Off Peak Hours Scoring, has it increased?
Its really quite simple now – EB determine the score.
Whoever dominate EB wins. The 3 deserted borders is something you can just go in quick, cap and then dont care about it because there will be few if any to cap it back. By dominating EB, people loose the will to fight there and they dont fall back to borders, they simply leave WvW. Servers that previously had a strong border presence now find it is quickly boring and leave.
Basicly, to win a matchup all you have to do is bring you A team to EB on reset.
I wish it was that simple Dawdler, EB is just a quarter of the points total. The majority of points are statistically scored on the borders off peak, and when players do wake up or get in from work / school to recapture stuff I is all T3 due to auto upgrade. The current environment seems to be an off peak heaven, cap, move on and wait for everything to fortify and be virtually impossible for small groups to retake.
I wish it was that simple Dawdler, EB is just a quarter of the points total. The majority of points are statistically scored on the borders off peak, and when players do wake up or get in from work / school to recapture stuff I is all T3 due to auto upgrade. The current environment seems to be an off peak heaven, cap, move on and wait for everything to fortify and be virtually impossible for small groups to retake.
… that was exactly what I said. Cap and move on in borders, then dominate EB for the win. People will always go EB first, find they are being dominated by the enemies. Instead of then joining borders to try and balance the points from a weak EB, people simply leave.
It’s pretty simple offpeak hasn’t increased but the new borders and the new upgrade system have killed the balance of playstyles thus keeping scores closer.
In other words servers that have the bigger karmatrain activity will quickly rise in ppt cause the other servers that used to have roamers and small groups on borders flipping things to keep this in check now don’t bother at all anymore.
The reason for this is mainly how the game functions now with removal of simple things like +5 buffs that small groups/solo-ers had acces too on top of losing quickly build siege like guildcata’s and most of all having to deal with passive upgrades which makes the timeframe a group has to break in before having to deal with siege huggers or overwhelming numbers simply not worth the effort anymore.
Nor will people get the desired small scale fights anymore because of it, and thus everyone flocks to eb, which in term leads to bigger gaps in ppt difference where the servers that still have the strong ktrain mentality will simply increase the gap more then they used to.
As you can see from my signature, I am playing on Desolation, EU rank 1.
We haven’t been doing more off peak time playing, but we have already for long time had a very good coverage = players at all times. And we have of PpT heroes (I count myself also a PpT player). We can still have the outnumbered “buff” on us, but we got have the karma train running pretty much 24h7 on Deso.
The new borderland maps, where traveling + capping is slower than on the old Alpine border, plus the auto upgrade system, which doesn’t require even any human interaction, makes the off time coverage even bigger problem. That is why almost every single match up is a blow out.
Having complete blow out match ups week after week is demoralizing for the enemy and will probably lead to even more diminished player base. I am very aware of this and I hope other Desolation players also don’t try to push enemy too hard to make it even more unfair for enemy.
Solution:
1. Replace the Desert borderland with Alpine borderland.
2. Disable the auto upgrade system. Make a new upgrade system, which requires human interaction + supplies. In other words a human player must take to the NPC to assign which upgrade to do next. Waypoints shouldn’t come 1st as that makes defense too easy. On the other hand Desert borderland without any way points is even more painful to travel than the existing one. Desert borderland simply is unsuited for fast paced WvWvW. Most players want face paced large scale battles and currently only EBG offers that.
I used to avoid Eternal Battlegrounds like plague, due the blobby nature and lag associated with it. Now I am also commanding on EBG as that is the only real WvWvW map remaining. Still my heart is on home border.
Deniara / Ayna – I want the original WvWvW maps back – Desolation [EU]
Its really quite simple now – EB determine the score.
Whoever dominate EB wins. The 3 deserted borders is something you can just go in quick, cap and then dont care about it because there will be few if any to cap it back. By dominating EB, people loose the will to fight there and they dont fall back to borders, they simply leave WvW. Servers that previously had a strong border presence now find it is quickly boring and leave.
