Defend Achievements - Difficult Progression by current design and change

[Aerthan.1907]

3 hours ago, Duos.3217 said:

I do believe something has to be done for those achievements, either the tier requirements or other ways to get credit towards these ones, as the way it is now, it s a very hard series of achievements to progress towards.

 

It definitely would have been better to pair this with a bug fix to killing enemies (not everyone that contributes to a down currently gets credit) and some help to support players who are already at a disadvantage for some of the other weeklies (yaks/player kills).

[Burch.5732]

3 minutes ago, neven.3785 said:

Roamers are still actively getting kills.   Scouting rewards are a different beast.  Especially afk tower scouts and camp golem users who panic type and die.  If that crowd wants rewards, thats what shared participation is for.  

I play primarily support in wvw when in squad, I am used to not receiving near the same rewards of the DPS.  I made the choice to do that, just as people make the choice to scout or roam.  Part of that choice is knowing you will will miss participation because it isn't something that can be balanced without opening the door wide open for abuse.  This current fix is a result of abuse from their reward system, of course there will be collateral damage from it.  However you will still get more rewards.

Yes roamers still get kills however the current system is broke.  Many good points have been discussed above and I do hope Anet corrects the problems.  I have experienced all of the above mention concerns and it is no fun not to get credit.

[Bristingr.5034]

9 minutes ago, neven.3785 said:

 If that crowd wants rewards, thats what shared participation is for.

Participation only addresses pips, not loot bags.

[neven.3785]

I play for the fights, especially hard fought ones over objectives, not what colour badge i get when a timer is done and a blue +### WXP number across my screen

[ArchonWing.9480]

This is a really bad decision because repairing is already a tedious and undesirable activity.. They have decided to punish people because some  nolife** PvErs are farming some useless WxP. And it was just SMC-- could have dealt with that in many ways that weren't as lazy as this.

Now it would have been sensible to simply nerf the XP gained from repairing instead of just removing it. One example is simply just giving it the bare minimum for partcipation  but lol, we can't do that.

Something has to be done about this. I think it would be reasonable that being in a structure and being in combat during a defend event should be sufficient.

Otherwise, I'd suggest simply removing daily defender because it's a dead daily in some cases, plus camp defense is so ridiculously finicky at times.

**Too bad Gw2mists can't record the time played, because I guarantee you the top of it has some huge hours. Come on, anyone that's played an MMO knows the outliers are massive.

Edited March 14, 2023 by ArchonWing.9480

[Vova.2640]

this is a good change.. this was honestly ridiculous in its previous state.

u have ppl afk on trebs with macros set up for hitting smc walls 24/7(sadly this is likely not addressed yet)
and then u have ppl constantly draining supply to repair the smc walls to get easy rewards.

with this change hopefully there will be less afk repairers clogging the ebg queues.
one thing i will add- if they can add dealing dmg to enemies to award some defence participation that would be good. i do agree right now if u dont get a kill u likely wont get any credit- and it is hard to get kills if u r outnumbered defending.

Edited March 14, 2023 by Vova.2640

[Ashen.2907]

So, if I see a swords on an objective I should not bother to respond. 

[Pagan Highlander.5948]

Thanks for not helping WvW with a totally unnecessary change. Might as well remove the walls. This means people facing huge blobs while outnumbered cannot get the Weekly achievements. Bad enough Maguuma stopping everyone from getting Stonemist. Now we cannot get the Defense achievements either. Why bother giving us Bonuses if you won't let us have a chance at getting them. I wish we could get a chance to give input before unnecessary changes are made. No onw will defend towers and keeps if they can't get credit as it is impossible to defend when you have huge blobs attacking and only small numbers of defenders

Edited March 14, 2023 by Pagan Highlander.5948

[crepuscular.9047]

sorry Anet, the loss outweighs the gain.

what counts as defend from player kill is buggy as kitten! every single other defend AP done years ago except camp defend, because the dumb thing did not count the player kill even though I was standing within the camp while scoring the kill.

https://i.imgur.com/zUkNCWh.png

[Eudaimonia.8695]

The fact that a lot of people here can't look at this objectively and not see how it was a detriment to the game mode is appalling. 

 

It needed a change and I applaud ANet for taking action.

 

What we need NOW, as others have said, are more ways to get credit for defense. Some good suggestions in this thread already, I hope ANet actually reads this?

[Jampire.4593]

So now it's impossible to tag defense event when you one vs blob. Perfect design.

[Mihile.7609]

This back and forth with the defense thing is weird. Do you want people to defend or not? Should probably just rework the whole system because we can't have a good change for more than a few days to a month without a nerf lol.

[Bern.9613]

So on 31 January we had:

Before we dig in, we wanted to remind the community of our current team priorities:

2. Make WvW more rewarding to play with a focus on active participation.

To:

Repairing walls and gates will no longer award event participation.

Bad enough that cataing/trebing a wall and capping ruins, which is a weekly, give zero participation but now this? That was fast, 42 days to come up with this disastrous decision. I can see this attempt at weekly achievements going the way of the original weekly and monthly achievements. Just pull the bandaid off quick and kill off your weekly achievement experiment.

[Neathra.1950]

10 minutes ago, Eudaimonia.8695 said:

The fact that a lot of people here can't look at this objectively and not see how it was a detriment to the game mode is appalling. 

 

It needed a change and I applaud ANet for taking action.

 

What we need NOW, as others have said, are more ways to get credit for defense. Some good suggestions in this thread already, I hope ANet actually reads this?

