Guild Wars 2

Some comments on your ideas:

If a team is winning because they have more players, then helping people to “avoid the zerg” by having bigger maps won’t do anything to balance that. That’s just cat-and-mouse gameplay, like racing around trying to take undefended camps or towers before the enemy zerg arrives. That’s not what I think we should strive to achieve. We need the game balanced so that teams can fight on an even level. Also, having larger maps may make it that much harder to hang onto gains when the maps ARE balanced, since the more places you have to try to hold on to, the less able you’ll be to keep preventive defensives up and active at each location.

The same applies for having more objectives for small groups and for having them be worth more points.

As for point scaling, it may be feasible if calculated fairly, but points aren’t a big concern for me. I just want the game to be fun and balanced in terms of gameplay, regardless of points.

Scaling of NPCs is a potentially feasible boost for undermanned teams, but not as you suggested, which is that NPCs should increase if few defenders are in the area. That just rewards teams for not staying on defense, and penalizes them for actually defending. If anything, NPCs should scale based on total map population imbalances. Give the undermanned team a boost.

For the more “safe zone” spawn points idea, I’ve always found that there are more than enough exits from spawn to avoid spawn camping. And if it’s that bad where that still isn’t enough, the problem isn’t with the spawn points, but rather with the overwhelming player imbalance.

Making dead players unable to be resurrected is feasible too. I don’t think it’ll do much to help balance things though.

My own suggestion is that instead of trying to compensate for WvW population imbalances, they should just dynamically adjust the map population limits as needed based on WvW player population limits at any given time. Population limits are what balances the teams and makes the game fun. When you’re behind in population and you can’t even fill 1 map, it makes it so that the enemy team will outnumber you in every map and just move around between maps as needed to outnumber you on every map. So what could be done is they could adjust the players limits on the maps to automatically lower when player counts are lower, which would make it so that outnumbered teams could at least fill a few maps (because the player limit is lower) and have fun balanced battles in them.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Use-Dynamic-Map-Population-Limits-to-help-keep-WvW-competitive/first#post614264

Even at the top tier of WvW at primetime on weekdays, population imbalance is still the determining factor of who is getting the most points. We’re not filling the maps, which would bring balance. I’m sure the lower tiers are even farther from filling the maps as we are.

That’s just no fun. There MUST be balance, because WvW is just about broken without it. Unless something wild is implemented to boost the strength of outnumbered teams (which is likely to introduce a whole bunch of other problems), better balance needs to be enforced through map population limits. Tell me another way to balance the game, because I can’t think of any.

That’s why I think dynamically adjusting map population limits really needs to be considered and implemented.

Mik Hell.8206:

As a side effect I think it could discourage people from amassing on overpopulated servers: if I knew that on a T1 wvw server queues are 1h+ long while on a T2 I have to wait less than 20 minutes I’d move to the T2.

I agree with that.

Also, it’s just more efficient in general. I’d like to see the real WvW situation at a glance. But instead, I have to join maps and kinda have to look around for myself or ask people what the situation is in terms of player numbers for each team. I’m never quite sure which map really needs me, or which map lots of people really want to join when there a queues (because I don’t usually care, so I’d prefer to wait in a shorter line).

I don’t like to pile-on when enemy teams are outnumbered either. And I’m more likely to join when my team can really use some help. So this would help with that as well.

Fildydarie.1496:

The problem isn’t that one team can field 200 while the others can only field 150, the problem starts happening when one team can field 400 and the other teams choose to not fight—they have already become too demoralized to participate.

I agree this is the problem. Though as the losing teams lose players, so does the dominate team, since people quit when they can’t even find a good fight, even if they are on the winning team. I haven’t played WvW for 2 weeks now because my team has been so dominant because of numbers and morale (rather than strategy, etc.).

But I think the reason that people on the losing teams give up is mainly because they are outnumbered all the time and it takes too many people to actually turn it into an even fight. Lots of people want to play, but only if it’s a fun and fair fight. But the problem is that they need 100+ people on a map to make it even. So they quickly learn that it’s not even worth trying, because it’s just not going to happen. It’s just a waste of time.

