Improve might be a bald statement. This is only a set of some ideas that in my opinion would change WvW to being less pve and more pvp. Also my essay here will be rather long but read it all if possible.
No matter if u’re playing in America, Africa, Europe or Asia what we all have in common are zerg groups. Zergs that feel safe and comfy and the common tactics among all servers is – each form 1-2 zerg groups – then make em chase each other around in circles on the map. This feels so wrong sometimes – and is one of the reasons so called night capping is so popular.
Firstly let’s ask ourselves why is sucha behaviour so popular during the day when most of us is online. Shouldn’t normally defending what u own be easier since u’re behind the walls ? The answer to that is: Yes but… What’s preventing a common defender from doing such a thing then? It’s not encouraging to stay in a tower – spend your money to upgrade it – and later on wait for that very ‘something’ (often nothing) to happen. It’s simply not rewarding to be on a ‘watch duty’. This can be improved significantly by … adding 100% sure reward for staying back and defending your land. Noticed that timer when u enter a tower encouraging you to defend it? Make it 20-30 min long and give 2-4 badges (or 1 badge per 5-10 min) to whoever was in the tower/keep zone when the timer hits 0:00. Badges are the only currency we earn in WvW that shouldn’t affect game economy. This however will give some people a reason to stay behind.
Now moving onto the zerg topic. Don’t we all kinda hate when one servers has just like one army that runs around the map and just caps everything in it’s path? We often dislike it despite which side we’re on. Simplest solutions to that I can imagine are:
1)having the entire army share the profit from conquering a keep/tower. This way the more of us is there the less rewardable per person it gets. Thus it’s encouraging to split and find ourselves our own goals.
2)modify the Boiling Oil / Cannons / Mortar so that it’s as resistant to normal damage as walls / doors are (I suppose that would involve removing on of Bioiling Oils in the outter walls of Castle in Eternal). Right now you can conquer everything without any siege if u’re in a group large enough. And the dudes inside defending feel helpless if outnumbered – even manning a ‘deadly cannon’ gets you nowhere since it then gets destroyed fastly. My idea therefore is to force the sieging army to build balistas so they can take out those cannons, To build a catapult just to take boiling oil down. So that each and every siege involves those (as long as whatever they’re attacking isn’t unupgraded set of wood and stones).
Lastly… this will be most controversial – how about we add a feature similar to exhaustion – something that will affect either your running speed or character stats if you are on a ‘streak’. For example if u conquered more than 4-5 towers/keeps during an hour (Suply camps wouldn’t include in this). Or maybe a feature that will prevent you from getting event reward for conquering another one above those 4-5 per hour. A dimishing return that would e… “encourage” players to stay in their keeps/towers and defend them while waiting for it to pass. (let’s say… force them to pause for 10 min).
All those features would (hopefully) decrease the scale of night capping as a side effect.
P.S. I’m fully aware that the changes I proposed aren’t all possible to implement (at least not at the time) nor all (if any) are a good idea. Still – if you’ve read this all through – write what you think. So far Devs seem to pay a lot of attention to their community (us) and giving them some ideas of our own might help us find a golden solution to prevent WvW from becoming alterac valley 2.0