Guild Wars 2

What I mean by Dynamic Map Population Limits is a mechanism that automatically adjusts the player limit per WvW map based on the current player populations of the teams. This means lowering the maximum player limits for each map at periods of low population (mostly off-peak hours).

The problem this addresses:

To have a competitive WvW match on a map, the participating teams need to have somewhat similar numbers of players. When all teams have their maximum number of players on the map, it’s a fun game. It’s also not too bad when just 2 teams have the max number of players present.

However, when one team has a significant advantage in player count on a map, the game stops being as fun for all teams. During off-peak hours, it becomes quite unlikely that teams will be close to equal in player numbers because player counts can vary a lot depending on the whims of players. Player counts are essentially random at this time. For an equal strength battle to occur, you’d have to depend on the luck of having similar numbers of players from each team decide to play at the same time. That’s going to be a rare occurance.

Furthermore, once one team has a significantly higher population at an off-peak time, they will dominate the map. This worsens the population balance even more because the players on the losing teams quickly find out that they don’t have a chance unless more allies show up to help. But few people are willing to stick around in hopes that more people show up. As many people have witnessed, this imbalance at off-peak hours can actually lead to imbalances at peak hours as the players on the losing teams keep quitting and this prevents the team from ever reaching the population maximum that would have turned it into a balanced and fun battle.

What the proposed solution does:

In order to keep battles fun and balanced, teams must be able to compete on equal footing on individual maps, even when the WvW populations are low. One thing that would help this to be achieved is dynamically lowering the population limits for each map when total WvW player populations are low.

For example, let’s assume the maximum number of players allowed per map is 100 players for each server (I don’t know the actual limit). This works fine when each server is able to fill all or most of the maps with 100 players (400 players total per team). However, when it moves into off-peak hours and say one team can field 200 players total, and the other 2 teams can field 150 each, you’ll start to see the team with the high population dominate. Each of the lesser population teams can only fill one of the 4 maps completely, and that’s not even likely since they’ll tend to be a bit spread out among the maps. Perhaps they would be able to fill the Eternal Battlegrounds, but the team with 200 players would dominate every other map because they’d be able to outnumber their opponents on any map, and they are free to jump around any map their opponents attempt to attack.

This is where Dynamic Map Population Limits could help. Since even the top team in the above example can only fill 200 out of 400 player slots across the 4 maps, the population limit for each map should be reduced to make it so that more maps are full and competitive. For example, if the map limit were brought down to 50 players per map, the team with 200 players could fill all 4 maps. The teams with 150 players would be able to fill 3 maps each. With just this little change in map limits, you’ve suddenly gone from having 1 team dominating at least 3 maps simply because of a relatively small population advantage, to now likely having a competitive battle on each of the 4 maps.

In addition, this makes players from the lower population servers more likely to join the battle and to stick around since they are able to have fun and balanced battles. Even in cases where they are still outnumbered on a map, they will be outnumbered by less, so it would seem more feasible that they could stick around and expect more allies to show up and turn the tide (since they would need fewer allies to fill the map, players would be more likely to join when they see WvW looks balanced, and the other maps may have a queue so players will be more likely to join their particular map rather than just any of the 4).

Of course, there are details at to how exactly such a mechanism should work. But this is the general idea.

I absolutely love this idea! I am tired of WvW going one of two ways. Domination or dominated. This would go a LONG ways in correcting that.

The only comment I’d like to add is make each map dynamic of it’s own accord.
Meaning one borderlands could have like 35 v 50 v 45 and then another borderlands could have say 75 v 69 v 85. It would really depend on the server.

The only issue that I can see at the start is what happens when people go to bed/get off. Say you have 60 v 60 v 60, then one or two servers have 30 people hop off but one team doesn’t. Then you still have an imbalance. However I don’t believe that people should get kicked out of WvW because of that imbalance. It would just prevent that team from getting more players until the balance is reached again.

Good post Kay of Sauvage.

This would only makes queues worse, sadly. Is it worth making it so people can’t play when it happens to be their play time, in order for it to be fair? I don’t think it is personally—and server imbalance as far as population can make the game even more fun (think 300, stuff like that actually happens to an extent in this).

