Guild Wars 2

Dayra.7405:

Jezynka.2651:

Yes, zerg gets bigger but main problem is hard-resing during fight.

No the problem is resing of the winner after the fight. That way the zerg keeps size and never has looses due to several small group that are only able to produce causalities, but aren’t able to win.

If instead every complete dead would be send to spawn, the zerg shrinks as a result of every fight. A group of 10 (with a short way) that can force a 40 zerg (with a long way) to fail by repeated attacks: 5 kills on 1st try leaving 35 left, on 2nd attack they have better odds 35:10 and they are able to kill 8, leaving 27, 3rd attack odds are 27:10 they kill 12, leaving 15, …

I know if get dead in zerg play (and it’s rare unless i over extend), i’m running back. If people are hard ressing it’s just people in their guild/party at the risk of being dropped as well. The zerg just keeps moving usually.

Dayra.7405:

That’s a possibility, however in this case:

• don’t make the matches (same world opponents) 1 week, 4h to 2 days is enough
• don’t compute a score (and no ranking), but instead provide some statistics about the match
• make matches completely random SFR-Deso-Kodash should have the same probability as SFR-Vabbi-Millers
• NEVER EVER make a competition
• NEVER EVER reward winning.

*A lot of people like 1 week matchups. There are a lot of coverage differencies between week and weekends. Servers play with that. Also upgrading things becomes worthless. Why to upgrade a keep if the matchup will end before it reaches T3?
*About competition, if you eliminate some sort of ranking and competitions, WvW becomes EoTM.
*If people are complaining because matchups this week are outrageously unbalanced, what would happen if SFR fought 17th or below servers? They’re already stomping Baruch and Elona.
*Never ever reward WvW with pve rewards, but WvW rewards.

Really, what you will see if you want WvW to be a more organized EoTM is a massive drop of WvW population. Instead of perma zergs 24/7 you’ll have to deal 15h per day of empty maps in all servers.

Ansau.7326:

*A lot of people like 1 week matchups. There are a lot of coverage differencies between week and weekends. Servers play with that. Also upgrading things becomes worthless. Why to upgrade a keep if the matchup will end before it reaches T3?

Also a lot of people say, one-sided matches would be ok, if they would be shorter.
And 2 days are enough to upgrade your keep a dozen times

Ansau.7326:

*If people are complaining because matchups this week are outrageously unbalanced, what would happen if SFR fought 17th or below servers? They’re already stomping Baruch and Elona.

SFR becomes bored and spread out instead of Elona stops playing?
(As Baruch already do between reasons.)

Vabbi can test if their guerrilla tactics work against SFR as well?

Ansau.7326:

*Never ever reward WvW with pve rewards, but WvW rewards.

I really mean: never ever determine a winner in a playground.
If there is no winner there is no stomping.

Provide people statistics they may like to see.
Vabbi may be happy to have a higher killed dolyaks per player rate that SFR.
SFR may be happy to control the map 100% of the time.

*About competition, if you eliminate some sort of ranking and competitions, WvW becomes EoTM.

EotM is as it is due to a bunch of reasons

• random teams, quite often different for every join
• imbalanced reward structure, objective+lord farming with green beats nearly everything in GW2 by far.
• the only statistics is a meaningless score
• no voice-com
• …

Interest for a score that only measure manpower (we know it ahead), coverage (we know it ahead) and PvD-Speedrace (Elona is quite good in that, and this is all that matters in EotM as well) is not what makes play style in WvW different from EotM. A lot of people in WvW have lost interest in score and it’s still partially different. (But only partially, it’s much more similar than most WvW-elite allows itself to admit)

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?

If I may, I’d like to point out the recent example of this exact issue in Planetside 2.

They found that there was a real population imbalance between servers, with one being very big and the others of varying sizes. So they looked at the numbers and decided to do some merges that would result in four main servers of around the same size (plus a small Oceanian one, which you couldn’t merge with anyone due to latency, but that’s another story).

Now, in PS2 they have what are called ‘Community Clash’ whereby the communities of each server put forward players from various guilds (outfits) into one army and fight against another server, in a big two-hour fight.

The first merge was between two North American servers, named Waterson and Mattherson. They decided to have one of these server fights between the two and whoever won would keep their name for the new, bigger server (the fight was re-named ‘Server Smash’).

What actually happened was there was a mistake on the part of the people who ran the event, and they miscalculated what each base captured would be worth. So one server thought they needed to hold a certain base to have enough points to win, but once it was over there was a few hours of uncertainty until it emerged they’d actually lost. In the end, the devs decided to give a completely new name to the merged server and commemorated the two previous ones by re-naming bases after them.

Later on, they decided to keep the ‘Fight for your name’ when merging EU servers. Some people complained that they wanted a new, neutral name as above, but the large majority actually said they were actually looking forward to it as it gave them a cause to fight for. So, without the issues that had befallen the NA merger, these fights came & went and everyone accepted the outcome with good grace.

The players on those losing servers were disappointed in losing the name they’d been fighting under for all this time, but that was less important to them than the fact they’d be on a new, larger server with much more going on all the time, with more people to fight alongside & more to fight against, too.

So if you went ahead and said “We’re going to merge this server and this one” I think their players would be more excited that they’d be getting a much more active & dynamic community than they’d be upset at losing what they’re used to.

Now, I would presume it’s not difficult for you to determine a match-up… so say you wanted to reduce the amount of EU servers from 27 to 24. How I’d envision it happening is you’d announce “We want to merge some servers, so we’re going to have a match-up beginning [future date] between [pure speculation on my part] Whiteside Ridge, Vabbi and Underworld; the servers that finish 2nd and 3rd will be merged; the new server will take the 2nd server’s name, and a keep will be re-named after the 3rd server”.

So the match comes and goes, it finishes according to current rankings. Whiteside Ridge stay on as they are, because they finished 1st and were stronger anyway so didn’t need change as much as the others; Vabbi finish 2nd and the new server takes their name; Underworld’s population gets merged with Vabbi at some point in the future, and a keep on one of the borders gets re-named to “Underworld Hills”. Then you can do it twice more with other sets of servers, giving you that number of 24 post-merger servers.

Don’t confuse spreading from stopping playing. Baruchians weren’t spread during summer, simply we didn’t play and have come back.
The same will happen to most servers with server pride. Or they stick to they server, or they simply stop playing WvW.

And if there is no winner, there is no competition. If there is no competition, people who search that won’t play WvW. If those people don’t play WvW, all it is left are pve farmer. You’re just discribing EoTM: A place where there’s no competition and wvw dedicated players don’t go there, because you only find farming blobs.

I reside to Aurora Glade[EU] since Early Access.

The WvW population and coverage imbalance was present since launch. What made it more obvious and annoying in many cases was the implementation of Megaserver. While megaservers where a salvation for PvE areas it brought some side-effects.

For example, Aurora Glade server always had been a relatively balanced population server between PvE and WvW. Neither aspect of the game (WvW/PvE) was empty. There was a large portion of players who didn’t want to move to another, (unofficially) WvW-oriented server, cause the downside of such servers was the smaller PvE population.

Now with the megaservers, the smaller PvE population isn’t an issue for anyone. Still, being stuck on a server with smaller WvW population is still an issue (at least for anyone who enjoys WvW) cause we have no chance to compete with servers who retain a large number of WvW players. Especially in this Season, due to some poor decisions made by A.net, people aren’t motivated to spend time in WvW anymore. Most just join the fight on reset day, do 5 events, and will leave as soon as they get current weeks achieve just to retunr on the next week.

Personally I don’t see how this can be dealt with in a way that will solve the issue permanently unless megaserver idea is applied to WvW aswell.

I like the idea of Alliance battles. I would keep the servers set up as they are currently and have alliances created depending on the server ranking. Alliances can be as follows (numbers represent server ranking):
1|2|3
6|5|4
7|8|9 and so on

Alliances would work so that the higher tier server can send a specific number of players (lets say 20) to each ally per map, but lower tiered servers cannot send players up. This would alleviate ques on higher tiered servers since the excess of players can go help the lower tiers. the lower tiered servers would then get an influx of players at all time zones.

