Guild Wars 2

So I think even the most forgiving person, including ANet employees, would have to agree that there are some issues with WvW. Certain things which are shall we say less than desirable, and those things would include but not be limited to:

-Zergs or zerg-play being overly dominant as a strategy, especially when against non-zergs
-WXP-induced tactics, such as not defending assets and playing for WXP and not PPT
-Blowouts or match imbalance, snowball effect etc
-Bloodlust effects

It occurs to me that some of these things could well be addressed in ways which compliment one another, and that the divisions of servers into groups coming with the League system might be the ideal time for such changes.

Right now, there is often little motivation for defending assets in WvW. First, since the point gain is only dependent upon owning the asset at the end of the tick, actively defending it is not necessary from that perspective. Second, as long as an asset is secured or resecured before tick, allowing it to be taken by an enemy server and then retaken by your own is more advantageous from a WXP perspective.

One way to address this would be through changes to how both assets and Points Per Tick are awarded, as well as how WXP can be earned. It has always seemed wrong that an asset is worth the same number of points to someone endeavoring to take it, should the asset have no upgrades or be fully upgraded. There is a strategic benefit of course to wiping upgrades on an asset, but the act of taking it from the enemy has the same potential reward whether it was upgraded and difficult to secure or not.

Altering this fact would change the calculus for both the attacking and defending sides, with the overall equation as regards deployment of forces becoming much more complex, with different variables and multiple potential solutions. It would be possible to make an asset worth more points through defending than simply taking and owning at the tick. Where points denied to your enemy are just as important, indeed more so, than the points you yourself can possibly earn through ownership.

One way to do this would be by tying an asset’s upgrade status to it’s points potential. For example, currently a Keep will earn you 25 points per tick, or 100 per hour. You can lose and retake the Keep multiple times each tick, and still earn all the potential points from that asset during for the hour. There is no motivation to hold it for the defenders, and no points-based reward for an inferior enemy force to try to take in the face of it’s likely being retaken for tick.

What if however, an asset awarded the team taking it an amount of points when they took it, in real time, and this amount was relative to the asset’s upgrade status? For simplicity’s sake, let’s use the supply capacity value to determine how much point an asset is worth for taking. With this system, an un-upgraded Keep would be worth 500 points simply on capture, which would require the defending team 5 hours of ticks to match, at 25 points per tick. Just taking the Keep becomes a viable form of points acquisition, as good as, or even better, than just holding it in the first place.

This also means that defending a Keep, in this scenario, for that hour, is actually worth more points than just what you get for owning it, if you do manage to prevent the enemy from getting those 500 points. Points your enemy does not get are important in such a system.

This method of tying realtime points value to upgrade status also helps mitigate ‘no-defense’ PPT asset-trading, and prevents abusing this system, as there is a finite amount of points an asset could produce since it takes a set amount of supply and time to upgrade it, while rewarding waiting until an asset is taken as it will give you more points overall once it has been upgraded.

Zerg tactics are also addressed via this change, motivating a larger force to split up and defend it’s assets, and not focus so much on flipping them for tick. Even losing un-upraded towers could net the enemy server more points than you are earning from anything you just take for tick. Over-matched servers would gain a clear and simple avenue for catching up or earning meaningful points, by focusing their fewer numbers on single goals – taking upgraded assets over a longer period of time, rather than ninja-flipping assets for tick points. The more a match progresses, the more points are on the board for the taking – offsetting the snowball effect.

Lastly, Bloodlust’s mechanic of giving points for stomps is a good one, but the stat bonuses should be removed, or traded straight up with the Outnumbered buffs. To be considered as another small-scale method of earning points, the ruins cap areas could give a steady stream of points while owned individually, regardless of the Bloodlust buff status. A Conquest source of points inside WvW.

That later may need to be zerg-balanced in some way, but in conjunction with the main change, it should be equally open to all servers.

While the concept of making points through denying them to your enemy may seem abstract and lack glamor, it makes a lot of sense and would be pretty easy to do with the existing mechanics, given each asset has a set value/variable for it’s supply capacity already. You would literally be able to walk up to a tower and see what it gets you for the effort you invest – unlike per-tick gains where you are not always sure if you will still own something when the tick ends.

So first, thank-you for reading this far! And second…what do you think, crazy or no?

Surely there are at least a few people with the faculties to read all that and offer some intelligent commentary… :P

Indeed loads of text that one has to decipher, atleast i do.

I feel that PPT has become one of the least worries of wvw but you make a valid point.
no incentive to defend, yet this would work both ways, the overpopulated/overpowered server would easily hold their border thus earning the more defensive ticks, unless that is scaled trough ranking. i would love to have more information shown on my map though. supply count/upgrades/garrison present/forces on map/ppt per item.