In addition to this, what if people are AFK or off PvEing (puzzles/completion) in WvW? How can we regulate those two things? Those two still exist and would in fact be far more detrimental under your suggestion. And what if one side’s players leave? Then your suggestion doesn’t even fix the one issue it’s aiming to fix. The server with more people would still have an advantage, because people would just stay on after prime time and not log out. And then there’s the randomness factor, what if one server gets a very organized guild in, while the other server just gets a pug?

This just doesn’t seem to solve many problems, and seems to create a few of it’s own. I’m just gonna have to say, to me, it’s definitely not worth it. But, I loved your post, I read most of it, skimmed through the rest, and it was very constructive at least.

@Arius, the most cautious implementation of this would be to have the per-map player limit be entirely dependent on the total player population of the team with the most players. So if Team A has 200 people playing, and that is the most out of any team, then the per map-limit can be set to be some amount greater than 50 players per map (so that the combined limit is over 200). Whenever more people join, the limits would be increased. That would mean there would always be more room for people to join WvW, up to the current limits the game allows today.

Also, as Lethe suggests in his post, the limit on maps shouldn’t be reduced forcefully. If there’s 80 players on a team on a map, and the game wants to reduce the limit because there’s low populations in the other maps, then it shouldn’t be able to reduce the limit until players start actually leaving. Until all 3 teams fall to 79 people or less, the limit for all teams remains the same at 80.

As far as your other concerns in your 2nd paragraph (@Arius), I don’t believe those issues would be any different with this idea implemented compared to what we have now. But with this idea, you’ll have less imbalance, less empty maps during off-peak times, and more potential for dominated teams to get back into the fight (without needing 100 people to show up on a map at the same time).

@The Lethe, your suggestion for map-independant limits would require some formula to determine those limits, and that would have to include some combination of counting players from each team. This would be more tricky, and the effects can vary a lot depending on what formula is used. I don’t have a good formula to suggest.

Also, I think map-independent limits would leave the same problem that we have today. For example, imagine people tend to go to the Eternal Battleground first. If there’s only around 100 players per team playing in all of WvW, and EB’s population limits independently adjust to allow them all since it’s balanced on that map, then EB will eat up most of the WvW population. There is nobody left to fill other maps, and so the team with the most leftover players will dominate the last 3 maps. That’s a big part of the reason that 1 team tends to dominate during off-peak times, even if they only have a slight advantage in player numbers overall.

Arius, I understand your concern about the queue, but that is the nature of the beast. Regardless of number allowed in, you will always be fighting the queue. I don’t have much to say beyond either face a potentially longer queue or deal with having no one to fight for a week or two. Last week was a good fight, but this week we get excited to take back the ONE supply camp or tower the other teams manage to take when we are off doing a jumping puzzle.

With the severely unbalanced servers, the jumping puzzle and map completion is the only thing to really do in WvW for a whole week. I’d take a longer queue over not playing WvW for a week. Right now going against weaker servers is a punishment for all players all around. No one to fight = no fun.

@ Kay, it would be roughly the same formula as what you currently proposed. It would just apply to each borderland the same way and independently from the rest. This way you would be able to keep each borderland at semi-equal numbers instead of a complete route in specific borderlands. Each area would be a reasonably fair fight.

@Lethe, the formula I suggested looks at the total player population of the most numerous team and sets player limits for each maps based on that, basically making it so the players are more spread out among all the maps. If this were done for each map independently instead, it wouldn’t do anything since the map limit would be set by the team with the most players on the map. As more players of that team join, the player limit would increase, and they would never be subjected to a player cap.

So to do what you suggest on an independent basis for each map, there would have to be some formula that includes a required ratio between players of each team, or something like that. For example, the max number for each team might be the sum of the 2 lower population teams, or the population of the 2nd lowest pop team + 20, etc. Unlike the method I was suggesting, these formulas can actually prevent people from being able to join WvW at all.

More importantly, I think they can be a bit self-defeating in fixing the imbalances, since as a team might manage to get more players joining to fight a more numerous and dominant team, they’ll keep increasing the limits for that dominate team on that same map, and they’ll be unable to start filling other maps to compete on. For example, if the cap was at 50, and the lower pop team had only 30, they would be 20 people away from having an even strength battle. If they do get 20 more, and the cap rises to 70 players, then they are still 20 people away from an even battle. This continues until they reach the normal map limit, and only then can they have a truly even battle. But they wouldn’t be able to fill other maps in this time. If they only had 100 players to work with, they’d have to send them all to this one map to have an even battle.

