Guild Wars 2

Change the matchup reset time. The current schedule will always prefer servers with a better nightcrew to have a huge influence on the scores and ladder.
For US servers the matchup reset is friday afternoon and for EU servers midnight GMT. For many EU players who like to participate in the hours after reset it’s not really ideal. We heard a couple of times that these two regions are located in different datacenters and are not related to each other, so why make a simultaneously reset for both regions?

When the reset takes place on wednesday afternoon/evening, for both US and EU, the weekend suddenly would be in the middle of the week and give servers with low player numbers during the week an opportunity to catch up and play down the impact a good nightcrew has right now.

I don’t necessarily believe it would help with night capping at all,

But I have always thought Friday night was a really silly time to have the matches reset.
The weekend is the most active time in wvw and, with Friday night match resets, is also one of the least important parts of the week (In balanced matches).

this is not true at all. we have a really strong push for reset night. which is mostly our primetime. but as soon as we all sleep, JQ overtakes us

The only practical solution is global servers, nothing else.

the sooner Anet realizes this the better for everyone.

There is no nightcapping, unless you mean there is always nightcapping going on because as people have stated on previous threads: Its always night somewhere around the world.

It will not stop nightcapping, as I said. But it will reduce the impact a small player group has at night during weekdays compared to weekends. There is an imbalance in player value. 15 people playing tuesday night have so much more influence on the scoreboard than the same 15 people playing on saturday night.

why not allow two server per team One with 12 hrs block and the other. You know so that players can you know get a life play some pve content do spvp or work on crafting etc. Or do fract runs. I was thinking of one aussie server one america server such and so forth. so that the two server team is contantly helping each other. keeping battles alive at all times.

Many war use this tatic hell even america have company platoon that sleep day work night other sleep night work day so that battles are constantly in check

I thought about this a bit, and so do these late night players consider all the “normal” people to be daycapping them? It’s not really the time of the day that’s the problem, it’s the overall population at the time. Capping during a prime time is not easy, points are earned and defended with large groups of players making coordinated efforts. Capping at off times can be small groups just effortlessly taking points because there’s little to no competition on the entire map, sometimes taking over almost the entire WvW zone while everyone else is asleep/work/etc.

Imo, some system that reduces point worth based on the overall population currently playing. If every place is 100% packed, you get full points. If there’s only 10% in the zone because it’s super late at night, you get… some amount less. There would be need to be some balance there to keep the overall point score the same as now, since it does affect the bonuses and such. Basically if all your points come from capping while you have no opposition, you get a good deal less points than you would if you had to actively push and defend during more active times.

Right now you could have similar scores with 1 server that has a big prime time population, fighting and defending large battles vs the other 2, and have another server who puts up low scores during prime time, have a similar total score at the end of the week just by taking points with little opposition at night. I think that’s what really annoys people about “nightcapping”. Losing to a server you aren’t fighting, who isn’t having to fight for their points with anywhere the difficulty as you are.

What Zephyranthes said.

Hope this ll come in future update.

Zephyranthes.2715:

Imo, some system that reduces point worth based on the overall population currently playing. If every place is 100% packed, you get full points. If there’s only 10% in the zone because it’s super late at night, you get… some amount less. There would be need to be some balance there to keep the overall point score the same as now, since it does affect the bonuses and such. Basically if all your points come from capping while you have no opposition, you get a good deal less points than you would if you had to actively push and defend during more active times.

A lot of people have proposed similar systems. Something like this definitely needs to be in place. Anet is hopefully paying attention to posts like this.

The side effect of score manipulation is that it may interfere with the glicko rating calculations. E.g. a low pop server is going to sink into a worse form of black hole rating than the current T8.

That said, there’s no reason that pop activity shouldn’t be reflected in the rating more directly. ANet just needs to put a soft “floor” to how much rating changes by. Zzz.

Zephyranthes.2715:

Imo, some system that reduces point worth based on the overall population currently playing. If every place is 100% packed, you get full points. If there’s only 10% in the zone because it’s super late at night, you get… some amount less. There would be need to be some balance there to keep the overall point score the same as now, since it does affect the bonuses and such. Basically if all your points come from capping while you have no opposition, you get a good deal less points than you would if you had to actively push and defend during more active times.

-1. For that to happen, Anet would have to know pretty accurately the actual number of players active on the map. The available evidence suggests that they don’t.

-2. The player count would have to include the aggregate of all four maps. Otherwise the strategy of trying to pull enemies from one map to another would go away.

-3. Your suggestion would have the negative effect of discouraging participation at certain hours because point contribution would be significantly reduced. There’s no guarantee at all that they would migrate to different hours, and anything that reduces demand to play the game is ultimately a bad idea.

