Guild Wars 2

Avathor.1849:

1. The homebase, like in the King in chess, should be possible to overtake! Yes, i said it. And once taken, that team is out of the game, for this week. And most likely you go one tier down when the ladder updates (i dont know, perhaps monthly?).
The homebase should have TONS of npc`s fighting for the server, and for sure it would take some 3-6 hours just to get rid of them. And even more time if players are there. But still doable.

In a perfect world, this sort of high-stakes PvP feature would produce epic battles. In practice, though, it runs into the problem of time zone dominance. Flip over to the WvW forum and you’ll find many complaints about “night-capping” and suggestions for how to mitigate it. Your proposal would potentially punish dedicated WvW players/guilds for events that occur while they’re asleep by denying them access to their favourite part of the game. It would even punish the victors – if you knock out both of your opponents, then what do you do for the rest of the week? Swim around in the lake killing Krait?

Since much of the “final battle” content would be PvE, it would be susceptible to the usual PvE exploits (e.g. “everyone stand on this tree branch so that the NPCs won’t fight back!”) and would tend to favour players who are best at discovering and abusing such exploits. The aftermath of any defeat would be rife with accusations of hacking, cheating, spying, etc… which would be pretty bad for the player community.

You may want to look at the history of EVE Online’s “Sovereignty” system. They faced similar challenges (asymmetric PvP engagements across timezones, with serious consequences for a failed defense) and it took them years to develop a system which is (reasonably) fair to both sides. Their basic approach (similar to yours) was to include some sort of “speed bump” which delays the attacking team until (hopefully) the defending team is awake and online. In practice, the attackers are forced to do something unchallenging, boring, and repetitive (e.g. killing endless swarms of NPC mobs for 3 hours). Most importantly, the process for challenging Sovereignty in EVE is overwhelmingly not fun for either the attackers or the defenders, and you risk bringing similar unfun content into GW2.

I would model after world war II warfare and put tanks in there to smash everything to bits. And some aerial bombers too to impose your aerial might on the ground forces and lay waste to your enemies.