Her invasions should have been every hour in multiple locations with no fail timer….just a large bar showing the reinforcements coming through the portals with the different tiers. Less champions and more silvers/vets that would swarm in places so that players would be pushed back from waypoint to waypoint, waypoints would become contested as her minions cleared players and waypoints would reopen as players cleared the minions.
If there is a war to be had, I want a war. I want there to be a little loss of hope that we just might lose Queensdale and our new, fresh and young characters will be slaughtered by scarlet’s army. I know that sounds harsh, but isn’t she the bad guy? I think a living story should churn out memories and stories that veterans will tell for months about how a ragtag group kept the last waypoint in mount maelstrom at the heart of the volcano from scarlet.
What would this do to new players? My first memory of an old pvp/castle warfare based MMO was going to one of these high level only wars on my first low level character. Yes, I got slaughtered and did not contribute, but I saw what was coming once I leveled up more. So would it discourage new players? No, it would intrigue their interests and they would be conditioned to fear scarlet’s name and give them a motivation to level/gear up so that they can fight off this now common enemy.
Also, the WvW tab can show the status of each server in their fight against scarlet, maybe by showing how many waypoints are contested or how many scarlet minion kills a server is at. Heck, maybe scarlet can invade WvW every once and awhile just to throw a wrench at what has become a monotonous game of ring around the commander. (There is a lot fun in WvW, but mostly in the castle/keep warfare, not the in the parts where you just run around from camp to camp.)
I for one would have had no problem with scarlet if she had actually been a threat to the world, for now she just drops in every one in awhile and then leaves because she gets bored. That’s not an invasion, that’s just a skirmish.
So before there are any complaints about shutting down waypoints and personal story or low level characters, scarlet shouldn’t care. She should be the bad guy, so let her be the bad guy and do bad things.
tl:dr More scarlet invasion, less panzy fights, all out war, contested waypoints, lost zones, no hope except through unity. Memories.