Guild Wars 2

What is more sad to me is that this is probably not even the developers fault. Based on what I have read over the years, the devs are just so limited by the management that they cannot develop anything real. Such as their inability to know the basics of good business.

Broken record moment. Nearly every successful business has always thought in the long run. Key word, nearly. Not saying all but you get it. When you build a computer do you build for now? No, you build for the future, when you fix up a car, do you buy parts for tomorrow? No, you buy for years down the road so it is as easy to maintain as possible. Why should this game be any different?

It has been proven time and time again that if you just wait and take your time with development and release a solid quality product/content whatever you want to call it, the community will be more pleased then releasing half baked products/content like a machine gun. This Living Story thing is a joke and it always will be. It has a story yes, but the execution is the worst I have ever seen. Giving no time to any of the writers to make a good solid story, they are forced to just put it out asap. And this pans out to every aspect of this game and it is heart breaking, truly heart breaking.

As I said before, Guild Wars 2 is not long for this world with this sort of business model/thinking. No business has ever thrived and is excepted by the sane public by doing this. Your reputation is your biggest product, if you lose your reputation then you lose your product, it is as simple as that.

I felt I needed to clarify what I meant when I said “Anet”. I am not saying the dev’s arent a part of this but from what I see this is a management screw up. In my business I will never ever ever let a suit manage a game. They have no interest in it. You must have a love for your product or you mine as well toss it out.

TL/DR When you let someone who doesn’t have a love for the product take over, the product is doomed to fail eventually. You can try and try and try to hype it all into the sky but in the long run, you will fail I can promise you that. Guild Wars 1 was a masterpiece. Some of the best PvP/PvE I have ever seen in an MMO. Guild Wars 2 is the worst PvP/PvE I have ever seen in an MMO (That is functioning).

lordkrall.7241:

kokiman.2364:

How is it actually useful?

“Only guild X follow Yellow tag!”
“Pugs follow Blue tag!”
“Camp-flippers follow Red tag!”

Sure people will still do a bit what they want. But it is quite a bit easier than having every commander having the same color.

“Only guild X follow Sarah Soothsayer’s tag!”
“Pugs follow Burny Madoff’s tag!”
“Camp-flippers follow Sir kitten y’s tag!”

^ What would be the difference if you have to keep telling people what to follow and hoping they join the squad? Newsflash! It’s no different than what we have have now.

Guilds will still have to hope people are decent enough to not blob onto them. What happens when guild X leaves the map temporarily and another yellow tag pops up with completely different intentions or any other tag for that matter? There is zero additional functionality added it’s just another BS vanity item that will probably cause more confusion than they’re worth.

lordkrall.7241:

And how would you suggest they fix it?
If it is so easy you would have a couple of examples on how to fix it, right?

They actually DID change the match-up at least once after release, and yet the issue still seems to exist, so I would love to hear your solution for it.
As long as people are not forced to join certain servers or forced to WvW, there can never really be complete balance.

You also seem to have rather little knowledge of WvW when you claim that 3 colors (I am assuming you are talking about Commander Tags) is not useful.
It is actually very useful for organized WvW-play.

Of course there can be balance. The fix would be to take 2 low pop servers and stick them in the same wvw instance on the same faction.. I don’t know all the servers off hand.. but for example:
Server A has 100 people in wvw on average.
Server B has 100 people
Server C has 100 people
Server D has 300 people

You merge server a b and c into an instance on one faction to fight server D

Rift did a similar thing where they would take instance the pvp match compromised of players across 3 or 4 servers on one team. It was faction vs faction in that game and this game is void of factions so it resorts to server vs server which is a bad move right from the word go because you always have some dead servers and some over populated servers.

The fix is to incorporate 3 factions into the game and let players decide which one to fight for.

So it becomes less of a high pop server vs a low pop server issue, then it would still become a high pop faction vs a low pop faction, at which point you add incentive to play on the low pop side with maybe increased loot chance and by buffing the low faction side with more dmg and hitpoints to counteract the population imbalance.

Or, scrapping all that and just simply giving the low pop faction a better buff to compete… It the servers calculates a 100 vs 25… Buff the 25 players with an appropriate amount of hitpoints and dmg modifiers.. And give them better rewards so people may transfer over to help even things out? I don’t know, its not bloody rocket science..

