Guild Wars 2

Really eye opening…

You figure you are outnumbered and thats why you are getting rolled so hard, but Mike’s charts really illustrate it so well.

While on some world v world fights the numbers are close (JQ vs HoD, etc) on Sanctum of Rall we are getting rolled by Fort Aspenwood.

If you compare FA’s queue chart with SoR’s queue chart it provides a really clear picture of the imbalance in the matches right now.

I know they are working on it, and I love WvWvW, but a 1 week match where you are so outclasses in zerg numbers just makes it not fun to jump into WvWvW.

For analysis’ sake: FA frequently peaks over 200 in Eternal Battlegrounds, and almost never lacks a queue for that zone. SoR hits a peak of 160 at its highest, and frequently lacks a queue for that zone.

Compare the images for your WvWvW battle from Mikes post and see what you can gleen.

I wouldn’t say its a server imbalance, I think you read it wrong.

It’s obvious FA has more queueing up than your server. That is all the graphs show.

It appears your server isn’t interested in WvW (player to player). Tell the PvE’s to get out there and stop running dungeon loops.

also no idea how to edit, but queues = full battlegrounds, if you have a smaller queue than them, you still have equal people in the zone… just less people waiting to get in when it dies down.

I agree with you there Monte,

But I think it still shows many times when they have server queues and we do not, across all BG. They have two gaps when they have noone queued for any BG, we have 4.

Ironically, the FA-SF-SoR matchup has been one of the closest ones during prime times this week. I’ve had some exciting times both on SF as an independent and on FA last night as part of a guild group checking out the server. It’s just FA nightcapping that skews the scores.

Monte.5013:

I wouldn’t say its a server imbalance, I think you read it wrong.

It’s obvious FA has more queueing up than your server. That is all the graphs show.

It appears your server isn’t interested in WvW (player to player). Tell the PvE’s to get out there and stop running dungeon loops.

According to the stats fully 70 percent of the player base has never been in wvw. You are right that it isn’t really a server imbalance, it’s a participation imbalance. It is also a failure of the scoring system. The primary way to ‘win’ in wvw is by making sure you server has 24 hour participation. It isn’t about tactics, how many enemies you kill, or how many keeps you take or defend. It is all about holding your own until the other servers enter a dead zone in participation and you take the whole map.

Hopefully, Arena Net will reconsider the scoring system to take into account the actual fights that occur. As a previous poster said the fights this week from 7 est to midnight est have been fast, furious and a great deal of fun.

Actually… matching up servers with similar graphs may be the answer?

Archaeneoso.8461:

I agree with you there Monte,

But I think it still shows many times when they have server queues and we do not, across all BG. They have two gaps when they have noone queued for any BG, we have 4.

Agreed. During the weekend FA has a queue on eternal battlegrounds the entire time. There are times when the borderlands don’t have a queue but EB does. My guess is during those times FA has the borderlands a lot more full then SoR does.

I wouldn’t say its a server imbalance, I think you read it wrong.
It’s obvious FA has more queueing up than your server. That is all the graphs show.
It appears your server isn’t interested in WvW (player to player). Tell the PvE’s to get out there and stop running dungeon loops.

The fault with this system lies in what the reality looks like. Instead of fighting the uphill battle people will just transfer over to the steamrolling side and enjoy themselves. The only hope would be to have players interested in WvW transfer to the server and reinforce the existing population. If that doesnt happen it will always be that uphill battle.

Yes, it can feel great to prevail against the odds but there have been many games in the past to show us what reality actually looks like. If there is an imbalance in large scale PvP, people will flock towards the side with the advantage, further exacerbating the problem.
Tight battles are amazingly fun. But if the battle is lopsided it’s much more fun (and much more rewarding in terms of actual virtual rewards you get for putting so much time into the game) to be on the side steamrolling the enemy instead of getting rolled.

Firefly.4165:

Actually… matching up servers with similar graphs may be the answer?

This would be a good step. However, even just 1 hour where one server has a queue and the other 2 don’t could mean that server is able to capture every holding on multiple maps, and also give them position to upgrade those holdings to make it harder to take them back.

So FA move up into a higher bracket next round.

