Guild Wars 2

Hello,

I have already posted most of the following ideas in other messages, somewhere…
As some people (thanks for their comments) found them good, and as some others, in game, say to me I should create a topic about them…well I do it.

I just wish this contribution will feed the reflexion. As usual with this kind of message, just prepare a coffee before reading

ROOTS OF THE SCORING ISSUE

WvW is a match.

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

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

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

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

This is unsatisfactory.

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

According to me, there are two main axes of progress.

FIRST AXIS OF PROGRESS: GIVE A SENSE TO THE SCORE

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

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

SECOND AXIS OF PROGRESS: MAKE ASYMMETRIC WARFARE INTERESTING IN TERM OF SCORING

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

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

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

And we are not limited to a single measure.

First measure: PPK (already done).
I consider this as a step in the good direction: a team with less people can make a good amount of points against a biggest one if they play better, choosing their fight as in a guerrilla warfare.
It’s a good system as long as a killed player can’t give a victory point before a short cooldown after is death.

PPK exits, keep it preciously.

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

According to me it should be a solution to explore because it doesn’t not focus on this or that category of player but on the potential asymmetry of the populations each times the points given by structures are calculated.

The more the players of a team are present on the field at the “tic”, the less the structures should give points to that team. It would change nothing when populations are equivalent, but this would balance asymmetric situations.
The all population of the 4 maps should be considered together because players travel from a map to another, and teams develop for a long time “multi maps zerg”.

There are certainly different clever calculations. however, even if it seems a complex thing to manage, the calculation should remains as simple as possible in its principles.

I recognize that it’s not an easy exercise, but I’m proposing one:

Third measure: threshold effect.

A thing could be done to limit the impact of an unusual or extreme situation, as when one team is momentarily absent.

We could imagine a threshold effect:

As soon as one of the three teams has less than a percentage of its maximum number of players on the field (the 4 maps together) at a “tic”, PPT is 0 for the three teams as long as the situation continue. It does not prevent the other teams to capture structures or PPK, but it limits the impact of the situation and preserve the interest of the match.

One more time that percentage would be an adjustment tool used by Arenanet team.

If we take an example of 5%, it would mean that as soon as a team as less than 320×0.05=16 players divided on the 4 maps, the three teams mark no points for their controlled structure.
Even if they can still take an advantage conquering structures of the absent team, and mark Points by the ppk way, the score is not too distorted, and the interest of the match is preserved

CONCLUSION.

Whatever future decisions nearly taken, they should focus on the sense of the scoring itself and manage asymmetric confrontations, in term of scoring, which are a characteristic of Gw2 WvW whatever day or night.

The objective should be to improve the interest of the competition for everybody, those who play in big teams and enjoy that, and those who prefer small teams and guerilla approach.
Up to all the players who enjoy WvW to adapt their gameplay to win a match, using conventional, guerrilla, counterinsurgency strategies and tactics at the good moment.

Thanks for reading, prepare a second coffee…

Nice ideas, looks interesting to me.

You should probably consider how to avoid following server behaviour:

Suppose server A rushes everyone into WvW at reset night. They get ahead by small points, they now decide nobody from server A logs into WvW for next 6 day. Because they have 0 players, servers B and C can never gain any points. Server A wins witht he score from reset night.

About what I’ve called a threshold effect, you’re right. That’s a risk.

But this would mean that almost all players of a same team would be ready to stop playing to do such a thing….being all ok with such a beahvior, depriving themselves of the pleasure of playing.

Honestly, when I see the difficulty most of them have to coordinate their zergs and roaming groups, the probability of such an exploit seems reasonably low enough to me.
And the team trying to do such a thing on a long period of time would take itself a big risk to loose the match because of the natural indiscipline of players.

But perhaps we should still imagine that threshold effect doesn’t take place the last 24 hours of a match if we want to mitigate such a risk a little bit more.

The risk you describe is also a reason why a threshold effect should be relatively small if it was used.
If really Arenanet observes such a behavior, their team could adjust the percentage down.

And yes, even if I think the mechanism should be tried, if we discover that in practice it’s to easy to abuse threshold effect, abandon it and look for something else to manage extreme situations, as the momentary absence of a team.

