Guild Wars 2

holy hell @ the queues for HoD

Loving the information (charts = nom nom nom) but…

Where are Vabbi, Desolation, Ring of Fire, Piken Sq charts? Thats 4 worlds off the top of my head missing a chart there’s possibly others too.

EDIT: Bah fail post, there’s a 2nd tread with them and other missing world charts.

Thanks!!! That’s exactly the kind of information needed to calm the many, many whiners.

~MRA

edit: Since I am a sucker for data like this, or just greedy:

• Please keep posting such information regularly, this really helps the community to understand why there may be some hick-ups or other problems with the user experience.
• If possible, please consider using the same absolute y-axis for all charts. Then players could immediately see which servers have a high WvW load and which don’t. You gave the warning in your post, but it is rather cumbersome to find this kind of information.

@Pligrim, Now you know T.T 300+ ques are the average… With about 100 being the minimum.

Samfisher.7942:

@Pligrim, Now you know T.T 300+ ques are the average… With about 100 being the minimum.

I feel sorry for you HoD guys. I play on the EU. Used to be Ruins of Surmia (https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/6496/Ruins_of_Surmia.PNG) but we transferred to Vabbi (https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/6500/Vabbi.PNG). A bit more queues, but overall not to bad. I just wish that Anet never went with the EU/NA servers but made them all international.

Also they need to make sure that when guilds transfer to lighten the load for Wv3 to keep their upgrades. But alas, doubt that will happen.

Well, this shows that a lot of server have more than 1 peak time (hopefully will help stop all those wanting W3 changed outside of US “primetime”).

Amazed how nearly everyone has queues, and hopefully it will enable servers to see their week spots and recruit – also for those with queues to identify servers where there are no queues at their play time, but with good coverage at other times.

wow, DR and Kaineng is so obvious, I can pick it out without even looking at the file names

poor henge. so so many people transferred here…

way to go Kaineng! You got some Queue going on!

Props on sharing this information. Thank you for your time…

Eager to see the future resolution of the issue none the less.

Spent the whole week fighting SBI in their borderland which even on HoD was rarely a queue over 15min during my playtime.

I’m still uncertain about how are they going to allow us to get our whole guild in a WvW… because having 50 queueing individually and crossing fingers for the planets to allign and get at the same time is kind of ridiculous.

Awesome information. It illustrates the big problems with WvW currently very well.

When the new matchups are announced, look at the graphs. You will easily be able to tell who will win every single match based on the gaps in participation.

Doesn’t matter what anyone does in WvW or what strategy they use, the server with the least gaps in coverage will win every time.

Also:

Hopefully it will also help some people decide to leave some of those higher population worlds for one of the worlds with smaller (or no) queues, which would reduce the queue pressure on the overloaded world and help provide more manpower for the smaller world.

Hopefully you understand that this is never going to happen in a million years and have a plan B to resolve these issues. People would rather queue than play and lose and nobody is going to give up their slot on a stacked server for the chance to get steamrolled by it.

For the love of all that is good, start pitting servers with similer que times throughout the day. IT SINT FUN to have a server tyhat has a great deal more night-crew than you and everything you worked for, literally EVERYTHING is gone by morning.

If you want that 30% to continue, please balance by que time of day as PRIORITY over server point accumulation. *

For example, Darkhaven and Anvil Rock are similer, so good matchup time-wise. However toss Yaks Bend in the mix and you get a horribly lopsided matchup that makes the point system wholly irrelevant when trying to balance by skill. Skilled players cant win against a lesser skilled enemy WHEN THEY ARE ASLEEP.

+1 to Chalky.

I merged the graphs of the servers in my matchup, Blackgate vs Crystal Desert vs Gates of Madness. I changed the Hue/Color of each graph to match the color the server represented during the matchup, Blue for GoM, Red for Blackgate and Green for Crystal Desert.

The merged Graph is attached. Notice that Queue times were pretty even that first day or 2, with GoM logging off a little earlier than BG and CD those first 2 nights. Then the start of the Third day, CD has more people waiting in queue earlier than the other 2 servers. Coincidentally, that Monday morning Blackgate and Gates of Madness woke up to Crystal Desert owning EVERY holding, and had upgraded them fully. You can see that participation was alright in that third day(monday), but it was much lower than the previous two days (saturday and sunday). This could be attributed to the work day and not everyone being able to play as much. But you can see Crystal Desert had a nice population during the weekdays and into the nights, with it not ever dropping below map capacity between the third and fourth day.

You can really see BG and GoM pretty much give up that fourth day, as their queue length peak drops considerably, and the queue starts later and ends earlier for the servers than the previous 3 days.

