A New PvP Mode is Coming to Guild Wars 2--We Need Your Help Developing It!

[Kuya.6495]

Here's more feedback after playing more matches:

1. It feels like whoever has the most supports wins because you can just cycle them through the capture point to mitigate the debuff's effects. It's kind of like a version of the boon ball.

2. It seems like a lot of the match gets decided on the first team fight. If one team wins at mid and they leave their enemies as downed, it's almost a guaranteed win.

3. The sword debuff seems like a distraction. The tranquility buff is useful though.

I think based on these observations, I would:

1. Increase the amount of healing reduction and incoming damage increase from the capture point debuff.

2. Eliminate downstate or increase the damage bleed out does so you are defeated faster.

3. Keep tranquility debuff and remove the sword buffs.

[Shagie.7612]

3 minutes ago, Kuya.6495 said:

1. It feels like whoever has the most supports wins because you can just cycle them through the capture point to mitigate the debuff's effects. It's kind of like a version of the boon ball.

I think part of the reason it feels like that is that the debuff only stacks when the point is actively contested. The only way to debunk the enemy team at that point is to have a team comp that can also just stack on point and spam skills on top of each other.
And if your team doesn't have that, you lose by default. Conquest has other ways to win like map rotations, Push lacks other objectives or ways to achieve a win by design.
Hitting some sort of critical mass in team's support/utility being the main factor in your win or loss isn't a super enjoyable formula.

I don't think the debuff stacking even when it's not contested would be a very good solution to that though.

[Desaita.3792]

On 9/17/2024 at 7:19 PM, arazoth.7290 said:

Trebs at each team close to base, repair kits are nearby there. For once trebs will be usefull to force ppl of that node and support may try if they want to out support that, they won't for long

how bout each non support just gets a pocket treb to shoot those bastards

[arazoth.7290]

3 hours ago, Desaita.3792 said:

how bout each non support just gets a pocket treb to shoot those bastards

nahhh too OP.

Jokes aside, I seriously think trebs would be a good idea for this mode. Because how the mode works it would be usefull, OP nah because trebs have some inert slowness in firing. But it will give times that forces enemy players who can have a  big lead in the game to hold the node to be forced outside so that allies can move it back.

And perma sitting treb won't be as usefull so it would be situational if enemy gets too much uptime.

Others may laugh for how awful treb is in kylo but because their are too many nodes it isn't really working. And they take time to cap there in this push game mode it's instant if a team is on it without enemies.

Btw have you ever tried use treb if 4 enemies are getting in kylo mid, it is instantly a lot harder for them to stay on it. But because how conquest works you still make enough progress by avoiding it. So these are my arguments for it 🙂

Oh yea, buff the buffs in push mode, they need more relevance 

[Captain Crapface.7528]

The gamemode is going to flop.

- All fights devolve into either a onesided massacre, or a complete Clusterkitten of people going down and reviving all the bloody time, becoue entire goddamn team can revive from one kill, even if said kill happens in the opposite corner of the map.

- The losing team has to work double as hard to turn the game around, becouse they need to push the point back into the middle first before they can start gaining any progress towards the win.

- Teamfight specks and supports are grosely overpowered, because you can't do anything on the map that'll help you if you're loosing teamfights.

- Some playstyles are downright unplayable in the gamemode, and those which are playable, are hevily incentifized to bunker, with blocks/invoul/barrier and prot, usually stacked on top of eachother.

- side objectives aren't worth bothering. They'll never change the outcome of a match unless it is very, very, very close.

- Meta for this mode is more ruthless and kittenous than for conquest, and new players entering this envioronment are likely to either quit PvP on the spot or quit GW2 all together after expieriencing their first loss within two minutes from logging in. 

If the point was to give newcomers something to learn in, the project is a faliure. The effect we archieved is completly opposite. 

[Captain Crapface.7528]

8 hours ago, Kuya.6495 said:

1. Increase the amount of healing reduction and incoming damage increase from the capture point debuff.

Every AoE damage skill will turn into teamwide oneshot if we do so.

