Implementation of prizes for Cutthroat

In the midst of some discussion on reddit of how to encourage cutthroat play, an idea came up: race-style rewards for short-term cutthroat events.

Right now, there's not much to encourage a player to keep going after dying once or twice. Nor is there enough encouragement for pvp: the zones become awfully sparse after a while.

So how about having the players compete for unstashable "tokens"? The idea is, every player has some, and are actively trying to hunt one another down for more of these tokens, which are redeemed for points once the event ends. Make them quest rewards so you can't stash them. Make you drop one per death, so you're not instantly out of the game.

Have each major boss drop one, such as Brutus, or Merveil, or Fidelitas, or Vaal etc. If you like, make them progressively more valuable to encourage progression (and therefore at risk of being PKed).

And to encourage players to play out the entire event in active PvPable zones (instead of idling offline), give bonus points for have spent >75% of your time in these zones.

These are all rather half-baked ideas, but it could give a framework on which to build a really fun pvp gamemode which encourages aggression and hunting of other players for sweet sweet point rewards. Assuming you guys aren't working on it already.

I'm afraid this would be going in the opposite direction that cutthroat needs to go.

Your token idea would simply encourage players to organize a coordinated effort to farm each other for tokens. New cutthroat rules do not include permadeath, and unfortunately respawning over and over is not compatible with the proposed token system.

If they were to introduce a permanent Cutthroat league it would offer a different kind of gameplay and would not need silly PvE "rewards" to encourage players to play it. The reward is the rush of successfully having the ability to hold your own against people invading your instances and attempting to kill you as you further develop your character.

A perma cutthroat league would fill up with people that actually want to play that style of gameplay and not just a bunch of kids that are sticking it out just for some reward to be handed to them at the end for their "hard work in enduring such a league".