I think this really shows the detrimental effect Night Capping has on WvWvW in week+ long matches. BG and GoM were eager to fight, BG was even winning over the weekend in our matchup. Then that first day CD was able to get on early and get a lead on the other 2 servers. When it happened again the next day, GoM and BG gave up and didn’t care anymore with 3 more days still to play. 2 Week long matchups will be even worse when half way through the first week 2 servers just give up trying, all thanks to one server being able to take every holding while the other two are unable to log on for various reasons.

Link to the merged Graph – http://i.imgur.com/ZozlP.png

Do you realize that if you do an integral on these graph, they are close-related to the ranking? IMHO, WvW as PvE style, with fixed number of maps is not quite a good idea in the first place because of the population dynamic . Instead if you try it as PvP style, with dynamic numbers of maps/instances, you may address the population issue better.

Chalky.8540:

Hopefully you understand that this is never going to happen in a million years and have a plan B to resolve these issues. People would rather queue than play and lose and nobody is going to give up their slot on a stacked server for the chance to get steamrolled by it.

Not true at all. I did. Others are as well. I moved to the worst server out there, and I guarantee you I’m having a LOT more fun losing in WvW than all of these people waiting in queue for hours jut to be able to say their server won, only to get in and having nothing to do because their server already owns everything and the other teams have given up.

When you stop caring about the score board, and just play to kick some good old fashioned buttocks, WvW starts to feel a lot more like DAoC’s Realm vs Realm and a lot less like Zerg vs Door for the sake of winning an eSport.

Queue times, no thank you.

Now that you’ve collected this data would you consider closing transfers to the top 4 NA servers?

Fubuki.7162:

Chalky.8540:

Hopefully you understand that this is never going to happen in a million years and have a plan B to resolve these issues. People would rather queue than play and lose and nobody is going to give up their slot on a stacked server for the chance to get steamrolled by it.

Not true at all. I did. Others are as well. I moved to the worst server out there, and I guarantee you I’m having a LOT more fun losing in WvW than all of these people waiting in queue for hours jut to be able to say their server won, only to get in and having nothing to do because their server already owns everything and the other teams have given up.

When you stop caring about the score board, and just play to kick some good old fashioned buttocks, WvW starts to feel a lot more like DAoC’s Realm vs Realm and a lot less like Zerg vs Door for the sake of winning an eSport.

Queue times, no thank you.

I am unconvinced that queuing up for ages to have nothing to do because your server is dominating is particularly worse than instantly getting in and having nothing to do because the second you leave your base you are killed by a spawn camping zerg.

Which server did you move to? Was it Kaineng? Ferguson’s Crossing perhaps? Was it any of the servers that are getting completely battered in WvW? I predict that the answer is no and that you simply server jumped to somewhere with lower queues but where you’re still basically guaranteed victory due to off primetime stacking. I’ll be interested to find a single WvW player who went from HoD to Kaineng to avoid queues.

Chalky.8540:

I’ll be interested to find a single WvW player who went from HoD to Kaineng to avoid queues.

This guild did:
http://www.usacentralpom.com/forums/

I moved from HoD to Kaineng to avoid queue’s.

I wonder if we could match this up with “number of people logged in” at similar times. It could be that some servers just need to advertise that “Our server is under attack and needs help” during the night.

Of course, they could already be doing that but I wouldn’t know. Randomly joined Henge when the servers first opened without knowing that it would be a 3W server. Been playing PvE and have not touched the PvP or 3W yet. (also have not reached lvl 80 yet. Been jumping between a number of games)

Myrkur.7049:

I merged the graphs of the servers in my matchup, Blackgate vs Crystal Desert vs Gates of Madness. I changed the Hue/Color of each graph to match the color the server represented during the matchup, Blue for GoM, Red for Blackgate and Green for Crystal Desert.

The merged Graph is attached. Notice that Queue times were pretty even that first day or 2, with GoM logging off a little earlier than BG and CD those first 2 nights. Then the start of the Third day, CD has more people waiting in queue earlier than the other 2 servers. Coincidentally, that Monday morning Blackgate and Gates of Madness woke up to Crystal Desert owning EVERY holding, and had upgraded them fully. You can see that participation was alright in that third day(monday), but it was much lower than the previous two days (saturday and sunday). This could be attributed to the work day and not everyone being able to play as much. But you can see Crystal Desert had a nice population during the weekdays and into the nights, with it not ever dropping below map capacity between the third and fourth day.