[DarkK.7368]

The more games I play, the more I do confirm that the winner team is decided in the first 30 seconds. Whoever wins first team fight and how the capture point moves, for now, 100% or so decides who wins at the end. The game leaves no possibilities for comebacks like I feel conquest has. I remark this because it's one of the most important things that drains my motivation. Falling into an unbalanced fight and having to stay there for a full 5-10 minutes.

[decorator.2938]

Some central box-shaped objects with common steps and some without are indistinguishable.
In the case of objects with common steps, the enemy will be tracked by the target teleportation skill.

Already in NA there are BOTs who do nothing but use only the necromancer self-damage skill from the beginning at spawn points.
We chatted with the team as the players around us didn't seem to notice, but they ranted at us, saying that it doesn't matter, we lost the match because of you.

There are too many toxic players. I see them in almost every match.
Before developing new content, it would be better to develop a system to automatically punish players who say bad words.
Suspending accounts would be a loss of player numbers, so I think the best solution is to disqualify them for the relevant season and restrict their chat. It is too short to be able to come back within the season.

[shion.2084]

I don't know if it's been mentioned.... But can there be a notification at the top of how far each team has pushed.... where score goes?  You could even do 500 is like to the other teams base and you win the game, and the score is a percentage of that based on your farthest push.  That way you could easily tell which team was winning if they both did pretty far pushes.

[Captain Crapface.7528]

1 hour ago, decorator.2938 said:

Suspending accounts would be a loss of player numbers

we already have timeouts for missing queue.

All we need is to add systems that would, prevent ppl from requeueing for say 1h to 24h for afking, and being twats in chat, and the problem would fix itself.

[Miki.3862]

Now that I've had the chance to play some more varied matches, big wins, loses and more balanced ones, I'll leave my feedback, I'll bold the 'gist' of my points.

What works already

• Overall premise of single point push works well with the combat and actually helps to give some variety to sPvP that it's been sorely missing
• The 'Z' shape pathing for the point movement is good, would be interesting to see other types of pathing for different maps or alternatively other options to 'change' the pathing
• Map size is good, feels well balanced for both attacking and defending positions
• The pacing when teams are playing the objective can already be great, but there are a few things that could help maintain that (see below) 

What needs improvement

• Power Ups, I understand the existing ones are very placeholder and harvested from other maps, so they likely aren't final in their placement or effects, however, I think they need to be more related to the game mode itself and useful in it's context, for example:
     Bomb - replacing swords, an item that turns into a special action button with a single charge, instead of being placed by the player, when used it attaches to the point (with clear visual indicator but short activation) and sets off a large explosion that cannot be blocked, with a knockback that can't be broken lasting a second or so, allowing teams that are struggling a better chance to re-capture or slow down an enemy team that have built up too much momentum. (Can only be used on enemy controlled point)
     Barrier - replacing the existing 'take control of objective' power up, this would neutralise the point and create a pushing barrier around it, forcing all teams off, halting progress for either team and forcing them to fight it out off point for a moment (perhaps 20~30 seconds to give impact to the power up) the centralised positioning for this would still work very well, again aiding struggling teams and giving them a better chance at recovery.
     Block - this is entirely new, these would be one per match use locations that can be interacted with to create a blocked path, temporarily blocking the point and players from moving beyond it, even if the point is beyond these locations they can still be used to block up the pathway and force enemies down specific routes for a time (perhaps the time varies depending on if it's blocking the point or not, shorter for blocking the point from movement, longer if the point is already beyond it - or depending on the time in the match they are activated, later in the longer, earlier the shorter)
     Speed - another new one, team-wide buff that gives an unstrippable boost to movement speed (for 1min~)  that a player can grab, spawning in the middle left/right side, spawns on the side not being pushed, giving the winning team the chance to split off and grab if they have the time/people on point or alternatively the easier chance for the losing team to grab it and further speed up their returns to the point.
   
