Guild Wars 2

The key to remember here is that DAoC didn’t have anything directly like PPT. In theory, the war was based around relics that gave bonus damage if your realm captured and held them. In Old Frontiers, taking keeps reduced the number of guards at the opponent’s relic keep… In New Frontiers, you needed to take a series of keeps to unlock the gates of the relic temple.

The only “coverage” type issues the game had were that during lower population times, the realms with more people could stage a relic raid, whereas typically at night the sides were simply too balanced. It became discouraging at times to win night after night and log on the next day to find that all of those gains were lost.

At some point though, the shine of “For teh Realm!” wore off and most people played to grind up their personal point totals. And as points were spread among the groups doing the killing, you saw a lot more 8-man groups running around in either an aoe bombing or assist train set up, killing larger groups of less organized and/or skilled players. Skilled small group play was VERY well rewarded, which led to both the skilled players and the wannabe skilled players to roam as smaller groups.

Of course, as Svarty says above, it’s not fun to be on the receiving end of that, and it’s not good for subscription levels to let small parties have fun while the zerg is getting mauled. Rewarding PvD keeps the zergs happy… And if Warhammer taught me anything, it’s that people will do whatever rewards them, even if it’s painfully boring, so it keeps people in zergs.