Guild Wars 2

I’m sure I’ll get some flack for this, and this isn’t the most polished idea so it has its Pros and Cons.

Income scoring is (imo) the entire reason WvW as a game mode has become a complete coverage and numbers game. Coverage wins matches, bottomline and that’s the reason most rational people don’t care about “winning”. Yes you can play smart and efficient and affect the score to an extent, but that can’t account for a coverage disparity.

1) Take away upgrades from World Vs World

• With a paper borderland, you are forced to be on your toes defensively and react quickly.
• The almighty “Discourages Zerging” – Forces groups to split up, which forces them to heighten their efficiency as a group (forces groups to get better at fighting)
• Smaller groups have an actual chance to affect a map or gain an objective.
• Lets a server recover from a coverage gap instead of having to face enemy t3 triple waypointed borderlands.

2) Replace Income Scoring with Successful Objective Capture/Defense Points

• Success can be judged on a numbers scale with a multiplier:
  Even Numbers = score multiplier of 1.0
  50% Less Numbers = score multiplier of 2.0
  Twice as many people = score multiplier of .5

Example of a very unpolished scoring chart:
Keep Capture = 1000 points
Tower Capture = 400 points
Camp Capture = 50 points

Keep Defense = 500 points
Tower Defense = 200 points
Camp Defense = 50 points

Scenario: 30 BG captures Keep from 15 SoR

Multiplier = 15/30 = .5 × 1000 Keep Capture Points = 500 pts for BG

Scenario 2: 15 SoR successfully defend Keep from 30 BG

Multiplier = 30/15 = 2.0 × 500 Keep Defense Points = 1000 pts for SoR

The Breakout Event already can determine how many players are in a specific radius so this is possible to do.

Obviously, there is a lot more perfecting that would need to go into this idea, but some version of this would get the game into a “less with more” mentality and change a lot of the coverage issues and reward skilled play. Maybe changing the scoring is too much, but I still think we’d all benefit from fighting on unupgraded borderlands.

I do agree with the basic premise of this, despite that I do have some things to say.

The first thing (while I do like it) has the downside that it might encourage real keep and tower trading and that people might not defend because it is easy to take back anyway. Maybe add a system where you have to keep a structure for a full tick before it starts giving points. So the first tick after taking something does not net you any points. This would encourage defending for at least 15 minutes.

I do agree less with your second point. It will encourage a lot of flaming and griefing. People telling others to stay out of their way to maximize the income and others hanging around just to annoy players. In a perfect and honest world that would be the best system but in the real world it just creates problems. I cannot give you a real fix for the problem you are attempting to solve but I do not believe that what you suggest would work.

Another fun idea I’ve heard from people is that after upgrading a tower should be worth less points. It would be easier to defend and keep but it would net you a lower income. (I do not believe Anet would ever do implement this because it might bring griefing, however it is an idea worth exploring, maybe tied to guild claiming).

Another thing that should be rewarded is ‘keeping peace’ in your land. I think for every hour that a corner is in the hands of the server you’d expect it to be and where nothing has flipped it should receive some kind of bonus, be it in terms of points or some kind of WXP or Magic Find bonus in that area. If you for example hold the -lake tower, Hills and the Lowlands camp for an hour straight everyone within that area gets some kind of boost/reward. This encourages owning structures and defending them.

Removing upgrades and making everything paper would promote zerging and karma trains.

sostronk.8167:

Removing upgrades and making everything paper would promote zerging and karma trains.

It might indeed, but you cannot be sure of it.

If anything undefended can easily and quickly be taken by 10 ppl it would be stupid to bring 50 people to do it. Also if a tower is never safe, they might leave more people to defend.

If everything is paper and one server has a 60 ppl zerg (an Abbadon roaming squad) they can attack and take one tower but the other server that has 3 20 man groups can take 3 towers in the same time, partly because nobody leaves people to defend. It will not take long until one of the ppt-centric servers discovers how inefficient zerging would be in that environment and that might change the meta.

Of course it is possible that there will be even more zerging because of it but I think it is the less likely possibility. Changing anything about the game is a risk of how it will influence the meta, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try. Unless of course the only possible consequence would be to promote zergs (like the AC patch).

Caliban.3176:

I do agree less with your second point. It will encourage a lot of flaming and griefing. People telling others to stay out of their way to maximize the income and others hanging around just to annoy players. In a perfect and honest world that would be the best system but in the real world it just creates problems. I cannot give you a real fix for the problem you are attempting to solve but I do not believe that what you suggest would work.

Agreed, that could definitely be a downside for it. I didn’t think it would change too much from the way things are now when guilds run tagless. Ideally Anet completes the Commander/Squad/Party Overhaul and lets groups run with a tag visible to guildies only or something similar. Running tagless, we end up with probly an average of three non-guildies latching onto us which wouldn’t normally be that much to drastically change the amount of points you earn for your side with the new scoring system. It’s definitely possible though.

I think most guilds at this point though really wouldn’t place a heavy enough emphasis on the points to rage at a few leechers since it’s still the fights that keep all of us coming back anyways.

sostronk.8167:

Removing upgrades and making everything paper would promote zerging and karma trains.

That’s why I included both removing the upgrades and then changing the scoring system to prevent that. It was an extremely rough draft of the idea, but I just wanted to share the general basis of the idea. It wasn’t a flawless idea at all, but I think with a bit of touching up would be a better/more competitive system than what’s in place now.

Uhm there was a post somewhere that mentioned they were in fact looking at changing the scoring system to alleviate the population differences.