WvW restructure will fail if you do not balance defensive power

Ok so i decided to post this since looks like Arenanet is finally going to address that population problems i figured why not telling them what my and many of my friends perspective is about the real WvW problems, as a long time commander and guild driver on NA servers , played WvW since beta, 10k rank 700k+ kills 10k hours in WvW alone, etc, etc 10k+ hours, i believe one of the main and most cancerous problems of WvW right now, apart form the flawed matchmaking system is the siege and defensive power granted to players with all this new gimmicks (tactivators) that do nothing positive for the game but make it boring and slow and action lackcluster.

I am going to point out the problem starting from a pugmander's perspective and how this affects the whole WvW dynamic from the biggest of the blobs up to the solo roamers. So i have a big blob enemy has a big blob i decide to push a T3 keep, the defending team will sit inside the whole time building siege repairing walls pulling tactivators with a massive blob this means it would take me 2-3 hours at best to crack that thing open and get a fight at lord's room that will maybe last 15-20 mins. So i spent 3 hours of my day fighting a walla and 1 door to get a15 min fight in the lords room win or lose, this is a terrible desing flaw, no commander will do this for long time it is such a boring thing to do people will just get burned out very fast from it and quit. After pugmanders quit the guilds that used to fight that pugmander out pure fun they will also get bored and quit, the guilds/individuals that defend and upgrade stuff will also quit cuz nobody is trying to take their structures anymore and everything is T3 24/7, the roamers who would gank people trying to take structures or running yaks or running back to the commanders will also quit, cuz there is nobody doing those things anymore, and this in the end is death spiral that kills WvW as a whole.

I remember when u could warrior banner the lord for example or port into lords room every 2 mins, that would keep fights alive for way longer then 15 mins a fight at SMC lords room would take hours, those were the time where u could also break in using omegas in 2 mins, so you would open up a structure very fast and get a massive fights in the lords room for hours, defenders could keep warbannering the lords indefinitelly and people porting inside constantly would keep the fight going for so long, this was a very good thing very action packed, very fun, intense and rewarding for everyone involved. Those were the golden years of pugmanding full of real PvP action. We need to go back to those days WvW needs to be a dynamic enviorment keeps tower need to be papered constantly in order for people have something to do with their playtime other than sitting on a T3 keep and wait for something to happen.

So my suggestions to fix WvW as a whole and make it fun again would be the following:

1. T3 gates need to be reworked for way lower health/armor please remove t3 gates all together.
2. Make upgrades manual (free silver cost) again, this is huge requires a lot of work and it is much more satisfactory for defenders/upgraders to have it this way in order to keep em busy andoing their thing
3. Reduce siege AC damage or make em work like catapults where u have to aim and charge up the shots, Acs sucks nobody wants to fight Acs pls, NOBODY period.
4. Make lords inside keeps/towers insta revivable (lower his health too, those aint no PVE raidbosses) again and go back to the old waypoint system that will allow defenders to port back every 2 mins. This is huge to keep fights alive and requires strategy form defenders and atackers to deal with also allow solo players to feel more important since a solo guy can sacrifice himself to ress the lord for example and feel he is contributing on a big way to the fight.
5. Encourage fights overall make kills more relevant, KDR is important but i feel PPK affects WvW in a negative way i think, make KDR stats show up, even cool stuff like killstreaks showing on the screen (MOOOONSTER KILL BABY!), squad kills/deaths counters etc, but do not make em impact the score since this makes people turn away from fights sometimes just cuz they don't wanna ¨feed¨ the other server, and that is a terrible thing if anything u should be rewards for kills on a personal way like maybe giving u items or extra bags per killstreaks but do not punish the people who die and disencourage them from engaging altogether.

To finish i just wanna say that this post is probably going to get a lot of hate from those people that want to defend a keep from 30 guys with 5, but lets face it guys there is no reasson whatsoever why u should keep your structures if you are outnumbered like that honestly, and just imagine what happens and how bad it gets when u have 30 guys trying to take a keep/tower and there is 40 people inside using siege, it is just very boring for everyone involved. Currently 5 people can make 30-40 man blob to back off a tower and that is pretty stupid i think defensive power needs to be turned down to 1/2 ratio 1 defender per 2 atackers kinda thing at most. This will definitelly make WvW a more changing enviorment more dynamic and more fun for eveyone that just having everything T3ed 24/7. Going with alliances is a good start but there is just so much more WvW desperatly needs to be fun and enagaging again.

