Guild Wars 2

BAITness.1083:

I am really not sure what ANet thinks would be a good idea for changing WvW scoring. They created a game mode where coverage is important, and now they are considering punishing that coverage.

They also want more ways for servers to catch up? That sounds an awful lot like punishing the server in first place. I have played during pushes where my server has narrowly lost or even won from behind. Neither are particularly enjoyable, as you end up playing hard throughout the entire week.

It seems like there are a lot of individuals frustrated with the current scoring system not giving them an opportunity to affect the result. The problem is that WvW is not about individual skill, but large scale teamwork. Changing the scoring system is not going to make these people happy, the only thing that will help them is having someone team up with them and show them how to be an effective part of the whole.

All this complaining about night-capping is just about people valuing their own contribution over the contribution of every other player.

On top of it all, to humor the people that really think they alone should determine the outcome of a 24/7 400v400v400 match, I wonder what they would change?

I assume everybody realizes how crazy it would be to ‘close’ WvW during certain hours of the day, so that leaves only one other potential solution to me – scaling score based on the number of players.

I imagine the idea goes like this: if across all 4 maps the combined number of players from all servers is 100, then make the PPT at that time worth only a fraction (100/1600 for example) of what it is worth when the maps are full. The problem being that having no players would then be more valuable than having bad players. Some of the servers I have been on were mean enough without having this kind of incentive to harass other people. I think a lot of the players in favor of this type of change would only be in favor of it until they were the ones their server was trying to get to log off.

No I just find is dumb when the work of 20 to 30 players can out do the work of 100 -200 players by a huge amount. Just because they show up when those 100 – 200 players work on their server “NA” are counted for horse shoes and hand grenades because another server stacked OCX or off prime time server population.

So I guess your agruement is that the basic servers designed for NA players “NA” servers should come down to who can slot the 20 to 30 OCX players vs a emptied server. Yup you make less sense. Because if the easy work of a few can grossly overturned the hard work of the many to such a degree we are seeing now then sorry to say it.

It’s time to give OCX TZ players their own 3 worlds and score each of the three TZ groups of servers more during their prime times and alot less during their night time. Cause atm on NA servers the actual NA prime time players don’t have a voice far as PPT goes because the fights are populated vs when a stacked off-prime time server shows up just dominate with a fraction of the people.

Either case ANet is going to have choose how to fix this inbalance that has been happening for a while now. No ANet can not spread the population out themselves short of forcible moving players that mainly play in servers off-peak times to other server and stopping from being able to server transfer out, which imo seems more illogical than giving them less incentive to stack to one server in a matchup for effortless matchup wins.

What it really comes down to is that we have a game mode atm where 20 off peak time guys = 500 or more actually prime time guys. In turn to balance this situation one has to pay for more server transfers and sever stacking, which by the way is very good for ANet’s business. So I doubt ANet will ever truly fix this imbalancement of scoring. So lets get to the real of basically what a very very few OCX and nightcapper’s are saying. "All the subhuman NA players work should continue to count for peanuts on their own servers, and the few of us OCX players own the right to dominate and troll NA while they are sleeping.

So think about the situation objectively is the few the victim OCX in this or the many NA players who’s work goes by the wayside the victim here. All NA players and even some off peak hours players are saying is make everyone’s regardless of TZ’s work equal and if that mean shorten up the PPT that the nightcapper stacking server get than fine.

At current moment lets all be honest here this is a game. Not a real life war where soldiers are force to fight and hold the line, or they get put in military prison or worst shot on sight by their CO for not showing up. The reality of the situation is, the only reason ANet hasn’t and will not fix this problem is very basic and simple “MONEY” from server stacking kittenters who will pay ANet a boat load of again “MONEY” to win and manipulate a match-up/server. This is why this problem will never be fully addressed as needed, nothing else.

I can’t really blame ANet after all “Business is business” and the only thing the matters at the corporate/investor level is those quarterly profit margins always being in the green.

This argument sounds so Trump. Build a firewall for OCX/SEA players, I don’t want them playing when I’m not. And have the OCX/SEA community pay for it.

Terrahero.9358:

The drama and sheer exegeration in this thread. “If anet doesnt let me contribute 10x more because i play at night it means they think i am subhuman”.

What the actual kitten?

Nightcapping has been issue since day one, no time slot has more impact on determining the winner than the night slot. Adressing this issue to lessen the overwhelming impact of a few players during off-hours should’ve been done years ago.

Nightcapping is not going to be worthless, however you simply should not be the “Kingmakers” of WvW. Where all that matters is your work and everyone else is irrelevant.
Because that is the reality here that these nightbabies seem to ignore. Right now and for the past 3,5 years it has been the people playing during the day and prime time who have been made, to put it in your words “subhuman”. Because that 4k lead we etch out over the course of an evening of battle is dust in the wind compared to the 30k nightcapping wins back knocking down undefended keeps.

Depends if you’re in NA or EU. “Night capping” hasn’t been as much of an issue in NA compared to EU because NA has a greater diversity of players, except in the lower tiers before the mergers. Nowadays it shouldn’t be an issue at all except for the fairweather problem.

Reverence.6915:

Terrahero.9358:

The drama and sheer exegeration in this thread. “If anet doesnt let me contribute 10x more because i play at night it means they think i am subhuman”.

What the actual kitten?

Nightcapping has been issue since day one, no time slot has more impact on determining the winner than the night slot. Adressing this issue to lessen the overwhelming impact of a few players during off-hours should’ve been done years ago.

Nightcapping is not going to be worthless, however you simply should not be the “Kingmakers” of WvW. Where all that matters is your work and everyone else is irrelevant.
Because that is the reality here that these nightbabies seem to ignore. Right now and for the past 3,5 years it has been the people playing during the day and prime time who have been made, to put it in your words “subhuman”. Because that 4k lead we etch out over the course of an evening of battle is dust in the wind compared to the 30k nightcapping wins back knocking down undefended keeps.

