Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone!

It has been quite a while since Guild Wars 2 has been released and what was new is now old. Over the time things have gotten more familiar and talking from my persepective, the incentives have gotten less.
As I know the word “incentive” has been thrown around already from time to time by players, I feel there have to be made some lasting changes for the reward system and what incentive PvP offers. I therefore want to propose some ideas of mine.

1. Ranks

So according to http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Rank reaching rank 80 equals nearly 9 million rank points. The maximum rank point being able to achieved each match are 330. Now this equals around 27186 played matches in case one reaches max rank points each match. Alternatively, if one makes 20000 glory per day, it equals around 448 days to reach max rank. Looking at PvE, the cost of the tier 3 cultural armor is set at around 120 gold ( if I am not mistaken ). This means it takes one much less time to get hands on a full set of a tier 3 cultural armor. In case of hardcore-farming it may even take less than a week, though this is more of an assumption of me. Looking at the nightmare armor now though, it may be even easier to get the full set. Same goes for the Dredge Armor which is most likely set at rank 70.
Seeing how far off the actual reward is for the effort put in in reaching the higher ranks, I want to suggest something.

Suggestions 1: Scrap the Rank System
Instead allow us to buy every armor set and weapon through a fixed amount of glory. It can be even set high and have a similiar mechanic as jewels, sigils and runes in the locker, making it able to have an infinite amount of this or that item. This would also fix the issue with not being able to storage more than 1 exemplar in the locker yet.
A high amount of glory needed for the for full tier 3 cultural armor set around let’s say 350k-400k would mean that it takes some time to get that much glory.
There can even be an achievement for having all these items stored or enable in the locker. A title or something.

I also want to mention, that the crafting mats and the mystic forge gamble are not necessary anymore. Instead we could have more crafting materials for dyes and have a more stable income to earn gold and therefore gems. Which is also an issue, forcing some pvp players to play pve and farm the necessary amount of gold or have them wait until they reach enough gold with spent laurels and sold dyes here and there.

2. Leaderboards rewards

So far the only incentive for playing leaderboards is facing good teams on a similiar skill level as one’s own and to be able to brag about a high position on the leaderboards. Aside that there is not much incentive, especially for these who do not have an own team yet and a forced to play SoloQ before we have more options in the future.

Suggestion 2: For more incentives to play in ranked tournaments, give us rewards in form of titles ( seasonal, similiar to the gladiator ones in WoW ), special weapon and armor skins ( which can also be seasonal ), monthly rewards, weekly, daily, etc.. Just give more incentives to play for a high spot on the leaderboards cause right now it does not hold much of any reward as the top teams can also scrim instead of playing tournaments, making a few aspects easier to handle, such as what map to play on.

3. Endless Finishers

Right now, Finishers can be crafted or gotten through chests. This means crafting materials have to be spent. The crafting materials necessary to craft the finishers are not so rare, so it is easy to craft one, but they only last for 60 minutes as much as I know. I have not used any of them in a while. This comes down to how much worth it is to use a finisher.

Suggestion 3: An Endless Finisher would make things much more interesting. They can be chosen via an additional tab in the hero-menu. The UI can be similiarily structured as the mount and pet menu in WoW, so it is somewhat similiar to the locker UI too.
It has to be made clear now though what to do with the various finishers we have right now and when once has access to them. They can be tied in to an amount of matches played.

These are my suggestions so far, I may have forgotten the one or another I still had in my mind, but I can add it later.
Bottom Line of this post is though, make the actual gameplay more rewarding and the others things a pleasent suprise or reward on the side. Do not hold a meaningless carrot in front of us.
PvP is not about looks or anything, but about skill and recognition as a good player.
It is not a grind. At least as much as what has been told us before release.

Lady Sara Goldheart.2764:

Suggestions 1: Scrap the Rank System
Instead allow us to buy every armor set and weapon through a fixed amount of glory. It can be even set high and have a similiar mechanic as jewels, sigils and runes in the locker, making it able to have an infinite amount of this or that item. This would also fix the issue with not being able to storage more than 1 exemplar in the locker yet.
A high amount of glory needed for the for full tier 3 cultural armor set around let’s say 350k-400k would mean that it takes some time to get that much glory.
There can even be an achievement for having all these items stored or enable in the locker. A title or something.

