Guild Wars 2

(con’t)
SUMMARY/RATIONALE FOR THIS PROPOSAL
Current WvW is plagued by many limitations and issues inherent to its current form. If it is intended as the ‘3rd Pillar’ of the game alongside PVE and sPvP those limitations cripple the format’s potential to fill that role.
The structure of matches into a competitive format of glicko rated servers with wildly variable actual WvW populations semi-randomly matched against each other in a 24/7 scored matchup usually produces situations where one server has a clear advantage early in the matchup, creating a positive reinforcement loop for participation by that server’s members and a negative one for the other two. This means, in effect, that the only time the match is competitive may be on reset night… making the remaining 160ish hours of the week pointless and pretty boring for all sides.
The best servers are those who have all of the following: very high WvW participation from their server, a lot of organized guild groups as part of that participation, as close to 24/7 coverage as possible, as high a degree as possible of participation on that server’s TS, and a very high amount of coordination between that server’s players. Those servers are also pressure cookers that tend to burn out the players that function as their core fighting forces.
The problem is, there is less than a handful of servers in the NA/EU leagues that fit those criteria, with pretty much no chance of that changing because there are not enough active WvW players around to do that for every server, and human psychology combined with a severe lack of material rewards means that it is not very likely that many PVE/sPVP players can be enticed into becoming regular WvW players. Pretty much all the suggestions made so far are band-aids that either won’t fix the root causes or can trigger more negative reinforcement loops.
With that said, from what I’ve seen all Tiers can manage a fairly respectable turn out on reset nights, EOTM is pretty popular, and overall turnout increases dramatically during tournaments (at least for as long as it takes to get the meta done for the reward) which indicates to me that WvW shouldn’t just be written off.
So, what does the Guild Alliance proposal do?
Pros:
• Population imbalances are no longer an issue
• Coverage is no longer an issue
• Stale matches are no longer an issue
• Matches become much more competitive at any time
• Players have more flexibility in how they play the game
• Players are much more likely to be able to find fights that fit their style of play
• Players can choose Alliances that fit their playstyle
• Alliances actually will have control of their lineup instead of being subjected to the whims of the queue.
• Trolls can be easily dealt with by /alliancekick
• It allows both better separation between ultracompetitive play and casual while simultaneously providing a clearer progression towards competitive play.
• It provides better integration of the EOTM/regular WvW formats
• It allows increasing the overall rewards for WvW as a carrot to increase participation levels without worrying about hitting the absolute map cap of WvW (9600 in NA) causing queues which tear large holes in zerg busting guild’s formations and overall C3
• It allows for matches where guilds from an entire region are much more likely to interact with each other, as allies or enemies (group queue)
• Guilds can get better individual recognition because Alliance glicko rating will only reflect their efforts instead of an entire server.
• The Challenge mode establishes the basic framework for different styles of play that portions of the player base have expressed quite a bit of interest in.
• Its more economical for Anet because only as many maps as needed will be created.
Cons:
• The servers at the extreme ends of the spectrum (Tiers 1 and 8 ) will have issues forming the Guild Alliances. The Tier 1 because basically they would need multiple Guild Alliances which will inevitably cause community disruption and the Tier 8 because there just might not be enough organized guilds to form an effective alliance.
• There will be far less opportunity for off hours players to form Alliances, meaning that there will be fewer of them and hence less depth in Alliance play during off hours.
• I spoke with our guild’s resident A-net Dev and he said I shouldn’t expect that anything like this could be implemented quickly, it would require some pretty major changes. Please note this caveat: he made clear this was his own feel about the situation and in no way whatsoever represented an official company stance.

(con’t from previous post)
Group Queue
This is the option which people choose if they want more organized yet casual play, whether as entire guilds, fragments of guilds, groups of friends, etc. It will use megaserver technology to fill out sides, prioritizing from the largest guild formations to the smallest mixed groups. This is important because the first 2 map sides filled out via group queue could potentially find themselves matched against the lowest ranked Alliance(s) if there are not enough alliances queued for that match to make the lowest alliance match alliance-only.
Example: A megaguild decides to have a guild WvW night. They group queue with 16 5 man groups. They will all get assigned to the same map side, and will probably be 1st in line to be selected as an alliance match round out team if one is needed. The next map side consists of a 35 person guild, a 25 person guild and a 20 person guild, etc etc etc.
Solo Queue
This is what a player picks if they are queueing alone. Players from this queue will be used first to round out any gaps left in group queue maps, then will be round robin assigned to sides on new maps (ensuring as close to even numbers on all 3 sides as possible).
Solo Queue (Low Pop)
This is one of the two special queue options. Players who select this queue are NOT part of the pool selection for the Alliance/Group/Solo maps. They will be placed on their own map (s) which have half the pop cap of regular ones (IE 40 instead of 80 per side), round robin style. This is basically the roamer/duelist queue.
Challenge Queue
This is another stand-alone that doesn’t interact with anything else. The purpose of this is to allow Alliances and Guilds to do 1v1 fights, either rated or not. Hitting the Challenge queue button would bring up a submenu with 2 further options: Alliance or GvG. Selecting either will bring up another submenu where you choose who the Challenge will be issued to, whether the challenge will be rated/non rated and whether the scoring will be PPT or PPK (points per player kill) only. The GvG option would also have numbers scaling option (IE 10v10, 15v15, etc). Once the parameters were set, the Challenge would be submitted. The Challenged party would receive notification of the Challenge and could either accept or refuse. If accepted, the whole roster confirmation process would proceed on both sides and the match would start once both sides hit the Confirm button. In order to prevent griefing/trolling by making repeated cold challenges, a /challengeblock GUILD <guildname> or ALLIANCE <alliancename> list should be added.
(con’t)

(con’t from previous post)
Guild Alliances – a detailed explanation
An Alliance is a new organizational level above a guild. While it could be used for PVE purposes, (an example being the various TTS guilds would make a natural PVE alliance,) the main purpose would be to provide the structure to build WvW teams around.
Maximum alliance size will need to be fairly high to account for differences in use and playstyle. Probably 8191 (that isn’t an arbitrary number, its 13 binary digits… the next lower would be 4095 which wouldn’t be enough for TTS.) No matter how large the total alliance membership is, the important limiting factor is only 80 will be able to be in an Alliance WvW match at the same time.
An account can be a member of multiple alliances at the same time, however any alliance can see exactly what alliances you currently have a membership in so they can spot potential conflicts of interest.
All Alliances will have their own glicko rating. This glicko rating is only affected by matches that the Alliance participates in via the Alliance queue. Since the rating is no longer a composite rating covering an entire server it will be much more accurate than current glicko is.
The Alliance will need to have their own rank structure with varying permission levels… this will have to include membership invite/kick, queueing authority, and permission setting authority.
You can add an alliance tag at the end of the current character display. Syntax: Character name [guild tag] [alliance tag].
Queue Option Interface/System – a detailed explanation
The revamping of the queue system is an important part of this change. I will go over each individual option in turn. It is important to know that the Alliance, Group and Solo queues are integrated together while the Solo (low pop) and Challenge options are special cases handled independently.
There will need to be a down time in between match time slots to account for glicko recalculation and to allow time for people to queue up, get a drink, go to the restroom, etc.
There will also need to be a roster confirmation cutoff time (probably on the hour mark) to allow proper matchup calculations.
Alliance Queue
This option is picked by an Alliance member who has queueing authority to kick off a scheduled alliance raid. Once this action has been taken, all alliance members online get notification that a queue request has been submitted (suggestion being an exclamation point on the WvW icon on the upper left part of their screen accompanied with an audible sound similar to when a player receives mail) and the individual who started the queue gets a progress indicator that fills up as other alliance members join the queue. This progress indicator could be quite detailed… IE like the WoW raid interface that shows group number, character name and color coded by class. The queueing member has 2 option buttons: Confirm and Cancel. Confirm commits the Alliance to play in the next match, the Cancel option stops the process to prevent an Alliance that isn’t ready or has too many no-shows from being forced to participate in a rated match.
Note: outside of the submission window the Alliance queue button will put you into a queue for your currently represented Alliance’s match IF a match is underway, you CANNOT submit a new Alliance queue request outside the matchup window OR have 2 separate Alliance matches active at the same time.
(con’t)

I posted this about a year ago in the Population Imbalances CDI. It (mostly) still stands, so I’m going to post it again.

