Guild Wars 2

MaLeVoLenT.8129:

Hey Jayne, I’m going to make another thread soon. So that what I pasted here is as the topic and the focal point of discussion. Thanks for the discussion so far and I hope we can continue it.

I’m typically ok with any changes that Anet wants to implement as long as it’s fair and doesn’t affect community. I don’t believe these proposals are fair, and I do believe it will have great impact on community.

That said, as long as they poll the players about it before they implement it, fill your boots with any and all ideas.

Jayne.9251:

No the model outlined above caters to big guilds and seemingly ignores the contributions of smaller guilds.

The battlegroup system doesn’t cater to large guilds, human nature does.

I would presume that there would exist enough battlegroups/alliances to accommodate all players. But I would expect less organized players and guilds to find themselves together in a less organized battlegroup. These players would then have the opportunity to build new alliances to become competitive.

This type of system isn’t designed to create parity in skill, simply to ensure balanced populations. Just like PvP, equal numbers will not mean equal skill.

Of course, all the best and most hardcore players will want to team up. Everyone is trying to build the best team. If you are not hardcore and not obsessed with winning, that shouldn’t be an issue for you.

You can still play for fun. That is always an option. But others may not want you on their team.

TorquedSoul.8097:

You can still play for fun. That is always an option. But others may not want you on their team.

This is a perfect quote to outline the reason why this is a bad idea.

Anything that is exclusive and not inclusive, particularly in an MMO, is bad for business.

SkyShroud.2865:

SloRules.3560:

Malediktus.3740:

Server merges instead of linkings are the solution.
Server communities can never establish if people get rotated in and out every 1 or 2 months.

This might be the best solution in the end. Like i said in post above, there is a lot of community rotation going on, i can’t even track guilds on my server+linking server.

I have a question for you, how do you control the bandwagon when everything is merged? If you can’t control the bandwagon, wouldn’t everything return to pre-hot eventually? Does that make sense to you?

Does not make sense to me. Less servers = more activity on all servers = less reason to bandwagon.
The reason people bandwagon is that they want a server with 24/7 action not small scale boredom.
And noone going to invest into building a server community if people get rotated in and out every 1 or 2 months. Too much administrative effort.

When I hear “rewards for xyz” I just think of a blobbing and hurting roaming/havoc even more. Any little thing that has swords right now you can get quite a response as a roamer or the lovely target tracking they graciously included now.

The 1 up 1 down system will just promote frustration from players as the “I can’t lose” players will transfer up to bandwagon. I agree with Swamurabi, will just make the player base even smaller and promote bigger blow outs and the game will continue to lose players due to boredom or just breaking moral of the losing servers. However, I could see anet being a fan of this because it would increase transfer activity in my opinion and that means gems. We’ll just be the same boat we were before with dead servers with spawn camping.

Glicko offset seems like a good idea to try out.

It seems that the greatest problem with battlegroups is the phase of building it. People fear discriminations and elitism. Maybe it would be better to randomly fill the battlegroups like the current WvW server do.

The concept of battlegroups would create units of the same size. That would make linking of them much easier. The concept would offer much more flexilbility. Servers with large WvW populations would send several battlegroups. Smallest server would maybe have only one. It could eliminate bandonwagoning since more players on a server would simply create more battlegroups instead of stacking on a single WvW server.

Guild members should play in the same battlegroup. New members will join in the next matchup. We would need some kind of overflow battlegroups where all the not already assigned players play.

Jayne.9251:

TorquedSoul.8097:

You can still play for fun. That is always an option. But others may not want you on their team.

This is a perfect quote to outline the reason why this is a bad idea.

Anything that is exclusive and not inclusive, particularly in an MMO, is bad for business.

You expect Anet to overcome human nature with game mechanics?

Not every Battlegroup would be exclusive. But team building will require including some and excluding others. The totally inclusive groups will likely be at the bottom of the pecking order simply due to the fact that they will not be the hardcore players.

Casuals shouldn’t care that the hardcore players have the best team. I thought that not taking it seriously was the definition of a casual. If you want to be casual and also the best at online games, you have unrealistic expectations.

BTW, I’m a casual and don’t care that others are more hardcore than I am.

TorquedSoul.8097:

BTW, I’m a casual and don’t care that others are more hardcore than I am.

That’s ok. I’m hardcore.

And yet I still care about inclusivity.

