Guild Wars 2

For starters, there is no such thing as “night capping”. Because there is no one singular “prime time” of day. That type of thinking, that level of self importance, IS a big problem. Think about this, a “prime time” is a small window of time lasting 12.5% of the day. Such a small percentage of time should never outweigh the other 87.5% of the day. Every minute matters and has to be equal to all others. Asking the Dev’s to meddle with the equality is asking for disaster to the mode.

This is going to be harsh but, let me round up the numbers and be blunt about what this thread is basically about. Players are saying, “We’re only good for 20% of the day and suck for the remaining 80%. Make us win still please Devs???” The answer from them should be a solid 100%, NO!

DeWolfe.2174:

Such a small percentage of time should never outweigh the other 87.5% of the day.

And with the exact same argument, such a small percentage of players should never outweigh the other 95% of the players. Why should the PPT worth of 10 players completely unopposed equal that of 200 players fighting same numbers?

Dawdler.8521:

DeWolfe.2174:

Such a small percentage of time should never outweigh the other 87.5% of the day.

And with the exact same argument, such a small percentage of players should never outweigh the other 95% of the players. Why should the PPT worth of 10 players completely unopposed equal that of 200 players fighting same numbers?

Any evidence to support your claim that is a small percentage of players? My experience suggest that the larger player count logs in through those times, only it is more spread out so that less are on at any one given moment.

dancingmonkey.4902:

Dawdler.8521:

DeWolfe.2174:

Such a small percentage of time should never outweigh the other 87.5% of the day.

And with the exact same argument, such a small percentage of players should never outweigh the other 95% of the players. Why should the PPT worth of 10 players completely unopposed equal that of 200 players fighting same numbers?

Any evidence to support your claim that is a small percentage of players? My experience suggest that the larger player count logs in through those times, only it is more spread out so that less are on at any one given moment.

US or EU? EU is much tighter in what primetime is (even on T1/T2), during a normal weekday all 3 borders can be completely empty in the night (or until 18:00 for that matter). The only thing running around is often a single borderhop commander. Hell it even varies by server, FR servers come out of hiding for primetime an hour later than everyone else for some reason.

For US, I can imagine its more spread out, with all the timezones.

I’m not a big WvW-player, i just do it for dailies or fun from time to time, but I think the problem is with severs with majorly players from one region, that play almost all in the same Timezone (i.e. players having similiar times they’re off-line because of work/education/life/sleep), like the FR and DE severs for example, being matched up with over-regional severs with players in different areas of the world (Russians and asians also like to play on EU severs for example), like the EU-wide servers, that have very different time-zones and so have it easier to mobilized bigger group of players during the non-peak-times of the DE, FR, ES servers.
the thing is, i don’t think this is so easy to solve, since you can’t forbid people to play in their free-time, just because their opponent is at work or asleep at that time.
It also seems to me (as I said, I’m not a pro WvW-player) like the national servers sometimes don’t even try anymore, when playing against the biggest EU-servers…they just do’nt do much WvW until the week is over…which is kind of boring for both sides.

One thing, that you could think about, even though it would be unpopular, would be to merge smaller national servers together. but even then you’d have the problem of the different timezones.
One reason the people playing on DE,FR,ES servers probably chose their servers, was that they can communicate in their native language and don’t have to type in English, so merging the different language servers to another EU server, would give a lot of backlash.
There are enough French, Spanish and German native speakers on EU servers, the ones that aren’t probably have a reason why they want to stay on a Server with another dominant language than English.

dancingmonkey.4902:

Dawdler.8521:

DeWolfe.2174:

Such a small percentage of time should never outweigh the other 87.5% of the day.

And with the exact same argument, such a small percentage of players should never outweigh the other 95% of the players. Why should the PPT worth of 10 players completely unopposed equal that of 200 players fighting same numbers?

Any evidence to support your claim that is a small percentage of players? My experience suggest that the larger player count logs in through those times, only it is more spread out so that less are on at any one given moment.

Jade Quarry, yes?

I play on JQ, FA, NS, and ET on the NA side. I have 4 EU accounts on different tiers as well. I have various friend I like to play with from my different out of game communities as well as several friends from my varies duty stations with the military after 16 years in EU on active duty. So I spread it out quit often. Why do you ask?

dancingmonkey.4902:

I play on JQ, FA, NS, and ET on the NA side. I have 4 EU accounts on different tiers as well. I have various friend I like to play with from my different out of game communities as well as several friends from my varies duty stations with the military after 16 years in EU on active duty. So I spread it out quit often. Why do you ask?

Try playing on DB and IoJ.

Wow I just noticed Kaineng is good ktrain for PST players! I got some account I need to level….

Oreithyia.3064:

the thing is, i don’t think this is so easy to solve, since you can’t forbid people to play in their free-time, just because their opponent is at work or asleep at that time.

Well, it both is and it isnt. You can think of a million different scoring ideas involving long algorithms and pages of rules or you could simply scale PPT based on current/total population. If servers score 100/100/100 because population is considered “low” and 200/200/200 when above “low”, I fail to see how its unfair to anyone. All it does is equalize PPT so that 1 hour of activity give the same points as 2 hours of inactivity.

lordkrall.7241:

There is no such thing as nightcapping. Ones night is someone else’s day.

how is there no such a thing?

EU is mainly +1 gmt thus if u take +1 gmt as prime time from let say 19:00 till 00:00 and after that u change the ticks in a way that capping stuff doesnt make the difference so much anymore it would be fine no?

if NA players want to play on EU i couldnt give a rats kitten about it, come ur welcome but if they only come to karma train at night which is again their choice (seems most boring choice ever) then they better go play NA no?

i mean WvW for me is just for the PvP just like most of FSP players we dont really care about PPT so much we prefer the fights but it doesnt reward us in any possible way..

on the other hand i dont really care about night capping much getting rammed down in ranks or going up i frankly dont care, only time i care is when our enemies have absolutely no chance of fighting us cus their servers are far smaller then FSP in this case..

so it will turn out in complete run over like we had 3? weeks ago or so which is beyond boring haaaai lets go to their keep with 10 players and take it away from them cus no1 even shows up anymore jup that was best WvW i had in my life…

if Kills would count more the servers would also balance it self out more…

if server X has tons of night cappers but barely any on in prime time then this server get downgrade together with other servers which ends up low pop servers get to fight each other with equal numbers, while their night crew is not making the difference anymore..

for example no offense to sea far rest players but these guys wouldnt be a T1 server if it came down to Point per kill, they used to have this night coverage to do their job at what they fail during prime time.

but like i said i dont really give a rats kitten about people capping during the night aslong i get to fight reasonable servers and not complete walk overs i have my joy.
but i would support if arenanet decide to change the system and would make capping outside prime time less effective.

