Guild Wars 2

No, I’m not talking about the gift boxes you get (two level 80 Medium and one Light Armours for a Guardian… Yay?), that’s a well-worn topic. They are automatic rewards anyway. What I am talking about are the rewards you can choose. Three different WvW Siege Blueprints.

This was my first time finishing the Personal Story, so maybe it’s a random selection of items and different characters will get different choices… but I don’t know. It certainly seems like “Congratulations! You’ve finished the PvE story, but have you tried out WvW? Here’s some Blueprints, get out there and defend your Borderland!”. I’m not against that at all, though I know some people are.

These are the most unfair rewards I have seen anywhere in the game.

I do play WvW and I enjoy it, most of the time. I’m all for encouraging more people to get out there. Because I play WvW I know the worth of Blueprints and this is what makes them so extremely unfair. The selection I got was something along the lines of two Flame Rams, two Catapults or one Alpha Siege Golem. WTF?

Even if I’m mis-remembering exactly what the choices were (was there a fourth choice? A Trebuchet?), it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Siege Golems cost 1 Gold to purchase while the other selections cost a trivial amount. Two Flame Rams, at 6 Silver each, are not an equivalent reward to one Alpha Siege Golem. Fifteen Flame Rams are not equivalent. Maybe a Trebuchet was one of the rewards, but if it was there was only one or two of them… not the four that you would need to be an equivalent value.

Again, I play WvW so I know what these things are worth and chose the Siege Golem. But if the intent is to get people into WvW then those people, by default, do not know what the value of these items are. They are being given a choice between items of vastly different value. It’s like giving you the choice between an Orange, Yellow, Green and Blue item when the player doesn’t know the difference between them.

Why is there even a choice? Everyone who plays WvW is going to take the Siege Golem anyway. Those who have no intention of doing so are just going to destroy the Blueprint. And those that are lured into the Borderlands for the first time… well bringing a Flame Ram when they could contribute a Golem just doesn’t compare.