Guild Wars 2

I just recently started getting into WvW, and found it a very enjoyable experience. Then about a week after the tournament started, I noticed the population of my server’s WvW community dipped. Now it’s only a few of us on EB or BL at any given moment. If we get lucky, a zerg comes online and helps out. Other than that, we spend hours upgrading and fortifying, and it only takes minutes for one zerg to clean us off the map in both BL and EB (at the same time for that matter).

It crossed my mind how crazy this was, and it also crossed my mind that if one server doesn’t have that many players in the map at that moment, then another server shouldn’t be allowed to have 10x the amount of players on the map from their server.

A tournament is supposed to be about teamwork and, not necessarily “skill,” but coordination and planning. What is fair about spending all day planning defenses, only to be wiped off the map whenever an extremely populated server decides they don’t like your server’s color on their map? And yes, I say “their” map, because that’s exactly what it seems like. I looked on the map and saw one server’s entire BL untouched, 95% of the EB map in their color, and 80% of their color in our own BL. If you think I’m telling a story, next time I will take a picture.

You shouldn’t be able to win only because you’re able to throw numbers at a wall or gate; it makes the WvW for a smaller server incredibly useless to play. I truly had fun defending towers from equal-numbered zergs, and it didn’t make me want to drop out of the game whenever they made it inside and captured it — it was just time to launch a counter strike. But when you have 5 people at your tower — and quite honestly, on the entire map — and you look out and see a 40+-man zerg coming around, you just don’t feel like playing anymore.

Do you know why? It’s not because you hate losing; it’s because at that moment — at that very moment, you realize that all the time, money, and love that you spent upgrading and looking out for your side, doesn’t mean a thing, because that zerg is going to stomp on it all like they’re making wine.

I’m no sore loser, but come on, what is the incentive of playing if I’m gonna be spending my gold to upgrade, and my time to watch over the towers, if none of it matters? I have no desire to transfer to a highly populated server, because quite frankly, I don’t care about winning. Mowing downs towers and keeps isn’t even fun to me unless it’s a fair fight with near equal numbers. For the max pop’d servers, I’m glad you have an active WvW community and the numbers required to get things done. Now, with that said, what about everyone else?

As a suggestion, what if when people tag up as commander, a ring appears around them on the map like Commander Siegerazer. Now, if this server is going up against another server that has much lower numbers, then everyone inside that commander ring would receive some kind of debuff if a certain amount of people were to enter that ring. Nothing major, but something that would allow the low-population server to take advantage of.

Maybe any siege deployed while you have the debuff on takes twice as much damage, or anything along those lines. Or perhaps you deal 50% less damage to supervisors and lords. And there would also need to be something in place to ensure that commanders still have a purpose for tagging up, so they won’t tag down to bypass this feature. On the other hand, a commander from the low-pop server could receive a buff when a much smaller amount of players enter the ring. And if the servers are balanced, then no buff or debuff is applied. Basically the Outnumbered, but much more viable.

MaLeVoLenT.8129:

GvG. Support it. See your player base come back from the dead. Incorporate Mega Servers in a GvG sense. Allow guilds from other Tiers to fight your Tier 15v15 20v20(NOT SPVP).

DO away with Season Tournaments everyone knows who will win before they even happen. Pointless.

The population imbalance is coming from WvW becoming very stale.

STOP with this living story crap and focus on things that will keep your player base playing consistently.

EoTM was a terrible idea. You guys put so much effort in that map. It’s literally insanity because it serves very little purpose. Overflow map? what queues? More like Karma Train map.

Obsidian Sanctum was a band aid to pad a niche community of WvW outlaws that broke the PPT meta. Now it’s time to lift the band aid and support what the community is dying for.

Guild Wars 1 was so successful because of the varying types of PvP. GvG, Heroes Ascent, Team PvP, Random Arenas, Alliance Battles. The variety created balance and not over population. There weren’t even servers just instances in that game yet the vast amount of PvPers where spread and had the ability to do different things without creating their own game type that ArenaNet didn’t support.

Now everyone is suffering. The lower tiers sub Tier gets it the worse because when there is attrition it effects the lesser populations greater than Tier 1. Everyone now wants to move to Tier 1 where the fights are happening and the GvG scene is still trying to kick off. BG, TC and JQ are perma full with Tier 2 collapsing this will only get worse. Increase server capacity will help stabilize Tier 1 while further draining the life of the lower Tiers because it’s like the great depression. These lower Tier servers still have the will to compete in a different meta other than PPT which is decided by the server with the most Coverage and Overtime. Because of this, it’s pointless to even have a tournament. Before and after every Season you will notice a huge shift in player base which causes guilds to implode, servers to die, and the attrition rate greatly increases.

BTW, ArenaNet I’m server leader of Blackgate. I deal with the community greatly on all Tier 1 servers and even Tier 2 servers. Before Season 3, Tier 2 collapsed slightly and is still collapsing because the GvG scene imploded. Now, all the Tier 2 guilds are starting to look for a new home in Tier 1 because their guilds are dying the fights are becoming stale and YOU ARE NOT SUPPORTING WHAT THE COMMUNITY WANTS again this is yet another band aid invoked by the community itself. This will never be sustainable till ArenaNet helps us.

The game needs variety even SPvP is the same game mode with a new gimmick….

Seconding everything that this guy said, even if he is a BG heathen.

i don’t think enough people are considering the impact of a badly implemented alliance feature. if it’s implemented, and either the execution fails or the design of the system is bad then Anet will not be able to patch it fast enough to retain the players. the risk involved in such a massive change is too high, and the consequences of failure are too great.

choovanski.5462:

i don’t think enough people are considering the impact of a badly implemented alliance feature. if it’s implemented, and either the execution fails or the design of the system is bad then Anet will not be able to patch it fast enough to retain the players. the risk involved in such a massive change is too high, and the consequences of failure are too great.

