Guild Wars 2

Since Anet is working on server population balance, it might be useful to the developer to read some the old discussions we had here, so that they could to see the Pros and the Cons from the community’s point of view and maybe take some of the suggestions and try them out.

The Matched Entry system for WvW was an idea discussed a while back. This would bring a simple mechanism for balanced matches but players might be queued.

Another idea is to increase rewards for WvW to boost WvW population. This could bring more fights and fun and the concern is that new players dies too often and does not listen to commanders.

Maybe trying both ideas at the same time would lessen the concerns and sustain the benefits.

Maybe there are better ideas.

Maybe it is the communication.

Let the developers know and maybe they will read and consider.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/The-Matched-Entry-system-for-WvW/first#post5141717
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/What-s-going-on-with-WvW-rewards/first#post6009451

One more thing, the expectation from players with many years of WvW experience could be very different form someone who played a few months and even more different from some one who just starting.

So when players discuss the pros and cons from their point of views, the pros and cons could be very different based on their experiences.

It is very challenging please everyone.

However, there is a common denominator for all the players.

Everyone likes having Fun.

There is hope.

“The April update is about reducing grind, clearing away some tedium, getting quickly to the fun, and improving rewards. We’ve always said that Guild Wars should be about having fun rather than preparing to have fun” – Mike

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/48zlyd/im_mike_obrien_here_with_gw2_dev_team_ama/

I am scared they can transform WvW in EOTM merging all people from colours.

The EotM Server mechanic is a disaster. PERIOD.

If they try to use it for actual WvW, they will kill WvW (as if they haven’t done it with negligence).

Also, why doesn’t A.Net actually ASK the guilds that play WvW what they want and need and have them test what ideas they have, not big, multi-server PvE guilds. If they continue this way, they will lose ALL of the WvW population.

Dusty Moon.4382:

The EotM Server mechanic is a disaster. PERIOD.

If they try to use it for actual WvW, they will kill WvW (as if they haven’t done it with negligence).

Also, why doesn’t A.Net actually ASK the guilds that play WvW what they want and need and have them test what ideas they have, not big, multi-server PvE guilds. If they continue this way, they will lose ALL of the WvW population.

Some wvw guilds play different then other wvw guilds. You have ppt guilds, fight guilds, gank guilds, roaming guilds and havoc guilds. Me for example, have always been in a very large more PVE focused guild. It is more casual then anything but the majority of my play time is in WvW. I stick around in the guild because the players are nice and there is little to no drama.

I never wanted to join WvW guilds because some of them have elitist that try to be better than the guilds on their own server which leads to guild drama which leads to mass transfers.. The large PvX guilds are the ones that stick around through thick and thin. On my old server, I lost count of how many WvW guilds left the game, disband or transferred but you know who is still around? Those large PvX guilds.

Asking just wvw guilds is not the answer either as I have over 9k hours and over 4.5k rank and I did it all in a PvX guild. So if they just ask wvw guilds what they want I guess my feedback means nothing since I’m not in a wvw guild yet spend most of my time in wvw..

Oh and I don’t want EoTM/megaserver wvw either :P

Lord of Rings.5371:

Another idea is to increase rewards for WvW to boost WvW population.

Increasing rewards is still a complex problem. The overall level of rewards needs to be increased to help sustain players who only play WvW (and still need to dump thousands of gold into guild halls and tactivators to remain competitive), but if you increase it too much it becomes an EotM farm. However, that is simply a quality of life update and not a way to solve the population balance problems for 2 reasons: 1) everyone gets the same boost, the imbalance remains 2) does nothing to address the time coverage issues.

Increased drop rates, WvW only skins, access to more stat combos or ascended armor/weapons, or a legendary backpiece (every other game mode has one) help retain the players that have been leaving constantly. Something else is needed to make it matter to the non-core WvW community or people will just go to EotM to karma train and farm the rewards. To actually draw new players into WvW, it needs to have a real impact on the rest of the game in some way. I’d bet that most new players don’t even know the server-wide buff to xp, crafting, etc based on WvW score even exists. Those who know that it exists don’t care because it does not change the way they play the game.

Veles.1405:

Lord of Rings.5371:

Another idea is to increase rewards for WvW to boost WvW population.

Increasing rewards is still a complex problem. The overall level of rewards needs to be increased to help sustain players who only play WvW (and still need to dump thousands of gold into guild halls and tactivators to remain competitive), but if you increase it too much it becomes an EotM farm. However, that is simply a quality of life update and not a way to solve the population balance problems for 2 reasons: 1) everyone gets the same boost, the imbalance remains 2) does nothing to address the time coverage issues.

