Guild Wars 2

Thinking about the future of the game, I had this thought about another form of PvP or a Team Mini Game.

Pirate Vs Pirate!

I imagine 2 ships on a body of water. Each ship is equipped with cannons, row boats and a crows nest. It would be ideal if this was an objective based scenario where you either destroy points on the other ship with cannon fire and other attacks, or board and take control of the other ship.

Cannons, Sails, Eagles Nest and parts of the ship are targetable and losing each one has some sort of detriment. Each ship has a limited supply deck that they can use to repair destroyed or damaged parts of the ship. If all the destructable points on a ship are destroyed, then that ship sinks and the opposing team wins.

To board the other ship, you would need to plan rowboat boarding parties. Swimming to the other ship would not be viable, the waters should be shark infested to make swimming across a poor option. Enemy ship cannons can target rowboats and watch the chaos if they hit and sink the ship, and the enemy has to deal with hungry sharks!

There are a lot of pirate assets already in the game, it would be fairly easy to make use of them and expand the game. The pirate theme could be further expanded and you could offer other pirate costumes that a player and earn or purchase.

Oh my god, that would be amazingly fun, might be a stretch, but i’d love to see it added! Really, the more different features a game has, the longer its life span. Some games (cough wow/swtor) mistakenly add more content to the same parts of the game, where in reality they need to expand outward, by adding more systems and features for players to do.

In my mind, most of this idea is already implemented in the game, it is sort of a smaller scale WvW siege. The only thing not in game is a functioning row boat model. There is actually a row boat in Lions gate that caught my eye near the cooking station in a canal. I went and sat in it for about half an hour just because!

And I agree, more systems and features really help to enrich the game, and give everyone more content.

That sounds amazing. Two huge warships strafing each other while the players from either team try to shoot cannonballs and destroy each other’s ships.

*People lug cannonballs up from below deck to put in a pile of ammo that the cannons fire from.

*People grab toolboxes and stuff to try and (slowly) repair damage done to the ship.

*Players hopefully have a way to disguise or stealth themselves and get onto the enemy ship to sabotage their operations (or simply attack them if they’re suicidal).

Bonuses for certain classes for certain activities, like engineers repairing, fast classes get an inherent bonus to the speed they retrieve cannonballs, thieves sabotage things faster, and I guess they’d have to come up with something for the other classes.

Although it might get boring for the people lugging cannonballs and there might need to be some additional activities, I could see this being absolutely glorious and a really fun alternative mode of PvP to play.

Edit: Actually, it doesn’t sound very great by reading what I wrote here. I’ll have to make a more substantial post with some more detailed mechanics.

Those are some pretty fantastic ideas actually.

Carrying the cannonball to the cannon gives you one shot that starts a timer immediately upon pressing f to load the cannon with the cannonball you just retrieved. That way no one hogs the cannon, and its not just an endless cannon spam, and organizing boarding parties is encouraged.

Of course there can be other objectives on the map, islands with buried treasures, more Quaggans(they are hilarious), an underwater boss- RELEASE THE KRAKKEN!!!!!!

There are a lot of options that could be viable. And ANet already took a step in the pirate direction with the purchasable pirate gear. Time to increase pirate gear sales and give the players a pirate fight!

Okay, I wrote out some additional info that I think sounds entertaining. Let me open with a list of general mechanics:

1.Everybody is level 80 with base HP.

2.Everybody has 75 trait points to allocate when they join. Traits don’t add stats, but the minor and major traits work. Most traits probably won’t be effective in this mode.

3.Weapons are all standardized. Every greatsword does the same damage as every other greatsword, though they can look different.

4.Armors are all standardized. Armors from the same class all have the same stats, though they can look different.

5.Players do not heal automatically. There is no downed state. At 0 life, you’re dead. You can only be resurrected by other players. If you die on the enemy ship, you’ll respawn on your own ship in X amount of seconds. There is no gear repairing and you won’t lose a ton of money or achievement progress for death in this mode.

6.Cannonballs, when they hit a player, knock back and always deal 8000 damage (unless the target is under the Protection buff, perhaps?). Most classes will be killed in two cannonballs. Warriors and Necromancers can survive until three because they have higher base HP.

