Guild Wars 2

So, we all know that some worlds manage 24/7 coverage, at least as compared to their opponents, gaining an overnight advantage.

I would suggest that tick rate is based on the current average population (this might need some weighting depending on the exact populations in each map and who holds how many forts/keeps/supply camps).

The basic idea is that if one world is dominating because they simple outnumber everyone else then they will do so with a reduced tick rate so they don’t gain as much score advantage as currently. The alternate idea is to have the score per Keep/Tower/etc vary based on average WvW population, but that’s likely more confusing.

Keep in mind that such a dominating 24/7 World would still start the ‘day’ hours with the advantage of owning most/all of the map, with keeps etc. all upgraded.

A variable tally time is just one step on the path to fixing the late night disparity in many WvW matchups. Some have disliked the idea due to the notion that it tells certain people who may only be able to play at X time, such as Australians or late-shift workers, that their contribution is less valuable. It’s not about the perceived value of the individual helping out the server, it’s about whether it’s fair that a server with a large late night (from the perspective of purely American servers, or purely European servers) population be able to utterly dominate the map and take control of every keep and tower practically uncontested, not because they are better, but because they have later bedtimes and are merely more populous.

We already see that Anet does not match US servers against EU servers. This is partially for lag’s sake, but even if you were to magically eliminate latency across the ocean, you would get tremendously unfun matchups where the entire map is practically guaranteed to fall into the hands of the US servers at primetime American time, and into the hands of the EU servers during the American morning. So it is with servers that have large Australian populations or have a playerbase large enough to support hitting the queue at night when other servers can barely muster 20 players per borderland.

So, in addition to adjusting tallies based on time (and population—more on that later) there should be some kind of shrinking of queues to match the less populous servers. Example:
Let’s assume that for every Borderlands, there’s a max pop of 50 players per server, and 100 per Eternal Battleground. These are hypothetical numbers. During the ‘day’, all servers are hitting the queue and have their 50 players in every borderland and 100 in the battleground, for a max of 250 people WvWing at any time. At night, Server Alpha has such a large population in general, or such a large Euro/Aussie/WeirdLateNightPeople population that they continue to hit their queue limit, while Servers Beta and Delta pull in 30/60 and 20/30, respectively. Realistically most people will jump ship from enemy borderlands to protect their server-owned BL or Eternal, but let’s forget about that for a moment. So what happens? Obviously, Alpha sweeps the entire map, holds it all for eight hours, and gets a hugely inflated point score. When Beta and Delta wake up, they’re not only way behind when it comes to points (and Orbs), they are fighting an uphill battle against what are almost assuredly a 3 Orb server with control of the entire map and at least T2 upgrades to every tower and keep. It’s going to take them a long time just to battle back from this, during which Alpha’s point lead continues to grow.

Now, if there were some kind of intelligent algorithm that could look at Beta and Delta’s population, note the time (4am), and decide, “Hey, this isn’t quite fair—let’s drop the queue so it’s 30 for BLs and 50 for Eternal,” eventually, through attrition, Alpha’s enormous zerg will diminish. They don’t need to be forcibly shunted out, just prevented from upkeeping their huge numerical advantage. It gives Beta and Delta a chance to fight on even terms.

It’s great for longterm WvW health because not only does it promote more intelligent matchups (face it—the best metric of server strength in WvW was who was leading between the reset and late night, not who was in the lead before the reset, when the late night advantage had already reared its head) but doesn’t feed into the vicious cycle of, “Oh, we’re losing in WvW, why would I even want to jump in there now and get zerged to death? Why do I want to spend money on siege when it will only get blown up by the zerg? Why would I want to upgrade this Keep before I go to sleep knowing it will almost assuredly be destroyed by the zerg within two hours because we have no defenders?”

The beauty of the system is that matchups where population remains high all day don’t have to be impacted by it. I’m sure Henge of Denravi has queues maxed out everywhere 24/7, and the servers they’re playing against likely do, too—in this instance, there’s no reason for the point tallies to ever slow for them, or for the queue size to drop at night, because the servers will always be matched evenly, population-wise. It is only those matchups where one or both servers are clearly falling behind in population at given times that the system should kick in and lower queues and slow tally times.

