The way the system works now is: Enter zone, secure BO’s, get supplies, Keep level up, siege, win/lose, repeat.
The problems stated: zones taking too long, players playing without purpose, lack of motivation, attacking side is at a disadvantage. Did I miss anything?
Some facts: pugs usually tend to play with the mentality of winning the zone, now if they are using all the tools they have at their disposal is not known. Making a premade doesn’t mean confirming and becoming an elitist. Simply it means working together to a common goal. Elitists exist yes, but every premade is not an elitist.
Most premades of guilds or friend groups work together with the goal of getting Phat loot, just having fun in unfavorable encounters, or fighting to win a losing battle until it’s won then switching sides to repeat that. Now the conflict between pugs and premades comes from this, a conflict of interests.
Pugs want the gold bag (essentially) while premades want to gear their characters and have fun with the community they know. This is fine as this is the same reason why people do pve vs pvp. They all want different things.
Now I think a good remedy for the problem is where you get the phat loots from. Most premades enjoy just running around killing people for purple rain and medals, as stated before. This is because it’s the most effective way to climb without wasting time.
Now if you made it so roaming around killing people helped the zone in anyway it might be a different story but most people just respawn and eventually get to where they’re going (a keep or BO) and help defend it.
Anyway I’m falling off into tangents. If defending BOs got similar renown gains as a roam group you would expect to see premade 6’s doing that for the min(effort) max(reward) mentality that is common amongs elitist players. A good population of players come from returning live players who were apart of guilds and had some organization. They want to play the game well and they want to enjoy absolute domination, some of these players think dying once is the end of the world. It’s kind of sad but they do everything in their power to prevent that, and have a lot of knowledge to actually make that a reality. Changing up the game on these players might not be the smartest of actions since theyre a little bit stuck in there ways but it could cause good changes to the zone. While still given them an environment to preform in and prove themselves. It might even elicit different comps that are better for defending even for the offensive side.
Some examples: holding a BO gets you x amount of renown per minute and x medallions (as associated with your RR- officer/conq/vanq). Optional: The rr bonus can increase to incentivize holding BOs for a longer time. After 5 minutes x renown becomes x + (x *.75). So if x=1000 you get 1000 renown per minute, then on your 5th minute you get 1750 until you get another boost at 10 minutes, then 20? Idk. Just numbers to show examples not suggested values. Note that if the values are too high you’d have to make keeps more enticing so people decide to attack in the 1st place. Something like while a keep is lit for siege all players attacking get y renown per minute.
Holding BO’s gives your zone advantages:
maybe stats
maybe siege weapon hp/atk power increase
keep upgrades?
taking away privileges from the other realm
when the enemy holds one BO you can’t use the front door of your keep
oil has a longer CD
rams hit harder.
Who knows.
Something to help pugs pug - Meaning the uncoordinated mass of players have an easier time and mistakes are more forgiving.
When 1 BO is held you get bonus a. When 2 are held you get bonus a and b. Etc. This gives incentive to hold more than one, and spices things up.
Now a huge concern is what’s stopping pug war bands from just rolling through BOs wiping the people? Absolutely nothing but hopefully they will be attacking a keep while you’re trying to stack BO “enhancements” is what I’ll call it.
Maybe have some WE WH scouts to give you information if you need to evacuate the BO instead of getting wiped. Who knows.
This is a mixture of that guys heal debuff idea and a few suggestions from the thread and a few of my own I guess. It’s just an idea, sorry if you don’t like it.