joneirikb.7506

Do like this one, been saying it for years.

My somewhat similar idea for this, as a "cheapest way to handle WvW" was: WvW * Remove all maps except 1 EBG (1 map per matchup) * Remove linking Expansion: * Fully Automate the entire system (So devs don't have to touch it ever again) EotM * Add Gliding/Mounts/PIPS Expansion: * Add all the other maps into EotM The people that still cares about competition, servers, ranks, and stuff like that gets to focus down to a single map as without the pugs and hybrid players they likely can't fill 2 maps anyways. The majority of casual players gets EotM mode where they can enjoy zergs/karma trains without having to care about points and tryhards.

That said, ANet did try some of this with DesertBL. With the 3 shrines around each keep. I honestly don't remember/know how they've been nerfed/changed by now, if they still do anything at all or are just "whatever". But back when the map came out, you could turn some battles around with taking shrines. Which was honestly really interesting. Iirc especially air and fire keep, not so much earth. Edit: Oh yeah, also EotM, tunnels, siege-scorpion etc. Honestly fun stuff.

I was just discussing something similar with a guildie, while re-watching that same video (classic). I'd actually like "Lines", like that line of fear, and line of warding etc, to have no target caps. Make it a defining trait of that specific type of skill, and then try to get 1-2 on each classes. * They have obvious tells, so there's counter play. * They'd be a defined type of skills that comes with no target limit * Lets each class have something that can be useful in zergs * It would limit the number of such skills each player could bring to a zerg (1-2 per class total) * As such they'd become skills that defines the "tempo" of zerg battles, and also letting smaller groups affect zergs through smart play and coordination. That said I *REALLY* would wish for all of these to be available to core classes, as to not break the advantages of elites further. Heck give Thief a Line of boon-stealing, with no target caps, and see them getting instant spots in zergs.

Well, depending on how you see it, any and all bonuses are void in front of the zerg. So at that point does it even matter if you get any bonus at all? And from a design perspective, getting stats for owning more objectives feed into snowball issues. It also feeds into the zerg mentality. Since most players today isn't going to bother to aggressively back-cap, and just wait for a zerg of their own to come and express take them all back. In that regard it would almost be better to give penalties the more objectives you own. I'm particularly fond of the idea of having a -X% move speed (including mount) the more objectives you have. 😛 Unfortunately here we run into ANet design philosophy, so won't happen.

Ok, so all of your points basically sums up into "Motivation". And how WR ruins your personal Motivation. And from what I could understand the question could be summed as "How do you think being put into WR as a solo player will affect Motivation?". The answer to that is that it depends on the person in question. But if I where to try to narrow it down to a median of the player-base, I'd assume that would be represented by a mostly PVE/hybrid player, that jumps into WvW occasionally for a bit of side fun and working on a reward track, that isn't very invested in the mode itself, and is happy as long as they find a commander to run around with for a couple of hours. As such, their entire enjoyment of the system is going to depend on them finding a commander when they want to play. So some might end up using that 6th guild slot to try to join a guild that runs frequent commanders at certain times. Others might just just running when there is a commander and just ignore it otherwise, while some are going to get angry and say it's WR's fault because they always used to have a commander before! etc. (And not use the tools available for that) Overall, I don't think that itself is going to change motivation much, not for that group of players. I think it will negatively affect morale strongest on players that likes to scout/defend/roam that are in small guilds or hybrid/pve guilds. And obviously it will affect morale the least in big zerg guilds. ---- But at the same time, I don't think it will actually change overall player mentality at this point. It won't really change the way players play the game mode. Example: * Meaning to win/lose * Fix points * credible competition You mentioned these in your post, and they're all related to both Motivation and Player-behaviour. You can also sum all of them up into just "points" for simplicity. I feel that the question you tried to ask was something like: "How can we get players Motivated again?", which would be to get players interested in Points again. Frankly, I think that ship has sailed. I don't think it's possible at this point. Players where extremely interested in points for the first 1-2 years, but this also highlighted the flaws with the Points system, and now that we've seen it, we can't really put the geenie back in the bottle. If ANet where to try for a similar type of engagement again, they'd honestly have to tie the entire point system (or a replacement) into rewards, as it's the only thing they're left with that can motivate/affect player behaviour at this point. And frankly that would be disastrous for the game as a whole, not just WvW. Something like: * Access to unique dungeon/raid/strike etc with unique rewards * More rewards in general the higher rank/tier * Higher reward the higher the tick Basically every way to reward players for winning, means that the entire WvW system (no matter if it's worlds or WR) will again de-evolve back into what Black Gate perfected back when they basically "won wvw" and beat the system. Server stacking, buying coverage, creating a monolith to take all the rewards for a select group (server/guild) that everyone else wants into at any cost for the rewards.

