Guild Wars 2

This is the score… I get it some servers are way better then others but seriously? There is no fun getting matched like this we have not even the chance to get out of our base most of the time. I came from FoW server cause there was no WvW on there (hints why they are always matched with the lowest 3) and the only server I had a chance to join that was not in an other language was GH. Its an amazing server met amazing people on there and we do have the will to improve and we got a nice community. But the past weeks we got matched against people with way more organization and also a way more people. We are constantly out matched (people + skill wise) and that buff when you are out matched giving you more xp etc its useless give us a 50% damage boost or something then at least we got some kind of chance, but whats the point in giving xp if you can barly get out of your base? At peak time we actually do pretty good but that is only for 3-4 hours a day. after that we are pretty much screwed and I go back to sPvP. We keep getting promised that they will put there focus improving WvW and its there main focus after HoT release, but right now its all sPvP and Raid improvements, where is this promised “MAIN FOCUS” on WvW? Its even in the sticky!

That’s nothing. Did you see the score in NA T8 last match?

Eredon Terrace: 39 323
Ferguson’s Crossing: 518 381
Devona’s Rest: 166 690

You know something is wrong when no one is playing WvW and yet there is still a PPT.

As long servers have different populations, there is only 2 possible matchups:

• one server in matchup is having much more or much less players then other 2
• the matchup is fairly equal but never changes, the opponents are exactly same for many months

You can easily find many forum threads where people complain about both situations.

In the 3 1/2 years I’ve played WvW, there have been exactly two (2) weeks where I was actually surprised by the outcome at weeks end.

All other weeks I’ve known – at reset – not only who would place first, second and third, but also, approximately, what the score separating each server would be…..

Far Shiverpeaks has the guilds, commanders and players to match T1 servers, what did you expect? As usual, the problem is coverage. And obviously Gunnar and Blobbadon are even worse in this matchup.

I play on FSP and in fact, I havent even seen GH players in their own border, let alone the others. All I have fought is mediocre AM blobs fleeing from FSP rabble a third their size and a few guilds.

These Mu blowouts are not really helpfull with the failure of new borderlands. Lots of people already gave up cause of that, now add this and you get even more boredom.

FogLeg.9354:

As long servers have different populations…

• the matchup is fairly equal but never changes, the opponents are exactly same for many months

This is not so much the result of servers within a tier having different populations, but servers in other tiers having too much of a different sized population. This doesn’t happen as much in EU as compared with NA where the population differences between tiers is much more pronounced. IMHO all servers within a tier should have roughly the same population size as servers in neighboring tiers. But with the way NA tends to stack into the winning server in a single tier instead of raising all boats, it just won’t happen in NA.

In EU the language barrier probably reduces possible server hopping. I mean most germans (not all of course) will play in DE servers, and French in FR servers. Also if you want to play in international/english server in top 10, there just isnt much to pick from.

World matching has to go. We need factions instead.

And alliances for guilds.

Guilds join in alliances to do content together in all 3 modes, alliances join factions in WvW, factions compete for world control.

Changing factions would be possible once a week, never during seasons (there would be warnings before so people prepare and join the faction they want), it’ll be easier to join ‘underdog’ factions with less population and score, and there should be some measure to encourage joining those ‘underdog’ factions and spread skill and population among all factions evenly.

MithranArkanere.8957:

World matching has to go. We need factions instead.

And alliances for guilds.

Guilds join in alliances to do content together in all 3 modes, alliances join factions in WvW, factions compete for world control.

Changing factions would be possible once a week, never during seasons (there would be warnings before so people prepare and join the faction they want), it’ll be easier to join ‘underdog’ factions with less population and score, and there should be some measure to encourage joining those ‘underdog’ factions and spread skill and population among all factions evenly.

Factions and alliances amongst WvW guilds already exist. The rush to T1 earlier in the game showed what factions and alliances would do. In a perfect world where everyone cared about competition this would be great. In our world where the only thing that matters is winning this will not work, and will only drive more and more people away.

GH is playing EB only while AM is capping all the borders except where FSP stops them. The scores dont reflect the manpower that much this week because GH plays only 1 of 4 maps.

Kaiser.9873:

[…]

Factions and alliances amongst WvW guilds already exist. The rush to T1 earlier in the game showed what factions and alliances would do. In a perfect world where everyone cared about competition this would be great. In our world where the only thing that matters is winning this will not work, and will only drive more and more people away.

No. You are talking about match manipulation. That’s not what I’m talking about.