 

I don't think its specifically that people aren't looking objectively. Its that there isn't a clear list of what actually gets you a defender credit, and of the two things we know gets you defender credit, one just got removed and the other is highly arbitrary.  If we had a list of slightly more involved things that consistently gave credit I don't think anyone would actually care that much. But the way things are repairing was the only way to ensure you got credit for defending at all. 

[Chaos God.1639]

people who like these change should stop ignoring the benefits the repair rewards brought to the game.

the main problem is that players don't get rewarded for being support, scout,...

I was even thinking of becoming a support player and start to heal other players more, just because I could get all the rewards I wanted by simply repairing a wall.

yes, it brought some issues to the game, but it also made supplies more valuable, because you spent supplies to get the rewards. and if you didn't get the camps or the supply routes got disrupted by the enemy, then you wouldn't get the easy rewards.

Edited March 14, 2023 by Chaos God.1639

[Ashen.2907]

1 minute ago, Neathra.1950 said:

 

I don't think its specifically that people aren't looking objectively. Its that there isn't a clear list of what actually gets you a defender credit, and of the two things we know gets you defender credit, one just got removed and the other is highly arbitrary.  If we had a list of slightly more involved things that consistently gave credit I don't think anyone would actually care that much. But the way things are repairing was the only way to ensure you got credit for defending at all. 

This.

[ArchonWing.9480]

5 hours ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

 

Top WvW ranks gained until yesterday for this week on gw2mists: 345 (likely close to 400 today)

Kills 1.038

Killed Doylaks 19

Escorted Dolyaks 59

Captured Camps 25

Defended Camps 2

Captured Towers 29

Defended Towers 7

Captured Keeps 4

Defended Keeps 5

Captured SM 9

Defended SM 537

Captured Targets 67

Defended Targets 551

WvW Rank 345

 

That's without getting into the official statement in regards to players intentionally wasting supply into inefficient repairing.

Yea that is a bit excessive, but I think it also highlights how little killing players contributes to WvW rank. You pretty much have to zerg to top the leaderboards to begin with unless you put in many hours.

537 defenses would have taken 1722 minutes (3 minutes each right?) So they did nothing but SMC defense (28.7 hours), almost like a job at this point. And this is assuming SMC was under nonstop attack and never flipped.

So yes it is bad and it is rewarded excessively. But is it catastrophic? WvW Ranks haven't meant anything for the longest time. The old EOTM already bloated it, and you don't need more than 1500 to max everything.

So how much is a WvW rank worth in terms of coins? 30 silver. 30s x 345  = 103.5 gold plus 345 spirit shards. Over 28 hours.

Even in this massively outlier scenario, it's honestly chump change in the grand scheme of things. Also it's not like they only  repaired walls; they still had a decent amount of kills.

SMC has always been a farm to some degree.

Also, when was this stat taken? It was posted yesterday I remember and the week is like half over. That's like 7 hours a day.

And were they using boosters? I'm guessing not, but we can't tell.

Edited March 14, 2023 by ArchonWing.9480

[MedievalThings.5417]

This patch is basically Anet saying  "you guys need to stop defending".

Repair = no reward, no credit

Kill 10 people = maybe 10% chance of any credit at all

 

Spent all morning defending keeps/towers, getting plenty of kills (as support and dps).  Of the 30+ defenses, got tower twice and keep once.  This is more of Anet just saying "we only want blobs to ktrain and avoid each other".

[Neathra.1950]

2 minutes ago, Ubi.4136 said:

This patch is basically Anet saying  "you guys need to stop defending".

Repair = no reward, no credit

Kill 10 people = maybe 10% chance of any credit at all

 

Spent all morning defending keeps/towers, getting plenty of kills (as support and dps).  Of the 30+ defenses, got tower twice and keep once.  This is more of Anet just saying "we only want blobs to ktrain and avoid each other".

I mean if it somehow gets mag off SMC maybe its worth it

[ArchonWing.9480]

1 minute ago, Neathra.1950 said:

I mean if it somehow gets mag off SMC maybe its worth it

Mag's reward is people's tears. That doesn't change. They're account bound anyways.

Edited March 14, 2023 by ArchonWing.9480

[BigShow.8460]

Maybe there needs to be a secondary supply type added to towers and keeps that can be only used for repairing the structure.  When that pool depletes you can no long repair the structure until more supply arrives.  This would separate the use of supply for siege building vs repairing structures.

[TheQuickFox.3826]

I don't like this change. Question is what counts to the ArenaNet computers as participating in a defense?

 

Repairing during a defense was a guaranteed checkmark. But if I destroy offending sieges, healing allies or damaging enemy players, does it count as defense? Or will progressing defense events become as rare as defending a camp.?

 

Also, what exactly is the reward for players to stay behind in a damaged keep to scout and repair after the defending commander moved on? This already is a bit of an issue after participation was removed from the act of repairing and this change does not help.

Edited March 14, 2023 by TheQuickFox.3826

[CelestialCat.6240]

I feel like the removal of rewards for repairing walls and gates might have of been a knee jerk reaction after hackers started teleporting in supplies to speed repair walls and gates. I personally sent Anet a video of two such teleport hackers only a couple of weeks ago and now this patch happens.

 

Well, I guess getting those defender dailies is going to take longer, and I now have no incentive to run (on a warclaw and on foot) supplies from camps to fix the keeps and towers.

[Noah Salazar.5430]

As person that was able to defend gari/tower vs 10-15ppl single handedly, i'm ofended by that change

if i was not rapair walls after disabling cataputls/rames, and counter fire with range skills/my own sage, that 15 ppl wuld run over me xd 

 

Insted i constalty forced them to regroup

Edited March 15, 2023 by Noah Salazar.5430

[Cuks.8241]

It's definitely really hard to get any defence participation right now. Even participating in several kills within the building doesn't seem to do it.