Faction for losing?

Hi everybody.

Taking on a noble challenge should get the attention of the gods. When you win a battle and when you kill your enemies you get faction. We all know about this system - it was the community developed compromise of fame unlocking under a different name and extended to all forms of PvP.

I have been thinking about the barrier to entry into PvP that new players and players moving on from PvE are facing. You know, people asking for specific skills, asking for a lot of fame, not being tolerant of mistakes etc. The fixes to faction mentioned in the state of the game letter should help this.

Varyag proposed a system where faction costs for skills would be lower at first and then increase. Kind of like how the cost of skills increases when you buy them from a skill trainer like Captain Greywind or Firstwatch Sergio. The faction cost would start very low and reach a cap of the present costs. This is a good system because it means new players can catch up to seasoned players in terms of building up a library of skills so they are more versatile and adaptable, and by giving them rewards for actually trying PvP, encouraging them to get better. There is a learning curve involved and quite rightly there should be a reward.

At the early learning stages, players are likely to get beaten a lot more often than they win. In other wordes they are going to get pwnz0red, and many people have said this has turned them off from PvP.

My idea is that since these players are taking on a challenge, the god of war, Balthazar should bless them for this and they should be awarded some faction when they die and when they lose the battle. Now this would be less than you get for winning, maybe a half, a third, 10% I don't know. Just a little reward for at least trying.

This is very important, because losing over and over again can be very demoralising, but if after a couple of hours of losing you have enough faction to get a new skill or weapon unlock you get some motivation to pick yourself up and try again. This mechanic can make PvP in arenas, tombs and GvG more popular and open up this world to people who are currently not encouraged to try or give up soon after trying. This can make even losing fun and with a lot of content players, there will be more competition at each level or tier of competiton so people can find more people like themselves to have fun with.

I know this idea may seem absurd to some, but I generally do care for this issue since I have read how players have been put off because getting zerged by experienced players with a lot of unlocks is not fun.

Tell me what you think of this idea, and if you agree support it by posting your opinion. Anet are making these changes now and if you mention it now and with plenty of supporty they might make this happen with the updates and you all will be happy

The main problem for getting faction when you loose/die is bots. Think about it for a moment, the entire bot script would have to consist of click on enter button.

The second but just as annoying problem would be people entering the mission, then going afk.

Do you really want these people ruining your PvP experience?

In the current system, you get Faction for downing an enemy player (and if that player gets ressed and you kill him/her again, you get more faction). This method works, I think, since even if you lose, your team should be able to take at least one or two enemies down with you.

Faction for losing sounds like a bad idea...

Making the cost of skills (in faction) rise like the cost of skills in gold sounds like a fairly good idea...

I personally would want to be able to trade faction (and skill points too)

I think that maybe this would be a decent idea if when it was "searching for a worthy opponent" you pulled someone WAY higher then you..

We were doing our GvG practice night and our guild (which at the time was 220ish) pulled the rank 21 guild.... we got stomped pretty bad.

it wasn't as bad as the time we were around 1500 and pulled the number 2 guild at the time, that was ultra bad.

it woulda been nice to get maybe 30-50 faction for the battle, since it was a very unfair matchup =/

but either way its no big deal.

maybe the closer you get to winnning, but end up losing ,the more faction its worth for example in team arenas all but one in their team is alive he uses rez sig on the monk who rezes everyone else so maybe it could go off of the scoreboard thingy

Getting enough faction for skills seem hard enough. However gaining faction for losing would ruin the integrity of the competition even more. People would leave on purpose, or not fight on purpose just to lose.

I think they should make more ladders for the arenas. The higher the rank, the more faction and ladder points you get for winning. You get an incentive to not give up, and you also get a faction reward for it.

I think rewarding people for losing or dying could create quite a few more problems.

Getting faction per unique kill seems good enough to me, it's not often you go a whole match without killing anybody.

To adress the bot problem, we could make it so you only activate the losing reward after one person on your team makes a kill - hard for bots to do, if they could they'd be abusing arenas now. It could be such a small reward like 10% of the kill reward. I'd like to hear some more ideas for this please

The idea of being able to trade faction and skill points is amazing. I often say to people "you can't buy skill points so gold means little to me" but never thought about actually asking for it. I guess there would be fewer people botting than do for gold because you can't trade skill points and faction at the moment.

