Guild Wars 2

The timed reward system in WvW is badly designed. It encourages doing just enough to get to participation 6 and then doing as little as possible to stay there. The reward is disconnected from the act of earning it, since as long as you do something every ~10 min, you get exactly the same rewards (less a little karma, rank gain, and junk loot) as being fully active the whole time. WvW needs to be changed to an action-based reward system. You do something, you get the reward. You do nothing, you get nothing. If you leave for 10 min, you have 10 min less rewards.

Badges! Perhaps you’re thinking of badges being used as the reward currency. Veterans already have a lot, they get earned by actively contributing and there isn’t a whole lot of use for them.

Careful I made a thread about this exact subject and like 15 people tried to jump down my throat for it, and I WAS THE ONE infracted.

Boogiepop Void.6473:

The timed reward system in WvW is badly designed. It encourages doing just enough to get to participation 6 and then doing as little as possible to stay there. The reward is disconnected from the act of earning it, since as long as you do something every ~10 min, you get exactly the same rewards (less a little karma, rank gain, and junk loot) as being fully active the whole time. WvW needs to be changed to an action-based reward system. You do something, you get the reward. You do nothing, you get nothing. If you leave for 10 min, you have 10 min less rewards.

I agree that rewarding action versus rewarding time put in is a better way to go about it, but how would you propose it be done instead? Allow players to gain bonus pips for keeping a higher participation level (and correspondingly having higher participation levels degrade significantly faster, so you have to be playing constantly to keep T6 participation)? I could get behind the bonus pips, as it allows you to fill up the chest tracks faster, but it still doesn’t allow you to gain any extra tickets per week, which is the issue that I see a lot of people have with this system.

First of all get rid of participation. It’s inherently linked to the current time-based system. Give points for the reward track directly for doing things.

Have pips be related to positive actions. Increase war score by X, get a pip. Take a certain number of objectives, get a pip. Deal X damage to enemies, get a pip (it would be too frustrating if this were just kills since you can get in bad situations and you don’t want to penalize for being in the smaller zerg or not dealing killing blows). Lead a party for a certain time IN ACTIVE ENGAGEMENT (ie not just standing around), get a bonus pip (I know this is still time based, but it’s active time as opposed to passive time).

Notice that nothing I said here has to do with ranks, etc. The difference in rewards by ranking right now is insane and discourages people from playing.

I’m aware this suggestion means you are doubled up, earning pips and reward track progress for the same things. but that’s because the pip system itself is an awkward bolt-on to WvW (as it is for sPVP as well). Having the reward tracks be the main thing, with direct contribution, and tweaking things for more rewards from there, would have been the more natural action, instead of having 2 parallel reward systems. If you need 2 systems to do the same thing, reward players, then one or both systems is not designed properly.