Guild Wars 2

Tekyn.5376:

Scaling PPT based on time held would allow outpopulated servers to ‘bunker’ inside the objectives they already control and still gain enough War Score points to be competitive.

Scaling the PPT would also add a new dynamic to the match in that objectives that have been held for a long time become ‘high value’ targets. To lose one could significantly alter the outcome of the match.

If you are bunkering inside your own keep, then so are your enemies. Except they are also holding your other objectives and scoring off them as well.

Your solution would create a larger point gap than is possible now…

Doing the opposite could work though. The longer an objective is held by your enemy, the more points you can earn from taking it back.

So whilst an enemy gains a point advantage by scoring more points, they put themselves at risk if their coverage drops.

John,

Do you have match data where you can use one or more of the scoring ideas to compare the current score totals to what it would be under the proposed changes?

Sube Dai.8496:

Tekyn.5376:

Scaling PPT based on time held would allow outpopulated servers to ‘bunker’ inside the objectives they already control and still gain enough War Score points to be competitive.

Scaling the PPT would also add a new dynamic to the match in that objectives that have been held for a long time become ‘high value’ targets. To lose one could significantly alter the outcome of the match.

If you are bunkering inside your own keep, then so are your enemies. Except they are also holding your other objectives and scoring off them as well.

Your solution would create a larger point gap than is possible now…

Doing the opposite could work though. The longer an objective is held by your enemy, the more points you can earn from taking it back.

So whilst an enemy gains a point advantage by scoring more points, they put themselves at risk if their coverage drops.

The point I was making was in response to John’s question regarding 24 coverage. A server could defend/bunker when their numbers are low then push out and capture when their numbers are high.

Obviously, it could create large point gaps but it could also reduce them as well.

As I stated at the end of my post it is not the end all suggestion to fix everything in WvW. It is simply a suggestion to fix the mechanics of PvD that feed the population problem.

Zaxares.5419:

Oh, and to hire the Giant, they need lots and lots of Badges of Honor.

Adding some sort of defensive ‘Break Out’ event sounds like a great idea. 50k Karma + 1000 badges and Siegerazer will spawn inside your keep for 10 minutes.

Balance the point system is just one thing. 1-2 hours of boredom of pvd to get in an upgraded object is an other thing

There should be some sort of handicap system based on WvW population at each tick (and not including EOTM).

give ppt for kills instead of structures. Add something else to towers / keeps to make them worthwhile having. (buffs, sups generation or whatever).

I too think the outnumbered buff has to be reworked in some manner to give advantages to smaller population servers.

If ANY borderland is overloaded with one teams players, the costs of all upgrades siege and the like should increase significantly. The supply goes to feeding all those extra bellies if you would.

I like the idea of breaking the day into segments yet at the same time do not like the PREDICTABLE nature of such. This the same issue I had with the PPT timer wherein zergs would rush another borderland just in time to flip objectives for the timer and then leave.

So perhaps a randomized system can be used where rather then 3 fixed segments of 8 hours one could have as many as 8 segments in a day some as short as 2 hours and some as long as 8 with NO way the players can predict how long a given segment will last.

So day one of a tourney you might have 8 segments. (You might have 6 in the day or 4 no one can know) Randomized each segment worth the same number of points.

The scoring for PPT would be more or less the same as now but those points do not carry over segment to segment. Rather flat points awarded for 1st second and 3rd and those are the points carried over through the day and rest of the given matchup.

As example.

12-3 AM segment one point winner gets 5 points (3 second ) (1 Third)
3 to 7 AM segment two point winner gets 5 points (3 second) (1 third)
7 Am to 12 pm segment three
12 PM to 5 pm ….and so on until the day filled and another reset occurs with another series of random length segments.

The only inkling one will get of how long a given segment is would be a timer coming up saying “5 minutes left”

Each day the length of the segments will vary at any given time period. This should in theory (and i welcome debate) help minimize off hours coverage advantages that some servers have and others do not.

It my opinion this will make taking and holding an objective much more important then just flipping it and moving on.

it would also help keep up player morale (the snowballing) because they just have to win the next segment as in “Ok guys that was a 3 hour segment we lost..but we have more people now and a new one starts maybe we can win this one”. A player that might have only 3 hours to give in a day can help towards winning a segment if s/he happens to be in one that lasts that long. There less of that hopeless feeling of “no matter what I do they got a 80k lead and it will only grow overnight , I am not going to even bother” . With unfixed length of time segments when wednesday night rolls around you can look at the score and still see a chance of winning a few before reset night.

BrunoBRS.5178:

weird idea popped in my head:

what if the overall point value of structures was relative to how many points you have VS the total amount of points in the match up?

say for example, we have 3 servers, A, B and C. A has 150k points, B has 100k, and C has 50k. the total tally is 300k points. so if a structure is worth, say, 30 points baseline, in this system it could (easy to follow theoretical values for brainstorming’s sake) translate to:

• A: 30 x (300k/150k) = 60ppt
• B: 30 x (300k/100k) = 90ppt
• C: 30 x (300k/50k) = 180ppt

this would translate to unfairly populated teams scoring more until the score evens out. balanced match ups wouldn’t be affected because they all would have similar multipliers, whereas skewed match ups (be it a population or a coverage problem) are dynamically corrected the more skewed the points get.

this doesn’t mean covering off hours becomes less important, because even though you’ll be scoring significantly less if you own everything and are far ahead, letting the other team capture points during the off hour times could rocket them past you if unchecked.

of course, the numbers i showed might not be the best example, but the core concept is there.

TL;DR: a dynamic ppt readjustment based on the total tally VS individual scores.

Personally I like this system – cause it doesn’t force the day to be broken up into timezones (since some servers are stronger in some and weaker in others), but it still accounts for coverage disparity (ie the 24hr gameplay cycle of WvW & score snowballing).

Anybody out there willing to critique / play devils advocate with Bruno’s train of thought here?

To help with population imbalance, have an option similar to the current ‘volunteer to move out of map to receive a temporary buff’ to instead a sort of ‘hire PvErs to help in WvW’ where you queue an upgrade in the keep for gold/karma. Then all the PvE players on your server get the option to warp into WvW to do a certain quest like ‘capture stonemist’ and at the end they get a big chest for participating (smaller reward for not capturing it within time limit).

Another idea is ‘job boards’ where you pick a certain job in WvW and if you complete the task you get loot bags/rewards.

Overall, I think increasing the rewards and increasing the amount of dynamic events that occur in WvW would provide more of an incentive for all players on a server to participate.

I like the addition of the Siege Disablers, however there needs to be more of a counter on them than just reflects. It’s hard to plan for a reflect when they can effect things through gates. Perhaps a stacking buff on disabled siege that results in immunity from the disabler when x number of stacks are reached.

