Guild Wars 2

Hey,

First, thanks for a great game :-)

It seems like the way to win the season is to get some US guild to change to your server, so these guilds can color the maps your color while your opponents sleep. This undoes all the good work the players did during the day – that design could be better :-)

Other games have things like “night protection” where your resources are frozen until the next day. I could imagine a stack of Legendary defenders walking out into the map during night to hold the keeps and then leave in the morning. It doesn’t even have to be 8 hours, just something like 6 so it’s not so easy to color the entire map using American guilds.

Edit for clarification: The idea is to have night protection during US night for US servers, and protection for EU servers during EU night time.

Thanks for considering a solution to this.

Tsath

It can be really unfair to those who just went on for 2-4 hours trying to cap a keep rather than take 1-20 minutes for those night capping, its ridiculous, now for those americans and alike who would complain that this closing time would be when they are playing, I got 3 things to say:

1- You are playing in a server that is hours different than yours, don’t see how this is a smart move
2- it’s for a moment of hours, not necessarily the whole night and even not necessarily at night, could be during morning or afternoon, whichever the timings Anet probably knows by now that can work for both sides
3- It’s only WvW, if its down for a few hours left, play something else like dungeons, having fun with mates and so on, then you can go back to it as it starts up again, at least it would give time for all sides to have an acceptable amount of players awake and refreshed

If this wouldn’t work, I would really hope for someone else to think of a better idea since this is becoming unfair to the hardworking servers at night times (european times that is).

I said this on the last thread, and ill say it again here, its not fair on those who are not north american. As an oceanic player, on a server with a very strong SEA presence, closing down wvw at night time (why would they do it NA day time) would mean i cant play wvw at all. No thanks

Well tough, go play on your own servers :-)

Because there are sooooooo many australian servers…… -.-

Well, I guess either Europe or NA matches your needs? I don’t see why 6 hours of nighttime on EU or NA servers would impact you that much? Explain please.

I play on a NA server, usually 7-11pm each night. This is 1-5 am server time, more than likely when wvw would be ‘down’ with this idea

Okay, so because you’d potentially have to move to EU servers to play WvW with some actual people instead of empty servers this idea is no good?

We’re trying to figure out a way to solve a hugely demotivating problem which impacts all servers in WvW and this is what stops it for you? Try to be a bit more constructive and imaginative :-)

If we could get ArenaNet to realize this is a huge problem for people we may even get a world transfer for free to better fit your time zone.

I personally wouldn’t like just playing WvW during night when most people logged off anyway.

Other way of thinking might be that server points stop counting if there isnt anybody against you → you could still cap, but the match would still be more even. Most of karmatrain-pvd people dont even care the score, so it would not be so bad. Problem is how to balance it.

I’m loyal to my guild, and my guild isnt leaving, so im not leaving. “Empty servers”? Try telling that to the 100+ taiwanese that get on around my time on my server.
This could possibly work, if they had servers in more locations (such as oceanic or SEA based).
I personally dont mind playing when most log off, it isnt the zergfest that NA is, when i can roam and have fun with my guild

Dragan, great input. I’m leaning more towards your idea than locking the WvW down completely. Locking down is in my opinion not the right way to go about it (I play a lot during my nightshifts ;-) ..) , but something has to be done. It is as Tsath says, kind of demotivating that all your hard work just get wiped out because some battlegroups bring in overseas players.

Dragan, excellent and constructive idea. +1.

I’d say just close down one or more of the borderlands outside of NA/EU prime. Saying that OCX/SEA flat out don’t get to play wvw is a bad idea obviously. Individual OCX and SEA players contribute disproportionately to weekly scores. If NA servers could trade 50 NA prime players for 25 SEA players they would increase overall ppt. probably by a lot. This does not upset me personally; it’s just the way it works. But, if there are fewer objectives during these times we would see less score disparity.
This is just a way to keep scores closer- not sure if it makes the game more fun overall. Free transfers should be given out in a system change like this so players can spread out of relatively over stacked time zones to avoid the queues something like this would create.
I think in addition to keeping scores closer, this would reduce some of the no-that-fun parts of wvw: float teams, map-hopping, and lonely scouts on team speak watching Watergates on maps by themselves.

