Either remove rewards from PvP or just reward winners

[Luthan.5236]

At least the seasonal achievements should be removed. They incentive playing focused on getting them as time-efficient as possible. Especially in the mini season therefore I like to just get myself killed if after the first 1-2 rounds it seems that we can't win anymore. (No reason to try in the other rounds. Would only prolong the match. Better to lose it fast. Then trying another one where our team might pwn instead.)

This is efficient. And of course I want the few AP from that achievements.

Can be similar for the rewards from the pips. Though ... imo the game mode there is a bit more fun. Can be more fun to still try hard even if you seem to have lost. And the rewards can ge gotten from other game modes as well. (Well most of it. But for the warlords armor skin you only need a few chests.) The AP on the other hand can only be gotten if you repeatedly complete the seasonal achievements until you have maxed them out.

I would prefer if there were no rewards at all. Would be less pressure and you could concentrate more on having fun. At least they should remove them from ranked. (Maybe rewards only in unranked.) Then there would be still a good amount of work needed to be done - when winnning gives more pips than losing. On the other hand the ranked people that actually care about rank (I do not care!) would not complain and flame others when they play so bad and are only there for rewards.

So basically swap ranked with unranked regarding the rewards. (Just leave the ranking for unranked. and the different map rotation - no Spirit Watch. But swap the rewards and the AP achievement stuff or remove the seasonal AP completely.)

Edit: Removing ranked could also be a good idea. Just have one unranked where everyone plays together. For people that want to play "competitive" there are still the tournaments. + they could organize own matches and private tournaments in those custom arenas.

[Drakonhammer.2148]

@Trevor Boyer.6524 said:The ideology being discussed in this thread concerning rewards in wealth and incentive is completely off the mark and entirely wrong.

The truth is that truly competitive players don't care how much or how little gold they make. What they are really after is clout. Even if the MAT had absolutely no rewards, the truly competitive, the best players, would still go to compete over clout.

In other words, adjusting rewards has absolutely nothing to do with anything outside of the idea that:

1. Increasing wealth rewards brings in non competitive AP/Skin/Gold hunters who will leave and never come back once they've obtained a goal.
2. Decreasing wealth rewards will make those players disappear.
3. Remove all rewards entirely, and you'd see who the real pvp community was by who stayed to continue playing for the game and for clout.

If there were only non-PvPers and PvPers, and nobody inbetween, I'd agree with you, but as someone who plays a bit of everything and does enjoy the purely competitive elements and getting better at the game mechanically - outdoing other players and yourself - PvP would feel empty in some ways without those rewards. Gold I'd be okay without, albeit a little unhappy since it helps me get certain items in PvE and WvW easier, but I like my cosmetics a lot and I don't have as much time to spend on the game anymore as an adult. Making PvP rewards worse would be pushing my time investment towards high end PvE and WvW more to get what I need to keep up in those, I don't imagine I am alone in this.

[Khalisto.5780]

i hope devs don't listen to this

it's like a player forcing his own ideas into a whole community

[Master Ketsu.4569]

Removing rewards entirely just instantly makes PvP dead. They did that in Tera for a gear season where none of the PvP rewards were worth spit, and it killed the queue times - something like hour long PvP queues became "normal". It's one of those ideas that might sound good on paper but is in fact awful in execution.

An infinitely higher IQ move would be to increase rewards for winning, but leave the rewards for losing as they currently are. This way the overall reward is increased, but packaged with the incentive to play better / not just troll + afk.

[georgessj.4198]

@Khalisto.5780 said:i hope devs don't listen to this

it's like a player forcing his own ideas into a whole community

Why not? what do you have to lose? the pvp experience? the fun? fighting along with friends? your achievements? OOOOOORR...........your infinite amount of gold from botting?

[Khalisto.5780]

@georgessj.4198 said:

@"Khalisto.5780" said:i hope devs don't listen to this

it's like a player forcing his own ideas into a whole community

Why not? what do you have to lose? the pvp experience? the fun? fighting along with friends? your achievements? OOOOOORR...........your infinite amount of gold from botting?

