Guild Wars 2

Sorry if this has been brought up, I’m sure it has but I’ll post this anyways. I think resing someone should result in a random chance to gain a badge. I hate that at times I try and bring back my comrades and don’t get in on a kill because I’m resing someone. Obviously every res shouldn’t result in a badge, but to be honest I find badges to be so rare when killing someone, the same drop rate could apply to resing a person.

The only exploit I can think of is if someone is jumping off a cliff constantly dieing to let a friend res them. And perhaps it can be limited to those that have been downed by another player.

well some chance to earn “badges of honor” for reviving downed / defeated allies due to enemies is good.

after all, it is called badges of “honor” and not badges of “killing” etc.

reviving fallen team mates surely is an “honor” act yes?

Should be rewarded with 1 or 2 for defending a siege, etc as well.

If they were rewarded for ressurrecting, they’d be easily farmable. Just let someone stand on the edge of an arrow cart area and stay outside pressing F. Not good.

As for defendind a siege, ok, I guess.

Okey, here are some ideas of what could give a badge and what the change to gain badge could be:

For reference, I think killing has roughly 10% to give a badge. (That’s what I’ve been getting.)

Reviving – 10% as its at least as important as killing. Might be even a bit more important.

Healing – 0.5%*(Amount/100) its important aspect too. We don’t want those capable of keeping our offence alive to camp damage just to get those darn badges. Well, they shouldn’t camp healing either, and they can’t since when people are at max HP, they aren’t getting any heals.

Combo field – 0.5% for every activation. Combo fields give a nice bonus to the speed you get your opponents down, and there are the kind of “support” professions that deal way less damage (and don’t get as many drops as they can’t seem to hit the treshold atm. At least not by playing support.)

The way I see it, I want to get rewards by playing as a team. Not by rolling a warrior and doing heavy AoE dmg on close range.

EDIT: Changed 0.005% into 0.5% as originally intented. (0.005 is the value used in calculations. Duh. I’m sleepy.)

SevenSigma.7462:

If they were rewarded for ressurrecting, they’d be easily farmable. Just let someone stand on the edge of an arrow cart area and stay outside pressing F. Not good.

As for defendind a siege, ok, I guess.

They could easily introduce a code that does not allow you to gain badges if you heal the same person(s) over and over, or even set a limit on how many badges you can get for a certain period of time.

Fred Fargone.3127:

Reviving – 10% as its at least as important as killing. Might be even a bit more important.

Healing – 0.005%*(Amount/100) its important aspect too. We don’t want those capable of keeping our offence alive to camp damage just to get those darn badges. Well, they shouldn’t camp healing either, and they can’t since when people are at max HP, they aren’t getting any heals.

Combo field – 0.005% for every activation. Combo fields give a nice bonus to the speed you get your opponents down, and there are the kind of “support” professions that deal way less damage (and don’t get as many drops as they can’t seem to hit the treshold atm. At least not by playing support.)

These are all easily exploitable.

SevenSigma.7462:

Fred Fargone.3127:

Reviving – 10% as its at least as important as killing. Might be even a bit more important.

Healing – 0.005%*(Amount/100) its important aspect too. We don’t want those capable of keeping our offence alive to camp damage just to get those darn badges. Well, they shouldn’t camp healing either, and they can’t since when people are at max HP, they aren’t getting any heals.

Combo field – 0.005% for every activation. Combo fields give a nice bonus to the speed you get your opponents down, and there are the kind of “support” professions that deal way less damage (and don’t get as many drops as they can’t seem to hit the treshold atm. At least not by playing support.)

These are all easily exploitable.

Hmm? So is killing, but you don’t see me complaining.

But please do tell what tactic you would use to exploit each one of those, and I’ll go ahead and crush each of your theory, ’kay?

How is killing exploitable? I’m interested.

Combo Field is the easiest to exploit, just get one character spamming a field and another spamming a finisher.
Healing and Reviving could both be exploited by simply staying in the range of enemy siege weapons (often in the safety of a keep’s walls) and, you know, healing and reviving.

I’m not against the idea of alternate rewards, but we need to be realistic here.

“need to be realistic here” kinda made me laugh a bit. I mean no offence but…

The ways you describe are even worse than what I have in store for killing. (Oh, just have a bunch of friends transfer server, then stay in your AoE.)

