Guild Wars 2

Hello my dear WvW enthusiasts. I realize there is another topic where people argue about night capping, this topics purpose is to actualy come up with possible solutions that arena net team might use to solve that certain “problem”.

Let me talk about what exactly the problem is for a minute and then i expect only the people with realistic solutions to post so we get somewhere instead of just arguing.

So the main problem is people not being able to make a comeback from the big amount of points that their enemies have acquired during their sleep time/night time. One might say it’s not fair, but you always have to look at the other side too where as in the guys actualy acquiring those points just play in their prime time(most of cases). So should we be biased based on where you live?( We all know the answer to this question), so what else is there that we can do about it? I saw somewhere that Mike Ferguson said they will increase the point count from 5 minutes to 15 minutes, but that won’t change much unless the point count changes back to 5 minutes in the mornings? That would make them zone biased again and not fair towards the effort of some people. So what else is there that they can do?

I expect constructive posts with reasons/arguments as to why it should be changed the way you propose. We need a clean topic so please keep it that way, if mods can delete the spamm that would be awesome.

hi here is the whole post. WvW is 24/7

MikeFerguson.8921:

WvW is intended to be a persistent 24 hour game.

In a large scale persistent game like this, you need friends and allies on at all hours to be able to do well. Some worlds will have issues finding enough people to be on during certain hours, but you also don’t need a lot of people to defend or take things back during low population hours.

We will be making a couple changes to scoring in the next build we do. The biggest change you’ll see is that we will be extending the score tick to 15 minutes instead of 5 like it is currently. As always, we will continue to monitor things to see if additional changes need to be made in the future.

Telling people they cant play during certain hours of the day is just not an option. Not everybody has a day job with 9-5 hours and can be on during prime time. Those people should be able to play anytime they want, just like the people who play during prime time.

Well one easy way to solve it without hurting anyone and making it fair AND allowing servers a more fair fight and even giving them a chance for a comeback would be a system like this:

You split scores into 4 times a day (or 3) Each “round” can be won and will give the team with the most score during that time 2 points. The team on 2nd place will get 1 point and the team on last place will get 0 points.
At the end of each round the points that you gain from capturing and holding locations is reset (Note only the score not the map itself). Then a new round being and the team that have the most points during that time will win the next round and so on.

This gives people a reason to continue to fight, it allows night timers to play (or people from other time zones), But it also allow people that play on the servers main prime time (when the most people are on) to make a comeback and not wake up and think "oh kitten the other team have a 60k point lead ahead of us.

Example:
Red team now have 54000 points after night time while Blue have 4000 and Green have 1000. Then it get to the end of the round and red wins so they gain 2 points blue gain 1 point and green 0.

Score:
Red:2
Blue:1
Green:0

Now everyones score from capturing things reset (note the bonus things dont, neither do the capture points), Now everyone have a score at 0 again but red is in the lead on the score that decide the 2 week winner.

It the next round is won by Green 2nd place is red and last blue. Then the score look like:
Red:3
Blue:1
Green:2

And it continues like that until the end of the 2 week time.

You cannot punish players for logging in whenever they want or the server for supporting an international crowd. To eleviate the issue people are having, I’d remove bonuses from the power of the mists that directly affect competitive play: +health, +healing, +experience and +endurance are probably the most influential. Hence players will be on the same playing field regardless of having players capturing during night time.

Additionally, I’d track player and guild performance in WvW. Monitoring kills, captures, won encounters, lost encounters etc is way more effective at tracking player skill than scores being accumulated through the day. Let the score be an indicator for which bracket the server belongs and a ladder system for both players and guilds be a platform for pride and skill.

A good ladder system would help track performance and how “fair/unfair” a server accumulates points. For example a guild with 100 captures but no successful clearances tells a story or two about the circumstances the guild fights in.

TL;TR:

-Establish a ladder system/tracking system for guilds and individuals.
-Remove bonuses to player stats used in direct competition to other players.

So you are saying no matter what it will always be unfair there will always be time when you just cannot affect the WvW no matter what, and thus they should just implement a good system that tracks the most important stats of guilds/players and how much they have affected the point score. So you think it’s not about winning in general but rather the fact that all your effort goes to nothing?

Best solution : play the night.

I think the only real solution is to address the heart of the issue: outnumbering the enemy being such a decisive advantage. Steps should be taken to minimise the impact of population advantage.

