Balancing skills or changing matchmaking, won't fix what matters

[Riba.3271]

The WvW we fell in love with had a place for newer players while providing long term goals for the community. Siege and objective balance was in a way that it was a joy to attack things and get balanced fights out of it. Siege slowed down the attacker, supply count mattered and new players had a place utilizing supply or siege. Communities had a reason to provide guidance to new players, and tried their best to climb as high on the ladder as they could by trying to organise and educate people.

Now we entered the era of shield generators, boon golems, empty borderlands and community graveyards. It is just pointless to try buy time with siege or drain supply when very few people are willing to actively participate in sieging down objectives knowing that it won't bring good fair fights. Meanwhile there are gazillion people, guilds and commanders willing to defend knowing that they will have massive combat bonuses. Organising randoms or climbing up in tiers also has its limits, because ín return your playercount will be exactly same as enemy servers after relinking.

No matter how you balance the skills the big picture won't change: hardcore players will farm the casuals, queues will be bad at higher tiers and lot of people will try to be with winning team. What needs to be done is to fix the game so that there is something else to do than open field humping. Make the game so that siege matters. When is the last time anyone saw a trebutchet that didn't involve SM? Slow the attackers down... But give them better combat experience. Allow pushing objectives slowly. The optimal strategy for fun at 99% of situations shouldn't be stacking boon golems and shield gens, and never trying same objective again if you fail.

Now moving onto how to fix server wide communities, entities that are much larger and impactful than guilds. Well this is quite simple: Provide people stable playerbase without anyone having power to kick anyone else out. So not alliances. Not 500 man guilds consisting of guilds. Not server linkings. But an environment you either have to fix problems in, or find a better place. Yes, stable playerbase does mean some servers will have less playerbase than others, but that is why tiers are there. They can always become active again by providing people entertainment, and even if they don't, they will face against other smaller servers. It will be and feel fair, and they will have a goal, to climb up the tiers and attain the eternal glory of being known by everyone.

Summarizing main points, what we need is to bring back good combat for objectives by making disorganised clouding a terrible strategy again. Then all kind of groups will feel good at attacking objectives, and bring good times to enemies as well. They also need to slow down this revitalized experience by returning some of the time defenders have. Longer, better experiences? Yes, please! Larger communitites also need more impact by having stable playerbase they can influence. Changing people, tiers and active timezones around so often, will just end up in a mess no one can bring together.

As a sidenote, why is desert map still there? It isn't popular and all it does is make the scoring seem a joke. One server has completely inactive home map with different mechanics, and other 2 have active maps. It is supposed to be a competitive gamemode, both scoring and combatwise. Desert is an okay map, but it just doesn't have comparable activity or balance. At least developers should pretend to care about competitive balance by having 3 desert maps replace 3 alpine maps every 3 weeks. It was such an carebear solution to keep just 1 desert map around, eactly like keeping link servers around. So many things are a mess because of this indecisiveness. One makes the whole scoring a joke, and other just lets people stack infinitely with a cheap transfers anywhere. I get it, the developers are too nice to make decisions and are like a king that can't decide which farmer has rights to the land. Make a decision, it is literally the kings job.

[flyingplanet.6912]

Most of the things you wrote were discussed before for many years. It just never happened. I don't think devs even consider any of the suggestions offered here as you can see from recent balance patches. Also it's not because they have different visions to wvw, but more like they have no intentions to put any resources onto wvw. 
The only updates that you will see in wvw is when:
1. New game with similar identity comes up: You will probably notice by now alliance beta events generally align with big game release dates. 
2. They seem to throw some random events in competitive modes like experience boost day if they see too much uproar/dooming in community like reddit because of slow pve updates (dunno who would be having fun with that though).

So overall it would be faster for you to just wait for another game that meets your favor and play that. They have already allocated their budget to whatever their yearly plan is and certainly WvW is not part of it. Also as a sidenote, BDO have launched wvw-like system recently.

Edited August 19, 2023 by flyingplanet.6912

[XenesisII.1540]

2 hours ago, Riba.3271 said:

It will be and feel fair, and they will have a goal, to climb up the tiers and attain the eternal glory of being known by everyone.

lmao

Ok bandwagoner.

Ok stacker.

Ok blobber.

Is that the glory you're looking for?

There's no glory or challenge in stacking a server with twice the players of other servers with 24 hour coverage. Winning in this scenario means nothing, it might have meant something in the first couple years, but that before everyone wised up and realized it actually doesn't. The tournaments proved that this could never be "fair" to every server, it wasn't based on "skill", it's whomever had more numbers and coverage, which absolutely does not work for a competitive environment, which at minimum requires sides to have even numbers.

Balancing skills, or changing matchmaking, or flattening out population, won't matter much as separate individual solutions, but it's all needed in some way, including some others such as motivation, in pushing players to go after the winning servers, no two strongest vs the weakest, it has to be two weakest against the strongest. Balancing the game just for 50 boon blobbers shouldn't be a massive advantage to overcome, smaller groups should be allowed to overcome this with skill, positioning, and tactics, something that is quickly disappearing as the tools to do so keep getting nerfed.

I'm starting to think we shouldn't even have tier matches either, or it should be static tiers so we don't see something like BG down in T4, or maybe an ESO system of fighting in a month long campaign to get an Emperor/Empress would be better. You want glory? that's probably how it needs to be done http://tamrieljournal.com/become-emperor-in-eso/ even though I'm pretty sure I know who the first one will be. Or bring on actual leaderboards for everything.

Not like any of it matters, Anet checked out of wvw since 2017. We lost another lead dev, we lost the alliance update news, hey maybe Floyd took the laptop it was typed out on and now anet can't find it and he won't return their calls while he's helping put out D4 fires at blizzard. 🤷‍♂️🤡

[Zyreva.1078]

The linking system has it's flaws. World restructuring will have it's flaws. But the old system of single static servers cleary didn't work out very well either and there is no point in going back there again and pretend it creates a more competitive enviroment or anything close to that. It's better to treat WvW as the sandbox mode it really is, and make sure players can have fun in  as many ways as possible - and that's where class balance as well as a somewhat reasonable population balance comes into play, because those things actually have a impact on everyone's gameplay. Not some imaginary competition for glory among a bunch of bandwagoners on stacked servers (if there's even more than one).

2 hours ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

I'm starting to think we shouldn't even have tier matches either, or it should be static tiers so we don't see something like BG down in T4, or maybe an ESO system of fighting in a month long campaign to get an Emperor/Empress would be better. You want glory? that's probably how it needs to be done http://tamrieljournal.com/become-emperor-in-eso/ even though I'm pretty sure I know who the first one will be. Or bring on actual leaderboards for everything.

Unless things have changed a lot during the past few years - which i doubt - the ESO campaign system is even worse than what we have in GW2. Static campaigns instead of dynamic tiers means more population imbalance - usually each alliance had their "own" campaign where they can dominate with little to no resistance outside of maybe a few hours of primetime and there is no mechanism to counterbalance this. But well, Cyrodiil doesn't even have enough population to create a proper tier system, so yea ...

And there is nothing competitive or glorious about becoming emperor - it's all about playing a lot and being on the most populated alliance. It was (is?) even possible to become emperor by doing nothing but repairing walls 24/7. And once an emperor is crowned it gives even more advantages to the already dominating side. Because that's always a great idea, isn't it?

Edited August 19, 2023 by Zyreva.1078