Guild Wars 2

Problem Some server have much to many WvW-Player, some server have to few players to play competitive WvW. And even worse people seem to have a tendency to concrentrate on a few server and not to spread out over all servers.
This uneven player distributions lead to very unbalanced matches and as only a few servers are of similar strenght to very repetitive matches.

Prerequisite: Mega-servers are in place, such that current servers are nothing else than “WvW-teams”, i.e. a switch to another server, has only WvW-effect, but no effect on guild-membership.

Previous Proposals
- map capacity reduction: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Proposal-decrease-the-player-cap-on-WvW-maps is currently under discussion
- free transfers to low pop servers: had either no or sometimes even the opposite result
- enforced assignment of people to servers: unrealistic

Solution Proposal (stick-version)
Compute for each week how many different player entered (or wanted to enter) WvW over all worlds and matches (per league, i.e. one for EU and for NA).
Divide this LastTotal by the number of servers to get the mean quota for the last weak matches. Add 10% reserve to it to get the intended player-quota for next week.

The places in this quota are filled up by players joining WvW in a first come first serve manner. A player that get into WvW, can play over the whole week. A player that tries to get into WvW when it’s server quota is exceeded cannot play WvW this week on this server, however he get the offer of a free transfer to the 3 server with lowest filled quota (these servers always exist). He can accept this and play WvW on the new server, or he refuses and can try to be faster for the next match.

The total number off available place is 10% higher than the number of players that played or tried to play last week so under normal circumstance (no peak increase in player numbers, e.g. at the beginning of the league. In this case: If 66% of the servers reached the quota, add 10% to the quota of all servers, and announce that to everyone that hit the quota and did not transferred via ingame email.) there is a place to play for everyone, however if he is to slow not on the server where he was so far.

Intendet results:
- Player amount imbalance is restricted, no server can field more players than 10% more than the mean number of players.
- Player that are to slow to play, will sooner or later accept the offer to spread out to lower populated servers and by that help to balance the server even more.
- as soon as more balance is reached, no one will ever hit the quota.
- the quota will avoid that imbalance is ever increased

optional extension: People on low-pop servers say that they want to be on low pop servers and do not want to have the masses of players that run around in matches of the high-pop servers.

If this is true: make two permanent leagues in EU (1-18 large-scale, 19-27 smale-scale) and NA (1-15 large-scale, 16-24 small-scale) and compute the quota per league and offer only servers of the same league for the free-transfers for exceeded quota.

Another solution (carrot-version) proposal added
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Proposal-Enforced-Player-Balance/3921574

Why not just offer free transfers to low-ranked servers (rather than Anet’s bizarre pre-season idea of offering free transfers to the second-ranked Silver EU server!)? Banning people from playing the game they paid for just because they didn’t click ‘enter’ in the first 0.5s of reset night isn’t something even Anet would do.

quota will be much higher than map-capacity.

I guess in mean around 2000-3000 different people play WvW per server and week, whereas map-capacity of all 4 maps is somewhere around 400. Don’t forget that the quota is based on the sum of players over all the 168 hours of the match.

So no way to reach quota within “first 0.5s of reset night”, maybe it is reached on saturday evening on some high stacked servers.

And: it will never be reached on 50% of the servers!

And they are not banned. They get a “capacity exceeded” message and they are offered to play IMMEDIATELY somewhere else. This is similar to be placed on an overflow map, because the map you wanted is full. That’s better than the queue that already exist, where you only get the offer to “play sometimes later”.

Dayra.7405:

And they are not banned. They get a “capacity exceeded” message and they are offered to play IMMEDIATELY somewhere else.

They are banned from playing on the server they chose, and which (if they transferred) they paid to use.

If you wana do a WvW-guild-raid and you are so late that the map is full and queue is long you are banned to play it, such is life.

If it is for some reason important for you to stay there, you will try to be faster for the next match. So again you aren’t banned, just paused due to match-balance-capacity.

Dayra.7405:

If you wana do a Tequatel and you are so late that the map is full you are banned to play it, such is life.

If it is for some reason important for you to stay there, you will try to be faster for the next match. So again you aren’t banned, just paused due to match-balance-capacity.

Which Borderland map is Tequatel on?

And thanks for the further illustration why free-transfers alone aren’t sufficient
“If I choose to overstack I wana win overstacked” seems to be a to common attitude, much more common than “yeah I like balanced matches between many equally man-powered servers”..

The big problem here is that people who get off work earlier will have the greatest chance of getting in WvW on the server they want, so mostly NA EST guilds (in NA) will have no problem running organized WvW together each week, NA PST guilds might get in but will probably lose at least a few members every week, Oceanic, EU, and/or Asian time zone guilds or guild members will likely have to choose each week between taking the day off and getting online in the middle of the day (or night!), or be forced to run on a new server each week with random people, getting crushed by any organized forces who managed to get in together on competing servers.

