).

- The guild alliance matchups handle just like regular WvW, but now Anet got ingame tools to actually balance them. Imagine the following scenario: You enter a city, you go to the guild alliances HQ (ie “neutral” ground). Outside there are a number of NPCs yelling how their alliance need your guild. You go to one of them and listen to him. You are in a T1 alliance and the alliance he represent is T6, so he recognize that and offer everyone in your guild 250 gems to transfer to this T6 alliance, it need some new blood. In other words, Anet can balance WvW by making NPCs pay for guilds to reinforce weak servers, but you still have to pay to freely transfer.

I decided on a gem fee to combat the knee-jerk argument of, “Well, ANet would never do this because they want money from server transfer fees.”

So to make this idea sustainable, we need to build in a way for ANet to get some revenue from it.

The problem you point out wouldn’t exist, because the system doesnt have to work that way.

Let’s say there are 4 Alliances willing to pay gems to form teams.

ANet opens up a ladder with 3 slots, and uses some mechanism to choose which Alliances get the slots (auction, tournament, lottery, whatever). The last Alliance misses out, this season. Their guilds can apply to join the successful alliances, maybe helping out with the gem cost using the gems they were willing to spend.

Your free idea (basically a form of auto-balancing using money incentives) would work too, except there’s no way ANet would constantly go around paying people gems. Maybe gold. Maybe.

Not a perfect system, but a better system than what we have none the less. The whole server vs server system based around PvP was a failure right out of the starting blocks. It works fine for PvE; in fact I’d argue in PvE it worked better than our current megaserver.

Gw2 should have been either color vs color, faction vs faction, or guild vs guild right from the start. If it was, the coverage problem we have wouldn’t even be a thought at the moment.

I don’t want to speak for everybody but I’m going to take a wild guess that when an individual logs onto WvW, they will have more fun facing off against equal numbers in closer match ups.

I do hope, Anet gives some serious thought to combining all servers into 3 somehow either through a major update or even in an expansion. It would take some re-tooling WvW but I think it will be worth it in the end as it’d take care of our biggest problem in WvW.

I see some problems with such a system, especially regarding EU.
In EU nearly all guild raids are in a short prime time. What about the other 20 hours of the day with hardly any guild around? It will only be PuGs.

How will you organise ts?
Outside prime time, without ts and guilds this will only encourage zerging as most will then just follow the tag.

What about the big changes in population in EU? You have full maps in prime time on many servers, so you’ll need many maps/overflows/districts…Then at 10 or 11pm most guilds in EU will leave. You have now many empty maps, often without commanders.
What then? Put the maps together? How can this be solved?

What about the different languages in EU?

And regarding PuGs/mercenaries who can join alliances: it would be difficult as most guilds are on their own ts and don’t want non guild members to join their raid.
Sure you could join a guild, but some just don’t want it or don’t play regularly,
Some may want to play more often than the guild is raiding. Some maybe just can’t play during prime time and will have a hard time finding a guild.

What if two big guilds on the same alliance stop playing? Then you don’t have balanced alliances anymore.
What if a commander with 50 people tags off and with him most of the players leave as well? How will you fill the gap?
What if one allliance has all the Spanish players who have a later prime time? Still no balance.
What if one side has only a PuG zerg with 50 People, the other side has two hard-core guilds with 25 players and the third side has only guild groups of 10 players and roamers? Still no balance and no side will really have fun.
I think alliances will still have 50 running over 10, 10 running over one, as you won’t get equal sized groups, even if you have the same amount of people on each side.

These are just a few thoughts which came to my mind.

I think really balanced matches are very hard to get.

This would be a totally different game and is not practical.

Rieselle.5079:

- Groups of guilds can pay a gem fee to form an “Alliance”. This is equivalent to a registering a team on the ladder. In the system, an Alliance is similar to what servers are currently. Players who belong to an Alliance can fight in WvW for their Alliance, to win WvW and improve their Alliance’s ladder ranking.

