Guild Wars 2

Defending objectives always felt pretty useless. Yes, you might lose the upgrades, but in the end the objective will be easy to cap back once flipped. You lose maybe a few ticks of PPT and the effort required to upgrade it again (that happens automatically if you hold your camps).

What we need is a complete overhaul. Remove Points-Per-Tick completely: factions will gain points by killing enemies and capturing or defending objectives.

Capture and Defense bonus points are to be calculated based on a sensible balance with the PPK score.

Having the scores based on combat and capture will automatically give a more balanced result that reflects the level of activity thorough the day AND night without any need for complicated systems to calculate the population or force servers to have a predetermined “prime time”: only active play matters, from every player in any timezone.

This will also greatly reduce the influence of “nightcapping”: once the objective is captured, it won’t bring in any more points, unless there’s someone attacking it and the nightcappers defend it.

Capturing objectives will reward points based on the objective type (camp, tower, etc) and the upgrade level. Capturing a fully upgraded Stonemist will finally feel rewarding!

“Under attack” and white swords

Camps are considered “under attack” when any of the guards is in combat.
Towers, Keeps and Stonemist Castle are considered “under attack” when any gate or wall receives siege damage or falls below 95% health: this should prevent most griefing/exploiting by tagging objectives with bots.

When the objective is under attack, white swords appear instantly, for better reaction times in defense.

Defense events

When a Tower, Keep or Stonemist Castle are under attack a new event spawns for the defending server: they have a “defensive window” of N minutes (2 minutes seems like a decent value to start with, could scale with the upgrade level since it takes longer to break into upgraded objectives) to kill or chase away the attackers and/or destroy or disable their siege. The conditions to win the event may vary, I’m not sure how the event engine works internally and what statistics can it hook to, so that’ll need more research.

If the defenders win the event, they gain a fixed amount of wvw score based on what objective is being defended.
This bonus doesn’t scale with the objective upgrade level for a simple reason: while it is more important to defend an upgraded objective (because you’re denying a bigger chunk of points to the enemy), it is also easier. Keeping the defense bonus equal at all upgrade levels should be an incentive to defend non-upgraded objectives, even if it’s harder.

Camps would not give bonus points for defense, because having the supplies delivered to upgrade objectives should already be incentive enough for defending them (strategic value).

The objectives are not considered under attack anymore when they are captured or there’s no damage to guards, gates, walls or stationary defensive siege (cannons, mortars, etc) for two “defensive windows” in a row.

New mechanic: “Desperate Defense”. When an objective is being captured (“ring up”), defenders gain rewards for each second they can stall (account bound currency – proof of heroics? – capped hourly or daily to prevent exploiting). Bonuses could be applied for specific situations, for example there could be increased rewards for upgraded objectives, or for strategic objectives like the shrine of a keep that is under attack.

New mechanic: “Multiple objective bonus”. When multiple objectives are conquered by the same faction in a short timespan (let’s say, less than the “Defensive Window” duration), the faction receives bonus points for the feat: rewarding attacking multiple objectives at the same time, we give incentive to split the blobs in smaller groups and make fights better for everyone.

This post is part of a series I made for the 4th birthday of the game. You can find links to the other posts in the overview

Interesting thoughts, to me you make sense, I would like to hear if anyone has an argument against it.

any mention about nightcapping is like suggesting those who live outside NA timezone does not deserve to play WvW….

azizul.8469:

any mention about nightcapping is like suggesting those who live outside NA timezone does not deserve to play WvW….

But the suggestions don’t marginalise contributions by those in affected timezones like other ideas do, especially anets own ideas.

I like the points for defending, it’s something that a lot of people just give up on when it’s not an easy win, because as you said majority of the time they can just cap it back later.

My concern is with the no points for structures held, only taken and defended. When you are in an out numbered time zone, part of the strategy is to back cap paper objectives so the larger server has something to do rather then focusing on your few remaining upgraded keeps and spawn camping. Where as with this system I would be just feeding the larger server more points and would be more effective just letting them cap everything (defending a push or two on fully upgraded objectives) and logging out thus limiting the total amount of points they can gain, until the time zone shifted and my server was the dominate force.

