Guild Wars 2

This is an idea to counter the stacking and coverage meta with a relatively simple change to the math behind PPT.

The idea is, apply diminishing returns to PPT, such that the first few objectives taken add a large (same as current) increment to PPT, but each additional objective adds a smaller and smaller increment as more are taken and held by one side.

This would do two things: (1) push the point at which a match becomes a certain loss farther out toward the bitter end; and (2) allow a side that is behind in PPT to catch up quicker, without being buried overnight in a PPT hole that they never can dig out of during their peak hours.

Overall, the goal would be to balance the math out so that today’s 695 tick is never possible. With DR, the new math would mean that a side that holds the entire map would get, say, a 250-300 tick, and another side could come online and get back up to say a 200 tick just by taking back it’s own corner of EB.

This could be matched by a new “Overextended” debuff that would kick in on the side with the highest numbers on a map, any time another side gets “Outnumbered.” The effect would be a strong and scaling debuff to PPT, to the point where if one side was on a map all alone, PPT would basically grind to a halt for that Overextended side, on that map, until the population balance recovers to the point that nobody has Outnumbered there any more.

These two things could help to negate the strategy of winning through stacking and coverage alone, and make it a lot harder for a side to just dominate, without winning fights consistently throughout the match. It would also require each side to scrap to maintain much narrower leads than we tend to see servers winning by today, which would allow reversals to still happen right up into the final day or two.

With stacking + coverage no longer the dominant strategies for winning, people also would go back to thinking about where they should transfer based on more desirable criteria like where queue times are shorter (i.e., populations lower), or what the actual community is like, instead of who is paying the most to stack.