How about 1-up/1-down with the stipulation that it will only occur when the top server of one tier has at least a 25% point lead over either of the other two servers, and the lowest server in the tier above them is losing by at least 25% in points to either of the two servers in its tier? The victory would have to then be more convincing to move the top server up to the next level, assuming the next level has an imbalance in scores as well. Or, it could be combination where the % by which the top server wins and the % by which the next tier’s lowest server loses adds up to a total percent difference, like 50%, then that would also trigger the 1-up/1-down between those two tiers.

Jayne.9251:

TorquedSoul.8097:

BTW, I’m a casual and don’t care that others are more hardcore than I am.

That’s ok. I’m hardcore.

And yet I still care about inclusivity.

And nobody is stopping you from caring about it. However, expecting Anet to successfully enforce inclusivity in a gaming culture built around guilds and competition is a bit unrealistic, IMO.

Speaking of EU: What was so wrong with what we’ve had before? Didn’t things work out? Nightcapping was a problem, yes, and T8 and 9 were dying (because the wvw mechanics are out of control) – but other than that – did we really need artificial rankings, linkings and all that stuff?
That’s a genuine question and I won’t be able to vote for that (return most of it to how it has been) in any poll.

They are still ignoring the obvious which is to eliminate Glicko. I believe they should manually shuffle server links and rankings around as necessary to balance the tiers and create diversity.

This week moving DB down/NSP up and YB down/TC up would likely make for more even fights across the tiers. Next week they can relink a couple servers to further balance out the tiers.

Jana.6831:

Speaking of EU: What was so wrong with what we’ve had before? Didn’t things work out? Nightcapping was a problem, yes, and T8 and 9 were dying (because the wvw mechanics are out of control) – but other than that – did we really need artificial rankings, linkings and all that stuff?
That’s a genuine question and I won’t be able to vote for that (return most of it to how it has been) in any poll.

Yes, if I had my preference, they’d revert EU to the way it was and continue this grand experiment on NA only.

We were fine before.

TorquedSoul.8097:

Jayne.9251:

TorquedSoul.8097:

BTW, I’m a casual and don’t care that others are more hardcore than I am.

That’s ok. I’m hardcore.

And yet I still care about inclusivity.

And nobody is stopping you from caring about it. However, expecting Anet to successfully enforce inclusivity in a gaming culture built around guilds and competition is a bit unrealistic, IMO.

Well except for the issue that the bulk of players in WvW aren’t in big organized guilds.

I’d be curious to see the demographics actually. I’d wager that organized guilds are about 35% of entire wvw population.

Jayne.9251:

Yes, if I had my preference, they’d revert EU to the way it was and continue this grand experiment on NA only.

We were fine before.

Yeah and anet should know that. They should give us a real choice and not ask “do you want a 1 up and down or rewards for skirmishes” (what a choice is that anyway?).

Hey Anet: Link former EU T9 and 8 with slightly higher ranked servers, balance professions, balance siege, balance upgrades, rethink guild upgrades (the “buggy” WP was way funnier than the Emergency WP I’ve seen in use maybe 5 times) and then leave us alone, we will pull through.

Servers should be manually adjusted here and there, the glicko system prevents faster transition between tiers, when massive population movements happen.

On a side note, I think the 25% thing might be a good idea.

In my Opinion Anet needs someone on each server for “scouting” purposes so proper actions can be taken preferably during NA prime preferably if manual adjustment are possibly needed, for example DB needing to be moved down to T4

The glicko system is only preventing faster transitions between tiers because of the way it is being used. Please review: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/The-math-behind-WvW-ratings/first

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Hey everyone,

I wanted to address the idea of moving world linking to monthly instead of every 2 months, since it is being brought up more and more frequently.

After all is said and done it really doesn’t matter at all whether it’s 1 month, 2 months, 3 months… the ‘slave’ servers will be tossed around from time to time in an attempt to balance something out. How in the world can a “team” of host and hosted actually produce valid results when they could very well be separated at next linking?

I’ve tried real hard to work WITH this link-up thing and it’s a lot more of an annoyance than anything else. How do you actually know what a WvW population of a hosted server is anyway? At least a valid count… you don’t because many many people bounce from server to server in that wunnerful bandwagon to join up with the host that is either full or too expensive for them to join directly.

I’ve said it before… I used to play almost ALL of my time in WvW… since linking I now go into WvW maybe 20-30% of my time in GW2 and ONLY if certain friends are in. A good number of the host players aren’t interested in the linked server and many make it clear. Getting the kind of help we used to get from our own server doesn’t exist like it used to.

