After Alliances, Anet said they will work on Rewards. what do they mean?

[Ausar.9542]

So after the dawn of Alliances finally hit, ANet said they will be working on the reward system in WvW. I am curious as to what they mean.

 

Are they talking about the Reward Track system?

talking about the way players gain Participation?          

Talking about the Rate of gaining rewards?

or something else altogether?

[Zikory.6871]

We don't know. They mentioned they should be looking at rewards after EoD and iirc Alliance launch. As far I remember, they haven't said anything new past that. 

[Gorani.7205]

IIRC, "pretty much everything with rewards" is on the table for discussion.

People here on the forums (including me, @Lan Deathrider.5910 and many others) have posted idea from daily/weekly/monthly vendors to turn in or exchange Emblems, Badges etc for Skirmish Tickets, T6 mats, Mystic Coins and so on. The back loaded skirmish chests could be normalised to hand tickets out at the same rate (making tickets more available for players spending less time each week in WvW, while preserving the max number WvW mains get). Ideas float around to use those thousands of WxP Ability points many veterans have (e.g. for some account augmentation analogue, to give you extra karma, WxP, MF% or even a bonus pip chance). We had ideas to change WvW guild missions, to make them more approachable for smaller guilds and roamers (like removing the 3 men limit of dolly escorts and sentry caps). Guilds, being able to get rewards to "skin" their siege or guards that hold claimed structures.
That's just the things from the top of my head, but the possibilities to work on WvW rewards are kind of endless, when you compare how horrible they are in comparison to other game modes or parts of those modes.

Edited January 25, 2022 by Gorani.7205
typo

[Xenesis.6389]

About as meaningful as "cornerstone" at the moment, just talk.

Only things they did was the 2 pips change and mention increasing rewards for support specs.

After that no one but anet knows, as usual.

Edited January 23, 2022 by Xenesis.6389

[Infusion.7149]

If I remember correctly it is after alliances are implemented.

[gloflop.3510]

My guess is that they want to reward player for winning skrimishes/matchups. At least that was once the plan when alliances were first announced.

[The Boz.2038]

Normalized rewards are a good step. But the absolute amount also needs to change; WvW is insultingly unrewarding.

[kamikharzeeh.8016]

13 hours ago, gloflop.3510 said:

My guess is that they want to reward player for winning skrimishes/matchups. At least that was once the plan when alliances were first announced.

cannot be happening like that. anet removed tournaments bc it made player ppting too hard 24/7. they, and no sane person, can want this. matchups are not competitive. ppt is never competitive, it cannot be.

 

the big, major issue is that playing Wvw is unrewarding. active participation, tons of played hours is extremly unrewarding. the things u get are mainly filling your small pockets (we dont even get anything bigger than 20er bags).

 

the WHAT we get and the TIME that we are "paid"/rewarded for is, what needs a rework, precisely a big buff.

[Forgotten Legend.9281]

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/studio-update-world-restructuring-and-the-future-of-world-vs-world/

 

quoted from the blog:

Quote

After World Restructuring, we’ll be looking to make WvW more rewarding, with a focus on active play. There’s two major parts to this. First, we’ll be looking at improving individual rewards for participation and performance. This will be a mix of adding new rewards and improving older systems. As an example, we’d like to address how support players are under rewarded. Skirmish tracks also take longer to progress than we’d like, especially for new players. Second, we want to give players and guilds reasons to care about winning their current match up and reward them for exceptional performance during a season. Longer-term, we’d also like to introduce systems that would allow guilds to flex and compare their WvW prowess.

 

[Xenesis.6389]

Oh right, I forget they also wanted to give boon blobs more rewards for their exceptional performances in running over lesser numbered and lesser organized groups than them.

[Ovalkvadratcylinder.9365]

it means jack kitten... EVERYTHING wvw related is gonna happen after alliances

[Forgotten Legend.9281]

i just hope they distinguish the difference between participation and performance.

 

participation is attacking an enemy player, while performance is "killing" the enemy player.

participation is killing guards at a camp, or standing in the ring. while performance is successfully capturing the objective, or successfully defending the objective.

 

too often right now, you can be stuck in combat for minutes at a time without killing an enemy, that you lose "participation" while participating, without successfully capturing an objective, and without successfully killing an enemy, but actively participating in the battle, firing off attack skills and support skills and healing skills, landing attacks on enemies, landing heals and buffs on allies, but none of it counts because the participation meter only measures successful performances

[coro.3176]

Optimistically, they might reward winning a matchup.

 

The WvW ecosystem works best if people care about how their team is doing. When players don't care, bad things happen. I've seen:

• Fight guilds refuse to leave EBG bag farming / spawncamping to come save a T3 objective even when it has EWP ready
• "Roamers" spending all day on degenerate noob-ganking
• "PvE"-ers just in it for participation only coming out to flip the spawn camp/tower every 10 minutes
• Pugmanders giving up when they face any opposition to their K-train

But with a real reward for winning, it could be better:

• Fight guilds would have a reason to fight for something rather than doing aimless circles around EBG
• Roamers would actually play with purpose
• "PvE"-ers would be incentivized to actually play, since they'd lose out on rewards if they don't win
• Pugmanders would be motivated to keep trying, or call in fight guilds to help
• etc.

