(UPDATED) February 14 WvW Rewards Update

[nutri.1385]

9 hours ago, Rubi Bayer.8493 said:

Hello World vs. World Community,  
 
I have an update about Objective Scaling Rewards! As we mentioned Tuesday, we released the system in a testing state so we could see if everything worked as intended in a live environment. 

As often happens with testing, things were NOT all working as intended! Due to some issues, rewards were being distributed in much higher quantity than we expected. Also, the bonus world experience was too high – especially for mid-tier rewards. 

We'll be hotfixing both issues and turning the OSR system back on soon. For now, we’ve adjusted the reward bag to a common one that poses less risk. We chose this route because we want to reactivate the system to continue data gathering without risking the health of the economy. We’ll be updating the rewards based on live data in the near future. Similarly, we’ve reduced the world experience gains. 

For now, we’ll continue to monitor and adjust OSR. Also, we will be adjusting the WvW Weekly Tower and Keep achievements to progress for defense in addition to capture in our next release. Thank you for your patience and ongoing feedback as we continue iterating on the various WvW Rewards systems! 

Thanks for the update, and a swift response! It's great to see wvw get some love, it's a great game mode. I'm a pve player who got there because of GoB (of course), and stayed because it's still enjoyable. Even with only a few old maps and little rewards, it's really cool to play it. 

I'm positive that you will polish it a lot more in the future. Maybe a new Canthan borderlands map, who knows? ^^

[vares.8457]

This really sucks. As a support player now I only get bronze reward for taking keeps and towers 

Edited February 17, 2023 by vares.8457

[walkery.5012]

39 minutes ago, vares.8457 said:

This really sucks. As a support player now I only get bronze reward for taking keeps and towers 

I am DPS player and i didnt get single gold participation reward, max i got was silver, even when we took T3 keep few time. I guess i should kill 500 ppl to get gold reward. All morning not a single gold reward for capping. Defending is a different story, Silver and gold participation reward was almost the same.

Edited February 17, 2023 by walkery.5012

[Hemi.5267]

Yeah those medals need to be reworked a bit haha, it's very unclear what does what atm. The rewards are nice though, if you pop a silver. I got 1 Skirmish Ticket for a Keep / Silver medal. I kinda like that. 

 

Bloody busy atm, huge fights everywere. You can complain all you want, but I think they are heading in the right direction with this. WvW feels ...more alive lol. 

[Eudaimonia.8695]

38 minutes ago, Hemi.5267 said:

Bloody busy atm, huge fights everywere. You can complain all you want, but I think they are heading in the right direction with this. WvW feels ...more alive lol. 

 

WvW always needed just a little effort to get fixed, it's just sad to see that it took them 10 years to really get going.

Edited February 17, 2023 by Eudaimonia.8695

[nthmetal.9652]

Agreed, it feels like we're on the right track.

I only joined ~4 years ago, so I never witnessed the beginning of WvW with the huge events, which became even overbearing. I see the result, that almost everything in terms of mechanics, was stripped away, which of course solved part of the problem, however from what I see and keep seeing there is an underlying issue: There's too few things that help the underdog teams catch up.

And it's amazing that even comparatively subtle and simple changes can go a long way here. Reduding the supplies in keeps and towers, while increasing the supplies from dollies and camps helps the attacking party, while also encouraging a more active form of defense. It's only one step though.

The rewards are surely part of the issue, too, but at the moment I still see a spiral helping the winning team. When you have a strong team holding on to SM (or a keep), it doesn't matter how easily your enemy can rock it down. They will still easily defend it, get nice rewards for the defend action, while the attacking party doesn't really get anything helping their effort. You can run against SM a hundred times and still not able to take it.

I'd like to see some kind of reward that further helps the underdog parties recover from their losses with bigger ease. Be in the form of an NPC faction pestering the winning server, or events that the losing party can trigger under certain circumstances helping them catch up somehow. Something to keep even imbalanced matchups somewhat interesting.

