Guild Wars 2

As has been stated a few times in this thread – the real problem with WvW is the disparity between servers, specifically populations and 24 hour coverage. The matchup the OP cites (HOD, BP, DR) remained pretty even (and alot of fun – with all three servers leading at one point or another) for a few hours Friday night, but BP and DR just didnt have the consistent population to keep it up.

Every server has strong players – as it is, however, it just comes down to a game of numbers.

That is where the change needs to come – either scoring provisions that take coverage into account or balancing mechanics that help lower pop servers – or server merges or ongoing free transfers to the bottom three servers.

DevonCarver.5370:

One up and one down solves some problems but creates a bunch more. Including that it invalidates ratings entirely. It no longer takes into account quality of victory but simply uses the fact of victory to move a server out of the matchup they were previously in.

Ratings have long since been invalidated entirely by ANET’s approach to population and coverage. Before your change in the system folk’s cared about rating only so far as it pertains to giving them a competitive match, now thakittens random on such a wide variance, rating is even more invalid then before.

AdamHughes.4306:

This may have been so they could join up with other equally committed players. In my case, living in Asia, I had to join a US server with an Oceanic/SEA presence in WVW, meaning a top 2 tier server.

I stopped reading after this gem and started laughing.

Actually a few of the lower tier servers have deceant oceanic presence. ioj for example, They are not T1, not T2, not T3, not T4 nor T5 and yet they keep up.

You choose to transfer to the top tiers for a silly number next to the tier and now your trying to rationalize it because of a timezone. now your mad after your stacked server goes aginst nonso stacked servers. so much irony.

Anet see it to be fit to put FA aginst ET/FC for 3-4 months straight…… no scratch that why should they get all the fun substitue DH in one of their place. Im sure theyd be happy to be seperated for a while after being joined at the hip for x amount of months

DevonCarver.5370:

One up and one down solves some problems but creates a bunch more. Including that it invalidates ratings entirely. It no longer takes into account quality of victory but simply uses the fact of victory to move a server out of the matchup they were previously in. The system we are using now creates varied matchups, which will allow us to get more accurate ratings. As those become more accurate we can dial down on the amount of variance we are introducing to have matchups that are varied, but less prone to large rating gaps between the servers. But, again, this is entirely based on server rating, which is the thing we have actually been calculating this entire time. Until that number is a more accurate reflection of server quality, we are going to keep mixing the matchups up.

Why does it matter if it negates ratings? What value is ratings when it’s either not giving you movement between tiers or you end up adding random numbers to it just to get some movement (defeating the purpose of having a rating in the first place)? I don’t think the vast majority of players know or care what the ratings are. One up, one down is easy to understand, gives movement between tiers and prevents servers from jumping from fighting 11th and 12th place to fighting 1st and 4th place within two weeks (unless they really should be there).

I don’t understand why you are so determined to have ratings when they are clearly not creating the kinds of matches players want to play. Your post is full of talk about ratings, but you don’t demonstrate why we need ratings at all. You seem to want ratings for the sake of having ratings.

I also don’t understand why you think you are gathering accurate data when plenty of players are leaving WvW as a result of the current imbalances in the match.

I don’t know where the imbalances lie, personally. Is it in skill level, WvW participation on some servers, or overall population? This is data that ANet should be collecting (which i’m sure they are) but if they have this data they should share it so players can make informed decisions about whether they want to switch servers and such. Just offering free transfers doesn’t help when we don’t really know where we’re going. I’d like to go to a server, possibly, that has active WvW participation not just high population. But at the same time I enjoy the WvW crew I have, it seems to me and most people we just don’t have enough. But I don’t have hard numbers, which I think ANet would have. Can we maybe get a peak at those so we can be more informed?

Benjamin.7893:

Maybe Iron should consider transferring to a balanced matchup every week from now on.

You make it sound like we’re server hoppers or glory hunters, when in reality we’ve only ever moved server ONCE. And that move was to get away from a completely dead tier1 eu and that boredom which fighting visunas walls equals.

wish.1027:

Wolbryne.4037:

SoR has won tier1 NA for a few weeks in a row now. we’re the strongest server atm. then wham bam! we’re forced down to fight servers who don’t stand a chance. we had 3 waypointed garrisons when I logged on this morning and we’re currently ticking 500+. seriously anet. you messed up. BIG TIME. revert this nonsense and start actually listening to what the PLAYERS who PLAY wvw are actually saying needs done!