They can’t do nothing.

commenting on this topic is quite difficult without sounding pretentious.

Basically, what I want to say – and excuse coming across as a bit of a prick…

is that this thread is just qq over losing

dedication and organisation wins the day

SFR were fighting for no.1 spot when we were a medium server. Even now we are outnumbered much of the time on borderlands and it is only really ebg that has a queue. On a night time, we have no NA guilds… most of the time we are 15 outnumbered people who are sacrificing a bit of sleep to win and it is down to strategy.

You don’t need numbers to win the points game. You just got to play smart.

1. Remove server transfer fees to and between lower tiers.
2. Enforce a restrictive cap on T1 servers.
3. Redesign current maps to be more small group focused. More objectives. Less zerg friendly. Proper meaningful objectives.
4. Implement GVG to help seperate fight guilds from PPT. GVG’s should be cross server.
5. Remove all hard rezzing. Double downed must waypoint. This will help smaller numbers in keeps and towers sustain a defence against large zergs.
6. Introduce weekly rewards to WVW like the current tournament. Even laurels will do. Please, no more badges or ascended mats.
7. Merge EU and NA servers.

Just some options..

Sube Dai.8496:

choovanski.5462:

i don’t think enough people are considering the impact of a badly implemented alliance feature. if it’s implemented, and either the execution fails or the design of the system is bad then Anet will not be able to patch it fast enough to retain the players. the risk involved in such a massive change is too high, and the consequences of failure are too great.

They can’t do nothing.

Of course they can! Where have you been the past 2 years?!?

5 days Thead open, over 900 Posts and 31110 Views, should I say anything more?
Just wake up ANET and move your kitten ………………you did and do enough for your PVE Casuals, we are still out there…………..WAKE UPPPPPPPP……………

Greets Myrmi

Nymph of Meliai.6739:

dedication and organisation wins the day

Numbers and Off PRIME coverage wins the week

1- Make 3 new WvW maps
2- add EOTM to PPT rotation
3- merge all the servers in 3 alliances
4- add GvG

You would have 7 maps to choose from and GvG to play when the maps are full. That’s plenty to accomodate for the population of all servers.

If they merge all the servers into 3 alliances then they better have gvg and several other new pvp modes ready for release because the karma farm WvW will turn into will ruin the game for a lot of people.

I really had to laugh when i saw that certain “server leaders” had posted on these forums with an apparantly logical explanation for the population imbalance that we see today in wvw.

It’s about time some of these leaders stopped blaming anet and admitted that they themselves are part of the problem. All that “chest thumping” and pushing “for the win”, inviting guilds, paying for guilds to transfer has in the end killed wvw as a competitive environment. Just read in these forums what one “server leader” really thinks and we can understand how polluted the atmosphere has really become because of this kind of leadership.

http://www.gw2wvw.net/topic/bgtcsos-s3-week3

This is an example of one thread. I would advise ANET to be very careful taking any advice from any server leaders who are capable of writing this kind of toxic material. These are in fact the kind of people who are killing the game.

The current state of WVW and population imbalance is the fault of the players themselves. To watch T2 NA guilds transfer to T1 servers just before season 3 started really made one realise that season 3 was dead. Everyone knew before it even started who would win…

As to what to do about it……sry but nothing in the posts above posts will change anything. Its for the players themselves to start to act in a more responsible manner..server leaders that means you.

choovanski.5462:

i don’t think enough people are considering the impact of a badly implemented alliance feature. if it’s implemented, and either the execution fails or the design of the system is bad then Anet will not be able to patch it fast enough to retain the players. the risk involved in such a massive change is too high, and the consequences of failure are too great.

And what are the consequences of failing to produce balanced matches?

Merging servers is such a horrible idea, everyone would basically go towards the server with the most population to simply bandwagon it. Not to include the massive lag it will include depending on the population amount of server merging. Not sure many of us can handle 50+ or even 80+ depending on ya’ll merge servers…. Which i hope not. Some servers are already build up in its community it would be a shame for them to loose it with one simply horrible update.

Tier 1 isn’t the problem. If people transfer to T1 servers it is because they are seeking the sort of 24/7 competitive WvW slugfest that the game was advertised to be from the start.

The problem is that the overall WvW population has dwindled to the point where the action in other tiers is just a shadow of what it once was.

Putting more emphasis on a GvG would only hurt WvW these days. If they had of put an emphasis on it and backed it from the beginning then it would have helped it by generating interest in the game from players who are interested in this sort of thing. But these days the player base isn’t changing much and going to the steps of adding an extra game mode is just going to dilute down the WvW population. I’m not opposed to GvG getting the attention it deserved from the beginning. But I in no way see it as a solution to population imbalances.

Nimrod.9240:

What about EU?
The communities here are not only formed by server but also by language.
Remember, this was one major critic point with the PvE megaserver implementation and will have a hughe impact on the communication in an alliance. How will this be addressed?
——————-
So far this alliance things smells too much like EOTM for my taste just with a diffrent name and the last time i tried that was one of the most disgusting expieriences i had in GW2.

I can follow the blue Doritos in any language.

Just let me know the German for stack and French for fire and water.

Karuna.1357:

Tier 1 isn’t the problem. If people transfer to T1 servers it is because they are seeking the sort of 24/7 competitive WvW slugfest that the game was advertised to be from the start.

The problem is that the overall WvW population has dwindled to the point where the action in other tiers is just a shadow of what it once was.

The sad state of the game.

