Guild Wars 2

Something that I propose for the next tournament is to have the tickets be connected to individual contribution as opposed to the tickets being dependent on the entire server. This way, even if an individual is on a server that simply does not realistically have the same WvW capabilities as other servers in its league, he can still reap the benefits of his own contribution.

A very simple hypothetical is let’s say that Anet has 20 total achievements for the WvW tournament. They then have 5 different ticket brackets of 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500.

To obtain 100 tickets, you need to complete the bare minimum of 10 total achievements. To obtain 200 tickets, you need to complete 12. To obtain 300 tickets, you need to complete 14. To obtain 400 tickets, you need to complete 16. To obtain 500 tickets, you need to complete 18 of the 20 achievements. For 20/20 achievements, there could be a special title as the reward.

This would show just how active you were as an individual and your own contribution, especially if you got the 20/20 title. Of course, there could still be server-wide rewards like the dolyak finisher as an example but the server-wide rewards should not be greater than individual rewards.

I believe that this type of reward system would be a lot fairer for everyone involved because the philosophy is simple… the more you contribute, the more you earn. With the current system, it is incredibly unfair to me that someone that happens to be on Fort Aspenwood (example of server top of their league) and does the bare minimum for a few days to get the meta reward will be rewarded far more than someone on Sanctum of Rall (example of a server tumbling downward due to mass exodus) who commands in WvW almost everyday for the entire tournament. With individual rewards, that commander on SoR will be rewarded handsomely for his contribution to the tournament while that person on FA will be rewarded, but minimally because he only cared to get the meta achievement. As it stands right now, that commander on SoR will never receive the same rewards as the person on FA simply due to the fact that he isn’t on the “right” server for the tournament.

This would be nice. It could also lower the bar for the meta achievement while still giving the big WvW players something to strive for. I honestly don’t know why it’s not set up like that in the first place.

One good reason stuff like this isn’t done in most games is that actual, useful contribution to a group effort is extremely hard (impossible in most games) to quantify. You could have one person who just scouts for hours at a time, occasionally flipping camps, and though he might be the most useful individual person in the entire map, he still wouldn’t get rewards for doing the sort of stuff he isn’t doing, like taking towers or killing players.

Millillion.5914:

One good reason stuff like this isn’t done in most games is that actual, useful contribution to a group effort is extremely hard (impossible in most games) to quantify. You could have one person who just scouts for hours at a time, occasionally flipping camps, and though he might be the most useful individual person in the entire map, he still wouldn’t get rewards for doing the sort of stuff he isn’t doing, like taking towers or killing players.

Which comes down to the ability to track scouts help and have 50% sucess linked with scouting (eg : resetting x minutes of siege, escorting x amount of dollies, speeding x amount of workers, buying x amount of upgrades (though that one would be dangerous… risk having someone buy it at the wrong time… like a build x defensive siege achievement could be disastrous), etc.).

I’d suggest a middle path, of giving the winning worlds some rewards (tickets+finisher), while also giving the people who’re playing tickets with some sort of repeatable achievement system.

It’s true that some things (scouting, being eyes for a tower, or keep, etc.) are great contributions and not really easy to quantify or reward. That will always be the case, though, and I can’t think of a way to address that and have rewards for the gameplay. This is an issue with any metric, though (you see it in workplaces, schools, college admissions, scientific or statistical studies, etc.): if you addressed it in one place, there would always be another place where you could argue that a contribution is very helpful and unrewarded, so I don’t think that’s a good reason to tie all of the rewards to world success.

The current system has some pretty major faults, though, and one is that certain rewards (bought with tickets) are exclusively reserved for players on winning worlds. It over-incentivizes jumping to worlds that are likely to win, which is bad for both the server that people are leaving and the one that people are going to: one server loses population, which makes WvW and PvE (some people do both, after all) harder for everyone.

The other server loses too: if any community (online or offline) has a huge influx of new people, it’s likely to cause the community+culture that was there to be lost in the din. New blood doesn’t enter the community, and older members are likely to become dissatisfied because the community they were part of seems gone, and might leave the server or potentially the game. If the new players then move worlds again (because they aren’t doing as well as they expected, or because the tournament was over, or because there isn’t a strong community on the server that they’re part of), it’s a net loss for the server that had the influx, even if they won in the short term.

Since ANet does seem to care about the health of servers* (but even if they don’t, they should: it’s what keeps people from jumping ship to another MMO when they get bored or hit a cap or a point where the difficulty spikes), it’s strange to me that they didn’t try to address that issue.

• I think the tiered transfer system was intended to balance WvW out, which in moderation has the effect of strengthening the communities that might be doing less well by incentivizing people going to them.

electronvolt.7541:

The current system has some pretty major faults, though, and one is that certain rewards (bought with tickets) are exclusively reserved for players on winning worlds. It over-incentivizes jumping to worlds that are likely to win, which is bad for both the server that people are leaving and the one that people are going to: one server loses population, which makes WvW and PvE (some people do both, after all) harder for everyone.

That is definitely what occurred with free transfers and Henge of Denravi. Anet hoped that more players would transfer to the servers that had free transfers. What inevitably occurred was people transferring to one or two free transfer servers and thus stacking them. HoD is the perfect example of how Anet really did not have the foresight to predict what would occur.

In addition, they didn’t even allow the rankings to adjust from all the transfers, so that’s why you’re seeing HoD dominating CD and NSP.

Just really mind boggling decisions that doesn’t make any sense.

Millillion.5914:

One good reason stuff like this isn’t done in most games is that actual, useful contribution to a group effort is extremely hard (impossible in most games) to quantify. You could have one person who just scouts for hours at a time, occasionally flipping camps, and though he might be the most useful individual person in the entire map, he still wouldn’t get rewards for doing the sort of stuff he isn’t doing, like taking towers or killing players.

The one person who just scouts for hours at a time isn’t being rewarded for scouting under this system either because he still has to do 10 achievements to get the meta reward. Only an extremely tiny portion of the population would be like one of those scouts you mention.