Guild Wars 2

Whats up everybody. Lately I have been very active on this forum telling everyone whats wrong with WvWvW and in rare cases giving suggestions to fixing it.

In this thread im about to show whats wrong with WvWvW, nothing here is going to be opinion, its FACT, dispute it at your own peril.

Many popular opinions on this board seem to be that the match making will solve all our problems, server with equal 24/7 coverage will be matched against each other, and other misleading stuff.

First attatchment :

Graphs provided by arneanet. You can find them in this sub-forum right here.

I laid Vizunah Squares and Far Shiverpeaks graphs over and under each other for ease of reading.

In the graph I laid red boxes over 2 distinct times. First box covers 12.13 AM (13 minutes past midnight) to 10.36 AM.

Second box is alot bigger and covers more then 12 hours. It starts at 9/17/12 10.50 PM (22.50) and ends at 9/18/12 at 12.00 PM (Midday)

If you compare the graphs its easy to see that Viznuah Square has fills there borderlands ALMOST 24/7. The significance of the graphs are this : If there is a line it signifies a que, which in turn means that the borderland is FULL, if there is no line, there is no que, thus the borderland is not full.

For example, in the first red box you can see that Viznuah Square has over 150 people in que for eternal battleground at 3:13 AM while Far Shiverpeaks has no que at all. Many of these differences can be found in the graph. I trust you will examine the graph in your own time and see.

Now for the second attachment.

This image pertains to the ladder system, the ladder is taking from the sticky on this forum. I imagine the image is self explanatory in what it conveys, but you cant be sure, so let me explain.

The numbers before the server is the match making rating (MMR from now on)

MMR is not changed by points in WvWvW, it is not an average. MMR is a pure win/loss ranking system, it is not affected by points in game. Many people seem to think so, but its not, period.

As the image shows, middle servers do not move, the server that is in the middle can change but a middle server will always be the one matched against, one with a higher MMR and one with a lower MMR.

So why wont everything get fixed by the system? Why wont servers who have 24/7 coverage get matched against each other? Simply because the system cant account for that. As it stands right now most servers have found their stable MMR, and have found the most balanced match up for them. The problem arises from server like my own fighting another server with much more players 24/7, this is the problem with WvWvW.

The graph is the clearest indicator of where the problem lies. In player numbers. The only reason I included the rankings and such was to illustrate to people like eliteseraph why the system wont solve anything, it cant. Its not a problem of wrong match ups clearly servers are where they currently belong.

And that my friends is all I have to say. ArenaNet needs to find a way to fix this, most people dont want imposed player caps on WvWvW or several instance borderlands, we just want a way to have matches be more equal, as of typing this Vizunah Square have a 156,857 point lead, the graph shows you why, now its up to ArenaNet to find a solution.

Although I am generally inclined to agree with you, I need to say: correlation does not imply causation.

Good thread. I hope they figure out how to handle night capping.

Your night, is someone elses day.

Night capping is not an issue. The issue is, what you do during your day to make up for it.

testpig.5018:

Your night, is someone elses day.

Night capping is not an issue. The issue is, what you do during your day to make up for it.

Work?

During prime time, populations are balanced. There is not much you can do to “make up for it” during prime time unless you totally outclass your opponents in organization and skill.

Sweeping the map when your team is popcapped and the other two teams are running at 20% capacity requires no organization and no skill, yet counts for more because that’s generally about 16 hours of the day.

I’m on FS and don’t have a problem with nightcapping, we just need to figure a way to get some night shifts in as well and I don’t really see how Anet could fix that other than by introducing horribly OP outnumbered buffs (or rather debuffs on the server that has a huge population advantage). We’ve proven to be a strong server so we might be able to make some alliances with players from other time zones that don’t mind empty PvE zones during their playtime (personally I even preferred that for some time years ago in a game that had horrific spawn camping).

Slamz.5376:

During prime time, populations are balanced. There is not much you can do to “make up for it” during prime time unless you totally outclass your opponents in organization and skill.

Sweeping the map when your team is popcapped and the other two teams are running at 20% capacity requires no organization and no skill, yet counts for more because that’s generally about 16 hours of the day.

I mostly agree with this and the original analysis. This could be complete with actual numbers in wvwvw. Having no queue wait could indicate 80% capacity or 20% capacity, knowing that data would back you up more. It can probably be guessed from how long the no queue wait has been around. I could bet that less than 3 hours of no queue wait in a dip could still mean 80% capacity. 80% against 100% spread out over the map should (could?) still be relatively even. Or at the least, I would think 80% versus 100% could prevent full capping.