Why not? Cuz the whole topic is built upon false accusations

What do i have to lose? A lot, currently i'm gathering currencies for skyscale and I'm doing it through reward tracks. I could do it fully in pve, but it's boring af and makes me wanna die. If i get no pips from losing it wold actually hurt me so much, because i still want to do it as fast as possible.

"Rewarding people for losing makes absolutely no sense, getting better should be your reward and if you can't stand that...then don't go PvP it's that simple"

That's the part he forces his opnion into a whole community, which botters me a lot cuz reminds me when wvw players did the same accusing eotm for wvw being garbage and totally killed the most fun map this game ever had.

and then this

"You should go PvP because you enjoy fighting other players first of all...not because of the reward itself, how can you expect the gamemode to work when you invite that kind of ideology?"

i really doubt any pve player would come to this mode to farm gold when the liquid gold hour is probably less than top pve farms, like i don't do stuff in pve even if it's better cuz i think it's boring.

Bots come for gold? Yes

But they stay cuz somehow, even when it's clearly as day for 98% of the community those accounts playing obscene amout of matches for over an year now are bots, but arena net still don't ban them. I doubt it would take more than 30 min to check those numbers and ban all those account from pvp for the next season, they can come back after that, then flag those account to check if they're playing 24/7 and perma ban them

[georgessj.4198]

What do i have to lose? A lot, currently i'm gathering currencies for skyscale and I'm doing it through reward tracks. I could do it fully in pve, but it's boring af and makes me wanna die. If i get no pips from losing it wold actually hurt me so much, because i still want to do it as fast as possible.

He said rewards probably meaning gold and NOT reward tracks that give acount bound items or dance emotes or scyscales!The rest of the things you said are irrelevant to the question what you have to lose if you are not botting.

[Dami.5046]

This has troll stamped all over it.The only mode that rewards need fixing are WvW.

[Khalisto.5780]

@georgessj.4198 said:

What do i have to lose? A lot, currently i'm gathering currencies for skyscale and I'm doing it through reward tracks. I could do it fully in pve, but it's boring af and makes me wanna die. If i get no pips from losing it wold actually hurt me so much, because i still want to do it as fast as possible.

He said rewards probably meaning gold and NOT reward tracks that give acount bound items or dance emotes or scyscales!The rest of the things you said are irrelevant to the question what you have to lose if you are not botting.

irrelevant to whom lol

Quick math for you, a loss gives you 15 silver, so 7 losses would give you 1.05g, bots have 50% ish winrate and play 2k ish matches/season. Now 1000/7 would give you exactly the amount of gold they make for losses over 45 days if you round it down to 1g every 7 losses which is 143 gold. Now do you think they would give up botting over -3g/day.

[georgessj.4198]

@Khalisto.5780 said:

@georgessj.4198 said:

What do i have to lose? A lot, currently i'm gathering currencies for skyscale and I'm doing it through reward tracks. I could do it fully in pve, but it's boring af and makes me wanna die. If i get no pips from losing it wold actually hurt me so much, because i still want to do it as fast as possible.

He said rewards probably meaning gold and NOT reward tracks that give acount bound items or dance emotes or scyscales!The rest of the things you said are irrelevant to the question what you have to lose if you are not botting.

irrelevant to whom lol

Quick math for you, a loss gives you 15 silver, so 7 losses would give you 1.05g, bots have 50% ish winrate and play 2k ish matches/season. Now 1000/7 would give you exactly the amount of gold they make for losses over 45 days if you round it down to 1g every 7 losses which is 143 gold. Now do you think they would give up botting over -3g/day.

thats why i agree with the man saying remove rewards from PvP :)

[Khalisto.5780]

@georgessj.4198 said:

@Khalisto.5780 said:

@georgessj.4198 said:

What do i have to lose? A lot, currently i'm gathering currencies for skyscale and I'm doing it through reward tracks. I could do it fully in pve, but it's boring af and makes me wanna die. If i get no pips from losing it wold actually hurt me so much, because i still want to do it as fast as possible.

