Guild Wars 2

I really enjoy WvW, though I play GW2 mostly casually, so I have no stake in the whole “my server is the best” debate. I’m mostly speaking from my experience with running several large competitive tournaments.

Putting servers that nightcap vs each other will not solve the problem. The issue with night capping is not that it’s unfair, night capping is completely fair and game under the current WvW implementation. The problem is that giving night cap scores the same reward as 100v100 man prime time fights is undesirable from a competitive standpoint. The obvious solution is to scale down point gain during off hours, which will solve most problems but will not not make night capping obsolete as a tactic.

The gains of playing versus a nearly empty server during off time are much higher then the gains of playing versus a full server on prime time, which is obviously not ideal. If all servers have their max players out, it really is a challenge to capture multiple points, especially with 3 servers competing. So mostly you’ll be fighting for a 50/100 point lead. And getting more then that is really awesome. But playing at night versus an empty server has even better gains then that. And since you will retain what you capture, you will keep earning points for the rest of the night.

From a competitive standpoint nightcapping will still be worth it if it only gave 20% of the points it gives now. A competitive player will go for any advantage he can get, and playing versus a nearly empty server is a guarantee for an advantage.

As it is, Oceania vs US and Russia vs UK servers will have troubles with fair matchups versus eachother. A Russian server simply can not stay up as late as the European/UK servers, simply due to their time-zone differences. Now, they can wake up a few hours earlier, but that advantage will only last for those few hours. The advantage that the UK server has over the Russians will run for the same amount of time and all trough the night that follows, totaling an insane score advantage that the Russians will have a hard time catching up to even if they dominate when the fights are equal. So competing fairly will be really troublesome for a Russian server (I’m not Russian, just using them as an example).

Making the score intervals dependent upon the amount of players in the server will not make any of the current tactics obsolete, but will more fairly reward an advantage gained when the actual enemy is there to compete and solve potential unfairness due to timezones.

tl;dr: the tactic is fine, its rewards are problematic

Offcourse nightcapping is fair, if the oponents have a similar force inside the same map.
It aint fair when there is zero resistance.

it creates muliple problems for servers who are up against night capping servers.

1. Fully upgraded enemy keeps / towers
2. fully filled suply’s inside all towers / keeps
3. full build up siege equipment on every tower / keep

Its a massive advantage versus server who cannot / doesnt have people willing to skip hours of sleep.

When servers who do that are matched against server who have similar night crews then i call it balanced.

Great post Racio

The problem though with tying the points into server population is that as you said competitive players will take any advantage they can get. You might run into the situation where competitive servers initially avoid joining WvW to slow an enemies point gain until the situation favors them.

Those that played WAR early on might remember that all it took to prevent enemies from taking a zone, was to leave the zone.

In effect linking point gain to population could have the same effect.

That’s my concern with your suggestion. I agree night-capping is an issue, but I think it may be something that individual servers may need to address though community building. Forming guilds, and alliances, and recruiting players to play in the off hours.

If you decide to leave, the other 2 servers will be able to get a massive point score on that map as they will both have people playing.

The real solution is to restrict the servers by region. I do not see any other way to balance it correctly.

Maybe we could just give the matchmaking system some time to work itself out…. There really was no way for the servers that capture everything overnight to be taken into account in the 24 hour test matches. I think this was an oversight by Anet.

They probably should have gone from 1 day matches to 3 or 4 day matches, then to a week and worked their way up to the full 2 week matches. Keep in mind though, this is the first real data point they will have for matchmaking, it should improve significantly in the next couple weeks.

Mog.1589:

The real solution is to restrict the servers by region. I do not see any other way to balance it correctly.

Problem is, even a small timezone difference such as Russia vs. Europe will have problems.

Restricting by region just means servers with lots of unemployed people or people who work the night shift and who can stay up all night end up winning. That’s a terrible solution.

The real problem is what the original poster pointed out – capping at night is about three times as good as capping during the day, when it should be about 1/3 as good.

What I would suggest is just steeply discounting point gain at any time besides prime time. It could be a sliding scale, going from normal 100% gain during the 6-8 prime time hours for the relevant server down to 10% for the lowest population time hours.

