Would it be good if camps were harder to flip?

[blp.3489]

What effect do you think it would have if camps, or at least higher tier camps, were harder to take?  Right now a middling player like myself can take a camp with very little effort or risk.  Would it be better if camps had a champion supervisor and more effective supports?  Or if at least higher tier camps did?  I can picture where a scenario where a defending player could work with the NPCs to make it difficult for a couple roamers to take the camp.  That might make defending camps more worthwhile and encourage small groups to form to take camps, the same way that a few of the towers are challenging to take solo for middling players like myself.  Or would there be downsides to it?

[Dahkeus.8243]

Eh, it would just give solo roamers less to do if solo capping was no longer a viable strat.  
 

Solo players are important for good group play too since solo roamers who run around and flip camp give team chat good intel on enemy team movements.  

I don’t see much benefit to making camps harder to flip though.

[Chips.7968]

A question to ask yourself about your question is - what are you trying to achieve?

Should solo players be stuck with only attempting to take guard points, ruins and intercept dollies? Would your next request be to buff guard points so only groups can take the guard points? As it currently stands there's PLENTY of group based content and incentives to defend in the game - towers and keeps (though you can solo a tower lord fairly easily these days). 

So what is the ISSUE (the problem) you're hoping to solve by making camps require groups to flip? What, in this game mode, is currently the problem and why is this going to fix it.

Edited February 28 by Chips.7968

[TheGrimm.5624]

32 minutes ago, blp.3489 said:

What effect do you think it would have if camps, or at least higher tier camps, were harder to take?  Right now a middling player like myself can take a camp with very little effort or risk.  Would it be better if camps had a champion supervisor and more effective supports?  Or if at least higher tier camps did?  I can picture where a scenario where a defending player could work with the NPCs to make it difficult for a couple roamers to take the camp.  That might make defending camps more worthwhile and encourage small groups to form to take camps, the same way that a few of the towers are challenging to take solo for middling players like myself.  Or would there be downsides to it?

This is one I would rate as fine as is. It requires more scouts which means more people in the open and more open field fights. It also requires servers to make a more active role in holding their camps like setting up siege or golems for defense events. A zerg is going to just roll over a camp, but if they don't have some that are set to defend the camp, that's a tactics issue and they mis-managed their numbers in favor of just zerging.

[Dinas Dragonbane.2978]

Camps are way too easy, good players could solo them back in 2012 in green-rare level gear, and t3 camps with rare to exotic(but watch out for the cabalist pull). Fast forward to today with 3 games of elite specs,  better and stronger stat selection, a multitude of weapon skill upgrades, and a ton of consolidated traits and general trait improvements, and laugh at the camp guards that still use auto attack and 1 skill(2 for the super). 

There are three things I would look at to bring them to being a little up to date so they can get out of the  ex bags category.

1. Improve the ai- the sole reason they are easy to group up for being AOL's to death, OR

2. Redo or update their skills(similar to desert tower/keep guards, but not near their difficulty)

3. Allow t2 tactics back on them for iron guards

[dead.7638]

The camps seem fine.   You defending the camp is plenty enough to make it difficult for someone or a small group to take.   On ebg you have the moles, frogs, and ogres to help defend them.   And t3 camps are buffed slightly already.   There are plenty of newer players that still can find them challenging.   People will pull and Argo everything into a corner anyways to just burst anything down.   Making them buffed won’t change much.

[TheGrimm.5624]

5 minutes ago, Dinas Dragonbane.2978 said:

3. Allow t2 tactics back on them for iron guards

I agree I don't think they should have blocked the camps from also having options when further tiered up, but iron guards don't stop people from soloing towers so without active player defense how does this just not support large scale versus smaller scale? Mind you I am about defending. So if a side is losing their camps then their players aren't actually defending else they would be passing thru them checking as they head to other points of conflict. If the issue is a need for earlier detection then other options might be investigated like more sentry points or new tactics that can be deployed on the camps.

[Sviel.7493]

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.

[blp.3489]

On 2/28/2023 at 2:01 PM, Chips.7968 said:

So what is the ISSUE (the problem) you're hoping to solve by making camps require groups to flip? What, in this game mode, is currently the problem and why is this going to fix it.

On the one hand, the current camp guards are merely a brief inconvenience during capture, one can currently sleepwalk through a camp capture, and that's kind of boring for the player capturing, on the other hand they don't delay the capture of a camp for long enough to allow defenders to arrive, which means you need to just hang around the camp waiting for someone to attack if you want to defend it, which is boring passive play with no guarantee that anyone will ever attack.

