Guild Wars 2

A tournament season could be the highlight of the (half) year, but only if the teams are balanced.

There are mostly 3 servers per league on par, everyone else is just there to get crushed. And in most leagues the winner was clear from the beginning. This of course is a setting where any tournament is annoying and not interesting.

It has a reason why the number of member is fixed in any sports league. Who would be interested in watching a football game of 100 vs 10 more than once in a lifetime? (Once can be funny, but week after week?)

Please ANet balance the teams first, then make a next league

Tournaments only work with balanced teams, without any balancing factor in game design they only lead to more imbalance season by season, as more and more people are an annoyed being overrun and move to the winners, increasing imbalance.

Yup, the imbalance is harsh.

And this is the most balanced round in the whole season.

Next week will be the most imbalanced one.

Dayra.7405:

And this is the most balanced round in the whole season.

Next week will be the most imbalanced one.

Not in NA, there is only one really competitive match-up and one that is somewhat close. The rest are runaway victories… in fact there are only a couple competitive match ups for second place. Tournament = Joke.

This week is according to glicko, i.e. as balanced as possible, if glicko isn’t disturbed by transfers. Next week the Top Tier Server of each League will spread out to crush all Tiers. (Beside NA-Gold, which is different due to it’s only 6 server)

• Top-Tier Winner vs Mid-Tier-Winner vs Low-Tier-Winner
• Top-Tier 2nd vs Mid-Tier-2nd vs Low-Tier-2nd
• Top-Tier looser vs Mid-Tier-looser vs Low-Tier-looser

And EotM will be ugly as well,

• all Top-Tier Server of all (9 server) leagues will be green.
• all Middle-Tier-Server of all (9 server) leagues will be blue.
• all Low-Tier-Server of all (9 server) leagues will be red.

Glicko remains the first problem. Historic ranking does not mean a thing when massive player movement changes occur before the season (and even during).

Coverage still wins over everything else because winning is based on PPT. There are no bonuses for the underdogs/low population sides to score and catch up.

Forget glicko in this small sample size – it’s broke. Servers should be matched on the preceeding 2 weeks of server queue times/volume of queue. Weigh it more if one server has a queue when the other two opponents do not. Done.

Lastly, no week-in week-out WvWer cares not one iota about the rewards for the season. Remove them or add them for every week (what is the harm of WvW skins available all year long?)

You want people to care and participate in WvW seasons … change the rules. Change the landscape. Change the scoring system. Change it is no longer server based/you are assigned a team. Pair servers against other paired servers.

Win.

Balance will never be achieved. So instead of attempting to mitigate the imbalance, Anet has chosen to go ostrich and stick their heads in the sand.

There are several methods available to mitigate the imbalance but I won’t bother writing them because it would be a waste of time. Anet is not going to change anything about WvW.

They have failed utterly at WvW and now they’ve just thrown in the towel. Why bother putting development resources into WvW when you can just have “Seasons” and get all the achievement hunters out and pad your numbers so you can claim WvW is healthy?

Anet have said they never intended for WvW to be balanced and have no intention of it ever being balanced.

nirvana.8245:

Anet have said they never intended for WvW to be balanced and have no intention of it ever being balanced.

All the more reason why people (both players and developers) should stop treating WvW competitively and realize what it actually is; an intentionally flawed PvP format that’s only strong point is the social aspect, not the game mechanics.

Of course they could have designed something that works well both mechanically and socially, but they didn’t.

But hey, who cares about deserted maps, unfair sides, and one-sided uninteresting fights?

simply because incompetent people tend to stack on already stacked servers with looking for ‘better fights’ excuses.

human nature i guess

retsuya.4708:

simply because incompetent people tend to stack on already stacked servers with looking for ‘better fights’ excuses.

human nature i guess

Or some people want to play on servers that have activity outside of a narrow time window?

Anyways, GW2 will continue to get these ridiculous seasons because it’s the cheapest “content” Anet will muster.

retsuya.4708:

simply because incompetent people tend to stack on already stacked servers with looking for ‘better fights’ excuses.

human nature i guess

Human nature is one thing, the lack of any game mechanics to counter it the other. Season-rewards to even encourage it the third.

All together ….

You see it.