If instead, the player limits were set equally across all maps instead of independently, this teams could have an even battle on one map with 50 players or whatever, and they’d be able to fill another map and have an even battle there too. Or if the most populated team had less than 100 players total, you could even have limits of 25 players per map for that time and probably have many great battles across all 4 maps even with so few people.

Extreme cases of 24/7 servers that have people from several time zones playing constantly against servers with peaks of inactivity is a problem, but this solution would only make things worse, by removing slots where people could be playing.

Something must be done, but not this.

Better outmanned effect, one or more NPCs that stay around conquered structures and players can ‘hire’ to follow them and help them do stuff until players take those slots, a ‘guesting’ system that lets people in worlds with no free slots in their own WvW maps fight for other worlds for increased rewards…

Thee are many other things one could come up with, but not this.

@Mithran, Your first paragraph doesn’t make sense to me. I’m not sure what about this idea “make things worse” as you say. Can you explain how you see that? And the suggestion doesn’t prevent people from playing. It makes the maps into smaller bite-size chunks that make it easier for the teams with lower populations at any given time to actually play.

For example, imagine there was absolutely no limit on the number of players allowed on a map at any time. The game would be pretty terrible all the time because it would primarily come down to player numbers, not strategies or anything like that. That is essentially the same thing that is happening now when teams don’t fill any maps. Outnumbered teams get outnumbered everywhere. Dynamic limits changes that.

The issue isn’t quite with 24/7 servers or night capping, because we actually get this problem even during peak hours. Why should a team being outnumbered and dominated at night cause them to not be able to even make any progress during peak hours? The answer, and the real issue here, is that whenever there is a large imbalance in total number of players for each team, and that imbalance doesn’t get equalized by both teams hitting a maximum player limit on a map, it leads to a situation where the players on the losing teams end up quitting or not joining at all and never being able to reach the “magic number” (the maximum player limit) on a map to make it fun.

I’ve seen it myself on both sides of the coin. The outnumbered team’s players quit. The dominate team’s players only quit when they can’t even find someone to kill. If the outnumbered team even does manage to gain some players, it just causes more of the dominate team’s players to stick around since they have more people to kill.

I’m on Blackgate’s server. We’re in the 2nd tier, I believe. We own everything in WvW. There is not any queue to get into anywhere, even at peak hours. It is not simply that we have that many more players than the other team. It’s that the other teams can’t manage to get enough of their players into a map at the same time to actually make it fair fight. That’s because the bar is set so high. They need to build up 100+ people on the same map to have a fair fight on just 1 map.

Imagine instead that because of the low amount of players in WvW during the day, the population limit per map was dynamically lowered to maybe 25 players per map. People wouldn’t find that to be a difficult number of players to reach to have an even battle. Some guilds could probably get around that number of players to show up at the same time by themselves. That very attainable number would make it worth people’s time and effort to join WvW because they could expect that a fair fight was not far away. As more people joined WvW, it would automatically cause the map limits to rise.

That’s the idea. Dynamic limits to each map that is more appropriate given the WvW population at that given time.

Because people wanting to play and not being able to play when the worlds have slots for players is bad.

A solution for imbalance in numbers must avoid having less people playing.

Imagine if a weak world is against two strong ones, and players on all sides had to match the number of the side with less people.
Since worlds must have the same number of players, all they have to do is not enter at all. 0 players in one side, 0 players in all sides.
That way they skip facing those who would utterly crush them. And no one gets to play at all.

Now, limit it in ‘stages’ like 50, 100, 150. And if one side has only 25 players, a side with 50 players is still in advantage, and you still have tons of people waiting in the queue for the other worlds. Make it 25, and one side may still have 15, and there would be even more people waiting in queue when there’s room enough in the servers for more people from all worlds.

It doesn’t fix anything. It only make things worse.

We need something to address the problem derived from time frames and being outmanned, without affecting those who want to play.

That’s why things like side-kick hirable NPCs and extra NPCs in structures taking up player slots while they are not in use but that vanish when a player enters, guesting fighters from worlds that have their own WvW slots filled and better outmanned effects are preferable to things like limiting numbers or alternate smaller maps for less people.