He said rewards probably meaning gold and NOT reward tracks that give acount bound items or dance emotes or scyscales!The rest of the things you said are irrelevant to the question what you have to lose if you are not botting.

irrelevant to whom lol

Quick math for you, a loss gives you 15 silver, so 7 losses would give you 1.05g, bots have 50% ish winrate and play 2k ish matches/season. Now 1000/7 would give you exactly the amount of gold they make for losses over 45 days if you round it down to 1g every 7 losses which is 143 gold. Now do you think they would give up botting over -3g/day.

thats why i agree with the man saying remove rewards from PvP :)

Then you probabaly fighting him v1 till they shutdown servers cuz ppl would just log in for Ats

[Daishi.6027]

OMG! LMAO! LMAO!

Yes! Please do this! Better yet remove everything except for the top players, and large win streaks.

A-net you have a duty to your game and players. This will handily clean up the scene and improve quality of play significantly. Queue times will go up, but that is a worth while venture when it will improve match quality.

Please A-net if you can only do 1 change before 2022 let this be it.

Do it, do it! :}

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

@Trevor Boyer.6524 said:The ideology being discussed in this thread concerning rewards in wealth and incentive is completely off the mark and entirely wrong.

The truth is that truly competitive players don't care how much or how little gold they make. What they are really after is clout. Even if the MAT had absolutely no rewards, the truly competitive, the best players, would still go to compete over clout.

In other words, adjusting rewards has absolutely nothing to do with anything outside of the idea that:

1. Increasing wealth rewards brings in non competitive AP/Skin/Gold hunters who will leave and never come back once they've obtained a goal.
2. Decreasing wealth rewards will make those players disappear.
3. Remove all rewards entirely, and you'd see who the real pvp community was by who stayed to continue playing for the game and for clout.

I do believe that players stay for the sake of enjoying combat with other players, and the reason veteran's, myself included have stayed for so long is because of that idea...

but I think incentive to drive new growth is also key. It's not exactly clear how one could structure incentive. For me what I saw a lot of incentive for is the drive for social interaction...Back in the day, The awesome Duel Arena/Hot-join community is one of the reasons people who were new would stick around and come back, because they made friends and enemies and all kinds of things happened there.

Gold and rewards are bit more secular...there exist a large portion of PVE players that literally do not care about friendship and only to farm gold, and those people's only incentive to do spvp is just for gold and nothing more...it's a strange behavior and whether that actually helps or hinders SPVP as a whole is another story.

I think the removal of gold and all the other things happening to SPVP balance would just cascade the process of dead-game-mode rather then help it, because the duel arenas don't exist anymore (they do exist it's just all the people that kept it alive have left) so not much is left to drive new growth. I think what needs to happen is some major systemic changes to how social, reward, and balance systems work to facilitate growth.

Something also interesting to look into, is the role of AT and whether the implementation of it did something or did nothing. I see AT's as a failure and that even heavy monetary incentive is not enough to get players to play the game and yearn to play the game well. It's something to think about.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

@JusticeRetroHunter.7684 said:

@"Trevor Boyer.6524" said:The ideology being discussed in this thread concerning rewards in wealth and incentive is completely off the mark and entirely wrong.

The truth is that truly competitive players don't care how much or how little gold they make. What they are really after is clout. Even if the MAT had absolutely no rewards, the truly competitive, the best players, would still go to compete over clout.

In other words, adjusting rewards has absolutely nothing to do with anything outside of the idea that:

1. Increasing wealth rewards brings in non competitive AP/Skin/Gold hunters who will leave and never come back once they've obtained a goal.
2. Decreasing wealth rewards will make those players disappear.
3. Remove all rewards entirely, and you'd see who the real pvp community was by who stayed to continue playing for the game and for clout.

I do believe that players stay for the sake of enjoying combat with other players, and the reason veteran's, myself included have stayed for so long is because of that idea...

but I think incentive to drive new growth is also key. It's not exactly clear how one could structure incentive. For me what I saw a lot of incentive for is the drive for social interaction...Back in the day, The awesome Duel Arena/Hot-join community is one of the reasons people who were new would stick around and come back, because they made friends and enemies and all kinds of things happened there.

