Guild Wars 2

I was watching a video today with some of the Devs, and they basically implied when they are thinking about rewards and item distribution for various incentives, they basically have to consult somebody like an econimist, or item/reward guys.

This got me thinking, it essentially means that these developers are essentially in charge of how rewards and item distribution, etc is handled.

So then the question is, what is your vision of a good balance? How do you approach that balance? Do you favor skill, rarity, effort, ingenuity etc in what decides reward.

My interpretation is that right now, the game is more focused on either effort, through time spent farming, or ingenuity in terms of capitilizing on the market. IE most of the economy of rewards are based on efficient production of high value items, and the ability to react to and anticipate trends.

also what do you feel is a good amount of energy that should be required to achieve low end, mid end and high end rewards, do you feel this should be extremely curved, or more linear in relation.

As for the other players this is for you too, what do you think would be some good reward metrics and what should be the major factors etc

Item distribution should be tiered

Legendaries should be rewarded to the least amount of people while whites rewarded to the most, which is how it works in this game.

How are they rewarded? Time, gold and skill, with heavy emphasis on the former two.

Vol.5241:

Item distribution should be tiered

Legendaries should be rewarded to the least amount of people while whites rewarded to the most, which is how it works in this game.

How are they rewarded? Time, gold and skill, with heavy emphasis on the former two.

Why is skill less worthwhile of a measure than time or gold. Why is gold a top tier method for deciding item distribution, when the game doesnt really reward gold that much for regular play, or high end play? why is luck higher than effort?

Also, should things really distributed in teirs, with forced rarities? If you have strong mechanics behind difficulty, time, skill and even luck deciding items, why does there need to be forced limits on items.

this aside, what im kind of asking, is it essentially seems like the game design team dont really get to decide how much of a reward activities can give. Not just precursors, but everything in the game, even spvp rewards are essentially decided by items distro people/economists/etc You can be fairly certain that how much items are required for ascended backpieces was decided here, as well as what type of loot champions can drop. What type of items dungeons can give, and how much of them.

So what im getting at, is what is their vision for item distribution since they are controling it. It seems they prefer a production line style for item creation. IE most activities reward similar level of small value items, the distribution of good items is based on rng, which amounts to the same thing, IE overall, a rare drop balances out to, generally not much in terms of how much you earn. Difficulty also plays in very little, you essentially get about the same level of drops in a dungeon as doing the easiest kill massive amounts of monsters dynamic event (actually you generally get more doing such events)

Then for higher tier items, its usually about putting these tiny items together. put 20 in mf maybe get 1 rare, craft using mats you only get by breaking down 20 trash items.
put 250 rare drops to get an ascended. etc.

My guess is that their plan is essentially to be a pyramid of time spent with time measured primarily as the production of gold, and the TP one of the main means of getting around this(Ie not having to spend 300 hours obtaining something)

however, if this is the case i think they need to be more dynamic in their approach. monetary value will be determined by the market regardless, its fine to set a bottom for items value by raw production and brute force creation, but There should be some things that are awarded primarily due to adventure, or difficulty, not every activity should boil down to the same thing.

For example, charged lodestones, the main method of obtaining them requires an event, that spawns high level sparks, but the rewarding of these items for the timed farmed, is generally less or similar to just grinding in Orr, so essentially this special activity unlock, is not really giving you a better way of obtaining anything, also the means of obtaining it is fairly tedious.

Essentially you can manage the economy with just some simple metrics that boil down to gold value per hour earned for all activities, then make all items of higher desire require more gold/value per hour, but that cripples the world.

it means, that the guys in charge of rewards will not allow difficulty, adventure, etc to signifigantly impact what type of items you get. This means you will never get much more for delving into the hidden area no one found, or beating the monster no one has beaten. Surviving wave after wave of monsters and beating a champion without dying, than you would get spamming AOE at shelters gate or similar.

It suggests that no matter what cool content the other developers create, nothing will ever be more rewarding than the straight up focused farming because all methods of obtaining value/hr should be roughly similar regardless of skill, knowledge, difficulty and even rarity of the circumstances that lead to them

Problem with rewarding players purely with skill is that it’s hard to enforce rarity based on challenges based on purely skill.

