Much less talked about, but arguably just as damaging to the long-term fortunes of the game, was the banning of so-called "match-up threads" on the official forums. For the first year or two, every week would see the creation of a new thread for each of the tri-partite matches. Forum warriors would then slog it out with insults and zingers while armchaire commanders offered predictions and analyses of the results.
Even with ANet's hyper-aggressive moderation (there's an automated feature that turns every conceivable pejorative into the catch-all euphemism "kitten", for example) these threads often turned nasty. Rather than try to keep everything civil, which would have required even more moderators taking an even more pro-active stance, ANet decided they could do very nicely without the hassle, thanks.
Ever since then any post that even mentions the names of two different Worlds is as likely as not to receive the stern response "Match-up threads are not allowed", whereupon the entire thread will be locked. This heavy-handed behavior has led to the closure of any number of perfectly innocuous discussions but the decision itself is emblematic of a much deeper problem: ArenaNet simply don't understand the needs of their own players.
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| Inc to defend Hills (by air) |
When GW2 was new it attracted a very significant number of players who were looking for the next Dark Age of Camelot or Warhammer Online. There haven't been all that many MMORPGs that set out their stall based on "Realm vs Realm" but there's an established audience always on the lookout for the next one that tries.
The buzz and hype didn't last long. The lack of permanency was a factor. The game-mode had originally been predicated on matches lasting two weeks. That never happened. Eventually ANet settled on week-long matches but before then there was a lengthy sorting and data-gathering period using shorter periods, which made for a fractured and disconnected start.
Weekly resets didn't help but the main reason ex-DAOC and WAR players were unimpressed with what they found was probably the perceived pointlessness of the whole affair. Where DAoC had access to the Darkness Falls dungeon to fight over and WAR had structured progression both in land ownership and gear acquisition, WvW relied on a basket of buffs doled out to the entire server according to how well the world was doing in its current match.
Most people never even noticed those buffs, except when a normally dominant world slipped and PvE players logged in to find they'd lost a chunk of hit points. That was popular...
All of which left one overriding motivation to drive participation in the Mists: pride. For a while, server pride was undoubtedly real. In the same way true sports fans will support their team - and only their team - regardless of how badly the players play or what jackasses the coaches are, so GW2's hardcore WvW aficionados battled for nothing more than the pride of the name.
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| Inc to defend Hills (on foot) |
The coming of Multiserver technology poked a hole in that balloon. Where it used to be common practice for a beleaguered world to send someone to Lion's Arch to rally the militia over map chat, multiservers meant such pleas reached the ears of every server in the region. It quickly became both embarassing and unproductive and no-one did it any more. (The repeated destruction of Lion's Arch and the concomittant loss of a generally-accepted hub zone didn't help much either).
Over the years, ANet have tried any number of gimmicks to encourage players into The Mists. There were the Tournaments, which I loved but which had the unfortunate effect of initiating severe burnout in commanders. There have been numerous "special event weeks" - there's one on right now - and various carrots in the form of Ascended and Legendary armor have been dangled.
Nothing has made much of an impact on the steady decline in numbers of people logging in to fight over structures that don't matter on maps that never change. In a last-ditch attempt to keep the game mode alive we now have the doomsday proposal on Alliances that will rip everything up and start over.
Maybe that will work. Maybe it won't. What it has done, amazingly, is revitalize WvW for those who expect the worst.
In preparation for the new system (even though we have no idea when it will come or much of a clue what it will look like) a bunch of self-selecting heavyweight guilds decided they'd give the Alliance thing a go right now. That resulted in worlds thought dead coming back from the grave.
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| Guarding Hills (the spare one) |
Something I didn't know when I wrote about the phenomenon a few weeks ago was that the bulk of the carpetbaggers who resurrected Anvil Rock were guilds from Yaks Bend, my own server. Because I haven't bothered to sign up for the new YB Discord I missed all the drama but apparently Things Were Said that cannot be unsaid and Claims Were Made that must not be allowed to stand.
The upshot is that Yaks Bend is at war with Anvil Rock. And by great good fortune, since the split, we have found ourselves in the same match a couple of times. Suddenly we have something to fight for once again: pride.
As Wilhelm has frequently demonstrated in his tales of EVE Online, there's nothing like a grudge to get people to put in the extra hours. The Imperium took a thrashing and Circle of Two did a few things that won't be forgotten and all that fed months of economic grinding and a whole new War in the North.
EVE players, rightly, may regard most other MMORPGs with systems of territorial acquisition as something less than child's play by comparison, but children hold grudges too. The first week we played Anvil Rock was widely believed to be one of the most exciting Yaks Bend has had in six years. This week, the rematch, is pretty good too.
When the half-dozen or more sizeable and active guilds (aka "The Traitors") were with us I rarely saw full zergs on YB outside of weekends. With those people gone, we have them often.
We have commanders working in series to maintain "raids" for 10, 12, 24 or even 40 hours. I was in a squad last night where the commander tag hot-swapped twice without my even noticing, a practice which successfully keeps people following the tag for longer. I see names playing now that I haven't seen for years. The atmosphere is vibrant and exciting and the result is that I have played more WvW in two days than I normally play in a week.
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| That's a lot of work for 10 AP! |
What's more, we are winning both the territory-holding game and many of the big, set-pece battles. And I'm killing a lot of pesky AR. I'm still working on getting my Ultimate Dominator title by completing the Realm Avenger achievement, for which I need to record fifty thousand player kills. After six years I'm up to 36,200 and I got almost 900 of those on Saturday and Sunday evening. Nine hundred kills in two sessions!
As I type this, Yaks Bend holds every structure on Anvil Rock's borderland. We have waypointed all of their keeps, which was the plan when I logged out last night. While most servers like to waypoint one enemy keep for convenience, waypointing all of them - particularly their Garrison - is considered bad form by many. It's something you do to make a point.
The point in this case is that, contrary to the exit line taken by the Traitor guilds, Yaks Bend has not "fallen apart without them". Rather the other way around, if anything. And this is what competetive games are all about: pride and rivalry.
Pride and rivalry will motivate more people for longer than any amount of rewards. People will stay up late and go into work without having had enough sleep if it means they can hold their heads up and wave their colors high. It's not pretty and its not nice but it works.
Which is why ANet should never have banned match-up threads.
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