I agree, something should be done. We should have the #1 EU server fight the #1 NA server every week, that would give them good matchups.

nobody wants to fight visuna. see my previous answer

Deniara Devious.3948:

Wrex.6798:

Wish, I don’t care about other EU guilds

This we already know at Desolation. No pun intended.

We worked our butts off for desolation, day and night. We were wearing ourselves out 24/7 for desolation server and community. And what did we ever get back? We got nothing but grief back. We got a several hundred slot TS for all of deso to use. We held alliance meetings. We sacrificed our real lives and families for the sake of pushing our wvw effort for desolation through primetime, into the small hours and early mornings. Still only getting crap thrown back at us for it.
Desolation made clear, over several months, that they hated us. So why all the kitten when we leave?

Wolbryne.4037:

We worked our butts off for desolation, day and night. We were wearing ourselves out 24/7 for desolation server and community. And what did we ever get back? We got nothing but grief back. We got a several hundred slot TS for all of deso to use. We held alliance meetings. We sacrificed our real lives and families for the sake of pushing our wvw effort for desolation through primetime, into the small hours and early mornings. Still only getting crap thrown back at us for it.
Desolation made clear, over several months, that they hated us. So why all the kitten when we leave?

This is off-topic, so sorry for the rest of this thread.

Unfortunately we-will-desolate.net forum contents are gone, but I am pretty sure a lot of people were telling how much they appreciated the efforts of Iron Triangle. I co-operated with some very nice Iron members, including Offski, Yanox and Omphin, just to mention a few. But I am just a small pawn in the chess board and back then early this year I had just gotten my tag, so I can only speak for myself and not for the entire community.

I can tell you that any commander will have moments when he/she will doubt whether people care or not. Do you think our players don’t feel frustration when they see enemy quickly cap an upgraded tower or keep, which was full of siege and could have been defended if people had reacted faster? So many wasted gold pieces and blueprints, gone in a flash.

As you know we also have our own server wide TeamSpeak (ts.desospeak.com), but you insisted to use your own TS, thus creating a dilemma for the PuGs (which TS to listen?). I have absolutely no quarrels with that. Anybody can use any TS server they want or not use any TS. I can successfully command the PuGs just using the map chat, despite it is harder.

I am sorry if you had sacrificed your real life for a game. This is just a game and I think your families should matter more. Enjoy the summer, spend time outdoors. You are now on a winning server. We are still stuck at tier #2, despite is plain dead obvious we don’t belong there.

so about 40 hours since the reset, we still have 16 blow-outs occurring over 18 total matches..

Deniara Devious.3948:

Wolbryne.4037:

We worked our butts off for desolation, day and night. We were wearing ourselves out 24/7 for desolation server and community. And what did we ever get back? We got nothing but grief back. We got a several hundred slot TS for all of deso to use. We held alliance meetings. We sacrificed our real lives and families for the sake of pushing our wvw effort for desolation through primetime, into the small hours and early mornings. Still only getting crap thrown back at us for it.
Desolation made clear, over several months, that they hated us. So why all the kitten when we leave?

This is off-topic, so sorry for the rest of this thread.

Unfortunately we-will-desolate.net forum contents are gone, but I am pretty sure a lot of people were telling how much they appreciated the efforts of Iron Triangle. I co-operated with some very nice Iron members, including Offski, Yanox and Omphin, just to mention a few. But I am just a small pawn in the chess board and back then early this year I had just gotten my tag, so I can only speak for myself and not for the entire community.

I can tell you that any commander will have moments when he/she will doubt whether people care or not. Do you think our players don’t feel frustration when they see enemy quickly cap an upgraded tower or keep, which was full of siege and could have been defended if people had reacted faster? So many wasted gold pieces and blueprints, gone in a flash.

As you know we also have our own server wide TeamSpeak (ts.desospeak.com), but you insisted to use your own TS, thus creating a dilemma for the PuGs (which TS to listen?). I have absolutely no quarrels with that. Anybody can use any TS server they want or not use any TS. I can successfully command the PuGs just using the map chat, despite it is harder.