[Hemi.5267]

Even had a few moments were the zerg got obliterated by good defence. Good times! 🙂

Edited February 17, 2023 by Hemi.5267

[cdsmith.1072]

Even though I'm right in the thick of battle for a tower or a keep I never get anything but bronze participation. I guess if you're not Min/Max that's just how it's going to be.

[reddie.5861]

1 hour ago, nthmetal.9652 said:

Agreed, it feels like we're on the right track.

I only joined ~4 years ago, so I never witnessed the beginning of WvW with the huge events, which became even overbearing. I see the result, that almost everything in terms of mechanics, was stripped away, which of course solved part of the problem, however from what I see and keep seeing there is an underlying issue: There's too few things that help the underdog teams catch up.

And it's amazing that even comparatively subtle and simple changes can go a long way here. Reduding the supplies in keeps and towers, while increasing the supplies from dollies and camps helps the attacking party, while also encouraging a more active form of defense. It's only one step though.

The rewards are surely part of the issue, too, but at the moment I still see a spiral helping the winning team. When you have a strong team holding on to SM (or a keep), it doesn't matter how easily your enemy can rock it down. They will still easily defend it, get nice rewards for the defend action, while the attacking party doesn't really get anything helping their effort. You can run against SM a hundred times and still not able to take it.

I'd like to see some kind of reward that further helps the underdog parties recover from their losses with bigger ease. Be in the form of an NPC faction pestering the winning server, or events that the losing party can trigger under certain circumstances helping them catch up somehow. Something to keep even imbalanced matchups somewhat interesting.

u know its really hard to do?
how a system that has no idea knows u where trying to attack something with enough force to actually reward u?
sure it might be a bit unfair but if u cant beat the enemy dont ram on their doors/walls in order to give them the chance to rack up rewards? 😉

[nthmetal.9652]

16 minutes ago, reddie.5861 said:

u know its really hard to do?
how a system that has no idea knows u where trying to attack something with enough force to actually reward u?

I am not sure it's all that hard to do. We have seen one idea already implemented: More supplies from camps, less in the keeps. Coming up with the idea might have been hard (though a thorough analysis of the game mode, what is needed to attack and defend should reveal things like this)

Another idea, which could help balance out things is an NPC faction dwelling in the ruins, which will attack and take (decap) objectives of the team currently in the lead, putting additional pressure on the biggest fish. The only map I see a bigger issue with for something like this, is EB, because we don't have central ruins, but rather central SMC.

And probably additional mesaures are needed. I have seen times, when one server took and held almost everything for prolongued times, because population imbalance was so heavy, that the underdogs didn't stand a chance of even gaining a new foothold. In the end such an imbalance is bad for everyone. The leading server lacks "content", the underdogs will only see frustration to even the point where getting participation in the mode can be hard.

[Baldrick.8967]

47 minutes ago, cdsmith.1072 said:

Even though I'm right in the thick of battle for a tower or a keep I never get anything but bronze participation. I guess if you're not Min/Max that's just how it's going to be.

It's all down to bad tagging mechanics and group.  Some classes can breeze through tagging everything, whereas your group might not be efficient at tagging and hence end up bronze.

 

You need to game the system as after ten years it's still basically broken.

[Arya Whitefire.8423]

I've played the new system on several accounts, in several matchups.  It's incredibly nice when when playing on a stacked server, and it's almost unnoticeable when playing on a server that is outnumbered all the time.

 

Adding rewards for failed attacks would help even it out a little, but since most of the boost comes from getting kills, I think it will still leave a wide disparity.

 

 

 

[Greyrat.2378]

3 hours ago, nthmetal.9652 said:

Agreed, it feels like we're on the right track.

I only joined ~4 years ago, so I never witnessed the beginning of WvW with the huge events, which became even overbearing. I see the result, that almost everything in terms of mechanics, was stripped away, which of course solved part of the problem, however from what I see and keep seeing there is an underlying issue: There's too few things that help the underdog teams catch up.

