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Please nerf bull escort rewards in Drizzlewood


rune.9572

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Title, people are leeching the meta only tagging the first pack of mobs in the escort for easy 10% participation and t6 drops to the point where half of my squad was doing it last night. We're also slowly getting people botting with multiple accounts on those spots.

I think aggressvie DR where rewards stop after 3rd escort is the way to go unless we want this map to look like another pretend-afk farming spot.

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Part of the problem is that it's quite tedious to build up participation in the first place. Only completing events gives you participation, and it's always only 10%, no matter the type of event you're doing. As a result, people are zone hopping in an attempt to tag as many events as possible so they can build up their participation to 150+ for the best rewards. Leaving aside the issue of bots parked at the start to farm the bull event to leech rewards from the map progress meta (the only way to really deal with those is to report them and get ANet to put on more support staff to deal with them), in order to get real players to stop just camping the bulls, we need to increase the number of ways to raise participation. Some ideas:

  1. Each Dominion enemy you kill raises your participation by 1%. This has the side benefit of greatly incentivizing assault and defense events due to the high number of enemies you'll kill during them.
  2. Environmental actions related to the war such as "Investigating Suspicious Bushes", "Repairing Listening Devices" and "Destroying Dominion Propaganda" each increase participation by 5%.
  3. Bull Escort participation remains at 10%. (The final participation total will be boosted due to #1 anyway.) Side events such as minesweeping, cannons, balloons etc. are increased to 20%.
  4. Defense and Assault events, as the two primary event-types, increase participation by 30%. Again, the final total will likely be higher than that due to the extra enemies you kill during the event.
  5. Destroying or Rebuilding base structures increase participation by 5% for each structure.

Finally, instead of the map completely resetting your participation to 0 with each map reset, how about it instead reduces it by 100% (so if you had 100% or less, you'd be back to 0, but if you were at 150% prior, you'd start the new meta at 50%)? This encourages players to remain in their current map to start afresh rather than map hopping to chase caches or the final meta battle.

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I was quite surprised when I realised that the bigger events (that can take 5-10min I think?) only gave a measly 10%.because of the periodic nature of the bonus rewards, ppl would naturally want to quickly boost their participation value to beyond the threshold, so I went back to dolyakking first before returning to the events.

In addition to what others have said so far

There could be some kinda participation bonus per event, eg x% bonus per minute that you are actively killing event mobs in event zone

Supply cost for parachuting to a hot zone could be sponsored for the legion, to promote active response

Perhaps a new social tool during defense events , where you can place a map distress signal when outnumbered, and ppl can chute in to aid you.

Active bot kicking

Just generally better rewards for key events.

A kind of active-event-participation system to prevent ppl from tagging-and-leaving

Perhaps a map klaxon (toggle on-off in camp, default off) with a verbal notice for hot zone events, when lockdowns end. Like in dota

Dolyak can give 5% beyond 50% participation, and 1% beyond 100%,or something. It's just a quick boost to your initial participation. Or the early Dolyak give less, the deeper Dolyak give more

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@"Zaxares.5419" said:Part of the problem is that it's quite tedious to build up participation in the first place. Only completing events gives you participation, and it's always only 10%, no matter the type of event you're doing. As a result, people are zone hopping in an attempt to tag as many events as possible so they can build up their participation to 150+ for the best rewards. Leaving aside the issue of bots parked at the start to farm the bull event to leech rewards from the map progress meta (the only way to really deal with those is to report them and get ANet to put on more support staff to deal with them), in order to get real players to stop just camping the bulls, we need to increase the number of ways to raise participation. Some ideas:

  1. Each Dominion enemy you kill raises your participation by 1%. This has the side benefit of greatly incentivizing assault and defense events due to the high number of enemies you'll kill during them.
  2. Environmental actions related to the war such as "Investigating Suspicious Bushes", "Repairing Listening Devices" and "Destroying Dominion Propaganda" each increase participation by 5%.
  3. Bull Escort participation remains at 10%. (The final participation total will be boosted due to #1 anyway.) Side events such as minesweeping, cannons, balloons etc. are increased to 20%.
  4. Defense and Assault events, as the two primary event-types, increase participation by 30%. Again, the final total will likely be higher than that due to the extra enemies you kill during the event.
  5. Destroying or Rebuilding base structures increase participation by 5% for each structure.

