This is just what flew through my head today and may have been requested in a bit of a different form already.
I imagine having a dynamic ppt system in which holding a structure gives you more points the more it is in danger of beeing retaken.
ANet would basically collect all the data of each individual server at which time they attack which structures and when they manage to cap it as well as population data during these times.
When the servers are matched together they’d combine the 3 servers’ stats calculating the actual “danger” a structure is in and adjust it’s ppt according to this and how well you manage to hold it.
Taking ebg as an example:
It would mean that the servers would be rewarded more ppt the closer the object is towards the enemy. For example Anzalias and Durios are capped very often. So if the defenders actually manage to get it upgraded and defended it gives much more ppt than say Bravost or Veloka that never flip and therefore are much safer.
On the other hand if you actually manage to attack and cap one of the closest spawn towers holding it would give you a massive reward because it’s very difficult for you to hold it.
If you manage to get SMC to t3 in prime time where it ususally always looks like swiss cheese you’d also get quite a big boost.
And there may even be some funny situations when people are actually trying to defend their supply camps because a fully upgraded camp is much harder to accomplish than taking a t0 SMC and would therefore even give more points.
This system would create an incentivise to go for the more difficult structures because they are more rewarding. And defending would of course also be improved because upgrading an endangered structure rewards you with more ppt, but on the other hand may result in some very nice fights because people now start to care about structures that they are used to watch color flipping faster than a traffic light.
Also the dynamic scaling with the upgrade status would mean that a) upgrading and b) especially taking the effort to attack a keep over and over and over again until you finally manage to take it would finally have an impact instead of it beeing all the same value as a simple wooden tower.
The reward factor should ofc be visible on the map so you know what keep gives you best results.
Until this point the system could even be fairly simple to implement without requiring much fancy data. But I’d like to include the time factor which basically means having an activity graph for each object depending on the time:
An example: The system knows that at 5am server A has an active night crew of say 60 people capping their way through the maps. Server B only has 20 left during the off time (probably mostly on ebg) so their keeps are in big danger. Now the system would say “Hey server A it’s nice that you are slaughtering all over the borders but where is the fun in fighting NPC’s only? There is no reason for me to greatly reward you for doing this. Though I may give server B points for holding their stuff if they were still here. But look there are still some guys from Server B left on ebg. How about you try and take their stuff and have some nice fights? Then you’d deserve your points.”
That of course doesn’t mean that fights become more fair for server B but defending a structure with 20 guys against 60 is fairly possible with the right communication. And they wouldn’t feel useless because their effort has a huge impact on the score.
The system basically always compares the values of the server owning and the server attacking a structure. That would also passively encourage the two low activity servers to go against the high activity server because capping things from each other is no big action when they are fairly balanced, but taking it from the big guy over there is.
What do you think of this? Do you see any major drawbacks to the actual system that may not have come to my mind?
I don’t see much potential for exploiting the system, because it relies on long term collected data and therefore would be pretty hard to manipulate unless you wanna completely stop playing for 2-3 weeks.
There may be some problems with sudden bigger population changes on a server, for example if the guild that took care of the night crew for the last half year suddenly quits the enemies would suddenly get a much higher score. For me that would be an acceptable compromise tho because it still has less exploit potential that only relying on the immediate measurements.
For ebg it is of course quite unrealistic to hold the closest towers but it should work on both alpine and dessert borders.
PS: It’s pretty late already so it may take some time until I can answer again.
All we wanted was a GvG.