Guild Wars 2

On Why World Linking?

We had/have another, much more elaborate, solution to world population imbalance. However, we decided to table it (perhaps indefinitely) in favor of World Linking for three primary reasons:

1. Time – We felt we needed to improve the world population situation as soon as possible. Any solution that was likely to take 6+ months was off the table.

2. Acceptance – Our two ‘quick’ solutions were World Linking and World Merging. We went with World Linking because we felt players would be more likely to approve it, due to it better preserving the identity of all original worlds, and being more flexible than a more traditional World Merging solution.

3. Complexity – World Linking and World Merging are both fairly easy to understand solutions. This ties back to points 1 and two, but a complex solution would have taken longer to implement, and have been harder to get players to understand and accept.

On The Elaborate Solution

Well as an elaborate solution, it would take quite a few words to effectively detail it, but the short version would be: We blow up, and then completely reform worlds quarterly, with a lot of additional rules governing the formation of worlds (dynamic number of worlds, keeping guild members together, not mixing languages, attempting to balance coverage, etc.)

On Why Not Unlink Tier 1 NA?

Maybe, though it’s not quite that simple, for a few reasons.
First let’s look at Tier 1. At the time we defined links, the top 4 NA worlds were:

1. Yak’s Bend
2. Blackgate
3. Jade Quarry
4. Tarnished Coast

Notice that Blackgate was not the highest ranking world, and due to transfer bandwagoning Tarnished Coast was rising fast out of T2. Would it have been fair to leave YB, BG and JQ unlinked, but then link TC? Had we done so, we’d just be seeing a different world (or set of worlds) dominating T1 right now.

Next let’s consider the fact that there are 24 worlds in NA. Linking T1 allowed us to match the top 12 with the bottom 12, giving every world a partner. Had we decided not to link T1, then we would have been left with the top 9 and the bottom 12. This no longer links evenly, unless we give one tier a third partner, or leave yet another tier partnerless (most likely T2.)

Then there’s the question of how much we should link worlds based just on their tier or leaderboard rank, versus weighting it more based on actual population, coverage, or compatability. Leaderboard rank is the most understandable, and, at least on the surface, the most fair. However, as many of you have pointed out, occasionally a world’s current leaderboard rank is not representative of the world’s current population situation (usually as a result of mass transfers.)

Finally, whatever solution we decided for NA, we still needed to devise a unique solution for EU.

Anyway, probably the next most reasonable option, other than what we actually did, would be to leave NA T1&2 unlinked and then link T3+T8, T4+T7 and T5+T6. At the time we believed players (especially on T1 & T2) would view this as less fair, but now that players have actually experienced it, perhaps this is the way to go the next time we re-link worlds (assuming World Linking wins the vote.)

On Linking More Than 2 Worlds Together

This is also something we might do. Especially in EU due to the difficulty of balancing linked worlds with language restrictions. World linking is pretty flexible, such that there could be any number of worlds linked together, all mixed with unlinked worlds as opponents.

Chris and I just made several informative posts about World Linking on Reddit. I’m reposting them here.

On Population Caps

Some information behind the current server population cap behavior:
Many may already know this bit, but for anyone else who doesn’t: world population is determined by activity level in WvW (Edge of the Mists and Obsidian Sanctum don’t count). If World A has many-times the number of players on it as World B, but World A does’t play WvW at all and World B plays tons of WvW, A will have the lowest population, and B will have a very high one.
/u/piInverse, to your point on increasing world population levels, and especially some becoming full
This is not caused by the additional players bought about by the server link, but from returning players and a lower population cap on the host servers.
This is only partly true. We’ve also had a substantial increase in global WvW participation since reward tracks, world linking, and the return of the Alpine borderlands. On top of that, we use a fairly long historical tail on WvW activity level for world population purposes. Intent being to prevent worlds from artificially lowering their cap with just a couple weeks of intentional inactivity. One flipside of that being that even if global WvW population levels dropped next week, if they were still higher than pre-<aforementioned factors>, population levels would still go up as a new, higher week replaces an older, lower one in the window of time being used.
World linking problem: linking, say, a T8 NA world with a T1 NA world and doing nothing with population caps will make it very easy to pile onto an already-healthy world. So something needs to be done with population caps.
There are two opposing goals we can aim for.

