Guild Wars 2

BrickFurious.7169:

In terms of a low-hanging fruit, relatively easy/cheap to implement solution to scoring that could have a large impact on making matches seem more fair and fun, I believe that the scoring periods idea has the most potential. I’ll try and illustrate why.

Here’s an example of a server matchup, broken into six 4-hour scoring periods per day. The table shows the average percentage of total players in the match commanded by each server during each scoring period over the course of one day:

                      1        2         3        4         5         6
Server X    85%   60%    25%   20%   10%    20%
Server Y    10%   30%    40%   35%    40%    35%
Server Z      5%   10%    35%   45%    50%    45%

As you can see, Server X is extremely dominant during the first scoring period, fairly dominant during the second, and not a force to be reckoned with the rest of the day. Server Y is weak in the first period, but more even throughout the rest of the day. And Server Z is largely MIA in the first and second periods, but makes a strong comeback in the rest of the periods and clearly seems to be the dominant server the majority of the day.

Let’s assume for the moment that a server’s current % of total player population in a match is linearly correlated with its current PPT (not a completely valid assumption in every situation, but I think most agree that population = PPT much of the time). We might intuitively assume that Server Z, as the dominant server the majority of the day, ends up with the most points. But here is what the scoring breakdown looks like using the current scoring system and that assumption:

                      1          2         3          4         5          6      Total (day)   Total (week)
Server X    9452   6672   2780   2224   1112   2224      24464         171248
Server Y    1112   3336   4448   3892   4448   3892       21128        147896
Server Z     556    1112   3892   5004   5560   5004       21128        147896

Server X wins the match easily, simply because its utter dominance in scoring periods 1 and 2 carries it the rest of the match. The weekly total also assumes that each server carries on with its normal player populations during the week. In reality, we know that as servers fall behind on points during the week, especially to a server with vastly superior off-hours coverage, those servers that fall behind are likely to see a drop in morale that results in less players showing up. So in reality, it’s likely that Server X would win by a far greater amount of points at the end of the week.

Now imagine instead, using the exact same population % values in the first table, that the scoring were based on each period, rather than total PPT accumulated over the match. Say, for example, that in each scoring period, the winning server would receive 5 points, 2nd place would receive 3 points, and 3rd place would receive 2 points (I happen to like this scoring allocation as it gives a lot of credit to the winning server without putting losing servers too far behind). Here is how the match would look with that scoring system:

                     1        2        3        4         5        6         Total (day)       Total (week)
Server X      5        5        2        2         2        2               18                       126
Server Y      3        3        5        3         3        3                20                       140
Server Z      2        2        3        5         5        5                22                       154

Now Server Z wins the match and Server X is 3rd place, which makes more intuitive sense given its their respective dominance of the match over the course of the whole day, not just isolated time periods.

*

This is definitely the best proposition for time sliced matches I have seen yet. It’s important to note that the upgrades from structures needs to carry over to different matches if time slices were implemented. In fact, you wouldn’t need to be logged out of WvW to even change the time slice. With the 5-3-2 point system, you just add the points of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place servers like you would a ppt tick. Except that it would happen once every time slice (4 hours) instead of the usual 15 minutes.

I like the timeslice idea (imagining lengths of 2-4 hours), just for the purpose of tallying points. I certainly think upgrades and ownership should be conserved through the week, long drawn out sieges add drama and character to a match. In addition to making matches more balanced, it could make the PPT game more engaging because players will see a more immediate goal apart from the total score, and this is good for defensive players.

I think a lot of players currently are most interested in PPT when the total accumulated scores are really close, once there’s a spread it’s harder to care about adding one more keep or tower to the tick.

While this does diminish the incentive to defend or capture objectives during a timeslice when a server has no chance of doing better than third place, those are usually where the situations where it’s impossible to defend anyways. The focus in that scenario is to prevent the enemy from getting upgrades, which is healthier for morale than looking at a giant uphill battle to regain tick.

Jerus.4350:

Not if you learn to fight, you can do a lot more with smaller numbers than people might think.

All you have to do is take out at least 1 for every person you have. If it’s 20 vs 60, if you can outplay them and take out 25, you’ve just gained points.

And I see this happen regularly, a team will bait the larger force stretching them out letting them loosen up, hit those that overpushed taking out 10, suddenly it’s 20 vs 50, rinse repeat and while you may lose the battle in the end you’ll have done so after taking out a mighty chunk of them.

You see that now because it makes minimal difference to the score, so commanders don’t care. As soon as that changed there’d be an immediate difference. Zergs of 60 would stop getting strung out. Groups of 20 harrassing them would cease to be an annoyance to the karma train and instead become a target. Tightening up and spiking damage would become the norm, and that group of 20 will be lucky to down 5 before they’re all dead.

If even a small percentage of the suggestions in this thread and the previous thread go ahead and be implemented, you might as well just delete WvW now and keep EoTM. The discussions in these threads are pushing towards killing WvW and that is what will happen. To quote something said on Teamspeak recently from a well known commander from a well known guild, “I have no intention of being involved in this discussion thread. If Anet want to kill the game mode than that’s on them.” Tread lightly. That’s my only suggestion.

I’m just passing through the thread while on the train so if I have time I can sit and do numbers later but just incase … here goes

24 hour coverage
To keep it short I don’t beleiove anything that you can class as low hanging fruit is viable here to tackle this. It is the nature of a 24 hour game that players will play in a manner that games this as best possible. Without changing the game type you aren’t going to stop or mitigate people playing for the whole of the 24 hour period.

scoring

• scoring periods

This is a great idea form my pov. It follows a similar idea to the current split up of the wvw tourney into smaller weekly segments and whether they scoring is weighted differently or each scoring period is given a score itself, each being a match is debateable.. Either has merits

• point accumulation over time
  SO curentlly I understand that point scoring is fairly linear over time (given variations for activities. Over a period of time there is some merit to the option of modifying the accumulation of points so that the number of points scored over a period of time (being x) take the form of say points = 1/x . I.e. the number of points scored over a period of time from the start of a scoring period reduces continually untilt he end of day. This has some merit but does obviously stack the wvw scoring at the very start of a time period which Im not 100% sure about

• point accumulation as a function of total points scored by a server

There is also some merit to the idea that over a period of time the accumulation of points scored for performing an activity (eg capturing sm) is scaled based on the total number of points that a server has such that over the initial say X number of points a server can gain occurs at a normal rate, at a total points score of Y the score gain per tick or for performing an activity is scaled down such that rather than a linear graph of total points scored over time we’d see this increase then tend towards a flat line (not entirely obv) .

This increase in difficulty to gaining points would potentially stop snowballing , be able to tackle the night team if combined with scoring periods however it again would encourage some amount of being first out the gate and stacking to the start of the wvw scoring period. SO nothing perfect but some ideas to think about

Berk.8561:

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First point:
1) I disagree, maybe that’s a stated intent but it sure isn’t held true in ANY other aspect of the game. PVE open world, things scale, if someone doesn’t hold their weight they’re a drain on the system. In Dungeons, they’re a drain, in fractals, a drain, in PVP a drain, in WvW rallybot, it simply isn’t true.
2) I guess you could argue that but I guess it’s more of a lack of confidence, I’m no great amazing player but I’m confident I can do well and I rather live and die by the sword than sit around with my thumb in my bum
3) That’s a decent point, but I guess you could put the same timer as there is on loot bags to prevent the abuse from really being an issue.

