Guild Wars 2

My server is around a middle ranked server and recently during primetime we can barely field the numbers to max the quene in even one area.

Now it’s not because of night capping or anything like that is driving the population down as participation naturally declines immediately after launch (since the week after launch/major patch/expansion you will always have more people then average), but the “nightcapping” issue and now the lower population prime times does reveal the biggest issue about the entire system.

The issue is that the playing field attempts to be one size fits all. The largest server during prime time plays on the same size field that the smallest server during night does. Now normally this isn’t an issue in most games since team sizes rarely change, but in WvWvW you need to take into account that not all servers are equal in numbers.

Having 4 maps the size that they are is perfectly fine if you can nearly max every quene during prime time and still have the population at night to field a sizable fraction of that, but if a server cannot muster enough people to pass a certain threshold then having 4 maps is destructive to the game since it just simply isn’t possible to fight on all of them at once and all the fighting will tend to gravitate to a certain area.

I am going to make a bold prediction. The green team is going to win a lot from here on out especially on lower ranked servers. While the first place team is given the green color something else will bump the green team’s win percentage higher then it normally would be, team placement.

First you have to realize something that is apparent to most people experienced in the borderlands. On the borderlands the Hills keep is freaking awesome and the Bay keep is terrible. Hopefully I don’t need to go into detail too much about this since anyone who has much experience with WvWvW should understand why (a large part of this is Garrison being able to treb the Bay which I’m pretty sure was not intentional when these maps were being designed and I hope will get fixed).

The issue is that the way the maps are set-up. While because there are 3 borderlands it may look fair and equal because each team gets one of each starting position instead there’s actually a Rock, Paper, Scissor type system going on.

On Green’s map (the first placed team entering the match) Blue (second placed team) is given the side of the map with the Bay while the Red (the third placed team) is given the side with the Hills. This means that the third place team is the team with the best chance of taking territory in the first place team’s borderlands while the second place team shouldn’t even bother unless you have enough people in all the other battlefields already.

In Blue’s borderlands Green is placed on the Hills side while Red is placed on the Bay side meaning that in the second place team’s borderlands the first placed team has the best chance of taking territory while the third placed team should likely head elsewhere.

In Red’s borderlands the Blue team is given the Hills and the Green team is given the Bay. This mean that in the third placed team’s map that the second placed team has the best chance of taking territory while the first placed team should try elsewhere.

If you look closely in terms of positioning Green has an advantage against Blue who has an advantage against Red who has an advantage against Green, or on other words the first ranked team is best against the second ranked team who is best against the third ranked team who is best against the first ranked team.

Now this works fine and all if all 3 teams are close in score and all competing for first, but with the sheer number and magnitude of the slippery slopes in this game it is very hard to keep 3 teams in balance. Once one team begins to lose and starts to lose interest in competing you are now essentially playing Rock, Paper, Scissors without Scissors.

The issue is that the winner in a system like this isn’t whoever the better team is, but whoever has the weakest team sitting on the right of their map. Statistically this will be Green since, not only is Green ranked the strongest but Red is ranked the weakest. If Red starts to lose hope at winning and they will withdraw then the first placed team is sitting at an advantage against the second placed team in their 1v1 duel.

Essentially, Blue may lose to Green because Red sucks.

This isn’t as large of an issue when a server has lots of players where players are more or less forced to go to a map they aren’t as strong on because of quenes everywhere else, but when there are only enough players to fight on one or 2 maps, which is pretty common on lower population servers especially at night, then this is highly detrimental to the game.

In these situations fighting will generally gravitate towards the second placed team’s borderlands. The first placed team wants to protect their lead so generally they want to attack the second place team and given that they have an advantage on their borderlands while the second place team has a disadvantage on their borderlands meaning that you shouldn’t need that many to defend. The second place team wants to take the points from the first place team and prevent them from scoring any more. Because of the fact that they have a disadvantage on the first place teams borderlands and that the first place team has an advantage on their borderlands they will likely have to just defending against them especially if the first place team is under no threat from the third place team unless they want to lose their entire borderland while not likely able to push very far into the first place teams borderlands. The third place team will likely either have given up or be trying to score as many points as they can. Generally they will do this by attacking the apparent second weakest team even though they may be at a disadvantage against them. The second place team’s hands will already be full dealing with first place team though making it fairly idea to attack someone’s back.

This will generally lead to the first place teams borderlands pretty much going uncontested because the second place team cannot contest it on equal footing and the third place team either being too weak to contest it, or they will just have given up. This just gives them time to upgrade their borderlands which makes the situation worse and just continues the snowball.

This isn’t even getting into the issue of how much Green has an advantage on Eternal.

Like I mentioned before though, when you have enough players to reach a certain threshold this really isn’t an issue since players will sorta be forced to migrate into those disadvantaged battlegrounds because of quenes anyway, but for low population servers and mid servers at night this is the real issue that night capping produces. There is no real equal play, just which color you are.