At the very least, the logistical advantages of having so many more players (and being able to carry so much more supply) should be addressed, as well as the advantages of having more money to throw at siege equipment and upgrades. Realistically, I think it has to go further than that – the underpopulated side needs bonuses to damage, healing and survivability to help even it out.

One side getting crushed because they don’t have as many people online just isn’t really fun for anyone.

There isn’t going to be a solution now that will be satisfactory plain and simple

I always believed in time segregated servers and those servers were locked to those in those areas, but it never happened
This issue goes all the way back to EQ really and probably before. I remember we had one Asia based guild on our server who locked alot of world contested mobs simply because they killed them in their timeframe and then they repopped in their timeframe when everyone else was asleep
I wish I had an answer.

Solution: Stop thinking the world revolves around your time zone.

Solution: People should stop being weak-minded beings with terrible mentalities – they should stop all team-stacking 1 server to ‘win’ and start thinking about being the ones to balance out population issues.

Especially the large guilds – stop allying with other large guilds, spread yourself out, keep it balanced.

There is no other reliable solition. The problem here is the players, not the system.

The solution is this:

Play at night.

Eventually with server matching those servers with 24/7 active pops will be matched against each other and the rest will stabilise against servers in their band of performance. its early days and matching is not great yet.

Solution is play in the mists where real skill is the factor. WvWvW is a joke in current state.

There is no solution to this because there is no problem. If you log in and the entire map is capped, then guess what – you get to play the hell out of some W3! You’ve got nothing but fun in front of you taking those things back. As MF said, W3 is a 24hr game and that is the nature and point of W3.

This is false problem.
The fight is supposed to be 24/7 and I would not like it any other way.
The real issue here is having servers split between US and Europe for WvW.
This creates “false” timezones in WvW.
Even if the majority of the population on a server belongs to the same timezone there are also different time lines in it West coast vs Eats coast or Uk time vs Moscow time (as examples).
What may in fact disrupt the time zone, in the current system, is when only a server (or some) have a split population from both US and EU servers.

Mike doesnt seem to understand the concept we are having difficulty with….gaining a rediculous lead over night when there are little to no enemies.

I cant believe he has completely oversighted this issue and pretended it doesnt exist, by portraying our suggestions as an attempt to stop players playing at certain times. ‘’Those people should be able to play anytime they want, just like the people who play during prime time.’’, what does this relate to? we are not shutting down the WvW zone, we are bringing to your attention the failure of the scoring system to realise when 100 are fighting 30, and failing to acknowledge the achievments of those 30 holding maybe even 2 or 3 control points on the map vs the 100 that simply faceroll every desolate objective.

Why are you rewarding the taking of an entire map against a handful of players by the ‘bigger’ server? Are you advocating alarm clocking? Are you advocating a rediculous level of hardcore rarely seen before? how about account sharing to ensure accounts are online 24-7? How is this different than one server having 166 per map and the others only having maybe 50 or less per map?

Points should scale accordingly.

Khyk.1642:

There is no solution to this because there is no problem. If you log in and the entire map is capped, then guess what – you get to play the hell out of some W3! You’ve got nothing but fun in front of you taking those things back. As MF said, W3 is a 24hr game and that is the nature and point of W3.

You are obviously one of the servers that is taking advantage of this relatively serious scoring issue, your response is completely discredited. The mechanics make you win, not your skill. You do not see an issue because you are blinded by your obsolete awesomeness. Get over yourself. It doesnt work. Do you actually enjoy fighting againt no opposition in your AM capping servers?

If arenanet do not think scoring is an issue, please take away the rankings. They only show how active a server is during the AM capping hours, nothing else. If you were conducting research there is a cause and effect, the cause here is AM Activity, and the effect is RANK due to inevitable points gained against what may be deemed NO OPPOSITION. GG Anet, you are showing us exactly what you have learnt from past 24-7 failures, nothing.

Our server is next to last on the leader boards (Devona’s Rest). We’re hardly taking advantage of anything. We fight for everything and we win it all back because we’re highly coordinated and play well with other guilds.

While your rant and personal attacks are an unfortunate side effect of your passion for this topic, I do like the idea of possibly scaling points based upon the numbers that show up. That being said, I think the servers balancing themselves out is still a work in progress. So, in theory, you should eventually be playing other servers that have low pop/ranking and get a better match.

Of course, if your server doesn’t show up for WvW then it doesn’t matter who you play, you’re always going to have this issue.

