Guild Wars 2

Let’s pretend that there’s a magic matching system that will ensure balanced matches every time. But the consequence of this is that you’ll get the same opponents every time, since they are your perfect balanced opponents.

On the other side, you have fluctuating matchups, where you’ll get a variety of opponent servers, but many of the matches will be very lop sided.

Which would you prefer, out of these two extremes?
(assuming the ideal, that each server is viable against the others and thus all matchups are fair, is impossible.)

Get both by balancing the server-strength.

Good Balance > Variety

There is a threshold where servers are decently balanced and then we can talk about variety but the big suck WvW is balance/coverage.

Balanced matchups are way more fun, would prefer balanced repeats than a fresh unbalanced matchup. Imo, blowouts suck even for the winning server. There just isn’t much to do after they (understandably) give up.

What really sucks is when the same match week after week after week is also unbalanced.

there are many cases where the “best” match is still horrible. ideally, servers of similar strength would always be found in groups of 3 so they can be matched together, but unfortunately this is rarely the case.

-ken

If a balanced trio can be sustained over many weeks, then I don’t mind playing the same servers. The problem is that this is rarely the case. Servers 4, 5, and 6 aren’t necessarily the most balanced servers for each other. It could be that a match between 5, 6, and 7 would be more balanced. But that matchup would be extremely unlikely to happen. And if it did happen, who would server 4 face? Their match would be incredibly unbalanced.

If WvW was balanced by design, we wouldn’t need this type of discussion. Balance across servers would allow variety to be viable. But since WvW isn’t balanced, we just have to deal with it until someone makes a better RvR game (preferably without sub fees lol).