Guild Wars 2

Plains of Ashes.5941:

I have read thru pages of this thread and I see a lot of complex solutions, alot of gaming the PPTs and buffs. Most of what I see is cures for symptoms. The first step is to separate the cause from the effect, identify the root cause, then solve the root cause.
The population imbalance, the stacking of servers, the fact that coverage defines the winner, the outmanned buff, the week after week of lobsided matches are not the problem, they are symptoms of the problems.

I submit the primary root cause, but not the only one, is the fact that servers are allowed to field unequal number of players. I have never played a game which allows one team to field unequal teams as its default mode. WvW allows you to field 70+ more players on one side than the other. Not even GW2 sPvP allows unequal teams. I cant name a game or sport which breaks this rule.

This i would contend is the underlying cause of most of WvW’s problems. Its a violation of fundemental game design. What flows from this flaw is what you would expect of human nature: everyone stacking the teams because stacking is rewarded with what people want the most: and that is to win. Its simple, if the NFL changed the rules which allowed a team to field all the players on its bench (like WvW), and players didnt cost the team money (like WvW), and the winning team gets a super bowl ring, well, the NFL would look like WvW next season with all the same flaws we see now.

WvW WILL BE BROKEN FOREVER UNTIL SERVERS ARE CONSTRAINED TO FIELD EQUAL NUMBER OF PLAYERS. Without this we will continue to have kludges (outmanned anyone?) and incentives, and the horribly complex solutions to manipulate PPTs and buffs when the solution is very simple. You must remove the incentive to change the behavior, and the incentive is stack a map and win the game.
So how do we fix it?

• limit the fielded teams to equal sizes, just like every other game does.
• make the remainder wait in queues, like other games
• Dont kick in the dynamic cap till the teamsize is over 20.
• if the teams are equal and one server has people leave then this offset is ok, balancing should only prevent folks from joining a team when that team is larger than the other teams (ie nobody ever gets booted for the sake of balane, let normal attrition do this)
• once this is in place, allow matchups between any 3 servers. thats right, for some matches it means HUGE queues (like for JQ vs AR), but that is what it will take to show players that a) stacked servers have no statistical advantage in winning, and b) stacking to a server means less playtime as a reward for their choice. with even teams, skill and tactics will matter more, where now they almost dont matter.
• keep statistics on which servers are cronically limiting the map pop and make a finite number of transfers avalable for free. Keeping statistics will allow ANET to know the specific number of transfers a server needs.

In summary: there are multiple flaws that result in stacked servers, but WvW will be broken until ANET creates a limit which equalizes the size of fielded teams between servers. You cant violate a fundamental game design principle and not have endless bad side effects and kludges.

I will pitch in another root cause for the stacking and that is ANETs attitude of treating the high ranked servers better. Example: we have 3 totally independent leagues in Season 1. why dont they get the exact same reward as a function of where they place in their league? why is the first place silver league reward worse than the gold winner? and the bronze league winner worse still? they dont play each other so why dont the 3 number ones each get the same number 1 prize? cant ANET see this forces players to stack because ANET themselves reward stacking? ANET should make all 3 league winners have the same quality of reward, then there is no reason to say “I gotta transfer to T1 or ANET is gonna screw me out of something worthwhile”

The reason there is stacking (and the resultant pop imbalance) is because ANET rewards it. both in its gameplay flaws, and in the very culture ANET has created for WvW. Pick the simple solution to the WvW problem, not the insanely convoluted solutions ive seen posted – equalized fielded teams in WvW just like every other online game does! that and enable transfers to even out the teams and ANET is on its way to making WvW what it should be.

Just so we’re clear, am I to understand that, for example, in EB, it’s possible for all three servers to be queued, and yet for one server to have more people on the field than the other two?

Or are you talking about the population imbalance where, say, one server can field a queued team, and the other two can’t? Such as during off hours, etc?

Of solutions mentioned, I like:

- Implementing the ‘colour’ system. To create a flexible league environment, where you can guest to servers in your ‘team’ (allowing you to find a fight elsewhere should the current fight not appeal to you).

- Reworking the supply system, to create longer supply lines as more objectives are captured (meaning the more of the map you take, the more it takes to retain it).

- Reworking the reward system to favour some form of ‘alliance’ between 2nd and 3rd. Such as greater reward for capturing objectives from the 1st place server.

Plains of Ashes.5941:

I have read thru pages of this thread and I see a lot of complex solutions, alot of gaming the PPTs and buffs. Most of what I see is cures for symptoms. The first step is to separate the cause from the effect, identify the root cause, then solve the root cause.
The population imbalance, the stacking of servers, the fact that coverage defines the winner, the outmanned buff, the week after week of lobsided matches are not the problem, they are symptoms of the problems.

I submit the primary root cause, but not the only one, is the fact that servers are allowed to field unequal number of players. I have never played a game which allows one team to field unequal teams as its default mode. WvW allows you to field 70+ more players on one side than the other. Not even GW2 sPvP allows unequal teams. I cant name a game or sport which breaks this rule.

This i would contend is the underlying cause of most of WvW’s problems. Its a violation of fundemental game design. What flows from this flaw is what you would expect of human nature: everyone stacking the teams because stacking is rewarded with what people want the most: and that is to win. Its simple, if the NFL changed the rules which allowed a team to field all the players on its bench (like WvW), and players didnt cost the team money (like WvW), and the winning team gets a super bowl ring, well, the NFL would look like WvW next season with all the same flaws we see now.

WvW WILL BE BROKEN FOREVER UNTIL SERVERS ARE CONSTRAINED TO FIELD EQUAL NUMBER OF PLAYERS. Without this we will continue to have kludges (outmanned anyone?) and incentives, and the horribly complex solutions to manipulate PPTs and buffs when the solution is very simple. You must remove the incentive to change the behavior, and the incentive is stack a map and win the game.
So how do we fix it?

• limit the fielded teams to equal sizes, just like every other game does.
• make the remainder wait in queues, like other games
• Dont kick in the dynamic cap till the teamsize is over 20.
• if the teams are equal and one server has people leave then this offset is ok, balancing should only prevent folks from joining a team when that team is larger than the other teams (ie nobody ever gets booted for the sake of balane, let normal attrition do this)
• once this is in place, allow matchups between any 3 servers. thats right, for some matches it means HUGE queues (like for JQ vs AR), but that is what it will take to show players that a) stacked servers have no statistical advantage in winning, and b) stacking to a server means less playtime as a reward for their choice. with even teams, skill and tactics will matter more, where now they almost dont matter.
• keep statistics on which servers are cronically limiting the map pop and make a finite number of transfers avalable for free. Keeping statistics will allow ANET to know the specific number of transfers a server needs.
  …

I’d say queues are symptoms as well. Why should I, as a player, would need to wait in queues just to play. For people who play an hour or two a night, wvw becomes a non-option for them to play unless they move to a low pop server and leave their friends behind.

