Guild Wars 2

Amen and thank you <3

Setch.2398:

Dordane.5412:

Just balance the ques out so one team can’t have 100 people while the other one has 20. A scoring system based on population is just going to get exploited and abused. I can just see people shouting in team chat “omg we are losing in this map to that zerg!! Everyone leave now so they get less points.” Unbalanced teams is boring for everyone and ruins the whole fun of the game imo. More balance might also stop all the roving nomads that switch servers every time a new wvw match starts.

I would love to see a chart on server transfers over a one week period. I’m actually dreading getting a match that’s unbalanced in our favor because I’m betting that the que times will go up.

Your system would fail in the same way. You answered yourself here.

Only if it was a 1 for 1 que and you kicked people out when the sides got unbalanced. That’s not practical. It would have to be some kinda of tier system to prevent people from blocking just by leaving. I don’t know what the real numbers are in wvw, but lets just say you can have 100 people on each team max. Just allow 20 or 25 ppl on each side to start then increase by 10 or so. Yeah in theory you could still be outnumbered 20 to 1 but I kinda doubt that will happen too much.

Too many times i go into a map when one team has the whole map and i see 50 invaders spawn camping 5 guys. People que in and see that they say forget this and leave the map. Momentum means a lot. It’s a snowball effect and it is why so many matches end up one sided. Most of the complaints about wvw come down to unbalanced numbers. Yes balancing ques would result in longer ques on more highly populated servers. Good! Just the thing to deter more people from going to already overpopulated servers and move to less populated ones.

Population Imbalance, not “night capping”.

Population imbalance, combined with keeps falling way too fast, way too cheaply, is the real problem. Once one server gets a modest population advantage they roll up the maps over the next 60 minutes and that’s often the end of it.

By the time balance is restored, the other servers are at a tremendous disadvantage. The momentum of off-hours population imbalance is hard to stop, and that’s a problem.

I just want to say that there is some hypocrisy in what Matt is saying. They want everyones time to be equal, yet that is not the case. Currently the night cappers time is worth more than those spending hours to capture 1 tower or keep. They are being punished because they can’t play 24/7 or didn’t have a large oceanic population roll on their server.

I fully understand not wanting to punish players because of the time of day that they play, but that is exactly what the current system does and the reason there is so much unrest on the forums. It needs changed soon or the damage will be irreparable.

The scoring system needs overhauled. It needs to reward points based on how difficult an objective was to take(IE if they defend it again and again then it is worth more when captured), points need rewarded for successfully defending, kills should give tiny fractions of points that add up, killing siege equipment should give points, etc. Basically a system where if there is no one to defend then it isn’t a complete blow out. There are flaws with this system but it at the very least is better than the current system.

Slamz.5376:

Population Imbalance, not “night capping”.

Population imbalance, combined with keeps falling way too fast, way too cheaply, is the real problem. Once one server gets a modest population advantage they roll up the maps over the next 60 minutes and that’s often the end of it.

By the time balance is restored, the other servers are at a tremendous disadvantage. The momentum of off-hours population imbalance is hard to stop, and that’s a problem.

Well stated, I agree.

Zeorn.4735:

Matt Witter.6982:

How we’ve came to this conclusion is that no player’s time is more valuable than another.

This is the problem, the north american prime time players feel their time is completely wasted because no matter what they do, the server with the more active night/morning crew can take everything and upgrade with no resistance whatsoever. This means that anyone who plays during these “off” hours time is more valuable.

You can spend hours during primetime making little headway, taking some towers and a keep, maybe getting pushed back and then losing it all again, but the amount of points night and morning crews can gain for their server is by far more valuable.

This a thousand times yes.

If all playtimes are supposed to be equal in value then why is it that one of the Region primetimes is completely pointless? Currently US primetime is completely dwarfed in value because all other region primetimes are immediately after it. Take everything during US primetime? Go to sleep, now lose it all to Euro/Oceanic Primetime and allow them to hold it for 6-8 hours before US primetime.

Redtah.3016:

Zeorn.4735:

Matt Witter.6982:

How we’ve came to this conclusion is that no player’s time is more valuable than another.

This is the problem, the north american prime time players feel their time is completely wasted because no matter what they do, the server with the more active night/morning crew can take everything and upgrade with no resistance whatsoever. This means that anyone who plays during these “off” hours time is more valuable.

You can spend hours during primetime making little headway, taking some towers and a keep, maybe getting pushed back and then losing it all again, but the amount of points night and morning crews can gain for their server is by far more valuable.

This a thousand times yes.

