It's time to restore Manual Upgrades for structures in WvW.

[TheGrimm.5624]

@Dinas Dragonbane.2978 said:

@Yuffi.2430 said:It is really demoralising to log on at a quiet time and see all T3 structures that you know you can't take. It's unpleasant but perhaps excusable if this is because there are so many players on the other side that they have held and upgraded everything (I've seen both sides of 600 tick matches) but when this situation occurs because no-one was playing - that's wrong in my opinion.

Therefore I am still convinced that WvW structures should not reach T3 without some form of PLAYER intervention, and I'm not the only player who feels this way.

This is one of the worst parts of auto upgrading right here

Sanity check here, pre-balance, how many in the havoc were needed to flip an empty T3?

[Warlord.9074]

@Yuffi.2430 said:

It is really demoralizing to log on at a quiet time and see all T3 structures that you know you can't take. It's unpleasant but perhaps excusable if this is because there are so many players on the other side that they have held and upgraded everything (I've seen both sides of 600 tick matches) but when this situation occurs because no-one was playing - that's wrong in my opinion.

Therefore I am still convinced that WvW structures should not reach T3 without some form of PLAYER intervention, and I'm not the only player who feels this way.

Lets suppose for 1 minute that your theory that it is wrong that structures auto upgrade when no body is there to defend them.I suspect that If there is no one there to defend them and you and your server can't take undefended structures than thats your problem.

The underlying problem is it doesn't change night capping and it doesn't address population imbalance and those things discourages players to spend gold upgrading structures.By design T3 structures, siege, tactivators, disablers, NPCs, are all there to discourage fighting over an objective. So I don't see how you can come to the conclusion that anything related to upgrades encourages fights. Part of the problem is the objectives are just not worth the trouble to take. If both sides are there to fight like you claim than both would be happy to just fight it out in open field. Most of the time 1 side is there to take it and the other side is just there to get slaughtered that is not fighting.

I honestly think the fix should just be that only your sides designated objectives should be up gradable by you, and that you can't upgrade enemy designated structures at all same for both sides. Stonemist castle should never upgrade and be considered neutral, maybe revamp it with some other mechanics keeping in mind that it stays paper. On the Borderlands same rules should apply to keep things fair.

[Yuffi.2430]

@TheGrimm.5624 said:

So do you still feel enough people agree to return to the old? ANet does have a track record of taking unopposed statements as consent, which is why some people will take time to say, um, no. Since we have seen issues in the past where they took a few posters and said, everyone must feel that way and that lead to bigger issues. Hence why your statement of 'enough people' needed counter view points.

I'm quite happy for the idea to be debated in a sensible manner: ie views for, counter views and exploration of related ideas.I started the thread with the suggestion we returned to manual upgrades and listed how I think things have changed concerning what I recall as being the reasons the system was changed to auto upgrading. I know there were problems with the original system, but the point of a discussion like this is to see if we, as a community, can come up with something better (better than the current system which has faults, and better than the old system which also had faults). There have been some good suggestions in this thread, and as long as some form of PLAYER input is required I'd be happy.

[Dinas Dragonbane.2978]

@Sviel.7493 said:Do you perhaps have the numbers on how long the old upgrades took? A difference in upgrade time is a big deal, so I'd love to compare the current numbers to the old numbers. However, finding info on the old upgrade system isn't easy these days.

Also, when you saw the new upgrades are slower, are you already taking Yak upgrades into account?Towers had...

2nd worker 100 supplyBuild oil 100 supplyReinforced walls 200 supplyBuild Cannon 150 supplyAdditional guards 200 supply

This was the order we used to build the swt in enemy maps, 750 supply is 22 regular yaks or 11 double yaks. We used to flip the sc and double its yaks, respawn and start the breakout, then flip the swc and double it, take the tower, buy worker with the tower's 100, razor filled it back up and we had 2 double yaks already on the road to the tower, meaning it could have 340 of the 750 supply needed to upgrade to that level in the first 5 minutes of capturing it. Played well you can upgrade quickly, now sometimes when we did this we had money shinez show up to build trebs but that was how it goes

[Sviel.7493]

Beautiful~

So, first, let's break the new tier system down into upgrades.

Tier 1: Build Oil 100sup, Build Cannon 150sup, Hire Outfitter ???sup - 250sup+Tier 2: Reinforced Walls 200sup, Additional Guards 200sup - 400supTier 3: Fortified Walls ???sup, Even More Guards ???sup - 600sup?

If we don't count the unique circumstances (like the breakout event) so that we can get a more general picture, it used to take roughly 22 Yaks to hit T2 (they used to give 35 sup to towers and 70 to keeps). I don't know how long those upgrades took to complete so I can't compare that here, but 22 yaks gets you started on the last upgrade.

Under the current system, it takes 60 Yaks to hit T2. There's still the option to double Yaks, so all around that's 3x longer than the old system. Likewise, T1 takes roughly 2-3x longer depending on the Hire Outfitter cost. Now, this really all depends on how long it took those upgrades to complete--the actual time is probably between 1-2x faster, but your assertion that the old system was faster is almost certainly correct and definitely is with certain unique circumstances accounted for.

Now, let's ask why!

As you may recall, HoT launched with a completely new upgrade system that was based simply on timers instead of Yaks. I may have foolishly defended it for a moment but even I soon realized that it came at too great a cost--there wasn't enough player interaction in the upgrade process. That is, nothing about Automatic Timed Upgrades gave players something to fight opposing servers about. It's true that Yaks would reduce the timers, but there was no win condition for the people stalling--they were playing a game they were destined to lose.

However, looking at those Automatic Timed Upgrades can give us an idea of how long Anet thought it should take to upgrade structures. I haven't found hard numbers yet, but it seems like it took 3 hours for T2 and 4 hours for T3 assuming every Yak got in. With no Yaks, it took 6 hours for T2 and 8 hours for T3. Let's compare that to the current update times: http://puu.sh/FobD1/fa46af9053.png

Right now, with full, unupgraded Yaks, southern towers take 3 hours to fully upgrade and northern towers take 4.5 hours to fully upgrade. To reach T2 only is 3/7 or ~43% of that time, so ~76 minutes for southern towers. To get 22 Yaks into a southern tower back in pre-HoT days would take roughly 35 minutes, depending on the tower, then we'd need some unknown amount of time for everything to finish building.

So both new upgrade versions have been longer than the original, but they were also both about the same in terms of time to upgrade under optimal conditions--at least when it comes to the southern towers. Absent a message from the Silent Gods themselves, this is a good indication that they wanted to slow down tower upgrades in general.

So my question is, would you still want to return to the manual system if it did not result in a change of upgrade time? You said:

The old system allowed more intelligent upgrades and encouraged smarter use of supply, the wvw only mechanic for the mode. There are advantages to both systems and neither one is perfect, I prefer the one that has more individuals learning to play smarter with upgrades and supply than ignoring it all to follow the zerg.

I'm not clear on what you mean by 'more intelligent upgrades' unless it was the scenario you described at your server's spawn tower. I think smarter use of supply is just not letting the zerg drain it all?

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Side note, found an old post (by me!) that listed supply costs for keep upgrades. Seems it took 6,300 supply to get a fortified keep with a waypoint. That would make the new upgrade system faster than the old but only for keeps. Post is here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Auto-Upgrade/page/1#post6595480

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EDIT: Immediately after posting this, I found a full listing of upgrade costs under the old system: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Structure_upgradeAnd estimates of how long everything took to build under optimal conditions: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Average-Time-to-Build-a-Waypoint/page/1#post5332741