Unfortunately I think that aspect of your proposal does discourage people from playing in any timezone (or perhaps even match up) where they are facing a larger more dominate force.

I think that people who don’t play in “night capping” time zones don’t realize that there is game play on at those times it just has a tendency to be less even in balance then prime time. So any feature that encourages people to simply give up and log off if they can’t match the numbers is not a good solution.

I also think your "Multiple objective bonus”, just gives more benefits to larger servers. Who have the people to multiblob.

Menaka.5092:

Defending objectives always felt pretty useless. Yes, you might lose the upgrades, but in the end the objective will be easy to cap back once flipped. You lose maybe a few ticks of PPT and the effort required to upgrade it again (that happens automatically if you hold your camps).

What we need is a complete overhaul. Remove Points-Per-Tick completely: factions will gain points by killing enemies and capturing or defending objectives.

Capture and Defense bonus points are to be calculated based on a sensible balance with the PPK score.

Having the scores based on combat and capture will automatically give a more balanced result that reflects the level of activity thorough the day AND night without any need for complicated systems to calculate the population or force servers to have a predetermined “prime time”: only active play matters, from every player in any timezone.

This will also greatly reduce the influence of “nightcapping”: once the objective is captured, it won’t bring in any more points, unless there’s someone attacking it and the nightcappers defend it.

Capturing objectives will reward points based on the objective type (camp, tower, etc) and the upgrade level. Capturing a fully upgraded Stonemist will finally feel rewarding!

“Under attack” and white swords

Camps are considered “under attack” when any of the guards is in combat.
Towers, Keeps and Stonemist Castle are considered “under attack” when any gate or wall receives siege damage or falls below 95% health: this should prevent most griefing/exploiting by tagging objectives with bots.

When the objective is under attack, white swords appear instantly, for better reaction times in defense.

Defense events

When a Tower, Keep or Stonemist Castle are under attack a new event spawns for the defending server: they have a “defensive window” of N minutes (2 minutes seems like a decent value to start with, could scale with the upgrade level since it takes longer to break into upgraded objectives) to kill or chase away the attackers and/or destroy or disable their siege. The conditions to win the event may vary, I’m not sure how the event engine works internally and what statistics can it hook to, so that’ll need more research.

If the defenders win the event, they gain a fixed amount of wvw score based on what objective is being defended.
This bonus doesn’t scale with the objective upgrade level for a simple reason: while it is more important to defend an upgraded objective (because you’re denying a bigger chunk of points to the enemy), it is also easier. Keeping the defense bonus equal at all upgrade levels should be an incentive to defend non-upgraded objectives, even if it’s harder.

Camps would not give bonus points for defense, because having the supplies delivered to upgrade objectives should already be incentive enough for defending them (strategic value).

The objectives are not considered under attack anymore when they are captured or there’s no damage to guards, gates, walls or stationary defensive siege (cannons, mortars, etc) for two “defensive windows” in a row.

New mechanic: “Desperate Defense”. When an objective is being captured (“ring up”), defenders gain rewards for each second they can stall (account bound currency – proof of heroics? – capped hourly or daily to prevent exploiting). Bonuses could be applied for specific situations, for example there could be increased rewards for upgraded objectives, or for strategic objectives like the shrine of a keep that is under attack.

New mechanic: “Multiple objective bonus”. When multiple objectives are conquered by the same faction in a short timespan (let’s say, less than the “Defensive Window” duration), the faction receives bonus points for the feat: rewarding attacking multiple objectives at the same time, we give incentive to split the blobs in smaller groups and make fights better for everyone.

I have been advocating something like this for the exact reasons you stated. Its sensible, its self balancing as far as night vs day etc. And if you throw PPK into it and make it so a total weekly score averages roughly 50/50 from caps+defenses etc / player kills, then the system itself becomes also balanced across playstyles.

Only thing that would be left is to impliment a local “outnumbered” buff that would affect PPK as well as be tied to personal rewards both in quality and quantity. Easy to do, gives stacks of + to magic find % and some extra buff to the reward track gain rate.

done and done.

instead we get some over complicated over elaborate schemes, that are based of off glicko, which is largely based of off INACTIVE scoring and overpopulating servers.

I would love to see stuff like this in the game.

