Guild Wars 2

Ok so.. let me start by saying last week (the week prior to the new scoring system) on reset night… ( i play on tarnished coast btw )… we had a major que for EB sitting around 30-50 at most times for the first 3-4 hours of the reset.. and for almost the entire night we had the outmanned buff.. It finally dropped about 5 hours into the reset (1:30 AM EST) approx

so.. with that said.. i have a few questions.

Most of the time when TC ques a map.. we all notice that the enemy zergs seem to still outnumber is 2 to 1 or sometimes even 3 to 1… in appearance anyway. We will have a group of maybe 20-30 facing two enemy groups (from the same server) of 30+ most of the time. Meaning that when fighting BG for example.. we will be fighting one group of 30-40 and another group of BG will flank us with 30-40 more players.

So i guess my question are..

1 Is there any way to physically check the map population so that we can see if our server is bugged or if it is actually full when we have a map que? I know that TC doesnt usually map blob so we may not be seeing ALL the players on the map when we are in a group, but when running on a tag we hardly have any scouts, roamers or anyone else and our population most of the time seems really low. We may have a max of 20-30 on one tag with another support tag of 5-10 with very few standing in spawn or roaming.

2 Was this reset night a bug? Something to do with the new linking? or what happened to cause a qued map to roll outmanned for hours on end? We did ok but we were heavily outnumbered in most fights as i stated.. with a fully qued EB map.

BTW.. i dont know if this was reported on the bug forum but if we could have a dev check into it, it would be great. Should i post over there as well so maybe someone will look into it?

Thank you

Truely Purrfect

As far as I know anet has never given exact numbers on how many players it takes to trigger the outnumbered buff.
If both of the other servers are queued as well that means the ratio of enemies to allies is 2 to 1, maybe that’s all you need to trigger it and everyone had the buff.

Since before linkages I’ve noticed queued ebgs with no commander or any real groups of people around, maybe 20 randoms at Max. I’ve been waiting for another post about it and maybe it’s just in my head but I feel like something has been wrong with how many people each side gets across all maps and could be inconsistent.

This issue happened on the TC/Mag/FA matchup the other week as well. Outnumbered buff while EBG is queued. We are also experiencing some irregularities in the current t2 matchup as well (mainly for our opponents).

This issue is nothing new. 2 years ago this exact same issue came up where there was an issue with the queue system. Anet needs to look into this immediately.

Yeah outnumbered buff shouldn’t even be possible with a queue unless it’s a “fake queue”…basically a large group just hopped maps. This has seemed pretty broken though recently.

gatsu.2813:

This issue happened on the TC/Mag/FA matchup the other week as well. Outnumbered buff while EBG is queued. We are also experiencing some irregularities in the current t2 matchup as well (mainly for our opponents).

This issue is nothing new. 2 years ago this exact same issue came up where there was an issue with the queue system. Anet needs to look into this immediately.

One of the old issues was people logging out directly while still in wvw but their account was still in wvw, you could see this through party ui. I’m wondering if the new squad system combined with linking servers creates some sort of bug slipping more people into one team somehow.

If Anet could look into for peace of mind that would be super awesome, or if they could just tell me I’m crazy that would work too.

It’s been like this for us as well, for a long time. I’ve known this issue for years and honestly, I think it’s intentional in some way. I’ve tagged up quite a few nights in the past month, getting about 30 people on tag, and having to face 2 groups of 20+, while our map is queued.

I think it’s some form of dynamic population control on the map that doesn’t take into account which server you’re from, so like, the whole EBG map might have a cap of 240 (80 on each side if ideal circumstances are met), but on some days, servers stuff up with the queue timers, resulting in one side getting 100, one side getting 90, and one side getting 50, and because the queues, the side with 50 can’t get any more people in until the other sides lose people.

I’m sure you’ve all noticed having to wait at position 1 in queue for ages sometimes, while other times, you could be at position 5, then all of a sudden queue in.

It is not the first time ive seen this, the server where i play had the same issue one or 2 times, arround16+ players stacked on commander and fee loose cannons and this was also on reset nightwhile other server looked to have 80 or more… we were outmaned and with a small queue…
The speculation:
This is the reason i usualy say that server player limit is not equal to all 3 sides, i think that the server that can have more players on map is green, than blue than red, and sometimes those values got broken becaus they must be a % based on server population variable, somehting to force the big server vs smaller vs smallest.

Chris Barrett.3280:

trueanimus, I just checked our logs for the counts of each team, as output by the same area of code that calculates the need for and applies the Outnumbered buff, for the period of 2016-09-03T02:00:00+00:00 to 2016-09-03T05:30:00+00:00 in NA’s T1 matchup.
This is from the last pre-skirmish match’s opening reset in NA to 3.5 hours later. Other than Dragonbrand being Outnumbered starting at roughly 04:45Z (2.75 hours after reset), no team in that match should have had the Outnumbered buff for that period.

That said, right there I’m only looking at the logs of team counts and how the ratios play out. That doesn’t rule out the possibility of a bug with when/how the buff is being applied. We’ll keep an eye out around reset times in-game.

