Event Reward Feedback

Feature Requests and Game feedback
1

When Diabolist came out, I wanted to get it to 100 for the Orb of Power and because I didn’t yet have a class at 100 that had Fireblade, so I spent about 6000 gems and won the event. There was hardly any competition.

Class Diabolist Event_Pixelized
Class Diabolist Event_Pixelized1066×533 472 KB

I skipped competing for the Slayer event, but decided to compete again when Archmagus came out because I had quite a stockpile of gems and I had 7 Orb of Power, 1 away from Zuul’goth. Perfect reason.

Turns out there was a lot more competition this time…

Class Archmagus Event_Pixelized
Class Archmagus Event_Pixelized2880×1440 926 KB

I used about 10,000 gems this time. My opening move was using Elspeth to kill herself for the yellow/blue gems, which almost always filled my Dawnbringer. Because Archmagus was already at 100 (because I had purchased so many of the last tier), I leveled up Warpriest instead (I went from 32 to 55 – around 1000 experience!) The battles were incredibly fast because I just one shot everything with Dawnbringer, so it was a quick 2 class XP and 2 trophies.

I didn’t have enough gems to go for first place though, and had I wanted to, I would have needed around 2500 gems just to tie. Buying the last tier for 500 gems gives you 20 sigils, which gives you ~41 sigils due to ravens. So how could I have gotten 2500 gems? Well, I would have definitely needed to buy The Motherlode, which at VIP 9 would have given me 2175 gems. I would have spent $100 just to potentially tie myself for first place and get an Orb of Power.

In other words, one Orb of Power would have cost me $100. Well, that’s just silly, because just the past week in the Holiday sales, they were selling 1800 Gems and an Orb of Power for $50. Obviously the developers know that Orbs of Power are used to craft Zuul’goth. I don’t know of anyone who is actually using them on troops.

So what did I end up getting? Two Major Orbs of Wisdom. Now I have 48 of them. Woohoo! Now, aside from all the trophies, class experience, and gold that I got from the quick farming, those 10k gems were kind of wasted.

I think the developers clearly know that people are competing for first place exclusively for the Orb of Power. No one actually cares about that gem reward. I spent 10k gems and I get 400 back? First place spent nearly 13k gems and gets 700 back? It’s just silly to hand gems out as a reward when spending thousands and thousands of gems is the only way to actually get up there in the first place.

But the second point is that an Orb of Power is worth 3 Orbs of Ascension, 3 Orbs of Growth, and 3 Orbs of Wisdom. I’ve had 36 Major Orbs drop in Vaults since I started keeping track. Of those, 13 (36%) were Clan, 11 (31%) were Growth, 10 (28%) were Wisdom, and only 2 (6%) were Ascension. Minor Orbs are similar (except Minor Growth is 44% for me, 28% for Clan, 19% for Wisdom, and 9% for Ascension).

In other words, Ascension Orbs are incredibly rare, less than a 10% chance to get one when you get an Orb. Getting an Orb of Power from an Event reward gets you a guaranteed 3 Major Orbs of the rarest kind. 2nd and 3rd place are identical in Major Orb rewards, they give you two chances at the two Orbs that matter: Ascension and Clan.

So what’s my point? Well, this whole game is gambling, in a way. You open a chest hoping for a mythic. You open a major orb hoping for an ascension orb. The one time you can actually control that is during events where first place gets the holy grail of rewards, yet the “competition” for that is simply who can spend the most gems. I got really lucky the first class event I did, maybe Diabolist just wasn’t popular (could have something to do with that awful trait at summoning a Nightmare, a troop which makes Red gems, for a class that uses a Purple weapon bonus…)

I think a revisit to event rewards would be great. Get rid of the Gem rewards, there’s no need to give gems as a reward when you’re spending gems just to get there. The only place gem rewards makes sense is in Guild Wars. Even in Towers of Doom it’s really dumb, because to get everyone in the guild a better gem reward, everyone needs to buy more gem packs. You’re just spending gems to get less gems in return.

I definitely think Orb of Power should be reserved for first place only, but second place shouldn’t be getting Orbs of Growth and Orbs of Wisdom. Those things are handed out like candy already. Second place should be getting like 2 of every Major Orb (That’s 2/3rd of what first place is getting). Then third place should get 1 of every Major Orb (1/3rd of first place).