Of course, you CAN have rewards that reward skill, but it’s gonna be common as heck. Because whatever Anet designs, it’s either gonna be uber hard or easy enough that half the population can do it. If it’s uber hard, it becomes incredibly unfair to those who lack skill. What if you’re just not that good at jumping puzzles? What if your profession is just bad at soloing? And of course, on the flipside, if it’s doable by the majority of the population, it loses its “rare” status.

Again, not saying they shouldn’t. I personally think that completing all jumping puzzles should let you get a token or something that you can trade in for a “Jumping puzzle” themed skin. Nothing too fancy, but still a nice reward for those who love JPs.

So in order to enforce rarity, you have to introduce time/luck into the equation. Because in the end, time/luck is “fair.” Everyone can choose to invest more time. Everyone has a fair shot at getting something.

Like for example, Arah. It’s a pretty hard dungeon, requires a lot of skill to do, but Arah armor sets are VERY rare in this game. If you got the full armor set in just one run (pure skill) then that armor set would not be as rare. But since getting that armor set takes both skill AND time, it’s incredibly rare.

People in this forum like to talk about skill a lot. “Skill should be rewarded, blah blah blah.” While it’ll be nice, in a game it’s just incredibly hard to come up with metrics of “skill” that’s fair and can’t be gamed. So Anet uses time and luck to enforce rarity of items.

Ursan.7846:

Problem with rewarding players purely with skill is that it’s hard to enforce rarity based on challenges based on purely skill.

Of course, you CAN have rewards that reward skill, but it’s gonna be common as heck. Because whatever Anet designs, it’s either gonna be uber hard or easy enough that half the population can do it. If it’s uber hard, it becomes incredibly unfair to those who lack skill. What if you’re just not that good at jumping puzzles? What if your profession is just bad at soloing? And of course, on the flipside, if it’s doable by the majority of the population, it loses its “rare” status.

Again, not saying they shouldn’t. I personally think that completing all jumping puzzles should let you get a token or something that you can trade in for a “Jumping puzzle” themed skin. Nothing too fancy, but still a nice reward for those who love JPs.

So in order to enforce rarity, you have to introduce time/luck into the equation. Because in the end, time/luck is “fair.” Everyone can choose to invest more time. Everyone has a fair shot at getting something.

Like for example, Arah. It’s a pretty hard dungeon, requires a lot of skill to do, but Arah armor sets are VERY rare in this game. If you got the full armor set in just one run (pure skill) then that armor set would not be as rare. But since getting that armor set takes both skill AND time, it’s incredibly rare.

People in this forum like to talk about skill a lot. “Skill should be rewarded, blah blah blah.” While it’ll be nice, in a game it’s just incredibly hard to come up with metrics of “skill” that’s fair and can’t be gamed. So Anet uses time and luck to enforce rarity of items.

^

It’s very hard to design a system based on skill while maintaining item rarity.

How exactly do you determine ‘skill’ in an MMO? And how do you program the game to properly recognize those skills and prevent exploits?

It doesnt have to be just about rewarding skill, but really everything should not give you the same reward. What is the benefit for playing well or achieving greatness, how does the reward system reinforce adventuring or fighting monsters.
The current rewards dont, and they cant. The people in charge of items decided that they want the highest reward (in value per hour) from normal play to come from repetitive simple activities.
look at jumping puzzles, they may an hour to complete, and you can only do them once a day, but the big chest reward at the end gives the equivalent of 1/2 of one kill lots of monsters dynamic event.

Fighting a dragon, though it can only happen once every few hours, also gives less.

fighting a champion, who takes 5 minutes to kill gives less than fighting 10 nobody enemies.

this is all because the design bias is towards controling the value per hour to be virtually the same for all tasks.

I dont see how they can every create the reward level necessary with this mentality. Im not saying it needs to be completely skill based, but there has to be incentives to play well, and gains for skill or intellegence or something. There is no point to having the out of the way hidden behind a wall treasure chest if it gives less than killing 2 monsters.
If its not money, or items, it needs to be something else, maybe they need to bring back the skill system because at least that gave you something to hunt, and some reason to delve into the secrets of the game.
If the only type of smart non repetive play that is rewarded is playing the TP/merchanting you will lose a lot of players who want an action adventure based game.

