Guild Wars 2

I got an idea how to make scouting valuable in a sense of having the game reward you for it. At the moment scouting is largely arbitrary. Some person stays behind and communicates on map/team chat what he sees.

So here’s the idea: make scouting a thing. In the map screen when you hover over enemy towers and supply camps there would be three things displayed in the tooltip:

• Time limit until the lord becomes vulnerable to attacks
• Supply count (e.g. 135/400)
  Not displayed on tooltip, but rather as small icon on the map:
• Broken walls

These statistics would update whenever an ally player has vision of the change.

Example 1: Red side’s trebuchet has broken down blue side tower wall (there’s no icon on anyone’s map). Blue side defender goes to check on the wall in the tower. Now every blue side player has map update that shows the broken wall piece and its location. Red side attacker goes to check on the tower and all red side players’ maps would get updated with the information of broken wall.

Example 2: Red side’s supply camp lord’s invulnerability has two minute timer left. Blue side attacker sees this and blue side players’ maps are updated with this information when they read the supply camp’s tooltip. Blue side attacker, who was the only source of this information, leaves the site. Now the map tooltip has ? as value for invulnerability timer.

Example 3: Like example two, but instead of having lord timers, information deals with location’s supply count. There are two ways to deal with lack of information here: either stop information whenever vision is lost, or mark the information veracity with color code: bright white for up-to-date information gradually fading to grey and disappearing as the time passes from last observation.

Tooltip could also feature information like what ‘tier’ the location has. This would allow for new structure upgrade that could hide the actual supply information.

How do you guys like the suggestion?

I’m going to say no, simply because this rewards laziness and crappy teamplay. Commanders on the map should already be having people doing scouting on the map and should be sending people to scout locations before sending the zerg there.

Also the WvW Overlay is a good 3rd party program for team leaders to use to tell timer status (usually buggy for the first 1-2 hours after reset though).

I don’t want any development time to be spent on rewarding poor team organization.

Chris.3290:

I’m going to say no, simply because this rewards laziness and crappy teamplay. Commanders on the map should already be having people doing scouting on the map and should be sending people to scout locations before sending the zerg there.

Scouting is the most unrewarding thing to do in this game, especially if it’s stationary scouting.
You literally do not get WXP, karma/money or any other type of compensation that is so typical of MMOs.
It really does need to be made an ingame-thing for that fact alone.

I don’t want any development time to be spent on rewarding poor team organization.

You mean like not rewarding scouts ever, so that commanders have to search half an hour every time for the replacement?

Seems like this just removes the need for people to communicate. This is a game of people, communication is as part of it as anything else.

Jamais vu.5284:

Scouting is the most unrewarding thing to do in this game, especially if it’s stationary scouting.
You literally do not get WXP, karma/money or any other type of compensation that is so typical of MMOs.
It really does need to be made an ingame-thing for that fact alone.

You mean like not rewarding scouts ever, so that commanders have to search half an hour every time for the replacement?

If your team/guild/server is so selfish for Wxp and the need for constant rewards (not unlike a Labrador Retriever or a teenager with low self-esteem); then I daresay that they deserve to lose.

It’s a pain to be stuck running an abandoned road in the BL or on an AC, waiting for an attack that can come in 5 minutes or maybe not for hours.
These are the things that you do to be successful in WvW though. You take turns so that the others are getting all that Wxp and loot; so you can go on the offense and take towers and keeps, rather than sitting in a contested garrison all day/night long. You do this so you don’t lose T3 towers and keeps to 6 jokers with a superior ram and spare time.

You don’t scout, you waste the zerg’s time, they’ll stop listening to you, you’ll have objectives getting flipped before you can respond; and it’ll just be a mess.

Lastly, if this wasn’t intentional by the developers; then why did they add a delay for white swords and up the orange swords indicator to 25+ on one side?
Less karma trains and more strategy.