At least view the attached image if you don’t like walls of text.
I started thinking about how WvW could improved in order to deal with a major gripe I had with it, and this issue is of course;
WvW encourages you not to fight, and cap structures that have… nobody in them.
Attacking in WvW; Join a zerg, go around flipping structures all day. You get rewarded for fighting nobody, for avoiding confrontation. It creates a dilemna in that you came to WvW to fight, yet you don’t want to fight. Great for boosting your character to 80, bad when you’re geared out and want something more. Alternatively there’s the small group who think they’re too good for the zerg, go around ninja flipping structures all day again hoping that there is nobody there to repel them.
Defending in WvW; You don’t. To say it simply it’s pointless. You stand there and scout, waiting for the attackers to come along. Delay the inevitable possibly, or hope your own zerg decides to waste their time and show up from their structure flipping in some other corner of the map. Basically WvW defending boils down to flipping structures at the same speed as your opponents or hopefully faster, until one side gets bored and gives up.
I could expand on this a lot more, but the horse has been trampled into mush. Basically what I want to do is promote healthy attacking/defensive gameplay and get away from this non-combative rubbish. My current focus only concerns EBG though.
My idea;
You have a protective link starting from your home keep.
After your home keep is in your control, you can only take keeps connected to your keep, and then only keeps connected to that.
Only stonemist outer gates should be vulnerable (or maybe also a very small portion of the walls next to the gates – not quite sure). Nobody complains about there being no walls to protect inner SM, plus the outside walls are so numberous that they are only good for a discreet ninja assault, or a constant catapult barrage. Bleh.
Ninja Edit: I was thinking maybe you should need both of your nearest towers in order to be able to damage the nearest Stonemist gate/wall on your side. Not entirely sure.
To start taking structures in your enemy territory, you need to first take Stonemist and you have to take them in reverse order to your progress you took towards Stonemist.
For the typical WvW player this is problem solved in my opinion, you get epic warfare, concentrated battles so you know where you should be, meaningful feeling attack/defence, actual combat is not promoted rather than discouraged.
Now on the other hand we have the player who prefers the smaller battles, running into another small group of players, open ground fights, ganking, strategic positioning on the map. This is what we will use the supply camps for.
Dolyaks will always be killable, this will give importance to a smaller scale group hanging out in certain areas of the map where they could expect confrontation and feel like they’re helping the large warfare battle.
For supply camp capping I am not entirely decided. Would it be healthier if supply camps were dictated by the same rules in that they can’t be captured unless the nearest structure is owned by your team or they are capturable at any time? Personally I don’t want to promote flipping unprotected camps then running off elsewhere, I want them to be fought for when they’re most needed.
Camps should retain ownership by the previous holder even if both of the nearest structures are owned by a different world, but can’t be recaptured again once completely lost until you retake an appropriate structure.
Smaller groups could still be used to assault dolyaks/supply runs and the enemy reinforcement lanes.*
(edited by gingertree.5062)