There is a few problems I see with this way of calculating points.

1) Trying to cap an objective with small ninja group would be a bad idea, because on most of cases those events fail and you don’t want to feed the enemy points unnecessarily. You are better off just moving as a group killing players than trying to take objectives.

2) People would blob up more because failed capture event would lead into points for the enemy, so you better capture that objective when you attack it. People would just look for a best moment to capture something that is undefended or something that is almost impossible to defend.

3) If there is no enemies, there is no points. If you get a good head start on the match, you can disappear from the match up and lower the amount of points the enemy servers can obtain.

4) It would be a valid tactic to log on only during night, and capture every T3 objective, gaining a lot of points and logging off and not defending your objectives and hoping the other servers cap them when they are still T1. Rinse and repeat for maximum points with minimal PvP.

5) Long sieges would be bad for attackers. If you can’t cap it fast, you would be better off to just move to next objective and try a fast cap later on.

While I don’t think the current system is any better, it is way more simpler and logical way of calculating points. You hold territory, you get points. Easy to explain for new players and it makes sense.

This suggestion seems to accomplish nothing but support blob wars. Its fine if that’s what you like, but a lot of players don’t like blob wars. And quite frankly in the current state blob wars are already heavily rewarded, if ANet were to change anything it should be to encourage other ways to play WvW (namely smaller groups).

SailorSpira.9371:

I like the points for defending, it’s something that a lot of people just give up on when it’s not an easy win, because as you said majority of the time they can just cap it back later.

My concern is with the no points for structures held, only taken and defended. When you are in an out numbered time zone, part of the strategy is to back cap paper objectives so the larger server has something to do rather then focusing on your few remaining upgraded keeps and spawn camping. Where as with this system I would be just feeding the larger server more points and would be more effective just letting them cap everything (defending a push or two on fully upgraded objectives) and logging out thus limiting the total amount of points they can gain, until the time zone shifted and my server was the dominate force.

this is an interesting point, thank you for bringing it up!

in one of my other posts I suggested some ways to work around this horrible thing that is “unbalanced population” over time zones/servers, so ideally I wouldn’t want for this situation to happen at all because it’s not funny for anyone

but assuming it happens, if a less populated server goes around capping back undefended t0 objectives and the enemies cap them back, the net score is 0 because you both gain the same amount from capping the same objective, so you wouldn’t give the enemies any more point, but you could gain point compared to the third server and maybe get a second place in the matchup instead of the third…

right now if you can’t cap back the objectives and the more populated server holds them for the whole night, they gain points for doing basically nothing, with this activity-based system, instead, you don’t lose too many points if you don’t have the people to cap them back

SailorSpira.9371:

I also think your "Multiple objective bonus”, just gives more benefits to larger servers. Who have the people to multiblob.

again, the unbalanced population is a different problem and requires different solutions

but consider that if they attack 2 objectives at the same time, they have to split their forces and you have better chances to defend at least one of them, thus denying the enemy the multiple-cap bonus

that said, from my experience, splitting a blob is hard… if you have multiple groups on a borderland it’s usually organized groups (guilds), and as a defender I would rather have many 15-20 man guilds to fight than a single 80-man blob

Paavotar.3971:

1) Trying to cap an objective with small ninja group would be a bad idea, because on most of cases those events fail and you don’t want to feed the enemy points unnecessarily. You are better off just moving as a group killing players than trying to take objectives.

well it’s a risk/reward thing… if you don’t think you can’t cap an objective, then it’s probably better not to attack, it comes down to how many points you would get from capturing it, how many they would get from defending it and how many you could possibly make by going around killing enemies

Paavotar.3971:

People would blob up more because failed capture event would lead into points for the enemy, so you better capture that objective when you attack it. People would just look for a best moment to capture something that is undefended or something that is almost impossible to defend.

blobbing already works like that, sadly… more people means more supplies and an easier cap
on the bright side, defending against that big blob with this system means keeping a big number of enemies busy while gaining points

Paavotar.3971:

If there is no enemies, there is no points. If you get a good head start on the match, you can disappear from the match up and lower the amount of points the enemy servers can obtain.

the other 2 servers fighting each other would easily gain back on you, since the system rewards activity