And it's amazing that even comparatively subtle and simple changes can go a long way here. Reduding the supplies in keeps and towers, while increasing the supplies from dollies and camps helps the attacking party, while also encouraging a more active form of defense. It's only one step though.

The rewards are surely part of the issue, too, but at the moment I still see a spiral helping the winning team. When you have a strong team holding on to SM (or a keep), it doesn't matter how easily your enemy can rock it down. They will still easily defend it, get nice rewards for the defend action, while the attacking party doesn't really get anything helping their effort. You can run against SM a hundred times and still not able to take it.

I'd like to see some kind of reward that further helps the underdog parties recover from their losses with bigger ease. Be in the form of an NPC faction pestering the winning server, or events that the losing party can trigger under certain circumstances helping them catch up somehow. Something to keep even imbalanced matchups somewhat interesting.

Ohhh I still remember vividly the season 1 WvW rewards, that was true clown fiesta in terms of what we got for all the effort 
I believe this video: https://youtu.be/HXDXeVoWclc is probably the best summary of it, and still makes me laugh when I remember how excited I was about it (title is nice but ANet dropped the ball really hard on that one).
It's nice to see that they are trying to improve the reward system tho.

[evlover.6270]

7 hours ago, nthmetal.9652 said:

It would be interesting to know, what you think endangers the game economy, after all there are pve open world metas netting around 20 gold (or more) an hour, and I think even with the buffed rewards, WvW is still quite below that. 

The rewards do quite speed up the WvW progress though with those 10k wxp for keeps / smc. 

WvW is kinda good where it is rewards-wise with this update, even with the nerf. It's PvE that's way too rewarding with throwing rares at you from everywhere and needs fixing instead of the rest being buffed to the lvl of PvE. Look where ectos are this past year compared to the 9 years before and even the last few years from that time span they were going down. Only thing that is "saving" ectos is the bazaar fest where all the mats become tied to eachother and they raise to around 50g/stack instead of the current 30g/stack. People just expect everything to succeed all the time and get multiple rares while back in the day we farmed freaking Plinx chain and Orr events for some t6 mats, did daily temples for some rares while Grenth failed more often than not, Teq was failing more often than succeeding even during serious tries. If they do something like that now though like Soo Won, the backlash is unreal and it gets nerfed to shreds because the community does not accept zero rewards for a 90-120min event anymore when they can drown in loot just by tagging some 10 second event.

Now half of the time TD is finished in the 1st of 3 phases, you login to teq a minute before it starts and still get the kill, you hit a pinata that goes down within 10 secs and everything gives you more reward containers and rares than you can carry. Look at where all the material prices are at, 95% is worth nothing anymore, t6 is declining because you only need 100 for the gen 3 leggies instead of 250/200 for gen 1 and gen 2 (should need the same amount for every gen). There's only a few exceptions left like amalgamated drac lodestones but those will half in price as well during SaB cause they're in the weekly rewards vendor (last year they dropped to like 7g at the end of SaB). The economic state of the game is something that could really use some proper polishment both in the recipes-section to craft things that grant more or less the same endproduct except from its cosmetics, as in the rewards-section where short taggable events shouldn't overload you with loot. They can keep on buffing rewards everywhere, but if the droprate of materials is systematically higher than the demand (as is currently the case), they'll have to keep buffing rewards because the net value you get from everything will keep decreasing over time.

edit: oh, and another part is also all the trading outside of the tp that's been going on for years through reddit and discord. The 15% tp fee is there to act as a money sink, but it's getting bypassed for billions of gold. Beats me how there has been zero action against trusttrading by just making the 500g mail cap apply to item values as well instead of gold only. 500g item value/gold cap would mean no more GoM/GoJM selling, no more legendary trading, no more infusion trading cause it would all be above the 500g cap, force people to use the tp and drain 15%/trade again.

