Guild Wars 2

Yenn.9185:

Make sense. Force the big guilds to transfer out of T1 so they can get all their members in WvW.

This would definitely help the issue and it is something they should do (even though I would prefer “encourage” or “reward for” rather than force).

That said, it would be a short term solution. The issue is the constant ebb and flow of players and guilds between servers (based on perceptions of performance) makes it pretty much impossible to predict populations/coverage season to season – making meaningful matchmaking a pipe dream.

A more drastic solution is needed, imo, even if it means some server communities find themselves combined with others. That is why I would be an advocate of a battlegroup model that lumped servers together into three big piles and then gave us enough maps to fit everyone on (WvW on a HUGE scale – just with more map instances adding to one score each week).

I know that has downsides, but what we have right now doesnt work for many servers out there – especially considering that greater frustration leads to even more transfers – creating a system that continually becomes more and more imbalanced with every season.

Its time to break from the model weve had the past 2 years and come up with something fun for EVERYONE, not just those on a small handful of servers.

Sharpoon.8197:

Battle Groups: Since it’s been stated by Anet sometime last year that WvW maps could not possibly be bigger than they currently are (due to technical reasons), you won’t be able to fit the entire game’s WvW player base into 4 maps

Even t1 doesn’t queue all 4 maps often so it’s possible that extra space wouldn’t even be needed. Either that or fix eotm so it’s not wvw’s skyhammer and it could actually work as an overflow.

Diru.4531:

John Corpening.9847:

You guys beat me to it. After last week’s positive discussion on siege trolls I wanted to bring up the topic of population imbalance and ideas that you have on it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHcO6Xo8eJ8&feature=youtu.be

Pair servers together based on ranking and allow for WvW guesting between the paired servers. Simple. The only thing the video doesn’t cover is that servers rarely need, or want that much help, so something like a 20-30 limit on WvW guests would probably do. One thing I really like about the idea is that it allows for small groups to play with or against new players more often, which is something I feel WvW could really benefit from.

One year old video but still with the best changes:
1) easy to implement = it’s just extension of overflow system and guesting
2) server communities stay and will have higher impact on winning
3) semi-random grouping every week = harder to transfer to winning side
4) opportunity to meet new enemy anytime
5) GvG with all guilds from other 2 teams possible
6) coverage will be little bit less important, not completely fixed but one step at a time

But it has issues for EU. There’s different number of servers and than national servers (FR/DE/SP). Still I believe it’s possible to implement it somehow.

It’s much better than other suggested ideas. Merging server wont help, population will shift to winning server anyway. Population cap will screw over high population server fighting low population server and not everybody wish to fight in EOTM when all borders are ”full“ / dead empty.

Tie any rewards for WvW, including Karma, coin and loot drops to the server population balance at any given moment, a modifier to multiply your chances. To maximize reward you will want to play during non-peak times or against a force larger then yours. Once the large, highly populated servers realize that they get more bang for the buck on the lower populated servers they will move. Over time it will all balance out. No need to change population caps.

John Corpening.9847:

You guys beat me to it. After last week’s positive discussion on siege trolls I wanted to bring up the topic of population imbalance and ideas that you have on it.

There are a couple of ideas already going in this thread:

• population caps
• merge servers
• Battle Groups

I’d like to join in this brainstorm with some questions on these. For merging servers, how do we determine who gets merged? Where would we merge them to? How do we maintain any sort of world pride or identity they have? How do we handle potentially merging with your mortal enemies?

For population caps, how do we deal with the longer queues on the worlds that can field enough people? If it is dynamic, would players be able to manipulate it? For example, our world is ahead so we all agree to not play WvW so the other worlds are capped down and can’t counter us.

For Battle Groups, Asglarek mentioned more details are on the way. I’d love to hear more.

I’m approaching this as a brainstorm. The topic is “Approaches to correcting overall population imbalance”. I know there is a related topic of 24 hour coverage but I’d like to keep that as a separate conversation for now.

Please keep this friendly, constructive and on topic. We had a really good discussion on the siege troll thread I’m hoping we can kick around some ideas and have another great discussion here. Feel free to add additional ideas that I didn’t list out but please make sure they are on topic.

Thanks,
John

Population Caps:

Iffy on this one. You can have a ‘queue’ full of people, but that doesn’t mean all of those people are actually playing. You’ve got scouts, you’ve got people being jerks and crafting, you’ve got people who love citadel so much they need to afk there for 10 mins…

Merge Servers:

The mortal enemy thing isn’t an issue, at least in T1. I’ve been playing with or against most if not all of these people since launch. Besides, most of us can talk and joke with each other outside of WvW because of those longstanding connections.

As for who to merge, that’s a tough one. The lower tiers like their small set ups. They don’t need or want to be pushed into the stress of having to worry about a 24h battle. A merge of groups would likely keep the matches similar to what folks in those blocks are used to. So, 1+2, 3+4, etc. 12 servers, and not 24. It would be disruptive, sure, but 12 servers of decent coverage beats 24 where one server might have a piece of gum and some tic tacs defending a tower from a zerg.

I think I am desensitized to the concept of losing server identity since T1 has changed so much these last two years. Much of it has already been stripped away with megaservers anyway. Heck, we’ve had mergers (SoS into BG, SoR into TC, SBI into JQ/SoR…) that weren’t official, but still happened. You bring the new people in, you adapt, and then look for red names to kill.

This might also provide less … terrible match ups? With coverage relatively ‘equal’, you’d less see of the crud that is pretty much every match up this week.

I’m not going near battlegroups. Anything that looks and smells like a zombie eotm k-train, is probably just that.

Also, jeez, will the ‘t1 has 24/7 queues’ rumor finally please die? The only people who still believe it are people who don’t play up here.

An alliance system would be interesting. But mathematically it’d be a hard problem to solve
Ideally — guilds would specify preferences via majority vote to which color they would be allied this week. For example “green, red, blue”. Sort them together by rank of wvw and amount of time users play, then group the guilds together to that color, creating current match of approximately the same size

For solving temporary severe disbalance do the “volunteer to switch over” offer that gives karma boost or something (kinda like rebalancing pvp match, but triggered by big population mismatch)

It’s all good but I think there are basically 4 problems :

1) Most people want the easy win, that’s why we have SFR and BG/JQ(NA) with a lot more coverage than any server.
2) Seasons that rewards these server to stack even more.
3) A lot of people complain about the same matchups over and over and complain when they face a new and more populated server.
4) The ppt system of 24h gives the server with more coverage a big advantage

Solutions ?

