Nerf GVG Cheatway

omg... AN really sux...
form gw.com : "For that we've crafted the Zaishen Strongbox, a grab bag item that drops when the Guild Lord is killed."
but resigning also kill the GL...
and damage on GL after 28 min doesnt give u the reward xD

Meh it is really not a big issue. It's not like HB was where you would be getting a Zkey every game. Most of the time you get stupid shit like sparklers and flames of balth. The only people who would complain about it are people who haven't/can't gvg.

It's really not that exciting.

8 boxes per win * 65 wins per guild * 6 guilds = 3k+ boxes

The going rate is what, 2e per box?

Then no one will ever see a strong box. Even at 26+ minutes, killing the lord takes a couples seconds. Plenty of time for the other team to resign out. No one will ever get strongboxes because people will just resign to troll them instead of letting their lord die.

Simplest solution is to just add a rating requirement. If the winner of the match doesn't have at least 975 rating, they don't get a box. It's really not a difficult concept, not sure why there's any argument here.

If anything forcing the guild lord kill even helps the exploiters. They have to wait for 2 mins to /resign, but they can kill the lord at any time. If the other team isn't interfering you could actually speed UP the rate at which strongboxes were being farmed.

People will always find a way to exploit the system in order to rake in easy cash. So basically:

Don't forget 8x9000 baltazar faction = 14 zkeys per win.

Basically making 200k every 2-5 minutes. Just by resigning.

If you ARE a low level guild, you get a strongbox with low rewards. BE a high level guild, get a strongbox with higher rewards.
So you have no advantage going down in the ladder, its better to stay high!

Another problem has come to my attention during last nights AT. A.Net had to put in a stipulation that you had to be ranked in the top 1000 in order to get tournament reward points because we had guilds entering and just sitting idle throughout the tournament in order to get points.

Now, every single guild that has played a match is in the top 1000. Therefore, even if you have 0 wins and 1000 losses, you are still eligible for tournament reward points. So guilds can now just join the AT's, sit idle for all rounds while watching TV or something, and gain the 15 RP's for completing the tournament.

Action needs to be taken against these guilds as well. A.Net has already established in the past that this is not acceptable behavior by creating stipulations to get rid of it. So A.Net needs to do something about this as well. Maybe change it from 1000 ranking to needing 1000 or more rating.

No one has really brought this up, but this type of farming also applies to the Zquest.

Yep, its only that the strong box made cheatway so much more profitable and the ladder reset made the cheatway guilds stand out.

Good lord, that is going to be a complex solution. Implementing PvE farming code for a range of guilds and have it affect their strongboxes? I'm going to bet that there's a much simpler solution for this problem somewhere here. Others who have proposals of limiting strongboxes to higher rating ranges or to a certain number in a period of time would probably be more reasonable.

Last I knew, the boxes were going for 2e each on average. That's pretty nice in itself, for those who don't care to gamble on opening them on their own. The price might drop off after a bit, but for the time being, it's a pretty big steal to earn a couple ectos every few minutes for little to no effort.

Bans can eliminate the guilds and accounts that are currently participating in this behavior, but that doesn't mean they can't hop on other guilds or account and do the same thing, or that new players won't eventually try to do this.

By design, R.R. guilds won't be playing against non-R.R. guilds very often at all, so this solution does practically nothing.

Not likely to happen until a system is put in place that could track victories and losses in GvG across multiple games. The only reason that they can do that with RA, CA, and HA is because those matches are strung together. With nothing to string victories together in GvG, the only option is to give players a box for a single win. Even then, well-coordinated R.R. guilds would just adjust the system in such a way that guilds would go for X matches until they resigned. If consecutive wins were not required, the same thing would happen, but it would just take a little longer to accumulate the wins for each box.

The strongboxes were added as an incentive for people to play PvP. Why would we want to stick it on a Z-Coin vendor for PvE players to farm up? That would defeat the original purpose of the item, and it's not like we need to give PvEers more stuff to farm.

Okay, so all you've done is force R.R. guilds to wait five minutes until resigning instead of two.