This would devolve into pay-to-win as guilds pay to stack Alliances just like they do servers. Now, if you can figure out a way to balance the Alliances, you may be on to something…

My concern is that alliances will pick and choose their members. Your reply to my earlier comment operated on the assumption that there is such an alliance that will accept me. If there isn’t, I am SOL. In my case, there probably would be, but I find the idea distasteful because it’d be up to other players to decide whether or not, and in what capacity, you will be allowed to play. Sooner rather than later these alliances would only approve of new members who run “acceptable” builds, and the Rangers’ forum will once again look like a suicide hotline.

The best and simplest solution is to get rid of the servers and create 3 alliances. The player will choose one alliance for his account and fight the other alliances using the megaserver’s tech. The numbers would be even in every instance, the megaserver’s tech would put u in the same instance as your friends and guildies, and would still be some form of pride to be fighting for.

I cannot agree with Forced GvGing. Even with all the rivalries between servers, the bandwagoning, “buying guilds”, spying in TS, etc. There are big server communities behind each server. Players work together and form real friendships in WvWvW.

I believe this is something GvGers forget about server based WvWvW. GW1 had GvG but I don’t think Arenanet will ever support it completely in GW2. The simplest is that unorganised zerging with “PUGs” is easily done with a commander tag.

This is just my opinion of course but I think that GvGers are too elitist and even mean sometimes to the players on a server. The militia fight for their server too. They may not all be on TS, some may even be on uplevels but without them at all WvWvW would be much more emptier place.

Please love the random players aka the PUGs of your server and teach them how to WvWvW even encourage them to join a guild or give advice on builds and gear. But don’t just hate on them for the sake of it. Thanks for reading. <3

Rieselle.5079:

goldenwing.8473:

I signed up to play GW2 based on that “fundamental flaw” of WvW (e.g. 3-way server vs server.)

What aspect of Server vs. Server gameplay do you love/need, that would be missing from my Alliance system?

As far as I can tell, there’s only one key difference between Alliance v A and Server v S – whether “teams” get to choose who to recruit or exclude.

Incentive.

Being a part of something bigger.

Inclusivity. Automatically. Without the exclusivity inherent in the sports-style “pick me” team approach.

This is the biggest difference between most of those that prefer GvG gameplay versus those that prefer community-oriented play that benefits both the WvW community and (the larger) PvE community they belong to.

The difference is players focused on the technical aspects of playing versus those that are focused on the social aspect.

This is concept aside from tangible rewards.

50% of a given population will focus on the social aspect of a given situation. This has been scientifically proven over the last 40+ years. We’ve also seen evidence of this in GW2 based on the number of threads / posts related to WvW, the megaserver’s impact on WvW and continuing threads regarding server loyalty. For those players, a server is more than a collection of players grouped together in anonymous sports-style-picked teams. Those players are playing for more than just a technical playstyle, for points, for rewards, or ladder-style bragging rights. (And btw, those are not mutually exclusive with technical excellence/skill.)

Again, see the numerous threads in this forum over the last year+.

Yes, 50% of a given population would enjoy the technical aspect of a given situation, without specific concern for social content. There are multiple MMO’s that offer this style play, including the two latest “contenders”: TESO and Wildstar.

At the moment, GW2 offers the only (flawed as it is), community-oriented approach to PvP , which borrowed from the best community-oriented PvP that has existed to-date in the MMO industry (DAoC’s RvR.) Many are hoping CU (which is being developed by the same creator, Mark Jacobs), will replicate that same community-oriented feeling, enough that the game is actually player-funded.

Again, see the many eloquent posts out here talking about server communities.

Neither playstyle is better than the other, the focus is different. It is possible to have both in this game, which has been suggested multiple times.

Eliminating the current design concept (which everyone agrees needs adjustment), eliminates the differentiation that GW2 offers as a game.

Something like this would be the last nail in the coffin for WvW and the game format would cease to exist.

what is the difference between an alliance and a server? One excludes small and new guilds and solo players while the other includes them.

Other than sorting out the bugs… the only thing wrong with wvw as it stands is that there are a lack of players who like to play defensively. Said it many times now… in order to have a good offensive that is not pvd karma train… you need a good defensive team to fight against. It is not exclusive one or the other… if everyone spent a little bit of time doing both then the game would improve immensely.

Rieselle.5079:

They don’t have to accept every random newbie.

You need go no further than right here to see why this would be a horrible idea.

goldenwing.8473:

Yes, 50% of a given population would enjoy the technical aspect of a given situation, without specific concern for social content. There are multiple MMO’s that offer this style play, including the two latest “contenders”: TESO and Wildstar.