Depends if you’re in NA or EU. “Night capping” hasn’t been as much of an issue in NA compared to EU because NA has a greater diversity of players, except in the lower tiers before the mergers. Nowadays it shouldn’t be an issue at all except for the fairweather problem.

EU’s got a bit more centralized time coverage since it operates in the middle of the spectrum; you have people several hours ahead in OCX to cover daytime, then EU prime, and then NA prime, which when it ends, leads back into OCX. There are few NA players on EU servers as well, since NA has its own servers, meaning the flow of control becomes fairly interrupted by EU’s prime.

NA servers are OCX = off-hours, EU = off-hours, and then NA. Since our EU populations are also pretty low for the inverse of the above, OCX’s control extends to what’s essentially 17 consecutive hours before NA prime.

The flow of control isn’t changing, and that’s something people are seriously overlooking. OCX still gets what’s effectively a 17 hour advantage in this situation on NA. They can take keeps and block progress just as much as they do now, and ultimately, things like having upgraded keeps/towers is what tips NA prime into going one way or another in most competitive matchups.

It’s literally just the score. If one server’s NA-native presence is so much better than another’s as to offset the points gained in off-hours, the server, for all intents and purposes, is dead on NA. It might having a thriving OCX community, and it’d be great to just give them their own servers as to not need to reduce off-hours ticking, but that’s an idealistic solution which would only work if non-OCX players didn’t invade those servers to “night-cap” for OCX for PPT dominance.

That 17 hour dominance is pretty much a joke. Look at T3 right now with #magswag dominating once OCX is over (aka when Mag wakes up).

OCX cannot and does not carry a server alone, or SoS would be T1 since ages ago.

Drew.7192:

This argument sounds so Trump. Build a firewall for OCX/SEA players, I don’t want them playing when I’m not. And have the OCX/SEA community pay for it.

I like your perspective on this.

Back on topic, it seems the players in favor of scoring changes cannot wrap their head around the idea that everybody is playing during another players off-hours. A person above argued that eking out a small lead during NA prime should be more important than the subsequent 18 hours that they got stomped, as if the server that basically tied them during one time zone and then continued to do well around the clock should not be rewarded.

Almost all the proposals I have seen suffer from the major flaw of making a lack of players more valuable than having inferior players.

I did see a proposal that does not have this issue, the proposal to not count total points but just reward points for 1st/2nd/3rd place during the tick. IE server A has all the keeps and SMC, they get 5 points, server B has a few towers, they get 3 points, server C has a camp and a sentry, they get 1 point. I don’t think i have seen it in this thread, which is good, because this is another seriously flawed idea – it makes server A and server C focus on server B at all times, a forced double team as a result of the crappy scoring system.

Finally, I have seen a few people proposing a removal of PPT completely. Aside from how the lack of meaningful objectives would hurt the game, I want to share something I think these people are not aware of: the majority of every server’s score is already not from the tick.

http://www.gw2score.com/currentscore/total_score/desc

This topic keeps coming up because people want to have more individual influence on the score, while forgetting that it is a massive 400v400v400 24/7 game mode. If you want to personally affect the outcome, work better with your server. The game mode already offers ways for skilled small groups with coordination to have a large impact.

I think another contributing factor is how unaware players are of how much PPT contributes vs all other sources of points. If you made WvW all about kills and nothing else, the same servers would be winning, likely by larger margins: http://wvwintel.com/

All these proposed changes are people trying to think of a way to make winning servers be scored lower. Look at these links here. The servers that are winning have the most kills, the best kills/deaths, and the best ppt. They tend to go together. There are some servers that are still competitive in matchups where they have been getting destroyed in kills – because they backcap, because they flip for tick. The current scoring system is excellent in that it rewards teamwork and strategy heavily, those matches would be blowouts without this.

morrolan.9608:

SkyShroud.2865:

Substance E.4852:

morrolan.9608:

Weli.4568:

Reducing off time mattering in mu’s is obviously more logical answer.

Players contribution being worth less solely due to where they live is logical?

When you are on a server not located in your personal time zone. Yes, yes it is.

Base on the logic, the server is located in PST, so EST is considered night capping hours.

OK then you;d be happy for all your non NA to move to a rival server then I presume.

I totally do not understand what you saying has any relationship or whatsoever.

the only other solution would be to force even populations through out the servers, which would hurt gem sales quite a bit and kitten plenty of people off. i think most will agree this is a problem that needs to be addressed in some way.

personally i dont care much for the score, but it matters when a server moves up a tier or two with no real primetime presence. then the primetime from the other server has no one to really fight and cant win the matchup due to the other server nightcapping. so basically theyre both nightcapping and have no one to fight (other then chasing a force that is twice as small as them).

Stand The Wall.6987:

the only other solution would be to force even populations through out the servers, which would hurt gem sales quite a bit and kitten plenty of people off. i think most will agree this is a problem that needs to be addressed in some way.

personally i dont care much for the score, but it matters when a server moves up a tier or two with no real primetime presence. then the primetime from the other server has no one to really fight and cant win the matchup due to the other server nightcapping. so basically theyre both nightcapping and have no one to fight (other then chasing a force that is twice as small as them).

Balancing population is the only reasonable option. Every other suggestion has glaring, obvious issues. This server pairing is a good step, and I hope ANet continues to look at ways to balance population rather than ways to punish servers and players that organize themselves better than their opponents.

BAITness.1083:

Balancing population is the only reasonable option. Every other suggestion has glaring, obvious issues. This server pairing is a good step, and I hope ANet continues to look at ways to balance population rather than ways to punish servers and players that organize themselves better than their opponents.

People can’t be just moved around freely and when anet merges servers or links servers people complain either about Q’s or not having their own server names. I agree it’s a step to better direction but still doesn’t solve the issue of off time capping on EU side.

