9 replies to this topic

[Featherman]

One of the many reasons I bought GW2 was to participate in what ArenaNet advertised as a perpetual battlefield, WvW. I made it my sole purpose in the game to join an active WvW guild and spend the weekend and some weeknights on the battlefield with a warband and cooperating with other guilds in order to help conquer maps. For the first two months, my goals were realized. Slowly but surely, however, my server's WvW community began to die out and my guild has all but stopped logging in for this Activity. With the WvW community a shadow of its former glory, the problems that have always riddled WvWvW became clearer and clearer to me.

-Guilds and alliances are coattail-ling winning servers leaving losing servers even weaker. The players that do this are not penalized

-Nightcapping tries the enthusiasm of many to log on and recapture properties even during peak hours (unfixable unless they add in time restrictions, which is also bad)

-A static scoring system causes servers to be either in a state winning or losing the week after the matches begin, and this discourages players from going to WvW

-There is no competitive reason for players in the higher bracket to move down and revive the lower tier communities

-Players are simply not interested

Reading through the forums, it's clear that these are at least some of the many issues with the current WvW, but many posters claim that they can be fixed with tweaks and re-balancing. At this point, however, it's clear to me that ANet shouldn't waste their effort with re-balancing and tweaking. The problems go deeper than that. The current system requires communities to work together without giving them the incentives and tools and requires players to be engaged without engaging them. There's nothing to draw people in and keep them there other than the initial premise. I believe that, with the resources currently available in the game, WvW can be reformatted and restructured into an activity that is rewarding for the community and exciting for everyone who participates.

WvWvW 2.0

Overview:
As with the current WvW, in WvW 2.0 servers will be pit against eachother to claim and hold territories for points using players and siege. Essentially the principles behind WvW 2.0 will be the same. This is where the similarities end. In WvW 2.0 the matches will be divided into multiple parts to better accommodate player habits and new mechanics will be introduced to better structure communication between guilds, building community between them.

General Structure: A Twopart Campaign
In WvW 2.0 the fight will be divided into two parts major parts: The Battles of Mistfire Summoning and The Misftire War, with both parts affecting but not outwieghing eachother.

The Battles of Mistfire Summoning
This will take place during the weekday and be split into five battles, one for each workday, and will take place only in the borderlands of each server. Each day, up to three guilds may be chosen to represent the server through votes, and a total of 15 guilds can represent during the week. The mechanics behind the voting system and guild representation will be explained later. The points earned during these days are weighted to about 1/5 of the points during the Mistfire War and will be calculated separately for each of the three maps. At the end of each battle the winner of each map will be rewarded special items to be split among the representing guilds, three Cauldrons of Mistfire. The PvP officers of the guild can use the item during the Mistfire War from their guild interface to gain a tactical advantage which I'll go into detail later. A server can earn up to a total of 9 Cauldrons of Mistfire each battle if they conquer all maps.

The reason this format is chosen is because weekdays show the lowest amount of activity for WvW due to real life obligations, so the punishment for a server not defending their maps during these days should be proportionate to the overall activity. This is achieved by  Scaling the points earned during the battles to 1/5 of the points earned during the Mistfire War. Additionally, as the battles are reset each day, players are less likely to be discouraged by being far behind in points and if they win at least one map they still earn 3 cauldrons for the day.

The Mistfire War
After the five battles are complete, the Mistfire War begins and will last throughout the weekend. During this period the Eternal Battlegrounds will be open to be contested along with the three borderlands maps that were opened during the week. Points for all maps will be totaled into one score and they will be worth five times as much as the points earned during the battles. This style is similar to the current WvW and and is chosen as it should work during the weekend due to generally higher server activity and WvW interest.

It is during this time that representing guilds that were successful during the battles will be able use their cauldrons for a tactical advantage...

Mistfire Cauldrons: Nuclear Strike Detected

The Mistfire Cauldron is a tool I devised to keep the war less static by adding in another layer of strategy. The cauldron may only be used one at a time per server per map (so three can be active at a time in one map, one from each server) and hen activated the user chooses any tower or supply camp to summon a Mistfire Titan. The titan has as much health as a raid boss, and unless killed within 3 minutes with a large group the titan will set the property ablaze with mistfire, leaving it unable to be claimed for 2 hours. Towers and supply camps will no longer award points and supply camps will not supply dolyaks. When the two hours are up the properties are up for grabs.

As a tactical weapon the cauldrons provide no intrinsic benefits outside of map denial. Used effectively It can deny opponents towers that would otherwise be unobtainable by you own server or strategic towers would be able to attack keeps and/or Stonemist Castle. Similarly, the server may lock themselves out of potential points if they use it in poor judgement. The cauldron is limited to supply camps and towers only so as to prevent servers from isntagibbing keeps.

One choice of design you may have noticed by now is that the cauldrons are dispersed among representing guilds. This is intended to act as an incentive for guilds to communicate with one another.

The Guild Representation System: Building and Maintaining a Strong Community is Half the battle!

As one of the main focuses on WvW 2.0 is the importance of community. WvW 2.0 will attempt to help servers build a strong community by adding in the Guild Representation System. As mentioned earlier the system allows players to vote three different guilds to represent the server per day of Mistfire Summoning Battle, one guild per map. This is done when a guild applies for it either through the WvW 2.0 Menu (which is more sparkly than the current menu) or on the boards near the Heart of the Mists Asura Gate. This method will encourage alliance members to vote their preferred guilds into the slots. Guilds on bloated servers may find themselves leaving for lower brackets in order to gain representation

In order to prevent the system from being too cosmetic, the elected will apply a choice stat bonuses to map they represent based on the Warfare upgrades, and will earn rewards for the success of their map. The same guild may represent multiple days, but in order to promote both diversification of guilds and communication between them there are large benefits for having different guilds representing each day.


