Contesting an Objective

[Svarty.8019]

At the moment, just running past the guards will contest an objective. Thirty seconds later, the white sword indicator will appear on everybody's map.

 

Should Contesting be changed? Perhaps.

 

Reasons to change it:

People are using this overly-sensitive trigger to cause waypoints to become blocked. This means a single perma-stealth thief or other difficult to catch character can continually frustrate the entire enemy team. 

 

Whilst I believe that small numbers of players should be able to have an impact on the experience of others, I've noted that Arenanet have nerfed other aspects of the game that do so. One example being the impact of the brutal, mindless, nerf-bat swinging that ruined the Dragon Banner.

 

Lest we forget, Arenanet is no stranger to intervention akin to this proposal. From golems to arrow carts to warclaw, even walls got nerfed!

 

How should it be changed?

This is what I'd like to discuss in the thread, because I think it's important to get this right.

 

Perhaps an objective should only be contested once the first damage is caused to a [wall or door] or when a guard is killed, not just aggro'd?

Perhaps the timer on the appearance of the white swords should be reduced?

Perhaps the guards should spam team chat like they did in DAoC?

Perhaps the whole "contesting" idea needs a rethink?

 

Please offer your constructive suggestions.

 

[Faccina.5091]

imho it should block the teleport only when a siege hit walls or doors and show white swords when theres ppl hittin guards

[Strider Pj.2193]

This is really a tough thing.  Damage to the structure sounds like a good thing.  But would it really change much?  
 

The Warclaw counts as damage..  One Warclaw could chain pull once, and boom, contested.

 

Killing a guard is easy.  Especially with the upgraded structures.  Those guards can be alone in some parts of the structure.  And with build templates, it’s not hard for that perma stealth/mass evade thief to swap builds and kill a guard quickly, and leave again.

 

Get a structure to a certain damage percentage?  Well, that could be a real problem also as with no swords popping until, let’s say 75%, well, it would be too easy for bigger groups to get in.

 

People don’t want to scout anymore.  And please don’t give me the participation excuse…. If your scouting is actually valuable to the server, you’d get a participation spot.  If the squads aren’t big enough for a participation spot, then why the heck are you wasting time scouting…

[Gorani.7205]

25 minutes ago, Faccina.5091 said:

imho it should block the teleport only when a siege hit walls or doors and show white swords when theres ppl hittin guards

The problem is that the contested condition is directly tied to the locking of the way point.

it would be nice to know what conditions/parameters could be changed and what are linked/not-related to each other.

 

WP locking & white swords = contested, when...

... a (non-patrolling) guard is killed, stationary siege gets destroyed, walls and gates lose 1% damage

 

sounds like a good compromise  to me, to the current "tap and run" thing. (although guards are easily killed and damage to gates with warclaw isn't too difficult).

Edited March 29, 2022 by Gorani.7205

[Xenesis.6389]

Damage to structure should be the only thing to fully contest a structured objective.

Damage to guards should be the way to contest a camp.

Or killing a guard to trigger the contest to either.

Simply running past guards to contest a structure so it doesn't have it's waypoint for 3 mins is pretty stupid. If anything aggroing a guard this way should only lock up to 30s, if the guards are still aggroed or have been killed, or siege damage done during this time then the full contest should go up. If you want the defense to commit to a contest, then you better be committed too and at least kill the guards to do it, not run by and drop some siege to aggro guards.

 

My guess is anet is too lazy/this is too low priority to program differences in contesting, so this will never change.