Guild Wars 2

There have been posts all over in various threads discussing this so maybe it would be a good idea to have a thread that is solely dedicated to discussing pip distribution.

So ArenaNet probably used analytics to determine how they hand out pips based on various forms of gameplay, but the current distribution of pips is problematic.

More specifically, as a relatively frequent morning commander, I am now more likely to play solo to take advantage of the outnumbered buff because tagging up will result in an influx of players and I will thus loose the buff and play for less rewards. I am surely not the only player who does this, so this can’t be a good thing.

The other issue is that in its current form EOTM farmers are rewarded more pips because of their high rank that is, lets face it, illegitimately earned by exploiting EOTM karmatrains. EOTM is not real WvW, so why are they rewarded more over players who didn’t abuse EOTM and are stuck at 1.000 or 2.000 rank?

I think we should communicate better that the current distribution is out of wack. So maybe it is a good idea to post your wishlist for pip distribution below.

Outnumbered map hopping is also a genuine problem, but is better discussed in a separate thread.

War Score Placement
Last place – 2 pip
Second place – 3 pips
First place – 4 pips

WvW Rank
Bronze – 0 pips
Silver and Gold – 1 or 2 pips
Platinum, Mithril, Diamond and up – 2 or 3 pips

Commander Bonus
Squad with 5 players – 1 pip
Squad with 25 players – 2 pips
Squad with 50 players – 3 pips

Server commitment
2 pips

Outnumbered
1 or 2 pips

I like the current system more. Maybe outnumbered could be 3 pips instead.

What i dont like about your suggestion is the bigger pip gain difference between 2nd and 3rd place on a gamemode where doubleteaming is very frequent.

Also even if they got diamond in eotm, they still played wvw. Eotm is wvw just lower quality. EotM is comparable to playing in Drakkar Lake, weakest EU PPT server that dies instantly. I got my diamond in real WvW but even in EotM it would have taken ages.

Also commanders dont need extra rewards for commanding, we dont want people to tag up just for extra rewards. +1 pip was approriate.

Only thing I like about your suggestion is the idea of increasing base pips to +2 for 3rd place server so new players wouldnt suffer so much

Gunner Morton.8340:

Commander Bonus
Squad with 5 players – 1 pip
Squad with 25 players – 2 pips
Squad with 50 players – 3 pips

This basicly mean your 50 man tell your 5 man squad “oh look, you’re useless”.

I suggest the following instead:
Squad with 5 players – 3 pips
Squad with 25 players – 2 pips
Squad with 50 players – 1 pip

Threather.9354:

What i dont like about your suggestion is the bigger pip gain difference between 2nd and 3rd place on a gamemode where doubleteaming is very frequent.

Yep, edited but forum post edits are so kitten slow so you posted before it got through.

Threather.9354:

Eotm is wvw just lower quality. [..] I got my diamond in real WvW but even in EotM it would have taken ages.

Technically, EOTM isn’t directly related to your world, so many players I know would deem it to be more leaning towards PvE than WvW. EOTM karmatraining was a lot faster and easier than WvW karmatraining.

Threather.9354:

Also commanders dont need extra rewards for commanding, we dont want people to tag up just for extra rewards. +1 pip was approriate.

My theory is that if people will tag up just for rewards and command like kitten they will get burned in map chat and people will not be bothered to join their squad, so they would never get the additional pips. The other option is adding a timer to see if their squad is filled over a longer period of time.

Dawdler.8521:

This basicly mean your 50 man tell your 5 man squad “oh look, you’re useless”.

I know this is problematic, so maybe there should be a different system for this type of participation. The only reason I distributed pips this way is because blobs are very common on my server any time of day and 5 man squads would be useless against them and commander faces more responsibility when dealing with these numbers. They could still be useful by flipping objectives, so maybe a different mechanic would help.

You could boost your rank with a b-day boosters /experience boosters with 100-300 ranks /day easy if you just play on EB and win fights arround Stonemist.
Yet i see no reason to reduce the rewards /rank , even for " Eotm Karma trainers" wich spent a lot of time in wvw game mode and have maxed all masteries , etc

The only thing that needs adjusting is the outnumbered reward buff, it should be reduced to 3.

