Guild Wars 2

This been on my mind along time, one of the main reasons we have huge zergs taking things is couse its simply more rewarding, it gets harder and harder to get people to hold and sentry Keep and towers, not to mention escourt yaks, and the few that does it, its usually the same that gets stuck with it, and sooner or later they stop, couse they also want alittle reward.

So give defenders in a Keep or tower that stays for a extended time a time tick bonus, equal to atleast 2/3 or the same points or rewards you get for taking it… only when defence is pays a equal amount as it does to take things, people will start to sentry things, or we can just abandon upgrading things, couse there is where we stand at times, a unsentried keep, tower despite its upgraded falls to fast and mostly people wont get there in time

Please anet implement a WW reward for the sentries !

Nice thought but it would just lead to exploiting and botting.. map would be full of emoting dancing bots in towers and border would be full queue

Well do it, so you enlist for a period by talking to a NPC, when the time for the elapsed you have to go to the NPC again to get your reward, and sign up again for next phase…

maybe have it so that a tower only can hire 2-3sentries, a keep 5-7sentries, and once you take a sentrie duty your stuck in tower or keep or imediate area till that phase ends, leaving will void the sentrie duty, and it works after the 15min standard phases

I thought this was going to be some thread pretending that attacking is so much easier than defending and that the defenders would need an advantage. I’m very glad that it isn’t because defending is easy.

This thread really touches on the core issue of this. People just choose not to defend for different reasons and those reasons need adressing and I think these are the reasons.

1: Not sure to get action. If you defend, you can only actually play if the others choose to attack. If you attack you actually have your own choice of initiating anything.

2: Unrewarding. Because you only get rewards when the event is on (for obvious anti-botting reasons). The defence event can trigger every 3 minutes while the attack can only happen once. But that ratio isn’t good enough especially since it can happen that you don’t get credit for the defence. If you do a lot of damage and dissuade them from staying on the gate but nobody dies, you won’t get credit. I don’t really know how they should fix this, but maybe they can figure out something.

3: Because of those previous reasons it is hard to find people to do it. That creates a new problem. Nobody wants to do it and therefore if you want to defend you are most likely in the minority. Defending can easily be done with less people but you do need some and the right minimal ratio.

4: Arrowcarts. The most efficient way by far is to use siege (trebs and arrowcarts), especially arrowcarts. It just so happens that this way of defending is also quite boring. I’d rather lose a keep than stand on an arrowcart for an hour keeping people away. (Luckily there is a third option to just jump off the wall and kill the attackers with your weapons).

it’s a shared workload issue, really. if a server plays smart, they’ll spread the boring jobs across their population. if a server plays stupid, they’ll consistently stick a small handful of people with it. if the workload is shared, everyone gets to rotate around and have a chance to have fun. if it’s dumped off on a few people, those people will eventually get burned out and just stop playing entirely.

at this point, i don’t see Anet making any changes to help support those who do the chores. everything they’ve done has been in support of creating a single giant invincible zergball. the majority of the players have drank that kool-aid, and fiercely defend their WXP trains anytime something might potentially disrupt their imaginary rewards from flowing in. the few who do the chores, and get no rewards, simply end up weary from it all and end up leaving. which fuels the zergball cycle.

there are 3 social classes in WvW now. zergmanders, zerglings, and slaves. the first two get the rewards, while the latter group gets nothing but crap. anyone that actually understands strategic play gets drowned out by a chorus of “shut up. we’re here for loot.” yet, the zerglings and zergmanders have no problem making use of the siege and upgrades that the slaves bought, built, and maintained. even going as far as expecting it to be their for them, and whining when it isn’t.

it’s a very depressing and disappointing dynamic that i’m seeing in there every single day. but, it’s easier to point out a problem than it is to fix it. the fix is possible, but at this point it might already be too late. the zerg culture has been ingrained into the playerbase. so changing it would alienate a significant portion of the players. players that anet is relying on for cash.

numerous suggestions have been made for how to fix the problem (regulated rewards, tools to make sentries more important, even events to make sentry duty not mindnumbingly boring), but they’ve all fallen on deaf ears.

hell, this even ties into the “what to do about all the zergin” topics. if you want to break up zerging, there MUST be incentive to do anything else. right now, ALL of the incentive is to mash up into a giant blob, blow yourselves up with combo fields, then run face first into another giant blob. in fact, any solutions to change that are made impossible by the paranoid fear of bots. honest players get punished needlessly, while botters and hackers still run rampant.

now that all of that has been said……

a combination of suggestions could be the solution. have it be siege based. if you go into a tower or keep, and tick the siege, you become flagged. in 20 minutes, if you tick the siege again, you get 10 WXP, and are now listed as a sentry. every minute, a sentry recieves 10 WXP, and 25 when they tick the siege. limit siege ticking rewards to once every 20 minutes per piece. when they leave the area, the sentry status disappears, and they stop receiving the benefits from it. it could even be put on a 5 minute long timer, so that if a sentry needs to push out of the area to finish off an attacking group, they’d be able to get back inside in time to retain their benefits. the same if they need to go to the closest camp to defend it, flip it back, or simply grab supplies from it to build siege in the area where they’re on sentry duty.