This is an informative and important thread. WvW has always been gw2 endgame imo and if it isn’t fixed the ominous cries of “the game is dying” might come true… I’ve already lost many friends and a hardcore guild to wvw’s suffering. Not even counting my friend’s guilds who have started to quit lately from boredom and discouragement.

Curby.4897:

What is more sad to me is that this is probably not even the developers fault. Based on what I have read over the years, the devs are just so limited by the management that they cannot develop anything real. Such as their inability to know the basics of good business.

Broken record moment. Nearly every successful business has always thought in the long run. Key word, nearly. Not saying all but you get it. When you build a computer do you build for now? No, you build for the future, when you fix up a car, do you buy parts for tomorrow? No, you buy for years down the road so it is as easy to maintain as possible. Why should this game be any different?

It has been proven time and time again that if you just wait and take your time with development and release a solid quality product/content whatever you want to call it, the community will be more pleased then releasing half baked products/content like a machine gun. This Living Story thing is a joke and it always will be. It has a story yes, but the execution is the worst I have ever seen. Giving no time to any of the writers to make a good solid story, they are forced to just put it out asap. And this pans out to every aspect of this game and it is heart breaking, truly heart breaking.

As I said before, Guild Wars 2 is not long for this world with this sort of business model/thinking. No business has ever thrived and is excepted by the sane public by doing this. Your reputation is your biggest product, if you lose your reputation then you lose your product, it is as simple as that.

I felt I needed to clarify what I meant when I said “Anet”. I am not saying the dev’s arent a part of this but from what I see this is a management screw up. In my business I will never ever ever let a suit manage a game. They have no interest in it. You must have a love for your product or you mine as well toss it out.

TL/DR When you let someone who doesn’t have a love for the product take over, the product is doomed to fail eventually. You can try and try and try to hype it all into the sky but in the long run, you will fail I can promise you that. Guild Wars 1 was a masterpiece. Some of the best PvP/PvE I have ever seen in an MMO. Guild Wars 2 is the worst PvP/PvE I have ever seen in an MMO (That is functioning).

gw1 wasn’t the best pve experience.. Everything was instanced and it kill the immersion of what an mmo is.. It felt more like a glorified version of diablo 2 with 3d graphics. I can’t speak to the gw1 pvp.. But there were way better pve mmo’s out there than gw1.

Turns out that Diablo 2 was also very popular.

vaalix.4913:

Curby.4897:

What is more sad to me is that this is probably not even the developers fault. Based on what I have read over the years, the devs are just so limited by the management that they cannot develop anything real. Such as their inability to know the basics of good business.

Broken record moment. Nearly every successful business has always thought in the long run. Key word, nearly. Not saying all but you get it. When you build a computer do you build for now? No, you build for the future, when you fix up a car, do you buy parts for tomorrow? No, you buy for years down the road so it is as easy to maintain as possible. Why should this game be any different?

It has been proven time and time again that if you just wait and take your time with development and release a solid quality product/content whatever you want to call it, the community will be more pleased then releasing half baked products/content like a machine gun. This Living Story thing is a joke and it always will be. It has a story yes, but the execution is the worst I have ever seen. Giving no time to any of the writers to make a good solid story, they are forced to just put it out asap. And this pans out to every aspect of this game and it is heart breaking, truly heart breaking.

As I said before, Guild Wars 2 is not long for this world with this sort of business model/thinking. No business has ever thrived and is excepted by the sane public by doing this. Your reputation is your biggest product, if you lose your reputation then you lose your product, it is as simple as that.

I felt I needed to clarify what I meant when I said “Anet”. I am not saying the dev’s arent a part of this but from what I see this is a management screw up. In my business I will never ever ever let a suit manage a game. They have no interest in it. You must have a love for your product or you mine as well toss it out.

TL/DR When you let someone who doesn’t have a love for the product take over, the product is doomed to fail eventually. You can try and try and try to hype it all into the sky but in the long run, you will fail I can promise you that. Guild Wars 1 was a masterpiece. Some of the best PvP/PvE I have ever seen in an MMO. Guild Wars 2 is the worst PvP/PvE I have ever seen in an MMO (That is functioning).

gw1 wasn’t the best pve experience.. Everything was instanced and it kill the immersion of what an mmo is.. It felt more like a glorified version of diablo 2 with 3d graphics. I can’t speak to the gw1 pvp.. But there were way better pve mmo’s out there than gw1.

