Sviel.7493

They can't even get the base update out and you want to pile more work on top of it? Bold choice, I guess. It's probably wiser to either enjoy WvW as is or quit. This is not a situation where the devs are bright-eyed and optimistic and full of ideas. Most times, it's hard to tell if they even exist. There have certainly, at times, been people at Anet who were passionate about WvW and that does show through in some of the updates we've gotten, but for reasons I cannot speculate on they are clearly not the folks in charge of what actually reaches us.

I am not sure what you mean by 'still' viable. Nothing major has changed in WvW in ages--certainly nothing on the scale that would affect viability of maps. DBL is better for havoc, for non-zerg-v-zerg defensive stalling, etc. These differences are baked into the map and will not change. If that's what you're here for, it's still the map for you. There are still as many exploits as there ever were. Anet does not generally fix those. If that's an issue, WvW as a whole is non-viable.

There are conditions under which this would be funny, but we're not anywhere near them.

I think the core issue is that Anet does not seem to have learned from the problems that led to the tournament burnout. They never addressed it publicly and the changes to the game have been all over the place. It's simply not possible to play WvW seriously for any length of time without realizing the gap between your efforts and your results. You can play a part of it like in a raiding guild, but if you actually try to engage with the scoring system then you will inevitably understand that nothing you do matters if your opponents have a bigger zerg. You can't really outmaneuver that. Thus, to win, you must stay online as long as possible to ensure your server has the edge in numbers all for...nothing. Just a weekly reset and another pointless match. The game is not fun in the moment and not fun in the big picture. The people that stick around tend to find something fun in the moment, like raiding or dueling, and try to stick to that content exclusively. This exacerbates the scoring issues but who can blame them?

Can we call this the Pinball meta? It might still suck to experience, but the name is pretty fun, no?

Higher tier camps could use a buff to reward teams for getting them there. T0 camps should fold to any solo roamer (though they could use a rework to recgonize the existence of condi damage). However, I think the respawn for guards should increase as well so that the camp isn't necessarily harder to take but just buys more time for defenders to arrive since a solo roamer could no longer facetank and AoE the entire camp at once. Perhaps there's a better way to do it than buffing guards, even, so long as higher tiers mean longer windows for defensive responses.

I think it's fine to reward a failed attack as long as significant progress was made. If you break a wall/gate, for instance, that's worth rewarding. Getting wiped before that should be less rewarding.

While there isn't much info out, this update sounds very promising to me. Conceptually, they seem to understand that failed assaults must be rewarded to diminish the incentive to zerg everything down. They also, for the first time in recent memory, verbally acknowledged the existence of defensive play and have at least said they're going to attempt to reward it. The devil may be in the details, but if they're sincere about the idea behind these changes then I can weather a few failed attempts. This is a vision I can believe in.

Surprisingly, giving incentives to only offense does not result in clashes of players with opposing goals. Still, if they keep working on this then it may end up being a great WvW feature. The idea of giving more rewards that are tied to actively playing WvW is definitely good--they just missed the mark in terms of what they were incentivizing.