3 Likes
2

Potions have wrecked events…fact. if you spend enough you can gain a high LB position. Potions wrecked skill and LBS are now meaningless. They show how much time and cash people are prepared to waste. I have zuul and I am VIP 1. Luckily I was almost there before potions trIed to wreck it for me.

3

Yup.

Working exactly as designed. There’s a psychological factor at play where players will spend more to “preserve” a hard-earned reward, even if it is to their financial detriment. As you correctly mention, leaderboards explain this phenomenon quite clearly.

Won’t happen for reasons listed above. Why strive for first, when second or third is “good enough”?

Also, any endgamer will tell you that the only orb that matters is ascension and that they are swimming in non-ascension orbs of all other types, both major and minor. The devs will never give out ascension orbs as prizes, as that defeats the whole purpose of playing the Chaos Orb game.

Also working exactly as designed. More events where spending determines event performance will very likely be entering the game soon, bank on it.

1 Like
4

The leaderboard is a kind of auction, and anyone who knows money knows that nobody wins an auction. It’s a room full of people who estimate the value of the item. The “winner” is the person who values it the highest. In terms of valuation, that means they have the worst valuation.

In an auction, you can also be valuing other factors. Perhaps the winner thinks the item will gain value in the future. They’ll still make less than a lower bidder would have. Perhaps that’s all they value.

On the GoW leaderboards, you’re competing for dust. There is no winner.

2 Likes
5

As someone that won a Power Orb Frostmage Weekend, I can tell you the power orb wasn’t dust to me.

6

Have you ever come in first in ranked pvp? I was under the impression you don’t like competitions, if I’m wrong I apologize. Seems strange to comment on a type of gameplay that’s completely optional, which you yourself would never willingly participate, if that’s the case.

8

No worries. I don’t mind competitions, in general. Stacked or biased competitions really irk me, though. I’ve mentioned this in a past thread, but I don’t currently play PvP because the rewards are too weak for the time investment. Moving optimum gold farming to Explore was the final nail in that coffin. That said, my personal opinion is that is this issue is going to be resolved by the devs soon (by no later than 5.0).

Removing my personal perspective from the situation, and looking at this from a purely analytical situation, the tea leaves are pretty easy to read and this thread already picks up on most of them.

Everyone in this thread already appears to agree that leaderboards are about gem spending for placement for featured prizes. I don’t believe that’s up for debate. The devs more than assuredly have tons of data supporting that assertion. We also know that most new features being developed require monetization in some way to justify development.

Knowing that the devs surely see that leaderboards bring in solid income, they would want to expand on that, right?

We know that:

– PvP is due for a rework. From the 4.7 patch notes, the likely location of the PvP revamp will be at the arena.
– Salty has said on a recent stream that the matchmaking system is currently scheduled for full replacement and in development.
– Sirrian has said multiple times on past dev QA streams that he wanted to redesign PvP to be more “engaging”, “competitive”, and “rewarding”.

So, if one considers the concept of the new Arena to be more like traditional RPG colloseum/arenas, why wouldn’t the devs apply the leaderboard concept there? Why wouldn’t the devs offer something new and shiny (that’s not orbs or gems) of significant value and then have players of equivalent strength/power compete for them in brackets to generate income?

From a personal perspective, I’m grumbling over the potential of another likely biased competition entering the game. On the other hand, from a business perspective, I’m have a hard time coming up any compelling argument on why the devs wouldn’t do this in the upcoming updates to monetize the PvP revamp.

2 Likes
9

Nope on Xbox it was high too and the person had already crafted Zul. First was like 50k and 2nd was only like 28k so not sure why people keep going.

1 Like
10

Kinda sounds like the end of GW to me :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:.

Maybe it’s the reason they can say,

1 Like
11

Pvp LB has always been a demonstration of the ability to endure monotony provided you have the time and inclination to do so. Top rewards are ingots you don’t need. A very unappealing game mode that holds appeal only to those (previously) who believe trophy count means something. It doesn’t, and nor do most LBS because skill has long since been replaced by gem funded potion boosting. Wars is the last bastion of true competition in gems. Lose that and it’s over.

4 Likes