I’ll stop rambling… at the end of the day you will do what you want.

imo, relink all you want, it really makes zero difference to the slave servers.

Chaba.5410:

The glicko system is only preventing faster transitions between tiers because of the way it is being used. Please review: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/The-math-behind-WvW-ratings/first

LOL how about that last comment from 3 years ago. They called it.

“Imo no amount of math manipulation to try and set the matchups is going to work.
They are going to have to come up with some sort of manual matchmaking”

1000 players is pretty small to fill an entire WvW match-up for an entire week. Including all time zones, and all days a week. If all those 1000 players decide to play weekend only, it could be completely dead in week days etc.

Still pondering what I think of the system, it is interesting, but also not developed enough to give all the answers and details needed.

For one thing I can’t see anything but a rough idea on how to actually construct the teams. It mentions mixing BG’s, Guilds, and single players, but no details at all on how, other than trying to keep friends and guilds etc together (guess they would use the existing megaserver matching up to do the last bit).

By that vague definition we could end up with 5 different small BG’s combined with a dozen solo players, and a few random small guilds.

Also see no clear signs of when it locks downs the teams, and for what period. Does it only lock it down for the 4 week tournament at the end ? But stays open for the 8-10 weeks before that ? They can’t shut people out of the entire thing for 8+4 weeks just because they just joined a guild/bg and want to try ? Perhaps they only mean per week, or for the final tournament style 4 weeks.

For the game design of a PVP game mode, this makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t solve everything, but it does solve a few things. Ah well, will have to ponder it more.

MaLeVoLenT.8129:

1000 players is pretty small. I thought.

I do agree, WvW requires easily 3-5k players. The maps as they are now requires roughly 54k player hours to maximize output. If an entire side of only 1k had to cover the maps we have now, you’d have to play roughly 7 hours per day, 7 days per week. It would be nothing more than “OT Wars 2 : the Zombie Apocalypse”. All this illustrates is, is that the Dev’s are looking at population poorly. The map queues should be the only limitation.

DeWolfe.2174:

MaLeVoLenT.8129:

1000 players is pretty small. I thought.

I do agree, WvW requires easily 3-5k players. The maps as they are now requires roughly 54k player hours to maximize output. If an entire side of only 1k had to cover the maps we have now, you’d have to play roughly 7 hours per day, 7 days per week. It would be nothing more than “OT Wars 2 : the Zombie Apocalypse”. All this illustrates is, is that the Dev’s are looking at population poorly. The map queues should be the only limitation.

sry, I was more imagining the attempt to have 1000 players in a match. Sure there’s lots across servers of course, but all in one spot? sheesh people cry about lag when you get 3 groups of 50 together… :P

The way I took the information is the initial formation of the Battlegroups is to be capped at 1000 players. After that, All battlegroups and individual players and guilds will be match made.

Thus, the actual size of a world is greater than that of 1000 bodies.

Leaa.2943:

Servers have always been the reason to why wvw worked better then other game that choose linking, alliance, factions or fluffy pink unicorns. Reason is because servers have their own way and their own identity. With linkings they manage to remove a lot of this, and moving it further will end up like every other game out there were players just move to the group that wins the most.

“Alliance” or “Battlegroups” or “Factions” or whatever else you want to call it can work just as well as single server identity and can promote loyalty and pride for sides, it just depends on how well Anet presents this.

If you look at other games that promote sided pvp, they have the content to give those sides an identity, and not just red blue green. Look at Warhammer and World of Warcraft (no comments on why they are similiar! XD ), but they have two distinct sides that they built the conflict around, and players choose what sides they rally to which has also been given their own distinct flavor by the players and how they act. When wow players clash it isn’t For the Dalaran server!, no It’s for the Horde! or For the Alliance! That’s the identity and pride aspect that anet would need to build wvw around.

Anet essentially replaced the side identity with server identity, instead of Alliance vs Horde, or Order vs Destruction, or Vanu Sovereignty vs Terran Republic vs New Conglomerate, they made it Blackgate vs Jade Quarry, vs Tarnished Coast.

Planetside is a three sided scifi shooter game that runs like wvw, but it’s built around three distinct sides, even their weapons and vehicles are distinct on each side. Dark Age of Camelot/Camelot unchained, same concept, three distinct sides with history and lore built in. Everyone has pride for the side they choose, and then the server.

