Please broaden the participation parameters for defend events

[Twilight Tempest.7584]

Since the March 14, 2023 update, it has become very difficult to get participation for defend events, particularly towers.

Now the only way to get participation is by killing an enemy player within the defend-event range, during the countdown timer.  It is almost impossible to achieve when significantly outnumbered.  The only reliable way is to flock with big groups that bother defending, if they exist, and if they bother.  Small groups and solo players need not apply.  This greatly reduces the motivation to defend when outnumbered, because simply back-capping lost objectives is more efficient, and more rewarding.  This goes against the goal of encouraging more player on player engagement.

Right now, one can scout, make timely calls, disable and stall enemy siege, and otherwise play a pivotal role in successfully defending an objective, and still get no rewards at all because the narrow participation parameters aren't met.  This is what happened in the video below.  After all the time, effort, and probably making a difference by stalling the attack long enough for help to arrive, I was shocked to see I received no progress towards the Tower Guardian weekly achievement.  Only after reviewing the recording, did I see that the enemy kills happened just after the event timer ended.  This occurred a couple weeks ago and I have basically since given up on the achievement.  I imagine others have as well.

Please consider broadening the participation parameters for defend-events beyond the extremely situational state it's in now.  For example, these should grant participation during defend-events:

• Being in combat for a certain continuous duration, perhaps a minute, within the range of the defend-event.  The continuous duration requirement should help minimize cheesing ambient creatures.  Or relocate creatures out of defend-event ranges/reduce the ranges.
• Disabling or destroying enemy siege.
• Causing enough damage to enemy players or siege.  Though this may not be easy to measure, and is biased against supports.
• Let repairs count again, but increase the threshold so only repairs after major assaults really count.  And exclude repairs at SMC.

These small, but important contributions are vital to defending objectives and should award participation.  Please look into the state of defend-event participation.

Thank you.

 

[Player.2475]

I agree with your suggestions, but I disagree with the fact that killing people is the only guaranteed way to get defense objectives.

 

I just successfully defended Stonemist castle in my zerg, disabled their siege, killed enough invaders to get 15 bags within the inner walls, repaired all the broken walls, and I didn't get ANY participation towards the "Repel the attackers" event. ANY whatsoever.

 

The defense participation system has always been so unbelievably broken and repair used to be the ONLY reliable way to ever get participation. Anet seems completely unable to implement anything to benefit the game mode or reward active play that contributes to your team. It's almost like they have no contact with anyone who plays WvW outside of a 50-man karma train zerg that just flips paper towers all day.

 

I don't care if a new player wastes supply on getting his participation, because I know that it's either that or having to kill someone every 10 minutes. Bleed SM dry, I don't care, I will just get more supply from the nearby camps.

 

Meanwhile Anet clearly sees that as a problem and instead of fixing the problem with the limited sources of participation, they limit it even more.
Keep in mind that the need to make this change happened only because they introduced ridiculous bonus rewards for defending and didn't bother to create a separate system for it, nor did they bother to look at nerfing the bonus rewards instead of the methods used to get ANY rewards whatsoever. Before, it's been 5 years without any need to change this system, and I imagine it'll take another 5 years before they decide to revise what a horrible mistake they made.

[Hotride.2187]

22 minutes ago, Player.2475 said:

Anet seems completely unable to implement anything to benefit the game mode or reward active play that contributes to your team. It's almost like they have no contact with anyone who plays WvW outside of a 50-man karma train zerg that just flips paper towers all day.

Sounds about right.

[Blockhead Magee.3092]

Anet always has a blob first mentality.  Changes benefit the blob and, maybe, sometime after everything is given a passing glance. 

Want credit for structure?  Go kill a guard.  Go to spawn, wait (maybe hours) for someone to take it and viola, you get credit.   Defend said structure,  disable siege, harass attackers, do callouts, repair walls - tough luck, no credit for you. 

