Guild Wars 2

I don’t believe in this night capper crap and I don’t think it will be fair for OCX players BUT if people are going to crash on this topic over and over and over and over again I might aswell join in and give a solution I think might help all who play WvW and want their contribution to count the same as others.

It’s not my idea, I read it about 2 years ago and always thought it was a great idea.

Make WvW into 3 time blocks that resets every 8 hours then distribute points accordingly.

EG:
1st 8 hours;
Server A – 8,953
Server B – 7,400
Server C – 1,400

When it ends:

Server A – 3 Points
Server B – 2 Points
Server C – 1 point

Next 8 hours the score resets back to 0.
Same scoring system again, winner takes 3 points, loser takes 1 point.

At the end of each match up for the week, the winner is decided by who has the most points.

A system like this might prevent run away matches and might be able to give the losing server a chance to recover after the weekend rush, it might also help with this whole “my points are worth more because it’s prime time” rubbish.

Thoughts?

IMO if they plan on nerfing “night caps” they should basically make all timezone suffer accordingly. If a server has a strong population at a certain time over another server their tick should be reduced. That way if a server’s off hours happen to be NA Prime they aren’t punished or at least they are equally punished.

Both ideas you guys posted were implemented in the Anet proposal. It was really good, fair system, look it up and read it.

People tend to overreact easily. The term “nightcapping” itself has become some horrible trigger forcing half the players jump in to point out how somewhere in the world day is night and night is day and how any change will ruin the game.

I know I’ve said this several times elsewhere, sorry if you have to read it again, but I really don’t think we need to do any more than increase the contribution of ppk to, say (exact % to be agreed) 50%.

Then, no one can say those playing “out of prime time” are less valued. The points they get for their cap are exactly the same. However, if people have to fight and defeat players to get that cap that effort is recognised too. No one can say that out of hours players are being undervalued, yet the final result will be more influenced by the times when activity is highest, which just makes sense. It is also self balancing in that the contribution of a particular period of time to the end of the week score will be heavily influenced by the actual activity at that time not any arbitrary “time zones” determined in advance.

Looking at the detail of how it might work, in the poll thread I suggested we could drop feed extra points into the ppk “pool” each tick, so ppk is always 50% of the ppk+ppt total, but share the points according to the then ratio of kills across the teams in the week so far. All that would matter for the ppk 50% of the score is your teams share of the kills at the end of the matchup. Also, if the matchup were to start and end on Sunday night the number of kills would be much higher at the end of the matchup (because Friday night and weekends are much busier), making the final few days far more exciting and influential, another one of Anet’s objectives – stopping matchups being over on Monday and giving people a reason to keep playing. All without the need for overly complex scoring schemes that do risk making “non prime time” players feel they are being devalued/discriminated against. What’s more, it’s so simple it could probably happen really quickly and free up some of that valuable WvW dev time for other things!

FogLeg.9354:

Both ideas you guys posted were implemented in the Anet proposal. It was really good, fair system, look it up and read it.

No they weren’t. The timezones are used to dictate what the expected population is supposed to be for that period and to weight the score accordingly, totally different to the OP. And I’m pretty sure a strong NA won’t be punished for being stronger than their opponents.

morrolan.9608:

FogLeg.9354:

Both ideas you guys posted were implemented in the Anet proposal. It was really good, fair system, look it up and read it.

No they weren’t. The timezones are used to dictate what the expected population is supposed to be for that period and to weight the score accordingly, totally different to the OP. And I’m pretty sure a strong NA won’t be punished for being stronger than their opponents.

It would be difficult to argue about something we can not even post here. But let’s hope this will not be deleted, I will quote the unmentionable now:

Placement

Points for 1st – 3/6/9
Points for 2nd – 2/4/6
Points for 3rd – 1/2/3

Not only smilar, but exactly same.

FogLeg.9354:

morrolan.9608:

FogLeg.9354:

Both ideas you guys posted were implemented in the Anet proposal. It was really good, fair system, look it up and read it.

No they weren’t. The timezones are used to dictate what the expected population is supposed to be for that period and to weight the score accordingly, totally different to the OP. And I’m pretty sure a strong NA won’t be punished for being stronger than their opponents.