You already have to wait and face four (or is it five?) other guilds before you can face the same one again. This restriction alone can cause some slowness in the format at times or on levels where opponents of equal caliber are rare. Restricting it to a 24-hour time limit would be a very steep push in limiting how much guilds can play, and would likely hurt others more than it would hurt these offenders.

Increasing the cost of the guild too will also likely be more hurtful to others than these farmers. Sure, you might make it so that the farm isn't necessarily profitable,, but you could ruin some people's desires to even get a hall in the first place for their startup guild.

Pretty much the OP's suggestion, yeah?

Probably the only way that this could be accomplished is by making multiple strongboxes for GvG, and giving them tiers (Champion's Strongbox I, Champion's Strongbox II, etc.) so that different boxes could be rewarded at different levels. Then it becomes a dispute over what rewards should be offered where, what levels the boxes should be available for, etc.

At the lower level, you'll likely end up with a strongbox chocked full of "junk" items like single-point consumables or something, at which point we just have to ask, "Why do we even have a strongbox for this," and following that, "Why didn't we just limit our first strongbox to the levels where the reasonable strongboxes are awarded?"

These are problems of the formats, not of the boxes, I would say. If there was a decent solution for dead hours farmers of an arena, it might have been implemented in the last update. Under the current system, there's not much to do about them but increase the length of the string required for earning a strongbox, which will end up hurting the majority of the playerbase more than the farmers.

Players shouldn't exploit systems when they find them, but loopholes like this should be closed up before they even exist too. You can't say that ANet isn't responsible for the abuse of this system when they skipped putting in more preventative measures to prevent exploitation in the first place.

Can you make 2e every ~7 minutes? How much effort would that take you? Do you think it's worth your time? If there is indeed something that is consistently more profitable than this, then yes, people may cease doing it. I doubt it though, because the amount of actual effort required for R.R. is next to none.

Strongboxes are only awarded for victories before the 28-minute mark, last I knew. This was intentional. The strongbox acts as a prize for those who have aggressive enough play to win the game before the tiebreak kicks in.

@ Shayne..thx for one of the better posts I have seen in quite some time as it addresses many posts w/o bias

I think it's time for a good old rollback and some bans. PvP should not give PvE rewards.

I can't tell if you actually believe yourself or if you're just a troll.

- Refer to drops from Strongboxes, such as tonics, Flames of Balthazar, party items, and minipets as "PvE rewards"

-- Flames of Balthazar give Balthazar Faction, which cannot be acquired in PvE, so how is that a PvE reward?
-- Almost all minipets are acquired from birthday presents, special events, access codes, etc. All of which can be acquired without even entering PvE. How is that a PvE reward? There are some minipets that are only PvE rewards, but that's a pretty small minority.
-- While some tonics are acquired from PvE chests, the majority can still be acquired from the Zaishen Chest and Birthday Presents, neither of which require PvE play. How are tonics in general a PvE reward?
--- Where do you even get the sense of entitlement that these rewards were specifically designed for those dedicated enough to play PvE and only PvE? You seem to feel that the PvE community deserves more shiny pixels than the PvP community, and I don't understand the deep-seated feelings behind that.

- Claim that PvE rewards should be reserved specifically for PvE play.
- Forget the title of the game is "Guild Wars", referring to GvG combat, the very idea this game was first based around.

On the whole, I'm sensing a couple truckloads of jealousy from the hardcore PvE crowd about Strongboxes.


He did address many of the points and pointed out how they would not work. However, any solution to this issue was not offered up.

Although, I suppose that lends itself to the fact that this is a pretty big beast of a problem that has no clear-looking solution outside of removing the boxes, which I personally don't think will happen.

This only proves how big of douches people can be.. When we did GvG with the guild I didn't know of the 2 minute restriction, I though that if the other team resigns, you don't get a box anyway. So when we got rolled by a bloody gold trim, I refused to resign because I thought it would rob them from their box...

What about weapons that can only be obtained from strongboxes which, in turn, can only be acquired by playing PvP?

Minipets and tonics? Please. Worst additions to GW ever.

