2. Berk- you are 1 of 95-99% of this game that doesn’t want to do anything else but use wvw as your “epic battlefield”. Dude it’s pvp… Player vs player… There are towers and keeps here And that is all you see. Forget the red players running around, theyre just annoying right? Forget that running around with 20+ people makes this game ez mode because of dumb mechanics like 5 person Aoe cap and downed state (worst idea ever in mmo history btw).
Not at all. I’ve done all sorts of things in WvW ranging from running with a zerg and camping sites to chasing a single player half-way across a map and taking him out at the end and charging a group of three alone and scaring them off. Heck, I’ve even repeatedly thrown myself into a spawn camping zerg with the Outmanned buff to see how I’d do for an hour or so.
I don’t think it’s just towers and keeps but I also don’t think they are just there for decoration. I’m fine with the PvP part but I think there is more to PvP than well-practiced teams fighting in an open field. I find the fortification and siege mechanics interesting when they are actually PvP instead of PvDoor. I think cracking a defended fortification is interesting, both as a defender and an attacker. And I think that part of the game suffers as much from players not knowing how to use all of the other tools the game gives them as much as the open field combat does.
When I first started playing WvW and reading the forums, I thought there were all sorts of things wrong with WvW ranging from balance to overpowered mechanics but as time goes on, I think many, if not most, of the problems in WvW are related to how the players play the game (there are still some true problems, such as the AoE limits which are the natural and realistic solution to a stacked zerg — the problem with the downed state in WvW is how rallying works, not the whole concept, in my opinion) and ANet’s problem is largely a matter of what they reward and “punish” (I lose gold whenever I play a defensive game). Players zerg because that’s how they make money. If you could earn a lot defending a tower or engaging in small group combat, more people might do those things.
I’ve demonstrated to my guild of friends that a fairly small number of people in a pre-siege equipped tower can melt zergs and they told me it worked exactly the way I told them it would. And the reason for that is that the siege weapons have a much higher AoE limit than my ranger’s Barrage does and that’s what busts zergs. I see siege weapons as the anti-zerg work-around for the ridiculously small AoE limit that ANet isn’t in any hurry to get rid of for characters.
Siege weapons also require a certain amount of skill to place and use and a lot of it gets used badly and sometimes, amazingly, not at all (I’ve been in plenty of attacks in towers or keeps with siege weapons not being used by players standing on the walls watching the attack). It’s not easy to kill player-characters with a cannon, for example, but I’ve done it. In fact, I’ve killed a team of two scouts when the thief wouldn’t leave their downed friend behind and wasn’t nearly as clever with their stealth as they thought they were. I’ve actually been training newbies about how to find and use the siege equipment properly because that’s the best change an outnumbered server like ET has to fight off the zergs.
Have people camp the towers and keeps with manned siege weapons and they’ll need to build their own in the field to crack the tower or keep. PvDoor disappears once the arrow carts and other siege weapons start raining death down on the zerg looking to press 1 to win. And when they build field siege weapons, that creates a great opportunity for open field combat with an objective. Some of the best open-field combat I’ve seen between large groups on ET has involved surging out to attack a siege weapon set up to take a tower, both as defender and attacker.
I’ve also been part of a group of people that I wasn’t even in a party with that held a tower despite the wall going down twice because we were ready for the enemy and took them out as they came in (not even using siege weapons) and they only took the tower with a much larger zerg on the third try. I find that defend and hold game, against other players, every bit as interesting as chasing the guy half-way across the map and taking him out. And I’ve also found it interesting being on the invading side of that same scenario and being driven out of a tower we didn’t have sufficient numbers to take. That’s not PvDoor. It is PvP. And my feeling about PvDoor is that if I wanted to attack NPCs that I’m guaranteed to beat for loot, I could go back to PvE and get a much better experience doing that.
The shock value alone just shuts them down.