The new desert borderlands has been pumping tons of Invisible PPT into the scores. If you want even higher scores, go speed up your yaks.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Phantom-Points-in-WvW/5755054

HoT release had a huge negative impact on WvW. A lot of people went to play PvE and those that didn’t ran into high costs for wvw upgrades and lack of players to play with. The changed reset time would also have had to do with it.

With the high reduction of WvW players, servers that used to be locked are now open and this probably caused players and entire guilds to move as well.

Because of these huge changes to WvW (direct and indirect), the ranking system will have to resolve itself and that might take a while.

MithranArkanere.8957:

Kaiser.9873:

[…]

Factions and alliances amongst WvW guilds already exist. The rush to T1 earlier in the game showed what factions and alliances would do. In a perfect world where everyone cared about competition this would be great. In our world where the only thing that matters is winning this will not work, and will only drive more and more people away.

No. You are talking about match manipulation. That’s not what I’m talking about.

It would be worse due to people not having to pay to transfer. Do you really think for an instant that the top end WvW guilds would spread out evenly? There would be some outliers, and I do think the GvG guilds would probably spread out a bit, but there is almost zero incentive now to spread out except for fights. That would only last until the true top end WvW guilds established some hierarchy among themselves, and then you would see a meeting of like-minded GMs getting together to REALLY manipulate matches.

I wouldn’t mind seeing ANet force three realms similar to DAoC, but their metrics better be spot on. There could not be server transfers in this iteration of the game, and I doubt ANet would go for losing that money maker.

Kaiser.9873:

[…]

Having a gem cost doesn’t really prevent it. It just keeps things stale. Players interested in WvW either switch to a world doing better if they can afford it, or stay in their own. And some worlds have a fixed language, and people simply can’t leave them if they want to stay in a world with that official language.

I think that Rather than focusing on keeping people in a world, the focus should be on coming up with ways that may work to spread populations and skill levels evenly.

There could be measures to encourage people to stay in ‘underdog’ factions. There’s always lazy players that jump ship to the sides doing better to have others do all the work for them, but more skilled players can do well while being outnumbered (we all have seem great WvW outnumbered matches). With a good incentive, we’ll have an alliance filled with traitors that jumped there expecting an easy win being thrashed by smaller factions filled with the skilled players who left that very faction. That would serve such traitors right.

There could be a little competition within each faction. Being the most scoring of your own faction could net additional rewards. Some players would avoid the most skilled ones and switch to factions in which they have a better chance at being the best of the faction, instead having all best players in one.

There could also be measures to stick with your faction. Loyalty rewards. So in the long term being a traitor gets you less rewards. In some cases even less than losing while being loyal. So people isn’t stuck to a faction permanently and they can switch without losing loyalty, there could be a ‘grace period’ 1-2 times a year between seasons, so someone who wants to join their friends in a different faction doesn’t lose too much loyalty when switching to their friend’s faction.

Choosing the faction could be limited or even impossible in some cases. Each faction could have a ‘weight’ or ‘rating’ that increases as players join them. Based on individual player and alliance stats. If a faction would has too much weight compared with the lowest one after you join, joining that faction would then simply not happen.

There could be a mercenary/mentor system that lets you participate in matches of factions sharing your team color when your own maps are full. Higher skill players could go there and help them or event teach them so they get better. And the score of all factions sharing your team color could improve each individual score, so the better each one does the better all do. The Mercenaries in exchange bet bonus rewards and WXP while helping.

One could spend months coming up with small features to encourage sticking to certain sides, or discourage leaving for the easy road. It’s a lot of moving parts. The trick is picking the combination that works.

But one thing is for sure. Sooner or later WvW will have to do away with ‘worlds’ as a static thing.

Chaba.5410:

That’s nothing. Did you see the score in NA T8 last match?

Eredon Terrace: 39 323
Ferguson’s Crossing: 518 381
Devona’s Rest: 166 690

Good lord… what happened to ET? We used to spar with them… but for them to drop that far below DR (which I thought was the lowest-populated server), they must have lost pretty much everyone…

The only true “solution” is EoTM-style matches of pooled servers based on a server-by-server performance metric. Granted, we’d need like five copies of the maps to fit everyone at reset, but this is the only way to ensure server pride (do well and you go up a “tier” to become more of a deciding factor in the matchups; only your server-members are permanent allies). This also makes guilds more pronounced as other servers start seeing various tiers’ top players, and the skill can escalate for guilds and crate good fights no matter what tier the guild is currently residing on/will not be held back by low population/interest or lack of off-hours coverage. Guild raiding becomes way more impactful this way, as your competition and allies are game-wide, so getting noticed can be a huge deal, and might help spur some more WvW play.