Increased drop rates, WvW only skins, access to more stat combos or ascended armor/weapons, or a legendary backpiece (every other game mode has one) help retain the players that have been leaving constantly. Something else is needed to make it matter to the non-core WvW community or people will just go to EotM to karma train and farm the rewards. To actually draw new players into WvW, it needs to have a real impact on the rest of the game in some way. I’d bet that most new players don’t even know the server-wide buff to xp, crafting, etc based on WvW score even exists. Those who know that it exists don’t care because it does not change the way they play the game.

If you remember the 1st tourney, at that point WVW rewards were roughly on par with PVE rewards, just that the rest of the game moved forward when WVW stood still on this aspect.

Anyways, a lot of new people stuck around, yea, some of them came to farm but so what ? they were such easy kills and it was a lot of fun stalking them on a thief or mes while they tried to do jumping puzzles etc. hell, one time i even remember we got a whiff of an opposing server doing a full scale jumping puzzle event on our BL (Alpine BL JP) so we prepared, set up a couple balistas and ACs, it was freagin great, like 20ish of us vs map que for hours.

yea, occasionally you get some idiot that will do nothing but keep runnign into a wall or blank jumping using a keyboard macro or whatever, but those were very few and not the general playerbase, so I would definetly welcome all that back in WVW.

as far as rewards, impliment reward tracks that you get for killing players and actual fight events.

impliment fight events, game can already identify fights somewhat and player numbers (for example orange swords, outmanned buffs, lord scaling) so the underlying mechanics are there. they just need to be refined and then you can have actual fight events with actual fight event rewards. you can even make it tiered, so that a smaller group that wins vs larger group would get more rewards.

stuff like that on top of what already is would be great.

other 2 things of note: wvw really needs its own legendary or 2, and unique ascended obtainable only via active wvw game play which includes player vs player as well as objective defense and offense.

Dusty Moon.4382:

The EotM Server mechanic is a disaster. PERIOD.

If they try to use it for actual WvW, they will kill WvW (as if they haven’t done it with negligence).

Also, why doesn’t A.Net actually ASK the guilds that play WvW what they want and need and have them test what ideas they have, not big, multi-server PvE guilds. If they continue this way, they will lose ALL of the WvW population.

You don’t see anyone complaning about population issues or capping at off peak hours… so that pvp game mode is doing a pretty good job, it’s pretty popular too.

And if you want to talk about loot or karma… Players can go to silver wastes and get 10x the amount of stuff in the same amount of time.

Swagger.1459:

Dusty Moon.4382:

The EotM Server mechanic is a disaster. PERIOD.

If they try to use it for actual WvW, they will kill WvW (as if they haven’t done it with negligence).

Also, why doesn’t A.Net actually ASK the guilds that play WvW what they want and need and have them test what ideas they have, not big, multi-server PvE guilds. If they continue this way, they will lose ALL of the WvW population.

You don’t see anyone complaning about population issues or capping at off peak hours… so that pvp game mode is doing a pretty good job, it’s pretty popular too.

And if you want to talk about loot or karma… Players can go to silver wastes and get 10x the amount of stuff in the same amount of time.

Oh you don’t see any complaints about EoTM populations? Everyone knows if you are green you have a better chance to win your 3 hour matches. Its been complained about many times on these forums. How can you complain about night capping when matches are 3 hours long? Nice try though.

oh look at this SS. I was wrong. Blue seems to be the better color this week. nice balanced score though

Lord of Rings.5371:

Since Anet is working on server population balance, it might be useful to the developer to read some the old discussions we had here, so that they could to see the Pros and the Cons from the community’s point of view and maybe take some of the suggestions and try them out.

The Matched Entry system for WvW was an idea discussed a while back. This would bring a simple mechanism for balanced matches but players might be queued.

Another idea is to increase rewards for WvW to boost WvW population. This could bring more fights and fun and the concern is that new players dies too often and does not listen to commanders.

Maybe trying both ideas at the same time would lessen the concerns and sustain the benefits.

Maybe there are better ideas.

Maybe it is the communication.

Let the developers know and maybe they will read and consider.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/The-Matched-Entry-system-for-WvW/first#post5141717
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/What-s-going-on-with-WvW-rewards/first#post6009451

you should have at least give a summary on whats posted in there, to be honest its tldr
for me

what all i can say is separate the fight servers from the PPT servers,

fight oriented servers vs fight oriented servers, PPT oriented servers vs PPT oriented servers

Lord of Rings.5371:

Another idea is to increase rewards for WvW to boost WvW population.

