Guild Wars 2

It’s quite obvious that the direction Anet is going with the game is Megaserver and EtoM. We would probably already be there now if people didn’t scream bloody murder about eliminating server identity in WvW, but everything Anet is doing is moving in that direction. There is no way to “balance” the servers for WvW without que problems or time zone gaps. Free transfers or pay transfers makes no difference, enabling easy transfers makes individual servers irrelevant and deemphasizes “your home server” as a game concept and the tournaments are just population/complete timezone coverage rewards. Of course, eliminating servers is not going to happen overnight, but merging is not the way to go unless you just want to have map ques…
I think EtoM was too successful at what they wanted. I don’t think the devs realized it would become a coordinated karmatrain zergfest where opposing teams would agree to avoid actual fights and simply concentrate on flipping stuff without opposition. It’s extremely popular.
But, EtoM is fun for Trolling, which is done mostly at bridges and places it’s easy to fear people off the edge… LOL I never thought about that until now… Bridges-Trolls-LOLz Spoon

thats right, the way to eliminate coverage is to not make it continuous, eotm is in the right direction. omg, i am a genius

Exept I hate EoTM. Doubly what it has become. I’m not motivated by easy loot sorry.

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

Exept I hate EoTM. Doubly what it has become. I’m not motivated by easy loot sorry.

You hate it. I hate it. Most forum posters hate it.

But go ahead and click on the little button once you get in game. Most of the players in EoTM do not post/look at forums. Most of the players in GW2 love EoTM.

Yeah, I admit it. I’m an EotM troll. I look at the map to find out where the enemy zerg is and move to ambush them with a fear wall or drop oil on them when they think nobody is defending. I solo cap reactors to try to steer the zerg over a good fear spot. I repair walls/gates to give me time to move into a good fear spot.

I’m a Fearaholic.

Narkodx.1472:

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

Exept I hate EoTM. Doubly what it has become. I’m not motivated by easy loot sorry.

You hate it. I hate it. Most forum posters hate it.

But go ahead and click on the little button once you get in game. Most of the players in EoTM do not post/look at forums. Most of the players in GW2 love EoTM.

80+% of the EotM players are people leveling alts (because it’s pretty much the only way to level one while staying “sane” after 4/5 lvl80 toons or more, on top of a way to not redo the boring painfully slow maps you done dozens of times, on top of allowing you to actually farm things worth money/time, be it karma/badges/WxP, or bags you can open on a lvl80) for once.

The rest are nearly all people farming, not playing for “fun” (even if they derive a fair amount of “fun” from it), moslty replacing Champ trains with EotM, with the added cherry of WxP/Badges on top.

Add to that the very few (mostly terribads/griefers) going there in guild groups to farm upscaled people not in organized groups, not in WvW gear/build, and not on TS, and you basically have 95% of the EotM population.

Add to that again the fact that Blue is basically dead 80% of the time and being farmed to no end by green (in EU at least) except when some really big and active server(s) end up there with the “semi random” possibility of some color change not linked to results in previous MUs now, and your whole “EotM is something most people love, forums posters are a minority” is a fallacy.

EotM is something a LOT of people use to farm/make money/level, like the champ trains in Queensdale and FSG, that don’t make them “love it”, and that sure as Hell don’t make it something they want to replace WvW (for those that actually play WvW, there isn’t that much, and pretty much all are alt leveling or WxP/Badges/Gold Farming or Guild Griefing).

There is good things in EotM, but it can’t replace classic WvW. With all it’s problems and drawbacks, classic WvW gives far more and has far more ways of sustening the “fun” of people with multiple different ways of playing (EotM has basically 2 that can work with the stupid kitten landscape and running times : Ktrain farming or siege turtle/fear walls/Knockback off edges farming/griefing the Ktrain).

I guess I’ll never understand 80% of the ppl…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Please-merge-the-servers/first#post4344432

Don’t merge the servers, and please merge the servers….hmmmm I don’t know what to do!?!?!

pdavis.8031:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Please-merge-the-servers/first#post4344432

Don’t merge the servers, and please merge the servers….hmmmm I don’t know what to do!?!?!