Finally, instead of the map completely resetting your participation to 0 with each map reset, how about it instead reduces it by 100% (so if you had 100% or less, you'd be back to 0, but if you were at 150% prior, you'd start the new meta at 50%)? This encourages players to remain in their current map to start afresh rather than map hopping to chase caches or the final meta battle.

Just my thoughts about those ideas

  1. Is a bad idea, while it would benefit the active players more, it as well would benefit the afk-player (e.g. minion masters) and with that encourage those afk player even more.
  2. I feel like 5% for simply interacting with something is to much. Especially if you compare it with your idea in point 5. which requires you to spend supplies.
  3. Would say idea is fine at it is.
  4. Should be fine even without the additional increase in one. (The 3 Assault of one side of the map already would boost you to 90%, with the additional events between the assault and the increase for the defense and side events that should be fine.)
  5. Would scale those with the supplies spend rather than giving a flat participation increase. No idea how much would appropriate though.Edit: (After thinking about this some more, i think that idea might not be that good, neither with a flat nor with a particitipation increase which depends on the supply spend.With a flat increase people would just spam the lowest supply they can use.And even with a scaling participation i think it might be hard to find a good balance there as even if lets say you get just 0.1% participation per supply spend, which would be 1% for 10 supplies spend (the minimum you can use if I'm correct) that would already translate to 40% for a 400 supplies spend. )

I'm all for buffing the participation for action you need to do actively, so we don't need to jump around on the map like a madman to get that participation up, but everything that can be earned passively should be in no way increased.

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@pninak.1069 said:I thought lots of the rewards you get on drizzlewood are mostly tied to achievements rather than events. I mean you lose a big chunk of loot once you got them all.

The majority of the rewards are tied to the green meta participation chest, the four repeatable achievements, and from the keepers.

You can get participation up quickly and then almost AFK until the final meta. You do lose participation if you don’t do anything but it’s not difficult to just tag an event and then go AFK again.

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There being no reward decay is a problem for sure when it comes to bots. There is still a lot of bugs and problems when it comes to this system and it needs fine tuning.

One example is that if a map is about to make the final assault, but loses all the zones the supply drop timer doesn't return and that IP is pretty much bust.

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@"Ronan.9518" said:Just my thoughts about those ideas

  1. Is a bad idea, while it would benefit the active players more, it as well would benefit the afk-player (e.g. minion masters) and with that encourage those afk player even more.
  2. I feel like 5% for simply interacting with something is to much. Especially if you compare it with your idea in point 5. which requires you to spend supplies.
  3. Would say idea is fine at it is.
  4. Should be fine even without the additional increase in one. (The 3 Assault of one side of the map already would boost you to 90%, with the additional events between the assault and the increase for the defense and side events that should be fine.)
  5. Would scale those with the supplies spend rather than giving a flat participation increase. No idea how much would appropriate though.Edit: (After thinking about this some more, i think that idea might not be that good, neither with a flat nor with a particitipation increase which depends on the supply spend.With a flat increase people would just spam the lowest supply they can use.And even with a scaling participation i think it might be hard to find a good balance there as even if lets say you get just 0.1% participation per supply spend, which would be 1% for 10 supplies spend (the minimum you can use if I'm correct) that would already translate to 40% for a 400 supplies spend. )

I'm all for buffing the participation for action you need to do actively, so we don't need to jump around on the map like a madman to get that participation up, but everything that can be earned passively should be in no way increased.