At the moment, GW2 offers the only (flawed as it is), community-oriented approach to PvP , which borrowed from the best community-oriented PvP that has existed to-date in the MMO industry (DAoC’s RvR.) Many are hoping CU (which is being developed by the same creator, Mark Jacobs), will replicate that same community-oriented feeling, enough that the game is actually player-funded.

I don’t see how TESO is any different from GW2 in this regard, plus it has the benefit of being far better designed than WvW.

morrolan.9608:

goldenwing.8473:

Yes, 50% of a given population would enjoy the technical aspect of a given situation, without specific concern for social content. There are multiple MMO’s that offer this style play, including the two latest “contenders”: TESO and Wildstar.

At the moment, GW2 offers the only (flawed as it is), community-oriented approach to PvP , which borrowed from the best community-oriented PvP that has existed to-date in the MMO industry (DAoC’s RvR.) Many are hoping CU (which is being developed by the same creator, Mark Jacobs), will replicate that same community-oriented feeling, enough that the game is actually player-funded.

I don’t see how TESO is any different from GW2 in this regard, plus it has the benefit of being far better designed than WvW.

Thank you, I really need that.

Add Dueling/Battle request function so we can fight against teamates from same same server again! This would be Pv of course, so runes sigils, nourishmensts, etc count. Thanks!

80 Thief, Guard, Warr, Eng, Mes.
*BP

Grym.4295:

Rieselle.5079:

They don’t have to accept every random newbie.

You need go no further than right here to see why this would be a horrible idea.

Agreed. Getting new people in WvW is tough enough without this garbage.

SpehssMehreen.5897:

The name Guild Wars is based on lore not on guilds btw

That was flavour lore created to give some context to gvg. You really think this random lore that wasn’t even brought up once during the actual gw1 campaign was the basis for the entire game?

ricky.2679:

I cannot agree with Forced GvGing. Even with all the rivalries between servers, the bandwagoning, “buying guilds”, spying in TS, etc. There are big server communities behind each server. Players work together and form real friendships in WvWvW.

I believe this is something GvGers forget about server based WvWvW. GW1 had GvG but I don’t think Arenanet will ever support it completely in GW2. The simplest is that unorganised zerging with “PUGs” is easily done with a commander tag.

This is just my opinion of course but I think that GvGers are too elitist and even mean sometimes to the players on a server. The militia fight for their server too. They may not all be on TS, some may even be on uplevels but without them at all WvWvW would be much more emptier place.

Please love the random players aka the PUGs of your server and teach them how to WvWvW even encourage them to join a guild or give advice on builds and gear. But don’t just hate on them for the sake of it. Thanks for reading. <3

This really.

WvW is supposed to be accessible to all players, no matter if you are new, casual or hardcore – without any stigma or being left out from communities and rewards because you aren’t to their high standards

Being community based has many flaws especially when I’ve seen my own Server go through some Alliance problems which would be a major issue in this system really, otherwise there are the usual population imbalance issues due to transfers (which you have to realize also makes it hard to maintain a Community) and cross-server rivalry toxic stuff.

There are enough positives such as the unique social experience you get from being among your own communities, even if you are socially indifferent for some reason – there is space for everyone in their communities whatever play-style you prefer.

Jim Hunter.6821:

Grym.4295:

Rieselle.5079:

They don’t have to accept every random newbie.

You need go no further than right here to see why this would be a horrible idea.

Agreed. Getting new people in WvW is tough enough without this garbage.

First they exclude the uplevels. I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t an uplevel.

Then they excluded the Rangers. I said nothing, I wasn’t a Ranger.

Then they excluded anyone who wasn’t GWEN. That was fine, I had a warrior.

By the time they excluded everyone who didn’t have the right gear, build and weapons, there was no-one left to speak out.

I joined guild wars 2 thinking there are something really “guild” related, but I got scammed.

Rhiannon.1726:

I see some problems with such a system, especially regarding EU.
In EU nearly all guild raids are in a short prime time. What about the other 20 hours of the day with hardly any guild around? It will only be PuGs.