Edited February 17, 2023 by evlover.6270

[BloodyDBunny.8192]

16 hours ago, Rubi Bayer.8493 said:

Hello World vs. World Community,  
 
I have an update about Objective Scaling Rewards! As we mentioned Tuesday, we released the system in a testing state so we could see if everything worked as intended in a live environment. 

As often happens with testing, things were NOT all working as intended! Due to some issues, rewards were being distributed in much higher quantity than we expected. Also, the bonus world experience was too high – especially for mid-tier rewards. 

We'll be hotfixing both issues and turning the OSR system back on soon. For now, we’ve adjusted the reward bag to a common one that poses less risk. We chose this route because we want to reactivate the system to continue data gathering without risking the health of the economy. We’ll be updating the rewards based on live data in the near future. Similarly, we’ve reduced the world experience gains. 

For now, we’ll continue to monitor and adjust OSR. Also, we will be adjusting the WvW Weekly Tower and Keep achievements to progress for defense in addition to capture in our next release. Thank you for your patience and ongoing feedback as we continue iterating on the various WvW Rewards systems! 

About the game Economy, it was already screwed by its community and by protecting the PVE farming legendary meta, having ascended and legendary gear stashed behind so many time gates that new players need to farm at least 3 months to even get some decent gear or even get decent sigils, unless they get donations from gold inflated players who craft legendaries to sell for gold to make more gold from crafting more. That was already the biggest economic mess created. We are already at the point where day 1 players got 10k+ gold on their accounts, being able to duplicate that in a few days if they want by just trading and farming, while a new player cant even get close to any of those at all. This is not a new game and the economy is not good at all for new players, so that ship has already sailed, unless you move the meta so the economy changes. Keeping this will keep making the gap bigger. Second is how this game promoted not to rely on the holy trinity system and yet every group finder you see now asks for a DPS, Tank or Healer, so that failed too, big time! 

 

What bothers me most is how a part of the community seems to try and protect their "meta" of gold influx to prevent new or other players from being able to get there too in other ways. WvW and PvP really need better rewards. It would also make it more fun, just to be rewarded for playing instead of having to minmax grind everything and be burned out within months of grinding and hitting time gate after time gate trying to get to those ascended and legendary gear.

[Graymatter.4723]

6 hours ago, reddie.5861 said:

u know its really hard to do?
how a system that has no idea knows u where trying to attack something with enough force to actually reward u?
sure it might be a bit unfair but if u cant beat the enemy dont ram on their doors/walls in order to give them the chance to rack up rewards? 😉

If you only reward the defending side and don't reward the attacking side (unless they actually capture the target) then you will end up with a situation where people only want to be on strong teams and those strong teams will sit in the keeps all day milking rewards. It's a bad design. If you reward a team defending then you have to reward the team attacking too and not just for captures.

[Engel.6029]

Doing nothing would have been better than what you did.  

[Akneiz.8364]

22 hours ago, Debesyla.7102 said:

RIP WvW being a rewarding game mode 2023-2023, it was a good 6 hours. Will be waiting for another 6 hours after another decade.

Are you aware that the absurdly high rewards that were being thrown around like plastic beads at Mardi Gras were not intended? In case you don't actually read what ANet tells us (including in Rubi's post on this page), they've made it clear that those ridiculously high rewards for minimal activity of any kind were a mistake, presumably because of a miscalculation somewhere in the various formulae involved in determining what rewards get assigned for event participation. You're acting like a child who's parents accidentally gave them a hundred dollar bill for their allowance instead of the ten they were supposed to get, and throwing a tantrum when they don't agree to give you a hundred every week from then on even though you still got to keep that extra ninety. 

 

9 hours ago, cdsmith.1072 said:

Even though I'm right in the thick of battle for a tower or a keep I never get anything but bronze participation. I guess if you're not Min/Max that's just how it's going to be.

