Guild Wars 2

WvW players refer to the sieging of a fully fortified and defended keep as “The Long Siege”. The new map with the automatic upgrades seems like it will increase the need for the long siege.

The long siege is an attrition game involving supply denial, sieging and counter-sieging, and ability to fend off skirmishes. It is a very time intensive task that tends to turn off the more casual players (one reason they go to EOTM). Only the truly “hardcore” WvW players and larger organized guilds are able to accomplish a long siege. Experienced commanders who lead militia have come to know that sometimes so-called ktraining is needed in order to grow/obtain enough of the casual players on a tag in order to attempt a long siege and even after that they cannot stay long at the objective, but must hop back and forth to different maps or objectives as a way to hold the interest of followers and get opponent attention off the target objective.

As you go about balancing defense against offense in the new map, consider finding a way to hold player interest in the long siege.

One factor influencing the lack of player interest in the long siege is that a long siege in the current maps can take longer than the length of time guilds rally. This has had the effect of larger organized guilds complaining about opponents that won’t come out to fight them. Part of that comes from guilds choosing to not spend their limited playtime performing a long siege.

Another possible influence is that there often isn’t any “hand-over” mechanism. There’s no “big picture situational awareness”, like what an RTS provides. Guilds and militia commanders start their rallies and are unaware of the progress another earlier group made in sieging/defending as that group logs off. So they often start over from scratch.

In addition to increasing the time to fortify, has there been any consideration of requiring a certain amount of yaks to reach an objective in order for it to upgrade?

Looking at the current upgrade timers, they felt pretty fine actually in my opinion if you didn’t count the fact that yaks reduced the timers. The yaks were what seemed to make objectives upgrade way too fast. They also made it hard as an attacker to gauge how long I had to take an objective before it upgraded.

What about, instead of yaks reducing the timers, each objective simply required a certain amount of yaks to successfully reach it, plus the time on the timer, in order to upgrade? This would also make the “invulnerable yaks” tactivate a lot more meaningful as it would guarantee progress toward an upgrade (right now that guild upgrade feels a little underwhelming compared to the others), in addition to making escorting yaks feel a little more important.

Honestly, I think it’s pretty great the way it is now. The major problem WvW has always had is lack of permanence or incentive to defend, resulting in most maps being a series of very boring zergs running around the map in circles rather than spreading out, setting/defending siege, making a concentrated effort to blockade or protect supply, etc.

People that want to “casual” the mode should be incentivized to “casually” work on supply camps, as those are the lightest defended objectives intended to have the greatest turnover.

Also, gates and wall mounted siege equipment should never have been vulnerable to non-siege damage in the first place. It’s a design that encourages zerging in stead of setting up siege, and dumbs the entire design down. Assault should be about zone control of your siege emplacements, not running 80 people up to a door.

Making siege more important also makes supply more important, which in turn makes people treat their camps with a bit more care, especially with the new booby trap. If I never see another “flip and loot” run again I’ll be a very happy camper. The ability to do that in the first place is a large part of what makes wvw unsatisfying from a tactical perspective in the first place, and since there’s no real sense of ownership and the objectives are by and large either impossible or massively unrewarding to defend there’s no compelling payoff for playing the game in the first place.

Heck, what if we just changed the scoring system to only award points when upgrades are reached, and then over time once they are fully upgraded? This would make “flipping” a sub-optimal way to play.

Additionally, why don’t we scale personal reward relative to team placement? Handing out individualized rewards in a team based mode is the cause of a lot of the bad behavior we already see in WvW. Give people loot bags as they are now, but give chests with large chunks of loot and wxp once an hour based on total assets held and time held during that hour rather than primarily incentivizing attacking everything and upgrading nothing, letting your opponent take it, and attacking again to get rewarded better?

The personal reward for WvW do not fit the goal structure of the mode, and thus the “casual” players don’t care about the goal structure. Change the rewards and suddenly you’d find that they start caring.

Don’t know if certain amount of yak is needed. During test noone was really putting pressure to snipe yaks or prevent enemy having camps while main force attacks the keep, but during real gameplay it will most likely happen. When defenders use up the supply for repairs/siege they will see that they need yaks as well. Just my opinion.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Agreed. Things are a little too skewed in favor of defense currently and we have a few changes in mind. We want defenders to have an advantage, just not quite so extreme of an advantage.

Woaoaoa! Hold on, please. I have not been invited to a beta test of the new maps yet, so I cannot know whether stuff has changed in such a significant way, but when in this game have the odds ever been “too skewed in favor of defense”?