Well, there are PvP rewards I'd like to have but cannot obtain unless I play PvP. And that's all fair and square. What I don't like is PvE stuff (shiny new weapons) that can be obtained only through PvP. It's pretty simple to understand, actually.

Since PvP rewards are specifically reserved for PvP, why is so bad to have PvE rewards reserved for PvE? Isn't it only fair? How would PvP crowd have reacted if ArenaNet gave rank 9 and 12 Hero emotes for maxing PvE titles? I bet you a stack of ecto they would not approve and the uproar would be massive. Why? Oh maybe because those PvP rewards are specifically reserved for PvP. Maybe. >_>

They played GvG before getting these PvE rewards, am I right? Or was GvG introduced in the same update? Oh, wait. I'm right.

referencing the above post regarding weapons being available only through pvp, this isnt a new concept and has happened for a long time. shield of the dead anyone?

The whole point of the update was primarily to try and push some players from PvE over into PvP, for a couple of days at least it worked quite well as people were eager to get the new rewards. Unfortunately most of the "new" teams got their ass handed to them and have quit again since they couldnt actually win the rewards, proved by the ladder already beginning to show signs of being dead after just 1 week. So even though the update failed to some extent (its still been really good in other ways such as ladder reset), the idea behind it is entirely logical. Put PvE style items in pvp, if the pve'rs want them, they have to pvp.

Your argument about handing out tigers and such as largely irelevant also, i do admit the emote is seen as "cool" by a lot of people, but essentially its just a title. PvE players have their titles, PvP players have theirs and the zaishen title is available to both and it comes with an emote! But in terms of actual items accumulated from playing one format or the other, they are not too different. Ectos in PvE, zkeys in PvP. PvE weapons/armour, or Reward point weapons/armour. The only real exception is consumables, but during holiday events, these regularly appear in PvP anyway...

So far it's more along the lines of "throw in some PvE rewards that people will pay large sums of cash for then farm and abuse the hell out of it for max profit without banning a single person".

If you could remember how the PvP crowd reacted to Sardelac ideas of making emotes for KOABD title track you wouldn't have called my argument irrelevant.
And yes, rank 9is a title. And the reward for achieveing it is its emote. Why no rewards for KOABD title tiers? Maxing 30 titles takes a lot more skill than playing IWAY anyway.

Seriously?

I don't GvG but that's insane.

I don't suspect anything will be done about this "exploit" anytime soon. It has already done a lot of damage. The only solution is to make changes via update then ban accounts.

Everyone knew this would happen, just gotta do what they do with champ points and limit it to a certain guild range, or do regular ladder resets. If you do ladder resets, means grinding for champ range, lose lose situation

TBH, take out the rares from strongboxes and give it party items/alcohol/sweets/green weps/zcoins/zkeys, it's kinda bullshitty move, but it'll stop the box farmers.

So the rewards brought the worst of PvE to PvP I see. Speed clear groups and full on exploiters.

This game is rather dead.

It was already in PvP. It just wasn't as obvious or lucrative.

A rollback might have been a good idea if we were still in maybe the first twelve or so hours of this getting exploited. At this point, these guilds have been doing this for days, and everyone else has been playing the game as they see fit. Rollbacks affect everyone, not just those who are doing this.

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In addition to that, bans for the accounts and guilds that have been involved directly in this activity could also be a reasonable course of action. Bans alone will do little if the exploit remains. This idea has also been brought up by others.

If any action was to be taken on the ill-gotten strongboxes, it would have been a rollback, and should have happened a long time ago. At this point, there's little that can be done about them except hope that they're being hoarded on the abusers' accounts so that they'll be inaccessible if they get banned.

Reason #129 that people don't want to play GvG. The funny part to me is I have suggested rewards for PvP in general in the past and I have had more than a few seasoned players tell me(as well as insult me) that true PvP'ers didn't care about loot. I feel vindicated that the truth was as I suspected it to be: Most players want phat lewtz.

Then they can change the name of the franchise to Random Wars. I like your idea.

GvG has had more cheating going on in it than all the other formats combined. I agree, get rid of the format.

If anyone from anet is reading this thread today is the day where it'll be painfully obvious who the offenders are as they will be doing it all day b/c of the zc.

