Guild Wars 2

Brow.9425:

At this point, since they are unwilling and unable to fix it, they should go back to the 24 hour matches we had 24 months ago.

What’s hilarious is that 24 months ago, Anet made it clear that “Real WvW” would be 14-day matchups, and that the 7-day matchups we’re all complaining about were just to get accurate ratings for the start of 2-week matches. We all dodged a bullet on that one! lol

But yeah, I don’t really know what to do about the population difference, but something does need to be done eventually. Honestly, just adding a competitive GvG component to the game might be enough for Anet to realize their original dream of WvW as a “Casual PvP” zone…

Seriously, fix this.

We’ve been grossly outnumbered for months, it’s not fun playing when you have 3 people and you get portal-bombed by a zerg of 30 when you’re retaking your borderlands.

Deleting these posts and giving infractions for them is just rude. Take a look at these matchups for yourselves, hell, come over to our server and actually experience the crap we’re putting up with.

Is this a joke? I mean, the first week I was surprised by how well we (Mag) did for the first 2 or 3 days. And then we get matched with TC?

Look, the match ups for this tourney are the biggest joke since – since I don’t even know. Mag should have been dropped FORCIBLY by ANet. Take a look at the coverage. You guys at ANet all say you listen to metrics. Did the metrics not tell you that Mag had maybe 1/10th the coverage of TC?

Look at the bright side, at least you didnt get stuck fighting BG!

Lurock Turoth.9085:

Look at the bright side, at least you didnt get stuck fighting BG!

Well, I suppose that is a small plus. But that’s not the main issue really. The main issue is the fact that people have been having to tell ANet that their matchups are messed up. They should be able to see that for themselves when servers are losing their matches by the kind of margins we are seeing at the moment.

But instead of helping us, they actually hurt us with the new achievements for the tourney. Mag did well the first few days last week because we had an influx of PvE players who just wanted to grab the meta. It helped us get set up for a little bit immensely. But by making it so easy to get, we basically get screwed over by ANet because they wanted to cater to PvE players with the WvW tourney.

I personally hope that BG is having a blast, and I’m being serious. Because if BG isn’t having fun, then I don’t really think anyone this week is.

I have been saying for a long time that Anet needs to find some way for forcing the server pops to even out. I think you will always have T1 servers that will be the biggest most organised wvw servers. But the kitten gap needs to be more like TC/JQ vs SoS. T2 will still loose the week vs T1 but they can take and hold ground reliably.

Lurock Turoth.9085:

I have been saying for a long time that Anet needs to find some way for forcing the server pops to even out. I think you will always have T1 servers that will be the biggest most organised wvw servers. But the kitten gap needs to be more like TC/JQ vs SoS. T2 will still loose the week vs T1 but they can take and hold ground reliably.

That’s the thing though, we can’t even take or hold ground reliably. Both FA and Mag have nothing in EBG at the moment. Our keeps, and FA’s, are being fully upgraded and wp’d by TC. At the moment, Mag has one keep, garri, which has zero upgrades and I expect we will lose within an hour.

The concept of T2 servers is a bad one, because the T1 server takes so much stuff we cant even fight each other. Maybe if we teamed up we could take a keep and a few towers, but you guys would steamroll us as soon as swords popped.

I just want to be clear, I have absolutely nothing against you guys. You’re playing WvW the way that you can win. And if Mag were in the same spot, we wouldn’t be different. I’m mad at ANet for thinking that these kinds of match-ups are remotely fair and don’t have predetermined endings, however.

It is disheartening.
no doubt about it.

What I’m saying is, both FA and MAG feel much more like tier 3.5 and 3 to me. My recollection from previous seasons is that T2 was much closer to SoS now than it is to FA.

It would be soooo nice if T1 and T2 were close enough to allow the top six servers to trade around in match ups. But I don’t really see that happening.

I do 100% agree though, its pretty stupid that MAG got stuck in gold league.

Lurock Turoth.9085:

What I’m saying is, both FA and MAG feel much more like tier 3.5 and 3 to me. My recollection from previous seasons is that T2 was much closer to SoS now than it is to FA.

It would be soooo nice if T1 and T2 were close enough to allow the top six servers to trade around in match ups. But I don’t really see that happening.

I do 100% agree though, its pretty stupid that MAG got stuck in gold league.