They’ll be fighting the same T1 server for an eternity and win blowouts vs t2 during tournaments. Staleness will kick in and quit the game/gamemode forever. GG

retsuya.4708:

Karuna.1357:

Tier 1 isn’t the problem. If people transfer to T1 servers it is because they are seeking the sort of 24/7 competitive WvW slugfest that the game was advertised to be from the start.

The problem is that the overall WvW population has dwindled to the point where the action in other tiers is just a shadow of what it once was.

The sad state of the game.

They’ll be fighting the same T1 server for an eternity and win blowouts vs t2 during tournaments. Staleness will kick in and quit the game/gamemode forever. GG

We’ve already been fighting the same servers for months on end. Here’s the thing. The matchup isn’t stale. Red tags are the same no matter what server/guild you’re fighting. Some will be better and some worse. The mechanics don’t change when you fight a different server. A balanced(ish) matchup will always be more interesting than a blowout matchup.

Otokomae.9356:

Asglarek.8976:

Otokomae.9356:

TLDR: adding an official (good) GvG mode would make it easier to spread out guilds across servers/alliances, and would likely reduce the number guilds Tagging up to lead massive forces, with guilds playing WvW just for fun a lot more.

The problem you have by adding a GvG mode as a hypothetical wvw population fix is that the more stacked a server is like BG/JQ/TC the less of an impact it would have on them as it would on say a less stacked server. Its a numbers game and the only real fix with the least amount of impact is still IMO battle groups.

With caps you create ques where big servers with mega guilds that will fill wvw instantaneously forcing others to either stop wvw or transfer.

With technical changes to the scoring system or buffing or nerfing objectives you create a punitive system in essence you’ve taken the “unfair advantage” and flipped it you know “two wrongs don’t make a right”.

Closing servers and migrating the players to a predetermined server is always painful something no company wants to do but sometimes attrition is the best cure.

Which leaves grouping servers together as alliances where they share ques with others in there alliance so hypothetically you would take the top 6 servers and devide the remaining 18 based on internal metrics so maybe the top 3 servers only take the 2 of the lowest tier servers and the other 3 take the higher tiered.

In this scenario I can see increased wvw participation and a chance to grow communities the others not so much.

If you’re going to quote someone, PLEASE don’t read only the “TLDR” at the end, read the whole post, and re-read it if you didn’t understand it the first time. Here is the bullet points version covering only a few of my points, since the admittedly “Wall of Text” version is probably overwhelming: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Solution-to-fix-the-population-imbalance/page/18#post4450064

One of those points was that, contrary to what you’ve said here, Tier 1 would be heavily affected by a decent GvG game mode, since so many of the guilds in T1 came here essentially for GvG purposes. They tried making Tier 2 into the “GvG Tier”, but that effort fell apart, so many of the GvG guilds are now in Tier 1, since there is a diverse group to fight here, and you can ONLY GvG with other guilds in the same matchup as you. It would also ease the transition into something like the “Battle Groups” you’re suggesting, since turning all of WvW into a casual, EtoM-style affair would likely cause many players to leave WvW and/or the game altogether, unless they had a more competitive alternative for guilds within GW2 already in place.

I don’t know where you come up with “so many guilds came to tier 1 for GvG” when there has never been more than the occasional small scale gvg match ups and I’ve been playing in t1 since launch on JQ in fact most of the GvG crew from JQ and HoD and the other original t1 servers left for lower pop servers a long time ago.

The gist of your post was saying that GvG would somehow miraculously fix coverage problems and I retort by saying it would have the opposite effect and exacerbate it by shear numbers alone BG/JQ/TC could absorb far more guilds leaving wvw than say FA/MAG/SOR this fact is indisputable.

Reverence.6915:

retsuya.4708:

Karuna.1357:

Tier 1 isn’t the problem. If people transfer to T1 servers it is because they are seeking the sort of 24/7 competitive WvW slugfest that the game was advertised to be from the start.

The problem is that the overall WvW population has dwindled to the point where the action in other tiers is just a shadow of what it once was.

The sad state of the game.

They’ll be fighting the same T1 server for an eternity and win blowouts vs t2 during tournaments. Staleness will kick in and quit the game/gamemode forever. GG

We’ve already been fighting the same servers for months on end. Here’s the thing. The matchup isn’t stale. Red tags are the same no matter what server/guild you’re fighting. Some will be better and some worse. The mechanics don’t change when you fight a different server. A balanced(ish) matchup will always be more interesting than a blowout matchup.

The mechanics don’t change but the players do. Fights against other servers wouldn’t be fun for you right now because it would be a complete blowout but if the numbers were a little more even you might have fun running into servers using different strategies than what you are used to.

If you ever leave the zerg you will see roaming and small scale is very different from server to server.

Well I do not like cap limits really – point of www is to have various size battles and map full of people. Maps of that size would suffer immensly if cap limit is presented too low. People don’t change servers easily (well that could be fixed with free transfers I guess but still) – There are a lot of people who have been there for their servers on ups and downs and don’t like the idea of “forced” change plus I would see it bringing forth a lot of elitistic discussions like “only the best guilds are allowed to stay in our server” etc.

I really would like to see solution for imbalance as two-fold. Combination of firstly battle-group and new maps.

First if there would be say 2 new map types going hand in hand with existing ones (BL + EB) – secondly there would be battlegroups bringing together small and large population servers, so pretty much cut amount of servers in half by pairing them up.

I would see benefits of it as follow:

• “empty” servers would get to fight alongside with more populated ones – taking away the feeling that it is “always about the numbers”
• New people to fight alongside with
• New maps to experience alongside with old
• bigger pool of people in battles making sure you get a nice head-on clashes almost always

I see www as a control, co-operation and communication thing (alongside with fun!) and that would IMO increase it a lot.

Cheers,

just remove EotM , and WvW will be back to normal….

azizul.8469:

just remove EotM , and WvW will be back to normal….