Creating world servers would solve night/day capping. But create latency issues that nobody would want.

Dragan.7568:

Other way of thinking might be that server points stop counting if there isnt anybody against you -> you could still cap, but the match would still be more even. Most of karmatrain-pvd people dont even care the score, so it would not be so bad. Problem is how to balance it.

Imo it should just scale vs the ratio between the opponents on all maps (since you could have a fully capped map on another map). No opponents shouldn’t mean no points (people would get yelled at for going into wvw if that was the case), but it should give fewer since it’s easier to cap things etc.

Can’t they just close the homeborder for the server that is last, or make some sort of upgrade for keeps that protects them for x amount of hours, regardless of when during the day it is finished?

Another option is to change the ppt completely, dividing the day into Three 8 hour “shifts”. If you win the PPT game during one of those shifts you get 3 pts, 2nd gets 1 pt and last gains nothing. That way, pvdooring a few hours won’t skyrocket the points.

There are plenty of fairly simple solutions, just need to be creative and willing.

Don’t really want to see any sort of preferential treatment for daytime WvW as there are many people who play late night/early morning because those are the only times they can play – it’s not just a timezone thing. Also, coverage imbalance is an issue that can occur at anytime of day (with the usual exception being primetime) so any sort of ppt limitations would need to be enforced 24/7. If one server can pvd their way to a win from 7am-12pm, how is that any different than pvdooring from 2am-7am? Not many people can log in to WvW whilst they’re at work/school/college.

I’ve always hoped that Anet would just enforce a maximum ppt tick of say, 400. You can still reduce the ppt tick of the other servers by taking their keeps/towers etc, but your ppt will no longer increase when you hit the 400 cap. Could even make it a dynamic ppt cap based on the disparity between server populations.

It’s a good thing to talk about though, especially now that ppt has become more important with the seasons.

I agree Simonly, it shouldn’t be done by time zones, but at the same time you shouldn’t have an advantage just because your opponents went to bed. Scaling PPT based off of the populations seems the best route to me.

What servers are you guys from, and do you think you have the problem? I’m from Gandara and we definitely do have the problem.

Tsath.4527:

What servers are you guys from, and do you think you have the problem? I’m from Gandara and we definitely do have the problem.

I was on FoW earlier this league and now on GH. FoW did have nightcappers but nothing compared to lets say drakkar.
On GH we had this against desolation who have a very good nightcapping team.

Tsath is clearly new to WvW.

Tsath.4527:

Well tough, go play on your own servers :-)

wow how ignorant! my whole guild is aus and im in na. because i work till 2am in the morning and am on an na server and u want me to not be able to play with my guild at the time when im off? i dont care that u went to bed. this is an international game and all servers are open for everyone to join. there is no oceanic server. there is eu and na thats it.
if anything changes it has to work 24/7 and not that when i play at night i cant cap anything.

We should just have different leagues (or ranking) with different matches for the 3 mayor timezones (running in parallel, such that there is 24/7 a match you can join)!

Every server plays in three matches in three leagues during every week:
the league of 0-8 UTC – called NA-prime,
the league of 8-16 UTC – called Pacific-Prime,
the league of 16-24 – called EU-Prime.

At 8, 16, 24 UTC the matches are switched (new match maps restore from last save in the background, player on map and in queue moved to new match, and then maps of the suspended match saved).

There will be 24/7 WvW, and and in each time-slice each server will be matched against equally strong servers in that time-slice.

Then we can have the best 0-8 server, the best 8-16 server and the best 16-24 server
and one server may be top in one slice, mediocre in 2nd and worst in 3rd.
I wonder if there is a server top in all three slices.

Dayra, good suggestion! Join the league that fits your schedule.

