Guild Wars 2

This thread serves no purpose other than to beg Anet not to implement Season 3. Seasons 1 and 2 were both failures for the same reasons:

1) Huge population shifts and imbalances, with no time to adjust Glicko and server rankings to respond to them. Pre-season, the massive migrations tear apart lots of lower tier communities. Post-season, the bandwagons fall apart and servers burn out, destroying even more communities. (Part me suspects that Anet condones this because it’s the only way to keep WvW from being completely stale, and it offers nice returns in gem sales).

2) Stale matchups, with no chance of finding more even matchups. Locking servers in a League for 2+ months is a terrible idea because server population and effort drastically change in that time frame. The top servers get bored, and the bottom servers collapse.

These two problems are symptomatic of a larger problem endemic to WvW: a poorly designed scoring mechanic centered around large population imbalances. It’s just that without the incentive of Seasons, this PPT/population problem isn’t as daunting because servers can rise and fall in the rankings fluidly. I don’t expect Anet to fix this problem any time soon, if ever, but I do plead that there be no more Seasons.

As the title suggests, the idea is to lower the number people able to play on a map. I’m not sure how the algorithm works now, but the current system makes 50-60 man blobs possible without queueing the map. The proposal is to make the queue hit at, say, 40-50 players on the map.

I feel this could address many of the recurring problems that players bring up here.

1) It decreases blobbing. If the queue is 40-50 people, it becomes inefficient to stay in a 40-50 man blob. Zergs would probably naturally split up into 15-20, with smaller havoc and roaming groups.

2) It decreases the influence of coverage without being biased towards any time zone. If the player cap is decreased on all maps, it becomes a bit easier to defend structures. As it is now, some servers are able to run 60 man blobs over BL’s of 10-20 defenders.

3) It decreases the influence of population. Same reason as above.

4) It discourages server stacking. If the player cap is lowered to 40-50 people per map, some servers will easily see 250+ in queue for all maps, even post-Season. At some point, it becomes better for guilds to just transfer off to a lower populated server. This offers guilds some reason to look into dead servers.

5) It decreases the amount of lag players experience. Self-explanatory.

I realize this sounds viscerally unappealing at first, and I don’t pretend there are no cons to it. But after thinking about it, it would help with many of the recurring issues. Thought I’d open the thought for discussion here.