Guild Wars 2

One of the biggest and most common complaints about WvW in general is that a lot of players don’t feel like their efforts are valuable because they get diluted simply by the 24 hour clock. The primary component of winning or losing comes down to which server merely fields players when – chiefly to take objectives lightly opposed, if opposed at all. It also encourages players to play on servers geographically where they would/do have much less than ideal latency and game performance in order to win. Coverage is certainly not the only thing that matters, but it is unfortunately the first thing and has no link to compelling gameplay but rather the opposite.

Ideally, high participation gameplay on all sides should be more rewarding than low participation periods. It already is more rewarding in terms of simple fun-factor while playing, but it is not in terms of score and result. After all, the game mode, maps, siege equipment, and classes are all designed and balanced for high or significant participation, not nearly empty zones.

Lets first also realize that the current scoring and ranking systems for WvW aren’t exactly elegantly simple math and that making them slightly more complex isn’t going to do harm. The system takes a small amount of effort to understand regardless, and that’s okay.

So, the idea is just to have a “Participation Multiplier” that is shown on the WvW tab/scoreboard and that multiplier gets directly applied to PPT each tick for all three servers. PPT ticks during high participation get magnified, and during low participation they get reduced. Exact numbers aren’t important and could be tweaked, but just for example lets say if all three servers have queues in all four zones, then the Participation Multiplier would be 2×. So, all PPT’s get doubled when tallied to overall score. If there were literally zero players active on any server, then the Participation Multiplier would be 0.5x, so all PPT’s get halved when tallied to overall score. Any participation level in between would scale between appropriately. Scaling between could be linear, or follow a curve, endpoint values could be different – it doesn’t matter – it’s just a concept.

It’s important to realize this doesn’t eliminate coverage as an issue or its importance for winning; it’s not meant to. Servers would still accumulate points for showing up and playing when others don’t. They would also gain tactical advantage by controlling objectives and supplying and upgrading them. All it does is soften the impact on overall score and make meaningful crunch times when everyone is actually playing count for more. Hopefully, it would encourage more participation overall and more competitive matches.

I could easily imagine someone already had or posted this same basic idea. If they did, I just hadn’t seen it yet.

Straegen.2938:

Score is simply reflecting the balance problem. Even if they adjust the score it doesn’t solve the general lack of fun fighting against an overwhelming population. Until they find a way to address balance WvW will not be particularly enjoyable for some servers in certain tiers regardless of what the score is.

There are some servers in low tiers where I agree with that – they just don’t have enough people interested in playing no matter how you score it.

Although, there are a lot of servers in middle tiers that are capable of fielding (and often do) competitive forces during certain peak time periods. Many times, it’s just a question of server moral and a perception of a chance at not losing. They might battle to a standstill or even win during primetime for 3-4 hours while everyone is actually playing, but then spend the next 12 hours hemorraging PPT and facing a hopeless score no matter how well they might perform while playing. Realistically, the servers could be closely and competitively matched, but relative small off-hours crews can arguably create an illusion of a massive gap in the overall score.

Clearly, the off-hours crews should be meaningful, but the current scoring system makes them more important than pretty much anything else.

Clearly, the off-hours crews should be meaningful, but the current scoring system makes them more important than pretty much anything else.

This is something the developers and moderators don’t understand. They don’t want to penalize off hour people, but by not making any adjustments they are penalizing the on hour people (which is more of their paying playerbase).

Weighing the PPT by relative populations that are on at the time the score is updated is the most logical and balanced approach to this entire mess. The last time this was mentioned the moderator either willfully or innocently misread that as a suggestion to weight PPT by what time it is. It’s not the same thing.

This thread will be locked with the comment that “GW2 is a global game.”

Who are you or anyone to decide what hours are the right hours?

Whats to stop a server from logging out in mass shortly before score update if they are doing poorly to mitigate the dmg being done?

Catisa.6507:

Who are you or anyone to decide what hours are the right hours?

Whats to stop a server from logging out in mass shortly before score update if they are doing poorly to mitigate the dmg being done?

This has nothing to do with what the right hours are. You are intentionally misreading it. It gives points based upon the effort necessary to capture and hold things based on the RELATIVE POPULATION whenever a score update is made.

Your second question was actually covered in the other thread which got locked. You hide the time when an update is going to happen from the players and add an element of randomness as to when the update occurs.

It’s all about rewarding effort. If your server is getting over 600 PPT totals from PvDooring very late at night or early morning during a work day then you do not deserve the same reward as people who actually have to fight to take and hold objectives.