But what if you are a variable shift worker like my brother.

If they want to solve the “night capping” problem there is a simple solution

reduce the amount of ppt gained from SMC, garrison, keeps, towers and camps and increase the amount of ppt gained from killing players

and this is not just during off hours this is a 24/7 change

change the objective values based off upgrades
make camps worth 1ppt, towers worth 2, keeps 3, garri 4 and smc 5ppt and increase that every time an objective is upgraded, so a fully upgraded camp is worth 5 and a full upgraded smc is worth 25

bring back the 3 ppt per stomp based off the number of bloodlust buffs you have

so what will this do
ppt based off actual fights not just holding objectives, killing yaks to starve supply now has a even more direct ppt impact as those upgrades to get max ppt are not going through, even when outmanned you can still impact the max ppt a server gets just by flipping camps every so often and not just before the tick, upgrades actually mean something more than just a longer response time to defend

sure if you have no one on during an off time for your server things are going to get flipped, but most of the ppt will be gained from player kills, not from the recently flipped objectives which will now take time to fully upgrade to maximize ppt

the game is 24/7 solutions need to be 24/7 too

No one hinders you to play 24/7.
It is just that you play in different matches depending on the time at which you play.

Probably you should not select a server that abandoned your prefered playtimes. But even if you do, you play against servers that abandoned that slice as well.

Overal you will have much more fair matches 24/7, because a good dayshift puts you in the match with other server good at day and doesn’t put you in matches with servers that have a good nightshift, if you do not have one.

so WvW server mergers is what you are suggesting?

the only reason there are servers atm is for wvw, you can guest for pve,

if a server is not performing to your liking then transfer off or try and build it up so it can compete

if everyone transferred to the top 9 servers we would get the same result

Fundamentally, everyone paid the same $60 for the game, no one deserves preferential treatment, especially not at the expense of other players. And, this is beside the fact there isn’t an APAC based server.

Now come practical questions to the brilliant ideas.

Who defines primetime?
NA has several timezones starting from UTC -11 in the Pacific to UTC -4 in the Atlantic. EU stretches from UTC -1 to UTC +4 (Moscow). If you include Eastern Russia, which is very much a part of Russia and hence Europe, UTC +9 (Irkutsk).

Server lockdown? Seriously?
Too easy to exploit! What is stopping a server from taking the lead then “locking down” their assets by not fielding any one in the map they have fully capped?

Timezone servers.
No one likes being forced to leave a server. Besides, why should people be forced to relocate over a gamemode that, from the get-go, is defined as unbalanced. Also, see the $60 price tag point above.

No I do not propose to merge servers and no the result will not be the same.

Currently ranking and therefore matchmaking is based on the mean performance over the whole day. Therefore a server strong at day and evening is in mean equally strong than a server strong at night and evening. So they are matched together with the known bad result of only 8h fight and 16h PvD.

In my proposal you would be match against servers equally strong per time-slice.
So e.g. Elona would be match with top-evening-servers in the evening (I think :-)) say
Elona-SFR-piken in the 16-24 match
But e.g. only against bad night-server in the night (the 0-8 match), e.g Vabbi and Blacktide.
(But in fact I’ve no idea who will be rank where in such splitted ranking)

No lockdown, no prime time, no time zone server, just more differentiated match-making. Every server play 3 likely different matches per day for the different time slices so each match is 7 days a 8h (or 3 week long matches of a 1/3 day each if if want to take total playtime equal)

Dragan.7568:

Other way of thinking might be that server points stop counting if there isnt anybody against you -> you could still cap, but the match would still be more even. Most of karmatrain-pvd people dont even care the score, so it would not be so bad. Problem is how to balance it.

Yes but what would be the limit? 5 people on the map? 4? 3? 2? 1?

(!)
What about this: you do not gain PPT for claiming the enemy player’s borderlands!
- Eternal battleground gives you PPT
- Your own borderland gives you PPT
- Other borderlands will not give you PPT, but you can cap them for WXP/karma/gold rewards of course.
(!)

