Guild Wars 2

The current reward structure of silverwastes is broken in that it doesn’t encourage effective event play.

Currently the most effective way to get rewards is to ignore the event structure completely, with everyone camping out at the amber fort and opening buried chests.

The second problem is with the events themselves, in that they do not reward the player based on how helpful their participation was. Why defend for the 5 minutes when you can kill a few groups, move your way to the next fort while tagging other events on the way, and repeat, ending up with 3 times the reward? Why focus on dolyak supply runs when their rewards are lacking and disabled after running the same dolyak just a few times?

What I suggest be done is:

• Change how buried chests work. Uncovered buried chests should remain active until the meta event is finished, bandit crests should be removed from their drop table, and reduce the number of chest locations, possibly appearing in different locations each time.
• Open up more tiers of rewards for events, the more participation in the event the higher the reward would be. This way players are encouraged to do entire events, not run around doing the bare minimum for credit at each one.
• Dramatically slow down how often dolyak supply runs appear, make them harder, and increase the rewards to the player and benefits to the fort.

What this would do is better distribute rewards based on effective play in the event structure and since buried chests remain uncovered for the entire event period, players wouldn’t be so distracted by them.

Follow up post:

The chest farm has been addressed, but the other issues with the map are still there:

• The event rewards are lacking, both for events that lead up to completion and the completion rewards.
• Players are encouraged to tag as many events as possible, not do them effectively.
• Since chests are so rewarding compared to events and are limited time, players are encouraged to abandon whatever they are doing when one is dug up.

You can only get the shovels from the events themselves.

You either have to stock up on keys at the start, or keep a fort defended/supplied so that the merchant will sell them. And they only sell them when the fort isn’t being attacked.

While people do camp out at chest heavy areas and dig them up, it tends to be during the down periods in between defending the forts and the “break time” bit after fighting the bosses from what I’ve seen.

On no map so far have I seen everyone stop doing events altogether and only hunt down the chests the entire time.

Yet another “the chests give too much stuff, nerf it now!” thread.

Nilkemia.8507:

You can only get the shovels from the events themselves.

You either have to stock up on keys at the start, or keep a fort defended/supplied so that the merchant will sell them. And they only sell them when the fort isn’t being attacked.

While people do camp out at chest heavy areas and dig them up, it tends to be during the down periods in between defending the forts and the “break time” bit after fighting the bosses from what I’ve seen.

On no map so far have I seen everyone stop doing events altogether and only hunt down the chests the entire time.

Yet another “the chests give too much stuff, nerf it now!” thread.

The chests are just a small part of what I’m trying to bring up with this thread.

The overarching issue is that the reward structure does not encourage players to do the meta event effectively, if at all. Once players are more familiar with the map it won’t be so easy to ignore.

Nilkemia.8507:

You can only get the shovels from the events themselves.

You either have to stock up on keys at the start, or keep a fort defended/supplied so that the merchant will sell them. And they only sell them when the fort isn’t being attacked.

While people do camp out at chest heavy areas and dig them up, it tends to be during the down periods in between defending the forts and the “break time” bit after fighting the bosses from what I’ve seen.

On no map so far have I seen everyone stop doing events altogether and only hunt down the chests the entire time.

Yet another “the chests give too much stuff, nerf it now!” thread.

You should open LFG tool and join one of the chest farming maps. Look for keyword like “Shovel”, “Chest farm”

you will see how broken it is lol. People can get an average of 100g/h. It is the best farm in game atm.

With ~80 players around, the shovel is not a problem. There are more shovels available than the number of chests that can be dig up.

They will do the defense event, rubble event when they’re up. Because with that big zerg, those events are easy. Hence, merchant is not a problem.

You get around 3~5 crests per chest + from those events. Therefore you will never run out of crest to buy keys (5 crests per key)

I seriously doubt it’s anywhere near 100G an hour.

It certainly isn’t. I earned around 10 or 20g in that hour of enduring this most boring farm I’ve ever experienced. It is still ok money but certainly doesn’t make up for the suffering it requires.