Edited April 1, 2023 by Blockhead Magee.3092

[Player.2475]

7 minutes ago, Blockhead Magee.3092 said:

Anet always has a blob first mentality.  Changes benefit the blob and, maybe, sometime after everything is given a passing glance. 

Want credit for structure?  Go kill a guard.  Go to spawn, wait (maybe hours) for someone to take it and viola, you get credit.   Defend said structure,  disable siege, harass attackers, do callouts, repair walls - tough luck, no credit for you. 

Shhh keep quiet about THAT strategy, or they'll change it so you don't get any credit for capturing objectives if you don't kill any players!

Edited April 1, 2023 by Player.2475

[IndigoSundown.5419]

My guild group now only goes to objective defense to get weekly or daily kills.  Barring that, we don't really bother responding.  Given that I'm not willing to run a public tag and not respond, it also means I'm running private more often, even though there are plenty of requests like, "Any tags?"  Too bad for those players, amirite?

 

So, congratulations, ANet.  In choosing to use the lowest common denominator solution to the "problem" of SMC defense, you've negatively impacted most players who aren't running in the 50 person blobs.  Way to go.

 

I'm adding my request to the OP's, though I have NO faith that ANet will ever do anything about this issue.

[Xenesis.6389]

Sure, credit process needs to be looked into.

But it's strange how people choose to stop defending altogether to never get defense rewards, over still defending and maybe getting defense rewards while still killing enemies for other rewards. Which overall is still 100% better than the rewards we were getting before OSR, you know, garbage karma. So they either need to be 100% guaranteed rewarded? or don't bother at all? weird, why did those players even bother defending before....

That's why you should never play wvw purely based on rewards, considering it's the lowest reward area in the game for the past ten years, it's a bonus and should always be treated as a bonus. I sometimes wish they would lock the wvw legendaries to wvw only, get rid of all the pve scavengers who avoiding pve for their own.

Starting to think the OSR was a major league bad idea, and new rewards should have just been placed within the skirmish track or vendor areas of the game mode, that includes the tickets and shards, along with better balancing of the track itself.

[blp.3489]

17 minutes ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

Starting to think the OSR was a major league bad idea

While it is disappointing that they haven't got tower defense rewards working reasonably yet, I have to say that I have been enjoying the new rewards, both the bonuses and the weeklies even though I don't place all that much value on the actual rewards.  It's just a nice experience to be frequently getting bonuses and  leveling up a little faster.  I maxed out the masteries recently so the leveling up doesn't feel all that significant but still, it's nice to see the extra chests piling up and I'm sorry but I do appreciate the extra skirmish tickets, I receive enough of them now that I don't feel pressured to get all the way to the last diamond chest.  Now I get them from doing stuff rather than for spending a lot of hours in wvw. 

Hopefully they will fix up the defense rewards and then we can all be at least a little happier for what we received rather than being upset we didn't get more.

[ArchonWing.9480]

 I feel like this could be simply solved by giving credit to destroying enemy siege since it plays a role in either attacking or defending anything anyways. They could allow siege disablers to do a small amount of damage to siege (like 100) so just enough to tag it,.

Main thing is what activities they want players to be doing. If they don't value it, then neither will players, especially when it comes to insanely tedious activities that people basically do because nobody wants to do it like trebbing for a while or repairing.

I personally would never treb a structure for 20 minutes even if it did reward something, but truth is someone has to do it, and kittening on them when they probably don't get much if anything is in bad form and like I said-- I don't want to be the one doing it!

I strongly recommend the devs try to play on a map without any tag and try holding structures. It's almost an entirely unexplored part of the game for many.

 

2 hours ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

That's why you should never play wvw purely based on rewards, considering it's the lowest reward area in the game for the past ten years, it's a bonus and should always be treated as a bonus.

But despite this, people have also been karma training for the last 10 years and also you have supports complaining about fairly worthless loot bags. A lot also complain about being poor and having to do pve though this isn't really true. But it's effort.

