So I’m curious, and interested in players thoughts on this. It’s been said by more than one player that WvWvW is war, and war isn’t fair. I think there’s a large portion of the WvW community that would concur.
There’s some mechanics in place, however, that minimize the warfare aspect of WvW, and that’s been something I’ve wondered about for awhile. The Seasons rolling out finally motivated me to develop this topic.
Specifically, we’ve all been exposed to zerg karma trains. On Anvil Rock, we have some very good Commanders who excel in taking our rag-tag guerrilla forces into places, wreaking a little chaos and havoc, and bugging out before the generally larger opposition returns for some vengeance of their own. We never seem to hold on to points for long, but when we’re organized enough, we can generally flip camps and towers readily enough. If we’re lucky and have done so enough to keep supply for the other side a question, we can take keeps. Stonemist is a welcome victory, but not one that happens often for us, at the moment. In open-field, if we’re evenly matched numbers-wise, we generally do pretty well.
It’s too easy to blame lack of active WvWers for AR’s issues, but in looking at some of the things that have happened in the past few weeks, it’s hard not to blame lack of participation. We’d had some pretty nice successes for a server that until recently spent many a period of time Outmanned on any map you cared to check, and at prime time. A few diehards carried the torch until many of us got in there to contribute. For us, all the evidence we needed was plain to see recently: NSP stomped a mudhole in both GoM and AR, holding all of EB and their own Borderlands, in addition to a sizable portion of both GoM’s and AR’s. Success on that scale is what we expect going up against a server ranked as high as NSP is in comparison to ours – we just didn’t have enough to counter both them and GoM. We’d hit one keep, knock the door down, and get stomped by the third side’s zerg. Certainly not what anyone would consider “fair” but war is war. Good on them, frankly – they save the resources by letting another server do the work, then move in and take the weakened position. That’s sound strategy.
So here’s what I’m wondering: There appears, from time to time, strategic aspects to the WvWvW scene, but those seem few and far between. Certainly, a large marauding zerg, while great for flipping (and reflipping) camps ad nauseam and the supply ripples that causes, it doesn’t defend anything.
The question I’m wondering is, assuming higher tiers have better participation, are those tiers stationing a garrison force to hold positions against attack? Or do they also just rely on zerg-might to swarm a position to reclaim it over and over again?
I can’t help but wonder if the resources being spent to take the same positions over and over again wouldn’t be better spent upgrading and reinforcing it once, and staging a force to hold (or delay the attacker long enough for more defending troops to arrive) instead.
It seems like there is a strategic element missing from WvW, and I wonder why that element doesn’t seem to be a factor, when it could be a force multiplier in the right hands.
Thanks for reading. I appreciate your thoughts.