WvW isn’t successful enough to meet Anet’s aspirations, and the the way it’s been headed it’s not going to be.
Even with (or perhaps because of) the disasters of the current patch, WvW is rapidly turning into a game focus on the hardcore WvW players and servers. This is emptying out the WvW maps, makes WvW less appealing to new and casual players (they are even more stomp bait than they were in the past), and makes it progressively harder to create successful match-ups in WvW.
The problems seems to arise from two lines of flawed thinking:
- Flawed Idea #1: Imbalance is a defining characteristic of WvW
This has led to Anet’s Wvw team:
a) Implementing changes that make WvW even more unbalanced
b) Being blind to the potential to improve balance in WvW and the benefits that would deliver (WvW would be more fun for existing players and and more attractive to new/casual players)
- Flawed Idea #2: Increasing player power is a successful strategy for WvW
This idea has lead to changes that directly increase the power of dedicated WvW players and servers and in doing so has:
a) Made WvW less appealing to new players and players on servers with low levels of WvW participation
b) Exaggerated the differences in competitiveness between WvW servers.
Amazingly, this idea (which seems to be derived from the flawed imbalance idea) is directly counter to the approach that has been fundamental to the success of the rest of GW2.
There is one further problem:
- there are too many WvW servers for the number of people playing WvW.
This results in many servers having WvW populations that too low to be competitive, and avid WvW players flocking to the few servers with competitive populations and in the process further eroding the competitiveness of the servers they abandon.
Anet need to clean up the mess they’ve made of WvW with this latest patch. But rather than plaster over the latest problems, Anet would be far better to use this as a prompt to change direction and improve the balance in WvW. The obvious steps to doing this are:
- Reduce the number of WvW servers and balance up their populations This can be done by:
a) Unhooking WvW servers from PvE
b) Consolidating servers with low populations
c) Capping WvW sever populations at the highest current WvW server population
d) Making it free to join or transfer to WvW servers with lower populations
- Cap WVW gear stats at the exotic level
- Remove buffs that cause power creep for WvW players
Once that’s in place, we will all have a more competitive environment in which to play WwW (and without which we simply don’t have enough people to play against). From there Anet can take complexity they’ve already put into WvW and make it work by doing things like: fixing the older lag problems, improving the commander system, fixing the party system, and fixing the excessive incentives for zerging.
Overall, this will make WvW more enjoyable for existing players as match-ups and in-game fights will be more balanced and therefore more exciting. This will also make it easier for new players to join WvW as they will a) have less of a performance deficit against established WvW players, and b) have access to more competitive WvW servers without having to sacrifice ties to their existing PvE communities.
Unfortunately, this will also require Anet to acknowledge that it has made mistakes with the direction it’s been taking WvW. The mistakes are there, but to date Anet has shown very little willingness or ability to acknowledge mistakes. Hopefully the disaster of this latest patch is enough to push them past that.
The other problem will be the dedicated WvW players who’ve become addicted to the extra power the recent changes (guard buff, bloodlust, open ended WXP abilities, ascended weapons) have given their characters. They’ve got used to winning more easily and won’t want to give up their hard won superpowers. Their challenge will be to accept that instead of making WvW better, that increase in power has been undermining WvW by i) making participation in WvW less appealing for new and casual players, and ii) making it harder for servers with more dedicated WvW players to find decent competition.
( http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/power-creep covers the basic issues. Anyone have links showing how imbalance and power creep erodes player numbers in PvP games?)
TLDR: Anet have to fix the current mess they’ve made of WvW. It will be far better if they do that in ways that return balance to WvW because that’s what it’s going to take for WvW to succeed.
[Edit: Included statement about there being too many WvW servers]
[Edit: revised recommendation #1 to explicitly state it will reduce the number of WvW servers]
