Guild Wars 2

MornaVal.4508:

So uh.. the defenders just sit on one cap point with a ton of siege like they always do and create choke points. So how would the other two capture points matter?

Updating the original post for clarity.

Do like what Planetside 2 does, or every capture & hold game in the history of gaming: whoever owns the majority of capture positions is gaining points faster than everyone else. If that’s the defenders, great, they keep the castle. If an attacker wants the castle, they need to capture 2 of the 3 positions and hold it. If they can capture all 3, so much the better, it’ll flip quicker but it’s only really necessary to hold 2.

This is why Maguuma will always come in 2nd or 3rd place.

Crystal Desert borderland: Ehmry vs Crystal.
Maguuma borderland: Ehmry vs Maguuma.
Other two zones: Ehmry vs Maguuma + Crystal

The net result, like last week, is Crystal Desert takes #1. They have the manpower to make sure that any alliance with them in it works in their favor. Maguuma doesn’t. The best they will ever make with this strategy is second place.

ktith.6197:

Crafty idea…and would give epic battles for sure. Still wouldn’t fix the culling problem though unless each section was on its own server.

From what I’ve seen, culling isn’t “server-wide” — it’s locational.

If there are 100 people in the Lord room, you’re probably seeing 20% of them and you might have 5 seconds of skill lag. If you’re over at Ogrewatch, though, same server, and 10 enemies show up, you’ll see 100% of them and there will be no skill lag.

I’ve never been standing in Ogrewatch and had skill lag or bad culling issues just because there was a fight in Stonemist. So I think spreading people out more, even from one side of Stonemist to the other, will prevent the worst of the problem.

Draygo.9473:

but how would you force the zergs to split. All multiple objectives will do is force servers to cap 4 areas one at a time.

It’s just like any “capture and hold” mechanic.

You capture #1 and then all zerg to #2. You capture #2 and then all zerg to #3. But while you were doing this, one of the other teams retook #1.

It would probably be best to make it point-based too, so defenders can’t just hold 1 location.

If your team owns 2 of the 3 locations, then you are gaining points and ownership of the castle is drifting in your direction. Defense can pile up on one location but they will lose the castle if they can’t hold at least 2 locations.

Jumping puzzles = free siege.
Free siege = you taking my forts.
Killing enemies at jumping puzzles = less free siege for your team, more free siege for my team.

I dunno about “psychological”, but there’s a great STRATEGIC reason to camp the jumping puzzle.

You are basically asking us why we are camping the big free weapons arsenal. Silly question.

moirweyn.9872:

Did you just lose the castle really quickly?

No. This is not a post about a specific event. It happens just about every time Stonemist gets seriously attacked. One team breaches, which usually distracts the defenders enough for the other team to breach. Now there’s a huge 3-way fight in Stonemist and it will tend to all come together in the Lord room, since that’s the only place that really matters.

It usually drags on for some time, probably because culling issues mean nobody can see anything and server lag issues mean nobody can reliably fire off abilities.

It just turns into a big, frustrating lagfest. I think they could fix the worst of it with a fairly simple design change. Even breaking Stonemist into 3 separate zones of control would probably be better.

Stonemist makes me want to go play Planetside 2. It really highlights this game’s server-side performance issues. Even though MY machine is getting good FPS, culling issues mean I can’t see more than a quarter of the enemies in the room and my skills may take several seconds to fire off (sometimes they simply don’t fire off at all).

Arenanet is aware of the general issue but Stonemist makes the classic Warhammer-style mistake of “cramming tons of people into one room”. It’s a place where there’s usually a 3-way battle so the entire server is there and all the action is in the middle.

I suggest Stonemist have 3, perhaps 4 lords:

North Lord
Southwest Lord
Southeast Lord
(Middle Lord?)

There is a 1000 point pool. Whoever owns 2 positions is gaining points. When they hit 1000 points, they claim the castle. If you camp 1 position you’ll never win.

This might not solve the underlying issues but at least it will keep it from being so bad.

It should be a research item.

The research should give whoever activates it the Commander icon for 24 hours.

2500 influence, 24 hour research time.

Large guilds will be able to run several commanders at the same time while still buying other things. Small guilds will have to pick and choose but should be able to afford a full time commander. Solo people will not be able to farm up 100g and be a commander forever with no followers.

P.S.
Don’t use the guild bank for anything useful. We had a member hacked a couple weeks ago and the hacker cleaned out the guild bank. Whereas Rift customer support restored the entire contents (multiple times, when everyone was getting hacked…), GW2 support said they had no facility for doing this.