What is this organization people keep talking about? Spreading people more evenly to match the hours? If that is the case you should get a reality check. Most people simply can’t play when ever they want. Simply not possible due to real life commitments. Do you mean buying people outside of your servers prime time to play on the off hours? Yeah cause that helps, making the situation worse. Stacking people on servers shouldn’t be the solution to this. But do tell me what is this organization you are talking about, I’m interested.

Sooooo against this idea. It reeks of favoritism even more then the recent balance update and discriminates against a huge portion of the WvW population. The definition of “night” seems to evade me as it pertains to WvW. Sometimes my server has less players then the other servers at different times depending on whom we are against, sometimes more. Maybe the idea of point taxing the server with more population at any given time would be better, would definitely be fairer to servers with a larger non- NA prescence.

Weli.4568:

BAITness.1083:

Balancing population is the only reasonable option. Every other suggestion has glaring, obvious issues. This server pairing is a good step, and I hope ANet continues to look at ways to balance population rather than ways to punish servers and players that organize themselves better than their opponents.

People can’t be just moved around freely and when anet merges servers or links servers people complain either about Q’s or not having their own server names. I agree it’s a step to better direction but still doesn’t solve the issue of off time capping on EU side.

What is this organization people keep talking about? Spreading people more evenly to match the hours? If that is the case you should get a reality check. Most people simply can’t play when ever they want. Simply not possible due to real life commitments. Do you mean buying people outside of your servers prime time to play on the off hours? Yeah cause that helps, making the situation worse. Stacking people on servers shouldn’t be the solution to this. But do tell me what is this organization you are talking about, I’m interested.

In every tier I ever played in, servers worked together by having guilds plan their raid times and locations. If your server still is not doing that, they should start.

While you are right that moving people or guilds around would be an issue, I do not really see it as a problem when servers are moved around. In fact, I really like the idea. It gives servers the chance to learn from each other’s commanding style, and reminds everybody that the people on the other server, no matter how much annoying underhanded stuff they try, and still just gamers that want to have fun. If servers can be teamed up to fill their coverage gaps, I think it would be an ideal situation for everybody.

You mention the long dispelled myth of servers ‘buying’ guilds. I would like you to try to do the math to determine how much gold it takes to move 40 people. Personally, I would be surprised if any server could cover that, but this idea does not stop there. The server would have to be able to fully fund the transfers, and then have enough left over to pay the guild to pick their server over another. Now imagine that times 30, since you need 400 players in each non NA timezone. It is far too much money for even one guild, and the cost to cover all hours is so ridiculous that nobody would even attempt it.

You seem to be suggesting that the server winning a matchup is not winning the majority of their fights, just capping things when you are not on. I cannot recall ever being in a match where the winning server did not win the majority of fights.

You can see the kill counts here:
http://wvwintel.com/

and the % of score not coming from PPT here:
http://www.gw2score.com/currentscore/total_score/desc

BAITness.1083:

You mention the long dispelled myth of servers ‘buying’ guilds. I would like you to try to do the math to determine how much gold it takes to move 40 people. Personally, I would be surprised if any server could cover that, but this idea does not stop there. The server would have to be able to fully fund the transfers, and then have enough left over to pay the guild to pick their server over another. Now imagine that times 30, since you need 400 players in each non NA timezone. It is far too much money for even one guild, and the cost to cover all hours is so ridiculous that nobody would even attempt it.

You seem to be suggesting that the server winning a matchup is not winning the majority of their fights, just capping things when you are not on. I cannot recall ever being in a match where the winning server did not win the majority of fights.

You can see the kill counts here:
http://wvwintel.com/

and the % of score not coming from PPT here:
http://www.gw2score.com/currentscore/total_score/desc

Now let me be clear. In case you didn’t read my signature. I’m from Desolation and you should be able to deduce from that the server I’m playing on is on the EU side of servers. Plus I have clearly stated earlier in this thread that this is more of an EU issue than NA one. About tranfering people it was plausible. It would be much bigger problem with the gem prices being what they are right now. But remember how gems used to be 40g for 400 gems? Pepperidge farm remembers. You can do the math when you need 1200 gems (or was it 1800) to transfer to high population server.

At least on EU side from all the tiers I’ve been through the most points servers get together comes from off hours. Just take a look at Desolation&Vabbi vs Elona Reach vs Riverside from mos.millenium.org/servers/view/15/380
You should be able to see how the score massively changes around 1am to Desolation’s favor and evens out again at 9am. Now think what it would be if that score at night time didn’t matter that much as the mu was quite even during daytime and prime time.
What I’m trying to say is. It is not about organization on EU side. We are as organized as we can without server stacking. It’s simply a matter of someone having more people at EU off/night hours than the others.

PPT should be impacted by current WvW population in a scaled manner. Scaled meaning that the PPT multiplier gradually goes up or down based on average population per server per time interval. So if a server is suddenly losing keeps/towers they won’t benefit immediately by disconnecting, things like that.

Main thing to avoid here is that roamers are not impacted and general players don’t feel they are better off leaving to benefit ppt.

@OP

Let me join you in being silly…

How’s this for a hillarious but extremely simple solution:

1) Give Certain Players/Guilds the ability to shut down their World Server at the end of day when they’re done playing for the day. The next day…this same group is responsible for power up of their World Server.

or

2) Automate World Server Open & Close Hours

World Servers are shut down for the night when employees/staff aren’t there to mind the World. Nobody gets robbed in the middle of the night.

Why come up with a bunch of complex solutions…when the bottom line is…those vocal about Night Capping…don’t want a small group of robbers stealing their World when everybody isn’t on.

It’s very absurd, but these vocal players…somehow convinced ANet that they need to fix this…in an online game that is supposed to be 24/7.

WvW Community…if you didn’t know:

The fix to Off-Peak…aka…Night Capping…is being proposed…because ANet is asking if we want it in an Official Poll.

Diku.2546:

@OP

Let me join you in being silly…

Don’t forget that PPK needs to be lowered during peak times as they get more kills (due to more players) and thus makes it unfair! Also less badges received would make perfect sense.