If all playtimes are supposed to be equal in value then why is it that one of the Region primetimes is completely pointless? Currently US primetime is completely dwarfed in value because all other region primetimes are immediately after it. Take everything during US primetime? Go to sleep, now lose it all to Euro/Oceanic Primetime and allow them to hold it for 6-8 hours before US primetime.

This is how I feel

Redtah.3016:

If all playtimes are supposed to be equal in value then why is it that one of the Region primetimes is completely pointless? Currently US primetime is completely dwarfed in value because all other region primetimes are immediately after it. Take everything during US primetime? Go to sleep, now lose it all to Euro/Oceanic Primetime and allow them to hold it for 6-8 hours before US primetime.

Without directing my post towards a specific area of the world, I fail to realise how the ‘peak’ time players cannot see that they’re being completely selfish. The Oceanic & Asian communities paid for the game as well, expecting that the WvWvW would be open 24/7 so that we could enjoy it as much as everyone else. You seem to think that your servers are being rolled during your off-peak because you don’t have numbers. Have you thought for a second that maybe your off-peak players are just really bad?

In addition to that, take the above poster I’ve quoted… he says “Take everything during US primetime? Go to sleep, now lose it all to Euro/Oceanic Primetime”… ok, so you’re taking everything during your prime time? Flip the situation around for a second. YOU, or the NA prime time, is taking EVERYTHING during OUR off-peak timezone. I’m pretty certain that what you’re doing is EXACTLY what you’re accusing the Oceanic & Euro communities of doing. You take everything during the US timezone, we take everything during the Oceanic timezone. The same. It’s pretty easy to understand.

To counteract these problems we’ve been recruiting NA guilds like crazy so develop a strong NA timezone so that we can eventually move up into Tier-1. You should be doing the same instead of expecting that your timezone becomes ‘special’ compared to the rest of them.

There’s always the option of transferring servers yourself to help an Oceanic server.

I’ve always suggested that a point scoring system that’s relative to the amount of people in WvW would be the best all round approach. As seen in this thread i had i suggested a system that scales point vales of objectives on the map according to how many people are in WvW.

• Point Value to Population %: At the moment all point values of objects on the map are fixed, this means during off peak hours the ‘Night-capping’ guilds take advantage of outnumbering the enemy and capture major points holding them for 12+ hours and earning a huge lead on the sleeping enemies. A simple fix to this would be scaling values depending on the total population of the 3 servers in the 4 borderlands. As an example:

Note: the % displayed are of the current population in Wv3 out of the maximum it can hold. i am unsure on the actual numbers but say 3 borderlands + eternal can hold 500 people, and 250 are online and in any one of them, i am referring to that being 50% population.

During Prime-Time Wv3, all 4 borderlands would be full for all 3 servers. The population would be 100% full across all servers:

• Supply Camp = 10 Points
• Tower = 20 Points
• Keep = 50 Points
• Castle = 70 Points.

Now during off-peak hours, some borderlands for some servers wont be full. Lets say 50% of one server is still online, and the other 2 are @ 25% (33% full across all servers)

• Supply Camp = 3 Points
• Tower = 7 Points
• Keep = 17 Points
• Castle = 23 Points.
  Figures rounded up or down to nearest 1

This type of system would somewhat balance the point gain and not make the lead uncatchable, whilst still promoting as many people to log on as possible to night cap (more on, higher the value)

Thats a nice idea! But I think that scaling the intervals at which points are being gained would be a bit better. That way a castle is always the same amount of points, but when there’s enemies to fight, you will be getting points every 12 minutes instead of every 14.

This way objectives still hold the same value to everyone, but the timezone problems would be resolved.

Matt Witter.6982:

Greetings everyone!

We’ve received lots of feedback regarding night capping. Many want to know how Arenanet views this. Our answer is that WvW was developed as a never ending continuous battle.

We feel that everyone should have the ability to contribute no matter what time of the day it is. How we’ve came to this conclusion is that no player’s time is more valuable than another. Everyone has different off peak hours for whatever reason. Players should not be punished or unable to experience and view the same content as everyone else because they play at a different time. They too are paying customers.
This is not saying that we are against any adjustment to scoring, or against developing another mechanic to improve the capping system. This is simply saying that we will not be changing WvW based on some players’ idea of off time hours.

Please use this thread as the main discussion for this topic.

I agree that every player’s time is just as valuable as another’s to you guys. So, fix outmanned or region lock the game.