Looking at server’s that dominated but were in lower brackets (Eredon Terrace, Crystal Desert), they had near 100% capacity, especially compared to their competition (notably Isle of Janthir, Gate of Madness, etc). Even looking at lower tier domination (Yak’s over Darkhaven/Anvils), you see large differences in the shape of their queue waits. It will be interesting to see how they build the next matchups and whether they take this into account. The queue depths were likely influenced by the lopsidedness of the points, so they may not use it as much as we’d expect.

I think it should be ‘easy’ to bracket servers into groups: 24/7, peak hours, and under capacity. Whether or not they would like to do this long term will be seen. Incentives to move, at least to the grossly underpopulated servers, I think is likely. Once servers get balanced out and even the ‘worst’ server still has the characteristic 4 peaks of queue waits, I think we can expect better matches (each team gets at least 100k). 100k points to 150k, seems to at least indicate a front line that isn’t your doorstep (both teams have stuff to defend and attack). This is still only week one and they had little insight into this data, so it’s not surprising this happened. If they do matchups based on this, I would expect this week to be much much better. Balancing out server populations will allow more server permutations in the future, while now they are relatively restricted.

My biggest hope is that people don’t think wvw has large fundamental problems that can’t be fixed. This still seems like a pretty simple problem and they’ll handle it just fine.

“Your night, is someone elses day.”

Are you really that dense?
Ofcourse when we talk about “night cap issue” we meant what everybody knows. The ability to some server to conquer everything without any resistance.
And NO. we CANT deal with it simply because we dont have a population that is active during certain hours.
You either dont like fairness or you are too hipocrite to accept that the system, as it is, is clearly flawed.

Most people fail to see or mention the main causes to problem of night capping / and 24/7 full queue times: Free, unlimited server transfers and international server hopping.

The 24 hour restriction to free server transfer won’t do much to prevent bad server imbalances. ANet has to limit server transfers to 1 week.

Allowing international players to play on another region’s server also causes major imbalance in WvW results. Servers with little to no international players will most likely be dominated during their off-peak, AM, and work / school hours by severs with a large international presence.

ANet needs to rework their ranking system to include queue times and server population (including international players). Their current W-L points system is simply too flawed. WvW is all about fielding superior numbers and the number of available WvW players.

Couple of points:

- the graphs only indicate a queue. A map could be full with no queue, or almost full and not show up.
- the vast majority of people complaining about night capping are claiming that it is being done unopposed. The graphs do not show either way whether this is the case as they do not show population. If one server has 500 people in plus another 100 queued and another server has 475 in and no queue is that a night capping problem? The graphs do not say.

So overall the graphs are useful, but only when taken in context. Night capping is about the population INSIDE the maps, not those outside. You can make the claim that no queue means less people inside but you have no means to measure how many.

“Although I am generally inclined to agree with you, I need to say: correlation does not imply causation.”

Ya know, people that generally say that back it with opposing reasons. By itself that statement is irrelevant and empty pseudo-intelligent rubbish. The probability that the reason the imbalance is happening on many servers is due to a very faulty que system that was not designed well to do exactly why we have que systems; balance the load. They seem to have forgotten that the server load isnt the only thing needing to be balanced.

Tzash.5748:

Couple of points:

- the graphs only indicate a queue. A map could be full with no queue, or almost full and not show up.
- the vast majority of people complaining about night capping are claiming that it is being done unopposed. The graphs do not show either way whether this is the case as they do not show population. If one server has 500 people in plus another 100 queued and another server has 475 in and no queue is that a night capping problem? The graphs do not say.

So overall the graphs are useful, but only when taken in context. Night capping is about the population INSIDE the maps, not those outside. You can make the claim that no queue means less people inside but you have no means to measure how many.

Well, its not that black and white. For there to be no que, the borderland cant by fact be FULL, or rather it can be PRECISELY capped, but what are the chances of that when there is no que for 8 hours? Very slim id wager.

If there had been a 1 hour window of no que we could say that it has been at 90% capacity, but 8 hours with no que tells us that the borderlands are nearly empty. We dont know the turn over rate for every single borderland player tho, so its hard to say. Some stay in a borderland for 10 minutes other 10 hours. But what we do see is a constant que during those 8 hours for the other server meaning constant 100% cap in the borderland map, we can agree on that yes? If not then check the graph.