Paavotar.3971:

It would be a valid tactic to log on only during night, and capture every T3 objective, gaining a lot of points and logging off and not defending your objectives and hoping the other servers cap them when they are still T1. Rinse and repeat for maximum points with minimal PvP.

let’s imagine a server doing that: they log on when the enemy objectives are T3, capture them all during the night, then log off until the enemy objectives are T3 again… they won’t gain any more points in the meantime, while the other 2 servers are still gaining points by capturing, defending and killing each other

assuming the points gained by kills are about 30-40% of the total (right now, but it could be more with the new system), you’re giving up about a third of your points by not playing

Paavotar.3971:

Long sieges would be bad for attackers. If you can’t cap it fast, you would be better off to just move to next objective and try a fast cap later on.

long sieges are boring!
and it’s definitely smarter to back off and go for another objective if you can’t take that one only because “it’s T3 and by just by holding it, the enemies gain points every 5 minutes”… I think this system would incentivate smarter/better play instead of painful headbashing over objectives for hours

OriOri.8724:

This suggestion seems to accomplish nothing but support blob wars. Its fine if that’s what you like, but a lot of players don’t like blob wars. And quite frankly in the current state blob wars are already heavily rewarded, if ANet were to change anything it should be to encourage other ways to play WvW (namely smaller groups).

I’m sorry but I can’t see how this system supports blob wars… if anything, it rewards playing better and smarter, by attacking multiple objectives at the same time with smaller groups so that a defending blob could not save them all.

Having multiple smaller groups sounds more fun to me than single zone-blobs.

Menaka.5092:

OriOri.8724:

This suggestion seems to accomplish nothing but support blob wars. Its fine if that’s what you like, but a lot of players don’t like blob wars. And quite frankly in the current state blob wars are already heavily rewarded, if ANet were to change anything it should be to encourage other ways to play WvW (namely smaller groups).

I’m sorry but I can’t see how this system supports blob wars… if anything, it rewards playing better and smarter, by attacking multiple objectives at the same time with smaller groups so that a defending blob could not save them all.

Having multiple smaller groups sounds more fun to me than single zone-blobs.

The problem is that your proposed changes help blobs score more points, and give the other servers more points if you are running in a small group.

Yes, capping multiple objectives in a small time frame requires multiple groups, but your other suggestions drown this out by encouraging blob wars even more.

1 – You propose to add in new defend events that reward a server for defending a certain objective for X minutes. This encourages blob wars from the other servers, they now have extra incentive to blob up in order to take the structure before this defend event finishes to prevent the server that holds the objective from scoring points on it.

2 – You propose moving most of the scoring to capturing/defending and PPK. Blobs are harder to kill. If Server A is winning, then they will want to blob up so that you have less of a chance to kill any of them in order to gain more points for Server B. Likewise this just encourages server B to blob up in order to kill Server A’s blob.

I admire what you are trying to do but I don’t think this is the right way to go about it. If you want to counter blobs then you need to be awarding more war score for taking objectives with a smaller group. But this is very hard to implement so I doubt that it will happen soon.

Besides the issues mentioned above with awarding points for defending, I believe Anet has said they can’t figure out how to “calculate” defense accurately enough to award points or good rewards for it. And I know they have categorically stated that PPT will not go away totally.

So let’s break this concept right now before this thread gets any longer. Right from reset, all you have to do is never cap anything, never hit anything, and just Omniblob for PPK all week. #winning

Then it would also be easy to abuse by using an alt/spy account to go tap one of your own gates to trigger the defense for free points all day long.

Please leave scoring alone…….

This ppk nonsense encourages people to avoid battles. I can probably manipulate points by not fighting and denying the other server of potential points

Generally like the suggestions from both Menaka and Tongku. Tying up score to active play is the best suggestion I’ve seen on the forums so far, and have advocated for it before. I also agree with others that there are problems with it.

Score should be rewarded for active play. However a blob is technically active play as well, so I don’t think just awarding score for brainless, active play should exist.

I’ve said it before and I think that one thing that would help a lot is for ANet to somehow implement a system that awards more score immediately for capturing/defending an objective with a smaller force and scales inversely with the size of the group.

