Guild Wars 2

TLDR: Divide the rewards for capturing a location by the number of people who capture it. This will reduce (but not eliminate) zerging and breathe new life into WvW.

WvW has devolving into near mindless zerg trains.
Why? Because zerging is both the fastest and the lowest-risk way to get WvW rewards. Some of this comes from the combat mechanics, but a lot of it comes from the way capture rewards are given out.

In the middle ages, wars were expensive. Invading territory was profitable (if you were successful) but the rewards were offset by the costs of fielding your army. The bigger the army, the more territory you had to capture before you could turn a profit.

But, in WvW everyone currently gets the same rewards regardless of how many people are involved in capturing the location. This means locations return more profit the more people that participate in capturing then: e.g. a zerg capturing a tower will earn far more than a ninja team that caps a keep. This inversion of warfare economics is a major cause of zergs.

Solution: Assign overall reward values to locations and divide this across the number of people who participate in their capture.

If we want WvW battles to get more interesting, then WvW needs to go back to more sensible economics and set an overall value of reward for capturing a location. This overall value then gets divided across the people who participate in the capture. The more people who participate in the capture, the less each individual gets.

This will reduce the incentive to join large zergs (due to the reduced personal rewards), and reward people who capture locations in smaller groups. It won’t stop zerging, because zergs will still be the safest way to participate in WvW. But it will encourage breaking into smaller groups to capture locations – and that will make WvW much more interesting.

what it will do is cause endless kittening and fractured communities over ‘leechers’.

‘warfare economics’ is not affected since the # of people that cap a keep does not affect supply in any way.

proportional rewards for longer battles/sieges might help, something to reward hardfought battles rather than steamrolls.

TLDR:

1. Scale the division to to keep it friendly among allies
2. If it helps, thinks of this as a way of getting better rewards for smarter capping.

Shoe.5821:

what it will do is cause endless kittening and fractured communities over ‘leechers’.

That’s an important point, as one of GW2’s major draw cards is its open cooperative environment. The last thing we want is people bad mouthing others who turn up to help with a capture.

The solution is a non-linear spread. That way the reward reduction still occurs, but not so drastically that a few more people joining a fight really hurts. For example:

• 1 person 1000
• 2 people 900/ea
• 3 people 800/ea
• 4 people 710/ea
• 5 people 630/ea
• 6 people 560/ea
  …
• etc.

At the high end it will also help if there rewards get to the point that other people simply won’t bother to join in. The threshold for this would depend on what’s being capped: small target, low threshold; large target, high threshold. (E.g. a 12 person zerg is overkill for a supply camp so they might get little more than some supply and dolyaks moving again. “They’ve got enough there already. Let’s go hit another target.” But more people might join the same zerg if it starts capping Garrison.)

Of course, there will always be those who’ll complain about every little bit they think they’ve miss out on, and others who’ll turn up in the last few seconds and claim unearned rewards – but that all happens now anyway.

The underlying problem is that zergs have a inverted risk/return curve: they get increasing returns with decreasing risk – and capping rewards play a large part in this. Zergs cap faster, with lower risk and no reduction in rewards. That’s why people zerg on uncontested maps. It’s not interesting gaming – but it’s a logical behaviour given the current way capping rewards work.

We can’t change the combat mechanics (e.g. aoe caps are here to stay).
We can’t do much about the capping rate of zergs (Lord scaling does a little of this, but only for the very last part of the capture).

But we can do something to fix the distorted reward side of the equation. – Change the capping rewards and the zerging behaviour will start to mature (not completely, but it will be a marked improvement).

If it helps, thinks of this as a way of getting better rewards for smarter capping.

IMHO even a non-linear spread would result in flames about leeching.

I’m also not happy with the current solution, because you are forced to run with the largest zerg to get the most world xp.

Here is another solution:

World XP for capturing or defending objects should just be rewarded to ANY active player in the whole wvw zone! (World XP for killing players, guards or siege stays as is.)

That way it wouldn’t matter whether you actively help attacking that tower or instead scouting around, taking supply camps, hunting dolyaks or expand your own towers. Indeed it would be more rewarding to split your large zerg into smaller teams, so you can take multiple objectives at the same time.

^^ i like that one a lot actually

the only problem is people leeching in spawns

the obvious fix is some sort of WvW reward multiplier that scales based on any active action (damage enemy walls, engaging enemies, using supply, participating in events, etc.)

Either that or just track user activity + prevent any world xp when user is inactive for more than x minutes.

User activity should be one of:
- damages or get damaged by a guard or player
- is in range or reachable for an enemy guard or player
- upgrades objectives or repairs buildings or builds siege

Did I forgot something?