I already posted this in another thread, but I agree that we should try and keep it all together in one thread so the WvW devs can find it more easily. Here’s my proposal:

This thread (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/How-long-it-take-for-all-skirmish-reward) shows how long it would take you to earn the maximum 175 tickets per week. Refer to the Google doc link in that post. Based on the figures there, I think a happy medium that all players should be getting as a baseline is +9 or 10 pips per tick. This would take you an average of 12 – 13 hours in WvW per week, which is about 1.5 – 2 hours a day (which is also about the time it would take you to do one complete HoT map meta). Here’s the breakdown of how I think it should be arranged:

Participation
1 pip per tier (maximum 6 pips)

War Score Placement (I decided not to change this because of the potential of “tag-teaming” where two servers conspire to just beat down the third; the #2 server does so because they know they can’t challenge the #1 server and so settles for making sure they don’t come in last. Best not to have there be such a massive difference between rankings.)
Last place – 1 pip
Second place – 2 pips
First place – 3 pips

WvW Rank
Nothing – 1 pip
Bronze – 2 pips
Silver – 3 pips
Gold – 4 pips
Platinum – 5 pips
Mithril – 6 pips
Diamond – 7 pips

Commander Bonus
1 pip (I don’t think it’s necessarily a good idea to give zerg commanders more bonuses over havoc squad commanders, hence why I’m keeping the original.)

Loyalty Bonus
2 pips (increased from 1 pip) if you have been on the server for 3 weeks or more, plus an extra 3rd pip if you have earned at least 100 pips the previous week. (This change encourages people to play WvW weekly, but doesn’t put you back at square one if for some reason you’re busy one week and can’t get on to play.)

Outnumbered
2 pips

Under this system, if we’re looking at a total WvW newbie who’s just been obediently following his tag around until he reaches maximum participation, he would have 8 pips (10 if he has the Loyalty bonus). For veteran players, you could potentially be earning 19 pips every tick (20 if you’re a Commander), although most will be lower than that. Finally, with the Outnumbered boost being reduced to +2, it should be enough to make it appealing to stay in such a map, but not such a HUGE difference that people are compelled to swap maps purely to make use of it.

Finally, to help counter afk farmers (that is, people who have built up their participation, then just map hop to a quiet map and hide in a corner somewhere, killing the occasional sentry or dolyak to prevent their participation from dropping. I normally wouldn’t care about this, except that it could potentially clog up maps and prevent other people getting on to play), I propose also giving a small direct pip boost whenever you do something that contributes to your War Score, equal to the amount of War Score that your server gains. (This applies to both captures AND defenses, so while killing a Dolyak only gives 1 pip, defending a fully upgraded SMC grants 30 pips per defense event.)

Anytime a person’s main objective in playing is the rewards, they aren’t going to be contributing as much as possible to the actual competition. There’s no changing that and there’s no point breaking everything else in the effort. The goal of this change is to have people feel rewarded for playing a game mode they find at least moderately fun. It’s not to incentivize people who don’t care about the game mode at all to clog it up in hope of getting new shinies.

Also, reducing rank-based rewards due to what EotM used to be is short-sighted. Sure, some folks now get more rewards because of that, but that has nothing to do with anyone else. New players are 100% unaffected and veterans aren’t adversely affected either. It feels a little bad, but why make it worse for everyone for all time including yourself?

The Outnumbered bonus would be better served with a delay. You don’t get it the first skirmish, but you do get it all the rest. This is similar to the lock-out on pips from switching servers, but on a smaller scale. It needs to remain high to encourage people to stick around, but it should not be so easy to abuse.

Imo the current pip reward system is trash tier and I have no idea why it became the way it is.
Awarding pips based on rank is the dumbest thing I have seen regarding rewards in GW2.
My main account has rank 686, I play cele guard in zergs, my alt account is rank 22 and is an exact copy of my main accounts cele guard. My main account gets 2 pips while my alt account gets 0 pips for doing exactly the same thing. This is some next level bamboozlement and makes my head spin. But this is meant to retroactively reward WvW players aye? Because WvW rewards used to be kitten aye? Because you k-training in borderlands (dont deny this didnt happen) or in eotm was somehow worse rewarding than frostgorge bag farm or dungeon farm? Dungeons which rewarded gold and zero t6 materials. Materials you could sell on the tp for gold. But you got less gold/hour than dungeoneers? Maybe because dungeoneers got good at what they did and you kept wiping in WvW.

Outnumbered is absolutely toxic as hell, when I get it on a borderland and lose the buff 5s before pip/tick Im this close > < to foaming around the mouth.

The difference in pip gain between new players and high ranked is DEMORALIZING! If you are a new player <150 rank and are losing the skirmish you get 1 pip/tick. A losing skirmish for <150 ranked players means they need 8 HOURS TO GET TO THE WOODEN CHEST!!!!!A high ranked player, let’s say gold, gets 4 pips in this scenario. That is 4x faster to get to the end reward chest. A low rank will get the same WXP for capping, same loot for killing, same reward track progress but pips, wew lad go drown in your own misfortune! Pips is for the chosen WvW players.