And what about people that doesn’t live in the EU or NA timezones?

The world is not just Europe and North America.

reddie.5861:

EU is mainly +1 gmt thus if u take +1 gmt as prime time from let say 19:00 till 00:00 and after that u change the ticks in a way that capping stuff doesnt make the

Here is where you make the biggest mistake you could. Settling a prime time based on what you’re used is just plain wrong.
I’m from Spain and here the prime time is from 10pm to 3am CET. Then you need to count English and Portuguese people who live in CET -1. Then all Russian people who play CET +1 or even more. Then…

The same way you want score to stop after midnight, I want it to stop after 3am… Don’t you realize how selfish is this?

Ansau.7326:

reddie.5861:

EU is mainly +1 gmt thus if u take +1 gmt as prime time from let say 19:00 till 00:00 and after that u change the ticks in a way that capping stuff doesnt make the

Here is where you make the biggest mistake you could. Settling a prime time based on what you’re used is just plain wrong.
I’m from Spain and here the prime time is from 10pm to 3am CET. Then you need to count English and Portuguese people who live in CET -1. Then all Russian people who play CET +1 or even more. Then…

The same way you want score to stop after midnight, I want it to stop after 3am… Don’t you realize how selfish is this?

As far as I know the people in Asia also play on the EU severs relatively often and people from Korea for example are more likely to play on a EU-wide server with english as dominant language, than on an ES or FR server. So you got to count with much bigger timezone differences, in my opinion.

Ansau.7326:

reddie.5861:

EU is mainly +1 gmt thus if u take +1 gmt as prime time from let say 19:00 till 00:00 and after that u change the ticks in a way that capping stuff doesnt make the

Here is where you make the biggest mistake you could. Settling a prime time based on what you’re used is just plain wrong.
I’m from Spain and here the prime time is from 10pm to 3am CET. Then you need to count English and Portuguese people who live in CET -1. Then all Russian people who play CET +1 or even more. Then…

The same way you want score to stop after midnight, I want it to stop after 3am… Don’t you realize how selfish is this?

Indeed. That is part of the problem as I see it. Some posters seem to make the inaccurate assuption that what they see in their tier is what happens to everyone. There are what, 70 servers after the China release? So why posters think thier experience with 3, 6, or even 9 servers, come close to representing all servers, is beyond me.

dancingmonkey.4902:

Indeed. That is part of the problem as I see it. Some posters seem to make the inaccurate assuption that what they see in their tier is what happens to everyone. There are what, 70 servers after the China release? So why posters think thier experience with 3, 6, or even 9 servers, come close to representing all servers, is beyond me.

It doesn’t really matter that it’s only a problem in some tiers and not in all. The solution that was suggested to scale the tick based on active population means that the points are in relation to the amount of players that participate, so if your tier has coverage for all time zones it will hardly influence you, while solving a big problem for other tiers.

Macilien.3078:

dancingmonkey.4902:

Indeed. That is part of the problem as I see it. Some posters seem to make the inaccurate assuption that what they see in their tier is what happens to everyone. There are what, 70 servers after the China release? So why posters think thier experience with 3, 6, or even 9 servers, come close to representing all servers, is beyond me.

It doesn’t really matter that it’s only a problem in some tiers and not in all. The solution that was suggested to scale the tick based on active population means that the points are in relation to the amount of players that participate, so if your tier has coverage for all time zones it will hardly influence you, while solving a big problem for other tiers.

Indeed, scaling PPT based on population have nothing to do with timezones. Timezones are irrelevant. I fail to see why people keep bringing it up.

Macilien.3078:

dancingmonkey.4902:

Indeed. That is part of the problem as I see it. Some posters seem to make the inaccurate assuption that what they see in their tier is what happens to everyone. There are what, 70 servers after the China release? So why posters think thier experience with 3, 6, or even 9 servers, come close to representing all servers, is beyond me.

It doesn’t really matter that it’s only a problem in some tiers and not in all. The solution that was suggested to scale the tick based on active population means that the points are in relation to the amount of players that participate, so if your tier has coverage for all time zones it will hardly influence you, while solving a big problem for other tiers.

That is a suggestion, it is by no means a solution. It will do little more then drive players away from the game who cannot play on each servers peak hours. By demonstrating their efforts are worth lesser of a point value, and thus punishing them for it.

Part of the issue is that you seem to be unaware of what the entire problem is. You specifies “tiers” for example. Well if tiers had similar player distribution over similar times, the off time point accumulation wouldn’t be an issue now would it? the tiers themselves are irrelevant. The player participation imbalance throughout various time frames are what the complaint seems to be here. That is not a tier to tier issue, because if it was equal across a tier, their would be no complaint. It happens between servers within a tier.

The issue would be made worse with the suggestion your promoting. Forcing a lower value during another players time, because it is not consistent with your play time, displays an intended devaluation of the other players time online. Disincentivising their play time. All that does is make player outside of each servers so called prime time, lose their desire to play. Your suggestion will inevitably push players out of the game in my opinion.

dancingmonkey.4902:

By demonstrating their efforts are worth lesser of a point value, and thus punishing them for it.

I would argue that the effort of taking an undefended keep with 4 Omega golems in 5 minutes is worth less than spending 2 hours draining supplies, killing siege and just generally trying to get in a keep defended by 60 people, 10 arrowcarts, 4 trebs, 2 catapults and that one guy spamming emotes all the time.

But what do I know, nothing I guess.

dancingmonkey.4902:

That is a suggestion, it is by no means a solution. It will do little more then drive players away from the game who cannot play on each servers peak hours. By demonstrating their efforts are worth lesser of a point value, and thus punishing them for it.

Their efforts may be worth less than they are now, but the entire point of tick scaling is to make sure that every indivudual can have the same impact and those who can raze t3s while nobody else is around still are a great advantage for a server, because they don’t have to take these t3s while it’s heavily defended.
As it is now people who can’t play when their server needs more coverage are punished.

Part of the issue is that you seem to be unaware of what the entire problem is. You specifies “tiers” for example. Well if tiers had similar player distribution over similar times, the off time point accumulation wouldn’t be an issue now would it? the tiers themselves are irrelevant. The player participation imbalance throughout various time frames are what the complaint seems to be here. That is not a tier to tier issue, because if it was equal across a tier, their would be no complaint. It happens between servers within a tier.

