In my opinion WvW lacks rewards for defending structures and fighting enemy players. Attacking and defending stategies are getting poorer, because attacking unprotected structures is more benificial.
The problem is the loot you get for capturing empty structures. You didn’t fight any enemy, but you get loot from veterans and champions which is equal or even more benificial than fighting enemy players.
Therefore whole servers are mobilizing a lot of players to play on times they know the enemy has few players. They run in a huge blob and flip structures on every map. This is widely known as PvD (player versus door), because there is hardly any enemy player they fight against and even if the 2-3 defenders should be able to destroy the siege of the attacking crowd, the attackers autoattack the door down, because they are so many. In EOTM this behavior is even worse. It became standard to capture structures in rotation.
In my opinion the rewards for capturing structures with high numbers of players are too high because of the lootbags and levels the NPCs give. Also the attacking event gives more benefits than defending.
My suggestions to improve the benefit for defending and fighting enemy players:
- No loot from NPCs or limit the lootbags from NPCs in WvW according to their rank – For example 10 player get lootbags for veterans and 20 player get loot from champions. This way there is less loot in huge blobs and the same loot for small groups.
- Better balance the rewards for events in WvW – at the moment capturing a structure gives too much compared to defending a structure, killing or protecting dolyaks.
- Give less rewards per player the more players participate in an event – cut down the rewards of blobbing and improve the status of smaller groups.
- Do not allow lowlevels in WvW – they cannot even use all their skills and the upscaling of numbers doesn’t help, because they have white/green/blue armor and the least you should have is exotic armor.
- Make up a seperate WvW daily – this improves the motivation to go into WvW and equals the lack of rewards the players get because of the reward scaling of events. Also add tomes of knowledge to these daily rewards because leveling in WvW is not possible anymore.
- Increase the loot from player kills – because world vs world massively lacks loot compared to other gamemodes, loot should be increased for killing enemies. Especially badges should only be given for killing players, not npcs.
If you make it like this, blobbing up and turning in cricles would give less benefit than splitting up and run in smaller groups. Defending a structure would give you more rewards than capturing, because you will get at least one event while the attacker only gets one at most.
Some nice add-ons would be:
- Connect the quality of the loot dropped by a dead enemy to the WvW-Level of the enemy – by this good players get more of a challenge.
I know high WvW level doesn’t necessarily mean high skill, but there is a good correlation between skill and experience. - Block waypoints on attacked structures for 20s (or the time it takes to make one shot with a trebouchet from max range) with overlapping timestamps – this way you also need scouts on structures with waypoints to stop the enemies from hitting doors.
- Make it impossible to port to any waypoint while being within reach of a structure that is infight – make it harder for the defending/attacking crowd to get away once they see that they will loose the fight. This grants more lootbags when attacking a structure that is defended.
Benfits:
- more search for fights because this is the only way to get loot
- less rewards to play in low-activity times – no enemy, no loot
- more rewards for the not so popular events like pushing/killing dolyaks, defending structures
- new strategies needed to attack better defended structures – I like complex situations
Risks:
- it might become even harder to capture structures against enemies with higher numbers
- no loot, because the enemy runs away all the time or there is no enemy on the map in the times you play
I hope for a constructive discussion. Maybe some points could get more elaborate but I am convinced this would change the modus WvW to be more like a PvP modus than a PvE modus.
Last Phoenix [Nix]
(edited by Oak da Vite.9054)