  1. I still think that a 1% boost for each enemy killed is the simplest and fairest way to boost participation gain, although I do see your point about afk farmers. Unfortunately, the crux of the problem is that the farmers are there because once you get your participation up, all you have to do is stay in the map and reap the periodic rewards every 10 mins. Unless we remove that somehow, the farmers will remain. One possibility is that we dump the whole 10 min reward thing, and instead shift the chests to be given out only at the completion of an Assault/Defense event. Because the bots can't know which camp is currently under assault, if they just park themselves at one location, they'll miss out on most of the loot since active players can parachute in to whichever location is active.
  2. I'd argue that 5% is an acceptable amount for participating in environmental activities, because unlike afk camping, you can't simply park your character at the same spot and repeat that activity over and over. Once repaired/destroyed/investigated etc. that particular item becomes completed and won't reset again until you change maps. You make a good point about #5 though. I did originally think that the amount of participation increase should be tied to how much supply you pump into it, but what sort of system should we use? 1% per point of supply donated? (If so, then fully repairing a destroyed structure, which costs 200 supply would boost you up to 200% participation immediately. Everybody would be gunning for those.) If we boost it higher than 5%, say, to 10% or more, how would you calculate the boost for players who simply pick one structure and spam the "Reinforce" option for 20 supply on it multiple times?
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I would vastly prefer a system that recognises ppl actively killing things during the event vs parti%/kill tho.Parti/kill, if not balanced properly, would likely encourage tag-everything-and-run, or a rush for trash mobs/vets, etc, to make things more efficient for themselves, but which leads to unsatisfactory gameplay for those who stay to finish off the tougher mobs. It could also indirectly penalise non-aoe classes.

For this kinda map content, we would want to encourage ppl to gather and do things together, and the reward mechanics should be tailored to encourage such

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@"Zaxares.5419" said:

  1. Environmental actions related to the war such as "Investigating Suspicious Bushes", "Repairing Listening Devices" and "Destroying Dominion Propaganda" each increase participation by 5%.This actually sound like botters heaven. I don't think it is hard to program a bot to interact with different object in game world that are static, including the movement in between. If locations would be random though, that would work fine.
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@Zaxares.5419 said:

@"Ronan.9518" said:Just my thoughts about those ideas
  1. Is a bad idea, while it would benefit the active players more, it as well would benefit the afk-player (e.g. minion masters) and with that encourage those afk player even more.
  2. I feel like 5% for simply interacting with something is to much. Especially if you compare it with your idea in point 5. which requires you to spend supplies.
  3. Would say idea is fine at it is.
  4. Should be fine even without the additional increase in one. (The 3 Assault of one side of the map already would boost you to 90%, with the additional events between the assault and the increase for the defense and side events that should be fine.)
  5. Would scale those with the supplies spend rather than giving a flat participation increase. No idea how much would appropriate though.Edit: (After thinking about this some more, i think that idea might not be that good, neither with a flat nor with a particitipation increase which depends on the supply spend.With a flat increase people would just spam the lowest supply they can use.And even with a scaling participation i think it might be hard to find a good balance there as even if lets say you get just 0.1% participation per supply spend, which would be 1% for 10 supplies spend (the minimum you can use if I'm correct) that would already translate to 40% for a 400 supplies spend. )

I'm all for buffing the participation for action you need to do actively, so we don't need to jump around on the map like a madman to get that participation up, but everything that can be earned passively should be in no way increased.
  1. I still think that a 1% boost for each enemy killed is the simplest and fairest way to boost participation gain, although I do see your point about afk farmers. Unfortunately, the crux of the problem is that the farmers are there because once you get your participation up, all you have to do is stay in the map and reap the periodic rewards every 10 mins. Unless we remove that somehow, the farmers will remain. One possibility is that we dump the whole 10 min reward thing, and instead shift the chests to be given out only at the completion of an Assault/Defense event. Because the bots can't know which camp is currently under assault, if they just park themselves at one location, they'll miss out on most of the loot since active players can parachute in to whichever location is active.
  2. I'd argue that 5% is an acceptable amount for participating in environmental activities, because unlike afk camping, you can't simply park your character at the same spot and repeat that activity over and over. Once repaired/destroyed/investigated etc. that particular item becomes completed and won't reset again until you change maps. You make a good point about #5 though. I did originally think that the amount of participation increase should be tied to how much supply you pump into it, but what sort of system should we use? 1% per point of supply donated? (If so, then fully repairing a destroyed structure, which costs 200 supply would boost you up to 200% participation immediately. Everybody would be gunning for those.) If we boost it higher than 5%, say, to 10% or more, how would you calculate the boost for players who simply pick one structure and spam the "Reinforce" option for 20 supply on it multiple times?