This is a problem. Tying gold tier participation on a capture to a heavy active player defense (which is the only thing I can see missing from some of the ones I've gotten silver and bronze on the past couple days) just means nobody will get gold any more. Because players are not going to sit in a tower en masse waiting for somebody to come attack it, watching their general ppt participation level drop while the enemy zergs run past them to attack objectives they can actually take. Huge, epic seige battles sound really cool but without completely altering the way rewards are given out it's just not going to happen.

[Goglak.2591]

new system is trash, now more than ever people just stand or AFK on a wall in SMC for rewards, and repair bot standing around ready to fix walls so fast you cannot even build siege., just total garbage. Do way with rewards for fixing walls and fix the kitten AFK running into an object issue. 

Rewards should be for actually doing something, not just being there. 

Edited February 17, 2023 by Goglak.2591

[LokiSaint.3457]

I quit the game 5 months ago because WvW became just extremely boring and unrewarding. I keep reading the forum once in a while to see if anything has changed. I can tell you that these updates are so minor that it won't make me even update the game launcher. Its been so many years and all you can give the players is some extra xp? As if that was what we were missing? Then the guy says they don't wanna risk the game economy with more gold rewards in wvw, meanwhile pve and pvp players and alt farmers laugh at us? Yea. Not a company i wanna support anymore 

[Polish Hammer.6820]

Man you guys just can't stop CONSTANTLY dropping the ball. In all aspects of this game. All we get are empty promises of change that will never actually come.

[Ashen.2907]

15 hours ago, nthmetal.9652 said:

It would be interesting to know, what you think endangers the game economy, after all there are pve open world metas netting around 20 gold (or more) an hour, and I think even with the buffed rewards, WvW is still quite below that. 

The rewards do quite speed up the WvW progress though with those 10k wxp for keeps / smc. 

Not only that, it is also worth noting that insufficient individual income is bad for an economy as well. More than ten years of substandard rewards in WvW was, apparently, not considered harmful to the economy (although it absolutely was) but a few days of increased individual income was.

This is, in my opinion, an irrefutable demonstration that ANet views WvW, and its players, as a lower class of customers.

[Varis.5467]

Hey Anet, why is WvW always getting the kitten treatment? 

 

The class balance in wvw is questionable at best and now when the game mode was just becoming rewarding to play, you step in and get rid of it after 6 hours. 

 

What do you want from us?

 

 

Quote

As often happens with testing, things were NOT all working as intended! Due to some issues, rewards were being distributed in much higher quantity than we expected. Also, the bonus world experience was too high – especially for mid-tier rewards. 

@Rubi Bayer.8493 We are your customers, NOT your game testers. 

Test your products (the game in this case) on a test server instead of the live server. 

Edited February 18, 2023 by Varis.5467

[darksome.1697]

8 hours ago, BloodyDBunny.8192 said:

We are already at the point where day 1 players got 10k+ gold on their accounts, being able to duplicate that in a few days if they want by just trading and farming, while a new player cant even get close to any of those at all.

 

Are you saying that new players should be handed 10k+ gold like those who played the game since release have gathered through 10 years of playing? "Hello Elon, just joined your company! Ahh... I see you have 492 billion dollars. I can't even get close to that, can you give it to me?"

[Gotejjeken.1267]

57 minutes ago, Varis.5467 said:

Hey Anet, why is WvW always getting the kitten treatment? 

 

The class balance in wvw is questionable at best and now when the game mode was just becoming rewarding to play, you step in and get rid of it after 6 hours. 

 

What do you want from us?

 

 

@Rubi Bayer.8493 We are your customers, NOT your game testers. 

Test your products (the game in this case) on a test server instead of the live server. 

 

Oh, no we've been public testers since game launch.  

They really should put a sticky PSA on this, but probably bad PR to say there is no test server for WvW as all tests depend on live players to see if they work (for some reason).