Ascii.9726:

This type of system would somewhat balance the point gain and not make the lead uncatchable, whilst still promoting as many people to log on as possible to night cap (more on, higher the value)

Whilst I appreciate the fact that you’re one of the first people to actually put some thought into a solution rather than continually complaining, I have a few points that I believe you haven’t taken into account.

a) Your setup basically says that if a server has a strong NA population that dominates other servers and builds up quite a significant lead then they should be the clear winner. The reason this doesn’t work is because your server also has an Oceanic/Asian playerbase, and let’s say my server has a very strong Oceanic/Asian base and we dominate, there’s really no way that we can catch up because we’re being crippled by being rewarded with lower scores until the NA prime time kicks in again, at which point we’ll be dominated again and fall further behind. In my opinion if we dominate a timezone due to skill then we should be rewarded the same amount of points that you are being rewarded for dominating.

b) That brings up the point you made of it all being based around population that is online at the time. I understand that the NA prime time ‘fills’ out the 4 Wv3 maps better than the Oceanic/Asian prime time, but what you have to realise is that the fights at a keep or a tower are still the same in size because we’re just concentrated into a smaller area than you are. So again, crippling our timezone because we don’t have the population to fill out the other maps doesn’t mean that we’re doing any less of a good job than you are. We’re still facing the same size attacking force on the same map because each individual Wv3 map is queued separately than the others.

Like I said, I appreciate your ideas, but it still points towards one thing, which is that the NA prime time is more important than the rest of the world, and this is a global game and not just a NA game, irrelevant of where the actual servers are hosted.

Honestly, and no offense to people who came up with them all of these ‘solutions’ to population imbalance are bad. All they do, if they do anything positive, is make the symptoms a little less obvious.

Really the only thing that might even come close to solving the issue is a dynamic population cap. Unfortunately this is avoided like a leper here for various reasons.

But lets face it, the real issue here is that WvW was poorly designed. Full stop. The only way we are ever going to see the WvW we want is if Anet throws away every scrap of WvW they have made and starts from scratch. This obviously will not happen, so we are stuck with what we have now. We might as well get used to the situation as it is now.

If you want to win? Go to a high pop server and languish in queues.

If you don’t care? Go to an underpopulated server and lose, but do it quickly.

Corew.8932:

Redtah.3016:

Zeorn.4735:

Matt Witter.6982:

How we’ve came to this conclusion is that no player’s time is more valuable than another.

This is the problem, the north american prime time players feel their time is completely wasted because no matter what they do, the server with the more active night/morning crew can take everything and upgrade with no resistance whatsoever. This means that anyone who plays during these “off” hours time is more valuable.

You can spend hours during primetime making little headway, taking some towers and a keep, maybe getting pushed back and then losing it all again, but the amount of points night and morning crews can gain for their server is by far more valuable.

This a thousand times yes.

If all playtimes are supposed to be equal in value then why is it that one of the Region primetimes is completely pointless? Currently US primetime is completely dwarfed in value because all other region primetimes are immediately after it. Take everything during US primetime? Go to sleep, now lose it all to Euro/Oceanic Primetime and allow them to hold it for 6-8 hours before US primetime.

This is how I feel

Yeh, what ANET wrote is pretty disheartening. I guess American primetime players will continue to be second rate citizens of the game. I’m not saying this is going to be the death of the game, but sure is not going to help retain NA players that only play this game for WvW. Oh well, Planetside 2 isn’t too far off in the future.

My suggestion posted earlier:
“All the recent unhappiness regarding “nightcapping” is getting a little silly. What “night” is for some, is “day” to others. However, it is also good to acknowledge that the efforts put in by those in one timezone is effectively wiped clean once the bulk of them go to bed, school or work. Digging down deeper into the psychology of the matter – what people want is recognition.

So lets do this by simply splitting the main WvW score into 4 parts. Keeping in line with mythology, lets name these 4 parts:

Fire: 6pm – 12am
Air: 12am – 6am
Earth: 6am – 12pm
Water: 12pm – 6pm

*Active/current time-element is highlighted on the scoreboard

Potential points are transferred to the respective element section in the main score table respective to the server time. This way, players are able to compare across the main score how well they did according to their committed time-element segment.

Yes, there will definately be complaints of how one particular time-element starts off with low potential points ALL the time, but without a constant reset every 6 hours, this is inevitable. This gap allows cooperation between guilds to split the workload and also organize with global players how they could aid in the war.

While this solution can’t possibly address 100% of the unhappiness, it does in some way acknowledge work done during a particular “prime time”. Additionally, scoring for capping towers etc. could also be INCREASED to reflect that.

For example if your guild plays mostly in the fire-time segment, your guild comes in at 6pm and starts capping to accumulate points up until 12am. You can then go to sleep peacefully knowing that anything that happens thereafter will not be reflected in your fire-time segment score area.