Oh, also people have been leaving enemies in downstate just so they can get defender after it flips. Yea that kinda stuff....

It's just natural for many to gravitate to the shiny, even if it's not very shiny.  And it's up to the game developers to use that to lead them to the right places, because people aren't going to change.

 

Edited April 2, 2023 by ArchonWing.9480

[MedievalThings.5417]

I second this motion, but it is working exactly as Anet intends.  The don't want people to defend or slow down the giant boon-blob ktrain.  So, at every turn, they have nerfed or removed anything that encourages defending.

[Matty.1234]

4 hours ago, Xenesis.6389 said:

Sure, credit process needs to be looked into.

But it's strange how people choose to stop defending altogether to never get defense rewards, over still defending and maybe getting defense rewards while still killing enemies for other rewards. Which overall is still 100% better than the rewards we were getting before OSR, you know, garbage karma. So they either need to be 100% guaranteed rewarded? or don't bother at all? weird, why did those players even bother defending before....

That's why you should never play wvw purely based on rewards, considering it's the lowest reward area in the game for the past ten years, it's a bonus and should always be treated as a bonus. I sometimes wish they would lock the wvw legendaries to wvw only, get rid of all the pve scavengers who avoiding pve for their own.

Starting to think the OSR was a major league bad idea, and new rewards should have just been placed within the skirmish track or vendor areas of the game mode, that includes the tickets and shards, along with better balancing of the track itself.

 

I play during off hours, being Aussie, there's usually not enough people on to defend against a zerg. If I go to defend, chances are we wont get enough people. We likely wont even get a single kill if it's 40 vs 3 - 10, which happens often. All we get for going there is lost participation. The longer we hold them off, the more we get penalized.

 

Back when we could do a repair and at least keep our participation up and hope we could accumulate enough people to defeat them. If we lost, was a good try, oh well. Now if we try, we most likely end up just losing participation levels. Now less people even bother trying to defend. Which means we almost never accumulate enough defenders. Why even bother? Flipping a camp instead might not get me great rewards, but at least the timer wont keep going down while I try to defend.

 

The old solution... Defend like a mad thing and throw 4 supplies in a wall to keep up participation. It worked.

 

I want to defend, but when we have not enough people to get groups or zergs together, it's way to hard to get participation back up to 6 again.

[crepuscular.9047]

1/8 Tower Guardian this week, what a trash changes

I propose add a new ability "Skull Piercing Shot - Fires a deadly unlockable bolt that travels twice as fast, piercing the enemy's head, instantly killing the enemy - 60s cd" to Superior Ballistas skill 5 slot, that would help 1) get a tower defense kill count 2) kill those pesky firebrands in blobs 3) make ballistas worth more than just a few copper

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

1. Give defense credit for tagging enemy players, not just killing them
2. Give defense credit for tagging siege
3. Give defense credit for destroying siege
4. Give defense credit for how long you spent in combat while in range of the objective.
5. Give defense credit for repairs, but raise the threshold from before (i.e. for every 50 repair spent you get credit).

[Dawdler.8521]

20 minutes ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

1. Give defense credit for repairs, but raise the threshold from before (i.e. for every 50 repair spent you get credit).

Tbh that would just mean there will be no supply in objectives after an attack.

Edited April 2, 2023 by Dawdler.8521

[Edu.6984]

Reduce the requirements to get participation if one has the outnumbered buff. Also implement more than 1 tier of outnumbered buff, the more outnumbered you are the stronger the effect of the buff.

 

Disabling siege should guarantee as much participation as killing a player or more. 

 

 

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

31 minutes ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

Tbh that would just mean there will be no supply in objectives after an attack.

That happens anyway since people repair the walls to 100% so...

[Gorani.7205]

All of that would be less awful, if we had a visible clue whether we got participation or not
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/8/86/Event_bar_empty2.jpg

You see a bit of orange progression: You participated, you get a full bar, you got Gold (and every other thing in-between)
The game tracks you participation somehow, if it would be shown one problem we have now is gone.
PS: Yes to do anything for Tower Defense! I have 4 defenses in two weeks (and everything else finished this week ... even SMC!)