How about removing castles and walls and doors all together?Remove all siege too.Make it a large scale PvP multi zones capture style fight.Essentially make WvW a large scale Lord down and Lord Rings up fight in open field.

@EremiteAngel.9765 YEah that would be sweet in my opinion but some people like to defend and upgrade so i guess the game needs to acomodate for them too, also structures pin point enemies on a location, u dont have to run arround looking for them if you know they are there and fighting inside structures can be fun too it gives verticality chokes small areas that can be fun at times and give fights some different feel which is nice to keep people entertained

So you want to PvD faster?

@EremiteAngel.9765 said:How about removing castles and walls and doors all together?Remove all siege too.Make it a large scale PvP multi zones capture style fight.Essentially make WvW a large scale Lord down and Lord Rings up fight in open field.

no if i want to play like that, i could play spvp. the larger scale wont make it more interesting.

all those defensive 'gimmicks' as you name them actually make it more interesting. else you would have one fight and then the losing team will just logg off cause they cant even use the envoirement to even the match and make for more interesting fights.

@MUDse.7623 said:

all those defensive 'gimmicks' as you name them actually make it more interesting. else you would have one fight and then the losing team will just logg off cause they cant even use the envoirement to even the match and make for more interesting fights.

They don't make the game more interesting for the team that can't do anything to find a fight, they also dont make the game interesting for the team that is fighting 10 ACs 2 shields 2 catapults trying to PVD a door while the whole enemy blob is just sitting inside, i mean defending outnumbered is a thing but this all collapses when this defensive gimmicks are used by a team just as large as the atacking force is, defending should be done by man power honestly. If you dont have the mampower u should lose and u should lose baddy so you get matched up vs lower populated worlds (assuming matchmaking is fixed ofc). It makes no sense that a team that has 20 people online have 3 T3 keeps generating points while a team that has 120 has the same ammount generating the same points, in this case both teams are actually having a bad time here both getting bored. So unless the 20 man team can actually kill that 100 man team on a real fight there should be no reasson for this matchup to exist, low pop team should be loosing bad not scoring near the same points, in order for the matchmaking system to give them a more balanced enemy.

@Rampage.7145 said:

@MUDse.7623 said:

all those defensive 'gimmicks' as you name them actually make it more interesting. else you would have one fight and then the losing team will just logg off cause they cant even use the envoirement to even the match and make for more interesting fights.

<3

@Rampage.7145 said:

@MUDse.7623 said:

all those defensive 'gimmicks' as you name them actually make it more interesting. else you would have one fight and then the losing team will just logg off cause they cant even use the envoirement to even the match and make for more interesting fights.

if you are able to defeat you opponent on open field, why would they fight you again openfield ? by bringing the fight to a structure they ensure they are not being farmed. you would surely prefer open field close fights, but that is rarely the case. mostly one side is pretty dominant and the other sides will get farmed, that is onesided.

@Loosmaster.8263 said:So you want to PvD faster?

absolutely, I think walls & doors should only be there to allow time for defenders to arrive. They need to slow down a ktrain enough that they can be caught but structures shouldn't hold without a breach for more than 10min at the absolute outside.

Paper SM is the best SM, heck I think EBG would be better if they just deleted the gates on SM all together, maybe toss in a couple of portals so defenders get the advantage of being able to cross it slightly faster.

@MUDse.7623 said:

@Rampage.7145 said:

@MUDse.7623 said:

all those defensive 'gimmicks' as you name them actually make it more interesting. else you would have one fight and then the losing team will just logg off cause they cant even use the envoirement to even the match and make for more interesting fights.