Better rebalance and integrate it. I.e instead of 3 identical BLs and EB, make it EB+EotM2.0 in prime-time (more than 100 want to play) and only the better filled one in off-time (less than 100 want to play). Reduced match capacity would help a lot of server to become competitive.

Jim Hunter.6821:

Reverence.6915:

retsuya.4708:

Karuna.1357:

Tier 1 isn’t the problem. If people transfer to T1 servers it is because they are seeking the sort of 24/7 competitive WvW slugfest that the game was advertised to be from the start.

The problem is that the overall WvW population has dwindled to the point where the action in other tiers is just a shadow of what it once was.

The sad state of the game.

They’ll be fighting the same T1 server for an eternity and win blowouts vs t2 during tournaments. Staleness will kick in and quit the game/gamemode forever. GG

We’ve already been fighting the same servers for months on end. Here’s the thing. The matchup isn’t stale. Red tags are the same no matter what server/guild you’re fighting. Some will be better and some worse. The mechanics don’t change when you fight a different server. A balanced(ish) matchup will always be more interesting than a blowout matchup.

The mechanics don’t change but the players do. Fights against other servers wouldn’t be fun for you right now because it would be a complete blowout but if the numbers were a little more even you might have fun running into servers using different strategies than what you are used to.

If you ever leave the zerg you will see roaming and small scale is very different from server to server.

They are fighting the same servers, but looks like its not really the same guilds/people as before. It feels like most of the population are transfers from lower tiers.

What will happen to tier 1 if there are no lower tiers to replenish its people?

dynamic map capacity

Assume that at off-time the superior side fields 100 people and a minor side fields 25.
Currently this allows the superior side to jump around with a single 100 people blob, to be 4:1 superior wherever it likes.
If we would reduce the map capacities such that every map can be filled with mostly 1/4 of the manpower of the superior side (i.e. 25 in this example), then still everyone can enter the match (no one has to sit in queue for non-technical reasons), but the superior side can no longer overrun everything 4:1. The minor-sides can fight 1:1, if they focus on a map.

dynamic value of objectives

Obviously it is more difficult to acquire an objective from a side with superior manpower, than it is to acquire something from a side with lower manpower. This should determine the value of the objective for scoring till next conquest. And if you acquire something from a side that has no one on the map it will have no value for scoring. Still the owner looses score, so abandon things without need isn’t a strategy.

At every time the system tracks the mean manpower balance between the 3 teams within the last 5min for every map.
E.g.: Blue:Red 2:1, Green:Blue:1.5:1, Green:Red 3:1, if blue conquers a tower (base 10) from red, while having 2:1 on the map, the score-value of this tower is 10/2=5 pts while it is in blue possession. If red takes a camp (base 5) from green while it is 1:3 inferior the value is 5*3=15pts while it is in reds possession.

equal rewards for per team and map

Currently defense is much less rewarding than fights and conquest. And individual reward hunting hinders optimal play. How about all rewards generated by a team on a map are equally distributed to everyone in this team on this map outside spawn. (To disable leaching: every inactive (including dead and dc’ed) outside spawn is ported to spawn after a minute, 15min inactive at spawn is kicked from map to disable capacity waste). This way the whole team – independedly of task-assignment – profits from any team action.

Why does this help?

Gameplay will become much more strategic! It’s no longer pure manpower and coverage that scores best, but most efficient usage of available manpower that score best. A small well-organized team becomes a change to fight a thumb mass successfully. Therefore man-power imbalance becomes less decisive. A nice side-effect is improved 3-sided match balance, it is most worthy to acquire stuff from the superior side, so the two minor teams may find it more worthy to attack the side that has currently most man-power and not each other. Another thing is: Defense is much more important for the superior side. It just cannot afford to loose a tower, while is has 4:1 superiority (as this would give an objective with score value 40), it has to assign more people to defense, reducing it’s attack superiority.

Last but not least: being on a strong superior side can become quite boring, if the enemies do not choose your map to focus their man-power, while the minor side has always action. People may chose to improve balance to be less bored.

eithinan.9841:

Nymph of Meliai.6739:

dedication and organisation wins the day

Numbers and Off PRIME coverage wins the week

On SFR it is the same people. We have commanders who command for 14+ hours every day. Dedication.

We are outnumbered during the night but still manage to turn the map green. Organisation.

PabbyGaul.9682:

I don’t think high-population servers are the root of the problem. I think the imbalance is simply human nature, playing the game against the rules they are given. Its all artificial. If you want it function in verisimilitude yer gonna have to simulate it.

Again, my point to balance things out has to be centered around the design of the game mode. Tier 1 players have noted they typically don’t queue more than 2 maps during seasons, so lowering the cap (unless it’s brutally lowered) does very little to influence movement. What about the people that like playing on BG JQ TC and aren’t there simply to win? It’s basically a punishment to those folks.

PabbyGaul.9682:

Well “punishment” is necessary in any balanced system. Pick any naturally balanced system and you will find that something pull in the opposite direction, generally something that directly counters that which is pulling in the other direction and is related to the consequences for doing so. Just how it is. rarely do things people want come without a price, there are natural consequence for practically everything worth having, doing ect. In essence we are really just taking the “bonus” from the higher tier servers and giving it to the lower tiers. So, it snot just a punishment, someone gets a Bonus! And the point would not be to force anyone, simply put the stuff in place and let it work itself out.

As many have mention, Overpopulation, Coverage, Rewards, Tournaments, all related. We submitted about 20-30 different changes. Its like 7 pages of stuff…If people are interested I could post I suppose.

Lowering map caps doesn’t do much more than institute frustration, but as John mentioned it’s a suggestion that is the least amount of work, but it’s also one of the least effective methods. Which falls right in line with your natural balance example.

