Guild Wars 2

The new proposed time for Friday is only 1 hour later than the old time. I’m east coast and I don’t mind starting at 9 EST/10 EDT. The previous time of reset (8 EST/9 EDT) tended to be too early for our pacific coasters, especially in the winter (5 PM PST). Not being able to make it at reset = stuck in queue, which seems like more of a problem to me than east coasters having to wait a bit longer or stay up later on a Friday night.

Two guilds on NSP (The Forest Guard and Phoenix Battalion) had the same problem with the easy WvW rank mission, but not the medium or hard. The medium WvW challenge also had the same issue.

You get 60 a day from doing the WvW dailies. They can be usually completed in less than 15 minutes.

This bug happened to me and a couple guildmates as well. Can confirm golem was not deposited to personal inventory or guild storage.

EDIT: Perhaps this would be better in the bug report forum?

I like the maps, and honestly think they would be fine if so much of the WvW population hadn’t been forced into PvE by the HoT content that cannot be obtained in WvW. A number of NSP guilds had a lot of fun on the new borderlands at reset after some communication with an opposing server where we agreed to be on one specific borderlands. To be clear, after travelling there we were not communicating our positions to each other.

So far we’ve used the supply drops and the sabotage depot. Supply drops are super OP, guaranteed 100 supply every 15 minutes, makes a big difference at important objectives that are under pressure.

Sabotage depot is a lot more situational, ideally defenders should be able to draw down the supply at a major objective before it’s flipped, and minor objectives don’t carry that much supply.

Evil Tim.5104:

Every time I enter my guild hall, Guilded Hallow, I get a message saying the instance owner has left you will be ported to whatever zone I was in.

Also having this same problem, applies to all guildies.

Anyone know if the cost of upgrading guild capacity will change with HoT?

This got buried, still hoping for an official response if possible.

Chris Barrett.3280:

Here’s what the Heart of Thorns release will look like for WvW:

1. On the morning of Thursday, October 22nd, WvW will be terminating without completing or updating Glicko ratings as normal. This will be the end of the classic (“Alpine”) Borderlands maps for the foreseeable future.
2. On entering the build with the new Heart of Thorns content, all of your spent WvW Ability points will be refunded. Recall these can be spent differently per character, and spending them on one character doesn’t spend them on any others.
3. WvW’s reset time will be changed to be 24 hours later in NA and EU. It will now occur on Saturdays instead of Fridays.
4. At the moment Heart of Thorns content becomes available, WvW will prepare its maps. Including the new Desert Borderlands map. There’s no guarantee the matchups from earlier in the week will be the same as the new ones (or that they’ll be different).
5. The new round will run until the new reset times on Saturday, then end and update Glicko ratings. After it comes up again, WvW will be running as “normal” except for the changed reset times and the new Desert Borderlands.

I interpreted the above to mean that a) the 6-day matchup that is in progress right now will not affect Glicko ratings and that b) the approximately ~1 day matchup beginning with the HoT release will affect Glicko as a normal matchup would.

I’m not concerned about this 6-day matchup not updating Glicko, but I would like confirmation that this is definitely the case.

However, I am concerned about the very short matchup beginning with the HoT release affecting Glicko. A large proportion of players will be doing the new PvE content, particularly that related to guild halls, and consequently server population and coverage will not necessarily be reflective of their usual strength. Even under normal circumstances, a very short matchup could have the potential for enormously imbalanced scores that are reflective of a single major push rather than overall strength, and that can cause a large change in Glicko.

These two factors combined mean that it is quite possible that updating Glicko based off of this matchup could result in substantial and inaccurate changes in Glicko. While I acknowledge that this would be corrected in the following weeks, we have seen in the past that Glicko can be fairly unresponsive under some circumstances that can arise normal 1-week matchups.

It would be preferable that the 1-day matchup is not allowed to affect Glicko to the same extent that a 1-week matchup would, and perhaps it would be simpler to have it not affect Glicko at all.