I wish they could get it so that T1 and T2 were interchangeable and really relied on the skill of the commanders a server had in order to win a matchup instead of coverage. And in FA’s defense, they probably are the closest thing to a T2 server that NA has at the moment. The issue is that gap between T1 and T2 is so large, TC might as well be facing T8 and T9 servers for all the good it does us.

And Mag tried tanking down to a lower tier. We never played for PPT before, but the weeks leading up to the tourney we literally avoid it like it was toxic. And we still couldn’t get down a tier. Which says that the disparity between T2 and Silver T1 is also huge, and that is an issue as well.

It’s a shame that ANet never forcibly merged servers or encouraged free transfers to servers like Mag who really needed it. I mean, the way Mag is doing at the moment, I doubt we could pay people less that 5-10 gold AND the transfer cost in order to get them to come on over.

That difference between tiers appears to be everywhere not just t1 and t2…… T3-t4 was close, but not since tourney was announced….

Whoever was 5-6 in gold was going to get demolished….. Sort of like 8-9 in silver etc…..

I think this matchup is the best thing that could ever happen during a Tournament. It’s stupid imbalanced, but so is WvW in general. Why is there no turnout? Because there’s no reason to turn out, show up 5 minutes, get your five events, week result will be the same as if you put in serious overtime. So why bother? Why even try to PPT when you know you don’t have to at all.

sishbob.3987:

Is this a joke? I mean, the first week I was surprised by how well we (Mag) did for the first 2 or 3 days. And then we get matched with TC?

Look, the match ups for this tourney are the biggest joke since – since I don’t even know. Mag should have been dropped FORCIBLY by ANet. Take a look at the coverage. You guys at ANet all say you listen to metrics. Did the metrics not tell you that Mag had maybe 1/10th the coverage of TC?

I think its more like 1/20 for Mags and 1/5 for FA compared to TC. Even if Mags and FA were to 100% 2v1 TC we would both still get stomped very badly. This match is laughable. WvW needs a complete overhaul to save it, what a mess. Fix your kitten Anet!

The problem with the current league+swiss style system is how it sets up grossly lopsided fights. At least every other week, one server completely dominates the match and even decisively influences [via who to focus on] second and third places.

Instead, how about a self-balancing match up system? For the following week:
- first place server moves up to the next higher tier;
- second place server stays put;
- third place moves down to the next lower tier.
Remove all [Gold Silver Bronze] league groupings.

This match system is simpler, plus fits the theme of the new weekly rewards system. There is no perfect system but at least this provides fairer yet varying fights and discourages bandwagoning toward the top of each league – an ongoing concern unaddressed by the current match up system.

Thing is… I’m from a T1 server. And sure, we have numbers. But being T1 means also that we have a LOT more experience. And a lot more organization than servers in lower tiers.

Yesterday, we wiped a red zerg of 50 people with our 10-15 people (and 2 superior ACs and a ballista). And in EB, we wiped 40 blues in open field with 20-25 players. So yes, the matchups in this tournament are jokes, and I don’t really blame them for hacking their way into our keeps when they do this.

This said, the problem won’t be fixed overnight, if ever.

My suggestion to fixing this (at least moving it in the right direction) is twofold;
First off, monitor the amount of players each server has on WvW every day, and make the numbers public. Then, make the server transfers free and watch the problem solve itself.

sishbob.3987:

Is this a joke? I mean, the first week I was surprised by how well we (Mag) did for the first 2 or 3 days. And then we get matched with TC?

Look, the match ups for this tourney are the biggest joke since – since I don’t even know. Mag should have been dropped FORCIBLY by ANet. Take a look at the coverage. You guys at ANet all say you listen to metrics. Did the metrics not tell you that Mag had maybe 1/10th the coverage of TC?

Agree 100%. Getting paired with one, usually green world, that is ranks above the other two is just a blood bath plain and simple.

The only thing I’ve come across that might make any sense whatsoever is this Dev quote…

Jessica Boettiger.2563:
Basically removing the achievement requirement during a tournament is an experimental step we took to reduce the incentive for achievement grinding. We want people to play WvW, and not focus too heavily on satisfying achievement requirements.

If they are changing things up in “experimental steps” to try things out, I get that, but in the case of matchups why do it in the middle of the kitten Tournament? Also, our less WvW inclined servers needed the rewards to draw in people to stay longer than 10 mins. People can argue over skill>numbers, but it doesn’t change the fact that most servers are getting steamrolled. I mean look at those kitten numbers!