From an EU point of view you can’t have similar player distribution over similar times due to the structural difference of national and international servers.

Dawdler.8521:

dancingmonkey.4902:

By demonstrating their efforts are worth lesser of a point value, and thus punishing them for it.

I would argue that the effort of taking an undefended keep with 4 Omega golems in 5 minutes is worth less than spending 2 hours draining supplies, killing siege and just generally trying to get in a keep defended by 60 people, 10 arrowcarts, 4 trebs, 2 catapults and that one guy spamming emotes all the time.

But what do I know, nothing I guess.

If you desire to discuss issues with siege, please make a separate thread for that.

The taking of a keep is the fault of the defending community. It seems irrational to me to justify punishing players for taking a keep, simply because no one arrived to defend it.

Macilien.3078:

dancingmonkey.4902:

That is a suggestion, it is by no means a solution. It will do little more then drive players away from the game who cannot play on each servers peak hours. By demonstrating their efforts are worth lesser of a point value, and thus punishing them for it.

Their efforts may be worth less than they are now, but the entire point of tick scaling is to make sure that every indivudual can have the same impact and those who can raze t3s while nobody else is around still are a great advantage for a server, because they don’t have to take these t3s while it’s heavily defended.
As it is now people who can’t play when their server needs more coverage are punished.

That is not their fault. That is the defending servers fault. Nor does a tower need to be “heavily” defended. As well, those who cannot play when their server needs defending are not punished. Because the rule set does not change in a way that targets them. The suggestion you are supporting changes the rules to specifically segregate and punish others for the playing the game, simply because it isn’t the same time you play. Unless you offer a solution that does not biasly segregate others, your are going to not only push players out of the game, but you will get heavy pushback. Perhaps instead of arguing this terrible idea, it would be best served to focus that effort on finding a good idea.

dancingmonkey.4902:

That is not their fault. That is the defending servers fault. Nor does a tower need to be “heavily” defended. As well, those who cannot play when their server needs defending are not punished. Because the rule set does not change in a way that targets them. The suggestion you are supporting changes the rules to specifically segregate and punish others for the playing the game, simply because it isn’t the same time you play. Unless you offer a solution that does not biasly segregate others, your are going to not only push players out of the game, but you will get heavy pushback. Perhaps instead of arguing this terrible idea, it would be best served to focus that effort on finding a good idea.

That’s like saying that banning cars from a marathon is punishing carowners when it’s the contrary, it puts everyone on equal footing.

I wouldn’t even care for points at all, but they determine our matchups and as it is now a very small group of players can make a disproportional amount of points resulting in matchups where one server dominates during a certain time, but can’t rise appropriately because another server can make just as many points with a much smaller force at another time, which results in matches that are extremely one-sided most of the time and no fun at all.

There are still so many people in this thread advocating for a system where PPT is weighted/scaled based on the amount of population that is currently online as a potential fix to the effect that “nightcapping” has on scoring. This kind of solution is highly imperfect and has the potential to cause a lot of unintended consequences, and you really need to address them if you want your idea to be taken seriously.

First, it disincentivizes actually playing the game if you are on a currently-outnumbered team. If you are currently vastly outnumbered by a team that has a very strong “nighttime” presence (I’m well aware it’s not nighttime for everyone, hence the quotes), you know that they are going to accrue a bunch of PPT no matter what. If you still decide to play, even while outnumbered, you will add to the total population in the matchup, and thus give a greater weight/scale to the PPT the strong team accrues. If you want to limit the amount of PPT they gain, you are better off not playing at all so that it is weighted less. That way your server has an easier time making up the difference during its “primetime”.

Second, WvW is not designed to be fair or have balanced populations all the time. Yes, your team’s strategic, tactical, and straight combat skill should be a factor in how highly you score. But success in WvW is also frankly a matter of effort, recruitment, and keeping up morale. Those WvW communities which do the best job at convincing their players to show up night after night (day after day) and play should be rewarded. Those communities which are more highly organized and manage to recruit populations during all time slots should be rewarded. This is a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week match; an ultramarathon, not a sprint. Weighting the PPT score based on current population completely negates this second aspect of success in WvW, rendering community efforts to recruit players from various time slots and to increase player turnout during a given time slot useless.

Third, a team’s time in WvW should not be more or less valuable to the score than another team’s just because they play at different timezones. A weighting system would mean teams that play “at night” are inherently less valuable to a matchup than those that play during “primetime” since they contribute less total PPT to the score for the same amount of time played. This has a significant negative effect on morale and just overall fun. As a competitive player, you want to feel that your time played is valuable to your team. With a weighting system, the value you add during your playtime is now largely out of your control, since it is dictated by the number of other players playing.

Ironically, it’s this third point where the current scoring system also fails. Unlike a population weighting system for PPT, where teams playing “at night” contribute less to the score than teams playing “at primetime”, the current system has the opposite problem. Right now, it’s possible for teams playing “at night” to rack up an outsized portion of their team’s total weekly score. This means that, effectively, teams playing during “primetime” contribute less to the total weekly score than teams playing “at night”; that their playtime has less value score-wise. And this has an effect on morale that we’ve all seen; everyone asking “why do you even care about PPT?” is basically echoing this sentiment, that the scoring system feels meaningless or that they don’t feel they make a valuable contribution to the score anyway, so why fuss over it.

The solution is not a population weighting system, which has the unique problems I identified in points one and two above, and in the case of point three (which it shares with the current scoring system) simply transfers the problem from one timezone to another. A proper solution is to find a way to value a team’s contributions in all timezones equally, while avoiding any unintended consequences.

The best solution I’ve seen that values playtime in all time zones equally is the some variation of the scoring periods idea, where a match is split up into several scoring periods per day, and winning the match is a matter of winning the most scoring periods. Because the PPT score is reset between scoring periods, winning the match cannot be accomplished just by having a highly populated team in any single scoring period. In the CDI thread about scoring changes we had almost a year ago, this was largely the consensus solution that seemed the most fair while retaining the best “unfair” aspects of WvW. I gave a detailed example of one variation of such a system here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Scoring-Discussion/page/4#post4474765

That said, there may be other solutions. But no matter what, if you’re going to continue to advocate for a population weighting solution, you need to address the three points I made above, because they are serious potential flaws.

lordkrall.7241:

And what about people that doesn’t live in the EU or NA timezones?

