Yowzers that was a lot to read! You guys have been busy. I dropped that line that I needed to get caught up and then the size of this thread more than doubled! I’ll apologize in advance for not calling out who some of the ideas in this post are coming from but there were too many posts to keep it all straight.
There are a number of great ideas circulating attacking the problem from different angles and with varying levels of magnitude of change. One note though, I really feel that scoring is a separate issue that needs to be addressed on it’s own. We will discuss that one after we wrap this one up. Even if we were to overhaul the scoring system population imbalance will still be an issue.
From reading through this thread I think we can agree on the following goals:
- We want a thriving and vibrant WvW community in each world. That is to say, we want people to play with and against.
- We want to continue to play with our friends and the communities that we have developed already.
There were a number of other goals but I think those are the two big ones. I’m going to combine a number of your ideas to attempt to address this problem with a proposal and see what you guys think.
First off, as many of you have pointed out, it will be impossible to create equal populations without moving people around. As several others have pointed out we don’t want to break apart communities. This has been a really tough one for all of us. I know all about server pride. At the risk of having people scream “MATCH THREAD” and red card me off the forums, I’ll let you know that I have been known to pipe up in meetings with “SBI TILL I DIE” because it’s where I play with my friends and family members. So I’ve had the same reaction that many of you had when merges have come up in discussion. Through Adopt-A-Dev I’m now repping the DR crowd and I’ve learned that these guys on DR don’t all have three heads and eat puppies (unless they are really cool) and while it did feel a little dirty to fight SBI last week it was still great fun.
Anyway, this discussion made it clear it is who you play with that’s important and a number of ideas in this thread preserved that without restricting the number of people who could play at a time. These have had a number of names but for the sake of discussion I’ll go with Alliances. The idea that I liked for Alliances is that it is a group of guilds and people that are guaranteed to stay together no matter how things are rearranged. There would probably need to be a size limit on Alliances and several of you pointed out that whatever limits are put in place it should be based on WvW participation.
A few of you noted that things will always be changing over time so the system would have to be dynamic. There are a couple of ways of addressing this discussed in this thread. An idea that would be a small incremental change to how the game plays would be to create a new set of worlds then fill them up with our Alliances of guilds and players that are guaranteed to always play together. This would happen at regular intervals, the intervals were all over the map as were the size of the worlds in this thread so I will propose this cadence:
- Off Season
- Tournament
- Restructure
- Create new Worlds
- Redistribute Alliances
This cycle would take a few months given the cadence of tournaments we have had which is about the time that we would want to rebalance populations. After the restructure, players could transfer like they do now if they so desired.
Alliances would provide continuity for the community. I see the server pride of today becoming Alliance pride because of that continuity. But I also see the off season as a time for the newly formed world of alliances to develop their own identity as they head into the tournament. Keep in mind that if an alliance was big enough to fill a world that mapping becomes one to one. If that became the case maybe the world could just take the alliance name. It’s interesting because that time together gives everyone involved a chance to see if they all want to ally together to truly solidify into a world. If not, you are still playing with your community for the glory of your alliance in the next restructure. But your community would be playing with other communities new to you and maybe this new bunch is a better fit for you and an opportunity for your alliance to grow.
The pieces for this idea comes from a number of posts in this thread. There are also some thoughts in there from some discussions I’ve had with several guild leaders. I just glommed it all together into something that I think could be a workable solution. I do want to emphasize though that this is all brainstorming
Let me know your thoughts and thanks again for all the great and constructive discussion!
John