Guild Wars 2

Tomasen.6013:

To be honest, this feels like walking into any sportgame, computergame, boardgame, you name it and the referee is telling you the other team already won because thats the rules and you cant do anything about it. the score is 50.000 against you and the game started 2 days ago.
Now you can try all day long to do your very best and you might even gonna make a diference when you play, but it wont matter in the end because the game have been decided by something you have absolutly no effect on. (We all have to sleep)

Question is: Do i wanna bother playing such a game?

Im still playing but im getting closer and closer to a bad conclusion

As much as I enjoy this game – even when out-numbered and my server is getting demolished – It is obvious that there are a lot of people that don’t play the game to be challenged (server hopping to winning side, logging out and not playing when on the losing side).

Understanding that, the game is probably the most enjoyable to everyone when the sides are relatively even. Back and forth capture and maneuvering is what we are looking for.

Whatever changes are made should be done to ensure that as many people as possible are encouraged to participate. I honestly don’t care how this is done, but I just want to log in and have people playing – the ghost town stuff is already getting old.

amen to that….ANet invested a lot of money into GW2 and Wv3. Equal matchups is obviously what their intention has always been, not map flipping.

It would be good if we could all agree to re-balance the servers and everyone would happily go on their merry way. Unfortunately that will never happen due to external influences on all of us (playing with friends, family times, school, work, connectivity etc).

Getting something that works for 60%+ should be achievable I would have thought. Obviously any solution would need to factor in concurrent population into the scoring and/or doing something to mitigate the ‘unfair’ advantages committed servers have over the less committed servers (by committed, I mean servers who actively work towards 24×7 presence and dedicate the time that requires)

The only way I can see to achieve higher satisfaction is disconnecting the teams from servers, to allow players to form their own super/mega guilds or teams for the sole purpose of Wv3 – which then would not be WvWvW …

Until either of those things happen, the night-capping will remain an annoyance to the same groups of people (despite the fact that night-cappers are in turn night-capped

Guild Wars Fan.3249:

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

Two-thirds of the customers are unhappy. How many businesses stay in business that way?

You can use what ever kitten scoring system you want, but until servers with an active off-peak population are matched up against each other, two-thirds of the customers will remain unhappy, or perhaps go find something else to do.

Piano lessons are looking good.

which 2 thirds of people in the world are you talking about sorry?

don’t forget that this is a thread about night-capping, and funnily enough, the posts from people who have issues with it, will generally outweigh the people who don’t (and can’t be bothered responding).

If 2 servers per 3 way match are being night capped, then 2/3 of the population is being night capped. It is impossible to actually enjoy being night capped, so approx 2/3 of the population is unhappy with night capping. The only people you see who are arguing against this are the people who are night capping.

If everything in war is fair.

Remove – the – queues. Why do we have to fight equally in our prime-time and be underdogs at night (some server’s prime time)?

Why is there an undermanned buff? Why do they get better loot/xp whatever?

I really dont understand this logic.

Yes i know their server cant handle without queue… but you see queue also is an effort in making it equal in numbers. Why? If we have 3x your size on prime time let us zerg it all and enjoy it as you enjoy nightcapping.

Such pathetic excuses.

Seriously Matt..

How the hell can you clam that “no player’s time should matter more than anothers” and then still dont have a problem with nightcapping?

It is destroying the one truly great thing about this game (WvW), it is fustrating and makes WvW effort a total f.. waste of time.

Do your job: Fix the scoring!

24hr battles just doesn’t work

Dinks.2478:

Guild Wars Fan.3249:

If 2 servers per 3 way match are being night capped, then 2/3 of the population is being night capped. It is impossible to actually enjoy being night capped, so approx 2/3 of the population is unhappy with night capping. The only people you see who are arguing against this are the people who are night capping.

So, what you are saying is that in EVERY Wv3 matchup at the moment, 2 of the 3 servers are being nightcapped? OR are you really trying to say that it only matters if 2 thirds of YOUR current matchup are being nightcapped? In which case, specify that, instead of claiming that 2 thirds of the people are being night-capped, when globally, they are not.

My point here, is that the OP for this claimed 2 thirds of people are being night-capped, with no proof or reference to real data, because, like a number of other night-capping-is-bad posters, they were thinking only of themselves and not of the Wv3 community as a whole. If you can prove to me that 2 thirds of the entire global GW2 Wv3 community are being night-capped, then I am more than happy to stand corrected.

seriously mr guild wars fan boy , your argueing over percentage points like it makes your case. the fact is every week a large portion of matches are screwed by one servers ability to night cap. The evidence is all over this thread in the form of screenshots.

So dont waste our time trying to debate how much of an issue it is ,,, just accept its a big problem for a large number of folk . just look at this thread , you can take it that its a large enough sample of folk to be indicative of the player base at large.
that being the case if even half the folk in this thread are unhappy , and that reflects the player base in general then it is unquestionably a MAJOR problem.

tyu.9470:

If everything in war is fair.

Remove – the – queues. Why do we have to fight equally in our prime-time and be underdogs at night (some server’s prime time)?

Why is there an undermanned buff? Why do they get better loot/xp whatever?

I really dont understand this logic.

Yes i know their server cant handle without queue… but you see queue also is an effort in making it equal in numbers. Why? If we have 3x your size on prime time let us zerg it all and enjoy it as you enjoy nightcapping.

Such pathetic excuses.

this is the truth, I want my time spent in the battle to be as easy and as significant as the night cappers and i demand that i get to do it in my prime time, i want to be allowed to over run the other 2 servers in a massive zerg while they can barely reach double figures.
i want to have the whole map upgraded and ready for the nightcappers arrival

cos if i dont get this then Matt fails in his quest to make MY time as valuable as the nightcappers.

ginzo.8792:

seriously mr guild wars fan boy , your argueing over percentage points like it makes your case. the fact is every week a large portion of matches are screwed by one servers ability to night cap. The evidence is all over this thread in the form of screenshots.