That way you don’t get a situation where suddenly the clock strikes 12:01am and suddenly points go down rapidly, but you also end up with a situation where capping at 5am gets you very limited rewards.

If you want the primetime WvW to count more, how about having to pay a fee to play during those peak times? Or everyone who plays off-peak hours gets a 50% refund on their game since the WvW stuff they do won’t matter, but you still have to pay full price? I am willing to bet that you don’t really like either one of those ideas….

Uh right now off-time WvW counts MUCH more than prime time, for the reasons the OP explained. So acting like there is parity now is silly.

One thing everyone should be able to agree on is that of all the possible combinations, the WORST is having off-time WvW count more than prime time WvW.

How do you propose restricting servers by region when there are only EU and US servers?
What about international guilds?
I am a member of a large international guild which isn’t from my region, restrictig by region would mean that I can no longer play on the same server as my guild, a guild which has become part of my family.
There is no way this can be balanced without screwing over someone. My server is very low populated offpeak, I like being the underdog and I like having the opportunity to play with my buddies in the US and EU.

They obviously are never going to restrict by region. That’s a silly idea that will never go anywhere.

Discounting point gain at offpeak times is the only real solution I have seen anyone come up with that seems like it would both address the problem and not be a non-starter for some other reason.

Eh track point gain by hour. Those with similar gains during a certain time period get matched with each other. This will end up being an average trend on the server rather than a per week basis, so even if one cycle has the night crew holding out to get situated against servers with a different play time won’t work cause they’ll still end up spending a majority of their time taking stuff at night so their gains will always show up then.

DemonCow.5328:

If you want the primetime WvW to count more, how about having to pay a fee to play during those peak times? Or everyone who plays off-peak hours gets a 50% refund on their game since the WvW stuff they do won’t matter, but you still have to pay full price? I am willing to bet that you don’t really like either one of those ideas….

First of all, I am not talking about restricting access during peak hours. I’m talking about that fact that even if you are doing well during peak hours, you’ll get maybe a 50/100 point lead over the other servers. At night you can cap more points with more ease and thus have a higher gain then when there are actually enemies to fight.

Playing off peak will still matter immensely. But at the moment it simply matters way more then fighting during peak hours, which is the imbalance that should be fixed.

DemonCow.5328:

Maybe we could just give the matchmaking system some time to work itself out…. There really was no way for the servers that capture everything overnight to be taken into account in the 24 hour test matches. I think this was an oversight by Anet.

As I said, this will still not solve any of the problems. First of all the payoff of night capping will still be higher then the payoff for tense fighting between full servers. Second of all, the servers are supposed to be ranked, and being the best should be meaningful. As it is, a Russian server has a severe disadvantage because of the way points are distributed. Even if they dominate the enemy, they will lose out during the night because of the 3 hour time zone difference.

Yukishiro.8792:

Uh right now off-time WvW counts MUCH more than prime time, for the reasons the OP explained. So acting like there is parity now is silly.

One thing everyone should be able to agree on is that of all the possible combinations, the WORST is having off-time WvW count more than prime time WvW.

So as the OP suggests, the hypothetical 100 vs 100 fights should count for more since they are even as opposed to one side just steamrolling another. What about when we have a 20 v 20 fight overnight? Our fight was no less even than yours, and it wasn’t any easier to win it. It certainly is more difficult to capture objectives with 20 people than with 100 people just zerging everything.

We also have less people to defend objectives if we are attacking something else. And a relatively small group of people can hold back a much larger attacking force, provided they are sufficiently entrenched.

Besides, once the first couple of weeks of matchmaking are over, the servers that actually have people online during off-peak hours should move up the rankings. I’m sorry if you think your server is much better than others during the daytime, if you’re not very good in off-peak hours, then your server isn’t that good.

DemonCow.5328:

What about when we have a 20 v 20 fight overnight? Our fight was no less even than yours, and it wasn’t any easier to win it. It certainly is more difficult to capture objectives with 20 people than with 100 people just zerging everything.