Risk versus reward. It’s like ANET doesn’t even know what that means. It’s like having a special dungeon for special people with no MOBs to fight but gives the same rewards as a dungeon where people have to actually overcome serious challenges to be beat the dungeon.

The system is broken.

Honestly, at this point in time they’d just be better off manually matching up servers that have a similar history of population and coverage. The current system has way too mismatches that are effectively tier-locked into place for weeks if not months.

fixing the scoring is only attempting to put a band-aid on the bigger issue anyway. Anet fouled up by dividing Europe from the rest of the world, we’d have far less gaps if this global game was played on global servers.
Oceanic manages to do just fine with higher pings, EU could have also.

let’s assume servers A,B and C.
following senarios:

A captures tower that belongs to B
the tower score is : 15 X (number of player B on map / number of player A )
this mean if small group attack larger defender they will be better rewarded, and if the attackers are outnumbering the defenders then the reward is lessen.

This will greatly encourage tactical play, and small teams ninjas, big zergs can take a hit from this.

Catisa.6507:

fixing the scoring is only attempting to put a band-aid on the bigger issue anyway. Anet fouled up by dividing Europe from the rest of the world, we’d have far less gaps if this global game was played on global servers.
Oceanic manages to do just fine with higher pings, EU could have also.

Agreed, and something they can’t fix supposedly.

Not a bad idea but I would rather see actual benefits to outnumbered defenders rather than intangible score multipliers that doesn’t actually affect anything in the gameplay.

NPCs of outnumered players could be greatly multiplied and boosted or tower and wall strenghs greatly increased. It wouldn’t necessarily need to be direct stat boosts to players.

Catisa.6507:

Who are you or anyone to decide what hours are the right hours?

Whats to stop a server from logging out in mass shortly before score update if they are doing poorly to mitigate the dmg being done?

With what I’m suggesting, it would be no one deciding other than the players participating themselves. When people show up from any of the servers (at any time), the Participation Multiplier would start ramping up.

With the example numbers I gave (and which could be whatever ends up being best,) mass logging out to mitigate damage like you say would incur more damage to the score than actually staying and fighting and holding some objectives. Also, if the winning server was pushing out queued zones (or just a lot of population on their own,) the multiplier would stay reasonably high even if the other servers did try to ditch out.

Catisa.6507:

fixing the scoring is only attempting to put a band-aid on the bigger issue anyway. Anet fouled up by dividing Europe from the rest of the world, we’d have far less gaps if this global game was played on global servers.
Oceanic manages to do just fine with higher pings, EU could have also.

Forcing the whole world onto NA located servers would smooth out a lot of coverage issues in WvW to some degree for sure, but I doubt it would be better for the game as a whole.

If anything I would put some servers in east Asia somewhere too, just so that more people globally would have the opportunity to play the game with high performance. (At least have the choice.) Especially people who particularly like sPvP or Dungeons would benefit a lot.

Regardless, it’s already water under the bridge.

@ OP please look at this thread from 4 months ago.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/An-alternate-scoring-system-Accounting-for-population-differences/first
A simple population modifier wont have that much impact by itself, I can run it against the model I developed in that thread to test your theory, but it will probably result in the sameish point differential that we see now.

increase the Tickrate from e.g.15min to 60min between 3am and 12am, so night and morning cappers don´t destroy the score.
+ give for every enemy player kill 1 point to total score.

Keep: +25 points/tick
Keep capture: 250 points + 25 points for each unique enemy death that occurred since the attack event was started.
Keep defense (per cycle): 0 points + 5 points for each unique enemy death that occurred there during the defense cycle.

“Unique enemy death” means if 5 people die X times each, there are 5 unique enemy deaths. Basically it’s meant to measure how many enemies show up rather than how many times they individually die.

Planetside did something like this and it works much better. Fierce battles are rewarded. Ninja captures are not worth very much.

This would solve a lot of problems.

Draygo.9473:

@ OP please look at this thread from 4 months ago.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/An-alternate-scoring-system-Accounting-for-population-differences/first
A simple population modifier wont have that much impact by itself, I can run it against the model I developed in that thread to test your theory, but it will probably result in the sameish point differential that we see now.

I haven’t read it all, but it looks interesting. Significantly different than what I was proposing though. You were also trying to predict and assume objective holdings from what I skimmed so far. It seems you kinda set out to force scores closer together for servers with big population disparities, but I am not sure that’s an objective that would be good to pursue. In that sort of instance, it’s probably better to let the blowout happen and then let matchmaking place the servers against more similarly populated opponents.

I’m more working under producing more accurate scoring where matchmaking has happened to produce matchups where population differences are already reasonable. In other words, the servers truly belong together in a tier, but the scoring system still ends up producing arguably unreasonable overall scores and suppresses server moral for one or two of the involved servers. You might get some of that with your system too, although the premises are a bit different.