Adjusting the score is nothing but a crutch to make it look like servers can compete. It does absolutely nothing for the actual state of WvW. No amount of score tweaking will make the 3 against 30 problem go away. Do people really want to win because every point they make is worth 20x the amount of the opponent’s? I see no satisfaction in that.

coverage/population imbalance:

Another mechanism to approach the problem that servers with good coverage “run away” too fast would be to erase the lowest third of the tick ppt scores per day per server.

Currently in a 24 hour time period there are 96 ticks. For every server the worst 32 tick point results (the points earned in the 15 minute period of the tick) are erased. Only the remaining 64 “best ticks” remain for the score.

A server with great coverage loses more points than a server who cannot cover all times, giving them a better chance to fight back.

A modification would be to count stomps/player kills seperately (no deleting of points here). Reason for that would be that a server with lower coverage offers less opportunities for the more populous server to get stomp points because there are less potential victims to stomp on.

You should remove or turn off or change the WvW score if it is not during the Tournament season because it does not help anything, or change it from seven days to two days or three days and have a relax (no fighting) day. WvW score makes everyone feel stressed and hardcore players have to worry about the competition all the time.

I think seven days is too long for the wars. Most players are busy and they have no time to play together, moreover, EotM too large to play as WvW. That is why EotM was really boring (not popular) for me and hardcore players.

I like the idea of dividing the day, and also the ones proposed in the video at the start of the thread.

What I would also like is to give some relevance to EotM, it’s such a cool map, that I feel shouldn’t just end up being a massive farm, neglecting all the interesting stuff that it has.

I really like two suggestions: switching to time slots — whoever wins within time slot, wins points. And preferably to only give points for flipping objective or defending to the point where certain damage/ circle up state is reached.

Biggest issue would be re-taking back after “total night wipe”. For servers with uneven population playtime allocation, it can be difficult to come back to everything being flipped and upgraded. Re-setting probably wouldn’t work as this would bring regular wvw too close to Edge of the Mists. However, there could be a buff or NPC helpers available for those who got severely outnumbered/out-upgraded.

So if your server lost everything to night crew of opponents, when you come back you get bonus SiegeRazers that go to many different towers and/or get additional NPC fighters/ mobile yak supply to help out with re-taking objectives.

Assigning points only for flipping/severe attack defense would probably encourage people in night crews to move/play against servers that do have night crews (as it’d be “no points most of the time” type of deal)

John Corpening.9847:

• How do we make play time in off hours valuable without blowing out the score?

I think it’s not fair to “off hours” players to refer to them as “off hours” players. Language like that carries with it the implication that, as players, they should be treated differently from “prime time” players. There shouldn’t be a class system for GW2 based on the time zone you play in.

Everyone who plays GW2 WvW should be respected as a WvW player, not an “off hours” player. Maybe to a heavy NA (North American) population SEA (South-East Asian) or OCE (Oceanic) or EU (European) prime times are “off hours” but to many of the people who play during those times it’s their prime time. That’s when they get home from work or school, that’s when their guilds and friends play, that’s when their rivals play. To them “off hours” is simply “hours”. WvW to those players is more important during “off hours” than “prime time” is because they play during “off hours”.

The entire premise that “off hours” scoring is a problem is rooted in the idea that WvW should revolve around NA hours (or EU hours in the case of EU servers). It’s NA/EU-centric thinking (unsurprising since many players are from those time zones and ArenaNet themselves are NA) and it’s not inclusive of other times zones as though players from those times are equal.

The problem of population differences and score blow-outs is not an “off hours” issue, it’s a core WvW issue. As an example, imagine if Yak’s Bend has 400 active WvW players every day during NA hours and their opposition Sanctum of Rall only has 100 and Borlis Pass only has 15 active players. Obviously Yak’s Bend will win NA hours. But what if Yak’s Bend only has 15 OCE/SEA players and Borlis Pass has 400 active OCE/SEA players? From the perspective of a Borlis Pass player, Yak’s Bend is PvDooring all their keeps and blowing out the PPT during “off hours”.

Scoring problems are a symptom of the population problem, not an “off-hours” problem.

John Corpening.9847:

• Snowballing
  • How do we give worlds a fighting chance throughout the duration of the match?

Balance the population. This is primarily a population problem, not a scoring algorithm problem. Snowballing isn’t primarily a case of “we give up, we are too far behind” it’s the simple reality that even servers within the same tier are often dramatically mismatched in terms of population and that more players means a higher score, less players means a lower score and current WvW design gives lots of benefits to dominating servers (upgrades is one of them). In almost every match up the outcome is predetermined by population and players know this. Most servers aren’t racing for second or third place, they are just finishing the race each week because they know they can’t win – match ups are too imbalanced.

There is truth to the point that snowballing makes your opposition less competitive than it would be in an easier match for them. Fair weather players are a big factor in WvW – some players will queue up one or two maps daily during easy match ups (when everything is essentially a karma train) but during difficult match ups those maps will constantly be outmanned because WvW becomes an uphill challenge for them.

I don’t think anything ArenaNet does will solve any of these issues until the population issue is solved. The scoring system isn’t bad, the population imbalance is what’s bad. I do think some band aid improvements or adjustments could improve the quality of life for losing servers.

• Give the home BL keep a WP for the home server without requiring an upgrade. That WP makes the home BL much more friendly to play on and in really bad matches, not having it heavily contributes to the snowballing effect for the opposing server.
• Don’t charge for objective upgrades on home BL or a server’s third of EB, at least not until T3. Losing servers simply don’t have the numbers to defend objectives and so most of the time objectives are constantly paper, making them easy targets for karma trains. Upgrading them is time intense and incredibly frustrating for bankrollers and yak escorts when they get flipped with no defence (because coverage is bad), which turns away players from ever upgrading things or, on paper maps, playing at all. Some servers have players happy to bankroll upgrades, really privileged servers have the population to actively defend upgrades. Losing servers simply don’t and it really hurts their competitiveness (and makes them easy targets). If towers and keeps would automatically begin an upgrade without it being ordered or paid for, even losing servers would gain a passive defensive bonus that winning servers enjoy. You still need to defend (or you lose something that upgraded over time and go back to paper objectives).
• Turn camps into hybrids of yak escorts from current WvW and supply depots from EotM. Holding a camp will slowly deliver supply to towers and keeps with a supply drop, but escorting yaks will build more supply. This ensures that a heavily populated server can’t destroy all the supply of a less populated server with a single yak slapper, but it also preserves the role of a yak slapper and yak escorts.
• Stack the value of PPT on home BL and a server’s third of EB. One of the issues with “off hours” population imbalances is that most servers (especially losing ones) can’t protect (or attack) multiple maps. Giving a heavy PPT incentive for them to protect their home map will centralise the player base (giving them other players to play with) and they don’t miss out on as much by not being able to PPT enemy BL’s as long as they can hold their own.