Guilds will also lose members each week who generally sign on on Sunday or Monday, instead of standing around waiting for reset each week, and guilds who avoid reset but who run organized raids the rest of the week will probably give up on WvW altogether if they find that they can’t count on all playing on the same server together anymore each week.

Blackgate will likely be hit hard by that proposal.

But

be forced to run on a new server each week with random people,

is simply wrong. As said: most server will never hit the quota. And if everyone would follow the quota recommendation as described above, after 1 week no one will ever be hit by it again.

Only if a lot people refuse to follow it, they will be hit again, till enough people follow it.

I certainly would vote no on this system. I would rather have unbalanced match ups than not be able to play at all.

Dayra.7405:

Otokomae.9356:

be forced to run on a new server each week with random people,

is simply wrong.

So… in your proposal, you’re saying that people who miss getting into WvW on time but still want to play WvW AT ALL that week would need to take a PERMANENT TRANSFER to one of the 3 lowest population servers, not just a free transfer for that week? So if a guild with 50 people has 5 people who don’t get into WvW on time because they usually play on Sundays or something, those players would never get to run with their guild again unless they could convince the ENTIRE GUILD to transfer to one of the lowest ranking servers, so that a couple of members could log in on Sunday? And what if that causes the lowest population server to reach 111% of the mean average? Would people who don’t jump in WvW early enough each week have to either server hop endlessly or give up on WvW altogether? Would the free transfers to lowest servers be for anyone willing to transfer, or only for the people who didn’t get into WvW in time? Would the people in the example above be able to transfers an entire 50-person guild for free, or only the 5 people who logged in on Sunday and found WvW to be full?

read the prerequisite: mega server in place, I.e. Server = WvW-team and nothing else.
See https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-megaserver-system-guilds-and-the-future/

I didn’t care about other transfer costs so far, but the filled quota percentage of a server would of course be a very good base for determine general transfer costs. If transfer costs will be needed et al. Probably it would be sufficient that WvW-teams that hit the quota are marked as full.

As ANet never publisher player numbers I can only guess where the quota will be, if my estimate of 2000-3000 players is correct 10% will be 200-300 free space per server and I don’t know a guild with that many WvW player.

So… in your proposal, you’re saying that people who miss getting into WvW on time but still want to play WvW AT ALL that week would need to take a PERMANENT TRANSFER to one of the 3 lowest population “TEAMS”, not just a free transfer for that week? So if a guild with 50 people has 5 people who don’t get into WvW on time because they usually play on Sundays or something, those players would never get to run with their guild again unless they could convince the ENTIRE GUILD to transfer to one of the lowest ranking “TEAMS”, so that a couple of members could log in on Sunday? And what if that causes the lowest population “TEAM” to reach 111% of the mean average? Would people who don’t jump in WvW early enough each week have to either “TEAM” hop endlessly or give up on WvW altogether? Would the free transfers to lowest “TEAMS” be for anyone willing to transfer, or only for the people who didn’t get into WvW in time? Would the people in the example above be able to transfer an entire 50-person guild for free, or only the 5 people who logged in on Sunday and found WvW to be full?

There, I replaced the word “server” with the word “TEAM” for you. I actually don’t see any change here. Is there something special about Megaservers and WvW “TEAMS” that changes things, allowing someone to run with their guild despite the fact that they were forced to transfer to another server away from the guild they’ve played in since 2012? (sorry, I meant “TEAM”)

I mean, there are still a LOT of Guilds in this game who spend 75% or more of their time in WvW, so being banished to another server (I mean “TEAM”) because you have stuff to do on Friday or Saturday means that you are not able to run with your Guild anymore, Megaserver doesn’t change this at all.

I mean, statements like this:

If you wana do a WvW-guild-raid and you are so late that the map is full and queue is long you are banned to play it, such is life.

If it is FOR SOME REASON (caps for emphasis) important for you to stay there, you will try to be faster for the next match. So again you aren’t banned, just paused due to match-balance-capacity.

make me wonder if you are, or ever have been, in a Guild at all. “If for some reason it is important for you to stay” on your home server (sorry, “TEAM”)? I mean, some people have been on the same server (“TEAM”) since Beta! If you are in a WvW Guild, then being forced to move to a new “TEAM” means you’re no longer able to play with that Guild, unless you’re lucky enough to be in an early NA Timezone and are never, ever busy on Fridays, and therefore able to que up early enough to guarantee your spot on the “TEAM” each week.

And if you are shunting all the players who try to log in to WvW too late to just 3 servers, that could certainly add up to a higher than average WvW population in a short time. If all those enthusiastic newcomers spark a new interest in WvW in the general population that’s already on that server, many of the people who were forced to transfer could soon find themselves locked out of WvW AGAIN, since the reason they were sent to that server in the first place is simply because they don’t get on early enough to guarantee their spot on the “TEAM” each week.