Basicly, to win a matchup all you have to do is bring you A team to EB on reset.
hmm i havent done quite alot of WvW last few days cus im lil bit dissapointed what anet did.
but Farshiverpeaks has absolutely no problem dominating this match up if they want problem is i doubt alot of Fsp want to go borderlands where RS is active as kitten (i think i dont play much anymore) RS always been capping stuff when kitten gets to hot on a other map. then again no offense to riverside but for me they have gained reputation when stuff gets to hard change map go flip stuff there and aviod PvP as plague..
dominating 3 borderlands with nightcrew RS has or “geeks” will easily let u win even if u dont go EB.
If you just roll over and die when the k-train comes, there’s a good chance everything will be fortified by the time you get around to taking it back. You can’t just abandon things. An abandoned map is a fortified map.
The trick is to take camps back immediately or at least snipe yaks. Without yaks, the k-trained stuff won’t get cannons for half an hour, won’t reinforce for 2 hours and won’t fortify for a full 6 hours.
Rule #1 of the Time War: Act Faster
rule 1 would apply if people actually enjoy it, to be honest i used to login to WvW and logout nowadays i login wonder wtf to do alt tab and dont even look at it anymore..
the joy is gone u either queue up for EBG which is somewhat fun still i just dont like auto upgrade stuff or u go to dead map(even tho yesterday all 4 maps had queue yet i found the map quite empty..) its just not same anymore, whole WvW has been automated all we need now is a auto walk/PvP feature and u got a full auto WvW the human aspect has been completely removed from wvw some might like it some dont.
personally i think this update on WvW has just failed horrible, and worst of all Anet has never really given a kitten about WvW as far i have seen. So waiting for a patch, fix or doing something players have been asking for is gonna take months so ye for me WvW is in a choke hold and more and more people just leave WvW and dont give a rats kitten about it anymore.
I think very few people are enjoying the match-ups now Reddie. When I observed the score discrepancies on Sunday morning it showed the new maps and features had made a huge 25,000 point approx point difference in favour of the servers with an off peak blob. And now 2 nights later we are seeing leads of 60,000 – 90,000 on all of the EU gold league match-ups. Small groups defending a border have been made irrelevant. Just look at the graphs, once keeps are taken then generally will not flip back until the following morning or lunchtime when the server gets numbers again.
At least on the old borderlands we had a chance to take our stuff back, but this is a joke, so everybody just logs off and leaves the blobs to it now, either returning when the server gets numbers, or not at all. There is no incentive to defend a desert borderland outside of peak hours any more and the longer this discrepancy exists, the more the less populated servers will have players leave.
Anets figures for WvW population are laughable, if all 11 top EU servers were full then we wouldn’t be seeing the ridiculous score differences we are seeing now. Just look back at the weeks prior to HoT and the score differences between servers and then at the differences after HoT. Unless some servers got miraculously good and others incredibly bad in the space of a day, then HoT has definitely had a massive effect on WvW.
I honestly feel the badly thought out changes in terms of auto upgrade and map size have torn the soul out of this game mode I love.
Anets figures for WvW population are laughable, if all 11 top EU servers were full then we wouldn’t be seeing the ridiculous score differences we are seeing now. Just look back at the weeks prior to HoT and the score differences between servers and then at the differences after HoT. Unless some servers got miraculously good and others incredibly bad in the space of a day, then HoT has definitely had a massive effect on WvW.
I honestly feel the badly thought out changes in terms of auto upgrade and map size have torn the soul out of this game mode I love.
Desolation was intentionally tanking 2 weeks before HoT release to get rid of band wagoners. But even now when we are having a massive lead (156 534 vs 81 743 vs 77 699 ) our numbers are not that large. In the morning and near noon we had about 5-6 players in total in EBG. Kodash actually had slightly more, perhaps 7-8 players. We had some nice skirmish between the small PuG groups. Anyways the numbers are pitifully low for all servers. I remember that such hours used to have at least 10-20 players on each side and often a 30-40 man enemy border hopping blob. Desolation used to have very strong morning presence. Nowadays it is rare to see queue outside EB.
I was also on some enemy border flipping camps (I forgot which one) and I didn’t run into any enemy players. And we are talking about EU tier 1!
