Guild Wars 2

Right now, I’m rank 2826 and have 10k+ hours into the game. Most of that time has been spent in WvW. Enough of my time is spent in WvW that I would claim to have put thousands of hours into WvW over four plus years of routinely playing WvW.

I like the rewards themselves, but the execution is a big mistake. And as a Vet player, I’m rather insulted and disillusioned by ANet’s approach.

To help quantify the problem, I’ll mention that I have over 24k Badges of Honor. Badges of Honor were the main reward token that devoted WvW players received over the years. With Heart of Thorns, Proofs of Heroics were added as a second token. I have over 2200 Proofs currently. The most expensive Badge item is tier 3 cultural armor, which costs 700 badges and was added only recently to WvW. Before that, 100 badges got you a alpha golem worth 6s on the trading post. The most expensive Proof item costs 100 Proofs.

Either way, these two tokens have little value to the WvW player. The Proofs have value in letting us buy HoT runes and sigils, but the Badges have become meaningless. We’ve been grinding these items for four to five years.

Finally a reward update comes out and these items are just as useless as they were before.There is no reward to long time players and the tokens they have accumulated. No recognition for keeping a game alive pretty much by themselves*.

Badges once served a minor purpose of buying a Legendary crafting item, but that was moved to a reward track. Currently, they are as useless as Karma. The difference being that Karma was nerfed later in the game’s life while Badges were boosted.

Instead of rewarding long years of playing, these tokens were ignored and WvW tickets became the new token for which every new reward cost. Further, the Tickets have a weekly cap which nullifies the one advantage Vets have with their extra PiPs. Yes, I get four more pips than a new player, but that means I run out of progress faster than a new player. It’s completely backwards to force the casual players to play hardcore all week to get max rewards and then let the Vet players quit by the end of the weekend because the rewards stopped.

This isn’t even getting into the Outmanned buff being the biggest key to getting through these Skirmish levels. This rewards a type of play unnatural and harmful to WvW. People dodge active maps not to create action elsewhere, but to find an out manned map where they do the most minor of work to keep ticking pips. It’s AFKing for Legendaries.

I propose these changes:

-Remove the ticket cost from several items. In this group, I’d include everything under the Miscellaneous tab of the skirmish vendor. There is no reason things like Minis or Tonics or rng Siege boxes should cost tickets. I’d remove ticket cost from tier 2 exotics as well. Make these items costs Badges of Honor.

-Add a conversion option for Badges of Honor and Proofs of Heroics that convert these items into Tickets. You owe* WvW vets time served. We’ve already had these awards time gated for four plus years. Time gating us again is just savage.

-Lower the PiP bonus for Outmanned. Add a PiP Bonus for capturing a Keep and a PiP bonus for killing X amount of players in the skirmish. Reward active play.

-Improve continued play rewards for those that finish off Diamond quickly. This is a problem vets currently face. You could remove the ticket cap, but lower the Ticket reward on repeats of Diamond or if you allow the exchange of Badges or Proofs, you could up that reward on continual completion of Diamond ranks. Right now, its praying and hoping to get good stuff out of the material boxes.

*: These remarks are due to the sandbox nature of WvW. Without the vets running this game mode and organizing it, the whole thing is an undesirable mess. The audience for this game mode kept it alive when there really wasn’t much dev attention on it. If we had left, then the game itself would have been in trouble and in danger of closure. This isn’t like PvP, where matches automate with clear rules. WvW requires community action and organization to make it work. The community has kept it alive and is rewarded with a somewhat redudnant PiP bonus for it and a venemous amount of time gating after getting any rewards worth anything was essentially time gated for five years.

Still no where near what you get in PvE.

Some of us arent in it for the rewards though, but then there arent many good fights left, even in T1

Well it’s totally the modus operandi of Anet, if you’ve seen the evolution of PvE. Have players farm for something, then half a year later nope here’s a new currency, the old one is now worthless. And then another 6 months after that… well we know what happen. It’s basicly what replace the gear threadmill in games like WoW. Wanna bet that the next expansion will bring at least 2 or 3 new currencies?

I don’t have a lot of badges of honor because I have spent so much of it to buy sieges to use for wvw. Please send me if you don’t need them, thank you.