For me, if people are participating, points deserve to flow regardless of outcome and regardless of a side being outmanned or not. Yours seemed more based on trying to give the outmanned a helping hand.

My issue is just trying to align scores closer to actual player effort, and that includes showing up to fight in numbers. Right now, low effort time periods (very few active players) sometimes dominate the scoreboard and make high effort time periods (lots of active players) effectively inconsequential to actual outcome. However if a server is consistently outmanned regardless of time period, they should get blown out and placed into a more competitive matchup.

Manipulating the score to help out outmanned servers just hamstrings the matchmaking system (makes it slower at producing correct matchups.)

Something else I want to be clear on…the system I suggested would not actually change placement (finish #1, #2, or #3) between servers except on likely very rare occasion – unless moral and turnout were truly affected significantly due to tighter scores. Mainly, it would just allow closely matched servers to actually produce closely matched scores more often. It wouldn’t deter a legitimate blowout in the slightest.

I apologize if I misinterpreted some of your information; I haven’t had time to go through it carefully or in detail yet.

No, it doesnt try to balance score for overall population disadvantages (if your server has overall less pop, all else being equal you are still going to lose). What it tries to do is weight the point gain by the population ratio, and add in a system to allow for comeback scenarios to occur.

Secondly the system I proposed as well as yours dont affect placement in the model, what it does affect the ‘how much’.

Basically I ran the numbers on just modifying score gains based on participation and ended up finding nearly no real difference between that and the normal system. (a coverage blowout, was still a blowout). Only when I added a come from behind scoring mechanic did scores even out, but not entirely. It became possible for one server or another to close the points on the final day, instead of the match being done on monday.

In that thread, server 1 and 2 have roughly equal overall participating wvw population. Server 3 has less. You will see in every case server 3 is last place.

Where do i collect my prizes for winning in wvw?

Play for the fights, the points only matter when the tier you are in isnt fun anymore.

Something I find very annoying about the differences in coverage between servers is that in matches where one server has a strong presence in a different timezone, the match becomes very binary.

I’m on Crystal Desert – most of our WvW score comes during these off-peak hours where we dominate the entire map (depending on which guilds decide to come on). During the rest of the time (especially during NA peak hours), we kind of fight a very fast losing battle and have a bit of our borderlands and stuff.

In effect we are either losing really badly (not fun), or winning with no resistance (not fun either).

Well I’m not really sure what can be done short of matching servers with similar coverage against each other (which leads to other problems), but it is kind of an annoying issue.

Oozo.7856:

Catisa.6507:

You are intentionally misreading it.

Many people do it when it comes to losing their spotlight. People who play at odd-hours are not more important then the ones who play during primetime, they shouldn’t be better rewarded.

This idea was already proposed several times but it was always ignored (like said here: ppl misread it/a moderator closed it saying “GW2 is a global game”, while the people who actually do PvP and not PvD are not rewarded accordingly)

I would like to fight a T5 server, I’m sure they can have good players, being in T5 doesn’t mean your players or guilds are bad.
However, SFR is “stuck” fighting in T1/T2 until the server collapses (apparently that’s Anets objective, servers collapsing…).
Matchup rotation is impossible because atm we have this idiot “the server with more people/better coverage wins YOLO”.
I won’t change servers, I already have one and am happy with the people here, we’ve worked hard to estabilish a profitable system in our server and many of us won’t abandon it.
I would like to play once or twice against all servers in a competitive league, but it’s impossible atm.

Free transfers should be opened before they implemented this system tho, servers would finally become more balanced=less superservers=less queues=more happy people=more potential customers

Of course this system could be exploited, but the current system is already being exploited by the people who play against less enemies.
Plus, you are forgetting one of the main characteristics of WvW: it’s casual. Most people will play when they want to play.
Sure there will be guilds who will mass-log out when faced with defeat to minimize the damage, but most people won’t just stop playing for something so shallow (also, points will keep ticking, only at a lower rate).
Most people come home from work, they are tired and just want to blow of some steam in WvW, there’s no way some carebears (yes, I’m using the same word we use to describe PvErs, sue me) will stop them from doing that

As I’ve said before, the ladder wasn’t supposed to be a reward, but everyone likes to be #1 so it’s a reward, deal with it.

I’m not saying this might be an issue, I’m saying this is an issue. People will leave the game once they realize their efforts in actual PvP are countered by the efforts of a small amount of people in PvD. Maybe not right now because GW2 is still the best mass-PvP game out there, but it’s only a matter of time until other “WvW” games enter the market.