WvW Skirmish Claim Ticket system and requirement for Conflux.

[SweetPotato.7456]

sounds like someone wants something but does not want to work for it.

[Biziut.3594]

6 hours ago, SweetPotato.7456 said:

sounds like someone wants something but does not want to work for it.

Be careful, or Your name will change into ToxicPotato or GatekeepingPotato, becouse this is what stands for truth for some peoples these days. xd

[TheGrimm.5624]

2 hours ago, Biziut.3594 said:

Be careful, or Your name will change into ToxicPotato or GatekeepingPotato, becouse this is what stands for truth for some peoples these days. xd

One of the options that was floated back in the day is that WvW would require more time to acquire Leggo gear since you didn't need a group to achieve it. It would also have a less shinny skin. So for any I am not sure the best point to make is less time now after those previous compromises. A better one might be if you raid, options for raid Leggo accessories instead.

[Ares Alpha.6725]

It's the same complainment, always.

PvE players want everything for free in WvW instead of playing the game mode. If you want an item of a specific mode - play it or leave it.

I play PvE and WvW and legendary items are much easier to grind in WvW than PvE. Mostly you just need some time and do whatever you want to. In PvE I need time, sometimes also specific groups with kill proof, an achievement here, an achievement there, oh and another achievement when finishing the first two.

Took me longer to get Aurora and Vision, two simple trinkets, than my whole WvW Armor.

Edited December 13, 2023 by Ares Alpha.6725

[Ashen.2907]

Many inaccuracies in the opening post. The author might want to re-examine the facts and repost so that these discrepancies, deliberate or otherwise, dont undermine his position. His point may have merit, but misrepresenting the facts can lead to the entire position being dismissed out of hand.

Edited December 13, 2023 by Ashen.2907

[Ryuk.6840]

I wouldn't worry too much .

Most likely with the release of Restructure , or the new Guild focus , they can lure most Casuals people by lowering the requirements

[Curennos.9307]

I started playing WvW approximately two months ago (give or take) and I am currently 581 tickets away from conflux. I'm not sure if there's a way to accurately tell how many hours I've spent, but I currently have 11 gifts of battle (I had a birthday booster running for the majority of the time, I forgot to use it at first cause I forgot I had 'em >_>) and am rank 143. On average, I spend maybe 1 hour a day (sometimes zero on weekdays, definitely more on weekends).

I also have never gone out of my way to do the weeklies, I just meander around and set people on fire and die. I have never maxed out my claim ticket gains in a week. Per GW2 efficiency, I strated gain around the start of October, and had 5 for some reason I can't recall. Anyway, I currently have 1269 tickets. Gonna say I started oct 1st to make this easy. I'd say I average one hour a day, or 7 hours a week. 74 days, approx 10.5 weeks or so, 120 tickets per week, 17 ish per day. I've been VERY lazy and I'm almost done, and already have enough gifts of battle for two.

There may be a point to be made for ensuring there's diminishing returns on ticket gain instead of compounding returns for time played, but overall it has felt like a very fast process to me. If I'd bothered to pay attention during my playtime instead of just wandering around doing whatever and maxed out my tickets per week, I think I'd have built conflux twice by now and been done. For additional context, I have never gone out of my way to do a weekly. I don't think I've even ever completed the dolyak one where you gotta kill. I forget, 8? I think I'm an excellent data point cause I'm almost entirely new to wvw, though I've done enough spvp to have two sets of legendary armor from it and a back piece.

Overall, the time required to get conflux feels appropriate- I could've done it much, muuuuuch faster if I wanted, but as it is with my limited playtime and extremely limited attention span for doing a specific task instead of chasing the nearest red dot, this is where I am currently and it even feels rather quick.

[Player.2475]

8 hours ago, Ares Alpha.6725 said:

It's the same complainment, always.

PvE players want everything for free in WvW instead of playing the game mode. If you want an item of a specific mode - play it or leave it.

I play PvE and WvW and legendary items are much easier to grind in WvW than PvE. Mostly you just need some time and do whatever you want to. In PvE I need time, sometimes also specific groups with kill proof, an achievement here, an achievement there, oh and another achievement when finishing the first two.

Took me longer to get Aurora and Vision, two simple trinkets, than my whole WvW Armor.

It sounds like a skill issue. In the 22 weeks it took me to farm up my first WvW legendary, I finished raid heavy armor, Aurora + Vision, 6 runes, and 4 sigils. It took me about 2-3 months doing raids almost every week for the entire armor set and all achievements, but that was about 2-3 hour investment per week, which is 10x less than WvW. In general, it takes me on average 3 weeks to get one legendary weapon valued at around 1000g, while 1 piece of WvW armor took me around ~60-70 hours just to get the skirmish tickets.

