Guild Wars 2

So I am really big on WvW, I love open pvp and I am really enjoying the game right now. But I have come to notice a few issues and I have a suggestion that might help to make WvW even better.

One of the issues that pops up when you have 24/h pvp is that of night capping. Some servers will have either a higher population or more active population at night. This can allow them to cap the maps with ease or little to no resistance.

The only effective counter to this is to forum alliances and recruit guilds to fill the gap and build your own night capping squad but this is difficult and takes time. If your server is being squashed at night, and there is another server that isn’t a lot of individual players and guilds will transfer or opt not to roll on your server.

Now defending while out manned is not a hopeless affair. An organized team, even when fighting another larger organized team can hold out for insane amounts of time from within fully upgraded towers and keeps. These towers and keeps will eventually fall to superior numbers and a lack of supply but the sieges can take hours and this buys time for more players to log on. It’s also far more enjoyable game play for both attackers and defenders. It’s not hitting gates, but countering enemy siege and tactics.

The issues that these undermanned groups have is that when you do eventually lose your upgrade keeps and towers your out of options. Against a larger organize or semi organized force an non-upgraded keep or tower is easy meat. Without supply and upgrades a good team can take out a tower in 3-5 minutes, and no matter your organization if you do not have near equal numbers you can’t hold it.

So under manned crews can take towers and keeps but they can’t hold them long enough to make a difference. Upgrades and supplies take to long to build. By the time you get any supply into that keep or tower the enemy will have retaken it. It also only takes 1-2 players to stop supply, but 4-5 to defend it. This makes it even more challenging for the undermanned side.

But you can’t simply increase upgrade speed or supply rate. This would ruin the balance and shift it more to the opposing side. One of the issues that night capping causes is when more players log in during the mornings and evening and numbers even out you have the situation where a server holds a majority of the map fully upgraded.

TL DR:

My suggestion is this: Have the undermanned buff decrease the supply cost of siege weapons and upgrades, and increase the speed of upgrades for the out numbered servers.

bump to keep post visible

Yes, I was thinking something like this the other day, but I believe a slightly easier way of doing this is to instead allow players with an outmanned buff to pick up 20 supply, the same way the +5 supply guild buff allows players to pick up 15 supply. Upgrade speed and cost could be reduced a bit when outmanned aswell, I certainly see that helping a lot, more so than +15% Health from switching the outmanned and orb buffs.

Possibly increase the gates of towers / keeps to be more resilient depending on how much your outmanned by giving low numbers of defenders just a little bit more time to defend, increase the strength of the guards too, again, depending on how much your out manned by, giving the attacking force a little more of a challenge.

These should be calculated due to population NOT just because you have the outmanned buff, the gates are suddenly twice as strong. If they have twice as many guys as you, gates, twice as strong… three times the amount of guys, three times as strong… something along those lines. Obviously i’m plucking figures and the math would have to be properly thought out but you get the idea

Sadly, ANET has all but confirmed that they don’t view nightcapping as a problem.
Funny though, that most of the server transfers are away from worlds with a shallow off-peak population into 24/7 servers.

Matchmaking won’t solve the problem because 24/7 servers don’t occur in groups of 3s but like so many MMO companies they are stubborn in their ways. Hope they don’t go the way of bioware.

Likely arenanet suck playing their own game.
nightcapping got to go.
its a game not a job.

Well this is a fix that would address night-capping but it works primarily for out manned servers.

The extra supply capacity suggestion is a good one but I don’t think it would get to the core of the issue.

The big problem as I see it, is to have a chance at defending a keep or tower against a much larger force, you need to have the objective upgraded for the larger supply capacity / door HP.

If your out manned the chances of you being able to take and hold a supply camp while a keep or tower is being sieged is very low, so your not going to be able to get supply into that keep for repairs or siege weapons even if you wipe the enemy.

With upgrades in and a pool of 500-700 supply rather than 100-200 you can take your force out after wiping an enemy to reclaim a camp and run 2-3 dolyaks in to get supply up.

But normal upgrades simply take to long. A large night capping team can recolor all the other maps and come back before you get more than 2-3 upgrades in. I see it happen almost nightly.

The proposed change creates a system that encourages the underdog to put it out there and try to take and defend anything they can letting them take better advantage of the increase karma, coin, and experience buffs.

it also gives the larger side a better fight of it. I’ve been on both sides of the night capping recently and there is nothing I dislike more in WvW that hammering at the door of an empty keep or tower. I go to open world pvp to fight other players, not to pve objectives.

Um its NOT night capping. Its a population issue. That’s why ANet dont see it as a problem; it doesnt exist. Wonder when ppl will realize, while its night time in the USA, its Daytime in other places? Off peak on USA is Peek for others. Ergo.. No issue.

HOWEVER, the population imbalance is another issue. Hence, the outmanned buff and as soon as people realize that, maybe solutions can be discussed properly. So what we really SHOULD be discussing is what will help those servers who are outmanned?

Karicus.8356:

Um its NOT night capping. Its a population issue. That’s why ANet dont see it as a problem; it doesnt exist. Wonder when ppl will realize, while its night time in the USA, its Daytime in other places? Off peak on USA is Peek for others. Ergo.. No issue.

HOWEVER, the population imbalance is another issue. Hence, the outmanned buff and as soon as people realize that, maybe solutions can be discussed properly. So what we really SHOULD be discussing is what will help those servers who are outmanned?

As per the suggestion in the post.

Night capping = population issue.

Change out manned buff to help with population issue.

^ agree! and said as much in an earlier post. Just commenting on those who STILL think its a night cap issue and that ANet wont do anything about it

“Night” capping is an issue for one reason — there aren’t enough Asian/Oceanic players to go around. Plus, the big four draw in all of the transfers. Good luck getting a decent portion of those players to xfer to tier two servers like Dragonbrand and Crystal Desert. All of that being sad, I really could care less. WvW is a poor RvR clones, but it’s good for having fun on occassion. The small scale battles are the only enjoyable aspect of WvW at the moment, sadly they’re few and far between.