So, I have been thinking a lot on how wars currently work, and I wanted to offer some suggestions that I think would improve the state of “wars” in this game.
First, let us recognize that the current state of “wars” is not a war at all, just simply a battle. There is no long drawn out part to it that typically makes a war, a war. My first suggestion to make “wars” seem more like a war is to extend the event duration. Make it a week long event, make it truly feel like a war is happening and let’s get more people involved in this war.
Now, you might ask, how would you fill this time up? You can’t have multiple battles going on through the week, that is boring and pointless! Too which I would say that I totally agree with you. So lets mix things up a bit
Stage 1: Reconnaissance and Espionage
As soon as war is declared and the warring companies are decided, lock the guild rosters. No one may join the guild until the war is over. People may leave, however they probably will not want to do this. The recon and espionage phase has begun. Over the next few days the two warring companies will engage in PvP quests within the given zone scoring “recon” points for the attacking team and “espionage” points for the defending team that will directly affect the next stage of the war. Only the two warring companies may score these points, however faction members are still able to participate in pvp missions and just pvp in general within the area, they just can’t score these points. I envision this as playing out as essentially a high value escort quest on the server. With the company members attempting to perform their various pvp quests and faction members being able to operate as an escort to ensure the company members survive. This would create a more rewarding pvp environment days before the war and could actually make some of the more lame pvp quests more interesting. To increase participation I think it would be good to remove the “pvp” quest qualification of the “Dominate” quest and allow fast travel/unflagging with this quest so it just turns into a “kill 10 people from the other faction and get a reward” quest. This would further incentivize randoms from the faction to drop in for a few kills when they can and drop out when they want to do something else and still get rewarded for their participation.
Stage 2: Fortify the forts
This is what the recon and espionage quests have been building up to. In order to make this work a few things need to be adjusted with the way invasions/wars work. Remove the ability of invasions to downgrade the fort fortifications, like the horn and such, and instead allow the ability for them to be downgraded through wars. How this will play out in the war will be addressed later in stage 4. As of right now the improving of the fortifications on the fort is done by completing town board quests, in the town. How do these improvements get to the forts? They need to be escorted there of course. This event will require instancing almost the entire territory but could make the battle feel pretty epic. 72 hours after the recon and espionage phase has started this phase is entered. The defending company will need to plan a route (or multiple routes depending on if they want to break up the materials being delivered to smaller packets) to get the repair parts from the city to the fort. They have 24 hours to submit their plan and to set a start time. The start time can not be less than 24 hours away or more than 48. Depending on the ratio of recon missions to espionage missions the attacking team will receive information about when and how this is happening. The scales don’t matter but to give you an idea of how it would work. If the attacking team did hardly nothing for recon and the defending team did extremely well way a 10/90 ratio, that attacking team gets a 1 hour heads up when the fortification escort is happening. 20/80 get a 5 hour heads up, 50/50 a full 24 hour heads up, 80/20, a full 24 hour heads up and information on one of the routes being taken, 90/10 or above, 24 hour heads up, and information on all the route being taken. Once the event starts the supplies slowly follow the paths the defending guild has chosen, perhaps being pulled by a cart or something along those lines, and need to make it from the city to the fort to be implemented. The defending teams job is to defend, and the attacking teams job is to destroy the cart(s). Since this is instanced people need to sign up, however there is no sign up “limit” allow each team to be as big as they can be, as long as they are even. So 100 v 100, awesome. 67 v 67, great. However there should be a minimum, say 30 v 30 and if a team cant field 30 players then too bad you play at a deficit. Whatever amount of repair parts make it to the fort should be allowed to be used on upgrading the fortifications. There is no maximum to the amount of parts you can begin the mission with, so if you quest enough to get a ton of repair parts you have a better chance at getting the maximum amount of repair parts needed to upgrade everything fully at the fort. No extra repair parts can be stored once the repairs are complete and upgrade quests at the down can not be started until the entire war is over.
Stage 3: Duel of the champions
This one is pretty self-explanatory. 24 hours before the final battle, a 5v5 arena of 5 members on each company’s roster takes place. Somehow allow the duel to be visible by everyone through a spectator mode so you can cheer on your champions as they battle to the death. There are 3 matches in which a different team must participate for each match. So a total of 15 players from each team are needed. The winners of each round receive a boon for their entire team during the war. What the boons are I still haven’t thought of, could be something as simple as a 3% weapon damage increase, 5% crit chance increase, things like that. Try to make it powerful but still not be totally game breaking. The Duel of the champions shouldn’t necessarily decide the outcome of the war so balancing should be done here.
Stage 4: The final battle
This is what we currently call “war”. It will stay mostly the same apart from a few modifications. Open the doors to the fort. With the inability to capture the center point until the 3 outside nodes are captures, the doors do not need to be inaccessible anymore, this will encourage opportunities for different play styles because of other changes. Increase the fortifications health and allow tier damage. If the fortification is at 70-100% health it is tier 3, 30-70% tier 2, and 1-30% tier 1, it is inoperable at 0 percent. The damage done during the war is directly reflective of the tier and health of the fortification after the war as well and can not be repair until the next “Fortify the forts” stage. This would encourage different play styles. Weapons with siege might become viable as you have specific members playing the fort and attempting to destroy the fortifications. However, do you want to damage them too much? Because if you win the war it will be your team trying to fix them during the next war. Risk vs reward has to be considered. If we take them out now, and win, we might not have them for our first opportunity for defense, or they might start at an extremely poor state. This would accurately reflect some of the volatility that occurs when actually taking over a territory in a cool way. This would also affect invasions as well as it would make the city more difficult to defend directly after being taken over.
These are my ideas and rambling. What do you think? I would like to see some changes to make pvp and wars more interesting and more accessible to more people. By allowing people to participate in the R&E stage, the fortify the forts stage it might provide a bit more incentive to pvp. I am not a game designer and I have no idea how easy/difficult any of this would be to implement, just hoping to give some constructive feedback.
If you read all of this, thank you! I hope you have a great day!