When people go to eotm, which an alliance system would basically mirror, do you think they give a care about the blue frostreach winterland, red badlands desert or green overgrowth forest? There’s nothing there for them to feel any pride to fight for. The same will happen if they built the alliance system to be run on guilds as the face of those alliances.

What anet needs to do if they move away from server structures is to shift the pride and identity aspects to the three alliances. Example of this would be building the three sides to be The Durmand Priory, The Order of Whispers, or The Vigil. As with the personal story players chose one of the three sides for a reason, they have their own history and ways of doing things, which lined up players own personal style of play, that’s something they can rally behind. Or even choose gods or dragons to be represented. Give each side their own distinct legendary back piece or finisher to go along with it.

This may all sound like roleplaying bull, but it helps getting players to rally behind something to fight for. If they go down the road of the Green [OnS] alliance!, the Blue [FoW] alliance!, the Red [KnT] alliance, then yeah I’m sure people will not care very much other than those guilds and their friends.

Stacking a side is also a problem, but they have ways to deal with that, like planetside will give stat boost to sides that are underpopulated at the time, but given the way anet handles the outnumbered buff not sure they could get that one right. But you could also use side lockouts, or population caps, transfer lockouts, etc. Just a matter of how much effort they are willing to put into it, to make players feel attached and give a care for the warring alliances.

Jayne.9251:

MaLeVoLenT.8129:

I didn’t write this. Only Arena Net can explain it not me. But from my perspective, this is what the game needs. It would even allow downtime tournaments and proper rewards. It would allow us to keep our communities together while keeping match-ups competitive and adding variation to them as well.

I don’t think Anet wrote this either, so it would be hard to explain for them.

Its along the lines of what Tyler has stated.

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Question still remains, how are people gonna deter others from bandwagon to maintain a healthy game mode

Professional sports leagues use a draft system.

I’ve bold the key word.

What’s the point we’re supposed to take-away from your emboldening? WvW is not a pro league, but how does that matter? It is widely recognized that WvW players have differing levels of skill. Not all professional sports players are of the same skill level either. Professional leagues use several mechanisms to prevent teams with deep pockets from stacking the team. WvW has no such mechanisms when perhaps it should as a deterrant to maintain a healthy game mode.

Clearly, your idea of professional is in term of level of skills. However, my idea of professional is in literally professional. Professional is not a term to define your skill level but is way more than that. WvW players do not play WvW to reach professional stage (there’s nothing professional about wvw anyway). Just like dota, do everyone play professional? Nope. Trying to implement something that is only acceptable in professional context is…..

PS: I did play live tournaments before, not just typical online league which people are doing nowadays.

QuickRain.4735:

\
In my Opinion Anet needs someone on each server for “scouting” purposes so proper actions can be taken preferably during NA prime preferably if manual adjustment are possibly needed, for example DB needing to be moved down to T4

Yes I’ve come to this conclusion lately as well. Anet are clearly making decisions based on metrics alone, they actually need to get some experience of what is happening on servers.

Malediktus.3740:

SkyShroud.2865:

SloRules.3560:

Malediktus.3740:

Server merges instead of linkings are the solution.
Server communities can never establish if people get rotated in and out every 1 or 2 months.

This might be the best solution in the end. Like i said in post above, there is a lot of community rotation going on, i can’t even track guilds on my server+linking server.

I have a question for you, how do you control the bandwagon when everything is merged? If you can’t control the bandwagon, wouldn’t everything return to pre-hot eventually? Does that make sense to you?

Does not make sense to me. Less servers = more activity on all servers = less reason to bandwagon.
The reason people bandwagon is that they want a server with 24/7 action not small scale boredom.
And noone going to invest into building a server community if people get rotated in and out every 1 or 2 months. Too much administrative effort.

Don’t make sense to you because you simply cannot see how things happen. Game decline, they always do. Once 24 servers packed with players, it slowly decline and thus people move up and stack. When people move up and stack, unbalance issue occur in servers that got destacked and servers that got stacked. This further give birth to more issues like making more people quit faster, timezone unbalance and so on but what is for another time to talk about. Anyway, this will continue to repeat as long there are more than one server. This is just a basic cycle.

So again, how are you gonna resolve that?

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Question still remains, how are people gonna deter others from bandwagon to maintain a healthy game mode

Professional sports leagues use a draft system.

I’ve bold the key word.

