Upgrade costs are very high for some extremely basic things when you add them up throughout the play time.
If you are one of those players that guards camps and escorts Dolyaks as a very unrewarding service for your server, you could blow through far more gold than you will make when the enemy zerg rolls by and flips that camp very 10 to 12 minutes.
The upgrades are worth having but they can be rendered useless in seconds and therefore are rarely queued during the busiest time on the map.
Keeps are generally very tough to get into unless your enemy is not on the map or just has very low numbers due to the ability to lay out plenty of siege and keep it in places a zerg can’t reach unless they breach the walls. On towers there are not really very many practical and safe places to lay out your siege.
Tower costs are rather high to upgrade when most zergs can drop the gates in minutes with gollums or superior rams if they desire. I have watched a zerg arrive at a tower and melt gates in a mere couple of minutes if they are willing to use enough siege.
This brings about a fundamental flaw I think we have with both the structures and the siege equipment. The towers, especially early in the upgrade stage are far too soft and the siege prior to being upgraded is very powerful for invasion but weak as far as defense goes.
The difference between using regular siege and superior siege should be enough that we prefer to use the upgraded items rather than view them as luxuries that the more serious guilds use.
Three or four regular rams can take down most doors really fast and unless the enemy has stacked several arrow carts or invested in superior arrow carts and is standing right in that tower to defend the zerg is most likely getting into a tower at will. Most tower flipping failures happen when a smaller force is stopped by a bigger zerg and rarely the other way around unless there is a well prepared group already inside the tower manning heavy siege.
Running with a zerg pays pretty well if they are able to keep taking lands and flipping camps. When the action slows down, or the map has few places to conquer there is little to no incentive for the players to defend and upgrade much more than a keep, or garrison as no one expects to keep any of the towers they took.
The ability for guilds to claim a tower, keep, and castle seems to be a shell of what the true intent was meant to be. I believe when the concept was designed guilds were expected to take pride in their new “home” and defend it. The reward for doing so is nowhere near enough to encourage such a thing. This one aspect alone could help to break up zergs and place far more emphasis on defense if Guilds had something significant to win and lose when they lay claim to something.
If the incentive was big enough, they would come and defend from just about anywhere in the game. I would suggest that a claimed tower generate some bonus gold during its capture for the guild that owns it and a mercenary reward when allies defend it with appropriate awards.
As an example, if my tower made my guild one gold an hour, or produced suitable rewards for my guild’s occupancy but gave out a debuff, and or penalty that prevented us from claiming anything else for a time period, guilds would defend that with a enthusiasm. Zergs would get broken up quickly when a profit loss was at stake or multiple profit losses were at stake.
The mercenary concept could be expanded upon as well. For smaller guilds laying claim to a tower they would certainly want allies to defend it and help defend it granting an opportunity for roamers and small groups to get some decent rewards and money for fighting an enemy at the gates.
With this concept in mind I think we would see groups spread out scouting and fighting more often as well as defending due to the risk versus reward at play. Perhaps instead of having BL maps with 200 people massed at a keep pounding on each other we would see more tactical play and 200 people spread around the map keeping their eyes open for opportunities and dangers.
Basically if defending a tower or keep paid better than capturing them, and further if one could make more money by conquering and defending them, zergs would be more of a tactic for enemies that have nothing much to defend rather than the reverse.
I don’t believe that this idea is without flaws of course, but I do think it would give WvWvW a great deal more purpose and would appeal to most players wants and needs.