But a low starting limit like 25 players is much more doable. I’m sure guilds especially would be eager to get their members together and be able to have such influence in turning a map around mainly with just their own people.

Regarding the other concerns you raise, Fydydarie… If people are joining WvW, the population limit per map would grow as well. There will also always be at least a map that isn’t full (the limit would be raised dynamically the prevent all from being full). And I think most people just go to the maps with space available before they bother with getting in queue for a particular map. So for these reasons, I wouldn’t expect to see very long queues at all in this situation.

There’s also the matter of priorities of what is most important to the game. Yeah, sure, they can fit everybody who wants to play into the maps if they want. But the game will suck because it’ll make it an unfair game. And then very few people will want to play because of that. That’s what we have now. So first priority is making it a fair and fun competition. More people can join only if doing so doesn’t break that part of the game. Right now, there is essentially no WvW for me to play. It’s broken. I’ll take a WvW that has some drawbacks, over this broken WvW we have now.

The same idea applies for your complaint about bots. We have a bigger problem to deal with before bots can ever become a problem. That problem is the imbalance and unfair competition due to player numbers I’ve been talking about. If my suggested changes actually cause more people to play and reach these new dynamic map limits, then bots can become a (relatively small) issue. Anet probably should be able to deal with them. For example, they can simply make it a priority to investigate when there’s lots of bot reports coming in from a WvW area. If I recall, they already said they were working on something that would help a lot with combating bots.

MithranArkanere.8957:

.Forthing people to spread evenly between all maps would fix when players from one world gather massively on one map, since they’ll be forced to spread instead, but will not help when your world is outmanned in all maps, which happens fairly often against worlds that nightcap constantly.

What happens is that the more populated team responds to where the opponents are. If an outnumbered team tries to build up on one map, they’ll see more and more players of the dominate team showing up. If the outnumbered players start leaving to go to another map, more of the dominant team players leave as well since there’s less fights to be had. If players on the outnumbered team jump to an empty map, maybe they can quickly capture something. But then all the players on the dominate team can see it on the map and know there’s at least some action on that map to go and crush.

So during times like this, it’s pretty much like all 4 maps are just 1 big map, just with more spawn points.

That’s what this idea fixes. It puts a cap on each map that allows the outnumbered teams to build up their player count on individual maps to a very achievable number of players that will turn it into a fair fight, without having the dominant team able to just come and outnumber them some more. Imagine your team is being dominated on all the maps, but you only need 20 or 25 people total to make it equal on a map and get the ball rolling, instead of 100+.

@Lethe, what you described at the top of your post is correct. That’s what I was suggesting.

Regarding the other idea of WvW guesting, I suppose griefing could be a problem. But the bigger concern I have is that it’s likely just going to result in random shifts of team strengths in WvW, like as some guilds decide to go join some low-population 3-way battle and simply cause their chosen team to dominate because of the extra numbers. You still encounter this problem of extreme imbalances, and you only get balance by pure luck of teams happening to have similar numbers, or by actually reaching some caps on maps to force number to be equal (which is the point of my idea). Plus it’s not likely to have much effect during off-peak hours since no servers are going to be full then anyway.

@Mithran, my suggestion is to base the player limits entirely on the player count of the team with the most players. That means there would always be room for anyone from any team to join in WvW, the only difference being that they’d have to be more spread out instead of being able to all fit into one map.

So there’s no requirement to match player numbers, and no potential tactic of just not playing in order to deny the opponent. There’s nothing here that makes things worse as you suggest.

I want to play WvW myself. I have wanted to for the last 3 weeks. But it hasn’t been the queues stopping me (except right after match resets). It’s been the lack of any chance at fun games due to severe player count mismatches. I’m pretty sure that’s the case with most WvW players. Competitive balance in terms of player counts is a requirement, and queues don’t even matter until that is achieved. I don’t think anything is accomplished by allowing more people from the dominant team to join and increase their advantage when the lower population teams aren’t at least close in numbers. That’s actually what makes things worse. Maybe you do fit more people in, but it doesn’t improve the gameplay, and you’ll probably see people from all teams leaving in that case (just as we see now during peak hours and not one map being full for any team).