We have more details on the changes now: Anet says the purpose of these changes is "to encourage direct player vs. player conflict in fights over objectives while taking care to not take the fun (or the teeth) out of objective defense." While not mentioned in the preview, they say they have fixed certain CC skills knocking players off of Burning Oil despite having the WvW mastery that is supposed to prevent that. Being able to stay on the Oil may make it possible to live long enough to get a few shots off before it's destroyed. Previously, you would get feared off and lose your damage reduction which would mean a quick death. On the other hand, rams have had their health increased by 100% and now an additional 25% since Burning Oil was made. Not surprisingly, this means that Oil damage is far too low to actually kill Rams in time to save the gate. I'd love to test the exact time at some point, though I'm not sure how. Per the Supply changes, they did not actually increase the amount delivered from Yaks to anywhere except SMC unless that change was left out of the patch notes. They shaved off 100 (20%) of the maximum base Supply and 300 (33%) of the upgraded Supply for Keeps. This is pretty huge, but currently Supply doesn't have much impact on defense because you can't actually use it to stop your enemies. It is key for repairs and that's probably what they're targeting. Camps now hold enough Supply to build 1 additional piece of Superior siege. We'll likely see even more obnoxious siege drops in the future though this may be offset somewhat if zergs were draining allied Keeps to 0 to fund the war effort. They increased the damage of side Keep lord on DBL, but this is after they drastically increased the cooldowns on their actually "dangerous" skills. They're still much weaker than they started out but I guess it's...something? Middle Keep lord now can't be permanently CCd, but he isn't exactly a threat so I don't think this is going to change much. Still, it's a great bug fix. --- Overall, I think this patch is a mixed bag. Perhaps my standards are very low, but it seems like they're at least trying to do something and that's kind of encouraging. I don't think that promoting one-push objective caps is going to lead to "direct player vs. player conflict" nor do I think it's wise to go this route in a 24/7 game mode with inevitably uneven team sizes for much of the match. Mostly, I just don't really understand why they feel that actively defended Towers and Keeps need to breached more easily. Perhaps the phrase "actively defended" means "defended with numbers equal to the attackers?" If their goal is to have direct PvP fights in situations where direct PvP is actually possible, they would be better served by increasing the incentive to fight in the field as opposed to letting enemies breach before combat. They sort of hit on this by making repairs harder to do via Supply reduction but making it easier to just throw your entire server at the gate means that breaching Keeps isn't going to be a matter of draining resources first and thus there is little incentive to minimize the need for repairs. Their desired play pattern seems to be that you easily breach the Keep and, ideally, have a fight at the lord. If you wipe, it's now harder for your foes to repair everything quickly. This works in a server vs. server situation with perpetually equal numbers, but what do they expect to happen if one side has an extra 10 people? Do they just get to roll the whole map? Does Anet expect their opponents to rally rather than log off? And what happens when the third server easily breaches the gates somewhere else at the same time? A better approach would be to give defense more teeth but also double down on reducing the ability to repair siege damage. Rather than making every assault end in the lord's room, give assaulters the ability to create meaningful results without fully flipping the objective. It's frustrating to attack something and see it instantly repaired by the responding enemy zerg. That promotes a mindset that if you didn't flip it, you failed and accomplished nothing. Thus, despite being the person who does the repairs, I agree that the ability of an objective to recover after a hit could be toned down. Anyway, they also fixed a bunch of decade-old bugs so we are officially in a new era. There is a lot of work that remains to be done. Somehow, the removal of miniatures gives me hope that they may actually do it.

Part of that might be that people flock to an Anet tag whenever one pops up. When they did their guild tag-along thing many years ago, the smallest they could manage was a 'havoc' team of about 20 people. It's probably more accurate to say that they only play on offense. When they're streaming or in game as a group, they're incentivized to make their own content rather than hoping that other people attack their stuff. I mean, I'd watch someone maintain supply lines and repair and such if they explained why each action was important, but that's probably not going to be the most popular stream.

The thing about that is even if I land multiple traps, they only need to build 2 rams to take a keep. It seems kind of toxic, but my current strategy is to drain Supply from whatever gets attacked, drain supply from nearby camps by building Ballistae (their only real use, lol), and drop as many Supply traps as possible so that the enemies are slowed down as much as possible. Every now and then, I manage to stop an assault because they break through the gate and step on a trap and can't build a ram on inner. That doesn't strike me as healthy gameplay, but it's clearly my best option. If a ram gets built, the gate is 100% dead and I can only slightly delay it with disables if they're lazy about reflects.

You can't distract a zerg...these are human beings, not dogs. Delaying them would be nice; the issue is how? Siege disablers are always a key tool but we all know how much projectile hate there is in the game. If a zerg doesn't want their siege disabled, they can easily maintain 100% reflect/block uptime on it. Counter siege is mostly useless because gates die faster than enemy siege. Catapults helped to delay but that's no longer going to be the case. I'm not sure what you mean by harass...? Do you think that killing a bit of their tail will matter? Disrupting supply lines should be key but does nothing if you can't destroy or prevent their initial siege. Reporting progress is a good idea but does not buy any time. I'm not sure what scenario you're envisioning, but these don't seem like serious suggestions. My point was that the changes in this patch remove or make harder the impactful things that defenders could do. You come here and talk as if I'm saying that people should stop attacking if I yell at them or something. If that's what they want, they are not making the right changes. Increasing the inevitability of zergs will increase the incentive to zerg.