Ayrilana.1396:

I seriously doubt it’s anywhere near 100G an hour.

From personal experience, it’s not. They respawn about every, oh, 5 minutes. The highest concentration of them is near the yellow camp. It’s pretty suicidal to go grab them during an attack, so realistically you get to open them about every 7-8 minutes. There’s 7-8 spawns in that immediate area, each one giving a single champ bag.

Unless you get seriously stupid lucky on the champ bag drops, it’s nothing like 100G an hour. 7-10 is what I’ve been averaging. The patterns that drop from them aren’t worth all that much and the sheer number of Tornado in a Jar trinkets for that collection that people have been getting has driven the sell value of them down to about 17 silver.

I mean, I don’t actually do it for the cash, because I have every one of my characters decked out in ascended weaponry and have absolutely zero interest in the legendaries, so I don’t really need money for much of anything. I do it because the zone is fun as heck.

That said I have two basic complaints about the zone:

1) The twin Teragriff fight seems specifically designed to troll players in this game. People tend to get used to the stack them and DPS thing, but you do that to that pair and they pretty much instantly kill everyone. It was funny watching dumb people do that at first, but as it stands now its mildly irritating. This may just be a case of people needing to just get better at it, but I have never, in playing it all week last week, seen a map actually 5/5 those bosses.

2) This is related to the above: The rewards for actually getting 4/5 (and probably 5/5) aren’t all that great, especially given that its relatively hard content. I mean, you’d see more effort out of people if say, you got a bag with 60 dungeon tokens of your choice for getting 5/5 completion.

Just as a quick response to the above, I’ve seen a 5/5 kill a few times, but it was back on Wednesday and Thursday before the chest zerg had fully became “a thing,” and when it was maps full of “hardcore” achievement hunters trying to get everything all at once.
I must have commanded the Indigo defense for something like four to five hours solid with mostly the same people. We learned the fight, yeah, but I feel it’s just not feasible to expect the entire population to spend that much time learning/practicing one fight (a fight that occurs for five minutes basically once an hour).

I think the problem with the Gold and Silver fight is that, regardless of wether or not one is aware of/practices the stacking meta, it is completely unlike any other fight in the game.
Certainly the other three champs have their own quirks, but the “rules” that we’ve been taught over the past two years of Guild Wars 2 still apply. Gold and Silver almost feel like they belong in an entirely different game.

Edited to add: Oh yeah! And the rewards did suck really badly. On a 5/5 win we all got three rare loot bags instead of just the one you get for a partial win. /rolls eyes condescendingly

I’m actually liking the challenge with Gold and Silver. I’ve only successfully taken them down once.

The main problem I see with that boss is players going around and popping bubbles when the boss is nowhere near it. I accidentally did that once too (had auto-attack enabled). Though, in the very same encounter, I popped a bubble just as I was about to be charged, and the group was able to DPS it down. Ran out of time for the second one though.

I’m really enjoying Silverwastes though, despite that, and I agree, rewards need rebalancing. Chest farming needs to be taken care of, while tying the Breach rewards to the Fort defence and supply level (high the level for each fort held, better rewards in the Breach).

Generally the rewards in Silverwastes are ok but I agree that the chest farming has to be tuned down. OP’s proposal is a bit radical, though. The main problem is that buying keys does not depend from doing events. That is because chests give the currency to buy keys themselves.

To remedy that it should be enough to decrease the number of crests a chest gives. Halving it sounds like a good first attempt to handle the problem without making the farm completely impossible. It would lead players to participate in the events about half the time.

All other rewards could stay the same imho.

This is exactly what I was thinking, and clearly we’re not alone (there are many threads about this, wasn’t even sure which to reply to!)

Here, ANet has designed a map which requires large group coordination to do the content, and, even worse, a set of achievements that require the same (I loathe acheivements that aren’t related to your personal effort. You can try as hard as you want but you’re not getting the map to breach on your own, or defeating any of the bosses.) And then, they proceed to attach almost no rewards to defeating those bosses.