Having NPCs fill in for player slots might help, though there are plenty of complications that need to be worked out with that idea (who controls them, are they smart enough to not just get go and get killed like other NPCs, what happens when they die, etc.). Allowing guesting in WvW would also have a lot of issues I can think of that would need to have solutions worked out for. But regardless of these potential other ideas, the idea I’m suggesting in this thread still stands as it’s own improvement, and I think it’d even be an improvement to the situation even if ideas like you mention were ever implemented. It would basically lessen the need for (or lessen the influence of) such handicaps and outnumbered bonuses like you are suggesting.

@Mithran, Your first paragraph doesn’t make sense to me. I’m not sure what about this idea “make things worse” as you say. Can you explain how you see that? And the suggestion doesn’t prevent people from playing. It makes the maps into smaller bite-size chunks that make it easier for the teams with lower populations at any given time to actually play.

For example, imagine there was absolutely no limit on the number of players allowed on a map at any time. The game would be pretty terrible all the time because it would primarily come down to player numbers, not strategies or anything like that. That is essentially the same thing that is happening now when teams don’t fill any maps. Outnumbered teams get outnumbered everywhere. Dynamic limits changes that.

The issue isn’t quite with 24/7 servers or night capping, because we actually get this problem even during peak hours. Why should a team being outnumbered and dominated at night cause them to not be able to even make any progress during peak hours? The answer, and the real issue here, is that whenever there is a large imbalance in total number of players for each team, and that imbalance doesn’t get equalized by both teams hitting a maximum player limit on a map, it leads to a situation where the players on the losing teams end up quitting or not joining at all and never being able to reach the “magic number” (the maximum player limit) on a map to make it fun.

I’ve seen it myself on both sides of the coin. The outnumbered team’s players quit. The dominate team’s players only quit when they can’t even find someone to kill. If the outnumbered team even does manage to gain some players, it just causes more of the dominate team’s players to stick around since they have more people to kill.

I’m on Blackgate’s server. We’re in the 2nd tier, I believe. We own everything in WvW. There is not any queue to get into anywhere, even at peak hours. It is not simply that we have that many more players than the other team. It’s that the other teams can’t manage to get enough of their players into a map at the same time to actually make it fair fight. That’s because the bar is set so high. They need to build up 100+ people on the same map to have a fair fight on just 1 map.

Imagine instead that because of the low amount of players in WvW during the day, the population limit per map was dynamically lowered to maybe 25 players per map. People wouldn’t find that to be a difficult number of players to reach to have an even battle. Some guilds could probably get around that number of players to show up at the same time by themselves. That very attainable number would make it worth people’s time and effort to join WvW because they could expect that a fair fight was not far away. As more people joined WvW, it would automatically cause the map limits to rise.

That’s the idea. Dynamic limits to each map that is more appropriate given the WvW population at that given time.

@Lethe, the formula I suggested looks at the total player population of the most numerous team and sets player limits for each maps based on that, basically making it so the players are more spread out among all the maps. If this were done for each map independently instead, it wouldn’t do anything since the map limit would be set by the team with the most players on the map. As more players of that team join, the player limit would increase, and they would never be subjected to a player cap.

So to do what you suggest on an independent basis for each map, there would have to be some formula that includes a required ratio between players of each team, or something like that. For example, the max number for each team might be the sum of the 2 lower population teams, or the population of the 2nd lowest pop team + 20, etc. Unlike the method I was suggesting, these formulas can actually prevent people from being able to join WvW at all.

More importantly, I think they can be a bit self-defeating in fixing the imbalances, since as a team might manage to get more players joining to fight a more numerous and dominant team, they’ll keep increasing the limits for that dominate team on that same map, and they’ll be unable to start filling other maps to compete on. For example, if the cap was at 50, and the lower pop team had only 30, they would be 20 people away from having an even strength battle. If they do get 20 more, and the cap rises to 70 players, then they are still 20 people away from an even battle. This continues until they reach the normal map limit, and only then can they have a truly even battle. But they wouldn’t be able to fill other maps in this time. If they only had 100 players to work with, they’d have to send them all to this one map to have an even battle.

