Guild Wars 2

Hi, just wanted to share an idea I had, I enjoy thinking about WvW theory and would be interested to hear why it may be a bad idea or good.

What if when a server owns every keep(in EB keep+castle) on a map they get a debuff that makes walls/gates vulnerable by 25% and if they have all keeps and towers they are 50% more vulnerable, for being.. spread too thin? Like all their engineers and good workers just can’t handle owning everything! Ok I haven’t thought of a really great realistic explanation yet.

One key part of the idea would be to give people defending the weakened structures more reward/wxp per tick maybe double… once a tower gets taken the 50% debuff is down to 25% and once a keep is taken the bonus is gone and the debuff drops from the remaining buildings.

This I think could create interesting split up strategies to try weakening all the buildings while they are all owned, especially helpful when a zone is fortified up, instead of quickly rushing to ninja a keep before the dominating servers zerg shows up to stomp you out, but even that sometimes impossible task at least now would be realistic.

It would help promote defending instead of abandoning a zone once your zerg steamrolled through it and give people who own nothing a much more realistic goal to shoot for.

I just think this would make the game more fun/interesting especially in bad matchups/times of day for both sides.

Why doesn’t this naturally happen already? When server A has 50 players on a map, and B has 25, why is it that server A can so easily sweep B’s side of the map? Why isn’t A’s ability to expand limited by how much they already have (and presumably defend)?

personally I think it’s because defense is too easy. walls, gates and siege make it simple for 1 or 2 to hold off an attacker long enough for your zerg to show up and wipe them. essentially, it doesn’t matter how much territory you hold — since you don’t need to dedicate a significant number of players to defense (and you can easily more a large force in a short time, especially with waypoints) the side with more people can win any offense regardless of how much they already hold, and will only be stopped when they run out of map.

since defense is completely unrewarded anyway, how about you simply remove it? just make all the objectives paper, easily captured even by small groups, and servers will be forced to defend using players. this will naturally limit the ability of a larger server to expand.

(it will also cause players to quit because defense is boring and unrewarding, so clearly this isn’t a good idea.)

it comes down to this: can you fix the game so that defense is rewarding and players will want to do it? if you can, “overextended” should fix itself.

if you can’t do it, then look for another solution. I know you would like to make defense more rewarding but if you can’t actually deliver on this then stop wasting your time and ours, and just put in artificial barriers to unlimited expansion, like the OP suggests.

if you don’t like the idea of a structural debuff (or your tech doesn’t allow it), there are plenty of other options (e.g. giving the server that owns “too much” a speed debuff that reduces their mobility, and therefore reduces their ability to defend).

-ken