If you care about losing towers / keeps / whatever in WvW, you are new to the game and don’t really understand WvW. Get your boots wet, rookie.

Americans go to play in EU for no que time whatsoever. Same as EU to americans. No lock down would work for this game. It’s meant to be unfair.

Does it undermine the hard work we put in during prime time upgrading, hell yes. But locking it down is not a solution in a follow the sun model of game.

Nor is it fun for some to pvdoor while others are in dire need of night presence. Grows disparity between tiers. We need people to be willing to level out the playing field.

But no one will. Too many want to win, and this game basis its winning around coverage stacking. Until a viable solution is found, many have been offered, while some good, none have fit the problem. Only bandaid ideas that would lead to further issues elsewhere.

WvW gameplay is based on uneven numbers clashing, outcomes changing and pretty heavily focused around offense. Defense comes to play, but more as a slow down, deterrent to enemy capturing points. Only to be taken as soon as you have 0 coverage. But this also leads to some valiant last stand style battles that we have all endured at some point.

Tsath.4527:

What servers are you guys from, and do you think you have the problem? I’m from Gandara and we definitely do have the problem.

That is actually quite ironic if we look at the last match-up between our two servers..

One persons night is another persons day.

Horrible idea. It’s been horrible every single time it’s been proposed over the past year, and it hasn’t gotten any better. Whine less, play more.

Pyroatheist.9031:

One persons night is another persons day.

Horrible idea. It’s been horrible every single time it’s been proposed over the past year, and it hasn’t gotten any better. Whine less, play more.

Pretty much this. This exact complaint and exact solution has been proposed on the forums and duly discarded as being awful since day 1. The reasons it is horrible are so obvious and have been rehashed so many times it’s not even worth writing them all out again.

aspirine.6852:

Creating world servers would solve night/day capping. But create latency issues that nobody would want.

Latency wouldn’t be an issue but they can’t do it right now anyway so that doesn’t matter.

Well it´s a tough subject for sure. I think WvW was meant to be 24/7 available. Sure the server that has the most coverage will win with no doubt. What could possibly happen as alternative solution will be to increases the duration of the timer. At the moment grants every 15minutes points. A possible solution will be to increase the timer from 15min to 1Hour. So instead of having (e.g 100Points/15min. will be 100Points/1Hour). In that way even servers with little or no coverage at night/day will have a chance. If that is possible i do not know. It´s just a fast solution that came to my mind.

Regards

Seed

As an OCX player I hate it when those annoying North Americans night cap all my stuff. Please ban all North Americans from playing WvW.

I love how your “imaginative” solution is to stop players from other parts of the world from playing the game.

Why don’t you reach out and make some friends in other timezones?

^ Yeah, “night” in a 24 hour game is relative. If our server gets a NA night-cap… we will be in deep smelly stuff, because for us, night is when NA wakes up.

This is a horrible idea, as a sea player, my night is your day, my day is your night. And I paid the same amount that you paid for the game.. Locking down the wvw maps in my prime time would just be plain unfair.

Its the equivalent of a SEA player complaining that ppt is gained when they are are at work during NA prime, just because you live in NA doesn’t mean that your sense of self-entitlement should screw over all but your own timezone.

’murica

Night protection would suck for people playing off hours.

A far simpler way of managing it would be to provide far reduced numbers if your server’s population greatly outnumbers the enemy’s across all maps. You calculate this at a random time every 15 minutes for each tick of points (because if you did it right before the tick of points people would just log off and log back).

Now, the smaller team would get a lot more points for taking keeps/towers/camps from the larger team and the damage done if you were actually empty (still would happen) would be manageable.

It’s all about getting the ratios right. But what makes no sense is to treat a 2x force the same as a 0.5x force.

Dragan.7568:

Other way of thinking might be that server points stop counting if there isnt anybody against you -> you could still cap, but the match would still be more even. Most of karmatrain-pvd people dont even care the score, so it would not be so bad. Problem is how to balance it.

