Guild Wars 2

silvermember.8941:

Blaeys.3102:

Fairly simple solution (from a player’s perspective) that takes server pride, griefing and 24/7 coverage into account -

Right now, in North America, we have eight matches spread across 32 maps (3 borderlands and one EBG per match).

Instead, give us one huge match every week that is basically 8v8v8 (evenly split servers – can adjust if populations dont match up well).

And, have that match on the exact same 32 maps. Every server would still have a “borderlands map” named after their server.

Players could queue for any of the following three: any enemy borderland, their own borderland (no other server in their battlegroup could), or any of the 8 EBGs (which would need unique names). This would give every player a total of 16 possible maps to play on each week – at any given time – with access to players from 8 different servers (which should fix the coverage problem as well).

To retain server identity, rewards would be two tiered. First, the servers in the winning battlegroup would get the same rewards winning servers get now.

Second, servers should get slight advantages while holding their own borderland, giving them something to hold/brag about. By limiting queues to server borderlands, it would retain server identity and reduce griefing. Griefing on other maps would be a non issue because guilds or server groups could simply move to another map to get away.

This seems like it would be easy to implement from a dev side as well – all we would need is a new interface (with new scoring) and player access to multiple maps.

This is probably the best idea. So have an 8v8v8 but instead on 32 maps have it about 16 to 24 (so 1 borderland for each server and 6 eternal battlegrounds) maps to allow for increased population on certain maps that are underutilized. This will allow for over flowing servers to go support others in their league that are under populated while keeping the bigger server’s imaginary “community” in tack.

Agree with the above. Unlike every other proposal, I don’t see any major downsides here. I do wonder about epic levels of map hopping – with so many vulnerable objectives, a blob could train around 16 maps forever finding weak spots to break open. Moreover, if home borderland participation is limited, you’re bound to face a multi-server queue-blob at a bad time and come out hurting. The asymmetry seems to favor attacking, which the game already does.

Perhaps extend the pseudo hub-and-spoke layout of EB and the borderlands like GW1 did with Hall of Heroes? The three t1 borderlands connect to EB and each other, but each also connects ‘outward’ to multiple other BLs and you have to actually travel to an adjacent one to use the portal to the next. A ‘web’ and not just spokes, so you can travel to other BLs in your ring/tier and still have more opportunity to spread out than there is now. Also I assume free ports to EB, the center, for all. You could also put the EB clones at the outer perimeter, so there’s a ‘true’ center and other big/stonemist objectives easily accessible to those in the outer BLs. But, nobody likes travel time. Brainstorming, I still like the original idea however we lay out the worlds – in an actual map, or just a drop-down list.

Outnumbered buff: Yes, improve it. Problem is that getting an extra 25%, 50% loot… Doesn’t matter when you aren’t getting any loot because you’re facing groups 3x bigger than you. Similarly, even if you penalize the ‘overstacked’ side, at 50% drop rate, stacked team is still getting more loot/wxp farming dozens of bags than outnumbered team is from picking off yaks and roamers.

One aspect of the existing system I don’t see under discussion – 2v1. Much of the reason for having a 3-way matchup (on my view) is so 2 weaker servers can team up to defeat the stronger. This should provide a natural balancing effect, and keep matches more dynamic and fluid but has largely failed to do so. Exception being Season 2 T1 NA, which caused so much drama that even though the strategy succeeded it wasn’t worth repeating.

As-is, the three-way matches are all 1 server dominating, and 2 others fighting for scraps. Further distorts the imbalance, because it’s easy to stay #1 once you have the help of the #3 team focusing on #2. Once in that spot, it’s generally all #2 can do to fend off attacks from both ends, and keep their position.

Bloodlust: Not sure why people are calling for removing it in this thread. I like bloodlust, but it’s only tangentially related to the coverage/imbalance issues.

Suggestion: change the siege cap from server wide to player based.

If each player can only have, say, 5 pieces of siege equipment up at a time (and building a new one automatically replaces the oldest) then you can limit the total amount of siege in play without allowing one saboteur to clog up the whole server.

Where there’s no advantage it’s an easy question. A more salient example that I’ll give, now that it’s been patched:

What about in Citadel of Flame, where on one path you could jump the final gate? Pure exploration, but you could avoid doing the task to open the gate, and the final boss doesn’t trigger to attack you making the climax trivially easy. Moreover, you could then get the final chest to spawn twice at the end (by opening it, and then opening the door and starting the boss fight), granting double reward which is surely unintended behaviour.

It certainly seems like there are some cases where reaching a zone without hacks should be considered exploitative. Imagine if you could spawn an infinite number of reward chests from a similar bug? An extreme hypothetical I know, but: still not an exploit, go nuts while it’s not common knowledge/patched yet?

Also, as Jestunhi said — an exploit by definition involves “exploiting” game mechanics to reach unintended results rather than hacking anything.