1) Is there a solution ? the only solution I see is to make lower tier server more appealing.

2) Speaking of EU, first season Anet gave free transfers to every Medium populated server, PS was 3rd and medium populated and with the Anet promise to give a better rewards for gold league servers a lot of people jumped in and destroyed the server.
This is what you must avoid, season are cool ? no, but if you must do them at least give the same rewards to every server.

3) People don’t like to be matched with the same server over and over but do they know that every RvR game does that ? look at this week MU and tell me you enjoy it more than the one of last week ? servers should be matched against the most equal servers

4) One solution might be to re evaluate the concept of PPT, some time ago people have suggested to make only 3/4 time frames that give points from objective, points from stomps should be available 24/7

These time frames could be (for EU GMT+0) 19.00-23.00 / 03.00-07.00 / 11.00-15.00, the rest of the time it should be invested in securing keeps/towers and preparing for the next time frame. In this way a server with lower coverage has still a chance to compete against a more populated server.

easy…. remove EotM for now….

EotM was introduced because of the queue problem. Nowadays queue only exist during weekend reset day. The rest of the week, you can always find borderland with no queue at.

If people from the stacked server says, hey, where should we go if we can’t get onto WvW because of queue ? non-stacked server that way —-——>

Decrease WvW Map Cap,
Sorry but you have to spread out or play EotM while on Queue.

Off hours coverage might still be there but, 30 vs 80 (assumes 80 is the cap) is still a lot better than 30 vs 150

Staleness of match-ups.
If players are a bit spread out, the gap will be smaller and we can have a variety of match ups every week

azizul.8469:

easy…. remove EotM for now….

EotM was introduced because of the queue problem. Nowadays queue only exist during weekend reset day. The rest of the week, you can always find borderland with no queue at.

If people from the stacked server says, hey, where should we go if we can’t get onto WvW because of queue ? non-stacked server that way —-——>

Do any “real” WvW players actually make use of EotM to get the WvW fix though? (I honestly don’t know, I never go there.)

At any rate, we’ve seen in the past before EotM existed that people are willing to put up with queue times in order to overstack a server.

Delete EoTM. Increase WvW rewards / gold gains etc.

Pretty sure that solves your population problems.

TexZero.7910:

Delete EoTM. Increase WvW rewards / gold gains etc.

Pretty sure that solves your population problems.

It’s not a population problem so much as a population density problem. There are plenty of WvW players, they just all want to be on the same couple of servers.

i’d much rather see some kind of handicap system over population caps/server mergers. caps do nothing to solve the problem of coverage, which is where these massive gaps between the servers are coming from. some kind of system that awards more points for anything achieved with less people (lets say for arguments sake stonemist was worth 25 points with a full map, whereas if your world only had 20 on the map it might tick for double that or even more). it might allow for some actual strategy beyond ‘have more people online at all times than the other guy’, and in theory would mean a smaller more organised world would still be able to compete against a (potentially) poorly organised opponent with higher population.

John Corpening.9847:

For merging servers, how do we determine who gets merged?

Server are a relict from pre-mega-server, and it’s probably time to get rid of them in WvW as well.
Instead of merging existing servers, it probably better to kill all server and do a fresh start (all Glicko 1500) with new WvW-Teams. (Concerning names, you could make a vote in the forum, propose a list of current and new names, and the most voted ones are choosen). Current Server communities of course can talk to each other to join all together the same WvW-team. The recruitment thread in the forum can probably be of good use to find out who is planning to go where to avoid incompatibilities.

People that only play PvE, sPvP or even EotM (seeing EotM independend of WvW, which it is. So EotM team assignment should be independend of WvW-team membership, which would make eotm team balancing much easier than as well.) but not WvW do not need to be associated to a WvW-team. This would make population counting (for balancing) much easier than it currently is.

How many WvW-teams are optimnal is only decidable after an analysis of the current WvW-population, numbers only ANet have access to. I would rather choose to few teams than to many, because only full teams are competitive. And capacity should not oriented on occasional maximal need, but on mean need. At maximal peek moments, peole can play EotM which could be extended by an Ethernal Battlefield Map and/or Borderland-maps running in EotM mode. There has been rumors in the forum that people are on low tier servers because they do not want so many people in their match as there are on high pop servers. This should be examined and if it is the case 2 permantly separated leagues (with different map capacities) are probabaly a good idea.

WvW-Teams Initially no one is associated to a WvW-team, and every one has a free choice for a WvW-Team (but restricted to not able to join already full teams). Choice should no longer be mandatory in the char-selection, but if you enter WvW and aren’t associated with a team you are asked which team to join. You cannot transfer between, teams, but you can be inactive for a match, which automtically drops you out of a team. When you aren’t in a team, you can choose one when you next try to enter WvW. The initial join and rejoining your last team should be free, choosing a different one cost gems. (if there are two leagues (mid and large scale), you should have a last- or current-team in every league, which you can freely join.)

Member of a WVW-team should all share the team-chat whenever they are online independent where they are, e.g. if a wvw-map needs reinforcements, it could ask for help in the team-chat, and all people of that team see it, if they are on this map, on a different wvw-map or not in WvW (e.g. in PvE, EotM or sPvP) at moment.

Transfer costs
Transfer costs didn’t worked as a balancing tool, they did not avoided overstacking for leagues. In fact they are only a flatting-function currently cementing the existing imbalance. To ease balance movements (and to allow player to experiment with different communities) they should be low during off-season as soon as a balancing mechanics (as described below) is in place, and high (10-20 times higher) during seasons. Important is: Season-tariff starts in the moment the season is announced (and not when the season matches actually start, that’s to late to tax the WTJ).

John Corpening.9847:

For population caps, how do we deal with the longer queues on the worlds that can field enough people?

If the worlds are balanced there is much less queue for everyone. In fact queues were the only balancing factor in WvW, but lost effectiveness with the introduction of EotM.

I would add a balancing mechanism to WvW-Teams. We know that queue and personal rewards are effective methods to direct transfers (not always on an individual level, but statistically they do).

Global Team Balance

If only currently active WvW-player are members of WvW-Teams counting team-size is much easier and adequate.
Each team has it’s size and we can compute an average team size (per league, should there be 2) and we can compute how much above or below mean the size of any team is.