Suggestion, if instead of stat bonuses (power/vitality/toughness/precision), instead you got bonuses to something else, for example to defensive benefits (Siege damage, supply use, specific boons when on siege, or other relevant bonuses to defending). I feel that would be more impactful and relevant, and would actually help players defend better overall. But unless those numbers where off the charts, you'd still have to rely on a big group coming to aid you, but that big group wouldn't be getting the piddly +100 vitality either. ---- Regarding numbers and players wanting the easy solutions, that's kind of what my overall rant was about, and I don't think there's any kind of easy fix for that. With as few tools as ANet has these days, I suspect the only ways they could really do something about that at this point to shift this: * Reduce rewards the more players you're with. Taking a tower gives X rewards, divided on the number of players that captures it. So people want to capture things with as few players as they can to maximize their own rewards. This has some serious issues and goes completely against every design philosophy ANet has. * Change some gameplay mechanics to strongly handicap players the more numbers they have, like upgrading all guards in a tower to scale like champions to the number of players, including all 4 main stats (power/precision/toughness/vitality) to the point where above 20 players they start one-shotting most players and takes a lot of effort to take down. This has some serious issues and goes completely against every design philosophy ANet has. Things like Points where supposed to be one of the main "knobs and levers" that ANet could use to adjust and shift player behaviour, and as that completely failed, together with most of the other minor "levers", they're sort of stuck. Players, by learning to ignore points, have basically taken away ANet's means of changing the game mode. Except... for the option to turn WvW into an EotM style karma-train... That's about the only meaningful change they're still able to do.

A thing of beauty. And that comes from someone that absolutely loaths necromancers.

This is a very interesting point, because I've seen it done before. And the result was that the company thought no one cared/played the game any-longer, and just shut it down, and replaced it with a new game. So it's very much a possibility that if people just stop playing WvW, they'd just shut it down, because well no one is playing it. They'd finally have the excuse they needed to just turn off WvW entirely, and put GoB in a pvp track or something.

Thanks, but too much effort, I'm just here for my easy zerg-post-surfing for salt rewards 😛 Besides, it would take way too much work to actually clean that up into something readable. (And honestly, it's kind of multiple 2-3 different topics/threads worth, sort of stuffed into a single post)

Well add mount and gliding to EotM (in addition to pips). And then add a map rotation so new instances opens with random WvW map. And you'd be set.

You could effectively replicate most of this wishlist by just adding PIP's in EotM. It would constantly fill up and creating new instances, and you'd have constant action more or less at all times. You'd still be limited by the 3 colour system, but I don't think that's a major problem. This wouldn't even need to change the different data-centers, so you could still have NA, EU, China etc separated, for Latency/Lag reasons. As you would still get everyone from within one region to be gathered into the same maps at any time of day. Note: If they did add PIPS to EotM, they should remove the borderlands, and leave the normal WvW just EBG, as there would be a whole lot less players in normal WvW.