This is also due to the way of capturing a keep/tower. instead of making a keep defendable trough skilled play/tactic they trew up barriers to be taken down.

I would rather see three different points to be held simultaniously inside a keep (bring the spvp maps in small form inside a keep) before being able to kill the lord, iow unvulnerability buff only goes down when the three points are capped.

This stops the blitzkrieg zerging way of attacking/capping and forces people to think for once.

you can use this mechanic in different ways and the options are numerous..

Wouldn’t it be awesome if a tower must be held to be able to reach a keep in the first place? Or a point must be held to keep a gate open?
Or maybe to stop reinforcements from using a waypoint? hold the enemy point = waypoint closed. how about making workers fix opened gates trough an mini event?

iow mechanics that give people the idea they are contributing to the defense..
A shout on the map saying “need 100 supplies to activate repair event for garrison”would bring more people to garisson instead of “all gates down in garisson need more people”.

Also the implementation of inner fights draws out the defense/capture giving players an incentive to run back to the fight instead of giving up after one death because all gates are down and 40 enemies are inside.

I feel a focus on ppt would make wvw even more monotonous, rather add mechanics that allow different tactics and make defense/attack diverse and worthwile.

For now its al linanimate objects people must combat promoting massive numbers (the road of least resistance) to accomplish something.

I would like to see a small team sneaking into a keep capping a point wich allows a gate to be opened.

Great idea! One problem I could see with it is one of the problems not listed:

- Coverage wins PPT.

The scenario I am thinking is that in matches where 1 server has night-time coverage and the others don’t, that one server will completely obliterate the other servers.

I think it’s really important for defense to be important for PPT. So one addition I would make is: the amount of points for holding a position decays the longer you hold it.

Currently the keep contributes 25 points per tick. That’s 5% of its initial supply capacity (25/500) – let’s say that after 5 hours (20 ticks) that should decay to 3% (15 points). That means it decays at 0.15% per tick. HOWEVER, capturing the keep is seen as effectively upgrading its supply from 0 to 500. Each upgrade would add PPT at it’s own decaying rate.

So as a “battle log”:

• Keep is captured. Contribution from capture = 5% * 500 = 25 PPT
• Cannons are ordered.
• Point tick happens – team gains 25 points.
• Keep points decay. Contribution from capture = 4.85% * 500 = 24 PPT (24.25)
• Cannons complete. The increase the capacity by 100 supply. Contribution from cannons = 5% * 100 = 5 PPT
• Point tick happens. Team gains 24 + 5 = 29 points.
• Keep is not upgraded for 20 ticks. PPT = 3% * 500 + 3% * 100 = 3% * 600 = 18 points.
• or Keep is fully upgraded. PPT = 0.3% * 1600 = 48 points.

This creates an incentive to continuously upgrade the keep (valuing defense) while not creating an outright snowball if the keep is never turned into paper because there is nobody to capture it. In addition it adds interesting meta around the upgrade meta.

There is still a problem with how rapidly a large zerg can raze over a keep even if it is upgraded. Since getting those upgrades asap is the priority once the keep has been swapped back to your side, it becomes about whether your side want to continue ‘buying’ ppt with gold. In T1 servers with large playerbase this won’t be such a problem, but outmanned servers might not be motivated to throw their hard earned gold into a structure for PPT, just to have it taken by a zerg they could not hope to defend against. So it might make T1 more interesting, but for other servers it means the dominant server will dominate even harder.

The main point of my idea is that a large zerg or a group that has night coverage, that is superior in whatever respect, cannot and does not gain more from this system…they don’t make more points than they would otherwise through defending than they get now, they can only prevent the other side from acquiring these ‘new’ points by taking upgraded assets. The server that is at the other end of the spectrum and not dominant, is going to have less of these kinds of points -upgraded assets – for the dominant server to take. So it should not be an issue, at least in that respect.

Because most people want action and let’s be honest, defense is boring.

Defense is definitely boring if you are not being attacked, this is true. One of the things this idea is intended to do through the new more-than-tick points-on-capture mechanic, is to produce more attacks on assets. That aside, yes, defense is boring…but people do boring things all the time, when the reward is sufficient – the old yakking for karma, current karma or WXP trains…these activities are repetitive and unexciting yet people do them because of the reward.

Denying your enemy a large amount of points is not exciting, and likely not sufficient reward to motivate active defense. One way to do this could be through a bloodlust ruins-type control pad that would exist on the ‘doorstep’ of each asset, where the supply depot for a supply camp or the gate for a fortification would be. Any player standing on this pad would earn WXP…say at the rate of 5 per minute for camps, 15 per minute for towers and 25 per minute for keeps.

This may motivate some people to spend more time at owned assets. Some people may try to afk on these pads, but this would only draw enemy players to these locations, and spawn need for more defense. This is just one idea, there are many possible ways to reward people for defending.