• Short-term prevention of bandwagoning. To do this, we’d need to make it more difficult to join a world that’s already low enough in WvW population to merit being linked in the first place.
• Long-term health of worlds with less WvW activity. To do this, we’d need to make it easier to join a world that’s already low enough in WvW population to merit being linked in the first place.

As for what modifications we’ve put in place for population levels to not allow world linking to break the meaning and purpose of population entirely, we’re currently trying a compromise between going completely toward either the long-term or short-term health goals for world populations.

• Unlinked worlds have the highest population cap.
• Linked worlds have significantly lower population caps.

Some things we’re considering to help discourage bandwagoning:

• Increasing the cost to transfer to lower-population worlds (since they’re now often going to be linked to high-pop worlds). For example, possibly 800 gems instead of 500.
• Having merge hosts always considered Full, and their guest(s) all sharing the population their host would otherwise have.
• Locking out transfers for a period of time after world links become active.

On Relinking More Often

We are also considering adjusting links more than once a quarter. There are some pros and cons to this, but assuming World Linking wins the current poll, we could poll on adjusting the re-link rate.

Pros:

• More variety in allies and opponents.
• Players are less likely to bandwagon.
• World populations become more stable.

Cons:

• Matchmaking becomes less accurate. There’d be more unfair matches.
• The WvW World Rank leaderboard becomes less meaningful.
• Additional administrative work for worlds coordinating voice-chat/forum access with their changing allies.
• Players may start to avoid socializing and forming bonds with their cross-world allies, since they are likely to change often.
• My team(WvW) spends more of our time analyzing population and match data, to determine new links, leaving less time for other types of WvW work.
• It becomes harder to remember which worlds are currently linked, and know when the next relink is supposed to happen.

A reminder: This is a great initiative, and it seems to be going well. However, as mentioned some weeks ago, such a thread can be, indeed has been, over-used by some participants. While this is a community initiative that we do not intend to oversee in a major sense, issues have arisen and reports have been submitted in relation to such “over-asking” and those concerns seem legitimate in light of the intentions of the thread.

Please show the good manners that would make your mother proud and allow more players to benefit from the generosity of others by posting only a single request.

Also, as requested by the OP, please edit your post to indicate that your request has been partially or fully fulfilled.

Lastly, a “thank you” to the gift giver(s) in your request or in this thread later is always in good taste.

May 2016 Episode

Here is the list of artists featured on this show:

• Corvus
• Michael Hester
• nora
• Geekfox
• Selana Firestone
• Boshysboshandstuff
• pastelmordrempup
• Off the Rails Cosplay
• Zellk
• Nightrend
• Hahnchen
• Paraphernalia
• gw2tokyo
• Wanna Kudzu
• Bootleg Lisa Frank
• The Designs
• nuclearkielbasa
• Primescore
• John H
• Nán
• astin-the-silent
• dona-vajgand
• Official Trahearne
• Asura News Network
• Delston
• commandertwigs
• ghostyreader
• NefyFeiri
• Shiaya-costumes
• hunasdrawings
• idrawtoomuch-gw2
• kialeinchen
• Marschire
• readytoroargw2

Thank you to everyone who shares their creations here on the forums or on our Tumblr page.

I wanted to add that I really like being able to record the episodes for two reasons:

1. We can include more dev guests, like Cameron Rich (this month) and Peter Fries (who guested on the January episode).
2. I can hang out with you in Twitch chat, which is a ton of fun!

Next Show: Wednesday, June 22 — Noon Pacific time.

You have to be above level 10 and also earn a rank to receive the mail.

There’s a proposal for this on github; I haven’t had the time to implement it yet though.

