Guild Wars 2

Hi, I’d like to address the overall state of pvp in terms of rewards and longterm motivation (since addressing the balance situation with all the upcoming changes is pointless).
Before I get to the part on how to possibly improve the pvp enviroment and its reward structure, I want to take a moment to make a list of things that are in a bad,faulty or even nonexistend state:

• little motivation through unique rewards for people to try out pvp and even more importantly stick around and actually care about performing good.
• while Rewardtracks are a nice they dont offer much aside from the glorious amor and 1 back piece skin which all are really easy and fast to obtain
• currently balance updates are very few in between long time periods causing a
• currently rather stale metagame (though I hope the way u set u up the new
• specilisation system will allow for more frequent updates)
• the heart of the mists is a rather boring map and with us being forcec to Q into ranked and unranked arena games we need more things to do while waiting for 8minutes(which is the regualr Qtime for people with a higher MMR), also pls add a forge into the mists so we dont have to enter the pve world to throw items in the toilet
• new player are often lost in pvp and its complexity, thus there is a big need for ingame tutorials since alot of people dont even know where to find third party sites with helpfull videos
• we also lack basic report functions for people that afk/leave/grief by not playing actively on purpose

Proposed Improvements

Motivating the playerbase:

• people like small comsetic stuff that has some kind of recogniton value to it
• give some small visual to see how someone has done in a previous season(..more later) or how good a player is by visually displaying his mmr in some way
• the visuals would show in which percentage of the playerbase a player is:
• in 20% increments till 60%, after that increments of 10% till 80%, then 5% increments till 95% and then 2.5% increments for example
• rewards could for example be custom emotes for the % the player that is using it is in and/or titles allocated to their placement in the leaderboards (these titels could also be displayed in a different color than normal titles and are 1 time unlocks and would change every few seasons to give them some prestige)
  * Option 1: MMR-based (would avoid the possibility of grind, but harder for the players to grasp since it is invisible to us)
  * Option 2: Point-based (would require an overhaul to the current point system)

Improving the rewardstructure:
Currently pvp-seasons are uninteresting for a big part of the playerbase because very few people are actually getting rewards.
Furthermore from the just 500 people per season that get rewarded(this is first and formost too small a number to motivate people) especially given that the 500 only get Mini-Llamas which while they are great for people who like minis are not really a motivation for most people. (And only 25 receiving an actual reward in form of skins, which is ok because the glorious hero armor is supposed to have prestige, but people need something they are motivated to get)
So here is my proposition: Implement a Ticketsystem like in WvW that awards a certain number of tickets based on your performance in a season with people.

• (Optional)Addition of a new item called Glorious Mist Essence to gate the highest reward skins to people that managed to get in the top100 or bought it for a certain number of Mist-Tickets (to give the highest rewards Tier(4) a sense of prestige)
• Add 1 new Vendor to the Mists [insert name for npc here] for players to exchange their earned Mist-Tickets for rewards.
• Add 1 unique skin(armor piece or weapon) per season which will be awarded to all who manage to place in the top500, this skin will be added to the Tier(4) of the MistVendors selllist

Following is an example for how such a reward structure could look like (all numbers are just hypothetical) :

Contents of the new Mist-vendor:

• playerbase created designs(more about that in a later section)
• other new skins
• discontinued Items that were unobtainable since the removal of pvp equipment(like the tribal armor set)
• bundles containing multiple crafting bags(T1 through T6 )
• bundles of lodesstones and other currently really are crafting mats like giant eyes (maybe 10 per bundle)

Rewards at the end of a season :

• rank(1-10): 2 pieces of glorious hero armor + Mini Llama + 750 Mist-Tickets + 1 Glorious Mist Essence
• rank(10-25): 1 piece of glorious hero armor + 1 Mini Llama + 700 Mist-Tickets + 1 Glorious Mist Essence
• rank(26-100): 1 Mini Llama + 600 Mist-Tickets + 1 Glorious Mist Essence
• rank(101-250): 1 Mini Llama + 450 Mist-Tickets
• rank(251-500): 1 Mini Llama + 350 Mist Tickets
• rank(501-750): 300 Mist Tickets
• rank(751-1000): 250 Mist Tickets
• till 90% : 150 Mist Tickets
• till 70%: 100 Mist Tickets
• till 50%: 50 Mist Tickets