Instead, what should be a throwaway activity (shovels and chests) is made fantastically rewarding on an effort vs. reward scale and it’s all people do. I’m not sure if people even make organized SW maps for anything but farming chests, I haven’t seen them in the LFG or zoned into one – basically if you didn’t get the achievements and shoulderguard components the first couple of days, you’re SOL. So if, like me, you took the time to play the story first before diving into the map meta, too bad. Unless the subsequent releases change things this map will be far too dead to allow anyone arriving later to the party to do anything.

If nothing else, the timer to take down the bosses after breach needs to go. Change it to a system like Queen’s Gauntlet, where you are rewarded for winning faster, but allow people the chance to learn the mechanics for the bosses and eventually take them down rather than for 5 minutes an hour trying to herd all the cats on the map to do the right thing.

Nilkemia.8507:

While people do camp out at chest heavy areas and dig them up, it tends to be during the down periods in between defending the forts and the “break time” bit after fighting the bosses from what I’ve seen.

On no map so far have I seen everyone stop doing events altogether and only hunt down the chests the entire time.

Yet another “the chests give too much stuff, nerf it now!” thread.

That may be the experience if this person, it certainly was not my experience this past weekend. I do not think it unreasonable to expect that the player base increased on the weekend, yet while as mentioned by one person above, several of the meta-events I participated in were successfully completed Tues-Thurs, I have not seen a single one succeed Friday-Sunday. Worse, Saturday I was on three successive map instances in the Silverwastes where I watched the number of keeps go from 3 held and almost complete to 4, to 1 held and it remained that way for extended time periods. I also was in 2 separate map instances where despite getting to 4 keeps held and the final boss fight, there was nobody in the one fight I was in with no bosses completed, and the other had a sad 4 people including myself trying unsuccessfully to take the boss down, with only one boss completed that time.

I would have to agree with the OP that the balance is off. In Dry Top there is the Sandstorm mechanic to limit the event/farm competition, but there does not seem to be any recognizable effort to keep the two from conflicting in Silverwastes, and even there they have increased the event reward during Sandstorms to somewhat compensate.

I will confess after so many failed attempts I finally gave up on trying to do the event chains and went and farmed chests as well because there simply was no point in trying to do anything else. I admit that I loved the ROI which for me was essentially slightly better than self-perpetuating. Between local events and chests I got more crests out then I put in, with the contents of the chests as pure profit. I didn’t make 100G/hour, but probably made 14 or so, along with almost 4 stacks of each ascended crafting mats (dragonite/bloodstone dust/empyreal fragments).

That ROI is exactly why I believe this will continue to conflict with doing the meta-event chains. I agree with the previous suggestions on spreading out the placement of the chests and reducing the crest return would go a long ways towards modifying that balance. However appeasing the event/achievement community would certainly be at the cost of aggravating the farming community.

I think the best option would be to have a Sandstorm like mechanic FOLLOWING the meta event. Failure gives only a short term of farming friendly time (Say 5 minutes) where successful completion gives a longer (10 minute?) window and increased likelihood of the chests appearing.

Something like that would keep the focus on completion, with fabulous farming as the part of the reward for successfully completing. It would also complement the storyline since we are attempting to beat back the Mordremoth incursions. Victory gives respite, failure does not.

It just give a decent reward for successfully completing the meta.

Which I feel is the right way to go. I remember the anger and venom in map chat whenever people missed out on the top rewards back during the Battle of LA because people were farming for heirlooms etc. It’s best not to tie the best rewards to absolute tip top perfection that requires everybody on the map to be doing the same thing.

Anyway, it looks like ANet did think the Amber chest farm was too profitable and adjusted it. I expected as much anyway; it was too good to stay as it was.

And this is why we can’t have nice things…

Well their response to the chest farm was typical. Call it a “bug” and apply the simplest solution they could come up with.

Now that the chest farm has been addressed hopefully the other issues with the map will get more attention:

• The event rewards are lacking, both for events that lead up to completion and the completion rewards.
• Players are encouraged to tag as many events as possible, not do them effectively.
• Since chests are so rewarding compared to events and are limited time, players are encouraged to abandon whatever they are doing when one is dug up.