Examples:

• 10 people capture a supply camp. No war score for that server vs 1 person solo-captures a supply camp, a small amount of war score is immediately given to that server

• 20+ person blob captures an un-upgraded tower. No war score for capturing the tower vs a 5 person group capturing a T2 tower, a moderate amount of war score is immediately given to that server

• 20+ person blob capturing a keep. A moderate amount of war score immediately awarded to that server vs a 10 person group capturing the keep. They get a larger amount of warscore for their server since they did it with a smaller group.

• Any group that captures SM should receive a large amount of Warscore immediately if it was defended, but more should be awarded to smaller groups, or groups fighting through stronger defending (read: more people defending).

It allows Blobs to run around with no penalty relative to how they perform now (they don’t lose any war score or karma), but encourages smaller groups by rewarding them more than it would if they were in a blob. It also encourages capturing keeps (which I don’t see happen too often) since your server could gain some immediate warscore and not have to wait for the ticks.

OriOri.8724:

Score should be rewarded for active play. However a blob is technically active play as well, so I don’t think just awarding score for brainless, active play should exist.

I’ve said it before and I think that one thing that would help a lot is for ANet to somehow implement a system that awards more score immediately for capturing/defending an objective with a smaller force and scales inversely with the size of the group.

Examples:

• 10 people capture a supply camp. No war score for that server vs 1 person solo-captures a supply camp, a small amount of war score is immediately given to that server

• 20+ person blob captures an un-upgraded tower. No war score for capturing the tower vs a 5 person group capturing a T2 tower, a moderate amount of war score is immediately given to that server

• 20+ person blob capturing a keep. A moderate amount of war score immediately awarded to that server vs a 10 person group capturing the keep. They get a larger amount of warscore for their server since they did it with a smaller group.

• Any group that captures SM should receive a large amount of Warscore immediately if it was defended, but more should be awarded to smaller groups, or groups fighting through stronger defending (read: more people defending).

It allows Blobs to run around with no penalty relative to how they perform now (they don’t lose any war score or karma), but encourages smaller groups by rewarding them more than it would if they were in a blob. It also encourages capturing keeps (which I don’t see happen too often) since your server could gain some immediate warscore and not have to wait for the ticks.

This is going to make your server mates hate you for running with them. I can foresee more friction and closed off plays because there is no way to stop ppl from grouping and should we? There is currently already some advantage in people taking camps with small numbers because it frees up the other players to take other objectives. So it is not like there isn’t an advantage, it is just not obvious.

@ Ori

If you link up “Active Play” with enemy players, they would also have the tools to effectively deny the opponent zerg points. Though that is also a slippery slope as well, since it gives players a good bit of ability to game the point system. “Everyone waypoint out, don’t fight them so they get points!”

Personally I’m for a scaling of rewards in some manner, like what you suggested for example. But I don’t think ANet will ever implement that, because it goes against their design philosophy that “You should never feel negative about seeing another player.”

Pondering if the best we can salvage out of this might be to link some tremendous bonus rewards to the Outnumbered, so that skilled players are willing to move servers in order to increase personal rewards. Say +100% wxp, reward track, magic find, gold (or more).

If they where considering actually penalizing more players, I’d just go for divide the reward on the number of players. Both the personal rewards (track etc) and the points for capture considering how much less a feat it is.

Blobbing up wouldn’t be discouraged though, it wouldn’t be any less rewarding than it is now (slightly more in fact, since I propose adding immediate war score for any size group capturing a keep or SM). The only thing that changed would be to offer additional incentives to running in smaller groups. By no means should this be a huge amount of warscore otherwise I agree with you two in that it could create toxicity. It should be a small-ish amount, nothing that will directly affect who is winning the match etc… but it should help.

I admit it would be tricky to balance the values of warscore given out (to avoid the situation you describe @joneirikb), it shouldn’t be advantageous to just give up an objective and retake it later due to not giving the enemy war score on capture (which means we could probably do away with getting more warscore for taking a well defended structure to help balance it).

As for players teleporting out right before capturing an objective in order to game the system, this is where I agree it would be most difficult to implement. ANet would need a system that could keep track of how many people helped take the structure, not just how many were in the node when they finally captured it. That would be hard to implement if it is even possible