Ah Stonetroll Crossing, we’ve never really been friends. Your awkward King of the Hill, Capture the Flag, Base-running mechanic is one of the worst. Perhaps better if the map functioned properly and showed where my group and/or the flag runner is. Perhaps if the capture points opened up one after another, funneling people to a fight, instead of running in a big goddamn circle, or going to the top of the hill… again.

Either way, STC, please promptly cut your wrists open and bleed to death while engulfed in flames. No one likes you, you’re stupid and ugly.

 
Now, in the event we ever have the pleasure of dry humping this flame scarred corpse of a scenario again, maybe we can at least make it somewhat pleasureable. So here’s the lube.

Personally, I enjoy the King of the Hill mechanic. There’s not a lot of GOOD scenarios that know how to do it. So here’s the deal, change the central point to reward each realm every 10 seconds for a player standing on the hill. This means 12 players would have to hold the hill for a solid ~6m40s to win the scenario. Fighting on top of the hill is so damn nerve wracking with all the punts going back and forth, limited LoS, and an amount of space that limits how much AoE healing (and damage!) can be done. All too often one side will wipe the other, grab the flag and run along. When the other team respawns, the map is fubar’d, and the part appears to still be on top the hill. The entire respawned team runs right back up the hill, and usually down the other side. Just make the hill the main objective!

Now, the secondary objectives should enhance and directly affect the primary objective. At each spawn during the live event there was a box of munitions to throw at the trolls on the ledges. Personally, this was the least intriguing and engaging Live Event tasks I’ve seen yet. One-shotting PvE mobs during a PvP battle is just… out of place. I could toss any amount of more flavorful words there, but I’m feeling a bit calmer today. Now, to use this idea, change the munitions to some kind of bait or bribe. Run four pieces to a point, and the trolls will start to target a section of the hill with a medium AoE knockback once every 30s. Capture all three points for 30s and the hill explodes and ejects EVERYONE off the sides, as per a normal flag reset. Of course, the PvE knockbacks would ignore immunity.

Now you have a scenario with a single main objective full of crazy, haphazardous, stressful fighting. Three secondary objectives that scatter your enemies and give a legitimate chance of overtaking an entrenched enemy. Turn off points for kills, and you have at BARE MINIMUM 6m40s of scenario insanity. Alas, it’s time to return to reality…

We’ve had these Weekend Warfronts for a couple of months now, revisiting a lot of scenarios over that time period. There’s never been any drastic changes like the one briefly outlined. I’ve pretty much given up hope that we’ll see anything like it either. I know city siege changes took a lot of development resources, but look at the rewards. Heal pot, DoT pot, Emblem. Never changed even though there’s been tons of suggestions for something better. Weekend Warfronts appear to be something that works ‘good enough’ and are unlikely to change significantly in the forseeable future. It’s a shame too, especially after all the love they had for bringing out the Ironclad. Pretty sure the playerbase would give up a vital organ or two for some real shuffling of scenarios at this point.