Why worry about balance when the royalties from GW2 China almost equal the money made by NA and EU combined. If anything, when profits start slipping bad, expect NCsoft to step in to get their board to examine the cause of the decline. Until then, Balance is not a top priority. Profit is.

if they really want profit, they could just make the servers that splatter competition and win every/most of the time cost more gems to transfer to. They have a metric (tournaments) every 4-6 months so they can reevaluate the costs then. People will still transfer despite the higher gem costs. The better a server does in the tourney, the more gems it costs to transfer there.

Why to ask so many times to balance a game mode anet stated during betas WvW wasn’t meant to be balanced (interms of coverage and ppt), they didn’t have idea to change the way it is, and after 2 years is still the same unbalanced game mode, and still there is no sign it will change in the next years?

Some of it has to do with the fact that “rankings” are based on the 75-80% of the year that “wvw doesn’t matter” then the rest (leagues) are formed based on those flawed numbers.

I would like to see a GvG Arena and a skirmish PvP Mode. First one would take some pressure of matchups because you don’t have to transfer to mess “with the best” and the second one is for people not really interested in WvW. Maybe something like a hybrid of WvW and EotM, a map like alterac valley (in Warcraft) with close combat, tower by tower…the new map looks like that.

This isn’t a solution but WvW wasn’t meant to be fair. It just takes a part of the pressure away. If there is no need to stack in one Tier for good fights, there won’t be mass-bandwagoning.

Ansau.7326:

Why to ask so many times to balance a game mode anet stated during betas WvW wasn’t meant to be balanced (interms of coverage and ppt), they didn’t have idea to change the way it is, and after 2 years is still the same unbalanced game mode, and still there is no sign it will change in the next years?

Maybe the players asking for balance realize that balanced matchups provide more intense gameplay, giving the players a reason to log in and play the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day.

It shouldn’t be too difficult for Anet to gather the data that proves or disproves whether close matches have more player-hours than blowout matches.

If WvW is not meant to be balanced and that imbalance is what is causing players to leave the game, I’d think (there I go thinking again), that Anet/NCsoft would want to change it. Driving customers away is no way to run a business.

Balance is not a on or off, but a continuum. And we do not ask for “Give us total balance tomorrow”, we asked for “put anything in that helps to improve balance”

But in fact we only got 2 things from ANet that improve imbalance:
- EotM removed queue pressure from overstacked servers
- Season-rewards rewarding overstacking

Dayra.7405:

Balance is not a on or off, but a continuum. And we do not ask for “Give us total balance tomorrow”, we asked for “put anything in that helps to improve balance”

But in fact we only got 2 things from ANet that improve imbalance:
- EotM removed queue pressure from overstacked servers
- Season-rewards rewarding overstacking

You forgot Bloodlust, which also rewarded and even post nerf still rewards overstacking.

Also there was pre-season 2 free transfers which only helped the highest ranked free transfer server, HoD in NA, but after winning silver HoD are now a few tiers lower.

After we finished the fairest round of season 3,
now for the basest round of season 3:

The top-tier servers of each league spread out to crush the rest.
Or will there be any surprises, i.e. not green will win? (Maybe Dzagonur in EU-Bronze?)

(Match prediction based on Season 2 matchmaking, colors: green-blue-red)

• NA-Gold
  BG-SoS-JQ
  TC-FA-Mag
• NA-Silver
  YB-SI-NSP
  DB-IoJ-HoD
  CD-DR-BP
• NA-Bronze
  GoM/SoR-EB-FC
  SoR/GoM-Ka-AR
  DH-SF-ET

• EU-Gold
  SFR-Elona-BB
  Deso-Gandi-FSP
  Kodash-RS-JS
• EU-Silver
  PS-GH-DL
  AR-AG-Arbor
  Aba-Vizu-FR
• EU-Bronze
  RoF-Dzag-WR
  MS-BT-Vabbi
  RoS-FoW-UW

And there is no escape from imbalance:
In EotM all Top-Tier-Server of all Leagues will be green (beside JQ-red due to the 6 server league), the middle tiers blue and the low tiers red.

WvW is on a downward spiral!