I also want to mention, that the crafting mats and the mystic forge gamble are not necessary anymore. Instead we could have more crafting materials for dyes and have a more stable income to earn gold and therefore gems. Which is also an issue, forcing some pvp players to play pve and farm the necessary amount of gold or have them wait until they reach enough gold with spent laurels and sold dyes here and there.

This is in my opinion probably the best way to go about ranks/glory. Maybe you can keep rank to show how much time people have invested in this game, but in terms of armor I think it should be glory based, and I wouldn’t mind it being something like 300k glory like you said. I’m sitting on like 450k glory atm.

4. RNG, Scelerite and similiar Items

I have heard of a couple friends of mine, pvp-players, that they took some time of playing PvP to be able to get weapons such as the fused or scelerite ones.
Currently we only have had the possibility to earn fused gauntlets randomly by having the luck of getting them in a Tournament Reward Chest.
However, it was only for fused gauntlets, no fused weapons or scelerite ones.
What even PvE-Players have complained about is that we are dependant on RNG.
This is not what benefits us, the players, nor the company and their gems store earnings.

Suggestion 4: Let us by these skins through gems, do not make them RNG with having to get a Weapon Ticket through black lion chests or supply crates. Instead let us even pay for them, which will benefit ArenaNet more directly. Like with Wintersday, which has been the best example in my opinion so far.
Also give us PvP-Players a chance to earn them from Tournament Reward Chests.
Just do not let us be left out.

New Suggestion I totally forgot about.

@Zoose, yes I feel there is too much Grind involved for the decent looking sets and the effort in PvP is way off from the effort spent in PvE. One can argue we have an easier access to these armor sets and weapons once we reach the higher ranks but it is not so hard to get cultural armor in PvE, especially Tier 2 which takes like 10 gold compared to the 3 million glory for rank 70.

I also want to mention that a rank 80 shield PvE equivalent can be sold for 2 gold on the TP at least as much as I saw last time a while ago. ( Ordinate Defender/Guardian of the Six )

hello bai
i think there is a fundamental misjudgement anet is making. pvp players want 1 thing: to show they are pro. in gw1 for instance there was rank emote. here we have… finishers… that are actually consumables… and our rank emote can’t be used in all places.. and to top it off they’re just copy paste from the finisher. it feels very lame. i don’t care about armor that you get by grinding hotjoins — i want something that shows i win often and that I am good.

they took pve reward system (“everyone can have nice things”) and then put it in pvp. this was 1st mistake. then 2nd mistake was trying to extend the glory rank system so the top rank (and associated gear) would seem “elite”. which is dumb because it’s just grinding (not even winning) and also because you can get in pve 10x easier.

they don’t need to make new armor sets or weapon sets, they don’t need to really do much of anything else but give us small things that can only be gotten by winning. like an emote that is not a copy paste from a gemstore item and not associated with braindead grind.

Hello Milo,

I think point 1 answers your concern about the rank system rewards as I meant to change armor and weapon to optional items and have less of a flawed connection between skill and glory-grind if even one.
About your other concern with showcasing your skills, there are many possibilities of titles, items, emotes and other stuff achieved through a high competitive standing. May it be in context of the leaderboards or other competitive enviroments.

And I fully agree with your point on the fundamental misjudgment from ArenaNet. The current structure does not give much reward for any kind of skill shown.

yes I was mostly agreeing with you. armors should come at same pace as in pve, especially if they are from pve.

I cannot understand why people dislike the rank system, I much prefer it to a linear one. So what if it takes ages to get to the higher ones?

I think the rewards are a bit too powerful from the tournament side, where any r1 noob can ride (or ruin) good players and stack up in dungeon sets. Thus devaluing their ‘prestige’.

I’d agree with the limited time RNG-drop. I doubt many pvp players buy these skins- so having a small chance to drop is both a small incentive to casual players to start pvp’ing and as a reward incentive. This would especially be a good idea for future team rewards perhaps, unless they bring some gems back into the picture.

An other incentive I’d like to mention is where a pvp’er can obtain some gold in pvp. Since I spend 80% of my time there, I am very poor q.q. I remember the system in gw1 was very decent and attracted me to pvp. If this could be introduced along when new pvp gametypes come out- it would be a hit.

just one more thing gw1 did better you could use youre pve skins in pvp

Rallad.3802:

I cannot understand why people dislike the rank system, I much prefer it to a linear one. So what if it takes ages to get to the higher ones?

