Weekly Defense - Unknown Parameters or Bugged?

[Kelian Ravenwood.4130]

I didn't see anything posted within the last year, so I figured I would ask again; can we have a definitive answer as to what is required to receive credit for a defense participation for a tower or keep?  Today I successfully defended my home garrison 4 times, SMC 3 times, and Hills 3 times, with at least 3 kills for each timed event (and on two occasions more than 15), and received a single credit for Keep Keeper... I don't know how to proceed to attempt to finish the WvW weekly  defense challenges.  Should we just assume it is a random system, or that it is bugged and we should ignore it (and consider ourselves lucky if we get the credit)?  We can then simply let rival teams take our targets and focus on PPT to finish our weeklies instead of the large battles I thought ANet was encouraging... it truly feels like a waste of time on Sunday night to defend a keep when I could be finishing other weeklies...

Please provide as much clarification as you can... I am truly at a loss.  Thx!

[AlCapwnd.7834]

This is the official Forum. You might be better off commenting on a random Youtube video or reddit, a dev that plays the game might read it there.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

Good question.  There's sort-of a formula that I have to go through to get the defense reward.  First, the enemies have to destroy some structures and/or kill a few NPCs.  Then, after that has happened, you need to kill at least one enemy player.  You can't just run them off.  They need to be defeated.  Then, if all of those things happen, I'll get the defense credit.  

[Kelian Ravenwood.4130]

11 minutes ago, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

Good question.  There's sort-of a formula that I have to go through to get the defense reward.  First, the enemies have to destroy some structures and/or kill a few NPCs.  Then, after that has happened, you need to kill at least one enemy player.  You can't just run them off.  They need to be defeated.  Then, if all of those things happen, I'll get the defense credit.  

That's what I thought as well, but all of the keeps that I listed had at least a destroyed outer wall and I killed at least 3 enemies in each instance, which is where my confusion stems from... if the idea is that the player I killed must have killed multiple NPCs or manned a siege weapon, that is simply ridiculous... you could have a 50 player zerg with only 5-8 players with those requirements...
Thank you for your input; hopefully we can see some more information/insight from others!

[Zyreva.1078]

Based on my own experience it doesn't matter whether the killed players did anything. If i solo kill anyone within active defense event range or at least deal the majority of dmg - i get defense credit 100% of the time. If i'm just tagging alongside a zerg, i might not get defense credit, despite geting kill credit. So i guess the dmg treshhold that is neccessary in oder for a kill to count for defense is higher than the requirement for kill credit itself. It would perfectly explain why so many players struggle to get defense credit (most are just zerging) while i do not.

[TheGrimm.5624]

4 hours ago, Kelian Ravenwood.4130 said:

I didn't see anything posted within the last year, so I figured I would ask again; can we have a definitive answer as to what is required to receive credit for a defense participation for a tower or keep?  Today I successfully defended my home garrison 4 times, SMC 3 times, and Hills 3 times, with at least 3 kills for each timed event (and on two occasions more than 15), and received a single credit for Keep Keeper... I don't know how to proceed to attempt to finish the WvW weekly  defense challenges.  Should we just assume it is a random system, or that it is bugged and we should ignore it (and consider ourselves lucky if we get the credit)?  We can then simply let rival teams take our targets and focus on PPT to finish our weeklies instead of the large battles I thought ANet was encouraging... it truly feels like a waste of time on Sunday night to defend a keep when I could be finishing other weeklies...

Please provide as much clarification as you can... I am truly at a loss.  Thx!

See defense events on a normal basis and its become a running joke. In order to get a defense tick you need defenders to go yolo if bad things happen. So if you are pulled out you need to live as long as possible to be hit by as many attackers as possible so they are all tagged as attackers. Then when your side kills them they are up for the defense event.  Live hard, die hard, help your server mates when accidents happen. WITNESS ME! or crap I got pulled. 

[ArchonWing.9480]

I generally find it easier to get  credit with boon spam builds because you probably will give boons to someone that hits something that dies.

