Guild Wars 2

Dear Santa Dev,
I know you are busy with Xmas stuff, but mean children want cookies too….

Talking seriously and out of the metaphor, I know Devs are working on updates for WvW, but since we dont know what these updates will be about i feel the need to write this down…
I think many people feel like WvW is not much rewarding… you might say “hell, you can help your server to be the best!”, yep, ok…. but not every server will be the best and not everyone who loves pvp actually care about his server rank. (Personally i’d rather have some really nice battles in a low rank server than smashing emtpy keeps in the top ranked server)
Seems like its missing a long-term reward to keep ppl focused on WvW. For example this long-term thing in PvE are legendaries, ascended, cool skins, world completion… something that pvers work on for a decent amount of time so then they can show to others what they could achieve with their efforts.
All this work fine cause it is on a personal level, while WvW only has the “world-wide” level…. this is too wide for most ppl, and makes them think it wont really change much for them to go or not to go play WvW.

So Server pride is fine, but we need something to focus on, on player and guild level, something really simple would be a WvW rank…. thats something really easy but can still make a difference for many ppl. There are way crappier games that could keep ppl there for ages just cause they wanted to rank up over and over…

The system is already there, cause there is already a player kill counter, a dolyak kill counter, and so on…. in the achievement page, it would be good to gain rank points that sum up leading to different titles on the way (like it is in spvp with gladiator-mercenary-avenger etc…) so that once you get the title you can choose to “equip” it and show off a symbol. Then… if you want this to be really cool, the amount of rank points gained should scale according to the situation…
for example:
1v1 kill = good amount of rank points
zerg killing 1 = almost no rank points
And then badges (oh my god) let them drop directly in our inventories! and put in some really cool stuff to buy with those, either skins or upgrades or whatever…
So this would be cool, but just for personal use, it wont be of much help for the server…. so what about giving more importance also to solo players or little guild-groups that dont want to stick with the zerg for whatever reason ?

As things are now ppl mostly tend to run after zergs… ad if there is no zerg on their faction they will just logg off from WvW, starting a loop that lead a map to be empty and dominated by another server until some commanders with their own zerg get into that map to take back some stuff.

The idea is that kills should be really more important… point system could be revised so that also kills get into counts, and to make it somehow fair, how much a kill is worth could be scaled based on the numbers that faction has (hint: outmanned buff … ). This is still pvp so kills deserve some impact on the score. This way little groups will have their chance to contribute to raise server score.
For example:
Server A got a 70 men zerg, server B got a total of 30 ppl in that map, so server B cant really win an open fight against server A, so they split up in 6 groups and start to starve Server A, killing dolyaks, getting camps, killing little groups of reinforcements running back to a siege. I did this stuff all the time when HoD was dominating, but sadly this wasnt granting almost any point to our server cause doesnt matter how many waves of them we killed…. what only matter with the actual system is who got what at the tick.
So, along with these changes, some more objectives for small groups would be a good add.
Oh… and since are settign up all this nice reward system why not putting also Commander tag into a meritocracy system instead of a gold-farming system ? A WvW Commander should be someone that knows how WvW dynamics work, not someone that knows when Orr events start or stuff like that…

Sorry Santa Dev for the wall of text but i had to do it…
p.s. cookies are on the left shelf next to the fireplace

I know it’s not a new idea,
But making things more valuable to stay and defend should be a priority here.

Even the rewards for zerging and taking territory are negligable (I spent an hour with two zergs taking the Hills keep from an opposing server. 10s and 1k karma are not an appropriate reward for an hour’s work), but the rewards for defending territory is pretty much “Your server gets points, which gives you very minor buffs to PvE content”.

There are so many interesting things that Anet could do with towers/keeps/Stonemist, even supply camps, that would make them more valuable to actually want to have.

It could be as simple as making the amount of points you get from any given piece of territory increase the longer you hold that piece of territory. That could go a long way to discourage zergs just running around the map one behind the other and flipping every piece of land 5 times an hour.