I would like confirmation that my interpretation of the original posting is correct – but presuming that it is, it would be greatly appreciated if updating the Glicko at the end of the 1-day matchup was reconsidered.

Chris Barrett.3280:

Here’s what the Heart of Thorns release will look like for WvW:

The new round will run until the new reset times on Saturday, then end and update Glicko ratings. After it comes up again, WvW will be running as “normal” except for the changed reset times and the new Desert Borderlands.

Does this mean that they’re actually going to adjust glicko ratings based on a matchup that lasts only one day and where most people will be playing the new PvE content?

This website is great – would it be possible to post historical data for the ratings/PPT, similar to what millenium has but with the coverage breakdown?

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. :P Good luck DB.

I’m really glad these guys came to NSP. They’re a lot of fun, and integrated into the NSP community right from the start.

After getting to know them over the past year, I can’t imagine that there’s a guild that does Christ-centered, family-friendly, fellowship, and community better than FIRE does.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/wvw-matchup-variance-reduction/

TL;DR: Matchups aren’t just determined by the glicko rating alone, a random roll is applied to the rating (up to about +/- 70 points atm) when matchups are generated. This is done to create matchup variety. At this time, servers within about 140 points of each other can therefore switch positions when matchups are generated.

Post has been edited with a new contact for SEA.

About NSP

Northern Shiverpeaks is a friendly community of loyal and dedicated players. On the WvW front we boast a stable and resilient core of players and guilds that serve as a backbone for our growing competitive community. We value community on NSP and are looking for like minded people to keep us competitive across all time zones.

What Do We Have To Offer?

• Strong server stability
• Positive, friendly community
• Active community Teamspeak with Ccoms
• Community website
• Weekly WvW Training nights
• Balanced blend of PPT, fight-oriented, havoc, and roaming guilds

What Are We Looking For?

Most importantly, we are looking for guilds and players that want a home to stay, rather than a bandwagon to hop on to. Our intent is to have competitive and fun WvW matchups while still fostering a strong, positive server community. Guilds that thrive on community and enjoy open raids will find themselves comfortable on NSP.

At this time, we feel that our sweet spot for activity, fights, and community building is in T4. However, many of us would ultimately prefer a rotation between T3 and T4 for matchup variety and a bit of a challenge.

The following list gives an assessment of what we’re looking for in each time zone:

• NA: Our NA is competitive in T4, but still has room to grow. We could benefit from a few more raiding/havoc guilds.
• OCX: Our OCX can be hit or miss. We have a few small guild groups, which tends to be less than our opponents. However, commanders receive a substantial boost from NA night owls, especially in early OCX. Addition of any OCX guilds would be helpful.
• SEA: Many of our opponents in T3-T4 have substantial SEA population, including dedicated guilds. Commanders in this time zone receive a substantial boost from NA-based militia. We would particularly benefit from guilds running open raids.
• EU: We often do well in EU, but this is largely from the strength of NA-based militia. In this timezone, we would particularly benefit from guilds running open raids or from pugmanders.

Who Do You Contact?

• NA: Baron Oakley.1539, Curo.2483, xivor.8754
• OCX: Arlien.9140, SteeK.1427
• SEA: Roti Kompeni.3570, wey daw ming.5784
• EU: mossus.4268, wey daw ming.5784

Wow,. a third [FIRE] thread. Xivor, just how many [FIRE] threads are there?! I’ll bump this one too – very happy to have these guys on NSP.

Is there more than one [FIRE] thread kicking about? Well, this one deserves a bump too! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: love these guys, very happy they’re on NSP.

Bump. Love these guys, very happy they came to NSP.

Liston.9708:

On top of 4 servers 3 slots, 5 v 10 v 11 makes it even more lopsided than when ioj/ nsp drew the match for months….

Nope, IoJ and NSP are completely sick of that ****, that’s why NSP did worse than HoD last week. IoJ has lost population after nine consecutive weeks of that **** and they even lost to CD last week (13th place).