• team > 125% mean means the team is full, it is not possible to join the team. The overstacking-penalty applies here as well.
• team > 105% there is a overstacking-penalty in personal rewards (e.g. karma, gold, WEXP, EXP, drop-rate, season-tickets) proportinal to how much oversized the team is, e.g. team = 110% there is a 10% penalty, means you get only 90% of what you currently get. Transfer cost to such a team are high.
• team = 95% – 105% perfect, personal rewards, as they are now. Transfer-price is normal
• team < 95% there is a hero-bonus in personal rewards (e.g. karma, gold, WEXP, EXP, drop-rate, season-tickets) for fighting in an outmanned team, e.g. if team = 90% there is a 10% bonus, means you get 110% of what you currently get. Transfer cost to such a team are low.
• team < 75% additional to the hero-bonus, transfer cost to such a team are zero. Maybe the hero-bonus should be doubled, if a team is that underpopulated for longer times.

The team size as percentage of mean should be visible in the team-choice dialog, such that people, do not have to choose their rewrd level blindly, but instead can actively contribute to balance, by choosing an underpopulated team with hero-bonus.

Queue EotM game mode (4h matches of mega-server technology assigned teams) can be extended to not only contain the EotM map, but also EB and Borderland maps. People not in a wvw-team that play in EotM have no overstacking-penalty and no hero-bonus, people in a wvw-team have their overstacking-penalty applied in EotM as well (they are a reserve-force with gun by foot, but the hero-bonus should should not be applied or at least limited according to the time spend in WvW to avoid exploitation by leecher.).

Dynamic 24hour Balance

It is clear that the demand for WvW-capacity is not equal around the clock. Some times have much higher demand than others. It is also clear, that concentration of people that play in low-demand times in a team currently gives that team a decisive advance in scoring that disturbe match-balance. Therefore 24h balance cannot be ignored in team-balance. However, there are many possibilities to choose.

• reduced (no) personal rewrds and no score for PvD (less incentive for low-demand-time raids)
• dynamic maps availability. If this is computed on a global (all matches) scale, it contributes to balance (T1 cannot field a superior force in off-time, if there is no one in T5- that want to play at that time) and it is imune to match-manipulation as the demand in all matches is averaged.
• dynamic scoring, again if it is computed on a global (all matches) scale, it is imune to match-manipulation as the demand in all matches is averaged.
• dynamic queueing, average demand over all matches determines how many people can enter in every match. Again due to averaging over all matches it is imune to match-manipulation. It contributes to global balance, as concentration of people playing in low-demand-times on a few servers, only leads to queue even in low-demand-time.

Combined Global and Dynamic balancing
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Why-imbalanced-season-after-season/4428902
can be considered as a starting point for an integrated approach.

I can take on 2-3 players now. The problem is the rally mechanic make it a pain in the kitten

You can take on 2-3 lesser players and/or with lesser classes, perhaps, but not 2-3 payers that are exactly equal to you. I’m talking about giving enough stat advantage that an outnumbered map, even with weaker players, can put up as strong a defense as an equally balanced map. It might even tend to favor the underdog outright, which would encourage players from high-pop servers to migrate to low-pop ones for better bonuses, which will eventually balance out because you can’t have ALL low-pop servers.

The basic problem is, people who care about PvP will mostly not live on PvP servers that lose all the time, so dilettante players will migrate off those servers, leaving only the hardcore and the slackers, giving them little chance at success. Any system that wants to get players to migrate to low-pop servers has to be one in which they are more likely to win by doing so.

Anyways, here’s another idea, what about a Citadel-exit queue? Put a wall around the Citadel where you can only leave via certain gates. Make it so that you can’t pass through these gates (or use WPs) unless you have permission to do so. The same would of course apply to the enemy camps.

The basic queue to Borderlands/EB will let you into your respective home base, so you can use the facilities, but then you have to talk to an NPC to queue up for a “Sortie Pass” that will allow you to leave and join the battle. Sortie passes would be handed out in groups of 5-10, always balanced with the other side at 30 second intervals.

What this means is that if it’s the start of the map and 45 people join one side and 48 people join the other, then 45 on each side get immediate sortie passes and get to leave, the other three need to wait for someone to leave or someone to be added to the other side. If 45 show up on one side and only 12 on the other, then 30 on the one side will have to wait.

If a player dies, they might have to queue up again, or not, whichever works best. If you gain a sortie pass but do not leave the base within 60 seconds, you lose it and get re-queued (to prevent griefing). People that are just around to use the facilities will never get counted in the balance equation because they would not have (or need) sortie passes.

Of course ideally they could just take all the crafting stations and other facilities out of the borderlands and put them in EotM or the PvP area, so that people just wanting to craft without leaving the zone they’re in could do so without needing to travel to the borderlands.

we can marge NA and EU.. there is no reason to separate this ppl because of connectivity since there r ppl from NA who play in EU without any lags/problems. if we marge it there will be no night-capping but i think also less important prime-time because prime time will be now 24/7.. queue will be mostly constant so everyone who want to bandwagon and stack on server will be disapointed and ppl will give up fast and bandwagon to somewhere else. and since all maps would be full mostly whole time, it will not be about covarege but about how good they are just because if the same amount of ppl
there r many ways how to move server/players and marge them but i have no good solution now how exactly

I’m not reading everything already said right now, I’ll do that tomorrow, but please, do not go another route of ‘merging’ or ‘megaserver’ for wvw. You need to encourage people to spread out, which should have been done back even at release. Instead you have part of the game population wanting to move to the ‘winning’ servers or the ‘top tier’ while others want to stay as far from that zergfest as they can. Some can’t stand sitting in queue for hours and shouldn’t be forced to do so, nor will any solution to turn wvw into eotm style.

It is bad enough we can’t see the people we use to see all the time in PvE, but now some want to eliminate the last place we can reliably run with people we know. Perhaps I’m still a little bitter on the fact Megaserver split up a healthy PvE community and gave in return a ‘world boss train’. If people want something like that in WvW, well, we already have it, it’s called EotM.

Something needs done, but instead of throwing everything into a blender and hope it mixes, how about an actual solution to do the following.

1. Discourage server stacking. This should have been done long ago, and you are approaching it being too late to do any good but perhaps #2 may work for that. You will never prevent this fully, only discourage it. Some people prefer this, but how they can stand the queues, I’ll never understand. Lowering the map limits a bit would increase queues for upper tier servers and would encourage some spreading out to other servers, but this would take time and if other incentives (see #2) are not given, this alone would hurt the game.
2. Encourage players to move to lower population servers. Free transfers themselves seemed to do about as much harm as good, though. Perhaps it may require a carrot/stick approach to spread people out. While this is extreme, the situation WvW is in now may require something a bit extreme, because as things stand, it is too stagnant and in turn the environment is becoming toxic.
3. WvW badly needs developer attention, and it needs it, well long ago but right now will suffice. Not just a few gimmicks, however enjoyable, but real attention, and this cannot wait any longer. So much about WvW is unbalanced , and I’m not just referring to the current tournament. We are not content with it, we just go in because a lot of us have mostly done everything else multiple times. I’d probably rather go in WvW every day even if every exit from spawn was camped by opposing servers, than to pug dungeons. But if WvW were all ‘merged’ and we had a system like EotM, I’d be tempted to throw my hands up and walk away.

