Guild Wars 2

Hi all,

This is my idea to end the imbalance in coverage so that hopefully future seasons will be more meaningful for all.

Basically the idea is to group the current pool of 24 servers into 9 clusters of approximately equal player size. These clusters will be fixed for the duration of the tournament and will be considered a team (for purpose of aggro and chat).

(Obviously I don’t have any idea of the exact number of players in each server but just for example)

Cluster 1: BG,
Cluster 2: JQ,
Cluster 3: TC,
Cluster 4: SoS + 1 other server,
Cluster 5: Mag + 2 other servers,
Cluster 6: DB + 3 other servers,
Cluster 7: HoD + 3 other server,
Cluster 8: FA + 3 other servers,
Cluster 9: Remaining 4 servers.

(I thought of naming the clusters after the 6 human gods + Abaddon, Menzies and Dhuum.)

In the example above, aside from Clusters 1-3, the rest of us would have to learn to live and work together as server groupings to make things work out.

There will be no Gold, Silver and Bronze leagues. Only 1st to 9th place. The position of each cluster will rise and fall just depending on their performance the previous week. No Glicko stuff.

Across all clusters, the variation in total population should not differ by more than 20% (ideally even lower). I believe A-net can come out with a suitable algorithm to determine server groupings.

There will be 3 servers at any time in Blue, Red and Green. EOTM pairings will simply follow the cluster colors.

Sorry if this has been suggested before.

Season 2 is my first WvW season and I enjoyed myself when the numbers were almost equal. But when we were paired with a T1 server, we simply couldn’t compete. Figured this could help to correct that imbalance.

I don’t think I’ve seen this exact suggestion before. It would be great if something like this could occur but I don’t think it would be possible to estimate the populations on the other servers in order to group them together.

Another problem is that even grouping them together would give them no chance against BG, JQ and TC. Maybe SoS plus all the other servers. The reason is coverage.

Speaking of coverage, the groupings would be very heavy in the NA time zone and still be light in the rest. I even wonder if you grouped just NA prime players into 9 servers they could compete with the top 3?

There could be variants floating around but the gist is to even out the player numbers and hence coverage. There will be some odd combinations created to be sure. Some may have particularly strong coverage at a certain time zone and others may wind up having even coverage at all time zones.

As for not standing a chance against the likes of BG, JQ and TC, there may be some larger scale tactics that lesser populated servers may not be used to initially but evening out the numbers will give us the chance to adopt them or form a viable defense; as well as preventing us from losing simply due to overwhelming numbers.

(My server was in the Gold League. I’m only in WvW 4hrs a day but honestly, I’ve not really seen any inspired tactics from them in Season 2. It always just involved overwhelming numbers.)

Such clusters could even be maintained after seasons and periodically updated every few months to take into account player migration and the like.

A big part of winning a battle is having more people. You may not like that fact if your server is small or doesn’t focus on WvW (like mine), but it’s still true. So another way to handle imbalanced populations might be to leave the population itself alone, but look at the score as a ratio of participation.

See my idea here: [Suggestion] Publishing WvW Player Hours. This would tell you how good a world is per player-hour spent in WvW.

That won’t work as you’re ignoring coverage which is a more determining factor into who wins or loses. Larger servers can also usually gain a large enough lead over the weekend where they only need teams to go between servers capping stuff. This will keep their WvW hours low while maintain a high score.

Have you applied your suggestion to past results to see the outcome?

Ayrilana.1396:

That won’t work as you’re ignoring coverage which is a more determining factor into who wins or loses. […] Have you applied your suggestion to past results to see the outcome?

Thanks for your comments. I replied in the other thread to help keep things on topic here.

I’d had a similar thought before, but was never really aware of who had how many wvwers which makes it hard to determine how the various servers get matched up.

Obviously we don’t want to turn wvw into eotm (blob wise), but some servers definitely don’t have enough people to make things interesting. Personally, even though I don’t main wvw, if I look at the match up and see certain servers, I know we’ve lost, before the thing even really gets anywhere. It makes me less inclined to play because we’ve got about a snowflake’s chance in hell of actually winning. We definitely need something to mix the game mode up.

Combining a higher tier with a lower tier would actually make more sense, due to the fact that the coverage holes the lower tier server has would be covered by the higher tier. For example, JQ + CD, would give CD the off-hours coverage they may need, and supplement the NA coverage for them both.

If you did this up and down the line, you’d see far less coverage issues. This would also solve the problem that comes up when you just blob up mostly NA servers and pit them against the top clusters.

or you get randomly assigned to a server each time you log in.
nobody should have a choice in the mists
you best start believing in Mist Wars Ms Turner, you’re in one

or at least do this for a halloween update

I agree that it may not be as simple as matching total populations. It could also involve the number of active accounts instead of just total accounts. We also cannot account for individual skill, interest in WvW and that almighty ‘coverage’.

If something like this gets implemented, I will leave it to A-net to come out with the exact criteria.

But, I think that we need to start somewhere. Even ‘coverage’ itself is a function of population. A server with 2000 players may have some chance to muster up 500 players at any particular time but a server with 400 players will have no chance to get that number. So yes, although there are many variables, removing the imbalance in population is the first steps to evening things out, IMO.

As for the rest, servers within the same cluster must learn quickly to cooperate, learn to leverage their strengths and learn the blob tactics that the T1 servers are already familiar with. Perhaps, simply that I could get paired up in a cluster with one server this season and another the next could keep things interesting and could be a reason why some would leave the monotony (yet stability) of a current T1 server.