Guild Wars 2

I’ve recently been drawn to sPvP; I’m a longtime veteran of MMO’s with quite a bit of experience under my belt, but I’ve never found a game with PvP activities that I actually enjoyed (except classic WoW open world, but that’s different). So I have to admit, I’m far from a PvP expert.

However, I can’t help but feel that there is something lacking from the process of defending a point in an sPvP match. I play a Mesmer, sword/torch and staff, with an emphasis on stealth and illusion abilities. I can set up shop on a point and hold it for forever by bouncing around on clone cooldowns and cycling stealths to prevent taking heavy damage between heal recharges. On a few occasions, I’ve sat on a particular point the entire length of a match, under constant pressure, and not died a single time.

Today, I took a step further and held a point (the Mine on Forest of Niflhel) for 4 minutes; I showed up as an opponent was trying to capture it, halted their progress, and toyed with them for the first 30 seconds or so; they got 2 more people as backup, I still held out; their team captured the other two points and sent another 2 guys over at about 2:30 in. Being built for durability, I still had not yet killed off any of the attackers, so I was now facing 5 opponents. I held out until about the 4 minutes in mark, and finally fell.

The important part of this isn’t holding the point against 5 people, or anything like that. What really bugged me the most is that in that time, the rest of my team didn’t even capture one of the other two points. There were 6 others on my team, and I’m fairly certain the enemy only had 7-8 total as well, which meant that while I was playing Helm’s Deep at the Mine, 5 of my guys couldn’t take a point from 2 of theirs…

OK, things happen, big deal. Well, we end up losing the match, and I look at the scores. The rest of my teammates got between 70-150 points, even though we didn’t capture a single point the whole match. Most of it was from killing the NPC bosses and some from killing players. I only got 40 points, 10 of which was for point neutralization. I got the lowest score of the group, while bearing the weight of the battle, simply because I didn’t kill anyone…

Is it my “noob” mentality as a newcomer to sPvP that makes me think there is something wrong with this? If my team had been better organized, my holding the majority of the enemy team in one place for so long would have let us take both the other points, making my actions much more useful than them running around in circles killing stuff, not to mention I kept the enemy from capturing the point for so long. However, the system as it is doesn’t reward combat of any sort unless it results in a kill, and only rewards a single time for interrupting a capture attempt.

I know there are no easy fixes for this; it’s difficult to quantify the value of a distraction in terms of match success, especially if your team doesn’t take advantage of it at all. But is there really no reward for an epic, drawn-out slugfest over a point? Or is the only real worth in PvP to kill the enemy and take points?

Maybe this is just senseless rambling from a PvP “noob” but I can’t help but feel there’s a problem here.

You touch on the very issue with spvp: it simply doesn’t reward strategic play.
And even worse: it does reward selfish play.

It’s becoming my mantra when discussing spvp:

defending in spvp gets you nothing but killed…

Putting 8v8 on a 3 point map enforces this playstyle.
You never can defend well enough against a big group incomming.
Making spvp 5v5 too would at least force people to think.

Also consider this: a kill on a enemy point gets you 5 points.
A skirmisher kill gets you 10.
And than we’re surprised people run of after the first enemy they see in big groups, ignoring all objectives?

A defender kill gets you 10 points by the way. Good luck getting many of those kills when the enemy zerg is arriving…

I’m extremely disappointed with the way ‘casual’ pvp in this game is designed.
I never thought it could end up worse than WoW, where I come form, but it is.
And WoW random bg’s were already a mess where people got more points from kills than going for objectives.
Here it is even worse, something I never expected.

And that leads me to my other big grief with spvp:
why only that same game mode, over and over and over…?
If there are alternative game modes, at least some will cater better for strategy and team play.

In GW2 it’s basically: play tpvp or forget any form of strategy and team play.
In tpvp it is: put pugs against premades and enter uneven fights every tournament.

And yet the main focus of pvp for the dev’s seems to be on the paid tournaments. Even todays blog only talks about those.
The word ‘paid’ likely being crucial…

There is a pretty easy solution for this problem. Give Defenders 10 points for every 30 seconds they stay on the point (or some comparable value / time). Now at least you can earn 150 points for defending, even if no ones comes at you.

Those of you that have seen my name know I support a lot of things in this game, but I agree that the points system is not balanced that well overall. Some of the best games I’ve ever played I only had 45 or so points to show for it.

I don’t understand why AN didn’t just take the point system from LoL’s Dominion – 5 points every 10 seconds for sitting on a point defending it, 10 points for dying on a point to defend it (martyr bonus) would help tremendously in justifying point defense to players as opposed to the current method which really feels kitten.