I am sorry if you had sacrificed your real life for a game. This is just a game and I think your families should matter more. Enjoy the summer, spend time outdoors. You are now on a winning server. We are still stuck at tier #2, despite is plain dead obvious we don’t belong there.

we-will-desolate.net was created by iron, I believe. it was used very little if at all. And after all the crap we constantly had to endure from our own server “friends”, why should we care about what happens to that site? fed up person shut it down. as simple as that.

the deso speak was created long after we created our ts. and we had paid for several hundred slots for many many months to go. we chose to use our own TS because of this simple reason. we paid for it, all of us in iron did, so we wanted to make use of our investment. Why someone else thought it was a good idea NOT to use our TS for free and go buy another one is beyond me. but I guess it was some iron hater who felt a strange urge of some sort.

as for real life, yes, that’s one of the main reasons we left desolation. we now have time to play and have fun as well as spend time with our loved ones and not lose everything on every border in the process. here on SoR we’re just one of the strong forces helping eachother whilst on deso there was only a handful of dedicated wvw guilds and the rest fair weather players who only played if we were doing good that week. most of deso is full of pve players and the server full status because of them also blocked an influx of wvw guilds. no matter how hard we tried, we simply couldn’t get new guilds to join deso, escept for a few rare exceptions (kaz, votf).

but the bottom line, I think, is that the desolation community is absolutely bull kitten. it’s all about drama, backstabbing, name calling, griefing and kitten envy. we do not want part of that. for example, our EB-branch “eternal iron” was subject to a very sly attempt of mutiny. Luckily we could salvage all the gold and materials etc that we had invested in that sub-guild before the bank was looted. But that didn’t stop the drama queens from crying bloody kitten robbery all over every forum known to man. just because we took back our money before they could steal it lol.

well yeah. that pretty much sums it up.

DeadlySynz.3471:

so about 40 hours since the reset, we still have 16 blow-outs occurring over 18 total matches..

Wait…isn’t this what people asked for?! Oh wait…no it’s not.

Can you people from desolation please keep your petty argument out of this thread?
It has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

A sincere thank you in advance.

[Wolbryne.4037:]
the deso speak was created long after we created our ts. and we had paid for several hundred slots for many many months to go. we chose to use our own TS because of this simple reason. we paid for it, all of us in iron did, so we wanted to make use of our investment. Why someone else thought it was a good idea NOT to use our TS for free and go buy another one is beyond me. but I guess it was some iron hater who felt a strange urge of some sort.

as for real life, yes, that’s one of the main reasons we left desolation. we now have time to play and have fun as well as spend time with our loved ones and not lose everything on every border in the process. here on SoR we’re just one of the strong forces helping eachother whilst on deso there was only a handful of dedicated wvw guilds and the rest fair weather players who only played if we were doing good that week. most of deso is full of pve players and the server full status because of them also blocked an influx of wvw guilds. no matter how hard we tried, we simply couldn’t get new guilds to join deso, escept for a few rare exceptions (kaz, votf).

but the bottom line, I think, is that the desolation community is absolutely bull kitten. it’s all about drama, backstabbing, name calling, griefing and kitten envy. we do not want part of that. for example, our EB-branch “eternal iron” was subject to a very sly attempt of mutiny. Luckily we could salvage all the gold and materials etc that we had invested in that sub-guild before the bank was looted. But that didn’t stop the drama queens from crying bloody kitten robbery all over every forum known to man. just because we took back our money before they could steal it lol.
[/quote]

Huh?

I haven’t witnesses any back stabbing or drama during our WvWvW play. Surely in the moment of being repeatedly face rolled by a larger enemy group, some people vent on map chat, but that is normal. But generally there is good intel and advice both on the map chat, teamspeak and private messages I get from the players. In fact some players remember to thank me for commanding both privately and in map chat or request or even beg me to command when the tag is off. I highly value such personal thank yous.

Contrary to your testimony, most Desolation players have been mature and helpful for most of the time. I can very easily communicate with other commanders and we can flexibly rearrange stuff as it goes. Our weekly meetings are friendly. Almost all the pro elitism is gone. There are no clashes between existing guilds.

One doesn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to understand why the server wide TeamSpeak should be named something else than Iron TS and speculate that it was some hater doing that is…. ridiculous. Iron Triangle was a mighty and important guild for Desolation, but Desolation is more than Iron.

Perhaps you wanted to dominate things too much and pretend that Desolation = Iron Triangle? That could of course irritate a lot of people and I can then very easily understand hostile reactions.

Ayna Micro,
friendly PuG Commander from Desolation

PS. Back to this topic: It would be great if Devon would once again comment in this thread and acknowledge the fact that majority of the WvWvW players don’t care about the ratings, but want more balanced match ups. Adding random numbers to broken rating ain’t gonna fix things. Contact us, communicate with us! You can see our game ids.

