Guilds Rural Player Discrimination Aka How To Fix Sniping

Aight so yall remember that last thread. Thanks to the Content Team listening that was resolved quite neatly, which is why we are gonna build on this newfound trust and try it again!!

As Wynncraft has grown in popularity, the guild community has increased in size as well. In today's competitive scene, a single guild, taking at minimum 2 minutes to claim a territory that has a non-zero defence, is worthless in large guild wars. Therefore, the fate of the entire guild community falls onto a mechanic called "sniping", which is completely and utterly broken, both in game design, and in breaking the server itself. In this thread I'll explain what sniping is, and my solution on how to patch it. The solution isn't perfect, but it would be an easy implementation that significantly improves things till a proper rework can be released.

So any territory taken has a 180 second grace period timer. After that, whoever is first to issue a /gu attack or click the respective banner button gets to either confirm the attack, or instantly takes the territory in case there are no mobs defending.
On paper there's no problem with that. However, when an alliance defends against a bigger-scale raid (which, given guild history is a pretty common scenario) a lot of guilds will resort to territory feeding.
By not defending a territory your guild reclaims, the intended owner can instantly take it back without having to go into war. It's most frequently used between allies or subs to keep an area under a main guild's control.

That mechanic is generally seen as a counter-balance to a war system that inherently favours the attacker, as one guild would by default always lose against multiple attackers, even given a much higher count of online members.
Issues arise when multiple guilds try to attack an undefended territory at the same time, as it ends up becoming a pure ping & click-rate gamble. To make matters worse, on a territory with a banner one can spam numpad buttons while hovering over the attack option to send upwards of 400 /gu attack commands in a second when quick enough. Trying to get a territory this way is referred to as "sniping".


Not only does that make bigger wars even less fun than they already are given various other glitches and repetitive gameplay (topic for another thread), not even the server seems to keep up properly.

While, as a rule of thumb, the last guild displayed gets it, the banner and display often desync showing two different guilds afterwards. The API gets messed up so bad, you might end up taking territories from yourself.

This design flaw breaks one of the few competitive elements in guild wars entirely, usually awarding territories to those with the best location and ping.

Now, how does one go about fixing this issue? The problem is that, without a full war rework, most "fixes" will at best minimize the odds of the problematic scenario occurring. While discussing this topic with several other guild community members we've found an option to cut short the territory cooldown to be the best solution: /gu cede

Sample scenario: Fox takes a Light Forest territory and shortly after uses /gu cede while standing within the respective territory. That would instantly set the grace period timer to 0, allowing everyone to take it as if it ran out naturally. That way, the guild ceding the territory can coordinate with the intended receiver and get people ready to take it the moment it's activated, adding back some strategy to feeding while minimizing the odds of multiple players sniping.
To balance things out a bit, the remaining cooldown would carry over to allow the attacking side to take it back earlier should they not manage to intercept it. Of course they can still spam attack and use player ghosts to figure out if someone is getting ready to claim a ceded territory, hopefully making for a few more sophisticated mindgames.

In the end it's not a perfect solution, but one that requires minimal dev input till a proper rework can be put into place.

 

not the best solution admittedly but pretty good considering we wont be getting a revamp that would be appropriate for something bigger anytime soon, neat work

also the whole carryover part of the time lost by ceding is a nice touch for balance purposes

 

Another one

 

Yea this is a problem, please fix this.

 

I think this change would be good because rather than giving an overwhelming advantage to players sniping territories over other players because of where they live and nothing else, it equalizes it by giving a better, well coordinated defense/offense a chance at fighting back.

 

I completely agree with this. This system is biased towards people with good ping, so people (like me) who have bad wifi and/or live far away from a proxy are at a severe disadvantage. That's not really fair at all. Also, it would fix all the glitches displaying who owns the territory. Please fix :(

 

yea pls quickly fix it thanks <3

 

Yeet these squares!

 

anything that makes wars more fun is a win in my book

 

When guild wars end up falling to someone's ping and location, you know guilds need a rework. The current system is just so irreparably broken that there will always be new flaws found in the ancient code, and guild wars (at least from a gameplay perspective) keep becoming less and less fun than they already are.

I agree with this change as it will help contribute to fixing the problem until the entire guild system can be reworked in hopefully one hundred years. It will also make warring more fun and increase the mind game aspect of it.

 

I knew you were making a thread about a solution to this, but I didn't know what the solution was going to be, this is pretty epic ngl. I like how it would make it so the new owner of the territory is determined by strategy rather than the loser that lives closest to Wynncraft's house

 

This is interesting, but what would /gu cede just give up the territory entirely or just make it attackable?? And if you gave up the territory entirely by doing /gu and nobody was there to attack it, would the territory remain without a guild that owns it???

 

i agree im fairly new to warring but have been in plenty of snipe wars. pls fix so we can y e Ee t thE se swq Uar Es

 

Nope, perhaps "cede" is a bad word to use. Doing the command simply reduces the cooldown in the territory you are standing on to 0 at that moment (obviously,, only the guild that has the territory can use the command, and it would be captain+ only). Therefore, instead of every territory having a cooldown of 180 seconds, a guild has the option to end that cooldown early.

 

sounds like a good way to lopsidedly benefit one particular mapholding alliance.,.. and also make subguild use more chaotic in general.

As well as quicken the pace of the already unstable war system that can barely handle the rate of attacks we get to as is. There wre multitiple war glitches occuring today. Changing anything coding wise about the guild system is unwise when the current code can't even handle a real multi-dozen guild showdown. It's far from time for any internal systems that would quicken the pace of guild warring to be changed.

 

As an outsider, this is absolutely perfect. I love warring, but a very important issue with wars is stated above. This is an awesome fix to a game braking issue and I would love to see it introduced.

 

I like this idea and I think this would hold us off for a while until they can give us a revamp we deserve :)

 

as a 200-300ping asian I can't still snipe 1 0 mob terrs help I only have 1.5k wars because lag keeps killimmg me stonks

 

You do realize that over half the war/API glitches today were due to the sniping system correct? Obviously there is a problem with starting servers as well, but honestly wynn has been doing a really good job at keeping up with our attacks.

 

Just remove sniping :D Or just fix wars? But that's maybe asking too much eh?