It would be difficult to argue about something we can not even post here. But let’s hope this will not be deleted, I will quote the unmentionable now:

Placement

Points for 1st – 3/6/9
Points for 2nd – 2/4/6
Points for 3rd – 1/2/3

Not only smilar, but exactly same.

No its not. Those are the PPT you get for being in 1st 2nd or 3rd at the tick. Totally different, servers also get PPT for the structures they hold and it increases near the end of the week. And it decreases in the off hours hence the complaints from off hours players.

Agreed – Night capping is Crap!
The term night capping has people overreact to it because frankly it’s offensive.

It suggests that in a worldwide 24 hour game mode, that someone who plays outside of your own hours should be valued less or scored differently just because of the time they play.

For ANET to actually call it night capping had me vote for the other option immediately, as I had echo’s of MO’s comment return to mind –
“if you’re into WvW, typically, you’re really into PvE”

Please ANET don’t lose touch with your INTERNATIONAL community like you once did with with your WvW community, and please call it for what it is…

Allow me to spell it out for all of you who still don’t understand.
If you’re playing WvW and there are 5 of you vs 20, that’s what you call a population imbalance, just because it happens to be in your night time doesn’t make it a night time thing.
WAIT! – ANET? You have already mentioned that balancing population is an issue? Then why additionally are you using an offensive term of “night capping” for the exact same issue?- It suggests exactly what we are all thinking, that you value your international community less.

SO -Can we all PLEASE drop the term night capping….?… It is not a thing.
Signed your entire international community.

morrolan.9608:

No its not. Those are the PPT you get for being in 1st 2nd or 3rd at the tick. Totally different, servers also get PPT for the structures they hold and it increases near the end of the week. And it decreases in the off hours hence the complaints from off hours players.

Possibly, to me the whole system looked exactly like described in OP. Maybe it’s just me.

Anyway, we have to wait until Anet publishes some more detail.

jazdarc.1367:

SO -Can we all PLEASE drop the term night capping….?… It is not a thing.
Signed your entire international community.

Amen.

jazdarc.1367:

It suggests that in a worldwide 24 hour game mode, that someone who plays outside of your own hours should be valued less or scored differently just because of the time they play.

But as an Australian, I’m so sick of the NA crews night capping our things when we go to bed! Because we just have to take it back when we wake up!

jazdarc.1367:

SO -Can we all PLEASE drop the term night capping….?… It is not a thing.
Signed your entire international community.

Seriously, Amen. Call it what it is.
Population imbalanced.

The problem with this proposal is it creates a double team against the second place server. First place server is only capable of being threatened by second place, so they focus them. Last place server is only capable of threatening second place, so they focus them.

The problem with all the proposals is they are just trying to slow down the winning team. It is this weird concept where the most organized international community should be punished and brought back down to the level of the others. The thing is, you can’t stop there – every server currently winning their matchup is absolutely dominating in kills. Changing the scoring system won’t change that. You need to handicap the winning server, make it so their players only deal 50% damage and have a max health of 10k.

I wholeheartedly agree that WvW scoring should be divided up into blocks to prevent runaway week. I wanted to but didn’t vote for scoring change in the poll because I was worried about diminishing none NA/EU prime’s points value.

[Mini Rant about ‘Night capping’]
Honestly what is night capping? If night capping means being capped when the server’s most active time zone is asleep/work, does that mean JQ’s night capping is NA’s time? So servers that matches up with JQ should have NA ppt nerfed? Or are people in NA time zone == VIP, so everyone else don’t matter.

BAITness.1083:

The problem with this proposal is it creates a double team against the second place server. First place server is only capable of being threatened by second place, so they focus them. Last place server is only capable of threatening second place, so they focus them.

I don’t see how this will be an issue at all. At least I can’t see how it differs from the current system or any other systems. Whatever scoring system you use, second place will always be closest to first place? Third place will always be closest to second place?

At least under OP’s suggestion, comebacks appear more achievable and makes the game mode more competitive for the entire week.

