Guild Wars 2

After much thought I have come up with a solution to balance WvW on all servers regardless of Time-Zone. To eliminate servers recruiting for coverage, and force guilds on stacked servers to transfer to other servers.

The solution is a soft-cap and a hard-cap. Queuing based on the numbers in que across all 3 servers, per borderland.

If a soft-cap was set at 20 people per borderland and EB. It would stop massive influx of enemy players into a borderland. It would force more defensive play and promote commanders to rely upon their minds instead of the size of their zerg.

Every wvw zone should have a hard cap based upon what the servers can handle. If the servers can only handle 240 simultaneous players then the hard cap should be 80 per world. I suspect the servers ability is much lower. It feels like they can only handle 120 players on the world before players start experiencing skill lag.

WvW queuing should be based upon the total number of players in a borderland relative to the world with the lowest number of players currently in that wvw zone. Example: If world 1 has 19 people in green borderland and world 2 and world 3 have 20 then players form world 2 and 3 will start entering que. Once world 1 has 20 people in the borderland and 1 more player wishing to enter the que it will allow the first player in que from each world into the borderland. This will continue till either the hardcap is reached or there is no longer any players in que for one of the worlds.

To combat inactivity or players taking up spots in a borderland the afk timer should start after 3 minutes. If a player has not moved a relative amount of distance, within that period of time, then they are considered afk. The crafting stations should be removed, to stop crafters from taking wvw slots. You may ask what about sentries. With a lower amount of players your sentry should be moving from point to point within a keep or tower and therefore they will not be considered afk.

Free server transfers for 1 month after it has been implemented. To encourage guilds to move server transfers should be free for a period of one month. This will allow wvw guilds to distribute themselves to different servers, without the 92gold drama. That is how much it cost me to transfer Saturday 9/21/13.

If this was implemented every server would be on even ground in terms of coverage. There would be no time slot that any server did not have at least 20 players wishing to wvw in each borderland. Guilds would transfer to those servers that have lower ques freeing up the ques on stacked servers and then even themselves out, over that month period of free transfers. Zergs would become a thing of the past and highly coordinated havoc teams would rule wvw. The only time you would see a zerg is in peak hours where all 3 servers have a bunch of people wanting to wvw. If the scores were also reset every 3 months. You can implement seasons. Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring you get the point. Whichever server does the best will of done so based on the merits of commanders and it’s people, not due to stacking it’s coverage. I feel this would encourage an extremely competitive form of wvw game play.

Please chime in with your thoughts.

LunarFault.6780:

Every wvw zone should have a hard cap based upon what the servers can handle. If the servers can only handle 240 simultaneous players then the hard cap should be 80 per world. I suspect the servers ability is much lower. It feels like they can only handle 120 players on the world before players start experiencing skill lag.

There is a hard cap in the game already. It called queue. From lower tier server, queue don’t exist. So how is it going to help low tier server?

LunarFault.6780:

WvW queuing should be based upon the total number of players in a borderland relative to the world with the lowest number of players currently in that wvw zone. Example: If world 1 has 19 people in green borderland and world 2 and world 3 have 20 then players form world 2 and 3 will start entering que. Once world 1 has 20 people in the borderland and 1 more player wishing to enter the que it will allow the first player in que from each world into the borderland. This will continue till either the hardcap is reached or there is no longer any players in que for one of the worlds.

There will be crying everywhere. The number different between lower tier is actually quite big. And ppl can leave to “defend” their land.

LunarFault.6780:

To combat inactivity or players taking up spots in a borderland the afk timer should start after 3 minutes. If a player has not moved a relative amount of distance, within that period of time, then they are considered afk. The crafting stations should be removed, to stop crafters from taking wvw slots. You may ask what about sentries. With a lower amount of players your sentry should be moving from point to point within a keep or tower and therefore they will not be considered afk.

Macro allow player to have "fake "activity

If this was implemented every server would be on even ground in terms of coverage. There would be no time slot that any server did not have at least 20 players wishing to wvw in each borderland. Guilds would transfer to those servers that have lower ques freeing up the ques on stacked servers and then even themselves out, over that month period of free transfers.

What makes you think guild will transfer down? From what I know, they are transferring up

My solution is actually quite simple:
1)You can’t que for your server, only WvW, meaning you will join red,green or blue team.
2)After joining, everyone is relocated so that the team number is equal
3)To be fair,everyone in the same group can be together
Let be honest, ppl join WvW to have fun and reward. Server pride is dead.