I would them limit allies by not allowing them to claim keeps or towers, not allow them to use waypoints and have only limited access to supply (maybe one supply depot per map + any captures). Maybe even restrict them from entering keeps and towers? This would create a force that has a bit less value than a player from the home server.

There also needs to be an incentive for players to help out their allies. Anything can do. Maybe a buff of some sort.

I got a copy right on this idea, so if you plan to use it you must pay me off with a Predator and a Juggernut.

Ansau.7326:

And if there is no winner, there is no competition. If there is no competition, people who search that won’t play WvW. If those people don’t play WvW, all it is left are pve farmer. You’re just discribing EoTM: A place where there’s no competition and wvw dedicated players don’t go there, because you only find farming blobs.

Didn’t you read the 2nd part of the original post?

WvW is not competitive, was never competitive and if you read the thread a lot do not want it do be competitive.

You do not need a match to compare manpower and coverage, the match is completely superfluous to determine the winner, just compare the man-power per time graphs of the 3 server, and give the one that “wins” (the one with the largest lonely coverage advantage) a reward. After 2 years WvW everyone should have noticed that.
The only surprise is: You don’t know the man-power per time graphs of your opponents in detail ahead of time.

The answer isn’t hard to work out

1) Decouple wvwvw from pve so during population checks only people in wvw are counted towards population cap on server transfers (not an issue for pve due to mega servers) remove gem costs from transfers for a 1 month period.

Example your an sea guild looking to move to t1 for wvw population checks shows JQ full during these hours discouraging sea moving to there while BG shows as nearly full TC medium/full etc. How ever during NA BG will show as full TC and JQ nearly full etc can’t be to hard to set the metrics up on this.

2) Remove all wxp/karma rewards from keeps/towers/camps to stop people pvd dooring for karma/wxp. At same time buff wxp and add karma on players by a decent amount so its a similar speed of advancement through the levels, also add a 5-10 min timer on killing the same player to prevent abuse.

3) Now that players are fighting players to get wxp/karma introduce a system so it splits up wxp per player vs how many people hit them ie 1 on 1 full points, 1 vs 8 you get 1/8th of the points. This actively encourages more even or fair fights breaks up the maptag blobbing and means more roaming fights for everyone. Would also discourage full groups or above from ganking soloers due to the diminished rewards.

4) Change the outnumbered buff to a 25% or 50% wxp buff under the same system as above to make it worthwhile.

There you go took me 5 mins to fix wvw so everyones having fun even sized fights without nuthugging seige or hitting doors on empty keeps. People on much less populated wvw servers will be able to migrate towards higher pop servers where the fights and fun are.

Crius.5487:

Sakura No Seirei.6120:

For me, the quickest, easiest, and fairest system to go with to balance out WvW would be based around points scoring. Just run everything as it is now, but with every tick each server’s population in WvW would also be recorded and added to an aggregate. At the end of each week divide the total number of points a server scored by the total number of players logged into WvW for that server during that week and use that figure to determine 1st, 2nd, and 3rd places, and adjustment to server rankings.

e.g. With numbers pulled from thin air, and for a single Tick:

Green = 365pts WvW pop = 320 Adjusted Result for Tick = 1.14
Blue = 170 pts WvW pop = 250 Adjusted Result for Tick = 0.68
Red = 160 pts WvW pop = 100 Adjusted Result for Tick = 1.6

I used a single Tick as an example because it’s easier to see the numbers, but imagine the example using the weekly score and weekly population figures and you see what I am getting at.

The reason I favour this system, it rewards good tactics (gaining points for stomping w/bloodlust, capping sentries, ganking dollies), good strategy (aiming to gain and hold objectives for the tick), and removes built in advantages that very high population servers would otherwise have.

Interesting idea to change the tick based on population but this can easily be manipulated by trolls. I’m going to take your concept and put my own spin on it. For this discussion, which I have said in previous posts, since forces can hop between maps and since scoring is based on all maps anything which has to do with population should be considered based on all maps.

Adjusting the end of the week score based on the total players who logged into WvW is probably a bad idea considering some people play longer than others. Green may have had 200 players who each logged in for an hour a day while Blue had 100 players who logged in for three hours each day. Green may have had more people, but Blue had more man hours played. Blue’s may already be higher and basing by players who logged in would only increase it.

Adjusting each individual tick is probably better than the end of the week score. This would also give you an idea of how your server is doing through out the week.

Scenario 1: Blue has 350 PPT and leaves WvW with scouts in place. Red with 150 PPT now out numbers Blue however Blue is getting increased PPT on top of already having 350. Red is trying to catch up and hits a T3 Blue objective, Blue ports blob in from LA, wipes Red, and ports back to LA before tick trying to manipulate the score.

Counter: End tick is adjusted based on the number of people who earned WXP during the 15 minute tick window.

I’m still a bit partial to this idea but it might work.

Someone mentioned earlier the idea of completing removing damage against gates. This is probably a good idea so it forces you to use siege to get through gates, however with siege disablers sometimes it’s the only way. If one person can solo defend a paper tower against a map blob by throwing a siege disabler and countering the enemy siege while it’s disabled, it kind of ruins the game.

There is a way to stop blob manipulation, and that’s to introduce cooldown timers for re-entering WvW after a deliberate exit from a WvW map to a non-WvW map (which quite handily gets rid toon hotswapping). A detection and flag system could be put in place to detect and record when a player sends a taskkill (or equivalent) signal to the GW2.exe process (through the normal game exit window, or via the OS) or presses the ‘Leave the Mists’ button. If they do that then their account gets flagged for 10 minutes and during that time they can’t re-enter WvW. On the other hand, if the game detects that the internet connection is lost between the client and server, or the game crashes and the error report box comes up, or the game forces an exit due to incoming patch, then the account isn’t flagged and the player can re-enter WvW as soon as their game comes back up.

The Megaserver has taken care of some of the problems of rent-a-mob tactics in LA, but further improvements could be made. The game can be made to detect whether any of the previous 3 or 5 maps that the player was on was a WvW map and whether the current map is a PvE/PvP map and place those players on map instances with the lowest number of people from their server on it. That way, any blob that exits WvW would be scattered across instances, making it very difficult for them to co-ordinate back in, especially if they have to wait 10 minutes to get back into WvW anyway.

The WvW-population of a server is variable, but this population acts always inside the fixed container of 4 maps, so the result is an unequal “power density” and an unequal battle.
If the WvW-maps are opened and closed similar to the Megaserver PvE-maps, with the lowest population setting the upper limit, the resulting battle is much more equal.

Also, to avoid endless queues for the servers with large population, make alliances of lower populated servers for the duration of the current match.
Example:
LargeServer1 (red)
vs.
MediumServer1 + MediumServer (blue)
vs.
SmallServer1 + SmallServer2 + SmallServer3 (green)

Sakura No Seirei.6120:

There is a way to stop blob manipulation, and that’s to introduce cooldown timers for re-entering WvW after a deliberate exit from a WvW map to a non-WvW map (which quite handily gets rid toon hotswapping).

If my client crashed or if I send him a kill-signal is not distinguishable and
if my internet DCs on purpose (switched WLAN off) or not (critical packets got lost/delayed somewhere) is also not distinguishable.

And I would be really kittened if a (currently quite frequent) client-crash/DC is additionally punished by a cool down timer.

Here is what Anet should be striving for in a single sentence:

-
The fun of WvW should be the same regardless of whether you play on the top rated server or the last.
-

That is what megaservers did for PVE. While it would be more complicated for WvW, I do believe a solution exists.

IMO, making that happen will require a drastic change to how WvW works. The only thing I see working is the battlegroup suggestion – potentially with the tweaks I noted earlier in this thread to ensure server identity and pride remain intact, while still giving everyone no queues and the ability to find engaging fights.

It isnt just about making things competitive – its about making them fun. condemning the low population servers to face off each other eternally doesnt do that – battle groups (done properly) would.

Herbal.6291:

The answer isn’t hard to work out

1) Decouple wvwvw from pve so during population checks only people in wvw are counted towards population cap on server transfers (not an issue for pve due to mega servers) remove gem costs from transfers for a 1 month period.