If anything, a buff to defense is still very much needed to bring an end to this long-running, low-effort, “raze the tower in under three minutes, and then move on to the next” fast-cap meta. The guild tactics shown in the past POI could finally be a first step into the right direction.

Chaba has been talking about the long-siege, a type of play that — I’d like to point out — many of us (but of course not all, and maybe not even the majority) consider the essence of a good WvW matchup. The long-siege was something that has been pretty commonplace in the early days of WvW, before builds and tactics had been min-maxed. But over the months (years), with tactics becoming more optimized towards scoring PPT, and scouts being harder and harder to find, the fast-cap meta took over. Personally, I haven’t experienced a decent siege in months. While a long-siege would still be very well possible today, commanders (and zergs) have become way to impatient to spent the required time, and the next free fast-cap is always waiting just around the corner.

The true problem of the long-siege is this, again correctly identified by Chaba:

Chaba.5410:

As you go about balancing defense against offense in the new map, consider finding a way to hold player interest in the long siege.

Making the long-siege more interesting is the core term here. Making an objective easier to cap is certainly not making it more interesting for the defender. And I’d even argue it is not making it more interesting for the attacker either, unless she/he is completely loot-minded. The dilemma of a scout is that there is too much donwtime and too little activity while doing the job. (And don’t get me started about rewards.) And if an enemy finally arrives (usually zerg-sized), there is most of the time only so much the scout can do other than crying for help. Find mechanics to make both (the downtime and active defense) more interresting and engaging, and you have hit the jackpot here.

There are plenty of us scouts and builders who love the strategic RTS-like aspect of WvW. We rarely see any of the loot or WXP other players farm so efficiently. (Heck, I spent 2000+ hours in WvW, and I am merely at WvW level ~500.) But we accept this since we want to play strategically for our server.

If you want to respect the playtime of your scouts and builders, don’t make them just impotent bystanders who see the objective they looked after for many hours being razed in mere minutes.

My 2 copper.

~MRA

MRA.4758:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Agreed. Things are a little too skewed in favor of defense currently and we have a few changes in mind. We want defenders to have an advantage, just not quite so extreme of an advantage.

Woaoaoa! Hold on, please. I have not been invited to a beta test of the new maps yet, so I cannot know whether stuff has changed in such a significant way, but when in this game have the odds ever been “too skewed in favor of defense”?

Well, you’ve answered yourself, you weren’t in beta. Believe us, they overshoot with defense in this map. It is too early to tell because lack of proper organized gameplay, but there is simply too much stuff. What brothers the most are auto turrets (by guild claim and keep shrines buffs). It is okay to help defenders to slow the free flipping of a tower or a keep, but not at the cost of having to deal with dungeon like bosses, hordes of guards, turrets and ambient effects everywhere.

I do agree with the rest of your post, long siege are some of the best moment I had in WvW, both on defending and attacking side. It’s just I want to fight players, not NPCs and turrets.

@MRA: With all the buffs to defense, that Anet makes for so long (starting with stronger ACs, trebs wiping supplies, thru the recent guild claims like indestructible cannons or invul walls), I think that there will be no place for long, siege, or any siege, in WvW anymore. Anet works hard just to make flipping upgraded keeps impossible, except sneaky attack in offhours with a zerg of reasonable size. This will make no more any fights in the “so cute” new borderlands. Also you, as a defender and builder, could be not so happy, when you will run on your renforced keep’s walls refereshing precious sieges, and no one will ever try to attack…

The good point of this is no more ktrains on borderlands. The bad – dead zones with reinforced keeps with tons of sieges inside. No action on borderlands at all, except – if the opposite server has a good night coverage – a sneaky zerg attack wiping all your keeps in offhours…

TLDR: too much effort in making keeps impossible to take over = no action in prime time, the server with biggest offhours zerg always wins… Actually it happens for long on many middle tier servers.

I have not had the chance to try the new BL myself yet, unfortunately, but I agree with both Chaba’s and MRA’s views on the long siege.

For WvW to have that epic warfare feel, the long siege needs to be improved somehow. Which means fights over towers and keeps need to be drawn out not shortened. Most fights in the current BL are way too short in my opinion. By the time a group has rallied to defend a zerg can quickly steamroll a tower and cap it. Another problem I feel WvW has is that it currently feels like there is only ever one big group running around the map, with the rest being small groups and roamers, which makes the game mode feel too small and not very epic.

Things I would like to see in WvW:

- Longer fights over towers and keeps (the long siege).
– More strategic importance to towers and keeps (beyond point scoring).
– Reasons to have several large groups in different areas of the map at the same time.
– More reasons to keep supply chains intact.
– More impact from scouts (enemy spotting on the map for example).
– Situational conditions that effect battle (bad weather conditions for example).

