- if more than X number cross a bridge, everybody near gets immobilized for 30 seconds because the bridge collapsed.
LOL. To have destructible bridges…
I don’t think I’d really like to see things that directly impact the value of a player though, more along the lines of the game requiring more of a larger team. I brought up logistics because it’s an example of how asymmetrical warfare can be viable in reality, but it could be applied in game as well.
Suppose for example that in addition to our material supplies (the current type we use for building, repairing, upgrades, etc) there existed another kind of supply to represent essentials for upkeep (this could be all manner of things, but let’s simplify it to ‘rations’ because they’re obvious). It wouldn’t be a thing players interact with, but each building would have a store of it, each supply camp would generate it, and yaks deliver it alongside normal supply.
Over time, each building drains its rations. If it runs out of rations, bad things start happening to it. This again could be all sorts of stuff, from the mild to very drastic. Maybe the NPCs stop respawning, or actually begin to disappear; the walls and gates slowly take damage with nobody to maintain them, and players have to do it manually; eventually the whole thing could deteriorate, leaving only indestructible parts and a coloured circle in the lord room.
By itself that doesn’t change a whole lot, but what it does is provide us with a way to scale things without making players on one side stronger/weaker. After a minimum population level is reached, additional growth accelerates the rate at which rations diminish for that team (on a particular map). They’d never quite run out by themselves, because the dolyaks bring in more constantly, but the more people you have, the more important it becomes for each yak to arrive with its supply. Thus a smaller server may have a lot of leeway with losing its yaks, while a larger one needs most of them to get through.
The idea being that if a whole team is off zergballing somewhere, they couldn’t be assured their highly upgraded stuff couldn’t possibly fall to a handful of people before they swarm back there and kill them all. They’d need to be constantly aware of threats and divert people not just to sit in towers as sentries slowly dying of boredom, but actually move around and protect their supply lines between towers, even to a base that hasn’t needed anything built or repaired in ages.
The more people they divert, the less a smaller team has to deal with closer to home. If a team loses everything, they could even just spread out and screw with all your stuff at once, weakening your defenses before an attack rather than smacking their heads pointlessly on a door and being mobbed. Or they could just weaken your stuff until the other team notices and starts knocking on doors, then take advantage of the shift in focus.
I would add though that for this to work, ideally I’d think we’d need to have more frequent yaks carrying less each. They’re fairly fragile, which is fine because this shouldn’t require loads of people, but the supply line overall shouldn’t be so weak that a few players can alpha-strike your yaks, die to the defenders, repeat a few times and make all your stuff fall down. A greater number on the map at once may also help to keep both attackers and defenders spread out, and avoid just giving old zergs new targets.
This is just an example of course, but I think that sort of thing would go a looong way to improving WvW. We need ways to reduce the effect of pop imbalance without being as unpleasant as buffing one team or punishing another; this stuff should actually add things to gameplay.
Your Killing your own game. We play 10+ hrs a day because we really like the game play. Not like this.
, even if the reduced map-capacity also means less skill laags.