Guild Wars 2

Where I think a lot of players (and probably Anet) is going wrong is in trying to make some of the current content support small groups.

Tower capping should not support small groups, for example. If a small group can bash down the door before defenders can respond then a huge group can do it in 10 seconds flat. If we time things so that zergs have to do some work then small groups will never stand a chance.

And that’s fine — for towers and keeps.

The problem is that there’s no content designed for roamers, soloers or small groups to DO — that is, something a solo person can go work on which makes him more of a roamer, vulnerable to other roamers.

Suppose, for example, each map had some “diamond dust mines”. They work something like supply camps but instead of just picking up the material, you have to bang on the node for a while. Each pickaxe swing gives you 1 diamond dust and subtracts it from the pile. The pile slowly regenerates. You can carry up to 20 dust but if you die, you lose it. Solo players and small groups can mine these nodes and carry them to towers and keeps where they reduce the cost of the next upgrade (both money and supply costs). Potentially all upgrades can be “free” if enough diamond dust gets brought in.

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The goal is to give roamers, soloers and small groups something to “do” — something to work at continuously outdoors, leaving them vulnerable to other roamers, soloers and small groups. (The diamond mines won’t regenerate fast enough or build up enough of a backlog to support a zerg.)

This doesn’t have to be “the solution”, but if you want to support solo/roamer/small group, you need to give them an activity that:

• Can be worked on continuously (unlike NPC flipping or supply camp capturing)
• Does not support the zerg (again unlike NPC flipping or supply camp capturing)

The diamond mine idea is just an example of something that would fit the bill. I don’t think any of the current WvW content fits this description.

I know its not ideal, but loathing zergs as I do, i tend to think that the Event scaling mechanics should kick in on towers/keeps and maybe even stonemist Lords to increase the health.

Seeing a Zerg run in and everyone getting 1-2 shots on the lord and he dies is kinda annoying. It would also help the defense of the structure.

I run almost exclusively in a Five to 10 man group. Telling us we can’t take Tower here and there when the enemy zerg is distracted or to cause a distraction won’t sit well with me. I don’t think there needs to be more things to do, but definitely needs to be a method to dealing with larger numbers.

edit filtered a number for reason.

The problem I see with event scaling is the likelihood that it would create unfriendly situations, unless it was balanced perfectly — that is, we could have easily killed this tower lord with 5 quality players but when 20 sub-par players suddenly ran up and joined us, now the encounter is going to take too long and be much more difficult. We’re going to yell at them for showing up “to help”.

Plus I just think it’s a mistake to expect 5-10 people to cap towers quickly and efficiently. We already have people proclaiming that upgrades are a waste of time. If anything, towers should be tougher to capture, with new content created for 1-10 people.

My ideal would be that there would be a lot of stuff to work on outside of towers for 1-10 people — some project that takes a while but can be worked on continuously. Towers would then become a refuge to retreat to rather than simply being a round-robin karma trading post that few people hang out near.

It’s probably worth mentioning that in DAOC, the WvW (RvR) section of the game had some of the best NPC farms in it. I don’t think that’s the solution we want here but basically it meant that in DAOC, players were out in the field all the time, Doing Stuff, and this promoted a lot of small group hunting and ambushing.

You don’t get that in GW2 because there’s really nothing for players to do that puts them out in the field for long periods of time.