Second point, and in response to the other post in reply. My experience recently is that there are guilds, multiple ones, that will sit and farm larger groups, sure they eventually lose the battle of attrition but they literally hang outside a waypoint and farm off people racking up bags and getting kills. if you are a well organized quality force then the idea of getting at least 1:1 ratio of your kills to your teams deaths is no problem. These people are getting easily 5:1 if not more. I’ve seen these groups sit and farm for hours. Maybe I’m being a bit too optimistic, but to me that’s where I’m coming from, seeing these quality guilds and playing with them seeing what is possible I don’t see it as being bad. A quality small force should be able to gain points off a larger force as the larger forces aren’t going to be as organized, if they go to try and one push they’ll dodge and avoid it, running away not losing points. Again, maybe I’m optimistic in that sense but that’s the perspective I’m coming from.

As far as the last point, I’ve seen suggestions that screw over off time players, is that right? maybe /shrug it’d be more fair to the overall player base i think but really if I were an offtime player, screw that. I’ve seen suggestions that are FAR FAR more exploitable than player kills. I’ve seen suggestions that could just potentially screw your play time. So to me other than points for kills none of the ideas sound acceptable to me overall.

Here is my take on it:

24 Hour Coverage:

Break the 24hr clock up into 3 parts: (12am-8am); (8am-4pm); (4pm-12am). Matches are based on points (best out of 3). Winning 1 time slot will only net you 1 point, so this alone should alleviate the servers who are stacked in 1 time slot (IE: Sea coverage)

It also wouldn’t hurt to split the actual match-up into 2 parts instead of weekly: (Fri-Sun) and (Mon-Fri)

Snowballing:

Award points for defending, holding, capturing, and killing players; then scale the points based on the disparity in population at a given time. For example, a ratio of 1:1 will yield little to no points. Ratios of 1.5:1, 2:1, 3:1 etc.. will yield far larger points for completing the above objectives if your severely outnumbered.

Stagnation:

Add WvW themed quests. Gw2 is largely based on quests so why not add WvW quests: capturing, defending, killing, etc.. Have the quests award points upon completion and the points scale (like above) based on the population of the map. Enemies can’t see your quests, nor can you see theirs (unless there is a spy of course). Would be nice if rewards were tacked to these quests seeing as WvW rewards are abysmal at best.

Now as far as seeing the same servers week after week; I’m afraid the only real solution to that is getting rid of the servers and have players join 1 of 3 factions. There would always be enough players involve to fully populate at least 2 instances of each map (total of 8 maps). Players just have to abandon the whole “server pride” idea and just live with the fact it’s a hindrance.

You can’t leave players on their own accord to balance the servers out (even though it’d be quite simple to do with a little organization). It’s been 2 years and they would have done it by now. You have to take the heavy handed approach and do it for them.

24 hour coverage:

Dynamic map cap. No server can have more than, say, 1.5x the amount of players of either other server (above a certain minimum cap, though-the cap can never fall below maybe 50). No more Server-A-Covers-24-hours and server-b-just covers-local issues. One server can’t dominate purely by numbers (at least not to the usual extent). Now that we have “WvW overflow” (eotm) for people who just want to get in fights, this can work.

Snowballing:

Award more points for cap, defend, and stomp, and far fewer for ppt. If possible, instead of giving team points for stomp, give points for last-hit, so that fighting tactics aren’t compromised by the need to stomp.

Stagnation:

A few things here.

-more variety in maps (not more maps per week, though- maybe shuffle the maps available each week. Hell, even different art passes for two of the borderlands (same layout, but different art)).

-Make a buildable item for guilds (costs a LOT of influence) that allows every member a free transfer to a certain, specific server (makes it easier for guild to transfer). Then offer incentives to transfer to lower tier servers (maybe when a server moves up in rank, anyone who fought x amount in wvw that week gets some goodies)

-reset the glicko ratings

-create official mumble/ts servers for each world, let people get ts/mumble info with an ingame command and launch with an ingame command, automatically getting ts/mumble username with their guild and name, into the channel for their current battleground. People with commander tags up launch in with privileges to create new sub-channels and mute players. Make everything about the new ts/mumble support known to players, including a hint that shows up when someone first enters wvw. This makes it easier for wvw newcomers to become actual wvw-ers, not just “pve-ers clogging up wvw”, as a newbie in the TS/mumble is generally more valuable than an expert player not in the mumble

Why so complicated? Couldn’t you just remove leagues (so that servers can rise and drop tiers freely) and equalize the populations and let things work themselves out?

Ironwill.5389:

-24hr coverage
If the holding of objectives did not reward points, but the taking of objectives did, then the siege/defense dynamic would be more relevant. Off peak hours could clean out your battleground rewards, but after the map has flipped colours, the score would stagnate.

-snowballing
Again if the scoring rewarded activity and not possession, then individual efforts might be more worthwhile… There’s little interest now in holding an objective longer than it can be locked down for a ‘tick’.
Give outmanned buff some teeth in regards to taking and holding of objectives; the risk of getting Zerg one rolled is the same; but reward factor is in favour of the underdog

This is difficult because you need to avoid the losing side just not bothering to cap anything until the last hour where they retake the whole map and win.

Has anyone considered multiple victory conditions, like the Foefire map in pvp?

For example you can achieve a certain number of PPT, or cap both of the enemy garrisons.

Of course this would mean the matches could be a lot shorter, and you would probably need to buff garri defense to compensate, but it would also mean the losing sides always have a chance of winning.

It will always be a advantage to have more players, but as it is now that you get full Point no mater how many players are in or if its paper or fully upgraded is bad, both for the ones that want to only kill and players like me that want to protect.

Read something that actually made me reconsider and that was instead off having tick point you only get points when you defend or cap, what the points should be then I have no idea, but you can still use something like this were a building is more worth the better it is upgraded for defenders/attackers and then take in the calculation how much damage the attack/defend do especially for the player reward. (like 0 defender 0 reward for the player) (changed to damage done so it will make it harder to cheat, then they cant just stand with 10players in a tower to get better reward)

My idea around dolys is that I know they removed all reward on dolys and then give a reward were you can carry more supply for a time I think is a good solution, maybe lower time like 30min and race how long you have to protect doly to get gold, something like 80-100% trip gold, 60-79% trip silver, 30-59% bronze, now you only have to run next to doly for like 10% to get gold.

Otokomae.9356:

This system would work ENTIRELY in favor of the PvD servers. The main complaint people have with off-NA coverage in NA matchups is that they go to bed with the maps looking relatively even, then wake up to find that the server with the best coverage has FULL T3 STRUCTURES ON EVERY MAP!

Shadow.3475:

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.

First of all, this sounds extremely complicated, especially if the point tick is constantly changing every time a new guild decides to form up on a map, or whenever a guild ends their raid and starts going to bed. This is also one of those systems that would be easy to exploit, as the moment your main guilds start to log off or you see your server’s WvW population start to dip, you would immediately have Commanders yelling “EVERYONE OUT OF THE TOWERS NOW! Defending anything on this map only means handing bonus points to the enemy!” etc, etc.

Shadow.3475:

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.