Even transfering servers is a symptom. Why can’t I, as a player in the gold league, play for another team (say Kaineng) while I wait for my home server queue.

I have no idea for a solution though.

akanibbles.6237:

Of solutions mentioned, I like:

- Implementing the ‘colour’ system. To create a flexible league environment, where you can guest to servers in your ‘team’ (allowing you to find a fight elsewhere should the current fight not appeal to you).

- Reworking the supply system, to create longer supply lines as more objectives are captured (meaning the more of the map you take, the more it takes to retain it).

- Reworking the reward system to favour some form of ‘alliance’ between 2nd and 3rd. Such as greater reward for capturing objectives from the 1st place server.

Ok, I guess I was too lazy to read all 13 pages; because those ideas sound nice.

Just now it is 4 o’clok in the morning and vizu destroyed everything with tons of omegas against outnumbered…. And this will happen every day I guess. It is very frustating to build up everything again and again each day. It pretty much ruins the gamemode in every way. Option (a) make night raid significantly less points lucrative (12 hr fight, lick wounds 12 h) (b) extremely limited number of players at night

edit: It is not realy on the topic, but I think if two servers constantly focus on one server on its own homemap, then it is realy hard to stand the ground, because you run out of mats sooner or later. (especially if their are queues and you cannot use the other maps.) from my pov a server should be superior on it’s home. what I think would be great is some kind of gate from the spawn that can only be attacked by the map owner and some kind of a private supply camp right behind. To make it short, on the home you have not enough supply and much to long way (take eternal as example, that is just perfect when it comes to mats and the way to run)

edit2: p. 10 in this thread read all 6 posts or have look two post below. why I did even take the time to write myself. it is all said in their! now go and solve it :P

edit3: What also could help is a significant reward for targeting stronger opponents. One big problem I see as a result of imbalance is that the strongest server can decide who will be the target. Right now there is no point reward for taking upgraded things or attacking the leading server in general. E.g. taking down a waypoint should give 1k or something like that. Smallscale can generate significant points, but right now large®scale is very ineffective. Also defending T3’s over half a day against two opponents constantly pushing does also not give any points. And they will not stop, because why the heck the weakest server should attack the strongest servers T3’s with full of mats…

cubed.2853:

Well Anet, EU and US (wvw) Servers has to only be accessable for continents or there has to be some kind of regulation, so the people transfer. Option (a) make night raid significantly less points lucrative (12 hr fight, lick wounds 12 h) (b) Other time zones / continents block / limit (extremely limited number of players at night) (c.) language tagged us or us/eu/world servers.

I mean just now it is 4 o’clok in the morning and vizu destroyed everything with tons of omegas against outnumbered…. And this will happen every day I guess. It is very frustating to build up everything again and again each day. It pretty much ruins the gamemode in every way.

Doesn’t make sense. NA servers are also the SEA servers. So making the game less appealing to non NA time zones would not be very helpful. There are long queues at what you may think of as ‘night time’, so don’t assume it’s just a handful of players.

Yerffejy.6538:

Pt 1/6
Devon Carver: I’d be more curious to know what people think is the reason behind the fact that score is so directly related to the number of people on a server 24/7 and how WvW could be designed differently to address that moving forward. My personal observation is that the momentum you gain from even a small period of having more people online is so large that it can’t be overcome. Which makes me think we need to be doing more to slow that momentum.

Direct response to Devon asking about how the landslide occurs: The main problem with population imbalances is the upgrades that are used on every objective. The landslide happens when Server X outnumbers Server Y and Server Z. Server X flips every asset they can get their hands on, and the other servers are helpless to stop them. This creates the intial PPT gap, in which Server X rapidly increases their Points lead over the other two servers. This creates the first gap.

When Server Y and Z log on in the morning, they see their entire maps have been flipped, and everything is paper. They now have to start the process of retaking all of their assets, and start upgrades and replacing all the lost siege. (That is a lot of money spent.) As Server Z and Y start to retake their objectives, they still have to deal with Server X, who continuously comes and recaps everything, and hinders Server Y and Z’s progress in regaining their assets.

Now, low and behold, primetime occurs. Server X, Y, And Z are all relatively equal in their primetime, and can remain competitive. However, due to Server X flipping most if not all objectives, Many of Y and Z’s objectives are not fully upgraded, and can still be paper. So normally, where the three servers were relatively equal, Server X has a huge advantage: All their objectives are T3, completely full of supply. So during Primetime, Server X makes more headway against the other 2 servers, and continues to increase their lead over the other two servers.

After Primetime, most of Server Y and Server Z still have many objectives not fully upgraded, but have gone to bed. Server X continues to push, and flips everything faster because many objectives are not upgraded and sieged out. The period of Server X dominating PPT happens faster this time, and the lead continues to widen by a large margin. When Server Y and Z log on, they look at the map, and some decide to do something else this time, and many others choose not to spend money on upgrades and siege. The reclamation after the nightcap from Server X happens less effectively, meaning more points lost by Y and Z. And Server X makes captures even easier than before, facing less opponents, and less defense.

Primetime rolls around, and Server Y and Z look at the score and decide to relax, since the match has officially been loss. Less people turn out, they try less to play competitively, and start to karma train. And that is the landslide brought on by population imbalances. It not only effects the timezone it happens it, it effects the entirety of the match, causing a close match otherwise to become completely lopsided.

I decided to directly answer the first question you posed, since you seem to want to see a player’s take on what causes the landslide.

I have quite a few selections to post as well, but they will have to go into another post in order to fit. Bear with my walls-o-text.

I was about to make a post directly responding to Devon’s question but Yerffejy says it far better than I could. Please go back to p. 10 in this thread and read all 6 posts. There’s gold there.

Oh and Anet, hire this person. They very well may be able to save WvW.

(I do agree with Plains about equal numbers but I don’t see how that is possible without basically making a new game and besides Anet has said they’re not going to do that so barring that, Yerffejy’s ideas are the best.)

shagworth.5017:

bradderzh.2378:

Are the devs still reading this? Seems devoid of developer posts/opinions/suggestions. Doesn’t appear to be much collaboration going on aside from the usual playervsforum stuff we usually get.

Pretty disheartening when you see the number of Dev replies in Living World thread compared to this one, but not surprising.

I count 4 replies not including the original post. The pve version has 38 dev replies…

I have a simple yet effective fix for the population imbalance for wvw. However, it will not initially be popular with most players and T1 worlds.

Lower the max number of people allowed in a borderland per world. (say to 60 or so)

This will initially create longer queues and frustrate many many players. It will get so bad that guilds will do what they already do when the queues are just stupidly long and they can’t even group up as a guild. They will migrate to worlds without the dreaded queue problem.

