Guild Wars 2

Excited about the new WvW Abilities, I spent several hours in WvW last night. Unfortunately, the current WXP system rewards players in a way that detrimental to the overall WvW experience.

While the majority of players enjoy zerging, one of the reasons that WvW works so well, and in fact, one of the core design philosophies of GW2 WvW, is that smaller groups and even individuals can contribute and make a difference. This is evident by the supply system, consisting of yaks and camps to be killed/captured, as well as the individual guard posts.

Obviously, it’s going to be hard to balance WXP across diffferent styles of play. How can one system adequately reward zergers, roaming groups, and individual scouts on an even level. It’s impossible to get perfect.

But as it stands right now, it’s so far out of whack that I feel it’s game breaking.

I’d love to see some metrics to back up my assumptions on this, but it seems clear that players have two choices:

1. Run with the zerg, gaining a healthy amount of WXP per hour by tagging as many enemies as possible.

2. Doing stuff outside the zerg, and making a tiny fraction of that amount of WXP per hour.

After playing for several hours, getting into plenty of fights while killing yaks, flipping camps, dodging the enemy zerg and ganking the slow and the overly brave, I had barely made a single World Rank.

During the same time, I had a guildmate in the same BL, who was running with our zerg. He made it to level 6 World Rank in the same amount of time. Meaning he made more than five times as much WXP by just running with the zerg.

And in this case, the zerg was running around alot and not engaged in any long battles. I can only imagine what the difference would be like then?

Proposed Solutions:

1. Divide the amount of WXP given out for each enemy defeat by the number of people receiving credit. (or the num_attackers)

2. Divide the amount of WXP awarded by the number of friendly players in the area.

I think the second is the way to go. I hate thieves as much as the next guy, but it seems troublesome that they get the same amount of credit for a solo kill that someone in the zerg gets for every person they happen to tickle with an AE in a large battle.

I have no way to judge this, having not participated and mostly avoiding WvW even before this patch, but that does seem reasonable based on the provided situations.