My Additional Points
Observers: Stronghold will be no better than conquest for viewers and will likely be worse. Like conquest, Stronghold divides players between many locations at once. You can’t focus on any one fight without missing another. The fights are still laden with particle effects ending in “Oh, someone died”. And if you focus on a fight, you quickly lose the big picture. But unlike conquest, which has a relatively simple to grasp indication of lead and momentum, stronghold’s indicators are more plentiful and less concrete. Further, watching players fight NPCs is kinda boring.
In my opinion, conquest wasn’t well received by viewers because the focus was misplaced in early shout-casting. The part of conquest which has more appeal to the less knowledgeable observer is the map-level: the score, who is losing or gaining nodes, and player positions. Instead, focus was on fights, which was a mess of particle effects where even knowledgeable observers couldn’t see most of what was happening. This was exacerbated by early bunker-heavy strategies which lead to less dynamic map play.
The snowball argument for conquest is mostly born out of disparate skill levels between the teams. When teams who are closely matched in skill play each other, the match is often back and forth with close scores. I wouldn’t be surprised if Stronghold snowballed too.
Complexity: Conquest is simple – get to 500 points first by holding combinations of three nodes. If you have less nodes than an opponent, you have more free people with which to assault a point to turn it back in your favor. Yet it’s deep at the same time. There’s depth in which builds you put on a team, how you play that team composition, which nodes you push or guard and when, how you deal with players dying, etc. Secondary mechanics spice it up.
Stronghold is overly complex, which will likely cause it to lack the depth it’s trying to provide through its complexity. To make all the options worthwhile, the cost and benefit from each needs to be tightly tuned. Otherwise, a single choice will always be the best, eliminating any chance at depth. For example, if skirt sappers die too easily to players, why even pick them? If they’re very hardy against players, offensive archers are pointless and you just use a Wall of Reflection on the NPC gate guards and laugh.
NPCs: Unless the AI is better by leaps and bounds than any other game, it will be too easily to take advantage of their weaknesses. In that case, they just feel like giant HP punching bags.
Audience: In PvP, you have a lot of “factions”. Some people want pure team deathmatch/annihilation (some small like 2v2 or 3v3; others large like GW1 GvG and GW2 GvG). Others like conquest and enjoy its depth, which fuels its competitive nature. Still others just want something different. Stronghold caters only to the last group. Unfortunately, that last group is the most fickle and likely to find the next “new toy” once they tire of the current one.
It’s worth noting that conquest has a shortcoming here as well. Because the depth is implicit, it’s hard for new players to learn. The initial frustration drives people away, leaving you with a small PvP base compared to WvW and PvE.
My Conclusion
I’m saying that stronghold will be the downfall of GW2 PvP for the following reasons. First, it doesn’t appeal to competitive PvPers, yet so far there has heavy emphasis on stronghold and nothing on conquest for the future. If this comes to fruition, it will alienate the top and drive them away. Second, stronghold’s more rigid roles and hodgepodge of mechanics has all the foundations very toxic PvP environment (described previously). If that does happen, it turns away the casual players it’s aiming to recruit.
The best thing that can happen is that Stronghold serves a way to get new players into PvP and prepare them to advance into conquest.
Kirrena Rosenkreutz