Example your an sea guild looking to move to t1 for wvw population checks shows JQ full during these hours discouraging sea moving to there while BG shows as nearly full TC medium/full etc. How ever during NA BG will show as full TC and JQ nearly full etc can’t be to hard to set the metrics up on this.

Doesn’t really work over the long term, meaning that this process would need to be repeated every x months.

2) Remove all wxp/karma rewards from keeps/towers/camps to stop people pvd dooring for karma/wxp. At same time buff wxp and add karma on players by a decent amount so its a similar speed of advancement through the levels, also add a 5-10 min timer on killing the same player to prevent abuse.

I can’t think of anything that would kill WvW faster than this suggestion. Essentially this would take WvW maps and turn them into GvG maps. That’s already a problem that’s causing problems with WvW. Instead ANet should look at creating GvG maps where this kind of system is in place so that GvGers can go there, get rewards appropriate to GvG maps, but don’t contribute anything to the WvW score (which a lot of GvG guilds don’t do anyway).

3) Now that players are fighting players to get wxp/karma introduce a system so it splits up wxp per player vs how many people hit them ie 1 on 1 full points, 1 vs 8 you get 1/8th of the points. This actively encourages more even or fair fights breaks up the maptag blobbing and means more roaming fights for everyone. Would also discourage full groups or above from ganking soloers due to the diminished rewards.

That’s not how blobs work. Blobs have a mob mentality, and tend to jump solo players or small groups because they can, not because of any reward from it. If you doubt me, watch what happens everytime a PUG blob runs over an enemy sentry point; at least half the blob ends up glueing itself to the sentry point despite the fact that the commander told them not to, yet the rewards for capturing a sentry point are so minimal as to be non-existant when you are high ranked WvW player.

4) Change the outnumbered buff to a 25% or 50% wxp buff under the same system as above to make it worthwhile…

A 25% or 50% increase of what would be 0 WXP under your system comes out to 0 WXP. The Outnumbered Buff mechanic is seriously out-of-date and broken. It needs to be remodelled from the bottom up. Probably the best change that could happen to it is that all downed players on the outnumbered server get auto-rezzed at their location on a global 30 second tick. That way large blobs would have to be efficient in capturing locations, not just large, because if they aren’t, all the defenders at their location are going to pop back up at either xx:00 or xx:30. If the defenders pop back up with some serious 10 second buffs, so much the better.

Rush.8253:

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

Thanks,
John

*Break up the Blob – Currently easiest way to win is with a blob (Revamp rules to encourage more spread out/tactical play; i.e. remove waypoints from WvW)

Remove all the individual rewards for capping towers etc, take back the orbs and have a karma/gold/exp/whatever tick together with the Points(More reward per points earned) as long as the orb is yours. To make it even more competitive and extreme include server bonus to this aswell. Have it go up 1% in every area for every point tick.

This means you will have to defend the orb against the other blobs that will get ZERO reward ticks unless they have the orb, while still maintaining your own points. This would make every server almost depending on small groups to go around and cap towers and keeps and fight other small groups, since you want as many people as possible defending the orb. Since the other servers won’t get anything for their towers and such they will get their entire force to get the orb, and there won’t be one server holding on to it forever.

Things it will solve: Zerging. PvE players will come to WvW because they want the world bonuses to happen. WvW will be a much more central core in the game. Small groups will get the hype/praise they deserve. The entire server needs to cooperate and use tactics.

Things it will not solve: Night capping. Population issues and queues. (Which this thread is about, sorry to slink in.)

zerorogue.9410:

In my own opinion any server merging would be a bad idea. Server have prided themselves on being a competitive team. Merging them would only further degrade any server pride.

I think what should happen is the same thing that sets guild wars 2 apart from other mmo’s, Dynamic scaling. The system that allows level 80’s to sill enjoy lv 10 events. It need to be brought to wvw.

My idea is this.
As the difference of players becomes apparent players on lower servers get stacks of outnumbered. (invisible to enemy players of course) Each stack unlocks bonus abilities for the server.

Stacks would be determined by the average of players between the other two servers minus your player total.

20 = 1 stack
40 = 2 stacks
65 = 3 stacks
75 = 4 stacks
90 = 5 stacks

Example
World A has 100 players
World B has 90 players
World C has 70 players

(A+B)/2-C = 25

In this example World C would qualify for 1 stack of outnumbered.

For the abilities here’s my suggestion.
First a new status called “Balanced Force” would be implemented for two of these that gives the target the same damage bonus as Righteous Indignation does but without the invulnerability.

Outnumbered Stacks
1 stack would be the traditional outnumbered buff. (minus armor repair since this is now defunct)

2 stacks would place additional veteran defenders at all captured areas(minus flags). They would be called something unique like “Veteran Equalizer” These veterans would be skilled at AoE Damage and gain “Balanced Force” if there is a player nearby them.

3 stacks would place free ghostly arrow carts on all keeps and towers these carts would disappear when the outnumbered stack diminishes. (if someone is on one of them it disappears when they leave it.)

4 stacks gives all lords “Balanced Force”.

5 stacks gives all players a ghostly ally that supports them in combat(there’s only going to be about 5-10 players on the map at this point.)

These abilities are off the top of my head so there bound to be needing balancing. The idea is to give the outnumbered players powers that balance the game but do not modify their combat abilities or prove more useful than being without outnumbered.

It’s just go down the stack of 1000 good suggestions for WvW that will never been implemented. I have 0.01% hope left for WvW, the siege disabler being the latest new thing that is ruining the game.

Dayra.7405:

Sakura No Seirei.6120:

There is a way to stop blob manipulation, and that’s to introduce cooldown timers for re-entering WvW after a deliberate exit from a WvW map to a non-WvW map (which quite handily gets rid toon hotswapping).

If my client crashed or if I send him a kill-signal is not distinguishable and
if my internet DCs on purpose (switched WLAN off) or not (critical packets got lost/delayed somewhere) is also not distinguishable.

And I would be really kittened if a (currently quite frequent) client-crash/DC is additionally punished by a cool down timer.

Actually, the client already distinguishes between crashes and kill signals, that’s why the Crash Error Report box pops up on crashes, but not on taskkill processes sent via cmd or the Task Manager. (Next time you get a Crash Error Report box on anything have a good look at it, somewhere it will normally say that something has happened to cause the process to terminate in an unexpected way). If the process gets terminated in an expected way, the account gets flagged, if the process gets terminated in an unexpected way the account doesn’t. That way somebody who experiences frequent crashes wouldn’t be penalised.

You are right in that the client can’t tell whether a connection has been deliberately terminated, or if the disconnect has happened further down the line, but it doesn’t need to. In either case the game wouldn’t flag the account, but for deliberate connection lost you are still looking at 15secs~60secs for the game to confirm that the internet connection is lost, the time needed to reload the game, log back in, choose your character, load your PvE map, and then load your WvW map. Add in the time for your computer to fully reconnect itself back to the internet as well (that would depend on how you killed your connection, if you rebooted your router for instance, you could be looking at 5 minutes before that is ready and you can do anything else) and you are looking at a good 5+ mins before you could get back in to WvW.

I played a different game before, it had a 3 way match up with around 2 hours game play. It was set up with 3 battle groups, and in the beginning the game was putting a lot of effort in to that you will be so proud over your group and fight for it to win.
Reality is that people saw that one of the fractions was stacked with people known as being very good, so all the players wanted of course be there too. And so it moved on, and it ended up with each round this team was always stacked and they totally slaughtered the other two teams and farmed them. Of course the game tried to solve this by making random joins and they made changes by changes, but nothing could stop that one color of team to always turn out as winner.

Now we already see this at eotm. Green team will be the winning team nearly always, so we already know what will happen if we choose for this to be about 3 teams with no server connection, no server pride. People stop care about the whole, and start care about them self, and then loot/karma/gold/badges and xp will be what counts.
For me, this is not wvw, this is brainless tagging of everything to gain loot. It is not what i want. It is not what most of us want.