TeamBattleAxe.3901:

Here’s a proposal I pieced together from several ideas posted by forum users:
(exactly one year ago! o_O)

http://youtu.be/qHcO6Xo8eJ8

Server “pairing” is a terrible idea. If you want to merge servers, just merge them, but temporary pairing makes communication, planning, coordination across guilds and maps, and several other important parts of WvW nearly impossible, and puts WvW into permanent “EtoM-style” casual mode.

One of the things I feel that is lacking with WvW is the possibility of a comeback.

In all good sports one side can dominate the match but there is always the chance that the losing side can score 3 or 4 quick goals and win the match.

This can never happen with the current scoring system…

What may help is if the emphasis was placed on captures rather than PPT.

So you would drastically increase the value of capturing an objective, and greatly reduce the points from holding an objective. You would still want it to give you an advantage, to encourage the winning side to hold on to it, but the losing side still needs some sort of way of turning the tide in the final hours/day of the match.

Maybe that is in the form of capturing SMC or an enemy Garri. If the winning sides are far ahead on points all they have to do is hold their garri. But likewise the losing side still has a chance if they can mount one massive offensive and cap the garri before the match ends.

TheFamster.7806:

For stagnation, it is the fault in match making and lack of people playing wvw. Since you have removed almost all farms for pve people, increase the drop rate of something for killing players in wvw so that people will come do wvw even just for the reward.

Please do not turn WvW into a loot-farming area.

@ John

On the first one, most people play for one of 3 reasons.
1: Badges of honor
2: World XP
or
3: Fun

And the definition of “down time” can vary widely by server as many have people who play on servers not based in their area of the world.
My best suggestion would be to create more events that can be done by single players or groups that actually have an impact on the game.
(Take the harpy event outside AC for instance, what if there was something similar which when completed gave your guards a temporary damage or damage resistance buff ?.
Or what if there were more legendary monsters in the game & we could make them get kittened off at our enemies thus making them go on a rampage in enemy controlled areas.

On the second & third question, the answer is quite simply to do away with ranking by servers.
The amount of people who do WvW on any given server can fluctuate & vary widely even within servers pitted against each other.

To fix this problem you should instead create an alliance based system, allow players to chose the alliance they belong to (after the first they would need to pay to join another unless kicked & can only belong to one at a time).
Split the alliances into divisions based upon their size & put a cap on how big the maximum size is to prevent bloating.
This also creates a larger number of groups for each division thus preventing groups from getting pitted against each other as often.

The Issue of making it possible for comebacks is more complicated however.
It would need to be something that cannot be exploited by the winning side.
It would also need to be something that would not be exploited by both sides in order to generate more karma, WXP & loot.
This narrows the options a bit & the options are even further diminished unless you go with an alliance system as I suggested above because then you could end up with small pop un coordinated worlds accidentally being placed up against groups that would dominate them horribly.

John Corpening.9847:

• Add score for kills

I think pretty much everyone seems to be in favor of something like this. 1 point for Kills, 2-3 points for Stomps (with Bloodlust), or some variation. It honestly won’t do much to solve problems caused by population imbalance, but I think people would generally enjoy it more.

John Corpening.9847:

• Consider adjusting score based on placement

Let’s try to stay away from solutions that revolve around the “Reward servers who suck at WvW” theme. I know, everyone likes to assume that the ONLY difference between any 2 servers in this game is population, but if populations ever start to balance out, then this type of scoring will truly become a reward for bad WvW play.

John Corpening.9847:

• Adjust score of objectives based on upgrade level

This actually favors stacked servers, imo, and also favors servers with better off-hours coverage. I like the idea of rewarding players/servers who upgrade their structures, but this will actually make the score disparity WORSE, imo.

Otokomae.9356:

John Corpening.9847:

• Add score for kills

I think pretty much everyone seems to be in favor of something like this. 1 point for Kills, 2-3 points for Stomps (with Bloodlust), or some variation. It honestly won’t do much to solve problems caused by population imbalance, but I think people would generally enjoy it more.

John Corpening.9847:

• Consider adjusting score based on placement

Let’s try to stay away from solutions that revolve around the “Reward servers who suck at WvW” theme. I know, everyone likes to assume that the ONLY difference between any 2 servers in this game is population, but if populations ever start to balance out, then this type of scoring will truly become a reward for bad WvW play.

John Corpening.9847:

• Adjust score of objectives based on upgrade level

This actually favors stacked servers, imo, and also favors servers with better off-hours coverage. I like the idea of rewarding players/servers who upgrade their structures, but this will actually make the score disparity WORSE, imo.

I can actually see all 3 working.

But only if they do away with “Servers” and instead go with something like alliances which have smaller caps placed upon their numbers.

That’s because it would ensure no server is winning because they simply outnumber the other to the point they can run right over them.

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

Otokomae.9356:

John Corpening.9847:

• Add score for kills

I think pretty much everyone seems to be in favor of something like this. 1 point for Kills, 2-3 points for Stomps (with Bloodlust), or some variation. It honestly won’t do much to solve problems caused by population imbalance, but I think people would generally enjoy it more.

John Corpening.9847:

• Consider adjusting score based on placement

Let’s try to stay away from solutions that revolve around the “Reward servers who suck at WvW” theme. I know, everyone likes to assume that the ONLY difference between any 2 servers in this game is population, but if populations ever start to balance out, then this type of scoring will truly become a reward for bad WvW play.

John Corpening.9847:

• Adjust score of objectives based on upgrade level

This actually favors stacked servers, imo, and also favors servers with better off-hours coverage. I like the idea of rewarding players/servers who upgrade their structures, but this will actually make the score disparity WORSE, imo.

I can actually see all 3 working.

But only if they do away with “Servers” and instead go with something like alliances which have smaller caps placed upon their numbers.

That’s because it would ensure no server is winning because they simply outnumber the other to the point they can run right over them.

If you make a system in which everyone has relatively equal numbers, then “* Consider adjusting score based on placement” becomes completely pointless.

phys.7689:

break the 24 hour periods into 3 rounds
win two rounds, you win the day
win 4 days you win the match

this way, one 8 hour shift cant win you the day. 2 however can, but i think if you lose two timeslots, then ehhhhh you lost that day.

soo now there would need to be a reason to play when you are getting blown out.
hmmm

Honestly, this doesn’t solve any of the ‘problems’ mentioned in the OP.

