What do i do on the game these days: 1) Open map. 2) Find a fascility that is almost captured\defended. 3) Redeploy or fly there. 4) Get points. 5) Repeat. That sucks. This is not even a gameplay. This is a result of poor gamedesign, that rewards doing nothing more then fighting hard big fights. What WDS is supposed to push players towards (in my opinion): 1) Big long awesome fights. 2) Make everyone work for the faction victory. 3) Organization of zerg masses. It fails in everything exept last right now. There's now reason to participate in a long fight if you can get twice more points by capturing something ungarded. What can be done: WDS should be given not for the fact of capturing\defending but for the process and for the contribution to the result. I suggest calculating WDS in such way: Every N amount of xp that player gets in battle gives him 1 WDS point in defence and 3 WDS points in attack basicaly. Only basic xp counts - with no effect of boosts. This will make zrg-capping unprofiable, thus making players gravitate towards actual fighting. All WDS points that a player got in a region during last 10 minutes will be given to that player as a reward if the region is captured or lost. This will make people less likely to abandon fights they loose and fight till the last second to get those extra WDS points and reward attackers more for tense and even fights then for zerg-capping. Also, if this will be not that hard for programmers, make such rewards be even for those who are in a squad. Like their reward are summed and devided equaly amongst all sqadmates. That will make a lot of people, who play not very xp-profitable but vital for a squad roles, very happy. Overall faction WDS income should be benefitial to all players in some way. For example, make milstones: +100 income = -1% grenades cost + 200 income = +1% cert generating rate + 300 income = -1% ESF cost and so on. But don't make any EXP or WDS bonuses, scince factions with high WDS income will be in even more advantage. Such bonuses will make WDS represent not some ghost-like victory somewhere in the fututr, but right-now bonuses worth fighting for. So defending will make more sense then it has now. I strongly belive such changes will make gaeplay more interesting and profitable for everyone.
I appreciate the fact that you actually put thought into your post. Are you tracking SOE's post on upcoming changes to WDS? If not, here is the link: https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/wds-preseason-2-changes-and-feedback.172502/
Great ideas, right now WDS is a ghost-capping zerg of a joke with, in my opinion, little to no real incentive to participate. "My faction endured 6 weeks of ghost-capping!"
In all honesty though, it is really not much different than regular gameplay. The zergs and ghost capping where still going on even before WDS, it's just that more people are doing it now. I've still been in quite a few medium-large engagement where it was a good fight. We won some, we lost some. I like to be a fun ruiner of zergs. Instead of allowing enemy to keep flowing into the bases, trying to farm kills off of them; I go straight for their sundies. For some reason, zergs only like to bring 1-3 sunderers. There also seems to be a large reluctance by most players, to actually seek and destroy sundies. In an assault situation, you can't keep people off of the damn enemy spawn room. But if they are defending, you can't get but a few people to even attempt to find the sundy to kill it. WDS has amplified quite a few problems, one of which is defensive campers camping harder.
It's almost the same, but with different numbers. Though, cheating will become much easier - you can claim\reclaim caprure points on small outposts all day on Amerish with little effort and get insane amount af WDS points in no time.
Yeah attacking Sunderers is what to do, but sometimes I think that there is a reluctance to do that because fighting is fun. I see this a lot actually, the opposition knows that we have only one Sunderer right around a rock and they don't blow it up because they wan't to fight and vise versa.