Very long, multi part post incoming. Fair warning :P
Proposal: Guild Alliances
Objective: replace the current uncompetitive system which consists of multiple reinforcing negative feedback loops with a new one that takes into account the current ‘facts on the ground’, is highly competitive, robust, and capable of continuous dynamic adjustments throughout the day faced with varying degree of player participation and play styles.
Method:
• Scrap the persistent 24/7 timeframe. Replace it with a series of time blocks which are individually scored and rated matches. Suggested time frames are 16 matches of 90 minutes in length (probably best), or 12 matches of 2 hours in length.
• Scrap all existing servers (which will be replaced by):
• Form Guild Alliances. (A detailed explanation of what these are follows after Method and scoring sections).
• Change the current queue option interface/system to offer these choices: Alliance, Group, Solo, Solo (low pop), and Challenge (A detailed explanation of what this means as well as implications is after Method & Scoring sections and Guild Alliances explanation.)
• Each match is on a single map chosen at random from the 4 available maps: EB, EotM, Alpine or Desert BL. The sides are filled out by placing Alliances first in order of their Glicko rating (IE first map consists of the top 3 rated Alliances which have queued for that timeslot, next map is the next 3, etc). If there are 1 or 2 Alliances left as a remainder, that map is filled out with the first group queue sides, etc. (This will be clearer once you read the detailed Queue Option section).
• Reduce map capacity for each faction down to the size of a squad. Squad size might want to be increased to 60, but this is debatable.
• All characters start with 0 supply at the start of each match.
• All objectives start at completely unupgraded, but the upgrade schedule is vastly compressed… 4 supply deliveries/dolyaks delivered per tier.

Scoring and Rewards:
• Match score follows current PPT rules with the following change: All player kills are worth 1 point, stomps are worth 2.
• All matches that have at least one Alliance present are considered rated matches.
• Rated matches result in glicko rating changes for the Alliances participating.
• Non rated matches have no glicko effects.
• Add a reward chest for the 1st place finishers at the end of a match that contains 1 each of the ascended crafting materials: (IE 1 Deldrimor steel, 1 Spiritwood Plank, 1 Elonian square, 1 bolt of Damask).
• The current World bonuses are reassigned to be Alliance bonuses and the trigger points would have to be recalculated based on what kind of scores an Alliance could expect given a reasonable amount of playtime during the week.

(con’t)

Go to the sPvP lobby, there is an NPC right in front of where you port in, click on that NPC. That should fix your problem.

I’m at “meh”.

If all this is doing is setting most of the WvW achievements low enough that pretty much everybody who has played remotely seriously in the last year will get most of them, this is going to be just a band-aid if it doesn’t address the huge disparity in achievement point gain between the 3 game modes.

By this point, most of the people who consider themselves WvW players are not achievement hunters, by natural selection.

For the purpose of debate however, lets say that there are a lot of WvW achievement point hunters out there. How long is it going to take for them to figure out that future effort will get no AP reward? Both s/tPvP and WvW have been rewarded far worse AP-wise than PvE, each less than 20% of the PvE total… and that is just going to get worse on Friday when new PvE achievements come out.

PvP and WvW need to be on par with PVE as far as achievement point potential goes. That means repeatable achievements grandfathered into the game to reflect time already spent.

Malediktus.3740:

You are suggesting a whole new title system which would probably take much more effort than just changing the numbers.

Not really all that much effort, since the basic subsystems for repeatable achievements are already there and would need only minor tweaking, like removing the “Ultimate” part of the title to make room for the extra cluster suffix icons, and reusing the World Completion star with different colors as the cluster icon.

Programming wise, its about the same difficulty as a high school programming homework assignment, shouldn’t take more than a couple hours or so to do. It would take more time to judge where to put the numerical break points at for each of the individual achievements to reflect time/effort and match them with the PVE achievement plans.

Malediktus.9250:

Here are what I would find realistic requirements for the final tier of the WvW achievements – based on my 4 digit hours I spend on different activities in WvW:

[SNIP – had to remove your list because the overall post was too long with them included]

I think these requirements would motivate more people to play WvW – and more importantly do all aspects of WvW including dolyak escorts and defending. I expect with these requirements it would take about 2000 hours (= 5.5hours per day for a year) for the average player to max out WvW achievements.

I agree that the current kill/cap/defend numbers for WvW achievement brackets are almost all ludicrously too high, but I think the numbers you are proposing are too low for an absolute cap. The problem is, this game is still basically pretty early on in its lifespan. Given how long Ultima Online. EverQuest 1, Dark Age of Camelot, WoW and Eve Online have lasted, its reasonable to think that GW2 could easily last past 10 years although with a much smaller population than it currently has.

There is also a huge disparity between long time dedicated WvW players and casuals for how much time, effort and progress has been made towards these achievements. Any change that is made should try to meet the needs of both categories of player.

I would also like to point out that at present, there is a huge disparity between the achievement point pools possible of the 3 game modes: PVE, sPvP and WvW. At present the totals are:

PVE ~10,450 permanent achievement points (including all Living Story)
sPvP 1,651
WvW 1,737 (including all 3 WvW seasons)

This is even worse than it looks because it is quite possible for a PVE player playing on a more casual time frame to have gained all of those PVE points while it is extremely unlikely that even the most hardcore WvW player has gained even half of the WvW ones.

This time/effort/reward disparity in achievement points is part of an overall imbalance of time/effort/reward throughout the game so just fixing the achievement part alone isn’t going to be a panacea to the sPvP and WvW game modes but at least it COULD help change the perception that both sPvP and WvW are the forgotten modes of the game.

My proposal to fix this is to borrow an idea from the world’s militaries. The “Medal with Cluster” system. Clusters are additions to a base medal to denote multiple awards of that medal… so an Iron Cross with 2 clusters means you were awarded the Iron Cross 3 times.

So, treat the WvW titles as the Medal. Drastically reduce the goals to achieve the current titles, lower even than the totals you suggested. Make earning the base title worth 50 achievement points (spread out over a tiered system like there is now), but every time you earn enough extra credits to hit that base title number again you earn a cluster… 50 more achievement points and an icon added on to the end of the title.

Suggested icons are: bronze star (1 repeat), silver star (5 repeats), gold star (20 repeats). Lets say that an example title for Yakslapper would be 500 kills. At 1k kills you would have 100 achievement points and your title bar would say: Yakslapper with a bronze star after it. At 3,000 yak kills it would be 300 AP and Yakslapper with a silver star after it; 3,500 = 350 AP and Yakslapper with a silver and a bronze star; 10,500 Yak kills = 1,050 AP and Yakslapper with a gold star, etc.

The same principle should honestly be applied to sPvP achievements, by making the class specific rated game wins open ended and on the same AP scale, also adding clusters to the “Champion” titles.

