Just four days until the pre-purchase head start release of Guild Wars 2 and the excitement levels are beginning to rise. I cannot wait to be traversing the full map of Tyria, enjoying the new areas never seen in betas and stress tests, feeling the thrill of the huge battles that take place in the world vs world areas and pushing my tactical skills in structured player vs player. Enough of that, we wouldn't want to get too excited. Onto today's topic - World vs World.
World vs World
Most of us will already know something about World vs World (WvW) but I shall assume no knowledge in an attempt to get new people into the true epic value of the game. World vs World is, in it's most basic form; a three-way server war! There are four main maps in WvW; one map for each of the servers taking part and another central area. Each of these areas are of equal size and layout, which is a very large size.
"World vs World is, in it's most basic form; a three-way server war!"
WvW takes place in a what is called "The Mists", this is effectively an area which is off-world, the lore of the mists is that they can re-create any battle in history for players to train on. This works the same way with structured player vs player.There is a main PvP area where players are able to hone their skills and setup their character's weapons selection, utility skills and trait lines in order to create an overall build before heading into structured PvP. WvW however, can be accessed from anywhere, simply tapping "B" (default) brings up the current statistics for WvW along with a button at the top of the window which allows you to join any of the four WvW maps. When any of the four maps are joined; your character is scaled up to level 80, this increases balance and allows new players to jump in and have a go. You will however still have the skills, utility skills and traits that you would normally have.World vs World is another feature in Guild Wars 2 which is generally unique to the game. There are other games which claim to offer a similar experience, none of which actually do! For example, World of Warcraft has "Wintergrasp" as it's castle siege PvP system which is fairly limited not only considering it is a basic system but the game itself has a great deal of limitations due to it's current age. There are a group of specific things that make WvW in Guild Wars 2 a much better experience. Firstly, there are three separate warring factions (servers), this allows for more balance as well as making the fights a great deal more interesting. Secondly, every two weeks (or each day at release) the servers are all swapped over based on the outcome of the previous battles. This is another really good way to keep balance between servers as close as possible. Finally, WvW is always joinable, you don't have to wait in queues (unless the map is full, hopefully this will be ironed out for release) you can always join throughout the entire two week period, then the next two week period comes in and you can join that.
So how does WvW work in Guild Wars 2? Well, that is a rather difficult question, there are so many factors involved. Let's start with the basics; on each of the server based maps; there are spawn points where each of the server's players will always spawn. There are also large castles, outposts and supply points each of which give points to the server who are currently in control of them. Once a supply point is taken, a supply transport in time intervals will leave from the supply point and move to the castles on the map. The supply can then be used to fix gates/walls as well as create offensive siege vehicles in order to take down the enemy. On top of that there are all sorts of territories and other events which all add toward a specific server's overall score. As you can see, it begins to get quite complex! That's all for the basics of WvW check back tomorrow for the next countdown post. I shall see you all on "Desolation (EU)" in the stress test tonight.
Picture to follow.
