Guild Wars 2

One thing that every person who regularly tries to get keeps and towers upgraded and supplied has to deal with is people taking supplies directly from a place that’s either upgrading or generally low on supplies, leading to situations where said place is under siege without defensive siege and without supplies to build them, or with fortify having blocked the upgrade queue for hours, preventing reinforcements per WP.

And by “has to deal with” I mean “has to helplessly observe”, as there seems to be no effective way to prevent abuse of resources that you worked to create by members your own team. Of course, you can try to reason with people, leading to pleasant conversations and supreme sportsmanship, such as (all but names in original):

Alya Lucis: please don’t take supplies from bay
<redacted>: blabla
<redacted>: need dayly
<Another Person>: then take from camp.
<redacted>: Dont dare telling me what to do, brat

Ah, with friends like this…

Sure, the new daily and the WxP for repairing have virtually solved the problem of things not getting repaired. They, however, substantially increased the already bad tragedy of commons that is tower and keep supply. This in turn has led to even fewer people buying upgrades. And unlike the repairing situation, which we solved with organising defensive guilds and coordinating friendlies, there’s little that we can currently do to change things.

And the situation is not limited to invdividual players, but includes examples such as a big WvW guild draining several hundreds of keep supply after an attack in a sitation where supply routes hadn’t even been secured and the keep was far from full to begin with. It would have had been better if they had simply left the walls for the defensive guilds to repair, who, after going on the long and stony trek to north camp from citadel and then porting back to the keep, were confronted with a fait accompli. Indeed, the draining guild would probably not have survived the whole of 30 seconds that took, making the action somewhat understandable.

Indeed, the exhaustion of the journey from the keep’s supply store to the broken doors appeared to have a profound effect on the guild, as it was not able to actually engage in the securing of said supply routes, wandering off to WxP-heavier targets instead, not before, however, commenting on how the keep’s supply will be filled soon again, once dolys start appearing, thus nullifying the effect of guild’s drainage. (Of course, as every child knows, dolys appear at their destination by magic (or was it elves? Hundreds of tiny elf mesmers portalling them? I forgot), in the same way finished upgrades appear in keeps and towers. No problem at all with taking that for granted.)

One way to improve things would be to track if supply carried by people came from a supply camp or a tower or keep and only give WxP and achievement credit for use of supply from the former, although I’d certainly prefer an improved way to manage tower and keep supply (not sure exactly how that would best work, but tracking people who upgraded or added buffs to a keep or escorted dolys there or built siege and allowing them some form of limited control over supply based on the amount they invested into the keep would be a great start to make defensive play less frustrating).