Dominating server will always dominate, at least less people will get demoralised from chasing 50k+ points, only getting like +/-30 points closer/further per tick (assuming an even timeslot).

It doesn’t really address population coverage issue, but honestly, is there really a better way other than poop over everyone who plays outside of NA/EU prime?

Unfortunately I don’t have any ideas how to balance population coverage. But I’m definitely sure that pooping on ‘night’ ppt, or any methods that diminishes the value of players’ contribution is not the way to go. Maybe have some incentive to make people spread out more? I honestly don’t know. But I believe OP’s suggestion is not a cure, but a worthy compromise that can at least lessen the pain.

EDIT:
Maybe this pooping over other time zone is not what Anet has in mind. But I’m just paranoid from seeing so much reddit/forum post that uses this suggestion to ‘address ’night capping’ ’

Let me explain better.

Say server A is winning at 300 ppt, server B is second at 200, and server C is third at 100 – just example numbers. At the end of the tick they get their assigned points for first second and third place.

In this scenario, server C has no chance of coming in first. They can only come in second. If they want to come in second they can take either 100+ points from server A, or they can take just 50+ points from server B. Either will get them second place for the tick.

It basically forces the third place server to full time focus on the second place server. Attacking the first place server would be very inefficient and likely lead to losing.

In the current set up, this is not at all the case. Map politics dictate who you should be attacking – server C would be smart to help server B take a fully upgraded keep from server A – it benefits both of them to make it paper. In the current system, this happens all the time. In this proposed system that would be very unlikely, as a strong keep for server A is helping to keep server B’s ppt within striking distance of server C.

So, isn’t that why OP said:

Next 8 hours the score resets back to 0.

Well, 8 hours fits nicely for dividing up regions within a day, but it can be anywhere from 12 hours or 1-3 days. Personally I would prefer at least 1-2 days because it will reduce the impact of definite win for a specific time zone throughout the week.

server C would be smart to help server B take a fully upgraded keep from server A – it benefits both of them to make it paper.

Upgrades won’t reset, only accumulated ppt resets. So it’s like ppt x 2. So if both servers don’t want this upgraded keep to keep ticking for ppt, maybe they both will want to paper it?

It won’t feel much different from WvW currently, except scores are a lot closer to chase after. Servers who want to play for second will always play for second. We see it even right now, why cap the strong server A when you can easily backcap server B when server B is preoccupied with server A? This will let me tick slightly closer to server B.

Like I said, this suggestion doesn’t remove absolutely dominating server ticking 400+, but the weaker server won’t have to chase over tens of thousands of points during their stronger timeslot.

I don’t think this will work for all the reasons mentioned. Mainly:

• It encourages a 2v1 on second place even more than occurs now.
• It won’t really help population imbalance. The same servers that are dominating at a particular time will still dominate.

The only way the time slice method will work is to actually have each time slice have its own rating and be matched up with other time slices of similar rating. So in essence each time slice is a separate weeklong match.

• For example if JQ Sea is much stronger than their JQ NA. JQ NA would be matched against lower ranked opponents in a lower tier. But JQ Sea may be in top tier.

If I’m reading it right I actually think Anets leaked solution will incorporate some of the OP’s proposal but be better. Because its more intricate and seems to take population difference into account not just time of day.

50% voted for discrimination
discriminated scoring system is fundamentally flawed to begin with

the root of the problem all points towards population imbalance which the “world linking” did not fully solved.

again, to really solve population imbalance is to literally delete all servers and force people to choose a new server, additional repeating this every X months. of course this is a extreme unpopular choice, more so than discriminated scoring even though it is more logically sound

sephiroth.4217:

A system like this might prevent run away matches and might be able to give the losing server a chance to recover after the weekend rush[..]

Thoughts?

WHile I do like the original idea a lot, the only way to make matches closer (IMO) would be to have the tick/score increase over the course of the matchup, so ticks/ppk or whatever is worth more the nearer we get to reset.

THIS way, you could recover from weekend rush and runaway matches. It also gives more meaning to the final few days and adds drama to the end of the matchup!

(in fairness, it was not my idea, I saw it on these forums years ago, too)