Vol.5241:

^

It’s very hard to design a system based on skill while maintaining item rarity.

How exactly do you determine ‘skill’ in an MMO? And how do you program the game to properly recognize those skills and prevent exploits?

Rarity is highly overated in terms of game enjoyment. Milestones on the other hand are very important. I contend that forced rarity is bad in conjunction with milestones.
You dont have a lottery to determine who plays in the playoffs, it would discourage players of the sport.

In all honesty it doesnt matter if everyone has something if you made the path to getting it challenging/fun/rewarding.

For example phantasy star online,
challenge modehas many super rare drop items, it was pure luck whether you obtainined them, and pretty low chances over all. But to me, the best thing they added to that game was challenge mode. It was basically a mode where you started off each level with predetermined items, level, stats, and basically had to beat the level with whatever you could find. Monster spawns were somewhat randomized, and even what skills and abilities you had varied every time you played. the goal was to beat all of these levels in under a certain time limit. (i think it was 4 hours for all the levels combined) If you succeeded at this, you could choose one item, which basically had a rare skin from a list of rare weapon skins, you could name it, and while these weapons seemed weaker, you could upgrade them to become some of the strongest weapons in the game. IMO it was the best content and the most rewarding they ever added. I had a certain level a respect for every s rank weapon user, because i know they had achieved a certain level of mastery in the game. But make no mistake, it wasnt super rare, many many people got these weapons, many people made multiple charachters to keep getting them, but every one who had one basically earned it (non tradeable). And difficulty wise, it was simply the hardest thing in the game, (not to say impossible by any means)
point being it didnt have to be rare to be prestigous, or desired, it just had to be challenging and fun to obtain, and worthwhile. Now they could have given it for killing farming for 1000 hours, but that would have been less worthwhile and enjoyable.

figuring out the item reward level needs to not be just about the bottom line of controling supply, limiting volatility, and meeting metrics on value per hour. It needs to be about goals, milestones, and playing the game well, or at least playing the game presented. Honestly in many respects GW1 had this better, sure you could farm a lot, but the highest value in earning took you to the most dangerous and hard to farm places.(mostly) and generally required you to have done most of the content in that campaign, and display more mastery of the game than other lower places.

right now the vision seems to be that these type of activities are really not comparatively rewarding, and this is not really an error, this is the plan of specific people who have reasoned and decided this is the way things should be distributed.

Ultimately, any “skill” reward system ends up conflicting with corporate sales goals. GW2 is designed to be a mass market game. The reality is that 50% of players are below the median skill level. Any content that is awarded based on “skill” will either be extremely common or limited to an extremely small subset of the game’s population. In the case of the former, the content either is too common to carry any meaning (think average level 80 exotics right now) or is very discouraging to those players unable to attain it (think the constant complaints about ascended items, especially prior to the laurel system). In the case of the latter, great expense and a lot of developer time and effort must be devoted to an entire system that only a very small percentage of the game’s population will ever see. Since GW2 is intended as a mass market, and not a niche game, that goes very strongly against the development direction and principles that Anet has pursued.

Syeria.4812:

Ultimately, any “skill” reward system ends up conflicting with corporate sales goals. GW2 is designed to be a mass market game. The reality is that 50% of players are below the median skill level. Any content that is awarded based on “skill” will either be extremely common or limited to an extremely small subset of the game’s population. In the case of the former, the content either is too common to carry any meaning (think average level 80 exotics right now) or is very discouraging to those players unable to attain it (think the constant complaints about ascended items, especially prior to the laurel system). In the case of the latter, great expense and a lot of developer time and effort must be devoted to an entire system that only a very small percentage of the game’s population will ever see. Since GW2 is intended as a mass market, and not a niche game, that goes very strongly against the development direction and principles that Anet has pursued.

heres the real key, people want to feel appropriately rewarded for their efforts, they also want to see progress.
people really dont expect something for nothing, or expect to recieve the best rewards easily, as long as they do feel rewarded appropriately for the task

The bias of the economy development guys seems to be to pay everyone minimum wage, regardless of how difficult, how intelligent, or what the task the most you should be able to earn doing it is set. even worse, the most difficult, requiring knowledge skills, etc tasks tend to pay the least (barring high end fractals, maybe but im guessing it is still around 5g an hour there).