KOK.2650:

My solution is actually quite simple:
1)You can’t que for your server, only WvW, meaning you will join red,green or blue team.
2)After joining, everyone is relocated so that the team number is equal
3)To be fair,everyone in the same group can be together

And what about guilds that want to play together? Playing with people I chose to play with, is what makes WvW fun for me (and not only WvW).

KOK.2650:

My solution is actually quite simple:
1)You can’t que for your server, only WvW, meaning you will join red,green or blue team.

Eww. This is horrible. This is what they did in Rift, and the people you were proud to be owning all the time. were then your teammates. No TY.

KOK.2650:

There is a hard cap in the game already. It called queue. From lower tier server, queue don’t exist. So how is it going to help low tier server?

I answered it in my statement about setting the hard-cap to a number below skill lag. That is an issue in T1 servers. All you can do is press 1 because no other skill will work when blobs collide. The soft-cap addresses the problem with lowered tier servers being over-run by sheer numbers alone, and not skill. It also addresses the issue of server stacking. Which became worse with the league system. WvW is large team competitive game play and the number of players on a map should be relatively even. Ie a soft-cap before players are starting to be put in que. The cap could be even as low kitten .

Devs want easy solutions that are based on upon already implemented game mechanics. It’s the most cost effective way to solve problems. It’s also one of the best ways to get community input implemented quickly. They do not have to redesign the wheel. They just have to adjust it.

KOK.2650:

There will be crying everywhere. The number different between lower tier is actually quite big. And ppl can leave to “defend” their land.

Again this was addressed in my statement about a soft-cap. A soft-cap creates it so you can’t a) map hop your blob and b) you do not have the time-zone coverage issues, providing the cap is a low number like 20.

KOK.2650:

Macro allow player to have "fake "activity

You can’t stop people from doing things that they shouldn’t be doing, such as macroing. It’s a part of MMOs. Just report them when you see it.

KOK.2650:

What makes you think guild will transfer down? From what I know, they are transferring up

Guilds already transfer down because they want different fights. Those are mainly GvG guilds. Guilds will transfer off the stacked servers because on high wvw populated servers like t1 and t2 you will have 3 hour long ques. Nobody is going to deal with that. They will move themselves to a less populated server.

KOK.2650:

My solution is actually quite simple:
1)You can’t que for your server, only WvW, meaning you will join red,green or blue team.
2)After joining, everyone is relocated so that the team number is equal
3)To be fair,everyone in the same group can be together
Let be honest, ppl join WvW to have fun and reward. Server pride is dead.

You destroy the very heart of guild wars with that. You take the guild completely out of it….

Hey LunarFault, this is a great concept and has been brought up a few times. I feel it would solve the biggest problem with WvW right now. I’m waiting for someone to point out the downside to this concept, but since the threads don’t get many replies… maybe there are no valid flaws.

Here are two other threads with a similar concept, one from Plains of Ashes.5941 and one I created about a month ago:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Simple-solution-to-the-WvW-coverage-problem/first

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Plus-Ten/first

The queues on some match ups would be ridiculously long. Imagine a server with a weak NA Prime and strong Oceanic against the inverse. Players would be queued for hours and simply quit. There are times when maps in the lower tiers have less than 5 players on the entire map.

IMO the solution to the WvWvW imbalance is to eliminate the server concept completely. Instead guilds would be pooled each week allowing guild alliances, guild war declarations and guild rewards (as opposed to server rewards). This would allow ANet to realign populations on a weekly basis without the player suffering a prolonged uneven server matchup. We would also see fierce guild rivalries and a constant shifting of alliances that would have a lasting impact on a players guild.

@Straegen,

It would be suggested that Anet allow free transfers to the lower tier (less populated) servers when this concept went into effect. People originally transferred to the top Tier servers because they were winning, in direct relation to population.

In this model, when people in the over populated servers realized they could transfer to a “lower tier” server and have an equally competitive fight, they would. Eventually balancing out the population among all servers and making queue times nearly equal on all servers.

Varkin.3419:

It would be suggested that Anet allow free transfers to the lower tier (less populated) servers when this concept went into effect. People originally transferred to the top Tier servers because they were winning, in direct relation to population.

While a relatively simple fix, it doesn’t seem to work in the real world. When we had free server transfers, we ended up with servers like Kaineng. A massive guild transfered to a bottom tier server and began to plow through every tier. Rather than spread out, players flocked to them because they got a lot of easy wins and easy rewards.