If you cant win by manpower u should not be able to win by stting behind safety of a wall and usinng ACs either, this just ruins the game for everybody. When u watch a an action movie like the lord of the rings is Aragorn using an arrow cart behind a wall at any point? no he is just fucking fighting, if you cannot make a defense epic by just defending outnumbered by using your skill and tactical advantages u should just lose there is no epicnes on defending with catapults where oponents can´t do anything about it to counter it. Keeps allow defenders to have enough tactical advantages over oponents as it is outside siege, chokes, high ground positions, respwn time, if after all those advantages u cant win still u should just lose the structure and find a more suitable opponent

@Rampage.7145 said:

@MUDse.7623 said:

all those defensive 'gimmicks' as you name them actually make it more interesting. else you would have one fight and then the losing team will just logg off cause they cant even use the envoirement to even the match and make for more interesting fights.

For someone who claims to have so much experience you seem to have, you seem to be completely lacking in tactics or any sort of strategic thinking, other than 'rub face on door with 50 people' then moan when it doesn't work.

If the whole enemy blob is sitting inside one target, attack several targets at once.

Have a small havoc team set up siege to take out the defensive siege in other places while you draw all the enemy away to another tower/keep.

Trebs from afar on a different objective whilst you keep the enemy tied up defending where you are, wiping out all their defences.

Get 2/3 people to set up catapults at different targets- they might get discovered but in the meantime they might do 200-300 supplies of damage to the wall, or wipe several ac, etc.

If they only have 20 people online they aren't going to come out and fight your entire zone blob- that would be just stupid. However, if you engaged your brain you'd quickly realise that the cannot defend everything at once, and that is your real advantage. Your disadvantage is that having trained a zerg of brain dead zombies to follow you and only do what you say (as it leads to most loot bags/easy p6 particiaption) is asking people to then think and split off to go and do something that might get them less rewards might be too much of a challenge- especially as if half the zerg is your guild, you'll probably ask the 'pugs' to go do it as it's beneath your guildies...

Just because you struggle against well organised defence doesn't mean it should be removed from the game so you can press the 'i win' button.

@Rampage.7145 said:(free silver cost)

Ignoring the rest of the post, this leaves me somewhat confused.

Agree with Bloodie 100% and as a pugmander this is probably the most annoying thing about the game for me right now but it's particularly annoying while commanding.

He's not lying about the time it takes to crack a t3 objective and how miserable it is to do so. Trebs, Mortars, Cannons, Arrow Carts, Ballistas all being fired on your entire force for the entire time you're even near the objective. Most of an attempted assault is surviving siege and then every objective has Structural Invulnerability and an Emergency Waypoint which means they get a free minute to full repair and 40s!!! now to zone in if they're too slow responding or if they happen to die during the fighting. It's absolutely the most absurd thing in WvW right now.

The thing he doesn't mention is that servers with OCX/SEA get to upgrade all their structures mostly unopposed every single night while their enemy has to spend EU/NA rebuilding and simultaneously trying to crack multiple t3 objectives just to have everything reset the next day. THE INSANE GIMMICKY DEFENSIVE NONSENSE EXACERBATES THE EFFECTS OF COVERAGE DISPARITIES.

If you can't win a fight you shouldn't be able to keep your keep or your tower or whatever. In my opinion they should remove arrow carts from the game entirely and remove the ability to upgrade any objective. At the very least they should remove structural invulnerability and Emergency Waypoints. If defenders die they should be out of the fight for entire time it takes them to run back. The game should be centered around fighting to keep as much stuff as you can while you're online not upgrading every objective during OCX/SEA and then turtling EU/NA.

@Baldrick.8967 said:

@Rampage.7145 said:

@MUDse.7623 said:

all those defensive 'gimmicks' as you name them actually make it more interesting. else you would have one fight and then the losing team will just logg off cause they cant even use the envoirement to even the match and make for more interesting fights.

All this takes too much time imo, again is all about time, 3 hours hitting a door aka supply draining killing ACs catapulting etc to get a 20 min fight out of it it is just not good, some people just get to play for 3 hours, nobody wants to waste their 3 hours of playing a night like this, this drives so many people away form the game, to the point where all u got left is the people who is actually ok with this and at that point everything is T3d all the time cuz there nobody willing to take anything anymore and the game just feels dead

Emergency Waypoint should not be available until an objective is upgraded to T3, like we had before tactics.