Raids aren't even that hard. Finding a group is also not a problem if you take the time to find yourself a guild that will do guild runs. My group was awful to begin with, but once they got better and formed a static group, we were breezing through W1-4 in 2 hours. There are many communities and guilds dedicated to being like a dating app for statics, too. Then there are also public groups.

In WvW? Your server is bad? You need 5 hours more to get the same rewards. No, you as 1 out of 100 players on the map cannot do much to change it. Even worse if you only have 5 players on the entire map and the enemy has 100. Theoretically you could flip camps for 300 hours, but c'mon, good luck being able to leave your spawn to even flip camps. You will spend more time losing participation and walking around desperately trying to find a single objective where you won't get ganked.

If you play on a decent server you can be relatively passive about it and still get participation, but it is still a massive time investment even if you spend most of it playing Baldur's Gate 3 on your second monitor and check in every 10 minutes. I'm sure they will eventually nerf that too.

Edited December 13, 2023 by Player.2475

[Quirin.1076]

Legendary = Time
They should create a new mount skin collection, they could call it the Wambulance skin collection for all the mounts, little blinking light on the head of the creature. 
They could make the currency be "Skirmish tickets" or "Legendary Insights" or "Ascended Shards of Glory" instead of gems.  You know to be fare to all game types.

[ArchonWing.9480]

25 minutes ago, Player.2475 said:

Raids aren't even that hard. Finding a group is also not a problem if you take the time to find yourself a guild that will do guild runs. My group was awful to begin with, but once they got better and formed a static group, we were breezing through W1-4 in 2 hours. There are many communities and guilds dedicated to being like a dating app for statics, too. Then there are also public groups.

 

25 minutes ago, Player.2475 said:

In WvW? Your server is bad? You need 5 hours more to get the same rewards. No, you as 1 out of 100 players on the map cannot do much to change it. Even worse if you only have 5 players on the entire map and the enemy has 100.

So why is it you can group up in PvE, but not in WvW.? There are many groups running on Discord if you take yourself the time to find them. My server is frequently dead last but I always get spammed with squad invites from tags I've never seen before. I'd rather find a way to block it. It helps if you show up on a meta spec so people may want you in their groups-- much like raids.

And of course there are guilds too.

  

25 minutes ago, Player.2475 said:

Theoretically you could flip camps for 300 hours, but c'mon, good luck being able to leave your spawn to even flip camps.

Capturing anything above a tower does not really  hasten pip progress. You're just needing to capture camps.

Also spawn has multiple exits and there are 4 maps. There is also this thing called team chat you can try calling for help on.

This is an MMO, so having friends or more players help. And you already realize this, since evidentially you do so for PvE, but there's a blindspot here.

Edited December 13, 2023 by ArchonWing.9480

[Player.2475]

23 minutes ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

 

So why is it you can group up in PvE, but not in WvW.? There are many groups running on Discord if you take yourself the time to find them. My server is frequently dead last if you actually would try to find them like raid groups.

And of course there are guilds too.

  

Capturing anything above a tower does not really  hasten pip progress. You're just needing to capture camps.

Also spawn has multiple exists and there are 4 maps. There is also this thing called team chat you can try calling for help on.

This is an MMO, so having friends or more players help. And you already realize this, since evidentially you do so for PvE, but there's a blindspot here.

The reason I don't compare playing WvW as a group with PvE group content is because the argument people use for why WvW legendaries should take 300 hours is because you can do it very casually even if you are a garbage player, and you can do them solo, it just takes a long time. With a group it can be more fun, but like you said, you do not need a group for flipping camps. A group of 5-10 can only really flip towers, and only undefended ones at that. If you are outnumbered, you will lose unless the players are very bad and you are playing some cheese boonball meta zerg that Anet staff members seem to play and nerf boon strips every patch. It's rare that you will fight between 3 and 10 other players; it is either roamers you can win against solo or a zerg that will roll over you. There is not much you can do at that point other than to form your own zerg, but if you are playing on a server like Gandara where 20 people will run away as soon as 1 person gets downed, even a zerg won't get you far.

Either way, I would only want to reduce the weekly time investment, not the time gate of 22 weeks. I think the intense grind goes against the core philosophy of GW2, which is more about giving you a small trickle of consistent rewards for small time investments, and then diminishing returns. That's probably some psychological manipulation tactic, but hey, I think it works well to restrict how fast people can get something without making them play GW2 like it's a full time job.