Rewardtiers for Tickets at the new Mist-Vendor:

• Tier (4): 600 Mist-Tickets per item + 1 Glorious Mist Essence
• Tier (3.5): 600 Mist-Tickets per Glorious Mist Essence
• Tier (3): 300 Mist-Tickets per item
• Tier (2): 200 Mist-Tickets per item
• Tier (1): 100 Mist-Tickets per item

The overall goal of this part is to give people a way of working towards a further sense of preogressing towards a goal, here for example a fancy new skin while keeping the strongly limited availibility of the glorious hero armor pieces
(Specifics for each Vendor-Tier may be added by me later)

Stronger involvement of the community:
Anet should make use of the love people have for ur game and their artistic skills like u did in GW1.
This could be done by holding a design-a -weapon/armor/armor-piece contest which in order to minimize logistical effort and time investment for Anet could be done via fansites as a third-party-jury to filter out non serious contributions.
The people who enter the contests would asked name an accountname that will be associated to their entry.
The winning entries are being sent to Arenanet who will evaluate them and decide which ultimately get realized as skins in game (These would end up as Tier(4)-Mistvendor skins or Tier(3)-Mistvendor skins depending on how fancy/decorated/awesome they are).
Every winning entry in the contest will award the associated GW2-account a Mini-Llama.
The winning entries that are being realized in game will also be given to the people in who’s accountname the entry is associated. (So you design an awesome item and Anet makes as an ingame skin, then u would get the skin u created with out having to pvp for it [this is mainly to motivate people from all gametypes to contribute] )

Titles:
Most (class specific) pvp titles currently are way too easy to get and dont tell us anything about the amount of experience someone has with a class, people would most likely more motivated to stick to a class if there are things for them to achieve with it beyond their 150 ranked/unranked game wins. Therefore I would suggest to add new achievements for winning in unranked/ranked games for each profession that award titles(which are displayed in a different color [optional]) after each milestone :

• 250 Veteran Champion (insert class specific title like genius for engineer here) [display color: blue]
• 500 Ascended (insert class specific title here) [display color: green]
• 1000 Legendary (insert class specific title here) [display color: yellow]
• 1500 Glorious (insert class specific title here) [display color: orange/brown]
• 2500 Legendary Glorious (insert class specific title here) [display color: purple or pink (whichever is better visible)]

Seasons:

• they need to be more regular with breaks in between
• duration of a season: 4 weeks – 6week (6 weeks is already quite a long time and most people agree that the current 8 week format feels like it is too long)
• duration of the break: 2 – 3 weeks
• balance updates after 1 – 3 seasons (depending on the state of balance, though 4months is the longest we should have between updates to keep things from getting stale)
• after balance updates break-period may be extended by another 2 weeks if something proves to be out of bounds/hard to handle balancewise

Improving heart of the mists:

• improve the wall of champions to be up to date
• add something where we can check the ladder ingame(maybe where the old rank 50 – 80 rank vendors were at) [possibly with search option]
• let some people like Josh Foreman(loved SAB) improve/redesign the heart of the mists with some jumping puzzles so people can train their movement over/around obstacles (can’t stress how important movement and kiting with your surroundings in mind is in GW2)
• add activities (which would get cancelled by a Qpop)

Tutorials:
no concrete thoughts yet
(maybe an interface accesable via the pvp panel, videos would be devided into categories and the videos themselves played as ingame cutscenes)
to be updated

General Stuff:

• give players the option to use standart player models in unranked (no one should be forced to look at asuras in pvp)

At the end of this post u will find an example of a piece of concept art I made(based on the pheonix rank icon and a small conept idea) and would personally submit in a Design-A-Weapon-Contest. (was my first time ever using photoshop seriously so don’t judge it too harsh )

Thank you for your time if u read so far.
Also leave a comment with ur thoughts, additional improvement ideas and wether or not this would motivate u to play pvp more frequently.

Greetings Kranox

ps. I apologize in advance for any possible spelling or grammar mistakes I may have made. (Its late and english it not my first language)

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+1!

+1
this game only seems to have PVE content : (
and the new map PvP is just more of the same. :-(
sometimes makes me want to play again LoL : )

+2
This kranox girl really knows what she’s talking about.