So dont waste our time trying to debate how much of an issue it is ,,, just accept its a big problem for a large number of folk . just look at this thread , you can take it that its a large enough sample of folk to be indicative of the player base at large.
that being the case if even half the folk in this thread are unhappy , and that reflects the player base in general then it is unquestionably a MAJOR problem.

hmm…I fail to see how I am wasting your time any more than you are wasting my time by making stuff up. A number of unhappy players are voicing their complaints / dissatisfaction of Wv3 in a thread on a forum does not a MAJOR issue make. It is definitely a big issue on the forums. No question there. It is definitely a big issue for you, not questioning that.

Is it as big an issue for 2 thirds of the population as is being made out? Possibly, but I dont KNOW for sure. I’m a subscriber to the belief that the people who post about issues, are in fact the ones that have an issue with something. As opposed to the people who do not post regarding said issue. Have you tallied them up in your convenient calculations? of course not, because they are not posting. Perhaps I would be more accurate to say the 50 or so people who have posted that this is an issue for them represent a tiny percentage of the player base.

Lets for example, PRETEND (<— see, I’m not stating that this is a fact) that there are 1 million players ( http://www.computerandvideogames.com/365210/guild-wars-2-hit-1-million-pre-release-sales/# – not entirely sure if this is correct, but seems to be the agreed upon number). Of that 1mil people, 50 are complaining. Thats what? 0.005% of the player base….not quite the 67% (generous rounding) I’m hearing about….ok, so thats player base, no Wv3 base I hear you say? Well, I suppose that we could be conservative and say that world-wide there is a measly 1000 Wv3 players (lol), and get a closer number like: 50/1000 -> 5%!!! OMG!!! PANIC!

This is why I do not agree with that 2 3rds rubbish. Anyone can make up numbers to support their argument based on their own feel / opinion.

When you have a good solution to the problem, I’m more than happy to listen, but when all you can do is moan about how its unfair to you and invent facts and figures, then I’m sorry but you’re wasting everyones time.

2/3rds of the player base are going to be (relatively) unhappy each week regardless of nightcapping because 2 out of 3 servers will lose their match each week.

To say (or even imply) that every winning team only does so because of nightcapping is pure conjecture. I would really like to see actual WvWvW population graphs instead of queues as this would give us a real indication of which servers have an offpeak presence.

If you are on a server that is suffering from this situation…you would know its more than a small percentage of people who are really unhappy about the state of WvW, I rarely see a map chat not filled with kittening about WvW. For each person on here who is upset there are ALOT more who just don’t bother with forums, (and I don’t blame them) because no matter how worked up we get and no matter HOW MUCH we cry for change, we’ll get a bullkitten response just like the one Matt here gave us.

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

His “point” proved our own point about why nightcapping is making the game not fun. We are being punished because we don’t stay up all night, during their prime hours. The player base should not be responsible for finding oceanic people to balance out our matchups, that idea is ridiculous. Servers that have both the oceanic pop and American pop, have such an advantage that the game isn’t fun. I don’t have to win, I don’t have to have an advantage, I just want an equal opportunity to play without these ridiculous barriers. He says everyone should be able to experience and enjoy the same content, well………………………………………..when i wake up EVERY MORNING to the same crap, I stop playing because I can no longer experience WvW. How ANET fails to realize this is beyond me. Stop. Failing. Anet, do you want what happened to Swtor to happen to you?

Elder Scrolls Online, you can’t come soon enough.

Shepperd.2178:

If you are on a server that is suffering from this situation…you would know its more than a small percentage of people who are really unhappy about the state of WvW, I rarely see a map chat not filled with kittening about WvW. For each person on here who is upset there are ALOT more who just don’t bother with forums, (and I don’t blame them) because no matter how worked up we get and no matter HOW MUCH we cry for change, we’ll get a bullkitten response just like the one Matt here gave us.

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

His “point” proved our own point about why nightcapping is making the game not fun. We are being punished because we don’t stay up all night, during their prime hours. The player base should not be responsible for finding oceanic people to balance out our matchups, that idea is ridiculous. Servers that have both the oceanic pop and American pop, have such an advantage that the game isn’t fun. I don’t have to win, I don’t have to have an advantage, I just want an equal opportunity to play without these ridiculous barriers. He says everyone should be able to experience and enjoy the same content, well………………………………………..when i wake up EVERY MORNING to the same crap, I stop playing because I can no longer experience WvW. How ANET fails to realize this is beyond me. Stop. Failing. Anet, do you want what happened to Swtor to happen to you?

Elder Scrolls Online, you can’t come soon enough.

tell me…what happens when ANet limit the player base per Wv3 to timezone matchups that run an hour or two longer than you can stay up at night or start a few hours earlier? are you then going to complain that it should be based on your definition of times?

Of course, then there will be the players who play classes you don’t like, we should exclude them too, cause thats not fair on you…and the ones who are better than you, we can get rid of them as well, cause well…that aint fair on you is it? Oh, but next we have to get rid of you cause there is this computer illiterate guy who wants to play but he can barely turn around, let alone hit things and you’re griefing him with you uber skills.

ANet have already provided a service for people with limited time or who want to play against a matched number of players. Its called sPvP and it doesn’t last for a day, so you can’t get night-capped or anything! They have also provided a PvP event that lasts 7 days and runs 24×7 where you get to play other servers from all over he place. Sometimes the other servers might not have the same numbers of you, and we’re hoping that the ones with more people on per 24 hour period will out-score the other people and move up in rankings, while you drop down to play other servers with similar numbers etc. Its a work in progress, but we’ll give it some time and see how it goes. You could help (yes, you…instead of moaning and wailing, you could do something too) by either encouraging other players to move to your server, or moving yourself and guesting back to hang with your buddy(s)…or not, thats entirely up to you.

Zierk.4289

Sounds like it’s time to merge some servers so everyone can have a queue and be happy. Then they can all complain about having a queue for WvW.

I would LOVE to always have a 15-30 minute queue on my server at any hour of the night. Do I want a 6-12 hour queue? No, but that’s why I didn’t join the bandwagon on of the most popular servers. But I would greatly prefer to wait a little bit and always have even numbers than roll the dice on possibly logging into a zone with 0% control and the sweet outmanned buff.

Guild Wars Fan.3249:

Shepperd.2178:

If you are on a server that is suffering from this situation…you would know its more than a small percentage of people who are really unhappy about the state of WvW, I rarely see a map chat not filled with kittening about WvW. For each person on here who is upset there are ALOT more who just don’t bother with forums, (and I don’t blame them) because no matter how worked up we get and no matter HOW MUCH we cry for change, we’ll get a bullkitten response just like the one Matt here gave us.

