Greetings, gamers!
The Competitive team is excited to talk about an upcoming event we'll be running during the month of March! As we've talked about in the past, one of our priorities is to align player goals when it comes to winning and make winning feel important to teams. On the road to reaching this goal, we've made several changes to scoring in World vs. World (WvW) in the past. We've made updates to victory points and adjusted the points gained from objectives, both per tick and on capture, but now we're looking at changing how War Score is gained.
Before we dive into the details, it is important to note that the changes we're making for this event are not final. We'll be looking for and gathering as much feedback as possible from the community, and we will make updates or even fully roll back changes as needed.
What Is War Score, Exactly?
War Score is the term for the points you currently gain from capturing and holding on to objectives. These points accumulate over the course of a skirmish—a two-hour window in WvW—and at the end of each skirmish. Victory points are awarded to teams based on that score, which in turn accumulates over the course of the week. We want to change how War Score is gained throughout the skirmish period while incentivizing and rewarding more active gameplay. To achieve this, we have some War Score rebalancing changes that we'll be beta testing in an event in the near future!
During this test, we'll be removing the points gained from holding objectives. This sounds like a big change, and it is, but we're going to add it back in several different places. You'll earn points for taking part in multiple different activities in WvW as either a defender or an attacker while ultimately helping your team achieve victory. You can get points for things like killing guards, building siege equipment, and downing and resurrecting players. The purpose of these changes is to give more agency to players when it comes to how their team is performing in the Mist War while not relying so much on passive progress ticks. That being said, it'll still be extremely important to hold on to objectives and participate in actively defending the objectives you own, as you can generate large amounts of War Score for your team during defense events. Additionally, the points gained from capturing objectives will be increased. Several actions that grant War Score will also scale by objective type, upgrade level, and the number of defenders in the area.
Schedule Change
Currently, new teams are created during the first week of each month; however, for this test, we'll be moving team creation a week earlier, starting on February 27. This means you'll need to have the correct guild selected for team creation before lockout on Monday, February 23. This test will run for about five weeks, with the next team-creation period returning to its normal schedule on April 3, which will mark the end of this test.
Quality-of-Life Updates
We're also planning to make some quality-of-life updates to a few WvW systems alongside this test, including allowing waypoints in your home borderland and Eternal Battleground spawn keeps without needing to upgrade and a change to help cut down on players being stuck in their spawn keep versus overwhelming forces on Eternal Battlegrounds. We will also be adding access to the newly released Infinite Utility Primer and Infinite Metabolic Primer via WvW, as we mentioned on the forums. The full notes on these changes will be found in the February 24 release notes.
What Comes Next?
Before signing off, we want to give a brief overview of some other WvW work that we have planned. During the beta test, we'll be paying close attention to the amount of War Score being generated from the new sources to see how they're performing relative to our expectations. We plan to run a second beta test of the system with these War Score adjustments alongside another new system: end-of-match rewards. As mentioned earlier, we want to make winning a match feel more important to teams, and additional incentives for match placement are one element of that. After the second test is complete, we'll reevaluate the state of War Score distribution, and if we're happy with the result, the changes will stay enabled. Otherwise, we'll continue to iterate on the system through beta-event tests until we feel that it meets our goals. End-of-match rewards will be permanently enabled once we're confident that the updated War Score system is a good representation of playing WvW with the intent to win.
End-of-match rewards are a good reason to care about the match at large, but we also want to reward players for their accolades during smaller chunks of time. With that in mind, we'll be looking to create a similar reward system on a per-skirmish level to better align with individual play sessions. Log on, play for a skirmish, and get some cool stuff.
Further down the road, we also plan to look at the participation system with many of the same intentions as the War Score updates: rewarding players for active gameplay while removing some of the passivity of the current system.
These plans are largely focused on updating reward structures and incentives to better align with active gameplay, but we're also looking into new content ideas. While there aren't any specifics to share just yet, we're thinking about ways to add new gameplay experiences to WvW. Whether that will be by refreshing existing mechanics or adding new things entirely—i.e., new events—we'll likely want to leverage a similar beta test and iteration cycle for these new ideas, but our goal is to find things that will be positive permanent additions to WvW.
As always, we're on the lookout for smaller quality-of-life adjustments or mechanical tweaks to improve the overall gameplay experience and flow of the game mode for the future, and your feedback helps shape the direction of those changes.
Happy gaming! We'll see you in the Mists!