24 hours coverage: NA prime time would only account of 1 of the 3 8-hour slots. So no matter how you do in NA, it can still be overridden by whoever wins the other 2 slots.

Snowballing: the match can literally be absolutely decided after 4 days. Even if the PPT scores would actually be close enough to allow a comeback. And a single day can be decided after 2 8-hour slots: if it is, there’s no point in playing in the 3rd slot at all.

Stagnation: basically, the same things as said in snowballing.

My own opinions:

Snowballing/stagnation: Neither of these things are symptoms of the PPT scoring system. Both are simply because the matches last a whole week. Let’s imagine this is a basketball game (which lasts 40 mins, in 4 quarters). Team A manages to take a 70 point lead in the first half. Whereas it is technically possible for Team B to come back in the second half, it’s extremely unlikely, since Team A is probably much better than them, to have been so dominant in the first half. To have a fighting chance in the second half, Team B needed to give themselves that chance in the first half. The same applies to WvW – you have one whole week to get your server points and put yourselves in the lead; if you fail to do so early on, then yes, you will have very little chance to actually win later. Note that, due to reset and the weekend, there is generally far greater player participation in the first half of the week anyway, so it would be a bad idea to make the second half of the week somehow more decisive.

The week-long match also influences stagnation: Team B in our basketball game only had to keep trying to win for a further 20 mins, which, although it might have been almost impossible, was well within the bounds of human mental fortitude. A losing server has to continue playing for an entire week, which, quite frankly, gets boring. And a basketball game only happens every so often… WvW happens all week, every week without fail. Even if you shorten the matches, WvW would still be going on every day.

24 hour scoring: here, I have a solution. Designate the bottom few Tiers of servers as “NA-Prime” (or EU-Prime), while the top few Riers would be “International.” Offer some free transfers, and make it so points in “off-hours” count for less in the Prime servers. That way, players from OCX/SEA/etc would have a place where their contributions could count. Which would simply assist the situation at the moment, where “off hours” players are concentrated in the top few servers anyway.

My suggestion about live scoring compensation which I posted few days ago to separate thread can be found here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Suggestion-Scoring-compensation-tick/first#post4465686

Also would probably add some value to border maps north towers/camps and reduce it from southern ones. Same in EB but just for towers so that the ones closest 2 spawn would be more valuable and the ones closer to SM would be less valuable.

The goal of this format is to:
- Make it possible to fight against more numbers with less numbers (world population differences)
- Make defending meaningful even it would be just delaying the capture.
- Make offensive payout greater with less numbers attacking (harder cap = more points).
- Make defensive payout greater with less numbers defending (harder to defend = more points).
- Make it worth splitting the zerks among the maps rather than all guilds running on same map.
- Making small groups have stronger impact to overall scoring if not taken care of (camps).

TeamBattleAxe.3901:

Here’s a proposal I pieced together from several ideas posted by forum users:
(exactly one year ago! o_O)

http://youtu.be/qHcO6Xo8eJ8

I like this proposal. I also proposed something similar here

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Solution-to-fix-the-population-imbalance/page/15#post4446396

and to further improve scoring I would add:

Each match would contribute to an overall alliance score and the highest scoring alliance would win the week. In the event of a tie winner would be decided by comparing total points of all matches.

• Winning a match (for example: [Tier 1] match) = 1 point to the alliance <— this is like winning a battle

• Most matches won (for example: winning tier 1 to tier 5 matches gives that alliance 5 out of 8 possible points) = That alliance wins the week <— this is like winning a war

You could further dilute coverage advantage by having short 6 or 3 hour matches instead of week long matches while having a big reward for winning the most matches in a week

Claudius.5381:

coverage/population imbalance:

Another mechanism to approach the problem that servers with good coverage “run away” too fast would be to erase the lowest third of the tick ppt scores per day per server.

Currently in a 24 hour time period there are 96 ticks. For every server the worst 32 tick point results (the points earned in the 15 minute period of the tick) are erased. Only the remaining 64 “best ticks” remain for the score.

A server with great coverage loses more points than a server who cannot cover all times, giving them a better chance to fight back.

A modification would be to count stomps/player kills seperately (no deleting of points here). Reason for that would be that a server with lower coverage offers less opportunities for the more populous server to get stomp points because there are less potential victims to stomp on.

So, each server keeps their 64 “Best” Ticks, is that what you’re saying? Because that makes score gaps caused by coverage vastly worse than they are now! A server with 8 hours of massive coverage that their opponents don’t have might tick @ +500 several times during off-hours, while during NA, if even 2 of the 3 servers have decent coverage, it would be nearly impossible for any of the servers to match that +500 tick. This system greatly favors servers with better 24/7 coverage.

Bottom feeding is a thing. Would love to see the first place server be worth more points to encourage the other two servers to go there. A couple of times the race for first has been more about who can beat up third the most. Be nice if defending was worth while more, somehow too.

Not exactly scoring, but yeah, having waypoints automatically on the home BL keeps would be a welcome change for the lower pop/off hour servers.

Without putting in a ton of thought into attempting to make Points in WvW make sense and prevent run away matches in the least balanced and least updated aspect of the game..

hmm..

well i can at least throw this out there for someone else to maybe run with.

Server gains no points on a tick for any camp/tower/keep/etc in which the Lord value NPC has the Invulnerability Buff

I would also throw in some division of points gained on capture of an item based on the number of players in the “area” (taking part in the event, not just standing in the capture circle.) maybe something along the lines of ..

Base Score for Cap / Players participated | Result x Current Server Standing (1 for first, two for second, 3 for third) equates Points gained for server.

in action a 3rd place server that caps a supply camp with 5 players would look like this.

50 / 5 is 10. 10 × 3 is 30 – the server gains 30 points.

if the first place server caps with 10 players afterwards they only gain 5 points.

This can change the Lower end into a Cap to Catch up whilst High end (first place) is a battle of attrition on holding for PPT.

Flipping camps and such becomes massively less profitable the further in the lead you get with some maths and adjustments to the formula. Plus not having PPT on things recently capped aids to put a shorter leash on Potential run away match ups.

at least in theory..

I have a further question about split several scoring periods, I do think this is a good way to make off-peak periods more competitive, but is it still need 4 maps? because most servers don’t even have so large population to fill one map during off-peak time, and what we seeing now is people avoid to meet each other for easy cap and ppt, that’s a main reason why off-peak hours have to be fixed.

Dear John,

The answer to these questions were done in great detail at least 6, 9, 12 months ago by players who were at that time passionate about WvW and left long, carefully thought out posts. Some of those players had a history of playing other games such as DAoC and Warhammer (which were the predecessors to WvW.) The posts contained a great deal of analysis and reasonable suggestions.