 

[Dawdler.8521]

49 minutes ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

That happens anyway since people repair the walls to 100% so...

But defense is dead, how does that happen?!?!

[Chichimec.9364]

On the one hand, defending is still very active, perhaps even more so than before. Every day this week the squad I run with has been attacking and defending towers and keeps on all the maps. We got wiped several times while we were attacking by zergs that came to defend. Several times we were the zerg coming to defend and were able to wipe the attackers. Since the reward changes were introduced, it does seem like there is a lot more active defense happening.

On the other hand, defense participation does seem to be badly broken. Yesterday, Objective Defender was one of the dailies. Our squad defended a tower, some folks got their OD in that fight, others didn't, including me. And yes, I had killed a number of attackers. About 40 minutes later we defended another tower and it was the same thing. Some folks got credit, some didn't. Luckily for me I did get my OD that time.

After a two hour run on Monday, I had three weekly achievements done and had made good progress toward a number of others.. During another two hour run on Tuesday I got my 8 gold. After today's run, I still haven't completed the Tower Guardian weekly, the only weekly I hadn't finished days earlier. Despite our squad defending whenever necessary for seven days, I ended the week still needing three tower defenses. The consensus in our Discord channel was that Tower Guardian is too buggy to be concerned about.
 

If we ever get our missing Q1 WvW update, hopefully Anet will let us know what their plans are for fixing defense participation. As always though, given Anet's sad WvW track record, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for them to tell us they are going to fix this, let alone waiting till they actually do fix it.

[Xenesis.6389]

15 hours ago, Matty.1234 said:

I play during off hours, being Aussie, there's usually not enough people on to defend against a zerg. If I go to defend, chances are we wont get enough people. We likely wont even get a single kill if it's 40 vs 3 - 10, which happens often. All we get for going there is lost participation. The longer we hold them off, the more we get penalized.

 

Back when we could do a repair and at least keep our participation up and hope we could accumulate enough people to defeat them. If we lost, was a good try, oh well. Now if we try, we most likely end up just losing participation levels. Now less people even bother trying to defend. Which means we almost never accumulate enough defenders. Why even bother? Flipping a camp instead might not get me great rewards, but at least the timer wont keep going down while I try to defend.

 

The old solution... Defend like a mad thing and throw 4 supplies in a wall to keep up participation. It worked.

 

I want to defend, but when we have not enough people to get groups or zergs together, it's way to hard to get participation back up to 6 again.

Participation is a pretty flimsy excuse tbh. Camps give you 10 mins of participation, they flip all the time, they can be solo'd. If you are spending 10 mins in an active defense and not getting any participation from even side kills, what are you all doing in the objective? It doesn't take 10 mins to rally people to fight back enemies, it also doesn't take enemies 10 mins to break into anything that's not fortified with people, unless they are absolutely boneheaded stupid in siege placements. If you make calls and no one responds in 2-3mins it's lost, be on your way to the next thing.

Not to mention participation is 10 mins, decay is another 15 mins, you don't even need T6 for the skirmish track, just T3, you only need T6 for the maximum tick on reward track which isn't the main reward for wvw, so what are people doing for 20 mins to lose their participation for skirmish rewards? No active player needs to babysit their participation, and can weave offense and defense situations and kills into their game play without ever needing wall repairs.

Overall I don't disagree that something is wrong with participation for defense credit, it's very inconsistent and needs to be looked at, removing wall repairs has now highlighted a major problem with that system, that we all knew was there, but did the work around. But I don't think wall repair needs to part of equation, it was too degenerate and easy for afkers, other parts of battle need to give better credit, killing enemies around the objective, killing siege, killing siege, disabling siege, boon stripping enemies, healing allies, even laying down a trap to strip supplies, all these things should count for something. The question is whether anet is going to bother updating it, or leave us hanging for another year if ever.