So whats left then is server merging. Well yes this is probably the best shot. I would announce what servers that will be merged long time before this happen, and let anyone on those servers to move out for free if they wish to do so, tbh you should have a free period of letting all people move to were they want.
Also maybe let the communities to have a chat with each other and see if anyone is willing to merge together, just give the players a chance to find a way that suits them better. Time to settle it is probably whats important. Will is make all players happy? Not really, but i think it is the best chance of keeping the most players happy and that is probably what you need to aim for.

Blaeys.3102:

Here is what Anet should be striving for in a single sentence:

-
The fun of WvW should be the same regardless of whether you play on the top rated server or the last.
-

That is what megaservers did for PVE. While it would be more complicated for WvW, I do believe a solution exists.

IMO, making that happen will require a drastic change to how WvW works. The only thing I see working is the battlegroup suggestion – potentially with the tweaks I noted earlier in this thread to ensure server identity and pride remain intact, while still giving everyone no queues and the ability to find engaging fights.

It isnt just about making things competitive – its about making them fun. condemning the low population servers to face off each other eternally doesnt do that – battle groups (done properly) would.

They need to re-balance all the servers population, to do a massive reshuffling.

The problem is that they cannot do it on a player basis, they have to do it on a guild basis. The only solution WvW has of rebalancing itself is a guild alliance system, where guilds are assigned to a different color (alliance) according to their rating in the guild ladder.

Then they can start creating a set amount of overflows according to the WvW population, like ESO or other mmo.

Server merging alone doesn’t solve anything, it only buys some time, concentration on the winner side will just continue afterwards as it did in the past.

Server merging can solve only one issue, it relaxes the balance restrictions to be placed on all servers, e.g. capacity restrictions will be less harsh, if there are fewer server to take the mean from (that’s still an achievement, but only nice for the over-populated server not for the underpopulated merge servers., i.e. their bonus is missing.)

We need active balancing measures, without them merging is not a long-term solution.

Balancing measures that already proved their value in the past are

• queue
• rewards (even if it was so far only used as an imbalancing method)

Rewards are nicer than queue’s so I would suggest rewards as the main soft-balancing method and queues as the emergency hard-balancing factor for massive over-stacking.

Rewards can also be used to make life on a merged server more sweet.
Still I think setting up new teams from scratch is

• more fair than merging
• get’s rid of ballast from pre-mega-server times (like pve-only population included in servers, server-selection before you even know what WvW is, …)
• makes it easier to add some new goodies, like a team-chat for all WvW-players of a team currently online

Sakura No Seirei.6120:

Herbal.6291:

The answer isn’t hard to work out

1) Decouple wvwvw from pve so during population checks only people in wvw are counted towards population cap on server transfers (not an issue for pve due to mega servers) remove gem costs from transfers for a 1 month period.

Example your an sea guild looking to move to t1 for wvw population checks shows JQ full during these hours discouraging sea moving to there while BG shows as nearly full TC medium/full etc. How ever during NA BG will show as full TC and JQ nearly full etc can’t be to hard to set the metrics up on this.

Doesn’t really work over the long term, meaning that this process would need to be repeated every x months.

2) Remove all wxp/karma rewards from keeps/towers/camps to stop people pvd dooring for karma/wxp. At same time buff wxp and add karma on players by a decent amount so its a similar speed of advancement through the levels, also add a 5-10 min timer on killing the same player to prevent abuse.

I can’t think of anything that would kill WvW faster than this suggestion. Essentially this would take WvW maps and turn them into GvG maps. That’s already a problem that’s causing problems with WvW. Instead ANet should look at creating GvG maps where this kind of system is in place so that GvGers can go there, get rewards appropriate to GvG maps, but don’t contribute anything to the WvW score (which a lot of GvG guilds don’t do anyway).

3) Now that players are fighting players to get wxp/karma introduce a system so it splits up wxp per player vs how many people hit them ie 1 on 1 full points, 1 vs 8 you get 1/8th of the points. This actively encourages more even or fair fights breaks up the maptag blobbing and means more roaming fights for everyone. Would also discourage full groups or above from ganking soloers due to the diminished rewards.

That’s not how blobs work. Blobs have a mob mentality, and tend to jump solo players or small groups because they can, not because of any reward from it. If you doubt me, watch what happens everytime a PUG blob runs over an enemy sentry point; at least half the blob ends up glueing itself to the sentry point despite the fact that the commander told them not to, yet the rewards for capturing a sentry point are so minimal as to be non-existant when you are high ranked WvW player.

4) Change the outnumbered buff to a 25% or 50% wxp buff under the same system as above to make it worthwhile…

A 25% or 50% increase of what would be 0 WXP under your system comes out to 0 WXP. The Outnumbered Buff mechanic is seriously out-of-date and broken. It needs to be remodelled from the bottom up. Probably the best change that could happen to it is that all downed players on the outnumbered server get auto-rezzed at their location on a global 30 second tick. That way large blobs would have to be efficient in capturing locations, not just large, because if they aren’t, all the defenders at their location are going to pop back up at either xx:00 or xx:30. If the defenders pop back up with some serious 10 second buffs, so much the better.

Funny all the systems you’ve just said won’t work worked just fine in one of the best mmos to have ever done wvw/rvr Dark age of Camelot.

Also are you seriously suggesting people won’t want to fight each other once you remove the main reason people take empty undefended keeps karma/wxp? It wouldn’t kill wvw it would promote it, it would however kill pvd which it seems you really want kept in the game for some strange reason.

Sakura No Seirei.6120:

There is a way to stop blob manipulation, and that’s to introduce cooldown timers for re-entering WvW after a deliberate exit from a WvW map to a non-WvW map (which quite handily gets rid toon hotswapping). A detection and flag system could be put in place to detect and record when a player sends a taskkill (or equivalent) signal to the GW2.exe process (through the normal game exit window, or via the OS) or presses the ‘Leave the Mists’ button. If they do that then their account gets flagged for 10 minutes and during that time they can’t re-enter WvW. On the other hand, if the game detects that the internet connection is lost between the client and server, or the game crashes and the error report box comes up, or the game forces an exit due to incoming patch, then the account isn’t flagged and the player can re-enter WvW as soon as their game comes back up.

The Megaserver has taken care of some of the problems of rent-a-mob tactics in LA, but further improvements could be made. The game can be made to detect whether any of the previous 3 or 5 maps that the player was on was a WvW map and whether the current map is a PvE/PvP map and place those players on map instances with the lowest number of people from their server on it. That way, any blob that exits WvW would be scattered across instances, making it very difficult for them to co-ordinate back in, especially if they have to wait 10 minutes to get back into WvW anyway.

This is pointlessly intrusive. And how is it a problem to hit LA and ask for WvW help? Or limited hot-swapping toons? This address nothing about population balance either. Blobbing as a tactic isn’t broken. If they balanced the reward for defense with offense, folks wouldn’t be so quick to jump on the blob wagon anyway.

munkiman.3068:

Sakura No Seirei.6120:

There is a way to stop blob manipulation, and that’s to introduce cooldown timers for re-entering WvW after a deliberate exit from a WvW map to a non-WvW map (which quite handily gets rid toon hotswapping). A detection and flag system could be put in place to detect and record when a player sends a taskkill (or equivalent) signal to the GW2.exe process (through the normal game exit window, or via the OS) or presses the ‘Leave the Mists’ button. If they do that then their account gets flagged for 10 minutes and during that time they can’t re-enter WvW. On the other hand, if the game detects that the internet connection is lost between the client and server, or the game crashes and the error report box comes up, or the game forces an exit due to incoming patch, then the account isn’t flagged and the player can re-enter WvW as soon as their game comes back up.

The Megaserver has taken care of some of the problems of rent-a-mob tactics in LA, but further improvements could be made. The game can be made to detect whether any of the previous 3 or 5 maps that the player was on was a WvW map and whether the current map is a PvE/PvP map and place those players on map instances with the lowest number of people from their server on it. That way, any blob that exits WvW would be scattered across instances, making it very difficult for them to co-ordinate back in, especially if they have to wait 10 minutes to get back into WvW anyway.

