Guild Wars 2

Let me be frank for a moment. I don’t know if this has been discussed openly, but I’m firmly of the belief that there is no point to bother with WvW.

Shocking, right?

Now just hold on a moment before you naysay and argue with me, and hear me out.

Compared to PvE…

Significantly worse loot/gold rewards (see : dungeons/fractals/“dragon” events)

Roughly the same Karma as “Karma Train”, but less reliable (assuming that farming camps and sentries is done)

Very limited/poor rewards via Tokens (Dungeon tokens give gear for free, wvw requires gold as well. There are more stat combos in dungeons, too)

Secondarily, very limited unique items (Light/Medium skins are the only unique items WvW has, period)

Extremely poor achievement progression (not a huge factor, but it’s a factor)

Compared to sPvP…

Significantly less balanced/less reliable fights, as is the nature of WvW.

Additionally, as above, in sPvP if you get a bad match, you waste a few minutes. In WvW, you waste a week.

Less ACTUAL PvP, more time spent running around.

Worse unique rewards (sPvP has finishers, WvW has…?)

And here’s the biggest factor…

Playing WvW, I’m restricted to one character. If I’m not, I’m gimping myself. Progression is character-based, as is commander. Progression is also slow enough that it’s not realistic to max more than once, either.

Additionally, what does this progression yield? Virtually nothing. At extreme rank, 5% increased damage/defense against non-lord guards and mercs, 5% increased/reduced damage vs siege, some bonuses with ballista and cannons, and 5 more supply.

What else do you get? Enhanced focus fire. If you WvW a lot, you’ll stand out, and get focused down by large groups of enemies. It’s counter-productive to be high rank, ironically…. As the only defensive benefit is 5% reduced siege damage.

Oh, and there’s no way players on your server can see your rank, either. So there’s that.

I don’t mean to come off as whiny or whatever, but… aside from monthlies and dailies, I don’t see any reason to enter WvW. Which is a real pity, honestly. I’m just wondering if there’s any plans to improve upon these issues,

I only WvW, because I enjoy it. That is enough incentive for me.

No idea why they don’t allow your own team to observe your rank while in WvW. Theres alot I don’t understand:

-Why no leaderboard yet?
-Why is there no content planned for guilds to show up on the leaderboard?
-Why is there a merit cap(as opposed to allowing infinite and having it show on the boards)?
-Why do people that rush back out not give even 1 wxp as opposed to 0?
-Why is there no WvW guild mission?

In short my beleif is that they either do not care about rewarding the effort of competitive players or just have no idea how to. Either way its a strong arguement for sadface.

Boolet.2968:

Playing WvW, I’m restricted to one character. If I’m not, I’m gimping myself.

Boolet.2968:

Additionally, what does this progression yield? Virtually nothing.

You can’t have it both ways, if the progression yields virtually nothing, as you stated, you are not kitten at all playing a character that has not progressed.

Play because its fun. That’s the ultimate objective of any game, fun.

yup.. fun is incentive enough…. if i want to amass gold i would take a break from WvW and farm orichalcum/omnom on my 5 characters…. that’s guaranteed 8g (per day)…. good enough for me when i need it….

World vs world needs better rewards such as armour skins. It needs leader boards such as rank kills guild influence etc. I don’t get why arena net are trying to be care bares and taking out competitiveness by hardly allowing any progression. There are also no duels yet which is very stupid and also nothing to do with a huge guild except world vs world. We need raid dungeons not some silly guild missions. I have been hoping arena net would add this since November but here we are half a year later still the same crap. The rank system is pointless too. 5% less damage from siege? Great! Now instead of being hit for 10k by a ballista I’m getting hit for 9.5k so worth it for 30 points!

We also lack achivement progression in world vs world. Our current achievements require years of no lifing to get. I’ve escorted 300 dolyaks and on the progression it shows that I’m still 0% complete. WTF am I expected to escort 100k Dolyaks to get a stupid title? I have 10k kills in wvw and I need 240k more to get the achievement. You should be rewarded with a legendary weapon for achieving something so high. It’s extremely uncreative to make achievements so hard and long to get.

It needs to throw away the rank system, get rid of all stats and just have people killing each other for the joy of killing other players.

All the rank system has done is promote the “Zerg all camps, defend nothing, run from all fights because we could be capping a camp instead” playstyle.

which is why i always say WXP should largely come from killing players/defending and less from capping….

Not sure if “lack of incentives” is the right way to put it. Ideally, a game should be fun enough that even if there’s no rewards you’ll still want to play it. Adding “incentives” to force people to play a game that’s not fun to begin with is flawed, and cheapen the experience for everyone. This is proven quite clearly with the introduction of the progression system.

I am a fan of leader boards, especially if they are broken down into a variety of categories.

I am also a fan of allowing people to opt out of leader boards. Just because I enjoy something does not mean it should be forced upon other gamers.

I get all that I need from WvW. Sure there are quite a few improvements to be made, but none have to do with incentives for me. My incentive is the challenge of the fights and the joy of doing well in them. Learning how to improve and tinkering with my build to get just a little more boons out of it while remaining survivable and enough of a threat to scatter enemies when I charge in.

Once you have your exotic gear, you don’t need anything else. Sure you make only a couple of gold a night, which you can either spend on upgrades or saving up for a nice skin. You can always faceroll some dungeons if you’re truly desperate for cash.

The leaderboards won’t be showing who is skilled or not, so they’re pretty pointless to me, the only way you’ll find that out is by fighting people. The new wexp system is a fun distraction and I do get some joy out of it for all my alts as well, seeing at what lvl they are now. The new ‘skills’ aren’t very strong, but they’re not useless so I don’t really care about now having them yet, while retaining the desire to eventually get them. I believe Anet really gave them just the right usefulness and I’m pretty happy the way things stand there.

If only they could do something to spread out the zergs a bit WvW would be truly awesome.