Could have all points scaled to the number of opposition you have.

Not going to happen. Transfer or well… tough

The biggest single cause of server imbalance is coverage. Servers with large SEA populations simply have a huge advantage over those that don’t. I in no way blame SEA players for the problem but it does suck. In theory if SEA populations were even close to equally spread amongst servers then there wouldn’t be a problem. For what ever reason they don’t seem to be which is somewhat perplexing to me. On one hand I can see where players would want to congregate to servers with more players on in their timezone……but on the other you would think they might want a sense of competition and not just PVD all the time? I’m not sure, maybe massive zerging with minimal resistance 90% of the time is an appealing play style for SEA players? Maybe they could all go play on the China servers in the future?

Blackjack.2083:

The biggest single cause of server imbalance is coverage. Servers with large SEA populations simply have a huge advantage over those that don’t. I in no way blame SEA players for the problem but it does suck. In theory if SEA populations were even close to equally spread amongst servers then there wouldn’t be a problem. For what ever reason they don’t seem to be which is somewhat perplexing to me. On one hand I can see where players would want to congregate to servers with more players on in their timezone……but on the other you would think they might want a sense of competition and not just PVD all the time? I’m not sure, maybe massive zerging with minimal resistance 90% of the time is an appealing play style for SEA players? Maybe they could all go play on the China servers in the future?

Hardcore WvW guilds won’t go to those servers as it’ll be less competition and less fights.

J heazy.7214:

I’d say just close down one or more of the borderlands outside of NA/EU prime. Saying that OCX/SEA flat out don’t get to play wvw is a bad idea obviously. Individual OCX and SEA players contribute disproportionately to weekly scores. If NA servers could trade 50 NA prime players for 25 SEA players they would increase overall ppt. probably by a lot. This does not upset me personally; it’s just the way it works. But, if there are fewer objectives during these times we would see less score disparity.
This is just a way to keep scores closer- not sure if it makes the game more fun overall. Free transfers should be given out in a system change like this so players can spread out of relatively over stacked time zones to avoid the queues something like this would create.
I think in addition to keeping scores closer, this would reduce some of the no-that-fun parts of wvw: float teams, map-hopping, and lonely scouts on team speak watching Watergates on maps by themselves.

most people would use free transfers to go to higher populated servers to zerg. why face 40 with your 15 when it could be the other way around? im sure there would be some dedicated people but the number im sure would be comparatively smaller.

Tsath.4527:

I personally wouldn’t like just playing WvW during night when most people logged off anyway.

Jade Quarry often has 4 maps queued “during night when most people logged off” (Oceanic prime time and SEA prime time).

Oceanic/SEA has quality guilds and big numbers that are the envy of Jade Quarry EU and Jade Quarry NA. To say that “most people are logged off” is simply ludicrous.

I would argue that Jade Quarry is an Oceanic/Asian server and we should shutdown WvW when most of the Asian players log off (this will stop North American players from playing during their prime time but what does that matter? WvW would be no fun for you when everyone is logged off right?).

Seriously though, night capping is a very, very, very old idea – it’s been touted by shallow thinkers since the start of the game and it’s been dismissed by Arenanet (and every rational player that has put a modicum of thought into it).

People just need to realise that servers are called North America and Europe because of their geographical location of the server farm – NOT because they are specifically made for North American and European players.

North American servers are for all players anywhere on the planet.
European servers are for all players anywhere on the planet.

Every server has coverage blackspots – yours is during Oceanic/SEA and JQ’s is during EU/NA – just learn to deal with it.

If servers were separated by time zones and people were able to pick which server they were on when they first started playing the game based on their time zone, then yes this would be a good idea. But the way things are set up now, this would be extremely unfair to people in different time zones. It annoys me too when we fight all day to cap things and people show up at night and take everything while our whole server is sleeping. But the way things are set up now, it would do more harm than good.