How will you organise ts?
Outside prime time, without ts and guilds this will only encourage zerging as most will then just follow the tag.

What about the big changes in population in EU? You have full maps in prime time on many servers, so you’ll need many maps/overflows/districts…Then at 10 or 11pm most guilds in EU will leave. You have now many empty maps, often without commanders.
What then? Put the maps together? How can this be solved?

What about the different languages in EU?

And regarding PuGs/mercenaries who can join alliances: it would be difficult as most guilds are on their own ts and don’t want non guild members to join their raid.
Sure you could join a guild, but some just don’t want it or don’t play regularly,
Some may want to play more often than the guild is raiding. Some maybe just can’t play during prime time and will have a hard time finding a guild.

What if two big guilds on the same alliance stop playing? Then you don’t have balanced alliances anymore.
What if a commander with 50 people tags off and with him most of the players leave as well? How will you fill the gap?
What if one allliance has all the Spanish players who have a later prime time? Still no balance.
What if one side has only a PuG zerg with 50 People, the other side has two hard-core guilds with 25 players and the third side has only guild groups of 10 players and roamers? Still no balance and no side will really have fun.
I think alliances will still have 50 running over 10, 10 running over one, as you won’t get equal sized groups, even if you have the same amount of people on each side.

These are just a few thoughts which came to my mind.

I think really balanced matches are very hard to get.

One of the goals of my system (which doesn’t match up with some people’s desires – I’ll post about that a little later) is to make the WvW ladder a proper and meaningful competitive ladder. (ie. like sports.)

If you think of sports, some teams are rich, some teams are poor, some become great, some go downhill.

Every team takes responsibility for its own success.

So in my system, if your Alliance’s strength suddenly changes due to people leaving or whatever, then you’ll quite naturally have some bad matchups, until you lose enough to fall to your new position. Just like a sports team who loses some of their good players or whatever.

The point is not necessarily to always have fair matchups, the key point is that your ladder position is purely the outcome of your Alliance’s efforts and choices.
Not just on the battlefield, but on how/where you recruit, how you organise, how you obtain and distribute funds, everything.

As for your questions:

TS would be much easier to organise in my system. Because each Alliance is a player-formed entity, that means the Alliance’s management can set up a homepage, TS, and other resources, just like Guilds do. I know that some current Servers have tried to do the same, but since a Server is decided and formed by ANet, it’s more difficult to define a “management” group that has the authority to make choices for the entire team.

As for EU playing mostly with their own language and their own timezone, I was already thinking about that.

Let’s say my system results in many small Alliances. So we have 50-100 Alliances, but each only has a small number of people, compared to Servers today.

If we have that many Alliances, then we can play around with alternative ladder formats.
For example, we can have 3 seperate ladders, based on timezone, and a fully open one? That means the EU ladder will only be open during EU primetime, etc. Alliances can compete on multiple ladders, all of them, or just compete on the open one.

If we have many small Alliances rather than a few big ones, then possibly the ladders will remove the borderlands maps and go for a single map for each match (an opportunity for ANet to develop some more WvW maps!)

The beauty of this system is that, because Alliances are fully responsible for their own success, we can make Winning a WvW match actually have meaningful rewards.

At the moment, whether a Server wins a WvW is partially decided by performance, and partially decided by other things like population, etc. Also, when a Server wins, it’s very difficult to automatically detect who actually contributed to the win, versus other players on the server who didn’t really do much in WvW at all.

When an Alliance wins, it’s assumed that every member of the Alliance is part of its success. The game can dish out a hefty reward and divide it evenly between the members of the alliance.

Whether each player actually -deserves- the reward or not, becomes the responsibility of the Alliance. After the season ends, they can kick out people they don’t like, or train them, or yell at them, whatever. But basically noone can bandwagon for easy rewards, unless their Alliance is happy to let them do it.

Having a prize of 10,000,000 gold (or whatever) evenly divided between all players in the winning team is something that simply isn’t possible in the Server system. So instead of rewarding overall victory, ANet is forced to reward various objectives in the game, like taking a keep, or getting kills, etc.
But this is inherently flawed because it incentivises behaviours that don’t necessarily lead to victory. Eg. two zergs running in an infinite loop taking empty keeps back and forth from each other, is the optimal way to earn lots of rewards from taking keeps.