WvW desperately needs to move on from the tower flipping meta and needs to start being an epic war for control and domination. It needs more RTS.

Rin.1046:

Things I would like to see in WvW:
[…]
– More strategic importance to towers and keeps (beyond point scoring).

All structures are vital for mobility, as owning a keep or a tower significantly change the way you move around. Upgraded towers will be able to spot enemies

Rin.1046:

- More impact from scouts (enemy spotting on the map for example).

The stress test already had this and the final release will have it.

@Rin: The long siege may be fun for many player. The thing is, that increasing the defense capabiliities of keeps wont make the siege longer, it will just make no sieges at all…

http://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html

“When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, the men’s weapons will grow dull and their ardour will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.”

Long sieges may be fun and engaging for a subset of players, but as was pointed out above, they aren’t done as much these days as they used to be early on. Players lose interest in them for whatever reason. Maybe it is just human nature to lose interest in it because it requires delayed gratification. The gratification that players get right now from the game for the time they spend in WvW are found mostly in the fights, not the sieges (or scouting/defending). And we all know a siege can fail, which should happen, and there is no reward for that time and effort, especially if the opponent never sallies forth.

But yea, correct. I’m not trying to suggest that attackers should be able to burn through objectives. Only saying there needs to be something in-game maybe that promotes players keeping interest in a long siege or that a long siege shouldn’t be longer than, for example, a timezone’s prime time.

Long sieges are draining on people’s patience, focus, and interest. Yes it feels good to finally bust a waypointed, heavily defended T3 keep. The payoff that our commanders promises us for spending this much time is the eventual fights (or bags) inside once we break through. Most people are not keen on spending so much time grinding supplies down, trying to damage walls/gates while being farmed by hundreds of arrowcarts, treb shots, etc.. and the long boring resupply runs while getting picked off by gankers.

Speaking as someone who spends a lot of time playing, the last thing I want to do after a long siege is another long siege. If I find that there are no fights to be had outside of siege infested areas, there’s a good chance I’ll logoff after 1 long siege. You as game developers need to make sure there’s more than just dealing with siege and annoying things ingame (I find eotm-style turrets and side distractions annoying while attempting to fight players). People like fights, and often fights are the incentives for players to even attempt these long sieges in the first place.

And as OP mentioned above, casual players don’t have the patience, will, interest, or often they simply don’t have the time to join in on a long siege. So they often will skip these sieges altogether if they see a heavily defended keep where defenders are not willing to come out to play. You most definitely lose casual players if WvW is designed around long sieges. Just put yourself in their shoes, if you have 1 hour to play, do you want to stand there and watch siege wars? No, you want to kill people and play your class.

Back in DAOC days, we always told Mythic that the fun part to sieging keeps & towers isn’t really the siege aspect of it. The fun part is the actual fighting that occurs after we break through, and it became every men/women for themselves inside the courtyard. For defenders the fun part wasn’t to siege camp. The fun part was coming out to fight, giving it all once they’re in the courtyard, or making a last stand at the lord room.

gavyne, how is it possible for the game to promote the fights, increase the willingness of players to perform a long siege, without nerfing defense too much and turning into a ktrain?

Chaba.5410:

gavyne, how is it possible for the game to promote the fights, increase the willingness of players to perform a long siege, without nerfing defense too much and turning into a ktrain?

Can start by promoting the “fights” part. Defenders have it rough in this game because of how ground marks work, and how aoe’s extend beyond walls range. Anybody attempting to get line of sight to cast down from the walls get insta gibbed. Anybody attempting to use a cannon or oil gets insta gibbed. Anybody not insta gibbed is insta pulled…and killed. This game is very anti-defenders.

So what Anet has done is to gift players with annoying arrow carts, door trebs, and such to compensate. Unfortunately all they’ve done is to turn the game into siege wars during these long sieges, where players are more annoyed than having fun. With majority of the defenders & attackers doing pretty much nothing while they sit and watch the siege war go on for however long it takes. Defenders can’t do anything other than rain arrow carts or run trebs. Attackers can’t do much of anything other than run around dodging red circles, dying, rinse & repeat until one side has the will & numbers to break through.

I have no solution, as this game is designed differently. They would have to change the core design of the game so attackers can’t instagib defenders on the walls or defenders using stationery sieges such as cannons & oil. Allow people a chance to fight rather than sit inside raining arrow carts and waiting for the walls to go down. Like I said, DAOC promoted fights both in and out of keeps. Here, it’s way too much siege wars. That and skill lag once you do clash inside, so the promise of a fight often are ruined by not being able to use your skills. Oh and all the while you’re trying to have player vs player battles, you’re getting rained on by ac’s, cata’s, trebs, etc.. That last stand lord room defense we saw in DAOC? Don’t work here, you’ll get rained on by ac’s, cata, bals, trebs, etc..