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

His “point” proved our own point about why nightcapping is making the game not fun. We are being punished because we don’t stay up all night, during their prime hours. The player base should not be responsible for finding oceanic people to balance out our matchups, that idea is ridiculous. Servers that have both the oceanic pop and American pop, have such an advantage that the game isn’t fun. I don’t have to win, I don’t have to have an advantage, I just want an equal opportunity to play without these ridiculous barriers. He says everyone should be able to experience and enjoy the same content, well………………………………………..when i wake up EVERY MORNING to the same crap, I stop playing because I can no longer experience WvW. How ANET fails to realize this is beyond me. Stop. Failing. Anet, do you want what happened to Swtor to happen to you?

Elder Scrolls Online, you can’t come soon enough.

tell me…what happens when ANet limit the player base per Wv3 to timezone matchups that run an hour or two longer than you can stay up at night or start a few hours earlier? are you then going to complain that it should be based on your definition of times?

Of course, then there will be the players who play classes you don’t like, we should exclude them too, cause thats not fair on you…and the ones who are better than you, we can get rid of them as well, cause well…that aint fair on you is it? Oh, but next we have to get rid of you cause there is this computer illiterate guy who wants to play but he can barely turn around, let alone hit things and you’re griefing him with you uber skills.

ANet have already provided a service for people with limited time or who want to play against a matched number of players. Its called sPvP and it doesn’t last for a day, so you can’t get night-capped or anything! They have also provided a PvP event that lasts 7 days and runs 24×7 where you get to play other servers from all over he place. Sometimes the other servers might not have the same numbers of you, and we’re hoping that the ones with more people on per 24 hour period will out-score the other people and move up in rankings, while you drop down to play other servers with similar numbers etc. Its a work in progress, but we’ll give it some time and see how it goes. You could help (yes, you…instead of moaning and wailing, you could do something too) by either encouraging other players to move to your server, or moving yourself and guesting back to hang with your buddy(s)…or not, thats entirely up to you.

Arenanet should’ve set timezone servers anyways, 4 different 12 hr time slots. That way, people can select servers based on which WvW time suits them most, and only get paired up against servers that WvW during that time. This would balance out population across servers something they consistently fail to do because of the stupid free server transfers. People won’t complain because THEY chose the time for their battle when selecting a server.

Guild Wars Fan.3249:

You could help (yes, you…instead of moaning and wailing, you could do something too) by either encouraging other players to move to your server, or moving yourself and guesting back to hang with your buddy(s)…or not, thats entirely up to you.

I’ve already invited you to our server. We get night rolled very regularly but we’re pretty strong during our primetime and you’d have constant action with plenty of opportunity to improve your WvWing. We’ve got some great guilds, some great players and apart from a few cracks showing due to our days being wiped out at night, we have a great attitude across the server.

If you want to play with friends or your guild, bring them too! The more the merrier. We could probably even help your guild get all its influence back by joining and repping for part of our days.

It’s a great deal and with nightcapping being a minor issue as you’ve explained so well what’s stopping you?

Tomasen.6013:

To be honest, this feels like walking into any sportgame, computergame, boardgame, you name it and the referee is telling you the other team already won because thats the rules and you cant do anything about it. the score is 50.000 against you and the game started 2 days ago.
Now you can try all day long to do your very best and you might even gonna make a diference when you play, but it wont matter in the end because the game have been decided by something you have absolutly no effect on. (We all have to sleep)

Question is: Do i wanna bother playing such a game?

Im still playing but im getting closer and closer to a bad conclusion

QFT

Gibbonici.9437:

I’ve already invited you to our server. We get night rolled very regularly but we’re pretty strong during our primetime and you’d have constant action with plenty of opportunity to improve your WvWing. We’ve got some great guilds, some great players and apart from a few cracks showing due to our days being wiped out at night, we have a great attitude across the server.

If you want to play with friends or your guild, bring them too! The more the merrier. We could probably even help your guild get all its influence back by joining and repping for part of our days.

It’s a great deal and with nightcapping being a minor issue as you’ve explained so well what’s stopping you?

Ah you see, we’ve already been working on getting our server sorted for our night-time-capping I’ mactively talking and organising with other guilds on the server and participating and encouraging more cohesion and cooperation as I can. Due to large number of peoples efforts we are getting more of a presence in our night times now, so things are starting to work out. I’d like to see that to an end (one way or another), but will definitely keep your offer in mind if that changes at all.

Which server are you on?

Whiteside Ridge, you might have seen our ads for night crews and new players. Being fourth from the bottom of the EU table seems to make us a hard sell, which is a little unfair because our experience, burgeoning organisation and solid all-in community isn’t represented by our table position. We will never get higher because all our hard fighting and shrewd strategising is meaningless when we get capped at night and end up 100,000 points behind after 4 days with nothing we can do about it.

The only people who could help us get through that wall of night-crewed servers probably look at our ranking and dismiss us as a ‘noob server’, even though we’re pretty strong when, y’know, we’re not asleep.

so guild wars fan is trying to become part of the problem not part of the solution.. i would question why that makes you such a great fan.

and to your glib rebuttal to my post i would say this; you obviously are ignorant to how statistics are gathered or are willfully misunderstanding. it’s like this if you gather a SAMPLE of a population and ask them if they think it’s good or bad , you can then be fairly certain they reflect the population at large. depending how large the sample then you can also judge how accurate the mood of the population is.
so my point is if the forums are in fact a representative sample of the population then a large portion of the population isn’t happy.

only a fool or someone trying to be blind to reality would judge as you try to that EVERYONE who is unhappy is here saying so , thus everyone not here stating their unhappiness by default must be happy in the game.

i never claimed to know how large the percentage is that are unhappy with nightcapping , but I did say that it clearly must be VERY significant judging by this thread and the multitude tht were closed and deleted by moderators.
however you want to try to refute that by saying unless we have accurate numbers there is no problem.. which is simply delutional

Guild Wars Fan, wow……nothing you said had absolutely anything to do with ANY of the points I made. nice. I didn’t suggest a solution, or timezone matchup changes, as I said I don’t care about losing to people more skilled than myself, I just want an equal opportunity to play in WvW, and I simply don’t have that. Stop exaggerating.

