World vs World in Guild Wars 2 is good, probably the best PvP system of any MMORPG in the last 5 years, but it’s certainly not perfect. Think of it as the common merry-go-round system where objective points are flipped between factions, but on a much larger scale and between three factions.

While the Guild Wars 2 system is quite a bit more complex than other PvP systems, the basic gameplay mechanisms are the same. Go to a hold point, take it over and move on. What I’d like to see is a little more sand added to the box, so below I’ve outlined my wish list for Guild Wars 2 World vs World.

• Guild controlled hold points – Instead of everything being controlled by factions, think of what would happen if individual guilds held the points instead. There would be more incentive for guilds to hold and control points if they received the rewards themselves. There would be more guild vs guild competition, even between friendly factions, to hold or take over new points. Guilds would also fight a lot harder to defend and hold their own points as opposed to players who might not care enough to defend a faction point because, hey, someone else will go defend it.
• Quick travel – Having to run back all the way to where you were each time you die is more than annoying, it’s a game killer and I can’t stand it. The penalty for death should not be wasted time. If you die, players should be able to respawn at the closet keep, with the only exception being if you died in a keep, then the next closest one. So you still have to run back to where you were, just not all the way from the beginning.
• Looting – Yes looting. There still needs to be a penalty for death and I think one randomly equipped item should be dropped when a player dies. There can be 2-3 safe slots so you can protect your most valuable items, but everything else should be free game.
• Breakable gear – All gear should eventually break. This would create a huge demand for crafted weapons and armor and yet another additional penalty for dying.
• Mounts – While I can understand the reason for not having them, I’d still love to see mounts someday make it to GW2 and WvW.

The ball is in your court ArenaNet :)

The first beta weekend kicked off for Guild Wars 2 yesterday, which gave me the chance to try out the game for the first time. If you’re a dedicated reader of Lorehound, you’ll know I’ve been looking forward to World vs World for a long time, so I spent the majority of my time there.

During this first beta weekend, only three races were available, Human, Charr and Norn. I decided to go with Norn and selected a class I normally don’t, a Thief.

I started off in a small town and immediately began trying to figure out how to get to World vs World, since it’s been said you can start there at level one. After a few mins of searching, I gave up and figured a NPC would tell me, so I began doing some quests. After a few quests and no help, I just started spamming the local chat until someone told me how to get to the Mist. Some nice people whispered me how and I was off. (Hero PvP menu)

You begin in a very small outpost that acts as an intro tutorial with three lessons. Once you complete that you are teleported to a slightly larger area with more tutorials and once done with that, you’re teleported to Lion’s Arch, a large city back in PvE. This was confusing for me because it took me a little while to realize this wasn’t World vs World. Why was I being sent back to PvE when all I wanted was PvP?

Around the area were four more portals, Blue, Red, Green and Eternal Battlegrounds. Having read up on the system, I knew those were the portals I was looking for, but I had no clue what color I was. The NPC at Lion’ Arch tells you to check you Mist Score Board, but doesn’t tell me how. I couldn’t find any game menus that showed it and had to look at key binding to find the hotkey for it (N). Once I opened the score board, I finally saw what color my server was and then entered the corresponding portal.

ArenaNet really needs to work on their tutorials for World vs World. Most of them were pretty bad, not just this one. If I was a player who didn’t know anything, I would have been completely lost.

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With Guild Wars 2 beta on the horizon, I can’t wait to get my hands on this game, specifically on the World vs World vs World PvP system. This is the first triple-A MMO game that I can remember in a loooong time that actually allows players to PvP exclusively from level one, all the way up to the cap, and is exactly what I plan to do.

No more boring quests; no killing rats; no deliveries, no linear story to follow and no random pointless NPCs to please. I won’t have any of it. The moment the first round of WvsWvsW beings, I will be exclusively battling it out against other players to help my server gain glory and power. With any luck, hopefully, I won’t have to touch the PvE part of the game ever. We’ll maybe not never, I don’t mind raids and high level dungeons so much, so I’ll probably dabble in those once I hit the cap.

My one worry about WvsW is the speed at which players level up. We all know PvE has lots of mechanics to gain XP with, but with GW2′s PvP, I’m really not quite sure. There needs to be a balance so that both level up at about the same speed, however that’s easier said than done. Some PvP players might decide to stay off the front-lines and instead help gather resources and craft, while others might exclusively fight.  EXP distribution will be a large factor as to what players decide to spend their time doing and if there’s a large imbalance, it might end up crippling the first few rounds of WvsW until they get it right.

With that said, I have full confidence in ArenaNet and will be pre-ordering my copy on day one. See you on the battlefield.