*Add: Example of how the scoreboard could look like – http://i45.tinypic.com/2i7tj41.jpg

Additional ideas based off the current one:

1. You could REMOVE the total score, and just display the time-element scores only.

2. Servers could be matched up according to the scores in their specific time-element of the week. (Eg. Week 1 – Fire, Week 2 – Air … etc.) After all there are roughly 4 weeks per month. This allows servers to be matched up for 1 week a month to a competitive peer server of the same timezone. During the “Week of Fire” for example, monthly bonus points can be given at the end of the week to the top servers respectively.

3. At the end of the month. Results can be tabulated and ranked according to each element. (E.g. Champions of Fire, Air, Water, Earth.)

Coupled with the increased scores for capping and other possible scoring tweaks, this might allow for a better assessment of which servers/worlds do better according to their time-zones; thus eliminating the complaints of “night capping”."

So basically WvW is not based on skill. Its based on population and having an Oceanic or Asian population counts for double. Glad you are coming out and admitting it to us. We can stop seeking any legitimacy in WvW.

Next time you give us the rankings, include a small graph for each server that tells us how much of the map was held during the day.. and during the night!

Cheers :P

Thalantyr.2856:

Redtah.3016:

If all playtimes are supposed to be equal in value then why is it that one of the Region primetimes is completely pointless? Currently US primetime is completely dwarfed in value because all other region primetimes are immediately after it. Take everything during US primetime? Go to sleep, now lose it all to Euro/Oceanic Primetime and allow them to hold it for 6-8 hours before US primetime.

Without directing my post towards a specific area of the world, I fail to realise how the ‘peak’ time players cannot see that they’re being completely selfish. The Oceanic & Asian communities paid for the game as well, expecting that the WvWvW would be open 24/7 so that we could enjoy it as much as everyone else. You seem to think that your servers are being rolled during your off-peak because you don’t have numbers. Have you thought for a second that maybe your off-peak players are just really bad?

In addition to that, take the above poster I’ve quoted… he says “Take everything during US primetime? Go to sleep, now lose it all to Euro/Oceanic Primetime”… ok, so you’re taking everything during your prime time? Flip the situation around for a second. YOU, or the NA prime time, is taking EVERYTHING during OUR off-peak timezone. I’m pretty certain that what you’re doing is EXACTLY what you’re accusing the Oceanic & Euro communities of doing. You take everything during the US timezone, we take everything during the Oceanic timezone. The same. It’s pretty easy to understand.

To counteract these problems we’ve been recruiting NA guilds like crazy so develop a strong NA timezone so that we can eventually move up into Tier-1. You should be doing the same instead of expecting that your timezone becomes ‘special’ compared to the rest of them.

There’s always the option of transferring servers yourself to help an Oceanic server.

yea except you didn’t read my post at all, the Non US primetimes are worth more because after them is a large downtime of no region primetime. AKA not all playtimes are equal which is what Arenanet said.

When people say prime time, they don’t mean the peak hours of their servers. They mean the time where both servers are competing at full capacity. In a matchup with Russian or East-European servers primetime will end earlier, and in weekends primetime will last longer. The only thing people are asking for is that point gain when servers are actually competing is properly rewarded.

I really like the WvW gameplay and I don’t think the gameplay needs to be altered at all. What does need to be addressed is that fact that when you have a fair and tense battle filled with large scale sieges and defenses, you will only get a fraction of the point lead you are able to get when the opponents are logging out due to the fact that they are Russian and living in a different timezone. As it is, Russian players are being punished for their timezone. I’m not Russian, but I would love my matches with them to be focused on the times we are actually competing actively and are having a great match.

Making sure that the scoring interval goes up when there’s many people competing will work wonders in solving the timezone issues.

Just adjust the outmanned buff to actually balance out server strength when another server have more numbers then you. Just start with a small adjustment and improve it as you get more data about it. It’s ALL that needs to be done and although it would take time to get it right, it would be simple to get it started.

Matt if that is Anets point of view would it be so hard to accually put up french servers in canada or US not having them capping EU night time against empty keeps becouse

I cant see how that is how you guys wanted WvWvW to be?

Matt Witter.6982:

This is not saying that we are against any adjustment to scoring, or against developing another mechanic to improve the capping system.

I agree that players should not be treated differently based on their preferred time of playing. I also understand and accept the fact that WvW is a 24-hour battle. That said, I think something still needs to address the issue of a team controlling 100% (or close to 100%) of the map. It’s really boring for both sides of the battle especially when they last for a week.