#Kranox4PlayerModerator

I’d be happy with a full detailed board at the end of each match, and a record available for consultation. Map played, Number of kills, points capped/decapped/defended, damage dealt/taken (normal, crits, and conditions), number of deaths, hp healed….

That would also give players something to read between matches.

Only thing i will say about this is i agree, but dont forget the balancing system. It needs to be more frequent if they want to keep a good balance up and running, especially with the expansion comming soon.

Rest of the points i all agree with. Maybe some day anet will venture in PvP areas of the forum and stay there, instead of peeking once a blue moon when they are ‘prepping’ for a pvp update every half a year. One can hope. lol

Great post, definitely needed changes. I’d like to add one thing:

- Get rid of the chest spam on reward tracks, give more valuable stuff more rarely

PLEASE ANSWER OUR PRAYERS ANET

SHOW US A SIGN!

Pray for the almighty Anet!

Some of these ideas are nice (I really like the Mist Token idea). I have a few comments and issues with the OP’s proposals from a veteran player perspective:

Rewards

• The reward problem isn’t so much unique rewards as the reward rate not being anywhere close to what can be accomplished in PvE. If you’re new, the dungeon tracks are pretty good – you get exotic weapons and armor. But if you already have that stuff, you’re just getting crap to salvage, no matter which track you do. Adding unique rewards only keeps players around long enough to get them and then they go back to other areas of the game.
• Downtime between matches directly affects reward rate.
• Less transmute charges and Tomes of Experience or an option to choose them.

Matching and Ladder

• The current leaderboard is awful. It’s based on time, not skill. In fact, it disadvantages better players because they wait longer for matches. Before anything based on leaderboard standing is added, the leaderboard needs to reflect skill over quantity of games. It’s a big reason why this test ladder season is so lackluster.
• Matchmaking for higher rated players usually takes around 7 minutes and if you partial queued, you still get terrible teammates. I don’t know what’s going on, but if we’re still going to get bad matches, just match us faster.
• Additionally, it seems that new players deviate too much in rating initially, which leads to frustration.

Balance and Gameplay

• The specialization change will not affect the balance cycle. Balance cycle is affected by ANet’s scheduling and patch cycle – not any difficulty in balancing. This will remain true until they change their philosophy or staffing allocation. A two to three month cycle is probably best.
• Toning down sigil procs (and some profession ones too) would help all levels of gameplay. The burst can be frustrating, especially for inexperienced players who blow up in a couple hits and have no idea what they can do to stop it.
• Need to change the amulet system, especially with divorcing stats from traits. Many guildies don’t like to PvP because they can’t closely match their build from PvE/WvW. The reason given by ANet for the current amulet system was to make it less confusing for new players, but I’ve still seen people without amulets, runes, or sigils. Someone in HotM has to point out the “PvP Build” button at least once a night.

New Players

• Not sure if one exists, but an arrow pointing out the “PvP Build” button and the contents inside would be good for new players.
• The “Practice/Play/Compete” layout didn’t really do what it was supposed to. Hotjoin is an auto-balance cesspool where people of all skill levels farm their dailies or just beat up on bad players. Suggest that for players above a certain rank (maybe 20?) that PvP dailies can only be completed in unranked and ranked and PvP reward track advancement is even more limited than it currently is in Hot Join. It doesn’t curb the problem entirely, but makes it more clear that practice is for new players and trying out builds.
• In the death log, maybe add a class and weapon symbol for each ability so you know what to avoid next time without looking at the wiki? Or allow a hover-over?

I approve of everything in this post

The problem with the reward system is that it’s likely to cause a substantial number of the population to give up. For example, if you’re in the bottom 70 or 90 percent, why bother. There’s still no incentive to play.

Now, maybe this will cull the weak from PvP and that’s what you want, but all I’ve heard is that PvP has a serious lack of players. I would think you’d want people all all skill levels so everyone can have a decent matchup.

If you look at the WvW Season rewards in Spring 2015, 1st place got 500 tickets and last place got 200.
In the Fall, each week 1st place got 200 tickets and last place got 100.

Here you recommend giving 1st place more than 15 times the reward of last place.

I think that after one season, the bottom half of the players just won’t ever bother with another PvP tournament. Meaning there won’t be anyone for new players to play as the learn. Instead, they join, get stomped, and quit.

Even 1% of these proposed changes would be an improvement over what we have now.
+1