I feel HoD/SBI’s pain, I really do – but it’s someone else’s turn.

The faster turning time of guild trebs is just a visual illusion – I think it has something to do with the turning radius. If you actually time it they take the same amount of time as regular trebs.

I haven’t had a chance to play around with the festival skins much, but I suspect they are not turning faster.

Anet didn’t break T3, the players did when they created four T2 servers. There’s no easy solution to the situation, either. No change to the matchmaking system could prevent two servers from being vastly outnumbered by the other server in T3. At best, a change to the matchmaking system could spread the pain around to servers other than NSP and IoJ more often.

misterman.1530:

One way to fix this is to not allow a player to join a server outside of their actual region. So, no EU players on NA, and vice versa.

Even if it weren’t ridiculously unfair to force players in other regions on to other servers (note that DB’s SEA coverage has been there since the start of gw2 when there were no servers in China), the T2 servers outnumber NSP and IoJ vastly even in NA. They consistently queue all 4 maps at reset and at least 2 maps during NA primetime during the week from what I’ve been told, and NSP and IoJ are barely able to queue 1 at reset and very rarely during the week.

Baratta.1083:

I think everyone is just frustrated about the way the match-ups have been going. When a server can not compete with a blob server it gets old real fast. No way should these match-ups happen. I am on NSP and two servers are losing to the match-ups we have been getting by a long shot.
This is the judgement part because nothing gets fixed. This is the first Anet post I have seen in WvW forums in a long time.

The completely broken matchups in T3 are not being caused by the matchmaking system, they’re being caused by the very poor decisions of players who decided to create 4 T2 servers. There is no possible matchmaking system that could prevent T3 from having one server (the T2 dropdown) from vastly outnumbering the other two.

It’s true that from the outset, it’d have been highly improbable for HoD to get the sequence of matchups that it did. The point I was attempting to make (perhaps clumsily) is that it’s dangerous to use probability to argue backwards.

For 11 weeks after season 3, HoD has had the most likely matchup or 2nd most likely matchup seven times, and for the other four weeks has had an improbable matchup with a likelihood of about 2%. This is actually not very surprising.

It’s true that the chance of this exact sequence of matchups was vanishingly small (about 1 in 110 billion). But even the chance of HoD getting the most likely matchup for all 11 weeks in a row would have only been ~1 in 145,000. To put this in perspective, the chance of HoD never getting the most likely matchup for all 11 weeks in a row would actually have been ~1 in 124. This particular scenario is more likely than the others, however, because it allows for any matchup each week except one.

Even the probability of HoD getting either the 1st or 2nd most likely matchup for all 11 weeks in a row would have been ~1 in 1220. To put this another way, you would expect there to be a 99.92% chance that in at least one of those 11 weeks HoD would get an “unlikely” matchup. (ie. not the 1st or 2nd most likely)

TL;DR: After 11 weeks pretty much any specific sequence of matchups is going to seem unlikely, and there’s nothing particularly surprising that in an 11 week sequence that a few unlikely matchups would show up somewhere.

dancingmonkey.4902:

What does “would impossible” mean? Would be impossible?

Corrected. My mistake.

dancingmonkey.4902:

For someone being so snarky in your post, you would think you could grasp the difference between luck and “probability”, which is the only term anywhere in there that could possibly be misconstrued as “luck”.

You are right, of course, that luck and probability are not synonymous. However, if you recognize that there is a random component in the matchup generating system, then you should be able to accept that one may describe a particular outcome as “lucky” or “unlucky”. I presumed that when coglin said that “luck” had nothing to do with how matchups were generated he was suggesting there was no random component. I made this presumption because he had responded to my original post which made reference to probabilities (I did not mention luck) with a reply that “luck” had nothing to do with it.