Deniara Devious.3948:

[Wolbryne.4037:]
One doesn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to understand why the server wide TeamSpeak should be named something else than Iron TS and speculate that it was some hater doing that is…. ridiculous. Iron Triangle was a mighty and important guild for Desolation, but Desolation is more than Iron.

and the “desolation=iron” thing

Our TS is named Iron ts because it’s our ts. we paid for it, for our guild. we then later opened it for everyone on desolation. we didn’t say anything about someone starting a deso speak ts. they, on the other hand, started moaning about us wanting to stay on our ts. and about the “ridiculous” speculations… is it ridiculous when the drama was started by the very same people who made deso speak to get away from iron’s ts? iron didn’t start the drama. desospeak did.

and now for the “desolation doesn’t = iron” comment.
we never claimed that we were desolation. we always said that we were part of the desolation wvw community with emphasis on “part of”. all this hostility about how “iron think they’re all that” and “iron think they ARE desolation” blah blah, is all part of the hate throwing that a lot on desolation loves to do. we always tried to be helpful and modest in what we said or did. comments in map, like “no worries, iron is here” or “iron to the rescue” and comments like that have always been frowned upon by guilds leaders and officers and every time that has happened, the person writing the comment have been told to stop on ts or in guild chat. but it is pretty hard to keep everyone on tight reins when you have 200+ members, like we did on deso.

I’m sorry, on behalf of myself and iron, if anyone on deso was insulted by us or made feel small in any way. we never intended that and always said and did what we thought was the best we could say or do.

And on that note, I’m done talking about the deso drama in this thread. if you want to talk some more about it you can pm me on this site and I’ll be happy to answer you

hello arenanet,

it took a long time (of crying) till we have got balanced tier but finally we had.

now you destroy it and nobody really know why. because some idiots wanted to gank low-pop-server?

between one tier up or down could be worlds. the new system make it possible to fight against server that are more than 1 tier up or down as your own.
this isn’t fun.

let the system how it is and you will lose a lot of player.

Funny the Dev mentions quality of Victory. My server Borlis Pass spent 13 weeks getting stomped by EB, the quality of victory? Over 90k points+ per victory,they could man all 4 maps when we could barely man one at the time, AR the other server stuck with us barely showed up after week #2 with many of them either quitting or server hooping for what I heard, new system comes, guess wut? Yup Week #14 of the same bullkitten, now this week we got paired with different servers. But they’re low tier servers with barely any people at most hours, sure they did had numbers during reset and at some times today but hey night time and morning time and even prime time they getting stomp.

For them is a pointless situation. For us is logging to farm people and really do nothing since after 13 weeks of fighting a giant, fighting a much smaller server feels like a vacation. Now with servers being paired randomly, next week we might end up against some even bigger server or more T7 – 8 people that will bore both us and them.

T8’s ET here. GoM is currently stomping the kittens out of us, and we have no real way to do anything about it.

We’ve lost quite a few of our people, and with the current match up (And, hell, even the one before it, less and less people are competing in WvW. Went into EB earlier today, and there were a wopping 3 people doing things on the map from ET. Ajax Blue, me, and some guy who was just standing there.

I left soon after after having to run from groups of GoM over and over again. Couldn’t even cap a camp without a horde of them showing up. Kind of ridiculous.

I don’t see how this can be considered “good” for the game.

ET is currently in second, which is surprising, so I’m sure the effects we’re seeing on our end are quite a bit higher on FC’s end. Literally had conversations in map chat about where and when people were transferring to, and more of the people on map were planning on moving out eventually then were planning on sticking with ET.

Hi Devon, I hope you read this.

The flaw in this new system is that the movement of all servers, high and low, tends toward the median. This is incorrectly saying that ET is getting closer in capability to SoR every week, which is clearly not a true statement.

(No offence to ET meant, I just picked #1 and #24, they same would be true for HoD #22 V JQ #3).

You have not explained how this trend towards the median will be useful in the long run, how will it actually be useful when SoR, ET, and everyone in between are all closer to the median?

It seems to me that a trend towards the median will mean that every week it will become more and more likely for weaker servers to face stronger servers.

One of the other issues, is they keep saying they want the ratings to get closer and to stabilize so there aren’t huge gaps. The issue with this is that with their rating system is that unless the deviations change accordingly, there will be more and more blow out matches since the ratings will get closer. The devs REPEATEDLY tell us that they expect better things “in a few weeks”, but never show us proof, or show us what they’re expecting. When they did their release on the new system, they showed an example match up which they said was actually useless and wouldn’t happen (even though it did!), and responded saying they expected something else. However, they refuse to ever actually show us anything to give us confidence that they actually know what they’re doing besides the same generic statement of “we’ll wait a few weeks”.

