Showing Posts For Daver.9548:
To me, there seems to be a couple of related issues with the population imbalances, one is allowing the final score to be competitive, and the other is allowing the fights to be competitive. I think that any solution should both minimize the impact to the importance of the way a server plays (such as devaluing points based on the time of day) and limit the cause of contention within a server (such as having a serious bonus tied to the outmanned buff to attempt to equalize the fight, so that when a player joins the map causing outmanned to be lost, the others on the map would rather have that player leave to regain the outmanned buff instead of having that player contribute to the fight). Additionally, I think that changes should be made to attempt to make matchups more competitive/fun, rather than in an attempt to completely balance or level the playing field (as an example, since I am on SBI, a few weeks ago our matchup was with SOR and SOS, with SOR predictably winning easily. In this matchup I would always expect SOR to have an advantage, they have the numerical superiority and that aspect should continue to count for something, but changes could help lessen the gap and make it more competitive and enjoyable for all three servers).
Point #1 – allowing the final score to be competitive:
My suggestion here would be to break each week-long matchup into a series of short matches with each match contributing to the final matchup score. The length of the mini-matches could be anywhere from 4-12 hours, but I’ll use 8 hours in my example. Since NA reset happens at 6pm server time there would be three matches that occurred each day – 6pm to 2am, 2am to 10am, and 10am to 6pm – so 21 total matches in a single matchup. At the end of each match the server with the highest match score would get three matchup points, second two points, and third one point, and the match score would reset to zero (objectives would not reset though, so upgrading structures would still have benefit). This change would help prevent coverage from having as large an impact (i.e. ticking at 660 overnight has the same effect on the matchup as winning the primetime match by 100 points) as well as providing smaller goals throughout the week (sure, our server might not have a chance at the matchup, but can we win this single match…) and help bring relevance to the entire matchup (just because your server was grossly outscored over the weekend doesn’t mean that it can’t make a run later in the week). Total server score could still be calculated for the existing buffs and used to break a tie in match points.
Point #2 – allowing the fights to be more competitive:
My suggestion here would be to encourage the weaker two servers to gang up on the top server. 2v1’ing the top server has long been one of the self-balancing features of the three server matchup, but one that seems to rarely be put into practice. To help enable 2v1, I would recommend allowing commanders on the losing servers to have the option to flag themselves as “allied” (both servers would need to be behind the leader by a large enough margin/percent to trigger the option, and if/once that margin is closed the alliance would automatically break – for example, an initial margin might be that the two servers need to individually be at least 15k behind the leader and a total of 40k behind, and once either of the servers closes to within 7.5k the alliance is broken). Anyone following a commander would receive that commanders “alliance” status. If commanders from both servers flag themselves as “allied” then they would see each other as friendly, but an “allied” vs. non-“allied” scenario would still see each other as hostile.
Got some movement improvements coming for Mesmer also. Mostly more reliable swiftness.
I’m not a big fan of passive speed buffs or perma-swiftness on all classes (otherwise what’s the point of having a default run speed), but I do think that with the ability of other classes to get the passive buffs or perma-swiftness mesmers need some help. More reliable swiftness would be my preference, but this last patch did not really help our situation. The buff to temporal curtain (10 to 12) seconds does not do much to improve our mobility, especially since it does not stack with other forms of swiftness and requires a specific weaponset. Signet of Inspiration applying buffs out of combat is ok, but cannot be considered a ‘reliable’ way to get swiftness.
Just for fun, I tallied the boons applied by Signet of Inspiration over a 13 minute 20 second period (80 occurrences – while in Lion’s Arch) which means I should have gotten around 10 of each boon available if the averages played out exactly. Granted, since we are dealing with random numbers this is not a large enough sample size to actually draw conclusions, but I think it does quite well at illustrating that Signet of Inspiration can in no way be considered ‘reliable’ swiftness:
Regen – 8 occurrences
Aegis – 16 occurrences
Retaliation – 20 occurrences
Protection – 20 occurrences
Swiftness – 6 occurrences
Might – 6 occurrences
Fury – 4 occurrences
Vigor – 0 occurrences
If the goal is to give mesmers more reliable swiftness, especially outside of combat, I would recommend fixing/changing the swiftness granted by temporal curtain to stack with other applications of swiftness and/or modify Signet of Inspiration so that it gives preferential treatment to swiftness when out of combat (such as a 50% chance to get swiftness instead of the current 12.5%).