Guild Wars 2

Someone do some digging and remind me what the point of this beta wvsw thing really was. Let’s just assume everything started with the pairing system 2-3 months ago.

I’m from Ehmry bay (so tier 4 i guess), and I woulda thought that the point was to:
-standardize the wvsw experience across all worlds
-reset the glicko/ratings/tiers of all worlds….everyone starts on the same level
-standardize/balance populations across all tiers
-balance the guild upgrades
-deeblobify the meta and k-training
-create ‘avenues’ for meaningful gameplay experiences for all players.
-do things, collect data then use it to improve upon those things before repeating them

Looking at the mode now…..this is complete bulloney! None of this has been accomplished in T4. None of this was accomplished for the first pairing period (forgivable as a starting point)! None of this was accomplished in the second pairing period (WTF IS WITH CD!?!?!? SERIOUSly!)!

You made it easier to k-train, easier to blob, easier to win by pressing 1 button. You made it easier for winning teams to steamroll. Harder for the losers to get back up. There is no changing in the matchups…..people losing will keep losing, people winning will keep winning. You haven’t learned anything from the first pairing period, u need only look at the second pairings for evidence.

I mean by that logic, can you really say that the mode has been balanced in any sense of the word since this ‘beta’ period began? I cannot.

It is worse now than it was before the pairing period started. We here on Ebay had different matchups all the time…we always had the chance to win and the chance to lose. And the result at the end of the week would lead ‘somewhere’ almost immediately into the next week. Leading to harder enemies if we won….or weaker enemies if we lost.

So what server and tier are you on and has ur experience been any different? Are you happy with the beta wvsw? Do you feel anet is getting data and applying what they learnt? Do you think they need more time to look like they are “getting data and applying what they learnt”?

If this was report card time. Out of the ABCDF ratings I would give you, anet, a….

D

I have 3.5 years of experience with wvw beta as it never hitted alpha. Most if not all changes benefits the blobs.

EBay actually won matchups in the last 6months without HoD?

Justine.6351:

EBay actually won matchups in the last 6months without HoD?

I guessing beating HoD back then didn’t count.

Cerby.1069:

Justine.6351:

EBay actually won matchups in the last 6months without HoD?

I guessing beating HoD back then didn’t count.

EBay beating HoD? eBay was always like 3rd lols.

it wasn’t ‘beta wvw’ it was specific wvw features that were being tested over the short term

reward tracks were a beta feature now they are a live feature
world linking was a beta feature now it is a live feature

Offair.2563:

I have 3.5 years of experience with wvw beta as it never hitted alpha. Most if not all changes benefits the blobs.

This is the way most (and maybe every) changes work in GW2. There’s a meta, things are tweaked, some are buffed, some are nerfed, and then the next opti build with the outstanding synergy comes, and everyone plays it.

Same for blobs : as long as things will add and/or stack, then blobs will be encouraged, because players will look for the quick and easy way.

Cerby.1069:

Justine.6351:

EBay actually won matchups in the last 6months without HoD?

I guessing beating HoD back then didn’t count.

EBay won matchups while linked with HoD.
EBay won matchups in T5 against SF, FC and CD prior the pairings.

Justine.6351:

Cerby.1069:

Justine.6351:

EBay actually won matchups in the last 6months without HoD?

I guessing beating HoD back then didn’t count.

EBay beating HoD? eBay was always like 3rd lols.

Not true, when we fluctuated between t4/t5 we usually would dominate t5 and come in second in T4 (not that we were that populated but often the two larger servers took a chunk out of each others scores). I don’t remember the last time we came in 3rd prior to the server linking (Mag/HoD maybe?) I am sure someone can remember.

To make it look like anet was doing something? Come on, too obvious lol

I would like to hear what ANET has observed and come up with at this point.

Some of us knew linking was fail sauce from the start and voted against keeping it. We had the vote to drop it or keep it. The vote to keep won and it is no longer beta. It just doesn’t work. Yay us the players for keeping it, wishing and hoping and praying it would actually work….

