This week, The Scrying Pool turns its sight on sPvP with the topic of new game types.

I had this dream the other night of a new PvP game mode that was conquest mode but included flags gained from capturing each point. My dream did an awful job of selling the game mode to my conscious self and I thought it was awful. It did, however, give me this idea for combining traditional capture the flag and king of the hill game types.

The traditional capture the flag game type has one team trying to capture their opponents flag and return it to their own base all while trying to defend their own flag. King of the Hill has players standing in a random control point, the “hill”, gaining points over the duration they remained within the hills. In some versions of King of the Hill, the hill would change to different locations throughout the map, typically changing after about 30 seconds to a different location. At any point there would only be one active hill.

So my game type, called Claim the Hill, has two small teams trying to take control of the hill that changes locations around the map. Instead of gaining points for staying in the hill, however, the hill would function like one of the current conquest nodes where a team must capture the node. Upon capturing the node, a flag for the capturing team is spawned (so if red team captures the point a red flag is spawned).

At this point another node is spawned somewhere else on the map. This is where I would like to test how the flags would play in a match. Originally I thought the flag would just be like capture the flag, where players would need to return it to their home base to score their point. I liked this because it kind of setup this strategy. With one player on their team having to run the flag back, it gives an advantage to the losing team trying to capture the next node (since the opposing team is down the man with the flag). But the losing team could also send a player to harass the flag carrier, slowing them down and possibly allowing the next node and flag to be scored before the previous one. Which I thought sounded like an interesting game type.

Then I thought, what if there was a way to negate the previous flag. Maybe instead of running the flag back to the base, the team must run it to the next node and score the flag while the node is not contested by the other team. Now a player isn’t removed, but if the flag carrier runs slowly like running the orb on the Spirit Watch conquest map, there is still an advantage to the underdogs. To make the next node even more of an important capture, if the red team doesn’t score their flag on the node before blue captures it, then not only does a blue flag spawn but the red team’s flag is destroyed without scoring a point for red.

As I said, I don’t know how well this game type would work without testing it, and I imagine some kind of changes would need to be put in after testing it out. Something else that would need to be discovered by actually playing it is the default team size. Conquest currently sits at 5v5 and I think Claim the Hill would be a little smaller with a 2v2 or 3v3 arena.

What do you think? Would you be interested in a daily PvP game type rotation and would you be interested in playing Claim the Hill? What game types from other games (whether that’s a returning favorite from GW1 or a game type from any game out there) would you like to see make an appearance in Guild Wars 2? Or do you have a unique take on game types that you would like to see tried?

Matt "Mattsta" Adams lost a bet that Ascended armor was coming in next week's patch.

I am really excited about next week's patch. I don't go into Fractals of the Mist too often, but I have generally enjoyed them whenever I do. As someone with a lot of alts, I am most excited for the fractal levels becoming account wide. Mistlock Instabilities also sound really interesting, but the jury is still out on those since we don't know much about them yet.

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