Livestream insight into reward philosophy
http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/c/2883855
At 23:07 – Hugh Norfolk told us why you don’t get personal rewards with the new borderlands ruin caps.Quick Transcript:
Do I get any karma or gold or anything, any world v world score from these things? Do I get any experience? No. This, the sole purpose is this orb buff.It’s so good, so important… we didn’t want to give anyone… you know, cause these things are going to be right out in the open. They are going to be easy to take. Easy to lose if you don’t watch them… ? for a short amount of time.
We didn’t want to give people rewards for these because then you see people start capping and decapping for like world v world experience or anything like this. This is for the sole purpose of this buff… it’s that good, it’s that strong, we feel like the reward is enough for your entire server getting this buff, we feel like it is good enough for that.
Earlier in the livestream he said this about a golem he summoned to capture one of these points for him:
He’s going to cap that for me… you know, he’s going to be the stalwart defender that’ll defend this point with his life.Let’s examine the basic philosophy of reward in-play here.
1. Stalwart Defenders get screwed: These new points are so easy to lose that you will need constant vigilance to keep them, and they are so important that you need to keep them. Vigilant tasks usually require missing out on gold, karma, loot, wxp, skill points, and ascended mats. Whether defending the Bloodlust Buff, trebbing the keep, escorting the dolyak, repairing the wall, upgrading the structures, or scouting enemy forces… you are really helping your server in a such a meaningful way that you can’t also get meaningful personal rewards because that would be too much. Doing good for your server is its own reward.
2. Giving out personal rewards for flipping things encourages people to flip them: If they handed out xp, gold, karma, wxp, skill points, and ascended mats at the new borderlands ruins then people would be incentivized to lose the points and recapture them which is crazy (but is absolutely fine for other objectives). By giving you no material wealth it stresses just how super important it is, and encourages you to defend it with your life for no pay.
3. Solo/small groups had too many options for earning wxp: The krait nodes and temple of storms were wxp earning events that could be done solo or with a small group. Those 12 events (4 per map) have been removed and replaced with non-wxp earning activities. When your server was completely outmanned and everything was the wrong color, and everyone on your server had given up, you could still flip krait by yourself, and cause lightning that would damage enemy siege… but not anymore. Maybe you should join a larger group ‘hint-’hint.
I’m okay with losing the nodes and Temple of Storms. I’m a lil’ influenced by somethin that happened on Teamspeak a couple days ago. We were at the NW camp when the conversation went like this:
Scout: “They’re at the inner gate on Bay!”
Commander: “Quick! Everyone to the inner gate in Bay!”
Random player: “Can we stop and kill the worm?”