P.S. It might seem counterintuitive, but people who flip camps all day do not actually want to play WvW and will run away from anything resembling a fight, so you might as well do both PvE and WvW players a favor by limiting the time they are exposed to each other.

Edited December 13, 2023 by Player.2475

[ArchonWing.9480]

6 minutes ago, Player.2475 said:

The reason I don't compare playing WvW as a group with PvE group content is because the argument people use for why WvW legendaries should take 300 hours is because you can do it very casually even if you are a garbage player, and you can do them solo, it just takes a long time.

Grouping up has nothing to do with skill though.

It's still a disingenuous comparison. You should be comparing it against a solo casual player going into pugs in raids, vs the same going into WvW.

 

7 minutes ago, Player.2475 said:

With a group it can be more fun, but like you said, you do not need a group for flipping camps. A group of 5-10 can only really flip towers, and only undefended ones at that.

Not really true but even if it were, I don't see the problem. Keeps aren't a particularly efficient way of farming anything even in a  zerg assuming there are defenders

[Lan Deathrider.5910]

On 12/12/2023 at 12:45 AM, Anasate.5408 said:

Hello. I decided to make this post because I take issue with the way WvW Skirmish Claim Tickets are awarded, and the time investment required for filling one of the item slots with the best-in-slot option, specifically Conflux.

First of all, skirmish claim tickets are pretty toxic as far as game currencies go, it's a very non-GW2 system. You have to sit through ~15 hrs of WvW per week to maximize claim tickets, but the acquisition is non-linear. Curve is (roughly) as follows:

• wood - 0.17 tickets/pip
• bronze - 0.2 tickets/pip
• silver - 0.22 tickets/pip
• gold - 0.25 tickets/pip
• platinum - 0.26 tickets/pip
• mithril - 0.27 tickets/pip
• diamond - 0.27 tickets/pip

The average person with a job, kids and/or school doesn't have 15 hrs of game time per week to begin with, but making it non-linear with a positive feedback curve makes it way worse because it promotes addictive behavior. This makes no sense at all in the context of GW2 (neither financially for Anet, nor from a player enjoyment perspective).

Coalescence (raid legendary ring) requires 6 weeks (at 25 legendary insights/week, using only raid encounters). All raiding guilds I've played with complete all raid wings in about 6hrs every week, so that's 36 hours of playtime required for Coalescence. Admittedly, this is anecdotal, but I have no data for raid clear times and empirical evidence feels good enough here. Now, assuming the best case scenario of 4 weeks (with 455 tickets/week, including weeklies) for getting enough claim tickets to make Conflux, at 15 hrs/week, that makes ~60 hrs total time investment. In a typical scenario, Conflux takes 66% more hours to make than Coalescence which is very imbalanced!

This post will probably get buried, but just in case someone in charge reads this, my humble suggestion is to change the WvW Skirmish Claim Ticket acquisition curve and drastically reduce the amount of WvW Skirmish Claim Tickets necessary to put it on par with its counterpart.

The ticket acquisition curve should at least be reversed to create a player friendly environment within the game mode. A negative feedback rewards system promotes responsible play time and caters to all player types, not just to enthusiasts of the game mode who also have a generous amount of play time at their disposal.

Here is the thing. WvW has the easiest acquisition methods of getting legendary gear, for that reason it has a longer time gate. All you need to do is stay in the corner of a borderland and take a camp every 10 minutes once you reach tier 6 participation.

That's it.

It will take you some time sure, but as you can ranks, you'll clear chest tiers quicker. Long time veterans clear the diamond chest on reset day, and it does not take them 15 hours to do so.

WvW is a perpetual endgame style mode. It is meant to be played over the long haul of the game, not quickly. Does that mean it should have fewer rewards per hour compared to other game modes/activities? No. But with things like legendary gear their acquisition needs to be tailored for the easy ways of gaining the gated currency.

[Chaba.5410]

43 minutes ago, Player.2475 said:

compare playing WvW as a group with PvE group content

Both game modes require teamwork and usually assigned roles.  It looks silly to suggest that they are not comparable.

When I did raids a lot, it was always the WvW players who performed the best/picked up the roles and mechanics fastest.  That's not to say all WvW players, mostly the ones with experience playing grouped up either as a roamer/havoc group or a "fights" guild.  There's a natural overlap between PvE raids and WvW with regards to teamwork requirements.

