Guild Wars 2

Instead of your idea of skirmishes, I would suggest instead just applying diminishing returns to PPT to avoid some motivation problems.

With skirmishes, if I am a player on a weak world that is locked into last place for the skirmish, I have no PPT motivation to play. Similarly, if I am part of a small havok group on the strong world that is locked in first, I again lack PPT motivation. Scaling points by timezone is fraught with its own issues, as elaborated on in other posts. Scaling based on population has problems such as people using the Citadel crafting stations, or people sitting around accumulating participation rewards while occasionally repairing a wall or killing a guard (which also leads to a queued world only being able to field a 15 map group).

I have long felt that WvW would benefit instead from diminishing returns on PPT, something like:
PPT awarded = sqrt( point total of holdings) * 15
With the above, average holdings would still be worth the same, but holding just a single camp would be worth 33 points (instead of 5) while holding absolutely everything would be worth only 395 points (instead of 695).

With diminishing returns, nightcapping would still be nerfed, but it reverses the lack of motivation problem. A weak world’s players would be encouraged to turn out, since now their ability to hold a tower and two camps is worth thrice as much.

PPK I feel is generally bad for WvW. Winning fights and getting kills is already tremendously awarded with: fun, ego, loot, moral, group cohesion, ability to take or hold objectives, and misc bonuses (stacking sigils, holding onto banners their full duration, etc.). Adding points to that is unnecessary, and just adds another source of demotivation for the weaker world’s players to fight when outnumbered or outclassed.

Points for upgraded objectives is similarly problematic. Strong worlds are much more likely to build up upgrades (and add guild buffs), to the point where their spawn side holdings are often effectively removed from the matchup since the other worlds cannot threaten them. If you want to add points for upgraded holdings, I suggest limiting it only to holdings in enemy territory (their third of the map) and camps.

JetLu.1874:

You hit the nail on the head, Radioactive. It just boggles my mind, why one server accuses another server of doing something and the server who is doing the accusing does the exact same thing.

Servers don’t make accusations, people do. Each world is made up of a lot of people playing in different guilds on different maps at different times and having different experiences. So you might have one guy saying X world doesn’t spawncamp and then a day later on a different map people from X have sieged up all of Y’s exit points, or whatever.

Honestly, YB and Kaineng should be putting up more of a fight and 2v1’ing SBI. Sure, rank 9 vs 13/14 is lopsided, but you can still have some fun with it. Back when these random matchups started, SBI at r13 went against the r5 and r7 servers, DB and Mag — nearly twice the disparity as this week. With a bit of 2v1, we were pulling many more points in that match than you guys are this week, even sieging DB’s EB keep during the evenings (I don’t remember if we ever got it). I loved that week.

It might be harder for you guys to pull off the 2v1 right now since your populations/moral is so low and SBI is loaded up on fairweathers and mappers, but I still think it’s the best bet to make this match fun for all of us.

Nikkinella.8254:

Not that I care, more wxp for me every time we take it back.

Faster dragonite restocking too.

Gravy.7589:

Ashamed that some of our people emoted on you in a video game….. nah. Why people think this is such a big deal idk. Get over it, it happens and will happen again.

It’s a pretty kitten thing to do pretty much always (exception: killing stealth thieves). The same with trash talking on forums or trolly behavior in general. Sadly, I think SBI picked up a few bad apples recently, plus our resident more trolly members have been energized by the company and the lopsided matchup. We’re almost as bad as NSP in this thread.

From what I have seen, IoJ puts up a better borderland fight than SBI would pull off before our recent transfers, at least during NA primetime. Nothing to be ashamed of there, imo. Keep up the good fight IoJ!

Kolisch.4691:

Wow, this ele was amazing! Two times I got beaten in 1 second the same way… I’d love to know how this ele does this!!

Wait around on eb until a massive zergfest battle happens and bogs down the server, then after the battle clears you can go around wrecking people while the server is in super-hyper-duper-fast-gotta-catch-back-up mode.

