Guild Wars 2

So I’m on Sorrow’s Furnace, and after a very exciting weekend of back-&-forth with Henge of Denravi, HoD is finally starting to pull steadily ahead and establish a commanding lead on us. OK. I can see when we’re beat, and I can admit defeat like a good sport. Hats off to them, because even though I’m still going to try my darndest, I don’t think we’re coming back from this.

However, it seems like they’re able to field more players than us. Like, loads more. Also, they have some pretty good scouts who are presumably reporting on our troop movements and numbers from the objectives they control. Interestingly, the latter could create an illusion of the former; if so, then they’re just plain out-playing us. But I want to dig deeper: anyone can say, “They outnumber us!” I want to know what’s true.

I would really like to know how many WvW player hours have been logged this week for both HoD and SF. Total points divided by logged player hours in the WvW game mode would yield a “points per player-hour” (P/PH? PpPH? P3H? Let’s go with P3H), and that would be a pretty solid metric for a server’s relative player efficiency during that week. There would clearly be fudge factors, such as players only logging in for map completion or jumping puzzles or crafting or what-have-you, but I don’t care about any of that. Just take the server’s total points that week, divide it by the total player-hours spent on the WvW maps, and bam: that’s the figure I’m interested in knowing.

I obviously can’t do this by myself, though, so I guess I’m just putting the question out to the devs: is this something we could maybe get? I think it would be a useful statistic for servers to have, if only to say, “Oh, jeez, we totally got trounced this week – but that’s OK, because even though Server X got twice our points, they used four times the player-hours to do it. They won, but we know for a fact that we did more with our inferior numbers.” The game already tracks total hours logged on each individual character and each account as a whole, so I think it would be a (relatively) simple matter to track this (if it isn’t tracked invisibly already). I don’t think it would be game-breaking or overly intrusive, as it would be impersonal, anonymized vis-a-vis aggregation, and only applicable to that particular week’s matchup (as other weeks would have different point totals, different servers, and different amounts of total player hours logged). Plus, it would be kind of like the way StarCraft logs Actions-Per-Minute: a metric that doesn’t tell you the whole story by itself but helps to put other data in perspective.

Anyway, that’s my idea. Other players’ thoughts? To the devs, is this something we might maybe some day get, or is it just plain not on the menu for some reason or other? Or is it something we can already see and my Google skill is just failing me?

So a statistic to make people feel better about themselves? Also, SC2 generally has some sort of skill involved in it which is why APM as a statistic can be useful. Here, who cares about skill when you’ve got 40 other people next to you.

Also, yay for more keyboard warriors.

More like to see if we’re really being out-played or just overpowered by mere numbers. The statistic already exists, it’s not a made-up thing: there is a total amount of points obtained by a server (which is currently visible), and there is a total number of player hours logged in the WvW game mode (not currently visible to players, dunno if devs track this). I just want to put the numbers next to each other and compare them, to see if anything can be learned from it – despite your nay-saying, this is still an open question.

APM is useless during those times when players are just making boxes and selecting units with no further purpose as a nerve-calming exercise during the odd few seconds of downtime, which they do all the time. Knowing when a number is useful to look at and when it’s not is another factor entirely, so harping on my throwaway “if only to say” comment doesn’t really advance the discussion or argue against the usefulness of the statistic. Thanks for trying, though!

At any rate, I never said anything about player skill in my entire post – you changed the subject by bringing that up. My question is specifically about numbers – to wit, how many points are accrued and how many player-hours were logged in their accrual. Please tell me where you got any notion of skill out of that, because I’m just not seeing it. I’m not talking about player skill in a fight or commander skill at commanding or any other kind of skill at all, just server-wide results and time spent in the game. This essentially treats all servers as black boxes with no attempt to explain what’s going on inside (so no “skill” is involved at any step). Assessing player skill, I think we’d both agree, would require much more analysis and would probably be better suited to the more controlled environment of SPvP.

It would just be a misleading statistic. On Deso we have a massive queue on reset, and even throughout a lot of the weekend. Yet we typically tick very low because most players are pve zerkerlings that are just feeding points and acting as rezbots.

Yet at other times we tick a lot more because people stay up through the night, or when there isnt a lot of pve players to muck things up. These would all be thrown on the same pile, and the serious WvW players are told they suck because their tick-per-player is low, because its skewed by less beneficial players.

You accurately articulate how the statistic would work, and that is precisely why it is in no way a measure of any kind of skill. Remember, each server is treated as a black box: no matter what’s going on inside, all that’s being measured is overall points divided by total player hours logged – and the only new information we’re getting is that “total player hours logged” bit. Your argument about player contribution is exactly why we need to keep this “black box” mentality firmly in mind.

If anything, a low overall P3H would be a sign that something like that “mass of feeding zerkerlings” stuff is going on. The only way it’s misleading is if people try to erroneously assign extra meaning to it.