YOUR GUILD BANK ITEMS HAVE NO PROTECTION AGAINST HACKERS, short of simply not letting anyone access the withdraw function.

Did they have the mobile authenticator enabled? Guessing not.

Although the original hacking in Rift turned out to be a flaw in the login process itself — the Rift hackers didn’t need your password at all. They could login with just your username and some trick that fooled the login server into letting them in with no password check. Hopefully that’s not what’s happening here!

I’m curious why they don’t show colors but they DO show that you have hat #48, backpiece #12, chest armor #892, boots #681, gloves #211, etc.

I would think if they wanted to save bandwidth/memory/CPU, they could chop everyone down to, say, 1 fixed “look” per class, at least for enemies. I really pay no attention to what anyone is wearing in WvW so it seems like a waste.

Planetside always had like….4 uniforms. Total. Saves a lot of texture loading, I imagine.

Ralathar.7236:

Honestly this game hasn’t been out long enough for anyone to have a valid opinion on what their focus or concerns are.

I have played roughly 80% of all MMORPGs ever made (and several non-RPG MMOs as well).

I can’t think of a single example of where a company switched focus. Once a company goes down the PvE road, all you’ll ever get for PvP is occasional tweaks. In every single case, there are many people like you who state “you need to be patient” and in every single case, they have been wrong, as 6-12 months later the game is a ghost town and PvP concerns were never fully addressed.

In fact, the only game I would say came closest to a focus switch is WOW. WOW launched 100% PvE (they didn’t even launch with battlegrounds) and over time they’ve gradually moved towards more and more PvP attention. They are still a PvE game but not as much as they launched with.

Arenanet seems to be going the opposite direction and they’ll end up like all the other PvE games.

I think this is a design problem.

“Camp flipping” really shouldn’t be a thing. But camps are indefensible — if the enemy shows up with a small zerg, you’re not going to stop them without your own small zerg. The NPCs, including the supervisor, are such total pushovers that against 15 players they might as well not exist. Could just have the circle up all the time and anyone who stands in it gets the camp.

I really hate the camp flipping game but that’s where the points are. Good loot, good XP, good karma, good for your score, but gets old fast and just isn’t interesting as a longterm game mechanic.

Not to mention it makes the upgrades worthless.

spiritus.7983:

no, no more maps, my server have problems in filling 2 maps…

Do all maps really need to be filled?

That’s not how other WvW type games worked. In Planetside, there were always more maps than players to fill them — this was by design. The idea was that if one map wasn’t fun for whatever reason, you’d always have another map to go to. As long as there’s good reason for zerg to fight zerg (and not simply play the fort-swapping game) then it should work out nicely to have more maps than you can fill. (Battleground Europe also always has areas to fight in than any team can possibly fill. EVE certainly does this as well. The need to fill up every map is a bit silly, really.)

At the very least, though, they could keep us at 4 maps but start replacing the borderlands so that they are all unique maps. We should have 4 maps, not 2 maps with copies.

I agree that ArenaNet is being oddly slow on addressing WvW issues, some of which were apparent in beta, 6+ months ago.

• Server transfers continue to ruin WvW server balancing efforts. This was known about by ArenaNet and talked about by them in beta and the solution they already had for this was never implemented.

• The game is too pro-zerg. AE’s are limited to 5 but there’s no limit on single target damage, meaning 10 should pretty much always beat 5, all else being equal (this was not true in DAOC, where the 5 could hit the 10 with AE and potentially win if they did a good ambush).

• It’s too easy to zerg down a target. Golems are a big problem. You can have any fortress in the game 100% full upgraded and manned by a skeleton crew 24/7 and there’s just nothing you can do with 10 golems roll up to the door. Those golems were FREE, by the way, from the jumping puzzles. And they will be through both doors and the lord will be dead before there’s any possibility of a defensive response.

Consequently, WvW has too much zerging and “fort swapping” — the sort of thing faced by games like Planetside and Battleground Europe before solutions were put into place to discourage it.

I have to imagine that this is all fairly obvious to ArenaNet but for some reason they simply aren’t giving WvW the necessary development resources to do anything about it. Their focus continues to be on PvE. I did the new PvE zone for about an hour. I’ll probably never go back if I don’t have to. WvW is what I like but I’m afraid ArenaNet is going to allow it to go stale. All new content is going to PvE and sPvP.