Ulion.5476:

Wvw population does not reflect the pve population, so simply combining server would fix the wvw problem but create other issues. Eotm is an example of why server identity is important, no one cares to defend. It is just a karma train instead of how it was at the beginning and fun.

This is a really important point and, for me, emphasises an issue with the whole, transient “matchup” concept. Personally, I’d prefer if WvW had a more permanent aspect to them, rather than having immersion-breaking resets and “scores”. Still, this is all just conjecture now, we have what we have.

Until some kind of effort is made into fixing WvW the threads almost seem pointless. We all continue to complain, The devs keep saying were talking over different ideas. How about stop talking about it, Stop thinking about it, and make SOME kind of effort to fix the issues. Right or Wrong, at least we know your trying.

Or come up with a simple “poll” and throw three ideas into fixing WvW and let the masses decide what should be tried. So far all I see is allot of talk, very little if any effort to address the issues.

Eshady.9146:

So many threads popping up about the same frustration. This can’t outrage go unnoticed and if it does… shame shame.

It can and it does.

: ) I feel that this weeks Henge of Denravi / Borlis Pass / Devona’s Rest match-up is leaps and bounds better than last week’s Monkey+Football croc-o-kitten fiasco. It feels really competitive, yet doable. /pats ANet’s back with a soothing clockwise rotational rub “You are doing so good, remember, you can do it!”

Anet needs to fix WvWvW coverage/population wars. It’s hard to attain it but at least minimize stacking of huge population in one server.

WvWvW is the most imbalanced match up i have ever played in my 12 years of playing mmo’s. even the old school mmo’s have better matchup scaling than gw2.

I’m not enjoying this series at all each week in T2 were getting out covered by T1 servers each week what a waste of time and effort. Currently were ticking for less than 50ppt.

This needs fixing just the 30+ mesmer bugs.

Really very unhappy this imbalance needs urgent attention, week three and four I wont be bothering.

Dayra.7405:

WvW is broken. That’s it.

It started with the removal of the queue by EotM as the only balancing factor that ever existed, got out of control by season 2 rewards and is now gone.

If 4 ranks difference is a blow out there is nothing left to play.

More often than not even two places higher can be a blow out.

maybe it should be based on an historical assessment of server participation. The bottom line is that smaller servers and servers with lower overall WvW participation will never be competitive. Even with the tier system, these guys have the sense that there’s no point in playing if they’re going to get their kitten handed to them on a regular basis. Why not let all the servers with the worst historical participation and performance merge into a single WvW team?

I think the biggest issue with this season was locking leagues. The servers at the bottom of silver have no business fighting many of the servers they’re fighting against, the servers at the top of bronze have no business fighting against the servers… etc. If there were no leagues, we’d see a more even spread of matchups, less blowouts (still happening, 3rd week into the tourney, and will happen again next week), and servers that don’t normally face each other because they’re locked out of a certain league would get a chance to face each other.

Also, they should buy an island somewhere in the south atlantic and throw everyone from Tier 1 onto it so they have no way of fighting any other servers, because the difference between Tier 1 and 2 is so vast they should really just be their own league — but, since I’m talking about doing away with leagues, we should just call Tier 1 “that other WvW mode” and isolate them from the rest of the world forever.

Just 2 leagues t1 and the t2-t8/9, even better 8/9 leagues (each tier it’s own league), best no season, but some improvements to our problems: imbalance & coverage.

After the last 3 hours of defending our BL with 10 ppl vs 50, I think I’ve finally had enough of this game.
There’s no fun and no point anymore.

There is no perfect solution for this issue, as devs have been hamstrung with just keeping the status quo as there are always detractors who had zero empathy for quality of other’s play times. WvW server inbalance has been an issue since gw2 was released. The population and anet turned a blind eye to this until the unfairness and non-competitiveness affected themselves. The tournament should just be called population wars. Anet with their wvw population data could accurate forecast perfectly the results of the tournament without people even playing it. That speaks a whole lot to the failure of the system.

Good suggestions that would go a way towards fixing this growing issue get squashed again and again due to Anet’s inability to act until they find a golden solution when there is none.