I’m going to assume that you were NOT playing GW2 anytime time in 2012, or near release, as there is a good (albeit sad) reason why escorting Dolyaks doesn’t give any tangible rewards… back when the game came out, and for several months after, escorting a Dolyak to its respective tower/keep gave essentially the same rewards as taking a camp, but was 1,000 times easier, and could be repeated over and over again on a set schedule, for as long as you held the camp. As a result, back in 2012 we used to have massive armies of 50+ people doing NOTHING but escorting Yaks for hours on end, in every timezone, in every Tier!

What you have listed here is different, and isn’t really a bad idea, but it certainly doesn’t address any balance issues. This would likely work in favor of the higher population servers, actually, as it would simply become part of the meta to have your full zerg escort a Dolyak once an hour along the shortest available route. Hello, 20 Omega Golem rush from the most stacked server in the matchup…

Jerus.4350:

1) I disagree, maybe that’s a stated intent but it sure isn’t held true in ANY other aspect of the game. PVE open world, things scale, if someone doesn’t hold their weight they’re a drain on the system. In Dungeons, they’re a drain, in fractals, a drain, in PVP a drain, in WvW rallybot, it simply isn’t true.

And if you add in the event farmers who purposely fail events to farm them, you’ve named every single one of the most toxic and abusive parts of Guild Wars 2 where players behave abusively toward each other and the forums contain plenty of complaints about it. While I doubt it could be entirely eliminated in the more structured parts of the game that are limited to very small groups (dungeons, fractals, and PvP) I think that hardly reflects well on the game or meets the goals that ANet says that they have for the game and I don’t think Guild Wars 2 needs more abuse and hostility between players than it already has.

Jerus.4350:

2) I guess you could argue that but I guess it’s more of a lack of confidence, I’m no great amazing player but I’m confident I can do well and I rather live and die by the sword than sit around with my thumb in my bum

People have said that they already see some of this behavior among PPT-oriented players in the top tier. While I agree with you that it’s more fun to live and die by the sword, the problem is that risky choices and losses will be an invitation for abuse from other players who are point-oriented. because every time you die by the sword, you are giving the enemy server points. The most toxic parts of the game are when winning leads to other people telling you how to play the game or to leave because they don’t like how you are playing or how well you play. Maybe you are so good at winning fights that you’ll never personally experience that sort of abuse, but everyone can’t be above average.

Jerus.4350:

3) That’s a decent point, but I guess you could put the same timer as there is on loot bags to prevent the abuse from really being an issue.

Something could probably be done about this one, but it would need to be considered.

Jerus.4350:

Second point, and in response to the other post in reply. My experience recently is that there are guilds, multiple ones, that will sit and farm larger groups, sure they eventually lose the battle of attrition but they literally hang outside a waypoint and farm off people racking up bags and getting kills. if you are a well organized quality force then the idea of getting at least 1:1 ratio of your kills to your teams deaths is no problem. These people are getting easily 5:1 if not more. I’ve seen these groups sit and farm for hours. Maybe I’m being a bit too optimistic, but to me that’s where I’m coming from, seeing these quality guilds and playing with them seeing what is possible I don’t see it as being bad. A quality small force should be able to gain points off a larger force as the larger forces aren’t going to be as organized, if they go to try and one push they’ll dodge and avoid it, running away not losing points. Again, maybe I’m optimistic in that sense but that’s the perspective I’m coming from.

You also need to consider this from the other side. What incentive would any commander have to run with an unorganized large force if they are simply going to provide points to an opposing server? Why risk an engagement with a quality guild in an open field if it’s only going to give the other side more points? For someone to win engagements, someone else needs to lose them.

Jerus.4350:

As far as the last point, I’ve seen suggestions that screw over off time players, is that right? maybe /shrug it’d be more fair to the overall player base i think but really if I were an offtime player, screw that. I’ve seen suggestions that are FAR FAR more exploitable than player kills. I’ve seen suggestions that could just potentially screw your play time. So to me other than points for kills none of the ideas sound acceptable to me overall.

Part of the reason why I made the suggestion to make the score handicapping based on score differential alone was that it would address a big part of the problem (runaway scores and the inability of underdog servers to catch up) without directly impacting a particular time of playing or having to worry about how many players are involved in WvW at a particular time.

And note, that even basing score on player kills can hurt particular play times. If a server with a strong OCX or SEA player base goes up against a server with only a handful of players during those time periods, there won’t be many players on for them to earn points off of by killing them.

nirvana.8245:

If even a small percentage of the suggestions in this thread and the previous thread go ahead and be implemented, you might as well just delete WvW now and keep EoTM. The discussions in these threads are pushing towards killing WvW and that is what will happen. To quote something said on Teamspeak recently from a well known commander from a well known guild, “I have no intention of being involved in this discussion thread. If Anet want to kill the game mode than that’s on them.” Tread lightly. That’s my only suggestion.

As someone who despises the megaservers, knows people who stopped playing because of them, and who said that I might stop playing WvW entirely if they merged the servers to force a T1 experience on everyone, I think it’s quite possible for the cure to be worse than the problem it was designed to fix, so this is a legitimate concern and your advice to tread lightly is good advice. That said, details and specifics would be useful here.

Which suggestions, in particular, do you think would be detrimental to WvW and why? What are you concerned will be changed or lost? Or from the flip side, what do you think is working well and shouldn’t be tampered with?

One thing missing from a lot of the time slice suggestions is what would happen during the transition to the things on the map from the previous time slice? Would you inherit whatever siege weapons and upgrades were done in the previous time slice by your server? Would all upgrades and siege reset? Would they be restored to whatever state they were in at the end of the last time the time slice was active?

I collected another infraction point for my last response- criticism will not be tolerated.

I think they need to look at the overall design of wvw first and look at ways of redesigning it so that it favours something other than mindless GWEN trains- for instance, design a map with a lot more water, or snow that’s an environmental effect, and swap out maps every week to make it more interesting. And have just one large map with at least 3 sides (5 would be awesome but probably beyond their programmers), the map changes from week to week (so have 5 or so different maps), and have areas that punish groups that ball up (say, for instance, mud from endless footfalls causing slow, disease, bleeding, all not removable) and promote some ranged spread out play.

Or even have maps that need co ordination of more than one group to achieve the goal, so two or three groups must take different areas to achieve their goal, whilst the other two servers may have different objectives.

Loot should be given out server wide every minute for those on the wvw maps who are active (might be hard to program that to stop exploiters) but there needs to be a way to reward the support players and make it so spamming 1 on a guard isn’t the most rewarding in terms of loot whilst the ele healing in the back picks up 1/10th of the loot the guard gets.

Points need to adjust for population, and the one mega map needs to have a higher cap of around 150 per server with aoe affects whenever more than 50 are in the same spot to discourage a mega zerg (and a system that forces them to do more than one thing at a time, which means a bigger map, better objectives, etc).

Lower population on a map compared to your rivals gives you better scores. defending needs to give better rewards or map wide rewards need to be granted.

If a decent anti exploit system can be made, then map wide rewards based on points scored could be brought in, so you gain a ‘wvw box’ for x points scored by the map which can contain anything from a spike to a blue, green, rare, exotic, etc .

Berk.8561:

One thing missing from a lot of the time slice suggestions is what would happen during the transition to the things on the map from the previous time slice? Would you inherit whatever siege weapons and upgrades were done in the previous time slice by your server? Would all upgrades and siege reset? Would they be restored to whatever state they were in at the end of the last time the time slice was active?

