Howdy, here’s my 5.
Maps: I’d say bring back Alpine. The issue with Desert Borderland is that it has too many elements that aren’t really strategic and instead are just pure annoyances. If you really need something for players to gather up or take aside from buildings, why not bring back the orbs of power? If you brought back the orbs of power, you could split them up in three pieces, with one in each keep that give out smaller bonuses to the owning server on the map. The server that controls all the keeps on a map can then extend the bonuses with the orb of power onto other maps, thus I feel it would create more of a reason for people to defend their keeps. WPs on the keeps shouldn’t exist until it goes up to T3.
-On Upgrades: I’d say keep the amount of dolyaks required, but players need to be the ones to toggle the next upgrades. The map could let players know when it’s time to upgrade a camp, keep, or tower.
-On GH Consumables: Banners, Airship Defenses, Assault Rollers should be reduced more in effectiveness. Everything else I feel is fine currently.
Pop Balance: I don’t have much of an idea on this, but I don’t recommend guild alliances or server merges because that would kill off the final piece of what keeps people in WvW (their sense of server identity). Part of the problem with getting players into WvW currently is that there’s no way to let people know in PvE lands that their server needs some help in WvW(I still think that Team chat should be made into Server chat when in WvW and PvE). I’d also suggest that more people are made aware that WvW exists, I think some people don’t really realize that WvW exists at all honestly since the game currently doesn’t really go out of its way to let players know that the server they’re on is the server they’ll be fighting for.
Rewards: Part of the reason why people don’t come out to WvW is there’s no reason to do so and rewards I feel are one of the big reasons for it. WvW needs a reward track, and I also think that players who put in a good effort on the week deserve more loot as well. Perhaps a weekly system akin to the daily system can be made to better help recognize players who go above and beyond for their server, but the requirements should be high such as killing 250 players for example. There also needs to be rewards for winning the week as well, such as some old WvW tournament tickets, exotics (with a chance of ascended equipment), and money, while second and third place servers get rewards as well. Seasons could introduce legendary armor and/or backpieces. EotM would stay as it is, because it’s currently still quite rewarding even with the nerf.
Scoring: Scoring as it is right now is too much a steamroll effect and its not very competitive. I would say that PPK amounts should be increased up to 5, with 10 points being rewarded on a stomp. The amount of points that structures make should be greaty reduced in order to better emphasize that this is a large scale pvp zone. If a server should manage to gain all the structures in a BL, then it should give out a big tick just once and then they get nothing until enough structures are re-flipped. Servers in second and third need a boost to the amount of points they get, so they can keep themselves competitive unless the matchup is fairly close (around a few hundred to a thousand points from each other should work). I really feel this should be a higher priority, since this is one of the reasons people don’t really have much of a desire to win.
Skill Balance/Stab: I think bringing back old stability would be fine, but boon stripping/corrupting should make stripping stability more of a priority. WvW skills and PvE skills should be separate from each other, and condition application should be toned down a bit because many classes don’t have a good enough defense against heavy condition builds. Outside of that, I don’t really have much to add on the balancing front that hasn’t been said before.
Hopefully the feedback here isn’t done in some monkey’s paw fashion, I do wonder when details about WvW overhaul are going to pop up.
