Guild Wars 2

I was thinking a bit more about WvW balance. Being on FSP I don’t have the feeling that fights are massively unbalanced… well at times it is but over all it seems fine there to me. However, I see often threads about unbalanced matches due to player population imbalance. So I was thinking:

Limit supply
What if we let balance follow a limited resource. This resource would be supply. Rethinking how supply is… well supplied might help. Supply would only come from camps (as it is now), but it would be generated much slower. Dollies would transport supply generated in camp. I mean really generated supply. Not just spawn with supply, but spawn and then carry 35 of the previous (for example) 100 supply. Leaving the camp with only 65 left. This is meant to slow down supply production and make supply production vulnerable to roamers. Empty camps wouldn’t be able to transport any supply and either the dolly waits for 35 supply in camp or just walk with the supply that is there (not sure here). This may make roaming play more effective for the over all match outcome and would make dolly defending necessary, if you don’t wanna lose that 35 supply for your server to a singly roamer. On the other hand upgrading supply camps would work without the use of supply (to avoid supply usage conflicts). Tower upgrades still would need supply.

Decay
Another thing that could be introduced is decay. Decay of player armor as well as decay of fortifications. Armor decay would result (after having received a certain number of hits – maybe tracked with a stacking decay icon) in gradual loss of player armor points (marginal, but it would accumulate). A player can then repair the armor by spending his supply with a button next to it on top of the screen or by returning to the spawn.
Fortification decay would in a very slow rate lower wall and gate HP and needs a repair “upgrade”. Players can also manually put supply in the wall/gate to repair it. NPCs also would use up supply (role play wise for food and medicine) and constantly lower supply reserves. More NPCs would lower supply reserves quicker. Siege would also suffer from decay. Siege would have no refresh timer any more, but would also decay and be in need of repair.
The outnumbered buff would prevent player armor decay.

New reward system
I would also tie rewards to supply stealing/destroying/defending as well as upgrade level. This means, capturing/defending a low tier fortification with no supply would give only a marginal reward in terms of karma, money and drop quality/quantity. A fully supplied (at beginning of defending/attacking event, which only ends 5? min after attack actually ended), fully upgraded fortification on the other hand would offer much better rewards for attackers and defenders. Killing dollies with supply would give a reward tied to the amount of supply (players wouldn’t see how much supply a hostile dolly carries). Player kill rewards would not be tied to how much supply they carry for it doesn’t destroy or steal the supply.

Aim of that system
This proposal follows the idea that with more soldiers in a war and better, bigger fortifications the need for supply rises. This would lower a bit the number advantage of a better populated server. Farming an empty server on the other hand with fortifications in a bad condition gives less reward than capturing high tier fortifications and may be a way to answer the population imbalances on low tier servers. I have no dreams of this system fixing everything. But I believe it could lower the gap between certain unbalanced matches. What do you guys think?

No feedback? TyPin sad… sniff

Perhaps no feedback because its not easy to understand what you’re saying – at least for me. Plus its too level headed and not a QQ rage post, those attract more attention on forums.

But I’ll try.

Limit Supply. If the aim of this is to even out numbers advantages then are you saying that the more structures a server owns, the slower the supply will be generated? If that’s what you mean then I think that is a good idea actually. And I don’t remember hearing it before.

And it makes sense. The larger army and the more assets the army holds, the more supply they will need. And the faster they will use it up. To simulate this, the supply is generated more slowly.

Decay. I’m not sure how armor decay helps an underpopulated server, I actually think it will hurt. As far as structural decay, that’s a great idea – as long as the decay only happens after a certain amount of assets are held and the speed of decay gets faster the more assets are held. Kind of like in the game Civilization the more cities you build the more your citizens would get unhappy.

Again makes sense and actually a good idea.

Rewards. Rewarding capturing an upgraded structure more I have seen proposed and I think its a good idea too.

I’m all for giving incentives to the smaller/weaker server(s) in a match. I think it is actually the only solution to imbalanced matches. Actual population imbalance is impossible to fix. But Anet can introduce mechanisms such as you have proposed to help mitigate the effect of population imbalance.

I was gonna respond earlier, then considered the risks of getting an infraction for saying something negative, but now Im just scouting this keep so…

This idea is needless complicated, heavy on micro management and hard to understand. No one wants to escort yaks. Supply is not an interesting feature in wvw, its just part of the mechanics.

Theres a portion of the current population who dont understand supply in the current system. you want to add individual supply management on top of trying to get these wxp rank 5s to even pick up supply in first place?

I think its a terrible concept. Have you been a commander, claim a camp, then try to get everyone following to go back to the supply pile and interact again for the extra 5? its like 4yr old children refusing to eat their vegetables! Imagine trying to explain all this to some noob you cant even convince into picking up +5.

TyPin.9860:

Aim of that system
This proposal follows the idea that with more soldiers in a war and better, bigger fortifications the need for supply rises. This would lower a bit the number advantage of a better populated server. Farming an empty server on the other hand with fortifications in a bad condition gives less reward than capturing high tier fortifications and may be a way to answer the population imbalances on low tier servers. I have no dreams of this system fixing everything. But I believe it could lower the gap between certain unbalanced matches. What do you guys think?

