Guild Wars 2

Just some food for thought: TL/DR at the bottom

Rewards in WvW are a bit complicated as you want people to feel rewarded to play without creating the incentives that result on karma train and objectives exchange that turn the game from a competitive environment to a farm.
At the same time, you need to reward veteran players so they have a distinct visual that show their long term commitment to the game mode without creating a barrier that scares new players from the game-mode.
The other point to balance is the reward of playing the mode without making it easy to just afk or karma train.

So a few suggestions:
– More dynamic participation levels:
Increase participation level to 10 or leave as it is, but make higher level decrease faster (instantly start the decay) and lower levels slower (longer to start decay and slower decay). In this way to get max participation you will need to be fairly active in fights while at the same time you can keep a average level of participation while scouting or doing small things.
– Participation penalty in safe zone (starter area) or dead
Whenever you are in a situation where you cant take dmg (starter areas or dead, invul skills dont count) your participation is given a penalty that sets it to the minimum Pip level (currently level 3) and will stay there until you earn participation again. You cannot earn shared participation while under this penalty

- Build up Pips
Each interval you have a maximum of ‘build up Pips’ (lets say 5). Build up pips stack every minute and are rewarded at the end of the tick (5 minutes) when they are set to 0 for the next tick. You can win pips for:
– - New player (rank 1-150) taking a tower or keep: +1 pip tick (the 5 minutes)
– - Gaining participation on outmanned map: + 1 pip per minute (max 5 per tick)
– - High participation: reaching max participation level: + 1 pip every time max participation is reached (max 5 per tick)
This would reward people that actually play on outmanned maps instead of just hop there on the last minute, while also rewarding people that stay on maps where fights are constantly happening.

TL/DR: Make participation levels more dynamic, apply penalty to participation levels for people dead or on safe zones. Create a pip category that reward people for having max participation and gaining participation on outmanned maps every minute (max of 5 pips per tick) instead of the current 5 at the spot for changing maps.

I think this is a pretty good OP. As such, I plan to poke lots of holes in it. This is how I show love, or something.

I like that you acknowledge the need to avoid incentivizing K-Trains, but your suggestion for build-up pips seems to do just that. In order to maximize pip gain with the high participation pip, you have to do a bunch of things in a short period. That means running in a huge zerg to quickly cap many objectives—no time to deal with defenders or to defend yourself as it doesn’t build much participation.

The new player pip has a similar issue. It incentivizes capping something but not holding it. In fact, it’s better if things flip constantly and best if every team focuses solely on offense.

The outmanned build-up pip has a different issue. If the buff drops because people come to farm it then comes back because people didn’t actually plan to help, nobody gets rewarded at all. Not even the people that were there the whole time. In addition, since you have to gain participation every minute, you can’t afford to use a cata in a small team unless everyone switches off on the siege to gain participation.

As for the other suggestions, dynamic participation levels have merit but, again, they incentivize doing lots of things all the time with minimum downtime. That means no time for scouting—even if it’s active roaming scouting, no time for sieging since everyone not on siege has their participation decay, no time for dealing with defenders and no time for defending since, for some reason, killing enemy siege doesn’t grant participation.

The participation penalty in safe zones will drastically slow reward track growth (since it’s tied to participation levels) if you don’t have an uncontested WP outside of your starter area. Simply respawning will knock you from +195 to about half that. You could make participation decay go faster in such areas, but that punishes people who are trying to clear their bags and get back to the fight.

The difficulty with afk pip farmers is that pushing pips onto more active play incentivizes K-Training while punishing downtime too harshly also incentivizes K-Training. It’s a pick-your-poison situation and I’m firmly in the no K-Train camp.

Penalising for dying would suck. It’d be worse then when armour repair costed money, when everyone would avoid dying at all cost, and mess up group/Zerg plays

If you’re watching over a camp while it upgrades, you’re not actually afk and you are participating, but your decay timer will still go down just as fast in the camp (if it sees no action or if you dont get a kill from said action) as it would for someone sitting at spawn or in a keep twiddling their thumbs.

To remedy the participation decay of people that are actually playing, I’d suggest quicker decay timer kick in and count down depending on where people chose to afk. RisK vs reward so to speak.

For example, the safest place by far is citadel or spawn. But, what if the decay timer started the minute you wp’d there? The timer starts decaying the moment anyone wps to Citadel/spawn, if they stay there and afk for 5 mins, well tough luck T0 participation, if its a situation where they have no choice but to wp to citadel, then the decay timer halts the second they leave the seige barred areas of citadel/spawn and reenter the battlefield, at which point, the resume whatever participation they had left after their run through spawn. The goal is to get people back on the battlefield quickly.

Secondly, afking in a friendly controlled camp that has no walls and afking in Garri or even a tower are different things and the decay timers should NOT be the same in both locations. The higher the risk the slower decay should kick in basically.

Afking in JPs…this one is a problem, because both ABL JPs are technically part of the battlefield and also considered high risk areas, OS is 1 giant JP and also high risk, not to mention a great place to go when trying to free a que spot BUT, all are apart of wvw and therefore should benefit from bonuses such as outnumbered. Therefore I’m inclined to say participation decay should begin the moment a player enters either ABL JP tunnel or switches over to OS.