I assume you meant that upgraded gates were always paper? Even before HoT, upgraded walls were reinforced and fortified. But even then, you mention stronger walls despite walls being weaker than ever before. You talk about higher Supply caps despite them already being nerfed in the HoT update due to Supply no longer being needed for upgrades--they never got higher. You also talk about more powerful defensive siege despite all siege health being doubled which rendered everything but shield generators pretty useless. I guess we can agree that shield generators are useful on defense even though they're much more useful on offense. Anyway, your point seems to be that paper gates led to intra-objective fights and you enjoyed that. This works out well enough if there are two big servers and one dead server, but it falls apart in any other situation. If you are fighting for several hours inside of a keep, the third team should cap everything else on the map. Still, I'm not saying we shouldn't have intra-objective fights. I'm saying that if that's the first effective line of defense then we're doomed to have a circle of K-Trains. Besides, what facilitated those long battles was the waypoint bug that let you teleport back into the keep every 2.5 minutes and a very different combat balance environment with more rallies, rezzes on lords, etc. Even if we made gates paper again, we wouldn't see hourlong battles return as a normal thing. It would just lead to whatever server had the blob K-Training the whole border just like in the old days. I agree that scouting in WvW is in a bad place right now, but the issue I'm talking about here is what options are available after the enemies are scouted. What can players do after finding the enemies and before allied forces arrive.

