Guild Wars 2

I think it’s safe to say that all of us WvWers are always hungry for some content and rewards. PVE always have new rewards and vendors for every new festival or episode of the story. Why can’t we apply the same concept in WvW?

How It Works?
We can have a new festival event every once a while (i.e. quarterly or something). The event can last for 2-4 months. It doesn’t have to be permanent (it shouldn’t be), and the events can always be recycled next year or so. So if someone misses out on a festival, they will always get another chance later. It doesn’t even have to be continuous, and can have a month break before the next event.

During this event, we get a new reward vendor. Rewards can be mini, tonics, ascended trinkets, anything (just like the vendors we have in PVE). These rewards can be traded for the respective event tokens.

Acquiring Tokens – the complicated part.
Rewards had always been a complicated issue in WvW. How do you give individual players reward without being too dependent on the performance of the server? How do you stop people from transferring to a stronger server for a better chance at being rewarded?

Personally, I suggest diversifying the methods for the acquisition of token.

1. Token should primarily come from killing enemy players - this is the most engaging and challenging for players. This should be the most reliable method of acquisition so coverage and server size will not affect much.
2. Harvesting WvW nodes - suitable for smaller groups and people who do not like to blob too much.
3. Capturing a t3 structure (keeps/SM/maybe towers) - this should not be as profitable as killing enemy players, so it attracts the defender to defend and gives a reason for the attackers to attack. The attacker can be rewarded a little bonus when successfully capturing a tough structure. The reward should also not be very high – so no bandwagon. This should be a small bonus and not a primary way
4. Winning the week - I know I’ll get stabbed by pitchforks before finishing this sentence, but hear me out. What if I tell you we are already being awarded for winning the week? Yes – those world rank chests. Have this cause anyone to bandwagon to a winning server? No not really. The tokens should work the same way, giving very little or slow bonuses to the winning server and does not significantly impact the speed of acquisition.

As for the specific drop rates? I do not know. But the order from the most efficient to the least should be 1 -> 2-> 3 -> 4. Though any of the choice shouldn’t be overpowered (except for the 4, that can be extremely underpowered, but is a nice minimal bonus nonetheless).

>>>>Importantly – This needs to feel like a festival/event.<<<< Can’t Stress Enough
It is important to give this event a story, theme, or a personality. Make it feel like a festival, instead of a boring new farm. A good analogy to describe why this is important would be using the Mario series for example. If Nintendo did not give mario a personality, a world to traverse, a boss to defeat and a princess to save, the game would have become another interesting but forgettable platformer. It works the same in WvW. If you just added in rewards without a story or without a theme, it would have just become another forgettable new vendor added into the spawn. Not to mention no one who aren’t actively playing WvW probably won’t even hear about it.

The story doesn’t even have to be original, it can very well be following the same theme in PVE, where things are “overflowing into the mist”. This was done in the past during the scarlet period and some past yearly festivals. There is no need to completely come up with a new PVE encounter or gimmicks in WvW (most people will prefer not to). It would work simply by reskinning sieges/NPCs/structures, have a few NPC yell different dialogues, a small festival magic find buff or something seemingly insignificant, but powerful. I’m sure people will find ways to enjoy themselves just by running around with the new combat tonics from the event

Just imagine how different it would sound between: “A new reward vendor has been added in the spawn which can be traded with tokens enemies drop” and “Colin’s zombie zerg minions, [ENTER YOU HATED SERVER], have flooded the mist. It is up to you and your allies to repel his invasion!”

Issues It Will Fix:

• Forever silence the people complaining no events.
• Forever silence people complaining no reward and WvW is an unrewarding game mode.
• So the “unhealthy” tournament is not the only event in WvW.
• Increased interest in WvW, hopefully getting more people to participate in the game mode.
• Gives us noisy WvW players something to chew on for months, giving developers time to do other stuff without people constantly yelling: “Anet doesn’t care about WvW”, “Unsupported dead game”, “No new contents!”
• A lot of work will probably need to be done at first, but once the structure is there, it is an easily recyclable bone that the devs can always throw back in.
• A “longer lasting” new content. We like to pretend we rarely get new contents. We do, but those contents don’t keep us occupied for longer than a month. And it’s those things where it feels more like a QoL update, a small side section update, nothing truly feels major.
• Gives us a reason to compete and outdo our opponent.
• Makes defence profitable. I mean you want to farm them noobies for the tokens right?

FAQs and Other Stuff
Current Rewards
Reward Track
Reward tracks are definitely a great addition to the game mode, but is it really enough? Reward tracks are slow and require absolutely minimal attention to maintain. There is absolutely nothing fun and provides no challenge in getting rewards from the reward track in WvW, all you have to do is kill a sentry every five minutes or so. Unlike PvP, reward track is engaging and works well in PvP because how your team performed in PvP directly reflects the amount of reward track you advance.

Badges of Honour
I know we got a few extra things we can purchase using badges of honour. They are great for exotic gearing, traps/disablers, food and sometimes cultural armour if we didn’t already have it. However, they are permanent and are not exciting. We also should not use badges of honour as our event token because a lot of people probably already have thousands of them.

FAQ
We have more important issues to fix and don’t have time to waste on this
Contents and rewards are also a part of these ‘important’ issues. I’m just putting suggestions out here for Anet to consider.
The harder you blob, the faster you get tokens
Of course there’s always been an efficient way vs preferred way to farm, and this is no different. Some methods of acquisition are designed to prevent this. Smaller groups / roamers may obtain the tokens at a slower rate but it should not be a rate where it’s impossible to get even a single reward from the vendor.
I just wasted my time
Well I don’t care. I’m just a player who’s passionate about the game and would like to see the game succeed. My suggestions may not guarantee success but I’m just putting any ideas I have out here. Maybe people can salvage parts of the idea and make an even better one.

Oh, and if you want to make money off this. You can. Just make it so that we can only access the merchant/token with the expansion, like what you did it with the provisioner merchant.

PS – is this thread a reasonable way to properly give suggestions/arguments?