I came to think of, if it would be fun, if we would get loot bags for kills just like in WvW. The idea behind that is that you get rewarded based on the rank of the opponent you kill. So the better the opponent, the better the loot.
How to make this work:
1. It must be possible to lose rank. The rank would have to be linear to your ELO or ranking on the leaderboard, so if you win a bunch, you would progress upwards the rank tiers and if you lose too much you end up being a rabbit again.
You would drop items of your rank tier, when you get killed.
2. The progression has to be fast. It has to take just a few games to move up or down a rank tier, or else everyone would end up on the same rank tier, when the ELO system does its work and everyone sits on 50% win ratio. It would have to be possible to maintain around 50% win ratio but still vary in rank.
3. There has to be a larger number of items. It would be boring, if you would get a weapon or an armor piece with every kill. Just like in PvE the drops should be crap most of the time, like junk items (greys) you can sell for glory, or salvagable items you can salvage for arcane powder. Mystic forge components would be the rares and actual armor and weapons the exotics.
Furthermore the prices would have to be adjusted. Everything would have to cost much more glory and mystic forge recipes would have to require much more arcane powder.
It should be possible to work towards the armor you want (which would essentially mean ranking up and getting to be a more skilled player), with the occasional lucky drop.
4. Looting on the interact hotkey has to be disabled, so that it is only possible to loot with the hot key for AOE looting. It would be very annoying, when you try to res or stomp someone, but loot instead.
5. Rewards have to be disabled for hot joins, otherwise it would be exploitable. You could meet up with high rank friends to kill them for better loot or do massive zerg fests for huge amounts of loot.
Just like in dota2 hot joins would be practice matches and would give no rewards. More players would have an incentive to join the solo queue.
So what do you think? I know this looks like a lot of work and I don’t really expect something like this to be implemented, but with the talk about reworking the reward system it is fun to speculate how far it could go.
I could see some complaints about team mates not concentrated on the fight, because they are looting, but that doesn’t seem as bad as 3 team mates capping the same node, as it is only one button press. DPS specs would be favored, because more damage means more kills, means more loot, but bunkers are also not getting the most glory with the current system and I guess it depends on how many people attack the node you are defending.
Please discuss, if you are interested. Should you also get rank points for kills, or should rank only be acquired through winning matches?