Oops, those extra added achievements were a fat-finger on my part. They’re all stuff that was cut or not released or unfinished, including that “Treasure Hunter” achievement (there’s another one with the same name in the rare collections category).

I’ve taken the liberty of un-whitelisting them, sorry about that.

Kalavier.1097:

Well, if I can post them here. These shouldn’t be related to any spoilers at all hehe.

A: When stated that “Basically everybody learns their first spells from tutoring of their parents.” What does that mean? Human example: does this mean most people learn the “Prayer to Dwayna” style skills, or profession specific. That specific source mentions Charr in Farhars learning their first spells (implying nearly all), yet we have Rytlock who never used magic, that is until his anti-foefire ritual.
B: Part of the “warriors and magic debate” I see a lot. Warrior shouts. Can a warrior use the one shout to actually heal a wound(Like the one skill does ingame)? Or is this a case of “most of the time, it’s just morale.”
C: This one is stupid, but I’m putting it here just to silence it… Warriors do not summon banners from the sky do they? Again, something I see a lot despite how silly it is.
D: In comparison to adventurers/military forces/orders, what kind of spells or power levels do civilian spellcasters have, like the civilian necromancers in Divinity’s Reach.
E: Relating to above slightly, how often (in a generalized statement across all the races), do warriors use magic in a trained manner? How much magic could a Seraph warrior squad be expected to showcase? Obviously some warriors train in magic (asura especially), but how about the other races?

Those are the ones that pop into mind immediately.

As Konig stated, warriors and engineers absolutely can use magic. Most of their skills are presented as nonmagical, but they do wield magical or magic-infused weaponry, so the lines get blurred (and the debate you’re describing occurs). Take the warrior’s torch skill Flames of War, for example. It creates a mobile flame field that follows the player around and explodes when it expires. There may be a non-magical weapon that can do those things, but a simple knotty branch with a burning oily rag tied to the end isn’t one of them. Likewise, the engineer’s pistol produces a lot of different effects—poison, burning, bouncy lighting blasts, glue—and it’s pretty hard to say there’s no magic involved in a pistol that serves as a dart gun, flamethrower, arc thrower, and glue bomb (and never needs reloading).

So there is no absolute in this case—i.e., you can’t say “warriors never use magic” any more than you can say “warriors always use magic.” Most warrior and engineer skills generally don’t use magic, but there are some with a clear magical component, be it in the weapon itself or in the skill’s effects.

A:
I’d draw an analogy to a child IRL learning to cook: the child sees their parents doing something, expresses an interest or is told “this is something you need to learn,” and the parent teaches the child how to do it. Once the child learns to grill a burger or mix up some mac & cheese, they may never use that skill again in their entire lives, but their experience includes learning how and, if ever called upon to do it later in life, they have some experience upon which to draw.

In other words, spellcasting in Tyria is a basic life skill like cooking, riding a bike, or swimming—it takes discipline and practice, and each family has its own way of teaching it, but learning how to master that basic life skill starts early. In your Rytlock example, he learned basic spells in the fahrar like every other charr cub, but he doesn’t routinely use spells in his adult life as a soldier (though he does carry a sweet magical flaming sword, so that does balance things out a bit).

B:
Without getting too meta or gamey: a player’s health automatically regenerates outside of combat, and conditions like bleeding or burning eventually wear off even if the player doesn’t administer first aid or stop, drop, and roll.

By the same token, I’d describe a warrior using a shout to heal as psyching themselves up to keep fighting, pressing on despite an injury, and otherwise refusing to let physical damage stop them—in effect, accelerating/activating that natural automatic recovery process that starts once combat is over—but bypassing the normal cooldown/out of combat requirement.

C:
Well, the animation does pretty clearly show the banner slamming down into the ground from above, or at least, blinking in/appearing as a result of the gesture the warrior makes. I could see that interpreted as the warrior had just pulled the banner out of their inventory and planted it (kind of like weapon swapping), but I come down on the side of the warrior magically summoning it from the sky.

