What numbers should Offence vs Defence be balanced for/against? And why?

[cyberzombie.7348]

19 hours ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

Siege was a mental game before it was nerfed, after it's nerf its even less of a factor. 

Yeah, though one tactic that never gets old with me is building siege behind the attackers. No one ever expects to get trebb'd or ballista'd from behind

[TheGrimm.5624]

3 hours ago, cyberzombie.7348 said:

Yeah, though one tactic that never gets old with me is building siege behind the attackers. No one ever expects to get trebb'd or ballista'd from behind

They do, use that one as well, it depends on how mixed their groups are. It works better if the group you are flanking has less Roamers and Havocs intermixed. This again relates to tag dependency. Roamers and Havocs joining tag may less likely wait for a tag to request a terminate and deal with it. A tag that knows they have the mix might asks for a number of players to deal with it and return. That's before you consider Off-Havocs that are running with a tag not in a squad that will deal with side issues like this and other issues like slowing sups, reinforcements and other tasks to keep the most focused on the tag's target.

I use the term light siege these days since its just an hour of building siege in a keep. During tourney days it would be three hours to build siege up. Which is why its funny to see players still complain about standing in light siege and after it was already nerfed. 

Edit: One of the reasons I could see getting back to winning and tourney is smarter game play. Not just zerging but spreading out to handling more everywhere. Reason to take and reasons to hold. How to do more with less versus just run it over. 

Edited May 15 by TheGrimm.5624
Edit: Outside of tourney

[TheGrimm.5624]

If we want more balanced maps, we need reasons to win to encourage players to spread more and do more with less across all maps and timezones. Versus stack and roll since winning means nothing. What does this help? Class spread, skill balance and latency. Plus balancing 50 v x v x. You want to run with 50? You are countered by 10 groups of 5 or 5 groups of 10. Anet already said defending should not favor a side, so they want us to split up attackers. Give us reasons to do so then.

[Gehenna.3625]

1 hour ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

If we want more balanced maps, we need reasons to win to encourage players to spread more and do more with less across all maps and timezones. Versus stack and roll since winning means nothing. What does this help? Class spread, skill balance and latency. Plus balancing 50 v x v x. You want to run with 50? You are countered by 10 groups of 5 or 5 groups of 10. Anet already said defending should not favor a side, so they want us to split up attackers. Give us reasons to do so then.

Personally I feel that not giving defenders a bonus is dumb when you combine it with home borders that you're supposed to defend against two other servers. Anyways, by nerfing defense into the ground, Anet made it pointless to defend because it's not worth it anymore. So moving forward, I suggest that Anet remove the "home" theme  from all the maps and turn them into maps with a similar layout to EB (including a castle in the middle, keeping their orginal theme of course).

Besides, how often do you see EB with a massive queue and the other maps no queue or very small queues? So I say let's turn all maps into EB style maps.

[joneirikb.7506]

2 hours ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

If we want more balanced maps, we need reasons to win to encourage players to spread more and do more with less across all maps and timezones. Versus stack and roll since winning means nothing. What does this help? Class spread, skill balance and latency. Plus balancing 50 v x v x. You want to run with 50? You are countered by 10 groups of 5 or 5 groups of 10. Anet already said defending should not favor a side, so they want us to split up attackers. Give us reasons to do so then.

Counterpoint: ANet seems to have done everything they could over the years to make certain we ONLY play in big groups. They seem dedicated to that "idea", so why would they change? (Not saying it's smart or good...)

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The problem at this point is that rewards unfortunately drives the actions and behaviour of most players, even players that doesn't care too much about the rewards tends to shape their play around it to various extent (there's been a lot of observations and study on this). So the most surefire way to change this is through rewards in some manner.

Linking rewards up to Points seems obvious at first glance, but has some severe problems (server stacking, coverage stacking, encouraging chasing fair weathers off the map so you can dominate entire maps unopposed).

Making Points feel useless and we get to our current situation where no one cares at all, and just focuses on personal rewards (zerging objectives unopposed).

In that regard, perhaps linking rewards (participation/pips) to gaining points (short term), or to actions done while defending might work better? Say fix the kitten defence events and have them give bonus pips for as long as you keep the defence going. Gain participation for actions you should do while defending (pick up supply, destroy siege, kill enemies, cc enemies, etc add more).

