Guild Wars 2

I made this suggestion before launch, considering how elitists in WoW discriminate on achievement scores. I’ve seen what this can do to a community. Even in GW2 I’ve seen the first 3000+ lfm posts. Given that dailies are equivalent to /age, this was always a problem waiting to explode.

Time to remove daily/monthly from the achievement equation.

Risingashes.8694:

ScottBroChill.3254:

If you want to play casually, you shouldn’t be concerned with leaderboards. If this statement is false, let me know and convince me otherwise.

Leaderboards were not hinted about at launch.

Those that didn’t do dailies AND pvp dailies for the rewards presented will now never be able to compete against those that did.

People joining the game at any date past the launch date will never be able to compete against those that did.

This has nothing to do with casual vs hardcore.

That is how ranking work? I don’t see the problem. In no system anywhere in the world can you obtain the same rankings as someone who has been playing longer then you. The newer players move up as the older players quit. It is the same in every league, sport and ranking system I know of.

As long as the people put in the same time the gap between them will always remain the same, which is pretty obvious how it should be imo. Take some sporting examples. In baseball you have achievement leaderboards based on RBI’s, Homeruns, Bases stolen, etc. Think about how absurd it would be if they “capped” these after a certain number because it “wasn’t fair that new players can’t catch up”.

Of course new players can’t catch up, that’s the point! they will advance when the older more experienced players quit or move on or start playing less.

Every leaderboard tracking a video games’ stats is utterly biased and useless.
It’s not a welcome feature by any stretch of the imagination and is just taking up work force and bandwidth as far as I’m concerned.

Not even common sports and leagues are able to maintain a performance based leaderboard, what makes you think a team of mere developers are going to do it?

Deroy.2457:

Every leaderboard tracking a video games’ stats is utterly biased and useless.
It’s not a welcome feature by any stretch of the imagination and is just taking up work force and bandwidth as far as I’m concerned.

Not even common sports and leagues are able to maintain a performance based leaderboard, what makes you think a team of mere developers are going to do it?

Top scorer comes to mind. Most penalty saves. Those are two standard statistics for every soccer player.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Of course new players can’t catch up, that’s the point! they will advance when the older more experienced players quit or move on or start playing less.

You live in a reality where a player who has scored 200 goals over 10 games is a worse player than one who has scored 400 goals over 400 games?

Must be nice over there, buy me a unicorn.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Think about how absurd it would be if they “capped” these after a certain number because it “wasn’t fair that new players can’t catch up”.

Yet this is the exact system that we currently have, and which you are arguing for.

Currently achievement points are capped. And no matter how many ‘home runs’ you hit you’ll never be able to catch up to the people who’ve simply been playing for longer.

‘Games played’ shouldn’t be the only stat that matters.

Risingashes.8694:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Of course new players can’t catch up, that’s the point! they will advance when the older more experienced players quit or move on or start playing less.

You live in a reality where a player who has scored 200 goals over 10 games is a worse player than one who has scored 400 goals over 400 games?

Must be nice over there, buy me a unicorn.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Think about how absurd it would be if they “capped” these after a certain number because it “wasn’t fair that new players can’t catch up”.

Yet this is the exact system that we currently have, and which you are arguing for.

Currently achievement points are capped. And no matter how many ‘home runs’ you hit you’ll never be able to catch up to the people who’ve simply been playing for longer.

‘Games played’ shouldn’t be the only stat that matters.

nice catch +1.

first to hit 10K achivement points in the new leaderboards wins the “nobody-cares-about-achievement-points-but-still-trying-to-have-as-much-of-it-as-possible trophy”

can’t stop laughing at the people who salvaged millions of stuff to get 25K/35K achievement points. Arenanet did a good job at capping the repeatables

I know I will never be at the top, time is the factor. I’m fine with that. I do however like to work on them in my spare time. My problem is, there are various bugs in the achievement points being added properly. For example the hints. and I have completed 3 slayers that the points showed completed but never were added. And yes I watched very closely. As do many that are working these points. These are just the ones I am having problems with. Can’t say if there are others. My point is I guess. If they do not fix the known problems. Isn’t that like putting the cart before the horse? Oh, forgot to add in the hobby dungeon that is bugged as well. Seems pretty unjust for those that are really pushing for these only to be short changed by the known bugs in the system.