D:
The average citizen has basic magic, but people who use magic everyday as a soldier or order operative have had a lot more practice and experience, so they’re able to cast bigger and more powerful spells more regularly. Think of it as a natural talent like singing or athletic ability—if you’re blessed with a lot of that talent, but don’t exercise it/practice it, you won’t be as good at it as someone who does.

E:
Warriors rely on their physical skills more than their magical ones, but as stated above, everyone in Tyria can use magic and almost everyone learns to do basic magic as a part of growing up/learning basic life skills.

Game-wise, one of the first things a new character does is level up their weapon skills by using that weapon; this is analogous to training hard and mastering the basics, which opens up access to the more advanced skills for that weapon. So as a natural consequence of perfecting their warrior abilities, the warrior PC learns some skills that have a magical component, and how to apply magic to some of their basic physical skills to improve the effect.

Jaken.6801:

Oh, a dev. Quick catch him.

Nah, my only question is, if the near future will trim some of the “loose” storylines, that are mostlikely not being resolved in the next 1-2 years.

Jaken,

Sorry, I’m a little unclear on the specific storylines you mean. I’m not playing dumb or trying to assert that there are no open-ended plotlines from GW1/GW2 that need resolution—it’s just that I’d have to guess which plots you mean. Which brings me to:

This is a great example of the type of question we’d love to answer, but really can’t. We do have plans to address some of the big questions/unresolved plots that players (and especially players on the forums) have been asking about, but to confirm or deny which ones (or even when) would directly or indirectly create a spoiler for the upcoming storylines. “Directly” as in we say an upcoming release definitely will feature <fill in the blank> plot; or “indirectly” by saying an upcoming release definitely won’t feature <fill in the blank> plot, so by the process of elimination, we make it clearer what the upcoming release will be about.

Add to that the mad skillz of our community’s theorycrafters, and we quickly find ourselves in a situation where the plot we’ve settled on (and dozens of people from various departments and disciplines are working on) gets thoroughly discussed, dissected, examined, and evaluated before it ever gets released, so that by the time it does get released, it’s old news and there are no surprises.

Thank you for sharing the link Wolfie – and for everyone – thank you for your continued patience while we try to stomp the bug for good!

Just curious, what world do you play for? I’m looking at the current breakdown of votes by world right now, and nearly every world has voted in favor of World Linking. There are a few that are 50/50, and one that is against it.

Kalavier,

I say go ahead and ask your questions.

Aaron A. is right, we can’t and won’t say anything that might spoil future story lines, but if it’s a question we can answer, this forum is the right place for it.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

I was having visions of cow pies being a weapon in WvW and zergs carrying stacks of them to have cow pie fights with other zergs.

That would put a very stinky spin on “pie in the sky”.

Said pies could have caused a cow in the economy. We had a beef with that.

Bug Fix

• Fixed a bug with the vendor value of Cow Pies.

The in-game mail notification should be active now.

How it works:
The mail is sent once upon WvW rankup (minimum rank 10), each time a new poll is activated. The mail includes a link to the poll website.

Good day!

The guild team continues to investigate why some Guild Missions are not awarding some guild players for individual participation when they have done a mission with their guild. We’ve identified causes to the Guild WvW Challenge: Obsidian Sanctum, but we’re seeing a lot of player submitted reports through the bug submission window (brought up with “/bug”) that Guild Races are sometimes not awarding members participation.

Some of the player reports have been helpful but we’re looking for a bit more information for our investigation. If you have been affected by this:

1. What was the date and time you encountered this bug on (time just helps us look this up in the records, a general ballpark estimate is fine)?
2. What guild were you representing and was it the guild running the mission, or another guild?
3. What race(s) did you participated in, when you didn’t get personal rewards? (Personal rewards being the bouncy chest that appears in the right side of the screen over the minimap – Note, currently guild races need you to pass between every flag and reach the finish line within the time limit for the event AND the guild mission timer in the mission tab).
4. Have you gotten participation for these races in the past and received rewards?
5. When your guild runs the race, are you in the same map as the rest of the guild, or did you end up in your own map?
6. How many guild members are running the race with you?
7. Are you part of a squad or party? Or are you participating without a group?