Capping the servers even lower depending on the population of lowest server would not be fun. Let’s say two servers without overlapping prime times go against each other. Nothing really changes but a lot less people get to play. In addition, population imbalance is part of the game which can actually make it more fun.

The issue is doing well in the absence of competition is rewarded the same as doing well with a lot of competition. So people who play on the off peak hours of the opposing server are more valuable than people who play on peak. They should be equal.

I think variable tick times based on server population is a good idea. I prefer the idea of awarding points for kills. Like having a counter and giving a point for every 800 or so kills. That would also slant points toward times of increased population. I also think increasing the strength of keep and tower guards would help a bit.

They do have to be careful with incentives too. Making the competitive times more rewarding could make queues a lot worse. Would leaving the match be more advantageous to playing when you’re getting demolished? The reward structure needs to be thought through carefully.

Every hour should be worth the same, it’s 24/7 and has been stated multiple times by the devs that it will remain that way. Unnecessary development time for something that doesn’t need to be fixed and is working as intended.

They could base it on population, and give bonuses instead of changing tick rates.

If you are outnumbered by 50% your holds should be worth 25% more, ending at 75% more when you are 100% outmanned. (0 for 25% pop disadvantage).

The bonus could easily be displayed and tracked. The bonus should be small enough that larger servers and pops still have the advantage for having more people. But they should be expected to expand their holdings.

Is this not what the outmanned buff is supposed to do? It does it by giving an advantage to underpopulated servers.

Giving undermanned people more power I believe is a better option than giving them more points.

Tweak the outmanned buff, don’t do a population based point buff.

I’m not talking about outmanned, thats a seperate mechanic.

I’m talking about total server population in wvw. Outmanned is zone specific and not applicable.

Scaling a bonus will help keep the scores more even overnight for servers that dont have strong night forces, if your enemy is taking things with little to no resistance, its not quite fair that they get more points for it.

If something like this were to be considered, it’d have to span all hours and not just NA off-hours. Servers in NA are not just NA servers, they’re the default servers for everyone outside of EU.

Also, it’d have to be balanced in such a way to prevent people from emptying WvW during certain times to purposely deprive the enemy of points in lieu of not being able to capture/defend objectives.

Anore.6213:

Capping the servers even lower depending on the population of lowest server would not be fun. Let’s say two servers without overlapping prime times go against each other. Nothing really changes but a lot less people get to play. In addition, population imbalance is part of the game which can actually make it more fun.

There is no universe in which being outnumbered 4:1, as can happen in WvW now, makes a competition more fun. And I reject the notion that lower caps make for less fun overall due to fewer people playing; the people in the populated zerg are steamrolling over what is essentially PvE content at this point, and the underpopulated servers are getting demolished without being able to put up any resistance. There’s definitely no fun on the latter part, and whether you can have “PvP fun” doing PvE is debatable. WvW already uses a Glicko system to create fair match-ups based on server ‘skill’, but what we see in many cases is that skill takes a back seat to population shift. I have been on both the zerging end (when there are no defenders to stop us and we take the entire map) and the opposite, and it feels unsportsmanlike in the first instance and infuriatingly unfair in the latter.

Would that I could interest more people in WvW, but instead we find that these late night map control switcheroos only discourage people from playing on the losing side, exacerbating the problem.

Nevron.9413:

Also, it’d have to be balanced in such a way to prevent people from emptying WvW during certain times to purposely deprive the enemy of points in lieu of not being able to capture/defend objectives.

I doubt it would end up being abusable. Since the system would set a minimum threshold for the queue size based on the lowest pop, you won’t run into a situation where there’s ten people per server on a map and besiegers can’t possibly defeat a ‘heavily’-defended position. A server with low pop on defense will still have fewer players; the disparity between the two forces will simply be not as severe. Instead of a 40 man difference it might get cut down to 10 or 15, which is much more manageable. As for emptying a server to deprive others, if you somehow miraculously convince your entire server to just leave WvW, you’re still stuck at a minimum for the queue size, so there’s going to be enough attackers to take everything back. That, and your server leaving the borderlands does not force the overpopulated server to get kicked out—anyone in there when the queue size drops gets to stay.