Exactly.

Right now we have a system that has removed any want or need to utilize any of the guild functions that were originally designed for pvp. Originally, they had designed the use of "Create a guild team and name it" for the purpose of Season 1 and Season 2 five man premade guild league, where rankings where based on Guild Teams instead of individual rating. This system ENCOURAGED players to meet people and join guilds so they could make and participate in guild teams. Back then, joining the community had an entirely different feel than it does now. Back then, you joined and messed around in unranked until you realize "Oh man, I need to meet some dudes and join a guild or maybe make my own guild and recruit some dudes, if I want to participate in this game's ranked modes." This older system encouraged positive social interaction & cohesion amongst the community and gave them every reason to do so. It established a platform reason for making friends with people and forming guilds in a game named Guild Wars.

But after they removed all of this and turned ranked queue down to solo/duo only, it created a socially isolated play dynamic where there was no want or need to communicate with anyone past the one or two guys know that you like to duo queue with. It's no surprise the community has no cohesion at this point. It completely dissolved the feeling of an mmorpg where the entire purpose of a person buying the game named "Guild Wars" was to go participate in some kind of team oriented pvp while they wear some guild standard of their buddies above their head that they are proud of. We don't have any of this any longer.

Even in AT 5 man premade play, there is no need or want or requirement to form social guilds that form teams to enter. The LFG is great for forming groups last minute, but again this is a double bladed sword where in the long term, it works to avoid social cohesion rather to encourage it. At this point with how the game modes function, your guild is the LFG and people only communicate based on some historical knowledge they know about each other's skill levels, rather than even a shred of human decency.

It would be better if they would:

1. Remove ranked mode entirely and move ranked rewards to unranked, and leave unranked a mixed queue system. This way pve grinders can head on down to unranked with the rest of us who are practicing or playing for the casual funzies. No one is going to match manipulate in unranked when it has nothing to do with clout.
2. Transfer the rating/badge icon system to ATs. Each month will soft reset rating/badge icon exactly the same way it does now, but it will happen after MATs are complete. The rating/badge system will work EXACTLY the same as it does now, but only AT games played work towards those ratings gained & lost.
3. Due to 5 man premade AT play being where the real clout gain is, it will encourage players to once again have a real reason to communicate and organize with each other again. It would encourage the formation of guilds, general community cohesion. There should be a separate leaderboard that displays actual guild team rankings again, based on monthly AT seasonal performance. This leaderboard wouldn't even need to give any special rewards at the end of an AT monthly season. It just needs to be there to display clout, which is what the real reward is for any competitive player to begin with. And this wouldn't take away from any of the MAT's fire or importance, it would simply stack onto it, to put more into competitive perspective of our community.

Gold and rewards are bit more secular...there exist a large portion of PVE players that literally do not care about friendship and only to farm gold, and those people's only incentive to do spvp is just for gold and nothing more...it's a strange behavior and whether that actually helps or hinders SPVP as a whole is another story.

Well that's what I mean with my suggestions, just give THOSE people a reason to go away to unranked. Leave the AT scene for the people who don't even care about rewards past having good strong competitive games, and gaining competitive clout. MAT rewards are great but tbh no one really cares about that. They care about forging a personal history of clout. Bots and pve farmers have no place in this environment and I'm sure I speak for most of the hardcore pvp fan base when I say that: "I have absolutely no problem with creating two different fish tanks here."

I think the removal of gold and all the other things happening to SPVP balance would just cascade the process of dead-game-mode rather then help it, because the duel arenas don't exist anymore (they do exist it's just all the people that kept it alive have left) so not much is left to drive new growth. I think what needs to happen is some major systemic changes to how social, reward, and balance systems work to facilitate growth.

You're absolutely correct on that, and this is a discussion that if truly excavated, would be worth a college thesis write & read, so I won't even attempt to go into it all here. The only thing I will say, is that I truly believe the right direction at this point is to create two different fish tanks. We need 1 tank to be habitable for the people who want a lower skill cap environment while they grind and have fun experiencing the game, without running into top tier players while doing that. Then we need a 2nd tank that lures all the old veteran top players over to more hardcore pvp, so they will be against each other and not clapping on new/casual players all day.