I think the rewards are a bit too powerful from the tournament side, where any r1 noob can ride (or ruin) good players and stack up in dungeon sets. Thus devaluing their ‘prestige’.

I’d agree with the limited time RNG-drop. I doubt many pvp players buy these skins- so having a small chance to drop is both a small incentive to casual players to start pvp’ing and as a reward incentive. This would especially be a good idea for future team rewards perhaps, unless they bring some gems back into the picture.

An other incentive I’d like to mention is where a pvp’er can obtain some gold in pvp. Since I spend 80% of my time there, I am very poor q.q. I remember the system in gw1 was very decent and attracted me to pvp. If this could be introduced along when new pvp gametypes come out- it would be a hit.

With the ranking system there are two issues: 1. they do not reward skill properly and 2. the reward is not worth the effort. I mean, the higher ranked armor and weapon sets show it clearly. I need max. 1 week to enjoy a nightmare armor in PvE while it takes around 2 years or more to land my hands on that armor in PvP. I mean, why are PvPers hold back to wear armor sets hold back by that grind. Grinding does not equal a busy and happy customer, only if they consider the reward worth the effort. And I know many people who have stopped going for higher ranks conciously.

About your 2nd point, I did not fully understand it. If you mean the rewards for the tournaments do not hold any prestige right now, I agree.

And since they have taken gems out of the game we PvPers have a hard time earning gold and gem store items, so there lies an issue too. Aside the sweet fused and scelerite weapons forcing us to PvE or buy keys/supplies. So I agree with you there, I would like to see them back or have an other good alternative.

Good ideas Bai, though I remember them saying a while ago endless finishers are not possible atm.

Very good suggestions, although i’m not much into seasonal stuff, especially with GW2 where the designers’ minds are like
http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/38231444.jpg
But why not if set up with the #2 Suggestion which is the principal lack of this game (for PvE like PvP).

The rewards definitely need re-work. I’ll start by saying I agree with the suggestions and obviously everyone wants to look cool but ranking up is just not worth it and a complete waste of time in my opinion. Ssince anything can be better than the situation we’re experiencing I’ll just hop out to what the PvP community will actually need (skins are skins), lets look at the so called Custom Arenas.
We players don’t know how many Gems one starter kit will cost so I’m not going to refer to it, but we do have access now to Custom Arena time tokens which are at the Gem Store.
Lets take a look at the prices: 480 Gems = 20 Days Extension (ATTENTION: IN PROMOTION). As of this precise moment, to buy that amount of Gems with ingame currency you need 16 gold and 27 silver.
For the many players we have who just PvP that’s just an insane amount of gold they can’t obtain even if they spend most of their time playing. (I’ll leave here just a though: does Arenanet want PvP players to be associated to PvE guilds so that these can easily buy those custom arenas for a team that represents them? I don’t think anyone really wants this, but still a viable solution for many).
I’m not asking for gold as a reward from PvP but consider all the Glory Points people have stored and have nothing to spend them on (and also all the mats from salvaging the amount of chests you gain). They’re useless at the moment.
When I got to rank 50 I used about 50k glory and got all the amour sets that are the “new” ones from rank 50 to rank 60 (this last rank I’m not even going to bother farming since it’ll take forever to achieve already) and still i got over 300k Glory just standing by and here is where the Suggestion #1 Bai mentioned comes up. Making every single skin purchasable with glory is the best thing PvP players could ask for. Instead of aiming for a rank (and giving up because of the amount of time it’ll take), players could aim for a glory amount to get the skin they actually want. The chests we see right now are just bad.
As for rank specific stuff the endless finishers do sound really cool. Another thing is, imagine me ranking from 50 to 51.. what do I get? Just a chest I could easily buy with 1k glory when I farmed 75k to rank up. Now could someone explain where this makes any sense? We have so many ranks just because PvE max level is also 80? Because to me this sistem is the same as:
1 – 9 = Rank 0 → 14500 Rank points
10 – 19 = Rank 1 → 43500 Rank Points
20 – 29 = Rank 2 → 82500 Rank Points
30 – 39 = Rank 3 → 180000 Rank Points
40 – 49 = Rank 4 → 480000 Rank Points
and so on..
It just matters if you’re 10, 20, 30 ,40, 50 mid ranks aren’t even rewarded (sorry but 1 chest isn’t a reward to me).
Now about dailies, why would someone want just 1 Orb, or 1 Sliver, or 1 Powder, or 1 Crystal? They aren’t even worth the same in the mistic forge. You did add laurels and to be honest I already have over 100 which I’m not using for anything,

