Hello, Tyrians!
Throughout this year, the Competitive team has been running beta tests to improve how scoring works in World vs. World (WvW). The focus of the betas has been to shift score generation toward tangible player actions like sieging, capturing objectives, and killing players while moving away from passive mechanics like owning objectives over time that can happen whether players are involved or not.
After the first beta, we shared our findings in a retrospective posted on our forums. Today, we're here to discuss our feedback and changes based on the second War Score beta we ran during the matchup in May. This beta included new placement-based match rewards, a series of scoring adjustments, and the addition of points awarded for upgrading objectives.
Balancing Active and Passive Play
While the first beta started with zero passively gained points aside from supply deliveries, we agreed with players that defending objectives was not adequately rewarding. In response, we adjusted to a good mix of score accrual from holding objectives that still encouraged interaction from enemy teams. Some points were added back to holding tier 3 objectives, but a larger number of points were added to objective tier-ups. This created contention that players could expect and play around instead of having all objectives constantly trickling points.
So how was the balance? After fixing some extreme outliers—dolyak’s deliveries, for instance—we landed on a much healthier spread in Beta 2 compared to Beta 1:
Objective captures resulted in roughly 30% of all War Score generated.
Player combat was about 25% of all War Score generated.
Progress ticks accounted for 5% of the total, but combined with upgrades, holding objectives jumps to 15%.
The single largest source of War Score generation was keep captures followed closely by player kills.
For reference, the score breakdown for normal gameplay outside of the betas is roughly 40% player combat and 35% passive objective ticks with objective assaults being only 9% of the total score generation.
Adjustments for Beta 3
Dolyak deliveries are still on the watchlist. Supply is the lifeblood of WvW, so we're very hesitant to remove scoring from dolyaks entirely even if they do provide a challenge for balancing passive score generation. We will continue to adjust their point value. Additionally, while guard kills do add some flavor with a low barrier to interaction, their total score value outweighs their mechanical contribution to the game mode, so they will no longer reward War Score in Beta 3.
One mechanic in the beta that hasn't had much attention is scaling score based on player counts. The intent was to encourage player congregation, but the system has been overly complex to balance and not easily understood. Plus, the majority of points being scored were coming from objectives that already had naturally incrementing point values.
Therefore, for Beta 3, we will be removing player count and objective type/tier scaling multipliers for simplicity, though the capability will still be there if we want to bring it back.
Beta 3 will include the return of placement-based match rewards, placement-based skirmish rewards, more balance changes, and boosted points for defensive player kills. For defensive actions, smaller areas around objectives will be used instead of the entire sector.
Another exciting new feature to look forward to is an in-game breakdown of War Score sources. We believe that if there are rewards attached to winning, players deserve more insight into what results in victory and the ability to compare against opponents. We're looking forward to your feedback on these additions!
What's Next for WvW?
At the end of the War Score betas, we're going to have new tech that we can leverage, regardless of whether we permanently adopt the adjusted scoring paradigms or not. This would include keeping the new in-game match scoring breakdown and placement-based rewards locked in to continue incentivizing players to care about scoring. Lastly, don't forget we're also developing a new WvW borderlands map alongside the community. For a refresher on that and our upcoming WvW initiatives, here's a recap of what our Game Director, Josh Davis, spoke about in June:
Beta 3 will begin in the middle of a matchup, so we want to make you aware in advance. We're looking forward to hearing your feedback about our latest changes to War Score when you get to experience it in WvW during Beta 3 running from August 11 until September 4. We'll see you in the Mists!