-4. Your “solution” opens up lots of opportunity for abuse. Let’s say my server has a large population advantage at some point in time. We run around capping and defending supply camps, and we set up lots of siege outside various keeps and towers that we don’t currently own. All of a sudden we have a bunch of server mates log out of WvW and let the remaining few quickly cap the objectives for more points than we would have gotten otherwise. And once we take those objectives, we have even more players log out so that we get the next several point ticks with almost nobody on the map. Where do you draw the line between the contribution of the many versus the contribution of the few?

tl;dr I don’t see anything “easy” about your proposal at all.

Yes, population has to be taken into the score formula. It can’t be that 50 blue vs 10 red can accumulate the same points for blue in 1hr as 100 blue vs 100 red in 5hrs (numbers made up). Like EasymodeX said, there are some other factors to consider too but a simple multiplicator based on pop red vs pop blue percentage would already help a lot.

We’re enjoying some great battles in T1 EU atm during prime, but it’s devastating to wake up seeing server red ticking with 500+ again.

Hmm Night capping. My night or yours?
My night time starts at 8am EST.

If there are no nightcapping problems, then why is a server with 10 oceanics scoree way better than the other servers which doesnt have them?

maybe “nightcapping” is not the right word, but it doesnt hide the fact, that score imbalance needs to be looked at!

The only thing that will solve the problem of equal rewards for taking an empty base on a map with no opposition (aka: “Night capping”) is scaling point values for objectives.

So lets take a tower. Towers have a variable score of 5-15. If you take the tower against a faction who has the undermanned debuff, it’s only worth 5. This means if you go ahead and wipe out someone who isn’t really there to defend themselves you don’t really get that many points. If you take the tower against a force who has normal numbers in the zone, you get the normal 10 points. However each time there’s a defense tick and a pre-requisite number of players die in the radius of the Tower the tower value goes up 1 up to a max of 15.

This would preserve all the current forms of game play (such as tagging doors to show swords so you feign your position/attacks) while opening up new tactical scenarios (defense just became a whole new proposition) AND eliminates extra rewards for factions who simply out coverage other time zones by reducing their benefits of taking empty maps.

ok, so speaking form experiance….. ( BS Fergs Nite Crew) all you need do is find a guild in the “nite” timezone or some of the larger guilds may have many members from a “nite” timezone. get a bit organised?? no offence but the “American Day” players think the world revolves around you! i dont want to get less points beacuse you aint organised enough to get a nite crew?

example ferg was loosing 500+ to 50+ at nite till a few people founded a nite crew recruted “nite” players eg Aussies and now we sit more like 250-320+ over nite with about 20-40 active nite crew. (5 good players can defend a castle from 20 people)

to be ohnest our nite crew is way better than our day crew. BS and other nite guilds log on to 50+ points…. we do all the work t make that 250+

being in the nite crew is just a different set of skills. we dont get 40 man zergs (we do get 10-20) but day strats are seige, zerg ect. nite strats are quick, well organised, responsive. have someone on all maps to call out for a quick defence if an attack happens. we do just as much work, why should we be getting less score for it?

not to mention the “nite” time is only like 6-7 hours (12am-6/7am) at about 6/7 there are many americans/day ppl on. 6/7 hours out of 24?

Kodiak.3281:

The only thing that will solve the problem of equal rewards for taking an empty base on a map with no opposition (aka: “Night capping”) is scaling point values for objectives.

So lets take a tower. Towers have a variable score of 5-15. If you take the tower against a faction who has the undermanned debuff, it’s only worth 5. This means if you go ahead and wipe out someone who isn’t really there to defend themselves you don’t really get that many points. If you take the tower against a force who has normal numbers in the zone, you get the normal 10 points. However each time there’s a defense tick and a pre-requisite number of players die in the radius of the Tower the tower value goes up 1 up to a max of 15.

This would preserve all the current forms of game play (such as tagging doors to show swords so you feign your position/attacks) while opening up new tactical scenarios (defense just became a whole new proposition) AND eliminates extra rewards for factions who simply out coverage other time zones by reducing their benefits of taking empty maps.

The majority of points don’t come from capping, they come from the potential points that become real points every 15 minutes. So how would your system handle that then?
If a tower is taken A 14 minutes before next tally while defender had out manned buff, what happen if at tally they no longer have out manned?
How about the reverse? Will people just want to log out every 15 minutes until the tally is taken so they can make the most points?
How about if two 50 man zergs are battling out in hills keep on one of the borderlands, while a small team of 4 stealth caps woodhaven which had no defenders there because they were all at hills. Is that tower worth less points because no one came to defend it? If not why not? it is essentially the same as ‘night-capping’

@OP

The solution you mentioned will do nothing for night capping. Beyond that, you just need to accept that this is a global game. What you consider night capping is prime time for someone else.

