One of the biggest issue in WvW now is the lack of incentive to take on a challenge. People are always finding skirmishes where their forces are stronger or outnumber the enemy. Naturally, 2 servers will always team up and slice apart the weakest server. Most often it would be GREEN and BLUE taking pieces from RED, making it even harder for the weakest server to ever come back into the score race. Even more so now as ANET is getting ready to spread out server matchups more randomly.
Then, a solution came to me during a dream. Why not really integrate 2v1 as part of the game?
It’s quite simple. Every Keep/Tower/Camp that has not been taken will slowly build up one-time bonus points when captured.
For example, a Tower is 10 pts for tick and for every hour the tower has not been flipped, a one-time 10 pts bonus will be rewarded for the flipping team. If your team captures the tower, then an instant 10 pts is added to your total WvW score (an alternative would be to reward base 10 pts and the one-time bonus at the next score tick, so you can’t just cap and run).
The goal here is to make strong fortresses more and more attractive to capture as time passes. No more lock down borderlands, the stronger you are at any Keep/Tower/Camp, the more likely that place will be 2v1’ed by other two servers. I expect this change to also increase those epic moments of 3 zerg balls all running inside SMC while half the walls are down, or increase those surprise attacks on Garrison without a foothold in the map yet. More fun for everyone.
Numbers can be tweaked around. Like setting a maximum 3x the pts of the captured object (so 10 pts + at most 30 one-time pts in our example). Rate of bonus points can adjusted (so 5 bonus pts are added instead of 10 pts in our example). Personally, I like the exponential model. Still using our Tower example, 5 pts added after first 3 hrs, 10 pts added after next 2 hrs, and 15 pts added after next 1 hrs. Making a total of 30 one-time bonus pts for a tower not lost in 6 hrs. So your team would have received the equivalent in points as if you capture the Tower and ticked it 3 times. Keep roaming and capping in RED BL is good, but you can be 3 times effective taking something in the big-bad GREEN BL. This can also work for giving bonus WXP as well.
This change will achieve three goals: (1) greatly increase incentive to take on upgraded and guarded borderland, which leads to (2) more balance distribution for server forces to keep fights competitive, and most importantly (3) the losing server actually has a chance to catch up and win the match up if they play smart.
By creating more 2v1 scenarios across all maps, this can become an internal check to keep matchup balanced and fights dynamic. Do you guys think this can work?