Anyway, obviously that all requires some balance (#s, play hours, time zone coverage), which is a really really hard problem, but if Alliances can solve it, then hell yeah. Bring on the rewards.

[aspirine.6852]

rewards, in wvw.. How would they do that without people making the transfers all the time.. Anet cant win, people are lame they will do anything to get shinies.

[coro.3176]

1 minute ago, aspirine.6852 said:

rewards, in wvw.. How would they do that without people making the transfers all the time.. Anet cant win, people are lame they will do anything to get shinies.

See post title: "After alliances". No servers, no transfers.

It's true, people will do anything to get shinies - best to harness that drive to encourage better gameplay.

[aspirine.6852]

1 minute ago, coro.3176 said:

See post title: "After alliances". No servers, no transfers.

It's true, people will do anything to get shinies - best to harness that drive to encourage better gameplay.

Are there really no transfers after alliances? I didnt read all so not sure.

[subversiontwo.7501]

On 1/23/2022 at 6:09 PM, Ausar.9542 said:

Are they talking about the Reward Track system?

talking about the way players gain Participation?          

Talking about the Rate of gaining rewards?

or something else altogether?

To know what they talk about is difficult. To see what they should be looking at is much less difficult than people assume.

There are two things: The first is to look at the balance of existing currencies and what you can spend them on. The second is to look at group-wide rewards for matchups (which depends on matchup balance being fixed first, so people are not just rewarded for P2W transfering). That is the difficult thing to solve, while looking over currencies, mechanics for them, their scarcity and things to buy with them is the easy part to solve.

WvW has an overall lack of appealing things to spend currencies on. It also has a rather poor balance between how currencies are given out, their supply-demand and what they are spent on. Most players bathe in emblems, badges (which have little use both in or outside of WvW) and so forth while things like marks are notoriously pre-nerfed (resulting in precursors being available at the same time as legendaries, beyond the gold for T6) and things like memories are rather divisive because they are likely inflated in price thanks to isolated demand from PvE (ie., from the sublime skins alone) where skirmishes and tracks do not add up (while for players who play WvW more they tend to get more memories than tickets, so they should be cheap barring the tourist demand). They are divisive in the sense that they are the only real gold income for players who do not need them, but if you need them they only break you even (you can't collect memories and sell them to buy T6 at the same time, needed for the same items).

WvW differs quite wildly from the other modes there since you generally do not have to choose between specific and general materials in your grind and sPvP stand out even more since you do not use the gear in your mode anyway - so the sPvP set is mainly a mean to gear for other modes through your preferred mode. It also differs in how much less skins and graphics are obtainable through it along with the aforementioned options for progressing.

Amusingly enough, the few more coveted things you might want from WvW, beyond the sublime skins and legendary armor, tend to be gated behind gold rather than WvW currency: The tags, the outrider track, the GH WvW upgrades etc. Most bottlenecks whether direct or indirect lie in the inequal access to gold, pushing you out of WvW. Marks can be crafted with gold, gems can be converted with gold, etc. Most of this likely stems from WvW being considered for a gold dump sometime in early production and it remains as some misplaced ghost only due to the overall lack of attention WvW has been given over the game's lifespan. It was never a fully intended thing, afaik, because even in pre-release interviews the devs talks about how each mode was supposed to be an equal option and that the horisontal progression was originally to, in part, be the continously cycling XP systems (WXP for us). That they've both changed WXP mechanics (kills, support etc.) to little effect and then abandoned it (for tracks) speaks volumes for how much effort has been spent on WvW and its balance.

Edited January 25, 2022 by subversiontwo.7501

[SweetPotato.7456]

On 1/24/2022 at 1:09 AM, Ausar.9542 said:

So after the dawn of Alliances finally hit, ANet said they will be working on the reward system in WvW. I am curious as to what they mean.

 

Are they talking about the Reward Track system?

talking about the way players gain Participation?          

Talking about the Rate of gaining rewards?

or something else altogether?

I speculate they are talking away all rewards from WvW. 

[Sleepwalker.1398]

OP, maybe for next year, they might finally add a reward track for Lunar New Year. 

[Svarty.8019]

On 1/23/2022 at 5:09 PM, Ausar.9542 said:

So after the dawn of Alliances finally hit, ANet said they will be working on the reward system in WvW. I am curious as to what they mean.

 

Are they talking about the Reward Track system?

talking about the way players gain Participation?          

Talking about the Rate of gaining rewards?

or something else altogether?

A good question.

 

I'd like a total rehash of the whole Rank and Ability systems, but I don't see that happening.

[ugrakarma.9416]

On 1/24/2022 at 5:13 PM, coro.3176 said:

Optimistically, they might reward winning a matchup.

