Guild Wars 2

Back in the good old days of a few weeks ago, small groups or even solo players had a valuable function in WvW: preventing dolyak travel to stop keep and tower upgrades. With the current map, this is no longer possible because everything auto-upgrades on a timer anyway. What would be good would be a slight return to the old system: camps can continue to auto-upgrade, but make towers and keeps require a certain number of dolyaks to upgrade.
Since misterdevious was so good to lay out the current state of the timers in this post we can see that it takes 30 minutes for stage 1, 2 hours for stage 2, and a full 6 hours for stage 3 upgrades. The current system has successful dolyak entries reducing that time by 5 minutes, and the yaks arriving every 2 minutes and 30 seconds, give or take for the various keeps (Earth Keep has 4 yaks reaching it with various timings). So to get to full upgrade we divide 6 hours by 7 minutes 30 seconds (which is how much time is taken by the yak, plus the five minutes it takes from the keep timer) = 48 yaks. If you get 48 yaks into your keep, it upgrades to full (and it only takes 2 hours if you only have one yak source). Earth keep is even faster because it has the potential for 4 yaks. Right now the fire and air keeps don’t get a southern yak for some reason. Now, 48 might not be the right number because this will throw the system into imbalance, but it replicates the current state of affairs more or less.

So, tl;dr: To modify the current system, make it required for 48 yaks to reach a keep before it upgrades to stage 3. Solo roamers will have a much more valuable presence on the borderlands., being able to stop upgrades. It will force a lot more fighting into the yak routes and camps will become even more tactically important.

They can easily achieve this by just stopping the clock. Comment it out. Problem solved, lol. Every dolly subtracts time from the frozen countdown.

Simple :p

If you kill a dolly then the objective doesn’t get the 5 minute taken off from the total timer.
So killing dollies actually hurts the upgrading forcing a fortification upgrade to last 6 hours if it doesn’t get any dollies inside. This also means that the objective has no supplies inside to repair stuff or quickly build defensive siege like a treb, cart or rebuild the oil/canons.

So there’s no need for a change like that. I think easier would be to make the dollies run slower and reach the objective in 5 minutes instead of 2.5 minutes. Also killing a dolly should have a respawn delay of 10 minutes instead of 5 minutes.

Basically double the walking time and the respawn when killed.

Some human element for upgrading would fit right in. Like talking to a npc to make the next upgrade going. So if one side does not do that it wont get upgraded. No pain no gain method.