You can easily make sure that point scaling stays high when the fight is equal, so your idea that 20v20 would not be rewarded is incorrect. And even if the reward would be a bit lower, shouldn’t 300 people fighting score more points then 40 people fighting?

RaCio.6891:

DemonCow.5328:

What about when we have a 20 v 20 fight overnight? Our fight was no less even than yours, and it wasn’t any easier to win it. It certainly is more difficult to capture objectives with 20 people than with 100 people just zerging everything.

You can easily make sure that point scaling stays high when the fight is equal, so your idea that 20v20 would not be rewarded is incorrect. And even if the reward would be a bit lower, shouldn’t 300 people fighting score more points then 40 people fighting?

No. I have played during peak hours and during off-peak hours. Both capturing and defending objectives is an easier and cheaper job per person with more people.

During off peak hours, I have to spend more on siege doing either one because we don’t have as many people to spread around the costs, and I don’t have time to go do the jumping puzzles because 1 person missing from 20 is a whole lot more valuable than 1 person missing from 100.

When defending with fewer people, I have to balance my time between doing repairs (because siege equipment doesn’t do any less damage to walls and gates) and attacking the invaders to try and drive them off. If we don’t repair enough, we lose the tower/keep, if we don’t attack them enough, we lose the tower/keep. We certainly don’t have enough people to guard supply camps overnight, so we have to constantly be capturing those too, and hope they don’t try to hit our dolyaks because we can’t afford to protect them constantly.

When attacking with fewer people, I have to be able take more damage (because they have almost the same number of arrow carts firing at significantly fewer targets), while trying to drive them off the front of the wall and take out the cannons and oil (which still have the same amount of damage and health as during peak hours) with a lot less damage from my team. Then there’s the siege equipment again, which we are very limited on since each person can only carry a very small amount of supplies to build. If someone has to leave for supplies, as opposed to costing us 1%-2% of our attacking force to run for 10-20 supplies, it costs us 5%-10% of our attacking force. That can easily decide the battle.

Its pretty obvious that when the numbers massively favor one side, yeah its unfair. The bottom line is: the flaw is with the matchmaking system, not with the WvW rules or the people on the servers. If your server is really good during peak hours, and really bad during off peak hours, then your server should probably be ranked somewhere in the middle. If your server is pretty good during peak hours and dominates during off peak hours, your server should probably be a top 10 server.

I don’t see how gold is relevant to this discussion as it would not be affected. And as I said, you would relatively be gaining more points per player as point scaling wouldn’t happen linearly. Regardless, this topic is not about point scaling but about the competitive problems WvW runs in to.

the flaw is with the matchmaking system, not with the WvW rules or the people on the servers. If your server is really good during peak hours, and really bad during off peak hours, then your server should probably be ranked somewhere in the middle. If your server is pretty good during peak hours and dominates during off peak hours, your server should probably be a top 10 server.

As I’ve said before, server populations have different timezones. The server ranking is not a bandage to fix the system, its supposed to represent the best servers. Under the current rules Russian servers have a huge disadvantage. If you disable half the units of a SC2 player and let him play on the ladder, then yeah, eventually the matchmaking would give him winnable matches, but that would kind of be beside the point…

You can not have fair cross timezone matches unless you focus on the times they are actually actively playing against each other.

Bump for relevance.

The issue is not that night-capping is unfair. Night-capping as a tactic is completely fair, and I have not heard many people cliam otherwise. As I explained earlier, one of the issues is that the scoring system puts some timezones at a disadvantage because of their geographical location. ArenaNet seems intent on building a caring community that competes for a high ranking. So I hope they will look at a system that represents the best server as accurately as possible. It’s possible to remove (some) of the influence of the geographical location of the players without altering any of the skill-level.

Making the score intervals dependant on the amount of players in the servers is a very simple but elegant sollution. This means that for example Stonemist always gives the same amount of points. But when there are 1000 players playing a WvW matchup, they would see the score count go up every 5 minutes instead of every 15.

Not this again, there is ANOTHER thread already at page 5, use that.

That thread started about moderation and is all over the place. This thread is about the score rewards during different timezones. Hopefully we can all agree on the fact that night capping is fair, but that some adjustments to the scoring system can improve the competitiveness of the server ranking.

