TL;DR: A system similar to PvE and PvP where a combination of your servers tick and personal participation gives you regular progress to WvW Reward tracks.
As most of us agree, WvW rewards are currently in a terrible state. For those who don’t believe it I recommend playing 3 hours of WvW, after it go to Silverwastes for 30 minutes and then compare what you get.
Thing is that WvW rewards need to be not abuseable, this leads me to my proposal.
My idea is to combine two systems that are already in the game and combine them for WvW rewards: HoT meta event rewards and PvP reward tracks.
It’s kinda simple:
As in PvE you have two bars: One for your personal participation (Let’s say 1 event counts 30 minutes towards that, events that include defending something 60 minutes) and the other bar for the “meta” event. As “meta” event we use something that makes it necessary for players to compete with each other: the tick. As result of this rewards are given every tick (= every 15 minutes).
Three types of rewards here, highest reward for the highest tick, medium for the 2nd best tick, lowest reward for the lowest tick. These however need to be balanced well enough for encouraging the competition but not giving a too huge disadvantage to weaker coverage.
So for example when a tick ends you get 80% (personal participation) of the reward for the lowest tick.
What can this reward be?
Here we use the second system I mentioned above: Reward tracks.
This allows as in PvP a wide variety of possible rewards and to make the rewards more individual. Examples for reward tracks could be a blueprint track, a melee food track, a ranged food track, tracks for skins, special finishers or stuff from pve maps (so we don’t have to farm Silverwastes for shovels and sand for example).
For every tick you get progress towards your reward track based on – as mentioned above – personal participation and tick quality.
Issues:
- This kinda forces people to ppt for progressing their reward tracks, but not everyone likes ppt:
Solution for this could be to rework the rank up chests. Killing people gives WXP -> rank up chests. Insted of the current 2 green items, proofs of heroics and 20s, rank up chests could reward 20s, proofs of heroics, a reward track progress tonic (as for pvp dailies) and the current chance of 0,1% for an exotic or ascended as additional reward.
- This favors strong nightcapping servers, they will get max rewards for hours:
This is true, but those players have fewer enemies so less fights (-> less fun) and less loot bags.
- Rewards for winning the matchup are still somewhere between poor and non-existent:
True, maybe this could be used to adress this as well.
Conclusion:
I’m sure a system like this could significantly improve the current situation, seems to be kind of fair and gives a lot of room to bring the rewards for playing WvW more in line with the quality of rewards in PvP and PvE.
However as for every WvW reward system it needs careful balancing to avoid favoring dominant servers too much and not to lead to WvW becoming just a farm spot. It has to be interesting enough to care about it, but cannot be unfair.
Thoughts?
(edited by rdb.9258)