Guild Wars 2

The way the scoring and match-ups for the NA Silver League are set up results in some weird final scores.

The rank column below is based on head-to-head server match-ups during the first four weeks of the tournament, not points. (Stormbluff Isle and Yak’s Bend haven’t met yet, so I’m listing them as a tie.) Based on that ranking, and assuming that higher-ranked servers always beat lower-ranked ones (which is an assumption, I know), here are the projected point totals for the remaining weeks, sorted by the projected final score.

rank	server			week:	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1		Henge of Denravi			15	20	25	30	35	40	45
2		Fort Aspenwood			11	14	17	20	23	26	29
3/4		Yak's Bend				11	12	17	18	23	24	29
3/4		Stormbluff Isle			9	14	15	20	21	26	27
5		Isle of Janthir				9	12	15	18	21	24	27
7		Crystal Desert			9	10	15	16	21	22	27
6		Northern Shiverpeaks		7	12	13	18	19	24	25
8		Borliss Pass				7	10	13	16	19	22	25
9		Sanctum of Rall			3	4	5	6	7	8	9

Note that the point scores depend on whether a week is odd or even. On even weeks, FA ends up tied with SBI, but on odd weeks FA is tied with YB. Similarly CD and NSP swap places every week. And there are lots of ties.

The Swiss system doesn’t seem too bad for creating match-ups (though HoD will always face FA, and BP will always be fighting SoR), but it shouldn’t be used to determine the final rankings.

I think the best way to determine final rankings is good old server rating. But then with server rating the quality of win matters, and servers may play differently on whether or not win quality affects the final ranking. So if server rating is used, servers need to know now.

Yeah, we pretty much all knew this going in. An odd number of weeks doesn’t much much sense.

I’m already seeing a lot of talk about match fixing and throwing the week so that servers can manipulate who they are fighting the next week and hopefully maintain/disrupt a rotation of scores to create favourable match ups for your own server and unfavourable match ups for other servers.

I’ve seen people talk about intentionally aiming for third place (and targeting specific servers while ignoring others to manipulate the league score) rather than playing to win.

I am fine with a 2v1, that’s players still trying to outdo another server. A league (and rewards) system which encourages players to throw matches or not fight for the best placement they can get that week, that’s not OK.

No server should get better rewards than another at the end of the league – your server’s placement is an arbitrary measurement of WvW population and coverage combined with how well you did the maths and threw matches to get a better score. Why does someone who did the exact same meta (arguably more difficult the lower your server places because you can’t rely on zergs) get less tickets than someone who did the same meta with the luxury of being on a higher placing server? This kind of rewards incentive doesn’t encourage players to play competitively in WvW, it just rewards them for tranfering to stacked servers, throwing matches to get to the top of a lower league and match mixing during the league if they think it will give them a better score in the end.

WvW has never been a serious or balanced competition. Individual fights have had meaning (fighting over a sentry, supply camp, tower or keep) but winning the week is rarely competitive, never mind winning the league.

The current system is too easy to abuse and the rewards give too much incentive to abuse it.

Horrible implementation. It’s even worse for the 6-server gold league.

My problem with the system it rewards servers, not individuals. The pve player gain more in a wining server as a HC player on an other one

McWolfy.5924:

My problem with the system it rewards servers, not individuals. The pve player gain more in a wining server as a HC player on an other one

But isn’t that the whole point of WvW, realm battle means your success is always going to be tied to your server performance, thats the whole point of World vs World. If your looking for pvp rewards more dependent on individual skill you would do better in hotm for pvp matches.

For next season, it would be nice if they

(1) kept the Swiss style match ups, but
(2) abolished leagues, throwing everybody into the same system, and
(3) Gave gold reward to server 1-6, silver to the next 9, and bronze to everybody else

Structuring match ups this way would make matchups more meaningful, and would eliminate incentives to over stack the top 2 servers, while also not screwing over the lower servers who also have harder to complete metas.

The Swiss style match ups are nothing more than what the Glicko-2 rating does, indicate a server’s active WvW population. Abolishing leagues won’t do anything other than be a faster way for servers to settle into their population ranks after the mass transfers because, for example, HoD would not be prevented from fighting against DB or Maguuma and SoR would be able to fight Bronze league servers.

An easy fix would be creating like a new type of siege that can disperse zergs easily by creating an a skill that does a crazy amount of extra damage towards the higher amount of people in a certain area. Like balista doing 10x more dmg if it has 10 people in a area circle

Also giving seige a size limit where you can’t run through it but only jump over or destroy it ( and making seige not blockable if you occupy the area to stop trolling )

The problem is the PPT system doesn’t handle imbalanced matches at all. It does a decent job of matching servers when it is used to determine who a server should match against.