The differences in tiers was mostly in populations, and the servers stay that way until they get lots of transfers, or people leaving. If you minimize the difference, while the population difference stays the same, there will be a higher chance of blowouts, not a lower.

Handin.4032:

The differences in tiers was mostly in populations, and the servers stay that way until they get lots of transfers, or people leaving. If you minimize the difference, while the population difference stays the same, there will be a higher chance of blowouts, not a lower.

I would want to correct you a bit:
The difference in the performance of a server in WvWvW lies in the WvWvW coverage. By coverage I mean how many active players are participating WvWvW at each hour. A server with superior coverage wins and a server with lower coverage loses.

A high population server isn’t necessarily doing that well in WvWvW, if its players are mostly interested in pve. Thus their WvWvW coverage can be low for many hours per day. For example SFR has been a medium population server, yet they can muster several 30+ WvWvW guild teams at same time and have full maps with queue from afternoon to late evening.

A correct way of match making should be mostly decided based on WvWvW coverage. I am sure Arenanet has all the data related to this.

@Devon can you post numbers from friday reset? I mean those randon rolls. And from first week?
Thanks

@Deniara well, then you can’t really have static match-ups for even a day, as wvw population/coverage is vastly different. Borlis Pass, for example, has large time slots where the population is minimal, no commanders are present (maybe one somewhere in Eternal Battlegrounds etc). Does that mean that time of day needs to be re-matched?

I am happy that for at least a week we’re out of “foreven in Ebay/Arock match” though

DevonCarver.5370:

One up and one down solves some problems but creates a bunch more. Including that it invalidates ratings entirely. It no longer takes into account quality of victory but simply uses the fact of victory to move a server out of the matchup they were previously in. The system we are using now creates varied matchups, which will allow us to get more accurate ratings. As those become more accurate we can dial down on the amount of variance we are introducing to have matchups that are varied, but less prone to large rating gaps between the servers. But, again, this is entirely based on server rating, which is the thing we have actually been calculating this entire time. Until that number is a more accurate reflection of server quality, we are going to keep mixing the matchups up.

I for one am loving the new system. My sever “NSP” has had a very poor WvW population while having a huge PvE population. Many of us do not desire to transfer, but simply to take the tough fights head on and do our best. With this we have grown as individuals, and as guilds. Now we are fighting severs with a much higher WvW population and at the end of the week we may still have the lowest score. But we are STILL gaining progress in ranking. This is because we choose to keep fighting.

I would love to get some transfers but doubt that will ever happen. So I just try to recruit new people and show them what an organized force can do. But to see our ranking scores go up like they have simply because we do be do better against severs that the system expects us to.

So In short, Thanks! Its fun to fight servers we probably wouldn’t have ever gotten to fight with the old system!

Deniara Devious.3948:

Handin.4032:

The differences in tiers was mostly in populations, and the servers stay that way until they get lots of transfers, or people leaving. If you minimize the difference, while the population difference stays the same, there will be a higher chance of blowouts, not a lower.

I would want to correct you a bit:
The difference in the performance of a server in WvWvW lies in the WvWvW coverage. By coverage I mean how many active players are participating WvWvW at each hour. A server with superior coverage wins and a server with lower coverage loses.

A high population server isn’t necessarily doing that well in WvWvW, if its players are mostly interested in pve. Thus their WvWvW coverage can be low for many hours per day. For example SFR has been a medium population server, yet they can muster several 30+ WvWvW guild teams at same time and have full maps with queue from afternoon to late evening.

A correct way of match making should be mostly decided based on WvWvW coverage. I am sure Arenanet has all the data related to this.

Agreed, the current rating isn’t taking the ratio of PvP population per server into account.

Another example is NA server pop across most servers are “Very High”. Which under the odd Anet philosophy of global server pop for rating is taken into account, all servers should be near equal.

Obviously not the case since it’s the PvP population that determines the rating which is 7% or less of a server. Basically Anet your using the wrong variables to determine rating.

Hickeroar.9734:

There is a clear and distinct difference between a T3 skill level and a T2 skill level. It’s like night and day, when you put a new T3 server against experienced T2 servers.

Yes, population has a ton to do with winning, obviously, but 30 people can wipe 60 people if they are “skilled” about how they do it.

ELLE OH ELLE

Funniest post I’ve seen on these forums. Thank you.

Khayoss.2019:

Hickeroar.9734:

There is a clear and distinct difference between a T3 skill level and a T2 skill level. It’s like night and day, when you put a new T3 server against experienced T2 servers.

Yes, population has a ton to do with winning, obviously, but 30 people can wipe 60 people if they are “skilled” about how they do it.