• UI indication of progress is a bit dire, for a game mode like this it'd be incredibly useful to have some indication in the top UI for the match of where exactly your team stands, especially in the last few minutes of a close game, as I understand it, the team that made the furthest progress wins in the end, assuming they get control of the point, but it's not really clear in the closer games, my suggestion for this would be either adding points to your teams score for each 'checkpoint' reached, to more clearly visualise who's in the lead, or better yet, although more difficult, adding a new UI element to show more precise bars for each teams furthest progress.
• The map is too open and I think it would benefit from having the paths in the centre quadrants locked down a bit more to avoid giving too large an advantage to classes with easily attained enhanced mobility, the size is fine but creating narrow paths in the centre area should help to alleviate that and also focus combat in places other than the main paths, this leads me onto...
• Player funnelling feels like it should be more of a thing, as previously mentioned, adding lots of surrounding (insurmountable) terrain to the middle quadrant with smaller path ways cut through, perhaps an outer (leading to close and mid left/right) and inner (leading to centre) path, with the inner path containing power ups - this would help to give more options of approach without being quickly/easily spotted.
• Point Capture should need two players (and/or have reduced speed with one player), I'm a little hazy on the finer details but it seems quite straight forward at the moment, the point seems to work like any other in sPvP, I don't know if that's beneficial for this game mode though as it seems to lead to 'one man on the point' situations were the rest of the team aren't focused or are otherwise too engaged in combat to move off to the point - I think a good alternative would be for a single player on the point to move at reduced speed and anything more than 1 to be regular speed (nothing more as giving extra bonuses for players on point only serves to boost already winning teams)

I think that's everything I've got at the moment, I'm probably forgetting something, I guess as side notes, it'd be nice if this game type was in the general rotation of ranked (once it's a bit more worked out of course) rather than being sectioned off like Stronghold was, which was also a game mode with promise but perhaps needed more work and maybe it's own seasons to really shine.

So overall very positive with lots of room to make the game mode a real different beast to conquest and nice shake up for the sPvP community, very glad to see them working on this side of the game more actively again.

Edited September 20 by Miki.3862

[aliksyian.7642]

How is player feedback being collected? I hope it's not just play time. Some people in a guild I'm in played it to get the title while hating on it constantly. I don't know why people spend 6 hours doing something they hate for something as small as a title in a video game, but I'm not a therapist.

I've had some fun in the game mode. I've even seen some comebacks where the payload was really close to the end, and we pushed it back. It's rare, though.

Would be interesting if you had to hit the payload to move it, like the orb in harvest temple. Then low damage bunker builds wouldn't be quite as useful, because they wouldn't be able to move the orb much. You could also end up with the orb moving in weird directions , and like have a shorter path that goes through a damaging field or something.

There are still a lot of crybaby players that stop playing when they think the match is lost. In one match we were making good progress towards a comeback even with one player crying in spawn. I don't know how to make players be good sports.

The biggest problem for me is the same as all game modes: poor legibility. It's hard to tell what's going on because there are a lot of indistinct , small, fast animations. This doesn't really matter much in PvE where you're in a clusterfudge of colors in a convergence, but here it's hard to parse a jade sphere, mesmer feedback, some guy spinning, some other guy raising his hands, and another guy spinning but on fire all at once. Some moves like the herald elite knockback have a huge tell. Most don't. Some people might like this, but I think for a lot of people it makes the game feel like a chaotic , unpredictable, mess.

Also it's a little weird I can't visually tell who's a soft target. Like in TF2 I can see a scout and know they're soft and a heavy is not. Here I don't know if they're wearing berserker amulet or not. Maybe originally armor class was supposed to matter. Maybe some people like that hidden information and figuring it out mid match.

I think it's got potential, but I also kind of liked stronghold and that didn't take off.

[Rose.2593]

Got the tranq point right at the end but still lost? No one pushed the point to the end,but with tranq, they shouldnt have been able to claim it, so we should have had the point and won.