The reason that PPT doesn’t work is that it is controlled by situations where one side has more players than another. The extra players are able to control more territory than the ones matched with the enemy. In real war this beneficial. In a game it produces a matchup where one side dominates another. This dominance gets magnified by the active playtimes within a single day. Your server needs to field a strong presence in all play times to get ahead with emphasis on these ones:

• US Primetime 200-500 gmt
• Oceanic primetime 800-1000 gmt
• Asia Primetime 1200 – 1500 gmt
• Euro primetime 1800- 000 gmt

When a server fields more numbers at a time than another server it can more effectively control territory. You end up with situations where one server has 200k points by monday while the others have 50k each.

The real solution is to not use PPT as a competitive score mechanism in WvW. It doesn’t do that. A competitive score mechanism would produce score when servers are equally balanced and not when they are imbalanced. I’ve proposed several times a player kill to points system that would replace or augment PPT to make the balanced time frames more valuable to a server than the imbalanced times. Whatever the system ANET chooses ends up being they MUST implement it before the next “season” starts. To not implement it will be to vindicate all those players who say that ANET doesn’t care about WvW.

Holy wow. Everyone in this thread is 100% missing the point made by the OP.

The OP isn’t talking about PPT or that sort of points. They’re talking about the odd discrepancy where despite beating YB and SBI every single week they meet, FA is still losing in matchup point totals to SBI and YB as an artifact of how the matches end up flipping.

FA will land 2nd even if they are tied for it. It is possible either SBI or YB will get screwed. SBI and YB never fighting will allow one to win over the other based on schedule assuming IoJ never beats either which is not a given.

Dweasel.3950:

The way the scoring and match-ups for the NA Silver League are set up results in some weird final scores.

The rank column below is based on head-to-head server match-ups during the first four weeks of the tournament, not points. (Stormbluff Isle and Yak’s Bend haven’t met yet, so I’m listing them as a tie.) Based on that ranking, and assuming that higher-ranked servers always beat lower-ranked ones (which is an assumption, I know), here are the projected point totals for the remaining weeks, sorted by the projected final score.

rank	server			week:	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1		Henge of Denravi			15	20	25	30	35	40	45
2		Fort Aspenwood			11	14	17	20	23	26	29
3/4		Yak's Bend				11	12	17	18	23	24	29
3/4		Stormbluff Isle			9	14	15	20	21	26	27
5		Isle of Janthir				9	12	15	18	21	24	27
7		Crystal Desert			9	10	15	16	21	22	27
6		Northern Shiverpeaks		7	12	13	18	19	24	25
8		Borliss Pass				7	10	13	16	19	22	25
9		Sanctum of Rall			3	4	5	6	7	8	9

Note that the point scores depend on whether a week is odd or even. On even weeks, FA ends up tied with SBI, but on odd weeks FA is tied with YB. Similarly CD and NSP swap places every week. And there are lots of ties.

The Swiss system doesn’t seem too bad for creating match-ups (though HoD will always face FA, and BP will always be fighting SoR), but it shouldn’t be used to determine the final rankings.

I think the best way to determine final rankings is good old server rating. But then with server rating the quality of win matters, and servers may play differently on whether or not win quality affects the final ranking. So if server rating is used, servers need to know now.

Good ol server rating is the actual tie-breakers for the matches and final results.

So, it is used. Also, YB could get upset by IoJ, SBI could get upset by IoJ, We don’t know who would win between YB or SBI. NSP has shown that it might be able to even upset IoJ if it pushes hard enough.

SBI could even attempt to upset FA (we only lost by 15k last week I believe to them). The tournament needs a fair scoring system, and the 5/3/1 is unbiased. And facing the servers based on their scores is fair. It gives servers like NSP a chance to upset IoJ. Even gives YB and SBI a chance to upset FA.

Even DB pulled an upset over Mag (I bet JQ helped a little in that match). SoS is pulling an upset of JQ so far this week. Don’t know if they can keep it up, but they are fighting for those points.

Glicko ratings are a joke and unreliable as a basis for determining the season. Look at how you can stomp a server by 100+k and still lose points.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I am on SBI and we are kind of in the driver seat for 3rd, so I guess me liking the points system is invalid. But, if YB was in the driver seat, they wouldn’t have a problem with the point system. And so on.

Although, the swiss style tourney might discourage some servers (hint hint) from forming 2v1 alliances like last season.

Kobi Beef.3895:

McWolfy.5924:

My problem with the system it rewards servers, not individuals. The pve player gain more in a wining server as a HC player on an other one

But isn’t that the whole point of WvW, realm battle means your success is always going to be tied to your server performance, thats the whole point of World vs World. If your looking for pvp rewards more dependent on individual skill you would do better in hotm for pvp matches.

I agree with this. People need to get more people from their server to contribute, and stress the importance of the outcome in relation to their rewards. The megaserver merges here will make it more difficult to communicate with the pve population of one’s “server”. Or should I say “server identity”.