If you have been seeing reward issue for other missions that are not the races or wvw challenge: obsidian sanctum, please let us know.

Good morning! Sorry for the delayed response on this. It appears the recipe is looking for the wrong guild upgrade, keeping it from being crafted when expected. Currently the recipe will not appear in the list until a guild has unlocked the War Room upgrade “Scribing: Packed Dolyaks”, rather than once a guild has unlocked the War Room upgrade: “Scribing: Guild Ballista” and the scribe is the appropriate level.

I’ve passed this bug along to the team so they can begin to look at fixing it and thank you for your report!

We want to give you a heads up about our next planned raids release: In the first event of the raid wing, some members of your squad (most likely half, or 5 out of 10) will need to have the Ley Line Gliding mastery trained in order for the team to succeed. For the final encounter, all members will need to have Ley Line Gliding.

So as you’re getting your masteries and deciding which line to pursue, give a special look at the Gliding Mastery and try to max that out, so you can be one of the cool kids on the team.

Stayed tuned in the coming weeks for more info on the planned release date.

Could you post some of these crashes you’re seeing?

What happens if World Linking is voted out?

• We’d unlink worlds at the next reset, and we’d either do another partial Glicko reset, or restore pre-link values. Consider this an immediate return to the old system, with similiar to original populations on each world, excepting of course the players/guilds who have transfered to new worlds while World Linking was active.

• The next time we poll players asking which feature we should prioritize, we’d include population balance improvements as an option. This prioritization poll likely wouldn’t happen until we complete at least a significant part of the Scoring changes that have already been voted on. (Time-slice scoring/Skirmishes)

• If population improvements won that poll, then we’d poll again to ask what type of population balance feature you want to see worked on, including the amount of time each of those features would take. World Merging might be pretty quick to implement (though less reversible if the community later decided they didn’t want it), but most other solutions are likely to take a very long time, and it may be that when completed, the new population still won’t be able to get 75% of the community to approve it.

There are very few (if any) features in the game that couldn’t be improved with additional resources invested in them. However, that then becomes a question of priorities. Do we improve Feature A, Feature B or Feature C first? Or perhaps we should prioritize building an entirely new feature instead?

So the first thing we need to ask is: “Is World Linking a positive improvement to the game and worth keeping around?”

If it is, then the next time we ask players to determine which feature work we prioritize, additional World Linking improvements can be one of the options. But it’s important to ask that question in a poll where it’s clear what the tradeoffs to that choice are. For instance: Players may want improvements to World Linking, but perhaps not at the expense of delaying improvements to Scoring.

A message from the WvW Team,
The next WvW Poll is up!
https://feedback.guildwars2.com
Please share your thoughts and feedback on the poll in this thread!

LFG:

• Fixed a bug that would allow non-commander players in a commanded squad to unlist an LFG posting.

General:
Items:

• Rune of Vampirism: Fixed a bug that disabled the leeching aspect of this rune from dealing damage. Fixed a bug that added healing power contribution to this item.
• Rune of Scavenging: Fixed a bug that disabled the leeching aspect of this rune from dealing damage. Fixed a bug that added healing power contribution to this item.
• Sigil of Leeching: Fixed a bug that disabled the leeching aspect of this rune from dealing damage. Fixed a bug that added healing power contribution to this item.
• Sigil of Blood: Updated this sigil to correctly display in the combat log.

“it’s best to be careful while AFKing”

There’s no need to be careful. The criteria between game mechanics and automation are very clear and we can easily tell the difference.

Xulie.6201:

(sorry in advance to those of you tired of these threads)

We thank you for your patience. While this isn’t an outright bannable offense, it’s best to be careful while AFKing on your Reaper as sometimes a false flag occurs. While I can’t guarantee or deny if this might happen again in the future it’s always best to be mindful of the Rule of Conduct and also the Breaches & Outcomes.