There is no such thing as a fix for off hours capping unless ANET can and do decide to shutdown maps regardless of time zones. Open up maps if there are enough players on all 3 servers at that time frame. If server A has 200 players ready, server B has 150, server C has 100, then open up 2 maps. 50 from each server on the 2 maps and all others will need to be in queued. This is a perfect fix. It will force servers who are heavily stacked in a time zone that if you want to play, you move to a server where you are not doing a 10 vs 1. I’m sure NA primetime will see a few servers frustrated where they’ll move their behinds to servers where they get play time instead of where they are able to do blob time against lower population. It’ll force equal and competitive gameplay. It’ll help all time zones. And if there’s only 30 in OCX/SEA.. then 1 map is needed. Don’t need to pay me ANET. I just given you a fix for making competitive and fair game play.

Jiminy.8340:

Diku.2546:

@OP

Let me join you in being silly…

Don’t forget that PPK needs to be lowered during peak times as they get more kills (due to more players) and thus makes it unfair! Also less badges received would make perfect sense.

Less badges recieved actually make zero sense, changes to the server scoring rules have nothing to do with badges.

PPK however do, so you’re actually right: PPK should be lower the more people are online. Just like max PPT should be lowered the less people are online.

We use to want to win cause moving up in the tiers ment more fights not for bragging rights. Now there are fight at all hours of the day on every server. So imo I could care less about the score or winning. Scoring should be the lowest priority. Maybe if this was a tournament id care.

Dawdler.8521:

Jiminy.8340:

Diku.2546:

@OP

Let me join you in being silly…

Don’t forget that PPK needs to be lowered during peak times as they get more kills (due to more players) and thus makes it unfair! Also less badges received would make perfect sense.

Less badges recieved actually make zero sense, changes to the server scoring rules have nothing to do with badges.

PPK however do, so you’re actually right: PPK should be lower the more people are online. Just like max PPT should be lowered the less people are online.

But see, during ‘primetime’ there are more players online and thus a better chance of more kills. More kills means more loot. Thus, to make thing fair for the ‘night-cappers’ who don’t have that same chance to get a similar number of kills, it only makes sense to lower rewards during ‘primetime’. Have to make things fair!

These suggestions are getting so bad that I struggle to tell who is being sarcastic and who honestly thinks that only their kills/ppt should count.

TheBandit.7031:

I get that this was an issue with the low population servers, but with the merge what is the problem?

Just because you play at a time with less players on means that your success is worth less? Makes no sense to me. I completely agree with you.

Consider a server like Maguuma. For the majority of the North American day, Mag ticks at 300 or higher and regularly owns entire borderlands, especially in this week’s t3 matchup. However, Mag has terrible SEA presence, reducing their tick from 3 or 400 to less than 100, but only during SEA times. SoS, as a result, catches up.

Sure, there are ways for the NA crew of Mag to counter this, but I doubt that either server’s crews are entirely happy fighting nobody. Addressing night capping would potentially let SoS fight other servers with a similar SEA population and Mag fight other servers with higher NA populations and give the tiers the chance to be more fluid, meaning the barrier between kitten and t3 (etc) wouldn’t quite exist. Mag is just an example, but nobody likes to PvDoor. Hopefully addressing night capping would allow for servers to disperse in such a way that would give either varied fights or interesting fights no matter what your EU/NA/SEA populations are.

Zeghart.9841:

Seems to me that you’re pulling numbers out of nowhere. Chances are the servers that have more people playing during the night are those that have more players in general. It’s very unlikely that a bigger server would have less people playing during the night than a smaller server.

This change in almost all cases would simply help less populated servers with close to no way of defending during the night, making them give away less points for free.

And when you mention night-time players being less valued than day-time players, the opposite is happening at the moment. A night-time player is worth way more than a day-time player, since they can accomplish more with way less resistance and numbers.

Not at all, some servers have No NA prime at all and only OCX and SEA. Servers who are outnumbered on all maps during NA prime ALSO have opponents capping everything EVEN MUCH WORSE than their OCX time zone players. People often forget that California and Hawaii are part of the US and those players like to play with and against people when they come home from work as well. Hawaii’s 8 pm is East Coast 2AM. California’s 8pm, is East Coast 11pm. There are plenty of people in the US awake when others are asleep and should not have their game play determined by only part of the NA population. There are plenty of players in the US that ALSO work while others are sleeping, they should not be punished for what time they can work or play. They deserve to be able to come home, take a shower, eat dinner then wind down with some wvw like everyone else.

If they removed passive scoring however all together , however, and focused more on PvP scoring in a PVP game mode that would actually solve the problem and still be able to treat all players equally.

BAITness.1083:

These suggestions are getting so bad that I struggle to tell who is being sarcastic and who honestly thinks that only their kills/ppt should count.

I don’t understand why treating all players equally is such a difficult concept. I am sure the East coast would not be happy if they just catered to California or Hawaii and ignored them, what many are essentially asking them to do to California, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii as well as the international community which is a pretty messed up thing to do.

Everyone’s PvP should matter, it is only the passive scoring that is actually causing the problem here rather than basing the score on PvP in a PvP game mode and treat everyone the same.

Hello,

WvW is a match.

The first principle of every organized match is equity in chances to win for all teams : Only collective and individual skills should make the decision.

That’s why they have a simple rule: same amount of players (football, soccer, rugby, basket….).
The only reason for a handball/football/rugby/etc. team to have less player than another is because of a penalty…and it’s always one of the biggest penalty because to play with less players is always consider as a huge disadvantage.

The particularity of the GW2 WvW is the length of the match (168 hours) and the size of the teams (up to 4×80=320 players according to my memory).
Teams have not the same amount of players to relay themselves on the field during the 168 hours and do not have an access to the same category of players (in term of time zone coverage specially in Europe with the mix of “national language based team” and “european teams”).

In fact Gw2 WvW organizes “asymmetric confrontation”…but does not manage enough that asymmetry.

This is unsatisfactory.

And what we call “night-capping” is only a symptom of that general situation.