If we do that, then I think more players would be willing to defend, because they're rewarded for defending (short term). The better they get at defending the more rewards they can milk out of it. If ANet also changed so that clever defence can last as long as you have supply, we'd have motivated defenders defending things for all they're worth (For those precious gifts or whatever).

Would that be an more ideal situation for the game mode? Or would that make defence too strong/popular, and zergs would constantly have to go into sieges to get stuff?

tldr: Use rewards to encourage and teach players good behaviour/strategy. It's not as easy as it sounds like, and would need a lot of iteration and brainstorming to pull off.

Edited May 15 by joneirikb.7506

[TheGrimm.5624]

8 hours ago, Gehenna.3625 said:

Besides, how often do you see EB with a massive queue and the other maps no queue or very small queues? So I say let's turn all maps into EB style maps.

I have to agree here, all maps should be three way maps and there are no HBL except in name status only. I also think all 4 should be unique but that's a whole different thread. 🙂 

[TheGrimm.5624]

7 hours ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

Counterpoint: ANet seems to have done everything they could over the years to make certain we ONLY play in big groups. They seem dedicated to that "idea", so why would they change? (Not saying it's smart or good...)

tldr: Use rewards to encourage and teach players good behaviour/strategy. It's not as easy as it sounds like, and would need a lot of iteration and brainstorming to pull off.

Agree its not a quick add this to do that and it wouldn't be the same for all players but finding and targeting whatever that is to encourage more people to want to win might help. What form is that in, agree it might need to be various things. This again might be a whole thread by itself. Example could see it based on activity, on placement, it might come in the forms of bonuses to other game modes, new achievements, new earnable over time rewards, placement rewards, temporary access to new reward tracks for the week following and so fourth. It might look like the wizard vault, you earn tokens and then choose what you want. Take inverse rewards as well, coming in last means your scribes have lowered build times to craft new siege for the new week, you get a discount for things that allow your side time to catch up. Its not a small topic nor one path I agree. 

What I am concerned with is focusing on all the same scale of play by removing options for other scales of play and watching for changes that address your top line of just size matters. Doesn't mean I won't still try and 1 v 6, but that's not for everyone. And too many worry about their KDR which is what I think lead to some of the defensive nerfs. PPK and PPT were in reasonable standing though I think PPK could be adjusted to encourage balance in attacking and defending and in potentially addressing the issue of just jump the side that is down if in doubt so I admit the upcoming scoring changes are both questionable and encouraging at the same time. If it creates more of a wedge between PPT and PPK play then it will be bad, if it addresses issues in the others it could be good. If it encourages less public versus private tags it will be bad. All these things are interconnected and sometimes it seem like Anet loses focus on that or its seems that way in which they release their changes. 

[joneirikb.7506]

15 hours ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

PPK and PPT

The more I think about PPK, the more I honestly dislike it. In theory it's nice, in practice it tends to encourage gameplay I honestly don't like. I'm sure there are things I haven't thought about and that I mostly see it from the role I've usually played in the mode, so it isn't something I can say with certainty. I'll need to think more about it, but the gut feeling says it creates more negative situations than positive.

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Regarding the topic of changing the maps into 4x BattleGround style maps, and removing the BorderLand system: I'm all in favour of that, but that's a separate topic entirely. I haven't really felt that "HomeBL" have had any notable advantages for defence/offence for about 10 years now. It's usually been more about the feeling "it's ours" than anything else, and that's been so eroded over the years that at this point I consider it a non-issue.

[Sviel.7493]

I am strongly opposed to creating 4 Battleground style maps.  While borderlands don't have much of a home team advantage, they are a largely different style of gameplay.  In EBG you can more or less get away with zerg defense and you will very often have massive battles in or around SMC.  In the borderlands, scouting and defense used to be key and a skilled havoc squad could cripple enemy progress.  You still have zergs in the borderlands and scouts in EBG, but the relative importance of the two is flipped--or was flipped.

Anet has been trying to make the borderlands more like EBG, it seems, though it is impossible to say if it is intentional or not.  If they replace borderlands with EBG copies, no EBG map will maintain the player density needed for the zerg centric design to work.  The current EBG is only successful because there is no alternative--otherwise each server could just pick a map to K-train and swap when there are no more caps to be had.  This is not unlike what happens on the borders when a few strong zergs avoid each other.  It'd be tragic to give up completely on an alternate playstyle only to end up killing the favored playstyle as well.