It has been my hope that the Adopt a Dev idea allows many more of Anet Devs to see the issues we deal with daily. But if the solution to come from that is to turn WvW into a EotM-clone, then you might as well just remove it and consider all the time invested in it already a waste. (I’m not even getting into the effects this would have on guilds.) Because this is how many will treat it.

To reiterate: To a large extent WvW is our end game. We like it, at least when not constantly outnumbered because fairer fights make for a happier general population, and actually helps encourage more to go in. Some people prefer smaller scale roaming/havoc while others like to defend, but the rewards are not good. It’s not that enjoyable to sit in a tower for hours just to chase off a few people, and eventually have an entire map blob come to knock on the door. Have to say it is kind of interesting how fast a gate can be destroyed by a large group smacking their heads against it in frustration because you disable their rams consistently, but also ultimately futile if you do not have an equivalent size group in WvW at that moment to wipe them (This is where I will point out, that since Megaserver, there is not an easy way to just go into PvE, say Lion’s Arch, and exclaim “We need help in WvW”… since, you know, most likely there’s not many from your server in that copy of Lion’s Arch…)

edit: I am sure that I, and others, will have a lot to say on this,
Actually I take that back, the I part, and while this is coming from frustration and a bit of disgust at how things are and what I expect to happen, still going to say it.
“Do whatever, I don’t care. I’ve said my peace in the siege trolling thread, and the above. I will deal with it in game, or I’ll just take an extended break again in disgust.”

But let me point out something I have seen a few times…
“Person A: Merge the lower servers because they need it, BUT DON’T YOU DARE TOUCH MY SERVER”
“Person B: Split up the upper servers because they bandwagon to there anyways, BUT DON’T YOU DARE TOUCH MY SERVER”
Hypocrisy is amazing.
Also, I’m done.

I was waiting for the GvG CDI to talk about that.

Let’s embrace the Mega Server and get rid of servers for ever. Transforming WvW into a kind of GvG game mode.

How is this possible?

• Don’t need to change any WvW gameplay mechanic.

• Create a individual score for Guilds that will serve just to determine the Guild position on a Ladder.

• The Top 30 Guilds in the Ladder will play on Tier 1, 10 Guilds on each color. (Devs can better determine the number of guilds)

• Lower Tiers can have more guilds participating as lower as the tier.

• Better rewards for Tier 1 1st place, and decreasing according to the position and Tier. Tier 1 3rd place receive a better reward than Tier 2 1st place. It will give a reason for Guilds to want to progress to a higher tier.

Issues

*The fact that a player can represent multiple guilds.

*The community of this game don’t react well to drastic changes, even if the change is for better.

Theftwind.8976:

Tie any rewards for WvW, including Karma, coin and loot drops to the server population balance at any given moment, a modifier to multiply your chances. To maximize reward you will want to play during non-peak times or against a force larger then yours. Once the large, highly populated servers realize that they get more bang for the buck on the lower populated servers they will move. Over time it will all balance out. No need to change population caps.

Now that’s a decent idea

In my ideal Battle Group format all current servers would remain intact they would be assigned to a World Alliance adding a server identity to name plate so communities would stay intact.

Not knowing how many NA/EU servers there is currently nor there populations but if possible you could make atleast 5 World Alliances and still have tournament style game play adding in meta achievements goal on a per server basis that gave individual servers a goal that effects the ppt for your world alliance aka war efforts.

Transfers out of your battle groups would be eliminated.

More details to follow.

Hamster.4861:

Theftwind.8976:

Tie any rewards for WvW, including Karma, coin and loot drops to the server population balance at any given moment, a modifier to multiply your chances. To maximize reward you will want to play during non-peak times or against a force larger then yours. Once the large, highly populated servers realize that they get more bang for the buck on the lower populated servers they will move. Over time it will all balance out. No need to change population caps.

Now that’s a decent idea

I agree rewarding people for dispersing across servers is better than punishing people for overstacking (at first. Some might require “punishment”.) However I don’t think people are playing WvW for karma or loot. I think people are overstacking so they can… how to say… ‘feel like they’re winning’ for lack of a nicer way to put it. Give the average player 10x as much loot as normal and he’s not going to accept that if he gets mutilated by better players every time he steps out the door.

Fluffball.8307:

Hamster.4861:

Theftwind.8976:

Tie any rewards for WvW, including Karma, coin and loot drops to the server population balance at any given moment, a modifier to multiply your chances. To maximize reward you will want to play during non-peak times or against a force larger then yours. Once the large, highly populated servers realize that they get more bang for the buck on the lower populated servers they will move. Over time it will all balance out. No need to change population caps.

Now that’s a decent idea

I agree rewarding people for dispersing across servers is better than punishing people for overstacking (at first. Some might require “punishment”.) However I don’t think people are playing WvW for karma or loot. I think people are overstacking so they can… how to say… ‘feel like they’re winning’ for lack of a nicer way to put it. Give the average player 10x as much loot as normal and he’s not going to accept that if he gets mutilated by better players every time he steps out the door.

Full servers who are still getting transfers due to some loophole (blackouts) deserves to get some light smacking.

Let them choose again, Queue/EotM or transfer. everyone wants pop balance right?

Add some new wvw reward tracks for unique skins to get some new blood.

Server merges will not save the problem. Poeple wil migrate, either to other servers or to other games. Take Vizunah Square as example. Long time no. 1 wvw server in EU with a nearly 24/7 coverage. In spring they lost a lot of wvw players and are currently ranked 15th.

The question to ask is, why players are asking for rebalancing wvw. It’s not because they loosing fights in open field. You can easily outnumbered while running around. And not the bigger team wins every fight. A good guild can take down a public zerg with double size quit easily.

Poeple are asking for rebalancing wvw because the loose the match because of points. The server with better overall coverage wins.

So, how can you balance this? Here some ideas I have in mind.