Well, since RNG is a favorite tool here abouts, merge a random number of servers!

Filovirus.6258:

There is good things in EotM, but it can’t replace classic WvW. With all it’s problems and drawbacks, classic WvW gives far more and has far more ways of sustening the “fun” of people with multiple different ways of playing (EotM has basically 2 that can work with the stupid kitten landscape and running times : Ktrain farming or siege turtle/fear walls/Knockback off edges farming/griefing the Ktrain).

While agree with your summation of EtoM completely, Red Green Blue will replace servers, ok they may call it something else, like “factions or alliances” but just look at where ALL the “improvements” are pointing. Guilds will now be merged across servers sharing bank space, influence, etc…. At this point, megaserver means there are no “servers” in PvE already. EtoM is “WvW” with no servers. In WvW if you are in the top tiers you have que problems if you are at the bottom you have empty maps. Most WvW guilds want fights not Ktrains, well ok, maybe a little Ktraining cuz the loots. My guess is that they let the “not allowed” stuff on EtoM, like opposing teams coordinate for ktraining, is because they are using EtoM to work out map issues and how to allow for large groups to be on a single map, or a que system for an EtoM type map structure, so they want the large populations there.
PvE had the same problems as WvW, wildly uneven population distributions, now that isn’t an issue any more in PvE. As soon as they figure out a non-server based scoring system you can say bye bye to your “server”. Spoon

Well the in fact to eliminate coverage issues is to merge the servers; however, given there is a PvE population to think about, Anet cant do it.

This is a player issue, and if they want balance, they need to collectively get together and merge themselves on a few servers to strike balance.

codiac.5642:

pdavis.8031:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Please-merge-the-servers/first#post4344432

Don’t merge the servers, and please merge the servers….hmmmm I don’t know what to do!?!?!

Well, since RNG is a favorite tool here abouts, merge a random number of servers!

But RNG being RNG, there also is a chance the no servers get merged, as well as all serveres get merged into one…

DeadlySynz.3471:

Well the in fact to eliminate coverage issues is to merge the servers; however, given there is a PvE population to think about, Anet cant do it.

This is a player issue, and if they want balance, they need to collectively get together and merge themselves on a few servers to strike balance.

So what you are saying is you missed all the server stacking in the last couple of tournaments…..

pdavis.8031:

codiac.5642:

pdavis.8031:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Please-merge-the-servers/first#post4344432

Don’t merge the servers, and please merge the servers….hmmmm I don’t know what to do!?!?!

Well, since RNG is a favorite tool here abouts, merge a random number of servers!

But RNG being RNG, there also is a chance the no servers get merged, as well as all serveres get merged into one…

If it’s Anet’s RNG we’ll all be rolled into greens….

Tspatula.9086:

pdavis.8031:

codiac.5642:

pdavis.8031:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Please-merge-the-servers/first#post4344432

Don’t merge the servers, and please merge the servers….hmmmm I don’t know what to do!?!?!

Well, since RNG is a favorite tool here abouts, merge a random number of servers!

But RNG being RNG, there also is a chance the no servers get merged, as well as all serveres get merged into one…

If it’s Anet’s RNG we’ll all be rolled into greens….

LOL that actually made me laugh…Thats awesome…

Seriously though, I don’t see why servers should be merged. If your home server isn’t WvW oriented, then switch servers. It’s too expensive? then ask for help. It’s quite simple really.

Server identity is some nebulous concept created solely because of hardware limitations. Guild identity is far more important. Had the game been based around player formed guild alliances rather essentially random selection, GW2’s WvW system would be significantly better with improved balance, less stagnation and would likely come with a lot of external politics for those that like that sort of thing. Eve is a blueprint on how to do guilds (corporations) properly in an MMO.

If WvWvW was introduced from the beginning as Frostreach vs Badlands vs Overgrowth, I doubt anybody would be on here stressing about “server pride”. At this stage, we are all playing with people who were at one point on an “enemy” server, omg say it ain’t so! It all comes down to being scared of change and it shows people will get tribal over every little dumb thing.

gennyt.3428:

If WvWvW was introduced from the beginning as Frostreach vs Badlands vs Overgrowth, I doubt anybody would be on here stressing about “server pride”.