 

Nevermind, I think there flags were further along I guess.

Edited September 21 by Rose.2593
Was wrong

[pukish.5784]

I don't want to play with someone who don't know GW2 basics or any other game basics so I haven't logged since August. Now my mental is healthy, stressless, thanks for my decision making.😸

[Shacka Hacka.7068]

Anet really need to make tutorial videos on how to play these PvP modes as the majority of players seem clueless how to play and spend most of the match running aimlessly about, either explain properly how games modes are played or do away with capturing points altogether.

[Shacka Hacka.7068]

oops double post

Edited September 21 by Shacka Hacka.7068
double posted

[Zaxares.5419]

After about 2 weeks of playing, my assessment of Push is that, yeah, it still requires a lot of work. Some of my main impressions:

1. It is far, FAR too difficult to stage a comeback once one team manages to get any kind of lead. Typically what happens is that one team wins the initial mid fight, the circle gets pushed to about 50-75% of the way, and then it gets stalemated due to the staggered respawn timings for reinforcements to get to the fight. So the match drags on for the full 10 minutes, and the initial team wins anyway because they technically got further. To address this, I propose that the "Tranquility" buff in the middle of the arena, if channeled, instantly teleports the circle back to the middle if it is inside the "territory" of the team that does the channeling. (e.g. Blue has pushed the circle to Red's midway point. Red channels the buff, the circle gets teleported because it is in their "territory". If Blue channels it, nothing happens because the circle is outside their "territory".) This makes the Tranquility a highly crucial buff that needs to be addressed, and it also gives importance to speedy builds whose role in the match can be to quickly move around and capture bonus objectives or deny them to the enemy team.

2. Push STRONGLY favours Support and High Burst builds. If one team has a Support or two, and the enemy team has none, the latter team is almost certainly headed for a loss unless they are exceptionally on the ball about knowing how to pick out critical enemy targets AND focusing them (which are far from guaranteed in a largely random match). Likewise, there is not very much use for builds that traditionally favour speed, stealth or hit and run tactics, so some professions (like Thief) have a considerable disadvantage in Push. To help address that, and to also make it so that the mode basically doesn't just favour "stack and burst" as an unstoppable meta, I propose that more buffs be added Push, similar to the special actions granted in some maps like Djinn's Dominion.

• As mentioned above, activating the Tranquility buff can potentially send the circle right back to the middle, giving the person who channeled it a good opportunity to get the point immediately moving towards the enemy side.
• The damage buff is largely solid, but perhaps the duration can be lowered to 1 min, but is stackable. (So again, this gives a mobile player who can quickly channel both damage buffs potentially 2 minutes of the damage buff for his team, a considerable boost even though they themselves are not present for much of the fight.)
• Special action boosts like the damaging Meteor (which can also insta-finish downed enemies) or the debilitating field (which strips/corrupts boons, making it much harder for a Support standing on the circle to hold it) or possibly a defensive bubble that heals/cleanses allies within it (giving a team who didn't get assigned a Support a potential way to help tank/endure fights) can also help add more variety to the fights.

3. Related to the above, I imagine it's not something that would be easy to do, but I would love it if the matchmaker could somehow detect what sorts of builds players are running and sort the teams appropriately. Also of note is that sometimes I've seen match-ups include two duos on one team, and none on the other. Couldn't the matchmaker pick up on that and assign 1 duo to each team? While there's no accounting for individual skill, the fact remains that two duos likely means some increased level of coordination and class synergy you're not likely to get in a completely random team of 5.

[Rose.2593]

On 9/20/2024 at 4:42 PM, aliksyian.7642 said:

How is player feedback being collected? I hope it's not just play time. Some people in a guild I'm in played it to get the title while hating on it constantly. I don't know why people spend 6 hours doing something they hate for something as small as a title in a video game, but I'm not a therapist.

I've had some fun in the game mode. I've even seen some comebacks where the payload was really close to the end, and we pushed it back. It's rare, though.