You do have to kill stuff pretty close to the structures. I would imagine being Gw2, it must have wonky definitions of what constitutes what is "in the structure" and some places are harder to get credit than others. In general tower defenses seem harder to get probably because they are smaller and also the nature of the fights is usually shorter too.

[ZenDrake.8316]

To get defense event participation, you need to kill an attacker. The problem here is, who is an attacker? It's irrelevant where you kill them, the important thing is that they have either killed other defenders (people already having participation for the defense event), OR one of the NPC guards. That's basically it. Very unreliable, but now you know.

The easiest thing to do is to spam out boons to your allies, increasing the chance of tagging an attacker.

Another (kinda) reliable way is to capture an objective and hope that there are some defenders left after capping it, because they usually instantly count as attackers once it flipped (defenders become attackers, basically).

Edited March 6 by ZenDrake.8316

[Dawdler.8521]

Define “kill”?

In my experience ever since the defense achievements I am like 80% successful if I stomp someone within the event.

Edited March 6 by Dawdler.8521

[ZenDrake.8316]

1 minute ago, Dawdler.8521 said:

Define “kill”?

In my experience ever since the defense achievements I am like 80% successful full if I stomp someone within the event.

Doesn't matter how you kill them. You just have to have participated in their killing by doing damage or giving boons to allies who did. There's some sort of threshold you have to meet before you have tagged the kill though, so doing 3 damage might not be enough.

[Dawdler.8521]

2 minutes ago, ZenDrake.8316 said:

Doesn't matter how you kill them. You just have to have participated in their killing by doing damage or giving boons to allies who did. There's some sort of threshold you have to meet before you have tagged the kill though, so doing 3 damage might not be enough.

Hence why I ask. That defense “threshold” is unlikely to work like loot otherwise people wouldn’t complain so much as you’d get credit for sneezing at an enemy. I still believe that actually stomping enemies make reaching that criteria for defense credit a lot more reliable than just pewpew them to death.

[Gorani.7205]

It doesn't matter how fiercely we discuss the problem here, as long as ANet Devs don't acknowledge that there is a problem (that has been covered by wall repair participation over many years). Ideally, there would be an "orange participation progression bar" for yourself during an defense (or attack) event, that fills up with everything the game registers as "participation" (because somehow the game has to decide on no participation, bronze, silver or gold anyway). But that would require commitment and programming resources for the game mode.

[Entara.3075]

The whole defence credit things is a giant messy bug in my opinion. I REALLY wish they would make repairing count again as it was one of the only things that worked. To me having some people abuse it is a small price to pay for having a working system since they don't seem inclined to fix the overall problem.

The only sure way I have found to get defence credit on Keeps and Towers is to target an enemy who has damaged the structure or damaged a guard and then damage that enemy while they are in downstate. This appears to work for me 95% of the time.

In my experience damaging the enemy, but not damaging them while they are in downstate does not always work.

Additionally it seems that anyone inside a Keep of Tower when it is flipped can also be killed for credit regardless of if they have damaged the structure. My havoc squad loves when people afk in Towers. We flip the tower than kill the afk for defence credit.

Edited March 6 by Entara.3075

[Kelian Ravenwood.4130]

12 hours ago, ZenDrake.8316 said:

To get defense event participation, you need to kill an attacker. The problem here is, who is an attacker? It's irrelevant where you kill them, the important thing is that they have either killed other defenders (people already having participation for the defense event), OR one of the NPC guards. That's basically it. Very unreliable, but now you know.

The easiest thing to do is to spam out boons to your allies, increasing the chance of tagging an attacker.

Another (kinda) reliable way is to capture an objective and hope that there are some defenders left after capping it, because they usually instantly count as attackers once it flipped (defenders become attackers, basically).

While the first scenario does explain some of the confusion, it's hard for me to imagine for some of the defenses (I mean, we were defending garri for about 20 minutes, constantly running back while trying to repair to cut off their own supply of attackers, so we know we died and killed often); if that does explain the situation, then it's so close to random that I simply will go PPT.
The second scenario actually happened twice and neither defense granted credit (we flipped 2 keeps and killed the 20+ zerg that was there and still received no credit).