World vs. World: January 31 Update Preview – GuildWars2.com I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Most of these changes are not to my liking. However, rather than simply flaming the devs, I want to explain in detail what they actually mean for the game mode and how we players can expect our experience to change. Despite everything, I think it's best to assume that devs know what they are doing. Based on their changes, we can try to figure out their intentions. It's more likely that they intended to do a certain thing that no one likes than that they just screwed up and accidentally did the opposite of what they were trying to do. What Defense Should Be Generally speaking, the purpose of defense in WvW is to buy time. Sometimes you're stalling for allied reinforcements to show up--other times you're just trying to increase how long it takes enemies to flip an objective so that allies elsewhere can accomplish some other goal. It is not and should not be possible to defend indefinitely. In order to facilitate defense, it must be possible for a relatively small number of players to interact meaningfully with a larger amount of players. This is why the siege system exists. It funnels PvP interaction into a form that is less dominated by sheer numbers than direct combat. Major objective fights in WvW begin with siege where number differences are less critical and end with direct PvP where relatively even numbers are a must. The purpose of the siege is to allow the defending team to amass numbers and move to the direct PvP portion. This does not mean that sieges should never be rebuffed. In an evenly populated map, a good defending crew should be able to delay some assaults significantly by destroying the enemy's siege. If the enemy builds all of their siege in range of a single AoE, for example, it should be possible to punish that. When this happens, there is still major damage done to structures that must be repaired which means that the assaulters have still made progress on their goal--but the defenders have now bought enough time that allies elsewhere have an opportunity to capture a different objective. Flame Ram Changes Gates in WvW have less health than walls but also have built-in, dedicated defenses. They're meant to be a higher risk/higher reward assault point. In reality, there's no risk to attacking a keep with a zerg because the built-in defenses are simply not effective enough. It's also extremely difficult to use them while being blasted by dozens of enemy players. Thus, zergs tend to favor attacking gates as they are rewarded with faster entry but do not suffer from substantially increased risk. Flame Rams were previously sturdy enough to destroy gates even if under constant fire from enemy Arrow Carts. They could also survive being hit with Cannons and Burning Oil many times. The exact numbers vary depending on how many Rams were dropped, but even two Rams were enough to reliably open the gate before they could be killed. Now that Ram HP is being buffed, the few cases where assaults were rebuffed will become even rarer. It was already not really worthwhile to try to destroy them, but now it is basically pointless. Combined with the change to make it harder to disrupt enemies on Rams and thus increase the gate's lifespan, even the most desperate defense attempts will amount to nothing--no siege destruction and no delay. Since players have no way to contribute to defense against larger groups, the only way to defend is for an allied zerg to show up in the ~90 seconds that it takes to reach the lord room from first siege damage. Ballista Changes Ballistae are Anet's balancing lever of choice for siege battles. Some years ago, after accidentally buffing siege TTK across the board, they gave Ballista bonus damage on one skill to "make up for it." Today, the Ram changes are meant to be balanced with another buff to one Ballista skill. In the past, the Ballista change did not matter. There's even less reason to expect it will matter this time around as it is specifically meant to defend gates and Ballistae are basically unable to hit Rams in the first place. Ballistae require a clear path to their target and the player must be able to click on it. This means that in order for a Ballista to hit a Ram, it must be on the absolute edge of a wall overlooking the gate. Just like cannons, this means that the Ballista will be under constant, heavy fire from the enemy zerg that is using the Rams. It is unlikely that a player will get a single shot off even if they, by some miracle, are able to build a Ballista in the first place. They and the Ballista will die in seconds while a single Ram would take about 30 seconds to kill depending on the magnitude of their recent HP buff. Even if we presumed that the player and Ballista were granted invulnerability by the gods, you would still need to outnumber the enemy Rams with allied Ballistae to kill them all before the gate went down. Thus, the Ballista changes will not temper the Ram changes whatsoever. In fact, the wording of the post suggests that the true intent was for offensive Ballista use. The increased range will be useful in allowing Ballistae to destroy cannons, oil and player-built siege on objectives to clear the way for a point-blank assault by a group too small to enjoy the inevitability of a zerg. Presumably, once they clear enemy siege, they can destroy the gate with no further defensive interactions unless they are outnumbered. Warclaw Changes The skill was bad and is still bad. The only time it's better than building a ram is when you're alone, the gate has been patched shut and it is not currently being defended. Don't expect this change to have any impact on the game whatsoever. Honestly, if you're on a Warclaw, you should just jump over the gate without worrying about damaging it. Keep Supply Reduction Change Anet states that these changes are intended to reduce the time it takes for assaulters to drain defender's resources. This a direct nerf to defender's resources so we can expect these to work out as intended. The reduction is offset by increased Supply from Yak deliveries which MAY mean that an objective that is successfully defended can still be repaired if supply lines are kept open. We weren't given any numbers so it's impossible to say. This should encourage players to take a more active role in defending camps. Assuming a reality where players are able to defend objectives and sieges are actually a matter of chipping away at Supply reserves, this is actually a good change in that it rewards players for engaging directly and indirectly with other players. Unfortunately, the other changes in this update seem to cement sieges as one-sided blow-outs so it's more likely that Anet just wants a repeat zerg assault to have a better success rate if a defending zerg pushes them out the first time. Increasing the health of Dolyaks is a curious change. They already get a 90% damage reduction buff when near an ally so their survival depends on whether or not they are escorted instead of their HP pool. This probably won't have much impact as an unescorted Dolyak is still going to die every time. Camp Supply Change Increasing the maximum amount of Supply and regeneration