In conclusion: If you’re going to change the WvW achievement system you might as well solve multiple issues at the same time by making it more accessible to casual players while at the same time reflecting the time and effort put into the game mode by vets as well as the open ended nature of WvW and PvP game play.

Nash.2681:

Hey Jon, besides all that balancing and bug fixing, are you guys also aware of this ?

Btw., what made me ponder yesterday was, that even though I didn’t see any significant difference in the number of my stats, i felt like dishing out way more dmg. Example: my wife and me decided to have some WvW fun with our rangers. Quickly set up a build being quite close to what I played before, checked my stats, reckognized that Power, Crit. Chance, Lifepool was all about as pre-patch but boy… my actual damage was way higher than before.
Had one funny situation with a thief running up to us, stealthing himself while still being out of range. Sneaked up, 1-hitted my wife… just to get insta-downed after half of my rapidfire. That was our “wtf happened to all that damage” moment

What was probably happening in your WvW encounter was: said thief was full zerk and hadn’t changed his or her gear to reflect the stats lost from the trait lines. So that thief had roughly 3,000 less hitpoints and 300 less toughness. So yeah, one rapidfire is more than enough to kill a glass cannon player with 10k hitpoints.

JonPeters.5630:

Just getting these out there so we know we are all in agreement:

1) Conditions seem a bit strong
2) World bosses are currently too easy
3) There are some bugged skills and traits
4) There are some overpowered builds

We won’t fix it all at once but these are four large topics we are talking about. In the meantime keep the feedback and bug reports coming, and I guess farm up some world bosses. We are dedicating time towards these issues and are intending to resolve them as quickly as possible. As we have said before, the live environment differs too greatly from anything we can reliably simulate internally so big changes like today’s build will cause things to sometimes change at an alarming rateTM.

Thanks for your patience,

Jon

Yes, some builds will need tweeking, others are fine.

As far as world bosses go, one thing to keep in mind: up till this point anything more than 1 condi user in a zerg was a huge drag… they would be lucky to be doing 10% of the damage of a power build but contributed the full scale up effect. Before megaservers, I could routinely kill Golem Mk2 in less than 90 seconds with 3 players in power builds. The Teq world record speed kill pre patch had slightly more than 13 min left on the clock. Whenever you would attend any world boss event where almost all the players present were using power builds, the boss would die very fast.

savageschemer.1036:

People throwing around the word “entitlement” in the HoT pre-purchase discussion(s) really should learn what the word means. Entitlement in the ongoing community discussion would be, “I’m a veteran player, therefore I should get the expansion for free”. That’s not, as near as I’ve been able to tell, what one single person over hundreds of pages of threads has said. Instead the ENTIRE discussion has been, “if ArenaNet wants my money, then something needs to change”.

That “something” has been different for different people joining in the discussion, and is central to the debate. For some its that the price is too high no matter what. For others, they want ArenaNet to “sweeten the pot” a bit before they commit their hard-earned money to a purchase (which is how business negotiation and trade works). Others still feel the value being offered in the product punishes the very people who’ve provided ArenaNet with past revenue over those that have never provided them any revenue. Finally there are those who feel the product for its price is completely fair as-is. I assume most of the "entitlement’ meme repeaters fit into this last category. These are all examples of people making value statements.

To reiterate, the discussion this community has been having, then, is 100% based on the exchange of money for a product, making the entire discussion one of value by definition, not entitlement. So please, please stop using the “entitlement” meme if you’re one of the people who disagrees with the value statement being made by others in our community. It just makes you look ignorant.

I agree, people using the word entitlement should know what it means. Here is the definition:

en·ti·tle·ment

/in?t?dlm?nt,en?t?dlm?nt/

noun: entitlement; plural noun: entitlements

1) the fact of having a right to something.

“full entitlement to fees and maintenance should be offered”

synonyms:

right, prerogative, claim; More permission, dispensation, privilege

“their entitlement to benefits”

2) •the amount to which a person has a right.

“annual leave entitlement”

synonyms:

right, prerogative, claim; More permission, dispensation, privilege

“their entitlement to benefits”

3)the belief that one is inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment.

“no wonder your kids have a sense of entitlement”

So yes, the arguments that NCSoft should offer a different HoT package to pre existing GW2 players are absolutely ones of entitlement.

The debate about whether $50 is a fair price for the expansion content is one of values.

Danikat.8537:

Actually the reason they changed it is that before then it was pretty much standard practice for people to make a legendary and then immediately transmute it’s skin onto another exotic weapon in order to get the stats they wanted.

Since ascended was deliberately designed to be much more time consuming and expensive to made (it was described as an intermediate step between exotics and legendaries) that was no longer seen as a practical option, so stat swapping was added as an alternative.

I think Anet still intended most people to choose one stat combination for their legendary and stick with it, not keep changing depending on what they were doing.

I’m pretty sure that if you were correct about Anet intending choice of stats for a Legendary to be a one shot choice it actually would have been a one shot choice, like all the other items in the game that actually are one time choices.

Since that isn’t the case, and the Ready Up that previewed the legendaries made a point of swapping the weapon stats more than once, that you are incorrect on this.

When ascended weapons came out, and Legendary weapons were upgraded to ascended stats, Legendaries were also given the ability to swap stats out of combat to any existing combination. This was to increase their utility, and hopefully their desirability to the player population. The idea was that if you had a legendary, it could potentially save you the trouble of carrying around multiple copies of a weapon with different stats and sigils.

This sounds great on paper, but a pretty important aspect of stat swapping was overlooked: the sigil(s) on the weapon. These remained as before: the only way to use a different sigil in your legendary was to overwrite an existing one, losing the existing one in the process. Since this could get pretty expensive pretty quickly, the best option remained keeping multiple copies of a weapon in inventory, so most of the utility aspect of legendary weapons were lost.

This has not been much of an issue up till this point because bluntly condition damage oriented builds have been extremely sub par outside of small scale PvP, and healing builds have frankly not been needed. So the default for most players has been to go with power oriented sigils.

The situation is changing though with Tuesday’s release. The new trait system combined with the condition damage rework means that condition damage and support healer builds are now going to be a lot stronger, so people will probably try experimenting with such builds to see how effective they are now. In order for Legendaries to fully realize their promised utility, we need a way to hot-swap sigils (and runes if Legendary armor is ever introduced).

Here is a proposal of how to do so.

At the expansion announcement event at PAX, I believe that Colin mentioned how Anet planned on making a lot of use of the collection system in the future. Specifically, using it as the method for Precursor crafting. Well, why not use it here for sigils and runes of the completed Legendary? Each legendary weapon and armor piece could have an associated collection of sigils/runes respectively… if you have added a sigil to a weapon’s collection in consumes said rune, but the rune then becomes available to choose from a drop down menu similar to the sPvP build menu under the same conditions as you could change the item’s stats. You could even use this as a chance to remedy the achievement point vs cost disparity of Legendary weapons vs most other collection achievements.

A foreseeable issue is that there would only be one collection for each legendary weapon, but it is possible to have multiple copies of an individual weapon. My proposed solution to that is a legendary weapon collection would apply to every existing duplicate Legendary on the account.

Comments?

Alright, I’ll bite.

You’re claiming that NCSoft did customers wrong by offering the base game months in advance of the HoT release for 83% off while not mentioning that said base game would be included in HoT in a “stand alone expansion” model. Then you are using this as justification for demanding a reduction of the price for the expansion for players who already own copies of the base game. Is that right?

You might actually have HAD a case for moral outrage if the sales had happened a week or two before expansion release. That isn’t much time to get anything done or learn a lot about the game, but in this case the sales happened MONTHS in advance.