ELLE OH ELLE

Funniest post I’ve seen on these forums. Thank you.

Are you really serious? Like…really?

Anyone who has been through the high-tier promotion process will back up what I’ve said. T3->T2 is especially jarring. T2->T1 is more of just a numbers game. If anything the tactics are LESS aggressive in T1 than T2.

EP, in T2, have wiped zergs up to twice our size, sometimes without a whole ton of effort. A concentrated, trained DPS/Healing ball of 25-30 is a lot scarier than a zerg of 60 unorganized players.

You sound like a noob when all you can do is laugh, without presenting why you think I’m wrong.

maybe I can explain: EB is playing FA this week.

-ken

Hickeroar.9734:

Khayoss.2019:

Hickeroar.9734:

There is a clear and distinct difference between a T3 skill level and a T2 skill level. It’s like night and day, when you put a new T3 server against experienced T2 servers.

Yes, population has a ton to do with winning, obviously, but 30 people can wipe 60 people if they are “skilled” about how they do it.

ELLE OH ELLE

Funniest post I’ve seen on these forums. Thank you.

Are you really serious? Like…really?

Anyone who has been through the high-tier promotion process will back up what I’ve said. T3->T2 is especially jarring. T2->T1 is more of just a numbers game. If anything the tactics are LESS aggressive in T1 than T2.

You sound like a noob when all you can do is laugh, without presenting why you think I’m wrong.

Ok, where you are wrong is the “clear and distinct difference in skill”. What you say about population and coverage is bang on, that is the difference between the 1-3 servers and 4-6, and then again between 7 and a lot of stuff below it. If the T2 servers had such a high discrepancy of skill over a T3 server, then any 25 man guild from a T5 server should absolutely, positively, and unequivocally never be able to do this to said higher population and higher skill server, because they haven’t gone through that progression so there’s no way they could ever match said skill.

edit: dunno what I’m doing with the formatting… have to follow link, sorry.

Snowreap.5174:

maybe I can explain: EB is playing FA this week.

-ken

That doesn’t tell me anything. FA has a much larger WvW population, obviously, but if EB had a very skilled guild-zerg of 30 players, it wouldn’t matter a whole ton that they had less numbers on a given map

Last night, an EP zerg of 30-35 laid waste to SoS/SoR’s holdings on SoSBL, while a CERN zerg roughly the same size was taking property on SoRBL. /shrug

Khayoss.2019:

Hickeroar.9734:

Khayoss.2019:

Hickeroar.9734:

There is a clear and distinct difference between a T3 skill level and a T2 skill level. It’s like night and day, when you put a new T3 server against experienced T2 servers.

Yes, population has a ton to do with winning, obviously, but 30 people can wipe 60 people if they are “skilled” about how they do it.

ELLE OH ELLE

Funniest post I’ve seen on these forums. Thank you.

Are you really serious? Like…really?

Anyone who has been through the high-tier promotion process will back up what I’ve said. T3->T2 is especially jarring. T2->T1 is more of just a numbers game. If anything the tactics are LESS aggressive in T1 than T2.

You sound like a noob when all you can do is laugh, without presenting why you think I’m wrong.

Ok, where you are wrong is the “clear and distinct difference in skill”. What you say about population and coverage is bang on, that is the difference between the 1-3 servers and 4-6, and then again between 7 and a lot of stuff below it. If the T2 servers had such a high discrepancy of skill over a T3 server, then any 25 man guild from a T5 server should absolutely, positively, and unequivocally never be able to do this to said higher population and higher skill server, because they haven’t gone through that progression so there’s no way they could ever match said skill.

I’m talking over-all skill. There are times on EBG that SoS has every bit as many players as we do, but their zergs are highly unorganized and wipe pretty easily in head-on combat. They’re simply not skilled at doing zerg fights. THIS is what I’m talking about.

Once TC came back from the two week haitus when DB moved to T2, we discovered the same thing with many of their native guilds. Sloppy and disorganized.

TC also ran into the same thing when we first hit T2. There were several weeks where we REALLY had to catch up before we got the hang of things. Just look at our history since the hop to T2.

Skill is a HUGE thing. It’s not everything, by any stretch, but it’s still incredibly important.

Agg, on the other-hand, transferred to like…T8 at one point. They were WAY overskilled for that tier. I’m by no means, saying that very highly skilled groups can’t be on lower tiers.

