Guild Wars 2

Introduction

WvW is stagnant, server pride is on the fall, every day it’s zerg after zerg. The “Holy Kitten this is awesome moments” are few and far between, however in my opinion, when I get that feeling, it is usually because we are defending. However there is no incentive to do so. In this document I want to put forward my proposal to the developers at ANet in a form they will hopefully recognise.

Background

There is no incentive to defend, therefore no one defends, if you do defend your the guy who has to sit at the back serving as a scout for a keep/tower, if you get a few people together and play excellently with siege you get a peasly reward for repelling the invaders, that’s no where near what the rest of the people on your team are getting from fighting out in the field.

The solutions presented are purposefully simple and based on the current system to reduce time that developers needs to spend on changes and to make them a more realistic possibility.

Problem Breakdown

1) No incentive to defend
2) Rewards for defending are inadequate

Proposed Solutions

Numbers are for example purposes only

1) Upgraded towers/keeps give more warscore

Example
A basic tower gives 10 warscore, tier 1 should give 15, tier 2 should give 20 and tier 3 should give 25.

Keeps can follow a similar pattern, as can Stonemist.

2) Defenders should be rewarded equally to attackers

Defending rewards should be proportionate to how long the siege has gone on for and track how long the individual player has been participating in the fight for.

Example
Case 1:
A player has been defending a keep for 10 minutes, have constantly been in combat they finally rout the enemy and the repel invaders reward triggers. They get a champion loot bag + 10 silver.

Case 2:
A player arrives halfway through and is there for 5 minutes, however they spend 1 minute salvaging items and using the trading post before they dive into the fight (for 4 minutes). They get a champion loot bag + 4 silver.

Case 3:
A player is afking inside the keep and never enters combat or using any supply. They get nothing.

Case 4:
A player helps defend a keep for 3 minutes but leaves before the siege is finished and run across the map to attack another tower, They receive no loot bag but still get 3 silver.

Solution justification

By changing upgraded keeps/towers to be more valuable you give more of an incentive to defend them.

Then you reward the players who are defending them by the amount of time they put into it.

Also the systems to implement these changes are already in the game. The value of keeps/towers just needs to be changed when adding to the warscore and a time tracker to be added when defending.

Developer Guidance

Disclaimer: I’ve never seen the GW2 source code so I base this of my own programming knowledge and how I would tackle the problem, and is included to show how simple these changes would be to implement. Also apologies for no indentation in the psudocode, I couldn’t figure out how to do it.

When warscore is added to the total every 15 minutes I assume there is a check in place along the lines of:

Loop through 3 teams {
Loop through all capturable points
If current point is under teams control {
add 10/25 to teams warscore
}
}
}

This can be changed so a check is in place to make the amount added to warscore a variable depending on the tier of the keep/tower.

Loop through 3 teams {
Loop through all capturable points {
If current point is under teams control {
x = point tier level
add x to teams warscore
}
}
}

With regards to defending rewards, When a ‘keep is under attack’ triggers and a player enters combat/uses supply in a keep radius, an internal timer should start on the player that is used when the current repel invaders reward is given out.

The timer should pause when the player is out of combat or outside of the ‘defence radius’ of the keep. The repel invaders reward can then be changed to make it dynamic and use the timer to give appropriate rewards based on participation levels.

Conclusion

While these changes may not fix every aspect of WvW as a whole, I feel it tackles a key issue and would be a significant improvement over what we have now. Which would infuse it with new life and get people wanting to play again, to take part in those drawn out, epic siege fights and finally be rewarded for their efforts.

I look forward to what the community thinks of this proposal and would be willing to update sections with well thought out and presented changes.

Rewarding defenders and sentries of towers in 2 years over due

they should make defending more lucrative as currently it is broken in a sense that deep down many players think that defending their positions is more of a waist of time and effort making them unwilling to contribute in defensive efforts…

I like the thoughts, but have issues with some assumptions they’re based in, and I like the defense event proposal more than the score one.

Greenwolf.3625:

1) Upgraded towers/keeps give more warscore

Gives another snowball effect to the coverage-dominant team. This strengthens the problem that most week-long matches are decided in the first 24 hours.

http://mos.millenium.org/servers/view/37

Matches like Sea of Sorrows week 33, 2014, would become worse for everyone, not better. Their heavy point gains during OCX and SEA playtime would be much more severe.

Comebacks from first-day defeats would become even more rare. Losing teams would be less incentivized to defend after the already decided winner had piled up a day or more of tier 3 upgraded PPT.

The end result would probably be a significant increase in the “volatility” metric on every server’s glicko-2 rating. That increase in volatility would be systemic, because all servers would move around the leaderboard more. The snowballing effect of higher PPT for upgraded structures would demand that.

Greenwolf.3625:

2) Defenders should be rewarded equally to attackers

Defending rewards should be proportionate to how long the siege has gone on for and track how long the individual player has been participating in the fight for.

We all agree with the ideal, including ANet. Devon Carver said in a recent interview that their blocker for accomplishing it is that the game’s server+client code was never built for that concept. To me that sounds like an engineering problem on level with what leads to the AOE target caps, so I’m not angry about that one.

Greenwolf.3625:

Case 1:
A player has been defending a keep for 10 minutes, have constantly been in combat they finally rout the enemy and the repel invaders reward triggers.

Actively defending player characters rarely stay in combat throughout a defense event. They enter and exit combat multiple times. Having the combat flag switched on for your character is very easy: simply do damage or have damage done to you. Being flagged as in-combat is not equivalent to contributing to the defense event. Neither is consuming supply.

The way event contribution is currently decided can be summarized as “damage output during the event”. At a rudimentary level, this must require at least a single database table of the form:

Event Instance ID | Player Account Name | Damage Output

That captures the specific event being considered, the player, and the determining factor for event contribution. A table like this must be created at every instance of any event in the game world. Producing this table is relatively simple, as is checking its determining factor against a requirement for the event reward.

We want simple, because this thing has to compute and deliver the rewards at speeds that seem instantaneous to human players.

In that I see a compelling argument for finding places to add a reward for healing output. It should be equally simple to do in some contexts. It would be far less simple in others. Simply put: ask for healing to be counted during rewarded events, but not battle of any kind. The former is easy, and the latter is just a bad idea for the GW2 system (despite being a common-sense appropriate idea that can be done in other games).

Your cases are asking for many other data points that are much more complicated. They are complicated because they are subjective. That’s where solutions to programming this sort of thing break down. The logic of it, and the fact that any Comp Sci student should be able to write it, is not the issue.

The issue (as is always the case in a near-real-time system) is getting that logic to compute in series with all other requests, inside of the budget defined by the system’s responsiveness needs and capabilities.

All of what you’re asking for is possible in single-player and small-scale multiplayer systems: particularly if they are LAN, and not WAN. It’s probably all possible in an MMO, if the surrounding systems are built and budgeted for it.

The problem for us as players that would suggest such things is linked to the problem at ANet, where they have already built up and scaled the GW2 system to the limits of its hardware budget. This is evidenced by the server lag that still occurs during large battles.

For every such addition that is made, some other process in the system needs to be made to run just a bit faster, to make room for the new cool thing. If more hardware is what solves the problem (and that assumes that the problem is server-side throughput), then expect that to be offset by the gem store for the benefit of that other kind of budgeting.