Guild Wars 2

I know people are looking forward to new content and additional character progression through WvW. However, none of that is going to matter if the game isn’t actually fun and competitive. If you don’t do something about the ridiculous mismatches in WvW participation will inevitably decline. It’s Tuesday morning and the majority of matches are already blowouts. The fact that close, competitive matches are the exception instead of the rule can’t be the intended result.

Assuming weekly blowouts aren’t the goal, what’s being done to correct this issue? Please don’t say the glicko system. It’s an abject failure in this application. There is simply not enough data being generated to allow the glicko ratings to mature. Additionally, the server profiles are constantly changing due to player activity and server transfers. The glicko rating for a given server is invalid when the population is altered through inactivity or player migration. The glicko system is based on consistency which doesn’t exist in WvW. Unless you progress the ratings artificially or manually adjust them we’ll still be stuck in this rut 3-6 months from now.

I suggest you adjust the tiers based on recent WvW activity. If you don’t do something to generate competitive matches then this big WvW patch is nothing more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

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The scoring is close to irrelevant, in my opinion. Based on that, Ehmry Bay is blowing out the competition this week but in reality there have been good fights every night. If they’re not trying to make progress in our border, we are trying to make progress in theirs while holding more than our fair share of Eternal. So we’re “winning”, by a good amount of points, but it’s not like we’ve crushed them off the map.

The battles are good, every night, and that’s all I really care about.

I agree that there are flaws with the rating system. I would be tempted to just try locking down the matches as-is and let the players sort it out. Servers that crush the map every week will eventually get bored and realize they have to change servers if they want any actual action.

As it is, servers that crush every week just keep crushing because they know that eventually they may move up a tier and get better fights.

The DAOC analogy is that it was a locked 3-team server. If your team dominated 24/7 so much so that the game wasn’t fun, you’d quit or change teams, eventually allowing some semblance of balance to come into play, because you knew it wasn’t going to just fix itself. Right now we are relying on the rematching system to do this for us and it’s not.

I like this game… if you don’t then im sure theres still 1 WAR server online somewhere in canada

*cough, Ahem….u jelly?

Yes i know GoM are in third >.> gives us a break.

Maladon.5760:

I suggest you adjust the tiers based on recent WvW activity.

That sounds awfully vulnerable to match manipulation.

got any other suggestions?

GrandmaFunk.3052:

Maladon.5760:

I suggest you adjust the tiers based on recent WvW activity.

That sounds awfully vulnerable to match manipulation.

got any other suggestions?

They know the levels of participation in WvW for a given server. They simply need to group the tiers based on those levels. Waiting for the glicko rating to stabilize after a mass exodus or a downturn in player activity (at which point the rating is basically invalid anyway) results in non-competitive matches and a generally poor gaming experience.

Straegen.2938:

I’ve said this in other posts: Moving to 8 hour matches with population medians being the primary way to rank servers in tiers would be a much better system than the current one. This solves long term mismatches, creates more variation in the match ups and works inside the current 3v3 tiered system. Worst case a server is dominated for 8 hours rather than 7 days.

8 hour matches would be worse for glicko ratings than 7 day matches. You’d basically have three different server profiles feeding the ratings instead of building a composite rating covering all time zones. The numbers would literally be all over the place.

the “levels of participation” vary constantly for dozens of reasons, there’s very big changes day-to-day and even averaged out week-to-week there’s dips and surges.

It’s vulnerable to manipulation because all it would take is a few big guilds to take a break for a week or two and then force a tier drop.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

the “levels of participation” vary constantly for dozens of reasons, there’s very big changes day-to-day and even averaged out week-to-week there’s dips and surges.

It’s vulnerable to manipulation because all it would take is a few big guilds to take a break for a week or two and then force a tier drop.

Can’t they do that now anyway? I know SoR delayed advancing to T1 in a match a few weeks back.

However, spikes or drops in participation can be accounted for with reliable math. It would require a trend of non-participation to manipulate a matchup. Basing matchups on participation is actually less vulnerable to player manipulation than the current system if done correctly.

I’m definitely jelly of that T7 matchup. That would be awesome.

