Guild Wars 2

I searched the forums for a while to make sure this hadn’t been addressed before. Malin covered it briefly here, in point 6:

6: Make it worth defending: Right now we defend for pride, and to keep the upgrades we have. But, a lot of people are not interested in defense, because that is boring and gives them nothing. It is awesome fighting to take a defended keep and I wish everybody to have that experience of true carnage and war, so make it worth it for the brave ones in there.

While this touches on what I have in mind, it’s three sentences among many different points. I wanted to go a little deeper into the structure of the game, the incentives provided, and the difference between “rewarding” and “effective” gameplay. Here, “rewarding” means “gets you stuff” (coin, karma, XP, and/or loot); “effective” means “wins the game” (points, and points alone).

Ideally, effective gameplay is also rewarding – playing effectively should earn rewards. Sometimes ineffective gameplay should also be rewarded – less so than effective gameplay (usually), and often to keep players interested in the game even if they’re not always winning. However, when ineffective gameplay is rewarded and effective gameplay is not rewarded, this almost always creates a perverse incentive. Players pursue the reward instead of pursuing effective strategy, resulting in a hot mess.

Lots of things in WvW are both effective and rewarding, such as taking map objectives from the enemy, driving off enemy players from your map objectives, and killing enemy supply caravans. These activities contribute to one’s score both directly and indirectly (as points accrued for oneself are denied to the enemy, and slapping ‘yaks makes it easier to take the enemy’s land).

However, some ineffective activities are also rewarding. The prime example is killing enemy players. “Now wait a second, doctor,” you may be saying, “how on Earth did you decide that killing enemy players is ineffective?” Simple: killing enemy players, by itself, does not earn points for your world. Now, killing enemy players is often required in order to do something genuinely effective – such as killing the two folks babysitting that ‘yak in order to kill the ’yak. But this is the important point: killing the players doesn’t earn your world points, killing the ’yak is what earns the points. Likewise, if you take an enemy’s tower, that tower is worth the same amount of points for your world whether it’s defended or not, and whether any hypothetical defenders flee or fight. Player kills, in and of themselves, are rewarding for the player but absolutely ineffective in terms of advancing up the WvW ladder.

This is not problematic in itself. As mentioned above, sometimes ineffective gameplay ought to be rewarded to maintain player interest. This is a prime example of that, too.

What’s problematic is that there are also effective actions which are not rewarded. I don’t mean “rewarded little” – I mean not rewarded at all. Actions like protecting supply caravans that happen not to be attacked (you get a gold medal, but no reward as in coin/karma/XP), and defending map objectives that happen not to be attacked.

Put it all together, and we can contrast the most effective strategy with the most rewarding strategy. The most effective strategy possible, that which maximizes world points, would be to take and hold every objective on every map: any world that managed to do this would clearly win the week, as they’d nab every possible point. However, aside from the initial rewards for capturing the objectives, there would be no rewards for doing so (outside of the mere killing of enemy players who tried, unsuccessfully for the sake of argument, to take the objectives).

(continued)

Contrast this with the most rewarding strategy possible. To maximize player rewards, map objectives would be taken and then lost as soon as possible so that additional rewards could be accrued by re-taking the objectives again; lather, rinse, repeat. This would take the form of player mobs zerg-rushing every objective, then immediately abandoning it to pursue whatever the enemy zerg had just taken in the meantime. This was dubbed “the Ouroboros effect” in some blog column (which I can’t find at the moment, probably because there’s a book by the same name), named after the mythical snake that eats its own tail. There would be no strategy, no defending of any objective, and victory come Friday would be a matter of chance – but players’ rewards would be higher than on any other tier.

When the most effective strategy is so diametrically opposed to the most rewarding strategy, something is awry. The Ouroboros effect is encouraged by the reward structure, and effective gameplay is all but explicitly discouraged by the very same mechanic. Now, nothing’s perfect, and these can’t be brought into perfect balance (largely because different people have different ideas of what “perfect” is). But I think a couple simple changes to the reward structure could go a long way toward encouraging more effective gameplay, without disrupting the WvW flow. So here are my suggestions.

1. Add a reward for protecting supply caravans, even when they’re not attacked. This could be divided by the number of participants, or limited to a small number of players (say, three). It’s just highly discouraging to babysit ‘yak after ’yak from Hell to breakfast, see that gold medal pop up with “Event Succeeded,” and get nothing for it. I believe it’s literally the only event in the game that provides zero reward to the player for accomplishing it. It doesn’t even need to be a big reward; I’d just like it to be more than absolutely nothing. I can motivate lazy workers, pick scrap materials up off the ground, and solve math problems in PvE for a reward – all without entering combat. I see no reason why this principle couldn’t carry over to WvW. Yes, it’s most exciting to be where the action is, but a few warm bodies are needed where the action isn’t, on the off-chance that it comes there. When the action doesn’t come, and the housekeeping team gets nothing for staying behind and doing their job, it adds insult to the proverbial injury.