To a degree it works but clearly the 2nd linking did not follow the most up to date population data or take into account the large flux in players.
Maybe the 3rd will be the charm?

Liston.9708:

Some of us knew linking was fail sauce from the start and voted against keeping it. We had the vote to drop it or keep it. The vote to keep won and it is no longer beta. It just doesn’t work. Yay us the players for keeping it, wishing and hoping and praying it would actually work….

Excellent and extremely valid point. We only have ourselves to blame for voting linking in permanently. I was one who voted for it, and now I wish there had been an option to just merge servers…..that would have worked a lot better, imo, now that I have seen the unstable mess that linkings that change every 2 months has created.

Akkeros.1675:

To a degree it works but clearly the 2nd linking did not follow the most up to date population data or take into account the large flux in players.
Maybe the 3rd will be the charm?

We can always hope. But even if it does, it too will change in 2 months.

I don’t like the current links either. I for one didn’t vote on the links because I couldn’t decide, good and bad with both.

But that said there are still advantages to linking over merging, it is just that whatever you get will have consequences. No matter what people suggest or ANet tries to add to the game, will comes with good and bad, and someone has to compromise. (Recently that has been us, through the voting)

* Even if this current link isn’t working very well, the linking system does allow for re-linking every 2 months, giving us very different match-ups. Something that wouldn’t be possible with flat out mergers, as you know people would stack again and create new Glicko walls. (Granted Glicko needs to be changed for linking)

* Linking does allow to put enough servers together to compete against a larger/stacked server. If glicko didn’t fubar T4 right now, we could have seen how that worked.

Where Merging would once again leave us entirely at the mercy of server stacking. In the long run lead us to more stale match-up’s, tier locks, and the usual reject tier empty of folks (except me, as I’d transfer there).

While Server community isn’t exactly the largest thing right now, with mini EotM-Links (for some of us), Merging would be the final straw for that.

That being said, Glicko needs to change (or go) ASAP. I’ve also come to the conclusion that it is utterly impossible to balance population in this game, no matter what ANet or anyone else tries to do, a pile of fair-weathers just transfers around and mess it up, or just stop playing until they’re winning again. Short of stopping transfers, there isn’t a think ANet or anyone else can do to stop that.

I still think we should have used shorter re-linking periods up front to balance the pops and discourage the transfers of fair-weathers.
I.e. 1st 2 months = re-link every 2 weeks until pops find some form of harmony and mass transfers are discouraged due to only lasting a short time b4 they may have to transfer again.
Then, move to the 2 month cycle of re-linking once we have confirmed populations are consistent and stable as they can become.

Cerby.1069:

Justine.6351:

EBay actually won matchups in the last 6months without HoD?

I guessing beating HoD back then didn’t count.

Nothing prior to linkings counts apparently. SF for example, never won a T5 matchup when we’re were there from like January -March (I forget). Though we did come in second a few times when it was Ebay/SF/CD or DH/SF/CD and 1 maybe 2 weeks when it was FC/SF/X server, once again, I forget.

Anyway, there was a time in there, where we (or atleast I) felt bad for CD. Fast forward to present, DH…Seriously, that one week where you pounded us both into the ground, why oh why didn’t you pound CD harder? Hindsight eh?

Anyway again, to the best of my remembrance, CD, BP, Kain and ET have all made it to or above T3 in the past on their own, DH got there briefly (like a week before linkings), but think about those 4 servers, currently all paired together, in previous linkings were paired in higher tiers, seperately in the past have been in higher tiers and here the rest of us are….has SF, FC, GOM or Ebay ever been above T4? Was DHs first trip to T3 on their own the last major rise of an independent server?

Back on topic: The point of beta and subsequent approval of linking and delinking of T1 was to force all us that chose not to rise too quickly to be as miserably blobbed or blob as miserably as those that broke the system in the first place.