This is pointlessly intrusive. And how is it a problem to hit LA and ask for WvW help? Or limited hot-swapping toons? This address nothing about population balance either. Blobbing as a tactic isn’t broken. If they balanced the reward for defense with offense, folks wouldn’t be so quick to jump on the blob wagon anyway.

I agree this is a pointless solution and consider how many times people get dc each night without willingly doing so but the game throws them out in a lagspike then why should they be punished? If anything it would make people rage and leave.

Xillllix.3485:

They need to re-balance all the servers population, to do a massive reshuffling.

The problem is that they cannot do it on a player basis, they have to do it on a guild basis. The only solution WvW has of rebalancing itself is a guild alliance system, where guilds are assigned to a different color (alliance) according to their rating in the guild ladder.

Then they can start creating a set amount of overflows according to the WvW population, like ESO or other mmo.

Most of the guilds i know of on NSP wouldn’t leave for this. ESO is a terribad example of a model IMO. The best re-balance they can do is in the mode itself and let the chips fall where they may. I’m not sure how guild ladders would be tallied, but it could be a welcome addition. If you used guilds with the most wxp, that really doesn’t prove a whole lot. We really need to be thinking about how to change the game mode/scoring to reflect skilled play and tactics over just bringing numbers. Everything else so far just seem like rhetoric that either complicate things or will end up being overall bad for the game.

Dayra.7405:

Didn’t you read the 2nd part of the original post?

WvW is not competitive, was never competitive and if you read the thread a lot do not want it do be competitive.

You do not need a match to compare manpower and coverage, the match is completely superfluous to determine the winner, just compare the man-power per time graphs of the 3 server, and give the one that “wins” (the one with the largest lonely coverage advantage) a reward. After 2 years WvW everyone should have noticed that.
The only surprise is: You don’t know the man-power per time graphs of your opponents in detail ahead of time.

Don’t fool yourself, those who don’t want to be it competitive are just a tiny minority of players compared to those who want it to be a competition. How many people are here commenting WvW to turn into a EoTM brother, 10 or 20?

My server has tried several time to win matchup in Friday. Don’t know what you think, but for me that is competition, if not, why to push that hard the last day?
Hundreds of people were involved there, and we’re talking about one server. Then there’s all the gvg scene in WvW. Tons of 20/25 people guilds fighting each other to see who is the best. People stacking to SFR and blackgate to beat Vizunah, now Deso to beat SFR. Thats competition…

In forums only the small, but loud, otherwise-minded minority speaks.

I’ll stop reading your posts. You only throw outrageous and heavily complicated ideas, hoping one day WvW will be something like you dream. you have demonstrated me that WvW is not for you. You want something that is completely different from WvW, why not to move and find another game where you can fit, instead of trying to destroy a game-mode hundreds of people like?

A lot of people keep bringing up map caps and server merges. I think neither is a good approach long term. Simply because the issue would come up again in 6 months. We have to think long term.

This is why I posted my ideas, and I saw some other ones that could be utilized to help the problem.
That is:

• Cutting EotM rewards to not include WvW based rewards (badges by X%, wexp by at least 90%, karma by half) to get people into WvW.
• Battlegroups/Alliances/Clusters of servers that fight as one world. so basically we end up with 12 evenly populated Battlegroups fighting each other for superiority week in and out. Each 6mo/1year the alliances can be re-organized to help population.
• Provide incentive to move to a low population server, and limit movement to a high population server.
• Buffing outmanned to provide a substantial windfall for captures/event completions
• 0 gem cost for transferring to lowest pop server
• (sug. by others)Offer guilds benefits for being in WvW by providing extras for claimed objectives. Such as gathering/karma/mf boosts if you hold a specific objective on the map. Guild usable crafting/vendors in a held keep. Make a guild feel like they own the objective.
• (sug. by others)Buff the PvP aspect of WvW to provide more loot for a player kill vs objective completion.
• (sug. by others)Scaling of objectives according to the # of defendants present in-around the objective vs the # of attackers present in-around the objective. So a door would be reinforced grade if there is 40 attackers but 4 defenders, walls too. If even numbers current meta remains intact.
• (sug. by others)Tournaments should involve all worlds. So lets take 3 regions servers scores together and fight for supremacy. Could be through an alliance, or pre-determined matchmaking using population.
• (late edit) Provide a substantial incentive to fight for first place each week. Maybe champion loot bags are awarded to players who completed X amount of WvW events each week if their server wins. That would create constant gunning for #1 and help stop the stacking on 1 server.

etc etc.
But lets try to stop making suggestions that stop people from playing or entering a map (aka map caps), or simply thinking that merging servers will solve the problem.

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

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
[/quote]

I’d be curious if there are any analytics being done on WvW matchups, and what that entails. For instance, tracking each player’s active WvW hours for every matchup such that predictions can be made about their future play. The same can be done with other stats gathered from players’ WvW activities. Some of my ideas:

The first would be dividing players evenly into tournament groups (red, green, blue) based on analytics gathered for each player (i.e. split the players up so that coverage is less of an issue, while also dividing the players up based on their stats such that not all of the ‘best’ players are on the same team). Yes, that would affect world pride, but how proud can you be when you knowingly have a 270k point lead midweek over a lesser populated or lesser WvW active world? Small price to pay for more challenging and closer matches in my opinion, and would only affect ‘pride’ during tournaments.

My second idea involves using the same analytics to dynamically control either player population or PPT during certain hours. If there is an ‘overpopulation’ issue in the ‘closer’ matchups, it typically has to do with 1 world having more people on during certain timeframes. Based on the analytics gathered for each player, it would in theory be possible to predict which hours 1 world will have a population imbalance over another. During these hours either throttle down how many players that world can introduce to a map, or reduce the points per tick they can achieve when there is an outnumbered scenario. Third idea in next post.

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

Thirdly, there is the question of persistent 2 vs. 1 scenarios. 2v1 is inevitable and in many ways needed to tilt the balance of power, however when 2 worlds constantly beat down the 3rd without any penalty or deterrent to discourage this activity, it changes WvWvW to W&WvW and ruins the experience for many players. Harder to detect and control I’m sure, but surely there must be some mechanism that could be introduced to dissuade such activity from being persistent. What if there were capture bonus points awarded based the current world scores, matchup positions, and captured objectives? For instance, let’s say we have the following score: 1st=30k; 2nd=20k, 3rd=10k. If 3rd place captures 1st place’s home world keep they are awarded 75% of the point difference between 3rd and 1st. In this case, 15k thus closing the gap to 1st place significantly and bringing the 3rd world now into 2nd place. Lower objectives such as home back/front towers would award a smaller percentage of the point difference respectively. What if 1st captures 3rd place objectives? No bonus points there, but if they capture 2nd place home objectives they to could get a smaller % of their point difference bonus. So in this scenario, 1st place could capture 2nd places’ home keep for let’s say a 25% point bonus of their lead, in this case 2500. Someone with better math skills and the time to run through some scenarios, could I’m sure, find the right balance for such a bonus point system. So now 2nd place has some incentive to attack 1st place so they too can close the gap and try to steal 1st place; 3rd place has opportunities to even the score with just a few 1st and/or 2nd place objective captures, while 1st place has reason to not only defend all of their objectives, but to protect and extend their lead over 2nd place by taking 2nd place’s objectives. If 1st and 2nd still continue to beat down 3rd extending their lead, they could potentially set themselves up for a major shift in points. (i.e. if 1st=200k, 2nd=150k, 3rd=50k, and 3rd manages to mount a successful assault of 1st place’s home keep they would earn 112.5k in points and pass 2nd place by 12.5k) That would be a game changer where I think worlds would now have to protect themselves from such a scenario by working with and against the other worlds so as to keep the scores relatively closer throughout the matchup such that the last day of the matchup would be as important, if not more so than the 1st day.

I’m hoping some ANET geeks could put their heads together to take some of these ideas and at least play through various scenarios to see how they would play out

John Corpening.9847:

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?