Tldr: Ranting. So there's a few topics to break down here: * Players * Balance They do depend heavily on each others, and making changes to one without taking the other into account will just fall flat on its face. ---- * Players: So the short version is that players are different now than they where at launch/vanilla (2012-2015), and there are a lot of reasons as to why that is so and I don't think there's anyone that could even list all of those reasons. The important part here is that we're never going to get back the type of mentality we had back then, and this is more because of the players than the changes to the game. Some of those changes in player behaviour is that: * More reward driven * More impatient * Less skilled (in nearly all ways) * Less goal driven/tenacious Some of the obvious ways this changes the game mode, is that zerging becomes more and more popular, and less and less people want to play outside of zergs. The old "karma-train" (yeah I know, no karma involved any longer) becomes the most approachable and desire-able activity for a larger group of players than before, and steadily increasing. We further see this with the "Participation" system, which makes a very large amount of players consider anything that isn't giving them participation to be a waste of time and thus not desire-able. This is one of the most behaviour shaping mechanics we have in the game mode today. All of this together is already shaping the entire player-base as a whole toward attack and zerging (impatient, reward, easy), and away from defence (patience, outnumbered, less-rewards, community driven). Where the "mechanics" that should work toward getting players to defy odds and keep fighting would be: * Points * Community (server, guild) Has largely been ignored by the player-base over the years, until they're no longer sufficient to motivate enough players to make a change/difference. And this is more the fault of the players than of ANet. ---- * Balance: (game-mode, not class) While there has been a lot of changes to defence vs offence over the years, I ultimately find that they're of less impact than the changes to the player-base-mentality itself. Their primary impact is in how it affects players perception of the game mode, and thus leads players towards viewing the game, and thus affecting their player-mentality. That said, there are some mechanics that I do feel shuts down a lot of player-interaction. I'm not going to try to make a complete list, I'm just going to mention some examples and why they mechanically complicate the situation. * Static stat boosts The problem here is that if you have 10 vs 10 it's supposed to be a fair fight, determined by skill. If you give a +X stat boost through an objective, outnumbered or bloodlust etc, then those has to be rebalanced into say 12 vs 10. But that means a 10vs10 is no longer considered fair, and a 10vs12 would be even more unfair. Static stat boosts never actually help balancing out anything, they just push the needle a bit in one direction or the other. And player/group skill is still such an important matter that the stats are often completely irrelevant, or the number difference between the sides is so big that the starts are again irrelevant. So with all these variables that affects the outcome of a fight far more than a passive stat bonus, the stats themselves only barely push the needle a little bit back and forth, and just makes it even murkier to decide if it was a fair fight or not. Now each of those (claim bonus, outumbered, bloodlust) requires different solutions, there isn't a one solution that fits all of them. And it also depends largely upon what they (ANet) actually want each of those to actually do. Example, if they want the claim bonuses to stimulate fights in towers/keeps, then the current +X stats doesn't really do anything, as it still depends entirely upon if the defenders can get a larger group to come defend or not. One thing they could do, was to have a changing buff system, that modifies the defenders inside walls stats by +/- X% based on how much they're outnumbered/outnumbering. So if there's 20 attackers against 5 defenders, the 5 defenders get a massive bonus to stats so they might survive and deal some damage back, to actually make a noticeable dent in the attackers. And also if a group of 50 comes to defend, then the now 55 defenders could also get a similar -X% so the 20 attackers can at least still do something, or at least do a fighting retreat. This would naturally disrupt a lot of the current idea of "fair fights" about messing with stats etc, but it would do so in a way specifically to encourage fights IN objectives. I'm not sure if this is the way to go or not, just talking about it as one way to make a "stat bonus" matter, and actually affect gameplay to encourage specific types of gameplay behaviour. And there'd be a lot of side effects that would have to be dealt with, more than I can manage to predict. There are several other things that would fall into this same issue, Siege for one thing has static numbers that just doesn't scale well into larger groups etc. Other ideas: * Make the objective claims instead give bonuses to supply/siege. Stuff like get x2 use out of your supply, do x2 damage with siege, gain pulsing stability on siege etc. That would make the guild claims desire-able for defence, and actually give relevant bonuses for slowing down enemies or sometimes even beat them back. But without the mostly irrelevant bonus stats. * Force Multipliers Yes, this is where we're talking about Boons among other things. Basically the game mode is dominated by force-multipliers, the two most obvious being boons and just player numbers. And while I think they could tweak some of the boons, there's not really much to do about the player numbers, as those are honestly outside of ANet's control. The biggest thing in WvW has always been just sheer player numbers. Population + Coverage, these two has always been the two largest issues with the game mode. I say that the third biggest issue is Fair-weather mentality, but it's just as much a result of the first two. If the enemy has full maps, and your server barely has people on when you play then: * You don't have fun * You generally can't do much to affect the map/situation * You're stuck in a losing situation which you're not responsible for * You don't have a way to change it And most players, when they don't have fun with a game, leaves. Either to another mode, to another game, or goes back to cleaning dishes or finish of that spreadsheet the boss is complaining about. And again, the mechanics that are supposed to be there to assist or counter this doesn't work as intended: * 3 way fight * Community * Points (to some degree) Honestly, boonballs isn't even a blip on the radar compared to the problem that Population/Coverage/Fair-weather is to the game mode. Boons is stills something that needs a look on, that I never expect is going to happen. But essentially, since force-multipliers is what is driving the game mode, counters to these should also be force-multiplying. A passive stat boost will never affect these problems, you'd need something like an AC do a multiplier per enemy hit, until it actually starts devastating 40+ zergs. Abilities that actually can hurt players with large amounts of boons. And these also needs counter play, the most obvious place to put these are Siege since siege is a unique mechanic to WvW and thus won't affect other game modes, so they're in theory easy ways for WvW devs to affect the entire game mode with sweeping easy changes, without having to go through the balancing team and mess up their plans for the rest of the game. ---- Couple of things that affects both: * Points: One of the largest problems with the game, is that players completely ignore Points. It's an entire game mode designed around points being the "big thing", and players completely ignore it. This is creating more issues than I can shake a stick at, but the main ones: * Points was supposed to be the main thing to drive player behaviour * Thus it was the main way for ANet to try to adjust player behaviour * This has 99% been replaced by "Rewards" (Participation, PIPS, Bags, GoB, etc) If players cared about points, they'd defend, even if just to slow the enemy down, and then back-cap right afterwards. Because under a "point centric" game, that makes sense. If players cared about points, then big-zerg/blob is a moronic idea, because you can only capture 1 thing at a time. You'd split up into multiple havoc parties, run around and take everything that's undefended, and then team up to take things that are defended. That way you constantly have smaller groups running into each others, and get constantly shifting numbers at objectives. The mode would largely self balance itself constantly. If you already have 20 fighting 10 in a keep, it's better to use the remaining 5 man parties to take other stuff, the 20 can handle the 10 even if it takes a bit longer. When player doesn't care about points, all we're left with is: * Rewards (Participation, PIPS, Bags, GoB, etc) * Spectacle (Big fights, running over others, etc) And when those are the main motivations, you can see how and why we're stuck with the kind of player mentality we have nowadays. * Interaction: All of these things collects up into that players feel unable to meaningfully interact with the game. They feel like they can't do anything that makes a change, like they can't affect any outcomes, feel useless and insignificant, and obviously that's really bad for a "Game". Most players will generally not think too hard about any of these, and just associate it with something they personally felt changed this. So say a patch comes and changes X into Y, and that patch changed the player experience to hit under the tolerance threshold for player Z, then that player Z will blame that patch for the changes to the game mode, and will want that patch reverted in order to make "WvW great again!". When in the majority of those cases it's just a steady change/decline in player-behaviour that's to blame. The most obvious example: If ANet now caved in to my completely unreasonable demands to roll back the ENTIRE balance to 2014, which is the last time I felt class balance and wvw balance was good... the result wouldn't be very good. Largely because the player-base is completely different from back then, the player-behaviour is completely different, most players wouldn't enjoy the more skill based and more interact-able gameplay/balance we had back then, and would largely complain about everything we lost that they thought was fun (elite specs, new trait system, new stat sets, runes, sigils, foods, QoL, mount, gliding, every single guild bonus and guild aura grind etc) And it still wouldn't change that players today are much more reward driven, still don't care about points, still are lazy and want easy wins and stack servers (Population/Coverage/Fair-Weather). And even if we had better tools to deal with that (as we'd still have the near full powered old zerg-busting options with oldschool stability), there's even less people that would use those, as they require a different type of dedication/interest than the majority of players have today. ---- /rant Okie that's more than enough, I gotta shut up now. Sorry for the mostly unstructured mess.