I apologize for the tone of my original post, it was snarky and unnecessarily so.

dancingmonkey.4902:

And no, the statement above is not all you said. You went into some story about rolling die and all that. I don’t think anyone would have disagreed with much about what you said until you went off on your blind luck, roll of the dice tangent.

It wasn’t a random tangent. Ark suggested that the exact sequence of matchups that HoD has had since season 3 has had a very low probability. My point was that you can’t use probability that way, because if you rolled a dice 8 times (by analogy with 8 weeks of matchups) that exact sequence would have been very unlikely to occur. However, you would not conclude that there was anything wrong with the dice, because one of the 1,679,616 possible sequences had to occur.

Edit: Okay, so it turns out there’s been a lot more than 8 weeks since the last tournament. But it was intended as a theoretical example.

In reply to above:

1) All I said is that no matchup has occurred since season 3 that would be impossible under the matchup generating system described to us by ArenaNet . This is a fact. I do not believe that “miracle play” has occurred.

2) “Luck”, as you put it, is in fact part of the matchup generating system. (Presuming that by “luck” you mean some random component, which is what I was referring to.)

If you refer to the page linked above, you can understand how to generate tables with server probabilities like those provided at the bottom of that webpage. The matchups are not generated purely based on server rankings or ratings alone, there is a random probabilistic component.

Edited: Unnecessary snark removed. I am sorry, didn’t mean to offend. Also, missing a very important word.

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

Thanks for doing this all, Snow, but Anet has changed its matching system since the end of Season 3. Many improbable matchups that you would expect using glicko and predicted ratings based on score have been happening — we’ve fought outside our tier almost every match in the last 2 months (Tier 5, what’s that? Hi Tier 7, Tier 4, etc), which boils down to approximately 0.006% chance as of my math last week.

Not a single matchup has occured in NA since season 3 that suggests that the matching algorithm has changed. That being said, a small change would be hard to detect.

Imagine that you roll a 6-sided dice 8 times and record the results. The probability of the numbers showing up in that exact sequence would have been 1 in 1,679,616 (~0.00006%). However, there’s nothing remarkable about that particular sequence. The probability that any one of the 1,679,616 possible sequences would occur was 100%.

Jeknar.6184:

The part where you shoot yourself on the foot is where you say they are exploiting to deal damage to you, and you don’t actually prove it.

So far you post is nothing but one of the tons of other threads of people who were annoyed by some kittens invading an area where you can simply kill them without them being able to do anything at all.

You should consider actually looking at the screenshot. They clearly are doing something (look at the damage being done). That definitely isn’t working as intended, which suggests that it is an exploit. (I said exploit, not hack)

NSP would love to see Darkhaven in T4. They are one of the more skilled (actual skill, not blob-skill) servers we have faced.

Definitely consider DH, especially if you are EU. I agree with the OP’s assessment of DH’s coverage.

antihopper.6871:

You can join the squad of the commander you want to follow.
If you are in a squad you only see the tag of the Squadleader, to join a squad you have to rightklick the commander and klick join squad

i hope it helped you

Ps. sry for bad english im not a native speaker

The join squad function is an imperfect solution: it prevents you from seeing all other tags, some of which you may still want to see. The OP seems to be aware of this and is asking for a “block squad” option.

The tournament format was probably designed this way to block a 2v1 in gold league until the last week, by which point it will make no difference to the final standings. (It does in fact do this, although I guess it’s possible that this is coincidental…)

NSP’s situation is not unique. However, unlike season 2 it is most common for it to be advantageous to tank into 3rd from 2nd, rather than 2nd from 1st, in order to secure an easier final matchup.

sparc.3649:

Only problem with this is, by nature (numbers/MATH) the Ktraining Zerging players WILL benefit MORE from this than anyone else. Why, because a Ktraining Zerg may have 100 of these traps on them, while my 5 man defense group may have/get a handful. So again, the defenders are getting the short end of the stick.

I’m not sure if I’m being trolled or you just haven’t thought about this very hard.