If WvWvW would have been introduced as EotM, it would have not attracted the same people who now play WvWvW hard core. EotM = pve karma train for loot.

I would love if the WvW grouping was based on guild and the maps were like Megaserver/EotM. The only problem with that scenario is that you could switch guilds.

Deniara Devious.3948:

gennyt.3428:

If WvWvW was introduced from the beginning as Frostreach vs Badlands vs Overgrowth, I doubt anybody would be on here stressing about “server pride”.

If WvWvW would have been introduced as EotM, it would have not attracted the same people who now play WvWvW hard core. EotM = pve karma train for loot.

To clarify, I meant EotM style factions on classic maps and not the actual easy farm Eotm map.

gennyt.3428:

Deniara Devious.3948:

gennyt.3428:

If WvWvW was introduced from the beginning as Frostreach vs Badlands vs Overgrowth, I doubt anybody would be on here stressing about “server pride”.

If WvWvW would have been introduced as EotM, it would have not attracted the same people who now play WvWvW hard core. EotM = pve karma train for loot.

To clarify, I meant EotM style factions on classic maps and not the actual easy farm Eotm map.

Replacing EotM with a map like EBG would of course be an improvement.

Reducing all the servers into just 3 factions is not that great idea, as there really is such thing as server pride and communities and that would not necessarily solve the population and coverage balance issues. Notice how in EotM green usually wins and blue can be outnumbered 50% of the time. We need a different scoring system and real actual outnumbered buff e.g. make the tower, camp and keep events scale based on the number of enemy players there. Same like the do on pve side. So if 50+ man blob attacks one tower, it will get spawn more guards and archers than the one which is attacked by just two guys.

EU has 4 types of language based servers: French, German, Spanish and International. How are you going to divide them into 3 factions?

No doubt some communities are more pleasant than others, but pride doesn’t really exist. Your fooling yourself if you think thats true, come in third for weeks in a row and youll see people transfer off, Have a tourny where better rewards are promised for placing higher and youll see in an influx of transfers to promising servers, get a matchup against a lower pop server and youll see more people on the field, get a match up versus servers with higher pop and youll see less.

In its current state theres nothing that they can do, they can’t restrict play hours or force people onto other servers. Tournies cause some population shifts but they are always temp and end up just being mini versions of the same issue.

Some things are lost while other could be gained if they were to turn to factions. Right now if your facing a super stacked server its A. suck it up B. tank down C. transfer out. If it were factions theres a possiablity that anet could move servers around to somewhat even it out, its never going to be perfect.

echo.2053:

No doubt some communities are more pleasant than others, but pride doesn’t really exist. Your fooling yourself if you think thats true, come in third for weeks in a row and youll see people transfer off,

That people transfer off a server that comes in third for weeks in a row does not preclude server pride really existing among those who don’t. Eredon Terrace has spent a lot of time coming in third and being at the absolute bottom of the rankings in NA. While we’ve certainly lost people to transfers who were unhappy with that, we have a very solid core of players who have a great deal of server pride, including not only people who have stuck with the server through thick and thin but people who have transferred off and then came back to ET because they missed playing with the people there.

echo.2053:

In its current state theres nothing that they can do, they can’t restrict play hours or force people onto other servers.

There are other things they could do such as adjusting handicapping the score based on population playing at the time (using a rolling average population that responds instantly to increases in population and slowly to decreases and factors in previous week participation numbers to reduce the ability of servers to manipulate their populations for scoring), which would both make lower population servers more competitive in terms of points and provide incentive for the more powerful servers to attack each other rather than gang up on the weakest server (which happens now).

While Glicko is used in competitive environments for ranking, there are other ranking and handicap systems that adjust points to allow weaker competitors to win match-ups, including point spreads. What they need is a handicapping or scoring system that allows a weaker server that punches above it’s weight in participants (not necessarily past performance, which is what Glicko takes into account) to actually win the match-up in points, not simply tell that they did better or worse than expected, even if they won or lost the match-up.