I understand why PPT is what we have, it’s very likely a more death-match type scoring system has overhead and tracking issues. It also would cause scores to vary wildly, higher pop servers could have quite a bit higher points than lower pop, but if you score on averages via a max point count, say to win you need more than 33% of the total score, then you solve that problem. I mentioned before that PPT has been a bad idea since almost a month or 2 after release, which is why we keep having these conversations. The mode needed a restructure before it even made it to the design table.

Nymph of Meliai.6739:

eithinan.9841:

Nymph of Meliai.6739:

dedication and organisation wins the day

Numbers and Off PRIME coverage wins the week

On SFR it is the same people. We have commanders who command for 14+ hours every day. Dedication.

We are outnumbered during the night but still manage to turn the map green. Organisation.

Sounds like burn-out, which doesn’t help with the longevity of the game mode. Also, depends on what you mean by outnumbered.

I don’t feel bad if I lose cuz of outnumbered. It is war, it happens. Imo it is not problem, but it is only IMO. I have one bad experience with balance take as example (arena pvp) one team win and second lose, people leave if they lose, then autobalance starts, and you or your team-commrade (betray: volunter or through roll of dice). People work together for one achievement. I think the most problematic thing for wvw was allow to transfer beetwen servers. Final blow.
Make new wvw map, that will refresh a little atmosphere instead of wasting ur development time for number caps etc.. New map can be less rewarding. Btw. u can also decrease rewarding for eotm if u think that will help. Or buff all npc of outnumbered team, as long as outnumbered.
I can only repeat outnumbered=/=imbalance. IMO.

yanniell.1236:

TC + ET = Eredon Cost

If they do this, I will stop playing Guild Wars 2. I despise what the megaservers have done to PvE, found out that’s one of the main reasons the person who got me into GW2 hasn’t played in 2 months despite formerly having played every day and having more than 10,000 achievement points, and it’s why other friends play less. If they do the same thing to WvW, I’m outta here.

Berk.8561:

yanniell.1236:

TC + ET = Eredon Cost

If they do this, I will stop playing Guild Wars 2. I despise what the megaservers have done to PvE, found out that’s one of the main reasons the person who got me into GW2 hasn’t played in 2 months despite formerly having played every day and having more than 10,000 achievement points, and it’s why other friends play less. If they do the same thing to WvW, I’m outta here.

Isn’t that a bit to emotional reaction? Mega-server still mean you may or may not meet your people, while in a community preserving merge, you are guaranteed to meet all ET people, just some others as well.

It like a merge of two schools where classes remain the same (WvW merge) vs a merge of two schools where classes are mixed on order of entrance (mega-server and EotM).

I didn’t read all 19 pages of text so sorry if this had already been dismissed. Someone suggested PPT scaling on page 1 which I concur is a good idea.

Something along the lines of this:
- the scale factor is unique to all servers on each map, depending on the server population
- categorize the objectives on every map so it inherently “belongs” to a server
- example: if red holds a red objective, get the full PPT. If blue holds a red objective, scale PPT gain of that particular objective to a factor of (red pop/blue pop), likewise if green caps it scale the PPT gain to (red pop/green pop)

Essentially this reduces the nightcap PPT gap so there is a chance for serves with less coverage to catch up and penalizes servers for losing objectives when evenly matched in numbers.

Keep the same WXP and EXP rewards so off-prime players still get rewarded. Even if they are not getting massive PPT ticks for their server off-prime they are still denying opponents PPT so there is still reason to play.

Dayra.7405:

Berk.8561:

yanniell.1236:

TC + ET = Eredon Cost

If they do this, I will stop playing Guild Wars 2. I despise what the megaservers have done to PvE, found out that’s one of the main reasons the person who got me into GW2 hasn’t played in 2 months despite formerly having played every day and having more than 10,000 achievement points, and it’s why other friends play less. If they do the same thing to WvW, I’m outta here.

Isn’t that a bit to emotional reaction? Mega-server still mean you may or may not meet your people, while in a community preserving merge, you are guaranteed to meet all ET people, just some others as well.

It like a merge of two schools where classes remain the same (WvW merge) vs a merge of two schools where classes are mixed on order of entrance (mega-server and EotM).

Thing is, it’s so arbitrary and doesn’t solve anything as long as people are free to move. Nothing wrong with expressing an emotional reaction.

Dayra.7405:

It like a merge of two schools where classes remain the same (WvW merge) vs a merge of two schools where classes are mixed on order of entrance (mega-server and EotM).

The analogy is incomplete. To me, a server merge is like:

School A (high tier servers) is full of students, sometimes to the point where there are waiting lists for future students. With that many students, there are enough who are interested in playing football (huge zergs), so School A has a football club with many, many members on the team. So many that sometimes not everyone gets a chance to play in a match (map queue).

School B (low tier servers) has fewer kids, they don’t play football because not enough are interested to form a full team. Instead, the kids play a casual game of basketball in small teams of 3 people each side (small group raids) or some other activities (roam solo).

Some kids join School B because their parents heard good things about the low student/teacher ratio, since more teacher attention would give them a better education (less lag). But then some kids complained that they didn’t like playing basketball and wanted to play football, so they transferred to School A.

The football-fanatic kids who were unable to transfer from School B to School A, because their parents couldn’t afford to, kept whining about how all students should have the right to join a football team (“fair fights”) and that the only way to achieve this is for School B to merge with School A, in the misguided notion that more students would give them the inter-school victory they desire. But they fail to realise that in the long run, this with do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to help them win inter-school football matches because the kids that did not want to play football (fight large zerg groups) will simply just not play sport at all (quit WvW), or transfer to another school.