Just my 2 cents, the rewards are meh, I’m decked out in all ascended anyways, it’s just more skins to unlock for a game mode I play mostly which I’ll eventually collect cause I’ll keep playing it. The bigger reward for me now is that there’s definitely more people playing so its not always an empty map, yea there’s zergs still but I also notice more random small groups everywhere and more roamers everywhere. It reminds me of when this game first started and there was people everywhere and fights everywhere

My thoughts on rewards:

- There’s too many different ones. Badges of Honor, Memories of Battle, Proofs of Heroics, they’re all the same thing. They should be condensed so that there are two currencies; Memories of Battle and Skirmish Tickets, similar to sPvP’s two currencies, Shards of Glory and Ascended Shards of Glory.
The only issue I can see this creating is making Hero Points trivial, as Memories of Battle would be used to buy Scrolls of Heroics, and Memories of Battle are tradable. Put a 1:1 rank:heropoint limit on purchasing new Scrolls.
- Improve raw track rewards. Tickets are the only reason to clear the track at the moment. Mist-Warped Packets only giving 2 of a basic material is really poor and should be tuned up to match Magic-Warped.

DevilishLyx.2340:

Some of us arent in it for the rewards though

Had a friend asking me about pips, what I’m going to buy with the new rewards and if I like them.

What I like about the changes to WvW is that it revitalized the community. I care nothing about rewards or score. I play WvW because it relieves stress, it’s good for socializing and it’s the only aspect of GW2 that I genuinely enjoy and rarely get tired of.

I played when it costed money to repair armor, when there were no reward tracks, when you had to pay to upgrade objectives and when you had to PvE if you wanted certain gear and items. The only thing I care about rewards is that it brings more players in to my favorite game mode.

Sometimes when I say things like this to people, they can’t wrap their head around it and it makes me chuckle. I understand the want for loot and rewards but it’s unfortunate that more people won’t do certain content if they’re not showered in gifts.

etiolate.9185:

This isn’t even getting into the Outmanned buff being the biggest key to getting through these Skirmish levels. This rewards a type of play unnatural and harmful to WvW.

Not 1 spamming in a map queue sized blob is unnatural and harmful?
The outmanned bonus is by far the best addition of the new reward system, it actually encourages players to break off in small groups and try to do kitten on their own. I’m astounded that anyone would actually be opposed to this.

My thoughts are idc. As a vet I’ve always had everything I ever wanted and more than I know what to do with.

Puck.9612:

etiolate.9185:

This isn’t even getting into the Outmanned buff being the biggest key to getting through these Skirmish levels. This rewards a type of play unnatural and harmful to WvW.

Not 1 spamming in a map queue sized blob is unnatural and harmful?
The outmanned bonus is by far the best addition of the new reward system, it actually encourages players to break off in small groups and try to do kitten on their own. I’m astounded that anyone would actually be opposed to this.

You are very naive if you think this is how the buff is being used primarily.

Killdozer.5731:

Puck.9612:

etiolate.9185:

This isn’t even getting into the Outmanned buff being the biggest key to getting through these Skirmish levels. This rewards a type of play unnatural and harmful to WvW.

Not 1 spamming in a map queue sized blob is unnatural and harmful?
The outmanned bonus is by far the best addition of the new reward system, it actually encourages players to break off in small groups and try to do kitten on their own. I’m astounded that anyone would actually be opposed to this.

You are very naive if you think this is how the buff is being used primarily.

If you’re complaining about people afk pip farming that has nothing to do with the outnumbered buff, that is happening on every map. I see it happening the most on EBG and home bl because they can wp to commanders quicker to get their participation up.

The outnumbered pip bonus is a nice buff for roamers, you zerglings already get more loot from capping things quicker so this evens things out a bit.

I spent a lot of badges on guild upgrades post-hot and I spend most of my badges of honour on guild siege these days (mostly guild catas).
I use proofs to buy superior siege if I need any siege while roaming as when I’m roaming I don’t get all of my siege out of the bank

Should add an item that allows us to convert badges of honor to wxp.