Risingashes.8694:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Of course new players can’t catch up, that’s the point! they will advance when the older more experienced players quit or move on or start playing less.

You live in a reality where a player who has scored 200 goals over 10 games is a worse player than one who has scored 400 goals over 400 games?

Must be nice over there, buy me a unicorn.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Think about how absurd it would be if they “capped” these after a certain number because it “wasn’t fair that new players can’t catch up”.

Yet this is the exact system that we currently have, and which you are arguing for.

Currently achievement points are capped. And no matter how many ‘home runs’ you hit you’ll never be able to catch up to the people who’ve simply been playing for longer.

‘Games played’ shouldn’t be the only stat that matters.

I guess technically there is a cap on achievement points… though I seriously doubt anyone has hit it. I find it doubtful that anyone has actually completed 100% of the dailies either.

I mean there is a cap on the number of RBI’s and Home runs too if you are taking it to extreme’s. There has only been a finite number of pitches in baseball so that is the current “cap” on home runs. But just like daily and monthly achievements that cap gets higher every day.

I agree with you in the fact that it isn’t the ideal situation, however the only alternative I have seen is to put a hard cap on daily/monthly achievement gains, which removes the current soft dynamic “cap” and replaces it with a hard cap that will significantly reduce the diversity in achievement points people have.

I would suggest a dynamic cap on daily/monthly achievement points. One that increases every day but is lower then the current maximum, this would help equalize people who missed the absurdity that was 25 points per daily that we had going for a few weeks there. This would help alleviate the problem but still allow for some diversity in the leader board instead of a ton of hard capped players.

Sil.4560:

Someone had over 20k achievement points because of salvaging. They mean little to nothing.

Anet has already taken this into account and is putting a hard cap on it along with all others expect for daily and monthly.

Dailies and Monthlies should stay factored in.

Honestly, rewarding consistency is far more valid in my mind than rewarding repeated running of a dungeon, or fanatical marathon sessions of playing. It makes more sense for both the game (who would want to encourage players to log on) and the player (playing a little a day is far healthier than telling your players that you can reach the top of the leader board, but you need to sink in 16 hours/day).

I don’t think the solution is to remove the impact of dailies and monthlies. In truth, being a player and fan of the game for a long time IS an achievement, at least more valid than getting turned into a rabbit or having the Claw of Jormag fall on you.

I believe what the problem is, is that right now Dailies are worth too much relative to other achievements. Rather than going with the rash decision to just cut them to 0 and invalidate the efforts of those who have tried to log in every day to pick up their points, why not reduce the number of points they are worth, and increase the number of points other achievements are worth, possibly adding more of them as well.

Have completing the main block of dailies (5) be worth 1 achievement point, and completing the remaining 4 be worth 1 more bonus point. Have all 4 PvP daily achievements be worth 1 achievement point, for completing all of them. These are just a few. Rather than cutting them altogether, turn dailies into just part of the equation.

Categories that I believe should be worth more AP include the WvW achievements, which take a long time to finish and are worth comparatively little. Slayer and Weapon Mastery titles can be expanded to 10,000, 100,000, etc, with decent rewards. Legendary Weapon being worth 5 AP is quite silly, that can be ramped up.

Tweaks like this are far more sensible than suddenly vanishing what devoted players perceive as their achievements. This still leaves the devoted, consistent players with a higher potential ‘cap’ of AP (which SHOULD be the case), but reduces their impact greatly.

Right now dailies are a possible 13 points (x 30) = 390 possible points in a month.

Given what I suggested, there are 3 possible points (x 30) = 90 possible points in a month. Even doing every single one over 7 months (approx how long the game has been released) would be 630 AP. By no means a drop in the bucket, but certainly not a large portion of the points.

Covis.6037:

Are you joking? For example if someone has played soccer for 20 years, u should be equally skilled as him if u started today?