As much is obvious that the algorithm is not doing this job anymore in 2021. The answer is to make two different fish tanks that both separately have lures in them. One tank luring the new & casual so they can reward grind and meme around. The other for the veteran try hard clout chasing.

Something also interesting to look into, is the role of AT and whether the implementation of it did something or did nothing. I see AT's as a failure and that even heavy monetary incentive is not enough to get players to play the game and yearn to play the game well. It's something to think about.

As a person who runs 2 or 3 ATs a day, I can say that the current AT format does pull the hardcore base in for participation, and it does lure new/casuals to try and form LFG teams and enter. But the large majority of those new/casual players don't stick around because they absolutely cannot hang with p2+ teams in ATs who have been doing this for years, and then they end up heading on back to unranked/ranked.

To further exasperate my previous points made, one big problem is that we have 3 different queues. We have unranked, ranked, ATs. Between these 3 different modes, all demographics of players have some reason to play each one. <- In theory this sounds good but in application this is bad. At this point in 2021, we just need two distinct separate fish tanks. One tank to give all the purpose in the world for new/casuals to go into, with very little reason for the veteran top tiers to go into. And then the 2nd tank to give all the reason for veteran top tiers to go into, with very little reason for the new/casual to go into. Then it's up to the news & casuals to decide WHEN they are ready to leave the 1st fish tank and begin participating in the other. This would solve an incredibly large amount of problems that we have right now.

However it is that this could be accomplished, even if it isn't from my suggestions, this is what Arenanet should be discussing and evolving, if there are even any further plans to work on this game mode at all.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

@"Trevor Boyer.6524" said:But after they removed all of this and turned ranked queue down to solo/duo only, it created a socially isolated play dynamic where there was no want or need to communicate with anyone past the one or two guys know that you like to duo queue with. It's no surprise the community has no cohesion at this point. It completely dissolved the feeling of an mmorpg where the entire purpose of a person buying the game named "Guild Wars" was to go participate in some kind of team oriented pvp while they wear some guild standard of their buddies above their head that they are proud of. We don't have any of this any longer.

Ya dude, In addition, I also feel like the ability to que anywhere in the world, rather then just the pvp lobby has also further dissolved that dynamic. In the past before the PVP lobby was reworked, everyone basically had to come to the pvp lobby and the design of the lobby itself placed you together with all other players upon entry, so you actually saw physically that the community was alive...people chatting, forming teams etc. Right now if you were to join the PVP lobby from the world, it brings you to this portal, where nobody is standing at, so I suppose new players already get a feeling isolation. Then those new players have very little to go off of to interact with other players because the systems aren't in place anymore for that to happen much.

I of course had another hectic argument in the PVE forum about how the added convenience of certain systems was actually hurting the game rather then helping it. Like I totally understand that convenience is quality of life, but it comes at a cost...a hidden systemic cost that isn't so apparent to see at first but over time it's slowly eats away at things that keep the game alive. I see this problem as being very similar to today's age of cellphone obsession. People would rather text each other, rather then go out and be physically together. It's convenient to watch movies from your house via Netflix, but the movie theaters brought people together and created new bonds and re-enforced friendships.

All I can really say is that as someone who's seen this game's history play out over the decade, I see the exact behavior you describe. This dynamic has indeed been lost over time, and it's not absolutely clear why, but something has to change in some fundamental way to get the dynamic to at least stop hemorrhaging players.

As a person who runs 2 or 3 ATs a day, I can say that the current AT format does pull the hardcore base in for participation, and it does lure new/casuals to try and form LFG teams and enter. But the large majority of those new/casual players don't stick around because they absolutely cannot hang with p2+ teams in ATs who have been doing this for years, and then they end up heading on back to unranked/ranked.

True. My experience with AT at Plat1-2 level has been either our team completely ...and I mean COMPLETLY destroying the opposing team 500-0, to the point where they quit or don't even know why they lost, or our team getting absolutely demolished by P3+ players. P1-2 players at least know why they lost, and have hope to participate and get better, but man if someone is in these silver/bronze teams the gams are just that hopeless that I actually feel bad for participating against them...