I agree with the original poster. I have way more badges (64k+) and about 9.4k proofs and well over 10 million karma and I haven’t even been doing EotM, just regular WvWVW. I have already 5 characters with full ascended sets. I could easily equip 3 other characters with full ascended set as I got the ascended materials, armor/weapon chests for that, but I am too lazy to bother. I think most players play max 4-6 characters regularly and the rest of the alts gets fairly little play.

Karma, Badges and proofs of heroics have become more or less useless. I guess I will at some point be sitting with 20+ million karma, 100k+ badges, 20k proofs….

Arenanet please give us useful stuff to buy with the badges, proofs and karma!! Also laurels have become quite useless, I got 1200 laurels despite already putting all the infusions I managed to do without fractals.

Deniara Devious.3948:

I agree with the original poster. I have way more badges (64k+) and about 9.4k proofs and well over 10 million karma and I haven’t even been doing EotM, just regular WvWVW. I have already 5 characters with full ascended sets. I could easily equip 3 other characters with full ascended set as I got the ascended materials, armor/weapon chests for that, but I am too lazy to bother. I think most players play max 4-6 characters regularly and the rest of the alts gets fairly little play.

Karma, Badges and proofs of heroics have become more or less useless. I guess I will at some point be sitting with 20+ million karma, 100k+ badges, 20k proofs….

Arenanet please give us useful stuff to buy with the badges, proofs and karma!! Also laurels have become quite useless, I got 1200 laurels despite already putting all the infusions I managed to do without fractals.

Buy these with karma, wait until frostgorge has vial of powerful blood and charged lodestones for map rewards, get a ton of them.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Pact_Scout%27s_Mapping_Materials

Wish I had that much karma still.

Badges became obsolete the day eotm arrived, same with karma being useless when they decided to move to ascended and individual map currency. There are ways to convert them to gold, but that depends on how much time you want to spend on that.

I like the rewards, finally I can fashion wars like pvpers due to having way more transmutes. But like you I am a little sad that I still have 60k useless badges.

Yeah, I’ve heard of various schemes to convert all that stuff to gold (21million karma, 75k+ badges, 7k proofs…and all the rest of the map specific pve stuff like 54k unbound magic…junk!!!!). But as a prev poster noted, who has the time to convert all that stuff?

Now I just delete some thing rather than store them, like bloodstone dust, empyreal fragments, dragonite ore and obsidian shards. I keep some on hand to craft, when and if I have time to craft.

Time in GW2….game says 6,205 hours in 1,750 days. Whoa…

But yep. All the time I spent getting the various ‘coins of the minute’ and Anet changes the currency. I expect the pips and claim tickets will become worthless by the next big update or expansion.

Puck.9612:

Killdozer.5731:

Puck.9612:

etiolate.9185:

This isn’t even getting into the Outmanned buff being the biggest key to getting through these Skirmish levels. This rewards a type of play unnatural and harmful to WvW.

Not 1 spamming in a map queue sized blob is unnatural and harmful?
The outmanned bonus is by far the best addition of the new reward system, it actually encourages players to break off in small groups and try to do kitten on their own. I’m astounded that anyone would actually be opposed to this.

You are very naive if you think this is how the buff is being used primarily.

If you’re complaining about people afk pip farming that has nothing to do with the outnumbered buff, that is happening on every map. I see it happening the most on EBG and home bl because they can wp to commanders quicker to get their participation up.

The outnumbered pip bonus is a nice buff for roamers, you zerglings already get more loot from capping things quicker so this evens things out a bit.

All it takes to make that buff meaningless is for people in guilds on that map that communicate to their other guildies that the outnumbered buff is on, then they just need to pop into that border right before the timer resets, get their 5 pips, then pop back off to EBG or wherever, which only works if not too many of them pop over and cause the buff to go away. I’ve seen the outmanned buff occasionally on TC late at night, but it never lasts long enough for the timer to get to zero and give everyone the extra pips. Until populations really drop off, this is probably going to be one of those fluke things, so no…not much incentive to roam on emptier maps quite yet.