Another bonus, less players means less skill lag. An 80 man blob vs and 80 man blob always results in terrible lag where you can just afk in battle and come back with no health lost.

This is bitter medicine but it WILL result in guilds fleeing the T1 queues and to the open arms of worlds in need of wvw players.

From the perspective of the lowest tier servers, the problem of world population imbalance focuses around a lack critical mass. As a preface to this discussion, I believe that there are definitely upsides to population imbalances. Specifically, the current server diversity creates many different play environments. Different people will seek different things from their WvW experiences. Not everyone wants to play on a fully stacked server where every map is packed full around the clock and where every player is expected to follow orders or go back to PvE. At the same time, many people in the lowest tier servers will tell you that a certain critical mass of population is required in order to make WvW into an enjoyable (or arguably even viable) play environment. As things currently stand, I feel that several servers consistently fail to achieve this critical mass, even at prime time.

Throughout this thread, people have discussed PPT scaling, outmanned debuf scaling, strategies to encourage 2nd & 3rd place to team up against 1st place (instead of the current 1st & 2nd fighting to get a bigger piece 3rd place’s territory), and many other topics centered around making a moderate population imbalance less of a factor in determining the weekly victor. While these are all viable approaches for mid-tier servers, I believe that the discussion for the lowest tier servers really needs to focus on population migration. In order to drive population migration, I believe that two things need to happen. First, some of the barriers to migration to need to be removed. Second, migration to lower tier servers needs to be incentivized. My follow-up posts will discuss both of these elements.

BARRIERS TO POPULATION MIGRATION
When discussing population migration, a good starting point are the pre-existing mechanisms of server transfers and guesting. Since guesting will allow a player to participate in both PvE and sPvP on any server, there are really no barriers to enjoying either of these types of content. Want a busy sPvP environment? Guest to Anvil Rock. Want to kill Tequatl? Guest to Blackgate (example), or even join an overflow with a cross-server guild. Want to run guild-missions for weekly commendations? Guesting will let you do that too. However, since guesting is not currently supported in WvW, a large barrier exists for enjoying this content. When a player is unsatisfied with the WvW experience that he can get on his current server, the only current options are to either transfer off or to try to build up the community on his/her server.

Unfortunately, both of these options are very one sided. People on low population servers have been paying to transfer to higher tier servers for quite some time now. As more and more people abandon the bottom end servers, the population imbalance becomes larger, which encourages more people to leave, creating a very negative loop. While people on the highest tier servers may have an incentive to transfer to mid-tier servers for reduced queue times, very few people can seem to come up with a compelling reason to transfer to the bottom of the barrel. This, in turn, makes community building on those servers an impracticality verging on the border of impossibility.

One aspect of this is server transfer price. Currently, the transfer price is based on total server population, rather than on average WvW population. Anvil Rock, for example, has a “Very High” server population, but likely has the lowest WvW population of any NA server. From a backend server + database architectural perspective, I can understand that the total server population across all game modes may be more important for imposing population limits than the total population for a single game mode. However, from a gameplay perspective, your actual home server matters very little for any aspect of the game other than WvW. As such, we arrive at the first suggestion.

SUGGESTION 1: Base server transfer prices on average WvW population of the destination server, rather than on total destination server population. On its own, this will not likely do much to incentivize transferring to a lower tier server. However, the intended outcome of this change would be to remove a significant barrier to entry. The potential downside to this would be a reduction in profit from players who are dis-satisfied with their current game environment (running an MMO is a business after all). With that said, the opposite argument could be made that if this change does contribute to improving population imbalances, a reduction in player dis-satisfaction could actually result in player retention and more micro-transactions.

SUGGESTION 2: Consider enabling (limited?) guesting in WvW. There has been a fair bit of discussion about this already. For example, styx.7294 floated a very interesting initial concept for WvW guesting around in a youtube link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHcO6Xo8eJ8). I like this concept quite a bit as a starting point for simultaneously addressing long queue times in high tiers and lack of critical mass in low tiers. While guesting does not necessarily build the same level of community as a permanent migration would do, it definitely has the benefit of providing a low-risk opportunity to test the waters on other servers. This concept does have a few downsides, but I think that it (or something like it) would provide a good starting point.

SUGGESTION 3: Allow guilds to transfer influence and upgrades from one server to another. I’m not sure that I would rank this with the two previous suggestions, but I have seen a number of other posts that have complained that the fact that a guild would essentially need to start over if they transferred servers was a large barrier to them doing so. As such, I felt this appropriate to include here. I don’t know exactly what technical challenges would be associated with this, but it doesn’t seem like a huge hurdle from a 3rd party perspective.

INCENTIVES TO MIGRATE
The suggestions in the previous section have the potential to reduce the current large barrier to entry for players who are interesting in migrating to lower tiers. Suggestion 2 does provide some incentives for playing in a lower tier (via combined point totals when determining which color wins a given week). However, a lot of players do not necessarily play WvW to win at the end of the day as much as they play it to have fun fights in the here and now. As such, I don’t feel that either really provide sufficient incentive on their own. Additionally, neither really provides any incentive for players who do not normally WvW to spend more time in that game mode.

At the end of the day, personal rewards are a large motivator in any game for many players. While it can be a good source of Karma, I don’t think that there is a lot of debate that WvW is far less personally rewarding than PvE. If you compare the ascended materials gain for taking an objective with the same gain for doing an Orr Temple, there is a huge disparity there. Similarly, if you compare the gold gain from running a quick dungeon to the gold gain (or arguably gold drain when factoring in consumables) in WvW, there is obviously no comparison.

While the development team has said numerous times that they want players to play all game modes, and that rewards for each mode are not intended to be equal, I think that this needs to be re-evaluated. One of the best ways to incentivize play on servers with lower WvW populations would be to increase personal rewards. If you want to give PvE players a reason to try out WvW on their servers, provide enhanced personal rewards. The exact type of rewards that you would need to provide, and how you would provide them in a way that limits the impact to the economy and is difficult to exploit is a whole other discussion on its own (and one that I don’t have time to start in any depth right now). However, some form of limited, enhanced personal rewards seems like the best way to encourage players to participate in WvW on servers with low WvW pop.

SUGGESTION 4: Scale WvW personal rewards to encourage play on servers with low WvW population. Provide increased rewards for all WvW play to make it more appealing to PvE populations. Scale these rewards up when total WvW populations are low +/or outnumbered.

SUGGESTION 5: Provide increased personal rewards to players transferring to lower tier servers for a significant period of time (even if said servers are no longer low population, stack with low pop bonuses in suggestion 4?). This type of boost may be unlikely to sway players to migrate on its own. However, when combined with several other suggestions could add up to balance the decision in favour of transferring down.