In all my time playing WvW there has only been one day where there was someone organizing defense of the camps.  Maybe that's the fault of the players on my server or maybe it's happening in voice chat, but I have very seldom seen anyone hanging around a camp to defend it.  And actually the player that was calling out to defend camps was getting abused for it a bit.

Also in terms of defending, even standing in the midst of the camp guards doesn't give a defender much help, the guards can pretty much be ignored by attacking players as they focus on a defending player.

Would there be a big downside to giving camp guards the same exposing function that sentries have?  That would at least give defenders more of a chance to respond, especially in those cases where there are people just hanging around waiting for the 5 minute timer to run out.

Maybe some of the guards could get reflects that defenders could hide behind?

Or make some of the guards mechanists?  Maybe their mechs can even give barrier when they are all close together being AOEed to death?

In short the issue I would like to see change is having more player fights at camps and fewer strictly PvE camp flips.  And if you have to spend time flipping camps with no defending players, at least make it a little more interesting.

 

[Chips.7968]

So you wish to have more player fights at camps. Meanwhile, you wish to make camps harder to flip to get defenders to the camp in time.

The two do not add up. It sounds like you just want more time to defend camps when you've no defenders near them. I've stood in vale camp and had a constant stream (literally, non stop) of 1-3 players coming in and dying. If you *defend* the camp, it's hard to take by default (other than the X players can rally from 1 npc, which is a significant boon).

It honestly reads like you're attempting to masquerade one thing under the guise of another. You want to fight in camps? STAY IN THE CAMP to defend it then. The idea that you should have minutes to get there is bonkers. Be there, or risk losing it. That's it. 

Edited March 1 by Chips.7968

[TheGrimm.5624]

25 minutes ago, blp.3489 said:

In short the issue I would like to see change is having more player fights at camps and fewer strictly PvE camp flips.  And if you have to spend time flipping camps with no defending players, at least make it a little more interesting.

 

I admit when roaming I see quite a bit of fights already at camps while both attacking them and defending them. What I will give a hats off to is with server links have seen how different servers evolved differently over time. We usually have people making various call outs, good and bad ones be that zerg, roamer or havoc shoutouts. That said I have also seen some servers request scouts only callout when its large groups moving around and asked people to not scout less than 10. Usually this has been when there are larger squads moving and they didn't want the information that havocs and roamers might need to respond to this kind of thing. So some of this might just be different environments. 

[Chaba.5410]

1 hour ago, blp.3489 said:

In all my time playing WvW there has only been one day where there was someone organizing defense of the camps.

I don't know what this means.  Are you talking about a squad leader organizing defense of the camps or a scout/roamer?  If there's only been one day you've seen of someone trying to defend/scout camps, that's 100% the players on your server.

[Zyreva.1078]

Making camps more annoying to flip does not incentivise players to fight for them. Just makes it less likely that players actually attempt to flip them solo or with a small grp. And i don't think we need more zerg objectives.

Generally fights tend to be the best when nothing interferes but the players themself (which is why many "here for the fights" players still prefer to fight away from objectives - too much annoying stuff that makes fighting less fun and fair).

Edited March 1 by UmbraNoctis.1907

[blp.3489]

Maybe it's because a lot of the time I am playing in off hours on the BLs when the maps are sparsely populated or when our server owns pretty much all of our BL, but quite often there are long waits between anyone coming to flip a camp, and when someone comes it's a zerg that's flipping the whole map and aren't going to be slowed down by me being there.  Being between the two non-home spawn points, south camp on the alpine BLs is probably flipped the most and then the two other southern camps.  I don't go to EBG usually unless I'm following a tag so I don't "roam" there.

I wonder if my mostly playing on the BLs is producing the disconnect here, I suspect EBG is different due to the map and the higher population.

[Gehenna.3625]

They already made it harder to cap camps solo. The supervisor hits harder and has more hp. Also the dolly's have more health and I'm not sure how the mercenaries fit into this when they are there, but they seem harder to kill as well. 

I used to be able to round them all up (without mercenaries) with an los pull and kill them in a short time. I can still do that but it does take longer and I do have to watch my defences a bit more. It gets trickier when there is no los pull possible. But I've found a solution for that as well. It just takes more time.

But when there are mercenaries there it gets really tedious for a solo player, at least for me.

Edited March 1 by Gehenna.3625