Showing Posts For Alaron.1523:
If you did offer free transfers to certain servers, it might be worthwhile to consider the sort of targetted transfers that many other games do. For example, the #1, #4, #7, #10 servers can all transfer to the #24 server. #2, #5, #8, #11 servers can all xfer to the #23 server, etc…
The upside of this type of proposal is that it prevents coordinated stacking on a single server and balances the transfers more evenly across the targetted tier(s).
The downside of this type of proposal is that some guilds with a strong but friendly rivalry (if such things actually exist) might find some incentive to transfer to the same destination server and to team up with their former rivals.
So, if prices for server transfers were based on WvW population, what would a fair distribution of costs look like from the lowest population servers to the highest? Keep in mind that making it completely impossible to transfer to a server puts a burden on other players. That doesn’t mean that you couldn’t have an incredibly high price, just that completely blocked isn’t an option.
I would say that a server transfer fee price reduction should applied in a binary fashion to target specific servers (i.e. 1800 gems or free), rather than a linear scaling across all tiers. The problem with applying a linear (or even a non-linear) scale to transfer fees is that it makes the middle tiers much more attractive. If you offer no other incentives to actually transfer to (or to stay on) the bottom tier server but also reduce the price to transfer to the middle tiers, then I think that you will find that those mid tiers become the most attractive destination. In fact, it would likely encourage MORE people to abandon the lowest tier servers.
I will therefore echo what several others have already said in response to your questions, and which I pointed out earlier a few pages ago. A transfer fee price reduction on its own is likely insufficient. This reduction will reduce the barriers to transferring down to a lower tier server. However, you also need to add meaningful incentives to encourage people to move.
With that said, standalone price reductions on carefully targeted servers are certainly a good start. I think that further design effort is needed to encourage more movement, but this would represent a very low-cost (transfers themselves have zero actual backend cost associated with them from a tech perspective, we have seen that the ability to adjust prices already exists so there should be a relatively low dev-time cost here) method of kicking off the process while working on better solutions.
INCENTIVES TO MIGRATE
The suggestions in the previous section have the potential to reduce the current large barrier to entry for players who are interesting in migrating to lower tiers. Suggestion 2 does provide some incentives for playing in a lower tier (via combined point totals when determining which color wins a given week). However, a lot of players do not necessarily play WvW to win at the end of the day as much as they play it to have fun fights in the here and now. As such, I don’t feel that either really provide sufficient incentive on their own. Additionally, neither really provides any incentive for players who do not normally WvW to spend more time in that game mode.
At the end of the day, personal rewards are a large motivator in any game for many players. While it can be a good source of Karma, I don’t think that there is a lot of debate that WvW is far less personally rewarding than PvE. If you compare the ascended materials gain for taking an objective with the same gain for doing an Orr Temple, there is a huge disparity there. Similarly, if you compare the gold gain from running a quick dungeon to the gold gain (or arguably gold drain when factoring in consumables) in WvW, there is obviously no comparison.
While the development team has said numerous times that they want players to play all game modes, and that rewards for each mode are not intended to be equal, I think that this needs to be re-evaluated. One of the best ways to incentivize play on servers with lower WvW populations would be to increase personal rewards. If you want to give PvE players a reason to try out WvW on their servers, provide enhanced personal rewards. The exact type of rewards that you would need to provide, and how you would provide them in a way that limits the impact to the economy and is difficult to exploit is a whole other discussion on its own (and one that I don’t have time to start in any depth right now). However, some form of limited, enhanced personal rewards seems like the best way to encourage players to participate in WvW on servers with low WvW pop.
SUGGESTION 4: Scale WvW personal rewards to encourage play on servers with low WvW population. Provide increased rewards for all WvW play to make it more appealing to PvE populations. Scale these rewards up when total WvW populations are low +/or outnumbered.
SUGGESTION 5: Provide increased personal rewards to players transferring to lower tier servers for a significant period of time (even if said servers are no longer low population, stack with low pop bonuses in suggestion 4?). This type of boost may be unlikely to sway players to migrate on its own. However, when combined with several other suggestions could add up to balance the decision in favour of transferring down.
SERVER MERGERS
If all of the above fail to produce the desired effect, server mergers are something that should not be ruled out. There are certainly a lot of potential downsides to such mergers which can range anywhere from stressing server infrastructure to incurring negative press. However, the current state of WvW play on these servers is often simply not fun due to a lack of a critical mass of players. There comes a time in every MMO’s lifetime when server mergers become a necessity to improve gameplay. For this game, I firmly believe that the trigger for such mergers should be based on WvW populations (infrastructure permitting).
SUGGESTION 6: Consider merging some of the lowest tier servers with either mid-tier servers, or with other lower tier servers.