[SweetPotato.7456]

17 hours ago, Zyreva.1078 said:

Based on my own experience it doesn't matter whether the killed players did anything. If i solo kill anyone within active defense event range or at least deal the majority of dmg - i get defense credit 100% of the time. If i'm just tagging alongside a zerg, i might not get defense credit, despite geting kill credit. So i guess the dmg treshhold that is neccessary in oder for a kill to count for defense is higher than the requirement for kill credit itself. It would perfectly explain why so many players struggle to get defense credit (most are just zerging) while i do not.

This one, I follow a squad, when I do more damage to enemy, I get credit, when I don't do enough damage, I don't get credit, sometimes when I am not in squad, if my trebuchet hits the enemy squad, 100% will get credit if my ground force kill those enemies which was hit by me.

[ZenDrake.8316]

1 hour ago, Kelian Ravenwood.4130 said:

While the first scenario does explain some of the confusion, it's hard for me to imagine for some of the defenses (I mean, we were defending garri for about 20 minutes, constantly running back while trying to repair to cut off their own supply of attackers, so we know we died and killed often); if that does explain the situation, then it's so close to random that I simply will go PPT.

I've had this happen on our home keep on BBL. Defended the garrison for about 25 minutes against multiple attack waves and never got defense participation... Defended bay on the same map once and instantly got it. Might be bugged, I guess.

1 hour ago, Kelian Ravenwood.4130 said:

The second scenario actually happened twice and neither defense granted credit (we flipped 2 keeps and killed the 20+ zerg that was there and still received no credit).

Usually works for me, but your mileage may vary of course.

[SweetPotato.7456]

I am going to say lagging has something to do with this.

[Mistwraithe.3106]

13 hours ago, ZenDrake.8316 said:

To get defense event participation, you need to kill an attacker. The problem here is, who is an attacker? It's irrelevant where you kill them, the important thing is that they have either killed other defenders (people already having participation for the defense event), OR one of the NPC guards. That's basically it. Very unreliable, but now you know.

I'm not convinced it is irrelevant where you kill them. I've felt before that killing someone who was inside the walls was almost a dead cert way of getting defence participation.

This seems to work immediately after a tower/keep flips too, if there are members of the opposing side still in there and they run then taking them down while they are inside the walls seems to give defence participation.

However, it's hard to know for sure. Maybe in all the instances this has seemed to work there are other explanations (eg maybe after the flip the opposing players did some damage to us before fleeing, dunno).

[Zyreva.1078]

9 hours ago, Mistwraithe.3106 said:

I'm not convinced it is irrelevant where you kill them.

It needs to be within active defense event radius. I'm not sure if both defender and dying enemy need to be within that area at the moment the kill happens or just one of them, but i do know for sure that the defense event needs to be active. And it is actually possible for a structure to be contested without active defense event, because active/contested capture circles do not trigger the event, only aggroing guards or damaging walls/gates does and both can be down when the event timer runs out, so a new one might not always start right away, even when there are still attackers present.

Edited March 7 by Zyreva.1078

[Gehenna.3625]

On 3/6/2024 at 4:42 AM, Kelian Ravenwood.4130 said:

I didn't see anything posted within the last year, so I figured I would ask again; can we have a definitive answer as to what is required to receive credit for a defense participation for a tower or keep?  Today I successfully defended my home garrison 4 times, SMC 3 times, and Hills 3 times, with at least 3 kills for each timed event (and on two occasions more than 15), and received a single credit for Keep Keeper... I don't know how to proceed to attempt to finish the WvW weekly  defense challenges.  Should we just assume it is a random system, or that it is bugged and we should ignore it (and consider ourselves lucky if we get the credit)?  We can then simply let rival teams take our targets and focus on PPT to finish our weeklies instead of the large battles I thought ANet was encouraging... it truly feels like a waste of time on Sunday night to defend a keep when I could be finishing other weeklies...

Please provide as much clarification as you can... I am truly at a loss.  Thx!