Luffy.3208:

So you are saying no matter what it will always be unfair there will always be time when you just cannot affect the WvW no matter what, and thus they should just implement a good system that tracks the most important stats of guilds/players and how much they have affected the point score. So you think it’s not about winning in general but rather the fact that all your effort goes to nothing?

Yes, WvW will always be unfair. Yes, you as an individual cannot always affect WvW (e.g. when you are asleep). What is winning? Winning in WvW to me is doing a good job at domination enemy groups/zergs or regions for the time I am in WvW. WvW itself is designed as an ongoing process that ends at some point in order to rebalance the matchup, but not because one team reached a specific score. If WvW was like sPvP with a winning condition, then yes you could win in WvW. Currently you cannot win WvW, only have a good time and show allies and enemies who is better organized and better at PvP for the time being.

Your efforts will go to nothing in WvW, whether you like it or not, only a complete redesign of WvW will make changes permanent. But permanence is not what WvW is about. A tracking system would show your performance and might reflect your efforts in a meaningful way.

Outnumbered?
Use a choke point and a ballista. You’d be suprised the amount of kills you will rack up, along with 1 other person AOE’ing.

Think it’s time zone?
Then come to the conclusion the world does not revolve around you or 1 group of people. Realize you might want to speak to all the people on your server via a VOIP or forums and organize (OMG organize) to have people in at all times of they day and night.

Or, try to work out with a few guilds on another server to come join yours.

Use challenges as ways to learn, not come onto forums and post multiple threads on WvW being “night capped”.

Yes it’d be nice for me to know that the next group of people coming in will hold off all I worked for, but if they don’t, or are unable to, I guess that’s expected with WvW being 24hours and many people playing, who work all times of day. (Not just 8am-5pm)

chili.9382:

Khyk.1642:

There is no solution to this because there is no problem. If you log in and the entire map is capped, then guess what – you get to play the hell out of some W3! You’ve got nothing but fun in front of you taking those things back. As MF said, W3 is a 24hr game and that is the nature and point of W3.

You are obviously one of the servers that is taking advantage of this relatively serious scoring issue, your response is completely discredited. The mechanics make you win, not your skill. You do not see an issue because you are blinded by your obsolete awesomeness. Get over yourself. It doesnt work. Do you actually enjoy fighting againt no opposition in your AM capping servers?

If arenanet do not think scoring is an issue, please take away the rankings. They only show how active a server is during the AM capping hours, nothing else. If you were conducting research there is a cause and effect, the cause here is AM Activity, and the effect is RANK due to inevitable points gained against what may be deemed NO OPPOSITION. GG Anet, you are showing us exactly what you have learnt from past 24-7 failures, nothing.

Could you post your bed time so Anet knows when servers should be shutdown?

I have been doing 3 shift work last ten years so I’ll be online different times every week and thats why I like games with 24/7 action.

Pawlegance.7012:

Yes, WvW will always be unfair. Yes, you as an individual cannot always affect WvW (e.g. when you are asleep). What is winning? Winning in WvW to me is doing a good job at domination enemy groups/zergs or regions for the time I am in WvW. WvW itself is designed as an ongoing process that ends at some point in order to rebalance the matchup, but not because one team reached a specific score. If WvW was like sPvP with a winning condition, then yes you could win in WvW. Currently you cannot win WvW, only have a good time and show allies and enemies who is better organized and better at PvP for the time being.

Your efforts will go to nothing in WvW, whether you like it or not, only a complete redesign of WvW will make changes permanent. But permanence is not what WvW is about. A tracking system would show your performance and might reflect your efforts in a meaningful way.

I totally like your way of thinking!

pheuno.3410:

I have been doing 3 shift work last ten years so I’ll be online different times every week and thats why I like games with 24/7 action.

Yeah, the only problem with that is that there is hardly any action at night. So all the more power to you if you enjoy banging on a door of an empty tower, but if you can’t see a problem then you’re just oblivious.

I respect that not everyone is a slacking student or a nine-to-fiver and they shouldn’t be shunned from participating and helping their server in WvW, but it shouldn’t be the determining factor. And, face it, you’re a minority. Don’t get me wrong, I want you enjoying WvW just as much as me, but the system currently fails.

Also to the guy who said you’ve got nothing but fun ahead against an all capped map; sure I enjoy myself a long and epic siege against a well fortified structure, but it still feels a bit sour knowing that structure is so fortified, because a group for whatever reason put on their nightcap.

