Guild Wars 2

In WvW defending is a very important role. However some people give it little to no thought. When I ask for help during a zerg some people come while others say “We can re-capture it later” When I or some one else volunteers for making a small defence group people are immediately against them saying "Why are you focusing on “insert place here” get your priorities straight why don’t you read chat?" kitten quot;

How many people have experienced this? (I’m on Desolation). I understand that this is an issue that probably happens on all servers, anybody have any ideas on what to do?

I see it all the time. I was criticized just last night for asking people to repair gates and work toward upgrades because we were “just going to lose the tower overnight anyway.”

Granted it will probably be lost, but the point is to buy time and get as many points out of it as possible. The longer a tower/keep holds the enemy at bay, the more the enemy has to invest time and resources into it. Upgrades aren’t meant to make a fortress impregnable; they’re there to make it difficult to the enemy and help your side make a stand.

Give people time to figure it all out. I expect WvW to be a very different experience 3 months from now.

The problem is that the game only rewards aggression. Defending will not net anywhere close to the badges/karma/loot as zerging. Running siege equipment actually costs you something. Repairing, or running supplies, or upgrading, all things that give no tangible ingame reward. Really, honor/karma/loot should be tied to your server’s progress and point advantage attained in WvW. The current system is, well, bad.

I think it really depends on which server you are on.

I’m one of those people that like to stay behind and build up defenses after a tactical point is taken. I’ve yet been told to quit defending and re-join the Zerg.

Servers that understand giving up hard fought real estate so easily is not going to win too many week long matches.

Winterwolf.3782:

The problem is that the game only rewards aggression. Defending will not net anywhere close to the badges/karma/loot as zerging. Running siege equipment actually costs you something. Repairing, or running supplies, or upgrading, all things that give no tangible ingame reward. Really, honor/karma/loot should be tied to your server’s progress and point advantage attained in WvW. The current system is, well, bad.

Yes, it is unfortunate. Too many people play for the “reward” for this system to work. More people want personal gain for their efforts and there’s no changing that. Playing to have “fun” or even to win doesn’t mean as much to them as playing to max out your characters. The “fun” is more in the end and not so much the means for them.

Gaslov.9164:

Give people time to figure it all out. I expect WvW to be a very different experience 3 months from now.

I fear there might not be a WvW in 3 months. WvW really needs some tuneups and fixes. Its simply too easy to rollover upgraded keeps and towers. Asuming there is no other on the map, how many people you need? 5 to take everything?

In DAoC for example fully upgraded keeps/towers got guards that hurt. Here gurads are just…slight anoyance.

Estus.1726:

I think it really depends on which server you are on.

I’m one of those people that like to stay behind and build up defenses after a tactical point is taken. I’ve yet been told to quit defending and re-join the Zerg.

Servers that understand giving up hard fought real estate so easily is not going to win too many week long matches.

I’m the same way. I have a lot of fun placing siege on the map and watching people use it to make a difference in the match. That’s more rewarding to me than gold or karma. I like getting gold and karma, but the real fun for me isn’t in getting a tangible reward.

Finally like minded people! I have half a mind to make an entirely new guild and invited you guys, more people need this kind of attitude!

This is called the “Arathi Basin Effect”
You see 90% of these people are the same people who just ran around in a circle in Arathi Basin never bothering to hold a point.

defend rewards suck as they are now, fix em and people will defend.

Pretty much agree w/ just about every poster here. There’s a huge advantage to zerging and taking objectives more so than defending. One afternoon I spent a few hours just defending and upgrading a tower and watching a security check point. Very little xp or karma….a few days ago while running w/ a zerg…I gain 3 lvls and a lot of karma.

I can understand limiting xp/karma in following a supply caravan or just standing on a security checkpoint…however…more needs to be done to give credit for defenders.

Still I can understand why ArenaNet may not want people to just hang out and upgrade objectives. it increases the chances they will be taken…thus making it easier to flip objectives.

I liken this to the NFL or NBA enacting rules to increase scoring and making it difficult (or in our case less attractive) to defend.

This depends largely on the server. Hell even from one borderland to the next on the same server you can tell a difference sometimes.

I get far more badges running catapult on defense during peak hours then I do attacking. Still if we have an attack squad roaming I’d much rather be with it then on defense. So it’s not a rewards issue. I could give a crap about rewards. I’m lvl 80 and have the gear I want. The rewards do nothing for me, I’m there for PvP.

That being said I also care about winning. So as much as I enjoy attack squads better then defense. When a keep is in trouble and our commanders call for the attack squad to come help defend, I have no problems answering the call.

Personally,

I’d like to see the player that placed the siege get a cut of the rewards when kills are made with them. I like to place carts and ballistae but after I place them I lead the charge into the heart of the enemy on foot. This may incent more players to purchase and place siege at defensible positions. It could be a start.

Another possible idea.

-I’m in favor of removing the score completely and letting it tick in the background (still scoring and sorting servers) and in it’s place have a karma and/or exp reward system.

-For each camp, tower, keep that you hold in the current BG everyone on your server (that’s in the current BG) will get a karma reward at every 15 minute score update.

-Have the karma reward for each encampment scale based on the amount of time you’ve held it. Starting at a very small amount once captured and scaling up as each 15 minute scoring interval goes by.

-Make this karma reward have diminishing returns at a certain number of held objectives and give each objective an award cap so it stops scaling.

By removing the score from the game you remove a critical factor that causes the average player to not join WvW, particularly once the snowball has started against them.

By giving time based karma rewards you incent players to hold objectives once captured.

However, this could be easily abused by AFK’ers and also what happens when every objective starts scaling and you hold every single one? The rewards seem like they could get out of control in a hurry.