Well the Silverwastes kinda doesn’t really seem a fitting name for the map any more – I propose it renamed “Wasteofsilver” cos judging from the emptiness many players don’t seem to want to spend the cost of WP’ing to it anymore

Heavy handed, non intelligent nerfing has pretty much killed it imo, so for those who QQ’ed and cried for the chest nerf, gratz on your success… have fun with what’s left out there.,, achievements aside I cant really see a reason to keep running the same events for a few more crests and grains of sand then hope there is enough around to take down 1 champ let alone all 5 in the Breach. Once those players still out there have got their achievements/Legendary kills and got bored of running around the map to try and answer the calls of “Indigo needs help, im alone here” etc etc… there wont be much left to do and a lot less to show for your time there.

As I have said in other threads.. ANET took completely the wrong action in controlling the chest farming, but hey I guess that’s their way… easier to hard nerf and kill the map completely rather than considering how tweaking other factors that affected the over abundance and affordability of keys/chest – well speaks volumes to me.

I mean whoever dreamed up the idea in the first place that limiting shovels per player whilst rewarding players with silly over the top amount of crest currency compared to the costs of keys, then making the chests lootable by anyone and everyone was the way to go .. … well, sorry to say it, but that person definitely needs to download GW2 on to their PC and spend a little time playing the game in future before having that light bulb moment cos that was a complete lack of understanding of anything Openworld in their own game.

Don’t worry, players will come back when they add the weapon set and other kittening items like they have done in dry top.

Bloodstealer.5978:

~Snip~

Heavy handed, non intelligent nerfing has pretty much killed it imo, so for those who QQ’ed and cried for the chest nerf, gratz on your success… have fun with what’s left out there.,, achievements aside I cant really see a reason to keep running the same events for a few more crests and grains of sand then hope there is enough around to take down 1 champ let alone all 5 in the Breach. Once those players still out there have got their achievements/Legendary kills and got bored of running around the map to try and answer the calls of “Indigo needs help, im alone here” etc etc… there wont be much left to do and a lot less to show for your time there.

As I have said in other threads.. ANET took completely the wrong action in controlling the chest farming, but hey I guess that’s their way… easier to hard nerf and kill the map completely rather than considering how tweaking other factors that affected the over abundance and affordability of keys/chest – well speaks volumes to me.

I mean whoever dreamed up the idea in the first place that limiting shovels per player whilst rewarding players with silly over the top amount of crest currency compared to the costs of keys, then making the chests lootable by anyone and everyone was the way to go .. … well, sorry to say it, but that person definitely needs to download GW2 on to their PC and spend a little time playing the game in future before having that light bulb moment cos that was a complete lack of understanding of anything Openworld in their own game.

Heavy handed…hardly, if you can’t tell it was a bug in programming, then you need to look back at it again. Amber was the only fort that had an over abundance of chests that had 1 minute spawn timers(yes, it was only 1 minute before they would respawn) of the 4 forts. So somehow, to many got placed near amber in the first place(it was about 10 or so, not 7 or 8 as someone else said) and you could continually open them up with only maybe a 1 minute pause here and there.

Second, the keys are not the only thing you can get with Crests from the merchant, some people also were buying Obsidian Shards, or maybe other Chest Boxes in case they didn’t want to do the LS 3 times for all 3 sets, Infinite Dust Mite(if you wanted it), the 3 crafting recipes…etc., Don’t just focus on the keys, there are other items to buy.

Third, I can guarantee you that the person that works on the reward system already plays the game, so there’s no need for them to install it on their computer and play it. The map isn’t dead, people are still getting 5/5 champs, but no one is getting prepared for the next step…hopefully they’ll do that right and make it so we have to hold the forts to be able to advance/attack the giant flower boss.

After the chest farm nerf, I would simply rename the thread from

Silverwastes – Poor reward design

to

Silverwastes – Poor reward