Guild Wars 2

I believe that the new upgrade system is harming the WvW more than doing it any good and here is why:

- Before HoT many players were spending time upgrading objectives, guarding dollies and speeding up workers.
- Planning strategy what upgrades to start, when and in which order was part of the deal. Available supply played big part of that.
- Escorting dollies and keeping camps secure was important.
- Possibility to deny supplies and basically stop upgrades/repairs was valid offensive tactic.

In above you see game what was running inside many maps and provided stuff to do for many people – daily. Only bad part of that was the gold people had to spend to actually start the upgrades.

What we have now is totally different. It is automatic, brings all upgrades in few big bundles and offers about zero stuff to do to anyone.

I agree that it was good decision to ditch the gold in upgrades, but I disagree with the automation.

This is how I would had done it:

- Exactly same system than before, including the supply management and individual single upgrades.
- Started from quartermaster – by player – like before.
- All upgrades free of charge.
- To able to start certain upgrade you need certain WvW ability and high enough rank for that.
- 4 new WvW ability skills: camp upgrades, tower upgrades, keep upgrades and castle upgrades. 1st being cheapest and last being most expensive.
- Each new ability should contain as many ranks as there is tiers in that objectives upgrades.

Benefits of adding the system:
- Sink of 250 (in example) ability points created.
- Totally new people can not mess with upgrades by accident and are “guided” to start from camps by using lowest cost on those.
- More communication between newer and older players about the upgrades and tips and tricks related to those.
- Being able to unlock abilities is rewarding to players and offers them goals (this is one of the other reasons why I really didn’t get why guard stacks were removed but is another issue there…)

…and that’s pretty much covers what I wanted to say. Shield for escorted yaks was one of the good updates of the expansion. Too bad the functionality was undermined with the automatic upgrades themselves.

…also it is much more inviting to defend something where someone has actually invested some time and effort into, than a thing what has no meaning to anyone except in scoreboard – maybe.

yeah, but generally the scout are the people with the lowest wvw rank, and people in zerg have the most…
Then you have here some issue… Scout wouldn’t be able to start upgrade but they want to do this, and people in zerg can do this but they don’t care…
Maybe automatic unlock this abilities once you reach some wvw level. Then you need to play to unlock but this will not cost you points…

And yes they have to remove those automatic upgrade…

The main issue is : Scouting is boring most of the time and reward nothing.
If you could think of a way to make scouting interesting, it would be different and Arena.net would probably remove auto-scouting.

in scouting the interesting part was the team work to protect supply camp > supply line (doly) and then manage the upgrade (to avoid keep with 0 supply). Defending the keep to be able to have the WP.
This require team work and to use a little your brain.

T3 and WP was the reward for all this work. People on the server always respond to call for help to defend keep with WP, because it’s very usefull to move faster on the map, and because people have work for that.

Now there is no work for the upgrade, no reward with the WP. Then now no one care about the keep. This remove a big part of the activities on the off peak time. Defensive roaming, killing ennemy dolly to prevent keep upgrade, etc.

At prime time automatic upgrade it’s ok, everyone focus on fight. But during off peak now we have nothing to do… Impossible to use the wp to defend the contested camp at the south of the map. It’s take too much time to from one side to another.

Then you just don’t care, you go later to take the camp back. This create just pve and KT and avoid fight.
Now if you call for help on EB for your keep on the BL no one care, because those keep have no value… No WP, no work to be T3…

Auto upgrade is a off peak time killer.

T3 and WP are useful for everyone, but it’s not a reward for the scout.
Arena.net want people to do things, enjoy them, feel rewarded by the game for doing it.
Not having to do things, be bored by them, and may be rewarded by other players (it’s a bonus).

If you can’t suggest things to make scouting interesting even for not dedicated players, nothing will change :/

Even minigames can be suggested!

Kulvar.1239:

T3 and WP are useful for everyone, but it’s not a reward for the scout.
Arena.net want people to do things, enjoy them, feel rewarded by the game for doing it.
Not having to do things, be bored by them, and may be rewarded by other players (it’s a bonus).

If you can’t suggest things to make scouting interesting even for not dedicated players, nothing will change :/

Even minigames can be suggested!

If you don’t enjoy scouting then don’t do it, no one is forcing you to. There are plenty of other people that loved defending and upgrading.

Puck.9612:

Kulvar.1239:

T3 and WP are useful for everyone, but it’s not a reward for the scout.
Arena.net want people to do things, enjoy them, feel rewarded by the game for doing it.
Not having to do things, be bored by them, and may be rewarded by other players (it’s a bonus).

If you can’t suggest things to make scouting interesting even for not dedicated players, nothing will change :/

Even minigames can be suggested!

If you don’t enjoy scouting then don’t do it, no one is forcing you to. There are plenty of other people that loved defending and upgrading.

Yep… this is one of the main reason why I think that locking free upgrades behind (relatively low) WvW ability wall is good thing (but obviously not mandatory in my suggestion).

When people specialize to something everyone else can not do, it makes them feel more important and involved on the stuff they do. In this case managing upgrades. Usually these people manage several structures and scout only the location they happen to be in.

My another reason for this was to prevent total newbies from accidentally starting fortify or draining keeps when sups low/objective under attack. Once they have obtained enough points to actually unlock the skills, they have learned the basics of upgrading and WvW in general already.

Obviously none of this matters as long we’re stuck to anets new fully automatic upgrade failure.

What comes to scouting anet has already introduced spy balloons etc to replace scouts I think… enemies around objective will show on map. Not sure is this time limited or permanent improvement/tactic though… haven’t really paid too much attention to details of it.

I didn’t say I don’t enjoy scouting.
I say that from Arena.net point of view, if there are not enough people enjoying doing something that is mandatory, they change it.