It’s just a game. Trust me, the sun will still rise tomorrow whether your server did well or horribly while you slept.

What about the “day capping problem” ?

Regards,
Oceania

salluks.6017:

The only practical solution is global servers, nothing else.

the sooner Anet realizes this the better for everyone.

Global servers will have higher latency. That doesn’t help with lag nor culling.

I would love for reset for European servers to happen at more EU-friendly time but I don’t think it would solve the nightcapping “problem”. The match lasts 7 days and servers with better coverage would again take advantage during nights regardless of when the match begins.

But yeah, please put reset times for EU at earlier hour – staying awake for reset after a whole week at work is often challenging.

At this point in the game I suggest getting used to it. Not trying to be a jerk but there is really not much they can do to fix it in its current state. The mistake they made goes up to the way they set up servers. USA/EURO split. The dumbest thing they could have done.

I mean really, how do you make such a simplistic mistake. If I was making an MMO I would realize right off that by locking server regionally it would create issues like this. So whate the solution? There is no PERFECT solution, but the best thing they can do is the following.

1. Realize they royally made a mistake with server setup when it comes to WvW.
2. Take the time and effort to Merg 1 USA and 1 Euro server across the board taking into account WvW pops on both servers being merged.
3. Merge or destroy other Euro and USA servers after his to help finish balancing out pops a bit.
4. Add 1, 2 or 3 more WVW maps (AKA bringing the total maps to 5, 6 or 7). Why more maps? With servers merged and population increase you will need more maps to allow the larger population to WvW without being in 15hr q’s.

Servers should have been global from the start so that each server could have coverage over all hours of the day/night. This would have led to less blowout matches overall.

And yet again a thread that suggests changing reset times ends up in Suggestions…

Easy fix: make points tick for 1/10 during the night for the server designated zone. Since servers are NA and EURO its very easy to establish what “night” is (something 1am-13 CET on Euro servers and a bit looser on NA servers with east-west coast time difference

That’s pretty unfair to players that don’t play during “NA primetime”.

Overall the suggestion that is best for the actual scoring within a single matchup has been made many times previously — reduce total point accrual by the missing population in WvW at the time of the score tick.

If one server has 0 coverage and the others have full, then reduce point accrual for all servers by 33% (or some fraction of the missing population — maybe 33% / 2). If two servers have 0 coverage and the third has full, reduce point accrual for everyone by 66%/2).

This won’t band-aid magic-bullet fix activity disparities. Servers with higher coverage will still be ticking higher because they can actually go around capping the map. The /2 scaling ensures that the effect on the score is muted a bit. Last, as a practical matter, no server has “zero” coverage at any time of day.

Note that this would also benefit “primetime” balance for a SEA/EU-heavy NA server. Their point slowdown during NA primetime will be slightly mitigated if they are losing by actual active population.

Catisa.6507:

The majority of points don’t come from capping, they come from the potential points that become real points every 15 minutes. So how would your system handle that then?
If a tower is taken A 14 minutes before next tally while defender had out manned buff, what happen if at tally they no longer have out manned?
How about the reverse? Will people just want to log out every 15 minutes until the tally is taken so they can make the most points?

Whatever the status of the map when the objective was taken is what the value is. So if team A takes a tower at 8pm from a faction that has the outmanned buff it’d only be worth 5 until it’s “upgraded” through defense regardless if at a later time (say 10pm) the other side is not outmanned anymore. This means regardless of what time it was capped (night, day, prime time) taking an objective from an outmanned team is worth less than taking an objective from a team with a fighting force on the map.

People aren’t going to actively log out every 15 minutes to reduce cap values. Doing so will let enemy sides basically have free reign of the map. During that time they could lose total map presence and in the higher tiers (where there are actual queues) means they won’t guaranteed get back in.

Even if there are, you simply adjust the outmanned debuff system. So for example lets say you get a clever group of people. They know they’re going to lose a keep in a Borderlands and gets 50+ people to log out while the enemy takes the keep. This would normally give the outmanned debuff. However if you adjust the system, make it so it doesn’t do outmanned for 15 minutes until after it triggers and then if the condition is true then the penalties go into effect. This prevents that kind of rapid logout to reduce score values.

I mean really there’s a variety of ways to go about it and fix all the exploits that may pop up and meta game shifts that occur but without some some sort of variable point value system there’ll never be a real solution to sides with superior coverage (aka: “night capping”).