Ideally, rather than trying to design a system that tries (and fails) to reward certain actions and behaviours that might lead to victory, it’s much better to have a system that rewards victory, and let people do whatever they can imagine to achieve the win.

Rieselle.5079:

Whether each player actually -deserves- the reward or not, becomes the responsibility of the Alliance. After the season ends, they can kick out people they don’t like, or train them, or yell at them, whatever. But basically noone can bandwagon for easy rewards, unless their Alliance is happy to let them do it.

Which means that if alliances can kick people out… They will kick people just before the season ends and reap the rewards.

When you start letting players decide who deserve a share of the booty, you’ll open it up for everyone and their grandma to abuse. And abuse it they will. This is a game, not a knightly order that have some sense of moral duty. You cant wish for people to behave. You have to enforce it.

Looking at the responses, it’s interesting because there seems to be 2 schools of thought here:

- Community based, sandbox
I don’t know much about DAOC, but I think it lies in this school of thought. Basically, overall victory or loss doesn’t really matter much. It’s playing with your community, and those small moments fighting together, that matter. The overall match is just an excuse to have endless back and forth battles. Maybe you lose more than you win, but you’ll always have that time where those guys did that crazy thing and took that keep in an awesome way, etc.
If one day GW2 becomes less popular (or server tech becomes sufficiently powerful) and we end up having only 3 servers, in a neverending WvW, then it would be a good example of this type of thinking.

When GW2 tries to put servers into “fair” matchups, they are trying to aid this goal.

- Competitive
In this school of thought, PPT matters, being #1 on the ladder matters, it matters whether you win the match or lose. It matters whether you won the Season. But it also matters -how- you won or lost, because it sucks if the reason is out of your control (bandwagon server transfers, timezones and coverage, map imbalances, etc)
This is the school of thought where it’s exciting to work together to build your success.
You don’t have to be hardcore or fanatically Play to Win, because it can be just as fun to be #6 on the ladder with a goal towards finally beating down that hated #5 team.

When GW2 has a ladder, and competitive WvW seasons, they are trying to aid this goal.

The problem is that GW2 is stuck with the worst of both worlds.
They don’t have big enough servers to squeeze everyone into 3 servers, so they must have a ladder.
But they can’t control the population and participation of the servers, so the ladders are meaningless for matchmaking and meaningless for competition.

My system is designed to convert WvW into the Competitive format, where you might have lopsided matchups just like a sports league, but it’s purely the result of your recruiting/organisation/performance.

People who like the Sandbox format often come up with suggestions designed to try and achieve “fair” matchups. Eg. arranging the servers into Tiers based on WvW population, and only scheduling matches within those Tiers.

Both are equally valid. GW2’s current hybrid system is probably the worst of both worlds, pleasing noone.

Dawdler.8521:

Rieselle.5079:

Whether each player actually -deserves- the reward or not, becomes the responsibility of the Alliance. After the season ends, they can kick out people they don’t like, or train them, or yell at them, whatever. But basically noone can bandwagon for easy rewards, unless their Alliance is happy to let them do it.

Which means that if alliances can kick people out… They will kick people just before the season ends and reap the rewards.

When you start letting players decide who deserve a share of the booty, you’ll open it up for everyone and their grandma to abuse. And abuse it they will. This is a game, not a knightly order that have some sense of moral duty. You cant wish for people to behave. You have to enforce it.

That’s why I said after the season ends. We can guard against that sort of abuse by rewarding everyone who participates during a season (or a match), even if they get kicked out during the season/match. It just means they won’t be part of that Alliance next time around.

This allows Alliances to be properly rewarded, without the sort top-down abuse that you describe. (as for bottom-up abuse, where people join an Alliance to leech rewards, the potential is limited since they won’t get to do it a second time.)

Rieselle.5079:

Looking at the responses, it’s interesting because there seems to be 2 schools of thought here:

No there is a 3rd school of thought here. There are those of us that realize this is a terrible idea. Where do you plan to recruit people from? The eotm karma train? Do you look at people stacking in dungeons and say, “Wow look at that stacking skill! I bet he would be great in WvW!”

Most people start off as a pug when they first come into WvW. It takes them time to learn what works in there. What you are suggesting would drive away a ton of new players that WvW desperately needs and you would start seeing people excluded for running the wrong build or profession.