The world is not just Europe and North America.

Have you ever asked Anet that?

dancingmonkey.4902:

By demonstrating their efforts are worth lesser of a point value, and thus punishing them for it.

Do you have any evidence to back up your claim that non-peak player efforts are of equal worth to peak players? If the efforts are not currently equal, how do they become of lesser worth?

BrickFurious.7169:

success in WvW is also frankly a matter of effort, recruitment, and keeping up morale. Those WvW communities which do the best job at convincing their players to show up night after night (day after day) and play should be rewarded. Those communities which are more highly organized and manage to recruit populations during all time slots should be rewarded. This is a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week match; an ultramarathon, not a sprint. Weighting the PPT score based on current population completely negates this second aspect of success in WvW, rendering community efforts to recruit players from various time slots and to increase player turnout during a given time slot useless.

ooOOoo real talk!

I agree with you in this. But there’s a fault in the logic. You’re making an assumption that all the players have the same goal: to highly organize a single server. And yet we see that doesn’t always hold true; from the players who enjoy the feel of “winning” by ktraining to the GvG/fights players who don’t care about server organization.

Specific servers in this game have been trying to recruit for specific timezones since launch. There have been some successes here and there, but for the most part servers are still trying to recruit for those timezones, even in T1 where JQ always has had weak NA. Where are the players for those timezones and why don’t they want to go there? I suggest that they don’t want to be recruited. Now I’m not saying that PPT should be weighted, only going to suggest that the current scoring system contributes to players deciding not to be recruited.

BrickFurious.7169:

First, it disincentivizes actually playing the game if you are on a currently-outnumbered team. If you are currently vastly outnumbered by a team that has a very strong “nighttime” presence (I’m well aware it’s not nighttime for everyone, hence the quotes), you know that they are going to accrue a bunch of PPT no matter what. If you still decide to play, even while outnumbered, you will add to the total population in the matchup, and thus give a greater weight/scale to the PPT the strong team accrues. If you want to limit the amount of PPT they gain, you are better off not playing at all so that it is weighted less. That way your server has an easier time making up the difference during its “primetime”.

This incentive might be there, but only during times where one or two server clearly dominates the other, which are times with low population so the incentive is minimal and no bigger factor than players stopping from frustation by being rolled over.
If you want to further reduce this incentive you can add an offset of 10% – 20% even if no one is around.

Second, WvW is not designed to be fair or have balanced populations all the time. Yes, your team’s strategic, tactical, and straight combat skill should be a factor in how highly you score. But success in WvW is also frankly a matter of effort, recruitment, and keeping up morale. Those WvW communities which do the best job at convincing their players to show up night after night (day after day) and play should be rewarded. Those communities which are more highly organized and manage to recruit populations during all time slots should be rewarded. This is a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week match; an ultramarathon, not a sprint. Weighting the PPT score based on current population completely negates this second aspect of success in WvW, rendering community efforts to recruit players from various time slots and to increase player turnout during a given time slot useless.

While I think that the strategic element is important as far as motivation, training and recruiting (means activating the potential of the own server) is concerned, I doubt that it ever was intended that servers buy guilds from other servers to improve their coverage.
Having the point of view of a German server there are hardly any German-speaking guilds outside of CET-time zone.

Third, a team’s time in WvW should not be more or less valuable to the score than another team’s just because they play at different timezones. A weighting system would mean teams that play “at night” are inherently less valuable to a matchup than those that play during “primetime” since they contribute less total PPT to the score for the same amount of time played. This has a significant negative effect on morale and just overall fun. As a competitive player, you want to feel that your time played is valuable to your team. With a weighting system, the value you add during your playtime is now largely out of your control, since it is dictated by the number of other players playing.

I don’t see an issue there since each servers tick has the same weight. It’s the point of the scaling system that each player is valued equally.
The thing I see having a negative effect on morale and overall fun right now is doing well on an evening and see all of it gone when you get back from work the next day.

Ironically, it’s this third point where the current scoring system also fails. Unlike a population weighting system for PPT, where teams playing “at night” contribute less to the score than teams playing “at primetime”, the current system has the opposite problem. Right now, it’s possible for teams playing “at night” to rack up an outsized portion of their team’s total weekly score. This means that, effectively, teams playing during “primetime” contribute less to the total weekly score than teams playing “at night”; that their playtime has less value score-wise. And this has an effect on morale that we’ve all seen; everyone asking “why do you even care about PPT?” is basically echoing this sentiment, that the scoring system feels meaningless or that they don’t feel they make a valuable contribution to the score anyway, so why fuss over it.

Actually a weighting system doesn’t have to be linear, if the current system leans to far to one side and a linear system to far to the other there must be a feasible function in between. For the sake of simplicity I argue for a linear system but if you want to discuss math I’m up for it.

The solution is not a population weighting system, which has the unique problems I identified in points one and two above, and in the case of point three (which it shares with the current scoring system) simply transfers the problem from one timezone to another. A proper solution is to find a way to value a team’s contributions in all timezones equally, while avoiding any unintended consequences.

The best solution I’ve seen that values playtime in all time zones equally is the some variation of the scoring periods idea, where a match is split up into several scoring periods per day, and winning the match is a matter of winning the most scoring periods. Because the PPT score is reset between scoring periods, winning the match cannot be accomplished just by having a highly populated team in any single scoring period. In the CDI thread about scoring changes we had almost a year ago, this was largely the consensus solution that seemed the most fair while retaining the best “unfair” aspects of WvW. I gave a detailed example of one variation of such a system here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Scoring-Discussion/page/4#post4474765

That said, there may be other solutions. But no matter what, if you’re going to continue to advocate for a population weighting solution, you need to address the three points I made above, because they are serious potential flaws.

The first thing I noticed with your system is that it’s completely incompatible with the current rating system, the second issue I see is that it doesn’t make a difference between let’s say 3800/3710/3610 and 10000/570/550. Your system greatly favours coverage and thus works even more than the current system towards excluding most of the players of a server to have an influence on the final result.

Gideon Ravenor.5603:

I am currently on a server which is strong at prime. Often we can maintain a tick of 300+ and our enemies strugle to compete.

So if your server can maintain 300+ and enemies struggle to compete, it means your server is seriously over stacked at that time zone. So is it fair for your server to outnumber others during that time but not fair if other time zones your server suffer from lack of players? This posts comes out as, can we modified the game because it doesn’t benefit me.