SERVER MERGERS
If all of the above fail to produce the desired effect, server mergers are something that should not be ruled out. There are certainly a lot of potential downsides to such mergers which can range anywhere from stressing server infrastructure to incurring negative press. However, the current state of WvW play on these servers is often simply not fun due to a lack of a critical mass of players. There comes a time in every MMO’s lifetime when server mergers become a necessity to improve gameplay. For this game, I firmly believe that the trigger for such mergers should be based on WvW populations (infrastructure permitting).

SUGGESTION 6: Consider merging some of the lowest tier servers with either mid-tier servers, or with other lower tier servers.

Today is the last day for this topic.
There has been zero developer replies.

What’s the point?

One of the thing which is supposed to happen is analyze what went wrong. Well here’s one for you straight here: how are we supposed to give useful suggestions if we don’t even know any of the constraints and the communication is exclusively one way?
For that matter, how is a “collaborative development” topic, in which no dev ever bothers to reply, at all different from any other forum topic?

I think taking a page out of guild wars 1 is a good idea.

Instead of wvw being about server vs server, why not have alliances.

each alliance has a population cap attached and then are matched up against other alliances, get rid of the server vs server altogether and make each alliance have some back story, coat of arms etc.

let alliances be cross server, and keep caps on them, make new ones as needed.

example : The Lionguard

Players that fight for this alliance wear the lionguard’s colors, and keeps they capture display the lionguard symbol. A player allied with the lionguard builds up ranking (wvw xp) and can unlock lionguard equipment blah blah blah.

the problem with the current system is it’s server based, and there is not way to fix it, ever. By making alliances multi server, and making wvw about these alliances competing, you have a way to cap numbers, ensure good fights, and add a whole new meta to wvw.

at the end of each season players sign up for a new alliance, the meta shifts, drama between guilds etc, all the juicy stuff that makes wvw fun.

World population
Suggestions to help people on servers that are outnumbered (vs night zergs etc)

1. Diminishing returns on damage to gates and walls

Diminishing returns after e.g. damage equivalent to two rams.
Because zergs can currently melt gates extremely fast, and because out-manned groups only have supply for one or maybe two rams

2. Adjustment so swords on towers give a bit better warning in time.

Both because spending all your time in WvW being the tower scout can be honestly plain boring, and also because you don’t have the numbers to have tower scouts if you are outmanned.

3. Guesting low populated servers as a WvW mercenary.

This one could be a bit complicated though.

It would for instance be unfair for the people on low populated servers, if they don’t get an equal chance to try to be a WvW mercenary, since they already are on a low populated server. But it could be solved.

Ideally maybe people from European servers could only be mercenaries on American servers and vice versa.

This might not have been such a big problem IF anet didn’t split euro and NA apart. They wanted a 24/7 battlefield, then they should have anticipated that coverage would be a major thing and the most simple solution to me would have been to not split euro and NA apart, but to let them coexist on the same servers.

One suggestion if ANet is willing to let the primetime have a bigger impact on the score:
Multiply the points per tick by a factor representing the number of all players of all three servers during one tick. So if each server has all four maps filled, there should be something about 1,000 players. Therefore the points per tick would be multiplied by (let’s say) 10 and if one server is roaming against 20 defenders with 80 karma trainers the PPT would be multiplied by 1 (1,000 / 100 =10 and 100 / 100 = 1).

This would make the primetime more important, but won’t give servers more points only because they’ve less players.

Ok, some random thoughts. Didn’t read all posts, so I might be duplicating someone else’s ideas.

Maybe it’s not about server population, but about wvw ‘usefulness’.

There aren’t that many players in wvw at any point compared to the entire pve population of a server, so, imho, the question is rather: how to make the pve population find it worthwhile to be in wvw and do useful stuff without working on wvw’ers nerves?
We saw an influx of new players with the achievements, and altho it hurts to be in a queue and see clueless pve-people go for silly achievements, it still brought in new players and new commanders who seem to stick around. So how can you make pve players useful for wvw without them messing things up too much? Maybe delve into the catacombs under the keeps and put a dungeon in there, only open when your server holds that keep? Or different keeps having different pathways to that dungeon? Would make defending keeps interesting for pve’ers, no (maybe make those keeps have 1 hour locks so they can squeeze 1 dungeon run in)? We’d need a way to stop camping those pathway entries though, like maybe having a keep makes some portal work in LA straight into that dungeon.
Oh, and – instead of having Scarlet messages pop up in wvw, why not have wvw messages pop up in pve?

Imbalance could be evened out with some sorts of diminishing returns: the more you have, the less it pays off. Outmanned makes underground tunnels open up straight into keeps, so that more gates in that keep have to be defended, succesfully spreading zergs.

Hey Devon,

Just curious if you’ve been out in WvW this week in the BP/FA/NSP matchup?

Are you having fun? Probably not.

Would a change in scoring make it more fun? Probably not.

Would a change in buff/debff make it more fun? Probably, but Anet doesn’t want to do that.

Would a change in population make it more fun? YES.
I think you’ll find that balanced populations make for more fun for everyone involved. I just checked scores and see that NSP is ticking at 85PPT, but at least that’s better than Maguuma with 0 PPT. That’s right, ZERO PPT. And that’s in a gold league match.

To fix this you need to stop transfers to high WvW pop worlds.
You need to announce lower map caps to take affect before season 2.
You need to display participation levels, by hour, for each server during season 1 so that those servers above map cap will know they will have to transfer to play.

None of this will be done. Which leaves as the only solution a break from WvW servers and PvE servers and WvW guesting during matches.

I’m slowly coming around to the opinion that it’s less a server population issue and more a timezone coverage issue.

I’m on Maguuma. While we got 2nd the first week, we’re most likely going to lose every other week this season. Which is fine. I don’t really care where we place, I just care that WvW is fun when I play. Last night in EBG was a blast. We had enough people, could hang onto our (upgraded) section of the map, and even took stonemist a couple times. To do this we had basically no presence in any borderland. Some karma trains I think, but we weren’t holding anything.

When I got up this morning, we owned 2 camps. total. If this week follows last week’s pattern, we’re never going to be able to hold anything for a decent length of time again. We’re behind because other servers are camping in our keeps and fortifying them. So while Sunday play is fun, the rest of the week is kind of a loss.

If there were something that could be done to negate or lessen the advantage gained by overnight caps, I think that would go a long way toward evening things out. Maybe a daily reset of ownership for all areas before primetime? So the maps revert to the initial layout they have when the week started, but daily instead of weekly (without the score resetting daily.)

Even if my supposition about coverage isn’t correct, I think this would make things more interesting for the servers who are doing the blowing out, as they’d have things to capture at least once a day.

Yerffejy.6538:

Pt 5/6
And finally, my last suggestion! Although I consider this one to be the most important.
This final solution is a way to stop the Landslide at a certain point. So instead of going all the way down the mountain like we see, it is stopped midway on the mountain, and not allowed to proceed further. However, while my other suggestions were small changes, this final suggestion would drastically alter WvW. (Aka, a lot of work to program and such.)

