Guild Wars 2

Problem:
All seasons so far saw a lot of bandwagon jumping around to over-stack servers and maximize personal rewards. So far this resulted in seriously over-stacked servers and very imbalanced matches, as server with many more people usually beat others in coverage over 24/7 matches.

Original formulation of idea:
(https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Give-Bonuses-to-Gold-Silver-League-Servers/3920804)

Proposal
Use the personal rewards system in the next league to balance servers and not to over-stack servers.

Clearly a server performing better should receive more rewards than a server performing worser.

But if two servers perform equal, but one has less WvW-player than the other, each player on the lower populated server did a better job than each player on the higher populated one. Therefore they should get more rewards.

This can be achieved by a 2-step reward assignment:
1) Assign rewards to the server based on the rank (or points) it achieved. Better Rank/points should give more rewards.
2) Distribute the server reward equally among all player that have finished the meta-achievement and are on this server at the end of the league.

For optimal results all 24 NA-/27 EU-server should be in ONE big league playing swiss tournament, such that massive transfers shortly before or even within the league can adequately influence the ranking.

For optimal balancing effects during the league the current
rewards per player estimate should be visible in https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/ (updated every week based on rank) as well as in the world transfer dialog (computed on the fly, based on the current number of player that finished their meta and are on this world) . If the server-rewards per rank are not known to the community this cannot be used to estimate actual player numbers (only the relative amount of player can be estimated).
BUT it may be a strong incentive to transfer to low populated worlds, as they likely have a higher reward per player.

This way a player movement to lower pop worlds will be generated with the hope of more balance. To avoid to many transfers to a world the actually of the reward per player in the world transfer dialog is essential.

Optional: For better matches where everyone fights the leading server, I would give one point to the winner of a match and no points to 2nd and 3rd. 9 round of swiss tournament will still be more than enough to clearly order the server and even to reorder them based on population moves.

Optional: To reward the effort of players individually, make the achievements repeatable (and count WvW only, not EotM), count per player the total number of achievements finished, and compute (and publish) the sever reward per achievement. Each player get: sever reward per achievement times achievements finished by this player.

I very much agree with this.
Please take your time to read.
it is a splendid idea.

1. you cant judge who does a better job by basing it on server population, or time zone coverage.
2. its unfair to punish players by forcing them to split rewards with an entire population just because they had the common sense to move to a place where people actually log in to fight daily. if your sense of loyalty to your server keeps you in the bottom tier, that’s entirely on your back, not ours.

3. anet wants you to compress servers. the less servers they have to run, the more money they make. I don’t ever foresee a day that they don’t announce server positioning and then offer a sale to get ppl to transfer up.

I think the only true reward for WvW should be the fun gameplay.

WvW isn’t grinding, you shouldn’t need a carrot at the end of a stick.

It’s perfectly okay that there is population imbalance. I prefer lower population servers to higher population servers and I have no problem with people who prefer it the other way.

I think people should be able to transfer (even though that creates instability in the rankings). They can leave drama behind, just make a fresh start, connect with new people, whatever.

All I expect is good match making between servers of similar size so that people can find battles that are interactive instead of always being one sided. In my experience, it’s healthy for servers community and morale to both win and lose battles regularly. Having too much of either one agitates.

All I expect from WvW is to make enough gold to cover my fees (food, whatever) and save up money to progress at a competitive rate along whatever horizontal character progression there is.

I do not at all want vertical progression.

geist.3980:

3. anet wants you to compress servers. the less servers they have to run, the more money they make. I don’t ever foresee a day that they don’t announce server positioning and then offer a sale to get ppl to transfer up.

Should this be ANets plan, then it shutdown the superflous servers, the sooner the better: “Lieber ein Ende mit Schrecken als ein Schrecken ohne Ende”

And make such a league afterwards to balance the remaining server.

geist.3980:

1. you cant judge who does a better job by basing it on server population, or time zone coverage.

The fewer people you need to win the better you are, very easy to judge.

geist.3980:

2. its unfair to punish players by forcing them to split rewards with an entire population just because they had the common sense to move to a place where people actually log in to fight daily.

no one is forced, no one is punished

geist.3980:

if your sense of loyalty to your server keeps you in the bottom tier, that’s entirely on your back, not ours.

I am not in bottom tier, and I find a one-sided win where you wake up and map is 690:5:0 for YOU the worst. Even the other way around (you are at 5 or 0) is better, then you have a lot to do

But of course most I like matches like the last 2 weeks in EU-T2, where winner and looser are open till last hour.