Please do let us know when you see something that seems wrong with the buff, with as much information as possible. Even if it’s something we can know by our logs, sometimes it can save some time if it’s listed, so it’s not an extra lookup of something on our part. At the least, I’m looking for: your team (any one or more of your color, your world, or your host world will do), time/date with timezone.

Thanks for the breakdown Chris. Where would we send any info if we notice anything weird?

May be helpful if someone out of the map took a pic with the timestamp of the queue … while someone in the map took a pic of the outnumbered buff being applied and the timestamp

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

You can post the information in this thread or PM me

OK awesome, thank you.

PS people say devs never come to the wvw forums but every time I ask for a comment you guys deliver!

Slightly off-topic, but how many times to the poor devs have to state that there is not a different queue number for any color in the WvW maps, before people stop asking that one ?

I think my earliest memory of reading these forums some 3+ years back was people complaining “Green has more people on map than we have!”. And I’ve seen devs state “nope, no team can have more than any other team.” about once every 3 months or so.

Geez, you people really can’t give them devs a break on that topic :p Whom would you trust to answer this if not the devs ?

PS: The chances are higher that it is a bug with Outnumbered effect and how it triggers.

joneirikb.7506:

Slightly off-topic, but how many times to the poor devs have to state that there is not a different queue number for any color in the WvW maps, before people stop asking that one ?

I think my earliest memory of reading these forums some 3+ years back was people complaining “Green has more people on map than we have!”. And I’ve seen devs state “nope, no team can have more than any other team.” about once every 3 months or so.

Geez, you people really can’t give them devs a break on that topic :p Whom would you trust to answer this if not the devs ?

PS: The chances are higher that it is a bug with Outnumbered effect and how it triggers.

I haven’t seen this in a while but I only pop in every so often.

And there was at least one confirmed bug causing teams to be unable to get equal amounts of players in maps before. People were still being counted as on a map for up to like 3 hours after logging out straight from wvw, filled up slots for long periods of time.

I don’t remember that one, so I stand corrected !

I just can’t stop laughing at the mental image:

“The numbers are wrong!” -players
“Uh, we’re looking at the code and live numbers they’re right, the sides are equal.” -devs
“No they’re not! We don’t trust you! Put someone that knows what they’re talking about here!” -players

Just how it feels like at times.

joneirikb.7506:

I don’t remember that one, so I stand corrected !

I just can’t stop laughing at the mental image:

“The numbers are wrong!” -players
“Uh, we’re looking at the code and live numbers they’re right, the sides are equal.” -devs
“No they’re not! We don’t trust you! Put someone that knows what they’re talking about here!” -players

Just how it feels like at times.

Yeah pretty much, although I think we managed to stop before line three, this time! lol

There may have been a coordinated attempt to troll the queue with people hitting the re-queue button when it came up.

I wonder how hard it would be to have a total team population counter for each server that’s in WvW .Or would that cause to much flak with in the server.I don’t know,it was just a thought.

Mokk.2397:

I wonder how hard it would be to have a total team population counter for each server that’s in WvW .Or would that cause to much flak with in the server.I don’t know,it was just a thought.

Anet do not want us to know how many players are on a map at any 1 time. They completely lack transparency in this regard.

morrolan.9608:

Mokk.2397:

I wonder how hard it would be to have a total team population counter for each server that’s in WvW .Or would that cause to much flak with in the server.I don’t know,it was just a thought.

Anet do not want us to know how many players are on a map at any 1 time. They completely lack transparency in this regard.

They go out of their way to obfuscate this information. They have, however, stated that all the sides have the same pop caps.

Update

I logged in a few times yesterday and each time i saw a max of about 30 people on TC EB and at times we were facing at least 2 groups of map blobs. We would run in to take a camp or a tower and get completely ran over by groups of 50+.

One fight at quenton lake around 8 pm lasted almost two hours last night while our group of 10 was fighting with another group of 15 or so against FA with a full blob of 60+ and BG with about 40+. In the end, we couldn’t do anything and finally let them have the tower and they continued to cap most everything else.

With that said, there was no outmanned buff but we did see a few fake ques (would say a que of 3 or 5 one time) but you could log straight in.

I think the population que is messed up somehow since we always seem to be outmanned and we do have fake ques popping up more often than usual.

Thank you for the reply, it is great to know anet is actually looking into it.

Thanx

Truely Purrfect

So how does the game code respond if a player is in a squad in a WvW map… and logs directly out…. but the commander leaves them in the squad so the rest of us all seee this guy who is offline. Does that get removed from the calculation or does the capacity count the total squad? I would assume offline accounts have some mechanism that ‘kicks’ them from both the map and the pop count.

And what is the red tape reason behind hiding the active numbers on each map? Is the worry that people seeing the actual numbers will play less, and only go to where the more populated maps are? Cause i think we’re far enough into the game that it really doesn’t matter. If people are still playing WvW, they won’t all of a sudden stop because only 2 maps get decent numbers while the rest are very unpopulated. or is it because the actual floating numbers of active players on a map isn’t actually calculated and anet are just unable to provide it.

