Guild Wars 2

If one have been following the community lately, these are 3 of the issues that have been concerning players

• The participation system is allowing players to earn rewards while not playing as much as other players earning the same rewards.
• Outnumbered is being exploited and causing problems.
• Skirmish reward track feels too slow and unrewarding for less veteran players.

I think that the following series of changes could work to solve or ease many of these issues well enough:

• Change the participation system to work more progressively and reward more gaining score for your world.
  • Tiers are now numbered 0 to 5.
  • Now each tier adds the same number of pips per tick as its own number indicates. So at tier 1 you earn +1 pip per tick, at tier 4 you earn 4 pips per tick.
  • Tiers would now slowly decay to the previous one over time based on a decay rate that increases over time. The higher the decay rate, the faster your participation decays.
    • The decay rate would be shown in the participation panel.
    • Each point of war score earned for your world by any action in which you participate reduces the decay rate. WXP does not count for this.
    • Being at a higher participation tier would increas the decay speed. So staying at higher tiers requires more aggressive and active gameplay, maintaining and defending higher scoring locations, thus earning more war score.
    • Being inside contested objectives, and being in combat would slow down the decay. But being out of combat, and being outside objectives would speed it up.
    • Being tagged to share participation by a squad would increase participation and decrease decay whenever anyone in the squad gains participation, but it won’t give you more than the highest player in the squad.
  • Participation would not be lost or decrease when switching characters.
  • Destroying or disabling fully built enemy siege would now count towards participation on defense events. Allowing someone defending a tower to gain participation even if the enemy runs away before damaging doors or walls.

• Change how outnumbered gives extra pips:
  • Bonus pips from Outnumbered are no longer directly granted by each tick while having the Outnumbered effect itself, and instead come from a separate effect that is received while under Outnumbered as you earn warscore for your world:
  • This effect would stack over time while Outnumbered, giving just +1 pip per stack up to 5, and increasing as you do things that give warscore to your world.
  • The more warscore you get for your world, the faster the stacks get to 5. For example, you could earn 1 stack for every 2 points of warscore you earn. So you could go get 5 sentries or shrines, defeat 5 enemy players while under a stack of bloodlust, or take over a Tier 3 tower.
  • So if you just jump between maps all the time hoping to get your tick to happen in an outnumbered map, you won’t ever get any bonuses at all.
  • The stacks would go down one at a time over time like the stacks of the Hammer Corruption effect in Cliffside fractal. Whenever do something that earns warscore, all the stacks refresh for a duration based on the warscore earned. For example, 2 minutes for point of warscore up to a max of 30min. The duration from different objectives won’t stack, but if the duration of what you last did is shorter than what you already had, it won’t be decreased.
  • So as long as you stay outnumbered and giving score to your world, you keep all the stacks. And if you only go around taking shrines and sentries, you’ll only get 4 mins extension every time, which may not be enough to keep them. But defend a Tower, and your stacks get 8 mins of duration, enough to get you going while defending the tower.
  • When your map is no longer Outnumbered, the stacks are not lost instantly at the same time as the Outnumbered effect is lost. Instead, they still go down slowly one at a time naturally, so you can still benefit from your efforts until they are all lost. This way if a squad comes and leaves you don’t lose it all instantly.

[Continues->]

• Have pips earned in two ways: Per row and per tick.
  • Per row pips are given only once per row of pips regardless of participation tiers. Every time you reach a row, these pips will be granted right away when you are in WvW. So if you just log in and enter WvW after reset, these will be instantly applied to the first row in the Wood chest.
    • Rank pips : 0-7 pips given based on rank. These pips are never lost once gained.
    • Dedication pips: 0-3 pips based on how many consecutive weeks have you completed at least the Wood chest (gain at least 100 pips) in an scrimmage. After 4 weeks, you’d get 3 pips already completed per row of pips. Dedication pips would reset to 0 if you change worlds, but they would only be reduced 1 per week after one week without completing the wood chest. So you can leave for 2 weeks and lose just 1 pip, then complete wood another week to get it back.
  • Per tick pips are given on every scrimmage tick:
    • War score : 1-3 pips based on your world’s current placement in the current skirmish.
    • Participation pips: 0-5 pips based on one’s participation level.
    • Commander pips: +1 pip per tick if you are the leader of a squad with at least 5 players.
    • Outnumbered pips: +1-5 pips for playing while being outnumbered.
  • By having the rank and dedication pips only count once per row, the pips from active gameplay can be increased without increasing the overall pip gain. This way we can reward more players who play more actively even if they have less rank, while those who have accumulated more rank can’t play less actively and still get as many pips per tick, yet they still get rewarded more if they play the same.