And to other people saying that Anet should match servers with equal graphs I would say that it wont work. In WvWvW there are more factors then night capping, for example, river side has similar cover 24/7 as Viznuah Square, yet Far Shiverpeak beats them, its also about organization and average skill of servers, the problem is not an easy fix. I hope arenanet sees this thread and reads the opinions of the people in this forum and formulates a strategy to fix it.

the correct term for the “MMR” is ELO ranking. ELO is not an acronym for anything. it’s literally ELO.

another kitten that doesn’t know a world exists outside america… get more “offpeak” countries into your server.

I find it kind of weird that OP shows us with red squares two nights when Vizunah had “night capping”, and doesnt mention all the other nights where the populations are more or less equivalent.
You can’t say that you have FACTS and that there doesn’t need any opinions with such a narrow study.

Arasuki, ELO rating is a specific system “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system” MMR is again NOT a specific system. We do not know if arenanet uses an ELO rating system we do know that there is a match making rating for every server tho, keep your stupidity to yourself!

Salnt, this is europe so im very aware that a world exist out of america, as im born and raised in a country thats not america. And getting more “offpeak” countries into my server is not something I can do, nor should I have to do so to fix problems in a game I have not created

Tygra, I picked those nights as they showed the biggest difference, if you look at the graph yourself you will find that every single night has a difference in VS favor.

Tygra.4570:

I find it kind of weird that OP shows us with red squares two nights when Vizunah had “night capping”, and doesnt mention all the other nights where the populations are more or less equivalent.

Those other nights you speak of? Weekend. Self explanitory.

Any further data we get from this matchup after last week is now completely useless in my opinion. Anyone one with an ounce of sense on FS is going to realise they don’t have a chance in winning with the current issues without something drastic happening, but hey, they could all be masochists, I don’t play there.

SaInT.5274:

another kitten that doesn’t know a world exists outside america… get more “offpeak” countries into your server.

This thread is about EU worlds. Quit embarassing yourself.

Have you single one proofs of a single canadiene guild? No.??

shut….

zarg.1853:

Have you single one proofs of a single canadiene guild? No.??

shut….

Have I said ANYTHING about canadian guilds? Shut up kitten, go re-read everything………………….

nilco.8457:

zarg.1853:

Have you single one proofs of a single canadiene guild? No.??

shut….

Have I said ANYTHING about canadian guilds? Shut up kitten, go re-read everything………………….

I address not has you but…,
Not on this post in the others you speak about it, 3/4 of your posts to pity you, my little furious Lol

zarg.1853:

nilco.8457:

zarg.1853:

Have you single one proofs of a single canadiene guild? No.??

shut….

Have I said ANYTHING about canadian guilds? Shut up kitten, go re-read everything………………….

I address not has you but…,
Not on this post in the others you speak about it, 3/4 of your posts to pity you, my little furious Lol

haha you are so cute, I adore you my little wine drinking frog eater :-)

han!!! i hate wine and frog but…l like english girl

/kiss

(I am of bad faith I know…but like troll

Doesnt matter much anymore, we look forward to crushing french all day long when we get some decent numbers inside WvW.

Thing is french think their special and good at WvW when they get kicked inside out by Desolation / Riverside / Far Shiverpeaks when numbers are even.

The only pain is that they get ranked #1 each week when in reality its those Hebrew Alliens capping at midweek that makes them win that spot cough cough.

if only we had a few guilds playing a midnight from monday to friday, if only other servers had that same advantage….you french would drop ranks faster then mykittenhits the bottom of the toilet.

Your guild Russians make him(it) they but well….

Very nice post, I have similar thoughts on night capping. The international server hopping isn’t helping either since the servers they hop to are the servers who already win meaning the servers who don’t always win are handicapped

If they balance the game on day to 500vs500 so balance it on the night or remove the 500 limit during day. Whats the diference?
And pay atention to EU servers arena net, they are not like the US and soon all ppl will be in USA getting those queues even bigguer. In USA its naturaly balance queued 24/7 so if they lose its because of skills and organization problem.
Far Shiverpeaks has a full server of ppl who works by day (northen europe those with jobs) and is marked as full so they canot recruit new players for night crews cause they are full.

Pay attention its your job not ours