Guild Wars 2

I think a semi-solution to overnight population imbalances is allowing stronger fortifications to towers and keeps.

I propose Elite Upgrades: the final tier of upgrades.

Elite Upgrades are seriously strong and can help protect your keep/tower after the majority of your population has logged off.

Some examples:

• Incredibly strong and epic NPCs: giants, dragons, monsters, etc. Killing these should be like killing world bosses in PvE. They should do a lot of damage and have a wide variety of crowd-controlling abilities.

• Super reinforced walls and doors. These will take forever to break.

• Automated turrets and guard towers. Think Tower Defense games. Build a bunch of automated weapons that can help defend you from invaders. The turrets could fire massive artillery, lightning or flame attacks on enemies and capable of snaring or other crowd-controls.

• Way stronger lords. Who ever dies from a lord in all those zergs? Let’s make them stronger.

So then… we should cap as much as possible (until we have a solid PPT lead), fully upgrade it, and then go play a different game while the map wins itself?

Epic level NPC: This would be kind of cool. Something like a giant Asura golem that patrols the fortification with “boss” level hp.

Reinforcement: Eh, not sure how much this is needed. I think it would be better to make it cost more supply to build siege equipment.

Automated defenses: No, just no.

Stronger Lord: This would be a good idea, Lords fall way to easily. Maybe also add some beefier adds along with the lord?

So then… we should cap as much as possible (until we have a solid PPT lead), fully upgrade it, and then go play a different game while the map wins itself?

If you’re implying that the elite upgrades would be able to hold their own, and even dominate, overnight zergs — you’re wrong. They would be balanced, of course. They would simply deter progress but eventually could be overtaken.

Gilgamesh.2561:

So then… we should cap as much as possible (until we have a solid PPT lead), fully upgrade it, and then go play a different game while the map wins itself?

If you’re implying that the upgrades would be able to hold their own, and even dominate, overnight zergs — you’re wrong. They would be balanced, of course. They would simply deter progress but eventually could be overtaken.

Ok, well then I have two questions:

1) How do you determine when to turn these on and off?
2) If they only deter progress, what actual effect will this have on the game? I mean… if it takes twice as long to take each objective, the end result is the same as before but with a slightly lower point total?

You are one seriously negative person Sky. Look at things in a fun light and then see if there might be a way to make it work.

Just throwing it out there but the system could have potential if the upgrades took hours to complete and only lasted maybe 8-16 hours and only usable on keeps. I’m not opposed to upgrades that give advantages like that. There is just no way it should be permanent because they it’d be almost impossible to take it at peak times.

It also adds more depth to the game which isn’t bad.

It’s actually not a bad idea, just needs some tweaks. Letting it be an upgrade anyone can get is not a good idea. Otherwise winning servers will get those benefits on all their towers.

However, saying “The <npc group here> has come to aid you in your time of need!” is more appealing. In other words, when you get the Outmanned buff, NPCs of boss level, even roaming friendly NPCs, come to aid in defenses and offense. Boss level patrolling NPCs around your towers would just mean it takes longer for the enemy to cap a position, and as soon as you take a tower, you get an instant defensive buff with the boss NPC, making it much harder to re-cap instantly. The key is to increase the time between caps for the team which has the most numbers. So while it takes a full raid 1 hour to cap a single tower, a group of smaller players could cap two towers in that time frame.

Plus it would be cool to see awesome NPCs like Dragons and so on in PvP

Edit: Last night my group of 5 capped a tower by ourselves. We did this by baiting people off the walls and killing them, and preventing any enemy trying to run into the tower from getting in. So we turned the tower into a defenseless nothing, set up a catapult, and made our way in. There was some good fighting during the time it took 1 Catapult to kill a wall, but the enemy was Outmanned and us 5 with coordination were quite the force. So, my suggestion would break this style of stomping, and reduce this kind of fun to be had, however it wouldn’t break it. We could still Catapult a wall from a further distance, but we’d have more trouble getting inside and taking it with such a small group otherwise. The boss might take us 15 minutes to kill, or longer. And we’d then have to deal with guards inside the keep and the Lord. So this kind of suggestion would be very doable and very cool in terms of bringing some variety.

Sigh when will people realize overnight raids are not a problem and just a part of the game. Waste of a post.

I’m not trying to be a “seriously negative” guy. Honestly, I am just trying to find some actual reasonable ideas to promote and help show ANet that this is a problem and there are a wealth of solutions that don’t go against their design philosophy.

I guess I can go along with the theme of the thread…

… so I think any server who currently has zero objectives should be allowed to spawn magical pegasus-unicorn hybrids and fly to the enemy garrison Keep Lord.

There ya go. I got a laugh out of that.

The players on the server with the lowest score should all get blue turtle shells.

ANet will not fix this: “It’s unfair people can play when I’m not playing”

The sooner people start realizing that is what they are saying in every “night raid” post, the better for all of us.

p.s. if you actually believe people should be penalized for playing when you’re not playing, then: http://static.someecards.com/someecards/usercards/1332353416152_9127263.png

Bruce.9674:

ANet will not fix this: “It’s unfair people can play when I’m not playing”

The sooner people start realizing that is what they are saying in every “night raid” post, the better for all of us.

That isn’t what people are saying.

If you have your way, WvW will be a ghostland within a year. We might have ONE matchup with players in it, but most players will cease to play on most servers.

Of course, if winning is more important to you than the future of the game, I could see how you might think that way.

I do not think the whole “night raid” complaint is the issue that needs to be cared about. I think it would just be nice to have some greater defense upgrades to make it harder to just be zerged with little chance for players to react.

There is an interesting idea out there, a zerg of npc guards moving through all the owned towers/keeps, so enemy has to pay attention to them and to their position. This would add some interesting strategy.
And maybe this should exist only for the low population side when the population gap is over a certain threshold.

Lets think the other way around. Consider a night capping team captured your forts and applied elite upgrades on that before morning. How do you plan to get them back on day time where even forces fighting?

Kazim.2043:

Lets think the other way around. Consider a night capping team captured your forts and applied elite upgrades on that before morning. How do you plan to get them back on day time where even forces fighting?

quit being negative… UNICORNS AND RAINBOWS AND kitten

With current scoring system “Night Raiding” is the most effective way to win. I’m not against “night raiding”, I would just prefer other aspects of the game would be as effective as it is.

However stronger upgrades favor “Night Raiding” doesn’t hinder it.

We don’t need to fix things that are not broken.

everyone talking nonsense about HoD not being challenged during night hours please try staying up late one night and jumping into WvW you will see that there are queue’s there are live groups/zergs out on all 3 servers and fights are happening. In every game there are casual’s and hardcore players. casuals being the highest in population are mostly the under geared/under leveled and under organized out there in GW2. I run in a group with 15 people and we are clearing 40+ people zergs hitting them from behind. It’s all about organization like anything else out there the amount you put into something is what your going to get out. If anything those people getting dominated out in pvp use it as a tool to see what you did wrong and how to get better. It will make it a more challenging game for all of us