I think Kay’s formula is being misunderstood. I know I did at first. So please correct me if I am wrong but here is what I am understanding.

Team 1 has 100 players who are trying to join WvW at a time.
Team 2 has 60 players who are trying to join WvW at the same time
Team 3 has 50 players who are trying to join WvW at the same time

Based on the server with 100 players, the 4 battlegrounds will be capped at 25 players max per team. (Until more players want to join the 100 man team or one of the others goes above 100)

What this would do is force team 1 to have 25 per map.
Team 2 and 3 would have to pick and choose which maps to load 25 onto, or spread themselves thin.

This would not prevent people from joining WvW at all, however it would limit the numerical advantage the stronger team would have in any map.

Another option would be to place a backup limit which would keep the higher population bound to within 30 people per map or something.

It would be nice to add a feature that shows the current population of each battleground and the size of the queue. (Great idea for another post)

@Mithran, I do not believe WvW guesting is a wise idea. What is to stop someone from guesting on another server and blow all the supply in the keep to build siege rams in worthless places? We’ve already seen some guilds transfer a few to opposing servers to do just that before a big attack on that keep.

The hiring NPC idea is very do-able, and I hope Anet considers your suggestion.

@Mithran, my suggestion is to base the player limits entirely on the player count of the team with the most players. That means there would always be room for anyone from any team to join in WvW, the only difference being that they’d have to be more spread out instead of being able to all fit into one map.

So there’s no requirement to match player numbers, and no potential tactic of just not playing in order to deny the opponent. There’s nothing here that makes things worse as you suggest.

I want to play WvW myself. I have wanted to for the last 3 weeks. But it hasn’t been the queues stopping me (except right after match resets). It’s been the lack of any chance at fun games due to severe player count mismatches. I’m pretty sure that’s the case with most WvW players. Competitive balance in terms of player counts is a requirement, and queues don’t even matter until that is achieved. I don’t think anything is accomplished by allowing more people from the dominant team to join and increase their advantage when the lower population teams aren’t at least close in numbers. That’s actually what makes things worse. Maybe you do fit more people in, but it doesn’t improve the gameplay, and you’ll probably see people from all teams leaving in that case (just as we see now during peak hours and not one map being full for any team).

Having NPCs fill in for player slots might help, though there are plenty of complications that need to be worked out with that idea (who controls them, are they smart enough to not just get go and get killed like other NPCs, what happens when they die, etc.). Allowing guesting in WvW would also have a lot of issues I can think of that would need to have solutions worked out for. But regardless of these potential other ideas, the idea I’m suggesting in this thread still stands as it’s own improvement, and I think it’d even be an improvement to the situation even if ideas like you mention were ever implemented. It would basically lessen the need for (or lessen the influence of) such handicaps and outnumbered bonuses like you are suggesting.

@Lethe, what you described at the top of your post is correct. That’s what I was suggesting.

Regarding the other idea of WvW guesting, I suppose griefing could be a problem. But the bigger concern I have is that it’s likely just going to result in random shifts of team strengths in WvW, like as some guilds decide to go join some low-population 3-way battle and simply cause their chosen team to dominate because of the extra numbers. You still encounter this problem of extreme imbalances, and you only get balance by pure luck of teams happening to have similar numbers, or by actually reaching some caps on maps to force number to be equal (which is the point of my idea). Plus it’s not likely to have much effect during off-peak hours since no servers are going to be full then anyway.

Looks like you think team count is global, when it’s actually per map.
Each map has separate queues. You may have to wait to join in one, but be queued for another, that indicates that each maps has a separate cap already.

Forthing people to spread evenly between all maps would fix when players from one world gather massively on one map, since they’ll be forced to spread instead, but will not help when your world is outmanned in all maps, which happens fairly often against worlds that nightcap constantly.

I think i missed something when reading through…

The problem isn’t that one team can field 200 while the others can only field 150, the problem starts happening when one team can field 400 and the other teams choose to not fight—they have already become too demoralized to participate.

When the maps are below capacity and players want to start joining, they would need to round-robin to the maps on the most populated server. This will cause problems for groups that play together (which is most wvw guilds).

