Guild Wars 2

The golem rush event underlined the fact that the enjoyment from WVW comes from the player vs player dynamics within the objective-driven system. Without defenders, I don’t find that capturing objectives is enjoyable. Currently, I believe defense is underemphasized and defenders are not rewarded for their efforts. Here I suggest a few changes that could easily increase the emphasis on defense:

1. _ Scaling PPT._
The point value for objectives would scale over time to their total potential value. For example, a tower would only be worth 1 point for the first tick that it is held but would increase for every subsequent tick that it is held for until it reaches its maximum value of 10. The amount of time it takes to reach maximum PPT could be 3 tickets or based off of some metric relating to the average amount of time that type of objective is held for.

2. Rewarding our defenders.
The longer a defender successfully defends and objective the greater the reward should be. I.e. Every sequential time an objective is defended the defenders could progress along an objective defender reward track until the objective is either lost or the attackers are driven off at which point all the defenders would receive a reward based off of the cumulative number of defenses they partook in. Separate reward scales could be set for each different type of objective.

3. Linking reward to effort.
I am not going to suggest what rewards should be (please don’t give us more karma) but I think the reward should be associated with the difficulty of the objective and scale with its upgrade tier. Capturing or defending a tier 3 objective with reinforced gates and fortified walls should offer a greater reward than capturing or defending a paper tower because it is strategically more important.

Why I think these changes would improve WvW.
Incentivizing defending structures will encourage players to defend what they have, alter objective priorities, and bring out more opportunities for pitched battles over strategic targets. By allowing objective point values to scale over time it could become more rewarding to attempt to hold one long-held tower "for the tick” rather than avoid the enemy group to reflip two recently captured towers. These changes may have the most important effects during “off-hours” when the server’s population is fighting outmanned in an attempt to hold what people during prime time captured and upgraded. The change in PPT values for objectives over time could also help break up karma trains by making targeted assaults on higher value targets more rewarding for the server as well as individuals.

I think these suggestions are great, I’d love to see them in game.