Now, this may seem complex because I’m rather thorough when explaining things, what this system intends to do is rather simple. In a nutshell:

• Get more score for your world during a scrimmage -> Get more pips per tick the more score you get for your world.
• Keep getting score for your world even when outnumbered -> Get more pips per tick the longer you keep scoring while outnumbered.
• Play more WvW -> Complete faster each row of pips.
• Keep playing for the same world -> Complete faster each row of pips.

What do you think. Could changes like this work? Would they cause more problems? Did I miss something? Could a dev tell us if if any of these could even be possible?

That sounds way to complicated.

Let me describe my evening in wvw yesterday:
I was on our home map → DBL. It was mostly red but there were several small enemy groups running around. So we often had the white crosses on our objectives (I’m not sure if it is called like that in English).

I was mostly running around checking if everything was allright. So I was outside of objectives and mostly out of combat. I just captured a sentry/camp every few minutes or met an enemy or destroyed a cata or repaired a wall.

If I understand you system right, I would have had a hard time to keep up my participation.
On the other side, someone “karma training” on a map would easily get a high participation.

Outnumbered:
I don’t understand the problem with it. It doesn’t hurt anyone when people jump to an empty map.

Your outnumbered system would also be unfair for roamers who just look for duels and aren’t interested in capturing towers.

His idea is generally good, but as a software developer, I can guarantee that too much microcalculation is basically asking not to be implemented, the developers will not even finish reading. When I have time I will come back here with a “lean” sugestion.

Rhiannon.1726:

That sounds way to complicated.

Let me describe my evening in wvw yesterday:
I was on our home map -> DBL. It was mostly red but there were several small enemy groups running around. So we often had the white crosses on our objectives (I’m not sure if it is called like that in English).

I was mostly running around checking if everything was allright. So I was outside of objectives and mostly out of combat. I just captured a sentry/camp every few minutes or met an enemy or destroyed a cata or repaired a wall.

If I understand you system right, I would have had a hard time to keep up my participation.
On the other side, someone “karma training” on a map would easily get a high participation.

Outnumbered:
I don’t understand the problem with it. It doesn’t hurt anyone when people jump to an empty map.

Your outnumbered system would also be unfair for roamers who just look for duels and aren’t interested in capturing towers.

Looks like I wasn’t able to explain properly, maybe it was too long and you gave up reading.

Every time you repaired a wall or broke catapults while the objective’s location is still being attacked, you would get participation on the defense event, you would get quite some war score points as defense ticks from walled objectives are high.

If you also escorted dolyaks, walking from the camp to the walled objective and killing enemies, and basically looking out for that walled objective, you’d also be getting war score from the dolyaks, from the sentries and the camp, and from defense ticks. Keeping your warscore gain and participation high. The more of the route from the camp to the walled objective you guard and protect, the more participation you’d get.

And the higher the objective’s upgrade tier, the more warscore it would provide for your world. And the higher the participation of those defending.

But if everyone just stayed at one objective, letting the enemies capture, your entire world would get less score, so having more locations benefits everyone.

So to get the most rewards for everyone, people would have to capture things with large groups and leave players behind as scouts and taking care of the locations.

In my outnumbered system, roamers would get warscore if they kill enemies. And warscore is what keeps participation and outnumberd stacks high. If they also talked with each other and with other roamers in each Mist War map and took as many bloodlusts as possible, they would get even more warscore per kill, and keep their participation and outnumbered bonus even higher much faster. But also make their teammates get more score from their kills, thus helping the entire world.

If they were just hanging around for duels letting enemies revive, they would not be getting score for their world and thus they would not be rewarded as much, which is pretty reasonable.

Hm… I tried to be concise, but I keep thinking of all the possibilities and solutions for them and it’s really hard to keep it to a minimum.

I may need to reformat this.