Moral of the story: some of us like the ecosystem that has developed in the lower tiers. Forcing a server merge does little, if anything, for the “population” issues that the I-just-wanna-win brigade want.

I am yet to hear an explanation of what problem a server merge would solve that cannot be solved by giving free transfers to the whiners who want Tier1-style fights so they can move to a server that offers them what they want.

roxybudgy.8205:

Dayra.7405:

It like a merge of two schools where classes remain the same (WvW merge) vs a merge of two schools where classes are mixed on order of entrance (mega-server and EotM).

I am yet to hear an explanation of what problem a server merge would solve that cannot be solved by giving free transfers to the whiners who want Tier1-style fights so they can move to a server that offers them what they want.

I’m not going to dispute that some people enjoy playing basketball in School B.

But as for your last paragraph, free transfers to people who want T1 style fights so that they can move to a server that offers them what they want:

• There are no servers to transfer to that will offer them what they want because the populations are too unbalanced between servers – even ones two Glicko spots away.

Simply offering server transfers is not going to solve the issue. (I’m not convinced server mergers will either)

1) If some want to play basketball (great), some want to play football (great) and it cannot happen together on the same field (here I am at doubt, Kodash is a good example where the integration of both playstyles works very well) then yes: We would need two permanently separated league. And as there are people that want to play both, all server/alliances/teams should participate in both leagues at the same time, up to players choice which type of sport to join. (But for that we need server mergers, otherwise man-power would be reduced even more.)

Restrictions on how many can be in the same area (foraging levels) before they suffer something like fractal-agony (when you are long in the area with the right amount of people you gain some resistance/imunity over time, but if you enter it and overstack it at the same time you are hit by it hard, you can turn back and go out, at some places you may be able to cross it, but if you just stay inside you die) could be used to make sure that everyone plays in the right match. (but does it need two leagues, simply different foraging levels on the same maps, could be used to enforce that some areas on the maps are large-scale and some are small-scale).

2) I play in EU-T2 (Elona) we only have queue on all 4 maps only during reset, I am in doubt that many servers below us have queue on all 4 maps during normal prime-time, and I don’t thing that a server with queue in most prime-time should be merged with someone. Goal of a merge of course is to fill empty maps and not to generate (more) queue.

3) Server-merges must never be seen as a contribution to the coverage problem in itself. Do not follow the wrong Motto more queue at prime-time, will generate more off-time play. Instead, adapt the map-capacity to time-demand, just make more maps available at prime- (if there is queue) and less at off-time (when less people want to play than fit).

i wrote my 2 cent about megaserver/alliances some time ago here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/WwW-Megaserver-GvG/first

The servers that overstack players to win today will be the alliances that overstack players to win tomorrow.

What’s going to change?

The aliases have been changed to protect the guilty.

PabbyGaul.9682:

Apparently, there aren’t any ecologists that play/program in this game.

The slow polarization of WvW servers is inevitable because the system doesn’t mimic reality and is being played by real people. There is NO incentive to move to lower populated areas because right now More Population = More Kills = More Rewards. Its not rocket science…….its ecology.

Scale Magic Find, Drop Rates and Experience based on simulating a limited resource (Bags) rather than an infinite one (because its computer game) and the problem solves itself.

The result would be that high population servers have a severely impaired Magic Find, Drop rate, and Experience bonus in WvW. WHY?….Because in reality bags don’t drop out of thin air, they are a limited resource. So if there’s only a thousand bags to be had, I would much rather be after them with only 50 ppl rather than 2000. Making these stat bonuses inversely proportional to population mimics the reality that when you have lots and lots of people good stuff is harder to find. Exp would scale also because fighting on lower populations is simply more challenging. If it wasn’t people wouldn’t be leaving. If yer always the underdog why shouldn’t their efforts be considered more difficult? Isnt experience related to the difficulty of the task…ect.

So….the solution is really simple. Limit rewards in a way that mimics the consequences of actual population size.

The details of this idea were already submitted via Adopt-A-Dev. Would welcome some criticism.

This… is an amazing idea. I definitely think that ANet should apply it for a month or so after the tournament and watch their metrics.

munkiman.3068:

I personally would like to stop thinking terms of imposing limits on an already tightly monitored, fairly unrewarding (besides winning good fights) system. Caps that cause longer queues on highly pop servers, things that focus on high pop servers rewards, in order to “force” balance are simply crappy solutions, they are “one click fixes”. I think most of us are growing tired of those.

Except that this is a thread about population imbalance, and high population servers are one end of that imbalance. And almost nobody complains when they end up against a lower population server. Since the population is a finite resource, methods that spread it out rather than hoarding it in just a few spots are viable to explore, and very much in the spirit of this thread.

Rimmy.9217:

PabbyGaul.9682:

Apparently, there aren’t any ecologists that play/program in this game.

The slow polarization of WvW servers is inevitable because the system doesn’t mimic reality and is being played by real people. There is NO incentive to move to lower populated areas because right now More Population = More Kills = More Rewards. Its not rocket science…….its ecology.

Scale Magic Find, Drop Rates and Experience based on simulating a limited resource (Bags) rather than an infinite one (because its computer game) and the problem solves itself.

The result would be that high population servers have a severely impaired Magic Find, Drop rate, and Experience bonus in WvW. WHY?….Because in reality bags don’t drop out of thin air, they are a limited resource. So if there’s only a thousand bags to be had, I would much rather be after them with only 50 ppl rather than 2000. Making these stat bonuses inversely proportional to population mimics the reality that when you have lots and lots of people good stuff is harder to find. Exp would scale also because fighting on lower populations is simply more challenging. If it wasn’t people wouldn’t be leaving. If yer always the underdog why shouldn’t their efforts be considered more difficult? Isnt experience related to the difficulty of the task…ect.