I don’t think the game experience should change*, just how the points are counted. The great thing about reset once a week is that your game only gets interrupted once a week. Timeslicing addresses the off-peak issue without changing the rules for only a specific group of players.

*What I mean is that this can be an improvement to the game without having other changes. Certainly WvW needs continuous improvement but let’s start with this.

Baldrick.8967:

I collected another infraction point for my last response- criticism will not be tolerated.

That right there is one of the biggest issues with this game! These mods need to change their kittening attitude!

Punishing your players for trying to point out issues with the game is the biggest deterrent and will only result in people leaving this game.

Hoe can you ask for information an then punish a player for giving their HONEST opinion on the matter?!
If you are going to continue to be like this, then shut down these forums as you did with the matchup forums, you obviously do not want to hear from players who are more concerned about this game than you are!

PPT based on a timed ticked is frankly broken. That is the biggest issue here. If you have coverage, you can exploit the PPT and build point leads while other servers sleep. it completely invalidates all of the work and effort and GOLD spent to get structures upgraded if 5 people can PvD and paper everything when no one can defend it.

Actions need point values assigned to them. Actually capturing and defending objectives need point values assigned to them and the longer it takes to take or defend the objective should increase the points given. This way, if its a long hard battle fought and the attackers get the objective, then they should be awarded more points then if it was 5 dudes with a golem steamrolling a keep. same is true for defending. If its a long battle and defenders win, they should earn more points for the defense of the objective.

This will encourage both fighting and defending with a real reward for the effort put it. It also makes upgrading things more worthwhile for ALL players since upgraded keeps and towers and camps should mean something.

can we also agree that the ruins have…well, ruined things? Seriously, they don’t add much to the game play and in fact punish smaller pop servers.

Outmanned: Any group that successfully attacks an objective or defends one with this buff should be getting a small bonus to their server’s score as well.

To add to my point above: Remove NPCs that can contest camps as well. They are unnecessary and go counter to the defend a camp kind of thing I’m suggesting above.

Also, while i’m thinking on it:

Other point generating actions (albeit SMALL point gains, like 2-10 points at most)
Yakslapping – 5pts
Wall Siege clearing (cannons, Oil, etc) – 2pts
Player SPIKING (not killing, but having to actually spike them) – 5pts

It will both encourage actual spiking in the middle of combat if you want the points, help give starting players and roamers something to do that can contribute to scores while also encourage others to help defend and move yaks along, and also allows smaller groups to contribute to overall score when attacking objectives.

@Berk

1) Those may be potentially toxic places, but first, that’s literally the entire game, I mean hell even RPing in Divinities Reach has you getting trolled and griefed from what I’ve seen (I don’t RP but I’ve seen more than enough complaints to know it happens). We’re talking about the internet, people are not always very nice. It’s unfortunate but welcome to the real world.

2) There are some people who will go to any lengths but again, it wouldn’t be as big of a deal as spiking, as the only option to avoid that death and it may not even work, is alt + f4, which means you have to start the game back up and get back into queue for one measly point? naw, I just can’t see it being a problem, maybe a handful of cases just like there are now (it already happens without points associated to the kill). So yes there is the potential for it to happen, but realistically I doubt it’d be an issue worth being concerned about.

3) cool we can actually agree on that, and I hope I don’t come off as being just rude, just having a good conversation figured I’d mention that as this point isn’t something I need to elaborate on , I know I may come off as an unforgiving elitist, but hey I enjoy a game that sets a bar that requires me to put a little work in, lets me reach it and then rewards me for doing so. If that requirement of “getting good” is removed, it’s not all that interesting to me. but back on point!

4) Incentive for running a larger force? You’d still be able to brute force objectives and still run over less skilled groups. While a highly skilled smaller group would likely be able to pick off chunks and not be at a loss if they’re less than highly skilled they’ll be a good target to run over. Again, that’s what IMO makes this idea great, it rewards skill over size, but size still helps if you can utilize it correctly.

5) I’m not very convinced with score handicapping. The predictions would be tough to nail down, and in all honesty the entire idea rubs me the wrong way. It’s pretty much the opposite of what scoring is, giving points to teams for being weaker… yeah I don’t know.

As for the scaling of off prime time for kills… exactly, but I’m not suggesting the removal of PPT, but with kills it’d just water it down, making it less important but still something you need to manage

Fixing the scoring system is a very important issue, but there are also important gameplay issues to fix.

Points for kills: good in theory but it doesn’t fix the blob issues, it encourages it.

Upgrading towers should have a bigger impact on the score and should make a bigger difference in walls/gate hp. You should also be forced to upgrade inner before outer and both should work independently.

I’m more in favor of a server merge and a reset of the WvW population according to current WvW players. Guild alliances should be the main thing, a guild should represent a certain server, and be allowed to switch server for some influence.

Blobs:
AoE limit that encourages stacking blobs; Increase the AoE limit for AoE classes depending on their armor; Heavy armor Aoe cap = 5, Medium armor 7, Light armor 10.
It will at least give some sort of advantage to a class having twice less health than another and put an end to the stacking blobs which makes fights predictable.

Immobilize stacking
Condition stacking and more precisely Daze and Immobilize stacking is totally Game-Breaking. You’re in a fight 20 vs 40 but on top of that you cant even move once your stability runs out; NOT FUN. The game was more fun before you allowed immob/daze stacking.

Class balance
Some classes do not even have an elite worth using in WvW. The new elementalist summons take 10 seconds just to do something useless. Fiery Great Sword is only good to run away. Tornado is useless. Mistfire Wolf only attack once after 5 seconds and disappears in the middle of its second attack animation before damage is done. Asura’s elites are also worthless; whats the point of the golem suit if it doesn’t do any damage?

Conditions killing you while you are invulnerable and unable to cast skills = Game-breaking

Btw is it possible to make a body block system as in gw1? No more megaballing

Jerus.4350:

MakubeC.3026:

Jerus.4350:

MakubeC.3026:

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

Dude…This is like real good.

• We don’t lose server pride.
• We are still merged.
• Loving the idea of assisting other matchs on different tiers.
• Reducing queues.

Attention to this man.

Can we discuss this?

I feel this idea would be spreading everyone too thin. While generally in t1 you can find fights at any time, and that’s why I enjoy it, even in t1 sometimes there’s just dead periods, and spread that population out over half a dozen servers… that’s going to mean a lot less action.

Contrary to popular belief we’re not queuing maps 24/7, we have a deep queue reset night, then we queue one map if that at any given time, we may see 2 maps queued on a saturday/sunday but that’s about it.

A year ago when the guy made the video it may have been solid, but I really don’t think the current population can handle that without it being a pretty spread out and small force type thing which honestly would have me not very interested in WvW anymore as even now I’m logging off sometimes when after 30+ mins we can’t find a force to fight. Walking Yaks isn’t fun to me.

I don’t think it’s a bad idea, I just don’t think the current population can handle that many servers. Alliance up and use fewer overall servers for a season then we could talk but not half a dozen servers with 4 maps each spreading the current populations over all that area.

I see.
I play on a low-tier server, Sorrow Furnace to be precise, and we see queues very very rarely. Even in reset nights for this leagues I’ve seen them only once.
I think you are right on the thought of spreading us thin. Maybe then, remove the feature of server hoping?
But then that will leave us with servers ranting because their low tier companions didn’t even make it to 75k PPT. How could we resolve this? Or does this trash the whole idea?