One guild in particular comes to mind that was created 2 days ago has 27 losses 0 wins...not gonna say their tag but it's on the ladder for anyone to see.

lol

You realize that the rewards are probably being exploited by gold sellers, right? I'm not sure if I'd describe them as "PvPers."

Incidentally, I'm interested in hearing the other 128.



Back on topic: A problem I see with banning is that new accounts are so cheap at this point that with the profit they're making, it's far too easy/cheap to replace them. Even IP banning won't be slow them down that much, I imagine.

AT forfeits losing your guild 25 rating is one way to tank a guild in preparation for this. The only other way is to resign a lot of matches. Perhaps both of these can be used as methods of identifying perpetrators.

It is a problem and a reward at the same time. Accounts are cheap and they are able to buy a new one for less than what they made off the banned account so they really aren't hurt by the ban, but it does slow them down and A.Net gets more money every time they buy a new account to replace the one they banned. Could be a very profitable policy for A.Net to adopt.

You really think they're buying from Anet, though? I don't know how much profit Anet makes off of resold CD keys, and I can only assume that for resold accounts, it's zero.

The gold seller thing makes sense. But, it doesn't change the fact that "PvPers" were doing similar things when tanking ratings, sans loot. What would keep them from getting all the loot on their alt accounts whilst tanking their main accounts. Who's to say that really good players don't like making in game coin on the side?

I am working on the other 128 reasons. I will message you with them as soon as I make them up

I have no idea what you're referring to. Refresh my memory?

1) Strongboxes in their current means of acquisition have caused more harm than good.

2) GvG/HA cannot be fixed by just adding more PvE rewards.

3) Changing the titles was a damn good incentive to start doing RA/Codex(also changing deck rotation once per day).

4) PvP has enough PvE rewards(zkeys/HA chest/z-combat)

5) Even at the z-coin vendor a pvp player can make more z-coins per day than a pve player.

can't really argue with Sauron's logical estimation of anet's historical blunt axe problem solving methods, funny though

and as someone else posted, anet doesn't apologise and doesn't change

still, anet has given a carrot, doesn't mean that the cheats have to bite, it's just a depressing aspect of human nature

remove the new rewards, balth and zquest bonus is enough

oh, and the fun

or they could design the game a little better to avoid this type of thing. how about this: disable being able to resign for the first 5 minutes of a GvG Battle. If people want to rage quit, let them. If ANet doesn't want to do this then go with Sauron's idea.

I'm actually of two minds about this one. Setting aside the issue of match manipulation for the moment:

- These players are engaging in economic behavior that benefits a lot of players. The items that come out of the strongboxes are desired, and so if you want to buy the item with existing wealth you win as a result of the price decline.

- By driving down prices, these players are cheapening the reward for people that play the game legitimately.

My sense is that the best solution would be to rework how the highly desired items such as mini Guild Lords and EL Tonics are distributed. Enforcement isn't going to solve this problem, as much as we might wish for that to be the solution. Giving out the highly desirable rewards in a box that can only be acquired by winning ATs would at least do a better job of rewarding the "right" players.

removing GVG is a bit much in the least and would kind of go against the game being called "Guild Wars' in th first place however, if it was made simple to something like a team or so of anything even gvg and HA that the strong boxes have a lower chance of spawning etc after a set number of consecutive wins or so. say 5 legitimate wins that a GVG team must beat opponents that ARE NOT in the alliance or guild at all that fight each other so no one knows each other and no one is in the same alliance that can possibly rig a match, one team beat the opposing team 5 times from then on strong boxes can be obtained AFTER a win the constant farming them is a bit heinous so the only way to get them is to fight and win consecutively.

much like switching the OLD pre-update point aquisition RA with gvg except instead of points make it strong boxes. ... less whining....gets things back on track and a well balanced compromise as well

killing humans with BRAINS is harder than killing computers. #elitistlolol

also gw just loves throwing me wads of $$$. i dont even have a job and buy all this expensive shit. ahhh gotta love being a professional gw player.

They should just do what they did with reward points, you don't get a box if you have less than 1000 rating.