Guild Wars 2

Current #1 fear for WvW, especially with longer match times coming:

“The match ends tomorrow and we’re down by 80,000 points. It’s a waste to keep trying.”

Even if it’s too late to stage a comeback, even to 2nd place, I’d still like to play and feel like upgrades are worthwhile and do all the usual fun stuff. I still want a tower with cannons, even if it’s too late to help us win.

One idea to help mitigate this problem would be to scale upgrade costs based on scores and how much time is left in the match.

So in a 7 day match:
Days 1-3 — everyone pays full price.
Days 4-7 — score leader pays full price. 2nd and 3rd place pay a price based on their score versus the leader’s score. e.g., 1st place has 100,000 points. 2nd place has 80,000 points so they pay 80% cost for upgrades. 3rd place has 20,000 points so they pay 20% cost for upgrades. (We could go even further and say that on the last day, upgrade costs are halved for 2nd place and quartered for 3rd place. So in the above example, 2nd place pays 40% and 3rd place pays 5%.)

This might also extend to the supply cost of siege engines. (Purchase cost would be abuseable…lose one round and buy 500 cheap siege engines… but supply cost would be on-the-spot.)

I agree that there needs to be more ways for “defeated” servers to feel like they have a chance to get back into the game. It’s hard to think of fair ways to do this, but reducing or removing repair costs when killed by an enemy player would definitely help combat the discouragement.

Armor doesn’t take damage when you jump off a cliff and die right now, so I’ll often use that as a weird “out” if I’m obviously about to get overwhelmed by a huge zerg.