For each guild representing one player will be added to the queues of each map during the Mistfire War and be reserved for the Officer of the representing guild so that they will be able to use their guild's earned cauldrons. If the maximum number of guilds participates during the week, there will be an additional fifteen reserved spots on each of the maps. This will reward servers with more diversified and established guilds a numerical advantage and, due to the function of the Mistfire Cauldrons, they will need to effectivelycommunicate with one-another to make tactical use of their cauldrons.

Edit: those not in elected guilds will still be able to enter the WvW maps. Should have mentioned that

That's all folks
So this is all for my ideas of how we could revamp WvW. I plan to eventually post this on the official suggestions board but I feel the need to gather more opinions on these ideas and WvW as a whole, because even if it turns out to be utterly ignored I want to post something that everyone would want to play. If you also have the feeling that WvW in its current state will not last, share your opinion of it. If you think otherwise, post why. If anything criticize my design of WvW 2.0. I know it's not perfect and it won't fix all of the current issues but I think it'll be more fun that the current incarnation.

PS. Sorry for the long preface

Edited by Featherman, 14 November 2012 - 01:40 PM.

[GrandmaFunk]

So if you aren't in a guild, or your guild isn't heavily focused on WvW.. you just can't play?

and even if you are in a WvW-focused guild, you can't play unless your guild is popular enough?

[Featherman]

GrandmaFunk, on 13 November 2012 - 08:58 PM, said:

So if you aren't in a guild, or your guild isn't heavily focused on WvW.. you just can't play?

and even if you are in a WvW-focused guild, you can't play unless your guild is popular enough?

You can still play. You can even go guildless. The system rewards more organization between guilds, but it doesn't lock people out.

[stefanplc]

In EU atm, top 6-7 servers are in a tight competition. That's not bad at all.

[lmaonade]

Alaroxr, on 13 November 2012 - 09:06 PM, said:

Why should people be penalized for moving to a server that doesn't have to deal with low populations and night capping?

There's a reason why the top tier servers are top tier servers. That's because good players moved there long ago and created communities with other guilds.

that explains Henge of Denravi's current freefall in the rankings then I'm assuming

[Featherman]

Alaroxr, on 13 November 2012 - 09:06 PM, said:

Why should people be penalized for moving to a server that doesn't have to deal with low populations and night capping?

There's a reason why the top tier servers are top tier servers. That's because good players moved there long ago and created communities with other guilds.

It weakens losing servers and and bloats winning ones. The game isn't competitive when its the same few servers fighting eachother every match because lower servers can't reasonably catch up. And I'm aware that "good players" moved to the higher servers and created communities with other guilds. It caused massive bloat and queue times, and then a ton of complaining about server transfers on the boards. Now just imagine if the some people in those queues were in the less populated servers.

And yes, nightcapping is a problem. They need to mitigate that somehow because causes many different problems. The problem occurs usually during the weekdays, since players aren't able to stay up as late. Weighing the points less during weekdays might mitigate the problem by at least a little bit.

Edited by Featherman, 13 November 2012 - 09:17 PM.

[Featherman]

Alaroxr, on 13 November 2012 - 09:20 PM, said:

I don't see why you want to restrict people's freedom to choose a server because it's not "fair" for other servers.

Even on SoS we don't have bad queues (we really never have queues), and we're still winning t2 three weeks running.

I never said it wasn't fair. If anything I implied that it wasn't healthy for either server, and in the long run it really isn't.

Edited by Featherman, 13 November 2012 - 09:44 PM.

[Aetou]

Um, no.  While the current system has issues those are largely due to there just being too many servers.  There are about 10 solid US servers, split roughly into three bands (JQ&SBI; BG, SoS, SoR, IoJ; TC, YB, CD, FA.)  Outside of that WvW doesn't work, within it things are working pretty well and the issue is just that more WvW players are needed in those at the lower end of that scale in off-peak slots.  There are certainly good arguments for shorter matches (after day 3 most fights seem to be basically concluded) but a complete overhaul isn't needed.

[omar316]

Featherman, on 13 November 2012 - 06:02 PM, said:

A lot of stuff.

While being fairly interesting, such a overhaul would not be in the best interests.

There is no way to guarantee this overhaul while being fun for you will indeed rejuvenate the current status quo.
They launched with a system which was spiralling south wards from the beginning. There are several PvP focused guilds who quit within the first few weeks of launch because they felt "invincible". Now the top servers are quite stable, with consistent action.

Thus the rotation begins. The top 9 are going to be rotated, or inbred, among themselves.
Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel again, for the 3rd time, we should just try to salvage the situation.

I vote for a mega PvP server. All NA servers in 2 or 3 WvW servers. Something like a WvWvW in the sPvP format. Remove server identity and points system. It really serves no purpose. In fact it just introduces fairweather server hoppers. Make it a 24 man queue to a single instance or something. PvP for the fun of it rather than these nonsensical, pointless point system which gives nothing towards progression.

Also give numbers to the instances. So people who want a good fight can join populated instances and people who want to PvDoor to earn badges/karma can be relegated to low population instance.

[Featherman]

Good points, both. When I devised this I was thinking more about the lower half the bracket, the side left in shambles by the formation of the upper brackets. I thought if there were enough incentives (guild representations) guilds would move down lower brackets and help form communities there, and also get people who just are uninterested or discouraged into WvW. It's really a system that tries to organize things for people and even things out. But of course there's no guarantee that it'd work.

I think a megaserver might not be a good idea due to overflow system. I don't know about the exact numbers to even suggest server merging. Instances sound nice in and of themselves but I think it'd segregate people of the same server, and that's not healthy for the server if it's looking to be competitive.

Edited by Featherman, 14 November 2012 - 01:31 PM.