Guild Wars 2

The +5 pip boost for Outnumbered is currently a little too nice to have, making it worthwhile to move around looking for an outnumbered borderland, but problematic if you get enough people to begin to compete on that borderland.

If the goal of providing the buff is to spread the population more evenly (both across maps and servers), it shouldn’t completely disappear before it’s done its job. Right now it encourages staying at a population where your server remains non-competitive, or bandwagoning somewhere that wins all the time for the +3 server tick. Anyone in between gets neither – in my current matchup my server is actually better off being a minor nuisance than putting in any serious effort.

Instead, the buff should start from +1 when you’re slightly outnumbered on that map, and end at +5 when you’re extremely outnumbered. This way, it’s still worth staying on when you begin to have enough players to compete, and when you can compete you can start thinking about changing the +1 server tick into a +2.

A graduated outnumbered buff is an interesting approach.

There’s another way to work it: play outgunned for a single tick isn’t worth any bonus. Play through a second tick, you get +1, and so on up to five bonus points.

This way it’s not an incentive to move at all; it’s a reward for fighting the good fight. It’s a “loyalty reward,” just like playing the same world for 3 weeks running.

I like this approach. It may need to have fewer stages, though.

What I would personally really like would be if the Outmanned pip were two buffs; one to say you’re currently outmanned, one to say you’ve been Outmanned at some point since the start of the tick. Attach the benefits & pips to the second. Flickering Outmanned is kind of annoying in the context of this system.