The current problem in WvW is a population problem much more than a game-mechanic problem. Solution: do away with “servers”. How you say? Bare with me… If Anet matched up faction vs. faction vs. faction the population problem would solve itself.
What factions you ask? Name them whatever you want. Right now they could be red vs. blue vs. green. In other words, when you create an account, you don’t choose a server, you choose a faction. A lot of things to clarify, be patient.
Obviously, at first more people will choose to be the red faction than the green. If they really didn’t want to sit in queue, they would trade factions. It would take awhile, but we would take pride in our faction more than we ever could have taken in our server. People jump servers all the time, but it is much harder to get Alliance players to jump to the Horde.
Lets get to the mechanics. Each BL has a 133 player cap. In server vs. server a BL can literally be 133 vs. 1. Not so awesome, (try to log in to Anvil Rock on Thursday, or Friday with any enthusiasm). So, we could have instance caps based on the population that is logged on. Okay so, 3 BLs + EBL = 532 per faction, 3 factions = 1596 maximum players per instance.
Simple rules would need to be implemented. No human system is perfect, but this is better than the one we have. These rules would need to be tweaked, because non of us can foresee all it’s problems. Rules like:
1) The first instance has no population rules, so anyone can log into WvW. A second instance would not exist until enough people logged on to demand one.
2) No “demand” instance can ever be populated more than 2 to 1. Any more than that and you will wait, in queue, until enough people from the other 2 factions log on to at least make it 2 to 1. (If there is a giant population gaps that create giant queues, this is where faction transfers would auto-correct the problem.)
3) Dynamic queues. One could either queue up for an abandoned spot in a high populated instance, or just queue up and wait until enough other people queue up in other factions to start another WvW instance.
Guild queuing. Instance queuing. To try to get into the instance the rest of your guild is already in.
4) Insert more population-equalizing “backbone” rules here.
What this does, is create WvW instances based on the population needs. If only a total of 1,000 people are logged on across all factions, only 1 instance is needed. When multiple instances exist, all red points go to the red faction, etc. When an instance is filled up, another will be created to accommodate. As people log out, we would be required to be ushered into higher population instances, based on population balance, (in a way that doesn’t suck too bad – see rule #4).
I know the “bottom instance” will have problems, but that’s better than ALL the instances having problems. Which is what we have now.
Side note: in EB, the factions would have home-field advantage. If I was green, I could never spawn on blue side. I have many arguments that I could address, (money spent on upgrades etc.) but this post would need chapters. I’m just trying to identify the actual problem, and solve it.
Hint: To Anet. If you think you would make less money this way. How much less are you going to make with continuously unhappy WvWers? We aren’t going to T1 transfer forever. Un-fun games dwindle… We might actually buy gems for in-game stuff, if we weren’t so kitten ed about buying them to make WvW fun.
Thank you, Recluusa.