So Messi would never win a Golden Ball before 35 years old?

If you look into “soccer team rankings”, like IFHHS, they structure their rankings according to recent achievements. That is nice because you get a dynamic ranking based on who is better at that moment.

They could maybe add these two types of ranking. Having only an all time leaderboard is completely frustrating.

This… again…. sigh.

When it comes to these leader boards, you will have 4 types of people:
1) The person who logged in every single day and did dailies/monthlies for the last 7 months.
2) The person who just started a month ago.
3) Someone who has been playing since launch, but took a couple of months off.
4) Someone who has been playing for the last 7 months, but didn’t do dailies or monthlies.

Should players 2-4 have any chance at a high spot on the leader boards? Of course not.
In each case, player 1’s time/effort or both put into the game is higher than any of 2-4’s.

In the case of player 2, as long as player 1 continues to play, player 1 will always have put in more time. Why should that not reflect in player 1’s score?
In the case of player 3, player 1 will have put in both more time and effort into the game than player 3. Why should that not reflect in player 1’s score?
In the case of player 4, player 3 put in more effort by deciding to do the dailies and monthly on top of everything play 4 also did. Why should that extra effort not be reflected in player 1’s score?

If player 1 has put in more time AND effort than another player into the game, no matter the circumstances, than player 1 should ALWAYS have a higher score. If not, you are basically saying that what player 1 has achieved is moot.

The problem is that there are two schools of thought here and both have different views:

• The leaderboard should measure how much time you’ve invested into the game.
• The leaderboard should measure how good and what you have achieved in the time (regardless of how much) you have put into the game.

I’m, personally, in the second school of thought, though I see posters above me clearly favoring the first. I think capping the daily/monthly outputs would be stellar because it means I can focus on other challenges. The reality is, if I want to compete on the leaderboards, I must do the PvP/PvE dailies/monthlies every day/month forever, which is a drain of my time online and inhibits my ability to do other things I enjoy. This notion that I must invest time to compete is crazy for me, because I come from other competitive games where the only thing that matters is how well you do things and what you do, not how much of it you have done.

I’m rank 22 in EU. Which is crazy since I have 7596. That would make me hovering around 6/7 if I were in NA. EU’s are some real overachievers, lol.

Geikamir.6329:

I’m rank 22 in EU. Which is crazy since I have 7596. That would make me hovering around 6/7 if I were in NA. EU’s are some real overachievers, lol.

Or exploit abusers, it’s hard to say. Some people abused glitches in the system allowing them to accrue points they shouldn’t have been able to, and it’s unclear whether ANet has addressed them yet or subtracted from the account points post-mortem.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

You live in a reality where a player who has scored 200 goals over 10 games is a worse player than one who has scored 400 goals over 400 games?
.

So divide rankings into monthly/annual/all-time rankings. As older players leave newer players will rise in monthly, then annual, then all-time ranks.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Geikamir.6329:

I’m rank 22 in EU. Which is crazy since I have 7596. That would make me hovering around 6/7 if I were in NA. EU’s are some real overachievers, lol.

Or exploit abusers, it’s hard to say. Some people abused glitches in the system allowing them to accrue points they shouldn’t have been able to, and it’s unclear whether ANet has addressed them yet or subtracted from the account points post-mortem.

The only one I know of is the HoM tinkerer one, which was fixed months ago (and points taken away). There could have been others, but that’s all I know.

Rising Dusk.2408:

The problem is that there are two schools of thought here and both have different views:

• The leaderboard should measure how much time you’ve invested into the game.
• The leaderboard should measure how good and what you have achieved in the time (regardless of how much) you have put into the game.

I’m, personally, in the second school of thought, though I see posters above me clearly favoring the first. I think capping the daily/monthly outputs would be stellar because it means I can focus on other challenges. The reality is, if I want to compete on the leaderboards, I must do the PvP/PvE dailies/monthlies every day/month forever, which is a drain of my time online and inhibits my ability to do other things I enjoy. This notion that I must invest time to compete is crazy for me, because I come from other competitive games where the only thing that matters is how well you do things and what you do, not how much of it you have done.