Until they provide a way for less populated or less well covered servers to win actual matches with points, the server with the most population and best coverage is going to win, and the way to assure winning is going to be to transfer to the server with the most population and best coverage because that’s who is predictably going to win. Make winning about more than population and coverage through handicapping of the match-up score and then they’ll solve the problem.

Deniara Devious.3948:

gennyt.3428:

Deniara Devious.3948:

gennyt.3428:

If WvWvW was introduced from the beginning as Frostreach vs Badlands vs Overgrowth, I doubt anybody would be on here stressing about “server pride”.

If WvWvW would have been introduced as EotM, it would have not attracted the same people who now play WvWvW hard core. EotM = pve karma train for loot.

To clarify, I meant EotM style factions on classic maps and not the actual easy farm Eotm map.

Replacing EotM with a map like EBG would of course be an improvement.

Reducing all the servers into just 3 factions is not that great idea, as there really is such thing as server pride and communities and that would not necessarily solve the population and coverage balance issues. Notice how in EotM green usually wins and blue can be outnumbered 50% of the time. We need a different scoring system and real actual outnumbered buff e.g. make the tower, camp and keep events scale based on the number of enemy players there. Same like the do on pve side. So if 50+ man blob attacks one tower, it will get spawn more guards and archers than the one which is attacked by just two guys.

EU has 4 types of language based servers: French, German, Spanish and International. How are you going to divide them into 3 factions?

Please read what I actually wrote. I said if WvWvW was introduced , as in initially, with chosen faction based teams(or even guilds/alliances of guilds??!! Nah that would make too much sense) instead of server based no one would be getting all weird about server pride. That would solve the language barrier issue(guilds/alliances btw).

I never even mentioned the scoring system, no scoring system will ever be balanced on a 24/7 open map btw.

Berk.8561:

echo.2053:

No doubt some communities are more pleasant than others, but pride doesn’t really exist. Your fooling yourself if you think thats true, come in third for weeks in a row and youll see people transfer off,

That people transfer off a server that comes in third for weeks in a row does not preclude server pride really existing among those who don’t. Eredon Terrace has spent a lot of time coming in third and being at the absolute bottom of the rankings in NA. While we’ve certainly lost people to transfers who were unhappy with that, we have a very solid core of players who have a great deal of server pride, including not only people who have stuck with the server through thick and thin but people who have transferred off and then came back to ET because they missed playing with the people there.

echo.2053:

In its current state theres nothing that they can do, they can’t restrict play hours or force people onto other servers.

There are other things they could do such as adjusting handicapping the score based on population playing at the time (using a rolling average population that responds instantly to increases in population and slowly to decreases and factors in previous week participation numbers to reduce the ability of servers to manipulate their populations for scoring), which would both make lower population servers more competitive in terms of points and provide incentive for the more powerful servers to attack each other rather than gang up on the weakest server (which happens now).

While Glicko is used in competitive environments for ranking, there are other ranking and handicap systems that adjust points to allow weaker competitors to win match-ups, including point spreads. What they need is a handicapping or scoring system that allows a weaker server that punches above it’s weight in participants (not necessarily past performance, which is what Glicko takes into account) to actually win the match-up in points, not simply tell that they did better or worse than expected, even if they won or lost the match-up.

Until they provide a way for less populated or less well covered servers to win actual matches with points, the server with the most population and best coverage is going to win, and the way to assure winning is going to be to transfer to the server with the most population and best coverage because that’s who is predictably going to win. Make winning about more than population and coverage through handicapping of the match-up score and then they’ll solve the problem.

In theory that seems reasonable but in reality that would be incredibly complex. For example factoring population loss/gain from outside factors such as school and holiday breaks, you may/may not have experience this on et but fairweathers who come out to karma train during the easy times and are gone during the hard.

As much as we may hate coverage gaps handicapping based on that would penalize the servers and possibly make it far worse. For example suppose a server is the strongest during ocx time but weakest during the rest of the time, It wouldn’t remotely be fair to handicap them which in many times is the only time they can catch up.

