Arenanet have listed their plans for World vs World Scoring Overhaul.
Hey guys, as most of your are probably aware, Scoring Improvements won over QoL improvements in the last poll. So now it’s time to delve deeper into what that means.
We want to improve scoring for a few big reasons:
Changes to Match Structure:
Hey guys, as most of your are probably aware, Scoring Improvements won over QoL improvements in the last poll. So now it’s time to delve deeper into what that means.
We want to improve scoring for a few big reasons:
- Reduce the need for 24 hour coverage by reducing the effects of off-hours capping (night capping)
- It’s not okay that the time periods with the smallest number of active players have the largest impact on the score
- Of course we don’t want to alienate players who play during these period, off-hours coverage will still matter, it just will no longer be the primary factor in determining which world wins any given matchup
- Reduce the number of runaway matches
- That feeling of hopelessness when your team is down 100,000 points after a single day
- Give players a real opportunity to make a comeback
- Matches are often decided in the first few days, making playing in the final days feel pointless
- In conjunction with population rebalancing, updating Scoring allows us to decide a winner of a match more fairly, and thus reward players more fairly
- Currently we can’t give out worthwhile rewards for winning, as most match-ups are already decided before they begin
Changes to Match Structure:
- We’ll split the week long matches into 2 hour time slices we are calling ‘Skirmishes’
- Warscore is used to determine the winner of a Skirmish
- Skirmishes award varying amounts of Victory Points based on placement
- Victory Points are used to determine Match victor
- When a Skirmish ends, Warscore is reset, but actual map-state remains unchanged
- Winning a Skirmish by a small margin, or a large margin, awards the same number of victory points.
- This keeps the winning and losing scores closer together, allowing the losing worlds a fighting chance
- Teams will still want to win as many time slices as possible, off-hours coverage is still important, but less dominant
- While the above change takes steps to bring the value of off-hours coverage in-line, there’s a good chance it’ll still be overvalued. If that’s the case (and we’ll eventually poll on this), then we have plans for an additional system.
- This is the Action Level – Victory Point Multiplier system
- This system would multiply the Victory Points awarded by Skirmishes based on map populations and time of day.
- During prime time hours, the multiplier would always be at it’s maximum of 3.
- During off hours, the multiplier might stay at 3 or drop to 2 or 1, depending on on activity level.
- It’s important to include map populations as a factor, to make the system more fair for off hours players and its important to include time-of-day as a factor to prevent a winning team from trying to keep the score muliplier low by exiting WvW
- Last Stand describes the final day of any week long matchup
- During Last Stand, Skirmish placement Victory Points are multiplied
- This is intended to make the last day of the match as exciting as the first, and provide a final comeback mechanic for teams that are behind
- This will guarantee that every objective is grants at least one score pulse before it can be flipped by another team.
- Objective Score will be reduce by 1/3rd since they’d be ticking 3x as often. This keeps the relative score from all sources the same.
- Reward Track points will also be ticking 3x as often, and likewise be decreased by 1/3rd.
- Each tier of objective upgrade increases the amount of score per tick
- The goal is to incentivize defending your upgraded objectives and assaulting opposing upgraded objectives
- Capturing an objective awards immediate score.
- If the objective is upgraded it is worth additional score.
- The amount of score earned from PPK will be increased, so that it contributes more to the overall score.
- As a rough number, PPK may increase to 3-5 points, rather than 1, with diminishing returns on killing players who have been alive for less than 5 minutes.
- Warscore for Caravan Kills, Caravan Delivery and Sentry Capture should increase by at a similar rate as PPK.
- Many of these new systems and changes will also necessitate updates to the UI, to display all this new information.
- Once we have these scoring updates in, we can look at adding placement rewards for Skirmishes and Matches.