+1 for this. I’ve suggested such ideas many times in the past. I think the basic idea should be one of spreading what resources you have more thinly the more you have, rather than accumulating camps and waypoints to sufficiently supply all the keeps and allow you to get around them all in time to save them.

Shamelessly quoting myself from 2 years ago:

One idea I had which might help a little is what I am calling the “Garrison Mechanic”. Each realm has a set number of guards in it’s Garrison (not to be confused with the name of the keep – this is a different concept, as in a traditional garrison of guards). These will be spread across all the keeps that realm owns, so if they have only a few keeps, each keep has more guards. If they have lots of keeps, they have less guards per keep.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Why-WvW-is-unbalanced-a-rather-longish-explanation/page/2#post448286

@Synosius.9876:
I don’t think the idea is too complicated. But maybe I didn’t explain it well enough.

The part about the rewards is actually nothing the player has to worry about. The bigger and better the thing you capture or defend, the better the reward. That’s quite easy to understand I think.

The other part is supply. Let’s not hang up on details. Those need testing and balancing anyway. But the main idea is, that fortifications slowly decay. The goal is, that the better populated server, which holds most likely more structures, also needs more supply to keep the structures in tact. Supply may be “broing” (I see that differently), but I believe it would be a good way to keep a balance. I have not been a commander myself though. But teaching ppl that supply has more function than building siege (what is the function 99% of the time, when I run with a zerg) would be a necessity in my proposal.

But as the idea of Svarty.8019 shows, there are other ideas to balance. Balancing through a limited resource, which is spread thinner the more people try to use it and the more fortifications you actually have, would be imho a good way to decrease the gap between servers with different numbers of players.

Generally quite good ideas.

I am also thinking since a while on something related. Balance is a matter of (nearly) equal numbers. So far we had proposals, to limit the map-capacity to the numbers of the smallest force. However, this is to susceptible to manipulation. (Stay away to hinder the enemies attacking you)

How about Foraging as follows:

Each map is divided into 4 areas. Each sides corner and the center (ruins and south, east and west supply camp on BL, SN and the Merc-camps on EB).

In the center-area there is no limit. In the side-areas there is a soft-limit corresponding to this sides-force on this map (anywhere on the map) plus 5, e.g. if Red has 20 people on EB, the soft-limit of blue and green in the red-area is 25 for each.
What does soft-limit mean? Simple: If your side exceeds the soft-limit you cannot “live of the land” anymore, but need supply to survive. The more people are over the limited the more supply each player consume per minute. And if he runs out of supply he starts to starve, i.e. loosing life per minute.

The optimal force-size to attack an enemy third is therefore enemy-size plus 5.
Leaving a map-emtpy is not a good strategy, because 5 vs 0 can easily turn it, the more people the weakest side has the easier is it for them to defend. So the usual manipulation problem is dissolved.

As the strongest size, you face a limit now. You can only concentrate all your forces for defense and for attacking the center, but you will start to starve when you try to overrun the opponents in their third. You can still play, you just have to split your forces to attack both sides.

Dayra.7405:

How about Foraging as follows:
[..]

Sorry, but I don’t like this idea because;

• It is very convoluted, not simple enough
• Roaming players would find themselves dying through no fault of their own and by merely being in a place

I kinda like the idea of upkeep for a large army. Similar to Warcraft3, larger army will cost you more gold. We can have larger armies here in GW2 cost supply to maintain. Same goes for structures you are holding. This way, it will be more costly for the server with larger population to maintain everything they have.

Exciton.8942:

I kinda like the idea of upkeep for a large army. Similar to Warcraft3, larger army will cost you more gold. We can have larger armies here in GW2 cost supply to maintain. Same goes for structures you are holding. This way, it will be more costly for the server with larger population to maintain everything they have.

Yep, that’s the idea behind it

+1 to this idea. I love it.

I especially love the idea of building decay. This would allow the underpopulated servers to break into small groups to retake the map since they will never be able to match the numbers of the larger server Zerg. This fact would require the larger server to split up and defend (hopefully) as well as be constantly using up their supply to repair the decay. A smaller group would be able to quickly take forts that had decayed down to 35% percent strength before the Zerg was able to react.

The only thing I would argue is that the decay should be solely based on population imbalance and not on structure possession imbalance. This is to say that if there is no population imbalance then there is no decay. This will alleviate the cry from fairer, more balanced matchups.

Another idea along these lines that could be implemented quickly is the the thought that they could make siege cost exponentially more supply to build based on the current population imbalance. They are already calculating this for the Outmanned buff so it would be a matter of adding a condition that increases the amount of supply needed to build siege weaponry.

I am from NA IOJ server so I am no stranger to this heartache.