  1. While removing the periodic rewards and adding those chests to other events certainly would be a good way to make this map less appealing to botters, i think it would change the way the map is "played". Currently it's beneficial to split up and advance both sides of right from the beginning to earlier unlock the chest for the hold objectives. If they remove the periodic reward it would become more beneficial to just make one big train that goes from event to event, doing first one, then the other side.

  2. The reason I chose a rather low participation gain (1%) is that you have to spend nearly no time to investigate/repair/destroy the interactibles. If we go with 5% you proposed, it just wouldtake 6 of this interactions to get the amount of participation you would get for a defense/assault event (with the proposed 30%).Since there are rather many of that interactibles on the map, it doesn't take long to jump from one to another using the mounts. So i still hold on to the opinion that 5% is too much, although I see that 1% might not make it feel worth it. Maybe something inbetween might be appropiate. I just think it shouldn't give a better participation gain per time invested than the main events.

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@Cuks.8241 said:This actually sound like botters heaven. I don't think it is hard to program a bot to interact with different object in game world that are static, including the movement in between. If locations would be random though, that would work fine.

Yes and no, I think. The locations of the various objects ARE fixed, but the bots would need to use that teleport script to jump between each object (which would make it REALLY obvious they were bots) to collect them all because once interacted with, you can't activate the same object again unless you change maps (which resets your participation). They can't just run to each object location either because they'd either get jumped by enemy mobs or run into sealed doors on maps that haven't captured objectives yet.

@"Ronan.9518" said:

  1. While removing the periodic rewards and adding those chests to other events certainly would be a good way to make this map less appealing to botters, i think it would change the way the map is "played". Currently it's beneficial to split up and advance both sides of right from the beginning to earlier unlock the chest for the hold objectives. If they remove the periodic reward it would become more beneficial to just make one big train that goes from event to event, doing first one, then the other side.

  2. The reason I chose a rather low participation gain (1%) is that you have to spend nearly no time to investigate/repair/destroy the interactibles. If we go with 5% you proposed, it just wouldtake 6 of this interactions to get the amount of participation you would get for a defense/assault event (with the proposed 30%).Since there are rather many of that interactibles on the map, it doesn't take long to jump from one to another using the mounts. So i still hold on to the opinion that 5% is too much, although I see that 1% might not make it feel worth it. Maybe something inbetween might be appropiate. I just think it shouldn't give a better participation gain per time invested than the main events.

  1. True again, although is it really up to us to decide what's the "correct" way for people to play DWC? I think that both approaches have their merits; splitting up to conquer both paths at once has the benefit of making the meta faster, but forming one train to do each side alternately means that players also benefit from more participation, more loot from ambient mobs, as well as giving players more opportunity to grab specific events they may need for achievements.
  2. It takes longer to destroy structures now, since the nerf to Electro Pulse. Generally players will still take it over the Remote Charge because Electro Pulse is much more useful for breaking boss CC bars. That just leaves using siege to destroy structures, and it's been going a lot more slowly now on the maps I've been on. (I don't always join the train maps.)Regardless, the main aim of these changes is to basically try and push players away from just camping the bulls at the start of the map (which now just about everybody is doing) just to get their participation up to 150%. The faster players can achieve that, the faster they'll move to actually participating in the map meta.
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