-You seem to be confusing “limited time,” with sleeping.
-I didn’t buy this game so I could spend every moment trying to find people to make the game enjoyable instead of actually playing it.
-I really suggest you go through some of the other threads and look at the screenshots of scoring from the past few weeks.

-Now what REALLY doesn’t make sense, follow me here, if you are trying to let their fancy algorithmic system work, which I guess we just have to assume will work to begin with, wouldnt abusing the free server transfer to make hundreds if not thousands of players bouncing around severely disrupt this process? Yes, yes it would.

And heres an example, last week my server Dragonbrand was leading in a very fair matchup, which all sides were enjoying, all 3 servers were within 20-30k of eachother all week. 2 days before reset, 500 european players xferd to Blackgate and over those 2 days they crushed us, we couldnt do anything, and we have some good commanders. Reset happened, they ranked up we ranked down. Ok, now say in 2 weeks those 500 abandon blackgate while they are still up high in ranking, then they get roflstomped and they will have to play several weeks of terrible matchups before they settle into the proper ranking. Or better yet, say those 500 european players transfer to my server after we “settle” into our appropriate position lower down, then we roflstomp every matchup we play for weeks until we reach our right spot nearish the top. Does that make sense to you? Does it? I really hope not.

The fact that this logic is escaping people is astounding.

Maybe you should look at the number of replies in this thread to get a gauge of the general people’s opinion.

All of the flippant QQing around here aside, I think the general attitude of most of the community I have personally talked with (and I might add they usually aren’t the ones camping the forums to trolllolol) is that we don’t want some massive overhaul of WvW and we certainly don’t wanna punish people who are able to play on so-labeled “off hours” because in no way would that be fair, nor would it help the problem. I don’t have the perfect solution as many others have attempted to speculate on, but I do wanna let Anet know what you see here is really not the general consensus (I’m sure you already know that you sneaky peeps lol). But there is a genuine concern about the balancing that keeps putting these servers with 24/7 coverage against servers with less constant coverage overall throughout the week. I added the week part because something most people don’t realize is even those smaller servers that don’t cover all day usually come on later in the week more frequently and make large pushes and earn lots of points. The reason it’s so disheartening in the smaller servers is you spend all day or night building, fortifying, spending untold amounts of money, only to come back and find it all got wiped away in an hour or so because no one was left to defend it. That’s pretty disheartening to many of us. Had it been taken in active combat and they were just better, well thats WvW and kinda the point lol. That being said, letting us know that the balancing and matchmaking is being looked at seriously and solutions in the works makes many of us feel better already. I know it’s gonna be a long road to get the right fix, and may be a neverending procedure, but I ask everyone in the community to give it some time, and if you have actual constructive ideas to put them up but all this QQ and trolling really doesn’t help. We’ve already established the problem, let’s establish a solution.

This game seems to be approaching the Warhammer model of PvDoor: avoid the other side for easy rewards. Nightcapping is just an extreme version of it.

We know how well that turned out.

One of the lower pop servers that is always matched up with us has a habit of running karma/exp trains with 20+ people. They can easily take towers if they had a decent leader, but all they do is run a circle around the map capping supply camps and sentries. They do this because it’s the easiest way to get karma/exp without the risk of having to fight anyone (usually).

The funniest part of this is that they are taking camps far away from their spawn, even though the tower/camp right outside their spawn is easily available to them.

It’s become a joke as we call out their movements in map chat and bounce them back to spawn.

People avoiding combat and being rewarded for it is just bad design. Encourage more defense and less rolling zerg-cap-this-and-run-to-the-next-door.

Dax.3815:

Tomasen.6013:

To be honest, this feels like walking into any sportgame, computergame, boardgame, you name it and the referee is telling you the other team already won because thats the rules and you cant do anything about it. the score is 50.000 against you and the game started 2 days ago.
Now you can try all day long to do your very best and you might even gonna make a diference when you play, but it wont matter in the end because the game have been decided by something you have absolutly no effect on. (We all have to sleep)

Question is: Do i wanna bother playing such a game?

Im still playing but im getting closer and closer to a bad conclusion

QFT

Also this…

Having a system where points collecting is the main way to win is a very bad idea in the first place

Nay of the Ether.8913:

But there is a genuine concern about the balancing that keeps putting these servers with 24/7 coverage against servers with less constant coverage overall throughout the week. I added the week part because something most people don’t realize is even those smaller servers that don’t cover all day usually come on later in the week more frequently and make large pushes and earn lots of points. The reason it’s so disheartening in the smaller servers is you spend all day or night building, fortifying, spending untold amounts of money, only to come back and find it all got wiped away in an hour or so because no one was left to defend it. That’s pretty disheartening to many of us. Had it been taken in active combat and they were just better, well thats WvW and kinda the point lol. That being said, letting us know that the balancing and matchmaking is being looked at seriously and solutions in the works makes many of us feel better already. I know it’s gonna be a long road to get the right fix, and may be a neverending procedure, but I ask everyone in the community to give it some time, and if you have actual constructive ideas to put them up but all this QQ and trolling really doesn’t help. We’ve already established the problem, let’s establish a solution.

Totally agree with all this. It’s silly to match 24-hour high pop servers against small, peak-centric ones and expect anything different to what we’re seeing. I’ve said all along that scores and rankings are meaningless without population and coverage taken into account.

I saw there was a sticky post with a bold fist stance on night capping from ANet, however I thought I’d put my two pence in.

I play on the EU Server ’ Gunnar’s Hold’. When the WvW was set to daily battles and server changes, we were a fairly successful server. Rarely we were beaten by a large margin and often competed first or second place. However since the weekly switch we have come into huge problems.

During the day-time running off GMT London time, we are a very successful world. Our highest performance comes mostly around the 17:00-23:00 time zone, when your average Joe is out of work. But we are losing, by a very substantial point gap. “Why is this?”, you might ask. Well to sum it up, we don’t have the overnight power of other servers.