This is a mistake; and is being addressed (with haste).

Wow, I can’t believe I missed that.

I’ve made a tracking issue on github, I should have that fixed sometime next week.

I’m here with HOPE. The issue has been found and a solution has been attempted.

The change will potentially prevent any disconnects that are seen when resurrecting from any other story instances as well.

While you are waiting for the fix to be put out there is a chance that you will not get disconnected if you click the “Retry from last checkpoint” button, once. Seriously don’t spam it, it will get mad at you.

Bug Fixes:

• Players will once again be teleported to their team starting locations on match countdown in PvP to prevent players from starting matches from improper locations.
• Fixed an issue that prevented the installer from working properly.

It looks like you’re using different graphics settings based on those two screenshots. For example the 64-bit one is anti-aliased, while the 32-bit one is not. Could you please double-check your graphics settings?

This radius is larger. Fixing.

The fix should go out with the next release (e.g. the next patch that is not a hotfix). It takes awhile to push changes through the pipeline is all.

Hey there! Thought I’d pop in and answer these mysterious mysteries

In early development, we used those portals in the corner of the map to change teams for testing. We’d teleport everyone in the map to that spot when they zoned in, then they would choose the R,G,B portal to then go to their team. They were normally swapped to “off” but from long distances they could bug and you could see them! I think the portals have been completely removed now.

That jumping puzzle I put in was originally going to be a vista. We removed vistas from portal keeps before ship, and I lazy artist’d it by just removing a rock or two. xD

I would rather us fix the underlying issue with this rather than band-aid the issue by enforcing rules and punishments that don’t solve the issue at all.

The core issue here is we don’t want to have players feeling that their main source of income is generated while they are not at the computer. We have already started to see the impact of this in-game and within the community. Not only does this behavior impact players in the world when they run across a pack of unattended farmers, but also the players who are performing the unattended farming. Eventually these players spend less and less time actually playing the game, and more time unattended farming.

We see the same trends in players that use bots, macros and cheats. It eventually leads to players falling out of the game (from both encountering the impact in the world, or by participating themselves).

While there is an economic impact of having a large number of players farming like this, I’m more more concerned about behavior trends shifting than anything else.

The 3 rules above aren’t just for your protection, they are for everyone’s protection. GMs have been trained to identify and handle these situations, it’s one of the first things they learn. GMs are overly generous on the amount of time that players are given to respond.

As for how we intend on fixing that, some of us had a meeting today to talk about that. While there are some systems working against each other here, we all agreed that we didn’t want to make any changes that anyone would actually run into unless they were no longer at their keyboard for an extended period.

Rest assured, we aren’t going to take away auto-loot in the world, or remove your ability to auto-cast. Everything we implement will only impact players who aren’t actually performing actions. I’m sure when we do implement something, it’ll be in the patch notes to read about. Until then, follow the 3 rules above. After that, they won’t be relevant anymore.

(Automation is still against the rules, unless you are using it to play music in-game)

The Tier 1 Weapons will be made available in an upcoming Reward Track, much like the armor already is.

We haven’t fully decided how to distribute the T2 Weapons and Armor yet. Though, we are currently leaning towards players purchasing them with a currency that they’d earn as a match reward. We may also set rank requirements for the various pieces, so you’d need to be a relatively high rank(1-2k) to purchase a full set.

Personally, I do most of my gaming in the dark.

Our primary motivation for avoiding running another tournament, is that at the end of every tournament we saw a permanent dip in the number of players playing WvW. Presumably this was due to players burning themselves out during the tournament.

However, we can still run a poll to see if the majority of the community wants another 4 week tournament, even if it might be bad for the long term WvW population numbers. Though even if ‘running another tournament’ won the poll, we’d probably hold off until we get the scoring updates in.

Bug Fix:

• Fixed a bug that prevented Activity Lead Cassi from letting players join Crab Toss.

The non-transient errors are supposed to be “invalid key” (key doesn’t exist), “banned key” (we’ve blacklisted the key on our side) or “broken key” (something horrible has happened).