Unfortunately most of those players have been driven off both by the moderators and by the game itself (lack of attention and communication in the area these players most cared about.)

The suggestions you will receive now, will probably for the most part, not be as robust as they would have been previously.

I would encourage someone from ANet to dust off the archived threads (at least those that have not been removed.) There’s a wealth of data there just ready to be mined.

We’ve been asked these questions before.

-Slapped in the face with this thread

Meta-suggestion:

First, before implementing, stop and think about the different groups of players you care about, who it’s most important to retain as customers and who you’re willing to alienate. Then think about whatever is proposed, from the point of view of each of those groups, and get a sense of who’s going to blow all over the boards and who’s going to leave as a result of the changes.

Second, put a red team to work. No matter what you choose, the players will figure out how to optimize play for it (and possibly how to exploit it) by the time it’s been live a few days. Have some smart people figure out what the min-maxers will do, and what the exploiters will do, before it goes live.

Third, the real problem is that the ready availability of transfers, together with the unwillingness to do server merges, inevitably results in population imbalances. This in retrospect fatally flawed combination is really the cause of today’s problems in WvW; the scoring system is secondary and while it might mitigate some of the issue it is a tail which cannot wag the dog.

Looking at the suggestions made above, I would lean toward those which favor the underdog, that is, make the outnumbered buff more robust and reward the successes of an outnumbered team richly. Might even make it more fun to be on a low pop realm, which would be a very strong restoring force toward balancing the servers. That having been said, I guarantee any such mechanic is entirely exploitable, particularly by a realm as disciplined as Season 2’s winners were, who could cause everyone to “take a break” (log off or go to a different map) while a SWAT team finished taking an objective, doubling or tripling the reward. Whatever mechanism is designed must be resistant to manipulation and exploits.

What I would propose would be rather more sweeping than a simple scoring-system change, but ties in so closely to it that I feel it necessary to explain the whole system. I will note, I don’t actually know the capabilities of the game to track certain information, so some or all of this may be impossible.

First, although on its own it would be unlikely to fix any issues and may even exacerbate some (such as snowballing), providing point-rewards for player kills in general would open up a lot of space to play with the balance of the rewards system in order to incentivize certain things. My proposal would be to grant one point per killed player, cumulative with the Bloodlust point in the event of a stomp.

Though, as I stated, this could exacerbate the snowball effect, I believe with some work the numbers could be manipulated to actually work against the same. For example (without any assurance that this is the optimal way to balance the numbers), in the event that your population is outnumbered 2:1, all players in the outnumbered server receive an Outmanned buff, changed at least so much as to include a x2 multiplier for killed players. Note that this would not apply to the Bloodlust point. Furthermore, if a population is outnumbered 3:1, a different buff takes the place of the aforementioned, which includes a stat boost and a x4 multiplier for killed players, also not applying to the Bloodlust point.

This scoring could also be used to incentivize defense at least somewhat. A similar multiplication to the above could be applied to all player-kills that took place within a certain (small, range definitely </= 1200) range of a control-point owned by your server. For example, killing someone anywhere in your tower or within 800-1200 range of any walkable surface of it or in it(not bound by LoS) would award 2 points rather than 2. Of course, another major part of the strong incentivization towards aggression is greatly improved loot, and so perhaps bag drop-chance within the same region could be increased by a factor of 1.25-1.5. Of course, this would make defending against rams more profitable than defending against trebuchets, so perhaps this could be corrected by applying a similar or identical bonus to kills made within a certain range (probably 1200) of a siege weapon that has damaged a structure owned by your server within a certain amount of time previous. As well, all of the above could theoretically be used to also add an additional bonus to defending a location owned by your guild specifically, which would serve to further incentivize guild-claiming, and, more importantly, to incentivize medium-sized structured groups to detach themselves from the main zerg without as much decrease in rewards or impact.

The scoring system would likely want to be changed for the holding of points as well. My suggestion would be to score control-points based both on type and time held. Specifically, my suggestion would be to score points in a logistic fashion based on how many update-ticks the point has been held by that server. On the first update tick since gaining control of the structure, the server gains 20-40% the current base points of the structure-type. Every tick thereafter, this percentage increases in a logistic fashion, capping somewhere around 160% per tick after perhaps 4 hours(16 ticks), the percentage reaching 100% somewhere in the 1.5-2 hour range. While this on the surface looks like it might exacerbate snowballing, I would claim it would have the opposite effect: First, strongly outmatched servers could retreat to their most fortified position and gain points at an accelerated rate for as long as they could defend it, both in terms of the points gained by that site and in terms of the above player-kill points. Second, these same servers could also greatly reduce the points-gap caused by the unevenness by attacking relatively-undefended locations. This would require the leading server to either split its forces (and thus reduce their attacking front, allowing the trailing server to repair and regroup), or suffer a significant penalty in incoming points from those structures attacked.

Finally, one might consider making points awarded for holding structures scale with map-population, and with whether your server was outnumbered significantly, higher total populations and lower population shares each increasing the total points-output by some multiplicative factor. This would serve to decrease the impact of off-hours without mitigating it, in addition to, again, giving some advantage to severely outnumbered servers.

First: if you’re planning in changing the population distribution and/or matchmaking strategies, the issues about scoring might go away by themselves, so it’s maybe premature to talk about this.

Back when I submitted my proposal for an Eventful WvW I suggested that the score could have been split between holding objectives and the results of the active events. That way, flipping and holding keeps in empty maps would reward a lot less points, let me quote myself here:

Menaka.5092:

From a scoring system point of view, linking the results of the events (including the scaling!) with the score would help balancing the night capping and point-per-tick system: structures that see no attacks for a long time will provide less points in the same timeframe than those that are heavily contested: successfully defending T1 towers could probably give more points in time than a fully sieged T3 keep that no one dares attacking.

With a scoring system based on active play (both from an attacking and defending perspectives) instead than passive “holding” objectives, the scores would be a lot closer between servers, even assuming big population imbalances, so the comebacks would be easier.

Otokomae.9356:

Claudius.5381:

coverage/population imbalance:

Another mechanism to approach the problem that servers with good coverage “run away” too fast would be to erase the lowest third of the tick ppt scores per day per server.

Currently in a 24 hour time period there are 96 ticks. For every server the worst 32 tick point results (the points earned in the 15 minute period of the tick) are erased. Only the remaining 64 “best ticks” remain for the score.

A server with great coverage loses more points than a server who cannot cover all times, giving them a better chance to fight back.