I really don’t think the second mode of thought would work unless some things really changed in the game.

1) Pick a thread on the forums, any thread. There’s a 99% chance that there will be a half dozen responses complaining that they aren’t being handed X, Y or Z on a silver platter. This community is spoiled. If Anet were to even consider that it’s consumers should have to work for what they want, the community would summon a large fiery ball of angst and doom on the poor company.

2) The games MAJOR weakness right now is that it is incredibly lacking in achievable content. As it is, the gaps between ranks are less than the achievement points achieved by doing one daily… if dailies and monthlies were gotten rid of, or capped, the top 25 at least would have the exact same number of achievement points. What would be the point of having a leader board with a plateau like that? The only mode of competition we have right now is time invested, there isn’t any other way to get ahead.

3) Dailies and monthlies give you way to much achievement point bang for your buck, compared to time and effort to invest into other achievements. (this has been fixed somewhat with the new dailies). But think about it, 30 mins of play gets you 5-9 points (depending on how many of the dailies you do). But killing 1000 giants, of which there exists like 3 enemies in the entire game that count toward this achievement only nets you 16 points.

If they were to make achievement points more tiered based on difficulty, say like for instance the harder and longer jumping puzzles are worth more points than the easier ones, I can imagine the second mode of thought working.

Dailies / monthlies shouldn’t count. Some achievements take a significant amount of time and effort to acquire ,and are a measly 5 points, whereas cranking out your daily (not to mention the optional dailies, almost doubling your points per day – and the plethora of extra points from optional monthlies now) far exceeds that. Sure, in theory you’d reward the no-lifer who not only does every daily ever, but also ends up getting every legendary and WvW achievement – and you’d be rewarding them with the #1 slot. However, why not reward the people who don’t focus on cranking out every pvp and pve daily, and instead focus on the actual achievements?

Really doesn’t help that for one month, every daily was 25 points. Good lord.

LordGustoff.3752:

1) Pick a thread on the forums, any thread. There’s a 99% chance that there will be a half dozen responses complaining that they aren’t being handed X, Y or Z on a silver platter. This community is spoiled. If Anet were to even consider that it’s consumers should have to work for what they want, the community would summon a large fiery ball of angst and doom on the poor company.

That’s a bit melodramatic, and I don’t think it’s nearly as bad as you think. Forums are a minority of the population, and there are very few people on any game forum that are level-headed and middle-of-the-road. Most are very opinionated and are on the forums and posting specifically to complain about or laud the company. I would call this a non-issue; developers are trained to be thick-skinned to people crying.

2) The games MAJOR weakness right now is that it is incredibly lacking in achievable content. As it is, the gaps between ranks are less than the achievement points achieved by doing one daily… if dailies and monthlies were gotten rid of, or capped, the top 25 at least would have the exact same number of achievement points. What would be the point of having a leader board with a plateau like that? The only mode of competition we have right now is time invested, there isn’t any other way to get ahead.

I don’t disagree that the game lacks hard content to achieve, but that said, games typically have “100%” players who get every achievement. If players can get there, then more power to them, they have reached the maximum possible, and will be at the top of the leaderboard when they get there. That is an absurdly difficult task in GW2, mind, so this would likely never happen in half a decade. Because dailies and monthlies count, certain players are prevented from obtaining that 100%. Presumably, by the time anyone ever reaches the plateau you speak of, ANet will have other leaderboards with other statistics (perhaps fastest runs of certain Dungeon paths, or other things to achieve). Keep in mind that to reach that plateau would take years.

LordGustoff.3752:

3) Dailies and monthlies give you way to much achievement point bang for your buck, compared to time and effort to invest into other achievements. (this has been fixed somewhat with the new dailies). But think about it, 30 mins of play gets you 5-9 points (depending on how many of the dailies you do). But killing 1000 giants, of which there exists like 3 enemies in the entire game that count toward this achievement only nets you 16 points.

Yes, and this is the one change that would need be made. If dailies and monthlies were worth nothing (and past points for them were removed), then the value of those other items becomes significantly higher.