Guild Wars 2

You remember those scenes from Scooby Doo, when there was a hallway with lots of doors and they just ran from one to the other like crazy? That’s how I sometimes feel like in WvWvW. “Hey look, that completely undefended camp got captured because three guys just walked right behind our lines!” And then you run over, you recap it, but oh look, they did it with that other camp… and it just goes on and on. I know skirmishes are an important part of warfare, but this is ridiculous.

So here are some independsnt suggestions to fix this issue! Note that these suggestions are kinda mutually exclusive, I just wanted to present alternatives.

1. You can only capture a point if you hold a point next to it:
   Fairly straightforward. You cannot capture a point unless you hold one next to it (what points count as adjacent would have to be precisely determined, but it’s not a huge task); this would create “lines” of battle, basically there’d be front lines where all the fighting takes place and the rest would basically be safe. The problem with this suggestion is that it completely prevents skirmishes, surprise raids and surgical strikes, which would basically turn WvWvW into a massive tug-of-war; this may or may not be seen as a good thing.
2. Camps cannot be captured at all, they are attached to nearby keeps and towers:
   The idea here is that each camp is “assigned” to one or more keeps or towers, basically the ones it supplies. So when the keep is captured, so are the camps with it (unless they are assigned to something else as well, up for debate what happens then. Maybe keep trumps tower?) This would make annoying little runs against camps impossible; a keep under siege already doesn’t get supplies (the siegers kills the caravans), so that wouldn’t change. The issue with this solution is that you couldn’t starve a keep not under siege from resources by capturing its camps.
3. Camps cannot be captured, but can be neutralized:
   And extension of the above, camps are still assigned to keeps and towers and cannot be captured, but they can be occupied. Basically if you kill all the PCs and NPCs guarding a camp and stay there, it stops producing supplies and sending caravans; you can even pillage the supplies already there. As soon as all hostile forces leave the camp, it resumes production, so this would actually give you a reason to leave guards in the camps you raided; or not, you just pillage the supplies and flee! To prevent leaving just one guy in a camp to idle, NPCs will periodically attempt to recapture occupied camps. Note that occupied camps do not spawn NPCs for the occupiers, it has to be held entirely by players!

Here are some other small suggestions that would help with the issue:

1. Players can be spotted by other players and NPCs, display on the map:
   A simply idea, if a hostile player is seen by a player or an NPC of your server, they show up as red dots on your map. This would prevent enemy players from just “sneaking in” because NPCs have a limited range of engagement. It would also make communication and mobilization significantly easier, since everyone could just see where enemies are and how many. You shouldn’t win a battle just because none of your enemies reported how many you are in chat! As an additional idea, add simple, barely defended watchtowers all around the map; these would be strategically important and aid with spotting, but very lightly defended, similarly to the current minor points.
2. Punish guilds when points they claim are captured:
   This may sound harsh, but I feel that if a guild stamped their badge on a camp, tower or keep, then it should be their duty to defend it and if they fail, they should be penalized. Nothing too serious, of course, but enough to be an incentive. We don’t want to force people to WvWvW however (or to log on in the middle of the night), so the punishment would basically depend on how many guild members are in that WvWvW area versus how many are actually defending that spot. Basically “if you’re on the same WvWvW map and your point is under attack, you should go defend it!” is the basic logic. Could also possibly scale depending on the number of attackers to not punish guilds too much for getting zerged.

I think most of these idea would change the way WvW works a bit too much. I get where you’re coming from but at the same time I feel that WvW is such a big thing that some servers are still trying to figure it out.

I also think that being able to capture any point is pretty essential, otherwise everyone is just going to go to the front lines. It’ll pretty much empty the whole map except for the points next to hostile points cause you can’t do anything anywhere else. This seems like it essentially forces a super-zerg all the time. Sometimes it’s tactically a better idea to sneak around the enemy and capture a base behind them and give ’em the old pincer maneuver

I do however completely agree with punishing guilds that lose things they own. Although perhaps it would be better to reward guilds who protect their stuff rather than punish those who don’t. We could have a ladder in each server that shows the name of the guilds. You sort it by point/point type/total points. So you could say look and see which guild has held longview the longest, or who’s defended it the most. you could see which guild has held/capture/protected the most supply camps. You could see which guild has done the most defence in total. Of course these scores are only generated when defending a supply camp/tower/keep/castle that your guild owns.

I disagree. The whole point of world warfare is to put your main force in a position that draws attention while your small groups move around behind the lines cutting off supply routes and other important factors.

The problem is WvWvW needs a lock out that keeps one side from overwhelming the other simply because of time zone differences, 30 big pvp guilds vs 5 from the other servers, and just overall bad organization.

1st problem: Lockouts
You should not be allowed to have 100 guys from your server stomping the 10-20 from the others simply cause you have a higher server pop or your server has a different peak hours. That generates bad gameplay from the losing servers because they see no point in playing when they know the few things they cap will be gone in the morning. I would suggest a lockout of you can’t have more then 25, 50, 75, or 100 players out on a borderlands until all 3 sides have achieved close to the required number to unlock the next tier of players allowed out.

2nd problem: Free Server Transfers
WvWvW won’t be safe until these finally end. You have spies and players recruiting for guild chapters on other servers while their main body is using them to stop the competition. ANet has already stated spieing is part of the idea in warfare but when you allow the losing side to just switch to the winning team you end up with screwed up servers. I don’t care about losing, I care about my servers integrity.

3rd Problem: Organization
WvWvW is made or broken by the amount of communication and organization involved with your server. As I mentioned before with spies they like to spam chat with bad information. Zergs are just a group or groups of people with a large random following. Get together with a PvP guild and you may find yourself enjoying WvWvW more.

I was under the impression that you couldn’t join WvW for a week after changing servers. Was that scrapped?

I don’t know if WvW lockout was scratched, but I do know that you have a one day lockout from switching servers again. Even with the server switch lockout, you can still immediately WvW on that new server.

You can definitely WvW immediately after server transfers, I can attest to that.