A modification would be to count stomps/player kills seperately (no deleting of points here). Reason for that would be that a server with lower coverage offers less opportunities for the more populous server to get stomp points because there are less potential victims to stomp on.

So, each server keeps their 64 “Best” Ticks, is that what you’re saying? Because that makes score gaps caused by coverage vastly worse than they are now! A server with 8 hours of massive coverage that their opponents don’t have might tick @ +500 several times during off-hours, while during NA, if even 2 of the 3 servers have decent coverage, it would be nearly impossible for any of the servers to match that +500 tick. This system greatly favors servers with better 24/7 coverage.

No. Simplified example with only 3 ticks:

Big server A: 500, 350, 380

Small server B: 110, 200, 180

Even smaller server C: 80, 140, 130

Currently the scores would be:

A: 1,230, B: 490, C: 350

My proposal would lead to:

A: 880, B: 380, C: 270

As you see the gaps are smaller. And I chose an extreme example with a very strong server A and 2 very weak servers (in these cases my proposal helps the least because these weak servers in the example are weak during all 3 ticks).

Add this here to.

Remake score system:
T0 (Paper) you get 0points for buildings both capping and owning.
T1 33% points for buildings both capping and owning.
T2 66% points for buildings both capping and owning.
T3 100% points for buildings both capping and owning.
1 Tear is Reinforced gate and walls, 1tear Fortify, 1tear (Mortar tower) (Waypoint Keep/SM). (for supply camp T1 2 first upgrades and then 1 T ever on second row.

If you want it in points, camp 0, 3, 6, 10, Tower 0, 5, 10, 15, Keep 0, 10, 20, 30 SM 0, 15, 25, 40

And then the most important part is that if your server have buildings for 400points you don’t autonomic ally tick that and how you solve that is simple, you count how many players there is on the 4 WvW maps and there you do 0% = 10% then for every 1% players you gain 1.5% in tick, so if there is 10% full on all 4 maps and your server have 400Points you will tick 20% of that with then mean tick is 80. When there is 60% full on all 4 maps and all 3 servers you tick 100%
Then to take a building that is fully upgraded and fully defended we say you get 100points (50k exp), then if there is 0defenders you get 10% 10points 5k exp and then race the points you get with how many defenders, say 10def camp, 20tower, 30keep/sm is what is needed to get to max.

Escorting Dolys should give a buff were bronze give you +1supply you can carry Silver +2 Gold +3 supply you can carry and it last for 1hour (only successful escorts), it don’t stack but the 1hour is reset/you get higher if you had bronze and then do Gold you get +3 instead off +1 if you Escort again within the hour you have the buff.
When queue on the map lower AFK timeout to 5min and if you run against a wall to 2min, if you have scout buff and are in scout area AFK timer normal 10min.
And add so you get 1point for stomp without any bloodlust then +1 for every BL your server have.
That way it will be much harder to gain points with PVD, you will need to hold your building until they are upgraded with takes a lot off time and a small group can take supply camp / kill dolys with then stops upgrades.

• 24 hour coverage
  • How do we make play time in off hours valuable without blowing out the score?

Ulion.5476:

Make fighting players more meaningful than holding more points. How about making zerg fight add instantly to ppt. Orange sword fight should be worth 25ppt, make white sword fight add 10ppt. White sword will not appear on the mini map only on the big map (10players attacking). Outmanned (35% instant ppt), size of the enemy zerg (1v2 100%more, 1v3 150% more ppt) will increase the reward. Outnumbering your opponent will decrease the reward by 50% if it is a 2v1, 0% if it is a 3v1. The dynamic event effect for the zerg fight would take into account the number of players on both side during a 30s period. The winner will be determine by which side has the most players double down. If you completely destroy the enemy zerg(50-75% of the enemy down) you should get more instant ppt(50%). Some type of system like that would help.

Then split wvw into a weekday and weekend match-ups to enable weekend warrior a chance to feel like they are contributing. Playing knowing you can not win a game is very depressing even if you are having fun. Next change would be bloodlust make it effected by ppt or outmanned. The server with the least amount of people on have bloodlust and make the node only effect if your server has the stat increase not the point per stomp.

• Snowballing
  • How do we give worlds a fighting chance throughout the duration of the match?

Improve siege damage(33%), siege damage reduction(33%), and reduce supply(50% less supply) for siege on the server that has an outmanned buff. This will force the stronger server to have to defend instead of pvd, since the weaker server will take less time/supply to break into a t3 keep. Improving overall havoc play on the weaker server. It will also make defending easier for the weaker server.

• Stagnation
  • How do I feel continuously challenged when my world is ahead?
  • How does my world break the hold that other worlds have on me when I’m behind?

That is an interesting question why join wvw when you are ahead or behind by 400ppt? I think my answer to the snowballing effect would help with this one too. It would make the stronger server have to defense more vigilantly by spreading out. That would enable havoc groups for feel useful again. Instead of having a end all 60man zerg the stronger server would have to split off into havoc groups to defend. A 5man havoc group could build 2 sup rams that do increased damage and bust into a keep faster.

The best and simplest method of competitive WvW is introduce a HANDICAPPING system based on the points score we have now.

The way it would work is at the start of the week, each of the 3 servers performance would be looked at over the last 4 weeks only. Each 3 server ranked, lowest server 1pt still equals 1 pt, middle server scores 0.9 to 0.1 pt depending on its average advantage over bottom server and top server same.

For example,

Seafarers Rest 1 pt=0.5pts (strongest server over last 4 weeks)
Kodash 1pt=1pt (weakest server last 4 weeks)
Desolation 1pt=0.8pts

Those are just random numbers to give you the idea of what I mean. The actual numbers would be worked out based on previous 4 weeks performance.

The effect such a system would have is create intense, close matches which would end up being decieded thurs or fri, probably with all out pushes and intense fighting. It would be awesomely competitive, often going down to the wire, between all 3 servers..

make sure that only servers with equal timezones (+-2 hours for example) can play vs each other… problem solved… and control that only players with such a timezone can join the server… and not like it is with sfr, on which server are so many people from na, so that they have 24 hours coverage…

totally fail when such servers are allowed to play vs servers in eu → with not that population and people who are from germany or france only and nobody from na…

thtats not competive…

John Corpening.9847:

Hey Guys,
I’d like to kick of a discussion on scoring in WvW.

Here is a summary of what you guys have brought up in our previous discussions:

• 24 hour coverage
  • How do we make play time in off hours valuable without blowing out the score?

I had some thought of scaling the PPT by (server1CurrentPlayers+s2CP+s3CP)/(maxPlayers*3) to reduce but not eliminate off-hours score, but I like phys’s suggestion more. However, if you’re playing for the point at the end of each 8 hours, servers who get to upgrade everything while their opponents are asleep get an advantage heading into the next point. It’s still better than what we’ve got now though.