I think a potential fix to this would be to appoint a fixed karma award value to Towers and Keeps, but allow supply camps to scale based on the time held. This in turn could turn Supply Camps into some of the best open field skirmishing we’ve yet seen. If you make them even more important than they already are from a reward standpoint I could see some epic open field clashes going down as servers desperately try to hold onto their camps.

Again, these are just ideas shooting from the hip and would require considerable examination before implemented.

Anet just made the same mistaken assumption EA/Mythic did with WAR, that there are enough people who will play for the ‘honor’ of their server/realm/faction and didn’t put any ‘carrots’ in to encourage defending. The reality is, the majority of gamers now don’t care about server pride like they were counting on.

They would also need to give more reward to defending than attacking to have any real effect since attacking will always have a higher ‘base’ appeal to it.

Zerging around taking things, while letting the following zerg take it back, then going back around again will most likely be the norm the majority of the time and it would be tough to change that.

I would also add to my previous post, that if you overtake a camp / tower / keep that your reward as an attacker would also scale off the amount of time the opposition held the particular objective.

If you manage to get behind enemy lines and take a camp they’ve held for 3 days you get a bonus to your rewards. Likewise for towers / keeps ect..’

This would be similar to how they reward PVE exploration / killing mobs in remote areas.

While I appreciate a good keep defense, I believe the reasoning behind the attack mentality (zerging, if you insist) goes something like this:
1) Siege has a cost (of some form, be it tokens, cash or time invested doing the jumping puzzle),
2) You can attack (and win) against undefended keeps without siege, where defending without siege is mostly futile,
3a) You only get reward for defending IF the enemy ever attacks and,
3b) By attacking, you control your own destiny and are not waiting for enemy to attack.

All of this can be contrasted with the problem that getting a keep upgraded and ready for flash-defense (i.e. you get enough time to arrive at the keep and to man the already set up siege gear) takes time and it’s not fun to run back and forth from a siege camp.

Couple this with the low reward for defending and you have a recipe for zerg.

It kind of depends really. A newly captured keep or tower has to get a good stream of supply and a decent amount of time before it becomes somewhat formidable. Therefore losing an un-upgraded position isnt that big of a deal. And ofc it also depends on its map placement and current holdings. So it is situational really

If I am for example holding the blue world garrison and Dawn’s Eyrie is under attack then yea that needs to be defended for sure but if they are attacking Redbriar or Blue Briar on the same map then yea you can get that later

WvW rewards favor joining a zerg and steamrolling everything.

It’s too bad cause defending can be a lot of fun, but as long as capture rewards are the same for everyone no matter how many participate, and benefits for defending and holding are next to zilch, don’t expect attitudes to change.

Gaslov.9164:

Give people time to figure it all out. I expect WvW to be a very different experience 3 months from now.

With current design? It’ll be more of the same but with much much less people.

Seriously I have a lot of fun trying to defend against an overwhelming force and to delay the inevitable defeat. However the current rewards are really lackluster for defenders. To defend well you have to do little things like defending your yak’s, doing supply chain run from other safe spots, standing on guard duty, scouting, putting down siege weapons (out of your own pocket) for anti-personnel and anti-siege purposes, etc. None of which really are rewarded at all.
You get a good feeling of a job well-done and that’s about it. If you want XP, karma, and gold, currently defending won’t really give you any. In fact the system is so skewed right now that I want to salute all the players that play for their server in the off-hours delaying the onslaught of a different time-zone server. Serious dedication to their server with little to gain from the current reward system.

Well, I think you need to look at it from the other side.

If you only have one or two hours a day to play a videogame every night do you really want to spend it running back and forth between a supply dump and a fort building walls and defences? Most normal people will find that fairly boring, and not to mention it will drain their gold reserves quickly if they build up places properly.

Since they have limited play time they will most likely not be there for the eventual fall of their tower, meaning that all the effort they put in to it was essentially a waste. So really you are left with the situation where the majority of players will not defend a tower, not because they have an aversion to doing it, but instead because its just not a rewarding experience compared to running with the zerg.

Defending is more fun and cheaper when you let enemy get in and wipe them last moment.

I disagree that there’s a lack of rewards for defending. If you’re under attack and you have a good setup of siege weapons, you’re likely to get a lot of kills, plus you’ll be getting “repel the attackers” rewards every 3 minutes or so. The attackers in that situation, on the other hand, are not going to get much of anything. They should have a hard time getting kills, and they shouldn’t get capture in the end if the defense is good enough.

You generally don’t need to sit there and defend when there’s no attackers. You can go out and probe for the enemy. If you see a large group coming, then you can warn allies and get back yourself. That’s probably even more effective than staying on the walls since you’ll be less likely to be overwhelmed suddenly by many attackers if you can see it coming earlier. If you did stay back at the walls, your presence there might not be making any difference in slowing the attackers down anyway, if it’s too many)

I think sometimes the strategy of giving up a tower that can be retaken later is a sound strategy if you’re trying to take something more important (Usually a keep). It’s especially true if you don’t yet have any defenses set up at the tower in question. If there’s no defenses, then that tower is nothing more than something to delay the enemy and buy you time. It doesn’t offer much of any real advantage in the battle unless it has siege weapons.

At the same time, I do agree that it’s a very good strategy to set up excellent defenses at a tower before moving on. Too many people rely on just trying to zerg faster than the other team and hope they can just get back in time to clear out attackers by brute force. That strategy can only go so far. At some point, you will be losing what you’ve gained faster than you can take new things.

Servers that defend will wipe the floor against Zerg only servers. Defense when you’re 1-5 is just plain fun.