The 4-Matchup Solution

Reasoning: My reasoning was simple. I asked myself: What is a way to stop the Landslide effect from effecting all aspects of the matchup, having extreme repercussions to everyone playing. And it came to me, break up the segments of the day, so that one does not negatively impact another. So I split up the 24 day into 4 different time periods.
The way this would work, is that each segment of time is considered a different matchup, and so score in one segment would have no effect on that of another segment.
Implementation: So we start by dividing the day into 4 segments. I like using

1. Segment 1 3:00PM-9:00PM
2. Segment 2 9:00PM-3:00AM
3. Segment 3 3:00AM-9:00AM
4. Segment 4 9:00AM-3:00PM

Now I understand that reset (for NA) falls in between a segment, but I believe it is manageable.

So after we split up our timezones, we make each one its own separate matchup. What this means is that everything that happens in one timezone has absolutely zero consequences in another timezone. After every 6 hours, the match experiences a mini-reset, where the previous data is stored, and the data from the upcoming segment is restored, starting where you last left off in that matchup. So a server has a possibility to win in 4 different timezones.

Now, the added twist, that really makes it a good system. Each segment has its own specific matchup. The segments have their own opponents, who are unrelated to the server’s other segments. Each segment has its own rating, and so each time segment faces a balanced (as much as possible) opponent for that timeslot.

This allows for servers to be competitive in a specific timezone, and not have to worry about being nightcapped or anything like that. If they stack NA primetime and nothing else, they can still be strong and compete, and not depend on offhours coverage to secure a win. This also allows a server to say without a doubt that they are number 1 in a specific timezone, because every other timeslot has no bearing on that specific timeslot’s performance.

During the downtime, while waiting for Segment 1 to come back into play, the score hasn’t been ticking. It only ticks when gameplay is active.

This idea is the greatest thing I have ever read. Because even the smallest server can cover 6 hours of war I guess. I would just suggest to shift it one hour into the front, so people have time to come home from work.

calankh.3248:

I’m slowly coming around to the opinion that it’s less a server population issue and more a timezone coverage issue.

I’m on Maguuma. While we got 2nd the first week, we’re most likely going to lose every other week this season. Which is fine. I don’t really care where we place, I just care that WvW is fun when I play. Last night in EBG was a blast. We had enough people, could hang onto our (upgraded) section of the map, and even took stonemist a couple times. To do this we had basically no presence in any borderland. Some karma trains I think, but we weren’t holding anything.

When I got up this morning, we owned 2 camps. total. If this week follows last week’s pattern, we’re never going to be able to hold anything for a decent length of time again. We’re behind because other servers are camping in our keeps and fortifying them. So while Sunday play is fun, the rest of the week is kind of a loss.

If there were something that could be done to negate or lessen the advantage gained by overnight caps, I think that would go a long way toward evening things out. Maybe a daily reset of ownership for all areas before primetime? So the maps revert to the initial layout they have when the week started, but daily instead of weekly (without the score resetting daily.)

Even if my supposition about coverage isn’t correct, I think this would make things more interesting for the servers who are doing the blowing out, as they’d have things to capture at least once a day.

Preventing unequal border zone populations would also address timezone coverage.

If you have a rule that queues people when their server has x% (let’s say 15%) more people than the second highest population in the borders, then overnight people will not be able to form large enough groups to take a lot of keeps etc.

You need a basic population minimum before the rule starts kicking in, but if you set it at, say 3 people, then you’d stop groups going in an taking keeps in zones with no opposition.

I too would like to see a daily reset. More drastically, I would be happy to see seven 1-day “rounds” per matchup with points (5-3-1 or something like this) for placing 1st, 2nd, 3rd. This would ameliorate some of the score related symptoms of unbalanced wvw map populations.

I too am on Mag, and have always been on Mag, so honestly I can’t speak for other servers, but my experience is that most WvW’ers priorities are as follows:
1: Opportunity to take part in even fights
(If you want to 1v1 you should be able to find people to 1v1. If you want to do 5-10 man roaming and fight others of similar size, that shouldn’t be a problem to find. If you want to take part in blob v blob, good on you, that should be available too)
2: Opportunity to take part in different types of activities in WvW and be rewarded for it
(Defense, Upgrading, Roaming, Havoc squads, Offense, etc)
3: WINNING

Any changes to WvW should keep these priorities in mind.

For example, a giant blob need not, and should not be particularly mobile. As it currently exists, large groups are just as mobile as five-man groups due to the mechanics of swiftness and boon sharing. I’d like to see a “crowded” debuff, perhaps equivalent to being in combat (reduced movement speed, inability to use waypoints, no health regen, slower res speed) that goes away if you are in an owned structure (same range to guild fort buff). This would have no effect on blobs in combat, but would change the way in which large groups zoomed around maps).

I recommend that large groups put an indicator on the map even if they are not assaulting something. This would allow other players to go find or avoid them.

The only solution here in my opinion which has been posted by multiple people already is limiting the player population per map. One server having 80 players vs the other two servers that have 30 each is going to result in a very obvious conclusion. Those two servers are going to get crushed. Good luck getting people to even join WvW from those other two servers if they are being beaten so badly. Make a soft cap starting at 20 players. Equal population is the only thing that’s going to remotely resemble equal battles here. it boils down to strategy from there if its an equal playing field

One of the biggest issues during unbalanced population matches is siege. This becomes an even bigger issue in Eternal. Typical unbalanced match starts with the strong realm taking SM. Immediately they build 3-4 trebs that now will go non stop on walls of the other realms main border keeps and/or ogres etc. With walls down they easily can overwhelm/rush and take for example Overlook. From there they can build siege that completely dominates the under populated realms area of Eternal. I would love to see trebs removed from Eternal due to the small cramped map design

In other border lands siege overall simply favors the over populated/dominate realm. When 1 dominate realm can take over an entire enemy borderland, build multiple siege in every tower, and still run around with numerous omega golems, open field balistas/ACs etc. it just crushes the under populated servers even more. Siege limits need to be smaller, and need to consider all maps at the same time. Fixing population balance will be impossible but you can keep it from being even more of a deciding factor than it is right now

Plains of Ashes.5941:

I have read thru pages of this thread and I see a lot of complex solutions, alot of gaming the PPTs and buffs. Most of what I see is cures for symptoms. The first step is to separate the cause from the effect, identify the root cause, then solve the root cause.
The population imbalance, the stacking of servers, the fact that coverage defines the winner, the outmanned buff, the week after week of lobsided matches are not the problem, they are symptoms of the problems.