Due to the Affordable Healthcare Act, Arenanet had to cut their WvW guy to 28 hours. He’s already gone home. Be back Monday.

Oh yeah they forgot to tell us, it’s 2 week matches now. Have fun!

“The WvW players are pretty happy but the PvE players aren’t. We need to focus on PvE.”

Every company says exactly this.
Eventually the WvW (PvP) players become unhappy due to lack of updates while the PvE players are NEVER, EVER going to be satisfied.

Eventually the game collapses because the PvP content is all old and stale and while the PvE players got 15 big updates, it’s never enough to keep them going and there goes Rift, Aion, Warhammer and basically every other MMORPG.

Start times are randomized each week.

Players are not notified because studies suggested that players enjoy surprises.

Zero notification WvW reboots are done for the same reason.

The 1 guy in charge of the entire WvW part of the game is busy with his other duties.

He will squeeze in a few seconds to hit the reset later. Be patient.

I was rather hoping the “big patch on the 15th” would have something in it for WvW.

I’m not picky. Doesn’t have to be 3 new maps. Just….something.

Besetment.9187:

What game are you playing? Defense gives tonnes of loot bags. Get on those superior arrow carts and ballistas.

I’m talking about the patch notes. Champions and veterans will have more loot, apparently including Exotics.

This will encourage offense even more than it already is while doing nothing to encourage defense (nobody is going to guard a wall when the people over THERE are maybe getting exotic drops).

Maybe loot drops could be scaled based on YOUR TEAM’S total upgrades in the zone, up to a certain point.

No upgrades anywhere = poor loot drops.
1/3rd of all structures fully upgraded = full loot drops.
Any additional upgrades = no further bonus.

So if you own your third of Eternal and have it all fully upgraded, you get phat lewts. If you own all of Eternal but none of it is upgraded then you get minimal lewts.

(We could base it on how upgraded the thing you are attacking is but that provides a disincentive for the enemy to upgrade things. Not only does it become a target but they basically gave you free gear.)

If WvW is disabled, I will stop playing.

If I can’t progress through stat-increasing loot tiers inside of WvW, I will eventually stop playing as other people get too far ahead of me and the game stops being fun.

I don’t like PvE.
I don’t like “dungeons”.
I don’t like “epic holiday events”. Bah humbug.

I love WvW and it needs to be supported like the other game modes.

One thing that concerns me from the new patch notes: drop rates are increasing for killing champions and bosses.

To which I have to ask, “What about defense?”

On defense I can get karma, xp and money like everyone else, from the event completions, but obviously I’m not killing any champions or veterans — just players; the ones attacking the thing I’m defending.

MOST people already don’t like defense. Towers (and especially supply camps) just get swapped — effectively farmed for offensive rewards — which I don’t think is healthy, long-term gameplay. Adding more rewards to offense while overlooking defense will simply encourage this behavior. I hope it’s something that’s being pondered by the devs because it’s certainly going to be on the mind of the players who already say things like “let them have it so we can take it back”.

I agree that oil is mostly useless in its current state.

I think I would actually just make the oil itself invulnerable, but make it do less damage to rams. That way the defenders can always risk running up to it to do a pour and you have to be on guard against this to bomb them off of it quick.

Or maybe just move the oil to the INNER side of the door — it’s something you don’t use until the door is busted open. Then you can drop it to put a serious hurting on people running in, and maybe tip the scales in your team’s favor if you have some defenders on hand.

As it is, the only real use of the oil is as a small additional buffer to door health. They have to kill the oil first. Unfortunately, in zerg conditions, this only takes a few seconds.

The amount of time it takes to even get those golems (due to the “once per 24 hours” chests) is far more than the amount of time a keep has been upgrading. I’ve done each of the puzzles at least 15 times each, and I have yet to get a golem. It’s fine.

1 mesmer
1 guild with 50+ people on
Multiple free golems every day

There are also 4 jumping puzzles, so, yeah.

Anti-invisibility field would work. Like an engineer turret that, when dropped, decloaks anything around it in a fairly large radius. Make it an elite. Engineers need an elite turret anyway.

Invisibility currently has no direct counter. Something like this would help bring thieves back in line a bit as well as allow a prepared group some chance to defend against a rushing, invisible mesmer.

All of this really highlights a serious problem with the game, which is that FOR FREE, you can acquire golems in jumping puzzles and then use a squad of them to eliminate the biggest, toughest, most upgraded targets so fast that the enemy simply can’t respond in time to do anything about it.

