Guild Wars 2

Here’s an explanation of the lattice I copied from someone on this forum:

“2) “The Lattice”.
World War 2 Online and Planetside both ran into the same problem: players spread out too much and there was no real “front line” or focus to the fight. They both added their own style of “lattice” system — Given bases A-—B—-C—-D—-E, you own B and the enemy owns C, you can attack from B to C but you cannot attack D or E. You need a link to them. Of course, the real lattice was multi-pronged so you always had options on where to attack next but you couldn’t just abandon “B” to go on the offensive somewhere else because if the enemy took it behind you, your offensive would be dead in the water with no friendly territory to link to.”

How do you think this would affect wvw? Pros? Cons?

Planetside maps are much larger than WvW maps… If Anet added like 20 more maps to fight in maybe this could work, but currently there is no need for this. The maps are currently too small anyway.

BroScientist’s explanation is a bit convoluted; as a long time Planetside player, I’ll explain a bit more.

Every base in Planetside was connected by a series of lines that formed like a “web” or “lattice”. Where these lines intersected, you had bases, towers etc.

In order to take a base, you had to own a base connected to the one you wanted to take. This meant you couldn’t go really far behind enemy lines and take a base, even if you had an army of players, because it simply wouldn’t work.

Additionally, bases that were connected to other bases on the lattice conferred bonuses – for example, if a base had shielding, bases adjacent to that base on the lattice had shielding too.

The idea behind this was to prevent the battles in Planetside being a free-for-all, and caused the action to “bottleneck” on the continents on battlelines between bases that tended to run perpendicular to the lattice lines. It was actually quite a clever system.

However, as Churros has said, WvW maps are too small. A borderland only has what, 7 “bases” (not including camps)? A continent in Planetside 1 had many more, perhaps 12-15. If you had a lattice system in a borderlands I suspect it would make them far too easy to defend, or breaking a siege would become even more difficult. Currently, if your borderland has been overrun, your force can realistically attack one of 5 targets (the closest 3 camps and 2 towers) but in a lattice, this might be reduced to 2 or 3.

The one advantage it would offer would be that it’d give an impression, without needing as much prompting from commanders, for PUG players to decide where to go – as there’d be inherently less choice, so a guess at the one or two valid choices would usually be right. Still, I’m not confident it’d give an optimal result.