Guild Wars 2

I was having a think today about zergs, unbalanced matchups, and back and forward capping. As most everyone has probably already seen a tower or keep, once captured, is prone to recapping almost immediately as it is without upgrades, sometimes supply, and often siege. With a force large enough you can just run up to the wooden gates and bash them down without must cost or worry.

One idea I had was to put an immunity on the gates/walls for a period of time to allow for the recent owners to run supply if they need to, and lay some siege. Something like 15 mins for a tower, and 20 for a fort. There are probably a number of benefits but there are two obvious ones. The first would be a small step toward discouraging zergs. I’m not saying it’d stop them, as the cool down will ware off eventually, but it might go to help chopping up their power and frequency. The second benefit would be to shift focus to another important aspect of WvW, which is escorting dolly’s. If the tower/keep is safe for a brief window of time, that’d allow for players to run to camps and bring dolly’s in to their new locations. Once the supply is there the upgrades/fun can really begin. A decent defence/offence at a tower is much more enjoyable than a steam roll across the land.

Would it work? Would it not? Would love some constructive criticism.

No thanks. Nothing more fun than to ninja a keep/tower just after somebody capped it and ran off before upgrading.

Don’t want people to recap, time to defend and fortify with siege while the upgrading process takes place.
There’s plenty of time to bring supplies in, if you work effectively and defend your lines.

Why create a game mechanic like this, when you should be considering whether or not you can keep the tower once you take it in your strat.

There should not be artificial benefits for a server that can not field enough people to be competitive. They should just lose rank until they are matched up more evenly. The outmanned buff should be enough.

Leaving a freshly conquered tower/fort OR staying, upgrading defending is a strategical decision. And it should be, so no siege lockout timer please. The 3 min buff on supervisors/lords is enough.

I also dislike this idea. Owning more objectives should be more difficult than owning few. Therefore every capped keep/tower is followed by a strategic decision by the attacking team. Can I afford to keep x people in this tower to keep it for y time, or am I left vulnerable at another, possibly more important, position if I do so.

I’m also having a hard time to understand why you would want to discourage zergs. To me WvW is mainly about large scale battles with lots of people, optimally on both sides (=zergs, imo). There’s plenty of stuff to do for smaller groups as it is now. So, I can’t really grasp why you would want to discourage people from forming large groups (and as most zergs are pretty uncoordinated you can easily dismantle them with a smaller but well coordinated group), when that is what WvW is really all about.

But I also can’t see how your suggestion would actually hinder zergs? Wouldn’t it make them only bigger because both the attacking and the losing team don’t have to spend resources (people) on attacking/defending a point if it’s invulnerable for some period, thus freeing these people up to join an even bigger zerg at another point.

No, bad idea.

You forget about the possibility where 2 servers are attacking the same keep, this happens alot at Stonemist Castle.
Your idea would mean that if the first server gets the keep, the second server who is attacking has no chance of taking it, while they should because they also worked for it!