I’ve looked at several servers and companies are still owning 3+ zones.
What happens.
Company forms.
Gets successful against near peer companies
mega company murders them in wars and takes their territories.
Company falls apart. This even happens to megacompanies if they lose a war.
This has repeated consistently since launch and in many cases, people leave the game as well.
Territory control needs to be refactored to faction control and bonuses. Move the gold rewards into OPR/Dungeons and make the territory bonuses worth fighting over. Make the control based on open world objectives. Look at how GuildWars2 does things. It’s a working formula and some parts could be adopted.
I think you are right to an extent. I think the main issue lies behind how pushing and declaring works. Back when the game first came out, everyone would push land in the company, you could have 100’ people pushing land from your company alone plus other companies. you could very quickly throw a zone into conflict unless the owners defended the push. After a few weeks Owners stopped defending the push because its was far easier just to defend the actual war than the push itself. People also wanted the war content because its super fun. you can only slot 50 people in a war so obviously the people who help push but don’t get slotted eventually stop pushing or just go to a new company where they get slotted.
Now a year and a half later almost after the majority of pvpers quit, most companies barely get 20-30 people out to help push. It literally takes hours to throw a zone into conflict now, hours of mindless boring fetch quests. You spend hours over the course of a few days to declare war that will last 30 minutes and sometimes less if its a throw war. This honestly is what makes people quit, You push land for hours for a 30 minute war. If you lose most people don’t really want to run it back, some do but after the 3rd or 4th time losing people give up and either quit trying or go to a new company. People have always band wagoning to the strongest companies because for 1 people hate losing and 2 the companies that own land don’t have to do anything to get war content, the war content comes to them. There is so much to say on this so ill just leave it at that but get to my main point about what’s hurting the game the most revolving around wars right now.
The recent war changes were a good attempt to try to help more people get into wars but it is doing the exact opposite really. The 3 top companies on my server, Green being the strongest, and Yellow and Purple being similar strength. Green can take land from anyone they want, they currently own 5 lands, obviously they can’t defend 5 lands, that means people can quad or even multi dec against them, meaning there would be potentially 4 throw wars, literally 4 of there lands would have 0 out of 50 players vs a full enemy roster, how is that getting more people into war??? Also how attackers can merc out 25 people but defenders can only use 10, I was in favor of this change at first but now idk how I feel about it. A company can take 5 full groups from the strongest company from a different faction and take land and then be unable to hold it in 2 days because they don’t have enough people to defend it or because when they have to use everyone in company, most of there players have 0 experience and get rolled and they literally lose in less than 10 minutes. The strongest green company can lose those lands and then goes and takes zones back because they are that much better than everyone else just waiting for the server to triple dec again etc, which is totally fine. My point is when the server works together to throw 3 or 4 lands into conflict, that’s all those wars having 0 people on one side. On a side note, no one wants to push them because they will just gate camp you for 30 minutes, so you are just pushing for hours to get war camped, people don’t have interest in that rofl. I think the new war changes aren’t good for the game long term, just create more throw wars. They need to fix how pushing land works and fix it 10 months ago.