Honestly pip rewards should be along the line of:

• War score placement 1-3 pips, this is fine.
• If you are in a squad that is between 5-20 players, all those players get 3 pips, 20-35 players 2 pips, 35-50 players 1 pip.
• Loyalty 2 pips
• Outnumbered 2 pips
• Ranks 50-150 1 pip, 150-1000 2 pips, 1000+ 3 pips.

Here is a fun little scenario for the current system. the new expansion hits, you get new players into the game. PvE (dungeons, fractals, raids, open world bosses/meta: everyone is rewarded equaly for doing the same thing, sPvP: Everyone is rewarded equaly for winning or losing, WvW: GET BENT!

But Setz pips is only a small piece of the reward cake in WvW, chill your panties. It’s also the one that contributes the most to helping guilds with superior siege and improvement/tactics without opening your wallet, allows players to buy WvW infusions without destroying their laurels, allows players to progress towards skins, a progress where low ranked players might as well shoot their own foot because its less painful than looking at their pip acquisition.

Just remember those pips for outnumbered maybe feel skewed now, but when everyone leaves again after they have rewards, they will give people the incentive to turn up in a match rather than sit it out for a week.

Start looking at a broader picture, rather than how someone can get more pips.
And further note, most people are not getting outnumbered bonus for long as someone ALWAYS team chat it and it gets lost.

Up until now the server with low population coverage wise could look forward to no armor damage (nice, because you will be zerged over and over) the chance of a precursor (000.0000000000001%) and wxp bonus (only if you can leave spawn). Now they have the added incentive to turn up and try.

Outnumbered is only toxic because of the amount of people in wvw at this time all trying to finish their rewards and move on, again what happens when they leave?
Think long term not short term gains.

Anet should make the outnumbered bonus stackable, gain 1 stack for each minute in an outnumbered map, 1 stack is 1 pip

I agree with everything Zaxares said. It’s also nice to see an answer to afk farmers that works by giving incentive to play actively. Personally, I’d probably prefer to see things rejigged so you earned rewards from what you did directly rather than simply building up participation and then spending the time, but as long as that’s the system (and maybe it needs to be, for scouts getting participation sharing) then I think people should be able to sit in Obsidian Sanctum as their participation ticks down after they’re done.

One observation I’d also make is that I feel that placing all the tickets at the end of a tier was a mistake. They seem to have just copied over the ranked sPvP system, where such a system makes sense – you’ve got eight weeks before your pips reset, and having the majority of the rewards at the end of a tier gives you incentive to strive to reach that point, and once you do then, depending on how you’re feeling, you can either bow out for that season or start pushing for the next tier.

In the World versus World context, however, the pips get reset every week. Getting any tickets at all, then, requires making enough of an investment, per week, to hit the wooden chest. If, for whatever reason, you’re getting low pips, this can be a significant barrier for entry for people to basically get anywhere at all, and an even more significant barrier to keeping going once you’ve got an end-tier chest. (if you’ve just gone through 100 pips at 1-3 pips per tick, you’re probably not going to be enthusiastic about committing to another 150…)

My proposal would be to make it so that some of the pips in the end chest get redistributed to the earlier chests in a tier, in a 20%-20%-20%-40% arrangement. This means that the final chest is still something worth going for, but it’s not an all-or-nothing proposal: if, for whatever reason, you’re in the middle of a tier when reset happens, you’ve still earned something from that tier.

Grant fewer pips via passive requirements (such as being outnumbered or being a higher wvw rank) and grant more pips based on actions the player takes during a skirmish that might contribute to their team:
- Escorting Dolyaks
- Defending Objectives
- Capturing Objectives (based on the tier of the objective)
- Participating in a ruins capture.
- Killing Players (Perhaps 1 pip if you tag 10 kills in a single 5 minute skirmish, for the zerg fights.)
- Stomping Players (More geared towards roamers, perhaps 1 pip if you stomp 3 players.)
(For examples.)

Also, change the pips granted based on your server’s current position in the 2 hour skirmish to grant pips based on how your server performed in that 5 minute skirmish. If your team is behind in ppt but wipes an enemy zerg, they deserve that one extra ppk pip.

Among other things these ideas will discourage AFK heroes by making the players do stuff to earn their pips.

~ Kovu

TheWolf.1602:

Anet should make the outnumbered bonus stackable, gain 1 stack for each minute in an outnumbered map, 1 stack is 1 pip

I’d actually even like to build on this idea.. cuz there’s nothing more annoying than to fight in an Outnumbered map for almost the entire tick only to loose the Outnumbered buff just as the tick comes in (guess people mapping around to find Outnumbered?) then go back to Outnumbered again once the tick happens.. Then rinse and repeat the entire night.

Give 1 bonus pip for each minute your map was actually Outnumbered while you were on it, don’t base it off the 1 second the tick actually happens..