Would you be able to elaborate on some ideas that would deal with this? Is this something that we should just expect to fix itself as server populations even out? If that’s the case, should we move to other servers for now in order to have a better experience?

I’ve been on Borlis Pass since the beginning and every matchup I can remember, aside from one, has been completely lop-sided. It’s absolutely boring on either end of that kind of a matchup.

So someone in my guild mentioned a system in which at any point you owned more than 50% of the map the other teams would have npcs that would slowly continuously spawn to take back anything that is deemed in the corner of the losing sides. Ie if you are in lower left corner of BL the would push on briar, vale and bay and help get that stuff back for the team that is outmanned, being 1v2-ed or just aren’t doing well in general. They would not push past this point but it would help teams to bounce back.

Obviously there are some things to be figures out but at least it would help those who don’t have the numbers over night push and those who have a lot won’t be bored as much.

Please dont change anything. Thanks!

You pretty much killed the game with that stance
Thanks for ignoring the playerbase and make it easy for yourself
Alot of players will leave becouse it, so your just shooting yourself in the foot

Is this really what Anet wanted to create with WvW?

WvW – an epic battle where the best night crews win glorious battles against empty keeps in order to determine the winner!

Not how I imagined it would be and that’s how it works even at the highest levels of server competition right now.

Honestly, WvW has only “officially” (rankings) been turned on for a little over a week. Lets let the awesome game developers capture some data and then identify real issues that can then be fixed if need be. Not by what some people “think” they should do.

If they are banning over a 1000 gold spammers a day… Im not to sure that they will do knee jerk reactions because 25 people in a forum dont like the current state of WvW. At least I hope they dont. That would be more disappointing then the dramatic statement of “you just killed the game.”

I mean.. I know people dont like to hear it.. but the option to move is available. If it boils down to you think you need to quit maybe you should move. I dont think the statement of “Alot of players will leave” holds as much value in a non-subscription game. I dont know… <shrugs>

Well, if you allow approx 10% of your WvW crowd to ruin the game for the rest, then i assure you that WvW will fail in the long run. It´s not the individual who can only play at night. It´s the intentional guild night cappers (mostly french cowards), who ruin battles for everyone instead of having close battles.

Hello fellow discussioners,

i’ve got a few options. Nightcapping is the conversation of the last weeks and Arenanet said they cannot decline paying customers.

A. make sure continental players are not allowed on other continents.

B. destroy the continent barrier. If nightcapping should be a 24/7 game, what does 2 different continents mean? make it world ranking not EU/US. several players are playing at different continents to gain an advantage. This way all 24/7 servers get to battle other 24/7 to a fair lvl.

C.onclusion: continental server were made to avoid these things, if it doesn’t matter what continent ur on, throw all servers together in a world ranking!

This is what things look like currently:

[img] http://i46.tinypic.com/1685tty.jpg [/img]

and thats the way it’ll stay until tomorrow, go Canada..

Obviously a tricky topic for you, but i can’t agree with your positions here.

“How we’ve came to this conclusion is that no player’s time is more valuable than another”

Players who spent hours taking and defending forts, when all their efforts are wiped in 5 minutes by nightcappers playing in PVE mode will probably agree with you.

“Players should not be punished or unable to experience and view the same content as everyone else because they play at a different time. "

They will never experience the same content as the majority of players since there is nobody against them besides NPC’s when they’re playing, but well, maybe i’m wrong since the start and WWW is supposed to be a giant PVE battleground.

Well in any case thanks for clarifying your position on this.

Alright, I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while now so this seems like a good time to do it. First of all, it’s amusing to see the official position on this:

(2)We feel that everyone should have the ability to contribute no matter what time of the day it is. How we’ve came to this conclusion is that no player’s time is more valuable than another. (1)Everyone has different off peak hours for whatever reason. (2)Players should not be punished or unable to experience and view the same content as everyone else because they play at a different time. They too are paying customers.
(3)This is not saying that we are against any adjustment to scoring, or against developing another mechanic to improve the capping system. (1)This is simply saying that we will not be changing WvW based on some players’ idea of off time hours.

(1) What exactly is your definition of “off peak” hours? Most people who have been discussing this has defined it by the traditional meaning of off peak and prime time: namely the hours of the day where few people can play is called the off peak hours. Prime time on the other hand is the time where most people will play because it makes the most sense in most people’s lives. Between work and sleep is obviously the prime time, while off peak hours are the hours when most people work or sleep.

We really need to know how you define this if we are going to have a meaningful conversation.