Anet should really wake up and do something radical with the wvw population imbalances which will only get worse with the current system. Letting servers and the community try to build their population is a failed experiment. There are many non-perfect suggestions which would help balance matchups. Anet needs to stop being so politically correct and just experiment with a few of them.

Latency.3907:

There is no perfect solution for this issue, as devs have been hamstrung with just keeping the status quo as there are always detractors who had zero empathy for quality of other’s play times. WvW server inbalance has been an issue since gw2 was released. The population and anet turned a blind eye to this until the unfairness and non-competitiveness affected themselves. The tournament should just be called population wars. Anet with their wvw population data could accurate forecast perfectly the results of the tournament without people even playing it. That speaks a whole lot to the failure of the system.

Good suggestions that would go a way towards fixing this growing issue get squashed again and again due to Anet’s inability to act until they find a golden solution when there is none.

Anet should really wake up and do something radical with the wvw population imbalances which will only get worse with the current system. Letting servers and the community try to build their population is a failed experiment. There are many non-perfect suggestions which would help balance matchups. Anet needs to stop being so politically correct and just experiment with a few of them.

Well, here’s the funny thing about your last statement. To clarify, I’m from HoD. Once upon a time, in a galaxy far away, HoD was a Tier 1 server. I was there when I watched it fall all the way to Tier 8. It sat there for months. The server and community gradually did start to build population; more guilds were formed, transfers came over, population began to increase again, things got better. We gradually began to climb the ladder. The server as a whole became better for it, and months and months later we climbed to the very bottom of silver — Tier 5, 15th place.

And then Season 2 was announced, and bottom tier servers such as ours were given free transfers. Free! To the people who had been around and watched the fall to the bottom and then worked to pull us back up, we knew it was a death knell. So many people transferred that we had no server cohesion, queues that would make T1 jealous, and of course we steamrolled straight to the top through sheer numbers and coverage. One of our commanders gloated about it (he no longer plays the game), but the rest of us were silent.

Season 2 ended, and everyone left. We became the server everyone hated and wanted to destroy. There are still grudges. Still insults being thrown at us for something that was far beyond our control. We fell to the bottom of Tier 5, and were looking forward to being able to drop back down into bronze so that we could start pulling people together and find out where our strengths and weaknesses were, and look towards possibly getting some transfers out of bronze.

Then Season 3. Leagues got locked. Aside from BP, every server we face has steamrolled us and are steamrolling us right now. People don’t even bother to play anymore. Roamers have stopped roaming. You’re lucky to come across half a dozen people defending the BL during prime time. Our map “blob” consists of, at most, 50 people, and that’s on reset and Saturdays and then sharply falls off during the week.

We didn’t want any of this. It sucks. Anet, you’ve ruined our server — not once, but twice. And because you got greedy by removing the WvW lockout for S3, people are just transferring over to the server they know is going to win, leaving us with even less people than before. All because you wanted a few extra bucks out of all the people who transferred and are still transferring week-to-week to ensure they sit on a first place server when it’s time to collect their rewards.

Again I firmly believe there should no differing rewards for 1st 2nd and third place or ANY place for that matter. Rewards should simply be based upon participation on any given server.

I really do not understand how it can be interesting for either the server that overwhelms another in population when their zergs hits a map that no one defends OR those trying to defend their maps with 6 people against 50.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just tally the population of only WvW population for a week and then average it out instead of the entire server population where on some servers it’s mostly pve but being counted higher for wvw. Seriously the current match up is just akittento t2. Having to be matched up with t1 servers ever match? How does anet not know that the numbers of t1 are going to blow out t2 easily? t1 will always win and t2 will always lose. Really nice match up anet. Really nice. Since you seem to cater to the t1 servers and everybody else can just go get bent.
Needless to say I’ve given up on WvW completely when it was the only thing I did in GW2. So many players from my server had just quit GW2 completely cuz WvW was the only enjoyment they had in GW2. I rarely even show up in WvW at all anymore somehow I find the super boring grinding in PvE much more enjoyable then banging my head against the wall in WvW where its no longer fun due to being constantly blobbed over. So I now I go the route of almost everyone else on my server and get my 5 acheevos done for the week and then be gone.

Latency.3907:

There is no perfect solution for this issue,

Maybe there is no perfect solution, but for sure it can be improved! And putting the head in the sand till it disappear it far from optimal.