The question now will come down to how many people are going to bandwagon for the final half of the season? People can up and transfer to higher placed servers to get better rewards (and aren’t the transfer prices lower?). Sure they will get locked into EoTM for 2 weeks, but that still counts as contribution to the new server, and when they out contribute what they did on the old server they will get the better rewards. Not locking people into the server they started on might become an issue this season.

Pyroathiest.4168:

Holy wow. Everyone in this thread is 100% missing the point made by the OP.

The OP isn’t talking about PPT or that sort of points. They’re talking about the odd discrepancy where despite beating YB and SBI every single week they meet, FA is still losing in matchup point totals to SBI and YB as an artifact of how the matches end up flipping.

And, if SBI would face FA in the final matchup, and win, they could tie or beat FA for 2nd.
I know, it is kind of wierd that 3+3+3+3 is the same as 5+1+5+1, etc, but their is a strategy involved in getting those points as well.

Hi. I made the same considerations.
The other problem is the match-up: if the best-ranking server wins every match end the worst-ranking lose every match, after the 3rd week the match-up are pretty the same thing until the 9th week.
The Swiss system works if you want avoid play-off tournaments (no giant-killers!) but you haven’t enough week for a league tournament. Infact the Swiss system try to emulate the final standing of a league tournament, a sort of prediction, with a limitated number of matches. But in WvW season we have too much matches.
I think the best way is a static schedule like the season 1, maybe a little more bilanciated (strength-of-schedule of the 3rd and 4th servers was absurdly worst of the one of 5th server)

My ranking table (same of the first post)

Ranking
Server/week W1 W2 W3 W4 W5 W6 W7 W8 W9 Pt
Server1 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 45
Server2 3 5 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 29
Server3 1 5 5 1 5 1 5 1 5 29
Server4 5 3 1 5 1 5 1 5 1 27
Server5 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 27
Server6 1 3 5 1 5 1 5 1 5 27
Server7 5 1 1 5 1 5 1 5 1 25
Server8 3 1 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 25
Server9 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 9

My match-up

Round 1
game 1 S1 S2 S3
game 2 S4 S5 S6
game 3 S7 S8 S9

Round 2
game 1 S1 S4 S7
game 2 S2 S5 S8
game 3 S3 S6 S9

Round 3
game 1 S1 S2 S4
game 2 S3 S5 S7
game 3 S6 S8 S9

Round 4 =ROUND 1
game 1 S1 S2 S3
game 2 S4 S5 S6
game 3 S7 S8 S9

Round 5 =ROUND 3
game 1 S1 S2 S4
game 2 S3 S5 S7
game 3 S6 S8 S9

Round 6 =ROUND 1 & 4
game 1 S1 S2 S3
game 2 S4 S5 S6
game 3 S7 S8 S9

Round 7 =ROUND 3 & 5
game 1 S1 S2 S4
game 2 S3 S5 S7
game 3 S6 S8 S9

Round 8 =ROUND 1 & 4 & 6
game 1 S1 S2 S3
game 2 S4 S5 S6
game 3 S7 S8 S9

Round 9 =ROUND 3 & 5 & 7
game 1 S1 S2 S4
game 2 S3 S5 S7
game 3 S6 S8 S9

Darth (EU server – Piken Square)

p.s. sorry for my English!

The problem is population gaps at specific times, such as oceanic, where my server Borlis Pass, just doesn’t have the coverage. So CD or NSP, during oceanic times not only dominate the PPT and entire maps, they end up with full supplied, fully upgraded keeps, towers and forts on almost every map. So when we get back into our prime time, not only do we have to take stuff back, they have the supplies to delay things significantly. Spoon

Tspatula.9086:

The problem is population gaps at specific times, such as oceanic, where my server Borlis Pass, just doesn’t have the coverage. So CD or NSP, during oceanic times not only dominate the PPT and entire maps, they end up with full supplied, fully upgraded keeps, towers and forts on almost every map. So when we get back into our prime time, not only do we have to take stuff back, they have the supplies to delay things significantly. Spoon

I understand that. CD has a good force on at that time. I didn’t really think NSPs OCX/SEA was as good as CDs (population wise). I have noticed that around 3 am EST, that CD seems to drop off, until around 8 am EST. That is when IoJ can dominate some in our match.

This is why I don’t think coverage should be nerfed. We can dominate in NA, and they can get points in OCX / SEA. It really makes the matchup more competitive and fun.

As for BP, you guys got hit hard with all these kitten transfers lately (just like Ebay, SoR, YB, SBI, and a few other servers). I hope you don’t fall to far before you settle out.

yup.. server that dominates in the odd-week (3,5,7,9) wins more points and placed higher than the server that dominates in the even-week (4,6,8) ….