During three years the arenanet management refuses to consider that issue (I remember messages explaining that on this forum).

Things seems to change. It’s the first time the arenanet team offers to do something, asking the players there advices: we would be silly not to encourage them in that direction.

That’s the reason I vote “scoring”.

If that orientation is validated we can propose things to the team in charge of the WvW.

FIRST THING TO DO: GIVE A SENSE TO THE SCORE

As a competition WvW needs to be a challenge. If the challenge doesn’t exist, scoring itself has no interest. It’s should be the base: Nowhere you’ll find a never-ending league as we have.
According to my mind the first thing we need is an organized season like in football. One or two per civil year…I don’t know but we need something similar.
At the end of the season we could have an annual (bi annual…) tournament.

Imagine: a WvW season starting in September, finishing at the end of may just before university exams…a break of about one month and then a summer tournament until the end of august. Scoring would be interesting. The confrontations would have sense.

SECOND THING TO DO: MAKE ASYMMETRIC WARFARE INTERESTING IN TERM OF SCORING

Once the interest the match established, equity should be organized.

“Teams have not the same amount of players during the match…” Well, well, well,…

So the challenge is to make interesting an asymmetric confrontation, as well as a conventional one.

And we are not limited to a single measure.

First measure: PPK (already done).
I consider this as a step in the good direction: a team with less people can make a good amount of points against a biggest one if they play better, choosing their fight as in a guerrilla warfare.
PPK exits, keep it preciously.

Second measure: PPT calculation impacted by a team population at the “tic”

Swedemon.4670:

PPT should be impacted by current WvW population in a scaled manner. Scaled meaning that the PPT multiplier gradually goes up or down based on average population per server per time interval.
(…)
Main thing to avoid here is that roamers are not impacted and general players don’t feel they are better off leaving to benefit ppt.

That’s another solution!

Different ways to introduce a penalty linked to the amount of players of a team present at the tic in term of ppt are surely possible. The more the players of a team are on the field (the all population of the 4 maps together) at the “tic”, the less the structures should give points to that team. It would change nothing when populations are equivalent, but this would balance assymetric situations.

Third measure: threshold effect.

A thing could be done to limit the impact of an unusual situation, as when one team is momentarily absent.
We could imagine a threshold effect:
As soon as one of the three team has less than a percentage of its maximum number of players on the field (the 4 maps together) at a “tic”, PPT is 0 for the three teams as long as the situation continue. It does not prevent the other teams to capture structures or PPK, but it limits the impact of the situation and preserve the interest of the match.

lil devils x.6071:

BAITness.1083:

These suggestions are getting so bad that I struggle to tell who is being sarcastic and who honestly thinks that only their kills/ppt should count.

I don’t understand why treating all players equally is such a difficult concept. I am sure the East coast would not be happy if they just catered to California or Hawaii and ignored them, what many are essentially asking them to do to California, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii as well as the international community which is a pretty messed up thing to do.

Everyone’s PvP should matter, it is only the passive scoring that is actually causing the problem here rather than basing the score on PvP in a PvP game mode and treat everyone the same.

Just want to point out again that the servers winning the fights and getting the most kills are winning their matches. The servers winning ppt do it by winning their fights. Even with maguuma in a match pitting “prime time” vs “off time” in the most extreme fashion, maguuma is winning. They are winning because of their crazy high 2+ kills/death. The server that wins the fights wins the match in the current system.

BAITness.1083:

Just want to point out again that the servers winning the fights and getting the most kills are winning their matches. The servers winning ppt do it by winning their fights. Even with maguuma in a match pitting “prime time” vs “off time” in the most extreme fashion, maguuma is winning. They are winning because of their crazy high 2+ kills/death. The server that wins the fights wins the match in the current system.

I’d like to point out again to Desolation&Vabbi vs Riverside vs Elona Reach mu from week 16. You can clearly see Vabbolations tick peaking up after 1-2am and evening out after ~9am. This is due to having close to none resistance while capping objectives and stopping enemies from getting theirs back. It was not about winning fights unless you count night force rolling over some german night players who most likely weren’t even organized a fight.

So can we at least agree that this is a problem on EU side if not on NA side due to many servers having oceanic presence

Anvil.9230:

WvW is a match.
… long description of problem and some solutions…

That was really well written! Thanks, I hope Anet does read it too and also acts while keeping those points in mind.

Reverence.6915:

Terrahero.9358:

The drama and sheer exegeration in this thread. “If anet doesnt let me contribute 10x more because i play at night it means they think i am subhuman”.

What the actual kitten?

Nightcapping has been issue since day one, no time slot has more impact on determining the winner than the night slot. Adressing this issue to lessen the overwhelming impact of a few players during off-hours should’ve been done years ago.

Nightcapping is not going to be worthless, however you simply should not be the “Kingmakers” of WvW. Where all that matters is your work and everyone else is irrelevant.
Because that is the reality here that these nightbabies seem to ignore. Right now and for the past 3,5 years it has been the people playing during the day and prime time who have been made, to put it in your words “subhuman”. Because that 4k lead we etch out over the course of an evening of battle is dust in the wind compared to the 30k nightcapping wins back knocking down undefended keeps.

Depends if you’re in NA or EU. “Night capping” hasn’t been as much of an issue in NA compared to EU because NA has a greater diversity of players, except in the lower tiers before the mergers. Nowadays it shouldn’t be an issue at all except for the fairweather problem.

Exactly, it should only concerns EU server because they’ve a maximum time difference of 1h, but most server got several NA guilds which karmatrain the whole night.

For EU it is a good choice.

Jiminy.8340:

Dawdler.8521:

Jiminy.8340:

Diku.2546:

@OP

Let me join you in being silly…

Don’t forget that PPK needs to be lowered during peak times as they get more kills (due to more players) and thus makes it unfair! Also less badges received would make perfect sense.

Less badges recieved actually make zero sense, changes to the server scoring rules have nothing to do with badges.

