Curse

olXor · Jan 16, 2008, 03:59 AM // 03:59

Hey all,

This is my first post on this forum, and I am pretty terrible at Guild Wars. That said, I was recently thinking about the inadequacies of the current GvG situation and came up with some simple yet radical solutions. I leave it to you to evaluate their efficacy and, if necessary, flame me ad hominem.

I feel that the main problem with modern GvG is not lacking skill balance but rather the more fundamental issue of a terrible winning condition: VoD. As a large number of people much better at the game than I have already pointed out, matches between good teams will invariably result in unfeasibly long games, so some sort of tie-breaking mechanism is necessary. However, VoD in its current form serves not so much as a tie-breaker but as a win condition in and of itself; plays that have no chance of winning a close game pre-VoD become incredibly powerful after the NPCs march to the stand. Thus we get strategies like blockway and splinter-farming - "boring" strategies that fly in the face of the stated objectives of the GvG format. We also see a decrease in the prevalence of “interesting” plays such as splitting and actually killing stuff before VoD, since very often it quite simply isn’t worth it when the game is on the line.

The above situation is, to my mind, a BAD THING. If you disagree, you can stop reading here and just tell me that I suck... but I hope you'll at least hear me through. I realize that many good players believe that the game is currently very balanced and fun and may not witness the problems outlined above (especially since much of the time they play teams much worse than themselves and simply roll over them). However, as long as VoD is in its current state, I believe that the meta will remain more stagnant and less interesting than it has the potential to be.

So, how can we fix these problems? How can we bring back the exciting game play that we all enjoyed when people didn’t know how to play, when they actually tried to win the game before their guild lord walked to the stand, when koreans ran around the map and people died every thirty seconds?

Well, here’s my suggestion.

First, get rid of the current VoD. It’s bad. Toss it entirely. You don’t do more damage, you don’t have less health, NPCs certainly don’t walk to the stand.

Instead, at the 20 minute mark, the Victory or Death flag triggers, and every minute after that each team suffers a “Fatigue Penalty” (or some more suitably witty name). If a team still has NPCs alive, it loses 1/6th of the total number, whatever that is (I’m not sure how many NPCs there are, to be honest). Perhaps the number of NPCs could be altered so that the number that die is round, like, say, 2. They die in reverse order of importance, so first the outside archers, then the inside archers, then the knights, then the bodyguard. If an NPC that is to die has already been killed by the other team, the next one in line takes its place.

After all of a team’s NPC force has been depleted, the “Fatigue Penalties” grant 10% death penalty to all players on the team. If any player would be put to 60 DP by this penalty, he or she dies (and, obviously, does not base res). The same win conditions from the normal game apply, so if all players on the team reach 60 DP, the team loses (the Guild Lord can be killed at any time, of course). These times and numbers have been chosen fairly arbitrarily, but so that holding the flagstand and receiving constant boosts is able to provide a team with a significant advantage, slowing the rate of DP accumulation but unable to counteract it. Also, this rate should force games to end in a reasonable amount of time. However, it can easily be altered to suit preference.

As a side-note, I think that this implementation as is may produce a few draw games, since it determines the winner based on the team-member with the lowest DP (I can envisage scenarios where, for instance, one ranger runs around the map for the last minute of the game until both teams die). This can be circumvented by dividing the DP that would be conferred upon dped out players evenly among their teammates, but this solution is slightly more convoluted. I think the simple implementation should suffice.

The aim of this change is to promote the aggressive, split-friendly play that is common pre-VoD, and to make this type of play continue up until the very end of the game. With this change in place, I think that we would see a return to games that are actually exciting to watch as well and play. I also believe that games between slightly unequal teams will far more often end before 20 minutes, as teams will be forced to bring less defense and will have no incentive to turtle, as any disadvantage they have accrued during normal play (whether it be NPC deaths or DP) will simply carry over to the end of the game, and giving the opponent permanent morale boosts will be equivalent to signing your own death warrent.

Advantages of this change, in no particular order:
1. Requires incredibly little actual coding or effort on the developers’ part. Even I could code this.
-Does not require the introduction of many new gameplay mechanics. The only possible candidate is the timed killing of NPCs, but I don’t think that should be much trouble. The rest simply involves the appropriation of existing mechanics, for instance a “reverse morale boost.” Indeed, most of the work involves removing existing code.
-Unlike most similar changes (for instance, any change to do with NPC pathing at VoD), this suggestion does not require specific alterations to each map. Nor should it require extensive testing from the coding side (unlike, again, NPC AI fixes).
2. Promotes more active, exciting, split-centric gameplay
3. Serves much better as a “tie-breaker” than the existing mechanism. All NPC and player kills before VoD essentially serve as a way of keeping score – and the team with the highest score at the end wins.
-Provides a much more fluid and natural win condition, and ensures that the same strategies are effective at all points in the game (no more “splinter is mediocre for 18 minutes then wins you the game in 2").
4. Manages to do all of the above while still bringing the game to a hard close, which is necessary for the AT system. I believe that, with the current numbers, games should end in at most 35 minutes (20 minutes normal gameplay, 6 minutes to kill all NPCs, 9 minutes to give 70% DP to both teams assuming they alternate boosts from the watchtower every 2 minutes). It may be possible for games to go longer (do you get XP from killing 60 DP targets?), but all such scenarios are ridiculously farfetched. In any case, the current time-cap can easily be put in place while affecting effectively zero games.

Disadvantages of this change:

1. ANet probably won’t do it. Not much to say here except that it should be pretty easy to implement.
2. Such a change might upset the delicate skill balance we have laboriously achieved under the current system (lol?). In particular, sin split may become overpowered. Ideally, I think that this change should be implemented alongside the complete obliteration of the assassin class, but even if that doesn’t happen I think the benefits outweigh the risks.
3. Some people like blowing up NPCs with splinter? Big explosions are fun!
4. A bunch of other stuff I’m sure the next few posters will inform me about in explicit detail.

That’s all, I think. Pretty sure the benefits outweigh the risks.

Peace.

tl; dr version:

-NPCs no longer come to the stand at vod.
-Every minute after vod, each team loses 2 NPCs.
-If all of a team’s NPCs are dead, that team gets 10% DP; any member brought to 60 DP dies.
-First team to DP out or let their guild lord die loses.

TimTimTimma · Jan 16, 2008, 04:44 AM // 04:44