First off, shoutout to the devs who fixed Skirmish Chests. Seriously, thank you.
Okay, timers. Do you guys remember that huge patch to the Heart of Thorns maps that changed map rewards from a meta event participation system to getting loot on doing events? When HoT came out, you could load up on participation from doing events and AFK to get loot chest popups until your participation ran out (at least in Verdant Brink). Sound familiar? Exactly, which is why I always found it weird that ANet chose this exact system for reward tracks in WvW.
Every rewards system has its pros and cons. For timers, they’re either too lenient and people can AFK for extra rewards, or excessively draconian, and the forums light up. In general, players are gonna be happier with the former, but really guys. Why is there even a timer for rewards in the first place?
Take a note from the HoT maps: loot on event completion = rewards based on participation. Why can’t this work in WvW? The game mode is all about capturing and holding objectives, and every time that happens, you get a medal saying you finished an event. That’s the time to give reward track points and pip progress! Ideally each event would give a small amount of reward track points based on how difficult it is, like how WXP is rewarded, so you’d get just as much if not more than 200 reward track points (without an EXP booster) every five minutes for actively following a commander, roamer with Outnumbered buff, or with shared squad participation.
As for pips, honestly there’s always going to be an issue here with bonus pips based on WvW rank, as many have pointed out already. Instead of pips in WvW, you could get something like “Skirmish Points” on event completion to fulfill the same function but allow incremental progress instead of one flat payout every tick. This system also allows for a smaller bonus based on WvW rank (10-20% bonus Skirmish Points for each rank category, instead of 1 extra pip per category as it is now), instead of most of your pips coming from rank. We could theorycraft the specific numbers for days, but I’ll bet you ANet has the sort of analytics to better be able to tweak the numbers right.
Of course this system isn’t perfect: roamers get less rewards, and long battles on offense might not give you any event credit. However, roamers have never gotten as much loot as people following a tag with a big group, and to make prolonged engagements worthwhile, towers, keeps, and SMC can give bonus reward track points and “Skirmish Points” based on their upgrade level upon capture (or number of dolyaks escorted to be precise). For what it’s worth, you might as well already be getting bonus WXP for flipping heavily defended objectives, right?
tl;dr: Timers will always be a problem. Make reward track points and pip progress tied to event completion (like karma and most WXP) to reward active play and make AFKing worthless.
(edited by Mal.1670)