I think it kills the idea, I know I wouldn’t want my score to be determined by something completely out of my hands. I mean at that point might as well just roll a dice and that decides who wins for the week and do away with the scoring all together.

I think some alliances combining servers into one entity could mean more competitive “servers” but that idea was shot down by many smaller server players in the last discussion as they don’t want the larger population play style.

In the end at this point there is only one idea I’ve seen that I really think is solid and should be added. That’s points for kills. If those were very impactful it would reward good play, promote fighting, water down the PPT influence, and with that it’d automatically scale based on population as when there’s less people to kill you’ll get less kills meaning less points, and on the flip when there are more you can get more. So I think that idea is solid, the rest of them IMO still need to be worked out and many details kinda throw them into the “please don’t do that” pile for me.

Have to agree with you. The idea loses it light without the jumping between servers.
But I’m also heavily against rewarding points per kill, at least not in a even way. Like I said, I play on a low tier server, and when you are losing, specially with 10k gaps, most players even enter. In the other hand, the winning server always has many people, because they have high morals and PvErs can visit their beloved missing WvW vistas. So you end up running around with luckily 15 people while the other team has 30+. That’s a high percent death rate.

Points per kill should be implemented only if the losing server gets more points for them as many have suggested. Else, the gap will only stay or become larger.

You should gain points per kill only when you have the outnumbered buff. Gives the outnumbered server at least a chance to get something without giving the dominating server the ability to further dominate the score.

Jerus.4350:

1) Those may be potentially toxic places, but first, that’s literally the entire game, I mean hell even RPing in Divinities Reach has you getting trolled and griefed from what I’ve seen (I don’t RP but I’ve seen more than enough complaints to know it happens). We’re talking about the internet, people are not always very nice. It’s unfortunate but welcome to the real world.

Not in my experience. I saw very little trolling and griefing in PvE before the time-limited events and megaservers on my server, and see very little of it in WvW because when you’re on the bottom ranked server, just getting some participation is welcomed. Sure, people can get nasty regardless of how the game is designed and pick on people who have no impact on their game, but l when success and failure hinge on certain people playing the game a certain way or not participating at all, that makes certain players a legitimate liability. The design of the game is making their participation a bad thing, not simply the quirky tastes of a particular player. No, MMOs don’t have to care about that at all, but one of the distinguishing features of GW2 (and the reason why loot and resource nodes are shared rather than competitively distributed to whoever gets the kill or gets to the node first) is to avoid that sort of dynamic wherever possible.

Jerus.4350:

2) There are some people who will go to any lengths but again, it wouldn’t be as big of a deal as spiking, as the only option to avoid that death and it may not even work, is alt + f4, which means you have to start the game back up and get back into queue for one measly point? naw, I just can’t see it being a problem, maybe a handful of cases just like there are now (it already happens without points associated to the kill). So yes there is the potential for it to happen, but realistically I doubt it’d be an issue worth being concerned about.

The way to avoid death is to run at the site of a larger force in the open or to hug a tower full of siege and, if a bigger force shows up, jump inside. And if it looks like they’re going to get in, waypoint out or jump out the back before they break in. But a “What the heck, let me see how many I can kill before they take me down,” approach of always fighting or even roaming around solo or as a pair to take the risk of flipping some camps before getting stomped could easily be a net detriment to your server. People who care about PPT are going to care whether you die or not to a degree that they currently don’t.

Jerus.4350:

3) cool we can actually agree on that, and I hope I don’t come off as being just rude, just having a good conversation figured I’d mention that as this point isn’t something I need to elaborate on , I know I may come off as an unforgiving elitist, but hey I enjoy a game that sets a bar that requires me to put a little work in, lets me reach it and then rewards me for doing so. If that requirement of “getting good” is removed, it’s not all that interesting to me. but back on point!

People have different tastes and everyone should fight for what they want the game to look like. I get that skill and even coordinating numbers should be rewarded. You’ll notice that with my diminishing returns proposal where the score increases are reduced for the servers that are ahead, it can never stop the server that’s ahead from earning more points if they take and control more stuff and it doesn’t stop larger numbers and greater skill from leading to victory. It simply slows the point increase as the gap grows so that a server that’s behind can catch up if they have a good part of the day, too.

The extreme end of balancing would be to make sure that every server always winds up with the same number of points per tick, no matter how many people play, no matter how good or bad they are, and no matter how many battles they win or lose. Basically, everyone gets a trophy, even if they don’t show up or win any combats. I don’t think anyone wants to get anywhere near that extreme. But I do think we want mediocre players showing up and participating, not only to provide loot bags for the good players but so they can stick around long enough to get better at WvW. Making mediocre players a liability to their own server works against that. The game already has a fair-weather effect to some degree where players stop playing WvW if their server is getting stomped to badly but show up in force if they’re doing the stomping.

Jerus.4350:

4) Incentive for running a larger force? You’d still be able to brute force objectives and still run over less skilled groups. While a highly skilled smaller group would likely be able to pick off chunks and not be at a loss if they’re less than highly skilled they’ll be a good target to run over. Again, that’s what IMO makes this idea great, it rewards skill over size, but size still helps if you can utilize it correctly.

Sure, but it could look like what I’ve seen in EotM, which is two zergs circling the map to flip empty objectives while largely avoiding direct contact with each other because defending or combat is too slow and messy. I do see the appeal of rewarding skill over size, but I would do it through karma, gold, and drops rather than points. That way, if you lose and die because you are casual or are still learning how to play your character in WvW, it enriches the guy who killed you but doesn’t make you a liability to your own server. That’s the key problem and, yes, it’s already a problem with rallying and spiking under bloodlust.

Jerus.4350:

5) I’m not very convinced with score handicapping. The predictions would be tough to nail down, and in all honesty the entire idea rubs me the wrong way. It’s pretty much the opposite of what scoring is, giving points to teams for being weaker… yeah I don’t know.

There are two ways competitive sports and games keep competitions interesting and somewhat balanced. They either carefully control the competitors in number and skill through fixed team sizes, leagues, weight classes, and so on so that the competitors are roughly equal in number, ability, and skill or they handicap the points or scoring so that the player with more skill or ability has to work harder to win. That’s not simply to make the game fair and the outcome unpredictable but because blow-outs are generally not interesting to any competitor involved, nor to any spectators. Yes, there are people who like repetitive and predictable activities in MMOs, which is why GW2 has karma trains and loot trains in PvE and in EotM. But is that really the direction people want for WvW?

WvW is never going to be as carefully balanced as a football league without it turning into something that looks very much like the PvP part of the game. That leaves handicapping as the alternative to allow underdogs to compete. It’s no different than point spreads in sports gambling, having a better chess player remove pieces before playing, a father letting his son start running early before the father starts running in a race, or handicapping in golf. This stuff is all over the place for a reason, and it’s not giving a player points for being bad. It’s acknowledging that the player isn’t as good and giving them points so that they can still be a challenge for better players to beat and still get something out of showing up to compete.

Bertrand.3057:

I don’t think the game experience should change*, just how the points are counted. The great thing about reset once a week is that your game only gets interrupted once a week. Timeslicing addresses the off-peak issue without changing the rules for only a specific group of players.

That’s one way to do it, but then it doesn’t address one of the key complaints of defensive players, especially in the lower tiers, which is that they can spend a day upgrading a map only to see their work undone overnight because they have poor overnight coverage. A lack of WvW players doesn’t have to last long to see a whole map of fully upgraded towers and keeps flip. It still puts a lower-tier server with poor coverage during part of the day in a repetitive cycle where they need to retake and upgrade everything again every day after their dead period.