I did say SOME of the best, not THE best .

This isn’t even only about the matchup system. The glaring issues of kitten near every single leap sending you off of an edge, or send you in the direction you are looking not the direction you are telling it to go (Earthshaker), skills canceling out for no reason, massive lag during large scale battles when they boasted the awesomeness of it during their hype train of the game. I mean hell they even denied help from Nvidia and AMD when they were struggling with the GPU vs CPU usage issues.The serious neglect to this game is just amazing to me. How can someone make an amazing product and then completely ruin its massive potential. It still makes me facepalm, it really does.

The glicko system works………to a point. If populations were static then the rise and fall of the glicko would follow the fortunes of the server in WvW. However populations are not static and a sudden increase or decrease in the server’s population and the glicko takes a long time to respond and re-balance the server matchups.

The glicko system was developed for chess ratings, and was modified for WvW. It does not have the systems in place to adjust for the rise and fall of server populations which in WvW is ongoing.

you could transfer off SoS to a server where WvW exists

Theftwind.8976:

The glicko system works………to a point.

The problem is that I think most people care about whether they win matches or not, not whether their server ranking goes up or down. They need a handicap system that allows a server punching above it’s weight to win the weekly match-up, not come in third but improve their rank. Do that, and the incentive to stack no the server with the most people and best coverage will be greatly reduced.

Berk.8561:

The problem is that I think most people care about whether they win matches or not, not whether their server ranking goes up or down. They need a handicap system that allows a server punching above it’s weight to win the weekly match-up, not come in third but improve their rank.

The problem is that players don’t want to face 2x or more their numbers every night. Good fights = Good scores.

As I have said before the score IS NOT THE PROBLEM. It is a symptom of the problem. Trying to “fix” the scoring is like putting a bandaid on a gushing wound.

Straegen.2938:

. As I have said before the score IS NOT THE PROBLEM. It is a symptom of the problem. Trying to “fix” the scoring is like putting a bandaid on a gushing wound.

I think the score also creates the problem by encouraging stacking for rewards and because people don’t like to loose in points, either. To encourage distribution of players to produce good roughly even fights, the game has to reward the behavior rather than telling stacked servers with superior coverage that they are the winners and doing things right via points & rewards.

It is correct to say that the score is not the problem but a symptom. However, there is NO fix to the problem.

It is impossible to balance the populations in a 24/7 game. Never going to happen. Doesn’t matter what system they use – server vs. server, red vs. blue vs. green, alliance vs. alliance – it will NEVER be balanced.

Therefore what they should do is attempt to mitigate the problem. This is why people keep talking about scoring adjustments and other attempts at “correcting” for the balance problem.

Aw well, it doesn’t matter anyway, Devon has said they’re not changing WvW. So I won’t bother to write any more.

The score is a symptom yes. The scoring is still a problem but a different one (off time player are around 10 times as valuable for your match win than prime time player).

The main problem is: emptyness of maps In most matches and man-power imbalance between teams.

It is just not very funny to play football with 11 vs 3 than it is with 11 vs 11.

Johje Holan.4607:

It is correct to say that the score is not the problem but a symptom. However, there is NO fix to the problem.

It is impossible to balance the populations in a 24/7 game. Never going to happen. Doesn’t matter what system they use – server vs. server, red vs. blue vs. green, alliance vs. alliance – it will NEVER be balanced.

(emphasis mine)

Bingo! Scoreboard + “persistant maps” do not work. They could have still had the open world PvP aspect with prime time raids (a la Aion), come as a guild or pug it. They could have had large scale GW1 style instanced two and three way fights where people can hop in or organize a grudge match with their PvE food/gear/whatever and again chose to guild or pug it.

Dayra.7405:

It is just not very funny to play football with 11 vs 3 than it is with 11 vs 11.

I’d say WvWvW is more like two of those three players going home for the day and seven more joining the eleven man team. It fails at being entertainment and at this stage, we know major changes are not coming.

Anet needs to revamp the que system. They need to include a que for all wvwvw maps not just a separate 4 map que system. A global system that takes the current population of all 3 servers and limits entry to wvw by the lowest population of the three in an attempt to balance player numbers. Alllow a plus or minus 10 person buffer of sorts when people come and go. Then leave secondary que for max population per map like what is in place now.