Arena net don’t need to determine who gets merged and at same time avoid the world pride with this solution:

– Reset all servers names at a predetermined date (let’s say January 2nd of 2015).
– Inform players around the World about what will happen to prepare minds for the incoming changes.
– Because of Megaserver existence, PvE and sPvP players will not be directly affected with this transition, only WvW community will be.
– Merge 27 EU servers into 18. Each one of this new 18 servers will have also new names from Anet choice.
– Merge 24 NA servers into 18. Each one of this new 18 servers will have also new names from Anet choice.
– Each player chooses aftermath a new server from the 36 available at 1st login after the predetermined data. After, charge them for any transfer as usually.
– Few months of balance matchups will happen at WvW, then the inevitable attraction done by the winning servers influence transfers.
– Shuffle again to provide new horizons!

Sigmar.2185:

John Corpening.9847:

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?

Arena net don’t need to determine who gets merged and at same time avoid the world pride with this solution:

– Reset all servers names at a predetermined date (let’s say January 2nd of 2015).
– Inform players around the World about what will happen to prepare minds for the incoming changes.
– Because of Megaserver existence, PvE and sPvP players will not be directly affected with this transition, only WvW community will be.
– Merge 27 EU servers into 18. Each one of this new 18 servers will have also new names from Anet choice.
– Merge 24 NA servers into 18. Each one of this new 18 servers will have also new names from Anet choice.
– Each player chooses aftermath a new server from the 36 available at 1st login after the predetermined data. After, charge them for any transfer as usually.
– Few months of balance matchups will happen at WvW, then the inevitable attraction done by the winning servers influence transfers.
– Shuffle again to provide new horizons!

So your solution is to merge the servers, let them sit for a while, then merge servers again? This doesn’t help the issue, just temporarily alleviates it.
As far as server identity, this completely destroys it. Believe it or not there is server pride in PvE as well. Megaservers aren’t used on every instance and until that point is reached, there will be a server identity for guilds/players that people want to preserve.

Herbal.6291:

Funny all the systems you’ve just said won’t work worked just fine in one of the best mmos to have ever done wvw/rvr Dark age of Camelot.

Also are you seriously suggesting people won’t want to fight each other once you remove the main reason people take empty undefended keeps karma/wxp? It wouldn’t kill wvw it would promote it, it would however kill pvd which it seems you really want kept in the game for some strange reason.

No, that’s no what I’ve suggested at all. I suggest you reread my post to see what I actually said,

munkiman.3068:

Sakura No Seirei.6120:

There is a way to stop blob manipulation, and that’s to introduce cooldown timers for re-entering WvW after a deliberate exit from a WvW map to a non-WvW map (which quite handily gets rid toon hotswapping). A detection and flag system could be put in place to detect and record when a player sends a taskkill (or equivalent) signal to the GW2.exe process (through the normal game exit window, or via the OS) or presses the ‘Leave the Mists’ button. If they do that then their account gets flagged for 10 minutes and during that time they can’t re-enter WvW. On the other hand, if the game detects that the internet connection is lost between the client and server, or the game crashes and the error report box comes up, or the game forces an exit due to incoming patch, then the account isn’t flagged and the player can re-enter WvW as soon as their game comes back up.

The Megaserver has taken care of some of the problems of rent-a-mob tactics in LA, but further improvements could be made. The game can be made to detect whether any of the previous 3 or 5 maps that the player was on was a WvW map and whether the current map is a PvE/PvP map and place those players on map instances with the lowest number of people from their server on it. That way, any blob that exits WvW would be scattered across instances, making it very difficult for them to co-ordinate back in, especially if they have to wait 10 minutes to get back into WvW anyway.

This is pointlessly intrusive. And how is it a problem to hit LA and ask for WvW help? Or limited hot-swapping toons? This address nothing about population balance either. Blobbing as a tactic isn’t broken. If they balanced the reward for defense with offense, folks wouldn’t be so quick to jump on the blob wagon anyway.

This solution was being offered to address points raised about manipulation of the system previously mentioned in the quote (manipulation of player numbers at PPT scoring, where scoring is calculated based on Score At Tick/Numbers of Players of that Server on WvW Maps). The person I was replying to was pointing out how that system could be manipulated, I was pointing out how to provide solutions to that problem. Without having read about the previous solution offered (which is in the quote), the solutions aren’t going to make a lot of sense.

Leaa.2943:

munkiman.3068:

Sakura No Seirei.6120:

There is a way to stop blob manipulation, and that’s to introduce cooldown timers for re-entering WvW after a deliberate exit from a WvW map to a non-WvW map (which quite handily gets rid toon hotswapping). A detection and flag system could be put in place to detect and record when a player sends a taskkill (or equivalent) signal to the GW2.exe process (through the normal game exit window, or via the OS) or presses the ‘Leave the Mists’ button. If they do that then their account gets flagged for 10 minutes and during that time they can’t re-enter WvW. On the other hand, if the game detects that the internet connection is lost between the client and server, or the game crashes and the error report box comes up, or the game forces an exit due to incoming patch, then the account isn’t flagged and the player can re-enter WvW as soon as their game comes back up.

The Megaserver has taken care of some of the problems of rent-a-mob tactics in LA, but further improvements could be made. The game can be made to detect whether any of the previous 3 or 5 maps that the player was on was a WvW map and whether the current map is a PvE/PvP map and place those players on map instances with the lowest number of people from their server on it. That way, any blob that exits WvW would be scattered across instances, making it very difficult for them to co-ordinate back in, especially if they have to wait 10 minutes to get back into WvW anyway.

This is pointlessly intrusive. And how is it a problem to hit LA and ask for WvW help? Or limited hot-swapping toons? This address nothing about population balance either. Blobbing as a tactic isn’t broken. If they balanced the reward for defense with offense, folks wouldn’t be so quick to jump on the blob wagon anyway.

I agree this is a pointless solution and consider how many times people get dc each night without willingly doing so but the game throws them out in a lagspike then why should they be punished? If anything it would make people rage and leave.

Wow, people really don’t read posts before replying, do they? If the client detects that the internet connection is lost, or if the GW2.exe process is terminated in an unexpected way then the account would not be flagged. If the account isn’t flagged and the player can get straight back into the game, how are they being punished?

Just create 3 factions like how its suppose to have been, Luxons vs Kurz vs X. Make it so it does not matter WHAT server you are from just the faction you rep, that will reduce the amount of wvw servers needed and increase population, you already have mega servers an overflow for pve why not do the same for wvw. Also that would mean you cant just server xfer over to all the sudden get a huge pop advantage during tournies. Hell EoTM has a similer system as well just add 3 diff factions to it an i think that will help solve most issues.

Delete servers..
Problem solved..

(pretty sure the devs in this thread thought about this for a couple of times while reading)

Given the current scoring system, split OCX/SEA players off to their own set of servers.

Sakura No Seirei.6120:

Wow, people really don’t read posts before replying, do they? If the client detects that the internet connection is lost, or if the GW2.exe process is terminated in an unexpected way then the account would not be flagged. If the account isn’t flagged and the player can get straight back into the game, how are they being punished?

I think the response here is mainly that people don’t want to use any type of ‘exclusionary’ tactics. So anything that stops people from playing. To be fair, on a overpopulated server, queue’s are a deterrent to char switching. On reset night you are stuck with the toon you go in with. But otherwise even t1 has no queues during the week.

population imbalance would be less of a problem if the difficulty of capturing new objectives became progressively harder the more objectives your team already had, and if the ease of defending objectives increased the fewer you had left to defend.

a big part of the reason that population imbalance causes such a problem is that the team with a numbers advantage keeps that advantage regardless of how many objectives they take, leading a zerg to naturally try to sweep the map (a zerg big enough to wipe you at this objective, is probably large enough to wipe you at any objective, and no amount of falling back will change this). there is no need (or incentive) to leave players behind to defend, so the same advantage that lets you take one thing can be used to take every thing.

there are numerous ways to make it harder to sweep a map (or more to the point, to accumulate a lot of PPT). one option is to dynamically scale guard strength according to the defender’s current PPT (a low PPT server will hve stronger guards). another option is to change the PPT rules so that you get few points for a freshly captured objective, but comparitively more points for objectives held for a long time or upgraded (to encourage defense, and to put downward pressure on the size of zergs — you cannot have your whole team attacking one thing if the bulk of your team is chasing PPT by defending/upgrading objectives).

another way to encourage defense (and thereby limit zerg size) is to have roaming npc squads that will take back undefended objectives (these npc squads will have a ‘goal’ of returning the map to its reset state (home borderlands owned, your third of EBG owned — the npc’s would not attempt to seize objectives their server didn’t start with).