Another possible solution [that likely has been said before by others in prior posts] could be to add rewards to the existing current dynamic events that say ‘Defend or Control ______ (insert name of keep, courtyard of SMC, tower, sentry point, dolyaks, supply camps, etc)’ that pop up when the player enters the area nearby their home world’s owned objectives. These events should start rewarding players bronze, silver, or gold rewards for event participation like similar dynamic events in PvX. Where upon reward, the players get a certain amount of wxp for each tier of reward. This can become a Daily Achievement, and maybe a World Skill that gives boosts to defenders, too. Hence this could give more of an incentive for people to do things other than attack objectives and give lower level players a chance to help their world in wvw while earning rewards.

An idea of how to keep track of event progress is to have a bar fill up as more time is spent actively watching (moving around or doing something productive) while at the objective.

This issue is difficult to address as you are rewarding players for effectively staying in one spot, for watching a tower, being a spotter.

Dolyak escorts used to reward, but that was heavily abused and removed.

I agree with OP that it usually comes down to the same few people to do such a thankless and unrewarding job. It’s these players that hold a server from falling apart, by maintaining a stronghold to fight from.

I doubt Anet will ever come up with a reasonable solution, as it just affects a small group, and has no significant impact on the game. You either sacrifice your loot or join the zerg train.

It might be more effective if anet creates NPCs that would operate items like arrow carts and other siege in a keep and call out incomings. It would be like hiring guards would create “siege engineers” and “lookouts” to operate siege and call incoming.

If course players would always be able to take control of siege from the NPCs.

lioka qiao.8734:

It might be more effective if anet creates NPCs that would operate items like arrow carts and other siege in a keep and call out incomings. It would be like hiring guards would create “siege engineers” and “lookouts” to operate siege and call incoming.

I like your idea.

If course players would always be able to take control of siege from the NPCs.

I’ve often wondered why all those nifty Guards you have at your towers idly stand next yo unmanned siege equipment when it’s attacked and no one is around. Make Tower and Keep upgrade that trains Guards to operate siege equipment. That would encourage at least people to build siege equipment after that take a Tower at least.

Defending isn’t unrewarding, waiting to defend is unrewarding. Also really, really boring. Unfortunately waiting to defend is often the only way the thing lives long enough for you to defend it, or the only way you can get in the door alive (though this varies with enemy numbers and alertness). Nor could it be solved by just making structures stronger, because then attacking them would be unreasonably difficult, especially for smaller groups.

I think some form of early-warning would be nice though. One that, unlike now, doesn’t require a person who is here playing a game for entertainment to instead be bored witless doing laps of a tower/keep/garrison.

Maybe similar to the orange swords marking battles, we could have a marker for significant enemy numbers in general. So that if they (or you) gather x amount of people within x distance of one another you get a marker showing this on the map, and thus significant forces able to effectively shut down doorways and knock down the gate with no defence able to arrive would be more visible – or at the very least, they’d need to carefully spread their movement so as not to trigger the marker until they get there, rather than just arriving in huge blobs.

When you put it in the idea of “waiting to defend” ANET gave us the perfect tool for that:
Supply Traps!

Put a Supply Trap in front of the Objective you want to defend (like a tower) and you’ll blow up the supply the enemy needs to quickly flip the objective. For keeps supply traps are doubly devastating. An enemy needs a minimum of 160 supply to flip a keep within the response time you need to get your defenses to it. I’ll show you the numbers.

Assume your keep has no door or wall upgrades. An attacking enemy force is most likely (up until they read this post) to attack the gate closest to their spawn. A smart enemy force will attack the gate between your spawn and the keep to cut off reinforcements. A normal ram will take 3 minutes to destroy a “paper” gate (that is the gate has no upgrades). A superior ram will take 2 minutes to destroy that gate.

Now 3 and 2 minutes respectively is exactly how long it takes to run from the Citadel to the Garrison in a borderland. From spawn to the border keep in EB is faster. Therefore most commanders will drop 2 rams to cut the time in half to 1:30 and 1:00 respectively. They’ll do this for two different gates.

The average zerg numbers in the 20-40 person range and a commander can only rely on about 60% of that to actually carry supply. This means about 250 supply total is available for the siege attempt. Guild groups will obviously carry more as they’re more coordinated. They can expect to have 400 supply on them depending on how well the other borderlands are doing or if there is a fully supplied keep in the area. On reset night the average zerg has not much more than 200 supply.

Now in order for them to complete their siege using 2 rams per gate they’ll spend 160 to 200 supply. Your supply trap will hit up to 20 people for 5 supply each. This means 1 trap at a gate will destroy the enemy’s ability to siege the inner keep. 2 traps behind an outer gate will accomplish the same thing. Their siege is now nearly impossible until they resupply, giving you time to rally your server to defend the keep.

For a tower most commanders will attack the tower after hitting only 1 camp for supply so your trap will completely shut down the siege if placed outside. Supply traps lose their effectiveness if a commander suspects that you used them since he can send a scout in to clear the traps.

TL;DR – Your four buddies can place up to 4 supply traps to guard a keep. Each person can have only one trap out at a time so you’ll need to use teamwork to place them effectively. Cover the entrances of the keep where you think the enemy will come from.