The only real difference is that WvW is more open-ended than a preset PvE encounter that never changes between each attempt.

 

Edited December 13, 2023 by Chaba.5410

[Player.2475]

8 minutes ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Both game modes require teamwork and usually assigned roles.  It looks silly to suggest that they are not comparable.

When I did raids a lot, it was always the WvW players who performed the best/picked up the roles and mechanics fastest.  That's not to say all WvW players, mostly the ones with experience playing grouped up either as a roamer/havoc group or a "fights" guild.  There's a natural overlap between PvE raids and WvW with regards to teamwork requirements.

The only real difference is that WvW is more open-ended than a preset PvE encounter that never changes between each attempt.

 

WvW is more like open world PvE than raids. Prove me wrong.

Protip: You can't

[XenesisII.1540]

2 minutes ago, Player.2475 said:

WvW is more like open world PvE than raids. Prove me wrong.

Protip: You can't

And Boon balls are raid bosses. Being stuck with them on a map for 2 hours is a raid wing. 🤭

[TheGrimm.5624]

53 minutes ago, Player.2475 said:

A group of 5-10 can only really flip towers, and only undefended ones at that.

Not sure what to say here. 

[Chaba.5410]

2 minutes ago, Player.2475 said:

WvW is more like open world PvE than raids. Prove me wrong.

Protip: You can't

What a ridiculous comparison.  Open world PvE doesn't have opposing players that can destroy your engagement with NPCs.  Prove yourself right first before responding with such absurdity.

[Player.2475]

1 minute ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

And Boon balls are raid bosses. Being stuck with them on a map for 2 hours is a raid wing. 🤭

Boon balls are like trying to do Dragon's End meta while you're the only person on the map.

[XenesisII.1540]

2 minutes ago, Player.2475 said:

Boon balls are like trying to do Dragon's End meta while you're the only person on the map.

I don't own EoD I don't know what this would be like. 🤭

 

[Chaba.5410]

Just now, Player.2475 said:

Boon balls are like trying to do Dragon's End meta while you're the only person on the map.

Dragon's End meta before it was nerfed or after?

[ArchonWing.9480]

11 minutes ago, Player.2475 said:

Boon balls are like trying to do Dragon's End meta while you're the only person on the map.

I'm pretty sure you have to kill the boss to win at Dragon's End, according to last time I was there.

You don't have to kill the boon ball.

The better analogy is that hero point in Auric Basin with the champion guarding it. You don't have to kill the champion to get it-- it is possible to sneak through. Back then when the game was a bit harder. people would complain a lot while banging their head against it. I just stealthed and got it.

The game sometimes demands you use a little problem solving ability.

Edited December 13, 2023 by ArchonWing.9480

[Chaba.5410]

Mighty Teapot xD
 

 

[Anasate.5408]

22 hours ago, ArchonWing.9480 said:

Usually when pointing out fallacies, you should link to the one in particular and explain why it is fallacious.

If you insist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_fallacy

On 12/12/2023 at 10:08 PM, Cyninja.2954 said:

Consider 1 team made up of players spending 1-2 hours per week in the mode meeting a team with players who invest multiple chunks of time in the hours.

Consider players going in, taking up the limited amount of slots on the maps to get their maximum rewards instead of committing a certain minimum amount of time.

Consider players sticking with the mode for a longer time, because rewards are back-loaded versus players leaving the moment they are done with their rewards.

This is a side effect of the current system which is affecting WvW fans. It should not be on the other players to make up for it, and Anet is wrong for doubling down on the flaw by skewing the reward system to incentivize otherwise unmotivated players to play longer hours per week in WvW. 

On 12/12/2023 at 10:25 PM, XenesisII.1540 said:

There are many players who have completed the legendary rings already, so I don't think they should lower the bar on obtaining them now after those players put in the time and effort for it.

The fact that some players already acquired the reward doesn't mean the acquisition method can't or shouldn't be changed. I got a Heart of the Khan-Ur years ago when it was worth 20k gold. Then the drop rate was increased. If I had kept it, I would've lost roughly 18k worth of value on it because of inflation, but I wouldn't have been entitled to cry about it.
A flawed system should be changed, and if Anet wants to be fair about it, they can reimburse the claim ticket difference to players who already got the ring.

On 12/12/2023 at 10:25 PM, XenesisII.1540 said:

Mind you they already have, since tickets from skirmish track are now a soft cap as you can earn more from OSR and weeklies.