What’s the point we’re supposed to take-away from your emboldening? WvW is not a pro league, but how does that matter? It is widely recognized that WvW players have differing levels of skill. Not all professional sports players are of the same skill level either. Professional leagues use several mechanisms to prevent teams with deep pockets from stacking the team. WvW has no such mechanisms when perhaps it should as a deterrant to maintain a healthy game mode.

Clearly, your idea of professional is in term of level of skills. However, my idea of professional is in literally professional. Professional is not a term to define your skill level but is way more than that. WvW players do not play WvW to reach professional stage (there’s nothing professional about wvw anyway). Just like dota, do everyone play professional? Nope. Trying to implement something that is only acceptable in professional context is…..

PS: I did play live tournaments before, not just typical online league which people are doing nowadays.

If it helps you, then remove the word “professional”. Recreational kids sports leagues where I live ignore coach and friend requests so that the league can form teams where skill is spread across all teams and the season ends up being fun and competitive rather than one team stomping everyone else.

Players cry here on this forum for fun and competitive WvW matches, but they also bandwagon. Can’t have the cake and eat it too.

What you guys forget: People want fair fights and they want to know that they’ve won/been defeated because of skill. If no amount of skill can conquer the bigger group, then people will leave – that’s the reason people are leaving wvw. The problem you guys on NA have is also that you are convinced to need a 24/7 coverage which was never an issue on EU – but also EU is dying and also on EU the people are moving to more populated servers because bigger = better.

Jayne.9251:

Also, calling something alliance or server or whatever will not resolve issues plaguing WvW. You have to resolve the bandwagonning issue FIRST.

This, right here.

That’s why I think matchups should be re-calculated weekly. Get rid of Glicko. Have the matchmaking be data-driven based on how a server has performed, transfer rates calculating where players have moved by WvW-hours from prior weeks, etc. This doesn’t even need to be confined to the ineffectiveness of 1u1d to solve this problem or any other simplistic algorithm. When dealing with predictions and the subjective nature of balance, more complex, data-driven systems are going to be required to get more accurate results.

Do this, and now you have a system that removes all the incentive from stacking – it deliberately punishes large groups of players from moving together, because with some tuning to how heuristics are weighted, it would ultimately force player-decided pairings aside in favor of the better matchup. Coverage stops being a problem. Population stops being a problem. Bandwagoning becomes extremely cost-prohibitive, and allied servers could constantly be rotated.

Letting players choose where they’r going to go solves nothing and exacerbates the existing problems of stacking and coverage. This should be something that should be avoided at all costs or the fate of WvW is sealed.

Gaile loves me.

Xox.

morrolan.9608:

QuickRain.4735:

\
In my Opinion Anet needs someone on each server for “scouting” purposes so proper actions can be taken preferably during NA prime preferably if manual adjustment are possibly needed, for example DB needing to be moved down to T4

Yes I’ve come to this conclusion lately as well. Anet are clearly making decisions based on metrics alone, they actually need to get some experience of what is happening on servers.

Have to agree, if you want to understand a topic read up or experience it for yourself. I’m just not sure anet is willing to put the work in, just having polls isn’t going to quick fix the challenges in wvw.

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Question still remains, how are people gonna deter others from bandwagon to maintain a healthy game mode

Professional sports leagues use a draft system.

I’ve bold the key word.

What’s the point we’re supposed to take-away from your emboldening? WvW is not a pro league, but how does that matter? It is widely recognized that WvW players have differing levels of skill. Not all professional sports players are of the same skill level either. Professional leagues use several mechanisms to prevent teams with deep pockets from stacking the team. WvW has no such mechanisms when perhaps it should as a deterrant to maintain a healthy game mode.

Clearly, your idea of professional is in term of level of skills. However, my idea of professional is in literally professional. Professional is not a term to define your skill level but is way more than that. WvW players do not play WvW to reach professional stage (there’s nothing professional about wvw anyway). Just like dota, do everyone play professional? Nope. Trying to implement something that is only acceptable in professional context is…..

PS: I did play live tournaments before, not just typical online league which people are doing nowadays.

If it helps you, then remove the word “professional”. Recreational kids sports leagues where I live ignore coach and friend requests so that the league can form teams where skill is spread across all teams and the season ends up being fun and competitive rather than one team stomping everyone else.

Players cry here on this forum for fun and competitive WvW matches, but they also bandwagon. Can’t have the cake and eat it too.

Still, the point stand, you can’t force a professional level concept into a casual game like this filled with casual players.

So, again, how are you gonna deal with bandwagon?