Then anet needs to work with players to help spread (rebalance each server) like SoS so players aren’t in a 100 man que at 4 am. Anet can assist guilds to transfer them to another server for free by carefully managing it.

The main idea to reach more balance is rewarding achievements with fewer numbers than the same achievements with higher numbers. And make this reward difference public, such that people see it and start thinking.

If you want to reach 24/7 balance you have to measure 24/7. So at every tick the current-manpower of every team is measured (as mean of people in during these 15min).
Then you compute the mean over all server and how many percent of this mean every server has. The reward multiplier is 1/percentage, i.e. the more manpower you used to reach something the lower is your accomplishment and therefore your reward.

Here is an example with 9 servers in a league:
Server Manpower % of mean Rewardmultiplier
server 1 240 135.85% 73.61%
server 2 230 130.19% 76.81%
server 3 250 141.51% 70.67%
server 4 180 101.89% 98.15%
server 5 170 96.23% 103.92%
server 6 130 73.58% 135.90%
server 7 140 79.25% 126.19%
server 8 130 73.58% 135.90%
server 9 120 67.92% 147.22%

The mean manpower of all servers is 176.6666667

This reward multiplier is used to modify

• the score-value of every objective acquired in this tick till next owner change, if you acquire a tower which normally worth 10 points as server 1 in the tick above it’s only score for 7.361 pts for you till someone conquers it, i.e. conquering something while you have a strong manpower advantage is less accomplishment than acquiring it while you have low manpower. If server 9 acquires a tower it would worth 14.722 pts per tick.
• all individual rewards, i.e. karma gain, gold, wexp, exp in the next tick is also modified by this reward multiplier. A player participating in an event on server 1 would only get half the rewfds a player on server 9 would get, because it is only accomplished with twice the manpower.

This normalizes every achievement by the manpower used to achieve it. The fewer people you needed to do it the better you are. Of course if the server with double the manpower gets 2 towers while the half pop server gets only one in the same time rewards are equal.

The publication of these Rewardmultiplier in the transfer dialog show the people where they can possibly get more our of their effort, i.e. on lower pop worlds.

I expect this to increase balance a lot. The transfers caused by the season rewards showed that such incentives are quite strong motivations for a change.

Johje Holan.4607:

Aw well, it doesn’t matter anyway, Devon has said they’re not changing WvW. So I won’t bother to write any more.

I’ve been pretty pessimistic about the direction the game is going, but that’s not the impression I got from the interview with Devon. The impression I got was that he was following the company policy of not promising anything that’s not nearly ready, but he talked in great detail about some of the problems of WvW and some of the changes people want (new maps) that strongly suggested they’ve been working on those things internally and we may see them someday.

Another glorious day in WvW, Lag, Blobs, oh and…. zero competition because we are up .. yet again, against a dying server, and another that is just in it “for teh lulz”. I have no problem for the reasons people WvW, again… Why are we still matched?

The matchmaking system completely ignores mass transfers to and from a server.

With the upcoming tournament I think it’s extremely important this is addressed soon.

Trinnitty.8256:

Anet needs to revamp the que system.

Please stop asking for changes to queues. Lots of servers no longer have them. So much got EotM!

Pinkamena Diane Pie.8054:

There are no plans to change WvW at all!

Confirmation: 6minute in, straight from the mouth of the D-man himself
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyWxsJU4InM&t=6m04s

Warning: Watching this video may make you leave GW2 earlier than you were expectin!

Yep… completely clueless

Ariel Cor Leonis Inferi.2894:

Pinkamena Diane Pie.8054:

There are no plans to change WvW at all!

Confirmation: 6minute in, straight from the mouth of the D-man himself
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyWxsJU4InM&t=6m04s

Warning: Watching this video may make you leave GW2 earlier than you were expectin!

Yep… completely clueless

At 18 minutes he PROMISES a new map!

;) jk Anet, jk.

You guys are 1 year too late…

Svarty.8019:

At 18 minutes he PROMISES a new map!

While he doesn’t promise a new map, the fact that he talks at some detail about the timeframes and issues involved in creating a new map suggests that, at the very least, it’s being discussed in detail internally, and from his tone, I got the impression that they’ll be releasing one at some point but he’s not at liberty to talk about it. I simply hope it’s not as busy and gimmicky as the EotM map.