Another thing could be more comprehensive rewards to guild-claimed towers and keeps for that guild. If there was more to guild claiming than a few stat buffs that didn’t even come into effect unless your guild pays for and activates them, it would go a long way into making a tower or keep that your guild has claimed feel more like your territory.

I’m reminded of the old days of Ragnarok Online’s War of Emperium.
When your guild held a castle in that game, your guild got major rewards for it. Rewards that spawned daily and gave your guild a really solid, really valid reason to want to stay and defend that castle at every opportunity.
It also went a long way to prevent smaller guilds from over-extending and stretching themselves too thin, because their members would have no way to hold more territory.

I know that when you get into providing bigger rewards for things like this, it opens it up to farming and exploiting. But right now WvW doesn’t feel anywhere close to what it should feel like. I want to feel a little more accomplished when my guild has claimed a Keep than just having our emblem flying on a flag.

i hope….. wvw rank <3

I agree with most poins but disagree with the points for kills, the system could be abused and the majority numbers servers would get even further ahead. I made a suggestion in another thread that could add points to kills via another system where instant battle porting to in a restricted numbers area(say the top of a mountain overlooking the entire battlefield). That way those that don’t find the Zerg could go do that and points could be given for each kill in there. Maybe pro rated to make it not so much of an impact on overall score.

Rank system pllllllssssssssss, also really like the idea of structures giving more points the longer you hold it for, i started doing more defending/reinforcing recently and it can be a lot of fun, just need more incentives for it.

War dad KISS Guardian

MrZigwah.2165:

also really like the idea of structures giving more points the longer you hold it for,

I like that.

Instead of something being worth 20 points right off the bat start at 5 and work up.

First 4 ticks are 5 points. Next 4 are 10, etc, etc, up to 20 or whatever the full amount is.

Hmmm….Not sure of all the specifics but I like the general idea. (I think. I may decide it sucks after I’ve had a chance to fully think about it.)

Yeah, that seems cool too…. I still think the game has a huge potential, but it still needs more ways to make it true.
All we can do is to write our letters to Santa Dev and hope we’ll get our goods, there are so many good ideas in here that I hope we’ll see some of them applied soon.
I suggested that kills should take part to the score so that even solo players and skilled-but-small pvp teams might feel to be more active part on the server victory….. but any other way to achieve this would be good aswell.

I would support player kills earning points.
I know it can be “abused”, but honestly, the amount of coordination and effort that would go into abusing it would really not be worth the effort (Let’s say each kill earns your server 1 point [Taking out a Sentry, even now, instantly earns the server one point {Watch, it happens}]).

There are ways to make it work, variations on the idea that would be less prone to abuse.
As far as I see it, the best we can do as players is talk about what we’d like to see and then trust the Devs to work with it if it’s got potential and make it playable and fair.
The specifics aren’t up to us, just the general idea

The MMO I played before GW2 had a ranking system based on a player’s “contribution” during the war. This was not just based on kills, but also heals, buffing, debuffing, taking objectives, etc. A player’s rank was a good notion of how well that player contributed to the wars.
Going along with the encouraging players bit, giving an outmanned buff to ranking points would help to get small groups some meaning to hit smaller objectives, as cuge had described.

EnRohbi.2187:

I would support player kills earning points.
I know it can be “abused”, but honestly, the amount of coordination and effort that would go into abusing it would really not be worth the effort (Let’s say each kill earns your server 1 point [Taking out a Sentry, even now, instantly earns the server one point {Watch, it happens}]).

There are ways to make it work, variations on the idea that would be less prone to abuse.

I feel the same…. cause to abuse about that system would require players from a server to transfer to another server every week and let others farm kill on them…. walk all the way back, get killed again, and so on… just to make someone else win the match up ? That would be sick…. but even if we suppose there might be ppl like that, ther is a really really easy fix: block free transfers.
Or even if they keep at once per 2 weeks there wont be time to do the trick whenever they wont… so i think it could still work.