Guild Wars 2

I see a lot of people on the forums who keep repeating like a mantra “wait a bit, give the server ranking algorithm time to work and wait for free transfers to end, soon enough we will have perfectly balanced matches” etc.

It’s never going to work. You could give a billion years time to the algorithm to do its job and it still wouldn’t work.

The current WvW implementation creates an intrinsically unstable situation. Meaning every slight population imbalance quickly snowballs into unassailable leads. The only way to have balanced matchups would be to somehow miraculously have 3 servers who get to have the exact same population on all 4 maps at every hour of the day for a week (or 2 weeks when the matchups will last as long). It just ain’t gonna happen.

There are several reasons for this, and all of them have already been reported many times. Just to make a quick recap:

A) The system does not try to put itself back into an equilibrium state, meaning that whenever there is slight or no opposition even a very small force will manage in a trivially easy way to have a colossal impact on map state and that impact will persist for several hours (aka “night capping”).

B) Having bigger numbers is still too big of an advantage due to how quickly you can simply move a huge zerg over the whole map and the bigger amount of resources (not just dps but supplies carried, money gained from events etc.) the bigger zerg is continuously getting. Anti-infantry siege weapons are too weak and (especially) too fragile to counter this effect.

C) The stronger you are on a map and the more of it you control, the easier it becomes to hold all of it, leading to spawn camping.
Part of it is the speed of movement: there’s no penalty for “overextending” simply because you can reach any point of the map from any other point within 5 minutes, which means you really only need a couple zergs moving around to cover all your points.
Another part is that there’s absolutely NO “home advantage” to speak of so holding that keep/tower right in front of the enemy spawn is exactly as easy as holding the one in front of your spawn.

D) Orbs make the strong even stronger, while the outmanned debuff is nigh useless in helping fight superior numbers.

E) The linear accumulation of points during the week makes it painfully obvious which server is going to win right after one or two days, leading to reduced participation on the losing servers.

If these fundamental design points are not addressed, the matchups will keep being total washouts and WvW will die on all bar maybe a couple servers per region within a couple of months.

Ive learned the hardway that WvW is never going to be balanced the sooner people learn it the better people understand WvW.

Far Shiverpeaks has no night crew and loses all their bases in 1 night of sleep, its kitten unfair but nothing we can do about it but retake it during the rest of the day.

Free migration = deadly 1 hour queues are becomming 6 hour queues at prime time.
I left my Server Far Shiverpeaks for 2 reasons:

1. Queue time at prime was 1 or 2 hours, after the winning servers got posted it increased on a day by day bases, ive stood in a 5/6 hour queue at prime time…….

2. Fight versus servers that play WvW 24/7 made my decision final to move to USA servers.

What we are left with now is massive exodus to winning servers creating massive queues and massive destruction for WvW community’s that had a tight WvW alliance.

They cannot play together unless they abandon their own server to play on a low populated server.

Anet can never get this right it needs to played like it is, casual and hardcore shuffle the cards and hope for the best.

Imposible to queue up with a guild / full friends after a day of work, takes untill 22:00 hours to get inside WvW if you queue at 1700/1800 hours after you got home from work.

Give it time…….lots and lots of time

Great post, Magnus. You summed up my thoughts exactly. As a result of this terrible design, there is eventually zero incentive to fight in certain scenarios such as my own server’s this past week (Blackgate).

Crystal Desert is in first with 250,000+ points which increases at least 50,000 by the time we wake up every morning. Blackgate is in second place, but we are far enough ahead of Gate of Madness that we don’t need to worry about them taking second place. Why? Because Crystal Desert ensures that they don’t take second place by capping everything at night.

What does this mean? It means that literally no server has any reason to play World vs. World.
Crystal Desert is more than 150,000 points ahead of Blackgate due to late night zerging. There’s no way anyone is ever going to be able to catch them in score.
Blackgate, knowing that we can’t possibly catch Crystal Desert, is only worried about staying in second place. But we know that Gate of Madness, being so far behind us, don’t stand a chance of taking second place by the rematching.
Gate of Madness, being dead last with no hope of passing anybody by the time the servers are rematched, have no motivation to play because they aren’t going to be winning anything. Even if they could make a decent comeback, Crystal Desert would just zerg-rush everything in the night when nobody is online and nullify all their hard effort.