Another problem this solution would exacerbate is that of bots; when map caps are low, those 10-15 bots can be a significant percentage of your force, and they will be everywhere too.

Edit: I’m on Sanctum of Rall. We don’t give up, no matter how far down we are, so I honestly don’t encounter the outnumbered bonus or related issues that often.

MithranArkanere.8957:

.Forthing people to spread evenly between all maps would fix when players from one world gather massively on one map, since they’ll be forced to spread instead, but will not help when your world is outmanned in all maps, which happens fairly often against worlds that nightcap constantly.

What happens is that the more populated team responds to where the opponents are. If an outnumbered team tries to build up on one map, they’ll see more and more players of the dominate team showing up. If the outnumbered players start leaving to go to another map, more of the dominant team players leave as well since there’s less fights to be had. If players on the outnumbered team jump to an empty map, maybe they can quickly capture something. But then all the players on the dominate team can see it on the map and know there’s at least some action on that map to go and crush.

So during times like this, it’s pretty much like all 4 maps are just 1 big map, just with more spawn points.

That’s what this idea fixes. It puts a cap on each map that allows the outnumbered teams to build up their player count on individual maps to a very achievable number of players that will turn it into a fair fight, without having the dominant team able to just come and outnumber them some more. Imagine your team is being dominated on all the maps, but you only need 20 or 25 people total to make it equal on a map and get the ball rolling, instead of 100+.

Fildydarie.1496:

The problem isn’t that one team can field 200 while the others can only field 150, the problem starts happening when one team can field 400 and the other teams choose to not fight—they have already become too demoralized to participate.

I agree this is the problem. Though as the losing teams lose players, so does the dominate team, since people quit when they can’t even find a good fight, even if they are on the winning team. I haven’t played WvW for 2 weeks now because my team has been so dominant because of numbers and morale (rather than strategy, etc.).

But I think the reason that people on the losing teams give up is mainly because they are outnumbered all the time and it takes too many people to actually turn it into an even fight. Lots of people want to play, but only if it’s a fun and fair fight. But the problem is that they need 100+ people on a map to make it even. So they quickly learn that it’s not even worth trying, because it’s just not going to happen. It’s just a waste of time.

But a low starting limit like 25 players is much more doable. I’m sure guilds especially would be eager to get their members together and be able to have such influence in turning a map around mainly with just their own people.

Regarding the other concerns you raise, Fydydarie… If people are joining WvW, the population limit per map would grow as well. There will also always be at least a map that isn’t full (the limit would be raised dynamically the prevent all from being full). And I think most people just go to the maps with space available before they bother with getting in queue for a particular map. So for these reasons, I wouldn’t expect to see very long queues at all in this situation.

There’s also the matter of priorities of what is most important to the game. Yeah, sure, they can fit everybody who wants to play into the maps if they want. But the game will suck because it’ll make it an unfair game. And then very few people will want to play because of that. That’s what we have now. So first priority is making it a fair and fun competition. More people can join only if doing so doesn’t break that part of the game. Right now, there is essentially no WvW for me to play. It’s broken. I’ll take a WvW that has some drawbacks, over this broken WvW we have now.

The same idea applies for your complaint about bots. We have a bigger problem to deal with before bots can ever become a problem. That problem is the imbalance and unfair competition due to player numbers I’ve been talking about. If my suggested changes actually cause more people to play and reach these new dynamic map limits, then bots can become a (relatively small) issue. Anet probably should be able to deal with them. For example, they can simply make it a priority to investigate when there’s lots of bot reports coming in from a WvW area. If I recall, they already said they were working on something that would help a lot with combating bots.

Nudge because I’d like to see Anet say something on this idea.

Even at the top tier of WvW at primetime on weekdays, population imbalance is still the determining factor of who is getting the most points. We’re not filling the maps, which would bring balance. I’m sure the lower tiers are even farther from filling the maps as we are.

That’s just no fun. There MUST be balance, because WvW is just about broken without it. Unless something wild is implemented to boost the strength of outnumbered teams (which is likely to introduce a whole bunch of other problems), better balance needs to be enforced through map population limits. Tell me another way to balance the game, because I can’t think of any.

That’s why I think dynamically adjusting map population limits really needs to be considered and implemented.

Any word from the Devs on this? I do like that they dropped the orbs but perhaps something more should be done.