Belenwyn.8674:

It seems that the greatest problem with battlegroups is the phase of building it. People fear discriminations and elitism. Maybe it would be better to randomly fill the battlegroups like the current WvW server do.

Guild members should play in the same battlegroup. New members will join in the next matchup..

^THIS

The destruction of small guilds and elitism is deadly to the game, and ANET’s bottom line (- are you listening Mr O’Brien?).

Back in the day before GW2 was released, they talked about WvW being a place ANYONE could jump in and have fun with. “The Mists” or some such. To ANET’s credit, WvW is very accessible for most players. Alliances could kill that if not done correctly.

If Alliance participation was randomized to favor small guilds and singles with only one or 2 large guilds in each then the matches would be dynamic and unpredictable. The trick is to keep each match short term – one (or 2) weeks at the most.

One of ANET’s major mistakes has been the snail pace of their WvW matches, events (golum was great fun for a day and then everyone hated it), server links, tournaments etc etc etc. Everything they do in WvW lasts way too kittening long.

ANET needs to get a fire under their behinds and get with it. They are snails the age of leopards. Other RvR games are coming, and the one that has the most nimble devs will win.

There’s no way to balance WvW Population between Servers.

Solution needs to use these huge differences in Population levels to create Match-Ups…that is a fact…imho

Take a moment & visualize that a Server’s Population level can define what they bring to a battle.

The below is only an example on how I’d visualize this:

Large Servers – Aircraft Carrier

Medium Servers – Squad of M1 Tanks

Small Servers – Squad of Motorcycles

Ok with this in mind…

There’s only going to be a few Large Servers that can bring an Aircraft Carrier to battle.

World Linking actually steals players from all Small & Medium Servers to fuel the Large Server’s Aircraft Carrier needs.

World Linking actually prevents Small & Medium Servers from ever growing in the long term.

World Linking with Tiers ensures that only 2 Servers can directly attack the Largest dominant Server that has the Aircraft Carrier.

WvW game mode needs a design that allows competition between All Servers & not encourage this mechanically imposed dominance.

Small & Medium Sized Servers will only have Motorcycles & M1 Tanks because resources are mechanically diverted to Large Host Servers.

Tiers, World Linking, and Glicko design will only have the ability to create Match-Ups between an [ Aircraft Carrier ] vs [ M1 Tanks & Motorcycles ]

At this rate…we’re going to end up with a schizophrenic WvW Culture.

Our commanders & communities will always be

Unhappy, Unsatisfied, & Burned Out

with constantly having to adjust to change while trying to fight for meaning where there is none…given the current game design & mechanics.

If you’re on the Aircraft Carrier…you probably think…why is everybody complaining…everything looks good to me.

Haha funny how lowest tier match is most unbalanced. I would think that 13 vs 14 vs 15 would be most balanced matchup.

Junkpile.7439:

Haha funny how lowest tier match is most unbalanced. I would think that 13 vs 14 vs 15 would be most balanced matchup.

You just need to look at it from the right angle:

Jana.6831:

Junkpile.7439:

Haha funny how lowest tier match is most unbalanced. I would think that 13 vs 14 vs 15 would be most balanced matchup.

You just need to look at it from the right angle:

I don’t get it? Are you saying that somebody showing us middle finger?

Junkpile.7439:

I don’t get it? Are you saying that somebody showing us middle finger?

I would never do that!

Factions are a horrible idea. It would be super easy to manipulate that system.

Faction 1 full, make faction 2 an ally of faction 1. Dominate faction 3. or Make 3 factions and win trade.

Factions are too mercurial to create any kind of pride or identity, which is an important part of many players in this game. Also, they’d be total anarchy. Who’d be the leader(s) of a faction? How often would those leader(s) need to be redetermined with new factions? What about VoiPs? Who’s gonna create, administrate, and pay for voips so that factions can be secure and communicate? What about community websites? If factions were constantly re-forming, there’d be no point to them. What would happen to all the people that currently play together, but now can’t. Instead, they may be pitted against eachother.

Servers have a purpose. They create a sense of identity that drives people to win a match. They also create a foundation to build a community that a faction system could never do.

Of course, Mal, and players like him, don’t get that. They are the people who have multiple accounts on different servers, create their own factions and try to bully and manipulate other servers to their whims. He has no interest in community and usually ends up hurting them. He enjoys playing the political game to influence things to fit his way.

Spurnshadow.3678:

Factions are a horrible idea. It would be super easy to manipulate that system.