I like the idea that ANet has advanced of a period scoring system per day. Lets everyone feel invested without making anyone HAVE to play dangerous amounts of overtime to keep up. For all I care it could be an hourly scoring system, which might even make the score more relevant for every sever’s coverage. Since NA prime could be dominated by EST or PST guilds.

Make it all or nothing. You win the period or you don’t. OR make it a 3 point period where 1st gets 3 points, 2nd gets 2 points, and 3rd gets 1 point per period. However you implement the system then you end up with NA, OCX, SEA, and EU being worth the same. I tend to lean to the 3 points hourly system myself, but any of them would be fine.

Another aspect of breaking it into hourly, or quarterly, blocks would be that servers couldn’t run up a giant score, and then just sit back and wait out the end of the week as easily.

More fights=more fun
More activity=more fun
Less runaway scores = more fun

Chaba.5410:

BrickFurious.7169:

success in WvW is also frankly a matter of effort, recruitment, and keeping up morale. Those WvW communities which do the best job at convincing their players to show up night after night (day after day) and play should be rewarded. Those communities which are more highly organized and manage to recruit populations during all time slots should be rewarded. This is a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week match; an ultramarathon, not a sprint. Weighting the PPT score based on current population completely negates this second aspect of success in WvW, rendering community efforts to recruit players from various time slots and to increase player turnout during a given time slot useless.

ooOOoo real talk!

I agree with you in this. But there’s a fault in the logic. You’re making an assumption that all the players have the same goal: to highly organize a single server. And yet we see that doesn’t always hold true; from the players who enjoy the feel of “winning” by ktraining to the GvG/fights players who don’t care about server organization.

Specific servers in this game have been trying to recruit for specific timezones since launch. There have been some successes here and there, but for the most part servers are still trying to recruit for those timezones, even in T1 where JQ always has had weak NA. Where are the players for those timezones and why don’t they want to go there? I suggest that they don’t want to be recruited. Now I’m not saying that PPT should be weighted, only going to suggest that the current scoring system contributes to players deciding not to be recruited.

I think we’re on the same page. And yes, the current scoring system rewards players for stacking an off-hours time period, so they don’t have much incentive to be recruited. I also understand that “off-hours” players probably want to play with their friends/other people, so there’s an incentive to form “oceanic servers” and “SEA servers”. I get that. I think a scoring periods type system like what I described would alleviate this to an extent, because stacking a time period loses some of its potency, while still allowing “off-hours” players that want to play together to ensure they at least win their primetime scoring period.

As far as a lack of common goals, I’d argue the current scoring system is at fault for this too. PPT is supposed to be the common goal, but the currently unsatisfying/somewhat flawed implementation of it has rendered it a four letter word among many (especially the fights/GvG folks). I have a feeling a scoring periods implementation of PPT would be more satisfying and might renew the fights groups’ interest in the score.

Chaba.5410:

dancingmonkey.4902:

By demonstrating their efforts are worth lesser of a point value, and thus punishing them for it.

Do you have any evidence to back up your claim that non-peak player efforts are of equal worth to peak players? If the efforts are not currently equal, how do they become of lesser worth?

Claims? You appear confused. I never made any claims my friend. I simply stated “in my experience……..”. I rather specifically qualified each post I made with one statement or another expressing that my comments were my opinion based on my experience.

As well, I feel your way off base to assume off peak hours players do not invest equal effort of peak players. There is almost always resistance. Similar to how you can be against much larger forces on various days in peak hours, there are fluctuations going all three ways in off peak hours.

Have you ever regularly played in what would be considered off peak hours on your server?

Whilst I welcome the message from John that they would dedicate development time to fixing nightcapping, among other long-long-long-standing problems, I have less than zero faith in Anet to fix it. I believe it is far too complex a problem, which is one reason they’ve left it so long to even address.

Macilien.3078:

This incentive might be there, but only during times where one or two server clearly dominates the other, which are times with low population so the incentive is minimal and no bigger factor than players stopping from frustation by being rolled over.
If you want to further reduce this incentive you can add an offset of 10% – 20% even if no one is around.

There’s a couple problems. 1) It’s still possible for even vastly outnumbered teams to do something useful in WvW (and they can often avoid getting rolled over). You don’t want to make their very presence potentially detrimental by inflating the enemy teams’ scores. And 2) perception is an issue. If a team thinks they’re going to be vastly outnumbered, and that by logging in they may inflate the enemy score, they’re less likely to log in at all, or hang around if they don’t see many teammates on initially. Even if enough people would have eventually logged on to put up a good fight. TL;DR: having any disincentive to play, even if it’s just for a small number of people, is problematic.

While I think that the strategic element is important as far as motivation, training and recruiting (means activating the potential of the own server) is concerned, I doubt that it ever was intended that servers buy guilds from other servers to improve their coverage.
Having the point of view of a German server there are hardly any German-speaking guilds outside of CET-time zone.

I mean, I don’t know whether it was intended that servers can buy guilds, but it’s not exactly against the rules. And I think my comment applies to recruitment and community-building in general, not just buying guilds.

I don’t see an issue there since each servers tick has the same weight. It’s the point of the scaling system that each player is valued equally.
The thing I see having a negative effect on morale and overall fun right now is doing well on an evening and see all of it gone when you get back from work the next day.

The problem is that WvW is not designed around each player having an equal value. The only reason objectives even have walls and gates is so that an outnumbered force has some advantages over a more populated force and can hold them off at least for some time. A 40-person guild may spend all evening holding and defending garrison and upgrading it to T3, only for 5 people with a golem to take it a few hours later after they log off (and no scoring system can change the fact that that will happen). I definitely agree that it’s not fun when you lose everything overnight, but a population weighting system wouldn’t fix that either, it would only prevent enemies from running up the score overnight.

Actually a weighting system doesn’t have to be linear, if the current system leans to far to one side and a linear system to far to the other there must be a feasible function in between. For the sake of simplicity I argue for a linear system but if you want to discuss math I’m up for it.

It doesn’t have to be linear, but even a linear weighting system is already rather complicated. The current system is simple: the more objectives you own, the most points you accrue. And when it comes from to a scoring system, simplicity is a good thing. I think anything more complicated than a linear weighting system would rule your idea out entirely.

The first thing I noticed with your system is that it’s completely incompatible with the current rating system, the second issue I see is that it doesn’t make a difference between let’s say 3800/3710/3610 and 10000/570/550. Your system greatly favours coverage and thus works even more than the current system towards excluding most of the players of a server to have an influence on the final result.

