There needs to be some changes to the way fort capturing and defense works.
Currently you have to be on 24/7 watch otherwise people will sadly avoid PVP engagement and just wait for you to leave the fort to cap it back. This is really boring and frustrating - it’s as if they have alt accounts sat outside waiting to cap or they just wait outside until they see us leave. We have waited up to 60 minutes, intentionally looking for a fight and nobody turned up, this seems to be an emerging pattern, and as soon as we leave the fort, somebody starts to cap it.
I propose:
Adding an accumulative cooldown on the fort to penalise factions who do not show up to defend the fort but continuously camp fort without intention to engage in defence or pvp.
For example, starting with a 30 minute cooldown for the first capture, double the cooldown each time there after with maybe a cap of 4-6 hours, and a cooldown reset daily.
Increase the duration required to capture the fort so people have time to react to the attack, make it a flat duration that does not scale with number of players on the fort so it can not easily be zerg capped really quickly (i.e 150-30 minutes regardless of players on the flag).
To encourage more than a handful of people continually running to the fort and trolling the capture, there should be a timer that start’s when a faction first initiate’s a fort capture (i.e by entering the fort gates or by standing on the flag). This conflict period should not be too long, and should reflect the time required to capture the flag maybe a period of 30-60 minutes - if the time expires but they are still contesting the flag, the capture should remain active until it is no longer being contested - making sure that defending faction’s are not only working hard defending the flag but also hard at work clearing the flag/fort.
If they fail to fully capture the fort within that time period, they should also be put into the accumulative cooldown bucket and prevented from capture again until their cooldown expires.
(Pro) Encourages faction’s to work as one, and target fort’s effectively instead of having a few stragglers.
(Pro) Encourages more meaningful/intense open world pvp engagements around forts, and not mindless back and forth tug of war.
(Pro) Forts now are worth defending.
(Pro) Fort is no longer a game of tug of war where the person who gets bored/tired first wins.
(Pro) More strategic fort captures and defense for pvp quest runs, when trying to obtain influence in town.
(Con) One company could troll the faction and trigger their cooldowns.
(Con) Zerg faction’s may always hold the upper hand having more players to throw at fort defense/attack, making it difficult for underdog faction’s to benefit from forts at all. Although in the same vein, this would already be the cases if there are 5x more players in the zerg faction actively running between forts.