Guild Wars 2

As far as I can tell the only rewards you get are based on ticks. Skirmishes are just for awarding victory points. And winning a match just moves your world up a ranking for matchmaking purposes and higher ranks are just for bragging rights with no extra rewards ?

Thats the idea.

Player rewards are loosely linked to your server performance. Pips in this case being higher = faster rewards. Other than thats you get stuff every tick based on your performance/xp gains.

If server performance start having a major impact on player rewards, every pug will transfer to the winning servers (as opposed to just guilds bandwagoning today).

The very core of WvW is that things are supposed to be fairly equal, not a win everything or get nothing situation. Thats bad because you have no control over the thousands of players on your server.

Correct. Ticks for skirmishes track rewards (after 95/195 participation 2-3camps). Skirmishes are a way to reduced the effects of coverage in wvw (a 4hour period of no coverage use to decide match-ups). Winning the wvw match-ups does not matter much.

After Gold Invader you will have all of the wvw masteries, so it just a measurement of timed played in wvw. The bronze-diamond ranks just gives you more pips per tick now, so being a high rank wvw reduces the amount of time needed to gain skirmish tickets. Should gain 1.5-2.5 wxp ranks per hour in wvw. Gold Invaders have played ~1000hrs in wvw. Need to be a Gold Knight for the final wvw armor piece.