Catisa.6507:

How about if two 50 man zergs are battling out in hills keep on one of the borderlands, while a small team of 4 stealth caps woodhaven which had no defenders there because they were all at hills. Is that tower worth less points because no one came to defend it? If not why not? it is essentially the same as ‘night-capping’

Actually it isn’t the same thing at all.

Outmanned means you can’t possibly match the numbers of the enemy side. The other side simply has a numerical advantage where they can field more players doing more activities than you. It’s simply an unfair advantage on an offensive, defensive and side (such as extra people to escort yaks) levels.

However through superior tactics and subterfuge (important elements in WvW) if you can hold up the enemy force and “free cap” a base with no defenders, or more important blitzkrieg a base before the enemy can respond, that’s a perfectly valid tactic. It’s the defenders poor ability to defend their territory with the numbers they do have that is at fault, not that the base was empty. Outplaying your opponent should never be penalized.

Again, that’s why the whole variable system works. It still rewards current tactical game play while reducing the benefit of curb stomping an enemy that isn’t there.

Kodiak.3281:

Catisa.6507:

The majority of points don’t come from capping, they come from the potential points that become real points every 15 minutes. So how would your system handle that then?
If a tower is taken A 14 minutes before next tally while defender had out manned buff, what happen if at tally they no longer have out manned?
How about the reverse? Will people just want to log out every 15 minutes until the tally is taken so they can make the most points?

Whatever the status of the map when the objective was taken is what the value is. So if team A takes a tower at 8pm from a faction that has the outmanned buff it’d only be worth 5 until it’s “upgraded” through defense regardless if at a later time (say 10pm) the other side is not outmanned anymore. This means regardless of what time it was capped (night, day, prime time) taking an objective from an outmanned team is worth less than taking an objective from a team with a fighting force on the map.

You sound like the kind of person that writes laws so complicated that they can’t be interpreted, much less enforced.

How do you determine the relative difficulty of defending or taking a tower or camp? Simply the number of people on either side does not determined difficulty. If we have six people sitting on well placed defensive siege we can defend a much larger force of enemies … especially if they are smart enough to use siege well. And how do you determine exactly what constitutes “taking” a tower? If we bomb the crap out of well defended walls with six trebs before waltzing in with a few players does that count more than using lots of players to do the same thing with flame rams at the gate? What if we start out with lots of players to take a tower and then pull most of them away at the last minute? How far away do they need to be not to count? Do players running supplies for siege (defensive or offensive) count? If so, how do you decide whether they are or not? Does taking a tower further away from your spawn or nearest capped structure count more than taking a closer one? If not, why not (since it is generally more difficult)?

You clearly have not thought this through very well. What you propose would require so many purely arbitrary decisions by ANet, with so many opportunities to game it during the match, that there would be no end to the complaints from the user base.

Cactus.2710:

You sound like the kind of person that writes laws so complicated that they can’t be interpreted, much less enforced.

How do you determine the relative difficulty of defending or taking a tower or camp? Simply the number of people on either side does not determined difficulty. If we have six people sitting on well placed defensive siege we can defend a much larger force of enemies … especially if they are smart enough to use siege well. And how do you determine exactly what constitutes “taking” a tower? If we bomb the crap out of well defended walls with six trebs before waltzing in with a few players does that count more than using lots of players to do the same thing with flame rams at the gate? What if we start out with lots of players to take a tower and then pull most of them away at the last minute? How far away do they need to be not to count? Do players running supplies for siege (defensive or offensive) count? If so, how do you decide whether they are or not? Does taking a tower further away from your spawn or nearest capped structure count more than taking a closer one? If not, why not (since it is generally more difficult)?

You clearly have not thought this through very well. What you propose would require so many purely arbitrary decisions by ANet, with so many opportunities to game it during the match, that there would be no end to the complaints from the user base.

What the hell are you talking about? Who ever brought up difficulty? The only thing I ever brought up was having numbers over a side that was outmanned which is something very easy to measure (and the game already does measure).

It’s pretty simple:

1. If you take an objective and the enemy has the outmanned debuff that objective is worth less points.

2. If you take an objective and the enemy doesn’t have the outmanned debuff, its worth the same points as it is now.

3. If you defend an objective (defense tick event) and X players died, your objective goes up in value by a point. The X players is to prevent ghost attacks of 1-2 guys attacking an objective and adding artificial value to it.

4. Outmanned debuff kicks in after a delay instead of instantly being calculated. This is to prevent people from rapidly logging out to devalue an objective.

You seem to be the only one over complicating the issue by bringing up “difficulty” of taking objectives which is irrelevant and immeasurable in the grand scheme of things.