You have said yourself multiple times in this thread that you enjoy the game, play it a lot, and plan on continuing to play it a lot in the future. You have had a chance to level up and gear characters while prices have been quite a bit lower than normal. If you’re a smart player you’ve had chances to learn the game and the economy, earn gold to make investments in preparation for the expansion which (if you guessed correctly) should make you more than enough gold to completely offset the entire $50 for the expansion, and then some.

Let us look at another aspect of this. Say a new customer bought the game at $10 and DIDN’T like it after all. Finding that out at $10 is a whole lot better for the consumer than finding it out at $50 or $60. Inevitably, there were people who fell in that category during these past sales, so putting it on sale by that much almost certainly cost NCSoft some money.

Finally, I know many of my guildies and other people in the game bought multiple extra accounts at that $10 price, with no intention of playing them except to log in daily for the log in rewards and as cheap extra space. ALL of my guildies who did so were happy with their decision, none have ever expressed any regret.

In short, considering the above points, I don’t know how it is possible to continue taking the position that NCSoft cheated their customers with those sales unless you’re not very bright, or cynically assuming a false stance in a shameless attempt to extort an unjustified reduction in price of the expansion.

Cheers.

@ OP: Please read more carefully and think before you post. Upgrade time does depend on yaks making it in.

I am far more concerned that there has yet to be any mention of a way for scouts to get some type of compensation for the incredibly boring job of sitting in a tower or keep as an early warning system.

I hope Anet just forgot to tell us that they finally decided to import one last thing from Dark Age of Camelot that they forgot up till now: automated # of enemies in area reports to all members of the owning guild when a guard is killed or a wall is damaged of a structure or location claimed by the guild.

Darkhaven suffers from the “Cool Server Name” curse, like Dragonbrand. So you guys probably got more than your fair share of actual new players from those $10 sales. The server probably actually IS full of active players… just not ones that WvW.

So DH is probably kittened unless you can make it a really noob friendly place in WvW. Which is going to be pretty hard.

BTW, this should probably be in the WvW section, FYI.

Like others I am a bit concerned with build diversity, in a couple ways.

Part 1:
Decoupling stats from traits seems like a good idea on paper, but in spvp and WvW there are quite a few builds that rely on those stats from traits to create effective hybrids. Considering that spvp stat diversity is the most extremely limited in the game at present because everything is in the amulet now, how does Anet plan on dealing with this? Will we see a return of the “gem” component of the amulet? As far as WvW goes, changing a few pieces of ascended gear is likely to be extremely expensive, upwards of several hundred gold per character, just to get back to where we are now. That isn’t going to make WvW players happy.

Part 2:
Again, many people regularly use double Adept or Double Master traits in builds, or situationally. This seems like it will not be possible in the new system. The only way that I can think of to cover this is if those commonly used Adept/Master traits are the ones that will now become baseline.

Part 3:

I am also concerned about the skill point conversion. Are we going to get something like “crystalized experience” that replaces all other skill points, whether on scrolls or currently on characters? If so, is this finally going to go into the wallet where it belongs? I definitely would prefer to have a choice over what I got from my (large) stockpile of skill points.

Not sure what the issue is here. The way that the WvW maps are handled now is consistent with the other 3 maps that were added since launch (Southsun, Dry Top and Silverwastes) all of which have those kinds of features and none of which give a zone map completion reward, or count towards World Completion.

nassaya.7109:

Hiya i’ll keep it short, i noticed today that our server had a que but we where outnumbered. How is this possible?

Cheers,
Nassaya.

There was a bug a while back where players who logged out in WvW were still being counted against the map limits, so queues were being forced when they shouldn’t have been.

I don’t honestly know whether that was ever fixed, but if you were getting the Outnumbered buff on a map where your side had a queue something along these lines has to be happening.

(con’t)

SUMMARY/RATIONALE FOR THIS PROPOSAL

Current WvW is plagued by many limitations and issues inherent to its current form. If it is intended as the ‘3rd Pillar’ of the game alongside PVE and sPvP those limitations cripple the format’s potential to fill that role.
The structure of matches into a competitive format of glicko rated servers with wildly variable actual WvW populations semi-randomly matched against each other in a 24/7 scored matchup usually produces situations where one server has a clear advantage early in the matchup, creating a positive reinforcement loop for participation by that server’s members and a negative one for the other two. This means, in effect, that the only time the match is competitive may be on reset night… making the remaining 160ish hours of the week pointless and pretty boring for all sides.

The best servers are those who have all of the following: very high WvW participation from their server, a lot of organized guild groups as part of that participation, as close to 24/7 coverage as possible, as high a degree as possible of participation on that server’s TS, and a very high amount of coordination between that server’s players. Those servers are also pressure cookers that tend to burn out the players that function as their core fighting forces.

The problem is, there is less than a handful of servers in the NA/EU leagues that fit those criteria, with pretty much no chance of that changing because there are not enough active WvW players around to do that for every server, and human psychology combined with a severe lack of material rewards means that it is not very likely that many PVE/sPVP players can be enticed into becoming regular WvW players. Pretty much all the suggestions made so far are band-aids that either won’t fix the root causes or can trigger more negative reinforcement loops.
With that said, from what I’ve seen all Tiers can manage a fairly respectable turn out on reset nights, EOTM is pretty popular, and overall turnout increases dramatically during tournaments (at least for as long as it takes to get the meta done for the reward) which indicates to me that WvW shouldn’t just be written off.

So, what does the Guild Alliance proposal do?

Pros:

• Population imbalances are no longer an issue
• Coverage is no longer an issue
• Stale matches are no longer an issue
• Matches become much more competitive at any time
• Players have more flexibility in how they play the game
• Players are much more likely to be able to find fights that fit their style of play
• Players can choose Alliances that fit their playstyle
• Alliances actually will have control of their lineup instead of being subjected to the whims of the queue.
• Trolls can be easily dealt with by /alliancekick
• It allows both better separation between ultracompetitive play and casual while simultaneously providing a clearer progression towards competitive play.
• It provides better integration of the EOTM/regular WvW formats
• It allows increasing the overall rewards for WvW as a carrot to increase participation levels without worrying about hitting the absolute map cap of WvW (9600 in NA) causing queues which tear large holes in zerg busting guild’s formations and overall C3
• It allows for matches where guilds from an entire region are much more likely to interact with each other, as allies or enemies (group queue)
• Guilds can get better individual recognition because Alliance glicko rating will only reflect their efforts instead of an entire server.
• The Challenge mode establishes the basic framework for different styles of play that portions of the player base have expressed quite a bit of interest in.
• Its more economical for Anet because only as many maps as needed will be created.

Cons:

• The servers at the extreme ends of the spectrum (Tiers 1 and 8 ) will have issues forming the Guild Alliances. The Tier 1 because basically they would need multiple Guild Alliances which will inevitably cause community disruption and the Tier 8 because there just might not be enough organized guilds to form an effective alliance.
• There will be far less opportunity for off hours players to form Alliances, meaning that there will be fewer of them and hence less depth in Alliance play during off hours.
• I spoke with our guild’s resident A-net Dev and he said I shouldn’t expect that anything like this could be implemented quickly, it would require some pretty major changes. Please note this caveat: he made clear this was his own feel about the situation and in no way whatsoever represented an official company stance.

Comments? Questions?

(con’t from previous post)

Group Queue

This is the option which people choose if they want more organized yet casual play, whether as entire guilds, fragments of guilds, groups of friends, etc. It will use megaserver technology to fill out sides, prioritizing from the largest guild formations to the smallest mixed groups. This is important because the first 2 map sides filled out via group queue could potentially find themselves matched against the lowest ranked Alliance(s) if there are not enough alliances queued for that match to make the lowest alliance match alliance-only.
Example: A megaguild decides to have a guild WvW night. They group queue with 16 5 man groups. They will all get assigned to the same map side, and will probably be 1st in line to be selected as an alliance match round out team if one is needed. The next map side consists of a 35 person guild, a 25 person guild and a 20 person guild, etc etc etc.