(2) The way you have designed the game, the way your mechanics work, you are severely punishing players who play at a certain time of day. You have literally made it impossible for people to experience WvW at certain times of day. Claiming that you care the same for all customers is obviously not true if we look at how the game is designed, and by earlier statements we have to assume that this is deliberate in order to manage server load. I know tons of people who simply gave up on this game because it is impossible to play the endgame (which WvW inescapably is) when they have time for it.

What good is a game that you cannot play?

(3) Adjustment to scoring or making it harder to cap stuff will not improve the game. At all. The problem is not that people PvE doors for some karma, the problem is that there is no meaningful fights at certain times of the day. Add PvE content to WvW that motivates people more than whatever points they could scrape together from bashing on a door. What people fail to understand is that night capping isn’t fun for the night cappers either. It’s simply the game design that forces them to play like that. Even if they WANTED fair fights, it wouldn’t happen due to how the game works.

The ridiculously severe diminishing returns as punishment for playing with your friends that you have in this game is just embarrassing and as a game developer you should really reconsider every choice you’ve made when it comes to designing WvW and the server structure in general. The name of the game is Guild Wars. People assume that you want them to band together in these social structures called guilds and play with each other.

Telling us to stand in neverending lines (which the 6-8 hour lines at certain servers absolutely are) because we want to play with our guild or with a community that is larger than the game itself is simply outrageous for us as customers. Telling us to move away from our friends and our communities is even more outrageous. You can’t put the responsibility of server balance on the shoulders of players, especially since you don’t even give us the data and tools we would need to make it happen.

TL;DR night capping isn’t fun for anyone, queues can never be blamed on customers and you need to thoroughly review the choices you’ve made that has resulted in this mess.

Please fix the game before everyone I know has stopped logging in because there’s nothing to do in the game but sit in endless queues.

I think a lot of the issues are that people just don’t want to play when they’re loosing badly. It’s not that WvW rooms with the outmanned buff have low population on the servers, it’s that people are PvEing. What happens if you base it on population, people still loose badly, stop playing, but now the server that is winning is not benefiting as much simply because the other team gave up?

My suggestion to combat night-capping is to encourage friends or guildies that play late at night to represent in WvW. There’s plenty of people in the cities during said “off-peak hours”, advertise, form a group of 5 at night and get some of them into WvW. Some people simply want to PvE, but it helps if you pukitten.

Matt Witter.6982:

Greetings everyone!

We’ve received lots of feedback regarding night capping. Many want to know how Arenanet views this. Our answer is that WvW was developed as a never ending continuous battle.

We feel that everyone should have the ability to contribute no matter what time of the day it is. How we’ve came to this conclusion is that no player’s time is more valuable than another. Everyone has different off peak hours for whatever reason. Players should not be punished or unable to experience and view the same content as everyone else because they play at a different time. They too are paying customers.
This is not saying that we are against any adjustment to scoring, or against developing another mechanic to improve the capping system. This is simply saying that we will not be changing WvW based on some players’ idea of off time hours.

Please use this thread as the main discussion for this topic.

Good, but nobody ever asked for such a thing.

The only requests were for some sort of adaptive mechanic to limit the impacts on the overall score. Not more, not less. That’s all that was ever asked for and something you didn’t exclude.

Edit: I feel at this point it might be right to bring up the two best suggestions I’ve heard to this issue.

1. Award points for actually killing players. WvW is after all a PvP activity. If every kill added a +1 to your servers score then at least PvP would be rewarded, not just taking keeps.

2. Scale the current value of objectives with the current number of active players in WvW. Ergo, the more activity is going on the more rewarding WvW is.

None of these two suggestions would in any way impair the playing experience for anyone playing at any time. They are merely modifications to the scoring system to more accurately reflects a servers WvW prowess.

Change point capping intervals to 60minutes or 90 mintues rather than 15 minutes
This will mean that both On peak and Off Peak are as equal in terms of point gain +/-12 hour windows. It will mean stronger side during both times will get the point gain. Keep the supply/tower/keep/castle point gains as they are .. i think this will promote a much closer fairer and balanced matchup, at the moment servers that have the largest populations and/or night time players will dominate in off peak because of the next to no contested areas they can get for their point gains.

I think this is probably one of the only ways to change this so onpeak is as fair as offpeak in terms of point generation.

Steveo.1574:

Change point capping intervals to 60minutes or 90 mintues rather than 15 minutes

IMO that would ruin the pace of the game. As it is we are always hitting B and checking scores etc. It was hard to adapt to the 15 minutes… but an hour would be terrible.

Here is my idea.

When the “Outmanned” buff is active all point generation of that Borderland should be reduced by 75%. This means that 600 points per 15mins equals 150 points, over 8 hours that means the nightcapper server would earn 4800 points. 4800 points is not such a tragic score for the prime time players to catch up.