Faction 1 full, make faction 2 an ally of faction 1. Dominate faction 3. or Make 3 factions and win trade.

Factions are too mercurial to create any kind of pride or identity, which is an important part of many players in this game. Of course, Mal, and players like him, don’t get that. They are the people who have multiple accounts on different servers, create their own factions and try to bully and manipulate other servers to their whims. He has no interest in community and usually ends up hurting them. He enjoys playing the political game to influence things to fit his way.

Funny how factions are regarded as the best systems for large scale pvp in game design then. A good factional system will be flexible enough to at least partly mitigate issues with population imbalance. As for alliances, sure but that happens now and requires the full time co-operation of the other faction.

And factions in any factional game have an identity, ESO does, DAOC did.

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Question still remains, how are people gonna deter others from bandwagon to maintain a healthy game mode

Professional sports leagues use a draft system.

I’ve bold the key word.

What’s the point we’re supposed to take-away from your emboldening? WvW is not a pro league, but how does that matter? It is widely recognized that WvW players have differing levels of skill. Not all professional sports players are of the same skill level either. Professional leagues use several mechanisms to prevent teams with deep pockets from stacking the team. WvW has no such mechanisms when perhaps it should as a deterrant to maintain a healthy game mode.

Clearly, your idea of professional is in term of level of skills. However, my idea of professional is in literally professional. Professional is not a term to define your skill level but is way more than that. WvW players do not play WvW to reach professional stage (there’s nothing professional about wvw anyway). Just like dota, do everyone play professional? Nope. Trying to implement something that is only acceptable in professional context is…..

PS: I did play live tournaments before, not just typical online league which people are doing nowadays.

If it helps you, then remove the word “professional”. Recreational kids sports leagues where I live ignore coach and friend requests so that the league can form teams where skill is spread across all teams and the season ends up being fun and competitive rather than one team stomping everyone else.

Players cry here on this forum for fun and competitive WvW matches, but they also bandwagon. Can’t have the cake and eat it too.

Still, the point stand, you can’t force a professional level concept into a casual game like this filled with casual players.

So, again, how are you gonna deal with bandwagon?

What do you mean again? I wasn’t trying to force a professional level concept into a casual game. That’s your reading of what I wrote while you outright ignored my recreational league example as clarification.

Sports leagues utilize several different mechanisms to prevent team stacking. All I’m suggesting is that real world paradigms exist as potential solutions to be modeled in-game.

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Question still remains, how are people gonna deter others from bandwagon to maintain a healthy game mode

Professional sports leagues use a draft system.

I’ve bold the key word.

What’s the point we’re supposed to take-away from your emboldening? WvW is not a pro league, but how does that matter? It is widely recognized that WvW players have differing levels of skill. Not all professional sports players are of the same skill level either. Professional leagues use several mechanisms to prevent teams with deep pockets from stacking the team. WvW has no such mechanisms when perhaps it should as a deterrant to maintain a healthy game mode.

Clearly, your idea of professional is in term of level of skills. However, my idea of professional is in literally professional. Professional is not a term to define your skill level but is way more than that. WvW players do not play WvW to reach professional stage (there’s nothing professional about wvw anyway). Just like dota, do everyone play professional? Nope. Trying to implement something that is only acceptable in professional context is…..

PS: I did play live tournaments before, not just typical online league which people are doing nowadays.

If it helps you, then remove the word “professional”. Recreational kids sports leagues where I live ignore coach and friend requests so that the league can form teams where skill is spread across all teams and the season ends up being fun and competitive rather than one team stomping everyone else.

Players cry here on this forum for fun and competitive WvW matches, but they also bandwagon. Can’t have the cake and eat it too.

Still, the point stand, you can’t force a professional level concept into a casual game like this filled with casual players.

So, again, how are you gonna deal with bandwagon?

What do you mean again? I wasn’t trying to force a professional level concept into a casual game. That’s your reading of what I wrote while you outright ignored my recreational league example as clarification.

Sports leagues utilize several different mechanisms to prevent team stacking. All I’m suggesting is that real world paradigms exist as potential solutions to be modeled in-game.

So two of the issues a new WvW must answer is:

How do you have equal players on each side when you step into a map?

How do you prevent all the skilled players from grouping together?

Swamurabi.7890:

So two of the issues a new WvW must answer is:

How do you have equal players on each side when you step into a map?

How do you prevent all the skilled players from grouping together?

You can’t & you don’t.