Indeed, the system doesn’t make a difference between those two, but that’s supposed to be the benefit of it. It means there’s no benefit to overstacking a time period. It greatly favors time zone coverage, yes, but since this is a 24/7 game mode I think that’s ok. I don’t see how that means that it excludes players from having an influence on the final result, you’d have to elaborate on that one.

dancingmonkey.4902:

Chaba.5410:

dancingmonkey.4902:

By demonstrating their efforts are worth lesser of a point value, and thus punishing them for it.

Do you have any evidence to back up your claim that non-peak player efforts are of equal worth to peak players? If the efforts are not currently equal, how do they become of lesser worth?

Claims? You appear confused. I never made any claims my friend. I simply stated “in my experience……..”. I rather specifically qualified each post I made with one statement or another expressing that my comments were my opinion based on my experience.

I didn’t address your “in my experience” line which is not even from the post I quoted. Nowhere in the post of yours I quoted did you qualify anything. You appear rather confused. I understand. In PvP parlance, your rhetoric style is called dodging.

Tell us how non-peak player efforts are of equal worth to peak player efforts in the current system. How is 30 players spending three hours to cap a single keep equal in points to 10 players capping an entire borderland in 10 minutes? Maybe you’ll have a leg to stand on when you say that weighting PPT by population creates inequality instead of dodging all the time.

Kaiser.9873:

I like the idea that ANet has advanced of a period scoring system per day. Lets everyone feel invested without making anyone HAVE to play dangerous amounts of overtime to keep up. For all I care it could be an hourly scoring system, which might even make the score more relevant for every sever’s coverage. Since NA prime could be dominated by EST or PST guilds.

Make it all or nothing. You win the period or you don’t. OR make it a 3 point period where 1st gets 3 points, 2nd gets 2 points, and 3rd gets 1 point per period. However you implement the system then you end up with NA, OCX, SEA, and EU being worth the same. I tend to lean to the 3 points hourly system myself, but any of them would be fine.

Another aspect of breaking it into hourly, or quarterly, blocks would be that servers couldn’t run up a giant score, and then just sit back and wait out the end of the week as easily.

More fights=more fun
More activity=more fun
Less runaway scores = more fun

I was thinking of something like this as well

I would be all for alliances (temporary server merge) or time slice wins. Both those ideas were accepted during the adopt-a-dev.

Both are pretty much a version of EoTM, which was good on paper but a few things killed it.. Map design, and linking it to the WvW servers via color coded matchmaking.

Chaba.5410:

dancingmonkey.4902:

Chaba.5410:

dancingmonkey.4902:

By demonstrating their efforts are worth lesser of a point value, and thus punishing them for it.

Do you have any evidence to back up your claim that non-peak player efforts are of equal worth to peak players? If the efforts are not currently equal, how do they become of lesser worth?

Claims? You appear confused. I never made any claims my friend. I simply stated “in my experience……..”. I rather specifically qualified each post I made with one statement or another expressing that my comments were my opinion based on my experience.

I didn’t address your “in my experience” line which is not even from the post I quoted. Nowhere in the post of yours I quoted did you qualify anything. You appear rather confused. I understand. In PvP parlance, your rhetoric style is called dodging.

Tell us how non-peak player efforts are of equal worth to peak player efforts in the current system. How is 30 players spending three hours to cap a single keep equal in points to 10 players capping an entire borderland in 10 minutes? Maybe you’ll have a leg to stand on when you say that weighting PPT by population creates inequality instead of dodging all the time.

I never said it was equal, it is irrational in my opinion to suggest that much is “equal” in WvW with consistent changes in the rivals player counts and professions they are using at any given moment. Not to mention the same happening with the population of friendlies. I simply suggest that as a general rule, your example is an unreasonable over exaggeration. On the 8 servers I play on, I have never seen 10 players have free reign to do that with out resistance, on any sort of regular basis.

I am not sure what your getting at about dodging, it is a major game mechanic, why wouldn’t I dodge? I am certain you are rather confused to suggest I need your approval in some form in order to have a leg to stand on though. I am simply speaking on my experience, your delving fairly deeply into rare and extreme hypotheticals and extreme hyperbole.

Anet should shut down WvW to prevent night capping… Atleast that way us Aussies can play without Americans screwing everything up as usual….

#AmIdoinitright?

dancingmonkey.4902:

Dawdler.8521:

dancingmonkey.4902:

By demonstrating their efforts are worth lesser of a point value, and thus punishing them for it.

I would argue that the effort of taking an undefended keep with 4 Omega golems in 5 minutes is worth less than spending 2 hours draining supplies, killing siege and just generally trying to get in a keep defended by 60 people, 10 arrowcarts, 4 trebs, 2 catapults and that one guy spamming emotes all the time.

But what do I know, nothing I guess.

If you desire to discuss issues with siege, please make a separate thread for that.

The taking of a keep is the fault of the defending community. It seems irrational to me to justify punishing players for taking a keep, simply because no one arrived to defend it.

Geez, talk about reading only what you want to read. I was comparing the effort to cap a defended keep compared to nightcapping empty keep. You said it was worth the same, I say not really. And you had to single out siege to respond to, lol.

You also seem to be intent on calling PPT equalization based on population a punishment. How is the servers being punished? All of them will score lower PPT at that point in time. The reduction is an equal percentage drop for the 3 sides. And the nightcap crew know perfectly well wtf they are doing, capping easy undefended keeps just to exploit PPT when no one is around.

dancingmonkey.4902:

By demonstrating their efforts are worth lesser of a point value, and thus punishing them for it.

dancingmonkey.4902:

it is irrational in my opinion to suggest that much is “equal” in WvW with consistent changes in the rivals player counts and professions they are using at any given moment.

You wrote that efforts by non-peak players would be worth lesser of a point value compared to peak players. To move to a state of being “lesser” implies moving from a state of equality between the two sets of players. To say otherwise is both irrational and illogical.

BrickFurious.7169:

Macilien.3078:

While I think that the strategic element is important as far as motivation, training and recruiting (means activating the potential of the own server) is concerned, I doubt that it ever was intended that servers buy guilds from other servers to improve their coverage.
Having the point of view of a German server there are hardly any German-speaking guilds outside of CET-time zone.

I mean, I don’t know whether it was intended that servers can buy guilds, but it’s not exactly against the rules. And I think my comment applies to recruitment and community-building in general, not just buying guilds.