Solo Queue

This is what a player picks if they are queueing alone. Players from this queue will be used first to round out any gaps left in group queue maps, then will be round robin assigned to sides on new maps (ensuring as close to even numbers on all 3 sides as possible).

Solo Queue (Low Pop)

This is one of the two special queue options. Players who select this queue are NOT part of the pool selection for the Alliance/Group/Solo maps. They will be placed on their own map (s) which have half the pop cap of regular ones (IE 40 instead of 80 per side), round robin style. This is basically the roamer/duelist queue.

Challenge Queue

This is another stand-alone that doesn’t interact with anything else. The purpose of this is to allow Alliances and Guilds to do 1v1 fights, either rated or not. Hitting the Challenge queue button would bring up a submenu with 2 further options: Alliance or GvG. Selecting either will bring up another submenu where you choose who the Challenge will be issued to, whether the challenge will be rated/non rated and whether the scoring will be PPT or PPK (points per player kill) only. The GvG option would also have numbers scaling option (IE 10v10, 15v15, etc). Once the parameters were set, the Challenge would be submitted. The Challenged party would receive notification of the Challenge and could either accept or refuse. If accepted, the whole roster confirmation process would proceed on both sides and the match would start once both sides hit the Confirm button. In order to prevent griefing/trolling by making repeated cold challenges, a /challengeblock GUILD <guildname> or ALLIANCE <alliancename> list should be added.

(con’t)

(con’t from previous post)

Guild Alliances – a detailed explanation

An Alliance is a new organizational level above a guild. While it could be used for PVE purposes, (an example being the various TTS guilds would make a natural PVE alliance,) the main purpose would be to provide the structure to build WvW teams around.
Maximum alliance size will need to be fairly high to account for differences in use and playstyle. Probably 8191 (that isn’t an arbitrary number, its 13 binary digits… the next lower would be 4095 which wouldn’t be enough for TTS.) No matter how large the total alliance membership is, the important limiting factor is only 80 will be able to be in an Alliance WvW match at the same time.
An account can be a member of multiple alliances at the same time, however any alliance can see exactly what alliances you currently have a membership in so they can spot potential conflicts of interest.
All Alliances will have their own glicko rating. This glicko rating is only affected by matches that the Alliance participates in via the Alliance queue. Since the rating is no longer a composite rating covering an entire server it will be much more accurate than current glicko is.
The Alliance will need to have their own rank structure with varying permission levels… this will have to include membership invite/kick, queueing authority, and permission setting authority.
You can add an alliance tag at the end of the current character display. Syntax: Character name [guild tag] [alliance tag].

Queue Option Interface/System – a detailed explanation

The revamping of the queue system is an important part of this change. I will go over each individual option in turn. It is important to know that the Alliance, Group and Solo queues are integrated together while the Solo (low pop) and Challenge options are special cases handled independently.
There will need to be a down time in between match time slots to account for glicko recalculation and to allow time for people to queue up, get a drink, go to the restroom, etc.
There will also need to be a roster confirmation cutoff time (probably on the hour mark) to allow proper matchup calculations.

Alliance Queue

This option is picked by an Alliance member who has queueing authority to kick off a scheduled alliance raid. Once this action has been taken, all alliance members online get notification that a queue request has been submitted (suggestion being an exclamation point on the WvW icon on the upper left part of their screen accompanied with an audible sound similar to when a player receives mail) and the individual who started the queue gets a progress indicator that fills up as other alliance members join the queue. This progress indicator could be quite detailed… IE like the WoW raid interface that shows group number, character name and color coded by class. The queueing member has 2 option buttons: Confirm and Cancel. Confirm commits the Alliance to play in the next match, the Cancel option stops the process to prevent an Alliance that isn’t ready or has too many no-shows from being forced to participate in a rated match.
Note: outside of the submission window the Alliance queue button will put you into a queue for your currently represented Alliance’s match IF a match is underway, you CANNOT submit a new Alliance queue request outside the matchup window OR have 2 separate Alliance matches active at the same time.

(con’t)

Very long, multi part post incoming. Fair warning :P

Proposal: Guild Alliances

Objective: replace the current uncompetitive system which consists of multiple reinforcing negative feedback loops with a new one that takes into account the current ‘facts on the ground’, is highly competitive, robust, and capable of continuous dynamic adjustments throughout the day faced with varying degree of player participation and play styles.

Method:
• Scrap the persistent 24/7 timeframe. Replace it with a series of time blocks which are individually scored and rated matches. Suggested time frames are 12 matches of 2 hours in length (probably best), 8 matches of 3 hours, or 6 matches of 4.
• Scrap all existing servers (which will be replaced by):
• Form Guild Alliances. (A detailed explanation of what these are follows after Method and scoring sections).
• Change the current queue option interface/system to offer these choices: Alliance, Group, Solo, Solo (low pop), and Challenge (A detailed explanation of what this means as well as implications is after Method & Scoring sections and Guild Alliances explanation.)
• Each match is on one map (randomly picked between available choices, for now only EB and EOTM –the Borderlands map is too unbalanced for single map play). The sides are filled out by placing Alliances first in order of their Glicko rating (IE first map consists of the top 3 rated Alliances which have queued for that timeslot, next map is the next 3, etc). If there are 1 or 2 Alliances left as a remainder, that map is filled out with the first group queue sides, etc. (This will be clearer once you read the detailed Queue Option section).

Scoring and Rewards:

• Match score follows current PPT rules with the following change: All player kills are worth 1 point, stomps are worth 2.
• All matches that have at least one Alliance present are considered rated matches.
• Rated matches result in glicko rating changes for the Alliances participating and award 3 WvW rank chests and 3 Tournament reward tickets for 1st place, 2 rank chests and 2 tickets for 2nd, 1 chest and 1 ticket for 3rd place.
• Non rated matches have no glicko effects and only reward the 3/2/1 WvW rank chests depending on final score.
• Buff the EB map objective reward levels to EOTM level.
• The current World bonuses are reassigned to be Alliance bonuses and the trigger points would have to be recalculated based on what kind of scores an Alliance could expect given a reasonable amount of playtime during the week.
• Change the EB map structures to conform to EOTM norm: IE all personnel upgrades done; all mortar/cannon/oil upgrades done but not built, waypoints built, doors and walls at reinforced level but not upgradable further.

(con’t)

fellyn.5083:

Vercinorix.3021:

If full sets of the achievement armor are supposed to be penultimate long term awards for achievement hunters similar to the invitational tourney pvp sets, then yes 18k achievement points IS too easy. A year or so ago, when the revamped achievement point award system was introduced, I had 9600. That was pretty high up on the leaderboards at the time. Now 10k isn’t enough to even show up on the leaderboards. Half of my 160 person guild is over 10k, including plenty of people who have zero focus on achievements.

It is a pretty reasonable assumption that trend will hold true among actually active players and 18k won’t be enough achievement points to be on the leaderboards by this time next year. Also yes, 3 years is very early in the lifespan of a successful MMO. EQ1 is still going after 15 years, Dark Age of Camelot still has the lights on after 13, and WoW is about to hit the 10th anniversary with more current subscribers than all the copies of GW2 sold to date.