Each player can carry a stack of up to 250 of these. You can even carry extra stacks if you like. However, each player can only carry 20 supply at best, 10-15 being much more common. Remember that you cannot throw the trick if you have less than 10 supply, and 15 still lets you throw only one trick. Therefore, the limiting factor in placing these tricks isn’t how many players you have, it’s how much supply you have.

Defenders have the advantage of being much closer to a supply depot. A zerg that has spent supply on offensive siege will have many people with <10 supply and will have to run back to a camp (or other objective they own) for more.

Speaking of “numbers/MATH”, even if a zerg were to throw 100 siege disablers (which would require them to resupply) that would be a very lengthy siege. Throwing just 4 siege disablers (40 supply) buys you an entire 3 minutes to call for backup. Zergs can’t usually call for backup because they already represent the bulk of map presence.

These siege disablers have given me the most fun I’ve had for a while. (I mostly play defensively.) They do make things challenging for small groups trying to cap stuff.

I completely disagree with posts that suggest they give the advantage to the zerg/k-train. It’s true they disable siege on top of walls, but defenders have other options for siege placement. (I shouldn’t have to detail examples: remember that defensive siege has a greater than 1200 range) And in an objective with supply, the zerg/k-train will often run out of supply to throw more traps/lay more siege before you do. In an objective without supply, they still buy valuable time to call your own zerg.

In the past the matchups for the first week of the tourney did not use RNG. Therefore, this Friday’s reset is the last opportunity for an RNG roll to drop Mag into T3.

Even if Anet were to license technology from TS3 etc. the problem is community voice comms would still have the advantage of being player-moderated instead of Anet moderated. (It’s nice to be able to control who can listen as well as speak.) My concern is it’d be harder to bring new players into a private server TS if voice comms were already built in.

It’s been that way for as long as I can recall. (spring 2013)

retconned.9358:

Arius.7031:

NSP is the one that disappeared and got wrecked a couple weeks back when a PvE patch lauched xD.

how is doing this right after a new content patch (just like you said) when there are little to no defenders (again just like you said) an accomplishment to brag about?

Means they had people who had their priorities straight. I try to go into WvW post-PvE patch in the hope that I can cap the other servers stuff while they’re in PvE.

Usually at least one of the enemy servers has more people thinking along those lines than NSP though. This week worked out well though.

Arius.7031:

NSP is the one that disappeared and got wrecked a couple weeks back when a PvE patch lauched xD.

So true. Historically, PvE patches have nerfed NSP WvW pretty hard (for the day/evening of the patch). Speaking as an NSP-er, I was pretty surprised this week when that wasn’t the case.

proviticus.4183:

You can be a complete master of your class in WvW and still never get world completion if you’re stuck like I am as always green in tier 1.

JQ was blue from 21-28 June and red from from 14-21 June.

Underworld ticking +305 right now. Also, all the enemy keeps have been flipped in the past 4 hours. Pretty good for servers where no one plays.

Seriously, in a low tier server you just need to get some friends together to flip stuff, since at best the enemy servers only have numbers for part of the day.

Balanced matchups are way more fun, would prefer balanced repeats than a fresh unbalanced matchup. Imo, blowouts suck even for the winning server. There just isn’t much to do after they (understandably) give up.

What really sucks is when the same match week after week after week is also unbalanced.

This is a very old glitch. A new build will always cause the upgrade status bar to disappear. The upgrade itself also stops until you talk to the workers. This gets the upgrade going again, but unfortunately not the status bar.

Fortunately, subsequent upgrades will not be glitched.

I’m from NSP. We have zergs (~25ish, sometimes bigger) in NA primetime during weekdays, and pretty much all day on weekends (maybe not first thing in the morning). Weekday mornings and afternoons a typical pug group will be 10-15ish, plus some smaller groups and roamers. Our OCX coverage is weakest, total number of people in WvW (all maps) will be 10-ish in that time period (~4 am to ~8 am Eastern), but there are unlikely to be any groups of more than 5. Enough people use the server TS during the day that you ckittene it as a way of seeing where the action is.

