1.) Commanders being determined by gold. I don’t know what you thought would happen, how that would pan out, but it seems pretty obvious to me it’s a fundamentally bad idea to have gold the determining factor.
Is it really such a stretch to imagine some sort of skill/contribution/rank system in its place? It would lead to a.) less of them, theyre already 5 or 10 commanders on ours and what about a year down the road? b.) better quality commanders, rather than some random guy with 100g. Basically, you improve your rank by completing objectives. This would mean the highest ranked players would likely be the most active. Along the way of being the most active, said players are likely to learn how to play WvW to some degree. You give command to the top percentiles of rank.
Also, as it’s been said command should be more than a blue arrow. I would even go further to suggest there is a commander that watches the map and influences the game indirectly (alot like commander did in one of the battlefield games with scan sweeps, supply drops and artillery) – with the blue arrows being a sort of subordinate rank to the overall commander. Let’s face it, most generals don’t get on the frontline. There’s alot of room for improvement here, that much is obvious. The commander system as it stands is nothing short of illogical and disappointing.
2.) WvW balancing, or lack thereof. Currently the most active realms dominate. That’s not hard to imagine as having more bodies gives your zerg more power or allows you to spread more etc. The ‘outmanned’ buff designed to compensate… I don’t understand your intentions there. You improve the gains for those outmanned, but do nothing to improve their combat effectiveness. This means they stand to gain more if they achieve objectives – but are fundamentally unable to do so due to being overpowered easily. Yes, it does allow for circulating the map supply raiding etc, but I don’t really think that’s what WvW should boil down to for some players.
How to address it? Cap player numbers so that one side does not get massively more players than any other? Have a sort of halfway system where there is SOME discrepancy allowed between player numbers and giving the outmanned buff some actual combat effectiveness boosting? This issue is harder to address than the commander one, but still obviously needs fixing. I can’t possibly imagine arenanet expects most players to be pleased with more active servers dominating less active, encouraging clustering of WvW fans on certain servers, and denying any sort of quality WvW to those on less active servers.
Fingers crossed some moderator can’t construe something to delete this for.