A player gets achievement points for doing practically anything in GW2. You get a lot of achievement points by trying and doing all aspects of the game. They exist as an incentive to get you to try new things. With that in mind, it isn’t unreasonable to have awards in place to reward a consistent, sustained dedication to the entire game over a period of years as opposed to something like Yakslapper which requires a completely insane dedication to repeating a very boring, monotonous SINGLE task for years.

But they aren’t. From what I’ve seen anet has not even acknowledged they’re even in the game. There has literally been 0 talk from anet reps about them that I’ve seen.

And still, good for you, your friends, and your guild mates. You’re still in the upper 5% of the games population for ap’s.

Just to repeat for the sake of repetition and the hope that it sinks in. Less than 1% of the game population has more than 15k ap.

There is also the fact that a lot of chose certain ap rewards before there the boots even existed, not to mention the chest and pants parts.

It’s not exactly fair that they release this stuff after we’re set on a certain path.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Achievement_rewards

This table has been present since the July 2013 patch that revised the achievement rewards. It went out to 20k at that time. It was extended to 25k in the feature pack last April, and was extended to its final form with this last patch. If for some reason you don’t think it is accurate you can always send a PM to Venge. S/he is definitely at a point where the 27k chest can be previewed (which is when the first pair of legs is awarded.)

I’m going to assume here that the “but they aren’t” was referring to my “penultimate long term awards” comment. Would you mind clarifying the point you were trying to get across? Did you take issue with “long term award” or “penultimate” or was it something else?

The whole “x percentage of the population thing” really doesn’t matter much except to prove how at least up to now how much most players really didn’t care about APs. If you played since launch, and the ONLY thing you aimed for was doing all the dailies, you would have a minimum 15-18k AP by now. That takes 2 hours or less, and would only take about 1500 hours playtime… well within the range of casual play. If you’ve got that amount of playtime or more and aren’t at that range or higher its pure and simple because you’ve chosen not to. When you choose not to participate in an activity you won’t get the rewards associated with it. How hard is that to grasp?

Finally, considering that you get both sets in tandem its not like it matters what piece you choose first.

Labjax.2465:

Vercinorix.3021:

If you’re not willing to play to achieve a goal you don’t deserve to have it handed to you.

I think you know what you’re trying to say, but your sentence makes no sense. Why would you ever need the goal handed to you if you’re playing to achieve it?

Anyway, statements like yours are great in spirit, but they’re an absurd load of hyperbole. It isn’t black-and-white, “You either put in the hours every single day for years and years or you get it handed to you.”

There’s always a middle ground and the ground that the OP is asking for isn’t even in the middle. It’s still hugely to the advantage of people who have been around for years and put in the hours.

What I don’t understand from some of the people posting here is the complete lack of openness to any sort of change – even something that would still be in their favor. Are you afraid of losing the goal to work for? Is that it?

I mean, I’m just a little baffled is all. At the end of the day, this issue means nothing to me.

There is no hyperbole about it, in any way.

As it stands right now, a full set will require a sustained commitment specifically towards achievement points over a period of years. If it is meant as an ultimate award for that type of play, it does not make sense for that reward to be commonly available 3 years into the game.

For people playing since the start, 18k achievement points should be pretty easily attainable by this time next year without any real special attention towards achievement points., in other words not any real effort or compromises to their regular routine. Thats where the “just handed to them” comes in -justifiably.

In contrast, the people who are very high up on the leaderboards have built their play around achievement points for the past 2 years and that has involved some real opportunity costs which can’t be recovered.

if you want a compromise suggestion sure, here’s one: change the reward brackets back to the original pattern where you’ll get the last piece of a single set at 29k. Let the people who got their 2nd pair of boots at 24k already keep em as a consolation prize since their effort had to be pretty much extreme to get that high.

That probably will take a year off the time needed to get a single complete set, and is pretty fair since it will still require those who have finally woken up a year later and decided oh hey I want this to go through about the same amount of effort and opportunity cost to get them as we already have.

Life is a bunch of choices. Some are under your control, some are not. All choices have consequences and opportunity costs.

A couple of members of my guild at the 10k mark chose to focus on different things: one wanted legendaries- He’s now working on his 19th. One wanted to play GW2: Wall Street- He went from 0 gold 9 months ago to his target of 1 million gold at the beginning of this month.

If you’re not willing to play to achieve a goal you don’t deserve to have it handed to you. I never played GW1: do you think if I complained enough Arenanet will give me those 500 achievement points? If they did, how do you think all those people with the GWAMM title would feel? For that matter, even if I bought all the GW1 games getting those 500 points might be impossible now… but thats life.

When the achievement point reward system was introduced, there was enough information on the wiki to predict that if the pattern continued the remaining 3 pieces of one set would be awarded by the time you hit 29k. Some players decided at that point, (whether to go for that set or to get the account bonuses) to change their play to systematically get achievement points. Those players have been pretty much in lockstep with my own progress on the leaderboards. A few have passed me.

Everybody had access to the same information. Doing different things in this game gives different rewards, the degree of focus determines how much of any given reward you get. Thousands of people made the choice to systematically go for achievement points, and have already paid the opportunity cost to get to where they are. If getting those skins are really personally important, you’ll do the same.

If full sets of the achievement armor are supposed to be penultimate long term awards for achievement hunters similar to the invitational tourney pvp sets, then yes 18k achievement points IS too easy. A year or so ago, when the revamped achievement point award system was introduced, I had 9600. That was pretty high up on the leaderboards at the time. Now 10k isn’t enough to even show up on the leaderboards. Half of my 160 person guild is over 10k, including plenty of people who have zero focus on achievements.

It is a pretty reasonable assumption that trend will hold true among actually active players and 18k won’t be enough achievement points to be on the leaderboards by this time next year. Also yes, 3 years is very early in the lifespan of a successful MMO. EQ1 is still going after 15 years, Dark Age of Camelot still has the lights on after 13, and WoW is about to hit the 10th anniversary with more current subscribers than all the copies of GW2 sold to date.

A player gets achievement points for doing practically anything in GW2. You get a lot of achievement points by trying and doing all aspects of the game. They exist as an incentive to get you to try new things. With that in mind, it isn’t unreasonable to have awards in place to reward a consistent, sustained dedication to the entire game over a period of years as opposed to something like Yakslapper which requires a completely insane dedication to repeating a very boring, monotonous SINGLE task for years.

The most likely reason you are seeing an awful lot more people showing up at Jormag and targeting the trash mobs more than anything else most likely has to do with the new Collection achievements. You need a drop from them to activate the collection associated with Jormag.

For me, that is the only reason why I started doing that event again, and I will stop going to that event as soon as I get the drop because the rewards for doing Jormag (even including getting any extra champ loot) are horrible compared to the time needed to do the event chain.

Also, be glad those champs actually DO drop loot again… because the few times I actually did that event during the period where they didn’t drop loot they were flat out ignored and ran around killing people at will.

A better suggestion if you are interested in avoiding large amounts of people showing up with a single minded determination to kill trash is to move the collection drop to Jormag’s ground chest and give it a fairly high drop rate like Teq’s spoon.

A global server specific chat seems like it would be the easiest (and probably best) solution to trying to recruit people from your own server for guilds and WvW purposes. +1!

Why is all this important?

Consider what are the common complaints about WvW: matchup outcome determined mostly by coverage, lack of reward in general, existing rewards skewed massively towards offense, rewards being negative for people doing PPT critical activities such as scouting, upgrading, placing and maintaining defensive siege., lack of recognition towards guilds and individuals.

My suggestions offer a low cost way to fix all of these issues.

You might ask: how does this fix coverage? During week 1 of WvW season 1 my server had all 4 maps queued 24/7. This had never, ever happened before. Turnout was larger than normal on week 2 as well but dropped to normal turnout by week 3. Normal being some queues at NA prime, outnumbered buff on 3 out of 4 maps at all other times.