So….the solution is really simple. Limit rewards in a way that mimics the consequences of actual population size.

The details of this idea were already submitted via Adopt-A-Dev. Would welcome some criticism.

This… is an amazing idea. I definitely think that ANet should apply it for a month or so after the tournament and watch their metrics.

I could be very simple: at every match end there is a lottery for each team: 20000 WEXP-level up boxes are raffled between all that entered (maybe even with more shares for those that contributed more, hard to measure, but whatever it is: keep it secret, such that people cannot optimize) WvW for that team. If you prefer to be in a lottery with 1000 or with 10000 participants is up to you. (Could be made reward neutral, use the winner/2nd/last bonus boxes for that.)

In fact I proposed that for the league rewards:
1st place server get 1000000 tickets
2nd place server get 950000
….
And then the server earned tickets are distributed between all that made their achievement on the server.

my magic recipe. try it out, it’s tasty!!!

first: alliances by colour, on top on what is already, so mantainig 3 way server matchups ad is
second: limited guesting capabilities on allies’ matchups with proper prioritization on own matchup (maybe lowering a bit the mapcap to promote peoples spreading out more )
third: juicy rewards based on global color + own match placement (maybe accounting on color also EotM?)
fourth: 8h x 21 rounds a week, maybe even more rounds (so less than 8h each round)
fifth (optional): concentrated sauce of match’s maps

this way, or some better way on this foundation, we will:
- have dynamic alliances rearranged every week on an non-volountary base in order to prevent stacking and even out the relative “strength”.
- have a way to rebalance population inbalances between servers on a voluntary base (so people will play with who they want to play).
- mantain server pride and identity (i do care about it!).
- have wider goals and deeper strategical gameplay.
- address coverage issues.
- maybe we can leverage some good things for wuv from EotM (like enable guesting after some special event in EotM, or placing portals for guesting in some objective in EotM)

that’s it, don’t you like?

ps: sorry for poor english
Edit: stressed out first point better.

John Corpening.9847:

(snippet…)

From reading through this thread I think we can agree on the following goals:

• We want a thriving and vibrant WvW community in each world. That is to say, we want people to play with and against.
• We want to continue to play with our friends and the communities that we have developed already.

There were a number of other goals but I think those are the two big ones. I’m going to combine a number of your ideas to attempt to address this problem with a proposal and see what you guys think.

(snippet)

A few of you noted that things will always be changing over time so the system would have to be dynamic. There are a couple of ways of addressing this discussed in this thread. An idea that would be a small incremental change to how the game plays would be to create a new set of worlds then fill them up with our Alliances of guilds and players that are guaranteed to always play together. This would happen at regular intervals, the intervals were all over the map as were the size of the worlds in this thread so I will propose this cadence:

• Off Season
• Tournament
• Restructure
  • Create new Worlds
  • Redistribute Alliances

This cycle would take a few months given the cadence of tournaments we have had which is about the time that we would want to rebalance populations. After the restructure, players could transfer like they do now if they so desired.

Alliances would provide continuity for the community. I see the server pride of today becoming Alliance pride because of that continuity. But I also see the off season as a time for the newly formed world of alliances to develop their own identity as they head into the tournament. Keep in mind that if an alliance was big enough to fill a world that mapping becomes one to one. If that became the case maybe the world could just take the alliance name. It’s interesting because that time together gives everyone involved a chance to see if they all want to ally together to truly solidify into a world. If not, you are still playing with your community for the glory of your alliance in the next restructure. But your community would be playing with other communities new to you and maybe this new bunch is a better fit for you and an opportunity for your alliance to grow.

The pieces for this idea comes from a number of posts in this thread. There are also some thoughts in there from some discussions I’ve had with several guild leaders. I just glommed it all together into something that I think could be a workable solution. I do want to emphasize though that this is all brainstorming

Let me know your thoughts and thanks again for all the great and constructive discussion!

John

Well, If you look at the Guild CDI there was a lot of talk of wanting alliances and what features it should have.

I think having alliances would create more matches, but it would allow for better balancing for WvW.

Just like boxing, you could have leagues, but instead of it being defined by weight, you define them by alliance size. The fact that daily activity is about 20-40% of actual roster size in general.

Ex:
20-130 small (single map)
131-240
240+ (i think 320 is the softcap for WvW if we include all 4 maps?)

Also, each alliance (all of similar sizes, well be rated and we will have a proper ladder system)

Also, part of the issue comes from random players that just come into wvw and follow the zerg around and creating a blob in that fashion.

Something to take into consideration is also timezones, you dont want 2 alliances to face off when one is mainly NA and the other OCX. I’m sure you guys have the numbers to tell how to further balance that, but I really think alliances is a step in the right direction.

Servers obsolete? Maybe, but they could also act as “countries” and how we have olympics. So we could sometimes have a similar competition where the best alliances of each server fights for dominance?
Or maybe an all-stars style thing. (just brainstorming, i know this is not the best, but im sure someone will suggest something)

Rimmy.9217:

munkiman.3068:

I personally would like to stop thinking terms of imposing limits on an already tightly monitored, fairly unrewarding (besides winning good fights) system. Caps that cause longer queues on highly pop servers, things that focus on high pop servers rewards, in order to “force” balance are simply crappy solutions, they are “one click fixes”. I think most of us are growing tired of those.

Except that this is a thread about population imbalance, and high population servers are one end of that imbalance. And almost nobody complains when they end up against a lower population server. Since the population is a finite resource, methods that spread it out rather than hoarding it in just a few spots are viable to explore, and very much in the spirit of this thread.

Yes, i know. But, i actually don’t think it’s a problem that needs to be solved, as i’ve stated numerous times already. If the game mode supported imbalanced match ups, we wouldn’t keep having the same conversations over and over.