With this in place, when you log in and see yourself 20k points behind a server you know it’s because they out played you and that time period of your server needs adjusting.

ANET have seriously got this wrong.

The 24/7 servers win WvWvW

Why even bother having designated servers for Europeans and North Americans?

All servers might as well just be called Global because that is the current design.

If ANET honestly feels 24/7 WvWvW is for the best just merge EU + NA servers right now.

Very surprising how any serious game designer can fail to see the issue with night capping and how it completely degrades any value to the effort of prime time players for which the server is designated for.

I can only hope you see the light of day like most of your normal customers and understand that their time is important to the longevity and future of playing your game.

Thalantyr.2856:

Redtah.3016:

If all playtimes are supposed to be equal in value then why is it that one of the Region primetimes is completely pointless? Currently US primetime is completely dwarfed in value because all other region primetimes are immediately after it. Take everything during US primetime? Go to sleep, now lose it all to Euro/Oceanic Primetime and allow them to hold it for 6-8 hours before US primetime.

Without directing my post towards a specific area of the world, I fail to realise how the ‘peak’ time players cannot see that they’re being completely selfish. The Oceanic & Asian communities paid for the game as well, expecting that the WvWvW would be open 24/7 so that we could enjoy it as much as everyone else. You seem to think that your servers are being rolled during your off-peak because you don’t have numbers. Have you thought for a second that maybe your off-peak players are just really bad?

In addition to that, take the above poster I’ve quoted… he says “Take everything during US primetime? Go to sleep, now lose it all to Euro/Oceanic Primetime”… ok, so you’re taking everything during your prime time? Flip the situation around for a second. YOU, or the NA prime time, is taking EVERYTHING during OUR off-peak timezone. I’m pretty certain that what you’re doing is EXACTLY what you’re accusing the Oceanic & Euro communities of doing. You take everything during the US timezone, we take everything during the Oceanic timezone. The same. It’s pretty easy to understand.

To counteract these problems we’ve been recruiting NA guilds like crazy so develop a strong NA timezone so that we can eventually move up into Tier-1. You should be doing the same instead of expecting that your timezone becomes ‘special’ compared to the rest of them.

There’s always the option of transferring servers yourself to help an Oceanic server.

This completely (what Thalantyr said)^ Though I’m pretty sure it’ll be skipped over again because it makes too much sense.

And thanks for the response Matt, this is getting ridiculous – it just looks like they’ve grabbed onto something they can blame their losing on, and running to the forums with it.

stop harassing the rest of the world, we paid for the game too.

Dredj.4025:

Here is my idea.

When the “Outmanned” buff is active all point generation of that Borderland should be reduced by 75%.

People would get tired of Alt F4’ing right before the score tally.

Ok i’ve read what Matt Witter said and i totally agree but my question is; knowing Arenanet that french Canadians would play this game why didnt you add a [FR] tag on a north american server??
they would have better pings and wouldnt be moving to EU…. and all this frustrating night capping issue wouldnt be a concern ATM

Joriel.1530:

Ok i’ve read what Matt Witter said and i totally agree but my question is; knowing Arenanet that french Canadians would play this game why didnt you add a [FR] tag on a north american server??
they would have better pings and wouldnt be moving to EU…. and all this frustrating night capping issue wouldnt be a concern ATM

24 hour capping will always take place whether you limit servers or not. Then people will be offended by anyone who plays outside of their own time frame. (Not unlike what we are seeing now)

I want to say that players playing on different times than me have the same right to play the game as I do with equal conditions.

Right now it’s not the case. We’re not playing on equal conditions. 40 player, playing on a specific time will have 10x effect compared to 600 players playing on different time. This is negating the effort of that 600 players, demotivating them, alienating them, eventually causing them to give up.

What we want is a scoring system which would even out effect of each player on the overall score. So that whatever time a player plays, she won’t get any advantage or disadvantage on her effect on overall score.

Scoring system shouldn’t enforce people to set alarm-clocks to be competitive. Scoring shouldn’t promote playing on a specific time. Just fix this and we’ll be happy.

I agree that you shouldn’t limit when people can play. However, I’m wondering if there is a way to address people’s concerns. And I’m sure it’s not an idea that I’ve come up with first.

Perhaps guilds or individuals could purchase a buff to a tower or keep Lord the way way that supply camp supervisors can be buffed. As it stands, they can be tougher than Lords. The ability to purchase an upgrade to a Lord wouldn’t prevent an organize force from taking a location, but it would potentially offer protection for a team where hours don’t quite match up.