Good question but i dont think that is the problem, especially with TC commanders. I know that almost every squad im in, we have a LT that kicks offline people from squad because we have had problems with people joining squad and then getting disconnected or logging off.

I would think that it has more to do with the player cap especially after seeing some of the groups we are up against while we have a que.

Some rumors have popped up that most of the devs play on other servers (ones we fight against) and that is why the pop ques and we are still at low numbers, but i dont think thats the case either since i have seen numerous anet tags running on TC at different times… it has been a while but i know there are some.

A lot of innuendo is flying around about outnumbered ratio. Chris… Considering that there is no real good reason to keep it a secret, can you please just tell us outright what the ratio is that’s used to determine the outnumbered state?

Balthazzarr.1349:

A lot of innuendo is flying around about outnumbered ratio. Chris… Considering that there is no real good reason to keep it a secret, can you please just tell us outright what the ratio is that’s used to determine the outnumbered state?

Good luck haha. I mean they wont even tell us exactly how many players can be on a map when we could visually count them and say the number if we really wanted…

Either way outnumbered do behave oddly at times anyway. Sometimes you can have outnumbered buff but the guy next to you dont have it.

It’s all a conspiracy, it is actually entirely random!

Svarty.8019:

morrolan.9608:

Mokk.2397:

I wonder how hard it would be to have a total team population counter for each server that’s in WvW .Or would that cause to much flak with in the server.I don’t know,it was just a thought.

Anet do not want us to know how many players are on a map at any 1 time. They completely lack transparency in this regard.

They go out of their way to obfuscate this information. They have, however, stated that all the sides have the same pop caps.

I didn’t mean each sever could see the other servers population count in WvW just their own .I might give the commanders a general idea of how many players he/she can get in squad .And maybe with a little persuasion can get some of the roamers to join when needed.
I realize that some people don’t want to join a squad and that’s fine .they may have their reasons.It’s just that many times the commanders can advertise to join squad until they’re blue in the face and nothing improves ,yet theirs a queue . I’m sure it can be very frustrating knowing that you have people waiting to play in queue and you just don’t seem to have the numbers on the field.
And just to bring up further strangeness is many of us can have the same queue number .Is their a mechanism that accounts for simultaneous queuing?

Yes, a squad has nothing to do with the pop in the map of course. It’s a nice indication of how many people you have following you but that’s it. Of course many people prefer not to join squads; prefer roaming; small havoc groups; Rangers who are typically not wanted in squads etc etc.. many reasons. Bottom line is that the squad count isn’t a true indicator of the count of people in a map.

Dawdler.8521:

Balthazzarr.1349:

A lot of innuendo is flying around about outnumbered ratio. Chris… Considering that there is no real good reason to keep it a secret, can you please just tell us outright what the ratio is that’s used to determine the outnumbered state?

Good luck haha. I mean they wont even tell us exactly how many players can be on a map when we could visually count them and say the number if we really wanted…

Either way outnumbered do behave oddly at times anyway. Sometimes you can have outnumbered buff but the guy next to you dont have it.

They might… at the very least it would be nice to be told one way or the other if that information will be released. Respectfully speaking, to just ignore a direct request is truly nothing short of rude… so we’ll see how it goes… still hoping for some sort of decent response.

Yes, it’s very strange that they won’t tell us the number limit. They might keep it secret because the limit is un-even, or scales after the server population. I don’t know. I just think it’s just very strange that they are so secretive about it. Something fishy must be going on…

Are you guys messing with something right now in NA T1 match? BGBL has a queue from both BG (26) and FA (16) side yet there’s no one on anyone’s contact lists who are in that map.

Timelord.8190:

Yes, it’s very strange that they won’t tell us the number limit. They might keep it secret because the limit is un-even, or scales after the server population. I don’t know. I just think it’s just very strange that they are so secretive about it. Something fishy must be going on…

ANet has never given out ANY numbers for anything ever. So don’t bother with conspiracy thoughts etc, there isn’t any, it is just the company line to not give out hard numbers. They only thing they have said is that they promise it is equal between the servers.

I can understand them in a way, it makes it easier for them to adjust and change things as needed in background (as when they where testing on the map-population regarding a lag issue a while back) without people blowing totally up, as you know they would if they had clear numbers say: “Modified EBG from 100 pop to max 80” you know the forums would be full of rage.

It is also a fact that anything players know, they will game. So if we knew the pop limits, or numbers to outnumbered etc, we would likely find some way of abusing that, because that is what players do.

So it does make sense for them to keep some numbers back (that we strictly speaking don’t need). Heck, had I been in charge of that, I’d have added a 1-5 randomizer on the trigger of outnumbered just to mess with players trying to calculate it.

not looking for hard numbers.. just the ratio.. simple…

There’s a thread about an entire bl not letting people in. It could be connected to the outnumbered bug? Anet?

sigh ok I see people are right.. ANet has fallen totally silent on this one… not gonna get an answer… will file this in the stack of straws on the not happy pile…. Even the camel had limits. :P