As Grim has pointed out already, this already exists in the game and is called EotM. And all they really have to do to make that active, is give PIPS in EotM and it will likely become just as popular as it was back in the day when it had good rewards. The downside of that, is that normal WvW would wither up and die even further, and we'd get almost no new players in. So it would be the same old neckbeards and grognards we already got, endlessly complaining about stuff while not even filling EBG, wondering why WvW feels to dead. So it's as much a question of what ANet wants to do with the mode, and how they want to deal with it. The fact that they've kept normal WvW for as long as they have, and not just rolled everything over to EotM mode 5+ years ago, shows that there's still someone in the dev-team that cares enough about the mode to fight for keeping it. Otherwise I think they'd already have moved WvW over to EotM long ago just for a rewardtrack-karmatrain-farm map and moved on. Personally, I think that if ANet wanted to go the route to make the largest amount of players happy, they should enable pips in EotM and just shut down old WvW. You'd get a small group of very angry players, and a very large group of players that would think "Ah that's a bit nice, now I don't have to go into that sweaty EBG to grind out my gift any longer." essentially. Naturally that would have some very interesting repercussions down the line. /rant

Amusingly, this would actually counter all the people that sneak into towers/keeps using various sneaky unintended teleports/jumps or stealth to stay inside. Since they'd now have to kill the gate to get the capture circle to appear. I kind of like it.