You design a game mode that takes advantage of all these player’s basic behavior patterns to drive Match-Ups…imho

Spurnshadow.3678:

Of course, Mal, and players like him, don’t get that. They are the people who have multiple accounts on different servers, create their own factions and try to bully and manipulate other servers to their whims. He has no interest in community and usually ends up hurting them. He enjoys playing the political game to influence things to fit his way.

Solid. Maybe next time try an argument without talking out your other end? If you need to keep feeding yourself false stories to make Mal your sworn enemy to help yourself sleep at night, that’s your issue. However if you seriously think that, and aren’t just dribbling to manipulate other people into hating someone they never met, then you need to chill out and go talk to some people. Your claims are laughable.

There are two major problems that have plagued WvW from the beginning…and solving any problem requires identification, first.

There are really only two problems, but they compound each other, and here they are…

1. Any effort to balance WvW by balancing servers will fail while transfers are allowed and easy.
Every time ANet announces a new plan to balance servers, the major guilds react by stacking on some new server to exploit the new system and matchups.
I actually think ANet doesn’t acknowledge this, because there is so much profit to be made in mass transfers.

2. The Glicko system is stagnation. It was a dumb idea to use it for server matchups.

Glicko works in, say, professional chess…because low ranked players have opportunities to play higher ranked players on occasion. An upset in such a matchup will cause a shift in Glicko ratings.

In WvW, lower ranked servers never get an opportunity to beat higher ranked servers, let alone actually get an upset victory.

Glicko is designed to for a competetitive sport where higher ranked players are matched up against lower ranked players as well as evenly ranked ones. This does not occur in WvW, so Glicko ends up being a stagnant and irrelevant scoring system.

So long as Glicko remains the matchmaking system, and servers only play against equally scored servers, Glicko will lock in place the matchups…and it will take months to overcome the imbalances created by server transfers with every new effort to rebalance WvW.

We run into the same problems over and over again because we address everything except the root cause of the problems.

Vihar.5780:

There are two major problems that have plagued WvW from the beginning…

1. Any effort to balance WvW by balancing servers will fail while transfers are allowed and easy.

2. The Glicko system is stagnation. It was a dumb idea to use it for server matchups.

I’d like to add to your list…

3. Can’t “team-up” in WvW & play together with all friends & family that are on different servers.

4. Allow players to resolve off-peak capping themselves.

Spurnshadow.3678:

Factions are a horrible idea. It would be super easy to manipulate that system.

Faction 1 full, make faction 2 an ally of faction 1. Dominate faction 3. or Make 3 factions and win trade.

Factions are too mercurial to create any kind of pride or identity, which is an important part of many players in this game. Also, they’d be total anarchy. Who’d be the leader(s) of a faction? How often would those leader(s) need to be redetermined with new factions? What about VoiPs? Who’s gonna create, administrate, and pay for voips so that factions can be secure and communicate? What about community websites? If factions were constantly re-forming, there’d be no point to them. What would happen to all the people that currently play together, but now can’t. Instead, they may be pitted against eachother.

Servers have a purpose. They create a sense of identity that drives people to win a match. They also create a foundation to build a community that a faction system could never do.

Of course, Mal, and players like him, don’t get that. They are the people who have multiple accounts on different servers, create their own factions and try to bully and manipulate other servers to their whims. He has no interest in community and usually ends up hurting them. He enjoys playing the political game to influence things to fit his way.

No need for the character assassination when the only thing I’m trying to do it be apart of the GW2 community you claim I have no interest in. You should know the attempts generally don’t work in your favor.

Alliances aren’t Factions. They are two different things yet both can have an identity.
Players make Guilds. Guilds make Alliances. Alliances are apart of a Faction. Factions exist on a Server and in Guild Wars 2, Servers exist in a Tier.

It doesn’t matter if the game design fails to incorporate mechanics in which the community can categorize, organize, and balance itself. Humans in general do this and a video game is nothing but a simulation. We are the same community and all layers of the community has its own identity.

If Arena Net wants to better quantify, analyze and kitten the community to provide rule sets for proper balance, they need to be able to identify and analyze the identities of the community.

After Arena Net identifies the actual structure of the WvW community and its identities, ANET will be able to strike balance. The same balance and health we ask for will be achieved.

This is why I’d back any of the following: Battlegroups, Globes, Factions, Alliances. To fix our issues.

EDIT: ArenaNet pls https://puu.sh/ruah8/85ed477b96.png no kittens.