PPK however do, so you’re actually right: PPK should be lower the more people are online. Just like max PPT should be lowered the less people are online.

But see, during ‘primetime’ there are more players online and thus a better chance of more kills. More kills means more loot. Thus, to make thing fair for the ‘night-cappers’ who don’t have that same chance to get a similar number of kills, it only makes sense to lower rewards during ‘primetime’. Have to make things fair!

Loot still doesnt have anything to do with the rules for server scores, no matter how much you think it does. More kills means more loot true. But it’s irrelevant.

With your argument, I can argue why I dont get any sPvP points and lootchests when I am playing WvW? I mean I could have played that. I was thinking about it. I should also get all the ori from an orr mining round too. Because that’s loot I would have gotten if I wasnt asleep. Oh and 3 precursors. I’m sure they meant to drop.

Your point is pointless. As long as killing 1 player or 1 NPC give the same exact chance for loot, killing 1000 or 10 is irrelevant. Everyone will be different. You kill what you kill, end of story. It doesnt unbalance the whole matchup system, unlike runaway PPT gains during low pop times.

BAITness.1083:

lil devils x.6071:

BAITness.1083:

These suggestions are getting so bad that I struggle to tell who is being sarcastic and who honestly thinks that only their kills/ppt should count.

I don’t understand why treating all players equally is such a difficult concept. I am sure the East coast would not be happy if they just catered to California or Hawaii and ignored them, what many are essentially asking them to do to California, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii as well as the international community which is a pretty messed up thing to do.

Everyone’s PvP should matter, it is only the passive scoring that is actually causing the problem here rather than basing the score on PvP in a PvP game mode and treat everyone the same.

Just want to point out again that the servers winning the fights and getting the most kills are winning their matches. The servers winning ppt do it by winning their fights. Even with maguuma in a match pitting “prime time” vs “off time” in the most extreme fashion, maguuma is winning. They are winning because of their crazy high 2+ kills/death. The server that wins the fights wins the match in the current system.

That is not necessarily true. As long as Die as fast as you can, run back to PvD an undefended structure and have your zergs bunker down and siege hump instead of fight is rewarded as it is, it will still remain an option to win. It STILL rewards lazy gameplay. THAT is exactly how YB was winning. JQ and BG got so bored of getting no fights from YB that they wound up fighting each other until everyone finally just got bored and left..

When you have full map queue zergs bunkering down on siege instead of fighting due to the scoring system, the game play becomes very stale very fast. In addition, no PPK should be given to siege damage on players to encourage players to learn to use their characters rather than be lazy and jump on an AC with a shield generator behind walls instead.

I’ve decided all match ups should only have one prime time player’s score count towards the total on each side, that way there can be no arguments about blobs or night capping affecting the score.

The scoring will start at 7pm (yes, just when the EU sits down to eat or feed the kids) and end at 9.30pm, just when the working adults can finally get some game time in.

This way we can each have some spotty cave dweller determine our score for us rather than those nasty nightcappers…

(the above is a joke).

I still think the ‘score once for capping, score a small amount for successful defence’ is the best solution with the cap score based on tier of objective and objective type. That way you could cap all four maps entirely overnight and 6 hours later when some enemies arrive the score will not have suddenly jumped up by 20k when literally no one was around.

Tweak that idea and test it out to settle on the points given, maybe have a very small tick so retaining things still matters.

Anvil.9230:

Hello,

WvW is a match.

The first principle of every organized match is equity in chances to win for all teams : Only collective and individual skills should make the decision.

That’s why they have a simple rule: same amount of players (football, soccer, rugby, basket….).
The only reason for a handball/football/rugby/etc. team to have less player than another is because of a penalty…and it’s always one of the biggest penalty because to play with less players is always consider as a huge disadvantage.

The particularity of the GW2 WvW is the length of the match (168 hours) and the size of the teams (up to 4×80=320 players according to my memory).
Teams have not the same amount of players to relay themselves on the field during the 168 hours and do not have an access to the same category of players (in term of time zone coverage specially in Europe with the mix of “national language based team” and “european teams”).

In fact Gw2 WvW organizes “asymmetric confrontation”…but does not manage enough that asymmetry.

This is unsatisfactory.

And what we call “night-capping” is only a symptom of that general situation.

I think you made a very good observation.

Weli.4568:

But do tell me what is this organization you are talking about, I’m interested.

what i meant was forcing even populations of players through out the different time zones and servers and restricting transfers so that no one side can gain a population advantage.

Probably the best solution is to make EOTM (the game mode, not necessarily the map) into sWvW; where people form and queue their squad before a match begins. The match would only exist while those teams are playing.

I think the core issue here is that there are players that want balanced/“sporty” game-play out of an inherently unbalanced game mode (open-world 24/7 pvp).

Dawdler.8521:

Jiminy.8340:

Dawdler.8521:

Jiminy.8340:

Diku.2546:

@OP

Let me join you in being silly…

Don’t forget that PPK needs to be lowered during peak times as they get more kills (due to more players) and thus makes it unfair! Also less badges received would make perfect sense.

Less badges recieved actually make zero sense, changes to the server scoring rules have nothing to do with badges.

PPK however do, so you’re actually right: PPK should be lower the more people are online. Just like max PPT should be lowered the less people are online.

But see, during ‘primetime’ there are more players online and thus a better chance of more kills. More kills means more loot. Thus, to make thing fair for the ‘night-cappers’ who don’t have that same chance to get a similar number of kills, it only makes sense to lower rewards during ‘primetime’. Have to make things fair!

Loot still doesnt have anything to do with the rules for server scores, no matter how much you think it does. More kills means more loot true. But it’s irrelevant.

With your argument, I can argue why I dont get any sPvP points and lootchests when I am playing WvW? I mean I could have played that. I was thinking about it. I should also get all the ori from an orr mining round too. Because that’s loot I would have gotten if I wasnt asleep. Oh and 3 precursors. I’m sure they meant to drop.