Ya, that was a pretty pathetic way to take hills. Your mesmer was using some jump/fly hack to hop around in mid air into and around hills. Specifically, I watched him doing mid-air jumps about 50 feet up in the air over the northeast bridge area before he noticed me, stealthed, and waypointed or jumped off the map not to appear again. (No, mesmers don’t have perma stealth.) I have a screenshot of him on the fall from one of his 50 foot jumps from 10 minutes before your ported in; Asylum Elites [FURY] guild.

Clean up your server.

Also keep in mind that like most buffs, the swiftness proc only hits 5 allies per pulse. Further, since it’s a field that pulses independently from you once it’s placed, it doesn’t prioritize you over other players. So if you drop it on a clump of people around you while running around wvw, you may not get any swiftness.

Thanks for the EB fights last night, BP. I have to agree with Maladon, though, on not seeing the reason for so much boasting. For the 2-3 hours I was on, you wiped us twice that I saw (dredge and AR keep, grats!) and you got wiped or left a whole bunch to die 8ish times (couple at JS, once at RQ, several in/around SM); my kill counter is ~1000 higher than when I checked it a couple days ago, if that’s worth anything. Of course, I can’t speak to anything that happened before I logged on.

Constructive criticism: your might stacked portal bombs and veil rushes are fancy and sorta intimidating, but also kind of silly. This is entirely subjective, but you seemed to lose as many people on those push+leave passes as you killed. A warding or two on the portal and your squishies get isolated from your frontliners, a good chunk of those squishies then getting squished because you guys leave them behind. The pushes seemed mostly designed to give kills to your frontliners while leaving everyone else to fend for themselves. I’m no expert, but you can clearly organize so maybe you can find a better way to go about it without losing so many people.

Also, a question: what was going on when you were on the hill north of SM later in the evening for what felt like 5 minutes? We switched to a commander I didn’t recognize, he was all ‘push’ and I was thinking ‘but there are so many up there.. well, okay’ and you guys just sorta took it until you all fell off the back or died. It didn’t feel right.

Character: Dual Axe warrior using rare Traveler’s axes (1 sup sigil of luck, 1 sup sigil of fire), rare Traveler’s armor, masterwork Traveler’s jewelry, 5 Pirate runes, 1 Traveler rune, with constant 1 omnomberry bar and intermittent guild buffs for around 170 magic find.

Location: Cursed Shore, doing primarily Penitent Camp, Shelter’s Gate, and Jofast Camp defense events, intermixed with Plinx events to fill time gaps.

Data Gathered: The number of rares obtained over 1 hour, the duration of two omnomberry bars. I would typically farm 1 or 2 hours a day and check the rare counts as a farming efficiency benchmark. This was over the course of approximately two to three weeks on this character.

Late October/Early November: 5-9 rares an hour, with 9 being the record and 7 being typical. These primarily came from Shelter’s Gate events (primary focus on spider spawns), with 2 rares dropped in a typical event and the event repeating multiple times per hour. This is over about 20-25 hours of farming.

Late November: Plinx events are ignored by players, so only Penitent/Shelters/Jofast events done. 1-2 rares gathered per hour, with a typical Shelter’s Gate event dropping 0-1 rares. This is over about 4 hours of farming.

Other data: I would occasionally check how much money was gained by selling to a merchant the drops from a single Shelter’s gate event, not including rares, materials, or salvage items, as a secondary benchmark of my farming performance. In late October/early November, across ~6 such checks, anywhere from 30s to 50s was gained by selling these drops. In late November across 2 such checks, only ~10s was gained per event.

Some less concrete observations:
-Porous bones are drastically more likely to drop after the mid November updates instead of normal weapons and armor.
-Material drop rates seem to be unaffected.
-Total number of drops seems to be unaffected.
-No exotic items dropped before the mid November patch for any of my characters anywhere; two dropped after the patch in Cursed Shore, both during the Protect Historian Fia event that takes place between Shelter’s and Jofast and applies an additional magic find buff.