I submit the primary root cause, but not the only one, is the fact that servers are allowed to field unequal number of players. I have never played a game which allows one team to field unequal teams as its default mode. WvW allows you to field 70+ more players on one side than the other. Not even GW2 sPvP allows unequal teams. I cant name a game or sport which breaks this rule.

This i would contend is the underlying cause of most of WvW’s problems. Its a violation of fundemental game design. What flows from this flaw is what you would expect of human nature: everyone stacking the teams because stacking is rewarded with what people want the most: and that is to win. Its simple, if the NFL changed the rules which allowed a team to field all the players on its bench (like WvW), and players didnt cost the team money (like WvW), and the winning team gets a super bowl ring, well, the NFL would look like WvW next season with all the same flaws we see now.

WvW WILL BE BROKEN FOREVER UNTIL SERVERS ARE CONSTRAINED TO FIELD EQUAL NUMBER OF PLAYERS. Without this we will continue to have kludges (outmanned anyone?) and incentives, and the horribly complex solutions to manipulate PPTs and buffs when the solution is very simple. You must remove the incentive to change the behavior, and the incentive is stack a map and win the game.
So how do we fix it?

• limit the fielded teams to equal sizes, just like every other game does.
• make the remainder wait in queues, like other games
• Dont kick in the dynamic cap till the teamsize is over 20.
• if the teams are equal and one server has people leave then this offset is ok, balancing should only prevent folks from joining a team when that team is larger than the other teams (ie nobody ever gets booted for the sake of balane, let normal attrition do this)
• once this is in place, allow matchups between any 3 servers. thats right, for some matches it means HUGE queues (like for JQ vs AR), but that is what it will take to show players that a) stacked servers have no statistical advantage in winning, and b) stacking to a server means less playtime as a reward for their choice. with even teams, skill and tactics will matter more, where now they almost dont matter.
• keep statistics on which servers are cronically limiting the map pop and make a finite number of transfers avalable for free. Keeping statistics will allow ANET to know the specific number of transfers a server needs.

In summary: there are multiple flaws that result in stacked servers, but WvW will be broken until ANET creates a limit which equalizes the size of fielded teams between servers. You cant violate a fundamental game design principle and not have endless bad side effects and kludges.

I will pitch in another root cause for the stacking and that is ANETs attitude of treating the high ranked servers better. Example: we have 3 totally independent leagues in Season 1. why dont they get the exact same reward as a function of where they place in their league? why is the first place silver league reward worse than the gold winner? and the bronze league winner worse still? they dont play each other so why dont the 3 number ones each get the same number 1 prize? cant ANET see this forces players to stack because ANET themselves reward stacking? ANET should make all 3 league winners have the same quality of reward, then there is no reason to say “I gotta transfer to T1 or ANET is gonna screw me out of something worthwhile”

The reason there is stacking (and the resultant pop imbalance) is because ANET rewards it. both in its gameplay flaws, and in the very culture ANET has created for WvW. Pick the simple solution to the WvW problem, not the insanely convoluted solutions ive seen posted – equalized fielded teams in WvW just like every other online game does! that and enable transfers to even out the teams and ANET is on its way to making WvW what it should be.

Here, I’ll break your idea:
EVERYONE GET OUT OF THIS BL – [DFND] HAS 20 PEOPLE IN AND WILL LOCK IT DOWN. GET OUT SO THE OTHERS GET STUCK IN QUEUE!

On every organized server, that is exactly how it would work. As long as there is PPT, you cannot have balanced matches. However, sPvP does have that balance you look for, why not join it?

lordkrall.7241:

shagworth.5017:

Pretty disheartening when you see the number of Dev replies in Living World thread compared to this one, but not surprising.

Quite logical though.
They have WAY more people working in the Living Story teams than they have in WvW, thus it is much easier for that team to get some time to read and post on the forums.

If we accept your excuse as being “logical” we can also pretty much expect that it will take WAY more time for anything to come from the many suggestions posted in this thread.

Besides, what the hell is the point of calling it a “collaborative discussion” if there is virtually zero involvement from the dev side. Remember Devon’s famous “WvW was never meant to be fair” statement? My suspicions were that that his heart was never in this initiative in the first place and I had hoped that I would be wrong about that, but the available evidence says otherwise.

Collaborative my kitten .

Since the issue should be clear by now and most of the ideas I have can already be found in this thread here another minor fix that won’t solve the problem but could help a little.. It should be rather fast to implement since the new GvG area in obsidian sanctum comes out relatively fast (I heard it’s planned for november) and this change should take less afford..

Remove the jumping puzzles from all borderland maps and attach them as 1 jumping puzzle to the obsidian sanctum. If the league system continues this way (with achievements for jps) it will force many players to theses jps at the start of each season (it was really massive at our server…). This would reduce the amount of “missing” players a little and remove the necessity for jp fans to “steal” manpower from the WvW community. The removal of that area from the map could also possibly reduce lag issues a little.

My favorite solution to this would be to add it to the end of the obsidian sanctum and increase it’s difficulty and reward.. WvW jps seam mindless since blueprints can be bought at the trading post.. If you would increase the amount you get from jps while reducing/removing the blueprints you get through kills this map might lure some players from overpopulated servers to the sanctum (or at least it could give WvW players something to do while in queue…).

my view on the servers is that there are pve servers, and pvp servers. to exsplain… some servers have the vast majority seeking only to pve. they do not like pvp, and avoid it. these servers do not do well in wvw due to low attendance. a pve server will run 20 man zergs that get destroyed by pvp oriented 50 man zergs with superior communication and supplies. these pvp servers are servers that over time has put forth great effort in a wide scope of areas to ensure their success. much money, decision making, moral issues.. these pvp servers are servers who are by majority wanting to pvp. it is not an unfair advantage they have, as any server can achieve this by trying. it would be a larger travesty to handicap a server because the other server would rather be in pve than wvw. why should a server work so kittenly to be limited to what someone who hasn’t. my point to handicapping servers is this… you do that.. and the Olympic runners will have to wear weighted belts, and get their left foot cut off… because dave, who never worked out in his life.. feels he would be at a disadvantage if he was to compete.
little d’s comments will be withheld since it is ..harmful to the discussion.

ptitminou.6489:

Here, I’ll break your idea:
EVERYONE GET OUT OF THIS BL – [DFND] HAS 20 PEOPLE IN AND WILL LOCK IT DOWN. GET OUT SO THE OTHERS GET STUCK IN QUEUE!

On every organized server, that is exactly how it would work. As long as there is PPT, you cannot have balanced matches. However, sPvP does have that balance you look for, why not join it?

a) I think you’ll find most people’s desire to actually play is greater than their desire to win. Not many would care enough about winning to actually leave the border. Probably it would happen, but I can’t see it being frequent enough to hurt the game.

b) With population limiting rules there is a question do you limit it per border or for the whole of the borderlands. I suspect the latter would work a lot better.

c) There is also a question of how low the minimum population should be before the capping kicks in. I personally think it should be low enough that minimum vs unpopulated border would struggle to take a tower. That would help a lot to prevent night capping. In my opinion 20 is way too high.

lordkrall.7241:

shagworth.5017:

Pretty disheartening when you see the number of Dev replies in Living World thread compared to this one, but not surprising.