There have been a lot of great suggestions on how to fix some of the problems with WvW on this forum but this idea is just awful.

paying gems to transfer in diff. server, for what its the same game.

Community, competitive spirit and winning are not mutually exclusive.

How the win occurs differs:

One perspective values winning through and with and for community.

The other often fosters winning in spite of and usually by excluding parts of a community.

Excluding community within an MMO incents those excluded to leave the game. In other words, those players who are “cut” from the “sports team” aren’t going to just sit in the stands and watch and cheer for those on the field and be happy about it.

GW2 is not a sport.

It’s an MMO.

Where players expect to be able to play themselves. Otherwise why have the game?

goldenwing.8473:

Community, competitive spirit and winning are not mutually exclusive.
How the win occurs differs:
One perspective values winning through and with and for community.
The other often fosters winning in spite of and usually by excluding parts of a community.
Excluding community within an MMO incents those excluded to leave the game. In other words, those players who are “cut” from the “sports team” aren’t going to just sit in the stands and watch and cheer for those on the field and be happy about it.
GW2 is not a sport.
It’s an MMO.
Where players expect to be able to play themselves. Otherwise why have the game?

Hmm, I have been convinced by you and other posters about the value of inclusiveness. But I think my proposal can be adjusted to support it.

The key question is, for the random PUGs that don’t want to join a guild and just want to hop on and play, does it matter where they are playing?
If the answer is no, then we can have some sort of system that assigns Mercenaries to Alliances on the fly. We can just do it randomly, but I’m thinking of a more complicated system that tries to make people happy:

- Alliances can specify that they are need of more players at the moment, which will increase their odds of receiving Mercenaries.
- Mercenaries can specify whether they want variety or continuity. If the former, the system will try to assign them to different Alliances, if the latter, it will try to assign them to Alliances they have played with before.
- Alliances can blacklist particular players. (possibly with some form of regulation, like they have to give a reason for the blacklisting that can be reviewed by ANet.)
- Or maybe some sort of thumbs up / thumbs down system that will tend to bring together Mercenaries and Alliances that like each other.

Although I have been convinced of the value of inclusiveness, I haven’t been convinced that competition and community aren’t mutually exclusive.

You just need to look at all the negative feedback about stacked servers, bandwagon transfers, lopsided matches, unfair matchmaking, outnumbered buff, etc etc to see that the current system doesn’t encourage players to feel that wins/losses are within their control or meaningful.

Or am I judging too much from forum whiners? (such as myself) Is there a silent majority out there who are really passionate about their server ranking, winning the WvW seasons, etc, and feel that their victories and losses are fair and entirely dependent on their community’s effort?

Rieselle.5079:

Hmm, I have been convinced by you and other posters about the value of inclusiveness. But I think my proposal can be adjusted to support it.

The key question is, for the random PUGs that don’t want to join a guild and just want to hop on and play, does it matter where they are playing?
If the answer is no, then we can have some sort of system that assigns Mercenaries to Alliances on the fly. We can just do it randomly, but I’m thinking of a more complicated system that tries to make people happy:

- Alliances can specify that they are need of more players at the moment, which will increase their odds of receiving Mercenaries.
- Mercenaries can specify whether they want variety or continuity. If the former, the system will try to assign them to different Alliances, if the latter, it will try to assign them to Alliances they have played with before.
- Alliances can blacklist particular players. (possibly with some form of regulation, like they have to give a reason for the blacklisting that can be reviewed by ANet.)
- Or maybe some sort of thumbs up / thumbs down system that will tend to bring together Mercenaries and Alliances that like each other.

---

Although I have been convinced of the value of inclusiveness, I haven’t been convinced that competition and community aren’t mutually exclusive.

You just need to look at all the negative feedback about stacked servers, bandwagon transfers, lopsided matches, unfair matchmaking, outnumbered buff, etc etc to see that the current system doesn’t encourage players to feel that wins/losses are within their control or meaningful.

Or am I judging too much from forum whiners? (such as myself) Is there a silent majority out there who are really passionate about their server ranking, winning the WvW seasons, etc, and feel that their victories and losses are fair and entirely dependent on their community’s effort?