Maybe there could be a cap on how much losing faction you can gain per day say equal to 3 hours of play, or something for the week. This might put off botters because then they wouldn't be able to unlock accounts quickly at all.

Mithie, in the present system you only get faction for unique kills FYI.

Thanks for the input so far, just wanted to give some feedback. More suggestions/discussion please

Well you do get faction for killing people, so even if you lose the match, you can still get faction, albeit not as much as if you win. I was in a GvG battle once for about 30 minutes on the fire island hall, in which mine and the enemies guild pushed back and forth to each others bases untill the other guild finaly got to our guild lord and killed him, I didnt win, but I still got a fair amount of faction from that battle from all the kills I got.

You only get faction for unique kills (i.e., the first time you kill another player/pet/priest etc.)

Hello Divinity and others,

let me tell you about my barrier.
I have 95% of all skills (16 to go) and all runes (5 sups) unlocked. and a free slot for pvp, as i planned it. But I don't pvp, altough i wish so. I played in random arena, and loved it. But there comes a time one wishes he can try out builds he invents. That leaves team, tombs or gvg. Unfortunately my guild isn't that pvp ready mostly, so playing with my guild is hard bargain. *scratch gvg*
I can try tombs with a PUG. now here is where the real horror starts. One month ago, i tried an air ele PUG. I was the ranger, and asked for Frozen Soil, Edge of Extinction and some other rituals. All cool, i respec and ask them when they want the spirits up. The EoE right away they state. So pvp starts. They have a hard time with the unworthy, which should have been a warning. Then the real pvp. I lay EoE down, and they couldn't kill ONE guy with 6 air eles. We got squashed, and they turned on me:"your eoe killed us". Well, it is a double edged sword yeah. I tried one or two other PUG's with similar experience (altough this example was by far the worst). But this was such a bad experience, i'll probably won't ever go back to PUG tombs.
So that leaves team arena for me. And if i'm lucky, I can play that once a week.

go pvp......

a pvp wannabee player,
Makkert

PS: the system you describe sounds good, altough it won't effect me much.

Makkert, it seems like they were new players and well new players take time to learn. Some of them can get a bit stressed. Why let a few experiences like that turn you off PvP? It's a lot harder to beat humans than NPCs. I am sure you wouldn't have given up in Thunderhead Keep or Elona Reach or Hell's Precipice the first time. So many PvE players have complained about noobish players ruining those missions for them too. I don't want to force you to PvP, but after you start winning and you have to use all your wits to do it, it can be very satisfying. Encouraging new players to stick at it even though it's real hard should help open up this part of the game to more people, and it is very replayable indeed.

oh, i WANT to pvp. I want it badly. I haven't carefully planned my unlocks for nothing. And I agree, it is more satisfying then killing silly flesh golemns. But the experiences of tombs really left a bad taste in my mouth. The only time i was laughing out loud, was when we faced War Machine with a PUG. the whole party went 'omg', and i just laughed and took the defeat that was about to come casually. A strange paradox: A big part of players seems to behave....not with grace. Teaming up with them is simply not fun. Beating them is fun, but then they have to be on the other team . Finding players with grace [read: take a loss without starting the apocalypse] that want to pvp seems a rarity...
I haven't completely given up on pvp, as i still make plans to get my guild to pvp. But I don't feel anymore going PUG with a bunch of 14 year olds that (every single one) thinks they know what is best (and a result, no leader).

It's been a month, so I guess i'll try it again, see if things are better now.

grtz Makkert

Makkert, I just started back with PvP. Finding mature, PATIENT players is tough. My IGN is Santanus Perro. I usually don't use him for PvP, but if an alt character is on, you will still see I am online. If you see me on, give a shout out.

I have to agree - PUGs really can suck :/ Heh the only practical way I know of to avoid the jerks is to be in a guild that is active or fill out your friends list

And that's a bad thing? From my perspective, it keeps those who are really truely skilled/persistant/determined in, and those that arn't out.

I'm probably in the minority on this one, but I think that the current system promotes those who are truely "hardcore" pvpers to keep playing pvp, and those that are not out. It makes my time spent pvping that much more challenging and fun. Perhaps unfair of me to say, but it's the way I feel about the situation nevertheless.