Where did this huge influx of players come from? Not from spvp, world bosses, general world pop… those activites had very sparse numbers for a very long time. The only possible place they could have been hiding was dungeons and fractals. They came out to do the Season Meta, then went right back to dungeons.

This is proof positive that the vast majority of this game’s player base is rewards-driven. Only difference being who wants to exert what degree of effort for specific reward levels.

ShadowStep.3640:

Vercinorix.3021:

…

So you’re saying that for every siege and guild buff active in a keep or tower that said members get 50 silver? Just for one tower/keep? WvW would go from being one of the least profitable game modes to the absolute most. Dedicated WvW players with even 1 tower or keep would rake in hundreds of gold every week. Just for one tower!

What would stop me from claiming a tower or keep then mass building siege to increase my own gains? The potential for exploit is enormous. If you want to lower the coin amount and reduce the amount of things that increase the coin gain, then it would be fine.

The following would work better with your example without being broken, “For every tower or keep that is claimed by a guild, said members receive 3 silver for a tower, 5 silver for a keep, and 15 silver for SMC every PPT tick. For every guild bonus in a claimed tower or keep the amount of silver increase is 1. Max 1 tower, 1 keep per WvW map. Members of a guild with towers/keeps claimed among different WvW maps will only experience the money gains from their current map (EX. Member of guild X only gains coins from the map he is currently on even though his guild has claimed forts in the other 3 maps.)”

For offense, instead of the 12 rares, do something like this: “Capturing a tower rewards 5 silver as a base amount, this is increased in increments of 2 per active upgrade in the enemy tower. Capturing a keep rewards a base 10 silver as a base amount, this is increased in increments of 3 per active upgrade; if the keep has an active waypoint inside, an extra reward of 15 silver is given.” SMC could be similar but it rarely is upgraded far before it flips.

Please read what I said carefully. Only fortress upgrades and WvW buffs would provide income. Players would want to place siege to protect their base, but that would be an expense which is also limited by the siege cap.

Yes, making WvW potentially THE single most profitable way to play Guild Wars 2 is very much the intent. Considering that WvW requires the highest time commitment, the most coordination between players, has the greatest costs, and involves beating other players determined to defeat you WvW SHOULD have the highest potential rewards. Please note though that my suggestion’s rewards structure is VERY MUCH performance based.

Assuming that both of my suggested new guild WvW buffs are implemented, and that a guild can pop ALL of them, initial revenue would be 6 g per hour. Everything else after that would depend on A) how successful your guild is at holding the fortification,
how successful you are at upgrading said fortification, C) how well your guild does on the rest of the battlefield.

To put this in perspective, 6 g per hour is about what you can expect to earn running a full-bore non combat karma train in EotM with MF booster, omnom bars, karma booster, WvW booster and Birthday booster active; converting all karma gained to cash via linen salvaging. 6 g per hour also doesn’t even come close to what you get when speed running dungeons with nothing but guild buffs active.

I’m sorry, but your suggested rewards are too weak to achieve the desired results. Let me again offer an example to put things in perspective. An average dungeon speed clearing group can do AC all paths, CM all paths, TA U/F, SE 1/3 and CoF1/2 without too much effort in 2 hours. Doing that will give you ~19.5 gold cash, ~800 dungeon tokens, 36 champ bags, 32 ground chests, 240 emp frags, and roughly 10-11 skill points plus whatever random drops you pick up on the way. That works out pretty easily to 15+ g an hour, minimum. It gets better if you’re actually really good at it. The only thing you need to do this is have 5 people who know the dungeon speed run paths, know the encounters, and are geared properly. People who are interested can start doing this like clockwork roughly 1-2 weeks after buying the game. It also can get pretty boring because there is little challenge and it is so predictable.

(continued next post)

If you want to stop EotM being a karma train, and improve participation in WvW in general, the issue is the rewards from both… specifically that the rewards are bad across the board compared to dungeon speed clearing, and what rewards that exist are skewed completely towards rapidly flipping as may objectives as possible.

Arenanet’s biggest design issue since game start has been consistently awful time/effort vs reward calculations in all parts of the game. Going into detail on this would require a very large post on its own, so I’ll only deal with WvW here.

WvW’s single greatest problem as a format is that the economy was set up to mirror a modern civilian/miltary relationship instead of a feudal one. Doing WvW is a lousy way to make money, and playing PPT defense is actually a NEGATIVE income. (Upgrades and sup siege cost money yo, and you don’t make anything at all sitting in a keep/tower scouting and refreshing siege).

Want an easy, fast, low programming resources required way to fix WvW/EotM in one set of small changes?

If a guild has a tower or keep claimed on a map, every member of that guild on that map will get an automatic gold reward every PPT tick = 50 silver for every upgrade and guild WvW buff active. The guild itself gets the same amount added to the guild bank. Those guild WvW buffs become unlimited range and apply throughout the game except spvp. Add 2 new WvW guild buffs: +10% gold find and +50% WvW experience earned. The WvW status map would be upgraded to show the claiming guild’s banner and name. To reduce the chance of “claim-griefing” a minimum claim requirement can be put in place… something like 5 active members within the last 24 hours for a tower or 10 for a keep, activity being defined by an amount of achievement points earned which a bot could not get.

To balance this out, on the offensive side attackers get a guaranteed rare added to the capture reward for every completed upgrade. Yes, that means a fully upgraded tower or keep will award 12 guaranteed rares upon capture.

As a further incentive towards the PPT side, change the weekly bonus chest award to a system that makes each week a ‘mini tourney’… each week will have a series of WvW achievements available that contribute to a meta achievement. You’ll be able to partially complete the meta in EotM, so if you are stuck in queue for regular WvW you won’t be hosed.

Suggested is 10 3 tiered achievements rewarding 1/2/3 achievement points per tier, with the achievement goals reflecting what a dedicated WvWer could reasonably do given 2-3 hours play every day in an environment where every major objective will actually be fought over. The meta achievement reward would be something like 50 g + some random items for 1st place, 20 g + some random items for 2nd, 10 g + some random items for 3rd. It would also be nice if there was a set of WvW armor similar to the tourney reward weapons that you would have a random chance to get a piece of from each week’s meta chest… odds of getting one piece being better depending on your placement but not low enough that some poor schmuck stuck perpetually in 3rd place wouldn’t have a good chance of getting a full set in one year of completing the meta every week.

Putting the above suggested changes in place as a package would completely change the current dynamics of WvW and servers. It sets up a “push-pull” performance related reward system based on server/guild/player organization, skill and activity. It also provides a huge incentive to destack, because every WvW guild will want to have a claimed fortification.

In addition: expand the leaderboards in the following ways:

For guilds keep track of #ticks of objective claim, average level of upgrades achieved, total player-kills gained by guild members, and total WXP earned.

For players have # of successful captures, # of successful defenses, Player kills, WXP earned, and PK/death ratio.

EotM, as a map, is fine for combat. You’ll find thread after thread on these boards asking for changes to the regular WvW maps which are in place in EotM. If you’re having a hard time dealing with fighting in EotM, it really is a “learn 2 play” issue.

Sergoros.4398:

Vercinorix.3021:

Sergoros.4398:

Astral Projections.7320:

It would have been useful if ANet had stated their reasons for the cap instead of just the flat pronouncement. Perhaps they could reconsider and put in a soft cap where people can continue to earn AP points but only the 5 points a day needed to gain the daily. This would allow people to continue to progress but limit the ones who feel compelled to get all the points.

