Guild Wars 2

Reverence.6915:

Do keep in mind that “scouting” is a community created meta that gameplay mechanics have no bearing over. A game cannot tell the difference between a scout and someone who’s afk, as they’re largely doing the same thing. How can you differentiate between two characters standing around in the same spot, while one’s scouting and the other is afk?

Since it’s a community created meta, it should be rewarded by the community – BG recognises and occasionally reimburses scouts for their time. Others should probably start doing that too perhaps?

Defending on the other hand, needs to be made easier and more rewarding. Laying down 6 superior flame rams with 10 omega golems backing you up means that there is very little you can do to defend the structure if you’re even 30 seconds late in responding, assuming you have the numbers to defend in the first place. There’s got to be something devs can do about that.

you are right and wrong.

The game detects AFK in WvW/EoTM and after 15 minutes of being AFK, the player is sent beck to LA.

Also Scouts are not completely AFK, they need to refresh siege and check different walls or even report stuff in map chat. Also browsing TP….

It is certainly not easy to come up with a solution for this, but Anet’s is got bunch of smart devs that can make this happen…

We try to not have any one scout for more then at Tick or Two at the most. Even then there are members of my guild who would stay in there all night if we let them.

Problem rewards are not easily answered. WvW is balanced very thinly. PvE is were the money is. I can make more in a few hours in pve then a full night in WvW.

We don’t want to good of rewards because that would just lead to farmers in wvw.

Still something needs to be done.

And by the way “Holy necro-ed thread batman”

I love scouting… but I don’t do it for the time being because I miss out on a tonne of loot. Thinking of hiring myself out for 1G an hour

If I ran a guild, I would be happy to pay my scouts for their efforts… everyone wins with good scouts!

I would like to see some better rewards for scouts but I imagine it’s not an easy task to track reward-wise. My guild tries to do the one scout per tick thing, but we have at least two that are pretty much permascouts because it’s not always easy to get people to volunteer (and these people really like scouting, upgrading camps/towers, etc.). I try to do 2-3 tick’s worth of scouting when I first get into the map. I then set aside a percent of my bags and share them with the permascouts. It doesn’t make up for their loss of wxp, karma and all that, but at least they get some bags out of it.

Dedicated scouts’ rewards should be based on the utility they provide to commanders. Which in this case, means that commanders should be allowed to choose how to reward ’em.

Of course that can cause too many people willing to scout to get the neat stuff. BUT, if you give the option to pick specific people to scout for a period of time, then it’d be OK IMO.

Scouting = roaming, not sitting on Anza walls for the whole day, telling people about a bunch of PvD’ers that want to take a tower. You need to provide info beforehand, to shut down the enemy, not to clean up the mess they have made.

Sieging rewards are fine as they are. Of course it takes time to down a wall or remove enemy trebs and stuff… BUT, 90% of the time it looks like this:

Bunch of people sitting at a tower get trolled to finally get out if it and actually fight. After 10 seconds they realize, that they can’t beat you 10v5, so they run away and get back in the tower, only to build ACs/trebs/catas and use them on you, because they simply suck. Why on earth should such behavior be rewarded? There’s absolutely ZERO risk in sieging and endless rewards for just tagging zergs (12390147 lootbags suddenly appear at your feet). Isn’t it enough?

Sieging helps the idea of blobbing, kills the idea of fighting. Period. Thank you for upvotes.

DevonCarver.5370:

Solstice.1097:

Can I ask what you perceive as a bigger problem; giving rewards to those who may not deserve them, or giving no rewards to those who do?

It’s like asking which is worse; letting a criminal go free or convicting an innocent, and I personally agree with the latter.

I say decide what rewards are appropriate, put them in place, and as you start to see the ways in which it can be abused you will much more effectively be able to tweak it to prevent said abuses.

Unfortunately that runs the risk of closing the barn door after the horse gets out. The economy is not something we like to take those sorts of risks on and we wouldn’t be adding rewards until we are more certain of their effects on all of the game.