If every golem cost someone 1 gold or 100 badges, it would be hard to complain about situations like this.

But when I know golem rushes are frequently assembled using jumping puzzle rewards that cost nothing, I become frowny. Nobody should get to bash through thousands of supply and many hours of defensive upgrades for free, in under 3 minutes from the first knock on the door to the capture of the keep.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Arrow carts are overpowered. The winning team always has most.

This is true.

The winning team always has the most siege. Or, the same situation worded differently, the team with the most siege always wins.

Siege, like arrow carts, are actually one of the very few effective ways to attempt to counter a zerg. 10 can’t beat 30 people but if it’s 10 people falling back to 10 prepared siege engines, they can probably either win or at the very least greatly slow down the attackers, who must now build their own siege.

And really, complaining about arrow carts is silly because their range is so limited.

Build a catapult. Build a trebuchet. Build a catapult up against a wall in an area where no arrow carts are covering. There are plenty of options. “Ram on door” is really what you do when there’s no defense and you’re in a hurry. Arrow carts on defense are one of the best ways to force attackers to commit to a serious siege rather than simply beating down the door with their fists.

Thief in berserker gear soloed the supervisor, is the most likely explanation.

The supervisors are pretty weak and they don’t benefit from any upgrades. It only takes 30-60 seconds or so for even a typical 5-man group to take the whole camp legitimately so if the camp isn’t watched 24/7, you’re going to lose it faster than you can respond. The control circle flips really fast even if only 1 person is in it (in fact, I don’t think the speed of the flip varies by the number of people).

The only “unusual” thing here is that someone soloed the supervisor without engaging the other guards but I have a feeling that it’s really not that unusual, and is something a skilled thief could do on a regular basis.

Personally, I think it’s a problem (that camps, even fully upgraded, can be so easily flipped) but I’m not sure Arenanet agrees (or knows, or cares). I’m a power/vitality/toughness engineer and I’m pretty sure I could duo an entire unupgraded camp, guards and all. The only reason I can’t solo it is because of the blinds from the scouts. Guards in this game are pushovers and supervisors are only dangerous when they have the invulnerability buff.

“Poor design”.

They created jumping puzzles in WvW apparently in the thought that it would be an amusing little side-show and simply didn’t think about how it might actually impact the battle. What you see in the screenshot is one of those “little fun jumping puzzles” on the map that incidentally gives one team an amazing, nearly unassailable position to setup trebs.

No one said orbs are gone forever, just going to be worked on.

They said that about Dolyak rewards too.

This really isn’t a thread about orbs.

It’s a thread about how the borderland maps are less popular than Eternal Battlegrounds. The long supply routes, the northern towers only being fed from 1 supply camp, the vertical nature of the map, the water — lots of factors lead to these maps just not being considered to be as “fun” as Eternal Battlegrounds.

The only thing that kept so many people going there was the fact that orbs were seen as OP so everyone wanted to make sure their server had some. We went to borderlands despite the fact that Eternal was more generally fun.

Without orbs, I’m afraid borderlands will just lead to more people quitting. They won’t be able to get into the “fun one” because of the queues and they’ll quickly tire of the 3 identical auxiliary maps.

I don’t get this either. It’s on a regular basis too. What are they doing that needs to be patched without warning in the middle of peak usage?

BTW,
Any fort upgrades that were in process get lost during these takedowns. You don’t get refunded the money and the fort doesn’t get refunded the supply. The upgrade that was in progress simply gets lost.

We’ve also noticed that superior siege engines all vanish. Regular siege engines will still be around but the superior versions all poof in the reset.

psirca.9452:

No one said orbs are gone forever, just going to be worked on.

In the last 2 months, and really, in the last 6+ months of beta prior to release, we haven’t seen any real WvW content updates that I can think of. Lots of balance tweaks to skills and so forth but no new mechanics, maps, structures, siege engines or things like that.

I’m sure they are working on these things but it’s not where their focus is really at. They are focused on dungeon content, quest content and, to some extent, sPvP (especially tournaments).

I would bet that other WvW improvements are being worked on now, and Orb fixes will be behind that. I wouldn’t expect to see Orbs come back for several months.

That’s a long time for the borderlands to be seen as second-rate places to be.

.