BrickFurious.7169:

In terms of a low-hanging fruit, relatively easy/cheap to implement solution to scoring that could have a large impact on making matches seem more fair and fun, I believe that the scoring periods idea has the most potential. I’ll try and illustrate why.

<snip>

Just got a chance to read through all the posting. Always prefer to not be biased by others when putting an idea forward but like to them compare to continue to adjust concepts.

I think we were generally thinking in the same way outside of point assignments for winning a given period of time. Keep the scoring but break things into smaller time frames for point accumulation and remove the advantage that a given time period would have on the overall match. Your example illustrates the issue that I think a number of us have with the coverage.

It feels like this may be the 8th or so time that I’ve posted this, but I’ll try to shrink it down since it can take up multiple posts.

The proposal is to take the current scoring system and week long match and break it up into a week long match decided by 21 sets of 8 hours each within the week.

Each set lasts 8 hours, starting from reset at 6pm server time to 2am server time. The points are scored via PPT as they do now. The winner of that set gets 2 win points and second place gets 1 win point. Then from 2:01am to 10am server time is the next set, with the next set going 10:01am to 6pm server time. This continues through the week, with 2 win points awarded for first place within the set, and 1 win point for second place.

At the end of the week, all win points are added up and the server with the most win points then wins the week. If there is a tie in win points, the tie is broken via the week long total PPT score.

This means that if you get ‘nightzerged’ or ‘pvdoored’ during your off hours, you lose at most 2 win points. This keeps matches closer and allows for easier comebacks. It’s also less a mental hump to try to comeback from 4 points down rather than 40,000 points down. A server can also specialize in being strong in two time regions rather than needing 24/7 coverage (which tends to burn people out).

That’s my main suggestion. I have other changes to follow.

Berk.8561:

One thing missing from a lot of the time slice suggestions is what would happen during the transition to the things on the map from the previous time slice? Would you inherit whatever siege weapons and upgrades were done in the previous time slice by your server? Would all upgrades and siege reset? Would they be restored to whatever state they were in at the end of the last time the time slice was active?

Same as some of the others here, the time slice idea wouldn’t be a reset of the maps or siege, just a period in which points are tallied and reset. This doesn’t wouldn’t help a server retain its upgrades but does help them stay in the race for competition for the week. I like the 24-7 fight even when it means my enemy will paper all that I did for the last 8 hours after I go to bed. That adds a depth to the fight that’s a positive in my book, but I don’t want it to be a death blow either.

A New Outmanned Buff and a new Roflstomp Debuff.

I suggest adding a buff to outmanned that makes it so you a chance to get supply back from looting fallen enemies. When outmanned and defending, you often lose your supply lines and have nothing left but the depressing situation of waiting out the inevitable. If the larger server dies to siege fire or gets picked off, this allows an outmanned server that’s defending to keep supply up for repairs and siege.

I feel this change doesn’t encourage being outmanned, but does give some relief to outmanned defenders. It’s not too powerful while still being potentially helpful.

The New Roflstomp Debuff

I am sure you can think up a better name for this, but this is debuff that triggers once a server has a large enough lead in PPT. Say 30k for the old system and 8k for my revised 21-set system. Anytime a server has gained X amount of lead within the PPT, any new towers, Keeps or SM they take gains a debuff for 40 minutes. While this tower has this debuff, they are worth 50% more PPT points to any losing server that takes the tower.

This creates a situation where a server karma training through outmanned maps faces the possibility of losing PPT difference or buffing the other servers PPT by giving them increased points for paper towers and keeps. This also makes those towers and keeps worth defending for all sides. If a server roflstomping through keeps flipping things, they’ll be feeding the opposing servers. It makes karma training and defending an important choice to make. It’s risk/reward.

New Sigil:

Sigil of the Swarm: All AOE skills on this weapon now hit 3 more targets (or 5 more, depending on what the server can handle).

This is a way to increase AoE size without making it a standard. This sort of sigil would perhaps be desirable to classes like Necromancer or such more than a Guardian. It adds increases to AoE limits without it getting out of hand. It all depends on balance and whether the client and servers can handle it.

New Siege:

Spiked Wall – This a piece of siege that creates a unpassable wall. Mastery in its siege line increases the size of the wall and then the health of the wall, with the final point giving it spikes that applies one stack of bleeding to foes that run into it. Like all siege, this wall can be damaged to be taken down.

I realize these last two don’t have to do directly with scoring, but in a way deal with other problems that impact scoring.

Thanks.

Dropping keeps to 15 ppt and sm to 20 ppt would lower the total possible ppt. This would soften the impact of servers taking most or all objectives for brief periods.

@Berk
1) I see your point, but as you said, look at the timed events, and the flow towards that type of content. You simply can’t make content that’s challenging and still allow people ot kitten around and do whatever they want, they’re conflicting ideas. So yeah, the last bastion of this mentality that you say defines GW2 is in the open world where it’s not made to be challenging but just allow you to get through it, the pinnacle of that probably being like Jormag but something like Teq… “get the hell out of the turret area and get back to the zerg if you aren’t int he defense team!”

2) Again, kill one and you’ve not hurt anything, get 2 and you’ve gained points for your world. Live and die by the sword.

3) At this point I’m kinda done with the discussion obviously there seems to be many that hate the idea, so I’m not going to push it, I jsut figured I’d make one last post in the spirit of discussion

4) I can see where people could opt to do that. I guess I’m just of the thought that fighting is something people will do and PPT would be there to bring out a fight, a confident and strong team will fight off attackers while still plowing into enemy territory, if a team is too cowardly to fight they’ll quickly find themselves down on the PPT and they’ll have to act in some way.

5) Honestly the handicap is the best option I’ve heard so far, but it still rubs me the wrong way, reward people for poor play…

And with that, what happens when say Hibergate happens after the season(which it likely will as the people who are pulling overtime will stop)? Will they roll into season4 with bonus points?!?

What about when servers collapse, how will that be handled, Look at Maguuma, it’s a shadow of it’s former glory, how would they correctly compensate with such a quick turnaround?

I see it being pretty open to manipulation and possibly just handing away victories not to better performances but simply due to getting a bigger handicap than they really needed.

Berk.8561:

Bertrand.3057:

I don’t think the game experience should change*, just how the points are counted. The great thing about reset once a week is that your game only gets interrupted once a week. Timeslicing addresses the off-peak issue without changing the rules for only a specific group of players.

That’s one way to do it, but then it doesn’t address one of the key complaints of defensive players, especially in the lower tiers, which is that they can spend a day upgrading a map only to see their work undone overnight because they have poor overnight coverage. A lack of WvW players doesn’t have to last long to see a whole map of fully upgraded towers and keeps flip. It still puts a lower-tier server with poor coverage during part of the day in a repetitive cycle where they need to retake and upgrade everything again every day after their dead period.

I think the timeslicing idea, if done correctly, could actually address this in the long term.

If, say, the weeklong match was sliced in 4 hour scoring periods, per mine and others’ suggestion, it means that a server with lopsidedly superior coverage during a single period of the day will only be rewarded for that coverage in that part of the day. They will still lose the match if their coverage is inferior the rest of the day (as opposed to the current scoring system where it is highly possible for them to win the match solely due to that one period of lopsided coverage).

