My love for mmo’s started way back with EQ. I played virtually every game that released afterwards sometimes with the worlds best players (triality in eq, AP in Doac, etc) and sometimes as a casual player. Unfortunately from a gaming aspect I had to move on somewhat and took RL work as an analyst finding relationships in large sets of data, however I do feel these WvWvW matchups are pretty interesting from a numbers standpoint and got me tracking data points from an ET player perspective.
I decided to post this however for two reasons, first off our server is down at work and I have nothing better to do aside from type and look busy, secondly there has been a significant amount of bantering back and forth with a minority of individuals complaining on forums especially about this top tier match up. I wanted to look at some of the patterns and numbers and make a conclusion on it to the best of my ability.
The cliff note version at the end of the week if it works out we should see Henge push up to 1st place by a sizable gap (~115k), SBI will be a distance second and ET will round it out with a smaller gap between 2nd/3rd (~31k).
When I look at the reason why this is, the most heavily weighted statistic I can find are server population and a boolean queue value. It’s essentially an even match if there is a queue at all, as a 5 minute queue time and a 5 hr queue time both indicate that the battleground is fully populated and an even numerical match.
Here is a small sample of some data points I saw.
-At 10:30cst on Saturday night ET / HoD / SBI showed “full status” and had a queue of ~45 minutes to get into EB.
-At 3:30am cst when I logged it showed “high” status with a unknown queue length for EB and no queue for any of the borderlands. HoD and SBI were listed as “full”.
- Last night (monday) I logged in at 9:30cst and it showed ET as “high” status with SBI and HoD listed as “full”. The queue on the borderland was ~8minutes and it was ~35 minutes to get into EB from the borderland.
- When I logged off at 2:00am cst last night ET showed “medium” status while SBI and HoD were “full” , at this point EB was insta queue.
- This morning (tuesday) I had an early day and checked the status again before leaving at 6am cst, it showed ET as “medium” SBI as “high” and HoD as “full”. All the ET zones were insta queue.
Looking at this snippet of the data points I took and the point gain spread overlay you can summarize that there is a pretty direct correlation to the point spread and gains during this time with few exceptions. If you look at the other servers all of the “full” population servers are considered to be in the top quartile effectively. Combined with queue length you can accurately predict the best servers in WvWvW without even factoring in player skill or coordination (which we all know makes a difference). Essentially most of the complaining about a lack of oceanic presence on ET/SBI is fairly rooted in fact that they lose the majority of points during the US off-peak hours.
The social aspect of why HoD/SBI/JQ/ET seem to be doing so well shouldn’t be discounted either though. I forget the psy term, but highly skilled competitors do not like to lose over and over (let’s call it the Lebron syndrome) and tend to go to a situation that favors them winning, which is sometimes illegal (Lance) or sometimes legal like a boxer moving up or down a weight class to a less competitive one. When ET played against equivalent population opponents we went from “medium” to “high” for the nighttime play after each match was underway for awhile. This was not due to more people logging in (else we would have seen that in losing matches as well), but an influx of people jumping ship from the less coordinated server to ET. Clearly the will to be the best drove multiple players to the top servers and kept them pegged at full population.
I do feel of the top 4 servers ET being in that mix is the largest anomaly, due to the relatively low population of players. The numbers would indicate that they have more factors not related to population allowing them to be in the top bracket and there is no way to address those without personal bias and starting a flame war.
If there is a desire to make WvW fair (you can argue this either way) the designers just need to remove/increase the caps from the zones, and implement a <=5% queue depth with a base value of 25 or something. Meaning that servers could never have 5% more players than the smallest population server after the first 25 people.
At the end of the day though WvWvW is not designed to be fair (play spvp if you want that), and all three servers are having a match without mass exploiting or doing anything outside of the rules to win. It’s a ton of fun in this game to have good competition at the time slot I play in and hope to see you all out on the battlefield tonight.
~Gug