I strongly believe we are not facing FA’s A game. Any time we have doubled an opponents score, all of the PvE’ers come out of the woodwork to do map completion. On reset night though, EBay was able to keep pace with FA and Mags for as long as populations held out. It may have been a small window, but at one point we even held a lead of like 5 points over both servers. There’s nothing that has shown me that FA has a higher level of coordination or skill in running an army than we can handle.

Are we going to win the match? No. Oceanic+SEA coverage had this match decided the second the dice were rolled. If anything I feel bad for FA’s population in those two timezones because fighting mostly empty maps isn’t that challenging, and I wish we could give them a better game.

But ask FA. Are we squishy and uncoordinated oafs that can’t hang with them when our main force is online? Do they see a bunch of pug zergs running around not knowing how to respond to them? I doubt it, but they would have to answer that for themselves.

All I can say with certainty is that FA has been the first great fight that we have had in over 3 months and I have deep respect for their coordination levels. But I respectfully keep my stance that their small group, roaming, zerging and overall server skill and coordination levels are not some mythical T2 only godlike level that we can’t compete with. We are learning from them, for sure. But not as much as everyone who is looking down on the other tiers below them seems to think we should be.

The tiers displayed coverage. That’s it. Skill has nothing to do with it.

Please implement the one up, one down system. The rating system is good in theory, but bad in practice. Look at what happens when a mass exodus occurs on a highly ranked server, it takes weeks for that server to drop.. YAWN.

DevonCarver.5370:

One up and one down solves some problems but creates a bunch more. Including that it invalidates ratings entirely. It no longer takes into account quality of victory but simply uses the fact of victory to move a server out of the matchup they were previously in. The system we are using now creates varied matchups, which will allow us to get more accurate ratings. As those become more accurate we can dial down on the amount of variance we are introducing to have matchups that are varied, but less prone to large rating gaps between the servers. But, again, this is entirely based on server rating, which is the thing we have actually been calculating this entire time. Until that number is a more accurate reflection of server quality, we are going to keep mixing the matchups up.

Would it be possible to avoid big jumps in rankings? Consider the rankings of servers without the random aspect. Then consider the rankings of servers after the random roll has occurred. If a server jumps in ranking more than 3 spots, then bring him back to a 3 spot jump. This would solve the issue of a server jumping 7 ranks, like Borlis Pass just did.

They can say that “tiers” no longer exist until they are blue in the face, but it doesn’t change the fact that those tiers typically held servers of a certain rating range, and that the gap between the servers were typically-wide. The only discrepancies were SoS and EB in NA (sorry, I know nothing about EU).
So T4 and T3 were close, I’m so glad that they hosed up WvW for weeks on end to prove this point. So much data to collect, they’ll need a new data warehouse to store this fact!
Who would have guess that with SoS and CD getting transfers that they could fight well in T3….

I know they said they are not going to stop this madness for a few weeks, but if they had simply moved SoS up one tier for one week (override the system, is it that hard?) They would have gotten the exact same results.

The only other things this has done was ending the bandwagoning to DB and will end people naysaying JQ when they recruit (we didn’t know they were that weak against BG).

So, to recap…This was all to help Jade Quarry’s recruitment prospects…..FML

Proven.2854:

Are people listening to him? He’s saying that server ratings decided these matchups. If these matchups are bad, it’s because the server ratings were bad. If the server ratings are bad, then you need to shakeup the matchups in order to get more accurate ratings, because the current ratings were gained from stagnant matchups.

Or: it’s not the ratings that are bad and need to be fixed; it’s that there is a huge disparity of WvW population from server to server so that each server only has one or two possible matchups that have the possibility of being competitive. So no matter what the ratings are, whether they’re accurate or not, chances are that either you’ll be in an unbalanced (pop wise) matchup or matchup stagnation.

Well I for one am loving the random roll.
NSP vs SF vs DH is proving to be surprising I think for all sides and a welcome relief from fighting a leech server which just kept putting down our rating.

NSP may not win every match, but we never lose by much even against servers much larger than us. Meaning our rating still goes up.
So this random roll is good for us.

BRING ON THE BIG SERVERS.

DevonCarver.5370:

One up and one down solves some problems but creates a bunch more. Including that it invalidates ratings entirely. It no longer takes into account quality of victory but simply uses the fact of victory to move a server out of the matchup they were previously in. The system we are using now creates varied matchups, which will allow us to get more accurate ratings. As those become more accurate we can dial down on the amount of variance we are introducing to have matchups that are varied, but less prone to large rating gaps between the servers. But, again, this is entirely based on server rating, which is the thing we have actually been calculating this entire time. Until that number is a more accurate reflection of server quality, we are going to keep mixing the matchups up.