This won’t change what you’re concerned about immediately; it is likely that initially servers will continue to have their current coverage patterns for the short term. But over time, as players and guilds transfer, they will have the opportunity to decide on which server their coverage will make the greatest impact toward improving the server’s performance. And the timesliced scoring means that they will have the greatest impact on a server where their addition makes the server more likely to win a particular time slice, aka, a server that is lacking in coverage for a particular time slice. In other words, there’s no incentive for them to go to a server which would result in them further stacking a time slot; they’re better off choosing a server that is lacking during a time slot in which they regularly play.

Long story short, over the long term the timeslice scoring change has the potential to result in servers whose coverage is more balanced across a day, and thus are less likely to have populations that regularly paper your T3 borderlands overnight (of course, servers could still organize night raids, but those would not be an every-night thing like you’re complaining about).

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?

You have to condense the number of servers or lower map cap 50% and force players to move and gradually tweak it so that 1 server can’t just lock/unlock population at whim

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

get rid of the siegerazor advantage to enemies that are in the lead (even 1 point) on borderlands or remove that completely for enemies on other peoples maps and tweak from there

• Stagnation
  • How do I feel continuously challenged when my world is ahead?

if you condense the servers then this will be less of an issue

• How does my world break the hold that other worlds have on me when I’m behind?

as the second suggestion above get rid of siegerazor on enemy lands for the people ahead, buff the underdogs capping points 50% and tweak as needed

of all the possibilities I can think of (without giving a medal to everyone for trying their best which is ridiculous for adults) removing server transfers, condensing servers would actually remove most of the scoring issues

These are all very much related and solutions are not just in one area but I’d like to keep this discussion focused on scoring. Also, if there is another aspect to scoring that we should consider that I’m missing please feel free to bring it up as we kick off this discussion.

We’ve had some great discussions so far and I want to thank you for keeping it constructive and friendly. I’m looking forward to what you guys bring to this discussion too.

Thanks,
John

Jerus.4350:

1) I see your point, but as you said, look at the timed events, and the flow towards that type of content. You simply can’t make content that’s challenging and still allow people ot kitten around and do whatever they want, they’re conflicting ideas.

Absolutely. But I think the game needs a bit of both if they want to attract a larger pool of players and I think a lot of things can be both at the same time. I’m pretty awful at dungeons so I only do dungeons and fractals with friends who don’t expect perfection. We eventually make it through them, but nowhere near as fast as speed runners who know what they are doing can. Rather than make the content so challenging that it’s impossible for more casual or mediocre players, they should make the content so that it rewards excellent play with bonuses for quick and/or flawless completion. WvW already has roles that are challenging and require skilled play and perhaps they should be better rewarded, but if we want to allow beginners and casual players to play alongside hardcore WvW players, the score has to be something both can contribute to.

Jerus.4350:

So yeah, the last bastion of this mentality that you say defines GW2 is in the open world where it’s not made to be challenging but just allow you to get through it, the pinnacle of that probably being like Jormag but something like Teq… “get the hell out of the turret area and get back to the zerg if you aren’t int he defense team!”

The problem is that they needed to implement the megaservers to make a lot of those events viable for a lot of servers that didn’t have the people or the hardcore players to do them. The smaller the player base that can complete the content and have fun playing the game, the fewer people will be playing GW2. I don’t think “smaller player base” is a winning business model for GW2.

Jerus.4350:

2) Again, kill one and you’ve not hurt anything, get 2 and you’ve gained points for your world. Live and die by the sword.

Various mechanics make that fairly difficult when one is outnumbered, especially if all other things are equal — condition stacking, AoE caps, down state, rallying, escape moves, invisibility, and so on all make it very challenging to get kills in before going down. Yes, I know highly trained and coordinated players, often playing the most powerful builds in the game, can pull it off, but what percentage of WvW players are they what’s in it for anyone else?

Jerus.4350:

3) At this point I’m kinda done with the discussion obviously there seems to be many that hate the idea, so I’m not going to push it, I jsut figured I’d make one last post in the spirit of discussion

By all means advocate for the sort of game you want to play. That’s what everyone else is doing and that’s how we can anticipate pit-falls. If these proposals are going to suck the enjoyment out of WvW for you, I would expect you to complain and fight against them.

Jerus.4350:

5) Honestly the handicap is the best option I’ve heard so far, but it still rubs me the wrong way, reward people for poor play…

If you look at the diminishing returns proposal I made in the first page, it doesn’t really reward people for poor play or not showing up. It doesn’t really care why a server is ahead or behind (coverage, points, skill, etc.). What it does is make it more difficult for the servers that are ahead to gain points as quickly as they increase the point spread in order to keep the spread more competitive for comebacks. Basically, the bigger the lead that you open up, the harder it becomes to increase that lead, but it never becomes impossible.

Jerus.4350:

And with that, what happens when say Hibergate happens after the season(which it likely will as the people who are pulling overtime will stop)? Will they roll into season4 with bonus points?!?

I’m not sure that any handicapping system can look outside of the current match-up because a lot can change from week to week, as you point out. I don’t think the solution is going to be easy, which is why I’ve been posting considerations that should be kept in mind for any changes to the scoring. Whatever they come up with, they need to make sure it provides the incentives they want, doesn’t provide incentives they don’t want, and doesn’t fall apart if players game the system or don’t play it exactly as anticipated.

Some type of proportional system would be good:

For example:

8:00-8:15: 400 players on all servers combined divided by the maximum number of players (or 2/3 of the maximum or whatever you like). Maximum = 500.

Score Weight Points
TC 200 * 400/500 = 160
JQ 300 * 400/500 = 240
BG 200 * 400/500 = 160

2:00 am 100 players online

TC 100 * 100/500 = 20
JQ 400 * 100/500 = 80
BG 200 * 100/500 = 40

This way the scoring reflects the number of players playing, making it more democratic. It doesn’t have to be completely proportional – you can take some type of logarithm of the score. I would have a floor as well so as not to trivialize any time zone. That said, killing a player should offer the same amount of points regardless of how many are playing.

I might weight the total scoring calculated per period favor of the middle or lower server’s population. (.3 most pop, .35 middle server and .35 lowest server)

Taking Stonemist when 40 people are online should not be accorded the same weight as doing so when 400 are on.

Representation by population!

I’m not sure whether holding an upgraded keep or tower should get extra points. Initially my view was they should, but given that yaks are pretty much indefensible to a thief and their killing already offers points, my view has shifted as one could end up with paper everywhere unless you buff yaks defense somehow so they can be better defended.

@Berk
Personally I enjoy the fighting in WvW, it’s an interesting and fun dynamic to me having these mid to large scale battles, I’m not a fan of the SPvP in this game, but when you scale it up it gets fun for me. The people I talk to daily, the discussions I see and hear going on, it seems like that’s a very common opinion among the community I’m in. So I figured people would be all for the idea of rewarding points for fighting instead of just holding objectives. Again “live by the sword, die by the sword”

However it seems that’s not the case and it would actually be counter productive as more people would be scared of fighting than being drawn to the fight, which is the exact opposite of what I was thinking/hoping it would do. Ohh well.

Personally I’m for any idea that gets more people engaging in combat vs running around trying to find vacant areas to capture.

For the sake of discussion, and since it fits the topic, I’d like to re-post this suggestion I made over two years ago.