I think you mentioned this solution, that AT's should become the new ranked, and that players should be at least ranked up against each other in similar skill level so that at least bronze/silvers can progressively face harder and harder teams so that they aren't just nuked from orbit upon entry by 55 Dragons or whatever ESL team. I don't know if it would work or how it would work (to determine player skill level) but at this point it's better then nothing and might be worth a try idk.

[Stand The Wall.6987]

how they should've done pvp in the beginning: mostly everything is centered around your guild hall (basically a private server with the owners setting the mode and team size). you can attack others, defend your own, and each time you win you get upgrade points/ some monetary stuff. when you win enough you can upgrade and if you lose too much you get downgraded. there has to be risk if there is to be reward. have a giant physical guild ladder with a bunch of different stats. a duel arena where you only enter combat with people you bow to. have a couple of public servers with differing game modes and team sizes where anyone can spectate. create as many places as possible for people to gather and feel like a community. the hotjoin server 001 community (was tiny but it was still a place people gathered) was awesome. i mean, 7/10 the matches were garbage snowballs but still. there was a reason to play the game. now? can't really think of one tbh. the combat is still fun, but i don't have a reason to play more then a few matches here and there.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

@"Stand The Wall.6987" said:how they should've done pvp in the beginning: mostly everything is centered around your guild hall (basically a private server with the owners setting the mode and team size). you can attack others, defend your own, and each time you win you get upgrade points/ some monetary stuff. when you win enough you can upgrade and if you lose too much you get downgraded. there has to be risk if there is to be reward. have a giant physical guild ladder with a bunch of different stats. a duel arena where you only enter combat with people you bow to. have a couple of public servers with differing game modes and team sizes where anyone can spectate. create as many places as possible for people to gather and feel like a community. the hotjoin server 001 community (was tiny but it was still a place people gathered) was awesome. i mean, 7/10 the matches were garbage snowballs but still. there was a reason to play the game. now? can't really think of one tbh. the combat is still fun, but i don't have a reason to play more then a few matches here and there.

^ That would be fun as hell.

I particularly like the idea where it would be more like GW1, where your guild challenges another guild and you enter their hall for combat. Guilds could truly utilize their guild hall decorations to make interesting & unique combat zones for when other guilds invade. And yeah, there could be some kind of special guild leaderboard for something like that.

The framework to design a new mode like this is already laid down. Seems like it would be an easy design to finish. A design to complete the purpose of the name "Guild Wars", but hey what do I know.

[Stand The Wall.6987]

@Trevor Boyer.6524 said:

@"Stand The Wall.6987" said:how they should've done pvp in the beginning: mostly everything is centered around your guild hall (basically a private server with the owners setting the mode and team size). you can attack others, defend your own, and each time you win you get upgrade points/ some monetary stuff. when you win enough you can upgrade and if you lose too much you get downgraded. there has to be risk if there is to be reward. have a giant physical guild ladder with a bunch of different stats. a duel arena where you only enter combat with people you bow to. have a couple of public servers with differing game modes and team sizes where anyone can spectate. create as many places as possible for people to gather and feel like a community. the hotjoin server 001 community (was tiny but it was still a place people gathered) was awesome. i mean, 7/10 the matches were garbage snowballs but still. there was a reason to play the game. now? can't really think of one tbh. the combat is still fun, but i don't have a reason to play more then a few matches here and there.

^ That would be fun as hell.

I particularly like the idea where it would be more like GW1, where your guild challenges another guild and you enter their hall for combat. Guilds could truly utilize their guild hall decorations to make interesting & unique combat zones for when other guilds invade. And yeah, there could be some kind of special guild leaderboard for something like that.

The framework to design a new mode like this is already laid down. Seems like it would be an easy design to finish. A design to complete the purpose of the name "Guild Wars", but hey what do I know.

oh yeah i never considered guild hall decorations haha. that might make for some fruity gameplay.