2. Add a reward for protecting map objectives, even when they’re not attacked. Whenever I’m near a tower, keep, or camp, goals pop up in the upper-right corner, telling me to defend the workers upgrading a tower or defend this building for my world. That goal never completes – if enemies attack, a new goal (“Repel the enemy attackers”) pops up instead. But when the walls are upgrading and our main force is out taking other objectives, it’s effective to have a warm body in the tower to keep an eye on the place, providing intel in the event of an enemy attack so that enough people can show up before the door’s busted down. Again, this doesn’t need to be a big reward – nowhere near what you’d get for repelling enemies – but if any reward at all were provided, it would encourage the guarding of objectives instead of their mere endless flipping. You could call it “Protect the front lines,” and you only get credit if there’s an adjacent enemy objective (waypoints would count, so if you have your whole borderlands, only the southernmost camps & towers would have this available – but that’s exactly where you need coverage in that situation, isn’t it?). This would also encourage the holding of camps behind enemy lines, for instance taking and holding the supply camp north of a borderlands keep to help starve it off.

OK, I said a couple, and that’s two. And this is getting long, but there was a lot of ground to cover. To summarize, my complaint is that the current reward structure actively discourages various effective actions by providing zero reward for them; small rewards would help alleviate this problem.

I didn’t read everything in detail but I don’t think you quite explained how abuse would be handled. The rewards for escorting caravans was removed because of this and eventually evolved to what we have today.

I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the abuse you mentioned. Could you clarify?

EDIT: OK, after thinking about it for two minutes, I’m assuming that a million guys would babysit one dolyak and this wasn’t what ANet intended. (If I’m wrong on that, please correct me.) An easy fix would be to divide the reward among the number of participants, which makes a real-world kind of sense, as the caravan is only worth so much and so protecting it is only worth so much, so each of the protectors gets their share and that’s all. I know ANet’s all about encouraging cooperation instead of competition, so how about three (or five? Whichever) people can get the full reward; additional rewards get divvied up among all participants. So the formula would be something like ((Reward X)*(# players [ceiling 3]))/(# players [total]). So if you see a caravan with three players and no enemies in sight, it’s probably best to find another ’yak.

A second form of abuse could be skipping from caravan to caravan, speed-buffing the ‘yak for credit and then running off. A little trickier, but again, the fix is easy: only allow each player to have one escort quest at a time. Each new participation would erase the old one; so if I go from caravan to caravan, I don’t get anything (or lessen the others’ pay, if the first fix is implemented too), because I keep over-writing the last escort with the new one. That way, if I’m just passing through tossing speed buffs (which, admittedly, does help in a small way), I’m not racking up loads of points unearned.

Again, I’m not sure if this is the abuse you referred to, but those seem the two simplest ways to abuse the mechanic, and the easiest ways to prevent such abuse.

DoctorFaust.7103:

I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the abuse you mentioned. Could you clarify?

People want easy karma,exp, and silver. In the past, yak’s escort give you exp equal to killing yak. Which make people want only do escort.

I agree with DoctorFaust. We need to give back this reward for defending yak (escorting). The reward does not need to be big. It can be 1/4 reward of killing yak.

I agree with giving people reward for sitting in objective (afk/defending). For example each 5 minutes, you get 15 karma, 100 exp, 10 copper. Not that big, but at least we give something for these watchers.

Thanks for that information, deviller. Yeah, if the reward for protecting was the same as for killing, and people were then only protecting and never killing, I could see how that would get real stale real fast. I was unaware of this history, as I only really got into WvW after I had a pair of level 80 characters, and only started getting “serious” about it after our server moved up a tier.

In that case, I think ANet just swung the pendulum a little too far in the other direction. I don’t think the boring stuff should be equally as rewarding as the exciting stuff – exciting gameplay should be encouraged. I just think that effective play should be at least somewhat rewarding, even when it’s not exciting (and, in fact, because it’s not exciting – otherwise, why else do the boring things that help the gears run smooth?). Just to reiterate, the core of my complaint is that the housekeeping work of maintaining your own backfield gets absolutely nothing. If that were changed with even a small reward, then Problem: Solved, as far as I’m concerned.

Your premise that what is most effective to put points on a largely meaningless scoreboard should be the most rewarded is silly.

You should think bigger and expect more from ArenaNet, unless you want WvW to become a ghost town only populated by a bunch of siege monkeys and tower humpers.

What should come first is what the majority of players find FUN and what adds excitement and strategy to the game. And this is fighting other players for the objectives spread among the battlefield.

Once you establish that, you MAKE those fights the most effective way of accomplishing goals and then you make them rewarding.

(Also, I’d argue given the current state of the game… killing players is much more effective than killing yaks. Supplying keeps rarely stops people from taking them. Your definition of effectiveness of actions seems particularly shortsighted or literal. Just because something doesn’t directly score a point doesn’t mean it’s not effectively scoring points?)

it’s far too easy to defend towers and keeps as it is; with that said the current rewards for defending are justified any additional rewards would create more of a turtle and add to an already boring siege on towers/keeps. really sitting around defending ppl on trebs… just I case the turtle decides to come out and play is terribly boring. to further that would kill the game even more.