So why did they make this so unrewarding? because even though it is difficult, if the jps (for ex) all gave consistent good rewards, say 2 rares, they are afraid everyone would do them, back to back, everyday.

It makes sense, if your goal is to create an extremely stable TP, but it speaks really badly for what the other devs can do with the content they add, because it essentially means, they can never have anything, no matter how difficult, whether it happens rarely, requires knowledge or requires you to have done X Y and Z that can actually be any more rewarding than spam killing enemies in a high volume enemy area.

Now the other problem with this whole 1 value per hour for all activities, or less, is the TP breaks this rule, the TP is the only place where you can earn a substantial amount more per hour, not only that, but up to a point, having more money available allows you to make more money(not as high as irl)

so what you end up getting is this high inflation of highly desired goods, because the highly desired goods cost the most, and so the people with the most money set the prices. And there is an increasing gap in wealth between the rich and poor, hence, hence this will only get worse with time.

So what this reward system creates, you have to work longer at repetive easy tasks in order to compete for high end items with people who can make 4-20 times what you can make in the same time frame. This is set in stone by the current system, it will always be the case as long as the design philosophy remains the same, its an equation, and it will follow the curve.

Now the balance to this might be if everyone entered the TP, and played economically, but thats just not a realistic expectation for what is primarily supposed to be an adventure game. It also makes all of the other parts of the game unfullfilling.

rewards need to be more dynamic based on various factors, it doesnt have to be insanely better, but you should never feel like succeeding at high end content is a waste of time in terms of achieving endgame goals.

“The bias of the economy development guys seems to be to pay everyone minimum wage, regardless of how difficult, how intelligent, or what the task the most you should be able to earn doing it is set. even worse, the most difficult, requiring knowledge skills, etc tasks tend to pay the least (barring high end fractals, maybe but im guessing it is still around 5g an hour there).”

The market is willing to pay you minimum wage if you refuse to put in the effort to work hard for your money.

Run one dungeon per day? Casually farm for 10 minutes? You won’t be rewarded as much as that guy who puts in 4 hours a day doing hardcore farming

I feel you have a pretty different idea of what “difficult” is. Fighting dragons is not difficult. Nor is doing JPs, or killing champion mobs.

The most difficult content in this game currently are dungeons and fractals. They have many one-shot mechanics, as well as sequences which requires teamwork and coordination.

And players are well compensated for it, IMO.

Ursan.7846:

I feel you have a pretty different idea of what “difficult” is. Fighting dragons is not difficult. Nor is doing JPs, or killing champion mobs.

The most difficult content in this game currently are dungeons and fractals. They have many one-shot mechanics, as well as sequences which requires teamwork and coordination.

And players are well compensated for it, IMO.

Arah P4

shudders

Vol.5241:

Ursan.7846:

I feel you have a pretty different idea of what “difficult” is. Fighting dragons is not difficult. Nor is doing JPs, or killing champion mobs.

The most difficult content in this game currently are dungeons and fractals. They have many one-shot mechanics, as well as sequences which requires teamwork and coordination.

And players are well compensated for it, IMO.

Arah P4

shudders

I have so much respect for people who wear full Arah gear, more than so with people with Legendaries some times. I myself worked my kitten off for the Arah scepter/footgear (which of course no one notices).

Which is why I wish Legendaries included Dungeon Master, or something related to it, on top of everything else. That’s not even THAT hard, but it’s something. Oh well.

Ursan.7846:

I feel you have a pretty different idea of what “difficult” is. Fighting dragons is not difficult. Nor is doing JPs, or killing champion mobs.

The most difficult content in this game currently are dungeons and fractals. They have many one-shot mechanics, as well as sequences which requires teamwork and coordination.

And players are well compensated for it, IMO.

dungeons really dont compensate you any better than farming events in ORR, its at least competitive though.
fractals, at high levels may be rewarding, for me its generally similar to farming in ORR, though i have had some good runs here and there.

i use jumping puzzles as an example because it is a good midrange activity, but its rewards are way worse than probably, just killing random enemies even with no event going on. Some of the JPs are also fairly time consuming, difficult to get to, and more limited in how often you can get anything than a fractal.