Would be interesting if you had to hit the payload to move it, like the orb in harvest temple. Then low damage bunker builds wouldn't be quite as useful, because they wouldn't be able to move the orb much. You could also end up with the orb moving in weird directions , and like have a shorter path that goes through a damaging field or something.

There are still a lot of crybaby players that stop playing when they think the match is lost. In one match we were making good progress towards a comeback even with one player crying in spawn. I don't know how to make players be good sports.

The biggest problem for me is the same as all game modes: poor legibility. It's hard to tell what's going on because there are a lot of indistinct , small, fast animations. This doesn't really matter much in PvE where you're in a clusterfudge of colors in a convergence, but here it's hard to parse a jade sphere, mesmer feedback, some guy spinning, some other guy raising his hands, and another guy spinning but on fire all at once. Some moves like the herald elite knockback have a huge tell. Most don't. Some people might like this, but I think for a lot of people it makes the game feel like a chaotic , unpredictable, mess.

Also it's a little weird I can't visually tell who's a soft target. Like in TF2 I can see a scout and know they're soft and a heavy is not. Here I don't know if they're wearing berserker amulet or not. Maybe originally armor class was supposed to matter. Maybe some people like that hidden information and figuring it out mid match.

I think it's got potential, but I also kind of liked stronghold and that didn't take off.

I think anyone who plays gets sent a survey to fill out, So was waiting for that. I guess we will get it on Tuesday

[Rose.2593]

9 hours ago, Zaxares.5419 said:

After about 2 weeks of playing, my assessment of Push is that, yeah, it still requires a lot of work. Some of my main impressions:

1. It is far, FAR too difficult to stage a comeback once one team manages to get any kind of lead. Typically what happens is that one team wins the initial mid fight, the circle gets pushed to about 50-75% of the way, and then it gets stalemated due to the staggered respawn timings for reinforcements to get to the fight. So the match drags on for the full 10 minutes, and the initial team wins anyway because they technically got further. To address this, I propose that the "Tranquility" buff in the middle of the arena, if channeled, instantly teleports the circle back to the middle if it is inside the "territory" of the team that does the channeling. (e.g. Blue has pushed the circle to Red's midway point. Red channels the buff, the circle gets teleported because it is in their "territory". If Blue channels it, nothing happens because the circle is outside their "territory".) This makes the Tranquility a highly crucial buff that needs to be addressed, and it also gives importance to speedy builds whose role in the match can be to quickly move around and capture bonus objectives or deny them to the enemy team.

2. Push STRONGLY favours Support and High Burst builds. If one team has a Support or two, and the enemy team has none, the latter team is almost certainly headed for a loss unless they are exceptionally on the ball about knowing how to pick out critical enemy targets AND focusing them (which are far from guaranteed in a largely random match). Likewise, there is not very much use for builds that traditionally favour speed, stealth or hit and run tactics, so some professions (like Thief) have a considerable disadvantage in Push. To help address that, and to also make it so that the mode basically doesn't just favour "stack and burst" as an unstoppable meta, I propose that more buffs be added Push, similar to the special actions granted in some maps like Djinn's Dominion.

• As mentioned above, activating the Tranquility buff can potentially send the circle right back to the middle, giving the person who channeled it a good opportunity to get the point immediately moving towards the enemy side.
• The damage buff is largely solid, but perhaps the duration can be lowered to 1 min, but is stackable. (So again, this gives a mobile player who can quickly channel both damage buffs potentially 2 minutes of the damage buff for his team, a considerable boost even though they themselves are not present for much of the fight.)
• Special action boosts like the damaging Meteor (which can also insta-finish downed enemies) or the debilitating field (which strips/corrupts boons, making it much harder for a Support standing on the circle to hold it) or possibly a defensive bubble that heals/cleanses allies within it (giving a team who didn't get assigned a Support a potential way to help tank/endure fights) can also help add more variety to the fights.