All I know is…. My guild moved off my server to TC and now I can’t play with them even if I had just bought the gems for an outright transfer. It shows full nomatter what time of day it is. Every single server shows “very high” which I think is very untruthful and frankly impossible. Atleast for WvW representation. I sincerely feel like I’m being intentionally lied to when I click on the transfer button …it’s statistically impossible for that to be a representation of actual WvW capacity for each server

echo.2053:

In theory that seems reasonable but in reality that would be incredibly complex. For example factoring population loss/gain from outside factors such as school and holiday breaks, you may/may not have experience this on et but fairweathers who come out to karma train during the easy times and are gone during the hard.

I know it’s not easy to do right, but I think it’s necessary to make WvW anything other than “stack to win”. It’s also complicated by the fact that people will try to game the system for an advantage by manipulating their player population. I think that can be controlled through looking at various averages as well as the points, which do often indirectly reflect coverage and population.

In the past, for example, I’ve recommended calculating WvW populations as a the greater of either the current population or the last hour’s average population. Another way to do it would be the greatest population in the last hour. Looking at short-term population windows like that would automatically factor in the fairweathers. The idea is that a server should not get an instant advantage for abandoning WvW and should not get an instant advantage for surging on to a map.

But it may be necessary to look at turnouts from previous weeks to make sure that a server doesn’t deliberately sandbag and sit out a particularly difficult challenge or part of the day in order to rob their competitor of points while they have a numbers advantage. This is where fairweathers naturally resemble attempts at sandbagging to manipulate the score, and the answer there may be to limit the role the effects of handicapping so they don’t erase the advantages of a higher population but simply reduce the score advantage so that gaps in scores remain more competitive.

Finally, the handicapping could depend on score differential so that a server that’s ahead or trailing only a little in score gets no benefit from having a lower population while a server that’s trailing by quite a bit does. The goal there would be to keep scores differences within a competitive range to keep matches from being decided by Saturday or Sunday.

All of these will likely have problems and it will likely require some mix of strategies to get things right, and it may have to be adjusted over time. But the current system also has some serious problems and the incentives if provides distort the game from what players claim to want and what I think ANet intends.

echo.2053:

As much as we may hate coverage gaps handicapping based on that would penalize the servers and possibly make it far worse. For example suppose a server is the strongest during ocx time but weakest during the rest of the time, It wouldn’t remotely be fair to handicap them which in many times is the only time they can catch up.

In terms of “fairness”, I don’t think winning (and getting the material benefits for winning) is “fair” if the win comes from PvDoor while the other server is asleep. That’s like winning a sporting event because the other team has no players on the field while your team is racking up points. The goal of handicapping is to mitigate the distorting advantages of stacking which reward servers for fielding players while the enemy has nobody else on and for fielding numbers that the other server can’t match. None of that fits the ideal that many profess to want, which is PvP fights won through strategy, tactics, and good gameplay. And the only way I can see to stop encouraging stacking and PvDoor is to take the advantage of doing it away.

If only one server has OCX players, then they contribute to the score through PvDoor. If that didn’t contribute much to the score, then the solution would be for the OCX players to spread out over several servers so they fight each other instead of NPCs for empty camps, towers, and keeps. And that’s the whole point of handicapping, to encourage the players to spread out so they are battling each other for objective instead of stacking on single servers during a particular time period for easy wins against grossly outnumbered enemies or NPCs.

I keep hearing people say that they don’t want more PvE in their WvW but that’s exactly what PvDoor is and that’s exactly what happens overnight in the OCX for many servers. The reason a small group of OCX players can change the color of an entire enemy borderland or EBG is because they have little or no opposition. If that’s really not what people want, then we need to encourage people to spread out and reward them for it instead of rewarding them for PvDoor and easy wins against greatly outnumbered opponents. Or maybe it’s all talk and the WvW players really do want easy victories and to avoid serious PvP action as much as possible. That would certainly explain the fairweathers and the people I see zerging around EotM attacking empty objectives.