• Snowballing
  • How do we give worlds a fighting chance throughout the duration of the match?
• Stagnation
  • How do I feel continuously challenged when my world is ahead?
  • How does my world break the hold that other worlds have on me when I’m behind?

Unfortunately these problems are inherent to the timed game mode. There is always going to be a point after which victory is obviously impossible, unless you use a different victory condition.

What you can do is move that point as close to the end of the match as possible. That would mean it has to be difficult to break away from other servers in score, which would realistically require some sort of point scaling, whether it’s passive (scaling the score according to population, either targetted at all three servers equally or in proportion to the individual server pop) or active (giving servers a point modifier based on who they’re attacking).

John Corpening.9847:

I’d like to kick of a discussion on scoring in WvW.

Thanks, John. That’s really appreciated.

Ok, time to unshelve those old proposals …
(blowing away the dust from a pile of paper) …

Category
24 hour coverage

Proposal Overview
Reduce ppt and significantly increase the war score gain for stomping enemies.

Goal of Proposal
Very roughly speaking, currently 75% of the war score gain is generated by holding objectives (“ppt”), and only 25% is generated by player actions like taking flag posts or stomping enemies with the Bloodlust buff. Thus, night-capping (which generates approximately four times as much ppt advantage as dominating during prime time, without much player interaction involved) still prevails as THE first-order optimal winning strategy in WvW. This generates a lot of frustration among the majority of prime-time oriented players since a server can essentially counter a mediocre playing performance by sheer night time coverage. The goal of this proposal is to shift the focus from time based scoring (ppt) to player action based scoring. This will break the dominance of night time coverage and give players an option to win the match-up by a solid performance during the prime time.

Proposal Functionality
The proposed functionality change could be as simple as just dividing the ppt score gain of objectives by two and doubling (or even quadrupling) the war score gain from stomps. I would even propose to implement a flat war score gain for stomping without the Bloodlust buff, and an increased gain (maybe tiered, but I’d prefer it to be not) if the server is under the effect of Bloodlust. These changes should be very easy to implement with the existing system. However, the actual numbers here should be subject to play testing. I would propose a target average war score split of at least 50% each for ppt and stomps, or even a split of 75% war score from stomps and 25% from ppt.

By shifting the war score focus from time based scoring (ppt) to player action based scoring you can counter the dominance of off-time coverage and generate a mindset where players feel that their actual actions do make a difference. You wouldn’t even have to define some artificial “prime-time” window to make this work: The changes will come into effect and scale automatically whenever players are playing. As a positive side effect, the performance after reset and at the weekends will also have a slightly higher impact than the performance during work days. The change would also increase the impact of mid-sized roaming groups since every small-scale fight will now contribute to the war score.

Let me add that I wouldn’t say that ppt has to go completely. I am all for incentivizing to hold and upgrade fortifications, maybe even by tiering the ppt gain of a fortification with its upgrade status. I am just arguing that scoring ppt (and, hence, coverage) shouldn’t be the single most match-up deciding statistic.

Associated Risks
I don’t see associated risks for the (software) system as such. All necessary mechanics are already in place an can be easily tweaked.

As with all scoring systems, people will try to min-max and find loopholes. Hence, the actual numbers have to be balanced using simulations and play testing. One risk might be two servers working together and “trading stomps”, thereby generating war score without fighting. This might be countered by using a similar cool-down mechanic as with the WXP gain of killing players.

Another abuse might be a leading server willingly not playing WvW to reduce the both remaining servers capability of scoring stomps. This should be countered by the fact that ppt are still in the game and does still have an impact.

However, I understand both exploits described above as rather artificial and not really something that will happen in practice. The majority of players of a server do not follow any agreements anyways.

Lastly, it should be mentioned that the proposal assumes an existing WvW community that plays at least kind of regularly. On servers with a very, very low WvW player base, the proposal will not have any significant effect.

My 2 copper.
~MRA

I think it is best to stop considering ways of how to fix PPT.

A server should score for a successful capture or a successful defense. This way a server which is outnumbered to hold a complete map can focus on defending a few selected targets and keep scoring if it manages to hold these targets.

Owning things at night without any resistance then will only score once for the attackers, not on every tick.

I believe that is the general direction in which a solution should be searched.

imho the scoring is fine – we all understand it by now and tampering with it for certain circumstances will just add confusion and probably outrage after 2 days of implementation…

On the point of alliances, I suggest that when a server pulls ahead by a certain margin (say 20K) the other two servers will get prompted to vote for an alliance (1/2/3 hours). If the vote is > 50% then take the average time the players voted for and the two alliance servers will not be able to attack one another or damage towers/keeps. Alliance will start after 30mins (or whatever time period)… Once the alliance ends, another vote can take place.

Also when a server falls behind more than 100k (they are totally out of the race at this stage), severely limit the player cap of apposing servers to their bl. Thus the obviously less populated server can step out of their bl and enjoy more of the game rather than just feeding the dominant servers with ppt. or defend garrison with 2 players and reg ac vs. 10 golems.

First and foremost I really think Anet needs to be more “hands on” with the matchup line ups. Draw stats for each of the 3 main time zones and find a best match per server. Maguuma should never have been in the gold league, but because glicko said so, they are on the loosing streak for I dunno how long now. Surely a manual intervention could have placed them in a T3 match looong ago to see how weak they really are pitted against the likes of YB.
In short: get stats, analyze stats, implement stats = proper matchups. Glicko is a fail, even after adding some “random” portion to it. Let’s face it, if you have to manipulate glicko in order to “mix things up a bit” then it’s already a fail. Why stick with it as if it’s the be all and end all of match line ups?

PS. Disabled siege should be invulnerable if you gonna stick with disablers

Thanks for bringing this topic up for discussion, John. As an avid WvWer, here are some of my observations.

Snowballing

Snowballing is a direct result of supply infusion. Let’s look at EBG – there are 6 supply camps, 2 for each corner. If an opposing server takes one of your camps, they didn’t just get 6 points out of a possible 695 points per tick stronger, they got 50% more supply stronger on that map while your supply was halved!

I was recently playing an undefensible match on a blue server where we were trying to hold Danelon Mine long enough to get a single dolyak out of it before the other teams flipped it. It proved impossible, we became discouraged and stopped putting gold into upgrading the camp since we could not hold it. This quickly snowballed into no supply to upgrade Langor or our Keep, while they continued to build even greater supply stores to take our weakened tower and keep. This is snowballing.

