To be fair, EB has the best setup of the three. Not necessarily the spacing, which does tend to make the pace a lot faster, but how the layout made the areas in each third strategically relevant. If you want to take a keep, your best bet is to take out a few of the towers first, because the towers assisted in the keep’s defense. Both versions of the borderlands lacked a strategic layout. Being able to treb the garrison from the northern towers was a minor bit of strategy, but that’s the equivalent to a fingernail compared to an entire person. Now, with the new maps, there’s not even that fingernail.
I disagree, borderlands were much superior to EB, for a start EB is very imbalanced, there is a fair difference between how strong each keep is, there is a difference in towers such as green does not really have a weak tower, when you compare it to Durios (blue) or Anza (red), etc.
Then you have waypoints, on borderlands upgrading to / preventing / taking down / defending a WP was far more important than those on EB, it was probably the biggest strategic map based objective in WvW and biggest strategic driving force, things like preventing the opposition getting a WP in bay/hills have been removed from the game. (that this is gone with perma WP & autoupgrades is one of the reasons the new map is such a failure, the basic lack of understanding of WvW by whoever came up with the map and new upgrade system is well…).
The fact there were three keeps, and that it was reasonably common for the home side to get garri + 1 other upgraded at times meant that defense was generally much more interesting than EB, where all that really counted was your keep, then the 1 or two defensive towers like Veloka, jerri, etc, but they are right next to the keep, which is kind of dull, part of what made defending say garri + hills both getting attacked at once interesting is the distance between the two, not too far that it was impossible to get reinforcements in or react, but so close that you can virtually defend two thigns at once, like you can in EB, and beyond that it was the importance and strategic value that made it interesting and worth defending, losing Veloka might not be good, but really pales into insignificance compared to losing hills or bay with a WP.
Furthermore you have the actual keep design, the keeps on the old borderland gave far more tactical options and produced far more interesting fights than the simplistic, rather one dimensional ones on EB (garri especially).
As for the “northern towers was a minor bit of strategy”, I look it like this, every tower except the SE one on the old BL had some strategic value for attacking a keep, on EB half the towers are redundant and SM is the biggest red herring in the game.
Which is why, or at least what I found on multiple servers (on EU) that most veteran players whether they wanted fights as a guild, decent fights as an open raid or liked scouting / upgrading or whatever, preferred the borders, often leaving EB to newer players / casual players.
The problem with EB is that most of the towers are right on top of their respective keeps. If the spacing between the towers and the keeps were a full treb distance, it would be much better. You’re looking at the details of EB, but you need to be looking at the overall concept instead. The keep is the heart, and the towers support the keep. That’s an intelligent layout. Intelligent layouts are far superior to “the keep is in the front and exposed, and the towers are behind it and isolated”. Look at it like this, you get a keep, 2 towers and 3 camps to work with. You have to set them up to try to defend them. How are you going to position those areas? If you look at the way the thirds are set up in EB, that’s at least close. If you look at any of the thirds in any of the borderlands, they’re completely backwards and designed not to be held and defended, but to be easily captured. That’s the problem there. They’re not laid out in positions that help keep them safe, they’re laid out in positions that make them easy targets.
Furthermore, a waypoint in the EB keep is crucial to the defense of the entire third. A waypoint in any of the keeps on the borderlands primarily just meant a little less distance when running to somewhere in the south. On your home borderland, the southern towers were completely worthless, since Sleazerazer could just be activated to take those, so the waypoints in the hills and bay had considerable less value. The only thing the waypoints were good or was spamming on them when the timer was low during a defense. Going even further the hills was important to defend, because it could be absolutely brutal to try to attack, so it was better to hold it. But the bay? The bay was mindnumbingly simple to capture, so you didn’t even need to bother defending it, unless you were just looking to fight some people.
As far as the actual design of the interiors of the towers and keeps, I certainly preferred most of the old borderlands to Eb or the new borderlands. The hills was awesome, the garrison was pretty good, and the NE tower was my baby. But the west side of the map needed improvements. The NWT was far too easy to siege cap. The bay was hideous, in that the defenders were on the severe low ground. the SWT suffered from the same problem as the NWT. The SET was good, but a single treb from the hills completely neutered the place. Now, those problems could have easily been fixed. The NWT and SWT could have had some modifications done to them. The bay’s inner could have been raised up and just leave the water as a moat there. And the SET could have been raised or the hills lowered so a treb would only be able to reach the back wall (which would have needed to have been made breakable). But let’s not pretend that EB doesn’t have some good and bad towers as well. The new borderlands are….. well…. they’re…. hideously bad. The art team may have done a good job making them pretty, but…. the sheer number of fatal flaws with the design, both overall and in the smaller details, absolutely kills every bit of it. The southern towers aren’t complete crap, but that just means they have a little bit of good mixed in with all of the bad. The keeps are nightmares. The NWT might be ok with 10 people inside of it. The new NET is a glaring example of bad design philosophy. And what’s worse is…. what are the northern towers protecting? The PvE mobs to the north of them. The skritt and whatever the hell that other thing is in the NE have towers to protect them, and the bizarre keep is a sitting duck.
Now, imagine this, if you will. Start with the old borderlands. Swap where the garrison and the north camp are. Slide the northern towers up along the road to be within treb distance from the garrison. Now, look at that third from a defensive point of view. Next, swap the hills and SE camp, then the bay and SW camp. Then look at those thirds from a defensive point of view. In each third, your keep would be in the back line, your towers would in in front of them to defend them, and your camps would be off to the sides. Sure, attackers could just go straight for a keep, but their best bet would be to take a tower and set up and pressure from there. Attackers would need to push out to advance, and defenders would need to push out to halt that advance, so open field fights would happen between the objectives. Sure, the defenders could try to sit inside on siege and wait for the attackers to approach, but the attackers could just drop an open field treb and take down all their siege. It’s those layers of strategy and counterplay that used to come in small doses, but have now been completely removed. But they should have been at the forefront from the beginning.