If instead, the player limits were set equally across all maps instead of independently, this teams could have an even battle on one map with 50 players or whatever, and they’d be able to fill another map and have an even battle there too. Or if the most populated team had less than 100 players total, you could even have limits of 25 players per map for that time and probably have many great battles across all 4 maps even with so few people.

@Arius, the most cautious implementation of this would be to have the per-map player limit be entirely dependent on the total player population of the team with the most players. So if Team A has 200 people playing, and that is the most out of any team, then the per map-limit can be set to be some amount greater than 50 players per map (so that the combined limit is over 200). Whenever more people join, the limits would be increased. That would mean there would always be more room for people to join WvW, up to the current limits the game allows today.

Also, as Lethe suggests in his post, the limit on maps shouldn’t be reduced forcefully. If there’s 80 players on a team on a map, and the game wants to reduce the limit because there’s low populations in the other maps, then it shouldn’t be able to reduce the limit until players start actually leaving. Until all 3 teams fall to 79 people or less, the limit for all teams remains the same at 80.

As far as your other concerns in your 2nd paragraph (@Arius), I don’t believe those issues would be any different with this idea implemented compared to what we have now. But with this idea, you’ll have less imbalance, less empty maps during off-peak times, and more potential for dominated teams to get back into the fight (without needing 100 people to show up on a map at the same time).

@The Lethe, your suggestion for map-independant limits would require some formula to determine those limits, and that would have to include some combination of counting players from each team. This would be more tricky, and the effects can vary a lot depending on what formula is used. I don’t have a good formula to suggest.

Also, I think map-independent limits would leave the same problem that we have today. For example, imagine people tend to go to the Eternal Battleground first. If there’s only around 100 players per team playing in all of WvW, and EB’s population limits independently adjust to allow them all since it’s balanced on that map, then EB will eat up most of the WvW population. There is nobody left to fill other maps, and so the team with the most leftover players will dominate the last 3 maps. That’s a big part of the reason that 1 team tends to dominate during off-peak times, even if they only have a slight advantage in player numbers overall.

What I mean by Dynamic Map Population Limits is a mechanism that automatically adjusts the player limit per WvW map based on the current player populations of the teams. This means lowering the maximum player limits for each map at periods of low population (mostly off-peak hours).

The problem this addresses:

To have a competitive WvW match on a map, the participating teams need to have somewhat similar numbers of players. When all teams have their maximum number of players on the map, it’s a fun game. It’s also not too bad when just 2 teams have the max number of players present.

However, when one team has a significant advantage in player count on a map, the game stops being as fun for all teams. During off-peak hours, it becomes quite unlikely that teams will be close to equal in player numbers because player counts can vary a lot depending on the whims of players. Player counts are essentially random at this time. For an equal strength battle to occur, you’d have to depend on the luck of having similar numbers of players from each team decide to play at the same time. That’s going to be a rare occurance.

Furthermore, once one team has a significantly higher population at an off-peak time, they will dominate the map. This worsens the population balance even more because the players on the losing teams quickly find out that they don’t have a chance unless more allies show up to help. But few people are willing to stick around in hopes that more people show up. As many people have witnessed, this imbalance at off-peak hours can actually lead to imbalances at peak hours as the players on the losing teams keep quitting and this prevents the team from ever reaching the population maximum that would have turned it into a balanced and fun battle.

What the proposed solution does:

In order to keep battles fun and balanced, teams must be able to compete on equal footing on individual maps, even when the WvW populations are low. One thing that would help this to be achieved is dynamically lowering the population limits for each map when total WvW player populations are low.

For example, let’s assume the maximum number of players allowed per map is 100 players for each server (I don’t know the actual limit). This works fine when each server is able to fill all or most of the maps with 100 players (400 players total per team). However, when it moves into off-peak hours and say one team can field 200 players total, and the other 2 teams can field 150 each, you’ll start to see the team with the high population dominate. Each of the lesser population teams can only fill one of the 4 maps completely, and that’s not even likely since they’ll tend to be a bit spread out among the maps. Perhaps they would be able to fill the Eternal Battlegrounds, but the team with 200 players would dominate every other map because they’d be able to outnumber their opponents on any map, and they are free to jump around any map their opponents attempt to attack.

