Guild Wars 2

Under this suggestion, each weekly match is broken up into three “lanes”.

(times are in eastern US because I think this is a reasonable breakout of US, Oceanic and Euro prime times, give or take an hour)

Lane 1: 6pm – 2am
Lane 2: 2am – 10am
Lane 3: 10am – 6pm

Each lane is a separate Glicko-based pairing.

So, for example, you may be facing Maguuma and Borlis in Lane 1 and then Devona’s and Kaineng in Lane 2.

When it’s time for a lane change, the state of the current lane is saved. The state is then restored when you shift back to it. e.g., at 2am it saves the state of Lane 1 and loads Lane 2. When 5pm rolls back around it will save Lane 3 and load Lane 1 back up, the way it was at 2am.

Each lane will have its own score and its own rating. You could be a Tier 1 server in Lane 1 and a Tier 4 server in Lane 3.

Each week, as usual, the lanes all reset and the next matchup is arranged.

I think this will help immensely with keeping all servers competitive across all time zones and nobody will “lose everything overnight”. It will also help keep a big Oceanic server from dragging US prime time players up into a tier they can’t handle, or vice versa, resulting in servers that dominate some hours and get dominated other hours — each lane will get its own tier.

This is an interesting idea. However, wouldn’t this necessitate a restructuring of the NA/EU leagues? They would have to break up entire servers and merge them into partial servers that can move through the tiers independently of each other. How would Anet go about deciding which players went with what servers?

Not sure what you mean. If I play on Ehmry Bay I will always be on Ehmry Bay. At 1am I will be playing in Lane 1. At 2am I will be booted to Lion’s Arch, the map will change to the state it was in for Lane 2 and then I can go back in and play in Lane 2. It’s still Ehmry Bay with the same players and guilds, it’s just that the 2am – 10am shift has its own map state, its own scoreboard and its own rating. What happens at 8pm has no impact on the 2am-10am shift and vice versa.