We need to set down some definitions. The population imbalance is something different from the overall dwindling population. In fact, looking at alot of todays post-AMA comments, it is obvious that alot of people commentating are confusing how the different things relate to oneanother.

The population imbalance is one factor that contributes to the dwindling population. Not the other way around. That also means that separate issues, like the maps or the rewards are factors that affect the population, do not affect the population imbalance, only the overarching game mode popularity question. The population imbalance is all about direct gameplay (eg., stability-) and scoring (eg., off-hour cap and tick-) issues.

Keep the discussions separate and structured to reduce clutter and improve clarity.

Lord of Rings.5371:

The Matched Entry system for WvW was an idea discussed a while back. This would bring a simple mechanism for balanced matches but players might be queued.

The matched entry system could work very well with a relative-number scoring system. Instead of locking people out of maps they could move people to new overflows that either begin at lower scores (being given a value reflective of the smallest server’s population on the map – so if the player spread is 10:80:80 the map’s value is 10) or directly reflects the relative (so a 20:40:40 map would be as valuable as a 40:80:80 map).

That would also mean that an overpopulated server would queue their players into an empty overflow that allow players to roam that map (say, 0:0:10) but that the map would have no tick value at all, just personal rewards for the captures, until opponents arrive.

Another upside of such a system is that they could introduce a form of megaserver system without removing servers and server communities. They could easily have one server face different opponents on different overflows as they fill up maps. Furthermore, it could even be used to effectively combat lag and large server population disparities since they could tone down map caps without causing more queues or otherwise affecting server populations adversely. They could even automate it with triggers on server hardware health splitting maps, though that is more a possibility than a necessity.

briggah.7910:

Swagger.1459:

Dusty Moon.4382:

The EotM Server mechanic is a disaster. PERIOD.

If they try to use it for actual WvW, they will kill WvW (as if they haven’t done it with negligence).

Also, why doesn’t A.Net actually ASK the guilds that play WvW what they want and need and have them test what ideas they have, not big, multi-server PvE guilds. If they continue this way, they will lose ALL of the WvW population.

You don’t see anyone complaning about population issues or capping at off peak hours… so that pvp game mode is doing a pretty good job, it’s pretty popular too.

And if you want to talk about loot or karma… Players can go to silver wastes and get 10x the amount of stuff in the same amount of time.

Oh you don’t see any complaints about EoTM populations? Everyone knows if you are green you have a better chance to win your 3 hour matches. Its been complained about many times on these forums. How can you complain about night capping when matches are 3 hours long? Nice try though.

oh look at this SS. I was wrong. Blue seems to be the better color this week.. Balanced?? I think not

Nobody really complains about populations…

That’s what I was referring to with the capping comment…

I was already a few steps ahead, nice try though.

Eotm mechanics resolve some big issues, there is no arguing that. Y’all should start embracing great mechanics like these.

Swagger.1459:

briggah.7910:

Swagger.1459:

Dusty Moon.4382:

The EotM Server mechanic is a disaster. PERIOD.

If they try to use it for actual WvW, they will kill WvW (as if they haven’t done it with negligence).

Also, why doesn’t A.Net actually ASK the guilds that play WvW what they want and need and have them test what ideas they have, not big, multi-server PvE guilds. If they continue this way, they will lose ALL of the WvW population.

You don’t see anyone complaning about population issues or capping at off peak hours… so that pvp game mode is doing a pretty good job, it’s pretty popular too.

And if you want to talk about loot or karma… Players can go to silver wastes and get 10x the amount of stuff in the same amount of time.

Oh you don’t see any complaints about EoTM populations? Everyone knows if you are green you have a better chance to win your 3 hour matches. Its been complained about many times on these forums. How can you complain about night capping when matches are 3 hours long? Nice try though.

oh look at this SS. I was wrong. Blue seems to be the better color this week.. Balanced?? I think not

Nobody really complains about populations…

That’s what I was referring to with the capping comment…

I was already a few steps ahead, nice try though.

Eotm mechanics resolve some big issues, there is no arguing that. Y’all should start embracing great mechanics like these.

Yet some maps seem to complain about a lot of other things.. Main complaint I usually see is after a wipe happens. People complain about dying. I’ve been in maps where commanders ask what do people want to do and the majority usually always pick k-training. The thing is, it is either get farmed or be the ones farming. If you are the ones being farmed you can just leave and try to get onto another instance that does the farming.