I’m sure there are other ways.

forcing population balance is a big hammer, maybe there’s a more subtle way to fix the problem by adjusting the game mechanics.

-ken

Snowreap.5174:

population imbalance would be less of a problem if the difficulty of capturing new objectives became progressively harder the more objectives your team already had, and if the ease of defending objectives increased the fewer you had left to defend.

a big part of the reason that population imbalance causes such a problem is that the team with a numbers advantage keeps that advantage regardless of how many objectives they take, leading a zerg to naturally try to sweep the map (a zerg big enough to wipe you at this objective, is probably large enough to wipe you at any objective, and no amount of falling back will change this). there is no need (or incentive) to leave players behind to defend, so the same advantage that lets you take one thing can be used to take every thing.

there are numerous ways to make it harder to sweep a map (or more to the point, to accumulate a lot of PPT). one option is to dynamically scale guard strength according to the defender’s current PPT (a low PPT server will hve stronger guards). another option is to change the PPT rules so that you get few points for a freshly captured objective, but comparitively more points for objectives held for a long time or upgraded (to encourage defense, and to put downward pressure on the size of zergs — you cannot have your whole team attacking one thing if the bulk of your team is chasing PPT by defending/upgrading objectives).

-ken

No one scouts in your Tier? Just zergs constantly back-capping each other, like EotM?

Anyway, sounds like you haven’t really looked into how these matches are being decided, but capturing objectives is only a SMALL part of it. Here’s last week’s Matchup from T1 NA, one of the most roflstomp matches of the Season so far:

http://www.gw2score.com/server/Blackgate?match=1

If you scroll down a bit, you’ll see a pie chart showing “Points From Tick” and “Points NOT From Tick”; 78.66% of Blackgate’s points in this match came NOT from Tick".

So asking Anet to simply hand an NPC army over to outmatched servers won’t really help imbalance, it just adds more PvE to WvW, which probably has too much of this already. And seriously, is “handicapping” every match really the solution people want to see here?

servers have to be merged. there is no way around it, and nothing else at all that isn’t a punishment or a step backwards to address the population issue.

servers HAVE to be merged. this only addresses the population and coverage issue, yes, but it’s not meant to address the ppt issue (which also doesn’t address the coverage issue).

anet has the wvw metrics of every server across every time zone. i’m sure it’s already been said but i’m just going to reiterate it to show support:

step 1 – merge NA & EU. yes, there will be language problems, but they will be overcome in gw2 as they were in gw1. the language barrier is virtually non-existent and is only made issue of by lazy/ignorant people who are afraid of everything different.

step 2 – merge servers according to metrics of wvw participation to create as balanced and even coverage as possible. if any gaps exist then open a free transfer from ONLY the most populous in that time to ONLY the least populous, limit it by number & publish that number in real time if you have to so you don’t split guilds.

yes people will complain, but it will be short lived and whether it happens now or in a year when the game is even less populated than it is now, it’s going to happen either way in the end.

it is sad and disappointing that you’ve left the problems of WvW to fester for so long and bled so many players, but with attention and care i hope it can be fixed. please, for the love of all that is holy and brilliant in RvR/PvP, save this game mode. there is nothing at all that even compares to your combat system, anet. nothing. you have designed the penultimate and all others are held to your standard.

obastable.5231:

servers HAVE to be merged. this only addresses the population and coverage issue, yes, but it’s not meant to address the ppt issue (which also doesn’t address the coverage issue).

anet has the wvw metrics of every server across every time zone. i’m sure it’s already been said but i’m just going to reiterate it to show support:

step 1 – merge NA & EU. yes, there will be language problems, but they will be overcome in gw2 as they were in gw1. the language barrier is virtually non-existent and is only made issue of by lazy/ignorant people who are afraid of everything different.

step 2 – merge servers according to metrics of wvw participation to create as balanced and even coverage as possible. if any gaps exist then open a free transfer from ONLY the most populous in that time to ONLY the least populous, limit it by number & publish that number in real time if you have to so you don’t split guilds.

yes people will complain, but it will be short lived and whether it happens now or in a year when the game is even less populated than it is now, it’s going to happen either way in the end.

The dismissive nature of your post aside, let me ask you a question about your suggestions:

Do you think that server merges are a viable long-term solution? I certainly don’t, as it can bring up the issue again in 6 months, and then we go through this whole phase of 2 years before merging again. Server merging along just doesn’t answer the problem.

Where would you place data centers for NA/EU merged servers? This is a non-starter from the beginning, and language has nothing to do with it. The increased latency from one continent or another would make people quit the game faster than not having enough players ever will. Merging continent oriented servers is absolutely a non-starter. Alliances(where composite score is the score for the week, and players can help each server in an alliance) maybe, but forcing people to play with 600-700ms lag is not an option.

obastable.5231:

servers have to be merged. there is no way around it, and nothing else at all that isn’t a punishment or a step backwards to address the population issue.

servers HAVE to be merged. this only addresses the population and coverage issue, yes, but it’s not meant to address the ppt issue (which also doesn’t address the coverage issue).

anet has the wvw metrics of every server across every time zone. i’m sure it’s already been said but i’m just going to reiterate it to show support:

step 1 – merge NA & EU. yes, there will be language problems, but they will be overcome in gw2 as they were in gw1. the language barrier is virtually non-existent and is only made issue of by lazy/ignorant people who are afraid of everything different.

step 2 – merge servers according to metrics of wvw participation to create as balanced and even coverage as possible. if any gaps exist then open a free transfer from ONLY the most populous in that time to ONLY the least populous, limit it by number & publish that number in real time if you have to so you don’t split guilds.

yes people will complain, but it will be short lived and whether it happens now or in a year when the game is even less populated than it is now, it’s going to happen either way in the end.

it is sad and disappointing that you’ve left the problems of WvW to fester for so long and bled so many players, but with attention and care i hope it can be fixed. please, for the love of all that is holy and brilliant in RvR/PvP, save this game mode. there is nothing at all that even compares to your combat system, anet. nothing. you have designed the penultimate and all others are held to your standard.

The proposition i presented (which is based on a years feedback from our WvW meetings and talking with heavy WvW guilds and players) ticks every box of the “issues” presented, without server merges. So no, servers don’t have to be merged. Even if pops drop even more, merges won’t solve any of that and arguably merges will make less people (those that like there servers as is) want to play. Even worse you want to add language barriers to the mix? Wow, that’s just so far away from anything good imaginable, not to mention the queues would be outrageous.

Altie.4571:

• Cutting EotM rewards to not include WvW based rewards (badges by X%, wexp by at least 90%, karma by half) to get people into WvW.

Removing rewards is always bad. At this point they should just incorporate EotM in WvW and be done with that failed experiment. Maybe we’d actually start seeing people return to WvW, even if it’s just the EotM map.

Populate WvW with the Orders of Tyria serving as guild alliances.

Benefits:
Eliminates the server population from being a roadblock and makes guild choice seem more relevant. Still allows for strategy since allies and opponents aren’t constantly changing. Current map assets could be reused in the short term until new maps could be made.

Potential problems:
WvW could become more like EotM by opening up the maps to all servers. The lack of ability to jump between different versions of the maps could create issues for getting guild together (as it currently is with EotM). A new UI would need to be made so that guilds could cross districts easier, especially if score is calculated compositely.