This sort of policy, as you’ve described, would simply be the end of the entire game mode. The population imbalance needs to be addressed at some point, but please, don’t simply ask ArenaNet to implement the worst ideas you can think of (hopefully no one has anything WORSE than this), because THEY JUST MIGHT DO IT!

Keep in mind, the whole idea of “Seasonal Leagues” or Tournaments started out as a suggestion thread on this Subforum back in late 2012~! We don’t need to just stack bad ideas on top of bad ideas here.

Transfer is transfer, guesting never existed for WvW. So I do not understand what you mean with permanent transfer, of course after a transfer you can do another transfer.

And yes, of course the sense of this proposal is:

Enforced destacking of overstacked servers like blackgate.

And yes, to enforce people to do something, you have to generate problems for them, if they do not do what is needed.

And yes, that the people on over-stacked servers do not like it is clear, they would not overstack if they don’t like it, therefore complains from them are expected and only support: for balance enforced de-stacking is needed, voluntary de-stacking will never work.

And it will do nothing on servers that aren’t overstacked. (with the clear definition: A server is overstacked if it has more than 10% more WvW-player than the mean of all servers of this league.), except: They will get more variance in match-making AND better balanced matches.

Terrible idea. A lot of adults don’t get to play on Friday night, or even at the weekend at all, or maybe just wvw on a Wednesday night. Under your system they are penalised for having a RL and are shunted around like some useless offal, not allowed to play with their guild mates on the server they chose and with the server TS they are used to participating in.

Having said that, the long term plan from Anet will be to copy TESO’s 3 alliance model and megaservers so there will be 3 colours on the maps- the problem being that ANet’s servers can’t cope with more than 80 people fighting in one spot and until they fix the lag issue they won’t be able to expand the maps to the size needed to run this sort of pvp.

ANet will do what is best for Anet from a financial viewpoint- if this means destroying the concept of ‘server vs server’ somewhere down the road, then that is what will happen. We already know how much care and attention is taken generally towards wvw consequences when patches are made (wonder if we will ever be able to extract runes from all that badge bought gear..).

This would surely create perfect balance in all wvw matches forever. Zero players in every map is the epitome of balance.

Dayra.7405:

Problem Some server have much to many WvW-Player, some server have to few players to play competitive WvW. And even worse people seem to have a tendency to concrentrate on a few server and not to spread out over all servers.
This uneven player distributions lead to very unbalanced matches and as only a few servers are of similar strenght to very repetitive matches.

If you put as much time into something positive for your servers WvW pop balance, say – recruiting?, then your pop imbalance may be less.

The issue here, fundamentally, is that you don’t understand the effort that goes into organising winning coverage. Some of it – inevitably – is bandwagoning, but you want socialised WvW – where those servers that know the meta, who have leaders who actively play and manipulate it, who spend time to play it, are brought down to the level of those who rock up on underlevelled rangers.

If the problem is “Some server have much to many WvW-Player, some server have to few players to play competitive WvW” then you have two options:
1. Do something positive. Recruit. Buy a tag. Set an example. Encourage people to come to you by performance.
2. Move servers.

Your “solution” is enforced WvW meta mediocrity. Ayn Rand says no.

The best counter so far is level 4 “contradiction” (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Proposal-decrease-the-player-cap-on-WvW-maps/3909770)

“If you do not allow us to overstack all will leave”
You forgot: Due to allowing overstacking so far a lot already left.

But most only make it till Level 2 “Ad Hominem”, Poor

PS: You best counter arguments on the level on which they are made, so this post starts with a level 4 reply to drop down to level 2 as well

Its a bad idea with no redeeming qualities.

Ok, after the stick-version in the opening, here the carrot-version:

Make 5 infinite (ala Agent of Entropy, i.e. each round get an achievement point up to 250) WvW-only (not EotM, as it does not contribute to the match) Ticket-Achievements
- 25 Dolyak killed
- 100 player killed
- 20 Towers successfully defended
- 10 Keeps successfully defended
- 5 SN successfully defended

Count per player how many of them he finished within a match.
Count per server how many of them where finished during the match.

Divide the server-score at the end of the match by the amount of finished Ticket-Achievements on this server to get the tickets per achievement. Payout every player tickets per achievement of this server times number of achievements completed in the week, if they are still on the server on which they made the achievements (nothing otherwise).

Publish the “tickets per achievement score” per server, to let people see what they miss by staying on an over-stacked server.

Remarks:
I intendedly choose defensive achievements and most need opponents to achieve, as offensive is already dominant (karma-train) and PvD does not need additional carrots to happen.

T1 should have many more players than T8/9, but the total score (of all 3 servers) would not be that different. So in T8/9 a player you earn much more per week than in T1.

Every score-point counts, even if you loose, you have a motivation to fight.

No please, move on.