The problem
The problem is that the effort of the majority of players is quiete irrelevant for the match result, only a small minority of off-time players decides the outcome of matches. (aka night/morning/day-capping)
This is the consequence of the fact that the amount of objective points available to capture for scoring is always equal, i.e. independent of the no of players that currently play WvW. Of cource the fewer people are in WvW, the easier is it for a side to dominate and the fewer people are in WvW, the easier is it achieve a major imbalance in scoring. While you need to be really good to achieve a 300:200:200 in prime-time for more than 1 tick, a 500:100:100 over several ticks is quite common in off-time.
As a consequence only a minority of players decides match results and by that dominate the majority of players.
The main-time players are discriminated with respect to off-time players in several aspects:
- they cannot play immediately but have to wait in a queue
- their effort is much less relevant (sometimes even irrelevant) for match result
- they are less worthy for the server
Especially the last point can be seen in many recruitement threads: If you are an off-time player we warmly welcome you, if you mainly play in prime-time stay away, we cannot hinder you, but we don’t want you.
The negative consequences
concentration As only a few servers have good off-time coverage (by definition the number of off-time players is smaller, or the off-time would turn into a prime-time), people that care about winning and loosing a match concentrate on these few server.
indifference You hear more and more
- "I better do not care about points, … "
- “I’ve no influence on winning or loosing”
- “Why should I spend money for upgrades/defensive siege, it will be gone when I go to bed.”
- ….
Over time such helplessness demotivates people to play WvW/Guildwars2.
imbalance
Server are different in their time-profile (caused by culture or by different time-zone majorities). As the rating of a server is based on performance averaged over time.
Very imbalanced matches may result. A example of this was Baruch Bay in the EU-ladder. Matches with them where nearly never balanced (e.g. see graphic in
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/matchups/SFR-Kodash-Baruch/2254763). They dominated when others where sleeping, and they were dominated other times of the day.
But the amount of time with interesting fights was very limited, therefore the resulting matches where quite imbalanced (and therefore boring) most of the time.
overcommitment followed by burn-out
During the league several server were overcommited to off-time play as this is the way to win a match. E.g. Jade Sea and Baruch Bay achieved league results much better than their pre- and post-league results by strong commitment resulting in strong off-time forces that decided the matches for them. Unfortunatly overcommitment has a price, namely that of burn-out. Baruch Bay fell into a very deep hole after league and jade sea felt into one as well. People feelt un-rewarded for their (over-)commitment and quite a lot, were not seen in WvW (or even GW2) since the league.