Reward scaling blunder | how to balance the new WvW xp rewards for capping towers/keeps better without breaking the game.

[zinn.2690]

THIS IS GOING TO BE LONG WINDED A LOT OF IT IS MEANT FOR PLAYERS WHO ARE NOT FAMILIAR WITH HOW WVW WORKS, IF YOU KNOW THEN JUST JUMP AHEAD TO THE LAST PART. THIS ONLY TOUCHES ON THE WXP PART OF THE NEW REWARD SYSTEM AND NOTHING ELSE.

 

Coming from a long time player over 7k rank in about 9k hours played, 80% of that spent in WvW.

 

I personally put value on WvW ranks. And I know many people who do as well. It is a rite of passage, I do not treat a low ranked enemy the same way in wvw as I treat a high rank one. While there is no clear difference in power level on paper, the higher level player will know tactics and can rally people more easily than someone who has less experience and don't know what to expect in a given situation.

Some people say ranks does not matter because there were some ways to gain rank and farm ranks easily in the past (mostly before pre-HoT) but usually anet managed to bring down the hammer on these fairly quickly so I believe putting a value on these ranks is warranted and valid.

And I do feel like it provides a very good and longterm progression opportunity for people who enjoy WvW and choose it as their primary gamemode. A lot of people don't understand but WvW is a completely different game. Some of us just don't enjoy pve in GW2 but we love WvW because it is unique and there is nothing like it on the market. The social aspect and the communities are just insanely addictive.

We don't want our longterm progression to be a joke because it already offers nothing more than a title and a number. It is the one thing that WvW players can feel proud of as over the years we got only the scraps and mainly got shafted when it came to updates.

 

 

 

First of all I want to get everyone up to speed here with some stats that will be important to understand why this needs to be nerfed heavily:

• To gain a WvW rank you need 5.000 wxp (wvw experience points), this is the same and true for all levels from level 1 up until you hit max level which is rank 10K

• Before HoT release it was possible to buy wxp potions at vendors, they disabled this option with HoT but kept the potions in a form that they are now a completely random (and pretty rare) drop from just playing WvW and killing players, npcs etc.

• Here is how these wxp potions look like from smallest xp gain to largest:

1. Drop of Instant World Experience - 250 wxp

2. Thimble of Instant World Experience - 2.500 wxp (0.5 rank)

3. Taste of Instant World Experience - 5.000 wxp (1 rank)

4. Swig of Instant World Experience - 10.000 wxp (2 ranks)

5. Keg of Instant World Experience - a massive 25.000 wxp (5 ranks)

In the new scaling system capping an objective gained you an additional chest which contained one of the above wxp potions inside (instantly consumed when accepting the chest)

We did not have enough time with the system yesterday to fully test what objectives give what rewards but it's safe to say that the system was insanely overtuned.

 

Here is a quick breakdown of the objective tier system in wvw to understand my next points:

• Every objective in wvw can receive 3 tiers of upgrades which look like this:

1. T0 - we call this paper, unupgraded objective, these usually trade hands fairly easily as people don't mind if these flip over to the enemy if there are more interesting things to go for on the map (fights or capping/defending a higher tier objective)

2. T1 - still has the same paper walls, can be taken easily but it usually takes like a good 30 minutes for an objective to reach t1 on average (it depends how heavy the enemy presence on the map is, not worth going over here), so people are more aware of it and willing to defend it more vigorously

3. T2- don't want to get into the details but obviously people want to keep upgrading this to T3 and it takes even longer (what a surprise) to upgrade so people will defend this if they can

4. T3 - people will fight tooth and nails to keep these objectives as these offer waypoints for the team controlling them (only keeps and SMC) on top of offering an advantage to defenders

 

 

The reward system they implemented yesterday was absolutely bonkers. You got half a rank (thimble) just for showing up for undefended towers ON TOP OF the normal wvw xp you'd get from them (which can be boostered up to like 300% with birthday and xp boosters). This means that you can almost gain 1 full rank just from 1 measly undefended paper tower. For an undefended keep you got a (5kwxp) on top of like the normal 2.5k wxp (if using boosters) so you could gain almost 2 ranks for a keep for essentially doing nothing.

 

Defending only gave you bonus 250xp (drop) which is fine I think.

 

I did not have a chance to cap SM yesterday so can't comment on the rewards there.