PabbyGaul.9682:

Apparently, there aren’t any ecologists that play/program in this game.

The slow polarization of WvW servers is inevitable because the system doesn’t mimic reality and is being played by real people. There is NO incentive to move to lower populated areas because right now More Population = More Kills = More Rewards. Its not rocket science…….its ecology.

Scale Magic Find, Drop Rates and Experience based on simulating a limited resource (Bags) rather than an infinite one (because its computer game) and the problem solves itself.

The result would be that high population servers have a severely impaired Magic Find, Drop rate, and Experience bonus in WvW. WHY?….Because in reality bags don’t drop out of thin air, they are a limited resource. So if there’s only a thousand bags to be had, I would much rather be after them with only 50 ppl rather than 2000. Making these stat bonuses inversely proportional to population mimics the reality that when you have lots and lots of people good stuff is harder to find. Exp would scale also because fighting on lower populations is simply more challenging. If it wasn’t people wouldn’t be leaving. If yer always the underdog why shouldn’t their efforts be considered more difficult? Isnt experience related to the difficulty of the task…ect.

So….the solution is really simple. Limit rewards in a way that mimics the consequences of actual population size.

The details of this idea were already submitted via Adopt-A-Dev. Would welcome some criticism.

This is perfectly inline with my analysis also.
(for reference :https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Solution-to-fix-the-population-imbalance/4438581)

I propose a test! Lets give this idea a try for a few months.

This is one of the least disruptive ideas. It will not break server communities or server coordination or large group combat or any of that stuff. It is not overly complicated. If it works, then we can be done with all of these crazy “remake everything about WvW” ideas. If it doesn’t work, then there is nothing stopping Anet from doing something more drastic later.

This idea has a lot of potential benefits, and very few risks. Most of these other ideas come with huge risks and sacrifices (including the one Anet proposed); some might even completely ruin WvW and turn it into EotM. Before we try anything drastic, lets give this simple but powerful tweak a try.

I’d propose an information gathering survey. I have a feeling it’d be inconclusive which is why I feel that the idea of balancing the populations is just something better left untouched.

Make a survey, propose size options on how big each side should be. Should it be 30? 50? 70? 100? I think you’ll find enough differentiation to say that forcing everyone into one size would be a bad idea.

However, maybe it’d provide some data, maybe a whole bunch like 100 and 50, so maybe they could split the servers into 2 groups where some could have smaller caps and some larger. I don’t know, but the one thing I do know is that this thread has demonstrated pretty clearly that the opinions are not all the same on this topic.

Who cares at this point? The only semi-competitive Tier was Tier 1, and BlackGate destroyed that by cannibalizing Guilds off other servers (And paying for it) before this Tournament. JQ and TC now don’t stand a chance. They both got humiliated at the start of this Tournament, then they both got humiliated in later matches (TC now being dominated this week).

Now they are getting guilds from SoS, too.

So what’s the point? WvW is dead. No competitive Tiers, dying and drying up population, less influx of casuals due to EotM being a much better fit for them, etc.

Edge of the Mists replaced it, basically. Pointless to worry about WvW at this stage.

Guys lets be serious. These are only talks, they don’t mean anything. We talked for more pages than we have now about commander tags back like 9-10 months ago, and look at the progress of that. Do you really think they are going to do that much more work on this? Something as big as a WvW revamp that we’ve needed for over a year probably won’t ever come.

Sorry but I can’t take the devs seriously until they do more than talking. Once I see a major update I will change my mind.

Nightingale.8364:

I really had to laugh when i saw that certain “server leaders” had posted on these forums with an apparantly logical explanation for the population imbalance that we see today in wvw.

It’s about time some of these leaders stopped blaming anet and admitted that they themselves are part of the problem. All that “chest thumping” and pushing “for the win”, inviting guilds, paying for guilds to transfer has in the end killed wvw as a competitive environment. Just read in these forums what one “server leader” really thinks and we can understand how polluted the atmosphere has really become because of this kind of leadership.

http://www.gw2wvw.net/topic/bgtcsos-s3-week3

This is an example of one thread. I would advise ANET to be very careful taking any advice from any server leaders who are capable of writing this kind of toxic material. These are in fact the kind of people who are killing the game.

The current state of WVW and population imbalance is the fault of the players themselves. To watch T2 NA guilds transfer to T1 servers just before season 3 started really made one realise that season 3 was dead. Everyone knew before it even started who would win…

As to what to do about it……sry but nothing in the posts above posts will change anything. Its for the players themselves to start to act in a more responsible manner..server leaders that means you.

I’ll try and make this as sweet as possible to keep this thread on point. If ArenaNet looked at my post history they’d identify that I indeed work with said guilds and I do indeed help them move. I do not try to overstack BG or any other server. I’m just a person and I try my best. I delivered quite a bit of transparency and insight on BGs community whether you view this as toxic or un leader worthy that’s you take. You can talk to any of your server leaders that I’ve spoken to and they should or will indeed tell you that while I have a mouth on me I have tried to direct guilds in a manner that would be the least detrimental to the state of T1. At the moment the mass amount of guilds and players that are moving to T1 don’t have a great care for PPT instead they care about GvG and even number skirmish fighting. Because they do’t care about PPT they don’t care about balancing out a Tier for Coverage. Talk to Shini, Talk to Dalloway, talk to Time, talk to Jeddbacca, talk to Morb, talk to Missy, talk to Greenarrow. I’ve talked to them all.

Coming off harsh on the public forums has stirred many debates and its enabled me to know more and do more for the community. Sorry for the feathers I rustled in my way but I will not stop. Prepare for my next big wall of text that I will be posting here, on GW2wvw.net and sending directly to all the server leaders i know and ArenaNet themselves.