Keeps, towers and supply camps are harder to capture

If a server has lesser player on a map, their keeps, towers and supply camps are harder to capture. For example: Server A and B have 84 players on a map, server C only 47. If server A tries to capture a tower from server B, there will be no different to now. But if server A tries to capture a tower from server C, it will be harder. Either they will get a debuff or the walls, doors and lords a stronger. (To take down the lord of a supply camp of an outnumbered server as hard as to take down the champion commander siegerazer.) The debuff will be removed if players from server A left or players of server C join the map.

Balancing points per tick

The points per tick are based on players on all maps. If a server has more players on all maps together, it will get lesser points for their objects.

devide a match into rounds

Break down matches to a shorter rounds. Every 6 or 8 hours a round will end and all points will be reset. (Not the objects!) The winner of the round will get 5 points, the second 3 and the third 2. So if a server dominate a round or two, its not possible to get too much in front of the other servers.

At last: Change the rewards and the achievments in wvw. I don’t know how someone will ever get the “Ultimate Chaperone” title for example.

Diru.4531:

John Corpening.9847:

You guys beat me to it. After last week’s positive discussion on siege trolls I wanted to bring up the topic of population imbalance and ideas that you have on it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHcO6Xo8eJ8&feature=youtu.be

Pair servers together based on ranking and allow for WvW guesting between the paired servers. Simple. The only thing the video doesn’t cover is that servers rarely need, or want that much help, so something like a 20-30 limit on WvW guests would probably do. One thing I really like about the idea is that it allows for small groups to play with or against new players more often, which is something I feel WvW could really benefit from.

That would make siege trolling and whatnot even easier as it is.

John Corpening.9847:

I’d like to join in this brainstorm with some questions on these. For merging servers, how do we determine who gets merged? Where would we merge them to? How do we maintain any sort of world pride or identity they have? How do we handle potentially merging with your mortal enemies?

I’m just commentating on merges, there are some great ideas about balancing WvW though.

1) It would be best if you found servers with good overall coverage and merged them with servers with less coverage.
2) Maintaining pride: Planetside 2 has a “Merger Smash” event when they merge servers. The 2 servers fight and the winner gets to keep the name, if the match is 50/50 then a new name is chosen.
3) Mortal enemies: IMO they will have to just deal with it or transfer off.

Balance world transfer price based on ranking

I mean, it’s still tied to global population, which means less than nothing now.

This is not a proper in-match balance method, but on the long run should help a lot. This works the same as “autobalance” for PVP.

The idea is this: going up in transfer always cost gems, pretty much the same amount. Going down (T1->T2->T3->…->T7->T8->T9) should cost much less, to an extent of a free transfer to really underpopulated server. You have the metrics, you know how many players log in WvW per each world, so you can figure it out.

I get that you (Anet) will get less money from transfer, but let’s face it, there are not many players who are so willing to throw 150-200g (don’t know the exact gem to gold ratio) to transfer to a t8 or t9 server. Even less 20€/$ I guess. And even if some of them do that, most of the time is to recruit a few players to the guild and then move to an higher tier (happened to us in WSR, I’m not complaining on their choices and it’s not Anet fault, but surely the background picture doesn’t help)

And losing players because they got bored by matchups is as bad as not getting a few € from those gems.

I get that this is from a low tier PoV, but if we manage to have a least more interesting matches, maybe have some competition with t8 and t7 and some variety on matchups instead of the stalemate we have outside of the season will make things way better than are now.

Free transfer before spring tournament (season 2) had its flaws, but look at how things have changed for Gandara (highest ranked international server with free transfer, jumped from 16th place to 4th/5th in EU). IF properly adapted, could give life to many and shake things up for the better.

On the long run, if you promote transfer for players on lower tier servers, population will spread out a bit better than now. That’s the first step.

Aarna.5178:

Keeps, towers and supply camps are harder to capture

If a server has lesser player on a map, their keeps, towers and supply camps are harder to capture. For example: Server A and B have 84 players on a map, server C only 47. If server A tries to capture a tower from server B, there will be no different to now. But if server A tries to capture a tower from server C, it will be harder. Either they will get a debuff or the walls, doors and lords a stronger. (To take down the lord of a supply camp of an outnumbered server as hard as to take down the champion commander siegerazer.) The debuff will be removed if players from server A left or players of server C join the map.

Balancing points per tick

The points per tick are based on players on all maps. If a server has more players on all maps together, it will get lesser points for their objects.

What happens if inexperienced players make their way into the borderlands?
Now they still could be handy (except for being rallybots, but you can overlook that) and slowly get the grasp on the matter.
If PPT or capture are balanced based on active players they could be even harmful. And they will never learn anything because nobody want them to play.

I guess one of the deal breakers for Anet is to not change WvW into a elitist gameplay full of toxic chat like “log off noobs, you’re making things easier to SERVER_NAME”

Much prefer a system of ‘carrot’ style changes being applied, based on what League tier you’re in. Make all three unique in their own way.

1) Change NA League sizes from 6/9/9 to 9/9/6. A separate suggestion, but is linked partially to others.

2) The nine (perhaps six?) Bronze servers are placed on a constantly rotating match setup (independent of Glicko), but still gain/lose Glicko based on those matches. This would give more variety in Bronze, while giving a server there a better chance to rise toward Silver.

3) Remove Karma/Badge rewards from objectives (EotM in particular). Badges should be given instead for every enemy player kill (not from bags). I still see this being farmable, but not as badly. XP/WXP can stay as-is. (Yes this is a stick, not a carrot. Perhaps start by applying this to EotM, and see how that affects the map’s use.)

4) Add +%MF to Silver (ex. 50%) and Bronze (75%). Borderlands and EB only.

5) Remove Bloodlust in Gold. Its not as needed in the high-end.

6) Winners of Bronze/Silver Tourney are given X guaranteed weeks in the next tier up (regardless of Glicko, but if they qualify later they can stay). This works better in the 9/9/6 layering I mention above.

Again, my personal take on ‘spreading out’ the population is to encourage different play styles in each League tier, and give lower tier servers more mobility to climb up. I normally try to make suggestions within reasonable development limits (and leveraging current mechanics in the game), but its been very hard to do that in this case.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Regarding interest in lower-pop servers: I moved down from T1 in an effort to have a more relaxed WvW (less taxing to my wrists). This has mostly succeeded, but the Tourney is clouding that somewhat. We’ll see.