I dunno what the solution should be but I hope it’s something Arenanet thinks about. I’d like them to keep an eye on WvW map populations and see if they can’t band-aid something in if borderlands populations crashes, which I predict they will.

I predict that Eternal Battlegrounds will be absolutely slammed now.

Eternal always was more popular with the masses and I think it’s because it has a good pace to it. It never really stalemates. There’s always a good attack or defense going on.

The borderlands maps are more spread out, with more cliffs and winding paths and longer supply routes. Sieges tend to be longer, more expensive, more brutal affairs. There are fewer forts so there are fewer options. If one attack isn’t working out, there may not be much real choice on where else to hit.

The main reason the Borderlands got what action they did is because of the Orbs. Big-name guilds usually went straight there and fought for orbs. “Eternal Battlegrounds is for noobs” was the catchphrase. People tolerated the slower pace and fewer options of borderlands because it was so critical to capture and hold the orbs.

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Without the orbs, Borderlands are just going to be seen as the annoying maps you have to put up with when Eternal Battlegrounds is full.

I hope Arenanet is aware that Borderland maps aren’t as popular even WITH the orbs and now without them, I think player disgruntlement with WvW’s lack of maps will accelerate.

You know you can’t hurt anyone in their spawn, right kitten

Golem rushes on keeps are more of a problem since they highlight the issue of how quickly and easily anyone can crush a fully upgraded keep, often faster than defense has any chance to respond. It’s simply not realistic to expect every keep to have 10 players manning siege 24/7, so inevitable some sort of siege rush will take it down in less than 5 minutes.

You could do the same thing with rams, though.

Well that’s lovely. Will this be before or after the majority of my guild quits?

Personally, I want to see more noise and action from Arenanet because I would like to convince my guildmembers to stick around and tough it out. I’m sure that, 1 year from now, it will all be very nice but what about tomorrow or next week or next month?

I’m also unsettled that they are making big plans without getting any community input. What if their plans suck? That’s basically what happened to DAOC and Planetside. (“Behold our new content that we worked for months developing! Hip hip…? Oh. Nobody likes it.”)

I don’t have a great deal of trouble with them. The question is, “what’s your toughness?” I’m an engineer with power/toughness/vitality exotic gear and if I can’t beat the thief, I can generally run a half mile to the nearest tower before he can kill me. Slick shoes, elixir S, supply crate drop, that sort of thing. Just takes them too long. No 10k backstabs on me because my toughness is too high for that and I have over 20k hp.

Defense is boring, but necessary. Unfortunately there is nothing to do there.

My idea:

Around the forts there are things that spawn. Maybe…nails, spare lumber, scrap metal, etc. Collect them and you can hammer them into walls and doors to give them a slight boost to their hit points above the max. For example, if a door normally has 100,000 hit points, putting scrap metal on it might add 1000 more. This does not increase the “max” — if the door gets beat down, it can only be repaired to its normal max, but it does add points above the max to act as a buffer in the next attack.

Similarly, you could find “abandoned equipment” or something to increase guard health. Maybe you could even plant a banner in the road for a chance to attract additional guards. (Like the door health, these guards are “permanent until killed”. They don’t despawn unless killed, but they also don’t respawn.)

Basically, instead of standing on a wall with our thumbs up our kittens, we could at least be occupying ourselves with something mundane, but useful.

It would be better than nothing.

This is why, ultimately, the counter to a zerg is another zerg.

Defensive siege can cause delay to a zerg, namely by killing their rams, but that’s all it can do: delay. And not by much, really, because a 40-man zerg can beat down a reinforced door with just their fists quickly enough.

So there’s your counter.

A 40-man zerg is countered by another 40-man zerg. Throwing down a couple ballista during the scrum can have a serious impact but siege needs a zerg to screen it and sweep up when facing an enemy zerg. You simply do not counter a competent 40-man zerg with a 10-man defensive force. Not in any fort, not with any upgrades, not with any siege.

If the “AE only hits 5 people” rule was lifted for WvW, then that changes everything but for now, it takes a zerg to beat a zerg.

It’s a little bit like putting a screen door on a bank vault and then blaming the people who steal from the vault when nobody is looking.

Yes, okay, sure, blame the people. You’re not wrong to do so.

But it’s also a bad vault design to have a screen door on it.

We can talk to people about the authenticator and the need for better password security and user behavior but that doesn’t change the fact that the vault, itself, has a really weak design and needs to have some more thought put into it.

Agreed. We need guild tax. It’s a fair and automated system and it works well in other games.