But lets take a look at some figures:
Uhm… thinking more closely, 0.005% is not quite what I meant, kinda meant 0.005 without the%, so 0.5%. Simple error on my end.
Anyways, lets turn it into numbers:
You get 1-0.005= 99.5% chance of getting nothing whatsoever for each activation. Lets say we consider this “certain” to get nothing. For “certain” gain of 1 badge you would therefore need to (1-0.005)^1000=0.66% failure change. So you need to activate the combo field a thousand times for 1 badge. So to exploit this? Uhm… you really got to be in good terms with your friend there. Oh, we’re basically talking bout personal slave here. Lets say you get around 2 combo field activations into 1 second, then we have around 500 seconds per one badge. Now, just who would want to stand around for 3000 seconds (= 50 minutes) just to be able to buy an arrowcart? You get far more badges by playing.

The healing is even less exploitable, as it basically requires there to be bunch of players to be healed for relatively high amounts of HP to be feasible. So… unless ya can hire the entire zerg in some borderlands to stand around in some fort thats under siege, you can’t even buy that arrowcart anytime soon.

And rezzing? Note that someone needs to die repeatedly = losing bunch of silver, just so you can rez them, to gain maybe 1 badge per every 10 silver they lose. (Worst case 0.9^40 = 1.4% (oh, its close enough!) for the “certain” badge. Thats 40 deaths for 1 badge! And its not even fast or anything. And well, I know we are talking about change here, if you’re lucky you could get a badge for every rez even, its just increasingly more unlikely.

But yeah, I guess if the question is merely “Is it exploitable?” the answer would be “yes” but if we take into account of the gain from exploit and the gain from normal play… Well, lets just say I doubt we would see whole lot of people farming badges through exploits. Especially as you can’t turn them into money in any way.

When I say “easily exploitable”, I mean as in “automatically”. As in, “you don’t even have to be playing”. Just let one combo skill on autocast in one character, a finisher on autocast on the other, go to sleep, wake up with shiny new badges.

Killing is very hard to exploit because it would take extended cooperation from both teams. Even if you and your friends go to some corner and start sparring, soon someone from either team will com up to see what the kittens is that green dot doing all over there, and then the gig is up. The only killing exploit I’ve seen involved bots and dozens of different accounts making a Death Ball.

Well, getting maybe 10 or so badges / night and running a high chance of getting 2 accounts banned really isn’t something I’d see as worthwhile.
And just what part of WvW is safe enough to stay all night? Lets assume that badges don’t drop in safe zones. (And even if they did = enough reports to get you banned ten times over the first night ya do it.)
Actually, it would be easy to tag an account that is spamming auto-attack for several hours suspicious and log it off. Oh, not sure if that’s being done already, actually. There is the “afk kick” but I’m not sure if auto-attack breaks it. It’s most likely “no input for 10 minutes = afk => kick” but I’m not certain. 10 minutes worth of auto-attack is not input, so it probably rewards you an afk kick.

Banning is a good deterrent to exploiting but by no means perfect, or you’d see no bots around. As for safe areas, anywhere near an Asura gate is basically safer than PvE. You could also go to a remote area, and since allies can’t disrupt the combo exploit and you don’t show up on your enemies’ map, it should be reasonably safe.

If getting badges from support would be so hard that a couple characters doing nothing else only got 10 from a night, then it’s essentially worthless to everyone else, who might maybe see one badge drop in a month.

Anyway, we’re getting bogged down by the specifics of an hypothetical system. Point is: we all agree it would be nice to reward support, but it’s trickier than you might think.

EDIT: If auto-attacking didn’t work anymore, people would just switch to AutoHotKey. If it was that easy to flag people for automatic behavior, there’d be no bots.

Its easy to flag, but it is also easy to get accounts from idiots who give too much information to a shady site just because they asked it. Which creates the market for the bots mining Orichalcum (which btw is relatively hard to flag, is it automated bot logging in every 5 hours, or just a player wanting to get ori but doesn’t actually have time to play? Of course, if it logs in at fixed intervals, its probably a bot since not even Germans would be that punctual)
However, as the badges are pretty much character/account bound, there is nothing to gain from botting for them anyways.

And well, the beauty of it is that to get 1000 combo fields from 15 or so players taking down that tower gate with you is easy. If we assume one player triggers the combo once a second, 15 players taking over a keep would trigger the combo field 4500 in the 5 minutes that it takes to bring down that door. So you’d gain atleast like 4 badges. Well, truth be told, you can’t hold the combofield up the entire time, and not everyone out of those 15 trigger it quite that often. But you get the idea. Its good when you’re actually playing/helping your team.

When my 80 Guardian uses symbols, he heals everyone around him.

He also brings virtue regeneration to everyone in the area.

When I use my staff I bust out 3 good heals.

When I rez you we get aegis, or we get a bubble or whatever.

None of this gets me anything at 80, maybe rez exp but that’s not a real reward compared to helping win the fight.

Badges for support, please