After around 23:00-16:00 on a weekday or Sunday, I have NEVER had to queue for a borderland or the eternal battlegrounds. If you take a look at the pie chart around this time is is more often than not completely DOMINATED by specific servers -around 90% of the map is there’s. Now you add up the points they get from those say, 17 hours, there is no chance what-so ever of competing.

You might think that there are not really many people complaining about this but I’ve already seen the massive drop in people joining WvW. On Gunnar’s Hold we have the official ‘PC Gamer’ Guild, this was originally led by players such as ‘olgit’ who used their large guild and commander status to help us out. But they are near non-existent in WvW lately. Why? Because there is currently no point playing, it’s a time sink. All the hard work we put in the day-evening – from sieges, defences, ninja groups and zerg’s is all undone when people are sleeping. There is no point playing if everything we work for and accomplish is simply worth nothing by the next time we play. That is TERRIBLE design no matter how you look at it.

I remember hearing that the large European server ‘Desolation’, has a large number of Australian players. Their guilds come on when we are asleep and at one point, owned the entire map except spawn zones. They build full upgrades on the surrounding keeps and had ridiculous amounts of siege weapons placed on them to make them near un-cappable. Is that fair? It’s a European server, you can’t look it in reverse, it simply doesn’t work that way. I know my server has suffered, I only have to look at my Guild Roster to see about 10 players in our’s alone that have moved to large servers, such as Desolation, Blacktide and Aurora glade. These three servers in particular, seem to dominate night-play.

This is true as of now in WvW. It’s 4:43pm GMT. Blacktide own over 70% of the map on their own, with 130k points, Gunnar’s Hold owns the smallest section with 126k points, Aurora Glade owns the rest with 70k points. In regular hours that pie chart is split more evenly, with Gunnar’s Hold often edging certain areas, thus our high score. But our world has barely any players over night. Blacktide was way behind us but the last two nights they have completely undone all of our accomplishments. This is losing us players fast. We are losing entire guilds and there is constantly people complaining. At this rate WvW will end up destroying the server population, with the overnight WvW servers becoming full and the others suffering greatly. This bad design for pvp will overflow into the rest of the game if not dealt with.

ArenaNet have said that it would be unfair to put time restraints on WvW, for those players who play over night. Well that’s hardly fair for your average guys. Your large majority should suffer for the benefit of the minority?

Why do people from US play on EU server? They argue it’s unfair on them if they were not allowed to play during their day hours. It’s a weak argument when there are servers specifically tailored for a players region, and at their own cost if they play on a server in an entirely different time zone. Not only do these people cause lag but they also destroy the balance of WvW. London time, or give or take a couple of hours is generally the norm for European servers and if you want a pleasantly experience time zone wise, your best bet is to join the servers closest to you. Games should NEVER be tailored to fit everyone. Every game has a target audience and ideal demographics. Nothing can ever be ideal for everyone so don’t try and pander, it hurts your core player base.

Solution Below.

TLDR: Night capping is unfair and causes problems.

I wouldn’t want time zone-restraints. I feel it would be nice to have as many people playing as possible. One solution could be to limit the points earned in WvW, based off how many players are on the opposing worlds. For instance, if a world had no players in WvW, the other world would not gain any points from the places they capture. If a world is half full, your world should gain only half the points you would normally get from captured locations. While this solution would in no way stop the over night bunkering and capping, it makes the point system fairer on those who sleep and go to work at in that time zone.

Another solution would be to limit the number of player allowed to enter each world, based off how many people are in the opposing worlds. The problem with this is it increases queue times for those high population worlds, but would go a long way in balancing this issue in WvW.

I apologise in advance for any spelling mistakes, typing errors or bad wording. The bright white background on this website really hurts my eyes.

>Night capping is unfair
Agreed.
Only one small thing.
Which night exactly is the “true” night? In Siberia, in Poland or in England?

German don’t have overseas players. Hence they get screwed at night. ANets response so far has been “deal with it”.

Yes, when it comes to certain issues ANet has the same amount of perspective as the opinionated teenagers who spout their usual one-liners in defense of night-capping.

Solution- Make servers country spacific to timezone.
After 1am each keep/Stonemist gets a 10x hp buff on gates and walls and is guarded by champions instead of veterans.

Night cappers can still get all the towers etc but won’t affect the outcome as much as it does now.

Also I’d like to point out, as a Desolation player, that if there ever were any Australians playing on our server then they kept themselves quiet and have now left. We have NO night presence (until last night that is).

So yeah. If we ever had one (which I find hard to believe anyway) we definitely don’t now, to my knowledge.

Night capping is not a problem.

The scoring system is the problem the community needs to take some responsibility and think before they post.

At present more points are accumulated off peak as the maps are designed to function at full capacity. when the capacity is lowered a side with a numbers advantage can physically take objectives faster with no chance of defending.

A server that plays 24/7 deserves to play 24/7 irregardless of their reasoning. What has to change is the fact that the scoring system benefits the landsliding capping over night to a degree that the points scored when at full server capacity are irrelevant.

What I don’t mean by this is population based scoring as you should not be able to defend by not defending. Instead the scoring system needs to be reduced to stop huge continual ticking of scores and to make the difference in objectives captured less of a factor.

ginzo.8792:

so guild wars fan is trying to become part of the problem not part of the solution.. i would question why that makes you such a great fan.

and to your glib rebuttal to my post i would say this; you obviously are ignorant to how statistics are gathered or are willfully misunderstanding. it’s like this if you gather a SAMPLE of a population and ask them if they think it’s good or bad , you can then be fairly certain they reflect the population at large. depending how large the sample then you can also judge how accurate the mood of the population is.
so my point is if the forums are in fact a representative sample of the population then a large portion of the population isn’t happy.

only a fool or someone trying to be blind to reality would judge as you try to that EVERYONE who is unhappy is here saying so , thus everyone not here stating their unhappiness by default must be happy in the game.

i never claimed to know how large the percentage is that are unhappy with nightcapping , but I did say that it clearly must be VERY significant judging by this thread and the multitude tht were closed and deleted by moderators.
however you want to try to refute that by saying unless we have accurate numbers there is no problem.. which is simply delutional

Listen, I agree that these population mismatches are problematic and put a serious twist on what WvW could truly be… but this is just wrong.