Wrote a solution to that in my sugestion post:

2. So not one server get to big advantage when few players are playing add a % with point gained / amount of players, something like this: Start (0player) servers gain is 10% and then 1.5% / 1% players, with mean that when it is 60% or more the servers gain 100% of what they have, that way if 1server is full and the 2 other is empty on World vs World the servers will gain 33% * 1.5 + 10% = 60% (59.5% but counted up) so that server takes everything almost and have 800points they will get 60% off the 800points, that way it should not be as much o great the other server lead with 60k point in the morning.

i think i have a solution, how about capping the lowest server playing out of the 3 playing, say red team is lowest with 50 people on so green and blue has cap of 50 which the cap lasts for 30 mins and then refreshes so if more join and more people join and the lowest is now 70 then it caps to this then refreshes after 30min and repeats

or if lowest server has 50 people then add 10 % increase to others so it not too much out of favour and is playable, what do you guys think?

chili.9382:

Khyk.1642:

There is no solution to this because there is no problem. If you log in and the entire map is capped, then guess what – you get to play the hell out of some W3! You’ve got nothing but fun in front of you taking those things back. As MF said, W3 is a 24hr game and that is the nature and point of W3.

You are obviously one of the servers that is taking advantage of this relatively serious scoring issue, your response is completely discredited. The mechanics make you win, not your skill. You do not see an issue because you are blinded by your obsolete awesomeness. Get over yourself. It doesnt work. Do you actually enjoy fighting againt no opposition in your AM capping servers?

If arenanet do not think scoring is an issue, please take away the rankings. They only show how active a server is during the AM capping hours, nothing else. If you were conducting research there is a cause and effect, the cause here is AM Activity, and the effect is RANK due to inevitable points gained against what may be deemed NO OPPOSITION. GG Anet, you are showing us exactly what you have learnt from past 24-7 failures, nothing.

Can I ask what guild you are in Chilli – just that a couple of people have suggested that you are in a international Alliance guild on the EU servers – one setup pre-launch to cover all timezones with it’s own community pages/Server wide TS etc -

Is that true ?

Why a whole new thread for this? Why can’t we just keep it all in one massive thread, which is much more likely to get attention?

Can I ask what guild you are in Chilli – just that a couple of people have suggested that you are in a international Alliance guild on the EU servers – one setup pre-launch to cover all timezones with it’s own community pages/Server wide TS etc -

Is that true ?

I find natural guys from chili want to play on a spanish server and were looking for alliance with spanish guilds or others latino guilds on a spanish speaking server
Why would you have to speak in english during your freetime or play with american who have lot more cultural difference
Gaming is about fun but also breathingout.. Im not a spanish speaking native but it ll bother me to go on an english speaking server. Im not at work and im not paid to use more of my brain trnaslating everything in my mind for hours

Do what other servers are doing in this very forum; reaching out to the international guilds and trying to organize their efforts among their server community.

Shaking your fist at Oceanics or whoever is completely pointless. As are the “suggestions” for crackpot handicaps for players who play in off-peak times. Mike Ferguson has given the official response on the matter and pretty much said point blank WvW is a 24 hour, international event. You can either do what the successful alliances/servers have done and start working with the international community towards something positive or keep stomping your feet and getting nowhere.

The choice is yours.

Exewre.2837:

Can I ask what guild you are in Chilli – just that a couple of people have suggested that you are in a international Alliance guild on the EU servers – one setup pre-launch to cover all timezones with it’s own community pages/Server wide TS etc -

Is that true ?

I find natural guys from chili want to play on a spanish server and were looking for alliance with spanish guilds or others latino guilds on a spanish speaking server
Why would you have to speak in english during your freetime or play with american who have lot more cultural difference
Gaming is about fun but also breathingout.. Im not a spanish speaking native but it ll bother me to go on an english speaking server. Im not at work and im not paid to use more of my brain trnaslating everything in my mind for hours

I have no idea what your talking about – I m asking a player what guild he is in, have you quoted the right person ?

Not seeing a problem in need of a “solution” here. We dealt with this in DAoC all the time. It’s part of the game.

In real life, if you own a keep, you live in it and sleep in it. If the enemy attacks, you wake up and defend your life.

In WvW, if you own a keep, you let a couple of NPCs guard it and let you know when it’s attacked, so you can run back to it to defend it, if you feel like it. If you aren’t online, it’s just a free keep for the taking.