I know people want to keep their servers isolated and avoid anything EoTM-like (and I can’t blame you), but aside from the size concerns of the maps/performance and calculating PPT, it’s really the only good way.

Letting players/guilds create their own alliance networks unfortunately does not work, as proven by several games which have previously tried this mechanic; it leads to a ton of backstabbing and general poor attitude in the game, and rather than working together as a force to overcome a struggle with no way of backing out, often results in just stacking the tables to win easily and ganging up on others to maintain superiority.

DeceiverX.8361:

The only true “solution” is EoTM-style matches of pooled servers based on a server-by-server performance metric. Granted, we’d need like five copies of the maps to fit everyone at reset, but this is the only way to ensure server pride (do well and you go up a “tier” to become more of a deciding factor in the matchups; only your server-members are permanent allies). This also makes guilds more pronounced as other servers start seeing various tiers’ top players, and the skill can escalate for guilds and crate good fights no matter what tier the guild is currently residing on/will not be held back by low population/interest or lack of off-hours coverage. Guild raiding becomes way more impactful this way, as your competition and allies are game-wide, so getting noticed can be a huge deal, and might help spur some more WvW play.

I know people want to keep their servers isolated and avoid anything EoTM-like (and I can’t blame you), but aside from the size concerns of the maps/performance and calculating PPT, it’s really the only good way.

Letting players/guilds create their own alliance networks unfortunately does not work, as proven by several games which have previously tried this mechanic; it leads to a ton of backstabbing and general poor attitude in the game, and rather than working together as a force to overcome a struggle with no way of backing out, often results in just stacking the tables to win easily and ganging up on others to maintain superiority.

If Anet can improve servers/server handling/population caps, this could become an option. Having multiple copies of maps wouldn’t be representative or fair, because some server that simply has thousands of WvW players could have completely empty maps to cap at will with no skill at all – while other servers with less population but more organization and skill are completely dominating their single copy of the maps. The alliance with the highest number of randoms showing up to ghost cap would take the win with its eyes closed…

And queuing alliances would mean cutting people out of WvW for ages.

If, for instance… low-tier servers were combined into a single alliance that competes in WvW against other servers, there might be room for population. Perfect solution? Don’t ask low-tier loyalists that question, certainly. But it might be an option.

I wholeheartedly agree with your speculation. To resolve the map situation and queues of combined servers problems are difficult ones.

Upping the map caps as they are unfortunately can’t be done to such an extreme. Framerates would plummet so harshly that it’d be playable. Not much you can do in terms of optimizations when there’s that much data to process and render, and server-side applications for processing this may bottleneck.

Do recall that I never stated these kinds of “alliances” would need to be created of an equal number of servers. You could end up having T1 against the rest of the game, and so on, but of course, this kind of matchup wouldn’t happen because the metrics would evaluate this as having queue problems among others.

I feel as though instances of new maps should open only if there are queues on all three servers, and subsequently allow only those queued in on the lowest-populated server enter.

This way, if populated imbalances from data from previous weeks ends up calculating reasonable matchups, the population differences shouldn’t be too substantial at any given time, thus only “alliances” with huge numbers disparities favoring them would be hindered, but that already occurs now on one map on reset night. Proper matchmaking could actually help solve the queuing problem. Of course, calculating PPT based on map instances is the next problem presenting itself, which is something I can’t really think of a solution for as of now.

Last week was a write off. Now we have to suffer another week of bullcrap because the matchup system says that wasn’t enough of a beating.

GG Glick9

Ferguson’s Crossing 567 767
Devona’s Rest 125 741
Eredon Terrace 63 862

Svarty.8019:

Last week was a write off. Now we have to suffer another week of bullcrap because the matchup system says that wasn’t enough of a beating.

GG Glick9

Gunnars hold is a funny beast. On reset nights, you can match pretty much any server with the size of your blob . The rest of the time… nothing. Literally nothing.

Seriously, I didnt see any GH guilds that matchup. I played about 90% in the borders and I cant remember one single instance where I found more than 3 GH players in one place. You didnt “suffer” anything, obviously few on your servers even tried. Will this weeks matchup be any different?

Dawdler.8521:

You didnt “suffer” anything, obviously few on your servers even tried. Will this weeks matchup be any different?

Well, I don’t intend to give you any more lootbags. I’ve had more than enough of being constantly out-blobbed.

[edit] …and frankly, I find it ironic that a representative from a server that intentionally failed to turn up to it’s own tier games and dropped into matchups with mid-to-low tier servers has the cheek to ask us to turn up to fight them.