The developers are too nice to the community.
Instead of getting nothing but good things from WvW, you should be able to get punished by WvW.
Example being you lost your keep on your borderlands, your world should receive -25% magic find, -25% chance at getting bags.
There should be no excuse as to why some worlds lose there keep in there borderlands.
Also should be true in EB as well, for a total of -50% mf and -50% chance for a bag to appear.
If incentives do not bring in people to play WvW, than deductions will.
All servers have high population, all servers are capable of defending there stuff and on fair grounds, its just getting people into WvW.
You should also have incentives to capture the enemies keep on EB and on the enemies borderlands. For that one world receieves a -25% debuff the invading world should get +25. For a total of +50 for having both worlds keeps, and +50 for having both worlds keeps on EB and you should get +50 buff for having SMC. A whooping +150 mf and bag chance, who doesn’t want that? While the 2 other worlds have -50 mf and bag chance.
Also, in order for this to happen well, developers need to stop being lazy and set up the matchups themselves, they should know which worlds will have a fair chance at fighting other worlds, there shouldn’t be 3+ different games where 1 world dominates all. If anything there should be only 1 or 2 games like that (lowest tier and 2nd lowest tier).
Another thing, WvW is stale, it needs some life a couple things I can think of to give life is:
1. Have in game commentary like PvP does. Ba ba bum (sound effect for capturing something) “Jade Quarry controls SMC”. Should be heard by every world competiting as well. You guys at anet are creative enough with this kind of stuff, just needs to happen in WvW and not just PvP.
2. Fireworks and large banners, horns you should have more things people can do besides use siege and ae the zerg invading you. You should be able to do fireworks to boost your defenders stats at the keep. You should do banners to show guild presence at the place your defending to increase stats as well (must have 10 guild members present at the site). You should be able to make a loud horn sound that all competitiors can hear and it boosts your world’s players speed so they can quickly run to the place that needs defending. (should have a cooldown, like 5 mins, speed buff applies for your territory and doesn’t show up if you are in enemy territory).
3. Commanders should have a certain glow or look on them, like for blue commanders they glow blue, and the enemy should be able to see them as well (should be very noticeable) and it should be very easy to spot commanders. Commanders need more pressure and need to be more like commanders, they should be seen by the enemy and the enemy should know if they take down the commander the enemy zerg will crumble.
Also, talking about siege, treb hits should drastically hurt the enemy, like 15-20k damage, instant kill. Ballistas need an upgrade because nobody uses these, it should have really wide ae and hurt like hell. Catapults should hurt like hell too, 15k damage. Siege golem should be really powerful that it can block siege attacks and deal insane amount of damage, it should be able to do a stomp that knockdowns the enemy zerg, should be able to pull people off the gate and towards the zerg so they get whooped by the zerg. If anything, they should be more useful blocks projectiles, massive ae knockdown (heck should be a blowout), and able to pull enem(ies) towards it and off the walls and gates, and should have a laser attack (600 range) that takes like 15 seconds to pull off (while making itself extremely vulnerable and weakness) and deal huge damage towards walls.
Right now, WvW is very stale, it needs some spice, it needs some other factors to include, some actual strategy besides ‘stack and ae hard here, stack and cleanse hard’.
I rarely even see siege golems, and its not because they expensive or cost a lot of supplies, its because they freaking suck.