I can stomach it, for 1 long siege, maybe. But your average gamers and casual gamers, they likely won’t make it through 1 long siege. Which is why WvW has turned into a niche for the enthusiasts rather than the casuals.

Dawntree.7246:

Rin.1046:

Things I would like to see in WvW:
[…]
– More strategic importance to towers and keeps (beyond point scoring).

All structures are vital for mobility, as owning a keep or a tower significantly change the way you move around. Upgraded towers will be able to spot enemies

Rin.1046:

- More impact from scouts (enemy spotting on the map for example).

The stress test already had this and the final release will have it.

That’s good to hear, and I must admit I have high hopes for the new map.

@Xeno – Longer fights doesn’t necessarily have to mean tougher walls or gates. It ideally means players fighting each other for longer. If you funnel players together more, which it sounds like the new BL will do to a certain degree, you increase the uptime of conflict.

The exciting part of WvW (for me) is then you get two equally sized and skilled zergs clashing over an objective. Those moments (rare as they can be) are fun and can last a good while. Not hours, but not a couple of minutes either. If one group simply cannot defeat the other, they will know when to quit and regroup. The trick to the long siege, in my opinion, is finding ways to get players to clash against each other more.

The towers actually seemed very easy to take as there was a half dozen or more walls on any of the towers u could just cata down. The towers are so huge now that it is nearly impossible to to cover all the vulnerable walls with siege.
The keeps on the other hand seemed like they always had choke points atleast at the lords room.

The biggest way to insure big fights outside the walls is to have locations receiving no yacks get a surrender timer. I don’t know what the average guild run time is but for example set it at two hours. Or it could be if you build siege works in all the marked locations around a location and each one is occupied by a player the siege timer starts. Building siege works is basically standing in a siege spot and hitting a dig command maybe one supply needed per spot. Breaking the siege is both running the players off but also distorting the siege works so it takes a few minutes to do. Or just stoping the yacks a better system don’t know.

This might not be necessary change if guilds would realize that trebs and catapults at long range from a big zerg can quickly down walls as long as you keep the supply routes cut. Yep ideas like following probably not needed as you start shelling somewhere they going to want to come out and stop you at some point thus fight.

Another guild fighting idea is a guild challenge. If your guild leader makes a challenge to a another guild on map from a challenge field near the challenged guilds location if the guilds are both able to field 10 plus players then a challenge will begin, if the challenged guild refuses there is a honor penalty and challenging guild gets small honor reward. Then the smaller group involved sets size of team and selects it’s challengers who are then tagged for the fight, the larger group then tags and equal number of players then the tagged players are put in the field and all other players placed out side tagged players and field immune to effects from outside. Reward to winner. This duplicates medical and other cultures arranged duals before battle, if this changes ownership of something can be discussed.

Mindless zerging is fun for a short while but except for the grinders not rewarding long term. And we have the edge of mists for players to do it plus the old maps.

Yes most rewards should be off of tracks that you earn by amount of time in wvw doing qualifying things. Eventually there should be map commanders who can assign roles but until that up to a certain percentage say 10 percent can select scout buff, then they earn credit by vote of friendly players on board for each half hour on if they get credit. 10 percent more can get credit for Yack protection again with vote so they protecting and speeding yacks that need protecting and speeding. 20 percent more can get credit for repairs and manning defenses. The rest must show they damaging things and killing things and taking camps or working with zerg.

Reward for holding must always be ,much higher for commander credit and rewards as players are being paid by NPC’s and Leaders are judged by populace way more negatively when they lose something then when they gain something.

Walls should give a stability and defensive buffs to people on them so they can’t be pulled and non siege weapon damage greatly reduced. One defender should be able to hold off 3 to 9 enemy on defense depending on what they holding.

I know of a few guilds that rally for only 2 hours. Others seem to rally for 3.

IMHO if a guild is seeing progress/having fun within the length of their rally time, it is more likely for their members or even their guild as a whole to stay playing longer. There’s always the effect of “one more fight”. On the opposite side of that, I’ve seen guilds call their rallies early when they feel they cannot make any progress/get the fights they want.

MRA.4758:

But over the months (years), with tactics becoming more optimized towards scoring PPT, and scouts being harder and harder to find, the fast-cap meta took over. Personally, I haven’t experienced a decent siege in months. While a long-siege would still be very well possible today, commanders (and zergs) have become way to impatient to spent the required time, and the next free fast-cap is always waiting just around the corner.