[Mabi black.1824]

On 5/14/2024 at 11:15 PM, Sviel.7493 said:

I don't think I can explain any more clearly the folly of creating a 24/7 mode that only feels good to play when teams are perfectly balanced.

There's no madness, it's as usual a matter of awareness of what WVW is. Our 24/7 matches are not a problem, they are a feature. It applies to your server as it applies to my server as it applies to all servers. Everyone has to deal with this. Even with a hypothetical similar number of players and hours of play, you will always see your team go from a similar number to the enemy and then move to an inferior condition and then return to a number of parities and then move to a number of superiorities. and so on. This kind of sine wave-like alternation is only a symptom of a healthy and functional WVW. And I personally think that all these alternating conditions are fun. all. in different ways, but all of them are interesting to play. You just have to know how and it's important to see them alternately. 

So much true is what I'm telling you, that WVW will give you the feeling of ''broken'' when this alternation stops. A side that wins anything (or likewise loses anything) for many days or a whole week becomes extremely boring. This observation highlights that even just by pure hypothesis you and I play an impossible weekly game where 24/7 we always get the same numbers, you will find that you are playing the most boring game ever. Because the most skilled team wins and will continue to win in the same way throughout the week without giving any chance to the other teams. Absolute boredom. From this perspective, then, our 24/7 matches are clearly a feature and not a problem. Like the fact that they are 3-way matches, same concept, is a feature and not a problem. 

That said, my remark was not referring to the concept of teams with identical numbers every time. I was referring to the specific defensive action at a certain time. That is, if you are attacked by X number of players and your defense can respond with an adequate X number. Under these conditions we should evaluate these recent changes, and not when you are attacked by 20 enemies and you have 5 defenders to respond. Because if you want or if you want changes from Anet that make it possible to defend in the latter case, I'm sorry but you won't agree with it.

Now let's move on to the anecdotes you haven't observed in this last month. If you haven't seen them, we can get there just by intuition. If you've run out of supplies to close the outer wall, what do you think will happen with your enemy's next attack. Where do you imagine the clash to take place? and always keep in mind the conditions of similar numbers please. Because if WVW is broken when you defend with 5 players an attack of 30 enemies, this is true now with these recent changes in the same way it was before without these recent changes.

[Mabi black.1824]

On 5/15/2024 at 12:17 PM, joneirikb.7506 said:

Counterpoint: ANet seems to have done everything they could over the years to make certain we ONLY play in big groups

I do not agree with that. It's not Anet, it's the players. The tendency to group is just a natural consequence of a large-scale PvP mode. It can also start in a stupid field with 5vs5, those who lose will ask for reinforcements, so it will soon turn into 10vs10, then 20vs20 and so on. It's just normal group PVP. Anet has protected all of us equally by limiting each map to about 80 players. How to use these 80 players on your border map It's entirely up to the player how to decide that. Often that choice will be dictated by your opposing teams.

[Mabi black.1824]

3 hours ago, joneirikb.7506 said:

The more I think about PPK, the more I honestly dislike it.

I think the point is no longer PPK or PPT when both (at this point) are rather 'marginal' in the sense that if we don't clearly define what you get when you win versus when you lose. It could be anything, but there has to be a clear difference. WR or Permanent Beta is just around the corner. This should be an opportunity for ANET and GW2 WVW. I think it's absurd to reset servers every 4 weeks.  Because we are definitely moving away from a competing team game. while it could really be a breakthrough if we use it 1 time a year. And within those 12 months, Anet can build a new points system and clarify the positions of who wins and who loses, who moves up in the standings and who goes down. I can also think of 6-month seasons. 2 annual competitions. But 4 weeks is like a stone crusher or a garbage disposal, a huge blender out of control.

[Mabi black.1824]

On 5/15/2024 at 11:08 AM, Gehenna.3625 said:

Personally I feel that not giving defenders a bonus is dumb when you combine it with home borders that you're supposed to defend against two other servers.

On the borderlands, the homeowner already have a ''logistic'' advantage in positioning the same structures. From this point of view, the Alpine border is almost perfect, while the desert border is more deficient (and if we will never have a new map, this one should at least be corrected, precisely from the logistical point of view of positioning and distances) The borderlands differ from the central map of EB in the same logistical way, none of the 3 teams have a clear advantage.

Edited May 16 by Mabi black.1824