What kind of sense does it have to recruit/buy a guild for a server, that for a big portion discusses tactics in a language they are very likely not able to understand.
German servers have a population that is for the biggest portion speaking German very good or is even a native speaker (or Austrian /cough). the most German natives live in the same CET time zone.
Of course the people could have discussions in English, but not everyone is that good in English or wants to use it in their freetime…and what would be the use of the DE-server anyway, if not make it easier to connect with people speaking your language and so make it easy to communicate with them?

littlemunster.1059:

So if your server can maintain 300+ and enemies struggle to compete, it means your server is seriously over stacked at that time zone. So is it fair for your server to outnumber others during that time but not fair if other time zones your server suffer from lack of players? This posts comes out as, can we modified the game because it doesn’t benefit me.

I’m not sure fair is the word to use rather I would say it is not enjoyable to fight an enemy that is weaker then yourself neither for us or them.
For me the most enjoyable experience is fighting an enemy of equal strength to yourself. I think we all strive to find a state where every timezone experiences such a situation. The current scoring system is flawed to some degree in this aspect and I am hoping that this thread paves the way for a solution.

Dawdler.8521:

I was comparing the effort to cap a defended keep compared to nightcapping empty keep. You said it was worth the same, I say not really. And you had to single out siege to respond to, lol.

I am sure he knew what you meant. I think they were using sarcasm to point out the effort your making to allow your bias to cause you to avoid having an actual discussion.

Your attempting to use backhanded comments at every turn. Why wouldn’t you compare night capping a defended tower to prime time taking an undefended tower. Is using 60 players worth of supply to slap down 8 rams and take a tower that is completely undefended, some special feat?

As a player who plays all hours of the day, I can tell you I take more towers and keeps, unchallenged, when I am pinned up and running a guild raid or as map pin, then I do I 5 AM pinned up with 6 players on me.

As a general rule, if it is way “off peak” time, when there are 10 players running around trying to cap a map, there are at least 5 trying to stop them. I have had just as much prime time unevenness with 25 players on one whole server and three maps queued on another.

You continue to argue from a point of dishonesty by repeatedly presenting no actual discussion, and using extreme hyperbole in scenarios as your arguments.

Dawdler.8521:

You also seem to be intent on calling PPT equalization based on population a punishment. How is the servers being punished? All of them will score lower PPT at that point in time. The reduction is an equal percentage drop for the 3 sides. And the nightcap crew know perfectly well wtf they are doing, capping easy undefended keeps just to exploit PPT when no one is around.

Well actually, your using the term “equalization” wrong. Your also making a fair amount of assumptions that are generally wrong in relation to map populations.

How is the server being punished? I wouldn’t say your bad idea to change the scoring system punishes a server, it just directly punishes players for not playing at what ever time you deem as deserving of a lesser score value per keep. Who cares if the score is “equally scaled” down for each server? Anyone who plays during the times that score is scaled down.

If we scale down your paycheck, are you happy with that as long as we scale down every one else, yet the people who work different hours then you continue to get paid more? I wouldn’t be happy with that. Unfortunately, you seem to think players worth and efforts are of different value for something as arbitrary as the time of day it is where you are at?

You keep bringing up some hyperbole about having no resistance during off peak hours. I always see as much resistance from my foe in off peak hours as I do during peak hours.

Chaba.5410:

You wrote that efforts by non-peak players would be worth lesser of a point value compared to peak players. To move to a state of being “lesser” implies moving from a state of equality between the two sets of players. To say otherwise is both irrational and illogical.

You do a fine job of both making a statement, and disproving it, in one post. Not sure where your trying to go with this, For one it is a fact that altering the score to scale to a lower max value is very much in fact, “lesser” value. Your comments do not reflect how math works.

dancingmonkey.4902:

There is no information to support your claim. My experience suggest that in the 20 off hours, near double the players rotate in and out of what you see in the 4 or so peak hours. They simply spread it out over 20 hours and do not stock pile their servers all in one short duration.

In matchups it is common for one server to tick for around 400+ for hours off-peak (which can be checked at sites like moz millenium), say 2am to 6am, when there are far, far less players on and populations at that time are often highly imbalanced, compared to say 6pm-10pm where tick is generally more even, because populations are more balanced at that time, because far more people are active, so those minority of players contribute a disproportionate amount of points, that is not opinion, that is fact.

dancingmonkey.4902:

You do understand that when you make declarations, unless you have any evidence to support it, that it means absolutely nothing right? Not only is the reply relevant, you declare that it is untrue, with no actual fact to support that. Remind me of those who were once putting people to death for disputing their claim that the earth was flat, with no evidence of that either.

You do understand that the above is a combination of unintended irony and empty rhetoric?

BrickFurious.7169:

There’s a couple problems. 1) It’s still possible for even vastly outnumbered teams to do something useful in WvW (and they can often avoid getting rolled over). You don’t want to make their very presence potentially detrimental by inflating the enemy teams’ scores. And 2) perception is an issue. If a team thinks they’re going to be vastly outnumbered, and that by logging in they may inflate the enemy score, they’re less likely to log in at all, or hang around if they don’t see many teammates on initially. Even if enough people would have eventually logged on to put up a good fight. TL;DR: having any disincentive to play, even if it’s just for a small number of people, is problematic.

Each player will contribute roughly one point to each tick and there are much bigger factors like fun or personal rewards that influences a persons decision to play. We even have a mechanic that is a disincentive to play, whenever you enter WvW you have risk to grant your enemy points if they stomp you and I never heard people complaining that they won’t play because of this.

In fact the far bigger problem is that the current system offers a strong incentive to play when you should sleep/work/go to school, because this is the time when you as an individual could have the most effect and I find this very unhealthy for WvW.

I mean, I don’t know whether it was intended that servers can buy guilds, but it’s not exactly against the rules. And I think my comment applies to recruitment and community-building in general, not just buying guilds.

The problem is that you can organize coverage only to a certain degree and especially EU national servers will have a hard time to cover all time zones no matter how much work you put into it.

The problem is that WvW is not designed around each player having an equal value. The only reason objectives even have walls and gates is so that an outnumbered force has some advantages over a more populated force and can hold them off at least for some time. A 40-person guild may spend all evening holding and defending garrison and upgrading it to T3, only for 5 people with a golem to take it a few hours later after they log off (and no scoring system can change the fact that that will happen). I definitely agree that it’s not fun when you lose everything overnight, but a population weighting system wouldn’t fix that either, it would only prevent enemies from running up the score overnight.

