There’s been a lot of discussion in some quarters about night-capping, as it’s been called by some, and how the scoring system should be changed to minimise its impact. A few different suggestions have been proposed; most of them have glaring flaws, but those are seen as minor compared to the problem they’re attempting to solve. All of these scoring adjustments are missing the point, though.
My server, Sea of Sorrows, was suggested as an unofficial oceanic server and ended up with a strong oceanic presence as a result. It very frequently smashes other servers in oceanic prime time with very little resistance – in one instance, after some preliminary fighting around a keep, which we won, we deployed siege weapons and took it without a single defender ever appearing on the walls.
There’s another side to this story, though. As the Americans start waking up, the population flips – oceanic players go to sleep and very few people from Sea of Sorrows seem to be online relative to other servers, and the gains, even if quite well-fortified, are lost in short order. Throughout the American morning and afternoon, Sea of Sorrows gets massacred, largely by not having as many players online as other servers.
In US prime time, numbers pick up and things start to be retaken, the scores start to even out – but even then, I was able to get into Eternal Battlegrounds without a queue around the start of prime time, and the opposing faction borderlands very rarely have a queue and the server performs extremely poorly there until the oceanic prime time begins again.
I’m sure you’re seeing the pattern here: it’s not a problem with people being awake at whatever time, it’s a problem with numbers. Being outnumbered in Wuv is just an absolutely murderous disadvantage at any time of the day and it seems to me (and logically so) that relative numbers are the overriding predictor of server performance at any given moment.
In other words: it’s not a scoring issue and there is no scoring solution for it. It’s an issue with numbers being far too strong an advantage, and the solution is to address numbers being such a powerful advantage. I don’t know what the solution there is – I’d probably personally go for a buff to the combat power and supply-hauling capabilities of outnumbered players, based on how outnumbered they are. Limiting the number of active players has also been proposed, but I don’t think that’s a great solution.
I don’t think “lol qq noob l2p” is the answer, as has also been proposed in places. Trying to coordinate better is fun. Trying to convince people to actually log on or to get into Wuv even though they consistently get murdered is not fun, it’s work, and people are not going to do it on a scale sufficient to fix the problem. They’ll just struggle along for a while, then eventually give up, or maybe only play on weekends so the imbalances are minimised.
Either way, scoring changes aren’t the solution. They’re a symptom, not the problem. Player vs Door is awful gameplay. It’s no fun at all, other than the brief entertainment of “hey the pie is all our colour lol” (which is entertaining, to be sure, but no substitute for actually getting to, you know, play).
I’d like to see the population problems addressed so that the Wuv game can really prosper, being both fun and competitive.