The forums are not a representative sample, for several reasons. Chief among them in my opinion is the fact that they are self-selected. Only a certain type of person chooses to come to the forums at all, of that set a smaller subset chooses to make posts expressing an opinion. Of those that make posts, only some are coherent. Of those that make coherent posts, many repeat themselves multiple times in multiple places.

Taking that forum noise as representative of the game population is a big mistake. None of us have data that would enable us to do any sort of statistical polling with any type of confidence.

I would like to ask would it be possible to pro-rate the amount of points a server gets per map based on the difference in number of players. For example if server 1 has 1 player in WvW and server B has 100 players then server B should have their point gain based on that fact that that have 100 times the server A players so if server B was to earn 100 points those points should be reduced by an appropriate factor based on the number of player difference. So they should have there points halved or a suitable mathematically valid factor. Then at peak time every server is full and then point gains are normal but in off times people cant abuse it and earn a giant lead in the morning

NakedMoleRat.2605:

I would like to ask would it be possible to pro-rate the amount of points a server gets per map based on the difference in number of players. For example if server 1 has 1 player in WvW and server B has 100 players then server B should have their point gain based on that fact that that have 100 times the server A players so if server B was to earn 100 points those points should be reduced by an appropriate factor based on the number of player difference. So they should have there points halved or a suitable mathematically valid factor. Then at peak time every server is full and then point gains are normal but in off times people cant abuse it and earn a giant lead in the morning

Keep the static points.

Capture/Defense award based on population. 100:5 in your favor? You get 5% the karma and exp. 10:200 against? You get 200% more.

The reason why some servers have such a large night presence is because ANet chose to only provide language specific servers in the European time zone. So players from other time zones who prefer to speak their native language are gravitating towards European servers, and English speaking people who play at night are gravitating towards NA servers because they prefer to play at a time when there is a large player base online (and language isn’t an issue). This isn’t anybodies fault but ANets, they should have either provided no language specific servers (and let guilds gravitate towards whichever one they wanted, like non French, German or Spanish speakers did), or they should have provided language specific servers in the NA time zone as well.

But if you think that Desolation has a large number of night capers, then honestly you’re nuts. The biggest problem we are having right now is getting enough prime time players, there is almost never a queue on at least 2 of the borderlands, and more than once I’ve been facing off against an enemy group with about 15 other players trapped in our spawn, at prime time. We are probably going to be matched up against each other next week, along with a Spanish specific server, and from what I hear we will both get to experience a proper night zerg then.

Atrixer.9275:

I saw there was a sticky post with a bold fist stance on night capping from ANet…

Oh, well…as long as you know your wall of text is pointless by all means, continue.

Luckily it is a problem that will mostly likely fix itself. Servers that can field a full population 23 hours a day will end up fighting each other at the very top of the rankings, and servers that can’t will be lower. Initially I wanted my server to be the very best, but that’s just not going to happen as things currently stand. Now I’d prefer for the ranking to get sorted out as quickly as possible until we can settle down and play against servers that are mostly equal, which will be a lot more fun. The week against Gunnars was easily the closest fight we have had and I look forward to facing you lot again.

Last post isnt fair. Next week those guilds with nighcapping are dorpped from top 3 or top 6 and they completely dominate anything esle without nightcapping.
Also about blacktide – their online are kids without work, nothing more, it s alwyas the same guild. It s a russian guild which is ashamed and not respected at every single of the russian forums. They start to play 5:50 AM in Russia – that s not because of their timezone, but because most part of them dont have work or they miss university/school. And it s a real truth, u can check their teamspeak server.
It wont last for long, but yes, everyone has to suffer from it.
Btw i was in Arborstone for last 3 days and i can say that they have extremely equal and interesting match vs elona reach becasue elona has also strong night presence, but 3rd one server in this match is FAR FAR FAR behind because they dont have night presence at WvW at all, and they lose online and points because their gamers see that they cant even be the 2nd, not mentionning 1st.

Sky.9347:

ginzo.8792:

so guild wars fan is trying to become part of the problem not part of the solution.. i would question why that makes you such a great fan.

and to your glib rebuttal to my post i would say this; you obviously are ignorant to how statistics are gathered or are willfully misunderstanding. it’s like this if you gather a SAMPLE of a population and ask them if they think it’s good or bad , you can then be fairly certain they reflect the population at large. depending how large the sample then you can also judge how accurate the mood of the population is.
so my point is if the forums are in fact a representative sample of the population then a large portion of the population isn’t happy.

only a fool or someone trying to be blind to reality would judge as you try to that EVERYONE who is unhappy is here saying so , thus everyone not here stating their unhappiness by default must be happy in the game.

i never claimed to know how large the percentage is that are unhappy with nightcapping , but I did say that it clearly must be VERY significant judging by this thread and the multitude tht were closed and deleted by moderators.
however you want to try to refute that by saying unless we have accurate numbers there is no problem.. which is simply delutional

Listen, I agree that these population mismatches are problematic and put a serious twist on what WvW could truly be… but this is just wrong.

The forums are not a representative sample, for several reasons. Chief among them in my opinion is the fact that they are self-selected. Only a certain type of person chooses to come to the forums at all, of that set a smaller subset chooses to make posts expressing an opinion. Of those that make posts, only some are coherent. Of those that make coherent posts, many repeat themselves multiple times in multiple places.

Taking that forum noise as representative of the game population is a big mistake. None of us have data that would enable us to do any sort of statistical polling with any type of confidence.

i disagree, i think they are representative , tho how much or how accurate is open to debate. waht is beyond debate is that this is THE burning issue with the game. after all this thread has more views and posts than the entire first page of the WvW section of the forum. So i call that evidence that there is no more important issue in WvW to be addressed.
now if like me you feel WvW is the key feature of the whole game for a large portion of its players , then u simply cannot escape the conclusion that it is the games biggest problem right now.
if this thread has now nearly 1000 posts , if even 200 of them are folk saying they are unhappy then there IS a problem because as a sample of the overall player base they must be mutiplied by a large factor to represent all those who feel unhappy who won’t visit the forums or move server , who will in fact just leave the game .
this is not the outcome ANet wants , and neither should we.