We always seem to always end up saying the same things to each other over and over lol Long as you have fun then feel free to continue to play it.. Only fear I have is the fun of working together as a server will be gone if something like this does ever come into play.

The guild I am in used to always run world boss trains in PVE every single daily reset for a few years. PVE megaserver killed that for some and they actually no longer play anymore. I used to just do world bosses because my guild use to do them but when megaserver came into play and we all started ended up on different maps, I lost interest in that too.

You can’t blame me for having a fear of the word megaserver because from what I’ve seen it only hides the problem but created a few more.. Apparently they are still having problems with megaserver in HoT maps so even after having it for a while there are still problems with it..

Subversion.2580:

..
The population imbalance is something different from the overall dwindling population. In fact, looking at alot of todays post-AMA comments, it is obvious that alot of people commentating are confusing how the different things relate to oneanother.
..

Yes, population imbalance is different from the overall dwindling population. However, growing population could make population balance easier to achieve. If there are excess players at certain time zone on a particular server, there would be pressure for players to leave that server to a less populated server to avoid the queues. This would be help balancing population as players leave for a lower population server.

Two sides of the same coin. If there’s less and less people, you cant fight your match ups people leave, no-one new can start as they get instant-shanked your WvW population dies. In some cases I think the servers should get merged at the bottom -this won’t make alot of difference to the others. Overall I’d like to see the charge to switch have about a 1/3 off it’s expensive for wvw’ers (but I don’t think free is the answer) and some decent stats published not ‘deviation’ but max and min figures on number of users per day in the last week (gone) so people know what they are getting into but cant use it to game this weeks score. Aswell as the average play time per character so people can get some idea of the ‘hard core’ it won’t be perfect and the average play time could do with being split into quartiles but hopefully you get the drift. Anet aren’t balancing the population I think the population should do it.

Some players requested a delay implementation of any population balancing mechanism after WvW reward increase because the returning players would change the existing balance. This should not be a concern if the balancing mechanism implemented is robust, always moving excess population to lower population server.

And there is a simple way to achieve this.

Lock all the servers except the bottom three for incoming transfers each week. Players can stay or leave the top servers but they can only joined one of the bottom 3 servers that have not reached its population limit as being “Full”. If all the servers are Full then 3 new servers to be introduced.

It is easier to understand if there only 6 servers and it is easy to work out after a some iteration all servers would be full as long as there total population of players is large enough.

Under the current server structure, this might take a while to achieve balance.

We could reduce the number of servers to speed up the balancing act. However, this might be disruptive. But if it is just one time pain, it might be worth it.

Not a bad idea but I think it’s a different game bottom middle and top + I think you are assuming a growing population, locking the bottom 3 servers now (in europe) the bottom 2 are empty, what about the final few stuck in there, and what incentive is there for anyone to go there?
At the moment it’s a mess atleast with a bit more info people can make informed decisions, not everyone wants to go from a bottom tier to a top one or vice versa, but alot of people aren’t happy with whats happened to their server rather than them leave WvW completely I’d rather they choose a new server. in fact given the mess we are in Anet could do worse than rolling out a free one account transfer on say the third birthday or some such. Who knows that and some info might tempt some of the now PVE’ers back if they could choose their server.

Lord of Rings.5371:

Since Anet is working on server population balance, it might be useful to the developer to read some the old discussions we had here, so that they could to see the Pros and the Cons from the community’s point of view and maybe take some of the suggestions and try them out.

Do you seriously think they haven’t formulated a solution already? The overhaul has been in development for over a year reportedly, some aspects are about to be released as a beta. We’ve discussed population issues before and they have undoubtedly used those discussions in the solution. Whether they drew the right conclusions or not is another thing.

Yeah. It would be a relief if they have a solution already.

This discussion should not hurt any of the progress they may have made anyway.

There could be holding place server where new player join before starting WvW and choosing one of bottom 3 servers.

With a holding place server, bottom 3 servers can also be disbanded if the none of the next higher up servers are full and the players from the bottom 3 servers go to the holding place server until they choose another one.

As long as the possibility of being disband is written into to the rules of WvW, this should not cause much disruption when a server is disband and it could motivate players to be engaged to avoid being disband.

It’s almost ready to test so what’s done is done.

The problem is that joining a server or another doesn´t solve anything, because new players may not even enter WvW.

when I use ‘soft’ staggered launch etc at work its cos I’m kitten. Not convinced its completely baked, but I don’t think Anet are upto to coming clean on the new Bl’s either a few visual blocks etc? come on. Doesn’t sound like they are near a solution.