Looking at the code, there may be an issue where “invalid key” is incorrectly returned during a temporary failure — need to root around in some code to check what situations can cause that.

In any case, this is definitely not documented well and we really should be returning 5xx responses for transient failures. I’ve created a tracking issue for both the audit and better docs; I would keep seemingly broken API keys around until this gets resolved. Sorry about the hassle

The current plan is to rotate the borderlands maps each quarterly update. That said, now that we are actively polling the community, perhaps we can start exploring other options.

For instance, nothing is really stopping us from having a combination of ABL and DBL maps running simultaneously. 2 of one and 1 of the other. If we polled that, and players approved it, then there’d be no need for the rotation, and players on both sides of the issue could play on their preferred map. The downside of course, would be any perception of imbalance that may arise from one map being considered the stronger “Home” map, but we could always give the more defensible map to Red/Blue and leave the less defensible map to Green.

DoctorDing.5890:

Surely using auto-cast while AFK is unattended gameplay ????

Yes. I’ve shot a mean glance his way.

But again: “Pet Kills & Macro Looting Excepted”

Edit – We’re going to monitor this for a while; our meeting is coming up.

Hey guys, the poll on Scoring has closed. I’ll repost my response on that thread here, for continued discussion:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/WvW-Poll-13-May-Scoring/page/2#post6161438

The poll has ended! The finals votes were:

• 38.4% – Adjust scoring to be relative to current activity and population (Large)
• 19.0% – Provide features that increase a team’s ability to recover from large point disparities (Medium)
• 13.7% – Modify objective scoring to be relative to upgrade level (Medium)
• 10.0% – Change WvW Tick timer to 5 Minutes (Small)
• 8.3% – No preference
• 6.2% – Rebalance scoring for actions that are not included in Points-Per-Tick (Small)
• 4.3% – Implement scoring for objective capture (Small)

So what are our next steps? The team is going to prioritize work on the Skrimish (time-slice scoring) system that was outlined in the Let’s Talk Scoring… forum thread. This system will be a big step to resolving the community’s top voted priorities: Adjusting scoring to be relative to current activity, as well as increasing a team’s ability to recover from large point disparities. It’s also a prerequisite to work on the outlined Action Level system, which would multiply score during periods of high activity, further addressing the top voted concern. Also, we’ll likely be able to periodically deliver the small features, like reducing the tick timer, while we continue work on Skirmishes.

This is a living process, and we plan to continue polling players to determine our priorities, doing live beta testing of features, and then polling again to determine if players are happy with those features once they’ve had a chance to actually play with them. Thank you to everyone who voted and left feedback!

The short answer is no.

There’s an open issue on github for this; the unfortunate bit is that the API frontend is entirely stateless (so it can’t persist data) and the backend that reads the dat file can only run the latest dat file (and is effectively also stateless) — and the dat file doesn’t have any versioning history.

So, to implement this on our side we basically have to rearchitect how data is obtained for a large portion of the API (basically, any endpoint that accepts a ?lang parameter). It’s something that I’d like to do at some point, but am currently unable to justify the massive amount of time it would take to implement.

I think the easiest solution is for end-users to basically clone the database (e.g., pull everything when /v2/build updates) and track changes locally. I realize that this is totally infeasible for webapps, but it’s the only avenue I can offer right now.

Sorry :<

stress level zero.4907:

Lawton Campbell.8517:

I found and fixed a bug awhile back that would cause issues like that for the first request once/day or so (when the session created for the token would expire). I haven’t personally seen it happening anymore, but let me know if you’re still seeing it and I’ll investigate some more.

Hey Lawton, this happened today.

Received an unexpected 400 response:

http://i.imgur.com/umE1OXw.png

Thoughts?

https://github.com/madou/armory-back/blob/master/gw2-fetch/src/controllers/ping-controller.js#L95

I guess I’ll disable deleting the token for now.