Would linking still win in the poll today, yes, but today, there are more people that would think twice before casting the vote…maybe

some tiers could have used the linking, some did not need them at all. i firmly believe there is too little effort going into these linkages (2nd link=blatantly obvious) and too little being done when they are clearly lopsided.

i would like to see some overall numbers being used to determine pops for each wvw server and how often they are using census data during linkages to find movement.

JQ owns T2
Mag owns T3
CD owns T4
Guilds own T1

See the beta worked=gem transfers for anet due to horrible state of servers/matchups.

Nah, game mode is a complete mess.

T1 is the most balanced this week but only because BG is going back into hibergate mode.

WvW is a dumpster fire.

Anet needs a month (or three) to gather data to determine if their changes are good or not. The people who actually PLAY the game need about a day….

Akkeros.1675:

I still think we should have used shorter re-linking periods up front to balance the pops and discourage the transfers of fair-weathers.
I.e. 1st 2 months = re-link every 2 weeks until pops find some form of harmony and mass transfers are discouraged due to only lasting a short time b4 they may have to transfer again.
Then, move to the 2 month cycle of re-linking once we have confirmed populations are consistent and stable as they can become.

interesting. I voted for every 4 weeks, but hadn’t considered dialing it back after a few links…

Linking, on paper can work, it just depends on Anet doing it properly. I think this comes down to knowing the servers instead of just reading data off the screen. Seeing that Darkhaven had just come from a poor linking which came in last in every match in the first set of links, I think we can all imagine they lost players and probably needed a break to recover from those losses, maybe linked with HoD instead.

Instead they gave them Ehmry who was winning with HoD, but quite frankly HoD did most of the work, no offense to Ehmry who lost guilds during that time and less regulars were playing. The 3 and 4 linked servers maybe could have matched up with just HoD/EB instead of DH/EB. The reason why they even threw that many servers in t4 is probably because of the complaints when the t8 servers were dumped into t1 with the first links. But that tier was poorly done this time around and players I’m sure were shocked to see it happen and probably could tell right away it was going to be bad.

What I expect from linking is either these two scenarios.

Balance every server population wise as close as possible so that every server will be able to have closer coverage and fights. Sounds like that t4 4 link could have maybe matched up against t2 or maybe t1 with their reported numbers early on. Problems with this is players who don’t want to be on packed servers, but even if the populations and coverage are closely matched, t1/2 guilds would probably demolish the t4 zergs/blobs. This scenario isn’t happening going by the 2 sets of links so far.

Second scenario, balance the servers according to their tiers, much as they were before the links. That means every tier will have less population overall than the one above it, but they should be close enough to the 2-3 servers they’re playing against. I know that’s difficult to do, and probably why they asked us if we would like more worlds as links so that it would be easier to build the jigsaw puzzle population with many more options. That 4 link just seemed a bit much this early on in linking.

At this point I wish they would just do away with glicko and just do the one up one down scenario for servers, enough of the glicko walls.

I’m sure at some point down the line they will consider doing away with servers and moving to the eotm alliance type of match making, whether by the way suggested in the forums to keep populations even on the new servers or by their own method. I expect links to be an experiment in trying to get populations closer without doing the drastic moves of hard merges or random eotm alliances, but eventually it will come down to that and I expect players will be more receiving of it now. Wvw isn’t growing from what I can see, it’s still dying a slow death in population, I don’t really expect that to change.

The server linking, when initially put in, was a good start, but clearly needed some tweaks before it was right. In true Anet fashion, however, they went in the complete opposite direction of what was actually needed and created a complete trainwreck. This isn’t anything new for them, they’ve been doing that since launch with nearly every aspect of WvW. Tier 1 at least has some semblance of balance, but..Tier 4 is a complete headscratcher.

