Guild Wars 2

When a server is losing significantly in WvW, its people stop queuing. When there is no competition, WvW is boring. It’s a loss for everyone.

How do we encourage losing servers to keep playing?

People play WvW for a number or reasons. Here’s a few;

• Fun
• Challenge
• Leveling
• Rewards (items, karma, etc.)

People will also not play for a number of reasons, but this thread is only about one:

• When losing, rewards are not worth the effort and time.

Rewards are what drive people to play and win. In real-life sports you would not have many participants if the rewards were not outstanding.

I believe WvW needs two new reward systems:

• GREATER REWARDS NVERSELY PROPORTIONAL TO THE WINNING SERVER’S SCORE.
  
  Scaled rewards for losing servers would motivate players to queue and play.
  
  Given these scores:
  
  Server A = 120000
  Server B = 90000
  Server C = 45000
  
  Server A, the winning server, will have no change in rewards. Their rewards will be normal.
  
  Server B and Server C will have greater rewards, scaled by how far they are from Server A’s score.
  
  What are the greater rewards? They could be anything or everything. Increased karma from WvW events (e.g. capturing or defending a tower). Loot bags could have more badges and items. Loot bags could have a higher drop frequency. Siege engines could cost less supplies to make.
  
  The scaled rewards would require much testing and tweaking to ensure balance and not encourage exploiting, such as losing a tower intentionally to recapture it for min/max karma gain. Diminishing returns on a timer would easily solve most cases.

• MATCH COMPLETION REWARDS
  
  Like most real-life sports, teams are rewarded upon match end. Currently there is no reward when a match finishes on Friday. There should be scaling rewards for every server based on placement and tier.
  
  However controversial, I believe match completion rewards should only be given to those who actually participated in WvW for that match. You would expect the same from real-life sports. This goes a long way to prevent people from transferring to a server that wins all the time simply to reap the Friday rewards. Participation could be an easily-obtained metric, such as participating at least 1 hour of WvW during the match, or merely completing the WvW daily at least once during the match. Alternatively, the match completion rewards could be scaled per player based on their participation.
  
  The match completion rewards could be a massive lump of karma, experience, skill points, badges, or even gold. They could be a chest with scaled rewards like how they are for sPvP tournaments.
  
  I believe match completion rewards are extremely vital for the long-term success of WvW. Currently there isn’t a great sense of accomplishment come Friday resets.

What would prevent a server that’s really good from taking the first day of WvW off and letting everything be captured and then coming back on non-peak hours and stealing everything back? In that scenario the game would be rewarding people for not actually playing the game.

Me, I’d like to see them do something like have greater rewards for people playing in smaller groups in an effort to break up the constant zergs but doing so would reward people for not playing with others or would breed a classic mmo environment where you’re competing with people you shouldn’t be.

What would prevent a server that’s really good from taking the first day of WvW off and letting everything be captured and then coming back on non-peak hours and stealing everything back? In that scenario the game would be rewarding people for not actually playing the game.

I’m not sure this would ever happen. We’re talking about a few servers that are capable of such server-wide organization that they could intentionally throw a day or two. For example, Henge of Denravi.

Even so, the net rewards from recapturing everything as a losing server would be negated by the day or two of missing all WvW rewards. My suggestion for improved rewards is that they are far more worthwhile and scale for losing servers, but at the same time they need to be balanced.

I made a similar post with some suggestions for WvWvW.

~Lockouts
The biggest problem as mentioned is losing servers quitting WvW until the refresh. I would suggest a lockout so for example: Tier 1 Lockout – 50 Cap
Meaning only 50 people from each server can be out in a specific borderlands. You can still have 200 players from each server spread across them but it would keep bigger servers from stomping the little guys simply cause they have more zergs, pvp guilds, longer peak hours, w/e.

~Transfer Cooldowns
There needs to be some sort of cooldown or lockout for transfers to servers. It hurts the server population to allow players to come and go as they please. I understand its a game and if your not having fun you deserve to move or go where you will enjoy yourself. If you keep letting players leave the servers that get stomped for the ones winning we wont get anywhere.

~Small Groups
I personally believe that small groups of players should receive buffs or bonuses for working as a team and trying to beat the odds. Now this only covers people in a party so happening to run around in a group of 4-6 wouldn’t count. I believe this idea would greatly increase WvWvW activity in regards to small groups using strategy rather than large zerg combat which generally isn’t all that organized.

Just a couple thoughts.