gisborne wrote: Tue Dec 30, 2025 7:37 pm
People don't play for objectives because they don't matter. You can lose every scenario and get 5-10x the renown of the winners by farming kills. You see premades let their opponents get objectives all the time just to lure them out to be slaughtered and not surrender.
If you want objectives to matter you need to reduce kill renown and increase objective/win renown significantly.
I partially disagree.
I do agree on the fact that playing for objectives should also provide renown (similar to how orvr BOs/Keeps do) and be competitive renown-wise to kills in scenario.
Where I do disagree, though, is that scenario objectives do not matter even now.
People, even good players I know, keep reverberating the saying that "The only thing that matters in scenarios is kills".
And, certainly, that is true if you look at renown gains. But Renown isn't your character's progression bottleneck;
it's crests.
The average characters requires around 17.000 crests for their main spec BIS and potentially that much again for the BIS off-spec.
Do you think people care about Renown? Playing everyday for a couple hours will see you hit rr70+ in a couple weeks if done efficiently. You don't need scenarios for that, rvr gains are better. Especially since people just stop queueing against you if the stomps go for too long. I also know at least 3 people who have gotten bored of some of their characters which they played during 2x or 3x renown events because they ended up with less than 4k crests when they hit rr78. Granted, the above arguement is empirical but it should gice you an idea about why renown isn't what people (should) care about.
Now here again people might claim that "Kills still are all that matter in scs", but let me show you how that is not necessarily true:
Imagine if you decide to completely throw a scenario just to farm kills and your team indeed manages to farm them non-stop. What's a reasonable amount of kills you'd expect at the end of the match? 60 kills make sense to me as an upper bound.
Now let's assume that your 6man takes the entirety of the crests dropped and it does not get split with the rest of the parties, if any (which I'm pretty sure is not the case since crests might be getting shared in scenarios like they do by default in warbands nowdays).
60 kills for an average of 1 war crest per kill (very high estimate considering that if you do 60 kills in e.g. 6 minutes then the enemies will be worth nothing after their 2nd death or so, but let's again assume that).
If everything goes as described, what has your 6man achieved under those ideal circumstances?
Basically 60 crests split in 6 for an average gain of 10 crests from kills. Let's be generous and add 2 more crests from the points your kills got you, for an average gain of 12 war crests per person.
What did the loser recieve from winning the scenario? 10 war crests each, across all parties too (if more than 6).
Now, who is the big winner? You might still say the people who farmed them, but the reality is that on average the "losers" came out of the scenario with better rewards and possibly with better payouts than the winning team if we are actually being realistic.
Let me repeat myself. Winning the scenario (with any means necessary) should on average net you better rewards than whoever has the most kills. "Should" as in what is happening currently, not "should" as in that is how it should be (that is up to the devs to decide, although I also think it "should" be that way).
Where the theory falls apart is that the current scenario matchmaking system and certain scenarios' design do not let the losing team win by points if their enemies decide to camp their warcamp. Essentially, due to the lack of comeback mechanics and complete imbalance of roles, gear and skill level across teams, it is quite often that meat-wave tactics (i.e. running away from your spawn to try and backcap while the enemy team is staring at the rest of your team waiting for them to get down) are not possible. That is in my eyes a design flaw and one that people use to break the current scenario system.
By breaking it, I mean that they are intentionally queing in those specific maps so that they can ensure that if they win by kills they will also win by points, or more specifically by their opponents surrendering after being unable to even exit their spawn safely. Not only that, but it a particularly malignant behavior (if you'd allow me the term) since the aim is to spam sc queue for hours in a row whenever a "good" map is part of the weekend scenario event since, unlike weekdays, they are guarranteed to keep getting matches and people to stomp.
Malignant, because while it is the most efficient method to gain crests (15+ crests per 6 minutes or so) it is a method that preys on the community itself and has been eating away at all our new players for the past 5+ years. Adding barriers to spawns and removing guards from them has only made the situation worse.
To reiterate once again: for a good part of the scenarios, playing just for kills is inefficient as a way to progress your character. Playing for objectives and using kills as a way to secure objectives is the most efficient way to gain war crests from scenarios currently.
For the rest of the scenario maps, I would argue that they would need proper restructuring so as to allow the losing team to win by points if their enemies are not engaging with the objectives properly and are just hunting after kills. They are scenarios after all, not orvr in fancy locations.
If the devs will lean towards that direction (and perhaps also buff renown gain from playing the objectives) or if they will decide to turn regular scenarios into a different flavor of Ranked remains to be seen.