As for score – people like to say score doesn’t matter but the evidence speaks otherwise. When a server is winning, a lot more people log in and play. And when it is not, well a population drop occurs.

And it is not just the score – its what the score represents. The score represents the balance or lack thereof on the field. It is an issue and you see it expressed all over these fourms.

Maladon.5760:

Can’t they do that now anyway?

Yes/No.. say your guild represents 20% of the server’s active WvW population and the whole guild goes offline for one entire match:

-pop-based ranking system: your ranking just dropped 20% no matter what(using simplified math here, i understand it would take more time and have fancier math)

-current system: you probably won’t do to well with 80% of the population you normally have, but those 80% still have the power to produce a potentially better-than-expected result(or a much worse one)

one system relies partly on skill, coordination and in-game effort whereas the other is based solely on attendance.

Johje Holan.4607:

I’m definitely jelly of that T7 matchup. That would be awesome.

Its as if we were all bloody and beaten on the floor but are still trying to rip each others throats out with our last breath.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

Maladon.5760:

Can’t they do that now anyway?

Yes/No.. say your guild represents 20% of the server’s active WvW population and the whole guild goes offline for one entire match

Using population trends would require them to be offline for longer than one match. The current system allows them to tank a match in a single week and manipulate the tier groupings if their current rating is close enough. We’ve actually seen this happen.

Actually that’s not a bad idea.

Each server would have 3 different rankings. 5pm – 1am, 1am – 9am, 9am – 5pm.

It still runs for a week, but with 3 different lanes.

So at 1am the server state for the 5pm-1am match is saved and the server state for the 1am-9am match is loaded. When 5pm rolls back around that 5pm-1am match is loaded and the server is restored to the position it was in at 1am.

This would make a lot more sense from an “eSport” perspective. You are only competing against your own approximate time zone.

Maladon.5760:

Using population trends would require them to be offline for longer than one match.

Which I mentioned in the sentence following the one you quoted.

SBI was in T1 a long time ago. Many fun memories of fighting them. How are they now?

The real problem with WvW is that tiered server-vs-server-vs-server matches are never going to give balanced matches and fresh opponents. That just seems so patently obvious by now that I don’t understand why people seem to think that there has to be a way around the problem … there isn’t. Even Straegen’s proposal has flaws and could be gamed by players shifting populations a couple of hours to get more favorable matchups. We’re either going to live with some unhappy form of the current system or ANet is going to have to change WvW to be instanced (preferably shorter than weekly) without unique server identity (maybe battlegroups).

if anything the patch is gonna break wvw even more

what if ANET hide the total score points and only display the PPT, and rearrange the following match up based on the score point only they know..?

would it be a better WvW ?

only way for wvw to be good would be a playerbase system instead of score that way Even player number servers would fight instead of small server vs medium server vs massive server.

WvWvW is fun when its big fights, ofc its fun to win but the importent part for me is that it should not be like now around 21.30 all evnings the skill lag start and then its almost imposble to defend beacse you cant shoot and sooner or later a AOE pull will pull you down from 1km away.

I think the tiers should be should be by participation level, not score. I’m on SBI and despite the BS out of the Maguma forum warriors, we spend half our day ‘out-manned.’

I logged on about an hour ago and went to EB. There were four of us, two of whom were doing “fight club” with Maguma/Crystal Desert players by Spelden’s. Meanwhile the Maguma Zerg was procing orange swords on the camps as they were grabbing supply.

And this goes on every day. We get, three or four times a day, completely rolled up by Maguma because we can’t even cover one map, never mind FOUR maps like they can.

Maladon.5760:

Straegen.2938:

I’ve said this in other posts: Moving to 8 hour matches with population medians being the primary way to rank servers in tiers would be a much better system than the current one. This solves long term mismatches, creates more variation in the match ups and works inside the current 3v3 tiered system. Worst case a server is dominated for 8 hours rather than 7 days.

8 hour matches would be worse for glicko ratings than 7 day matches. You’d basically have three different server profiles feeding the ratings instead of building a composite rating covering all time zones. The numbers would literally be all over the place.

Ok what 8 hour timezone would you suggest this be in and what 8 hour window would you suggest? yeah thats what I thought its 24/7 deal with it!