I think the key to balancing WvW is to find a way to level the playing ground when teams are mismatched in population. Ideally, it should be that the bigger a server is, the more cost associated with expanding.
Here’s my idea:
1) Allow everyone the ability to lift supply from one depot and place it in another (e.g. move it from a supply camp to a keep).
2) Dolyak’s must be “loaded” with supply. Hence, a player must go to the supply point and trigger a Dolyak.
When a team takes over a keep, they must not only defeat the keep lord, but they must stock up the depot with lets say 100 supply. That supply will trickle down every minute at a slow rate. This rate will will increase for every person that is within or near the walls on that team (enough so that it’s essential that a small proportion of your force must regularly be restocking supply). The idea being that a big army needs lots of supply to maintain strength.
Here’s the good part:
Should supply fall below the threshold, you will loose control of the keep and the NPC’s will leave; you will no longer recieve any points for it. This threshhold increases based on whether its a tower, keep or castle.
If it goes down to zero, you’re team in the vacinity will get a debuff (hence your food and medical supplies are gone).
What this means is if you’re zerging around at off peak with little resistance, you can’t shoot ahead in the scoreboard by capping everything; you’ll need to setup supply runs and stock up. You won’t be able to cap everything and go to sleep knowing that you’re team is trickling in points all night. You’ll have to setup supply chains if you need a big force to hold off a resistance.
If you’re a small force, you’ll want to cut off supply and starve the occupants out. If you’re a large force, you’ll have to think about if you can organise to supply your team.
Thus, ideally, what we’ll see is smaller skirmishes, fought smarter across the entire 4 zones.
Discuss…