Reward tracks are good, but… completely favor blobbing and k-training over everything else. (Something else that’s been true of most of the changes since launch)

Given that it seems people are warming up to the idea of megaservers, and Anet’s rather unscrupulous history of making bad changes to manipulate the playerbase into supporting the perceived lesser of two evils even in favor of any good alternatives, and that there’s been a noticeable reduction in communication, my guess is that they’re cutting their losses and riding this flaming trainwreck over a cliff to try to milk as much money from it as possible before the playerbase has stopped caring. Then they can make massive sweeping changes, and turn it into EotM 2.0, and it can just be yet another champ train map like most of PvE is anymore. The playerbase is reduced to nothing but mindless hamsters on a wheel, and they can go back to pumping out LS and cash shop items and it wouldn’t even surprise me if decided to try to package the previous LS seasons together and put them on the cash shop for 20 bucks.

It’s like the parable of the coyote and the scorpion. It was only a matter of time before everyone got stung. It’s just their nature, and their nature has been proven countless times without exception since launch. There’s no changing it. Trying to is a hopeless cause. They are what they are, and they’ve proven it beyond a shadow of a doubt at this point. Their pattern has been repeated a few times now. Ignore something until it affects their bottom line, then create a hype train, then completely botch the delivery, then go dormant again. Think back to every change they’ve made since launch and each one has followed that same exact pattern.

So…. to answer the question of the thread, the point of the betas was to try to stem the bleeding of profits by creating yet another empty hype train, sacrifice the long term health for some short term profit gain, botch the execution then go silent again. Simply another opiate for the masses.

Now, they can prove me wrong, and I’d be delighted for them to do so, but…. they won’t. This is their nature, and nothing can change it.

I love the fact that Anet completely ignores it’s player base. You didn’t get any answer. I do see Anet claiming towers and keeps for winning servers. I don’t see Anet owning up for the unbalanced matchups. Anet does not go to the servers that got destroyed by the beta. It seems Anet is content on steamrolling its player base that is down and ignoring all of us. I’m a Darkhaven player.

Jelly Pain.8027:

I love the fact that Anet completely ignores it’s player base. You didn’t get any answer. I do see Anet claiming towers and keeps for winning servers. I don’t see Anet owning up for the unbalanced matchups. Anet does not go to the servers that got destroyed by the beta. It seems Anet is content on steamrolling its player base that is down and ignoring all of us. I’m a Darkhaven player.

It would be nice of them to come out with a write up. Doesn’t have to be anything fantastic but could point out the pros and cons of the server linking. Just some type of update once in awhile with a clearly outlined work plan and organization, not “we have no eta” or “soon”. I just don’t understand how that is considered a professional answer, especially to paying customers. Anet just seems highly disorganized with no transparency about the future. You can’t just roll with it, players will continue to reduce playing time or worse, quit. Even the pvp forums are complaining balance, build diversity, player boredom, etc…..highly similar to wvw. It just seems in general the entire game is suffering. Though I understand players will complain about minor things but the complaints do have some validity to them when it comes to wvw and pvp.

However, the majority of us wvw players are dissatisfied IMO but I’m just one player. I can’t trust that servers like JQ, Mag, or CD are enjoying wvw right now. Some fights are fun, little roaming fights are fun, but the game mode is suffering horribly bad week by week. It’s gotten boring again and the hope for bringing more wvw players in doesn’t seem to be happening, unless others are seeing a massive influx on their server of new players, just not seeing it on my FA or SBI accounts.

That’s my salt shaker for the day

From what I have read in many posts in the forums there are no happy wvw players. Even servers that have the blob advantage get bored and complain about glicko. I didn’t feel that there was anything wrong with wvw before the blob beta. Seems to me if your players are not happy why punish them further?

Well, given the current state of affairs, I wonder if people who voted for 2 months or longer relink are regretting their decisions. I personally voted for monthly.

I voted monthly because not at all wasn’t a choice lol!

Jelly Pain.8027:

I voted monthly because not at all wasn’t a choice lol!

it was a choice. it was the previous vote to keep linking or trash it. many were way too optimistic in thinking that they would get the linkings right “next time” even though the first linking was poorly timed/based on out of date data/too simplistic..