You can really see BG and GoM pretty much give up that fourth day, as their queue length peak drops considerably, and the queue starts later and ends earlier for the servers than the previous 3 days.

I think this really shows the detrimental effect Night Capping has on WvWvW in week+ long matches. BG and GoM were eager to fight, BG was even winning over the weekend in our matchup. Then that first day CD was able to get on early and get a lead on the other 2 servers. When it happened again the next day, GoM and BG gave up and didn’t care anymore with 3 more days still to play. 2 Week long matchups will be even worse when half way through the first week 2 servers just give up trying, all thanks to one server being able to take every holding while the other two are unable to log on for various reasons.

Link to the merged Graph – http://i.imgur.com/ZozlP.png

Your graph makes my head hurt.

I wouldn’t say blackgate and gom gave up entirely. The graphs do show there were certainly less of them queuing later in the week, but I played CD border last night and it certainly didn’t feel like they had given up.

How do we tell which server is which?

Chalky.8540:

When the new matchups are announced, look at the graphs. You will easily be able to tell who will win every single match based on the gaps in participation.

Doesn’t matter what anyone does in WvW or what strategy they use, the server with the least gaps in coverage will win every time.

Also:

Hopefully it will also help some people decide to leave some of those higher population worlds for one of the worlds with smaller (or no) queues, which would reduce the queue pressure on the overloaded world and help provide more manpower for the smaller world.

Hopefully you understand that this is never going to happen in a million years and have a plan B to resolve these issues. People would rather queue than play and lose and nobody is going to give up their slot on a stacked server for the chance to get steamrolled by it.

Agree completely with the main issue being the fact that servers without a constant WvW presence are always going to be at a significant disadvantage in a 24-hour format. I still haven’t seen a game pull off large scale pvp with the same level of effectiveness as the War of Emperium in Ragnarok Online. Those battles only lasted 2 hours at a time and always had maximum participation. It would have been a completely pointless event if everything was available to be captured all day.

I’d almost like to see something like an 8-12 hour window each day where objectives can be captured, and during non-prime hours it would just be an open pvp environment where you can still have huge pvp battles but without the possibility of major objectives being taken unopposed because it’s an odd time of day. Perhaps allow small objectives like camps and scouts to be taken, but make the major forts off limits until the designated time period.

You’d have to adjust the number of points gained when major objectives are ‘frozen’, but overall I think it would add an element of excitement that doesn’t currently exist in WvW. Last minute rushes to try to take a keep will actually mean something, since most games are long since out of hand by the time you hit the end of the (eventually) 2 week cycle. And even when major objectives are frozen, there’s nothing stopping anyone from continuing to pvp and do all the other things available in WvW. It’s not like having frozen objectives for part of the day is really much different from a group taking an entire map in the middle of the night then having nothing to do for hours at a time because there’s no opposition.

Piccolo.7296:

How do we tell which server is which?

“Unfortunately I just realized I didn’t put the world names on the chart. A chart’s filename matches the world it represents, so you’ll need to look at the end of the url when looking at a chart (or before clicking on it) to see what world it represents.”

Xilodon.5031:

Agree completely with the main issue being the fact that servers without a constant WvW presence are always going to be at a significant disadvantage in a 24-hour format. I still haven’t seen a game pull off large scale pvp with the same level of effectiveness as the War of Emperium in Ragnarok Online. Those battles only lasted 2 hours at a time and always had maximum participation. It would have been a completely pointless event if everything was available to be captured all day.

I’d almost like to see something like an 8-12 hour window each day where objectives can be captured, and during non-prime hours it would just be an open pvp environment where you can still have huge pvp battles but without the possibility of major objectives being taken unopposed because it’s an odd time of day. Perhaps allow small objectives like camps and scouts to be taken, but make the major forts off limits until the designated time period.

Don’t really like this idea as prime time is nebulous and it would be changing game play based on when you can play.

What we could do is change the way the winner is determined. Divide each day into three 8 hour blocks. The team who scores the most points within that 8 hour block gets 3 points, the next team gets 2 and the last team gets 1. World ranking is determined by those points, ties broken by overall score.

I think a good solution would be to have dynamic server caps.

The maximum number of players your server can have in WvW could be set to slightly higher (maybe 10 players higher) than your opponent with the highest attendance.

That means that during peak times, everyone will hit the standard player cap because at least two servers will be fielding all of their players.

However, during the night, a server will only be able to field players if at least one of their opponents is also fielding players of a similar number. They can slightly outnumber them, but not completely overwhelm them.

This would solve the problem and encourage off-timezone guilds to spread out across many servers in order to be able to play against each other.