Deniara Devious.3948:

I agree with the original poster. I have way more badges (64k+) and about 9.4k proofs and well over 10 million karma and I haven’t even been doing EotM, just regular WvWVW. I have already 5 characters with full ascended sets. I could easily equip 3 other characters with full ascended set as I got the ascended materials, armor/weapon chests for that, but I am too lazy to bother. I think most players play max 4-6 characters regularly and the rest of the alts gets fairly little play.

Karma, Badges and proofs of heroics have become more or less useless. I guess I will at some point be sitting with 20+ million karma, 100k+ badges, 20k proofs….

Arenanet please give us useful stuff to buy with the badges, proofs and karma!! Also laurels have become quite useless, I got 1200 laurels despite already putting all the infusions I managed to do without fractals.

You have a problem with hoarding, that is pretty clear since you have that amount of laurels unspent when you could have easily exchanged them for various thing including converting to gold. I do agree we need more things to spend badges and proofs on but karma is also something you can convert to materials/gold.

Eypheha.5831:

I expect the pips and claim tickets will become worthless by the next big update or expansion.

No they won’t, because you need sooooo many tickets to get everything that we will be still needing tickets for a long long time to come.

I’m not sure why people keep bringing up badges,

Every 1k badges is ~10g and is easy to convert to gold with no gimic.

I skimmed this because it was such a long post as a fair warning if I stray.

Basically the game as a whole has too many currencies that will never be used after a certain period aka BoH. The new “reward” system put in place is garbo. Nothing is worth it even for vet/hardcore only WvW players. It’s still better to go into PvE and get 1 set of ascended and stay away forever like its a plague. It has not made me play any more or less for said rewards. I was excited until I realized how costly and inefficient these rewards are. Granted I like the t3 armor and animation but would much rather prefer it as a skin as is what it will be to me when I get there in 700 levels for 2k.

To make this short the tactics rewards are great for guilds in this in which is great but also for the players time in wvw the rewarding of gold is almost no better than before when there were no rewards at all. Basically the way it should work because most wvw players are in guilds that are based mostly on WvW. So there really needs for Guilds to be a reward of like Tactics, Siege, Decoration, maybe special guild missions that can be queued up(some of the wvw guild missions are laughable at best). Then on personal level the misc junk right now of transmutation charges, badges, proof of heroics, or some kind of gold or something worth some gold(possibly even redoing the bag system in wvw where they drop little items like fractals where they are junk that is worth gold so you could possibly pick bags as an option). As well fix bags so they are dropping at a rate for everyone being that some of us we can tag or kill same amount as another person and you’ll see someone get a stack of bags and another person get 20 out of doing the same stuff.

The skirmish tickets yeah I understand wanting long term rewards to work toward but some of us have been doing this on the long term already and all that means is waiting 2 years just for an armor skin not needing the actual armor or weapons. So basically we’ve had to balance getting gold and doing wvw where as others were just gold farming or whatever they were doing but hadn’t put in any of the time and gold into wvw that we have had to do and currently this system does not reflect that even with the pip bonuses. As far as the armor if its going to stay a time gated skirmish tickets system might as well make them legendary armor pieces for wvw imo.

The Outmanned buff is in a good state right now since it is drawing more people to maps that are under populated at the time and for weeks they have no chance of winning and therefore all maps are under populated. Will people abuse it, some will yes, but they will abuse any system that is created. Active play is a dicey thing. To a soloer or a havoc group, causing chaos elsewhere may be a way to draw pressure from elsewhere and they are aiding their realm for any points acquired. On an outnumbered map they may get run over a lot and therefore take more lumps then on a populated map. In short its too early to tell but I think this buff will help people spread out more than zerg which I believe is part of its intent.

I am almost rank 7000. I have many hours in wvwvw. I keep my badges as I dont really ever need siege. I am at around 100k badges currently. I am part of a awesome wvwvw guild and we can easily get siege any time we need it. Our server is also really awesome at sharing siege if asked for it in chat. As far as Proofs being useless, I use them to get all the HOT Hero Points so its 1 less thing I have to do in those maps. Also made unlocking specializations on characters almost instantaneous. I have crafted all HOT legendaries already so mapping them is quite a bit faster when I dont have to stop and do all the hero points. I would say Proofs were a problem if I didnt have them but they are definitely not useless.