Not sure how this would work out but my idea is to remove servers in wvw completely like in pve too
and introduce a queue system like the one from pvp so you sign up your roster for wvw and if you are missing one player you get add a random player who signs up on its own
and to keep the communities together the megaserver system kicks in so
that all from your guild and your old server start on the same side as long as there is enough place so the queue system should handle the population balancing
so in prime time you will mostlikely see only guilds from your old server and in offtimes you get put together with players from other servers
and the lfg tool could help too to get yourself a full roster for sign up

Maja.6372:

Not sure how this would work out but my idea is to remove servers but keep it three sided in wvw completely like in pve and introduce a queue system like the one from pvp so you sign up your roster for wvw if you are missing one player you get add a random player who signs up on its own
and to keep the communities together the megaserver system kicks in so
that all from your guild and your old server start on the same side as long as there is enough place

It would work out just like EotM and everyone would hate it. Permanent teams are critical or everyone just stops caring.

Scale PPT according to the people on the map on each side of the server.
Been saying it for over a year now.

Red – 1 player
Blue – 10 players
Green – 5 players

Coefficient for gaining points – Red 1, Blue 0.1, Green 0.2.

Merging servers won’t work. The problem is the disparity in OCX population and there is no way you can fill X amount of servers with a decent portion of OCX players without also introducing game breaking queues for NA players.

I don’t believe I can think of a single way to balance out WvW that would fit in NCSoft’s bussiness model.

Nick.6972:

Scale PPT according to the people on the map on each side of the server.
Been saying it for over a year now.

Red – 1 player
Blue – 10 players
Green – 5 players

Coefficient for gaining points – Red 1, Blue 0.1, Green 0.2.

So, if a server manages to get a great lead, they can just leave WvW, they’ll just outweight the points from the others. Or maybe you manage to swipe a border, then leave it empty, as no one will gain anything.
So less people will play WvW. And newcomers will hurt the server, as their return will be far less than the points they are going to give to the enemy because of an increased coefficient.

EFWinters.5421:

Merging servers won’t work. The problem is the disparity in OCX population and there is no way you can fill X amount of servers with a decent portion of OCX players without also introducing game breaking queues for NA players.
.

I see several possibilities:

• dynamic match capacity: With that you can balance time zones separate, I.e if NA population is balanced they do not have queue, if OCX pop is concentrated they have queue on the overstacked servers, but none on the servers that have low OCX pop.
• dynamic scoring: reduce the balance breaking importance of low-population time.
• separate the time-zone into different match-slices that contribute to the overall score in an aggregated manner, e.g. 3,2,1 points for winning/2nd/loosing every 4, 6 or 8h slice of the match. The different saved/restored slices ensure that each slice starts in the state it left it.
• under/over-populated bufs for increased/reduced personal rewards whenever they happen to reward balance transfer for any time separately.

Any dynamic (time-dependent) adaptation scaled by the mean of all matches is quite immune to manipulation. As there is no reason that match 2-5 manipulate match 1 and the influence of any team on the dynamic adaptation is limited.

Merging servers and lower the map cap won’t tackle the problem at all.
When 20 people can change the situation in 1 night by simply running against T3 Keeps, you have to change the way the PPT are distributed.

Maybe installing a dynamic map cap would help that your 20 people don’t have to fight against 80. But don’t lower the current cap, it’s pretty good.

Like Dayra already stated a dynamic way of points per tick might work well. Just scale the tick according to the ratio of players on each map or based on player on all 4 maps. Don’t let it scale down too far, something like a cap at 50% of the actual tick would be enough. The best thing about this solution is that you can adjust it on the fly.

A next possibility is introducing a monthly system which distributes free transfers to the most underpopulated servers. So you can control the flow of players a bit better.

“Scale PPT according to the people on the map on each side of the server.
Been saying it for over a year now.

Red – 1 player
Blue – 10 players
Green – 5 players"

While that is a really nice idea (was about to wright that just now but got ninja´d), it will introduce several problems, like a) toxic behaviour of WvW veterans vs WvW newbies and b) causing servers to mass log out right before a tick in order to increase their PPT coefficient.

You can eliminate the latter by calculating this coefficient using the coverage during the last two ticks. The former will exist regardless of which system gets introduced in order to prevent night capping.

What is needed, is a hybrid system. PPT needs to factor in active coverage on all three sides while generally all objectives have their own coefficient based on total population (all thee sides combined). What i mean is the following:

A server outmannig both other sides gets a PPT penalty based on how much they outman their opponents. Just as Nick said, this should be based on the server with the lowest active coverage. Numbers to be tweaked of course. Adn then we have the individual coefficient for the various objectives. The amount of points gained during a tick should be based on how many people are actively playing WvW on all three sides. This means Stonemist may earn you 100ppt during Primetime, but only as low as 20ppt during hours of lowest activity – before calculating your server´s PPT penalty. Based on those numbers, Keeping Stonemist during primetime while being outmanned may make it earn you 150ppt, while keeping it during low total coverage and while outmanning your opponents will only net you 10ppt.
This will give Nightcapping less of an impact on the match outcome while increasing the necessity of successfull WvW play during Primetime.

Yes, this may be uncool for oceanic players who play on servers whose Primetime is not theirs. Also it will be uncool for people with unusual working timeframes for their own region. But as far as i´m concerned and as far as i can think about it, this seems the most balanced possible solution.

I say no to population caps because that just introduces horibly long waiting times during Primetime and additionally will drasticly increase the amount of elitism because of newbs stealing the slot of veterans.

I also say no to merged servers or WvW battlegroups because either way organisation is even harder, balance is neigh impossible (even more than now – and just look at EotM where its often one group dominating the others) and you lose the last reason why you even chose a server to begin with.

In my opinion the first step would be to bring a GvG Map in tPvP. Guilds wouldn’t be forced to stack around a tier in WvW to play against the high ranked GvG Guilds. As a result there would be less support of specific servers and less bandwaggoning.

Also i would lower the duration of a matchup, so people won’t burnout so much. Or split the matchup in something like innings. Then rate the result of each inning by participation of each server. The less resistance (say population) the more points are needed to become the Winner of the matchup. Therefore “night innings” would need by far more PVD. E.g. the superior night crew with 0 resistance must tick with 600 to gain just a few points (many people stated this already with good ideas). This means no cosy PVD anymore and a handful of defender would mean the difference by doing stealth caps (although this means a better communication between them and a good/better rating system).

I see everybody assuming there are always people in maps, but my experience says that playing servers below top 10 in EU means not a single enemy in some borderlands during all night, meaning a single group of 5 people can take 4 keeps, 2 towers and some camps in less than 1 hour (done it).