Any chance future releases could use a fixed Y axis? When you put JQ along side HoD, your initial impression is that they are similiar, when in reality the peak queue time is almost 2 hours longer on HoD.

Also, raw data for us statistics geeks.

I love how people try to use “Skill” as the reason they have been winning WvW when this chart clearly shows that population and when you play is greater then everything else.

Yahkin.1254:

Also, raw data for us statistics geeks.

+1.

Fury.6248:

I love how people try to use “Skill” as the reason they have been winning WvW when this chart clearly shows that population and when you play is greater then everything else.

…except that results come before population for most servers. You don’t win because you are populated, you are populated because you win.

Holy hell SBI Queues Batman!

You could always start introducing costs to transfer to high pop servers and leave transfers to low pop servers as free. I don’t think anyone would complain that much if you implemented this.

An alternative would be providing some form of reward for transferring to a low pop server, although something like this could easily be abused.

Maybe some kind of “underdog” achievement for earning points when on the lowest scoring server (per match) would work. This would have the benefit of potentially being one of the hardest achievements to obtain – thus carrying additional kudos.

This is some awesome data to be looking at.. Thank you AN. Holly crap at que times in HOD!

The queues are horrible.
You should move the jumping puzzles to a different area of the game so that people doing that don’t take space in wvw.
You should also add and EB style BG and increase the populations a bit on existing.

In my opinion at least.

Here is a quick and dirty combined view for Anvils Rock, Darkhaven and Yak’s Bend. If I only had the original Data I could do tons more =P.

Ofc most of you are looking at this the wrong way.

This data should be used by guilds on heavy que servers to move to lower que servers

This doesn’t illustrate the WvW problems, it shows problems with guilds and players

You don’t like the queues, you don’t think you can get your whole guild in WvW then move to where you can

Players and guilds are creating this problem and AN is giving you free transfers to fix it

But instead people will continue to complain about the queues and not move servers. The issue isn’t going to fix itself people

Start taking action

part of the problem is the queues will follow the major guildsand alliances, i can guarentee you if TA moved off of HoD right now, whatever server they wound up would have just as large a queue in 24 hours (every non TA person on the server who either wanted the high war score or liked winning in WvW would jump ship and follow)

Basicly this will be solved a couple of hours before the end of free transfers. When guilds and alliances transfer to lower queue servers just under the wire so they arnt followed by the mobs.

Also the complete loss of all upgrades and all influence is a huge blow to any guild transfering. Even the bigger ones need weeks to get it back.

Fantastic info to share with us, props to ANet.

I really really hope some of the larger WvW guilds use this info to spread around some. The game will be much better for all involved if people stop piling on to the ‘top’ servers. Unfortunately it’s human nature for a lot of people to pile on to the top servers.

It would be quite interesting to see these graphs annotated with the start of the week-long WvWvW match, and have the scores for the three servers in that server’s grouping under each day on the graph, so one could examine the effect of winning/losing WvWvW over time on the queues.

ANet awesome data. Now please give us a way to spread this out in game.

You’ve already confirmed that players can only queue for one map at a time so can you tell us a number in queue for each so that we can spread the wealth so to speak. Without some in game data, queues will continue to spike on certain maps while others go with half or little. When all we see is “map is full”, we’ll continue to play on the ones we always do.

limiting transfers to once every 24hrs won’t fix the wvw problem at all. It will stop people from abusing it to farm, but that’s about it. I hope that the ques on the “winning” servers continue to grow. I hope it’s 8 hrs or more next week. My hope is that then the organized guilds will move off of those servers so they can get in the same maps and play together. Then all that will be left on the high population servers are the hundreds of idiots that just went there so they can pretend they are good because they play on server xyz. Insanely long ques is the only way this problems will fix itself. Always count on people doing what is best for them and forget the idea that people will do things for the greater good because it never happens.

@MikeFurguson If we could get End of Day Scores for time periods as well it would be helpful so we can combine the ques to scores that would great.

If Kaineg and Pike Square were the same server.

http://imageshack.us/a/img213/8296/kainengpiken.png

Just as I thought, there are times when there is room on European servers but US are busy queuing and vice versa.

Wasted WvW space because of the Eu-US divide.

Its great that you are revealing some of the behind the scenes data but the major statistic would be – average wait time.

Ive been in the queue for upwards 4 hours some times. I was part of the 30% that got in but only after waiting 4 hours.

I find it hilarious that sea of sorrows and isle of janthir eternal queues are shorter then their home borderlands. That just goes to show they gave up trying to combat eredon terrace in eternal.