I kind of wish there were some kind of upgrade that will provide NPCs to man all the unmanned auto-directed siege weapons available on the tower/keep. Basically things like the flame pot, cannons, arrow carts, and ballista can be auto-aimed by the NPC easily enough. Even if they’re not very good, the day crew would feel better knowing the stuff they pay for will do something at least.

ginzo.8792:

so guild wars fan is trying to become part of the problem not part of the solution.. i would question why that makes you such a great fan.

yes, thats it, after reading the obviously ill-through-out solutions that some people have and commenting on the issues with the solutions, I think to myself, how can I make people complain more!

ginzo.8792:

and to your glib rebuttal to my post i would say this; you obviously are ignorant to how statistics are gathered or are willfully misunderstanding. it’s like this if you gather a SAMPLE of a population and ask them if they think it’s good or bad , you can then be fairly certain they reflect the population at large. depending how large the sample then you can also judge how accurate the mood of the population is.
so my point is if the forums are in fact a representative sample of the population then a large portion of the population isn’t happy.

yes, basic stats, did that years and years ago at uni and when I tutored math and then again when my daughter started doing stats at school so have a pretty solid understanding of population sampling etc which is why it was a glib response. You took a non-representative sample of the population which you used to bias your results. Didn’t think I needed to spell that you for you, but there ya go.

ginzo.8792:

only a fool or someone trying to be blind to reality would judge as you try to that EVERYONE who is unhappy is here saying so , thus everyone not here stating their unhappiness by default must be happy in the game.

indeed…which is why i never stated that everyone who is unhappy is here complaining. Again, I was pointing out to you the ridiculousness of your assertion of this being a MAJOR problem based on the opinion of what is obviously a small percentage of the population (people posting in this thread – and the small percentage I refer to is the number of people posting, not that a small percentage are dissatisfied). Yes, those people do represent a larger group of dissatisfied players who are not posting who in turn are a percentage of the total population. Do I know or claim to know what these percentages are? No. I certainly don’t claim they are 2 thirds of the player base.

ginzo.8792:

i never claimed to know how large the percentage is that are unhappy with nightcapping , but I did say that it clearly must be VERY significant judging by this thread and the multitude tht were closed and deleted by moderators.
however you want to try to refute that by saying unless we have accurate numbers there is no problem.. which is simply delutional

heheh….no, you don’t claim to know how large the percentage is…but apparently it ‘clearly must be’ a VERY significant part based on the incredibly accurate measurement of number comments and closed or deleted threads – astonishing, I know some insurance companies who would kill to get their hands on you. So, do you or don’t you know this percentage and is it or is it not a significant percentage? Or, do you just not know and are you making up the ‘size’ of the issue to suit your arguments?

What annoys (and entertains) me in all of this, is the sheer number of repetitive cry-in-my-teacup posts that complain about how unfair things are (for the poster of course – never mind anyone else cause they must all feel the same) and how something should be done to make my time more important..er…sorry, I mean, how something should be done to make the more competitive times more important/relevant to the scoring system.

Surely, instead of posting yet another rant about how bad things are, people could just click on the [+1] button (beside one of the many rants) that best suits their mood and save the rest of us from reading something that adds nothing to anything like a solution.

I’ll continue to refute ill-thought solutions – I work as a software architect, so have a pretty fair idea about how any suggested solutions would have to be implemented. One of the most useful skills you learn in software development is to find the exceptions to the rules, because those are where bugs creep into your system. Any solution, at its core has to be simple (reduces the complexity of the measurement system therefore reducing bugs that result from emergence). The current solution is quite simple and still has a lot of issues.

ginzo.8792:

Sky.9347:

ginzo.8792:

so guild wars fan is trying to become part of the problem not part of the solution.. i would question why that makes you such a great fan.

and to your glib rebuttal to my post i would say this; you obviously are ignorant to how statistics are gathered or are willfully misunderstanding. it’s like this if you gather a SAMPLE of a population and ask them if they think it’s good or bad , you can then be fairly certain they reflect the population at large. depending how large the sample then you can also judge how accurate the mood of the population is.
so my point is if the forums are in fact a representative sample of the population then a large portion of the population isn’t happy.

only a fool or someone trying to be blind to reality would judge as you try to that EVERYONE who is unhappy is here saying so , thus everyone not here stating their unhappiness by default must be happy in the game.

i never claimed to know how large the percentage is that are unhappy with nightcapping , but I did say that it clearly must be VERY significant judging by this thread and the multitude tht were closed and deleted by moderators.
however you want to try to refute that by saying unless we have accurate numbers there is no problem.. which is simply delutional

Listen, I agree that these population mismatches are problematic and put a serious twist on what WvW could truly be… but this is just wrong.

The forums are not a representative sample, for several reasons. Chief among them in my opinion is the fact that they are self-selected. Only a certain type of person chooses to come to the forums at all, of that set a smaller subset chooses to make posts expressing an opinion. Of those that make posts, only some are coherent. Of those that make coherent posts, many repeat themselves multiple times in multiple places.

Taking that forum noise as representative of the game population is a big mistake. None of us have data that would enable us to do any sort of statistical polling with any type of confidence.

i disagree, i think they are representative , tho how much or how accurate is open to debate. waht is beyond debate is that this is THE burning issue with the game. after all this thread has more views and posts than the entire first page of the WvW section of the forum. So i call that evidence that there is no more important issue in WvW to be addressed.
now if like me you feel WvW is the key feature of the whole game for a large portion of its players , then u simply cannot escape the conclusion that it is the games biggest problem right now.
if this thread has now nearly 1000 posts , if even 200 of them are folk saying they are unhappy then there IS a problem because as a sample of the overall player base they must be mutiplied by a large factor to represent all those who feel unhappy who won’t visit the forums or move server , who will in fact just leave the game .
this is not the outcome ANet wants , and neither should we.

I agree that there seems to be enough empirical evidence to suggest that this is a potentially major problem.

I do not agree that over exaggerating things is productive or useful in this discussion.

Instead of trying to cite forum complaints as representative of the game population, which is patently flawed and possible false, why don’t we just talk about the empirical evidence which no-one can dispute?

