In territory wars, the merc caps are currently asymmetrical, with 25 allowed on the attacking side and 10 for the defending side.
The goal was to allow for smaller companies to attack a larger company. This is a noble intention, but it is a mistake. It produces an inherently unstable state, since there is no way for these smaller companies to hold the territory. This has various knock-on effects.
First, knowing there is no way to hold the territory for longer than a week, companies are incentivized to extract value from the territory rather than to invest in it. It would be illogical to upgrade anything to maximum level, aside from the gates. As a result, many territories are becoming extremely degraded, making Invasions more difficult to complete, which further degrades territories. This also reduces company incomes, which impairs the circulation of gold, damaging the economy of the entire server. It can be a vicious feedback loop that hurts everyone.
Second, for the people actually fighting the wars, it is creating a lot of perverse incentives. It is much harder to make a defensive roster than an offensive one right now. The larger companies, who are already advantaged by the situation, and who have more hardcore players, are filled with alts, having maybe two or even three per server to help fill defensive slots. Meanwhile, the leaders of small companies, with much more limited personnel, are being burned out trying to defend their territories against other small companies, who are slotting 25 mercs.
I strongly urge the developers to look into creating a symmetrical merc cap. 15 on each side would be ideal. Another option would be to scale the defense requirements with the territory’s income percentage. EF, BS, and WW would cap at 10 mercs, but other territories can have 15 or 20.
Yeah for example on my fresh start server there are the big companies that each have 1-3 territories each, then the small companies just keep flipping territory because they merc 25 bigger company people, take the territory and the the next day or two it happens again and rinse and repeat. All while the bigger companies territories are left alone because no one can even attempt to beat them.
Yeah I am in a small company - we are capable of taking a territory because you can fill out the numbers with non company members.
However on the defence war with us only able to get around 25-30 company members (less if people are slotted but don’t log on) and only 10 mercs we are outnumbered by like up to 15 people.
This means that the defence war goes for like no more than 5 minutes and we simply get overrun by weight of numbers. Also means that for the attackers they don’t get a real attack war either it’s just a free territory.
Given the dramatically falling player numbers (seriously AP has fallen from 4K total peak at start of Jan to only 2.6k peak last night and that’s split across 2 servers) it’s pretty obvious that only the absolute biggest PvP companies will be able to actually field a proper defence. And fairly soon even they will struggle.
I would say on Delos atm only maybe 4-6 companies could actually put up 40+ consistently into a war.
Not sure what the point of allowing a medium sized company to take a territory, but making it so they can’t put up a proper defence is meant to achieve, other than just to allow people to take free territory.
Numbers should be changed so you only need 25/25 for each.
Given that defending is significantly easier than attacking, I think the merc cap is fine and serves to balance that out. Companies that deserve the territories will be able to retain them and the rest will flip.
Defending is not that much easier than attacking anymore. In most competitive wars, an attacker captures all three points within the first 10 minutes. After that, it’s down to fort strategy. All it takes is one mistake, and the defenders lose.
That said, this is not a good reason to make rostering so much more difficult for the defenders. At the very least, make the defenders’ merc caps tiered:
Attacking is significantly easier when the defenders have 15 less people than them, and having a proper war rather than just running over people provides a more satisfying gameplay for attackers as well defenders.
Again, NW is starting to see significant player drop off and if most servers get to a point where there is only a few companies that can even muster 40 people together then wars are quickly going to descend into failed content.
There’s already a one war per character limit which will stop the type of best pvpers taking all war slots thing that happened before.