Tweaking supply, decay and the rest does not really make up for population imbalance. I have been playing off and on since the day the GW1 came out… and GW2… also. When the fewest opponents I see have me 5-1… no matter which section i visit… and a zerg of 15-20 is a large one for us IOJ and bands that size from FSP would be considered a small raiding party…

Limiting supply just encourages pvd, and have wvw even more pay to win than it currently is already with whoever has the most guild catas wins. Pvd currently doesn’t even take that long if you actually have a zerg. As I have found on Tier 1, they already use pvd frequently as it is, and guild catas are abundant. The larger the numbers on the server, the more guild catas you will have available as it is.

Again Armor decay just adds to Pay to win as well. I already carry multiple sets of armor with me without decay present, those who cannot afford to do so and the servers with less numbers would be put at further disadvantage. As it is we can have all the walls down at SMC and fight for hours in the Lords room without need of siege or walls. The larger better skilled team just farms whoever comes in. That just means whoever is stupid enough to go in there gives them bags.

We should just resolve the population issues instead of breaking the game more than it currently is. Wvw needs to be made less pay to win not more.

Player skill>>> Pay to win. Pay to win = BAD.

( even worse… I AM ONE OF THOSE CREDIT CARD PLAYERS. I BUY WHAT I WANT AND DO NOT FARM IN GAME AT ALL. PAY TO WIN IS BORING AND EASY.)

You should consider, the servers that are much more populated ALSO have paid for entire guilds to transfer there and pay players gold to stand in towers to scout, They give out gold in raffles on the server and buy people legendaries for the hell of it, making it more pay to win just benefits those who are able to do so.

Payne.3184:

Tweaking supply, decay and the rest does not really make up for population imbalance. I have been playing off and on since the day the GW1 came out… and GW2… also. When the fewest opponents I see have me 5-1… no matter which section i visit… and a zerg of 15-20 is a large one for us IOJ and bands that size from FSP would be considered a small raiding party…

Yea, I was on IOJ, and now on JQ 15-20 is a havoc group. I agree that tweaking supply and decay will not help with the population imbalance issues as well, it would only make the game more Pay to win than the current model, and the lower pop servers will still get face rolled by the 50+ man zergs.

They have to resolve the population issues, not make it more imbalanced than it currently is. Trying to do anything and everything except solve the problem just kicks the can down the road and spends much more time and money to do so.

If any of you don’t think there is a in-balance… your welcome to join IOJ. I know the reaction is to tank to drop tiers…

Payne.3184:

If any of you don’t think there is a in-balance… your welcome to join IOJ. I know the reaction is to tank to drop tiers…

Even that isn’t going to solve the problem for IOJ though, you are better than the lower tiers, but do not have the population to fight T2 and T2 has more than 3 servers. You would just be a yo-yo going down and then coming right back, pretty much making wvw unplayable at T3.

If you want actual wvw competitive gameplay where ppt actually means winning or losing, and you are not just blobbing about or getting face rolled, come JQ, where they use actual strategy to play and not just blob. Where even with our 15 man havocs we take out two 40 man blobs inside our keep with no walls! The key to being able to fight out manned is great commanders who use strategy, keep their group healthy and rez’d and everyone in the map teamspeak channels.

Paraphrasing: “Fortification decay would support PvD play style”

Fair point, that could be a problem. It comes down to the details there. And don’t forget, that the actual reward is coupled with the upgrade level of of the fortification. I came to think it would be a good idea to also couple it with the amount of PPT this fortification created for a server. This means tower/keep flipping would bring almost no reward.

In a scenario, where one server greatly outnumber the other server, it would mean that flipping low tier fortifications would grant almost no reward. While owning many fortifications would cause decay for the server, that keeps owning them (making supply a potentially scarce resource). This on the other hand would give the loosing server the chance to take towers with havoc groups, which have suffered from a decay and their walls are almost down. Those towers/keeps would grant a significant reward, because it had created many PPT for the previous server. How this plays out depends on the speed of decay itself.

In a very balanced matchup it may play out differently. Decay, as I imagine it, works very slowly and starts after some time of ownership. Flipping towers over and over again would be without much reward again. Holding a fortification and defending it on the other hand would offer rewards (tied to a defend event, reward scales with tier of fortification and PPT it has created). Even attacking a well fortified tower and failing would offer a reward (tied to the same event). However, event contribution must be redesigned for this, to prevent players from simply tagging a tower and therefor getting a reward from the triggered event.

So you must see the reward system and the decay system working hand in hand:

• the reward system aims to make high value fortifications (high tier, created many PPT for a server) more valuable in terms of giving the players gold and karma rewards. Flipping of low value fortifications (low tier, was just recently flipped) however would offer just few rewards.
• The decay system aims at making you work to maintain what you have (and plays a a bigger role the more unbalanced a match is). Owning more towers/keeps makes it more expensive to maintain their condition. Making it easier for havoc groups to capture them.

Ideally the supply is never enough. So that one must make decisions. Use it to attack, to upgrade or to simply maintain fortifications.

Maybe you could even say that towers, who were neglected for some time (long time decay), become NPC owned (pirates, bandits). Who make the tower/keep ruin their new base. They then would start looting dollies and such.