3. Related to the above, I imagine it's not something that would be easy to do, but I would love it if the matchmaker could somehow detect what sorts of builds players are running and sort the teams appropriately. Also of note is that sometimes I've seen match-ups include two duos on one team, and none on the other. Couldn't the matchmaker pick up on that and assign 1 duo to each team? While there's no accounting for individual skill, the fact remains that two duos likely means some increased level of coordination and class synergy you're not likely to get in a completely random team of 5.

Nice post, and I agree the Tranq point doesn't do a great deal right now, the team with the point can just wait on it to wear off amd then carry on. The reapers things are good. 

The point you mentioed about respwan is more the players fault, if they spawn and then run and sucide without waiting for help. 

Also yes, very hard to fight back, if the other team gets to a futher flag, but you start winning, you need to try and get to there point, can be hard to do, when they keep running at the point and its not moving.

Maybe getting tranq can reset one of the other teams flags, resetting everything might not be fair.

Some buffs from the other modes, like those you get inthe lamp could make it more intersting, But I know they don't want to make it too complicated as its supposed to be easier to play. 

They could also look at enabling all game modes for ranked? Like stronghold is only unranked

 

Edited September 21 by Rose.2593

[Virdo.1540]

Sometimes it seems to be bugged and not register the right winner.

For example we had a round, pushed the circle almost directly towards the enemy spawn, both teams fighting on the circle to keep it neutral, time ran out, we lost. Despite almost having it pushed to the enemy spawn until end.

The enemy wasnt anywere near our spawn with the circle. They didnt even get around the last corner before our spawn, so its not a win per furthest distance pushed

Edited September 21 by Virdo.1540

[WhoWantsAHug.3186]

Push should exclusively be a mini season along with 2v2 and 3v3. It's braindead, which I guess some people want. Conquest takes more brain powers and people tend to play games to veg out and be mindless. That isn't for me, and unfortunately push is exactly for the person I'm not. Conquest is overall vastly superior, more mentally stimulating, and more fun. If push is the gold standard, then more people will leave the PvP community as boredom will set in quickly.

Not going to lie, I don't find push fun at all, but I'll set my bias aside to try and cultivate constructive criticism. 

Kiting is pretty much pointless, instead you "push" people away from the node. This is the single most important factor of the game. Chasing for kills is less relevant which is so meh and the map is like totally flat. A core aspect of gw2 is movement and kiting vertically. There is nothing in the map to promote kiting and there's nothing to kite on. People find kiting and outplaying solely with movement enjoyable. Things should be implemented to make kiting and moving around a map more meaningful. Map shouldn't be 98% the same elevation, otherwise it gets boring.

Conquest allows for so much more than a mechanical outplay. Theres strategic outplay via time(wasting people's time from kiting them around, or recapping, forcing a recap, etc) or rotational outplay, or even outplay with secondary mechanic. Like in skyhammer if the enemy is capping the hammer, but you have no nodes, you can just ignore it and let them cap. You're outplaying with the secondary mechanic by wasting time essentially. Same thing with stalling node captures. Conquest is a great game mode because it promotes strategy. Maybe push can be reworked to do the same? I'm not sure, so regardless some people want gamemode that requires less thought process, but push should remain a mini season exclusively. It won't have longevity otherwise 

The single biggest issue with push is the game length.  I'm sitting in a 2-6 min queue for a 3-5 minute game. It's just blehh. What's the point? Game are too short. 

[WhoWantsAHug.3186]

12 hours ago, Zaxares.5419 said:

.

2. Push STRONGLY favours Support and High Burst builds. If one team has a Support or two, and the enemy team has none, the latter team is almost certainly headed for a loss unless they are exceptionally on the ball about knowing how to pick out critical enemy targets AND focusing them (which are far from guaranteed in a largely random match). Likewise, there is not very much use for builds that traditionally favour speed, stealth or hit and run tactics, so some professions (like Thief) have a considerable disadvantage in Push. To help address that, and to also make it so that the mode basically doesn't just favour "stack and burst" as an unstoppable meta, I propose that more buffs be added Push, similar to the special actions granted in some maps like Djinn's Dominion.