Quite logical though.
They have WAY more people working in the Living Story teams than they have in WvW, thus it is much easier for that team to get some time to read and post on the forums.

While this is true, when was the last post by Devon ? It would be nice even if he popped in every two days to say “hey folks still here and gathering data, keep the suggestions coming” as it stands he comes off like he really doesn’t give a kitten and is only participating because some evil over loard came in and said “your going to do this”. Its sad that this is the guy who is suppose to be passionate about WvW. Chris was warned that Devon would be less than cooperative.

Funny you should mention that because Devon made a post about 2 hours ago

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Updated-Obsidian-Sanctum-coming-in-November/first#post3149053

The thing is that IF he would just drop in and say: “We are still looking” people would whine about him not saying anything useful.

lordkrall.7241:

Funny you should mention that because Devon made a post about 2 hours ago

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Updated-Obsidian-Sanctum-coming-in-November/first#post3149053

The thing is that IF he would just drop in and say: “We are still looking” people would whine about him not saying anything useful.

Of course we wouldn’t like to have him say were still looking but many would settle for the fact that he is at least participating. His last post in this thread was 5 days ago, I understand maybe he probably doesn’t work weekends but its still unacceptable. Look at the posts following his replies (in which he really didn’t say much of anything) the posters mood changed to positive for the most part. Currently this Thread should be named “A place for all you WvW players to post suggestion so we can read them to our staff on fridays for a good laugh at your expense”. If you think any of Devons other posts were anything more then “were still looking” you need to read between the lines.

lordkrall.7241:

Funny you should mention that because Devon made a post about 2 hours ago

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Updated-Obsidian-Sanctum-coming-in-November/first#post3149053

The thing is that IF he would just drop in and say: “We are still looking” people would whine about him not saying anything useful.

You never cease to amaze me …

JonathanSharp.7094:

Keep in mind that weekends are a thing. Now that we’re all back in the office, caffeinated and ready to go, we’re gonna jump back in the threads.

Having said that, when you guys get going and are having good discussions, we sit back and make sure we give you guys room to debate/discuss. Just because there isn’t a dev response every X posts, it doesn’t mean we’re not watching the thread.

weird the other 2 threads the dev’s have had no problem posting throughout the week. Maybe you can read the other collaborative development threads see the amount of interaction and see why people think the wvw is being ignored.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Keep in mind that weekends are a thing. Now that we’re all back in the office, caffeinated and ready to go, we’re gonna jump back in the threads.

Having said that, when you guys get going and are having good discussions, we sit back and make sure we give you guys room to debate/discuss. Just because there isn’t a dev response every X posts, it doesn’t mean we’re not watching the thread.

Except it isn’t supposed to be a thread with players discussing stuff it is supposed to be a discussion between players and devs. Collaboration requires 2 parties.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Sure, those devs are free to post on the weekend if they want to!

Keep in mind that some devs have families, or may have prior obligations/plans on a weekend, while some other devs may have a lot of free time on a given weekend!

you say that like there was a lot of interaction during last week as well. there wasn’t and the dev interaction in this thread just looks bad if you compare it to the other 2 threads on collaborative development.

Its fine he doesn’t work weekends, thats his choice to make and is deserving of his free time to do with as he chooses. It still doesn’t help that it took him days to reply the first time and then dissapeared, the fact that your here now Jonathan instead of Devon is just compounding our beliefs that Devon does not care. I applaud most of your Dev’s for their compassion for the game, and yourself for having to put up with us and doing some good preventative maintenance before things blow up but, it really should be Mr. Carver here.

Ok now you are back what are you opinions on world population?

Are we likely to see any changes to the way the server population system accounts for players at a given time to make it focus primarily on players partaking in wvw?

Any ideas on implementing systems that encourage even distribution, over stacking the highest population servers? Have we really nailed down why people want to stack the top tier servers even with queues and skill lag?

Once we can truly identify why someone would rather not be on Anvil Rock as opposed to Blackgate we can look to solve the issues. My personal opinion however is an established community which is something developers can’t really do anything about unless better systems are put in place to organise a server from a wvw standpoint. (Better UI and raid systems could go a long way towards this )

Maybe you guys should start thinking a bit about what/how you write?
The kind of posts we see here right now is most likely a sure way to get them to shut down this initiative and not do it again in the future.

I think the wvw dev’s need to just apologize for having the least collaborative discusion thread and for not participating and then try to start the discusion up again. Pretending they have been active participants the whole time is going to derail the discusion because the players can see the obvious lie.

Was anything said about balancing for populations etc etc by a dev?

lordkrall.7241:

Maybe you guys should start thinking a bit about what/how you write?
The kind of posts we see here right now is most likely a sure way to get them to shut down this initiative and not do it again in the future.

Your not wrong but your not right either, would it matter at this point if it was shut down ? The WvW boards would just fill up with all these suggestions just as it did before and they to would be ingored just like they are now. There is no point in a Collaborative Disscusion without the Collaboration part.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Sure, those devs are free to post on the weekend if they want to!

Keep in mind that some devs have families, or may have prior obligations/plans on a weekend, while some other devs may have a lot of free time on a given weekend!

Well, OK … but that just tells me that many of us here have a stronger interest in fixing this mess than they do. The great majority of players who post here have busy real lives as well, but somehow we find the time to scan the thread and post an input or two.

More than just the lack of participation from Anet’s side, though, is the apparent lack of awareness and buyin to the issue itself. The core problem is that WvW populations are fundamentally and woefully unbalanced (hence the title of the thread), yet read carefully this last relevant post from Devon on the issue:

“The way that we try and find answers to the types of problems raised in this thread are by trying to get to the heart of the issue. Saying things like ‘populations aren’t balanced’ doesn’t lead to any productive solutions because they all involve things like drastically redistributing the populations of the game. Finding the core reasons for that like ‘score momentum is overpowering’ allow us to attack the actual problem. What I hope to get out of this is a sense of why people think that the population causes the scoring issues, because that is something we can find a solution to. As part of that it’s important for us to more clearly explain why we’ve made some of the decisions we have made so that we talk about the reasoning behind those and how they’ve been in practice.

These threads are intended to be a discussion about the design of various aspects of the game and how the team and the players view them. Our decision making in terms of what actions we take and what we are already doing have to take a wide range of things into account including available resources. So it was never my intent to imply that we would jump to do the things mentioned in this thread because some aren’t feasible, some require resources we don’t have, and some might already be in progress."