The simple fact is night capping does not exist. If it’s night for you, it’s day for me. Does night+day=night? … no.

Karast.1927:

The problem though with tying the points into server population is that as you said competitive players will take any advantage they can get. You might run into the situation where competitive servers initially avoid joining WvW to slow an enemies point gain until the situation favors them.

This would still be a loser for them. The idea is still to make having a big population advantage on a map an advantage, but just not be as lucrative as capping when it’s hardest against full caps.

The scaling would not be a 1 to 1 ratio. In other words if one server had 100% population on a map while the other two had 50%, they would not get 50% less points. It might be only 25% less. Therefore having more people contributing would always be an advantage, you would never want to purposely abandon playing in this system.

Actually We cant agree. At some point you are going to be matched to a server where YOU are in prime time, however to another server its offpeak. Are you gonna be happy with your efforts counting half as much? during your prime, you will be gaining points at a disadvantage while the other team will gain full points during their prime
does this sound like a reasonable tradeoff?

RaCio.6891:

tl;dr: the tactic is fine, its rewards are problematic

Completely agreed. If we can focus on this issue, we can find a common ground to agree upon.

etsmith.9025:

Actually We cant agree. At some point you are going to be matched to a server where YOU are in prime time, however to another server its offpeak. Are you gonna be happy with your efforts counting half as much? during your prime, you will be gaining points at a disadvantage while the other team will gain full points during their prime
does this sound like a reasonable tradeoff?

Yes.

The only time points should be worth 100% is when servers are full.

If my server is playing an Off Peak server, they will likely not be fielding 100% population in our prime time. We will get less points. That is fine. Then they in turn will get less when our manpower is weak. And whichever side fields less in their weak period, the % will scale to them in some small degree to provide balance. It won’t totally negate the value of their numbers, but will make it not all-important. For either side.

What people don’t realize is that a scaling system would also help a lot of low population servers in general. That has nothing to do with peak vs off peak.

Many servers right now struggle to get maps full at any time period, let alone overnight. Under the current system, these servers will be forever weak, because no one wants to go there. However, if they could gain more traction simply by playing ‘better’ than their opponent, even with less men, this would begin to close the gap in points by which they lose by, and more servers might become attractive destinations. Not based on just zerg, but by how skilled they are. Imagine that, rewarding skill.

Kazim.2043:

RaCio.6891:

tl;dr: the tactic is fine, its rewards are problematic

Completely agreed. If we can focus on this issue, we can find a common ground to agree upon.

I do think it’s possible, but it’s a dicey situation since there will always be off-peak cappers.

I agree with was a similar idea i had and was going to post a thread but found this one by coincidence.
Example of my idea:
say there are 100vs100vs100 fighting on a map at full capacity that would mean that all points per tick would be at 100%.
But say later in the night the numbers change to 100vs 80vs80 then you’d do some math and come to: 260/300 = 87% of the points per tick would be rewarded. If 2 servers for whatever reason decided to give up and not play at all then 33% of the points would still be rewarded per tick.

If you look at what happened to the hod, et, sbi match up this would have prevent the huge gap that resulted when hod took everything in one night and would still allow night time play to make an impact. It would also give you an idea of who is actually playing rather than just assuming that there is no one to defend.

Feel free to poke holes in the idea, i’m curious as to what people think anyway.

That’s a cool idea Phildo! The reason why I suggested adjusting scoring intervals instead of adjusting point values is that you would be able to keep the value of objectives consistent. So your server’s point gain of +230 wont suddenly drop when players leave. Instead, you’ll be getting points every 14 minutes instead of every 12 minutes.

etsmith.9025:

Actually We cant agree. At some point you are going to be matched to a server where YOU are in prime time, however to another server its offpeak. Are you gonna be happy with your efforts counting half as much? during your prime, you will be gaining points at a disadvantage while the other team will gain full points during their prime
does this sound like a reasonable tradeoff?

If you’d read the second to last paragraph of the 1st post you’ll find that I agree with you on the timezone problems.