Zyrusticae.7245:

I don’t understand why AN didn’t just take the point system from LoL’s Dominion – 5 points every 10 seconds for sitting on a point defending it, 10 points for dying on a point to defend it (martyr bonus) would help tremendously in justifying point defense to players as opposed to the current method which really feels kitten.

it could be that simple…

Well, that and reducing the points for a skirmisher kill.
How can that be rewarded more than a kill on an enemy node? That’s asking for people to neglect objectives.

Unfortunately, human nature prevents rewarding points for defending a node from ever happening and I hope they never implement such a system. Why? Because 90% of all people (give or take 2%) are lazy and pethetic enough to just sit at one node for a whole match in order to get some points. It’s common sense that this would happen and also sad that a lot of people would refuse to play a fun game just to earn points that do absolutely nothing.

Not to mention that even if just a few points were given for defending a node (with or without a max cap in place), any team that begins losing will have players who immediately stop trying and just stick to holding one node in order to get as much points as possible in the last few minutes. This means teams giving up way too early, which is not what you want in a serious PvP scene…at least I don’t. I’ve had an sPvP match a few nights ago where we 3 capped when the score was 458 (us) – 498 (them). We ended up holding all points without having anyone die as well as killed a few of them and won the match. It was a great moment for our whole team with lots of frantic, “Nobody die!” shouts.

tl;dr: These moments will no longer exist in sPvP with defensive scoring.

Strand, you are absolutely, 100%, COMPLETELY wrong.

Again, look at LoL’s Dominion. You don’t see people just sitting at points doing nothing all game, both because it’s not worth it and because it’s boring.

You can disagree with me and I respect your opinion, but I am going to guess you did not play SW:TOR. Now the difference with TOR was that scoring more points actually meant you could get better PvP armor a little sooner, however, even when armor sets became common place and pointless…majority of people on the losing team in a node match still bunkered down and gave up. That meant that if your team gave up, you had no choice but to do the same or if you’re on the winning team, you now have to wait out the rest of the boring match.

It doesn’t matter if it is “boring” or “not worth it” to players like you and me, but for many casual players or those who have the mindset of “My sPvP rank shows how awesome/good I am so I need to lvl fast otherwise I’m a n00b!!!”, they want to see the most rewards for their time spent…even if those rewards are pointless.

On a side note, LoL is a more competitive scene then GW2 atm, so you won’t see the same attitudes/behavior…especially if winning/losing affects your reputation/standing.

I don’t think a static amount of points per time block spent on a node would be a good idea, either. I think it should have some sort of qualifier, like actively engaged in combat, etc. Every time block spent in combat on a point that the enemy owns gives a certain amount of points that falls under interrupting their capture/ownership. Every time block spent in combat on a point you defend awards points that count towards defending your node.

Maybe throw in a modifier for how the odds are stacked for or against you. For the math-heads out there: C (time spent in combat), T (time block), E (enemy players), (A (allied players), G (glory gained)
C/T(E/A)=G
This means if you spend 30 seconds in combat, and the interval is set at 10 seconds, with 3 enemies and no allies, it would be 30/15(3/1)=G
30/15=2
3/1=3
2*3=6

So that means 6 glory for lasting 30 seconds against 3 enemies. That’s not game-breaking, you’re not going to farm an incredible amount of glory by camping a node, but it at least rewards strategy a bit more. And in the case of my circumstance that frustrated me into bringing this all up, that would be:
30/15(1/1)=2 +
120/15(3/1)=24 +
90/15(5/1)=30 = 56

Whereas the first guy fighting me would have gotten:
30/15(1/1)=2 +
120/15(1/3)=2.6~ +
90/15(1/5)=1.2 = 5.8
So that doesn’t quite work out… The idea is to award them less points because they have the strength in numbers, but that penalty is just way too much.

I can’t think of any better idea, to be honest, so I’ll just put this out there anyways, at the very least hopefully it will get the ball rolling on some brainstorming… this idea works out alright if you are outnumbered, but mobbing someone would get you almost no points at all. In one sense, mobbing seems like it should give significantly less points because it doesn’t take much skill, but in a tactical sense, mobbing could actually be the better route. Since we are trying to reward strategy and tactical thinking, I think that the equation I suggested isn’t quite the right route. On the other hand, the mobbing group might make up for the less points by capturing the point faster, or by getting more kills over time, etc.

In the end, I think there is an answer out there, but more research and thought will have to go into it.