@Dawdler.8521 said:

@Rampage.7145 said:(free silver cost)

Back in the day camp/keep/tower upgrades were manual, it woud cost real gold to upgrade for example to get T3 walls on SMC u would need to pay 2 gold from your own money to manually triiger the upgrade to start, i am proposing to go back to that system but without the personal cost of doing this since defenders would spend 100s of gold a week playing the game basically. Manually triggering upgrades would ensure keeps in your BL do not get ghost. auto upgraded all the way to T3 for example while nobody is willing to take them back, there would need to be people actually triggering this stuff. this way the morning server hero who tags up willing to start a squad in the morning with his 5 other guys do not have to painfully cap a bunch of T3 keeps and tores that auto upgraded overnight

Emergency waypoint isn't really the problem, it brings players together which is good. I think the old fashioned uncontesting one was better or a lower cooldown would be great as long as the structure is able to be breached much much faster than a current T3

So having everything defenceless and made of paper would be more fun? I happen to like long sieges and tactics- running over 20 people with 50 isn't really a challenge.

Of course, you could have had players softening up the targets all day, or preventing dollies from getting there, then you've taken the draining out of the equation. Ask guildies who are on at other times of the day to perform these tasks- it's so much easier then. At quiet times a 5 man team could easily take down an outer wall before they can repel you, kill all the cannons, etc.

If it takes you 3 hours to get the walls/doors down then you're doing it wrong. If you're attacking their keep there are many ways to wipe out their siege in inner - it's just that too many players can't be bothered to set these things up in advance and then moan when they turn up and find a keep fully seiged and maxed supplies. You can take out inner walls/gates from way outside the keep

I get the feeling you just want an empty flat piece of ground to mash into each other and win due to higher numbers on your side and collect your loot and 'kills'.

The best fights are after you get in, when all three servers are fighting over the objective - and your ninja team flips their t3 hills:-)

@Baldrick.8967 said:

@Rampage.7145 said:

@"MUDse.7623" said:

all those defensive 'gimmicks' as you name them actually make it more interesting. else you would have one fight and then the losing team will just logg off cause they cant even use the envoirement to even the match and make for more interesting fights.

1. If attackers can split up so can defenders and it only takes about 5-10 people to defend pretty much anything if they know what they're doing.
2. No one can be bothered with this because it's boring.
3. No one can be bothered with this because it's boring.
4. No one can be bothered with this because it's boring.
5. If they really only have 20 people online then they should lose all their stuff.
6. Everyone struggles against "well organized defense" aka siege humping and it makes the game slower and less action oriented as a result.

@Rampage.7145 said:

They don't make the game more interesting for the team that can't do anything to find a fight, they also dont make the game interesting for the team that is fighting 10 ACs 2 shields 2 catapults trying to PVD a door while the whole enemy blob is just sitting inside, i mean defending outnumbered is a thing but this all collapses when this defensive gimmicks are used by a team just as large as the atacking force is, defending should be done by man power honestly. If you dont have the mampower u should lose and u should lose baddy so you get matched up vs lower populated worlds (assuming matchmaking is fixed ofc). It makes no sense that a team that has 20 people online have 3 T3 keeps generating points while a team that has 120 has the same ammount generating the same points, in this case both teams are actually having a bad time here both getting bored. So unless the 20 man team can actually kill that 100 man team on a real fight there should be no reasson for this matchup to exist, low pop team should be loosing bad not scoring near the same points, in order for the matchmaking system to give them a more balanced enemy.

Your example is flawed: a 20 man team may be able to defend one T3 keep against 120, but there's no way they can defend three of them, much less anything else. If you have overwhelming numbers but near parity in terms of point generation, you're doing something wrong, and throwing all your people at the enemy's most fortified objective is probably what you're doing wrong. The way to rectify the score imbalance is to use some of your overwhelming numbers to take everything else. If those 20 are defending a keep, they're not defending towers and camps.

Defense needs to be viable for the game to work. Outnumbered teams need to be able to do something besides donate bags to the larger server, or else the players are going to leave WvW, and some of them won't come back. One of the reasons WvW works as well as it does is that defense gets harder the more area you have to defend (and, by extension, easier the less you have). If an outnumbered sever can't even expect to hold its own Garrison and EBG Keep, then there's no reason to play at all.