I still think ANet needs to realign populations weekly which can only be done by abolishing the fixed server system in WvW. A player’s guild would be assigned to a matchup and a player would be locked into whichever guild they represented at reset during WvW. Guilds would then be distributed as evenly as possible based on play time, play duration, alliances and variety. This would prevent constant blowouts and create variety in WvW each week. Changing the points accumulation to guilds and posting that on a scoreboard would also actively encourage guild participation.

I really want to play WvW than I do currently, its just hard with how poorly the matchups and populations work. The last 4-5 weeks we have been getting into stomp matchups, where one server has 50-75% of the map the entire week. What happens when people see that, when they are on the losing end? They don’t play as much. I get on, I almost always see us with the outmanned buff. Try to call out to people to help defend, but there is no one there. I could build an AC to take try to defend a garrison/tower by myself or with 4 other people, but guess what, the other server has like 20-40 people, and they just take whatever they want anyways. So I realize I can’t accomplish anything and go back to PvE and hope next week might be more balanced.

I think there is really just one way to balance populations (and hopefully some skill too), and its by making a outmanned buff that actually does something to make the matchups more fair. I know Devon sadly said he doesn’t care about fair, because be confuses the notion of there always being a better team with fair/balanced matchups. I don’t expect to beat BG on IoJ with a worthwhile buff. If they play better, they should win with or without my buff. The problem is, any matchup in this game that ends up with one server having 50%+ of the map (as the great majority seem to), that’s a failure of the developers in my opinion, and will cause a slow death of the game. The fact that I find it quite common to see 1 server have 85-100% of the map is just insulting. I know developers have this game theory thought that having three sides is a self-regulating situation, but that only works in ideal situations. Most of the time in WvW I see the number 2 and 3 servers fighting each other and not stronger server 1, simply because its a fight they have any chance with.

What happens now? The stronger server comes into your BL, takes all of your stuff, either with some resistance, or not much. Whatever resistance you have tends to get worse as they eat all your stuff and the sense of futility sets in. Then its really just a question of how motivated they are to stand around and hold it. When is the main time we get a keep back in this situation? When its completely undefended. Is that fun gameplay for either side? No, not really.

If the buff is worthwhile to where they can compete with a stronger server, more of your team will be likely to come in, and play. The more of your team plays, the weaker the buff needs to be, and be a better situation for all. If this is done right, other people who transferred to the higher servers might realize it could make sense to go to lower pop servers in the hopes of having easier queue times. This concept would also help lessen the impact of coverage (though maybe you might want to add in a degrade mechanic, where the longer you hold something, the harder it remains to be held in some manner, or requires more and more supply to stay totally built up perhaps).

One can hope the Leagues can help. I think Anet is probably hoping that the people who chase achievement points will see the additional points from the leagues as a motivating factor in playing more WvW. Since today, there is almost zero value in achievement points in the format. I hope it does, but I still think for the overall quality of game weeks could really use some help being more balanced. I’ve been on the side of controlling 100% of the map, and I’ve been on the side of having 0% of the map, and neither side is enjoyable for me, and I would most others would prefer a good fight over stomping someone or being stomped.

The idea to lock guilds in weekly server resets is interesting, but goes against any long-term allegiance. I really like the idea that every world is given a certain amount of reward, like 2000 gold, every month/week split evenly among all players that participated a certain amount (hours/kills/wxp/etc.). Thus, smaller servers get “paid” more than larger for their effort, while larger servers get almost nothing. See how quickly that makes people want to transfer for their “wvw gold” to the smaller servers.

Idk whose ideas this was, but it wasn’t my own. I just really liked it when I read it.

Alternatively, there could be a strong MF boost (similar to the gold distribution above) that is inversely proportional to the number of participants the previous week. This might drive some player movement to smaller wvw servers if they know they can get better drops, but it has to be well advertised.

Why not just go back to the old days of having your “PvE” servers be true PvP (ok fine, throw in a few carebear servers for those who dont like pvp) and let WvW be about GUILDS waging war with each other ? I mean, this is Guild Wars, not Server Wars, right ?

I honestly think the leagues have a chance at fixing the enormous wvw population imbalance going on right now. Most of the people who transferred into T1 did so because they enjoy playing wvw in a competitive setting. After a few weeks of server match ups in the new league system, many of these competitive players will grow tired of rolling over lower ranked servers week after week, and will be itching for challenging matches again, therefore will transfer to lower ranked servers where they will actually be challenged again. This is just speculation on my part, based on the fact that many of the guilds in higher tiers transferred there in the first place because they were sick of all the imbalance in the current system of wvw match ups. This, combined with the new achievement points drawing in PVE players to wvw may actually do wonders for wvw. So give the devs a chance, don’t claim that seasons will destroy wvw when in fact, it might be just the change that we need.