FxFighter.7824:

Every hour should be worth the same, it’s 24/7 and has been stated multiple times by the devs that it will remain that way. Unnecessary development time for something that doesn’t need to be fixed and is working as intended.

Actually the idea that WvW is “persistent” is a myth.

The server resets every two weeks — there goes your persistence. Thus, no great principle will be broken if the persistence over a 24 hour cycle is divided or reset.

And ArenaNet is actually incoherent on this particular point and needs to get their story straight, by answering these 2 questions:

1) Is WvW persistent, or is it not?

2) Is WvW a game for casual players, or is it one where 24/7 hardcore alliances dominate (as appears to be happening).

Clear up your thinking soon, or watch WvW degrade.

This really isn’t about hardcore alliances dominating. The servers where “night capping” is a problem are those that do not have alliances; if they did, they’d be matched up against other servers with them, and you could be sure these guys would keep the queues full 24/7 and territory would shift based on which server had the better “team” at any given point.

Unfortunately, on servers where population does drop off severely, it’s not about having the worst team—it’s about not having a team period. 20 incredible players are still going to lose to 50 in a zerg.

WvW is persistent… for x number of weeks at a time. If you want 100% persistence, you’ll be up against the same 2 severs forever. Having matches and resetting the maps actually is a function of keeping the game competitive. The idea is that within any given match it is 100% persistent, which is exactly the case.

As for casual vs harcore, it really is both. It allows casuals to enjoy, and it allows hardcores to be super effective. They never said casuals would be able to dominate, they said casuals could contribute and have fun. If you want a game that favors the truly dedicated and the casual equally, you’re going to need to play a game of pure chance, like something dice related.

That being said, none of that applies to the OP’s suggestion. While I’m not in favor of weighted times or taking steps to reduce the number of people playing at a time, some steps to seem to be taken to even out the servers. I do know that anet is practically begging people to switch servers and even out the population, which I think would be the most effective way to deal with it. Unfortunately, while people can switch servers at will, guilds can’t take their infrastructure with them from server to server, and I think that is what’s slowing server migration. If anet would allow guilds to wholesale move servers (just for a while, while the game is still settling in) I think that would go much farther toward easing imbalance.

Ok a few things

The difference between a variable rate based on server times and the system i proposed of a population based system are pretty big.

When you base it on server times you are being strictly unfair to people not in the prime of the server, what if your server and you opposing servers have similar off prime populations? The work they do in the off hours is mostly going to waste besides prepping for the ‘real’ times.

By basing the multiplier on population youre creating a system that can be applied to any server regardless of timezone. If a server is severely disadvantaged they only have to hold less objectives to get equivilant points, they can concentrate their population in 3 out of the 4 maps in order to hold as much territory as possible. While the larger server will be winning in total point gains, the gap between the servers wont increase as severely.

Basically if your server has it tougher in wvw, and you have less people to work with, you get more rewards for your server for accomplishing things. If the server with a concentrated Aussie population has a problem with it, they should switch servers and even out the night time populations so you reach population equivilancy so wvw is fair and fun at all hours.

Anore.6213:

I think variable tick times based on server population is a good idea. I prefer the idea of awarding points for kills. Like having a counter and giving a point for every 800 or so kills. That would also slant points toward times of increased population. I also think increasing the strength of keep and tower guards would help a bit.

If you reward based purely on number of kills then zergs will just headbutt other zergs all day long and not even bother with keep-taking as such. This would at least need to be “points per X kills within certain range of a keep held by one side of the kill”, so you can at least pretend to be battling over the keep you’re zerging outside of. Some way to only award the kills points if there’s real evidence of keep battling would be better. That’s easy if the attacking side takes the keep, they get the extra points then… but not so easy in the defence case, as you can simply get them for zerg-battling rather than defending a genuine attack (hmmm, make it trigger only if gates/walls take a certain amount of damage?).

Oh and ++ to Draygo’s post just above. This is why my OP was proposing variable tick rate based on populations, not purely on some time schedule. You do it dynamically so it fits any set of three worlds, not just what you think will happen.

I do realise now that giving points boosts to lower population Worlds is actually better, as it does more to level the playing field. Slower tick rates overnight might slow down the 24/7 World’s score, but would also slow down the others’ if they’ve managed to hold on to anything against all the odds.