rate in camps means that zergs can resupply more quickly. Your group has to have at least 6 people for this change to matter at all. Technically, it may slightly help havoc groups, but they aren't going to live or die based on having a bit more supply. Anet states that these changes were to compensate for the Keep Supply reduction which suggests they think that players are going to run to the camp and ferry Supply back to Keeps even though they removed the participation this gave some time back so...? Even in that case, it only makes a difference if enough players were running Supply to drain the camp. In reality, this is just going to increase the amount of Supply that zergs have at their disposal. This means more offensive siege for even faster assaults while defenders now have less ability to counter assaults and fewer resources to repair and rebuild siege. While this is not the stated purpose, it is consistent with the rest of this 'QoL' update so I am inclined to believe it is intended. Overall Thoughts I really, really, appreciate that Anet decided to communicate some of their reasoning to us with these changes. That part of this is encouraging. However, given that they have never given a clear idea of what they consider a healthy siege meta-game, it's difficult to assess what their goal is. On the face of it, it seems like they are nerfing defense (again) and making it easier to K-Train while steamrolling opponents. Maybe K-Training is what they want. If so, that's fine--it's their game, after all. But that impression comes from looking at the changes in the context of the game that currently exists. If Anet is instead trying to balance for a game where populations are even and players are fighting in smaller skirmishes rather than zergs, these changes could be seen as beneficial. In their post, they note that gate catapults (a WvW fixture for a literal decade) are a bug and also a key part of the WvW meta. They don't seem to acknowledge that it became a key part because of the futility of other forms of defense. In fact, they go on to say that they want to improve the success of gate assaults even when said gates are heavily defended. The dynamic of gates, in my estimation, is that they are a quicker entry point that are difficult to breach when heavily defended. The reality on the field seems to be that gates are a quicker entry point regardless of defenders. Anet's statements and actions suggest that gates should be even quicker entry points regardless of defense. What I want to hear is why they feel this way. What are they seeing that suggests to them that gate assaults need a higher success rate? When I heard QoL update, I did not expect across the board buffs to the current dominant WvW strategy. Perhaps I was foolish. Update: We have more details on the changes now: Anet says the purpose of these changes is "to encourage direct player vs. player conflict in fights over objectives while taking care to not take the fun (or the teeth) out of objective defense." While not mentioned in the preview, they say they have fixed certain CC skills knocking players off of Burning Oil despite having the WvW mastery that is supposed to prevent that. Being able to stay on the Oil may make it possible to live long enough to get a few shots off before it's destroyed. Previously, you would get feared off and lose your damage reduction which would mean a quick death. On the other hand, rams have had their health increased by 100% and now an additional 25% since Burning Oil was made. Not surprisingly, this means that Oil damage is far too low to actually kill Rams in time to save the gate. I'd love to test the exact time at some point, though I'm not sure how. Per the Supply changes, they did not actually increase the amount delivered from Yaks to anywhere except SMC unless that change was left out of the patch notes. They shaved off 100 (20%) of the maximum base Supply and 300 (33%) of the upgraded Supply for Keeps. This is pretty huge, but currently Supply doesn't have much impact on defense because you can't actually use it to stop your enemies. It is key for repairs and that's probably what they're targeting. Camps now hold enough Supply to build 1 additional piece of Superior siege. We'll likely see even more obnoxious siege drops in the future though this may be offset somewhat if zergs were draining allied Keeps to 0 to fund the war effort. They increased the damage of side Keep lord on DBL, but this is after they drastically increased the cooldowns on their actually "dangerous" skills. They're still much weaker than they started out but I guess it's...something? Middle Keep lord now can't be permanently CCd, but he isn't exactly a threat so I don't think this is going to change much. Still, it's a great bug fix. --- Overall, I think this patch is a mixed bag. Perhaps my standards are very low, but it seems like they're at least trying to do something and that's kind of encouraging. I don't think that promoting one-push objective caps is going to lead to "direct player vs. player conflict" nor do I think it's wise to go this route in a 24/7 game mode with inevitably uneven team sizes for much of the match. Mostly, I just don't really understand why they feel that actively defended Towers and Keeps need to breached more easily. Perhaps the phrase "actively defended" means "defended with numbers equal to the attackers?" If their goal is to have direct PvP fights in situations where direct PvP is actually possible, they would be better served by increasing the incentive to fight in the field as opposed to letting enemies breach before combat. They sort of hit on this by making repairs harder to do via Supply reduction but making it easier to just throw your entire server at the gate means that breaching Keeps isn't going to be a matter of draining resources first and thus there is little incentive to minimize the need for repairs. Their desired play pattern seems to be that you easily breach the Keep and, ideally, have a fight at the lord. If you wipe, it's now harder for your foes to repair everything quickly. This works in a server vs. server situation with perpetually equal numbers, but what do they expect to happen if one side has an extra 10 people? Do they just get to roll the whole map? Does Anet expect their opponents to rally rather than log off? And what happens when the third server easily breaches the gates somewhere else at the same time? A better approach would be to give defense more teeth but also double down on reducing the ability to repair siege damage. Rather than making every assault end in the lord's room, give assaulters the ability to create meaningful results without fully flipping the objective. It's frustrating to attack something and see it instantly repaired by the responding enemy zerg. That promotes a mindset that if you didn't flip it, you failed and accomplished nothing. Thus, despite being the person who does the repairs, I agree that the ability of an objective to recover after a hit could be toned down. Anyway, they also fixed a bunch of decade-old bugs so we are officially in a new era. There is a lot of work that remains to be done. Somehow, the removal of miniatures gives me hope that they may actually do it.