7.Utility skills can be swapped at any time, unless they’re on cooldown or you’re in direct combat with somebody.

I probably lost about 75% of the people reading this, didn’t I? I’m trying to create this mode to have direct player to player combat at a minimum. Because we already get that plenty elsewhere, right?

Activities:
1.Ammo replenishment: Players will run back and forth between the upper deck and the lower deck carrying cannonballs to put in an ammunition stack. The cannons will draw from this ammo stack, and if there’s no ammo, you aren’t doing any damage to the other ship or its passengers.

2.Healing and protecting: Because players don’t heal naturally, can be killed easily, and have to be resurrected, player healing and protection makes a big difference. Classes that are good at healing, such as water elementalists and guardians and engineers, will be loved. Also, during a strafe when the cannonballs are flying, utility skills that reflect or absorb projectiles will come in handy in guarding your cannoneers and other important areas against enemy cannonballs.

3.Shooting the cannons: The cannons can either be AoE target-type or aim-and-fire type, depending on what the devs want. Other than that, it’s pretty self-explanatory. Aim at the enemies themselves to damage/kill them, or aim at the enemy ship to deal damage to it.

4.Repairs: When your ship takes damage, noticeable cracks appear in the wood that your allies can use a repair kit to repair. The repair kit is received from a certain place on the ship and replaces your weapon skills. Repairing a crack uses a channeled skill that slowly restores some (but not all) of the lost HP from that part of the ship. Also to be aware of are fires that start above sea level and leaks that start below sea level as the ship takes damage. Engineers need to seek out and plug/put out these leaks/fires, as they act like slow DoTs in the parts they’re on. Slow, but eventually deadly.

5.Infiltration: When the two ships are within close proximity to each other, an individual can go to the mast. The mast has a rope hanging from it that he can use to swing to the other ship. That doesn’t actually happen, because he’d be killed instantly! Instead, the player in question appears at a random place on the deck, stealthed for 10 seconds, and disguised as a random enemy crewmate. The stealth is used entirely to find a place to pop out that won’t give away his arrival. After successfully slipping into the enemy crew, there are several activities:

5A.Ammo Sabotage: When you sabotage ammo, there’s no noticeable change. Except when the enemy cannoneer goes to fire it, it explodes inside the barrel, dealing the cannonball damage to him and anybody around the cannon and knocking him/them back.

5B.Repair Sabotage: Whenever you find an area with a leak that has been plugged recently, you can remove the plug so the enemy ship begins taking damage again.

Continued next post.

5C.Assassination: If you find somebody by their lonesome, say a lone engineer repairing a leak below deck, you have the option of assassinating him. While disguised, you have an option that, when used on the back of an opponent, instantly knocks them into a downed state (with no skills and no ability to type in chat) and removes your disguise. The downed state lasts 10 seconds. During those 10 seconds, you can perform a finisher “stomp” to kill that opponent. Other than the sound of a body hitting the floor, this kill is completely silent. Once the kill succeeds, you stealth for 5 seconds and attain the disguise of another random enemy crewmate. If you didn’t succeed, either because somebody walked in on you or you failed to hit the enemy in the back, you have a fight on your hands. Skip to 5E.

NOTE: I’m not actually sure how long the stomp finisher takes, exactly. Times will need to be tweaked for that.

5D.Survive: Try not to stand out. When you’re running around on the enemy ship, watch out for the guy you’re disguised as. He’s going to know it’s a saboteur if he sees a copy of himself running around the ship. And don’t stand around by another saboteur with the same disguise (lol). If somebody comes up to you and whacks you, don’t panic! He doesn’t see the damage numbers fly off of you (or any other damage feedback indicating an enemy) because you’re in disguise, but if you take off running or drop disguise and open up on him… skip to the next paragraph.

5E.Fight and Distract: If you’ve failed miserably at your job, you’re just going to have to bring down as many people as you can with you. Or maybe you simply attacked somebody on purpose. In any case, the ensuing fight should be heard by anybody above deck with their game not muted and enemies are going to pour down after you and brutally kill you. But hey, maybe that distraction is just what your teammates needed?