I have this issue particularly with defending a tower but also occasionally with keeps but that's rare. I have kills within the countdown times and then it doesn't award me the defense reward. And not just at the last moment. And then there are times when it does reward me. I can't figure out what the difference is between such instances, so afaic, it's bugged.

[TheGrimm.5624]

3 hours ago, Gehenna.3625 said:

I have this issue particularly with defending a tower but also occasionally with keeps but that's rare. I have kills within the countdown times and then it doesn't award me the defense reward. And not just at the last moment. And then there are times when it does reward me. I can't figure out what the difference is between such instances, so afaic, it's bugged.

Its harder at towers due to size and guard count. If the attacking player didn't gain WxP from breaching the structure via siege or killing guards, they are not an attacker until they do something to gain them credit on the attack event. My theory is part of this coding is to try and prevent kill trading which makes it muddy to the gamer playing the game and trying to read the event based on what they just did in game. Calling it bugged is fair since we don't have eyes on the underlying code. But if you want to test, target the players on the siege and after they breach go for them and see if the event is more consistent.

[XenesisII.1540]

21 hours ago, Entara.3075 said:

The whole defence credit things is a giant messy bug in my opinion. I REALLY wish they would make repairing count again as it was one of the only things that worked. To me having some people abuse it is a small price to pay for having a working system since they don't seem inclined to fix the overall problem.

The blanket nerf to defense probably wasn't the right way to go about it, since smc is practically the only place that's constantly under attack and easiest to get defense credit for, the rewards for that should have probably been nerfed, or possibly none given at all for that objective. But anet is lazy af, so it is what it is.

Now anyone desperately looking for defense credit, hop on siege whenever you can and tag everyone in the enemy blob. You can easily finish keep defense credit in one 10min fight just by being on a cannon or ac. Baseline I think you get defense credit for helping kill someone that killed a guard at the objective. Killing someone that only aggro'd and not even touch a guard doesn't make sense for credit, would make sense to me that there needs to be a chain of wxp earned to pass credit along. But we've heard people say that doesn't work at times either, but in any case throw the biggest fishing net to get a better chance to catch the fish. 🤷‍♂️

Lastly, you all know what the real solution is, right..... having more guards mass spawn around the objective, and hey if a 50 boon ball shows up, it's only fair that 50 guards spawn up. 🤭

P.S It's been a year and they still haven't implemented the repeat attack event like the defense one. "Cornerstone" 🤭

[Zyreva.1078]

1 hour ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

If the attacking player didn't gain WxP from breaching the structure via siege or killing guards, they are not an attacker until they do something to gain them credit on the attack event.

Just a few minutes ago i once again got credit for "defending" a tower, after the only thing i did was killing a player that never got close enough to said tower to be able to hit any guards, so i'm very certain that your theory is wrong.

[TheGrimm.5624]

48 minutes ago, Zyreva.1078 said:

Just a few minutes ago i once again got credit for "defending" a tower, after the only thing i did was killing a player that never got close enough to said tower to be able to hit any guards, so i'm very certain that your theory is wrong.

How long had the fight being going? Did it just start or what it an ongoing one? In any case gratz! You are in better position than a lot of the posters that show up here after scratching their heads wonder why they didn't.

Side note: This is probably too late since I don't remember how much WxP players are worth before the next fight, but do you recall? The premise I am mentioning here is that the players has to have value, aka done something since they last died. The event logic might be using that as another layer when determining levels of participation in the defense event.

Edited March 7 by TheGrimm.5624
Edit: side note

[Gehenna.3625]

3 hours ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

Its harder at towers due to size and guard count. If the attacking player didn't gain WxP from breaching the structure via siege or killing guards, they are not an attacker until they do something to gain them credit on the attack event. My theory is part of this coding is to try and prevent kill trading which makes it muddy to the gamer playing the game and trying to read the event based on what they just did in game. Calling it bugged is fair since we don't have eyes on the underlying code. But if you want to test, target the players on the siege and after they breach go for them and see if the event is more consistent.

ahhh, that explains a lot...thx for that