With primetime I meant a time where both servers are competing at their full capacity. So primetime will not always start at exactly 20:30 and weekend will have a longer primetime.

Also, try to look at it this way: you will get a higher reward when there is enemy players who are trying to stop you. So holding 2 keeps and 2 towers when there is an enemy force of 100 soldiers trying to stop you will give better gains then holding those points versus an empty server.

ok so they scale points
server A fields 6 pvp guilds per map and take everything. Once majority of maps are held, a prearranged amount of players leave before scoring only to return after scoring calculates. Since their team during that time had outnumbered buff, your score calculated at scale points while theirs at 100%
the opportunity for exploit are unlimited. As with the orb stealing exploit that should never happen, entire servers will generate ways to turn that type of system to their advantage.

etsmith.9025:

ok so they scale points
server A fields 6 pvp guilds per map and take everything. Once majority of maps are held, a prearranged amount of players leave before scoring only to return after scoring calculates. Since their team during that time had outnumbered buff, your score calculated at scale points while theirs at 100%
the opportunity for exploit are unlimited. As with the orb stealing exploit that should never happen, entire servers will generate ways to turn that type of system to their advantage.

Good mind excercise lets look at this.

First scenario: Server A fields 6 pvp guilds at peak time. As they will have full opposition from Server B and Server C they will have a really hard time to take everything. However if they do, they definitely deserve to win as they proved they beat 2 servers on peak time.

Second scenario: Server A fields 6 pvp guilds at off-time. They will own everything easily bu as there will be little less opposition they can only stack 1/3 to 1/2 amount of possible points due to scaling. As they sleep they will order all their players to get off WvW. However this time other two servers plant their forces due to it’s getting peak time. And they will get 2/3 of points as there are full two servers. And not only Server A loose everything, but also Server B and C will have more points due to there is more people on WvW in total.

So in both scenarios this tactic doesn’t prove to be any addition to Server A would do by other more conventional tactics.

Edit: About majority of players leaving and returning after scoring, I don’t think its not viable to do each 15 mins every day.

I agree, scaling the point accrual would be very simple and effective for a single match.

E.g. simply scale the point accrual down based on how many players are in the zone as a ratio of: current / maximum (cap).

The only problem is when you are adding up points for re-match calculations. E.g. a tier where there is little off-hours activity would pick up fewer total points than a tier where is a lot of off-hours activity.

That said, that is probably fair, actually.

Anyways, it wouldn’t solve everything — the server with more off-hours presence would still take territory and have more objectives when the clock swings to primetime NA. However, it would partially mitigate the point skew.

Edit:

As a general sidenote, no one’s going to coordinate a mass logout for 8 hours of straight primetime to partially reduce the enemy’s score.

Remember, if 2 servers are completely absent, the third server is basically getting 33% of +710. More likely they would end up closer to 40% of +650 (260ppt).

Even when the “2 servers” all log back on during off-hours (lol), they would be splitting 70% of 325 (228ppt).

It is theoretically possible to exploit it, but highly unlikely, and much less impacting than the current model.

Yea i don’t think it will solve the issue of some servers just have more active night crews but at least when the servers that supposedly have 0 night crew log in in the morning their point loss isn’t crazy. Hod was getting like 500 per tick over night and quickly came back from a 30k deficit within a day. If the points had scaled it would have taken an extra day or two for them to catch up, but i don’t think the other 2 servers would have given up so easily if HoD was still behind Tuesday night.

The deeper issue is that WvW is not competitive (skill and tactics are not leading contributor to victory), has no progression or rewards, has slippery slope and is plagued with technological/server issues (queues, invisible people). If the situation remains as is I have no doubt people will do WvW less and less as time goes on. Perhaps when less casuals will play it the problem will go away on itself, I doubt the night players would like to pve vs castle defender mobs years and years on otherwise empty server.

I agree with the OP. Nighetcapping is only an issue because it is such a high yield activity. It also demoralizes opposing teams to the point where they stop playing until the next matchup.

Hey all, Matt Witter has made a thread about night capping. Please divert all discussions on the topic to that thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Night-Capping-and-YOU