Obviously you would manage this by making it cost prohibitive so that it could not be done across the board or perhaps just limit it to keeps.

Just a thought. Because I principally agree that playing at all hours is just part of how it goes. But I do understand the concerns of players on servers where player hour rotations just don’t happen. Arguably, this is countered by more organization but that’s partially unrealistic. Allowing a team to offer some more protection to a location, at a significantly limiting cost and non-guaranteed effect could be the way to go.

Ok i just had an idea , why not add like strong NPC defenders to protect anything from a server that is completely outmaned?
even if other servers had big zergs it would still be a challenge to take a tower or something else

Like many people stated here. Giving few/lesser points when a server is just PvEing doors and gathering points is actually healthy for everyone. The people who play off-time will help and probably still take all objectives/maps getting points/karma/exp and so on. But they’ll just not be able to give a 30-40k point lead from one night to another while fighting no opposition at all…

Might not work with rankings and all but how about just letting the French fight each other, so maybe VS/Arborstone/Augury Rock then maybe next “tier” FS/River/Deso. At least that way it’s a bit fairer and the Canadians can fight themselves. I don’t know, but it’s going to get boring fast knowing you’re pretty much guaranteed a lose against the French servers.

This is the highest tier competition going on EU:

http://i46.tinypic.com/1685tty.jpg

If that is intended, it’s what it is

lollie.5816:

Thalantyr.2856:

Redtah.3016:

If all playtimes are supposed to be equal in value then why is it that one of the Region primetimes is completely pointless? Currently US primetime is completely dwarfed in value because all other region primetimes are immediately after it. Take everything during US primetime? Go to sleep, now lose it all to Euro/Oceanic Primetime and allow them to hold it for 6-8 hours before US primetime.

Without directing my post towards a specific area of the world, I fail to realise how the ‘peak’ time players cannot see that they’re being completely selfish. The Oceanic & Asian communities paid for the game as well, expecting that the WvWvW would be open 24/7 so that we could enjoy it as much as everyone else. You seem to think that your servers are being rolled during your off-peak because you don’t have numbers. Have you thought for a second that maybe your off-peak players are just really bad?

In addition to that, take the above poster I’ve quoted… he says “Take everything during US primetime? Go to sleep, now lose it all to Euro/Oceanic Primetime”… ok, so you’re taking everything during your prime time? Flip the situation around for a second. YOU, or the NA prime time, is taking EVERYTHING during OUR off-peak timezone. I’m pretty certain that what you’re doing is EXACTLY what you’re accusing the Oceanic & Euro communities of doing. You take everything during the US timezone, we take everything during the Oceanic timezone. The same. It’s pretty easy to understand.

To counteract these problems we’ve been recruiting NA guilds like crazy so develop a strong NA timezone so that we can eventually move up into Tier-1. You should be doing the same instead of expecting that your timezone becomes ‘special’ compared to the rest of them.

There’s always the option of transferring servers yourself to help an Oceanic server.

This completely (what Thalantyr said)^ Though I’m pretty sure it’ll be skipped over again because it makes too much sense.

And thanks for the response Matt, this is getting ridiculous – it just looks like they’ve grabbed onto something they can blame their losing on, and running to the forums with it.

---

stop harassing the rest of the world, we paid for the game too.

Yes, you bought the game expecting 24/7 access and no one is advocating taking that away from you. No one is saying that we need to block the game for Oceanic players. I don’t know where you get this idea that everyone is saying we should stop people in other timezones from playing the game at all. That’s absurd. No one is advocating that.

But you know what? I bought the game expecting amazing battles where the skill of my server determines whether we win. I didn’t expect to have a game where one server can nightcap their opponents so that the other servers give up resulting in an uncompetitive match for the rest of the week.

What we’re saying is that nightcapping is not a fun mechanic because it rewards high populations and night crews, rather than skill. It creates a system where the best night crew wins the game regardless of prime-time efforts. That is not epic PvP gameplay – that is competitive PvE to see how fast night crews can take down NPCs.

We just need to minimize the IMPACT of nightcapping for ALL TIMEZONES – NA, EU, Oceanic, Asia. (or some other creative solution!)

That means looking for a solution where nightcapping doesn’t hurt you as much or NA players or EU players. We want to eliminate the problem for EVERYONE, not just our own timezones. We’re looking for a fair solution for everyone. No need to accuse us all of being selfish.

This is the highest tier competition going on EU:
http://i46.tinypic.com/1685tty.jpg
If that is intended, it’s what it is

Yep, Arborstone (FR) looks identical to that on the Deso match.