IMO this is completely a non issue. Different game modes will give rise to different meta games. Game modes that are more simple and straightforward will have a more simple, straightforward, less nuanced meta game. This means less build variety. High mobility builds are much less relevant as is the strategy of mind gaming with stealth. Straight up combat prowess will be superior everytime. Doesn't make sense to critique this fundamental reality of metagames developing around a specific gamemode. This is just the fact.

Many thief builds rely on mobility to gain value both in map pressure and being hard to kill, thus wasting time via kiting. This is unfortunately the case, but there are some thief builds that can succeed. This is what happens when you spend 13 years buffing and nerfing for conquest, but then implement a new game mode like Push. Not saying conquest is 100% balanced, or that 100% perfect balance can ever be achieved, because it's objectively impossible. There's just more or less balance. It's a spectrum. Push will inherently be less balanced than conquest because conquest format is what's pushed in balance patches. Push is also way less nuanced which means even less build variety because what's strong is more narrow in scope 

I think it's important to understand the philosophy behind game development, mechanical interactions, and the subsequent arising of a metagame. Push can't be flawed or critiqued from the notion that some builds will perform better than others in any given scenario. That's like saying basketball is bad because tall players dominate the scene and short players are disadvantaged. It's irrelevant 

Edited September 21 by WhoWantsAHug.3186

[Aamu.3952]

Rallying needs to be addressed somehow.

This was my biggest pain point. I don't believe in instant-defeat like others have suggested, but the rally grace period definitely needs to be culled way down - maybe even to something like 3-5 seconds, meaning if you want to rally you need to actively hit the opposition downed. It happened a lot where I pressured an opponent well away from the fight, downed them several times, only for them to rally endlessly having tagged the blob with an AOE, and the 'tagging' might've been 20 seconds ago. Just felt frustrating.

Edited September 22 by Aamu.3952

[Aamu.3952]

I know a lot of this stuff will change with the map design - but if there are any plans to keep the node, it could be fun and intuitive to replace said node with an actual payload - something a little more interactive. Perhaps a leaky oil wagon that spills oil everywhere. With how the timer mechanic works, if the game reaches the timer, a point in the middle of the map blows up, lights the oil trail, and the furthest oil trail will therefore bring the fire (closer) to one teams base. If you manage to create an oil trail all the way to their base, your team must return to the middle of the map to manually trigger the explosion, which allows the opposition team one last stand to try and stop you from triggering it. The oil trail idea also provides a tangible visual cue on progress outside of just a flag on the mini-map.

Edited September 22 by Aamu.3952

[aymnad.9023]

Before testing it I was scared of steamroll (like deathmatch) or way less diversity / room (like 3V3). While it sometimes happened I enjoyed a lot this mode and was able to play many lb untamed games while having impact / fun. I tried range dps, a bruiser, a build closer to WvW and all had a place. This was mostly thanks to:

• The elevation / no port zone (mid and side): Those are a huge breathing room. In a time where Wb is the main power dps they allow range builds to kite / survive and still provide some cover for the melee (maybe some could be present close to the spawn)
• The map size: It is just big enough to have time for a team to regroup / reorganize after a lost fight and small enough to have fast games.

Here are the few points that were hit and miss:

• The capture / tranquility buff seems to be mostly taken by the team having the lead as the losing team is closer to their spawn or waiting to regroup. Maybe it is a good thing because it ends games or maybe it could take longer to channel for the winning team.  I am not sure how I feel about it.
• The debuff : I think this is a great way to encourage rotations on the node. Despite that some professions / builds could hold for a very long time but I do not think this can be changed / should be changed

Improvements:

• Indicator for the progression: it is not always clear which team takes the lead. 
• Movement / position of the node : when the node moves it is not always clear where the capture area really is

Bug encountered:

• Having a character stuck sliding to a side of the map. It happened only once when the game started.

Edited September 22 by aymnad.9023