This is where Dynamic Map Population Limits could help. Since even the top team in the above example can only fill 200 out of 400 player slots across the 4 maps, the population limit for each map should be reduced to make it so that more maps are full and competitive. For example, if the map limit were brought down to 50 players per map, the team with 200 players could fill all 4 maps. The teams with 150 players would be able to fill 3 maps each. With just this little change in map limits, you’ve suddenly gone from having 1 team dominating at least 3 maps simply because of a relatively small population advantage, to now likely having a competitive battle on each of the 4 maps.

In addition, this makes players from the lower population servers more likely to join the battle and to stick around since they are able to have fun and balanced battles. Even in cases where they are still outnumbered on a map, they will be outnumbered by less, so it would seem more feasible that they could stick around and expect more allies to show up and turn the tide (since they would need fewer allies to fill the map, players would be more likely to join when they see WvW looks balanced, and the other maps may have a queue so players will be more likely to join their particular map rather than just any of the 4).

Of course, there are details at to how exactly such a mechanism should work. But this is the general idea.

I disagree that there’s a lack of rewards for defending. If you’re under attack and you have a good setup of siege weapons, you’re likely to get a lot of kills, plus you’ll be getting “repel the attackers” rewards every 3 minutes or so. The attackers in that situation, on the other hand, are not going to get much of anything. They should have a hard time getting kills, and they shouldn’t get capture in the end if the defense is good enough.

You generally don’t need to sit there and defend when there’s no attackers. You can go out and probe for the enemy. If you see a large group coming, then you can warn allies and get back yourself. That’s probably even more effective than staying on the walls since you’ll be less likely to be overwhelmed suddenly by many attackers if you can see it coming earlier. If you did stay back at the walls, your presence there might not be making any difference in slowing the attackers down anyway, if it’s too many)

I think sometimes the strategy of giving up a tower that can be retaken later is a sound strategy if you’re trying to take something more important (Usually a keep). It’s especially true if you don’t yet have any defenses set up at the tower in question. If there’s no defenses, then that tower is nothing more than something to delay the enemy and buy you time. It doesn’t offer much of any real advantage in the battle unless it has siege weapons.

At the same time, I do agree that it’s a very good strategy to set up excellent defenses at a tower before moving on. Too many people rely on just trying to zerg faster than the other team and hope they can just get back in time to clear out attackers by brute force. That strategy can only go so far. At some point, you will be losing what you’ve gained faster than you can take new things.

TL;DR is at bottom.

I’m not convinced that new EU-based guilds are the reason for any turnaround by blackgate. I’m sure they were a contributor, of course, but it’s not the full story. Rather, I think it’s a case of momentum and morale. When teams lose when they were trying their best, some players give up and quit or become disorganized. This contributes to giving the other team a numbers advantage, making it that much harder for the losing team, causing further frustration and abandonment.

On Tuesday evening (ET), I was on the Dragonbrand home map (I’m Blackgate). Being a weekday, there’s was going to be less players overall for every team compared to the weekend, and I think most players tend to fill their home map first (or EB). Neither FA nor Blackgate had anything there. There were many more Dragonbrand players than us. But with a little organization, we avoided the spawncamp, took some camps as a group instead, eventually were able to get our Bluebriar tower and set up defenses quickly and barely hang on (even with losing all camps and needing people to sneak out to retake them just to get some supply back to the tower where it was needed).

Being still outnumbered by a lot, we managed to siege DB from defensive positions in order to be able to fight off DB counterattacks (as opposed to relying on plain old zerging at the front gate), and took the keep.

We were still outnumbered, but we seemed to have bought some cover for FA to get a foothold as well, so the double-teaming against DB began. Eventually, we took the garrison from DB while FA was already inside but at a different gate, but lost it 5 or 10 minutes later because we couldn’t manage to clear out the FA players that were already inside. It became clear that FA now outnumbered us now, since they were able to take the garrison from the inside without any reinforcements able to get in, and then siege bluebriar again our whole team while holding off dragonbrand at the garrison at the same time. We fought off FA at bluebriar only because our siege weapons were able to take out theirs. Dragonbrand, on the other hand, had lost numbers. They probably quit after losing the garrison.