Where is the problem again?

One imbalanced round, especially this early on, doesn’t indicate a broken system.

The primary way to ‘win’ in wvw is by making sure you server has 24 hour participation. It isn’t about tactics, how many enemies you kill, or how many keeps you take or defend. It is all about holding your own until the other servers enter a dead zone in participation and you take the whole map.

:( It is frustrating to hear people say BS like this. I play primarily primetime and we are leading the per tick nearly 90% of the time. Most recently Wednesday night when it was quite clear we were being double-teamed. Good leadership and a sound “divide and conquer” plan was made and in an hour we owned 60% of the map including garrison.

Tactics matter and you are just making excuses. Starting winning in primetime, and people will come to cover your oceanic hours.

Tzash.5748:

So FA move up into a higher bracket next round.

Where is the problem again?

One imbalanced round, especially this early on, doesn’t indicate a broken system.

The problem comes that in order for this tier system to eventually work servers would have to match up in participation exactly. Even a one or 2 hour difference in participation will result in a blow out. That is why I would like to see the current scoring system supplemented with points awarded for pvp kills. Kills will be more frequent whenever the ‘primetime’ for that match up occurs. It is a way to more accurately represent the battle without punishing a particular time zone.

Sure that will open the possibility of abuse but the scoring would hardly be more skewed than it is right now.

Yahkin.1254:

The primary way to ‘win’ in wvw is by making sure you server has 24 hour participation. It isn’t about tactics, how many enemies you kill, or how many keeps you take or defend. It is all about holding your own until the other servers enter a dead zone in participation and you take the whole map.

:( It is frustrating to hear people say BS like this. I play primarily primetime and we are leading the per tick nearly 90% of the time. Most recently Wednesday night when it was quite clear we were being double-teamed. Good leadership and a sound “divide and conquer” plan was made and in an hour we owned 60% of the map including garrison.

Tactics matter and you are just making excuses. Starting winning in primetime, and people will come to cover your oceanic hours.

LoL everyone is convinced they are being ‘double teamed’. As for tactics we start out with nothing on the map every night and end up with the largest share every single night. ‘Winning’ in prime time cannot make up for the other 12 to 18 hours under the current score system.

Lubricaton is right in that during primetime, its been a lot of fun and a nicely matched contest, with the scores being 200’s a tick for each server and shifting around during the evening who was in the lead.

But then you come back the next day and FA is 600+ per tick and the other two < 50 a tick.

Thats the problem that needs to be solved somehow.

Yahkin.1254:

The primary way to ‘win’ in wvw is by making sure you server has 24 hour participation. It isn’t about tactics, how many enemies you kill, or how many keeps you take or defend. It is all about holding your own until the other servers enter a dead zone in participation and you take the whole map.

:( It is frustrating to hear people say BS like this. I play primarily primetime and we are leading the per tick nearly 90% of the time. Most recently Wednesday night when it was quite clear we were being double-teamed. Good leadership and a sound “divide and conquer” plan was made and in an hour we owned 60% of the map including garrison.

Tactics matter and you are just making excuses. Starting winning in primetime, and people will come to cover your oceanic hours.

I play FA prime time. I would agree that we have been leading in per-tick most of the time and even during prime time I think we are the better server. However the difference is not huge. But the score gets drastically skewed during times when the other servers don’t have the population.

part of the FA discepency is certainly numbers, as I dont think I see players in our borderlands at night unless they have the outmanned buff. SF and Rall borderlands are a little more even, but there’s a point where we have 2 golems at once gate entrance, 3 rams at another, and then 2 rams and a catapult at yet another entrance into the same keep…

However I would like to say that the players during the night are far more co-ordinated. The “zerg” of about 30-40 people we have actually follows instructions, and there are a few people who are gaining… is notoriety the right word? Fame maybe? Notice basically as being able leaders/planners during night.

There are also about 4 commanders that ive seen, all of whom play during day hours (we have none at night)
Ive only seen one of them actually in WvWvW.
His resume includes, but is probably (sadly) not limited to
1. building a ram with oil still up
2. building a catapult INSIDE an enemy meteor shower and then wondering why we werent building it
3. building a trebuchet ontop of a wall that was being hit by an enemy trebuchet, then leaving it to go smack a gate with his sword for 5 minutes, only to come back and wonder why his treb had “vanished”
4. Jumping off a cliff with about 10 people following him to their deaths.

