I think not having a way to “reward” players is one of the biggest bars to having more people in WvW – it’s boring to defend
It can be worse than boring. In unbalanced match-ups, it can seem utterly futile because of how quickly things have fallen. More than once, I’ve spent a day on a weekend speeding dolyaks, triggering upgrades, building siege, scouting for enemies, and so on and when I return from taking an hour or two to eat dinner and help give my kids a bath, I’ll be lucky if the worst that’s happened is that the siege has all expired. Often, the T3 towers will have been flipped. When the matchup is particularly bad, it will get flipped while I’m sitting in it, even when everyone else on the map shows up to help defend. And during the really mismatched weeks, the enemy will simply sweep their zerg around the maps like the hand on a clock taking whatever they want and I’ll be lucky to get anything beyond reinforced walls done, even if I increase supply deliveries and personally speed up every dolyak that leaves the supply camp. But all of these complaints are alien to people in other tiers who don’t have these problems.
…and oh please, don’t tell me about the kitten “you defended xxx” after the tick is over and is worth it… it isn’t and it doesn’t come close to the players who are running in a zerg or fighting full fields and getting loot bags from their competitors.
Yeah, it’s always great fun to hear about how many bags your zerg is getting in map chat or TeamSpeak while you are sitting in a tower or keep making sure the enemy doesn’t flash-flip it before it can be defended. And of course they are earning a lot more WXP, too.
I don’t expect defending to be lucrative. It can’t be. If the rewards matched those for attacking, you’d see tons of bots and people Akitten in defensive positions cashing in on it. The problem is that it costs money to play defensive because it costs money to trigger upgrades and can cost money to get siege blueprints. It’s fine if ANet doesn’t want to compensate the player in the gold. But players can be compensated in WXP or karma instead.
One suggestion I’ve made is to give the player who triggers an upgrade a karma reward when the upgrade completes, so that there is no incentive to trigger upgrades that won’t or can’t complete and every incentive to make sure they do complete.
Another suggestion I’ve given was to base the points for a camp, tower, keep, or castle on how upgraded it is so that a player can give their server a PPT benefit for doing upgrades. I suggested:
Camp: 1 point + 1 point per upgrade (Max 5 points)
Tower: 3 points + 1 points per upgrade (Max 15 points)
Keep: 6 points + 2 points per upgrade (Max 30 points)
SMC: 9 points + 3 points per upgrade (Max 45 points)
(This would also provide incentive to try to prevent upgrades and to take fully upgraded structures.)
Finally, I think there is one tower that’s not boring for me to defend. Quentin Lake.
Why isn’t Quentin Lake boring to defend? Because there is a Hylek village behind the tower that’s well within ballista range of the platform by the lord’s room I drop a ballista up there and with it, I can take the Hylek camp for my team if it’s available by killing Krait from inside the tower. If our opponents have taken the Hylek, I can kill the Hylek from the tower and neutralize the camp. And both cases, I can also snipe enemies that inevitably show up to take or neutralize the Hylek and have killed quite a few that way. In short, there is something for me to shoot and kill from there and events I can do from inside the tower. I’ve found no other location that comes close. The best a few towers and camps can offer are some creatures that are close enough to kill, but there aren’t enough of them and there is rarely any sort of event associated with them (I guess I could probably kill mosquitoes from Klovan — maybe I’ll give that a try).
So one solution to boredom is to put creatures and events near enough to towers so that those watching them have something to do while they are waiting.