ArenaNet, World vs. World needs a change, and soon. This is ridiculous, and it’s never going to get any better unless you do something about it. Anyone else who believes otherwise is delusional, or on a top-tier WvW server with a a solid oceanic backing.

You’re right OP and I agree with you that W vs W will never be balanced.

Because it’s World vs World vs World with one Winner.

1. Winner
We won because we’re just better than the two other servers and we’re actually too low in ranking, that’s why we got paired up with these 2 bad servers. We actually should have been one tier up but because the other 2 servers were filled with cheaters and exploiters we lost our previous match of the week.

2. Loser 1
OMG server 1 are all exploiters and cheaters. I saw them even walk through walls with an entire Zerg to kill the Lord and take the keep. How can we defend if Server 1 can take keeps without having to destroy the front door. They also only play OP classes like Mesmers and Thiefs and they have hundredes of no lifes than can play 20 hours a day. We on Server 2 have families and we work and can’t be online more than 50 hours week so our Server will never be able to compete with those exploiters from Server 1. And please don’t tell me we should have worked together with Server 3 to beat Server 1. Server 3 are all imbeciles and badies and there’s nothing to expect from them. It’s like working with brainless NPC’s.

3. Loser 3
We’re last because we don’t have French speaking Oceanics that just recap everything we worked so hard for, between 20:37 and 01:43, when we are all asleep. And above that Server 1 and Server 2 worked together to make us lose because they know that in a fair and honorable fight we would always win. They’re just a bunch of noobs and I hope Anet is going to fix this otherwise we aren’t going to W vs W anymore if we have the same stuff in next game. We also saw Server 1 and Server 2 exploiting that well known bug so they could bring 50 more people than us on every map. And yes, we stopped doing W vs W after it happened again on Monday evening and night, exploits and night shift capping.

Good luck, have fun all

I agree on that sense that best that match makeup algorith can do is set roughly similar level of overall performance servers against each others – it is very similar to propability calculations, like interviewing 1000 people to create a behaviour-model for 1M people with just a margin of few percent. This should also in a longer run set against each other servers which have efficient night-capping and those with very low activity on night time.

So I believe it will prevent servers with constant high performance in long term to compete against those with constant low performance. But what you said is very much true, no possibility at least at this point to get into that level of calculations, too many variables.

Also I belive Anet has stated that it is not aimed to be balanced at all – there can be 100 person against 1. It is also about commitment and willingness to go for extra mile for server score – ok,naturally there are timezones but I doubt any serious guild is going to have any longer interest in wvwvw if all they do is log on empty wvwvw match and cap it fully from NPCs.

So shortly about inbalance of servers stated no A) I would say that…
Algorithm will in longer run set up servers with best 24/7 control against each others and servers with peak hour +/- 3 hours fighting against each others. It will never be totally balanced – thing everyone needs to approve. It is about going extra mile for score – staying awake on odd hours, control supply camp when others are zerging around to provide supply to towers, keeps and castle and so on. Which guilds/people get in, etc. So many variables.

About bigger numbers – it works, I have in best terms seen 3 zergs going behind each other cap after a cap indefinately it was hilarious but I tend to not fully agree about being unable to counter this. It takes immense effort to counter it but with tactics you can slow down considerably the enemy zerg. Lets say we have a 50 people zerg, when e.g a tower is capped and we know that enemy zerg follows in 5 mins we leave 10-15 peole there with 2-3 carts and ballista to defend and enough focus on ranged AoE damage you can considerably slow down enemy zerg – e.g. focus fire on ram users etc. It will change capping relationship from 1:1 to 1:2 or even 1:3 slowly making us cap faster and them slower us gaining foothold, I have seen it happen.
Another thing is that e.g. in EB adding catapults & trebus to keep close to own spawning WP covers closeby towers gates making it immensly harder for zerg to cap it and with proper defense it is very hard to cap.
So in my opinion it is not about neglecting a zerg – a good and organized zergs gets through your defenses for sure BUT you can slow them down considerably turning the capping rate against them or even crush them now and then between our zerg and defenses. And on gate 5% slowing team can jump from wall and move through closest camp to next defendable spot – very few will chase since they want to get karma, exp and gold from capping.
About siege being fragile – I agree again partly, have to e.g. wonder about cannons, they are just so easy to pick as well as oil pots but e.g. carts, there are places where you can hide them so that aoe doesn’t reach them and 2-3 with support of focus fire bursts usually slows down zerg forcing them either to withhold quite some damage (making them vulnerable for our zerg) or ranged assault.
Siege are easy to create so making them stronger would result pretty much unapproachable turning sieges only to max range siege assaults, thus removing IMO again one important of medieval sieges – rushing to gate through hailing storm of arrows, burning oil and so on…