Already accounted for dailies in my OP. I did not account for OSR because it's very difficult to quantify, as it is highly situational. If you can come up with a sensible statistical analysis which can account for the large total play time requirement discrepancy between the WvW ring acquisition method and the Raiding ring acquisition method, I would gladly revise the comparison. If you can't, the point is moot. As Kant puts it in his "Critique of Pure Reason" - "For if no intuition could be given corresponding to the concept, the concept would still be a thought, so far as its form is concerned, but would be without any object, and no knowledge of anything would be possible by means of it. So far as I could know, there would be nothing, and could be nothing, to which my thought could be applied."

On 12/12/2023 at 10:25 PM, XenesisII.1540 said:

If a player is considering to obtain the ring purely for stat swap purposes, it's a highly optional choice to chase because ascended rings have the same stats, and are quite easy to obtain in multiple ways.

If it's optional then it is an option, and the option should be on par with other existing counterparts for it to be a fair option.

On 12/12/2023 at 10:25 PM, XenesisII.1540 said:

Veterans of the mode have an easier time obtain these items, which is not unfair since they put in a lot of time before the items were even introduced, time served in a sense.

That's why we should make no assumption about prior experience or achievements of a player within the compared game modes.

On 12/12/2023 at 10:25 PM, XenesisII.1540 said:

The time gate is set to certain limits for each mode because of the effort required in them. Raids require you to run a semi competent group of around 10 to obtain it's rewards, but there is no solo mode. Meanwhile in wvw you can get to t6 participation and then go afk every 9mins watching netflix, then solo cap a camp to maintain the participation until you're done for the week, this can be done entirely solo, not much effort required, hence the minimal time required needs to be much more. So you can't sit there and say well coalescence only requires 36 hours, while conflux requires 60 and they should be the same! when the effort for them is totally different.

That is a very good point. However, how do you rationalize this? Can you use effort as a coefficient for decreasing the required time, something like effective_time=base_time*(1/game_mode_effort_constant)? Also, and this is tangential to the subject but it's an interesting thought - if you start doing that, wouldn't you lose justification for capping currencies? 
None of that matters anyway because it's not Anet's philosophy to compute reward acquisition time as a function of effort. If it was, its effects would've be present within the reward acquisition systems. In WvW you'd have substantial claim ticket OSR rewards and smaller rewards for the AFK track (to preserve the expected weekly income), and in raiding LI rewards would scale with the encounter difficulty.

On 12/12/2023 at 10:25 PM, XenesisII.1540 said:

The three main end game modes raids/fractals, wvw, spvp, should have their own separate legendary sets to collect.

Not necessarily. WvW has merit, so it should have its own exclusive shiny reward for people who manage to excel at it, but the acquisition method should be symmetrical with the acquisition method of other game modes' exclusive shinies.

22 hours ago, Biziut.3594 said:

I watched first two pages of this topic, and literally no single commenter agrees with You.

It's the same 3-4 people over and over again. A vocal group to be sure, but hardly a majority. 

22 hours ago, IAmNotMatthew.1058 said:

The "Guild FC in 6 hours" for Coal compared to just hopped into WvW time for Conflux, but calling others out when they are talking about how long it takes them at X rank is peak comedy.
What makes it go into the stratosphere is  "you can just do easy raids".

Do you have an argument in there somewhere or are you just typing words in an order that seems right to you? Yes, 6 hours for FC is a very sensible number which I got from my experience as a not terribly experienced raider. As Cyninja.2954 kindly pointed out, this is what my weekly clears look like. And yes, after doing the achievements you can just do the easy bosses. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to reiterate the fact that raid rewards are linear, which means the total hour investment doesn't go up no matter how many weekly resets it takes you. Even assuming you don't have guilds that can do full clears in that time, the difficulty among encounters is not homogenous, so if you only do the easy encounters, the total hour investment actually goes down, as opposed to WvW where taking the easy route makes the total hour investment go up. I didn't make this argument in my OP because it's very difficult to quantify, but since some people insist on bringing occult optimizations to the discussion table, there you go.

[Player.2475]

25 minutes ago, Chaba.5410 said:

Mighty Teapot xD
 

 

Good points are being made, but I'd say sPvP is probably a better introduction to WvW than WvW is to sPvP because you spend a lot more time fighting players in comparatively fair match-ups. You can more effectively learn how to fight players when one side doesn't severely outnumber the other, and you will not be scared to get into fights if you slowly learn how to deal with 1v2, 1v3, 1v4, 1v5 in a sterile environment like sPvP without a 50 man zerg around the corner.

Edited December 13, 2023 by Player.2475