Anvil.9230:

And yes, even if I think the mechanism should be tried, if we discover that in practice it’s to easy to abuse threshold effect, abandon it and look for something else to manage extreme situations, as the momentary absence of a team.

Very useful OP and this quote as well: something has to be done, solutions are needed, courage to try out variants and keep improving them, or remove those that doesn’t work.

Also something has to be done with balancing numbers – each timezone considered separately (not just overall total like it is now); by creating two kind of player categories:

1. bound to a server, can’t use the transfer feature
This is for players who value loyalty to a community above everything else
(Allow every WvW player account to define a permanent home server they want to stay loyal to, losing the right/option to ever transfer – they can be transferred in extreme cases by Anet, eventuallly, when their home will be merged again.)

2. available to transfer, can be encouraged with rewards to go where balance asks for
This is for players who value action, fights, balance (siding with underdog), and so on.
Those who won’t define a home server, will be considered “mercenaries” or undecided (doesn’t matter the name), and they can transfer or can be transferred by Anet, and used as balancing players, when needed (with their consent when possible, or given rewards if they accept to transfer to certain world in need of players, same ideea used to balance a sPvP match when becomes one-sided)"

Then start moving players, and don’t forget about incentives.

You nailed it then you lost me. Reasonable population equity or at least a system that strives for it is fundamental to making WvW a better game mode.

A big reason the game mode becomes less fun isn’t because the score gets out of hand, it is because the game itself becomes no fun to play as a side rolls in with 2x or more the numbers. It is like some random high school football team taking to the field against the Patriots and Broncos. We can handicap the scoring all we want but ultimately the game itself won’t be much fun.

I understand what you mean.

But I’m afraid we have to consider that unbalanced populations and asymmetric confrontations are part of massive online PvP games.

The easiest way to deal with that is to leave players free to constitute guild alliances as they want. That system is quite well adapted to sandbox MMO as eveonline.

But it doesn’t work very well on an instantiated game as Gw2 mainly because massive players confrontations are highly regulated in term of time and space, and because teams are divided by rigid servers which have not an equal access to players. An other important difference between the 2 kind of MMO is the reason of massive PvP confrontations: In a sandbox MMO, players fight to control a territory for its ressources and there’s no need of a score.

So, regarding a game as Gw2, according to me the best way is to consider this asymmetry as a part of the game, and to manage it as in similar games that use a score to define a winner, specialy wargames.

In wargames simulating assymetric warfare, players have not exactly the same kind of goals and/or the captured objectives do not pay the same amount of points to their score, depending if they play the conventional army or the guerrilla forces.

The reason is simple: A guerilla force and a conventional army have not the same gameplay. And as the goal of a score is to classify players’ skills to define a winner, scoring does not measure the same things.

For a conventional army, it’s mainly its ability to control a territory, and for a guerilla force its ability to harrass and destabilize the first one.

Finally the main difference between that kind of wargame and a game as Gw2 WvW is the fact that the situation evoluates during the play, following a moving path.
During a same match, a team can have to play a conventional warfare, or an asymmetric warfare (being time to time the conventional forces or the guerrilla).

That’s why I proposed to build the score calculation on a evolving system, depending of the population trends at each “tic”.

And an other advantage of that kind of approach is to make day/night debat obsolete.

There is a good point made here. While there are some very loud individual voices on the forums, the actual WvW population has a wide variety of play styles.

Some play for fights only. Some for score. Some love to protect their homeland. Some want to invade and take other people’s stuff away. Some want to do that in small havoc teams. Some want to get 40 of their best friends together and storm the castle. Some think siege is an abomination, some think it only belongs in structures, and some think it should be fair game everywhere.

Catering to one play style over another too much will cost the game mode players. And without enemies, there is no game.

Anvil.9230

Good post and ideas, like it.

I think it would end up with some weird situations, where 2 servers might have 100 and 50 people on the map, but the 3rd server has a 0. So the two remaining servers have to find each others and fight for points, or just go away.

But you’re spot on as for why this game mode has trouble becoming a serious competitive game mode.