This is a wildly embarrassing update. I don't know who looks at siege in WvW and decides that rams are just too durable and thinks that ballistae are actually usable. Truly baffling. The rewards part is nice, probably. I haven't looked too much into it, but more rewards for doing things should be good, right? But rewards are easy to throw around. What concerns me is that the updates to actual game mechanics are so consistently misguided. I sometimes joke that Anet is nothing but zerglings, but maybe that's more accurate than I thought possible. edit: Forgot to mention that they're increasing the availability of offensive supply for some reason while also handicapping defense. I do not know what game they are playing that this seemed like a good idea. It's now even easier to drop 8 catapults on a structure despite active attempts to disrupt your supply gains. And when you're pushed off, somehow, you can be sure that even fewer repairs will get done while you resupply more quickly than before. Do they live in some alternate dimension where zergs struggle to take keeps because of static defenses? Anyway, that about did in my last shred of hope for the game.

In theory, according to Anet, once alliances are done and additional polishing leads to more balanced matches, players might start caring about actually winning and thus change their behavior. At that point, being able to cheat your way into towers becomes even more onerous than it is now...so maybe that's the year it will get fixed. My next guess is Never, but I do think they'll get around to it eventually.

You must be new here.

Mag embodies my preferred playstyle, but I just don't want to deal with the internal environment they've created. Other NA servers are way too deep into the Great Man theory of WvW where this or that commander carries a whole server and no one bothers to do anything when he's away. That's not to say that these commanders aren't doing great work, just that the server is a lot weaker when work can only be done when commanders are present.

Clarity? In a zerg fight? Good luck with that, buddy.

Here's something I failed to mention in my previous post. WvW has very little hope for the future. There are alliances, which are great (YMMV), but that's a meta thing that isn't directly a game mechanic. We don't have any solid info on Anet's plans for the game mode and its core mechanics. Thus, if you're dissatisfied with something now you don't have much reason to hope that it will improve. Given how all over the place the mode is, everyone has something to gripe about and with no hope of change on the horizon that can make long sessions or long-term play very unappealing. This is very different from certain games where there may be a period of bad vibes but you know there's a patch coming and that it may restore the vibes to some established equilibrium. WvW is just bad vibes almost all of the time. Pointless suffering with no hope in sight. And yet, here I am, still loving it in small doses...

There are many reasons not to play WvW, but here are a few in no particular order. - Not only is there no point in winning, but often my team is actively trying to lose. For me, the fun comes from struggling to win somehow. If my team wants to tank, then I don't really have a reason to be there. The big picture is key for me. - Siege mechanics are awful. I mostly play defensively. In many cases, it is impossible to have any meaningful interaction with the people attacking my objectives. No matter how braindead their tactics, they can't be punished or delayed or such. - I don't care about rewards. None of the WvW rewards actually do anything in WvW. I just repeat some reward track that gives me free siege/traps and focus on the game itself. - Small-scale balance does not exist. In WvW, with food and PvE stats and all that, sometimes you just encounter something that makes you want to die irl. I end up in tons of duels over objectives and it can be pretty grating when some nigh invincible Asura runs in circles farting out condis and taking next to no damage. Sure, it'll die eventually, but it's also going to cap the ring since no NPCs have been updated to deal with condi damage in the last decade. - I do not play on ABL. I spend most of my time defending my home borderland. If home is Alpine, that is a lost cause. I can't move around discreetly and sieges are even less interactive while break-in times are shorter. I can't even stop Bay from upgrading because SWC on Alpine is a joke. If I don't have a zerg at my beck and call I might as well settle for havoc on RBL...or, more likely, log off. I just don't have sufficient reason to suffer through that as long as I maintain free will.

It took a few tries, but I eventually learned how to solo Lord Tirzah. If I had a partner, it was child's play. I imagine it'd be harder on a staff ele but...that's honestly fine. If you're in a squad with organized parties then I really have no sympathy for your issues with an NPC that will be murdered in under a minute. You may personally be pressured, but your group on the whole still kills the lord without meaningful resistance. Removing that pressure wasn't worth neutering the lord's performance elsewhere.

On the upside, this solution would force rough short-term population balance. However, it comes at too great a cost when we look at what the best strategies become. Say all servers clash on reset night and Server A pulls ahead as they have more people in that timezone. Even if they're restricted to 130% of their opponents, that extra 30% is a lot of people since overall activity is very high. As the night goes on, they see that Server B's primetime is coming up. They end their guild raids to bring overall activity down and now play defense with 10 people versus 13 while Server B languishes in queue. Obviously, they're going to be very successful. Over the course of the week, the score grows lopsided while far fewer people than now actually get to play the game. Granted, vacating the map to such an extent would be hard, but that provides an incentive for these hardcore groups to harass allies off of the map in the name of the server's success. If you can't field massive numbers 24/7, this is the way to min/max your odds of victory. While this would help in a major WvW problem, it seems to introduce several other problems of equal or greater magnitude. I think a healthier approach would be to give players more agency to function when outnumbered so they have some reason to play outside of their server's primetime. This would both smooth the population curves and curb runaway karma training.

Would be hilarious to see the epic charge every 15 minutes followed by getting stomped back into spawn once it wears off. I don't think this solves any problems in WvW and it may introduce more issues so...nah. edit: I know this isn't a serious suggestion, but I wanted to express that things of this nature should never be taken seriously regardless of their intentions.