Your point is pointless. As long as killing 1 player or 1 NPC give the same exact chance for loot, killing 1000 or 10 is irrelevant. Everyone will be different. You kill what you kill, end of story. It doesnt unbalance the whole matchup system, unlike runaway PPT gains during low pop times.

So you don’t spend your badges on things like siege blueprints or traps/tricks? More badges means more of those. So unfair to those night-cappers!

Reverence.6915:

Terrahero.9358:

The drama and sheer exegeration in this thread. “If anet doesnt let me contribute 10x more because i play at night it means they think i am subhuman”.

What the actual kitten?

Nightcapping has been issue since day one, no time slot has more impact on determining the winner than the night slot. Adressing this issue to lessen the overwhelming impact of a few players during off-hours should’ve been done years ago.

Nightcapping is not going to be worthless, however you simply should not be the “Kingmakers” of WvW. Where all that matters is your work and everyone else is irrelevant.
Because that is the reality here that these nightbabies seem to ignore. Right now and for the past 3,5 years it has been the people playing during the day and prime time who have been made, to put it in your words “subhuman”. Because that 4k lead we etch out over the course of an evening of battle is dust in the wind compared to the 30k nightcapping wins back knocking down undefended keeps.

Depends if you’re in NA or EU. “Night capping” hasn’t been as much of an issue in NA compared to EU because NA has a greater diversity of players, except in the lower tiers before the mergers. Nowadays it shouldn’t be an issue at all except for the fairweather problem.

That’s completely false. “Imbalanced population time capping” has been an issue in NA since launch. I think it is one of the top factors in WvW’s decline. (I see you’re on BG so maybe you haven’t noticed it since NA T1 is a completely different animal than all other tiers). And the server combining didn’t solve the issue.

No amount of server combinations are going to be able to satisfactorily equalize populations 24 hours a day. So what’s left is scoring adjustments to mitigate the negative effects of unequal populations at different times of the day.

Johje Holan.4607:

No amount of server combinations are going to be able to satisfactorily equalize populations 24 hours a day. So what’s left is scoring adjustments to mitigate the negative effects of unequal populations at different times of the day.

Or, you know, getting some SEA/OCX folks on your server to fight the other SEA/OCX people doing you damage. I know it’s a weird idea – actually playing for 24 hours with multiple people on a 24×7 MMO.

I dont understand what people do not get about a points based on the amount of resistance you faced in earning those points. More resistance = more points.

The more fights and time it took to capture objectives the more score you get for capturing those objectives. This keeps everyones “time” worth the same and only scales on how many other people are around when you do it.

Of course, OCX players dont like this idea because they enjoy their outsized power now AND get to claim they are being abused. Some nice parallels to SJW cry-bullying.

Jiminy.8340:

Johje Holan.4607:

No amount of server combinations are going to be able to satisfactorily equalize populations 24 hours a day. So what’s left is scoring adjustments to mitigate the negative effects of unequal populations at different times of the day.

Or, you know, getting some SEA/OCX folks on your server to fight the other SEA/OCX people doing you damage. I know it’s a weird idea – actually playing for 24 hours with multiple people on a 24×7 MMO.

Recruiting is not the answer. It just moves around the imbalance.

There are not enough SEA/OCX players to spread out to every server. And trying to spread out equally is such a logistical nightmare that it is impossible. Additionally, SEA and OCX are completely different populations.

Therefore what you get is stacking. Some servers have a lot of SEA and/or OCX players, some have little.

Achieving 24 hour population balance is not possible across numerous servers. Therefore the only thing left is a mechanism to lessen the negative effects of the imbalance. I see three possibilities for this:

• Divide the day up into smaller segments and match the mini-segments together with other servers of like population. This is probably not possible either given the wide disparity of times that people play.

• Incentives to attack the strongest server. This may not be possible either since often the population imbalance is so great that no amount of incentive can make a difference.

• Scoring changes to mitigate the negative effects of the imbalance. This is the mechanism that I think has the greatest chance of success.

This is the issue with WvW and there is really only one real way to make it fair, but this would make a lot of people mad.

If you were in sPvP you want 5v5’s all the time, imagine if you only got 5v5 during primetime, but come nights, it was 2v5. It’s unfair for the team with 2 players.

The only real solution to WvW nightcapping is to make another queuing system.
If there are 10 enemies on enemy server, but you have 15 players, then the max number of players allowed from your server should be 11, and the rest enter a queue which pops when either the enemy gets another player, or one of your allies leaves.

This means all maps would be equal players throughtout the day and night, +/-1

But who wants that?!

displacedTitan.6897:

I dont understand what people do not get about a points based on the amount of resistance you faced in earning those points. More resistance = more points.

The more fights and time it took to capture objectives the more score you get for capturing those objectives. This keeps everyones “time” worth the same and only scales on how many other people are around when you do it.

Of course, OCX players dont like this idea because they enjoy their outsized power now AND get to claim they are being abused. Some nice parallels to SJW cry-bullying.

So let’s follow that reasoning. The zerg blob throws down 6 sup rams, downs the gate in seconds, kills the lord in 5, and as it doesn’t take long gets next to no reward.

The 5 man night capping team takes 5 minutes to get the gate down, another 5 minutes to kill the lord, and gets a huge reward?

Or 60 man zerg throws down 6 sup rams, wipes gate inside a minute, wipes the 40 man defence in seconds, collects loads of bags, wipes lord in seconds..does that count as ‘resistance’ for your score system?

Or let’s game the system at night, and go around attacking every object on the map but capturing none, then start slowly capping so it takes, say, 30 minutes to cap. Game records that it took 30 minutes to cap, must be worth a pile of points, right?

Points systems needs to be robust enough to prevent obvious gaming of the system, ‘time taken’ can be easily gamed.

The right solution is still based on ‘points once for cap dependent on tier’ then a very small trickle score for holding and a small amount for defending – so if you contest a keep with a WP, you are adding to the enemy score (might stop a lone thief being able to count as ‘under attack’).