Look at the match up scores. Look at the difference in participation between Friday night (after reset, before common “bedtime” for the server) compared with say… Wednesday evening. Compare information between queue times (which should generally indicate the level of interest when combined with overall server population) and WvW performance. Look at results. Look at servers that move up and get crushed, then move down and crush the opponents.

Most importantly – look at all of these very avid and passionate WvW players who are saying in one way or another – “this starts out fun, but quickly becomes very un-fun, and here’s why…”.

But don’t rely on these bullkitten ideas of statistics that anyone who works for ANet will see as chaff and worthy of being ignored.

I’m not trying to argue with you… I’m just saying help us make the case in an intelligent way and lend some credibility to our cause.

IoJ needs more European players. Feel free to move here and you can be the “nightcapper” for once. Except you’ll be up against some other nightcappers from whatever t1 server we’re fighting, so you’ll actually get to have fun.

So basically you want people that live in Alaska to be banned from WvWvW during the winter or the summer… I’m lost.

It’s a big world. Do what we’re doing… recruiting guilds from around it to fill those time gaps. We’ve met some cool folks from Japan, for example, that are handling our local night, their day hours. Be an embassador and conquer the night rather than fear it.

Shepperd.2178:

Guild Wars Fan, wow……nothing you said had absolutely anything to do with ANY of the points I made. nice. I didn’t suggest a solution, or timezone matchup changes, as I said I don’t care about losing to people more skilled than myself, I just want an equal opportunity to play in WvW, and I simply don’t have that. Stop exaggerating.

but you DO have an opportunity to. You simply refuse to take it. Play sPVP. Move to a server that works for you. Use the free transfer service how it was meant to be used. IF you choose not to move to a server that works for you for whatever reason, why are you complaining about it? Maybe I should complain that I have to get out of bed every morning to come to work. Work should have to come to me and get me out of bed, make me breakfast and so on. You want to have your cake and eat it to. Guess what? You might not be able to.

Shepperd.2178:

-You seem to be confusing “limited time,” with sleeping.
-I didn’t buy this game so I could spend every moment trying to find people to make the game enjoyable instead of actually playing it.
-I really suggest you go through some of the other threads and look at the screenshots of scoring from the past few weeks.

I’ve read plenty of the posts regarding scores – been on both side of the scoring. I would expect scoring to work like that for a predictable number of matchups (can’t be bothered looking at the math for that atm) until servers auto balance due to scoring. And when I say auto-balance, I don’t mean fair or no night-capping, I mean that the match scores end up being closer for whatever reasons. Some servers will oscillate between ranks and fight the same servers again and again until another server figures out how to beat them better etc and surpasses them (or is surpassed). Servers will move up and down in rankings. In none of these scenarios am I guaranteeing that everyone will have truckloads of fun and enjoy equal matchups. Thats pretty obvious from the system.

My reference to limited time in relation to sleeping was based off your original post regarding limited time and the example you gave of sleeping. Wasn’t intended to be the one and only version of limited time. Believe me, I know, kids for example make free time a joke!

-Now what REALLY doesn’t make sense, follow me here, if you are trying to let their fancy algorithmic system work, which I guess we just have to assume will work to begin with, wouldnt abusing the free server transfer to make hundreds if not thousands of players bouncing around severely disrupt this process? Yes, yes it would.

Absolutely. There is definitely a huge issue around free server transfers being abused. I’m pretty sure that I didn’t preach that free transfers was not flawed and fraught with issues. My point (as always) is that you can choose to do something (i.e. move server to one where you are challenged for the times you play) or just handle the jandal! SoS (where I play) gets night-capped regularly by FA and Mag. We fight in Oceanic primetime against stiff resistance which drops away over time (their night time) until we cap the whole map. Nek minute, its all been nightcapped! OMG, maybe I should go post in a forum about it, when I know already why it all happened and know that thats how the system works. I paid for a software product, knowing full-well how it was designed/works. Its working as intended. By all means, I’m more than happy to suggest solutions, make bug-reports and discuss issues.

Shepperd.2178:

The fact that this logic is escaping people is astounding.

+1000 to that!

Shepperd.2178:

Maybe you should look at the number of replies in this thread to get a gauge of the general people’s opinion.

Please someone explain to me why posts in a forum equate to the ‘general’ peoples opinion….or by general people, do you mean people who have posted negatively about night-capping? as opposed to what I though the definition would be, where general is the most common opinion of the gw2 player population?

the fact of the matter, is that there have been a large number of idea for solutions posted now. Some of them are good, some just trash. Theres no point in continuing to post about the fact that we get night-capped or that it is unfair – thats been done to death already.

How about we just focus on other alternative ideas?

For me, to help resolve population imbalance issues, I’d like to see:

1) A debuff applied for each orb you hold (similar to current buff, but reversed)
2) Points for each orb you hold
3) Points earned per tick scaled to population ratio’s in a non-linear fashion (i.e. one server can’t just stop playing to make sure the other servers don’t get points..as in 0vs100vs100) so that more points are earned when the relative populations are close to equal and less when they are not.
4) Free server transfers with a 1 day cooldown on Wv3 participation and limited to servers not currently matched against the current server this week or next week (based on current scoring).

To be honest, I’m still not 100% sure about point scaling but can’t currently see an alternative.

I don’t mention hacking anywhere in here as that’s a whole other issue

Are you kidding? We are not nightcappers, we just have timezone GMT+4. For our server Gunnar = nightcappers. We sleep at night, but wake up at morning and begin to fight. We can spend all our free time on WvW, a lot of us play this game only because of WvW.
P.S. and don’t listen SnowFury.9243. He is also russian and his butthert is bigger than our guild. He is just a rat, who leaving Aurora Glade because they can’t win us.
[Xaoc]

It will always be a PvDoor type of gameplay. At least, it is always much more efficient to attack objectives when they are not there to defend it. The way the score is calculated dictate this is best practice/tactic. Unless they CHANGE the way score is calculated, capping while you have no opponents will ALWAYS be the most effective and efficient method to win.

Change how? In a way that your score is directly proportional to the amount of opponents you have. The more enemies you have, the higher your score is for holding that objective for that tick. It is easy to hold the entire map when there are only 5 enemies. It is very difficult when there are 200 enemies. The scoring should reflect this simple reality.