I have very little time to play, so I spend it playing and not posting, but one of my guildies mentioned the WvW poll and it was important enough to me to take the time to provide some input. Just my opinion, but one of the biggest challenges seems to be that many players get discouraged when the sides are lopsided. I cant count the number of times I have seen a fairly “balanced” time in WvW ended when an entire “map blob” shows up and just runs over everyone. When that happens many of the players just drop off and go do something else. What we need are ways to keep people engaged in the fight. No one likes to constantly get wiped over and over or feel like there is no way to compete.
I am sure there are a lot of players much smarter than I that can come up with good ideas, but since I dont like to bring up a topic without trying to help resolve the problem I will put my lame ideas out there for everyone to throw stones at. Hopefully this spurs some good thoughts and discussion.
1) Scoring absolutely needs to change. In the “off hours” one side can rack up a lot of points. For example, last night when I left WVW our score was close (~1K difference) between two servers (fun fights and a cahllenges that kept us engaged including several guidl members staying way later that expected to help keep the score close). The problem is when I logged in this morning (~7 hours later) the score was a 23K difference. As a result, the losing side just gives up and doesn’t bother trying to play because they don’t see a way to complete. The most fun I have had in WvW is when the scores are close and the teams are battling it out to trying to pull ahead. Once the score goes lopsided, the fights end and so does participation. I have heard lots of good suggestions on score balancing but here are a few more:
1a) We need to encourage players to join in when they are behind. Give more points, exp, rewards when the losing side takes an objective. The further behind they are the better the reward for that server.
1b) I am not sure PPK is really a solution. I can see how PPK can leading to farming (e.g., blob just keeps wiping smaller groups to get the “bags”). In fact this type of behavior can make the score differential even worse. After all, the side that is losing usually has less players and therefore is more likely to lose a fight against the blob. It encourages more “blobbing” because it increases the chance of winning a fight. Thus the blobbing gets worse and the score differential gets worse and even less people come and play for the losing side. This is the opposite of what we want.
1c) Give diminishing returns when an objective constantly flips. This may help reduce the constant “flipping” of a single objective (e.g., the “karma train”).
1d) Give more rewards the longer the fight lasts in taking an objective. Players should be rewarded for the persistence in taking an objective. This of course should only occur if there is a fight ongoing (e.g., I should not be able to kill the NPCs and just sit there to get a better reward, but I should get a better reward for staying in the fight).
1e) If the defender has even numbers, the team capturing the objective should get even better rewards because they really had to fight to get the capture.
2) We need to penalize the single large “blob”.
2a) Siege is not really effective against the blob. I cant count the number of times we have had an AC or two up and they amounted to nothing. Because of the number of players in the concentrated area, the seige damage doesn’t really do much because the damage is spread out. Maybe the seige damage should scale with the number of enemy players in the immediate area to make it more effective against the blob and force people to spread out more and not rely on staying safe because they have a lot of friends in the area.
2b) How many times have you seen a map blob show up and turn the whole BL one color in a very short time? This gives one side a fairly large “PPT” that is solely based on the fact that they can flip things fast. Rewards should diminish the more objectives get flipped in a short amount of time. At the same time the amount of points for “holding” an objective needs to be adjusted.
3) PIN/Commander watching. Many of our commanders no longer want to tag up because of enemy scouts on the server. This is a very difficult problem to solve. One suggestion is to only make commander pins visible to the available to the squad. This way the person scouting for the enemy needs to be in the squad. This approach will prevent the person from joining the BL to spy since if they sit at spawn the commander can just kick them from squad (i.e., it would force the spy to actively follow the commander). At the same time we need a way for players to know there is a commander on the map so they can figure out who to follow. Thus we need something like looking for group that enables people to see that a commander is on the BL, but without figuring out exactly where the commander is on the map. of course this does not prevent a spy from joinging the squad and following the commander around and reporting the commanders location, but it would reduce people who “dual box” on different accounts and use one account to spy.
I am sure there are lots of issues with these suggestions. They will need careful thought and input from others to see what may be viable and what is not.
I am encouraged that Anet recognizes that WvW needs some work and is willing to do something to help fix it.
Gilgax