Not to spoil your theory Sir.

If the top servers really wanted true competition… they would not have even started stacking.

DAoC players from all sides jumped on SoR and JQ. Warhammer to Blackgate and HoD. They did not do this to have good fights.. they did it to win at all costs.

RvR guilds have done this since Everquest players moved to DAoC. They have been stacking ever since.

Annndddd guilds on my server are talking about transfering off again. It’s like the fourth time now? or fifth. I lost count.

If Anet is going to cater to the stacked servers only they need to communicate that clearly to us so we can make the decision to switch.

Ostra.3927:

Not to spoil your theory Sir.

If the top servers really wanted true competition… they would not have even started stacking.

DAoC players from all sides jumped on SoR and JQ. Warhammer to Blackgate and HoD. They did not do this to have good fights.. they did it to win at all costs.

RvR guilds have done this since Everquest players moved to DAoC. They have been stacking ever since.

True many players/guilds have jumped on the bandwagon wanting to be part of the “best” servers, but there is also a significant population in the top 3 tiers that moved there because they are the only tiers that have any semblance of competitive match ups on a regular basis as opposed to weekly dominations by a single server per match-up in virtually all the lower tiers.

The players who transferred servers for the sake of winning all the time would still grow tired of facing servers week after week who give little-to-no resistance after having everything taken from them with no hope of winning (I know I would). Also, there will be many players wanting to leave these servers simply because the influx of pve players into wvw combined with the amount of players that will transfer to the top servers right before the leagues start will make their map queues and lag issues even more ridiculous than they already supposedly are. In the end, I think that after the first season, population will begin to even out. Will it completely fix the problem? No. But it is a step in the right direction, and at least they are attempting to do something about it.

Like I said, I have no way of knowing what the outcome of these leagues will be, I could be completely wrong, but I felt that in these forums, all that people do is complain about how every change made by the devs will ruin wvw, and don’t consider the possibility that these changes will make the game better.

I agree with you Sir in spirit.

The reality is these people stay on t1 for a year now… they have delt with the queue and the lag. There is still no incentive with the league to move to a lower tier.

The queue will be the same, the lag will be the same, the blowouts will be a bit more then before… BUT to offset that, they now get special rewards… a big thank you from Anet for doing the stacking to begin with. Even if it is just a finisher… true PvPers are there for the glory and prestige… if they come out with the special finisher or title for coming in 1st 2nd or 3rd place… thats a big ol thank you for stacking message Anet is sending.

There is nothing in the league system to support them spreading out.

But don’t you think that they would start getting bored of wiping servers week after week with no competition? After awhile players fun the servers matched against them will just give up and they will own all 4 maps besides for the odd flip every now and then. Then they will be forced to either sit in wvw owning everything and spawn camping the few brave souls who dare to venture out of their spawn (which would be very dull to do for hours at a time with virtually no one entering wvw) or they will have to find something else to do/transfer servers. If they really want to sit there and spawn camp all day long, let them. The longer it happens the more players will likely getbored and either leave or transfer.

It might happen.. and there will be a couple that move yes. However looking at the guilds moving away once the random matchup started (nearly 0) does not make me think any will suddenly change their mind. Most likely they will take the week off to work on practice of chain attacks and resets. But moving off and not being able to claim that pride for being in the top 3? Not likely to happen.

Remember these guilds will then go to new games and use the “We was on BG in GW2 and we won first place for 4 leagues in a row, we are now recruiting for Wildstar!”

This is not a vacuum, this will be guild pride to say they were up their when it won.

With that said. I SOO hope I am wrong.

I really hope you’re wrong to cuz that’s honestly just pathetic.

I don’t think people really want challenging match ups, except the GvG guilds. Without a proper GvG system similar to SPvP there is no way to have a real match up, with the buffs in wvw.

Long ques is what will make people transfer to lower populated servers. Overtime the servers will even themselves out. The problem fixes itself, through que frustration.

Using magic find buffs etc on low wvw participation servers is a carrot. When what we need is a stick.

It would be nice if a dev could chime in on if Anet has even considered the concept stated in the op.

It’s a business. Anet should institute the battle system like Dragon Raja. Any world that is disadvantaged (was defeated in the last war) should be assisted by the third world. I mean that there should be only two worlds are fighting, and another world must enter into battle by joining the world who are disadvantaged.