[IndigoSundown.5419]

9 hours ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

But defense is dead, how does that happen?!?!

Defense is NOT dead, it's just a lot more difficult to get credit for, especially for small groups and roamers.  Repair happens, when it does, because people care about keeping control of the structure.  I'm telling my group to repair T2 and higher, and not to bother with T1  or Paper.

[Nidome.1365]

This week I have defended 30+ towers, killed enemies in at least half of those but my weekly tower defender only reads 4.
Anet need to recognise their defence changes as a failed experiment and revert them until then can come up with a sensible alternative.

[Dawdler.8521]

8 hours ago, IndigoSundown.5419 said:

Defense is NOT dead, it's just a lot more difficult to get credit for, especially for small groups and roamers.  Repair happens, when it does, because people care about keeping control of the structure.

Well thats just weird.

[nthmetal.9652]

Repairs also still happen to waste supplies - I think it turns out, that if people want to waste supplies, they do it regardless of rewards and it makes sense: You don't wanna just hand it over to the enemy, who is already winning and taking over your objective, enabling them to win more. So all those steps taken to reduce the wasting of supply do not only not help, but go contrary to the the intended design.

[Matty.1234]

On 4/3/2023 at 4:19 AM, Xenesis.6389 said:

Participation is a pretty flimsy excuse tbh. Camps give you 10 mins of participation, they flip all the time, they can be solo'd. If you are spending 10 mins in an active defense and not getting any participation from even side kills, what are you all doing in the objective? It doesn't take 10 mins to rally people to fight back enemies, it also doesn't take enemies 10 mins to break into anything that's not fortified with people, unless they are absolutely boneheaded stupid in siege placements. If you make calls and no one responds in 2-3mins it's lost, be on your way to the next thing.

Not to mention participation is 10 mins, decay is another 15 mins, you don't even need T6 for the skirmish track, just T3, you only need T6 for the maximum tick on reward track which isn't the main reward for wvw, so what are people doing for 20 mins to lose their participation for skirmish rewards? No active player needs to babysit their participation, and can weave offense and defense situations and kills into their game play without ever needing wall repairs.

Overall I don't disagree that something is wrong with participation for defense credit, it's very inconsistent and needs to be looked at, removing wall repairs has now highlighted a major problem with that system, that we all knew was there, but did the work around. But I don't think wall repair needs to part of equation, it was too degenerate and easy for afkers, other parts of battle need to give better credit, killing enemies around the objective, killing siege, killing siege, disabling siege, boon stripping enemies, healing allies, even laying down a trap to strip supplies, all these things should count for something. The question is whether anet is going to bother updating it, or leave us hanging for another year if ever.

You must play on a busy server at times when a lot of people are on. There's times when all the camps that aren't at the absolute furthest parts of the maps are already ours and no opponents are flipping. By the time you get anywhere near close to those they're often taken by another solo'er on your team anyway, since there's not a lot to do. When you find a sentry that's alive and not yours you can get a 5 minute boost. That helps, otherwise it's down to walking dolyaks.

 

I've also seen many times where there's 3 - 5 around opponents just sitting around guarding camps. I can solo a camp. I can't solo a camp that we own or that the enemy is actively defending. I can't solo a tower and there's been times where you call out for people in team chat and you got not one response, where you see no one anywhere.

 

When it's our EBG home keep, and there's near no people online it's better not to defend at all, just let them cap and hope they leave so we can recap and get another 10 minutes. Then again there's been times when some sit there and defend and we call for more to come for ages and we still can't get even 10 to come try and reclaim.

I'm glad that you are fortunate enough to play during active hours on an active servers, but unfortunately that seems to blind you to the situations that others face.

 

Try having so few people on that the enemy owns almost everything and anything you try to attack brings up the contested icon and a bored zerg drops on you each and every time you try to cap. Time flies fast when you're outnumbered and being actively hunted.