@Civilis.2547 said:

@Rampage.7145 said:

They don't make the game more interesting for the team that can't do anything to find a fight, they also dont make the game interesting for the team that is fighting 10 ACs 2 shields 2 catapults trying to PVD a door while the whole enemy blob is just sitting inside, i mean defending outnumbered is a thing but this all collapses when this defensive gimmicks are used by a team just as large as the atacking force is, defending should be done by man power honestly. If you dont have the mampower u should lose and u should lose baddy so you get matched up vs lower populated worlds (assuming matchmaking is fixed ofc). It makes no sense that a team that has 20 people online have 3 T3 keeps generating points while a team that has 120 has the same ammount generating the same points, in this case both teams are actually having a bad time here both getting bored. So unless the 20 man team can actually kill that 100 man team on a real fight there should be no reasson for this matchup to exist, low pop team should be loosing bad not scoring near the same points, in order for the matchmaking system to give them a more balanced enemy.

If matchamking works properly you will jsut get matched up against a more suitable enemy and you will be able to have your fun, you dont need to face the top dogs to have fun in WvW, unless you activelly work towards becoming a top dog recruit and train people guilds and all that. Score should reflect the overall balance of the match if u dont have the numbers u should get rekt in score so the matchmaking system can work properly

@Drinks.2361 said:Emergency waypoint isn't really the problem, it brings players together which is good. I think the old fashioned uncontesting one was better or a lower cooldown would be great as long as the structure is able to be breached much much faster than a current T3

Keeps were never originally meant to have waypoints available before a server put the ORGANIZED ATTENTION into upgrading them. Now they are available much earlier, which helps snowball defense. EWPs give a large defending force more time to respond while a small force delays. They can be attacking somewhere else instead of needing to waypoint early to run to defend a T1 or T2 keep.

@Israel.7056 said:

@Baldrick.8967 said:

@Rampage.7145 said:

@"MUDse.7623" said:

all those defensive 'gimmicks' as you name them actually make it more interesting. else you would have one fight and then the losing team will just logg off cause they cant even use the envoirement to even the match and make for more interesting fights.

1. If attackers can split up so can defenders and it only takes about 5-10 people to defend pretty much anything if they know what they're doing.
2. No one can be bothered with this because it's boring.
3. No one can be bothered with this because it's boring.
4. No one can be bothered with this because it's boring.
5. If they really only have 20 people online then they should lose all their stuff.
6. Everyone struggles against "well organized defense" aka siege humping and it makes the game slower and less action oriented as a result.

Clearly your very narrow minded in your thinking. For many servers they would love to have 20 people online a lot of the time!

Your answer is basically 'we have more numbers we should auto-win'. You might think actually using some tactics is boring, but without them you are creating your own mess and then complaining about it.

Clearly thinking or adopting tactics to suit the situation is beyond you. It's not boring to have to think of ways to win other than 'we have more players we should always win'.

Cut out defence and you would have literally no one to fight. Put yourself in their shoes. Without defence, why would they bother trying to hold off your zone blob?

If you can't stand not having enough people to fight, then move servers with 5 like minded people and look for easier fights.

good thing Anet is talking about World restructuring to combat that very problem

If anything defending is incredibly gimped... IT SHOULD BE HARD TO GET A WELL DEFENDED KEEPThat's one of the biggest problems with WvW, it was never properly implemented, so people assume it's just a big game of conquest with some annoying obstacles in the way.It shouldn't have been If anything, the PPT, and easy farmable objectives are one of the worse flaws of WvW, because it doesn't require any proper strategy. Just go in with the bigger army and done. That's not a siege, that's a joke, and in return it offers no incentive to hold objectives, except for the stubborn need to not lose against your enemy.I've seen commanders just relinquish a T3 keep to go try and get a T1 from the enemy because the other mob was too big, and it would be too much work.And here i am, with my best memories of WvW being on the first couple weeks, before people were running all kitted up in huge zergs, when people would actually sit around "their" keeps and towers and defend them, and escort dolys so they could build them cannons.We were spending all our gold on WvW but still having fun. I never experienced that level of commitment and fun in WvW in the following 5 years.