 

The point is that this system is so easy to abuse, the rewards are so high that it is not worth doing anything else but cap t0 paper objectives ad infinitum for easy wvw rank gains.

 

Just to give you an idea, before this system if you had a good day and spent like 4-5 hours in wvw a day you maybe got 10 ranks maximum. With this system in 20 minutes I gained 4 ranks and our group was not even very effective at capping stuff. This means that with this system the wvw ''progression'' speed was roughly quadrupled or worse.

 

Here's my idea on how to balance this while keeping some of the xp rewards as well (this does not take the bronze,silver,gold rankings into account, IMHO that system is completely broken and should be discarded all together in favor of flat rewards):

Attacking:

• t0,t1,t2 tower cap grants 250wxp (drop)

• t3 tower grants 2.5kwxp(thimble)

 

• t0,t1 keep cap grants 250wxp (drop)

• t2 keep cap grants 2.5kwxp(thimble)

• t3 keep cap 5.000 wxp (taste)

 

 

 

• t0 SMC cap grants 250wxp (drop)

• t1 SMC cap 2.5kwxp(thimble)

• t2 SMC cap 5.000 wxp (taste)

• t3 SMC cap 10.000 wxp (swig)

•  

As you can see this would make attacking higher tier objectives much more desirable (these are usually avoided in professional wvw circles unless the commander is very ballsy because t3 objectives are pretty tough to cap in most cases when there are available defenders), but it also rewards you fairly for taking easier objectives.

 

Defending:

• t0 keeps and towers and SM - no wxp reward bonus

• t1, t2, t3 keeps and towers and SM - the same 250wxp bonus every 2.5 minutes (can be repeated indefinitely as long as there are enemies in there)

 

Much better system which rewards you more once an objective is actually upgraded to keep defending and keep upgrading it.

 

Besides the wxp bonuses I can't comment on the other rewards offered in the new scaling system, I did not concentrate on those since the xp rewards are so broken this needs to be addressed immediately.

 

Let me know what you think if you got to the end of this.

[LordHT.8297]

 

I agree that the new system was very overtuned and I don't think it was intentional. Your solution however still seems a little too much imo. To be honest I wish the changes didn't affect the xp gain. They should increase gold and items drops in those events but keep the xp gain as it always was.

[Xenesis.6389]

1 hour ago, Dondarrion.9530 said:

Some people say ranks does not matter because there were some ways to gain rank and farm ranks easily in the past (mostly before pre-HoT) but usually anet managed to bring down the hammer on these fairly quickly so I believe putting a value on these ranks is warranted and valid.

Eotm was the biggest rank farm, it existed for over 4 years  2013-17, there's players who got max 10k ranks in there. Your experience gained from time playing versus experience gained in game probably has more value at this point. In any case the wxp gain yesterday was a little insane, that alone felt it was higher than the bonus events, and imagine if they have bonus events running in the future with it at that level.

 

As for the rewards obviously it was overdone too, which is surprising given it's anet and wvw, but it was pulled within a few hours to make adjustments. We're not sure all that was broken, whether the amount of rewards from scaling, or pulling from the wrong reward pool, or the drop rates, or the contribution, or all of the above. I fully expect it will be over nerfed, as anet tends to do adjustments to extremes not inbetweens.

 

The system is already suppose to account for objective tiers for rewards. But you will still need to figure out how much a person participates in order to get the appropriate credit. A group doing all the work to break a wall, kill players, kill the lord should earn gold, a player just accidentally coming over to kill a guard obviously shouldn't be earning anything but bronze and shouldn't earn the full rewards as the group did.

 

The same goes for a person just repairing a wall for defense event shouldn't earn anymore than bronze(especially if it was just a tap and they're repairing an older broken wall or gate), and the players actually defending by killing siege and players should earn more. Defensive players will argue with me over that, but it's also about taking risk and contributing more for higher rewards.

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

We've complained ad nauseum for over a decade about how poor the rewards are in WvW. It's okay to have the new rewards be over tunned for a while to recalibrate the disparity between the game modes.

[Xenesis.6389]

1 hour ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

We've complained ad nauseum for over a decade about how poor the rewards are in WvW. It's okay to have the new rewards be over tunned for a while to recalibrate the disparity between the game modes.

Of course all wvw player will agree to that, but not the developers. 🤭