We definitely have solo roamers, I think most servers do? But nice thing about being where we are is that likelihood of a whole zerg coming to gank you is a good bit less than in T4 or T5.

We also have small team roamers, some guilds that are more into looking for small fights, others that like to run havoc.

PM me for more info, contacts etc.

They’ve never manually adjusted them before and I can understand why – then they’d be asked to do it all the time.

This week you actually had about a ~33% chance of being put in T6, seems that the RNG gods really hate you guys. Start praying to them now for a better matchup next week, it’s more likely for that to work than asking for manual adjustment on the forums.

If you don’t think the RNG gods are responsive to prayers, you are probably right. Sacrificial offerings would be more effective. To do this, run up to the enemy spawn en masse, and /kneel before it. Allow the enemy to stomp you. (which will give them war score) Do this repeatedly. Don’t forget to also offer up your entire bl and corner of EB to the enemy servers.

The situation sucks, I know – but honestly the only way out is a combination of your rating dropping low enough as well as some luck with the RNG roll.

Pavel.8531:

I remember a dev commenting in a thread about how scouting/defending is unrewarding and they are thinking of ways to fix this… year-year and 2 months ago. I’d paste it here for you, but the search function is so borked I don’t intend to try to find it.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/devon-carver-on-the-future-of-world-vs-world/

Unfortunately some people would just spam F next to a piece of siege to farm karma, xp, and loot. Then you wouldn’t even be able to use the siege when you needed it. (I can assure you they would be entirely unresponsive if you were to talk to them and ask them to stop.)

One possibility would be that if you’ve tapped a piece of siege you’ll get xp if someone else gets kills on it while you’re still on the map. (so there’s no incentive to spam re-tap siege, or build useless siege) But this could be difficult to implement at this stage in development. I’d definitely settle for a 2 hr timer though. A 1 hour timer is just too short – if I need to go get groceries for example that’s usually about 1h15 min by the time I get back. Realistically, neither of these changes is going to happen.

The big problem with recruiting on the megaservers is that your server’s population is now distributed across different map copies (unless they’ve fixed this).

Vakrir.4829:

Here on JQ we’ve been green forever, I think we may have gotten a blue every 7-8 weeks.

Jade Quarry was last blue for the week of 21-28 June and red for the week of 14-21 June.

Vakrir.4829:

Why don’t they just rotate every week? What’s the big deal? What reason is there for this new system?

This is a bit hard to explain, but they can’t actually guarantee a red-green-blue colour rotation for any given server because only 1 server per matchup will have each colour and the matchups change from week to week. (with the exception of T1 of course) Adding this as an additional constraint in matchmaking could produce very weird (and bad) results.

• Just to clarify: both before season 2 and after your server colour is based on your server’s position after a random number roll has been applied to the server ratings (up to about +/- 75). For example, for JQ’s week 28 matchup, they are the highest ranked server. However, the RNG roll means that they had a 23% chance of drawing blue instead of green, and an 9% chance of drawing red. The fact that you do occasionally (and for servers close in rating, often) draw a different colour than the most probable one has led some people to believe that an actual rotation had been implemented. This is not the case.

If they fully randomized it, so that servers had a one third chance of drawing any given colour in each matchup, then after 4 weeks of matchups ~14/24 servers will have gotten only 2 out the 3 colours, and probably none will have got the same colour 4 times in a row. (about 4-5 for each colour) After 8 weeks of matchups, it’s still quite possible that 2 or 3 of the servers (about 1 each) will be missing one colour (by pure bad luck).

The current system is actually better than full randomization for most servers, except for those that are locked in a given tier (ie. all three T1 servers). Otherwise, a server that is being placed green will on average tend to win and therefore move up into a tier where they will tend to draw red.

They’re working on it, and have been for a while: https://twitter.com/GuildWars2/