The sad thing is that this isn’t going to be fixed any time soon either because Anet is mistaken on how people will migrate. While they are half correct that people from servers with constant quenes will migrate to other servers it will NOT be an even distribution. People will migrate to the server with the highest population that does not reach quene. If there are enough WvWvW players to fill 4 battlegrounds at any specific time then, yes, the players will be spread out. If not (there’s not) then while the highest population servers will migrate to the next highest population server until they reach one without a quene. WvWvW players from lower population servers will also migrate up to those servers.

This will eventually lead to a rather sharp division of WvWvW servers that compete fairly well against each other, but then there will be a sharp drop off to servers where WvWvW is virtually dead.

Like mentioned before if you want to fix this you really need to restrict transfers to High population servers.

Anet may have to readjust how many WvWvW maps we can play on depending on how many WvWvWers there actually are at any given time. I highly doubt that eventually there will be enough WvWvWers to fill 400×24(the number of servers) during prime time. When this happens they may have to reduce the number of maps to play on so that hopefully people will transfer to servers without quenes.

In the long run ANet may have to rethink how the maps work. Ultimately they may have to create a system that scales how many/how much of a map you can play on depending on the population that are on at the time because there will never be enough late night players to be evenly distributed and for the more emptier maps at night 4 maps will be far too many to play on and unless everyone everyone wants to run around all night capping unguarded keeps ultimately one team will just be raking in free points if they happen to be the server which isn’t seeing any competition that night.

I can say as a member of a faction that is currently dominating literally 100% of the map (give or take a few camps once in a while) it does kinda suck if you want to WvWvW. Yea the bonuses are great, but not really worth giving up the fun of WvWvW. I think the problem is inherent with the system, not in the way that has been brought up but in that the servers are no where near balanced properly yet and with new arrivals and the currently super easy server changing they probably won’t be for a year, maybe even more given the length of the matches. 24 servers, 1~2 week matches = 7~15 weeks for a full rotation(assuming every server faces every other server once which doesn’t seem to happen) that in and of itself is only a 2~4 months give or take some time but the fact is you can’t have a balanced out ranking ladder with just one rotation. My “examples” aren’t anywhere near perfect, but they get my point across. Under pretty much perfect circumstances we’d have a decent~good ranking for each server in about 6 months to a year given it’d be at least a few rounds.

You are dead on. The uneven player distribution among servers is the real problem behind “night capping”.

It is aggravated by two issues:

1. PPT are not adjusted for players online.

If they adjusted the PPT for players online, servers that were evenly matched ON AVERAGE, would have pretty much even scores. Since the PPT is not adjusted, minor differences can have a huge impact. E.g. two servers with almost the same WvW population. Lets say server 2 has 95% of the population of server 1. If that 5% difference is during a period of low population online for both servers, it can easily translate to server 1 having twice as much people online for 8 hours compared to server 2. Which in turn means that server 2 will never win a weakly match, ever.

Due to the current unadjusted PPT system, servers need not only be evenly matched, they need to be evenly matched during each part of the day. That is very hard to achieve and will lead to unbalanced results for most matchups.

2. There is not enough of an underdog bonus

You want to give the underdog an advantage in your game. They are the worse team, so they need some help to be able to compete. Otherwise, you’ll end up with very unbalanced matches.
The main underdog bonus in GW2 is the fact that it is a 3 way match. The 2 lower servers should team up on the current leader, making it easier for the underdogs and harder for the leader. In theory, this should work fine. However, in practise, several issues prevent it from working.

- Playing for second
Several matches are decided quickly after 2-3 days. For the rest of the week, the main competitor of #2 is not #1, but #3. It becomes not a match to win, but a match not to lose and be send to a lower tier. Instead of teaming up on the winner, the opposite happens.
- Giving up maps
Due to low population, servers give up entire maps. Once pushed to the spawn, the spawn camping team has an overwhelming advantage over the camped team. So the underdog has a very hard time getting back into the game once they are pushed out.
- Orbs
This has been repeated ad nauseum on the forums, but is still true. The orbs act as a
huge underdog DISadvantage.

In my mind, simply adjusting PPT for total players online and changing the orb bonus (to something that is a nice reward for the players, but not helping them in WvW) alone are two simple changes that would alleviate a large part of the imbalances that make current WvW boring for all but the first 2 days.

- Xeeron

Well given the fact that it should be pretty trivial to merge servers in GW2, I’d say this problem will be solved by Anet. Whether or not it will be too late we will see.

Xeeron.9254:

- Playing for second
Several matches are decided quickly after 2-3 days. For the rest of the week, the main competitor of #2 is not #1, but #3. It becomes not a match to win, but a match not to lose and be send to a lower tier. Instead of teaming up on the winner, the opposite happens.

Yeah, this is a pretty significant point.

As soon as the third place team stops competing for first, you just might as well just hand the first place team the victory if the first placed team has an advantage against the second placed team (such as Green > Blue).

Having to compete against a team that has the Hills position on your map while you have the Bay position on their map is a pretty big disadvantage. The second place team has to significantly outplay the first place team to win.

If the second place team actually pulls out the victory in all honesty if the rolls were reversed the second placed team would have stomped the first placed team if their positions were swapped.