They have some beautiful environments, and well thought out and designed mechanics, however if you have any actual goal, you should never do any jumping puzzle except the WvWvW one.

Its fine to say killing champions is not difficult, but is it more difficult than doing the tar elemental event, shelter, pentinent, jofast, or plinx? than why are all those things more rewarding?

I think fractals has a good mechanic, difficulty and reward scaling, with a decent chance of cool stuff, but its the only thing like that in the game.

The Devs said they wanted to improve the open world, but no matter what they do, if the itemization continues to be biased towards uniform value gained, with even less given for more difficult/rare/hidden/knowledge/many condition required actvities then no matter what they do the open world will always be stale. Much of the content is ignored because it doesnt reward you.

Vol.5241:

“The bias of the economy development guys seems to be to pay everyone minimum wage, regardless of how difficult, how intelligent, or what the task the most you should be able to earn doing it is set. even worse, the most difficult, requiring knowledge skills, etc tasks tend to pay the least (barring high end fractals, maybe but im guessing it is still around 5g an hour there).”

The market is willing to pay you minimum wage if you refuse to put in the effort to work hard for your money.

Run one dungeon per day? Casually farm for 10 minutes? You won’t be rewarded as much as that guy who puts in 4 hours a day doing hardcore farming

you are more focused on being hardcore than designing a fun game. Im not saying the dude who plays 4 hours shouldnt get more, but why should the dude who spends 4 hours running between pentinent shelter with an occaisonal jofast get substantially more than the guy who spent 4 hours exploring hidden caves with champions and packs of murrows in a tight space.

also think, people working on interesting new challenging content now, who will do it, if its harder than farming pentinent/shelter/jofast, but rewards less?

Lets say they add some dynamic events the scale better, and have enemies in varied packs with much better AI scattered through out the world, you have hunt them and they frequent out of the way hard to reach places. Now, would anyone do it with the current reward systems? Its harder to get to, rarer, and more difficult, and it awards less or the same as doing spam events.

This is the current design bias, because some of this content does exist, and no one does it, primarily because it simply isnt worth it. hardcore or not hardcore, the current itemization is not encouraging the type of gameplay the world seemed to be designed to create.

phys.7689:

dungeons really dont compensate you any better than farming events in ORR, its at least competitive though.

Dungeons give you access to exclusive dungeon armor/weapon skins.
Dungeons have high guarenteed gold drops from bosses/completion.
Higher drop rates for rares/exotics compared to open world. Though this is based on personal experience, can’t say for sure.

Ursan.7846:

phys.7689:

dungeons really dont compensate you any better than farming events in ORR, its at least competitive though.

Dungeons give you access to exclusive dungeon armor/weapon skins.
Dungeons have high guarenteed gold drops from bosses/completion.
Higher drop rates for rares/exotics compared to open world. Though this is based on personal experience, can’t say for sure.

in my experience i make generally less doing dungeons (not counting the tokens being turned into gold) though i can see that with a little luck you make more. Farming events in ORR though pays a lot, in 2 events you probably earned more in straight up gold, it also rewards Magic Find, and gold find builds/foods at much greater rate due to the shear number of difference in the amounts of enemies you kill.

Risk vs. Reward

This needs to be always balanced. However, how this is perceived depends on which angle it is observed from. It all comes down to statistics and distribution of data (in this case game rewards) – i.e. mean, average, outliers, confidence interval etc. The problem here is that we, the players, do not have all of the data to accurately determine whether Risk vs. Reward is balanced. We normaly take one aspect of this and try to argue its merit, however, tend to omit other things that are crucial to seeing “the bigger picture”.

Then there is the “enjoyment” factor in all of this. The risks and concurently rewards should be fun and enjoyable with respect to gaming, however, if generally this is not then it will make it unbalanced. Currently, IMO, several aspects of the game (i.e. DR/RNG/TP) are skewing the Risk vs. Reward system. How? IMO, there is too much emphasis placed on players to use TP than move around the game to gain the rewards. Whether this was deliberatre or not is another thing.

What ANet should do, IMO, is add incentive for players to not use the TP and be less “manipulated” by RNG/DR.