Actually, I think we might have done a server deploy around that time — one of the backend servers the API talks to was timing out over two windows last night. Do you happen to have the error text returned by the server? There’s a lot of reasons a key can be invalid (and they all return unique error strings).

Silverstone.4539:

it was a fair game, I’m not talking about that. it’s the emerald in the game. I’m not even t1. wasn’t it meant to be up to 3 tiers above and below your tier?

mind you they change to rules so much now without telling people, who knows…

When the matchmaker looks for a match for you, part of the algorithm’s considerations is to look within 15 pips in either direction from your current spot for both teammates and opponents (at least to start with; this range expands the longer the matchmaker goes without finding enough players in that starting range). According to your pip location at the time of that match, this means that it’s entirely possible that the system could grab either allies or opponents from the first tier in Emerald, even without having to expand its range, which is why there were a couple of them on the other team. There are a number of other factors at work here that let the system ultimately decide that it was okay to put those two Emeralds on the opposing team and still keep the match balanced (most notably MMR considerations), but the matchmaker doesn’t do things like just pick several people at random from that 15 pip range and say, “Okay, that’s 10 players, let’s start.”

I’ll pitch in on this thread, as there seems to be some confusion about this situation.

The auto-cast feature was never intended to be used as an AFK farming mechanism, and usage of the auto-cast feature while AFK is fine as long as it is not used to facilitate unattended gameplay.

Mastery auto-loot also stopping players from being flagged afk seems like a bug instead of a feature, and I’ll be sure to bring it up today while we have a chat about this internally.

1) Using skill (1 or more) while AFK
2) AFKing in a place where it is beneficial for your character to be at
3) Unresponsive to interaction with GMs

If all 3 of these apply to what you are doing, you may get actioned for it.

The poll has ended! The finals votes were:

• 38.4% – Adjust scoring to be relative to current activity and population (Large)

• 19.0% – Provide features that increase a team’s ability to recover from large point disparities (Medium)

• 13.7% – Modify objective scoring to be relative to upgrade level (Medium)

• 10.0% – Change WvW Tick timer to 5 Minutes (Small)

• 8.3% – No preference

• 6.2% – Rebalance scoring for actions that are not included in Points-Per-Tick (Small)

• 4.3% – Implement scoring for objective capture (Small)

So what are our next steps? The team is going to prioritize work on the Skrimish (time-slice scoring) system that was outlined in the Let’s Talk Scoring… forum thread. This system will be a big step to resolving the community’s top voted priorities: Adjusting scoring to be relative to current activity, as well as increasing a team’s ability to recover from large point disparities. It’s also a prerequisite to work on the outlined Action Level system, which would multiply score during periods of high activity, further addressing the top voted concern. Also, we’ll likely be able to periodically deliver the small features, like reducing the tick timer, while we continue work on Skirmishes.

This is a living process, and we plan to continue polling players to determine our priorities, doing live beta testing of features, and then polling again to determine if players are happy with those features once they’ve had a chance to actually play with them. Thank you to everyone who voted and left feedback!

This is by design. We allow duo queues to pair up against full pre-made teams, but not a full group of solo queues. We changed this during Season 2.

As for the spread, it’s because those players are grouped up. For example, the Amber on Red Team is brought up to Sapphire level because they’re pairing with a Sapphire player. The Blue Team has Ruby players on it because they’re most likely in early Ruby which puts them within the range of upper tier Sapphire players for the purposes of matchmaking. The Emerald player is subsequently brought up because they’re grouped with higher division players.

I know that match-ups like this may seem off-kilter at first glance, but it’s entirely within the parameters we’ve set in the matchmaking algorithm and definitely by design. It looks like it was a close match though, so I’m glad you had fun!

Sirsquishy; your case has nothing to do with the afk pet issue. So; thus far I have seen no accounts suspended for taking advantage of this design feature.

There is a hidden mechanic that after switching maps, the game auto-consumes bouncy chests down to 4 remaining. It’s a confusing oversight as the normal procedure is to finish a match and leave the map before opening all the boxes. The items and currencies are in your inventory and wallet.