 

The WvW ecosystem works best if people care about how their team is doing. When players don't care, bad things happen. I've seen:

• Fight guilds refuse to leave EBG bag farming / spawncamping to come save a T3 objective even when it has EWP ready
• "Roamers" spending all day on degenerate noob-ganking
• "PvE"-ers just in it for participation only coming out to flip the spawn camp/tower every 10 minutes
• Pugmanders giving up when they face any opposition to their K-train

But with a real reward for winning, it could be better:

• Fight guilds would have a reason to fight for something rather than doing aimless circles around EBG
• Roamers would actually play with purpose
• "PvE"-ers would be incentivized to actually play, since they'd lose out on rewards if they don't win
• Pugmanders would be motivated to keep trying, or call in fight guilds to help
• etc.

Anyway, obviously that all requires some balance (#s, play hours, time zone coverage), which is a really really hard problem, but if Alliances can solve it, then hell yeah. Bring on the rewards.

bascially making fight for objectives more rewarding..

but the "fighting" people will complain about ppting.

 

chose one.

[Paradoxoglanis.1904]

How about they rework the reward tracks so there arent 1000 different types of chests and bags of garbage?

[Custodio.6134]

On 1/24/2022 at 11:43 PM, aspirine.6852 said:

Are there really no transfers after alliances? I didnt read all so not sure.

well, technically there are "transfers" after alliances. But this will work different (if the system turns out the way which ANet told us they have planned). 
So far we know (regarding "transfers") that the matchmaking will be split into "seasons" and "matchups", with "seasons" designating the window from the initial building of the worlds, until the teams get re-built again (with players, guilds/alliances getting put into new teams). The matchups just work the same as currently.

In this timeframe (currently 8 weeks to relink, then most likely 6 weeks until season-end) you will be able to select a new guild/alliance in the menu, however this change will not take effect until "relink". 

Basically, "transfers" won´t be executed until the end of each season, preventing mid-season "transfers" and changes of the "alliance roster" (i´ll just call players switching their guild/alliance-choice like that for now) will be taken into account BEFORE re-creating the worlds after the season ended and before the new season starts (so basically at the reset where a new season starts). 

[Dawdler.8521]

1 hour ago, Custodio.6134 said:

well, technically there are "transfers" after alliances. But this will work different (if the system turns out the way which ANet told us they have planned). 
So far we know (regarding "transfers") that the matchmaking will be split into "seasons" and "matchups", with "seasons" designating the window from the initial building of the worlds, until the teams get re-built again (with players, guilds/alliances getting put into new teams). The matchups just work the same as currently.

In this timeframe (currently 8 weeks to relink, then most likely 6 weeks until season-end) you will be able to select a new guild/alliance in the menu, however this change will not take effect until "relink". 

Basically, "transfers" won´t be executed until the end of each season, preventing mid-season "transfers" and changes of the "alliance roster" (i´ll just call players switching their guild/alliance-choice like that for now) will be taken into account BEFORE re-creating the worlds after the season ended and before the new season starts (so basically at the reset where a new season starts). 

But just like Anet also hinted, I still *highly* suspect regular transfers will also be a thing but the restrictions will be far narrower and weighted against the intended team size rather than world population. For example if average is 2500, your team has 2600 and the other team has 2400 you would be allowed to manually transfer there, wheras those on the 2400 man team cannot transfer. Of course it would cost gems vs the restructure "transfer" that always occur. There isnt really any reason for them not to do something like this.

Edited January 29, 2022 by Dawdler.8521

[Danikat.8537]

I'm curious about what this means too, especially the stuff about making winning mean something to players. That's always been one of the things I find somewhat dissatisfying about WvW, unless you're interested in the leaderboards it really doesn't matter if your server is winning or loosing. But at the same time I can see how that can easily have downsides because for most players it probably feels like something that's totally out of their hands - they can't control their whole server so it's unfair to be 'punished' for loosing when they had very little to do with it, and for those who do have more control (like commanders who can be online a lot and WvW guild leaders) it could easily turn into a 24/7 responsibility which wouldn't be fun or healthy.

Personally my top wish is for a more even distribution of skirmish tickets because I've never been able to play long enough to complete the skirmish track (in the rare weeks when I have time my RSI kicks in and I have to take frequent long breaks) and it feels frustrating to spend all the time I can in WvW only to end up with about 1/2 the tickets because I couldn't put in those extra hours as well.

 

On 1/24/2022 at 10:43 PM, aspirine.6852 said:

Are there really no transfers after alliances? I didnt read all so not sure.

The current structure is: Players > Server

The new structure will be: Players > Guild > Alliance > Team
(Or Players > Alliance > Team, or Players > Team because you don't have to be part of a guild to be in an Alliance and everyone in WvW will be in a Team.)

As I understand it players will be able to change which guild they're part of for WvW and guilds and players will be able to change which alliance they're in, but alliances are capped much lower than teams and Anet builds the teams, so stacking onto the winning side will be much harder. If a bunch of hardcore WvW guilds band together to form an alliance they still won't be able to be the majority in their team and can be matched against a team with a similar number of hardcore WvW guilds, so hopefully they'll balance each other out.

Edited January 30, 2022 by Danikat.8537