So the answer is: YES. HoT created a massive decrease in the number of WvWvW players. HoT pve maps are now also more or less empty unless you get lucky to get to a full map. You often need to do all the group events alone or with max 1-4 other players there. This doesn’t come as surprise to me. The massive increase in gimmicks and verticality doesn’t have lasting appeal. And relentless pve mobs make it stressful and chore for average skill level players. People farm their masteries, Hero Points, vistas and PoIs and materials. After this they won’t come to these maps, unless Arenanet increases the rewards and even then they come there for rewards only, not because the maps would be fun to play, because they are not. Instead of making gimmicks and difficult to traverse maps, Arenanet should have made simpler maps, which are more like Queensdale or Timberline Falls, and fill these maps with more difficult pve mobs, with better AI and create new interesting dungeons with high level rewards.
Now we can just wish Arenanet restores Alpine borderland + upgrade system back, before WvWvW is totally dead.
Deniara / Ayna – I want the original WvWvW maps back – Desolation [EU]
Verticality is fun with gliders and mushrooms. It is not in WvW.
I do not feel auto upgrades are the problem. Auto upgrades are too fast, which is the problem.
Roamers (who might kill dolly) do not much go on them because they find noone to fight. Dots on sentinel are not much use, because it takes too long to get there.
It is hard to get a WvW gang to do middle PvE event.
Last night I had from 3 to 7 people with me. In 3 hours, going twice on EBG to help the one scout who was there, we still had one tower and one fort to take on our home. The one ram we could build would take too long to open, the camps were so far that walking back took forever, the mobs spawned so fast we had to leave a figher with the ram guy to help.
The boss fights are gimmicky and too PvE like.
While my little gang usually keep the tick at somewat 200 + at nights, we were only averaging 130 something, despite noone defending, because it was upped everywhere.
One big bis do not gave the high end on these new maps, bit groups below 10 are almost useless…
After reading this thread I’ll have to admit that I hadn’t considered how easily the new upgrade system can be used to crush the 3rd place server every week.
[AIR] Henge of Denravi aka Pink Abu, [BAMA] RollTide
chopping wood one day, dropped a piece,
all I could say was, “…fell…foot…”
chopping wood one day, dropped a piece,
all I could say was, “…fell…foot…”
I think Jocksy a few changes would help redress the balance in off peak hours.
Firstly as mentioned in another thread, make each tier of auto upgrade have to be manually triggered. The reasoning behind this is that karma train blobs can hardly be bothered to clear siege any more, let alone constantly running back to trigger upgrades on the towers and keeps they have taken. Make it such that if they want it to fortify they have to put some effort in.
Secondly, small groups trying to recap generally cannot carry enough supply to get into keeps and towers before guards respawn and destroy the partially built siege you are trying to place, the distance you need to run is just too far. So a quicker method of obtaining supply via way of tunnels, or moving a golem by a similar method would help. I’m sure the devs could devise some mechanic that allows a small party enough supply to try to retake a keep.
Finally, scale the boss fights for smaller groups to give them a chance to defeat a keep boss in a reasonable amount of time before the karma train comes running back from whatever map it is currently flipping, it’s a simple mechanic that already exists in the game. It’s hard enough to get into a keep, let alone then be faced by a super buffed boss, just give the smaller defensive groups a chance to recapture. Alternatively, apply a buff to small groups attempting to retake a border, it could run similar to the outnumbered buff, but calculate when it applies based on the populations of all 4 maps at the time, so that it is countering the large blobs, but turns off if the numbers are fairly even. We used to have Siegerazer and his mate to help with the northern towers, now nothing.
We just need something that gives the small group a chance to regain their towers and keeps against the blobs as that is what HoT has taken away. If this doesn’t happen we are going to continually see match ups where one server will dominate purely based on off peak scoring. Points scored during the majorities playing hours have no meaning whatsoever when compared with the 6-8 hours a day a server with a strong off peak presence can dominate all 4 maps, if defenders have no chance of recapping.
Come on ANet, simple changes that don’t devalue anybodies time in the game. At the moment you are devaluing the players from small servers that play off peak and can no longer contribute in any meaningful way to their server.