So, with everyone QQing about night capping and proposing solutions, I thought I could jump on the train and describe my idea (and sorry if it’s already been proposed and I missed it):
Dynamic queues
At the moment, as far as we players can understand, every WvW map has 500 available slots for each server. These 500 slots are always available regardless of the time of day and this brings imbalance when during the night you have servers with only 100 or 200 people “fighting” 500-people zergs all over the maps.
A dynamic queue system would limit the number of available spots to try to keep some balance between the different factions. So, if the weakest faction can’t bring to the fight more than 100 people, the other 2 servers would be limited to a similar amount of players to keep the fighting fair.
Of course, numbers don’t have to be exact and you could allow for a 20% population bonus or similar.
FAQs
Q: You can’t propose to limit the available spots in a map. I can only play at night and I have the right to play without any population cap BS.
A: Population cap is already a mechanic of the game, by dynamically changing it we only improve fairness.
Q: It isn’t our fault if your server doesn’t have enough people to fight us during the night. Find some oceanic guilds and fill the gaps.
A: I wonder why are you going to WvW in the first place if you enjoy so much fighting against NPCs. The point of PvP battles is to have other players to fight with: if you can’t find any maybe it’s better if you switch the server and join the less populated side for once.
Q: People will exploit this by mass DC-ing when we are about to get a keep.
A: And they would extremely stupid because the dynamic queue system only prevents new players from entering the map, it doesn’t kick anyone out.
Q: Nothing will change because night-cappers will never log off from the map and they will always have max population.
A: We need an exploit-free afk-kicking system, of course. But even if they won’t be kicked they will still eat up their server spots during day time, giving their server a huge disadvantage.
Final words
I still haven’t thought this all through, but I believe this would be reasonable solution to give us fair fights, which is all WvW should be about in my opinion.
Some questions still remain unanswered, like how to handle exploits like what if people use secondary account to log on one of the servers they are fighting against with their main. But this is already a problem with the current design so it won’t be any bad.
What do everyone think? (I would love to hear from ANet too)