That is actually the point of a competetive system that each player has the opportunity contribute as much as any other player. Scaling the tick may not prevent t3s to fall to a few players but it prevents that the enemy server accumulates a big lead on top of that, so when the guild plays the next evening they see that their server still has a realistic chance to catch up.

It doesn’t have to be linear, but even a linear weighting system is already rather complicated. The current system is simple: the more objectives you own, the most points you accrue. And when it comes from to a scoring system, simplicity is a good thing. I think anything more complicated than a linear weighting system would rule your idea out entirely.

Why would simplicity be a good thing? The more accurately a player can predict the points he will get the more he may attempt to play the system instead of the game. The only thing the player really needs to know about the scaling is that more people means higher total tick, the actual algorithm used for the scaling is completely irrelevant to the player.

Indeed, the system doesn’t make a difference between those two, but that’s supposed to be the benefit of it. It means there’s no benefit to overstacking a time period. It greatly favors time zone coverage, yes, but since this is a 24/7 game mode I think that’s ok. I don’t see how that means that it excludes players from having an influence on the final result, you’d have to elaborate on that one.

My problem is that most people can’t contribute 2/3 of the day due to sleep/work/school and for a majority these 2/3 are the same, so even if they completely dominate during the 1/3 they can contribute they have no influence on the other 2/3 where they might loose the match to a much smaller force.

coglin.1867:

You continue to argue from a point of dishonesty by repeatedly presenting no actual discussion, and using extreme hyperbole in scenarios as your arguments.

Oh? I am trying to argue my idea while people like you resort to arguing me using fancy English instead counter-arguing the idea, other than saying it punish players – which I still fail to see that it does. With the current system, we already see servers with low PPT and I am fairly certain that the players on these servers feel more punished than the ones on the other servers with high PPT. A percentage change in this due to few being online wouldnt change where they are in terms of relative PPT, it would just flatten the wild curves we are seeing due to coverage.

If you want a down to earth common and exactly equal scenario other than population scaling, how about this:

At 17:00, there are 300 players currently online in WvW. Player A solo cap an undefended keep because he’s just that cool.
Server PPT is 300/160/240 (max PPT is 700 due to population being “high”).

At 17:00 the next day, there are 10 players online in WvW. Player A solo cap another undefended keep because he’s still that cool. Due to planets aligning, the relative PPT is the exact same as yesterday.
Server PPT is 150/80/120 (max PPT is 350 due to population being “low”).

Question: Is player A being punished compared to his activites the previous day? And if so, how?

@Dawdler

Wonder if ANet would change the Weekly Reset to an every 3 Hour Reset?

This would do nothing to discourage the Population Imbalance of Server Stacking…which could be the source behind Night Capping problems.

I still firmly believe the base WvW Map Mechanic needs to be changed.

However, it would provide a band aid response to people crying foul on Night Capping by changing the feedback timeframe on who is winning & loosing from a Weekly period…to 3 hours.

People finding their whole map flipped…can feel better knowing that they’re starting a New Timeframe on who is winning…so it makes sense to start all over again & recap things from scratch.

There…problem solved.

how gibberish, thanks obama.

coglin.1867:

For one it is a fact that altering the score to scale to a lower max value is very much in fact, “lesser” value.

But how? How are non-peak player efforts of equal worth to peak players? I keep asking this simple question but no one has provided a rational and logical answer yet. Instead they just dodge it like you’re dodging it now.

Yes, it is simple math. SMC is worth 35 points every 15 minutes. If your server is able to keep SMC for 3 hours for the simple reason that the opposing servers have only 5 players on trying to flip it and prevent upgrades compared to your 30, that’s worth 420 points. How is that in any way equal to SMC constantly flipping for 3 hours (12 ticks) between all three servers during a timezone where all three servers are of relatively equal strength where it would be next to impossible for one side to gain all 420 points?

Strategic and tactical skill during peak 3-way population times in capping SMC is demonstrated by which of the three servers is able to cap SMC the most before the tick over those 3 hours. The PPT system currently does not reward that. Instead it rewards the server that holds SMC for all three hours without challenge and punishes the players who play during peak times when forces are fairly balanced across all three servers in a timezone.

Diku.2546:

@Dawdler

Wonder if ANet would change the Weekly Reset to an every 3 Hour Reset?

This would do nothing to discourage the Population Imbalance of Server Stacking…which could be the source behind Night Capping problems.

I still firmly believe the base WvW Map Mechanic needs to be changed.

However, it would provide a band aid response to people crying foul on Night Capping by changing the feedback timeframe on who is winning & loosing from a Weekly period…to 3 hours.

People finding their whole map flipped…can feel better knowing that they’re starting a New Timeframe on who is winning…so it makes sense to start all over again & recap things from scratch.

There…problem solved.

The problem with that IMO is that it would water down WvW to just being a longer sPvP match. As it is now, “winning” may not matter to much but you can still feel the result, the excitement of working toward it. If we had 8 matches everyday, I think so many people would just go “meh this is lost, I’ll afk to the next round”. At least now we dont see that until thursday/friday, heh. This would be a fine hybrid gamemode idea between WvW and sPvP though (say 50vs50vs50 1 hour fights on a map the size of a zone).

Oreithyia.3064:

BrickFurious.7169:

Macilien.3078:

While I think that the strategic element is important as far as motivation, training and recruiting (means activating the potential of the own server) is concerned, I doubt that it ever was intended that servers buy guilds from other servers to improve their coverage.
Having the point of view of a German server there are hardly any German-speaking guilds outside of CET-time zone.

I mean, I don’t know whether it was intended that servers can buy guilds, but it’s not exactly against the rules. And I think my comment applies to recruitment and community-building in general, not just buying guilds.

What kind of sense does it have to recruit/buy a guild for a server, that for a big portion discusses tactics in a language they are very likely not able to understand.
German servers have a population that is for the biggest portion speaking German very good or is even a native speaker (or Austrian /cough). the most German natives live in the same CET time zone.
Of course the people could have discussions in English, but not everyone is that good in English or wants to use it in their freetime…and what would be the use of the DE-server anyway, if not make it easier to connect with people speaking your language and so make it easy to communicate with them?

If it’s true that most German speakers live in the CET time zone, then what does it matter if you recruit non-Germans for other time zones? You’re not going to be playing at the same time as them anyway, who cares if they don’t speak German?

When I was on SBI (US), we had a ton of Chinese and Korean players playing in the SEA time zones, many of whom spoke no English. No one cared, because there weren’t many English speakers playing at that time anyway.