Just roll with it until something else is released because WvW will NEVER be like it used to, Anet just insists on crushing it patch after patch.

here’s an easy way for ArenaNet to enforce team balance:

ArenaNet should pick which server you play on. Want to play on another server with your friends? too bad, no transfers allowed, and you play where ArenaNet says you’ll play.

problem solved.

if you don’t like this solution, try to think of another one that prevents players from leaving understrength servers to bandwagon onto already-stacked servers, because this is what caused the imbalance to begin with.

-ken

Only way this will be solved is an iron fist.

If you haven’t been on one of the T1 servers for at least a year and a half, you and your guild get assigned to another server until the active populations of all tiers are relatively equal, with lower tiers still being lighter in players (so players can choose the number of opposition they want to face.)

Now that all tiers are balanced, transfers are managed like national immigration. You need to “apply” for transfer to a server, and if its active WvW population has room, you might make it in. Active population is weighted by number of players in a WvW match at any given time, not the total number of active WvW players. E.g., 1 player playing 12 hours counts as much as 4 players playing 3 hours.

We need anet to get in to the dictator spirit.

Fluffball.8307:

Only way this will be solved is an iron fist.

If you haven’t been on one of the T1 servers for at least a year and a half, you and your guild get assigned to another server until the active populations of all tiers are relatively equal, with lower tiers still being lighter in players (so players can choose the number of opposition they want to face.)

Now that all tiers are balanced, transfers are managed like national immigration. You need to “apply” for transfer to a server, and if its active WvW population has room, you might make it in. Active population is weighted by number of players in a WvW match at any given time, not the total number of active WvW players. E.g., 1 player playing 12 hours counts as much as 4 players playing 3 hours.

We need anet to get in to the dictator spirit.

Despite the tin-foil hat ramblings on this forum; I don’t think they really want to have that many people quit playing.

It wasn’t a 100% serious post. However players have consistently shown over the course of more than 2 years that they have no interest in creating a fun WvW environment and would rather ruin it for everyone involved.

It’s akin to when Brazil took some extremely drastic measures to stop their hyperflation back in the 90s.

ANet doesnt have to move people to reach balance, we already know 2 things that let people move on their own:

• rewards
• queue

So balance is as easy as that:

At any time measure how many people are in WvW or WvW-queue (not eotm) on each world and in total.

People on worlds that have at a time more than 110% of mean population get a fat red Overpopulated buf.

People on a server that has currently 150% of mean population that want to enter a WvW map go to an "overpopulation-queue* instead, i.e. how many people want to play in T8/9 influences how many people are allowed to play in T1.

People on worlds that have at a time less than 90% of mean population get a Underpopulated buf.

Overpopulated buf.: Only halve Karma, Exp, WEXP, Gold, baggies are earned in WvW and EotM, and on the right side a list of all servers with underpopulated but is shown.

Underpopulated buf: Double Karma, Exp, WEXP, Gold, baggies are earned in WvW and EotM.

After less than a month we have perfect (every server has 90%-110% of mean population) balance and coverage.

Maybe it’s a good idea to reduce the number of servers first.

Transfer costs can be equal and very low (e.g. 100-500 gems per transfer in general) only to generate income for ANet and to decay movements in general, the reward and queue system ensures the balance.

And if the system stays in place, we will keep balance, even when a server community implodes in dispute, it will be refilled fast by reward hunter.

because this bring more money to Anet from trasfers. why someone should transfer if its all good? Anet and have no interest to fix that even if they make a CDI to talk about population , thats why population will be always unbalanced.

strifer.7986:

because this bring more money to Anet from trasfers. why someone should transfer if its all good? Anet and have no interest to fix that even if they make a CDI to talk about population , thats why population will be always unbalanced.

Unhappyness due to queue and overpopulated buf, instead of overpopulated buf will cause transfers and with it income for ANet.

Dayra.7405:

strifer.7986:

because this bring more money to Anet from trasfers. why someone should transfer if its all good? Anet and have no interest to fix that even if they make a CDI to talk about population , thats why population will be always unbalanced.

Unhappyness due to queue and overpopulated buf, instead of overpopulated buf will cause transfers and with it income for ANet.

on a side or on the other side( becuase empty roflstomped server) … its always unhappinees that bring a player to transfer

For optimal income ANet should therefore
- make league with high prices for the first to generate over stacking movements
Followed by normal play
- with balancing rewards and queues as above, generating balancing movement.

Voila, steady income.