Appreciate your openness and respect your attempt to provide a good, fun environment for many players.

Yes, there is a majority of players in WvW who are absolutely passionate about winning, their ranking and feel those are dependent on their community’s effort. Most of the core WvWers. those regulars who talk about server pride, who are concerned that the megaserver structure inhibits their ability to run into Lion’s Arch, or one of the major cities and rally the PvE, PvX crowd to come help when the battles get hot are extremely competitive players.

That is why there is so much concern about what are perceived as the negative results of the flawed implementation of GW2’s WvW coupled with server transfers:

all the accusations about stacking, bandwagoners, lopsided matches, win trading, etcetera are in part because many feel those negate their community’s efforts as they are trying to win.

Just cut down the NA servers from 24 to 12.

goldenwing.8473:

Yes, there is a majority of players in WvW who are absolutely passionate about winning, their ranking and feel those are dependent on their community’s effort. Most of the core WvWers. those regulars who talk about server pride, who are concerned that the megaserver structure inhibits their ability to run into Lion’s Arch, or one of the major cities and rally the PvE, PvX crowd to come help when the battles get hot are extremely competitive players.

Thanks for your detailed replies. I guess that’s probably all that needs to be said.
There’s plenty of suggestions aimed at improving things that work within the context of the current WvW structure.

My aim was to come up with a structure that allows for attractive rewards for winning a match, removal/reduction of activity-based rewards, whilst solving the problem of free riders, spies and bystanders. I feel that having good rewards for winning would attract the mainstream, without distorting player behaviour like activity-based awards do.

Of course, we don’t want people who are only in it for the money, but having decent rewards makes WvW feel less like a waste of time, especially non-tracked tasks like scouting, supplying, keep skeleton guard, etc.

Anyways, I will shut up now and let anyone who wants to have the last word :P

I like OPs idea – problem is there will alway be more noobs who want to bandwagon and farm (aka zerg) then ppl who wants to actually compete …. and because ANet listen only to majority no matter how bad it is for the game this idea will never get through

iTB.1428:

I like OPs idea – problem is there will alway be more noobs who want to bandwagon and farm (aka zerg) then ppl who wants to actually compete …. and because ANet listen only to majority no matter how bad it is for the game this idea will never get through

WE HAVE A WINNER!

Why compete when I can karma train…? Why is EoTM always full of people while the BL in lower tiers (I am on CD) Mostly empty outside of Primetime.

I have been in favor of a server-less/population balanced or capped new format for a long time. But when I go roaming the zerglings continuously remind me this is a casual MMO not a sport like someone above me said.

The OP’s idea would work with a few changes. The best way I can forsee this working is putting in a reward/achievement system based on each Alliance, Guild, Faction, Color (whatever you wan’t to call it, it’s all the same). That way people have reason to not stick to one particular alliance.

Reward System:

- Give each Alliance it’s own set of achievements to work towards
- Give each Alliance it’s own set of WxP and Masteries for each alliance (in addition to what we have now)
- Give class mastery linked to each alliance (more reason to play all classes)
- Give weekly WvW achievements granting a chest for completion (Weeklies)
- Finally give 3 chests for 1st, 2 chests for 2nd, 1 chest for third (chance of pre-cursor)
- Most importantly, have WvW specific quests that grant extra PPT (hourly)

Take this system, and don’t restrict players to any alliance. The key allow them to freely hop as they please (yes no more gem transfers). Perhaps if there are seasonal competitions, then lock players in, though Anet should not announce it, just lock them , then announce. Aside from that, let them roam. Anet can find a much better way to monetize WvW if they introduce WvW specific goodies or skins linked to each alliance.

Make multiple instances of each map to handle the appropriate amount of people, and we should be fine.

- You will meet more people, gain new friends, as your not restricted to “your server”
- You now have ton more of achievements to work towards
- The coverage problem is now solved (numbers are now semi-even 24/7)
- No more stale matches

I should not have to join a guild or be invited to a party to be in WvW. I should be able to join the battle any time I want and do whatever I want. That’s the freedom we enjoy. Maybe if we had decent and helpful scaled NPC’s (Siegerazor nonwithstanding) to help us instead of useless placeholders on the map it would be more even against bigger servers.