You will find that most off hour players on NA don’t care about the score and just want people to play with/against. That’s why they generally move up to the higher tiers because there’s more action and nobody moves to T8 (or current T4) to PvDoor.

As long as scoring manages to group together servers with off hours coverage (eg. OCX→OCX and SEA→SEA; and not OCX→EU pvdooring each other) I’m happy. Fighting nothing is boringggggg.

You guys can have all the ppt you want as long as we get fights.

The only way i can think of making it work is to make caping objectives more rewarding doing off times but holding the objectives less rewarding. So during times of low pop. having active points becoming more important and passive points less important.

Keep in mind ppl who play during off times are part of the game too and should feel that there actions are doing something you cant simply “cut the game off when i am not on” and think its fair at any level.

Jiminy.8340:

So you don’t spend your badges on things like siege blueprints or traps/tricks? More badges means more of those. So unfair to those night-cappers!

So? Again, it has nothing to do with the server score.

The other day I spent ~15 superior catas and nearly 2 hours on trying to repeatedly get through a single T3 keep. At the end of that the enemy still held it and we got next to no badges to show for it.

Do nightcappers PvDing in the dead of night against near zero opposition do this? No. Yet you dont hear me crying about how unfair my fights are when people defend their keeps or zergs 5 times our size roll us.

Tyeme.6589:

I keep seeing people say that night capping or uncontested capping is somehow unfair or worth more points. It’s not. This is just a false argument.

The big zergs during primetime often run into undefended towers and keeps. They throw down 3-5 siege and are inside killing the lord inside 30 seconds…start to finish. Also, a lot of the big zergs spend time looking for other zergs for fights and seem to not care about the ppt, they just want fights.

At night, the groups are small and often capping upgraded keeps and towers. They build one, maybe two siege, often having to run back to camps to resupply to finish building. They bang away at the walls for 3-10 minutes, giving a lot of time for defenders to get into position. Taking a keep is a 10-30 minute ordeal which is often thwarted by 1 or 2 defenders.

…….

Some servers are organized and responsive during “primetime”, but their night crew all stick in EBG, don’t communicate and have no leadership. So, it seems to me these servers want Anet to skew the scoring to cover their deficiencies. They want the scoring to be worth more when they are more likely to dominate, and worth less when they are at their weakest. They scream long and loud to try to make this happen hoping the squeaky wheel gets the grease. It’s basically a “my game time should be worth more than their game time”.

If you don’t like the other servers flipping objectives at night, get organized at night, get some leadership at night, and get better coverage at night. Stop screaming at Anet that is unfair that when your not playing other people are and they should be punished for it.

^^ This. War =24 hours. I am prime time player but I did serve time on Farshiverpeaks (Miss you guys hugs) So I have been in both spots. Night capping or uncontested capping isn’t as easy as people make it sound and its often lonely. Not to mention it can feel like a job so if you don’t show up one night because of real life you feel like you let your serve down. Bottom line everyone should be able to play and have their time and effort mean as much as someone else’s. Now that Anet counts kills prim time players have an additional option to counter night capping by upping their kill rate, we didn’t always have this. Use the tools we have more effectively.

Johje Holan.4607:

Jiminy.8340:

Johje Holan.4607:

No amount of server combinations are going to be able to satisfactorily equalize populations 24 hours a day. So what’s left is scoring adjustments to mitigate the negative effects of unequal populations at different times of the day.

Or, you know, getting some SEA/OCX folks on your server to fight the other SEA/OCX people doing you damage. I know it’s a weird idea – actually playing for 24 hours with multiple people on a 24×7 MMO.

Recruiting is not the answer. It just moves around the imbalance.

There are not enough SEA/OCX players to spread out to every server. And trying to spread out equally is such a logistical nightmare that it is impossible. Additionally, SEA and OCX are completely different populations.

Therefore what you get is stacking. Some servers have a lot of SEA and/or OCX players, some have little.

Achieving 24 hour population balance is not possible across numerous servers. Therefore the only thing left is a mechanism to lessen the negative effects of the imbalance. I see three possibilities for this:

• Divide the day up into smaller segments and match the mini-segments together with other servers of like population. This is probably not possible either given the wide disparity of times that people play.

• Incentives to attack the strongest server. This may not be possible either since often the population imbalance is so great that no amount of incentive can make a difference.

• Scoring changes to mitigate the negative effects of the imbalance. This is the mechanism that I think has the greatest chance of success.

This

Just delete all the servers and recreate them, then we will really get to see if we do not have enough coverage to go around. While at it, create a algorithm that analyse historical records of the players and determine their wvw timing, then set a shared dynamic server cap base on actual wvw timing instead of simple max cap. A dynamic server cap where if the highest server and the lowest server disparity grow too much, it will close the highest server until the disparity reduced.

Currently, the population have been stacked at particular servers over the years. People are not gonna move if you tell them to move, why should they even pay to move anyway?

Dawdler.8521:

Jiminy.8340:

So you don’t spend your badges on things like siege blueprints or traps/tricks? More badges means more of those. So unfair to those night-cappers!

So? Again, it has nothing to do with the server score.

The other day I spent ~15 superior catas and nearly 2 hours on trying to repeatedly get through a single T3 keep. At the end of that the enemy still held it and we got next to no badges to show for it.

Do nightcappers PvDing in the dead of night against near zero opposition do this? No. Yet you dont hear me crying about how unfair my fights are when people defend their keeps or zergs 5 times our size roll us.

You’re complaining about ‘night-cappers’ impacting the score and decrying how unfair it is to those servers without such a presence. I’m giving examples of other unfair mechanics that work against those same ‘night-cappers’. If the crux of the issue is ‘night-cappers’, then everything associated with them needs to be looked at – not just the scoreline. If the crux of the issue is the scoreline, get player presence to bolster your off hours.

If you’re of the opinion that actually recruiting SEA/OCX players isn’t viable, someone best tell the current tier 1 servers who have full maps during prime time and a large presence in the off hour also. Seems to work for them.