Zosk.5609:

Your premise that what is most effective to put points on a largely meaningless scoreboard should be the most rewarded is silly.
…
(Also, I’d argue given the current state of the game… killing players is much more effective than killing yaks. Supplying keeps rarely stops people from taking them. Your definition of effectiveness of actions seems particularly shortsighted or literal. Just because something doesn’t directly score a point doesn’t mean it’s not effectively scoring points?)

Except that I didn’t say that “most effective” should be “most rewarded.” That would indeed be silly, because often the most effective thing is to communicate with your teammates in mapchat (there’s no way to reward that without encouraging spam). But this is not at all what I said. In fact, I even said in my latest reply that the fun and exciting stuff should be encouraged by making it more rewarding than the boring stuff. Once again, my problem is that certain effective actions get zero reward. So if even a small reward were implemented, we’d both be happy, to take you at your word: defenders get something instead of nothing, and defenders still aren’t the most rewarded.

That way, hurrah, no ghost town – the main force is still out doing the fun and exciting things, and getting the bulk of the reward for it; and the few defenders staying to keep an eye on things are getting something (not a lot, just something) instead of absolutely nothing.

Also, you’re apparently deliberately ignoring the part where I said, “Here, ‘rewarding’ means ‘gets you stuff’ (coin, karma, XP, and/or loot); ‘effective’ means ‘wins the game’ (points, and points alone).” Killing players in itself does not earn you points; you can kill players all day and all night, but if you have no land, you don’t earn points when that timer ticks over, and you lose. Stopping an enemy supply caravan will actually put points on the board immediately. While killing players is very often necessary to earn points, the fact remains that no amount of player-killing will earn points. You are confusing the fact that player-killing often happens alongside some point-earning action, with the idea that it is the point-earning action – the entire point of this post was to disentangle those notions, which is why I defined effective as “point-earning actions” (because points, and points alone, determine rank and advancement at the end of the day – kills and deaths are not tabulated in any way at all).

The Goat.1940:

it’s far too easy to defend towers and keeps as it is; with that said the current rewards for defending are justified any additional rewards would create more of a turtle and add to an already boring siege on towers/keeps. really sitting around defending ppl on trebs… just I case the turtle decides to come out and play is terribly boring. to further that would kill the game even more.

I don’t know what your idea of a good strategy is, but mine involves the idea that when you take an objective, you should hold it. The very point of siege weaponry is so that a smaller number of players can take on a larger number without it; if both groups have siege, then it comes down to supply, and look at what a well-stocked keep or tower is going to have piled up in its depot. Yes, the whole idea of having a giant building bristling with weapons is that it’s easy to hold. You build defensive fortifications with exactly this end in mind.

It sounds to me like “boring” for you just means “requires planning.” Yeah, if there were small teams of three to five keeping an eye on every objective and flash-building siege when enemies were spotted, that would mean you’d have to plan a siege rather carefully instead of charging in like an idiot. I also like how you can replace “ppl on trebs” with “towers & keeps,” and “turtle” with “zerg,” and your argument basically says that you don’t like WvW – if what you want is to fight players in “honest combat,” I think they already have a game mode for that. WvW is for tactical, strategic play – and when a good strategy works out, then yeah, everything goes according to plan and it can be boring. Against a wily opponent, however, you have to continuously adapt to changing conditions. If all you have to do to take a keep is cluster around trebs in case the group inside comes out, then boy-howdy, those are some lousy defenders and I feel sorry for you. On our server, at least, when things aren’t working out, we try to figure out what could turn the situation around and then do that thing instead of sitting around waiting to die.

I do want rewards for defending. But, here is a problem.

It will be abused no matter how small the reward.

Say if you make the reward for standing in the keep, 10 copper per 30 minutes.

I just need to create 10 bots and that will give me 1 silver per 30 minutes and make them run around the wall. This is free money right there.

One silver per thirty minutes? For ten bots? Are you kidding?

In the first place, I can make more money than that in PvE. The first radiant heart quests you can complete take about 15 minutes and get you almost half a silver – and it only goes up from there. When you add in drops and gathering, it goes up even more.

In the second place, botting is already abuse. You’re basically saying that “people who are already abusing the game will be able to abuse the game.” Which, I mean, friggin’ duh. XD

I hate botters, don’t get me wrong. And I especially hate the idea of botting in WvW. But this is far from a unique threat; you may as well say that PvE needs quicktime events to confirm actions, otherwise botters could program their bots to mindlessly run around farming.

EDIT: I see now that there are mobs that spawn along supply routes, and they give WXP for killing them. This fully addresses my concerns – it’s something to do for those on defense that gives a small reward. Thanks, ANet!