They put many caps. Why only daily runners should have no cap? I runned dungeons ~150+ times. Why am I rewarded only for first 40? I did salvage achiv ~750+ times. Why am I rewarded only for 125 times? Same could be said about activity’s. Why only dailys should give infinite ap?

I would agree with your reasoning IF the cap had been implemented at the start of the achievement point reward system and was known then. Instead, it is almost a year and a half later. I would wager that plenty of other people besides me made choices of how to spend their time and exactly what achievements to prioritize based on that reality.

I believe that the idea of a rolling soft cap of 5 a day beyond 10k is far more fair and would address everyone’s concerns without harming anyone. IE max dailies at patch becomes 10k, the next day max is 10,005, 2nd day 10,010 etc. This would allow you to miss days and still catch up. That way this isn’t a retroactive nerf on achievement hunters and people can still get at least some achievement point benefits from doing dailies.

There was no cap on salvage achiv at start. They nerfed it later, when some people started farming salvages and did get extreme amount of achiv out of it.

What I said “at the start of the achievement point reward system” was and remains accurate. There were no caps on repeatable achievements in the short time frame when there were no rewards attached to your overall total of APs earned. The time to put a cap on dailies and monthlies was then, NOT over a year later after thousands of hours of playtime has passed.

Sergoros.4398:

Astral Projections.7320:

It would have been useful if ANet had stated their reasons for the cap instead of just the flat pronouncement. Perhaps they could reconsider and put in a soft cap where people can continue to earn AP points but only the 5 points a day needed to gain the daily. This would allow people to continue to progress but limit the ones who feel compelled to get all the points.

They put many caps. Why only daily runners should have no cap? I runned dungeons ~150+ times. Why am I rewarded only for first 40? I did salvage achiv ~750+ times. Why am I rewarded only for 125 times? Same could be said about activity’s. Why only dailys should give infinite ap?

I would agree with your reasoning IF the cap had been implemented at the start of the achievement point reward system and was known then. Instead, it is almost a year and a half later. I would wager that plenty of other people besides me made choices of how to spend their time and exactly what achievements to prioritize based on that reality.

I believe that the idea of a rolling soft cap of 5 a day beyond 10k is far more fair and would address everyone’s concerns without harming anyone. IE max dailies at patch becomes 10k, the next day max is 10,005, 2nd day 10,010 etc. This would allow you to miss days and still catch up. That way this isn’t a retroactive nerf on achievement hunters and people can still get at least some achievement point benefits from doing dailies.

Tigerlily.3765:

…except they are not taking away your legends. It’s more like if they said there would be a cap of 20 legendaries when the highest someone in game has is 18. Which they wouldn’t do because it’s completely different.

The “acheivement” will be more meaningful when it doesn’t mean ‘log in every day.’

Capping how much you can do each day is a TERRIBLE TERRIBLE idea. It means new players will NEVER catch up and will gain AP at very slow rate if they are trying to go for the shiney boots all of a sudden.

This cap would take 2000 days for the average player to reach the cap!!! As others have said – why all the whining about something that won’t affect you for YEARS? They pandered to AP hunters in this change because really affects us.

To address your points in order:

I’ve already foregone between 10-40 legendaries worth of gold by choosing to pursue the alternate currency of Achievement points over raw gold. That is my already incurred opportunity cost.

New players will never catch up period under both the current and proposed system because they have no ability to earn ‘retired’ Living Story points. Long time players would have to completely stop playing for a year for that to even be a possibility. The point about the loss of ability to ‘sprint for the boots’ is ironic… because it applies even more for those of us who can hit the cap within weeks and thereafter will earn NO AP AT ALL from dailies. I would much rather have a system with a daily hardcap which slows everyone down equally than one where the frontrunners get kneecapped with no compensation at all.

I proposed a different leaderboard system that strips out all daily, monthly and living story achievements as the ‘competitive’ one. The only other option if people are serious about letting players ‘catch up’ is a hardcap on ALL achievement points. As in, absolute max is 25k.

DarcShriek.5829:

The deal with the daily cap is it will take most people more that 3 years to achieve it. I can live that cap.

The deal is that achievement points are one of the alternate currency systems in this game. It takes a huge investment in time to get a lot of them, and putting an absolute cap on maximum potential earned is a huge disincentive to play the game.

It is the same as saying ‘you can only run a dungeon 100 times, after that you no longer gain any gold reward but only get tokens.’ If you care about gold, you’re going to be mad and probably not want to do that dungeon anymore, correct?

I would feel a lot different if this cap had been put in place back when the original implementation of the achievement rewards system was done, but it wasn’t, and it is over a year later.

Again, it takes a LOT of time to go after all the daily points. That has a huge opportunity cost in game, because you can’t get those points by either chain speed running dungeons or doing TP flipping.

I could reasonably expect to hit the daily cap in 18 weeks from now. That is a whole different story from 3-5 years. Once I hit the cap, I’m going to be getting a reminder every time a daily hits that I got kittened over by Anet changing the rules. You can imagine how much that will kill my confidence in the relative permanence of ANY other reward system in the game.

How would you feel if you had worked your tail off, gotten 10 Legendaries, then had Anet decide “Sorry, we’ve decided you can only have 2 Legendaries per character, we’re taking 8 of them away”. If this cap had been in place at the start, I could have and would have only bothered with making sure I got the daily done, and spent the rest of my time split between WvW and farming cash. My personal opportunity cost is somewhere between 20-40k gold. If this change goes through as-is, that is exactly how I evaluate the effect on me.

Anet can’t give me back the time I have spent over the last year. What can be done to keep everyone happy is hardcap how many points you can earn per day, and adding an actually ‘competitive’ leaderboard that only reflects truly permanent achievements that any player, old or new, can earn.

The absolute cap on daily/monthly achievement points earned is a really, really bad idea. There are far better ways to deal with ‘quality of life’ and competitiveness issues.

First, quality of life. A better solution is to cap maximum daily and monthly achievement points at the number required to complete the daily (currently 5 and 40 respectively). This neatly solves the ‘must get all available achievement points per day no matter if it “forces” one to play game modes that are less appealing to the individual player’ problem.

At the same time it avoids penalizing the players who have invested a tremendous amount of time over the past year doing all the dailies, which the currently proposed system will definitely do once a player hits the cap.

Lets face it, the quantative rewards from the daily are actually the achievement point itself and the laurel. The karma, 50 luck and 5 silver are just tokens. Once you are at the new cap, most of the utility of the daily system goes away. Is this something that A-net really wants to do? It is also placing an implicit expiration date on the lifetime of the game: “We expect this game to last another 3 1/2 years, make your gem purchases accordingly” (roughly the amount of time to hit the cap based on doing 5 dailies every day since game launch.)

Second, competitiveness. Capping overall points earnable from dailies and monthlies really doesn’t make a newer or returning player competitive at all because of the Living Story points. The only way to catch up is if everyone ahead of you stops playing., since a player has no way of earning missed Living Story achievements.

Proposal: make an actual Competitive Leaderboard that ONLY tracks truly permanent achievements: NO dailies, monthlies or living story. This would instantly narrow the gap between most players while still leaving the relative positions of most players relatively intact.

It is still bugged.

I have gotten credit for less than half the rounds I have played. Never played more than 3 in a row, I only have credit for 3 total. Just ran 2 rounds back to back for the daily… got credit for the daily but my achievement counter did not progress.

You almost certainly need more system RAM. Even if you’re running a completely clean system you will have issues with that little system RAM.

I would recommend upgrading to 12 GB system RAM… That WILL be more than you need but if you’re doing an upgrade its best to not get jut enough but to get to the point where you have some slack for the future.