When anet released the new leaderboard season they said that more emphasis will be placed on wins – This is good in the sense it moves us away from total game played, however, I think that this is the opposite direction we need to head.
Personal reward is already downplayed to a high-degree in ranked and unranked. If you’ve played for any length of time, you’ve experienced just how severely your team can be impacted by an inexperienced (or afk/griefing) player – and really, a 4v5 is a pretty much a guaranteed loss. It is nearly impossible to carry a team against 5 other semi-competent players. I don’s suggest changing that in anyway; a properly coordinated team of 5 should always beat a pug of 5. No problems there.
The real problem is that all rewards are tied to the team win or team loss. With unranked/ranked losses giving a measly 1/3rd of the rank points, and personal achievements (top trebuchet hits, top points capped, etc) weighing in at a whopping 5 points each, the vast majority of your rank progress comes from whether or not your team wins or loses – not to mention if you DO care about the leaderboards the new one will weight wins vs. losses to a greater degree. Not everyone can win, I get that, but the takeaway here is that team performance GREATLY and almost ENTIRELY dictates personal achievement progress regardless of personal skill.
Losing isn’t so bad, but the ramifications of this system is such that a single bad player on your team can easily cut your reward/achievement progress in 1/3rd, regardless of how well you or the other 3 persons played.
I honestly believe that nature of the system leads to a toxic community. People will be hyper-sensitive to the skill of their teammates when said teammates literally determine whether or not they get rewards for the effort they put in. New players are discouraged from joining sPvP because their presence on a team drastically affects the rewards their teammates receive.
I don’t believe that people should be “happy-carebear everyone wins”. However, I should still be compensated for playing well even if my team loses because of a single person. If I suck and my team loses, then I should receive very little reward, and if I play awesomely and my team still loses, I should be rewarded (not as high as the winning team) highly.