Hello everyone. Long time reader 1st time writer here. After playing the stronghold beta I was instantly reabsorbed into guild wars 2. I had a ton of fun playing it, both solo and with friends.
There is one thing lacking however, the tension of “oh crap, we just wiped at their lord and now we are going to likely lose.”
Before that let me give you a little bit of background on myself. I played gw1 competitively since it launch until about 2008. I was a member of *bold*the trueblade*/bold* we took 23rd place during the second gw1 ladder season. That was the most success I’ve ever achieved in that game. So this is coming from an enthusiast, and not a “top player”.
Stronghold brought back a lot of those memories from playing guild wars. A rush of nostalgia invigorated me and I was all about playing this game mode. In fact, I played it from around 11 hours or so. I was hooked.
During my playtime, I noticed a lot of stuff that could have been done better and brought more pacing and tension to the game. For example in guild wars 1 if you wanted to kill an enemy base and solo the guild lord, it took A LOT of work and time. Mainly assassins could do this but I’ve seen a handful of skilled warriors and rangers also do this. In stronghold, it’s not like that. One glass zerker can just leeroy your lord unload his damage a few times, die, and repeat. There is no penalty for this type of play. (granted this has a little bit of set up time, not dismissing that.)
GVG in gw1 punished bad play and rewarded good play. Mesmer gets caught out of position and gets spiked down. Bad play. The player was punished for getting greedy, sloppy, or whatever. This bad play also punished the team because now your monks had to push up to try and heal your stupid mesmer self, and now they are out of position and vulnerable. Stronghold doesn’t really seem to punish bad play. You just re-spawn in 15 seconds and go at it again. There is no room for power plays while a man is down, they just come right back and are in the fight.
Sure it’s fun and all fine in a casual setting. In a more competitive setting this can get rather annoying, spending all your time and resources to take down that bunker guardian or engie defending the gate only to have them reappear in such a short-time window. It’s rather annoying.
I think anet needs to put more emphasis on good play as opposed to sloppy play. Punish those players for it, and reward those who are playing well.
Some suggestions for this are as follows:
Make the pit (lord room) more dangerous to solo players to come and gank the whole room. It should be a team effort to defend the lord / push for the win.
Each guild lord fight the lord should start with full hp. This will discourage those kamikaze strategies I mentioned earlier.
If not that, maybe add a healing modifier to the lord so a team can choose to spend the time to heal the lord to full health.
Make archers have another purpose or spawn two at a time with your supply investment.
In conclusion, stronghold might not be traditional gvg in the sense however, it adds it’s own flair to the mmo pvp. It’s in its own right a very good, fun, and challenging game more. With some minor improvements, it could be the best pvp experience in a long time.
This is a very well written piece. I’m going to bump it so that it gets more attention. I don’t know if I could have said anything better as you have put it but you made some great points and I agree. When I first started playing stronghold I was immediately brought back to guild wars 1 gvg and I wish that it was just like gw1 and the gates stayed open and kill all the guard NPCs and then focus on the Lord. all player deaths players would respawn every 30 seconds. and the power plays that you mentioned with the team splits like 4/4, 5/3, 4/3/1, 5/2/1 or 6/2 and 6/1/1s made strategy so much more fun than constantly Yolo zerging their npcs till your team wins or loses.