Frankly im a little worried that we’re going to get stomped during the day time next bracket matchup :/

To be fair, the mismatch between Deveron’s Rest, Kainaing and Northern Shiverpeaks is works (like 580k to < 100k each in Nothern Shivs favor)

Archaeneoso.8461:

To be fair, the mismatch between Deveron’s Rest, Kainaing and Northern Shiverpeaks is works (like 580k to < 100k each in Nothern Shivs favor)

That one is an actual population issue I think. While SoR could potentially match participation if we could figure out how to get pve’rs to pvp, I don’t think that option is open to Devona or Kaineng.

Holy crap! ARRRR! Just add a second optional queue that joins you into a match fighting for whichever server needs help the most. If abuse if discovered, then start locking players into aiding that server for 24 hours after they join.

Would fix this 100%. Would also balance the server populations when someone decides to switch to a server they enjoyed participating in WvW with.

Be glad you aren’t on Sorrow’s Furnace, because of the lopsided match we not longer have a queue for our “prime time” anymore for WvW… so heads up to anyone who wants little to no queues :P

Yeah,

Bouncing between servers to look at the deltas, it really looks like only the tier 1 (1-3) are even close. The rest looks like people gave up after the delta got too large.

Was this taken when people were server hopping?

If so those numbers aren’t truly accurate as people hopped to the winning side, boosting numbers for one server regardless of participation or not.

Notice on losing servers how the queue times have steadily decreased each week, while on winning servers they have remained constant or increased. Really shows how many poeple are transfering/giving up.

Tzash.5748

So FA move up into a higher bracket next round.

Where is the problem again?

One imbalanced round, especially this early on, doesn’t indicate a broken system.

You can think that if you want, but you are wrong. The amount of people playing in each server will not remain the same, and the distribution of players across time will not remain the same.

Take a look at the graphs that we now have access to. Scores are obtained through territory domination across time. However, territory domination changes according to a) player skill, b) defensive upgrades and c) the amount of players in each team at any given point in time. So, what does it mean? It means that you don’t understand how to read a graph if you think that match making is enough to fix that.

Firefly.4165

Actually… matching up servers with similar graphs may be the answer?

It might work for the next week, but don’t count on it to work for the next month. The people in that chart are from all across the globe and they will have different holidays, different behaviors, etc. Ideally, you don’t want one team to be steamrolled by another simply because suddenly it is holiday in country “X”.

Matching those graphs is the long winded, overly complicated way of doing what every other team vs. team game does – dynamic balancing of teams.

Of course, you cannot dynamically balance teams because this is “World vs. World” – i.e., you cannot take on person from that gigantic queue in Henge of Denravi and put him in a server that could actually use his help. It has something to do with “server pride”, whatever that means.

In the end, the granularity of the teams is simply wrong. In a game called GUILD Wars, you’d think they’d assemble teams using smaller cells, such as GUILDS. Using a subset of a server’s population (the people interested in WvW) sounds like a good idea in theory, but just look at how well it actually works.

With server hopping, quitting and tail-coating in full effect, this all means zip.

Hexd.4796:

Notice on losing servers how the queue times have steadily decreased each week, while on winning servers they have remained constant or increased. Really shows how many poeple are transfering/giving up.

That may be partly true. However, the graph does start on a Friday night, moving into the work week as it moves right.

Perhaps those servers who show no drop off during the week simply have more students, part-time workers, or unemployed who can play at that time. Thus we may have an off-peak, and and “off-work” problem,

If this is true, it is yet another reason to add an anti-snowball mechanic.

LoL everyone is convinced they are being ‘double teamed’. As for tactics we start out with nothing on the map every night and end up with the largest share every single night. ‘Winning’ in prime time cannot make up for the other 12 to 18 hours under the current score system.

I’ve logged over a hundred hours of W3 and had never been double-teamed until the other night. It was exciting as we had to think outside the box and change our strategy.