Category
Stagnation

Proposal Overview
Let world events be a thorn in the side of the the leading team to give the two other teams a chance to catch up.

Goal of Proposal
I still think that the “winning team” in WvW could use a little bit more opposition for being in lead. Many times both “losing teams” attack each other and I have yet to see some real cooperation to attack the current number one. Part of me believes that this will maybe never happen. (After all, all enemies have red nameplates and drop loot.)

I have a suggestion how PvE style events could help to balance the relative strength by putting some mob pressure against the leading team. I call this the Release the Kraken proposition. It is nothing which can be implemented immediately, but it uses only game mechanics that are already in place so it may be an option for the future.

Proposal Functionality
The idea is as follows: Assume that there is an additional map which is equally accessible to all three parties, such as the jumping puzzle in EB (but I guess it should better be new area). The center of this area should be hard to get to (traps, jumping puzzle, enemy interference, and all that stuff). At the center is a shrine/place of power/red button or whatever. This macguffin can be activated by any player from any team, except by players of the currently leading team.

Once activated the following happens: A huge creature is summoned to appear at one random castle/keep/tower of the leading team (equal chances, but at locations controlled by the leading team only!). This could be a Kraken rising from the water to attack Dreaming Bay, Gojira trashing Stonemist Castle, or whatever fits the mood. The creature is out to complete and utterly destroy the stronghold and anything in its way. This means that even maximized guards should not be a threat to it, and it should take an opposition of at least a small zerg to make it a fair fight.

The idea is that the creature should be a serious distraction to the dominating team. It should be as if a small “4th faction” joined in the fight. If it remains unopposed for too long it will shatter walls, doors, defenses, etc and it will ruin coin and resources spent to the fortification. (Maybe it should even be able to “downgrade” already made upgrades.) And it won’t go away until it has been beaten. So it should be a problem that the leading team has to address immediately, and this should give the two other teams an opportunity to push forward.

With the shrine/place of power/red button there would be another objective that is worth fighting for. The leading team should try to block any other faction that tries to unleash the beast, and both other teams have a fair motivation to activate it. Plus, since it can be activated by a player of any opposing faction, both loosing teams do have a real incentive to cooperate in the mini dungeon. When they don’t attack each other, they might outnumber the defense 2:1.

Associated Risks
Plenty. Events in GW2 are always a little problematic because they pose a risk of getting stuck, which of course would be catastrophic in the scenario sketched above.

Also, these WvW mega bosses should neither happen to early nor too often. I’d propose that the event should not be able to be activated for some hours after a match started, and it should not be able to be activated for some hours again after it had been active.

Bosses should also not carry any more loot than, say, a keep lord to prevent non-WvW related farming from disrupting the match-up.

I am sure that there are many more practical problems with this suggestion, but I really think a concept similar to this suggestion could be realized and would be a nice addition to the game mode. Personally, I would really like to see dynamic events to take a more relevant role in WvW than just to cash out rewards for taking objectives, or being completely unrelated like Wurmy, Grubby, & Co.

~MRA

Sube Dai.8496:

Ironwill.5389:

-24hr coverage
If the holding of objectives did not reward points, but the taking of objectives did, then the siege/defense dynamic would be more relevant. Off peak hours could clean out your battleground rewards, but after the map has flipped colours, the score would stagnate.

-snowballing
Again if the scoring rewarded activity and not possession, then individual efforts might be more worthwhile… There’s little interest now in holding an objective longer than it can be locked down for a ‘tick’.
Give outmanned buff some teeth in regards to taking and holding of objectives; the risk of getting Zerg one rolled is the same; but reward factor is in favour of the underdog

This is difficult because you need to avoid the losing side just not bothering to cap anything until the last hour where they retake the whole map and win.

That would just technically zero out the gains, not get you a win; and while you’re sitting on your thumbs the other two servers are flipping objectives from each other building up their scores… You do nothing.. You get nothing.. it could make for some strategic play as well as an emphasis on maintaining possession to reduce scoring chance.. Having a third server makes it harder to game the system like you’re describing it also reduces the 2v1 effect (ideally you need to take both servers objectives to pull ahead without them flipping them back on you to keep pace).

-Have upgraded structures worth more Points when capped. (so a paper tower is worth only 5PTs when capped.. a fully upgraded tower is worth like 40PTs when capped.
-Have upgraded structures worth more Points per upgrade.(paper tower ticks 1PPT, fully uppgraded ticks like 15PPT)
-Have structures generate coin/influence for each upgrade running on a claimed objective. (if my guild has objective claimed with 5 buffs running on it, we get like 5 silver and like 50 inf per tick)
-Have claimed objectives NPCs represented by the Guilds tag

John Corpening.9847:

Several people suggested keeping the map state across scoring periods so that the investment you make in upgrades and effort you take in conquering objectives but the scores will have far less of a chance of running away when the victory points come from the scoring period not the PPT.

Whether this is a good idea or not depends on how the winner of a scoring period is determined. Whether it’s on a per cap basis or the same system we have now.

If the latter, no issues will be solved since if server A has an overwhelming numbers advantage over B and C during 1 scoring period, they can cap/upgrade everything and then just play ultra defensively during subsequent scoring periods and get a win handed to them.

I see two issues with timeslicing/scoring periods.

First is that if you keep the upgrades etc at the end of the scoring period, you basically are just doing ppt. Calling it a tick or timeslice or scoring period or whatever doesn’t change what it is. The problem is that consolidating all of the activity of 8 or 4 hours into 2 points, 1 point, and zero points is possibly worse than the current system when population is close to even. If you use bigger numbers with the same mathematical ratio (100% vs 50% vs 0%) it sounds silly. Does having one server get 500,000 points vs 250,000 points vs 0 points at the end of 8 hours of NA prime sound good? Will people complain when a server dominates for 2 hours and gets the second 2 free because the other 2 can’t come back in time?

The second problem is that not everyone can play hours on end. If a player can only get in during the last part of the scoring period and it has already been decided who will get the points for the period they may likely just not play. If this happens every day I think you can see where this will go… people will stop playing or transfer to the winning server.

Please please please if you decide on points per kill add a debuff timer!

We dont want players logging onto their spy accounts and constantly killing their other character in order to gain points!

Pinkamena Diane Pie.8054:

Please please please if you decide on points per kill add a debuff timer!

We dont want players logging onto their spy accounts and constantly killing their other character in order to gain points!

Pretty sure this is already being handled well. Currently you don’t get experience or loot if you just killed the same player within a specific amount of time, same can be applied for point per kill.

Also this is probably quite obvious but I just want to add that if there are any point scaling using population count, please exclude players that are in protected base (with Determined buff).

How about the idea of a scoring system based on activity in towers/keeps? Finish an upgrade gives a few, adding some siege give some. Adding a timer before upgrades get wiped after its taken might help a lot as well. A server on off hours would have a better chance to actually have a fight if there stuff isn’t wiped by some passing zerg that has no interest in keeping the location or in scoring points for their side.

Personally, there are hours on my server that that is a ghost town in WvW, no one even tries to upgrade stuff because its just a waste. This makes it Very hard for a server to pull out of that ‘target of the karma train’ that off hours presents. However, if there was actually a reason to do it it would help out considerably. After all a five people in a wood tower can’t do much against 25 but if those five actually cared about the location enough to upgrade it it would help out a lot.