Because the scoring system does not encourage the two weaker servers to team up against the stronger server. There’s a weird interaction that occurs between the scoring system and the glicko rating system here.

1) The PPT system encourages the two strongest servers to 2v1 the weakest server.
2) The Glicko system encourages the two weaker servers to 2v1 the strongest server.

Because #1 (“The match score”) is far more visible to the casual player and some of the more inexperienced or “short-sighted” commanders, it becomes the overall strategy employed, which leads to a lot of the population imbalances. It is the path of least resistance. The strongest server in a match usually has the most objectives that require a long-siege (or a successful ninja attempt). That leads to the two stronger servers ktraining the weakest server in a match. If the weaker servers do not ktrain each other, they’ll lose more PPT because tying up forces to perform a long siege against the strongest server means giving up PPT from the paper stuff. When more players choose this strategy, imbalances in population become more pronounced over time until it becomes no fun for anyone.

The #2 strategy is best for the majority of servers in a match because Glicko gives better rewards based on performance against a stronger server, but few people seem to understand this. The notorious TC/JQ 2v1 against BG in Season 2 only came about because of the number of commanders and players who understood this longer-term strategy. Again, most players avoid this because the stronger server usually has the most objectives that require a long siege. Maybe Anet can add a “predicted rating” to the scoreboard. XD Or find a different match-making method or rating system.

I know some people like long sieges, but some don’t, including me. To me they’re a boring slog. 3-4 players man siege, hitting the same 1-3 buttons over and over again, while everyone else stands around and watches. The only person that gets to do anything interesting is the commander, who makes the decisions of how much supply is need, what siege should be placed where, etc….

Also, when people disagree over the relative strength of offense vs. defense when it comes to attacking a keep (and to a lesser extent a tower – towers are tougher in the new map), we should differentiate between how powerful defense is, and how much people actually want to do it.

As designed, defense is extremely powerful. In fact I’d say it’s by far the biggest force multiplier in the game. 5-10 organized people inside the walls can shut down a giant enemy zerg. In the current map (not sure if this is possible in the new one, never got a chance to test it) a single player with a gate treb can stop a ktrain by themselves.

The thing is that effective defense requires a scout who’s on point, and people don’t like to scout because it’s boring. There are a few people who enjoy it and do it well, but they’re rare. Commanders don’t like to tell people to do it either. I never liked telling someone “you babysit this tower while the rest of us go out and have fun.”

So if you’re one of the people saying defense needs to be buffed, I hope you’re saying the incentive to defend needs to be buffed. Defense itself, if an objective is actually manned and has supply, is crazy powerful already and doesn’t need any more buffs.

I feel like a lot of this could be remedied if Anet prevented damage from going through gates (with the exception of special skills like the ram skill that is supposed to go through gates). You’d eliminate gate trebs and the ability for defenders to aoe/disable rams through the gate, which would make the newly designed killbox areas around gates in the new map a lot more relevant and less overpowered. Ramming a gate should be more risky than cata/trebbing, of course, but it should still be possible if you want to make long sieges interesting.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Agreed. Things are a little too skewed in favor of defense currently and we have a few changes in mind. We want defenders to have an advantage, just not quite so extreme of an advantage.

One of the planned change will be to increase the amount of time it takes for an objective to fully upgrade to Fortified status. So you will be less likely to encounter fully fortified objectives.

I think if you go into the statistics of when objects upgrade you’ll find that the objectives frequently get upgraded due to coverage imbalances. If the first shift of a server logs onto paper vs. fortified then that change might not really affect the experience for most players in most tiers.

Chaba.5410:

gavyne, how is it possible for the game to promote the fights, increase the willingness of players to perform a long siege, without nerfing defense too much and turning into a ktrain?

One idea might be to automate the siege. This means players can choose to stay and defend the machines from other players (fights) or they can leave the machines and go seek fights elsewhere without giving up all progress.

While I am indeed thrilled that the new system gives defenders more, movement abilities on the map. Less babysitting, I to am concerned about the easily available amounts of defense at thier disposal.

In some ways this makes losing things to enemies even more time sensitive and builds meaning in losing and gaining objectives. However, it definitely does not fit the more relaxed nature of Guild wars as a whole.

Gamers to this game tend to have limited quantities of time to invest and to spend a whole night taking one objective just isnt going to happen.

I am glad to hear there are some buffs your considering to Offensive tactics.

Have you considered tying in buffs to offensive groups based off the Day/night cycles in Guild wars? For example during “Night Time IN GUILDWARS”, White swords take longer to pop up on a Keep or tower? Something of this nature?