Guild Wars 2

Phew somehow I had expected putting servers in Leagues in the Tournament would group us in somehow servers of similar stregth, to keep the WvW interesting. In reality, alas, the three servers are still VASTLY different.

The third ranked is usually MUCH weaker than the other two, and the First ranked is totally overpowering. It is so different and uneven matched that I wonder if the league system is even working at all? So far I didn’t notice any difference form the totally random system before. Both first ranked servers of the last two weeks seemed quite misplaced compared to my home server.

And doesn’t that sort of beat the sense of WvW, when one faction is so overpowering they can muster 4-5 times as many people on ALL maps, while our server just manages to have maybe one Zerg of reasonable size? If one server is so dominant that by Monday everyone else has gone, even the winner has a boring time and gets hardly any WXP anymore. So what’s the deal?

Sorry but the league system of putting servers together is TOTALLY out of whack at the moment.

Because of huge WvW population/coverage disparities, there are very few possible matchups for each server that are population-fair. So of course the Leagues was a terrible idea.

Yeah anyone that has had even a passing interest in WvW at any point over the past year would have told you this was going to happen.

Not saying its good, not trying to defend it. But honestly the only thing that surprised me about all this is that there are actually still people that are surprised by all this.

People complained that they were tier locked, especially when the matches were blowouts for months at a time, then came random matches, still frequent blowouts, now we got leagues aaand more blowouts! The very premise of WvWvW is flawed. It’s the number one reason I’m not going to touch that “Collaborative Development” debacle of a thread.

Ohhh, I get the big picture now. First it was the Tier system, where we climb up the rankings and were facing servers 6 times in a row. Then people whined there wasn’t enough shuffle so they introduced the randomness. Now there was a lot of shuffle but now there was huge blowouts because the ranking differed so much.

Then came the leagues where they try to control the disparity a bit. Next obvious step is to shrink the league pool size to 6 servers. The match ups will be still not good enough and then they shrink them to 3 servers and alas, we are back where we started.

Time to shuffle up again!

But yea, as Gennyt say, the system itself is flawed to favor the one who has more numbers. There will never be fair matches for such big group of servers where people seem to hop to another so much.

Devon wanted Variety over balance, while balancing would never be perfect it could have been alot better if he had listened to the payers. As it stands the Collaborative Development thread seems to be a flop, Devs are all over the other sections, while ours is ignored. So in short, why is anyone surprised that leagues are a joke with the current setup and complete lack of attention to what the customers are asking for ?

WWW is casual 24/7 game mode and still they wanna keep score. WWW should be about server resources. Maps should be much bigger and there should be places like dragonite mine, spirit wood mill and so on. Stronger server would try to defend these places and weaker servers could gather forces and attack. If you wanna keep score every server should be same amount players inside whole time. Otherwise score is just pointless and doesn’t mean anything.

I must admit I am not sure what to do besides a complete rework, either. shrug

And don’t forget about all the transfers before and during the season that are making those rankings worthless. It feels like an NBA league, where unfair trades happen during the course of the season that tends to benefit better teams, and hurt the weaker teams even more.

I’d like to see a combination of the planned Edge of the Mists (FAQ: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Edge-of-the-Mists-FAQ ) and a dynamic player limit on each map.

Right now, it’s clear and apparent, the highest population wins. This makes for long, drawn-out play time where you simply accept you are not going to ‘win’ most fights because the other server just has way more players in the WvW game at present.

My suggestion is start with a 100/100/100 base for servers (lets assume thats 100 players). Each server score effects the base with less numbers in high-score servers, and high numbers permitted in low-score servers.
Take for instance:

• 200,000 / 150,000 / 50,000 scores
  Proportionally, with set hard limits of say +/- 30% from the base, the split for each server would be:
• 100% / 107.5% / 122.5% player limits

With much higher stacked scores:

• 200,000 / 50,000 / 25,000 scores
• 86% / 119% / 125% player limits

Essentially, this is a Catch-Up game play mechanism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_mechanics#Catch-up
Yes you are limiting the servers who want to play more, by making them play less. This is obviously not desirable overall, which is where the Edge of the Mists maps come in to play. Right now, we assume there will be plenty to do in there. That’s the key point to making the player limit still be fun for all who do join in.

Since the EotM maps sound like they will be fun and active, with plenty of loot, I would also suggest a magic-find bonus seeded from the inverse of player limits. If you have an 86% player limit, offer 114% magic find bonus.

So this isn’t abating any of the inherent flaws in the ranking system, or server transfers, or even number of players. What it does is offer a softening effect to the massive disparity we see between servers, while still encouraging players to play.

Thoughts?

Paavotar.3971:

Ohhh.

People never asked for random matchups, what people asked for was a 1-up-1-down system. Winner goes up, loser goes down.

Or to put some nuance to the issue, people asked for the system to recognize changes within the ladder and the servers much quicker. So a server that lost a big chunk of WvW guilds wouldnt still be stuck against, now far stronger, servers for months on end.
But would far more quickly move down.

And similarly, servers that gained a boon dont dominate their peers weeks on end, but moved up much quicker.

That is what people asked for. Arenanet simply chose to ignore this request and threw in random match-ups. Which did nothing to solve the problem because with an unlucky dice roll you still end up getting blow-out matches.
I remember the majority of the matches we got were still with the same server we just spend fighting 3 months before.

Its the common case of Arenanet acknowledges a problem, then goes out of his way to fix it without actually just fixing it. This is particularly true in WvW.

biofrog.1568:

I’d like to see a combination of the planned Edge of the Mists (FAQ: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Edge-of-the-Mists-FAQ ) and a dynamic player limit on each map.

Right now, it’s clear and apparent, the highest population wins. This makes for long, drawn-out play time where you simply accept you are not going to ‘win’ most fights because the other server just has way more players in the WvW game at present.

My suggestion is start with a 100/100/100 base for servers (lets assume thats 100 players). Each server score effects the base with less numbers in high-score servers, and high numbers permitted in low-score servers.
Take for instance:

• 200,000 / 150,000 / 50,000 scores
  Proportionally, with set hard limits of say +/- 30% from the base, the split for each server would be:
• 100% / 107.5% / 122.5% player limits

With much higher stacked scores:

• 200,000 / 50,000 / 25,000 scores
• 86% / 119% / 125% player limits

Essentially, this is a Catch-Up game play mechanism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_mechanics#Catch-up
Yes you are limiting the servers who want to play more, by making them play less. This is obviously not desirable overall, which is where the Edge of the Mists maps come in to play. Right now, we assume there will be plenty to do in there. That’s the key point to making the player limit still be fun for all who do join in.

Since the EotM maps sound like they will be fun and active, with plenty of loot, I would also suggest a magic-find bonus seeded from the inverse of player limits. If you have an 86% player limit, offer 114% magic find bonus.

So this isn’t abating any of the inherent flaws in the ranking system, or server transfers, or even number of players. What it does is offer a softening effect to the massive disparity we see between servers, while still encouraging players to play.

Thoughts?

I can agree with that. Even sitting in the Edge of the Mists has to be better than the constant karma trains that are going on as early as saturday in some match ups.

Arenanet: Hopefully pride doesn’t stand in the way of reason. Not every idea works in practice.

Kilger.5490:

Arenanet: Hopefully pride doesn’t stand in the way of reason. Not every idea works in practice.

Are we playing the same game ? ;p

Of course pride comes before reason.