So I am concerned about something in the recent blog post about world experience.
“When you participate in WvW events and defeat enemy players, you will earn World Experience (WXP). When you earn enough WXP you’ll unlock World Ranks. Every World Rank earned will come with a World Ability Point, and some ranks can even give you a new World Title.
The amount of WXP you receive from defeating another player is directly related to how long the victim has been alive."
So the two bolded parts bother me. In the higher tiers there are literally hundreds of people running around on the maps. During a keep siege, it’s easily possible to get dozens of unique kills. One zerg wiping another zerg will result in a tonne of world experience (and is a relatively trivial thing to do – usually it means you either had the beneficial position such as defending Hills keep on the bridge or you had more numbers, your individual skill doesn’t matter – it’s zerg combat). The bigger the zerg, the more the experience. Doesn’t this encourage people to run in zergs so that they can take on much larger groups of people safely and grind their world experience much more quickly than someone who runs in a small ops team flipping supply camps, ninjaing towers or ganking yaks and any defenders? Why would you do something that so blatantly favours zerging and now puts smaller groups at a disadvantage? I thought you were trying to get away from zerg combat as the dramatic favourite method of achieving things in WvW.
What about players in lower tiers? These players will progress along the WvW ranks much slower than higher tier players because the number of people on maps is smaller. Open field battles are still hard fought (in many cases harder than big zergs in tiers one, two and three which usually tend to be a curb stomp of loot bags for one side) and kills are still earned but because there is less people, your curb stomp of the enemy zerg is worth less world experience than if you had done it in a higher tier with more people. Why would you design another reason to encourage players to stack in the same two or three tiers and disadvantage players from being on a lower populated server? This current design means you will progress your world experience grind slower simply because there are less people in your competition (and sPvP shows that numbers do not make the competition harder, in most cases WvW battles favour one side over the other and the result reflects this).
I truly hope you’ve made capturing objectives and completing events worth far more world experience than killing enemy players. This would go a long way towards rewarding players who flip supply camps, gank yanks or ninja towers without punishing them for not running with the zerg. It also lessens the world experience loss for lower tier servers that still have very healthy WvW competition, just with fewer enemy bodies to farm.
PS: Permanent choices for ability points is a terrible idea. Rerolling a level 80 character in an MMO because you screwed up their build should never be a viable idea. Permanent choices for ability points without a respec option is going to take far more away from the player experience than it will give (especially once the cookie cutter ability choices become realised). This also becomes another notch in the design ArenaNet implements which punishes players for changing their builds.
Then again SF only runs in packs of 20 so odds are it won’t be a hard fought fight so much as it will be a hard fought getaway. The zergling tactics are getting old guys.