tl:dr: Please take a look at the sugestions the players are giving you and make playing PvP feel worth it, I know many good suggestions are still going to appear on this thread. The laurels you added may have given you the so called 3% more PvP players someone mentioned sometime ago but that’s just because it takes a lot less time to play 3 hot joins in PvP other than doing PvE daily for PVE PLAYERS (they’ll just go back to LA right after..). You said you’re in a fixing bug stage other than class balance etc, so you should consider this being on the mid top of your priority list.

Sorry for the long read, didn’t look back to fix any typos or anything.
#IncentivisePvP

I did some math. ( Credits to luxen for the idea of a suiting context with numbers he will also post sooner or later )

I want to talk about the value the dungeon sets hold in PvP, not so much for the lower ones, but for the ones 60+.
I want to start with the Nobleman Set.

A full dungeon armor set equals 1380 spent tokens. The sets are dividede in:

• Headgear 180 13 %
• Shoulderpiece 210 15 %
• Breastpiece 330 24 %
• Gloves 180 13 %
• “Legguards” 300 22 %
• Footgear 180 13 %

Now these percentages are also a bit rounded up and down.

Aquiring a full set can be done with 1 path done per day to up to 3 paths done per day. The representative values of tokens aquired for the 3 options are: 60, 120 and 180.
Looking at how much time it takes for the full set depending on the numbers of paths one does every day, we get:

• 1 path per day: 23 days
• 2 paths per day: 11,5 days
• 3 paths per day: 7,7 days ( rounded )

Now looking at how many rank points are necessary for achieving rank 60 which equals a value of 1.771.500 rank points up to date ( taken from wiki ).
At a rate of 10.000 rank points per days, it takes obviously 177,15 days to reach that rank. If we consider that matches end around a time-span of 10 minutes and take a number such as 250 rank points, we reach 10.000 rank points in a matter of 6 hours and 40 minutes. A dungeon-run results in much less time for finishing 1 up to 3 paths of it.
Looking at the time it takes to reach rank 60 compared to finishing up 1-3 paths of a dungeon, one can get around 25 sets of the nobleman armor set for 3 paths per day, around 16 sets with 2 paths done per day and around 7 to 8 sets with 1 path done per day.
It has to also be taken in account that not everyone can reach rank 60 in a time span of 177,15 days.

So looking at these numbers, I doubt anyone can have 25-16 different characters wearing the nobleman armor. 7-8 characters wearing it sounds more reasonable, given how many character slots PvP-Players most likely have.
I also want to mention that 1 path in Cadeus Manor may only take up to 1 hour or less so, it is way less time-consuming for the time spent in PvP.
For the higher ranked armor sets, Dredge and Nightmare, I do not have numbers yet, but I will post them later on.
I just want to highlight how much such trivially farmed sets are out of a reasonable amount of rank points/ranks. They should have a suiting value for getting them in PvP compared to the time and energy spent in PvE.

Edit: I did some further math.
Rank 70 equals 3.871.500 rank points and rank 80 8.971.500 ( if I am not mistaken here either ).
For these ranks one has to get 10.000 rank points per day to reach it in 387,15 days and 897,15 days.
Compared to PvE, the numbers of sets one can get in PvE are:

Dredge:

• 1 path/day: 16,8 sets
• 2 paths/day: 33,7 sets
• 3 paths/day: 50,2 sets

Nightmare:

*1 path/day: 39 sets
*2 paths/day: 78 sets
*3 paths/day: 116,5 sets

Totally agreed!
I mean alot hardcore players like to hotjoin allday, solo q/premade tournament allday but that is a very low amount of players..
These players find GW2 already an e-sport. What Anet should do is care about the rank system since its not the best one, atleast for me it isnt.
As example let’s take the Champion tittle ranks. In GW1, the champion tittle was way better in my opinion, because u earned it from most of the times a hard match, now u can also grind the rank points in hotjoin and ignore tournaments. One of the idea’s that i have is: Why dont we do this in GW2 also? U can put in a special roster for guilds that want to face each other. Later at some point guilds will have the needed rating to gain the points for a new sort of champion tittle. It will give a lot more competition because ur going as guild, and as guild you have to keep up ur rating.