Wouldn’t a reasonable solution be to marry the idea of Glicko ratings (to establish and maintain relatively balanced match-ups) with an earned one-up / one-down system (to allow movement between tiers and widen the pool of matches)?

Theoretical example:

Rating system as it was before (i.e. before the random rolls) but before the ranks are sorted at reset the system tracks two more variables: 1) cumulative number of #1-in-tier placements, and 2) % of points captured in the last match.

Servers then get rank sorted based on ratings as they used to on reset, but the system does two more logic checks before setting the matches:

1) If a server has placed 1st in their tier for 3 weeks running, they are automatically promoted one rank (i.e. to the bottom of the next highest tier). This results in movement between tiers being easier than in the old system, and because the server’s rating stays the same, as long as they are able to hang in with the next higher tier, they have the opportunity to stay there. If a server has been able to win three straight it would seem to be fair to allow them a shot at competing at a higher tier.

2) If a server captures more than (let’s say) 50% of the available points in a match, that server is automatically promoted one rank. This prevents blow-out matches from lasting longer than a week and gives a strong server the chance to get into a match up closer to their true coverage.

(I see no reason these two couldn’t combine – so if a server wins three weeks straight and then blows out their final match, they could immediately be jumped to Blue realm on the next highest tier)

I think the key here would be to provide the possibility for variable match-ups, but while removing the “we got random roll f’d this week” that tends to bring down morale. In this model described above, if a server gets trounced it would be because they were good enough to earn a spot in that tier rather than getting trounced because a dice roll went bad – I think that concept would sit better with more players than the current one will.

I would like to echo a couple of the posters above in saying that this is an urgent problem. If the matchups continue like this for a few more rounds, there is a really strong possibility of permanent damage to WvW. It’s happened in other games, GW2 isn’t special in this regard. IMO, quick, decisive action is required here to stem the tide. Good luck Devon.

Grimthagen.6019:

DevonCarver.5370:

One up and one down solves some problems but creates a bunch more. Including that it invalidates ratings entirely. It no longer takes into account quality of victory but simply uses the fact of victory to move a server out of the matchup they were previously in. The system we are using now creates varied matchups, which will allow us to get more accurate ratings. As those become more accurate we can dial down on the amount of variance we are introducing to have matchups that are varied, but less prone to large rating gaps between the servers. But, again, this is entirely based on server rating, which is the thing we have actually been calculating this entire time. Until that number is a more accurate reflection of server quality, we are going to keep mixing the matchups up.

Wouldn’t a reasonable solution be to marry the idea of Glicko ratings (to establish and maintain relatively balanced match-ups) with an earned one-up / one-down system (to allow movement between tiers and widen the pool of matches)?

Theoretical example:

Rating system as it was before (i.e. before the random rolls) but before the ranks are sorted at reset the system tracks two more variables: 1) cumulative number of #1-in-tier placements, and 2) % of points captured in the last match.

Servers then get rank sorted based on ratings as they used to on reset, but the system does two more logic checks before setting the matches:

1) If a server has placed 1st in their tier for 3 weeks running, they are automatically promoted one rank (i.e. to the bottom of the next highest tier). This results in movement between tiers being easier than in the old system, and because the server’s rating stays the same, as long as they are able to hang in with the next higher tier, they have the opportunity to stay there. If a server has been able to win three straight it would seem to be fair to allow them a shot at competing at a higher tier.

2) If a server captures more than (let’s say) 50% of the available points in a match, that server is automatically promoted one rank. This prevents blow-out matches from lasting longer than a week and gives a strong server the chance to get into a match up closer to their true coverage.

(I see no reason these two couldn’t combine – so if a server wins three weeks straight and then blows out their final match, they could immediately be jumped to Blue realm on the next highest tier)

I think the key here would be to provide the possibility for variable match-ups, but while removing the “we got random roll f’d this week” that tends to bring down morale. In this model described above, if a server gets trounced it would be because they were good enough to earn a spot in that tier rather than getting trounced because a dice roll went bad – I think that concept would sit better with more players than the current one will.

I would like to echo a couple of the posters above in saying that this is an urgent problem. If the matchups continue like this for a few more rounds, there is a really strong possibility of permanent damage to WvW. It’s happened in other games, GW2 isn’t special in this regard. IMO, quick, decisive action is required here to stem the tide. Good luck Devon.

I did propose something in this direction a few times before but there seems to be no attention to it.

Link: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Discussion-Match-up-proposal/first#post2136556

Who wants to play WvW for rankings when it isn’t fun to play as it is?