There’s no real solution other than turning WvW off, which obviously no one wants. You could dramatically increase gate and wall health as player numbers decline, although that can get very wonky when people suddenly join en mass.

A small group of 10 people can get things done, but many are very uncoordinated during the night. Also, a lot of Oceanic guilds participate during THEIR primetime, making it basically impossible to hold anything or make quick strikes at targets because the map is saturated with enemies.

It’d be nice if keep NPC numbers scaled to the population to fill in the gaps when there’s literally no one on, or similar.

Maybe making it so that the timer scores faster as more people are logged in (also accounting for population disparity) would resolve most of the problems.

Solution – Change the ways queues work to only allow in enough people to match the other servers. If server A has 50 people, Server B 20 people, then Server C with its 250 people trying to play only lets in 50 people and queues the other 200. Anet already has in place when you try to join that it checks the current players and queues if needed. In this case it would check the other servers players as well and only allow in as many to equal the most from another server. In this case Server B could lose a lot (Though possibly not as much) and the other servers would be fighting it out like we should see.

Whilst night capping is an issue, I think it is really a symptom of the underlying problem that holding the whole map when you outnumber the opposition is too easy. If it was really difficult to do, not only would night capping be less effective but server mismatches would not be so uncompetitive it isn’t fun.

Other than the basic system of giving points for holding capture nodes, there are several mechanics that have an effect on how easy this is to do. Orbs of power, supply and NPC factions, who help out teams who help them. The problem is that these mechanics all help out the team who is dominant, not those on the recieving end, so they perpetuate one team holding everything.

A solution I think may help is to keep the NPC factions the same when the match is balanced, but when one team holds say 66% of the map the NPCs become that team’s enemy and an ally of the others. So the teams that are losing will at least have a chance of holding a few supply camps and towers but the best team should still be able to hold the keeps and the towers that aren’t near the NPCs. There are a couple of possible issues with this such as when the losing teams try to fight each other, what do the NPCs do. Also there may be a situation where the winning team doesn’t want more than 65% of the map so avoid this mechanic.

Alternatively the same thing could happen but when one server has at least 66% of the players on the map. They could also make the underdog bonuses buff your stats rather than xp and karma.

Here’s my solution (posted in another thread):

In order to mitigate the effectiveness of “night capping” by servers with unbalanced peak times, I would like to suggest the following changes to scoring:

• Change the scoring interval to several hours, such as every 3 or 6 hours.
• Reward a team with points upon successfully capturing a stronghold (keep/tower/camp/etc).
• Reward a team with points upon successfully defending a stronghold (keep/tower/camp/etc).

Here’s what these three changes accomplish:

• Rewards teams for maintaining map control (on a longer interval).
• Places emphasis on capturing and then defending what you have captured.
• Prevents servers with unbalanced peak times from gaining a significant advantage from sitting on every point in all of the zones for several hours straight during their opponent’s off hours, essentially being “rewarded” for nothing.

My one solution:

Adjust the maximum player count in WvW based on server load.

This will:

Limit WvW to a test of skill and coordination, as opposed to a gimmick.
Assist in balancing out the server loads

Stay up later if you want to win overnight, problem solved.

stay up late. or recruit a night shift to your guild. is it that hard to comprehend?

it’s been mentioned many times already; use a sliding point scale. your team outnumbers the other teams by 5 to 1? you get less points than if the teams were equal. this doesn’t only apply to the night time, it can be in place 24/7.

how on earth you people think that capping an entire map without any opponents provides a healthy, fair, fun and competitive environment is beyond me.

Kaldurenik.1275:

You split scores into 4 times a day (or 3) Each “round” can be won and will give the team with the most score during that time 2 points. The team on 2nd place will get 1 point and the team on last place will get 0 points.
At the end of each round the points that you gain from capturing and holding locations is reset (Note only the score not the map itself). Then a new round being and the team that have the most points during that time will win the next round and so on.

I second this suggestion. This essentially means that within each 6hrs block, it doesn’t matter if you beat the opponent by 50k points or by 5 points, a win is a win. It removes the problem very effectively. The servers with night presence still have significant advantage (they get 1 or even 2 free rounds per day, plus if the opposing team is beaten back to spawn it is still an uphill battle to get out…which is a separate problem), but at least the game will not be over in 1 day.

All other suggestions I’ve seen are either discriminatory (lower points on non “prime time”) or exploitable (whatever that counts the existing population, e.g. the winning server can just log out to prevent the opponents from catching up)