There are three troubling aspects to that response:

1. Devon doesn’t really accept that population balance is achievable or even desirable.
2. Devon prefers to focus on score balance, which as I and others have stated several times does NOT make WvW more fun. The severely undermanned side will still be squeezed out of much of the enjoyable game play even if the score is comparable by granting them point bonuses for their restricted subset of play.
3. Devon has already started hedging on what remediation will occur as the result of this “collaboration.”

After all those many frustrating months of being ignored we saw some promise by the creation of this thread … only to find that it’s headed to the same limbo that we were in before. I would have thought that you folks would have gone overboard to make sure that didn’t happen, but you haven’t at all held up your side of this “collaboration.” If you can’t recognize that, there is no hope for us at all.

Population issues could mostly be solved this way:

Your server’s historical performance should set an expectation/goal for the next match based on who you’re fighting (their ranking/performance). A winner will be picked based on the percentage of the goal that they reach. The goal calculation should be based on probably the last four matchups or something along those lines.

Ex: In BG/SoR/SoS this week, it could be said that BG will have a 250k goal, SoR a 200k goal, and SoS a 100k goal.

Now if BG gets 300k, SoR gets 160k, and SoS gets 130k, SoS would technically be the “winner” because their percentage of goal was 130%, as compared to BGs 120% or SoR’s 80%.

This way every server has a relatively even chance of winning, and you end up playing for a goal that is achievable for your server. You can still “win,” even if you’re the underdog, two tiers out of your league.

Winners for a particular week get a prize of some kind. Bonus WXP or ranks, Karma, gold, and/or something like that. You will also see that the winners will change from week to week, because servers that do exceptionally well one week will have a higher goal to reach for the following week. Then, because it’s percentage based, the less populated servers in their matchup will have a better chance at getting a higher percentage and will probably fight harder for it.

Edit: I would also say that you should actively tweak the algorithm that determines the next week’s goal, as relying on glicko rating and such doesn’t seem to accurately set expectations for a week. (Look at how much point gain low tiered servers have when going against high tiered servers, for instance.) It should not be a “set it and forget it” kind of thing.

Cactus.2710:

JonathanSharp.7094:

Sure, those devs are free to post on the weekend if they want to!

Keep in mind that some devs have families, or may have prior obligations/plans on a weekend, while some other devs may have a lot of free time on a given weekend!

Well, OK … but that just tells me that many of us here have a stronger interest in fixing this mess than they do. The great majority of players who post here have busy real lives as well, but somehow we find the time to scan the thread and post an input or two.

More than just the lack of participation from Anet’s side, though, is the apparent lack of awareness and buyin to the issue itself. The core problem is that WvW populations are fundamentally and woefully unbalanced (hence the title of the thread), yet read carefully this last relevant post from Devon on the issue:

“The way that we try and find answers to the types of problems raised in this thread are by trying to get to the heart of the issue. Saying things like ‘populations aren’t balanced’ doesn’t lead to any productive solutions because they all involve things like drastically redistributing the populations of the game. Finding the core reasons for that like ‘score momentum is overpowering’ allow us to attack the actual problem. What I hope to get out of this is a sense of why people think that the population causes the scoring issues, because that is something we can find a solution to. As part of that it’s important for us to more clearly explain why we’ve made some of the decisions we have made so that we talk about the reasoning behind those and how they’ve been in practice.

These threads are intended to be a discussion about the design of various aspects of the game and how the team and the players view them. Our decision making in terms of what actions we take and what we are already doing have to take a wide range of things into account including available resources. So it was never my intent to imply that we would jump to do the things mentioned in this thread because some aren’t feasible, some require resources we don’t have, and some might already be in progress."

There are three troubling aspects to that response:

1. Devon doesn’t really accept that population balance is achievable or even desirable.
2. Devon prefers to focus on score balance, which as I and others have stated several times does NOT make WvW more fun. The severely undermanned side will still be squeezed out of much of the enjoyable game play even if the score is comparable by granting them point bonuses for their restricted subset of play.
3. Devon has already started hedging on what remediation will occur as the result of this “collaboration.”

After all those many frustrating months of being ignored we saw some promise by the creation of this thread … only to find that it’s headed to the same limbo that we were in before. I would have thought that you folks would have gone overboard to make sure that didn’t happen, but you haven’t at all held up your side of this “collaboration.” If you can’t recognize that, there is no hope for us at all.

Well said, I think this is what many of us who weren’t so politically correct with our posts were trying to say.

lordkrall.7241:

Maybe you guys should start thinking a bit about what/how you write?
The kind of posts we see here right now is most likely a sure way to get them to shut down this initiative and not do it again in the future.

why would they shut down the collaborative initiative over this? the living story and pvp version is going great the dev’s are active in the thread the players are getting actual collaboration with dev’s.

lordkrall.7241:

Maybe you guys should start thinking a bit about what/how you write?
The kind of posts we see here right now is most likely a sure way to get them to shut down this initiative and not do it again in the future.

At this point, what would we have lost? That’s a serious question. We haven’t had a single informed, positive bit of feedback from ANet throughout this entire thread (no … I don’t consider Devon’s posts to be positive since he doesn’t seem to accept that population balance is the objective) and there has been zero collaborative content at all. I desperately wanted this thread to amount to something substantial, and there have been many, many worthwhile suggestions by the WvW player base in an effort to hold up our side of the collaboration. Where is the corresponding participation from ANet?? So far all we know is that the devs have finally managed to get their caffeine fix.

Hickeroar.9734:

Population issues could mostly be solved this way:

Your server’s historical performance should set an expectation/goal for the next match based on who you’re fighting (their ranking/performance). A winner will be picked based on the percentage of the goal that they reach. The goal calculation should be based on probably the last four matchups or something along those lines.

Ex: In BG/SoR/SoS this week, it could be said that BG will have a 250k goal, SoR a 200k goal, and SoS a 100k goal.

Now if BG gets 300k, SoR gets 160k, and SoS gets 130k, SoS would technically be the “winner” because their percentage of goal was 130%, as compared to BGs 120% or SoR’s 80%.

This way every server has a relatively even chance of winning, and you end up playing for a goal that is achievable for your server. You can still “win,” even if you’re the underdog, two tiers out of your league.

Winners for a particular week get a prize of some kind. Bonus WXP or ranks, Karma, gold, and/or something like that. You will also see that the winners will change from week to week, because servers that do exceptionally well one week will have a higher goal to reach for the following week. Then, because it’s percentage based, the less populated servers in their matchup will have a better chance at getting a higher percentage and will probably fight harder for it.

You don’t “win” if you’re the undermanned server and all you are able to do is cap camps and kill yaks … and that is exactly what happens even if your score says you were “competitive”. Returning the enjoyment to WvW requires that populations be more or else equivalent so that everyone has roughly the same ability to engage in all those aspects of the match that the game design calls for.