Also Glory should be spendable on armor. When i am rank 80, this game will be like 5 years old. It is very demotivating to play for r80 because it takes so much time.
Beside the fact that it gets boring I just dont see the worth to reach r80 anymore.
I hope Anet will make this decision to make glory linked to armor. Its fun to play for a special weapon/armor that you really want. As example a staff that is 100k glory is more fun to play for than a rank that rewards nothing but a chest. The chest is also a useless reward since u can buy one for 1k glory.
Since people want make their characters look cool, the will play for the items they want and that will make their characters good looking. while we gather the items, we will rank up, but still have a lot of fun.

Totally couldn’t agree more about glory purchases for armour pieces and skins. In PvE for some reason I fail quite often to pick up teams for Arah dungeon. If I had alternate ways to unlock that armour skin I would focus more on that means. Considering in spvp all armour comes with set stats that one changes through runes and sigils, there is no real reason way alternate skins shouldn’t be just that..just a skin, much like the gw1 skins made available in the gem store or similar to the super weapon skins.
As a player I reached the reward tier, unlocked the universal skins and can now apply it to whatever armour I currently have equipped..regardless of whether I equip it to my PvP gear, or carry it out and apply to my PvE gear. Some people might feel that to get a dungeon skin without actually doing the dungeon is cheap, but if the the glory price was appropriate, the same amount of effort and time would be required. I am not wanting to rag on anet, I do like their games..but the party search function in gw2 is decidedly wanting to be polite. Offering players ways of achieving existing skins/items already in game via alternate paths seems like a sensible solution to cater to different people. The dungeon rewards currently can’t be bought or sold, so any argument towards it may unbalance the economy are not valid, no one gets hurt, people still have to earn what they receive, no other mechanisms are disturbed.

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

Totally couldn’t agree more about glory purchases for armour pieces and skins. In PvE for some reason I fail quite often to pick up teams for Arah dungeon. If I had alternate ways to unlock that armour skin I would focus more on that means. Considering in spvp all armour comes with set stats that one changes through runes and sigils, there is no real reason way alternate skins shouldn’t be just that..just a skin, much like the gw1 skins made available in the gem store or similar to the super weapon skins.
As a player I reached the reward tier, unlocked the universal skins and can now apply it to whatever armour I currently have equipped..regardless of whether I equip it to my PvP gear, or carry it out and apply to my PvE gear. Some people might feel that to get a dungeon skin without actually doing the dungeon is cheap, but if the the glory price was appropriate, the same amount of effort and time would be required. I am not wanting to rag on anet, I do like their games..but the party search function in gw2 is decidedly wanting to be polite. Offering players ways of achieving existing skins/items already in game via alternate paths seems like a sensible solution to cater to different people. The dungeon rewards currently can’t be bought or sold, so any argument towards it may unbalance the economy are not valid, no one gets hurt, people still have to earn what they receive, no other mechanisms are disturbed.

This idea seems pretty solid and I agree but I want to discuss a few things.
First, it is really a neat option to have access to skins via playing PvP and unlocking it to apply it also on a PvE armor or weapon. It will bring more players in and it could even open them up to an enjoyable type of gaming they have not tried out yet, therefore having the community grow. Down-side can be though, PvEers will just farm their skin and go out immediately, though I think that can be only a minor part.
The hotjoin-servers will be quite full though.
About the imbalance to the economy, I think it may affect it a bit, but not imbalancing it. It will give the players farming the skin “solo” in PvP keep their friends and other party members for dungeon runs from earning tokens and other items therefore having these things rise in price. But I think that may also be a minor part as rushing through these dungeons can take less time in the end.

Furthermore I want to add, the rank system can be kept but it should not be interwined with any skin or item, it should be interwined with achievements.
I talked with a friend of mine recently and it would be darn sweet to have ranks specifically meant for tournaments and hotjoins ( so two ranks systems ).
Similiar to what we have with the Champion titles and the Champion Brawler one. The achievements have to be rehauled though. The current achievements are easily attainable over time and hold no lasting value.

It is insulting to see these Rank 70 and 80 gears totally beyond reach of any sane player.

No one is going to follow this linear grinding machine, which rewards 0 bonus to player skills.