WvW guilds in particular REALLY need this as there is no other way to fairly distribute the costs. Even the best efforts of distributing costs manually can’t be as fair as a “10% tax”.

So today we learned that if someone in your guild gets hacked and steals everything from the guild vault, Arenanet has no means of restoring items. This kind of renders guild vaults useless because there’s no protections we can put on them other than denying access to most people, which defeats the purpose.

To that end, I have several ideas:

• Authentication required.
  If this is checked, you cannot take things from the guild vault unless you use mobile authentication (it’s under “My Account” -> Security).
• Request -> Granted
  If this is checked, guild members may request to take an item, which moves it to a temporary holding area, but they don’t actually get it until someone else with “granting” permission releases it to them. That is, I click to remove the Sword of Awesomeness but I don’t get it until an officer approves it (officers can approve each other’s requests but nobody can approve their own request).
• Limited access.
  The most basic protection is to simply limit how many items someone can remove per day.

As it is, we have no defense against further hacking, short of locking down the vault. And even then eventually some officer may get hacked and that’ll be that.

Fix for the zerg:

• Allow AE to hit unlimited numbers of player

Currently you can only hit 5 people, but unlimited numbers can hit you, so it’s all about the zerg. In DAOC, 1 person could hit the entire zerg with an AE if they were all bunched up, so you’d end up with cases where 5 people mulched 30.

They actually prevented this from happening in this game. The zerg is “works as designed”.

I like the downed state, but it has several issues:

• Downed state in water lets you move, which is a huge pain.
• Downed state in land lets you revive too fast. 1 person should not be able to revive someone faster than I can finish him with a ballista.
• Partially revived, dead people should slowly lose their built up revive bar if nobody is reviving them. I don’t like a “dead” enemy sitting at 99% health waiting for one more tap to get back up, and he can sit there like that until it boots him for not moving, which is, what, 15 minutes?

I do like that revive helps mitigate “alpha strike” builds though. Okay, you alpha struck me and downed me quick. Fine. Now my friends are pushing you back and I’m going to get back up, no harm done.

Without the downed mechanic, alpha strike builds would be even more prevalent than they already are.

…is getting old.

One simple proposal (other than a Planetside style lattice…) would be to make rewards for capturing things relative to the upgrade state.

So a supply camp will always be worth 5 points on the map but for you, personally, it will reward far less if it’s completely unupgraded — that is, if you let the enemy capture it so that you can capture it back shortly after.

• “But won’t people just avoid upgrading things to screw over the enemy?”
  Maybe, but then we need to address why upgrades aren’t worthwhile. You should always want all of them and right now a lot of them are a total waste (I’m looking at you, useless extra guards and patrols that don’t even qualify as speed bumps).

Alternatively, it could be time based. Flipping a supply camp that was just flipped rewards far less XP/karma/money than flipping one that the enemy has held for 8 hours.

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Another thing to consider could be loosening up the requirements for a defensive event. Currently the enemy must hit the door or a wall and you must either kill someone or repair something. With no supply in the base and a remotely savvy enemy (plus the whole downed mechanic), it’s very easy to go event after event with no kills or repairs and therefore no credit. Maybe SOME credit could be gained through damage. I know this opens things to coordinated abuse but that might be better than having a lot of people see defense as worthless.

3 factions are better than 2 factions.
5 might be better than 3.
Nothing is worse than 2 faction combat, though.

Where GW2 went wrong was the scoreboard. Whereas Planetside had no scoreboard and it was always about the breakout and then beating down whoever was #1 on map coverage, GW2 is more about “holding second place” by beating on 3rd place. In Planetside there was no reason to do that. There was no scoreboard. You went after whoever was closest, which was usually team that owned the most stuff.

The scoreboard broke the 3-team dynamic.

Extra true when the second place team decides there’s no way they can catch up to first, so they “give up” on ever getting first and just focus on making sure 3rd place stays there. The game needs some sort of bonus, or accelerating point totals or something that can enable a 2nd place team to potentially recover 1st place rather than the game being basically over by Tuesday.

I predict DH will be a ghost town again in 2 weeks or less.

They got so many Oceanic players, they seize the entire map, which is incredibly boring. Lots of people are logging into to DH at prime Australian time and finding there’s nothing to do except spawncamp. They’ll get bored of that quick and either move (again!) or quit.

You just can’t pile everyone from one time zone onto the same server and expect that to be a form of fun that’s going to last for months.