But now we worked with Dragonbrand to fight to get the garrison back from FA. Dragonbrand fought from the NE garrison gate while we attacked from the SW gate. We got wiped the first time we broke through the SW gate even after killing many FA initially, but we came back immediately and this time succeeded. Dragonbrand attackers were still inside the first wall after we took it and we were able to wipe them out.

After this point, FA seemed to just disappear from the map (it was after midnight, so they probably thought it’d be a good time to sleep rather than starting the long process of going after the garrison once again). Blackgate kept a strong presence, though, as we were high on victory. In addition, everyone knew the strategic situation and what needed to be done to continue to win because we were all very organized and communicated the high level strategies in team chat. Almost all chat was concise and relevant to the battles, and everyone was on the same page. And since it was Dragonbrand’s home map, I’d guess most dragonbrand players would tend to go to it first. But they would come face to face with our strong, organized force that no longer had FA to worry about.

I left at this point, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Blackgate would have kept up that morale into the night, pushing dragonbrand back into their home map spawn until they gave up. Blackgate had taken a significant lead in points per tick at that point and Dragonbrand was in last place. That definitely wasn’t Euro players at work, since it was about 6 in the morning Euro time. When I came back the next day, Blackgate had dominated everything.

TL;DR: Maybe the new Euro guilds contributed to the dominance of Blackgate before prime time, but I think the biggest factor for Dragonbrand having trouble competing is most likely due to a loss of morale and players, and the inability to get the ball rolling again to revive morale.

Setch.2398:

Kay, what would hapkitten, when 1 team got ahead they would bail on that map so that no zergs from the enemy side could get enough forces to retake everything. Not to mention the fact that people don’t want to have to go to bed when the opposing team decides they don’t want to play anymore.

I’m not sure what you mean about “no zergs from the enemy side could get enough forces to retake everything.”

But as for the 2nd issue where a team decides they don’t want to play on a map (because they are outnumbered and instead congregate into fewer maps so they can at least compete there), I it think actually makes for more of a fight to be had, rather than not.

What I mean is, a server pretty much has to fill a map (or come close) to compete against the shear numbers of another team that HAS filled that map. say one team has 100 people and the other has 50. If they all fit onto the same map, it’s not a fight. It’s a massacre. So having 100 people fighting against 50 is nearly the same as fighting against nobody. I’ve been on both sides of that coin, and I didn’t feel like playing because it’s pointless.

So take for example what I saw yesterday while playing. Let’s say each map fits 100 players per team (I don’t know the actual count, so just use this number). The eternal battlegrounds had good numbers for all teams. It seems to fill up first. But having so many people there “ate up” our available pool of players. It left us with about 50 players for the remaining 3 maps. Let’s say the dominant server had 100 left over for the remaining 3 maps. (And the 3rd server maybe had 50 or less as well.) All the dominant server had to do to win all 3 maps was zerg everything that wasn’t theirs. They outnumber their opponent at least 2 to 1 in every battle.

Now imagine what happens if the map limit were dynamically changed to 50 players max. We had 100 players on EB, plus 50 for the other 3 maps. But now the eternal battlegrounds would eat up only 50 players, leaving 50 more available for the other maps. 150 players total would be able to fill 3 out of 4 maps (and that would be true for both of the low pop servers). The high population server would fill 4 out of 4.

That means lots of great battles, and lots of reason to play WvW at any time (which would help stop players from getting discouraged and making player counts worse).

I’m not surprised. I actually recognized one of the names (Epiks) as someone who I remember was giving instructions in team/map chat that were exactly the opposite of what the rest of us were saying, with the obvious intent to cause disorder and confusion, or to just be difficult in a childish way. That’s in addition to some other general pessimistic and disparaging remarks, so I think he’s just unhappy/bored and is taking it out on everyone, rather than him being an infiltrator working for the enemy team.

It seems like much of the data that has to be sent to the client from the server is information on exactly which pieces of armor/weapons (and colors), faces, bodies, heights, etc. the characters have. And it definitely seems to me to be unrelated to the client’s processing power.