Obviously each matchup is different and ones where you are waking up to 600/50/50 would be demoralizing. That has not been my experience, but I play on one of the top 4 servers. Some mornings we are leading and some we are behind. If you are truly making that kind of come back each night, then stream it, fraps it, and get advertising to get those Oceanics on board.

This would be a good step. However, even just 1 hour where one server has a queue and the other 2 don’t could mean that server is able to capture every holding on multiple maps, and also give them position to upgrade those holdings to make it harder to take them back.

That’s a critical point, I think.

1 hour is about what it takes for a server with more people to take the whole map away, particularly when they outnumber both other servers combined.

• Doors go down too fast and too cheap.
• NPC guards and especially lords die too fast.
• You only have to stand in the circle for about 10 seconds, which is too fast.

I think Arenanet should look into ways to slow down the capture rate. A team shouldn’t be able to sweep the entire map so quickly once they get a population advantage. Fully upgraded structures in particular should take longer to knock down.

I concur with some of that, especially the part about lords going down so fast, and more so, the 10 sec it takes to change ownership

Should be like someone has to remain for 3-5 min so you can rally and take back.

I believe a good starting point might be while counting the gained score each 15 minutes, it should be multiplied with total current player number on the map (all servers included). So for example on a prime time, where full numbers included what you “hold” means more compared to 03:00 AM where you or your opponent’s numbers are diminished.

I can’t claim this will solve all the problems, but it might be a start to make “good fights” mean more than “night capping” which I believe is the way to go to make WvW “more fun”.

Also as a comment against “Point by Kill” argument, such a system would change the value of objectives in the game. For example if “point by kill” is too much, people will start to fight on places where they will get more kills, rather than trying to capture Supply Camps or NPC Villages or other strategic objectives. Also as “dying” will mean more, people will start to move “more as a zerg” which will reduce the strategic variaty game presents. These are not speculations, just what I’ve seen on the past on other games where “Kill counts more than objectives”.

As a SF player I do have to ask SoR wtf they was thinking last night.

About 10est SoR owned their tower , the Hills keep & FA’s Orb inside it.
While sitting pretty on FA’s borderland 30 of you thought it would be a good idea to leave your keep…you know the one with the orb in it and ….

“Why not push blue !?!?….”

And hour later they lost everything but the tower ourside our spawn with FA breathing down the East and West flanks. FA & SoR fighting outside our spawn was.. kinda funny at least.

qq aside… If the score is 400k-100k-100k…then why are we fighting eachother?

Hashi,

A great question, but the answer probably is because SF and SoR were getting steamrolled anytime FA put their attention to either, so why go up against the bully where they feel they cannot win when they can go against the other losing team and at least get some tokens.

I can see that sir, I just wished there was a way for the two servers that are getting creamed to work agaist the powerhouse server at times when they have a stranglehold on the Maps. I’m sure there are larger issues at hand lol.

Yshyr.8709:

Tzash.5748:

So FA move up into a higher bracket next round.

Where is the problem again?

One imbalanced round, especially this early on, doesn’t indicate a broken system.

The problem comes that in order for this tier system to eventually work servers would have to match up in participation exactly. Even a one or 2 hour difference in participation will result in a blow out. That is why I would like to see the current scoring system supplemented with points awarded for pvp kills. Kills will be more frequent whenever the ‘primetime’ for that match up occurs. It is a way to more accurately represent the battle without punishing a particular time zone.

Sure that will open the possibility of abuse but the scoring would hardly be more skewed than it is right now.

Rewarding “PvP Kills” as points will result in Zerg V Zerg. GL getting points when a 40+ personon zerg attack your location.

Archaeneoso.8461:

A great question, but the answer probably is because SF and SoR were getting steamrolled anytime FA put their attention to either…

Er, no. We refer to Fort Aspenwood as the “Zombie Army.” They’re an endless fountain of badges and keep coming back after repeatedly being wiped. FA should move up a bracket but I imagine they won’t do very well against another “24-hour server” with equivalent queue times.

^ I can see this happening!

Most our night players seem to have their tails tucked between their legs.
darn zombies