Dawdler.8521:

Gunner Morton.8340:

Commander Bonus
Squad with 5 players – 1 pip
Squad with 25 players – 2 pips
Squad with 50 players – 3 pips

This basicly mean your 50 man tell your 5 man squad “oh look, you’re useless”.

I suggest the following instead:
Squad with 5 players – 3 pips
Squad with 25 players – 2 pips
Squad with 50 players – 1 pip

Flipping this around will surely cause even more abuse than the current outnumbered abuse.

I think they should make one direct change to the pips rewards:
1st place: 5 pips
2nd place: 4 pips
3rd place: 3 pips

The only real issue with the system imo is that it is so intimidating to lower-ranked players that they don’t want to bother trying. This will allow them to make actually noticable gains without relying on Outmanned.

I don’t think anything else needs changes.

Outmanned is an issue, but it’s not because it gives 5 pips. Outmanned needs to be redesigned to only reward players who have been on the map for at least one tick. It is a key system that is implemented at such a high weight to reward playing on low-pop servers.

Sarrs.4831:

I think they should make one direct change to the pips rewards:
1st place: 5 pips
2nd place: 4 pips
3rd place: 3 pips

The only real issue with the system imo is that it is so intimidating to lower-ranked players that they don’t want to bother trying. This will allow them to make actually noticable gains without relying on Outmanned.

I don’t think anything else needs changes.

Outmanned is an issue, but it’s not because it gives 5 pips. Outmanned needs to be redesigned to only reward players who have been on the map for at least one tick. It is a key system that is implemented at such a high weight to reward playing on low-pop servers.

The problem is that part of the idea is to attract players to outmanned maps.

One solution there could be to require that the last time the player earned participation be on the map. So the ‘switch at the last moment’ brigade don’t get anything, but, say, someone who switches at the 4 minute mark and flips a camp at the 2 minute mark gets rewarded.

This could be combined with the idea of Najten and TheWolf, so that you don’t lose the outmanned bonus because someone came in at the last moment, as long as you earned participation while the bonus was active.

The system will require a reworking so that Outmanned is practically required for a new player to get any tickets at all, though.

last week I managed to play 3 sessions, that was worth 1 of the 4 wooden chests, which means no tickets for the leg.backpack.
Then all my pips got reset, if I play 3 sessions a week (several hours each) and I can’t even complete the wooden chest, then I might as well not play WvW at all, since the leg.backpack has become exclusive to people who don’t have a job and don’t have a social life

I think the current pips system is absolutely spot on. It’s the price of items that use tickets as a currency that I don’t necessarily agree on.

One pip per WvW rank tier is absolutely deserved, rewards players retroactively for being fateful WvW players (I won’t go into the whole EotM rank farm debate).

Commanders should get +1 pip for doing their job, absolutely deserved and spot on.

Placement rewards are also fair because skirmishes do not last the whole week and as such provide each server with a time frame to catch on and earn more pips per tick (I completely agree with +1 pip/tick for every placement).

Adding more pips per players in a squad would be a recipe for a disaster, an incentive for people to form even bigger zergs.

As for the Outnumbered reward I think it should stay at +5 pips/tick however the conditions to qualify for it should be changed. The +5 pip reward should be awarded only if the player was present for the entirety of the tick during which Outnumbered popped up. That way people would not be able to switch borderlands 20-30 seconds prior to tick end just to get the reward. Also it’s worth noting that on most mid/high tier servers Outnumbered is not something that is seen often because these have large queues which make it impossible to trigger it.

Once again I have to say that I am really satisfied with the pip reward system. The only thing that really doesn’t look quite right are the ticket prices.

Amaimon.7823:

last week I managed to play 3 sessions, that was worth 1 of the 4 wooden chests, which means no tickets for the leg.backpack.
Then all my pips got reset, if I play 3 sessions a week (several hours each) and I can’t even complete the wooden chest, then I might as well not play WvW at all, since the leg.backpack has become exclusive to people who don’t have a job and don’t have a social life

To get the wooden chest, if you are earning one pip per tick, you need to maintain participation for 8 & 1/3rd hours. This is the absolute largest amount of time you need to open the Wood box. You only kept your participation up for about 2 hours; you’re not doing ‘3 sessions a week, several hours each’.

Amaimon.7823:

last week I managed to play 3 sessions, that was worth 1 of the 4 wooden chests, which means no tickets for the leg.backpack.
Then all my pips got reset, if I play 3 sessions a week (several hours each) and I can’t even complete the wooden chest, then I might as well not play WvW at all, since the leg.backpack has become exclusive to people who don’t have a job and don’t have a social life

I play on multiple accounts, one of which is very low rank and gets two pips per tick usually. I play a total of sixish hours a week on that account (guild raids only), and I finished wood on it.

Are you sure you are doing enough in those play sessions to maintain t3 participation?