I see spawn camping quite extrame and rare, it happens but mostly because people do not realize that there are 3 exits from own starting area (at least) – but if your server is low on numbers / organization it will be losing for sure. Still if you have some people around and you are organized you can yet again occupy something, build some defenses and delay enemy zerg again so that that 5 minutes mentioned on your example can increase considerably. Yes, they will take it back but e.g. if you are able to take few away from your spawn point zerg will go there to get some more exp, karma and money, meanwhile opening a spot to take closest tower to your spawning WP, it is usually rather easily keepable if there are some numbers in your side as well simply because our spawns come back considerably faster than theirs if they are tied to battle. And usually next to home spawn is easier to use landscape to your advantage, e.g. trebus on borderlands starting keep high walls to crush nearby towers defenses. So there are benefits from spawning point – landscape and fast spawn distance.
Also splitting to several 10-15 groups and hitting simultaneously few minutes before 15 minutes scoring moment will score us a bunch of points while enemy recaps them so that we have 10+ minutes to do that same again right prior the scoring…

I have to disagree a bit with outmanned buff as well – gotta love EB with outmanned buff – some NPC kills with that extra magic find, small event rushing with that karma boost – LOVE IT it certainly attracts me there, perhaps I am different.

About linear accumulation of points – here I truly believe match algorithm will help a bit and this statement really is something that would assume that zergs or people as majority care about score. Most of zergs you discuss about score is that it interests them around zero-level, they want just a lot of things to cap and if you get organized, large zerg with enemies 100% map control you are in karma-heaven my friend.

So I believe that is not our future, I mean that wvwvw will dry up. It will evolve, people will learn tactics, zergin will remain but there are things to do always and tactics to slow down and prevent zerging being ultimate weapon of wvwvw.

Very good discussion opener, love it although I don’t agree fully on these points, there is certainly room to make wvwvw even better but I believe biggest problem is that people don’t even try to prevent e.g. zerg being most efficient. You can hinder zerg, you can cap 2 in time of zerg’s 1, making you to be in lead all the time, etc.

I play for the enjoyment of being in WvWvW, winning or losing I’d be out there having fun.

Oh I agree on the fun part but that’s the whole point, it’s no fun going 10 vs 50, organization or not you’re going to get squished; neither is any fun logging in on day 2 of a 14-days matchup and know for a fact you’ve already lost.

I think most people who claim things will fix themselves up are not really understanding the magnitude of this problem. I’m on Desolation, the 3rd ranked EU server, and I can already enter borderland maps with zero queue and having the outmanned buff at 23:00 on weekdays. This means the exodus has already started and it’s already massive. And matchmaking won’t help a thing, because we ARE indeed the 3rd best server in EU, letting us drop a bracket will simply insure we steamroll the other servers. Matchmaking can’t help if there is no one of similar strength with which to match you in the first place, and given the current implementation, as I said, even the most ridiculously small imbalance snowballs into colossal point differences so it’s essentially impossible to find a server of “equal strength” because the operating window of “equal” is far too small.

100% agree with OP.

I love the concept of WvW and to be honest, it was the main selling point for me.

I’ve grinded thousands of hours in Lotr:O world pvp and I hoped GW2 would take a similar, balanced approach.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. I gave you guys the benefit of the doubt as it is a new release but instead of making it better you guys make it worse (week long matchups).

This is a bad joke that is making MANY great gamers second-guess there choice in playing Guild Wars 2.

Please wake up before it is to late ANet.

Thank-you.