Guild Wars 2

WvW is in a laughably bad state right now. Enemy players are totally invisible in almost any siege (good luck playing if your class can’t spam AoEs!), hackers are more common than they have any right to be in an MMO, WvW rankings are totally trashed due to massive guilds transferring to lower-ranked servers for easier opponents, and the WvW mechanics themselves are so shoddy that practically every match seems to end in a landslide. Timezone mismatches result in guilds that refuse to invest money and time in keeps that’ll inevitably be lost in the middle of the night. Winning teams accumulate enough supply, upgrades and orbs as to make the match totally futile for their demoralized opponents. There’s pretty much no point in playing when the other team owns the entire map.

Pretty sad since WvW is practically the only decent, fun and repeatable content at level 80 unless you do sPvP. Arenanet, you guys really gotta get a handle on this. WvW could be so great with a few minor adjustments and bugfixes to keep fights happening and matches even, but I’m worried people are already abandoning WvW in droves. I personally am giving up and moving on to other games (so many good ones have come out lately!) until this mess gets sorted out in a patch.

Player behavior in games is incentived based on what earns the most points on the scoreboard. Changing the scoreboard will change the way people play, guaranteed. I don’t know if any of you guys have played Tribes: Ascend, but it had this issue too. People would completely ignore the flag in CTF because camping the generator earned more points. Behavior would change monthly as the developers changed point values on medals. In our case, we want to switch the focus from getting 1st in the match to earning as many rewards as you can. Removing rankings from the scoreboard would go a long way towards eliminating the “Everybody gives up at once” phenomenon. and would make WvW much more fun to play.

No, the problem is that score and “Winning” matchups is overemphasized. Remember, you’ll “lose” 2/3rds of matches you’re in if matchmaking works correctly. If winning is what makes you happy, you won’t be happy with WvW. I’m proposing we focus less on winning and more on playing by de-emphasizing score. Right now players care too much about holding MORE objectives than the other servers, to the point of giving up on holding ANY objectives if they can’t achieve that. Making total scores and rankings invisible to the player should curb this irrational behavior.

Morale is a much bigger factor than orb bonuses and the small bonuses that points provide, IMO. Orbs change hands pretty much constantly, especially with all the hackers and glitching these days, but a solid guild staying in the fight is worth way more than these minor stat boosts. Obviously you should be able to know how many orbs you have, but knowing that the enemy team has more points than you doesn’t get you anything except players that throw up their hands and go home at the first sign they’re not coming in first. Removing points from the scoreboard is a good first step to fixing WvW landslides. Next step is swapping the demoralized buff with the orb bonus so the former gives stat boosts and the latter gives reward boosts. After that, make the Tyria portal trickle in supplies and extra siege gear if you’re losing badly enough so people have an easier time coming back and keeping up the fight. The scenario we want to avoid is the part of WvW where people give up and stop fighting because one side is dominating. I never see one side dominate on the 1st day of WvW when people are still trying, it only happens later in the week as people give up.

Just let guilds buy temp commander icons for members with influence. Guilds are the ones that bring the organization necessary to succeed at WvW to the table, let the ones that are actually organizing things have the icons. Bonus is that commanders will be guaranteed to have an organized group backing them too, so the icon will be worth trusting. The game is called Guild Wars, after all. Maybe let them buy icons for people outside their guild too, so organized players from small guilds can still participate. Believe me, guilds want all the good commanders and leaders they can get in WvW, and would be happy to spend influence outside the guild if it meant greater victories.

I oppose the idea of democratically nominating commanders since that will just lead to constant spamming in map/team chat and drama-filled fights over votes between wannabe server celebrities.

You guys are missing the point. You don’t get anything by winning, you get things by earning points. The things that you get are guild influence, karma, money, and WvW bonuses (gatherer, etc). It doesn’t matter that you’re in 3rd place, it only matters that you’re earning bonuses for yourself and your world by earning a decent amount of points, even if its less than the other servers. Giving up and pulling out just because you aren’t in first place in the match-up is stupid, because you’re forfeiting all the bonuses, karma and gold you could have earned.

This is why you need to get rid of point totals on the WvW screen and stop publishing rankings: So people realize that WvW is NOT about winning or losing a matchup, but fighting and earning points even if you aren’t earning as many points as the other guy. Its all about the progress towards those bonuses. Focus on the bonuses, maybe show your teams current point income to incentive people to take more stuff so the bonus bars fill up faster, and you’re golden. The number of points and amount of the map the other teams hold should not matter to you at all and should not be shown on the scoreboard, only what YOUR server is getting should be shown.

Commanders should be picked by guilds. Guilds are the ones that bring the organization necessary to take keeps and succeed at WvW, so it only makes sense that they should be able to spend influence and buy a commander icon for a member to increase that organization. The game is called Guild Wars, after all.

Here’s the biggest non-technical problem with WvW: The ranking and scoreboard system puts the focus on “Winning” matches, but your server is going to lose 2/3rds of the server matches its in, assuming perfect matchmaking. There are three teams on the map, and only one can come in first. This is a huge problem for some people, since WvW (on my server at least) turns in to a ghost town as soon as it becomes clear we aren’t going to win the match. Players stop playing, guilds stop leading operations and investing time/gold, and generally the whole experience becomes a one-sided stompfest as participation rapidly drops off. WvW rapidly becomes unfun to play because our team stops trying.

This doesn’t make any sense. The only thing being in 1st gets you is more difficult opponents and slightly larger bonuses. What we should be doing is holding on to what we can and earning what badges, karma and bonsues we can, not giving up and rolling over just because we aren’t in first on the stupid scoreboard. So, here’s my proposal to fix this:

Stop making WvW about winning. Hide the scoreboard and the pie chart on the WvW menu. Really, think about it: why do we need to know our point total or the other servers’ point total? That doesn’t get us anything except demoralized players. Just let us see our current WvW bonuses. Make us look at the map to see how much we hold, not the dumb pie-chart that makes everyone quit playing as soon as someone else owns more than 50%. Guilds and servers that care about rankings will still be able to keep track of whether they’re winning or not without the points anyways. Stop publishing server rankings except for the top three, too. The whole focus on the fact that we’re being ranked in matches makes people even more winning-fixated and contributes to server imbalance.

I’d also like to see more advantages for teams that are losing badly, too. Orbs should give bonuses to rewards, not amplify the combat advantages of teams already superior enough to take them. If you’re at a massive supply and upgrade disadvantage (like if you were pushed off the map in the middle of the night and are trying to come back), you should get free shipments of supply and siege blueprints from the portal to Tyria, and maybe a powerful buff to signify that you’re fighting to protect your home turf (AKA your server’s Tyria). Maybe it could even send out extra supply caravans to jump-start your tower upgrades if you’re losing badly enough. Right now good matches where every team can actually meaningfully play WvW are rarer than they should be. Morale, orbs and the supply/upgrade mechanics encourage landslide victories and losses where one or two teams become too entrenched to fight and the others just stop trying.