BARRIERS TO POPULATION MIGRATION
When discussing population migration, a good starting point are the pre-existing mechanisms of server transfers and guesting. Since guesting will allow a player to participate in both PvE and sPvP on any server, there are really no barriers to enjoying either of these types of content. Want a busy sPvP environment? Guest to Anvil Rock. Want to kill Tequatl? Guest to Blackgate (example), or even join an overflow with a cross-server guild. Want to run guild-missions for weekly commendations? Guesting will let you do that too. However, since guesting is not currently supported in WvW, a large barrier exists for enjoying this content. When a player is unsatisfied with the WvW experience that he can get on his current server, the only current options are to either transfer off or to try to build up the community on his/her server.
Unfortunately, both of these options are very one sided. People on low population servers have been paying to transfer to higher tier servers for quite some time now. As more and more people abandon the bottom end servers, the population imbalance becomes larger, which encourages more people to leave, creating a very negative loop. While people on the highest tier servers may have an incentive to transfer to mid-tier servers for reduced queue times, very few people can seem to come up with a compelling reason to transfer to the bottom of the barrel. This, in turn, makes community building on those servers an impracticality verging on the border of impossibility.
One aspect of this is server transfer price. Currently, the transfer price is based on total server population, rather than on average WvW population. Anvil Rock, for example, has a “Very High” server population, but likely has the lowest WvW population of any NA server. From a backend server + database architectural perspective, I can understand that the total server population across all game modes may be more important for imposing population limits than the total population for a single game mode. However, from a gameplay perspective, your actual home server matters very little for any aspect of the game other than WvW. As such, we arrive at the first suggestion.
SUGGESTION 1: Base server transfer prices on average WvW population of the destination server, rather than on total destination server population. On its own, this will not likely do much to incentivize transferring to a lower tier server. However, the intended outcome of this change would be to remove a significant barrier to entry. The potential downside to this would be a reduction in profit from players who are dis-satisfied with their current game environment (running an MMO is a business after all). With that said, the opposite argument could be made that if this change does contribute to improving population imbalances, a reduction in player dis-satisfaction could actually result in player retention and more micro-transactions.
SUGGESTION 2: Consider enabling (limited?) guesting in WvW. There has been a fair bit of discussion about this already. For example, styx.7294 floated a very interesting initial concept for WvW guesting around in a youtube link (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHcO6Xo8eJ8). I like this concept quite a bit as a starting point for simultaneously addressing long queue times in high tiers and lack of critical mass in low tiers. While guesting does not necessarily build the same level of community as a permanent migration would do, it definitely has the benefit of providing a low-risk opportunity to test the waters on other servers. This concept does have a few downsides, but I think that it (or something like it) would provide a good starting point.
SUGGESTION 3: Allow guilds to transfer influence and upgrades from one server to another. I’m not sure that I would rank this with the two previous suggestions, but I have seen a number of other posts that have complained that the fact that a guild would essentially need to start over if they transferred servers was a large barrier to them doing so. As such, I felt this appropriate to include here. I don’t know exactly what technical challenges would be associated with this, but it doesn’t seem like a huge hurdle from a 3rd party perspective.
From the perspective of the lowest tier servers, the problem of world population imbalance focuses around a lack critical mass. As a preface to this discussion, I believe that there are definitely upsides to population imbalances. Specifically, the current server diversity creates many different play environments. Different people will seek different things from their WvW experiences. Not everyone wants to play on a fully stacked server where every map is packed full around the clock and where every player is expected to follow orders or go back to PvE. At the same time, many people in the lowest tier servers will tell you that a certain critical mass of population is required in order to make WvW into an enjoyable (or arguably even viable) play environment. As things currently stand, I feel that several servers consistently fail to achieve this critical mass, even at prime time.
Throughout this thread, people have discussed PPT scaling, outmanned debuf scaling, strategies to encourage 2nd & 3rd place to team up against 1st place (instead of the current 1st & 2nd fighting to get a bigger piece 3rd place’s territory), and many other topics centered around making a moderate population imbalance less of a factor in determining the weekly victor. While these are all viable approaches for mid-tier servers, I believe that the discussion for the lowest tier servers really needs to focus on population migration. In order to drive population migration, I believe that two things need to happen. First, some of the barriers to migration to need to be removed. Second, migration to lower tier servers needs to be incentivized. My follow-up posts will discuss both of these elements.
1. Server Population Imbalances
2. Discouraging Zerging
3. Strategic play incentives (eg: 2v1 leader, defend objectives, etc…)
Beyond the muscle memory problems that this introduces (which is significant), the thing that really bothers me about this change is that I didn’t even use symbol of wrath for the retaliation most of the time. The more important aspects of the symbol were the light field that it provided, and the group support provided by the symbol traits. On top of that, it provided another key to press other than auto attack and a DOT-like source of damage from the regular ticks.
I used to consider the greatsword quite a good weapon. It had a lot of group synergy and support ability. It’s damage certainly wasn’t on par with say a warrior’s greatsword, but it didn’t need to be because of the extra group support that it brought. Now that support has been seriously nerfed, and the damage hasn’t been adjusted to compensate.