Guild Wars 2

Hey all,

We made some very intentional changes to the way we calculate loot. One of the effects of this change is that there is more loot dropping in WvW. Yay! Increasing the loot in WvW was one of our goals and we’re glad that it’s making some of you happy. Also, just to be sure that we were comfortable with the impact it had on loot in WvW we had our economist do some analysis of the drop rates in WvW after this patch. After looking at his results we’re still comfortable with the changes. On a personal note, I was very happy to get a much better badge drop rate when I played yesterday

Tl;dr: it’s not a bug, enjoy the loot!

Update 2/7/2013:
We’ve been keeping a very close watch on this week’s matchups and, despite our concerns regarding the recent population shifts, it seems that many of the games are quite competitive. At the same time we’ve been evaluating some possible changes to the math we use to calculate ratings. After examining a number of new methodologies for weighting the outcomes of matches we have found that our existing formulas already do pretty much what we want them to do. Certainly none of the candidates that we tried yielded better results.

In light of the strong community response to the idea of a WvW ratings reset, the results of our ratings formula investigations, and our data on the current matchups we have decided not to reset the WvW ratings at this time. All existing WvW ratings will be preserved and the rating calculation methodology will remain unchanged. Any existing mismatches should be corrected by the system in relatively short order. Now that there is less volatility in the player base for each world we expect the quality of matches to improve more quickly. This is both because the rating system is operating in a less unpredictable environment and because more stable teams tend to produce better results.

Thank you all for your feedback on this matter, and for your patience while we explored the various options. The community response was a key element in our decision making process.

Original Post:

In the run up to the end of free world transfers we saw large population changes as people settled in to their home servers. This means that the WvW teams being fielded by many of the worlds are now dramatically different. In recognition of this fact, and in light of the increased population stability that comes with paid transfers, we feel that this would be a good time to reset the ratings of all the servers. A reset at this point will allow the rating & ranking system to more quickly and correctly rate these (effectively) new WvW teams.

Here’s how the reset will work:

1) We’ll let the current matchup play out. Since free transfers were available during the first part of this matchup we don’t want it to count towards the new ratings.
2) When the matchup rolls over on Friday, February 1st we’ll post the final ratings & rankings. The new ordering will determine the groupings for the next matchup as usual.
3) After the new matchup has started on February 1st we’ll reset all the ratings (and deviation & volatility) behind the scenes.

Because every world will have reset ratings the system will treat the February 1st matchup as the first matchup and will calculate the ratings accordingly. The new ratings will then be calculated normally in the way that you’re already familiar with. We expect several weeks of volatility while the ratings settle down but we believe that it will ultimately yield a more correct result more quickly than letting the current ratings persist. That also means that the coming month or two will be a fantastic time to fight for your world’s place in the rankings!

Additionally, we’re taking advantage of the reset to revisit some of the math behind the ratings. I’ll have more to post on that once we’ve crunched some numbers and made some decisions.

Thank you, Grit, for posting that link. It points to a post in which I describe the culling issue in some detail and discuss a few of the issues involved with changing culling. An even more in depth explanation of what culling is can be found here https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/The-real-problem-here-is-invisible-enemies-Give-their-algorithms-time-to-match-servers-properly/page/4#post356817 (be sure to read both that post and the next – my description exceeded the post size limit).

As you know we’ve been working on this problem for a while but what I think we haven’t ever said before is that our goal is to remove culling completely from WvW. In order to remove culling completely we have to address three issues:

1) Bandwidth out of our servers/datacenter (traffic would increase without culling)
2) Bandwidth in to each client (traffic to each client would also increase without culling)
3) Client performance issues related to rendering (potentially) all the players on a map at once. (Note that we base our performance requirements in this case on min-spec clients. We don’t want to stop anybody being able to play the game after all.)

Until all three of those issues have been dealt with we can’t turn culling off because doing so would cause something to break or perform poorly.

Ok, now let’s talk about what progress we’ve made!

Issue #1 was the easiest to deal with because we can basically just throw money at the problem. When we first started down the road toward removing culling from WvW I took a bunch of bandwidth measurements and then went to the executives and said, essentially, “Hey, if we disable culling our network traffic will increase by X%. Are we ok with that?”. The answer I got was a clear and unambiguous “yes!” So issue #1 isn’t a problem after all.

Issue #2 is a little harder. We need to ensure that folks with a min-spec network connection won’t be overwhelmed by the data we send them and we obviously can’t just buy a better connection for all of our players. So we put our heads together and came up with a plan to reduce the bandwidth required for WvW (and Gw2 in general) as much as possible. Those changes are in testing now and will be rolled out as soon as we’re convinced that they’re solid. Assuming we’re able to get everything working the way we’d like (and I’m fairly confident that we will) then this will address issue #2.

So that leaves us with issue #3: client performance. Some time ago the WvW team acquired an engine programmer who is focused 100% on this issue (and he is being assisted by another engine programmer who isn’t officially on the WvW team). They’re working on some really fantastic optimizations and engine modifications which we hope will allow even min-spec clients to render all the players on a WvW map. We’ll be talking in more detail about the specific changes they’re making when things get just a little more nailed down, but I can say right now that I’m very impressed with the work they’ve done already.

So that’s where we are. Engine programmers are working their magic even now and we’re testing the networking changes that will be required. I believe that our goal of removing culling from WvW is achievable and I’m looking forward to the day that I can announce to you all that we’ve pulled it off!