Domm.8012

Lovely, now we can get banned for providing constructive criticism in dark mode I'm genuinely happy about dark mode finally coming to the forums though

This is going to be a long comment and I want to clear a few things up for a start. I completely agree that the issues of population disparity and coverage have to be solved in some way.I know that some of the things I'm going to suggest are an immense amount of work. FEEDBACK SECTION As a start, I'm aware that this might be unavoidable, but I'd prefer not to the community even more split than it already is. There are server communities that have been together since release, and without knowing the preferences and priorities of the matching system, these loose groups are looking at an almost certain breakup. With the amount of information provided in the post, for me as a player really hard to determine how this change will affect me in particular. There are some cloudy spots especially in the matching system that needs to be clarified to make sense. Quote: "World Creation builds teams so they have similar predicted participation, skill, coverage, and language. Team assignment moves players onto teams by calculating the contribution value of a player and using that calculation to distribute players fairly. We plan to track stats like play hours in WvW, commander time and squad size, time of day, and participation levels." This, in my opinion, bears multiple problems: Predicted participation is next to meaningless, due to the fact that you can keep T6 participation all day, just by taking a camp every 8-10 minutes. On the other hand, you have small groups of roamers and such, who contribute a lot with escorting caravans, defending camps, and other minor tasks like that, while likely not even passing T4 participation in the process. Skill, as in the form of individual player skill is almost, if not entirely impossible to determine unless you have hard data for damage, healing, and objective contributions like you do in PvP. Speaking of PvP, it would be unfathomably dumb to use PvP rankings to measure players skills in WvW, please don't even consider it. Playing with players speaking your language would be great indeed, but national servers already have a clear advantage when it comes to voice communication. Besides, people of the same nationality, eg.: the French and German guilds would most likely strive to form massive alliances of their own language, and by that making the efforts to keep playtime coverage almost pointless. Quote: "Guilds will be able to specify if they are a WvW guild. This essentially means the World Restructuring system will consider that factor at the start of each season when assigning the guild to a world. On an individual player level, once a player's guild has specified they are a WvW guild, the individual player will be able to set ONE of their guilds as their personal WvW guild. When World Restructuring happens at the start of a season, as long as you have specified your WvW guild, you will be assigned to the same world as everyone else in your WvW guild, guaranteeing you will be able to play with your guildmates." This would likely create a massive black market for guild invitations - period. As I already explained when talking about matching players of the same language, guilds and guild alliances would lead to a severe imbalance, with the addition of building elitism in the more competitive WvW scene (which to some degree already exists). Quote: "We understand that even though this system tries to keep guilds and alliances together, there will be times during the season when people want to change teams. Because of this, there are plans to allow transfers between worlds during a season. This means that new worlds will have size restrictions on them, as they do currently." This will make the new system inherit 90% of the current system's issues.The entire issue with the player base and coverage were that whenever a server was doing better, or much worse, guilds and people, in general, started moving accordingly. This will still be happening unless you make the transfers extremely expensive, which would be wildly unpopular, or make it available only for guild members, which would be even more unpopular, and would bring up the before mentioned issue of a market for guild invitations. (The second part is already half true in the proposed version with the 91-99% population phase.) SUGGESTION SECTION(pretty please don't ban me for bringing up WoW on the official forum, I'm not promoting/advertising it) I absolutely like the more guild oriented take on a large scale player vs. player game mode but in a much more structured way... Therefore, I propose the idea of Guild Battlegrounds.(I'm sure this has been brought up plenty of times on the forums but now it's more actual than ever.) I'm bringing up this idea, because at the moment there is next to no incentive for guilds to go for objectives, making the game mode, especially in T1-2 servers very stale. It would introduce more guild content, which has been asked for multiple times, and it would get away with a lot of cheesy advertisements because it has 'guild' in the feature name (actual guild wars in Guild Wars ? hint hint). With the Guild / Guild alliance system proposed with the WvW changes, it should be feasible to create a battleground system similar to what they have in World of Warcraft, but primarily guild focused.These could be anything from 15v15 (standard gvg size) up to 50v50 (roughly 2 guild raids) fights on maps designed specifically for this purpose. Isle of Conquest from WoW could work as the perfect example: 50v50 open map with side objectives and plenty of environmental interactions (gunship, siege tanks and other such things).For a map more in line with the current WvW maps, Alterac Valley is a good example of a mostly linear map with progression based on objective capturing. Basically, remove the competitive gvg from world versus world. This would help with population and commander balance since (in prime time at least) most of the top servers are carried by the 3-4 top guilds on the server. Lowering the total population of players on the map in WvW would help with (the lack of?) optimization as well as reducing the skill lag when having more than 60 or so people around the same objective. (the latter might still be a problem in larger encounters) Introducing guild battlegrounds, on the other hand, would bring up other problems, some of which I thought of are: Filling in emptied spots on the roster:Create a public queue.Record individual player statistics the way you do in PvP to create a rating for every participating player. If someone drops out, a player of the same class, and of a similar rating should be automatically selected from the queue. This would mean that only players that already have some degree of experience would be able to join and by this keeping the skill level relatively high. Blobs bruteforcing through the map:Fixing this is purely up to map design. Progression should require multiple side objectives to be held at once, splitting up the forces on the map and creating minor skirmishes while keeping the opportunity for big fights. Battleground design by itself could be weeks if not months of brainstorming and this post is already too long. Even if the battlegrounds were to be implemented, WvW would still have some remaining issues:No incentive for objective play. It's just simply faster and more profitable to go for kills instead of captures. The only real point in taking or defending is to have a waypoint closer to the enemy spawn.Skill balance (sb bubble, desert shroud skills): It's a general issue but it needs some work. As a general rule of thumb, I would make stability unstripable and resistance uncorruptable. Just give us a third unique borderland already!