We need ideas to change WvW, but with in mind WvW has to be appealing, not to discourage players not to play WvW when or where they want:
- PPT scaled on how much people is playing: First I don’t think anet has the technical way to apply it and second it would kill server organization and strategy. Loved so much the alarm clock we received that made us to rally in our prime time. Now only matters who has the most regular coverage.
- Servers merge: It’s just a temporary solution. Once some servers will be empty, we will be in the same position as now. It also kills server pride, which is pretty strong in EU (don’t know how it is in NA).
- Lower map cap: A harsh move for stacked servers. It really doesn’t affect in extreme situations (no way a 10vs50 is easier than 10vs70).
- PPT scaled based on timezones. People don’t chose where they’re born or which culture they live with. Someone’s daytime is other’s nighttime. Why American players have than OCX/asian and they prime time is more valuable? Why the same with Spanish and east europeans compared with central EU?
- Making structures more difficult to take: Things are already quite difficult to take. The key is if there’s anybody defending. If yes, taking a T3 keep is nearly impossible. If there’s nobody defending, you can make them as much difficult as you want, servers will eventually take them.
- Free transfers to low servers: It would only promote server rallies. It’s what happened with Desolation in S1 and Gandara in S2. Piken seems to be the chosen server for S3.

Punishing people based on when and where they play, and forcing people to move is not the way to fix things.

I’m more towards a full redesign in how structure PPT is gained. Get rid of ticks and implement a system where PvD is worthless, servers get points for defending structures, attacking them while defended, also upgrading them…

PD: Just an opinion from a player that has played WvW since betas, is in a server than causes coverage issues due to our nightcapping and has had the pleasure to fight one week against 17th and 18th, and just 8 weeks after will fight against 1st and 2nd.

If you abandon the idea of ppt and score and just have WvW as a large battle ground where you get a reward for capturing/defending objectives and the match ends at the end of the week just so that a new set of servers can be matched with each other, you will solve a lot of problems.

The reward for capturing increases depending on the upgrade status of an objective.
The reward for defending decreases depending on the upgrade status of an objective.
So far my thinking has lead me to believe this may be a good idea but I’ll let you (anet) take over and tear into it. You would definitely need to change the way the assault/defend events work.

And to avoid karma training/keep trading, either increase the RI time or implement a system similar to how wxp from player deaths are handed out. Miniscule at first but slowly increases with time. The rewards will have to be much better than they are now.

I would also add some more perks/cool stuff for upgrading to encourage players to do so. One thing off the top of my head (and it should definitely not be the only thing) is to create a new process for superior siege creation, that would require upgrading a structure. People have been complaining about how tedious/boring it is to make superior siege for years now which gives you (anet) the perfect opportunity. You know, make it so that players will want to upgrade and they’d want their opponents to upgrade their stuff too. And if your server has just so many people (i.e. overstacked) that it unintentionally caps and upgrades everything, you get less rewards which will encourage destacking which is a good thing.

WvW will still function like it does now but without the whole ppt/coverage thing lingering over it all. Log on, go try and cap a keep for some cool rewards and get some awesome open field fights in the process. Log off. Log back on, opponent owns everything and has fully upgraded it? Cool! More rewards for us and less for them! They kept it all paper so we get less rewards and they get more? Well, let’s do some good ol’ fashioned server coordination and hit multiple objectives at the same time! Of course, they shouldn’t just be rewards for those who capped something, but to those that helped as well i.e. the server.

Also, some new maps won’t hurt. Just sayin’
If you stop this whole ppt/coverage thing and if you also go ahead with server mergers, there’s really nothing stopping you from adding more maps in order to reduce any potential queues.

Easy

1) Monitor WvW activity on all servers at all times
2) Find out which servers have queues at given times and which have no activity
3) Allow free transfer for a set amount of players to go from and inactive server to an active server. Or from a server with long queues to a server without queues and lower activity.
4) Repeat until all server have similar activities at all times, 24 hours a day.

Of course you will have to do this regularly, and also allow guilds to reserve spots if their guild wasnt to move, dont want to split up guild like you did by introducing separate NA and EU servers now do we.

But again you should only offer these transfer to accounts which have shown to be mainly active for the time slots required by the other server, no point allowing free transfer to an account which will just increase the queues during primetime.

OR
OR!
You can change WvW so that it isnt all about having greater numbers with better coverage and actually make it about skilled players!

Pinkamena Diane Pie.8054:

3) Allow free transfer for a set amount of players to go from and inactive server to an active server. Or from a server with long queues to a server without queues and lower activity.

This sounds like something Anet would try assuming people want to voluntarily unstack or leave their home server. Which they don’t. There needs to be any incentive for people to take either one of those actions.

John Corpening.9847:

You guys beat me to it. After last week’s positive discussion on siege trolls I wanted to bring up the topic of population imbalance and ideas that you have on it.

Thanks,
John

For merging server

how do we determine who gets merged?

• Based on WvWvW population, not PvE (Stats which are available to you only)

Where would we merge them to?

• Create Clusters, give them names and do what DAOC did

How do we maintain any sort of world pride or identity they have?

• Clusters create new identity. After all, the movement by guilds from server X to Y is not uncommon

How do we handle potentially merging with your mortal enemies?

• You cant. They will learn to get along. Offcourse you cant merge BG with JQ. Thats of the table.

For population caps, how do we deal with the longer queues on the worlds that can field enough people?

• Clusters will solve the problem

If it is dynamic, would players be able to manipulate it? For example, our world is ahead so we all agree to not play WvW so the other worlds are capped down and can’t counter us.

• That is a bad idea. Please do not implement it

http://darkageofcamelot.wikia.com/wiki/Servers

“During the past weeks, we have been paying close attention to server populations. Our Herald Team has received a tremendous amount of feedback asking us to cluster more servers. In response to your top requests, we decided to do just that. Here are the server clusters scheduled to take place in the upcoming weeks”

Anet has many DAOC designers in your team. Use their experience on how to merge servers.

3 clusters would be enough IMO.

-Fuzz and GL on the cluster

John Corpening.9847:

You guys beat me to it. After last week’s positive discussion on siege trolls I wanted to bring up the topic of population imbalance and ideas that you have on it.

There are a couple of ideas already going in this thread:

• population caps
• merge servers
• Battle Groups

I’d like to join in this brainstorm with some questions on these. For merging servers, how do we determine who gets merged? Where would we merge them to? How do we maintain any sort of world pride or identity they have? How do we handle potentially merging with your mortal enemies?

