It would potentially work similar to Guild Wars 2, the ease of capture would depend on how high profile the objective is. So similarly like GW2 if you were a single guy you could cap a supply camp solo, but it'd take a lot of time. To cap an out post you'd need at least a squad who knows what they're doing and for a fortress you'd probably need several squads or a strike force.
It was never the intent to stop the coordinated. When I say "Pugs" I mean pick up gamers. So a random assortment of <5 undisciplined players who just showed up should not be able to take a base by themselves. Anything more than that should be able to succeed without much trouble but would be slightly slowed down and would risk setting off the alarm.
Personally I like the idea of NPCs spawning to protect key locations, like outposts, bunkers and fortifications, sparsely populated. Like guards, when players kill them, they have a long delayed respawn timer. These "guardians" of objectives simply stay there for the purpose of preventing ghost capping. Having enough to ward off 1 or 2 players. But not enough to ward off 3 or 4 players who want to go for it. Guild Wars 2 has this system in place in WvW, a guild once it takes control of a tower/keep/castle can then purchase guards to be stationed at the location. This has two positive outcomes, firstly it prevents ghost capping of hard won objectives, secondly it encourages players to look at the battlefield from a logistical standpoint. You get rewarded by distributing resources to the defense of an objective with NPC guards to prevent a ghost cap. You get punished for "zergin'" objectives. Where you take one, then leave it and go to the next, well if you don't put some effort into affording resources to the defense of the objective, your punishment is the risk of opposing faction's players ghost capping an undefended outpost. Early on in WvW in GW2 this happened frequently for the first month of release, people zerged like they did in every previous open world PvP game they played, such as Planetside and DAoC, only to have their hard fought objective ghost capped shortly after. The teams who instead put resources into extra guards held objectives a lot longer. This encouraged players to group together to take objectives. NPC guards can contribute to encouraging healthy social interaction and teamwork to combat them. Without them, people can go on soloist missions, this only encourages player hunting, which in turn encourages ganking which results in griefing. All bad things, it also devalues the point of having objectives if a single player can ghost it. I'd like to see a system like that personally, it was something that really works in an open world game with physical bases as objectives.
Read the last few posts, especially Krage's post at the bottom of page 7. The NPC defenders are not intended to stop the attacking players. The NPCs are meant to slow them down, and more importantly, send out an early faction-wide alarm to the defending faction, so they can start organizing a player-based defense. The additional benefit is adding the gameplay option for small, well-organized attacking squads to try to stealthily kill all the NPC sentries so there's no warning for the defender faction until the attackers are already inside. So if you want to ghostcap, you need to have a smart, organized and intelligent stealth squad to lead the way. Sounds like great gameplay.
Doesn't sound like you're willing to discuss this, but it's cool.. we're each entitled to our different opinions.
I would say in an ideal scenario I would agree with you, however, the only reasonable way to prevent nightcapping/backcapping is to have NPCs protect your bases at least to some degree. The reason why is because if they weren't there it'd force players to sit back and guard uncontested bases which ruins their game experience. Remember this isn't capture the flag or king of an empty hill. When a faction captures a base there should be NPCs of that players faction running around there sending and receiving supplies, sending out patrols and so on to help with immersion.
Immersion is another positive side-effect, even if it isn't an important one. It'd be nice if the facility didn't look completely desolate and abandoned once the battle is over and the defenders move away. Generally the primary purpose, I think, would be for them to send out a faction-wide alert if the enemy breaches the perimeter. Unless the enemy stealthily kills the NPCs.. which turns the unwanted tactic of "ghostcapping" into a positive and challenging activity instead. So any NPC that is purchased by the defenders could potentially send out an early warning alarm, and thus would need to be quickly and quietly killed in the early stages of a well-planned attack... aside from the immersiveness provided by such an NPC. I'm sure you made good points in those threads too, I'm just curious what you said. But I'll try to look for them instead of expecting you to repeat yourself, sorry.