Other Issues:
Multi-guilding would allow for easy spying/griefing.

language is a non-factor. i’m sorry if you believe it is, but in truth it isn’t. english is the international language of business, and if i’ve learned anything over my decades of travel it’s that people outside of english speaking countries usually speak/read/write the language far better than most immigrants that’ve passed their language tests to gain citizenship. as a matter of employability most non-native english speakers begin learning english in childhood. yes, i am generalizing, but it isn’t as broad and sweeping as you’d think. i have yet to meet a single person that i couldn’t interact with in english, in any foreign country i’ve ever been to, ever. i met a 7 year old in turkey who spoke, read, and wrote better english than my neighbour. i know we like to joke at americans who think everyone speaks english outside of north america, but the truth is about 90% of them really DO.

i’m not strictly speaking in terms of “solving wvw” when i say the servers have to be merged, but rather addressing the long term fact that anet will merge them as a cost saving initiative as the game dies, as they did with gw1. for a multitude of reasons, merging servers has to happen. whether it happens now or later is only relevant to wvw as a population balance adjustment.

they will merge servers because as the population declines it is not cost effective for them to maintain 50+ separate wvw servers when the population of all of them combined could be hosted on 30 now and probably on less than 10 2 years from now.

they will merge datapoints because as the population of na and eu declines it is not cost efficient for them to maintain two when one will support them at max active capacity. latency rarely has anything to do with the datapoint itself but rather with routing, which can be an issue regardless of where the datapoint is.

our input here on the matter only bears relevance to anet in how they do it.

i’m not being dismissive of other inputs, i’m being realistic to what is going to happen. they ARE going to merge servers, it’s just a matter of how/when/where & how they balance what we want with what is cost efficient and realistic for them to both create and maintain as gw2 declines across the years.

i am in no way belittling some of the really great and creative ideas in this thread for addressing population, but they are not realistic for a 2 year old game in decline. they would be great for a new game launching, and maybe anet will take them to heart for an expansion or gw3 or even a stand alone wvw game, but for this game NOW anything that doesn’t include server merging is not being realistic to the current and future state of affairs.

Sakura No Seirei.6120:

munkiman.3068:

This is pointlessly intrusive. And how is it a problem to hit LA and ask for WvW help? Or limited hot-swapping toons? This address nothing about population balance either. Blobbing as a tactic isn’t broken. If they balanced the reward for defense with offense, folks wouldn’t be so quick to jump on the blob wagon anyway.

This solution was being offered to address points raised about manipulation of the system previously mentioned in the quote (manipulation of player numbers at PPT scoring, where scoring is calculated based on Score At Tick/Numbers of Players of that Server on WvW Maps). The person I was replying to was pointing out how that system could be manipulated, I was pointing out how to provide solutions to that problem. Without having read about the previous solution offered (which is in the quote), the solutions aren’t going to make a lot of sense.

I read the entire discussion, i’ve been reading most of them. I understood that you were trying to correct an introduced counter to a suggested “feature” which again i’ll state both the suggested feature and the counter to protect that feature, comes down to be pointlessly intrusive.

If the goal is to improve the WvW experience by balancing out coverage, and population gaps. Then we should be discussing those points in which focus on that, not introducing things to hinder the player experience. The fact that people keep thinking inside the PPT “box” is completely avoiding the fact that PPT is a big part of the problem to begin with. Population gaps and coverage can be solved by looking at different scoring mechanics too, without impeding player experiences and trashing the already existing mechanics.

Thank you John C. for reading our numerous and lengthy replies to this topic.

My experience on Ferguson’s Crossing is that we can have a decent amount of players in WvW when the matchups are competitive, but become almost non-existent when up against an overwhelmingly populated server compared to us. When in a competitive or favorable matchup, I see 4 to 5 times more people involved than when not. I’ve heard countless people, from various guildmates, to friends, to strangers say “Why do WvW this week,” “It’s pointless,” “We don’t have a chance to win, so why try.”

The points being, from my perspective, we’d get a lot more participation if the matches were more often even. Also, judging WvW population by current involvement is impossible, as with a change to the game mode, it’s like either more or less people will participate whether or not they like the change. Thus, simply merging servers to try and combine low involvement or populated servers together, like many others have said, will not solve the issue of WvW participation, and only cause strife of those forced to split or merge.

What we need is: A competitive atmosphere. Something that gives us a will to fight and a reason to try and win every week. A feeling of accomplishment, even if we fail to take or defend an objective, because we had intense combat, a good feeling of teamwork, and are ready to continue to the next battle. We need more incentive to play with and for each other and less fear of imbalance, trolling and cheating.

My preferred improvement idea is that of a cap, but not of a hard cap, like 50 per map. I believe the cap should be for the total number of players across all 4 maps (3 borderlands and eternal battlegrounds). Each borderland can have a maximum capacity as well (for lag purposes) like it does now. Further, I don’t mind being outnumbered, even all of the time, as long as it isn’t so overwhelming that we can’t even put up a decent resistance. A maximum ratio of 2:1 is probably a good start. It could be higher or lower or even change depending on total numbers.

This cap would allow zergs and players to move from one map to another to attack or defend an objective without having to re-enter a queue (assuming the map moving to isn’t full). The ratio queue would allow peak hours for some servers to still have some advantage in numbers over other servers. This queue shouldn’t affect the top tiers much, as their numbers should be rather similar already. I still wouldn’t recommend putting Blackgate against ET, at least not until their active populations get closer.

The biggest reason behind using the cap method, is to gently push players to lower tier servers to attempt to even out the population or suffer waiting in queues. Announce the desire to spread the population, then start it gently, and slowly lower the cap, increasing the queue, to give the incentive to move. At the same time, try to find positive enforcement to lure people to another server. No matter how this issue is approached, there will continue to be people kicking and screaming, disagreements, and of course flaming. All I have time for now… Still have more to say.

obastable.5231:

language is a non-factor. i’m sorry if you believe it is, but in truth it isn’t. english is the international language of business, and if i’ve learned anything over my decades of travel it’s that people outside of english speaking countries usually speak/read/write the language far better than most immigrants that’ve passed their language tests to gain citizenship. as a matter of employability most non-native english speakers begin learning english in childhood. yes, i am generalizing, but it isn’t as broad and sweeping as you’d think. i have yet to meet a single person that i couldn’t interact with in english, in any foreign country i’ve ever been to, ever. i met a 7 year old in turkey who spoke, read, and wrote better english than my neighbour. i know we like to joke at americans who think everyone speaks english outside of north america, but the truth is about 90% of them really DO.

<< snip for brevity >>

i am in no way belittling some of the really great and creative ideas in this thread for addressing population, but they are not realistic for a 2 year old game in decline. they would be great for a new game launching, and maybe anet will take them to heart for an expansion or gw3 or even a stand alone wvw game, but for this game NOW anything that doesn’t include server merging is not being realistic to the current and future state of affairs.

Did you play GW, the original? It had language districts. It was never an issue, there were no servers in that sense. We already have a rather glaring problem with the megaservers in PvE and language barriers, which you now suggest we bring to WvW?

I can tell you this, most Spanish speaking players, at best, speak broken english, it’s not universally taught, especially in north america. Not sure where you are coming up with those percentages.

Regardless, merging servers aren’t inevitable. Even if ALL servers went to having 100 people playing at peak, it still wouldn’t be necessary. Some would even argue it would be a better experience since there are those suggestions of lowering map caps. Have you read any of this thread besides the red posts?

Diem.3529:

Thank you John C. for reading our numerous and lengthy replies to this topic.

<< snip for brevity >>

The biggest reason behind using the cap method, is to gently push players to lower tier servers to attempt to even out the population or suffer waiting in queues. Announce the desire to spread the population, then start it gently, and slowly lower the cap, increasing the queue, to give the incentive to move. At the same time, try to find positive enforcement to lure people to another server. No matter how this issue is approached, there will continue to be people kicking and screaming, disagreements, and of course flaming. All I have time for now… Still have more to say.

This has been brought up numerous times in this thread. How does this cap address servers that run 5-10 people on the BL just to scout/refresh siege while the rest of the server is in EB or another BL? It basically forces people to play in another map? I’m not sure how this is a solution to coverage discrepancies either.

I know for a solid fact NSP players are not going to want this type of thing to gentle force them to move to another server. Putting tighter limits on players has rarely proven effective, if anything, it would likely just cause rage.

Another idea that I find interesting, is making queues for wvw maps integrated. Meaning: you maintain the same amount of players on each side at all times. If there is 1 extra player on side Blue, for example, then the max queue for red and green is 1, until those are filled, no new blue player can enter the queue.