• Supply needs to have a certain amount of fixed resource, with possibly adding supply infusions to outmatched servers. Get rid of the EotM supply drop to Borderlands, a better solution is to add a supply drop based on how outmatched your server is.

• Supply Defense – eliminate the need to upgrade camps for outmatched servers, give them a full upgrade when they capture their own camp. Consider giving RI an increasingly longer duration for the defending server on their own camp the more outmatched they are.

Outnumbered vs. Outmatched

You’ll notice I’ve used the term Outmatched rather than Outnumbered. To avoid servers gaming the system by pulling their team off a map to gain an Outnumbered buff, instead have the buff based on the overall score. The greater the difference in score, the stronger the Outmatched buff becomes for the losing servers. The Outmatched buff could possibly include the following:

• Increased RI duration on all objectives held by the Outmatched server.

• Greater defensive NPC presence, strength and health.

• Increase in supply infusions.

• Reduce or eliminate the gold cost to upgrade objectives.

Glicko rating for matchmaking

I’ve been watching the rating and have noticed some anomalies that need to be addressed. For instance, there’s no question in anyone’s mind that Maguuma does not belong in T2 in its current state, however Glicko has been artificially keeping them there much longer than they should be. In fact, as recently as 3 weeks ago they gained rating for losing a match after losing the previous 4 matches against the same 2 servers. I direct your attention to Week 37.

http://mos.millenium.org/servers/history/38

This is not the first time I’ve seen something like this, there’s been a number of these “Glicko Hell” moments which continue to exacerbate outmatched situations while increasing gaps or shelves in the ratings. I believe if this is addressed we would see better matches. Consider doing a complete reset of the rating system to match servers more appropriately.

Thanks again for lending us your ear, John. I look forward to some action on these topics.

Something I posted in another thread:

Second Part
Scoring would be changed to reflect three 8-hour time periods. For this example, the times (rounded) could be 10am to 6pm, 6pm to 2am, and 2am to 10am. The server that scores the most PPT during one of the three time periods would gain 5 points, the 2nd place server would gain 3 points, and the last place server would gain 1 point. At the end of the week, each server’s points would be added and the one with the highest points would win. This would allow servers with conflicting active time schedules to essentially still compete with each other even though they wouldn’t necessarily meet each other on the battlefield during both of their peak times.

Hey everyone,

I don’t know if this idea actually fits in here, or if someone else already had it, but I think it would be good to shift the player rewards from event driven to score based. To avoid leechers, after successfully completing an event you would get a buff that would last a period during which you would get rewards with each tick. That way players would not be forced to be part of the zerg to be rewarded and small operations are not “if we don’t make it we get nothing, so we don’t try and stick with the zerg”. Attacking the opponent on multiple weak spots would reward all if just one was succesfull. This could also strengthen the “WE” feeling. It is basically the same as sPVP, you are rewarded as a team. However I think there should still be rewards for individual accomplishments, like kills, taps etc., but they should be minor compared to the tick reward.

Don’t know if you like it and for sure takes a lot of refinement and may cause some serious problems, but maybe it can be part of a unified solution.

John Corpening.9847:

Great start guys! There are a lot of good ideas already.

Here is a high level summary (not a proposal) of what is currently being discussed:

• Some sort of point scaling based on population or prime time hours
• Break the day into scoring periods. The match is decided on the scoring periods not PPT.
• Consider score for taking objectives either in conjunction with or in place of PPT
• Add score for kills
• Boost the outnumbered buff (in a number of ways)
• Consider adjusting score based on placement
• Adjust score of objectives based on upgrade level
• Create special objectives/achievements that occur when you are behind that give you a special reward for completing them

Someone had a question on this one from Phys that I wanted to answer:

• Break the day into scoring periods. The match is decided on the scoring periods not PPT.

Doing this would greatly buffer runaway score. If it is off hours and one world can cap most everything because of greater coverage they still just win the scoring period rather than rack up triple score all night. It means off hours play time still has value without creating blow outs. In conjunction with some of the other suggestions it has potential. I thought that was a pretty interesting suggestion from Phys.

Lots of great ideas guys, thanks for getting this rolling!

John

John,you cannot fix WvW without complete overhaul.

Current WvW format is lackluster and if you implement different scoring or population balance measures before you look deep into the design its made you will create only more problems.

I’ve pointed out in last CDIs the overhaul for Stonemist Castle (you can dig it in my posts) but that is only 1 mere example how counter-productive is the structuring and the whole system is made.

WvW is just too simple and easy that is why I and all the competitive guilds who left this game feel like.You just can’t get invested into something lackluster like this.

I will give you another example – you guys killed any initiative for defending just by putting 1 single entrance to the structure like towers – the same entry point is places on top of the main entry point for attackers. (so basically defenders need to run through whole enemy zerg to enter and start defending)

From the beginning if you would prioritize defending and keeping stuff rather than making it karma train non-sense adding 3-5 entry points for defenders (same way attackers have more than 1 attacking points like walls) everything could look way different.

You guys in ArenaNET thought that underdogs would team up vs strongest enemy server which was another ground breaking mistake – even in real life people stand united with stronger and smash the weaker.
This is what was happening past 2 years in wvw since the launch – strongest server attacks weaker and the other weak server just backdoors the weakest server. (why go poke the beast while you can just go pile points on the weakest server)

So please before you even start thinking (not to mention working) on anything related to wvw address the mistakes you have made at launch – you have more than 2 years to study and gather data.

Those are just few examples where i can write a whole library about why current design is bad.

Complete WvW design overhaul or Catastrophe.

P.S. I had my best battles in WvW at heavily defended structures (example: go check the video of 1st WURM kill – there people go euphoric because it was hard and well deserved kill and result of hard work – same way people was cheering after we took enemy keep after 3-4h long battle)

I’ve pointed out more poorly designed part of this game related to wvw in my forum signature (posts are made almost 1 YEAR AGO)

Luna.9640:

You guys in ArenaNET thought that underdogs would team up vs strongest enemy server which was another ground breaking mistake – even in real life people stand united with stronger and smash the weaker.
This is what was happening past 2 years in wvw since the launch – strongest server attacks weaker and the other weak server just backdoors the weakest server. (why go poke the beast while you can just go pile points on the weakest server)

We could make an Aliance inside the Alliance , marking half of the captured objectves of the domminant server (if they are too far ahead) , with dynamic events symbols where the Blue lesser server will benefit moree if they capturedd it .

But they dont get the WvW score rewards immidialty , but over time for the next 24 hours .
If thee lesser team’s ‘’extra rewards’’ exceed the 3000 , then a Npc will offer them for 50 copper the ‘’Scorpion Siege Form’’ item that last in their backpack for 3 hours (or a ram that dont need suplies)