I mean, I have a pretty good rig and can use high graphics setting, but I tested running through lion’s arch with both minimum setting and my normal high settings and saw no difference in how late characters appeared before I was on top of them as I ran around.

So I wonder if perhaps the game could prioritize sending the locations of players so that we see more of them onscreen and sooner, and make up for this increase in bandwidth by lowering the priority of sending data about their looks. Just give them a default set of armor, etc., and let them become more detailed as the real data is sent. Maybe just send their color scheme so they at least don’t change colors completely as they load.

Or is it possible that each individual player’s equipment loadout can be saved in a cache the first time the player is seen during a session? And then the next time that player is seen, the client can load the player’s graphics based on what they had last time they were seen (which is unlikely to change drastically in a single session), and the server can prioritize sending data only for players that haven’t been seen yet in the current session.

I just want to play on a WvW map that has full (or near full) population for at least our team and at least 1 opponent (and ideally 2 opponents of course). The problem is that this only seems to occur quite late in the evening or on weekends.

What happens during the day or early evening on weekdays is that our team has enough people compete on the eternal battlegrounds and that’s about it, while the largest population team is able to dominate every other map even though they don’t have enough to actually fill more than EB and 1 other map. But they can dominate all 3 of the identical maps with that, since we can only field a force that can maybe half-fill a single map. It’s total domination because the large pop team can just move around to any of the 3 maps. The only thing our team can do is just run around taking empty forts while the larger team comes around to retake. It’s more like a farming race than a strategic battle.

I think there’s an easy fix to help make this situation more fun and competitive:

Just make the player cap for the maps dynamic to some extent, so that when the server with the most WvW players can’t even come close to filling all the maps, just reduce the player cap on each map until they do come close to filling all maps.

If this were in place, we’d probably be able to fill the eternal battlegrounds and at least one other map if not 2. The other lower pop server would likely be able to do around the same. And the high pop server would be spread more equally across all maps. That would make for 4 fun, competitive maps where you actually need to win with tactic and strategy, not numbers.

I don’t care about the points too much. I don’t care too much about losing stuff and having to retake either. The real problem is what happens WHILE you play when the teams aren’t even.

It’s not fun to try to play while greatly outnumbered and having very little chance to even hold onto something. Many people seem to get discouraged and quit and just decide to play only when the population is good. I know I don’t want to play early in the evening myself anymore since I know it’s just going to be frustrating, but me and everyone else who feel this way ends up making the problem even worse.

What would really help fix the problem is dynamic map limits. If the team with the most population of the 3 servers can’t manage to fill the 4 maps, the maximum population for each team for each map should get scaled down until the largest population server at least comes close to filling each. That would allow the smaller teams to each be competitive on more maps that they can manage to fill, while they just give up on the other maps. And naturally, the two lower population servers will tend to each fill up different low population maps when possible (i.e., they don’t make a map a 3-way battle if there’s another map where a team has a free ride and isn’t facing opposition).

What this means is that the other lower-pop servers can at least be competitive on more maps, fighting an equal strength enemy team.

As it is now, you might have 1 team with many players clobbering a team with few players across all maps (and many maps sitting empty, since the dominate server was able to take everything in them and leave, and can show up again any time and overwhelm if they lose anything). It’s almost exactly the same as having just 1 big map with no population limit, since the dominate team can just jump to any map and overwhelm.

For it to be fair and fun, the lower pop teams have to at least come close to the player cap limit on some maps, and dynamically lowering map pop limits helps achieve this without preventing anyone from being able to play.

I don’t think this is really about gold sinks. I mean, if crafting was profitable, it’d be no more or no less of a gold sink, since those profits would be money coming from other players, not money created out of thin air.

But it looks to me like crafting could never be profitable with the way the game is set up. Any crafter can make unlimited stuff if he has the materials. The materials are available for sale. So any time there is something that is profitable to buy the material for and then make to sell, there’s going to be someone who does just that until the price is no longer profitable.

Even if there is high demand for certain weapons or equipment, the profit will be in gathering the resources needed, rather than the crafting being profitable.