Something about SH farm/ gem exploit/ ascended armor/material prices/ dvd bank/ glory to gold/bots/ boss exploits/

I wouldn’t be worried about the ingame economy that much tbh.

Scouting is one of the most important roles a player can have in WvW imho. Yet it is terribly difficult to find scouts and most of the time it is one small group of players who end up scouting for hours, instead of being replaced every 15 minutes. There is one commander on our server who asks players to send the scouts gold or items for scouting, but it is just this one commander. So here comes my suggestion for a scout reward system:

Gates and walls have alarm bells that can be rung. Ringing the bell while enemies are close, attacking a wall or gate, shows a map marker, even if the number of enemies is below 25. If the bell is rung and the subsequent “repel the enemy attackers” event succeeds, the person who rung the bell gets an extra reward. Some silver maybe. An Achievement track rewards players who are especially active as scouts. All commanders who tagged up in one of the bl or eb get a notification if the bell is rung and enemies are close, specifiying how many enemies are attacking, where and what is the upgrade level of the objective being attacked, even if they are not on the same map. All players on the map where the attack takes place should get a notification as well. The bells should be destroyable, an upgrade that needs to be purchased at the Quartermasters and rebuildable with, lets say 10 supplies. Of course scouts will still go unrewarded if enemies are not attacking, thats the downside.
This is just a very rough draft of such a system, of course it has to be thought through entirely but I think the basic idea of alarm bells is not so bad after all.

There should be an event every 5 or 10 minutes that you must turn in a scouting report to an NPC with options or something to get credit for scouting and possibly allow others to view the scouting reports on a map…or something.

Time to bite on the post necromancy frenzy (post minionmaster mode engage!)

Defensive rewards need to be designed to prevent botting. Beyond that yes they’re necessary.

Some quest ideas for scouts. Activate quests from an NPC patrolling the structure and return to that NPC with a report to gain credit. Quests will be at random and could include

• Assist the upgrade being built: Grab supply and build at the designated (random) locations. This build counts toward the structure upgrade.
• Construct defensive siege: Build an arrow cart at designated locations (these will be random spots on the walls.
• Wall patrol: Visit view points on the walls: randomly placed viewpoints appear on the walls.
• Siege maintenance patrol: Refresh the despawn on all pieces of siege within the keep/tower (markers appear on siege which the player hasn’t touched yet. these siege will also be marked on the map).

Defensive quests have a cooldown of 1 minute increasing cooldown by 1 minute for each consecutive quest completed at an objective. (turning in 3 quests in a row results in a 3 minute cooldown after the third quest). A quest ends if the player leaves the structure. The cooldown remains. This cooldown for all structures is reset if the player participates in a defense event or captures an objective (player must get bronze or higher reward for that event). Each objective has its own cooldown. Keep quests will have higher rewards than camp quests.

you could analyze the kinds of things people do while they are defending and increase rewards for those. Example might be that defenders are more likely to use siege, so exp for hits with siege, not just kills. Stats for guarding yaks are already kept, exp rewards could be increased. Exp for paying for upgrades is another.

imho, We don’t need more PvE in WvW (which is what quests are).

And basing rewards on an ennemy attacking would mean only the south towers would get scouts, and some players might decide to not call before door is hit for defense reward…

Structure scouts can be rewarded for what they do in the game and can be recorded by the game (eg: siege refresh).
Upgrade scout can be rewarded for helping dolyacks (bring back rewards, and investigate bot reports).

Mobile scout? I don’t know. They get their own, with camps/sentries/duels…

For the people sitting in towers/keeps how about adding a resource patch upgrade path e.g vege/herb patch which refreshes every 10min or so. Someone sitting in the tower might then get the awesome income of 6s-12s/hour. I don’t really know why the WvW economy is such a concern. Look at the rewards in EOTM, there are resource nodes in abundance there and the rewards are much, much better e.g I got 24 badges for taking a tower. Plus there are no big gold sinks in EOTM.