For population caps, how do we deal with the longer queues on the worlds that can field enough people? If it is dynamic, would players be able to manipulate it? For example, our world is ahead so we all agree to not play WvW so the other worlds are capped down and can’t counter us.

For Battle Groups, Asglarek mentioned more details are on the way. I’d love to hear more.

I’m approaching this as a brainstorm. The topic is “Approaches to correcting overall population imbalance”. I know there is a related topic of 24 hour coverage but I’d like to keep that as a separate conversation for now.

Please keep this friendly, constructive and on topic. We had a really good discussion on the siege troll thread I’m hoping we can kick around some ideas and have another great discussion here. Feel free to add additional ideas that I didn’t list out but please make sure they are on topic.

Thanks,
John

Hi John,

I made a post on a similar subject several months back. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Suggestion-Server-Clusters-to-even-coverage/first#post4107787

I would propose that server ‘partnership’ pairings happen on a quarterly basis (or a fixed frequency anyway). That is, the average WvW populations of servers are determined and servers are grouped/clustered based on equalizing that number to ±20% or less. Such clusters may be comprised of more than 2 servers. Example provided in the post (note that the example was based on post-S2 standings).

To clarify: the server each individual belongs to never actually changes. The server groupings are not permanent and will change every quarter.

Such partnerships could have interesting results in terms of play-style and coverage as servers learn from each other and also to cooperate with each other (or hate each other and implode together).

It may be impossible to take player skill, tactical ability, WvW interest and coverage into account. It will never be totally fair but I think equalizing the team populations in WvW would be a great first step. I’ve seen soccer matches between teams of vastly different skill but never one where one was double the size of their opponents. Such things are often a forgone conclusion and are not fun.

I also proposed that we only have 3 tiers; Gold (1st to 3rd), Silver (4th to 6th) and Bronze (7th to 9th). After each week (of the tournament), servers may rise or drop a tier depending on their scores. That way, the rewards for coming in 3rd (3rd in Gold tier) can truly be better than coming in 4th (1st in Silver tier).

Just my suggestion. Thanks!

You could potentially merge worlds based on total hours spent in WvW (not edge of the mists) summed across the entire servers population and roughly match the total values across each merging. This would prevent the merge being affected by falsely counting PvE/PvP players who rarely go into WvW.

This could be a moving (4 week?) average, and could probably be calculated easily from already available data, while you would have to potentially strain the servers when you sample an entire population, you would only need to do it once a week or so. It could even happen during WvW reset to reduce server load.

Changing world allegiance could be restricted for any server which is above the current average for its tier, creating a way of maintaining steady population in the league.

You could also do this to create separate population limited leagues based on server population, rather than gold/silver/bronze leagues based on ratings, which can be used to cheat your way into an easy league. In this method rather than just ignoring PPT, a significant fraction of the server would have to deliberately not log in for a month before the league.

The best way to avoid league tampering though is probably to announcing them a league as close to the start as possible.

It seems like the suggestions fall under one of four categories:

1. Map Caps (static or dynamic)
2. Teams (merge servers, battlegroup, faction)
3. Time Slice Matches
4. Handicap (Change scoring/stats to reduce impact of coverage/population)

Using Design for Six Sigma and a couple of Pugh charts with Anet and player supplied criteria should come up with a clear winner.

Jim Hunter.6821:

anzenketh.3759:

Lower Population caps
You install lower population caps you have people upset about not being able to play WvW especially during the weekend. This also only solves the population problem. You could adjust the population dynamically depending on how many players of the apposing team is on the map however some maps(Borderlands) however you will run into a deadlock until the apposing team decides to join the map.

I’m curious what you mean by deadlocked? If you have roughly equal numbers you can take just about anything on the map if you are good enough. From my experience playing against lower pop servers (often during off hours), this is when you find the best fights. If you build a cata outside of ac range and in a spot where a bali can’t hit, they have to run out to fight you because they don’t have the numbers to spike build a counter treb.

This means the tower/keep goes to whoever wins the open field fight. During prime time, especially against certain servers who will go unnamed, there is nothing you can do to get them to fight outside of their sup ac range.

What I meant is even with a dynamically changing population cap the number of players that you have on any one given map is determined by how many of the other servers have on said map. No side can get in more players until both servers increase in said population.

Haven’t red whole thread so probably someone suggested something similar , but what if put all servers both NA and EU into one pool and open something like 30 new WvW only servers and let’s say 500 players of each region could join one server. After server hits 1000 players mark just lock it and don’t let anyone else to join that server, that would make 30 equal servers with 24/7 coverage(because atm its really boring to play in the evenings… at least in EU). Let everyone to chose server that they want to represent and if person isn’t active in WvW in couple of months/weeks kick him from that server so active player could join, after “afk” person is back and wants to join WvW again he could join the same server(if its not full) or just join different server(which is not full). ANet could let current communities to make a list of people that wants to join same server together ,so communities won’t need to split up.

Changes like this could revive WvW from current state no more server stacking, no more humongous queues, no more same matchups over and over again. Tournaments would become much more interesting than atm, servers would need more strategy not just blob less populated server to death.

Well, looking at it from far seems to give you one clear winner.

Map Caps hurt the high population servers too much, because the target should not to not let people play.
Teams make WvW organisation hard and their balancing is neigh impossible, also destroys server pride as a minor argument.
Time Slice matches would be fine if some servers didnt have a spread out population of various time zones.
Handicap system is the easiest to implement and the easiest to adjust afterwards, and looks like its the most balanced. All people can play as usual, servers stay servers, and correctly set up this has the potential to make PPT account for actual effort instead of easymode nightcapping or winning because of outmanning.

Edmo.7159:

I was waiting for the GvG CDI to talk about that.

Let’s embrace the Mega Server and get rid of servers for ever. Transforming WvW into a kind of GvG game mode.

How is this possible?

• Don’t need to change any WvW gameplay mechanic.

• Create a individual score for Guilds that will serve just to determine the Guild position on a Ladder.

• The Top 30 Guilds in the Ladder will play on Tier 1, 10 Guilds on each color. (Devs can better determine the number of guilds)

• Lower Tiers can have more guilds participating as lower as the tier.

• Better rewards for Tier 1 1st place, and decreasing according to the position and Tier. Tier 1 3rd place receive a better reward than Tier 2 1st place. It will give a reason for Guilds to want to progress to a higher tier.

Issues

*The fact that a player can represent multiple guilds.

*The community of this game don’t react well to drastic changes, even if the change is for better.

You forgot the fact that there are a lot of players who are not on massive or even semi-massive WvW Guilds.